This afternoon, I had a bit of a brouhaha with one Jonah Keri, friend of the site and of mine. With the Royals leading the Indians 5-2 at the time of our fisticuffs, Jonah tweeted the following.

The Kansas City Royals have a very real shot at making the playoffs. Last time they made it was nearly 6 years before Mike Trout was born.

— Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) September 11, 2013

Because I have a reputation as a Debbie Downer to uphold, I went to our Playoff Odds page and noted that the listed playoff odds for Kansas City stood at just 2.7%. That didn’t account for the game the Royals were winning at the moment, so it understated their odds to some degree, but even with the victory over the Royals, I called out the Tall Canadian on his liberal use of the term “very real shot”, noting that math says that the Royals are pretty big long shots to end up with a wild card spot.

Of course, Mr. Keri prefers to poutine and Youppi to cold hard facts, so he waved off the numbers as something born out of a witches cauldron. Bah and humbug, he said, or something to that effect, before donning his Chris Getz jersey and resuming his cheerleading.

@DCameronFG I'm not a total believer in the odds reports, when you drill down to specifics. Also doesn't account for today's about-to-win.

— Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) September 11, 2013

Because I like Jonah and want him to see the folly of his ways, I figured this was worth a post. Even with just a couple of game deficit with a few weeks still go to, why do our playoff odds calculations think the Royals have little chance of actually making the playoffs? In large part, it can be summed up by the remaining schedule.

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Mike Trout isn’t going to win the AL MVP this year either. The Angels are 67-76 and haven’t been in the playoff race for months, and while it’s an individual award, it almost always goes to a player on a playoff team. The argument essentially goes something like this:

It’s not the best player award, it’s the most VALUABLE player award. And the (insert bad team here) would have finished out of the playoffs without him too. Those numbers he put up didn’t actually lead to a winning season, so he can’t be as valuable as (insert other good player on a playoff team), who helped carry his team to the postseason.

Essentially, this argument suggests that there is little or no value to be gained from wins that do not result in postseason berth, or at least playoff contention. The Angels would be the Marlins without Mike Trout, but when discussing MVPs, both teams are just seen as equally lousy, and there is little credit given for the separation created between bad teams. Losing is losing, and it doesn’t really matter what you do if your team doesn’t win.

Here’s my question, though: when using this criteria to determine the MVP, why is this point only valid at the seasonal level? If performance in a losing season has no value, then surely that same theory holds at the game level, right? If a player has a huge game but his team loses, well, they would have lost even if he hadn’t played. At the end of the day, his performance did not change the standings one bit. He might have played well individually, but the value of those contributions was negligible because his team lost.

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Last week, we took a look at the upcoming free agent hitters that may or may not be tendered a qualifying offer by their current teams. I’m going to borrow the intro that I used in that post, so if you read that piece, just go ahead and skip down to the discussion of the pitchers.

For some background, Jeff Sullivan wrote up an explanation of the Qualifying Offer process last year, but the nuts and bolts are pretty simple: for teams with free agents to be who have been on their roster all season, they can make them an offer for one year equal to the average salary of the Top 125 paid players in MLB, and then the player has one week to explore their market and decide whether to accept the offer from their current team or continue on in free agency with draft pick compensation attached.

Last year, the qualifying offer was equal to $13.3 million, and teams tendered it to nine players: David Ortiz, Josh Hamilton, B.J. Upton, Hiroki Kuroda, Rafael Soriano, Nick Swisher, Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse, and Adam LaRoche. All nine players declined the offer, and in each case, they ended up with better deals than accepting $13.3 million for just one season.

This year, the average is expected to go up slightly, reaching the $14 million mark or something close to it. So, let’s take a look at this free agent class and see who is worth that kind of offer, and since we’ve already covered the hitters, let’s look at the arms this time.

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A decent chunk of my chat yesterday involved questions about whether or not certain players should be expected to receive a qualifying offer from their teams this winter, thus ensuring draft pick compensation for their current teams if they end up changing teams via free agency. So, instead of talking about a few players here and there in various chats, I figure it’s worth investigating all the potential free agents who may or may not receive such an offer.

For some background, Jeff Sullivan wrote up an explanation of the Qualifying Offer process last year, but the nuts and bolts are pretty simple: for teams with free agents to be who have been on their roster all season, they can make them an offer for one year equal to the average salary of the Top 125 paid players in MLB, and then the player has one week to explore their market and decide whether to accept the offer from their current team or continue on in free agency with draft pick compensation attached.

Last year, the qualifying offer was equal to $13.3 million, and teams tendered it to nine players: David Ortiz, Josh Hamilton, B.J. Upton, Hiroki Kuroda, Rafael Soriano, Nick Swisher, Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse, and Adam LaRoche. All nine players declined the offer, and in each case, they ended up with better deals than accepting $13.3 million for just one season.

This year, the average is expected to go up slightly, reaching the $14 million mark or something close to it. So, let’s take a look at this free agent class and see who is worth that kind of offer. We’ll start with the position players, then do the pitchers later this afternoon.

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Here at FanGraphs, our pitching WAR is built around Fielding Independent Pitching, which focuses solely on a pitcher’s walks, strikeouts, and home runs allowed. Because it ignores the results of balls in play and the order in which results occur, there are occasionally big differences between a pitcher’s FIP and his ERA. This divide often leads to some consternation when a pitcher with a high ERA posts a decent WAR, or in reverse, when our WAR doesn’t grade out a pitcher with a very low ERA that highly.

A significant number of people — including a good chunk of our own readers, and noted sabermetric evangelists like Brian Kenny — prefer to evaluate pitchers by runs allowed because, as I’ve heard repeatedly over the last few years, that measures “what actually happened”. And that’s one of the reasons we have RA9-WAR here on the site, as we know that a sizable amount of people prefer to evaluate pitchers in that way.

I believe there are valid points on both sides, and I see the argument using a FIP-based WAR and a RA9-based WAR when evaluating a pitcher’s past performance. However, I find it interesting that this debate has not carried over to position players, where there seems to be broad consensus* that context-neutral is the way to go.

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With the regular season winding down, half the teams in baseball are already beginning to shift their focus to the off-season. If you root for one of those teams, you may already be looking forward to the winter and the roster changes it may bring. To help kick start your speculation needs, the guys over at MLB Trade Rumors have created four free agent leaderboards using the custom leaderboard tools here at FanGraphs. Here’s what Steve Adams wrote when he introduced them last week:

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