Project-a-tron: The rest of the starting rotation

The projections

Player	IP	K	K/BB	WHIP	ERA	WAR
Dempster	195	158	2.04	1.31	3.82	3.6
Lilly	210	183	2.54	1.29	3.88	3.7
Marshall	170	124	1.96	1.37	4.3	2.1
Heilman (as starter)	28	25	2.13	1.38	4.19	0.3

Before any comments, you gotta love the strikeout staff that the Cubs have assembled.

Dempster's numbers are obviously going to regress to the mean after last year's stellar performance. Even the most optimistic of Cubs fans have to admit that he won't put up those kinds of numbers again. The fact that he was able to pitch so many effective innings last year is a good sign of his conditioning, and the likely drop in numbers will be more indicative of his true talent than some sort of late-age Verducci Effect. Strangely enough, Dempster's ZiPS projection has him with an ERA of 4.08 but a BABIP of .254, without any other big variations in his other stats. Wierd.

Lilly had a much better season than his aggregate stats let on - he was just shelled in April (6.46 ERA at the end of the month), but he managed to shave about 2 and a half runs off his ERA over the rest of the season. Really Lilly's problem is that if he doesn't have it (or there's a strong wind blowing out), he gets hit hard, and if he does have his stuff, he's an incredibly effective pitcher. For a long time he has struck me as the kind of guy who has a good true talent level but with a very high variance in his performances when compared to other pitchers - If I have some time I might make a blog post about it someday.

I originally had Marshall pegged for 130 innings or so, but I think he can pitch for more. 170 innings might be stretching it, but since he'll be the team's defacto 4th starter he should see a lot of action. I'm still having a hard time getting over my perception of him from 2006 - which was that he was a guy who got hit very hard his second and third time through the order and would fade down the stretch as the league figured him out. But, I think that most of these problems stemmed from the fact that he was too young and pressed into service too soon. Marshall has grown as a pitcher and should do a fine job of delivering league average innings for a few years, though I don't see much potential in him to do much more than that.

Heilman seems like the most likely candidate at this point to soak up the extra Marshall/Harden innings. If Samardzija does end up going to Iowa he might end up filling this slot instead, which would not be so good - if Heilman excells as a bullpen guy this would make this more likely to happen as well.

Project-a-tron: Rich Harden

Rich Harden has the most pitching talent on this team, and, arguably, in the National league. His projected ERA is nearly a run better than any other starter on the Cubs staff. ZiPS has him projected at an obscene 2.37 ERA for next season (albeit over 17 starts), and for all of the hand-wringing that goes on over Rich Harden, he actually pitched a lot more than I thought last season. Between the Cubs and Oakland, he made 25 starts and pitched 148 innings, which seems to be about what most people are expecting out of him this year as well. I would bump him up another 30 innings this year again, but he still does have that shoulder strain from last year hanging around. With the quality of their team and the weakness of the rest of the NL central, the Cubs have no reason to work him very hard, so I'm going to stick with 150 innings (~25 starts) for Harden once again this year. Hopefully he will be healthy heading into October this year.

Projection:

Player	IP	K	K/BB	WHIP	ERA	WAR
Harden	150	181	3.02	1.15	3.02	4.4

Those are some sick numbers.

Fox as catcher?

jakefsu over at wpbc had an interesting idea about what to do about the backup catcher situation. Namely, why not carry Jake Fox as a backup catcher?

Now, I very much believe that Fox’s defensive shortcomings are serious enough that he’s well deserving of bench player status. However, I’m not sure I can be convinced he’s such a bad defender that there is simply no room for his bat on the big league roster. If the Cubs were to go ahead and give the 25th roster spot to Fox, he could back up both Soto at catcher and Aramis Ramirez at third while providing a much needed source of right-handed power off the bench, effectively addressing three legitimate needs with one roster spot. I mean, as long as we are talking about the last spot on the roster, why not try and get as much utility out of it as possible?

Before I get into analyzing their catching abilities, I just have one quick thing to say - if Fox is backing up Soto then it's highly unlikely that he will see many PH appearances. Managers are loath to PH with their backup catcher because of the fear that the starting catcher would need to leave the game, leaving no one who can catch.

Moving on to the main question at hand, the question here is whether Fox can fake catcher well enough to pick up some innings in the major leagues. His offensive contributions (wOBA projected at .327) would certainly be better than Koyie Hill (wOBA .293) or, God forbid, Paul Bako (wOBA .260). I'll be the first to admit that I know very little about Catcher defense numbers, especially in the minor leagues. So let's do a (very uncientific) comparison between the minor league catching numbers of Fox, Hill, and Soto, since they all have data at minorleaguesplits (this is from 2005-2008). The defensive value is calculated using Colin Wyers's catcher defense valuations, which used data from the major league level rather than the minors to figure out averages. To get the correct minor league ones we'd have to look at all the minor league data, which I don't have/am too lazy to generate. But, this is just a rough cut, and the same errors should appear in all three of their data sets.

Player	Innings at C	Sb	CS	SBA/9	CS%	WP+PB/9	Defense Score/150
Jake Fox	1380	137	53	1.239	28%	.9650	-18.5
Geovany Soto	2192.3	197	60	1.055	23%	.5049	-3.16
Koyie Hill	1509.3	102	46	.8825	31%	.4946	1.54

What do we see? As we can see here, people ran like crazy on Fox, and he was not good at blocking pitches. Let's see how Hill and Fox compare. Let's assume that Fox also picks up the extra 60 PAs or so that I have Miles due for at 3b, since he's a better hitter than Miles. Let's make the wild assumption that he would be league average at 3b defensively (he's no slouch at 1b, at least...I don't know the usual positional adjustment - if someone knows it would be great if you can help me out). I put a range of defensive numbers out there just to see what would happen.

Player	PAs	wOBA	Defense	WAR
Hill	100	.293	1.5	0.1
Fox	100	.327	-18.5	0.1
Fox (3b)	60	.327	0	0.2
Fox (3b)	60	.327	-10	0.1
Fox (3b)	60	.327	-20	0.0

Even if he is completely atrocious with the glove at 3b, this would not be a bad idea (he just wouldn't play 3b, and still have roughly the same value as Hill). Of course, this is just nitpicking over the backup catcher position (and 3b), and Fox would not be likely to see many PAs behind Soto and Ramirez. But hey, a run is a run, and if something were to happen to Ramirez I'd much rather have Fox backing him up than Miles. It would be great if he got lots of reps in at 3b in the minors, because at this point it's his most obvious route to regular time in the majors with this team, should anyone on the roster get injured.

(EDIT: the final defensive numbers I originally posted were not correct - they are aggregate numbers for the entire sample of minor league seasons that I used. This has been corrected.)

(EDIT2: I fixed the defense score to normalize it over 150 games (1350 innings))

Note to self

Don't be an idiot.

Project-a-tron: Carlos Zambrano

Zambrano has been my favorite Cubs player for many years. People use lots of adjectives to describe Zambrano, such as "Fiery", "Emotional", "Injury-waiting-to-happen" (thanks for that, Will Carroll), "Angry", and other such names. However, my favorite is "goofy", which I first read in BP's "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over" in the chapter on the 2003 Cubs. What better word to describe Carlos? He's a fun-loving guy who loves baseball.

Z has seen his strikeout rate decline for the past 2 seasons. However, this has been tempered by an equal decline in his walk rate, which had always been a problem for Z (especially in 2006, when he had a 4.84 BB/9). Instead, he began to rely more on his groudball tendencies to get his outs. You would think that this would lead to Z going deeper into games, but in fact this number has declined, as he has been hit harder (6.75, 6.35, and 6.27 IP/Start, respectively). I'm no expert, but I don't know if Z is as due for an injury as Will Carroll seems to be. He's been beating the drum on this for years, and only at the end of last season did Z start breaking down. He's certainly been pitching differently than he did in his prime years (lower arm slot), but it still seems to be working for him, though not as well as his prime years. His projection, perhaps not coincedentally, sees him continuing to produce at this new level.

Player	IP	K	K/BB	WHIP	ERA	WAR
Zambrano	180	152	1.85	1.33	3.83	3.3

Project-a-tron part 5 - why trading Mark DeRosa was inevitable (and a great idea)

2009 Projections:

Player	PA	HR	OBP	SLG	wOBA	UZR	WAR	Salary
Fontenot	550	14	.352	.439	.348	+6	2.8	~$0.5
Mark DeRosa	620	14	.353	.423	.342	-5	1.9	$5.5

(salary data from Cot's)

What's the argument here? Most of DeRosa's perceived value last year was in his ability to play multiple positions. Really though, what made DeRosa valuable was that he had a great backup in Fontenot to fill in for him at 2b while he was moving around the diamond. If Cedeno (or true-talent Aaron Miles) had been his primary backup, DeRosa's ability to move around the diamond would not have much value at all, as you would be choosing to have a replacement level batter at either 2b or at DeRosa's 'supersub' position.

The other thing to remember is that while DeRosa's output looks great relative to other 2b, it's not quite as valuable when moved to other parts of the field, from a purely offensive standpoint at least. His defense certainly isn't helping him much at 2b either. In fact, since it appears that he can play decent defense in RF (a UZR of ~+6 based on regressing extra innings to the mean), he actually has more value there (2.2 WAR) than at 2b (1.9 WAR), despite the fact that his bat does not contribute as much compared to a replacement RF. Strangely enough, he put up good defensive numbers at 3b with the Cubs despite several poor performances there in the past.

Of course, trading DeRosa leaves the Cubs with a player that has less positional flexibility (and a lousier backup), and one who has a much bigger platoon split than Derosa (who actually hits lefties quite well). However, trading DeRosa helped free up $5mm that went towards signing Milton Bradley, which was definitely a wise investment, as well as stockpiling minor league arms. Hendry made the right decision selling high on DeRosa, and I think this was his second best transaction of the offseason (which enabled the best one - signing Bradley)

Amending some projections

As MB21 pointed out in the comments of my Aaron Miles post, my defensive projections for Miles away from 2b are not very realistic, especially at 3b, where he has only had 61 innings of big-league time. I'm zeroing out his numbers there (since I still feel that 3b is a *little* more difficult) than 2b, where I have him at +2 runs. I guess it's not that big a deal anyway, since he's going to get the bulk of his time at 2b. I still think it's a poor signing - I think we should have gone with a cheapo shortstop (think Alex Cintron from last year's spring training) or, if we were actually spending money on a utility guy, nabbed Nick Punto (who has obscene defensive numbers). Of course, that's not very fair to the Cubs since he signed with MIN in early December, well before the DeRosa trade. In general though, just don't feel that we should be spending much more than the major league minimum on a utility player.

Over in the Lee vs. Hoffpauir thread on BCB, a discussion with Colin about Lee's projections has made me change my mind on my projections as well. I leaned heavily towards the more pessimistic projections for Lee (especially Marcel), projecting him at a .362 wOBA. My opinion was that Lee's 2007 was an up year for Lee, and 2008 was closer to his true talent level (since it looked so much like 2006). However, what I did not take into account (and neither did Lee's Marcels, given how that works) was that 2006 was Lee's injury bounceback year, and the data point just before it was Lee's career year in 2005. This would suggest instead that 2007 was closer to his true talent, while last year was a down year for him. I'm still not as high as CHONE is (.381 wOBA), but I think bumping Lee's wOBA up to .375 would be more than reasonable. Here are the new numbers:

Player	PA	HR	OBP	SLG	wOBA	UZR	WAR
Lee	685	22	.370	.481	.375	+3.5	3.2
Miles	350	3	.328	.370	.305	+1 (2B) -9 (SS) 0 (3B)	0.1