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haltz

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Everything posted by haltz

  1. haltz
    Miles isn't really a backup SS. He's only a SS insofar as Tony had a mancrush on him and had him stand there with a glove on his hand for 774 innings over the last three years. He's brutal defensively there and any team is better off never having him play the position. He's a backup 2B that is below average there defensively and hits .290 without any other discernable skills. He wasn't worth the million or so the Cardinals paid him until last year when he inexplicably hit .317.
  2. haltz
    Well then OPS sucks too. The big problem is the data. With better data, you'd get better results. Get ahold of an old UZR spreadsheet (STATs inc) and compare some players using the new fangraphs (BIS) numbers. It's sort of disheartening. It's certainly better than nothing or my own amateur WAGs though.
  3. haltz
    A run is a run. Players at the corners having less chances (and less at 2B than SS) isn't news to conventional wisdom or a metric like UZR. I don't see how it's over or underrated here. And a single play is actually worth slightly more at the corners. How are you coming up with Dunn as a 1-win guy? I have him at 2.5 WAR using Marcel and UZR/150, maybe slightly less if he really is a poor situational hitter.
  4. haltz
    I didn't include Lee because I don't think we're to the point with any system that can accurately get a grip on 1B defense because of how many throws they receive. I think it does as good a job as other positions with regards to fielding batted balls, but when you get maybe 2 of those per game compared to 10+ throws a game, it doesn't paint a very accurate picture. John Dewan tried to tackle this looking at game video. It looks pretty subjective, but according to this method, Lee is good, Pujols is a god (and/or Eckstein skipped 900 baseballs at him in 2005), and most 1B fall within a few plays of each other. Anyway, fangraphs is amazing. A WAR stat would be sweet and pretty simple with UZR and wOBA data.
  5. haltz
    What are the chances of this happening over 200 PA, given those numbers? It's not that large of a sample. He hit at home essentially like he always does.
  6. haltz
    i dont think you understand how that works Yeah you can't count the home runs twice. Either way he was easily the worst player in the history of baseball. Probably a bad idea.
  7. haltz
    dextermorgan obviously knows that VORP undervalues walks a bit. Hamilton was the eighth most valuable player in the AL this year, depending on your view of clutch stats. If you are concerned about the methodology, it's here.
  8. haltz
    Brian Giles would probably be a better idea. He still plays defense, the Padres need to retool, and apparently thought about not picking up his option IIRC. He's owed $9M next year, was +20 according to +/- in RF, and had the eighth highest EqA in the NL. Probably has 10-5 rights, but that might not be a huge obstacle. Abreu is younger, but he wants a three year deal and thinks that OF walls can kill you if you get too close. Paying him $40M would be a big mistake.
  9. haltz
    They should be interested in who's the best overall player (and consider the cost of course). There's a huge difference between the two if those numbers hold up.
  10. haltz
    .280/.360 + 18-20 HRs + very good speed + good defense + youth + cheap contract = great CF Does he even have a good reputation on defense? Chris Dial's system and +/- have him as absolutely horrendous with the glove this year.
  11. haltz
    It's similar in money, but Lilly is a better pitcher. He actually strikes people out and you'd expect him to get a bounce coming from the AL East. Even if they do something about the middle infield, the Cardinals won't have enough if something happens to Carpenter and/or Wainwright. Lohse doesn't make a difference there. What the Cardinals need are better players, not to be spending $40m on league average or worse pitchers because that's what they think the market dictates. Innings eater is just another way to say a pitcher sucks but hasn't gotten hurt yet.
  12. haltz
    There haven't even been 1,000 full seasons by 27 yo SPs. 204 with a 115 ERA+ or better in 162 innings. 127 since 1956. Anyway, I don't know what is or isn't hyperbole here, but I'm having a hard time finding many that didn't go on to have at least one more above-average season. Larry Dierker's one and so is Mark Mulder.
  13. haltz
    It's a huge stretch.
  14. haltz
    Just RARP. I didn't say those were true talent rankings (in fact I said I think he's better than this), just that this year he has a .278 EqA and all 1B have combined to put up a .277 EqA.
  15. haltz
    Sure there is. He's EqA is almost exactly average for a first baseman this year. He is still, however, a plus defender (which makes him an above average player) and very likely a better hitter than his rate stats show this year. Replacing him with Hoffpauir would be a pretty stupid knee-jerk reaction to what probably amounts to random variation for both. I don't know what kind of defender Micah is, but even if he is a .301 EqA hitter like his translation shows despite avoiding walks like the plague, it's probably not that big of an upgrade. What is the point of sitting the proven, high-ceiling, high-paid, still above-average first baseman when the team is pretty much a mortal lock for the playoffs? You want to give all your regulars a breather now and then down the stretch, that's fine. Any other reason is stupid.
  16. haltz
    He had a BABIP 30 pts higher than his career mark. His BA followed. His ISOP was down a tick, and his BB% was right at his career rate. These things happen once in a while. It's lucky that it happened for the Cardinals while he was on the team, but a 91 OPS+ second baseman is such a small part of that 2004 offense that it's hardly worth talking about.
  17. haltz
    Cocaine was seen as a bigger issue and there was no steroid hysteria yet. Vincent himself said they didn't really think about it. Steroids (and prescription drugs) are mentioned in passing here for clarity I think (and apparently Faye also said it was mentioned because of rumors surrounding Jose Canseco). It's basically just some sort of policy reiteration, and of course there's the union issue with testing. I don't know, here's the memo. EDIT: OK, here's the timeline: 1991: Faye memo 1997: Selig reissues the memo 2001, 2002: same thing 2002: new CBA implements steroid testing And also he made sure there was a drug policy and testing for non-player personnel.
  18. haltz
    There's no way that Ludwick continues at this pace (160 OPS+) for the next few years. For one, his LD% is entirely unsustainable which means he's not a .300 hitter going forward. Nothing in his track record suggests that he will be. Also, .300 ISO guys are very few and far between. Ten players in the history of the game have done that in their age 29-31 seasons. Ruth, Sosa, Mantle, Schmidt, Thome, Ortiz, Foxx, Walker, and Bonds. This is extremely unlikely. His in-season Marcels have him at a (last week I think) .850 OPS going forward and he plays solid defense. That's a good player, but it's not HOF-level production like he's putting up now.
  19. haltz
    Dye's been only a bit below average, but he posted a -55 plus/minus over the last two years. That could be the worst defensive outfield ever assembled. Danks has been pretty good. His FIP matches his ERA and his xFIP is only .40 off (because he has gotten somewhat lucky on HR/FB), and he's totally changed his GB/FB profile this year. I don't see how Contreras has been lucky. His ERA is worse than his peripherals suggest. You're correct about Floyd.
  20. haltz
    This is true, and probably always was, but there's been a five-game swing between the two teams since that post was made. Anything can happen in 50 games, but it's still true that .500 ball the rest of the way gets the Cardinals 87 wins. The odds report expects them to get to 86.6 wins based on PECOTA's true talent estimates which are probably low for several Cardinals at this point. 87 wins likely won't take the Wild Card anyway.
  21. haltz
    Yes, I get that. If they want the average to be 100 instead of 200 like I said. Anyway, I don't think it was ever like you are suggesting. People confuse it with ERA+ and think it's a straight ratio like other "+" statistics, when it's really not. Really, it's misnamed and could be improved relatively easily, but it's easy and Forman has it on BRef for free, so it's caught on quickly.
  22. haltz
    To probably state the obvious, the '- 1' at the end of the equation makes it so that the average is 100 instead of 200. So instead of a player with no value having a 0 OPS+, he'd have a -100 OPS+. Felix Hernandez has a 1188 OPS+ this year with a 5.000 OPS, as opposed to his -100 OPS+ in 2006 with a 0.000 OPS. The reason that it's broken into SLG and OBP is basically that it correlates better with runs/out. If it was just a straight ratio that would tell you that a 75 OPS+ is 75% of league average, but it would tell you less about production. There may more to it, but part of the reason is that there's an implicit weighting of OBP this way. For example, in a league/park with a .330 lgOBP and a .450 lgSLG, you'll get two different answers for extreme hitters. You know that player A (.400/.400) is more valuable than player B (.300/.500), but quick-and-dirty OPS tells you they are equal. OPS+ does not. .400/.400 = 110 OPS+ .300/.500 = 102 OPS+ OPS+ doesn't work as well at the extremes as something like EqA, but it's better than straight OPS, or OPS/lgOPS*100.
  23. haltz
    The Cardinals really [expletive] the bed down the stretch in 2006, but it wasn't a bad team. The playoffs are basically a crapshoot and most preseason projections had them as the clear division winners (eg, DMB): NL Central W L Pct GB RF RA #DIV #WC St. Louis 95 67 .586 - 781 664 85.5 4.8 Chicago 85 77 .525 10 735 704 8.5 26.0 Milwaukee 79 83 .488 16 736 746 2.5 7.3 Houston 78 84 .482 17 720 754 2.5 5.0 Cincinnati 77 85 .475 18 724 760 1.0 1.5 Pittsburgh 75 87 .463 20 706 765 1.0
  24. haltz
    not all as a 2B though Eh, I'm not a big fan of looking at it that way, but whatever. Collins is probably the leader in runs in that case, but Biggio has more doubles as a 2B than he had in his career, and he's just 40-50 shy of Hornsby's total (no splits pre-1960ish I don't think), who played 700 games off 2B himself. Hornsby hit .378/.456/.629 from 1920-1931, so he's probably the leader there still. OK, so apparently the leader in doubles hit while playing 2B, if that's what we care about here, is Charlie Gehringer.
  25. haltz
    Biggio has the most runs scored and doubles. Hornsby leads in all the slash stats.
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