and he’ll hit just like he did last year, barring some prolonged injury.

Did anyone have any idea this was going on? Assuage my fears. Tell me that the Crisp & DeJesus combination in the field isn’t going to handicap the offense too much. Tell me that DeJesus hasn’t hit some secret wall that none of us saw coming.

What matters in the OF, the IF or anywhere on the diamond is run differential. How many runs do you help score and how many runs do you prevent. DeJesus and Crisp are not a great offensive tandem. They are ok, but nothing to be particularly impressed about. But they make for a great defensive tandem. Crisp’s defense is a bit above average in CF and DeJesus’s defense is great in LF. D_F ran the numbers a month or two ago and found that DeJesus’s total value (including offense, defense and position) is very nearly the same in LF as it was in CF. His hitting is certainly below average for a corner OF position, but let’s remember that SLG isn’t nearly as important as OBP, and DeJesus has a consistently good OBP. And his defense is great for LF.

OBP counts. Defense counts. Did you not get your copy of the Sabermetric Newsletter?

…when every single projection has him slugging over .400 in 2009? That’s kind of like saying the Royals may win the Central in 2009. Sure it’s possible, but the available evidence shows it just isn’t likely.

Jose Guillen

Does that make you feel any better about him? It shouldn’t, because his bat still sucks according to CHONE and PECOTA and is slightly above average for ZiPS (I think). And that doesn’t even adjust for this position — that’s league average.

The point is just the one NYRoyal made — let’s talk about DDJ as a whole player, or at least about his offense as a whole, not just his power, or worse, a stat that doesn’t reflect value accurately like slugging percentage (since it gets the ratios of the values of singles, doubles, and homers wrong — a homer is not worth the same as two doubles, for example).

Failing that, if anyone didn’t read it the first time, read Dave Cameron’s devastating critique of position-adjusted offensive stats.

The net difference in moving a quality defensive CF to a corner OF spot will be a loss of somewhere between 2-5 runs, thanks to the decreased amount of opportunities that CF will get playing in a corner. Of course, if you replace that CF with another CF who is significantly better with the glove, you can get those runs right back by getting the premium defender more opportunities.

We really need to get over this idea that guys like David DeJesus, Carl Crawford, and Ichiro Suzuki lose a significant amount of their value because they’re not playing center field. The difference in their value in CF vs a corner is pretty small, and there are many cases where it certainly makes sense to have a premium defender in an outfield corner.

We have to get away from this notion that a good defender is wasted in a corner. It’s just not true.

It;s good to realize that offensive and defensive expectations change when you move down the defensive spectrum (or is it horizontal?), but it’s the total value that matters. When you write something like this, you sort of sound like the Bravest Pretty Boy GM in baseball:

“We need power on the corners, and defense up the middle.”

This is either an obvious platitude or an expression of a lack of understanding of player value. And, as I pointed out before, Dayton Moore seems to have latched on to one of the worst aspects of VORP — implcitly overvaluing players with “power on the corners” because of a straighjacketed understanding of what a “corner” player looks like, just like Cameron mentions.

Maybe DDJ is “done” as a hitter, maybe he isn’t. That’s another discussion. But how he becomes a +10 or -10 hitter or whatever hitter doesn’t matter. Like Louis Armstrong said about types of music, there are only two kinds of hitters: good and bad. Having a certain conception of what a “corner” player looks like is a big reason how the Royals got the wondrous roster construction they have at the moment.

OPS, MLV and VORP have their uses and were cutting edge for a time, but they’re mainly interesting now as museum pieces. wOBA, linear weights, and WAR are “the now” (whatever that expression means).

Slug this!!!!1

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but using wOBA/lineare weights really helps us judge (if we really want to leave defense aside) whether or not a player “hits well enough” for a position

If we accept that the positional adjustment for LF/RF is -7.5 runs per 600 PAs (and not everyone does), and leaving defense aside, then if a player’s offense is at least 7.5 runs above average per 600 PAs (prorated), then he “hits well enough” to play that position.

DDJ’s park-adjusted wRAA (basicallly, linear weights above average) since 2005 (first full-time year):

2005: 7.9 (523 PA)
2006: 8.9 (552 PA)
2007: -4.9 (703)
2008: 12.8 518)

This leaves aside questions about defensive value, the relative weighting of OBp and SLG, etc. Three of the last four years, in less than 600 PAs, DDJ hit “well enough” to be at least an average player if he had played in the corner outfield. And that’s leaving defense aside.