A Saber-Slanted Baseball Community

Just in time for the series, I got this out. Tomorrow I'll write about the Phillies. See where Derek Jeter should hit vs. RHP. Hint: Not 1st.

I know it's not terribly original, but I finally got my catcher defense post for 2009 up. It's pretty close to what Justin did on his 2008 Player Value series, with some twists from the New Baseball Reference. I hope people will read it and find it helpful as a supplement to WAR evaluations, MVP debates, etc.

Okay, I'm not much an analyst. But I do like to pretend. The link above is to my "objective" analysis of the Betancourt tradee (and also covers the Francoeur-Church disaster). This is my reaction as a Royals fan: Is Dayton Moore the Bravest GM in Baseball, or the Bavasi-est? Maybe my narcissism the contrast will interest some people.

Geniuses at work!

While hindsight is 20/20, I try to "go back in time" to the contract signing using some simple "retrojection." I look back at the Blue Jays' Decemeber 2006 extension of Wells to see how what he was reasonably projected to be worth over the life of the contract at the time. [Quotes below added by Sky. I love these things, keep 'em coming, Mr. Fingers.] "Wells plays center field, so that is +2.5 runs per season. The replacement level for AL position players is 25 runs/season. So 27.5 prorated for 150 game is about 23.4 runs. So, in total, we have 23.4 runs positional and replacement level, + 14.6 runs batting + 5.7 runs defense = 43.7 runs above replacement, or about 4.3 WAR. Remember that we said the Jays were paying for somewhere between 4.5 and 5 Wins Above Replacement... which means that they seem to have come pretty close. Except that they were paying Wells that $126M starting in 2008 -- and we projected for 2007. It is closer than we thought, but attrition has to be taken into account -- if not immediately, over the life of the contract. So Wells was likely to be closer to a 4 WAR than a 4.75 WAR player in 2008 when the contract started. That may not seem like a lot, but according to the salary chart, that implies that something closer to $96.5M than the $126M Wells received. And that's without figuring in the long-term commitment the Jays made."

Just more fun with the FanGraphs WAR leaderboards... Who is the most average player in big leagues? Who comes close? Don't contain your excitement any longer, click that link!

At the instigation of Sky, I added a final piece to my previous posts on Overrated RBI Seasons and Situational Hitting. This time, I look at the career numbers of players since 1955 who have hit more than 1000 and also 500 rbi. Some pretty interesting results... Click away to find the most overrated and underrated RBI Guys of the last 50 years.