It seems that the Atlanta Braves are intent on dealing Martin Prado this offseason. So far, Prado has been mentioned in trade talks with Kansas City (along with Jair Jurrjens for Lorenzo Cain and Wil Myers), with Colorado (for Seth Smith and a prospect) and with Detroit (for Delmon Young). Braves GM Frank Wren hasn’t found the right match for the 28-year-old yet — the Young rumor was shot down quickly — but a number of teams are likely to be interested in Prado if Wren continues to shop him. In fact, ESPN’s Buster Olney quotes an AL team’s official who favorably compares Prado to free-agent outfielder Michael Cuddyer. Trading Prado surely should be easy, but it begs the question: Why is Wren so anxious to get rid of his super-utility player?

The answer perhaps is difficult to understand, considering that Prado is a versatile defender who also has been productive offensively. He has a career wOBA of .337 and has compiled 10 WAR in three-and-half seasons of full-time play. He’s serviceable at both second and third base and is an above-average left fielder when you look at data from this past season. Prado is under team control for at least two  years, and he’s projected to make a budget-friendly $4.5 million in 2012. Additionally, the Braves don’t have an immediate replacement for Prado in the outfield — or in his other role as a  third base fill-in when the aging, oft-injured Chipper Jones needs time off. The Braves were in the bottom half of the N.L. in runs scored in 2011 and their outfielders’ combined .300 wOBA was last in the league. Needless to say, it’s not like the Braves are overstocked with productive outfield bats.

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Baseball folklore claims Indians manager Lou Boudreau devised the defensive shift to combat a Ted Williams hot-streak. Boudreau admitted the strategy was meant as more of a psychological ploy rather than a legitimate baseball tactic. In some sense, Boudreau’s unconventional stunt worked since Teddy Ballgame stubbornly refused to take advantage of all the open real estate he was presented with.

Even if its origin has been debunked, the defensive shift is widely accepted as a conventional baseball strategy today. Broadcasters and mainstream writers only seem to point out the gaping hole on the left side of the infield when the hitter who is subject to the shift is going through a slump. If you ask the player himself why he doesn’t lay down a bunt or attempt to hit a ground ball where the third baseman (and sometimes even shortstop) should have been standing, he’ll probably tell you he’s paid to drive the ball and hit homeruns, not bunt. The reality of the situation is runs are runs, regardless of how they’re generated. How good does a player need to be to justify continuously attempting to over-hit the shift?

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It has been reported that Brewers GM Doug Melvin is interested in signing two of his front-line pitchers, Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum, to contract extensions before they become free agents next off-season. This would be a big morale boost for a fanbase that will likely be going through Prince Fielder withdrawal this winter. If Fielder does leave, his $15.5 million salary coming off the books would certainly help create the flexibility to re-sign these two important parts of the organization. However, as with any long-term extension, there are plenty of risks to this plan, especially with Marcum.

Marcum was acquired from the Blue Jays in December 2010 as part of the Brewers’ “go all in for 2011” plan. He had a solid first season in Milwaukee, pitching 200.2 innings with a 3.73 FIP, both career bests. These numbers earned him 2.7 WAR, which due to the league switch and the decline in offense in 2011, was actually 0.9 WAR worse than his 2010 campaign with the Jays.

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A Best Buy in Ranch Cucamonga at which Brandon Wood probably shopped while hitting 43 homers.

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

1. Assorted Headlines
2. SCOUT Leaderboards: Arizona Fall League
3. Projecting: ZiPS for Chicago (AL)

Assorted Headlines
All the nerd that’s fit to print.

Colorado Signs Former Uberprospect Wood
The Rockies signed infielder and former top prospect Brandon Wood to a minor-league agreement on Thursday, MLB.com’s Thomas Harding reports. Wood famously hit 43 home runs as a 20-year-old at the High-A California League — a figure that, even after accounting for park effects, still pointed to excellent power from a potential major-league shortstop. As a major leaguer, however, Wood’s control of the strike zone has disintegrated almost entirely: in 751 plate appearances, Wood has a 4.3% BB and 29.0% K. To his credit, Wood improved upon those numbers after moving to the Pirates this year and managed to post his first positive WAR as a major leaguer. He’s a candidate at a third-base spot in Colorado for which only Ian Stewart and Ty Wigginton are the immediate competition.

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Clayton Kershaw received 27 of the 32 first place votes in the 2011 NL Cy Young Award balloting en route to his first major league award. He beat out all three of the Phillies horses — Roy Halladay finished second, with Cliff Lee third and Cole Hamels fifth — and Ian Kennedy to officially go down in the book as the best the National League had to offer this past season. But that isn’t necessarily true, and his case isn’t as shut and dry as all those first place votes make it seem.

It’s plausible to suggest that Roy Halladay and Cliff Lee were, at worst, Kershaw’s equals, and more likely than that his superiors. His winning the award is in no way a mockery, like it was when Bartolo Colon beat Johan in 2005, but it does feel like somewhat of a step back in the voting process. After Felix Hernandez won his award it sure seemed the voting body grasped that team context is important when evaluating players.

His wins total wasn’t up to par with traditional candidates, but voters understood that the Mariners offense was out of Felix’s control. He wasn’t penalized for perceived poor performance in a common performance indicator.

In the case of Kershaw v. Halladay v. Lee, a similar understanding wasn’t extended to strength of schedule and park effects. Kershaw deserves hearty congratulations, but his Cy Young Award win again illustrates the importance and utility of normalizing numbers. When adjusted numbers enter the fray, Lee emerges as a very viable candidate. Halladay steps forward as the best pitcher in the league, and by a long-shot. In our staff awards ballot, I did vote for Kershaw, but my stance has since changed. No matter how one chooses to slice it — unless they like slicing “it” incorrectly — Halladay was the best pitcher in the senior circuit this past season.

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The Houston Astros are heading to the American League and baseball is headed toward balanced divisions (numerically at least) and 10 playoff teams. There are many fans in Houston upset at the move, but one aspect that they ought to consider being excessively happy about is the team’s improved playoff probabilities under the forthcoming new alignment.

Currently baseball is a mess of uneven odds. The squads in the AL West only have three foes to compete with for a division crown while the Astros and others in the NL Central have five each. Furthermore, American League teams only have ten others to battle with for the current single wild card spot. National Leaguers must outpace 12 others in the race for baseball’s second chance bracket. Between the years of 1995 (no playoffs in 1994 remember? Good thing the new CBA’s already done) and 2012, there were four separate probabilities for making baseball’s postseason depending on which division a team played in.

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Episode 101
Today we consult FanGraphs Audio’s impressive Mail Sack and find a question regarding the Astros’ pending move to the AL West. Contributor Brandon Warne provides the salient details of said move — including, for example, its effects on the field. Also discussed: hot dish as haute cuisine.

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

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 18 min. play time.)

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It’s been a week since Wilson Ramos was kidnapped and rescued, in what was one of the most shocking baseball stories in a long time. In a certain sense, the Wilson Ramos kidnapping was not an isolated incident: just in the past five years in Venezuela, kidnappers have abducted Yorvit Torrealba’s son, Henry Blanco’s brother, Victor Zambrano’s cousin and mother, and Ugueth Urbina’s mother. (Blanco’s brother and Zambrano’s cousin were killed.) Money appears to be the basic rationale: baseball players are relatively wealthy, and have a supreme incentive to pay whatever the price for the safety of their loved ones.

But Ramos was a major leap from what had happened before. He’s the first major leaguer every kidnapped in Venezuela, and some Venezuelan major leaguers have begun to question whether they can continue to return to Venezuela in the winter, year after year. Ramos was rescued a couple of days after being kidnapped, in a commando rescue operation personally authorized by President Hugo Chavez. Still, the question remains: what will be the long-term aftermath of the Ramos affair?

It’s no surprise that Chavez got involved. The Venezuelan state has a major stake in resolving a matter like this as quickly and forcefully as possible. Venezuela’s baseball players are some of their most famous and important global ambassadors, both inside and outside the country. And baseball is a major part of the country’s economy. The Venezuelan Winter League benefits from the star power of the many major and minor leaguers who return home, the Venezuelan economy benefits from the remittances of professional players making huge amounts of money in the States, and baseball is a large part of Venezuela’s public image in the United States and throughout the Americas.
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You can set your watch to it: Every year after the MVP awards are announced, people complain about who got — or didn’t get — votes. We SABR nerds at Fangraphs are no different. But, of course, we look at things a little differently. With that in mind, here are some SABR-darlings who haven’t gotten a single MVP vote in five years — and why that might not change this year.

First things first, though. We need a metric by which to measure player production. Since this is Fangraphs, we’ll use WAR as the measuring stick. I’m using a five-year range because most MVP voters will have had some exposure to advanced metrics during that time.

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I’ve received a few reports today that there are some ads covering up content. If you see an ad in a place where it shouldn’t be, or if it’s playing unprompted audio, don’t worry, we’re not trying to destroy FanGraphs with ads. These types of ads annoy us as much as they annoy you (we use the site too) and they are not allowed on FanGraphs.

If we see one of these ads ourselves, we take the steps to remove it from the site immediately. If we only get reports of an ad and can not see it ourselves, it can be difficult to track down and the more information we can get about the ad the better.

The best thing you can do is to take a screenshot of the ad, or send us a description of the ad (what is the product?) and send an e-mail to ads+feedback@fangraphs.com and we will remove the offending ad as soon as we can track it down.

Update: It currently appears to be an issue with Internet Explorer only and ads in general. This should be fixed shortly.

Second Update: This should be corrected now. If you are still seeing issues, please let us know. For those interested, this was actually the result of a change in Google’s ad serving system and apparently it ended up breaking a number of website layouts in Internet Explorer that use third party ads in conjunction with DoubleClick for Publishers.