After reading Rick Hummel’s insightful piece on the Brewers’ fates this winter, which included signing Braden Looper to a one-year, $4.7-million deal, we pondered the decisions that Looper’s old team, the Cardinals, has made over the last three months. Hummel quotes Looper as saying that the Cardinals’ rotation “would be better with me than without me. But that’s just me.”

Perhaps, though, it’s more than just Looper. Given that the Cardinals are lining up their season with Joel “Give me the damn ball, Jose” Pineiro as their fifth starter, and that the team just paid Adam Kennedy $4 million to try out for another club, would the Cardinals simply have been better off keeping Kennedy and signing Looper?

It’s a false choice and academic, of course, since the move to cut Kennedy was probably more personal than strategic and that the two moves are basically unrelated. But let’s just see if the Cardinals might’ve gained by playing their cards a little differently this winter. With a roster now that features Pineiro as the fifth starter and someone other than Kennedy at second, the Cardinals can figure on Pineiro pitching around 130 innings with a 4.74 ERA. And if Skip Schumaker can make it through camp without embarrassing himself at second base, he stands to receive the plurality, if not majority, of plate appearances at the position. Plugging some projections into the fabulous Sky Kalkman WAR spreadsheet yields the following:

That configuration yields 1.9 Wins Above Replacement. Now let’s pretend that the Cardinals had kept Kennedy and signed Looper, pushing Pineiro to the bullpen. While it would undoubtedly create two clubhouse headaches (imagine the response if Pineiro missed out on both Puerto Rico’s and St. Louis’s starting rotations), would it also create more wins? Kennedy would probably take the lion’s share of PAs at second, while Pineiro would probably get a boost in his ERA from not being overexposed as a starter, so we’ll shave a half point from his ERA:

Grand total for the what-if configuration with Looper? 2.0 WAR. These are merely estimates and projections, of course, but the general idea is clear: Signing Looper wouldn’t have made that much difference (by the way, John Mozeliak deserves credit for not offering arbitration to Looper, after all). Similarly, keeping Kennedy wasn’t going to help much, if any. So if the Cardinals can receive roughly the same production from a better-contented bunch of players (though Pineiro bears watching), it’s probably just as well that they’re going to play their current hand. Now if only Joel Pineiro can pitch well enough to avoid have to talk.

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 12:31 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.