Even as the pennant races heat up, baseball is of minor importance this week in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The images, footage and reports of the devastation and chaos in New Orleans and Mississippi are simply jaw-dropping and heart-rending. For all our our high standards of living in this country, to see a natural disaster that kills thousands, brings millions to their knees, and induces lawlessness, panic, and a public health crisis worthy of a Third World country is incredibly sobering. The belated, pathetic response from our federal government in helping the victims of this disaster is particularly frustrating and disgraceful. We can fuck up a war in Iraq in no time flat, but mobilizing our troops to save our own citizens from the devastating aftermath of a natural disaster is apparently a different matter.

I don’t have any family in the Gulf Coast region, but having lived through September 11 in Manhattan, I can begin to identify with the fear and uncertainty the people down there must be facing. News from two of my good friends at Baseball Prospectus whose families have been affected by the hurricane bring the crisis even closer to home. Dayn Perry reports that his parents’ home in Gulfport, Mississippi was completely destroyed. Steven Goldman and his wife spent a tense couple of days awaiting word that her parents, who also live in Mississippi, were safe. My heart goes out to them and their families as well as everyone else affected by this crisis.

It’s heartening to see even everybody’s favorite villain, George Steinbrenner, set a positive example with his generosity by donating $1 million to the relief effort. If you haven’t done so already, I urge you all consider a donation to the Red Cross in the face of this emergency.

Last week’s Prospectus Hit List generated a larger and more contentious batch of reader mail than usual, with the relative rankings of the Oakland A’s and Anaheim Angels of Whereversville a particular flashpoint for some readers. Rather than take a defensive attitude towards the criticism, I’ve used the opportunity as a means to explain the methodology behind the Hit List in more detail, first in a blog entry for this site and now in a more formal article to accompany this week’s list.

Much of the mail came from Angels fans who accused me a BP of bias towards the A’s, a charge not to be taken lightly. It’s certainly true that BP has benefitted from the attention paid to the A’s front office for their use of sabermetrics in building their ballclubs. The smash hit Moneyball drastically expanded the market for such analysis, no doubt raising BP’s profile and and ultimately generating more subscriptions. A’s GM Billy Beane and Moneyball author Michael Lewis have both endorsed BP on the covers of the 2004 and 2005 annuals, and a BP alumnus, Gary Huckabay, now consults for the A’s. Furthermore, BP’s writers have picked the A’s to win the AL West in 2000 (eight out of 11 first place votes), 2001 (13 out of 13), 2002 (nine out of 13), 2003 (13 out of 13), 2004 (10 out of 12) and 2005 (seven out of 12; in my first year being polled, I was among the four who picked the Angels). They/we have been right three out of five times so far, and in the other two, the A’s garnered the Wild Card in 2001, and fell short of the division by a game last year. Of course, they’re right in the hunt this year as well. That’s not too shabby a record, either for the A’s or for BP, considering how out of vogue the team was a few years ago.

That said, as I wrote in the article:

I’m somewhat bemused by the fact that readers think there’s some bias built into BP’s brand of analysis to favor the A’s over the Angels. While it’s true that the two teams’ offenses are built along different models and that the A’s follow one that’s more in line with a sabermetric analysis, if you read what we’ve written over the years, you’ll see that we have no shortage of respect for the latter as a team, particularly in the way the Angels run their bullpen and their farm system. We don’t sit around trying to find measures that say, “Hey, we need to find a way to make the A’s come out on top, or at least better than the Angels.” As Bill James defined it, sabermetrics is the search for objective truth about baseball, and we hold to that standard. If we kept putting our thumbs on the scales every time the A’s–or the Red Sox, or another saber-friendly team–came up, our analysis wouldn’t have much value.

Look, there’s a reason the A’s and BP both favor the sabermetric approach: it’s a route to building a better ballclub, particularly when 90% of teams–and that percentage is much, much less now than it was a few years ago–aren’t using it. Entire books have been written on the subject, so I won’t belabor the point any further than that., except to say that nobody within the A’s or BP signed Orlando Cabrera, he of the .315 career OBP, to a four-year, $32 million deal, nor do they keep writing Darin Erstand and his .371 SLG into the lineup at first base every day.

Turning to this week’s list, the A’s rebounded from last week’s 1-5 showing to go 5-1, drubbing their opponents by a combined score of 47-14 and securing the #2 spot on the list. The Angels, perhaps exhausted by so many readers arguing on their behalf, went 2-4 and were outscored 29-22, falling three notches to #8 and thus earning themselves this week’s Golden Anvil award. The Hit List Factor gap beween the two teams, just .0027 last week, is now about 10 times that, .0254. And of course, the A’s now find themselves atop the Al West.

Elsewhere, the Yankees earned this week’s Platinum Pole Vault award, swapping places with the Angels to move to #5. As noted in their entry, GM Brian Cashman pulled a minor coup over the weekend by acquiring outfielder Matt Lawton from the Chicago Cubs for an A-ball pitcher named Justin Berg. Lawton (.266/.366/.408 on the year) immediately strenghtens a bench populated by the likes of John Flaherty, Bubba Crosby, Tony Womack and Felix Escalona, four players with a combined -20.0 VORP and little chance of hitting water if falling out of a boat. Unlike those stiffs, he gets on base; his current season is pretty much right on his career number of .369. He’s got a bit of pop, too, as he showed last night, homering against the Seattle Mariners. Reports today indicate that the Yanks will further strengthen their bench by adding Red Sox castoff Mark Bellhorn, who endured a dismal .216/.331/.360 season before being designated for assignment but was one of the Sox key players last year, hitting .264/.373/.444 and getting some huge hits in the postseason. He’ll likely take up some at-bats against lefties while slumping Robinson Cano sits, and with at least some experience at every position besides catcher, he gives Joe Torre some other options as well. With Alex Rodriguez reportedly nursing a groin injury, some spot work at third base would appear to be a likely scenario as well.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers are still mired at #24, and I, for one, have given up hope. Last week’s ugly war of words between Milton Bradley and Jeff Kent was disheartening; whether Bradley was right or wrong about Kent’s ability to deal with black players, going to the press with a clubhouse problem and playing the race card is a nuclear option which illustrates a startling lack of judgement and guarantees nothing but misery. I don’t look on Bradley’s season-ending torn patellar tendon as any sort of schadenfreude; I’ve been in his corner through every controversy during his entire Dodger career. Fellow Dodger fan and Dodger Thoughts blogger Jon Weisman wrote some words about the situation which I agree with:

The Dodgers will need to make a baseball decision about Bradley, not a therapeutic one. But – and I’ll apologize in advance for being soft on this one – if Bradley does leave, I’ll be disappointed for non-baseball reasons. For all his problems, I have found Bradley’s story so compelling ever since he became a Dodger, I don’t want to see it play out somewhere else. I want to see the third act here. Not to gawk, but because I think there’s value in the resolution. For all the talk about how difficult Bradley’s presence has been in the Dodger clubhouse, I think that the team would become stronger, more cohesive, if they see this through. I think we’d all learn something.

And I know many have lost patience with him, and I don’t begrudge that. But I’m still rooting for him. His emotions may not all be pleasant ones, but I just feel his struggle. I can’t justify it beyond that; I can’t be rational about it.

Having gone thermonuclear, Bradley has set off much soul-searching among the Dodger higher-ups. As an arbitration-eligible player who’s going to be dealing with injury and rehabilitation to go along with his growing list of off-the-field woes — new reports of multiple domestic violence incidents have surfaced in The Daily Breeze, a Redondo Beach newspaper — he has now given the team every reason to non-tender him rather than sign him to a multi-year deal. He’s played his last game in Dodger blue, cost himself millions of dollars, and lost the support of many who’ve stuck with him through the ups and downs, myself included. Sad but true.

None of which is to exonerate Kent, by the way. On the field, the Dodger second baseman is all business, and despite the reports of his locker-room detachment, the 37-year-old potential Hall of Famer has a right to “police the clubhouse” as he termed it. But pressing the sensitive Bradley’s buttons in the manner he reportedly did serves little productive purpose, either. You’ve got to pick your battles, and a lost RBI in an 11-6 win isn’t worth the trouble.

The Dodgers are now 11 games under .500 at 60-71, yet they’re only 4.5 behind the Padres in the standings, tied with the even more execrable Diamondbacks (who rank #28 on the Hit List thanks to being outscored by a whopping 151 runs, compared to 63 for the Dodgers). They’re tantalizingly close, but so inept and broken down I’m not sure I even want to see them win only to be crushed again by the Cardinals in the playoffs. From an emotional standpoint I’ve pulled the plug, and my continued attention to them is as much for professional reasons as any others.

• • •

As the Bradley controversy escalated last week, one of my BP colleagues noted internally the difficulty of writing about racial issues without either resorting to platitudes or being branded a racist. It’s a sensitive area even when taken to the baseball arena to address Milton Bradley’s mid-tirade observation that less than nine percent of players are African-American. But it’s not an impossible one, as I was reminded last night when reading Howard Bryant’s fine history of the post-strike epoch,Juicing the Game. Some 340 pages into the book, I reached Bryant’s chapter on Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield (recently excerpted in two parts by Bronx Banter). Bryant himself is African-American, and his first book was Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, so he’s well-versed in writing about the topic of race, and he brings to the Bonds discussion a unique and valuable perspective. Bryant notes Bonds’ connections to the game’s elite black players:

A unique figure in the history of the game, Bonds was third-generation black baseball royalty. His father was Bobby Bonds, who combined exceptional speed and power to become one of the most gifted five-tool players of the 1970s. With the Giants from 1968 to 1972, Bobby Bonds was mentored by his legendary teammate Willie Mays, who in turn became young Barry’s godfather. Growing up in Riverside, Bobby Bonds was a childhood friend of Dusty Baker. Baker’s father coached young Bobby through Little League. Like Bonds with Mays on the Giants, Dusty Baker, as a young outfielder with the Atlanta Braves, was mentored by the great Hank Aaron. As contemporaries of Jackie Robinson, Mays and Aaron were two of the most prominent forefathers of integrated baseball. As a child, Barry Bonds learned baseball directly from his father, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. No black player of Bonds’s generation would own such a personal connection to the roots of the integrated era, nor would any of his contemporaries be more closely linked to the major league black experience.

Not only did Barry Bonds grow up in the game of baseball, but his experience was not unlike that of a privileged member of a political dynasty. When Bobby Bonds played for the Yankees in 1975, Billy Martin, then the manager, would constantly have to run the eleven-year-old Barry off of the field during batting practice. Years later, after Bonds signed a record-breaking contract to join the San Francisco Giants, his on-field performance would help Dusty Baker become the most influential and successful African American manager in baseball history. Baker would be Bonds’ manager for his first ten years with the Giants. Baker’s hitting coach for the first four of those years would be Bobby Bonds.

…As a major leaguer, [Barry] Bonds’s battles with the press were legendary. He had inherited from his father a suspicion of the writers that was tied to a large degree to race. During his playing days, Bobby Bonds suffered through a difficult relationship with the writers and team executives, and he often warned his son to be cautious of the press. There would always be a distance between the players and the writers, he would say. Part of it is inevitable; it is your job to play, and their job to judge. But while the writers should be treated with respect first, Bobby Bonds believed, very few could be trusted.

To Bobby Bonds, what made the relationship especially volatile was the element of race. The overwhelming majority of the writers were white, and very few seemed willing to take the time to understand the special circumstances that existed for black players. In a sense, the relationship was no different than the black-white relationships that existed in the society at large. There was a certain unfairness to it, but that made it no less true: Whites could live their entire lives and never know or care to know anyone black. Yet it was impossible for a black person to be successful in America without knowing how to deal with whites and navigate the white world. As a result, there was a critical imbalance to the way white reporters would interpret the actions and personalities of black players that made it a virtual certainty that the black athlete would be portrayed inaccurately, if not unfairly. There was, especially when Bobby Bonds played, a type of conduct white reporters expected from black athletes. As much as the black player who was generally outgoing would receive fairly favorable coverage, the black player who showed any type of independence or intensity was met with an almost open hostility from the white press corps. There were a few reporters who would take the time to be fair, but most would not, and because they were the primary liaison between the player and the public (not to mention their connections to the upper reaches of club management), the writers could make life very difficult for a black player.

Barry Bonds’ penchant for seeing his career as an opportunity to revisit the battles his father fought has been discussed before in several places. But Bryant brings a new perspective to the equation. As a black writer himself, particularly one covering the Red Sox, no doubt he’s found himself in the same shoes as the Bonds duo, needing to understand racial dynamics with a depth his white colleagues may not have had to. Here, that plays to his advantage.

It was a mistake to view Bonds’ obdurate demeanor as a sign that he had not been profoundly affected by a society that was clearly racist and whose racism inflicted considerable damage on people whom Barry Bonds loved. He did not advertise his hungers, for there certainly would be no advantage in it for him, but Bonds sought redress through his play. There would come a time when he would have a chance to avenge the slights, both small and large, that contributed to his father’s alcoholism and bitterness. To Monte Poole, when it became clear that he had an opportunity to reach the elite milestones in the game, Bonds began to sharpen his focus. His evolving black conscience paralleled his rising place in the game. He did not want to break Hank Aaron’s record, he said. What he wanted to do, he once told Poole, was to erase the white men who played in the segregated era from the top of the record books. They were leaders because they were great players, but only in part, Bonds believed. The other reason was that they did not have to compete against a significant part of the baseball-playing population. It was not lost on him that the great black players of the Negro Leagues were cheated out of their moment in history by racism, and that many white players became legends at their expense. It was also not lost on him that despite his incredible natural talents, he, too would have been denied the opportunity to compete against the white players who would become icons had he been born in the segregated era. He was fueled to a large degree by addressing this historical racial slight.

…Bonds went through the decade consistently dominant, amassing staggering numbers, yet paying a price for his freedom. For despite his brilliance, something remarkable happened: The game started having fun without him. The best player in the game was not its most celebrated. Bonds may have been the best player in the National League, but he nevertheless seemed to be diminished by the home run fiesta that took place in the poststrike years. While Bonds smoldered, the story was Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. To Jon Heyman, watching Sosa and McGwire led Bonds to a fateful choice to transform himself into an incredible hulk of a baseball player, which led him eventually to use steroids. “I think he got mad when he saw lesser players like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa getting all the attention, and he said to himself, ‘Let’s level the playing field,'” Heyman said. “And when he leveled the playing field realized he was two times better than everyone else. He literally became twice as good as anyone else playing baseball.”

With a great deal of skill, tact, even-handedness and historical perspective, Bryant provides a fascinating level of insight into Bonds and his link with the steroids scandal. It’s just one more reason I can’t recommend this book enough.

• • •

Last week when I noted that I wasn’t the only BP writer to be tapped by Salon to pinch-hit for King Kaufman, I missed one detail. Namely, that this piece by Chris Karhl carried the following byline: “Christina Kahrl is a sportswriter who lives in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. She writes the column ‘Transaction Analysis’ at www.baseballprospectus.com.” For those of you doing a double-take, yes, Chris has been living as a woman since 2003. I met her at a BP Pizza Feed in March 2004, itself significant because it marked her first public appearance under the BP banner in her new identity.

But the Salon piece marked the first time she’d written under her female name, a fact that led to a nice profile of her situation in the Washington CityPaper:

Kahrl… adds that her heart’s been warmed by the utter nonreaction she’s gotten from baseball and baseball-journalism folks since converting to womanhood. At insider baseball events she’s hosted at U.S. Cellular Field, home of the Chicago White Sox, and at her alma mater, the University of Chicago, all the focus has been on her knowledge of the game, even from those who knew Chris Kahrl back in the day.

“Nobody has batted an eye,” says Kahrl. “Everybody has been great and supportive, from friends and family and colleagues to everybody with the White Sox to the University of Chicago alumni. A reader said, ‘I had no idea that Chris was short for Christina.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what it’s short for.’ But that’s it. So whatever people might be saying about the rising tide of conservatism in America today, from my experience, we’re also in a place now, a better place and a better society, than we were 50 years go. I’m certainly happy. Again, this isn’t something I broadly advertise, because it’s a secondary issue. Yes, it’s proof that life is interesting, but it doesn’t change the fact that I love baseball. I still love the game.”

Kahrl’s love of baseball comes through in each installment of her Prospectus column, Transaction Analysis, and whenever she even talks about the game. There is no way to exaggerate how well Kahrl knows the names and numbers of baseball and how good she is at cramming that knowledge into her writing and conversation.When talking about the Oakland A’s, the first team Kahrl fell for as a kid growing up in Northern California in the ’70s, she uses “the Chris Codiroli years” as a punch line. (Codiroli was a right-handed pitcher who put up a 38-47 record with the A’s, Indians, and Royals from 1982 to 1990. But everybody knows that.)

Kahrl’s column was itself the hook that got me reading BP on a regular basis; my email archives are filled with great lines I’ve clipped and sent to friends as they’ve generated laughs while providing spot-on analysis. Prior to meeting her in 2004, I had been briefed on her situation, but I had no idea what to expect. I’m pleased to note that we hit it off instantly and have since hosted each other on trips to our respective cities. Male or female, her love for the game is the same, and she remains one of the best baseball writers in the country, and has proven herself to be a great friend and ally as well.

The CityPaper article has garnered her some positive attention, with Editor & Publisher, Romanesko, and the Huffington Post all picking up the story and… well, I don’t want to jinx anything else, but suffice it to say there may be some exciting opportunities opening up for her. Kudos to Christina!

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a book I’d been reading, Matthew McGough’s Bat Boy: My True Life Adventures Coming of Age with the New York Yankees. I first encountered McGough’s story in the New York Times a couple of years ago. In that article, he described his first day as a Yankee batboy in 1992, during which he received quite a rookie hazing: Yankee captain Don Mattingly sent McGough on a fool’s errand of finding a left-handed bat stretcher, making for a hilarious tale.

Published by Doubleday earlier this year, Bat Boy is an a lighthearted, entertaining memoir of life in the dugout and the bowels of Yankee Stadium, circa 1992-1993, and thanks to the cooperation of McGough, I’m pleased to offer an excerpt of one of the book’s chapters here. The second half of the chapter is available by emailing the author via the link provided at the end of Part I. Enjoy!

Yesterday evening my pal Alex Belth sent an email asking my opinions about the Hall of Fame credentials of several active pitchers:

Got a question I thought you might have some thoughts about. I figure that Maddux, Johnson, Pedro and Clemens are sure-fire, first-ballot Hall of Famers. And I also figure that Glavine and Mariano will get there too.

1. Do you think T. Hoffman will?

2. Of the remaining starters with a legitimate shot now how would you rank the following pitchers: Mussina, Boomer Wells, Smoltz, Schilling and K. Brown (and is there anyone else I’m missing?).

In the midst of the Yankees’ drubbing by Toronto, it seemed a better use of my time to research for a more definitive answer than a quick off the cuff response, so I broke out my JAWS gear. First off, I have to commend Alex for correctly identifying the top nine active starting pitchers according to the system; he almost certainly did so without scouring their Baseball Prospectus figures, but he didn’t miss one. Here are the nine, updated through yesterday (so leaving aside Mussina’s drubbing at the hands of the Blue Jays), along with some average JAWS scores for Hall of Fame pitchers:

                 Age   PRAA  PRAR   WARP3   PEAK   JAWS
Roger Clemens     42   637   1787   187.5   53.9   120.7
Greg Maddux       39   471   1535   159.3   57.5   108.4
Randy Johnson     41   442   1336   130.7   49.9    90.3
Tom Glavine       39   290   1255   125.2   42.0    83.6
Pedro Martinez    33   417   1036   106.2   56.2    81.2
Mike Mussina      36   304   1084   112.2   43.0    77.6
Kevin Brown       40   279   1084   107.4   45.7    76.6
John Smoltz       38   295   1019   102.0   38.2    70.1
Curt Schilling    38   301   1020    94.0   42.9    68.5
David Wells       42   142    957    94.0   33.2    63.6

Avg HOF Pitcher        205    964    95.1   43.1    69.4
BBWAA HOF Pitcher      260   1174   114.9   46.9    80.9
VC HOF Pitcher         137    705    70.7   39.6    55.1

The listed ages are as of July 1, which is the convention in dealing with baseball databases. Clemens just turned 43, but we’re not too concerned about that here; he’s a freak who could likely pitch another five years at some level of effectiveness, but not all of thes guys has so much in the tank. PRAA and PRAR are Pitching Runs Above Average and Above Replacement, respectively; the two give a good secondary measure of peak and career value. WARP3 is a player’s career Wins Above Replacement Player total, adjusted for all-time, PEAK is his best five-consecutive year stretch, and JAWS is the average of those two numbers. The PEAK score skips over injury years in which a player misses more than 1/3 of a season; Pedro gets a mulligan for 2001, and Schilling, whose peak runs from 2000-2004, would get one for this year if his 2006 is better than his 2000 score of 7.2.

The numbers for the average scores are slightly out of date, as the WARP system has been recalibrated and will likely be recalibrated yet again this winter. I’m changing the way I handle it, but there’s no sense digging in until Clay Davenport updates the system. A JAWS score of 69.4 is the average among all Hall pitchers, but as I discovered in evaluating the Veterans Committee ballot, that conceals a huge difference between those elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America (an average score of 80.9) and by the Vet Committee (55.1).

Assuming Schilling doesn’t fall victim to the voodoo curses I place on him daily — I can’t take credit for the ankle, I want the fat bastard to REALLY suffer — he’ll surpass the overall average score, leaving Wells as the only pitcher below that bar. My guess as to how they’ll rank in the final analysis once they’re all done (taking age and health into account):

Clemens
Maddux
Johnson
Martinez
Mussina
Glavine
----------BBWAA Average
Smoltz
Brown
Schilling
----------Overall Average
Wells

I’m banking Martinez and Mussina will surpass Glavine, who at 39 is striking out 3.87 hitters per nine innings, a rather unsustainable rate. Brown is done, and Smoltz likely doesn’t have another 22 WARP in him (needed to add 11 JAWS points to top the higher average). Of course, none of this takes into account awards or postseason performance. I’d imagine Smoltz, who won a Cy Young award and a World Series ring, and Schilling, who has two World Series rings, have enough hardware to get the call from the writers, Brown, with one ring and no Cys, does not. Mussina might get his candidacy downgraded over the fact that in all likelihood he’ll have neither a ring (you’d have to be naive to assume otherwise at this juncture) nor a Cy to show for his effort.

Turning to the relievers, for reasons I explain here, I use a standard that’s 70% of the Hall Starter average, so figure a JAWS of 48.6 to be the overall bar, 56.6 to match up to the writers’ standard. Mariano Rivera’s JAWS is 73.5/36.5/55.0, which is pretty close to the higher standard, and should surpass that with another season. Given his postseason success and the deserved admiration the press has for him, he is as close to a mortal lock for the Hall as Roger Clemens, in my opinion.

Trevor Hoffman comes in at 65.3/34.1/49.7. I’d say he has a case for induction, but the reality is that it’s nowhere near as good as those of Goose Gossage (84.0/34.9/59.5) and Lee Smith (79.6/32.7/56.2), and since the voters haven’t figured out what to do with relievers yet, he’ll stand in the equivalent of a Moscow bread line. By that same token, Smoltz will get a bit of a boost as kind of a Dennis Eckersley Jr. when writers try to account for his four seasons in the bullpen. The fact that he’s made a successful return to starting only adds to the uniqueness of his career path, and as in the case of Eck, uniqueness is often a good thing where voters are concerned.

Anyway, it’s fun stuff to think about who will make the Hall of Fame; I always enjoy taking a look.

After a week’s hiatus so that I could complete my recent articles for the New York Sun and Salon, I’m back with a new Prospectus Hit List. The Cardinals sit at #1 for the ninth week in a row (zzzz), but the White Sox, who spent eight weeks at #2, have fallen to sixth on the heels of a 1-5 week. The Red Sox have taken over the #2 slot, followed by the A’s, the Indians, and the Angels. The Yankees are currently eighth, while the Dodgers are 24th.

Five months into doing the Hit List, I’ve found that many readers still don’t understand what the rankings are about, thinking they reflect my biases or those of Baseball Prospectus. The most frequent piece of mail I get regarding the Hit List is something along the lines of “How can the Sludgebeasts rise in the rankings this week if they lost most of their games? Your bias towards sabermetrically-inclined teams is showing, bitch.”

The answer I should offer, but usually don’t, is “Kiss my Pythagoras.”

The single most important tenet of sabermetrics, for my money, is that there’s a predictable relationship between a team’s winning percentage and the number of runs it scores and allows. Bill James first codified this in his original Pythagorean formula: win% = (RS^2)/(RS^2 + RA^2), where RS and RA are runs scored and runs allowed, and G is games. Studies by BP’s Clay Davenport have shown that not only is the Pythagorean a good predictor of a team’s winning percentage after the fact (how many should team X have won), it’s a better predictor of future winning percentage than the team’s actual winning percentage.

The Hit List builds on this in creating our version of the power rankings. There’s no subjectivity involved; the rankings are computed by equally weighting actual, first-, second- and third-order winning percentages for the season to date as calculated in BP’s Adjusted Standings (a Davenport invention). Actual winning percentage is obvious enough, the percentage of games a team wins. The other three are calculated using the Pythagenpat method, a close relative of Bill James’ original Pythagorean formula where win% = (RS^X)/(RS^X+ RA^X), where X = (RS+RA)/G)^.285. First-order winning percentage is computed using actual runs scored and allowed. Second-order winning percentage uses equivalent runs scored and allowed, based on run elements (hits, walks, total bases, etc.) and the scoring environment (park and league adjustments). Third-order winning percentage adjusts for the quality of the opponent’s hitting and pitching.

By using the four different percentages, we’re correcting for teams that over- or underperform relative to how many runs they’ve scored and allowed, how many runs they should have scored/allowed given the number and type of hits, walks and other events, their ballpark environment, and the quality of competition. There’s nothing written in stone about this formula, but neither is there any hidden agenda. It’s simply a way of looking at the question, “How good is each team?” and using a few related but slightly different objective measures to answer that question.

Now, with regards to this week’s rankings, I caught some flack from a few readers regarding the A’s coming in at #3, rising a notch despite a 1-5 record. But the A’s weren’t the only high-ranked team to have a bad week. The White Sox had a much worse week, and those of the Angels and Braves, the two teams directly below the A’s last week, were nothing to write home about. Here are the run totals of the four teams:

           W-L   RS   RA
A's        1-5   17   24
Angels     3-4   30   27
Braves     2-4   33   36
White Sox  1-5   14   28

The A’s, despite losing, at least did a relatively good job of preventing runs, which tends to have a positive effect on those Pythagorean calculations. The Angels actually allowed fewer runs per game, and they’ve got a better raw run differential this year than the A’s, but once all of the adjustments are thrown in, the A’s still come out ahead this week.

But not by much. In fact the A’s, Indians, and Angels are separated by .0027, with Hit List Factors (the unpublished average of those four winning percentages) of .5660, .5656, and .5633, respectively. That’s about 1/3 of a win this far into the season; another run here or there would have likely jumbled those rankings.

Anyway, enough about the nuts and bolts of the equation. This morning just before the Hit List went up, I tacked on a happy birthday wish to the Braves’ Julio Franco, who turns 47 today. He’s hitting a robust .299/.359/.503 with nine homers – his most since 1996, when he was an old man at 38 — and outproducing players who were still in diapers when he broke into the big leagues. If that doesn’t make you feel like a lazy slob of an underachiever, you’re one up on me.

If you’re in the demographic that has more than a passing familiarity with this site and its proprietor’s damaged sense of humor and jaundiced view of the world, then you’re no doubt familiar with The Simpsons, hands down the greatest TV show in the history of, well, history (hey, that’s a perfectly cromulant claim!). For the past 16 years, the show has proven to be a lingua franca for any clique worth being a part of among people our age (broadly defined as between 20 and 40 currently, though take no offense if you’re hip to it beyond those age groups). In the days before TiVo and our domestic pairings-off, we came together every week, dashing madly into the TV room in time for the show just as the characters do in the title sequence. We’ve seen every episode enough times to remember all of the good lines and know that like the Bible, there’s an applicable Simpsons reference for every occasion.

That goes for baseball as well. I don’t know how many Simpsons references I’ve made on this site or over at BP, but scarcely a week goes by without me combing the pages of The Simpsons Archive or elsewhere for just the right touch, the perfect link. To wit:

• Meaningless pregame ceremony? Must be a presentation of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.

• 2002 All Star Game? “And ties? You bet!”

• The Pittsburgh Pirates? “Arrrrrrrgh.” I’ve lost count of how many Prospectus Hit List comments make that joke.

• Kirk Rueter’s got gout? Cue Troy McClure’s acting credits, my all-time favorite Simpsons-related link.

• Long story from crotchety oldtimer? “We wore an onion on our belt, which was the style at the time.”

• Fidgety micromanager? “Sound’s you’re working for your car. Simplify, man!“

• The fickle fate of the average ballplayer? One day you’re on top of the world, the next day “you’re thawing hot dogs in a gas station sink.”

And so on. To say nothing of great baseball-themed episodes of the show — the classic softball episode, the Whitey Ford pretzel-pelting incident, the Mark McGwire cameo… somewhere I just read that Randy Johnson will be making a guest appearance this coming season. Even a minor league franchise got in on the joke, when the PCL’s Calgary Cannons moved to Albuquerque (where the venerable Dukes had left town a few years ago), the team was renamed the Isotopes based on an episode where Springfield’s ballclub nearly moved there, only to have the plot foiled by Homer.

Which brings me to The Definitive MLB – Simpson’s Analogy List, in which Dan McCarthy of Barstool Sports, a Boston newspaper, compares each major-league team to a Simpsons character, from the famous family to the town’s recurring characters. I’ll limit myself to a small selection of favorites here:

New York Yankees – C. Montgomery Burns – Driven to success by an almost unimaginable wealth of resources, which they use to ruthlessly crush their enemies, although typically not by the most efficient means possible (blocking out the sun, Bernie Williams). Seemingly unaware of the (obvious) reasons why they are hated. They seem to have been a key actor in pretty much everything important that happened before 1970.

Oakland A’s – Bart Simpson – Reliable bad-boy winners who march to the beat of their own drum. Locked in a constant struggle against the overbearing establishment. Every time you think they’re going to get what’s coming to them, they weasel out of it and surprise you again.

Cincinnati Reds – Principal Seymour Skinner – Spent much of their existence under the hand of a domineering, insane woman who was impossible to please (Agnes Skinner, Marge Schott). Possessors of a dirty little secret that they would rather sweep under the rug (Skinner’s true identity of Armand Tamzarian, Pete Rose). Their lives were given meaning in the ’70s (Vietnam, the Big Red Machine) but now all they have to escape the monotony of their everyday existence is the flashbacks.

Los Angeles Dodgers – Disco Stu – Overconfident and forever predicting the return of their glory days. Brought up by devoted fans more often than is probably reasonable, considering their sporadic appearances. Haven’t been relevant since the ’80s.

Atlanta Braves – Ned Flanders – The very definition of “traditional,” “white-bread,” and “boring.” Quietly keeping their affairs in perfect order, but they always end up as the butt of the joke. Spurred to success by a horde of Bible-thumpers. Made a living out of left-handedness in the ’90s.

That still leaves you 25 to discover yourself. In the words of C. Montgomery Burns, “Exxxxcellent.”

Written and delivered less than 24 hours after “The Claussen Pickle Revisited”, this week’s Prospectus Hit List is up at BP. This week’s edition features lots of stuff about rookies, for some reason; this late in the year, some pretty good ones, such as Oakland’s Dan Johnson and the White Sox’s Tadahito Iguchi, are playing big roles for contenders, while some teams such as the Pirates are simply more interesting now that they’ve abandoned their Tike Redmans and Kip Wellses in favor of the Chris Duffys and Zach Dukes.

There’s been precious little movement on the list, so little that I didn’t even award the Golden Anvil or Platinum Pole Vault awards, for teams that move up and down the most. The Orioles dropped down three, so consider them the winners of the former. It would take too close an examination to determine the latter, as several teams went up or down two spots. The Cardinals are still first, followed by the White Sox, with the A’s having shot up to third and nipping at the Sox’s heels. The Yanks are eighth, the Dodgers 24th, and I was probably as harsh on the latter for Jim Tracy’s handling of Hee Seop Choi as I was on any team on the list.

Finally, I want to thank everybody for the positive response to the Claussen piece; it generated more email than just about any BP article I’ve written, and while a good number of those emails came from people who told me I forgot Odalis Perez or Jason Marquis without reading the qualifications for the study (both had too many innings to qualify), there were some intelligent responses mixed in there as well.

Off to tonight’s White Sox-Yanks tilt, and thank the good Lord I never have to root for Jose Contreras again. I promise not to leave early this time.

Just over a year ago, I examined the track record of the Yankees’ front office when it came to dealing unproven talent. That Baseball Prospectus piece, “The Claussen Pickle: An Analysis of Traded Yankee Prospects 1994-2004,” remains a personal favorite, not only because it represented a huge amount of research and a novel approach to a familiar question, but also because just a few hours after it was published, I got engaged.

Now a happily married man, I’ve had a hard time pulling off major research pieces during the season, a situation owing more to my regular gig writing the Prospectus Hit List every week than to my marital obligations. Thanks in part to the help of my research assistant, Peter Quadrino, I’ve finally finished a piece that’s been on the back burner for awhile. It’s a look at the Atlanta Braves’ track record in trading prospects during GM John Schuerholz’s tenure (since October 1990), using the same methodology as the Yankee piece.

The surprise, to me, is that the Braves have been even more successful at such deals than the Yanks, and over a longer period of time. Of the 70 qualifying players the Yanks dealt — players who had fewer than 502 career major-league plate appearances or 162 career major-league innings pitched, arbitrary cutoffs representing a single-season of qualifying for the batting or ERA crowns — only 10 had reached 10.0 WARP3, a level I called a “career of consequence.” At best, another seven from that group had legitimate shots to reach that level, for a ceiling of about 24 percent of those prospects panning out.

From the Braves pool of 80 players, just six have reached the “career of consequence” level, with Jason Schmidt (40.4 WARP3) and Jermaine Dye (34.2) far ahead of the pack. At best, that number might double, a 15 percent ceiling. Even that number is dependent on several pitchers making good, and as it’s been said before, There’s No Such Thing As A Pitching Prospect. As I wrote in the article, John Schuerholz should sleep well at night knowing he hasn’t let too many useful prospects get away.

Late note: reader Mac Thomason, who runs the venerable Braves Journal site (which dates back to 1998!), pointed out that I made one omission. I left off Merkin Valdez, who was traded by the Braves to the Giants along with Damian Moss for Russ Ortiz in December 2002. Valdez has put up a 3.57 ERA, 8.0 K/9, 2.2 K/BB, 0.5 HR/9, .315 BABIP in Norwich, the Giants’ Double-A affiliate. He definitely fits among the more legitimate prospects they’ve given up, but even with that “Giant” error, that does little to change the conclusion of the article.

Late note #2: in the article I wrote that the Brewers are working on converting Jose Cappelan to the bullpen, having moved him there in June. Reader N.J. was kind enoough to obtain some splits regarding the move. He writes, “Posting a 4-2 record with a 5.16 ERA in 12 starts, Capellan went into relief during mid-June and has responded with 27 strikeouts in 27 1/3 innings. He has five saves, a 1-1 record, and a 1.32 ERA in 19 appearances.” Thanks, N.J.!

Late note #3: it looks as though I also missed Chris Spurling, who qualified for both the Yankee and Brave version of the articles, traded by the former for Luis Sojo in 2000 and by the latter in 2003 after being chosen in the Rule Five draft earier in the winter. Spurling now pitches for the Tigers, with a 3.76 ERA in 40.2 innings this year, and a career WARP3 of 2.9 over his two years.