When it was announced that the A’s had won the bidding for Japanese RHP Hisashi Iwakuma, there were generally two reactions:
1. Who knew the A’s had any money?
2. Why are they spending it on a pitcher, when their starters had the lowest ERA in baseball last year?
With the year-end awards right around the corner, fans are going to be celebrating and debating the most valuable players in baseball. The WAR framework is helpful for that sort of thing, as well as something just as fun: debating which players were the least valuable. But you know who gets left out? The guys in the middle: the most average players in baseball.
It is easy enough to determine (for position players) from the WAR components. As I did last season, by subtracting the “replacement” component from a player’s WAR (in this case, RAR) line, you get his combined batting, fielding (the WAR leaderboards use UZR, but one could do with with other metrics), and positional contribution above or below average. If you take the absolute value of that number, you get his distance from average.
Keeping the “toy stat” nature of this exercise in mind, here are the five “average-est” position players of 2010!
It’s hard to tell if this edition of Offseason Notes is more large or more in charge.
SCOUT Batting Leaderboard
The Leaderboard
Here is the SCOUT batting leaderboard for the Arizona Fall League. (Click here for more on SCOUT, the metric that’s “sweeping” the “nation.”)
The Orioles have quite a climb ahead of them. They weren’t the worst last-place team in 2010, but they have the furthest gap to reach fourth place (19 games, tied with the Mariners). Last year the AL East produced four above-.500 teams, and none of them appear particularly weak for 2011. That means Baltimore has to improve considerably if it wants to catch Toronto and move out of the cellar.
In particular, Baltimore would do well to improve on these positions in the off-season:
While it has generally been assumed that Adrian Gonzalez won’t be in San Diego much longer, the Padres front office confirmed these beliefs with some public comments last week, stating that Gonzalez’s asking price was not something they could afford and suggesting they would listen to trade offers for their star first baseman this winter. The question is no longer whether the team will trade Gonzalez – it is simply a matter of when. For Jed Hoyer, the biggest decision they will make all winter is whether to start the season with Gonzalez at first base. Should they?
According to Ken Rosenthal, Marlins 2B Dan Uggla was offered a 4 year, 48 million dollar contract, buying out his final year of arbitration and his first three free agent seasons yesterday. The second baseman declined the deal, preferring to head to arbitration this season and enter the free agent market after the 2011 season.
The Tigers already re-signed third baseman Brandon Inge earlier this offseason and it appears they have completed the left side of the infield by re-signing Jhonny Peralta. The league leader in typos, Peralta will play shortstop in 2011 and presumably 2012 at the cost of roughly $11 million.
It’s that time of year again, the time when teams and players start positioning themselves to get the best deals for themselves on the free agent market. A good deal of this is posturing, naturally, but it is often difficult to separate mere negotiating ploys from the honest truth. That said, taking some initial reports of what certain players (assuming their agents accurately speak for them) want, I wonder who the most deluded person of the 2010 offseason is so far: Bruce Chen, Jeff Francoeur, or Derek Jeter.
For whatever reason, “Quantitative Baseball Analysis Not Bombs” hasn’t ever really caught on as a slogan.
SCOUT Batting Leaderboard
The Leaderboard
Here is the SCOUT batting leaderboard for the Arizona Fall League. (Click here for more on SCOUT, the metric that’s “sweeping” the “nation.”)
You have seen a detailed report on the must-follow prospects in the White Sox system, and Marc Hulet’s ranking of the top 10 guys in the system. This is a list of the other guys, who you haven’t read about today, that the die-hard fans will know and want mentioned.
Given the White Sox International Scouting Department problems, and the issues they had with bad drafting for a few years, the lack of depth in this system should not be a huge surprise. The farm system hasn’t been a commodity as valued in a Kenny Williams-run organization as his competitors. It’s a tool to use in trades, and at some point, that philosophy is going to thin things out until your scouting director can replenish them. We are, at least, a year away from this happening for the White Sox.
