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Tampa Bay Rays' Ben Zobrist skips around the bases like a girl after hitting a grand slam off Kansas City Royals starter Brian Bannister-Posnanski during the fourth inning of a baseball game Wednesday, June 3, 2009, in St. Petersburg, Fla. (AP Photo/Steve Nesius)

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I was going to do somethig on BaseRuns this week, then I realized that it was boring. Maybe I'll make it more interesting after the season is over. In the meantime, I thought I'd add a bit more wood to the Ben Zobrist On Fire Bandwagon (how's that for a poorly mixed metaphor?).  He went from utility guy to taking Akinori Iwamura's gig. He went from fill-in middle infielder to legit AL MVP candidate (Ken Rosenthal's gonna love this). He's even got a cool nickname.

We all know, of course, that current performance does not equal true talent, right? I mean, clearly, Zobrist is good, but 7.9 WAR (as of this writing) good? Probably not. It's not clear where Zobrist will play on the field next season with Jason Bartlett being trade bait, Akinori Iwamura's option situation, and exactly what the Rays are thinking for right field between Gabe Gross, Gabe Kapler (okay, the latter half of the Grapler platoon is probably gone), and Matt Joyce (remember him?). But it's pretty clear that he's going to play somewhere for the Rays.

I'll try to put aside the bitterness of having kept him for my 2007 fantasy team that also included Shin-Soo Choo, they both sucked, so I let them go. Only to have them be picked up during the 2008 season by others... and so on Ugh. So let's get back to d_f's crappy  "true talent" machine and see what it pumps out for Zorilla!

Ben Zobrist

#18 / Second Base / Tampa Bay Rays

Height: 6-3

Weight: 200

Bats: B

Throws: R

Born: May 26, 1981

Hitting:(+basestealing): As usual, we'll use a variation on the method suggested in The Book for estimating a players true offensive talent -- regressing his wOBA (this version from FanGraphs including steals) for each major-league season against 200 PA of league average. In brief appearances in 2006 and 2007, Zobrist was helpless at the plate, posting wOBAs of .243 and .180, respectively.  However, toward the end of 2008, Zobirst got called up and put up a very good .364 wOBA in 227 PA. Given his previous performance in both the majors and minors, that appeared to be a fluke, but he started 2009 on fire, and with Iwamura's injury, Zorilla got enough playing time to silence the doubters with a (as of the moment) .399 wOBA over 578 PA. Regressing each season, doing a weighted average, and adding a slightly age adjustment gives us a current true talent level of a .358 wOBA, which translates to about 17 runs above average over 700 PA.

Fielding: Zobrist came up as a SS, and mostly played there prior to 2009 in the majors. He's played all over this season, putting up great UZR numbers at both 2B and RF. Since he spent most of his time this season at 2B, and it seems likely (to me, at least) that he'll be starting there in 2010, we'll try to get a sense of his talent there. Getting a good projection is tough, considering how little time he spent there in the majors prior to 2009. So what I've done is to take his 2009 2B UZR/150, then add in his SS numbers from the prior season while adding 5 to the SS numbers to account for the relative difficulty of that position. It's not perfect, but it's decent. Zobrist has an outstanding +24.1 UZR/150 at 2B so far this season, but his prior ratings at SS were less than impressive (in small sample sizes).  There's plenty of regression, and I incorporate speed score into that for outfielders and also middle infielders, although I'm not sure if I'll continue that for MIs. I also included data from the Fans Scouting Report.  This was particularly helpful because it allowed me to get a sense of Zobrist's skills relative to 2B even in the seasons when he was playing mostly SS. The Fans were less impressed, and my translations rate him at 4.2, -11.2, -7.0, and +3 runs at 2B from 2006-2009. Given the relative lack of data, I used 50% regressed UZR and 50% Fans Scouting Report. The final result was that Zobrist projects as about a +2 defender at 2B.

Baserunning: Using EqBRR from Baseball Prospectus (minus steals since that's included in wOBA), Zobrist wasn't really that bad or good. There's such a small sample that everything is heavily regressed. Let's call it average for now.

Adding it all up: +17 hitting +2 fielding +2.5 positional adjustment +25 AL replacement level = 46.5 times 85% playing time = about a 4.0 WAR player. Not bad for a guy making the minimum who, prior to this season, projected as a utility man who was a seeming thrown-in when the Rays traded away the immortal Aubrey Huff.

it's still hard to believe, given the out-of-seemingly-nowhere monster seasons had by both Zobrist and the previously-discussed Jason Bartlett, that the Rays aren't in the playoff hunt. But they'll be back. Even if he doesn't put up another Mauer/Pujols-esque season next year (and it's likely he won't), the Rays are in great shape with Zorilla wherever they end up playing him.

Update: Thanks to MGL's comment below, I finally got off my butt and corrected how my spreadsheet is set up (I'd prefer to do this in my database which has a more sophisticated [if still crude] Marcels-esque script in it, but it uses baseball databank, which understandably isn't updated in season... if FanGraphs would add current player age to their leaderboards, however... pretty please, Mr. Appleman? Right after you port the ap to BlackBerry?). Anyway, I don't know how badly this skew some earlier stuff, but long story short: Zobrist projects as more of a .348 wOBA guy, or +11/700. So he's closer to 3.5 WAR player at 2B. I leave the above unaltered as a testimony to my sloth, stupidity, and what half-assed projections can do.