Monday, November 7, 2011

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.

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