Tuesday, August 02, 2005

 

The Best Laid Plans

Big shocker--Barry Bonds doesn't think he'll make it back this year. And by "big shocker" I mean "no surprise."

Oh, what a glorious mess this is. Here are the standings in the NL Least as of right now. Viewer discretion is suggested.

San Diego 51-54
Arizona 52-55
LA Dodgers 47-58
San Fran. 45-59
Colorado 37-67

Let us imagine. Let us imagine a season in which Big Barry's knees didn't implode. Let us imagine a season in which Bonds played, and was about as productive as he was last year. How many more wins would the Giants have? We can figure this out with WARP, something I brought up yesterday to confuse people.

Last year, Bonds had a WARP3 number of 15.0. That means Bonds, all by himself, was worth 15 wins more than your average replacement player (say, Adam Shabala). We use WARP3 here instead of WARP1 because WARP3 is adjusted not just for that particular season, but for all time. Since we're comparing two different seasons here, we need to do that.

If Bonds was healthy, Pedro Feliz would have been the odd man out in the outfield. This year, Pedro has a WARP3 score of 2.3. He's a little over 2 wins better than replacement. So, last year's Bonds is worth 13 wins more than this year's Pedro Feliz.

Of course, we've only played two-thirds of a season, so let's call that 9 wins. Let's ding Barry a couple of wins because of aging, and say that so far, Bonds would have added 7 wins to the Giants total. Here's your NL West standings in our little fantasy now:

San Fran. 52-52
San Diego 50-55
Arizona 51-56
LA Dodgers 46-59
Colorado 36-68

The Giants are now in first place. A shaky first place, but first place!! That's how much Bonds' absence has hurt the team.

You might notice that each of the other teams somehow have one win less, too. Why? Because the additional seven wins for the Giants have to come from their opponents. The Giants play roughly one-third of their games against the NL West. It's close enough for government work.

The other half of the plan that failed was assuming Jason Schmidt would be himself. This year, he's about 5 wins behind where he was at this time last year. If he had maintained his quality, and Bonds had not been hurt, the Giants would have a healthy 7-game lead. Then the Giants would not have needed to trade away four young players for two overpaid veterans, and everyone would be much happier.

(Note: Grant over at McCovey Chronicles beat me to the punch on this today. Kudos to his Assotron for being faster than my methods!)

Jefferson 3:07 PM

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