Monday, October 15, 2012

David Wright: the next Carl Yastrzemski or the next Eric Chavez?


Sometimes you start to research an article and you end up shifting away from your original premise. I wanted to prove that the Mets should trade away David Wright and that his most productive years are behind him. While that may end up being the case, I have some evidence that swings things in D Wright's favor a little bit.

One of the many ways we try to predict how a player will do in the future is to look at how players similar to them did. The ever useful baseball reference does this for us by supplying similarity lists using the Bill James similarity score, which you can read about here. A score of 1000 would be an exact clone of the player, the farther from 1000 points two players are, the less similar they are. What we wanted was a list of the players most similar to Wright at his current age, so players through their age 29 season. The top 5 most similar player are:

Player
Similarity Score
Scott Rolen
932
Carl Yastrzemski
900
Larry Jones
896
Eric Chavez
894
Aramis Ramirez
889


Not a bad list to be on. You have a Hall of Famer and two likely future Hall of Fame guys (Jones and Rolen). These are all players who had similar numbers to Wright through age 29. Now obviously there are many factors that make those numbers hard to compare: these guys played in different era's, in different leagues, different stadia and entered the league at different times but from a pure numbers stand point, these guys and Wright had similar careers. Now let's hop in our DeLorean and go five years into the future to look at how these guys did in their next 5 seasons, which should bear some similarity to how Wright might do in his next five.

Player
AVG
OBP
SLG
HR
GP
rWAR
Value according to WAR
Rolen
.279
.353
.448
11
111
15.6
75 million
Yastrzemski
.290
.405
.461
20
147
23.9
120 million
L.Jones
.300
.404
.535
26
133
20.7
100 million
Chavez
.256
.313
.406
4
47
1.1
5 million
Ramirez
.290
.356
.509
24
131
10.2
50 million


These numbers represent the average statistics of these 5 players over their next 5 seasons. Again not a bad list to be on. The only bust here is Chavez who averaged 47 games played over the next five years and posted a cumulative WAR of 1.1. Yaz and Larry Jones went on to be as good if not better in their next five years of playing but I think we can comfortably say that we don't believe D Wright has the same talent level as those too.

Even the second lowest player on the list went on to have a serviceable career. Ramirez continued to bat around .300 and hit a decent number of homers. If Wright were to split the difference amongst these five men he would continue to be a useful player for the Mets. In the last column I listed the players dollar value according to WAR to get a sense of how much they were worth financially (the general standard is that one win is equal to 5 million bucks). The number we keep hearing for Wright is around 100 million dollars. If Wright signed for that he would need to produce around what Chipper did to be worth the money over 5 years. So a safe guess would be that 100 million would be a bit of an overpay. Sadly in baseball you pay what the market bears not what the rWAR numbers say.

After looking at these numbers I am feeling much more bullish about Wright. I still worry about any deal that last more than 5-6 years and I certainly don't want to pay him much more than 100 million (if that) but I know firmly believe he is worth signing.

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