General Manager: Andrew Friedman
Farm Director: Mitch Lukevics
Scouting Director: R.J. Harrison

2006-2009 Draft Results:
First three rounds included
x- over-draft signees ($200,000 or more)

2009 1st Round: LeVon Washington, 2B/OF, Florida HS (Did not sign)
2. Kenny Diekroeger, SS, California HS (Did not sign)
3. Todd Glaesmann, OF, Texas HS
4x – Luke Bailey, C, Georgia HS
5x – Jeff Malm, 1B, Las Vegas HS
9x – Kevin James, LHP, Wisconsin HS

There were a few teams that had ugly drafts and the Rays organization was certainly one of them – when you consider that it did not sign the first two picks: Washington and Diekroeger, who was rumored to be a tough sign to begin with. However, the club did grab some interesting players with above-slot deals in Bailey and Malm. Bailey was a possible first-round pick before undergoing Tommy John surgery on his throwing arm. He’s considered a solid offensive and defensive catcher. He should surface in rookie ball at some point during the second half of the year.

Malm appeared in just six games after signing and he should be back in short-season ball in 2010, although a strong spring could vault him to low-A ball. Glaesmann, an athletic outfielder, appeared in just five games. Prep lefty James pitched just one inning after signing. He’ll likely be a long-term project, as he needs to work on his secondary offerings.

2008 1st Round: Tim Beckham, SS, Georgia HS
2. Kyle Lobstein, LHP, Arizona HS
3. Jake Jefferies, C, UC Davis

Beckham has not been as explosive as the organization (and fans) likely had hoped, given his first overall slot. However, he’s still plugging along and remains on the club’s Top 10 list… so you’ll read more about him in the very near future. Lobstein did not pitch after signing in ’08, but he was excellent in his debut in ’09 and he joins Beckham on the Top 10 list.

Jefferies had a solid, albeit unspectacular, ’09 season by hitting .261/.326/.359 in 440 at-bats. The catcher rarely strikes out (8.0%) but he also does not walk much (7.8%). With a catcher-like BABIP of .270, he’s not going to score many runs. His ISO of .098 also shows his lack of power. Jefferies’ value is pretty much tied into his work behind the dish, which included a 26% success rate in throwing out runners in ’09. He looks like a future backup.

2007 1st Round: David Price, LHP, Vanderbilt
2. Will Kline, RHP, Mississippi
3. Nick Barnese, RHP, California HS
x- D.J. Jones, OF, Alabama HS

Price had a bit of an up-and-down season, but he’s already a full-time Major League pitcher who has a chance to be a No. 1 guy down the road, so the organization is no doubt pleased with this pick. Kline has been a disappointment as injuries have decimated his career; he hasn’t pitched a pro game since ’07. Barnese, on the other hand, has risen to become one of the club’s ten best prospects. The club spent more than $300,000 on the projectable Jones, but he has yet to hit above .227 in his career and he regressed significantly in ’09 as his OPS dropped from .613 to .549.

Matt Moore, another Top 10 prospect, was a steal of an eighth-round pick.

2006 1st Round: Evan Longoria, 3B, Long Beach
2. Josh Butler, RHP, San Diego
3. Nick Fuller, RHP, Georgia HS (Did not sign)
5x – Shawn O’Malley, SS, Washington HS

I think it’s safe to say Longoria was a nice pick. Butler’s value in the organization dropped quickly but he was traded to Milwaukee and he’s again having success. O’Malley is speedster (40 steals in 54 attempts in ’09) who hit a career high .268 in high-A this past season. With an .044 ISO to boot, you can pretty much read between the lines.

The club found its top prospect in the 10th round when it nabbed little-known Desmond Jennings out of an Alabama community college. Heath Rollins was nabbed in the 11th round and he should at least make the Majors as a back-of-the-rotation starter or middle reliever.

Up Next: The Tampa Bay Rays Top 10 Prospects

A year ago, I placed the Mets at #5 on my list of the healthiest organizations in baseball.

My bad.

Yesterday’s he said-he said recounting of the events surrounding Carlos Beltran’s surgery are just the latest sign that the organization is a ship without a captain. Even the most conservative reading of the events looks really bad for the Mets – at best, their front office lacks the ability to communicate their desires to their team’s best player, at worst the player has reached the point where he simply doesn’t care what they say.

And then there’s the handling of the news. Word began to leak out on Wednesday that Beltran had surgery and that the Mets front office was extremely angry about it. It’s one thing to do a controlled leak of news that will come out eventually, as most teams in baseball do – it is entirely another to bring reporters into what should have been an internal issue. Then, to cap it off, the Mets held a conference call (necessitated by the leaks) that was run by Assistant GM John Ricco, ostensibly because Omar Minaya wasn’t able to find a working phone in the rural back-country known as Phoenix, Arizona.

More likely is that the Mets just didn’t want Minaya on that call for fear of what he might say. Say what you will about Minaya’s roster construction (and I have), but when you don’t trust your GM to meet with the press, you need a new GM. A significant part of the General Manager job is to handle the relationship with the press about the affairs of the team. The Mets apparently do not believe Minaya is fit to fill that role any longer.

Ricco’s handling of the conference call only goes to further confuse the chain of authority in Queens. Minaya is clearly not in charge, as the Wilpons continue to exercise more than a usual amount of influence on the front office. But they won’t willingly admit to running things either, leading to a nebulous power situation where there is simply no clear leader.

This is dysfunction on a large stage. Much like the last days of Jim Bowden’s reign in Washington, you have to wonder whether they’ll be able to escape growing evidence of a lack of control in the front office – never mind the questionable decisions Minaya has made spending the Wilpons’ money.

At this point, they just need to start over. The current situation isn’t working and it’s getting worse, not better. The team has a new ballpark in a huge metropolitan area and some terrific pieces to build around – they should be contenders. They should be well-run. But they aren’t. It’s time for some wholesale changes before things get any worse, if that’s possible.

The Marlins locked up their most talented pitcher on Thursday, as they agreed to terms with 26-year-old SP Josh Johnson on a four-year, 39 million dollar contract. The deal will pay 3.75MM in ’10 and 7.75MM in ’11, Johnson’s last two years of arbitration, and buys out his first two years of free agency at $13.75MM per season.

Johnson is, simply put, a very talented pitcher. Despite only logging 481.1 career innings and 76 career starts, or about 2.5 seasons worth of starting, Johnson has already compiled 10.3 wins above replacement. He follows the general template of success for good pitchers – good strikeout numbers (7.95 K/9), and solid walk totals (3.27 BB/9), but most of all, he keeps the ball in the yard, as he only allows .67 home runs per 9 innings. Normally, a rate this low would signal luck, but Johnson is a heavy ground ball pitcher (48% ground balls to only 32.5% fly balls on his career), and so this is more a function of Johnson’s pitching than any sort of lucky circumstances.

Going by the standard 40%/60%/80% valuation of arbitration seasons, this contract is effectively paying for the equivalent of 3.4 free agent seasons of Johnson (.6+.8+2). With Johnson valued as a roughly 4.0 win player in his prime, the deal is paying for about 13.6 wins, and that’s a conservative estimate. That means that the deal is paying 2.9 million dollars per marginal win, well under either the $3.5M or $4.0M estimates that have been thrown around, and far under the $4.4M value of a marginal win from 2009.

The obvious comparison for this deal is Zack Greinke’s four-year, 38 million dollar contract that he received last offseason. Both players had similar paths to their deals. After putting up good numbers in ’05 and ’06, Greinke missed nearly all of ’07, but returned with a very strong season in 2008, which, much like Johnson’s 2009, was worth roughly 5 wins above replacement. Greinke’s contract bought out the same exact years of his career: year two of arbitration through year two of free agency. However, the marginal value of a win in the 2009 market was closer to 4.4 million, meaning that Johnson is actually being paid more in comparison to expected value than Greinke was back in 2009.

Obviously, the Greinke contract has been very favorable to the club so far, given Greinke’s historical 2009 season, in which he put up 9.4 WAR. It’s hard to imagine the Marlins getting that kind of return on their investment. It does look like the Marlins are getting a solid deal, however, and it can’t hurt that this news is coming out only days after the MLB released a statement regarding the Marlins’ thrifty ways with their revenue sharing income.

Overall, this deal seems like a win-win. Johnson gains financial security at a good rate for an arbitration player, and the Marlins retain a talented piece that will be a key to any possible playoff run in the next four years.

Jose Valverde’s nearly blasphemous contract with Detroit likely developed too lately to help Octavio Dotel out. The 36-year-old was reportedly nearing an agreement with the Pittsburgh Pirates yesterday afternoon in what should be a relatively low-cost maneuver assuming Neal Huntington is as smart as he appears to be.

Dotel last closed games on a routine basis with the Royals in 2007, spending time with the Braves and White Sox, both endowed with solid end-gamers themselves. Given that the Pirates non-tendered their closer, Matt Capps, earlier in the off-season, it would seem that Dotel will become their designated harbinger of finality, a job which could endear him to some team in need of pen help come July.

No matter the role, Dotel is an asset to any bullpen. Over the past three seasons Dotel has posted xFIP of 4.13, 3.38, and 3.73 while pitching mostly in the American League. Dotel’s fastball no longer zips across the plate at speeds routinely above 95 miles per hour, but he still misses enough wood while catching bats late enough to turn into harmless fouls to be a useful pitch. His contact rates have steadily been below 75% since 2007 and a move to the N.L. should help.

This is still the Pirates, though, which suggests there is a chance this deal could be the illegitimate cousin of Brandon Lyon’s ill-forsaken contract. Maybe it’s a leap of faith, but while he may save games for them, I doubt the Pirates have any illusions as to how much he is worth to their team. In five months’ time the clubhouse attendant won’t find the receipt of Dotel’s fake halo in Huntington’s trash can. Their concern right now is not about making the playoffs, but instead building a brand through player identity and by showing signs of competitiveness.

Dotel is not a bevel without a flaw, as he’s allowed at least one home run per nine in every season since 2004 and 23 total the past three seasons. PNC Park is tough on righties which will aid Doc Oct since 13 of those blasts were hit by right-handers (despite otherwise solid platoon splits). The majority of Dotel’s balls in play are put into the air – which explains the homer bug and also makes for some dramatic plays at the warning track.

I now fully expect Dotel to be paid equal to Rafael Soriano only to post a 6.50 ERA so everyone can resume mocking the Pirates.

Assuming he passes his physical, Colby Lewis is returning from Japan to his Texas Rangers roots.

Nothing has been written about Lewis this year without mentioning his two outstanding seasons with the Hiroshima Carp, most notably his other-worldly walk rate. But was it Lewis or Japan? We won’t really know until we see Lewis take to the hill in Arlington, but I can pass along a little insight from this NPB Sabermetric guide I picked up on my recent trip to Japan

Let’s start with that K:BB ratio. Lewis posted 9.79 K’s for every BB in 2009. The next best control pitcher in all of Japan was Chiba Lotte’s Yoshihisa Naruse at 5.57, and Yu Darvish, for comparison, posted a 3.71 rate. Lewis pitched in the DH-free Central League, where hitters accordingly struck out more than in the Pacific League, but the gulf between him and anyone else was so wide I’m going to say that this one was more Colby than Japan. Somewhat weirdly though, Lewis plunked 14 batters in ’09, nearly as many as the 19 he walked.

Thanks to his mastery of the strike zone, Lewis managed a .99 WHIP and a league-leading 2.53 DIPS figure, despite a .317 BABIP which was a bit below the Central League average of .298. And 2009 wasn’t exactly a fluke, as Lewis put up similar numbers in 2008.

Lewis’s success over the last two years recalls Koji Uehara’s excellent 2002-3 seasons, when he posted K/BB figures of 182/23 and 194/23 respectively. Uehara finally got his wish of playing in MLB last year, and despite being injury-prone and past his prime, still put respectable numbers in his limited number of starts. Lewis is doesn’t have Uehara’s injury history and is coming of the best seasons of his career. So there are reasons to be optimistic, and Lewis is definitely an interesting, low-risk alternative to guys like Jon Garland and Carl Pavano.

Carlos Beltran had arthroscopic surgery yesterday on his right knee and, as a result, seems likely to miss the month of April. Needless to say, the Mets are not pleased about Beltran missing time. They appear to be even less pleased that Beltran apparently did not inform them that he was undergoing surgery. Whoops!

According to the Mets assistant GM John Ricco, the team was expecting to continue discussing options about treatment with Beltran, Boras and the team’s medical staff. To the contrary, according to Beltran’s agent, Scott Boras, the Mets consented to pay for the surgery beforehand and it had been discussed with Omar Minaya on Tuesday. There is obviously either some mis-communication or mis-information going on, but I doubt it leads to anything serious in the long term.

Furthermore from Boras, Beltran had been feeling pain in the knee since November and it was inhibiting his ability to perform conditioning drills in the lead up to Spring Training.

Losing an entire month of the season reminds us all again to always be skeptical on playing time estimates in player projections. Coming into today, CHONE had projected Beltran for 514 plate appearances, which seemed quite low to fans, who had Beltran projected for 606. That latter figure now already seems unreachable.

The missed time, if as bad as being initially reported, looks to cost the Mets somewhere between 5 and 10 runs of value. So while it’s easy to be overly dramatic about the surgery and repercussions, if it stays at this one isolated rehab then the magnitude of the effect to the Mets is not too damaging. I’m sure the New York media will realize that and handle this with a reasonable amount of understatement.

Click here to update your projections for Carlos Beltran.

Let’s wrap this series up, shall we?

Starting Pitchers (Min IP: 100)

The Best:
Rich Harden 67.3%
Javier Vazquez 73.3%
Jonathan Sanchez 73.7%
Francisco Liriano 74.1%
Jorge de la Rosa 74.7%

There’s only a handful of starting pitchers in baseball where you can point to a 74% contact rate and say, “Man, he’s just not what he used to be.” Liriano is one of those. Many still recall 2005 (63.8% contact) or 2006 (65.4%), when Liriano’s fastball scorched by hitters with his slider carelessly generating empty swings. During those years Liriano posted xFIP of 1.98 (!) and 2.35 and gave the Twins a pair of ace lefties. Over the last two, he’s looked like an average starter, which still holds value, just not quite the value his name and stuff once held.

The Worst:
John Lannan 88.6%
Nick Blackburn 87.9%
Joel Pineiro/Livan Hernandez 87.7%
Aaron Laffey 87.6%

Blackburn really is Carlos Silva part two. Through his first three seasons, Blackburn has completed two outs over 410 innings while walking 1.8 per nine and striking out 4.4 per nine (with a 4.14 ERA). Silva had 374 innings with per-nine ratios of 2.3 walks and 4 strikeouts, as well as a 4.04 ERA. I’m telling you, if I were Blackburn’s agent I would do everything in my power to have Bill Bavasi signing off on personnel moves with some team come my client’s free agency period.

Relief Pitchers (Min IP: 40)

The Best:
Mike Wuertz 58.9%
Luke Gregerson 66.2%
Mark DiFelice 67.1%
Brad Lidge/J.P. Howell 68.1%

This isn’t the first time Wuertz name appears on under the best label. He had a rough season in 2008 – okay, not that rough; a 4.35 xFIP and 4.30 FIP certainly don’t justify dumping someone with a track record of success – but it’s easy to see why Billy Beane dealt for him once the opportunity presented itself.

The Worst:
Sean White 86.7%
Clay Condrey 86.6%
Chris Jakubauskas 85.8%
Bobby Keppel/Jeff Bennett 85.4%

With the exception of White, each of these pitchers has changed teams at least once over the past calendar year. Probably not a coincidence.

As we mentioned this afternoon, there continues to be mounting evidence that this is a strong buyer’s market. Adam LaRoche’s signing continued the trend of non-star players receiving contracts in the $3 to $3.5 million per win range, as we’ve seen all winter, and even dating back towards the second half of last off-season.

As we head towards February, players are finding themselves with fewer and fewer options. Rather than having teams bid for their services, they are seeking out one team that may have a spot for them and asking for a contract offer. Wins are cheap and plentiful, as budget conscious teams continue to drive prices down.

And then, something like this happens – the Tigers give Jose Valverde a 2 year, $14 million contract, surrendering their first round draft choice in the process, since he was the last remaining Type A free agent on the market.

Seriously, in a market where everyone else is finding bargains, the Tigers pay $7 million a year for a good-but-not-great relief pitcher, and give up a draft pick for the right to do so. Were they not paying attention to the rest of the contracts being handed out? Did they not realize they were bidding against themselves? How do you justify dumping Curtis Granderson to save money, and then use that money (and more!) to sign a flyball reliever with command problems who has never pitched in the AL?

This isn’t anything against Valverde. He’s got a good arm with a fastball that averages 96 and a knockout splitter that racks up strikeouts, but we’re not talking about Mariano Rivera here. He’s a guy who pitches up in the strike zone and has a history of giving up home runs (which, you know, can be a problem when you’re asked to protect a one run lead) and has below average command to boot (career 3.6 BB/9).

That doesn’t mean he’s not useful – he’s racked up 6.4 WAR in his career for an average of 0.9 WAR per season. That makes him a good relief pitcher – not a great one, a good one.

For one year and a team that had money to spend, the salary wouldn’t be that bad. But two years and a loss of a draft pick? Really? In this market? On a team that is going cheap at second base and in center field?

Sorry, but this is a bad use of resources.

As we await the stirring finale of R.J.’s Contact Tales series (tentatively called “Who Shot R.J.?”), I thought it might make sense to revisit a post I submitted in these electronic pages just before the start of this shiny new decade.

In said post, I took a look at Matt Hanna’s work on Expected Strikeout Percentage (eK%) — a study that first appeared at DRaysBay and which resulted in this equation:

eK%=(ClStr%*.9)+(Foul%*.5)+(InPly%*-.9)+(InZSwStr%*1.1)+(OZSwStr%*1.5)

As I noted then, what’s particularly revealing about Hanna’s work is that it allows us to see (for the first time, so far as I know) the relative importance of inducing in-zone versus out-of-zone swinging strikes. The latter, if you can believe it, are actually about 2.5 times more important than the former.

Using this information, I then provided a contact leaderboard of starters from last season, weighting O-Contact% about 2.5 time more strongly than Z-Contact%.

The error I made in that post — and which reader dyross brought to our attention in the most agreeable way imaginable — is that I submitted for the reader’s consideration only the O-Contact% (and Z-Contact%). The problem with only providing the contact percentages is that it presupposes a constant O-Swing% among all pitchers — which, obviously, that’s not the case. From just the sample I picked, there’s a range of 12.30% (Sidney Ponson) to 32.80% (Hiroki Kuroda). Certainly, pitching outside of the zone in such a way as to induce swings in the first place — that’s important.

Without further ado, here’s that Top 10 list as it should’ve appeared in place of the one I actually provided. Here swinging strikes are posted as a percentage of all pitches. [TOZSS% = Total Out-of-Zone Swinging Strikes Percentage / TIZSS% = Total In-Zone Swinging Strike Percentage / SDTOZ = Standard Deviations from the Mean, Out-of-Zone / SDTIZ = Standard Deviations from the Mean, In-Zone / wAVG = Weighted Average of Standard Deviations, or (SDTOZ*2.5+ SDTIZ)/2.]

Read the rest of this entry »

Reports earlier in the winter had Adam LaRoche seeking a 3 year, $30 million contract. That was laughable, as everyone knew he wasn’t going to get that, not in this market. Last week, a report came out that he had turned down 2 years and $17 million from the San Francisco Giants. Now, LaRoche has apparently accepted reality, as Sports Illustrated reports that he’s signed a one-year deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks for something between $4 and $5 million.

Unfortunately for LaRoche, he had to learn the lesson of this market the hard way. A few teams were willing to shell out real money for a few high-end players, but the bottom has completely fallen out of the low-end market. Average-ish players simply can’t get big money deals right now. And that’s exactly what LaRoche is – an average player headed into his decline phase.

Still, this is a pretty darn good deal for the D’Backs. They get a solid first baseman for 2010 at little cost, allowing them to use Conor Jackson in left field. He adds somewhere between +1 and +2 wins to their team, and, if Arizona is not contending, should be a pretty decent trade chip at the deadline for a team that needs a low cost first baseman.

For LaRcohe, I’m sure this is not the contract he thought he would have to settle for. But it’s the reality of this market. The remaining +2 win-ish players looking for jobs should take note. The jobs are drying up, and you better take a deal when you can, because the offers aren’t going to get any better.