Pirates Hold On To Win 9-8

How does that equate to “supposed to be a starter?” Whatever anybody in cyberspace wanted, he was never anything other than a bench guy in the real world.

But when Vlad listed Pearce and Jones as better 1B options than Overbay, I’m not sure what he was saying if he wasn’t saying that Pearce should get 50+ starts at 1B, plus miscellaneous starts at RF and 3B.

What I said is that because we already had four guys who were projected to put up almost exactly the same type of season that Overbay was projected to put up, it was stupid to bring in Overbay, in that even if he didn’t totally collapse it was still highly likely that one or more of the internal alternatives already on hand would end up significantly outperforming him. As it happened, two of the four (Jones and Doumit) did, although one missed a good part of the year due to injury.

I considered Pearce the most likely of the four to outperform Overbay, but the crux of the objection wasn’t just that Pearce was slightly better – it was that even if Pearce flopped, there was Jones, and even if both of those guys flopped, there was Bowker, etc.

Preseason ZiPS? After all, if all that counts is intention, then why look at the season at all?

I take your point about the flaws in counting stats – as I noted above, X Paul wasn’t acquired to get 250 PAs, but due to the coincident injuries of Tabata and Presley, plus the collapses of Overbay and Pearce, that’s where he ended up. In the smaller role that he would have played in NH’s preferred reality, he gets maybe 100 PAs (possibly in more suitable circumstances), and is around 0.0 WAR. Overexposed, he produces small, but visible, negative WAR.

But as I argued with white angus a couple weeks ago, it’s a fallacy to consider WAR a “counting stat”, because, unlike every traditional counting stat, it can go down as well as up, and it can also accrue relatively quickly: witness Fryer somehow getting 0.3 WAR in 62 defensive innings and 29 PAs.

The bottom line is that WAR reflects both talent and usage. Look at Bench’s backup: every catcher needs to rest, and so you know, before the season, that even Johnny Bench’s backup will get ~25 starts. If his backup is so shitty that, in just 25 starts, he manages to accrue -1.0 WAR, that’s entirely foreseeable, and that is the intention. I love this rotoworld in which outcomes don’t reflect on intentions. I seem to recall Vlad saying, just the other day, that Overbay’s collapse was entirely predictable. So does it reflect on the intentions? After all, Overbay’s preseason ZiPS and defensive projections indicated that he’d be somewhat better than Jones. So was NH smart to pick Overbay? After all, his intentions were to sign a 104 OPS+ player with plus defense, not to sign a 79 OPS+ guy who’s lost both range and the basic ability to catch a thrown baseball.

And big decline isn’t foreseeable? Screw you, “dense”. He’s the very fucking embodiment of a player likely to go straight to hell, even before you notice that his BABIP was .318 that year, 28 points higher than it had ever been.

So yes, his collapse was completely foreseeable, and Cashman, who’s paid to realize these things, deserves to get dinged for relying on a prime collapse candidate, even if he “intended” him to continue to play above his head at age 32. If we’re generous, then we say that Cashman was intending a season more like Sojo’s ‘99 (wRC+ 59, 1.0 defensive run above average); that season was below replacement as well, albeit not by much. Still doesn’t sound like “good all over.”

I don’t know which is worse: the tendentious argumentation, or the condescension of it.