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A's claim Encarnacion off waivers from the Blue Jays (Kouzmanoff on the market?)


Capn Vivi

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An above average third baseman under control for 3 years(if you include an option) who is still relatively young and signed for a reasonable contract is more valuable to a struggling, non contender than a few BP arms.

I don't disagree with you that getting rid of DH and JJ(btw, i dont think it takes both to get him anyway)hurts our pen but getting a 3 year answer at third base is more important.

I don't agree with this. His glove is subpar and always has been. He hits for power period. He walks and sees a lot of pitches but that doesn't do a lot for his OBP. Last year he had 80 BB but only .320 OBP. his BABIP was very low, but he hit fewer LD's, fewer GB's more IFFB's and his FB/HR% was down. Don't like those trends. I think I'd rather go for Kouzmanoff.
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I don't agree with this. His glove is subpar and always has been. He hits for power period. He walks and sees a lot of pitches but that doesn't do a lot for his OBP. Last year he had 80 BB but only .320 OBP. his BABIP was very low, but he hit fewer LD's, fewer GB's more IFFB's and his FB/HR% was down. Don't like those trends. I think I'd rather go for Kouzmanoff.

Reynolds defense has been getting better and was close to average last year according to UZR.

He has a very good walk rate...He hits for a lot of power.

You bring up his trends...They were a one year trend that if you look into the numbers, shows a guy that appears to have been trying to hit homers.

He is still just 27, which is historically the peak year for a player. I think he is a pretty good bet to play close to average defense, have an 820ish OPS and hit 30+ homers.

I don't have an issue with you wanting Kouz more...But he also has a poor OBP(and reynolds has a much better upside in the OBP department) and doesn't hit for the power Reynolds does.

You may want the defense the most and that's fine...But Reynolds provides much more offensive upside IMO and his defense isn't going to kill you and, as I said, it appears to be getting better...That tells me he is a hard worker which also bodes well for him turning around his offensive struggles as well.

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I don't agree with this. His glove is subpar and always has been. He hits for power period. He walks and sees a lot of pitches but that doesn't do a lot for his OBP. Last year he had 80 BB but only .320 OBP. his BABIP was very low, but he hit fewer LD's, fewer GB's more IFFB's and his FB/HR% was down. Don't like those trends. I think I'd rather go for Kouzmanoff.

I think Kouz would be a solid option, and I think it's clear that he is a very good defender, but, when a player's value is fueled by defense, I think it's important to consult a number of sources. There is no clear consensus in measuring defensive value, so it's best to take an aggregate measurement.

While Fangraphs awards Kouz 16.1 runs for his defensive contribution, accounting for the majority of his 2.9 WAR according to the site, Baseball-Reference, which uses Total Zone to measure defensive value, estimated that he saved only 4 runs with the glove and valued him at 1.2 WAR in 2010.

What's more, while Fangraphs, with the use of UZR, has consistently valued Kouz between 2.5 and 2.9 WAR over the last four seasons, Baseball-Reference and Total Zone have consistently valued him between 1.2 and 1.9 WAR over the same span.

Additionally, while UZR had Kouz at +16.1 runs last season, it has never valued him at more than +7.5 runs with the glove. I think it's safe to assume that, if Kouz produces offensively in 2011 like he did in 2010, he will not be an average or better third baseman regardless of what metric is used to value his defense.

I will note, however, that Baseball Info Solutions had Kouz at 13 runs above average defensively last season, though they've never had him above 4 in the past.

EDIT: I know you like to use Dewan's Fielding Bible measurements. What does FB say about Kouz over the last few years? Where do you find that information? Thanks.

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I think Kouz would be a solid option, and I think it's clear that he is a very good defender, but, when a player's value is fueled by defense, I think it's important to consult a number of sources. There is no clear consensus in measuring defensive value, so it's best to take an aggregate measurement.

While Fangraphs awards Kouz 16.1 runs for his defensive contribution, accounting for the majority of his 2.9 WAR according to the site, Baseball-Reference, which uses Total Zone to measure defensive value, estimated that he saved only 4 runs with the glove and valued him at 1.2 WAR in 2010.

What's more, while Fangraphs, with the use of UZR, has consistently valued Kouz between 2.5 and 2.9 WAR over the last four seasons, Baseball-Reference and Total Zone have consistently valued him between 1.2 and 1.9 WAR over the same span.

Additionally, while UZR had Kouz at +16.1 runs last season, it has never valued him at more than +7.5 runs with the glove. I think it's safe to assume that, if Kouz produces offensively in 2011 like he did in 2010, he will not be an average or better third baseman regardless of what metric is used to value his defense.I will note, however, that Baseball Info Solutions had Kouz at 13 runs above average defensively last season, though they've never had him above 4 in the past.

EDIT: I know you like to use Dewan's Fielding Bible measurements. What does FB say about Kouz over the last few years? Where do you find that information? Thanks.

League average for AL 3B in 2010 was .729 OPS. A career ave year for Kouzmanoff is .727. His FB numbers from 2006 on are 0, -4, -2, +7, +20. So maybe last year is an outlier or maybe it's steady improvement.

Anyway Kouz is going to be head and shoulders above the -5 you get from Reynolds and he won't cost nearly as much.

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League average for AL 3B in 2010 was .729 OPS. A career ave year for Kouzmanoff is .727. His FB numbers from 2006 on are 0, -4, -2, +7, +20. So maybe last year is an outlier or maybe it's steady improvement.

Anyway Kouz is going to be head and shoulders above the -5 you get from Reynolds and he won't cost nearly as much.

Kouzmanoff Road OPS 2007-2009 (all with the Padres): .823, .803, .778 and his road OPS while with Oakland was only: .685. Arguably, that is driven mostly by a road BABIP of .241.

For his career, Kouzmanoff's LD% and GB/FB ratio have been surprisingly similar in his Home/Road splits. Home: 20.1% LD rate, 1.11:1 GB/FB ratio & Road: 18.1% LD rate, 1.09:1 GB/FB ratio.

While Kouzmanoff had a really poor year offensively in 2010, he's far from a lock to be average or below offensively if he's playing in a ballpark like cozy Camden Yards 81 times a year. We'd be getting him for two years and his defense would likely show up even if his bat did not. Kouzmanoff is the textbook low-risk, high reward guy coming off a bad year. Particularly low-risk given the likelihood he can be had for very little.

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League average for AL 3B in 2010 was .729 OPS. A career ave year for Kouzmanoff is .727. His FB numbers from 2006 on are 0, -4, -2, +7, +20. So maybe last year is an outlier or maybe it's steady improvement.

Anyway Kouz is going to be head and shoulders above the -5 you get from Reynolds and he won't cost nearly as much.

You didn't bold my entire sentence, which was that if he produces offensively next year the same way he did in 2010, he will not be league average. I never said that he couldn't bounce back to a .729ish OPS.

I think he is a very good defender, and certainly a much better one than Reynolds, but I wouldn't bet on him saving 20 runs with his glove next year, nor do I believe that he did it in 2010.

Again, I'd be fine with a Kouzmanoff acquisition on the cheap. He'd be a nice stop gap while Bell refines his approach at AAA and he'd help our pitching staff with his glove. My only point is that we need to be careful when evaluating players whose value is derived primarily from defense, because our current defensive statistics are quite flawed and inconsistent.

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You didn't bold my entire sentence, which was that if he produces offensively next year the same way he did in 2010, he will not be league average. I never said that he couldn't bounce back to a .729ish OPS.

I think he is a very good defender, and certainly a much better one than Reynolds, but I wouldn't bet on him saving 20 runs with his glove next year, nor do I believe that he did it in 2010.

Again, I'd be fine with a Kouzmanoff acquisition on the cheap. He'd be a nice stop gap while Bell refines his approach at AAA and he'd help our pitching staff with his glove. My only point is that we need to be careful when evaluating players whose value is derived primarily from defense, because our current defensive statistics are quite flawed and inconsistent.

You aren't betting on him to be a +20 defender and you aren't betting on him to have career average offensive numbers. I think even if he puts up offensive numbers similar to 2010(not likely IMO) his glove would be enough to make him league average, even if it isn't a +20 next year.
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You aren't betting on him to be a +20 defender and you aren't betting on him to have career average offensive numbers. I think even if he puts up offensive numbers similar to 2010(not likely IMO) his glove would be enough to make him league average, even if it isn't a +20 next year.

You are twisting my words around. I never said I am not betting on him to bounce back offensively.

I'm going to reproduce the sentence and you tell me if there's something about it with which you take umbrage.

If Kouz produces in 2011 like he did in 2010, he will not be league average.

My entire post was not an attempt to deride Kouz, but to place caution on valuing production from guys who live by their gloves. This is because there will be great variance among metrics regarding just how much defensive value is provided. While the UZR-tied Fangraphs will tell you Kouz has been worth an average of 2.6 wins over the last 4 years, Baseball-Reference will tell you he's been worth an average of 1.5.

With a 95 percent confidence interval, you can really only say Kouz was worth 2.05 + or - 1.2 WAR in 2009. There's simply more variance and a larger margin of error when defense is composing a large chunk of a player's WAR.

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Reynolds is a potentially high-reward player thanks to his tremendous power, terrific walk rate, youth, favorable contract and huge upside. For those reasons alone, he may not be as easy to acquire as we think, whereas Kouzmanoff is now redundant in Oakland.

On the bolded... maybe.

He is due $13MM over the next two years, and to earn it he will have to be significantly better than he was this season. Or, for that matter, better than he was in 08. According to BR, he has averaged about 1.3 WAR/season over the last three years, and that wouldn't be good enough.

I like Reynolds, but he does represent uncertainty and risk.

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With a 95 percent confidence interval, you can really only say Kouz was worth 2.05 + or - 1.2 WAR in 2009. There's simply more variance and a larger margin of error when defense is composing a large chunk of a player's WAR.

I think the above is an excellent point and not one often discussed when it comes to what kind of player we should pursue via trade or FA. The old saying: "Defense never slumps," implies something much different than the quantification these newer statistical measures give us. If anything, this undermines the valuation that WAR assigns to UZR as a component of a player's overall value. At the same time, it's clear players have good and bad years defensively and are more than capable of getting better or worse with age and experience. At the same time, Kouzmanoff isn't Mark Belanger and if he puts up poor offensive numbers (especially with his consistently poor OBP) he will most definitely be worth less than Reynolds, if one is to assume Reynolds is capable of being average defensively.

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I think the above is an excellent point and not one often discussed when it comes to what kind of player we should pursue via trade or FA. The old saying: "Defense never slumps," implies something much different than the quantification these newer statistical measures give us. If anything, this undermines the valuation that WAR assigns to UZR as a component of a player's overall value. At the same time, it's clear players have good and bad years defensively and are more than capable of getting better or worse with age and experience. At the same time, Kouzmanoff isn't Mark Belanger and if he puts up poor offensive numbers (especially with his consistently poor OBP) he will most definitely be worth less than Reynolds, if one is to assume Reynolds is capable of being average defensively.

That old saying is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. I don't know how even someone who can't add single digit numbers but has watched the game with his own eyes for any extended period of time could truly believe that.

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On the bolded... maybe.

He is due $13MM over the next two years, and to earn it he will have to be significantly better than he was this season. Or, for that matter, better than he was in 08. According to BR, he has averaged about 1.3 WAR/season over the last three years, and that wouldn't be good enough.

I like Reynolds, but he does represent uncertainty and risk.

Yeah, it should be noted that BR and Fangraphs disagree wildly on the past value of Reynolds as well. The reality is probably an average of the two sets of numbers, where both have been about close to league average over the last few years, but there is certainly room for error.

With Reynolds, however, there is more upside in that bat, the value of which I feel more comfortable quantifying than that of the glove.

For example, I think we can say with more confidence that Reynolds was above average in 2009 than we can that Kouz was above average in 2010.

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On the bolded... maybe.

He is due $13MM over the next two years, and to earn it he will have to be significantly better than he was this season. Or, for that matter, better than he was in 08. According to BR, he has averaged about 1.3 WAR/season over the last three years, and that wouldn't be good enough.

I like Reynolds, but he does represent uncertainty and risk.

Baseball Reference REALLY doesn't like Reynolds defense! Rating it at -0.8, -1.4, and -0.8 dWAR the last 3 years. Assume that Reynolds is even average at 3B and he's worth more than 2.9 WAR/season over the last 3 years according to them!

Whereas Fangraphs rated Reynolds' defensive effort in 2010 as above average and according to them, he's averaged just under 2.5 WAR/season the last 3 years. As SG mentioned, he's capable of getting better offensively and defensively in the coming years. Couple that with him entering his prime and you've got a very favorable situation.

According to Fangraphs, he's been worth $31.8m over the last three seasons. I would be willing to bet he's worth $13m over the next two.

Also, I agree with you that any transaction represents uncertainty and risk. The trick is to find the situations where you can create the least amount of uncertainty and risk, or at least risk that is proportionate to the reward. Reynolds is one of those cases.

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That old saying is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. I don't know how even someone who can't add single digit numbers but has watched the game with his own eyes for any extended period of time could truly believe that.

I hope this isn't a dig at me, I'm certainly not endorsing the saying, just pointing it out so the baseball iconoclasts can tear it down! I completely agree that defense is a wildly varying component of a player's value.

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Baseball Reference REALLY doesn't like Reynolds defense! Rating it at -0.8, -1.4, and -0.8 dWAR the last 3 years. Assume that Reynolds is even average at 3B and he's worth more than 2.9 WAR/season over the last 3 years according to them!

Whereas Fangraphs rated Reynolds' defensive effort in 2010 as above average and according to them, he's averaged just under 2.5 WAR/season the last 3 years. As SG mentioned, he's capable of getting better offensively and defensively in the coming years. Couple that with him entering his prime and you've got a very favorable situation.

According to Fangraphs, he's been worth $31.8m over the last three seasons. I would be willing to bet he's worth $13m over the next two.

Also, I agree with you that any transaction represents uncertainty and risk. The trick is to find the situations where you can create the least amount of uncertainty and risk, or at least risk that is proportionate to the reward. Reynolds is one of those cases.

To be fair, Total Zone really doesn't like Reynolds' defense. Or at least it didn't last season. BR also lists BIS defensive runs above or below average, although they choose not to use it in value calculations, which had Reynolds at -3 in 2010 rather than -7. In 2009, it had him at -6 as opposed to Total Zone's -9 and UZR's -11.

The point here: Defensive valuation is wildly variant. Colin Wyers recently noted that our newest defensive metrics don't seem to have any significantly greater correlation to one another than they do to the average fan's take on a defender's ability (thanks to Tom Tango for that info).

This, combined with the fact that a player's defensive performance itself seems to vary from year to year, is what makes me less confident about adequately assessing a player whose value is not driven by offensive production.

Also of note: Baseball-Reference deducted about 5 runs from Reynolds' offensive production in 2010 because, I assume, their valuation places more emphasis on OBP than that of Fangraphs. In 2009 they had him a full run less valuable offensively. So there is some discrepancy there, too.

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