The Average Player

by
August 12, 2009

One of my long-time battles is explaining that MLB average players are actually good and important to winning ballgames. A few months ago, I ran across a piece on Driveline Mechanics that highlighted the most average players through means of WAR (simply put, Runs Above Replacement – Replacement Runs) and loved it. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen an update by the author, appropriately named Devil_Fingers, in a while. So, in his spirit I decided to highlight the players who exemplify league average performances this year.

Keep in mind; this is simply this year and not a complete representation of their true talent levels.

The most average players in baseball – which is to say those with the closest proximity to zero either way – are a pair of outfielders who hit about as well as anyone in the bigs, but field about as well as … well anyone in your local beer league. I’m talking about Brad Hawpe and Jason Bay. After them you have names like Luis Castillo, Mark DeRosa, Cristian Guzman, and Jimmy Rollins. Former top prospects like Billy Butler, B.J. Upton, and Andy LaRoche are within stone throws away from being average one way or the other.

Much like how Hawpe and Bay were penalized for their inability to field, Randy Winn has runs deducted for his poor bat. J.J. Hardy too. Clint Barmes has his offense and defense basically cancel out, and Jose Lopez is slightly poor at both things, but his positional adjustments cancel the struggles out.

You should be able to take away that average players are everywhere, unique to themselves and useful to their teams. I can go on for a while, comparing average players to snowflakes or butterflies, but that seems boring and misguided.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

31 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Slugger O'Toole
16 years ago

Good stuff. I always appreciate putting a few faces to league average preformance. I find it helps one to remember the level of play that falls dead center.

0