Geech

Good luck, Mark, especially against the Cobs!

Essentially the only thing it doesn't account for is his ability to throw. It certainly takes into account his ability to hit and defend, and will take into account some of his baserunning. It doesn't scout him, but that doesn't really matter, those things can be measured.

It is based on his skill set. That's what the similarity index is for.

This fact proves that these projections mean little in real life I don't believe it proves any such thing.

Interesting tidbits from the BP chat with Nate silver today: FYI, Patterson hit .263/.330/.408 in AA this season, and .358/.395/.493 at AAA.

I thought about posting something like this myself. PECOTA really likes Patterson; even his 10th percentile projections have him pretty comparable to DeRosa, while the 90th percentile projection might just make him the best player on the team. I've been a fan of Eric for a while, but these have made me very curious to see what he can do this year.

Astonishing. Is the interview archived or transcribed anywhere?

Nice move by the Pirates. I'm surprised Atlanta let him go for so little. Do they have a youngster ready to take over at first or something?

Any evidence of this? Fiddling around with the Lineup Anlyzer seemed to indicate otherwise. That's assuming universal health. If the lineup has nothing but .300 EqA's, the production would be easier to replace if somebody went down to injury. I don't think that's what he was arguing.

Any evidence of this? Fiddling around with the Lineup Anlyzer seemed to indicate otherwise.

A lot depends on what ends up happening in CF, but I don't think the Cobs lineup will be substantially better than the St. Louis lineup if it's better at all.

Did you see my post above? PECOTA is pretty much the best around when it comes to hitting, and very solid when it comes to pitching. That being said, there's still a lot of room for variance, especially when it comes to pitching. I would think of these offensive numbers as good ballpark figures.

Church is projected at an underwhelming .265/.347/.465.

Well, first of all, you might want to remove Jones and add Erstad (.241/.295/.321, but he's a gamer), depending on how much weight you give the recent rumors. The other thing is that PECOTA is pretty much state of the art when it comes to projection systems, so averaging them out wouldn't really give you better results. See this post for details.

Looking at the numbers for Cobs hitters it seems fairly reasonable. If anything, it's perhaps a bit optimistic. I think that's because of his injury. There's not really any good reason to expect him to miss a lot of time this year, but the simulation doesn't know that.

Some notables: Alfonso Soriano .287/.349/.569 Derrek Lee .288/.369/.527 Aramis Ramirez .299/.362/.564 Matt Murton .304/.365/.476 Michael Barrett .295/.357/.482

I think that's a bit of a weird argument to make. It's not like someone at BP just gave Ripken an arbitrary win bonus for a being a shortstop; the replacement levels were calculated based on the actual performance of players at that time period. Ripken was just that much better than other shortstops of his era. Now, if you want to make an argument against WARP3, I would focus on the fielding component. Rate is not all that great of a fielding stat, and pretty substantial amount of Ripken's value came from his fielding. Even then, Ripken's reputation as an excellent fielder would seem to corroborate BP's stat, so it's not like that totally changes the picture.

QFT Kent, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

The place for baseball discussion about Cubs rivals, Festivus, and potential Mercker signings.

Equivalent Average (EqA) is a baseball metric invented by Clay Davenport, and intended to express the production of hitters in a context independent of park and league effects. It represents a hitter's productivity using the same scale as batting average. Thus, a hitter with an EqA over .300 is a very good hitter, while a hitter with an EqA of .220 or below is poor. An EqA of .260 is defined as league average. EqA is one of several sabermetric approaches which validated the notion that minor league hitting statistics can be useful measurements of Major League ability. It does this by adjusting a player's raw statistics for park and league effects. For instance, the Pacific Coast League is a minor league known to be a very friendly venue for hitters. Therefore, a hitter in the PCL may have notably depressed raw statistics (a lower batting average, fewer home runs, etc.) if he were hitting in another league at the same level. Additionally, in general the level of competition at the PCL is lower than that in the Majors, so a hitter in the PCL would likely have lesser raw statistics in the Majors. EqA is thus useful to strip certain illusions from the surface of players' raw statistics. EqA is a derivative of Raw EqA, or REqA. REqA is (H + TB + 1.5*(BB + HBP + SB) + SH + SF) divided by (AB + BB + HBP + SH + SF + CS + SB). REqA in turn is adjusted to account for league difficulty and scale to create EqA. EqA is similar to Major League Equivalency (MLE), a metric developed by Bill James. EqA has been used for several years by the authors of the Baseball Prospectus.

Quality of defense is not a component of VORP, although positional scarcity is included. WARP in its various incarnations does include defensive contributions as measured by Rate.

I can understand a lack of faith in Dan Johnson, but Beane has Daric Barton waiting in the wings, so it's not like he needs more than a short term solution. Beane might have interest in someone like Murton, but not at the cost of Blanton. There were rumors of an Oakland-Mets trade, but Oakland was asking for Milledge, Heilman and more in return for Blanton, which the Mets were unwilling to pay. I don't really see Blanton as a realistic target for the Cobs.

It never stops being funny.

It makes sense if you don't care about OBP. Hendry probably looks at Ward and sees a guy who hits for a decent average with a bit of pop. His career .314 OBP probably doesn't even register.

That link doesn't work for me, but according to the data available at thehardballtimes, Jones' BABIP went from .283, and .282 in '04 and '05 to .321 in 2006. This was also accompanied by a large spike in LD%, but I don't think it's clear that this represents sustainable improvement.