With another Yankees World Championship comes another round of salary cap debate. The Yankees have an infield that costs a gaudy amount and easily make the most revenue of any other team. The idea of implementing a cap limits how much they can spend on free agents or absorb via trades, which seems to make the playing field a bit more even. But there’s a forgotten aspect to all of this: If you limit the Yankees Major League payroll from $200M to $100M (or whatever) without imposing a cap on the amount of money a team can spend on amateur and baseball operations talent, then really you aren’t helping anyone but the Yankees.

Why? Because if you knock that $50M off the Yankees payroll, that doesn’t mean they cannot spend it; instead, it simply means they must reallocate it to another part of the game. Now they can really go over-slot on a consistent basis. Or, if a hard-slotting system is imposed, they can reap the international talent market like none other. Not to mention the amount of front office talent they can add to the fold — ranging from scouts to quantitative analysis guys to medical staff and so on.

Living off free agency is usually a poor habit to fall into, because when signing a 30 – 32-year-old player, teams are paying for his past performances more than his future performances. By eliminating that practice for the Yankees, they can quickly develop the best farm system, player development, and front office staffs around and still have money to burn. Then, when those young players turn into young stars under a cost efficient umbrella, the Yankees can go out and do their spending thing on the free agent market with a bunch of homegrown studs intact.

You could argue they could do this already, but won’t for whatever reason. Maybe they haven’t realized it, or they would rather bank off the big-time free agents. I don’t know. This may result in fewer wins in the short-run, but a healthier organization in the long-run. Baseball would actually be doing the Yankees a service by saving them from themselves.

Perhaps that’s a wee bit hyperbolic, but the answer to any question about baseball’s competitive nature and balance lies beyond a Major League roster salary cap.

Jeremy Hermida seemed destined for the land of non-tenders as late as a week ago, but not any longer as the Boston Red Sox have acquired the corner outfielder via trade.

Hermida is formerly a top prospect with nearly 2,000 plate appearances in the bigs. Over that time his bat has played slightly above average (a .336 wOBA) while his defense has left much to be desired. The story with Hermida has been his lack of power. Since 2007 – when he first broke onto the scene as a true regular – his ISO has slipped in each season. From .205 to .157 down to .133, the soon-to-be 26-year-old was going the wrong way, even drawing some comparisons to former wunderkind-to-bust Ben Grieve. Fenway park is more receptive to offense – putting it lightly – which should raise Hermida’s offensive production without so much as a true increase in talent.

Barring something unforeseen – like Boston not addressing the left field spot further – Hermida figures to be a bench player for them in 2010 and potentially beyond. That’s ssuming he actually starts next season in Boston and isn’t flipped for something else through the off-season.

For their efforts to move Hermida, Florida receives a pair of arms: lefties Hunter Jones and Jose Alvarez.

Jones features impressive minor league numbers but has velocity that averages about 87 miles per hour. He’s a fastball/slider guy and 12 innings is far too small of a sample size to say one way or the other, but if his contact rate continues to be around 87% don’t look for him to sit down nearly 10 batters per nine like he did in the minors. He’s better against lefties, as you would expect.

I know next-to-nothing about Alvarez. He was as starter in the system with unimpressive strikeout rates that somehow dipped to four per nine after switching to relief and heading to High-A.

Question: Which of the following players had the highest wRAA last season?

A) Todd Helton
B) Matt Holliday
C) Shin-Soo Choo
D) Evan Longoria
E) Alex Rodriguez

Now, a question like this would only be posed if the answer was surprising, right? Which makes C the obvious (and correct) pick. Acquired in a July 2006 trade from the Seattle Mariners (for Ben Broussard) Choo has blossomed into a fine player, earning 5.1 WAR last season alone. The 27-year-old posted a .389 park-unadjusted wOBA and played essentially average defense in a corner outfield position.

A driving force behind his offensive outburst was a BABIP north of .375. Often that would be labeled a fluke and a confluence of a series of very fortuitous events. With Choo, it’s becoming a pattern. Throughout his 1,275 Major League plate appearances his BABIP is .373. Go to the career leaderboards and set a minimum amount of plate appearances to 1,000. From there sort BABIP descending and Choo’s BABIP ranks tops amongst active players and fifth historically. The next closest active players include Matt Diaz, Matt Kemp, Fred Lewis, and Derek Jeter. It’s a select club to say the least.

Of course you should still regress towards the league average before penciling Choo in for another .370+ BABIP next year even in extreme cases like this. Take a look at Choo’s career BABIP by batted ball type compared to the 2009 American League average and a trend becomes evident:

BB	Choo	AL
Grnd	0.284	0.24
Fly	0.226	0.134
Line	0.732	0.729

At moments like this, HitFx data would come in handy. Choo sees each of his types go for more hits than the average American Leaguer, especially fly balls. Best I can tell, there are only a few possible explanations for this:

1) Scorer inaccurately calling a line drive a fly ball.
2) Choo hitting the ball harder than most.
3) Choo possessing mental telekinesis powers and is extremely selfish.

Perhaps it’s a combination of the three.

All things considered, maybe it’s for the best that no small market teams made the playoffs. Now the next four months will be void of asking who the next “x” is. The sensation grasped onto the Tigers’, Rockies’, and Rays’ unlikely runs and killed any reasonable discussion of the next up-and-comer. Naturally nobody mentioned the most-likely choice, which happens to be the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Dave went in-depth on the aesthetic appeal of yesterday’s Iwamura deal and I covered the gritty baseball details last night, but some of the quotes from Pirates general manger Neal Huntington show why this team is in better hands now than most people suspect. Take this one, transcribed by Dejan Kovacevic, which touches on the service time issue (Chavez’ being under team control for an additional five seasons to Iwamura’s one):

“It was tough to give up Jesse, but the bullpen is the most difficult area to predict future performance. In our minds, it was much more difficult to find 600 quality plate appearances than 60 relief appearances.”

Focus in on the middle point more than the former (the Pirates liked Chavez) or latter (600 plate appearances of quality is harder to find than 60 relief appearances) and you see a common sabermetric principle: relievers are quite difficult to project moving forward. Take reliever’s home run rates. They have virtually no relationship year-to-year, yet they are important in a reliever’s success or failure. Again, this is nothing groundbreaking and most people who realize the sample sizes being dealt with are minuscule compared to the preferable total are rolling their eyes at this point.

Still, the sins committed by a previous front office leave residuals on the minds of many. People still think Pittsburgh is ran by a train of fools and that’s simply untrue. Huntington did excellent work in Cleveland and has assembled a few good men around him, such as Dan Fox. Check out his response to the most overrated statistic here and keep this in mind for when the Pirates start winning games. It’ll happen if this front office is given enough time.

As Dave alluded to earlier, the Pirates are set to acquire second baseman Akinori Iwamura from the Rays for (per Ken Rosenthal) right-handed reliever Jesse Chavez.

In a vacuum, this is a win for the Pirates. Iwamura is at-worst a league average player making less than what a win costs. His second base defense is average to slightly above, although his quick feet sometimes gives the impression of so much more. Iwamura’s cat-like agility is met with crisp and precise footwork. His range appears weak going towards his right. Offensively, Iwamura shows strong discipline at the plate (an O-Swing% of 14.5) and has walked 10% of the time in his three seasons in America. His career wOBA of .331 is quite reflective of his skill set. The Pirates figure to bat Iwamura second and this probably ends Delwyn Young’s tenure as a starting second baseman, barring something unforeseen like Iwamura shifting back to third and displacing Andy LaRoche and Neil Walker further.

Chavez is a right-handed reliever with a plus-plus change and velocity that sits in the 94-96 range. Thanks to that change he has a reverse platoon split, and is exceptional versus lefties. He figures to profile as a late inning reliever with the Rays, although he’s had issues with home runs which, if fixed, could really change the dynamic of his career arc. Whether that change actually occurs is up to Chavez and the Rays coaching staff to figure out. Ben Zobrist, Willy Aybar, and Sean Rodriguez figure to see some time at second base and there’s still the question of whether the Rays will trade Jason Bartlett or not.

Again, without the context that the Rays were going to lose Iwamura for nothing in a few weeks this looks like a lopsided win for the Pirates. The Rays’ hands were tied and Iwamura’s injury in May derailed any chances of swapping him out prior to the trade deadline. They get a potentially semi-useful part, but there’s little doubt Iwamura will likely prove more valuable to his new team than Chavez – that’s not a knock on Chavez either, full-time players are generally more valuable than relievers.

Watching Iwamura play over the last three seasons has been quite the thrill. He possesses a unique style foreign to most players. Between his hair cuts, futuristic sunglasses, or alligator-skinned glove, Iwamura is an enjoyable character for more than stereotypical (and at times xenophobic) reasons. Combine these perks with being an average hitter and fielder and the Pirates are getting a fun player in return.

Jorge de la Rosa is a journeyman in every sense of the word. By the time de la Rosa could legally drink he was already in his third organization and second professional baseball league. In 2003 he would be part of the package Boston sent to Arizona in order to acquire Curt Schilling. Days later he would be used to acquire Richie Sexson. A few mediocre seasons with Milwaukee and Kansas City passed and Colorado would acquire de la Rosa prior to the 2008 season in a conditional deal.

Naturally de la Rosa started 23 games for the Rockies last year and posted a 4.21 xFIP. He topped those totals this year with a 3.81 xFIP in 185 innings. Unexpected results are sometimes the best, and for a guy with a previous career best xFIP just over 4.7, these two seasons came unpredicted and left unheralded.

Once dubbed the “Mexican John Rocker”¹ by Dan Duquette, de la Rosa is a lefty with a fastball that sits 92-94 and wildly effective secondary pitches. His slider and change-up each generated more than 20% whiffs while his curve fell just shy of 13%. Batters made contact on a more consistent basis with de la Rosa’s fastball which makes his other pitches a saving grace.

Outside of the sudden breakout, why is de la Rosa the least bit interesting? Because tRA and FIP have contrasting views on just how good of a pitcher he is. Part of this conflict has to do with an unadjusted home run rates – playing in Coors has that type of effect – but de la Rosa also has perennially high line drive rates against. He also seems to have some slight issues stranding runners. Whether this is the result of scorer error or actual line drives being hit is beyond me, but for now I’ll assume the truth is somewhere in between.

—
¹This was intended to be a compliment, although nowadays it wouldn’t be.
xFIP data from The Hardball Times

As an aside, I would like to bid Sky Kalkman farewell from Beyond the Boxscore. Sky is one of the kindest and smartest writers in the baseball community, but his Life% has surpassed his time to spend writing on baseball. Not that BTB is in poor hands now either. Tommy Bennett — one of the brightest new writers to buoy to the surface this season — is now running it. Best of luck to both of those gentlemen.

It would seem the theme of this World Series will be reinvention on the mound. Cliff Lee, Pedro Martinez, and A.J. Burnett set the pace and last night Joe Blanton avoided making it a trend. Blanton is easy to get a read on. He is the same pudgy strike-throwing right-hander he was in Oakland; same high-80s fastball, same breaking stuff and off-speed pitch, same facial hair. Everything is the same, except now he strikes batters out instead of taking full advantage of the fielders. Nearly 20% of the batters Blanton faced this season had their plate appearances end with a K — a career high by a decent margin with his next highest mark coming in the half-season spent with Philly last year.

Team	Year	K%	uBB%
OAK	2006	12.1	6.4
OAK	2007	14.7	3.8
OAK	2008	11.3	5.8
PHI	2008	16.1	10.2
PHI	2009	19.4	6.5

This is surprising as Blanton’s fastball does not pop the glove and he uses it nearly 60% of the time, which can lead to some testy runs of ball-meets-sweet-spot action. Blanton’s secondary stuff is far more deceiving, or at least was this season. Last night, Blanton was facing not a National League opponent, but rather the best team in the American League (and likely all of baseball). He struck out seven, allowed five hits, four runs, and walked two within six innings of work. There’s nothing spectacular about that. With full knowledge of this you can see how the following pitch selection (all of his first inning tosses) may have been a poor choice considering the opponent and circumstances surrounding the game.

FF
FF
FF
CH
FF
SL
SI
FF
CH
SI
FF

That’s eight of eleven pitches that were fastballs. Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon lead off the game with back-to-back hits and both were the result of a fastball. I’m not saying work completely void of the heater; however, the Yankees possessed the highest weighted run value off fastballs in baseball and it wasn’t even close, meanwhile Blanton’s fastball is sub-par at best. To his credit, Blanton threw progressively fewer fastballs as the game wore on, but the damage was already done.

It’s impossible to peg the Yankees scoring runs on one pitch. And let me make clear: I am not saying throwing eight change-ups or eight sliders or four fastballs makes much of a difference in that first inning. I am saying Blanton pitched just as you would expect him to. That wasn’t such a good thing last night.

The Red Sox may employ the smartest front office in baseball, which is why this tweet from Jon Heyman makes little sense. Heyman suggests the Red Sox are willing (and able) to offer Jason Bay a four-year deal worth approximately $15M per season.

Bay turned 31 about three weeks ago and is fresh from his best season in years. Since moving to the American League in July 2008, Bay has seen his strikeout rate leap in upwards to 30%. Bay strikes out, walks, and hits home runs. Two of those qualities are great to have and make the third tolerable. The problem begins with his age. He’s on the wrong side of 30 and while he does play in a notoriously hitter-friendly ballpark, his bat is likely to decline over the next four years instead of remain static or (somehow) improve.

This would be fine if Bay’s value was supplemented by playing a key defensive position or at least playing defense moderately well. Instead, Bay is anything but a black hole in left. Bay has posted negative UZR in each season since 2004 with the exception of 2006. His arm has never been good, and whatever range he has left isn’t enough to make up for it.

Over the last three seasons, Bay has been wroth 3.4, 2.9, and 0.1 WAR. In dollar terms, he’s been worth more than 15 million exactly once. Maybe Boston has a defensive evaluation system that says Bay is better than UZR gives him credit for. Fans of the Red Sox certainly don’t see it that way, as they ranked him near Raul Ibanez and Alfonso Soriano in the Fans Scouting Report.

Boston has the resources to overpay for someone they really want, which is why settling on Bay before making a run at Matt Holliday is a bit bewildering. Yes, Scott Boras is the agent for Holliday and if the Yankees get involved things will get out of hand, but since when has that mattered for the Sox? Maybe Boston just wants to get this out of the way so they can focus their attention on Adrian Gonzalez or Felix Hernandez or whoever, but it still doesn’t make it the right move.

Two weeks ago it appeared Tim Hudson was on his way to the land of free agents; however, Ken Rosenthal is now reporting that the 34-year-old has agreed in principle to a three-year extension worth roughly nine million per season. The deal makes sense for both sides. Hudson is a well-established pitcher capable of producing the 2 WAR necessary to make this deal worthwhile on an annual basis, yet injury concerns required Hudson to value security higher than a higher potential payout.

During his last healthy season, Hudson was worth 5.3 WAR. It’s unreasonable to expect him to return and duplicate a season that good, but barring unforeseen setback or re-injury, the Braves have hitched their wagon to Hudson as one of their five opening day starters. Jair Jurrjens and Tommy Hanson figure to be in the same boat. That leaves Kenshin Kawakami, Derek Lowe, Javier Vazquez, and Jo-Jo Reyes battling it out for the final two rotation spots. Unless I’m missing something [I was, Reyes has one option remaining]. hat leaves the three starters who only joined the Braves last winter.

Lowe has three years and $45M remaining on his deal; Vazquez is in the final year of his contract worth $11.5M; Kawakami has an additional two seasons of $6.7M per left. That disparity probably keeps Kawakami in Atlanta, meaning it’s a battle of Lowe and Vazquez. Over the last three seasons Vazquez has posted xFIP of 2.89, 3.96, and 3.85; Lowe of 4.18, 3.43, and 3.50. Both had seasons uncharacteristic of previous years in 2009. Those numbers are not adjusted for league difficulty, Lowe has not been nearly a half run per nine innings better than Vazquez over 2007 and 2008.

There are cases to be made for trading either, but what it really comes down to is whether the Braves soured on Lowe (and sweetened on Vazquez) within a span of 12 months.

The last time I truly felt this apathetic about a World Series was the 2000 Subway Series. Usually team loyalty transfers over in cases like this, yet there is no lesser evil. The Phillies stole a world title from the Rays grasp with an assist from Mother Nature. The Yankees are the Yankees and they signed ol’ Nature to a contract especially for the post-season it seems. So maybe it comes as a relief when I state that everyone knows about the Phillies and Yankees to the point of ad nauseam and rather than previewing those two teams explicitly I wanted to look at the last 10 World Series and circle some interesting – if completely irrelevant – factoids to watch for in this Fall Classic.

Before leaping into the numbers, some notes on the data set.

As previously noted, this only includes World Series from the year 1999 until 2008. I went through the old game logs and noted the margin of victory and the total runs scored. With that data in tow, we can produce – hopefully – entertaining notes. For those in need of a refresher on what teams were involved, they are as follows:

1999: New York Yankees defeat Atlanta Braves
2000: New York Yankees defeat New York Mets
2001: Arizona Diamondbacks defeat New York Yankees
2002: Anaheim Angels defeat San Francisco Giants
2003: Florida Marlins defeat New York Yankees
2004: Boston Red Sox defeat St. Louis Cardinals
2005: Chicago White Sox defeat Houston Astros
2006: St. Louis Cardinals defeat Detroit Tigers
2007: Boston Red Sox defeat Colorado Rockies
2008: Philadelphia Phillies defeat Tampa Bay Rays

First up is the length of each series. No matter the results of games one-through-three, we will have a game four. The real fun – or lack thereof lately – is when games five, six, and sometimes seven are needed to decide a champion. Four series have ended in clean sweeps (1999, 2004, 2005, and 2007); three more have only gone five games; one has endured six games; and the memorable 2001 and 2002 series went all seven.

The average margin of victory is about three runs throughout, with the highest concentration of run differential coming in game ones. Not sure if there’s any significance there, but game ones also generate the highest run per game average as well. That seems a bit odd considering of the 15 games to have 10 or more total runs scored, only three came in game ones; games two and three also appeared on that last three times and game two features the 2002 series in which 21 total runs were scored.

Surprisingly, those 21 runs combined for a one-run game which is more than what most of the blowouts can attest to. In 2001 the Diamondbacks and Yankees combined for 17 runs, but the undercard D-Backs held a 13 run lead at the end of the game – which marks the highest margin of victory in the set. 2002 (game five) and 2007 (game one) tied for second with 12 run disparities. Oddly enough, those are the only three series to feature a margin of victory over 10 runs, and three of the six to see a margin of victory exceed more than five runs.

Of the 51 World Series games, 22 have been decided by a single run and 37 by three runs or fewer. Not all fit under the standard definition of a save situation – i.e. some were come-from-behind or extra inning walkoff victories – which lessens the significance that the two closers could play in the decision.

I’ll echo Dave’s statements from earlier when I say seven closely contested games would be pretty fantastic and the Pedro Martinez fan that lies beneath would enjoy seeing him pitch one more time like it’s 1999.