From: kbanaian@bernard.pitzer.claremont.edu (King Banaian)
Subject: Re: Holy Mother of God! (was: Re: Lou Gorman is a moron)
Organization: Pitzer College
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 19:20:16 GMT

In article <1992Dec14.162834.23791@cs.cornell.edu> tedward@cs.cornell.edu (Edward [Ted] Fischer) writes:
>From: tedward@cs.cornell.edu (Edward [Ted] Fischer)
>Subject: Re: Holy Mother of God! (was: Re: Lou Gorman is a moron)
>Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 16:28:34 GMT
>In article <1992Dec14.145106.22341@samba.oit.unc.edu> jmk.admin@mhs.unc.edu (Jim Kirkman) writes:
>>
>>Interesting comment by Phil Rogers of the Dallas Morning News 
>>in his Major-League Notebook. He puts the Melendez/Plantier
>>trade as his best trade winner! Called Ozzie's deal the 
>>best contract,player and Griffey Jr. best contract,team. First
>>positive comment I've read about Melendez.
>
>So Phil Rogers should be covering tiddlywinks rather than baseball...
>
>Griffey's contract was good for the Mariners, but he's only a fourth
>year player.  He wouldn't have gotten any more by going to
>arbitration.  The signing reduced tensions, but is hardly a major
>deal.  
It's a great deal because it's four years.  Thus the M's get Griffey to sign 
away two free agency years in return for stability and reduced tensions from 
going through arbitration (a very messy business).

...{much deleted about other signings, with which I agree}...

>I don't think the current team can contend without a lot of breaks.
>They need quality (and healthy) years out of the starting OF/DH:
>Greenwell, Burks, Dawson, and Calderon.  IF that happens, the pitching
>may carry them to a title.  The infield of Vaughn, Naehring, Valentin,
>and Cooper is young but solid.  (Okay, so it has a hole at second
>base.)
>
>But how many people expect the outfielders to produce a combined .750
>OPS season?  Because that is what the Sox will need.

I thought this a great question, so I decided to puch up some numbers to see 
what we reasonably could expect.  I've taken the STATS projections for these 
outfielder/DHs and plugged them into a sheet.  I assume 672 PAs for each 
position.  Burks comes up well short:  I gave the balance of 672 to Billy 
Hatcher (ugh!).  The rest project to pretty much play the rest, coming up 46 
PAs short, for which I used Zupcic.  (N.B., STATS has a real hard time 
getting playing time right, as does any Brock projection.  When projecting a 
team, you usually need to scale down the backups' PAs.)

I also re-adjusted Dawson and Calderon for their new parks, based on 1990-92 
park factors.  Here are the results:

Name	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SB
Cald.	400	60	121	27	2	15	61	27	20
Dawson	484	52	132	27	2	14	62	28	 7
Burks	407	59	112	27	4	14	57	37	 7
Greeny	543	71	162	30	4	13	77	39	10
Hatcher	314	35	 80	16	2	 3	22	19	10
Zupcic	335	36	 83	18	0	 5	35	26 	 4

Name	BA	OBP	SA	OPS
Cald.	.303	.347	.493	.839
Dawson	.273	.313	.424	.737
Burks	.275	.336	.464	.800
Greeny	.298	.362	.440	.802	<== Hobson, note OBP!
Hatcher	.255	.304	.353	.657	<==	"	"
Zupcic	.248	.302	.346	.646
OF/DH	.278	.326	.425	.751

My total PAs here are 2659, so I'm 29 short of my 672 total.  (Maybe Q hangs 
around to get these and some time at 1B.)  You can see how Dawson is  real 
drag, but given they've traded Plantier they have nothing better.  (He had a 
projected OPS of .847 ;-< )  So we could meet Val's goal but it requires 
that nobody gets hurt (as the backups are not good) and that Dawson and 
Calderon do not slip further than these values due to the league change.  (
Have any of you a paper on the reduction in performance as a player goes 
from NL to AL, and v.v.?)

I don't really believe this will happen, but if you *we're* building for 
1993 only, this group could be seen to be a help.  Lou should've been in the 
Bush White House for his shortsightedness.

Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball