The first thing, always, is to see what you've got when once you sort through the debris and shrapnel. Regrettably, when discussing the Giants' available talent, one almost has to have two discussions: what they really have, and what it seems likely that the thoroughly incompetent GM and field manager think (if that is the term) they have. For simplicity, I will stick to the first kind of discussion; but understand, then, that this is not necessarily a realistic guide to what the team will believe and do, just what one observer thinks they ought to think and do.

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That's the basic idea here: to try to clear out the game threads (and other FanPosts) of the seemingly endless backs and forths on this topic.

I'll open the floor up with a few thoughts of my own.

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This is a quarter-season look at how the Giants are doing.  But as a threshold issue, we want to define "doing": do we mean absolutely or relatively?  Well, in truth we want to know both things, but we do need to take care to keep them distinct in our minds.  "Absolutely" is what leads to winning or losing, so that's crucial; but "relatively" tells us whether how they are doing absolutely is under- or over-achieving, and what we might expect for the future.

Then there is the issue of what "actual" performance means.  The topmost, but crudest, measure is wins.  After 39 games, the Giants have 22 wins; pro-rating that to 162 games, it's 91 wins.  But, as is commonly known, wins are a function of cumulative runs scored and runs allowed; if the actual wins total is substantially different from the calculated one, the smart money will bet on the calculated wins as the better indicator of future developments (because the better indicator of developments to date).  The Giants have scored 135 runs and allowed 137; that calculates over 162 games to only 80 wins, which is discouraging.  But!  As is also commonly known, runs scored and runs allowed are themselves functions of certain performance stats.  So next we need to see what the current projections from actual stats are for expected runs scored and runs allowed.

Now things look brighter.  Calculating from the team statlines, we find that the normally expected runs-scored total would be 142, and runs allowed 131.  That calculates to 87 seasonal wins.  (In fact, if we don't do any rounding to whole numbers till the final wins expectation, it's actually 88 wins.)  Working backward from that projection of 88 suggests that right now the Giants "should have" won 21 games, just based on how they've actually played so far, and that is exactly the same number that calculating forward from the stats produces (as expected).  For comparison, here are the wins projections for the whole division, calculated in the same way from actual team stats to date:

San Francisco 88
Colorado      82
San Diego     78
Arizona       76
LA Dodgers    74

(You can see all of MLB on this page.)

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I am up to my neck in annoying and niggly but important stuff, but I wanted to pop in for a few words on the Opening Day roster.  These are they.

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Let's begin at the team level, then discuss individual men.

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As we are now almost exactly 1/3 of the way into the season, it is perhaps time to take a look at how the team's prospects look, and why, which last means some stats.

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Ignoring the myriad of things you don't even know a GM does and sticking strictly to player-personnel issues, what--exactly--would you do, and in what order?  Try to keep reality in mind: no Velez-for-Pujols trades need apply.

(My own thoughts below the jump.)

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Poor Edgar is another of the Rodney Dangerfields around here.  I thought I'd take a quick snapshot of where he is now, not to prove any very definite hypothesis, but just to get some perspective.  This uses data through games of Sunday, 23 May (which means, as it is being written, without the Tuesday game).

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The American scientist William Thomson, better known under the title granted him in Britain, Lord Kelvin, is famed for many things (the Kelvin temperature scale honors him), but the most-quoted of his remarks is what I want to address here in a baseball context:

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

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It is, I suppose, consensus that Eli Whiteside is not merely not a good hitter, but is in fact a bad hitter.  His major-league career numbers, sparse as they are, are such as rarely--very rarely--ever allow a man to continue at the major-league level; nor do his minor-league stats suggest that this is a SSS phenomenon.  So is it folly to even carry Whiteside on the roster, much less play him frequently?

As the topic title suggests, defense is a consideration.  Over 20 years ago, the redoubtable Craig Wright, in The Diamond Appraised, discussed at length, and made a strong case for, the importance of "CERA", Catcher's ERA (which, as he noted, had long been used in Japan, where managers often change the catcher instead of the pitcher when there's a problem).  Since then, some have agreed and some (notably Keith Woolner) have disagreed.  The reason analysts can differ so much on a numerical metric is that it is very hard to make decent measures of it--the problem being, of course, the ever-bothersome SSS issue.  On almost every team that's ever been, there is one catcher who gets the great majority of the playing time, so the data for whoever is #2 is awfully weak.

Another of the problems with CERA is that it is discussed by a lot of people who don't understand what it is, or at least what it should be.  It is not simply the ERA compiled while that man is catching.  It has to be the effective ERA when normalized for all the different pitchers caught.  That is, if Catcher X catches 200 innings of pitcher A and 100 innings of pitcher B, we need to halve Pitcher A's numbers with him (or double Pitcher B's), else we are measuring how good the pitchers were, not how good the catcher was.  Moreover, CERA is meaningless except if we are comparing two catchers who have caught mostly or wholly the same pitchers for long enough to have meaningful numbers all round.  A lot of people calculate what they call CERAs without normalizing for innings caught.  (The ESPN stat listing, for example, doesn't, nor, I am told, does The Bill James Handbook.)

There's a decent article on the subject here.  That article is miles and miles away from anything definitive, but it at least suggests that CERA differences for above-average catchers can range from as litle as .05 to as much as .50 of a run on the ERA.  That at least gives us a broad working framework of plausibility in which to examine the extent to which defense might make up for a lack of offense.  To proceed, we need, besides some estimate of the CERA difference, some estimate of offensive contributions.  There are numerous runs-created-type formulae; not surprisingly, my favorite is my own, the "TOP" (Total Offensive Productivity"), which is handy because, among other things, it is presented as a number of seasonal runs: it is, in effect, what would be scored in one season by a team whose offense was nine exact clones of the man in question.

Regrettably, one cannot simply average TOPs for individual players (even weighted for playing time) to get a team TOP, because the TOP is a multiplicative product of two elements, which are (as is the case with all such formulae save linear-weights types) essentially an on-base factor and a runner-advance factor, and the average of products is not in general equal to the product of averages.

Sidebar example: in the first two lines below, the average of the C factors is 8; but line 3, which uses the average A value and the average B value, gives 9.

A x B = C
=========
2 x 4 = 8
4 x 2 = 8
---------
3 x 3 = 9

Nonetheless, we can get a broad-brush idea of differences in team results from changing those for one slot in the lineup.  In the real world, the worst batters with an everyday job will have TOPs in the 600 range, or very, very occasionally the upper 500s (these are typically shortstops and catchers); the best, in the Pujols range, will have perhaps 1500 or so, though that is only a tiny number of outliers--1200s and 1100s are pretty good numbers.  Eli Whiteside's career-to-date number is 553, awful; BM's is 669, pretty punk.  By comparison, Joe Mauer's is 1122.  (Utterly meaningless but amusing sidebar: right now, as I type, Mauer's 2010 TOP is 1172 and Whiteside's is 1207.)

Let's take, then, not the difference between Whiteside and BM, but between Whiteside and a rather good offensive-value catcher, to whom we will assign a TOP of 953, exactly 400 higher than Whiteside's career number (Brian McCann's career TOP is 930, so that's a sort of mental bookmark).  A given man will, in the best of cases, get maybe 10% of his team's plate appearances.  So, in very broad-brush terms, playing an Eli Whiteside every day as opposed to a Brian McCann-type catcher would cost about 10% of the 400-run difference, or 40 runs.  Now 40 runs a season is a really big differential: at the usual 10-runs-a-game value, it means 4 more wins or losses, just from changing one man.

But now let's look at CERA.  The plausible range of differentials, we saw, seems to be maybe .05 to .50.  Let's hypothesize that Whiteside would have a CERA differential of 0.25 of a run, not minor but by no means stretching, or even approaching, the bounds of plausible (we will assume this differential to be over an "average" catcher).  If one lowers a staff ERA by 0.25 of a run, that's roughly 40 runs over a season.

My, how interesting: a reasonable, perhaps even modest favorable CERA differential is worth the offensive difference between Eli Whitside and Brian McCann or another like him.  I would call that big news.  If we compare Whiteside to BM himself, the TOP difference is only 116, or about 12 seasonal runs; to make up 12 offensive runs lost by a better CERA, Whiteside's differential only needs to be about 0.08 of a run over Molina's.

Granted the hard data is fragmentary and SSS, but let's see what there is.  I can't testify to the accuracy, but in a post to the Mercury-News board dated 22 April of this year, one person gave the following numbers (attributed to Baseball Reference):

Pitcher.....w/Molina...w/ Whiteside...Whiteside-Molina
Zito........... 4.79...........3.18............. -1.61
Sanchez.........5.31...........1.95............. -3.36
Cain............3.37...........2.59............. -0.78
Lincecum........2.63...........0.00............. -2.63
Wilson..........3.35...........2.45............. -0.90
Affeldt.........2.45...........0.00............. -2.45
Romo............2.05...........3.97............. +1.92
average                                          -1.40

Is that proof?  Of course not: nothing like it.  Is that suggestive?  You bet yer bippie.  (An unadjusted CERA comparison, up to date for 2010, shows Molina at 3.16 and Whiteside at 2.76, a differential of -0.40; also not remotely probative but also assuredly suggestive.)

So the bottom line is that there is a credible--nay, strong--case to be made that despite Whiteside's miserable bat, he would actually a strong net gain for the team as the everyday catcher (especially over BM).  If that sounds bizarre, go hunt up a copy of The Diamond Appraised and read Craig Wright's love song to Doug ("Eyechart") Gwosdz--whose name, I am pleased to say, I spelt aright on the first try.

The metric "OPS" (On-base Plus Slugging) is commonly used as a measure of both player and team performance.  While it is clearly better than the other "standard" metrics, it is far from being a perfect, or even really good, measure, and it's worth understanding how and why it comes up short.

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Op-Ed contribution in the 17 October New York Times: Building a Better Umpire.  (The Times site is funny: sometimes you have to register--free--if you haven't already, sometimes articles come up anyway; I'm registered, so don't know about this one, but it's a link from a news aggregator page, so should work.)

What Vincent says is mostly simple and obvious; it will therefore have zero effect on the present Lords of Baseball.  But I just thought some here might find it interesting . . . .

Perhaps it's time to take a break, and just consider some perhaps amusing fantasies (other than a new GM).  Suppose you woke tomorrow to find yourself Commissioner of Baseball?  (In fact, the Commissioner is anything but all-powerful, but we're just playing, so assume that the role gives you god-like powers.)  What would be the first things you'd do?

Around our house, the consensus list--14 items--is something like this (in Letterman-style reverse order):

14.  No cameramen running around on the field during games.

13.  Every anthem singer to have the mike turned off at 2:00 minutes into their rendition.

12.  Forbid making fans diss the National Anthem by having to stand and put hand over heart for "God Bless America".

11.  No imported foreign players with over a year's experience in their pro leagues eligible for Rookie of the Year.

10.  No artificial turf.

9.  No players to use snuff wherever cigarettes are now forbidden, or to carry snuff tins in their uniforms.

8.  Fans wanting to vote for the All-Star game can do so only by presenting a ticket stub: one stub, one set of votes.

7.  Re-disconnect home-field advantage from the All-Star Game.

6.  Annually have the players, managers, and coaches rate all umpires in a secret vote, then send the five lowest finishers to AAA ball (and bring up the likewise-selected top 5 from AAA).

5.  Make the first playoff round be 7 games, so teams have to use their pitching staffs more realistically.

4.  Eliminate the DH; make it good with the Players' Union by increasing rosters to 26.

3.  Realign to four 7-team divisions and eliminate all inter-divisional (and inter-league) play, so that we are spared the embarrassment of team A winning their season series with team B handily then losing to them in a playoff, and are restored the pleasures of fanciful speculation over who's better than whom that we used to have in the World Series.  (This makes, in effect, four leagues, though the nomenclature remains that of two).  In consequence, reduce the season to 156 games, and start it a week later.

2.  Mandate a reasonable number of double-headers (which helps keep the season length down).

And the #1 move:

Break the Fox and TBS contracts.

All daydreams, but ah, what sweet dreams . . . .

And yours are . . . ?