Ken Davidoff penned a piece today looking at potential landing spots for Hideki Matsui. He’s an interesting case given the depressed market for designated hitters last off-season, so let’s look at his potential value.

Matsui’s wOBA is .379 this year, which ranks as his third best offensive season since arriving Stateside.. His BABIP is only .260 – last three years: .320/.392/.312 – and his walk rate is relatively static. His home run per fly ball rate, however, is a career high 18%. This is only challenged by his 2004 rate of 16%, and over the last three seasons his high is 12.8%. That inflation explains his .262 ISO, another career high. He’s 35-years-old and it’s not often you see players flip the power switch this late in their careers which should raise some caution flags on his ability to repeat such an outburst.

Matsui hasn’t played an inning of outfield this season. He also assumed the DH role most of the time for the Yankees last season and his last real exposure to the grass was in 2007 when he posted a -7.6 UZR. Matsui is probably a -10 < x < -15 defender in a corner outfield spot over a full season which all but limits him to DH work. Combining his limited defensive ability with a season that smells of fluke doesn’t make for an attractive package. Further, Matsui has dealt with some injury issues over the past few years. Knee swelling and eventually draining has been a reappearing issue since Matsui underwent left knee surgery in late 2008. Matsui offers it all: durability concerns, fielding issues, and a luck inflated offensive season? As last off-season showed us, teams don’t seem overly willing to pay the big bucks for players with his skill set anymore. He figures to average around 2 WAR per season over the last three years when 2009 comes to a wrap, and while that’s valuable, it’s hard to argue that it’s Matsui’s true talent level or expected contribution level heading forward. A few teams should be interested in Matsui, but there’s no reason he should earn anything close to his annual rates with the Yankees.

I have to start this post off by admitting that I am un-apologetically one of the biggest Eric Young Jr. fans around, who has been lobbying for his presence amongst the Rockies’ best prospects for the past two seasons. The second baseman finally received his big-league shot and played in his first MLB game last night against the Los Angeles Dodgers in a key late season match-up. Young Jr. went 1-for-4 with a single. He was also caught attempting to steal a base.

The switch-hitter has purple and grey in his veins. Young Jr.’s dad, Eric Young Sr., was the Rockies’ everyday second baseman during the club’s inaugural season in 1993 (Junior was 8) and he spent five seasons with the organization. Young Jr. was appropriately selected by the Rockies in the 30th round of the 2003 draft out of a New Jersey community college.

Despite his modest draft selection (He was later signed in 2004 as a draft-and-follow), Young Jr. hit well in professional baseball right away. After batting .264 in his debut season, which included only 87 at-bats, Young Jr.’s average never dipped below .290 again in five seasons. He also showed a respectable approach at the plate with solid walk and strikeout rates. Although he possesses little power, Young Jr. – like his dad – builds his game around his speed. With a career high 87 steals in 2006, the youngster has 303 steals in his six-year minor-league career.

This season in triple-A, Young Jr. stole 58 bases in 72 attempts, while also posting an offensive line of .299/.387/.430 with 10 triples in 472 at-bats. Defensively, Young Jr. is considered an average-at-best second baseman and he has been seeing increased time in the outfield – which is where he made his MLB debut. With his pre-September promotion to Colorado, he’ll be eligible for the playoffs, where his base running could be extremely valuable as a late-game pinch runner.

Looking ahead to 2010, Young Jr. has a crowded second base and outfield picture to contend with. However, he possesses a skill that few Rockies do: Speed. If the organization is smart, it will find a way to make room for the speedster, who could combine with fellow rookie Dexter Fowler (26 steals) to provide a real spark at the top of the order.

Every year a number of relievers come, seemingly, out of no where to save a tons of games or post tiny ERAs. This year’s prime example is David Aardsma. He has kicked around for a couple of years throwing a really hard fastball, striking out a fair number of guys, but walking to many. This year he has all but given up throwing anything but his fastball, and is getting even more strikeouts with, slightly, fewer walks.

Aardsma throws his fastball 87% of the time (and 92% of the time to lefties). Even so it is a wildly successful pitch, saving more runs than any reliever’s fastball and more than all but ten starters’. It is the archetype four-seam fastball, very fast and lots of ‘rise’.

With four-seam fastballs there is a general relationship in which the higher in the zone pitch is the greater the whiff rate (the probability the batter misses if he swings) and the lower the ground ball rate. So a pitcher who throws his fastball up in the zone will, generally, have more whiffs, and thus strikeouts, and fewer grounders. Vice versa for a pitcher who throws his fastballs down in the zone. Aardsma is firmly on the whiff-side of this tradeoff, and even more so this year.

As a result he has a tiny 23% GB rate, but his fastball has one of the highest whiff rates in the game and he strikes out a ton of batters with just the fastball.

An even bigger change has been has been the horizontal location of his fastball. Here is a histogram of the horizontal location of his fastball to LHBs in 2009, in 2007 and 2008 and for the league average four-seam fastball to left-handed batters. Zero is the center of the plate, with -1 and 1 the horizontal edges of the strike zone. LHBs stand to the right of the plate in the positive numbers.

He was surprisingly close to average before this year, but now is much better at locating the pitch on the outer half, and even the outer fourth of the place. He is in the zone more and never misses inside. This cuts down on his walks and keeps the ball away, where most hitters have less power.

Aardsma fully embraces the ‘throw a very hard fastball up in the zone and hope the batter swings and misses’ ethos. This year he has embraced it further, throwing more fastballs higher up in the zone, and also seems to have better horizontal command. It has worked out well for him and for the Mariners.

I watched Brett Anderson carve up the Mariner offense (granted, one missing both Ichiro and Adrian Beltre) last night and was highly impressed, as is getting to be routine. If you watch this 21-year-old throw and don’t come away thinking that the A’s have found their future ace, you’re in the minority. Anderson is opening eyes every time he takes the hill.

The interesting thing about last night, though, is how much better his stuff was than the first time I saw him pitch this year. On April 10th, he gave up five runs in seven innings against the Mariners, only notching two strikeouts, while his fastball topped out at 93 and his breaking ball was in the low-80s. It was his major league debut, but the stuff was less than what had been reported in the minors.

Last night, it was better than I had heard coming into the year. Up to 97 with the fastball and a mid-80s hard breaking ball that no one could touch made him look utterly dominating. It wasn’t a one night fluke, either – here’s Anderson’s velocity chart for the season.

Whether the reason, Anderson didn’t leave spring training with his best stuff. His first six starts, he managed just 31 innings, gave up 28 runs, walked 10, and struck out 15. The stuff was just okay, the command wasn’t great, and he just didn’t look like a premier young pitcher.

Then, towards the end of May, the stuff shot up. Instead of averaging 90-91 with the fastball, he was suddenly at 93-94, topping out in the high-90s, and the slider went from 82 to 85. The results have been dramatically different since then:

18 starts, 109 innings, 49 runs, 29 walks, 102 strikeouts, 12 HR, 3.61 FIP.

That’s an impressive run for any pitcher, much less a 21-year-old rookie who had all of six starts at Double-A coming into the season. And, with the stuff taking a significant step forward, there’s a real reason for the improvement. His overall season line might not blow you away, but for the last three months, Anderson has been one of the best pitchers in baseball.

I have a feeling we’re going to be saying that about him for a long, long time. This kid is good.

Brad Lidge, fireman turned arsonist. Lidge was a perfect 48-for-48 in save opportunities last season for the World Champs, including the playoffs. This year has been a whole other story, as Lidge blew his 9th save yesterday against the Phillies lowly in-state rival the Pirates in true swamp gas fashion.

There’s a Jekyl and Hyde thing happening here with Lidge.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a season of grand performances, Zack Greinke added one more to the portfolio with his outing last night. The line: 8 innings pitched, 5 hits allowed, 1 home run, 1 walk, and 15 strikeouts; with 11 swinging strikes coming on 117 pitches for a modest 9.4% whiffs.

It may not even be Grienke’s best performance of the season, as ridiculous as that sounds. if you use Bill James’ Game Score as a reasonable summarizing metric, then the start registers as a 78, good for the fifth best start on the year. Yes, fifth best. How many pitchers are capable of striking out 15 and walking one, and then having that be their fifth best start of their career, don’t even think about seasonal ranks.

I don’t want to say Greinke’s flown under the radar for the past month, but, our last post on him was in early July and not much since. He still possesses a 2.45 FIP, a 2.93 tRA, and only a 11-8 record. Entering last night the Royals were averaging 3.66 runs of support per Greinke start and had lost eight of the last nine games started by Greinke, including defeats by the scores of 4-2, 1-0, 2-0, 4-2, and 3-1.

Run support is like oxygen for starting pitchers; you don’t realize you need some until you have none. In this case, Greinke was gasping while taking hacks that would make Miguel Olivo blush in order to get a few runs on the board. The Royals obliged last night and planted him four by the fourth.

Justin Verlander, Jon Lester, Roy Halladay, and Felix Hernandez are having fine seasons, but Greinke is still the class of the American League when separated from his putrid supporting cast. Enjoy his last few starts folks, this is one special season.

Mere hours after R.J. wrote about the possibility of Johan Santana headed for minor surgery, it was confirmed by the New York Mets that he would. The surgery is to remove bone chips from Santana’s left elbow and will end his 2009 season, but should have him ready for 2010 Spring Training according to the Mets.

Johan’s contract with the Mets guaranteed him $137.5 million over six years (with $5 million per year deferred reducing its value by about $2 million in present day terms) with a team (with incentives that make it a player) option for a seventh year at an additional $19.5 million.

One third of the way through the locked in portions of the contract and the Mets have paid out roughly $35 million in present day money and received back $34.7 in value, a shockingly on the nose figure. The problem for the Mets are:

A) Johan is already 30
B) He is now a worse re-injury risk
C) His contract payments escalate

In essence, since the Mets paid and Johan played even amounts so far, it can be viewed as the Mets inking to Santana to a four-year, $90.5 million deal this winter. How would that deal rank? A lot of that depends on how the projection systems like Santana for 2010 which we do not know yet, but can make an educated guess at.

Johan’s 2009 season has been quite similar to his 2008. The strikeouts are down a hair, the walks up a hair, but combined they amount to just a 0.1 change in ratio from 3.27 K/BB last year to 3.17 this year. The ground balls fell off and as a result, the home runs have risen. Those three indicators would suggest a higher predicted for 2010 than he received in 2009, which came out to about a 3.50 average FIP. Let us peg him for a 3.60 FIP for now (this is probably being generous to Santana).

The other major expectation will be innings pitched. Coming off an injury and just 166.2 innings pitched, the projections are not going to be up in the 200-220 innings pitched range as they were for this season. 185 innings seems a decent estimate to me, though again perhaps a touch favorable to Santana.

185 innings of 3.60 FIP comes out to about 4.25 wins, a figure that would be worth a little under $20 million per year in today’s financial climate. For the four years left on Johan’s deal, we would be expecting him to sign for something between $70 and $75 million.

Carson wrote a little about Jeremy Hellickson earlier today, but I wanted to write a little more on the guy I’ve affectionately nicknamed Narwhal – in large part due to the mystique surrounding his numbers and unappreciated talent.

Hellickson has complete 35 innings and a third in Triple-A and his numbers are spectacular; 39 strikeouts, 12 walks, and a 3.45 FIP. Hellickson’s stuff has always been talked about in a conservative manner. His command has been questioned – note: his command, as in placement within the zone, not actually throwing strikes – and while his fastball goes over 90 miles per hour and seems to have decent movement, nobody really talks about him as having good or great stuff.

Which is why, through 597 pitches, a 13.9% swinging strike rate (as provided by StatCorner) seems to shatter everything we thought we knew about Hellickson. The larger the sample size amounts, the more and more it appears that Hellickson has something going on that causes bats to go missing. Whether it be deception, movement better than advertised, or Triple-A batters just swing and miss at everything.

Luckily we can test the last part by looking at some other International League starting pitchers and their whiff rate. The minimum xOuts/PA to qualify is 200 as we look at the top 10:

Clay Buchholz (13.3%)
Lucas French (11.5%)
Ben Jukich (11.2%)
Chris Tillman (11%)
Jake Arrieta (11%)
Carlos Carrasco (10.8%)
Tom Gorzelanny (10.8%)
Chris Lambert (10.6%)
Daniel McCutchen (10.4%)
Homer Bailey (10.4%)

That’s sort of like the who’s who of young pitching prospects in the IL and yet Hellickson tops all of them by a decent shake. I’m not saying he’s deserving of being proclaimed the best IL pitcher or on the same level as Buchholz or Tillman, but he’s seemingly flew under the radar despite being solid at every stop along the way.

It might be time to embrace the Narwhal.

The Red Sox acquired Billy Wagner from the Mets today after a few days of drama surrounding the waiver claim, ranging from Wagner and Papelbon sparring over Twitter (is anyone surprised, with these two involved?), Wagner apparently invoking his no-trade clause to block the deal, and finally his “change of heart” that allowed the trade to be completed. The deal was certainly complicated, and came down to the last few minutes before the 48-hour window expired for everyone to get on the same page.

However, the most curious part of the negotiations center the team’s right to exercise his 2010 option, worth $8 million. Wagner apparently demanded that the Red Sox guarantee they would not pick up the option, making him a free agent this winter. However, he did not get the same assurance that they would not offer arbitration, and as a Type A free agent, Boston will have some incentive to do so.

By turning down his option and then offering arbitration, the Red Sox get the best of both worlds. If he accepts, they have him for 2010 at a price that should be in the same ballpark as his 2010 option was worth – maybe a bit more, but not outrageously so. If he declines and signs with another team, they’ll get two compensatory draft picks, which is the outcome you have to believe they’re hoping for.

But if Wagner thinks he’s going to hit free agency with Type A status hanging over his head, after just a month of pitching in the big leagues, and land a significant contract as a 38-year-old, he’s kinda crazy. Juan Cruz just had to suffer through a miserable off-season of avoidance as teams decided that relief pitchers weren’t worth both the loss of a pick and a big contract, and he finally ended up taking a two year, $6 million deal with the Royals as a last resort. And he wasn’t coming off arm surgery, nearly 40 years old, and known as a guy who causes issues with other players.

If the Red Sox offer arbitration and Wagner declines in order to become a free agent, he’s unlikely to get anything close to what he feels is fair market value for his services. Teams might be willing to give the pick if he’ll sign for peanuts, but I can’t imagine a 1 year, $2 or $3 million deal is what he’s looking forward to at the moment.

The only way this works out for Wagner is if the Red Sox decide not to offer him arbitration. Of course, if he pitches well down the stretch, that doesn’t seem likely, so the scenarios that involve them not tendering an arbitration offer also include Wagner not pitching well in September, and that isn’t likely to lead to a big payday for him either.

All in all, it seems like Wagner should have been asking the Red Sox to guarantee his option for 2010, exactly the opposite of the thing he negotiated. It was the only way he was going to get a guaranteed paycheck for 2010. Now, he’s going to have to hope for a pretty interesting set of circumstances to occur – he has to pitch well enough to re-establish his value to other clubs but not well enough for Boston to risk the chance that he could come back as a highly paid set-up guy for one year. I’m not sure I see too many ways that happens.

The day after Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS between the Red Sox and Yankees, I talked briefly, mournfully with my friend Leo, another Son of the New England States. While I had watched the game in a sports bar in Missoula, MT (where I was accidentally pursuing a bachelor’s degree*), Leo, who lived in New York, had acquired a ticket and gone to the game alone. Which, that means he had witnessed firsthand Aaron Boone’s game-ending dongpiece off Tim Wakefield, had found himself seconds later amidst a repulsive and jubilant (and considerably less homer-friendly) Yankee Stadium, and had made his way home on a subway car populated almost entirely by spiritually verklempt Red Sox fans.

*At the University, not the bar.

The thing Leo said the next day that has always stuck with me was something like, “I keep betting on the Red Sox, Carson, not with money but with my emotional well-being.” He discussed the degree to which, instead of his personal relationships, his career prospects — anything, in fact, that would normally inform a person’s inner life — he allowed the fate of the Red Sox to dictate almost entirely his emotional highs and lows.

Leo’s was a good assessment of how I, too, had approached my baseball fandom — less as an innocent pastime and more as a psychological instrument.

This is not all that shocking: many young men, particularly those of an analytic bent, view emotion as inefficient. Other People — regarded as “hell” by a certain Nobel-winning Frenchman — are notoriously unreliable. The prospect of allowing chance (i.e. Boston’s prospects) to inform one’s mood is quite rational, really.

There was only one flaw to this thinking. Apart from the fact that, through 2003, Boston had very often fielded interesting teams — notably, the Pedro-led teams of the late-90s and, before that, any of the teams which featured Randy Kutcher’s moustache — almost none of them were particularly well-constructed. Wunderkind Theo Epstein wasn’t hired until after the 2002 season and, therefore, was unable to fully assert his Genius upon the organization in 2003. As a result, they (i.e. the Red Sox anytime from 1979 – 2003) were probably not a great bet upon which to stake one’s personal welfare. The pay out would be great, certainly, if and when it came, but the odds of great success were low.

Two things have changed since then.

First is that the Red Sox won the World Series. Twice, in case you don’t remember. Theo Epstein and Friends got their fingerprints all up on the 2004 permutation of the team. The first Championship, in particular, did a lot to release Yours Truly from the bonds of single-team allegiance.

Second is that, in the meantime, I’ve read a great deal of the sabermetric canon. That includes books like Moneyball and BP’s Mind Game and Tom Tango’s The Book and then websites like the present one and BP and Hardball Times, and, retroactively, seminal works on baseball by Sabermetric Baby Daddy Bill James and John Thorn and Pete Palmer and Earnshaw Cook. Such reading changes the Baseballing Enthusiast — for the better, I’d argue vehemently. Where once randomness reigned supreme for Yours Truly, now randomness only reigns like 95%. Either way, I’m watching the game differently now, in a manner less dependent on the personnel decisions of a select few in Boston’s front office and more upon those players who profile well by the new metrics.

Greg Schimmel, keeper of the excellent Cape Cod League Blog, sums up this mindset in his website’s tagline: “Watching the players first and the games second.” While I’m sure that the Average Reader has ties of some sort to an MLB club — it’s very hard to become a fan otherwise — I’ll guess that you view yourself as watching the game similarly to Schimmel. Part of this is almost definitely the influence of fantasy baseball, which makes GMs of all of us, and which, in this author’s opinion, is basically the best thing ever to happen in society. The other part is the knowledge that baseball management is sometimes full of giant morons. Andrew Friedman & Co have done a lot to bring esteem back to that community, but so long as Dayton Moore has a job, a certain demographic of Baseballing Enthusiasts will always feel (and perhaps correctly so) that they could’ve done better (or at least not traded for Yuni Betancourt).

Despite these changes, I still find myself placing emotional wagers all the time; they’re just of a different variety. Where I once submitted to the fate of the Red Sox (read: terrifically irresponsible), I’m now more careful with my affections. In particular, I’ve switched the nature of my allegiances from a single team (Boston) to a variety of players in a variety of organizations. I allude to this at some level in my most recent dispatch from the front lines of baseball commentary, in which I attempt to classify the heroes of the sabermetric community.

The payoff from following this more obscure class of player is self-evident. Commenter “Tim” describes it as finding a “diamond in the rough.” It’s the sporting equivalent of bringing in a faded piece of cloth to the experts of Antiques Road Show. Sure, it might just be an old handkerchief, but maybe, just maybe, Robespierre used said handkerchief to wipe the blood of French noblemen from his brow.

Of the five types of player to which the Sabermetric Enthusiast forms his allegiances the one with the most potential for joy is the youngish minor leaguer or recent call-up. Youth, as the Greeks figured out a long time ago, is seductive. And even if they (i.e. the Greeks’) celebrated youth in ways that we Moderns consider both “morally deprave” and also “illegal,” they (i.e. still the Greeks) were at least on the right track.

I’ve made it a habit to choose a handful of young players at any one time and monitor their progress with something like a personal stake. This less resembles the gamble about which my friend Leo spoke in re that 2003 incarnation of the Sox and more like a low-risk investment in which one “diversifies his portfolio”*. One can pick a couple-few players who he finds appealing for whatever reason and then track their development through the various levels. If said prospects don’t make it, big whoop. In the event that one of them makes the Show, he (i.e. the fan in question) has earned the right to say “I told you so” — i.e. one of the very best feelings in the world.

*Whatever that means.

Marc Hulet’s coverage of the minors here at FanGraphs is an invaluable resource for the practice of prospect hunting. Minor League Splits owner-operator Jeff Sackmann does sweet work both at that website and THT (even if he’s made it his personal mission to report only on Felix Cespedes for the moment). Baseball America‘s reporting on prospects is also excellent, if slightly more traditional. First Inning’s good, and there are a whole bunch others, too, which I’m sure I’m omitting.

Below is a list of the players I’m currently tracking, my current “portfolio.” None of them are sure-fire stars, which I think is necessary ingredient to such a list. There has to be some doubt to the prospect’s chances, otherwise the return on the investment is sullied.

1. Alexander Torres, LHP, Los Angeles Angels (Double-A Arkansas)
I saw Torres pitch in early July for Rancho Cucamonga and was duly impressed by his stuff, which features, among other things, a two-seamer that helped him produce a GB% of 58.9% in 122 IP this season in the high Class A California League. Torres also posted a park- and luck- adjusted 9.12 K/9 there. Baseball America only ranked him 24th in their pre-season Prospect Handbook, so pulling for him smacks very little of front-running — a.k.a. the enemy of the True Statnerd. A recent promotion to Double-A Arkansas hasn’t been entirely kind to Torres, but he’s only 21 years old and sports a record of success.

2. Chris Heisey, OF, Cincinnati (Triple-A Louisville)
Heisey has steadily received more recognition as he’s continued to perform through the various levels. It was, in fact, a feature about him in Baseball America that first called my attention to him. Regardless of his recent press, however, the fact remains that Heisey was a 17th-round pick from a college most notable for its tradition of throwing newly engaged students into the nearby Yellow Breeches Creek. Heisey has a skill set faintly reminiscent of Curtis Granderson at the same age: a decent mix of speed, power, plate discipline, and Can-Do Spirit, but without any real hype to surround them. He posted a park- and luck-adjusted line of .315/.398/.538 in 314 PA at Double-A Carolina this season with as many walks as strikeouts. Despite only drawing 12 BB in PA at Triple-A Louisville, he’s hitting well there, too.

3. Any Young Rays Pitcher (and also Orioles ones, too)
I acknowledge this is cheating a bit, but allow me to explain. There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed whereby, if I enter a bar, say, or crowded room of any description and notice one or two attractive ladies, I’m more likely to consider all the other ladies in said space more attractive. Because it feels good to do so, I’m gonna go ahead and call this the Transitional Property of Hotitude. A similar Property occurs among baseball organizations. Recognizing that a team has one or two fantasy-inducing prospects, the observer becomes enthused by other prospects who might go unnoticed were they playing, for example, somewhere in the Houston minor leagues. Tampa and Baltimore currently fit this category. Matthew Moore (born in 1989!!!) has posted an adjusted line of 13.00 K/9, 5.17 BB/9, 47.5% GB% at low Class A Bowling Green, while Jeremy Hellickson (born in 1987!!!) has put up a 10.43 K/9, 3.21 BB/9, and 36.6% GB% at Triple-A Durham. Meanwhile, fellow Bull Wade Davis and other farmhands David Newmann and Darin Downs bask in their reflected glow.

The same is true in Baltimore, where Jake Arrieta, Brandon Erbe, and Zach Britton appear poised to follow Chris Tillman and Brian Matusz to the Bigs.

4. Val Pascucci, Inert Masher, San Diego Padres (Triple-A Portland)
Yes, he’s 30 years old and, yes, he’s incredibly limited defensively, but Pascucci has the sweetest name in the business, a good minor league track record, and only 74 major league plate appearances. My man on the scene Danny Woytek sings his praises at Portland Sportsman.

5. Cole Gillespie, OF, Arizona Diamondbacks (Triple-A Reno)
Gillespie has become considerably more interesting since his move to the Arizona organization in the trade that sent Felipe Lopez to Beer City. While Gillespie had cheap-ish young talent ahead of him in Milwaukee in the form of Ryan Braun and Corey Hart, Arizona’s outfield situation is considerably less certain. Furthermore, Gillespie has gone ahead and murdered the ball since his arrival in the Biggest Little City, posting an adjusted line of .313/.431/.515 in 123 PA, with 21 BB versus only 22 K. If he can end up playing a passable center field, at which position he’s played a little in Reno, he could be a valuable major leaguer.

Thanks to Minor League Splits for adjusted minor league stats.