I’ve been playing around with EditGrid this morning and I made a few graphs relating to the 2009 Giants WAR projections. There really isn’t any new information presented in these graphs, but they might help some to see just where the wins are actually coming from.
I like this pie chart because it shows — in my opinion — how much I think teams, fans, sportswriters, etc. can overrate the impact of a bullpen. I really like our improved bullpen, but in the big scheme of things, bullpens don’t add a lot of wins to a team. You tend to get the meat-and-potatoes from your position players — in part because they both create and prevent runs — and your starting pitching — because they throw more innings than your bullpen. If you want to spend on making your team better, you would get the most bang for your buck by improving your starting lineup and rotation. Of course, that assumes that you’ll be spending wisely. The Giants might have had the right idea with Barry Zito, but they missed the mark by miles.
Briefly looking at the wins added by the hitters/position players — this includes defense — we can see that Aaron Rowand is projected to add the most wins above replacement out of our group. For all those that groaned about the signing of Edgar Renteria, they could be groaning just to groan, he’ll add the 2nd most wins to the team among this group. In fact, only Renteria and Rowand are breaking the +2 wins threshold. Randy Winn almost breaks +2 wins with his projection. If I was a betting man, I would put down a bet on him to do so. Also, remember this is based on playing time — you can’t rack up WAR’s if you aren’t playing — so while Nate Schierholtz isn’t adding much to the overall team, it’s mostly because of playing time. Because of this, don’t get confused and believe that Dave Roberts is a better player, he’s just projected to get more playing time.
On to the starters group. Lincecum and Cain are really good. Johnson and Sanchez constitute a nice 1-2 punch, they both are projected to add +2 wins a piece to the team. Zito clocks in as our worst full-time starter and Noah Lowry is projected to chip in a quarter fraction of a win. If the Giants do decide to trade Sanchez, they would lose 2 wins off their team total. That assumes that they would replace him with exactly a replacement level starter — a starter with an ERA of 5.50.
Brian Wilson and Jeremy Affeldt should be the go-to relievers for the team in 2009. Also, remember that the reliever WAR projections include a leverage index which will help boost the wins of certain relievers used in high leverage situations. Wilson and Affeldt are getting a partial boost to their WAR’s because of this. Sergio Romo should be a solid member of the bullpen in ’09 and Bob Howry offers some upside if he can bounceback after a poor 2008 season. Hinshaw, Yabu, and Taschner are the bottom tier of the bullpen and should be used accordingly. The ‘Other RP’ group is responsible for 80 innings of exactly replacement level relief, that’s why they have a score of zero.
You missed a really good chance for good visual joke: with your title, it would have been great if you included both starting lineup and bench players, along with starting pitchers and relievers, and the graph above would have looked like a 60′s era Peace Symbol.
Nice post. Thanks for the link to EditGrid. I disagree about pursuing fixing up the bullpen. Both Lincecum and Cain ended up losing the win in at least 10 games, and that doesn’t count the other starters. Tom Tippett showed in his analysis that having a top bullpen has become a key to making the playoffs, and the bullpen needed fixing, and more importantly, could be fixed relatively easily, whereas there was not enough out on the market to fix up the offense. That, to me, is the point of rebuilding, tackling another facet of the team, fixing it, and moving onto the next.
@OGC
Someone on McC mentioned the similarity between my pie chart and the peace sign, I admit, I missed it. It’s pretty funny though, reminds me a little of Dr. Strangelove’s “Gentlemen, there’s no fighting in the war room!”.
Also, with EditGrid, anyone can download the WAR spreadsheets — the ones from the previous post — and fiddle around with them as they please. If you don’t like some of the assumptions I made in them, feel free to change it around.
Re: bullpens
I’m not saying having a good bullpen isn’t important, because it is — Brad Lidge added over +3 wins to the Phillies last year because of his outstanding relief work — and I’m clearly much happier with how the 2009 bullpen is taking shape as compared to the 2008 bullpen. But, what I’am saying, is that if your favorite team wants to find the most efficient way to add wins to the team, they’d do well to upgrade their position players or starting pitching because they-just-add-more-value to the team.
Tom Tango found that non-pitchers make up for a little over half of the wins a team generates.
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/how_to_calculate_war/
For the NL he found, and I’ll quote him:
and
In the NL, nonpitchers account for nearly 56% of wins. That’s a pretty big sum. Pitching accounted for %44 percent with starters accounting for 78% of that 44. It doesn’t matter how good your bullpen is if your position players and starters are lousy.
Again, I’m not saying that bullpens aren’t important, because they are. But, I’m saying that if you have money to spend and want to improve your team, you’ll get the best bang for your buck by spending it on quality position players and starting pitchers.
Another wrinkle to this little theory:
I think the main thing we learn here is that in terms of the Bullpen the law of diminishing returns kicks in rather quickly.
Ideally, given that the Giants’ payroll is $80mil, according to Tango’s theory, they’d allocate $8mil to the BP. Anything over that is throwing $$ in the toilet. The fact is, there are only so many innings a BP throw. Aside from 2 or 3 main guys you simply run out of opportunities to use them.
(And good for Sabes, as of right now the Giants have spent almost exactly $8 mil on their ’09 BP).
On that point we’re in agreement.
But…I think your last paragraph is overstated,
I would argue that spending anything less than that 10% threshold is equally stupid.
Spending on a bullpen is as important as spending on any other position *up to the point* that an additional bullpen arm will not be optimally used. In other words, if a team hasn’t spent enough money on its bullpen to account for all of the innings a bullpen will ultimately pitch, then it’s as detrimental as not spending enough on SP’s or hitters. Does that make sense?
If the Giants had $6 mil going to the BP, and $2 mil to spend, they would be just as well off spending it on the BP (perhaps more so) than they would spending that $2 mil elsewhere.