Braves - Acquired Renteria
Atlanta Braves - Acquired SS Edgar Renteria from the Boston Red Sox for 3B Andy Marte.
This trade is going to get a lot of negative backlash and while I wouldn’t do it from the Braves’ perspective, I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as it looks. Chipper wants to play 3rd and just deferred a bunch of money and the Braves aren’t going to push him to left against his wishes. Shortstop is a hole and they don’t like Betemit enough to play him there, apparently, and Renteria is one of the best choices around, especially considering the Red Sox are throwing in some money, $5 million apparently. Renteria was a disappointment in Boston, but I think he’ll be a lot better in 2006, especially defensively
There’s the problem of what to do with Marte in Boston, but the Red Sox have never seemed overly excited with The Greek God of Walks at 3rd, but they might be willing to let Marte play the hot corner. If the Red Sox start the season with Pedroia/Marte on the left side, it’ll go a long way to rectifying my complaints about the direction of the organization.
2006 ZiPS Projections
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Player AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB BA OBP SLG
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Marte 416 65 106 24 2 19 77 61 91 0 .255 .350 .459
Renteria 602 89 179 35 2 9 70 56 76 16 .297 .356 .407
Dan Szymborski
Posted: December 08, 2005 at 06:35 PM |
59 comment(s)
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1. Biff, highly-regarded young guy Posted: December 08, 2005 at 07:03 PM (#1767873)Anyhow, now that Marte is on the Red Sox, I wonder what kevin really thinks about him and Pedroia. Tell us, kevin:
Who's the better prospect, Marte or Pedroia?
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I heard some vague rumour about shipping Marte to Tampa for Julio Lugo and Aubrey Huff, which I pray to G-d is not true. Huff's thirty, he fell off a cliff last year, and he just ain't worth it. I'd rather they play Youks at first and let Marte try to prove that he's better than he showed in his cuppa this year.
he'll probably keep harping the same thing to save face.
but marte is definitely the (much) better prospect.
marte and pedroia could be the best left side of the infield in the al east next year!
Maybe we should think of this as a Fandom Factor when evaluating evaluations of Red Sox prospects by Red Sox fans. Something tells me that it afflicts others beyond the RSN, however.
It does, but I suspect it's worse for Boston fans, largely because we had so few prospects to get excited about at all for so long. I think that's the major factor for a lot of people -- when your team has nothing but chicken feed in the minors, you get excited about a little pig slop.
this was a very nice acquisition for boston. the gm in atl is losing his marbles. the right thing to do would've been to move chipper to 1b, leave marte at 3b, and play betemit at ss. but chipper redid his contract, blah blah blah, so the atl gm will bear his kids now...
which is why you should never ever put a veteran over the future of the team. the dbacks are still paying for that...
Red Sox fan that I am, I'll still take Jeter and A-Rod.
I'd rank Mora-Tejada ahead of them, too.
-- MWE
Sorry--he belongs in left.
Marte belongs at 3B, or should've been traded for comparable YOUNG talent.
Even if Renteria's effective cost is $6M/yr. for the next three years, it should've been possible to get within hailing distance of his output by buying talent on the FA market, WITHOUT giving up the gold that is a MLB-ready player who promises to be very cheap and good for a while.
Schuerholz is slipping.
Sorry--he belongs in left.
He's brutal in left, he belongs at first but I get your point. Oh wait the Bravos have The Great Adam LaRoche there. Can't take ABs away from him. Nope, can't do that.
FRAA's a joke.
God I am so pissed off about hearing this shtt. First off, i see no proof that fielding runs are a true measure of defensive ability. They might be, they might not be; stop taking defensive stats with out large boulders of salt. It's nice to have them and consult them but to pull out one number and say it proves his lack of defensive ability is ludicrous. Yeah he is probably a below average defender, but hes not bad either.
And stating it as 133 runs below avg for his career is misleading. Hes been playing since 95. Its not like his career average 133 below. Its like a guy posting 10 years of 95 ERA+ and you calling him 50 percent below average for his career. Thats about the most misleading way you could criticze his defense. Putting it that way punishes him for having a long career and for being good enough to stick at third for a decade.
Second, they put Chipper in left (or rather he put himself there, he volunteered it), he played bad, got hurt, hit poorly and didn't like it. Why would they move him back?
Considering that Fielding Runs is a crock of ####, yes.
s/
I agree with that in theory -- the optimal way this could have worked out for the Braves was Furcal back at short, Marte at third, and Chipper at first. The problem, though, is that there is no frigging way I would ask him to move after what he already did for the team in restructuring his contract. Both by his performance, and his attitude for the club, I think he's earned the right to stay at third if he wants. That meant the highest, best use they could make of Marte was in a trade.
I just wonder if Renteria was the right guy to pull the trigger for, that's all. I sure hope not!
Not really fair to talk about the year the Sox blew on Renteria. We already know they blew that year, and that the contract was looking bad. After this move, it's now looking much better.
Schuerholz is slipping.
When was the last time John Schuerholz did NOT make the playoffs?
Oh yeah. 1990.
And he's STILL underrated.
It's also foolish to say, Mordecai, that citing a career stat "punishes him for having a long career and for being good enough to stick at third for a decade." He's played 3B for all or parts of 9 years, and been below average every one of them. 0 for 9. When you're that consistently incompetent, it adds up; that's the point of citing a career total; it's not just one or two years that he sucked.
But even if one's organizational philosophy is "our superstar gets to decide where he plays, even if he'd help the club more elsewhere," the key thing about this trade is that the Braves didn't have to give up a very marketable young player, plus pay $6M (or more) per year, for the kind of output Renteria is likely to give them at SS. They squandered a very valuable resource here; if Braves fans aren't PO'd they should be.
*fn to MCA: Given the imperfect nature of defensive metrics, why "basically ignore" several? The more measurement error you have, the more important it is to examine several indicators to see if there's a robust pattern. If, e.g., FRAA says Chipper's chronically below average, but UZR, ZR, WS, etc. say he's great, I'll happily concede he should stay put (though dealing Marte for E-Rent would still be unwise).
The indicators MCA mentioned all are based on similar assumptions. Any pattern here is likely nothing more than a consistent bias.
This was the thesis of Mike Emeigh's great series of articles, "And the Beat Goes On," from three years ago. Here's a link to Part 2, where he shows that FR greatly recapitulates ball distribution. sadly, many of the articles are cut short in the BTF archives, and the FRAA section is missing its conclusiom, but I did find a post where Mike lays out the argument clearly:Also, Chipper Jones was -5 per 162 games by UZR in 00-01.
maybe- but like everyone else I get TBS where I am- and Chipper looked pretty bad at 3rd last year. He's definately below average defensively- but he's definately a vastly superior hitter to LaRoche...
Similar assumptions are not identical assumptions. In science, lots of different people attacking data from different angles--even if their angle differs only slightly from someone else's--is a necessary part of the research process.
And it's rarely fruitful to "basically ignore" a fairly large subset of the research that's out there. You might want to grant some established approaches less weight than others, but a zero weight is tough to defend, especially when you're talking about not just one but several studies. And especially when you're talking about the output of people like Palmer, James, or Davenport.
Apart from the question of whether Chipper is a below-average 3B (and it's interesting that even our beloved UZR suggests he is), there's a larger issue here: Peer review. Too often, we sabermetric types accord a great deal of trust to studies that have never been evaluated by competent referees.
SABR presentations, for example, could benefit from having qualified discussants who take the time to chew over assumptions and test interpretations for robustness. That's the way research is presented in every other field; why not in sabermetrics? Ditto the research people throw up on their web sites. Rarely do we see such studies acknowledge the help of peers who've helped them avoid errors (as is routine in most areas of research) or qualify their findings as tentative, pending replication by others. Yet we often start citing that work immediately ("Joe Blow posted a study on Seamhead Dot Com that proved... ").
This is all part of the reason sabermetrics has had a tougher time becoming influential in MLB than it deserved. We often jump to conclusions that are thinly supported, and pronounce these conclusions with certainty that borders on arrogance. Information that doesn't validate our priors is a "crock of ####," and opinions based on it are "ludicrous." Little wonder so many in the mainstream media hate us and so few teams listen to us.
I'd rank Mora-Tejada ahead of them, too.</blockquote>
And I don't think there's any reason to believe they'd necessarily be better than Burroughs and Upton in 2006.
I certainly agree that sabermetrics could benefit from being a bit more like an academic science. I think Sean Forman has tried to make some moves in that direction over the years, but it's true that the comment/defense response to studies is suboptimal.
However, I thought that peer review was exactly what Mike Emeigh's set of articles were. And the best kind of peer review, as they used the newest data to evaluate both older and newer systems. What he found, and what is so fundamentally troubling for all of the non-PBP metrics, is that they significantly recapitulate ball distribution. One of the big factors the quality of a fielder's WS/FRAA/CAD/FR is simply how many balls happened to be hit toward that fielder. Emiegh peer-reviewed a set of statistical measures and found a consistent pattern. It was great work. It was the sort of work that called into question an entire line of research and suggested new directions instead.
Now, if the ball distribution numbers were freely available, we could all go and adjust the numbers ourselves. But they're not. All of these numbers are heavily biased in one direction, and we have no idea what that is. What we've got, instead
I can see the case for still looking at the non-PBP stats and saying, well, this statistic says this, but I really can't know if it's just telling me about ball distribution which the player cannot control. I will say, though, that is not how you presented FRAA - you presented it as very strong evidence. Now, as I read it, you're arguing for looking at it as very weak evidence instead of basically ignoring it. I tend to think there's not a very wide gap between those two positions. I'll look at FRAA and WS if there are no pbp stats available, and I'll take them as the only data out there. But when we have pbp stats, I'll generally take them with only a little adjustment for non-pbp numbers.
Chipper Jones rates as a historically bad 3B by FRAA. UZR has him slightly below average. I disagree that this is telling - there's a ~20 run difference between the two evaluations.
One the great advantages of the internet over print publications is the virtual limitless supply of space. More people should take advantage of that.
In the last couple of weeks I read an interesting column on the future of newspapers vs web based "new media". The author made the point that while things like real time immediacy of web media and an open DIY ethos are nice benefits, in the long run web based new media can have it's biggest impact in long form heavily hyperlinked stories that newspapers will just not be able to do. We may have to wait for the generations that did not grow up with computers to die off, but eventually the depth and breadth of news delivery processes can and will grow because of the limitless space available on the web. It was an interesting somewhat contrarion pov anyway.
Not in every field, at least not for presentations at meetings. I assume however that articles published in the SABR journal are peer-reviewed.
I assumed the contract restructuring was contingent on signing Furcal. Does Renteria sub for that?
What I disagree with here seems to be a rhetorical move that steps to the big picture without addressing the content of the previous argument. Mike Emeigh's work - and other work by Chris Dial and I'm sure if Chris shows up he'll cite seven people we've never heard of on Usenet - looked over the major non-pbp defensive stats and found a basic bias which none of them had properly accounted for. I know of no major researcher today who views non-pbp defensive stats as particularly reliable in comparison to the pbp stuff. That's the state of the field, as I perceive it.
If I want to evaluate an individual defensive player, I look to his UZR, ZR (and ZR-based stats like Chris' and Chone Smith's) and to subjective evaluations (my own, the fans' scouting report, the Stats profile, and elsewhere). And I recognize that my way of bringing all those together will have to be idiosyncratic and thus less certain than an evaluation of offensive worth.
If you guys are suggesting that I should give equal weight to things like FRAA and WS, I strongly disagree. If you're suggesting maybe a half weight, I still disagree, but we're getting closer. And any less than a half weight, and I don't think I'm losing much value in my own evaluations from ignoring them.
If I were working for a ballclub and my evaluations mattered to anyone, well, I'd have access to the raw pbp data and none of this would matter very much.
I have to assume it was somewhat more broad than just signing Furcal. It was probably something like, "Here is our projected budget. It won't even make us competitive for Furcal. If you redo your contract, every penny of the difference will go into the budget, not into corporate pockets. The first place it'll go is into an offer for Furcal. If we don't sign him, it'll go to someone else."
The "someone else" turned out to be Renteria -- who surely is a lot more expensive that Betemit. I don't think Chipper can complain that the Braves haven't held up their end of the deal; they've plowed the money not only back into player salaries, but to the very position they all had in mind.
well i have a problem with any pitching metric that says chris hammond is the best pitcher in the league.
... i understand your point, but i don't think picking out particular strange data points is of much use unless it's part of a larger pattern.
but yeah, millar is a ballhog. the millar poach will forever be remembered as the ugliest play in baseball history.
However, I think we can also take the standard data like UZR and then make our own adjustments. Manny seemed to have a lot of linedrives taken away at the beginning of the season, and PrOPS supported that. It doesn't make OPS a bad rating system that it's liable to adjustments like that. It just means that we should add in other information to our judgments, but it doesn't mean that the system is bad.
Now, I know the flaws in one are more systematic. It's not that Kevin Millar is getting dinky Darren Erstad hits, it's that he's constantly taking balls that aren't his. So in order to get an idea of his talent, we shouldn't say, "disregard UZR" we should try to see, "what's his UZR if we discount balls hit into in between zones." What sucks is we don't have the PBP data.
It's too bad we can't buy the data here...like a contigency fund, where if we get to $10,000 in some 3rd party account we'd buy the data...i don't think it would be proprietary enough for STATS anyway.
On the fielding metric issue, what we're all talking about is coping with obvious measurement error. One thing I'd point out is that even play-by-play-based metrics have it. Zone boundaries are arbitrary; the distribution of balls within zones can have random clusters near the boundaries, which clusters can bias player ratings, especially for corner positions with relatively few chances per game. (E.g., for the first half of last year, A-Rod was rated one of the least-rangy 3Bs in MLB by ZR; it was just a bad draw of balls that were uncatchable, but in his zone; his ZR number recovered in the 2nd half.) And p.b.p. systems involve lots of judgment calls; I've sat in press boxes and watched scorers and recorders make those calls, and aside from obvious problems of staying perfectly alert for 3+ hour games (you have no idea how often even an official scorer will ask others in the box "what just happened?"), they just have different degrees of skill in categorizing plays.
So the bottom line, for me, is defensive numbers of ALL kinds have so much possible measurement error we should look at them all, in my view, but just be real careful about interpreting them. For fielding metrics, a small sample size can be just 2 or 3 years worth of data instead of 4 or 5. (That's partly why I cited Chipper's career number.) It's certainly true that non-p.b.p. numbers have biases (groundball staff? lefty-heavy staff? strange park?), but a savvy sabermetrician understands that and asks whether a number is meaningful or biased--and p.b.p. numbers probably shouldn't be approached with vastly greater trust, frankly.
*Here's an example: The common assumption that players generally peak at age 27, which probably originates in a short study Bill James did for his '82 Abstract, but which was based on a cohort of players from a single decade that, it turns out, was atypical. Bowling Green U. statistician Jim Albert looked at a far larger cohort, using a different methodology, and argues peak age for players born more recently is closer to 30, and that about half of players peak between ages 28 and 32, a quarter sooner and a quarter later. But how often do we hear people use the 27 figure as if it's set in stone?
Absolutely. Some seriously bad things have been published, that not only prompt erroneous conclusions, but lead others to proposterous conclusions. And that stiffles discussion, when these things are used like universal constants.
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He was rated the best defensive third baseman in the Triple-A International League in 2005, the fourth consecutive year he won such an honor in his league in Baseball America's annual survey of minor league managers.
As a Braves fan living in a AAA city: Marte is a pretty good defender; Jones is below average, but not atrocious.
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