Twins-Brewers Deal Opens Possibility of Cameron to Yanks/Sox

The Twins and Brewers completed the first major deal of this young offseason when Milwaukee sent shortstop JJ Hardy to Minnesota for CF Carlos Gomez.  Certainly not a blockbuster, but a solid move for both sides with plenty of implications.

The Twins acquire a slick fielding SS, coming off a down offensive year.  Hardy could be in line for a bounce back year as suggested by a career low BABiP last season, though that was combined with a career low Line Drive rate as well.  Either way, Hardy should easily be worth the approximate $3 million he's likely to earn through arbitration over the next 2 years based solely on his defense.

On the other side, the Brewers acquire a top notch defensive CF who will be making peanuts for the next several years.  The downside of course is that Gomez has not been able to get on base with any regularity in his 1,000 or so major league at bats.  It's hard to make a case for a guy who's never had an On-Base % above .300 as an everyday major leaguer.  Ultimately this was a cost cutting move for the Brewers.  They'll pay Escobar less peanuts than they pay Gomez (because he has less ML service time) and they save Hardy's salary along with another $10 million from letting go the perennially underrated Mike Cameron.  It's a good deal for them if they take that $12 million or so of savings and invest it wisely elsewhere, whether that be into free agency, the draft, player development, etc.

But the biggest implication here for Northeast baseball, comes with Cameron's availability.  On the surface, Cameron is far from an ideal free agent acquisition.  He has a rather underwhelming career BA of .250, he strikes out about 150 times a year, and on opening day next season he'll be 37 years old.  But there is a lot to like about Cameron, as Dave Cameron over at Fangraphs wrote on Monday.  Cameron focuses on  stats such as WAR (Wins Above Replacement Level) and wOBA (Weighted On Base Average), which I haven't yet taken the time to explain in detail here.  But Mike Cameron's value can be seen even without the use of these advanced metrics.

Cameron's OPS (On Base Plus Slugging percentage) of .795 was good for 7th among the 25 major league center fielders who accumulated enough at bats to be eligible for the batting title this season.  And that was no fluke as he's only dipped below that .795 OPS once in the past 6 seasons, and that was while playing his homes games in the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball, Petco Park, where home runs go to die.  All the strikeouts drag down his offensive value, but he takes enough walks to be at least an adequate offensive player and hits enough home runs (23 per year the last 4 seasons, including 2 seasons in Petco Park) to be a above average offensive producer, probably just a notch behind more heralded free agents like Jason Bay or Johnny Damon.  And that's without even looking at Cameron's greatest asset: his defense*.

*For this point I do need to introduce a new metric to the discussion: UZR (Ultimate Zone Rating).  Ultimate Zone Rating basically measures how many balls hit to certain areas in the field that are converted into outs a by a fielder and compares that to the frequency with which other fielders on average converted balls hit to those certain areas into outs.  Simply put, it rewards fielders at a given position for getting to balls that most other fielders at that position weren't able to get to.  It's not a perfect system.  For example, it doesn't account for how hard a ball was hit or where a defender was positioned at any given time.  For this reason, UZR is most accurate over large sample sizes, one or two whole seasons, because over long periods of time, the differences between how hard certain balls were hit or where certain defenders were positioned at any given point in a game will tend to balance out.

Cameron's UZR's in center field for the last two seasons have been 11.3 and 10, respectively.  That's 11.3 and 10 runs saved above the average center fielder in baseball.  Those were good for 2nd and 3rd place among qualifying major league center fielders the last twoyear.  Now compare that to Jason Bay (-13 UZR) and Johnny Damon (-9.2 UZR), two of the worst defensive left fielders in the game in 2009.  And that alone doesn't tell the whole story because you also have to take into account that Cameron pulled off those stats at the most challenging outfield position, CF, while Bay and Damon were in LF (and in Bay's case, the smallest LF in baseball at Fenway Park).  Now if you trust the baseball geniuses that have come before us like Tom Tango (I do), then you'll accept his findings that average CF play is worth about 10 runs more than average LF play, so the difference of about 20 runs saved between Cameron and Bay and between Cameron and Damon then jumps to about 30 runs.

So Bay and Damon, would have to be at least 30 runs better than Cameron offensively to make up for that difference on defense and there is simply no evidence to suggest this is so.  According to calculations at Fangraphs, Bay was about 20 batted runs better than Cameron this year, Damon about 15 batted runs better.

A finally, the kicker: Cameron will probably demand just about the same deal that he earned last year, 1 year/ $10 Million.  Compared to Damon who is the same age as Cameron and likely to demand a 2-3 year commitment at approximately the same annual salary, or to Bay who is 32 years old and is likely to demand a 4 or even 5 year commitment worth $12-15 million per year, Cameron appears to be an absolute steal. 

The Yankees would get the added benefit of being able to move Melky Cabrera out of CF, where he's only about league average defensively, to a corner outfield spot where he's above average.  The Red Sox would be able to do the same with Jacoby Ellsbury, who to the naked eye does appear to be a great center fielder, though for some reason he has never put up particularly good UZR numbers in CF (he has put up great UZR numbers in limited time in LF and RF in his career).

Ultimately, I'd bet the Red Sox probably shell out the dollars to keep Jason Bay in Boston, if they don't decide to put down even more money to bring in the younger Matt Holliday.  And the Yankees will probably try to bring back Damon or Hideki Matsui on a 1-2 year deal and one of them is sure to bite.  But both teams really should consider Mike Cameron for their OF openings.  He'd be both cheaper, and arguably more productive overall, than any of their in-house options.