Putting Miguel Cabrera's 2010 Season in Historical Context

It's no secret that the offense has been inconsistency surrounding one consistent rock: Miguel Cabrera. Miggy (I refuse to call him Cabby) is having his finest offensive season of his career, and arguably his best overall season as well. There's a refrain amongst Tigers fans about him winning the MVP -- something that Lee touched on pretty eloquently.

For me, it comes down to how you credit his intentional walks. I had a back-and-forth quickly with Tigs Town's Paul Wezner on twitter about Cabrera's MVP candidacy, and I'm waffling on my position -- it's closer than I was anticipating.

But, this post doesn't care about whether El Martillo should or should not win the American League MVP. Instead, I'd like to focus on just how damn good Cabrera's been and where this offensive season ranks in the pantheon of Tigers sluggers.

Anatomy of a Player: Miguel Cabrera

Update: I had to change some of the graphs as I had the data in the wrong chronological order. It should be fixed now.

I had stared a series I was going to call Graphic Value but I've decided to change the way I'm going to attack breaking down the Tigers. I'm going to start on an individual basis in something I'm tentatively calling Anatomy of a Player and you will be able to find the series in the sidebar to the right.

My first player will be Miguel Cabrera. I was going to start with catchers, but I don't have multiple-year catcher defensive data at the ready, so I can't go with Gerald Laird.

Below the jump you'll find graphs galore. I'm trying to make the value each player has more visual. However, I'm stuck with Excel 2003 (yeah, I know.) and until I upgrade and check out different graphing features, the only way that seemed right to me was a lot of stacked bar graphs. You'll see what I mean as I show where Miguel Cabrera's value comes from and how much value he has over the average (and replacement-level) player at his positions over the last four seasons after the jump. . .

Miguel Cabrera's Interesting Weekend

Ian, Kurt, J. Ellet have all discussed the Miguel Cabrera incident(s) over the weekend. I think there are some key things to keep in mind when discussing this:

1) The incident with his wife is of no business to us, the fans/public. The only information on it that we are "entitled" to (for the lack of a better term) is the public information that is known through the police. It's his home, his marriage, his problems that we shouldn't be privy to really knowing. I'm not even comfortable reading things like his gold chain was broken and both him and his wife were roughed up.

(more after the jump...)

Defense From The Hardball Times For 1st Base

Last year, Myron Logan (former author of Friar Forecast and current author of Another Padres Blog) penned this article at Baseball Analysts about turning Revised Zone Rating into a defensive runs saved number. After I read it, I contacted him and he had sent me his spreadsheet and I used it as well to calculate defensive data from 2008.

Now, Fangraphs publishes UZR data, so why bother? Well, because it's very simple to do this with just a little Excel know-how and I find defensive data very interesting because of the year-to-year fluctuations and how it is so far from the preciseness of offensive data.

Well, I've updated the numbers through July 10th, 2009. First, lets look at all teams. The following is sorted by total runs saved defensively:

Team	Total
PIT	62
DET	42
SEA	39
TB	38
SF	33
ARI	33
ATL	21
LAA	19
HOU	16
COL	16
MIL	8
TEX	7
STL	6
TOR	6
OAK	6
CHN	-1
WAS	-2
MIN	-2
CIN	-5
NYN	-8
NYA	-9
LAN	-11
PHI	-13
FLA	-16
BAL	-17
KC	-18
CLE	-21
SD	-25
BOS	-25
CHA	-29

For reference, the top/bottom five teams last year were:

STL	60
ATL	59
HOU	59
PHI	59
NYN	46

TEX	-34
BAL	-60
NYA	-81
MIN	-90
KC	-96

So, defense can make quite the difference in a team contending or merely being mediocre. For instance, if the Royals were on a Texas Rangers level of defense -- about -30 runs defensively -- they could've added nearly 3-4 wins to their total by just being a better defensive ball club.

Detroit's done this. In 2008, by this metric, the Tigers were -33 runs defensively. This year, however, they're already at +42 runs. That's a difference of 75 runs -- or 7-8 wins worth.

I plan on making this a series (taking a cue from Myron over at Another Padres Blog), and looking at each position's top and bottom five fielders, plus the Tigers players.

The first position I'll look at is First Base. Here's how all the teams in the league have done thus far at first base defensively:

Team	1B
STL	12
ATL	12
CLE	10
CHA	9
BOS	8
PIT	8
SF	7
KC	4
LAA	4
DET	3
NYN	2
CHN	1
TOR	1
NYA	0
HOU	0
SEA	0
MIN	-1
PHI	-1
ARI	-2
SD	-2
WAS	-3
FLA	-4
BAL	-5
TB	-5
LAN	-5
CIN	-9
TEX	-10
MIL	-11
OAK	-11
COL	-12

You've got to like Detroit being in the top third in the league. Here's the individual leaders:

Last	First	Tm	11
Pujols	Albert	STL	10
Konerko	Paul	CHA	9
Kotchman	Casey	ATL	7
Youkilis	Kevin E	BOS	7

Davis	Chris	TEX	-7
Giambi	Jason	OAK	-7
Hernandez	Ramon	CIN	-10
Helton	Todd	COL	-11
Fielder	Prince	MIL	-11

Albert Pujols is pretty good at baseball. But, we saw the Tigers are a positive fielding team at 1st base. Miguel Cabrera comes in at +2 runs defensively. Jeff Larish is +1 and Ryan Raburn is average at 0 runs.

One quick note: If you see any funky math where some things should add up to a certain number, but they don't (more specifically, in the team totals) it's because I'm rounding to the nearest whole number. Tom Tango's made some comments that make sense to me about how to present defensive data: it's such an inexact science when compared to offensive data, that just rounding to the nearest whole number makes it less precise then rounding to one or two decimal places. For instance, Albert Pujols is actually at 11.35 runs defensively, but we just put him at 11 runs saved defensively.