The Royals officially released Kyle Davies earlier this week following poor performances in parts of five seasons. Acquired from the Braves in exchange for half of Octavio Dotel’s 2007 season, Davies seemed like a solid return. He threw hard, complemented the heater with a decent yet underwhelming curve, and was not yet eligible for arbitration. In other words, he was exactly the type of project the Royals were looking for. While the trade itself was good for the team at the time, Davies has arguably been the worst regular starter in baseball over the last five seasons. His presence on the Royals roster this season, as well as his career numbers, invites discussion regarding tendering contracts, building rosters and large gaps between ERA and estimators.

Since debuting in 2005, Davies has thrown 768 innings with below average peripherals, poor controllable skill marks and abysmal run prevention rates. He has a career 6.4 K/9 and 4.3 BB/9, and a 39 percent groundball rate. He doesn’t miss many bats, exhibits poor control and struggles to keep the ball on the ground. The anti-Halladay, if you will. He stranded runners at a meager 67 percent clip, which hurt mightily given his 1.62 WHIP and .318 batting average on balls in play. Plenty got on and plenty came around to score, translating to a 5.59 ERA. Though his xFIP and SIERA were a bit kinder — they are identical at 4.91 — they didn’t exactly vouch for his performance.

Since 2007, the year he was traded to the Royals, there are 83 pitchers to throw 600+ innings. Davies has the sixth lowest WAR (5.6), the worst ERA (5.40), third worst SIERA (4.87), fifth highest BABIP (.313), second worst WHIP (1.58) and second worst strand rate (66.8 percent). No matter how one slices it, Davies has been the, or one of the, worst starting pitchers in baseball.  Read the rest of this entry »

I probably won’t make this a regular thing, but so many of you have been so remarkably supportive since I was diagnosed with leukemia that I didn’t want to keep you all out of the loop as we moved down the path. I’ve now been in the hospital a little over two weeks, and have completed my first round of chemotherapy.

To determine how effective the chemo was, they performed a bone marrow biopsy on me earlier in the week. The results of that test are in – I officially have no more leukemia in my body. The doctors won’t say I’m in remission until they discharge me from the hospital in a week or two, but given that I’m currently cancer-free, I’m happy to use that term, even if it is technically a little premature.

This doesn’t end my journey, as I’m still going to be in for three more rounds of “consolidation chemo” over the next few months, and will be in and out of the hospital for most of the rest of 2011. Remission isn’t the same thing as cured – the goal is to keep this thing from ever coming back. However, it’s a great first step.

And, because we’re FanGraphs (and with a huge hat tip to Mr. Cistulli), here’s the WPA chart.

Less than a year after Tommy John surgery last September, Stephen Strasburg has returned to professional pitching. He threw his first rehab start Sunday in single-A, reaching 98 miles-per-hour on the gun — and his second start is scheduled for tomorrow night. Strasburg is among the most valuable players in the game, with a Yankee-like ability to draw attendance; Maury Brown estimated that Strasburg’s debut alone netted the Nationals an additional $1.5 million in revenue, and Brown estimated that his injury last year cost the Nationals up to $20 million in lost revenue. So the team is understandably eager to get him back on the field, shutting down opponents and rolling in the dough.

GM Mike Rizzo has wisely attempted to throw cold water on the excitement:

We are just looking for him to build arm strength, build up innings, build up stamina and we’ll monitor the recovery…. He is preparing to get to the ultimate level. We have to do it the right way.

But it’s hard to temper expectations for a pitcher of Strasburg’s ability and star power. So should the Nats call him up this year? Better yet, can they afford not to?
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This past off-season it seemed as though Wandy Rodriguez would sit near the top of available pitchers at the deadline. The Astros were going nowhere, and Rodriguez was set to hit free agency after the season. But out of nowhere the Astros signed him to a three-year, $34 million contract that covered 2011 through 2013. In itself that’s still a tradable contract, but the $13 million option changed the story. If traded it becomes a player option, which makes a deal far less likely. Written that way, the inclusion of the option clause made it seem as though the Astros intended to keep Rodriguez. And yet here we are in August, hearing talk of a possible waiver trade.

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Let’s cut to the chase, how’s about.

Featured Game
Detroit (2) at Cleveland (6) | 19:05 ET
• Allow me to remind the reader that, after some important work in the NERD Lab yesterday, today’s Game Scores are being calculated with a new and improved playoff-odds adjustment — the entirely boring and unnecessarily complicated details of which any English speaker with a computer can read here.
• If you’re the sort of reader who prefers cutting to the chase, remain confident that Carson Cistulli is dedicated to improving your baseball experience to the max.
• If you’re the sort of film director who prefers cutting to the chase, your name is probably Hal Roach Sr.
• And you directed the Our Gang movies, among others.
• And you died in 1992. (Which: condolences.)

Audio Feed: Suggestions? (I’ve watched some Tigers Television. Rod Allen is quite strong, but I wouldn’t describe the broadcast as transencdent, either.)

Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 5.6.

Note: a full list of Team NERD scores — including the relevant playoff-odds adjustments (POFF) appear at the bottom of this post.

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As we saw earlier this week, a number of teams have developed a reputation for using the annual amateur draft as a means of infusing their organizations with talent. With an eye to the future, these clubs see the cost benefit to developing future stars in-house, rather than seeking out established, and quite likely more expensive, talent through trades and/or free agency.

Over the past three seasons (2008-10), the Pittsburgh Pirates organization has spent more cash on the amateur draft than any other club in Major League Baseball. The small-market organization sees the benefit of spending to acquire and develop amateur talent, rather than competing with The Big Boys for high-end free agents. Whereas the Boston Red Sox organization spent a whack of dough on 10 players in the ’10 draft, the Pirates spent a lot in the upper level of the draft, in part because it chose second overall and had to secure the best prep arm in the draft (if not the Top 2); the club used its hefty bankroll for seven players.

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Rays 8, Royals 7

Moving the Needle: Sam Fuld triples and then scores the walk-off run on an error, +.910 WPA. This really should have been divided, with some positive going to Fuld and some negative going to Johnny Giavotella. The Rays trailed 7-3 in the bottom of the ninth, but they got to work right away, riding two singles and a double to a run. A ground out and a single brought home two more, bringing them to within one. Fuld then came up with two outs and crushed one to the wall in right-center. That brought the runner around to tie the game, but more importantly it drew a throw as Fuld slid into third. Giavotella’s throw, however, got away from Mike Moustakas, and Fuld was able to dash home to score the winning run.

Notables

Melky Cabrera: 2 for 3, 1 2B, 1 HR. He drove in five runs. This furthers his incredible bounce back year.

Matt Joyce: 3 for 5, 1 HR. He scored twice, including once in the ninth.

Also in this issue: Orioles 6, White Sox 4 | Diamondbacks 6, Astros 3 | Indians 10, Tigers 3 | Cubs 4, Nationals 2 | Twins 5, Red Sox 2 | Reds 3, Rockies 2 | Yankees 9, Angels 3 | Braves 6, Marlins 2 | Phillies 9, Dodgers 8 | Mariners 4, Rangers 3 | Padres 9, Mets 5 | Blue Jays 8, A’s 4 | Brewers 5, Cardinals 1 | Pirates 9, Giants 2

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We often roll our eyes when announcers cite a player’s stats over the past 15 days. We’ll groan when they tout how many home runs he’s hit since the All-Star break. We’ll throw the remote when a pitcher’s last five starts are mentioned. And yet, when we attempt to analyze a player here, there’s nary a blink if ‘last season’ is mentioned.

Well, guess what. Seasons are also arbitrary endpoints. Yes, they are arbitrary endpoints that allow for easy analysis, and ones that we have all agreed to use. And, if we didn’t use them, statistical analysis would be rendered fantastically difficult. Our record books would look very strange. We’d have to phrase things very carefully.

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Should Hit, or ShH — pronounced like: “Shh! Be quiet or the Nazis will hear!”

Last week, while rifling through the lump of cold numbers that is the 2011 season, I stumbled upon a self-illuminating chest of gold coins: A reliable, fielding independent hitting formula. Today, we’re going to take it to the next level and get nerdy up in this beach.

Before we proceed, let’s do some of the research I did not care to do the first time around. Here are some of Should Hits’s predecessors (though they did not directly influence the creation of ShH):

FIP for Hitters
In 2010, Matt Klaassen wrote “FIP for Hitters? Defense Independent Offense.” His work in the article — though it does stay truly defensive independent and does not bring BABIP into the conversation — probably mirrors my work the most. However, his works is different both in process (he excludes BABIP and does not use wRC+) and intention (my tool focuses on regression, not really true talent levels).
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It’s long been a sabermetric truism that for hitters, strikeouts aren’t any worse than any other out — or at least, that strikeouts are much less harmful than is typically assumed. Strikeouts are slightly worse than outs on balls in play, since sometimes in play outs can advance or score a runner. But the difference between the two is minuscule, while fans tend to lampoon high strikeout hitters and overestimate the negative effects of strikeouts.

So the sabermetric truism has stuck: strikeouts aren’t that bad. Hitters can have high strikeout rates and still contribute loads of offensive value through their plate discipline. After all, the end goal is not making an out, right? It shouldn’t matter how a player does it, simply as long as they reach base at a high rate and avoid making outs.

But there’s a problem with this logic. While a player can be valuable even he strikes out frequently, strikeouts still decrease how often a player reaches base and can have an adverse effect on a player’s on-base percentage. They’re not as harmless as casual saberists typically assume.

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