During the first half of the year Edwin Jackson looked like a different pitcher. For years his hype had preceded his performance, so much so that you began wondering whether he was ever going to figure it out, or simply burn out like Daniel Cabrera. Then the first half of 2009 happened and wham. Jackson even made his first all-star team. Well, his second half numbers have raised a new question: was Jackson of the first half simply a fluke?

Take a look at his strikeout and walk ratios independent of innings, home runs, and hits:

K%
2006-2008: 15.3%
2009 first half: 20.0%
2009 second half: 16.6%

Unintentional BB%
2006-2008: 10.8%
2009 first half: 7.0%
2009 second half: 8.0%

Where both rates saw massive improvements in the first half, they’ve basically regressed to the mid-points of 2006-2008 and the 2009 first half over these past few months. Meanwhile, Jackson only allowed 10 home runs in 18 starts during the first half and has allowed 15 in his 12 second half starts; this in conjunction with a BABIP that was below .250 in the first half and over .310 in the second.

So it’s no surprise that Edwin’s ERA in the second half is near 4.8 while his first half ERA was 2.52. His FIP is still lower than recent years but his tRA is actually his second best since 2006 – with his best coming in 2006, and we know how the next few years turned out. Jackson has seemingly improved, but not to the degree many seemed to think during those early months.

Travis Snider has been back in the major leagues for a little over a month now. Needless to say, he’s still on the learning curve. Over the last 30 days Snider is reaching base 32.7% of the time and has a .407 slugging percentage. He’s just shy of performing like a big league hitter, minus one aspect. In this ~100 at-bat sample, he’s striking out nearly 47% of the time.

Snider’s 65.6% contact rate over that timeframe is surprisingly not the lowest in baseball (Mark Reynolds, Brad Hawpe, and Jason Bay are blocking him from that dubious honor) but he is in the bottom five. Snider showcased similar issues with contact in a much smaller sample last season and has always possessed a tendency to whiff a decent amount. Baseball America highlighted this as a major concern in their pre-season scouting report of Snider:

Because lefthanders threw him a steady diet of offspeed pitches—even in hitter’s counts—Snider struggled versus southpaws in the high minors, hitting a mere .233/.295/.310 in a limited sample of 116 Double-A and Triple-A at-bats. Showing a more patient approach could help him overcome this shortcoming, as he showed a tendency toward free swinging as he moved up the ladder. It’s not a long-term concern if he refines his approach to the point where he’s confident hitting with two strikes.

His power potential is yet to show up in the majors either. A .175 ISO is nothing to write home about, but a .326 ISO posted during his 200 plate appearance stint in Triple-A this season is. Nobody expects him to hit for that much power on a consistent basis, just a little bit more above league average would be a nice starting point.

Snider is only 21-years-old so there’s plenty of time for him to mature. In the meanwhile, opposing pitchers are going to pad their strikeout totals against him.

Allow me to be forthcoming and honest when I say I have no idea whether Cecil Cooper managed well or poorly over the course of his time in Houston. I can look at the numbers, I can read opinions of analysts I trust, and I can attempt to form an opinion from that. What I do know is that he was not Houston’s biggest issue — unless he is the worst manager in the history of baseball that is – because managers can only work with what they are given. Take a look at how Cooper’s team ranked in the major statistical categories:

Rotational FIP: 12th
Bullpen FIP: 17th
Lineup wOBA: 24th
Team UZR: 16th
Positional Player WAR: 25th
Pitcher WAR: 23rd

That’s a middle of the pack team at best. They have a laundry list of issues heading into this off-season, and it starts with their self-evaluation. Lance Berkman and Carlos Lee will be 34-years-old next season, Geoff Blum will be 37, Miguel Tejada – if he returns – will be 36, and so on. The lineup is mostly on the wrong side of 30 with Hunter Pence and Michael Bourn being the only projected main clogs younger than 30. With such you would expect a bit of a decline to occur with aging.

Despite tallying only 22 WAR to date, the Astros will win more than 70 games this season. A replacement level team wins a few less than 50 games, so that’s about right. Maybe the Astros are a few wins better at true talent level – I don’t believe they are, but follow with me here – say 75 wins. Most teams would look at that lineup, stacked with a few guys who won’t be with the Astros the next time they hit 90 wins, and say: “Gee, we need to rebuild, we’re a mediocre team right now.”

Are the Astros going to reach that conclusion? Doubtful. The worst thing that could happen to the Astros was overachieving once more and pushing their draft pick in 2010 towards the middle of round one. I find that a lot more troubling for the future than whether Cooper is their manager or not.

Buster Posey was promoted to the big leagues on the second day of September. Nearly three full weeks later, Posey has appeared in two games with a total of three plate appearances and one hit. Needless to say, this is insane. The Giants playoff hopes have fallen during the timeframe and CoolStandings now has them at 5%. Having to make up 4.5 games in a span of 13 games is extremely difficult on its own right. Factor in that San Francisco won’t see Colorado head-to-head again this season – barring a playoff at least – and it becomes a situation where a chain of unlikely situations needs to occur.

So why isn’t Posey playing?

When he was promoted I addressed the Giants awful catching tandem and for whatever reason the Giants have stuck with Bengie Molina and Eli Whiteside. Neither represents much of an upgrade over Posey and neither should play as big of roles as Posey next year. This isn’t a service time issue because he’s already up. Maybe the Giants don’t want to hurt his confidence, but what happens next year? Do they send him down again or simply throw him into the fire? Or, heavens forbid, attempt to bring in a veteran and let Posey learn underneath him?

Posey isn’t the difference between making the playoffs this year, not playing these three or four weeks won’t be the difference in the playoffs next year. It’s just an exercise of futility to continue playing two dead weights ahead of the future during extra time.

The Giants did some nice things this year, it’s too bad they don’t recognize the difference between Conor Gillaspie last season and Posey this season.

Earlier this year, Brian Burke of the fantastic Advanced NFL Stats site wrote a post in which he detailed and graphed a series of scatter plots that featured the power law distribution. If you have absolutely no idea what that means, click that link; his explanation is superior to anything I can offer. Anyways, he went on to address the idea of whether coaching job spans were a normal distribution or a data set that followed the power law. He found the latter, and I’ve finally gotten around to seeing how baseball managers compare.

First, let me detail my data set. I went team-by-team and collected each manager holding a position that was hired between 1995 and 2005. This means if a manager was hired in 1995, fired in 1996, and a new manager was hired then both count. If a team went through a manager per season they are all included. However I did not include interim managers who managed less than a season. So Bruce Kimm is out of luck, as are managers hired prior to 1995 or after 2005 – sorry Bobby Cox and Joe Maddon.

I ended up with 76 managerial cases. I then took down their organization, length of tenure, and win/loss record with that organization. With such I found the amount of seasons survived with that team by each manager, which was then used to create this graph:

For those who prefer charts:

Years Managers
15 1
12 2
10 1
9 1
8 2
7 4
6 5
5 8
4 15
3 21
2 14
1 2

The data set follows the power rule much like Burke’s examples. There are other questions to be answered though, which I’ll attempt to do now:

How long does the average managerial job last?

The mean of the tenures is 4.3 years, the median is 4, and the range is 14 years. So the mean is skewed to the right, but only barely. This matches up pretty well with what we see above since nearly 66% of the population falls into the 2-4 years group.

How does winning affect the lifespan?

It doesn’t:

That steep red line represents the .500 mark. Some were well below and lasted five or more years, some were well above and received the axe far earlier. That means to last as a baseball manager, you have to juggle player attitudes and egos, get along with management and ownership, and show competence at winning a fair share too. Most people would note that anyways and the numbers back it up.

To summarize, I think all of this is rather intuitive. Most managerial contracts seem to last 2-4 years, which is the average lifespan, and we can’t evaluate mangers well enough to say there’s a huge difference between any two skippers, which means firing a guy is more of a “gut” feeling. If the manager is friendly enough to the media he can probably buy time even if he makes questionable in-game decisions.

I’m not claiming this is a perfect measure and most people will probably read this and think “Duh“, but hopefully it did something for someone.

If I would’ve told you in spring training that Luke Gregerson would produce a higher WAR from a non-closer’s reliever role than Khalil Greene, you would’ve painted me eight different shades of crazy. It’s not longer insanity, it’s reality. Greene has struggled through his first season in the heartland, posting a .641 OPS to date and causing the Cardinals to acquire alternative options to fill their middle infield roles.

Gregerson on the other hand, has pitched about as well as you could ask. A 2.33 FIP and 2.62 tRA are extremely solid. His sinker/slider combination is producing groundballs (45.5%), infield flies (16.1%), and outfield flies that aren’t turning into home runs (3.6%). Nobody is hitting him. His 65.7% contact rate is one of the lowest in the major leagues. He’s not just blowing fastballs by hitters like Jonathan Broxton either, Gregerson’s fastball sits in the low-90s and he uses his slider (which sits in the low-80s) on a nearly equal basis. There’s some deception involved and his arsenal causes batters to swing out of the strike zone on nearly 40% of occasions.

In the spring, Padres Assistant General Manager Paul DePodesta wrote this on his blog:

We came into this spring knowing that a number of bullpen roles would be up for grabs, and with the recent loss of Mark Worrell for the year to elbow surgery (the other player acquired for Khalil) there are fewer guys in the mix. Our scouts believe that Luke could factor in our pen sometime in 2009, so we’re excited to add him.

I’d say Gregerson has exceeded expectations.

You always hear about how happy, excited, and relieved a player is to finally join a contender. These stories write themselves following an in-season trade. Well, Alex Rios hasn’t had much fun in Chicago. In 97 plate appearances he’s hitting .140/.156/.215 for the White Sox which translates into a .165 wOBA – or -13.2 wRAA. His simple batting figures aren’t the only out of place numbers since changing addresses:

ISO
2009 Jays: .163
2009 White Sox: .075

BABIP
Jays: .294
Sox: .174

BB%
Jays: 6.6%
Sox: 2.1%

K%
Jays: 17.9%
Sox: 24.7%

Contact%
Jays: 82.7%
Sox: 73.8%

It is only 97 plate appearances, meaning Rios is about three trips away from some Chicago-based columnist writing a piece proclaiming Rios as a player unable to adapt to the large market atmosphere.

Honestly it’s pretty hard to get worked about any of the numbers involved. None of them are good, none are encouraging, but remember John Smoltz and all the talk about 40 innings worth of work? Well Joe Mauer endured a 79 plate appearance streak that lasted from mid-August through early September in which he had an OPS of .804. In late April, Derek Jeter began a 84 plate appearance streak with a .643 OPS. Mark Teixeira’s first 95 plate appearances resulted in an .189/.358/.351 line.

I cannot definitively state that every single batter in the majors goes through streaks of 75-100 plate appearances where they experience what many label as slumps. However those were the first three players I checked and those are three very good batters whom each experienced a similar phenomenon just this season.

Poor timing? Absolutely. A sign of pressure getting to Rios? Probably not.

Back in the early part of the summer I wrote about Padres’ long-man Luis Perdomo. To call him a mop-up man is being generous. His average leverage index is 0.26, which is almost half of the next lowest-leveraged reliever. The Padres really don’t want him pitching in games in which the outcome is up in the air. It’s like Kevin Towers issued Bud Black a simple set of guidelines called the Perdomo Principles with the following instructions:

1. Only use when the score is +/- 5 runs.
2. Follow the first point religiously.

So I did what any person desperately wanting to label a player as the human white flag does and created graphs showing the margin of lead based on when Perdomo enters the game:

For those who prefer their data in words, here is a breakdown of Perdomo’s usage:

32 appearances
1 appearance when the Padres held the lead
2 appearances when the Padres were tied
29 appearances when the Padres were trailing
5 appearances when the Padres were trailing by less than five runs
15 appearances when the Padres were trailing by five or six runs
9 appearances when the Padres were trailing by seven or more runs

While serving as the anti-Heath Bell, Perdomo has shown some ability to strike batters out (21%), generate groundballs (50.6%), and give up home runs (19.6% of total fly balls). His 93-94 MPH fastball actually holds a plus run value despite being used more than half of the time meanwhile his other main pitch — a slider that sits in the high 80s — does not hold that same distinction.

The Padres can’t be blamed for limiting his exposure. Perdomo spent about a minute in Triple-A earlier this season but otherwise made the jump to the bigs straight from Double-A. It would seem protecting Perdomo’s confidence level is the only reason the Padres haven’t dropped him in more of their games, seeing as how the results matter little at this point.

Would you believe that for the first time since 2004 Carlos Zambrano’s tRA is under 4.5? Heck, for the first time since 2005 his FIP is under 4. I would heap praise on Zambrano’s improvement and such, but it’s not really to his credit.

Zambrano’s career home run per fly ball rate is 9.1% which falls into the 9-12% range we usually look for in starting pitchers. This year his HR/FB% is 6.5%. Everyone reading this is well aware that 6.5% is less than 9.1%. What happened? Well, he didn’t move to a pitchers park or an inferior league and he didn’t become a groundball maven or reliever, so that means he’s just been on the receiving end of some really good luck and wind gusts on his outfield flies.

His pitch selection has altered little; fewer fastballs per 100 pitches, more cutters in place of sliders, and some extra split-fingered pitches. His stuff gets more groundballs than fly balls which is a positive sign, but generally speaking there’s nothing here to indicate he’s going to continue giving up less than seven home runs per 100 fly balls. That means you should expect regression moving forward which will balloon his tRA and FIP upon its arrival.

He sells himself if the Cubs decide to put him on the block. He’s won 99 games since 2003 (an average of ~14 wins per season), a shiny ERA, and a recognizable name. Zambrano is no longer the stellar pitcher he was from 2003-2006 (although he’s still above average) but he’s not exactly Jeff Suppan either. Factor in his hitting — which seems silly, but his wRAA over the last three years projects him to be a -5 < x < 0 hitter during any given season – as an upgrade over most pitchers and you get a nice package. I wouldn’t recommend dishing out the players and 18.3 million for him through 2013, but I’m sure some team will.

Mired in off the field issues, Elijah Dukes’ arrival in D.C. allowed him to focus on baseball instead of the latest police blotter. Last year he was remarkably solid, hitting 13 home runs in a little under 350 plate appearances and posting a .382 wOBA. Even his defense was decent enough to nearly earn Dukes a three win season.

This year, everything has fallen apart.

His nose is shiny clean to his credit, but the baseball side of things has gone sour. Coming through the Rays system Dukes had a few major claims to fame: 1) he had the power of a bull, 2) the discipline of a monk, 3) the build of Ray Lewis, 4) Matt Kemp’s abilities mixed with Shawn Kemp’s sperm. These attributes accumulated into a corner outfielder with solid on-base and slugging percentage capabilities. So when you look at Dukes’ .258/.338/.416 line, you wonder what’s going on.

His walk rate is 10.4% which is above league average, but below what Dukes showed in the prior 500 plate appearances in the majors (~15.2%). He is striking out less, expanding his strike zone more often, and making more contact but not hitting for any power in doing so. His .158 ISO is easily a career low, and barely above league average.

Dukes is seeing an average of 3.7 pitches per plate appearance or 1,305 pitches in 352 plate appearances Prior to this season Dukes’ P/PA was 3.8. Not quite a radical shift in approach. What is a radical shift for Dukes is the amount that he’s swinging, 52.2% at this point; his career average is 46.3% including this year.

A passive hitter upon arrival, Dukes would look for a pitch to drive and if he had to take a walk, he would. He’s still taking some walks, but he’s no longer driving anything for extra bases. To be a successful major league hitter Dukes is going to have to get back to what got him here, and I don’t mean tomfoolery and hijinks.