We projected Ichiro last week, Felix the other day and Beltre  and Bedard earlier today.

You know the deal.  How do you think Lopez will do this year?  Take the offensive step forward we have been waiting for and maintain his defensive abilities.  See regression in either offensive or defensive production.  Or repeat 2007's hitting with defense slipping.  You chose.

(Table stolen from Fangraphs...hopefully ok?)

As always, honesty and intelligence is appreciated.

We projected Ichiro last week, Felix the other day and Beltre earlier today.

You know the deal.  How do you think Bedard will do this year?  Repeat the year he had with Baltimore before we brought him over because he is healthy this year.  Experience a season like last year with injury and mediocriocy.  Or have his arm blow up and become completely ineffective.  You chose.

(Table stolen from Fangraphs...hopefully ok?)

As always, honesty and intelligence is appreciated.

We projected Ichiro last week and Felix the other day.

You know the deal.  How do you think Beltre will do this year?  Continue his godly defense and have the offensive year we have always wanted now that he is healthy.  Field a little more like a human and maintain his underappreciated hitting.  Or revert back to 2005 Beltre who swung at every outside slider given to him.  You chose.

(Table stolen from Fangraphs...hopefully ok?)

As always, honesty and intelligence is appreciated.

I've fallen behind on my schedule for posting these so I'll be trying to throw them up over the next week or so.  We projected Ichiro last week.

You know the deal.  How do you think Felix will do this year?  Make the next step to finally become an elite SP.  Continue to be good but not amazing.  Or regress significantly.  You chose.

(Table stolen from Fangraphs...hopefully ok?)

Upon realizing today that LL/USSM have dropped the community projections, I figured I'd try to take up an abridged version of what they have been doing.  It was discontinued because they are busy people and its really just a fun thing and not really anything quantitative. 

I also agree it takes way too much time to do it in full justice so I'm going to try an scaled back version that will be easier to keep track of.  Instead of asking you to project a ton of categories, I'm gonna make it easy for you.  I will put up a poll that will simply ask you how valuable a player will be this year.  I'll break it down into increments and you can place your vote.

If you need an idea of how WAR works please go to fangraphs.  When projecting value please take into account the player's offensive value, defensive value, position and playing time.  I'm assuming most of the readers here have had this mantra beaten into their heads enough but if you need background on it Dave wrote some great "how to" articles that are posted under the glossary at fangraphs.

I will give a simple example of projecting a player.  Take Randy Winn for example assuming he plays a full season:

Offensive Value = 0 - 5 runs

Defensive Value = 5 - 15 runs

Replacement Value = 22 runs

Positional Adjustment  = -7.5 runs (RF/LF)

Total Value = 27 runs = 2.7 WAR (because 10 runs = 1 WAR)

In a little change from what fangraphs does, we will include SB/CS in the offensive value.  It shouldn't make much of a difference but if you think a player is a really good base stealer feel free to add a few fractions of a win on your projection.  Keep in mind that even the best base stealers rarely get more than ~0.5 WAR or so for their efforts.

Anyway, on to the poll.  I won't discuss my opinions on the players here in an attempt to avoid biasing your vote but feel free to discuss what you think he will do in the upcoming year.

We are starting off with Ichiro because he is awesome and if you are going to start talking about the Mariners, he's the guy you always start with.  I'll probably do a new guy every few days and try to cover the main guys on the team.

Apparently Smoltz may be going to the Red Sox in one of the more unpredictible moves of the offseason.  Reported by ESPN so its a little more credible than your typical rumor.

Smoltz has been great lately and looked to be doing well last year if it wasn't for the injury he sustained.  I'm pretty surprised Boston went after Smoltz because their rotation should be pretty set although I guess everybody could find room for him in their rotation.  Although it kills Smoltz's value, it would be interesting to see if he is used in Boston's rotation or the bullpen. 

This really hurts the Braves since they were looking for a pitcher. 

Apparently the contract is 5 mil base and up to 10.5 mil total.

(Olney's post doubled in size and details right as I posted this)

At the bottom is some speculation of trading young pitching (Clay Buchholz) for a catcher.  We have a lot of catchers....Lets make a deal!

Interesting little article over at BBTF.  Its probably written by a Red Sox fan so there is that small hint of irrational thinking.  Still its interesting.  More or less, its talking about what the Red Sox should do to get a good catcher.

One of his suggestions is to trade for a young catcher.  To avoid giving away too many prospects to do this he suggests taking on bloated contracts.  In the M's case he suggests trading for Jeff Clement and Carlos Silva.  You lose Clement who projects to be a good/great catcher if he can stick at the position and stay healthy.  Carlos Silva sucks both as a person and a player.  He is also making 36 million over the next 3 years.  Clement projects to be pretty good and Silva isn't quite as bad of a player as last year shows (although my hatred for him will burn strongly for the next three years) so I don't think this plan makes sense if its a pure salary dump. 

If you say that Clement is a 3 WAR player (4 seasons including arb? I suck at service time.) and Silva is a 1.5 WAR player then we are trading 36 million for Silva and 15 million in Clement arb salary.  We are trading 15.5 WAR * ~6 mil/WAR = 93 million in value at a price of only 51 million effectively giving them 42 million in value.  This means we need to get 42 million in value in return to come out even.  All this is really rough but this pretty clearly shows that this type of trade doesn't make sense if its just a salary dump.  Clement has too much value.  Clement might be around longer than 4 years if I messed his service time up too which would make him even more valuable.

I'd love to get a guy like Lars Anderson if that was possible but maybe we could grab one of their pitchers like Masterdon since they already have too many good SP.  There are ways that this could make sense because we need to get rid of some catchers and Clement has the most value by far and has his fair share of question marks.  With NYY and Tampa looking good next year the Red Sox have a lot of pressure to improve their team.  Their most obvious hole is at catcher and it makes sense in their case if they can get somebody who will help them out.  That motivation plus a pretty tight catcher market might make this the time to sell Clement.

There are a ton of reasons to hold on to Clement and if the return wouldn't be high enough then you definitely hold onto him.  I think it is an interesting thing to think about though.

Link

To sum up Dan Szymborski's projection of our team...We should have seen last year coming and the 2009 team is going to be pretty pathetic for a lot of reasons.

Kenji is projected to be our worst catcher behind Clement, Moore, Johnson, and Burke.  I think Moore's projection is actually much closer to Clement's than I thought.  If you haven't already jumped on the Adam Moore bandwagon, this is probably a good time to do it.

Russell Branyan is going to be one of our best players....

2B has three options all which look to give very similar production (Lopez, Tug, and Valbuena).

Beltre is expected to repeat last year without improvement/decline.

Yuni is the team's 3rd best option.  The best, Mike Morse...god help us all.  (Tug is probably a better option though).

Our OF is gonna suck unless we bring in some people.  Ichiro is good athough ZIPS has a tough time predicting a good year for him.  The rest are either not good or too young to help. 

Starting pitching should be good and the bullpen might be mediocre (especially if Putz is traded).

If this depresses you too much look at the Marlins projections.  They suck too although they have young exciting players.  All and all, these projections are pretty depressing to me.  The worst part is I think they might be pretty accurate.

Stumbled across this nice write up.  Goes through and shows a list of the league's best position players.  Combines all the saber stats to give total value for the players.  Also has links to each position so you can look at how bad our team is.  Moral of the story is Beltre is borderline amazing.

List of Positional Players

Anyway...check it out.  I don't think the climax will be a surprise.

(Saw this link on tango's blog.  Definitely a good spot to stop by.)