Angry at being left out of Matt’s post on The Contest last week, Brian Sabean’s San Francisco Giants have agreed to a one-year contract worth three million dollars with Aubrey Huff. Much like the Scott Podsednik contract, it looks fine in a vacuum. Huff is projected for somewhere in the 0.5 to 1.0 WAR range, meaning that Huff’s market value is probably the 2-4 million dollar range. If Aubrey Huff were indeed taking the roster spot of a replacement level player, the deal would make sense.

Of course, this is not the case. Before this move, the best scenario for San Francisco was probably to play Pablo Sandoval at 1B, Mark DeRosa at 3B, and Fred Lewis in LF. Instead, Aubrey Huff probably becomes the starting 1B. We probably would have seen Juan Uribe at 3B and Mark DeRosa in LF, but the differences between these two scenarios are insignificant. This causes a domino effect: Pablo Sandoval moves from 1B back to 3B, and Juan Uribe will be pushed to an infield utility role. This also means that Mark DeRosa will certainly be the starting left fielder, pushing Fred Lewis to the bench.

Effectively, this means that Aubrey Huff is replacing either Juan Uribe or Fred Lewis. Regardless of how you look at it, the Giants are not improving in this scenario. Uribe’s bat is weak, but he has a good glove for third base, and he figures to be at least a 1.0 WAR player last year. Lewis projects similarly – again, a weak bat for the position but solid defense, probably worth a little more than one win. Both of these players project similarly or better than Huff.

Much like with his pursuit of Adam LaRoche, it appears that Brian Sabean is scrambling to add offense due to the fact that his team only scored 657 runs (4.06 RPG) last year. Despite the poor performance with the bats, the Giants still won 88 games and had 83 3rd order wins – they were a playoff contender. Dave Cameron already showed over at USSM how the idea of diminishing returns on defense is bunk. Travis Ishikawa, a good defender with a weak bat is a better first baseman than Huff, all things considered. The runs saved by Ishikawa outweigh any runs produced by Huff, despite the lack of balance between run production and run prevention for the Giants.

Not only that, but 1B was not the weakest position for the Giants. San Francisco’s rotation now only runs four deep. It’s a solid four, with Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Jonathan Sanchez, and Barry Zito worth a combined 133 runs above replacement according to CHONE. Then the next highest projected SP for the Giants is Kevin Pucetas at 7 RAR. This 5th starter role is the easiest position for the Giants to pick up an extra marginal win or two, as there are players like Joel Piniero, Jon Garland, and Vicente Padilla who could all offer somewhere from a one to two win upgrade over Pucetas et. al.

No matter how you spin this, this was the wrong move at the wrong time for San Francisco. With a very versatile group of position players, they could have easily filled 1B with either Pablo Sandoval or an internal option that was superior to Huff. It pushes superior players to the bench or possibly even off the 25 man roster completely, and it also commits money that cannot be used to upgrade their worst position, the fifth starter. The Huff acquisition is a complete misuse of resources for a Giants team looking to get over the playoff hump.

I caught a brief glimpse of last weekend’s Cowboys-Eagles football game and seeing Michael Vick reminded me of a thought from many moons ago. I think most sports fans root for laundry first. We root for the team over individual players. Getting jerseys is one way of demonstrating said interest and I think, on average, the logo on the front means much more than the name and number on the back.

That being said, obviously there are cases where the purchasing and wearing of a jersey is meant as a sign of support to both the player and the team. In those cases, what happens when the conditions under which the jersey was selected change? For instance, owning an Atlanta Falcons Michael Vick jersey, as I saw someone wearing about six months ago outside San Francisco of all places, has had its meanings changed in the last few years. Maybe not to the person who bought it, but to others, and the owner is probably aware of that.

I do not own many personalized jerseys. I prefer to stick to blank ones. The very first personalized jersey I bought I got to enjoy for a whole year before the player whose name graced the back of it threw a fit in the locker room, demanded a trade, alienated the entire fan base and eventually forced his way off the team in a terrible trade. I don’t much like wearing that jersey anymore. No matter how much I know that I root for the team, not the player, it’s a constant reminder of that episode every time I see that jersey. Would you continue to wear it?

What about other altering circumstances? What about a player that changes his number? Does that annoy you? What about players that choke away an important game? How many were proud to wear their Jake Delhomme jerseys the last couple seasons? Or Brad Lidge Houston Astros jerseys? Or a Bill Buckner (if they had a name on the back) Red Sox jersey in the winter of 1986?

There are plenty of other events that could drastically alter the perception of a jersey as well. If golf was a team sport and there were Tiger Woods jerseys, would you feel different now about wearing it? At what point, if any, do you start feeling uncomfortable about the name on the back of the jersey that you wear and to what length — getting a new jersey, altering the current one, etc — would you go to rectify it?

Starting Pitchers (Min IP: 100)

The Best:
Jake Peavy 73.7%
Johan Santana 74.2%
Jason Schmidt 74.5%
Rich Harden 74.8%
A.J. Burnett 75.5%

Schmidt’s career arc is one of the oddest in recent baseball history. After toiling for years with the Pirates as a decent starter, Schmidt was traded to the Giants (alongside John Vander Wal) for Armando Rios and Ryan Vogelsong. It’s just as the Pirates luck: Schmidt would immediately turn into a well above average starter, posting xFIP of 3.57, 3.24, and 3.21 over 2002-04. Injuries would slow Schmidt down beginning in 2007 and he would throw fewer than 15 innings on average over the past three years.

The Worst:
Carlos Silva 91.1%
Kirk Saarloos 89.7%
Ryan Drese 89.3%
Shawn Estes 89.1%
Aaron Sele 88.9%

Saarloos has started nearly 75 games in the Majors and appeared in an additional 90 as a reliever. Even still, his career HR/FB% is 13% despite throwing most of his 509 innings within the snuggly confines of the Oakland Coliseum. Truth be told, his career 4.87 FIP isn’t too bad all things considered. Baseball-Reference’s most similar pitcher is Gary Glover. I’d say that fits.

Relief Pitchers (Min IP: 40)

The Best:
Rudy Seanez 58.7%
Brad Lidge 59.6%
Mike Wuertz 59.9%
Joe Nathan 66.7%
Ugueth Urbina 67.2%

Over his career, Seanez appeared in the Majors with nine different teams. His career contact rate was just shy of 70% and he did it mostly with a ferocious slider. Nearly one-third of the pitches Seanez threw outside of the strike zone were swung at during 2005.

The Worst:
Paul Quantrill 91.2%
Jesse Crain 88.3%
Dan Kolb 87.8%
Travis Harper 87.7%
Jason Christiansen 87.5%

Mostly names previously covered. Crain has impressively improved the amount of swings and misses he induces ever since.

It’s been a crazy day. I’m busy working, writing various things. Then, because I’m a real genius when it comes to hitting “reply all,” I realized that I didn’t let people know I wanted to post, and what I wanted to write on got (rightly) taken. To top it off, there’s big happenings afoot in Rumorland that may dramatically affect the outcome of The Contest, but I don’t want to jinx it (whatever “jinxing it” would involve).

So today, I want to do something different and look at some “low reliability” offensive projections for 2010. From time to time, I reference “my” projections for a particular player. Believe me, I’m no statistical or programming guru. I simply started with Colin Wyers’ MySQL script for a Marcel-type offensive projections, then added in some tweaks for different aging curves and amounts of regression for different components. Like Marcel, it doesn’t adjust for parks or leagues or include minor-league data. Marcel isn’t intended to compete with the “big boys” (e.g., CHONE, ZiPS, PECOTA), but rather to be a baseline against which they are judged — in fact, Marcel does pretty well. I just hope I’m not doing something worse. In any case, it’s just a toy for my personal enjoyment at this point; it would take a fair bit more tweaking before I published the projections as a whole or even gave the “system” a name (although I admit having some ideas for the latter).

For each player projected, my system, like Marcel, generates a “reliability score,” which, in Tango’s words,

shows how much of the forecast is based on his performance, and how much was regression towards the mean…. [for example] Bobby Abreu shows a .87. That means that I regressed towards the mean 13%. Using that, it should be easy enough to figure out a confidence interval for each of the stats. If I show a reliability of .00, this means that it is an absolute pure guess on my part.

Generally, you want to look elsewhere than Marcel’s or my system when the reliability score is under .72 or so.

But that’s where today’s “fun “starts, because the way the projection system is set up with the Baseball Databank, if a player (pitchers are excluded) even has 1 plate appearance in last three years, it generates a projection for him. So let’s take a look at four goodies my mystery projection system has in store for in 2010. I’ll give the “three slash,” then runs created above average per 150 games, and then the reliability score for each player and some commentary. At the very least, this might provide a weird corollary to Dave Cameron’s point about regression “fixing” problems.

Morgan Ensberg, .250/.332/.408, -2/150, .505 r. I just read that he retired last spring due to lack of interest from major league teams. It’s not surprising, I guess, but I have to say that it seems like just yet yesterday he was a decent-fielding, three true outcomes machine for Houston. Then, after 2006… nothing. But my system says he’s not a bad bat if he can field decently.

Neifi Perez, .251/.315/.402, -8/150 .141 r. Perez was the return for one of the worst trades in recent history, but at least the team that got him never repeated that sort of mistake again. That’s not a bad line for a shortstop. Indeed, Neifi’s due for a career year at the plate (regression!). I mean, you wouldn’t hit him first or anything.

With the signings of Vladimir Guerrero and Jack Cust this weekend, here are two DH candidates.

Jay Gibbons, .254/.305/.403 -12/150, .412 r. Last seen playing for the Newark Bears, Gibbons, like Ensberg, retired in 2009 after being unable to find a job for a major-league team. I used to regularly take a certain well-known fantasy guru’s advice and put Gibbons on my roto team. It never worked, not even once. I was never really not sure what the guru or the Orioles saw in him. I guess he put up a decent season in 2005, and even played the outfield pretty well. But he never really seemed to have the patience or contact skills to back up his lack of defense.

Barry Bonds, .261/.410/.478, +16/150, .536 r. You had to know it was coming, right? Not bad for a man who hasn’t played the past two seasons. Perhaps you’d expect better linear weights for a guy with a .410 OBP, but keep in mind that the lwts don’t include intentional walks, which Bonds had a lot of (like Marcel, my system current projects iBBs). Still, there are plenty of teams that could use a +16 hitter at DH. I wonder how permanent that retirement is?

Until the next installment!

It is hard to remember, but at this time last year, many projection systems had the A’s right there with the Angels competing for the 2009 AL West. Noting that is in no way an indictment of projection systems — even the best have to make mistakes — but to highlight that 2009 was a big disappointment for the A’s, who had hoped to compete as they rebuilt. Probably not the biggest reason, but part of it, was the poor season for Jack Cust. In his first year with the A’s, 2007, he had a wRC+ of 144, but it has dropped in the past two, coming in at 132 in 2008 and then last year at just 111. Because he was either a DH or a poor-defending outfielder this was not enough to make him an above-average player, and he was worth just one win above replacement. Now the A’s have re-signed Cust to a one-year, 2.65 million dollar deal: What does 2010 have in store for Cust?

In July I looked at Cust’s 2009 approach at the plate, noting his decreased walk and strikeout rates. At the time he was hitting just wOBA of 0.324 — he finished at a more respectable 0.342. Since then those two rates increased and ended closer to his 2008 and 2007 values, so maybe he read my article. The other issue in 2009 compared to the two previous years was his loss of power. His ISO was above 0.240 in both 2007 and 2008, but just 0.177 in 2009. The Game Day extracted fly ball distances bear this out: in 2007 his outfield flies went on average 330 feet; in 2008, 327 feet; but in 2009, just 306 feet.

Using the technique in my Kotchman post we can look at his non-ground balls in a spatially explicit manner. Again the playing field in broken into ten zones; the number in each zone represents the percentage of his non-ground balls to that zone; and the color the slugging percentage on those balls, going from gold (indicating zero) to dark green (indicating over three). The first zone is the infield and each subsequent ring is 100 feet farther.

Like most LHBs, Cust’s power is highest to right field, and while there is not much difference in the fraction of his hits to deep right, there is a big difference in the resulting slugging. In 2007 and 2008 non-ground balls to that zone were worth, on average, 3.3 bases, but in 2009 they were worth just 2.6 bases. The other big difference is that in 2009 he traded deep opposite field balls in play for deep center field ones, and these had a poor slugging percentage. Center field walls are the deepest and so fly balls to center are less likely to be HRs, and Hit Tracker shows fewer opposite field HRs in 2009 compared to 2008 and 2007.

Although they A’s are hoping for for a rebound from Cust — and he did perform better in the second half of 2009 — they are not paying for one. Combining his 2009 one-win performance with the chance of lost playing time to injury 2.65 million seems about right.

In the event that you haven’t heard, the Houston Astros have gone and signed Brett Myers. The deal itself — one-year, $5 million with an option for 2011 — seems entirely reasonable to my semi-trained eye. As our man on the scene David Golebiewski notes, Myers has chronically underperformed his xFIPs, a fact almost wholly attributable to an inflated rate of home runs per fly ball, a fact itself that is likely attributable to Citizens Bank Park. Translation: Provided that he’s healthy — which isn’t a guarantee given his injury problems last year — but given that he’s healthy, Brett Myers figures to post a better ERA than we’ve seen from him in a while.

Here’s the thing, though: the signing of Myers gives the Astros six starters. Roy Oswalt, Wandy Rodriguez, and Myers himself are likely candidates to fill the first three spots in rotation. Which, that leaves Bud Norris, Felipe Paulino, and Brian Moehler to compete for the last two.

For a number of reasons, those two spots should go to Norris and Paulino. It’s not just that Norris (4.38 xFIP, 4.25 tERA*) and Paulino (4.10 xFIP, 4.07 tERA*) are likely better than Moehler (4.67 xFIP, 4.49 tERA*), but also that, if Houston has any sense of building for the future, it would make a priority of developing the two young pitchers with upside. Brian Moehler is the absolute knownest of the known quantities. It’s not a terrible quantity, but it’s no great shakes, either.

I’m worried, though. I’m worried that the Astros will somehow see fit to go with Moehler. Yes, there’s a chance that they’re creating the illusion of a competition so’s to prevent their young starters from becoming complacent, but I’m worried that’s not the case. I’m worried they like Brian Moehler. I’m worried he’ll be their fifth starter heading into the season.

Here’s how I’ll feel if such a thing were to happen: sad. Not joking-around sad, but legitimately sad. Way sadder than at the end of a Lars von Trier movie, for example. And while I recognize that may sound melodramatic, I should note that I’m not the sort of person who’s otherwise prone to strong emotion. But I care about baseball, and I look to baseball to provide ethical cues for my life. And it frequently does that. Jack Zduriencik? Yes. Andrew Friedman? Yes, awesome. Brian Myrow? Right on. But this particular move — should it occur — will only reinforce for me that people in charge are fallible to a greater degree than I’d care to acknowledge.

Of course, there’ll be ways to deal with it. As Matt Klaassen showed us on Friday, the power of snark is mighty. (I mean, seriously, that post is brilliant.) Fire Joe Morgan raised snark to the level of high art. But snark isn’t an end in itself. It’s merely one way of coping with flagrant injustice or misbehavior. Snark is the mode to which we resort when we are powerless to protest in any other way. It’s fun, sure, but it’s not ideal. Ideally, men in charge — that is, men whose acts are conspicuous and, for better or worse, provide a model for the rest of us — make decisions using the faculty of reason. Ideally, the Astros make Brian Moehler their long reliever. The alternative will be disappointing.

If the sabermetric crowd is known for anything, it is their love of acronyms. There are hundreds of statistics, most of which can be broken down into two and three letter abbreviations. FIP, UZR, wOBA, WAR – our language is full of words that are short and fully capitalized.

When written, this does not present any kind of problem. We all generally come to understand what the abbreviations stand for fairly quickly, and we don’t have to spend too much time saying the full version of the names of these things – I don’t remember the last time I said “Weighted On Base Average,” for instance.

However, increasingly, these terms are making their way into conversation. And that means we have to pronounce these things. I am quickly learning that everyone has a very different path to pronunciation for these acronyms, and there is no clear pattern or rules on how they should be spoken.

For instance, some of them I spell out, while others I pronounce. Why? I have no idea. It goes this way across all the numbers. Some get spelled, some get said, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

Acronyms I say:

FIP – rhymes with hip.
wOBA – woah-buh, emphasis on first syllable, rhymes with toga (sort of?).
SLG – slug, like the animal.
BABIP – bab-ip, rhymes with nothing, no idea why I say this.
ISO – eye-so, this is actually a word, so that helps.
WHIP – pronounced like Indy’s weapon
LOB% – lob percentage, said like it’s the rate of soft-tossed pitches
WAR – said like a really big fight

Acronyms I spell:

E-R-A – not sure why I don’t say era, like a period of time, but I don’t.
O-B-P – are you down with OBP? Yeah, you know me.
O-P-S – not ops, as in operation, and never heard it said that way.
U-Z-R – someone once called it “oozer”, and I tried not to laugh.
W-P-A – can’t even figure out how I would say this? “Whoop-a”?
W-R-A-A – no way I’m going to say “were-aahh” to someone.

So, that’s my list. I know everyone does it differently, though, so I’m curious: which ones do you spell and which ones do you say? And does anyone have any idea why?

With his spot in Anaheim now filled by Hideki Matsui, it was time for Vladimir Guerrero to find a new home. His new home is one he’s quite familiar with, as he signed a one-year, five million dollar contract with the Texas Rangers. Guerrero figures to be the designated hitter for the Rangers, as Nelson Cruz, Josh Hamilton, and Julio Borbon should start the season as the outfielders.

Vlad should be a good fit for Texas, and he should be much better than Hank Blalock and Andruw Jones in that role. Despite a dip in production in his first season as a DH – to be expected – Vlad still put up a 110 wRC+, making him roughly a one-win player at that position. His power did drop last year, as his ISO fell from .218 to .164. We should expect some regression there, however, as much of that drop can be attributed to an 11.5% HR/FB ratio, by far the lowest recorded since 2002, when our batted ball data begins.

Guerrero can probably be expected to put up a 1.5 win season at DH, making his contract fair from a value standpoint. With the Rangers competing for the AL West crown, making a move at fair market value to pick up roughly an extra win makes a lot of sense for GM Jon Daniels.

One of the talking points surrounding this move has been how much Vlad loves to hit in Texas. It’s true – over 50 games and 221 PAs, Guerrero has a .394/.471/.705 line. That’s a 146 tOPS+, meaning that Vlad has performed 46% better than his average production at The Ballpark in Arlington. I don’t have to go into great detail about why 221 plate appearances aren’t enough to base a significant argument upon. We see this all the time here. In this case, however, making an assumption based on splits can be even more dangerous.

Not only are we limited to 50 games worth of data for this split, but it is also 50 games spread out over multiple seasons. Here’s how many plate appearances Vlad has seen in Arlington in his career, with his OPS in parenthesis.

Pre-2004: 0
2004: 46 (1.522)
2005: 38 (1.428)
2006: 40 (.929)
2007: 33 (.809)
2008: 36 (1.072)
2009: 28 (1.140)

That leaves us only 137 usable plate appearances as far as reliable data goes – what Guerrero did in 2004 and 2005 tells us next to nothing about the true talent of 2010 Vladimir Guerrero. With that, we’re already down to about 62% of our original amount of plate appearances, leading to an increasingly low amount of reliability with our split. Yes, Vlad has been above average in each of our four usable years (although not nearly as good as in 2004 and 2005).

How much do these road splits actually tell us? It’s possible that Guerrero is about a point or two of wOBA better in Arlington, true talent wise. Especially after considering park factors – Arlington allows far more extra base hits than most fields – it’s likely that it’s just statistical noise.

Vlad should be better in his second year as a DH and playing in Texas’s hitter friendly park should boost his numbers, but it’s important to remember that the Vlad that will be playing in Texas is not the slugger that raked in Montreal and won an MVP with Anaheim. This is 35-year-old Vlad with 40-year-old knees, and the data from the last few years in Anaheim far outweighs the fact that he’s killed the Rangers at home over the last six.

Today’s targets are three questionable Dayton Moore acquisitions: Scott Podsednik, Yuniesky Betancourt, and Kyle Farnsworth.

Otherwise known as The Trio That Drives Matt Klaassen Nuts.

Starting Pitchers (Min IP: 100)

The Best:
Johan Santana 66.3%
Matt Clement 69.7%
Randy Johnson 71.2%
Jason Schmidt 71.7%
Oliver Perez/Kelvim Escobar 72.4%

This was the season that Perez convinced everyone he was turning the corner. And with good reason, beyond his friendly old-timey stats (12-10 record on a poor Pirates team, 2.98 ERA), Perez also held a 3.45 FIP and 3.55 xFIP (for reference, Felix Hernandez’ career FIP is 3.54 and xFIP is 3.43). He promptly followed this up with xFIP of 5.26, 5.24, 4.65, 4.8, and then received a $36M contract.

The Worst:
Carlos Silva 90%
Ismael Valdez 88.9%
Jimmy Gobble 88.7%
Kirk Rueter 88.6%
Aaron Sele 87.9%

Speaking of poor contracts … here’s the scary thing: Silva not only tops this contact rate in 2005, but he does even worse at missing bats in 2009. Yeah, Silva at his best gets groundballs and avoids walks – and yes, that is a successful formula – but at the same time, Silva posted xFIP of 3.94, 4.81, and 4.57 before signing his four-year, $48M poison pill that the Cubs swallowed. Nick Blackburn can only hope Bill Bavasi is a general manager when he reaches free agency.

Relief Pitchers (Min IP: 40)

The Best:
Brad Lidge 50.5%
Eric Gagne 60.1%
Francisco Rodriguez 65.9%
Dennys Reyes 66.2%
Octavio Dotel 66.2%

The 2003 post established how nasty Gagne was during these days. Yet Lidge is even nastier. His trusty slider held a 3.39 wSL/C – easily a career best. Remember, at one point, the Astros’ bullpen featured Billy Wagner, Dotel, and Lidge.

The Worst:
Paul Quantrill 92.1%
Dan Kolb 88.8%
Tim Harikkala 87.8%
Jose Mesa 86.9%
Travis Harper 86.3%

There’s nothing particularly interesting about any of these five outside of Harper’s line from June 21st, 2005: 0.2 IP, 8 H, 4 HR, 1 BB, 0 SO, 9 ER. When he entered, the Rays were ahead by two. 46 pitches later, they trailed by seven.