A Little Help

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Given three articles and a chat since my last post, I’ll be clearing the decks with links to each individual piece rather than one monster post. First up is the AL West installment of the Outside Help series. Here’s the intro and the part about the Angels:

The AL West was the American League’s weakest division last year, finishing with a .487 winning percentage and a .475 Hit List Factor. The Angels won an MLB-best 100 games, but they were the only team in the division to finish above .500, and they reached the century mark only by setting a record by outdoing their third-order Pythagenpat projection by a whopping 16 wins. All told, the division’s HLF was just a single point ahead of the basement-dwelling NL West’s mark, and the 12th-lowest of the Wild Card Era.

As with much of baseball beyond the East Coast, it’s been a relatively quiet offseason in the AL West when it comes to flashing the cash around. The four teams have spent an average of $13.7 million on free-agent contracts, a bit ahead of the AL Central’s mark ($12.4 million), and with the dollar amount of Oakland’s Nomar Garciaparra deal still pending. But beneath the surface, a handful of trades have shown that these teams aren’t standing still this winter, and PECOTA now foresees a typically tight division race between the two teams that have dominated the division during this millennium.

As we move the Outside Help series on to the AL, we’ve got a revised set of PECOTA projections to deal with. Some of the player values won’t reconcile directly with the ones from the NL series, though perhaps I can ply a willing intern into getting some final numbers once the series is complete. Teams are listed in order of their 2008 finish; for each hitter, WARP and EqA are listed, while for each pitcher, the figures are WARP and EqERA.

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

IN: OF Bobby Abreu (3.2, .294), RP Brian Fuentes (3.1, 3.52), RP Matt Palmer (0.6, 5.74)
OUT: LF Garret Anderson (1.3, .260), SP Jon Garland (2.3, 4.85), SP Nick Green (0.2, 6.12), RP Darren O’Day (1.2, 4.23), RP Francisco Rodriguez (5.7, 3.02), 1B Mark Teixeira (5.1, .308)
NET: -8.9 WARP

The Angels are a most interesting paradox during this winter of discontent. They’re a perennially successful big-market club coming off of their fourth division title in five years, a 100-win season in which they had the sixth-highest payroll (according to both Opening Day and final reckonings). Among AL clubs, only the Yankees have outspent them in the free-agent market this winter.

Then again, that was by a mere $400 million or so, which helps to explain why the Angels have taken such a hit in the talent department. They were outbid on Teixeira, who ranked as the most valuable hitter on the market according to PECOTA and who came away with the winter’s biggest contract ($180 million), and they decided not to spend that savings elsewhere. They’ve replaced Teixeira with the inadequate Kendry Morales, the latest in a long line of highly touted infield prospects who haven’t really lived up to their hype (Casey Kotchman, Dallas McPherson, Brandon Wood, Erick Aybar, Howie Kendrick); the system says Morales will be worth 0.2 wins below replacement level. They let Rodriguez depart after he set the single-season saves record, and while they struck a reasonable deal for a replacement in Fuentes at less than half the total price tag, the latter doesn’t have quite as strong a track record or a forecast. A perennial bullpen powerhouse—with the top four team WXRL finishes in six of the past seven years—they could have chosen to fill from within with Scot Shields or Jose Arredondo, but instead they spent for Fuentes, while letting Garland walk and banking they could replace him with surgically repaired Kelvim Escobar, bruised prospect Nick Adenhart, and Grade D staff filler Dustin Moseley. They made a solid upgrade by replacing Anderson with Abreu, but that was only after re-signing Juan Rivera to a three-year, $12.75 million deal at a time when they’ve got outfielders coming out of their ears, somewhat neutralizing that gain. All in all, it’s a mix of defensible decisions and odd lapses, one that winds up being less than the sum of its parts, unless some of the youngsters on hand live up to their billing.

Between the Angels’ losses and Oakland’s gains, this might be the division with the largest impact owed to offseason moves, though the Halos’ returning to earth after last year’s Pythagorean overachievement will likely provide an assist as well.

You Can Add Dropping the F-Bomb in the Wall Street Journal to My Resume

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So, over the past three years, I’ve talked to two other WSJ reporters at length a total of five or six times, for maybe an hour and a half, without getting my name in that paper (not that I’m counting).

While part of me wishes that the eloquent command of the Yankee Stadium ticket issue that I’ve shown elsewhere were reflected in what amounts to my debut in the paper, I’m not too refined to say that this doesn’t trump that:

Jay Jaffe and a group of friends shared Yankees tickets for 11 years, but they won’t be making the move to the new stadium. The 20-game packages of $25-a-game grandstand seats they hoped to get were sold out. Instead, the Yankees suggested $85 seats deep in right field.

“Literally, my words were, ‘Are you f- kidding me?'” Mr. Jaffe recalls.

If you’re gonna be reduced to a soundbite, might as well go out with guns blazing. Somewhere George Carlin is getting a good laugh.

Manny Happy Returns

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Our long dreadlocked drama is over. MLB.com and ESPN report that after more than four months of arduous negotiations and more spin than the 2008 presidential election, Manny Ramirez has returned to the fold. From MLB’s Ken Gurnick and Barry Bloom:

The deal was closed, pending a physical, at a meeting in Los Angeles attended by Ramirez, his agents Scott Boras and Mike Fiore, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, general manager Ned Colletti and manager Joe Torre, the latter duo both flying from Spring Training camp on Tuesday night for the session.

Torre and Colletti were already winging their way back to Phoenix this morning and are expected to arrive in time for Wednesday’s Cactus League game between the Dodgers and Giants at Camelback Ranch.

The manager was summoned back to Los Angeles along with Colletti for what turned out to be the final negotiating session in a 4 1/2-month effort to get the free agent to return to the Dodgers.

Ramirez accepted the same deal the Dodgers offered last Wednesday — two years, $45 million ($25 million in 2009, $20 million in 2010), payment deferred over five years without interest, with an opt-out clause after one season paid at $10 million each for the first four years and $5 million for the fifth.

But both sides indicated Tuesday night that the deal could not be completed until all primary parties met face-to-face in Los Angeles Wednesday. Ramirez flew in from Florida Tuesday night for the meeting.

Considering Manny and Boras went into the offseason seeking a four- or five-year deal at rates comparable to Alex Rodriguez ($27.5 million per year), this is a pretty huge win for the Dodgers, particularly on the emotional level; they get a great hitter, the best free agent of the offseason, they get him while screwing überagent Scott Boras fairly hard relative to those lofty initial expectations, and — if the deferral info is accurate — they get him at a dollar amount that’s less than one of their recent, previous offers. Arguably, Manny bought himself the opt-out with that money, which doesn’t bother me as much as it will some people. It’s the cost of doing business, in this case.

On a baseball level, this is a great move even at that dollar amount. Lengthwise, it’s tough to screw up too badly on a two-year deal, though the Dodgers do have the Andruw Jones deal as the exception that proves the rule (how often does a player who was on track for the Hall of Fame suddenly hit .158 with three homers in half a season?). As a win-now move it’s even better. Baseball Prospectus’ current, PECOTA-based projections have the Dodgers at 84 wins, five behind the Diamondbacks. That’s with Juan Pierre as their regular left fielder. The difference in projected WARP values between the two (4.3 to 1.7) more than cuts that margin in half, and that’s if you buy that Manny is worth -13 runs in the field, which is, to say the least, extreme; his historic defensive numbers have always been distorted by Fenway’s Green Monster, while his numbers with the Dodgers last year were around average. Still, as a low-end estimate, that will stand. Figuring totally on projected VORP, the difference increases to 43.6 runs (49.0 to 5.4) — more than four wins — but even that doesn’t get it right, since Pierre’s VORP is based on his being a center fielder, where the offensive replacement level is theoretically lower than in left field. Marginal Lineup Value Rate (MLVr) numbers put Manny as worth .245 runs per game above an average hitter, whereas they put Pierre -.124 below, a difference of 59.8 runs, about SIX wins. Now, that’s assuming the Dodgers can just bury Pierre in a ditch without him getting any playing time, which unfortunately isn’t going to happen, and we’ve avoided the thorny issue of defense, but as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we can call that the high-end estimate.

So, we can estimate this move as worth between 2.6 and 6.0 wins. Considering the fact that the Dodgers are in the sweet spot where, as Nate Silver showed in Baseball Between the Numbers the marginal dollar values per win rise sharply, peaking around $4.5 million per win for the 90th win, this is essentially the point where the big-dollar incremental gains start to pay for themselves. Particularly so in this instance, given that this was 2005 dollars that Nate was figuring when he did that study, and that the bar for the current NL West is lower than your typical division. After all, 84 wins brought home the flag for Manny and the Dodgers last year.

As for Ramirez and Boras, it’s tough to say they came out ahead given their efforts. As Paul SF at YanksFanSoxFan did some figuring himself:

Assuming Ramirez were to exercise the 2010 player option for $20 million (I think he will because anyone who thinks the teams will be in any position to pay players more money next offseason is kidding themselves), he will have received a whopping $5 million more than he would have gotten if he had simply stayed in Boston and put up his big numbers (thereby assuring that the Red Sox would have picked up their two options on him).

Except he changed agents, and Boras now gets a commission for whatever deal Ramirez accepts. Everything I’ve read assumes Boras gets a 5 percent commission (though no one actually quotes Boras or a player saying this). Five percent of $45 million is $2.25 million — leaving Ramirez a net profit of less than $3 million over staying in Boston. If Boras’ commission is 10 percent, Manny would have agitated his way off the Red Sox for all of $500,000.

If the net present value of the contract is less than $45 mil, as it must be if those terms are right (my crash course in the Excel Net Present Value function yielded about $41.5 mil assuming a 3% discount rate), those gains are even smaller. As my financial guru over the lifespan it took to write this piece, Neil deMause, put it: “Basically you’re trying to figure out the cost of Manny giving the Dodgers a no-interest loan. You could argue that the Dodgers are a safer place to keep your money than a bank, or your mattress.”

Indeed. No chance of the Dodgers being nationalized anytime soon.

Stickin’ it to the Ticket Holders [updated]

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I’m mad as hell about the Yankees’ ticket situation, and I’m not gonna take it any more.

Instead of being offered our $25 seats, or even anything between the bases, we had been assigned $85 seats in section 107…

…right behind the right field foul pole. Obstructed view, at more than triple the price of what we were prepared to spend. Are you kidding me? No, really, ARE YOU &*^%$#@ KIDDING ME?

The article is a freebie over at BP. Those of you with Yankee-themed blogs, please consider linking to this piece, because the Yanks deserve every iota of bad publicity they get about this. See also the great additional commentary from Neil de Mause at the Village Voice.

UPDATE: Good additional coverage and tales of woe at Bronx Banter, ESPN’s Jim Caple, Exit 55, Field of Schemes, Fire Gardy, ESPN’s Rob Neyer, River Avenue Blues, Subway Squawkers, Was Watching, The Yankee Universe, YanksFanSoxFan. Thanks!

The Breakout Bunch

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I’ve got a pair of articles at BP and ESPN Insider focusing on young players whom PECOTA forecasts to break out, which in terms of our forecasting system means improving their productivity at least 20 percent relative to their three-year baseline. From the hitters piece (BP and ESPN):

Not every top prospect hits the ground running the way recent Rookie of the Year winners like Evan Longoria and Ryan Braun did, stepping into a major league lineup and putting up All-Star caliber numbers. Sometimes it takes a couple of years’ worth of experience and adjustments for a high-upside player to reach his potential, but when he does, look out.

Our PECOTA projection system can help to identify such players via a trio of categories called “breakout,” “improve” and “decline,” which estimate the likelihood of a player’s production significantly rising or falling relative to his established baseline level. “Breakout rate” is the percent chance that a hitter’s equivalent runs produced per plate appearance will improve by at least 20 percent relative to the weighted average of his performance over the past three years. A high rate generally indicates a high upside, though it’s worth noting the Ugueto Effect, in which the system will estimate a high rate for a horrible player simply because there’s nowhere else for him to go.

What follows are a handful of players — curiously concentrated among a small number of teams — whom PECOTA sees as excellent breakout candidates at the major league level this year, with “breakout rates” of at least 33 percent. Each is forecast for at least 400 plate appearances, a .275 “equivalent average,” and 2.5 WARP. Most are familiar names from our recent top 100 prospects lists whom you’ll likely hear even more about as they approach their considerable potentials.

The hitters most likely to breakout inclue Justin Upton, Elijah Dukes, Chris Young, Lastings Milledge, Ryan Zimmerman, Edwin Encarnacion, Jay Bruce and Adam Jones.

The pitchers (BP and ESPN) include Andrew Miller, Clay Buchholz, Anibal Sanchez, Clayton Kershaw, John Danks, Jonathan Sanchez, Max Scherzer and Justin Masterson. Here’s what I had to say about Kershaw and Danks:

Clayton Kershaw, Dodgers (157 IP, 4.35 EqERA, 23% Breakout Rate)
Drafted one pick behind [Andrew] Miller, Kershaw ranked fifth on last year’s prospect list, and dazzled observers in spring training — all before celebrating his 20th birthday. Recalled last May, he scuffled in his first major league stint before undertaking a Double-A refresher course. Upon returning, the young southpaw exhibited much-improved control (67/28 K/BB ratio in 69 innings) and impressive poise, finishing with a respectable 4.26 ERA that would have been considerably lower with average defensive support. Only the speed of his ascent curbs PECOTA’s optimism for him to maintain or better last year’s level, since his baseline includes relatively high translated ERAs from his low minors work.

John Danks, White Sox (169 IP, 4.03 EqERA, 20% Breakout Rate)
By any conventional sense of the term, Danks already broke out in 2008, pitching the White Sox into the postseason in the Game 163 tiebreaker to cap a season in which he finished fifth in the AL with a 3.32 ERA. His projection is weighted down by the brutal translations of his 2006 performance and an ugly rookie campaign, but the addition of a cut fastball to his arsenal last year boosted his ground-ball rate and prevented homers, and typifies the non-linear gains which developing pitchers often deliver. PECOTA remains bullish.

Sorry, Yankee fans, Phil Hughes just missed the list. His breakout rate of 48 percent is higher than any pitcher on the list, but his weighted mean projected ERA is 4.74, 0.14 above my cutoff.

Larry H. Miller, RIP

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In the years before the baseball bug returned to my life, the Utah Jazz were at the center of my sports universe, and the annual attempts of the John Stockton/Karl Malone/Jerry Sloan teams to win an NBA championship were as absorbing as any Dodgers or Yankees team if not more, since they remained part of the ties that bound me back to my hometown, family and friends. Their 1997 and 1998 NBA Finals runs and eventual losses remain as bittersweet as anything I’ve ever experienced as a sports fan.

So I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Jazz owner Larry H. Miller on Friday. A devout Mormon whose faith prevented him from watching his own team play on Sundays, Miller’s righteousness and his up-close style sometimes got him into hot water, and deservedly so. At times, he could make a villain or a fool out of himself as well as any Steinbrenner, and he probably holds the professional sports record for tearful press conferences.

Miller invested his heart and soul in the franchise as much as any owner ever did, and the simple fact remains that his 1985-1986 purchase of the Jazz saved professional basketball in Utah and insured that a club in one of the league’s smallest markets thrived as a top-shelf organization year in and year out. A large part of that was thanks to his work to build what is now EnergySolutions Arena in 1991 and his willingness to keep the Stockton/Malone/Sloan core together for 15 years (1988-2003), all of them seasons in which the Jazz made the playoffs. That the long-awaited Next Year never arrived on his watch doesn’t diminish his efforts one bit, because the team he saved and the organization he built remain strong even after those legends have moved on. He’ll be missed.

BP09 Book Tour

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I’ll be making half a dozen bookstore appearances on the East Coast next month to promote Baseball Prospectus 2009. Here’s the schedule, with times subject to change:

March 10, 7 PM: Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe
B&N @ Johns Hopkins University
3330 St. Paul Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

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

March 17, 7 PM: Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe, Clay Davenport (dressed as leprechauns)
Politics & Prose Bookstore
5015 Connecticut Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20008

March 18, 5 PM: Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe (dressed as hungover leprechauns)
McShain Lounge at McCarthy Hall (Building 42)
Georgetown University
37th and O St NW
Washington, DC

March 24, 5 PM: Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe
Penn Bookstore @ University of Pennsylvania
3601 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

March 26, 6 PM: Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe, Cliff Corcoran
Rutgers University Bookstore
Ferren Mall
One Penn Plaza
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

For more BP authors in other cities, please see here.

It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Coverage

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In addition to flattering me with some choice casting, El Lefty Malo (a/k/a Alex Lash, a mentor from way back) raised a provocative question in this post last week: is sabermetrics anti-labor?

One thing about our sabremetric era that doesn’t get discussed much: it’s inherently anti-labor. “Efficiencies” is not a word workers want to hear from the executive suite. When Bob Seger sang “I Feel Like a Number,” he wasn’t talking about OPS+ or Revised Zone Rating (and by “Like a Rock” he sho nuff didn’t mean Tim Raines), but there’s more than a grain of truth to the suspicion that all this statistical research turns people into commodities as owners squeeze the most performance from the least amount of capital.

But one man’s soulless Futuramic dystopia is another man’s common sense. Why not try to figure out who actually plays better defense? Why not ask what, exactly, is the pitcher’s contribution to his team’s success? Smart players will take advantage of the technology, too, whether it’s digital video or higher math.

Besides, when we describe baseball players as “labor,” we’re not exactly talking the downtrodden and oppressed. Baseball players are, shall we say, exquisitely exploited. If this report is accurate, Bobby Abreu is about to take a 67% pay cut, and he’ll still make at least $5 million. After pocketing more than nine digits during his illustrious career, Tom Glavine isn’t sure he’s willing to play for $1 million.

…So when I root for the Giants to build the best team possible at the most sensible price, I guess I’m siding with The Man and against my brothers in the fields. So much for solidarity. I don’t feel too guilty. The players’ union, like many other unions in history, has grown from a righteous cause to a juggernaut that has made its share of transgressions. For example, there are some who feel it’s just as complicit as management in the steroids cover-up. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

…What’s all this about? Perhaps as player contracts have increased, they’ve alienated more fans. Perhaps as prices have gone up, the fan base has become more white collar, more identified with ownership, not labor. Maybe it’s the Internet’s fault, making math and statistics and computing power so much easier for kids to get hold of. Damn you, Internet.

At times I’ve wondered about this question myself. In the six years since Moneyball was published, most of its lessons have been absorbed into front offices, but at a pace much more slowly than that of the business world (see Michael Lewis’ epilogue). Those lessons resonated most clearly with an audience of baseball fans who fancy themselves as the next Billy Beane — or, given even greater success — the next Theo Epstein. Stat geeks channel their inner GMs, talking of team-building and refusing to overpay for mediocrity.

Nonetheless, I think it should be apparent that among this crowd is enough understanding of the game’s historical nuances, from the rising and falling tides of offensive levels to the long and sordid history of its labor-versus-management battles, to find plenty of sympathy for the players’ side. Search “Marvin Miller” in the Baseball Prospectus database and you’ll find a wide selection of articles by numerous authors which either tilt towards the labor side or are heavily critical of the management side, and in particular, commissioner Bud Selig. I’ve written about Miller myself, and have long viewed the game’s steroid saga through the lens of the labor battles which left the union with the upper hand when it came to any attempts to impose testing. From a 2004 FI piece:

While I want to see the game I’m so passionate about come up with a sensible way to handle the problem, I see the failure to do already in the context of a labor-versus-management war that has waged continuously for the past 35 years. The owners have historically shown a strong aversion to bargaining in good faith and produced union-busting tactics such as collusion and replacement players, and they’ve offered up a general dishonesty about the game’s financial state as well. None of this justifies the players’ use of such substances, but the owners’ actions haven’t engendered the kind of trust necessary for the Major League Baseball Players Association to join the owners in constructing an effective and proactive means of combating their usage either. While the players’ conduct in this matter hasn’t been exemplary, their hands have yet to be forced, and the MLBPA didn’t get to be the most powerful labor union in history by selling out its rank and file just to appease a casual fan’s notion that everything was a chemical-free hunky dory.

While I had another couple of thousand words to follow this post regarding the less-than-flattering picture of the Major League Baseball Players Association that’s been painted by the A-Rod affair, that entry got stuck in the pipeline behind my other work, and now we’ve got Rodriguez’s press conference shit show to consider…

Or not. While I thought Rodriguez did a particularly craptacular job on Tuesday with his fable of the unnamed cousin administering an compound of unknown effect on an unspecified schedule during that “loosey goosey” era of being not-quite-so-young but certainly stupid, I’m far more tired of the way the mainstream pundits manufacture outrage in 800-word parcels while failing to acknowledge their own culpability in an issue that’s more nuanced than “liar, liar, pants on fire!/cheater, cheater, pumpkin-eater!” Remember, those pundits the ones who anointed Rodriguez the New Hope after they were forced to topple the previous gods they anointed such as Mark McGwire. They’re the ones who looked the other way while ballplayers were gobbling greenies back in the day and failed to report the steroid story as it was unfolding in major league locker rooms. They’re the ones who forget that all too often, big-money athletes have big-time failings as human beings, and their ability to hit curveballs 450 feet doesn’t make them saints or qualify them to be role models. Exactly what credentials do they have to serve as judge, jury, or executioner?

A-Rod deserves plenty of anger, sure, but the guy didn’t commit murder, didn’t bust his wife in the mouth for burning dinner, didn’t gamble on baseball, didn’t steal an election, didn’t wage a war based on faulty intelligence, didn’t cause the economy to collapse, didn’t bilk investors out of billions, didn’t cancel Arrested Development. For all of his obfuscations, he’s admitted to far more wrongdoing regarding steroid usage than any other player accused of using ever has, yet there appear to be some who won’t be satisfied with anything less than him opening up his wrists in remorse and bleeding to death mid-press conference while confessing to drowning kittens in puddles of spilled human growth hormone.

Colleague Joe Sheehan hit it out of the park yesterday at BP:

One of the ongoing notions in the past decade’s witch-hunting is that people — really, the media — just want players to confess, to own up to what they did. The idea is that by coming clean, the public — really, the media — will forgive them and allow them to get on with their careers. In fact, most of the case against Mark McGwire is that he didn’t do just that, and baseball fans — really, the media — have never forgiven him. The legal case against Barry Bonds isn’t about drug use, but about words. Rafael Palmeiro failed a test, but his reaction to it, pointing fingers at teammates, is what doomed him. We — really, the media — hate this behavior, belittle it, and yearn for a player who will talk about his use.

Yesterday afternoon, Alex Rodriguez sat down and answered as many questions about his use of performance-enhancing substances as any team-sports athlete ever has. No one has ever gone into the level of detail that Rodriguez did in his statement and in the 40 minutes of questioning that followed. No one has copped to as extensive a usage history. Whether you think he would have been there absent Selena Roberts’ reporting, the fact is that he provided more information about his personal use than any player caught up in this mess.

Yet it’s still not enough for many. The reaction to Rodriguez’s press conference has been at best apathetic, and at worst, critical. His demeanor, his word choice, his expressions, his inflections have all been picked apart, and he’s been given no credit for the details he provided. There’s an assumption that he’s being deceptive, duplicitous, and insincere. Whether this stems from the dislike so many people have for this very insecure man, the dislike of his agent, or the general disdain for the successful and wealthy — let’s face it, sports coverage has devolved into thinly disguised class warfare — this most open moment has been dismissed, and Rodriguez has been given no credit for providing it.

Contrast that with the reaction to the press conference at which the Chargers’ Shawne Merriman openly discussed his… oh, wait, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because the NFL doesn’t have a vested interest in making its players look bad to gain the upper hand in an unending war against its own product. The NFL would never sustain a story like that through multiple news cycles, never allow PED use to overwhelm the story of training camps opening, never contribute to speculation that its game and its stars were somehow less than because of their behavior.

The other day, Bud Selig whined that he shouldn’t be held responsible for the so-called “steroid era,” claiming that he wanted to talk about the problem as far back as 1995. As I’ve mentioned, Selig has flipped on this issue a few times, sometimes claiming to have been fighting it for a while, sometimes claiming he didn’t know there was a problem. I suppose he could have been fighting a problem he didn’t know about. It’s not as if Selig was running a needle-exchange program, but given that the man was an owner for 25 years and commissioner after that, I’m going to say that he had both the knowledge and the authority to do more than he did. His busy schedule of misleading Congress, putting out endlessly innumerate claims of poverty, attempting to break the union, destroying franchises, and extorting billions of dollars from taxpayers didn’t allow much time for attacking this issue.

Selig’s announcement last week that he was mulling punishment for Rodriguez was particularly laughable given the non-punitive nature of the original offense (which was supposed to remain anonymous, of course) and the ease with which an arbitrator would have swatted such an attempt away. “Jaffe mulls punishment for Selig” would have been just as credible a headline. The commissioner and the union leadership deserve to be sweating from the heat of the spotlight now just as Rodriguez is.

Anyway, I could go on, but I’ve had enough of this unappealing topic for the moment except to say that the idea that A-Rod is beyond redemption because of this transgression is pretty dumb. He’s got nine more years of playing ball according to the terms of his contract, and while the guy has shown his ineptitude at dealing with life beyond the foul lines, he’s hardly down to his last at-bat in the public sphere. If the media intends to make his every day as miserable as the past several have been — not just for the slugger, but for fans who have some sense of scale regarding his actions and their context, fans eager to embrace the renewal marked by the rite of pitchers and catchers reporting — then this truly is our prison without bars.

Clearing the Bases – Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Edition

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A fistful of links from the past couple of weeks, none of them having to do with steroids or A-Rod (we’ll get those in another post. Maybe.)…

• Baseball Prospectus 2009 is shipping from Amazon.com and on the bookshelves of your local retailer. I’ve had a copy in hand since last Friday, and it’s as chockfull of wit, wisdom and data as ever, with stats and projections for over 1,600 players across 628 pages by the BP crew. Your truly contributed five team essays and two sets of player comments, the most I’ve ever contributed to a BP annual. Get it.

• At BP I’ve been working my way through the new PECOTA projections to examine the offseason departures and arrivals on each team and in each division. By taking the Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) projections of each player signed (or lost) via free agency or acquired (or offloaded) via trades we can get a better sense of the flow of talent into or out of the various divisions and the way this winter’s hard economic times have had an impact on roster construction. Combining that knowledge with the publication of the PECOTA-based projected standings, we can see how these moves have an impact on the division races.

The series is called “Outside Help,” and thus far I’ve done the NL East, NL Central and NL West. Here’s a sample from today’s piece:

The West projects better than the Central in part because of high-upside pitching talent, with six of the majors’ top 15 pitchers according to the PECOTA VORP projections: Brandon Webb, Dan Haren, Tim Lincecum, Jake Peavy, Chad Billingsley, and Max Scherzer. The Central has just two among the top 15, Rich Harden and Roy Oswalt. The West has 13 pitchers projected for at least 20 VORP, the Central just eight—double the number per team, basically. Even given the fact that PECOTA underestimated the Central last year, the advantage seems clear.

As for the outside help, it bears repeating that what’s presented here is just one piece of the puzzle, with no attempt to account for longer-term concerns such as prospect trades or multi-year deals. This is just a rough guide to who’s new and who’s gone, and how much impact they’re expected to have on the division race this year. Teams are listed in order of 2008 finish; for each hitter, WARP and EqA are listed, while for each pitcher, the figures are WARP and EqERA.

Los Angeles Dodgers

IN: C Brad Ausmus (0.7, .235), SS Juan Castro (-0.5, .177), SP Shawn Estes (0.8, 5.40), SP Charlie Haeger (-0.4, 6.64), INF Mark Loretta (0.3, .249), RP Guillermo Mota (0.7, 4.88), SP Claudio Vargas (1.3, 5.00), SP Jeff Weaver (0.4, 5.76), SP Randy Wolf (2.4, 4.72)
OUT: C Gary Bennett (-0.1, .218), CF Andruw Jones (1.4, .267), SP Derek Lowe (4.2, 4.00), SP Brad Penny (1.8, 4.85), RP Scott Proctor (0.9, 4.56) LF Manny Ramirez (4.3, .316), RP Takashi Saito (2.7, 2.99)
NET: -9.5 WARP (-5.2 if Ramirez returns)

As you’d expect, the wealthiest team in the division has spent the most money this winter, primarily in the service of retaining their own. Presuming that the Dodgers will eventually strike an agreement with Ramirez, whose list of potential suitors has dwindled to LA and San Francisco, they’ll have given out three of the division’s four most lucrative contracts this winter. As it is, Rafael Furcal’s $30 million deal and Casey Blake’s $17.5 million deal rank first and third, respectively. Despite that spending, they’ve made some cuts that they otherwise might not have if they weren’t saving room for Manny, winding up with a net talent drain even if he does return. Lowe’s departure is the most significant, exposing a rotation that’s got plenty of health concerns, but while we’re on that subject, the losses of Penny and Saito may not be as painful as advertised, particularly since the latter’s elbow woes may be serious enough to merit Tommy John surgery. The most damaging blow, however, would be in losing Ramirez, whose return would improve the Dodgers’ eight-game deficit in the projected standings by three wins. And so long as we’re alluding to useless outfielders, the Rangers will take that projection from Jones, whose remaining $21 million the Dodgers figured out a way to eat on the installment plan. As for the players that the team has acquired, aside from solid fourth starer Wolf, they’re a singularly unimpressive lot, many of whom could be swapped out for Shawn Estes in Dodger Thoughts blogger Jon Weisman’s instant classic of a quip: “When I think of Estes, I think of a game show in which the category is ‘Pitchers I’ve been eager for the Dodgers to face in the 21st century.'”

Arizona Diamondbacks

IN: C Luke Carlin (1.0, .251), SP Jon Garland (2.1, 4.92), RP Tom Gordon (0.3, 4.53), 2B Felipe Lopez (2.2, .267), RP Scott Schoeneweis (0.7, 4.73)
OUT: UT Chris Burke (0.3, .238), RP Juan Cruz (1.3, 4.27), 1B/OF Adam Dunn (3.8, .308), SS David Eckstein (0.8, .243), C/UT Robby Hammock (-0.1, .201), 2B Orlando Hudson (2.6, .267), SP Randy Johnson (3.5, 4.01), RP Wil Ledezma (0.6, 5.1), RP Brandon Lyon (1.7, 4.33), RP Conor Robertson (0.5, 5.51), OF Jeff Salazar (1.0, .276)
NET: -9.7 WARP

As noted before, the Diamondbacks have already made a conspicuous show of belt-tightening this winter by laying off 31 employees and foregoing the Big Unit, not to mention other relatively high-quality free agents like Dunn and Hudson. As such, they’ve lost the most talent of any team in this division, though PECOTA still gives them a generous cushion in the standings. That only partially mitigates the decision to bypass Johnson, who took $8 million from the Giants, in favor of Garland, whom the Snakes signed for $7.25 million. While Arizona was one of the league’s most efficient teams in terms of marginal dollars per marginal win last year, this is an obvious error, as they could have bought the extra 1.4 wins forecast for Johnson at about 20 percent of the going rate. Meanwhile, the decision to let Hudson depart in favor of Lopez is closer to a wash, though the five-run difference in defensive projections (+2 for Hudson, -3 for Lopez) may have a ripple effect once the defense is factored into the pitching projections.

So far the numbers show the NL East gaining a fair amount of talent, with four out of five teams showing positive net WARPS via trades and free agency, while the Central and West both have seen talent drains, with only one team in each division bucking the trend. Pretty amazing. I’ll start working my way through the AL soon.

• Last week at BP and at ESPN Insider via our new syndication deal, I took a look at the Mets’ offseason efforts to upgrade their pitching staff:

[Mets GM Omar] Minaya entered the offseason with just three starters under contract: Johan Santana, John Maine, and Mike Pelfrey. Santana went 16-7 with a 2.53 ERA and 206 strikeouts last year, numbers that propelled the two-time AL Cy Young award winner to a third-place finish in his first NL vote. Maine pitched reasonably well (10-8, 4.18 ERA and 122 strikeouts), but a bone spur in his shoulder limited him to just six second-half starts and required off-season surgery. Pelfrey established himself as a viable starter by going 13-11 with a 3.72 ERA after getting the stuffing knocked out of him in 2007.

With the re-signing of Perez (10-7 with a 4.22 ERA and 180 strikeouts), the front four is thus unchanged, and a stronger unit than the one they left the gate with last year, given that Pelfrey is replacing Pedro Martinez, whose injuries limited him to just 20 starts and an ugly 5.61 ERA. Indeed, Martinez’s departure should liberate an organization that spent the past three years overestimating his capabilities and his durability; he averaged 16 starts and a 4.73 ERA in that span. Lacking in depth, the 2008 club called upon globetrotting journeymen like Nelson Figueroa and Brandon Knight to patch their rotation when Martinez or Maine were sidelined.

Minaya has improved that depth with fifth-starter options that include journeymen Tim Redding and Freddy Garcia, and homegrown prospect Jon Niese. Redding took the ball every fifth day for the Nationals last year, putting up a 4.95 ERA in 33 starts, while Garcia showed promise in a three-start audition with Detroit after more than a year lost recovering from surgery to repair a torn labrum and frayed rotator cuff. Niese made three starts last September for the Mets, but with less than 40 innings of Triple-A experience, the 2005 seventh-round pick could use more minor league seasoning. Though a few starts remain unaccounted for, here is the rotation’s initial prognosis: 

Pitcher    GS    IP    ERA   VORP
Santana    30   210   3.14   50.6
Maine      26   145   4.16   20.8
Perez      29   180   4.26   21.0
Pelfrey    26   145   4.39   13.6
Garcia     15    75   4.62    8.3
Redding    23   120   4.83    7.2
Niese       7    35   5.09    0.6
Total     156   910   4.14  122.1

Accounting for scoring inflation, that’s the equivalent of a 3.92 ERA last year, which would have ranked fourth among starters, and which is essentially on par with their warts-and-all showing of 3.98. Note the effect of regression upon Santana, who has bettered a 3.14 ERA five times in six years as a starter, and that neither Maine nor Pelfrey are projected for a full complement of innings. PECOTA’s initial forecast cautiously called for just 107 frames from the former because of last year’s dip in playing time, and was wary of Pelfrey’s 200-inning workload as a 24-year-old—48 more than he threw in 2007, including those in the minors. The Verducci Effect suggests that he’ll have trouble repeating that success, as do his peripherals, but the more innings either throws, the more this unit will improve relative to that projection.

The Mets are currently forecast for 92 wins, while the Phillies and Braves come in at 87 wins. Adjustments to those numbers will be made throughout the spring as injuries and trades happen and as job battles are settled, but the early line is favorable. Not that it will heal the wounds of 2007 and 2008.

• Speaking of job battles, one more syndicated column that ran on both BP and Insider addressed some of the highest-profile ones using the PECOTA projections. Here’s what I said about the various battles on the beasts of the AL East

New York Yankees: Center Field, Right Field
As they attempt to rebound from their first non-playoff season since 1993, the Yankees’ biggest question mark looms in center field. After solid performances in ’06 and ’07, Melky Cabrera’s horrid 2008 (.249/.301/.341) threw the job up for grabs, and while Triple-A farmhand Brett Gardner didn’t clinch it, his .294/.333/.412 showing in 73 plate appearances after a mid-August recall may have given him a leg up. PECOTA doesn’t see either as a slam dunk, but favors Gardner’s blend of speed and OBP, forecasting a .253/.339/.351 showing with 32 steals (2.4 WARP), compared to Cabrera’s .267/.326/.376/10 steal forecast (1.8 WARP). Meanwhile, in right field, the system is more sanguine about off-season acquisition Nick Swisher’s ability to shake off a down year than it is about Xavier Nady living up to the career bests he set in all three triple-slash categories. It forecasts a .244/.353/.460 performance for Swisher, compared to .270/.323/.444 for Nady. A platoon arrangement limiting the latter to lefty-mashing would maximize the duo’s production.

Boston Red Sox: #5 Starting Pitcher, Shortstop
Touted as the game’s top pitching prospect going into last year, Clay Buchholz thoroughly flopped (2-9, 6.75 ERA), plagued by mechanical woes. Hot stove rumors had him Texas-bound in exchange for a young catcher, but he returns to compete for the rotation’s fifth spot against Brad Penny and John Smoltz, two veteran free agents attempting comebacks from shoulder injuries. PECOTA remains optimistic about the 24-year-old Buchholz, forecasting a 4.56 ERA and 8.0 strikeouts per nine. Penny, who made a miserable showing in LA (6-9, 6.27 ERA) after a Cy Young-caliber 2007, was initially forecast for a 4.47 ERA, but that adjusts to 4.85 in the move to Fenway. Smoltz, who needed labrum surgery after just 28 IP last year, is forecast for the best ERA of the three (3.57), but he won’t return until June, and the number of innings left in the 42-year-old’s arm is an open question, so the additional depth is a bonus. As for shortstop, PECOTA is bullish on the 25-year-old Lowrie (.260/.341/.432, 2 Fielding Runs Above Average) outdoing Lugo (.255/.325/.347, -2 FRAA), though the $18 million remaining on the latter’s deal is a tough pill to swallow.

Since I was on a word count, I didn’t have room to fit the Rays’ job battles in there. I’ll probably tackle them in another article in the near future given the interest level from readers.

Site Hiccup

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I’m not sure what’s going on with Blogger but when I came to check on this page several minutes ago, none of my posts from the past week were visible. The problem appears to have been taken care of with a simple republishing of a post, but I apologize for anyone experiencing temporary busted links and assuming Selena Roberts’ jackbooted thugs (or maybe Gene Orza’s) had roughed me up. All is well now, and every word should be back in place.