Mephistopheles

well shucks i thought rock raines retired in 2001, but i guess not.

either that or theyll love him if he stays healthy and has 100 walks

and if you read the book, Beane wants athletic pitchers, not just K:BB stars like Ricciardi goes after

arguing semantics is just stupid.

it's november not july.

not to mention if you quickly expand the budget over the course of a year or so its going to be in the form of big name FAs (maybe some 3rd year arby players) meaning that your budget for year six and seven is already slammed despite not knowing what it is. that is unless you are the marlins*

id be willing to bet that the difference in sorianos obp and hawpes in 2007 is going to be a lot more than fifteen points, but that's just me.

i think its sort of useless in its numbers but not its concept. its basically saying if say Albert Pujols was not on the Cardinals, how much production would they lose? If you dont look at WARP youd say X runs he created, but that's stupid because obviously they would have someone playing 1B and he would produce some runs. And obviously a replacement ss and a replacement 1b are going to have different levels of offense, just by the nature of the dispersion of offense to key positions. its no different than saying, "Sure the Braves lost a 20 game winner in Greg Maddux, but they replaced him with Kevin Millwood, so they didnt lose 20 games"

wins over a replacement level player. Think Neifi without the glove.

God, I give up. I am arguing to a wall.

in WARP the difference is about 15 runs over 162 games. in eqa the difference is about 12 runs over 162 games. these are comparing average productin at both spots. I would assume that the stdev at lf is a lot higher than the stdev at 2b which makes the difference higher.

if soriano is playing cf then yeah but if sorianos playing 2b the added bonus of him playing there just might be negating by his defense which is uninspring at best jj, who said lying was a personal insult? everyone lies... http://www.piercecollege.edu/faculty/chartrfj/images/Bill%20Clinton.jpg

that's just a lie read it again

It was sarcasm, with a hidden point. You know if you take out their footspeed, Carlos Lee has a career 835 OPS, so does Soriano. Lee's career EqA is .284, and Soriano's is .287*. Carlos Lee's OPS+ is 113 and Soriano's is 115. They both hit 30 or so homers a year, give or take a couple. So in reality when they are standing at the plate they are pretty much unrecognizable from each other. We intend on playing Soriano in RF, so there's no reason to add value to Soriano playing a more demanding position such as center or second. So in reality the only difference is Soriano's SB speed and CS outs. So we decided to give more money to Soriano for more years when he is six months older all basically because well he can run. So yeah, it's definitely something that you know I decided to just bitch and moan for no reason when in fact i have every reason to speak my mind in this way. It's a pity you didn't read into it like that and thought it was just thoughtless bantering. I guess I am not the thoughtless one... *EqA does involve SB/CS, so dock Soriano down a point or so if you take off the speed factor.

god i feel like im talking to a wall. in fact, at least a wall has something i can bang my head against. okay i said an elite offense needs five 350 obp guys the last i checked all of these were in fact true 1+2+2 = 5 = 3 + 2 400 > 370 > 350

yeah his real value is that he gets out a lot, ohh that just makes me all giddy inside!

Yeah well the Cardinals scored four runs a game in the playoffs which would have placed them dead last in the national league, so I don't really see your point. oh and the "they faced better pitching in the playoffs" argument won't cut it, so don't even waste your time making it. It can be slammed down rather easily. No, my definition wasn't 5 obp > .350 = playoff caliber offense. I just said it's what most have. In fact you really do need three or so guys who have obp over .375 with 1 guy in the .400 range and a couple other guys in the .350 range AND power. It wasnt just over .350, some of them need to be well over .350. Let's look at the top four offenses in the national league (which represent the top quarter of the league and the number of playoff teams) The Phillies got 2 positions with obp over 400, Howard and Abreu + Dellucci. They had two other guys with OBP in the .380 range Utley and Burrell and they had Bell and Rollins placing average obps. The Braves had one guy over 400 in Chipper Jones. They had a one guy over .380 in McCann and they had four guys in the .350-.360 range and another guy over .340. The Mets had one guy in the 380 range in Beltran. They had four more guys in the .350-.370 range and they got a .490 slugging out of their 2b with a slightly below average obp at .330. The Dodgers didnt have a lot of power, but they had a team obp of .348, a figure the Cubs have three guys tops who will break next season. They had 2 guys in the .390 range and six or so guys in the .360-.370 range. Right now the Cubs have 1 guy at .380 in Derrek Lee. They have 1 guy in the .360 range in Matt Murton and 1 guy in the .350 range in Aramis Ramirez and one guy in the .340 range in Michael Barrett - who only plays two out of three games. The rest of their positions are held down by a .300 obp ss a .320 obp rf a .320 obp cf a .330 obp 2b Finally Mark DeRosa has never and will never hit 15 homers. Michael Barrett has never and will never play enough to have 20 homers.

But him stealing a bag isn't going to make up for him getting caught. The Cubs are and still are going to be a team who are out-[expletive]. They'll get them in bunches and REALLY need to conserve them. On the averages, a SB is worth .195 runs and a caught stealing is worth -.456 runs. Plug in his stuff last season and his stolen bases netted a whole .24 runs. Throw on top of that the Cubs higher than league average run environment (which makes each CS hurt them more and each SB help them less) and all of a sudden you have a guy whose running hurts us. And we decided to pay for it. As SBA goes up, SB% goes down usually. So again, choose your spots and it's a useful tool, but to pay big bucks for it is just stupid. Speed + Power = expensive. It's better to buy them seperately, that is by the power guy to play the position. Then buy the speed guy for your bench (and you can find a lot of them like say Joey Gathright or even Angel Pagan for that matter). The only time a SB is a useful tool is late in a close game after oh the 7th inning give or take, so there's no need to waste money on a tool that is useless most of the time.

hey jj, why not look at it in a simpler and easier way. The league OBP is .339 in the AL (which I am going to use to extrapolate the DH problem). Using simple stat 101 class stuff we can find the standard deviation using the formula s = sqrt (pqn)/n in this case. So if we let, say a 600 PA cut off, we get s = sqrt (600*.339*.661)/n = .019. So a .350 OBP is .569 stdevs over the mean, which the tail is going to correspond with a little less than 30% of the league having an OBP over .350. However, there's a bit of an issue that the league average is skewed by countless scrubs getting a lot of ABs (guys who wouldn't normally get 600 PAs which brings this down in the averages). Of the 148 players in MLB last season who got at least 500 PAs, 91 (61%) had OBP of .350 or higher. They averaged a .356 OBP. And mathematically, 62% of those players should have had an OBP over .350. If you break this down into teams, that gives an average of over 3 on each team, BUT doing so gives us an average offense. Any teams from like 5th to 10th in the league in offense would have 3 guys with this obp on their team. If you want a playoff caliber offense you're going to need five or so - or a lot of power to back it up

I just don't get why those who subscribe to the new way of baseball thinking have such a hard time conveying their message. wait...yes I do. Yes, because personal insults is the way to get YOUR point across.

well IF the cubs view Jones as a better defensive CF he should certainly be there. Once you say that the three OF positions are going to be filled by Murton, Soriano and Jones you have to move them where they are the best, regardless of their value. This is sort of what Billy Beane did when he let Tejada go. Value wise Tejada was probably a better bet than Eric Chavez. But he had a capable SS coming up in Bobby Crosby and went to the assumptin that Crosby would slide over to third if he kept Tejada. Once he knew that SS and 3B would be filled no matter what he had to choose the better bat since it was really all that it came down to, and at the time Eric Chavez was the better bat. There are other things (like a 3B being cheaper than a SS), but it's really a similar thing here.

yay we got a speed threat who can't walk and gets thrown out an additional 20 or so time on the bases because of that speed. Man what a threat! Soriano's speed is only a threat to our offense. Not to the opposing teams.

im not so sure giving 136 million to alfonso soriano would be classified as smart in my book

its better than giving a 2 year deal to jason marquis

i could go for some cheap maddux as an alternative myself.