It is over one week into the season but I won’t let that stop from doing one last season preview. In fact, I won’t stop there. I’m going to do a three part series on the subject. In my quest to better understand the serious subject of the NL Central, I created a series of dashboards to get a look at the relative strengths and weaknesses of the NL Central teams. I took the final PECOTA forecast from April 3rd and created a dashboard for position players, starters, and relievers to see the teams in a simple chart. I’ll put up position players today, relievers on Monday, and starters a few days later.
Looking at the total WARP for position players you can see the Cardinals have a big hitting edge at 23.3 WARP. The Reds follow in 2nd (18.6 WARP) followed closely by the Brewers (16.9 WARP) and Cubs (16.4 WARP). As always, Pittsburgh and Houston trail.
A few things I take away from the chart:
- Despite their reputation, the Cardinals don’t seem any more starry or scrubby than the rest of division.
- The Reds have an opportunity in LF to improve. As I talked in my last post this forecast is probably too low. Gomes is looking very good thus far both hitting for power (not surprising) and showing great patience at the plate (surprising). Given plate discipline is driven by approach there is a good chance we'll see a sustainable improvement from Gomes. If not LF is a position we have many options at today with Heisey, Alonso, Lewis, and more.
- The difference makers for the Reds are Votto, Phillips, Catchers, and Bruce. Votto and Bruce for being good. Catchers and Phillips for just not being bad as the rest of the division.
- Third base is a position the division is pretty bunched up on.
- The Pirates are one Overbay short of fielding a decent team on the position player side of the ball.
- Houston is really bad.
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