Kenny Williams, on whether he would sign Albert Pujols.

“If [Jerry Reinsdorf] gave me $30MM dollars right now, I’m not going to spend it on one guy. Sorry White Sox fans,” the GM said. “But I tell you what, I’m going to take that $30 million and I’m going to distribute it around. My team is going to be better as a whole than it is with one player who might get hurt. Then you’re done. Sorry, that’s just me. And that’s no disrespect to a future Hall of Famer, first ballot, one of the greatest players in history.”

This is an interesting quote, and it sheds light on a subject that comes up quite a bit when we talk about our dollars-to-win salary model. One of the objections that comes up frequently is the linear nature of that model, where we use $5 million per win for a one-win player or for a six-win player, since that is how MLB teams have generally provided contracts. Our model works off of how teams have operated, but to some, this undervalues star players.

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It takes a little luck to be a real-life All-Star, or to win yourself some individual hardware. Both Cy Young winners outperformed their FIPs by a nice clip last season. Felix Hernandez (2.27 ERA, 3.04 FIP) and Roy Halladay (2.44 ERA, 3.01 FIP) also did this despite owning career ERAs and FIPs that were much closer together. Fantasy baseball sleeper lists are rife with those that underperformed their FIPs – Francisco Liriano (3.62 ERA, 2.66 FIP) and Yovani Gallardo (3.84 ERA, 3.02 FIP) might feature prominently.

But what about the players that suffered through a season of incredibly neutral luck? Should we not celebrate them somehow? They somehow managed to flip a coin a hundred times and get fifty tails. That seems worth… something.

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You can say this about the Red Sox front office – they are remarkably creative in their never-ending attempts to find an advantage. Their latest beat-the-system gimmick is perhaps the most unique – I would also accept “sneakiest” – one yet. As first reported by Alex Speier, Boston struck a deal with Andrew Miller that essentially circumvents the waiver process.

Here’s the basics – Miller signed a minor league contract with the Red Sox, with the plan being for him to begin the year in Triple-A. If he is called up at any point, they will have to pass him through waivers before they can re-assign him to Pawtucket, as he is out of options. If Miller had a good showing in his time in the big leagues, there would be a decent chance that another team would have taken a shot at him, and used the waiver process to grab him for themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, the Red Sox gave Miller a $3 million option for 2012 that vests if he’s claimed on waivers by another team.

This essentially guarantees that Miller will slide through waivers unclaimed, giving them the right to assign him to their Triple-A affiliate even though he’s out of options. Effectively, this contract structure gives Miller an extra option year. My initial reaction is that the Sox are gaming the system – much like they attempted to do by signing Felipe Lopez for the final week of the season and then offering him arbitration in order to try and collect a draft pick – but after considering it a bit more, I’m not sure that this falls into the same category.

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In one of last week’s posts discussing whether or not the Yankees needed a speedy leadoff hitter, I mentioned in a parenthetical aside that “even [Mark] Teixeira is going to hit some singles.” I was trying to be openly hyperbolic, but some readers dutifully pointed out that even the most powerful hitters hit more singles than any other kind of hit. To what extent is this true, and what practical application might it have?

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We did it last year and found that there wasn’t much in the way of correlation between getting mentioned as being in “the best shape of your life” and actually outperforming the projections, but maybe this year will be different. Maybe this crop of worked-really-hard-and-had-laser-eye-surgery-and-showed-up-to-camp-focused guys will actually show that all that work really does pay off.

In the form below, please put the player’s name who you have seen referenced as making noticeable improvements this winter, and then in the second box, please include a link to the source material so that we can verify which improvement was noted upon their arrival to camp.

By using the form, I’ll have an easier way of collecting the guys to follow throughout the year. You can also leave the nominated player in the comments if you want to help people not repeat a submission that has already been made.

The Arizona Diamondbacks
2010 MLB Record: 65-97 (fifth place, NL West)
Minor League Power Ranking: 10th (out of 30)
Click for: Last Year’s Top 10 Prospect List

The Prospects

1. Jarrod Parker, RHP
Acquired: 2007 1st round (Indiana HS)
Pro Experience: 4 seasons
2010 MiLB Level: Injured
Opening Day Age: 22
Estimated Peak WAR: 5.5

Notes: Parker remains the top prospect in the system despite missing all of 2010 while rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. The 22-year-old hurler still has No. 1 starter potential and the organization expects his stuff to rebound to pre-surgery levels. He throws a mid-90s fastball and rounds out his four-pitch repertoire with a plus slider, curveball and changeup. Parker looks a little smaller on the mound than 6’1” but he has a sturdy frame. He has a low three-quarter arm slot and a fairly smooth delivery. After an encouraging instructional league, Parker should open 2011 in double-A or triple-A and could be in the Majors by the end of the season.

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Ben Nicholson-Smith is a staff writer for MLBTradeRumors.com. This is part of a series of guests posts he’s writing here on the site. You can check out his work regularly over at MLBTR.

Cliff Lee, Carl Crawford and Jayson Werth know all about the importance of contract years. Those three players and dozens of others played well in 2010 and went on to sign lucrative contracts in free agency this offseason.

Free agents enter their walk years with the expectation that a big season will lead to a big contract, but they aren’t the only ones who can cash in on a productive year. Let’s take Rickie Weeks and Jose Bautista, two players who signed extensions worth a combined $102.5 million last week. Neither player had performed at an elite level in the major leagues before 2010 and neither player was in a “contract” year, but both broke the bank after breakout seasons.

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Recently, the game lost two prominent outfielders to retirement: Gary Sheffield and Jim Edmonds. Although these two players will certainly invoke some heated Hall of Fame debates – Dave already covered Sheffield’s Hall angle last week – I am personally more interested in how the two players would have performed in 2011.

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Last Friday, I submitted for the readership’s consideration a brief post on how one might convert the ground-out/air-our ratios (GO/AO) found at MLB.com to the ground-ball rates (GB%) found here at FanGraphs. Though, as the much esteemed Tangotiger noted, the work wasn’t entirely grounded (get it?) in logic, the effort satisfied my immediate concern — namely, to create a quick-reference table for translating MLB’s GO/AOs (which are, for example, sometimes included with press-box stat sheets) into the GB%s with which most saber-oriented readers will be more familiar.

Of course, MLB.com is not the only site that publishes GO/AO data. Retrosheet (via Baseball-Reference) has GO/AO ratios going back to 1950. If it so happened that Retrosheet’s GO/AO numbers correlated strongly with our GB%s here, then we might — and I’ll stress might — have a tool with which to look back at some 60 years’ worth of ground-balling data.

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