Essentially, this methodology is a way to break down player contributions in terms of wins and losses. Using WPA ensures that you get the entire team total to add up to the team’s win-loss record, but then you cannot adjust for things like position and defense, which of course hold value. We can use WAR (used here from FanGraphs for ease) to adjust for those things, but then we lose the ability for the entire thing  to add up to seasonal win-loss records.

Without further ado, here are your results:

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Let’s get this out of the way immediately: the Marlins will not promote Stanton until the end of this year unless there are some extremely dire injuries. The team does not need to get Stanton up here with Chris Coghlan, Cody Ross, and Cameron Maybin already in the big leagues.

But, let’s consider a promotion for Stanton from the developmental side. What does the past say young players out of high school who are promoted as quickly as Heyward was and as Stanton may yet be?

I took a look at all high school position players drafted in the first round from 1990 to 2004. In an attempt to homogenize the talent level of the selected players (I’ll explain why later on), I weeded out any draftees who were not ranked in the top 50 of Baseball America’s prospect rankings at some point during their minor league career. This gave me a sample of 57 players. I then split these players into two groups:

Group A: Players who received a call-up and at least 400 PA before their fifth year since their draft. For example, a player drafted in 1990 would have to have at least 400 PA by the end of the 1994 season to qualify for this group. Stanton would qualify if he could get 400 PA by next year, 2011.

Group B: Players who received at least 400 PA in their career.

There were 20 players in Group A and 27 players in Group B. Group A totaled 91959 PA over their careers, while Group B totaled 89531. I then took the career WAR up to 2009 for each player in either group and figured out a rate stat of WAR/700 PA to compare the two groups.

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But FishStripes regular 3.3seconds has made mention in more than a few occasions that Pinto has been effective as a pitcher, citing his career batting line against of .222/.349/.352 as a display of effectiveness. Certainly that line is solid for a pitcher, but much of that is a part of pitching and not necessarily his own pitching. For his career, Pinto has posted a BABIP of .271, way below the league average of .300. We know that pitchers have very little control over BABIP, meaning that we would expect Pinto to regress plenty towards that average of .300. But how much has that difference really helped Pinto?

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San Diego Padres (11-7) @ Florida Marlins, April 26-28, Games 20-22

NL East Standings

Stadium: Sun Life Stadium
Five-year Run PF*: 0.99
Five-year HR PF*: 0.97
Stadium Dimensions:
Left Field: 330 ft.
Left-Center: 361
Center Field: 404
Right-Center: 361
Right Field: 345

*Five-year regressed park factors provided by Patriot here

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