Today let’s inspect the new-look Seattle Mariners outfield for 2009. Gone are Raul Ibanez and Jeremy Reed, and in are Endy Chavez and Franklin Gutierrez.

First of all, the loss of Ibanez’s offense will hurt. But the loss of his defense is a welcome change.  The last two years of Raul Ibanez in Seattle were remarkably similar, with a .291/.351/.480 line in 2007 followed by .293/.358/.479 in 2008. Typically, a corner outfielder of this offensive caliber would be worth around 3 WAR. But Raul’s defense was so terrible that his value was diminished greatly. In 2007, Raul’s UZR was a whopping -20.8. Combined with 13 games missed to injury, Raul was only worth 0.6 WAR over replacement (WAR) in 2007. That’s easy production to replace. 2008 was better, where Raul was worth a more normal 2.2 WAR, as his defense regressed down to a -12.6 UZR in LF, so…horrible to just plain bad. Over the past two seasons, Raul Ibanez was worth just 2.8 WAR– a total of $12 million on the open market. And, he made $11 million over those two seasons. Somehow, this managed to get him $30 million dollars over three years in a lefty-loaded lineup where he will be playing defense every day, and getting worse at it every year.

It’s important to understand the conditional value of offensive production compared to defensive production, and Ibanez is a prime example. Obviously, the point of baseball is to score more runs than the other team. The common perception of a fan is that this is done with great offense and defense is a nice bonus. In actuality, they hold similar weight. If scoring runs is one half of the equation, isn’t preventing runs the other half? This comes from pitching and defense. Clearly, position players (outside of catchers) have no effect on how the game is pitched, but their impact on defense can be evaluated in terms of runs prevented, which holds equal weight to their runs created with their bat. Adding the net value of those two numbers gets you to a player’s total worth. Again, I direct everyone to Fangraphs and Dave Cameron’s excellent series on understanding the win values/WAR section on player pages over at Fangraphs for a great explanation on this. I’ll be referencing these ideas and numbers frequently, so if you don’t get it, he does a great job explaining the methodology and logic, much better than I can.

With Ibanez gone, the team loses a constant of offensive production, but instantly becomes significantly better on defense with the addition of Endy Chavez and Franklin Gutierrez. Jon already did a nice job summing up Gutierrez in an earlier post, but let’s examine Gutierrez and Chavez’s win values in comparison to Ibanez and Reed’s departure. Offensively, there’s not a whole lot of difference between Jeremy Reed and Endy Chavez. Both got around the same amount of at-bats last year, with Endy posting a .284 wOBA and Reed posting a slightly better .296 wOBA. But Jeremy Reed’s WAR was actually -0.2 last year. Negative. In today’s market, Jeremy Reed should have paid the Mariners $900k for letting him get on TV and play baseball for a living. While Reed showed tons of promise defensively in 2005, he quickly declined in his later years, truly struggling in 2008. In fact, Reed had not posted a positive UZR in the outfield since his 2005 campaign. Endy Chavez, on the other hand, has been a outstanding defender his entire career, especially in corner outfield spots.

2008:
Jeremy Reed: -9.8 UZR, -1.9 value runs, -0.2 value WAR, Market value -$900k.
Endy Chavez: +14.2 UZR, 8.5 value runs,  0.8 value WAR, Market value $3.8 million.

As you can see, defense matters. It’s not unreasonable to say that if Endy Chavez is our full-time left fielder, receiving  around 600 at-bats, he’s nearly a 2 WAR player. And what was Ibanez? An average of 1.4 WAR over the last two seasons. It’s something to think about. Could a defensive wiz like Chavez be more valuable than Ibanez? It’s possible, and with Ibanez’s increasingly bad defensive skills, this is a player the M’s should be happy to have in LF instead of Raul.

Franklin Gutierrez is an even stronger reinforcement of the defensive theory. Once a top prospect, his bat has disappointed but has glove has not. Over the past 3 years, there has been nobody stronger defensively in RF than Franklin Gutierrez, according to The Fielding Bible’s plus/minus system. Gutierrez logged an astounding +55 score with a mere 1,933 innings logged there (for comparison’s sake, Ibanez logged 1,340 innings in LF last year alone). Over the past two years, Gutierrez has racked up an outfield UZR of 29.7, combined with his mediocre bat, he’s still worth 3.6 WAR over the last two years. Also, more than Ibanez. And that’s being a part time player, only receiving about 56% of the at-bats he’s expected to log in two years as a Mariner. Gutierrez, playing full time, could project to as great as a 3 WAR player next year. Now, there’s some uncertainty about him making the move to center field, but he’s shown proficiency at the position before and played it in the minors.  There’s also a chance for some offensive growth, and a much smaller chance for offensive regression.

In conclusion, if the Mariners stopped their shopping today and started 2009 with a full-time outfield of Chavez, Gutierrez, and Ichiro, they’re flat-out worth more WAR than Ibanez, Reed/Wlad/Bloomquist, and Ichiro were last year.  Last year’s outfield logged a -25.4 UZR, while this year’s could land in the +40-50 run range. In outfield defense alone, you’ve just made a +65-75 run differential swing between the 2008 and 2009 Mariners. This outweighs the loss in run value of offense the M’s will experience, and next week we’ll take a look at the difference in offense between this year’s outfield and last year’s. But it might be in the M’s best interest from a pure value standpoint to give Endy Chavez full-time innings in LF if they’re done acquiring outfielders.