Clearing the Bases — Multimedia Edition

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TV, radio, print, web… I ain’t kidding about the multi:

• As I’ve said for years, I recognize only one six o’clock, and it’s not the one with the milkman. The people involved with promoting Baseball Prospectus 2009 see things differently, however, and so it was that I had a car waiting at 5:50 AM this morning to take me to the WPIX studio in midtown Manhattan for a brief television appearance to promote this year’s annual:

I’ve watched the segment enough times to be hypercritical about my bit: the camera caught me looking at the monitor at the beginning… I stumbled over an answer or two, though I worked my way out of those jams… my body language could have been better, though the arrangement of the chairs didn’t help… humidity emphasizes the fact that I need a damn haircut, and while wearing contacts eliminates the glare my glasses produce, you can see every missing hour of sleep in my eyes (“The eyes, Chico, they never lie…”).

At least I had the presence to keep smiling and was smart enough to wear a suit; I didn’t know whether or not I’d be behind a desk, as in some other TV appearances. And while I’m patting myself on the back, my decision to start the Tivo recording at 6:55 AM instead of 7:00 was prophetic, as they actually chose to squeeze us in just before the top of the hour. Anyway, as a friend reminded me, I probably never expected that when I started this site nearly eight years ago that some day I’d be calling a New York manager out for bullshit busywork on a local network TV show. He’s right, of course. Pretty cool.

• If you live within earshot of my Wednesday afternoon radio hit on “The Front Row” on 1470 WLQR in Toledo, please note that my time slot has shifted from 4:10 Eastern (3:10 Central) to 5:35 Eastern (4:35 Central). The segment, which alas isn’t streamed, now runs for about 20 minutes instead of 15 so that we can ramble a bit more. Doing this hit with host Norm Wamer is one of the high points of my week, and I’m delighted to have an opportunity to expand just a bit more.

• The Philadelphia CityPaper interviewed me for their Phillies preview:

Another structural change could be more subtle. In 2008, Cole Hamels materialized as a true Major League ace, but stressed his body far past its previous limits in doing so. Last year, including the playoffs, Hamels pitched 72 more innings than he ever had in any previous season. The central question surrounding the Boy Wonder is whether the heavy load sustained during last season’s joyride to championship glory will take its toll this season. This is less a question of motivation — Hamels’ work ethic is lauded throughout the organization — and more of health. Still. Last season Hamels predicted that if he could get through just one season injury-free, all the questions about his fragility would expire. Well, he did and they haven’t. Already this spring, questions have arisen about whether Hamels’ increased workload will lead to increased time on the sideline, decreased effectiveness or worse.

The fears aren’t unfounded: The extra work is catching up with the young ace. Two weeks ago, Hamels felt tightness in his pitching elbow and was examined by the team physician. The tightness turned out to be simple inflammation, likely the result of normal wear and tear. This sounds reassuring until you remember that normal wear and tear usually develops toward the end of a long season, not at the beginning of one. Jay Jaffe, one of the authors of the annual Baseball Prospectus tome, explains, “Over a three-year period any given pitcher has something like a 50 percent chance of getting hurt.” According to him, for Hamels, a stint or two on the DL would be “pretty par for the course.” If he’s right, the Phillies, compared to last year, just got quite a bit worse.

Speaking of dangerous trends, the Phillies’ bullpen is also unlikely to have the type of season it pulled together in 2008. Behind closer Brad Lidge and his perfect 48-48 in save opportunities, the Phillies not only won every game they were leading after eight innings, but were also ranked by BP as having statistically the best bullpen in baseball. Part of that was skill, but a bigger part was good timing. Lidge, Ryan Madson, J.C. Romero, Chad Durbin and Clay Condrey, the Phillies’ first five arms out of the bullpen, all had ERAs well below their career averages. Out of the group, Madson (3.94 to 3.05) was the only one within a full run of his career mark. Regression is likely. “Historically,” Jaffe warns, “relievers just haven’t held up.”

• Proving that I’m nothing if not consistent, I make similar points about the defending World Champions in today’s ESPN Insider/BP stroll through the National League version of the PECOTA Projected Standings:

One real pleasure that we get in working with the PECOTA projection system comes when we move beyond the individual player forecasts to the team level. Every year, once we release the first batch of projections, our staff compiles depth charts and calibrates the playing time at each position for each team. Our system adjusts for strength of schedule, team defense, and reliever leverage, and we update these on a daily basis throughout the exhibition season based upon camp reports, expert injury analysis, our own intuition, and input from readers who keep a close eye on their hometown nine.

The result is our Projected Standings, and it’s often where we generate the most controversy. Two years ago, we drew fire for forecasting just 72 wins for the White Sox, who wound up winning exactly that many. Last year, we raised eyebrows with our assertion that the Rays would finish well above .500 for the first time in history. While we don’t always hit the bull’s-eye so directly, the standings are an area where we stand tall.

Our projections for this year’s National League standings aren’t likely to receive much brotherly love from Philadelphia, the home of the defending World Champions. That’s because PECOTA sees the Phillies finishing with 87 wins, second to the Mets in the NL East and a game short of the Wild Card. Their offense is slated to match last year’s number three ranking in scoring, but the pitching is poised for a major drop, from third in runs allowed to 10th. It’s not that the staff hasn’t seen upgrades; a full year of Joe Blanton and a more or less league-average expectation from fifth-starter candidates Chan Ho Park and J.A. Happ make for a stronger back end of the rotation. Their problems begin with the improbability of Cole Hamels matching last year’s 3.09 ERA over a career-high 227 innings (plus another 35 in the postseason); we’ve got him down for 3.65 and 180, and note that he’s already paid a visit to the doctor. The system also sees considerable regression for bullpen studs Brad Lidge and Ryan Madson. If there’s room for optimism, it’s that 46-year-old freak of nature Jamie Moyer practically broke PECOTA, and our 5.16 ERA forecast is based upon a dearth of comparable players.

As PECOTA sees it, the NL East race should see the twice-brokenhearted Mets christen their new ballpark with a 92-win season and a long-awaited division flag. While they could have done more to patch their rotation and their outfield corners, the bullpen makeover — starring Francisco Rodriguez and J.J. Putz — squarely addresses last year’s biggest flaw, and David Wright, Jose Reyes, and Carlos Beltran forecast as the league’s third-, fourth-, and fifth-most valuable hitters according to WARP. Also in the hunt for October are the Braves, who not only feature three players who forecast as the league’s best or second-best at their positions (Chipper Jones, Brian McCann, and Kelly Johnson), but can boast adding the Derek Lowe-Javier Vazquez tandem to their rotation, the strongest duo of pitchers added by a team last winter this side of the Yankees’ CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett.

Bitch if you must about the way the PECOTA projections see your favorite team, but the system is the clear leader of the pack at this sort of thing.

• Perhaps as karmic payback for all my squawking, a friend bestowed upon me a pair of tickets for Friday night’s Yankees-Cubs exhibition, technically the first game in the new ballpark. I’ll be in the bleachers beholding the dawn of this brave new world, no doubt missing the ballpark we’ve left behind, bemoaning the outrageous prices for piss-quality beer and reveling in the grief the Yankees are catching as they continue their efforts at social stratification.

• Speaking of the new ballpark, the photos from the Sliding Into Home blog show a new Monument Park that’s completely soulless. I’m not much of a Joni Mitchell fan, but her opening line from “Big Yellow Taxi” sums up the situation perfectly: “They paved paradise / And put up a parking lot.”

Back, Back, Back

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Call off the search party. It’s been nearly three weeks since I posted, and in that span I’ve been swallowed up whole by the Baseball Prospectus 2009 book tour and the Fantasy Baseball Index Spring Update deadlines, a brutal schedule around which I’ve salted 10 radio hits and two TV appearances as well as a few BP articles. Hitting the highlights:

• Spent two nights in Washington, DC for one exhilarating and exhausting day of promotional work that began with a 9 AM TV spot on the local Fox affiliate, WTTG for the Fox 5 Morning Show. From there it was onto XM Studios, where Steven Goldman and I did a half hour interview with former general manager Jim Duquette for “MLB Home Plate.” Duquette was a class act, engaging and open-minded, and he didn’t miss the opportunity for a moment of self-deprecation regarding the infamous Scott Kazmir-Victor Zambrano trade for which he’ll be remembered. He told that during his time in the front office, his teams had underlings digesting BP articles so the FOTs could glean whatever insights were to be had from the research end of things, and he gladly kept chatting with us for several minutes after the segment was done. An impressively good egg, all told — so much so that I’ll take an indefinite moratorium from bashing that trade.

After that and a quick bite, it was onto Georgetown University, where Steve and I lectured to a small class called “Sports Personalities of the 20th Century,” featuring our BP intern Ben Lindbergh. We talked about BP, Bill James, sabermetrics, Moneyball, steroids, Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and more. Then it was off to give another talk for the Georgetown Lecture Fund, and finally onto Politics and Prose, the great DC independent bookstore, where BP’s annual events are legendary, as we pack the house with about a hundred people, the store serves refreshments, and we sign and sell more copies of the book than anywhere else. I heart our New York area readers, but they can’t bring it like our DC ones can.

• Alas, no other promo stop could live up to the DC one. In Philadelphia we were the victim of an overzealous event coordinator who whisked us off the podium after less than an hour, which isn’t how we roll. Apparently, she’d double-booked events. Rutgers featured a small audience that inlcuded the Goldman family as ringers both in the audience and behind the podium, but we were joined by the always-entertaining Allen Barra, who is promoting his new book, Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee. Also, one reader brought us custom-decorated Rice Krispies treats:

• Writing, you say? I’ve squeezed in the last two installments of the “Outside Help” series at BP on the AL Central and the AL East. Here’s what I had to say about the Yankees:

Some shocking stats via ESPN’s Free Agent Tracker:
  • Of the $1.16 billion spent on free agent contracts this winter (not including minor league deals), roughly 38 percent of that was spent by the Yankees.
  • The $441 million they committed is more than the next five highest-spending teams (the Dodgers, Braves, Cubs, Mets and Phillies) combined.
  • That $441 million is also more than the bottom 26 teams combined.

Luckily for the Yankees, that money actually bought real talent. Sabathia has the highest PECOTA weighted mean WARP forecast of any pitcher in baseball, while Burnett ranks among the top 25, and third behind his new teammate and Francisco Rodriguez among the winter’s hired hands. Teixeira has the highest forecast of any free agent hitter and the 19th-highest forecast among all hitters. While the commitments are long, in Sabathia and Teixeira the Yankees paid for players who are entering their age 28 and age 29 seasons, respectively, a welcome strategy given the general tendency to sign free agents well into their 30s.

Not surprisingly given the expenditures, no team brought in more outside talent than the Yanks did, and none netted more once last year’s departures are considered (and yes, I’ve excluded retired players such as Mike Mussina across the board throughout this series). And while the Yanks have taken on a ton of salary, they shed so many big contracts that their Opening Day payroll should wind up a few million dollars shy of last year’s $209 million barring a late-spring trade to cover for Alex Rodriguez’s injury. Even given that situation, a sub-optimal playing time arrangement in right field (Xavier Nady over Swisher) and the mothballing of Philip Hughes and Ian Kennedy, PECOTA is extremely enthusiastic about the remade Yankees, forecasting them for an MLB-high 100 wins.

Back soon with more stuff.

Ticket to Ride [update]

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In the end, after no shortage of drama, we got our Yankees tickets:

Just moments before I embarked for the Baseball Prospectus 2009 Baltimore whistle stop earlier this week, I got a call from my friend Nick, the “commissioner” of our aggrieved group of Yankees partial-plan ticket holders. Two weeks after turning down the team’s generous offer to accept $85 dollar obstructed view seats behind the right field foul pole instead of $25 grandstand seats, a representative from the Yankees ticket office had phoned Nick to apologize for the way the ticket renewals had been handled, offering us a closer approximation to our initial request. Instead of a 20-game set of $25 grandstand seats between first and third base, we were offered $20 seats just beyond first, in section 413, three rows from the back of the stadium. No word on whether complimentary oxygen tanks would be provided.

As tempting as it might have been to tell the Yankees where to stick that offer given the way we and so many other fans had been treated, in the end, we accepted the deal. The desire to preserve the continuity of our 11-season tradition of making the occasional trip to the ballpark in each other’s company outweighed our distaste for the new world order in the Bronx. Still, this is no happy ending. In spite of this belatedly semi-favorable outcome, this episode still represents one more data point in a long line of them detailing the demise of the Yankee brand, at least from the nosebleed seats where I sit.

As it is, we’re only spending about one-quarter of the dollars did on last year’s 26-game Flex Plan Tier Box seats—a steep decline in our outlay which makes it clear we’ve voted with our wallets. We’ve lost our automatic access to playoff tickets, but particularly since 2004, the last time the Yanks made it to the ALCS, that’s scarcely amounted to more than a winter-long interest-free loan for tickets to games that never happened.

I’m extremely hopeful that other aggrieved customers have received similar remedies and apologies. Even if this is a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease — which I highly doubt given the lack of resourcefulness in the Yankee ticket office, given that my name’s not the one on the account — not everybody’s got the platform to speak up as I did and send a little ripple of dissent through the Yankees’ world. The Yanks owe every single customer better treatment than the type we received, and they’re not easily forgiven under the circumstances.

So while my friends and I will be making our regularly scheduled trips up to the Bronx after all, I’m still livid at the way all of this went down. But I’m also relieved that I’ll have the opportunity to shoot the breeze over beers and hot dogs at with my good friends a few times this season as we watch the Yankees. A summer without baseball and bonding at the ballpark would be a bleak thing indeed, so fuck the Yankees for hindering our pursuit of that possibility for even a moment. Seriously.

UPDATE: Great to see that the Yankees’ instincts regarding ticket sales just continue to get better. Via New Stadium Insider comes the word about the team’s brilliant pre-sale strategy:

Prior to the public on-sale, all Yankees Premium, Full-Season and 41-Game Ticket Licensees will be able to purchase individual-game tickets, online only, via a pre-on-sale on Thursday, March 19. On the following day, Friday, March 20, all other Partial Plan Licensees (of 20-, 15-, 12- and 11-Game Plans) will be permitted to purchase individual-game tickets online only as well. For complete information, including ticket limits, please visit yankees.com.

Backing up a bit… if you simply want to attempt to think about possibly trying to take a chance on buying single-game tickets, you have to register for a random drawing and be one of the lucky souls who wins a golden ticket pulled out of Randy Levine’s buttcrack or something, and even then you’re still third in line behind the season-ticket and 41-game holders, and then the partial-plan holders, each of whom gets a separate day to pick over the non-plan seats and put them up for sale on Stub Hub because after all, they’ve already gotten their seats. Swell.

According to Trost’s latest appearance on WFAN, there’s no truth to the rumor that once you register, a representative from the Yankees will come to your house and spray you with a fire hose for as long as you attempt to log into your Ticketmaster account and participate in the pre-sale. But would it surprise anyone if that were true?

Blog-Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

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Blogrolling, the third-party add-on to this site which maintains the links you see at left, recently returned from a lengthy stay on the disabled list. The code has been completely re-written, but as I’m just discovering, not all the kinks have been worked out. Instead of alphabetizing the links, they now appear in the order they were added, with the newest links down at the bottom. Not exactly user-friendly.

Anyway, lest you grow weary of scrolling down for hours at a time, I’d just like to call your attention to the most recently added link, New Stadium Insider, which has been covering the none-too-smooth transition from the House That Ruth Built to the House That Ruthlessness Built for nearly two years. Proprietor Ross has been following the latest twists and turns in the partial plan ticket fiasco with keen interest, chiming in via the comments here and at Field of Schemes to offer some support. Check his work out when you get a chance.

The Streets of Baltimore (and NYC)

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Not to tread on the five posts I’ve put up over the past two days, but I just wanted to call attention to my first appearance on the Baseball Prospectus 2009 bookstore tour:

March 10, 7 PM: Clay Davenport, Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe
Barnes & Noble @Johns Hopkins University
3330 St. Paul Street
Baltimore, MD 21218 (map)

Also, I’ll be appearing in New York on Thursday:

March 12, 6 PM: Neil deMause, Cliff Corcoran, Steven Goldman, Kevin Goldstein, Jay Jaffe
Barnes & Noble @ 18th Street
2 East 18th Street
New York, New York 10003

For more tour details see here.

Pole Dancing

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Friend, colleague and stadium shell game expert Neil deMause has been flexing his journalistic muscles by keeping up with the Yankee Stadium ticket beat(down), and generously salting his reports with a few choice quotes from yours truly. Following up his initial report for The Village Voice, last week he unearthed some choice euphemisms from Yankees’ chief operating officer Lonn Trost, who’s emerging as the face of villainy in this debacle:

Team COO Lonn Trost’s response has essentially been “RTFM,” but recent days have revealed some undocumented features. First off was Trost disclosing to WFAN’s Mike Francesca that the stadium’s 1,886 standing-room tickets will go for “around $20″ a pop — and that holders of $12 bleacher seats will for the first time be free to roam about the stadium at will. While this is no doubt because Yanks execs wanted to ensure that Bleacher Creatures are able to get to the new stadium’s many premium-priced concessions areas, it makes for one weird pricing scheme: Fans will, in essence, be levied an $8 surcharge for not having a place in the outfield to rest their tuchuses between purchases of $10 caesar salads.

The plot also continues to thicken regarding the seats behind the foul poles that offer obstructed views of the field — or as Trost neologized, are “architecturally shadowed.” Trost told Francesca that foul-pole seats will not be offered as part of season ticket plans, but rather only on a game-by-game basis; they won’t be marked “obstructed view,” however, which is apparently allowable under state law, which requires that obstructed-view tickets be so marked, but doesn’t define what “obstructed” is.

Neil then goes on to cite my ticket group’s experience regarding those “architecturally shadowed” seats and finds that we’re hardly alone in that treatment (a topic that’s made its way around the area dailies). Big surprise.

Over at Field of Schemes, the site devoted to his efforts to keep up with stadium shenanigans (following his book of the same name, which is now in its second edition), Neil details a year-old exchange between Trost, Francesca and his then co-host Chris Russo, unearthing some hollow words from the Yankee organization regarding the infamous relocation plan:

Mike Francesca: Are some people getting relocated, getting hurt? Are there some guys who’ve been loyal season ticket holders who are gonna get hurt in this move?

Trost: We hope not. We spent substantial time coming up with a relocation program, and the relocation program will probably be public in about six weeks. The program basically says, we will put you in a comparable location, and you have the choice of taking it or not. If you don’t want it, and elect to go down, or up, or move, we will do that also.

Chris Russo: You will take care of them.

Trost: We will take — and understand, this is most likely the largest and hardest relocation program in the history of sports. … But the philosophy is try to give—

Francesca: And you’re going to take care of your people in the bleachers, and take care of your people who are in the upper deck, and the guy who takes his son once a week, or has his Sunday plan. You’re going to take care of that fan in this new ballpark.

Trost: The plans will be the same, or comparable.

That relocation plan actually took six months, not six weeks, to appear, and contained none of the guarantees about “comparable” seating that Trost promised to radio listeners. Noting that Trost has recently begun berating fans for “not reading the documentation,” jilted miniplan holder Jay Jaffe tells FoS: “Basically, he’s insulting his customers for failing to read the fine print.”

As for that fine print, here’s what I wrote in one of the comments:

It’s worth pointing out that not only did Joe Stalin’s Guide to the New Yankee Stadium Gulags (a/k/a the Relocation Guide) contain none of the guarantees about “comparable” seating that Trost promised, it included the following, note in response to Question 8 in the FAQ on page 33 (“How will seats and seat locations be assigned in the new Yankee Stadium?”):

…With respect to existing “B” Plan and Partial Season Plan Licensees, the Yankees will attempt to assign seat locations in accordance with the Licensees’ seating preferences as expressed in the Licensees’ Relocation Program Questionnaires. However, please note, unlike existing Full Season and “A” Plan Licensees, under the Relocation Program, “B” Plan and Partial Season Plan Licensees will not receive reasonably comparable seat location assignments. All seat location assignments for existing “B” Plan and Partial Season Plan Licensees will be made in accordance with the Licensee’s preferences as reflected in the Relocation Program Questionnaire submitted by the Licensee. All seat locations will be determined by the Yankees, subject to the pool selection process. Please see pages 36, 38 and 40, respectively, for more information. (emphasis in original)

Got that? WILL NOT RECEIVE REASONABLY COMPARABLE SEAT LOCATION ASSIGNMENTS! Will receive unreasonably incomparable assignments. No wonder Trost is berating us for not having read the fine print, because he as much as said we were screwed, previous statements to the contrary be damned.

Capping it off, on Monday, Neil penned a brief Op-Ed piece for the free commuter paper Metro New York, one whose title may have caused readers to assume he was throwing his hat into the ring as the team’s fill-in third baseman (“Neil deMause: The solution to Yanks’ troubles”). Actually, it’s his modest proposal to remedy this whole fiasco:

There can be only one solution: The city needs to move as quickly as possible to put this whole sorry episode behind us by starting demolition. Demolition, that is, of the new stadium.

Think about it. The construction jobs that the Yanks were touting from the project have already been created, and the workers are home busily hiding their money under mattresses where the banks can’t get at it. Tear down the new building, and the locals get their parks back right where they’re used to them. Ticketholders get their old seats back. The Yanks can even keep their $350 million in new parking garages as a gift from us for being such good sports — while getting a mulligan on their final Yankee Stadium season, hopefully putting it off until after Jose Molina has retired.

Jay Jaffe, the baseball writer and Yankee fan whose blog posts about his ticket woes have helped spur Polegate, says, “I think it’s a great idea! Tear it down, except for the luxury boxes. Those of us who pay for our own tickets can go back to the great seats we’ve enjoyed for all these years in The House That Ruth Built, while the fat cats can hobnob without missing a thing, as they didn’t come to watch the ballgame anyway.”

I wasn’t initially supposed to get the last word, but I wound up with it anyway due to some overzealous editing. None of the quotes are as good as my little Wall Street Journal splash, but then what is?

UPDATE: Over at the excellent Biz of Baseball website, Pete Toms has a lengthy, link-heavy piece regarding the tarnishing of the Yankee brand as it relates to this whole stadium mess and the current economic downturn. A must-read.

The Replacement Killers

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Another one of my Baseball Prospectus pieces syndicated on ESPN Insider, this one on trying to quantify what the absences of Alex Rodriguez and other stars would cost their teams in terms of runs and wins:

When the news on Alex Rodriguez’s hip injury broke last week, the Baseball Prospectus crew brainstormed a few possible solutions for the Yankees. Unsurprisingly, we reached an inevitable conclusion: he’s virtually irreplaceable, at least when it comes to finding a player under team control who could offset the expected loss of production.

Bound for surgery, Rodriguez is projected to miss six to nine weeks. Barring a trade, his most likely in-house replacement is 33-year-old journeyman Cody Ransom, whose solid .251/.348/.432 line over the course of 214 major league plate appearances spread across six seasons is dwarfed by a lengthy, significantly less impressive minor league track record which drags down his PECOTA weighted mean projection to a brutal .216/.293/.386 line and a -0.164 Marginal Lineup Value rate, the number of runs per game he would contribute (or cost) to a lineup of otherwise average offensive performers. By comparison, Rodriguez is forecast for 0.174 MLVr, a difference of 0.338 runs per game. That’s 10 runs—or roughly one additional win—for every 29.6 games, or 54.8 runs over the course of 162 games.

As staggering as losing roughly one more game per month in the standings might be to the Yankees, at least 10 other stars’ losses would cost their teams even more—as many as 75 runs on the offensive side—due to a combination of higher MLVr projections and/or lousier backups. In reality, the extended absences of these players would likely trigger trades for better replacements to stop the hemorrhaging, but for this exercise, the pool is restricted to players under team control, and we’ll pay only lip service to defense.

…

3. Ryan Braun, Brewers LF (0.231 MLVr, 0.434 above backup): While Braun’s overall 2008 line couldn’t quite equal his 2007 numbers, the move from third base to left field saved 30 runs according to our defensive numbers. His MLVr ranks ninth among our PECOTA projections and is exacerbated by the Brewers’ lack of a suitable backup. Tony Gwynn Jr. (-0.203) and Chris Duffy (-0.239) carry weak sticks even for center fielders, and it’s a stretch to assume that Trot Nixon (0.010) will suffice given that he played in just 11 major league games last year. Former top prospect Brad Nelson (-0.083), a first baseman who’s taken up the outfield corners in an attempt to win a reserve job, would bump Braun out of the top 10 if he can handle the move to the pasture.

4. Albert Pujols, Cardinals 1B (0.456 MLVr, 0.398 above backup): Pujols’ MLVr tops our projections, hardly surprising given that he’s ranked either first or second in that category in five of the past six seasons. What prevents him from topping this list is the presence of the serviceable Chris Duncan (0.058), who’s played 43 games at first over the past three years and who appears to be recovered from last year’s neck problems. Once you figure in Pujols’ prowess with the leather and Duncan’s lack of same, however, this could well reclaim the top spot here.

5. Manny Ramirez, Dodgers LF (0.245 MLVr, 0.369 above backup): Last week’s signing averts the grim specter of the Dodgers starting the season with a slap-hitting $44 million left fielder (Juan Pierre and his -0.124 MLVr), instead of a power-hitting $45 million model. Skipper Joe Torre might have eventually stumbled onto a more productive solution by playing Blake DeWitt (-0.061) at third base and moving Casey Blake to left, but then again, it took the skipper over four months to give up on Pierre and Andruw Jones last year. Manny’s defense might cost one full win over the course of a year relative to these options, but his addition still pushes the Dodgers ahead of the Diamondbacks in the NL West projections.

A-Rod would actually rank 12th on that list, as I neglected to include the 0.340 runs per game gap between the Astros’ Lance Berkman (0.259) and replacement Aaron Boone (-0.081) because my calculations showed the ‘Stros would actually disappear into a giant Vortex of Suck before that could become a reality.

Chatterboxscore

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Friday’s Baseball Prospectus chat was one of the most enjoyable ones I’ve done in recent memory, the happy coincidence of a fun time of year, a good batch of questions, and a lack of the technical gremlins which have created a distraction in every one of my chats in recent memory. A few anwers covering a couple of last week’s bigger stories:

Manny Ramirez (Los Angeles): I am going to opt out of my contract after ’09 right?

JJ: Offhand, I don’t think there have been any big-dollar players who haven’t opted out when given the chance, but it’s hard to know where the economy will be a year from now. Manny might have a big year, and even be a model citizen, but I think the appetite for his services will continue to be suppressed. I would hardly be surprised if we see a repeat scenario of this winter, but I do think the Dodgers could more easily walk away if that happens.

rw448 (vt): Is Arod’s torn hip labrum a byproduct of steroid use? Thanks Jay.

JJ: It’s an ugly but inevitable question that’s been asked. From what I read via an article in the NY Daily News, there’s no avascular necrosis in the hip, which would be typical of a link to steroids. Here’s the take-home quote:

“Such questions arose because cysts in muscle are a common side-effect of intramuscular steroid injections, as is avascular necrosis (loss of blood supply to the bone) from use of the drugs themselves.

“‘Because A-Rod kept changing his story about his steroid use,’ said Dr. Lewis Maharam, the medical director of the New York Road Runners Club, ‘it made us skeptical about his hip issue, thinking it could be steroid-related. It is not. Avascular necrosis of the femoral head is linked to steroids and sometimes described by the lay public as a cyst. This is not what he has.'”

Scott (St. Louis, MO): Having just seen the update to the depth charts reflecting A-Rod’s potential output this year, I have two questions: 1) do you think that 95 wins may be an overzealous projection if A-Rod doesn’t play until June? and, the million dollar question 2) how should A-Rod be treated in a fantasy draft: is he still a top four round guy if he’s only giving you 360-400 PA?

JJ: The situation is too fluid to really gauge what the overall impact will be on the Yankees, though I do think this could be analogous to the Posada injury last year — the straw that broke the camel’s back, keeping a 90+ win team sidelined in October. As for A-Rod’s fantasy value, I took a swing at bracketing some expectations for Fantasy Baseball Index, a newsstand publication whom I write for in the winter (covering pitchers) and spring (covering all camp happenings, job battles and projection adjustments). We did dollar value projections based on four different scenarios, which you can see here and I’ll continue to keep an eye on the news as it develops.

On the latter topic, I contributed a few suggestions for this Joe Sheehan piece on possible replacements for Rodriguez:

Looking outside the organization is a better option, but the Yankees are limited by the uncertainty over how long Rodriguez will be out. A team already stuffed to the gills with corner players can’t easily bring in a third baseman in trade, someone like Garret Atkins or Adrian Beltre, and be left with no place to play him come June. On the discard pile you have Esteban German, who was designated for assignment by the Royals last week. Jay Jaffe scanned a list of players who were out of options and found Dallas McPherson and Jeff Baker, both of whom could be a short-term patch. The recently outrighted Andy Marte might be available, though it’s unclear if he can hold a major league job.

Jaffe also pointed out that the Dodgers’ Mark Loretta has become expendable in the wake of the Orlando Hudson signing. He brings a glove, some OBP, and the ability to be a useful bench player once Rodriguez returns. The Dodgers have some issues in the back end of their rotation and bullpen, and the Yankees’ depth in those spots could make a trade work. Loretta, as a free agent signed during this past winter, would have to approve any deal.

More on the topic of A-Rod in the next post.

The Class of 27

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An ESPN Insider/Baseball Prospectus twin killing, this one looks at PECOTA’s picks for the most productive 27-year-olds:

As with many a key sabermetric tenet, Bill James is responsible for introducing the idea that ballplayers, or at least hitters, reach their peak value at the age of 27. In fact, it was a serendipitous 27 years ago, in the 1982 Baseball Abstract, that James first presented his research supporting this conclusion, thus contradicting the then-prevailing wisdom that ballplayers peak between the ages of 28 and 32.

While you wouldn’t know it to see the way certain front offices function when signing over-the-hill hitters, this particular bit of James’ wisdom has withstood the test of time, and has even undergone some expansion. Using more advanced valuation methods, Nate Silver has found that players peak between the ages of 25 and 29, generally cresting at 26 and 27, with some understandable variations by positions. Speed-based players, like middle infielders and center fielders, tend toward the earlier side of that range.

Baseball fans like their rules of thumb simple, however, and focusing on hitters about to enter their age-27 seasons is particularly popular in the fantasy realm. Although this year’s “Class of 27″ isn’t full of marquee names whose eye-popping numbers match those of 25-year-old Hanley Ramirez, 26-year-olds David Wright and Jose Reyes, or 29-year-old Albert Pujols, it’s worth a gander.

For the list I ranked the nine players with the highest Equivalent Average forecasts, then interpolated between the various PECOTA percentile forecasts to estimate the chances they’re reach .300 EqAs and reach their career EqAs. Playing to the home crowd, here’s what I had to say about the Dodgers’ Andre Ethier (third on the list) and the Brewers’ Corey Hart (seventh):

Andre Ethier, Dodgers RF (.292/.368/.464, .292 EqA, Reach .300: 36%, Reach .293: 50%)
Perhaps no Dodger should be smiling as widely as Ethier after Wednesday’s Manny Ramirez signing, as it returns the player whose arrival coincided with Ethier’s scorching .368/.448/.649 performance over the final two months, less likely due to any mythical protection effect than to the end of Joe Torre’s dickering with the lineup’s Pierres and Joneses at Ethier’s expense. Ethier forecasts to have the highest EqOBP of any player here (.372), and assuming that he again hits ahead of Ramirez, that will put extra runs on the board for L.A.

Corey Hart, Brewers RF (.289/.343/.494, .286 EqA, Reach .300: 28%, Reach .277: 59%)
Hart went from being the second most valuable Brewer in 2007 to a basket case this past year, hitting just .252/.275/.452 from June onward, and hacking his way into an 0-1 hole more often than any other player. PECOTA believes he can recover his plate discipline, and it gives him about a 25 percent chance at 25 home runs and 25 steals.

As a side note, I remember the 1982 Abstract fondly, having borrowed the first mass market edition from a friend for the better part of a summer and gone nuts with my pocket calculator figuring out Runs Created for the players on the Salt Lake Gulls. I was 12 at the time, the young whippersnapper you see in the Little League photo on the site banner. I eventually returned that copy, and never tried to fill that hole in my collection until I recently won the bidding for a copy on eBay. Can’t wait to get my hands on that one again; it really blew my mind, and it remains one of the most important baseball books in the field of sabermetrics.