It’s rare I get to write about my two favorite things in tandem. Baseball and Food.

Today, as Top Chef runner-up Bryan Voltaggio offered his unique twist on ballpark food at a Frederick Key’s game, I made the two-hour drive in traffic from Arlington Virginia up to Frederick Maryland to check out his creations.

I got to Harry Grove Stadium at 6:00pm sharp – the time the gates opened – and was greeted by a mostly full parking lot and a line of people that started at the gate and made its way well into the parking lot. Apparently I was not the only one eager to see what chef Voltaggio had in store.

Inside the ballpark, the chef had taken over one of the standard concession stands and turned it into a “Volt” concession stand for the night. He was orchestrating the whole thing in person, and throughout the ballpark his family and friends could be seen wearing Fredrick Key’s shirts with Volt 21 printed on the back. The number “21” represents the 21 course tasting menu offered at his restaurant Volt in Fredrick, for which there is nearly a full year’s wait to make a reservation.

Once in line, Volt’s staff took your order before you made it to the counter to speed things up and keep the line moving. After originally ordering one of everything so I could write up a thorough report, I soon realized that there was no way on earth I could eat or carry all that food – 16 items! I ended up pairing down considerably to just five smaller items.

I apologized for changing my order so drastically, paid and received my food. I carefully balanced all my food and went off to a nearby corner of the ballpark to start tasting.

For me the highlight was the Gazpacho “Dipping Dots” Rock Shrimp Ceviche. These really were just like Dippin’ Dots, but instead of chocolate and vanilla, it was small frozen spheres of heirloom tomatoes. Quite refreshing on a hot day and an interesting twist on something I do not usually get at the ballpark. Am I alone in failing to understand how Dippin’ Dots still exist?

The other dishes I tried were the Coriander Crusted Yellow Fin Tuna (not my favorite), a Soft Shell Crab Sandwich with Pickled Fennel-Cucumber Slaw (pretty good) and a Chocolate Covered Banana which was a great way to finish things off. I also snagged some Summer Truffle Pop Corn to eat while watching the game.

I had meant to try the Lamb Hot Dogs but in my haste to change my order, I forgot, and I had no plans on waiting in a line wrapped around the entire stadium. However, the people I talked to seemed to enjoy them.

Overall it was a lot of fun and a seemingly huge success for the Frederick Keys and chef Voltaggio. On average the Keys said they have an attendance of about 4,500 and with chef Voltaggio they managed to draw a crowd of 7,135.

WHAG-TV reports that Bryan’s business partner says “there will be another ‘Volt night’ sometime in the near future.”

It looks increasingly likely that the Rangers will win the American League West division. If that happens, a big reason for their success will be Josh Hamilton and his monstrous season at the plate. How has Hamilton gone from his disappointing 2009 season to this dream season of anyone who ever once discussed what Josh Hamilton might look like if he reached that rarified air of a prospect’s ceiling?

In one word: power. Hamilton’s walk rate is unchanged from last season and his strikeout rate, though improved, is equal to what it was in 2008 and on balance with his overall career rate. However, his isolated slugging which went from .226 in 2008 to .158 last season has not only regressed to but has exceeded his prior numbers. Hamilton’s .279 iso ranks fifth in all of baseball. Helping to reinforce the notion that Hamilton is hitting the ball harder, Josh’s BABIP has ballooned to an eye-opening .399.

Is this increase in power resulting from better hitting, stronger hitting, good luck or some combination? What I call better hitting is more precisely defined by his line drive rate, a measure of how often he squares up on the ball. While line drive rate is prone to fluctuation and issues with scoring bias, since Hamilton has stayed with the same team I feel it a fair comparison. And what that comparison shows is very little difference. Given that, I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting Hamilton to hold on to that AL-leading batting average all season.

As a proxy for stronger hitting, I turned to HitTrackerOnline to get numbers on Hamilton’s home runs. In 2008, Hamilton sprayed home runs to all fields. Last season he hit all ten to either left or right field. None were within 15 degrees of the straight to center field line. Hamilton is back to dispersing his home runs this year, and more concretely his distance numbers are much higher. 2009 Josh Hamilton had an average true distance on his home runs of 412 feet. That’s pretty impressive, but pales against this year’s average of 423 feet. It indeed appears that Hamilton is stronger or in some other way making better contact this season.

Arizona Interim GM Jerry DiPoto, via Nick Piecoro of AZCentral.com

“He’s a pedigreed major league pitcher who has accomplished quite a bit. I believe it’s a .630 winning percentage in his major league career. We’re getting a pitcher for our major league club who comes in and delivers a message to our guys that this is about winning now and winning in the future.”

Jerry DiPoto has been largely panned for this statement on why he traded Dan Haren for a package including Joe Saunders and prospects, particularly among those in the sabermetric community. Of course, we know that pitcher wins don’t tell the whole story; after all, how many times have we seen a pitcher have a win blown by his defense or the lineup, and how many times have we seen a pitcher bailed out by spectacular run support?

However, with enough games, these things tend to even themselves out, and wins begin to track true talent. Looking just at starters with at least 690 innings pitched, winning percentage and ERA+ correlate strongly, with r^2 = .500. ERA+ is a simple statistic to use here, but I feel that it works given the sample, and the park adjustments come into play as well. Obviously, correlation doesn’t imply causation, but for the most part, pitchers that receive a win in most of the games that they start are better.

This is a pretty simple conclusion to make, but it does, in part, justify the statements made by Jerry DiPoto. Joe Saunders has a 54-32 career record, good for a .628 winning percentage, good for 16th all time among pitchers with as many innings pitched – 692 – as Saunders. Some pitchers with similar winning percentages? Juan Marichal, Dwight Gooden, Roy Oswalt, Rich Harden, and Justin Verlander – a pretty solid group. If Saunders’s true talent was indeed akin to these pitchers, this trade would not be so widely panned.

Saunders, however, simply isn’t that good. The correlation between winning percentage and ERA+ isn’t perfect, and Saunders is a great example of that.

We see Saunders is well below the ERA+ that we would expect given how many of his games he has won. That’s because Saunders has spent his career playing for good teams, for the most part, and also with decent defenses. What about his counterpart in this trade, Dan Haren? Haren’s 120 ERA+ is well above what we’d expect from a player who has won 55% of his decisions, although it’s not terribly out of the ordinary – Erik Bedard, Cole Hamels, and Kevin Appier have similar careers.

One of the largest differences between winning percentage and ERA+ comes from Haren’s former Diamondbacks teammate, Brandon Webb. Webb’s 142 ERA+ is nothing short of elite, ranking fourth among players with at least 690 IP and 95% of their appearances as starts, right between Roger Clemens and Randy Johnson. However, Webb has only won 58.4% of his decisions, well below the 65.8% mark from Clemens and the 64.6% from Johnson. Why? The Diamondbacks haven’t been as good as a team as the Angels or most of Clemens and Johnson’s teams. Outside of the 2007 playoff season, Arizona has had 3 seasons with win totals in the 70s, one in the 80s, and this year’s team is on pace to win 61 games.

Simply put, in many situations, DiPoto would be right to go after the pitcher with the higher winning percentage. I’m not sure that he actually used winning percentage in his evaluation – that may just be a media talking point. Regardless, this is just another example of how we need context with all of these stats, and particularly with statistics like wins. With context, it’s clear that Saunders’ winning percentage doesn’t mean he’s an elite pitcher, and Dan Haren and Brandon Webb are good to great pitchers despite poor luck in the win column.

All gathered from this Baseball-Reference page.

5. Seattle relievers have collectively entered 69 games when their team held the lead. That would be individual games, not team games. Meaning, simply, the Mariners have not necessarily held the lead in 69 separate games at the point when a reliever entered. That does not seem like a ridiculous number until you look at the second lowest total in the league, which happens to be Arizona’s pen at 90 games. That’s right, the Mariners are 21 games behind the second worst team in the majors.

4. Baltimore has had 111 relief stints of multiple innings pitched. That’s the most in the league by 15. Charlie Manuel, meanwhile, has only asked a member his pen to go multiple innings at a time on 46 occasions, a league low, although Houston and Arizona (of all teams) are not too far off.

3. Jerry Manuel’s Mets lead the league in number of appearances that have come on zero days rest. This isn’t much in the way of news for Mets’ fans. Pedro Feliciano takes fewer days off than the postal service (26 times he’s worked on zero days rest). It’s happened 93 times in total for New York, 89 for Cincy, then no other team is over 80, with Tampa Bay, Colorado, Atlanta, and Houston all sitting at 75 or more.

2. The Padres’ bullpen has allowed the fewest inherited runners to score. That’s not too much of a surprise (in part because the Friars’ relievers enter with a runner on base the least of any team in the league). What is a surprise is that Cleveland’s pen ranks second. That despite a 4.53 FIP (fourth worst in baseball).

1. Last, but not least. Three members of the Pirates’ relief corp are amongst the four pitchers who enter most often when their team is down. Javier Lopez (33 down, 14 ahead/tied), D.J. Carrasco (27 down, 17 ahead/tied), and Evan Meek (26 down, 20 ahead tied) are only interrupted by Matt Albers (29 down, 12 ahead/tied). Fifth belongs to the guy I wrote about earlier, Kanekoa Texeira (26 down, 6 head/tied).

The trade deadline is just four days away, leaving teams until just 4 pm eastern on Saturday to complete deals before the waiver period commences. Normally, we don’t post much on weekends around here, giving our authors the time off to go enjoy their lives, but since the deadline falls on a Saturday this year, we’ll be putting in overtime to cover all the action.

As usual, we’ll cover any trades of note with posts of their own, offering analysis on the deal from each team’s perspective. We’ll supplement this on Saturday with a live chat kicking off at 2 pm eastern time, so that we can sit around and talk about the rumors as they come down the pipe in real time. Pat Andriola, Joe Pawlikowski, and Zach Sanders will be rotating through the chat, so we’ll always have someone taking your questions and offering instant analysis while the rest of our crew writes up the deals as they go down.

Join us on Saturday for hours of hot stove talk and reactions to the deals. Should be a good time.

Later this evening Troy Tulowitzki will make his return from the DL after missing a little over a month with a chipped bone in his left wrist. It’s always tough for a contender to lose one of its stars. This goes especially for infield stars, since it’s tougher for teams to find replacements who can even remotely approximate the star’s production. A few contenders have faced the issue this year, and a few of them have gotten lucky with the replacement.

Injured: Troy Tulowitzki

Before his injury Tulowitzki was hitting .306/.375/.502, a beastly line for a shortstop. Even better, he’d recovered from a slow start and was hitting .308/.390/.545 since May 1. When he hit the DL in the middle of June Clint Barmes, who had been manning second base, slid over to shortstop. That left Jonathan Herrera, a 25-year-old who started the year repeating AAA for the third season, as Tulowitzki’s ultimate replacement. It was probably a stretch to expect much from a career .282/.347/.367 minor league hitter.

Yet Herrera has performed his task admirably, hitting .321/.377/.382 in Tulowitzki’s absence. The power isn’t there, of course, but he’s been getting on base at a rate equal to Tulowitzki’s season to date. Sure, that’s on the power of a .369 BABIP, but that doesn’t matter much when we’re talking about replacement performance. Herrera did all the Rockies could have asked. They still missed Tulo, but not as much as expected.

Injured: David Freese

The Cardinals took a gamble by handing their starting third base job to a 27-year-old rookie, but there were indicators that David Freese was ready for the show. His lowest SLG in the minors was .489, and that came during a stint in A+ ball in 2007. He jumped right to AAA after that and had little trouble adjusting. His overall minor league line was .308/.385/.532, and while he didn’t hit quite that well during his first 270 PA in 2010, his .296/.361/.404 line was certainly a productive one.

Perhaps his ankle injury was bothering him for a while. Freese was, after all, hitting .318/.386/.460 heading into June, but then his numbers, especially power, fell off. He hit the DL retroactive to his last appearance, June 27, to be replaced by Felipe Lopez, whom the Cardinals signed at a bargain rate late in the off-season. Since June 28 Lopez is hitting .312/.373/.441, or a close approximation of Freese’s early season numbers. He’ll have to keep it up, too, as Freese will miss even more time after dropping a freeweight on his toe.

Injured: Dustin Pedroia

On June 1 Dustin Pedroia had hit a low point. After a strong first month he slipped in May, and started June with a .254/.331/.445 line, hardly the stuff of a 2008 MVP award winner. But then he repeated his 2007 laser show, hitting .384/.461.640 from June 2 through 25. In that last game, though, he fouled a ball off his foot and fractured it. He’s been out ever since, making him just another in a long line of injured Red Sox. You’d think they’d have trouble finding adequate replacements.

Bill Hall has been the man most frequently summoned to handle the keystone in Pedroia’s absence. From June 26 through yesterday, though, Hall wasn’t getting the job done. In 83 PA he has hit just .227/.289/.480, hardly the stuff the Sox have grown used to out of that position. Last night the Sox turned to Jed Lowrie, though that doesn’t seem all that encouraging an option. Hall, at least, hits for power. It’s a tough call as to whom the Sox missed most, Pedroia or Victor Martinez. I suppose it has to be Pedroia, though, because Martinez is back behind the plate.

Injured: Chase Utley

This year has not been a Chase Utley year. Sure, his numbers place him above most second basemen, but his BA, OBP, and SLG are all down a bit from what he has produced in the past five years. A knee injury might have contributed to that. So might have his right thumb. He tore a ligament in it, which is why he currently sits on the DL. Still, a diminished Utley is still better than most other second basemen, nevermind an in-house replacement. The Phillies really had no way to salvage this one.

The main man in Utley’s stead has been Wilson Valdez. Unsurprisingly he’s hit much like, well, Wilson Valdez. In the 73 PA he’s accumulated since Utley’s injury Valdez has hit .224/.268/.373. What makes matters worse is that Valdez has been called on frequently this season. He filled in for the injured Jimmy Rollins after the Phillies had seen enough of Juan Castro, and then took Placido Polanco’s spot for two games before he had to slide over to second and replace Utley. It’s tough for a team to win when they’ve given a player with a 66 OPS+ more than 200 plate appearances before the trade deadline.

Injured: Mark Teahen

Losing a middling player like Mark Teahen might not seem like a big deal, but there is a reason that the White Sox traded for him this past off-season. They had few options at third base and Teahen represented an upgrade. He didn’t disappoint much with his .255/.340/.387 line, mainly because it was tough to expect more. He’s been hurt for quite a while now, and when he comes back he might find himself out of a job.

The Sox have started two players in his place. First is the 43-year-old Omar Vizquel. He was brought in to back up most infield positions, though with Teahen’s injury he has played the majority of his games, 41, at third. He’s hitting .301/.371/.374 as the replacement third baseman, and will probably continue to see time there even after the nominal starter returns. It’s unlikely that at age 43 Vizquel starts every day, and matters get complicated because his bat is better from the left side, the same side Teahen hits.

The Sox have also used rookie Dayan Viciedo, though without nearly the effectiveness of Vizquel. Recalled subsequent to Teahen’s injury, Viciedo i just 13 for 49 with no walks and four extra base hits when filling in at third. Chances are he’s the odd man out once Teahen returns.

Batted balls are a funny thing. I previously looked at the 2009 Yankees‘ propensity to hit fly balls and came to the conclusion that it must have something to do with the New Yankee Stadium being characterized as a huge hitter’s park. I figured that the Yankees players thought they could get more bang for their buck by hitting balls in the air at home, prompting them to attempt to lift the ball more in New York. However, this was before we had Home/Road batted ball data here at Fangraphs. I went over my analysis after the introduction of the splits and came to the following conclusion:

The short moral of the story? More data is always a good thing. While a few players saw leaps in their overall Fly Ball %, this was ironically due mostly to their road numbers as opposed to an air-driven frenzy at the new Yankee Stadium. The only real guys you can say were trying to get under the ball were Teixeira, Matsui, and Molina. Considering Teixeira’s 2008 was not with the Yankees and Jose Molina didn’t have that many at-bats, the conclusion has to be changed. It would appear that the 2009 Yankees did not have a conscious effort to hit more fly balls, apart from Hideki Matsui, who saw a staggering 14.3% increase in his fly balls at home from 2008 to 2009.

However, shortly after the original Yankees piece I looked at the 2004 Phillies, who similarly were opening up at a new ballpark that was well-known to be hitter-friendly, and found similar results. Almost all of the Phillies players had increased their fly ball percentage from 2003. I’ve gone back and looked at the Home and Road fly ball numbers from the team.

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Most of the conversations about the Dan Haren trade boil down to how a person feels about pitcher evaluation. There are clearly still a lot of people that simply believe that whatever happens is the pitcher’s responsibility, so if he gives up a bunch of hits and some home runs, he’s doing something wrong and that should be held against him. High BABIP or HR/FB rates are evidence of throwing too many hittable pitches, or that his stuff has deteriorated, or that his command isn’t as good as it was, or some other explanation that we haven’t yet figured out. But, whatever it is, it’s definitely something, and it’s definitely real.

These opinions are generally held because of the outright refusal to accept randomness. The idea that something could happen repeatedly, without cause, is very hard to for a lot of people to swallow. But it’s true, and it’s a very important concept to buy into when trying to project the future performance of baseball players. Random happens.

For instance, did you know that the NFC has won 14 consecutive coin-tosses in the Super Bowl? Since 1997, the AFC has been on the losing side of the flip every single time. The odds of that happening are 1 in 16,384, and yet, it’s happened. Do you think the NFL is weighting coins? Do you think the AFC is perpetually hiring players who are terrible at guessing coin flips? Or do you think it’s just luck?

I’d imagine that most of us agree that it’s the latter. Because a coin has no ability to control what side it lands on, we are willing to agree that the results of what happens when it is flipped is random. However, as a culture, we don’t like to apply that same belief to people. They can make choices, adapt, and do things that affect the outcomes they are involved in, and so many of us assume that nothing that happens to a person is ever random.

Haren’s BABIP has been abnormally high in four of the last five months, dating back to last September. For many people, that’s enough to say that there’s a pattern that rules out any kind of randomness, and that the fact that he’s been giving up hits for what amounts to 2/3 of a season is evidence enough that he’s doing something wrong. However, when you look at the actual odds of that happening by random chance to some pitcher in MLB, you’ll find that it’s not unusual at all.

Using binomial distribution, we can see that the odds of a pitcher with a true talent level BABIP of .300 randomly posting a .350+ BABIP in any given month (of 115 BIP) is about 10 percent. Thus, the odds of that same pitcher posting a .350+ BABIP in any four out of five months is 1 in 2,200. Those seem like really long odds (though nothing compared to the Super Bowl coin, of course) until you remember just how many different five month stretches of pitching there are in Major League Baseball, especially once you introduce selective endpoints, where the time-frame is defined by looking for the beginnings of a potential pattern.

Given the number of potential different five month stretches we could look at across 350 pitchers using selective endpoints, it’s not a surprise at all that we can find a guy who has performed in a way that looks to be a rarity. The sheer quantity of players in the game, and the amount of games they play, means that we will always see performances that had little chance of happening. On its own, it is not evidence that randomness can be ruled out.

Maybe Haren is doing something wrong. Maybe there is a reason for all these no-hitters. Maybe there’s an explanation for Brady Anderson’s 1996 season. We don’t know enough to conclusively say in any of these cases, but neither can you rule out that it may just be randomness at work. If you’re not willing to accept that, you’re going to see a lot of patterns where they don’t exist, and create explanations for things where there are none.

We’re happy to announce that Maury Brown, owner of the Business of Sports Network, will be writing for us here every Tuesday. Please welcome Maury to the crew.

Well, this is a fine mess you’ve gotten us into, Tom Hicks. The Texas Rangers, mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy when Hicks Sports Group defaulted on $525 million in loans, is about ready to go up for auction on Aug 4th. To place this in perspective, the last time this happened (it was also the first time) in MLB was with the Baltimore Orioles in 1993. Then, owner Eli Jacobs, had the club in bankruptcy and Judge Cornelius Blackshear held an auction that eventually came down to a group led by Peter Angelos and one by Jeffrey Loria. Angelos won the auction for $173 million over Loria, which, at the time, caused fans of the team in the courtroom to erupt into applause.

We all now know how that has tuned out with Angelos at the helm, which brings us back to the auction of Rangers.

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After returning from Tommy John surgery last September, Tim Hudson picked up right where he left off. The undersized righty logged 42.1 innings pitched for the Atlanta Braves, striking out 6.38 batters per nine, issuing 2.76 BB/9 and getting ground balls at a characteristically strong clip (62.2 GB%). Hudson’s xFIP was 3.47. Convinced that the former Auburn star was none the worse for wear after going under the knife, the Braves signed Hudson to a three-year, $28 million contract extension, with a $9 million club option for the 2013 season.

So far in 2010, the 35-year-old has pitched relatively well, if not quite up to his usual standards. His strikeout and walk rates aren’t as sharp, as he’s got 4.47 K/9 and 3.2 BB/9 in 135 frames. That punch out rate is the lowest of Hudson’s career, due in large part to a 6.8 percent swinging strike rate (9.2 percent average for Huddy since 2002) and an 83.9 percent contact rate that’s several ticks above his 80 percent mark dating back to ’02. Hudson has also placed fewer pitches within the strike zone than the MLB average for the first time since 2005, and his 53.4 percent first pitch strike percentage doesn’t come close to his 59.7 percent average since ’02.

But, Hudson’s scorched earth policy has been in full effect — his 66% ground ball rate leads all qualified starting pitchers by a wide margin. The next closest competitors are Justin Masterson (64%) and teammate Derek Lowe (57.9%). With those extreme ground ball tendencies, Hudson has still managed to post a 4.22 xFIP despite the downturn in K’s and increase in walks.

If you just focused on Hudson’s ERA, however, you’d be convinced that he’s experiencing a career year. His ERA currently sits at a sparkling 2.47. The 1.75 run discrepancy between his xFIP and ERA is the third-largest among qualified starters — only Jason Vargas and Johan Santana have larger splits between their peripheral stats and their actual ERAs. Hudson is stranding far more base runners than usual, with an 83.2 LOB% that exceeds his career 74.1% left on base rate. And, he’s also getting some fantastic bounces on balls put in play. Hudson has a .231 BABIP, compared to a career .286 average.

According to Baseball-Reference, his BABIP on grounders is just .190. For comparison, the 2010 NL average is .238, and Hudson’s career BABIP on ground balls is .209. Dave Allen has kindly provided a pair of Pitch F/X graphs that shed further light on Hudson’s ground balls. The top image shows the frequency of Hudson’s grounders by direction of the ball put in play, compared to the 2010 average for right-handed pitchers. The bottom image shows Hudson’s BABIP on ground balls by the direction of the ball put in play. The labels (3B, 2B, 1B) are the location of the bases, not the fielders.

A large portion of Hudson’s grounders have been hit right where the second baseman is typically positioned. As you can see, the BABIP on grounders hit to that spot, both for Hudson and the average RHP, is very low. Also, Hudson’s BABIP on ground balls hit down the first base line is much lower than the average righty. Here’s what Allen had to say about Hudson’s high rate of grounders hit toward the player manning the keystone spot: “I don’t think there is any reason to think that Hudson can magically throw pitches that turn into grounders straight to the second basemen, and it looks like tons of luck.”

Whether it’s a trend or just a coincidence, Hudson’s strikeout rate has climbed to about five whiffs per nine since June, and his walk rate has decreased every month of the season. Those are good signs for Hudson if he doesn’t want to see his ERA regress into the fours from this point forward, as he likely won’t get as many outs on worm burners in the months to come.