RotoAuthority

As for the VORP debate, if you want to normalize for Lee's durability and not give him credit for 700 PAs, use VORPr. If you rank NL LFs by that stat with min 300 PAs, Lee is 12th out of 18. Behind Jeff Conine, Ryan Church, Reggie Sanders...

Advantage - Baseball Prospectus has the average NL left fielder with stats of .272/.348/.457, for an OPS of .805. I picked Lee because his .811 was closest to that mark among qualified LFs. Kind of back of the napkin but I think it works. The only qualified NL LFs who had a worse OPS than Lee: Ryan Klesko Pedro Feliz Those better: Best to just check out this link at ESPN. sports.espn.go.com/mlb/st...d=a&pos=lf He's not a horrible player or anything, just my pick for the most average NL LF.

RedBirdRay - I'm with you on Lee's added value for the club - ultimately if he puts butts in the seats he's worth it. Statistically average or not.

"Some roto service takes one season, doesn't factor in SBs (for a roto service?! ), durability, age nor consistency, and therefore labels Carlos Lee as "average." Fine." He definitely has more value in the roto world, but when I use OPS I'm not really referring to that. 32 HR, 114 RBI, and 13 SB look nice from a LF on paper. At a 72% success rate, it's debatable whether Lee's steals have added any value at all over the course of his career. Age is probably a point against Lee...there's no reason to think his peak is ahead of him. Consistency, well, I guess there's something to be said for staying healthy and not sucking.

Hi. I wrote the article in question. It was just a fun exercise to see which players played closest to the league positional averages in 2005. Lee actually kind of got a break in that left fielders this year were the worst they've been this decade. With a career .825 OPS, Lee is definitely an average LF. Maybe a below average one in the long term. OPS isn't perfect but I think it works well enough here. He hasn't done anything to make us think that his .324 OBP this year was some sort of fluke - it was .331 in 2003 and .337 for his career. Lee's not old, but he's definitely on the decline. He matches up very closely to the 1988 version of Kevin McReynolds: www.baseballprospectus.co...ke01.shtml But that doesn't mean he's a bad player or a useless one. As was said earlier, he still has some value and should be traded for something good and cheap to clear the way for the young guys.