If the Reds fielding remains at the 09 level its means that Jannish is at SS.
Adam Rosales (he hustles well enough, but you still have to hit to stay in the big leagues). – Somebody needs to tell Jannish this too.

If Gomes Hits and Bruce figures it out (he will), and if Stubbs and Roland stay strong offensively 2010 will be a year of significant improvement..maybe even contending year…

Lots of ifs and of course there’s Always Dusty (The title of the new sit-com I’m working on for obc).

I think its going to come down to several places seeing improvements. Jay Bruce is clearly the biggest one. If he can give up an .850-.875 OPS over 600 PA it goes a long way to helping the offense. At the same time I think Rolen needs to step up his offense. I know he doesn’t have the power he used to, but the guy needs to slug better than .400. Stubbs being a league average center field bat would go a LONG way as well.

Homer Bailey and Johnny Cueto need to give the Reds 175+ innings (175 for Cueto works for me, but I think Bailey is capable of 190-200) innings with an ERA in the 4.15 range between the both of them.

The good thing is, I feel pretty good about most of those things happening.

We might have a shot at challenging for a pennant in ‘10. Fielding has been great. But with the lack of power, gotta try working the small ball. Which is hard when you can’t consistently get on base.

Janish, who has been a solid SS defensively, needs to learn to make contact with the ball, especially against righties, and at least get on base.

Taveras. I don’t even want to go there. He’s overpaid and an underperformer. Unfortunately, we can’t trade him either, since he has no trade value.

I definitely think Jay Bruce needs to get his shit together. Rolen needs to play better, Asking him to play like the old Rolen is asking too much, though.

I can count on Bailey And Cueto to at least pitch decent. Arroyo and Harang will probably play good this year, since they may be both auditioning for other teams. But then, they probably get no run support like last season.

Another thing I noticed in 09, is that when our pitchers pitched good games, we had no run support. that has to change also. I’m tired of losing. Put up with it too long in both baseball and football.

I predict we win about 85 games this year. time to at least post a winning record. If the Bengals can sweep the AFC North, then the Reds can post their first above .500 record in 11 seasons (I can dream, right?)

yes with a maybe. no with a but.

mainly because, short of picking up a good hitting shortstop (cough Hanley Ramirez cough), he is the spot where we are most likely to see the biggest upswing in production (all ifs, buts and caveats apply).

Like Doug said, we should also see improvements in CF, especially if Dusty manages it better by utilizing Dickerson if Stubbs isn’t getting it done or vice versa. I would think that we’d see similar defense there compared to what we got in 2009.

Having Rolen at 3B “all” year will improve the overall defense there, and I wouldn’t expect that he’d hit as poorly as the Reds 3B did before he got here.

We’ll likely see some offensive dropoff from Votto, but hopefully the fickle defensive metric pendulum will swing back in his favor to make up the difference.

BP should be BP.

Janish should be able to give us what we got from Gonzalez, so at least there won’t be a dropoff at shortstop, right?

So, as long as the outfield does its work and Rolen doesn’t fall off of a cliff, I think we should see some improvement over the 2009 offense. Not sure if it will be enough though.

The rough rule of thumb is that one season of hitting data is as reliable as ~3 seasons of fielding data, be it UZR, ZR, RZR, PMR, SAFE, etc. UZR data is repeatable, much more so than BABIP. But there’s a lot of noise in the signal.

The issue of data source is still present. Since Fangraphs buys its data from BIS, and it’s the only supplier of UZR data this point, all of the UZR data you see mentioned are bUZR (UZR from BIS). The correlation between bUZR and sUZR, last I saw this studied, was depressingly low. Apparently, we’re dealing with +-10 feet disparities or more in the outfield, which makes for fairly unstable data. We literally are dealing with stringers just eyeballing where a play was made and then assigning it to a specific zone on a map of the ballpark. No cameras, measuring, etc (yet).

My general recommendation for the best case fielding statistic given what we have available right now is to take the best fielding stat you can get based on BIS data and the best fielding stat you can get based on STATS data and average them. And then take those data and regress them to Fan Scouting Report data.

I didn’t get STATS data incorporated here, mostly because it’s a lot of extra work to covert Zone Rating (the only STATS inc-based fielding stat readily available) to runs and then (especially) get those players to match up to the same players already in my spreadsheets. But I did regress to Fan Scouting Report here. I didn’ t do so in a sophisticated way, but my feeling is that the difference between doing it in sophisticated fashion and the way I did it is a matter of a run or two here and there, at most. And it was a lot easier to do what I did. :)

Fielding stats do figure to get a tremendous boost in accuracy with the advent of the fieldf/x systems over the next few years. There will still be sample size issues, like with pitching stats, but at least the fairly extreme inaccuracy problems will be largely abolished.

As for Willy…the disparity only amounts to 5 runs or so, which isn’t huge. I think Fans tended to be more upset about his lack of ability to take good routes and such to the ball. He was rated as having terrible instincts, sub-par hands, and a sub-par arm. But he was rated as having superb speed. My guess is that, in his case, Fans were more disgusted with his fielding than is really justified. But that’s just a guess—it could be that UZR simply missed high on him this year (after, in my view, missing low on him in previous seasons with COL).
-j

my point was that the past two seasons Dusty has gone way too long with one crappy player in CF when there were reasonable alternatives sitting on the bench or in the minors. I was just saying that if Dusty can avoid that strict loyalty and utilize his quality bench players rather than sticking for too long with a struggling player, he will give the team a better chance of improving over last season. And before you try to tear me a new one, I’m not saying that he should “play the hot hand.” I’m saying that if Stubbs goes 1 for 43 with no walks, like Taveras did, maybe it’s time to change things up a bit.

I think Stubbs will be better than Taveras, but he’s not a prospect on the same level as Jay Bruce and doesn’t deserve the same long leash, in my opinion.

It is widely held that you need 3 years of UZR data go get a good read on someone’s actual defensive value. Which makes it next to worthless, in my mind, because a player’s skills can change over that time.

This is why Justin regresses to the Fans Scouting Report, to help make up for some of that shortcoming in terms of data.

The days of the good glove-not hit SS are long gone. Barry Larkin buried that player prototype, threw some dirt on the grave and peed on it.

as I hear it is that “all walk, little of anything else” hitters in the minors often can’t repeat their success at the major league level because major league pitchers have the ability pound the zone more so than you ever see in the minor leagues. I haven’t seen an objective study on that, however. Hanigan is a fairly similar hitter in that respect, and was essentially replacement level except that he can play behind the plate.

I certainly hope that Stubbs can at least hit like an average replacement player, because his fielding will then make him a legitimate asset in CF. I’ve just never been a big believer in his bat, and the fact that his success last year was due to a strange power surge rather than working his walks doesn’t make me any more optimistic.
-j