Dr. Nick Swartz or: How I learned how much injuries hurt this team and how to look to next year

http://www.ranyontheroyals.com/2009/06/release-hounds.html

There. For the like 3 people who haven't already read it.

That gets you up to speed. The idea? That this Royals team, the one we are painfully watching day in and day out, the one beset by injuries, is much better than the product on the field.

So I went ahead and did a fairly brief analysis of what this team would have been like with all its parts intact, no injuries to Soria, Aviles, Gordon, Crisp or Buck. I believe I did my best to approximate the playing time and performance of as much of the team as possible. For the most part I used the projections from Fangraphs for the players who missed large chunks of playing time, (Aviles, Gordon, Crisp) and simply extended the stats for those who didn't.

Then I compared that to the team without those players. For that I simply used the players performances so far as a starting point and extrapolated from there.

Other than that I made very few changes, certain things (like Catcher defense, running ability, final ERAs) I did my best to approximate, which is why the changes to those categories are generally quite small.

With Injuries: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AosqUw817rAGcmdLTWtxVHBVc0ZRQzlkaFA3YVJUVWc&hl=en

Without Injuries: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AosqUw817rAGcnBicHdaSkpRaXVpakZLbTdVRm9lMWc&hl=en

Basically I reused the old spreadsheet form the start of the season to determine the projected season.

Now this was a pretty quick and dirty method and if anyone notices any major discrepancies let me know, but I feel like this is a pretty good estimation both of the team that we had to start the year...and the one that is currently on the field.

Also just a small side note: I really, REALLY think people under appreciate David DeJesus. If he was hitting close to what he did last season, David would be a 5+ WAR player in LF. For comparison, here's the list of ALL OF's with more than 5 WAR last season :Carlos Beltran, Manny Ramirez, Grady Sizemore, Nick Markakis, Matt Holliday, Ryan Ludwick, Alex Rios. That's it. For those of you keeping track, only three of those guys, Markakis, Sizemore and Rios, are in the AL.