Following the wild bitterly resented by any serious analyst success of the Projecting the Enemy series, I come now to bring you the next edition, dealing with the free agent shortstop class. Should the A's sign Furcal? Who's the best bargain? And what would the position look like if the A's don't sign anybody?

Warning: there is going to be a methodological shift in this post relative to the prior posts. Because this is about player acquisition and not about team projection, we need to compare players to replacement level, NOT to league average. (Replacement level hitting is about 20 runs below league average, although it's more like 30 runs for shortstops, who tend to suck at offense.) Average players have value, because there are not an unlimited number of them. So if you're wondering why Crosby used to be a minus and is now (barely) a plus, that's why.

If you're wondering where I'm getting these numbers, they're formed through a combination of: mental Marcels (a rough weighted average of the player's career with more emphasis given to the most recent years), the projections that have been released for the player (if any), a conversion scale which treats 5 OPS points as worth about 1 run over a full season, and fielding evaluations, principally Sean Smith's fielding projections and Revised Zone Rating (blame it on the fact that I'm too cheap/poor, depending on your opinion of me, to buy access to Plus/Minus).

I'll be dividing this into three sections: free agents, trade acquisitions, and stopgaps. To wit:

Stopgaps

Bobby Crosby (10 RAR offensively, 0 defensively) $5.25M

Hey, we know this guy. He sucks. OK, probably not as much as we like to think he does. But still-- 1 win above replacement is awfully mediocre. He's roughly getting paid what he's worth on the market.

Gregorio Petit (5 RAR offensively, 0 defensively) $400K

Petit isn't totally inept with the stick-- he's had a few solid seasons in the minors-- but his offense is very batting-average based and young players who rely on hitting for average often struggle in their first exposure to big league pitching. So I wouldn't expect wonders. We can safely ignore his MLB numbers from last year as a small-sample fluke.

Defensively, he has the potential to be quite a bit better than average, but right now he's somewhat erratic in his jumps and throws. Again, ideally this is something he could work out in time. I say ideally because Petit appears to be loathed by the front office, who basically did everything they could last season to prevent him from getting consistent playing time.

Cliff Pennington (0 RAR offensively, -5 defensively) $400K

I'm sorry, I simply do not see how Pennington's high minor league walk rates are going to translate to the majors. We've seen what happens to guys with no power-- outfielders cheat way in on them and pitchers just throw gas constantly. Next thing you know you're hitting .194 and getting a ticket back to the minors. Or playing 80 games for the Mariners, I guess. Well, that's not all that hard to do, really.

Free Agents

Rafael Furcal (35 RAR offensively, 0 defensively) 4 years/$55 million

Furcal has been a bit erratic in recent years, but prior to that he had a pretty consistent period of being average at the plate, adding a number of runs with his legs, and being solid in the field. I'm basically figuring that this will continue; he has a career EqA of .271 and if he's healthy there's no reason to expect him to be far from that mark. He is a health risk, so any putative contract needs to build in an insurance policy against a relapse of chronic back problems.

Orlando Cabrera (25 RAR offensively, 0 defensively) 2 years/$18 million

Cabrera's a pure batting-average hitter, with the result that he's had a few fluky-good and fluky-bad seasons while hovering somewhere around "sucky" overall, albeit better than an average shortstop. His glove is good enough to hold down shortstop for another few years, but starting to fray a little. Next year is going to be his age 34 season, so there's a serious collapse risk here.

Edgar Renteria (30 RAR offensively, -10 defensively) 2 years/$15 million

Renteria used to be quite a good player, but his range has really fallen apart lately in the field. At the dish, he has better secondary skills than Cabrera and can take a walk, but he was dismal in 2008 and may not ever recapture the form he showed in 2007 for Atlanta.

One thing I will say-- his AL/NL split looks much more interesting than it is. It simply is not the case that hitters can hit in one league and not in the other. Moving leagues might cost a guy a few runs here and there, but it does not turn him from All-Star to chump.

Cesar Izturis (5 RAR offensively, +10 defensively) 2 years, $5 million

Izturis probably flashes the best glove of any of the free agents this offseason. Unfortunately, the guy cannot hit at all. Neifi Perez, the bete noir of sabermetricians everywhere, has a career OPS some 30 points HIGHER than Izturis does.

Then again, he doesn't look much worse than Renteria and he's going to be a lot cheaper...

Adam Everett (-5 RAR offensively, +10 defensively) 1 year, $2 million

There was a time not long ago when Adam Everett was a fairly crummy but not unacceptable hitter who was also the best defender in all of baseball. His 2006 was interpreted by some fielding metrics as having been as much as 40 runs above average, which is the fielding equivalent of Bondsian. What happened? Well, the Oakland A's happened, actually. A pop-up (natch-- this is the A's we're talking about here), an ugly collision with Carlos Lee, a badly broken leg, and suddenly Everett's tenuous grip on MLB regular status was broken.

He's no longer a realistic option as a starter, in my opinion. His defense is still quality but no longer ridiculously insane, and he's lost what little juice his bat once had.

Nick Punto (10 RAR offensively, 0 defensively) 2 years/$6 million

The 2007 Twins made the mistake of giving Nick Punto 150 games of play; the 2008 Twins cut that back to 99. Note the correlation with those teams' respective winning percentages.

Someone's going to give him some money to be a utility man, but it doesn't need to be the A's.

Omar Vizquel (-10 RAR offensively, +10 defensively) Retire

In case you didn't notice the giant fork sticking out of Vizquel's back: he's done. His goose is cooked. He's no longer capable of making contact with a quality MLB fastball, and I think pretty much everyone recognizes this, even notorious veteranophiliac Brian Sabean. Signing Vizquel would be closer to necrophilia at this point.

Trade Targets

J.J. Hardy (40 RAR offensively, 0 defensively)-- 2nd year arb

Smith likes his defense more than many, but it's certainly no asset. Hardy has a nice bat for a shortstop, though. The problem with him is not his play, which is very good, it's what he's likely to cost. It's hard to see the Brewers moving him for a package that doesn't include one of Trevor Cahill and Brett Anderson.

Clint Barmes (20 RAR offensively, +5 defensively)-- 1st year arb

Barmes is one of the most notorious hackers in baseball, but he has some power and knows his way around a glove, which is more than can be said for most of the guys on this benighted list. Surprisingly, he actually turns out to be a decent option. The problem is that the Rockies are liable to ask for something legitimate in trade for him, and he's just not worth that much. He'll be 30 next year.

Omar Quintanilla (10 RAR offensively, +5 defensively)-- 2nd year pre-arb

Hey, here's a blast from the past. The ex-A's farmhand has been viewed as a bust for some time, but has slowly but steadily improved his offense while projecting as a plus fielder. It would have been nice if Beane could have snagged him as a throw-in in the Holliday deal, but no such luck. He's younger than Colorado compatriot Barmes, so there's still some (OK, not much) upside left in him.

Chin-lung Hu (0 RAR offensively, +5 defensively) 1st year pre-arb

Hu delivered a shipment of Fail to the Port of Los Angeles in 2008. He's apparently had an issue with blurred vision; not mentioned by our sources is whether sunscreen was involved in any way... in any event, any A's trade for him needs to be predicated on the notion that they can fix this issue, because he was almost unbelievably bad at the plate this year.

Brent Lillibridge (0 RAR offensively, 0 defensively) 1st year pre-arb

It is, again, hard to overstate the magnitude of Lillibridge's offensive faceplant this season. A .630 OPS... in Triple A? Ouch. The good news is, the Braves can't seriously believe in him at this point... and with Yunel Escobar apparently sticking around, they have no particular reason to need him. Still, he's a reclamation project at this stage.

Miguel Tejada (30 RAR offensively, 0 defensively) 1 year/$13 million

Consecutive years with a sub-800 OPS make it fairly clear that Tejada isn't the player he once was (feel free to speculate as to why that is...), and his dipping power rate is troubling. Also problematic is the weird cratering of his walk rate last season, which dropped by half. As such, I find myself less optimistic about a bounce-back than I thought I would be. Still, at about a .750 OPS and still able to handle the position defensively, Tejada would be a plus option at shortstop.

John McDonald (-10 RAR offensively, +10 defensively) 1 year/$1.9 million

Don't blame me, grover asked me to look him over. McDonald is something of a uniquely bad hitter in that not only does he have no power and little speed, but he's a fly-ball hitter. In Major League Baseball, hitting non-home run flies is not a good strategy. Also not a good strategy: playing John McDonald in your lineup.

If anyone has any additional trade targets of choice, let me know and I'll run the numbers.