Quote:
Originally Posted by duncan_idaho
Also: Man, 5 wins might be a stretch to swing for Gorman, Nunez, and Montero. All have questionable gloves, which doesn’t give you much margin. You have to be a superstar, all-around hitter to get to 5 without help from your glove and legs.
Carlson might actually be the best bet for that. I like him a ton (but I’m also a sucker for do-it-all OF, especially switch hitters).
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Y'all seem to forget that I'm much more careful than you give me credit for.
I said '5 win
bat'. That means a bat that could yield a 5 win player. Matt Carpenter's glove/baserunning sucks bawls but on 3 occasions he's been roughly a 5 win player. Those years were driven by his offense and generally credible defensive play at positions that give him just enough of a positional adjustment to boost him the rest of the way.
I figure a neutral defender/baserunner can be at/near 5 wins w/ a WRC+ in the neighborhood of, what, 145? Seem fair?
All four of those guys have the potential to develop into a hitter than can hit that mark.
Look at it this way - from 2011-2013 Allen Craig had a WRC+ of 139. Would you say that those 4 guys I mentioned have the potential to be, say, 10% better than Craig was over that period of time? They'd get there in different ways (Torres excluded, who may be EXACTLY that kind of hitter if he continues on his present course), but if you pare that development down and 1 of them makes it to his top 20% projection, isn't that the kind of bat you're looking at?
Craig was never a 5 win player due to injury issues and negative defensive adjustments (I think all 4 of those guys profile better defensively than Craig, who was not quite Jose Martinez out there, but he made Matt Adams appear look like a MASSIVE improvement at 1b and was only a marginal upgrade on Matt Holliday in the OF). And I wouldn't say he QUITE reached the level of a 5 win bat. But I'd say he's pretty close and with a little bit of improvement on who he was over that 3 year period, you get to what I would call a 5 win bat.
Any of those 4 guys is capable of that. Which was precisely my point from the jump. I'm not saying all 4 of those guys are going to be dude's capable of getting MVP votes in any given year. I'm saying that with 4 of those dudes, you can be a lot more comfortable that at least ONE of them will be that kind of player and maybe another settles into a solid complementary lineup piece.