Re: Who is the most underrated player this year?

[Friendly Confines]

Aaron Hill

[SouthSideRyan]

I want to see how UZR accounts for defensive positioning, which side of the plate the batter is hitting from (given the slice or hook of the ball), etc. before I put too much validity into it. It's great that it does factor PBP but it's just the start of where defensive metrics could be.

 

It's a stat that has value, I think some get carried away with as the defining defensive tool. Like a hitter that has 150 ABs and trying to determine whether or not they can hit ML pitching even with a respectable minor league career, I don't think you can accurately judge an OF based on limited chances they get throughout a season to accurately gauge whether or not they have plus range. It isn't helped by the wild swings in flucuation, I could understand a regression once a player gets past his prime (espec. CF/SS) but there's often nothing consistent about the stat from year to year. It's not reliable enough yet to put on the platform many put it on.

 

Also if I have an OF/IF that is shading based on pitch location and that pitcher missed that side of the plate completely & if that defender gets a late break b/c of

that b/c his weight is shifted to where that pitch is supposed to be thrown, it'll hurt him and not really be his fault.

 

back to uk?

 

Yep. It just feels right.

 

if by "feels right" you mean "it's no longer embarrassing to be a Kentucky fan".....

 

 

:wink:

 

So he'll be back to PingHitter around 2011?

[chopsx9]

Aaron Hill

 

Aaron Hill is having the flashier season but I would say Marco Scutaro is the most underrated on that team.

[Cubswin11]

Has Zobrist been mentioned?

 

Also Jayson Werth is having a fantastic year, but he was relatively well known about and had a good year last year. But Howard, Utley, Ibanez and Rollings get a lot of the credit/attention and Werth goes relativley unnoticed.

[WreckingMachine]

Ubaldo

[champaignchris]

My vote is for Pablo Sandoval... OPS .933 - top among qualified 3Bs, 15 HR, 58 RBI, only 22 years old, about $400,000 salary, and no one seems to be talking about him.

[sneakypower]

everybody's talking about Sandoval and Zobrist

[SouthSideRyan]

Oh, and the answer among Cub fans is probably Milton Bradley.

[17 Seconds]

ignoring dexter's raving lunacy for a moment, i had no clue Jason Kubel was having such a huge season.

 

.348/.418/.656 vs righties, .942 ops overall.

 

Huh? Raving Lunacy? Care to explain that?

 

I guess I'm a lunatic for not buying into a stat that had Willie Harris being worth 15 million last season.

 

Or not buying into Morgan being more valuable than Dunn this year even though Dunn has like 200+ OPS points on him

 

By the way.. you know the girl in your sig is 17, right? If you're older than like 20, you're a creepshow

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Out of curiosity, how many OPS points is excellent CF defense worth over bad LF defense?

[17 Seconds]

I don't know, but I find it reeeallllyy hard to believe it would be close to 200.

 

Seriously, we're talking about the difference between a crappy hitter and an elite hitter.

 

If defense was worth that much, teams would just be stacking their team with cheap, light hitting, defensive players.

 

Also if Morgan is that valuable, why does nobody here want him? If he's worth that much defensively, then we could have just put him in center and moved the Johnson/Fukudome platoon to right.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

I'm sure it's not 200 either, I'm just curious as to how big the gap really is.

 

Morgan is definitely not a crappy hitter. He's got a career OPS of .747, and it's very OBP-heavy. That's valuable.

 

Dunn loses as much non-OPS related value as a player can possibly lose. He plays a high-offense position (although weirdly, CF is pretty much playing even with LF this year in the NL) and he plays absolutely awful defense. He even strikes out so much that you can shave a run or two off his value (at the stathead rate of about .02 runs per K). I'm guessing Morgan's steals aren't optimized to high-leverage situations, so his 30/14 is pretty close to breakeven.

 

Going by VORP, the difference between Dunn and Morgan to date is 27 runs on offense, which I believe includes a positional adjustment and proper weight to the Ks.

 

So how much of that 26-run gap can defense close? I don't have an answer, but I'd like something better than "MLB teams would be doing it if it were right," because it took those same teams decades to learn to properly weight OBP, which is pretty easy to measure, so I have little faith in them measuring the value of defense properly. And the Cubs' situation is slightly different, because they don't have anyone they are willing to replace in the OF.

 

I'll settle for saying Nyjer Morgan and Adam Dunn are as close in value as two position players with 200 points of OPS separating them can be.

[Vanilla Ice]

Morgan does have a .311 EqA for the Nationals compared to Dunn's .325 (Morgan's EqA with Pittsburgh was just .262 though)

[Transmogrified Tiger]

I don't know, but I find it reeeallllyy hard to believe it would be close to 200.

 

Seriously, we're talking about the difference between a crappy hitter and an elite hitter.

 

If defense was worth that much, teams would just be stacking their team with cheap, light hitting, defensive players.

 

Why do you think Seattle leads the AL in ERA?

 

Also if Morgan is that valuable, why does nobody here want him? If he's worth that much defensively, then we could have just put him in center and moved the Johnson/Fukudome platoon to right.

 

I'm guessing people didn't suggest Morgan because we have each outfield spot locked into an 8 figure contract at the moment. He's also not all that young, so there's probably nowhere to really go but down. Doesn't change what he's done this year, but it affects whether or not he's worth pursuing in trade.

[imb]

By the way.. you know the girl in your sig is 17, right? If you're older than like 20, you're a creepshow

 

 

hahaha i love these little thin-skinned non sequiturs

[VladiRad]

After doing some things I found out that they weigh defense too much/offense not enough on fangraphs.

 

My equations tell me that Nyjer Morgan has been slightly more valuable than Adam Dunn this season. Like the difference between a 103 OPS+ player and 100 OPS+ player if they were given the same amount of plate appearances and had the same value as a fielder. That means I retract some of my statements in this thread about agreeing with fangraphs. Their value differences between the two are off. Nyjer Morgan hasn't been three times as valuable as Adam Dunn so far this year. Not even close. They've been almost the same.

[Jehrico]

Out of curiosity, how many OPS points is excellent CF defense worth over bad LF defense?

Depends. By excellent CF defense, are you talking Grady Sizemore quality CF defense, or Andruw Jones in his prime caliber defense? And by bad LF defense, are you talking Adam Dunn bad, or Juan Pierre bad (when LA plays him in left instead of center)? You can't just attempt to put a value on the difference between "excellent" defense at one position and "bad" at another, because one excellent defendender can be worth alot more than another excellent defender at the same position (same with the bad defenders). You can't put a hard numerical value on some subjective concepts that aren't well defined.

[Hairyducked Idiot]

Out of curiosity, how many OPS points is excellent CF defense worth over bad LF defense?

Depends. By excellent CF defense, are you talking Grady Sizemore quality CF defense, or Andruw Jones in his prime caliber defense? And by bad LF defense, are you talking Adam Dunn bad, or Juan Pierre bad (when LA plays him in left instead of center)? You can't just attempt to put a value on the difference between "excellent" defense at one position and "bad" at another, because one excellent defendender can be worth alot more than another excellent defender at the same position (same with the bad defenders). You can't put a hard numerical value on some subjective concepts that aren't well defined.

 

85th percentile CF defense and 15th percentile LF defense.

[sneakypower]

By the way.. you know the girl in your sig is 17, right? If you're older than like 20, you're a creepshow

 

 

hahaha i love these little thin-skinned non sequiturs

never fails to deliver

[chuckywang]

I would say Mark Buehrle but then he went out and threw a perfect game and became the talk of the town.

[abuck1220]

 

By the way.. you know the girl in your sig is 17, right? If you're older than like 20, you're a creepshow

 

you stop thinking impure thoughts about iowa's lil' sweetheart RIGHT NOW.

[Vanilla Ice]

This is easy. Franklin Gutierrez.

[KarlMoats]

Martin Prado, 2B, Braves. Check his stats.