Dear Jim,
The Chicago Cubs need a lot of offense, it's true - but signing Alfonso Soriano will simply lead to disaster for this organization. There's no doubt that he's coming off of an excellent season, but to quote Albert Einstein "reality is merely an illusion." In order to move the Cubs in a good direction, one has to realize that the past is not always the greatest indicator of the future. Often one has dig deep for answers to simple questions, such as, "can Alfonso Soriano keep up the walk rate hike that he underwent at age 30?" As Lou Piniella has mentioned the Cubs are in need of proven guys who can get on base - and more importantly not make outs.
Last season Alfonso Soriano walked 67 times in 728 plate appearances, 9.2%. To put the increase into perspective, he walked 66 times in 1340 plate appearances the two previous seasons, 4.9%. His walk rate was 83% higher in 2006 than it was in 2004 or 2005. It would be understandable if a person who exhibited excellent walk rates in the minor leagues and was under 25 to undergo such a transformation, but a major league veteran at age 30?
Since 1900 among players with 300 ABs in three consecutive season such a condition has happened 37 times. Of these 37 players, 29 of them got 300 ABs the next season. On average they lost 48.9% of the gain they had. Only two of them managed to increase again the next season (Johnny Evers and Lave Cross). Due to sample size issues with the number of walks, I would throw out all dead ball era players. Doing so is going to leave us with a 20 player sample size, but oh well. These players lost an average of 53.5% of their gain. Two of them actually lost all of their gain (Carlos Lee and Shawon Dunston). Now, this is a graph of their relative walk rates compared to their 0 season, which would be the established season before the huge increase, in Soriano's case 2005.
As you can easily see, there's a huge dropoff after one year, but it's still above the established level for all of the players involved. However, there is another issue at work here. This year Soriano had sixteen intentional walks, nine more than he had the two years prior. Is this something to last? Possibly with his increased power - if his power increase is legitimate.
Once you factor out the intentional walks, you still find an increase of 62.1% on his walk rate. Doing the same above, we'd be able to find an additional 121 guys that fit our criteria, bringing the sample size to 141 live ball era players who increased their unintentional walk rate by over 62 percent. This sample size lost an average of 33.6% of their increase the second year, but they still had an increase of 53.5% over the established rate. Due to the much larger sample size, it may be possible to sort out the players by age brackets.
The brackets selected are pretty arbitrary. I used young as 20-24, prime as 25-29, past prime as 30-34 and old as 35 and up. The results are quite interesting, although there's an issue of which category Soriano is going to fall into:
The Chicago Cubs need a lot of offense, it's true - but signing Alfonso Soriano will simply lead to disaster for this organization. There's no doubt that he's coming off of an excellent season, but to quote Albert Einstein "reality is merely an illusion." In order to move the Cubs in a good direction, one has to realize that the past is not always the greatest indicator of the future. Often one has dig deep for answers to simple questions, such as, "can Alfonso Soriano keep up the walk rate hike that he underwent at age 30?" As Lou Piniella has mentioned the Cubs are in need of proven guys who can get on base - and more importantly not make outs.
Last season Alfonso Soriano walked 67 times in 728 plate appearances, 9.2%. To put the increase into perspective, he walked 66 times in 1340 plate appearances the two previous seasons, 4.9%. His walk rate was 83% higher in 2006 than it was in 2004 or 2005. It would be understandable if a person who exhibited excellent walk rates in the minor leagues and was under 25 to undergo such a transformation, but a major league veteran at age 30?
Since 1900 among players with 300 ABs in three consecutive season such a condition has happened 37 times. Of these 37 players, 29 of them got 300 ABs the next season. On average they lost 48.9% of the gain they had. Only two of them managed to increase again the next season (Johnny Evers and Lave Cross). Due to sample size issues with the number of walks, I would throw out all dead ball era players. Doing so is going to leave us with a 20 player sample size, but oh well. These players lost an average of 53.5% of their gain. Two of them actually lost all of their gain (Carlos Lee and Shawon Dunston). Now, this is a graph of their relative walk rates compared to their 0 season, which would be the established season before the huge increase, in Soriano's case 2005.
As you can easily see, there's a huge dropoff after one year, but it's still above the established level for all of the players involved. However, there is another issue at work here. This year Soriano had sixteen intentional walks, nine more than he had the two years prior. Is this something to last? Possibly with his increased power - if his power increase is legitimate.
Once you factor out the intentional walks, you still find an increase of 62.1% on his walk rate. Doing the same above, we'd be able to find an additional 121 guys that fit our criteria, bringing the sample size to 141 live ball era players who increased their unintentional walk rate by over 62 percent. This sample size lost an average of 33.6% of their increase the second year, but they still had an increase of 53.5% over the established rate. Due to the much larger sample size, it may be possible to sort out the players by age brackets.
The brackets selected are pretty arbitrary. I used young as 20-24, prime as 25-29, past prime as 30-34 and old as 35 and up. The results are quite interesting, although there's an issue of which category Soriano is going to fall into:
| Age Group | Sample Size | Year 1 | Year 2 | Change |
| 20-24 | 26 | +79.0% | +69.0% | -13.0% |
| 25-29 | 74 | +79.1% | +53.2% | -31.2% |
| 30-34 | 35 | +91.2% | +40.3% | -57.5% |
| 35-40 | 6 | +75.4% | +67.1% | -13.7% |
| 29-31 | 33 | +89.4% | +51.2% | -35.9% |
| Total | 141 | +81.9% | +53.5% | -33.6% |
Remember, the change in the Year 2, is still relative to the baseline in the two years preceding the "breakout" year. Obviously, you can throw out the oldest age group due to sample size, but that does not matter. It's pretty obvious that breakout gains of the magnitude of Alfonso Soriano's clearly drop off quicker as the player gets older. Soriano spent this season as an age 30, so he's right on the cusp of the two. That's the reason at the bottom I added the 29-31 class. As you can see that age group is a lot closer to the 25-29 class. However, there is one small problem - Don Kolloway in 1948. He's inflating the system due to just 9 walks in his "base" season. So any increase is going not be a good representation. If you remove that season, you get a drastic change in results for the class. Most importantly they fall from +90.4% to +44.9% a loss of 47.2% of the increase.
All in all there is pretty good reason to believe that Soriano loses half of his increase in UBB walk rate. Whether or not he duplicates the high intentional walk rate depends on two things - his team, and finally the power output he has. Jim, for the Cubs these two things are going to pull into opposite ways. If acquired and he bats leadoff in a revamped lineup, odds are with Derrek Lee a couple batters behind him they're going to face him more, and not walk him to get to Matt Murton or whoever is in the second hole (except Cesar Isturis). The other issue is his power.
Not adjusting for park, Soriano had an increase of 20 percent on his power output, HR/PA. With a minimum of 350 AB and 15 homers, we have 346 such instances in the live ball era. On average, all of those hitters lost 48.8% of the power increase in the second year. I am not about to enter 386 ages, but odds are that there won't be some magic thing that makes 30 year olds more likely to sustain the power increase over the average aged hitter. Still, the sample would suggest a plus 10 percent power increase for Soriano, giving him roughly 40 homers. But Jim, beware of the sample size issue. Soriano batted 728 times last season, about 50 more than he did the previous year, so keep that in mind.
So all in all we'd expect Soriano to regress around 50 percent over his improvement. If you were to take that to EqA you'd expect him to have an EqA somewhere near .290 next season which is pretty average for him. Soriano had a huge season, but a .290 EqA in left field doesn't play well. However, it does fit nicely in centerfield, but the return on that is probably only worth maybe $10,000,000 not the higher figures he's more than likely going to get (and has rejected). Sure, his bat profiles well at 2B, but his .290 EqA is going to lead to at most 25-30 runs over an average 2B, 20 of which will get negated by his rock glove.
Sure, you might not be able to get a better centerfielder than him, but who said he is going to agree to play there? He's got options and will probably try to move back to second. In left field he's a decent choice, but is he that much better than Carlos Lee? Probably not. At second you can surely do better for cheaper. It's just not worth the price on him, no matter the impact his percieved value is. We already have issues with players like him, we need on base percentage. Guys who can walk. Soriano is clearly not that sort of player.
Jim, stay far far far away.
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