In the sake of fairness to Delmon, and since Bill Smith is 99.9% likely to keep him around, I figured I'd take a full look at how he figures to play next year. The 2010 ZiPS projections have been out for the Twins for a while now. This is where they have Delmon compared to his last couple of seasons:
.290/.336/.405, 91 OPS+ -- Delmon '08
.284/.308/.425, 102 OPS+ -- Delmon '09
.286/.324/.426, 97 OPS+ -- Delmon '10 ZiPS
So he basically gets the walk rate from '08 and the "power" from '09. That seems fair. It's hard for me to wrap my head around Delmon improving much more than that, considering that he still stubbornly insists on spinning the bat in his hands, wood grain be damned, Harmon Killebrew's advice be damned, and he has a plate approach as refined as a preschooler's finger painting, but I suppose it could happen.
Anyway, figure Delmon has about a league average bat next year.
In LF this year, by UZR, Delmon was just as much a disaster as he was the year before, maybe more. And to the naked eye, he looked every bit as awkward, slow, and lost out there. Over the last two years, he's got a -17.9 UZR/150G. When he was with Tampa, he somehow managed a +6.0 UZR/150G in RF. So I'll still even grant that he might still possibly improve, or at least regress to the mean somewhat, and maybe he was just really bad at fighting the Dome lights in LF or something. I also don't think that it's necessarily fair to Delmon to hold his CF numbers against him, given the small sample size and the fact that he obviously has no business roaming CF.
Projected Delmon's defense in 2010 to be equal to his average performance over the last three years, he'd be a -9 UZR/150G fielder in a corner OF spot. That would be a pretty drastic improvement on what he's been the last two years, but that's what he's averaged over what essentially amounts to three years of data. It's tempting to look at his UZR data and say that we've spotted a pattern of him getting worse year after year, but I think there is too much noise for us to firmly say that there's a pattern there yet. (I still have trouble getting over just how slow he looks on the field, but he can't be that much slower than he was in Tampa, right?)
Delmon seems like a reasonable bet to be healthy enough for 150 games and 600 PA next year. A player's value for staying healthy for a year is about 20 runs. The defensive adjustment for playing a corner OF position is -7.5 runs.
So here is how it all shakes out:
+0 runs -- offense
-16.5 runs -- defense (UZR + position adjustment)
+20 runs -- durability
That gives us a grand total of +3.5 runs above replacement level over the course of a full season, which is roughly 0.4 WAR. I think it's an instructive comparison to consider that the position adjustment for DH is -17.5 runs, so a DH hitting league average for a season would be about +2.5 runs above replacement level. And that's about what Delmon seems like--a nondescript DH forced to play in the field because we a DH with balky knees and his own questionable defensive abilities.
Delmon's been an average of roughly -0.5 WAR/year over the last three years. So an improvement of 0.9 wins would certainly be welcome, though it's not the sort of thing that might inspire Bernard Malamud to write a novel. Regression to the mean is tough to avoid, and Delmon's not old enough where we ought to expect him to go backwards.
As I discussed yesterday in the bigger picture for Twins roster construction, it would be nice to have a right-handed hitting, good-fielding corner OF to push Delmon to DH on days where we face left-handed pitching, and also to come in as a defensive replacement for Delmon when the Twins are protecting a small lead. And in the case where Delmon regresses or gets injured, it would be nice to have someone to take over for him without needing to make a trade.
This has made me a little less bitter about keeping Delmon around, but having seen him botch plays left and right in the field, I'm wary that I'm being overly optimistic about his defensive projection. And even with what I consider an optimistic defensive projection, he's still miles away from being a league average player, let alone the perennial All-Star he was once touted to be.
If I could churn out my papers as fast you can these articles, I'd've finished grad school when I was 16.
Yep. This all looks about right. Best case scenario really. Just for reference, not that I put any weight into it, Bill James projections are out as well. The ever optimist in player projections projects a line of .297/.332/.437.
If I could churn out physics papers as fast as I churn out these articles, I'd be done with grad school already. Truth be told, I had a nasty procrastination bug this weekend and Saturday morning I wrote a post for each day from Sunday through Thursday.
LASIK?
That comes with a free trepanation to set the Delmonster free, right?
I happened to notice that this is ubelmann's 800th post at the WGOM. Thank you very much, sir.
Left field at the dome is actually pretty spacious and I think that will be the case at The Bullseye. One wonders what he'd look like in right, where the fence is about 15 feet closer. He may have had some problems with lights, but mainly, I think he got exposed by having to play in a big old part of the field.
Left, and left-center, will be smaller at the new place than they were at the Dome. The distance to straightaway left is four feet shorter than it was in the Dome, and eight feet shorter in left center. Even more significant, though, is how much less foul territory the left fielder will be responsible for covering in the new park, which should theoretically allow him to play closer to the gap. Here's an overlay to show what I mean (h/t: TwinsBallpark2010)
Now, whether that hurts _elm_n's defensive numbers because it means fewer "out of zone" catches, I have no idea. But would would have to assume that with much less ground to cover he's going to see at least some improvement.
Yeah, it's tough to say how that will affect his numbers. I would actually say that it might tend to hurt his numbers. One would have thought that the Green Monster (and the small foul territory beside it) would have helped Manny (or Jason Bay), but it generally seems to hurt a player's rate numbers to have something that takes chances away from him. That could just be poor park adjustments, but I'm not sure.
On the other hand, even if Delmon's rate stats look just as bad in the new park, fewer chances for him means that a poor rate doesn't hurt the team as badly. I do worry a bit that more balls over the fence for our pitchers means more pitches per inning and fewer innings for each pitcher. We'll see.
I have a post rattling around in my head about that. Just need to figure out the physics of a fly ball and collect weather data. I wish I had access to hitf/x for a more thorough analysis, but no luck.
Interesting. Prevailing summer wind direction in MN is typically more from the southwest than any other direction. If I recall the orientation of the field, that means the wind will be pushing a lot of balls toward left/left-center field. The way Delmon plays balls hit near the wall in the air (i.e., sort of like a whipped puppy whimpering for mercy), that will be anything but good. On the other hand, it bodes well for more opposite field HR from the Chairman, and may allow Cuddyer and other righties to pull a few more dingers per year.
And thank you for being a gracious host, SBG. On my own, I'm sure that I would have had no chance at fostering the community that you have here.
3.5 RAR for ~$2 million. At least the RAR looks to be on the positive side.
who knows. That may be able to project to 8 RAR someday!
It still blows my mind that Delmon Young has such little power. How does a guy like that end up a slap hitter?
I can understand the free swinging. A lot of players with a similar body type are just up there hacking with no plan. It is the slap-hitting that just blows my mind. How did that happen?
He only works out his glamour muscles.
I feel like that might have to do with trying to perfect his "slump-proof" swing that he mentioned a while ago. It's weird--he's so confident in swinging at just about everything, but seems scared of swinging hard because he might not have a great average. And yet he still strikes out all the time.