Chalk up another free agent who finally cashed in his chips, thanks to a lousy economy and Type A free agent status, and settled for a fraction of his actual value. The Dodgers have reportedly signed Orlando Hudson to a one year contract with $3.4 million guaranteed, though incentives could push his total payout to $8 million.

Before the economy went south and free agents became beggers, Hudson looked to be in line for something like the 4 year, $40 million contract that Brian Roberts just got from the Orioles. After all, Hudson’s averaged 2.5 wins per year for the last four years. Even factoring in age, it’s hard to expect him to be worth less than two wins above a replacement level player for 2009, and wins were going for between $4 and $5 million apiece last year.

However, with the economy struggling, MLB teams not named the Yankees have drastically pulled back on spending, and so Hudson settles for a contract that pays him as if he’s a +1 win player. Even if you’re pessimistic about Hudson’s future (30+ year old second baseman don’t age very well, so there’s some concern here), this deal is still a huge bargain on the old dollar per win scale.

The question we have to ask ourselves, though, is what is a win going to be worth in 2009? If MLB teams are correctly assessing that people will be cutting their discretionary spending on MLB games, and revenue for the league is going to shrink in the upcoming year, then the value generated from adding wins on the field will be diminished as well. And, when we reach a point like this, we just kind of have to throw our hands up in the air and say “who knows?”, because nobody really has the economic future of the U.S. in the next 6 months figured out, and our assumptions of the value of wins are based upon models that don’t work for this climate.

So, what can we say about this signing, if we don’t really have an ability to forecast the dollar value of a win in 2009? That it makes the Dodgers better by about +1 to +1.5 wins (depending on what they do with DeWitt and Blake to make room for Hudson), that it cost them the #17 pick in the draft, and that if this move is coupled with re-signing Manny Ramirez, the Dodgers will have nine major league starters for eight positions.

It’s hard to not like this deal for the Dodgers, but like every signing this winter, that’s based on an assumption that MLB revenues aren’t about to go in the tank. If they do, everything looks a lot different.

One of the things we like to do in the statistical community is test common wisdom to see if the empirical evidence lines up with what is believed to be true. One of these truisms is that pitchers are not afraid to high contact slap hitters, and thus will feed them a steady diet of fastballs, knowing the worst case scenario is probably a groundball, even if they turn on it.

Since I’ve been in a graphing mood and we have pitch type stats for hitters on the site, I decided to take a look at this theory, plotting the data from the 121 batters who have racked up enough plate appearances over the last three years to qualify. On the x asis, I put percentages of fastballs seen, and on the y axis, isolated slugging percentage.

Here’s the chart.

As you can see, the data definitively supports the truism. The correlation between FB% and ISO is -.59, suggesting a strong inverse relationship – the higher your ISO, the lower your FB% will be, and vice versa. The average hitter sees fastballs 60% of the time, but that’s the upper bound for low ISO hitters – Melky Cabrera’s .108 ISO and 60.8% FB% are about as far left as you can go on the graph and still be talking about a guy without much power.

However, it’s interesting in that the limit isn’t symmetrical. Notice how there are some high ISO guys on the right hand side of the graph. Matt Holliday, especially, stands out – he’s got a .248 ISO and has still been thrown fastballs 64.8% of the time over the last three years. Coors Field is likely a factor there, but it isn’t with Carlos Lee – .237 ISO, 62.9% fastballs.

Two other interesting players are Johnny Damon and Garret Anderson. They have identical .161 ISOs over the last three years, but Anderson has seen the fewest fastballs of any hitter in the sample (48.9%) while Damon is up near the top (67.5%). Do pitchers perceived Damon as a slap hitter, due to his frame? Or perhaps Anderson just really struggles against breaking balls, and pitchers are exploiting this? Maybe both?

We don’t have all the answers. I’m sure there are scouting reports at play here, indicating some hitters are more vulnerable to bendy pitches than others, but the trend is still clear – pitchers really will challenge no power hitters with fastballs while sticking to their off-speed stuff against the guys who can launch a baseball 500 feet.

Indians acquire Juan Salas from Rays for Isaias Velasquez

One of the longer-tenured players in the Rays organization, Salas signed as an international free agent in 1998 as a third baseman. In 2004, Salas converted to pitching and had an impressive streak of 34 scoreless innings for Double-A Montgomery in 2006. Salas broke into the Rays pen in 2007 and was amongst their more reliable relievers until being suspended for 50 games following a positive drugs test. Salas is 30-years-old, but his minor league strikeout rates suggest he’s got a chance of being decent if given the chance. He throws two pitches heavily – a cutter and a fastball – along with a slider, but his velocity isn’t quite what it was at one point.

Velasquez has an interesting name and plays second base. Another former undrafted free agent, Velasquez hit .281/.368/.343 in the New York-Penn League last season Over the last two seasons he’s produced wRAAs of 3.5, with varying wOBAs. Velasquez has maintained a decent walk rate while showing little-to-no power.

Diamondbacks claim Robert Korecky

29-year-old Korecky made his debut last season for the Twins, but his recently strong strikeout rates bombed while his walk and homerun rates crept upward. Korecky used a low-90s fastball nearly 60% of the time while mixing in a slider and sprinkling a change-up occasionally. The Backs aren’t losing much here whether Korecky works out or flames out.

Royals claim Timothy Hulett

It appears there no Mariner infielder is safe from Dayton Moore this off-season. “Tug” Hulett’s player page amusingly calls him a DH, but that’s not a mistake, Hulett actually did DH in eight games last season despite being a middle infielder in the minors. Hulett is short and basically everything you’d imagine from a utility infielder type.

No, I don’t really think so; even with my irrational following of Erik Bedard.

Jeff Francis hoped that rest and rehab would rid him of the shoulder pain that dogged him throughout the 2008 season. It did not and now he is headed to exploratory surgery under the assumption that the surgeon will find a torn labrum. Thus ends any realistic hope for Francis pitching in 2009.

As a result of this, we learn for certain a possible cause for Francis’ rather poor showing this past season. Francis had been a pitcher on the rise, posting increasing values each year from 2005 through 2007 and seemed poised to break into the upper echelon of pitchers following his, and the Rockies, success in 2007. That was not to be as both the Rockies and Francis faltered badly.

Interestingly enough, Francis’ stuff did not exhibit much difference in 2008 as compared to previous years. His control was a tad worse, but nothing even noteworthy. His velocity stayed constant and his batted ball and pitch result profiles did as well. Yet, the walks went up and the strikeouts down.

Francis provides a nice counterpoint to what has seemed like an endless stream of ridiculously team-friendly arbitration buyouts signed this winter. Not to say that Francis’ contract (he signed a four year deal in November of 2006 that bought out his arbitration years and comes with a $7 million team option on his first market year) isn’t a good one for Colorado; it is just that we need to be reminded about the risk in securing contracts to pitchers. They get hurt a lot.

Lucky for the Rockies that they have that amazingly attractive team option on Francis that allows them to keep him around through 2011, because it gives them all of 2010 to evaluate post-surgery Jeff Francis and if they can, or will still want to, count him as a pillar of the organization going forward.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about the odd contract Odalis Perez signed with the Washington Nationals. The deal, non-guaranteed, would pay Perez just $850,000 if he ended up making the team. My major points of contention were that a) Perez has been eerily consistent over the last four seasons, putting up win values of +1.6, +1.4, +1.5, and +1.5 and b) Perez projected to be worth right around +1.5 wins again in 2009, a fair market value of around $6.5 mil. It also made little sense that Tim Redding, essentially the same age yet much less productive in the recent past, would garner a guaranteed deal worth three times the money.

Well, apparenty Odalis reads Fangraphs and agrees with my assessment because he is now in the process of holding out for a better deal. Okay, he probably has no idea about this site, but the timing sure seems like he does. Perez stated that the more he thought about the contract, the more it bothered him. He wants his work last season to be appreciated and feels he deserves a guaranteed spot in the rotation with at least a bit more money. Honestly, I can’t blame him.

However, I can blame him for reaching his epiphany at this juncture. If someone offers me a contract, I’m going to carefully think over my options as well as the terms and then make a decision. This situation has the feel to it that Odalis signed the first deal thrown his way after experiencing the harsh market and then realized after the fact he was taken advantage of. The situation also seems similar to a prima-donna actor who feels a part should be given to him without auditioning because he has delivered solid performances in past films. Perhaps the actor, and Perez, should receive guarantees sans auditions, but these are contractual terms to be negotiated before signing, not afterwards.

If Perez does have a deal considered binding by the MLB and the Players Association, the right thing to do would be to honor the deal and report to camp. What makes little sense here is that Perez has no offers from opposing teams, and the best deal he could conjure up involved a non-guaranteed $850K from the equivalent of a Quad-A team. What does he expect is going to happen? That he’ll captain the Dominican team to the WBC Championship and the Yankees will offer him a 2-yr/$8 mil guaranteed deal? This simply is not likely to occur. If Odalis Perez wants to play baseball this year he should honor the contract he signed. It may be a lowballing deal and he may be worth more, but he should have thought about these things prior to signing.

This afternoon, the Indians acquired Juan Salas from the Rays, who had been designated for assignment last week. Salas is a fairly nifty pickup for the Indians and could turn into a decent RH middle reliever if given a chance. However, I’m not here to write about Salas – I’m here to write about Andy Marte.

Marte was DFA’d to make room for Salas on the 40 man roster, which means the Indians now have 10 days to trade him or put him on waivers. If they put him on waivers and he goes unclaimed, he can be outrighted to Triple-A, which would keep him in the organization while removing him from the 40 man roster.

This completes a pretty dramatic fall from grace for Marte, who was once considered one of the premier prospects in the game. From a performance standpoint, his track record in the minors was terrific. He showed power early on (slugging .492 as an 18-year-old in the South Atlantic League), added patience (a .372 OBP in a terrible-for-hitters park at 19 in the Carolina League), and hit well in the upper minors (.269/.364/.525 as a 20-year-old in Double-A, .275/.372/.506 as a 21-year-old in Triple-A).

However, after his 2005 season put him on the cusp of the majors, the Braves traded him to Boston (who subsequently sent him to Cleveland), and his career completely stalled. He didn’t hit in Cleveland or in Buffalo, and has continued to struggle ever since. In 561 major league plate appearances over the last four years, he’s hit just .211/.265/.337, racking up a terrible -3.68 WPA/LI in essentially one season’s worth of playing time.

Now 25 years old, Marte is essentially available to anyone who has a spot on the 25 man roster to burn – he’s out of options, so if claimed on waivers, the claiming team wouldn’t have the option of sending him to Triple-A without re-waiving him and hoping he cleared.

His performance over the last few seasons suggest that he’s regressed significantly from the player he once was, but it’s still hard to ignore what he did from ages 18 to 21, where he was consistently one of the best young players in baseball. I have a feeling someone’s going to give him a second chance, and they might just find themselves with a pleasant surprise on their hands. It wouldn’t be the first time the Indians got rid of a 24-year-old busted prospect right before he put things together.

Sorry for the absence of posts yesterday – I was pretty under the weather.

Getting back to the charting from a few days ago, but with a little bit of a twist. This next graph is similar to the previous ones, plotting fastball velocity and strikeout rate, but in this case, it’s minor league K/9. I took all pitchers who threw at least 30 innings in the minors last year and at least 10 innings in the majors and tied the major league velocities (published here on the site) to their minor league K/9 rates.

Essentially, the goal is to see whether there is a bigger variance in K/9 from velocity in the minors, which is what we believe to be true based on anecdotal evidence. We’ve all seen plenty of junkballers with 85 MPH fastballs blow away Double-A and Triple-A hitters with command and movement, but not be able to repeat this success in the majors. If our anecdotal evidence is correct, and there are significant amounts of minor league pitchers who can post miss bats with questionable fastballs, they should hopefully show up on this chart.

Obviously, there are selection bias issues here, as we only have velocity data for guys who were given some time in the majors. Pitchers who don’t get a callup to the big leagues won’t appear in our data set. It’s a problem, but we deal with what we have. Anyway, here’s the graph.

First thing you should notice is that the starting point on the regression line is quite a bit higher than in the major league graphs. The really low strikeout minor leaguers just don’t get called up. The lowest K/9 in the sample of 183 pitchers is Brad Hennessey, who posted a 4.69 K/9 for Fresno. His fastball was 88.3 MPH in the majors.

The other thing to notice is that the trendline is much flatter, and while the r of .27 means that the spread isn’t totally random, there are a ton of data points that don’t fit the line. Clay Rapada, for instance – 86.5 MPH fastball, 11.57 K/9 for Toledo, or David Robertson’s 13.11 K/9 with a 90.8 MPH fastball. Jason Bulger had the highest strikeout rate in the sample at 15.7 K/9, and while he’s not a soft-tosser, his 92.9 MPH fastball isn’t that far from the median.

While this isn’t a perfect analysis, it does seem to confirm the common wisdom that velocity isn’t as necessary to rack up strikeouts at the minor league level. There are a good number of pitchers who miss bats without a big fastball. When looking at minor league pitching numbers, you have to keep this in mind – gaudy statistics do not mean that you can automatically infer major league quality stuff.

For the second consecutive day, I’m talking about the Rays infield. Yesterday it was the addition of Adam Kennedy via minor league contract, and today it’s Willy Aybar signing an extension. The exact terms are two years and 2.3 million with a club option for a third year and a few escalators thrown in that could make Aybar’s deal worth 6 million. Frankly, that looks like a pretty good deal for the Rays.

A while back I evaluated Aybar’s value, saying he’s a ~1.5 win player on the Rays and likely a ~2.5 win player elsewhere simply based on the playing time he’ll be robbed of on a loaded team. That put his projected first year of arbitration value at 2.7 million, and somehow the Rays are getting him at 2.3 million for not only this year, but an additional season as well.

The question becomes, how in the world are the Rays going to find playing time for Aybar? Carlos Pena and Evan Longoria have the corner infield positions on lockdown. The addition of Pat Burrell should take away the option of Aybar acting as the team’s designated hitter on certain days unless the Rays do something silly like play Burrell in the field. Last year, Aybar saw time in place of the injured Pena and Longoria, even starting the season as the Rays third baseman before a hamstring injury struck him down.

There’s a chance Aybar could get some reps in the middle infield as well, but otherwise one of Joe Maddon’s toughest assignments this year will be finding consistent playing time for Aybar. When finding playing time for a ~1.5-2 win player is one of your so-called toughest assignments, you know you’re running a good team.

We have almost all the facets of the game covered here at FanGraphs. We have wOBA for hitting, UZR for both fielding range and fielding throwing, FIP for pitching and some nifty WAR calculations for positional and replacement value. Sure we can quibble over the effectiveness of this metric over that metric for measuring pitching or what have you, and we will, but a recent story by Sky Kalkman at Beyond the Box Score reminded me of one component that we’re missing right now, base running.

The wOBA formula at FanGraphs does incorporate stolen bases so that aspect is already taken care of, but there’s more to base running than just swiping bags. There is also being speedy and heady enough to take the extra bag when possible off hits or sacrifices or really any situation.

Dan Fox does tremendous work in baseball research and he’s compiled some base running figures for Baseball Prospectus. The figures are free of charge and accessible here. Just make note that the final figure, EQBRR includes the stolen base component (EQSBR) so if you want to make some adjustment to FanGraphs values, you’ll have to add in the difference between EQBRR and EQSBR, not the whole of EQBRR itself.

Anyways, I just wanted to point out a few people. Ian Kinsler, Ichiro Suzuki, Jose Reyes, Chone Figgins, Shane Victorino, Matt Holliday, Curtis Granderson and Nate McLouth all chime in with five or more runs added via these base running events. Bengie Molina, Dioner Navarro, Prince Fielder, Casey Kotchman and Mike Lowell were all five or more runs subtracted.

The spread from best (Kinsler/Reyes) to worst (Molina) was a whopping 13.5 runs. It’s just another example of stuff that doesn’t really show up in the box score or even among most analysts discussions, but is important to consider nonetheless.

Frank Thomas turns 41 years old on May 27, has not played over 27 games in the field since 2003, and is coming off of a poor 2008 season that, though marred with injuries, resulted in a league average .328 wOBA. Perhaps the average offensive output, deemed abysmal by many, speaks more for the career of Thomas than the season itself; you’re probably in good baseball shape when a .328 wOBA is considered poor compared to the .363-.421 range posted over the previous six seasons. Thomas is a sure-fire Hall of Fame player, with a .301/.419/.555 line, a .416 wOBA, and 521 home runs. Heck, with a bit more luck on the injury front, Thomas could be in line to approach the Willie Mays mark this season. He could hang up his cleats right now and walk away as one of the best hitters we have seen in a while.

But Frank Thomas does not want to retire. Instead, Frank has seemingly adopted the age-old spring training cliche that he is in great shape. In fact, Thomas recently stated he feels capable of mashing 35-40 home runs, and is surprised that nobody has made any type of bid for his services. With all of the corner outfielders and potential designated hitters on the market this offseason, Thomas became an afterthought, perhaps not even a worst case scenario. Good reasoning exists behind his lack of appeal, though, as Thomas has played 140+ games just three times in the last eight seasons. Combine that with the attributes mentioned at the very beginning of this post and it is not hard to see why teams are not exactly jumping to sign the former MVP.

Thomas’s balls-in-play rates last season were not too far off of his 2006 and 2007 marks, when he hit well enough to post wOBAs of .391 and .372 while launching a total of 65 dingers. His .282 BABIP actually surpassed the .251 mark produced in 2006, when he had a monster season. He sustained a solid BB-rate and didn’t see too drastic a jump in his K-rate either. So what happened? For one, Frank’s 7.9% HR/FB not only fell below the league average, but was essentially cut in half from the 15% HR/FB averaged since 2002. On top of that, his power output vanished. Since 2005, Thomas has seen his ISO decline from .371 to .275 to .203 to just .134.

If the nagging quad injury really hurt The Big Hurt’s production, and he checks out physically, why aren’t more teams calling? After all, without even factoring in a rebound from injury, Thomas still projects to be worth around +1.3 wins. Maybe, like Ray Durham, Thomas does not want to play for a bargain-bin salary or a non-guaranteed contract. Maybe he feels that with a fully healed quad, his production would more closely resemble the +2.4 wins amassed in 2007 or even the +3.3 wins supplied to the Athletics in 2006. The big elephant in the room of course is that he doesn’t check out physically.

Then again, if he were willing to accept a non-guaranteed contract or performance based deal, this wouldn’t be an issue. Just like the Eric Gagne deal, if Thomas makes the team he earns some money, and if he produces up to the standards he holds himself to, he would make even more. Frank Thomas is nowhere near as bad as he looked in 2008, with +0.2 win production, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking he is going to rebound into a +4-win player again. He could still help a team but it would have to be on their terms. We’ll have to wait and see if Thomas is too proud to play that way.

He did so back in 2006 to prove he could still hit, but who knows if he really wants to do that again. Maybe he feels that the 2006 and 2007 seasons suffice as showing what he can do and the 2008 campaign should obviously be considered a blip on the radar. This clearly is not obvious to GMs and I would venture a guess that Thomas doesn’t sign prior to Opening Day. No matter what, he has still put together one heck of a career.