What If?

Written by Josh W. | 13 August 2010

What if tomorrow, the Yankees were to put top prospect Jesus Montero on the 40-man roster, and call him up? In this hypothetical, let's also say that the Yankees are totally fed up with Cervelli. He's been doing nothing at the plate recently, being worse than 50% below average (offense) in June and July. In this scenario, the Yankees are in fact so frustrated with Cervelli, that they decide to shut him down for the rest of the season and work with Kevin Long on improving his swing. How much of a difference would this make, Montero replacing Cervelli?

Let's assume Montero would catch as many games as Cervelli from here on out. Cervelli so far has averaged 2.19 PA's per game this season. If we extend this rate of play to the end of the season, Montero would have 105 PA's.

Offense

ZiPS projects Cervelli to hit to a .303 wOBA for the rest of the season. Over 105 PA's, this would make him about 2 runs below average.

ZiPS projects Montero to be basically league average, but if you want an exact number, -0.18 runs. But Montero has really been hitting lately. If we look at the standard deviations of such a hypothetical performance, we would get 0.049. This means that there is a 68% chance that Montero would have a wOBA between .272 and .370, and 95% chance he would wOBA between .223 and .419.

Recently, as I'm sure you have noticed, Montero has been mashing. If we convert his July and August numbers into their major league equivalancy, we would get a line of .317/.397/.558. This would also be a studly .399 wOBA, which would be about 1.6 standard deviations above average.

If hypothetical Montero would hit to a .399 wOBA, he would produce about 7 runs above average. This would make the difference between Montero and Cervelli about 9 runs on offense, not including baserunning.

Defense

Cervelli hasn't been that good on defense this year, but just as any player can have a down year on offense, Cervelli may just be having a down year defensively. His scouting reports from his time in the minors always praised his defense, and Cervelli was great catching last year. For this reason, I will be a little generous to Cervelli, and say that over a fullseason, he would save a win on defense as his true talent level. If he would have 600 PA's in a fullseason, he would save 1.75 runs on defense over 105 PA's.

Everyone knows the book on Montero; awesome hitting prospect, not so much behind the plate. If we esimate Montero to play replacement level defense behind the plate, say about -30 runs across a full season, he would be about 5.25 runs below average over 105 PA's.

This would make the difference between Montero and Cervelli about 7 runs on defense.

Conclusion

Even with me being very, very generous to Montero, the difference between him and Cervelli would only be about 2 runs total. Sean wrote earlier about why the Yankees shouldn't call up Montero. I just wanted to show that even if Montero were to provide monster offense (.399 wOBA) in a call up, it wouldn't make that much of a difference anyway.