rluzinski

I think the trade was roughly equal, insofar as the value of Hardy over the next 2 seasons vs. Gomez over the next 4 years. If Melvin is trying to contend while Fielder is still here, however, he went in the wrong direction. As for offense vs. defense/pitching, just use this rough equation: Total Wins = 162 x (Runs Scored)^2 / [(Runs Scored)^2 + (Runs Against)^2] Basically, add 10 runs to your offesense and you gain a win. Subtract 10 runs from your defense and pitching and you gain a win. Math and common sense says they are equal. Now, if you want to get into 3 man rotations in the playoffs, that's a different matter altogether.

I think Looper would be fine to bring back at $4-5mil. You are basically assuming that he's a 4.7 ERA starter or someone like a 4.0 ERA reliever. I think he might be offered something better than that by someone else, though.

You have the time to write 6 paragraphs explaining how a Worls Series caliber offense should be constructed but you can't spend 5 minutes to look up the stats that disprove most of what you wrote? As for Harang, his salary over the next two years: 2010: $12.5 mil 2011: $12.75 mil A rough projection for him might be a 4.1 ERA and 190 IP (I'm assuming he won't need another appendectomy). That's about half a win over average. Assuming that $4.8 mil/win will be the going rate for free agents this off season, over the next 2 years, Harang will be paid about what he's worth. He has zero net value, in terms of "projected performance - salary). Even a pessemistic projection of hardy has him being worth more than he'll get paid. Even if the market for starting pitching forces Melvin to overspend for a glaring team need, there's no good reason to make the Reds the beneficiary of the situation, IMO.

Yes, 11 is the runs/win in an average situation. I think fangraphs calculates run/win for each season. You probably can dig up their methodology in one of their WAR articles.

If Gomez hits .250, we don't lose much at all in center. Sure Cam hits more HR's, but if Gomez gets 500AB, he'll have 15 triples. Is there really that much difference? Not much difference? 15 triples? Seriously? The difference between Cam and Gomez offensively is very large.

If Hall's contract doesn't count, we should just designate Suppan as well and free up even more money! And $12 mil probably buys you a 4.0ish ERA pitcher. I love to have that over Suppan but I don't think anyone would consider that an ace.

Can we please stop suggesting the trade had to be good because he trades someone who spent time in the minors for a starter? That's just a lazy, weak argument. Can we also stop suggesting that Hardy will not rebound because, well Hall didn't? After looking at this trade further, it's probably a fairly even trade over the course of both player's contracts. In other words, Hardy has the same net value (projected production - salary) in two years that Gomez is in 4. Gomez probably projects to be average around 2011 or 2012. It's hard to get very excited over such a deal, if you think the Brewer's window of opportunity is over the next 2 years. Escobar and Gomez are going to need some time.

Wehen you consider age, I think it's very fair to assume Gomez will be a better defender than Cameron going foward. I wouldn't assuem it to be a huge difference. Nothing compared to their offensive projections. I won't even call it a projection, since it's not regressed, doesn't account for age and many other things. I just looked at fangraph's "value" data for Hardy's last 3 years. I weighed 2009 50%, 2008 30% and 2007 20%. This is what I get for 2010 : Batting: -4.4 run average average Fielding: 10.1 run average average Positional: 7 runs Add in 21 runs for the difference between replacement level and average and you get 33.7 RAR for Hardy, or about 3.3 wins above replacement. According to that, Hardy's "projected" value is about $15 mil next year. He'll make, what, $7 mil? That's $8 mil of value the Brewers gave up for 2010 and maybe $6 mil for 2011. $13 mil total traded away? Gomez is impossible to project with any accuracy. Somewhere between replacement level and average? Let's say 1.5 WAR, worth 6.75 mil, while he'll be paid $.5 mil (depends on who you ask if he's a super two). So the Twins gave up about $6 mil in value next year and maybe that much for the following year. If Gomez could develop into even a /.320/.375 type hitter and remain a great defender, this might be an OK trade over the long term. For 2010, I think there's little chance Escobar + Gomez + $14 is as valuable as Hardy + Cameron. You're right, statistically. But if a player is going to put up 75% of his overall production in a short time period, then spread the other 25% over the remaining much larger time period, there is no way that player has an equal effect on wins as a player that spreads their production more evenly throughout the course of the season. Even if you assume that some players are predispositioned to be streaky, I don't think any reasonable model of that results in very much, in terms of wins and losses. It's just not extreme enough. Probably not even worth mentioning.

Any analysis that concludes a team has "enough" of something is absolute garbage, IMO

I will have to reserve final judgement on this trade until I can analyize it more carefully. I will say that I don't think Gomez projects to be even an average outfielder next year (even with his great defense), so it's very hard to get excited about this trade. As bad as Hardy was offensively last year, he STILL had a better offensive season AS A SS than Gomez did. Most likely, Hardy's 2010 offensive production will fall somewhere between his 2008 and 2009 seasons, so I think the true offensive difference between both players is much larger than their 2009 difference. Even with Hardy getting paid much more, this initially looks like a very bad deal. As for swapping Gomez with Cam, it obviously projects to be a huge step down from Cameron's 2008 performance but: 1. We probably shouldn't expect Cam to be as good as he was last year. 2. We have no idea what it would have taken to keep Cam here. Still, Cam is easily worth a couple of wins over Gomez, projection-wise. All this can be discounted by some due to the fact that I am not in love with home runs. You know what I'm in love with? Runs. I am in love so much with runs that my love for HRs is EXACTLY proportional to the amount of runs an average HR is worth. You can get slightly different run values, depending on how you estimate it, but here's one example: 1B = 0.47 runs 2B = 0.78 runs 38 = 1.09 runs HR = 1.40 runs Which of course means that I love HRs about 3 times more than a single. I LIKE home runs, but I will not worship a player because they can hit X amount of them in a season (especially when a bulk of the home run total occurs in a span of two or three weeks throughout a 6 month season). Ignoring the accuracy of your criticism, the distribution of production for a player over a season has little effect on his overall value. Take two players on different teams. Each hits 40 HRS for a season: Player 1: 1 HR for the first 40 games, none after Player 2: 1 HR every 4 games It simply doesn't matter, in terms of wins. In the end, that's what really matters, right? Now, if you take a theoretical player that hits 5 HRS for the first 8 games and then no more, that's different. But what you seem to be talking about..... it only matters to the perception of some fans.

I guess that I will need a more in-depth explanation to wrap my brain around this one. I don't understand how this ends up as a kind of bernouli experiement. I see it as more of an illustration of selective sampling. That said, all I know about probability theory is what I learned from basic stat courses in college and Google. An endaround 1 sentance explanation isn't going to be enough, sadly http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

Just looking around the site at the leaderboards, many FA players are signed to deals that are around 60-75 percent of their fangraphs' value. Perhaps that's because a player's projection is regressed from his performance? fangraphs doesn't think players should be paid their "value"; there isn't a 1:1 correlation. Every year 3 or 4 players really get paid, and they get paid so much that it pulls the average up so high that the value fangraphs is putting out there is actually significantly higher than than player's FA contract value, even for a guy that performs like Sheets does when he's healthy. No one is giving him $18 million per year, just like no one is paying Kapler $5.2 or whatever. I'm just talking players that performed well here and excluding players that have had down seasons since signing their contracts. No one is giving Sheets $18 mil a year because value = projected production rate x projected playing time. Sheets will probably be projected to pitch less than 100 innings next year. Kapler didn't get $5 mil for next year because he's not projected to give $5 mil worth of performance. One big reason why "only" 3-4 guys each year might get paid huge contracts each year because there aren't that many 3+ WAR players on the free agent market each year to begin with. Guys like CC don't come around very often. He's worth $25 mil a year. That's what he's worth to any team but only some teams can assume the risk of tying up so much value to one player. If CC is a 5 WAR player, the Brewers might instead sign 2 two WAR players and 1, one WAR player for the same price. And they won't sign those guys to 7 year deals. It's true that a win is worth more money to the Yankees than other teams. As a result, we won't expect every free agent to be signed to a deal exactly in line with their "free agent value". There are lot's a of reasons why a player might get more or less than their projected free agent value. The model is far from being able to consider all variables.

BA, OBP and SLG are subjective measures of a player's worth. They have to just become accepted. If people are looking for absolute truth, you'll have to stick with philosophy. That's not how science works. Create a model, test a model, improve it, repeat. If someone isn't familiar with the scientific method, I can see why the whole thing could make someone uncomfortable. JJ hardy might have looked to be worth 20 million but he would never have got that if he was one the open market after that season because nobody would have been sure enough of his continued production to offer it to him. He simply hadn't proven himself yet. If he couldn't get what fangrpahs said he was then why say he was worth that much? This is exactly what we keep trying to explain. Even if Hardy had been a free agent for the 2009 season, he wouldn't have been projected to repeat his 2008 performance, so we wouldn't have expected him to get anywhere near $20 mil. Hardy's performance in 2008 was estimated to be worth $20 mil; HE wasn't worth $20 mil/year. Like you said, it's when a player consistently performs at a particular level that his performances aligning with his projection.

Hits and misses but great reads: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/sabermetric_moves_of_the_2009_pre_season/ http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/sabermetric_moves_of_the_2008_pre_season/ Pitchers are damn hard to project.

Comparing a model that is constructed to estimate reality to adding and subtracting? My goodness. Engineers and scientist create models all the time. Some are better than others. A crude model got men to the moon, so prehaps their is utility in a model, even if it doesn't account for all variabes. UZR considers positioning part of the skill of being a defender. Now, positioning is often dictated by the coaching staff, so that isn't always fair. As soon as we can get pre-play positioning data, it won't be an issue. A lot of UZR's weaknesses are diminished with increasing sample size. For instance, the ball speed data is very course and somewhat subjective. Over 4 seasons, it sort of corrects itself. Over 70 games, not so much. It's like trying to measure the value of a ball in play when all youknow his hit location and whether the ball was hit soft, medium or hard. Give me 1500 balls in play and I bet I could get close. 100? No way. So the UZR based defensive value calculations have a whole extra layer of uncertainty than the offensive calcs. And I'm dismayed thata people continue to say that it's obvious that fangraphs can't predict what players get paid. They can't because they aren't even trying to. If we want to start predicting contracts for this free agents this offseason, we'll need to generate projections first. What player shall we do it for?

5 engineers at my work could work on the same peoblem and all get slightly different answers. According to you, that invalidates all the methodologies used. That's a weak argument. Fangraphs tweaked Tom Tango's methodology and will come up with a slightly different number than him. They had something like a 7 part series outlining exactly how hey calculate it. Others are free to tweak, refine and improve as well. It's a model. If somone is arguing that one player was worth 2 runs/.2 wins more than fangraphs indicates, they missing the point. As for defense, every missed play is worth about -0.8 runs (rule of thumb). that's the combined value of the extra basrunner, the missed out and the extra batter. So -15 runs equals about 19 less plays made over 162 games. One less play every 8-9 games. And we are really talking about probabilities of making the play. If Braun missed a ball that's converted into an out 50% of the time, he's debted .8 runs x .5 = .4 runs. I don't think Braun really is that bad of a defender but he may have just had a bad year. It's also possible that UZR didn't estimate the value of his performance very well for a season.

Please elaborate.

Most of us understand perfectly well how WAR is calculated and how they arrive at the average $ figure per win and simply don't agree with the methodology involved. You are one of the posters who's been willing to do his homework and actually learn about this stuff. I don't agree with all your criticisms (some certainly point out significant weaknesses) but at least you've armed yourself with much of the knowledge needed to carry on an intelligent discussion about the topic. Despite your claim, most of the detractors posting here have no idea how it's calculated. They don't agree with the conclusion, so that's the end of that. Hell, at least one poster still seems convinced that the methodology is a secret.

Note that tiny difference between Mike and Jody...that's slightly smaller than I would say, but still minimal for the money I agree that the offensive gap will be higher. Also, players get paid for their offensive and defensive contributions, which widens the gap, IMO.

We start with a tail of a normal distribution (the most skilled players in the world). The players that are better get more PA, but injuries are proportional to playing time. The end result is something that approximates a normal distribution. Just thought that was odd/interesting.

Log5 should approximate that: ExAvg = ((BAVG * PAVG) / LgAVG) / ((BAVG * PAVG) / LgAVG + ((1-BAVG)*(1-PAVG)/(1-LgAvg))) How are you going to handle expected platoon splits? I've just used league splits but I think that's wrong. Only the best lefties get to face everyone. So the average wOBA of the lefties facing righties is not equal to the average wOBA of the lefties facing lefties. The later's wOBA is higher.

Double posts are silly.

There is so much about baseball that I was CERTAIN about that was later proven wrong. In 2003, I was spouting off on this very board that I didn't think the difference between good and bad defenders was large enough to make good defense very valuable. I had no evidence of course; I just KNEW it was right. How pathetically wrong I was. I'm sure there are things about baseball right now I take for granted as true that isn't. If you are never proving yourself wrong it's only because you are never trying to.

OK, just going to ramble for awhile. No spell check, no nothing. as opposed to the open minded people who ignore the fact that it doesn't match up with what really happens. You mean, teams don't pay players after the year is over, for how much value their performance was worth? I think we already know that. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif And if they did, you would see a significantly higher variance in what players currently get. That's because we expect performance to have a higher variance than projected performance. Players are paid for projected performance. Sheethead, You are still completely confused. You are claiming that the methodology is propietary, despite it being pointed out over and over again that it isn't. You cite that the damning evidence against it is that end result doesn't match up with YOUR expectations. That is the WORST reason to ever reject something. You keep referring it as WAR, which which is simply baseline, not the metric itself. You claim it assumes that every team has Yankee money, which is completely false. You say this: "I posed the question earlier (using a point from another poster), who thinks Nyjer Morgan is more valuable than Ryan Braun? Any takers? I can see why that question is being ignored, if being done so on purpose. " People continue to point out the distinction between "is" and "was". Fangraphs claims that Morgan's and Braun's performances were essentually equal. Let's go through quickly why. First, offense: Morgan: 5.2 RAR (run above replacement) Braun: 46.0 RAR I think everyone would agree that the difference was huge and this agrees. Morgan isn't in the same universe as Braun. Now defense. We have to remember two things. First, UZR is trying to estimate the value of performance, not true talent. Now obviously, if a player gets a 10 RAR every year for 10 years, we are reasonably confident that his performance was equal to his talent. Keep that in mind when you see this: Morgan: 27.4 RAR Braun: -15.5 RAR UZR thinks Morgan is an elite defender, not only for 2009 but also in his short stints in 2007 and 2008. But it's only about a year's worth of data, which is roughly equal to a half a year's worth of hitting data. Maybe he's really a 12 RAR defender who happened to luck himself into a true 27.4 RAR of value in 2009. Maybe he's the next Andrew Jones and really is worth that much defensively. I really don't know and neither does UZR. Just an ESTIMATE based on the best data available. Is Braun really a -15.5 RAR defender? I don't think he but we only have 2 years of data to look at. We was a terrible 3B but looked decent last year and his UZR thought he was just a smidge below average. Maybe he played below his true abilities this season? Maybe? I watched almost every game and I can't really offer up a strong opinion. I remember some bad plays I guess. But short of reviewing every play he made in 2009, I guess I would trust UZR more than my memory. Of course, I don't really trust that my memory is clear and unbiased anyway, so that's not saying much. It will be interesting to see what the fans thought when tangotiger.net publishes the fan scouting report (maybe he did already?) Finally, we have positional adjustment: Morgan: -2 Braun: -7.3 I hope their isn't too much argument over why a positional adjustment is necessary. Now, how fangraphs converts RAR to $ is another topic altogether. I won't get into that but it's based on work by Tom Tango and you can find thousands of words about it on the web. It is based on real life data, though. So, it wasn't just "made up", as some people claim. insidethebook.com had a LONGGG thread that looked at every off season signing and checked the calculated value vs. what they actually got. It wasn't perfect but it was pretty darn good. Of course, they were using PROJECTIONS as the foundation, not simply the unregressed numbers from 1 year. I hope that this stat is forgotten someday because that will mean that it was replaced by a stat that better estimated the value of performance. Right now, for better or worse, this is the best publicly available one. I'm sure many teams have their own proprietary way to estimate what players are worth. I hope this helps!

Calling something stupid when you don't even know what it exactly is seems more like a defensive mechanism to me. Easier to dismiss something outright than to learn about it and intelligently debate its merit. There's plenty to disagree with AFTER you learn how it works and what it's trying to quantify. As has been mentioned, it's not saying what Kapler will be worth. It's not even sure what Kapler was worth this year. It's just an estimate. It has strengths and weaknesses. For instance.... UZR is just a "best guess" at defensive value. Kapler only had 62 full games in the field, so there's going to be significant sampling error in that estimate. And if you want to convert UZR into a projection for defensive value, you probably need 3-4 full seasons of data, regress it and adjust for age. Even then, it's STILL just an estimate. For Kapler, he's spent so few games int he field over the last 3 years that our best guess is probably average (slightly above average now but a year older). And the calculation of offensive value is context neutral (not all HRs have equal value, depending on how many runners are on, if those runs won the game, etc...), so you could take exception to that as well if you wanted to. The articles describing the methodology are all written and have been linked to several times before.