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Giants SS Options

Our good friend Xanthan had a recent post over at Bay City Ball, in which he used weighted averages to look at some of the available free agents at each of the Giants "need" positions this off-season. However, given that the options at SS are utterly terrible after you get past Jeter and Uribe, and that both are likely to be overpriced, I was wondering how some of the possible trade candidates stacked up.

Here's the numbers for the available free agent shortstops, along with some of the SS rumored to be available via trade, using 5/4/3 weights to find their Weighted WAR (wWAR):


Name 2008 2009 2010 wWAR
Derek Jeter 3.7 7.1 2.5 4.3
Marco Scutaro 3.1 4.3 2.1 3.1
JJ Hardy 4.9 1.4 2.4 2.6
Jason Bartlett 1.8 4.9 0.7 2.4
Juan Uribe 0.2 2.8 3.2 2.3
Miguel Tejada 3.3 2.8 1.3 2.3
Orlando Cabrera 3.5 0.8 1.3 1.7
David Eckstein 0.1 0.9 2.0 1.2
Christian Guzman 3.2 0.7 -0.1 1.0
Edgar Renteria 1.4 0.3 1.3 1.0

To me it's an interesting proposition to look at each player using weighted averages, but even still I doubt that Jeter will actually produce 4.3 WAR this year and highly doubt that he will produce anything close to that after 2011. I also don't think that Juan Uribe will only produce 2.3 WAR in 2011. Still I think this is great predictor of things to come and if the Giants can't re-sign Uribe they'll have to make a deal, because the drop-off is substantial in the free agent market, but not in the trade market.

To me this narrows the list of possible SS for the Giants next year to: Scutaro, Hardy, Bartlett and Uribe. Other than Uribe, each of them had somewhat of a down year at the plate. So which one is most likely to break out, or rather return to form? So I decided to take a look at each player's xBABIP and compare it to their BABIP so see how lucky or unlucky some of them may have been. (For more on xBABIP, click here)

Name BABIP xBABIP Difference
Marco Scutaro .295 .308 0.13
JJ Hardy .299 .316 .017
Jason Bartlett .299 .319 .020
Juan Uribe .256 .302 .046

At least according to their xBABIP's each of them were at least a little un-lucky this year, but Uribe was the unluckiest of the bunch, followed by Bartlett, Hardy and finally Scutaro. The last thing I thought was at least somewhat relevant were Bill James' predictions that are available this year on fangraphs. For this, I'll just include each player's slash line:

Scutaro: .266/.339/.374
Hardy: .263/.328/.425
Bartlett: .279/.328/.380
Uribe: .253/.307/.434

From my perspective, this all add's up to something most of us already believe: Brian Sabean needs to do what it takes to bring Uribe back. If Uribe gets silly and wants $12M a year over 3 years, than I think Sabean needs to make a deal for one of the other 3 shortstops who all have their individual pluses and minuses, but whose end production or value, is roughly the same. Personally, I'd like Hardy the best, because even if his bat falls apart he has a great glove, but he's probably the least available of the three, after that I'd take Scutaro because he's been more consistent, but Bartlett has more upside. Any way you slice it though, the shortstop market is very, very thin.

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