The Twins won two of three versus Detroit over the weekend to keep their play off hope alive and with four more games against Detroit next week they ‘control their own destiny’ as they say. Last night they picked up half a game by beating the White Sox. Nick Blackburn pitched a relatively non-Blackburnian game striking out six, a total he has reached or exceeded only four times previously in over thirty starts.

Blackburn strikes out only 4.18 batters per 9 innings, second lowest among all qualifying starting pitchers (John Lannan strikes out the fewest). He is one of only four qualifying starting pitchers to strike out fewer than a batter every other inning. But he is very good at limiting walks and thus second to only Joel Pineiro in lowest K+BB per 9 innings. So he is one of the most extreme pitch to contact pitchers. Here are his pitches.

The big reason for all the contact is that he throws his cutter and two-seam fastball 82% of the time. The contact rate on fastballs (two-seam, four-seam, cutter or splitter) is generally much higher than on changeups, curveballs or sliders. So right there you should expect much more contact.

But beyond that Blackburn’s two-seam fastball (which he throws 60% of the time) is particularly mad at missing bats. It has a whiff rate (misses per swings) of only 6%. The average fast ball is at 14%. It is probably one of the easiest pitches to hit in the game. Even Pineiro’s two-seam fastball has a higher whiff rate at 9%. Piniero gets fewer strikeouts in spite of his two-seam fastball having a higher whiff rate because he throws it even more often than Blackburn throws his and Blackburn makes up for it with his cutter which has a fairly good whiff rate of 20%. The problem is that Blackburn’s two-seam fastball is only ok at getting ground balls, 49% per ball in play, compared to the good groundball two-seamers which get upwards of 60% GB per BIP.

Blackburn is one of those interesting players existing at the extremes. He allows nearly the highest rate of contact possible by a pitcher who still holds a job in the major leagues.

Matt Holliday is making a strong case for a big payday as a free agent this winter, and he deserves it. Over the last two years, he’s accumulated more value than any outfielder in baseball, posting a +11.4 win value in 2008 and 2009. Want to know who is #2?

Jayson Werth, the new leading candidate for the most underrated player in the game.

Werth had a tremendous 2008 season, and he’s followed it up by proving it was no fluke. After hitting .273/.363/.498 last year, he’s topped it with a .274/.377/.523 line. He’s also a tremendous baserunner, having stolen 34 bases and been caught just four times over the past two seasons. He’s Ryan Howard with the benefit of speed and defense, but his slugging teammate continues to garner more press.

Werth shouldn’t be overlooked as one of the primary reasons the Phillies continue to contend in the National League, however. Over the last two years, he’s racked up +9.6 wins of value, ahead of the likes of Manny Ramirez, Ichiro Suzuki, or Ryan Braun. When the elite outfielders in the game are mentioned, however, he’s never mentioned.

Howard, Utley, Rollins, Hamels, and Ibanez have gotten the press, but Werth is just as important to the Phillies. He’s a tremendous player, and he’ll eventually get the recognition he deserves.

Allow me to be forthcoming and honest when I say I have no idea whether Cecil Cooper managed well or poorly over the course of his time in Houston. I can look at the numbers, I can read opinions of analysts I trust, and I can attempt to form an opinion from that. What I do know is that he was not Houston’s biggest issue — unless he is the worst manager in the history of baseball that is – because managers can only work with what they are given. Take a look at how Cooper’s team ranked in the major statistical categories:

Rotational FIP: 12th
Bullpen FIP: 17th
Lineup wOBA: 24th
Team UZR: 16th
Positional Player WAR: 25th
Pitcher WAR: 23rd

That’s a middle of the pack team at best. They have a laundry list of issues heading into this off-season, and it starts with their self-evaluation. Lance Berkman and Carlos Lee will be 34-years-old next season, Geoff Blum will be 37, Miguel Tejada – if he returns – will be 36, and so on. The lineup is mostly on the wrong side of 30 with Hunter Pence and Michael Bourn being the only projected main clogs younger than 30. With such you would expect a bit of a decline to occur with aging.

Despite tallying only 22 WAR to date, the Astros will win more than 70 games this season. A replacement level team wins a few less than 50 games, so that’s about right. Maybe the Astros are a few wins better at true talent level – I don’t believe they are, but follow with me here – say 75 wins. Most teams would look at that lineup, stacked with a few guys who won’t be with the Astros the next time they hit 90 wins, and say: “Gee, we need to rebuild, we’re a mediocre team right now.”

Are the Astros going to reach that conclusion? Doubtful. The worst thing that could happen to the Astros was overachieving once more and pushing their draft pick in 2010 towards the middle of round one. I find that a lot more troubling for the future than whether Cooper is their manager or not.

Buster Posey was promoted to the big leagues on the second day of September. Nearly three full weeks later, Posey has appeared in two games with a total of three plate appearances and one hit. Needless to say, this is insane. The Giants playoff hopes have fallen during the timeframe and CoolStandings now has them at 5%. Having to make up 4.5 games in a span of 13 games is extremely difficult on its own right. Factor in that San Francisco won’t see Colorado head-to-head again this season – barring a playoff at least – and it becomes a situation where a chain of unlikely situations needs to occur.

So why isn’t Posey playing?

When he was promoted I addressed the Giants awful catching tandem and for whatever reason the Giants have stuck with Bengie Molina and Eli Whiteside. Neither represents much of an upgrade over Posey and neither should play as big of roles as Posey next year. This isn’t a service time issue because he’s already up. Maybe the Giants don’t want to hurt his confidence, but what happens next year? Do they send him down again or simply throw him into the fire? Or, heavens forbid, attempt to bring in a veteran and let Posey learn underneath him?

Posey isn’t the difference between making the playoffs this year, not playing these three or four weeks won’t be the difference in the playoffs next year. It’s just an exercise of futility to continue playing two dead weights ahead of the future during extra time.

The Giants did some nice things this year, it’s too bad they don’t recognize the difference between Conor Gillaspie last season and Posey this season.

If you haven’t been following the Dodgers of late, there’s an interesting development down in LA – Joe Torre has decided to give a significant chunk of the playing time at second base to Ronnie Belliard, sending Orlando Hudson to the bench in the process.

With most personnel decisions in baseball, there’s a gray area where a legitimate point could be argued for either side. This is not one of those scenarios. Belliard is half the player Hudson is, at best, and if Torre is actually contemplating swapping the two out as his team heads into the postseason, then the man should have his sanity questioned.

Hudson is a known quantity, and a productive one at that. His .342 wOBA so far this season is basically a dead even match for his .339 career mark. He’s a good contact hitter with some gap power and draws a fair share of walks, making him an above average hitter overall. UZR thinks his defense has been in decline, but still thinks he’s around average with the glove.

The total package makes Hudson a slightly better than average player – he’s been worth +2.2 and +3.3 wins in each of the last five years. He’s consistently a quality asset, and certainly the kind of guy you can win a world title with as your second baseman.

Belliard simply is an inferior player to Hudson. His entire production bump since the trade to LA is a function of a 25% HR/FB rate that has allowed him to slug .589 in 18 games. If you think that’s sustainable, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Belliard is a swing-at-anything hack without the contact or power to make that kind of approach work. In 204 plate appearances before the Nationals shipped him to LA, he posted a .297 wOBA.

He’s not a defensive wizard. He doesn’t run well. He’s not as good of a hitter. The only thing Belliard can outdo Hudson in would be some kind of eating competition.

When October rolls around, Torre better have Hudson installed back at second base and Belliard on the bench where he belongs. Any other alignment will be a blow to the Dodgers chance of winning a World Series.

After suspending Milton Bradley for the rest of the season, the Cubs have made official what was already assumed – they’ll be dumping him on whatever team is willing to take the largest portion of his contract this winter. That will also put them back in the market for an outfielder. Not to throw salt in an open wound, but perhaps they should call the Orioles about Felix Pie.

The busted Cubs prospect is thriving in Baltimore of late, as he’s gotten regular playing time the last five weeks and making it pay off. Since August 14th, Pie is hitting .293/.366/.576, showing patience (12 walks in 112 PA) and power (13 of his 29 hits have been for extra bases) and finally living up to the potential he was known for in the minor leagues. With this late season surge, Pie has raised his overall line for the year to a respectable .258/.326/.436, making him essentially a league average hitter. That’s pretty nifty for a 24-year-old quality defensive outfielder.

Pie’s future in Baltimore appears limited, however. With Adam Jones and Nick Markakis locking down two outfield spots, Pie’s only hope for playing time is to beat out Nolan Reimold for the left field job, or more likely, to find some kind of job-sharing role that gives him a few hundred plate appearances per season. Given his upside, it’s way too early to pigeonhole Pie into some kind of fourth outfielder role, so he’ll likely have more value to another club than he will to the O’s. That makes him a pretty obvious trade candidate this winter.

Perhaps the Cubs won’t want to go down that road again – after all, reacquiring him would be tantamount to admitting that the series of deals that netted them Aaron Heilman was a mistake. But for a team in need of a young, cheap center fielder with upside, Pie is going to be an intriguing option this winter.

Last off-season K-Rod, Kerry Wood and Brian Fuentes were considered to be the cream of the free agent crop for closers. Wood signed for $20.5 M with an $11M vesting option if he finishes 55 games for the Tribe next year. Fuentes signed a two-year, $17.5 million contract w/2011 option. Francisco Rodriguez signed the richest deal of the three, with a 3-year, $37M contract. Other than all three pitchers becoming very rich men last winter, what else do they have in common?

They have all been, by varying degrees, free agent landmines. K-Rod’s peripherals have continued their downward decline. While his ERA looks acceptable enough at 3.36, his FIP has gone up from 2.70 to 3.22 to 3.79 this season over 65 innings pitched. That’s good for 0.6 wins above replacement, worth $2.6 million, a mere fraction of his actual salary.

Kerry Wood has thrown 51 innings and his FIP has nearly doubled from last year, from 2.32 to 4.08. His strikeout rate is still good at 10 K’s per nine innings, but his walk rate from has doubled and he’s suffered some severe bouts of gopheritis. Wood has been worth a measly .5 WAR. At least for this season, the rebuilding Indians are paying him 5 times his actual value. Chris Perez, who came over in the Mark DeRosa trade, has better peripherals and the stuff to close.

Brian Fuentes has all but lost his job for the Angels to youngster Kevin Jepsen. Fuentes has 43 saves but an awful 4.48 FIP, meaning he’s more deserving of mop-up duty than high leverage innings. He’s been worth just .3 WAR.

Meanwhile, the best relievers in the game have either been homegrown, as in the case with Brian Wilson, Andrew Bailey and Jonathan Broxton, or they have basically been freely available talent like Heath Bell or David Aardsma.

Paying a high price for a “proven” closer just isn’t always the greatest idea.

Earlier this year, Brian Burke of the fantastic Advanced NFL Stats site wrote a post in which he detailed and graphed a series of scatter plots that featured the power law distribution. If you have absolutely no idea what that means, click that link; his explanation is superior to anything I can offer. Anyways, he went on to address the idea of whether coaching job spans were a normal distribution or a data set that followed the power law. He found the latter, and I’ve finally gotten around to seeing how baseball managers compare.

First, let me detail my data set. I went team-by-team and collected each manager holding a position that was hired between 1995 and 2005. This means if a manager was hired in 1995, fired in 1996, and a new manager was hired then both count. If a team went through a manager per season they are all included. However I did not include interim managers who managed less than a season. So Bruce Kimm is out of luck, as are managers hired prior to 1995 or after 2005 – sorry Bobby Cox and Joe Maddon.

I ended up with 76 managerial cases. I then took down their organization, length of tenure, and win/loss record with that organization. With such I found the amount of seasons survived with that team by each manager, which was then used to create this graph:

For those who prefer charts:

Years Managers
15 1
12 2
10 1
9 1
8 2
7 4
6 5
5 8
4 15
3 21
2 14
1 2

The data set follows the power rule much like Burke’s examples. There are other questions to be answered though, which I’ll attempt to do now:

How long does the average managerial job last?

The mean of the tenures is 4.3 years, the median is 4, and the range is 14 years. So the mean is skewed to the right, but only barely. This matches up pretty well with what we see above since nearly 66% of the population falls into the 2-4 years group.

How does winning affect the lifespan?

It doesn’t:

That steep red line represents the .500 mark. Some were well below and lasted five or more years, some were well above and received the axe far earlier. That means to last as a baseball manager, you have to juggle player attitudes and egos, get along with management and ownership, and show competence at winning a fair share too. Most people would note that anyways and the numbers back it up.

To summarize, I think all of this is rather intuitive. Most managerial contracts seem to last 2-4 years, which is the average lifespan, and we can’t evaluate mangers well enough to say there’s a huge difference between any two skippers, which means firing a guy is more of a “gut” feeling. If the manager is friendly enough to the media he can probably buy time even if he makes questionable in-game decisions.

I’m not claiming this is a perfect measure and most people will probably read this and think “Duh“, but hopefully it did something for someone.

Coors Field is a good place to hit. That’s been true since it opened, and even the most casual baseball fan is generally aware to take numbers put up at altitude with some grains of salt. Thus, it wasn’t a big surprise that Matt Holliday’s abilities to hit away from elevation were greeted with skepticism, especially after he got off to a slow start in Oakland this year. But now, with his playing time in 2008 and 2009 nearly identical, let’s take a look at how he’s performed without playing half his games in a hitters paradise.

2008: 623 PA, .321/.409/.538, 38 2B, 2 3B, 25 HR, 12.1% BB%, 19.3% K%, .217 ISO, .361 BABIP
2009: 612 PA, .311/.389/.522, 37 2B, 3 3B, 23 HR, 10.6% BB%, 17.1% K%, .210 ISO, .341 BABIP

It would be challenging to find a player who has had more similar statistical seasons over the last two years. His numbers are practically identical, with the rates being marginally lower due to a slight reduction in batting average on balls in play. There’s no evidence there whatsoever that he was traded by the Rockies over the winter.

This doesn’t mean that Coors Field has no impact, of course. We know it’s a good place to hit, and one data point doesn’t disprove that. It should, however, serve as something of a reminder that not every player who puts up good numbers in a hitters park is going to immediately start performing at the rate at which they played on the road in previous years.

For whatever reason, it has become normal for people to adjust for park effects by looking at a player’s historical road numbers. Lots of people did this with Holliday, who had massive splits while a member of the Rockies. Those projections, based on his personal home/road numbers, significantly undershot how well he has played this year.

Personal splits can be quite enlightening, but by definition, a “split” is a fraction of a dataset. By making the sample smaller, you’re inherently making it less reliable. A home/road split gives us the effect of a player’s home park on his performance, but jumbles it up with a lot of other stuff that gets in the way.

Splits can be interesting, but be careful with them. When projecting future performance, you’re better off using one of the well tested systems, such as ZIPS or CHONE, which include park adjustments, rather than relying on that player’s previous home/road history.

It’s not uncommon for prospects to receive more hype than they are worth, and Dayan Viciedo was one of those players in 2009. The Cuban defector came into the 2009 season as the No. 2 prospect in the Chicago White Sox system, according to Baseball America. He was also ranked by Kevin Goldstein at Baseball Prospectus as the No. 4 overall prospect in the system.

In the 2009 Prospect Handbook, Baseball America stated, “Viciedo has the power to hit 40-plus homers in a season, thanks to a quick swing that’s triggered by strong wrists… He’s an aggressive hitter who will chase bad pitches… Viciedo has a high ceiling but brings a bigger risk than the more experienced and athletic [Alexei] Ramirez.”

Knowing little about Viciedo – aside from the circulating scouting reports – I was cautious with my assessment of him last winter by stating, “Only 20, Dayan Viciedo will not step right in to the Major League roster like fellow Cuban Alexei Ramirez did last season. The third baseman will likely begin his career in High-A ball and could move up to Double-A around mid-season if the hype surrounding him is somewhat justified. He has plus-power potential, but there are concerns about his conditioning and drive.”

Viciedo earned a spot on the double-A squad in 2009 and hit .280/.317/.391 with 12 homers in 504 at-bats. His .111 ISO was a far cry from the projected 40-homer power. As well, his walk rate of 4.4 BB% left something to be desired. His strikeout rate was reasonable at 17.7 K%, especially if he does develop at least 20+ homer power.

Viciedo’s .692 OPS versus right-handed pitchers is cause for concern, as are the scouting reports that focused more and more on his lack of conditioning, which no doubt hindered him at the plate, as well as in the field. He showed worse range than Oakland’s Brett Wallace, widely considered to be a first baseman playing third base (especially based on his range). Unfortunately for Viciedo, he has yet to display enough power to be an asset at first base, and he lacks the mobility for even left field. The Cuban also performed poorly in a small sample size as the designated hitter in double-A, which could be a result of his focus issues.

It’s a good thing that Viciedo is just 20 years old. He has a lot of work to do – beginning off the field this winter. It is imperative that the Cuba native get into better shape, as well as an improved mindset, for the 2010 season. The sky remains the limit for Viciedo, but his takeoff was more than a little bumpy.