The inflated offensive levels of the '20s and '30s probably have a lot to do with the overrepresentation. That period of time has the highest sustained rate of enshrined players per team, above 2.0 for the broad stretch from 1921-1942, and at or above 2.5 from 1923-1937. The year 1900, just before the introduction of the AL, is the only other year above 2.5, and only a small handful of other years scattered between 1892 and 1959 even reached 2.0.

Excellent stuff. The part about Glenn Wilson's Hit and Run gas station inspired me to dig a bit deeper in my playpen at SI.com: http://mlb.si.com/2013/03/05/glenn-wilson-hit-and-run-gas-station/

I've been hoping for something like this because for as long as I've known Christina (jeez, going on 10 years now), I don't think I'd ever heard her tell this story.

Very excited for this, and happy to note that I'm scheduled to be a guest for the shows the week of November 12-16, when the major awards will be announced.

Gossage beaned Cey in the 1981 World Series.

And for the record, I wouldn't say that I "just like" to swear. Here's the more complicated explanation, written upon the occasion of George Carlin's passing: http://bit.ly/T1dzrX

son of a [redacted], who cleaned that up?

The Tigers, having certainly read today's piece, have acquired the aforementioned Omar Infante as well as Anibal Sanchez in exchange for Jacob Turner and two other prospects, with the two team sswapping Competitive Balance Lottery picks, which is a thing from the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that exists for no good reason. That seems like a fairly steep price to pay in terms of future value, but it's the cost of not solving the problem earlier when the prices were lower.

The Pirates have Pedro Alvarez at third base, and he's currently producing a .280 TAv, with a positive FRAA. Acquiring Headley isn't an awful idea for them - he could play left field, or Alvarez could shift ot first, where the Bucs have had problems offensively - but it's not a need that rates as a high priority. Unlike the A's, there hasn't been any public expression of the Pirates' interest in Headley either.

Fair point on sample size, though Ryan (+58 FRAA career, +30 over past 3 seasons) has generally been better than Barmes (+28 career, +12 over past 3 seasons) with the glove, with a margin that's actually bigger in some of the other fielding metrics. His current .227 TAv actually represents a sizeable upgrade on Barmes' .193, and he's got a career mark 8 points higher than Barmes. Not saying they can't do better, but Ryan would help on both sides of the ball just the same.

The guy has 14 games played. This is a ranking based upon what players have done on the field this year, not what they might potentially be doing if they weren't hurt.

Barry Stace contacted me to note that he never misrepresented his age. Please see http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=17632 for the follow-up.

The build that I'm using has Manny at -76 FRAA, and yes, that's having a pretty large impact on his peak, with a ton of seasons ending up in the 4-6 WARP range instead of higher.

I have Belle at 44.8/41.0/42.9. When he came up for review and WARP had a lower replacement level, he was above the mark on peak but slightly below on career. Now he's much more substantially behind on career. Add in the fact that Vlad has about 850 hits and 70 homers on him, not to mention an MVP award, and it's not particularly close - and that's even before you get to the baggage.

Omar Vizquel has a Hall of Fame EKG.

I considered including Ichiro in this piece - man, does he look cooked - but as he is more secure with his contract than these three, he didn't quite fit into what I was going for, and the piece was long enough as is. I'll consider a follow-up with him, Andruw and Abreu. And yes, I knew the Vizquel one would inflame some passions - when I compared him to Ozzie Smith via Twitter back in early May, when he was first musing about retirement, I got a harsh response from a crowd that included many Venezuelans. Don't think I'll be traveling there anytime soon.

I looked at the DH issue in great detail back in March (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=16178) using the more context-sensitive True Average. AL DHs have consistently outhit NL DHs despite the latter having better hitters in that role; AL DHs have put up TAvs in the .269-.281 range since interleague began, while the NL average is .258, well off what those players hit when they're otherwise deployed. That's an issue both of roster construction - not having an extra above-average hitter on hand - and a lot of those players being at something less than 100 percent when taking on DH duties.

Thanks, it's good to be back. I learned from my experience writing for ESPN Insider that comments would become a larger problem at a major website — a significant percentage of the readers click through to a featured piece without being all that familiar with the advanced metrics, and often, their reaction to having their previously held notions challenged — particularly about their favorite team — can be harsh. But one doesn't last for very long in this business without developing confidence in one's own talent, awareness of one's limitations, and a fairly thick skin when it comes to criticism. Without giving too much of the game away, let's just say that I don't let harsh comments get me down, as they represent a very, very limited percentage of the total readership.

Nice to know we have a reader from Walla Walla here!

I greatly appreciate the kind words, Scotty. Thanks for reading!

Apparently I missed that Lindstrom has been on the DL with a torn ligament or tendon in his finger. This is what happens when you don't keep up with Collateral Damage, kids. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/collateral/?thisdate=2012-05-18

When I think of "long-suffering Orioles fan who reads BP," yours is the name that comes to mind, so I'm glad the O's are making it fun again. The fans certainly deserve better, and so does the tradition of the franchise.

A couple of good points from reader G.A, who emailed.: -- Yes- the Orioles overall run differential is only +16, but should it be noted that their run differential vs. Texas is -21, and vs. the rest of the league is +37? They only have 3 more games this season vs. Texas (the clear class of the league), and 120 against the rest of the league. One other word on context- the series vs. Texas came right on the heels of the 17 inning marathon against Boston, and the first game saw the Rangers score 9 runs against Jason Berken and Zach Phillips, two pitchers who were called up exclusively for that game and have since returned to AAA. -- Both of those things do color the analysis somewhat, but over the course of any season, being on either end of blowouts is going to distort a team's W-L record in one direction or another. At the other end of the spectrum, it's also worth noting that the O's are 6-3 in one-run games and 9-1 in two-run games, generally signs of a good bullpen, which thus far the O's have had. Still, that's a performance that's likely to regress, particularly given the track records of the aforementioned relievers and their dependence upon low BABIP.

Very interesting stuff, Diane. I wrote the Orioles essay for BP 2009 and harped on their history of late-season collapses but i never did dig deep enough to find such a consistent point of inflection.

I've got something on the order of 25,000 words on the steroid era in Extra Innings.

Installments of the Hate List will definitely continue - the possibility that I might not complete it and therefore gain (and provide to our readers) a certain kind of closure was something that actually entered into my thought process along the way. Thank you all for the congratulations and well-wishes, both here and elsewhere. I am overwhelmed by your kind words.

Sacs aren't included in either calculation, though it can be argued that they should be part of BABIP [(H-HR)/(AB-HR-SO+SF)]. The reason the bunting average is higher than the MLB BABIP is that a high percentage of bunts that weren't base hits were sacrifices, and therefore don't count against the average. The same cannot be said among the set of all balls hit into the field of play - if a batter swung away and made contact with a ball that turned into an out, it's not going to be score a sacrifice bunt, and sac flies are indeed part of BABIP. Does that make sense? For confirmation that I'm not entirely out of my mind on this, take a look at the B-Ref split showing that the league batting average on bunts is .403 (that does include pitchers): http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/split.cgi?t=b&lg=ML&year=2011#traj

Via SiriusXM's Mike Ferrin, here's a clip of Manuel talking to Jim Duquette and Ferrin on MLB Network Radio's Power Alley about the bullpen, his limited use of Papelbon as it pertains to his history of shoulder injuries, and to his philosophy of closer usage in general: http://t.co/oCdK4dk Main points: * Bastardo has been dealing with tenderness in his elbow since the spring, limiting his velocity and command. * Manuel's trying to use Papelbon the same way Francona did in Boston, trying to avoid 3 days in a row (which he did only 2x last year and only 6x from 2008-2011) * He's willing to go 4-5 outs with his closer in September but not elsewhere because he doesn't like sitting his closer down between innings and because he's scared of burning him out by September * He's utterly unable to conceptualize the use of his closer in a tie game on the road: "When you're on the road, usually you don't pitch him because you want somebody to close the game, and that's kind of why you hold him back." The bottom line is that Manuel seems unwilling to think outside the box on the issue, a trait which he sadly shares with most other current managers. Thanks to Mike for passing that clip along.

Interesting point about Bastardo; it's actually 16 walks in 17.1 innings dating back to August 24, compared to 16 walks in his previous 48.2 innings dating back to the beginning of the 2011 season (see http://bit.ly/IL11G0). That does look like bad news on the horizon. Furthermore, I hadn't realized Herndon was hurt.

I didn't write that, but it appears that one of our editors tends to favour the British spellings around this shoppe.

Yup, my bad on that one. He returned to action on 4/30. Still think his absence for most of April may have been one contributing factor to Davis pressing.

Weeks hasn't been good (.181/.317/.333, .236 TAv), but I was strict about only choosing players with lower TAvs than Pujols at the time of the article, and his was not.

Offhand, I'd say that it's already a likelihood that Pujols is going to wind up closer to last year's numbers - .299/.366/.541, 37 HR, strong for anyone else, but evidence of decline in the case of his own remarkable career - than his career averages (.328/.420/.617 coming into the year, with 40 HR). For evidence of a deeper decline, I don't have anything scientific but I'd say it's somewhere around the 2-3 month mark. We've seen hitters have amazing halves and then be unable to sustain them, or look totally done through June only to salvage their seasons with approximations of their previous form over a given stretch. A better way of looking at this is to think about when certain hitter stats stabilize, while acknowledging that the numbers for that are all over the map depending upon the category. Strikeout and walk rates stabilize relatively quickly - in this case already indicating decline for Pujols - and homer rates as well, but BABIP takes more than a full season to stabilize. Check out Derek Carty's article for more: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=14215.

Better question isn't whether the fans will face it but whether Kenny Williams will. Sorry I didn't get to bore you with tales of Cliff Pennington, Danny Valencia, and Erick Aybar. I'll try to make it up to you next time.

Lillibridge is probably not a bad alternative for the Sox, particularly in the short term. He's not likely to match last year's .297 TAv showing but he's been starving for playing time and can probably help.

Our data comes from MLB Advanced Media, Fangraphs' comes from Baseball Info Solutions. The fact that they differ so much on a given player with regards to line drive rate underscores the point as to the shakiness of relying upon that particular metric.

Actually, untracked has been around the world of sportswriting for over a century: http://articles.boston.com/2010-05-23/bostonglobe/29286233_1_runaway-train-readers-track "...Boxing may have launched the career of the phrase get untracked, but that wasn’t the earliest version of the sportswriters' untrack. Further digging unearthed examples of the verb as early as the 1890s, in regular use at — where else? — the racetrack. 'Before Carr had untracked his mind Dungarven had beaten him,” reported the Chicago Tribune. “The latter [horse] did not seem able to untrack himself in the heavy going,' said The New York Times."

I'm not Jim Tracy, and I'm not Not Jim Tracy, either.

Indeed, Hawk Harrelson probably belonged in there, as the most obvious example of a homer-announcer ever. I go so far out of my way to avoid him, though, that it's been years since I had to listen to a White Sox broadcast. As for the Reds, their NL West rivalry with the Dodgers from back in the day - and of course, the antics of Schott - ensures that I'll have something to say about them. I didn't think it was so easily reduced to a hasty paragraph cobbled together after submitting the rest.

It's an interesting question but MRIs cost more than $500, probably closer to $2,000 a pop (http://www.comparemricost.com/). A team that owns its own equipment - an investment upwards of $1 million in terms of hardware - could eventually realize some savings there, but it's not a trivial expense.

I loved that one, and not only do I still twirl my bat when I step into the cage, I can't NOT do it, it's so ingrained.

Yes. I regressed them using 80 percent of the value of the average HOF hitter, which matches the ratio of the average HOF catcher career value to that of the average HOF hitter. I debated using 85 percent, which is the ratio of HOF catcher peak value to that of the average HOF hitter. That would have inched the standard up to 43.8. I'll review that decision when I compile the next JAWS set.

I've written several times about Simmons recently, and talked about him on Clubhouse Confidential. Absolutely screwed for no good reason. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=16047 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15833

Frankly, yes, I am surprised, as Kendall had never particularly measured up that well in the previous )Clay Davenport) version of WARP. He's fallen a couple of points in more recent revisions, but is still within hailing distance of the standard. His early career work in Pittsburgh was very valuable, with a high of 6.9 in 1998, and an average of 4.4 WARP for his 9 seasons there, including the time missed with injury. His .366 OBP and plus defense (+34.2 including the Arm rating) go a long ways towards boosting his value, though he's got minimal traditional credentials (three All-Star appearances) and probably won't fare well in the voting. Because of the volatility in his ranking as we've moved from one system to another, I'll hold off on waving the flag for him until the time comes, particularly since we're still auditing our pre-1950 WARP values (which have less play-by-play input) to make sure they're in line with our post-1950 ones. But if he still ranks where he does now when the time comes (2016 ballot), I will muster the best arguments I can on his behalf, and try to forget the jokes I made about his offense late in his career.

PECOTA already is, via their 78-win forecast. I'm not arguing that they're world-beaters, but the evidence based on the history of 9-1 and 10-0 teams is that they're probably at least a .500 team. Interestingly, in the new Extra Innings, Derek Carty uses a couple of different methods to show that 16-17 games into a season is about the level when a hot start becomes real, which is to say that the value of their current record is at least as predictive as their preseason expectation. That doesn't mean that a 12-4 team can be expected to go 120-42 or whatever, but that their expected season winning percentage is well above .500.

That's a question better directed at Colin Wyers - but I'll leave it to him as whether such a thing is feasible. Probably more realistic to see which teams overachieved their PECOTA preseason forecasts by the most.

Second one (1002 runs) should be the 1932 Yankees

I have written several times of Schilling's career in a positive light - he was an extremely talented pitcher once he figured out how to dedicate himself to the game, and he is an above-average Hall of Fame candidate thanks in large part to his postseason credentials. I will mount a full-throated argument in favor of his candidacy anytime the subject arises. I'm also aware that he's devoted himself to several charitable causes. That said, Schilling made me miserable as a fan, because of 2001 and 2004 and in combination with his utter pomposity and his well-known political affiliations (he stumped for George W. Bush on Good Morning America less than 24 hours after the end of the 2004 World Series), I loathe his public persona as much as that of any player in recent memory.

LOL at that last line. As for the rest, a good point about their bullpens, particularly during a stretch where Joe Nathan was the best closer this side of Mariano Rivera, and the formulaic Gardenhire could push buttons. The Twins didn't have to push Santana terribly hard becuse he was an exceptionally efficient pitcher, and they got outstanding results - the two Cys came on their watch, not the Mets'.

One thing I meant to add to this but didn't... A couple times late in the spring, I said on the radio that Santana might still be a good frontline pitcher, but that he would no longer be a 120-pitch workhorse. As it turns out, he's gone 120 or more just five times in his career (http://bbref.com/pi/shareit/b8pR4), once with the Twins in 2006, and four times with the Mets from 2008-2010. That's an extraordinarily low number for an elite pitcher, particularly one healthy enough to average 216 innings a year from 2004-2010. Limiting the field to lefties, CC Sabathia has done so 17 times in that span, Barry Zito 13, Cliff Lee 12, Jon Lester 8, Cole Hamels 7, Oliver Perez 6... C.J. Wilson's already at 4, David Price at 3.

Good stuff from MLB.com's Matthew Leach on Strasburg, comparing his first 100 innings - a mark he reached in the first inning - to those of other pitchers who got off to hot starts. Some cautionary tales: http://washington.nationals.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20120411&content_id=28416992&vkey=news_was&c_id=was

To a certain extent, the results jibe with common sense, sure. But the goal of sabermetrics isn't just to nod heads with common sense and received wisdom. It's to attempt to grasp the extent to which something we "know" is actually true, and/or to discover the limitations of what we know.

Whither Parra is a good question, because he did have a nice little breakout last year. It's not the one that keeps me lying awake at night, though, or checking Rotowire on a daily basis to find out if there's more news. And no, Dunston's swing wasn't beautiful, but it was unproductive, and it seemed absurd enough to use as an example.

It looks as though Brandon Belt will be the Giants' Opening Day first baseman, with Aubrey Huff working on another chalk outline in left field: http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_20320088/san-francisco-giants-notebook-bruce-bochy-says-final

Well, sure, but that's in part because the offensive spread between a good and a bad hitter at a given position is generally much larger than the defensive spread between good and bad. Consider 2011 shortstops. The leader, Jose Reyes (58.5 VORP) was about 70 runs better than the trailer, Reid Brignac (-11.2 VORP). Fieldingwise, the leader, Brendan Ryan (13.3 FRAA) was about 33 runs better than Asdrubal Cabrera (-32.1). For 3B, the offensive spread was about 61 runs between Evan Longoria and Pedro Alvarez, the defensive spread about 32 runs between Jack Hannahan and Mark Reynolds. Most MLB regulars produce more value with their bats than their gloves, but for valuation purposes a run saved on the defensive end is the same as a run scored on the offensive one.

Agent007 - that's basically what WARP is for, valuing a player's offensive and defensive contributions together. Reynolds has been worth 8.4 WARP over the last four years (2.2 per year), and 2.9 over the past two years (1.5 per year). That's not much to write home about for a full-time player, but it's not worthless, either. Basically, it's stopgap-caliber.

Reds announce that Aroldis Chapman will head back to the bullpen. Yeesh, Dusty gonna Dusty. http://mlb.sbnation.com/2012/4/2/2920372/aroldis-chapman-reds-bullpen-rotation

As surely as God made little green apples, here's Buster Olney (http://twitter.com/Buster_ESPN/statuses/185747445504942081) using a fielding metric in a manner that represents ol' Pet Peeve #1: [Bobby] Abreu played 28 games in the OF last year, and rated a -38.0 on the UZR/150 rating last year, or 3rd worst among OFers. Everyone knows that the only player who can correctly be judged on a 28-game fielding sample is Rafael Palmeiro, circa 1999.

Yes, because I think both teams have convinced themselves they have better alternatives in left field. They're going to need to be liberated by a team dissatisfied with one of its corner outfield options, and I'm sure the respective GMs would attempt to extract a considerable price even with the player's value depressed at the moment - after all, if they were going cheap, they'd probably have been traded by now.

At the SABR Analytics Conference earlier this month, I met Richard Cramer, who created the Edge 1.000 system that the A's used. The broadcasters were into it, but Martin didn't feel the computer could tell him anything he didn't already know. The White Sox were the other early adopter, and La Russa, in his first job as manager, was open-minded enough to be interested in what the Edge system could tell him. A young Dan Evans ran it, and when the Yankees bought in, a young Doug Melvin ran their system. There's plenty about the system and the industry reaction in Alan Schwarz's fascinating book, The Numbers Game.

Dewan has posted a fairly concise and coherent version of his shift article at http://www.actasports.com/stats_detail/?StatId=324.

Audio and additional excerpted quotes from the Clubhouse panel is finally up: http://sabr.org/latest/sabranalytics-clubhouse-confidential-panel

Gah. The one percent approximation is correct, the second number should be 370,000.

Jeff Passan profiled Voros at leangth last year, and touches on his time with the Red Sox: http://www.thepostgame.com/features/201101/sabermetrician-exile

Audio for the Retrospective panel (http://sabr.org/latest/sabranalytics-retrospective-look-baseball-analysis), the Fantasy panel (http://sabr.org/latest/sabranalytics-fantasy-baseball-panel) and the Ricketts interview (http://sabr.org/latest/sabranalytics-qa-tom-ricketts) has been posted at SABR's website.

Audio for the Retrospective panel (http://sabr.org/latest/sabranalytics-retrospective-look-baseball-analysis), the Fantasy panel (http://sabr.org/latest/sabranalytics-fantasy-baseball-panel) and the Ricketts interview (http://sabr.org/latest/sabranalytics-qa-tom-ricketts) has been posted at SABR's website.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=16082), this wouldn't be the first time Torii misremembered Twins history: http://bit.ly/GTvK0S

Oh, I'd take the over as well, but that's the nature of projections - the system is more sensitive to certain types of over- or under-performance when it comes to making its forecasts.

The answer to this and most of the WARP/ERA disjunctions is that WARP is driven by Fair Run Average, which accounts for the pitcher-independent outcomes (he's got a low K rate and a mediocre walk rate), adjusts for defensive and bullpen support, and credits sequencing (the ability to get a double play grounder or to avoid a bases-loaded walk, at the extremes). Lannan is above 5.00 over the past three years while barely being above replacement level according to that. I think that's underrating him a bit, but WARP and PECOTA aren't so easily impressed.

Nolasco is a pitcher whose strikeout, walk and homer rates - the more repeatable skills when it comes to pitching - suggest a lower ERA than he has been able to muster. His posted some very high BABIPs that most projection systems would assume to regress over time. That's the way most pitching projection systems work, PECOTA included.

Trying to decide between Grape Ape IPA and Strawberry Shortcake Lager

Good. First door on the left, one cross each.

Fair points on both sides of the question, Llary. I had forgotten about Redman in the litany of pitcher offense-related injuries.

Not to be a dick, but nearly anytime one starts a statement with that phrase, they're pretty much issuing an ironclad guarantee of being a dick (this reply included). I suggest a different rhetorical strategy, particularly when replying to a comment that was clearly labeled as an off-the-cuff answer. And no, I don't think there's a ton of such players who would settle for that. Some, sure, to get their foot in the door, but when they realize the extreme limitations of their value to the team - basically the acknowledgement that they're so bad at offense that they don't merit a shot - and its impact on their futures, well, that's gonna leave a mark. Because even if it were so, I can't imagine teams willing to pay very many of those players the going rate for minimum salary of a two-way player. And if you're willing to work for far less than that, you devalue your own services.

My point wasn't that 400 PA constituted a full-time job. I did throw the "near-full-time" qualifier in there, and was attempting to set off a 400 PA as a DH - with others as PH or position player - that would further raise the player's total number of PA. Hideki Matsui (462 PA as DH, 119 in the field), and Bobby Abreu (462 as DH, 115 elsewhere) are a couple of generalized examples of what I meant, though they clear the cutoffs by a wider margin than most. Another way of looking at this is by calculating the average number of PA by those clearing the 300-PA bar. I can't drop a graph into the comments but you can see the data here: 1997 452.0 1998 476.3 1999 467.0 2000 462.7 2001 418.6 2002 462.2 2003 427.0 2004 464.0 2005 431.0 2006 463.8 2007 499.2 2008 418.9 2009 423.9 2010 445.9 2011 451.2 The average has risen over the past three years even as we've got an increasing number of players - double digits in each one, for the first time since 1998 - reaching the threshold. More of the playing time is in fewer hands (because it would be more dispersed among those not reaching the threshold) and performance is actually on the rise.

I can ask Corey Dawkins if he's got enough data on the topic to give us an answer, though I suspect that incomplete reporting makes it a more difficult issue on which we can gain a longer-term perspective.

It's a fair question. Effectively you're suggesting that instead of one DH, teams have multiple ones, the logical extension of which is separate offensive and defensive units, like in football. My response to that would be that fielding doesn't pose a tremendously inflated - and in my mind, unnecessary - risk to most hitters the way offensive responsibilities do to pitchers. Furthermore, the spread between a bad fielder (Cabrera at 3B) and a good one (Brandon Inge, to keep it with the Tigers) is still less than the spread between Rick Porcello (e.g.) as a hitter and Cabrera as a DH. Furthermore, I think it might be tougher to find players willing to settle for designated fielding roles, but that's just a guess.

While I can sort of appreciate the spirit of your modest proposal, it's pretty obvious how quickly those ideas fall apart - nobody is talking about building a new edifice on the field of play or allowing anybody who's not on a roster onto the field, nor should they. We're simply talking about extending a rule that's been in existence for four decades across 30 teams instead of 14 (or 15, as of 2013) teams. The argument boils down to this: it's better to watch people do what they do best, than what they do worst, particularly when their ineptitude at the latter exposes them to injury - not just bunting but swinging and running the bases.

Comprehensiveness was not particularly our goal in this exercise - when we brainstormed questions, both Geoff and I generally focused on the question marks, and I don't think either of us had any real concern that Lincecum/Cain/Bumgarner would be anything but very good (since I can't whistle either in real life or in print, I let it pass). It's Vogelsong and Zito where the intrigue lies, and where we thought we could offer more insight. I did do a press hit where I'm quoted as saying nice things about the Giants rotation for Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/03/03/SP1O1NFDSP.DTL

That's a question better directed at Colin Wyers - I'm not sure to what extent team expected BABIP is part of those projections at this stage. I will say that Greinke's lower-than-average BABIP has far more to more to do with his ability to miss bats (higher K rates correlate with lower BABIP) than it does the quality of the Brewers' generally substandard defense.

I'm a big fan of DE, and find it somewhat more useful in this context than FRAA. I see that we now have a means of downloading the .csv data from the depth charts page so that you can approximate DE or BABIP yourself.

Alas, the 4:30 ET airing of CHC is now 4:30 AM Tuesday morning, and 12:30 PM. Hopefully, those of you into it can set your DVRs accordingly.

Interesting question - I'm not really sure of the answer offhand. At some point every spring, I usually sit down with the depth charts and reverse-engineer BABIP, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

Loney never showed any kind of real power in the minors, actually - a homer for every 69 PA and a .134 ISO despite favorable hitting environments nearly all the way up; his high for homers in a season was 11. A .166 ISO and 9 homers in 667 PA at Las Vegas is nothing. Apparently, my making light of that was lost in the translation. Ah well. Goldschmidt has a high strikeout rate, but remember that up to a certain point, strikeout rate correlates positively with power in a young player, whether minors or majors. Furthermore, Goldschmidt walks and isn't the slowest guy in the world (13 SB last year between minors and majors). I'd much rather take him over Loney and live with the Ks because of the secondary skills.

Most readers can identify me as a lifelong Dodger fan, because I've written about that subject numerous times here. The above exchanges were meant to be playful jibes with a fellow non-Giants fan - if they didn't come off that way, duly noted. Given the number of times I have railed against the Giants about not giving Belt enough playing time - both here at BP and on Clubhouse Confidential (see today's episode, airing at 4:30 ET, or the one on the Replacement Level Killers a few weeks ago) - and lauded the organization for its ability to development of pitchers, I can't believe you could seriously think that compromises this analysis. The Giants frustrate me as a team because they don't make good playing time decisions, just as the Dodgers do. Both are equally worthy of being ripped for their foolishness, regardless of my rooting interests.

While I thank Steven for the kind words and wish him nothing but the happiest of trails, I can say - contrary to what he writes above - that he deserves at least a bit of the credit for much of the good work that has come out of my pen (so to speak) over the years. Steven edited my work on Mind Game, It Ain't Over, the forthcoming Extra Innings, and several annuals, always spurring me to work a little harder and to dig a little deeper in the service of whatever it was that I was trying to get across, and occasionally protecting me from my bad writing habits and excesses if not actually beating them out of me (he did some of that, too - I start one sentence every two months with the word "But" instead of one every 10 minutes, and I'm always aware of why I'm doing it). I have learned a tremendous amount from him as a colleague and even more as a friend, so I am elated that if I can't have it both ways, I at least get the latter.

It's not too difficult to retroactively tick off more effective possibilities for at least some of these trouble spots - I did so plenty of times in the semi-annual Replacement Level Killers and Vortices of Suck pieces. The White Sox could have turned to Viciedo last summer when their chances still had a pulse. The Phillies let Domonic Brown fester in the minors. The Angels could have gone even more all-in with Mike Trout. The Indians could have expanded the role of Duncan. The Giants, who got a .222/.310/.374 line from their left fielders, could have turned to Brandon Belt earlier instead of letting him rot in Triple-A or on the bench. The Yankees could have given more of Gardner's ABs against lefties to Andruw Jones (+1 FRAA in LF). Without digging out the FRAA for every player, it should be clear that the spread of defense just isn't enough to justify some of the decisions keeping some of these guys out of the field. Viciedo (-2 FRAA in RF), Duncan (-2.4 FRAA in LF in 2010-2011) and Belt (0.6 FRAA) are guys who were at least partially held back by the perceptions of their defense. Meanwhile, some of the underachieving guys were held in place by their big contracts. Both of those are inefficiencies of different varieties at work.

I'd say that hypothesis #1 falls apart pretty quickly when you consider the defensive spectrum in its entirety. The superior athletes - the ones with more range, fast-twitch ability and arm strength - are the ones who gather at the right end of the spectrum. The pool of players who can defend at an MLB-caliber level at those position is much smaller than those who can defend well enough to occupy the left side of the spectrum, and so the average offensive talent level at the position is lower. Right fielders should be more athletic than left fielders in that they have the arm strength going for them, but if they're too much more athletic (i.e., faster), they wind up in center field. As it turns out, since 1998, left fielders have stolen around 10% more bases than right field, but center field has stolen about 70% more bases than left field.

To my knowledge, not at this point. Colin does have his hands full with PECOTA at the moment, specifically the generation of the percentiles and such for the cards. I'm optimistic we'll see something added this season, but almost certainly not before Opening Day.

My apologies, I should have run the FRAA data by Colin as well before slapping it in there - I thought that the average may have been a historically based one and we could see y-t-y variations. We're working on a way to address this in a follow-up.

The positional adjustment varies from year to year and is derived from the relative performances at each position after the fact using a rolling average of recent performance. If I'm calculating it correctly, the gap between LF and CF, which was about 6.6 runs circa 2006, is down to about 2.5 runs circa 2011 — so at least on the offensive side, it's a lot smaller than 1.0 WARP (and it's WARP, not WAR). I suspect that similar rolling averages are incorporated into PECOTA, but you'd have to ask Colin.

Good stuff, thanks for sharing.

Just saw on Twitter that the Empire State Building will light up blue and orange in memory of Gary Carter tonight: http://bit.ly/AfucCV

When Bert Blyleven was elected I looked back at my first take on him from January 2002. http://www.futilityinfielder.com/wordpress/2011/01/rookie-blogger-stumps-for-blyleven-january-2002.shtml. Lotta talk about wins there, some talk about RBI in my Carter piece and other HOF analyses. And Win Shares. Blagh. Those were different times, though, and for whatever the point I made about the "unshakeable feeling" of watching a Hall of Famer in his prime, I also had plenty of objective analysis to back up my arguments. Which is why I was invited me to write my 2004 Hall of Fame ballot analysis for BP in the first place.

With all due respect to the Expos, I'll wager that Randy Johnson is wearing either a Mariners or Diamondbacks hat, Pedro a Red Sox hat.

From 2009-2011, Bautista's hit .269/.387/.585 as a 3B, .270/.401/.579 as a RF in about 3x as many PA - not a huge difference, but that's mostly because he was awful there in 99 PA in 2009; as Ryan says, it was when he moved that he started to mash. However, he has actually played more 3B in each of the past two years than in 2009, and done well enough that it can be said his spending more time in right contributed to the drain of talent from 2010 to 2011, as he dropped from 188 PA at .281/.383/.675 as a 3B, to 102 PA of .309/.441/.728 - a loss of about 20 runs worth of production over a small number of PA.

Thanks, Tim. I specifically sidestepped the question of defensive statistics, at least for the moment - that's going to take a lot more help from the data department, where PECOTA is clearly the current priority.

Aside from Sano, Kevin suggested that the other seven 3B on his list were either likely to stick at the position in the majors (Gyorko, Castellanos, Cutbert) or more definitely (Arenado, Rendon, Olt, Middlebrooks). Of course, it remains to be seen what happens to some of these players as they rise through the high minors (only two have played above High-A thus far), and whether teams wind up with obstacles in front of them. The Padres have Chase Headley at third with Gyorko already at Double-A, the Sox have Kevin Youkilis with Middlebrooks at Triple-A. The Nationals' Ryan Zimmerman could still be around as Rendon approaches.

The shortening of benches due to rampant pitching staff expansion is an interesting point to remember in general when looking at these historical trends. Nonetheless, I would think that having fewer ready alternatives at a position would increase the top-to-bottom spread across positions, and yet it hasn't, it's been particularly trending downward since the dawn of the Wild Card era. As for the minors, I've asked the question of Kevin Goldstein: how many of the 8 3B on his top 101 list (which is as many as he had SS, and more than 1B and 2B put together) are likely to stick at other positions? Will report back on that one.

One thing I didn't really get to but which Sirius/XM's Mike Ferrin brought up on Twitter is that several teams are considering moving offense-minded players to third base this year, which could help the position rebound at least by this measure. Miguel Cabrera is the obvious one, but Hanley Ramirez (career TAv: .300) and Mark Trumbo also fit this pattern; the latter, even with his .291 OBP, still managed a .278 TAv last year. Brett Wallace is also moving back across the diamond, but he hasn't proven himself as a hitter yet; his career .245 TAv is lower than that of Jimmy Paredes (.257) and regression posterboy Chris Johnson (.260).

I don't think so, because we'd expect the level of offense at a position to rise given a surplus of options.

Thank you for the kind words. Very much appreciated!

That's a good question that I'll take up in more detail when I do the DH article, but short answer: AL DHs are outperforming NL DHs but overall DH performance is still better in the interleague era.

they were the official Killers at 3B, dishonorable mentions at the other two, and yes, Rivera was just about all that stood between them winning something or other at both LF and 1B.

Speaking as a hater, I'm pretty sure Dodger fans hate McCourt with every bit as much passion.

As bad as the Twins' shortstops were, those of the Rays, Reds and Giants all paired lower OBP and SLG. Not sure where you're getting -36 runs on defense; I show Plouffe (-7.6) as the worst of the bunch and the only one more than a few FRAA in the red.

I'd say it's the latter. There's a much wider sustainable BABIPs among hitters than for pitchers. Note also that Janish's best showing came in the smallest PA sample (28) of his three seasons.

Well, they did have the Replacement Level Killers at first base and shortstop, plus a dishonorable mention in center field. Which either counts as close but no cigar, or much worse (considering what it did to their playoff hopes).

so, am I to take the negative rating on that comment to mean that I should take some prisoners?

They may be flat broke, but the one thing the Mets never run out of is bad ideas: http://mets.lohudblogs.com/2012/02/06/a-note-on-access-and-the-mets/

A NY Times article about the Mets' attempt to find minority investors says that the "has lost some $120 million in the last two years," which increases the losing streak of which Alderson spoke. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/sports/baseball/steven-a-cohen-expected-to-buy-stake-in-mets.html

Usually, it's the 1B coach who deserves more of the credit for SB success. See Davey Lopes, who reads a pitcher as well as anyone in the game, under whom the Phillies had a great deal of baserunning success.

You're asking a lot by assuming Freddy Sanchez will be healthy and effective in 2012. Over the past five seasons, he's averaged 0.4 WARP per year, with 1.8 of his 2.0 WARP coming in 2010. In that time, he's had major injuries to both shoulders, and he's now going on 34 years old. It's sticking with players like these that have put the Giants in this position.

The Wrigleyville 23 blog introduced the term: http://www.wrigleyville23.com/2008-articles/copy-of-may/rtaobp_a_new_stat_for_08.html

Thanks! That segment was ridiculously fun, so much so that I've done a blog entry at http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15954 to place it in context and issue a mea culpa about an error I made.

Probably slim, since unless Kenny Williams lost his mind again would mean they'd just about pay all of those remaining salaries minus the MLB minimum, which would be picked up by their new teams. I can easily see Abreu being traded if the team picks up a chunk of salary, the only question is how much. Wells won't happen until he's in the final year of his deal, I'd guess.

I love the cover, so "nyah"!

This happens to me once in awhile - intermittently and unpredictably, I'll see a piece that isn't recognizing new comments by highlighting. Will note it next time I come across it, Dave.

Thanks, Diane. Hobson's 1978 terror afield (43 errors, .899 fielding percentage) wasn't nearly as bad as you'd expect in terms of FRAA (-1.8), because he apparently made most of the plays he should have made. His 1977 (-13.3) and 1979 (-6.8) were worse, and he was at -30.7 for his career.

Let me see if I can explain this more clearly. Positional scarcity matters. At any easy-to-play defensive position (DH, 1B, LF being the easiest), the pool of players capable of doing the job defensively at a minimum level of competence is several times larger than at the more difficult positions (C, SS, CF, 2B, 3B). Thus, teams tend to wind up employing the ones who can hit the best, even if they're not good fielders. There's an opportunity cost to employing a relatively weak-hitting DH/1B/lF like Lyle Overbay or Juan Pierre because you can almost invariably find a much better hitter. Rather than employ a strictly theoretical model to explain this phenomenon within our value metric, Colin Wyers is basing it upon the actual level of production at each position (he uses a multiyear average). Basically what it's saying is that the average 1B is 11 or 12 runs better than the average overall hitter over the course of a full season, while the average third baseman is pretty close to the average hitter. Our metrics account for that. Now, the fact that the DH adjustment is slightly LOWER than 1B at the moment is something of a fluke, even with a multiyear average taken into account. That probably has to do with the fact that fewer teams are employing true mashers at the DH spot, the Ortizes and Hafners, and settling for crappy production there. Last year, 12 DHs had 300+ plate appearances, and four of them were downright crappy, with sub-700 OPS (see http://es.pn/yGyDom). Go back to, say, 2007, and you'll see that no DH had an OPS below 746 (http://es.pn/wKqB2K). Go back to 2003, and nobody was below 797 (http://es.pn/AbJz8K). It's an inefficiency, basically, as is the one where center fielders outhit left fielders in 2011 (http://bit.ly/y36BRn). Over time we'd expect it to be corrected, but we have to acknowledge that it currently exists if we want our accounting for value to be accurate.

I highly, highly doubt it. His traditional merits - 2,615 hits, 454 HR, "Golden Ratio" batting line (.304/.402/.533), MVP, 7 All-Stars, 11 postseasons, 3 pennants, 1 championship - are outstanding, and his JAWS score (69.7/42.1/55.9) passes muster even with the big defensive hits, of which the MSM is much less aware than, say, Derek Jeter. Depending upon what the PED-related logjam looks like on the post-2018 ballots, he could go in on the first try, and if he doesn't, the sabermetric cavalry will start to gain HOF votes early in his candidacy.

Oops, my bad on that.

The main thing is that there's almost no overlap between Chipper's worst stretch in the field (1996-2003) and the availability of DRS or UZR (2004 onward). Total Zone and FRAA don't really agree on how bad he was, but he has years in the former where he's more than a full win (10 runs) below average and they line up pretty well with his worst years in FRAA. Oddly, one of his worst defensive years comes when he played LF, in 2003, we have him at -24.8, and TZ has him at -1.1 WAR. That's massive for an outfielder.

Jeez, I pointed out that the numbers assert that isn't as bad as I thought he was - a good lesson in the value of faulty perception - and that his versatility increased the number of trade scenarios the Tigers could entertain. You want I should build him a bronze statue in front of Comerica too?

slick-fielding is probably an overstatement as to what the Tigers could use as an upgrade. Anybody who can field decently and outhit Inge - who's now the definition of a Replacement-Level Killer - would be be workable.

Glad you enjoyed the piece. Agree that it's time to take the training wheels of of Porcello and see if he can miss more bats. Fister replaces Penny only in the sense that the team is likely to have the former in the rotation wire-to-wire instead of the latter. We don't really know who will be the fifth starter, and it's a safe assumption that it might take more than one pitcher to make it through (a la Coke/whomever/Fister last year). Castellanos is 19 and just finished in A-ball. The Cabrera-at-3B show will probably be a distant memory by the time he's ready, and one or the other sluggers will be DHing even if he moves aggressively. VMart will be the odd man out by then if he isn't already.

The Sox may have more payroll flexibility next year, with Daisuke Matsuzaka ($10.3 million in 2012), Bobby Jenks (($6 million), and perhaps Kevin Youkilis ($12 million 2012, $13 million club option for 2013) and David Ortiz coming off the books. Salary increases for Dustin Pedrioa, Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz will take up $8 million of that savings, and an increase for the third-year arb-eligible Jacoby Ellsbury could take up some of that as well. That likely leaves them room to sign at least one major free agent, probably a pitcher.

Ozzie Smith almost invariably produced OBPs in the vicinity of NL average in a lower-offense era. Iglesias can't even do it at Triple-A. That's a massive difference. Can't just assume annual +10 defense, either. Unless his hitting improves drastically, I'd be shocked if Iglesias gets a chance to start anywhere, let alone Boston.

For what it's worth, we have his initial PECOTA as -0.3 WARP, with a .214 TAv in 250 PA offset by +2 defense. So, no, the defense won't offset the inability to hit.

Joe Sheehan proposed something along those lines in his latest newsletter. I can't say I think it makes as much sense as he does, because while Burnett's HR/FB rates have been well above average in each of the past two seasons, (11.6 and 17.0), I don't think that putting him in a homer haven like the Cell and simply expecting that rate to magically regress is a good idea. His velocity is receding and he hasn't figured out what to do about it. Cooper is about as good a pitching coach as there is this side of Dave Duncan, so maybe he can straighten him out. Even so, I just don't see the deal happening, because putting Dunn's contract on the books makes it significantly harder for the Yankees to get to $189 million in 2014.

Ah, that's actually an interesting point I hadn't considered. Morales is a going-on-29 year old switch hitter with a career .284/.336/.502 line who hasn't played since May 2010 due to a nasty fracture. He's set to make $2.975 million but stuck in a logjam with Mark Trumbo having emerged at first base and 38-year-old lefty DH Bobby Abreu making $9 million in the final year of his deal. Somebody's likely to wind up traded from among that trio. Morales will certainly cost something in talent for any team that wants to make a trade, maybe something of value but hardly a blue-chipper. Abreu, whose merits I'm not convinced of at this point (his power collapsed last year, .253/.353/.365) will cost something on that level, but only if the Angels agree to eat a significant chunk of change.If Cashman has the appetite to swing a deal, the Angels are an option.

Carlos Pena has agreed to terms with the Rays. So that's off the table.

I tried to come up with a scenario where Dunn made sense for the Yankees, but I couldn't find anything strong enough to make me hallucinate anything more plausible than "giant spacebugs agree to reimburse White Sox at least 75% of Dunn's remaining $42 million salary while his value is at its nadir." Sorry, folks.

Allen's an interesting idea, for sure, but the problem for the Yankees is that he requires a pretty solid backup plan because of his unproven nature, so the Yankees would probably have to come up with an additional option and hope one or the other pans out.

It might as well be called Pitchers Who Had More Career Value as Relievers Than Starters, But Not A Hell of a Lot of Value in the Grand Scheme of Things.

Very interesting stuff, Ben, building on a point I made last week. I do think it's unfair to assume that Posada was as bad at pitch framing during his prime as he was at the end of his career, and therefore hemorrhaging runs for 15 years. As game-changing as Mike Fast's data is, I also think it's unfair to assume that every other catcher in the Hall was at least average in this area where Posada was well in the red, and thus unworthy.

Generally it's at the position where a player accrued more value and you're right, it's very close for Smith. For what it's worth, he's above the overall outfield standard of 55.4.

In our system, the positional adjustment for playing center field is higher than for left field - I think it's about seven or eight runs a year - so average defensive play at the position has higher value, which is one reason why the center fielders as a group have higher value than the left fielders.

Evans isn't far off, 67.0/37.1/52.1. He ranks fourth among the eligibles in RF, with Sammy Sosa (59.2/45.5/52.4) third.

It's a 3,000+ word article because I went as long as I did and because Gooden was especially interesting. I made no promise of proportionality, and didn't want to add another 500 words.

Regarding Biggio, his defense has been panned by other systems. Career -70 in Total Zone, -43 DRS (since 2003), and -34 UZR (since 2002). It seems quite apparent that his defense ate into his value in a big way no matter which system you use. His offense really suffered from hanging on too long as well; he's pretty much right at the Hall averages among 2B for Runs Above Position and VORP, so combine that with sucktastic defense end you have a guy who falls a bit short of the standards. It won't stop him from getting in, though.

Whitaker was hosed by the BBWAA, falling off the ballot in his lone appearance in 2001 with just 2.9 percent. At one time, he was above the JAWS standard at 2B, but he hasn't been in several iterations (-28 FRAA isn't helping), and his current score comes in at 54.8/28.3/41.6, significantly below Grich. As with Trammell, Total Zone likes his defense more (+77) - which makes the Tigers defenses of their era something of a puzzle that I'd like to investigate further once Colin Wyers frees up from PECOTA responsibilities.

Frank Thomas is just fine (72.7/44.6/58.6) but as he's not eligible until the 2014 ballot, he's not included here.

I've had some fun looking at Luke Scott's splits over the past couple of days. Before all of those tweets get lost in the search-engineless suckhole that old tweets go... During his four years as an Oriole, Scott hit .291/.377/.566 in 909 PA at Camden Yards, and .229/.305/.403 in 886 PA elsewhere. In the crude terms of OPS, his 235-point home park advantage is the second-largest in the majors over that span, behind only Carlos Gonzalez's 246-point split. Less meaningfully in terms of sample size, Scott has hit .205/.290/.343 in 238 PA at Fenway, NuYankee and the Trop, career. Put those two things together and it's difficult to conclude that he's not a product of his home park. So yeah, good luck with that, Rays.

The resident USFL maven at BP was Christina Kahrl. I'd suggest chasing her down if you want to wax nostalgic on the topic.

The problem I have with all of this - not particularly you, Bill, but a sentiment that's been voiced elsewhere on the topic - is that we're already crediting Morris' ability to pitch a lot of innings. That's what any value over replacement level metric is purporting to do - reward bulk playing time even if it's merely average. If Morris is throwing 250 IP at a higher run-prevention-measure-of-choice rate, and another frontline pitcher only throwing 220 IP at a better rate, well, there's a tradeoff to be made there, and we can measure that value by comparing both pitchers to the run prevention of a replacement level starter. Which is what we've done, and the measurement doesn't particularly flatter Morris, since his run-prevention ability wasn't that special. What's not captured is the way his additional innings might help with distributing the bullpen workload, saving the best relievers from a small handful of extra innings, but even then, replacement level is a proxy for that as well. So I don't think we're particularly underestimating Morris.

Only in a very mythical past clung to by a faction of people who are invested in preserving myths instead of presenting facts.

I was right, it was 2008 at THT: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/tomorrows-cooperstown-election-results-today/ Good stuff there on the ballot surges above 60% too.

I believe my namesake, Chris "No Relation" Jaffe studied this a few years ago, I think at the Hardball Times. Will dig up the link when I'm back at my computer.

Alas I have jumped the gun on Jeff Kent's Hall of Fame eligibility. He's in the class of 2014 first-time eligibles, not 2013.

That's an interesting point, Cory. Given the PED-related heat connected to some of the overwhelmingly qualified newcomers in the next few years, and the likely resistance of the electorate to at the very least resist honoring those players with first-year election (which is such a BS distinction anyway), I don't think it will cost that much momentum among the incumbents, particularly those who have attained some type of critical mass.

Morris is so much further away from the JAWS standards it's not even funny. Posada's 2.4 JAWS points shy, with a peak that's essentially even. Williams is 11.3 points shy and down roughly one win a year at peak. Both were perennial playoff participants. Morris is 16.3 points shy and more than two full wins a year at peak. It's a HUGE difference.

I'd say it's very likely that Larkin's the only one this year. I'm looking to see substantial gains from Bagwell, Edgar and Raines - getting any of them over the 50 percent mark would be a significant step forward given the historical precedent. Everybody above 50 percent has gotten in via one route or another except for Gil Hodges, Larkin and Morris.

You are correct. Like VORP and RAP, FRAA is part of WARP, which is the stuff of which JAWS is made. I find it helpful to break out the components sometimes, though there are others where it becomes numerical overload.

I think the cocaine and the direct comparison to Henderson hurt him the most, along with a fundamental ignorance of the value of walks.

Yes. He looks a bit better, up from 50th among LFs.

JAWS uses WARP. VORP is a part of WARP - it's the batting value above a replacement player at the same position, which is different from RAP, which measures the batting value above an average player at the position, and RAA, which measures the batting value above an average hitter, period.

Mostly fielding (FRAA + Positional Adjustment = Total Defense), though if I understand it correctly, run environment plays some part in it as well. 10 runs above replacement buys you slightly more WARP in a low-offense environment (Citi Field, for example) than in a higher-offense one (Miller Park).

Thanks for the kind words!

sort of... theoretically it should be easier to find a 1B who's worth X WARP than it is a SS worth the same amount. Strictly speaking, Braun had the more valuable season (higher WARP - that's a negligible difference in VORP and besides, defense matters) but you can certainly make the case that due to positional scarcity Reyes was the more valuable. Since Reyes missed time while compiling that figure, you could also say that he was the more valuable on a per-game basis as well.

No, that's not quite what I'm implying. What you're missing is that there's a significant positional adjustment that's made in the process of tallying a player's WARP, one that is more or less analogous to what Fielding Runs Above Replacement was doing in Clay D's version of WARP. In the old version, a player who spent a full year playing average defense at 3B was worth something like 22 runs above replacement. A guy who was 10 runs below average would still be worth 12 runs above replacement afield when all of his various contributions were added up. By comparison, a DH who saw no time in the field would be worth 0 runs above replacement. A guy playing average defense at first base might be worth only 10 runs above replacement, a guy at shortstop more like 30 runs above replacement. As Colin has written, studies indicate that FRAP is a misnomer, since replacement-level hitters tend to be average fielders. Instead what we do is measure fielders relative to average and include a positional adjustment that's prorated to a full season of playing time at each position. These positional adjustments are included in each player's WARP value, which is why a first baseman who fields and hits like an average first baseman will come in as less valuable than a shortstop who does the same. According to our career value sortables (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/sortable/index.php?cid=1074623) which may differ slightly from the figures in my spreadsheet (WARP is updated with more frequency than I can keep up, particularly during book season), Bernie's positional adjustment is worth +9.5 runs over the course of his career. Edgar's is worth -114.1 runs, Murphy is at -31.6. You can see the annual adjustments on each player's card in the Advanced section. So to build upon the numbers we've used above, Edgar is being penalized -115 (-1 FRAA + -114 PosAdj) runs for his fielding and DHing. Bernie is losing 24 runs due to his work afield and his occasional DHing. Murph, who played mostly right field from 1987 onward, is losing 94 runs. So the answer is no, I'm not at all implying that the portion of Edgar's career derived from nailing his butt to the bench was not more valuable than Bernie doing his increasingly tedious Magellan imitation in center field.

If we're using peak in the sense of JAWS score 7-best year peak, then I certainly agree with you. At the same time, it's worth pointing out that in the single-season WARP values since 1950 that I linked to above (the Blyleven comment), Gooden has the 3rd most valuable season since 1950 (1985, 9.0 WARP) and three of the top 31 (1984 and 1990 being the others) but no more in the top 100. Scott's 1986 is 28th. Jose Rijo comes in at 11th and 81st. Stieb doesn't have a top 100 season. Maddux's only top-100 season, 1994, comes in 79th. Clemens is at 18, 22, 56, 62, 80, 90. Pedro's at 4, 48, 65, 74, 76. Johnson's at 5,7,9, 24, 43, 49, 68. In the balance, the latter group is clearly the better one, but the former had a small handful of seasons that exceeded the latter group's best, at least via the WARP reckoning. So I stand by what I said about a lack of staying power.

Can't get to it right now but check back tomorrow and I'll put something together here.

Duly noted. Apologies if you felt I pounced upon you.

Also, I just want to underscore one point that I've made over and over again throughout the series but didn't here, and clearly should have: JAWS is a tool to build a Hall of Fame argument. I have always fully recognized that there are things it does not encompass, which is why I bother to cite things like the Hall of Fame Monitor scores and awards won and postseason performance. Radke's ahead of Morris in JAWS by a small margin, but Morris' postseason highlights almost certainly make up for the gap between them. So when I say "Morris isn't even the best pitcher on this year’s ballot according to JAWS," that's not a definitive statement that I think he's the worse candidate overall.

At the level of 2000 innings, most of the noise that makes seasonal ERAs so sketchy is gone - fluctuations in BABIP and HR/FB and bullpen support have evened out - but yes, there are better measures, and we employ them to drive our values. At that level, it's still miles better than W-L record.

I wouldn't call it weakness so much as a lack of staying power. Dave Steib was a better pitcher but hung it up early. Dwight Gooden had drug problems. Fernando Valenzuela fell into the Lasorda shoulder thresher. Mike Scott didn't figure it out until mid-decade. And so on.

It does not concern me in the least, because I have spent dozens of hours poring over Jack Morris' career and am thoroughly convinced that he was overrated, and I am far from the only one who feels that way. I can accuse you of ignoring the context as well. Radke pitched in a much higher-scoring era - the highest-scoring since the 1930s - and put up better ERAs relative to his leagues. He fares well in part because his short career did not have a sharp decline phase the way that Morris' career did. When we use advance metrics to credit the things for which a pitcher has considerable control (particularly strikeout, walks, and homer rates) versus the things he doesn't (defensive support, bullpen support, offensive support), Radke maintains that edge. To bring the ERA+ of a lefty specialist reliever (Slaten) into this discussion is a completely off-base use of that particular statistic that has no bearing on the comparison at hand. Fair Run Average and FRA+ account for baserunners inherited/bequeathed, which is one reason why we lean on them instead of ERA and ERA+ for the heavier lifting of our advanced metrics.

It's a worthy idea but a fair bit of trouble to plunk those down for every player in what's already a three or four thousand word piece. Dealing with the tables is already one of the banes of my existence, and I don't think our editors love them either, particularly when they arrive at 1 AM as part of a huge, gnarly monster article. JAWS sortables, soon. The river outside Prospectus HQ will run red with blood if they're not up at some point during 2012.

What Colin said. With the career sortables, he and our current tech crew have accomplished something that I've been requesting for at least seven years, bringing JAWS sortables much closer to fruition.

It's a fair point, and something I've explored occasionally. It's much easier to do for contemporary players, because we have an extremely limited picture given that UZR and Plus/Minus only go back a few years. The real issue is that I'd have to tackle each position in full among the HOFers so I could get a basis of comparison, and that's a lot of time. If I get the book idea off the ground, a comparative defensive approach will definitely something that will be part of it. Back to McGriff, though, even average defense wouldn't get him above the JAWS standard at 1B, as one can see by comparing the component numbers in the 2nd table.

fixed, thx

Franco's way below Smith on the JAWS scale, much closer to Sutter: 13.6/12.4/13.0. Hell, Jeff Nelson and Elmer Dessens are above Franco at 13.4.

.005 * 6.4 (reflecting Morris' 106.4 SUP+) = .032 gain in winning percentage .500 + .032 = .532 winning percentage .532 * 440 decisions = 234 wins, 206 losses

"Some day, if we can have accurate assessment of the affects of verboten drugs on Palmeiro and McGwire's careers..." Alas, I'm pretty sure we'll have a cure for the common cold and direct human interplanetary transport before we have that capability.

True Average is a very good measure, but like all rate stats, it requires the context of sample size. McGwire's 7660 PA is 15 percent less than the average HOF 1B. Of the 131 non-pitcher/non-catcher HOFers for whom I can do a legitimate JAWS (I don't count Monte Irvin in this set), just 31 had fewer career PA. Two of them made the majors after years in the Negro Leagues (Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby), and none of them played after Doby's retirement in 1959. George Kell, who last played in 1957, is the next most recent. Furthermore, just five players with fewer PA were voted in by the BBWAA: Jackie, Bill Terry, Hank Greenberg, Lou Boudreau and Ralph Kiner, with Boudreau (1970) and Kiner (1975, his 13th year of eligibility) the only ones elected since Robinson in 1962. In other words, apart from anything having to do with his PED-related allegations and his shortcomings on the bases and in the field (which, had they been average, would keep him above the standard), his career length is actually his biggest obstacle in gaining entry.

Oh good Lord, much as Greg was a friend and a million-dollar baseball mind cursed with a 10-cent body (to turn an old phrase on its head), he was an awful driver. We went to Citi Field during its first year, he had gotten some great club seats for an early season game against (I think) the Pirates. Afterwards, once he could remember where he parked (definitely not his strong suit), he drove me home via the BQE. He was slow to react to my instructions to take the Tillary Street exit, and wound up hitting the giant yellow garbage can barriers where the exit split off. Not a glancing blow, either - we came to a full stop, though fortunately neither the vehicle nor us were the worse for wear (save for my heart palpitations) because nobody was behind us. Sadly, the fear induced from that incident has erased my memory of what must have been a particularly engrossing baseball conversation. RIP, Greg.

Olerud was one and done on the ballot last year, so I'm not sure why anyone would expect him to be brought up here. He received 0.7 percent of the vote. At 52.0/37.0/44.5, he's below the HOF standard for 1B, better than Mattingly and McGriff but not as good as Palmeiro or McGwire, and with a lot less of the "fame" stuff that can put a borderline candidate over the top.

The same way anyone else does: by hitting 39 homers!

Yes, Richard, I believe you did. And I'll remind that there's nothing particularly sacrosanct about our previous FRAA numbers and methodology either. It had plenty of critics, and its replacement-level methodology caused a huge problem with our player valuations, particularly w/r/t the pitcher/fielder responsibility split. To find out that somewhere there's a nostalgia for it is like finding out that the USFL had die-hard fans.

I haven't looked particularly closely, to be honest, though there is one year where he's like -32 which looks very odd now that I scan his player card. I'll leave the explanations of the intricacies of Colin Wyers' system to Colin, but I'll ask him about that one.

He's more or less unchanged, lost ~1 JAWS point relative to the standard. Gained ground in fielding, lost it in hitting with a higher replacement level.

I referred to it that way because for the most part, the public had no idea McGwire or anyone else was taking any supplements, legal or not.

Thanks for the kind words about the lesser candidates. the writing and research adds a significant amount of time to the process, but I've always felt like those guys deserve something more than a passing mention - a note on why they're significant in baseball history - before moving on. I'm glad that work is appreciated.

No, you are correct - there are very real costs to having a full-time DH. In the past, our system accounted for this using the concept of Fielding Runs Above Replacement, where a guy could be below average but still have significant value for filling a more difficult spot such as third base. Colin Wyers' research suggests that the notion of a replacement level for fielders doesn't really exist - replacement level hitters tend to be more or less average fielders. In our WARP framework, he did away with the concept of FRAR and includes a positive or negative positional adjustment instead. A first base or DH type will be penalized 100+ runs over the course of a long career; Martinez is at -114 runs in positional adjustment via our career sortables, which don't quite reflect the same data I've got in my spreadsheet at the moment (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/sortable/index.php?cid=1073161), but probably isn't too far off. So that cuts into his value, but not quite as much as playing an easy position badly.

I came across that factoid somewhere during my research but forgot to include both that and his career .314/.386/.529 line against the Yankees in 215 PA. I'm sure bitterness had nothing to do with it.

The hope is that the criteria and definitions are at least arrived at via some amount of empirical data. Linear weights, for example, isn't an arbitrary set of values attached to each event. The decision to use linear weights, however, is one based on an interpretation of what the best tool for the job is (see http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10917). I'd like to point out that the current versions of FRAA and WARP are far more transparent than the versions that came before them, as Colin has detailed the process by which he derived most of his conclusions. The decision to set a replacement level that has varied (and generally risen) over time based upon empirical data is one of them, and I think it's both a major point of departure from other systems and a source of the angst created by the shifting of some of the values of our treasured heroes.

I'm not sure how you're equating the observation biases that the new PBP system is trying to combat - i.e., the inclusion of subjective data in various PBP systems via the use of stringer data, such as to distinguish line drives from grounders and flyballs - with the shortcomings of previous iterations of WARP, etc. Whatever their flaws, observation bias was not one of them.

I've tried to provide short, concise summaries in the context of my articles because there isn't room to go on at great length, but Colin Wyers detailed most of those changes over the past year - it's not like this stuff has been hidden from view. His explanations are not particularly concise; there's a lot to digest in his articles, but the good news is that you can delve in to your heart's content. Here's a quick and dirty list: * The EqA/TAv formula changed http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11686 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11717 * The defensive system changed to a play-by-play based one http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11476 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11589 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11662 * Our method of valuing pitching changed http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11779 http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15098 * Our method of park-adjusting changed http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=12047 * The replacement level rose, and in fact has risen over time. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=12377 Hope that helps!

I'm not a fan of putting too much weight on comparing candidates to active players. In this instance, by the time A-Rod is up for induction, he will have played far more games at third base than at shortstop, so to hold his early career performance against Larkin is unfair. To some extent, I think that's what happened with Trammell, though - voters measured him against the A-Rod/Jeter/Nomar trinity when he first reached the ballot, and they've never compensated for that mistake by recognizing how hard it is to remain a productive starting SS for so long.

Again, I highly suggest you read what Colin had to say. In the PBP system he's built - which is constructed to avoid the biases that other PBP systems fall victim to - there's a margin for error in every estimate of whether a play should be made. It decreases the larger the sample size gets. It's true that the unreliability of defensive values in a single season can have an multiplied impact on peak, but again, I'm using seven seasons, not one or two, so the larger sample should increase the accuracy of the estimate. And remember, this isn't just something that's screwing one guy. Our defensive measurements for EVERY SINGLE PLAYER go through the same wringer. I am surprised that Trammell takes such a hit, but I think there's a danger in clinging to our previously held assumptions too strongly, particularly when they're partially founded on a system that had no shortage of questions about it when it was in the spotlight. I'll argue on Trammell's behalf if the evidence supports it, but after 10 years of him getting absolutely nowhere on the Hall of Fame ballot, I can accept that he's less of a slam dunk candidate than we previously thought, so I'm going to save my breath for the moment.

Exactly. This can't be Lake Wobegon, where all of the Hall of Famers are above average.

It states that he's below the current average for shortstops. To say that he's not deserving of enshrinement, however, is to misunderstand the entire JAWS project. JAWS is a tool best used to identify above-average Hall of Fame candidates. It is not a complete prescription to tear apart the Hall of Fame and rebuild it with a different membership. I am not advocating the mass expulsion of below-average Hall of Famers - if we were to bump off the ~50% who fall below the current positional averages, those averages would skyrocket, and then, theoretically, we'd have to do it again to the point of absurdity. Our Hall would shrink to include only Babe Ruth and Walter Johnson. Nor am I advocating a start-from-scratch Hall-building process - I'll leave that to the Hall of Merit gang, whose work I generally enjoy. One of the reasons I advocate using a standard based upon the average is that once you pick a bar lower than that, at every position you wind up with an increasing number of players with equivalent or better values. If, for example, we set the bar at Ozzie Smith's current ranking, then the players just above him who are not in include Nomar Garciaparra, Miguel Tejada, Derek Jeter, Trammell, Vern Stephens, and Bill Dahlen, with Jack Glasscock and Bert Campaneris very close as well. As discussed in the Resetting the Standards article, even using the median score has a similar effect.

Same guy who wrote the article - glad you enjoyed it!

Ours is an imperfect system but the idea is that this is supposed to be meritocratic, in that a comment that several people believe adds no value or negative value (such as the three "scum" posts. I mean, really?) can be temporarily hidden from view for those of delicate sensibility. Even then, it's not that the comments can't be viewed, it's just that they take an extra step to view. It's not that hard to implement and it's not censorship - the comments haven't been erased. We've made no law abridging anyone's free speech. I don't think the system should be used to pile on in the case of legitimate disagreements of substance. To me, that's an abuse of the system.

Just wanted to note that I'll be on Clubhouse Confidential discussing Braun on Tuesday at 5:30 ET, with reruns at 7:30 and several other times throughout the next day. Big thanks to those of you who have kept coming back with interesting insights and tips, which has been one of the big reasons I've stayed with this story.

Was going to add something on this to the next update but I'll add it here first. It's not so much that I feel compelled to defend Braun, or particularly believe that he's innocent, as that I want to know more about this process. This leak has created an unprecedented event in the annals of MLB's testing program, a peek into the sausage factory of the testing and appeals process, which hasn't been completed, which is why this case differs from all other cases. The fact that it's a star, an MVP (though FWIW, I supported Kemp), or a Jewish ballplayer (given that I'm Jewish myself) actually doesn't interest me all that much - and I say that as somebody who's long had a soft spot for the Brewers and Braun. I'm mostly curious as to why this case is so curious. And yes, I want to see due process upheld, though that phrase is actually a misnomer, since it applies to the actions of the state, which isn't in play here. My law degree from Wikipedia University tells me that the term is "fair procedure." Regardless, I am willing to withhold my opinion of Braun's innocence or guilt until the process is played out, while taking advantage of the chance to learn more about the process and its loopholes.

Oy vey.

Agreed. At this point, that Braun failed a test that dozens (hundreds?) before him have failed isn't as interesting as the report that he's an outlier in terms of how he failed the test. Those who aren't so busy rushing to their soapboxes to ask whether someone will think of the children would like to know why that is, or how/why any of this information was leaked mid-process, or why the contradictions about what we're hearing about Braun's test start with the opening line of Fainaru-Wada and Quinn's story (the PED vs. prohibited substance distinction). Maybe this can be chalked up to a tremendous amount of spin by the Braun camp, but anyone who thinks that they're the only ones with an interest to protect is giving MLB far too much credit. Casting doubt on the accuracy and efficacy of the testing procedure and the appeals process would be a huge PR blow for MLB.

As the history of the game's battle with steroid usage has shown, some insiders have had no hesitance to leak information regarding users to the media, mainly as a way of publicly shaming alleged PED users. IRS agent Jeff Novitzky, who investigated the BALCO case, is believed to have been responsible for the illegal leak of grand jury testimony, and federal agents are also believed to be responsible for the leaks of the names from the 2003 survey list. On the other hand, it's also worth noting that Troy Ellerman, who served 16 months for BALCO leaks, was actually a lawyer for the defense, albeit one who didn't exactly have his clients' best interests in mind (see http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=6229509).

It is inaccurate to say that no positive test has been overturned. Please see update #5 for the details.

Don't hold your breath. It has been suggested that this could take until January or even February to resolve. It's not Barry Bonds' trial, but it won't be over tomorrow.

Fixed

There are contradictions between what the ESPN report said, and what Rosenthal and Hadricourt have written. I pointed out some of the holes in ESPN's story when it first went up, and since then some but not all of them have been filled in. Best not to treat any source as gospel.

The identity of the drug has not been revealed - the methenolone cited above was in connection to Eliezer Alfonzo's positive test, not to Braun's. But one way or another, all of the anabolic steriods are synthetic derivatives of testosterone that can mimic its function in the body. They interact with the androgen receptors found in muscle cells, stimulating those cells to increase protein synthesis (anabolism), which results in the building of muscles and bones as well as the maintenance of secondary sexual characteristics. The binding of the steroid to the receptor also inhibits the breakdown (catabolism) of old proteins. The various drugs — Dianabol, Deca-Durabolin, Winstrol, etc. — differ in terms of the level of androgenic effects (the "side effects").

MLB takes its testing seriously, but even so, they weren't able to prevent a leak like this, before the appeal process was completed. It's unclear where that leak came from - someone involved in the testing process, or someone inside the commissioner's office. Either way, such conduct violates the confidentiality of the Joint Drug Agreement and is no less dirty and disappointing than the use of PEDs.

Thanks for your insights. The methenolone that's being mentioned in reports is actually in connection with Alfonzo - the substance for which Braun tested positive has not been publicly identified.

I don't recall Haudricourt's ballot, but it's important to note the distinction between one man's opinion/analysis regarding player value (the vote) and his reporting (the aforementioned quotes). Two very different skill sets can produce very different levels of credibility in the same way that a good hitter can be a lousy defender.

I have made clear that it's not clear, and attempted to get a clarification from Quinn via Twitter.

While that implication is there, the ESPN story doesn't make clear that it was a new sample: "A source close to Braun said that when he was told about the positive test, he immediately requested to be tested again. That second test, the source said, was not positive. Those close to Braun believe that the difference between the two tests will show that the first test was invalid."

good point on stadium location - I must admit that I know the particulars about the Rays situation a bit better, but I hadn't even looked at a map w/r/t the Marlins one. As of Wednesday morning, there's a growing sense here that the Cardinals are going to retain Pujols now that they have made what's been reported as a 10-year, $220 million offer. Cespedes could still be a sensible and much more affordable move with some definite upside.

Oh, absolutely, and that's the point - were they to sign Pujols as well, I don't think they can survive anything but a fairly positive outcome very quickly.

Winter Meetings update: The Brewers have said that they're out, the Orioles have said that they're interested, though consider it a longshot, and according to Rosenthal, the Cubs are interested in a shorter, high-dollar deal - which makes a whole lot more sense regarding Fielder.

The one decision that slays me is the lack of support for Buzzie Bavasi. I can understand the perception that the Dodgers teams of the Fifties still bore the imprint of Branch Rickey, particularly thanks to his bold decision to integrate, but he was forced out in 1950, and the team's dominance was just beginning. The Dodgers had won pennants in 1947 and 1949 with him in charge, and they would go on to win again in 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956 under Bavasi, before leaving Brooklyn, and then again in 1959, 1963, 1965 and 1966 with the Boys of Summer in the twilights of their careers or gone - the team was completely rebuilt. Detractors have always slighted Walter Alston's managerial acumen, a charge i don't agree with; as I wrote in It Ain't Over, his 1959 victory with a transitional team was almost LaRussian in terms of the way he juggled pitchers and used an early hook well. It has been suggested that the team should have won more, but much of that refers to the second half of his career (one pennant from 1967-1976). To me, there's still a good bit of credit unaccounted for beyond Alston and O'Malley and it rightfully belongs to Bavasi.

I was surprised, to be honest, that Kaat fared as well as he did. I do think his ability to stick around for 25 years and win 283 games, while impressive, is a bit overrated due to the absence of a high peak. But that's why I built JAWS the way I did - it is abundantly clear from the de facto Hall of Fame standards that the notion of peak is a critical one in the minds of voters. It explains the Greenbergs and Kiners and Koufaxes and Pucketts, not to mention a lot of the 1920s and 1930s guys whose stats are inflated by the era and who didn't stick around long. Not all of those decisions look great in light of JAWS, but one can at least understand why they were made.

Great, the birthers have arrived at BP. Until someone presents actual evidence that he lied about his age - instead of referencing a belief - I'm not going to worry too much about it. We already know enough about the late 30s aging patterns of most ball players to make signing Pujols to an 8-year deal very risky.

Using a given ranking at a position produces a set of standards that's no less uneven than what the raw JAWS standards produce. It's more artificial as well. JAWS is less an attempt to define an ideal Hall of Fame - which I would do if I were advocating starting from scratch, a la the Hall of Merit - than it is to recognize what's in line with the Hall of Fame as it exists.

I highly suggest you dig back into Colin's archive and read http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11476 and http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11589 where he hits some of the big stumbling blocks that one encounters when trying to measure defense. Long story short: a single year isn't enough to reliably measure defense, so take any yearly number with a grain of salt But remember that over time, the larger sample size should build confidence in what's being measured, at least if the methodology is sound. When it comes to measuring the Hall of Fame candidates' defense, we generally have 10-20 years worth of data, and while multiple sources may disagree as to the value of those years, they're hopefully pointing in the same direction.

Talent is not distributed evenly across positions, and skills certainly are not. While WARP compresses the offensive and defensive contributions of a hitter into one handy number, the offensive and defensive components of what make that up are still important, and I often make reference to them in the course of my analysis. I also make extensive references to things that JAWS doesn't capture - awards and counting stats. If I'm examining the Hall of Fame cases of Barry Larkin or Alan Trammell, it doesn't help me so much to measure them against Eddie Murray as it does to compare them to Cal Ripken.

Going to dispute your inclusion of Billy Martin in that grouping. In September 1973, Martin took over a team en route to a 57-105 season and a 6th place finish in the AL West. The next year the Rangers went 84-76, exceeding their Pythagorean by five games and helping the team to a 2nd place finish, their highest ever to that point. It wasn't sustained, as didn't make it through the next season, fired with a 44-51 record, as the team finished 79-83. Valentine guided the Rangers to 87 wins and 2nd place in his second season, but then went through two seasons well below .500 before winning 83 in his fifth, and he never got them above third place again.

You'd never get the legal clearance, though sure, I can understand the public's desire to know everything about the debaucherous early days where rec.sport.baseball was simply a front for an escort service, the infamous Strip PECOTA parties, and the dirty little secrets that put Richard Hidalgo and Josh Phelps on the covers.

Agreed. Sloppy phrasing preserved from a fairly informal conversation on the topic.

Gah, typo on Hamilton. It's almost like updating my table manually while editing the piece at midnight wasn't entirely foolproof.

Many of the comments in this discussion have been incorporated into my latest piece on JAWS. I invite you to offer further feedback: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15598

Yup, I meant 23 - n. Fixed.

Thanks, everybody for the kind words. If you missed the segment, you can see it on my Facebook or Google+ pages G+ http://bit.ly/tLDHoR FB http://tinyurl.com/bqv2esw

Before I dig into the meat of this argument, let me point out that walks counted as hits for, like, one year (1887). Meanwhile, other rules were changing on a nearly annual basis (number of balls for a walk, for example). Pretty much everything before 1893, you have to look up the year to get the rules. Nobody who does any serious investigation of the statistics of that era is unaware of that. This is not that, I don't think. I appreciate the passion you all bring to this argument, but I have to point out that some of you are carrying a misperception. The "old WARP" of yesteryear was hardly static. It underwent countless revisions without Clay calling a lot of attention to it - if I wanted to do a JAWS study in July, I'd have to get an updated data set because January's was out of date. Some of the revisions were minor, some were jarring. The biggest one came circa the 2009 annual, when Clay raised the replacement level and instituted a PBP defensive system both of which made what came before outdated - there might have been 20-point JAWS differences for a given player. Hell, I changed the JAWS definition of peak from a best 5-consecutive to best 7-at-large early on; actually, that might have been the year I christened it JAWS instead of something (even more) godawful like Weighted WARP. This is not the first time a WARP change has worked against Santo's HOF case either - I've done sets where he was well above the line, and ones where he straddled it. Given how he's fared in the voting, I have to wonder if the ones where he's straddling it are more onto something - he's not a "surefire" Hall of Famer, he's a bit more on the fringe - still clearly worthwhile to anyone who actually studies the matter, but at a distance, to a casual fan or a half-assed voter, less obviously so. That's a reflection of reality. Hell, there was one year that hit Blyleven's JAWS score pretty hard as well. And I have to tell you, this new data does Tim Raines no favors, particularly on the fielding front (we will get a closer look before running with the BBWAA ballot data). But you know, that also is more of a reflection of reality, in that it lines up a bit better with the common perception that he's a bit fringier as a candidate than some of us would like to believe. Given that BP has long battled to spread the sabermetric gospel and advance the more mainstream conversation about baseball statistics, I think there's far more danger in us letting 20 different versions of WARP float around out there with fine print as to which version we're referring to ("this is the original Port Huron WARP, not the watered down second draft") - see how easily the knuckleheads and Chassholes of the world dismiss WAR because there are two competing versions and my god, we can't have that! Sabermetrics is the pursuit of objective truth about baseball. If our understanding of the truth changes - "hey, we've been underestimating where the replacement level line should be set" or "pitchers deserve a bit less credit than we have been giving them for controlling balls in play" - we owe it to ourselves and our audience to review our previously held assumptions and revise our thinking a little bit. Bill James wasn't doing things in the 1987 Abstract the same way he was in the 1982 Abstract, after all, to say nothing of the two Historical Abstracts. Here at BP, the philosophy has generally been to go forward with the best information we have without worrying too much about what we've superseded. That doesn't mean what came before is wrong - it means it's ripe for revisiting with a fresh eye.

I have Santo 64th all time overall, with 50 of those above him already in the Hall (out of 206 for which I can JAWS; i.e., those who meet the 10-year requirement). Most of the rest are either active, waiting to reach the ballot, on the ballot, or banned (Pete Rose). Jimmy Wynn (60.9) is the best player outside who doesn't fit those categories, and Santo is second. Three guys above him: Brooks Robinson 58.8, Frank Thomas 58.6, Ed Delahanty 58.4. Three below him: Darrell Evans 57.7, Al Simmons 57.6, Mike Piazza 57.5. Of the five above and five below, six are in the Hall, 3 are awaiting eligibility (Thomas, Piazza, Manny Ramirez), and then Evans who's outside. There are 6 3B ahead of him overall: Schmidt, Brett, Mathews, Boggs, Molitor (who had positive defensive value) and Brooks Robinson. Alex Rodriguez will outrank him as well one day, though the system still classifies him as a shortstop. Santo is the best eligible 3B outside the Hall. Of those active 3B, Alex Rodriguez already outranks him (he's still a SS in the system but will be classified as 3B by the time he retires)

Richard, while I share some of that concern and frustration - believe me, the hours of labor it takes to refine these metrics for Clay or Colin or whomever is massive. For me to reorient my system, and update my take when I've put in considerable amount of research (this guy used to be 5th in the league in WARP for 1983, now where is he?) the investment of time is considerable. But I think you have to adjust for era, so to speak. What was state of the art five years ago with regards to our thinking has become outmoded, and looks a bit naive in retrospect. Or maybe a better analogy is a computer processor - what was top of the line five years ago is now a replacement-level machine you hand down to grandma or donated to a non-profit organization, and what we have in its place runs 50% or 200% faster or whatever. Can you believe we used to have to wait days to get in-season WARP updated? I don't love everything about the new WARP relative to the old, and I don't love change, but Colin tackled some age-old problems that smart people had with the system, things like the replacement-level fielding problem and the counterintuitive calculations involved in EqA. Baserunning is now in there, where it was not before. Play-by-play defense, where it was not before. In a year or two, as the PitchFX and HitFX stuff that guys like Mike Fast are doing revises our thinking about the nature of DIPS, we'll incorporate that. Sooner or later], someone will come along and solve some defensive quandary - maybe it's the adjacent fielder ballhog effect - that will make our current system look like we found those numbers by banging rocks together. At any given moment, these numbers represent our systematic best estimates, but they're still just estimates, not permanent figures carved in stone. We make a mistake when we think that we've solved the answer once and for all. Six years ago I had Ron Santo as a slam dunk Hall of Famer and told people to GTFO in no uncertain terms when they disagreed. Now I see him as closer to borderline, with a strong peak, short career, and extenuating circumstances that still make him a Hall of Famer, but also make more clear the differing perceptions - maybe we were overrating him considerably with the glove - that have kept him outside.

It's not the BBWAA's ignorance that's being addressed here - the BBWAA voters do a generally good job of recognizing the best candidates during their time of eligibility (with some occasional groaners). Very few Ron Santos make it to this stage. It's the ignorance of previous Veterans Committees, with a panel that looks remarkably like they used to. Not sure how that is going to correct for previous mistakes.

I can't speak for any of the other commenters, but my point in all of this isn't that one All-Star appearance means anything - flukes happen every year - it's that the cumulative weight of them certainly does.

First off, you have misinterpreted me if you think that I'm saying that anyone below the current standard who is already in the Hall is by definition unworthy. I use the adjusted average as a point of reference to guide future selections. Even so, I am more generous than the average BBWAA voter once you account for the large split between BBWAA-elected HOFers and VC-elected ones. Years ago, I looked at what my system would look like if it used a lower standard; I did so using median position scores instead of adjusted means; see http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=229. The basic problem is that it creates situations where there are far more than 10 players on an individual ballot who meet those lower standards. In the time I've been doing this nowhere has it been suggested, by voters or anyone who has studied the issue, that there are TOO MANY qualified candidates to list on a ballot, and since I strongly believe that JAWS should have some real-world grounding in terms of the number of candidates it says are worthy, I must reject the notion that I'm not setting the standards high enough. If anything, a more predicitive model (w/r/t voting performance) might require them to be even higher, but I am shooting for one that is more fair, not necessarily more predictive.

Santo has the highest peak and JAWS of those four Cubs, and is second in WARP despite his short career. The other three are above their respective position standards, but Santo suffers relative to them because the 3B standard is about 8 points higher than at SS. He's basically even with Brooks Robinson (72.7/44.9/58.8), who is below the standard on all three measures (career by just 0.2). Banks 59.3/48.1/53.7 Jenkins 56.6/37.2/46.9 Williams 69.1/44.3/56.7 Santo 66.1/50.3/58.2

Gonna have to disagree with you, first about the characterization of the early Seventies Cubs as sad-sack. From 1967-1972 - a stretch which covers all of the Durocher years except his first - the Cubs finished above .500 every year, with three second-place finishes in the NL East, and three third place finishes, two in the 10-team NL prior to expansion and one in the NL East. For that time, they had the league's fourth-best record. They didn't reach the playoffs, but that was their longest sustained stretch of good baseball since the Thirties, one that they have yet to top, at least in terms of consecutive .500+ seasons. When they won 92 games and missed the playoffs in 1969, they had the league's best run differential - better than the 100-win Mets or the NL West-winning 93-69 Braves. They were more or less even with their Pythagorean projections from 1967-1969, but finished 10 below in 1970, largely due to a horrible bullpen (4.63 ERA, 10th in the league). They were six games below Pythag in 1972, the year they fired Durocher midseason. They did not, unfortunately, have all four HOF-caliber players peaking at the same time, which was one problem - Banks was a below-average to replacement-level first baseman for most of that stretch before retiring after the 1971 season, when he made just 92 plate appearances. Banks' prime (1955-1962) and Santo's (1963-70) didn't even overlap. For most of the time they overlapped, they had bad pitching; in the 8-team NL in 1960-61, they were seventh and eighth in RA/G, in the 10-team league from 1962-1968, they were 8th twice, 9th twice, and 10th once, for an average league ranking of 7.4. As for Santo, the notion that it's the metric that's off because it's saying he's a HOFer, well, we're talking about a nine time All-Star a well-decorated player who was clearly considered among the elite of his era. Of the 17 players with exactly nine AS appearances, eight are already in the hall, plus two others will be (Torre and Pujols), with Vlad Guerrero and Gary Sheffield having decent shots as well.

Wow, in trying to recall the deals bigger than Lackey and Burnett, I totally blanked on the Mussina deal, which was for six years and $88.5 million - the Cots cutoff was at $90 mil.

I was a subscriber before I was a BP contributor, at which point I was granted a complimentary subscription via a separate account. Years later the original account was closed down. I'm not sure what that presumably triple-digit account number was, though; had I thought about its hipster cachet, I might have maintained it. I will take one more opportunity to point out that over the years, Nick has not only been a supportive patron of BP, he has been a frequent sounding board for my ideas, and a source of many a joke that found their way onto these pages under my byline. Anyone who enjoys my work should raise their glass (or turkey leg) to him, as I do now. Thanks, Nick!

Most reports I've read say he'd be moving to third base, and he even said he'd be open to the idea (http://bit.ly/vxJe1W).

I thought about the Rangers but the thing is that they've stated their preference to move Josh Hamilton to left field to save him some wear and tear (http://es.pn/sn0YX2). Nelson Cruz isn't going to play center field, and Beltran doesn't want to be a full-time DH (a plan which, here, would involve Napoli as the full-time catcher and Young as the full-time first baseman). So I see them as a very dark darkhorse at best.

Nachos and burritos aren't in the same ballpark, gastronomically speaking. The cheese used in most ballpark nachos is 30-grade toxic waste.

I figure he's likely to get a three-year worth somewhere between $10-12 million a year, possibly with some attainable incentive clauses to push the dollar value up. I have a hard time seeing the Phillies going there given their crazy spending elsewhere (assuming the Madson deal goes thru) and the need to find uses for John Mayberry Jr., Ben Francisco and Domonic Brown.

Yes, and before that he hit for a .177 TAv with the Sox while making 23 starts in right field. That looks a whole lot like someone who failure to pick up slack.

Good lord, that sounds like a pandemic waiting to happen.

That's an even worse idea, one that I meant to bring up but curiously omitted. Cabrera's defense in center field is godawful (-18 FRAA this past year, with estimates ranging from -7 to -19 over past two years from various systems) and unlikely to get better in the big Phone Network Park outfield if surrounded by Belt/Huff in one corner and Beltran in the other.

Hell yes on the pupusas. This past summer I've discovered their delicious glory via the food trucks at the Red Hook ball fields in Brooklyn, where one can also feast on outstanding authentic tacos and other delicacies. When I go there, I think about eating two lunches, there's so much good stuff to sample. Now I am bummed that the trucks are all gone until springtime.

My pal Nick was able to dig up a photo that I must have taken of him eating the turkey leg under discussion (the one above is a generic stand-in): http:lockerz.com/s/154921349

Reportedly the Yankees have worked out an extension with Sabathia, and he will forgo opting out. The new deal is for five years and $122 million - his 2016 salary is $25 million. There's a $25 million vesting option for 2017 that's dependent upon the condition of his shoulder (not elbow), with a $5 million buyout, taking the total of the deal if he's healthy (enough) to six years and $142 million. In other words, he'll get either $30 or $50 extra extra million for not exercising the opt-out. Seems like a reasonable move; Sabathia might have squeezed a bit more out by going on the open market, but he got something for not doing so, and the Yankees didn't have to wade a whole lot deeper into the uncharted waters.

Matt Swartz's article on MORP from last year confirms the ~$5 million/win ballpark figure http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=10629

What he said. A Team Entropy classic.

Interesting stuff, Bill - thanks for following up. A quick calculation shows that 91.7 percent of runs in the regular seasons since 1992 have been earned, so by that measure, we'd expect 837 of those World Series runs to be earned - that's less than one extra unearned run per World Series - it certainly doesn't sound like much, but it's persistent.

Interesting point - at least in my own mind, some of the WS I've enjoyed most have been ones where my rooting interests weren't all that strong. 1991 fits that bill, 1997 too - I had a long-running soft spot for Cleveland, but really dug Livan Hernandez and a few of those Marlins - as well as this one.

Interesting stuff, Bill. I would suggest that cold weather and out-of-position players (DHes like Michael Young playing the field, for example) might be the main reasons. What about unearned runs as a percentage or average per game? I don't have the time or energy to check this minute but I'd be curious.

The 2001 World Series absolutely belongs in the discussion among the greatest Fall Classics. Even as a Yankee fan who ended up on the wrong side of that one, I can certainly appreciate how remarkable that series was, and as a New Yorker, I know how much that team meant to the city after 9/11 — arguably more than any of the three champions that had preceded them, even in their defeat. My comparisons of this series to 1975 and 1986 owe more to the impossibly high standard for the finales set by their respective Game Sixes — two games that make nearly every shortlist for the greatest World Series games ever played. Both of those series' Game Sevens produced more drama than the 2011 one did, and it's fair to say that Game Seven of 2001 did so as well. You'll recall, however, that Game Six of 2001 was a blowout of ridiculous proportions, as the Diamondbacks teed off on poor Andy Pettitte as he tipped his pitches, winning 15-2. Since that series didn't fit the pattern of this one, I did not bring it into the discussion.

Check out Mike Fast's look at Lowe's fateful pitch to Freese: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=15375

Thanks, Joe. That certainly means a lot, coming from you. And likewise, of course. Just when I think I've wrung as much as I can from a game, I find a couple hundred words in the newsletter on an angle I completely ignored.

It's a good question to which I don't know the answer, and I'm not sure the Fielding Bible people or Mark do either. It's also a small sample size based upon data that includes some amount of subjective judgement. I repeated it simply to suggest that it was anything but a routine play - the chances of it being caught were probably less than 50/50. For what it's worth, Cruz is considered an above-average defender according to FRAA, UZR and Plus/Minus, with estimates of his value ranging from 4-13 runs above average per year over the last 3. Total Zone puts him much closer to average (+0/8 per year) but it would seem to be the outlier here.

Oh, get real. Oliver allowed four homers in 57.1 innings this year. Uehara allowed 14 in 66.1; the man has a serious gopher problem.

Darren Oliver has been pretty damn good for awhile now. Past five seasons: 0.6 HR/9, 2.4 BB/9, 7.6 K/9, and even better this year: 0.5, 1.9, 7.8. .212/.250/.305 vs LHB last two seasons. Feliz at .159/.234/.253 vs. LHB in that span, but having already fired most of his bullets while showing that he had far less than his best control. Not gonna kill Wash for that one.

Regarding Cruz's play, via ESPN's Mark Simon on Twitter: The @fieldingbible folks say 17 balls hit in 2011 to apx spot of Freese triple, with 4 sec hang time. 3 were caught. So yes, tough play.

I would classify the technique as bad - putting the ball in the air is generally the last thing you want to do on a bunt - but the result was good.

Good example on foul/fair pole.

According to Twitter, the Cardinals have removed Matt Holliday from the roster due to a sprained wrist, replacing him with Adron Chambers. Allen Craig gets the start in left field.

I understand what both are saying, but I also believe Wikipedia is quote correct when it says, "Ground rule double is also the term used to refer to a fairly hit ball leaving the field in circumstances that do not merit a home run as described in Major League Baseball (MLB) rules 6.09(e) through 6.09(h). MLB rules use no term other than 'ground rule double' for such a two-base award."

And then there's Ruben Rivera, who had this amazingly boneheaded basepath adventure, which Jon Miller described as the worst baserunning in the history of the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ94rkwdTvQ http://etsy.me/viWLt2

How about Roger Cedeno? I can't find the exact quote, but it was something like, "He chases the ball until it stops rolling, and runs until he is tagged out."

Fox has backed off the use of PitchTrax though they did show it at times - the questionable Pujols K, for one. To be sure, there were inconsistencies both horizontally and vertically - check the link to the essential Fastmaps, which use Mike Fast's observations about the differing de facto zones called against righty and lefty hitters. At a glance, I'd say that while others had more expanded zones - Game Four, in particular - this one seemed to have more crossover (called balls called that were more in the zone than some of the strikes).

To be honest, I had never heard that distinction in my 34 years of watching baseball and 10+ of covering it. The official rulebook contains the term "ground rule double" but not "automatic double or "rulebook double." For what it's worth, the ball simply bounced over the wall, I believe on one hop.

For all nearly pitch classifications, I'm going by F/X from MLB Gameday, though yes, that raised an eyebrow. But according to the data at Fangraphs, Garcia's changeup averaged 82.6 MPH this year, the fastball 89.8 MPH, so he doesn't have a lot of room to work with in terms of contrasting velocities. Clearly it works for him in other ways though, at least most of the time.

Yup you are correct on Napoli. I knew where the ball went but my ability to communicate my sense of direction failed me. Far more importantly, that is so awesome that you were there. I'm happy for you.

I think both decisions, to pull Feliz and Feldman, were worth addressing in at least a bit more detail than I gave above, but I lacked the stamina and focus to address either at the time. Feliz: He blew the save, allowing three of the six batters he faced to reach, and threw just 12 strikes among his 22 pitches. With that performance on his shoulders, and having not gone two innings since June 21, I don't see a whole lot of justification for bringing him out for another inning. I can find several things to fault Washington for, but pulling him was not one of them - I agree with Impresario. Feldman: This one was more debatable, with two outs and man on first; Colin's math says that the run expectancy gain was just 0.07 runs. Feldman had allowed two out of four runners to reach, and threw just eight out of 16 strikes, but with the capability of throwing multiple innings, and the gap between him and Lowe or the two lefties, keeping him in was probably the better play, particularly with righties coming up as the first two hitters.

Given that we've now had 10 Wild Card teams win pennants and four win World Series (with the Cardinals potentially a fifth), there's almost certainly no going back. My advice is to invest heavily in canes for shaking at teenagers doing donuts on the lawn, as you're going to need them so long as you remain a baseball fan.

The ninth-inning play was called a hit-and-run by most writers (and IIRC by Fox) in the immediate aftermath, but yes, it was a run-and-hit. I've seen only a few articles that referred to it as such. Regarding the rest of your comment, if what you're saying is that the break-even point for Craig stealing is above 90 percent, then that is an incredibly asinine strategic move, and I'm not sure I understand how any of the math beyond that could work out in favor of the Cardinals, since he didn't represent the tying run.

I have been dying to use that phrase in a baseball context for weeks. Been listening to that album - criminally underrated relative to Here Come the Warm Jets, and just as sonically inventive - for 15 years and only recently parsed those lyrics, which I now think of often anytime a manager self-immolates with smallball tactics. Losing Tiger Mountain (By One-Run Strategy)? Damn it, we might need Jim Leyland for that. I would take all four of those '70s Eno vocal albums with me to a desert island. I wish there were about 2-3 times that many of them scattered throughout his huge catalog.

Oh, you know I'm gonna reuse that. Thanks!

I'm well aware of the 1927 Yankees. It was a goddamn typo.

The Cardinals had the NL's third-best run differential. They led the league in scoring and were middle-of-the-pack in pitching but used some timely work in the mound to beat the two teams with better run differentials in their two playoff series. For all of the stupidity of Game Five, there's nothing about their performance that suggests they have no right or reason to be here.

Yup, can't believe I muffed that as i was watching a replay of it as I wrote, but wee hours and short rest make for the occasional mistake. Fixed above.

In the harsh light of day, all three cited sources now agree that Holland threw 116 pitches, 76 for strikes. The rest of the data pertaining to his pitch count breakdown should be correct.

Drat. Could have sworn I checked this on his ESPN player card. Given the nine-run lead and my focus on writing my own lede at the time, I would have been willing to believe Todd Worrell threw the ninth, as I wasn't paying attention at all.

Looking at Brooks Baseball's two Fastmaps at http://bit.ly/mQpMZ0, I count at least four St. Louis strikes - I didn't match them to pitchers at 2 AM - that were outside the rulebook zone (compared to nine for Texas) though yes, you are correct, for the Cardinals it was more in terms of depth than width. And no, I don't think it was an egregiously bad zone like we've seen elsewhere in the postseason. The strike zone is a malleable thing, and Holland's effectiveness at going inside consistently expanded that zone a bit. The Cardinals couldn't take advantage to the same extent.

I didn't title the piece, our editors did. The title I submitted at 2:20 AM was "[needs a title, my brain is fried]." Please direct all further complaints elsewhere.

Huh? Monday Night Football starts at 8:30 PM ET on most weeks (http://espn.go.com/blog/nflnation/post/_/id/39396/monday-night-football-schedule-2011), and Sunday Night Football starts at 8:20 (http://www.betvega.com/nfl-sunday-night-football-schedule/). Thursdays are at 8:20 ET, too.

I'm sorry if you found the term "b-s excuse" a bit harsh - it wasn't intended as a slap at you so much as it being a common fallback for a whole bunch of people who lean upon it to explain Greinke's ups and downs. We know this: Greinke did not pitch well in the postseason. Roenicke did not push their starters for extra availability in the postseason, in part because they hadn't been pitching well, and in part because he's just not that imaginative. Gallardo wasn't moved up to pitch Game Six on three days' rest. Greinke, in whom the team has invested a whole lot, wasn't going to be called upon under that circumstance either.

Interestingly, our 2011 defensive stats like Freese (0.3 FRAA) more than Descalso (-9.2, but with about 1/4 of his defensive innings at 2B or SS), and both Total Zone and UZR liked him more as well. We're talking about less than half a season of data for Descalso at third base, but yes, that looks a bit questionable.

Punto slugged .421 this year, 94 points higher than his career average, so again, it's enough of a risk that can see the merit of pitching to the guy slugging .150.

Still thinking about the Jay bunt, one thing that occurred to me was the possibility that La Russa was using it to bait Washington into the IBB. Would such a move have merit? Let's break out the Run Expectancy table (I'm using this one of 1993-2010 data: http://bit.ly/pzA9Mk) and play with it. Runner on 1B, no out after Furcal walk: 0.929 Jay led the Cardinals in GB% (56.6%), but due to his speed was tough to double (2.2%, -2.2 Net DP). If he makes an out without advancing the runner (16% strikeout rate, 33% chance of an air ball], the RE drops to 0.555, and Pujols is at the plate – an outstanding hitter, but also the majors' easiest to double up (4.9%, 9.6 Net DP), with just a 9% chance of striking out, and a 36% chance of a groundball, 45% chance of an air ball. If Jay advances the runner via a bunt, the RE for runner on 2B, one out drops to 0.714. Washington isn't a guy who orders many intentional walks (Rangers were 2nd-to-last in AL with 21), and of the ones he did, only six were with one out, and only three of those in a high-leverage situation (Daric Barton, Alex Rodriguez and Adrian Gonzalez were the recipients), so it's not like this is a tendency La Russa was likely to anticipate based upon past history (he had five such instances in 2010). If Washington does have Pujols walked, the run expectancy with men on first and second with one out rebounds to 0.948, though Holliday is nearly as prone to the DP (4.5%, fourth in the majors) as Pujols, and even more prone to the groundball (46.2 percent to 44.9 percent for 2011). So yes, there's an ever-so-slight gain to be had in using a sac bunt to trigger an intentional walk, but only if you know that the intentional walk is coming, and based upon Washington's tendency it seems a stretch to suggest that was a guaranteed move.

This is the best one I've seen yet, maybe a split second before the ones you link to, and it still looks very close http://bit.ly/pmxzRH

having reviewed the play several times this morning, I can say that the increment by which he missed the ball was easily less than a foot. A few inches. Good photo here: http://reut.rs/q5baXV

Wow, I looked at the replay again and you're right - I had seen it a couple of times before and I was sure Cruz had, and I didn't go back to check when writing this up in the wee hours. Still, a very close play. As for Descalso, I've been making that mistake all season, why stop now?

Neither do I. Since none of us really know the first thing about how it affects Greinke, it's a b-s excuse to haul it out anytime an underperformance needs to be explained away.

Turns out we're both wrong in that little Nicky Punto gets the start at second base tonight. .273/.389/.409 vs lefties in 57 PA this year, .257/.322/.327 career.

Collectively we decided that Wilson is ineligible until they film a sequel in which he is being tortured via force-fed chalupas.

Oh yes, I can't recommend this enough. Wrote about it here a couple years ago: http://bit.ly/or3xuy

I considered writing up Hrabosky, but this article was conceived during the rematch of the two 1982 World Series participants, and I felt a Brewer had to represent.

The Rangers have removed both Uehara and Tatayama from the roster, adding Lowe and catcher Matt Treanor, so consider these appended to their respective sections: Out since September 20 due to a hamstring strain, Lowe is back on the roster, likely to fulfill the lower-leverage role occupied by the displaced Japanese hurlers; like both, he's vulnerable to the longball (1.2 HR/9 this year); he also tends to walk his fair share (3.0 UBB/9), and is a liability against lefties (.295/.378/.506 career). Treanor (.214/.338/.291, .255 TAv, -1.2 FRAA, 0.6 WARP) isn't much of a hitter, though he can take a walk now and then. As the roster's third catcher, he gives Washington the flexibility to pinch-hit for Torrealba, though as noted before, Napoli is likely to see most of the time behind the plate, particularly in St. Louis.

Since Jason included Schumaker and not Ryan Theriot in his analysis, I'll add the note on the latter to the bench section: Theriot spent most of the season as the Cardinals' shortstop before Furcal's arrival; while his overall numbers aren't impressive, his .310/.356/.413 line against lefties (.301/.373/.401) likely means he'll see time at the keystone in Schumaker's place given the latter's feeble .210/.281/.243 career line vs. southpaws.

I've used both during my time as a writer, but more recently have gone to the two-word version because both B-Ref and ESPN do it that way.

Interesting, though the Brewers aren't in a great trade position given the way they emptied their farm system this past winter for Greinke and Marcum.

Among the in-house options are Mat Gamel and Corey Hart (who played a fair bit of 1B in the minors). On the free agent market are Carlos Pena, Derrek Lee, Michael Cuddyer, Casey Kotchman, and Russell Branyan. None of those are fantastic options, but there are some productive options in there, none of which should cost an arm and a leg.

more late night math correction: total number of innings by the STL bullpen was 28.2, with a 1.88 ERA.

Corrections: Pujols hit .478/.556/.913 and Berkman got on base at a .391 clip. The rest of my math wasn't bad for 2 AM.

Richard, you make some fair points , but to simply dismiss the matter of pennant-winning as "primarily based on luck" is a gross underestimation of what it takes. Obviously, first your team has have to win enough games over the 162-game season to make it to the playoffs, which is a considerable achievement. Yes, luck does play a part in the playoffs, but over time it tends to even out. For Leyland, the heartbreak of the early-90s Pirates - who were good enough to win a pennant - is somewhat offset by the Marlins' less-likely win, perhaps part of a cosmic Francisco Cabrera/Eric Gregg trade. That Leyland has had as much success as he had with three fairly different situations is an indicator that there's more than luck involved. As for the Rockies, Leyland was by his own accounts burned out from managing, and the fact that he took the next six years away from the dugout suggests he was quite serious about that - it's a demanding job, and he wasn't simply trying to weasel out of one position so as to take another (a la Billy Martin with the Rangers, or even Piniella with the Devil Rays). You could accuse Leyland of doing that in Florida, but the Huizenga teardown of the 1997 team was more or less a generational fluke (the post-dynasty A's of the 1970s would have been the most recent comparisons) and changed the conditions under which he was working rather drastically; I think most established managers put in that position would have done the same. That he was able to find considerable success after returning at an age when a lot of managers have hung up their spikes is impressive; his could have been an Earl Weaver comeback. As for the run differential and Pythagorean stuff, I couldn't put everything into the article that I would have liked (ESPN imposes space limitations on us), and it's not the easiest stuff to gather (B-Ref doesn't aggregate, so comparisons are time-consuming), or the most revealing, particularly in a career that as I pointed out featured a lot of teams that had relatively little shot at winning. Overall he's at -11 (-13 in his first year, +2 since) by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, but does that tell us much (Piniella was -5, for purposes of "comparison")? Take his two years in Florida: does a 54-win team falling four games shy of its projection mean as much as a 92-win team exceeding theirs by four wins? No, because those marginal wins at the top end are worth a whole lot more, and in this case they were the difference between winning the Wild Card and being in a three-way tie. The teams Leyland did take to the playoffs almost uniformly overachieved relative to pythag; those three Pirates winners were a combined nine wins above expectations, the Marlins another four, the '06 Tigers were even, and this year's bunch was six above. The 2009 near-miss club, which lost a play-in, was five wins above expectations; they were outscored by two runs, one of them in the 12th inning of Game 163. What does one do with that particular season's worth of info, ding him for blowing a seven-game lead or credit him for an overachieving team? There's no clear answer. As for the argument that he didn't stay in one place long enough, Leyland did last 11 years in Pittsburgh and has six seasons under his belt in Detroit. Piniella lasted 10 in Seattle but never more than 3 anywhere else except for his partial 2010 with the Cubs. Dick Williams' longest stint was just under six years with Montreal (he was relieved of duty in late 1981 when the Expos made the playoffs); he totaled 10 years with the three teams he took to the World Series. Casey Stengel's second-longest stint was five years, five very sub-.500 years with the Boston Braves. I could go on and on - not everybody is Weaver or Lasorda or Bobby Cox. As to the "fifth-best" argument, well, you have to look at the whole stretch of his career if you're talking about Hall of Famers. A quick-and-dirty WAR ranking (I'm using the Play Index) tells us that Biggio, Alomar, Kent, Sandberg and Utley are the top five in WAR from 1986-2011; two enshrined, Biggio with 3000 hits, Kent with a good case, and Utley the superior player at his position of recent years if hardly a lock due to injuries. Also on the list are Lou Whitaker (7th, with the majority of his career already behind him) and Robinson Cano (11th, and just 28 years old) - we may yet get five HOFers among the upper reaches of that list. So yeah, I don't think it's an unreasonable argument that Leyland is Hallworthy on that front either.

Perhaps because I've gotten used enough to the idea that our TV perspective makes us viewers less accurate arbiters than we think we are (per the work of Colin Wyers and Mike Fast), I didn't think the strike zone was particularly remarkable. There was some early kvetching about how wide it was, and a look at the Brooks Baseball Fastmaps (http://bit.ly/oQsES9) - which I didn't check while writing this - confirms both that and that there were a handful of pitches at the bottom of the zone, particularly against righties, that were called for strikes, and Wolf and friends may have gotten the benefit of a couple more calls than the Cardinals did; the Redbirds seem to have gotten more of the benefit of the doubt on calls at the edges of the zone, particularly on the first base side against lefties. I think it mostly comes out in the wash.

Kotsay's in the lineup for Hart for Game Four. I don't like that move either, feels like Roenicke is overthinking these decisions. Three days ago, Hart was riding a five-game postseason hitting streak. Now he's riding the bench - this for a guy who hit .313/.343/.597 with a team-high 5 homers against STL this year.

Man, I got confused when you were referring both to me and the STL center fielder by the same name. The other point I'd add is that not being doubled off second forces Carpenter to throw another handful of pitches, too. Not that getting to the Cardinals' bullpen helped the Brewers any.

Goddamn it. When I alphabetized the names, I cut him off, and wrote around what was left. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Anderson was the first manager to win a World Series in both leagues. La Russa was the second - it was going to be either him or Leyland in 2006.

Not nearly enough. The play resulted in runs being scored that might have scored anyway, but it also forced Gallardo to throw extra pitches — and not good ones, in his shakiest inning — costing him at least an inning on the back end.

"missed a hanging curve": 325 Google results. "missed a hanging slider": 348 Google results. "missed a hanging breaking ball": 943 Google results. Not a ridiculous amount, but not "no one" either.

Thanks, Ryan. I'm credentialed for Philadelphia and would like to get down there to cover a game or two if they advance, but if not, I'll take up the action from my couch the rest of the way... once I get some sleep.

Over at Pinstriped Bible, I've got a notebook regarding a few points about this series: http://bit.ly/qF4iBu Starters and relievers, lefties and righties, Granderson's defense, and a bit more about Burnett vs. Cabrera and Martinez.

Jackson's BABIP dependence is hardly ideal, but he's actually been about average for an AL leadoff hitter when you take his two years together. Last year he hit .294/.345/.407 where the average AL leadof hit .267/.330/.364; this year the worm has turned, and he's at .249/.317/.374 compared to league average .265/.326/.395. Because no other regular on their team has any speed whatsoever (Jackson stole 22 of their league-low 49 bases and had 11 of their 34 triples), it would have taken more outside-the-box thinking than Leyland can probably muster to put somebody like Peralta or Avila in the leadoff spot. That's in part on him, and again, partially a roster construction problem.

I've said several times on the air this year that the second base situation is something that the Tigers have won in spite of, and that they erred by not giving Sizemore a full shot at the job. This team has overcome some fundamental roster construction flaws to get to this point however (the contracts of Guillen and Ordonez, the overreliance on ball-in-play pitchers with a less-than-stellar middle infield), and I do think Leyland deserves more credit for managing around those flaws than he does criticism.

Interesting, I had not heard that about Fisk. Google did find this preservation of a Peter Gammons tweet: Peter Gammons: Carlton Fisk almost ended his career with a home plafe [sic] collision in '74, learned to sweep tag and went to Cooperstown.

Twice, I believe both times against Martin, Peralta displayed falldown range as the ball went right past him. His defensive numbers have improved since switching teams, and somewhere I remarked that those plays looked more like Cleveland's Jhonny Peralta than they did Detroit's. As for Avila, I think that positioning is so he's not guaranteed a collision at the plate. But yeah, maybe even six inches or another foot back and he gets the tag.

That was bad, though not as bad asJeter's bunt, which actually cost more than the out at first, though he was let off the hook by Granderson's double. But yeah, giving up outs. I've referenced this a couple of times on Twitter, but there's a great Brian Eno lyric I think of when I see excessive bunting: "Wasting fingers like I had them to spare." (From "Mother Whale Eyeless," on the absolutely killer Taking Tiger Mountain).

I think Granderson said after the game that he misjudged the ball initially, which upped the degree of difficulty. Burnett got 15 called strikes to Porcello's 18. Looking at the Brooks Baseball Fastmap (a strike zone map of what was actually called vs. LH and RH batters, drawn to the specs of our own Mike Fast: http://bit.ly/pIte98), it appears that Porcello got a few more calls on the outer edge against lefties, and more of the borderline pitches against righties as well. Still, I don't think there were nearly so many complaints as Gerry Davis' zone the night before.

By my count, Sabathia went to 2 strikes on 13 hitters, needed 39 pitches to finish them. 4 BB, 3K, 2 1B, 4 in-play outs.

Wow, I don't think I've ever gotten a compliment quite like that. I'll take it, thanks! I appreciate all the compliments here, actually. I'm credentialed for the NY games of this series, hence the singularity of my focus - it's the first time that I've ever had a playoff credential - and while it's pretty cool, the intensity of that investment means sacrificing most of the time I'd otherwise spend watching the other series. Thanks to the callback from the rainout, I haven't seen more than three innings of any game in the other three series yet. I had expected we would have other writers covering other series, at least from their couches. I can't speak to what the plans were or are, if somebody blew an assignment or what - I don't know the situation - but I do agree that our readership deserves quality coverage of the other series as well.

Girardi has announced that Burnett will start Game 4. Asked before Game 2, he elaborated his thinking w/r/t Hughes: Q. I think you had mentioned Hughes as a possibility for Game 4 as well. What led to the decision ultimately of A.J. over Hughes? JOE GIRARDI: The only way I probably would have used Hughes in Game 4 is if we had to use A.J. last night. Phil hasn't been stretched out lately. A.J., his month of September was not bad. You look at the strikeouts per innings, it was a complete turnaround from August. It was just if we had to use A.J. yesterday, I might have had to start Hughesie.

Alas, I did not review the replay of Avila play before leaving the ballpark at 1:45 AM, and am in error. Avila slid, but Russell Martin was far enough up the line to put a high tag on him before he could get low enough into his slide.

K rate. Among AL ERA qualifiers, he was 34th out of 42 with his 5.3 per nine, and 36th with his 6.6 percent swinging strike rate. Tough to consider a guy a power pitcher if he misses that few bats, no matter what his velocity.

Well played, sir!

Apology accepted. I (over?)used "overuse" as a shorthand in the service of a shower of data with which I had cited in partial or full form a few times over the past week as I was putting together this piece over morning coffee. I don't mind showing my work, but I don't expect to have to drag out every shard of it or undertake a full PitchF/X probe in the service of writing about one of more than a dozen players in a piece that had plenty of data already. I don't doubt that mental fatigue can present itself even at lesser workloads. It's also important to remember that very few of these players - relievers especially - are anywhere near 100 percent physically at this time of year. Perhaps that makes relying on the fatigue explanation a bit too convenient - we might say the same thing about Papelbon, Bard, et al.

Mental fatigue would seem to qualify as overuse, no? And while we don't have smoking gun hard evidence - I don't particularly care whether or not we use the word "overuse" - we can say this definitively: Atlanta's two young relievers, who were 1-2 in the NL in appearances, both had lousy Septembers that played major roles in the team's collapse, including 3 blown saves, 3 homers, 8 walks and 8 runs allowed in their final 8.1 innings. Happy?

Direct proof? No, but how often do we, really? I will say that of the six runs he allowed in that 7.1 inning span from 9/9 onward, five of them - all but last night's - and thus two of the blown saves came when he was pitching on consecutive days. The other featured his highest pitch count (29) since June.

Yes, I wasn't going any further into the laws of thermodynamics than the increase in the number of playoff options and extra games. The metaphor only takes us so far, because the entropy of this system does decrease once the season ends. "Lisa, in this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PTA_Disbands

I'm not sure I can pull this off two nights in a row, but I haven't entirely ruled it out. Not helping is the fact that I've come down with a cold. Blerg.

I don't believe that it contains individual breakouts the way UZR does, but that doesn't mean those factors aren't incorporated into the mix. A better question for Colin Wyers than for myself.

The WARP values are driven by the way we calculate Fair Run Average, which has to do with expected levels of defensive support and the impact of sequencing. Colin explained it at http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=11779 but it could still stand further clarification.

If you're the kind of person who wants to follow Kemp's progress on an at-bat by at-bat basis, True Blue LA has handy tables showing what potential combinations of at-bats and hits will put him ahead of Ryan Braun and Jose Reyes, the two men ahead of him in batting average: http://sbn.to/qmAPKZ

Updated WARP standings thru Sunday: Kemp 7.9, Braun 6.8; Bautista 10.3, Ellsbury 9.0.

Very good point about league size and the increasing difficulty of winning the award. I cite the expansion of the leagues often when I talk about Black Ink in the Hall of Fame context, but it's obviously a factor here as well.

So I guess I shoulda written up the Angels, too. Now even with the Rays, 2.5 behind Boston (2 in the loss column).

As a Brown University graduate, I can also report that one variant of the Ted Turner expulsion rumor was that he sent a bowling ball down the East Side Trolley Tunnel. Alas, he has since laid that rumor to rest.

Thank you, ScottyB! And here I was kicking myself because I probably should have more about our talented writers and so forth...

Outstanding stuff, Mike. Very interesting discussion & quantification of Posada's shortcomings, among other things. And wow on Martin.

Dear Jim Bowden: Never change.

Injuries (plantar fascia, Tommy John surgery on right elbow), the presence of Adrian Gonzalez, and questions about his lack of mobility/defensive ability in a park that requires it have been pretty obvious impediments. Most of those aren't a factor now (he's healthy, Gonzalez is gone, and small sample defensive metrics don't entirely hate his LF play), but he's hit just .198/.291/.374 in 299 PA since returning from surgery while striking out one-third of the time.

They were at 99.9% as recently as September 7: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/hitlist/index.php?thisdate=2011-09-07

I wish George Steinbrenner had been alive and coherent enough to comment on this hat flap. Had MLB tried to pull this stunt on the Yankees, he would have made Bud Selig sorry he was ever born.

Some perspective is in order with regards to the way the 2 NY teams handled post 9/11 security. As I've documented before (http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=8108), the Yankees went totally over the wall when it came to the changes wrought by 9/11. They outlawed backpacks and briefcases, even umbrellas, incorporated "God Bless America" into every damn ballgame and even ordered their security to restrict movement during the song's playing, at least until someone went public with reports of harassment by NY police in 2008. They did frisk during the 2001 World Series - I know, I was there. Meanwhile, the Mets were much more reasonable with their parks' security practices - one could bring in backpacks, briefcases, etc. There are times I've been frisked there, and times I haven't; I have no clear timeline as to when, but I've generally only gone 1-2 times a year since then. On the whole, their record on 9/11-related issues has been much less heavy-handed and condescending. I'm sorry if you had a bad experience at Citi, but relative to what New Yorkers have put up with for the past 10 years, at their ballparks and elsewhere, I don't think it counts as remarkable.