Projecting the 2009 Cubs: Chad Gaudin

2009 PROJECTIONS Rich Harden | Carlos Zambrano | Ryan Dempster | Ted Lilly | Sean Marshall | Kevin Gregg | Aaron Heilman | Chad Gaudin CHAD GAUDIN STATS Fan Graphs | The Hardball Times | ESPN | Baseball Reference | Cubs.com | Baseball Prospectus The playing time projections I'm using for the relievers are below: Carlos Marmol: 75 Kevin Gregg: 80 (I've updated his profile) Michael Wuertz: 65 Neal Cotts: 60 Chad Gaudin: 70 Luis Vizcaino: 65 Aaron Heilman: 70 Angel Guzman: 29 My handy dandy calculator tells me that's 514 innings. When I did Kevin Gregg's projection, I did it based on the 70 innings the projection systems averaged out to. We know Lou likes to use his 8th inning guy more than an inning from time to time and Gregg will be that guy in 2009 unless someone else steps up. I've increased his innings up to the 80 I projected above. That increased his WAR from 0.94 to 1.08. I'm not going to spend any time with the relievers talking about what they've done in the past or what kind of stuff they have. They pitch so few innings and most of them are 2-pitch guys. Head over to Cubs F/X to look around if you're interested in that. Harry does a fantastic job with the pitch f/x data. I'm just going to post the relievers projections and then their WAR chart. See below: Chad Gaudin IP H HR BB K ERA CAIRO 135 136 16 53 104 4.61 MARCELS 101 98 11 43 81 4.19 ZiPS 128 120 13 54 117 4.08 JAMES 68 68 7 28 51 4.19 CHONE 74 68 6 30 76 3.65 AVERAGE 108.1 105 12 44 91 4.19 Chad Gaudin is a pretty good pitcher. He's better than league average and he has a lot of upside as well. The projections project him to be about .1 runs worse than Heilman, but Heilman's numbers aren't park adjusted so the two are probably equal. Gaudin might be a little better. IP_Relief ERA W/L Win% WAR_Relief WAR $WAR Actual Diff. Chad Gaudin 70 4.19 1.10 0.52 0.49 0.49 $2.77 $2.00 $0.77 Running total for team projected wins (updated as I do each profile) Replacement level team: 48.6 wins Kevin Gregg: 1.08 WAR Rich Harden: 5.75 WAR Carlos Zambrano: 3.65 WAR Ryan Dempster: 3.42 WAR Ted Lilly: 2.92 WAR Sean Marshall: 1.84 WAR Aaron Heilman: 0.57 WAR Chad Gaudin: 0.49 WAR TOTAL: 68.4 wins