The Official 2007 Chicago Cubs Thread

[uclabruinz]

What a well thought out, lucid argument.

The guy's career bests offensively (he's 30 years old) are 16 hrs and 65 rbis. He's a career .267 hitter. It's going to be all downhill from here, and if he hasn't figured it out defensively by age 30, he's never going to.

These very mediocre offensive abilities can't overcome the fact his pitchers hate him and he's literally lost games with his moronic defensive mistakes. I'm 37 years old with two very bad knees and could block more balls in the dirt then Michael Barrett.

[Russ M.]

[ QUOTE ]
This might be better then it appears.

Barrett in 211 AB: .256/.307/.427
Bowen in 82 AB: .268/.371/.439

Bowen is five years younger with more upside. Barrett has baggage.

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL I KNOW WHERE YOU COPIED THIS FROM!!!!1111

[TheRover]

jesus christ someone tell which of the following sucks the least: Rob Bowen, Koyie Hill, Henry Blanco. i mean they could've at least got a crapass middle infielder out of the deal somehow. i guess matt bush or whatever his name is was too busy pitching

[battschr]

Soooooo, we traded a good offensive/[censored] defensive catcher for a [censored] offensive/[censored] defensive catcher? Interesting.

[uclabruinz]

My understanding is that Bowen is well respected defensively and his arm issues have mostly been attributed to SD pitching, namely Young and Maddux who are both horrific at holding on runners.

Anyway, this was clearly an addition-by-subtraction move, and I would expect more trades to come over the next several weeks.

[Your Mom]

Bowen's numbers aren't too bad the last 2 years, though he hasn't played much.

.339/.394/.733 in 94 AB's last year
.371/.439/.810 in 82 AB's this year

That being said, I'm still not a fan of this deal. Can't believe this is all we could get for Barrett.

[MikeyPatriot]

[ QUOTE ]
Anyway, this was clearly a subtraction-by-subtraction move, and I would expect more crappy trades to come over the next several weeks.

[/ QUOTE ]

[kyleb]

[ QUOTE ]
What a well thought out, lucid argument.

[/ QUOTE ]

I would explain further if I thought you would give any credit to logical thought. However, I guess I'll do it and see what typical Cubs fans say.

Michael Barrett is a good bet to have an OPS over 800 and will hit for significant power as an NL catcher. His defense sucks, but consider this quote from the BP PECOTA card:

[ QUOTE ]
Concerns about his weakness against the running game are overstated; the Cubs feature a lot of slow-delivery power pitchers and it would take a small howitzer to compensate.

[/ QUOTE ]

Anyone who has played baseball knows that controlling the running game is primarily on the pitcher first and the catcher second. The pitcher's delivery time has to be 1.3 seconds or less from start of windup to ball in the catcher's mitt otherwise even average runners will steal at a +EV rate. Given that most of the Cubs pitchers have ridiculously slow and long deliveries (Rich Hill being the exception - his pickoff move is very good), the catcher's defense doesn't factor in terribly much.

Let's assume that Barrett can only throw out 19% of baserunners (his 2006 total). That's pretty bad. How good will Bowen be? Well, most stats have him as league average. In a limited sample size (N = 50), he has thrown out only 10% of opposing baserunners. That's pretty [censored] awful, too. Again, small sample size.

Pudge throws out a ridiculous 48% of opposing baserunners. That is obscene. For the sake of argument, let's say Rob Bowen is even better - he throws out 50% of baserunners. We'll also assume that there are 100 stolen base attempts on the Cubs catcher, and that Bowen allows half as many passed balls as Barrett (5 per season).

If Barrett is catching, he allows 81 stolen bases. Tack on the PB differential, and we have 86 free passes on the bases due to poor defense.

If Bowen is catching, he allows 50 stolen bases.

Okay, so Barrett allows 36 more free passes on the bases. How do we quantify this as runs? Well, to keep it simple, let's use a 1999-2002 sample size for run expectancy found here on TangoTiger:

http://www.tangotiger.net/RE9902.html

Let's also assume that every time a stolen base occurs, it's with 1 out and the runner advances from first to second. This is a pretty average situation.

To calculate this effect, we take the expected run value of a runner on second with 1 out and subtract it from the expected run value of a runner on first with 1 out to get the difference. That happens to be:

0.725 - 0.573 = 0.152 runs

Again, Barrett allows 36 extra parts of these (assuming Bowen is better than Pudge at throwing runners out and twice as good as Barrett at blocking passed balls, neither of which is probably true), putting him on the hook for 36 * 0.152 runs = 5.472 runs.

So under the operating estimates we have used, over the course of a year Michael Barrett is 5.472 runs worse on defense than Rob Bowen.

Sound like a lot? Let's look at their batting.

Michael Barrett, PECOTA Weighted Mean 2007: .295/.357/.482
Rob Bowen, PECOTA Weighted Mean 2007: .232/.321/.379

By using a simple OBP/SLG = Runs formula over the course of a full year (assume they will have the same playing time), we can figure out how many runs that is worth in the lineup by using the Runs Created (RC) formula by Bill James. For more information on how MLV was derived from this and more explanation on RC, see it here:

http://www.stathead.com/bbeng/woolne...htm#Motivation

The formula for RC is simply:

RC = OBP * TB or RC = OBP * AB * SLG

Both are the same. We'll go with an AB figure of 400 for normalization.

RC(Barrett) = .357 * 400 * .482 = 68.8 runs
RC(Bowen) = .321 * 400 * .379 = 48.7 runs

We said that Bowen was going to be 5.472 runs better on defense; let's round it up to 5.5 runs.

RC(Barrett) = 68.8 runs
RC(Bowen) = 54.2 runs

So, with all this math done, we can clearly see that Barrett is the superior player even if you assign ridiculous defensive abilities to Rob Bowen, which he almost assuredly does not have. 12.6 runs is a lot, especially from the catcher slot.

The question you have to ask yourself is this: Is Michael Barrett's "clubhouse attitude" worth 12.6 runs? Also remember that Blanco and Koyie Hill will be getting ABs, who are probably even worse than Bowen, and recall that Barrett hasn't historically had any serious problems with his teammates or other players (A.J. Piersinkzgjsdkgj had it coming, so don't quote that) while Carlos Zambrano is a well-known idiot and hothead.

There. That's my full thought process that I go through in about 45 seconds when I go "LOL THE CUBS ARE IDIOTS." Believe it or not, there are sound reasons why I think the team you love is run by retards, and this is only the stathead side of the argument. Plenty of scouts agree with me.

[mattsey9]

[ QUOTE ]


Let's assume that Barrett can only throw out 19% of baserunners (his 2006 total). That's pretty bad. How good will Bowen be? Well, most stats have him as league average. In a limited sample size (N = 50), he has thrown out only 10% of opposing baserunners. That's pretty [censored] awful, too. Again, small sample size.

Pudge throws out a ridiculous 48% of opposing baserunners. That is obscene. For the sake of argument, let's say Rob Bowen is even better - he throws out 50% of baserunners. We'll also assume that there are 100 stolen base attempts on the Cubs catcher, and that Bowen allows half as many passed balls as Barrett (5 per season).

If Barrett is catching, he allows 81 stolen bases. Tack on the PB differential, and we have 86 free passes on the bases due to poor defense.

If Bowen is catching, he allows 50 stolen bases.



[/ QUOTE ]

One fly in the ointment of your argument is that if Bowen is throwing out 50% of baserunners, there is no way that opposing teams are trying to run on him as much as they would on Barrett.

[kyleb]

[ QUOTE ]
One fly in the ointment of your argument is that if Bowen is throwing out 50% of baserunners, there is no way that opposing teams are trying to run on him as much as they would on Barrett.

[/ QUOTE ]

While that's true, that makes Barrett better. You want runners to go on catchers like Pudge because he converts stolen base attempts into outs at such a high rate that it's way -EV to even attempt stealing against him. If Bowen gets this type of reputation, then he'll have less chances to flex his defensive muscle by controlling the running game and he'll be worth even less defensively.

It's an interesting paradox, but it's true. Of course, there is value in runners seldom going because they know the catcher is too good, but it's not more than actually converting 50% of stolen base attempts into outs. If anything, it's less, and for the sake of simplicity (and to err on the side of Bowen just to prove that Barrett is so much better) we're going to use the 50% figure.