You know, if teams would stop making transactions involving Scott Hairston, maybe we wouldn’t do so many posts about him…

Hairston, who knows the way from San Diego-to-Oakland-and-back quite well, recently settled with the Padres for $2.45 million dollars, avoiding arbitration. Hairston was traded by the Padres to Oakland during the 2009 season, then was traded back to the Padres a few weeks ago along with outfielder Aaron Cunningham. A player in his second year of arbitration is generally expected to get 60 percent of his open market value. Assuming a $3.5 million dollar current market value of a marginal win, Hairston, who will turn 30 in May, is getting paid as if he’s a bit more than a 1 WAR player.

Offensively, Hairston makes up for his below average walk rate and contact skills with good power. CHONE projects Hairston for .254/.315/.448 in San Diego, or two runs above average per 150 games in context-neutral linear weights. Defensively, Hairston has been above average in both center and left according to UZR. I have Hairston as a +2/150 position-neutral outfielder — that is, average as a center fielder, +10/150 on the corners.

Per 150 games Hairston projects as a 2.4 WAR player (+2 offense +2 fielding +20 replacement). However, Hairston has had problems staying healthy, never having played more than the 116 games he appeared in during 2009. The Fans notice this, and project him for 115 games in 2009. At that rate, he’s about a 1.8 WAR player. So this is a good deal for the Padres, depending on how they use him.

Hairston is a useful player at a price the rebuilding Padres can afford. Yet one wonders how long he’ll be in San Diego. The Padres are clearly at the beginning of a rebuilding process. At 30, Hairston is likely declining. Moreover, the Padres have a group of younger outfielders with more upside and years of team control: Tony Gwynn (27), Kyle Blanks (23), and Cunningham (24). (Will Venable (27) and Chad Huffman (25) might be in the conversation, but I’ll leave that to the prospect mavens.) Having Hairston around as a 4th OF or insurance in case, e.g., Cunningham isn’t ready, isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s not as if that is going to be the difference between the Padres and the playoffs this year. With his team-friendly contract, Hairston has more value to San Diego is a trade chip who wouldn’t be missed by the Padres (other than maybe his brother Jerry) as the Padres look ahead.

Hairston’s handedness also makes a difference. It’s easy to see a number of teams who could use a right-handed-hitting outfielder. I don’t want to exaggerate platoon issues, but teams with designs on contention such as the Yankees, Mariners, and A’s have been (or should be) looking for a right-handed bat for the outfield. Of course, the Yankees and Mariners have sort of addressed those needs with Randy Winn (although he’s a switch-hitter) and Ryan Garko (although he’s a 1B/DH). The A’s, of course, traded Hairston in the first place to address their hole at third base (in many ways, Kevin Kouzmanoff is a third base version of Hairston). Those are just a few examples. Given the distribution of handedness among outfielder/infielders, along with Hairston’s abilities and contact, it’s not hard to see him being part of a trade that helps both a trade partner’s present and the Padres’ future.

Okay, time for another installment of the answers series. I did part 1 last week, and the original questions post the week before. I’m planning to do one more installment and then get back to regularly scheduled programming. If you have a question that I haven’t answered so far, you can always reach me at npbtracker@gmail.com. I may use your question in a future post.

Time is of the essence, so let’s get rolling.

ryan says: January 22, 2010 at 1:05 pm

Welcome aboard!

1) Are there any rule differences between American and Asian baseball? Is the DH used?

2) Is there an arbitration process, and how does team control and free agency work?

3) Can you comment on the skill level differences between Japanese and American ball? How would you expect a .300/400/500 hitter to perform coming here from Japan?

Regarding item #2, as others have pointed out, there actually is an arbitration/inter-mediation process for teams an players, but it is rarely used.

Colonel Kurtz says: January 22, 2010 at 1:31 pm

I was wondering the difference of playing levels between Japan-Korea-Taiwan and now China. And if there’s an American equivalent talentwise i.e. Taiwan = Single-A

Also, there was a very good Korean player who was playing in Japan, lefty bat, great swing (maybe a Young or Kim <– yeah, I know). Will he come to the States?

A number of readers asked about the how the levels of play compare to MLB/MiLB ball. I find it somewhat problematic to make a direct comparison, because the intent of professional teams in Japan and Korea is to win games and championships, while MiLB teams focus on developing young players as well as win games. But that said, the main difference to me is depth. There is certainly MLB-caliber talent in Japan and in Korea, but the talent level drops off quickly as you move down teams’ rosters. It’s pretty generally accepted that the level of skill in Japan is somewhere between Triple-A and MLB. I haven’t seen nearly as much of the Korean League, but based on the fact that quite a few foreign players who don’t do well in Japan find their way to Korea, I’ll say the talent level is a step lower.

The Korean player I believe you are referring to is Seung-Yeop Lee, who is a lefthanded power hitter (here’s a video of him facing Yu Darvish in the 2009 Japan Series). Lee had a great pro career in Korea and a fantastic 2006 season in Japan, but has struggled the last two years. He’s made overtures toward MLB in the past, and his contract expires after this season, but his best days appear to be behind him and he’s not much of an MLB prospect at this point.

Sean D says: January 22, 2010 at 1:33 pm

What do you think of Tsuyoshi Nishioka? In the 2006 WBC he seemed like one of the better prospects among Japanese players. I read that he’s been banged up over the last few years. Is he injury prone or is there a chance he overcomes those types of injuries some day? Is he the type of guy that would be interested in playing in MLB? Japanese players have 10 year contracts, so that would make him a free agent in 2013?

He’s a talented player who runs and fields well, and has developed some power and patience at the plate over the last two years. I haven’t paid close attention to his injuries, but my brief research suggests that he’s had some nagging leg, wrist and neck problems, so we’ll see how he does in 2010. It’s worth noting that the playing surface at his home Chiba Marine Stadium is notoriously bad. I could see him making a move to MLB, probably as a utility guy, but haven’t read or heard that he’s specifically interested in making the jump.

Joe R says: January 22, 2010 at 1:44 pm

Are Japanese teams beginning to run and model themselves in the same way that MLB teams have, sabermetrically? I ask this due to the number of monsters from Japan that average-ify state side.

Eric says: January 22, 2010 at 1:46 pmThis is more about the baseball community than the game itself, but is there a sabermetric community over there like there is here? By that I mean are sabermetrics more/less prominent over there, and if they are, is there similar hesitation to accept more advanced statistics like there is in the US? It might be ignorant to think that the world of statistics would differ from here to Japan, but I’m curious as to how player evaluation compares.

There certainly wasn’t the scouting vs sabermetrics argument that we had in the States a few years ago. I don’t great visibility into the inner-workings of NPB teams, but from the outside it doesn’t appear that they are specifically implementing sabermetric systems. One of the big differences between NPB and MLB is that there are many, many fewer player transactions in Japan than there are in MLB. So Billy Beane’s moneyball approach doesn’t really exist at all. When a league’s free agency market is only a couple of guys and there are only a handful of trades per year, there are no market inefficiencies to exploit.

Player salaries are, for the most part, negotiated yearly. I think defense and team performance plays a bit of a bigger role in player evaluation in Japan than it does in the US, but aside from that NPB teams have a lot of the same tendencies MLB clubs have — highly valuing metrics like wins, saves, and batting average.

At a fan/media level, it feels like there is more data available in Japan via traditional means. Newspaper box scores usually show what happened in each at-bat, and it’s normal to see batting average with runners in scoring position and shutouts with no walks allowed listed with all the normal stats MLB fans are used to. There are also a lot of observations in the media that you wouldn’t see in US. One example that sticks out for me was reading about which player reached safely in the most games one season.

Dan says: January 22, 2010 at 2:16 pm

I’m curious about what an expert on Japanese baseball would have to say about Yu Darvish:

1. How does his stuff translate to some of the best in MLB? Is there a similar ML counterpart we can compare him to?

2. When can we expect him to come to the US? if at all?

3. If he does post, what kind of fee will the winning team have to pay?

4. How big a contract can he get?

1. Darvish has a fastball that he threw around 90-94 mph most of the time in 2009, a slider, a curveball, a forkball/splitter, a two-seam fastball, and the occasional change-up. You can get a sense of his repertoire and velocity on my data site. The first five pitches I listed are all well above NPB average, particularly his slider. As for an MLB comp I’d probably go with Tim Lincecum or Jake Peavy, though Darvish is taller than both and skinnier than Peavy.

2. He has adamantly denied any interest in moving to MLB, but I suspect he’ll change his mind. He has four more years of service time left to go before becoming eligible for international free agency. If he were to be posted it would almost certainly be his last year before free agency.

3. That’s pretty impossible to predict. The Japanese media was talking about $30m for Daisuke Matsuzaka, and he wound up going for $51m. The interesting thing about the posting system is that it’s a blind auction, so it forces teams to evaluate players in isolation of the overall market. So it only takes one high bid to drive the price way up, yet the teams can’t knowingly bid against each other.

4. It obviously depends on his health and performance, and the economic climate when he signs. If he had been a free agent this offseason though, I think he would have easily beat out the $30m Aroldis Chapman got.

That’s all for today. I’ll have more next time, then start working these back into regular posts.

Tango has already covered the optimism in the FAN projections a couple of times — and why being so optimistic might not be that bad — but I wanted to look at it from another angle. I noticed that the fans project much more playing time than other projection systems. This is particularly evident at the top. CHONE projects Jimmy Rollins to have the most PAs at 682, the fans have 12 players with more PAs than that (including three with over 700), and, while CHONE has only three players with over 650 PAs, the fans have 53. Note: I understand that fans project number of games played and batting order and the system extrapolates number of PAs. I am using PAs because that is what is displayed on the projection page and makes for the easiest comparison.

How reasonable is it to project any given player will get 700 PAs? Obviously, every year some players get 700 PAs, but can we identify them beforehand? There will be more than three players who get over 650 PAs in 2010, but before the season starts can we really pick 50 players more likely than not to get 650 PAs?

I am going to assume that most people use past performance (number of games or PAs) to project how many a player will get in 2010. To see how well this works I got three groups of players. For group one I found players who had three consecutive years averaging between 725 and 675 PAs, then I looked at how many PAs they got in the next year. Group two I did the same thing for players who had three years averaging between 675 and 625 PAs. And for group three 625 to 575 PAs. Here are the number of PAs each of these three groups got in the next year. Along the x-axis is number plate appearances and along the y-axis the fraction of the group that got that many or more PAs. So each curve monotonically decreases as if you got over 101 PAs then you must have also got over 100.

The first thing to note is that the group of players with more PAs in the previous three years had more in the given year. That is, a greater fraction of group one had 400 or more PAs than group two and a great fraction of players in group two had 400 or more PAs than group three. And this trend holds for almost any number of PAs. This should not be surprising. Players in group one are probably better, healthier and hit higher in the order, on average, than those in groups one or two. So it seems perfectly valid to use past PAs as a predictor for number of PAs in the future.

But that doesn’t mean that you just use the past average as your prediction. The horizontal line at p=0.5 shows the median number of PAs for each group. These values are ticked off on the x-axis. They are 667 for group one, 630 for two and 557 for group three. Although players in all three groups still go a larger number of PAs it was less than they had averaged in the past three years — they regressed to the man. There is nothing special about three years (I just chose it to get players with a history of playing in lots of games) you would see the same drop off if you just chose players who averaged a large number PAs in the two previous or just the last year.

Next I highlight the fraction of each group that gets 700 or more PAs. That is the vertical line. The tick marks on the y-axis show the intersection points: 24% for group one, 12% for group two and 1.5% for group three. So less than a quarter of players who averaged about 700 PAs for three years got 700 PAs the next year.

Part of this is aging. In a given year, a player is older than he was three years ago, duh, and probably more likely to be injured and have fewer PAs. But part of it is that getting 700 PAs is part skill, being a good, healthy player who bats at the top of an order, and part is luck, not having a fluke injury. CHONE knows that there is a chance that any player has a crash in his playing time even with a long history of over-700-PAs, over-150-game seasons and a starting job leading-off. So it rarely projects over 650 PAs. Just because someone has played in over 150 games for a number of years we cannot expect him to play over 150 games in the next.

The Blue Jays are in rebuilding mode. That much is pretty clear, given that they weren’t good enough to contend with Roy Halladay, and their chances of doing so in the AL East without him are slim and none. They’ve spent the off-season making trades for young, cost-controlled talent, reloading their farm system and attempting to put themselves in a better spot in the future.

But, there’s an interesting wrinkle to their rebuilding plan – they don’t really have much of a line-up for 2011 and beyond right now.

Here are their current projected starters for this year:

C – John Buck
1B – Lyle Overbay
2B – Aaron Hill
SS – Alex Gonzalez
3B – Edwin Encarnacion
LF – Travis Snider
CF – Vernon Wells
RF – Jose Bautista
DH – Adam Lind

Buck, Overbay, and Gonzalez are free agents at the end of this season. Encarnacion and Bautista are pretty good non-tender candidates, as both will likely be worth less than they would receive in their final arbitration season. Of their starting nine, only four are certain to be back next year, and if Wells has another poor season, he might find himself relegated to a reserve role, or potentially released.

Toss in free-agents-to-be in the bullpen, such as Scott Downs and Jason Frasor, and a huge chunk of the Toronto roster will probably be playing elsewhere next year. This leads us to two conclusions:

1. Expect a really large fire sale from the Great White North this summer. Once the mid-season trading season kicks into high gear, everyone’s going to be calling the Blue Jays. It doesn’t matter what you need, they’ll have one available.

2. The Jays are going to have a ton of money to spend next winter.

That second point is the interesting one that I want to focus on. Right now, the Jays have three players under contract for 2011: Vernon Wells ($26.6M), Aaron Hill ($5M), and John McDonald ($1.5M). Those guys total just over $33 million in commitments. That figure will increase significantly once they hand out arbitration raises to virtually their entire pitching staff (they have a stunning 11 pitchers who will be arbitration eligible next winter), but you’re still looking at only between $40 and $50 million in salaries for the guys who should be Blue Jays next year.

Assuming that ownership doesn’t pare their payroll back significantly, that should give Alex Anthopolous and his crew a pretty decent chunk of change to spend next winter. And, if there’s one thing that’s been pretty evident over the last two winters, it’s that a shrewd GM can do pretty well filling out his roster in free agency these days. Starting shortstops, even good ones, are going for $5 to $6 million per year. Power hitting first baseman are getting less than that. Good defensive outfielders with some power are signing for peanuts.

The young talent that the Blue Jays acquired this winter will be the core of the team that they try to contend with going forward, but they’re not going to be limited to just the guys they develop from within. Thanks to the payroll flexibility they now have, expect to see Toronto give their rebuild a jump start next winter.

(I am severely late to the party, but I’m here to talk about a movie that made its debut on the festival circuit in 2008, and was released sometime last May in the United States. But on the heels of yesterday’s Oscar nominations, I’m hoping you can see some tangential timeliness, if only to point to its glaring omission from the Best Original Screenplay category. I also think SUGAR can provide real lessons that can help us in our goal from Friday: finding ways to improve the existing Minor League development process.)

“It’s the same game we played back home.” It is this question — not the assurance, as it’s spoken in the film — that concerns the baseball element in “Sugar”, a story about assimilation into the United States told by fimmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (“Half Nelson”). The title character is Miguel “Sugar” Santos (newcomer Algenis Perez Soto), a right-handed pitcher from San Pedro, Dominican Republic, signed for $15,000 to the Kansas City Knights. Santos takes quite a journey in the film, traveling from his home country to Phoenix for Spring Training, then to Bridgetown, Iowa for his first minor league assignment, and to New York for a taste of the America he has dreamt about.

This is the baseball journey that we know about told through a lens we have only imagined. Boden and Fleck are unwavering in their pursuit to tell the Dominican story of playing baseball in America, from the playgrounds in the Bronx to the organizational facilities in the Caribbean. Sugar is good; at 19, the film opens as he begins to harness the ability that led to his signing. But the Knights realize what a bargain he is when Sugar quickly picks up a knuckle-curve that a visiting scout teaches him. From there, it’s onto Phoenix, as Sugar and his curveball are invited to the Knights’ Spring Training camp.

From here, the film begins a series of narratives that deal with the difficulty of the language barrier. Sugar arrives in America with enough English to play baseball with: his English classes in the Dominican consisted of “flyball,” “home run,” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Anything outside of this, like ordering food at a restaurant or understanding his coaches and teammates, is out of his league. “Donde está I-A?” he asks his friends before a plane ride sends him to his professional debut in the Midwest League. Middle America is not the stuff of Dominican dreams.

There are three principal relationships that a Minor League player has, and Boden and Fleck have done their due diligence to pursue each struggle in communication: the host family, the coaching staff and teammates. We can tell that Sugar, like so many Latin minor leaguers, is very smart, because he picks up the language very well. But a perfect storm of events strike midseason, as they so often do, and it drastically changes Sugar’s worldview in Bridgetown. He injures his ankle tripping over the first base bag, just when his lone Dominican teammate is released as the result of bad performance. His other friend on the team, a second baseman from Stanford, is promoted, and suddenly Sugar feels alone. When he returns and the inevitable slump hits, Sugar’s frustrations are read as make-up problems by his equally frustrated coaches.

This, I think, is the first lesson that we can take from the movie. I’m reminded of Hanley Ramirez, who had numerous suspensions in the Boston Red Sox organization for mis-conduct. Ramirez would often get in arguments with coaches and trainers, and was even demoted from High-A to Rookie League as punishment. I should preface this example by saying that Hanley’s own lack of maturity and ego were the central role in these problems. But I also can see that at no level in the Boston organization did he have a Latin coach, and thus, I find his immediate success in Latin-friendly Miami as something less than coincidence. I can’t help wonder if part of his anger outbreaks coincided with language barrier frustrations.

The film further reveals itself when Sugar travels to New York to visit the departed Dominican third baseman. There, he sees the Yankee Stadium he dreamed about as a boy in San Pedro, and finds a Latin community in the Bronx. It presents, to me at least, an interesting dichotomy: the biggest cities in America are home to our largest fanbases, but also are in the most Latin-friendly towns in America. Many of the minor league cities that players are assigned to, with the intention of developing them into Major Leaguers, are in towns with nothing to offer Spanish speakers.

Critics have credited Boden and Fleck for a niche look at the American dream, but they have also accomplished something that revered sports movies like “The Blind Side” and “Invictus” (both Oscar-nominated films) failed at: they delivered a universal message without dumbing down the sport serving as metaphor. In fact, I think “Sugar” raises issues that we need to pursue that could shine light on the ideal development process of a Latin player. What teams are best at developing these players? What do they do differently? Do players succeed in towns more accessible to Spanish speakers?

Is it really the same game they play back home?

The Rockies added Melvin Mora on Sunday, signing the aging third baseman to a 1.3 million dollar contract for the 2010 season. It appears that Mora’s primary role will be as a backup to Ian Stewart.

The signing itself isn’t terribly noteworthy. Mora is an average defender whose bat fell off a cliff last year at the age of 37. With that kind of profile, Mora projects as a roughly 1.0-1.5 WAR player per 600 plate appearances, or about a .75 WAR player off the bench. Given the high probability of injury and collapse with a 38 year old player, 1.3 million seems about perfect for Mora.

What is notable about this move is that it seems to signify that the Rockies do not view Clint Barmes as a utility type player, and instead view him as the opening day starter at second base. Perhaps he would move to the bench if Eric Young Jr. plays well enough to earn the job in spring training, but right now it is Barmes’s job to lose.

Barmes’s 76 career wRC+ certainly does not suggest starter ability, especially on a playoff team. He has performed better recently, particularly in 2008, where even adjusting for Coors, Barmes was an above average hitter. The 30 year old did slip in 2009, but some of that was BABIP based. His numbers should rebound slightly, into the 85-90 wRC+ range.

His true value comes from his glove. Barmes has played all over the infield. He’s only average at third, and quite good at SS, with a +6 UZR/150. The Rockies, however, are giving him an opportunity at his best historical position. At second base, Barmes has put up a +10 UZR/150 in just over one full season, but these numbers are supported by the fine two seasons he’s played at SS. As a +8 2B, as projected by CHONE, Barmes is a slightly above average player. Even at the +5 level projected by fans, he’s only slightly below average.

Rockies GM Dan O’Dowd’s willingness to stick with the light hitting Barmes over historically better hitters on the free agent market such as Felipe Lopez and Orlando Hudson is a good decision, regardless of whether or not it siginifies that the employers of Brad Hawpe understand defensive numbers. Lopez and Hudson both would represent a marginal improvement over Barmes once you factor in Barmes’s far superior glove. As such, the decision to upgrade the bench at 3B for a much cheaper payroll hit is almost certainly the correct one.

It took a while, but Jeff Weaver has finally stepped in from the rain.

Yesterday, he rejoined the Dodgers, but not on a Major League deal; oh no, on a minor league deal. The inking is a pyrrhic victory at best for Weaver, who actually did pitch in the Majors last season, and pitched pretty well at that. That the best he could net was an invite to spring training and a chance at maybe making the opening day roster seems a bit odd.

Weaver appeared in 28 games, starting seven of them, and compiling 79 innings and a 4.07 FIP. By my rough napkin calculations, Weaver’s reliever FIP was roughly 3.77, albeit in a lacking sample size. Still, the interest in the 33-year-old was nearly non-existent.

He’s always fended off batters of the same hand with great success. Remember, Weaver has made 274 starts, yet his platoon splits read as such:

RHB: .257/.304/.385 (3,650 PA)
LHB: .295/.359/.501 (4,121 PA)

Over the last three years those splits have still held mostly true, albeit in much smaller sample sizes. Fittingly, Dave Cameron just wrote about platoons and bullpens yesterday, which is something that can be discussed and applied to this signing. Weaver is a ROOGY, or at least, the right-handed version of a lefty specialist. These types can come in handy, since most batters are of similar dexterity and this gives Weaver the perceived edge, but types like Weaver are also the most fungible reliever type around.

The Dodgers already have a pretty fantastic pen, which means Weaver is by no means a safe bet to break camp in the bigs. Even if he starts in Las Vegas, it’s a nice piece of depth to have. After all, the Dodgers had seven relievers last season who made at least 20 appearances and had an above average leverage index, the most of any team ranked in the top 10 of bullpen FIP.

In case you missed it, here are links to the Top 10 lists for all the teams in both the American and National League East divisions. The link to the AL/NL Central Top 10 lists is HERE.

American League East
Toronto Blue Jays | Top Prospect: Brett Wallace, 3B/1B (AAA)
Boston Red Sox | Top Prospect: Casey Kelly, RHP (A+)
Tampa Bay Rays | Top Prospect: Desmond Jennings, OF (AAA)
Baltimore Orioles | Top Prospect: Brian Matusz, LHP (MLB)
New York Yankees | Top Prospect: Jesus Montero, C (AA)

National League East
Washington Nationals | Top Prospect: Stephen Strasburg, RHP (AFL)
Philadelphia Phillies | Top Prospect: Domonic Brown, OF (AA)
Florida Marlins | Top Prospect: Michael Stanton, OF (AA)
Atlanta Braves | Top Prospect: Jason Heyward, OF (AAA)
New York Mets | Top Prospect: Fernando Martinez, OF (MLB)

Up Next: The AL and NL West Top 10 lists

How many different batting orders do you think the average team uses throughout a season? Go ahead, guess a number in your head right now. I will write out the actual number to hopefully deter your eyes from jumping ahead and fixating on it. Would it surprise you to find out that in 2009, the average number of different lineups used was one hundred and twenty-two?

While discussing the addition of Ryan Garko to the Mariners yesterday, a random comment passed by about manager Don Wakamatsu getting to use a different batting order every day for 2010 with all the platoon options he now has at his disposal. Out of curiosity, I wandered, figuratively, over to Baseball Reference to see how many different orders Wakamatsu used in 2009. I was shocked to find out it was 138. I checked other teams and continued being shocked, so I wrote down the number for every team.

The Cleveland Indians came the closest to that passing joke as manager Eric Wedge used 148 different batting orders throughout the season. Their most frequently used lineup went:

Grady Sizemore
Mark DeRosa
Victor Martinez
Travis Hafner
Jhonny Peralta
Shin-Soo Choo
Ryan Garko
Ben Francisco
Asdrubal Cabrera

Wedge used that order five times in 2009. Arizona ran out the next highest amount of differing order with 144. Most teams are in the low 100s. The standard deviation is 16 from the average of 122. Amazingly, the team with the fewest different batting orders used, Philadelphia, is almost 3.5 standard deviations away from the mean, and a far cry removed from any other team in baseball. Phillies manager Charlie Manuel utilized only 68 different batting orders, 29 fewer than the second fewest Florida.

Also surprising to me is that despite having one fewer player to pencil in (I excluded pitchers from the batting order), the National League averaged almost as much variance as the American League. The NL used an average of 118 different batting orders, the AL 126.

I am not claiming the number of different batting orders used to be meaningful in any way. They’re influenced by roster turnover, health, player effectiveness, the manager’s whim and a couple dozen other factors. However, if you had asked me before I had looked how many different batting orders the average team used throughout a season, I would have guessed around 60. I would have been way off.

Willy Taveras is jobless. Not for too long, since the A’s will either lose him on waivers — not sure lose is the right word here — or he could find himself in Triple-A. His employment in limbo stems, in large part, because his on-base percentage was .275 last season. Here’s some food for thought. Zack Greinke was pretty much the best pitcher in the American League last season. Greinke’s on-base percentage against was .276. That means, Taveras got on base less against all pitchers faced than the rest of baseball did against the league’s best pitcher.

Some of that horrid mark involved disobedience by never walking and the other part seems to be poor luck. A .278 BABIP is well below his career norms, and his previous low was twenty points higher. Taveras is a slap hitter who is at his best when he’s hitting the ball on the ground and using his legs to secure singles. Bunts have always been a part of his game, but his execution last year was the worst he’s had throughout his major league career. Failure to reach on two-thirds of his bunt attempts wasn’t the only batted ball issue Taveras had, for whatever reasons, 20% of his fly balls were of the infield variety – about as close to a sure out as you can get.

Taveras can still be useful though. That seems like a thought shared by those who think Socrates is a clothing brand, but it’s true. The problem for Taveras is how late he joins the fray. A team could claim him on waivers, or look towards similar players – like, say, the recovering Endy Chavez – and save a 40-man roster spot as well as cash. It wouldn’t surprise me to see Taveras fill out some National League team’s bench. It does surprise me that Taveras racked up nearly 400 plate appearances as the Reds’ leadoff man.

I guess there’s nothing like starting every game by facing Zack Greinke.