No, I haven't given up on 2012 before it has even started. But, in order to figure out what might be best to do for next year (and to get my mind off the present debacle) I thought I'd look at where inertia might carry us in 2013.

This list, by position, contains a number of assumptions.  First, I think Tony LaRussa will probably retire at the end of 2012 after climbing to #2 on the manager-win chart.  Second, I'm assuming that our top prospects continue to develop.  Third, I'm assuming that we resign our own most-significant free agents.  Since I'm charting the path of least resistance, I'm not assuming free agent acquisitions (though I mention some areas at the end).

I find this list hopeful, but have tried not to be outlandish.  The question is, What might the 2013 Cardinals be like if we stay on course and promote from within (given the assumptions listed above).

Continue reading this post »

Coming up with good reasons to resign (or extend) Albert Pujols is easy.  At the moment, I can think of 407 good reasons, and counting.  But in order to make a reasonable decision it is always a good idea to consider the contrary point of view.  My overwhelming desire is for the Cardinals just to give the man his money, and let's play ball.  However, what are the arguments against doing that? 

I have not tried to do statistical analysis to support or disprove these arguments.  All I've tried to do is state the major types of arguments that one could use to support letting Pujols become a free agent and leave after 2011. My point is not to prove or disprove their validity but just to get the relevant arguments on the table. Some excellent discussion, of course, has already happened along these lines.

So, what do you think?  Are any of these obviously wrong or irrelevant?  What are the major arguments I've left out?  Which ones do you think are the most fruitful, and need to be looked at more closely?

Continue reading this post »

If Colby Rasmus were to be traded, what would be a reasonable return?

Note:I don't want to see Rasmus traded.  Sending his level of cost-controlled talent out of town seems irresponsible to me.  Doing it because a bad manager (and Tony LaRussa has been a bad manager this season) can't work with him would make me sick.

If Rasmus would be traded, though, what kinds of deals might be reasonable?

Rasmus is listed as #14 in Dave Cameron's 2010 Trade Value rankings (just above David Wright and just below Robinson Cano -- link)

The reasons are simple.  He plays a premium defensive position well, he can hit, he has not yet reached his probable peak-production years, and he is under cheap team control for four more years.

The Cardinals would need to get something similar in return (especially in terms of premium position and cost control), in order to make a trade reasonable.  We don't have needs in the easy-to-fill defensive spots (1B, LF, RF), but we have glaring needs in the more difficult infield positions (3B, 2B, SS) and in starting pitching.  Minus Rasmus, of course, we would also have a need in CF (which may or may not be able to be filled well by internal options, such as Jay).

In this post, I look at the players we might be interested in who rank below Rasmus according to Cameron. He may or may not know what he is talking about, but his list is at least a decent place to start.  This ranking came out in mid-July, and I would expect some re-ordering by now. 

I've excluded anyone with a contract valued at more than $5M per year, as well as any player not under team control for at least the next three years.  The numbers in front of the names indicate Cameron's Trade Value ranking.  The numbers in parentheses following the names are their 2009 and 2010 WAR according to FanGraphs.

SP

#21 Ubaldo Jimenez  (5.7, 5.3)

#27 Clayton Kershaw (4.2, 3.8)

#29 David Price  (1.6, 3.6)

#36 Tommy Hanson  (2.6, 3.5)

#39 James Shields  (4.1, 2.0)

#44 Brian Matusz  (0.8, 1.9)

#46 Mat Latos  (0.1, 3.3)

#48 Ricky Romero  (2.7, 3.6)

#49 Phil Hughes  (2.2, 2.1)

2B

#47 Martin Prado  (3.1, 4.0)

SS

#32 Elvis Andrus  (3.1, 1.7)

For reference, here is Colby's line:

CF

#14 Colby Rasmus  (2.3, 2.6)

The list is obviously heavy on starting pitching, with young starters seen as valuable commodities.  With respect to CF, 3B, 2B, and SS, everyone listed below Rasmus (except for Andrus and Prado) makes a lot of money-or they have an untradeable contract like Troy Tulowitzki.  Teams lock these players up quickly and keep them (perhaps a lesson we should learn from...).

On the good side, one can see why Rasmus would be a valuable trade commodity.  The performance, position, and price are a rare combination.  On the bad side, getting what we need from him may not be easy, if we want a position player. 

In my opinion, there is not enough difference in value between Elvis Andrus and Brendan Ryan to justify that trade.  It would just not be a Rasmus-sized increase.  Martin Prado is different.  He would be a significant upgrade, if you believe that all-performance-no-tools players can sustain excellence.  He is arbitration eligible 2011-2013.  Atlanta's current starting CF is Rick Ankiel.

Regarding pitching, I have to express doubt that a number of the players listed would be traded by their teams for Rasmus.  Pitching is also much more of a crapshoot than a position player because of injury risk.  However, if the Rays want to ship us David Price....

What think you?  Again, I do not want to see Rasmus traded.  However, if he does need to go, what would be the best (reasonable) option?

What kind of player, really, is Rick Ankiel the center-fielder?  What value would it present to the team if Colby Rasmus turns into the Next Big Thing in that position, instead?  What about Jay, or Pham, in the future?  What makes a superlative center-fielder, or even an average one?

Continue reading this post »

At a certain point in many deliberations, the parties involved start to ask not, “What do we do now?” but “How did we get is this situation?"  The latter question arises because none of the existing choices seems to make a lick of sense, whereas it seems reasonable that there should be at least some good option available.

Consider the St. Louis Cardinals and that most nebulous of positions, second base.  Whether or not the Skip Schumaker Experiment works, how did we come to this crossroads?

Well, consider the following (methodology below):

There are exactly 12 second basemen who played in 2008 that you may really want on your team. 

They are (with runs produced and runs saved above average per year, plus total):

Utley                (29.8 + 17.5 = 47.4)

Fontenot           (32.5 + 9.1 = 41.6)

Pedroia            (26.0 + 4.8 = 30.8)

Kinsler             (31.5 – 9.6 = 21.9)

Uggla               (21.0 – 0.4 = 20.6)

Roberts            (19.5 + 1.0 = 20.5)

DeRosa            (23.0 – 4.2 = 18.8)

Matsui              (9.5 + 6.0 = 15.5)

Durham            (15.0 – 1.6 = 13.4)

Polanco            (4.5 + 7.4 = 11.9)

Hudson            (14.0 -3.2 = 10.8)

Grudzielanek    (-0.5 + 10.6 = 10.1)

In that order. (The sample size on Fontenot is somewhat small, but if he keeps performing as he has, he is considerably better than Pedroia.)  These all play 10 runs or more above the average 2B, offense and defense combined, and there is a large drop in production down to the next player (Ellis, 5.8 total). 

So, how do you get one of those guys?

1.  Sign someone who is spry but not young.  Grudz and Durham are still available.  But age has not, historically, been kind to second basemen.  The UZR vz. Age curve looks like the Cliffs of Insanity once the 2B gets past 32.  Perhaps, though, a one year contract would be a good risk.

2.  Trade with crazy Jim Hendry.  DeRosa—who is better suited to play 3B, but whose bat made him a very good 2B, overall—was traded for three minor league pitchers.  The headliner was in AA.  Players like Ottavino and Salas, maybe.  Doesn’t it figure that the one GM crazy enough to trade DeRosa, for that, works for a team that will never trade with us again?

3.  Sign someone injured and past his prime, and lose your first round pick.  Hudson hit the free agent marketplace this year, and lingered.  Three reasons: Type A Status (Albatross ‘round his neck), he suffered a wrist injury recently, and he was barely a league-average 2B last year.

4.  Win a free-agent bidding process against other teams for a decent young(er) player.  Kaz Matsui signed with the Astros in 2008 for 3-years, $16.5 MM. 

5.  Trade a king’s ransom, dealing with a sane GM.  Would Motte, Wallace and Kozma get you Brian Roberts?  Probably.  Would it be wise to do that?  I don’t think it would get you Pedroia or Utley.  Maybe if you threw in Wainwright.  The Phillies gave us their best player (Rolen), a perennial All-Star in his prime, for Polanco and Bud Smith.

6.  Roll your own.  Problem: under Walt Jocketty, we didn’t even try.  Even under Luhnow, players at premium defensive positions (MI, C, and CF), who can hit, go in the top ten of the draft.  We never pick there (and thank goodness).  So, we roll the dice lower down and end up with T. Greene.  Or Kozma and Vasquez, who are still several years away.

7.  Of course, we could just have kept Grudz.  Hindsight is 20/20, but that decision was not one of Jocketty’s finer hours.  It would of saved us the whole Adam Kennedy Story.  Still, this year we would be looking at that UZR vs. Age curve and wondering…does he still have it?

Methodology:

First, I converted each player’s wOBA into runs over/under average.  To get a better value, I took their 2008 wOBA and regressed it toward their career average wOBA.  The weight was (2*2008 wOBA+Career wOBA)/3.

Then, I took their UZR/150 for 2008, 2007 and 2006 as 2B, and averaged the values together, to find runs above or below average per season on defense (over a 3-year stretch, as Fangraphs suggests).  If the player did not have at least 50 games at 2B for a year, I used 0.0, or roughly league-average defense, for the calculation.  So, new players and some utility players got regressed strongly toward league-average, which I think is fair.

Add the two together.  It produces runs the player produces (or loses) against average, per year.  For reference, replacement level (per Dan Cameron on Fangraphs) is about -20 runs per year (-15 runs on offense, -5 runs on defense).

In search of a league average 2nd baseman.

Question:  Will Skip Schumaker be a league-average 2B this year?

Further Question:  What is a league-average 2B, anyway?

Trying to answer Question 2, I looked at who played 2B for MLB teams last year, and used wOBA and UZR/150 to gauge how they performed offensively and defensively.  Then I took averages (arithmetic means) and medians, and tried to see who (offensively, defensively, and combining the two together) were the league-average 2B last year.

(All stats are from Fangraphs.  I didn't count anyone who played in less than half the games last year.  That did include several players who were utility players, or who played other positions than 2B.  But, these are who play 2B for a lot of MLB teams.  If I am including Utley and Pedroia, I think I need to include them, too.  I'm looking for an average.  There were 39 players considered, in all.  All stats are 2008 only, and UZR/150 is taken only for the players time at 2B.)

League Average 2B by wOBA:

The average (arithmetic mean) for the 2B I looked at was 0.333.  The median was 0.328.

The closest 2B around the median were:

Aaron Miles (0.331)

Mark Grudzielanek (0.329)

Felipe Lopez (0.328--taking WAS and STL combined)

Howie Kendrick (0.328)

Mark Loretta (0.326)

Jeff Kent (0.326)

League Average 2B by UZR/150:

The average (arithmetic mean) for the 2B I looked at was 1.4.  The median was -0.9.

The closest 2B around the median were:

Howie Kendrick (0.8)

Ray Durham (0.7)

Freddy Sanchez (-0.7)

Jamie Carroll (-1.0)

Alexei Casilla (-2.0)

League Average 2B by combining wOBA and UZR/150:

I used Dan Cameron's formula to convert wOBA to runs above or below average, given in his blog post on Fangraphs about Replacement Level 2B.  It is ((wOBA-0.330)/1.20)*600.  UZR/150 computes defensive runs gained or lost above average.  I took these two stats, both in runs, both adjusted for a full year (more or less), both referenced to "average," and added them together.

The league average 2B (offense and defense combined) had an average (arithmetic mean) total of 3.1.  The median was 1.7. 

The 2B who were closest to the median were:

Kaz Matsui (2.6)

Orlando Cabrera (1.9)

Aaron Miles (1.7)

Howie Kendrick (-0.2)

Mark Loretta (-1.2)

Back to my original question, it seems that if Schumaker is going to be a league-average 2B, he will have to have a combined offense and defense that would be at least in the Mark Loretta range.  Skip's wOBA last year was 0.341.  That translates into 5.5 runs above average (that means he would be comparable to Joe Inglett, offensively, as a 2B.). 

Therefore, he would need to lose no more than 6.7 runs defensively.  The comparable 2B to that (and there are several much worse ones in MLB) are Matzui and Cano.

Some Notes:

1.  Typing this data into Excel, I noticed how much UZR/150 varies from season to season for the same player.  Much more than any offensive stat.  It is the best metric I have access to for defense, but I just have a hard time believing that players' defensive performance really is that variable.

2.  A replacement level 2B (according to Cameron) has a wOBA of .306 and a UZR/150 of -5.  In case you are wondering, Brendan Ryan performed worse than that last year when he was a 2B.  He projects to do better, and think he should, but he did not show it.

3.  Adam Kennedy had a combined total of 9.7, but almost all of that was from his defense, which, as I noted above, varies like a yo-yo.  Felipe Lopez was considerably below average (-4.7), taking into account the whole year.

4.  I did not include baserunning.  Feel free to add it in, if you want.

5.  If my methodology is faulty, please let me know.  I'll correct it as soon as I can. 

On sum, it seems to me that if Schumaker can slip in above the Matsui/Cano line as a 2B defender, and maintain his hitting, he should do OK.  Otherwise, we might have been better off keeping Mighty Mouse.

What say you?

This FanPost is a combination of two original FanPosts which went up within minutes of each other.  At vivaelpujols' suggestion, I have copied his (I think, his?) post and pasted it under mine.

Original post from IL and StL Fan:

Thinking about what the Cardinals might do the rest of the offseason (or into Spring Training), I wanted to see the difference in win-shares between two possible scenarios.

Scenario # 1: Sign Ben Sheets. And our off-season pitching acquisitions are done.

Scenario # 2: Sign Braden Looper and sign a top left-handed reliever.

I chose these two scenarios believing that we have to sign another starting pitcher. If we sign Sheets, the money says we are done. If we sign a lesser hurler, my choice would be Looper, and that should leave some money for something else. It seems to me that the left-handed side of our bullpen is still awfully thin. At least two premium lefties remain available (Ohman and Shouse), so I used the better of them.

The 2008 stats are from Baseball Reference, and the projections from FanGraphs.

What actually happened last season:

The Starters:

Sheets win-shares in 2008: 16

Looper win-shares in 2008: 11

The Lefties:

Shouse win-shares in 2008: 6

Ohman win-shares in 2008: 5

Miller win-shares in 2008: 4

Villone win-shares in 2008 (for reference): 2

Ring win-shares in 2008: -1

Combination Win Shares in 2008:

Ben Sheets + Trever Miller + Royce Ring = 19

Braden Looper + Brian Shouse + Trever Miller = 21

Difference = 2 win-shares (in favor of Looper/Shouse/Miller)

Projections for 2009:

I used Marcel, because I have access to it and its values were in the middle of CHONE and Bill James. I then plugged them into the win-shares above bench spreadsheet erik has been so kind as to point us to. If someone wants to redo this using PECOTA, I'd be interested to see it.

The Starters:

Looper win-shares above bench: 2.2

Sheets win-shares above bench: 4.1

The Lefties:

Shouse win-shares above bench: 0.5

Ohman win-shares above bench: 0.4

Miller win-shares above bench: 0.2

Ring win-shares above bench: 0.0

Combination Win-Shares Above Bench (Projected):

Ben Sheets + Trever Miller + Royce Ring = 4.3

Braden Looper + Brian Shouse + Trever Miller = 2.9

Difference: 1.4 win-shares (in favor of Sheets/Miller/Ring)

Some notes:

1) All in all, Marcel expects a difference of 3.4 win-shares in-between what actually happened last year and what is expected next year, regarding the two scenarios. That is a big swing.

2) To account for that swing, Marcel is counting on 7 more innings from Sheets than from Looper (173 vs. 166). I think the probabilities are actually better for a healthy season from Looper than from Sheets. If that is true, Looper would be undervalued in the projection. I would guess that they are still using his inning totals from his last year as a reliever to calculate probable inning totals.

3) Marcel also counts on a major resurrection from Ring, cutting his ERA in half. That is a lot of improvement. In 2008, he was 3 win-shares worse than Villone.

4) Calculating win-shares above bench for the Cardinals may be deceptive regarding left-handed relievers. We have no bench, unless Ring is for real or another of our value signings comes through. A quality left-hander adds real value to this team that I think is not completely reflected in the projections.

5) My sig is still on the Sign Ben Sheets! Petition, but I'm not sure, anymore, where the smart money lies. If the projections are accurate, and he pitches most of the year, Sheets is the one you want. But the difference is not as huge as I had expected, if Looper and a quality left-hander can be brought on-board for about the same cost. And I have to suspect that if there were not serious medical concerns about Sheets, he would already be signed.

What do you think?

Original Post from vivaelpujols (BEN SHEETS!!!!!!!!! and the best upgrades):

A lot our the recent discussions VEB have been about Ben Sheets.  Many of us have different reasons for wanting or not wanting him, but I'm gonna try to show just how much sense it makes to get Sheets.

Right now our worst everday player is Joel-.300 batting average against-Piniero.  Last year in 148 innings he had a 4.71 FIP and a 5.15 ERA.  He managed to be "worth" 0.9 wins.  Next year, Piniero looks to be getting 25 starts due to an anemic amount of depth.  CHONE projects him at 131 innings and a 4.67 FIP.  That would be good for another miserable 0.9 WAR season.  Now Piniero could be a solid swingman, but with those projections he certainly shouldn't pitch every 5 days. 

Ben Sheets last year was fantastic.  He pitched nearly 200 innings and had a 3.38 FIP and a 3.09 ERA.  He was worth 4.6 wins.  He is clearly the best pitcher avalaible, but a rather significant injury history has scared off most teams.  However, while Sheets has missed significant time in 3 of the last 4 years, he has never been worth less than 2.3 wins.  Even the most conservative projection CHONE has him at 148 innings and a 3.84 FIP and a 2.9 WAR.  A more optimistic projection Bill James has him at 186 innings and a 3.46 FIP and a 3.9 WAR.  So the odds are that even if Sheets does miss a significant amount of time AND pitches significantly worse than last year, he would be a full 2 wins better than Piniero.  Any luck with health and he would be a huge upgrade.  Incidentally, his current asking price is 2 years 18 million which is almost exactly how much we have left to spend. 

So then if Sheets represents a 2 win upgrade over Piniero, is there any other FA out there that could match that number over our incumbent?  Manny Ramirez immediately comes to mind as he would likely be close to a 3 win upgrade over Skip/Mather/Ankiel, however he is WAY out of our price range and it doesn't make sense to sign another OF when we are so stacked with talented, young outfielders. 

Ty Wiggington has been mentioned a lot here as a possible replacement to Glaus in the early going and then a guy who could replace Kennedy at second or become a DeRosa type utility guy.  Wiggington is coming off a career year in which he surpassed 1.5 WAR for the first time, he was worth 3 WAR.  However, most projection systems think he will regress back a league average player at around 2 WAR.  Considering the fact that Freese and Kennedy project to be nearly as good as that next year, signing Wiggington for a slight gain at best seems to be a very poor allocation of our few remaining resources. 

Other starters who are available are Braden Looper and Randly Wolf.  Neither of these players project to be much better than Pinata or Boggs/Todd and both are being somewhat heavily pursued by other teams.

In short, there is no other player available who would upgrade us as much as Sheets.  Even if he misses significant time to injury, he would still upgrade our team more than any other player out there.  The risk is minimal with Sheets, because he would likely be on a short term, incentives based deal.  This is one of the best pitchers in the game who is almost falling on to our lap, hopefully the front office will see that and take a risk. 

SIGN BEN SHEETS.