Saturday a.m. Rangers things

I thought Feliz wasn’t ROY eligible, but could be mistaken. I will check on that.

Yeah, local writers are more provincial, as you put it. But they’re also scattered uniformly around the league. Writers in Seattle see Texas a lot more than they see Tampa; whereas Boston writers see Tampa more. It balances out. Yeah, they have biases in both opinion and perspective, but so do national writers. To pretend that a Keith Law or a Rob Neyer or whoever doesn’t have a bias in perspective is problematic. If you try to equally scan boxscores, weighting numbers based on your confidence in them, you may dismiss fielding altogether, because you just can’t quantify it as well as other facets of the game. Whereas if you are sitting in press boxes watching Elvis play, you can’t as easily say “well, we can’t quantify that range perfectly, so we’ll go with Gordan Beckham”

Elvis is an extraordinary player when it comes to quantifying his value; much like Pudge was early in his career. Sometimes you have to rely on intuition above numbers in those cases.

where he had mentioned that he had injured a couple of his fingers, and it bothered him for a couple of weeks while causing an inordinate amount of throwing errors.

and advanced stats like FIP is that they are predictive stats; they intentionally eliminate hard to interpret features so that predictions can be made based on what we understand. A guy with a great k/9, low HR/9 and BB/9 is very likely to be a good pitcher next year, even if choppy defense and bad luck gave him a bad ERA this year.

However, ultimately awards such as ROY and Cy Young reward past performance. Which, hate it as people may, is affected by defense and luck and all sorts of factors we can’t quantify or understand. I have no problem whatsoever awarding Cy Young or ROY based on ERA, which shockingly enough does a good job of telling you how many runs pitcher Y allowed in a given start in Year X. Maybe it isn’t predictive, but it is very descriptive.

the only thing I’d say is that I would try to correct for defensive inefficiencies. Peripherals obviously do that but they do it too much – not taking into account BA w/RISP.

I think this is similar to an RBI discussion. You should reward someone for having a high BA w/ RISP but not award someone for having more runners getting on base in front of him than the next guy.

The tigers were a much better fielding team than the Athletics according to UZR so maybe porcello’s numbers should be docked a bit for that.

But when those games are in August and September and you plan on being in the hunt for a playoff race you don’t want to be running out the B team on your broadcast.

Then Cruz’s defensive value goes out the window because he will be relegated to DH duty

Getting Willingham upgrades LF and fills the DH role for the most part. Then you could go out and sign a guy like Glaus and overall the team is better.

Until the Rangers come out and say they plan on using either Hamilton or Cruz full time in LF next year then I think getting rid of the logjam of RFs is a priority. They have said they plan on moving Hamilton to RF full time so Cruz’s defensive value means little to me if hes the DH here. And if they move Hamilton to RF permanently that means LF is the position we can upgrade this winter. Thats why I would look into trading Cruz for either Crawford or Willingham. Willingham is under team control for 2 more years and has been a very consistent producer.

Getting Willingham would be like making two moves with one. Because he has pretty even splits against both RHP and LHP you could use him as DH against LHP (which is what we are looking for) and play him in LF against RHP sitting Murphy.

Im not advocating getting rid of Cruz just for the sake of doing so but he is probably our best non pitching logical trade chip at the ML level.

And until the Rangers come out and say they plan on playing either Cruz or Hamilton in LF full time in 2010 then I am going on the premise that we have two starting RFs right now. Only one of them can play there which most likely is Hamilton so all the talk of Cruz’s defense really means nothing to me. The same reasons you don’t want to trade him are the same reasons I think he would bring back a nice player.

Im not saying trade him for prospects but if we are getting back a Carl Crawford or Josh Willingham I think you have to consider it very strongly.

You could put Hamilton in LF, put Cruz in RF, let Murphy be the 4th outfielder, and get a DH.

There’s no realistic way that replacing Cruz with Willingham makes the team better, particularly given that you then have $5 million less to spend.