It’s been nearly two decades since a pitcher has won the MVP award. Even then, the award went to a relief pitcher, who won based on a gaudy saves total. In order to find the last starter to win the MVP award, you would have to go back to 1986 — when Roger Clemens took home the hardware. Any way you look at it, it’s become increasingly rare for a pitcher to win the MVP award. Despite leading the entire National League in WAR, Roy Halladay is getting virtually no support for MVP. When it comes to the MVP award, one thing is clear: pitchers are extremely undervalued.
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The Mariners won today, beating the Indians by a 9-2 score. Jokes about the Mariners inept offense aside, there’s not much usually inherently interesting in the typical line score of a 9-2 game. Where this game picked up a noteworthy angle was in the last column of the line score, the errors. The Mariners committed four of them while the Indians were charged with zero and yet, the Mariners still won and won handily.

Four errors in one game does not happen all that often, and the team winning happens even less often. In fact, digging into Retrosheet, there were 1,021 such games in their records and the error-happy team had prevailed in only 191 of them for an 18.7% winning percentage. As a side note, there was no meaningful split between the home and road winning records here.

My initial research was spurred by a request for similarly errored games, but if I open it up to games with four or more errors for one team and zero for the other then the sample size expands to 1,342 and a 17.3% winning percentage for the erroring team. It’s merely two data points – and there are far more robust studies showing the same effect – but it makes sense that as the sample lets in games with more errors, the winning percentage drops. Errors are not the greatest measurement tool we have given their subjectivity, but they do have a correlation with losing.

Of course, I had to carry it to the logical conclusion and find the game or games with the largest disparity between errors. That turned out to be this game between the Oakland Athletics and the Kansas City Royals with the Royals (of course) committing a whopping eight errors to Oakland’s zero. Unsurprisingly, the Royals were trounced 11-2 in that game, although only four of the Athletics’’ runs were deemed due to the errors. The widest spread still resulting in a victory for the sloppy team circles back around to the Mariners in this game where despite seven errors and a 7-2 deficit to the Brewers in Milwaukee, the Mariners came back and won 10-8 on the road. Now that’s winning dirty.

We have discovered something marvelous! We only need to know four simple measures to predict what a hitter can do: Their walk rate, strikeout rate, home run rate and BABIP.

For weeks now, we’ve been exploring and playing with my initial discovery, and now we’re to the point where I feel comfortable calling it Fielding Independent Batting (FIB) — an homage to Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), which predates it and partly inspired it.

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Jose Reyes will become a free agent this offseason. The Mets’ shortstop looks to make quite a bit of cash, but his recent injuries might limit what teams are willing to pay.

From 2005 to 2008, Reyes averaged 157 games a year. During that time, he averaged 5.2 WAR per season and accumulated the thirteenth-highest combined WAR among all players. His wOBA was .347.

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Earlier this season, I re-introduced the two statistics Shutdowns and Meltdowns. In short, these two stats are an alternative way of evaluating relief pitchers, providing an alternative from the age-old standbys Saves and Blown Saves. If a pitcher enters a game and makes their team more likely to win, they get credit for a Shutdown; if they make their team more likely to lose, they get a Meltdown. It’s a simple enough concept, no?

Shutdowns and Meltdowns are a great way to look at which relievers are under- or overvalued based on their Saves total, and it can also be a useful tool for evaluating middle relievers. So which relievers have are being sneakily good or bad this year? Let’s take a look.

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A little taste of success, when combined with an expanding budget, can make for an interesting off-season. The Texas Rangers experienced that in the off-season, first bidding nine figures for Cliff Lee, and then signing Adrian Beltre to a five-year, $80 million contract. Yet it’s one lesser move, and a non-move, that have really spurred the Rangers lately.

After the Rangers signed Beltre and essentially removed Michael Young from third base, the third position he’s played for them, he predictably requested a trade. Rumors of a Rockies trade abounded, but never came to fruition. Eventually both parties agreed to drop it, instead using Young at DH and wherever needed in the infield.

About 20 days after the Beltre signing, the Rangers swung a trade, swapping reliever Frank Francisco for Mike Napoli. The Blue Jays had recently acquired Napoli from the Angels, but decided that they’d rather have Francisco in their bullpen than Napoli as their DH and sometimes catcher. The Rangers, who were likely dismayed to have Francisco accept their arbitration offer, were glad to add Napoli’s bat, even if it would be tough to find him playing time.

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With its stunning views and trademark architecture, Santorini would really impress Alexei Ramirez.

Featured Games (With an Ess)
Chicago Americans (3) at Los Angeles Americans (5) | 22:05 ET
San Diego (6) at San Francisco (3) | 22:15 ET
• The West Coast appears to be the best coast in terms of watching baseball tonight.
• With a win last night — and a Ranger loss — the Angels are 3.5 back now in the AL West.
• With a loss last night — and a Diamondback win — the Giants are 2.0 games back in the NL West.
• The White Sox — eh, they have the advantage of being able to make October travel plans.
• Like to the beautiful Greek island of Santorini, for example.

MLB.TV Audio Feed: White Sox Television and Giants 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 5.3.

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Last week, the Houston Astros put Wandy Rodriguez on waivers, giving teams until Tuesday afternoon to make a claim on him. At the time, Jon Heyman noted that only “some fool” would put in a claim, given the amount of money he’s still owed on his contract. This isn’t to pick on Heyman, since he’s hardly been the only writer talking about Rodriguez’s burdensome contract and how Houston should be happy to be rid of their obligation to him going forward.

Through it all, I’ve sat here and scratched my head trying to figure out if we’re all talking about the same Wandy Rodriguez here, because the one that I’m aware of is a pretty good pitcher.

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With the August signing deadline having come and gone close to two weeks ago, taking the time to look at which teams chose to spend big on the draft and those that took a more conservative approach is always an interesting task.

Baseball America does a fantastic job of covering the draft every year, and I recommending checking out the series of posts they ran covering draft spending this year. But sometimes I find it easier to view this type of data visually.

There will be some differences between BA’s numbers and mine. First, Baseball America limited what they considered draft spending to bonus totals. In the graphs that follow, I incorporated all spending. For example, the Mariners signed Daniel Hultzen to a major league deal worth at least $8.5 million. As part of that deal, Hultzen received a bonus worth $6.4 million. Baseball America would record the Mariners as spending $6.4 on Hultzen, I record them as spending $8.5. I don’t think either way is necessarily right, they’re just different.

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