I’d try to re-sign Wilson at the end of the season for two years around 4-5 mil/year. It might be a problem for the psyche of some pitchers if someone like Bixler is botching balls over and over. We have a young rotation and if they can’t trust the D, we could see them trying to strike everyone out, leading to shorter outings. Right now I think there can be a lot of growth by some of our young pitchers (Morton, Ohlie, Karstens, etc.) if they can work on improving knowing there is a great defense behind them.

I really think we have good prospects at the SS position, but they are years away. That is also banking on the fact that there are no setbacks.

Good points Charlie and WTM. Let’s also not forget that Jack is also hitting in the .280- .290 range. Not saying that will always be the case, even for the rest of this year but it is nice not to have an automatic out at the bottom of the order. I usually do not mind seeing jack come up when a big hit is needed with runners in scoring position.

Trade him if and only if the return is good. Not just for the sake of doing it. I think NH is smart enough not to do that!

This is something that some BD regulars, including myself, have repeatedly said in recent years in response to those who come on here and say simply that Jack is no good because his OPS is so and so etc.

Charlie is spot on with saying that it would be O.K. to trade Jack, but only for something really good. Otherwise, we’re better off keeping him til we have some better internal options, hopefully after next season.

Even from using a primitive metric such as range factor, it appears that Jack handles about five chances a game versus the average shortstop’s four. I started out wondering whether that’s such a big difference, because a ball that would elude a shortstop is going to end up being just a single 98% of the time, and one single in the course of nine innings just doesn’t seem like much. It would amount to what, one run every four games maybe? But then I added THAT up and it comes to saving 40 runs a year, the equivalent of four wins above average. That STILL seems like a lot to me to come from the defense of one position — not many hitters account for 4 wins a season above average, do they?

But then I realized that if Jack is turning that extra chance into a double play often enough, and a first-and-second-no-out situation becomes a bases-empty-two-out situation, I guess it doesn’t seem like such a stretch.

Anyway, good analysis work, Wilbur, and we thank you for it. We’ll hope the numbers are sustainable through a full season, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t be, barring a drastic change in the pitching staff, where we replace an extreme groundball pitcher for an extreme flyball pitcher or something.

BTW, this is twice I’ve seen Duke pitch this year and I just love being in the seats when he does now. The games snap right along, everyone’s involved. He had some good plays behind him, although he also had a couple seeing-eye hits that hurt (one juuuust got past Jack). But he was just nasty with that 74 mph change or whatever it is he throws, and he threw it a lot once he was able to start getting it over the plate. There wasn’t one time last night where I thought, Please, God, just throw the effing ball over the effing plate. Thank you thank you thank you, Joe Kerrigan.

Haren, on the other hand, made Adam LaRoche all night and Jack in one instance look ridiculous. He struck Jack out throwing nothing but off-speed, and before strike three I said to Paul, “Jack doesn’t have any idea what’s coming.” He proceeded to flail at another offspeed pitch in the dirt.

Good, good pitchers duel.

nice work as always wilbur. i laughed out loud at nate playing in a missile range.

suppose management does decide to try and resign jack. if we don’t exercise his option, why should he sign with us? if the shortstop market is that bad he may have a chance to go to a pretty good team. jack isn’t a money guy but if the pirates pull off a july firesale, why on earth would he want to hang around for the next year or two? if they can’t sign him to an extension before the free agency period they’d have to exercise the option or it’s unlikely he’ll remain a pirate.

it is runs saved or lost as compared to the average defensive player at the same position. Is there a way to get a similar measure for offensive production either by position or not? It might be called runs created per 150. Maybe there is a way to convert OPS+ to get a measure like that.

The reason I ask is that I have long been curious at how players would stack up if we were able to include both there offensive and defensive prowess together. For instance, many Pirate fans wanted us to sign Adam Dunn. I know he is a better offensive player than Morgan and that Morgan is far the better defender, but I really don’t know if Morgan’s great D comes at least close to offsetting Dunn’s O.

I did find it.

Morgan is 4th among NL LFs at 1.9 and Dunn was 14th at 0.8. BTW, another player who has been mercilessly criticized on this board, Juan Pierre, was 5th at 1.8.