Coming off their second World Series appearance in as many years, the Phillies have a talented group of players on their roster. The Phillies made moves this offseason in an attempt to push themselves over the hump and win another title this year.

Even after making it into November the past couple of seasons, and acquiring some big time talent this offseason, the FanGraphs FANS projections only have the Phillies winning the NL East division 23% of the time, and making the playoffs 34% of the time. CHONE agrees to some degree, placing the Phillies second in the NL East but winning the wild card by a 4-game margin. While I don’t think any casual fan would agree with the FANS or CHONE projections, the fact that multiple systems are agreeing that Philadelphia will fall off of their NL East throne is interesting, if not convincing.

Behind the plate, the Phillies don’t have a big name catcher, but two players with substantial time in the majors. Carlos Ruiz has had at least 370 plate appearances in each of the past three seasons, but never more than 430. Ruiz can draw a walk and was one of the 13 players who walked more than they struck out in 2009. While they may have been able to hand over more at bats to Ruiz, they decided to sign veteran Brian Schneider to help keep “Chooch” healthy. Schneider is below average, so his new backup role should suit him well.

Once you get past the man behind the plate, the rest of the Phillies offense is very familiar, with most players being household names. Ryan Howard will have another 40+ home run season at first base, with a wOBA around .390. While Howard is seen as a big bad power hitter and an one dimensional player, he doesn’t get enough credit for his defense. A half season in 2005 was the only time Howard has posted a below average UZR. Howard will barely be above average once again, but any positive defensive value from a fantastic hitter is great. Chase Utley is one of the most underrated players in the league, posting 8 WAR seasons in 2007 and 2008, and was worth over 7.5 WAR in 2009. After posting 5+ WAR seasons from 2006-2008, Jimmy Rollins was worth only 2.4 WAR last year. While he is on the decline, Rollins will be better in 2010. Acquisition Placido Polanco will be moving over to third base, where his value will still likely hover around 3 wins. The infield is aging, with no starter under the age of 31, but still have a couple of prime years left.

In the outfield, the age problem is still prevalent. Shane Victorino is under-30, but he’ll be joining the “Big 3-0” club a month after the season ends. The other two starters, Jayson Werth and Raul Ibanez are already in the club. However, like the infield, they will all be successful and worth close to 3 wins apiece. However, Ibanez won’t be helping his team in the field again, barring a minor miracle. Ibanez posted a -38.4 UZR from 2006-2008, but he was 8 runs above average in the field in 2009. There is no reason to expect him to be good again, with the FANS and CHONE have him in the -5 to 0 range.

Compared to the start of last year, the rotation is leaps and bounds better. Compared to the rotation they entered the offseason with, it is barely better. Roy Halladay, Cole Hamels and Joe Blanton will be worth somewhere around 12.5 WAR, combined. The rest of the rotation is suspect. J.A. Happ will be the fourth starter, but he stranded 85.2% of runners last year and allowed hits on balls in play only 27% of the time. Both rates will go through some regression, but Happ will still be close to league average as a starting pitcher. The fifth starting spot won’t be pretty, with Jamie Moyer slotting into the role barring another injury problem.

The bullpen is going to be a mess that Charlie Manuel needs to figure out, and quick. Brad Lidge won’t be ready to start the season, so the ninth inning job falls to Ryan Madson. Danys Baez could also get a few chances. J.C. Romero, Chad Durbin, and Jose Contreras will all see innings in the bullpen, which is not good news for fans.

The Phillies have some great pieces in place to win this year, but all most of them are aging and getting ready to fall. While some projection systems may like the Braves to win the division, I like the odds of the Phillies repeating as division champs. If the Phillies don’t make the playoffs with their all-star roster, heads will roll.

Now that we’re on to the top ten, we begin to nitpick a little bit. The previous 20 organizations all have one pretty significant issue, but now we’re starting to try to separate the good from the great. These distinctions are a bit tougher.

St. Louis is a good example of this. There are a lot of of things to like about the Cardinals; they have the best player in baseball, some all-stars around him, and a couple very good young players that they can build around. They’re the best team in the NL Central, and are a legitimate contender for the 2010 World Series. The fan base is strong, and the team makes enough money to sustain payrolls high enough to contend regularly.

But, there are cracks in the armor, most notably in the people management side of things. To say that Tony LaRussa and Dave Duncan don’t always get along with the front office is something of an understatement. Reports surfaced during the 2009 season of a near mutiny on the coaching staff when the organization decided to get rid of Duncan’s son. Walt Jocketty left town to get away from a power struggle in the front office, and while that has been mostly settled, there are still potential issues there.

How long the manager and coach will remain in place is a near annual story. The Cardinals have put a lot of faith in Dave Duncan’s ability to fix pitchers and turn them into valuable pieces, and it’s paid off for years, but how long he’ll be in the Cardinals organization is an open question. Can St. Louis continue to strike gold by teaching cast-offs a two-seamer and turning them into all-stars without Duncan? Maybe, but I don’t know that it’s a good bet.

These seem like minor issues, I know, and in the grand scheme of things, they may be, but while the Cardinals have a good team, the friction between the front office and coaching staff threatens the formula that they’ve built their roster around. The Cardinals should win in 2010, but if they don’t, things could go very, very badly in St. Louis. It probably won’t, but the potential soap opera disaster is there, and that’s enough to drag the Cardinals down to the bottom of the really good organizations in baseball.

Contention often breeds desperation in Major League General Managers, and amidst a divisional race last July, Cardinals General Manager John Mozeliak may have been guilty of just that. Mozeliak tipped his hand near the trading deadline, trading away Brett Wallace, Clay Mortensen, Chris Perez, Jess Todd and Shane Peterson for Matt Holliday and Mark DeRosa, committing the Cardinals window of championship opportunity to as long as this current brand of veteran stars allots it. Bringing Holliday back into the fold for seven seasons was not a luxury but a necessity — with little left in the farm system, this is a team that will simply ebb and flow as Holliday and Albert Pujols do.

And number 28, who if you haven’t heard, “hits that triple, double, single, that smooth home run.”

As poor a state as the Cardinals minor league system currently stands — and it’s a shockingly shallow group of players — credit where it’s due: the St. Louis opening day lineup will have six homegrown starters. And while half of them feel like second-division starters (David Freese, Skip Schumaker, Brendan Ryan), the presence of Pujols and Colby Rasmus overshadows a lot of the organization’s other shortcomings. Assuming they can re-sign Pujols, and I truly believe it is going to happen, the Cardinals have three very talented hitters under control for the indefinite future. Not many teams can boast such a thing.

The rest of the team’s future seems a little more definite, as a lot of money looks to come off the books after 2012: Kyle Lohse, Yadier Molina, Ryan Ludwick, and some combination of Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright (depending on their respective options). This buys the scouting department some time to rebuild this farm system, as replacements aren’t needed for three years. It certainly lends for patience in regards to top prospect Shelby Miller’s development, and the raw first-round pick needs it. Miller has great potential, but his secondary stuff must come a long way.

While the process for procuring and developing stars promises to be a slow process, I do expect the Cardinals to continue to fill holes with cheap, low-ceiling, homegrown options. For example, Tony La Russa’s acceptance in opening positions for David Freese and Jaime Garcia as his third baseman and fifth starter, respectively. I do like Garcia, a guy that has legitimate sink to every pitch he throws. It’s very possible he’ll be the Cardinals third-best starter as early as this season. If Garcia does falter, it won’t be long before Lance Lynn is ready to replace him in the back of the rotation. Freese, I’m not so excited about. Neither his walk or strikeout rates inspire me enough to believe he’ll hit, and I know his defense won’t be a help. It’s hard not to wonder if dealing with Allen Craig’s brutal defense at third base, while retaining some offense from the position, isn’t the better option.

The bullpen is another place that will be ripe with homegrown players as long as Pujols and Holliday eat up forty percent of the payroll. Four of the seven relievers slated to open the season in St. Louis are products of Cardinals minor league affiliates. Each of them succeeds in different ways, from big velocity (Jason Motte) to a lot of movement (Mitch Boggs). But there is more on the way, like Eduardo Sanchez or Adam Reifer or, maybe even Adam Ottavino. The scouting team clearly knows that the production of relievers is important to what they do, as both their third (Joe Kelly) and fourth (Scott Bittle) round picks last season were college relievers.

With the development of superstars out of the way, at times it feels the scouting department becomes complacent and seeks out only high-floor players that will produce marginally above replacement level. This is not a great way to run a team; I much prefer swinging for the fences on guys like Rasmus and Shelby Miller. Not thinking about what will surround Albert, and instead thinking about what will complement him, is a much better way to ensure long-term success.

The Cardinals cruised to the NL Central last season with a 91-71 record, 7.5 games ahead of second place Chicago. They did so despite an $11 million cut in payroll from the previous year down to around $90 million. They are maintaining that level in 2010 even with the addition of Matt Holliday.

Just as the payroll is remaining fairly static, the projected win totals for the Cardinals is close to their 2009 actual totals. FanGraphs readers have the Cardinals at 88 wins for 2010, a massive ten games over the second place Cubs. That is twice the separation of any other division. CHONE agrees as well with the Cardinals topping the NL Central at 91 wins, ten games ahead of the Brewers and Reds.

Around the infield, Yadier Molina, Albert Pujols, Skip Schumaker and Brendan Ryan all return. They’re all reasonably young and none really had outrageously fluke-filled seasons so St. Louis fans should have a pretty good idea of what is in store for 2010. I might expect slightly less offense from the right side, but Schumaker might make up for that with increased defensive prowess at second base with more experience there. What is less known is at third base where David Freese and Felipe Lopez will battle for the majority of playing time.

Matt Holliday, Colby Rasmus and Ryan Ludwick all return for the Cardinals outfield though there appears to be some questions as to who will be providing depth behind the starting three. Holliday and Ludwick are roughly average gloves in the corners but Rasmus provides an opportunity for a plus defender in center and obviously all three can swing the stick a little bit.

While Joel Pineiro is unlikely to repeat the success he had in 2009 for the Angels this coming year, his loss still hurts the Cards some. They did import Brad Penny to ease some of that pain however. The fifth spot was Kyle McClellan’s to lose and he apparently has as Jaime Garcia appears to have been named to the post. Nevertheless, his hold is tenuous and McClellan along with Rich Hill and others are lurking. Still, it should remain an above average unit for St. Louis.

The bullpen returns largely intact and that’s less of a positive as they were unimpressive in 2009. Still, they were not a disaster and if that’s the worst unit on the team, it’s not bad enough to prevent the Cardinals from playing postseason baseball.

When it comes down to it, the 2010 Cardinals look a lot like the 2009 Cardinals and for a team that’s not overly old and won the division last year, that’s a good thing.

One of the coolest things about Win Expectancy, in my opinion, is the way that it can be graphically represented. Of course, most people reading this post will know this from the classic Win Probability graphs we have here at FanGraphs. With this graphical representation, we can investigate beyond the simple line on the screen using the branch of mathematics known as analysis.

Analysis, better known as calculus, is used to solve two problems. One is finding the area contained under a curve, and the other, which will be used in this post, is to find the slope of a curve. In physics, if a graph is presented with time on the horizontal axis and position on the vertical axis, such as this graph (LINK) from HitTracker Online, the slope of the curve represents the velocity. Similarly, the slope of the line of a Win Probability graph in a way represents the “velocity” of a baseball game.

A Win Probability graph is composed of broken line segments, with each line representing the WPA of a play in the game. The slope of each line segment is then equal to the WPA of the corresponding play. Unfortunately, we can’t find the slope at the point where the broken line segments meet, because the slopes are different on each side of these points. In order to counteract this, we need to model the Win Probability graph with a curve. In this case, I choose to use something called a cubic spline, because it’s both accurate and relatively easy to compute with mathematical software. This makes it possible to find the slope at the points between the plays by taking the derivative of the curve.

Let’s show this with the 163rd game of the Twins and Tigers. Below is the graph for that game.

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The Cubs are in the midst of a drought. That one, too, but over the last decade-plus, their first round selections have inspired confidence only in the team’s inability to draft well in that round. 1999’s Ben Christensen is more famous for his hit-batsmen antics than his playing career. Then came Luis Montanez, then that Mark Prior guy, but since then, things have resembled Wrigley’s ivy in January. In 2002 came Matthew Clanton, Chadd Blasko, Luke Hagerty, and Bobby Brownlie. The next few years brought Ryan Harvey, Mark Pawelek, and then Tyler Colvin – who seemingly just made the Cubs opening day 25-man roster over the weekend.

Colvin appeared out of place as the 13th overall selection in the 2006 draft. The Clemson Tigers’ outfielder drew comparisons to Steve Finley and Shawn Green in part because of his left-handed stroke. Throughout the minors, Colvin has spent most of his time playing center, although with the presence of Marlon Byrd that appears likely to change. Kosuke Fukudome and Alfonso Soriano would presumably be the most affected, though early suggestions have Colvin playing once a week at each position.

Offensively, Colvin has more than 1,000 at-bats at Double-A, yet he’s never spent a day at Triple-A. His career Double-A slash line is .276/.318/.461; that’s an ISO of .185 to go with a walk rate of 5.5% and strikeout rate of 19.4%. Baseball America has noted that Colvin’s plate approach against crafty pitchers is iffy because he must cheat to square up on fastballs. That might be a problem because it would seem that the pool of crafty pitchers is only going to enlarge once major league teams become aware – if they aren’t well aware already.

Colvin’s fantastic exhibition season appears to be the driving force behind him making the roster. In an ideal world, your team’s players perform above expectations in spring training. This is not an ideal world. Reality exists. The reality is Colvin’s spring performance is unlikely to be a harbinger of Colvin’s rise to the outfield prospects elite. CHONE and ZiPS have Colvin posting a wOBA of .308 and .299, respectively. Unless his glove is something else, he’s going to hurt the Cubs more than he’s going to help them.

In the player pages there’s now a new section called “Dashboard”, which will be the first one you see. It includes a number of the most widely used stats on the site and they are arranged to allow you to get a statistical sense of a player with a quick glance.

We’ve also done some behind the scenes work which should make stats pages load just a bit quicker, I hope.

We’ll probably be messing around with this section a little, so if you have any feedback, be sure to let us know!

Not content with just one contract extension with a relief pitcher, the Giants nabbed another on Friday with a deal for Jeremy Affeldt that tacked on another guaranteed year plus a club option. Affeldt was originally under contract for 2010 at $4 million and then scheduled to become a free agent but under his new deal will make $4.5 million both this year and next and the Giants hold a team option for 2012 at $5 million with a $500,000 buyout.

The thirty-year-old was flat out terrific for the Giants last year as long as all you care about is ERA. 1.73 was the number in question and it’s hard to get over just how low and good that is until you notice the 12.5% walk rate and .240 BABIP. Affeldt’s FIP was 3.59 which is still decent and actually the best mark of his career, but hardly earth-moving in it’s wonderfulness.

One thing he did do was become even more of an extreme ground ball pitcher. His 65% ground ball rate ranked second in the majors for qualified relievers behind only Sean Green’s 66.2%. The thing is that with such a high ground ball rate, it makes the deflated BABIP all the more lucky and unlikely to repeat itself. 2008 Jeremy Affeldt did a superb job on limiting his walks and generating strikeouts. If he could combine that with his 2009 level of ground balls and average home run prevention, he’d be a star.

That’s a lot of wishful thinking though and in reality what is expected him from his by nearly unanimous consent of the various projections systems is about 65 innings pitches with a maintained strikeout rate, barely decreased walk rate and twice as many home runs allowed. That’s a receipe for a worse season than the one he just threw and the one he just threw made him worth about a single win, or roughly $3.5 million in value. The Giants just gave him a half million dollar pay rise up to $4.5 million and tacked on some extra years.

No, it’s not the best extension deal out there but at least it’s not an awful one either. It looks to be an overpay by about $1 million or so, but Affeldt does have his uses and it is a relatively short commitment. Call me unenthused but overly uncaring.

On January 30 of this year Brian Wilson and the Giants came to an agreement on a one year deal for $4.4 million to avoid Wilson’s first year of arbitration. Based on our standard expectation of arbitration value, that would value Wilson at around $11 million for 2010. Now, Wilson was legitimately fantastic last season with a 2.50 FIP and a 3.23 xFIP. He had over three strikeouts for every walk and was a even moderate ground ball pitcher.

The issue is that even with all that, Wilson totaled 2.4 wins worth just under $11 million under last year’s economic conditions. In other words, the Giants paid out roughly as if 2009 was magically going to repeat entirely.

Obviously that’s a bit wishful as this past winter has seen a reduction in the valuation of players on the whole and on top of that, Wilson does not have a long history of dominance. Some regression to the mean from his 2009 level is to be expected and you readers agree, projecting Wilson for 1.8 wins in 2010.

In today’s dollars, that projects to be worth a tad over $8 million. That means that while the Giants are almost surely going to see a net savings when it comes to Brian Wilson, they’re unlikely to see a net savings compared to other 4th year players. Overall, that’s not such a big deal, but then the Giants went and extended Wilson for another two years covering 2011 and 2012 at a total of $15 million. Given the expected arbitration figures, that actually constitutes a slight pay cut for Wilson, valuing him at about $10.7 million for those two years.

Given that the 2010 salary had already taken place, I don’t have a huge beef with the monetary figures of the two-year extension. I think the initial deal was a mediocre one for the Giants, but they did much better here in terms of money alone. My issue with this deal is the why. I have a hard time seeing the scenarios under which the Giants saved themselves money here.

If Brian Wilson did repeat his 2009 performance, how much of a raise was he really going to get in arbitration? Compared to the downside that is always present with relief pitchers and that’s where I find fault with this extension. Wilson had a great season and he keeps that up for the next three years then the Giants might come out slightly ahead here. But they’re locked in no matter what, Brian Wilson’s performance isn’t.

Episode Fourteen
In which all of your fantasies become realities.

Headlines
Budreika and Blahblahski: Duquesne Represent!
Sanders and Sarris: East Meets West.
Hulet and Joura: Hating on Colby Lewis.
… and other cracker jacks!

Featuring
Every Frigging RotoGraphs Contributor!

Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop.

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