There's been a lot of talk lately about how slow free-agency has been. It certainly does seem to be slow, and of course, there has to be speculation as to why. Some are citing the economy of course, but others, including unnamed general managers, are speculating that the movement is slow on certain players because front offices are finally learning how to properly evaluate players.
"There's no question this is a dual market situation," says one GM. "The corner bat/DH market is flooded, and the stock market is drowning. Not a good combination, not when pitching rules the market."
"The other thing is that teams are moving away from the base offensive statistics," says another GM. "They are pouring through defensive studies and seeing that below-average defenders like Ramirez and Burrell in the field depreciate their offensive numbers because of what they give up."
Welcome to 2004.
Back to Burrell. Depending upon how you slice it [I chose wOBA], Pat Burrell was w
orth 20 to 25 offensive runs above average in 2008. Sounds good. But when you offset this by his defensive performance, 18 runs below average as estimated using David Pinto's Probabilistic Model of Range, Burrell's overall run value takes quite a hit. Now we're talking more like two to seven runs of overall value above average. Let's call it five.
Five runs above average isn't that hard to replace and maybe even exceed. If the Phillies choose to go with a classic right/left platoon situation, the two players will almost certainly combine to offer significantly greater defensive performance and it isn't hard to imagine that they will combine to match or come very close to Burrell's offensive performance.
And, the two players will also probably combine to earn less in salary than Burrell will. If Geoff Jenkins is the left-handed portion of the platoon, and you combine his $6 million salary with another $6 million salary to employ the other half of the platoon, you're still less than Burrell's likely salary for 2009.
This isn't to say that the Phillies shouldn't try to bring back Burrell. Why have two players do a job that you can have one player do? However, when you really add up the numbers as we've done here, it just doesn't make sense to throw the kitchen sink at Burrell to keep him here as some would have the Phillies do.
