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We had A.J. Ellis, Brian Dozier, Juan Uribe and Gregor Blanco instead of JP Arencibia, Emilio Bonifacio, whatever we were running out there at 3rd / Lawrie, and Melky Cabrera.

This is a *very* rough estimate but if you simply swap out our current WAR production from C, 2B, 3B and LF for those players' respective WARs, we'd add 9.4 wins.

9.4 wins!

We're last in the majors with a negative WAR at the C position.
We're last in the majors with a negative WAR for the 2B position. Almost a -2 WAR!
We're 25th at LF and 27th at 3B with a 0.9 WAR.

Juan Uribe is an upgrade of almost 2 wins over what we have.

We have star players like Reyes, Edwin, Jose and Rasmus (yes he has star production) and then we have quite literally some of the worst players in the sport.

I'm not even going to go through the starting pitchers. Wake the F up Alex and fix this pronto. Guys like Beane and Friedman must be laughing at us every day when they see DeRosa/Izturis/Bonifacio/Melky/JPA out there knowing that if we just had some decent backups we'd be a real threat.

Edit: My point is that there is hope I guess? Or maybe Anthopolous is not as smart as we think he is?

WAR doesn't actually work like this.

It's the value a player gives you over a theoretical replacement level player... It doesn't have any literal correlation to the number of wins a team has.

And third base isn't a problem for this team... At least when they use Lawrie there.

You mean we'd have better record if we didn't run garbage out there every day? Shocking revelation.

kwamebargnani wrote:You mean we'd have better record if we didn't run garbage out there every day? Shocking revelation.

Just trying to point out just how bad our garbage has been and how big an effect your weakest links can be.

A -2 WAR at second base? That's the worst since the 2005 Royals.

Daniel Murphy's a 2.1 WAR player. If we had him playing 2B for us since day 1 we'd be 4 wins better. Daniel Murphy.

And we have people talking about trading Bautista.

Edit: Maicer Izturis is the 2nd worst player in baseball (qualified) with a -1.4 WAR. The 3rd worst is Melky Cabrera.

I think this is a huge problem going forward. I don't know if AA recognizes these things or cares about them. Or maybe he's holding tight hoping for some correction but man, there's no correction coming. These guys are what they are, terrible. Get rid of them.

You need to take into account games played. Bryan Holaday has 0.0 WAR as a catcher this season but has played only 4 games, so having him instead of JPA/Blanco/Thole wouldn't have made us a better team. That's an extreme example, obviously, but it shows the flaw in comparing one player to a group of players. And these are cherry-picked players done after the fact. Do you also regret not picking the right lottery numbers last week? The winning lottery ticket would have cost the same amount as all of the ones that lost.

But yes, the obvious point is that we have terrible players at some positions. I've said since the offseason that it was a mistake to try and fix the 2B issue with a mix of 3 futility infielders. Apparently the $2.4M Kelly Johnson signed for was too much. We were better off giving $9M to a 32 year old that had never been given a starting job. Of course, we could have got both of them and used Maicer as the backup which is where he belongs, and left Mark DeRosa on the scrap heap. And either traded or demoted Bonifacio since he has the rare Yuniesky-esque lack of ability to either hit or field above replacement level, and we already have a pinch runner in Rajai Davis. So we wasted two roster spots on DeRosa and Bonifacio and then acted surprised when it burned us. JPA is also terrible behind the plate but I don't know what else we could have realistically done there. Keeping John Buck (didn't realize he's been worth 6.8 fWAR the past 4 years) would have been a lot better than Blanco/Thole, and I suppose signing Russell Martin would have been nice, but pricey. Just goes to show how much a couple black holes can hurt you, regardless of how good the rest of the team is supposed to be.

We'd be 106-0 if we had these guys on our team:

Joe Mauer
Chris Davis
Robinson Canó
Miguel Cabrera
J. J. Hardy
Mike Trout
Adam Jones
José Bautista
David Ortiz
Jason Castro
Salvador Pérez
Prince Fielder
Jason Kipnis
Dustin Pedroia
Ben Zobrist
Manny Machado
Jhonny Peralta
Nelson Cruz
Alex Gordon
Torii Hunter
Edwin Encarnación
Grant Balfour
Clay Buchholz
Brett Cecil
Bartolo Colón
Jesse Crain
Steve Delabar
Greg Holland
Félix Hernández
Hisashi Iwakuma
Justin Masterson
Matt Moore
Joe Nathan
Glen Perkins
Mariano Rivera
Chris Sale
Max Scherzer
Chris Tillman
Justin Verlander
Yu Darvish

MikeM wrote:

kwamebargnani wrote:You mean we'd have better record if we didn't run garbage out there every day? Shocking revelation.

Just trying to point out just how bad our garbage has been and how big an effect your weakest links can be.

A -2 WAR at second base? That's the worst since the 2005 Royals.

Daniel Murphy's a 2.1 WAR player. If we had him playing 2B for us since day 1 we'd be 4 wins better. Daniel Murphy.

And we have people talking about trading Bautista.

Edit: Maicer Izturis is the 2nd worst player in baseball (qualified) with a -1.4 WAR. The 3rd worst is Melky Cabrera.

I think this is a huge problem going forward. I don't know if AA recognizes these things or cares about them. Or maybe he's holding tight hoping for some correction but man, there's no correction coming. These guys are what they are, terrible. Get rid of them.

He doesn't. This is a guy who brought in Mark Derosa because of his "veteran leadership". AA is heading into Bryan Colangelo territory pretty quickly.

DeRosa was brought in to hit lefties, which he's done effectively.

MikeM wrote:

kwamebargnani wrote:You mean we'd have better record if we didn't run garbage out there every day? Shocking revelation.

Just trying to point out just how bad our garbage has been and how big an effect your weakest links can be.

A -2 WAR at second base? That's the worst since the 2005 Royals.

Daniel Murphy's a 2.1 WAR player. If we had him playing 2B for us since day 1 we'd be 4 wins better. Daniel Murphy.

And we have people talking about trading Bautista.

Edit: Maicer Izturis is the 2nd worst player in baseball (qualified) with a -1.4 WAR. The 3rd worst is Melky Cabrera.

I think this is a huge problem going forward. I don't know if AA recognizes these things or cares about them. Or maybe he's holding tight hoping for some correction but man, there's no correction coming. These guys are what they are, terrible. Get rid of them.

Most of Maicer Izturis' negative WAR value comes from his defense (which obviously has been bad), which is a very imperfect science when it comes to WAR. If you look at his career defensive stats, this year is a huge outlier. I'm not saying that Maicer hasn't been awful this year, but you have to be careful when a player's WAR is hugely skewed by fielding and baserunning. The point I guess I'm trying to make is that Maicer probably won't replicate his ridiculous negative value again next year, and that while finding a better second baseman would be great, it shouldn't mask the fact that starting pitching is the only real area of concern for next year.