Some more follow-ups.

Have the Mariners miscalculated (and Fangraphs in the org rankings) by relying too much on UZR and other defensive metrics that end up being neither as predictive or descriptive as they were presumed to be?

To me, this is more narrative than reality. Because the Mariners got competitive using a great defensive team a year ago, and a lot of people wrote about it this winter, it has become popular to deride the Mariners for choosing defense over offense. That’s just not really the case, though.

Regardless of what you think of him as a person, Milton Bradley’s track record as a hitter can’t really be argued with. From 2007 to 2009, he posted a batting line of .293/.407/.495 over 311 games. His .389 wOBA during those years put him at the same offensive level as Adam Dunn and Magglio Ordonez and ahead of guys like Jayson Werth and J.D. Drew. He’s not much of a defender, though, and he’s unreliable, but the Mariners took a gamble on a guy who had proven that he was one of the best offensive players in baseball. It didn’t work, obviously, but the intent to acquire an offensive force was clearly there.

Then, there’s Chone Figgins. Yes, he was a guy who added value with his defense, but they got him for his bat, not his glove. His 2007 to 2009 line was .301/.386/.382, good for a .350 wOBA. Like Bradley, he’d established a track record of being a well above average hitter. They didn’t bring in Pedro Feliz – they spent a good chunk of money on a guy who had shown that he could get on base.

At first base, they only ended up with Casey Kotchman after attempting to sign Russell Branyan. They offered him more money than what he eventually got from the Indians, but he was holding out for a multi-year deal. They wanted him back for 2010, but didn’t want to guarantee 2011 to a guy with a herniated disc in his back. Everyone else in baseball agreed, and that’s why Branyan eventually settled for a one year deal with Cleveland. But bringing Branyan back was clearly the team’s primary choice to fill first base.

There’s just no real pattern of choosing defense over offense. The guys they brought in to provide offense failed. That’s different than not trying to bring in any offensive upgrades to begin with. Don’t buy into the narrative that the team decided to try to go balls out for defense. It’s just not true.

Some of the furor has to reside in the fact that a Front Office was praised for putting together such a high variance team to begin with. There was quite a bit of interweb pats on the back, so to speak for the way the 2009 offseason went, and yet they put out a team that, at best, was on the way to 83 wins.

I just don’t agree with this assertion. ZiPS pegged the Mariners for 86 wins, the most of any AL West team. When Replacement Level Yankee Weblog did their simulation blowout, running five other projection systems through 1,000 times each, the Mariners made the playoffs 29.4 percent of the time. The roster wasn’t high variance because they were .500 at best with a lot of downside – they were high variance because they were either going to succeed or flop. They flopped. However, I think that people who are taking the 2010 results as proof that the plan couldn’t have worked are overlooking evidence to the contrary.

The San Diego Padres are winning the NL West with essentially the same overall plan as the Mariners had – league average offense with league best run prevention. The Padres offense has been the definition of average this year – they’ve been worth +4.2 runs above average as a group in over 4,500 plate appearances. They’re in first place in spite of a just okay offense because they’re #1 in xFIP and #1 in UZR. The pitching and defense have both been outstanding, and have carried a mediocre offense into playoff contention.

We can disagree about the likelihood of Bradley, Figgins, Lopez, and Kotchman all performing as they were projected to by ZiPS or CHONE. I don’t think we can make the leap to saying that the team wouldn’t have contended if those guys would have hit as expected, however. We’ve got a team winning with the exact same formula that the Mariners were going for. You don’t have to field an above average offense to have a good team. I don’t think we can pretend that this roster was doomed from the start.

I think we as stat heads overrate the “process” and its ability to produce future results. There are several teams who on the surface really don’t look like they’ve had the best “process” but seem to make things work…

This is a conversation I had with several people up in New York – how much credit or blame should we apportion to a front office for getting unexpected results?

I go with not much. Let’s use the Giants for an example. They openly pursued Adam LaRoche to be their first baseman this year, offering him a decent sized contract to come in and help fix their offense. He decided to go to Arizona, and the Giants ended up signing Aubrey Huff instead. Huff, of course, has been much better than LaRoche, posting a +4.5 WAR compared to +1.8 WAR for the Diamondbacks first baseman.

The Giants preferred LaRoche to Huff. Had he taken their offer, they likely would have ended up with a lesser team. Instead, their back-up plan has blown away their first choice, and it has helped push them into contention. Should we give the Giants credit for signing Huff?

Some, certainly. But they obviously didn’t expect him to do this, or he wouldn’t have been the back-up plan. They’ve received far more than they thought they were going to get from their first baseman. I’m not sure why we should apportion credit to them for the performance above what they expected.

The reality of the situation is that a good process gives you a slight advantage over teams who are making sub-optimal choices. There’s a reason that Jonah Keri has entitled his book about the Rays “The Extra Two Percent” – that is the advantage that teams like Tampa Bay are trying to sustain through good decision making processes. It’s not a huge advantage, but it’s the one that teams can control.

Yes, teams with bad processes get lucky sometimes. If you watch enough poker, you’ll see a lot of bad players beat good players with hands they should have never been involved in to begin with. But the good players are good players because the understand that small advantages add up over time, and they’re willing to put their money on the line when they have an advantage because, more often than not, they’ll win.

More often than not, the good process teams beat the bad process teams. It won’t always work out that way, because there are far too many variables that clubs cannot control, but you want to bet on the teams that are doing things the right way, not on teams that are relying on career years from unexpected sources.

Remember the days when Barry Bonds would be the lone bright spot in a San Francisco lineup? Sure, he had Jeff Kent for a while, but toward the end would have to hit in front of the likes of Bengie Molina. It’s a different story today. The Giants currently sit four games behind the Padres in the NL West, a difference that can’t make the Friars all that comfortable. The Ginats, meanwhile, are tied for first in the NL Wild Card race. With a rotation that includes Lincecum and Cain, a hot offense could allow them to rack off a bunch of wins consecutively and quickly.

The biggest shot in the arm for the Giants offense has clearly been Aubrey Huff. After a miserable 2009, Huff has put up a .395 wOBA this season, providing the team with a legitimate power threat in the middle of the order. But the guy Huff has been knocking in, Andres Torres, has done more than hold his own: Torres has a .382 wOBA (139 wRC+); a slash line of .288/.370/.496 from your leadoff hitter and speedy centerfielder can do wonders for your club.

Don’t forget the new guys, either. Well, the newer new guys. Since being called up, Buster Posey has been everything advertised and then some. The rookie catcher is hitting .338/.386/.516, good for a .387 wOBA and 2.8 WAR in just 68 games. His performance has sent Bengie Molina, who was hitting .257/.312/.332, to Texas. ZiPS likes Posey for a .345 wOBA the rest of the way, although that may be a conservative estimate given his season thus far. Another new guy has been Pat Burrell, who apparently just needed to come back to the good ol’ National League. Since being released by the Rays after struggling for far too long, Pat the Bat has found his stroke by the bay, hitting .285/.378/.527 as a Giant. His power presence in the lineup shakes everything up and provides another threat to opposing teams.

Finally, there are the role players. Juan Uribe’s .327 wOBA has been solid for a middle infielder, and has made things easier with Edgar Renteria (.316 wOBA) struggling. Freddy Sanchez, meanwhile, still isn’t right since coming back from injury, and ZiPS’ projection of a .314 wOBA for the rest of the season isn’t all too promising. Still, he is capable of hitting .320 for the rest of the season. Oh yeah, and remember when Pablo Sandoval was the only dangerous bat in the lineup? The big guy is having a really rough year with a .312 wOBA after a .396 mark last season; his BABIP, however, is .55 points lower than last year, and he, like Sanchez, could turn it up real quick. Finally, the addition of guys like Mike Fontenot and Jose Guillen give the bench some depth.

If you were to ask what the Giants lineup for 2010 would look like at the start of 2009, I doubt many people would throw names like Huff, Burrell, and Torres your way. But these guys are getting it done, and it hasn’t been a fluke either. The Giants can hit.

Ask most people, and they’ll agree: moving sucks. Well, maybe we should preface that by saying, moving sucks, unless you’re moving into shiny new digs. At least the pains of relocating – the cost, the uncertainty of new neighbors, all the other hassles with packing up and trekking away from what you’ve called “home” can be offset by the thoughts of all the goodness in a brand new home.

For Major League Baseball, it’s not too terribly different.

Relocation has become progressively more difficult over the last 50 years. Not since the 1960s Expansion Era when the AL and NL went into a baseball version of a land grab has it come terribly easy.

Even with the last expansion in the 90s when the Rockies, Rays, Marlins, and Diamondbacks came on the scene there was likely ulterior motives involved. Baseball was hardly in the financial shape it sees itself in today, and with the payments due back to the players after the league fumbled and bumbled with collusion in the ‘80s, expansion fees were likely at the heart of the additions. When former commissioner Fay Vincent was asked in 2005, that there is a perception, real or otherwise, that expansion was done to offset the losses incurred over collusion in the ‘80s, he confirmed to me as such.

“Well, I think it’s absolutely correct. Indeed, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Look, each owner had a $10 million bill and there were about 26 clubs before expansion and 30 at the moment, then $280 million, let’s say $10 million a club – they didn’t have the money,” said Vincent.” So they did what most would business do, they sold stock, they sold interest in the clubs, in the expansion clubs. In my day two of them – Miami and Denver. And that money, which was vital, paid off their collusion debt. Without it I think baseball would have had a very serious time.”

Expansion, for all intents and purposes, is off the menu for MLB these days. With record revenues the pressure to do so is non-existent, and besides, why slice up the revenue pie or conceivably add other revenue-sharing mouths to feed?

In terms of relocation, the difficulties have increased with the advent of regional sports networks (RSNs).

In the early ‘90s you could count on the Cubs and Braves as being seen out of the local market on a regional and national level. There was no YES or NESN or MLB Extra Innings. And FOX Sports Net was just starting its march across the country with a fleet of RSNs. The addition of RSNs has created a hodgepodge of television territories, some of which overlap, and are guarded like a first-born child.

(SELECT THE IMAGE TO SEE DETAILS ON MLB’S TV TERRITORIES)

The test of the television territory issue was brought to the forefront with the relocation of the Montreal Expos to Washington, D.C. and rechristened the Nationals. In that instance, Orioles owner Peter Angelos threatened legal action, not over operating territory, but infringement of television market. To indemnify Angelos, Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) was created. The RSN sees not only the Baltimore/DC market as theirs but all of Virginia and the majority of North Carolina.

So, for the Athletics and the Rays, relocation has become almost exclusively a regional affair.  The Rays are looking for a location that is still within their operational and television territory, while the A’s fight over San Jose is based on getting back from the Giants what wasn’t theirs to begin with: Santa Clara Co.

And while neither of these clubs has said that they’re looking at the Charlottes or Portlands of the world, using other markets outside of Rays and A’s regional market as a method for leveraging a new stadium falls back on how hard fought MLB’s television territories are. The Athletics thinking of Portland? Then you deal with the Mariners. The Rays thinking of moving to Charlotte? Then you deal with the Nationals and Orioles.

The best bet for either of these organizations is the Chinese water torture treatment. Play the waiting game… choose an opening when it’s available… bide your time. Remember, it took the Marlins and Twins more than a decade to get new facilities built, and funding occurred before the bottom dropped out of the economy.

Putting it straight, times are tough in the relocation department, and expansion is a distant dream. Take a double dose of “patience” and settle in. It could be a while.

As a 23-year-old with a wide array of skills, Cincinnati Reds right fielder Jay Bruce is one of the most valuable long-term talents in the game. The twelfth overall pick in the 2005 draft reached the majors by the age of 21, raking to the tune of .308/.366/.551 on the farm and ranking as the best prospect in the game by Baseball America prior to 2008.

Bruce has done a number of things well at the big league level. His swift outfield defense (+8.6 career UZR/150 in RF) belies his 6-foot-3, 225 pound frame. Also, his plate discipline has improved since his rookie season. And at times, Bruce’s feats of strength give credence to the 70 power grade that Baseball America gave him in its 2008 Prospect Handbook. But at the plate, Bruce has yet to put it all together and bust out as a true offensive force.

In 2008, the lefty batter produced a 96 wRC+ in 452 plate appearances. Bruce’s plate approach was understandably raw, as his outside swing percentage was about 20 percent higher than the MLB average (Bruce’s 30.4 percent O-Swing, divided by the 25.4% average). The lack of plate discipline led to a tepid 7.3% walk rate. Still, a .199 Isolated Power from a guy who would be age-appropriate for High-A ball was extremely impressive.

Last year, Bruce refined his strike zone discipline. His O-Swing was four percent above the big league average (26.1% O-Swing, 25.1% average), and his rate of free passes taken climbed to 9.8%. The Boss hit for even greater power, posting a .246 ISO. But Bruce’s BABIP nosedived from .296 during his rookie year to .221. Even if you were to take his 13% line drive rate at face value, his expected BABIP (xBABIP) was .294. Bruce’s wRC+ (97 in 387 PA) barely budged, but it was hard to view his ’09 season as anything other than a big step forward.

Given Bruce’s age, elite minor league track record and promising secondary skills in the majors, he entered 2010 as a good candidate to start thrashing opposing pitchers. ZiPS was more reserved, predicting modest improvement (105 wRC+). CHONE, however, was firmly on the bandwagon with a 135 wRC+ projection. Bruce’s BABIP has bounced back and then some this year (.323), to the point where it actually exceeds his .301 xBABIP. Even so, his bat is once again three percent below average (97 wRC+ in 461 PA). What’s going on here?

He’s still working the count decently, with an O-Swing just once percent higher than the MLB average (29.5 O-Swing, 29% average) and a 9.3% walk rate. But while Bruce is getting more hits on balls put in play, he’s not doing as much damage on those hits:

Jay’s ISO is down to .155, just a bit higher than the .146 major league average this season.

Bruce’s performance to the pull field hasn’t suffered, with a spike in BABIP compensating for fewer extra-base hits:

But he remains below-average on balls hit to the middle field…

…and his excellent opposite-field hitting in ’08 and ’09 is absent in 2010:

Bruce’s spray numbers haven’t shifted much — he has hit to the opposite field about a quarter of the time, center about 30 percent and the pull side 45 percent. According to our pitch type values, fastballs and sliders have given him an especially hard time.

While this post might seem to take on a negative tone, I still think there’s plenty of reason to expect Jay Bruce to emerge as a star-level player in the near future. He saves runs with his glove, doesn’t hack and has a history of hitting with authority. ZiPS projects a .199 ISO for the rest of the year.

Bruce hasn’t become an offensive beast — yet. But if he continues to lay off junk pitches and taps into his power potential, watch out.

Edit: As Jason461 pointed out, Bruce fractured his right wrist last July. I was reluctant to ascribe the decrease in power to the injury, but I suppose it’s possible that it’s a factor. What do you guys think?

Cliff Lee struck out 10 batters, walked one, and didn’t allow a home run in 7.2 innings in last night’s start against the Tampa Bay Rays. Lee gave up six earned runs, taking the loss in the 6-4 contest.

Remarkably, this performance increased Lee’s ERA with Texas to 3.44, and his record with his new team fell to 2-3. The increase doesn’t seem too ridiculous, until you consider that Lee, in his 65.1 innings with Texas, has struck out 58 batters, unintentionally walked two batters, and allowed 4 home runs. Tonight’s outing brings Lee’s FIP ever closer to 2.00, a mark that becomes even more impressive given the higher degree of difficulty in attaining a 2.00 FIP as opposed to a 2.00 ERA.

And yet, Lee’s results with Texas are relatively underwhelming. Lee’s 3.44 ERA equals those of fellow veteran left-handers Ted Lilly and Barry Zito. His win% below .500 is hardly becoming of a staff ace designed to navigate the rough and tumble playoffs. Although those watching the game can clearly tell that Lee is an elite pitcher, right now, his effect on the team hasn’t been of one.

Naturally, poor luck is involved. This sequence against the Rays in the eighth inning tonight, in which Tampa scored the final four of their six runs, doesn’t exactly scream good contact.

[Click to enlarge]

This play log doesn’t even do the inning justice. The Rays mustered a total of two line drives in the inning – B.J. Upton‘s double (more of a bloop than a liner) and Carlos Pena’s single. Other than that, it was grounder after grounder. Jason Bartlett reached on an infield single. Carl Crawford reached on a fielder’s choice ground ball because shortstop Joaquin Arias made an ill-advised attempt to retire the lead runner instead of taking the out at first. Evan Longoria grounded to center, and after Pena’s line drive single, Ben Zobrist capped off the inning with a grounder to left.

The sequence is clearly a case where the mantra of “process over results” shines through, as any claim that Lee’s 10 strikeout, one walk start was anything short of masterful would be blind to the mitigating factors surrounding his pitching. He couldn’t control Upton’s bloop double, nor Arias’s misplay, nor, for the most part, the fact that grounders went to the holes instead of at fielders.

Starts such as the one last night are nothing for the Rangers to worry about. The Rangers are still 17 games above .500 and eight games clear of the second place Angels. They’re clearly the most talented team in the division. Lee has pitched like an ace during his time with Texas. It’s only a matter of time before the results fall in line.

First I’d like to acknowledge Baseball Prospectus’ Rob McQuown’s comment about needing to league-adjust the Clutch wins total. Somehow, the pitcher batting aspect slipped my mind, but it is a legitimate concern. At this point, I do not have the rectified team numbers although I’ll see if I can’t come back to that sometime in the near future.

This post is a little more on the trivial/fun side than the others because it concerns the players on the Cubs during those seasons. With the assistance of Jack Moore, I gathered each of the players between 2000 and 2010 who recorded at least 300 plate appearances with the Cubs and also played significant time elsewhere during their careers. I used careers rather than just 2000 onward because I wanted a larger sample size. Unfortunately, the total came in at 36 players, which is not huge, but not bad.

As for the results, it was 50/50 in terms of improving/declining Clutch scores with the Cubs as opposed to elsewhere. The most egregious of declines skews the mean and other data. Believe it or not, Sammy Sosa. I believe Sosa falls into the trap in which most of the criticism about the Clutch stat would reside. Namely, he was too good in regular situations. So, being anything shy of Superman in Clutch spots killed him. His career OPS in more than 2,000 high leverage spots is only .820 though, opposed to a .878 OPS overall.

Everyone else is tossed around randomly. Juan Pierre and Jacque Jones are second and third. Ramon Martinez and Michael Barrett are third and fourth. Mark DeRosa and Derrek Lee are fifth and six. And so on. The guys who actually have better Clutch scores with the Cubs are more interesting. The top two are Mark Grace and Fred McGriff. Grace might not be a surprise, since he played the majority of his career with Chicago and had his best seasons there. McGriff, though? A bit odd. Rondell White and the Bartman game goat, Alex S. Gonzalez, are next up, with Alfonso Soriano rounding out the top five.

There is no correlation between the non-Cubs and Cubs’ Clutch scores, which probably isn’t too shocking, given the variance in plate appearance totals, but … well, other than Sosa skewing the numbers down a bit, I have no explanation for why the Cubs are so random. Therefore, I’m blaming the goat.
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On the surface, the Francisco Rodriguez incident seems utterly disastrous for the New York Mets franchise. After a season which started out with playoff possibilities has fallen to below .500 and 10 games out of the NL East in August, the Mets’ problems only appeared to be compounded by losing their closer Francisco Rodriguez, first to a suspension following the now-infamous father-in-law punch-out incident.

Despite the black mark it may put on the organization, this whole incident may turn out to be a major financial boon for the Mets. Thanks to the torn ligament in Rodriguez’s hand resulting from the fight, the Mets may attempt to void the remainder of Rodriguez’s contract, which calls for a guaranteed $15 million and another $14M if Rodriguez’s 2012 option were to vest. That’s quite the cost for a reliever whose FIP over the past three years barely ranks in the top 20 and hasn’t posted a 2.5 WAR season since 2006. That doesn’t mean that Rodriguez isn’t a good pitcher – he’s a strikeout machine and is projected to have a FIP under 3.00. It’s just very, very difficult for a reliever to justify that kind of paycheck, unless he’s Mariano Rivera.

Even if the Mets fail in voiding the entirety of the contract, they may dodge a bullet in that 2012 vesting option. The option vests if K-Rod finishes either 55 games in 2011 or 100 games between 2010 and 2011. As Rodriguez finished 46 games in 2010, that means that K-Rod’s option will vest if he finishes 54 games in 2011. He still may achieve that mark if he stays with the Mets – he has finished at least 56 games every season since 2005. However, if the Mets’ are intent on keeping Rodriguez’s option from vesting, they will have a much easier time of it now that Rodriguez is on the shelf for the rest of this season – he was on pace to finish 63 games this season, meaning that he would only need to finish 37 to vest the option, an easy task for any full-time closer.

Francisco Rodriguez is a very good closer, but it was hard to imagine his contract being worth the money when he signed it. The 2012 vesting option looked especially dangerous, but thanks to Rodriguez’s stupidity and rash actions, the Mets may be able to get out from under that financial burden. Remarkably, it’s possible that they may even wiggle their way out from under the guaranteed 2011 season. If the Mets manage to void Rodriguez’s contract, it would be a major coup for both the Wilpons and GM Omar Minaya.

Earlier I detailed the Cubs’ clutch-hitting woes over the past decade-plus. I’m back with more stats on a league-wide level to support the insanity of the situation.

After taking each team’s Clutch batting score from 2000 until the 2010 season and averaging them on a per-team basis, I found that the mean is -7.26 wins and the standard deviation is 12.7. That means that the Cubs (-35.1) are more than two standard deviations away from the mean. The Diamondbacks (-26.2), Reds (-24.1), and Rockies (-22.6) are all a standard deviation away on the same side of the scale as the Cubs. Meanwhile the Angels (16), Twins (14.7), Mariners (11.7), Athletics (8.9), and Royals (8.5) are more than one standard deviation away from the mean on the other side.

No team, though, is as far away from that mean as the Cubs. The data presents a normal distribution, with 20 of the 30 teams falling within one standard deviation of the mean and every team but those Cubs falling within two standard deviations of the mean; making the Cubs a genuinely remarkable story. One that I have no explanation for other than, that is baseball.

I then ran a standard deviation on a team-by-team basis, to see if the Cubs were amongst the team with the most consistent Clutch scores. As it turns out, they are near the middle of the pack at eleventh. The most impressive team, from my perspective, is the Twins. Who have one of the highest cumulative Clutch batting scores and the second lowest deviations. The Angels are on the flip side, with a standard deviation of nearly four wins and the Reds, well, they’re a special story, with a standard deviation over eight thanks to some hot and cold seasons.

Below the jump is a complete list of teams and their cumulative Clutch hitting scores.
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There’s no way I can answer all of the questions in the previous thread, but I’ll do my best to pick ones that seem to represent the population, and so hopefully no one feels left out. Without further ado:

Do you stand by your pre-season ranking? I.e. would you put them #6 again given the same information? Somewhere else?

For most people, I assume this is the big question. Honestly, though, the answer is complicated. Yes, I stand by the ranking, but no, I probably wouldn’t put them #6 if I had to do it over again. That’s confusing, I know, so let me try to explain.

I’m of the opinion that we should see everything in shades of probability. Since we don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t find a lot of value in predictions. They are, for all intents and purposes, just guesses, some more informed than others. For instance, in my pre-season just for fun predictions post, I named Josh Hamilton as my AL MVP. I thought he was in store for a pretty good year. I had no idea he was going to go nuts like he has, of course, and I don’t think he’s proven that I had some special insight into how his season was going to go.

So, when people point to the Mariners record and how 2010 has turned out, I don’t look at it as proof that this result was inevitable. It was one of many possible outcomes, and one I tried to make clear was possible ahead of time. In the initial post, I talked about how I expected the team to either boom or bust, noting that the risks they had taken would either pay off and result in contention or flop and lead to a mid-summer sell-off. We saw the latter, obviously.

I do not believe that what we have seen invalidates the possibility of what we have not seen, however. I just don’t buy into the philosophy of the results of one season proving correct or incorrect a particular point of view. I believe that most of what I wrote about the team heading into the season was valid and logically sound. I stand by that logic. But, of course, with new information, we have to look back and determine whether or not our expectations were faulty, and there are a few areas where I would say I overestimated the organization.

Do you think you overvalued front office personnel, as opposed to player assets? (MLB and MiLB)

This is, I believe, where the largest disconnect in opinions comes from. I do believe that I value the non-player aspects of an organization more than most, or at least, that’s my perception based on the responses I’ve seen. In my opinion, the most important aspect of an organization’s future health is their continued access to capital and their ability to spend resources wisely. A large payroll team that knows what they are doing is, in many cases, in a better long term position than a team with better players in the organization that is either poorly capitalized or poorly managed.

It appears to me that most people think that I vastly overestimated the talent that the Mariners put on the field this year. I don’t think I did, to be honest. My best guess at the beginning of the season was that they would win 83 games and not make the playoffs, and we talked a lot about how they were counting on a lot of high variance players to perform well. None of them did, and the season has obviously not gone well, but I didn’t expect this team to win the division this year, and I went into the season knowing that a last place finish was entirely possible.

It seems that the consensus is that a team that I saw as .500ish in 2010 should not have ranked so highly, since their talent base is not as impressive as several teams ranked behind them. However, I see players as very fickle assets. You can easily have a franchise player like Grady Sizemore or Jose Reyes quickly lose almost all of their value, and I do not believe that an organization’s overall health should depend on the performance of a small handful of players.

A good team with a lot of resources can adapt to what the unpredictable future brings. We don’t know how players are going to do going forward, which ones are going to stay healthy, or who will follow a non-traditional career arc and play in a manner that is totally unexpected. We can make some educated guesses, especially for the upcoming year, but beyond that, we’re basically throwing dice. However, if you have an organization like the Yankees or Red Sox, who have sustainable resource advantages and know how to use those advantages to full potential, you can project contention further into the future even without knowing what players they’ll have or how the ones they currently have will perform.

Seattle is not a Boston or New York, but they’re a profitable organization that is consistently in the top tier of revenues and payroll, and has a management team in place that knows how to build a winner. Yes, I still believe that. I understand that some people will have skepticism of that belief. That’s fine. I’d argue that this is more of a “reasonable people can disagree” issue than a “oh my god you are a biased moron” issue, though. Yes, the Mariners got a lot of credit in the non-player categories, which pushed them to a level that I understand most of you feel they didn’t deserve. I hope that you can see the consistency of application of the approach throughout the list, however – well run teams with abilities to spend a lot of money ranked really well. My perspective is that the talent currently in an organization is not the primary driver of an organization’s overall health. I know that most people do not see things the same way. I’m okay with that. I just hope they understand where I’m coming from, rather than just assuming that the perspective was born out of a pro-Seattle bias.

Since the rankings basically read like a pre-season guess at who the best teams were this coming year – I acknowledge that wasn’t the intent, but that is how they appear at a glance – that caught attention.

We’ll finish up this post with this question (more answers coming tomorrow, I promise), because I think there’s an important distinction to be made here – the organizational rankings were not at all any kind of attempt at a prediction of the best teams of 2010. Certainly, there’s going to be a strong correlation between those two things for obvious reasons, but that was not the intent.

The organizational rankings are an attempt at a “state of the organization today” kind of analysis. Think of it kind of like the trade value series, only with teams instead of players. We openly admit that we have no idea whether Zack Greinke or Felix Hernandez is going to pitch better over the next three to five years – there are way too many variables in play to make that kind of projection much better than 50/50 either way. The best we can do is take the information we have today and say “if I had to pick one, I’d take this guy”.

The organizational rankings are the same, only with even more expected variance in on field performance because its dealing with significantly more than one player. As several people who hate the whole exercise noted in the comments, there’s no way to know what a team’s roster will look like in several years, or even how good players currently on the team will be. We can make some guesses, but that far out, we’ll be wrong more often than we’re right. I totally agree with the sentiment that projecting a team five years out is folly.

And so I hope that you guys will realize that’s not what we’re trying to do. It’s not a prediction. It’s an “as of today, here’s where they stand” analysis. We try to weigh what factors we can know at the moment and rank things in terms of probability. For all we know, the Astros and Royals may play for the World Series title next year. It’s highly unlikely, which is why those two teams are at the bottom of the list, but it’s possible.

Rather than seeing the list as a prediction of future results, try to see them as a state of the probabilities of success at a given point in time. Even the best organizations are going to be unlikely to win a championship in the next five years. We’re just trying to show which ones may have the best chance at continued success, based on what we can know at the time.

We’re not going to get everything right, clearly. I’d argue that I was more wrong about the Brewers than I was about the Mariners, and I can look back and see some serious issues that I overlooked or underestimated in Milwaukee, but clearly both of those rankings have been called into question, with valid reasoning. But, I think its helpful to at least agree on what the rankings are, and hopefully that can help alleviate some of the questions about why a team that wasn’t projected to be all that great in 2010 ranked so highly to begin with.

Bryan Smith will be be around a little after 4:00 pm to do his weekly Q&Q about all things in the land of prospectdom.