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Dave Fleming has a provocative article up, comparing the 1-2-3 best players in baseball:

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Is 'cause o' the title, that you know who goes into slot #2.   Fleming, one of my fave authors, even goes on to discuss the question of whether Ben Zobrist belongs in the Hall of the Fame discussion, based on this idea:

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Wow.  So we got an NFL TV sitdown with Richard Sherman, Derelle Revis, and Ben Zobrist.  Or, you got LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and Nick Collison.  The wonders of modern math, babe.  Would that we were major league GM's, having to take Scott Boras seriously as he lays out this math with a straight face :- )

If we take three breaths and think for a moment, we will sit up with a start, a light sweat on our brows.  There is a massive problem of scale here.  Fleming argues that the basic reason that Zobrist will miss the HOF discussion, is that his AVG-HR-RBI lines aren't flashy.  Let's, Do, the Time, Warp, Agaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnn ... it was 1983 when we put "PAID" to that one.

Laying aside Fleming's application, which is whether the writers take WAR seriously ... Our question is why Zobrist doesn't get a $200M salary.  No matter how little you think of the game's GM's, you can't believe that their consensus is to value batting average over WAR.

Something else is going on here.

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With Dr. D's typical meekness and modesty, he has explained many times what that thing is.  It's Chone Figgins.

And it's a hole in the WAR paradigm.  Take a player who is getting 5 WAR a year by defense, by baserunning, by beating out infield grounders, and picking up pop cans by the side of the road ... and that guy ain't going to continue to get 5 WAR.

If you knew for a fact that Chone Figgins, er, Ben Zobrist, was going to continue to scrabble up his stamp-collection's worth of bases at his very max potential, sure.  In a given season, a Zobrist can be close to as valuable as a 120-RBI man.  Problem is, there's too much pressure on his 5x ways of scrounging bases.  If two of those "hidden bases" pipelines clog up, you got nuttin' left.

Again, a cause for Mariners fans to shrug off the dogma and rejoice in Nelson Cruz' 40 homers.  You have Dr. D's blessing, if not Fangraphs'.  Others are busy finding bases others don't appreciate.  You, the discerning SSI reader, will watch every one of Nelson Cruz' home runs in ecstasy.  The opponents' chests will collapse.  The blood will be licked and savored.  

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It's fine to say, "OK, when you have 2 players with the same WAR, we'll put a thumb on the scale for sheer hitting talent."  This ain't a thumb on the scale!  This is Miguel Cabrera signed to make $30M per year on an 8-year deal that hasn't STARTED yet.

Let's allow our sense of proportion to digest the miles of difference between Miguel Cabrera and Ben Zobrist.   This is "cognitive dissonance" territory.  Therefore it is SSI territory.  :- )

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Fleming also has this very interesting 'put:

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This has been a quietly astonishing offseason for Oakland: they’ve traded away a player than ranked fourthamong AL batters in fWAR, and then acquired a player who ranked seventh by the same metric. To give that some perspective, the NL equivalent would have the Marlins trading away Giancarlo Stanton, and then acquiring Anthony Rizzo.

Even if these were the only moves Oakland made, it’s be a fascinating offseason.

But Oakland’s essentially redrafted their team. They traded away their best power hitter for a guy who had a decent half-season at Double-A. They traded their best (or second-best) starting pitcher to Chicago. They traded away both halves of their enormously valuable catching platoon. And…first actually…they signed Billy Butler.

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Agree:  if the A's simply traded Donaldson for Zobrist, that would be Bizarro World.  But that was simply Beane's starting point.

Dr. D suspects that he knows what Beane's underlying theme is.  I think you perceive it in trades like this:

• OUT:  Mark Mulder as a short-timer
• IN:  Danny Haren (!)
• IN:  Daric Barton
• IN:  Kiko Calero

And this one:

• OUT:  Nick Swisher as a short-timer
• IN:  Gio Gonzalez
• IN:  Ryan Sweeney

And this one:

• OUT:  Dan Haren (and Connor Robertson) as a short-timer
• IN:  Brett Anderson
• IN:  Chris Carter
• IN:  Carlos Gonzalez (!)
• IN:  Three other players

We could go on - the deals that brought in Jermaine Dye, Josh Reddick, Jason Isringhausen, and so forth.

If you and I are playing roto, I want to make as many trades as possible.  7-for-7 deals are great by me.  I'm just that confident that, in the long run, my dice will land right side up.  That's all.  It sez here, this is the point that mystified analysts whiff on.  Billy just loves to exchange players, as many as possible, in the same sense that the 3 Card Monte hustler wants you to buy as many games as possible.

Not many GM's who are willing to turn real life into fantasy baseball, though.  That part of it is wacky and wunnerful.  29 other places, the ballplayers resent the lack of loyalty.  Quote in the press today, Josh Riddick (who panned the Cespedes deal) gushing over Beane's moves.

Cheers,

Dr D