Setterlund wrote:Well I could argue that there are significant flaws in your thought as well. Does it matter that he would have put up better numbers if he had played a full season? He didn't, that's the point. He missed 30 games in 2007 and 40 in 2005, which says to me that there's a decent chance he gets injured every couple years and misses a chunk of the season, hurting his overall numbers. Beltre has been so consistent he's almost a virtual lock for 600 ABs. Probability of injury has to go into account when you consider a player's value. Not that I'm comparing Ramirez to them but that's why J.D. Drew, with sweet stroke and decent speed and Milton Bradley with that fantastic bat aren't really very hot fantasy commodities.
This comment is absurd for quite a few reasons. One, aside from those two seasons (one which happened four years ago from a quad strain, mind you) Ramirez has played in 140+ games in every single season of his career. For the most part he’s been a rather healthy and consistent producer; since coming to the Cubs, his
wOBA has ranged from .381 to .396, making him a very good offensive player in that span. Beltre, in a similar time frame, has ranged from .308-.346 since joining the M’s, making him slightly below average with the bat. Second, all Berry is proving is that, even when considering the amount of time missed by Ramirez in 2007, Adrian Beltre’s fully-healthy seasons are close is a few cherry-picked counting stats to one-and-two-thirds of Ramirez’s season in the same time frame. Since that one-third of a season would most likely be covered by a fantasy team’s back-up third baseman (a waiver-wire pick-up – a Casey Blake type), one would inevitably need to count his numbers into the mix, making the values that much more in favor of Ramirez. Simply put Ramirez + replacement > Beltre. Third, whatever value Beltre may give you in SB and comparable value in HR/R/RBI, he more than gives up in batting average, OBP and SLG, three categories Berry doesn’t even bother mentioning. Beltre is far inferior in rate statistics.
Your argument about Ramirez having a higher OBP and slugging is just as irrelevant as the thing about the defense. Beltre gets on base less but his superior speed and base-running skills mean that he still ends up with similar run totals.
What…the hell? First of all Beltre scores far fewer runs than Aramis. Seriously…look it up. Here, I’ll provide the links for you:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/playe ... ad01.shtmlhttp://www.baseball-reference.com/playe ... ar01.shtmlRun totals over the past four seasons:
Aramis Ramirez: 334
Adrian Beltre: 318
In four fully-healthy seasons Beltre has scored fewer runs than Ramirez has in two healthy and two injury-shortened seasons.
I'm not arguing that Beltre is Ramirez's equal and neither was Berry. We're just saying that there's not as significant a different between them as people think, where everybody has Ramirez as an elite 3B and Beltre as some scrub. If I had to make a safe projection of their totals for this season it would be:
Ramirez: 90 R/30 HR/100 RBI/.290/1 SB
Beltre: 85 R/25 HR/85 RBI/.270/10 SB
Is Ramirez better? Yeah, of course. But is he significantly better? Ehhh.
I agree that there isn’t much of a difference in certain aspects of their game: both hit similar amounts of HR (though Ramirez creams Beltre in XBH), and score similar amount of runs without taking into consideration Ramirez’s truncated 2007 season. Other than that, they’re completely different. More RBI opportunities for Ramirez, much higher OBP, higher slugging, better batting average…