The Wilson Conundrum

Part two of the "Dave Littlefield is the Smartest GM in the National League" series, or perhaps more accurately "Why I think Dave Littlefield is an evil genius." The Introduction can be found here, part one here, part three here, and part four here.

This is more or less an extension of yesterday's "Illusion of Competition" post, but the problem with how the Pirates evaluate talent is so plainly and clearly evident in two players with the same last name on the team that I couldn't stay away from it (and both these posts and mammoth on their own, thus the need for two of them). You've probably figured out who I'm talking about, the Wilson-not-quite-twins.

Let's get this out of the way first, I like both Jack and Craig Wilson. I find it hard to say bad things about either one of them, even though I know both of them have their faults. In the past, I've spent a lot of time defending Jack Wilson for last year and that won't change, but for the purpose of this post I need to accentuate the negatives that Jack Wilson brings to the field. So here we go...

2004 was a breakout year for both Wilsons. Craig had spent a ton of time on the bench and probably in McClendon's doghouse the couple years before, but had hit the crap out of the ball. Jack Wilson had been great with the glove but awful at the plate. I'm sure you remember how 2004 unfolded, but we'll do a quick recap. Craig got out to an absolutely insane start, batting .361 with a SLG of .649 an OPS of 1.086, 12 homers and 34 RBIs on June 4th. He had a terrible June (.178/.250/.337) but rebounded for respecable months in July (.255/.350/.426) and especially August (.242/.351/.526) , ending the month with an .880 OPS for the season to that point. He ran out of gas in September and finished up the season with only a .264 average (down almost 100 points from his torrid start that lasted into June) but still with very good OBP (.354) and SLG (.499) to finish up with an .853 OPS. Jack also got off to a hot start, but sustained it for a bit longer, going into the All-Star Break hitting .332/.354/.501. By the end of July, however, he'd dropped to .319/.341/.480 and he finished the season at .308/.335/.459 (.794 OPS). Two hot starts, two mostly cold second halves, but on the whole breakout seasons for both the Wilsons.

What I'm looking at is what happened after the season was over. Based on their 2004 performances and how they had performed prior to 2004 in their careers, Craig was clearly much more likely to replicate his 2004 season than Jack was. Still, Jack, with his flashy glove and 201 hits (remember, he was the first Bucco with 200 hits since Dave Parker in '77), got all the attention. Despite the fact that the only offensive advantage he held over Craig Wilson that year was batting average (which we know is a flawed way of looking at players, the fact is if you figure in Craig's 50 BBs and 30 HBPs, he reached base 228 times , compared to Jack's 229,despte Jack having nearly 50 more PAs) Jack was the one that got the public 2 year, $8 million contract (for his arbitration years) while Craig quietly signed a $3 million deal to avoid arbitration. Jack was allowed to speak his mind on the Jason Bay/Oliver Perez contract situation even though he was clearly wrong (remember, the team gave Bay and Perez low offers for 2005 since they were both still under 3 years of service, and despite this being how most teams typically operate, Jack was angry and chastised the Pirates for the move). Craig, meanwhile, was benched on Opening Day in favor of Daryle Ward.

Moving into 2005, neither Wilson had a good year. Jack had an offseason appendectomy that probably affected his early performance. Still, as I know Charlie has pointed out repeatedly, his second best month of the season was in May, while in June, July, and August he failed to put up an OPS over .700 (which is just downright miserable). He closed out with a scorching September, but looking at his final numbers they were more or less the same as they were in 2002 and 2003, and he finished up at .257/.299/.363. Craig meanwhile battled two hand injuries (he injuried a tendon sheath or something like that in his finger sliding into second and broke his hand getting hit by a pitch) that seemed to sap his power, but still put up a fairly productive season finishing with the same .264 average as he did in 2004 and going .387/.421 for a still respectable OPS of .808. The most telling stat may be a Bill James stat that Baseball Reference uses, runs created. They define it as

Runs Created - A runs estimator created by Bill James. A runs estimator attempts to quantify the entire contribution of a player's statistics to a team's total runs scored. It typically involves some positive value for things like hits, walks, steals, home runs, etc. and negative values for outs, caught stealing and GIDP. There are 24 different versions of RC depending on the stats you have and I am using the most basic here. (H + BB) * (TB)/ (PA)

By that formula Jack Wilson was responsible for creating 63 runs in 639 PAs in 2005. In only 238 PAs that year (or slightly more than 1/3), Craig Wilson created 30. To go a bit deeper, a team full of 2005 Craig Wilsons would've scored 5.33 runs a game while a team of 2005 Jack Wilsons would've scored 3.83 runs a game. The Pirates scored about 4.2 as a team.

To the naked eye or the casual obeserver, Jack Wilson hustles, makes amazing plays in the field, stretches singles into doubles and doubles into triples, and for a couple months every year can be Pete Rose. Craig Wilson makes a couple bad plays in the field, walks a lot, strikes out a lot, and is by no means anything special on the base paths. He also had long golden locks for a year and may or may not have spent 2004 truly believing he was the Norse God of Thunder. Looking deeper into things, Jack Wilson has been an incredibly unproductive offensive player for every year of his career except for one, his great plays on the base paths are probably nullified by his stupid ones, and yes, he still has a phenomenal glove. Craig Wilson, on the other hand, is a decievingly productive offensive player with a slightly below average range factor in right field (which may be affected by the fact that right field at PNC Park is smaller than most right fields) and who very rarely does stupid things on the bases. Still, this offseason we made two moves to put players in Craig Wilson's two positions, one of whom will only be more productive than Craig if he stays healthy all year, and one of whom is worse than Craig, relegating him to the bench. Meanwhile we'll probably see Jack Wilson batting second on Opening Day.

My point isn't that Craig Wilson should be an everyday right fielder, because 2004 and 2005 have showed that he just isn't durable enough to be an everyday player. It's not that Jack Wilson is a bad player, because he does things with his glove that shouldn't be possible and I do expect his 2006 to be somewhere in between his '04 and '05 numbers (of course, that's probably irrational, all signs point to '06 being more like '05 than '04, still, even I can be optimistic about some things). It's that a good baseball team is made up of both Craig Wilsons and Jack Wilsons (look at the White Sox last year as an example), but if given the choice between a team full of Jack Wilson type players, ones who looks good to the fans but deep down are surprisingly unproductive, and a team full of Craig Wilson type players, ones who doesn't always seem like the best player out there but are actually quite productive with a deeper look, this front office will choose 9 Jack Wilsons every time, and they'll do it with the approval of the fans (I know Craig is more popular in Pittsburgh than Littlefield thinks, but I'd guess if you asked 10 Pirate fans which Wilson they'd rather have, at least 9 would answer Jack). Why? Because we aren't creating a winning team, we're creating an illusion of one. And the more I hear people talk about the 2006 Pirates, the more I think we're succeeding.

All of the stats here came from ESPN.com's Game Logs or Baseball Reference.