That loud collective groan you heard over the weekend was the sound of Cub fans reacting to one of their favorite players getting traded to their hated division rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals. When Mark DeRosa was moved to the Cleveland Indians for a trio of C grade pitchers, it was a salary clearing move to enable the Cubs to sign Milton Bradley, who has predictably been unable to stay in the lineup, and over the weekend was called a piece of excrement (to keep it PG) by his manager for his “shenanigans”. Before trading DeRosa, the Cubs signed Aaron Miles, lord of the .228 wOBA. Good times in Cub Town.

The Cardinals gave up one pitcher that is worth more than the three the Indians traded to obtain DeRosa’s services by trading Chris Perez, who has been regarded by most prospect watchers as a top 100 talent. He was all but anointed to be the St. Louis closer headed into the season, but wasn’t quite able to nail down the job. Depending on how you view Perez is how you evaluate this trade, and of course there is the other shoe still yet to drop. Perez is a fastball/slider reliever who can brings the heat at an average of 94 MPH. To give you an idea of Perez’s “stuff”, here’s his movement chart from 5/18/09.

With two above average offerings, the problem with Perez has never been his repertoire, but rather his command. In 113.1 innings pitched throughout the minors, Perez struck out 12 batters per nine innings, but walked 6 per nine. In the 65.1 big league innings, he’s struck out 10 batters per nine but walked 5.2 per nine and has a FIP of 4.38. It’s that lack of command that has prevented him from ascending into the high leverage innings, and he lost his manager’s trust this year, with an average leverage index of a .84, compared with an LI of 1.34 the previous season.

If the Indians can coax Perez into throwing more strikes, they’ll have a good, cheap high-leverage reliever under team control for the next five years, making this deal a real win. If that doesn’t happen, he’s basically another Kyle Farnsworth, which still has some value, but isn’t exactly a rare commodity.

Mark DeRosa is a La Russa guy if there ever was one, in that he’s a veteran who can play a bunch of different positions, and the good news for Cardinal fans is he can actually hit a little bit. With Rick Ankiel, Ryan Ludwick and Chris Duncan slumping at the same time and Troy Glaus still on the shelf, the Cardinals in sore need of some run production. DeRosa is not a world-beater, but is projected to hit for a .348 wOBA the rest of the season, and he will probably be playing third base more often than not. The Cardinals are getting a .296 wOBA from the position, so they’ll gladly take it.

DeRosa’s not a plus defender at 3B by any stretch (-8 UZR per 150 games career), but neither was Joe Thurston. The last three seasons DeRosa’s been near a 3 win player or better, and should give the Cardinals about ~1-1.5 WAR the rest of the way. In a division in which the cellar-dwelling Pirates are just five games out, that could mean a world of difference for the Cardinals.

The Cardinals may have paid a stiffer price than they’d like by giving up their “future closer” for a half a season’s rental, but chances are Perez’s command never quite comes around, and they still would have been driven to the market once Ryan Franklin’s magic closer beard gets shaved off, or when he becomes a free agent in 2010, whichever comes first. I have to also think this trade was made not to just get DeRosa, but to keep him away from Milwaukee and Chicago, who also were expressing an interest.

I wrote about the Nationals defensive issues two weeks ago, and now they’ve gone and puzzled me even more.

Over the weekend reports suggested the Nationals are interested in Pirates outfielder Nyjer Morgan, the best despite an iffy bat has statistically the best defender in baseball . Apparently the Nationals were hoping to swap out wild child Lastings Milledge for Morgan in a good ol’ fashion challenge trade. In terms of assets, Morgan makes sense for the Nationals. He’s a bit older than you would expect (28) for the reasonably newcomer but has an excellent handle on defense and a below average bat that won’t sink a team.

What confuses me, is the Nationals then dealt Ryan Langerhans to the Mariners for Mike Morse. Langerhans is 29-years-old, a fantastic defender, and Langerhans has always hit better in the minors than Morgan. His weak 2007 was mostly due to bad luck on balls in play. Even if you argue Langerhans is slightly worse on defense, he closes the gap on offense and availability, since, you know, he’s already in the Nationals system.

While Milledge has a laundry list of past transgressions, it’s hard to believe the Nationals value him approximately the same as they value Morse. Milledge is a 24-year-old outfielder with two seasons of league-average hitting. Morse is 27, has no real defensive position and in his only real exposure to the majors hit about as well as Milledge.

So if the Nationals are interested in essentially trading Milledge and Langerhans for Morgan and Morse they gain nothing. The desire to dump Milledge’s baggage is understandable, but considering their 40-man roster already contains eight non-Milledge outfielders, it seems like they could stand to reshuffle assets to other positions than the outfield.

As for the Mariners, they get their Endy Chavez replacement for a spare part. Maybe the Mariners outfield defense will remain the best in the league after all.

In the past four years, Yorman Bazardo has played for four organizations (Florida, Seattle, Detroit and how Houston), being traded twice, designated for assignment twice and outright released once. Seems strange for a guy with a career ERA of 4.61 in Triple-A and who is just 24 years old, so what might be contributing to Bazardo’s seeming unattractiveness as a prospect?

First, because I like the hard evidence better, let us take a quick tour through his numbers. Bazardo does a good job of missing bats but has also had some issues finding the zone. His reduction in pitches outside the zone is a big reason why he is seeing the level of success this season in Triple-A for Houston that he is. Bazardo has also been a prolific groundballer, holding above the 50% mark as a starter. Based strictly on missing bats, finding the zone and keeping the ball on the ground, you would think Bazardo would rank as an above average Major League starter right now.

The problem has been turning those missed bats into strikeouts. That did not happen in 2008 and that torpedoed Bazardo’s stay with Detroit. Still, that usually corrects itself, as it has so far in 2009, so you would think that giving up on Bazardo so early still seems odd.

Here is where we get into the less clear issues. For one, there is speculation that Bazardo is not actually 24. If true, that would certainly explain teams being more willing to cut ties with him. Another issue might be his attitude, rumors of markup issues dogged him in the past. I could only speculate, and I won’t, on the severity of them if they were, in fact, present. Maybe the scouts see something that limits his ceiling. Even if all three of these were true, it still strikes me as odd that so many teams have passed him on in such inglorious fashions.

As Dave noted earlier this afternoon, several teams are currently trying to improve their starting pitching, presently plugging holes either internally or via stopgap veterans. Two of the bigger names on the market, Erik Bedard and Jake Peavy, have battled health issues all season, vastly reducing their perceived value in the market, especially given the haul of prospects required to entice their respective employers. Another name tossed around a bit, Brandon Webb, is out for the season and potentially half of the 2010 campaign.

Rumors regarding Roy Oswalt have been floated with increased regularity as well, but his no-trade clause combined with a very lucrative contract and Drayton McClane’s unwillingness to realize the current incarnation of his franchise is doomed, makes the Astros ace hard to move. The other popular trade candidates are Jarrod Washburn, Paul Maholm, Zach Duke, Jason Marquis, and potentially, Aaron Harang.

All of this brings us to Cliff Lee, currently a better pitcher than any of the guys mentioned above, who also has a pretty favorable contract relative to his contributions. Lee makes $5.75 mil this season with an $8 mil option for next season. His 2010 salary will actually be $9 mil on the option based on the incentive stipulating a $1 mil raise should he win the Cy Young Award in either 2008 or 2009. Seeing as he won the award last year, the incentive has kicked in.

With the Indians tanking and Lee’s value likely higher than it ever will be, it makes sense for Shapiro to kick the tires on a potential deal netting him prospects, but for some reason, more rumors and trade talks have involved guys like Marquis, who is actually making almost double Lee’s salary this year, and is a free agent at the end of the season with no option on which to hang his head. I am honestly perplexed as to why Lee has not attracted more attention; or if he has, why we have not heard about it yet. It is almost as if teams are still waiting for the massive regression to occur, when we now have a year and a half of awesomeness from the Indians lefty proving his worth.

Since the beginning of last season, Lee has thrown 334.1 innings over 47 starts, with a 2.67 ERA almost matched by an equally low FIP, a 1.17 WHIP, a sub-2.0 walk rate, and a 4.2 K/BB ratio. The only thing missing is the reputation that usually accompanies the name of a pitcher with numbers like that over an extended period of time. It is time to start realizing that Cliff Lee has become a very good pitcher, not a back of the rotation upgrade. If any of the Phillies, Brewers or Rangers is serious about solidifying their rotation by trading a young stud prospect, they should start amping up efforts to acquire Lee. He might not win the Cy Young Award again, but given his contract and current established level of performance, as well as the lack of health issues, no other pitcher being discussed as a trade target would be a more significant upgrade.

The Orioles have a lot of good young pitchers. David Hernandez made his major league debut earlier this season, and top prospects Chris Tillman and Brian Matusz aren’t too terribly far behind. Toss in Jake Arrieta and Brandon Erbe, and Baltimore has as good a crop of pitching prospects as any organization in baseball.

But, for all the big time velocity arms that are on their way to Camden Yards, Brad Bergesen and his 89 MPH fastball has snuck into the team photo and is threatening to stick around. I’m going to go so far as to say he’s the best pitcher that most people have never heard of.

Bergesen is the classic kind of pitching prospect that slips through the cracks. A fourth round pick back in 2004, he worked his way through the minors with average stuff and no out pitch, leading to rather boring looking strikeout numbers, which is the main way pitching prospects get recognized. His minor league K/9, by year/level:

2005: Short-Season A: 6.8
2006: Low-A: 5.1
2007: Low-A: 7.0, High-A: 5.6
2008: High-A: 7.8, Double-A: 4.4
2009: Triple-A: 7.4, Majors: 4.1

Usually, a pitching prospect isn’t going to get much respect if he’s punching out less than a batter per inning, especially in the lower levels. Pitching to contact in low-A is usually a sign that your stuff isn’t major league quality, and when your fastball tops out at 92, the suspicion is confirmed.

However, the strikeout obsession has led to a lot of missed evaluations on groundball specialists, and Bergesen is proving to be exactly that. Pitch F/x shows that his fastball has similar amounts of vertical movement to some guy named Roy Halladay, so we shouldn’t be terribly surprised that Bergesen has a 54% groundball rate through his first twelve major league starts.

When you can command a sinking fastball and have an off-speed pitch to keep opposite handed hitters at bay, you can be an effective major league starter. Bergesen doesn’t have the same potential as some of the more hyped arms in the Orioles system, but don’t discount his strengths and write him off as a no-stuff guy who belongs in the bullpen. Command, sinker, and change-up – it’s the recipe for a solid back-end starting pitcher.

I love under-the-radar minor-league moves. After years of player-development mediocrity, the Baltimore Orioles organization is slowly redeeming itself. We probably all know about prospects like Matt Wieters, Nolan Reimold, and Chris Tillman, but the organization did not have a ton of depth at the first base position – outside of converted catcher Brandon Snyder, who was recently promoted to triple-A.

This week, the Orioles organization picked up former first-round pick Michael Aubrey, who never reached his potential in Cleveland thanks to a rash of injuries. The left-handed hitting first baseman could offer a complement to the right-handed hitting Snyder. Aubrey also provides some immediate help if the club – likely out of the playoff race – decides to jettison veterans Aubrey Huff (at the end of a three-year deal) and/or Ty Wigginton (in the first year of a two-year deal).

Aubrey has actually been fairly health the last two seasons, having appeared in a career high 114 games last year and 57 games this season. After seven minor league seasons, it’s clear that the first baseman needed a change of scenery, having appeared in just 15 big-league games (all in 2008). This year, Aubrey was hitting .292/.322/.448 with 16 doubles and five homers in 212 at-bats. Despite some injuries at the MLB level to players such as Travis Hafner, Aubrey never received consideration for big-league playing time.

He’ll end his Cleveland career (presumably) with a line of .295/.356/.475 in more than 1,500 at-bats. The 27-year-old former Tulane University star has below-average power for a MLB first baseman, but he can hit for a solid batting average with gap power and he is an above-average fielder. It’s a very nice low-risk, medium-reward move by an organization that is getting better by the season.

As Matthew told us about a couple of weeks ago a new age of baseball data is upon us. Sportsvision and MLBAM released the HITf/x data from April 2009, which gave us information on the speed and angle of the ball of the bat for all batted balls. One thing I was interested in is how the swings of high strikeout high home run hitters differ from those of non-home run low strikeout hitters. Since the data only covers one month we do not have enough data to analyze individual hitters in depth, so here I pooled two groups of hitter to get more data. I choose the most extreme strikeout/home run hitters and none home run/stikeout hitters to highlight the differences.

In the home run group I choose five hitters from last year with greater than 25% HR/FB and greater than 25% K/AB: Ryan Howard, Jack Cust, Adam Dunn, Jim Thome and Chris Davis. The non-home run group was five hitters with less than 5% HR/FB and under 10% K/AB: Placido Polanco, Yuniesky Betancourt, Jason Kendall,Ichiro Suzuki and Ryan Theriot. For each group I plotted the speed of the ball off the bat versus the vertical angle of the ball off the bat, the vertical angle ranges form -90, a ball hit straight into the ground, to 90, a ball popped straight up. With a 0 angle hit being parrallel to the ground.

The non-HR hitters hit balls with a below 0° vertical angle slightly harder than HR hitters, but for balls with above 0° vertical angle HR hitters hit the ball much harder, with the difference increasing as the vertical angle increases. I guess that is not terribly surprising, HR hitters hit balls in the air very hard and non-HR hitters don’t. Balls on the ground they hit about the same.

One interesting difference is the angle where the speed peaks. I think that you can roughly interpret this as the vertical angle of the swing of the bat as it hits the ball. The greatest speed of the ball off the bat happens when the ball is hit squarely and this should result in the ball coming off the bat at the same angle as the swing of the bat. If you believe this interpretation it looks like the angle of the non-HR hitter’s bat as they hit the ball is just above 0°, roughly parrellel to the ground. While for the HR-hitters the angle is around 10 or 15°, a slight upper-cut.

When data from more months are released we will be able to analyze individual hitters in the same manner.

As we head towards the trading deadline, it seems like every contender in baseball is shopping for a starting pitcher, and they’re all complaining that there aren’t any available. The guys who were expected to be available aren’t as of yet, thanks to trips to the disabled list or the fact that they’re teams just aren’t ready to sell yet, so organizations like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Texas are just cooling their heals, trying to patch their holes internally while hoping that the market opens up in July.

Well, I have a suggestion. Rather than sitting around for a month, losing games that will come back to haunt you in September, why not give a kid a shot who deserves one and certainly won’t be getting one in his current organization. That kid is J.D. Martin, currently destroying the International League as the ace of the Syracuse Skychiefs.

Martin was signed as a minor league free agent over the winter by the Nationals to provide some Triple-A pitching depth, and while the Nationals have a lot of problems, they don’t lack for young pitching options in their rotation. It’s unlikely that they’ll be giving Martin a look this summer, and if he’s not traded, he’ll probably spend the whole year in Syracuse.

However, he’s earned a shot at the big leagues. A former first round pick of the Indians in 2001, he’s overcome some arm problems and has begun to show durability that was always a question mark. Despite standing 6’4, Martin is a strike-thrower with a below average fastball who lives off of his change-up. That package works a lot better in the minors than it does in the majors, but extreme users of this skillset can provide useful innings in the big leagues.

Martin is definitely an extreme strike thrower. He’s walked 7 batters in 70 innings so far this year while racking up 52 strikeouts and a league average groundball rate. When you pound the zone that often and aren’t getting torched for copious amounts of fly balls, you’re doing enough things right to get hitters out. This is, essentially, the Minnesota Twins model of pitching. Carlos Silva, Scott Baker, Kevin Slowey, and Nick Blackburn have all been successful in the Twin Cities while throwing below average fastballs over the plate a lot.

Other teams are still skeptical of the command-and-change-up right-handed pitcher, however, and guys like Martin have trouble finding a major league job. While it’s true that there’s almost no star potential in this skillset, and the upside offered is that of a #5 starter who will depend on his defense to help him get through 5 or 6 innings, that kind of pitcher can help a contender in the right situation. Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Texas could all use a guy like Martin right now.

If they’d overlook the lack of big time velocity, they’d find that there are pitchers out there who could be acquired right now and could help patch a hole in their rotation. J.D. Martin deserves a shot in the majors, and with all the teams currently whining about the lack of available pitching, one of them should give Washington a call and give the kid an opportunity.

With now over 300 plate appearances into the season, it’s hard to keep saying it’s just a slump for Jimmy Rollins. To the chagrin of his fantasy owners and fans of the reigning World Champs, the 2007 MVP is currently the worst hitting regular shortstop in baseball. His .255 wOBA translates to -20.5 batting runs. His manager, Charlie Manuel recently said Jimmy needs to “sit and relax”, meaning Rollins is going to ride some pine for a while and try and sort things out.

While I’d like to point to his .218 BABIP and blame bad luck, it is a little more dubious than that. Rollins really is trending downward in all the wrong places.

        BB%     LD%     IFFB%   HR/FB   wFB/C   Spd    UZR/150
2007    6.4     19.9     7.5    10.7     0.58   8.8     6.3
2008    9.4 	24.0    11.8     7.2    -0.12   7.8    15.0
2009    5.1     16.5    14.4     5.4    -1.57   5.7     4.0

What really rears it’s ugly head is that J-Roll is really having some major hang-ups with the heat, to the tune of -1.57 runs per 100 fastballs pitched. He’s also not striking the ball with authority, as evidenced by a plummeting line-drive rate and a hike in infield flies. It could be something as simple as a flat swing, or it could a slowing bat. That’s where scouting comes in, and someone who regularly watches the Phillies can feel free to help me fill in the blanks.

There’s also that drop in his speed score and UZR, which could have other implications, as in maybe he’s lost a step. At 31-years old, I’m hardly saying Rollins is finished, though I think this could be the beginning of the end of Rollins best days. Of course, he also could win another MVP next year and make me look really stupid.

Regardless of whether he’s entering a decline phase or is just in the slump of a lifetime, there has to be a little hand-wringing going on in Philadelphia over their star shortstop.

Cameron Maybin’s stay in the minors could be coming to an end soon. The Marlins’ collective centerfielders aren’t getting the job done, ranking in the bottom third of the league in offensive and defensive contributions. Meanwhile, Maybin has scorched Triple-A in his second month at the level. Overall, Maybin is hitting .323/.404/.452 with a homerun, four stolen bags, and a passable BB/K ratio.

Maybin is only 23-years-old and he’s outhitting the PCL average of .271/.341/.414 by a fair margin. Despite missing a few games after an altercation with an umpire, June has been Maybin’s month. Entering last night Maybin was hitting .377/.472/.492 in the month with a near 1:1 BB/K ratio. A nice contrast from Maybin’s May, in which he hit .270/.333/.413 and struck out twice as much as he walked.

Maybin spent about a month in the majors to begin the year, and according to Cots was just shy of 60 days of service time opening the season. That puts him in the ~90 days range, which means he’s about two and a half months from reaching a full year. With that in mind, the Marlins only have a few more weeks to wait until they can promote Maybin and avoid chipping away on his cost-controlled time.

There’s also the question of whether Maybin is indeed ready for major league action. Given a limited sample size of just under 200 plate appearances, Maybin has hit a pedestrian .242/.309/.345; although, the incumbent group of centerfielders is not doing much better, with a combined line of .272/.321/.443. If Maybin is able to make contact better than 70% of the time, he could do a lot better.

Maybin looks like a special talent, one the Marlins are going to be careful with. Being two games back of the Phillies is going to test the Marlins resolve on whether the extra help for a playoff push is worth the potential long-term cons.