Judging from this ESPNinsider piece by Buster Olney, it’s about time for a yearly piece of rosterbation when it comes to the Phillies’ lineup. With such a veteran lineup, the question really boils down to the top two spots. The three veterans that could fill those two roles are all above-average, strong players, but that doesn’t mean that the team can’t get it wrong. In fact, it’s possible they’ve been getting it wrong for a while now.

Much of this discussion revolves around the decline of Jimmy Rollins, but not all. He’s been a negative with the bat the last two years, and his sub-par wOBAs came in about half a season last year. The rule of recency might make us over-rate how far his athleticism has fallen, but if we focus on his career rates, we see that he’s always been below average when it comes to getting on base (.328 career OBP, average is about .330 most years; 7.4% career walk rate, average is about 8.5% most years).

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If the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals have one weakness, it would probably be the non-Albert Pujols part of their infield. David Freese appears to be a talented player at third base, but he only has 87 career MLB games and his ankle injury has him questionable for the start of Spring Training. There are legitimate questions about whether or not Ryan Theriot can play average defense at shortstop, and we already know that Skip Schumacher is little short of an unmitigated disaster at second. The Cardinals addressed all three of those positions in one fell swoop over the weekend, signing former Twins super-utility infielder Nick Punto to a one year, $750,000 contract.

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Since last July, the Arizona Diamondbacks have been on a mission to improve their pitching rotation. Heading into Spring Training, the Diamondbacks were set to open the season with three pitchers acquired over the last seven months. With their recent trade for Armando Galarraga, they may be looking at a completely overhauled rotation in 2011. Although Galarraga gained national fame by nearly throwing a perfect game last season, his overall numbers left much to be desired. We’ll see if Galarraga can add stability to a rotation in flux.
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One final post on Vernon Wells from me today, and then tomorrow we’ll move on to something else. However, I wanted to tackle one last angle before we dismiss this as just one of the worst trades ever – namely by asking, what would Wells have to do to earn the remainder of his deal?

Let’s start with a few assumptions. The cost of a win has been about $5 million this winter, even on four-year deals such as the ones given to Adam Dunn and Victor Martinez. This was not the only way the Angels could have chosen to spend the money and avoid a longer term commitment to a player like Carl Crawford or Adrian Beltre, and we have to account for the opportunity cost – those players that the Angels could have signed instead of acquiring Wells’ deal.

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The Pirates might not have been the worst hitting team in baseball last season, but they ended up the worst overall by no small margin. The Mariners, at 6.1 wins, produced -138.4 wRAA to the Pirates’ -99, but an 88-run difference in fielding left the Mariners with 6.1 Wins Above Replacement, more than doubling the Pirates’ 2.8. This represents the lowest team batting/fielding WAR since the Diamondbacks finished with -1.2 WAR in 2004. Yet that’s not the most interesting part. Clicking through to the Pirates team WAR figures, one thing stands out. It will make you laugh or cry, depending on your allegiances.

Andrew McCutchen produced more WAR than the entire Pittsburgh offense and defense, himself included.

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The Vernon Wells trade elicits a wide variety of reactions, as best shown by the amazingly awesome word clouds created by Sam Miller, but if I were to use just one word to sum up the trade, it would probably be “inexplicable”. This isn’t one of those moves where there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the coin – this is the kind of deal where it is almost unanimous that the Blue Jays took the Angels to the cleaners. No matter how hard you squint to try to find positives in Wells’ game, it’s still just a complete head-scratcher that the Angels would agree to take on a contract that size for a player of his abilities. This deal got me thinking – when was the last time there was this kind of near-unanimous reaction to a trade? In short, is this the most inexplicable deal in recent history?

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Underrated by casual baseball fans because he plays for the Royals, and overrated by many Royals fans because they don’t have many recent examples of what a good position player looks like, Billy Butler has agreed to a four-year, $30 million extension with Kansas City that also includes a $12.5 million club option for 2015 (the $1 million buyout is included in the $30 million guaranteed above). This is a good deal for the Royals, but given Butler’s age it is worth taking a look at how Butler might continue to develop as as hitter and provide the team with even more value.

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Victor Martinez – four years, $50 million. Joaquin Benoit – three years, $16.5 million. Brad Penny – one year, $3 million. It wasn’t Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez. But by bringing in a solid bat, a set-up man coming off a monster season, and a potential bargain of a back-end starter, the Tigers still made more shiny moves to upgrade their roster than many other teams this off-season.

Detroit, meanwhile,  kept its core intact, led by one of the five best hitters in the game in Miguel Cabrera, and (arguably) one of the five best starting pitchers in Justin Verlander. In a division with two solid but still beatable rivals, you’d think Tigers fans should get excited for a possible 2011 playoff run. So why does this roster seem…not quite right?

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There have been a couple updates made to a couple of the stats on the site and some new data for 2010 added.

1. Total Zone and Total Zone with Location Data (TZL) are now available for the 2010 season. They’re in all the fielding sections, leaderboards, etc….

2. wRC+ has been updated to fix an issue with the league baselines. As a result for 2010, all NL players are now -4.01 and all AL players are -2.58. This will have some effect on all seasons with a similar uniform effect for AL and NL players. Big thanks to Kincaid for alerting us to the issue.

3. Pitcher BABIP has been updated to use TBF instead of estimating AB through IP. This has been a long time point of contention with our BABIP calculation. For years where TBF is unavailable, the old method is still being used (years prior to 1916 and most projection systems). As a result, BABIP’s for pitchers will show as lower than they were, but the baseline is also lower. The ordering of players remains extremely similar and the correlation between estimating AB’s using IP*2.82 and using TBF is about .99. The BABIP formula we are currently using for pitchers is (H – HR) / (TBF – BB – HBP – HR – SO).

Episode Fifty-Nine
In which the guest beats around, like, zero bushes.

Headlines
Writing Reggie Jackson, Some Ins and Outs Of
Writing, And Then Detesting, A Book: What That’s Like
Dayn Invites the Host to a Diamond Mind League
… and other need-to-know information!

Featuring
Dayn Perry, Real-Live Book Author

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

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 45 min play time.)

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