CHONE!!!

First off a hello to all you PAH9ers; second, thanks to Erik for letting me tag along over here.

For those that haven’t heard of me I used to write here.  I’ll basically be doing the same thing over here that I did over there, which means a steady diet of numbers, graphs, and pitch f/x.  Some of it will be broad spectrum, but most of it will be Cards focused (or at least brought back to the Cards).  Now back to your regularly scheduled analysis.

CHONE projections for hitters are out, so now we can provide another piece of the 2010 projected value puzzle.  First just a quick table of the “relevant” Cardinals and their projected wOBA (for full stat lines go poke around the linked site)

Name	2010 Projected wOBA
Albert Pujols	0.433
Ryan Ludwick	0.356
Colby Rasmus	0.334
Skip Schumaker	0.330
Yadier Molina	0.329
Brendan Ryan	0.310
Julio Lugo	0.311
Allen Craig	0.346
David Freese	0.337

It’s good (but maybe overly optimistic?) to see both Freese and Craig come out as better than league average performers offensively. That really bodes well for Freese as all signs point to him being a capable (i.e. league average-ish defender).  It’s much less stellar to see Boog so low.

Keep reading after the jump for some FA projections along with a little more Cards analysis

Cards WAR 2.0

I tweaked the original a bit and came up with exactly 87 wins this time.

• This time I used CHONE projections. For some of the more optimistic projections, I scaled down some, as in the case of Molina, Greene.
• For the pitchers, I used FIP instead of their projected ERAs. I then shaved off a .1 or .2 up or down, depending on the pitcher.

It’s not quite a perfect world scenario, but it does assume everyone but Carpenter remains healthy, so feel free to shave off 2-3 wins in your mind.

You’ll notice there are four tabs.  The 2nd tab I added Orlando Hudson and Randy Wolf.  John Perrotto today said that Hudson has received zero offers to this point and the poor team Nats are biding their time, hoping to scoop him up on the cheap for a 1 year, incentive-laced deal.  I would think the O-Dawg would prefer St. Louis, if the Cardinals are interested.  The downside: He’s a type A, which will make liveblogging the draft over at FR a real bore, at the minimum.  His projection of 2.4 WAR also concludes he’ll bounce back some defensively.

Derrick Goold also earlier in the week tweeted that the Cards are interested in Oliver Perez and Randy Wolf.  Ollie is still probably priced out of the Cards’ budget, while Wolf is more of an injury risk and should come for less $/yrs.  Goold also said the market may push Jon Garland their way.  Bah.  They may as well have offered Looper arbitration.  All three pitchers project to be around equal value, and again, if all goes well, then O-Dawg +  either Perez/Wolf/Looper/Garland could push the Cards up to 90 wins.

The third scenario is the Summer of Colby.  Pushing Luddy to LF, Slick Rick to RF and assuming Colby will provide some darn good defense in CF  bumps the Cards to 88 wins without adding anyone.  (87.7 to be exact)  Combine this w/ the “sign free agents” scenario and it might do the trick. 

The final tab is the ever hopeful, no moves, 90 win tab.  That’s the dreamland scenario of Carpenter winning the comeback player of the year award and Colby having a ROY campaign of a season.   Hope springs eternal.