The J.D. Express

Strange as it may seem, J.D. Drew has been getting some good press recently.  I would like to jump on the bandwagon.

Last fall Red Sox GM Theo Epstein praised Drew as one of the top outfielders in the American League. Then not too long ago Amalie Benjamin of the Boston Globe wrote a very flattering article about Drew. The basic thrust of the piece was: Drew is not the kind of guy who inspires fan clubs with his personality, but, despite some of his "popular" statistical benchmarks (RBI, fr'instance) appearing sub-par, Drew does the things that truly win ball games: get on base, run the bases well, excel on defense.

The Globe article cited Fangraph's WAR statistic in evaluating Drew's contributions to the Red Sox. I actually prefer Sean Smith's similar statistic (also called WAR), because it includes more aspects of the game (like baserunning). To its credit Fangraphs' WAR uses the superior UZR to measure defensive value. Probably the best thing would be to take UZR from Fangraphs and the other stuff from Baseballprojection.com, but I'm too lazy to do the legwork.

Anyway, here's the J.D. Drew page from Baseballprojection.com:

As you can see, Drew has been above average in every performance category except outfield arm.  That includes: batting (Bat Runs), base running (BsR), avoiding the double play (GIDP), reaching base on error (ROE) and defensive range (TZ, Total Zone).  Despite missing a significant number of games over the course of his career, he has been an above average player (more than 2 WAR) every season of his career.   Using the going rate of $4.5 million per free agent WAR, Drew has so fully justified his lofty salary since signing with Boston three years ago.

Note that Drew for his career is averaging around 5.5 WAR per 650 plate appearances.  That's just about the same as Manny Ramirez over the same time frame.  And Vlad Guerrero and Carlos Beltran, too, for that matter.  Of course, Drew has not been in the lineup as much as those guys, he's been more fragile.  But even on a yearly basis, Drew has produced about 4 WAR per season over his career, still a very solid number.  That production is worth about 18 million dollars a year on today's (or maybe yesterday's?) free agent market.