Re-running the seasons with Oakland hobbled
After running the sims with a healthy A’s team showed them as division favorites, to much hooting, I took a suggestion and ran it again after crippling Harden and Gaudin, taking them out for the year, and re-ran the whole thing. Not because Harden and Gaudin will miss the whole season (well, Harden might if he’s traded) as much as to try and severely degrade the rotation all year.
The gap between the A’s and the Angels goes way up (average wins between them was 87 to 83, the A’s chance to win the division plunges to 17% win and 6% tied for the title).
Particularly interesting to us here in Mariner Land, though — the M’s win an extra game a year to put in an average season of 78-84. Yayyy.
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So all we have to do to win the division is cripple the important players on the other teams?
Really, that’s not so hard. Anyone have Tonya Harding’s number?
Too bad baseball isn’t a contact sport like football or hockey.
They can always hit a liner right at Hardin’s or Gaudin’s noggin, a la Guerrero to Soriano.
1 – There is also always Jeff Gillooly.
And a good thing the real game isn’t played via sim, or this year’s club (finishing third or fourth) would be in huge trouble.
I don’t mind discussing the ramifications of injuries, but let’s not jest about delibrately hurting other players — and particularly about hitting liners into people’s heads, m’kay? Mike Coolbaugh’s family thanks you.
Actually, going by the sims, the M’s are on track to finish 5th in the AL West.
I wonder how accurate the Sims was last year on the AL West’s teams’ win totals. They had to be off on the M’s projections. I still can’t figure out how 88 wins happened.
These projeactions are a joke. How can the hapless A’s be favorites to win. Over us and let alone the Angels. Its baseball, not a damn computer program. They are humans playing and not robots. In this game, anything can happen. Colorado Rockies 2007 National League Champions?? I rest my case.
projections* (typo) get sad.
7 Your post pushes in two contradictory directions. You ask “How can the A’s be favored?” suggesting that common sense should rule and unusual results should be thrown out. Then you cite “Colorado Rockies 2007 National League Champions,” but this reference suggests that common sense about who will win is meaningless, because the results will be surprising.
So which one is it? “Anything can happen” or “Everyone knows this can’t happen”?
John Heyman of si.com just told me the Bedard trade was worth it, and that we had the 4th best offseason in baseball. Carlos Silva’s cost may have been high, but he’s apparently expected to thrive with such a “superior defense” behind him.
I feel so much better now.
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I believe Auburn is quoting Jim Moore there, up until the final line.
I really don’t understand why you come to this site if you don’t like all the statistics-based arguments. Everything here is generally based on using the best information known to draw conclusions about the future. These sims are just another tool. Even if you don’t agree, it is worth noting their outcome and then compare what happens this year compared to the sims. It might help you draw conclusions about which sims are more accurate and where their limitations are.
I don’t think I am the only one here scoffing at this projection. I just used Niehaus to provide some contrast.
The nice thing about statistics is that they’re objective; just based on numbers according to a formula, not a “joke.” You can argue with the formula but the outcome is just math. That said, all these formulas have a difficult time quantifying the intangible. That’s why you have people (Bavasi) who in theory have their finger on the pulse of the intangible; the personalities, the culture of the club, the “chemistry.”
I remember last year when there were howls of laughter when Hargrove said the club would contend. All the “projections” were wrong. He was right. You can say what you want but you can’t go back and change what he said on the record.
I for one think these projections will be on the low side. I think the win projection is more likely similar to last year; 85-90. But I’m not using statistical analysis at all; just a pure wild ass guess really. I don’t think you can factor into the formula the Bedard effect. His presence will keep the team from losing streaks, keep the team from pressing (and losing), give Felix something to shoot for. This intangible I think can add several wins, say 3 or 4.
I’m a baseball purist…
It just seems to me that if this is based upon stats, i don’t see how the Oakland A’s would be favored to win the West according to the simulations. They are built to win in the future whereas the M’s and the Angels are geared to postseason in 2008 given their respective rosters. A stat that favors the A’s to win the West has to be taken into consideration. But what number 9 (pygmalion) is saying did prove me wrong, it is baseball, anything can happen…except for the Pirates.
Can you all stop assuming that we were totally wrong about the team last year? If you go check the preseason community projections, the USSM/LL readers actually nailed most things.
You can’t quantified the unquantified…but unquantified doesn’t mean unquantifiable. And beating the projections for one year certainly doesn’t mean you can beat them again.
Remember, probability is not the same as certainty.
I think Lopez will step up this year big, and I also think a projected decline by Beltre is completely absurd.
But, neither of those things changes the fact that we have the worst DH in baseball (for what a DH is supposed to do), a pretty thoroughly awful first baseman, and atrocious fielding at LF, which is a death wish in Safeco.
I think the interesting result is that it flies in the face of the “Oakland and Texas will be our bitches this season so we win” argument. Even with a severely degraded Oakland team, our win total doesn’t change much. Could it be that we just have a poorly constructed team? Nah…
Any idea why Oakland would be favored statistically? Isn’t their offense worse than ours? Isn’t their pitching, besides Harden and maybe Gaudin, not super? Is their defense really amazing or something?
It just seems to me that if this is based upon stats, i don’t see how the Oakland A’s would be favored to win the West according to the simulations
Have you considered looking through the ZiPS projections and seeing if you can find answers to your questions? It’s all publicly available data.
And here’s the thing — it’s fine if you want to say that PECOTA’s season projections are wrong, or if you doubt that the ZiPS projections are any good, or whatever, but without any kind of reasoning why they’re wrong, you’re not contributing to the discussion. I discussed the limitations of running the 100 seasons with the A’s assumed to be healthy, and now I’ve done it taking two of their pitchers out for the year to see how badly they tanked.
Then there’s Dave’s win value post, where he took a different approach to come to a set of equally interesting conclusions.
At some point, it would be helpful to present something more than “73 wins seems low” to advance things.
A 4 win intangible would be just about the most fantastic intangible of all time. Jeter-scale intangible.
Any idea why the simulations (even with hobbled A’s) seem to predict 8-9 fewer wins than Dave’s Win Values post? Both are based on similar projections, but of course the analytical approach doesn’t take into account the quality of opponents in the division.
25: Jeter’s patented CalmEyes are only worth 3 wins, in fact. A 4-win intangible would be like Paul O’Neil’s fiery presence plus Willie Boom-Boom.
I project the club house sing-a-longs will add immeasureably to the intangible total.
Actually, my win values projections are quite a bit more optimistic than ZIPS or PECOTA, which I stated in the comments of that post.
This is my first comment here, so hopefully I’m not being a total idiot…
I’ve been looking at the PECOTAs for Oakland and Seattle, and the thing that jumps out at me is the difference between the two teams outside of the starting nines. Oakland seems to be getting 5-6 VORP out of their backps at almost every position (Sweeny, Hannahan, Dan Johnson, etc.) while the Mariners are lucky when they get more than 1.5-2 (Clement, Morse, Reed) Over all the positions that difference adds up.
The back end of the rotations/ swing starters seems to be the same thing. Oakland seems to be getting a lot more out of the bottom of their rotation than Seattle, and the people penciled in to start games once injuries take the regulars out of the rotation also seem to greatly favor Oakland.
It looks like the old specter of freely available talent is coming back to help Oakland in this case, and it is magnified when projections which expect backups to have to compete are used. Since as fans when we look at things we often don’t think about the days the starters take off it isn’t surprising that we get startled when a projection that includes this, and which sees a major difference in backup quality comes to a different conclusion than the conventional wisdom.
It seems to be a common frame of mind to overestimate the effect of intangibles and underestimate the effect of chance.
Oakland seems to be getting a lot more out of the bottom of their rotation than Seattle, and the people penciled in to start games once injuries take the regulars out of the rotation also seem to greatly favor Oakland.
This is basically true. The M’s have three stars (Ichiro, Bedard, and Felix), two high quality players (Putz and Beltre), a couple of league average guys (Johjima, Silva, and maybe Betancourt) and a whole lot of crap. The last half of this roster is lousy.
I know I’m being needy, but I’l still LOVE to see how both offeseason plans of yours sim, just out of curiosity…see who is the better GM, sim wise
I just can’t see Ibanez as “Crap”…He lead all AL LF’ers in ‘runs created’ in 2007 & 2006.
40 more RBI’s over that period than Manny Ramirez… and every bit as handy with the glove.
Mis-used I would accept.
I’m seeing that you’re not seeing his defensive “contributions.”
They count, too…
4 – I completely forgot about that incident. That comment about hitting liners to the head was completely uncalled for, I am so sorry.
“I just can’t see Ibanez as “Crapâ€â€¦He lead all AL LF’ers in ‘runs created’ in 2007 & 2006.
40 more RBI’s over that period than Manny Ramirez… and every bit as handy with the glove.
Mis-used I would accept.”
If you look at Dave’s Win Value post, you will see that despite being a pretty good hitter, Ibanez is not even 1 win above replacement level. The stats I’ve seen suggest he costs the team about 2 wins defensively. That’s a real effect. Moving him to DH hides the problem, but doesn’t really make him more valuable b/c that means another bad defensive player, like Sexson, can’t DH.
I don’t get it…if Sims is so pessimistic, why is he the M’s color guy?
38 – Why do you have to be so racist?
Baseball Prospectus has Ibanez at 31.3 runs VORP last year – 71st among 1000 or so MLB position players.
He was 52nd on the same list in 2006 with 37.8 VORP.
Seems like you have to keep his bat in the line up.
Average the defensive stats and maybe he is as bad as -16 runs ?? It still seems to leave him in the top 1/2 of position players overall.
We all know he needs to be out of LF.
#30 Dan in NY.
Nice first contribution! One of my peeves the last several seasons has been how poorly the bench has been constructed. This year won’t be any better with both Bloomquist and Cairo. Part of the reason could be that Hargrove and now McLaren do not use the bench effectively.
There are those here who are not fond of Gillick, but, with the exception of the disastrous experiment with Gipson and Ugueto in 2002, his teams have tended to have strong benches. 2001′s was one of the best. But since Bavasi has arrived, they have been uniformly neglected. I wonder if that was his way in Anaheim as well?
At any rate, I believe that the Mariners inferior depth does explain to a great extent why other teams with seemingly weaker lineups pencil out as good or better. The Mariners have a number of players who would be well suited for platoon roles but they haven’t stocked other halves of the platoons. And it also makes their performance more vulnerable to injury than many other teams. Last season’s good luck with injuries cannot be expected to continue with a team that by no stretch of the imagination can be considered young.
“We all know he needs to be out of LF.”
Then why isn’t he yet?
Someone apparently doesn’t know this, or I wouldn’t be pulling my hairs out at the fact we’re seeing all these pro-Vidro colunms from various Mariner-affiliated sports articles.
Baseball Prospectus has Ibanez at 31.3 runs VORP last year – 71st among 1000 or so MLB position players.
“He was 52nd on the same list in 2006 with 37.8 VORP.
Seems like you have to keep his bat in the line up.
Average the defensive stats and maybe he is as bad as -16 runs ?? It still seems to leave him in the top 1/2 of position players overall.
We all know he needs to be out of LF.”
But he’s old and getting older. BP has him projected at 17.3 VORP for 2008. Zips has an almost identical OPS proj.
Take your -16 defense and he’s replacement level. Put him at DH, you have to subtract 1 win (10 Rs) for position and he’s a bit above replacement.
No way he’s an asset at this point, unless he’s the strong side of a DH platoon.
On the other hand BP has substantially ‘under projected’ his VORP (and ZIPS his RC) the past few years.. maybe the trend will continue.
Possibly he produces more at the plate w/o all the wear and tear from flying around the outfield turning doubles into outs (or vice versa).
“No way he’s an asset at this point, unless he’s the strong side of a DH platoon.” (or equal/better defensively at 1st base than Sexson – not that much of a stretch)
Last year, PECOTA had Ibanez projected to hit .283/.353/.487 in 572 plate appearances. He actually hit .291/.351/.480 in 573 plate appearances.
You might want to come up with some other criticism of PECOTA besides its inability to project Raul Ibanez accurately.
1 & 2: Or, Todd Bertuzzi’s number, for that matter.
One thing that I don’t understand is McLaren coming out and saying that Clement is pretty much a no-go for the team; most notibly @ DH. I understand that Vidro is still locked up and you don’t want Clement to ride the pine as a back up catcher, however, if they guy projects @ .280 20+ 80+ coming out out spring, wouldn’t that be a plus? Thoughts?
If we can establish Clement as a catcher by the end of this year, or at least see if he’ll ever be a viable one, that’ll be much more beneficial then using him when he’s not fully ML ready. Kind of the opposite of the way we’re completely misusing Morrow. I don’t understand why they don’t at least give him a decent shot at competing for a rotation spot, since Batista has been used as a reliever before in his life, and has what is known as a ‘rubber arm’, meaning he can rack up huge pitch counts and not be nearly as fatigued by it. Not only would that be good to have as a spot starter, but it also could potentially save us a roster spot.
The way this talent is managed just makes so little sense to me.
Since the Mariners were supposed to win fewer than 80 games last year, but won 88, and are projected to win fewer than 80 games this year, I can come up with only explanation. Jose Guillen’s “fire” has now been quantified at about 8 wins. Who said you can’t measure intangibles?
Re Clement: 48 is right, particularly in contrast to Morrow. A huge part of Clement’s value is that he’s a power lefty catcher. Not that I’m happy discussing him in terms of those particular stats (or that he’s a lock to reach them), but “.280 20+ 80+” isn’t a magical level of talent. Unless you’re talking about catchers, in which case it would make him about the 4th or 5th best offensive catcher in baseball last year. Sure, using him as a DH would improve the M’s — but that’s just a measure of how useless Vidro is. A better-constructed team wouldn’t need that kind of improvement, and the oft-discussed use of Raul as DH with a better defensive fielder replacing him in the OF would be an even bigger improvement overall.
Meanwhile, you’re talking about stunting Clement as a catcher. By all accounts he needs more work behind the plate, and he’s not going to get that catching one game a week (at most). So by having him ride the pine as a DH with the M’s you’re pretty much squandering most of his value. They’ve already allowed expediency to waste one first-round draft pick by putting Morrow in the pen instead of trying to develop him as a starter; why compound that by wasting another? If the M’s really were on the cusp of a championship season it might be worth it; the Bedard trade suggests they think they are, which is worrisome. If it turns out all the “gloomy” projections are wrong, and the M’s really are in a tight division race, Clement’s a great guy to have in your back pocket. He can get half a season of work in Tacoma, or more, and then get brought up as some added juice — a “lefty sock” you don’t have to trade for.
As much as Clement would be worth much more as a catcher, they still have Johjima as a catcher, and as Dave has said before, that Johjima isn’t someone you want “off the books”. At the same time, Johjima is kind of old for a catcher, so I wouldn’t know what the club would decide to do once the season is done. After Sexson is gone, I don’t know of a serious replacement at first besides Ibanez. Unless Clement puts up huge hitting numbers, it would be a waste to put him at first rather than catcher.
This year, Sexson, Johjima, and Vidro (I hope) in particular come off the books. Giving Joh another 2-3 year contract is certainly not a bad idea if he doesn’t decline rapidly this summer. As for Sexson and Vidro, thats about $17.5M in salary (since we’re not paying all of Vidro’s contract), giving us plenty of room to re-sign Beltre (…please?), Bedard, and get us an actual 1B (assuming Balentin or Reed is ML-ready).
But, that’s really a discussion for another time. The bottom line right now is, Clement should get at least half a season in as a catcher in AAA (and half is almost certainly too little), and Morrow should be starting…somewhere.
“As much as Clement would be worth much more as a catcher, they still have Johjima as a catcher, and as Dave has said before, that Johjima isn’t someone you want “off the booksâ€. At the same time, Johjima is kind of old for a catcher, so I wouldn’t know what the club would decide to do once the season is done. After Sexson is gone, I don’t know of a serious replacement at first besides Ibanez. Unless Clement puts up huge hitting numbers, it would be a waste to put him at first rather than catcher.”
But Johjima will likely be much more expensive next year.
The ideal would be for Clement to be ready to be the every day catcher, and use the Sexson/Vidro (you can’t let that option vest under any circumstances)/Johjima money to sign a 1B and a RF/LF. Adam Dunn would look great at 1B with his OBP/lefty power.
Tossing something else in…Roger Hansen has been quoted that it’s the day in between catching stints that help development for young catcher. If (and that’s a big if) we take him at his word, and he’s correct (another big if), that removes one block to Clement coming up. (Though he probably still has some development time left for his bat…)
Dave –
When are you coming out with an updated prospects list?
Would it kill his development to rotate Clement in as the LH platoon with Johjima, Vidro and Sexson? Let him catch two or three days per week, play 1B a couple days and DH the other days, with perhaps a day as PH per week. With most staters being right-handed this would significantly help the team and give Joh plenty of rest during the season.
This raises the question of whether Clement has played any 1B in the minors. I can’t seem to find it on the Rainiers web site.
It looks like he’s played 143 games as catcher, and 51 as DH. Other than maybe an odd spring training game or some emergency fielding insertion that I’m sure we would’ve heard about, he hasn’t played anywhere else since college. Which isn’t to say he couldn’t play 1B — he’s supposed to be a pretty good athlete, and it wouldn’t be hard to match the glacier-like nimbleness of other guys that end up fielding that base — but it’s not like you want to see him learning the position in actual meaningful games. And if you think he can be a catcher, you’re not going to waste everyone’s time putting him at 1B in Tacoma either. In fact if he starts showing up at 1B for the Rainiers it would be a pretty strong indication they’d given up on him as a catcher.
Johjima will be more expensive, but he seemed to go out of his way to sign with the M’s the first time around. Assuming the last couple of years haven’t soured him, he may not drive a hugely hard bargain. Either way, they’ve got lots of money coming off the books they can use. But Clement is obviously the big wild card. Does the transition begin in the latter half of ’08, or do you re-sign Joh because the transition year still hasn’t begun?
There’s no reason to carry Clement on the roster. It’s a bad idea – if you want a left-handed bat to backup at first base and play once or twice a week, just carry Greg Norton. For 2008, there’s very little difference between the two.
Yeah, and it sounds like him playing 1B in the majors is a very bad idea this season.
I Completely agree. Stunting yet another top prospect’s development isn’t really on the top of my list of things to do.