In the words of the Onion’s immortal Jim Anchower, “Hola amigos! I know it’s been a long time since I last rapped at ya…”

• Late Wednesday night I was thumbing through this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated and came across a Tom Verducci piece about the Sammy Sosa situation that grabbed me:

In mid-January, after the Chicago Cubs essentially put their winter business on hold for three months while trying in vain to trade outfielder Sammy Sosa, Cubs president Andy MacPhail and Adam Katz, Sosa’s agent, began discussing the damage control needed to bring Sosa back. There was talk of hiring public relations people with expertise in crisis management, a long past overdue meeting between manager Dusty Baker and Sosa, and the possibility of Sosa’s addressing his teammates in spring training. It all smacked of trying to glue together a porcelain vase that had smashed into hundreds of pieces. The beauty was gone, and the awkward attempt at restoration would serve only as a mockery.

…Remember this: Sosa is the Cubs’ alltime home run leader, is the only man in history to hit 60 homers in a season three times and, for many a day since he became a Cub in 1992, actually surpassed the warm sun and cold beer as the most compelling reason to go to Wrigley Field. You went to see Sosa make that exuberant dash to rightfield in the top of the first and that wing-flapping home run hop at the plate the way you went to see Old Faithful gush at Yellowstone. He satisfied thousands whether or not the Cubs won.

All that seemed forgotten among the dry-eyed Chicagoans who bid Sosa good riddance. As Rick Telander wrote in Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times, “Never in my life have I seen an athlete go from being the heart and soul and spirit of a team to an utter pariah — without point-shaving or outright felonious crime involved — as swiftly as I have with Sammy.”

Verducci’s porcelain vase metaphor really hit home. In Sosa’s fall — sadly, largely his own doing via the corked bat and the early exit of last season’s final game — something quite special was broken beyond repair, not just for Cubs fans but for fans all around the game.

I have a few fond Sammy Sosa moments. I recall the great pleasure and satisfaction I felt in visiting Wrigley Field back in 1999, watching Slammin’ Sammy and how much joy he brought to the crowd, even though he didn’t homer in either of the games I saw. Like Verducci wrote, he really did seem to outrank the sun and the beer.

Back in 2002, I championed Sosa as the cover icon for the 2003 World Almanac for Kids, for which I was the creative director, a choice that met with a high five from one of my clients, a diehard Cubs fan. The end result was a project that was a career highlight, one for the front page of my design portfolio.

While attending the 2002 All-Star Game’s Home Run Derby in Milwaukee, I had a great opportunity to marvel at Sosa’s blasts:

Then Sosa began one of the most amazing hitting displays I’ve ever seen. Six straight swings produced epic home runs which rattled off of the Miller Park furniture, two off of Bernie Brewer’s yellow slide in high leftfield (where mascots from all around the league–the Phillie Phanatic, the Oriole Bird, Youppi, and the Miller Park Sausage Racers, among others–slid down Bernie’s slide after each homer). From our perch in upper right, we had a magnificent view of each blast’s arc. The shortest of the six shots was 496 feet, the rest over 500, the longest a Derby record 524 feet. The crowd gasped each time Sosa launched another moon shot and cheered wildly when the distance was announced. By the time he’d used up his final two outs, he had 12 homers and 40-some-thousand jaws hanging open.

…[In the next round] He even hit one literally out of the park, as the ball traveled through the open left-center roof panel and into the parking lot, where a young fan holding a sign that said “hit It Here, Sammy!” retrieved the ball in the rain. With 7 outs (doesn’t that sound weird?), Sosa blasted a shot that everybody in the park knew was gone. Without even following the ball’s trajectory, Sosa flicked the bat with a dramatic flair, the winner of the round.

Watching Sosa get traded to the Orioles is like watching a married pair of friends divorce; you don’t really want to take sides, you don’t want to hear about the real dirt that lay beneath the veneer of a relationship you once envied, you just want relief for everybody involved. I feel for my friends who are Cubs fans, and at the same time hope that Sosa finds some measure of redemption in Baltimore.

Jon Weisman has an unique take on the Sosa trade, comparing the chemistry-laden takes of many pundits to the roasting Dodger GM Paul DePodesda received over trading Shawn Green:

When Dodger general manager Paul DePodesta traded Shawn Green (2004 OPS: .811) and $10 million to Arizona for four minor league prospects and release of the remaining $6 million on Green’s contract, not only did most mainstream reporters criticize the move, many questioned DePodesta’s credentials to be general manager, period.

Cubs general manager Jim Hendry this week is trading Sammy Sosa (2004 OPS: .849) and $12 million to Baltimore for infielder Jerry Hairston, Jr., two minor league prospects and release of the remaining $5 million on Sosa’s contract. Realizing that Green wasn’t the outward clubhouse problem in Los Angeles that Sosa had become in Chicago, the contrast in press reaction is strong.

…Chemistry still reigns in the press. Most of the reviews of the Sosa trade have nothing to do with on-field performance, but instead the dugout, the locker room and admittedly, the car driving away from Wrigley Field.

And so, Hendry gets a free ride on this deal. If Sosa knocks out 50 homers in Baltimore, well, today we say Hendry still had to make the trade. Forget about the relative values of the players involved – it’s all about peace and quiet.

• February is arbitration month, the time when players and teams square off for a good old-fashioned grudge match to determine the salaries of a select group of players for the coming season. Every year about this time I chuckle as I remember a line from one of the Bill James Abstracts in which the bearded bard discussed the misconceptions the public holds about arbitration. James’ words were to the effect that as fans see it, the player’s side tries to convince the arbitrator that player X is Steve Carlton’s brother, while the club side tries to frame said player as Joaquin Andujar’s niece.

There’s little reason to be so in the dark about arbitration in this day and age. Just this week, a fine pair of articles on the topic have surfaced. First up is a piece by Studes at the Hardball Times called All About Arbitration. Studes begins by providing some historical perspective on arbitration’s early years, noting that the process became part of the baseball landscape via the 1973 Basic Agreement. The Reserve Clause was still in effect, and free agency was still a twinkle in Marvin Miller’s eye, but the owners had unwittingly agreed to allow independent arbitrators to decide which of two salaries, one submitted by the player and the other by the club, would be determined by a hearing. According to Studes, Reggie Jackson won the first case for $135,000 after winning the 1972 AL MVP award.

As one would expect from the proprietor of the Baseball Graphs site, Studes provides a handful of graphs to illustrate arbitration’s evolution over the years. Nowdays, only a handful of cases are actually heard each year (seven in each of the past two winters, down from a high of 35 in 1986), with the rest being resolved prior to the panel rendering its verdict. A couple of other nuggets:

a) from 1979 to 1996, the average arbitration award rose from $68,000 to $2.3 million, a compound average growth rate of 23%.

b) teams have won 59% of the cases overall.

I do wish that Studes had given a figure indicating by what percentage the average winner and loser salaries increase, because to me the real point to be made about arbitration is that almost invariably even the players who lose receive hefty raises.

While Studes spends a bit of time discussing the mechanics of arbitration, Tom Gorman gives them a more thorough going-over at Baseball Prospectus (it’s a premium piece). His article is set up like a Frequently Asked Questions piece, providing easy answers to vexing queries such as “What the heck is a ‘Super Two?'” (that’s a player with between two and three years of service time who also accumulated at least 86 days of service in the previous year, and was in the top 17% among all two-year players in service time).

Gorman notes early in the piece that “Final Offer Abritration” as the process is technically called, is designed to produce a settlement, not a verdict: “The arbitrator cannot “split the baby” and settle on a salary in the middle of the spread between the club’s figure and the player’s. One side leaves the arbitration a winner and the other a loser, heightening risk and encouraging negotiation and settlement.”

He devotes a good deal of space to the process of selecting the arbitrators, how the hearing proceeds, and what criteria are in and out of bounds:

The following evidence is admissable:

1. The quality of the player’s contribution to his club during the past season (including but not limited to his overall performance, special qualities of leadership and public appeal).

2. The length and consistency of his career contribution.

3. The record of the player’s past compensation.

4. Comparative baseball salaries (the arbitration panel is provided with a table of confidential baseball salaries for all players broken down by years of service).

5. The existence of any physical or mental defects on the part of the player.

6. The recent performance of the club, including but not limited to his league standing and attendance.

The following evidence is inadmissible:

1. The financial position of the player and the club (though player representatives often try to get this information in the back door by presenting attendance information that implies the health of a club’s revenue streams).

2. Press comments, testimonials or similar material bearing on the performance of either the player or the club, except for recognized annual player awards for playing excellence.

3. Offers made by either the player or the club prior to arbitration.

4. Cost to the parties of their representatives.

5. Salaries in other sports or occupations.

Gorman, who also runs the Giants-themed Fogball blog, has remarked in email correspondences that the Giants are terrified of the arbitration process, noting the team’s loss to A.J. Pierzynski last year and their recent handout of a generous two-year, $6.1 million deal to the easily replaceable Pedro Feliz rather than going to the mat with him. Such fear of arbitration appears to be a trend. Dodger GM Paul DePodesta, who confronted Eric Gagne at the tables during his first week on the job last winter, was adamant about reaching a settlement with the begoggled closer before the case began, and he recently signed his star to a two-year, $19 million deal. DePo also reached deals with Cesar Izturis (3/$9.9 million) and Brad Penny (1/$5.1 million), clearing his docket this time around.

Gorman concludes in his piece that while the owners view arbitration as a means of inflating salaries, they find the process much more manageable than full-scale free agency, and because eliminating the process would require adjustments to that whole rigamarole — concessions that neither side appears willing to make — it isn’t likely to disappear any time soon.

• Finally, I want to thank my readers for their response to last week’s rant about the Yankees. Apparently I really touched a nerve; I can’t recall many of my blog entries getting linked in so many places. Bronx Banter, Baseball Musings, Baseball Think Factory, Baseball News Blog, and The House that Dewey Built were some of the sites calling attention to it, helping to generate a single-day record for traffic at FI (on a Friday, no less — typically low ebb for my readership) and still, via a Soxaholix comic strip, giving Red Sox Nation plenty of yuks a few days later.

While I certainly enjoy letting off steam in print, and hardly wish to shun the attention my rants can bring, I’d like to reassure the rubbernecking element among my readers that I am not, in general, an angry person, a violent one or, as Soxaholix tried to put it, “starting to go rabid froth at the mouth.” Rest assured that the only chairs and tantrums I throw where baseball is concerned are metaphorical (the caps are another story…). I’m actually rather happy, healthy, and levelheaded, if a bit cynical and not entirely sane. I do have a tendency, especially when frustrated, to be blunt and somewhat caustic with my written words, which combined with the freedom to write any damn thing I want in this space, can amplify my message quite a bit. Kind of like Wile E. Coyote with his dynamite and his ACME contraptions, though this one didn’t actually blow up in my face. For which I’m grateful.

Visitors who come to this space expecting me to write about the Yankees may have noticed that I’ve had precious little to say about the pinstriped team lately. Part of it has been my absorption in several Baseball Prospectus-related projects, including taking up the Dodger beat for my Prospectus Triple Play — a task that’s done a lot to refocus me on my true favorite team. Part of it has been to turn my attention to projects that don’t involve one specific team, like DIPS.

But another part of it is that I’m sick of this $200 million team before they’ve even played a game. Let me count the ways:

• I’m sick of thinking about how they could have saved themselves millions of dollars and averted a lot of risk by simply picking up Jon Lieber’s $8 million option and calling it a day. The Lieber decision set off a whole winter of reactionary signings and dominoed into the team’s inability to compete for the services of Carlos Beltran. For want of a nail…

• I’m sick of pondering in which backwater they’re going to bury Kevin Brown’s body, and what percentage of his $15 million salary the Yanks will be paying. I’m sick of the inevitable articles that some hacks will write every time the Yankees hit town: “How rich are these Yankees compared to our beloved Midwestern City Scrappers? Why, they’re paying more for Kevin Brown to pitch for the North Ogdenville Greasetrappers than the Scrappers are paying for three-fifths of their rotation, and that writeoff could cover the first two years of the well-deserved long-term deal our ace…”

• I’m sick of noticing that I’m just about the only analyst who supported the Jaret Wright signing. BP’s Joe Sheehan has already assumed the crash position by comparing him to Willie Blair circa ’98, which is pretty uncharitable, and the words “Ed Whitson” have been muttered elsewhere. Yes, the contract is based on one good season, and yes, his durability could be an issue, but this is a pitcher who posted the second-lowest DIPS ERA of any free-agent starter and looks to have taken a major step forward.

• I’m sick of reminding myself that the Yankees did everything by the DIPS book last winter in getting Javier Vazquez and Kevin Brown, and that didn’t work out so hot.

• I’m sick of hearing about Randy Johnson telling the cameraman to talk to the hand on his first day as a Yankee. If that’s the worst thing that happens to him here, he’ll be fine.

• I’m sick of the failure to find a lefthanded stopper for the bullpen, and sorry to see Mike Stanton, who served so nobly in the past, miscast in a role that he won’t able to carry. This one’s going to end in tears.

• I’m sick of being told how much better off the Yankees were with Tino Martinez than they are with Jason Giambi, and that they should have never let beloved Tino leave because gosh darn it, he’s a team guy, and this team doesn’t have the team guy thing like the Yanks did when Buster Olney’s heroes roamed the House That Ruth Built, and that now that Tino’s back he’s going to show these new Yankees how to win and zzzzz….

• I’m sick of reading about Jason Giambi’s health and his intake of everything from fluids to solid food to distilled spirits to antibiotics to steroids to humble pie. I really would like to get through the entire season without contemplating the big galoot’s alimentry canal, ok? I’m not particularly optimistic about his chances to regain his lost superstardom, but looking at this bereft offense, I’ll take the .249/.386/.472 (26.5 VORP) PECOTA has him pegged for and assume he’ll get more than the 307 at-bats it projects.

• I’m sick of watching Bernie Williams’ sad decline in centerfield and the team’s refusal to do anything substantial about it. Williams is 32 runs below average defensively over the past three years according to BP’s metrics, and by slugging a combined .424 over the past two seasons, can no longer make up for it with his bat.

• I’m sick of Tony Womack and his career .319 OBP. Hell, I was sick of Tony Womack before he got here, simply because I grew up having to watch a million speedy second basemen with no concept of how to take a walk drag down offenses all the time. I was lucky in that I had a deluxe model of the era in Davey Lopes, who could walk, hit for some power, and steal bases with a deadly efficiency. I’ve got a pretty good idea that Lopes, in his age 60 season, could still put up a .350 OBP and go 20/25 on the basepaths. I’m sick of the fact that the Yanks signed Womack when they could have had a comparable player who’s five years younger for half the price in Miguel Cairo.

• I’m sick of learning about the Yankees signing has-beens like Doug Glanville and Rey Sanchez and never-weres like Damian Rolls to compete for jobs at the fringe of their 25-man roster. I’m sick of contemplating a bench that with Glanville (34 years old, 2004 OBP of .244), Sanchez (37, .281), Ruben Sierra (39, .296), John Flaherty (37, .286), and Bubba Crosby (28, .196) is both incredibly old and lacking a single player who put up a .300 OBP last year. Glanville last broke the New Mendoza Line in 2000, Flaherty in 1999. The team’s thinking here is a direct affront to everything we’ve learned about winning baseball over the last quarter century.

• I’m sick of ranting about the Yankees’ player development woes. A couple days ago I quipped via the BP internal mailing list, “That’s an impressive new take on the concept of ‘farm system’ the Yanks have going — find the freshest corpse available, exhume it, and fit it for pinstripes.” Steve Goldman, bless his heart, liked the line so much he quoted me in the day’s Pinstriped Blog.

• I’m sick of Yankee fans pleading to see rookie Robinson Cano get a shot at the second base job. Kids, he’s just not good enough; PECOTA has him forecast for .255/.298/.389 (7.0 VORP) and below average defensively. I’m sick of the fact that this might be the best the decrepit Yankee farm system can do right now, except for the fact that staring him in the face they’ve also got a more-than-ready Andy Phillips, who while he’ll be 28, projects to hit .263/.326/.456 (10.4 VORP) and can play all three corner infield positions. In a better world, Phillips would break camp with the Yankees while one of those septuagenarians is appropriately reburied.

• I’m sick of envisioning new ways for Curt Schilling to die; the latest has me dreaming of watching him choke to death on the bloody sock while Alex Rodriguez bashes his skull into a gooey muck with his man-purse (and I’m sick of hunting for a link to that sissy-slap/purse image after it’s been shown to me a dozen times this winter).

• I’m sick of the fact that after holding the line on exorbitant ticket prices over the past few years and setting team records for attendance, the Yanks have passed on their contractual ineptitude to their customers, bumping up the prices of their tickets so much that I’m paying 20% more per game in my partial season-ticket plan than I did last year. The refund I was due for my postseason ticket desposit simply disappeared into the new charge, and I didn’t even get the satisfaction of a Yankee World Series appearance.

• I’m especially sick of the lack of vision and imagination being shown by the front office. At a time when the hallowed franchise is four years removed from its last World Championship, they appear to be accelerating in the opposite direction at alarming speed. I’m not going to pin this all on the increasingly marginalized Brian Cashman; it seems pretty clear that the shots are being called from higher up. Any day now I expect Randy Levine to call a press conference just to tell us that the team is completely out of ideas. As in…

Yankee Spokesperson: “On behalf of the New York Yankees, I have the obligation to announce that our storehouse of brainpower has been exhausted by all of this dynasty-keeping we’re expected to do. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re completely out of ideas [digs finger in ear, looks around the room solemnly, then examines finger pulled from ear] Yep. That’s it, we’re tapped. You can all go home now. Questions?”

And finally, I’m sick of temperatures in the single digits and low teens, and the increasingly graying snow still piled on New York City’s curbs. I want to see players bathed in sunlight as they run around on green grass wearing their batting-practice jerseys and tossing the ball lackadaisically. I want the next three weeks before Pitchers and Catchers to pass overnight so we can get on with a baseball season that will inevitably take more twists and turns than we can possibly predict. Bring it on.

It’s that time of the month again. My latest Prospectus Triple Play is up on BP today, and it’s free. As usual it’s a bit heavier on the Dodger analysis than on the others, but then again, they’ve been one of the busiest teams this offseason, and the statheads can’t get enough of Paul DePodesta. For the other two clubs, I spent a bit more time cracking wise while taking note of Eric Munson being signed to a minor-league deal, Pedro Feliz being overpaid, and the dark, unseemly world of the most hated man in baseball, A.J. Pierzynski.

A late note about new Giants rightfielder Moises Alou. Prior to publication, I couldn’t find the actual breakdown of his contract, which was reported as a two-year, $13.25 million deal with incentives and a player option for 2006. Just after the article went up, Fogball‘s Tom Gorman gave me a pointer to the one source that actually broke the deal down, Joe Roderick of the Contra Costa Times. Basically, Alou’s base salary for ’05 is $7.25 million, but some of it’s deferred ($1 million to ’06, $1.5 million to ’07). His player option for ’06 is for $6 million, but the Giants would pay $2 million of that chunk in ’08.

Personally, I think Giants GM Brian Sabean should skip the creative financing if it means spending money on the likes of Mike Matheny, Omar Vizquel, and Grandma Moises, but then again, I actually get paid to write about their follies once in awhile, and I still get to root against them. So go get ‘em, Sabes. You can borrow my brother’s calculator to compute the compound interest if you need it.

What is it with bloggers and fire? A little over a year ago, Christian Ruzich of All-Baseball.com lost his entire home in one of those California wildfires. A couple of nights ago the apartment of Larry Mahnken of The Hardball Times and Replacement Level Yankees Weblog burned down. Larry was unhurt, but he lost everything beyond the clothes he was wearing, and he had no insurance. He’s currently living with his sister and displaying his gallows humor via Baseball Think Factory.

It was only a few days ago that Larry and I were communicating about DIPS 2004; he’s been a huge ally in that project over the past couple of years. The two of us have never met, but we’ve corresponded with reasonable frequency, and we’re on the same side of many battles, whether it’s rooting for the Yankees, railing against Productive Outs, or spreading the DIPS gospel. He’s a good guy.

Back when the bad news befell Ruz, I tried to spend a few moments in his shoes; only then could I even begin to comprehend the magnitude of his loss. Since I don’t have anything more coherent to add about Larry, I’ll rerun an applicable bit of what I wrote:

Me, I’m a fairly stuff-heavy guy. Books, music, computer gear, artwork, memorabilia, photos, clothing — I’ve crammed my tiny Manhattan apartment with enough of that stuff to fill a place four times the size, and somehow I convinced my girlfriend to shoehorn herself and her belongings alongside of me. Our (ok, my) unholy but rather well-organized (cough) collection of objects is testament to thousands of individual decisions, and I can’t, under my present circumstances, imagine living without some of this crap. Sure, it’s not 1987 now, but who knows when somebody will refer to a Bill James article in the ’87 Abstract?

I’m babbling about myself, but that’s because I don’t really know what to say… I can only begin to fathom his loss, hope that no one he loves was injured or worse in the fire, and wish him the best of luck in putting the pieces back together… Who can replace the memories that one’s possessions hold? To say nothing of the possibility that he may have lost a good chunk of everything he’s ever written if he had a computer there (from now on, I’m storing some backup disks offsite).

It would be a really nice gesture to stop by the RLYW and make a small PayPal donation to help Larry out. We can’t replace everything he lost, but we can let him know that we’re thinking about him, and maybe do enough to buy the guy a little something that reminds him of that.

Larry, if you’re reading this, hang in there.

In response to Tuesday’s piece about the Dodgers, reader Andy Vogel piped up in the comments to call me on the following statement about Cesar Izturis: “batting him first or second, as Dodger manager Jim Tracy did all year, is a pretty awful idea.” Quite reasonably, Vogel asked the following:

How do you square this statement with data suggesting that batting order doesn’t make much of a difference in team scoring? Is it just the extra at bats for Izturis you want to avoid, or is there something more to it? I’m not saying Izturis should bat leadoff, but I’m interested in your take.

My quick response was that it’s still a bad idea to throw outs away when it’s not necessary. Dropping a player one spot in the lineup takes away about 20 plate appearances over the course of a season. Dropping a guy from 1-2 to 7-8 means eliminating about 120 PA. Those 120 PA get redistributed to guys who are, in all likelihood better hitters than the one dropped, especially when we’re talking about a guy with a career OBP below .300. It’s not a huge amount but it does add up, especially in a low-run environment like the Dodgers typically play in.

Ignoring the fact that complicated research has been done on this problem, I decided to take a quick stab at modeling this via my spreadsheet. I grabbed the Dodgers’ 2004 splits by batting position (1-9) from ESPN.com. For convenience’s sake, I gave these positions names based on which player hit there the most or whose stat line they most closely resembled on the team, more or less. Here’s what the Dodgers had:

1 Cesar  .276  .333  .394

2 Jason  .291  .349  .466

3 Milton .255  .335  .421

4 Adrian .306  .384  .563

5 Shawn  .296  .355  .492

6 Juan   .245  .304  .409

7 Alex   .248  .311  .427

8 Dave   .191  .284  .297

9 Pitch  .178  .219  .258

Yeeech. In firing off my first response to Andy, I neglected to consider just how bad the Dodger hitting was at various spots in the lineup. The #8 spot, much of it taken up by light-hitting catchers Dave Ross and Brent Mayne, was far worse than “Cesar” in the leadoff and “Juan” (Encarnacion) in the #6 spot. Of course, there’s the automatic out in the pitcher’s spot, which will stay at #9 because neither Jim Tracy nor I resemble Tony LaRussa.

I then set about creating a new batting order using the same nine “players.” Each batting slot’s rate stats (AVG/OBP/SLG) and per-plate-appearance frequency of events were held constant, but the totals were scaled up or down based on the proportion of plate appearances between old and new lineup positions. That done, I added up the team’s totals and used a linear run estimator (a simple version of Bill James’ Runs Created) and compared the new lineup to the old one. I lacked hit-by-pitch and sacrifice data, but that stuff tends to come out in the wash anyway.

Here is the new lineup:

1 Jason  .291  .349  .466

2 Milton .255  .335  .421

3 Adrian .306  .384  .563

4 Shawn  .296  .355  .492

5 Alex   .248  .311  .427

6 Cesar  .276  .333  .394

7 Juan   .245  .304  .409

8 Dave   .191  .284  .297

9 Pitch  .178  .219  .258

I simply dropped Cesar down to #6, moved Juan down to #7, and then shifted everybody up to the next available slot — not an incredibly scientific method, but hardly as disconnected from reality as a lineup that leads off with the top two sluggers. Then again, batting the keystone duo of Alex and Cesar fifth and sixth is no great shakes either.

Adding it all up, this “team” has almost exactly the same totals — three more homers, most notably — and saves themselves literally a couple of outs. For my trouble, they gain a quarter of a point of OBP and one-and-a-third points of SLG. By the Runs Created formula all of this adds up to the whopping total of…

2.09 runs.

That’s it. Two measly, stinkin’ runs. I tried more complicated run-estimation formulas — a technical Bill James as well as Extrapolated Runs, neither of them exacly appropriate because of the missing data — and the most I added was another 0.2 runs. Of course, the gains would be more if you buried “Juan” in the landfill of some coastal state — wait, the Dodgers actually tried that one — and found a catching tandem that could hit. That move alone could easily gain you ten times the number of runs my suggested lineup adjustment might reap.

The bottom line is that it’s far more important to have the right players out there than to spend a lot of time worrying about their optimal order. That said, if better options than a leadoff hitter with a career OBP below .300 exist, they should be taken, because that’s more times your top hitters come up with men on base. It’s still elementary.

I would be remiss if having gotten such a meager return on my inquiry didn’t mention more rigorous studies which tried a lot harder, only to come up with essentially the same answer. In The Numbers Game, Alan Schwarz recounts valiant attempts by proto-sabermetricians Earnshaw Cook (whose estimate yielded a whopping 11-run difference) and Art Peterson (whose FORTRAN game simulations yielded “negligible” differences).

More recently Mark Pankin took a swing at the problem using a mathematical concept called a Markov Chain model coupled with some strong baseball reasoning [“1) Getting on base is everything. To much lesser extent, home run hitters should not lead off. Stolen base ability is irrelevant”]. The maximum improvement he found was a total of 16 runs, with most of the teams within 10 runs, about one full win. Nothing to sneeze at if it’s the difference between golf and baseball in October, but otherwise small potatoes.

So there you have it. The next time I’m tempted to rail about batting order, I’ll hold my tongue, or kvetch about why the Yankees even signed Tony Womack in the first place, let alone allowed Joe Torre to put him at the top of the… wow, I’m feeling queasy already.

This one is for the technically-minded… Even those of you who frequent this site might have missed the tweaks I finally got around to dealing with on Tuesday. The biggest thing is that the home page to this site is now http://www.futilityinfielder.com/home.php to enable my RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to display snippets of my most recent blog entries. There’s a redirect script for those who simply type “www.futilityinfielder.com” but if you’re intent on coming through the front door, it wouldn’t hurt to update your bookmarks.

The short version fo all of this mayhem is that the third-party solution I had in place to display my RSS feed decided to go “pro”. Lacking the will to pay $10/month for what I once got for free, I set about banging my head against the wall for a few weeks until I came across an excellent tutorial which walked me through almost exactly what I needed to do, using a piece of software called Magpie. See, there are legions of ways to generate an RSS or XML feed (most blogs have them as built-in options) but precious few means of parsing said feeds — that is, bringing them into other HTML pages converted into readable English rather than coded gobbledygook. I have to thank Ashley Bennett for his patience and guidance with the aforementioned tutorial.

The upshot is that now when you visit my home page, you should be able to see the most recent blog entries at a glance, without any lagtime. Elsewhere on the site, I renamed the dorkiest department to “Field Trips” and made a few other tweaks here and there. Don’t sweat it if you don’t notice…

My recent chat with Jon Weisman caught the attention of the L.A. Observed blog, which is focused mainly on “[m]edia, culture, books and the politics of Los Angeles and California”. In particular, our discussion of L.A. Times writers Bill Plaschke and T.J. Simers seems to have whetted the Observed’s appetite for more. Cool.

Meanwhile, the Dodgers generated more headscratch-inducing headlines on Monday with their three-year, $9.9 million contract to shortstop Cesar Izturis. In the discussion following our Big Blue Bull Session, I had noted a couple of things about Izturis:

• He’ll be 25 this year, he took a great leap forward as far as his hitting goes last year, and is still at an age where he might continue to improve in that department. Using Baseball Prospectus’ numbers, he went from being an average of 10 runs under replacement over the previous two years to 18 runs above last year — a huge turnaround. While he might regress a bit, he also might continue to improve given his age.

• From a defensive standpoint, BP’s numbers put him at +1 run last year, +11 the year before, and -8 the year before that. Those numbers seem a little low given the perception of him as a Gold Glove-worthy defensive whiz. The Ultimate Zone Rating numbers, which are based on play-by-play data, put him at +5 in 2000-2003 (of which he played about 2 seasons total) — again solid but not sterling. Unfortunately, UZR numbers for 2004 aren’t publicly available because their creator, Mitchel Lichtman, has granted his employers, the Cardinals, exclusive access to them, but per Moneyball, it’s likely that Dodger GM DePodesta has similar numbers to UZR that tell him a similar thing.

I then stuck my foot in my mouth by declaring that this slightly below-average hitter and slightly above-average defender was still relatively affordable and not arbitration eligible yet, and I was clearly dead wrong on that last note, as this contract is a product of DePodesta avoiding arbitration and adding cost certainty. D’oh!

I don’t think it’s a great contract by any stretch of the imagination, but it does cover the shortstop’s age 25-27 years, which are likely to be his best from a hitting standpoint, and from a market standpoint, it can be argued that he’s a bargain when the following contracts are considered:

                 WARP  Age   Contract

Orlando Cabrera   3.2   30   4/$32 mil ANA

Cristian Guzman   5.7   27   4/$16 mil WAS

David Eckstein    4.2   30   3/$10.25 mil STL

Edgar Renteria    3.7   29   4/$40 mil BOS

Jose Valentin     5.0   35   1/$3.5 mil LOS

Omar Vizquel      6.3   38   3/$12.25 mil SFO

Cesar Izturis     5.5   25   3/$9.9 mil LOS

WARP is Wins Above Replacement Player, a stat that takes into account both offense and defense and is normalized for park, league, and era — in other words, the playing field has been leveled. Izturis is the youngest of these players, the only one, with the possible exception of Guzman, who’s not past his statistical peak age (25-29), and he’s also the cheapest on this list. The two most expensive players here, Renteria and Cabrera, had off years but were still rewarded with contracts only slightly more reasonable than the Derek Lowe pact. In that market, Izturis doesn’t look like the worst idea in the world.

That said, this is a guy with a .293 career OBP (.330 last year), some speed (25/34 steals last year) and no power (career SLG of .342, with a .381 last year). Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA forecasting system puts his 2005 weighted mean projection at .261/.304/.353, with a zero percent chance of breakout (improving his per-plate appearance productivity, in Equivalent Runs, by 20% above his three-year baseline) and only a 9.9 percent chance of improvement. In other words, we may well have seen the best of what he has to offer with the stick.

Furthermore, batting him first or second, as Dodger manager Jim Tracy did all year, is a pretty awful idea — about as bad as Tracy, who often used catcher Paul Lo Duca in that role a few years back, is capable of mustering. He and DePodesta should know better. Still, the Dodgers outperformed their Pythagorean projection by 3.4 games and beat their second-order win projection (which examines the team’s performance based on run elements) by 5.8, so it’s tough to argue that the strategy truly hampered them.

It seems clear that this move — locking up the team’s defensive anchor — has a lot to do with the decision to invest heavily in groundball pitchers such as Odalis Perez (career G/F of 1.68) and the extreme wormkiller Lowe (career G/F of 3.34), a controversial move that at best appears to have the Dodgers overpaying 2-3 times what they should for something resembling a League-Average Inning Muncher (LAIM). But as tied together as the two players’ fates are, it’s likely that the Izturis signing will be hailed by the same L.A. media that’s unwilling to cut DePodesta some slack for his other moves. Funny how that works.

Here we go again… for the third year in a row, I am presenting Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) via this website. DIPS was invented by an analyst named Voros McCracken, whose studies of pitching statistics suggest that major league pitchers do not differ greatly on their ability to prevent hits on balls in play. The rate at which a pitcher allows hits on balls in play has more to do with defense and luck than to his own skill, and can vary greatly from year to year.

This rather counterintuitive way of looking at pitching statistics has its advantages. The chief one is that it’s been shown that we can do a better job of evaluating a pitcher’s future performance by concentrating on the defense-independent things he does — strike batters out, walk them, plunk them, and give up homers — than we can by considering the effects of the defense playing behind him. The vehicle for this is the DIPS ERA (or dERA), which has been shown to correlate better with the following season’s ERA than that pitcher’s actual ERA.

If you’ve followed this site for the past couple of years, you’ve heard all of this before. DIPS has generated no shortage of controversy, but the work that’s been done in its wake does far more to validate McCracken’s central finding than to discredit it. It should be noted that McCracken is not saying major league pitchers do not control their ability to prevent hits on balls in play, just that they have less control than was assumed in a darker age.

The DIPS 2.0 system is a little long in the tooth, having been used for four years now as McCracken, who currently works as a consultant for the Boston Red Sox, is no longer updating it. Nonetheless, it’s handy and straightforward enough (if not exactly simple) to merit keeping it in circulation. My annual preparation of the numbers is a project that yields equal parts awed fascination and spreadsheet-induced blindness at each stage. At some measure, the blissful tedium involved in their preparation tickles my opiate receptors; in the dead of winter, staring at spreadsheets of endless reams of baseball stats late at night is still pretty damn fun and addictive.

And I’m a pretty big geek, but what the hell — this stuff is useful. So have at it.

As an aside, a few links pertaining to McCracken’s work are temporarily being hosted on my site because they were lost in the server move from Baseball Primer to Baseball Think Factory. While I have McCracken’s permission to do so and none of them will be mistaken for my own work, I am hopeful they will be restored to their rightful place in due time. DIPS is groundbreaking work that deserves better than to be lost in some “404 Not Found” shuffle.

The Dodgers have been generating plenty of headlines this offseason, with GM Paul DePodesta completing a decisive overhaul of the roster he inherited upon taking the helm last February. He’s generated no small amount of controversy in the process. Even after the Dodgers won the NL West for the first time since 1995 and earned their first playoff victory since the clincher of the ’88 World Series, DePodesta still endures flak for a midsummer trade which sent popular catcher Paul Lo Duca to the Florida Marlins. The young GM came under heavy fire again just before Christmas when he withdrew the Dodgers from a three-way, ten-player deal which would have brought the team Javier Vazquez, sent Shawn Green to the Diamondbacks and Randy Johnson from the Snakes to the Yankees. This past week, he finally finished the Green trade and signed Derek Lowe to a four-year contract that had everybody scratching their heads.

Jon Weisman of Dodger Thoughts has done a thorough and entertaining job in keeping on top of the team’s moves. Like many stat-savvy fans, he’s in DePodesta’s corner, but not every Dodger fan who passes through his site agrees with him, and neither do many of the writers covering the team. Jon and I have been planning to get together to chat at length about the Dodgers’ offseason plans since the team was eliminated from the playoffs last October. In the meantime, we actually got to meet in person at the winter meetings, which made our long-overdue chat on Thursday night feel like two old friends sitting down to gab; we went on (and off) for about as long as it takes to play a real game these days.

Part One of the chat is up at Jon’s blog. Part Two follows below.

• • •

Jon: I hear it. But 62 HR since August 1, 2003. When does the guy [Adrian Beltre] get some credit for being more than a flash in the pan?

Jay: When he puts up at least a pair of solid seasons back-to-back for the first time in this millennium.

Jon: I’d have gambled that he will.

But what this illustrates, I guess, is that DePodesta had a case for letting Beltre go, and that he has replaced him rather effectively in the cleanup spot, if not at his position.

Jay: Look, Beltre had a fantastic season and was a wonderful force to watch for the past eight months of Dodger baseball, but those kinds of performance gains are unsustainable. Guys just don’t do that, and if you look at the class of them that do, you’ve got Brady Anderson waving at you from a lonely corner of a bare room.

Jon: Anderson was 32 when he had his big year.

Jay: And he may have had some “help”. Nobody knows nothing, but nobody ever spiked to 50 HR from 16 before either.

Despite what I’ve said, I think it would have been worth a reasonable gamble to sign Beltre, but yes, DePodesta has replaced his profile offensively. I see Drew as capable of putting up Sheffield numbers in Chavez Ravine of the .300/.400/.500 variety; maybe a bit lower on average, but easily with the walks and power. And his track record is much more sustainable.

Jon: Well again, even if Beltre regresses, you’re still looking at probably more HR than Drew might hit, and at 3B.

Jay: But I don’t think it’s simply a HR-for-HR comparison with Drew; there are a lot of walks there instead of outs – the guy walked 118 times last year.

Jon: Yes, of course Drew’s walks matter.

Segue to Hee Seop Choi?

You should hear the conversations I have with my Dad about him. Cannot convince him to look beyond the infamous 62 AB with the Dodgers and the fact he was traded twice. Choi is the same age as Beltre and, batting in the No. 7 slot, I expect will more than justify DePodesta’s faith if given the chance.

Jay: There’s a Baseball Prospectus mantra, I can’t recall whether it’s credited to Keith Woolner or Rany Jazayerli or one of the other heavy hitters, but it goes something along the lines of in 100 at-bats, anything can happen. And it’s bloody well true, enough to move the masses to take up their pitchforks and torches.

It’s ridiculous to judge a player, particularly a young, promising player for whom you’ve traded, on 62 AB. If I can point to a failing of Jim Tracy’s over the past three years, it’s not giving Choi a chance to get comfortable. The guy wouldn’t be in the majors if all he could muster in any given 62-AB stretch was eight hits, and the evidence that he can do more abounds.

Jon: In defense of Tracy, as I said before, DePodesta gave him five people to play in those four slots, and all four were hitting decently. Green was playing his best ball in two years. Finley was hot in August. Bradley and Jayson Werth were decent in spots. The key for Tracy will be to not panic this year.

Jay: In the short term, you’re right, and Tracy was right to play the four hottest guys out of five. They won, so the end can be seen as justifying the means.

From a broader organizational perspective, his evaluation was shortsighted because, as I’ve said before, in 62 AB anything can happen. Who’s to say that playing Choi beyond those 62 wouldn’t have brought him back in line with his previous production or his projections? The odds are certainly in his favor.

If it did nothing else, Tracy’s move drained the paper value of a player the Dodgers had invested a good deal in, and that’s not such a hot thing for a manager to do on a regular basis. That it was in the fire of a pennant race, and that his other options panned out, is enough to cut some slack. But I’d hate to see it become a habit.

Jon: I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to.

Jay: I was a bit distraught to see how hard it was for Tracy and DePo to agree to a deal, by the way.

Jon: You mean in general, in how it would affect things going forward, or because you felt Tracy was being slighted?

Jay: Both. Tracy seems to be, if not the ideal manager for DePodesta to work with, than pretty damn close. There’s no reason for the situation to take up a month’s worth of media cycles or whatever over something that probably amounts to a half-million dollars here and there.

I appreciate that the team can operate on a budget, but they were second in MLB to the Yankees in attendance, they play in the No. 2 market, they need to cut the broke hobo act before it really screws them.

Jon: Frankly, things seem a little schizophrenic with the money spending. McCourt clearly wants to make some money, so frankly it won’t matter how good their income is – he’s gonna want to pocket some. But how do you explain approving the Lowetract, unless it’s, as some suspect, his desire to bring Boston’s glory to Los Angeles?

Jay: I can’t explain the contract beyond a point that says Lowe was worth about three years/$18-21 at the outer reaches.

But try this on: to a guy from Boston who’s hungry for his team to make a quick splash like the Henry/Epstein model did, Lowe’s postseason performances in closing out the three series were worth about $1 million a year apiece and an extra year over the life of his forthcoming contract. Take them away, and you’ve got 3/$24 million, the same as many others have gotten this winter. And of which Lowe, by moving parks, might stand to be in line with that… if you’re an optimist.

That plus the guy seems to have a strong track record healthwise throughout an otherwise schizoid career.

Jon: You got any DIPS (defense-independent pitching statistics) to add to the discussion?

Jay: As a matter of fact I spent the better part of this afternoon with my DIPS spreadsheet.

Lowe is at a 4.40 DIPS ERA (which has been shown to correlate better to the following season’s ERA than the actual ERA does), a run lower than he put up last season. Adjusting for park effects, that puts him in the low 4s in Dodger Stadium, which brings us back to the notion of Jeff Weaver territory. Worth maybe half of what Lowe’s going to be pad.

Jon: Park effects perhaps being mitigated in general by the decreased foul territory in Dodger Stadium, though perhaps Lowe, as a ground-ball pitcher, will still benefit more than others.

Jay: Yes.

Jon: How about the rest of the rotation?

Jay: I think if you had to boil down the success of the season, yea or nay, onto one Dodger, it would be Brad Penny.

[True story: Jon’s IM crashes. After reboot:]

Jay: Was that milk coming through the nose?:-)

Jon: No, actually, that kinda makes sense. If slightly unnerving.

Jay: Don’t use the word “nerve” anywhere near him, please.

Jon: Zing!

Jay: If he’s healthy, that’s an extra 150 league-average-plus innings at the top of the rotation. if he’s not, we watch Jackson, Dessens, or Alvarez get bombed or break down.

Jon: I will say, once you put the dollars spent aside, I’m happier now with the depth in the rotation.

Jay: Yes, it’s deeper and that’s good. But a true No. 1 would be welcome at the expense of a bit of depth; after all, that No. 5 won’t be starting in October, it’ll be the No. 11 twice.

Jon: Well, Penny or Perez will probably have to pitch like a true No. 1 for them to make October.

Jay: Given the strength of the NL West? I’m not so sure about that. Solidly above average and healthy would be sufficient.

Jon: Okay, mid-October then. Jake Peavy, I think, will be the division’s best pitcher, though. Padres may need to be reckoned with, along with the goin’-for-broke Giants.

Jay: The Padres and Peavy, yes, though I think losing David Wells hurts them considerably. The Giants? I don’t want anything I say on this to jump up and bite me in the ass in September, so I’ll avoid the easy potshot. But they’re so full of old ballplayers and so threadbare in the system (hitting-wise) that it’s almost impossible to see how they can realistically survive to contend.

Jon: I’m gonna have to wrap up soon, but give me your thoughts on Jeff Kent, Jose Valentin and Antonio Perez. I like the Kent signing, think Valentin is okay as a platoon player, and am having hopefully not naive hopes that Perez is a player.

Jay: I agree with you on the assessment of all three players there. It’s tough to go wrong on the two-year Kent deal especially if his defensive indicators (Ultimate Zone Rating and Fielding Runs Above Average) show that he’s a better player than most give him credit for. Valentin has his uses but he’d better get off to a good enough start to keep that average above .200 (with his usual good amount of productivity on top of that) or it’s going to get ugly. Perez on paper looks like a guy who can have his uses, if not actually be a star. I like the idea that he might platoon with Valentin (career OPS vs. lefties: .583, vs. righties: .826)

What I really like is that there’s a lot of versatility all the way around the infield. Kent can play all three corners, Valentin can move to short, Perez can play second or third, they’re at least somewhat covered in the event of an injury or something.

Jon: I like the versatility, although Kent hasn’t played third since 1996 or so, so I don’t want to see him there.

Jay: Not in any reasonable hurry, no, but it’s one of those things that is always nice to have from the manager’s point of view. Maybe there’s a few times a year it will make sense in the context of a bigger situation that will make everybody look smart – late-inning double-switch or something. Or a deadline deal like last year.

Jon: Anyway, I think they have a competitive team, despite all the changes. They have only three commitments beyond 2006, I think, in Perez, Lowe and Drew (although DePodesta keeps talking about instability now for stability later). They have a flexible roster, and they have a little ability for midseason improvements. I think, if nothing else, the gloom and doom brigade might not get to moan so much once the season starts. Although it wouldn’t hurt if Dave Ross hit like it was 2003.

Jay: Agreed. The flexibility, both short term and longer term, is the underlying feature of this organization right now. They’re supple if not especially strong in any one area, and I think they’ll hold up quite well.

That said, I think this is the beginning of better things to come. The Dodgers have four guys on Baseball Prospectus’ top 50 prospects, and another couple of honorable mentions – that’s great representation there. The system is going to bear fruit, they’ll be able to replace some of these middle-of-the-road guys with cheaper alternatives, and they’ll have the room to make big moves here and there.

Jon: Okay. We talked for a long time and could keep talking more, but that’s gonna have to do it for now. I pity the fools who read this far when we publish.

A couple of years back, Baseball Prospectus’ Dayn Perry took a look at the post-Moneyball backlash that pitted traditional scouting against performance analysis and coined a metaphor for the ages. “Should you run an organization with scouts or statistics?” asked Dayn, before providing the solution himself. “My answer is the same it would be if someone asked me: ‘Beer or tacos?’ Both, you fool. Why construct an either-or scenario where none need exist?”

But despite Dayn’s wisdom and the abilities of most intelligent people to reconcile multiple inputs, tensions between these two views persist. Those tensions are exacerbated in part by the hacktastic reactionaries who populate all too many of the nation’s sports pages, hurling epithets like “Google Boy” at Paul DePodesta as if some Luddite brand of senile dementia were the day’s blue plate special.

Intelligent debate on the topic is rare, which is why you should read this Baseball America transcript of a Winter Meetings roundtable between two top scouts and two top analysts, moderated by Alan Schwarz. The scouts are represented by Gary Hughes, assistant GM of the Cubs, and Eddie Bane, scouting director of the Anahiem Angels of Assville, California*, while the statheads are ably represented by Gary Huckabay of Baseball Prospectus (and now a consultant for the Oakland A’s) and Voros McCracken, a Red Sox consultant best known for birthing the Defense Independent Pitching Statistic concept. Schwarz is a senior writer for BA, a columnist for the New York Times and ESPN, and the author of The Numbers Game, a book on the history of baseball statistics that includes nods to BP, the Moneyball A’s, and McCracken — making him an eminently qualified go-between.

Cherrypicking a choice quote from each of them so that you can sample the flavor:

GARY HUCKABAY: I think it’s important to understand that a lot of people have overclaimed what you can do by statistical analysis. It’s a tool. A car is a tool as well—you can use it to drive to the store, or you can use it to drive into a tree. I think there’s more of a dichotomy between good statistical analysis and bad statistical analysis. But all the information you can get your hands on—as long as you understand what it’s good for, and what its quality is—is always a good thing. We’re all after the same thing here: We’re out to build a great baseball team. As long as you have X number of pieces of information, whether it’s performance data—a term I prefer to use rather than statistics, because these things are records of what happened on the field—and then also, if you’ve got people who have tremendous insight who are well trained, they know how to scout a guy, give me that information too. I want both of it. What I don’t want is someone going, “I want this guy because he had 120 RBIs.”

VOROS McCRACKEN: Certainly, we in Boston are not antagonistic to the concepts in “Moneyball” either. Obviously they hired me as a consultant. When they promoted Theo, basically the idea was he was going to try to meld the two approaches and get them to where they were not only getting along, but are complementing one another. The stats can help the scouts zero in on the guys they should be zeroing in on. And the scouts, once the stats are sorting things through, can tell you who exactly are the best guys to go after. The success of that can obviously be overblown because a World Series championship is a big thing, big news. How much it had to do with stats, how much it had to do with improved scouting . . . I think the point is that Boston has at least tried to reconcile the two positions.

GARY HUGHES: It seems like the teams that are so-called Moneyball teams — I’m not going to get into names of individual people or teams — those teams seem to really lack communication skills within their organization. They don’t talk to each other. They talk within their little comfortable niche of people, and the rest of the organization has no idea what’s going on. That seems to be by design. And guys are leaving baseball—just walking away—rather than work with people who just aren’t going to listen to them.

EDDIE BANE: I will have read this (statistics) stuff before I go into the ballpark. But I’m going to evaluate him myself as a scout — just as a scout — and I’m going to call Pat Gillick, if he had him in Toronto or Seattle in the past, and go, “Tell me about him.” I’m going to get information from the press box. I’m going to work other scouts over. I’m going to know everything I can about this guy. “Yeah, I heard his elbow was hurting him.” “No, it wasn’t his elbow, he pulled a hamstring.” “He had a drinking problem in the past.” I’m going to have the DIPS information already. I mean, this stuff if fabulous. But I’ve got to have the other stuff too — the intangibles.

Them’s good eats. Bane pops up in another venue this week. Rich’s Weekend Baseball Beat features an article in which Rich Lederer discusses the Angels’ standoff with first-round draft pick Jered Weaver, picking up on a statement in the roundtable where Bane dismisses the notion of comparing Weaver’s stats to those of Mark Prior:

I’m in the middle of a negotiation right now (with Jered Weaver) where a guy wants to compare our first-round pick’s stats to Mark Prior’s. And to me, there’s no correlation whatsoever.

Lederer runs the two pitchers’ stats — they’re two of the top hurlers in NCAA history, by the way — accounts for park adjustments and makes note of schedule difficulty, and replies:

Like it or not, Eddie, Weaver’s and Prior’s numbers can be adjusted and compared quite easily. This point, in fact, is one of the major issues separating the stats vs. the scouts debate. A lot of the scouts simply don’t want to believe the numbers because doing so dilutes the value of their worth (or so they think)

… I’m sorry, but it is simply disingenuous to say that there is “no correlation whatsoever” between Weaver’s and Prior’s stats. Bane knows the stats are incredibly similar so he is trying to play a little three-card monte on the public by proclaiming that they aren’t akin to one another.

This isn’t the first time Lederer has tweaked someone about the Weaver situation. Recall that during the Winter Meetings he threw Weaver’s agent, Scott Boras, a curveball as the agent was holding court in the hotel lobby and offering hardline answers to softball questions about his free-agent clientele. Here he’s lobbying for the Angels to shut up and sign the young pitcher:

Boras is believed to be asking for a deal similar to the five-year, $10.5 million contract Prior signed with the Chicago Cubs in August 2001. Given their comparable stats and competition, is that so unreasonable?

The whole thing is really quite silly when you think about the fact that Jered’s brother Jeff is scheduled to earn $9.25 million in 2005. I know Jeff is a more proven pitcher at the big-league level, but who would you rather have for about the same amount of money — Jered Weaver for the next five years or Jeff Weaver for one year?

Having spent the past two-and-a-half seasons with Weaver on the staffs of my two rooting interests, I’ll give up the washer and dryer for what’s behind Door #2.

On the topic of Lederer, a pair of congratulations are in order: he’s ESPN columnist Rob Neyer‘s “Link of the Month,” and a column of his on Jim Edmonds, co-written with Brian Gunn of Redbird Nation, was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top 10 sports columns of 2004 (the only one to come from a blog). Congrats, Rich!

Back to Perry, I had a chance to bend elbows with him last weekend as he passed through New York City. Alex Belth, Alex Ciepley, Dayn, his romantic interest Leanne, my gal Andra and I all trekked out to Queens to visit our favorite authentic Thai restaurant Sripraphai (of which Alex B. wrote so glowingly after our first journey there several weeks ago). It wasn’t beer and tacos — though we had plenty of the former as the night went on — but it was good food and good times. Fans of Perry’s work will be pleased to note that he’s got a book forthcoming as well as contributions to the Baseball Prospectus annual and the still-unnamed BP Red Sox project discussed a few days back.

• • •

* We’re going to have some fun with those silly Angels, kids. I don’t really have a dog in this hunt between the faceless, Disney-driven hell of Anaheim and a baseball owner insistent on insulting everybody’s intelligence. But as I’ve never cottoned to either the New York Giants of East Rutherford or the New York Jets of East Rutherford, I’ll concede my sympathy to the unrepresented taxpayers who foot the stadium bills. Besides, Angels owner has made a much more immediate and correctible mistake and deserves to have as much scorn and ridicule heaped upon his actions until the right thing is done. So today it’s the Anahem Angels of Assville, CA, tomorrow it may well be the Los Angeles Angels of “Screw You, Anaheim,” and the day after that the Angels of Arte Moreno’s Ass. Consider yourself forewarned that I’m just going to beat this ugly with the ugly stick for my own amusement. Feel free to offer your suggestions; good taste is hardly a prerequisite.

• • •

Speaking of McCracken and DIPS, several people have emailed to inquire about whether I’ll be publishing this year’s stats. Indeed I will, hopefully some time over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ve updated several links on last year’s page to compensate for the trainwreck induced by Baseball Primer’s relaunch as Baseball Think Factory. If anybody can help fill in more of the missing links, please email me.