Blogs: All Sports   Baseball   Football   Basketball   Hockey   Golf  

Jack Wilson Posted by Jeff Erickson at 2/28/2006 4:31:00 PM View more posts by this author

How much of a difference is there b/w Freddy Sanchez and Jack Wilson? I understand Wilson is excellent defensively, but when the primary organizational problem is scoring runs, I just don't see how that contract makes sense.

Comments....

The difference between a league average SS and Wilson in terms of runs prevented is MUCH MUCH less than the difference between Wilson and a good hitting SS like Joey Peralta in runs created. So if you're the small market Pirates, you only open the check book for a difference maker like Jeter, Peralta, Tejada, etc. A light-hitting, good fielding SS is fine for cheap, but $7 million a year in Pittsburgh? That's no good. And Wilson's one good year with the bat (2004) was solely due to an elevated hit rate - look at the other numbers - bloops were dropping in, ground balls were finding holes. Posted by cliss at 2/28/2006 10:19:00 PM

Just to play devil's advocate... Don't teams like the Pirates have to make an effort, on occasion, to keep popular homegrown players in town, even if they need to overpay a little to do so? Posted by czegers at 3/1/2006 8:42:00 AM

In my opinion, when you resort to any other motivation besides putting the best product on the field in order to win, you lose fans. Ask any small market fan whether they'd rather have their organization keep favorites for its own sake, or simply do everything they can to give the franchise a shot to win, and I bet they choose a front office that takes seriously the possibility of winning. Posted by cliss at 3/1/2006 11:21:00 AM

The Stats Geek thinks Wilson's worth it... http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06066/666266.stm Posted by jtopper at 3/7/2006 2:42:00 PM

You must be logged in to post a comment. Click here to log in or register with RotoWire.com.