ivanvamp said:
Sure there is. His oWAR (b-ref) the past two seasons have been 0.9 and 0.2. In other words, pretty much not good at all. His dWAR the past two years have been -0.7 and -2.3. In fact, his dWAR numbers have been awful (I mean, hideously awful) every year from 2006-2014. Gruesome.
So……. there is no way a team would acquire him to play 1b. The only spot he should have is as a DH.
And as a DH, you completely take away the defensive horror show and let him focus totally on hitting. Put him in a good hitter's park and see what he can do. He still has decent power (23 hr in 569 ab). So the team acquiring him has to receive a prospect and a humongously subsidized contract, meaning they only pay a few million a year for him. If he can put up 1 WAR as a DH, that's worth ~$6.5 million. So a half a WAR is worth a little north of $3 million. There's always a chance he'll be a little better than that if you take away the fielding responsibilities. Plus you get a prospect in return as well.
For Philly, they get freed from most - not all, but most - of Howard's contract, and, because they HAVE to play him at 1b which makes him a negative WAR player, just replacing him with an average bench guy is probably going to represent a baseball upgrade as well. So they have an incentive to do it.
I don't think it happens. But an AL team that needs a DH and has a hitter's park could conceivably take him on if the trade was heavily subsidized. Which means that Amaro won't do it.
I agree, I don't get this line of thinking at all.
First of all, WAR calculations take into account that one is a DH when calculating value. In other words, the fact that a player cannot or does not play defense actually hurts the team as the roster spot could go to someone that can play effective defense. In fact, many teams are starting to adopt the strategy of using the DH role as a rotation spot to rest position players. This is why, if you
look at david ortiz, you'll see that he has very low WAR numbers despite hitting 35 percent better than league average (2.4 WAR for 2014). Therefore, one cannot simply look at oWAR to project at DH; one needs to examine the overall defensive value of a DH and adjust WAR for that. In the case of
Ryan Howard, his actual fielding components are not horrific (-3.2 UZR/150 over 11,000 innings, -53 DRS, 0.991 FP) to the point where they drive the negative dWAR more than the positional adjustment; he'll actually provide less defensive value as a DH than as a 1B (obviously, an AL team should not employ Ryan Howard as a 1B based on this logic; a different 1B would probably be more valuable than Ryan Howard).
Second, one can simply not use WAR and look at this from a common-sense perspective. A DH needs to be a player that can hit, which means a sensible DH should be, at least, a league average hitter. Ryan Howard has a 88,112,93 wRC+ over the past three years, he's had an isolated power of .204,0.199,0.156 over the same span, and strikes out in about 30 percent of his at bats. None of the primarily DH players in the AL had a line that bad in 2014. Over the past three years, there are maybe two-four
times that a player has played so poorly at DH.
Finally, Citizens Bank Park is typically considered to be a hitter friendly ball park, so I'm not so sure Ryan Howard would benefit moving to an AL park. I'm aware that its BPF has gone down over the past decade, but then again, so has the level of offensive talent on the phiilies.