Who Should Trade for Pierre Boucher?
Dec 1, 2017 10:15:12 GMT -5
Tim_GiantsGM, FG-Jays-GM, and 8 more like this
Post by MetDaMeats on Dec 1, 2017 10:15:12 GMT -5
I don't know about any of you, but I've been bugging Toronto about the trade availabilty of Pierre Boucher for a while now. And when he posted a willingness to trade the star shortstop a few weeks ago, I underwent massive heart palpitations and had to lay down for a few hours.
Trade chips like these don't come around very often. I'm pretty sure most everyone out there has at least dipped a toe in to see what kind of price a guy like Boucher would command. But that got me thinking; which teams SHOULD be trying to put Pierre Boucher on their team?
To my mind, there are three important variables to consider:
Current SS WAR: How good or bad is your SS situation currently?
SS WAR was a little tricky to calculate. Very few teams had a single SS all year long. So I prorated each SS's WAR by how often they played the position. It's not a perfect system. For instance a player with terrible defense at SS might have a Zone Rating so bad that they put up negative WAR when they play there, but have a positive WAR from their normal position at, (say, second base). In general I'm okay with this discrepancy since a situation like the one I've just described would either lead to A) the player only filling in at SS intermittently or B) the player was there long enough for his poor fielding to effect his overall scores. So, the lowest SS ranking (Detroit at -0.81 WAR) was worth 100 points, and the highest (Minnesota with 7.62 WAR) was rated 0, and everyone else was scored linearly between those values.
As a side note, some of you may point out that you intend to put Boucher at second base, and keep your high quality shortstop. You people are monsters. Get out of my sight.
Win Total: How close were you to making the playoffs last year? Could Boucher be the boost you need?
Again, this had some issues. Should your team try to trade for one of the best SS's available? Sure. We all should. But when you consider Win Total, what you're really asking is who NEEDS Boucher the most. I'm going to say, despite the fact that I'm sure they'd love to add him to the Squad, that the LA Dodgers don't NEED the trade to contend. Similarly, St. Louis might want to trade for him, but it is unlikely that adding Boucher alone will put them in the mix for a playoff spot.
So I fed the win totals into a quadratic formula, where the lowest number of wins (55) AND the highest number of wins (107) would be scored as 0. A score of 100 was given to anyone who was directly between the two (around 80-82 wins). Last year's playoff teams might think that this is biased. Well, I think any year that I don't make the playoffs is biased. So there.
Prospects: Who has the capacity to actually pay the prospect cost for a guy like Boucher.
I'm not a tremendous fan of the Minor League Systems rankings in OOTP. For one thing, they tend to change pretty regularly. Not much to do about that. For another, they tend to discount valuable prospects that are farther from the majors, and recent draftees. However, since Toronto has specifically stated they want prospects who are closer to playing, I took this second aspect to be a feature rather than a bug.
The next big issue was how important prospects should be. I was torn between a calculation where a team without much chance at the playoffs (No offense, but it was St. Louis) would have been ranked highly, vs a calculation where a team with a 0 minor league system rating would be ranked highly. In the end, I decided that every other aspect of this calculation is moot if you can't afford Boucher. My final decision was to split the difference, where your Minor League System score was multiplied 0.6. The only change was that I capped St. Louis at a rating of 100 (they would have had 150 otherwise). That might seem unfair, but let's be honest. The Cardinals have a good thing going with that prospect mountain. I wouldn't mess with it if I were them.
So, below I introduce to you, the latest and greatest stat: The Boucher Rank! Ranging from 0 to 300 it quantifies exactly how much a team should be thinking about trading for Pierre Boucher! SCIENCE!
Trade chips like these don't come around very often. I'm pretty sure most everyone out there has at least dipped a toe in to see what kind of price a guy like Boucher would command. But that got me thinking; which teams SHOULD be trying to put Pierre Boucher on their team?
To my mind, there are three important variables to consider:
Current SS WAR: How good or bad is your SS situation currently?
SS WAR was a little tricky to calculate. Very few teams had a single SS all year long. So I prorated each SS's WAR by how often they played the position. It's not a perfect system. For instance a player with terrible defense at SS might have a Zone Rating so bad that they put up negative WAR when they play there, but have a positive WAR from their normal position at, (say, second base). In general I'm okay with this discrepancy since a situation like the one I've just described would either lead to A) the player only filling in at SS intermittently or B) the player was there long enough for his poor fielding to effect his overall scores. So, the lowest SS ranking (Detroit at -0.81 WAR) was worth 100 points, and the highest (Minnesota with 7.62 WAR) was rated 0, and everyone else was scored linearly between those values.
As a side note, some of you may point out that you intend to put Boucher at second base, and keep your high quality shortstop. You people are monsters. Get out of my sight.
Win Total: How close were you to making the playoffs last year? Could Boucher be the boost you need?
Again, this had some issues. Should your team try to trade for one of the best SS's available? Sure. We all should. But when you consider Win Total, what you're really asking is who NEEDS Boucher the most. I'm going to say, despite the fact that I'm sure they'd love to add him to the Squad, that the LA Dodgers don't NEED the trade to contend. Similarly, St. Louis might want to trade for him, but it is unlikely that adding Boucher alone will put them in the mix for a playoff spot.
So I fed the win totals into a quadratic formula, where the lowest number of wins (55) AND the highest number of wins (107) would be scored as 0. A score of 100 was given to anyone who was directly between the two (around 80-82 wins). Last year's playoff teams might think that this is biased. Well, I think any year that I don't make the playoffs is biased. So there.
Prospects: Who has the capacity to actually pay the prospect cost for a guy like Boucher.
I'm not a tremendous fan of the Minor League Systems rankings in OOTP. For one thing, they tend to change pretty regularly. Not much to do about that. For another, they tend to discount valuable prospects that are farther from the majors, and recent draftees. However, since Toronto has specifically stated they want prospects who are closer to playing, I took this second aspect to be a feature rather than a bug.
The next big issue was how important prospects should be. I was torn between a calculation where a team without much chance at the playoffs (No offense, but it was St. Louis) would have been ranked highly, vs a calculation where a team with a 0 minor league system rating would be ranked highly. In the end, I decided that every other aspect of this calculation is moot if you can't afford Boucher. My final decision was to split the difference, where your Minor League System score was multiplied 0.6. The only change was that I capped St. Louis at a rating of 100 (they would have had 150 otherwise). That might seem unfair, but let's be honest. The Cardinals have a good thing going with that prospect mountain. I wouldn't mess with it if I were them.
So, below I introduce to you, the latest and greatest stat: The Boucher Rank! Ranging from 0 to 300 it quantifies exactly how much a team should be thinking about trading for Pierre Boucher! SCIENCE!