Cliff Lee has taken to the NL well. He is 4-0 in his first four starts:

+-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+
|       | IP |  H |  R | HR | BB |  K |
+-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+
| @ SFN |  9 |  4 |  1 |  0 |  2 |  6 |
|   COL |  7 |  6 |  1 |  0 |  1 |  9 |
| @ CHN |  8 |  6 |  1 |  0 |  3 |  8 |
|   ARI |  9 |  2 |  1 |  0 |  0 | 11 |
+-------+----+----+----+----+----+----+

Two complete games, a 34 to 6 K:BB ratio and no HRs. Cliff Lee has provided more than the Phillies could have hoped, and helped to keep them 5.5 games up in the NL East division.

Lee throws a fastball, cutter, curve, slider and changeup. Over those four games he threw his fastball 2/3 of time to lefties, but only half of the time to righties. He made up for it, for the most part, with more changeups and cutters to righties. Like many pitchers he goes up-and-in with the cutter and down-and-away with the change to opposite handed-batters. Over the past four games he executed that plan to a T, keeping both pitches out of the middle of the plate but still in the zone. Here are the location of the pitches with swinging strikes indicated.

Anytime a pitcher can get some many pitches along the edges of the zone, and induce swings that far out of the zone he is going to be successful.

Of course we do not expect Lee to preform as he has these past four games going forward. Our estimate of his true talent is only marginally changed after a four game span. Still he is a very good pitcher, and a great addition to the Phillies’s playoff push and potential playoff rotation.

After watching Stephen Strasburg break a record for the largest bonus signed through the draft, it’s not a big surprise that Bud Selig is talking tough on mandatory slotting and saying that he’s going to be “very aggressive” in trying to implement a worldwide draft in the next round of CBA negotiations. The commissioner has continually seen the draft as a place to reduce labor costs for the owners, and the MLBPA is more agreeable to bargaining away the rights of non-union members than making concessions that effect players already in the union.

However, I think there’s a better way than a worldwide draft. So, since the commissioner is looking for options other than the current system, here’s my proposal for how to overhaul the acquisition of amateur talent.

This year, teams spent about $160 million on signing their draft picks, pretty much the same as last year. Baseball as a whole spends a little less than $50 million signing international free agents every summer as well, so the current output of bonus money for those two pools of player is around $200 million per season. The revenue sharing agreement currently in place, which transfers money from big market teams to small market teams, shifts more than that around each year.

My proposal would take $200 million from the revenue sharing pool and redistribute it for the purpose of creating budgets for yearly amateur talent acquisition. The draft is eliminated all together, and instead, a worldwide unsigned player auction would be held each summer. College kids, high school kids, international kids – all of them would be eligible for open bidding, where agents could negotiate the best deal they could get for their client with any team that is interested.

Each team would be capped at spending no more than allotted through the revenue sharing pool, which would be based on a two year moving average of their ranking in winning percentage. So, for example, the $200 million could be split up like this.

Average Win% over last two years, descending order.

Teams 1-5: $2 million each
Teams 6-10: $3 million each
Teams 11-15: $5 million each
Teams 16-20: $8 million each
Teams 21-25: $10 million each
Teams 26-30: $12 million each

The top tier teams who have been winning recently would receive small sums of money that would essentially take them out of the running for the premium talents. Given that the teams that finished in the bottom half would likely be willing to bid ~60-70% of their budgets on the top guys available, the Strasburgs of the world would probably command bonuses in the $7 or $8 million range, which the winning teams would not be able to match.

By giving each team a player acquisition budget, you also open up new strategies for teams to pursue. Like the international crop a lot more than the American kids? You could sign practically everyone you want with $10 or $12 million and skip the domestic players entirely. Want to load up on the best kids from your home state? Sign them all if you want. Think your team needs an infusion of pitching immediately? Bid on college arms and college arms only.

Teams would have flexibility to pursue the types of players they wanted, which would allow for more efficient team building strategies. The system would still funnel the best players to the teams that needed help the most, while also simultaneously ensuring that a massive part of the revenue sharing money did not go into the pockets of the owners.

It would be good for the players, giving them a choice over which organization to join and letting market forces dictate their bonus money. It would be good for the owners, giving the system a fixed cost that they’ve been pursuing for years. It would be good for the front offices, allowing for more options than currently available in shaping the strategies of how players are brought into the organization. And it would be good for the fans – every single team could theoretically have a shot at signing their local star talent, encouraging enthusiasm in high school and college ball that doesn’t currently exist.

If the two-prong goals of the draft are to put a ceiling on amateur talent costs and redistribute the talent to teams that need it, this would accomplish both goals as effectively as mandatory slotting without the whole Scott-Boras-Suing-Us-Every-Year thing as he looks for reasons to blow up the draft. There would have to be details to be worked out, of course (how are major league contracts handled? Can teams roll money over from one year to the next? What do you with Japanese players?), but I think the overall structure could work really well.

Abolish the draft, set budgets for teams to sign players via a pool of money pulled from revenue sharing, and open the bidding for any player not under contract to a professional team each summer. It’s a total 180 from the direction that Selig is headed, but I think it would work.

When I say “the Barry Zito contract”, what feeling immediately rises up in you? Is it disgust? Shock? A little schadenfreude? It’s still amazing to think how could a pitcher with such bad trends – xFIPs of 5.04, 4.61, 5.64 each season before signing with San Francisco – would ever get paid “ace” money, and that over seven years? How does a GM do that and still have a job? But I digress.

After pitching terribly for the Giants the past two seasons, Zito has put together a pretty solid season this year. No, he hasn’t had an $18.5 million dollar season, but a team could do worse for their 4th starter. Look at his three year trends:

(Pardon my use of MS Paint, WordPress is giving me formatting fits w/ making a table).

Looking at his peripherals, it’s easy to pinpoint the “why” for his improvement. Zito’s increased his strikeout rate by a batter per nine innings, while also cutting down his walks. His stuff appears to be new and improved compared to previous seasons with the Giants. Here’s a scouting report of Zito from just last April from the ever-resourceful site 60 Feet, 6 Inches:

Barry Zito is a nice guy. He does yoga and gives money to injured veterans. Unfortunately his fastball is slow and his changeup looks like a little league pitch. In his prime, he pumped in a 92mph fastball and was tough to hit. Always known for his curveball, the pitch has become a lob that is hard to throw for a strike. A couple years ago he added a tighter breaking ball that he uses like a slider to LHs.

Zito threw 92 MPH in his prime? Maybe that was true back in ’00-‘01, but for his Cy Young season in 2002 – the season we begin to have velocity data here at FanGraphs, Zito was averaging 87 MPH on his fastball. That’s consistent with his seasons in Oakland from ’02 through –’05. It wasn’t until 2006 that Zito was throwing his pedestrian 85 MPH fastball. This season, his velocity is up a tick. –

Last night against Cincy, Zito topped out at 89(!). Slight bump in velo aside, Zito’s started to get away from throwing that little league change-up so often. The past two seasons he’s thrown it 20% of the time, this year he is doing that with a slider, a pitch he previously has not thrown a whole lot of.

That lob of a curve has also been tightened back up to form. According to pitch-type values, Zito’s curve has been worth 11.3 runs, good for 6th on the leaderboards. Looking at pitch f/x, the pitch has gained about 2 and ½ inches of horizontal and vertical movement on average in comparison to last year’s slop ball. Zito isn’t about to revert to his former dominance, but at least he’s proving to be an above average starter at the moment. His ZiPS update forecasts that Zito will finish with a 4.13 FIP over 195 innings, good for nearly 3 WAR. Giant fans will gladly take it at this point.

Mitchel Lichtman (MGL), the creator of UZR, has been setting the record straight on UZR, among other things, over and over and over again. Here’s his most recent interview, and some other links worth reading if you’d like gain more insight on UZR and baseball data in general:

Newsday: Bellmore’s Lichtman shows his baseball knowledge through UZR

Comment: The difference between offensive and defensive statistics

Answering: What kinds of factors skew statistical analyses of defense?

Comment: The differences between UZR and +/-

Sample Size and the Granularity of Data [John Smoltz]

In the most minor of trade deadline deals, the Los Angeles Dodgers traded pitcher Claudio Vargas to the Milwaukee Brewers for back-up catcher Vinny Rottino. Less than three weeks later, the Dodgers saw a rotation slot open up, with no obvious options at hand to fill it.

So, did they hurt themselves by helping Vargas?

Vargas is no great shakes, mind you, he’s thrown 20 innings in relief this season with a 3.84 FIP, but the Dodgers need for a starter includes reaching out to free agent Vicente Padilla and inking him to a minor league deal. Outside of name value, the two are pretty similar.

Over the last three years Vargas has appeared in 57 games, starting 27, with a 6.7 K/9 and 3.3 BB/9. Padilla meanwhile has started all 70 of his games with a 5.8 K/9 and 3.5 BB/9. Since 2007, Padilla’s FIP is 5.04 and tRA is 5.96 while Vargas’ is 4.86 and 5.40. Since Vargas basically split his time between relief and starting you can add about a half run to both his run average metrics to project the numbers as a full time starter and you wind up with 5.36 and 5.90.

Padilla pitched in the American League and in a park that has a 1.04 PF per our five-year factors. Vargas pitched in Milwaukee (1.00), the part of New York that reps the National League (0.97), and of course with the Dodgers (0.98). Meaning Padilla has had the tougher slate of batters faced in tougher pitching environments yet performed near equally.

Padilla will make about 100k from this point on which is right on with what Vargas would make. Neither cost anything but money, making them essentially equal in value. I suppose this is a case of nothing gained, nothing lost, although it could make the Dodgers think twice before making another ‘favor trade’ in the future.

With a promotion to the major leagues today, Drew Stubbs is in an enviable win/win position.

If he performs well, he almost certainly sees his gig evolve into a full time one. On the other hand, if he bombs, he still possess more upside than the terrible Willy Taveras of which he replaces.

The 24-year-old from the University of Texas was ranked as the Reds third best prospect by Baseball America prior to the season. In Triple-A this year he hit .268/.353/.360, the lowest slugging percentage of his minors career. The scouting reports on Stubbs are pretty upfront. He needs to cut down on his strikeouts, even if it means taking away some power which should reemerge later, and use his speed to his advantage more often.

Stubbs has seemingly improved on the strikeouts facet. This is the same player who struck our nearly a third of the time in rookie ball fresh out of college, now he’s striking out a quarter of the time in Triple-A. Obviously that’s still quite a bit, but assuming his power comes back more so than it has during this season, he should be fine. The good news is that Stubbs is more than willing to draw a walk as well. In fact, Stubbs has 51 walks this season; Taveras has 54 over the past two seasons.

Defensively Stubbs has spent most of his time in center and figures to man the eight-hole for Cincy as well. Stubbs’ arm and range are above average, so he’s more than just a bat.

Taveras is one of the worst players in baseball this year, so Stubbs should be an upgrade even if he chooses to bat left-handed and stand backwards in center, but the real test will be upon Taveras’ return from the disabled list. Hopefully for Reds fans, Stubbs forces his way into sticking.

Today, the Cardinals signed John Smoltz to occupy the #5 spot in their rotation for the rest of the season, after he officially cleared release waivers and was let go by the Red Sox. With an 8.32 ERA at age 42, it might be easy to say that Smoltz’s eight appearances in Boston signify that he’s done as a major league pitcher.

But the sample was just 40 innings, and anything can happen to practically anyone in 40 innings. For example, here’s Smoltz’s career in Boston compared with Jered Weaver’s last 8 starts for the Angels.

Smoltz: 8 GS, 40 IP, 59 H, 9 BB, 33 K, 8 HR, 8.33 ERA, 4.94 FIP
Weaver: 8 GS, 46 IP, 51 H, 18 BB, 54 K, 10 HR, 6.50 ERA, 4.93 FIP

Over the last couple of months, there’s very little separating how Weaver and Smoltz have pitched. Their FIPs are nearly identical, even if they’ve gotten there slightly different ways. Both of them have been stung by the longball, which has outweighed strong BB/K rates. And neither have deserved results as bad as what they’ve gotten.

For Smoltz, there’s an easy narrative – he’s old, he’s washed up, he can’t pitch anymore. For Weaver, there isn’t an easy explanation for his struggles, so the Angels just keep rolling him out there and expect him to get better. But, for both pitchers, our expectations should be similar going forward.

A bad ERA over 40 innings, driven by a high BABIP and HR/FB rate, does not mean that Smoltz is finished any more than it means that Weaver is finished. And, of course, no one thinks that Jered Weaver is washed up.

Cardinal fans just picked up a pretty good pitcher for the league minimum, thanks to the continued overestimation of the usefulness of ERA. The sooner people realize that it’s an obsolete pitching statistic, the better off baseball will be.

The Colorado Rockies are leading the NL wild card race. They play in a surprisingly good NL West. Last year four NL Central teams and three NL East teams had better records than the NL West winner. This year the Dodgers are the class of the NL, and Colorado and San Francisco fight for the wild card. Colorado really has been a pleasant surprise and equally surprising is that they are doing it on the strength of one of the top pitching staffs in the game. We often let park effects influence how we think about teams (San Diego always has great pitching, if they could only get hitters), so it can be weird to think of Colorado having great pitching.

Looking at FIP, which does not correct for park or league, Colorado has the fifth best pitching in the game. At this point team tRA is not available here, but StatCorner’s tRA says Colorado’s pitching is 64 runs above average behind only by San Francsico (66), the White Sox (71) and Atlanta (77). Over at BtB JinAZ’s tERA has Colorado’s pitching as best in the game. I think it is fair to say they have one of the five best pitching staffs in baseball.

One of the big reasons is the health of their starting rotation. Ubaldo Jimenez, Jason Hammel, Jorge de la Rosa, Jason Marquis and Aaron Cook have started all but three games for the Rockies. Not having to dip into the sixth starter/minor league/replacement level pool for a number of starts really helps.

That is hardly a big name group, but they really get it done. Jimenez has always provided strikeouts and ground balls, and this year added the third leg of the stool cutting down on his walks. Hammel and De la Rosa have been surprisingly good. While Marquis and Cook provide solid, lots of ground balls with few walks or strikeouts, performance. Almost every game this season the Rockies have started a great to just below average pitcher, few teams can make such a claim.

In addition to health, another strength of Colorado’s pitching is ground balls. They are second in the league as a whole with 47% GBs per ball in play. Three fifths of their rotation, Cook, Marquis and Jimenez, get over 50%GBb/BIP. No accident I am sure, as ground balls are especially valuable relative to fly balls in Colorado.

Post season baseball has a good shot at returning to Colorado sooner than many expected.

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about why I don’t really care who baseball writers vote as the AL MVP, because we pretty much all realize it’s Joe Mauer, and it’s not particularly close. In fact, Mauer’s having such a good season that there’s a pretty good chance it will go down as the best season any catcher has ever had in the history of the game.

Mauer is currently hitting .383/.448/.653, good for a .464 wOBA in 415 plate appearances, the best mark in baseball. His +46.5 wRAA is better than any non-Pujols player in baseball, and he missed the month of April. The next best catcher in wRAA this year – Victor Martinez at +15.9, and he’s not really a full-time catcher. Mauer is a catcher hitting like a DH, and that just doesn’t happen very often.

The current standard for best catcher season of all time is probably Mike Piazza’s 1997 campaign. He hit .362/.431/.638 for a .454 wOBA, and because he played almost every day, he racked up 633 plate appearances and a +63.9 wRAA. Mauer’s rate stats are better, but he’s not going to match the counting numbers that Piazza put up thanks to his one month stint on the disabled list.

However, that’s just the offensive side of the game. Piazza wasn’t a defensive asset, even early in his career. Runners advanced 187 bases against Piazza in 1997 (via stolen bases, wild pitches, or passed balls), while he only nailed 45 runners attempting to advance. Mauer’s only had runners take 74 bases on him this year, and while his 16 “kills” aren’t that impressive, his reputation is keeping guys from running at will.

How much does that stuff matter? Well, in 1997, Piazza was rated as a -2 defender by Sean Smith’s catcher defense formula, while Mauer has been +10 or better in each of the last two years. Mauer’s ability to keep guys from running on the bases saves his team runs, and that goes in his ledger as well, to the tune of something like 10 extra runs that Piazza didn’t provide.

Remmeber, Piazza’s lead in wRAA is +17.4, but Mauer makes up most of that with his defensive abilities. As of right now, it’s pretty close to a push between ’97 Piazza and ’09 Mauer, but if Joe keeps hitting in September, he’s going to pull away. This very well could go down as the best season any catcher has ever had.

“You trade away your starting catcher, it could send mixed messages. This time of year is when you’re looking to make additions, if you feel your team is close enough. We didn’t do that. We chose to make a subtraction.”

-Astros third baseman Geoff Blum.

I’m sure Blum means well and takes pride in his team and all, but has he taken a look around lately? The Astros are a bad baseball team. They’re lucky to be just ten games back of the Cardinals with their -73 differential in runs scored/runs allowed. Looking at various playoff odds that are based on crazy things like, you know, math, Houston has a .2% chance of reaching the playoffs. I have a better chance at being elected the Prime Minister of Bulgaria than the Astros playing in the postseason. Nothing short of acquiring Tim Lincecum and Albert Pujols through the help of Jedi mind tricks can save Houston’s season, and I get the feeling that Ed Wade is not that strong in the ways of the Force.

Ivan Rodriguez is part of the reason the Astros are bad. He has a .285 wOBA, putting him in Willy Taveras, Jason Kendall and Emilio Bonifacio like-territory of ineptitude. The fact that the Astros got two C grade prospects in return for the charred remains of Pudge should be considered to be quite a coup.

The Rangers seem to be bringing I-Rod back for nostalgia’s sake, and a heavy helping of good ol’ intangibles. He’ll be backing up Taylor Teagarden, who Marc wrote about yesterday. ZiPS forecasts a .299 wOBA the rest of the year for Pudge. Teagarden is projected to rebound with a .319 wOBA the rest of the way.

Going to Houston is Matt Nevarez, 22, who working out of the bullpen was overpowering batters in Low-A with a 13.2 K/9. He’s going to be Rule 5 eligible this season if Houston doesn’t add him to their 40-man, but that may not be necessary as he probably would not get drafted. 2B Jose Vallejo was ranked in the Ranger’s Top 20 prospects by Baseball America, and the Ranger’s system is quite deep. He’s hit a wall in Triple-A, but hit .292/.345/.415 with 42 steals in 46 attempts between High-A and Double-A last year, and is said to have good range. Neither player is going to turn around the Astros, but credit Ed Wade for getting something out of nothing.