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I am wondering how everyone thinks our two big bats will do in 2024. Obviously if they both have years they are capable of that would go a long way to winning the division. However, I am not expecting that to happen. Here’s my $.02.
Goldschmidt – .262/13/52 and is dealt at the trade deadline.
Arenado – .301/34/110 and is in the hunt for MVP.
Thoughts posters? In my mind they are the keys to the 2024 season.
r/Esteemed Rat
Mr Rats I’m looking for a big bounce-back season from Nado. And I think that after a slow start, Goldy puts together a decent season, say .280 26 HR 90 RBI. However, this will more than likely be Goldy’s swan song as a Cardinal.
Agree that I see Arenado as the guy more likely to have a big season than Goldy.
Goldy has been lost this Spring. But everything starts over on Thursday. I will put them this way as far as batting average, homers and RBI:
Arenado: .277, 31, 96
Goldschmidt: .233, 20, 66 (relatively low RBI total assumes he bats second, which seems to be Marmol’s preferred slot for him. But if he does hit .233 he may end up hitting seventh at some point).Goldy has a long history of slumping badly for one month each season, even back to his Dbacks days. At one point, I recall doing the research and writing about it.
We have to hope that is what happened in March and not a reflection of rapid aging. Or that his walk year contract status is affecting his play…
With Goldy I say he ends up at .268/25/75. Hitting second hurts his RBI numbers.
With Arenado I will go with .270/26/85. Solid numbers but not worth his lofty salary.Just an impression nothing to back it up. I think Goldy was expecting an extension before the season started. He has had a horrible spring but I think once it gets warmer so will he. gscottar predictions look about right.
gscottar,
I hope those aren’t their numbers. If they are we are up to our a$$es in alligators.
r/Esteemed Rat
Rat,
I think Gorman may put up better numbers than either Goldy and Arenado. Guys like Gorman and Walker may be the key to our lineup instead of relying on the old regulars.
With gscottar’s numbers neither would be a bargain. Goldy at $26M and Nolie at $35M is a lot to pay a couple of vets past their prime. But at 33, Arenado should still be pretty good. He was not horrible last year with 26 homers and 93 RBI. I hope he picks it at third more like he has done in his career. He seemed to lose a step last year when playing defense.
Goldy at 36, 37 in September, is getting up there. But he has a lot of professional pride and might just surprise us. Also, he shares a birthday with Roger Maris, which has nothing to do with anything but is kind of a cool trivia stat.
Goldschmidt: .264/22/77
N. Anenado : .266/26/93I’ve got NA doing what he did last year. I’m knocking a few ticks off what Goldy did last year due to age, bat slowing down slightly.
I’d guess both Arenado and Goldschmidt will hammer out the sort of season we’d expect from two very good seasoned veterans who I suspect still retain a thirst for the chance at a deep post-season run. If Gorman can really set his young career in motion next to the two IF corner men, the offense could be really good.
I expect solid but unspectacular from the bronze busts at the corners. If the team is going to excel, there will have to be some torch passing. Contreras, Walker and Gorman will need to step into the spotlight.
Ya know, there’s that chance that next year’s team in 2025 will look A LOT DIFFERENT coming out of spring training compared to this years team.
r/Esteemed Rat
Yeah, Contreras could also be a major factor. Hopefully he’ll be spared any public condemnations this season. I thought he handled himself admirably considering the manner in which he was scapegoated and thrown to the wolves. It was pretty disgraceful.
gscottar
With Arenado I will go with .270/26/85. Solid numbers but not worth his lofty salary.Arenado, even with the slip in defense was worth $21.1M last year.
But you can’t judge a contract in a vacuum. He’s now played 3 years with STL and they’ve paid him $105M.
Per Fangraphs, he’s been worth $31.5M, $57.4M, and $21.1M in those three years ~ $110M.
Factoring in the Colorado money – 3 years ~ $36M would give you a surplus value of $41M after 3 years.
Since you are assuming another year similar to 2023 – We can see that he would still give us a surplus value of $27.1M.
His salary will start to drop in 2025-2027 ~ (with Col $) to $27M, $22M, and $15M.
Yes I am aware of the advanced statistics that supposedly deterimine a player’s monetary value but I view them as rather subjective. The bottom line for me is that we are paying superstar salary but receiving just better than average results, especially for a team where a $30M-$35M salary can be a real burden if the player isn’t carrying the team, which he isn’t.
$/WAR is an easy metric to use but it fits poorly in the baseball world. It works well if a team had an infinite number of players. But because they don’t, you really need to concentrate value.
A 1 FWAR player is really not worth much at all. Certainly not $10 million. You ought to be able to find that player from your minor leagues. So the first WAR a player produces should be worth $850,000.
A 2 FWAR player is again someone that you can produce internally, but they don’t necessarily come about all the time. So that 2nd “win” has a value of maybe $1.5 million. So a 2 WAR player is worth around $2.35 million. That’s the $850,000 for the first win plus $1.5 million for the second.
The third FWAR is where the value starts to really increase. I’m thinking that “win” is worth around $10 million on the market. So a 3 WAR player should have a value of $850,000 + 1.5 million + 10 million or $12.35 million – roughly. This is a good player. A little better than the average major league player.
Then, the price really goes up for that 4th or 5th win. Because you want to concentrate your value as much as possible when you only get 26 players on an active roster. Maybe $15 million for the 4th “win” and $20-25 million for the 5th “win”. Something like that anyway.
So it’s not really that the market is $10 million per win. It’s more about what each of those wins provides on top of the others.
Sorry to bore some of you with my rambling on this beautiful Wednesday morning!
Fangraph’s $/WAR estimate is an average value based on FA market transactions. The models that drive it acknowledge that the actual value of a win is non-linear, both from a player perspective (concentration is more valuable) and from a team perspective (a marginal win at, say, 88 wins, is worth a lot more than a marginal win at 62 wins). The estimated $/WAR in Fangraphs represents an average value across the market, not an estimate of marginal value in particular situations. It’s basically telling you how much, on average, a player’s production (measured in wins) would have cost if you had acquired those wins on the FA market, abstracted from the individual players (and their WAR concentrations) who were actually available.
The $/WAR estimate is best thought of as a useful shorthand or rule-of-thumb number. In order to be a useful metric, it requires certain simplifying assumptions, one of which is the application of an average $/WAR across contracts when we know $/WAR is non-linear. The idea is that across many contracts and hundreds of players, things will roughly average out and the average $/WAR gets you close to an answer, beyond which one can always drill down into the details and specific assumptions teams may have used on individual contracts.
Good stuff. In general, just thinking out loud and not putting value to salary numbers, I think most reasonable Cardinal fans would say the club has been better with the Goldschmidt and Arenado acquisitions, than they would have been had they not made those deals. Yeah, they make the big bucks. But you need a few of those guys if you are going to compete.
That value peaked in 2022, with the subsequent quick departure from the post season a huge disappointment. And neither guy did much in their brief appearances to get us deeper into the tourney – Goldy 0 for 7 with 4 strikeouts, Nolie 1 for 8 with 2 strikeouts. Neither guy received a base on balls.
Our top player in that series? None other than Juan Yepez, 2 for 5 with a homer and no Ks. I think Yepez particularly benefitted from Pujols being on the club. He seemed to regress a lot last year, but that discussion is for another day.
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