How about this guy for SS?

[Roll Tide]

Hopefully we can get a better SS candidate in a deal for Bedard or Roberts

[bandy75]

From Baseball America as of Nov 2nd 2007 the following are the listed MiL free agent shortstops:

Matt Erickson, Ronnie Merrill, Tony Granadillo, Ed Rogers, John Nelson, Victor Mercedes, Kenny Perez, Tomas Perez, Luis Sierra, Jeff Bannon, Caonabo Cosme, Aaron Herr, Anderson Machado, Rodney Choy Foo, Anthony Medrano, Mike Rouse, Tim Olson, Henry Mateo, John Labandeira, John Raburn, Eric Riggs, Rex Rundgren, Osvaldo Fernando, Danny Klassen, Andres Blanco, Jose Santos, Derek Wathan, Gary Patchett, Chris Barnwell, Gil Velazquez, Jason Alfaro, Wilson Batista, Mark Kiger, Andy Cannizaro, Angel Chavez, Antonio Perez, Francisco Tirado, Vince Faison, Luis Perez, Jorge Piedra, Jose Pineda, Gookie Dawkins, Danny Sandoval, Brandon Chaves, Javier Guzman, Jose Hernandez, Rico Washington, Luis Cruz, Jon Schemmel, Tomas de la Rosa, Ivan Ochoa, Jesus Guzman, Jesus Merchan, Dave Matranga, Manny Mayorson, Manny Alexander, Melvin Dorta, Felix Fermin, Marcos Yepez

One of these guys has to have more upside than what we are looking at now!!

http://www.baseballamerica.com/blog/prospects/?p=644

Bingo!

There's our man, sign him up!

[Roll Tide]

Can you imagine .... Now batting for the Orioles Rodney CHOOOOOYYYYY FFFOOO....

Actually it would probably sound better coming from Micheal Buffer ... Wonder if he can Box???:002_sbiggrin:

[El Gordo]

From Baseball America as of Nov 2nd 2007 the following are the listed MiL free agent shortstops:

Matt Erickson, Ronnie Merrill, Tony Granadillo, Ed Rogers, John Nelson, Victor Mercedes, Kenny Perez, Tomas Perez, Luis Sierra, Jeff Bannon, Caonabo Cosme, Aaron Herr, Anderson Machado, Rodney Choy Foo, Anthony Medrano, Mike Rouse, Tim Olson, Henry Mateo, John Labandeira, John Raburn, Eric Riggs, Rex Rundgren, Osvaldo Fernando, Danny Klassen, Andres Blanco, Jose Santos, Derek Wathan, Gary Patchett, Chris Barnwell, Gil Velazquez, Jason Alfaro, Wilson Batista, Mark Kiger, Andy Cannizaro, Angel Chavez, Antonio Perez, Francisco Tirado, Vince Faison, Luis Perez, Jorge Piedra, Jose Pineda, Gookie Dawkins, Danny Sandoval, Brandon Chaves, Javier Guzman, Jose Hernandez, Rico Washington, Luis Cruz, Jon Schemmel, Tomas de la Rosa, Ivan Ochoa, Jesus Guzman, Jesus Merchan, Dave Matranga, Manny Mayorson, Manny Alexander, Melvin Dorta, Felix Fermin, Marcos Yepez

One of these guys has to have more upside than what we are looking at now!!

http://www.baseballamerica.com/blog/prospects/?p=644

Have you looked at any of these guys numbers?

[Mackus]

Have you looked at any of these guys numbers?

Have you looked at Luis Hernandez' numbers?

The majority of these guys are better hitters than Hernandez, and quite possibly all of them. Having not seen (m)any of them play, I have no idea how there defense is, but I would be absolutely shocked if there aren't at least 5 guys in that group who are hands down better than Luis Hernandez.

[El Gordo]

Have you looked at Luis Hernandez' numbers?

The majority of these guys are better hitters than Hernandez, and quite possibly all of them. Having not seen (m)any of them play, I have no idea how there defense is, but I would be absolutely shocked if there aren't at least 5 guys in that group who are hands down better than Luis Hernandez.

Most of thes guys are 28+ and haven't played much SS in the last 3 years. I doubt any of them have LH 's glove because you're right, most of them are .50 - .100 points higher in OPS. But is that really worth the inferior defense?

[RShack]

When has Hernandez ever shown exceptional fielding ability ?

From what I can find he has never had a fielding percentage above 977 in any season where he has played more than 40 games.

Is that really exceptional ?

You can't go by that. The problem some folks are having is that they're trying to find a number to use to measure how good somebody's defense is, and there is no such number. With hitting and pitching, you can grab a number and get something of a clue, and then you can look at a short list of additional numbers and have a pretty good idea. It's harder with defense, simply because both hitting and pitching are neat little discrete events, but defense isn't. With defense, there's all kinds of things involved and we don't know how to measure them properly yet because it's a much harder thing to measure. There's various ways they try to measure range, but people argue about what's right and wrong with them. I don't know of any good way to measure arm. Meanwhile, you can tell a whole lot just from watching them play. Fielding percentage is not trustworthy, and it's certainly not a substitute for watching.

For example, a SS might get rung up for an E on a ball the Jeter would wave at while it goes into the OF. Or he might get a throwing error trying to be a hero on a ball that nobody else would touch. This used to happen to Brooks all the time. He'd dive over, land on his nose, and grab a ball that would be anybody else's double-down-the-line. Then he'd get to his knees and make a bad throw to 1st. The runner would end up on 2B with a single, and Brooks would have an E, all for a hit that was meant to be a double anyway. (So, both the hitter and Brooks would get screwed, and the pitcher's stats got protected from a double.) Speaking of Brooks, his first real ML year was '58. His fielding pct was .953 at 3B (to go along with his .597 OPS), and worse for the few games he played at 2B.

No, I'm not saying that LH is gonna be like Brooks. But people here need to realize that 3 things are true whether you like it or not:

• The O's believe LH is a top-notch defender. I think it is completely safe to say he is very, very good. I have no idea whether or not they think he can be truly exceptional. I don't know if he could be or not. But what you and I think doesn't matter. The O's have seen him play at 3-levels, and they think he's on the high-side of "very good" or else he wouldn't have a shirt with a single-digit on it and we wouldn't be talking about him. So, you just gotta face the fact that the O's think he brings a very valuable level of defense.
• They have evidently committed to putting good-D behind their if-fy kid pitchers. This means that local opinion that says it's better to get .650 OPS out of a league-average SS is completely irrelevant, simply because they don't have the same value-judgment you do. It doesn't matter if people here don't think good-D is important; AM and DT do.
• Because of the previous two points, if they're gonna go get a temp-SS, then you gotta accept that the temp SS needs to be noticibly better than average-D, because they're just not gonna get him otherwise.

So, if anybody has a theory about who the O's could get as a temp-upgrade over LH for a year while they look around for whoever they really want, then you should be listing guys with excellent-D who also happen to hit significantly better. Because that's what it's gonna take. No point in listing guys who aren't valid candidates, and if the guy is not a very-very-good-D SS in their eyes, then he's not a valid candidate. Meanwhile, people keep saying such people are a dime-a-dozen, that there's lots of them who are both very cheap and very available. How odd that nobody can actually find a bunch of them yet.

[Mackus]

I only got about halfway through the list, but here's the guys I'd probably rather start at SS for us than Hernandez:

John Nelson, Aaron Herr, Rodney Choy Foo, Mike Rouse, John Raburn, Eric Riggs

Of course, I haven't seen any of these guys play defense, but as long as any of them are about league average, I'd much prefer them to Hernandez.

Herr and Choy Foo seem the most intriguing to me.

[Mackus]

Most of thes guys are 28+ and haven't played much SS in the last 3 years. I doubt any of them have LH 's glove because you're right, most of them are .50 - .100 points higher in OPS. But is that really worth the inferior defense?

Unless you think Hernandez is a legendary defender and these guys are all butchers, yes, a 100 point OPS bump is worth "only" average defense (assuming thats what you'd get from these guys).

Hernandez being young I suppose is a point in his favor, but I really don't think he has any upside at all, so I don't really consider him any more attractive because he's 23 than the 26-30 year old guys on this list.

[RShack]

Of course, I haven't seen any of these guys play defense, but as long as any of them are about league average, I'd much prefer them to Hernandez.

Then you are applying a radically different set of priorities than the O's are. You're treating D as if it's some minor attribute that doesn't matter much, you're asserting that a superficial judgment of "about average" is good enough to go by, and you're claiming that an extra X-points if OPS is clearly worth crappier D. You need to face the fact that they're looking at SS based on a different perspective than you are. So, if you wanna find somebody who's a valid alternative, you need to be finding guys that fit their criteria.

[JTrea81]

What a surprise, another LH debate breaks out. I just hope the Orioles land another SS, so we don't have this all season...

[RShack]

There's a simple, back of the envelope way to check this.

The consensus best defensive SS is Adam Everett. Using BP's defensive metric (which I don't normally use, but it's a quick and easy find), in Everett's best season he had a rate of 114. This means he was 14 runs above average per 100 games played. Let's say the Orioles' primary SS will play 120 games next year. Extrapolate that out, and Everett was roughly 17 runs better defensively than an average MLB SS in his best season.

Now for the offensive portion we'll use a simple Runs Created formula. Mulitply ABs times OBP times SLG. A projection site that I personally have some faith in is projecting him to post a .286 OBP and a .321 SLG. Spread those out over 450 ABs and you have 41 RC. Add 25 points to each, and you end up with 48 RC. Add 50 points to each, and you have 56 RC.

Using the extremes, you have LH being 17 runs better defensively, and 15 runs worse offensively. Now, being more realistic, BP has LH at 107 defensively (compared to a career rate of 106 for Everett). Just so happens that the 7 run improvement defensively matches the 7 run deficit of a guy who is 50 points better in OPS.

Again, I need to point out that there's probably a better way to do the above, but I don't really have the desire to go through that process.

By the way, I'm thinking this is all a moot point as I expect them to bring in someone to at least compete against LH for the starting nod (after all, they did reportedly make an offer to Everett).

Maybe there's a better way, but your quick-and-dirty method seems reasonable (*if* the metrics you used are equally reasonable and unbiased, which I don't know). So, I don't have any problem with what you just tried to do, as far as it goes. IMO, the problem is how far the stat-based argument goes, and it appears to go only as far as counting runs. I understand how and why that happens, but it doesn't go far enough because other things matter too. For example, one thing that I imagine matters to AM and DT is that they don't want kid-pitchers being afraid to pitch to contact. They want the kid pitchers to have all the help they can while they get their sea legs. Palmer always says that pitching for the O's was way easier than pitching in the minors, in large part because he could trust the guys behind him. Problem is that there's no way to put a number on the effect of good-D on the confidence of kid pitchers and the impact on both individual and team development. Regardless, I agree with you that they would like to have somebody wth LH's glove and a bigger bat. It's the idea of trading glove for bat that I don't think they're gonna do, regardless of what stat-equation you use, simply because their total-equation includes things there's no stats for.

[El Gordo]

I only got about halfway through the list, but here's the guys I'd probably rather start at SS for us than Hernandez:

John Nelson, Aaron Herr, Rodney Choy Foo, Mike Rouse, John Raburn, Eric Riggs

Of course, I haven't seen any of these guys play defense, but as long as any of them are about league average, I'd much prefer them to Hernandez.

Herr and Choy Foo seem the most intriguing to me.

You need to go back and look at how many games these guys have actually played at SS in the last 3-5 years. The only guy I would be interested in is Mike Rouse. The fact that SS is still his primary position tells me his defense is pretty good and his MiL OPS is not bad either. You have to remember that .700-.800 MiL OPS translates to a lot less in The ML. We actually have a pretty good example of the typical MiL FA SS in Freddy Bynum. So the real question is would you play Bynum over LH? And that is dependent on how you value his defense, which you don't even seem to take into consideration. But as RShack has said above, it is something that the O's are placing a high priority on.

[El Gordo]

There's a simple, back of the envelope way to check this.

The consensus best defensive SS is Adam Everett. Using BP's defensive metric (which I don't normally use, but it's a quick and easy find), in Everett's best season he had a rate of 114. This means he was 14 runs above average per 100 games played. Let's say the Orioles' primary SS will play 120 games next year. Extrapolate that out, and Everett was roughly 17 runs better defensively than an average MLB SS in his best season.

Now for the offensive portion we'll use a simple Runs Created formula. Mulitply ABs times OBP times SLG. A projection site that I personally have some faith in is projecting him to post a .286 OBP and a .321 SLG. Spread those out over 450 ABs and you have 41 RC. Add 25 points to each, and you end up with 48 RC. Add 50 points to each, and you have 56 RC.

Using the extremes, you have LH being 17 runs better defensively, and 15 runs worse offensively. Now, being more realistic, BP has LH at 107 defensively (compared to a career rate of 106 for Everett). Just so happens that the 7 run improvement defensively matches the 7 run deficit of a guy who is 50 points better in OPS.

Again, I need to point out that there's probably a better way to do the above, but I don't really have the desire to go through that process.

By the way, I'm thinking this is all a moot point as I expect them to bring in someone to at least compete against LH for the starting nod (after all, they did reportedly make an offer to Everett).

The problem with your argument IMO, is giving the same credence to the defensive metric that you do the offenesive metric. Even so your numbers are close to a trade off. We suffered through league average defense at SS last year with Tejada. Think off all the howling and gnashing of the teeth we heard, and that for one of the best offensive SS in the game. I have been privilaged to watch every SS since Willy Miranda play for the O's. We have been blessed with extraordinarry defenders. I would rank them; Belanger, Aparicio, Ripken, Bordick, Miranda, Hanson and Carrasquel. When I watched LH I saw Aparicio. The guy could be very special with the glove IMO. How you value that is the question. I haven't seen an answer yet.

[El Gordo]

I don't necessarily disagree. By the way, the RC formula isn't pefect either. So while his defense may be worth more than the 7 runs noted above, it is also possible (if not likely) that the real difference in runs created is more than the 7 or 15 noted above. My guess is that they still cancel out each other.

Even if the stats aren't able to measure everything, they're still better than a bunch of people arguing over something in which neither side will possibly win. As much as all of us have seen LH play SS, none of us are a good enough judge of his true talent to make a truly definitive statement about how good or bad he might be defensively. One problem is that none of us have watched him nearly enough to be able to say that he's X times better or worse than Y defensively - particularly when none of us have even seen more than a few innings (if any at all) of Y in the field.

I'll stand by my (crude) assessment that LH's glove doesn't make enough of a difference to offset what will in all likelihood be a very inferior bat.

My two favorite managers were Earl Weaver and Davey Johnson. I'd bet money that neither would hesitate to use a lesser defensive SS if there was a potential 100 point difference in OPS.

What manager was it that said, "pitching, defense, and the three run HR"? Was it the same guy who played Mark Belanger at SS? Say LH gets to two balls that Tejada doesn't per game. That's 324 extra hits a year. How many runs does that translate into. How many extra pitches does the SP have to throw ? How many game situations would we be out of if the play had been made. How much more effective would a GB pitcher like Bradford be? How many of those 31 1 run losses might we have won last year? How do you find a number to answer these questions?