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.

Really? Because of the four offseason RF targets the Cubs had going into the winter meetings, Gathright is better than 2-3 of them (depending on how many games you think Bradley will last in the outfield). And that's BEFORE you take contract value into account.

A run saved on defense is equally as valuable as a run scored on offense. Joey Gathright is a top defensive player at a premium defensive position, who also has a little surplus value as a baserunner. Oh, yeah, and he's played his career in a tougher league, so you should expect to see his hitting stats improve a bit when he moves to a weaker league and a hitter's park. Let me tell you - the Cubs could do worse things than a Soriano-Gathright-Fukudome outfield, and you can let Reed Johnson spell one of the lefties against RHP for good measure. Worse things include Bobby Abreu - I'd rather have Gathright at whatever salary Abreu ends up making than have Abreu at whatever salary Gathright ends up making. Very good signing by the Cubs if true, especially if it's a minor-league deal.

I don't believe it takes into accounts receiving throws. It doesn't; MGL seperately accounts for that in his SuperLWTS system.

It's not as much of a skill as you might think. Something like two runs per year for a guy like Lee who's good at it.

To the extent that WHIP correlates with high-K and low-BB rates, sure. But we can figure out a pitcher's K and BB rates. We don't need WHIP. The extra information that WHIP contains - BABIP - over those two is not a very good measure of pitcher skill.

Sure, ERA's not perfect. I can name only, oh, 10-20 things wrong with it. But, well, all of them are also true about WHIP. And there's something like another 10 things wrong with WHIP that aren't wrong with ERA. The biggest problem with ERA is that pitchers do not have a large spread in talent for preventing hits on balls in play - it's largely the responsibility of the team's defense. So let's use WHIP instead, which is even MORE reliant on hits to evaluate a pitcher! And doesn't give any credit to pitchers that strike out lots of batters and allow fewer home runs, which means that their score rate is lower! This sounds like a fantastic idea.

Wow, did you miss the point there. You would be correct. Colin would be incorrect. I've recovered the park factors that Baseball Prospectus has used in EqA for the last ten years. It's constant for each player on a team, with a few exceptions. It's actually scaled as to what percentage each player had in each park, which of course is better. It makes no finer tune adjustments. Well 1.5 to 2 wins isn't really different than what I am projecting, with the exception of me being a little more optimistic on the offensive side of the equation. As for how I calculated runs. I reconstructed the EqR based on 660 PAs so that would be 5.2*outs*eqa^2.5. I also have to make a side adjustment for OBP%, what in my actual analysis I ignored it for the reason that the two OBP%'s were close and we're talking about a small hand full of outs that Theriot used. Even in accounting the difference, as 10 outs, all of this will be negated by Ryan Theriot's caught stealing, and one vital thing that my DRA uses that EqA should but does not, GIDPs. Because Theriot is a groundball first hitter, as you know, he hits into a lot more GIDPs than your typical hitter. Greene, being an extreme flyball hitter, doesn't hit into quite as many as Theriot. It's only a small handful extra per year, but couple those with outs made on the bases and you close the gap, at least in my eyes, of the OBP difference between the two with respect to outs. FWIW: I'm expecting Theriot to OBP around .350 and I would expect Greene to OBP around .330. Over 660 PAs, that's 13 outs. I'd expect Theriot to ground into about 4 more GIDPs and get caught about 6 more times on base. So we're really only looking at an extra inning with respect to that 20 point OBP difference. You may think I am a little too optimistic with my OBP projection of Greene, but that's all we're differing on. There's nothing wrong with my analysis on how his .330/.280 projection gets the difference over 19 wins. EqA is park adjusted from a value standpoint. As I mentioned above it makes no adjustments further than that. Are there other ways that are better to make more accurate translations for a player, yes. But from a value standpoint, the way they do it would be correct. We are answering an entirely different question. Actually, my .280 EqA isn't really that far out of the blue. His road EqA the three previous seasons were .285, .282, .280 and the season prior to those three he nearly OPS'd 900 so he was up around that mark too. Anyways, component factors aren't perfect. I think that the OBP for Greene is a shade high as well. I think that you and I are closer to agreeing on Greene's value than we are to anyone else in this thread, but I still think you're about 10 runs off on your estimate on offense. I didn't say that BP's park factors specifically were component-based - I only claim to know about the inner workings of the BP stats I claim to know the inner workings of, and that's largely restricted to run estimators. The disagreement was in the way that Rob phrased it - some park factors don't apply that way, but some park factors do. I don't think the difference would be dramatic enough to make up all of 10 runs, although of course if I'm that convinced of that I should test it at some point, shouldn't I. I dislike home-road splits because of sampling issues - you need to at least regress the split based upon the park factor.

Just to pick a fight... park-adjustments aren't specific enough to be of great use when you've got players on the extremes in flyball or groundball tendencies. It doesn't matter much if Juan Pierre is playing in Coors or Petco... but it sure as hell makes a difference for a guy like Khalil Greene. That's a broad generalization of what park factors are and how they work. Specific park factors - like the BB-Ref park factors - sure, you can say that. But we have component park factors and batted ball park factors available to us if we want them.

Really, I had no idea. I am ignoring defense for a shortstop in my analysis, I'm pretty sure never mentioned anything of the like? I'm pretty sure I have no idea why you're even mentioning marginal wins as X-average. I've used the word marginal once in this thread only because you brought it up. My point was that the value of the wins that Greene generates us over Theriot are worth a lot higher than your typical win. If you want to think of that difference as Greene's marginal wins over RP - Theriot's marginal wins over an RP or average or w/e level you want. Fine. It's a waste of time to calculate that stuff when you can calculate the difference between the two just as easily. If someone really wants to know what I think Greene gives the Cubs over Theriot. I'd project Greene giving the Cubs a .280 or so EqA. I'd peg Ryan Theriot somewhere in the .255 range, give or take. Again, there's no need to be much more precise than ballparks on these sorts of things. That difference, over the course of 660 PAs, is going to be in the high teens for runs, precisely at .280 and .255 it'll be 19.3 or so. There's a few more hidden runs in there in Khalil's advantage that we can ignore for now. You know where they come from on the offensive side of the game. As for their difference in defense. Defensive stat's suck and are for the most part, nearly useless. I'll let you dictate their difference in defense. Let's, for the sake of simplicity, assume the Cubs are a 820/720 team with Theriot, which you can bitch about if you choose to. Any slight difference is irrelevant. First column is defensive difference (+ means Greene is better) +10 - +2.68 W +05 - +2.18 W +00 - +1.68 W -05 - +1.18 W -10 - +0.68 W -17 - +0.00 W I'd probably say the difference between the two is around two wins, for the Cubbies. I'd also say that the two wins at 88 or 90 wins or any total close to that is worth a lot more than $6.5m + decent RP prospects. I really think you're handling the transition from R/O to R/PA wrong here, and that's giving you an inflated sense of what the difference between Theriot and Greene is on offense. If you want to step me through how you're getting those runs per 660 PA figures then we can have a discussion. (And a .280 EqA for Greene? Really? That's interesting, if by interesting you mean "totally cracked." You really expect him to tie his career-high EqA next year? Remember - EqA is park-adjusted.) I ran the figures real quick using the forecasted wOBA off Fangraphs, with a little park adjustment thrown in, and I'm coming up with a 7 run gap on offense in Greene's favor. Then a +12 for Greene over Theriot in defense (using Rally's projections), and you're looking at around 1.5-2 wins difference between them.

Again, I wasn't meaning 3 wins is marginal. I was merely using three as a whole number to explain my point about a team with wins around 90, each individual win has very high value, though a three win increase from Izturis/Slop to Greene has a pretty good chance of happening. Marginal wins means wins above X - average, replacement, Cesar Izturis, etc. And yeah, sure, if you ignore defense Izturis had a bad season in 2008. I don't see how ignoring shortstop defense is a credible way to evaluate baseball, though. Justin Inaz's TotalValue stats have Theriot and Izturis dead even in value in 2008, once defense is taken into account.