b-ref.com Comps for Robinson Cano
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This isn't analysis; it's just something I thought was fun to look at.
If you go to Robinson Cano's b-ref.com page, and scroll down to Similarity Scores, then over where it says 30. David Wright, you can click the little C and bring up Cano's age-based similarity players. That page will show you what ten Cano-like players ... Ryne Sandberg, George Brett, Joe Torre ... DID in their PAST careers, up through age 30.
Then you click where it says "Display totals from age ... to end of career," pick the 31 of course, and you get this page. It's an amusingly sad picture of what those 10 historical players did. Down where it says "average of all 5 retired players," you can see that as a group they only delivered OPS+ of 111 from age 31, and for only 5 years before retiring.
That's a "complete catastrophe" set of comps. The M's in-house list has not been this list. :- )
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What is entertaining, is that --- > David Wright is Robinson Cano's #1 comp and he is currently the same age as Cano (so they are not in any way era-shifted against each other; they are perfect contemporaries).
If you look at Wright's set of comps, you get a hilariously great set of performances from ages 31-40. The retired players, as a group, played a full 9 more seasons after age 31, and they averaged (averaged!) a 126 OPS+. Even including their AARP seasons.
Wright's current list of 10 Closest Comps includes:
- Carl Yastrzemski
- George Brett
- Garry Sheffield
- Carlos Beltran
- Chipper Jones
- etc
While Cano's list of 10 Closest Comps includes
- Two catchers (who broke down physically, of course)
- Bobby Doerr
- Vern Stephens
- etc.
If the M's actually sign Cano, SSI will draw up a list of comps per its own (chess-algorithm) style of selection, emphasizing batting stroke, EYE ratio, ISO, body type and so forth. (PECOTA, at Baseball Prospectus, does attempt to capture some body type data in its selection.)
But I thought it was interesting to see how different two sets of comps can be, when done by an "idiot" computer algorithm. There's no real reason that Wright's comps are the best ones, or Cano's are; both lists are collected in a very primitive way.
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From an intuitive standpoint ... here is that November article in which I compared Cano to Edgar Martinez, before any of us had any idea the M's had a shot at Cano.
The thing I like best about Cano: his entire game is about turning the bicycle pedals smoothly, in an un-shrill manner. Like Edgar always did.
Cano is an extremely "aiki" baseball player -- very relaxed, very within himself, very comfortable with baseball as a game of leverage and precision, rather than athletic talent. It's an axiom in Aikido that your best years are in your 50's ... I know, I know. But a ballplayer who doesn't grimace as he swings, I fancy a thumb on the scale for that.
So you know he's got a fan here on that score. As Edgar was. You want to find a successor to Edgar's legacy, it's not clear where you'd go to get a better shot at it.
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Finding the right comps set can be an exceptionally difficult task. There are a lot of George Bretts out there, and there are some Carlos Baerga's, too.
Enjoy,
Dr D