Which is the better strategy for building a good team — a “stars and scrubs” approach, or a balanced roster with few stars? Jonah Keri and Neil Paine recently tackled that question for FiveThirtyEight.com, and their answer is a complex one. One can build a good team with either approach, although the “stars and scrubs” strategy might not be financially feasible for many small-market teams. And based on fWAR, the most balanced rosters (such as that of the 1976 Pirates) tend to be much better teams than the most unbalanced rosters (such as that of the 2004 Diamondbacks, which featured Randy Johnson, Brandon Webb and little else). Johnson finished second in Cy Young balloting that year and led the league with 290 strikeouts, and yet the Diamondbacks still finished 51-111, proving pretty clearly that it’s almost impossible for one player to carry an entire 25-man roster. Here are more notes from around baseball.
- The Phillies have suspended outfielder Tyson Gillies for three games for doing damage to a bat rack and wall after striking out four times in a Triple-A game, Matt Gelb of the Inquirer reports. Gillies was one of three players the Phillies acquired when they shipped Cliff Lee to the Mariners in 2009. At 25, he continues to struggle at the Triple-A level and still hasn’t made it to the big leagues.
- The Rockies have placed pitcher Brett Anderson on the 60-day disabled list, Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post tweets. Anderson had surgery on a fractured finger. The Rockies acquired Anderson from the Athletics in December for Drew Pomeranz and Chris Jensen, and it looks like they’re going to get very little out of him in the first half of the season.
Brett Anderson’s baseball reference profile should list his team as the DL. That guy is made of glass.
IMO that’s a pretty poor article from 538. Let’s me down, they often have some interesting stuff, but they go through all that work to make some poor assumptions, and thus you really can’t make a conclusion on which is better based upon what they decided to use. Can’t really use 2 extreme outliers and derive a conclusion from that. There was way too much that they tried to base a conclusion on theories built on top of theories, you can’t derive anything from this because all sorts of teams are mixed together and nothing is based in reality. A 5 WAR player surrounded by 1 WAR players should have roughly the same gini as a 10 WAR player surrounded by 2 WAR players, yet would show up as just higher on the y axis, with no change in x The 2004 DBacks had a few really good players, but generally they were awful all around.
Gillies is the headliner for the Phillies (Ruben Amaro) inability to acquire useful prospects in trades. The victorino and pence trades which included 5 prospects now leave us with 2 who still have possibilities to have any success in rosin and Joseph although Joseph has dealt with serious injuries.
Also, look at the gillies trade. Ramirez was released and Aumont is STILL in AAA. we need a GM change more than any team in baseball fast.
Tyson Gillies might never make the bigs if you ask me. His ceiling appears to be Double-A. In 252 ABs at AAA, he is hitting just .214/.279/.310 – hardly major-league quality numbers.
BTW, for the Rockies, what was the corresponding move on the 40-man roster?