People are talking, talking about comeback people… Okay, so we’re not Bonnie Raitt, but, with various teams stumping for their favorite candidates for Comeback Player of the Year, we thought we’d give them something to talk about. Here are a few players that have been unofficially "nominated":

• Jorge Cantu
• Jody Gerut
• Mike Lincoln
• Carlos Delgado
• Brian Moehler
• Fernando Tatis

It is that last candidate who excited us to look into the nominees a bit further. The erstwhile Cardinal third baseman has returned from perhaps more important pursuits and is producing runs at a pace (6.3 RC/G) not seen since his salad days with the Cardinals (8.4 RC/G in 1999). His candidacy also gave us a chance to revisit our criteria for sabermetrically selecting the CPotY, which was admittedly a bit arbitrary.

Using the same working definition — "the Comeback Player of the Year is the once-good player who has the highest ratio of Win Shares from the previous year to the current year" — we’ve come up with a formula that we think works: (Previous-High Win Shares – Previous-Year Win Shares)*(Current-Year Win Shares – Previous-Year Win Shares). With a little more than a month left on the season, here’s where the senior circuit stands:

Fernando looks like he’s going to have a three-way battle with legendary barehand batter Jason Kendall and the resurgent Jorge "Yes he can" Cantu. We may no longer be a Mets fan, but we’ll be cheering for Fernando. After all, you can take the player out of the Cardinals, but you can’t take the Cardinal out of the player.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under analysis, fun. 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.