The MLBPA, it seems, loves to threaten collusion charges. We heard whispers of it after the 2007 season, when Barry Bonds didn’t get much of a look from the 29 teams that didn’t explicitly say he wasn’t welcome. During the 2008 off-season we saw a number of veterans take short-term contracts at what was considered reduced pay. Again, threats of collusion. After another off-season that was generally unfavorable to veterans we’re hearing yet again that the PA might file a grievance. As in years past, I doubt any such measure will go far.

The evidence of a possible impending grievance, per the Associated Press article, comes from player agents. They report having seen similar offers from different teams for their free-agent clients. It is understandable, then, that the Players’ Association would investigate. If owners were colluding, that is one symptom we might see. Yet, given the current environment, the claim should fall short.

There is one very good reason why agents would see similar offers from different teams for the same player: the Internet. Information is everywhere. Tom Tango took on the subject last night, using the availability of stat databases as an example. His argument certainly makes a degree of sense.

Ok, suppose that there’s a measure that everyone likes.  I dunno, let’s call it… WAR.  And let’s say that it’s constructed by researchers that both sides respect, say Tango, Rally, and Fangraphs.  And say that there’s a site that lists the dollar values, like a Beckett’s price guide or NYSE.  Then, teams give out offers that are consistent to what they read.  Well, this is a GOOD thing isn’t it?  There’s no collusion, there’s no acting in concert.  There’s an understanding that, hey, maybe Tango and Rally and Fangraphs know their [stuff].

This, however, represents just one aspect of the information revolution. Not only do teams have their internal data, but they have freely available data as well. This might cause them to act similarly when it comes to signing free agent players. But there are many other aspects at play here that would cause teams to similarly value certain players.

Just look at MLB Trade Rumors. Every day Tim Dierkes and his team aggregate more information than most people can process. This includes every rumor, from one-liners at the end of game stories to full-on reports. Some of it is noise, but some of it is legitimate information about a team’s thinking. This widespread access to information creates more efficient markets. It leads to fewer teams overpaying for talent, because they have a better idea of what other teams are thinking.

If teams were familiar with how others thought, though, wouldn’t they be able to make a superior offer to a free agent? For instance, if the Royals wanted Mark DeRosa and saw that the Giants were offering him two-years and $12 million, couldn’t they step in with a two-year, $13 million offer and have an advantage? Yes, they could. It seems, however, that the market was fragmented this winter. The big time players — John Lackey, Jason Bay, Matt Holliday — all got paid, and paid well. The similar offers likely came for the second- and third-tier players, who aren’t as important to a team. In this made-up example, perhaps the Royals didn’t feel a player like DeRosa was worth the extra million. They might be able to better use those funds to improve their team in another way.

With such easy access to so much information, it’s understandable that agents would see similar offers for their clients. Teams — most teams, at least — aren’t in the business of overpaying for talent. Nor should they. No team, not even the Yankees, has unlimited resources. The good teams deploy their funds in the best possible manner. If that means passing on a certain player because they’re not willing to overpay, so be it. Those resources can go to improve the team in another way. The superstars will continue to receive big contracts. But veterans like DeRosa might fall victim to the information revolution.

Monday night, Oakland’s Ben Sheets made his first regular season start in over a year. His results were decent. He went 5 innings and gave up 3 runs (2 earned). He was a little lucky in that he allowed 4 walks and had only 3 strikeouts. This start was one I have been waiting for to see how surgery on his pitching elbow affected his fastball speed.

Ben was one of the best pitchers in the league from 2003 to 2005 when he was averaging 5.3 WAR a year. His dominant pitch during that time was his fastball with a average run value -1 more than his curve ball (a larger negative number is better).

Then in 2006 he had problems with his left shoulder and missed over half the season. Coming back in 2007, he threw his fastball the same amount of time, but the results were not the same. His curve ball became his dominate pitch with a average 100 pitch run value of 1 greater than his curve ball.

Ben missed all of the 2009 season as a free agent with a torn tendon in is right elbow. He signed with the A’s this off season for 8 million dollars and a chance to prove that he is back.

Ben pitched his first game with Pitch F/X cameras on Monday. The initial results don’t look that good. First, his average velocity was down 1.5 MPH from his previous averages. Also, his 2010 peak speed is near his 2007 and 2008 average speeds:

Mike Fast at the Hardball Times recently wrote that for every 1 MPH decrease, the pitchers run value with go up 0.28 runs. The run value on Ben’s fastball would increase to approximately the 1.4 run level level. The loss of velocity on his fastball could be costing Ben around one third a run per game depending on how much he throws it.

Ben Sheets first start shows that his fastball is not up to speed and will probably cost him some runs over the season. For the A’s, he was a risky investment, but one they probably needed to take in the competitive AL West.

A couple of managerial decisions over the last two days of baseball have confused me in games that I have watched. Both of them involved the management of bullpens. Bullpen management can certainly get dicey as the season progresses, as usage has to balanced very carefully along with injuries, spot starts, and various other issues. However, it should be a relatively simple matter at this point in the season, as all teams are starting fresh. Nobody comes into opening day off a 14 inning, 10 pitcher thriller in the spring training finale.

The first came in the Milwaukee Brewers season opener against the Colorado Rockies, when manager Ken Macha decided to go with left hander Chris Narveson, a pitcher with a 4.22 FIP last season, mostly in relief, and only one year removed from a AAA FIP of 4.91 with the Brewers down 4-2 in the 7th. Narveson barely got out of his first inning, allowing a double to Todd Helton and two fly balls from Troy Tulowitzki and Brad Hawpe. He managed to escape unscathed thanks to an Ian Stewart groundout. The second inning did not go as well, though, as Carlos Gonzalez singled and then right-handed pinch hitter Ryan Spilborghs hit a double which scored Gonzalez from first, allowing the Rockies to go up 5-2. They barely avoided a rally, as the Brewers scored one in the 9th to make the final score 5-3. The run allowed in the 8th cost the Brewers about 6% of a win.

The second came in the Seattle Mariners vs. Oakland Athletics game, as the Mariners sent out Rule 5 pick Kanekoa Texeira to start a 1-1 9th inning. Texeira pitched well by all accounts, and managed to get through the 9th inning, even though he allowed a single to Mark Ellis and a broken bat double to Travis Buck. The A’s got to him in the 10th, as Mark Ellis hit a walk-off single to give the A’s their first win of the season. Texeira’s outing had a much larger impact on win probability – in his last inning, he had a -.417 WPA.

In the case of the Brewers, none of their relievers had seen any action in the game, and therefore the season. Is one inning too much for Todd Coffey or LaTroy Hawkins, even if the Brewers are behind? What about Carlos Villanueva, who is a better pitcher and possesses a changeup with which to neutralize opposite-handed hitters. For the Mariners, was the one inning that Brandon League threw on Monday enough to warrant keeping him out of this game? Was it necessary for a Rule 5 pick making his major league debut to throw the 9th and 10th innings of a tie game?

It’s very likely that I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill, but decisions like this irk me. It feels to me that the managers are either outsmarting themselves by trying to save their bullpens at such an early stage or are simply not taking April games seriously enough. Perhaps the rest of the guys in the bullpen just weren’t ready, or the managers felt the matchups were better. From my perspective, though, it seems like weaker pitchers were used in situations which warranted better pitcher’s – Narveson’s .79 entrance LI suggests something more than a mop-up pitcher, and Texeira’s 2.28 entrance LI suggests that it was a closer situation. Even though it’s only April, and only games 1 and 2 out of 162, these situations scream opportunity wasted.

Third night of the season and since more than half of the league was off, the decision came down to a pair of 7 P.M. starts: Either the Yankees and Red Sox or Rays and Orioles. No decision necessary. Here’s a few observations noted throughout the game.

Adam Jones and Matt Wieters are studs

One would wager that 99% of the reading populace is well aware of the existence and talents of Mr. Jones and Mr. Wieters. One is an uber toolsy centerfielder, capable of playing shallow without hesitation, with a great accelerator and iffy brakes on outside pitches. The other is a switch-hitting offensive-minded catcher. Both hit solo homers last night, and Jones added an infield single. Wieters received the Stephen Strasburg hype buggy treatment last season, but “disappointed.” Wieters had a .330 wOBA through 385 plate appearances as a rookie. He is a catcher. He is a catcher in the American League East. He was a rookie catcher in the American League East and he posted a league average wOBA. That is unnatural.

Take those two, add Nick Markakis, add Brian Roberts, and then think about adding Joshua Bell and, well, it’s not hard to fall in love with the potential of this team. It sounds defeatist or even mocking in nature to write something like, “They could compete for third place next year …” but that’s just the reality of the situation and it’s not a knock on the Orioles whatsoever.

Joe Maddon’s managing

I think Maddon is a smart individual, and relative to the other MLB managers, he’s probably above average, otherwise I doubt the Rays would continue to employ him. Some interesting developments that had me scurrying to the splits’ pages.

1) Randy Choate facing a right-handed batter

Choate entered to face Nick Markakis – a lefty – whom he retired on strikes. Miguel Tejada was then due up with another lefty – Luke Scott – on deck. Maddon only had Lance Cormier warming and, with one out and a runner on first, he elected to keep Choate in the game. I think this was the wrong decision despite the good result – Choate inducing a groundball that turned into a double play.

Choate is left-handed and rocks a side-armed release. That screams platoon split and, sure enough, Choate has a career 2.57 FIP versus lefties and 4.87 versus righties despite facing more righties throughout. Cormier became a full-time reliever in 2008 (with the Orioles, coincidentally) and, since then, has little in the way of a platoon split of which to speak. He’s posted FIP versus lefties of 4.02 and 4.28; and against righties, FIP of 4.06 and 4.08.

Scott was the key, since after Choate retired him in the next inning, Cormier entered to face the switch-hitting Wieters. It just seemed like two batters too late, even if no damage was done.

2) Carl Crawford facing a left-handed pitcher

This one is more trivial. The Rays have Gabe Kapler on the bench. He hits lefties quite well, and he’s a good defender, meaning replacing the superb Crawford in close situations with a lefty on the mound might not be as insane it sounds. Let’s say Kapler is projected to be a .350 wOBA hitter versus southpaws. Account for the pinch hitter penalty (10%) and you have him at .315. Crawford’s never been too good at hitting lefties, but his career .308 mark is a bit unfair and skewed from his first few seasons when he was absolutely miserable against them. Over the last three seasons he’s hit .313, .289, and .360 … which basically kills the idea that he should be replaced by Kapler in such spots.

But wait. In the ninth inning, Maddon shows understanding of this very situation once more, leaving Crawford in versus Mike Gonzalez. Crawford promptly drove home the game-tying and game-winning runs, and by pinch-hitting for Dioner Navarro with Kelly Shoppach.

Dave Trembley’s managing

In the seventh inning, he had to decide whether Will Ohman or Cla Meredith would face Ben Zobrist. I do not envy him.

This is running long, and that’s without mentioning Evan Longoria’s 470 foot homer, Rafael Soriano doing his best to invoke mass hysteria about his quality, Luke Scott’s free-flowing hair, Kevin Millwood’s missing hair, and Mike Gonzalez one-upping Soriano’s incompetence. Forget the payrolls and media attention; this was the game of the night.

The first thing I did on my iPad was check out how the FanGraphs app looked on it. It works, but truth be told you’re better off using the website on an iPad, which will work in its entirety. I much prefer the FanGraphs app on the iPhone to the website, but it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to use it on a bigger screen. Now if you could use the FanGraphs app as an iPad widget and leave it in the corner all the time or something, that would be cool.

The second thing I did was download the MLB At Bat 2010 for iPad.

MLB.tv through MLB At Bat 2010 works great on the iPad. While I was doing the live chat yesterday, I had the iPad propped up with whichever game I wanted to watch that was not blacked out. It’s like having a handheld television, specifically designed to watch baseball games.

And of course you have all sorts of statistical overlays available to you while you watch the game. Want to know which players are in the field, or want to see a boxscore while watching the game? No problem, those are all available right at your fingertips.

There’s also a high resolution MLB Gameday view, where you can see each at-bat, pitch by pitch along with lineup, boxscore, and video highlights. You can pull up so many extra “stat boxes” that it will more or less fill up the entire screen. It all looks really great and because you can’t access the web based MLB Gameday on your iPad, this is really the only official MLB live scoring option available to you.

The downside is that it costs $15 dollars, again. And I say again because I already have MLB At Bat 2010 for my iPhone, which cost $15 dollars too. I also noticed a few opening day bugs, which weren’t show stoppers or anything, but caused the application to crash on me a couple of times. I’m sure these will get ironed out pretty quickly.

While it’s one of the more expensive apps you’ll purchase, it does provide the most robust and prettiest live scoring experience on your iPad, mainly because of the lack of Flash software that will prevent many popular web based solutions (including MLB’s very own) from working. And if you have an MLB.tv subscription and an iPad, getting MLB At Bat 2010 for the iPad is really a no brainer.

I find these early season posts harder to write than the off-season posts. Part of it is the desire to write about the games occurring, while at the same time trying to provide something worth reading. There are only so many ways to write about the improbability of Yuniesky Betancourt’s at-bat against Justin Verlander yesterday*. With that in mind, I’m going to shamelessly steal a topic from Dave Cameron’s 2009 early season posts: Wins in the bank.

Dave’s original post was followed by Sky Kalkman expanding on the topic by applying it to the CHONE standings through that point. The concept is explained by both, but I’ll rephrase it here for originality’s sake. Say the Orioles start off 6-4. CHONE projected the Orioles to win 75 games, or 46% of their games. That 60% win rate seems to be overachieving, but don’t trip into the Gambler’s Fallacy line of thinking that the Orioles will go 3-7 at some point to ‘even things out’.

No, instead you give the Orioles credit for those earned wins while respecting the projections heading forward. 46% of 152 equates to 70 wins. Add those six they already racked up, and the Orioles solid start improved their expected record by a whole game. Of course, this can be applied at just about any time throughout the season. Say the Rays go 35-20 and we still have reason to expect them to be a 90 win team, then they would improve their expected record by four games. In that division, in that race, that’s a huge swing.

It’s early and easy to get swept away in some paranoia and hyperbole. But yeah, the results matter, and they can make a difference.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lineup optimization — ordering batters to create a lineup that produces the most runs — is a topic that receives a great deal of attention relative to its importance (and this article will only make the ratio worse). The fact is most sensible lineups (not batting the pitcher first or putting Alex Rodriguez 8th) will produce nearly the same amount of runs. Still, with the ever-expanding search to find any slim advantage it is something to think about. Sabermetric studies of lineup optimization have produced some interesting results; Sky Kalkman neatly reviews The Book’s findings on the topic. Compared to the old-school lineup dogma, more weight is given to the second and fifth spots, while less to the third spot. In addition, the Book suggests that batting the pitcher 8th is a good idea.

Baseball Musings has a lineup optimizer tool, which gives the optimal lineup based on each players’s projected OBP and SLG (this ignores speed and handedness, which are also important). Out of curiosity I wanted to see how each of yesterday’s lineups compared with the best one predicted by this tool. I used the CHONE projections and the tool spit out the estimated runs per game for the given lineup and the optimal lineup. I gave all pitchers the average OBP, 0.176, and SLG, 0.179, that NL pitchers had in 2009:

Team      Actual      Best      Dif
TEX       5.017       5.033    -0.016
MIN       5.257       5.308    -0.051
OAK       4.519       4.571    -0.052
CLE       5.019       5.081    -0.062
KCA       4.379       4.446    -0.067
PIT       4.552       4.628    -0.076 *
DET       4.698       4.776    -0.078
TOR       4.676       4.763    -0.087
CHA       4.759       4.858    -0.099
SEA       4.478       4.578    -0.100
LAA       4.891       5.016    -0.125
HOU       3.967       4.142    -0.175
COL       5.064       5.258    -0.194
ATL       4.898       5.106    -0.208
LAN       4.773       4.982    -0.209
ARI       4.704       4.916    -0.212
FLO       4.813       5.035    -0.222
SFN       4.294       4.522    -0.228
PHI       4.873       5.102    -0.229
WAS       4.410       4.644    -0.234
CIN       4.608       4.846    -0.238
CHN       4.660       4.899    -0.239
MIL       4.629       4.876    -0.247
SDN       4.176       4.431    -0.255
NYN       4.381       4.645    -0.264
STL       4.843       5.116    -0.273

* pitcher batted 8th

First off, notice that the worst-optimized lineups were all NL teams that had the pitcher bat 9th. The one NL team that had the pitcher bat 8th, Pittsburgh, fell out in the middle of the AL teams. So it looks like, given a reasonably constructed lineup (as these are), having the pitcher bat 9th results in a pretty big drop. The average pitcher-bats-9th team was 0.23 runs below optimal, while Pittsburgh and the AL teams averaged 0.07 runs below optimal. This would suggest flipping the pitcher and 8th hitter on the other NL teams would result in an improvement of about 0.16 runs. Over 162 games that is 25 runs or 2.5 wins, a surprisingly high number to me.Edit: It looks like the method I took is not correct and this conclusion is false. See the comments and this post by Tango. I apologize.

St. Louis had the worst-optimized lineup. The big problem for them, in addition to having Chris Carpenter batting 9th, was Albert Pujols batting 3rd. As noted above, the studies of lineup optimization shows that the 2nd, 4th and 5th spots should all have better hitters than the third, so having the game’s best hitter bat third really hurts.

I think Texas is the closest to their optimized lineup because they have so many similar hitters. Josh Hamilton, Vladimir Guerrero, Nelson Cruz and Chris Davis all project to have about average OBP (0.320 to 0.340) and good SLG (0.467 to 0.508). Once you throw Julio Borbon in the leadoff spot and Andres Blanco–Elvis Andrus eight-nine there is little variation in runs scored based on the ordering of the middle guys.

Two other quick notes: with Boston, Tampa Bay and the Yankees all off for the night CHONE saw the Twins’ lineup as the best, and Houston’s lineup was expected to score under four runs against the average pitcher, but they had to face one of the best.

Yesterday, every Braves fan on earth had a I-know-where-I-was-when-that-happened moment, when Jason Heyward destroyed a Carlos Zambrano fastball in his first major league at-bat. For anyone who even casually enjoys the game, it was a great moment. The crowd going insane, his parents jumping around and hugging everyone they can find, and Heyward rounding the bases on Opening Day in Atlanta – it was just a lot of fun to watch.

Meanwhile, up in the capital city, the Nationals got pounded 11-1 at home, as John Lannan and Miguel Batista made the first Washington game of the season a thoroughly miserable affair. Stephen Strasburg was nowhere to be seen.

This is a problem for Major League Baseball. The rules of the game currently incentivize teams to take the Nationals path. Washington is going to retain Strasburg’s services for 2016 by keeping him out of the big leagues in April, and everyone understands why they’re doing it. But, realistically, is it in the best interests of baseball to make their product worse every April by setting up a system that encourages teams to start the season with inferior rosters? Does MLB want to really continue a system where most organizations willingly choose to give up the moment that Heyward had yesterday? Does anyone want less of those?

Baseball needs to be in the business of promoting goosebumps and memories that will live forever. They need to fix the service time issue so that teams like Washington have no reason to send their best pitcher to the minor leagues for a month.

In yesterday’s chat, when this came up, I suggested one possible alternative; reduce the amount of days needed to count as a full year of service towards free agency. Right now, the number is 172, which means that a player has to be on the active roster or the disabled list for about 95 percent of the season in order to accumulate enough days for one full year. A player who is on the roster for 90 percent of the season will not get enough days of service to count it as a full season, which makes no sense whatsoever.

If you lower that number to, say, 100 days of service, now you’re making teams hold players back until July if they want to get that extra year of club control. That is a much tougher sacrifice to make when you’re staring at a big league ready prospect at the end of March. Would the Nationals have been willing to keep Strasburg in the minors until July? I really doubt it. Given the shifted incentives, he would almost certainly have broken camp with their big league team, and Washington fans could have had a Heyward moment of their own to look forward to.

Lowering the days of service causes some other issues that would have to be addressed, and it’s not a perfect solution, but at least it addresses the point of MLB actively discouraging teams from giving their fans once-in-a-lifetime memories. If baseball wants kids to grow up loving the game, they need more moments like what happened in Atlanta yesterday. It’s time for the rules to change.

One last off season related post to clear out of the outbox before we get too far into the season. Within its MLB preview SI listed the top performers (using 2009 WAR as the metric) within various 2010 salary bins. As could be guessed, most of the low salary bins (under $1M and $1-2M) had players that were still under team control. While this is interesting, I was curious about the best players signed to deals in those low salary bins, specifically those that signed to one year deals. With that in mind I set about to create a few lists of my own, a lineup for 2009 and a couple of potential scrap heap heroes to keep an eye on in 2010. Without further ado, the scrap heap heroes for 2009

Pos   Player            Money         War
C     Gregg Zaun        $1.5M         1.7
1B    Russell Branyan   $1.4M         2.8
2B    Craig Counsell    $1M           2.8
3B    Juan Uribe        $1M           2.8
SS    Omar Vizquel      $1M           1.1
OF    Gabe Kapler       $1M           1.3
OF    Fernando Tatis    $1.7M         1.7
OF    Jerry Hairston    $2m           1
SP    Carl Pavano       $1.5M         3.7
RP    Arthur Rhodes     $2M           1

Overall my list of qualifiers averaged right around 0.4 WAR and a salary a little over $1M. Since opening day is now in our rear view mirror, let’s stop looking back and look some likely scrap heap heroes for this year. On the position player side Troy Glaus hopes to bounce back from an injury plagued 2009. CHONE projects Glaus to produce 1.7 WAR, and the biggest hurdle to doing that might be staying on the field. Russell Branyan will be bidding for a repeat appearance as CHONE projects him at 0.9 WAR. A couple others to watch are Eric Hinske, who just missed the 2009 list, and Rod Barajas, who could get starter’s playing time with the Mets. On the pitching side the scrap heap is usually populated with injury question marks, and 2010 appears to be no different. A couple of names of note that fall into the injury question mark bin are Erik Bedard and Justin Duchscherer. All in all there are some values out there to be had for your $2M, but don’t expect to hit the jackpot every time.

Way Not to Use Your Head

Has anyone told the players that Spring Training doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter, especially if you are a regular. Why take a chance to miss part of the season? Well Alex Gordon and Coco Crisp will be missing a month of time each this season because they broke a finger each sliding in head first. How many of the 81 players that are on the DL are because of sliding in feet first, none. Maybe Alex and Coco didn’t see it as a problem, but now they and other players should.

Beginning the Season on the DL

The last few days, teams have been busy adding players to the disabled list. A decent percentage of the total number of DL trips happen at the beginning of season on average. Mainly this happens because of players recovering from off-season surgeries.

Over the past 8 years, there have been an average of 439 trips to the DL over an entire season. To start off this season, 81 players are on the DL or about 18% of an average season’s total. Twenty-eight of those trips are now for players still recovering from surgeries.

Not so Greatest Shape of Their Lives

At the beginning of Spring Training, Dave Cameron looked for players that said they were in the greatest shape of their lives. Of this group of 28 players, only one is currently on the DL, Daisuke Matsuzaka. I figured there was going to be more. Quite a few more games are left to play, so the list may change quite a bit. I plan on coming back to this list at least every month to see how these workout studs hold up over the season.

Unique Injury

Each team reports to MLB the nature of each player’s injury for reporting. Lance Berkman was said to have a “cranky” knee. Maybe the knee sees the team the Astros put together and becoming more disruptive with its complaints.