2006 in Review- Jack Wilson

Now that 2006 is over, I'll be looking at one or two Pirates and their 2006 season each day. I'll look at what we expected, what we got, and what that might mean for the future. I may or may not assign a meaningless grade to their performance. Today: Jack Wilson.

Let's churn one more of these out today.

2005 key stats: .257/.299/.363 with 8 HR, 52 RBI, 24 2B, and 7 3B
2006 PECOTA: .270/.312/.377 with 8 HR, 57 RBI, 28 2B, and 4 3B
2006 key stats: .273/.316/.370 with 8 HR, 35 RBI, 27 2B and 1 3B

If Freddy Sanchez provides us with a clear reason not to trust the computer projection models, Jack Wilson gives us a compelling case that they can be quite accurate. Jack actually had a rather interesting year, one that the numbers may not completely bear out. He put on his much ballyhooed 20 lbs of muscle in the offseason and charged out of the gates with a .326/.384/.562 April in which he hit 5 homers and seemed to be back in 2004 form. He injured his hamstring in early May, missed some time, and was miserable at the plate until early July. From May 1st through July 5th he was flat out awful, going .228/.254/.288 (that's an OPS of .543). Was the hammy the problem? I don't know, we used the appendix as a crutch last year, now the hammy this year. At some point, we simply have to say the guy is injury prone and needs to take some more time off. But from July 6th through the end of the year he was better, going .293/.344/.372 for a .716 OPS, not too bad for a shortstop.

Of course the elephant in this room is Jack's defense. Using the BP ratings (there's lots of different ways to quantify defense, so we'll stick with one method), Jack was 44 runs above replacement last year in the field (2nd in the NL according to BP 2006), and 23 runs above average. This year those numbers dropped considerably to 24 and 6 (granted, the replacement and average values they are compared against each season individually and thus are readjusted from year to year, but I don't think the shorstop play changed that drastically in the NL this year so we'll go with it). That means that while Jack wasn't quite as bad as we might've thought defensively this year, he was still a lot worse than he was last year. A shortstop that puts up an OPS around .700 and plays great defense is a valuable player (especially if he's batting 7th or 8th instead of second, but I'll leave that alone here, it's not Jack's fault). Jack didn't do that this year. I don't think he's capabe of a year like 2004 ever again, but if he loses some weight and gets his defense back to where it was in '04 and '05 I don't think he's as useless as people (myself included) like to make him out to be.

Stats from the Baseball Musings Day by Day Database, Yahoo! Sports, The Baseball Cube, the BP Website,and my trusty copy of Baseball Prospectus 2006.