Hot Stove Update: Agent Ned Adds HR's and Outs

I generally believe that since you can't control what other people do, it's generally best to focus on what you can do, or not do. This philosophy usually carries over to the sports teams I root for. If they take care of their own business they won't have to worry about what their rivals are up to. Of course, there are exceptions. A perfect example is last season when Brian Sabean worried about what the Padres might do with Cody Ross and placed a pre-emptive waiver claim. We all know how that turned out!

Another exception is pretty much everything the Dodgers do. Now, I can finally say that nothing beats the feeling of winning the World Series, but for a large portion of my life as a Giants fan, I have to admit that I was sometimes torn between which I enjoyed more, the Giants winning or the Dodgers losing. Having finally settled that and with the knowledge that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, I admit I have taken a peek or two at what the Dodgers are up to this offseason.

Ned Colletti, AKA Agent Ned, has done an admirable job of shoring up the back end of his starting pitching rotation by retaining Ted Lilly, Hiroki Kuroda and Vicente Padilla, and by adding Jon Garland. Some analysts have commented that the Dodgers now have the deepest rotation in baseball. I agree, it's an impressive bunch. Kuroda is a scary pitcher when he's healthy, but the other 3 are probably closer to Barry Zito than Jonathan Sanchez and Madison Bumgarner, if that good.

Last season, the Dodgers offense pretty much froze over after Manny went out with an injury. They had a severe lack of power and finished with just 120 HR's, the 3'rd lowest total in baseball. Agent Ned set out to correct that deficit, and did a good job. He retained Rod Barajas who will probably hit about 16 more HR's than Russell Martin. He added Juan Uribe who can be expected to add about 20 HR's over Ryan Theriot or Jamey Carroll, and retained Jon Gibbons and added Marcus Thames who will likely combine for about 20 more HR's than Scotty Pods. All in all, I'm estimating that the Dodgers are likely to hit about 45 more HR's than last season(Manny hit 8 and Gibbons hit 5 in limited PT). They are also likely to hit about 60 more HR's than the likely alternatives at C, 2B and LF. That is not an insignificant number. Each HR creates 1 run which adds 45 runs from last year and 60 runs over the alternative right off the bat.

As I have commented a few times, the cost of adding these HR's is that the Dodgers have also added a lot of outs to their lineup by decreasing their OBP. Although it is commonly expressed that way, a lower OBP does not really add outs to a lineup. Every game played in regulation innings has 24-27 outs depending on the outcome. You can't add or subtract from that range. What a lower OBP does is take away successful plate appearances. Just for fun, I decided to try and quantify how many runs these lost Successful Plate Appearances will cost the Hated Ones.

First we need to agree on what we are comparing here. After considering several scenarios, I finally settled on the career OBP's of the likely players at the 3 positions in question vs the most likely alternatives:

At catcher, the Dodgers lose Russell Martin and his career .362 OBP to Rod Barajas and his .284(that's right, .284) OBP.

At 2B, the Dodgers could have kept Ryan Theriot and his .348 career OBP(although he only had .323 last year) or they could have gone with Jamey Carroll and his career .355 career OBP. Instead they went with Juan Uribe's 22 or so HR's along with his .300 career OBP.

In LF, the Dodgers look like they are going with a straight L-R platoon of Jon Gibbons and his .314 career OBP plus Marcus Thames and his .311 career OBP instead of Scotty Pods and his .340 career OBP.

The average career OBP of the new Dodgers at the 3 positions of C, 2B and LF is .299. We'll round it to .300. The average career OBP of the 3 players who were the likely alternatives is .351. We'll round it to .350.

The formula for calculating the number of Successful Plate Appearances (SPA) for a given OBP is SPA/(Outs+SPA)=OBP. I estimated the number of outs over a 160 game schedule for the two sets of 3 players to be 160X9=1440.

For the Dodgers likely players in 2011, SPA/1440+SPA= .300. SPA= 1440(.300) + (.300)SPA. SPA-(.300)SPA= 432. (.700)SPA=432. SPA=432/.700= 617.

For the likely alternatives, SPA/1440 + SPA = .350. SPA= 1440(.350) + SPA(.350). SPA-(.350)SPA= (.350)1440. (.650)SPA=504. SPA= 504/.650= 775.

So, the Dodgers projected 2011 lineup can be projected to get 775-617= 158 fewer Successful Plate Appearances than a projected lineup with the 3 likely alternative players for LF, 2B and C.

That doesn't quite tell the whole story though. If you are going to give Agent Ned credit for adding about 60 runs from the added HR's he will get out of these 3 positions, you also have to subtract the HR's from the SPA's when calculating the runs lost to due to the lower OBP.

On average, 1 non-HR SPA produces 0.3 runs. If 60 more of the SPA's are due to HR's, you subtract that from 617 and get 557.

775-557= 218 fewer non-HR SPA's. 218 X 0.3=65.

In trading OBP for HR's, Ned ended up very close to even-steven in terms of run production. Since these are rough calculations, 60 extra runs from HR's is approximately equal to 65 Runs lost due to fewer Successful Plate Appearances.

Conclusion: The Dodgers offense is likely to be about as productive as it was over the second half of last season, which is quite bad. The pitching depth that Ned acquired is unlikely to be good enough to overcome that lack of run production.