User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
Demarini, Easton and TPX Baseball Bats
|
AllianceTickets.com has cheap MLB Tickets. Get all your Colorado Rockies Tickets, Seattle Mariners Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and all your favorite baseball tickets here. We also carry cheap Denver Broncos Tickets, Seattle Seahawks Tickets and Denver Nuggets Tickets. |
For wholesale prices on baseball gifts and equipment, check these stores out! |
Page rendered in 0.3289 seconds
50 querie(s) executed
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Ray (RDP)By the way, just realized that Nick Johnson is back, at 1B part time for the Orioles. Only problem is that he's 0-26 so far :-)
Meet the new Sox medical staff, same as the old staff.
Crawford could've been cleared to play for the Red Sox.
Holy ####, I can't stand Carl Crawford.
I'm co-managing a team with my buddy, who's a big Red Sox fan. Because of him, Crawford, Ellsbury, and Bailey are on our team.
As for the topic at hand, where is everyone realistically expecting this deal to eventually place on the all-time worst contracts list?
As for the topic at hand, where is everyone realistically expecting this deal to eventually place on the all-time worst contracts list?
Depends on how bad this injury ends up being but it's currently looking worse than Zito and moving into potential Dreifort land but for now I'll call it Hampton.
Needless to say, a position player contract being comped to pitching flops is not good.
One or two.
Has anyone ever been paid $20 million a season for 3 years at the start of a deal and produced 0 WAR? If Crawford winds up having surgery, that will be the return on the 1st 3 years of the deal.
Thanks, Theo.
Yes, I seriously said that and dammit I believed it was true. It is possible I was wrong.
Excellent, I managed to not post in that thread, so I can now claim with 100% certainty that I was totally against this deal from the beginning. Oh, and I did post this a couple years ago, so I feel vindicated now:
15. jmurph Posted: February 24, 2010 at 04:00 PM (#3466884)
But the enthusiasm for him on the Yanks sites (for instance) I've read far outweighs his actual performance. Not sure why that is. I guess he's an exciting player. But I can imagine him being overpaid.
I've always felt this. A leftfielder who doesn't hit for much power, doesn't really get on base at a great rate, but steals lots of bases (and, to be fair, is a great baserunner in other ways as well). But I'm told he's the bestest defender who ever defensed (even though, again, he's a leftfielder), so apparently he's one of the best players in the game. I don't get it.
My feelings at the time were that the Sox had to get Crawford or Werth. The outfield moving forward at that point was an aging J.D. Drew with one year left on his deal, Jacoby Ellsbury coming off a year where he played 18 games, and the two best prospects were Josh Reddick who had a .301 OBP at AAA in 2010 and Ryan Kalish who did in fact look pretty good but was considered a year away. With a weak FA market for outfielders looming in 2011-12 (especially once Bautista re-upped) I thought the Sox had to get someone they could be "certain" of out there.
Oops.
Has anyone ever been paid $20 million a season for 3 years at the start of a deal and produced 0 WAR? If Crawford winds up having surgery, that will be the return on the 1st 3 years of the deal.
Tommy John rehab doesn't take nearly as long for position players, so nothing is lost by waiting. Best case, he avoids it and plays this year; worst case, he has surgery at any time in the next six months and is ready to go on Opening Day.
Any lack of WAR in 2013 won't be as a result of this injury.
This basically sums it up. The Crawford deal was a litmus test of sorts which revealed who understood player evaluation and who was distracted by shiny things such as non-SB baserunning and dWAR.
Everything in Crawford's game had to be just so for the deal to be worth it. It has not been just so.
Actually, had you gone with VORP you would have been fine. Instead you went with WAR, which had produced extreme measures of his defense and non-SB baserunning.
Crawford was the Ichiro problem writ small.
The problem with Crawford was always his defense, and he needed to be an elite defensive CF playing in a corner for the money to work out. I don't think he was any more likely to turn into a terrible player than any other All-Star type, but paying him $140M in the hopes that you had his massive outlier defensive value measured correctly was a mistake.
I was always for getting Werth over Crawford. While Werth tanked last year, it's unknowable how he would have done in a Fenway environment for 81 games (isn't Nats' park considered a bit of a pitcher's park?)... It'll be fun to sort through the wreckage of those two contracts in 5 years to see which brand of awful contract was truly the most awful.
I don't think it's right to call it a misevaluation of Crawford's defense: his defense was all-world good. Then for some reason, in addition to not hitting, he played the OF like a speedier version of Greg Luzinski once he donned a Boston uniform. Perhaps you can get at defense having higher volatility than offensive skills or something, but there's really little doubt that Crawford was in fact playing defense that good in TB. Perhaps it's damning of defensive projection, but I really don't think anyone would dispute that Crawford was a 1-2 win player in LF for the Rays.
I firmly believe that the Red Sox FO planned on signing Werth all along. It's why they went for Lackey over Holliday, and it's why they ended up having to pay out the ass for Crawford. The Nationals offering Werth a billionty dollars completely caught them by surprise, and they had to tack quickly and the boat capsized.
MGL has stated many times that defense seems to peak and decline at a much younger age than hitting skills, like 23 instead of 27.
I see two problems:
1. The various defensive metrics didn't agree. Which is not uncommon (though it highlights the problem with being so sure about defensive value that you're supporting an outlandish contract based on it), but for the contract to make sense he _needed_ to be at the high end of the defensive evaluations.
2. Even at that, he was playing LF in Fenway, and I think it's reasonable to argue that Fenway's left field caps the value of even a great defensive player. And that Fenway's left field may be a reason that he posted the second lowest dWAR of his career.
---
On the offense side, he needs to hit .300 for the contract to work. He hits .260 or .270 and you're dead on arrival. The lack of ability to walk leaves his value very susceptible to the volatility of batting average.
As a side note, some of his speed indicators were down, but I can't tell if he's losing his speed or if it was just some sort of injury. (Was he bothered by leg injuries last year that we know of?)
I suspect this depends to some degree on position.
eta: If making the choice between Werth and Crawford, I would have still gone with Crawford due to the age and defensive difference. Werth merely needed to stop hitting to become below average. Crawford needed to stop hitting, stop running, and stop fielding. It's really stunning how bad he's been.
I do have some hope for this prognosis given who the second opinion is by, if anyone would know the likelihood of Crawford healing without surgery it's Andrews.
But that will put him right on the DL.
I don't know about that, even prime Crawford is a bit of hitting luck separated from a bad OBP.
Yeah, but the defense and base running were a mess last year too. Forget about the metrics, just watching him I couldn't get over how many times he would be on first base and not even look at second base. In the field it was much the same, for a guy who had played there a fair amount he seemed buffaloed by the angles and idiosyncrasies of left field at Fenway. Had he hit like he did but played Gold Glove defense and stolen 40 bases I'd have felt like he was going to be fine. Watching him play was like watching an episode of a TV show where a twin brother replaces the star brother after a serious illness and the star brother is hidden in a basement getting secret medical treatment somewhere.
Just looking at JD wrong might put him down for 2-3 weeks, if you kick him his leg will probably fly off.
Jason Schmidt was paid $15.5 million a season for 3 years and produced -0.6 WAR.
Chan Ho Park produced a whopping -0.5 WAR through 2002-2006, while making $64M.
Nobody could have reasonably predicted that. However, in order for the contract to work, (a) the extreme evaluations of his defense had to be correct, and (b) he had to basically produce at the top of his (overall) skill range. If he slipped significantly, it was going to be a real problem as far as his contract went.
He is playing a corner OF position, he does not have a lot of power, and he doesn't walk much. When a player like that goes bad, he kills you.
It feels like walks and power are being undervalued again as skills, as the stathead community has gone through the looking glass to obsess over things like non-SB baserunning and still-not-reliable-enough evaluations of defense. (And other things, like pitch framing for catchers.)
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main