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Matt Klaassen wrote on March 1st about Edwar Ramirez’s designation from the Yankees and today the seemingly inevitable trade was worked out. That the trading team was Texas presents some interesting considerations.

As Klaassen pointed out, a big part of Ramirez’s troubles in 2007 and 2009 aside from his walks were his home runs allowed. We do not yet have enough data on New Yankee Stadium to ascertain how home run friendly it is, but suffice to say that a move to Texas is not going to do much to help Edwar keep his many flyballs in the yard.

The projection systems do see some improvement coming for Ramirez, but almost entirely in a recovered walk rate. The strikeout rate from 2007 might be gone forever as there is generally only so long that you can dominate with a change up when your fastball averages below 90mph. If Edwar cannot get his walks figured out, then he’s unlikely to have a long enough leash to figure things out, especially since he’s almost assured to be allowing a lot of home runs in the launching pad that is Arlington with his ground ball rate in the low 30%’s.

The Rangers got Ramirez for “cash considerations” so ultimately the actual cost to them is going to be pretty low. The biggest risk they face are the innings that they let him pitch. Those are a scarce commodity, and is Ramirez does not improve from his 2009 performance then those innings would have been easily allocated in a better fashion. The biggest upside they have is that Edwar returns to being a serviceable reliever by getting his walks under control and avoiding too many damaging home runs. Even then, he’s unlikely to provide too much value and I wouldn’t be optimistic about a positive outcome.

Full disclosure: I planned on scribbling a post out concerning the Braves’ National League East chances before Tommy Bennett’s beard stole my thought and wrote its own piece on the matter. Since Bennett is smarter and more poignant, I switched my style up and will instead focus on the Braves’ reliance on medical tape.

The two feelings Bobby Cox is most familiar with are those of a crimson-flushed face and the sweetness of a baseball victory. Cox is the all-time leader in managerial ejections and fourth in managerial victories. Some would suggest Cox’s face should blush at the reality of the Braves’ run of excellence that included 14 straight division titles, 5 National League pennants, and a World Series victory. One hit in fourteen tries? Bobby Cox has benched players for less.

Such a streak is one we may never see again. Something else we may never see again after this season is Cox managing a baseball team. Joe Torre’s biggest nemesis during the 1990s has announced his intentions to retire from managing following the season. From which, Cox will ostensibly move into a comfy consulting job with the Braves. The retirement party might not take place until late October if the Braves live up to their potential, or perhaps more appropriately, stay healthy.

Perception suggests that Atlanta is dependent on injured players to the level of which T-Pain is tied to his autotuner. But maybe that’s off. After all, Billy Wagner missed most of 2009 and Takashi Saito’s elbow is a science fair project gone mundane, but the two relievers they are replacing (Rafael Soriano and Mike Gonzalez) combined to miss most of three seasons over the last two years. Other key players like Troy Glaus, Tim Hudson and Chipper Jones are guys awfully familiar with their health insurance plans too.

The Braves have roughly $34M tied into those five, so serious time on the disabled list would be an issue beyond simply losing their best players. They are no strangers to this phenomenon however. Beyond the Boxscore compiled the seasons with the most salary lost by time spent on the DL and Atlanta’s 2008 season ranked third while their 2006 season ranked nineteenth.

CHONE still has the Braves edging the competition in the N.L. East and doing so despite modest playing time projections. Chipper is projected at 531 plate appearances (his previous three-year low is 534); Glaus at 462 (32, 637, and 456 since 2007); Wagner at 37 innings; Saito at 51; and Tim Hudson at 114. Hard to claim those are unreasonable, if anything they might be too conservative.

When it does come for Cox to walk away, there’s a chance the wheelchair in the clubhouse isn’t for him. There’s also a chance the division title crown is.

Last week David posted projected standings generated from the FANS projections. I thought it would be interesting to dig a little deeper and investigate what it means for example to have the Yankees projected at 98 wins and the Red Sox at 94. My metric of choice will be playoff probabilities and my method will be simulation.

Before I get to the results of the simulation for the AL, let’s get into the nuts and bolts a little bit. In order to run the simulation needs the season’s schedule and each teams true talent win percentage. The simulation is a simple Monte Carlo that determines the winner of each game using random draws bounced up against log5 based winning percentages. For example, if we want to simulate the outcome of a game between Team A that has a 0.600 true talent win percentage and Team B that has a 0.450 win percentage, we first calculate the probability that A beats B using the log5 equation linked above. That calculation says that Team A should have a 0.647 winning percentage against Team B.

To simulate a game between these teams then, the simulation draws a random number between 0 and 1 and if the number is less than or equal to 0.647 then Team A wins, otherwise Team B wins. This process is repeated for all of the games for the entire season. Run the simulation for 10,000 such seasons and you have your results. Also built into the simulation is some up front uncertainty about the true talent win percentage. Before each of the 10,000 simulated seasons, the true talent win percentages for each team are varied slightly by using a random draw from a normal distribution centered at the input win percentage (which is based off of the projected standings) with a standard deviation of 0.030. For example, some seasons the Yankees will simulate as a 0.605 team, sometimes a 0.600 team and sometimes a 0.610 team. The standard deviation was derived through testing (read trial and error) and some of the comments in this thread at The Book Blog.

Now on to the results, starting with the East

East       Div Win %    WC Win %   Playoff %
Yankees          53%         27%         80%
Red Sox          26%         31%         57%
Rays             20%         28%         48%
Orioles           1%          3%          4%
Blue Jays         0%          0%          0%

Central    
Twins	         38%         1%          39%
White Sox	 24%         1%          25%
Tigers           19%         1%          20%
Indians          13%         1%          14%
Royals            6%         0%           6%

West      
Rangers          38%         2%          40%
Mariners         27%         2%          29%
Athletics        19%         2%          21%
Angels           16%         1%          17%

and finally some other useful data points compared to historical data

Division        Avg. Wins      2002-2009 Avg Wins
East             101           99
Central           89           93
West              90           96
Wild Card         94           96

Overall nothing too shocking. According to the FANS all of the divisions should offer plenty of intrigue be it in the form of a dogfight for the division title with likely no Wild Card safety net (the West and the Central) or the powerhouses taking it to each other all season (the East).

Next up I’ll do the same with the NL.

Whew. What you have before you is a project that spanned more than five months and included more than 30,000 words. To say that it was a massive undertaking for one person would be an understatement but it was a fun (and challenging) time. I want to thank all the readers for their (mostly constructive) comments; although I have been covering the minors for more than five years, this was my first attempt at my own Top 10 lists for every organization in Major League Baseball.

If you’re reading these lists for the first time, keep in mind that they do not include 2009 draft picks or international signings. Top 10 lists including ’09 draft picks can be found in FanGraphs’ 2010 Second Opinion fantasy companion.

A special thanks to all those who provided me with background information.

American League West
Texas Rangers | Top Prospect: Neftali Feliz, Starting Pitcher (MLB)
Seattle Mariners | Top Prospect: Michael Saunders, Outfielder (MLB)
Oakland Athletics | Top Prospect: Chris Carter, First Baseman (AAA)
Los Angeles Angels | Top Prospect: Hank Conger, Catcher (AA)

National League West
Colorado Rockies | Top Prospect: Christian Friedrich, Starting Pitcher (A+)
San Francisco Giants | Top Prospect: Buster Posey, Catcher (MLB)
San Diego Padres | Top Prospect: Simon Castro, Starting Pitcher (A-)
Los Angeles Dodgers | Top Prospect: Devaris Gordon, Shortstop (A-)
Arizona Diamondbacks | Top Prospect: Jarrod Parker, Starting Pitcher (AA)

American League Central
Kansas City Royals | Top Prospect: Mike Montgomery, Starting Pitcher (A+)
Detroit Tigers | Top Prospect: Casey Crosby, Starting Pitcher (A-)
Chicago White Sox | Top Prospect: Tyler Flowers, Catcher (AAA)
Cleveland Indians | Top Prospect: Carlos Santana, Catcher (AA)
Minnesota Twins | Top Prospect: Aaron Hicks, Outfielder (A-)

National League Central
St. Louis Cardinals | Top Prospect: Lance Lynn, Starting Pitcher (AA)
Pittsburgh Pirates | Top Prospect: Pedro Alvarez, Third baseman (AA)
Cincinnati Reds | Top Prospect: Yonder Alonso, First baseman (AA)
Chicago Cubs | Top Prospect: Andrew Cashner, Starting Pitcher (AA)
Milwaukee Brewers | Top Prospect: Alcides Escobar, Shortstop (MLB)
Houston Astros | Top Prospect: Jason Castro, Catcher (AA)

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)

For the past six seasons the Twins haven’t had to think about the ninth inning. If they had a lead in a close game, Joe Nathan was there to ensure victory. In only 25 of 272 instances did he fail to deliver. This year, though, the Twins will likely have to turn to someone else. News broke this morning that Nathan has torn his UCL and will probably undergo surgery before the season starts. He’s waiting two weeks to see whether rehab is an option, but at this point we can safely assume Tommy John surgery lies in his immediate future.

At RotoGraphs, Eno ran down Nathan’s possible replacements. The in-house options are pretty obvious: Jon Rauch, Pat Neshek, and Matt Guerrier. None of them stands a good chance to replace Nathan’s dependable production, but the effect on the closer role itself isn’t the Twins’ biggest problem. As Matt Klaassen has been saying all morning, they’ll lose perhaps two wins from that spot. There are larger implications, however, as Nathan’s absence cascades through the Twins’ bullpen.

For most positions, we define replacement level as the production of a AAA player called up to the bigs. This is not the case for closers. Replacement level for that position is the team’s next best reliever. When that next best reliever moves into the closer’s role, everyone else in the bullpen moves up, too. Relievers lower on the depth chart play a more prominent role. The biggest effect, then, comes at the back end of the bullpen, where the replacement level player shows up.

Teams, for the most part, can avoid using the seventh reliever on their staff in high leverage situations. But what of the former seventh reliever? He’s now the sixth reliever and will be pressed into more active duty. Such is the curse of bullpen chaining. About a year ago, Sky explained the process. His model agrees with Klaassen’s two-win estimate, but it also assumes a closer with a 3.00 ERA. The closest Nathan came to that was 2.70, and that happened five years ago. Clearly, unless one of the in-house replacements really takes to the role, as Nathan did when the Twins traded for him, the effect will be larger.

There’s no doubt that the Twins will miss Nathan’s dependable ninth inning performances. What they’ll miss more, though, is having guys like Guerrier, Neshek, and Rauch in setup roles. By moving them up in the pecking order, they’re allowing other, possibly lesser arms into the bullpen mix. That will hurt more than the mere ninth-inning downgrade.

Today I want to continue with the work in thinking about prospects in accordance with the WAR they might produce in the Major Leagues. With your help, the flaws of the analysis we’ve done so far have been recognized. In some cases, we’re at work behind the scenes. But I also want to flesh out this new thought process in the open. Today, I want to go through the four components of WAR, and talk about how we might treat each when projecting a prospect.

Runs Above Replacement

To keep things simple, this is computed in WAR as just 20 runs per 600 plate appearances. In my first two forays into this brand of analysis, I was after the question of what these players might look like given six full Major League seasons. It allowed for me to keep the math simple, but many of you correctly pointed out that I was overlooking the likelihood that these players fail. This, “Bust Potential,” is one of the white rabbits of minor league sabermetric analysis, but I think we can account for it in these quick-and-dirty projections in this quadrant of WAR calculation. Given that runs above replacement is only concerned with playing time, we can properly account for varying outcomes of each player’s career: a regular player, a bench player, a complete bust.

Today, I’ll be using Philadelphia Phillies top prospect Domonic Brown as my guinea pig. Brown is a consensus top 25 prospect, and the one player the Phillies would not let into trade discussions this winter. I wanted to see how rare he was, so I went to see who else Baseball America has ranked as a top 30 prospect as a “tall” (above 6-foot-2) outielder. In their first 15 years of top 100’s (1990-2004), BA ranked 25 players in that demographic. I’ll make the full list available in the comments. But the cross-section gives a really nice break down of the different possibilities for Brown’s career: 10 players became full-time regulars in the bigs, 8 players were never given a full-time shot, and the rest only got a few seasons.

So, while I’ve been giving guys +20 runs above replacement because it’s more fun to acknowledge a perfect world outcome, even for the top prospects it’s an up-hill climb. I think we can actually do better by saying that Brown’s peak is +20, but also acknowledge all outcomes and conservatively project +10 runs above replacement.

Positional Adjustment

When projecting what a player’s positional adjustment will be, there are two factors to consider: playing time and position. We have taken care of playing time in the runs above replacement adjustment — so like I did with Jesus Montero, this section allows us to look at a player’s specific situation and project a likely position. We look at the Philadelphia Phillies, and we see their outfielders contract situation: Jayson Werth is a free agent after 2010, Raul Ibanez after 2011, and Shane Victorino after 2012. While some scouts have said that Brown would work in center field, his size plus the long-term presence of Shane Victorino allows for confidence in seeing Brown in LF/RF. This means Brown would receive a -7.5 position adjustment in a full season, or -3.7 if we correspond with his conservative +10 runs above replacement projection.

UZR/Fielding

Presently, there are both quantitative and anecdotal offerings available, thanks to Sean Smith’s TotalZone play by play metric (offered at MinorLeagueSplits), or any of the great scouting reports you’ll find at Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, ESPN and more. Domonic Brown, by TotalZone, was a -6 defender in 106 games. Meanwhile, we have Keith Law’s scouting report which reads, “His biggest deficiency is in the outfield, where his reads are poor and he doesn’t set his feet to throw, but he has the speed and arm strength to become plus at the position and already runs down many balls he misreads.” Given the two, which say roughly the same thing, I’m fine with projecting Brown to be -5 UZR/150 as a Major League corner outfielder — and can accept improvement up to +0. These aren’t scientific, but it’s using an acknowledgment of everything available to us in determining a usable round number.

wRAA/Batting

Continuing today’s theme, I think we can look at batting runs in two ways: a median performance that acknowledges many of the guys that have tried and failed; and a rosier projection that comps the player to more success stories. So, I’m concerned with two things: how a player might hit if he lives up to that +10 runs above replacement number, and how he might hit if he gets to +20. However, one note that I’d like feedback on: I don’t think we should assume a lower number of plate appearances in our projection for the former. Since we are discounting a player in the first two columns for the likelihood of not reaching the Majors, I don’t think we need to double-dip when calculating wRAA. It’s essentially what a one-season snapshot in two different paths would look like.

I’m getting predictably long-winded, so I’m going to save you from the specific wOBA-generating math and use some round numbers. It’s essentially: does Brown’s power develop, or doesn’t it?

Paths   BR  UZR  Rep  PAdj    WAR   
Rosy   +25   +0  +20  -7.5    3.8
Mean   +10   -5  +10  -3.7    1.1

One day, I want to get to this point more scientifically, but I think you get the point. I think prospect analysis has a lot of value when we can call Domonic Brown a 1.1/3.8 WAR talent and understand what that means relative to other prospects. Hopefully we aren’t far away.

For most of this offseason, when our titles have contained the word “Mets,” the phrase “The Contest” could be shortly found. If Omar Minaya is trying to keep pace with Dayton Moore and Ed Wade, last Thursday’s pickup of Kiko Calero on a minor league deal was a major step back.

Joe Pawlikowski covered all of the reasons why Calero would be a good pickup last month. Quite simply, Calero did everything that DIPS theory and FIP suggest that a pitcher needs to do to be successful, as he limited home runs and walks while striking out over a batter per inning, resulting in a 2.56 FIP. His 3.92 xFIP suggests some luck, as his 1.4% HR/FB rate probably isn’t sustainable, but that’s still respectable for a middle reliever, and probably deserving of a MLB contract.

The fact that Minaya managed to snag Calero for a minor league deal is commendable. If any of the injury issues that have plagued Calero’s career show themselves in camp, he can simply be cut. If not, he could possibly be a setup man for Francisco Rodriguez given Kelvim Escobar’s injury issues. There’s no reason that it should have taken teams this long to offer Calero a job, and Minaya managed to pounce at the right time.

Everybody loves to make fun of Omar Minaya for some of his questionable decisions and leadership over the years, but we have to give credit where credit is due when he makes a smart move. His pickup of Calero was a smart move.

With no disrespect to Angel Guzman (and best of wishes to him on a speedy recovery and return to pitching), the most significant injury endured this spring has to be Russell Martin’s groin pull. The initial diagnosis is that Martin will miss a month and some change, casting doubt on being the Dodgers’ opening day catcher.

Not to get all poetic and artsy here, but … groin pulls are bad. Just read the Rotowire excerpt about Torii Hunter in which he hears “good news” about a “popping sound” stemming from the groin area and try to not wince. Especially for men who make their living off being able to bend and squat for hours at a time. Allow me to defer to those more qualified on what this injury could mean for Martin’s long-term health, and instead look at what this means for the Dodgers.

For one, those attending the Dodgers’ spring games will mostly see Brad Ausmus or A.J. Ellis behind the dish. Dave Cameron discussed Ellis here. The book on Ellis is simple: He walks quite a bit, catches, and offers little else in the way of baseball skills. The book on Ausmus is the Old Testament. He oozes seniority, so he’s Joe Torre’s new Joe Girardi. This duo is unexciting and rather uninspiring. The good news though, is that Martin missing a few games really isn’t a big deal.

That’s not to comment on the potential for re-irritating the injury down the road, just the initial timetable, and it’s not to say this is good news. It’s just not a huge deal. Say Martin misses 10 games to start the season. That’s something like 35-40 plate appearances. CHONE has Martin contributing 8 runs over 596 plate appearances, or 0.013 runs per plate appearance. Times 35, that’s a little under a half a run. That’s it over a 10 game stretch.

You have to factor in Ellis and Ausmus’ lack of contributions too and there’s the whole defensive aspect that I’m blatantly ignoring, but the reality is that Martin missing 10 games doesn’t change the landscape of the division much, if at all.

Part one dissected the claim and found that Davis attempting enough steals to successfully swipe 80 was improbable due to a number of factors. In part two, let’s focus more on the analytical side. I’m going to shamelessly steal an idea from Jeff Sullivan, but first some disclaimers and notes.

This process is going to blanket all steals attempts as being in equal in leverage. This is obviously untrue and affects how baserunners would approach certain scenarios. Certainly Davis is going to be more focused in and less willing to risk a caught stealing in the ninth inning of a tied game instead of the third inning when the A’s are up by four. Context is important, but it’s just not something I can accurately adjust for here.

Let’s assume the league run environment is around 4.5. As Sullivan notes, that makes the run value of a stolen base roughly 0.19 runs and a caught stealing is worth approximately -0.45 runs. One failure is worth two-and-a-third successes in such an environment.

The above chart details the minimum amount of attempts needed at various success rates to reach 80 steals. The best case scenario is that Davis turns into one of the most efficient basestealers in league history and needs fewer than 100 steals to rack up 80. The worst? Davis is caught left and right, but still allowed more than the 120 attempts necessitated by his performance to reach 80. Let’s turn these numbers into run values.

The same overlay is in effect here. The colored cells represent the point in which Davis would have at least 80 steals. The green means positive, the red means negative; or, in other words, not worthwhile to give Davis the green light to such an excessive degree. To surmise both parts: Davis is highly unlikely to get 80, but barring a total decay of his stealing skills, he’d probably make it worth the A’s time by adding a few runs.

The real intriguing part of the chart is look at the contrast between high success rates with moderate attempts and moderate success rates and higher attempts. Stealing bases isn’t always about volume. Perhaps the real goal Henderson should set for Davis isn’t 80 steals, but an 80% success rate.