Friday, November 9, 2012

David Wright v. Chase Headley


Today is the one year anniversary of Metsrospectus. A year ago today I wrote this article about Reyes losing  the Silver Slugger to Tulo, one year later here we are talking about another Met not winning awards.

In the past week the Padres 3b Chase Headley Lamar won both the NL Gold Glove and Silver Slugger both awards I feel belonged to David Wright. One of the most frequent reasons I hear cited is how well Headley did on such a poor team. The Padres were actually a better team than the Mets this year finishing with two more regular season wins and finishing in the same place in their division. Let's take a quick look at the pertinent stats of the two men.

Player
WAR
AVG
OPB
SLG
HR
K%
UZR
Wright
7.8
.306
.381
.492
21
16.7
16.8
Headley
7.5
.286
.351
.498
31
22.5%
6

Defensively I think Wright was the better player. Traditional defensive metrics have them with basically identical years. When we move to the more advanced metrics Wright clearly had a better year putting up a UZR significantly higher than Headley. I am fairly certain that the managers who voted did not factor UZR into their decision making process but ten additional runs saved is fairly significant.

On the offensive side I think it is close but I would have to give the edge to Wright. Wright led Headley in BA and OBP by decent margins and effectively tied him in SLG. The one area where Chase did soundly beat wright is homers. An additional ten home runs is a fairly decent margin and doubly impressive since he plays in a pitchers park. Another downside to Chase is his high strike out rate. Headley whiffs in about a quarter of his at bats which is fairly significant. I think if forced to choose a starting 3B for their team any rational fan would choose Wright over Headley. It is a shame that with the phenomenal year Wright had he will not be honored in any way, be it with a Silver Slugger, Gold Glove or spot as an All Star starter.


2 comments:

  1. I think the main reason Headley got silver slugger over Wright is because whoever voted only looked the simple stats: HR's and RBI's, which Headley had much better numbers than Wright. RBI's are probably the WORST way to measure someone's ability. It's a shame that these people are allowed to vote.

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  2. Could not agree more Derway, RBI is a complete joke. Pitcher Wins are better than RBI. They really shoudnt even be considered.

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