The Fourth Outfielder Baseball Blog

In this morning’s Around the Majors over at The Hardball Times, Lee Sinnis noted that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports the Dodgers are interested in acquiring Jason Kendall. Here’s the original (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04241/369318.stm, 8/28/04):

Another player who was placed on waivers is Jason Kendall, and the Dodgers have
expressed interest in acquiring him, just as they did before the non-waiver
deadline July 31. However, sources said a trade, if one happens, would more
likely occur in the offseason.

Kendall will earn about $1.6 million for the rest of this year. He’s on the hook for 10, 11, and 13 million dollars for 2005, 2006, and 2007, respectively. I have no good idea how much of that the Dodgers would have to take on in any of those years in a trade.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that they trade David Ross and Chuck Tiffany to the Pirates for Jason Kendall and the Pirates pay about a third of Kendall’s salary in each of those years so that the Dodgers owe Kendall $23 million for 2005-2007, plus $1 million for the rest of 2004. From a Pittsburgh point of view, this is a good deal, and I can’t imagine them turning something like that down.

Right now, the Dodgers catcher situation is slightly above replacement level. Using Wins Above Replacement (WARP1) from Baseball Prospectus, which measures both offensive and defensive contribution, Brent Mayne is 0.4 wins above replacement level for the year and Dave Ross .6 wins above replacement. That’s one win above replacement over 78 adjusted games at catcher. Kendall has 5.6 wins above replacement in 115 adjusted games. So if Kendall played 25 games over the rest of the regular season (the Dodgers have 32 left), we could expect a contribution of 1.22 WARP vs 0.39 WARP for Dave Ross in that same time, meaning we could expect the Dodgers to finish with one extra win in the standings. With the extra days off in the playoffs, Kendall would play every day and, if the Dodgers were to play the maximum number of playoff games, 19, could contribute an expected 0.92 WARP versus 0.24 WARP for the Mayne/Ross combo. Given the Dodgers’ 5-game lead and that the Padres and Giants are not great bets to outplay the Dodgers over the next month, the extra game advantage is probably not worth much. The real question is how much of a difference Kendall would make in the playoffs.

This is why I need to have a blog. To answer a somewhat simple question like this, I made an entire chart of the WARP for the playoff lineups of each of the likely NL playoff teams. I figured that all of the regular position players would play every game, so I used the Davenport cards at Baseball Prospectus to find each player’s WARP and divided it by AdjG (resulting, basically, in wins per 9 innings). I then totaled each team's WARP/AdjG and multiplied by 5 and by 7 for a 5-game series and a 7-game series (and also by 162 for contrast). Since pitchers don't play every day, I prorated pitching innings by choosng the four likely playoff starters, multiplying their WARP/AdjG by their IP/GS and dividing by 9 and then dividing by four (since there are four starters, and though starting distribution is uneven over the course of the series this is still a roughly accurate snapshot). That left several extra innings of pitching per game, and I arbitrarily assigned inning workloads to each relief pitcher based on their past workload and how I expected they'd be used. The innings were assigned so that a team would total nine innings of pitching per game-- that is, the sum of the coefficients of each players WARP/Gm would be 1. Yes, I probably made that more confusing just now, but if you have questions about my methodology email me and I'll send you the Excel file. Here are the numbers:

Cubs	Wins/Game		Braves	Wins/Game
Barrett	0.03854		Estrada	0.048626
Lee	0.05309		LaRoche/Franco	0.020513
Grudz/Walker	0.044481		Giles	0.053797
Ramirez	0.048869		C. Jones	0.043478
Garciaparra	0.059701		Furcal	0.058883
Alou	0.038396		Thomas/Marrero	0.060606
Patterson	0.048093		A.Jones	0.051071
Sosa	0.052128		Drew	0.078924
Hawkins	0.046914		Smoltz	0.049123
Mercker	0.019048		Reitsma	0.023111
Remlinger	0.009877		Alfonseca	0.031746
Rusch	0.005848		Cruz	0.017361
Wood	0.050737		Wright	0.039886
Zambrano	0.056913		Ortiz	0.035706
Clement	0.046388		Byrd	0.035269
Maddux	0.035897		Hampton	0.020788
Total	0.654918		Total	0.668888
5-game wins	3.27459		5-game wins	3.34444
7-game wins	4.584426		7-game wins	4.682216
162-game wins	106.0967		162-game wins	108.3598
Cardinals	Wins/Game		Dodgers	Wins/Game	Kendall wins/G
Matheny	0.018757		Ross/Mayne	0.012821	0.04861
Pujols	0.07853		Choi	0.04385
Womack	0.031		Cora	0.055499
Rolen	0.082508		Beltre	0.08516
Renteria	0.035294		Izturis	0.038057
Sanders	0.039953		Green	0.028902
Edmonds	0.094488		Bradley	0.054665
Walker	0.067039		Finley	0.038211
Isringhausen	0.054444		Gagne	0.081429
King	0.025455		Brazoban	0.014286
Tavarez	0.038596		Carrara	0.035613
Kline	0.024691		Alvarez	0.006403
Eldred	0.001852		Sanchez	0.002315
Marquis	0.03098		Perez	0.017302
Carpenter	0.03219		Weaver	0.033757
Suppan	0.018988		Penny	0.045232
Williams	0.019987		Lima	0.018986
Total	0.694754		Total	0.612488	0.64828
5-game wins	3.473768		5-game wins	3.06244	3.24139
7-game wins	4.863276		7-game wins	4.287416	4.53795
162-game wins	112.5501		% improvement		5.84348
			162-game wins	99.22306	105.021

It should be fairly obvious that this is nothing more than an educated snapshot, but it's probably pretty useful. Remember, this is a projection of how successful teams would be in the playoffs using playoff lineups and rotations (I didn't work pinch hitting in, but I don't think there are any real standout pinch hitters). As it stands, the Cardinals are substantially better than the other teams, the Braves are second best, the Cubs just behind them, and the Dodgers are the worst team. With the projected value of Kendall, however, the Dodgers close most of the gap. Here are the estimated win percentages for the Dodgers against each opponent, with and without Kendall:

Without Kendall	WPCT		With Kendall	WPCT
Cubs	0.46761		Cubs	0.494932
Braves	0.45784		Braves	0.484595
Cardinals	0.44079		Cardinals	0.466554

Is getting just under 6% better worth taking on a million in payroll and giving up David Ross' potential? I feel much less sure about this than I did about the A's in my Jeff Kent post. The Dodgers stand to improve about 5.8% by increasing their payroll (in our hypothetical situation) by about a million from its current 90-100 million figure (I would get a more exact figure but I haven't seen the amounts of cash that changed hands in the D'backs and Marlins deals). So a 1% increase in payroll could yield a 5.8% increase in results. I think that, all else being equal, that is certainly a good deal (compare to the A's and Kent: a ~2% increase in results with a 3% increase in payroll). All else may not, however, be equal; in part 2 I'll look at the effects of acquiring Jason Kendall for 2005-2007.