In the wake of the Juan Gonzalez signing, the Cardinals’ outfield situation has become even more muddled, with as many as 10 players coming into camp with a chance of making the 25-man roster. That hasn’t stopped us from trying to figure out the best combination of outfielders.

Assuming that no more than four pure outfielders (and we’ll include Chris Duncan in that list) will make the northbound club, which combinations will yield the best production? We decided to use the newly released PECTOA projections to analyze the best combinations of outfielders. PECOTA doesn’t have numbers for Juan Gonzalez (yet), so we didn’t include him (though with Tony La Russa’s preference for keeping low-upside veterans to big-upside youngsters, he very well could be part of the mix — similarly, that’s also why we did not include Cody Haerther, even though he does have a PECOTA projection). So here’s the group we’re considering, along with their PECOTA numbers:

Given six options and that we need three at a time, that yields 20 possible combinations. Because at least four of the possible outfielders can play all three spots — Ankiel, Barton, Ludwick and Schumaker — all 20 combinations are valid (since each combination will always have someone who can play centerfield). To get a sense of what each threesome can do, we used David Pinto’s Lineup Analysis tool. Now, a lot will depend on platoon advantage, etc., etc., but here’s a rough estimate of how many runs per game — as well as over 162 games — the Cardinal outfield combos will generate:

Per game, of course, the differences are nominal. But over the course of the long season, the difference between the best combination — Duncan, Ankiel, Ludwick — and the worst — Schumaker, Rasmus and Barton — is 46 runs, or around four and a half wins. Still not a huge amount, but one worth considering. To give you a comparison, if Albert Pujols were still an outfielder (or if the team were to have somehow acquired a comparable top-tier outfielder this winter), the best combo would produce around 337 runs, which would be five more wins than the actual best combo of Duncan, Ankiel and Ludwick. The point here is that someone like Juan Gonzalez isn’t going to significantly, or probably even marginally, improve the team.

The flip side of that, then, is that those six outfielders are largely interchangeable; each of the six appears in at least one of the top six combinations. Duncan is clearly the most valuable hitter, but his defense is the most suspect; Schumaker is one of the least potent offensively (at least, according to PECOTA) but has experience and a decent glove. We’re looking forward to seeing how the different platoons perform, and how TLR deploys them. Given La Russa’s pen-management style, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for the team to use 20 different starting-outfield configurations. (We can envision in-season discussions between fans now: "Who’s your favorite outfield combo? Mine’s Duncan-Ludwick-Schumaker!") But can Cardinal Nation tolerate an outfield by committee?

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 11:54 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.