2006 EWSL Wrapup By Team

As I did last year, before diving into my preseason Established Win Shares Levels roster analyses, I’m going to take a quick look back at last season’s. First up is the team-by-team results. For those of you who need a primer on EWSL and my annual roster roundups, go here. A few basic reminders:
*I look at 23 players (13 non-pitchers, 10 pitchers) per team, so an average team should exceed its EWSL due to the fact that most teams these days use between 30-45 players in a season.
*EWSL is an estimate of the established major league talent on a team (adjusted for age) going into a season. It’s not a system for predicting the future, although it can be a helpful part of the toolkit (or at least a sanity check) in making predictions of the future.
*EWSL uses a standard figure for rookies (12 WS for rookie everyday players, 6 for rookie bench players, 4 for rookie pitchers (starting or relief)). It does not distinguish between, say, Ryan Zimmerman and Reggie Abercrombie if both are expected to hold everyday jobs. Thus, a team with a lot of high-quality rookies will exceed its EWSL. I’d like to add a non-subjective adjustment for rookie quality, but until I can get Major League Equivalency Win Shares (I don’t believe they exist anywhere), I have to rely on the facts that (1) bad rookies rarely get everyday jobs and (2) good rookies often fall on their faces.
That said, basically, my analysis assumes that there are three components to team success: how much established talent is on the preseason roster, how well they perform, and how much production the team gets from guys who supplement those top 23 players with trades, rookies or scrubs. The following table shows the following columns: (1) each team’s 2006 EWSL; (2) the actual Win Shares for those 23 players (includes Win Shares earned for other teams, e.g., Bobby Abreu counts with the Phillies); (3) the ratio of column (2) divided by column (1) to show how the 23 players fared relative to EWSL; (4) the team’s total actual 2006 Win Shares (i.e., Wins x 3); (5) the team’s Win Shares minus those from the top 23 players (in the example above this will include the negative value of, say, Abreu’s Yankees Win Shares from the Phillies’ “Rest” column); and (6) the ratio of column (4) divided by column (1) to show how the team as a whole fared relative to EWSL. Teams are ranked by that last column:

It should come as no surprise that the Tigers, 2006’s big story, rate at the top of teams that exceeded expectations, and that the Cubs land at the bottom of the pile. As you can see, the top teams are something of a mix of teams that had great seasons and teams that had very low expectations – I was a little surprised to see the Reds and Rockies listed, for example. The Mets, on the other hand, did pretty much as expected with their roster but did better than average with guys they added on (although I should note that players overall rated at 0.968 of their EWSL, which will factor in as I re-adjust this year’s age and rookie adjustments). The Dodgers rate the highest in that regard, with rookies like Andre Eithier helping out, while the Red Sox, White Sox and Mariners got the least help for their original roster. For the most part, teams that were near the top of this list last year tended to be nearer the bottom and vice versa, but the Cubs were down with the dregs for the second year in a row.
Here are the players among those on the preseason 23-man lineups of each team who were the biggest over and underacvhievers (I’m mixing those who were the biggest ups or downs by percentage or raw total):

Bear in mind again that these are full-season numbers – Jorge Julio, for example, did his good work in Arizona. Derrek Lee had the worst falloff of any marjor league player, from an EWSL of 27 to 4 Win Shares. It doesn’t show here but the Rangers also took big hits from Teixera and Blalock.