Tuesday, April 5, 2011

There is no 'Sizemore' in word 'team'

I enjoy reading Paul Cousineau's posts over at DiaTribe. This week he has a post explaining the importance of Grady Sizemore. In the article, the claim is made that Grady returning to form is enough to make this a winning team.

However, I don't think that the numbers support this. Baseball Prospectus predicts Cleveland will win 74 games. It also predicts Sizemore to have a 2.1 WARP. Sizemore's best WARP was in '07 and was 6.3. So, Sizemore returning to his best performance still only gains the team 4.2 wins. This still leaves us 4 games short of winning season.

According to BP, our problems are at 1B, 2B, 3B, and LF. WARPs at those positions are -0.7, -0.1, 0.0 and 0.0. Our starting rotation has a high WARP of 1.4 (Masterson) and a low of .4 (Carrasco).

My point is that for us to be an above .500 team. We will need Sizemore to return to the player he was and get a breakout from a couple of our young players. I don't think that is beyond the real of possibility. But I do think we are more than one player away right now.

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