As most of you know, the Win Values we present here on FanGraphs are wins above a replacement level player. Replacement level, essentially, is the expected performance you could get from a player who costs nothing to acquire and makes the league minimum. That’s the baseline that players add value over – performance over their no-cost substitute.

However, I know examples can be extremely helpful, so today, we’re going to start looking at some players who currently personify replacement level, and what their respective organizations should expect from them in 2009. We’ll go through all the positions in order to look at what a replacement level player currently looks like at each spot.

First Base

First baseman who settle for minor league contracts are the quintessential Quad-A players. They’re usually the best hitter on their Triple-A club, but have some flaw that keeps them from getting an everyday job in the majors. For some, it’s a lack of power for at a position that demands it. For others, it’s that power is their only real skill and the sole reason they have a professional career at all. Often, they can be useful platoon players or bench bats, and in best case scenarios (Carlos Pena, for instance), they can turn into legitimate stars. Here’s this year’s crop.

Brad Eldred, Chicago (AL), .321 wOBA,
Mike Sweeney, Seattle, .319 wOBA
Chris Shelton, Seattle, .335 wOBA
Josh Phelps, San Francisco, .355 wOBA
Wes Bankston, Cincinnati, .305 wOBA
Larry Broadway, unsigned, .327 wOBA

It’s an interesting mix of players, ranging from soon-to-be-retired Sweeney to the never-played-in-the-majors Broadway. As expected, the average wOBA for this group is quite a bit higher than the catchers, since first base is where bad defenders try to hide, so the pool of potential players is a lot larger. The average wOBA for this group is .327, which is almost league average offense. Running the run conversion formula again, we see:

((.327 – .330)) / 1.20) * 600 = -1.5 runs

Yes, you can get a league average hitter (essentially) for free. The baseline for offense from a first baseman is essentially league average offense. If you’re not getting that, the guy better be a tremendous fielder, or he’s just not very good.

-1.5 runs on offense, -5 runs on defense (these guys aren’t exactly Mark Grace), and a -12.5 position adjustment gives us the result of these guys being about 19 runs below average per 600 PA. Let’s just call it -20 for round numbers sake. That gives us -2 wins for these minor league free agent first baseman over a full season.

As most of you know, the Win Values we present here on FanGraphs are wins above a replacement level player. Replacement level, essentially, is the expected performance you could get from a player who costs nothing to acquire and makes the league minimum. That’s the baseline that players add value over – performance over their no-cost substitute.

However, I know examples can be extremely helpful, so today, we’re going to start looking at some players who currently personify replacement level, and what their respective organizations should expect from them in 2009. We’ll go through all the positions in order to look at what a replacement level player currently looks like at each spot.

Catcher

This has been the off-season of the low cost catcher, as 14 of them have signed contracts as free agents, and only Jason Varitek received more than $1.5 million per year, and of the low cost guys, only David Ross got more than a one year deal. Seven of the 14 signed minor league contracts, so they’re the ones that we’re really interested in as replacement level catchers. The list, along with their wOBA projections from CHONE:

Jamie Burke, Seattle, .282 wOBA
Kevin Cash, New York (AL), .264 wOBA
Toby Hall, Houston, .292 wOBA
Robby Hammock, Baltimore, .287 wOBA
Adam Melhuse, Texas, .271 wOBA
Chad Moeller, Baltimore, .254 wOBA
Vance Wilson, Kansas City, No Projection – Didn’t Play in ’08

The average of the wOBA projections is .275. However, besides Burke and Cash, these guys aren’t renowned for their glove work. Hall and Melhuse, especially, are seen as fringe defensive receivers. Overall, we’d probably have to describe this group as below average defensively, so their total value is going to be a bit less than their .275 wOBA might indicate. Let’s knock it down to .270 and run it through the run value conversion.

((.270 – .330) / 1.20) * 600 = -30 runs per 600 PA.

So, we’re looking at replacement level catchers being worth something like -30 runs below an average hitter over a full season. Add in the +12.5 position adjustment, and we’re calling this group something like 17.5 runs below an average catcher over a full season. In reality, the gap will be a bit smaller than that, since catchers don’t get 600 PA. Given the reduced playing time, the gap between average and replacement level for a starting catcher is more like +15 runs, or about +1.5 wins.

So, here are your examples of replacement level catchers – guys like Burke, Hall, and Hammock would be expected to be something like 1.5 wins below an average catcher in 2009.

Yesterday, in the post about the players who have had comparable seasons to Matt Wieters Double-A performance last year, one commenter brought up Justin Upton, who didn’t have a chance to have a comparable performance because he got himself to the majors as a 19-year-old. And, since I angered a lot of D’Backs fans the other day, I figured I’d make it up to you by presenting the list of MLB players who have made it to the majors (and got at least 100 AB) at age 20 or younger since 1980, and how their MLB careers ended up shaking out.

Here’s the list of players.

Roberto Alomar – Hall Of Famer
Adrian Beltre – All-Star
Miguel Cabrera All-Star/Maybe HOF
Luis Castillo – All-Star
Wil Cordero – Useful Role Player
Carl Crawford – All-Star
Ken Griffey Jr. – Hall of Famer
Gregg Jeffries – All-Star
Andruw Jones – All-Star
Jose Lopez – Useful Role Player
Lloyd Moseby – Useful Role Player
Jose Oquendo – Useful Role Player
Aramis Ramirez – All-Star
Edgar Renteria – All-Star
Jose Reyes – All-Star
Alex Rodriguez – Hall Of Famer
Gary Sheffield – All-Star/Maybe HOF
Ruben Sierra – Useful Role Player
B.J. Upton – All-Star
Justin Upton – ?

That’s a ridiculous list of talent. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise, though – there’s perhaps no better proxy for talent level than ability to rise through the minors rapidly. If major league teams can become convinced of a player’s ability before his 21st birthday, he’s probably going to have a career somewhere between All-Star and Hall Of Famer.

That’s especially true if you display power at a young age and can still get to the majors quickly. Guys like Luis Castillo, Edgar Renteria, and Jose Reyes aren’t very good comparisons for what Justin Upton will likely become – instead, his comparables are more in the Beltre/Sheffield/Cabrera/Sierra/Ramirez range. When Ruben Sierra is your downside, and Gary Sheffield is your upside, you’re a pretty fantastic young player.

Don’t let his struggles in the second half deter you from realizing that Justin Upton is one of the premier talents in all of baseball. The odds are very good that he’s going to be a superstar.

So, for those of you who don’t follow minor league prospects all that closely, there’s this kid in the Orioles system named Matt Wieters. He’s good. He’s everybody’s #1 prospect. No one thinks he’s going to be anything less than a star. After all, he’s a catcher who just demolished Double-A pitching (.365/.460/.625!) in his first year as a pro and gets raves for his work behind the plate. What’s not to like?

However, I’m not sure people realize just how special the season that Wieters just had in Double-A really was. Here is the list of players who have hit had comparable offensive seasons in Double-A at age 22 or younger in the last 30 years.

Jose Canseco, 1985, age 20: .318/.406/.739 in 211 AB
Bob Hamelin, 1989, age 21: .308/.454/.640 in 211 AB
David Wright, 2004, age 21: .363/.467/.719 in 223 AB
Pat Burrell, 1999, age 22: .333/.438/.631 in 417 AB
Doug Jennings, 1987, age 22: .338/.459/.608 in 464 AB
Ben Grieve, 1997, age 21: .328/.455/.610 in 372 AB
Vladimir Guerrero, 1996, age 20: .360/.438/.612 in 417 AB
Miguel Cabrera, 2003, age 20: .365/.429/.609 in 266 AB
Eric Chavez, 1998, age 20: .328/.402/.612 in 335 AB

Okay, so, Hamelin and Jennings are around to remind us that he’s not a 100% mortal lock for stardom, but even including those guys, they totaled 33,620 major league at-bats and combined for a .283/.377/.501 mark. That’s an .878 OPS as a group. You know how many major league catchers have posted a career OPS of .878 or higher? Two – Mike Piazza and Mickey Cochrane.

I’m not saying that we should just enrhine Wieters in the Hall of Fame right now. There’s some chance that he’s going to be this generation’s Doug Jennings, after all. But it’s far, far more likely that Wieters is the best position prospect we’ve seen in quite a while – a catcher who hits like a DH and has the glove to be an asset behind the plate. That’s a remarkable player. Maybe we should start bronzing his plaque after all.

One of the bigger issues of disagreement between the statistical community and the mainstream media is the predictive power of minor league performance. It’s still widely believed that minor league statistics aren’t very useful, and that there is a significant collection of players who can hit well in Triple-A but will be exposed in the majors. It’s true that there are career minor leaguers beating up on younger pitching, but that group is much smaller than usually believed.

However, it’s not that rare to see a player come up from the minors, where he’d been destroying the ball, and fall on his face in the major leagues. Last year, for instance, we saw some disastrous performances from Chin-Lung Hu, J.R. Towles, Brandon Wood, Wladimir Balentien, and Jeff Clement. These guys have all experienced success as hitters in the minors, but all struggled mightily in short term looks at the big league level.

For most organizations, the reaction to such a performance is to go find another option. The Dodgers re-signed Casey Blake and Rafael Furcal rather than giving Hu another shot. The Astros have been in the market for a veteran catcher all winter. The Angels kept Chone Figgins despite trade interest. The Mariners acquired Endy Chavez to play left field.

Organizations aren’t the only ones. Fans, too, often give up on players who don’t immediately hit like they did in the minors, as they only see the struggles and usually didn’t see the successes. However, giving up on a young player with a good minor league track record based on a few hundred at-bats is hardly ever the right call. 2008 shown with examples of this very thing.

Carlos Quentin posted a .320 wOBA in his first 454 major league plate appearances over two seasons after posting a .419 wOBA in Triple-A. His power was written off as a product of Tucson, and the D’Backs essentially gave him to the White Sox. Whoops.

At least Quentin hit a little bit, though, even if he was a disappointment. Ben Zobrist, on the other hand, racked up an astonishingly bad .221 wOBA in his first 303 plate appearances as a major leaguer. In ’07, he hit like a weak pitcher in the majors, even after tearing up Triple-A the whole year. Never a top prospect, it would have been easy to write him off as a career minor leaguer, but the Rays gave him another chance in ’08, and he responded with a .364 wOBA in 227 PA. The leap in performance from ’07 to ’08 would be about +10 wins if both performances came in a full season of work.

Also rebounding from a bad major league debut was Elijah Dukes, who combined personal troubles and off-field problems with a .190 career batting average headed into 2008. While he still showed walks and power, a .190 average over 200 PA is going to raise questions every time, and it certainly didn’t help convince Tampa Bay that he was worth the trouble. However, he was one of the true breakout stars of 2008, posting a .382 wOBA over 334 PA.

You can add these three to the list of quality major leaguers who overcame the busted minor leaguer tag. The lesson to be learned – don’t judge a player with a long history of success on one bad season. Talent shines through, even if not immediately.

At the beginning of the off-season, the Arizona Diamondbacks reportedly offered Randy Johnson a contract for 2009 that would have paid him around $4 million or so. Realizing that it was a low-ball offer, he decided to pass, and the D’Backs told him to go find another employer. He ended up signing for $8 million to pitch for the SF Giants because he wanted to stay in the NL West and pitch close to his home in Arizona.

So, allow me to scratch my head and wonder why on earth the D’Backs would then turn around and guarantee that they’ll pay at least $8.75 million for Jon Garland. If you can figure out something that Garland is better at than the Big Unit, I’d love to know what it is.

Garland posted a 4.76 FIP in 196 2/3 IP last year, which made him a 1.9 win pitcher. Since 2002, he’s been worth 19.4 wins, due to his durability and ability to throw strikes. Johnson posted a 3.76 FIP in 184 IP last year, which made him a 3.8 win pitcher. Since 2002, he’s been worth 34.9 wins, due to his awesomeness.

The highest FIP Johnson has ever posted, in his entire career, is 4.29. That was back in 1990, when he was still trying to figure out how to throw strikes in the big leagues. Since 1992, he’s posted a FIP over 4.00 just once, when it was 4.27 with the Yankees in 2006. He rebounded in 2007 with a 3.20 FIP, and was among the league leaders again last year. Jon Garland has never posted a FIP below 4.00. Ever. Only once, in 2005, did he post a FIP (4.24) that was lower than the worst of Johnson’s career. At his absolute best, Jon Garland is worse than Randy Johnson at his absolute worst.

Deciding that you want Jon Garland instead of Randy Johnson is a disastrous decision. Yes, Johnson is old, but he’s still an excellent major league pitcher. Garland is a #5 starter whose best skill is not getting hurt.

In a market where good pitchers are signing for bargain rates, the D’Backs just paid non-bargain rates for a bad pitcher. Congratulations, Arizona, you’ve officially screwed up your entire offseason.

The Twins avoided arbitration with Jason Kubel yesterday, signing him to a two year contract that the Star-Tribune claims is for about $7 million and contains a team option for 2011 that is worth $5 million. So, the deal is either 2/7 or 3/12 for Kubel’s final two years of arbitration or his two arb years and his first year of free agency. Most people will probably consider that a good deal for the Twins – getting a useful bat under team control for reasonable prices without a long term commitment.

I’m not so sure. As R.J. noted this morning, the Pirates just signed Eric Hinske to a one year deal worth between $1 and $2 million. In what world is Jason Kubel a significnatly better player than Eric Hinske?

Kubel’s last two years show a pretty stable skillset – aggressive hitter with above average power, will take some pitches, and absolutely awful in the field. His wOBAs in 2007 and 2008 were nearly identical (.342 and .345 respectively) and are basically what we can expect from Kubel going forward. Heading into his age 27 season, Kubel is what he is – a guy with a decent bat and no defensive value. His career UZR in the OF is -18.9 in 1,375 innings, and the Twins seem to have recognized that he’s a full time DH for the rest of his career.

What’s a DH with a slightly above average bat worth? A little bit more than half a win above a replacement level player. In 2007 and 2008, Kubel accumulated a total of +1.2 wins in 983 PA. Given everyday playing time at DH, we can estimate he’ll be worth between 0.5 and 1.0 wins for 2009.

Compare that to Hinske (the guy who had to settle for a one year deal as a role player on a terrible team) – the offensive skillset is practically identical, but Hinske can actually play a competent 1B/OF. The offensive difference in their CHONE projections add up to 2-3 runs over a full season, but the defensive gap is clearly much larger. It’s hard to make a case that Kubel > Hinske.

Yes, Hinske’s five years older, but MLB is full of players with that skillset. Minnesota could have just used Hinske this year, then found his clone next winter, and so on and so forth. Same reward with none of the associated risk that goes with multiyear contracts.

I know, I know, it’s only $7 million over two years. But it’s a needless use of resources. The Twins budget isn’t that of the Yankees or Red Sox, so to contend, they need to maximize the return on all the dollars they spend. Especially in this economic climate, where good players can’t find contract offers, giving a multiyear deal to Jason Kubel doesn’t maximize the return.

So far, we’ve looked at a couple of teams who were less successful than we would have expected at turning their win values for 2008 into on the field wins, mostly due to situational hitting and pitching. Boston and Texas both played better than either their records or their RS/RA would show, and that should be encouraging to their respective fanbases with regards to 2009.

On the flip side, though, there’s the Minnesota Twins. They traded away Johan Santana, watched Torii Hunter and Carlos Silva cash in via free agency in other cities, and yet still managed to improve from 80 wins in 2007 to 88 wins in 2008, turning themselves into a surprise contender for the AL Central. If we were to use the standard deviation from pythag, we would simply concede that the Twins were a legitimate winner, as their 89 pythag wins was right in line with their 88 actual wins.

However, their team win value total for 2008 was just 80.5 wins. Based on the context-neutral performances of their players, they were a .500 ballclub, mostly due to an offense that just wasn’t that great. Their 12.8 batting runs above average was 9th best in the American League, but they were 3rd in the AL in runs scored at 5.09 runs per game.

Just like as before, let’s take a look at the situational context.

Bases Empty: .697 OPS, 11% below average
Men On Base: .811 OPS, 4% above average
Runners In Scoring Position: .826 OPS, 6% above average
Bases Loaded: .837 OPS, 2% above average

When a single wasn’t going to be worth much, the Twins didn’t do much, hitting like a band of Triple-A infielders. When they had a chance to drive men in, though, they turned into a pretty nifty bunch of run producers. Because their offensive distribution was so heavily skewed towards hitting in situations that would produce runs, the team ended up finishing 3rd in the AL in runs scored despite an offense that simply wasn’t that good.

While watching your team capitalize on a huge portion of their run scoring opportunities is exciting, it’s not a great recipe for success. If the Twins want to keep winning in 2009, they’re going to have to just hit better, rather than rely on turning up the offensive jets only in certain situations.

Yesterday, we talked about team win value totals, and how they won’t always match up with pythag win projections due to their context neutral nature. Today, I want to look at an example of why this is useful information, and how conclusions about a team’s true talent level based on RS/RA can be faulty.

Let’s talk about the 2008 Texas Rangers. They won 79 games, finishing nearly at a .500 record, despite the fact that they were outscored 967 to 901. Using the pythagenpat formula, you’d get 75 projected wins, so an analysis based on pythag might say the Rangers were lucky to win 79 games based on how they played. However, the total win values of their roster for 2008 paints them as an 84 win team. That’s significantly better than both their pythag and their actual record.

The difference, as usual, is situational performance. The Rangers allowed 98 more runs than the second to last AL team in run prevention, the Baltimore Orioles. Even when you include a park factor to make up for the environment they play in, they were still clearly the easiest team in the league to score runs against.

Now, it’s true, their pitching wasn’t very good. But it wasn’t far and away the worst in the league either. Their 4.83 FIP is actually substantially better than the Orioles 5.14 mark. Yes, Baltimore had a better defense and played in a less offensive-friendly park, but those don’t explain a 100 run difference in runs allowed when Texas’ pitchers posted a FIP of .3 runs better.

The difference can be found in situational pitching. The Rangers were unbelievably terrible at stranding runners – their LOB% of 65.7% was 3% worse than the next worst team, the Colorado Rockies. Look at these situational lines.

Bases Empty: .766 OPS, 5% below average
Men On Base: .874 OPS, 12% below average
Runners in Scoring Position: .891 OPS, 13% below average
Bases Loaded: .878 OPS, 8% below average

With no one on base, the Rangers were just not very good. Put a runner on, though, and they become disastrously terrible. Rallies just piled on top of rallies, and the runs came through like a flood.

There’s good news for Texas fans in this, though. FIP is more predictive from year to year than situational performance, so while their inability to leave runners on base hurt them in 2008, we shouldn’t expect that to repeat itself in 2009. They’re still not likely to be good at stranding runners (their pitchers aren’t really good at anything else, either), but they likely won’t be historically bad again.

This is one of the things that the team win values can highlight for us. The Rangers might have given up a lot of runs, but the way they went about giving up those runs shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as an indictment on the future abilities of their pitching staff. With a better expected situational performance, we can expect Texas to do a better job of keeping runs off the board even if their pitching and defense don’t improve at all.

As we mentioned this afternoon, adding up our individual win values for an entire team correlates very well with a team’s pythag win%, which should be expected since both are based on runs scored and runs allowed. However, while RS/RA does not account for the inning/score part of leverage, it does include the base/out portion of leverage. When looking at how many teams a run scores, a single with a runner on third will add to the total while a single with no one on will not. However, in our context neutral win values, all singles are treated the same – we do not account for the base/out context or the inning/score context.

Thus, you will still see some variation between team win values and team pythag wins. The Boston Red Sox are the best example of this from 2008. They won 95 games, had a pythag win expecation of 96 games, and had a team win value of 106 games. Their pythag matched their actual wins very well, but their win values had them as the best team in baseball, bar none.

Where does the difference lie? Performance in the base/out contexts. For instance, here’s how the Red Sox performed offensively in various base/out states, and their rank within that base/out split.

Overall OPS: .805 OPS, #2 in MLB
Bases Empty: .797 OPS, T-#1 in MLB
Men On Base: .814 OPS, #4 in MLB
Bases Loaded: .854 OPS, #7 in MLB

Only the Chicago Cubs could match the Red Sox in bases-empty hitting. Those two clubs started rallies more often than anyone else. However, Boston wasn’t as good at clearing the bases and capitalizing on their opportunities to score runs in bunches. The average MLB team had an OPS 18% higher with the bases loaded than with the bases empty – Boston’s OPS only rose 7% with the bases juiced.

This should actually be a bit scary for the rest of the AL East. What we’re saying, essentially, is that the Red Sox offense should have scored more than the 854 runs they actually compiled last year. On a context-neutral talent level, they performed even better than their 96 pythag wins would suggest. Their results suggest they were very good – the process behind those results suggest they were great.

Very few teams strayed as far from their win values in terms of their pythag wins as Boston. Almost all of a team’s RS/RA can be predicted by their context-neutral performance – the remainder is pretty marginal. That’s why win values correlate so well with pythag wins, and why they’re a pretty good estimator of team talent levels.