Life In The Cell

Love the Glove and Free Agents, the Lack Thereof

Two things to tackle for now.

Orlando Cabrera just received the TYIB (This Year In Baseball) Defensive Player of the Year. The award is decided via online voting by the fans. Over 12 millions votes were cast, with OC receiving 36% of the votes (or around 4.32 million votes). Unfortunately, there is no break down given of regional voting so it’s impossible to say if OC won because Chicago fans rocked the vote, much as Redskins’ fans tried with the Pro Bowl voting. Runner up with about 25% of the vote was Dustin Pedroia; Albert Pujols, Joe Mauer, Grady Sizemore’s, and Torii Hunter round out the top 6.

So congrats to OC on receiving an award you probably didn’t deserve. I don’t know how he pulled it off, because no matter how many times you call the scorer’s booth, that isn’t going to earn you 4 million+ votes. OC is a really good defender I’d say for sure in the top 10; I would maybe even assure the top 15, but he really isn’t the top defensive player in the league. I can think of a handful of players off the top of my head, but why rely on that? Even though defensive stats aren’t quite exact, I figure we should take a look at FRAR (Fielding Runs Above Replacement), which is Baseball Prospectus’s tool for measuring defensive awesomeness and takes into accoun position and league difficulty.

According to BP, OC ranks 7th in all of baseball. By comparison, Pedroia ranked 29th, Pujols ranked 91st, Mauer ranked 5th, Sizemore ranked 128th, and Hunter ranked 6th. I’ll give you guys free reign to check out other defensive stats, but at least by looking at FRAR we can see that OC was good, but not the best. If you were wondering, the top 4 defenders were Jason Kendall, Dioner Navarro, Micahel Young, and Kurt Suzuki.

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In Scott Merkin’s latest mailbag, this question came up “I’m a little concerned that the White Sox seem to be completely dormant on the free-agent front. This is the best free-agent pitching class in 10 years and we can’t even give Ben Sheets or A.J. Burnett an offer?” which I would like to address.

Thanks to Kenny’s many quotes to the media, it’s pretty safe to infer that the White Sox are scaling back the payroll a bit this year. They’ve already dropped the contracts of Javier Vazquez and Nick Swisher and have spoken about trading Jermaine Dye which would free up a further $11.5 million in payroll. The thing to keep in mind, is that as things stand (having not traded Dye yet), KW says the Sox are close to their payroll threshold, which means even if the Sox trade Dye, there won’t be a lot of extra money to make a splash in the free agent market. That means someone like Ben Sheets probably isn’t in the cards. I’m thinking the Sox, if they do sign a free agent pitcher rather than go into the spring with Clayton Richard and Jeff Marquez penciled in at the 4 and 5 spots in the rotation, they’ll seek a lower end free agent more along the lines of an El Duque. They’ll probably look for a pitcher with a good upside, but still a cheaper contract. Browsing the list of free agent pitchers, I’ve come up with Daniel Cabrera, Jon Garland, Pedro Martinez, and Mark Prior as potential pitchers that fit the highish upside, lowish cost model. Even in that narrowed down list, I don’t see a lot of potential there to fit in with this year’s team. Daniel Cabrera makes the most sense, but by all accounts, he seems to be in high demand which will only drive up his price. Jon Garland didn’t leave on the best terms, and will probably be looking for a similar contract to the one he just completed, which means he’ll probably be too expensive, though I would love to have someone like him eating innings in the 4th or 5th spot in the rotation. Pedro Martinez and Mark Prior just seem like big injury risks that the Sox wouldn’t want to take. Yes, there’s the possibility of hoping they hold up for half a season until Jose Contreras gets back, but there’s no guarantee that he’ll even be effective upon his return. So unless the Sox pull a 180 and decide to spend some coin, it doesn’t look like the rotation is going to receive that much help unless it’s via trade (ie the Dye for Homer Bailey trade). Unless the Sox can pull two rabbits out of the hat like they did with Floyd and Danks last year, we all may be doomed to 5th starter hell which plagued the Sox in the earlier part of the decade.