Is this Board full of Lewis's relatives?

All is forgiven.

Lewis has also had more opportunities than Velez. Lewis has plateaued in all likelihood, Velez still has room for improvement. And it will be far easier to cut ties with Velez should another OF be brought in by trade or free agency.

But that doesn’t mean they both don’t actually suck.

RBI are worse than worthless.

A guy that couldn’t play his position and couldn’t hit a lick with RISP. Or does that not matter either?

You’re wrong about one of these things, and the other one isn’t a repeatable skill.

RBIs are a poor way to evaluate individual hitters because they’re dependent on things beyond the player’s control, like how many runners are on base when they come up, how fast those runners are, etc.

Yeah those HR’s and RBI’s are worthless stats

But I’m not basing my view of Lewis on any stats.

Really? In your last comment your point was that he had “4 Hr’s and 20 ribbies. 20.”
You even repeated the number of rbi’s, so don’t try to tell me that you’re not basing your opinions on that.

I used to like this change your mind

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Change-Your-Mind-lyrics-The-All-American-Rejects/BFB83EA71F9A73A4482570060017BF7A

Now I like this change your mind

http://www.lyricsty.com/lyrics/k/killers/change_your_mind.html

1) Still better to have Lewis than Velez.
2) That wasn’t the way it should have been.

So you keep him as a backup outfielder/pinch hitter, or you shift DeRosa to another position to accommodate Lewis’ offensive skill set.

With Freddy Sanchez’s injury situation not clear at all, it is possible for us to see him in LF very often even with DeRosa in the line-up almost every day. Simply put DeRosa at 2B.

So if DeRosa is at an option 2B, the only OF set would be Rowand. And as you have said that you don’t want Lewis or Velez to be the 5th outfielder, your task is to conjure up 4 outfielders better than both. Possibilities include:
-Torres
-Bowker
-Schierholtz
-????

And even then the first three are all less proven than Lewis is. Even if you insist on inserting DeRosa into the outfield in the ???? slot, the prior sentence still holds for the three other players.

For the record, I’d go: 2B DeRosa LF Bowker RF Schierholtz BN Lewis BN Torres AAA Velez.

 you’re saying that emotionally, he’s a bad fielder?

Tomko, at least, used to just blow up.

I see what you’re saying.

But we’re making the assumption that Lewis is making more misplays on routine balls than your average left fielder, and we don’t know if this is true. We “feel” it to be true, but we don’t know if this is actually the case.

If UZR tells us nothing, then why are teams implementing defensive metrics similar to it to evaluate players?

UZR isn’t perfect, but it’s a far more reliable tool than using the eyes. You’re watching Lewis with a preconceived notion of his performance based on his appearance, rather than watching Lewis objectively and watching ALL OTHER left fielders at the same time.

…but rely on bad ones

Prove it.

Why is it that some guys have high totals essentially every year?

Some do. Some don’t. Saying it’s “not repeatable” doesn’t mean it never repeats, it means it only sometimes will, and therefore has poor predictive value.

Because RBI is based in large part on opportunities, and player tend to get a similar number of RBI opportunities year to year because opportunities are in large part tied to lineup spot. Leadoff men tend to stay leadoff men, middle of the order hitters tend to stay middle of the order hitters, and #8 hitters tend to keep hitting 8th.

Also because RISP is essentially the same as hitting w/o RISP, with a slight adjustment up for the pitcher throwing out of the stretch, 1Bs playing close to the bag, etc. The same players seem to to well with RISP every year because the same players seem to hit well overall every year.

Why not go look up Fred’s numbers with RISP from last year? They are pretty much the same as his regular career stats.

… he averaged 21 HR’s and about 80 rbi’s over his last 4 years with the Giants.

You are very flawed when it comes to evaluating talent.
Only reason Pedro was good because of his superb defense.

You can pretty much throw out RBI. Unless you like using them for pointless post-season accolades like MVP.

Pedro Feliz is proveably one of the worst hitters in the game. He has a career OPS+ of 83. His career on base percentage over 10 years is .293. He is one of the worst if not the absolute worst third basemen in all of baseball and has been for quite some time.

He, like Molina and so much of the flotsam that has floated through here during Sabean’s reign of stupidity, is an out machine.

But you can’t throw out HR’s and RBI’s. They matter.

RBIs don’t matter, at least not in terms of player evaluation. Rickey Henderson was a first-ballot hall of famer who averaged less than 50 RBIs per season. Pedro Feliz was a poor hitter (though an excellent defender) who averaged over 50 RBIs per season. In terms of hitting ability, the two are incomparable.

lexluth, you really, really need to read this artcle. For your own good as a baseball fan. It explains, in simple terms, why Pedro Feliz and hitters like him are in fact “very poor”.

by first not taking the time to learn the community but also putting down the statistical measures that we all rely on in favor of ones that have been proven faulty.

Well, you are not older than me. And if you have been following the Giants for 45 years you went to your first Giants game 7 years after I did. And from the way you are attacking the very sound discussions here, your 45 years of following the Giants seems to have served you about as well as watching one season 45 times—you haven’t learned anything.

And your rejection of the new knowledge, and what some folks are trying to communicate does not serve you well.

I also know that numbers are powerful and wonderful tools that even old farts like you and I can constantly learn from when they are applied in a logicla even-handed and objective method.

New ways of looking at old data is not restricted to baseball. Some of the rationale you’re using is little different from the same trains of thought that many in criminal investigation employed when DNA evidence was first introduced back in the early 1980s. “Fuck it man, we got fingerprints and blood type”

And we’ve all seen the results. The DNA was always there, it was just not being used in a way that was conducive to crime solving, as well as absolving for that matter.

Josh in Hollywood recommends a good column to you. Joe Posnanski a baseball writer is as old school as you can get, and he does not pretend to be a sabremetician, but he is also not one to take just one person’s word as gospel.

You, like a lot of folks, pick up far too much of your knowledge base in mainstream media and other agenda-driven outlets. The numbers cut through that. Morbidity studies based upon actuarial science trump anecdotal health claims incidents intellectually. The anecdotalists and observationists rely too much on emotional interpretation.

Try being a little more open-minded, a little less verbose, and a little more courteous when entering somebody else’s neighborhood for the first time.

Hmm, where to begin…

heh

Edgar: .250 / .307 / .328, 5 HR, .283 wOBA, -0.2 UZR, 0.3 WAR in 510 PA
Lewis: .258 / .348 / .390, 4 HR, .327 wOBA, 2.4 UZR, 1.4 WAR in 336 PA

…and since you like RBIs so much, Renteria had almost as few on a per-PA basis as Lewis.

WHY IT’S ALMOST LIKE LEWIS WAS BETTER IN EVERY CATEGORY!!!!!

Renteria’s career numbers with RISP are almost the same as his career numbers overall. So yeah.

is so ass-backwards I barely know where to start

Since you clearly aren’t gonna listen to anyone’s (very good) reasons from above for why your DINGERZ! and RIBEYEZ! stats are flawed, I’ll try explaining it like this:

Comparing Renteria to Lewis favorably is not going to endear you to anyone on this board. Which is fine. Maybe you’re not here to make friends. But don’t be surprised if after a few more fanshots similar to this you become a constant target of ridicule or are just flat out ignored.

Reasonable people can disagree. People on this board do it all the time. But generally speaking, reasonable disagreements come from two sides evaluating t

This is generally true, though some of them fail at that too. Similarly, I’m sure GMs base their actions on keeping their jobs as much as actually constructing a good team.

You can NOT sign crappy free agents who have no business starting (e.g. Richie from Cincy, Dave Roberts, Huff), yet Sabean has done that a lot since 2005.

But making a strategic mistake doesn’t mean they’re completely clueless about talent evaluation, or completely ignorant of advanced stats.

The front office has a history of making decisions with a disregard of advanced stats and even obviously backwards reasoning as part of the rationale. Others here have longer memories than I do, but I can point specifically at the Freddy Sanchez acquisition (horrible/mediocre hitter that Sabean lauds as a “.300 hitter”).