Phillies and Reds swap Valdez for Horst

The Phillies traded Wilson Valdez for Jeremy Horst from the Reds.

Valdez has a 1.8 WAR over the last 3 seasons or .6 WAR per year. He is scheduled to make just under 1 million dollars in 2012, or a solid 1667 projected WASP for 2012. Offensively, he has just a .290 OBP and 67 OPS + for his career. He has improved some offensively, as he has a 76 OPS + over the last 3 years. This still is pretty bad, and assuming Valdez plays 100 games, he will "create" 13 runs less than an average player (remember to distiquish between average and "replacement" player, average is .500 winning percentage, while replacement is .320). Pretty much every offensive metric shows that Valdez is a really poor hitter, I won't bore you with the details. However, does his defense wash this out? According to Baseball Info Solutions, the only position he is good at is shortstop. He has cost his team 6 runs more than average in 105 games at 2nd, and 3 runs in 41 games at third base (he has played just 5 games in the outfield). At shortstop however, he has saved his team 13 runs in 190 games. Adjusted for 100 games, like we did with hitting, he saves about 7 runs, meaning he would cost his team 6 runs more than an average player overall (with offense and defense combined) if he only plays shortstop and plays 100 games. However, he makes more than 2 million dollars less than an average player, so it would seem Valdez is still worth his salary.

Horst made his MLB debut in 2011, pitching 12 games in relief and posting a .1 WAR. He has appeared in 42 AAA games (65.2 innings), a much bigger sample, and the one we will be using here. There, he had a -1.104 PE, or -.911 Adjusted PE. According to our AAA metric, this projects to a 1.426 PE or 1.619 Adjusted PE. Neither of those numbers are very good at all for a reliever. If you assume he throws 60 innings (like most "full time" relievers) in 2012, his projected CWAR would be 1.05 (an average reliever with a 4.2 FIP and 0 PE that pitched 60 innings would have a CWAR of about 1.06, despite Horst's bad PE, he is helped by a pretty good projected FIP in the 3.5 range), which is better than Valdez's WAR of .06 average in the last 3 years. At least in his time in the Majors, he threw an under 89 MPH on his fastball. The velocity is certainly concerning, but other than that he projects to be about an average reliever, while Valdez is an under average player. This is why it looks like the Phillies have won this trade, even if by only 6 or so runs a season.

Nationals sign Carlos Maldonado

The Nationals have resigned Carlos Maldonado, a catcher who played almost exclusively in AAA in 2011. He has played 336 AAA games, almost all of them in the International League. His offensive statistics look like this: .324 OBP, 3.05 PAPP, .76 PPG, and -.46 Simple WAR. So he is a below replacement AAA player offensively. However, he is above average at catcher according to Range Factor (a 7.95 Range Factor, league average for catchers is usually around 7.4 or 7.5). However, you would think that no matter how great defensively he is, it couldn't make up for those terrible offensive numbers. Just how terrible are his offensive numbers, according to our AAA metric, they would look like this in the Majors: .278 OBP, 3.62 PAPP, .36 PPG, and -1.95 O-WAR. So just to become a replacement player, Maldonado would need about a 2 D-WAR. In the National League, 2.1 D-WAR would have been a share for the leader in D-WAR. Now even if we assume his above average catching, it is impossible for us to project him to be the best defensive catcher in the league. This means that he will be a below replacement player. For the Nationals sake, I hope they have other serious plans at catcher.

The Giants New Lineup

After the Melky Cabrera-Jonathan Sanchez trade (I wrote a post just a couple days ago saying it would make sense for the Giants to trade Sanchez), MLB Network projects this to be the Giants lineup in 2012:
 Melky Cabrera 2.9 2011 WAR, .331 Career OBP, .729 Career OPS
Freddy Sanchez 1.1 2011 WAR, .335 Career OBP, .748 Career OPS
Pablo Sandoval 6.1 2011 WAR, .356 Career OBP, .857 Career OPS
Buster Posey 1.5 2011 WAR, .353 Career OBP, .815 Career OPS
Aubrey Huff -.9 2011 WAR, .342 Career OBP, .808 Career OPS
Brandon Belt -.3 2011 WAR, .306 Career OBP, .718 Career OPS
Jeff Keppinger .6 2011 WAR, .332 Career OBP, .720 Career OPS
Nate Schierholtz 1.6 2011 WAR, .318 Career OBP, .727 Career OPS

League Average in 2011: .318 OBP, .711 OPS.
Giants: Career Averages of .334 OBP, .765 OPS. 2011 Average 1.575 WAR Average, 12.6 overall.

This means that while the Giants' lineup has better than average OBP and OPS, their 2011 WAR is only 1/3.43 of the WAR needed to win 95 games. This could suggest a couple of things, both of which I think are partly true. 1. Players like Aubrey Huff were once good hitters, but are clearly washed up and 2. Players like Sanchez and Posey were injured and didn't put up a good WAR, despite putting up good OBP and OPS. Another pretty obvious reason the WAR doesn't match up would be bad defense, which is certainly the case for guys like Huff and Belt.

Aramis Ramirez

The Cubs did a really curious thing this season. Despite being stuck in a terrible season with a large payroll, they didn't really part with any of their high paid players at the trade deadline (besides Fukudome). Among those kept was Aramis Ramirez, who is scheduled to be a free agent this year (if the Cubs decide not to exercise the option on his contract). There are now reports that the Florida Marlins will pursue him this off-season (as they plan to turn into a big market team with a new stadium). Ramirez is currently overpaid at 14.6 million with a WAR of 3.7 (giving him a WASP of 3946), but my guess would be that he will still get at least this much in free agency. He has proved to be an absolute liability on defense with a -5.9 D-WAR career-wise. He has also been inconsistent on offense, despite a good year this year, as 09-10 (both injury plagued) were not very impressive. I would stay far far away from this guy if I were the Marlins or any other National League team with limited payroll, he is clearly diminishing in skills, and seems best suited as a DH.