Over at Fangraphs, with the help of Dan Szymborski, they’ve finally rolled out their Rest of Season ZiPS Update, along with a final season update of the end-of-season numbers.  I’ve compiled all of the Cardinals hitters’ numbers in the spreadsheet below (y’know, with a protractor in my mother’s basement) with some notes below:

Click to embiggen

For those who don’t know how these work, Dan takes the players’ numbers-to-date, which are “in the books,” and regresses them to his true talent projections to get the “rest of season” numbers.  Then he adds those rest of season numbers to the players’ numbers-to-date to get the final statistics.  For example, he thinks that Colby has outperformed his true talent up until now, so Colby’s rest of season numbers are .268/.349/.450 instead of the .375/.464/583 he’s hit so far.  However, since those 56 PA are already in the books, they get added onto 533 PA of .268/.349/.450 ball to get his final line of .278/.360/.463. Also note that the projections assume that each player plays full time.

Notes, in bulleted format:

• Pujols’ end of season wOBA would be the lowest of his career
• I would love Berkman’s final line, though I would probably take the over on his OBP. Anecdotally, he looks like classic Berkman so far this season
• Give me a firm over on Theriot’s numbers. I think the walk rate so far this season is for real, and would guess that .350 would be the 50% mark for his OBP
• Yadier Molina’s line looks almost EXACTLY like his 2010 line. 2010: .262/.329/.342. 2011: ..263/.329/.348
• Holliday’s projection baffles me.  I understand that ZiPS projects an aging curve, but he projects a .317/.388/.543 career hitter to hit .297/.378/.494 for the rest of the season. Looking at the numbers, it’s almost entirely attributed to a regression in BABIP (.329 vs a career .344), so I understand why the projection sees Holliday this way. Still, for a player who hits the ball as hard as consistently as Holliday does, I could see him being a true talent .335-.340 BABIP guy.
• I love Colby Rasmus. He’s a Fire Burning in the Outfield. That is all.

I’ll be traveling for the next few days, but I’ll try and get to the pitchers when I get a chance.

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No doubt, many many words have been written about Albert Pujols, and many metaphorical inkwells have been spilt over the issue (In fact, robot tweeter azruavatar even went as far to say, “Somewhere amidst all us monkeys typing words about Albert Pujols, you can probably find a work of Shakespeare”).  In some cases, Pujols has been cast as Iago; in others, Bill DeWitt and John Mozaliak are the villain.  In any case, I hope that nobody minds if I add a few more.

Pujols’ self-imposed deadline has come and passed with no update, ostensibly to join the free agent market in October. This, I argue, is the most rational point of view from both sides of the negotiation.

From Pujols’ point of view, the benefits of joining free agency are obvious.  Right now, Albert and Lozano value themselves higher than the Cardinals do; they feel that if they get to the open market, they will receive more money than the Cardinals are offering right now.  With more bidders, comes a higher demand for his services, which raises his asking price.  He doesn’t stand to gain anything by signing a lower contract now, because if his market is lower than anticipated in October, then he just signs the same offer later with no real repercussions.

From the team’s point of view, however, they just want to sign Albert to a contract that does not hamper the Cardinals’ ability to stay competitive for the next 10 years.  As of right now, they are competing against one price point and one price point only: the bad Alex Rodriguez contract.  Should he hit free agency, they would add the free market as another comparison point.  There are two outcomes in this scenario: the market is not as strong as Pujols believes and he signs with the Cardinals for less than he is asking now, or the market is just as strong as Pujols believes, and they either increase the value of their offer or he signs with another team.  Their worst case scenario is the same as it currently stands, but their best case scenario could save them tens of millions of dollars.

Ultimately, both sides of the negotiation are acting precisely as they should be in the situation; neither of them stand to gain anything by compromising now, and both stand to gain quite a bit by seeing how the market values Albert Pujols.  To me, there are no greedy parties; there are just two rational actors.

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A couple of weeks ago over at VivaElBirdos, I got into a discussion with Nick Steiner (vivaelpujols) about the Matt Holliday trade where the Cardinals gave up Brett Wallace (now of the Astros), Clay Mortensen (now of the Rockies), and Shane Peterson, who somewhat surprisingly is the only one of the three to still remain with the Athletics.

Nick is adamant that the trade was a bad one. In fact, according to our own Erik Manning’s analysis, we gave up $28.7 million of value while only receiving $13.5 million in return, which clearly indicates the the Cardinals were on the losing side of the deal

I believe in Erik’s analysis. I fully believe that the numbers are more or less correct, and that the methodology is sound.  What I do NOT believe in, however, is that the trade was a bad one for the Cardinals.  In an isolated vacuum, with the only information being 1) What value we received and 2) What value we supplied, then Nick would win the proverbial internets.  However, I theorize that if every single other team engages in the very same kinds of trades that the Cardinals engaged in when they traded for Matt Holliday, then the Cardinals got fair value.

I took a look at several other prospect-for-veteran trades that happened over the past couple of years.  I omitted a couple of trades (Namely, the Greinke-Escobar trade, Teixeira-Kotchman trade, and the Haren-Saunders trade) because the main pieces for the trade swere not prospects; they were already fairly established Major Leaguers.  I then found analyses of the trades around the internet, who used Victor Wang’s trade values to evaluate.  I used their analysis rather than mine because it’s very difficult  in hindsight: I have more information on the trades now than when they occured, so I’m biased, and I also do not know the context in which the trades were made.  Here’s what I found:

Over at The Hardball Times, Myron Logan took a look at the trade this past season that sent Cliff Lee over to Texas for Justin Smoak, Blake Beavan, Josh Lueke, and Matt Lawson.  In order to gauge Cliff Lee’s value, Logan found Lee’s surplus performance value ((WAR projected * $/WAR)-(Salary)), then added on the playoff bonus (How much more likely they are to make the playoffs * $35 million projected value of making the playoffs), and compensatory pick value ($6 million).  To get the prospect-side value, he used Victor Wang’s prospect values, which can be seen here. In the end, he concluded that the prospects provided about $28 million of value while Cliff Lee provided only about $17.2, which is a ratio of 1.627.

Using similar methodologies, USS Mariner also analyzed the prior Cliff Lee trade, which sent him to the Mariners in exchange for Tyson Gillies, Phillipe Aumont, and JC Ramirez.  Ultimately, Dave Cameron concluded that the Mariners received about $25 M in value while giving up $15.3 in return, for a ratio of .612

That deal was actually part of a “three-way deal” that sent Halladay from the Blue Jays to the Phillies in exchange for Kyle Drabek, Michael Taylor (since traded for Brett Wallace), and Travis D’Arnaud. Dan at Beyond the Boxscore took a look at that trade (kind of… the trade hadn’t finalized yet, so the pieces changed.  I substituted the new players in and recalculated the values myself) and found that Roy brought $29 million of value to the Phillies while they gave up $46.5 million, for a ratio of 1.60

Finally, 4parl took a look at the Adrian Gonzalez-to-the-Red-Sox trade that netted the Padres Casey Kelly, Anthony Rizzo, Raymond Fuentes, and PTBNL (not counted in the analysis).  They concluded that the Red Sox received $21 million in acquiring Gonzalez while giving up $33.2 million, for a ratio of 1.58

If we average all of these out (including the Matt Holliday trade, which had an unfortunate ratio of 2.13 according to Erik’s numbers), we get a prospect value to veteran value of 1.52.* I know it’s a small sample size, but there just aren’t that many trades of this nature that occur, so I’ll be sure to add on to the study as more trades happen.

At the time of writing, we are currently 14 days away from Pitchers and Catchers reporting, so I thought that it would be fitting to take a glance at the current iteration of the Cardinals’ roster.  Our 25-man roster is pretty set, barring injury, so I wanted to put together a roster matrix for you all to see; however, I thought it would be neat to take a different, graphical approach to the exercise.

Over at VivaElBirdos, FreeRedbird posted a fairly standard roster matrix (As of Nov 15, 2010, so without Berkman, Theriot, Punto, and Tallet, basically), which denotes player, year, and salary.  Also, over at the ever-useful Cot’s Contracts, they have a Google Spread of the Cardinals’ 2011-2016 roster obligations, which goes a bit more in depth, including major league service time, agents, etc.  I compiled all the relevant information into my own updated roster matrix, which I posted in a link under the graph

Next, I converted all of the salaries into WAR by dividing the 2011 salaries by 4.5 million $/WAR and I got the 2012-2016 salaries by assuming an 8% inflation rate each year.  Therefore, the market rate for $/WAR for 2012 was assumed to be 4.86, 5.5 for 2013, etc.  When the younger players hit arbitration, I used historical comps to guess at an accurate number for them.  Thus, on the left side of each year in the graph, you have “Paid-for WAR” or “WAR on the books”

For the right side of each year in the graph, I took the Fangraphs Fan’s projections for 2011, and inserted them directly into the graph.  Then, I applied somewhat of an arbitrary aging curve on each player, based on a combination of age, logic, and my own intuition.  Playing time was a challenge, so I did my best to objectively determine how much players like Allen Craig and Jon Jay would play in 2016 (about equal amounts, for what it’s worth). Therefore, the right side of each year in the graph is “Projected WAR”

What we end up with, is this (Click to Enlarge):

(If you care, the table for the graph is here.  The formatting is terrible because that’s the only way I could get the bar graph both stacked and clustered like it is)

Notes and Musings:

• Assuming an all-replacement level team would win 45.5 games, then the Fangraphs fans project us right at around 93 wins.  I’m guessing that that number is slightly optimistic, so I think a range of 87-93 wins for the 2011 Cardinals is about right
• The Matt Holliday contract looks really good with this system, with the team having surplus value every single year of his contract.  I don’t necessarily think that will hold true, but the contract definitely looks better right now than it did when we signed him.  With 2010 already “in the books,” when determining cost/benefit of the contract as a whole, and seeing the contracts paid out this offseason, I think we did the right thing.
• It looks like we have about 77 wins on the roster (while paying market value for about 14 wins) for 2012.  If we resign Pujols, that will bump us up to about 84 with 8 spots left on the roster, which I think leaves the Cardinals in good shape, competitively, if they’re willing to bump payroll up a little bit and don’t just replace those 8 spots with replacement-level guys.
• About half of the projected WAR in 2012 are coming from cost-controlled players, which is exactly the kind of trend that needs to continue if we resign Albert.
• Wainwright’s contract is awesome.  Lohse’s contract sucks.

Steve’s note: We’d like to welcome Rui on board here at Gas House Graphs. We think he’ll be a valuable edition to the group as he tries to incorporate infographics, which are popping up all over sabermetrics, into the site.

For my introductory post, I thought that I’d keep it simple; I went through Baseball Almanac’s “Opening Day” page, created an Excel file of all the Opening Day lineups the Cardinals have seen throughout the Aughts (Hey, we’re in the slight-less-awkward-to-say Teens now!), and created a heat map of sorts to visualize which positions have seen the most turnover.  Then I added a completely unnecessary Arch (for the St. Louisness, you see) simply due to the fact that Photoshop is a skill that has eluded me throughout the years that I hope to improve on in the future.  Hopefully over the next couple of weeks, the graphs will start looking more like Justin Bopp’s, and less like a 14-year-old Rui playing on MS Paint in Biology class

Click image to enlarge

To nobody’s surprise, our catchers, first basemen, and center fielders have been incredibly consistent, mostly due to the effectiveness of Yadier Molina, Albert Pujols, and Jim Edmonds.  Second base has been a notorious turnstile in Cardinals nation, but actually isn’t the position that has seen the most turnover; that honor belongs to right field.  With nine different players (as opposed to three each for catchers and first basemen) occupying the position on Opening Day in ten years, the Cardinals have seen the likes of Bobby Bonilla, JD Drew, Eli Marrero, Reggie Sanders, Larry Walker, the immortal Preston Wilson, current 2B Skip Schumaker and Ryan Ludwick attempt to lock up right to no avail.

2011, unfortunately, doesn’t offer much hope in terms of right field stability.  A 10th player in 11 years, Lance Berkman, is signed to a one year contract and the future beyond him is murky.  Allen Craig or Jon Jay could try and hold the spot throughout the remainder of their cost-controlled years, but neither of them are sure-fire starters in the Major Leagues.  I would anticipate even more turnover at the position in the future, unless Matt Holliday makes the permanent switch there.