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Q. This guy had 6.1 WAR last season, was a Fangraphs short-list MVP candidate. What is SSI's reaction to Michael Bourn?
A. Dr. D knows jack about the NL, so he flipped over to b-ref.com for a quick eyeball.
OHHHH NOOOOooooooo ... another one of these soft-skills WAR mirages who contributes everywhere EXCEPT in the batter's box. And: he's a leadoff hitter who fans 150 times a year?!
Dr. D's stomach did a slow roll back from the left, to dead bottom, over to the right, and emptied itself over the rail.
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Q. C'mon. He's a defensive specialist who contributes at the plate. He's not kitty litter.
A. You've heard the term "so underrated that now he's overrated"? These guys should be winning 10th-man-of-the-year awards, like Mark McLemore in 2001, and here they are getting LeBron James recognition. It's "hey lookee what I found" syndrome run amok.
If Chone Figgins, Michael Bourn, Mark McLemore, Mike Cameron and the like were considered nice little ballplayers, who supported the stars on a pennantwinner, then that would be great. It's when they're anointed MVP candidates that Dr. D mounts his steed and tilts at the saber windmill.
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Q. He has posted 4+ WAR for four consecutive seasons now. That's got to be his Established Level of Performance (ELP), right?
A. It's a funny thing: the editor of Fangraphs his ownself was the one who .... alllllllmmoooooost! ... had an epiphany here.
Apparently on a lark, he ran a search of all baseball players in the UZR era who met two (2) criteria:
He came back with a sickening list of names.* In other words, guys who can't hit, but who show up as WAR heroes, are not impact baseball players.
Fangraphs kept this on the downlow: rather than launching a campaign to disseminate this fundamental insight into the way baseball works -- that WAR contributions outside the batter's box should be kept in proportion -- the conclusion was rephrased as an age-arc issue.
The fact is, all 30 GM's will pay less for a no-hit WAR hero than Fangraphs will.
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Q. How about the inversion of this insight?
A. Take a player whose hitting is impact, but whose WAR looks suspect -- let us say, Billy Butler or Mike Napoli as a 1B/DH -- and, yep, there we go again. All 30 GM's will pay you more for a pure bat than Fangraphs will.
The WAR amigos climb over the mountain summit and find the GM yogis sitting there smiling benignly, waiting for them. There was never anything wrong with researching baseball. The only problem came when we failed to respect the complexity of the problem, and accused GM's of IQ challenges when they paid for RBI.
Not to make too fine a point of it, what do you suppose would happen if Seattle's largest baseball blog trashed a Billy Butler trade, and one of the readers protested "Yeah, but WAR underrates RBI men like Butler"?
Fangraphs is my favorite national baseball site. It's tremendous. We're talking only about the need to respect alternative paradigms, in view of complex problems.
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Q. Lessons learned?
A. If the M's can sign Bourn for about 50%, 60% of his WAR dollar value, fine.
And don't undersell Billy Butler. The man's a cleanup hitter.
BABVA,
Dr D
*Troy Tulowitzki and Ryan Zimmerman were great hitters who, at age 22, weren't yet posting impact batting lines.
when it comes to hitting in Safeco. His power isn't sufficient to get deep into the gaps for doubles and the ball will hang for the outfielders to grab. He'll be the next Figgins, Spezio, Reed, Cirrillo, Aurelia, et al. who were good players who skillset wasn't suited for Safeco.
Bourn doesn't even do what Chone Figgins theoretically did - GET ON BASE. The Mariners need an on base hero or two, but Bourn can't even do THAT...If we pay him Figgins money...even if we get a better result, it's a giant waste of money.
YUCK!!!
This has always been my argument. We give a lot of weight to baserunning and fielding as WAR contributions, but I don't think those things alter the box score as much as we think they do. Maybe that's just my personal pleasure at seeing tangible results in the batter's box instead of theoretical results in the field, but No-Hit WAR creators seem more vulnerable to collapse if they aren't being propped up by actual batting results (either their own or others).
And as you say, GMs still don't believe in the total, SABR-accepted impact of defense. "A run saved is a run scored" sounds like a great motto, but in practice it doesn't work that way, and you just lose 1-0 with the worst offensive output in half a century (your Mariners!).
I still think it's because offense is not only additive but multiplicative, symbiotic in ways we haven't captured yet. According to math, there is no clutch and Chone Figgins is worth 5 WAR. According to life, I'm not seeing that. And I think you can have too many good defenders on a team. Overlap, whether in the infield or the outfield, because each guy can cover MORE than his zone, and so you are decreasing the usefulness of the defensive WAR you're paying for.
Although I do wonder whether Ackley's great defensive year last year was helped by playing next to Brendan Ryan, and trusting him to make OOZ plays... which meant Ackley was freed up to play a couple of steps the other way and make his own OOZ plays to help his rating.
Regardless - I don't want to play full WAR price for guys who can't hit but "make it up in other ways." Bourn is not on my radar, not for the price he's asking. We have run-producing needs and plenty of decent run-savers already on the squad. Detroit put Miguel Cabrera at third base, that's how much they worried about defense vs. offense. Complementary
It's more important to get the offense functioning - or at least the majority of GMs act (and pay) like it is. If you're going to pay for defense, then that's what pitchers are for. Having my defensive guy standing on 2nd base all the time when the 3rd out is recorded doesn't help me win enough games. Occasionally-chained-together-singles is a poor substitute for a working offense.
~G
Was happened upon by Cameron. This elegant little template allows us to see clearly into the problem -- and it isn't an age-arc problem.
............
You get the feeling that we might be juuuuust about to unravel some of those mysteries of offensive synergy. At USSM they discussed Butler's ability (or failure) to help KC's kids ... but (1) did he help Alex Gordon? and (2) what about other lineups? Paul Konerko has been legitimizing the White Sox for years.
Where there is the smoke of an Old School belief system, there should be the fire of serious saber investigation. "Legitimizing a lineup" is a concept that has been too commonly believed, by too many great baseball men, for too long.
The 2010-11 Mariners had no 3-4 hitters whatsoever, and all their hitters had bad years together. I'm willing to give it a shot to see what a Billy Butler could do for them ... of course, if they brought in Butler and the offense had an UP year, it would be attributed to anything and everything else.
I glanced at his stats and thought "he must walk a lot to make up for the fact that his bat has absolutely no sting" ... but he doesn't!
He has a high BABIP because of the speed, but he looks like a No. 8 hitter on paper, not leadoff.
Don't see paying major money for the guy.
Let's hope Z is pivoting to the Corey Hart scenario: last three seasons of Hart: .500 SLG, .230 ISO, roughly 5% HR/PA, 11% XBH/PA ... even if he starts to decline ... give us some of that.
Seems that the M's have finally loosened the purse strings and Z is like a kid in a candy store, seeing just how far he can possibly stretch those shiny pennies. Grienke is about the only FA the M's have not been rumored to be connected to.
ATL, a pretty successful org, gave up their pick and paid dearly for the opportunity to replace Bourn in the OF. That would give me pause, as a GM.
Many of the FA's the M's are tied to seem redundant given Z's collection of Scrubs. I hope that all of these rumors are just Z's due dilligence.
The Bash-O-Tron belches black smoke and emits a sickening clank of a machine about to break for the last time.
What created this catastrophe? A rumor that the Mariners were about to sign Michael Bourn.
Surely the Mariners wouldn't torture us with replacing Figgins with someone even weaker.That ain't right.
As a side note, in defense of Cammy, he doesn't belong on the list of no pop defensive whizzes. The man hit 20-30 home runs for years! He's the guy that Franklin Gutierrez was supposed to become; an elite center fielder who can smack a three bomb every once in a while.
by the sabrmigos around the net are not what they appear. Give previous generations a smidge of credit; if there was a way to win consistently on the backs of glove first no bat players, there would be a ton of examples of dynasties established on that exact principle. I believe there are not such examples in the fossil record.
I begin to suspect that these defensive monsters are a mirage created by a) deference of neighboring fielders and b) pitcher intention (which, if I understand dorrectly, the sabrmigos generally believe doesn't exist). Ryan Franklin would literally chuck and duck when he had Cammy and Ichiro in the outfield, but he took a step forward after leaving Seattle PROBABLY du3, at least in part, to not being able to rely on his historically good outfield.
Also, have there been studies on the value of created runs 300-400 on the season, compared to created runs 500-600 or 800-900? It seems absurdly obvious that marginal value increases steadily until somewhere around 20% above league average, at which point the returns diminish due to so many 'garbage time' runs puffing the totals. I haven't seen anything to that effect.
If my inkling is right, then these WARriors only have value to teams near the league average of both offense and pitching. At least, value commensurate with their WAR.
Z is finding out that he FINALLY got a little money to spend only to see it eaten up by a market increase.