The Baltimore Orioles wanna Schoop.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Offseason Notes.

1. Assorted Headlines
2. Prospecting: John Sickels’ Top-20 List for Baltimore
3. Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Atlanta Television

Assorted Headlines
Twins Signs Seven
Matt Eddy’s most recent Minor League Transaction report for Baseball America reveals that Minnesota has been quite active of late in signing minor leaguers. Almost all the signings have purpose and upside: outfielder Wilkin Ramirez has had contact issues but has both power and speed, is only 26, and can likely play an average center field; former Cincinnati prospect, right-hander Daryl Thompson, is also just 26 and has a history of success; former Rocky Sam Deduno has had problems with control, but has also posted ground-ball rates in the high-50s throughout his minor-league career.

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Matt Murton deserves another chance. Despite a .286/.352/.436 slash line over his major league career, Murton was sold to the Hanshin Tigers of the NPB in 2009. In his rookie season, Murton batted .349 and broke Ichiro Suzuki’s record for most hits in a season. He didn’t disappoint in his sophomore follow-up, batting .311 with 13 home runs, and a .339 on-base percentage.

Major League Baseball has recently seen former castoffs return to the States and revive their once promising careers, and many expected Murton to at least test the waters this off-season. With reports of Murton returning to Japan in 2012, major league teams may have just lost the opportunity at employing the next Colby Lewis/Ryan Vogelsong.

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Episode 104
Managing Editor Dave Cameron discusses not only the trade of John Jaso to the Mariners from the Rays in exchange for reliever Josh Lueke, and also the firing of Ed Wade, but also takes an analytical — and yet still decidedly personal — look at his illness and subsequent treatment.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 30 min. play time.)

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When we created the FanGraphs Power Rankings this year, we didn’t know how they would play out. At the outset, there was scorn over the Indians’ ranking. As the season wore on, that changed to scorn about the Rockies’ ranking. By the end of the season though, things seemed to work out pretty well. Eight of the top nine teams — with the Red Sox being the one exception — reached the postseason. That in and of itself is not a justification for the Rankings mind you, but it seemed to show that we were on the right track.

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With Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols hitting the free-agent market this offseason, there have been many discussions on how the two of them will age. Lots of work has been done on how an average player ages, but Pujols and Fielder aren’t your average players. Which begs the question: How do stars age, compared to the rest of the league?

One of the hardest aspects when looking at elite players’ aging curves is knowing when to consider them elite. Several hitters who are playing right now appear to be sure-fire hall-of-famers — just as long as their careers don’t do an Andruw Jones nose-dive toward uselessness. To generate a list of players who seem headed toward stardom, I selected players since 1980 who had a total of 20-plus WAR during a three-year span. Also, I took the players who generated WAR of 9.5 or more in a single season.

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Of course the internet baseball community hates Barry Bonds. Despite being clearly one of baseball’s greatest players, his career will always be overshadowed by his presence as Mr. BALCO, as the center of the steroids scandal which loomed over baseball for much of the last decade. Not only that, but he had a tendency to come off as short and angry with the media. A combination of cheating and nastiness hardly endears people to your cause.

But, naturally, I am not fully satisfied with anything until I can quantify it. Luckily, the Baseball-Reference Elo player rater exists. With the help of the users of Baseball-Reference, who have cast over one million votes rating players, we can see just how the internet baseball community (at least, that rather large part that uses Baseball-Reference) view players. Voters are welcome to use objective criteria from WAR to batting average, and obviously nothing is preventing them from hitting one player’s button if they simply like that player better. To me, finding a subjective measure of the opinions of greatness to put next to our objective measures is incredibly interesting.

Make no mistake: Barry Bonds is clearly one of the top hitters — if not the top hitter — to ever play the game. Between the home run record, 175 career wRC+, 168 career fWAR, and 172 career bWAR, it is impossible to argue with his on-field accomplishments. So when we see the Baseball-Reference crowd has him rated as the 26th best player of all time, right between Cal Ripken Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr., we know it goes beyond what’s on the field. Observe, the massive difference between how Bonds is rated by the people and how we would predict he would be rated simply by WAR (using the Baseball-Reference version as it is the one presented to the voter), looking at the top 50 players in the rankings:

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Despite the prestige of being 2011’s Most Average Player, Colorado Rockies outfielder Seth Smith has been the subject of trade rumors since the end of the season. Trading Smith might be a good idea for the Rockies if it enables them to fill a hole elsewhere, but Smith himself is better than one might think. He is not a great fielder, although it he is not horrible (the Rockies gave Brad Hawpe more than 6000 innings in the outfield, after all). What seems to bother many people is the large platoon split that the left-handed-hitting Smith has shown in his major-league career. However, Smith’s splits are at least as much of a potential opportunity as they are an impending crisis. It is, as a wise man might say, a crisitunity.

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Last week, reports began to surface that the Marlins were interested in acquiring Gio Gonzalez from the A’s. Depending on how much credibility you put in various rumors, the A’s have asked for the likes of Mike Stanton and Logan Morrison in discussions, and no matter who you believe, they’re clearly not going to sell Gonzalez on the cheap. Any team looking to acquire his services is going to pay through the nose to get him, so being the helpful soul that I am, I’d like to suggest a significantly cheaper path to acquiring a pretty similar talent.

Gonzalez debuted in 2008, and since then, he’s posted the following career numbers:

BB%: 11.3%
K%: 21.9%
GB%: 47.5%
BABIP: .293
LOB%: 73.9%

Over those same four years, here are Edinson Volquez’s numbers:

BB%: 12.4%
K%: 23.3%
GB%: 49.0%
BABIP: .292
LOB%: 73.7%

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The Major League Baseball Players Association and owners of Major League teams have just completed a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, as the previous agreement expired this December. One of the most underrated differences being discussed among the many changes is how the two sides resolved “compensation” for teams that lose free agents. The previous rule in recent years stated that when a player is ranked as an elite (“Type A”) player by Elias, the team that signs him forfeited their first or second round draft pick to the player’s previous team, and the player’s previous team picked up an additional “sandwich” pick between the first and second rounds as well (as long as the previous team offered salary arbitration to the player). When a semi-elite (“Type B”) player signed with a new team, then the previous team only received the sandwich pick, but no pick was transferred between teams.

On its face, it sounded like a fair gesture to maintain parity, but it really only served one main purpose—to act as a restraint on salaries and drive down the prices teams would pay for players on the open market. The “compensation pick” that a team forfeited when they sign a new player is actually what economists would consider a tax. When an employer has to surrender something valuable other than salary (cash or otherwise) to hire an employee, this has the effect of suppressing salary offers.

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