Detroit Tigers left fielder Yoenis Cespedes didn’t make the American League roster for the 2015 MLB All-Star Game as announced on Monday night, but he did land on the final vote ballot giving him the opportunity to be the last player selected to the AL squad.
Joining Cespedes on the ballot are Xander Bogaerts (SS, Boston Red Sox), Brian Dozier (2B, Minnesota Twins), Brett Gardner (LF/CF, New York Yankees), and Mike Moustakas (3B, Kansas City Royals).
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The MLB.com voting page lists these five players with their batting average, home run total, RBI total, stolen base total, and number of at bats. Fans may vote however they please — ignoring stats completely if they wish — but many wish to judge players on different metrics than the same-old traditional numbers.
Here’s a look at how these five players rank in some of the more advanced metrics. I’ve created a custom leaderboard over at FanGraphs to aid me in this endeavor.
Overall Batting
If you like your All-Stars to be the best batters (or to have had the best batting seasons to-date), then wRC+ might be for you. It combines hitting for average, hitting for power, and getting on base into on easy-to-understand number. 100 is set to be average for any given year, 90 would be a bit below average (the batter helped to create only 90% of the runs a league average hitter would have), and a 110 would be a bit above average (the batter helped to create 10% more runs than the average batter would have).
Puck Prose
1. Brett Gardner – 137 wRC+
2. Brian Dozier – 134 wRC+
3. Mike Moustakas – 123 wRC+
4. Yoenis Cespedes – 121 wRC+
5. Xander Bogaerts – 107 wRC+
Overall Fielding
If you grew up as a fan of Ozzie Smith (or like Andrelton Simmons now) then you may be more interested in how many runs a player can save with his glove rather than how many he creates with his bat. If this is the case, you may be interested in FanGraphs’ Defense (Def) metric.
This metric uses Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) to judge how many runs a player has saved or conceded at his position compared to the average player. But pure UZR makes no attempt to compare between positions. A player might be +10 at first base and another might be +10 runs at shortstop, but the first baseman is being compared to a poorer overall group of fielders (if he were placed at shortstop he might be -30 runs or something). FanGraphs’ Defense rating uses a positional adjustment to account for the difference in the difficulty of each position on the field.
1. Xander Bogaerts +6.3
2. Mike Moustakas +4.7
3. Yoenis Cespedes +3.8
4. Brian Dozier +1.1
5. Brett Gardner -6.5
Overall Player Value
But maybe you don’t care about component values for players. You simply want to vote for the player having the best season overall regardless if the value is achieved through batting, base running, or fielding. In that case you’d probably want to look at wins above replacement (WAR).
Different websites input slightly different metrics into their WAR calculations, so the numbers may look slightly different (this is a feature, not a bug!), but usually they’re pretty close. FanGraphs is always my go-to for WAR values.
1. Brian Dozier – 3.1 fWAR
2. Yoenis Cespedes – 2.7 fWAR
3. Brett Gardner – 2.3 fWAR
4. Xander Bogaerts – 2.2 fWAR
5. Mike Moustakas – 2.1 fWAR
All five of these players are having very good seasons. A league average-type player would be expected to finish a full season with 2-3 WAR total. These players have all achieved that mark in half that time.
Regardless if you want to vote based on numbers at all, or if you simply want to vote for your favorite player — cough, Yoenis Cespedes, cough — they’re all fairly deserving. One could make a legitimate argument for the inclusion of any of the five.
Next: Ranking the Tigers' 4th of July Caps