In the last couple days several players – most notably Adam Wainwright, but also Vicente Padilla and Nick Punto – have come up lame. Naturally, the loss of each of these players will have different effects on their teams’ respective win totals, as the Cardinals loss of Punto isn’t nearly as dramatic a blow as the news about Wainwright today. This season, I plan on tracking all players headed to the disabled list during the season including information on the injury, the amount of WAR and salary that were lost, along with several other factors

First of all, here is the spreadsheet to be viewed or downloaded containing all the players on or heading to the Nick Johnson List for 2011. As of right now, no player is officially on the DL, but several players will definitely be placed on the DL by opening day. I hope to keep this sheet updated daily by adding players as their information becomes available.

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When we talk about “resistance” to the practical applications of sabermetrics “in baseball,” we usually mean front offices and managers. But players themselves might have their reasons for objecting to some of those applications, and it isn’t just ignorance. Let’s take a look at two possible cases and what might be done to overcome the issue.

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Just yesterday, the Cardinals were holding open tryouts for the imaginary “sixth starter.” Well, those tryouts just bumped up in significance with the news that Adam Wainwright may be lost for the season. Over the past four seasons, Wainwright’s 17.5 WAR ranks 11th among all starters – and far outpaces Chris Carpenter’s 9.9 – making this a terrifying blow to the Cardinals staff. If the Cardinals have any good fortune, it’s that they’ve discovered this early in spring training, and have more than a month to find an alternative solution. While there certainly are options among the still unemployed, Tony La Russa has already declared that the solution will come from someone already at camp in Jupiter.

Candidates for the job include Kyle McClellan, P.J. Walters, Adam Ottavino, Brian Tallet, Lance Lynn and Ian Snell (of course, if the Cards wanted to get wild, they could promote Shelby Miller, but he seems ticketed for High-A Palm Beach). McClellan could be an interesting choice. While he has been a reliever throughout his Major League career, he did start in the minors, and was already slated to be stretched out this spring. Certainly, he has a starter’s arsenal. Last season, he threw four pitches – fastball, cutter, curveball and changeup – at least five percent of the time, and his fastball, curveball and change were all at least 3.5 runs above average. In fact, last season, among relievers with at least 60 innings pitched McClellan’s wCB mark of 5.9 ranked fourth in the Majors, ahead of both Heath Bell and Neftali Feliz. Whether or not he could handle a starter’s workload all season remains to be seen, but if his Marcel-projected 3.96 FIP held up as a starter that would be terrific for the Cards.

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Just because a team has pitching depth doesn’t mean that they need to trade it. It might be easier for them to swap an arm for a bat, but it is often not a necessity. Pitching depth can be one of the most valuable assets in the game. The Dodgers learned that first hand this week. Yesterday reports circulated that Vicente Padilla was heading back to LA in order to undergo an MRI on his right elbow. While Padilla will not require Tommy John surgery, he will miss an undisclosed amount of time as he recovers from surgery to “free up [a] nerve that is entrapped in his forearm.” Now imagine how good the Dodgers feel about not having dealt any of their six starting pitchers.

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1. Mike Trout, CF
Acquired: Drafted 1st Round 2009 (New Jersey HS)
2010 Level: A/A+
Opening Day Age: 19.9

Notes: Twenty three teams passed on Trout in the 2009 draft, and looking back less than two years later, it’s hard to believe a player with Trout’s combination of tools and skills could last until the end of the first round. Despite being listed at 215 pounds, Trout is one of the fastest players in the minor leagues. He gets down the line so quickly that fairly routine ground balls to the left side can quickly become an adventure. Once he’s on base, he continues to put pressure on the defense, stealing 56 bases in 2010. There is some sentiment that Trout may slow down as he ages, but he should always be a plus runner. At the plate, Trout has exceptionally quick hands and the coordination to consistently barrel the ball. Seeing him play, his line drives seem to have 5-10 more mph on them than anybody else. So although he only hit only ten home runs last year, he could wind up slugging 20-25 a year as he learns to look for pitches to drive. Just as impressive, Trout shows an extremely patient approach for such a young hitter, posting a BB% of over 12 percent last year. Defensively, his speed allows him to cover a lot of ground, and his arm is good enough that he should be able to stay in center.

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Last week, I examined the factors which affect a pitcher’s HR/FB rate and constructed a model which can be used to predict the pitcher’s future rate of allowing home runs. Using that model, we can examine which pitchers truly have good and bad HR/FB rates, find the realistic range of HR/FB rates, and analyze the pitchers which over- or under-performed their projections.

With this new perspective, Matt Cain no longer looks like a pitcher with completely unexplainable HR/FB numbers. Instead, he looks like a pitcher who has the ideal skill set and ballpark to minimize HR/FB rate.

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Episode Sixty-Four
In which the guest is more Cwik than dirty.

Headlines
A Real Cwik Introduction
Bad-Mouthing Dave Cameron for Fun and Sport
Walk-Up Music: Some Very Important Thoughts

Featuring
Chris Cwik, New-ish Guy

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

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 30 min play time.)

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Recently, in these pages, I’ve been looking at the relationship between ground-out/air-out ratios (GO/AO) — available in slightly different iterations at MLB.com and Baseball Reference (B-R) — and the ground-ball percentages (GB%) we host here at FanGraphs. (See Part One and Part Two of this most exciting of explorations.)

We know that GB%s measure the percent of all batted-balls that were hit on the ground and that GO/AOs are a ratio only of ground-outs to air-outs (with the Retrosheet data from B-R appearing to include line-outs as part of the air-out data and MLB appearing to exclude line-outs entirely). Despite this difference, it appears as though the correlation between GB% and GO/AO — especially the iteration available at B-R — is rather strong. Plotting actual GB%s against “expected GB%s” (xGB%) — that is, the exptected GB% using only GO/AO as the input — gives us a correlation coefficient of .98 for qualified pitchers from 2002 to 2010. The root mean square error (RMSE) between the GB%s and xGB%s is a mere 1.4%.

Because the data at B-R goes back to 1950, what started off merely as an attempt to provide a reference for people who had access to GO/AO but not GB% has potentially become an opportunity to estimate with some accuracy the GB%s of pitchers going back to the middle of last century.

“OMG” is what you’re saying to yourself, I’m sure.

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The comparisons to Brady Anderson and Davey Johnson grew old before the 2010 season ended. Any time a player hits far more home runs than we expect, he’ll draw those comparisons. It’s not without merit, since both of those players did have one season that stood out among the rest in terms of power. But those were different times. The 2010 season was unlike the previous few seasons for one notable reason: the lack of home runs. Yet Jose Bautista managed to completely reverse that league-wide trend.

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