I know I’m preaching to the choir here. I know the horse is dead and buried. We’ll talk about something else tomorrow, I promise. But, today, I have one final thought on the MVP discussion, and specifically, about the idea that a player on a non-playoff team has limited value. As Mark Bauman put it:

The Angels finished third in the AL West. Without Trout, where would they have finished? Unless you believe that they would have been 15 games worse without Trout, the correct answer would still be third.

The Tigers finished first in the AL Central, after a substantial struggle and a period of underachievement. Their subsequent advance to the World Series, of course, has no place in this election. But they did manage to make a push late in the regular season to overtake the White Sox and qualify for the postseason.

This is, for a lot of voters, a big issue. Cabrera’s team made the playoffs, and they wouldn’t have without him. Trout’s team didn’t make the playoffs, and they could have not made the playoffs even if he spent the whole year in the minors. So how valuable could Trout really have been?

To that question, I’ll ask one of my own – if you really buy into that argument, how can Trout even appear anywhere on your ballot?

Read the rest of this entry »

The MVP awards are announced tonight. Buster Posey is going to win, and deservedly so. Miguel Cabrera is also going to win, and he’s not the worst choice the voters have ever made. Cabrera had a fantastic season. This isn’t Juan Gonzalez in 1996 or anything. But, as you almost certainly know by now, I happen to think Mike Trout was both better and more valuable this year. I’ve already written extensively on their respective seasons, so if you want to know why I support Trout, I’d suggest any of these three articles from a couple of months ago.

Mike Trout, Miguel Cabrera, and Measuring Value
The AL MVP Debate: We Did This Two Years Ago
Trout Versus Cabrera: Offense Only, Context Included

I’m kind out of things to say about Trout and Cabrera, though. Everything that could possibly be covered has been covered. Anyone who could possibly be swayed has been swayed. At this point, everything else is just arguing for the sake of arguing.

I do hope, however, that tonight isn’t seen as kind of referendum on WAR. Because the pro-Trout people tend to also be pro-WAR people, there’s a tendency to see any argument for Trout as being based on accepting WAR at face value. Really, though, the pro-Trout argument has nothing to do with WAR, because the disagreements between the two sides aren’t about how we should weight their relative offensive performances, how we should handle position adjustments, or whether replacement levels and park factors are arbitrary or accurate. The pro-Trout argument essentially boils down to two main points:

Read the rest of this entry »

This piece originally ran on Ocotber 4th. Given the attention that Trout and Cabrera are going to receive today, I figured it was probably worth running again.

The AL MVP debate continues to rage on, and at this point, most of the arguments have already been made on both sides. If you think the Triple Crown should always be rewarded with an MVP, you’re voting for Miguel Cabrera. If you think the winner of the award has to come from a playoff team, you’re voting for Miguel Cabrera. If you think that WAR is a decent measure of player value, you’re voting for Trout. At this point, both sides are basically just yelling at each other, and no one is changing their minds.

However, for those who are uncomfortable with any of those positions and might still be on the fence, I wanted to offer one more perspective on the issue. The reality is that the case for Cabrera requires the assumption that baserunning and defense are of marginal value, and that position players should really by evaluated by their hitting statistics. The case for Cabrera also wants you to take context into account, since Cabrera drove in so many more runs than Trout did, and wants Cabrera to receive credit for his accomplishments with men on base. Interestingly enough, we have a metric here on FanGraphs that measures only offense and credits hitters for their performances with men on base. At the risk of adding to the alphabet soup, I think it’s worth looking at this little-used metric that measures exactly what the Cabrera contingent wants us to measure.

Read the rest of this entry »

This afternoon, Matt Klaassen detailed the NL Cy Young decision, which basically comes down to Clayton Kershaw and R.A. Dickey. Both had excellent seasons, and it’s essentially hair-splitting to pick one or the other, though as Matt notes, most of the hairs tend to fall Kershaw’s way when you actually do split them. Over in the AL, the story is similar, though in this case, the lines are a bit more pronounced.

Quite simply, there’s just not much of a case for anyone besides Justin Verlander. This isn’t to take anything away from David Price, who had an excellent season, but unless you’re still evaluating a pitcher by wins and losses, there’s really nothing you can point to that puts Price ahead of Verlander.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the Tigers outfield was dreadful. Mostly thanks to the disastrous performance of Brennan Boesch, they flanked Austin Jackson with a rotating wheel of scrubs, and ended up using journeyman minor leaguer Quintin Berry as their regular left fielder in the postseason. Given how much they’ve already committed to winning in the short term, an upgrade in the outfield was absolutely necessary. Today, they made that upgrade by signing Torii Hunter to a two year, $26 million contract.

With Hunter, there are two competing viewpoints, both of which have their roots in factual basis.

Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, the Marlins signed a bunch of free agents to long term contracts that were backloaded in salary and didn’t include no-trade clauses. At the time of the deals, many skeptics suggested the organization’s past history and the structure of these deals meant the entire spending spree was a mirage designed to fool the city of Miami into thinking they actually bought a competitive team with their new $500 million stadium. That once the rubber hit the road, the Marlins would just trade all these expensive players away and go back to putting a low payroll team on the field to accomplish their real goal: raking in cash while exploiting the flaws in the revenue sharing agreements for the owner’s own personal gain.

Tonight, the Marlins completed a trade with the Blue Jays that vindicates every single person who said or wrote such a thing last year. It doesn’t even matter if this was the original plan, or if this is just an audible that the organization called after things went south. There is a chance this wasn’t all pre-scripted 12 months ago, and the organization really did want to try and win with the group of players they signed. That’s now irrelevant. The fact that it looks like this was all part of a master plan concocted before Jose Reyes or Mark Buehrle signed up to play in Miami means that the Marlins not only traded away a bunch of players today, they shipped out any last remaining amount of credibility the franchise had as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Based on reports from the last few days, the Giants have reportedly agreed to re-sign Jeremy Affeldt to a three year, $18 million contract. Predictably, the internet has responded with scorn.

Three years for a reliever. Might as well give the money to Jean-Ralphio “@marcoacosta28: @keithlaw you like the Affeldt signing ?”

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) November 13, 2012

Multi-year deals for relief pitchers are generally not a great way to spend money. Relievers are fickle, they can be replaced fairly easily, and it doesn’t take much money to cobble together a bullpen full of failed starters who can excel in a more limited role. Keith’s overarching point about long term deals for relief pitchers is correct.

But, at some point, it probably behooves us all to move beyond generalities and talk about the specifics of contracts for free agent relievers, because despite the rhetoric, not every multi-year deal for every relief pitcher is a giant waste of cash.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stop the presses! Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer have signed a good player with durability questions to a one year contract. This time, their reclamation project is Scott Baker, who underwent Tommy John surgery last April and missed the entire 2012 season. To secure his services, the Cubs gave him $5.5 million guaranteed, with an additional $1.5 million in performance bonuses based on how many innings he throws.

When healthy enough to pitch, Baker has been an above average starter for the Twins, posting a career ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- of 97/93/94 in just under 1,000 innings. He’s an extreme fly ball pitcher, but he limits walks and racks up strikeouts by pitching up in the zone, so the trade-off works pretty well in preventing runs.

The question, of course, is how much quantity he’ll be able to provide. He’ll be less than a year out from surgery on Opening Day, and if he has any setbacks in his rehab, there’s a pretty decent chance he’ll have to start the season on the DL. If the Cubs want to play it safe and give him some time to build up his endurance in the minors, he might not pitch for Chicago until May or June. Projecting more than 100 to 150 innings from Baker in 2013 is probably too optimistic, so this deal likely buys the Cubs a pitcher for about half of next season.

But, just like with Paul Maholm last winter, this is exactly the kind of guy that the Cubs should be filling out their rotation with. Decent, young-ish starter with upside and no long term commitment who can provide solid results and potentially serve as a nice trade chip at the deadline. Or, if things go really well, they get a leg up on re-signing him before he hits the market again next winter.

For a rebuilding team, this is how Major League payroll should be used. Use available jobs and cash to sign guys who can offer some upside without locking yourself into any long term risk, and position the roster to offer the fans a decent product without giving up any of the long term assets that the team is building around. The cost isn’t so low that it would have made sense for every team to do this deal, but for a club like the Cubs, this is exactly the kind of move that makes sense.