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Friday, February 06, 2009
Replacement level OF
Dave continues his great look at real-life, not theoretical, replacement-level players. He shows an interesting result with replacement-level LF and CF. The forecasted wOBA for the players in question, using Chone, is .315 for the LF group and .306 for the CF group. That difference, 9 points, is 4 or 5 runs in a full season. (That’s a nice rule of thumb by the way… take the difference in wOBA, divide by 2, and you get runs in a full season.) Furthermore, the fielding talent of this CF group is better than the LF group. How much better? Well, lots! If you put both these particular groups in LF, or put both in CF, then these “true CF” would probably be a good 15 runs ahead of these “true LF” with the glove. (I didn’t check, but it’s my quick guess.)
So, you end up with these true CF being 10 runs better than these true LF. What does this mean? Well, teams have decided that even though these “true CF” can be effective as LF, they have decided not to put a non-hitter there, and instead are treating these players as replaceable parts. Well, not all teams anyway.
Regardless, the replacement-level is not who teams have decided to cast away as the replacements, but those who can be reasonably shown to be a replacement. There should be more Endy Chavez’s out there, guys who can be almost as effective in LF than CF, rather than thinking their MLB existence starts and stops in CF.
I am not going to value replacement level based on MLB’s insistence of what a replacement-level LF and CF looks like, when the players themselves are showing us exactly how a replacement-level LF and CF behaves. This is arbitrage, plain and simple.
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