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.

Mets v. 2012 Playoff Teams

The epic field of 8, let October madness begin!

I wanted to take a quick look at how the Mets fared against the 2012 teams that made the playoffs. Below is a table that shows the results, note the Mets did not play against the A's, Tigers or Rangers this year.

Team	W	L
STL	4	3
WAS	4	14
SFG	4	4
CIN	2	6
BAL	3	0
NYY	1	5
ATL	6	12

The Mets had winning records against the Orioles and Cardinals only with a split against the Giants. The teams we played the worst against were the Yankees and Cardinals. It's funny some of these wins represent the best games of the entire season. The opening sweep of the Braves, the sweep of the Orioles and the Cardinals in June, the Johan no hitter and the late season "maybe we are good again" series against the Giants. It also contains some of the lowest points in the season, the Yankee game that ended Dickey's crazy streak of strike outs and one hitters, the Dickey rain game against the Braves and the multiple drubbings we received from the Nats.

In the Earth-2 playoffs where the Mets made the post season, I wouldn't  feel too great about playing any of these squads. I think we could probably take the Orioles in a one game Wild card playoff and maybe the Braves, provided we are aided by new and wildly divergent interpretations of the infield fly rule. In a 5 game series I guess I would want Baltimore but I probably wouldn't want to bet on the Mets to beat any of these teams over that period. In real baseball today, my predictions are: Nats, Reds, Yankees, A's.

Mets Gambling Review: Player Props

Last March we took a look at some preseason prop bets for individual players which you can read here, It's time to check back in and see just how off I was.

Jason Bay 2012 Batting Average
O/U .250
My Pick: Over (but it might be pretty close)
Actual: .165
Well Jason Bay ended up having 32 hits this year. In my defense while Bay has been bad for a few years he has never been quite this bad. He hit .240 last year and never before under .250 in any year before so while I think over .250 may have been a homer pick, I don't think anyone was predicting .165. 

Jason Bay 2012 HR's
O/U 15.5
My Pick: Over
Actual:8
I got this one wrong also but I don't feel so bad about it. Bay hit 8 homers in 194 AB this year, in a full year or even just 400 AB he likely would have been able to reach 16. I was betting on what I thought Bay's power production would be not whether or not he would be injured or strike out so much he would end up benched regularly. Wow. I think that might have been the closest I have come to complimenting Jason Bay all year, I feel dirty.

David Wright 2012 Batting Average
O/U .275
My Pick: Over
Actual: .306
This was a no brainer. D Wright had one of his best seasons ever but even when he was playing poorly he always put up a decent batting average. He is a lifetime .300 hitter who has only hit under .275 once. That happened to be last year. Things like this are always a great value in betting. Wright hits .254 last year so they books give him an deflated o/u. Anyone who watches baseball can say that his .254 was probably an outlier and clean up on this bet.


David Wright 2012 HR's
O/U 22.5
My Pick: Over
Actual:21
Missed it by an inch. Again this was kind of a homer pick. Wright's power numbers have been trending down for years and if this were a non Met I probably wouldn't have bet it. I thought he would hit in the high teens and maybe the short Citi field walls would get me over, in the end I was about right but fell just short of covering.

Johan Santana 2012 ERA
O/U 3.45
My Pick: No Bet
Actual: Didn't Qualify
Johan's ERA for 2012 was 4.85 but he needed 135 IP for this bet to qualify and he only ended with 117. I chose not to make this bet because I thought that ERA was impossible to guess, however if I had guessed I would never have put Johan over 4.  He had never even sniffed in the general direction of a 4 ERA before so it didn't seem likely that he would do it now. Anyone who took the under should be happy they didn't let him pitch two more games.

Johan Santana 2012 Wins
O/U 9
My Pick: Over
Actual: 6
When I made my prediction I called this the " "Santana 2012 Health" bet because there was pretty much no way that Johan would not win 10 if he played all year. I was right. He won 6 games in about half a year and would have cruised to at least 4 more wins if he had been healthy. My mistake here was to bet on Johan to stay healthy. Every recent trend indicated he probably wouldn't have a full year but I was fueled by fandom and a good Spring Training, pro top kids: never make bets based on Spring Training performance.

Mike Pelfrey 2012 Wins
O/U 9.5
My Pick: Under
Actual: 0
Remember Mike Pelfrey? I feel like all I used to do was blog about how much I disliked Big Pelf. Then he faded away never to be heard from again. Pelfrey had a pretty strong 20 innings this year then promptly got himself hurt and out for the season. With any luck we will never see him a Mets uniform again. This was the bet I felt the most confidence in and i was happy to win it.

R.A. Dickey 2012 Wins
O/U 11.5
My Pick: Over
Actual:20
I lied. This was the bet I felt the most confident in. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I love the Dickster. He was so incredibly underrated coming into this year and it an absolute pleasure to see everyone else see what I have been saying for a few years. R.A. Dickey is one of the best pitchers in baseball. 

Frank Francisco 2012 Saves
O/U 30.5
My Pick: Under
Actual: 23
He actually looked like he might do it for a second but then he remembered he was Frank Francisco and did exactly what he did every year he has ever pitched. Frank Frank is a strong for a month or two, then blows up, then loses his closers job. This is what always happens. Frank Frank's performance this year was the most predictable thing possible, how did Sandy and co. not see this? It angers me to no end that this guy earns 5 million dollars for what he does.

So I went 4/8 on these bets which is not a bad record considering the difficult nature of predicting individual player performances. Feel free to share your failed or successful Mets bets in the comments.

The Terrible Trout Travesty

I think we can all agree at this point that Miguel Cabrera will win the MVP this year. He won the first triple crown in over forty years and no player has ever won a Triple Crown and not won MVP. However Mike Trout is my vote for AL MVP although it's pretty close.

Winning a Triple Crown is an awesome accomplishment but in this modern age we all can pretty much agree that RBI is not a great stat. It is batting position dependent and relies on what guys before you are doing, you can be the greatest hitter in the world but if the batters before you don't get on base, you won't have any RBI. So what Cabrera really did was lead the league in average and home runs. Let's compare Cabrera and Trout in those two categories. Miggy hit .330 on the season while Trout hit .326. This is essentially a push. The difference between those averages is three hits which is essentially meaningless. In homers Trout trails significantly with only 30 homers to Cabrera's 42. Trout however has a shorter season with about 60 less AB's than Miguel. Trout was hitting about one homer per 18.5 bats which gives him about 33 homers if he had the same number of AB's as Cabrera. Trout makes up for it a little with 49 steals (he was also an incredibly efficient stealer, only being caught 5 times), plus defensive skills and playing a difficult position. 

On the advanced metrics end, Trout pretty much passes Miggy on every end. The simplest way to compare two players is WAR. Below is a table that shows how the two players matched up using three popular WAR  metrics.

Player	fWAR	rWAR	offensive WAR
Trout	10.4 (1st)	10.7 (1st)	8.6 (1st)
Cabrera	7.5 (tied 6th)	6.9 (6th)	7.5 (tied for 2nd)

As you can see Trout is leaps and bounds ahead of Miguel. Trout was the top in baseball in all three and several wins ahead of Cabrera in f and r WAR. These stats represent a total package of offense and defense and tell a pretty compelling story. Trout had a higher OPS+, a higher OBP and led in my personal favorite stat, Win Probability Added by about .5 percent. I think that any statistical study would show Trout was the better player. However MVP is not awarded by statistics it is awarded by baseball writers who will no doubt choose the history making Cabrera. Miggy is not a bad choice at all but when it comes to value, I am taking Trout, even though he is a Phillies fan.

The Mets covered.

The Mets might not have done much this year, but one thing they did was cover the regular season wins bet. The Vegas line was 72. (which we wrote about here) but various betting outlets had it everywhere from 70 to 74. I locked it in at 72.5 which was a very small margin of victory. At different points throughout the year this bet looked like a lock. On the 4th of July the Mets were already at 44 wins meaning they only had to go a whopping 28-52 to get to the magic number, a sure thing! Then we got to September 1st and we are only at 63 wins, a mere 19 more than we had two months earlier. Virtually impossible to make up. Two weeks later we added only three more wins to that count. Finally it all came around, we swept the Marlins, we took three from the Bucs and Niese won his final start against the Braves. I have never felt to so good about a 74 win season.

The last day of baseball

I often talk on this blog about how the A's are my second favorite baseball season, they are going into tonight    tied for the AL west lead in a season where they were considered to be one of the worst teams in baseball. You would think I would be pretty excited and to some degree I am but more than anything I just keep wishing it was the Mets. As much as I enjoy A's baseball it is nothing in comparison to Mets fandom. The fact that another team who was supposed to go nowhere ended up in the playoffs just makes it all the more awful that the Mets ended up exactly where we all thought they would.

Frankly, I am excited for this season to be over. I miss baseball when it's gone and I am excited for the new playoff format but the real fun begins tomorrow when we will have a full season of Mets data to pour over. For stat geeks the day the regular season ends is the day a new season begins. A season of number crunching, player comparing and historical season ranking. The Mets had a lot of highs and lows this year. A 20 game winner, a 30 home run hitter and a new all time hits leader. In the coming months we will be able to see what other records were set, how good we were compared to other Mets teams and answer the most burning question of all, just how good is R.A. Dickey?

One thing I am happy is ending is the fantasy baseball season. I played in four leagues this year and it was basically like having a second job. I am proud to report that I won two (including Super Baseball 5000) and placed third in another. The amount of time and mental energy I put into fantasy baseball is just totally unreasonable, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Tonight is the final game of the season against the Marlins and I will be watching. While the Oakland A's fight for first place and the Presidential candidates debate, I will be tuned into the most important event of all, game 162. Mets and Marlins...LGM.

R.A. Dickey's 20th Win is in the books

THIS IS WHAT A TWENTY GAME WINNER LOOKS LIKE!