Should the Twins trade for Lee or Soriano?

The talk of a trade for Lee or Soriano has really been heating up. I am in the boat that I would love either player added to the Twins, as long as it didn’t cost too much.

What is too much? Garza for sure, and beyond that it is too hard to say.

So what will either play add? I think either will be a large addition to the team. But will they really? So I decided to look at the numbers to see what they will really add to the Twins.

Defensively, if either plays LF the Twins will have a decline over Kubel but since White has been playing more it will be close to a wash. So I won’t look at their defensive contributions. Plus, I believe they will be playing a lot at DH.

In order to figure out what the Twins will be adding, first we must decide who they would be replacing. They would probably be replacing White and Kubel. All three players would probably play a lot of LF & DH with Lee or Soriano and Kubel getting most of the playing time.

I decided the best way to determine what a player would add is to look at the Runs Created (RC) each players has had so far. I will pro-rate the RC out to the rest of the season.

One problem with this is that nobody plays exactly the same all year long. Also, it is obvious that White is a different player now than he was before he was injured. I will try to keep this in mind at the end but for now I will look at the overall RC so far.

White has 1.81 RC/27 outs, Kubel 4.45, Soriano 7.90 and Lee 6.52. By position the leftfielders have an RC/27 of 4.58 and for the DH’s it is 3.98. Then I divide this by 9 to determine what they add to the team as an individual player per game. Then I multiply by 60 since that is how many games the Twins have remaining.

Let’s assume that the player will replace White. For the rest of the season White would give the Twins 12 runs. Soriano would add 53 runs and Lee would add 43 runs.

The difference is 41 runs for Soriano and 31 for Lee.

It has been determined by people smarter than I in the Sabermetric circles that a 10 run difference equals 1 win.

Therefore if all 3 players continued at their current pace they would add 4 and 3 wins respectively.

But I do believe that White will improve. But it is hard to say how much. So I will look at the DH position which has been the Twin’s Achilles heal all season. The DH is projected to give the Twins 26 runs over the rest of the season.

So Soriano would offer the Twins 1.5 wins and Lee would offer .5 wins.

It doesn’t look like much does it? One more benefit would be that the Twins would be more protected if another injury occurred.

The biggest problem is trying to figure out how good or bad White will be the rest of the season. If either player ends up playing LF a lot, possibly because of Kubel’s knees, then their value decreases some more.

My guess is that Soriano would add about 2 wins to the team and Lee would add 1. I have now decided that I am against any trade that includes any of the Twin’s top prospects like Garza, Slowey, Casilla, or Perkins.