Wednesday, March 11, 2009

The Offseason and The Minor Moves

I'll throw out a thesis here for discussion. The moves the Orioles made this offseason are more important for who they allowed Baltimore to leave off the roster than the players they actually added. At least for 2009.

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Let's start with Felix Pie..

I'll focus on the bats. The addition of Pie allows Luke Scott to do a lot of DHing which in turn allows Aubrey Huff to play primarily at first base.

So we add Pie's WAR projection to the team (1.9) and subtract Millar's WAR projection (.4) for a net gain of 1.5 WAR.

The addition of Ryan Freel (WAR Projection: 1.8) allows players like Jay Payton/Freddie Bynum to be unnecessary (estimated platoon WAR Projection: -.4) for net of 2.2.

My point here is that I'm not sure the offseason acquisitions are that great but they do allow the O's to shed some players (or those types) who were pretty abysmal for Baltimore in 2008.

Am I off my rocker? Can we really evaluate the team this way?



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5 comments:

  1. I think we need to weight WAR by playing time as well as by position. I have a feeling Huff's WAR will not only regress in performance, but will also be demerited for his play at 1B.

    I know Dan has been working a bit on this aspect of projecting how well this team will do. I have been a bit remiss.

    What I wonder though is how our new defense will affect our pitchers. Our stadium is not a flyball pitchers dream as Camden was the second most prolific home run park in the Majors, if I remember correctly. We do have three outfielders who are likely to save about 30-50 runs solely because of their defense. Our groundball pitchers, who stand to benefit as they do not need to worry as much about throwing in a home run park, as saddled with an average to below average defense. Only Izturis is better than average. Roberts has been regressing as John Dewan and FanGraphs suggests. Mora is in the bottom quartile. Huff plays with over mitts.

    I think we are going to see small ball killing us at times. In turn, we will probably see sports journalists and message board guys around Baltimore show great esteemed for the single in the gap or the double over the bags in the corners.

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  2. "I think we need to weight WAR by playing time as well as by position. I have a feeling Huff's WAR will not only regress in performance, but will also be demerited for his play at 1B."

    This is true, I evaluated each player based on 695 PA which I knew was not realistic but I thought could give an approximation at least.

    Huff gives me pause as well...perhaps if we take the assumption that Pie caused a domino effect we should evaluate how those subsequent position changes would impact the team as well. Luke Scott's WAR will probably suffer a little bit due to reduced playing time in the field, Huff's will suffer from playing more innings in the field.

    Huff won't be good but according to CHONE he won't be Jason Giambi or Mike Jacobs bad...just Ryan Howard bad.

    And yes, I'm hoping Dan chimes in on this one...

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  3. "And yes, I'm hoping Dan chimes in on this one..."

    Ask and yee shall receive.

    1) To Jon's point about the defense. Yes, the infield D isn't good outside of Izturis, and that will hurt the pitchers. That's why doing WAR type analysis adds everything together. Roberts is going to hurt the team (via the extra runs the pitchers will be charged with) with his declining range, but when I see he'll be a 3.8 WAR player those runs are factored in. It doesn't really matter which side of the ball the value comes from, as long as the team is maximizing that value. Therefore the poor defense on the infield is the cost of doing business with their bats, and the team WAR is debited and credited appropriately (more or less). It would be nice to get a guy that hits like Huff did last year and also plays plus defense at first, but that kind of guy can cost you 8 years, $180 M.

    2) To question of bench player value. I have Ryan Freel being worth 0.8 WAR in 350 PA split among four positions (2B, 3B, LF, CF). Having one guy that could take that PA at those positions who was worse than Freel (lets say Bynum) or having 2/3 guys do that (Payton + Luis Hernandez) would result in less WAR for team (by about 0.8, probably).

    Another example: Ty Wigginton. I have Wiggy at about 1.1 WAR in 400 PA at 1B,2B,3B and DH. Just for his time at 1B, Wiggy is at 0.5 WAR in 200 PA. If Kevin Millar was still on the team and he would get 200 PA at 1B, he'd probably be worth around 0.1 WAR. That means signing Wigginton and letting Millar go is worth 0.4 WAR to the team just at first-base. But Wigginton will (may?) also see time at other positions. Giving him 25 PA at 2B instead of giving that playing time to Chris Gomez adds another (0.1 - 0.0001) 0.1-ish WAR to the team. And so on.

    Keeping it going with Scott. Luke with 575 PA playing LF all season is about 2.6 WAR. Even given that same amount of playing time (575 PA) but with only 175 coming in LF and 400 at DH, his value drops to 1.8 WAR. Being an above-average hitter is valuable if you can play slightly plus defense in left (as Scott can) but much less valuable if you don't play defense at all. That doesn't mean that Luke is a worse player, it just means that he won't add as much value to the team as he could have otherwise.

    Simple experiment: we have two players (Luke and Felix Pie) at two positions (LF and DH). We need 500 PA at each position from those two. Since one guy can't play two positions at once, if Luke plays LF for 1 PA then Pie has to play DH for 1 PA, and so on. What is the optimal arrangement for the team? Well Luke would provide about 2.3 with 500 PA in LF and 1.2 WAR with 500 PA at DH. Pie would provide 1.4 WAR with 500 PA in LF and -0.2 PA at DH. Even though Luke (himself) provides more value to the team in LF, the Pie in left and Luke at DH arrangement provides the most value to the team overall (2.6 WAR vs. 2.1 WAR).

    A nice thing about WAR, is that it's additive. What we're saying is "given the same playing time at the same position, how much more valuable is the new guy going to be than the old guy?" Replacing guys who are worse with guys who are better is always good.

    There are factors to take into account, of course. The Freel/Wigginton combo provides a lot of versatility, which is useful from a management perspective (though the team WAR is effected only insomuch as those guys take PA away from worse guys). There's also the piece of mind that if a starter goes down, the drop-off in quality to the back-up is lees severe.

    Though Cesar Izturis is only a 1 WAR player, the upgrade from last year at SS (around -4 WAR, which is astounding) is 5 WAR. That's the equivalent of replacing the #5 starter with a guy like Johan Santana (4.6 and 4.8 WAR the last two years).

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  4. Well, the problem with WAR . . . and it is a small problem is that it is pretty much based on last season, right? So, in order to project future defensive performance the underlying assumption is that there will be no difference in the number of ground balls vs fly balls. Last season a third of our innings were thrown by ground ball pitchers (>45% GB). This season we seem to have embraced fly ball pitchers even more so with Uehara, Hill, etc.

    If I had some time, I'd go through and figure it out, but I do not have that time at the moment. It may be a coincidence, but we have really shifted what little ground ball pitching we have into flyball pitching.

    I'm wondering if we are targeting fly ball pitchers in order to take advantage of our outfield. Not sure if that is a good idea at Camden Yards. It may also be representative of the type of pitchers we are developing in the minors as well. We do seem to focus on live arms that like to challenge batters up in the zone.

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  5. The GB/FB thing is fair. As you say, more flyballs at the expense of groundballs would leverage the team's defensive assets (great OF, mediocre IF) but be a hindrance at Camden Yards.

    I use tRA as my pitching metric of choice, which uses linear weights based on type of ball in play (GB/FB/LD etc.), walks, K's, and so forth. That would capture such differences, while still being fairly independent of the defensive metrics of the position players.

    If the pitchers give up more flyballs then their tRA should go up a little, but then the UZR of infielders should be less negative since they'll have less chances (and they're below average) and the UZR of outfielders should be more positive since they'll have more chances (and they're above average). So, overall, the WAR projections for the team as a whole will hopefully be close (predicting the future is usually an imperfect exercise at best) though the distribution of value amongst the players may be different.

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