Ben Jacobs at the Hardball Times and Newton at the Batter's Box have previews for the Cardinals up. Both articles raised a lot of questions in my head. For example, just how much will it hurt to lose Reggie Sanders? While he had an 886 OPS, he only had 295 at-bats and evidently he had a poor season in the field (how pathological is it to pop-under ads on a browser that's set to block pop-unders?). How do you compare Sidney Ponson against Matt Morris -- Ponson's sucked the past couple of years, but the presence of Anthony Reyes and Adam Wainwright should mean a short leash and it's not like Morris was anything more than mediocre in 2005. Could Ray King really have been a contributor? And really why is it that both Jacobs and Newton omitted any mention of my favorite Al Reyes? Does the author of their Q document still hold a grudge over the Nomar wrist incident?

I don't think they're Cardinal fans, so these questions probably aren't as interesting to them as they are to me. It dawned on me that historical Win Shares spreadsheet could be useful in answering the non-Reyes the Elder questions. So far the Cardinals have lost 89 Win Shares from the 2005 squad, which works to almost 30 wins of production. So now we compare that to prior years and, while we're at it, also examine prior improvements along the lines of what we're all expecting from Rolen in 2006.

In fact we can go one better and roll the win total from season X to season X+1. For example, the Cardinals won 105 games in 2004, lost 24.7 "wins" (i.e., thirds of Win Shares) from defectors such as Edgar Renteria and Woody Williams, got 28.7 wins in 2005 from players not on the 2004 roster and experienced a Rolen-fueled 9.0 win net reduction among players retained from the 2004 roster. Add 'em all up and you're at 100 wins. We can further break up that "retained player" gain/loss into guys who went up (e.g., So Taguchi) and guys who went down (Ray King). Here's a table:

I've pro-rated those awful strike years to 162 games. Obviously the 2006 additions and ups/downs won't be available until October, so I've naively averaged the past ten seasons.

It certainly isn't a good thing to lose players like Walker, but note that the Cardinals had similar exoduses in 1981, 1996 and 2000. The 2003 decline was mainly a result of retained players not performing more than replacements not matching departers (and there's also the accounting problem from the Cardinals outperforming their 2002 Pythagorean and underperforming their 2003 Pythagorean). The 2004 uptick was powered by newcomers, although counting Chris Carpenter as a newcomer is cheating a bit. A couple of graphs might be useful here:

I'm simplifying some things here. McGwire naturally created many more Win Shares in 1998 than in 1997 (was an "up") since he was traded mid-season in 1997. The second graph though suggests that players don't improve much after their first year with LaRussa, perhaps because there haven't been many youngsters the previous ten years and the most prominent of those few youngsters was an MVP candidate from Day One. In other words, what seems to have driven the Cardinals' recent success is either Jocketty's maneuvers, players responding immediately to LaRussa, or some combination of the two.