It was an interesting draft this year. There was a great deal more inflation in 2012 than any previous year (almost three times more, by my calculations) and it made for some pretty dramatic bids and extreme strategies. Although we had less dead money from cut keepers than previous years, we left more money on the table this year ($21, compared to $10 in 2012). That money would have yielded a player like CC Sabathia, Mariano Rivera, Asdrubal Cabrera, or Torii Hunter.
Andrew came out swinging, picking up the top 2 hitters available in Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, while dropping $100 on the two. Considering Andrew spent $70 on his keepers, this was amazingly aggressive - an extreme stars and scrubs approach we hadn't seen in the draft before. Both Pujols broke the record high salary at $48, only to see it broken again moments later by our first $50 player in Miguel Cabrera. After dropping $68 on three starting pitchers and a closer, Andrew scraped the bottom of the barrel to assemble the rest of his roster. Thirteen players, more than half his roster, make $3 or less. Smoak is having a great spring and has some promise, but is currently penciled in as a start for Andrew. He also managed to amass three excellent middle relievers in Doolittle, McGee, and Albuquerque. Unfortunately, while Andrew's offense is projected to be excellent (31 points, 2nd overall), his pitching lags behind (10 points, 8th overall), with Andrew last in wins, strikeouts, and saves. If he can work the wire well, that could be addressed, but if Sale goes down or Lester continues to struggle, his lack of starting pitching depth could prove to be his undoing.
Best pick: Drew Smyly, $1. Despite being a hyped sleeper throughout this spring, Smyly avoided a bidding war that affected players such as Alex Cobb or Aaron Hicks.
Worst pick: Jon Lester, $18. Thanks to Red Sox inflation, Andrew had to pay nearly full freight on Lester, despite three seasons of steady decline from Lester.
After the one man spending spree dropped $100 on Pujols and Cabrera, I think we were all shell shocked a bit. CC Sabathia was nominated next and I was able to snag him for a very reasonable $21. I followed this up with spending top dollar on Justin Verlander ($37), setting a record high for pitchers in the process. Four players in, $158 had come off the board, including the top two hitters, the top pitcher, and another top five starter. I built the rest of my staff around the two big starters, relying on middle relievers and back end starters such as Ivan Nova, Lucas Harrell, and Alex Cobb to round out my staff. Offensively, I was very quiet until 30 picks in to the draft. With four outfield slots to fill, I focused on moderate outfielders who were older, coming off of injury, or both, with Hunter, Gardner, and Crisp rounding out my top 3 OF. Middle infield was a bit of a mess, as I was forced into bidding wars on the last viable starting second baseman and shortstop in Alexei Ramirez and Omar Infante, but both are slightly below average in just about every category.
Best pick: CC Sabathia, $21. Discussed above. Mark Reynolds, $1. As the first $1 player, Mark Reynolds isn't anything special, but he's good for 25 home runs a year. Chris Carter's upside is something like what you can expect from Mark Reynolds and he was $5
Worst pick: Alex Cobb, $10. Cobb was a player I had penciled in for less than $5, but a bidding war broke out. He is someone I am very high on, but given that Jarrod Parker and Josh Johnson both went for $13, and have considerably higher upside, Cobb is clearly overpaid.
Finally, Kate decided that someone who isn't a McDowell should end up with a player, and snagged new AL shortstop Jose Reyes. Reyes was far and away Kate's most expensive hitter at $34, as all of her other hitters were $11 or less. Kate was true to previous form, spending $80 on starting pitching alone, the standard allotment for an entire pitching staff. Her staff is elite, with 33 projected pitching points, and is led by two extremely high upside starters in Matt Moore and Max Scherzer. In an impressive run, she picked up Matt Moore, Joel Hanrahan, and Hiroki Kuroda on three consecutive picks. Unfortunately, her offense lags behind, and she is only projected to get 11 points in the hitting categories. She'll need a big breakout from Chris Carter, as well as the long awaited Colby Rasmus breakout to compete in home runs and RBI.
Best pick: Joe Nathan, $15. For some reason, folks thought Kate was autobidding on Nathan. The prices for lesser closers nearly matched or surpassed Nathan,so the $15 she spent looks awfully good in retrospect.
Worst pick: Mike Morse, $17. Morse is a groundball hitter, despite his power surge in 2011, and is moving to an unfavorable hitters park and a weak lineup. ESPN projects him to hit 25 home runs
Following Kate picking up Reyes, Spencer went big on Jose Bautista at $38. This kicked off a spending spree for Spencer and he spent $206 of his $260 budget in the next 40 picks. Picks ranged greatly, but included Mariano, coming off of his serious knee injury, as well as injury question marks David Ortiz (since announced out for the beginning of the season with heel inflammation) and Yankee outfielder Curtis Granderson, who is out until May with a broken forearm. Spencer then was quiet for the next 50 picks, but was disciplined enough to have money to outbid folks on the $1-$2 players at the end of the draft.
Best pick: Curtis Granderson, $16. Granted, Granderson is injured, but since it is a bone injury the recovery time frame is much clearer than, say, Mark Teixeira's wrist. Healthy, Granderson would have likely been a $25-$30 player, and he's missing much less than half a season. By my math, that means Spencer did well there.
Worst pick: Howie Kendrick, $15. Howie Kendrick at $15 isn't a terrible price, but it means that Spencer was spending $15 of his remaining $38 on a second basemen while there were still many similar players remaining. David Ortiz was a big gamble, given the question marks surrounding his Achilles, as well.
Continuing the trend of teams spending money in bunches, Taylor picked up Evan Longoria as the 8th player nominated in the auction for $30, and quickly followed with Dustin Pedroia ($35) and Jeff Weaver ($26). Taylor was quiet for awhile following Weaver, but picked up Melky Cabrera, Josh Johnson, and Paul Konerko in quick succession. Taylor spaced his picks out fairly well from then on, focusing on snagging bargains as they came up, with the occasional slight overpay for starting pitching, which appears to be inevitable in our league. He also grabbed super prospect Jurickson Profar for $6, hoping for an opportunity to present itself in Texas.
Best pick: Josh Johnson, $13. Johnson may very well blow up and be a disaster this year as he transitions to the AL East, but most of the pitchers in the $5-$15 range could end up worthless as well. Few have the Cy Young potential that Johnson has, though.
Worst pick: Jered Weaver, $26. Somehow, Jered Weaver puts up good a good ERA and WHIP, despite mediocre strikeout rates. Even if that continues, Weaver is effectively a three category pitcher at this point, despite his reputation as an ace. His K/9 has steadily fallen since his elite 2010 (9.35) and was actually below league average in 2012 (6.77).
Mark was the 6th player to draft a player, grabbing Felix Hernandez who was the 8th nominated player for $33. Mark picked up three of the five players going from 48-52, and appeared to get a solid value in Matt Wieters for $14. Catcher was fairly well picked over by keepers and Wieters was head and shoulders above the other catchers available, so to get him for $14 was very nice. Throughout the rest of the draft Mark was consistently active, avoiding any big runs or conspicuous absences. Mark Teixeira at $13 could either provide an excellent, cheap power source or he could be a $13 waste of money, given how hard wrist injuries are to predict, particularly for power hitters.
Best pick: Matt Wieters,$14. See above. Nelson Cruz at $24 could also return solid value, if Cruz can reverse some of his 2012 decline and return to 25+ home runs. He does have the BioGenesis storyline lurking, though.
Worst pick: Michael Bourn, $31. Not quite sure what happened here, but the first elite speed player managed to kick off a brutal bidding war. Bourn ended up as the second highest paid outfielder, trailing only Jose Bautista at $37. Thirty one dollars for a player who only contributes in two categories is a huge reach, to me.
Luke was the 7th manager to draft a player, snagging R.A. Dickey at the relative bargain of $22. With other pitchers in this tier going for north of $25, except for CC Sabathia, Dickey is a huge bargain. Unlike CC, Dickey also does not have any injury question marks, except for the fact that he's pitched his entire career without an ulnar collateral ligament, which really ought to be extremely important for any pitcher, according to all kinds of specialists. Despite not having his UCL, the ligament that is replaced in Tommy John surgery, Dickey has been pitching without issue for his entire life, so it popping up now seems awfully unlikely. Generally speaking, Luke was at the extremes of the age spectrum, going with either very old or very young players. Jeter, Ichiro, Balfour, Swisher, Youkilis, and Pettitte bring up the ranks for the old guys, while Perez, Giavotella, Straily, Griffin, Hicks, and Bauer all retain rookie eligibility or lost it last year.
Best pick: Dickey, $22. See above, but if Dickey can even match his 2011 line, Luke should be turning an awfully nice profit.
Worst pick: No one, $12. Luke left $12 on the table, more than everyone else combined. Some of this can probably be attributed to his technical difficulties, but $12 can go a long, long way in an auction. Aaron Hicks, $9. Hicks made a splash by hitting 3 home runs in a game and looks like he could win the Twins CF job for opening day. Hicks hasn't played above AA, though, and relied on a high BABIP to maintain a passable average. He could go double digits in homers and steals, but hit .240. Given that Drew Stubbs went for 1/3 of the price, it is hard to find much value there. In his defense, though, since Luke had money to spend at that point in the draft, this is hardly a terrible pick given the circumstances.
Finally, we get to Caleb. Twenty one players had been nominated and $588 spent on them before Caleb successfully snagged Alex Rios ($27). That figure is a bit above projections, but Rios showed last year that he can be an elite all around contributor. Caleb is also banking on a bounceback from Elvis Andrus, whose SB total dropped precipitously, and continued growth from Houston's second baseman Jose Altuve ($25). Caleb may have been burned by waiting so long. He is the only player who did not draft a $30 player and his top 3 drafted players (Rios, Andrus, and Altuve) all fall short of elite. Granted, Caleb did have a nice set of elite players to begin with, such as David Price and Prince Fielder, but an opportunity may have been missed by waiting so long.
Best pick: Jarrod Parker, $13. Parker is young and has considerable upside. His underlying numbers and his minor league stats indicate he could be much more than he showed in his rookie season.
Worst pick: Elvis Andrus, $23. Andrus used to be a consistent 30 stolen base player. Given that he is only 24, it is odd to see such a big decline in stolen bases, but he has filled out considerably in the last two years and doesn't seem to have the speed he one did. Not only did he only steal 21 bases last year, he was also caught 10 times. Last year Andrus was the 4th best shortstop, in a weak year for the position overall, finishing behind Jeter ($8) and Zobrist and Escobar, both of whom were kept.
35 comments:
Yeah, I've been beating myself up today over those $12 unused dollars. Could've had Morneau instead of one of my $1 guys. Or I could've taken that $9 on Hicks and $12 on nobody and drafted myself Konerko.
There were many very expensive players for whom I had budgeted what I THOUGHT was a lot of money, but due to the inflation and I think a change in general league strategy, they ended up going much higher than I thought. So I was left with a lot of money and no elite players that I thought were worth spending it on. Meanwhile, I was trying to save money to fill out my pitching staff, which was empty beyond Shields and Dickey until very late in the draft. The 7 pitchers I drafted with my last picks were all guys that I thought would go for $3-5 each. Instead they went for $1-3, so I had money left over.
Hicks was definitely an overpay, but as Bill points out I can't be upset with myself for overpaying for anybody after finishing with $12 to spare. However, on my roster he's a bench guy with upside, and I'd much rather have him than Stubbs, no matter the price. At this point, we KNOW that Stubbs is a guy who strikes out 30% of the time in the majors and bats .230. We don't know what Hicks will do in the majors. He could be another speedster who is able to maintain a somewhat elevated BABIP (although almost certainly he won't maintain it a .346).
I'll also point out that Hicks' AA numbers last year are VERY similar to Trout's AA numbers in 2011. I don't want to get into the Mike Trout BABIP argument again, but....Trout supported a .326 AVG in AA in 2011 with a .390 BABIP. At that point, many did say "Trout required a very high BABIP to maintain a good average in the minors." Well, then he came to the majors and maintained a .326 AVG again with a similar .383 BABIP. It is possible, although I admit not likely, that Hicks maintains a .280 AVG this year in the majors with a .340 BABIP.
If Player Rater's valuation of stolen bases is correct, then I don't think $31 for Bourn is much of an overpay at all. If you linearly scale their draft costs and their 2012 player rater scores (and assume the same stats in 2013), Bourn at $31 is a better deal than Miggy at $52. I did a lot of work the last couple weeks trying to scale player rater scores with draft costs, and one thing I found was that according to player rater our league always underpays for steals. I may make a longer blog post about this at some point.
I had Bourn as a $14 player. All he does is steal bases. He's 1.5 standard deviations below average for home runs, 0.5 below average for BA, and 1.6 SDs below average for RBI (he is 0.5 above average for runs). This is a player who has never scored 100 runs, never driven in 60, and never hit double digit home runs. I'd much rather spend my money on someone like Brett Gardner or Coco Crisp and use the extra money elsewhere- it's just way too much money for someone who is a one trick pony.
Thanks for the detailed write-up, Bill! It was a very fun read.
I would never spend $26 on Jeff Weaver, though :)
Agreed, thanks for the write-up Bill. And sorry you drafted Jeff Weaver, Taylor, that was a bit crazy..
Already enjoying preseason injury news...Ortiz out for the start of the season and Brett Anderson pulled from his game.
Always a pleasure Mr. McDowell! What's weird about me and pitching is that EVERY year I tell myself I'm not gonig to spend money on pitching...and yet? Very Bizarre.
Given that I started with the lowest amount of money in the draft and an elite SP and 1B, I'm not beating myself up too badly for not joining the rather aggressive bidding on the first set of guys. I do wish I'd landed more of the middle-tier guys that I'd had my eye on. I'm happy to have Hardy and very happy to have Napoli at the price I spent, but I'd allocated $10 to spend on the INF and UTIL positions combined. Those choices, along with spending a bit much on Rios, Andrus, and Altuve, left me high and dry later in the draft when I couldn't beat $2 bids on a lot of the guys I wanted (Smyly, for example). Had I known I could land Hardy for $8 later in the draft (I had him going for substantially more), I would have let Andrus go.
Thanks for the writeup, Bill!
I am going to have to disagree the the McDowell's assessment of Bourn (surprise surprise) and maybe it's b/c I put more emphasis on consensus rankings but projecting Bourn as a $14 is multiple standard deviations* away from the consensus this year. I was hoping to get Bourn for 29, and would not have gone to 33 but Bourn at $30 is right in line with the consensus. So, not a ton of value in the pick, but I don't see how it can be my worst pick.
Also, where are your 95% CI's around these statements? Just saying...
"never scored 100 runs"
- 2011 = 94 runs
- 2012 = 96 runs
"never driven in 60"
- 2011 = 50 RBI
- 2012 = 57 RBI
"never hit double digit homeruns"
- 2011 = 2 HRs
- 2012 = 9 HRs
While the HRs might be just a fluke, I am intrigued with Bourn's increase in fly ball % since 2010. I think 60 RBI/10 homeruns this year is within reach.
I do think my worst pick with Teixeria, who I didn't really want, but got greedy trying to drive up his price a bit more. I still ended up drafting Chris Davis so that $13 for Teix could have used to upgrade a SP. There is some good upside and keeper potential with Teix, but it screwed my auction strategy a bit.
I am also kicking myself for not bidding up CC with Bill. I know I think this every year, but his arm HAS to be ready to fall off... amiright?
It better, or the rest of us are going to look really dumb.
I was kinda reeling when the CC nomination came in and didn't pay much attention, as he was never really on my radar. I never would have let him go for $21 if I'd fully realized what was going on.
I'll take the blame for CC. I wasn't prepared to nominate a player when it came to me. Since Pujols and Cabrera had gone for such absurd prices, I put up the first Yankee I saw. It didn't work.
All of you people with your thoughtfulness and good manners are making me feel like a jerk.
Thanks for the thorough recap, Bill. I enjoyed re-living the insanity!
Regarding Bourn, I used a composite of three projections (ESPN, Baseball Prospectus' PFM, and Steamer). Steamer didn't have Bourn's numbers in yet, but BP gave me $23 and ESPN game me $15 (because of generally higher RBI and HR numbers, ESPN punishes laggards in those categories more). The $19 average became $23 once you account for inflation. Bourn was paid as the 8th best player available in the draft, $1 more than Longoria. For a guy who is a two category contributor (runs and SB), that is awfully high to me. Also, players like Bourn who only contribute in a single category can have diminishing returns. Mark is already projected to be 13 steals ahead of me, and 26 ahead of Luke, who is in 3rd. A much cheaper player (Crisp, for example) could have done similar things for Mark for half the cost.
As far as comparing Hicks to Trout, that's patently nuts. One was a 19 year old in AA, one was a 23 year old.
Keeping on the subject of Bourn, my board had him at $14, and I think that was too low. That said, I think you could have gotten 80% of the production for 40% of the cost.
Well if being able to get 80% of the production for 40% of the cost is the criteria for worst pick, then I think Pujols has to supplant Lester as Andrew's. Luckily we're paying for upside as well as production, so Andrew gets a pass. So should Mark, because Coco Crisp doesn't have half the upside of Michael Bourn. Bourn is three years younger and has stolen 60 bases twice (Crisp stole more than 40 once). Coco has had more than 500 ABs once in the last 5 years. Bourn plays in a better hitter's park and bats at the top of a better lineup. This is also why one would pay more for Aaron Hicks than one would for Drew "I had a .277 OBP last year" Stubbs.
I'd say it's "patently nuts" to compare Bourn and Crisp, but I don't see how it can ever be patently nuts to compare the stats of any two players (which, of course, is what Luke was doing - not concluding that the two players were in any way equivalent). And regardless of the validity of the conclusions, an argument that someone has put time and effort into deserves better than a straw man and a blow off.
Perhaps "patently ridiculous" is a little harsh, but Hicks' numbers in AA were not very similar to Trout's 2011.
His triple slash was across the board worse, he struck out more, he had a lower isolated power. Finally, there is the age difference, as I pointed out earlier. A player at 19 you can expect lots of gains. A player at 24, not nearly as much. I stand by the statement that the comparison is specious.
As far as Crisp providing similar things for Mark, I mean in terms of points provided. Bourn will almost certainly outperform Crisp, but the drop off in points to Crisp would likely be minor, and would have freed up $17 to spend elsewhere.
Also, Michael Bourn's upside is awfully close to his 2012. He had a career high in home runs and RBI. He's moving to a weaker lineup.
Coco Crisp played in 120 games last year. In those games, he hit two more home runs than Bourn did in 155 and stole only three fewer bases. Granted, only a fool would count on Coco staying healthy, but his upside of a full season is higher than Bourn's. If anything, the $17 premium on Bourn is for his consistency.
Bourn's also moving to a tougher league. I think Bourn will be lucky to produce $25 of value this year (about what he produced last year).
Of course I picked arbitrary cutoffs- that's what one does when doing these things. I think Bourn's upside is basically his 2012- he might run more, but you're not getting those home runs again. He's not hitting the ball any farther (in fact, 1' shorter on HR and FB in 2012 than 2011).
Further, while I didn't adjust for this for my board, I maintain that SBs are the category most easily addressed via the waiver wire or trades.
Finally, no one said Stubbs was an excellent player. Arguing about Stubbs vs Bourn is just silly. Stubbs did fit my team well at the time because he was a) cheap and b) his main weakness is batting average, where I could afford to take the hit thanks to guys like Pujols, Cabrera, and Ellsbury.
As far as CIs go, I'm using z-ores, which assume normal distribution around the mean. This is probably not the case, especially for SBs, but I think it gives a fairly good expectation of value (assuming the projections are good, of course).
My main problem with Bourn is that $31 is a lot to pay for a guy that only excels in two areas, and is a major drag elsewhere.
As far as Pujols being a bad pick, I don't think he's a great one, but I don't think it's outlandish. I'm guessing I'll get around 90 cents on the dollar if you factor in inflation. I had Pujols and Cabrera head and shoulders above any other available hitter, and while getting BOTH of them was a bad idea because it kept me from getting value elsewhere in the draft, I don't think their costs (individually) were outlandish.
Bill points out that I might be too bullish on Pujols. That very well could be the case, especially looking at the rapidly dropping walk rate and big jump in swinging strike rate (though I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it's a league switch thing). That said, my points remain about Bourn.
It is interesting, if nothing else, that Pujols and Bourn had essentially the same ESPN player rater in 2012 yet you apparently valued Pujols at >3x the price. I realize 1B is going to have a premium, but that seems such an absurd difference to the point it throws into question either your rating system or the player rater. In the ESPN non-inflation adjusted 10 team ratings Bourn was -9 from Bautista, which is close enough to what I paid. While I deviate some from the PR in my rankings, I can't say it's ever by that size of a margin. I think I can safely say that Bourn is more likely to have 2x the value of Coco than Pujols is of having 3x the value of Bourn.
Player rater is a good way to compare players past performance, but does anyone really think it's the best way to predict value? I'm telling what my board was, based solely on projections (using Steamer, which is generally one of the best projections out there, which I used unadjusted thanks to lack of time). I took a look and noticed two things.
First of all, it's fairly bullish on Pujols, projecting him at 0.299/36hr/102R/114RBI/7SB. Steamer in general is fairly bearish on batting average (only Cabrera and Mauer projected to hit above 0.300). Pujols is projected to be significantly positive in all categories except stolen bases. If you want to believe his 2012 is closer to his value going forward, I'd still have him around a $33 player, $38 with inflation.
Bourn was projected 0.263/6HR/78R/47RBI/30SB, but only 542 PA. Double checking on Fangraphs, it looks like I had old projections or bad PT data. Updated, he's still only 0.263/6HR/87R/48RBI/35SB, making him a $20 OF in the neighborhood of De Aza, Markakis, and Melky Cabrera.
Part of the problem with my valuation system could be that SBs tend to have a larger standard variation than other offensive stats, perhaps leading me to undervalue SB specialists. That said, I think that large SD helps remind us of the fairly substantial pool of players available that can contribute there.
In the end, my point is NOT that $48 Pujols was a good deal. My point is that a player who is above average in two categories isn't worth 14% of your budget. I don't expect Bourn to put up a better overall season than last year (NB- his "improved" FB rate is 24%, with a career 4.1% HR/FB, 8.1% last year. His FB distance is unchanged.)
FYI- I looked into it, and between our 4 OF slots, infield, and utility, it looked like position adjustments were small enough that I didn't bother with them, so it's not a 1B issue either.
Also, Player Rater is really hard to use as a measuring stick when we don't know exactly how it's calculated. Does anyone know how it works?
I don't think there's any definitive explanation of how player rater (PR) is calculated. Googling it only brings up forum discussions and blog posts from over 5 years ago that are clearly out of date. However, the formulas appear to be simple enough that you can figure them out by looking at the numbers.
I think PR calculates an average for each stat, and it looks like a standard deviation too. I don't know how the average and standard deviation are calculated. It could be by looking at MLB averages, or by looking at ESPN fantasy league averages, or by some other method. ESPN is smart enough, at least, to score players differently in the mixed league PR ranks vs. our AL only PR ranks.
If a player gets the average in a given category, he gets 0 points for that category. For the counting stats, the scores scale linearly around the average. In a mixed league, the average hitter in 2012, who would've scored 0 in all 5 categories, had a 33.2/7.9/31.7/5.2/.259 line. Steals were the most valuable category, with each one being worth 0.119 PR points. HRs were 0.108, runs were 0.0337, and RBIs were 0.0335.
It's a little bit more complicated for rate stats, since it takes into account both the final rate, and the number of ABs or IPs. For example, McCutchen had a 3.63 in AVG last year, and Trout had a 3.38, since they basically had the same average, but McCutchen had more ABs.
Nobody is saying that PR is a performance projector. It merely assigns a value to a known past performance. Besides the one error of not dealing with partial seasons well, I think it passes the eyeball test as far as accomplishing this task. Every time I see 2 players and think "oh there's no way player X was more valuable than player Y," I take a closer look at the 2 players' lines, the +- in each category, and come away thinking that PR basically got it right. Looking at Bourn vs. Pujols in 2012, Bourn was +11 in runs, -21 in HR, -48 in RBI, +34 in steals, and -.011 in AVG. 34 steals is worth 4.05 player rater points.
That Steamer projection for Bourn is incredibly harsh. Bourn has hit .280 over the last 4 seasons. His career average is .272, dragged down by a .229 rookie year. Last season he hit .274. I don't know how Steamer works, but if it's based on age regression, is regression for a 30 year old really that high? The 35 steals ia also pretty harsh for a guy who has stolen at least 41 in every full season he's played, and averaged 51.
The HR/R/RBI totals are probably about right. However, I do think Bourn has 100 run, 60 RBI upside in the new and improved Cleveland lineup. Atlanta scored 700 runs last year, and Cleveland scored 667, so not an enormous difference. Cleveland also had a higher OBP than Atlanta (.324 to .320), and I expect them to improve on that figure this year, meaning more PAs for the leadoff hitter. I'd be willing to bet that the addition of Swisher and Bourn (and okay, maybe Stubby will help out a little, too), as well as some increased production from Santana and Kipnis, will be enough to make 2013 Cleveland a better lineup than 2012 Atlanta. Also, Bourn has always been a leadoff hitter in the NL, and it's hard to get RBIs hitting right after the pitcher.
Yeah, I was on my way in to say that 35 (or 30) SBs just doesn't pass the sniff test. When Bourn's most useful stat is projected to drop by 33% and Pujols is expected to improve significantly across the board, your valuations are gonna be out of whack with the norm. All the other major projection systems have Bourn between 45 and 50 steals. He's never had below 40 steals in a full season.
Going back a bit, in my post about upside I had meant to mention consistency as well (which Bill brought up instead). Consistency doesn't get talked about enough, but it's also why we overpay for Albert Pujols and Michael Bourn, but Alex Rios (who had a better 2012 than both) at a substantially lower salary is considered an overpay. Bourn and Pujols are both a little overpaid, but in the context of our league, their history of consistent production, and the chance that they both improve in 2013, totally reasonable values.
Err...smell test. Sniff test is a medical procedure.
Regarding Bourn's projections, I didn't have Steamer's Bourn projection - the site I was using didn't have him in their database as an AL player. But here are the two I did have, ESPN and Baseball Prospectus:
ESPN: .268/89/5/49/43
BP: .260/90/4/47/52
There is a good deal of consensus there, with BP projecting a few more steals. ESPN ranked him lower because 90 runs from ESPN isn't worth as much as BP, just because they're more optimistic overall. Finally, I think the 9 home runs scream fluke; in the last 3 years he hit 7 home runs combined and, as Andrew pointed out, his home run/ fly ball rate doubled. But Bourn's value isn't dependent on whether he hits 4 or 8 home runs, it depends on how many bags he steals, and what you think those bags are worth.
Ultimately, I think that is what it comes down to. How much to you value stolen bases?
I think part of the problem with the projections is that Bourn is a clear outlier in babip w/ no useful comparisons as far as I can find. I assume this is what depresses his projected average even though he has over 3000 at bats with high babip and .270-.280 BA.
The BABIP, at this point, certainly tells us that Bourn has that skill (it stabilizes around 2.5 seasons, but stabilizing means it tells us something, not that his career BABIP is 'real' BABIP, if I'm making any sense). The magnitude is really hard- there's a ton of noise there, so in that way it's like defensive stats.
Going back to the Bourn valuation, Steamer has him hitting 0.262 with a 0.329 BABIP. ZIPs has him with a 0.333, Oliver 0.338. Those are all well above average. I think it's reasonable to expect him to remain well above average, just not quite as much above average.
I do wonder if the z-score method consistently undervalues stolen bases, though. At some point, maybe this weekend, I'll see if I can come up with another way of looking at it.
Also, not to quibble too much (but I will, since it's my nature), we simply don't know how much of an outlier Bourn really is with BABIP skill. There's just way too much noise to sort out what has been luck and what is a skill. We certainly can say he's above average in that regard, but how much is really hard to say.
Well, we've gone full circle.
A BABIP ouroboros.
Can I please steal that for my team name?
Andrew, that would make you the 2nd person to get his team name from one of Bill's comments on this thread.
Thanks, Bill!
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