Any baseball fan likely realizes that the game is fundamentally different in 2013 than it was in, say, 1999 (the height of the "We Care About Steroids" era). In 1999, the league wOBA was .341; in 2013, it's .313. That's a titanic difference. Walks are at a 20-year low, and strikeouts this year are only lower than last year (and 19.7% of all PA). This seems to be understood by the vast, vast majority of Cubs fans.
On the other hand, there seems to be a disconnect at the team level. When people (myself included) look at a team that's offensively challenged, they have a tendency to overstate their putrescence. In reality, the Cubs are not much worse than the average team.
| League | Cubs | Difference | |
| C | .312 | .333 | .021 |
| 1B | .332 | .346 | .014 |
| 2B | .301 | .242 | -.059 |
| SS | .295 | .281 | -.014 |
| 3B | .312 | .311 | -.001 |
| RF | .324 | .308 | -.016 |
| CF | .317 | .319 | .002 |
| LF | .319 | .322 | .003 |
| Total | -.05 | ||
| 2B excl. | .009 |
Darwin Barney is a defensive wizard, but he's an offensive black hole. Luckily for the Cubs, not only is the bar for 2B offense quite low, the Cubs have 2 internal options that might be able to cheaply fill in as soon as 2014. The first, Logan Watkins, has a .327 wOBA in the PCL, which translates (roughly) to a .297 mark in the majors, and Alcantara's .360 translates to .302. Either one offers a substantial dip in defensive value, but I'm not sure that the tradeoff of 60 points of wOBA isn't worth it.
The other places the Cubs could upgrade are relatively easy to fix. SS has been a problem this year, but Castro is still expected to rebound (and he's been improving) and I'd expect him to at least hit the average SS this year. If you believe in Junior Lake, you could hope he gets you .319 in wOBA: your other option is to buy wOBA in free agency (and I'll detail a few ways that could happen soon). Other than those spots, the Cubs are as good or better than the league average; the only person they have to replace here is Dioner Navarro, and even omitting him, Castillo's .312 wOBA is exactly average for the position.
If the Cubs wish to upgrade externally at 2B, RF, or CF (moving DeJesus to a corner – keep in mind you'd have to get a CF wOBA around .332 to offset the decreased RF production from Schierholtz), they've got a few options.
2B
Robinson Cano is a free agent, and he's on a fringe-HOF path as it is. He's going to command somewhere in the realm of 8/$184, in my opinion. I wouldn't touch it, but he'd instantly take 2B wOBA up around 120 points. Kelly Johnson is probably a 2/$10 guy, which is totally fine, and he brings a roughly league-averag wOBA to the position this year and next. He's a solid replacement option that you don't feel bad about putting on the bench when/if Alcantara is ready to take it over. Chase Utley is probably being extended, and is probably priced out of our range for what he is.
CF
The big get here is Jacoby Ellsbury, if the Red Sox don't re-sign him. He is probably good for around .335 in the wOBA department, with the fringe benefit of competent defense there. A quick and dirty guess at his contract would be 4/71, so right at 17.8 AAV. That's pricey, but that's free agency. You could try to buy low on Curtis Granderson, but I wouldn't be that comfortable projecting more than a .330-.340 wOBA from him with poor outfield defense. If you could get him for 2/18 or something, you could probably talk, but his name will get him more than that.
RF
I've been carrying my torch for Shin-Soo Choo, and this is the reason why. He plays a sub-par RF, but he play it. He's on pace for a .388 wOBA season (and was projected for .372). I'd say the least optimistic projection for next year is .350, which is still 26 points better than the league average RF, AND you can keep the CF you already have (that's league average) in CF, where his bat plays. You could even move Choo to LF (which has lower offensive standards anyway, if not true historically), and keep Schierholtz there if you can find a platoon mate). Nelson Cruz is on option, too, but he's a horrific fielder, might be suspended/altered due to Biogenesis, is injury-prone, and is the kind of middling OBP – high SLG guy that we don't really need.
If you replace Barney with even a mediocre wOBA, you're sitting at a league-average offense in this depressed environment. The replacement is essentially free, with 2 valid options in-house for the league minimum. The Cubs have a ton of money to play with, and there are options in free agency to cover their few holes offensively. Add in a return to form somewhat for Castro, a step forward from Rizzo, and some natural regression to the Cubs RISP BA, and it's not hard to envision a Cubs team that is at worst an average offensive club.
Fun with MLE calculators: Javier Baez' projected line in the majors off of his AA stint is .187/.237/.546, 35.1 K%, 6.5 BB%.
Comments
I really hate the people that manufacture the dairy drink traditionally associated with Christmas in this country.
I will jump that fence and fight every nogger here!
Riley CooperQuote Reply
List of players currently in the Cubs system who are IFA guys:
DR
Starlin Castro 2004
Carlos Villanueva 2002
Welington Castillo 2004
Pedro Strop 2002
Arodys Vizcaino 2007
Alberto Cabrera 2010
Rafael Dolis 2004
Junior Lake 2008
Arismendy Alcantara 2008
Jeimer Candelario 2010
Esmailin Caridad 2007
Lendy Castillo 2011(or 2010, can’t tell)
Marcos Mateo 2004
Cuba
Jorge Soler 2012
Gerardo Concepcion 2012
Venezuela
Dioner Navarro 2000 (holy crap this guy is old)
Hector Rondon 2004
Eduardo Sanchez 2005
JC Boscan 1996
Henry Rodriguez 2003
Puts the Cubs emphasis on IFAs this season, and the investment in the DR facility in a little perspective. Dominican 15yos are apparently the new inefficiency, and not in a creepy way…
26.2cubfanQuote Reply
It’s a bit misleading to talk about changes in league wOBA because wOBA is, by definition, scaled to the league OBP. In other words, the average wOBA is just the league (non-pitcher) OBP. (The best way to measure league offensive environment is probably just runs/game.)
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
Sorry about the site being down all day.
dmick89Quote Reply
@ Rizzo the Rat:
A change in wOBA implies that, I think.
dmick89Quote Reply
@ dmick89:
It correlates to to change in offense the same way that OBP does. If you want to say that OBP went down, it’s better to just say that, I think.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
In other words, saying “wOBA went down” is a convoluted and misleading way of saying “OBP went down.” Both are mathematically equivalent statements.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
@ Rizzo the Rat:
yep. that’s why I hate that they scaled it to OBP. without that scaling step it’s “runs” per plate appearance, which is something that people can wrap their heads around, even if they aren’t really runs.
GWQuote Reply
@ GW:
Tango et al. created it solely for analyses in The Book and never really intended it to but used elsewhere. I prefer the “+” scale myself, but I understand that that wouldn’t be easy to use for the regression calculations they did.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
@ Rizzo the Rat:
sure, but it’s not like it wouldn’t have worked just as well without the scaling. the scaling was just to help people understand. and then when approached by fangraphs, someone should have stopped at some point and said, “look, this is now pointless. we have sortable leaderboards. drop the scaling factor.”
i’m beating a dead horse here, though. i’ve had this argument with tango before.
GWQuote Reply
@ GW:
Tango is advocating a “standard wOBA” that is roughly scaled to OBP, but not tied to it: http://tangotiger.com/index.php/site/article/standard-woba
That would allow you to use league-wide wOBA in a meaningful way. Simply doing wRC/PA (no scaling) would work, too, but I understand why people would be scared off by an unfamiliar stat that isn’t put on a familiar scale.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
now for the rest of our lives we have to deal with clunky explanations from announcers on stat sundays (“it’s a measure of offensive productivity…”) which no one really understands.
GWQuote Reply
@ Rizzo the Rat:
that’s how colin does it, i believe. league TAv is always .260. I actually don’t mind it all that much the way BP does it. the vast majority of fans have been using batting average for so long that it makes sense. with wOBA, only a small fraction of fans were even familiar with the OBA scale when the book was published, so the scale was to a metric that people weren’t using anyway.
GWQuote Reply
And, of course, the “+” measures are confusing because you have to explain that pitchers are factored out of the league average and therefore teams that have pitchers hitting average below 100. (This also holds for tAV, I think, replacing 100 with .260.)
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
To me the advantage to wOBA is that it is easy for me to do calculations in my head. If someone is 1-3 with a single and a walk, I think, “(.7 + .9)/4 = .400”. It also makes it easy to answer hypotheticals, like how much a player would be worth if he walked every time, etc.
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
Rizzo the Rat wrote:
That’s only true in a league sense and doesn’t make sense when I’m comparing individual player wOBA to the positional value (in my understanding). You’re right in the first paragraph that OBP is just as relevant as wOBA, but then I care more about wOBA when I’m comparing Barney’s to the 2B average so I might as well be consistent. Does that make sense?
Nevertheless, these qualms are interesting and I did not know there was this groundswell of counter-wOBA sentiment. I like RE24 myself, but thought that wOBA was generally more respected.
MylesQuote Reply
@ Myles:
I understand that; I just wouldn’t have written it that way. Instead of saying the league wOBA changed, I’d say that OBP changed, and therefore wOBA is scaled differently. In other words, I wouldn’t say “league wOBA” since it’s just a misleading way of saying “league OBP.”
Rizzo the RatQuote Reply
@ Rizzo the Rat:
I have no problem with league wOBA. I know it’s scaled to OBP and I don’t think Myles had an obligation to point it out.
I only occasionally look at avg/OBP/SLG for players so it’s not always the first thing I think about (lg wOBA scales to OBP).
As for the scaling, either way is fine with me.
dmick89Quote Reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22league+woba%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
dmick89Quote Reply
new shit: http://obstructedview.net/news-and-rumors/cubs-to-work-on-extension-with-jeff-samardzija-this-offseason.html
dmick89Quote Reply
Myles wrote:
I wouldn’t say call it that. I just think they made a classic mistake in analytics: in the process of trying to make it accessible to the idiot masses, they have done just the opposite.
wOBA:
1. calculate the run value of each event
2. adjust those relative to the value of an out (so that you don’t have a negative number)
3. divide by plate appearances
4. scale to league average on-base percentage.
Now omit step 4. If someone asks me what wOBA is, I can give a simple, one sentence answer: “It’s runs created per plate appearance.” If they want to know more, I can go from there to explain what I mean by runs created. When you include the fourth step, the one-sentence explanation goes from simple to utterly obtuse (“A measure of offensive productivity scaled to look like on-base percentage..”). All this to make it look like something that the masses weren’t even using at the time.
True shooting percentage in basketball makes the same mistake. They took a simple concept that anyone who follows basketball can understand (points per shot attempt), and make it look like field goal percentage so that everyone can relate to it, and in the process made it impossible to understand.
GWQuote Reply