Google+: Phillies Random Thoughts

by **uncle milt** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:03:13

CalvinBall wrote:Once Juan does something good none of you are allowed to be happy about it.

by **Barry Jive** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:07:49

Soren wrote:3 pages on a pissing contest over Juan Pierre. Jeff is the best troll on the board.

I kind of did all that work just so I wouldn't kill myself over Pierre making the roster

by **LongDrive** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:10:47

uncle milt wrote:
CalvinBall wrote:Once Juan does something good none of you are allowed to be happy about it.

by **jeff2sf** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:16:43

Barry Jive wrote:
jeff2sf wrote:Since you know how to find minor league deals, why don't you post all the NRIs in baseball this year and we'll go through em together and find 20.

I don't know how to find a full list of non-roster invitees without going through every MLB team's web site and finding them. I don't know for sure that there were any minor-league contracts given out to players with a better 2011 OPS than Juan Pierre posted (over 700+ major league PAs, for some reason). But to whittle this down, here's the standard I'll use:

Last year, the Phillies employed Ross Gload as a lefty specialist for an entire season. They had, in the minors, Brandon Moss, an outfielder who posted an .877 OPS and a 136 wRC+ good for fifth among International League outfielders. (wRC+ works the same way as OPS+ except it uses the more balanced wOBA instead of the mathematically flawed OPS. Just my preference. It adjusts for league and ballpark so I can compare across different AAA leagues for our purposes here.) Moss came up in September and was terrible.

I presume there may have been contractual complications with the idea of releasing Ross Gload and bringing up Moss at some point last season, but I also think if the Phillies thought Moss was better than Gload he'd have gotten more than the 29 PAs Gload got in September, or at least more than the 13 PAs John Bowker got. He didn't. He got 6 PAs and went 0 for 6. Bowker was 0 for 13 and he's in Japan now. Bowker's OPS in AAA last year was .830. Moss signed a minor-league contract with the Athletics and was sent to the minors on March 19. I'm confident Juan Pierre is still better than all three of those guys.

Here's the list of guys who had better AAA wRC+ in 2011 than Moss:

Russ Canzler
Jeremy Hermida
Brandon Guyer
Alejandro De Aza
Collin Cowgill
Ryan Langerhans

of those, the only two who were free agents this off-season were Hermida and Langerhans. Hermida signed a minor-league contract with San Diego, Langerhans with the Angels. It's possible we could have gotten one of those guys and that they'd be better than Juan Pierre. Hermida was a below-average full-time player back in his last full seasons in 2008-2009. He's been worse since. He might be a better hitter but it's hard to say. Langerhans might be a better hitter but it's hard to say because he's never had more than 373 PAs in a given season. But he's never been very good.

Here are some OF with better wRC+ (min. 110 PA) than Pierre's 78 in the majors who were FAs this off-season:

Rick Ankiel (wRC+ 83, re-signed a minor-league contract with Washington)
Conor Jackson (83, signed a minor-league contract with Texas, was released last week and signed with the White Sox)
Grady Sizemore (88, signed a major-league contract)
Raul Ibanez (90, signed a major-league contract)
Willie Harris (90, signed a minor-league contract with Cincinnati)
Ryan Ludwick (91, signed a major-league contract)
Nate McLouth (92, signed a major-league contract)
Juan Rivera (92, signed a major-league contract)
Kosuke Fukudome (93, signed a major-league contract)
Milton Bradley (94, free agent, has been out of baseball since his release from Seattle on May 16)

Ben Francisco also had a wRC+ of 94 last year, and the Phils traded him for a minor-league relief pitcher so I'll draw the line there. So there's your list.

Milton Bradley doesn't really count. He's run himself out of every clubhouse he's been a member of and is basically blacklisted. Willie Harris might have been a nice option. Conor Jackson hit .091 this spring before Texas released him so he could latch on with another team; he won't be in the majors this year unless the White Sox get into a team bus accident. Rick Ankiel might have been a minor upgrade over Pierre, but he played in Washington last year and his deal will pay him $1.25 MM as a major leaguer this year with considerable escalators for PAs ($0.2M each for 100, 150, 200, 250, 300 PAs. $0.25M each for 375, 400 PAs) according to Cot's.

Like Pierre, Willie Harris will make $0.8 MM as a major leaguer (though he'll make 50k each for 200, 300 and 350 PAs). Judging all of the above, it looks to me like that's the only option that would have been better than Juan Pierre.

Barry, good post and I appreciate you doing the work here. Here are my issues with your post:

1. You can't say in 6 and 13 ABs that someone was terrible. It'd be better if you said that Brandon Moss didn't get a hit in one game, because it's essentially the same thing.
2. I grabbed the PECOTA spreadsheet, because it was handy, and sorted by expected WARP this year. I got 228 people in the OF that were expected to outperform Juan Pierre (0.1 WARP) . Two of them are Brandon Moss (.5 WARP) and John Bowker (1.0 WARP). If you have a handy way of grabbing another, better system besides PECOTA that's predicting this year, I'm open to it.
3. That has two very important conclusions to it. First, we definitely took the wrong flier as there are people we will expect to outperform Juan Pierre that were freely available. Second, even if you want to quibble with every single one of the 228 people (let me symplifiy and say of the 50-70 people ahead of him because obviously many of those people are legitimate studs like Ryan Braun or prospect or whatever), the moment you hand a guy more than the minimum you've erred. And that's before you consider as a GM that your manager isn't always as shrewed as you and is more likely to start Juan Pierre because he's Juan Pierre than he is to play Brandon Moss.
4. When are we going to get to the fireworks factory? i.e. Why the hell has Laynce Nix been surpassed by Juan Pierre. It's not right.
5. As for the Gload/Moss thing, I'm not as dogmatic as some saber people to assume that I automatically know better than the Phillies at all places. However, I reject out of hand this idea that any time I disagree with them I must be wrong. As a clarification, is this really your stance? So I don't really understand what the Gload over Moss thing indicates except that the Phillies may have chosen wrongly here. I won't say they definitely did because to me, Gload isn't nearly as egregious as Juan Pierre.

by **Barry Jive** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:17:09

let's just re-sign Eric Bruntlett because he did a cool thing a couple times

by **Barry Jive** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:28:16

it was a little quick and dirty measure there, but I think aside from Moss and Bowker specifically there just isn't a good track record for guys in AAA with high OPS, as demonstrated by the rest of those AAA dudes I mentioned. Hermida and Langerhans have been poor hitters in the majors, and while they might mark a slight improvement over him their skill set is very limited. I don't know how they're going to handle Pierre's inefficient base stealing, or if that'll be a factor at all. Regardless, he still has speed and it'll be a valuable asset if the Phils can teach him some discipline. Aside from stealing bases he'll add other base running value.

I don't know enough about PECOTA's accuracy with projecting players based on their AAA output to argue with those numbers, but I trust the Phillies to know their own players well enough to know whether Brandon Moss would be an upgrade over Pierre. Given that they let Moss go and held onto Podsednik, I think there's probably something to that.

Maybe Hermida or Langerhans or Harris or Ankiel would have been better options, but beyond that I'm not really willing to go with this 50-70 number you keep throwing out there. John Bowker posting a 1.0 WARP doesn't pass the sniff test.

by **jeff2sf** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:36:21

And this is where we part company. If you don't believe in the idea of translations - that all the people that travel back and forth from AAA to the majors every year gives you a reasonable idea on what the jump is like and how numbers will translate - then we'll never see eye to eye.

There is too much inertia in this world, be it in baseball, teaching, business, whatever - it's an old boys club. Juan Pierre is treated as if his .657 OPS is magical because at one point he was Juan Pierre. But there's nothing magical about it. It provides no upside. The PECOTA people believe John Bowker and Brandon Moss could outperform Juan Pierre if they were given the same opportunity as Juan. At the very least, they probably wouldn't be any worse, so you'd benefit from keeping the 400K on them.

I also want to reiterate that I don't think will have a deleterious, or for that matter, any effect on them making the playoffs. The whole point of this was to take issue with this idea that the Phillies success is all due to "merit".

by **Barry Jive** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:44:53

I don't dispute the idea behind translations, I'm just saying there are some things about those players the Phillies know that the projection system doesn't. Maybe their judgments don't make up the WARP deficit there, but reading PECOTA like it was etched in stone is silly.

by **jeff2sf** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:54:03

So then we're back on whenever the Phillies, or baseball teams, decide something we disagree with, they must be right because we don't have all the info they have?

by **JFLNYC** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 07:57:59

Juan Pierre's OPS+ last year was 80 (career 84). In 622 major league PA (about a full season) John Bowker has an OPS+ of 74. Brandon Moss' career OPS+ is 80 with even more career PA (749). In the season in which he got his most PA (424 in 2009) Moss' OPS+ was 77. In their combined 19 PA for the Phils last year neither one got a single hit or BB. The notion that either would have been a clearly better -- or even likely better -- than Pierre has no basis in fact. Translation is a useful tool for players of unproven major league ability. It has little, if any value, for those of proven inability.

by **Barry Jive** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 08:05:21

jeff2sf wrote:So then we're back on whenever the Phillies, or baseball teams, decide something we disagree with, they must be right because we don't have all the info they have?

that's not what I said, it's just what I hope is the case in this particular instance.

fwiw
Marcel and ZIPS project Pierre to have a better wOBA than Moss
Marcel prefers Pierre to Bowker; ZIPS vice versa
Marcel and ZIPS prefer Hermida
Steamer, Marcel and ZIPS are basically the same for Langerhans
Bill James, RotoChamp, Marcel and ZIPS prefer Harris
Steamer, RotoChamp, Marcel and ZIPS prefer Pierre to Ankiel, Bill James prefers Ankiel

by **Barry Jive** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 08:11:43

Boras says Johnny Damon will sign somewhere by May 1. I wonder if Pierre will be bad enough by then for the Phils to jump in.

by **Grotewold** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 08:30:42

Can Bowker or Moss bat first or third? That's a big part of Charlie's thinking here, I think, as it relates to Pierre and Rollins, and with Mayberry not performing like a middle-order guy at the moment.

I do share the concern about Manuel overusing Pierre and/or slighting Mayberry moving forward though. Especially with Pierre being so good at reaching base against lefties. But if Mayberry's mashing, they'll slot him in.

by **Soren** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 08:41:26

I have an irrational soft spot for Damon

by **FTN** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 09:26:35

this over the top nonsense is another great example of how far we've come as an organization. but some of the comments in here are crazy. you still hate pierre because of 2003? i mean yeah, fuck those marlins, but come on. hes not a deviant, he's not a bad guy like milton bradley or elijah dukes.

if he sucks, the phillies will get rid of him. if mayberry finds his swing, he's going to play a lot more. im not sure why people have it in their heads that charlie would spite the team and just play pierre because hes a "throwback" player. charlie likes guys that hit, he likes scoring runs and winning games. jenkies was on a guaranteed deal making big money, and he got benched for werth. charlie will give guys at bats if they deserve it.

is juan pierre a great player? no. is playing juan pierre every day for a month to see if hes completely done going to ruin our season? absolutely not. in 2009 when he was a role player with the dodgers, he was worth 2.1 war and had a 107 rc+ in 425 PA. according to fangraphs monopoly money values, he was worth almost $10M that year.

in an ideal world, he plays a few times a week, hits an empty .300, and steals bags at a 75% clip while not killing us in the field. is that probable? i dont know, maybe not. but how will he kill the team? i guess if he hits .200, gets thrown out every time hes on base, and every time he throws the ball from LF he throws it in to the stands. mayberry had like 2 hits all spring. let him relax and not press for the job, let him win the job full time with his actual performance, and then pierre becomes a pinch runner/slap hitter when we need a hit late in a game. he's always been an elite contact guy, and thats valuable for a pinch hitter, especially when there is a runner on 3rd and 1 out in the 9th inning.

by **Grotewold** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 09:37:53

FTN wrote:then pierre becomes a pinch runner/slap hitter when we need a hit late in a game. he's always been an elite contact guy, and thats valuable for a pinch hitter, especially when there is a runner on 3rd and 1 out in the 9th inning.

yeah, i was thinking if nothing else he could have helped in those interminable extra-inning games of the past few years

by **jeff2sf** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 09:41:09

Floppy, before we go any further, please find any quote where I said signing Pierre will kill the team. In fact I've stated multiple times that it won't. You have to stop using this straw man.

by **Grotewold** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 09:46:38

by **Eem** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 09:54:41

Actually baseball talk, I love this

/contributes nothing

by **my cousin mose** » Tue Apr 03, 2012 10:00:43

Eem wrote:Actually baseball talk, I love this

/contributes nothing

we call this /mose'd

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