But I’m going to keep it simple. MBD’s response to you was critical, but it was made without rancor or animosity or insults. Yours were not. Whether or not you agree with his reasoning, he did a very good job of explaining it given the limits of a comment section such as this. He can’t write a book.

Your opinions and comments aren’t taken seriously if you present them in such an immature manner.

But it’s not about you vs. me. The list I sent was meant to be things we can all learn from the numbers, articles, commenters, and philosophy of this great site. If you take everything personally and refuse to acknowledge holes in your knowledge or understanding, you are denying yourself access to information that no one else could keep from you.

Taking the list from the top:
1) You make an assertion without evidence. This will not serve you well in life.
2) No, that’s not what positional adjustments mean. They are meant to indicate the relative difficulty of positions. If Kotchman moved to short, his defense would likely worsen by about 20 runs (+7.5 minus -12.5). See? You learned something. Check the glossary for more. That way you won’t say that I’m posting numbers with nothing to back them up (funny wording); we’re all assuming a certain level of familiarity with these ideas so that our comments don’t run for pages.
3) Cameron was underpaid because defense was undervalued (and strikeouts were over-penalized). No market is perfectly efficient.
4) It’s not an opinion that highlights are a small, non-random sample. The name itself indicates that the plays included are a subset of the population chosen for showing the player at his best and that no attempt is made to be thorough or representative. Have you taken a statistics course? Do you believe that the people putting the reels together want to educate us more than they want to entertain us?
5) It’s not an opinion that Kotchman is going backwards. Everyone on earth, including Kotchman himself, would agree that his play was not as good in 2008 and 2009 as it was in 2007. The OPS numbers you cite demonsrate the point. BTW, OPS is not a great stat, since it overstates the importance of slugging relative to OBP. You seem to be confused about what an opinion is. See point 1 again. In any case, my main point was that Kotchman is not an excellent player, and I produced evidence. Where is yours? And don’t say 1,000 PAs is a small sample for offensive statistics; that’s simply not true.
6) Here are some more words: player to be named later and we don’t know how much money the M’s are sending with Hall. Again you say Casey is excellent with no evidence. That’s your (uninformed) opinion, and this is not a popularity contest. Make better arguments with less rhetoric and more evidence, and people will take you more seriously.

Been fun. Good luck in school.

1) I don’t give a flying **** how many WAR’s Cameron is “worth”, he’s not an $8M player.

2) Positional adjustment my ass. (I can’t respond to your comment if you just post a number with nothing to back it up). You’re basically saying, if you take the same EXACT player, and all you do is move him to a different position, you can increase his value? (i.e. take Kotchman, put him at SS, and his value would increase because SS is a more “important” defensive position than 1B). OK…doesn’t make much sense to me but I won’t completely rule it out.

3) Again laughable, IMO. You think you’re the only one who knows about this? Why don’t you think anyone else signed Cameron to that kind of money? Is there a conspiracy against him?

4) Again you really can’t back this up. It’s just your opinion, as I have mine.

5) See #4. It’s your OPINION that he’s going backwards. I don’t know why you keep trying to push it that this is FACT. Also you have to keep in mind (1) 2 seasons is a pretty small sample size; (2) this kid got traded practically every 2 months; (3) he didn’t play every day in Boston.

6) Casey is pretty darn excellent for the price paid, whether that’s his likely salary for next year, or what was given up in the trade. 2 words: Bill Hall.

Don’t be a pompous asshole. If you want to post a comment, do so, but don’t act like you’re a spoiled teenage girl when you do so. If I wanted to be talked down to, I’d go talk to one of my professors.

1) Mike Cameron is not a crap player. He is a very good player, performing well at a position where good defense is worth a lot more than at 1b (1.5 wins more). He has been underpaid throughout his career, including the 2 years he spent with the Mets ($17M of value for $11.6M in salary). His WAR of 4 from just 2009 is over twice Kotchman’s contribution from the last 2 years combined. And Cameron has averaged almost 4 WAR over the last 8 years.

2) “Good defense” isn’t worth the same at all positions just because announcers call it by the same name. And defense isn’t half of a player’s contribution just because we all use the offense/defense dichotomy. You have to quantify “good” and adjust for position. Kotchman’s defense is not good *enough* to overcome the positional adjustment (-12.5 runs), so he needs to contribute more with his offense than average. He did that once, and it was 3 years ago. See point 5.

3) Kotchman will be making $4-$5M *this* season, so let’s compare apples. Last season, Cameron’s play was worth 5 times as much as Kotchman’s, and he only got paid about 3.5 times as much.

4) Highlights, although fun to watch, are a biased and really small sample of a player’s work. Yes, numbers can be manipulated but not nearly as much as highlight reels can. Numbers tell you whether the player’s beautiful skills amount to anything and whether he can repeat them throughout the season. Saying numbers don’t tell you everything doesn’t mean that the random non-numbers (anecdotes, conventional wisdom) that one cites are adding something significant.

5) Kotchman will be 27 in February (since we’re being fair and Cameron turns 37 tomorrow). He’s had the equivalent of 3 full seasons and is going backwards. No one is saying cut him loose, just that he’s not an “excellent player” and doesn’t hit well enough to be a starting first baseman. A team that starts him at 1b is giving away the opportunity to score more runs for a slight improvement on defense. For example, Kotchman’s defense in 2009 was worth 2 runs more than Youkilis’s and 3 runs more than Morales’s (by UZR; they’re the next 2 players on the defensive rankings) but his offense was worth 45 runs less than Youk’s and 31 runs less than Kendry’s (measured by wRAA). The vast majority of first basemen produce so much more than Kotchman with the bat that his defense couldn’t possibly make up for it.

6) Just because Kotchman is young and *might* improve does not mean that he is *more likely* to play better than other options. The Mariners need to go with the player who is most likely to produce for the best price. Maybe that’s Kotchman, but that means the other options are poor, not that he’s excellent.

Obviously the numbers are important but sometimes they don’t tell the whole story, and I think highlights are not completely devoid of information.

The guy is 26 – he will be entering his prime, and you want to cut him loose? That’s a pretty short term oriented point of view.

I don’t give a **** if I’m a troll – I’m only posting on here because I’m on my winter break.