As it has been noted about a thousand times around here, getting Putz and FranRod does not alone make this off-season a success. Rather, getting only those two and nothing else makes this off-season pretty much a failure.

And, as to Hammer, I don’t dare ink him in as an every-day player in LF right now; I’m just saying that, if he continued to hit and get on base at a clip like he did last season, I could live with him in left this year. It’s not like any other piece we had out there last year was any better.

LOLOLOLOL well done sir, very well done.

Every point of OBP for a player with a bit more speed or a player who can make contact and put a ball up the gap is a bit more valuable, since its worth more than just one base and forces defenses to make plays instead of just advancing runners base to base.

And while Dunn is consistent year to year, I think you’d actually see him drive the Mets to a more inconsistent offensive attack overall. He’ll help you build more big leads and score 7+ runs in a few more games, but it might also mean more games where you only get 1-3 runs of offense and more difficulty manufacturing runs in close games.

Lol exactly

but in this case, GMs aren’t the only people involved. There are lots of people who have access to far more resources than we do.

And yes, I’m very convinced those systems are more advanced than BP, THT, or Beyond the Box Score for two reasons:

1. Of the three, BP is the one I subscribe to, and Will Carrol says teams have more advanced systems in place than BP offers.

2. I know someone who is actually working on one of the next waves of these advanced systems. I won’t give too many details because there’s not much that’s been released about it, but there are agreements in place and the system is being developed by a well known company in the fields of statistical analysis and marketing. Anyway, the way the business model was layed out to me was that the company sells its system to a team or multiple teams, then publishes a watered down version that the public can subscribe to online, much like BP.

That said, the only team that I can confidently say has made the best use of a really advanced analysis system is Boston, but I know there are other teams out there experimenting with it, and the amount of data and resources those teams have dwarfs what we have access to.

But from my view, Tatis and Murphy are both much closer to average runners than Dunn. And this is just one of the many points I’m making here. Its not all about speed, its the fact that Dunn does a few things really, really well and a few other things really, really poorly. The things he does well are the things we tend to use to evaluate hitters by almost exclusively, because the vast majority of hitters have some sort of baseline ability in the other areas of their game. But you can’t do that with Dunn, he doesn’t have those baseline abilities in other areas of his game, you can’t oversimplify his HR and BB totals or tag him with an OPS+ and call it a day. That doesn’t paint the correct picture of what he’s going to do for a team’s overall ability to score runs.

With other hitters OPS+ is a great way of doing a quick, simple evaluation, but most hitters at least have the ability to put the bat on the ball, and most hitters can run a little bit or at the very least hit a ball into the gap every now and then, other hitters can play decent or better defense. All hitters don’t have all of these different skills, but the vast majority at least have some marginal combination of them that Dunn can’t even touch, and when you evaluate a hitter by OPS alone, your assuming that they have about average value in these other areas. That’s how we can get assume such a clear value from OPS, because most hitters just don’t deviate all that far in at least a few of these other areas. Dunn is an exception, and an outlier to common baseball wisdom, and any serious evaluation of him must be treated that way.

Hey, I’m not one to shy from away from someone making a good case, and I appreciate the discussion instead of just getting recycled gossip. I still think I disgree, but particularly point #2 you make is compelling. There is certainly more of a certain kind of risk in going with Tatis and Murphy, but I also don’t think its as great as your estimating. Tatis’ comeback was less of a shock when you look at what he had done in AAA the previous year, the only big surprise was the batting average. He showed lots of power in the year and a half prior to his reemergence with the Mets though. I agree he’s unlikely to repeat his numbers, but at the same time, he’s not some 40 year old veteran like Moises Alou or Jose Valentin. He’s 34 and has productivity in his track record. Murphy on the other hand is also difficult to count on for a repeat performance, but he swings a solid bat and has hitting intelligence to spare. I don’t expect him to be an above average LF, but I do expect him to make plenty of contact and get on base at a reasonable clip. I think, being conservative, expecting .280 / .350 / .470 from them combined, with something in the neighborhood of 20 HR is pretty reasonable. And while the OPS may not be as pretty as Dunn or the HR total, if they do give the Mets that line, I think they’ll score a similar number of total runs.

Don’t forget, this was the second best offense in the NL last year, and they didn’t have nearly as good a solution to LF as Murphy/Tatis to start the year.

As for 2010, that is also a compelling argument, but I still think there are more efficient ways to spend $30 million than bring in Dunn now to protect for 2010. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I’d much rather overspend on Matt Holliday or Jason Bay in 2010 than try and bargain shop on Dunn, who I think the market really is assessing correctly. You have an opportunity to get a similar result for a fraction the cost with Murphy and Tatis. In 2010 you’ll have an opportunity to overspend on improvements, even if the market is thinner, rather than overspend on a lateral move.

are you assuming that Reyes would have Dunn immediately behind him? I feel like the most logical order would be Reyes, Beltran, Wright, Delgado, Dunn, in which case Dunn is behind Delgado and your point seems moot (unless you’re expecting Delgado to steal a bunch of bases this year).

I’m going to contradict what I just said about being done talking about this, because the above makes no sense. There’s no reason at all to suspect that Reyes would wind up with fewer stolen bases with Dunn hitting behind him, because Dunn takes a ton of pitches. If anything he’d steal more bases.

And again, Dunn’s walks hypothetically also move Reyes to second. So while Dunn is a TTO guy and having Reyes on second rather than first isn’t a tremendous marginal improvement during Dunn’s plate appearance, it’s a significant improvement for the other guys hitting after Dunn.

Regarding batting order choices, putting Dunn #6 negates his high OBP by putting him in front of guys who aren’t likely to drive him in. you’re right about Dunn/Delgado type guys hitting #6, you’re better off with someone with better legs down there. (Or better off by having better hitters at the bottom of your lineup rather than offensive black holes like Schneider.)

but maybe you don’t. One of the many weaknesses of a player who only has one or two outstanding skills is that they if one of those skills evaporates or loses its potency for some reason, the player becomes worthless. Look at Andruw Jones. The guy could hit for power and field. His knees started barking, and all of a sudden he was a negative-value hitter and an average-at-best defender.

If for some reason Dunn sees any kind of slight power decline, he could be a lot worse than .240 / .380 / .500. In fact, that’s just about exactly what I’d expect if he’s healthy. Its not at all far from his .236 / .386 / .513 line from 2008, when he split his home games between Great American Bandbox and Chase Playground. And its better than his .234 / .365 / .490 line from 2006. If CitiField plays like the pitchers park many are expecting it to be, your projection might even be slightly optimistic, and certainly not a worst case scenario. A worst case scenario is more like .190 / .350 / .450.

The reason Carlos Beltran can always play through nagging injuries is because he has a variety of skills. He may not have Dunn’s pure power or plate discipline, but he does so many things well that if he loses one of them, he’s still plenty valuable.

Now, Tatis and Murphy are not Carlos Beltran, but they do bring a significantly wider skill base than Dunn. There’s some debate over their relative footspeed, personally I’m convinced that while neither is a particularly good runner, they’ve both easily got a step or two on Dunn. But they also have the ability to make contact with at least average consistency, something Dunn can’t do, and they have plenty of gap power to go around with average HR power between them (Murphy slightly below average, Tatis slightly above)

I do understand I’m putting a lot of faith in two relatively unproven players, but I like what they bring to the table. There are certainly ways to upgrade over them. I would love for the Mets to add someone like Manny. Even though he shares below average defense and speed with Dunn, he makes so much more contact . Honestly, I’d even prefer Bobby Abreu to Dunn. He has the same patience and defensive problems, and while he he has less power, he runs fairly well and makes much better contact. He doesn’t have the sexy HR totals Dunn has, but he’ll quietly give you similar run production by himself, and he would also enhance the elements of the Mets offense (speed, base running, run manufacturing, etc.) that Dunn would depress.