I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs is now carrying the results of the Fans Scouting Report, conducted each year by Tangotiger. We currently have 2009 and 2010, but plan to eventually get all the years going back to 2003.

Right now it’s available in each of the player pages in both the “Advanced Fielding” section and its own section. It will soon make it’s way to the leaderboards and team pages.

The one thing that you probably need to know is:

FSR – Runs above average for fans scouting report.

Other than that, everything is on a 0 – 100 scale, with 50 being the average.

The big one. This should be interesting. You knoow the drill.

Elijah Dukes has been arrested yet again. From the AP (via ESPN.com):

TAMPA, Fla. — Authorities say former Major League Baseball player Elijah Dukes has been jailed in Tampa on charges related to allegedly failing to pay child support.

Hillsborough County jail records show the one-time outfielder for the Tampa Bay Rays and Washington Nationals was arrested Monday on contempt of court charges. He remained in jail Tuesday.

The Rays have had quite the stock of young outfielders roll through their farm system. Carl Crawford and B.J. Upton have roamed the Trop in Rays uniforms. Rocco Baldelli had star potential before mitochondrial issues derailed his career. Josh Hamilton become one of the game’s best story in Cincinnati and then Texas, and Delmon Young is now a major part of the Minnesota Twins outfield.

Dukes was a prospect on the same level of those players. Every scouting report noted Dukes as an elite athlete with the bat to back it up. Dukes struggled in his first year in the minors – probably to be expected of a 19-year-old in A ball – but after that, Dukes put up an .830 OPS at every level with a combination of solid discipline and good power.

But every scouting report also noted his makeup issues. As much as his talent warranted unbridled optimism, his off-field issues loomed as a constant limit. Prior to reaching his Major League debut in 2007, Dukes had already been arrested multiple times. Dukes was also ejected five times in the 2005 season and, in 2006, received a combined 35 games worth of suspensions from the International League and the Tampa Bay Rays organization.

Dukes struggled in his first MLB stint with Tampa, putting up a .190/.318/.391 (.191 BABIP) line in 220 plate appearances. That performance is not as terrible as the batting average makes it look, but it is also certainly not the way a top prospect hopes to enter the Major Leagues, as Dukes finished the year with -0.2 WAR. He was eventually listed by the Devil Rays as day-to-day for “personal reasons” in mid-June, and placed on the inactive list for the rest of the season by the end of the month, effectively ending his season, and as it turned out, his time with the Rays organization.

Rays GM Andrew Friedman said that the time on the inactive list was meant to “take some time away from the field and to focus on his personal life, re-evaluate everything, and most importantly allow him an opportunity away from the spotlight.” Apparently, the Rays weren’t willing to go forward with Dukes in the organization. They traded him away to the Washington Nationals for Glenn Gibson, a left handed minor leaguer who has, as of this season, yet to pitch above A ball.

The Rays shot up to contention, the playoffs, and eventually the World Series in 2008, but Dukes had his own breakout year in Washington. In 334 plate appearances, Dukes posted a spectacular .264/.386/.478 (.323 BABIP) line while playing solid defense in the corners for the Nationals. Dukes walked in 15% of plate appearances and showed power, putting up a .231 ISO. Overall, Dukes’s season was worth 2.9 WAR in a mere 334 plate appearances, making him easily the best player on the Nationals roster on a per-game basis. That kind of pace equated Dukes with all-stars like Evan Longoria and Joe Mauer. Unfortunately, injuries limited Dukes’s on-field time, as he missed games due to hamstring, knee, and calf injuries to his right leg.

Even with the injuries, it’s hard to deny the merit of the performance we saw from Dukes in 2008. Despite that, Dukes spent opening day of 2009 on the bench, a decision which Dave tore apart at the time. For whatever reason, be it nagging effects from the injuries or mental issues or simply regression, Dukes couldn’t maintain the production that had Nationals fans and baseball observers alike chomping at the bit to see more of the outfielder in 2009. Instead, Dukes put up a meager .250/.337/.393 (.291 BABIP) line with poor defense in right field, finishing below replacement level yet again. By the time the 2010 season and another chance at star-level performance would come around, Dukes was released by the Nationals.

Dukes hasn’t played professional baseball since then. One has to imagine that the loss of his father to cancer merely months after his release from jail affected Dukes through the 2009 season and through 2010 as he dealt with and was eventually cut loose by the Washington organization. Dukes will only be 27 in June of 2011, but the fact that not a single organization was willing to gamble on him probably signified the end of a shockingly and unfortunately short MLB career. If that was not yet the case, this arrest is probably the final nail in the coffin.

Elijah Dukes was a tremendous talent who should be entering the prime of his career this season. The word “disappointing” doesn’t even begin to sum up the situation. Unfortunately for all parties involved, the Elijah Dukes that showed so much promise is no longer a part of baseball, now replaced by occasional negative headlines and reminders of what should have been.

Mitch Moreland led off the bottom of the sixth inning Monday night with a single and stood at first with the score knotted at zero. Elvis Andrus was at the plate with Michael Young and Josh Hamilton due next. Given the pitching duel seen so far and expectation for the remainder of the game, an Andrus bunt would not have shocked many people.

Followers of win expectancy rightfully agree with that call not being made. Sacrifice bunts rarely increase a team’s chances to win. It is, however, a bit more complicated to apply the tenets of win probability to an exact situation than it is to speak in broad concepts.

For one, win expectancy is blind to the specific players involved which can play an important part in skewing the numbers. But there are more subtle assumptions present as well that are worth delving into. A pertinent one in this case is that the markov chains inside win expectancy are calibrated around a run environment. Typically, we use the average run environment for the park in play, but on an individual game basis the environment can vary quite wildly due to the two pitchers in the game.

Examining whether a bunt call might have been proper involves figuring out the expected run environment of the game going forward. Based on the pitch counts of Cliff Lee and Tim Lincecum, the strength of the bullpens behind them and the venue, the number I roughly calculated pegged it at 3.4 runs per team per nine innings. Ignoring the chances of a failed attempt and a fielding error and making the simplistic assumption that a sac bunt would move Moreland to second 100% of the time, that presents a bunt play as being worth -1.4% of a win to the Rangers.

So even with the lower run environment, the call is still overall a bad one, but how low would the run environment need to be before a bunt would result in a positive change in win expectancy?

The break even point is around 1.1 runs per team per nine innings, which should give you an idea of how far off the bunt was from being profitable due to the run environment. One point one runs is not a realistic assumption under almost any condition.

How about the timing though? If the same situation presented itself later in the game, with fewer innings left to play, would that make it profitable? It certainly increases the benefit of the bunt play, but it turns out that it still never gets it past the 0% barrier.

There are times that sacrifice bunts are called for probabilistically. Nearly all of those,however, have to do with moving a runner from second to third. To justify moving a runner from first to second, a manager would need it to be late in the game and the run environment to be abnormally low.

Congratulations are in order to the San Francisco Giants and their fan base. The reduced period between the postseason conclusion and hot stove introduction will not temper the enthusiasm or vigor of celebrations, but does have serious implications for the Giants’ 2011 roster. As it stands, the Giants will see Aubrey Huff, Pat Burrell, Edgar Renteria, and Juan Uribe hit the open market come Sunday. Renteria will be by team choice; otherwise, the Giants would have to exercise his option worth more than eight figures, thus he’s sort of invisible in the re-signing discussions.

Now the Giants’ challenge is to avoid the post-championship re-signings fueled by the rush of emotion and clinginess. By doing so, that does not mean closing the doors to re-signing any (or all) of the aforementioned players. What it does mean is to approach these negotiations as rational agents. That does not mean they have to take up the most dynamic analytical approaches either, just that placing some logic on their checkbooks should prevent buyer’s remorse. If the Giants’ management absolutely positively must keep this group together, then overpaying the players with some of the added revenue is a better tradeoff than giving them lengthier deals.

Here’s what they’re dealing with:

Uribe is the youngest of the aforementioned trio at 31. He’s hit .261/.312/.443 over the last three years while playing good defense. He hit .248/.310/.440 this season and continued to play good defense. In other words, he is what he played like. The biggest concern in a lengthy deal might not be Uribe’s age – although one would certainly hope the Giants do not hand him a five-year deal or anything near that – but rather his work ethic. There is a reason he landed with the Giants on a minor league deal and the reason was not that he was a prisoner of an ignorant front office.

Burrell turned 34 a matter of weeks ago. His bat played like it came from the 2008 season upon joining the Giants – his World Series struggles notwithstanding. Burrell’s career flat lined the last time he won a World Series and then entered free agency and much of the same concerns that existed then still reign true. Namely, that Burrell’s three true outcomes skill set rarely ages well and his poor defensive efforts limit his overall value. Those concerns sunk his desirability through the market, and that was before he put up a .218/.311/.361 line in 572 plate appearances with the Rays.

Burrell seems unlikely to return given the Giants’ contract and outfield situations for 2011. Ignoring their farm system, one has to account for Aaron Rowand, Andres Torres, Cody Ross, and Nate Schierholtz. There’s the returning Mark DeRosa too, who figures to play the outfield instead of the infield, depending on what happens with Uribe and Pablo Sandoval. With so many moving parts, it’s just hard to see Burrell fitting in.

Finally, there’s Huff. He turns 34 years old near the end of the year and had the best season of the three. Huff does not offer the defensive ability or flexibility of Uribe, but is willing to play the corner outfield or first base. That versatility along with essentially equal offensive abilities and no gimp costumes in Huff’s closet make him the one to re-sign if the Giants have to choose.

Simply re-signing these players will not be a crime. Giving them inflated deals to celebrate the title is. The championship prizes are rings and trophies, not silly extensions.

We are one day into baseball’s offseason, but teams and players have been making decisions on the expected market valuations of the winter for a couple of weeks now. It’s early, but we’ve got some interesting data points to look at when trying to ascertain what MLB clubs think salary inflation will be like this winter, after several years of deflation or stagnation.

The decisions that look like they may give some insights into the expectations of what players will cost this winter.

Dodgers sign Ted Lilly to a 3-year, $33 million contract.
Reds exercise Bronson Arroyo’s $11 million option.
Tigers sign Brandon Inge to a 2-year, $11.5 million contract.
Twins exercise Jason Kubel’s $5.25 million option.

These four moves are the most significant that we’ve seen to date, and they all point in a similar direction – these four teams all seem to believe that we’re in for some inflation this winter.

Ted Lilly is pretty comparable to Randy Wolf, in that both are soft-tossing lefties who pitched well in Los Angeles. After wisely deciding to let Wolf leave, however, the Dodgers ponied up for Lilly, paying a bit of a premium to keep him over what Wolf got from Milwaukee last winter.

Bronson Arroyo is a useful innings eater, but it would be hard to argue that he’s appreciably better than Joel Pineiro, who got just $16 million over two years as a free agent last winter. While the commitment is shorter in term, the difference in per-season salary is significant.

Inge doesn’t have a great comparison from last winter’s class, but overall, last year’s market price for a starting infielder seemed to be around $6 million per year. Placido Polanco, Marco Scutaro, Mark DeRosa, Freddy Sanchez, and Miguel Tejada all signed deals in that range. Inge, coming off a worse season than almost everyone in that group, got essentially the same number for two years with a team option for a third.

And finally, there’s the Kubel decision, which is probably the most curious of the bunch. Despite wanting to retain the services of Jim Thome, the Twins were willing to pay $5 million to keep Kubel on the roster, despite a down season and no obvious starting position on the 2011 team. Given how the market for designated hitters cratered last winter, with good players having to settle for $5 to $7 million on a one-year deal, the Twins decision to give Kubel a similar amount is either a miscalculation of his value or the priced-in expectation of coming inflation.

Until we see teams start to bid openly for players, we won’t really know what the going rate for talent is this winter. Early returns, however, suggest that we may be in for a pricing increase.

This is the follow-up to (and conclusion of) yesterday’s post using the World Series teams to make a point about the “sufficiency” of the draft. But first things first: congratulations to the San Francisco Giants. I’ll freely admit that at the beginning of the season I didn’t see them as a playoff contender, but they made it in and won the whole thing with a mixture of young players they developed and some veteran castoffs that played better for them than most of us would have imagined. That brings me back to the theme of this two-part discussion: the Giants illustrate that while good drafting is essential for most teams to compete, it is hard to come up with examples of teams that managed to do so solely with players they originally acquired. (I used these two teams as examples because they were in the World Series — the 2010 Rockies would have been perhaps a more interesting case; they have a high proportion of drafted players, but imagine them without Carlos Gonzalez, Jason Hammel, Jorge da la Rosa, and Huston Street.) Having covered the Giants yesterday, I’ll briefly discuss the Rangers before offering some concluding thoughts. The World Series is over, but the point of these posts isn’t about the World Series, but rather using two teams (whose 2010 fate every other team envies) to illustrate a point about team building.

The Rangers are a very young team, so initially, one might think they might make a better argument for the relative sufficiency of the draft. However, this is far from being the case. Indeed, out of all the position players that started for the Rangers in the World Series, only Ian Kinsler and Mitch Moreland were originally drafted and signed by the Rangers. Even seeming Ranger-for-life Michael Young came over in a trade long ago from the Blue Jays.

The improvement of the Rangers’ pitching has been rightly oft-noted, but the final 2010 rotation relied heavily on “outside help.” Cliff Lee came over because the team was willing to trade top first base prospect Justin Smoak (and others) to the Mariners for him. Colby Lewis was actually originally drafted in the first round by the Rangers back in 1999, but as is well-known by now, bounced around both the majors a bit and Japan before the Rangers picked him back up. That’s a display of good scouting of an older player in a different league rather than good drafting. Neftali Feliz is a good young closer (who might still be able to start, according to some), but like shortstop Elvis Andrus, he came to the Rangers in the massive 2007 trade that sent Mark Teixeira to Atlanta.

I realize these two posts have been a bit disjointed, so I’ll summarize in conclusion. This was not primarily about comparing Brian Sabean and Jon Daniels with Dayton Moore or any other general manager or front office, although my introductory remarks from yesterday might have made it seem that way. I used Moore as a starting point because (a) despite all my criticism for his moves on a major league level, I wanted to acknowledge that he’s done a great job of building Kansas City’s farm system into the best in baseball, and I wanted to do so before he starts signing free agents and my goodwill (likely) gets buried; and (b) because the Royals’ front office is an example of a grop who seems to get amateur scouting, but generally struggles (to put it mildly) with making smart major league trades and signings. We all agree that drafting and developing talent is essential for any team (even the Yankees’ two most valuable position players in 2010 — Robinson Cano and Brett Gardner — are from their farm system). Some have pointed to the Rangers as a “homegrown” team, and to the Giants as a team whose drafts have overcome questionable signings. There is some truth to that, but as I hope I’ve pointed out, this isn’t really the case. Both teams had essential contributions from players (who were more than just role and bench players) acquired through free agency or trades without whom they probably wouldn’t even have made the playoffs. This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive study, but rather a reminder that while good drafting is certainly necessary for almost every franchise to compete, it isn’t sufficient to build a contender on its own.

The San Francisco Giants are the 2010 World Series Champions, and they won in impressive fashion. They went 11-4 in the postseason, handling teams easily even while maintaining the identity of an underdog. While hindsight is 20/20, perhaps they shouldn’t have been underdogs – this team really was one of the best in baseball all year.

In total team WAR, the Giants ranked 4th at +47.4 wins. Our replacement level is set at about 48.5 wins, so that number makes the Giants something like a team that deserved to win 95 games this year. They had more total team WAR than the Rangers, Yankees, or Phillies, and the roster they brought into October was the best version of any they had put together all year.

If they had started the year with Buster Posey at catcher, Pat Burrell and Cody Ross on the team, and Madison Bumgarner in the rotation, they would have almost certainly finished better than their final 92-70 record. That was a ~95 or so win team that ran over the Braves, Phillies, and Rangers.

While a few of the guys on the team were discards from other organizations who the Giants picked up on the cheap, those guys surrounded a core of extremely good players: Posey, Tim Lincecum, and Brian Wilson are all among the best in the game at what they do. Getting career years from role players like Andres Torres and Aubrey Huff certainly was a huge part of why the Giants won, but those guys were more exception than rule. By and large, the Giants collected a bunch of quality role players who did their jobs well and didn’t prevent the legitimate stars on the team from carrying them to a championship.

Were the Giants the best team in baseball? I don’t know, but they were certainly in the discussion, and they made a pretty strong case the last couple of months of the season. Brian Sabean should be proud of his guys for playing well in October, but he should also be proud of his staff for putting together a roster that could contend. The Giants may have been underdogs, but only because we didn’t give them enough credit in the first place. They were a championship caliber team, and they proved it on the field.

There it is. The final game of the 2010 baseball season.

Unless our dark lord David Appelman has some sort of fancy site redesign in the works that I haven’t heard about, that image will grace the upper right corner of this website for the next four months and 29 days. Until March 31, 2011, when the MLB season begins anew and 30 teams begin the arduous 162 game march toward the Commissioner’s Trophy, that abstraction of the clinching game of the most recent World Series will remain the closest thing to “Live Win Probability” we have.

What do we see? The defining moment of the final game comes from an Edgar Renteria home run. Juan Uribe hit an important single for the World Series champions. No Albert Pujols. No Chase Utley. No Mark Teixeira. No Kevin Youkilis. No Carl Crawford. And, most importantly, we see the final score, “Giants (3) @ Rangers (1).”

Unlike last season, in which the Yankees defeated the Phillies in a perfectly rational and sensible Fall Classic, this season’s final game also serves as a reminder of how unpredictable our sport can be at times. The Giants were by no means favorites entering the year, and many (such as myself) were pessimistic on their playoff hopes, predicting a .500 season or worse. The Vegas odds could have been an unprecedented 1000 to 0 – a zero dollar bet on the Giants pays 1000 dollars – and there may have been few takers.

No, instead the image of that final game will be a reminder that sometimes, things just happen. Sometimes, Aubrey Huff becomes Albert Pujols for a season. Sometimes, that superfreak catching prospect and the 30+ year old minor league veteran come from AAA to carry a team’s offense. Sometimes, a team plucks a player off waivers – not even intending to acquire him! – and sometimes, that player goes off in October. Sometimes, the 35 year old shortstop on his sixth team hits a go-ahead home run in a clinching World Series game.

Rarely do all of these things happen together, and rarely do they happen to a team that also happens to have pieces in place like a fantastic, young pitching rotation and an elite closer. 2010, though, was the year that everything came together. A group of guys who, at least according to everybody around the game, had no business winning the World Series will have the rings for the rest of their lives, and have they ever earned them.

If you use this site often, that image in the upper right corner will serve as your reminder of how the 2010 World Champions finished their season all winter long. March 31, 2011 is a long way away. Get used to it.