Community Projection: Jose Vidro
112 people chimed in, and the results are official – you guys couldn’t hate Jose Vidro any more if he kidnapped your children and sold them to be raised by Britney Spears.
Community Projection: .270/.333/.380, 447 AB, 22 2B, 0 3B, 9 HR, 40 BB, 2 HBP, 51 K
High: .292/.370/.443
Low: .223/.278/.281 (a few were even worse than that but with low PA totals)
Dave: .275/.353/.426
I’m apparently a Vidro optimist, relative to readers of USSM and Lookout Landing, anyways. Of course, I’m projecting a .790 OPS from an aging, overpaid DH, so I don’t think optimist is the right term here. I just don’t think he’ll suck quite as badly as you guys think he’ll suck.
I do wonder if the projection would be as negative if the Mariners had traded Rene Rivera instead of Chris Snelling in the deal. Yes, it was a horrible trade, and no, there’s no defending the transaction, but I do think that perhaps this is more of an angry projection than a consensus of how we actually expect Vidro to hit. He’s not a great hitter by any means, but he’s probably not the .700 OPS scrub that the projection has him pegged for.
His acquisition is already the worst transaction the team has made during Bavasi’s tenure. If he hits anything close to the community projection, it might go down as the worst trade in team history.
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Wow. I gave a similar prediction to Dave, just more doubles and less strikeouts and home runs. I need to stop drinking so much USS Koolaid.
No. No, I don’t.
Another factor: what if he wasn’t being paid $kazillion? The financial cost of having him on the roster might further taint opinion beyond what they gave up.
In reality, he’s not a terrible player. We’re not talking WiBlo here. If he can adapt to the AL, Safeco and being a DH, we should seem him put up decent (but not glorious) numbers.
Well, I suppose that Hargrove will be pleased with lack of strikeouts. If Vidro lives up to (or down to) the community projection, and Broussard is already traded away during Spring Training for some non-40 man roster player, which prospect does Bavasi then trade to replace Vidro? I suppose that I would rather watch Vidro stink up the join rather than have Bavasi add to the Choo-Cabrera-Snelling-Fruto exodus in a desperate attempt to find a competent DH.
I don’t know if the general pessimism isn’t warranted, though – taking an extremely general view, Vidro’s 32, and he’s declined ever since his outstanding 2003 at age 28: he’s lost a lot of playing time and his performance while in the lineup’s suffered, so the team takes up his contract at 32 on the bad end of four seasons of decline. I don’t blame people for not expecting even a dead cat bounce.
Not to Corco the thread, but the OBP is within shouting distance of his last few years. The surprising thing out of any of them is the SLG projection, as that’s a good chunk out of even his 2005 low.
I would guess consensus is that as a righty, the community doesn’t think the power’s going to carry over in Safeco at all – Vidro as Cirillo & others.(I have no idea why I wrote that the consensus would be that as a righty… ignore that)He’s an aging, declining, oft-injured, right-handed, NL player coming to the superior league to play in a park that kills righty power. I like the community projection on this one.
Being the Padawan of Designated Hitting Master Edgar Martinez has to be worth at least a one year plateau in the decline.
Ratewise, the community projection is a dead ringer for Vidro’s median PECOTA forecast. PECOTA’s not angry about the trade, so maybe the crowd isn’t letting the trade bother them that much, either.
Compared to other players in the community projections, it seems like the wisdom of this particular crowd might not have a whole lot of value to add above a generic projection system when we’re talking about someone for which they don’t have a bunch of extra information. I doubt many who submitted predictions have seen Vidro in more than a handful of games in the past couple of seasons, and they probably weren’t paying extra close attention to him, either. I could be mangling the theory here, but it seems like one of the big reasons wisdom of crowds works is because the more information you pump into a projection the better it can be.
On the bright side, we’re predicting him to outhit Scott Spiezio.
Vidro’s a righty? Well, sometimes, I guess.
The surprising thing out of any of them is the SLG projection, as that’s a good chunk out of even his 2005 low.
His line last year was .289/.348/.395. I’d say the projection’s SLG of .380 is within shouting distance too. And if the SLG drops, his BB/PA may drop in tandem, as pitchers do not fear solid singles up the middle.
Okay, but here’s the other projection systems, from Fangraphs:
Bill James: 493 ab, .296/.363/.440
CHONE: 430 ab, .288/.358/.782
Marcel: 439 ab, .282/.346/.415
ZiPS: 387 ab, .279/.344/.382
Of those, Marcel is the closest to eyeballing the last couple of years and making a guess – if fandom was uninformed, that’s where they’d be, not the PECOTA forecast
Not that I think Vidro is going to be anything more than a disaster, but I just wanted to point out that RFK is far far from a hitting paradise. There may be a significant difference in quality of opponent faced in the AL, but park factors may not be as huge as people seem to be making it. That outfield in RFK is an absolute canyon. I’m sure Safeco is tougher on righties but the park factor may be overstated in the projections.
.782 slugging! Wow-a-wee-wa! I know that’s a typo, but could you imagine?
RFK ruined Vidro; he was a completely different hitter on the road than he was at home. I definitely think there’s a backlash bias involved here that skewed the numbers downward a little bit.
I updated my comment in response to S-Mac’s comment – I have no idea why I wrote that, as it’s confusing and wrong, really, in any interpretation
Vidro, home: .272/.333/.362
Vidro, away: .304/.361/.424
I don’t mean to be shameless or anything but linking this is way easier than re-writing my thoughts on the matter.
As a switch hitter, 25-30% of Vidro’s AB at home still will be from the right side, so there will be some Cirillo effect. His SLG last year was .444 against lefties, .376 against righties. And with his legs, I doubt Vidro will attempt to stretch many singles into doubles on balls hit to the right side. A SLG projection a step under .400 is not unreasonable.
I think his batting average is going to be more in line with the other projection systems (.280 to .290), but I also think his power numbers will suffer in Safeco—as I think Derek is indirectly pointing out with the home/away splits from last year. He’s got a good line drive stroke but can’t run well enough any more to leg out any but the deepest doubles, and he isn’t going to reach the left field seats no matter what. Maybe Morse gets some ABs at DH against lefties? Nah, I forgot who our manager is…..(sigh)
I DO think he will put up one of the better OBPs on the team.
I can’t quite say this correctly, but with Vidro I think some of negative energy and “he sucks” mentality affects the projections. Vidro isn’t a horrible hitter or replacement level. He’s just replacement level for a DH. I think we’ll see some of the same with Bloomquist.
I think Dave said that in the original post.
Clearly the godawfulness of the trade are skewing the projections a bit, but I think the experience of the past few years (and their attendant veteran collapses) is playing a role too.
Carl Everett, Rich Aurilia, Bret Boone – we’ve just seen three great object lessons in why averaging the past three seasons for over 30 players isn’t always the best way to project future performance.
In the past two years, Vidro seems to have lost the ability to hit righties. He’s still OK against lefties, putting up an OPS of 800+ in 05 and 06 (but still declining). But against righties, he’s put up lines roughly akin to the community projection. This means that his ‘better’ side is right handed, and we’ve seen what Safeco does to righties. Either he needs to rediscover how to hit from the left side or this projection won’t be TOO pessimistic.
Agreed, he’s not a replacement level hitter, and he still has some value. But I just don’t think his home park struggles are going to be getting any better. He’d be a decent pick-up for someone else (preferably not at the cost of two decent prospects), just not for us.
And I agree that he still may put up one of the better OBPs on the team…and that’s just about as damning a statement about this org as you can get.
Vidro away from RFK was much better it seemed. I guess a major factor will be how he’ll do at the Safe of course. Also, I’m still holding out that we’re smart enough to use Burke and NOT Rivera as the back up catcher.
Fwiw my dad is retired and sell books on the net. He always gives away baseball books to me, like this weekend when I got the 2001 & 2005 Baseball Prospectus. It was pretty cool seeing some guy named Derek Z as one of the authors. Yeah, I realize likely everyone else already knew this…but I thought it was still pretty cool.
Does anyone remember if the M’s pursued Vidro to do this madness or did the Nats sucker us into it?
BTW, I do realize using “pretty cool” in two straight sentences is actually anything but.
Of those, Marcel is the closest to eyeballing the last couple of years and making a guess – if fandom was uninformed, that’s where they’d be, not the PECOTA forecast
Near as I can tell, PECOTA is the best that anyone is currently projecting based solely on statistics. So to me, it represents a sort of limit on what you can do if you base your opinion solely on the numbers. In theory, you can do better than where the stats get you by considering stuff like how Vidro’s swing looks, how fast he looks, etc., etc. That’s the sort of stuff that Mariners fans seemingly wouldn’t have the ability to add into their projections, because they just haven’t observed Vidro that much.
So I’m allowing that they could be very well informed from the standpoint of looking over the numbers, poring over splits, looking at studies on how different players tend to age, etc., etc. In fact, if they’re paying attention here then they probably are fairly aware of a lot of that stuff. I’m just saying that it seems like the crowd has an advantage over PECOTA when it comes to players they are extremely familiar with as compared to players that are coming over in a trade, who they are less familiar with and have basically the same inputs that PECOTA does.
Of course, of all the projection systems, PECOTA seems to be the lowest, so there does seem to be some level of pessimism here.
…
PECOTA incorporates more than raw stats: it’s looking at body type, position, speed score, age, all kinds of good stuff like that. PECOTA arguably has a wider view than a fan armed only with season stats, even with splits etc etc.
Does this mean you think Vidro will be good, or that he’ll suck but the rest of the team will be worse?
I guess I consider that stuff to be “raw stats” in that Nate Silver has quantified the information before sending it through PECOTA. Height, weight, age, the stuff that goes into speed score–that’s all information that I have access to without watching Vidro play. PECOTA is looking at all of those numbers in a refined way, but it doesn’t necessarily know more about Vidro than I know. (I would argue that its biggest advantage is what it knows about players from 10+ years ago much better than I do. PECOTA remembers who Johnny Ray was just as well as it remembers who Jeff Cirillo was. On the other hand, I wouldn’t know about Johnny Ray if it wasn’t for PECOTA.)
Nate Silver made an interesting comment over at The BOOK’s blog the other day:
PECOTA arguably has more stuff to work with than a common fan, but some of that stuff isn’t really helping its predictions very much. There is some information that I think isn’t readily available that would be more useful than some of the extra stuff PECOTA has. Stuff like what specific types of injuries a player has suffered, what pitches he throws, how fast his pitches are, etc. That stuff isn’t necessarily going to be important for any given player, but I think that it can be important for some players. [To be clear, I think the world of PECOTA. Nate Silver's done a lot of great work on it. It's just that, if the Wisdom of Crowds has anything on PECOTA, my intuition is that this is where the crowd's advantage lies.]
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I understand entirely.
This touches an interesting separate line of inquiry here, that I’ve touched on in previous threads: what information do fan projections seem to take into account, and how do they weigh it?
I’d be really interested in taking the fan projections and seeing if they couldn’t be regression-tested to see what seems to make fans participating tick.
No Mariner trade could ever be worse than Lowe/Varitek for Slocumb… unless it was something just so obviously dumb, like Ichiro for Jay Gibbons, Sidney Rleal and cash.
I wouldn’t call my projection pessimistic so much as ‘Vidro doesn’t play well in Safeco unless he’s a power hitting LH bat, and he isn’t.’
I’m disappointed in the trade but not upset by it. On the surface, we traded an injury-prone AAAA OF with promise and a marginal, erratic righthanded reliever for a veteran bat who’s seen better days but can still offer consistent, alright production that the lineup has been missing.
You really don’t want to know what makes me tick…..
#34: My guess is that it has a red digital readout and can only be defused by Sean Connery.
Has anybody looked at the Vidro projections in terms of how they stack up to other DH projections around the league? Whether or not Vidro stinks in the context of his career seems somewhat less important that how he measures out in a league-wide context.
Although, if the Rangers are foolish enough to make Sammy Sosa their DH, that can only boost Vidro’s standing.
Wait just a minute here. Isn’t Guillen for Santiago the worst transaction of the Bavasi era? Or maybe the Spiezio signing?
For instance – Guillen was servicable at SS, coming off freaking TB, and still coming into his prime. And wasn’t even that expensive. To flat out dump him for a marginal at best player was clearly not a baseball move. Even if he stays where he was, it’s a bad deal. I believe that Guillen’s ability to get deep in a count against good pitching was an underrated key to the 2001 offense.
Spiezio was a guy who at best didn’t kill you in a super-utility role in every year but 2002. And they gave him a three-year deal. Going into his 30s. What did they think would happen?
Vidro is not a perfect player, and I didn’t like this deal, but he’s been a league average hitter for a long time. RFK has made him look like he’s in a steeper decline than he is, and if Lopez gets hurt, he can plug in there without killing the team (better than Willie every day, anyway). And in this market, $7M is not crazy for a guy that might hit .290 with 60+ walks. As much as some of the readers have pushed his value up, Snelling is not a lock to have a career at all, and if he starts, Fruto might eat him.
Of course, this is still a bad move. The $16M he’s owed and the vesting option make this a bad deal. And it makes it impossible to get any value out of Broussard, because everyone knows he’s got to be moved now.
Call me an optimist, but I see a Vidro line of around .310 15HR 70RBI and probably more walks than strikeouts. He was leading the NL in batting average for a good portion of the season last year, until the nagging injuries chipped away. Now, are those numbers worthy of the DH spot plus the cost of Snelling? Certainly not, but Vidro is a nice player that will be a good fit in the #2 spot. Again, not where you want to plug in your DH, but he’ll be the right kind of guy to hit behind Ichiro.
Now I know this is certinly ad nauseum, the basic summary of the Vidro hatred is not in Vidro’s poor production, but the fact that this pretty much boils down a challange trade between Vidro and Doyles projected production at the DH spot. You can argue (and probably rightfully so) that Doyle will outproduce Vidro this coming year, and then blow him out of water for atleast the life of Vidros current deal. Besides being younger and cheaper, you can’t even argue that Doyle is more injury prone than Vidro. Not to put words in other community members mouths, but why pay premium for someone to hit for you when you have a perfectly good option in house with significant upside. Unless Vidro somehow becomes an above average DH this year, there is little chance for the Ms to win this trade. Based on context, this would be much more disasterious than a possibly Ichiro trade for scrubs and cash if it is already decided that he won’t be resigning for next year. I feel like this horse is beaten into dust about now
Vidro is not a perfect player, and I didn’t like this deal, but he’s been a league average hitter for a long time. RFK has made him look like he’s in a steeper decline than he is, and if Lopez gets hurt, he can plug in there without killing the team (better than Willie every day, anyway). And in this market, $7M is not crazy for a guy that might hit .290 with 60+ walks. As much as some of the readers have pushed his value up, Snelling is not a lock to have a career at all, and if he starts, Fruto might eat him.
Nope.
Where to start. It’s possible RFK plays a factor in making his numbers look worse than they are, but Safeco isn’t exactly going to help him. Vidro can’t play second; the team would be better off with Bloomquist out there. .290 isn’t out of the question and he might get 60 walks if he could stay healthy all year for a 360 OBP. Stick that with a .420 SLG and it’s a 780 OPS. If he could play good second base, he’d be another Jose Lopez. But a 780 OPS from a DH isn’t anything exciting. That’s not $7M, that’s 700K. Look at the contracts signed by Craig Wilson and Marcus Giles. Plus the Mariners already have Broussard who could put up numbers like that.
If Snelling doesn’t make the Nationals roster, they waive him and the Mariners claim him back, this is still a bad deal.
So typical of USSM fans. If you guys (posters not contributers) don’t like a move you bash the player unrealistically. Vidro has always been a solid hitter, maybe not a prototypical or great DH, but to have him collapse into a low .200 hitter is absurd. The guy always hits around 300 and walks decently. His power is the big question mark. Its just a joke to see this kind of terribly low prediction.
How do you support this statement? We all know that Vidro is practicing fielding in ST. I would think that is with the intent to play on occasion. Is he that much worse of a fielder than Bloom?
The projection has him hitting .270, which is nowhere near a “low .200 hitter”.
Read, then talk.
by posters I meant the lay folk who make up the bulk of the projection not your prediction which was fine…I was talking about the jokers who have him hitting 240 and 230….maybe I mixed up posters/contributers…but the random guys who made up the bulk of the google database were way off base on this guy, he is a good hitter.
If the communtiy projection has him at .270, then the “bulk of the projection” does not have him hitting .230 or .240. Most people had him hitting between .260 and .290.
So typical of USSM fans. If you guys (posters not contributers) don’t like a move you bash the player unrealistically.
Yeah, we are still wiping the egg off our faces from bashing last year’s Washburn and Everett signings.
As Dave says, the bulk of the database HAS to place him around .270—that’s the way the numbers work. (*sigh* Innumerancy, it is rampant…)
Someone’s off base on this guy…but it’s not “the random guys”….
I simply find it outrageous that 55 predicters are putting Vidro to have his worst average(often by a long shot) in the last 8 years. And that his predicted mean average is 31 pts below his career average.
Yes, it’s outrageous that a 32 year old with bad knees switching to a more competitive league might perform worse than he did as a healthy player in his prime.
He’s not the player he was five years ago. You need to get used to that.
Park adjustments (i.e. Montreal)! Age!
I find it outrageous that someone isn’t even considering them. This is basic stuff.
Vidro’s top PECOTA comparables are essentially Tony Fernandez and a bunch of guys who quickly declined from good to mildly useful (or worse) as they entered their mid-30s (Johnny Ray, Tommy Herr, Jeff Cirillo, Mark Loretta).
Why did Johnny Ray absolutely fall off the map so suddenly? Did he get hurt?
I guess I didn’t read long enough….Does that say worst trade in team history? Come on that is unwriteable, giving away a 4th outfielder cannot be the teams worst trade ever. How about Dave Hollins for David Ortiz….That one was a little worse.
There’s a couple parts to that. It doesn’t say it’s the worst trade right now
Ignoring, for a second, your omission of Fruto and your low opinion of Snelling, the team gave up two prospects to take on a massive salary. Dave’s comment was that if Vidro indeed hits to the community projection, it might go down as the worst in team history.
Without knowing the futures of Fruto/Snelling, we obviously can’t know now, but Vidro’s projection if he hits that badly will be arguablly the worst payout the team’s ever made, and trading away anything to get that contract will indeed put it up for consideration as the worst trade. If the two players we gave up become something, that’s even worse.