Baseball games are not perfect simulations. They’re not good ones, or even mediocre ones. They’re downright awful. When we design, engineer and execute proper simulations or models, we are often dealing with scales on the order of thousands of repetitions to become comfortable with the probability of the results. Baseball runs through it once.

Granted there are lots of smaller, more repeated samples within the larger single sample. That helps keep some of the noise down, but not nearly all of it, or most of it. Baseball is a noisy game dominated in many ways by what is commonly called luck and people by nature are just terrible coming to grips with that.

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With the offseason quickly approaching, today I’d like to take a glance at a few guys that I feel are prime candidates to be overpaid in free agency this winter.

To clarify, I don’t necessarily mean they can’t/won’t perform to the $5 million per win above replacement level. They may well do that. However, I’d like to present these players with all things considered, such as relative price of an available alternative, platoon splits, compensation, or anything else to that effect.

With this said, here are a few of my offseason overpay candidates.

Wilson Betemit – Detroit Tigers 3B

The pickings are slim at third base, where Mr. Betemit has played exclusively since coming over from the Royals earlier this summer. To contextualize a little bit, there are only six third-sackers league-wide with a WAR over 3.0 — in other words, even fewer than the similarly-shorthanded second base and shortstop spots. As a result, even marginal talents like Betemit appear likely to reel in a more lucrative contract than usual in this third base housing market.

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With a starting rotation that already boasts the likes of Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, and Jonathan Sanchez, the San Francisco Giants organization debuted yet another impressive starting pitcher over the weekend. Southpaw Eric Surkamp made a one-and-done appearance against he hapless Houston Astros but there is no doubt that he’ll be back after being optioned back to the minors after this start. Prior to the season, I ranked as the 11th best prospect in the Giants system.

Surkamp allowed just one run in six innings of work. He showed outstanding poise with 52 of his 87 pitches going for strikes (60%). He walked three batters but also struck out four. In his career, Surkamp has shown a tendency to induce fly-ball outs but six of his 10 in-play outs were recorded on the ground.

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Research often inspires more questions than it answers. That’s acceptable because asking the right questions is such an important part of doing the right research. Every presentation at SportVision’s 2011 Pitch F/x Summit either asked or answered a worthy question, making the summit a great way to spend an day talking about baseball.

That said, of course a couple presentations stepped to the fore.

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Adam Dunn is having a terrible season, and now, even the White Sox are giving up on waiting for him to regress back to the mean – he’s been told that he’ll spend the rest of the year as a part-time player. With limited opportunities to dig an even larger hole, it seems likely that Dunn will end the year with a line not too far from his current one – a .163/.289/.290 mark that adds up to a dreadful .268 wOBA. For a DH, that kind of anti-production is nearly unheard of.

I wanted to put Dunn’s season in context, though, so I thought I’d look through history and see just how often some useful Major League player has just fallen down on the job. We’ve all seen guys fall off the cliff before, so I figured this probably wasn’t all that unusual historically. Using the nifty little “split season” filter on the leaderboards here on FanGraphs, you can choose to see the best and worst individual seasons at different types of things over a specified time period, so I filtered by the worst seasons of the last 50 years.

At -2.5 WAR, Dunn checks in tied for ninth on the list in terms of net negative performance over a full season. Ninth in 50 years doesn’t sound so bad, after all, and would confirm my initial suspicion that this kind of thing isn’t all that uncommon. But when you start to look at the context of the guys ahead of him, the story begins to change.

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This Angels fan is like, ¿Dónde está Mike Trout?

Featured Game
Los Angeles Americans (6) at Seattle (0) | 22:10 ET
• The attentive reader will note that, somehow, Jerome Williams is responsible for what is
• Williams, since his return to the majors: 9.1 IP, 20.0% K, 0.0% BB, 31.3% GB, 2.98 SIERA, 3.01 xFIP, 75 xFIP-.
• He also has, inexplicably, an 18.8% swinging-strike rate. (League-average is somewhere around 8-9%, depending on role.)
• In other news, Mike Trout hasn’t started either of the last two games, despite looking very good since his recall.
• Here’s the average Halos Heaven comment on the matter: “Argh.”

MLB.TV Audio Feed: Mariners Radio.

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 5.1.

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Lance Berkman reportedly cleared waivers last week. How he went through the waiver process unclaimed is befuddling.

Certain noteworthy players pass through waivers based on a few factors. Some prove too costly in salary or years. Some may make it known they intend to invoke their no trade clauses. Others are viewed as risky and injury prone. The remaining players aren’t great enough to justify the acquisition cost, especially with a mere month remaining.

The Big Puma fits none of these descriptions. Determining why no team submitted a claim proves to be quite the tall task.

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Good starting pitching is always important, but it seems to take on added significance as the pennant race heats up. And often it seems that the teams with the freshest, strongest arms are the teams able to emerge out the grind of a 162 game season into the playoffs.

This year fatigue could be especially important to monitor since there are several pitchers pitching deeper into the year and/or logging more innings than ever before whose performance could have big implications on the pennant race.
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