2009 Cardinals by WAR. Do over!

Joey Bombs – .334 as 1B/3B, .343 as OF ? – Input mistake I assume

Molina BR at -.05 but Glaus at -.25 ?

From BB-Ref, I calculated the wOBA for PH as 0.301 from (1.75*OBP + SLG)/3

I asked Sky, but I wonder if the -2.0 POS adjustment should be applied to PH.

I actually did quite a bit of work trying to figure out predicted lineups and estimate PA, but overall they were only minor differences and didn’t have significant impact on the end result.

I don’t think any of these will change the result much and we all could probably argue all day about each individual wOBA, but it would only waste our time (I do enough of that already).

If we are shaping up right now as is to only be a 85 win team than this is bad news. We still need to acquire players that will give us a +5 Wins over current Replacement. Their is some big drop offs in most of our players compared to last year.

Schumaker is only going to be worth .8 Wins when he was worth 2.5 Wins last year? That seems rather unlikely to me. I expect CHONE doesn’t expect him to sustain his rather high GB% which is likely but I still think they are rather bearish on him.

Kennedy is another player seeing a rather large drop off being worth 1.7 wins in 08 to only .7 wins in 09. They project his offense to be around the same so they expect his glove to drop off that much? In 07 he had a -3.9 UZR/150 and 08 had a 22.0 UZR/150 so which one was the anomaly? I think this says more about Iz2 being great a great defender to relieve pressure off Kennedy. So we get have to see how good Greene is going to be on defense to really see how good Kennedy is going to be.

Looking up and down our roster it is the same story. A lot of career years in 2008 and 2009 a lot of regression to the mean. Some I find to be true such as Wellemeyer coming down to earth especially in terms of IP. But overall it seems like everyone is getting worst than last year. Which imo seems rather unlikely with such a young team. CHONE is far and away the most conservative league wide in their numbers which could easily skew the whole lot of numbers.

1. I think you have the outfielders about right. The only guy I would quibble with is Barton; I’m just not sure that he’s going to take AB’s away from Bombs even though we’d need a leadoff hitter when Skip isn’t playing. I’m bullish on Mather, though, so maybe that’s why I feel this way.
2. I’ve seen .301 wOBA used for pinch hitters in some spreadsheets done by other teams, so I would assume that it’s right.
3. I think that you have to include Thompson because of all the health concerns of the starting staff Ben Sheets, and the fact that Boggs won’t throw all of the innings to replace injured starters Ben Sheets.

I do think you should do a sheet with Rasmus starting the season in St. Louis, just to see what the difference looks like if he starts there. May I suggest doing three different ones though? One with Ank in RF, Colby in CF, and Ludwick in LF, one with Ank traded and Skip/Mather replacing him, and one with Ludwick traded and Skip/Mather replacing him. I’m just interested to see how moving either of those guys and calling up Colby effects the team. You could even add in a young starter that might be a trade target and give him 150 innings to see what difference it would make.

I added two tabs.

First, I bumped Skip to his Bill James/Marcel projection on all sheets.

On the 2nd tab, I gave Colby 500 PA’s and redistributed most of the 4th OF PA’s to Skip. Net gain of .4 wins, if Colby plays good defense. (Which I expect he will)

Third tab is a Dreamworld of Magic, 90 win with no trades/signings. Carp throws 135 innings, Pujols repeats his 2008 campaign, Colby has a ROY type of season, and Perez, Motte are thrust into key roles and excel whereas Ryan Franklin takes a backseat.

I think it would be most accurate if you used CHONE for hitters and PECOTA for Pitching since those are 2 most accurate systems.

give pinch-hitting a 6% wOBA penalty and somewhere on the blog I saw a positional adjustment of -.5. I gave them 220 plate appearances at .300. Assuming that’s close and whatever wOBA I fashioned out of ZiPS is reasonably accurate I get 84 wins according to that system. That’s with the old spreadsheet though.

… a Yanks blog did some sims, and have the Cards at 85 wins, 5th-best record in the NL, and first runner-up to the WC.

http://www.replacementlevel.com/index.php/RLYW/comments/extremely_early_projected_standings

quite frankly, i might take those odds. the season will probably come down to how healthy we are (Pujols, Carp, whatever random injuries) relative to other teams (esp. Cubs and Phillies). we’re certainly not favored to make the playoffs, but the odds can’t be terrible.

in fact, i looked the odds up: Cards are 8:1 to win the NL Pennant in Vegas. so their odds of making the playoffs in some form or other must be much better than that (not listed at the site i checked, and tradesports.com seems to be out of business). 3:1? 2.5:1?

i’m content with those odds.

and how far above that we were, because it seems to me that we have made some slight improvements… was last year just lucky? we could have been luckier without all those injuries though.

I just swapped out the CHONE numbers for Bill James numbers. Bill James has us winning 89.7 games. Here Here to Bill James!