The A’s do need more offense, but they should focus on adding offense at positions that consider defense to be a secondary concern like 1st base, LF and DH.

The A’s allowed 690 runs last year, preventing runs was not the problem. The fact that they only scored 646 runs, their lowest total in a non-strike year since 1979, was a problem.

I’m glad Ellis is back and at such a team friendly rate. I think any projection that has Ellis being a league average hitter over the next two seasons is a little optimistic but I’m willing to try a non-negative perspective for the sake of MaEL.

Oh yeah.

I still hate Crosby.

lowest of his career. Average BABIP is generally .290 (Ellis’s career BABIP is .2904), so you have to figure Ellis will not be as bad unlucky as he was last year.

Although that might be copying LL a bit too much. We could go with “MaEl is ours, and you can’t have him”… wait, that doesn’t solve the copying problem either. Oh well.

Staturdays are for intelligent discussion, and if you can’t keep up then I’d rather you not participate.

and the Ellis deal is fantastic — the desire to add offense is an entirely rational one. Improving on replacement or worse performances is a lot easier and more cost efficient than improving the same amount relative to average or better performances. The team defense and pitching were already good — so improving on them is going to be a lot more difficult.

As if I needed another reason to love my unicorn.

just aren’t that good and were looking at an all-field, no-hit 2nd basemen who, in theory, should deliver those win shares but in reality won’t?

I don’t know anything about defense metrics so please don’t go all postal on me. I’m just bringing up a point I have a question about.

I like Ellis and it’s a good PR move. I could see the media lambasting the A’s for another free agent loss.

So … he’s +0, rather than -0?

Way too many errors last year in the infield. He just makes everyone around him better. I’m hoping a combination of Ellis and Gallego as infield coach will help Crosby become tradeable.

Sal, I followed your link to the “Preliminary 2008 Total Value Estimates” page and then opened the spreadsheet. I’m not sure I’m reading it right, but it looks like they’ve got Marco Scutaro listed as even more valuable than Mark Ellis. How can that be? Am I interpreting it wrong? Is that spreadsheet not really reliable?

if that was the PESSIMISTIC and even MORE pessimistic projection of Ellis, I’d like to see the optimistic one. What if Ellis once again has +20 defense and an improved bat (read: an uptick in BA)? Now how much is he worth?

Let’s look at some possibilities. I’m pulling the probabilities out of my butt:

Old Ellis (20% probability) — +4.25 Wins Above Average
Sal Pessimistic Ellis (30) — +3 WAA
Complete collapse (50) — 0 WAA

Expected wins — 20% X 4.25 + 30% X 3 + 50% X 0 = 1.75 WAA

That’s still easily worth the contract using the $4.8M/WAA rule.

So even if there’s a 50% chance Ellis never plays at all, the contract is still a good deal.

Even if he doesn’t play at all, we’re back to Patterson and Pennington. I don’t see much downside here.

… but I’m curious about a certain chain of reasoning:

the going rate for a win on the free-agent market is about $4.8 MM

Just how legit is this figure? I don’t doubt that it can be calculated precisely in a really raw fashion (add up all WAA for FAs signed over, say, 3 seasons; divide that into the total $$$ commitment for those FAs). Ignore the various methodological issues in coming up with that number (Are those retrospective or projected WAA? Are the dollar figures retrospective or prospective and/or amortized?) and presume the number is “true.”

Is this ($$$/WAA) how FAs are actually valued by the teams bidding (or failing to bid) on them? Yes, even if it’s not (for the slowly shrinking majority), it may relatively accurately assess a certain cost, but not the valuation. (See, for example, Zito’s contract.)

I’m not arguing in favor of intangibles; or old-school W/L, S, RBI valuation schemes; or off-field marketing factors entering into the calculus; or the conventional undervaluing of defense on the FA market. But those are all factors that many, if not most, GMs use in their valuation of available FAs.

And given that set of inputs, I don’t know that the A’s got quite the bargain you argue they did.

Yes, on the field of play, all WAA (whether created or prevented) are fungible; but in the market, not all WAA are treated as equal.

Given the basic precept of Moneyball that still applies to Beane’s modus operandi—that the talent market in baseball is never “perfect” or in total equilibrium—I think there’s an argument to be made that by paying anything close to average $$$/WAA for a WAA source that is undervalued by the market, Beane is overpaying.

(I also have some issues with what vignette17 and grover were getting at with regard to marginal WAA and position and availability, but I haven’t assembled those thoughts yet.)

I agree with the overall point…

The easiest way to figure out how many Wins Above Replacement a given player is, is to simply go to baseball prospectus, search for a player and click on their DT Card.

Mark Ellis was worth about 4.4 WARP last year.. but in 2007 he was worth 8.1 WARP.

Justin Morneau was wroth 5.8 in 2007 and 8.6 in 2008, which basically confirms your hypothesis

JD Drew was only about 5.7 WARP this year.

If your curious BP defines WARP as:

Wins Above Replacement Player, level 1. The number of wins this player contributed, above what a replacement level hitter, fielder, and pitcher would have done, with adjustments only for within the season. It should be noted that a team which is at replacement level in all three of batting, pitching, and fielding will be an extraordinarily bad team, on the order of 20-25 wins in a 162-game season.

Unless I missed it, Ellis gets another .25 for that.

here is a interesting take on Mark Ellis.
http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/10/20/638859/requiem-for-mark-ellis

We’ve just signed unicorn to a low ball contract for 2yrs +1yr team option contract to what we all can see is a steal of a contract.
What if we package this contract and a pitcher for something sweeter?
Yes, he is probably staying, but I’m willing to bet that there are 20 or so teams that would LOVE Ellis and this contract.
His flexible contract is nearly as valuable as his defensive prowess right now.

Thanks for the article, great read. I totally agree that A’s got a steal in Ellis because his defense is under-valued, and he plays at a position where offense is typically weak, so other teams under-estimates Ellis’ value. By the same logic, at other more offensively oriented positions, A’s approach will lead to other teams over-valuing players, thus making it more difficult for A’s to offer competitive deals to free agents. Extending on that, it would make more sense for A’s to focus more on “growing” in house talent at these offense oriented positions, since they can always get a better free agency deal at the defense oriented positions because the way they evaluate player worth.

I really like your last part where you compared Ellis with the new guys coming up. It’s important to get a good deal, but when you want to build for a winning team, it’s even more important to get a good deal on a good/great player because we can only put 9 guys on the field at a time. Simply getting good deals on 9 average guys don’t help much. Getting a steal on Ellis only makes sense if he’s good enough to be part of a playoff team, which I hope if what A’s are building for 2010, 2011. In that case, if Pennington and Patterson are not up to Ellis’ caliber, do you think we should keep both of them? especially if Chavez comes back, or Barton moves to 3rd?

What do you all think of Crosby, goner after 2009? As much as he is un-impressive, none of our middle infield prospects have been able to bump him yet. Maybe we will be seeing Crosby for a lot longer.

and I find it very difficult to argue against signing him to a contract that short and cheap.

From a liability point of view, though, I couldn’t care less about his bat. I’m much more concerned he’ll spend 30-50% of that time on the DL, because of his less than stellar injury history and recently reinjured bad shoulder. The only think the A’s are worse at than hitting is fielding a healthy ballclub.

Lest I didn’t make it clear, though, this is a good signing. There aren’t better alternatives. Now they just need to sign a real outfielder instead of relying on a platoon of prospects that have “just OK” written all over them. We’ll probably get one of them to be better than that (my money’s on Carlos), and two if we’re really lucky, but there’s still a pretty big hole there.

Bc every player they add has to be justified by how many wins they add, etc. If you don’t have players whose back the team can jump on and depend on to pull out victories night in and night out, then it doesn’t matter. All you have are role players, and that will never be enough to win a championship. What you need are a few players like Chase Utley who are + defenders and huge offensive threats. The A’s ignore offense all together.