Angel Pagan is the #3 ranked free agent outfielder this offseason.
Could any of you have ever imagined this? Me doing a post gathering data from Fangraphs and even using WAR to illustrate the point of this post? Who says you can’t teach an old dog a new trick…
Anyway, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around all these wholesale changes that are apparently coming this offseason according to Sandy Alderson. The Mets GM Sandy always loves to talk about “options” and “possibilities”, and you find him using those words whenever he’s asked about any particular player, in-season and offseason strategies, or just the plan for the future in general.
Last offseason, I considered fixing the bullpen and replacing Reyes at the top of the order as two of our primary objectives. Alderson recently admitted that we failed on both those fronts and even took responsibility for those failures publicly I’m glad he recognized how badly he misfired because it gives me hope that he might get it right this third time around.
So how do we begin to undo this quagmire we now find ourselves in?
I figured the outfield was a good place to start. Two years ago we needed one outfielder, now we need three. Reverse osmosis…
I decided to take a look at who the top outfielders were in this year’s free agent class and the folks at Fangraphs already did all the legwork, so I just gathered some stats put them into a spreadsheet and I couldn’t stop staring at that column that read “WAR”. You see that’s how they rank the best players from the worst player over there. I was feeling a little frisky and said what the heck, lets give some of our readers who are deep into this sabermetric stuff a rare treat this morning.
What surprised me the most as I perused the list of potential outfielders, was how far the quality dropped off after Shane Victorino if you’re using WAR as your magic number.
You have just five outfielders with a WAR above 2.0 in Michael Bourn, Josh Hamilton, Angel Pagan, B.J. Upton and Shane Victorino. After them, the next best outfielder is Reed Johnson who has a 0.9 WAR. By the way, isn’t it ironic that the third best available outfielder this offseason is our old friend Pagan?
Anyway, do you see the Mets going “all-in” on any of those five outfielders? I don’t. Here is what the masses are already saying:
Michael Bourn and Josh Hamilton are too pricey…
Nobody wants an Angel Pagan reunion….
B.J. Upton has a bad attitude and won’t be a good fit…
Shane Victorino should never be allowed to wear a Mets uniform…
It’s funny, but none of that reasoning has anything to do with the player’s actual production, and I always thought acquiring productive players was the goal, but what do I know.
The next best players after those five are Reed Johnson and Rick Ankiel… Really? Yes, Really…
Since I had already done all this research, I thought hey, why don’t we compare the Mets outfielders to these Magnificent Seven if only to see what the disparity was between us and them… If only to see if any of these top seven free agent outfielders would even be an actual improvement over what we have now…
Cover your children’s eyes, this is going to get ugly. Check it out…
Embrace the horror..
Reed Johnson and Rick Ankiel would actually constitute as an improvement over Lucas Duda, Andres Torres, Jordany Valdespin, Jason Bay and Kirk Nieuwenhuis. Wow.
Angel Pagan has a higher WAR than all of the Mets outfielders combined in 2012. All of them!
The only Met of any real value is Scott Hairston, and after the season he’s having, the odds that he’ll be back are about as long as the state of Texas is wide.
The state of the Mets outfield?
It’s a god damned Greek Tragedy….
