The end of each year inspires many “Best Of” articles. Sports blogs, in particular, latch on to these types of posts. Best Plays of the Year. Best Games of the Year. Best Players of the Year. Even niche articles, such as Best Mustaches of the Year. The list goes on and on.

This list does not list the “Best Of” anything. Instead, it lists the worst five defenders since 2002 (when UZR was developed to record defensive statistics on this site).

To determine the worst defenders of the past ten seasons, I sorted players by UZR/150. This was to prevent a player — like Adam Dunn — from dominating the list by simply playing horrendous defense for the better part of a decade. I also set the minimum number of innings at 3,000. This helped to avoid one season outliers, such as Ryan Braun and his escapades at third base in 2007.

Finally, I employed positional adjustments, so the UZR numbers could be presented as a position neutral rating. This allowed for a poor fielding left fielder to be rated worse than an equally poor fielding center fielder, as one would assume the poor fielding center fielder would post improved numbers if moved to left because it is an easier defensive position. For more information on the specific positional adjustments utilized, visit this article from two years ago.

Without further ado…

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With the trade of Andrew Bailey and Ryan Sweeney to Boston in exchange for Josh Reddick and a pair of minor leaguers, one of the questions A’s fans are asking is, “Who is Miles Head?” The short answer is that Head is a mid-level prospect who would have been ranked in the 15-20 range among Red Sox farmhands by most publications in the coming days. A more detailed description will tell you that…

…Miles Head can hit a baseball. The 20-year-old first baseman proved that last summer, bashing his way to one of the best seasons of anyone in the Red Sox system. Splitting the year between low-A Greenville and high-A Salem, he emerged as a legitimate prospect by hitting .299/.372/.515, with 37 doubles and 22 home runs.

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It appears that the Boston Red Sox have found their new closer.

More than a month after the Philadelphia Phillies signed former Boston closer Jonathan Papelbon, the Red Sox on Wednesday traded for Oakland stopper Andrew Bailey. The Sox also received Ryan Sweeney in the deal, in which Boston gave up outfielder outfielder Josh Reddick and a pair of minor league players.

While Boston obviously thinks Bailey fills a major void in the bullpen — he saved 75 games during the past three seasons — the former Athletic now finds himself in a much less forgiving ballpark.

So will this move work out in Boston’s favor?

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Yesterday, we talked about Alan Trammell’s case for Hall of Fame induction, and if you’ve been surfing the baseball newspapers lately, you’re probably come across arguments for or against most of the other bubble candidates on this year’s ballot. While there’s certainly value in discussing the credentials of guys Edgar Martinez and Larry Walker, we’ve also been having those conversations for several years now, and the facts haven’t changed since the last time we reviewed their candidacy. So, today, I want to turn my Cooperstown-related focus to the guys that are still playing.

Given what we know today, which active players are going to end in the Hall of Fame? And which ones should, but look unlikely to get the necessary support? Is anyone currently playing likely to get inducted that doesn’t actually deserve it? Let’s take a look at the current crop of players and where they’re likely to end up, at least with what we know at the moment.

No-brainer, first ballot, let’s not even bother arguing.

Albert Pujols (+87.8 WAR), Chipper Jones (+87.5 WAR), Derek Jeter (+74.4 WAR), Ivan Rodriguez (+73.4 WAR), Mariano Rivera (+39.0 WAR/+54.6 WPA).

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Mariano Rivera’s cutter is the most dominant pitch in the game today, if not one of the best ever. Baseball’s all-time saves leader has carved out a brilliant career with his signature offering, sawing off a lumberyard’s worth of bats along the way. Hitters know it’s coming, but rarely can they square it up.

When a pitcher possesses such a weapon, it is easy to assume that he can simply rear back and let it go. Unlike a Greg Maddux or a Mike Mussina, he doesn’t need to be a practitioner of the art of pitching. He just blows hitters away with pure stuff.

According to Rivera, it isn’t that simple.

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Hall of Fame ballots are due at the end of the week, so this time of year, a lot of attention turns to which players belong in Cooperstown. The expectation this year is that Barry Larkin is going to get in, making him the 22nd shortstop (minimum 50% games played at the position) to get enshrined. I’m in full support of Larkin’s induction, and think he’s an excellent candidate who should have gotten in a year ago. But he’s not the only shortstop on the ballot who deserves legitimate consideration.

This year will be Alan Trammell’s 11th year on the ballot, and given how little momentum he’s garnered since debuting in 2002 (going from 15.7% to just 24.3% last year), he likely has no real chance of getting elected by the BBWAA. Unfortunately for Trammell, he didn’t hit any of the big milestone numbers that make voters take notice, and he excelled in the areas that aren’t generally valued all that highly by the voters. With just 2,315 hits and secondary numbers that aren’t overly exciting, Trammell is generally seen as a Hall of Very Good guy, a quality player who just wasn’t quite great enough to get a plaque in upstate New York.

However, I think Trammell has a better case than is generally accepted, and his candidacy points out why looking at career totals is not the best way to evaluate a player’s Hall of Fame worthiness.

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Command and control. They sound like terms we’d use during a military operation. But no, these are two skills that are very important in baseball. The two refer to the same general ability to throw pitches in the best locations for the pitcher. There is a distinction between the two. As I understand it, control represents the pitcher’s skill in throwing strikes; command refers to the pitcher’s ability to throw pitches where he intends to throw them.

We can’t actually measure command. That would require knowing where the pitcher wants to throw the ball, and we don’t know that unless he’s telling us before each pitch. CommandF/X  — Sportsvision’s technology that tracks the catcher’s glove — would help, but that’s not publicly available.  What we can do, though, is measure pitch location through PITCHf/x. This should work as a good proxy.

We know that command is very important, and that the best pitchers, on the aggregate, display much better command than lesser pitchers.

Or do we?

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One of the pitchers going from the Nationals to the Athletics in exchange for Gio Gonzalez is soft-tossing lefty Tom Milone.  Milone, who will be 25 in February, was a 10^th round draft pick by the Nats in 2008 and has gotten by with excellent control (only 4.4% free passes throughout his MiLB career).  What might be turning some heads is that his strikeout rate, unspectacular in 2008 and 2009, has jumped up to one per inning over the past two seasons.  Considering that Milone got five starts in the big leagues last September, we can look at PITCHf/x data to get a feel for his repertoire.

Milone showed four pitches in his stint with the Nationals:

           n    mph
Fastball   212  87.9
Changeup   90   79.4
Cutter     67   84.9
Curveball  33   74.2

Milone, whose four-seam fastball typically sits in the high-80s, has similar velocity to fellow lefty starters Ted Lilly, Chris Capuano, and Randy Wolf.  His cutter can blend in with the four-seamer both in terms of movement and velocity, but on average is 3 mph slower with ~4 more inches of cut and ~3.5 more inches of vertical sink.  His change is a fairly typical 8 mph off of his fastball and also gets 4 extra inches of movement away from a right-handed batter.  His curve doesn’t drop too much, generating only 3 inches of topspin.  (The biggest hooks in the majors – Barry Zito’s and Tim Collins’, for example – get over 10 inches.)

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Every off-season, the arrival of the winter meetings, top prospect lists and general baseball boredom leads to rampant speculation about baseball trades involving prospects who are presently “blocked” in their current organizations and need to be freed like Brandon Allen (Hasn’t he been freed twice in the last year already)? Maybe the Fangraphs crowd can come together and compile a list of prospects who wound up being truly “blocked” for an extended period of time, but I struggle to find even a few scenarios where a productive young player did not force his way into the picture or be traded to fill other holes.

Having previously scouted Braves Mike Minor, his name popped into my head as a pitcher who I have little doubt would have compiled 185 innings pitched as a mid-rotation workhorse and an improvement over the now exiled Derek Lowe. The extra half win or more I’m confident Minor would have provided came back to haunt Atlanta as the Braves missed the playoffs on the season’s final day.

And while it did take about a season and a half for a permanent rotation spot to be opened up for Minor, few scenarios actually exist where a legitimate big leaguer waited in the wings for two seasons or more marinating in the minor leagues. I use two seasons as a criteria for “blocked” status because an organization like Tampa will develop talent more slowly than other organizations. For me, “blocked” does not really exist when player development is still occurring at the minor league level and one has to provide leeway for that.

Additionally, I’ll also concede another season for a prospect to force his way into the picture, overtake the incumbent and then allow time for the organization to author a deal for the displaced player. Before writing my own #Free(insert prospect name here) post launching verbal darts at a General Manager pinned up on the dartboard nestled in my “Cheers” case (where much of the writing magic happens), that executive deserves ample time to negotiate the best deal possible before being subjected to this father-of-three’s G-Rated rantings.

For this reason, Mike Minor doesn’t truly fit the criteria.

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