Hot Stoves

The hot stove season is often a bad name for this time of year. Yea, when the Yankees are wheelin and dealin the stove sure seems hot, but with money tight and teams waiting it out it gets pretty lame. With that said, I've been enjoying these Yahoo! sports Hot Stove Dailies where they examine each teams offseason so far up until spring training (which is kind of around the corner, sssssiiiicckkkk!).

Recently I came across this one on the Cincinnati Reds. Pretty good stuff as usual, although I had a few problems. In talking about newly acquired CF Willy Taveras writer Steve Henson states:

"The new center fielder and leadoff hitter is Willy Taveras, nontendered by the Rockies and a bargain for Jocketty at $2.25 million in 2009 and $4 million in 2010. Tavares, who made $1.95 million in 2008, would have been in line for at least $3 million through arbitration after leading the majors with 68 stolen bases. His on-base percentage was a subpar .308, but it was .367 in 2007 – maybe he’ll split the difference in ’09."

Getting Willy Taveras isn't necessarily a bad move, and even if he's no better than last year, he's still better than Corey Patterson (.205/.238./344), but calling him a bargain is just ludicrous. According to FanGraphs' Win Values in dollar amounts, Taveras was worth $1.6m in 2007 and -$2.3m last year. So the past 2 years Taveras has been worse than a replacement player anyteam can find in AAA, yet giving him a two year deal ($2.25m in 09/$4m in '10) is a bargain? A 1 year deal for a mill or two is worth a shot I guess to see if Taveras can get on base at a decent clip and reek havoc on the basepaths, but to give such a one dimentional risky player a 2 year deal is not a good move by Jocketty, and is the kind of deal that if repeated enough will get him fired again as a GM.

An average on-base percentage is roughly .330, so .320 would seem subpar, an OBP of .308 (like the one Taveras had last year) is just downright awful. To give Taveras some credit he did have a .367 OBP in 2007, and in 2006 was worth $8.2m, but nothing he has done the last 2 years merited a multi year deal, let alone one worth upwards of $7m. Splitting the difference between his last two years makes Taveras a 50 sb threat that gets on-base at a league average clip but does so with literally no power. Next year CHONE projects Taveras to have a wOBA of .311 (wOBA is nicely explained here and here but for a really short horribly explained version... it's weighted on-base percentage and it's scaled to look like league average on-base percentage. It uses linear weights to properly assign value to all the positive outcomes a hitter can produce. Slugging treats a single as 1 and a homer as 4, which isn't fair since a homer isn't worth that much more than a single, so using OPS isn't so hot then. I'm not good with math and don't fully understand all of it, but just know it's a number that you look at and judge based on OBP but instead of just OBP in involves all hitting) Anways, the point of all that was to show that Taveras projects at about a .310 wOBA where wOBA "scales the result similarly to OBP, where .330 is about average, .370+ is great, and below .310 or so stinks", Taveras basically stinks.