Colin Wyers

Since the end of last May, not including his 65 or so PAs this season, Lee has a 108 OPS+. Your notion of "utterly useless" is questionable at best. (And I'd argue that OPS+ underweights Lee's offensive production - I used it because that's how the splits are presented at B-Ref.) I find that hard to believe. However, why the end of May and why would you not include his PA this year, that's dumb? He sucked starting at the end of April. From May 1 to today he's got to be sub 100 OPS+. I did the end of May because that's the time period Andy specified. Including this year's PAs would have taken some additional time and it didn't really change the substance of the point. But all selective endpoints are arbitrary if we're trying to discern future performance - why exclude last April? Projections based upon past performance are simple stuff - just go take a look at whatever's on Fangraphs under the player card and that should work just fine. (Well, except for the Bill James projections. Ignore those.)

Since the end of last May, not including his 65 or so PAs this season, Lee has a 108 OPS+. Your notion of "utterly useless" is questionable at best. (And I'd argue that OPS+ underweights Lee's offensive production - I used it because that's how the splits are presented at B-Ref.)

I'm not so sure about that anymore. Derrek Lee is borderline useless. He still is a solid defensive first basemen but he can't hit at all anymore. Cubs leaderboard by OPS, at this date last season: Name PA OPS Lee, Derrek 100 1.130 Soto, Geovany 82 1.069 Ramirez, Aramis 98 0.996 Cedeno, Ronny 37 0.995 Fukudome, Kosuke 91 0.986 DeRosa, Mark 87 0.877 Theriot, Ryan 83 0.871 Blanco, Henry 16 0.795 Johnson, Reed 71 0.755 Ward, Daryle 19 0.676 Fontenot, Mike 36 0.575 Pie, Felix 37 0.529 Soriano, Alfonso 61 0.528 Murton, Matt 10 0.200 Patterson, Eric 6 0.000 It bears SOME resembalence to the end-of-year leaderboards, of course. But last year around this time, everyone was freaking out over Soriano. He ended up the season with typical Soriano-like numbers. It's way too early for people to be jumping to conclusions like that.

It's called confirmation bias. The people freaking out about Lee are the same people who were freaking out about Lee last December. But 62 PAs is insufficent to prove them right (or, in fairness, prove them wrong.)

Because of the need to play defense as well as hit, Reed Johnson is a better baseball player than Micah Hoffpauir. And this would be true even if we were in the DH league. (And Derrek Lee? From all available evidence, still a better baseball player than Micah Hoffpauir.)

They're a young team, in the right part of the talent curve to have a breakout. They got rid of Dunn and Griffey so there's a hope that a fly ball will be fielded for an out at some point. (They'll miss Dunn in other ways, but replacing Griffey is an underrated boost for the Reds.) It's not the craziest idea to suggest that the Reds could challenge. It's probably unlikely that they WILL, but far from impossible.

The pitching situation is a little more fluid right now, but I do anticipate adding a form for that in a few weeks.

Every year, a lot of Cubs sites do community projections. I thought that for this year it might be beneficial if there was cooperation among sites in compiling the data. I've put together a web form to collect projection data from you, the fan. To participate, simply go to the form, select a hitter, and put in what you think he'll do next season. Do as many hitters as you feel comfortable projecting. Fields with an asterisk are required; fields without an asterisk are not. You do not have to look at any computer-based projection systems before hand. (You can if you like, though!) We are deliberately seeking human input here. Remember that these are median forecasts - we're projecting the most likely estimate here, where the truth is likely to hover around that. These forecasts are for a player's time as a Cub only - if you anticipate a player being traded away before the season starts, just put a 0 into everything. If there is a roster change, I'll add or remove players as appropriate. Thanks in advance for your time! EDIT: Forgot to mention. There's also a Referrer blank that you can set to "Northside Baseball." I'll prepare two sets of results for publishing here - one with all Cubs blogs/sites, one simply of NSBB posters. That way you can see how the NSBB community results look, in comparison to Cubs fans as a whole.

You showed Abreu and Gathright to be similar players in terms of value, yet would rather pay Gathright at 10M per year more. Does that make any less sense than preferring to pay Abreu 10M more? Especially when you consider their ages? You said you'd rather sign Gathright at Abreu's price than Abreu at Gathright's price. i.e. Gathright @ 10M > Abreu @ 800K Fine you'd prefer Gathright at 3Y/30M to Abreu at 1Y/800K?? Do we really think that Abreu signs a one-year deal? ...I should confess that I'm getting ready for work and sorta skimming this part of the thread. Sorry. I think that Abreu, at his age, is perhaps a bit more... volatile commodity than Gathright, where I think that it's very possible you're stuck with a replacement-level player making $10 million. Is that difference worth $10 million? Maybe not. But the train of thought among a lot of posters is that they'd rather have Abreu on Abreu's deal than Gathright on Gathright's, and I contend that's much more ludicrous than what I've said.

You showed Abreu and Gathright to be similar players in terms of value, yet would rather pay Gathright at 10M per year more. Does that make any less sense than preferring to pay Abreu 10M more? Especially when you consider their ages? You said you'd rather sign Gathright at Abreu's price than Abreu at Gathright's price. i.e. Gathright @ 10M > Abreu @ 800K Do we really think that Abreu signs a one-year deal?

You showed Abreu and Gathright to be similar players in terms of value, yet would rather pay Gathright at 10M per year more. Does that make any less sense than preferring to pay Abreu 10M more? Especially when you consider their ages?

You cannot possibly mean this. No way. I spelled out exactly how much I thought Abreu and Gathright were worth in another post in this thread. If you disagree with any of the particulars, feel free to state that and we can have a discussion. But I absolutely can mean that. Okay. First of all, I'm perhaps the biggest skeptic of advanced metrics as anyone on this forum, and your metrics "proving" that Gathright is as good a player as Abreu only serves to strengthen that notion. However, that is neither here nor there in this discussion. My point is that you made the comment (and for argument's sake, we'll assume Abreu gets a contract worth 15.5 million in 2009- below what I think he will actually get, ftr) that you would rather have Gathright for 15.5 million than Abreu for 800k. That's patently absurd, and there are no metrics that you can make up that support that stance. Your turn. You contend that my argument is obviously wrong by contending that my argument cannot be correct. I mean, I guess I can't really argue that - you'll just call all of my points made up, right? I don't have the lack of self-respect required to continue this line of conversation. If at some point you decide to actually, um, think, let me know.

Um: And I could care less whether you "like" defensive metrics or not. I don't like the fact that sandwiches don't appear in my hand whenever I snap my fingers. We all have our crosses to bear.

You cannot possibly mean this. No way. I spelled out exactly how much I thought Abreu and Gathright were worth in another post in this thread. If you disagree with any of the particulars, feel free to state that and we can have a discussion. But I absolutely can mean that.

Let's break this down. I split the difference between his Marcels and Bill James projected wOBA, and let's say he'll put up a .305 wOBA, so to convert out to runs in a season: (.305-.338)/1.15 * 650 = -18 Or roughly a replacement-level hitter, maybe a little better. (All estimates of hitting are relative to league, not position - we add in a positional adjustment separately.) So now let's look at defense. Eyeballing UZR/150, let’s say he’s +10 in CF. Then give him a positional bonus - I use +2.5 for playing CF. So to convert to runs above replacement, we add a replacement level bonus - +20 for the National League and +25 for the American League. Add it all together: -18+10+2.5+25=19.5 Voila, a league-average player in the NL, a bit below in the American League. And then you leave Fukudome in RF (you can do the same chaining with Dome - I think it's about +10 on defense, 0 on offense, and -7.5 for position - nowhere near as bad as most people think). Ok, now let's look at Ibanez. (.345-.338)/1.15 * 650 = 4 Again, looking at his UZR/150 for the past 3 seasons and regressing to the mean a bit, we get -10 runs or so defensively in a corner outfield, and another -7.5 for position. +25 rep-level bonus for an AL player: 4-10-7.5+25=11.5 Or roughly a win below average. Abreu: (.366-.338)/1.15 * 650 = 16 Again, looking at UZR/150, -15 on defense in an outfield corner and another -7.5 for position. +25 rep-level bonus for an AL player: 16-15-7.5+25=18.5 So it's a bit closer between Abreu and Gathright - Gathright likely gets a bit of a bonus for baserunning that I'm not accounting for here. Then you start getting into the fact that Abreu's older and the fact that Abreu wants an absurd contract. Bradley is a different animal - it's not that he isn't a better player than Gathright, it's that he's a much more fragile player.