Yes, because neither of them are close to the sort of return you’d want for a player playing their position, and right-handed pull hitters who are statues defensively are poor fits for Safeco. I’d rather do Dave’s plan. You’re wasting money on both of them, but I have more use for a utility IF/OF in a decline phase than a 1B in a decline phase.

Their stats certainly do — but that’s not telling us that their performance is.

Ah, performance divorced from statistics. Maybe we can start talking about what makes for good team chemistry, too, if we’re going to divorce ourselves from any discussion of things we can objectively analyze.

Also, your hypothesis is “There aren’t big declines; people just leave baseball when they have a flukey bad year in the course of gradual decline.” There’s also the hypothesis of “People leave baseball when they have big declines”. How would you test between these hypotheses? And if you can’t, you can’t SAY one is more true than the other, can you?

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=7000

Sorry, it’s probably the pay part. I’ll qouthe,
“Me, I’d rather see the Mariners make Jose Vidro disappear, give most of the DH at-bats to Raul Ibañez, and play Balentien and Jones in the outfield“.

I’ll give her credit. She does advocate removing Vidro and setting Raul in at DH. Maybe she is reading??

So again — where are these great studies you said exist that prove player performance doesn’t deteriorate suddenly, so I can go check them out?

Their stats certainly do — but that’s not telling us that their performance is. Age-related studies are incredibly, incredibly difficult to do in a way that returns data where you can be confident in what it’s telling you. There is just too much selective sampling being forced into the study.

So let me ask you. When is a player most likely to leave the game? Well, there can be different reasons why, and that affects when any one player leaves the game, but I’d have to guess that it’s much more likely to happen after the player has had a bad year. That’s probably not too surprising. Either the player himself decides that he’s had enough and it’s time to hang it up, or no team is interested in his services anymore. Because if a player’s going good, they’re generally going to want to stick around a bit longer and there are going to be teams that want them. It’s usually not till their numbers decline that they stop playing. So you do an aging study and you find out that, what do you know?, players at the end of their careers seem to deteriorate dramatically. But that’s just an artifice created by selective sampling. You see the problem?

I’m pretty sure it was Tangotiger that said that we don’t have the luxury of seeing all players play for 2-3000 at bats every year from the time they are 17 until they are 45 so we can get a totally accurate picture of how players age. There is just so much bias and selective sampling employed by Major League teams to trust that you can assume that any one study is telling you what it’s supposed to. There’s no reason at all to think that, in actuality, players true talent levels deteriorate dramatically all of a sudden. It’s only the way it’s perceived to happen.

I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.

There’s a huge amount of variability in player careers. Many players stave off decline from year to year, many suffer huge declines. Happens all the time.

As a group, certainly, the decline is gentle, but there’s also a selection bias there… but ignore that for a second. Given any player over the age of 27, there’s a chance they’ll have an up season, a down season, a normal season, a shockingly great one, and a decline. All of these happen more than you give them credit.

In the decline phase of a player’s career, a dramatic year-to-year decline often ends their career.

In other words, ball players don’t just “lose it” from one season to the next. Well, at least not if they’re keeping themselves in shape, they haven’t had a career-altering injury, they don’t practice bad lifestyle decisions, etc. There are certainly times when players would fall under one of those categories. But that’s the exception and we usually know about these things.

This just isn’t true. It happens all the time.

I don’t know what studies you’re reading, but there’s massively more player performance variation season-to-season in their career, and players can and do, indeed, fall off a cliff one year.

Well, #1, I’m not ignoring Sexson’s most recent performance. But I’m also looking at it in the perspective of his career as a whole, which tells me a heck of a lot more than just one year does. And I’m not exactly sure what you’re point is about Ray Durham. I’m not ignoring his most recent year, I also consider it in perspective of his whole career. Ray Durham has a 103 OPS+ for his career. In 2006, it was 126. In 2007, it was 65. He also has experienced pretty wild swings the last two years, but the average of the two is pretty much in line with what you’d expect from a guy that’s in his mid thirties and has an OPS+ for his career of 103. Now you can go ahead and believe that 2006 is closer to his true talent level than 2007 is, if that’s what you’re trying to say, but myself, I find that hard to agree with. Going forward, somewhere in the low 90’s seems reasonable to expect. I’m not at all familiar with his current defensive proficiency, but unless he’s at least average for a second baseman, he doesn’t hold a whole lot of value for a team. He’s still got a place in Major League Baseball, but would you really rather pay Durham $11.5 MM rather than Richie Sexson $14 MM?

Jeff Cirillo, Scott Spiezio and every player who started a decline phase say “Hi” to you. There are plenty of hitters who start working their way out of the league in their early 30’s, and there is nothing that says the decline has to be gradual

Well, yes there is. The vast majority of players do not suffer precipitous declines in performance during their decline phase. We know this from the many age-related decline studies that have been done. Since you can’t look at any one player’s numbers and know whether you’re looking at reliable information that tells you anything about his decline, we can look at huge numbers of players and make good conclusions from that large data set. With the caveat, of course, that the study is done well with a good design and precepts. What those studies have been telling us is that baseball players, in the absence of factors such as injury, debilitating illness, lifestyle habits, or lack of conditioning, do not suffer huge declines in true talent level or performance from one year to the next. So when you see numbers that suggest to you that a player has done otherwise, you should be mighty skeptical about coming to that conclusion.

In other words, ball players don’t just “lose it” from one season to the next. Well, at least not if they’re keeping themselves in shape, they haven’t had a career-altering injury, they don’t practice bad lifestyle decisions, etc. There are certainly times when players would fall under one of those categories. But that’s the exception and we usually know about these things. But nothing that I at least know of about Sexson suggests that any of those are true about him. Maybe something is wonky with him and he just can’t play like he used to, but like I said, in the absense of any knowledge of something like that, I’d be pretty dang skeptical of coming to that conlusion about him.

Much more likely that he was the recipient of what you might call negative random occurence, and we should expect a return to more normal levels for him next year.

And honestly, you can’t just bring up one or two names and point to them and go “aha!” That’s ecological fallacy taken to it’s most extreme. Every player is an individual, and trying to look at one certain player to discern something about one other particular player is just, quite frankly, bad baseball analysis. It’s much more informative to look at large groups of people to try to understand trends as a whole, with the understanding that while these trends apply to the majority of players, it’s not going to necessarily apply to every individual.

A below-average 1B has very little value, because it’s relatively easy to find 1B who can hit decently and not be horrible defensively.

If this is true (and I believe that it is), why don’t we have one in our minor league system? Or is there, that I’m not aware of?

If I can clear up salary for 2009, sure, why not? Washburn just isn’t very good for the premium salary in terms of years/dollars he commands. Let Philly deal with the downside risk of the rest of his multiyear deal.

As far as Sexson goes, you’re puting to much emphasis on short term results. The guy’s been an excellent hitter for the bulk of his career, and will almost certainly hit near his career levels next year. Can’t understand why people think he’s somehow forgotten how to be a good hitter.

Again, Sexson’s career OPS is around .850. His performance was below that in 2006 AND 2007, and for 9 months of the past 12 Richie Sexson played baseball, he basically hit like Willie Bloomquist, and spent 3 months hitting like Richie Sexson. It’s not a one year fluke. He’s been a drag on the offense for a season and a half.

Besides, your argument is that we should ignore Richie Sexson’s most recent performance when we assess his value- so why shouldn’t we ignore Ray Durham’s most recent performance when we figure HIS value? Ray Durham was a better hitter in 2006 than Richie Sexson was (.293/.360/.538 as opposed to .264/.338/.504). Or does this argument only work for Richie Sexson?

It’s a highly unusual thing to see a player’s production vary so much in one season.

Jeff Cirillo, Scott Spiezio and every player who started a decline phase say “Hi” to you. There are plenty of hitters who start working their way out of the league in their early 30’s, and there is nothing that says the decline has to be gradual- especially when Richie Sexson’s stock in trade boils down to mashing pitches into the bleachers and doesn’t include foot speed, particularly good strike zone judgment or coverage.

What I am arguing is that he has value, and it seems counter-productive to trade him off without getting some reasonable value in return.

A below-average 1B has very little value, because it’s relatively easy to find 1B who can hit decently and not be horrible defensively. A backup plan at 2B for Belliard who could also fill in in the OF (basically, a Mark McLemore type) is fine for the return on value.

Usually, for most players, I think that would be true. But Richie Sexson’s season last year was far from usual for him, or for any player. It’s a highly unusual thing to see a player’s production vary so much in one season. We normally do see considerable variance from players year-to-year, but what he did last year was well beyond the norm. And that three year average does put him at .815 OPS, which is certainly within the range of what I would expect from him next year. I’d probably expect a little bit higher, but somewhere between .800 and .870 seems most reasonable.

Maybe you think I’m arguing that he’s going to be an above-average firstbaseman next year. Well, no, I don’t think that. His defense is pretty bad, and if he’s around league-average hitting wise, that makes the whole package somewhat below average. But it’s because of the defense, not the offense. What I am arguing is that he has value, and it seems counter-productive to trade him off without getting some reasonable value in return. We are going to need a firstbaseman next year, no? If we can find one that’s better than Sexson that we can reasonably acquire, I’d be all for it. But if we were to find that guy, why not just move Sexson to DH where he has plus value to a team?