Before anyone reads Joe Strauss’s article today and cries foul on the Cardinals for not prioritizing Jason Bay, we wanted to dispel a couple of bits of, well, misinformation in Strauss’s dispatch. First is Strauss’s claim that

Bay’s offensive numbers parallel Holliday’s in the last five seasons

A more accurate phrasing would be "Bay’s traditional but ultimately meaningless offensive numbers…" In that case, Bay does indeed look similar to Holliday:

But some more useful offensive statistics show a greater disparity between the two free-agent leftfielders:

And that’s to say nothing of each player’s defensive production, which leads to our next point. Strauss goes on to write

but numerous defensive "metrics" insist Bay is far inferior defensively.

First, why put scare quotes around metrics? That defensive metrics exist isn’t in question; they are actual metrics. This appears to be a case of Strauss, who is on record as doubting the value of certain kinds of quantitatve metrics, projecting his personal views into his news report. But even qualititative (aka, scouting) metrics — such as the Fielding Bible’s 10-member panel — show that Bay is an inferior fielder:

Overall, then, Holliday is clearly in a class above Bay:

That’s not to say that Bay isn’t a good player or won’t provide value in his free-agent contract. But our interpretation of the Cardinals’ position that "he’s not one of [their] top priorities" is merely that he won’t offer the kind of return on investment that makes pursuing him worthwhile, not when the Cardinals would have to outbid Boston for his services. The "If not Holliday, then not Bay" approach makes sense, even if Strauss’s bias doesn’t.

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 12:30 pm 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.