Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
July 13, 2004
Western Flip

Before the season started, I tried to do an analysis of each team using their core players (projected starting 9, starting rotation and closer) win shares. You can see the AL West here. This analysis had Seattle with the best core of players and Texas with the poorest. What happened?

The Hardball Times has win shares calculated through July 5th, which is just about the half-way point of the season. What I've found is that in Texas, young players improved, and when the projected core failed, players filled in well. In Seattle, there was a total core failure, and no one stepped in to take up the slack.

Let's look at Texas first. There's no surprise that Michael Young and Hank Blalock have been great. Young put up 21 win shares in 2003, and halfway through this season he's at 16. Blalock has 15 already this year, after 17 last year. Teixeira, Mench, Cordero and Nix are all ahead of the win share paces of last year. Kenny Rogers is probably the biggest surprise of all, posting 11 win shares last year, and 10 through the first half of 2003.

One disappointment is Soriano. He had 27 win shares last year, only 9 so far in 2004. The core, if they had performed like last year, would have put up 132 wins shares; they've already posted 87.

Texas has five non-core players who have also contributed a great deal; Barajs, Drese, Almanzar, Matthews and Delluci have added 29 win shares. That's almost 10 wins from players not expected to be in the everyday lineup.

Seattle is a different story. Only two players are exceeding where they should be based on last year; Dan Wilson (7 in 2003, 6 in 2004) and the traded Freddy Garica (8 in 2003, 8 in 2004 for the Mariners). Only Eddie Guardado is close to half of last year's win shares (15 to 8). Most core players from the Mariners are at 1/3 to 1/4 of last year's totals over the first half of this season. Overall the Mariners core produced 75 win shares last year; this year, only 26 so far.

And unlike Texas, there's no one who has stepped in. The most win shares a non-core player has added to the team is 4. The Mariners hitters got old fast, and they had nothing in reserve when the team went down the tubes.

Texas deserves credit for recognizing young talent that would improve, and Seattle deserves much criticism for too much old talent, and not being prepared for the decline.


Posted by David Pinto at 05:39 PM | Team Evaluation | TrackBack (1)
Comments

You're absolutely right about Seattle (I live in Tacoma, so I've watched the disaster up close). What makes this even more inexcusable was that it was entirely predictable; the fall off in performance the team had in the second halves of 2002 and 2003 made it blatantly obvious that the team was too old. So what did they do? Go out and trade for or sign some more old players (Spezio, Ibanez, Aurelia etc.)!! The results were as expected.

Posted by: Rebecca Allen at July 13, 2004 08:31 PM