25 for 25: Angels

But I made an exception for him because he was a 3-win player, despite only playing a third of a season with you guys. His 2008 was more valuable than any other first baseman season that you’ve had , other than Wally Joyner. Kendry Morales was very good as well, but I needed 2009 for Figgins and 3B.

They were there mostly just to trim out the great majority of the dross. This whole process takes about 8-10 hours per franchise and it would have taken too long to sift through all the data.

If a partial year was genuinely good enough to shine through, I didn’t have a problem including into the mix. This also holds true for worthy 45-50 IP relief seasons.

His season is too far back to be considered for this. I was trying to find a place for him on this squad, but once Chili locked up the DH spot, his outfield seasons since 1985 aren’t good enough to compete with the hest of the era.

He doesn’t really stand up well against the top pitchers earlier in the era (Blyleven, Abbott, Langston, Finley). And he doesn’t have the continued excellence with the club that Lackey did (John had 5 qualifying seasons, compared to 1 for Bartolo, and had three years as good or better than Colon.) If you feel that Colon would be a better choice for the team, it’s easy enough to do a straight switch with Lackey.

But Chuck had a lot of good years, so it worked out well enough when his 5 best seasons got claimed by other players, based on need.

So he wouldn’t be part of this exercise. As for Morales and Aybar, there is only player from each year (plus at least one player from each year), so I’m not sure if you’re just adding them or replacing Figgins in some way. And you can’t exactly have more Vlad (unless you want him to put on weight); any player can only be chosen once, otherwise, all 6 Giants outfielders would be Barry Bonds – and who wants that?

This has been fun to do and tough to accomplish. It’s great to refresh my memory of the players from my old baseball card collections and get a better understanding of who they were. But it’s hard not to have the history of the teams ingrained into me and know who had the greatest impact. (It’s also freeing not to know because I can be objective and not be swayed by popularity and such.)

You actually get a slight improvement going from Cabrera (2.6 WARP1 / 3.8 WAR) to Aybar (2.5 / 4.3). But you take a big hit going from ‘09 Figgins (6.3 / 6.9) to ’07 Chone (1.9 / 2.8). I don’t think that hit is worth the edge you get from making the move at shortstop.

His best years get claimed by other players (‘03 Kennedy, ’02 Eckstein) and by the time I have room for him, he’s not worth it.

Especially when you simplify the stats to WAR/WARP1. Trying to dig through this using traditional counting stats would be madness and while I qualify for that, I just don’t want to waste too much time on this. I’m blowing off enough work at my job as it is doing this; I’d never get anything accomplished.

You should take a look at the extended version I did for the 1910-1934 Cardinals. That one has full backgrounds, pulled off a dozen websites and a couple books, pictures that I was able to find for those old guys, and the write-up with links galore. That was somewhere around 50 hours by itself; it was a bit of a slog – these simple rosters kind of just drive themselves. Once I start doing one, I want to to get it done so I can look back at the team.

But the total package probably put him somewhere in 5th place among the shortstops (Eckstein, Schofield, Aybar, Cabrera, DiSarcina). I always found his name interesting for some reason, though.