Missin you, Doc.

He said he watched every pitch of the World Series and rooted hard for the Red Sox. Here's what he said about the Phils:

“On our team, I honestly believe we have more talent than any other roster out there. But if you don’t take that talent and mesh it together, figure out each others’ little pros and cons and figure out how to make a 25-man roster form into one, nothing will work. I don’t care how much you spend or how many guys you have in the bullpen or how many starters you have and it just doesn’t work. Look at the Red Sox last year. John [McDonald] will probably tell you the moment he walked into the Red Sox clubhouse there was an entirely different feel from when he left Philly. I’m not putting those words in John’s mouth by any means, but when you have a group of guys who go for 162 games plus spring training plus the playoffs, you have to have each other’s backs and know what he’s going to do before the next guy from you is going to do before he does it.”

Papelbon made similar claims during the season with the Phillies, including a memorable midyear suggestion that he “didn’t come here for this.” McDonald said that he understood where the Phillies closer was coming from in making that claim. Papelbon, meanwhile, suggested that he’s made similar statements while with the Red Sox at times when his team struggled, but without the same response.

“I was a new guy coming into the Philadelphia clubhouse. Coming into a new clubhouse, you tend to watch more than you speak. I will say this, I came from a clubhouse where it was in your face, it was, ‘This is how we’re going to do it. We’re going to yell at each other and when we don’t do what we’re expected of, we’re going to let you know.’ That’s kind of the way I was groomed into being a baseball player. Then I go to Philadelphia and it wasn’t necessarily that way, and I know that I’ve gotten a bad rap, some of the guys will say I’m not a good clubhouse guy because I’ll get upset and I’ll say something, but I’ve always said what’s on my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever shied away from my beliefs. But I think some of it reporters in Philly maybe take a little bit different because I was used to saying that, hey, this is how I feel, we’re not winning and I’m not happy.”

Well, it's certainly helpful to discuss it openly in the media in early January. I'm sure that will constructively impact clubhouse chemistry.

That style in Boston really worked wonders in 2011 as the team was tanking and the Phillies laissez faire style clubhouse could only put together 102 wins.

Trent Steele wrote:With Choo gone, I feel comfortable saying that there is no big upgrade coming to this team, our offense is going to suck balls, and hello irrelevance. Nice work.

the offense probably will be bad, but, according to the projection systems, that doesn´t necessarily doom the team to irrelevance, even without additions. i find it a bit surprising that almost everyone here, at tgp and crashy´s site assumes the current roster is good for something like 77 wins at BEST. it is pretty straightforward to find and to justify a combination of projections that puts the phillies at 85 wins without giving anyone a career year, and without banking on unlikely rebounds from rollins, howard and papelbon.
pretty much all it takes is assuming a 1993ish smart platoon usage and crash´s hopeful take on the bullpen. that´s enough to justify going out and getting tanaka, if he can pass a CAREFUL medical (agree with smitty... huge, huge red flags on overuse injury), or even one of the remaining top 3 fa pitchers.

for those (few) interested, my long explanation is below.

steamer, oliver, and zips projections for woba all are out. all three include regression to the mean and aging, though only steamer has realistic playing time numbers, but those can be used to get realistic war estimates from oliver. zips doesn´t have defense, so i use that just to examine steamer-oliver woba inconsistencies.

steamer and oliver differ most significantly on byrd, ruiz/rupp, and howard/ruf. zips splits the woba difference on the first two, and favors the lower estimate for the third. however, if the phillies were to take the 1993 approach of maximizing platoon possibilities at all positions (that they probably won´t is one of the reasons a sucky offense is likely), going with the higher of steamer/oliver war estimates for all hitters seems plausible. remember, these are already regressed, so this is far from a high-end estimate

2013 phils had 6.3 war from position players and 10.5 for pitching. with the 47.7 win baseline, that gives 64.5 wins. that fangraphs doesn´t do the leverage adjustment for reliever war (b-r does) probably accounts for the difference between that and the 66 pythagoren wins, so i´m ok with using a 1.5 win leverage adjustment for 2014 as well.

using the higher of steamer/oliver gives me 20 wins for the position players, about 13.5 better than 2013!!
sound unreasonable? please recall that 2013 included spectacularly bad defensive and baserunning war contributions from the youngs, and all-round horribleness from minimart and nix.

steamer´s 2014 pitching war projection for the phils is 10.6 war.
but that has each of lee and hamels pitching 30 fewer innings. that accounts for an 1.2 win dropoff beyond the 1 win decline one would expect due to the aging of the two. in other words, too much regression of the innings pitched number. then again, steamer projects hernandez with 1.7 wins which seems about one too many, so i´ll call it even.

the big thing that looks wrong in the steamer pitcher projections is the pen. [crash covered some of this a couple of days ago.]

steamer has a net of nothing coming from adams, bastardo, diekman, de frastus, martin, rosenberg, and mgm. given bastardo´s track record and winter league performce, martin´s pen performance relative to his starting, and the apparent maturation of the younger relievers in the second half, i think that this group is worth 3-5 wins in 2014, even though i don´t think adams will pitch again. call it 4, which also is about one win for mgm plus the 3 wins b-r had for the bullpen work of the others in 2013. this moves the pitching up to 14.6 wins. that´s just 4 more than in 2013... pretty much what one would expect from removing the negative contributions of durbin, halladay, jcramirez, adams, and the failed martin-the-starter experiment while discounting lee, hamels, and pettibone for aging and injuries.

47.7+20+14.6+1.5 = 83.8, rounding to 84. throw one win of pythagorean luck (much smaller than the 7 wins of such luck in 2013) and you are at 85 wins, just a bit more luck and a tanaka away from the 90 wins that got the last playoff spot in 2013. not great, but not irrelevant, and this is very important...

at 84 projected 2014 wins, signing fa starter this offseason might well be a net budgetary win, because it significantly increases the likelihood of season-long relevance, and a resulting boost in ticket sales. if things go south quickly, there´s a decent chance of being able to dump half each of the contracts of papelbon and rollins.

So if everything breaks completely right, they're a slightly better non-playoff team? Wahoo!

thought this was a fair, and discouraging, piece of analysis on Dom

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/what-can ... o-for-you/

ReadingPhilly wrote:So if everything breaks completely right, they're a slightly better non-playoff team? Wahoo!

no. look again. 84 wins with actual projected performances, including regression for things going wrong performance-wise (like injury), and pretty much neutral luck. 87 wins if they replace their 5th starter with one of the 3+ war guys still out there. everything breaking right would add another 5-10 wins and easily make the playoffs.

sydnor wrote:thought this was a fair, and discouraging, piece of analysis on Dom

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/what-can ... o-for-you/

among things most likely to have the phillies performing under the projections, i think i would rank dom going bust right there along with overplaying decrepit versions of rollins-howard-paps-adams and a bum leg eliminating revere´s peak-years value.

2011 -> 2014
(102 wins) -> (???)

Ruiz = Ruiz
Howard = Howard
Utley = Utley
Rollins = Rollins
Polanco < Asche
Brown = Brown
Ibanez < Byrd
Victorino > Revere

Lee = Lee
Hamels = Hamels
Halladay > Tanaka
Oswalt > whatever
Blanton < MAG

Madson = Papelbon

same team as 2011 almost. 100 wins, here we come.

Brown = Brown? Pence?

midseason acquisition. They can acquire him again this year.

theoretically, could teams make a trade where the sending team is responsible for a portion of the salary based on appearance (AB, IP) stats???

Bucky wrote:theoretically, could teams make a trade where the sending team is responsible for a portion of the salary based on appearance (AB, IP) stats???

Couldn't this be somewhat of a conflict of interest, possibly?

IIRC, when the Mets traded KRod to the Brewers, he was approaching an incentive for finishing games. I believe the Mets compensated him for at least a portion of that incentive, probably to avoid a possible grievance. I could be mistaken, though.

yes, in the typical case. But I'm talking about a situation where an incentive clause with the player does not exist. So, let's say (theoretically, of course) you have an oft-injured slugger making $25M. Nobody wants to take on much (or even any) of that salary given the injury history...so could the teams make a trade with the sending team paying his salary based on a scale? Say if the slugger gets under 100ABs, they pay $20M. If he gets 300ABs, they pay $15M. If he gets 500ABs, they pay $5M. Just a made-up, hypothetical example, of course.

I agree, the receiving team could intentionally limit the bonus milestones in order to recoup more $, but that type situation already exists with player contracts.

It's a great question. I see no first-order reason to think this would bump up against the terms of the labor contract, in that the player gets paid the same no matter what--unlike the K-Rod example. I guess it could be argued that the decision to limit a player's at-bats would hurt his value the next time he hits the market, but that feels like a stretch... and illogical, in the sense that the acquiring team presumably would want the guy to play, and play well. Generally you're thrilled when a guy performs to the point where he's earning his incentives.

phorever wrote:pretty much all it takes is assuming a 1993ish smart platoon usage and crash´s hopeful take on the bullpen.

My issues with this start here. Assuming platoons that we're reasonably sure won't happen, and what? "Crash"'s? hopeful take on the bullpen?

I can't argue with the math, since you don't show any. Are you including every Phillie projected to get ABs? Or just the regulars? We probably got 5-7 negative WAR from our non-regulars, and figure to get several again. How many negative WAR are included in the total? Steamer shows us with 14.1 WAR from the position players, in 5712 PA. You're using 20 in your calcs, based on platoons?

And on the pitching side, Steamer already has the Phillies at 0.7 WAR in the bullpen. You're adding 4 wins, giving our pen 4.7 WAR. Last year, the Phillies got -0.1 WAR from the bullpen, according to fangraphs, within .1 of the worst team in the league. The 3 best bullpens in the league got 4.8, 4.8, and 5.2. So for this exercise, we're assuming the Phillies go from thisclose to the worst bullpen in the league, to thisclose to the best bullpen in the league. And that's before leverage adjustments that you give them, on top.

So it seems we take the best of 2 projection systems, based on platoons that won't happen.
We don't add any negative value for crappy bench or part time players.
We take full value from our pitching projections.
We add 4 wins to that based on "Crash".
We add 1.5 more wins to that based on reliever leverage (giving our awesome bullpen of great dominance 6.2 WAR)

And that's how you get 47.7+20+14.6+1.5=83.8, then you add 1 win for luck, and round up. Then you're hopeful we can add the next Yu Darvish, though we're not linked to him at this point, and then with a little luck, compete.

It doesn't make you uncomfortable that Steamer, seemingly the biggest influence in your scenario, without Crash or other adjustments, has the Phillies at 72 wins? (47.7+14.1+10.6=72.4)

I'm hopeful that our defense can't possibly be worse. Per the Fielding Bible runs saved for last year, we were -102 (unsurprisingly, worst in MLB). UZR has the Mariners worse.

C -1
1B -2
2B -6
3B -26
SS -16
LF -7
CF -20
RF -19
P -5
Total -102
INF -50
OF -46

Per Player:

Jimmy Rollins -15
Domonic Brown -7
Chase Utley -4
Michael Young -20
Carlos Ruiz 3
Ben Revere -5
Ryan Howard -1
Delmon Young - 10
Erik Kratz C -4
John Mayberry -4 (RF)
Cody Asche -7
John Mayberry -10 (CF)
Darin Ruf -2 (1B)
Darin Ruf -7 (RF)
Cesar Hernandez -3

And those aren't dashes, they are negative signs

Maybe it can't be worse, but that doesn't mean it will be significantly better.