Friday, November 20, 2009

Room for Improvement: Intro

This is my first post in the Brave New World, so bear with me here.

I don't think it's a statement of Great Earth-Shattering Controversy to say that the Cleveland Indians need to do a lot of things better to have a more successful season. The team lost 97 games, fer crine out loud. This was a bad baseball team. To say it needs to improve is kind of like saying, "Oxygen is helpful" or "Teletubbies are creepy." When you lose 97 games, improvement is necessary. No team loses 97 games solely through "bad breaks." They lose 97 games because there is a fair amount of suckage.

In Cleveland in 2009, this suckage took many forms, a majority of which took the guise of men throwing baseballs from the pitcher's mound. In an effort to quantify exactly where we as fans might reasonably expect improvement, though, I went to Baseball Prospectus' Team Audit for the Indians. The idea here is to identify players who can reasonably be expected to improve their VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) in 2010.