The Depth Thing: Kind of Depressing

Live Feed

FanSided

Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs.com posted a story on Monday entitled: “

A Quick Attempted Measure of Team Depth

“.  The idea behind this was to make an attempt to determine how much each team might be dependent on its starting players to carry its offense through this next season.

In doing this, Jeff used the production projections provided by steamerprojections.com for 2015.  These are generally optimistic (based on a full season), and are based on assumptions that become less assured as you move further down the bench.  Nonetheless, even if your team’s assumptions are bad, they’re also bad in the same manner for other teams, so we proceed with caution while noting that comparisons are effectively made between bad apples and other bad apples.

Methodology

Sullivan noted how many different players per team were being projected to finish the 2015 season with 1.0 WAR or better.  Not a high bar to climb, and probably a good bar to use, given the source material.

His premise was this:  how immune to injuries would teams be if a top performer were to go down for the season?

His chart is reproduced below:

Jeff Sullivan, fangraphs.com

Yes, that projects that 24 of the 25 players on the Boston Red Sox roster will produce 1+ WAR over the course of 2015.  This means that short of the team bus running off a bridge somewhere, this team is very well protected against the occasional injury.

NL East Impact

Interestingly, check the positions of the NL East teams in this chart:

• Nationals (14)
• Mets (13)
• Marlins (12)
• Braves (8)
• Phillies (7)

… all of them in the bottom half.  Huh.  That means each team is more susceptible to seeing problems if key-contributor injuries crop up.  It will be something to watch as we go forward.

Note that not all of those figures are equal.  Here’s the specifics on the Braves’ projections (don’t focus on the numbers themselves – they are mostly for comparison purposes):

• Andrelton Simmons (4.1) (mostly via defense, of course)
• Freddie Freeman (3.8)
• Evan Gattis (1.0)
• Nick Markakis (1.0)
• Alex Wood (2.2)
• Julio Teheran (1.9)
• Craig Kimbrel (1.5)
• Mike Minor (1.1)
• Daniel Winkler (1.1)

3 position players and 6 pitchers.  However, one of those names is not like the others.  The inclusion of Winkler (who allegedly will go 12-13 with a 4.85 ERA over 200 innings) is ludicrous.  He might not throw 1 inning in 2015 at the major league level as he rehabs from Tommy John surgery.

So that’s really just 8 players projected to 1+ WAR, and appears to be correct via the chart.

Additionally, you’ll note the dearth of offensive production:  Just 4 Braves’ position players forecast for 1 WAR or better… and 3 with emphasis on offense.  This means Atlanta is highly dependent on these few for offense generation in 2015.

The Upshot

So when reviewing the data, Sullivan had this summary comment:

"“The Phillies and Braves are kind of depressing.”"

The meaning here is that if Atlanta were to lose one of these better performers, we would have very little to fall back upon to compensate for the loss of production.  That’s a difficult pill to swallow.

Teams like the Red Sox or Pirates – they can cover for one another with an incredibly deep bench.  Atlanta?  Not so much – especially on the offense side.  We have very little room for error.

By contrast, I suppose you might turn this around and suggest that if a modest performer is hurt, then anybody else could take over since you weren’t getting that much out of the position anyway.  I somehow don’t think that’s going to be a comforting thought to Braves’ country:  “we suck more, so inserting a new player that also sucks is all good.”

We knew this:  the offense will not have the lustre that we have expected over the prior few pre-seasons.

But we’d also better not lose Freeman, Gattis, or Markakis in the meantime.   [but see below in comments]