Many years ago, when Jacobs Field was shiny and new, I was friendly with this girl from Cleveland. Everyone in her family was a big Indians fan, and Manny Ramirez was just coming into his own as one of the greatest right-handed hitters the game would ever see.

Whenever the Indians were on TV, the whole family would gather around to watch. When Manny would do something particularly amazing, everyone would go nuts. “Manny Ramirez! Manny Ramirez!”, they’d all yell. The family’s King Charles spaniel was your typical cute little lap dog, rarely making noise or bothering anyone. But every time anyone exclaimed “Manny Ramirez!”, the dog had the same reaction: YIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIP

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The Angels entered the offseason with money to spend and designs on nabbing a primo free agent position player, like Carl Crawford or Adrian Beltre, to invigorate a team that ranked 13th in the American League in wOBA and toward the middle of the pack in UZR. After Crawford inked with the Red Sox and Beltre joined the division rival Rangers, it looked as though L.A.’s most prominent winter move would be adding lefty relief pitching.

That changed Friday, as the Angels acquired Vernon Wells from the Toronto Blue Jays for Mike Napoli and Juan Rivera. In picking up Wells, the Angels added name value and spent the cash that was sitting in the club’s coffers. Unfortunately, they didn’t get any better in the process. The team is now saddled with a cumbersome contract for a player who is almost assuredly going to regress next season, and who is entering the typical decline phase of a player’s career. The Jays, meanwhile, get out from under the baseball equivalent of a subprime mortgage and pick up the trade’s best player to boot.

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By acquiring the $86 million that Vernon Wells has left on his contract while shipping out Juan Rivera ($5.25 million) and Mike Napoli (~$5.8 million or so), the Angels essentially agreed to add $75 million to their books over the next four years. Just for fun, let’s take a look at what they could have bought with $75 million this winter.

Power Hitters.

Adam Dunn ($56 million) and John Buck ($18 million) would have given them a lefty thumper to use as an OF/DH type and allowed them to replace Napoli with another catcher who could hit the ball over the wall. Sure, they would have had to play Bobby Abreu in the field for one more year, but the difference between Dunn’s bat and Wells’ bat would have compensated for the difference, and they wouldn’t have had to start Jeff Mathis at catcher.

Detroit’s off-season

The Tigers acquired Victor Martinez ($50 million), Joaquin Benoit ($16.5 million) and Brad Penny ($3 million) for $5 million less than the Jays just paid to “upgrade” to Vernon Wells.

An entirely new starting rotation

Jorge de la Rosa ($21.5 million), Jake Westbrook ($16.5 million), Carl Pavano ($16.5 million), Hiroki Kuroda ($12 million), and Javier Vazquez ($7 million) signed for a grand total of $73.5 million this winter. This isn’t quite as fair, since it’s almost all 2011 money rather than being spread out over the next four years, but still, the total dollar figure for Vernon Wells is about the same as buying five of the best free agent starting pitchers available this winter.

After cutting ties with outfield mainstay Carl Crawford, as well as veteran back-up Gabe Kapler, the Tampa Bay Rays are rumored to be in the market for Johnny Damon. Assuming the price tag is reasonable, this would be the kind of low-risk, potentially high reward deal available every year to teams who wait out the annual free agent feeding frenzy.

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Although Carl Pavano had nearly identical FIPs in 2009 and 2010 (4.00 versus 4.02), he achieved them in quite different ways. Pavano, who re-signed with the Twins yesterday, did a great job of limiting walks in both years. But in 2009 he combined that command with average-ish strikeout and ground-ball rates. In 2010, however, had just 4.8 Ks per nine (two per nine fewer than in 2009 and sixth lowest in baseball), but induced grounders on over 50% of balls in play.

Usually such a change in strikeout and ground-ball numbers is the result of a drastic change in pitch usage, see Joel Pineiro’s 2009. But it looks to me like Pavano’s pitch usage has not changed that much from 2009 to 2010:

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After analyzing all of the preceding numbers (here and here), I bucketed various players into different bins according to their age, BMI and if they attended college.

The main problem I’ve run into with my analysis is that, as I divide the data, the sample sizes get smaller. With only 947 samples with which to work, the numbers get scattered quickly. For this chart, I’m only looking at the player’s age and his BMI.

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With Jim Thome returning to Minnesota, and Johnny Damon reportedly closing in on signing with the Rays (although it isn’t a done deal as of this writing), the remaining designated hitter spots on contending teams are dwindling: perhaps only the Texas Rangers (who missed out on Thome and are now said to be in pursuit of Ramirez) fit into that category if the Rays get their man. There may also be some non-contenders who think it is worthwhile to add someone in a hitter-only spot. With that in mind, it is worth comparing three of the best hitters left on the market who might fit the description “designated hitter”: Manny Ramirez , Vladimir Guerrero, and Russell Branyan.

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Yesterday in Part 1, we set out to see what the MLB landscape would look like if the current three-division format was scrapped in favor of the old two-division ways, but with two Wild Card teams instead of one. Today, we go back to 1996 and view the playoff races in the past 15 years through this lens, and it turns out that one-third of the playoff races were affected.

In the proposed new format, 10 different teams would have reached the postseason – nine new Wild Card teams, and one new division winner (the 2000 Cleveland Indians). It would break down as follows:

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In the first part of this piece, I established a framework for evaluating streakiness, using David Wright’s consistent performance in 2007 and his streaky performance in 2010 as examples. Now that we have a methodology for assessing the streakiness of players, we can extend it to all players. I repeated the same process I applied to Wright for all 1,545 players with 500 or more PA in every year dating back to 2001. To save computer processing time, I only ran 1,000 simulations for all players, rather than the 10,000 I ran for Wright in the first part of this piece (this is the difference between the calculations taking days and their taking weeks). While this reduces our precision slightly, the distributions are nearly identical:

So, let’s just get right to the red meat. Here are the five most and five least streaky players in every year from 2001 to 2010:

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