Last night, Gerry Fraley of the Dallas Morning News reported that Josh Hamilton was spotted drinking at a local area bar on Monday evening. According to the report, Ian Kinsler appeared at some point and tried to convince Hamilton to leave. Beyond that, we don’t really know much. In fact, including that information, I’d argue that we don’t really know much.

I’m conflicted about even writing about this, to be honest. Yes, it’s news, and we try to provide analysis and commentary about things going on in the news, but what can we really say about Hamilton’s battle to remain sober? I have no insight into addiction or what a relapse might mean for a recovering addict. There might be people who can speak about what could be inferred from Hamilton falling off the wagon, but as far as I know, no one on staff is an expert on alcoholism. I’m certainly not, and I don’t feel qualified to have any kind of opinion on what this news means for Hamilton’s sobriety.

I was tempted to write about what this might mean for Hamilton’s potential chances for a contract extension, since that’s a bit more up our alley, but anything we said would really just be baseless speculation. To actually know how this might affect the Rangers desire to give Hamilton a long term contract, we’d need access to information that only they’re privy to – his drug test schedule and results, his resolve to get back on the wagon, and what steps he’s willing to take to ensure that this doesn’t become a recurring issue.

We don’t know any of that. In all honestly, we don’t really know anything. The only thing I’m comfortable saying about this news is that I hope Josh Hamilton wins his battle with alcohol and that the sport is better when he’s playing at a high level. Whether you root for the Rangers or not, Josh Hamilton is worth rooting for.

Well, it looks like we finally have an aggressive suitor for Edwin Jackson. Ken Rosenthal is reporting that the Nationals are trying to trade John Lannan – who just lost his arbitration case and will earn $5 million in 2012 – in order to clear salary to make a run at signing Jackson.

If the Nationals can pull this off, it’d be a pretty neat trick. When you look at Lannan and Jackson side by side, this would be a pretty massive improvement for the team. Over the last three seasons, Jackson has posted an ERA- of 93, supported by quality peripherals, while Lannan has posted an ERA- of 101, a good bit better than his FIP/xFIP would suggest is sustainable. Jackson’s also thrown an additional 100 innings, so he’s provided better performance in a larger sample.

Even if you think Lannan possesses an ability to regularly beat his FIP, Jackson is roughly a +1 win upgrade. If you think that Lannan is about to run out of pixie dust and his run prevention is due for a regression, the upgrade is more like +2 wins. Given that the Nationals are on the contender-or-not bubble, those wins could have a lot of value to the team, and swapping out Lannan for Jackson would be a no-brainer.

The tough part might be finding someone who wants to take Lannan off their hands at this point in the off-season. Most teams are shopping in the bargain bin now, and there aren’t many clubs left with much in the way of budget room. They probably could have moved him a few months ago, but salary dumps in February aren’t easy. It’s an idea worth trying, but they might have to eat a little bit of money in order to convince someone to take him.

On Tuesday, Jon Heyman reported that Davey Johnson really wants Bryce Harper to begin the season as his everyday right fielder. While we don’t have a direct quote from Johnson confirming the story, given the fact that the alternative is some combination of Roger Bernadina, Mike Cameron, and Xavier Paul, it’s understandable that Johnson would prefer the uber-talented Harper in his quest to win games.

Managers always want to put the best players on the field that they can. Their job is to maximize performance in the short term, and given the choice between a raw potential superstar or a mediocre role player with limited upside, they’re going to take the kid nearly every time. However, this is also why managers aren’t allowed to make these calls, and Bryce Harper’s opening day assignment will be decided by the team’s front office.

For the Nationals, this should be a pretty easy call. The 19-year-old Harper looks to be a special talent, but even the very best 19-year-olds are generally not great Major League players. In the history of the sport, 16 guys have gotten 100 or more plate appearances in the Majors at age 19 or younger and been above average Major League hitters – the list includes Ty Cobb (134 wRC+), Mickey Mantle (114 wRC+), and Ken Griffey Jr (106 wRC+). If we assume that Harper is that kind of talent, maybe we could pencil him in for a 110 wRC+ or so this season. If he’s more like previous elite teenage prospects B.J. Upton (93 wRC+), Robin Yount (90 wRC+), or Mike Trout (88 wRC+), he’ll likely face his share of struggles and contribute minimal value to the team.

The Nationals simply should not trade team control of Harper’s age-25 season in exchange for getting a few hundred additional at-bats from him this year. The marginal value of having him on the roster from day one is massively outweighed by keeping him from hitting free agency after the 2017 season. Johnson may want Harper, but he shouldn’t get him until June at the earliest.

Jeff Blair of the Globe and Mail had an interesting note in his column today, noting that there’s speculation in Toronto that the Mariners offered Michael Pineda to the Blue Jays in exchange for Brett Lawrie. They passed, and as we all know, the Mariners shipped Pineda to New York for Jesus Montero instead.

So, this brings up an interesting question – who is the more valuable player going forward, Lawrie or Montero? A year ago, Marc Hulet ranked Montero as the fifth best prospect in the game, while Lawrie came in at #35. Baseball America concurred, putting Montero at #3 and Lawrie at #40. Lawrie had a fantastic 2011 season, capped off with a monstrous performance in the Majors, but Montero hit well in his late season call-up as well. His minor league performance wasn’t as impressive, but you have to adjust for the difference in league/park and note that catching generally diminishes offensive numbers, so the gap might not be as large as it might seem on the surface.

Of course, Lawrie looks like he could be a quality defensive third baseman, while Montero offers little in the way of defensive value. Scouts seem to be a bit more sold on Montero’s bat, though, and prior year minor league performances all favor Montero. They’re essentially the same age, and both will be counted on as building blocks of their respective team’s offenses for years to come.

So, that brings up the question – who would you rather have going forward, Lawrie or Montero?

Poll after the jump.

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Yesterday, Pat “The Bat” Burrell retired, seeing his playing days end due to a combination of chronic foot problems and a lessening need for a bat-only player who flopped in his one audition as a DH. Burrell finishes his career with 6,520 plate appearances and a .253/.361/.472 line, good for a 117 wRC+ and 21.9 WAR. If you offered nearly any player a 12 year career with those kinds of numbers, they’d probably jump at them, as Burrell had a nice run as a quality player for the Phillies.

However, Burrell wasn’t just any player – he was a member of an exclusive club of players selected #1 overall in the June draft. When you’re taken first overall, expectations are high. You’re not just supposed to be a nice player – you’re supposed to become a star. Anything less could be perceived as a disappointment, and given that Burrell never made an All-Star team and only had two season where he posted a WAR above +3.0, his career could be construed as a failure to live up to those lofty expectations.

Are those expectations fair, though? What is the normal performance for a position player taken with the top overall pick in the draft? I wasn’t sure, so I decided to use the Custom Player List function on the leaderboards to find out.

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This post is quite a bit shorter than our normal fare here. We’re going to experiment with some quicker news analysis pieces for things that are still churning through the rumor mill. Don’t worry, these pieces won’t take the place of the more in-depth articles you’ve come to expect from the site.

A few weeks ago, I talked about how Roy Oswalt could end up as the steal of the off-season, and noted that he could instantly improve the rotation of nearly every team in baseball.

In fact, there might only be one team where Oswalt wouldn’t represent an upgrade over someone currently penciled into their starting five – that team is the one that Oswalt is meeting with today, and is apparently one of the two teams he wants to play for in 2012.

No team in baseball needs a starting pitcher less than the Texas Rangers. Their starting pitchers combined for +19.8 WAR last year, third most in the Majors, and while they lost C.J. Wilson, they spent roughly $110 million to bring in Yu Darvish and have decided to bring Neftali Feliz to camp as a starting pitcher. Toss in Derek Holland, Colby Lewis, and Matt Harrison, and their rotation doesn’t even have room for Alexi Ogando, who himself probably belongs in a Major League rotation next year.

Oswalt’s a good bet to be a solid starter next year, but the Rangers already have six solid starters at the big league level. If, as rumored, they’d have to either move Harrison to the bullpen or make him available in trade, they should simply say thanks but no thanks. Oswalt makes sense for St. Louis, who have replaceable pitchers at the back-end of their rotation. Texas, though, simply doesn’t need him.

On Friday, I spent some time talking about the change in bullpen usage patterns over the last thirty years, and noted that the shift to more pitchers making shorter appearances hadn’t led to an improvement in performance for relief pitchers in the aggregate. There were a lot of good responses left in the comments, and there’s some useful commentary on the issue over at The Book Blog as well.

Many of the responses focused on a similar point that I didn’t do a very good job addressing – that by focusing on aggregate data, we could miss value being added if the performance in extremely important situations was greatly improved due to the new usage patterns. The results as a whole might be similar, but if the new allocation results in better performance during important situations and worse results when the game is already decided, then teams would be drawing a benefit from using relievers in this manner. William Juliano expressed this view on the issue in a really good post he did at his own blog as a follow-up, and looked into the relative performance of the top tier of relievers from both 1982 and 2011. As expected, he found the quantity-for-quality trade-off, as modern day relief aces are pitching fewer innings but getting somewhat better results in those innings than their counterparts were thirty years ago. The two changes essentially offset, as he notes, and there’s only a small difference in WAR between the 25 best relievers of 1982 and 2011.

Juliano finishes with the following conclusion:

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Yesterday, Brian Kenny and I spent a few minutes talking about relief pitchers on Clubhouse Confidential, and specifically, about the differences in the role of a middle reliever versus a closer. Both Kenny and I believe that the idea of a “closer mentality” is mostly a myth, but we do spend some time talking about why some guys aren’t cut out for the traditional closer role. If you want to watch the segment, I’ve embedded it after the jump, and will expand on one of the things I said on the show below that.

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As expected, there were two basic responses to yesterday’s news that the Tigers had agreed to pay Prince Fielder $214 million over the next nine seasons:

1. “That’s just way too much money.”

2. “As long as he helps them win, the cost is irrelevant.”

I’m part of the group that says the former, as I simply don’t think that the Tigers are going to get a very good return on their investment in Fielder, and if they had this kind of money to spend to upgrade their roster, I think there are far better ways they could have used that money to produce a better team overall. However, while I think the second point ignores the fact that signing Fielder wasn’t the only option available to to the Tigers, I understand the desire to focus on total wins rather than cost efficiency. After all, the point of baseball is to win a championship, not to finish first in the $/WAR standings. Efficiency is a method to help create a championship caliber roster, but it isn’t the goal in and of itself.

And, those that argue in favor of the deal are arguing from a premise that holds some truth – the Tigers were absolutely in a position where each marginal win is significantly more valuable than the average. I referenced the win curve theory in the post yesterday, but it’s worth expanding on briefly. If you’re not familiar with the concept of the win curve, this article by Vince Gennaro from 2007 is a good place to start. I’ll highlight one of the important passages:

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