MLB Trade Value: Top Fifty
For the last few years, I’ve done a ranking of my interpretation of the fifty most valuable assets in MLB, taking into account a player’s current and future value as well as contract status. I just finished this year’s list, which was published over at FanGraphs over the last week. In case you missed them, here are the posts:
And here’s the list in its entirety. I wrote commentary for all fifty guys in the fangraphs posts, so if you’re wondering why I ranked someone where I did, check out those posts. They might answer your questions.
1 Evan Longoria
2 Hanley Ramirez
3 Grady Sizemore
4 David Wright
5 Albert Pujols
6 Brian McCann
7 Chase Utley
8 Felix Hernandez
9 Tim Lincecum
10 Troy Tulowitzki
11 B.J. Upton
12 Josh Hamilton
13 Cole Hamels
14 Brandon Webb
15 Joe Mauer
16 Justin Upton
17 Jay Bruce
18 Russ Martin
19 Jose Reyes
20 Ryan Braun
21 Roy Halladay
22 Miguel Cabrera
23 Scott Kazmir
24 Josh Beckett
25 Chad Billingsley
26 Justin Verlander
27 Dan Haren
28 Geovany Soto
29 James Shields
30 Prince Fielder
31 Joba Chamberlain
32 Clayton Kershaw
33 Adrian Gonzalez
34 Ian Kinsler
35 Lance Berkman
36 Curtis Granderson
37 Edinson Volquez
38 Dan Uggla
39 John Lackey
40 Alex Rodriguez
41 Jake Peavy
42 Chipper Jones
43 Dustin McGowan
44 Jacoby Ellsbury
45 Robinson Cano
46 Ryan Zimmerman
47 Carlos Zambrano
48 Clay Buchholz
49 Johan Santana
50 James Loney
Platooning, Riggle-style
Bloomquist/Reed, centerfield.
Bloomquist plays against lefties, Reed against righties.
Bloomquist career against lefties: .272/.332/.362
Reed career against lefties: .169/.247/.228
Now, in terms of where they are and how they’re hitting this year, if you played Reed all the time you’d probably be just as well off — Reed’s better than where he was back in 04/05, and while I don’t have access to his minor league splits off the top of my head, it seems unlikely that he’s quite that helpless against lefties that his hitting would be reduced to Bloomquist levels. Still, this is defensible at least.
Anyway, so there’s data point one.
What really makes no sense though is Vidro. Historically, Vidro hits the same from both sides (seriously, the lines are within points of each other) — about a 800 OPS.
This year, he’s hitting almost equally badly from both sides — .215/.269/.312 vs RHP, .226/.250/.340 vs LHP (small sample size here, obviously) — and both Jose and Pepe are equally done. He is among the worst hitters in baseball against both left and right-handed hitting. Being a switch hitter just means he sucks from both sides of the plate.
Nearly everyone else playing baseball is better at hitting left or right handed pitching compared to Vidro. Clement qualifies as “nearly everyone else”. He’s a hugely talented hitter and even if you believe that he’s not as good against left-handed pitchers he cannot possibly be worse than Vidro in any situation at this point. Ever. Vidro’s done, he’s toast. Clement has a pulse. There is no situation you’d ever want Vidro over Clement, because in every situation of the other four hundred something hitters currently on major league rosters at least four hundred of them will be better than Vidro, and many of the three-hundred-some pitchers will too.
So beyond why you’d run a pseudo-platoon at DH with those two, it entirely baffles me why Riggleman would pinch-hit for Clement against lefties with Vidro.
Mariner GM watch: Kim Ng article
Lots of hand-wringing but also a good summary of Ng’s resume in this Yahoo Sports article.
Game 89, Mariners at Athletics
The Bus vs. Eveland, 7:05 our time.
I’m watching the Tour de France while I wait for the game to come on. Woooooo!
Pretty normal lineup, Johjima catches, Clement DHs and is protected in the order by Willie Boom-Boom Bloomquist.
All-Time All-Mariner Roster: Third Base
Derek:
I wanted Edgar, I really did. I was prepared to refute my own Olerud-Davis arguments on playing time and argue that Edgar’s 140-some games at third in 1991 were so good offensively they overcame any defensive edge.
But I can’t have Edgar at DH and at 3B, which means that I have to pick. And the gap between Edgar at DH and the second-best DH is much greater than he gap between Edgar 1991/1992 and Beltre 07.
There are other reasonable candidates here if you’re looking just at raw offensive stats. Purely on offense, I’d rate the non-Edgars as
Presley 85, .275/.324/.484
Beltre 07, .276/.319/.484
Blowers 93, .280/.357/.475
There’s maybe ten runs of difference between those. And I see Beltre’s defensive advantage easily making up the slight gap between him and Presley, leaving Blowers way back.
It’s interesting as I look at my giant sheet of Mariner position-seasons… Besides Edgar, Adrian has two of the top four Mariner 3B-seasons (06,07) and his 05 isn’t quite top ten. Even with Edgar, he gets in the top ten twice. And it’s not as if he’s set the team on fire, as much as I’ve been a fan. It’s that unlike, say, shortstop, where you get to pick Alex and there’s some nice Omar seasons in there too, or centerfield where we got Griffey Jr. and some wildly (and previously discussed) underappreciated Mike Cameron seasons, third base has really been weak for the M’s historically. You get a few years of Mostly Edgar and then what? Besides Beltre, the third basemen the M’s have had for more than a season or two are few: Jim Presley, Blowers, Russ Davis, Dave Elder, Bill Stein…
Anyway. Beltre 07.
Dave:
Since I like to talk about defense a lot, this gives me a chance to do it again, so I’m taking it.
Even though we’re not going to consider Edgar here because he’s got the DH spot locked up, let’s compare 1992 Edgar (his best offensive season at 3B) to 2007 Beltre.
1992 Edgar hit .343/.404/.544 in 592 plate appearances. Obviously, it was a pretty awesome season – he won a batting title, was 5th in the league in OBP, and 2nd in the league in SLG. He was a great hitter, and his offensive contributions were worth about 47 runs over an average hitter that year. That’s a lot of runs.
2007 Beltre hit .276/.319/.482 in 639 plate appearances. It wasn’t nearly as impressive of an offensive season. He didn’t finish anywhere near the league lead in BA, OBP, or SLG, and he was only a slightly better than average hitter. His offensive contributions were worth about 9 runs over an average hitter. That’s not that many.
So, the offensive difference between 1992 Edgar and 2007 Beltre was about 38 runs or so. That’s a big gap.
However, clearly ,the two weren’t equal caliber defensively. We know that the boundaries of defensive value generally fall in the +20 to -20 range, where teams will almost always take a guy who is worse than -20 runs at a position and move him to an easier spot, and very few players get miscast defensively at a position where they can put up a better than +20 mark. We know Beltre’s good with the glove, and the advanced defensive metrics we have now tell us that his defense is worth something like 10 runs a year, which sounds about right since he’s good but not the absolute best. So, let’s say we give ’07 Beltre a +10 credit for his defense.
What do we do with 1992 Edgar’s defense? We don’t have good defensive data for way back when, and as we discussed in the Olerud/Davis argument, even the proxies such as playing time and such don’t really give us an idea for how well a player handled the position. However, I think we all watched Edgar play the field and would agree that it’s pretty likely that he didn’t do particularly well at helping his pitchers. I love Edgar, but he wasn’t much to write home about defensively.
So, just for sake of argument, lets say that Edgar was the Manny Ramirez of third baseman in 1992 – a guy who should have been DH’ing and had no real business playing the field. If we give him the -20 penalty, then combined with Beltre’s +10, we’d have closed almost the entire gap between their offensive seasons. If that assumption was true, the “disappointment” that everyone likes to write about as an underachiever would be nearly as valuable as the guy who was the 3rd best hitter in the league.
I’m not saying Edgar was that bad, but I wanted to highlight again just how much defense can effect value. A really good hitter who plays really terrible defense is worth about the same as an average hitter who plays good defense. Repeat this to yourself until you believe it, because it’s a vitally important concept to understand.
So, yea, ’07 Beltre gets the nod here. Edgar will get his time when we do the DH post, and the rest of the candidates can’t hold a candle to Beltre’s value. Just like with Mike Cameron, I’m afraid that Beltre’s always going to be unappreciated until he’s gone, because people just don’t value the things he does well correctly.
Derek:
I understand why more fans don’t evaluate defense enough to appreciate the contributions of a Beltre, though. For one, it’s almost never covered, and when it is, it’s covered badly. When Richie Sexson is described as being a good or even solid defensive first baseman, what does it mean to say that Beltre’s outstanding?
Moreover, we’re constantly given information about a hitter’s triple-crown stats. Every time they’re up, you get at least their average, and so everyone understands a .200 batting average is bad and a .300 is good, and so on, and the stat itself is easily comprehendable. Even OBP makes sense (I actually find that when I explain batting average to baseball newcomers, people are sometimes surprised to find it doesn’t include walks).
So it’s easy for a casual fan to evaluate the relative hitting value of players, while defensively you have to work a lot harder, and unlike with hitting statistics, you can’t work backwards.
Take UZR, for instance. You can’t reverse-engineer it, and it’s too complicated for easy explanation. To use it, you wind up saying “Ichiro is ten runs better in right field than the average player over a full season” and leaving it at that.
So Beltre’s 07 is predictably underappreciated: his counting stats didn’t look that great, he’s punished as a RH in Safeco Field, and while his defense is acknowledged as good, everyone’s fed the same line about every other player.
I don’t know that there’s an easy solution to this. Do you remember at one of the feeds, someone asked if there was a stat that incorporated defense into hitting statistics? We ended up pointing them towards some of the overall player measures, but I really wish in cases like this that there was some readily accepted shorthand we could use, like
“Beltre hit x/y/z, which is about n runs better than an average third baseman, and he took away n hits with the glove, so credit those to his line and you can think of him as a total a/b/c player.”
And a large part of this problem comes from almost all games being broadcast by baseball teams themselves acting as PR for the franchise, which in turn means that educating the fan base on how much worse Betancourt is getting defensively each year won’t ever be done.
I do wish though that among all the chatter we could at least get some of that commentary on the standout players. All Dave Sims has to say after a nice Beltre play (and he won’t have to wait long) is “You know, people who study this, the serious statheads, they figure that Beltre saves ten, twenty runs a season with his glove over an average third baseman.”
And then Blowers can say “No question about it, Beltre is one of the best defensive third basemen in the game right now…” or whatever.
Anyway, I’ve gone off on a tangent. I agree with you entirely: Beltre’s defense puts him at the top.
A brief thought on Ichiro pitching
Jose Canseco’s Typhoid Mary impression did amazing damage to baseball’s reputation, but I don’t at all doubt there would have been another. What I particularly blame him for, tonight, is the reluctance to let position players pitch. It used to happen all the time — actually, if you watch minor league box scores, it happens more often than you might guess — and Canseco blowing out his arm was so big that it made everyone more reluctant to let their position guys pitch for fear of the same criticism Kevin Kennedy endured.
But to my point — Ichiro, and probably any number of Mariners, can pitch. Not well, but they can, to varying degrees. Ichiro, if nothing else, could certainly throw smoke up there. But he can’t, because everyone’s too scared that a valuable player will hurt themselves, despite all the evidence that they can pull it off… because Jose Canseco blew out his arm in 1993. So only back-roster guys get asked to take the mound, and if you’re lucky, you get Brent Mayne 2000*.
I don’t know if Ichiro would have done any better. And yes, he might have blown his elbow out. But we have tons on tons of evidence that he’d have been fine, and it would have been absolutely freaking awesome to see. And it might have helped.
One more reason to hate Canseco.
Read more
Sabathia down, Bedard to go
Two things happen now:
– Hopefully, other teams look to Bedard as their second choice
– The Sabathia trade will help set the market for what a top-level starter
The bad news is that the haul the Indians made is nowhere near as good as what the M’s gave up to get Bedard, so the question may well be whether the M’s are better off keeping Bedard at all.
The thing I worry about is whether Bedard has already soured the organization on him (as fragile, not PR-friendly, and so on) and he’ll be moved regardless of whether the return would be better than the value of retaining him, in the same way we’ve seen other players shown the door when the team got tired of having them around.
Fun, fun, fun.
Running out of patience
Robertson went nine innings allowing two walks and one strikeout. The thirty-two times the M’s went up to the plate against a pitcher who threw hittable strikes and they saw barely three pitches each time. When they made contact, it wasn’t as if good things happened: they hit two singles and two doubles, and that’s it.
The story of the game of course is that the M’s ran out of arms, putting Jamie Burke on the mound, but the real issue here is how utterly futile their flailing was. They couldn’t score two runs off a guy who might as well have thrown the ball underhanded to the plate for their ease of hitting.
Robertson pitches seen
Ichiro: 4, 2, 3, 3
Lopez 3, 1, 3, 2
Ibanez 7, 3, 3, 6
Beltre 1, 7, 4 (IBB), 4 (IBB)
Sexson 5, 2, 3, 4
Cairo 3, 3, 5
Johjima 2, 1, 1
Bloomquist 3, 2, 3
Betancourt 2, 3, 2
(I get 100 pitches including the IBBs against the box score count of 99, but oh well)
Game 88, Tigers at Mariners
Robertson v Rowland-Smith. 1:10 our time.
Go team wooooo!
No pre-game chemistry report…. again. Sigh.
Lineups yayyyy
RF-L Ichiro
2B-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
DH-R Sexson (okay, replacing Turbo with MegaTurbo, I get it)
1B-0 Cairo (wait, what?)
C-R Johjima
CF-R Bloomquist
SS-R Betancourt
Wow. I uh… if that’s who you’re going to play, that’s a reasonable lineup. And yet…
Tampa Rejects Results Based Analysis
From Rays GM Andrew Friedman, on the necessity to make a deadline deal to avoid criticism if they don’t hang on and win the division:
Friedman, however, dismissed that sort of pre-emptive second-guessing as “outcome-based instead of the process,” saying the Rays need to figure out now how they would fill potential holes in the coming months and move accordingly.
Outcome-based, results based, call it what you want – Tampa clearly understands that good organizations implement a process based on logic and reason and don’t diverge from that to satisfy the desires of those who don’t understand why results based analysis is stupid.
The media might not understand why Tampa is winning, but it’s the natural byproduct of an organization who put an intelligent plan into place.