One offseason removed from signing Jayson Werth to a 7 year, $126 million contract, the Washington Nationals are looking poised to make another splash. They are going strong in the bidding for Prince Fielder, and considering that they are reworking their television contract to get at least double the amount of money they are currently receiving ($26 million/year), they certainly seem to have the money to do it.

So to answer the title of this post, if money isn’t an issue, why shouldn’t the Nationals pursue Fielder? He’s the best player left on the free agent market, and the free agent class of 2013 is relatively barren at first base. Fielder is young, powerful, and a star — surely he’d be a good investment?

As we all know, though, teams need to put more thought into their decisions than that. In particular, there are two important questions to answer before we can properly evaluate if pursuing Fielder is in the Nats’ best interests: how close are they to contention, and how would Fielder’s signing impact the rest of their roster?

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ERA estimators estimate how well a pitcher pitched in the present, and pitcher projections estimate how well a pitcher is expected to pitch in the future. Naturally, we’d expect projections to more-accurately predict pitchers’ future performances, since that’s what they’re designed to do. But it appears that ERA estimators can figure future performance quite well — and SIERA, in particular, has actually done a better job projecting pitcher performance that than traditional projections.

Projecting pitchers is harder than projecting hitters. Not only do pitchers’ skill levels change often, but simply estimating a pitcher’s skill at any given time is challenging. Differentiating their performances from that of their fielders’ — and removing luck — are difficult tasks necessary to isolate pitchers’ true talent.

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All the leaderboards now preserve sorting in the link, meaning you can sort by whatever you want and share with someone exactly what you were looking at. This is made even easier by the addition of the usual smorgasbord of “share” buttons to the leaderboard pages.

For instance, here are the qualified BsR (baserunning) leaders last season.

Also, sorting now sorts in descending order first. Fans of looking at the league-worst first will just need to click again. Someday we will just have the stats sort from best-to-worst, first, regardless of whether it should be ascending or descending. But in the meantime, having stats sort descending first should save an extra click most of the time.

On the exporting front, playerids are now listed by default at the end of the dataset when exported. Gone are the days of parsing out playerids and player names. Thanks to all those who found and shared workarounds while exporting wasn’t so pretty.

Hat Tip: @GiantsNirvana, @CajoleJuiceEsq, xiefrank

Sometimes, we can just have a little fun with the numbers. And now that our Dark Overlord has been studiously typing away in that basement of his, we that play in the light can have a little more fun. Yes, he gave us Minor League leaderboards that have all sorts of delightful little snippets of knowledge — what they all mean in sum, who knows, but each is a nugget of beauty in baseball.

* Junior Lake was third-fastest player in all of the Minor Leagues by Bill James’ speed score. He even hit 17 out and showed a .175 ISO, so he’s got some tools. If only he could walk, limit the strikeouts or show some defense. The Cubs could move him to the outfield if he can’t handle the infield, but that only solves one of the problems. And let’s not forget this is the team that drafted Corey Patterson, so even center field won’t solve all of his woes.

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We only remember the most exciting plays. Diving catches, game-winning hits, high-pressure situations — these are the things that fill our memories and our imaginations. But baseball isn’t always exciting — often it’s far from it. I love baseball, but many of its events are boring. Headlines in the following morning never read, “Roy Halladay throws a two-seam fastball for a called strike to open third inning.”

Home runs are some of the most exciting events in baseball. Everyone — even the most apathetic towards baseball — can appreciate a baseball that’s hit really hard and really far. But home runs are, compared to more mundane baseball events, pretty rare. During the 2011 regular season, batters hit 4,552 homers. That’s a seems like a lot. But considering the fact that about 700,000 pitches were thrown, home runs make up less than 1% of all pitches. It seems pretty likely then that our impressions about what is important in baseball are disproportionately affected by home runs.

Not surprisingly, most homers come on pitches that are thrown down the middle:

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Ricardo Nanita relaxes near a white tiger in heaven.

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

1. Assorted Headlines
2. Final (!) SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League
3. Projections: ZiPS Converted Poorly to WAR

Assorted Headlines
Trumbo’s Foot: Still Not Healed
The stress fracture in Mark Trumbo’s right foot isn’t healed yet, nor does the cornerman expect it to heal until around late February, reports MLB.com’s Alden Gonzalez. With the addition of Albert Pujols over the offseason, Trumbo obviously won’t be playing first base much; however, the injury prevents him from taking reps at third base and likely also hurts his trade value for the short-term, if that’s a direction in which the Angels were interested.

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The dream NotGraphs roster has officially been assembled. On top of Logan Morrison and Ozzie Guillen together in the same clubhouse and on the same Twitter, Miami will now house the other noted Chicago fireball, Carlos Zambrano. The Cubs ate $15 million of Zambrano’s $18 million salary for the privilege to ship him down to Florida in exchange for former top prospect and current disappointment Chris Volstad.

With Miami building a contender this offseason through the acquisitions of Jose Reyes and Mark Buehrle but still ostensibly looking up at Philadelphia and Atlanta for the NL East, the addition of Zambrano on the cheap could be what pushes the Marlins into the playoffs — that is, if he has anything left in the tank.

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Let the Theo Epstein overhaul continue.

Matt Garza might have been the most popular name tossed around this off-season in Wrigleyville, but Carlos Zambrano was the first Chicago Cubs pitcher to be traded. After three injury riddled season — and a ton of headaches — the Cubs elected to deal the sole survivor of the Dusty Baker era to the Miami Marlins. In return, the  Cubs get 25-year-old Chris Volstad. While Volstad hasn’t established himself as a top of the line pitcher in the majors, this deal might just work out in the Cubs’ favor.

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The Minor League leaderboards have been overhauled and now have a ton of new features including:

– Filtering by individual team.

– Custom stat lists, just like the major league leaderboards.

– The ability to group stats over multiple leagues.

– Custom player lists, allowing players to be easily compared.

– Custom reports let you save your custom stats / players for easy retrieval.

Not everyone from the 2011 Oakland Athletics is leaving town. Last night Buster Olney reported that the As had re-signed their center fielder from previous two seasons, Coco Crisp, to a two-year deal guaranteeing the 32-year old $14 million dollars with an option for a third season. Some may doubt whether Crisp is really worth the money, particularly given his health record, but the more interesting question is what this means for the As seemingly-eternal rebuilding effort and future.

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