The Cincinnati Reds had an abundance of redundant prospects and a big need to upgrade their starting rotation, so their plan for this off-season was obvious to nearly everyone. They needed to combine a group of good young talents who were blocked from playing regularly and turn them into one high quality starting pitcher. After kicking the tires on nearly every available arm on the market, the Reds finally got their wish today, shipping a quartet of good young talents to San Diego in exchange for 24-year-old Mat Latos.

Let’s start with what the Reds are getting in Latos, who is probably the best fit for their team of any pitcher rumored to be available on the market this winter. During his first two years and change in the Majors, Latos has been one of the better pitchers in baseball. For comparison, here are the starters who have thrown at least 350 innings in the last two years and have posted strikeout rates between 23% and 25%.

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On the list of things I thought I’d be writing about today, Andy Sonnanstine ranked somewhere just south of nuclear physics. He was among the worst pitchers in baseball last year, running a 7.09 FIP in 36 innings at the big league level, leading the Rays to non-tender him yesterday and put his Major League career in jeopardy. He’ll probably be able to land a minor league deal from some team that needs Triple-A innings, but there’s a pretty decent chance that he’s seen his last days in the big leagues.

So, why am I writing about him? Well, thanks to the rabbit hole that David Appelman has created with his custom reports features on the leaderboards (seriously, if you’re not using these, you’re really missing out), I ended up spending a decent amount of time this morning looking at some of the differences in how pitchers perform in various situations. What led me down this path?

Well, when looking at Sonnanstine’s player card, I noticed that his career LOB% was an incredibly low 65.5%, the kind of number that is almost always driven by a relatively terrible performance with men on base. Some pitchers just do not perform well pitching from the stretch, so the gap between their bases empty performance and their men-on-base performance can be stark. Indeed, when looking at Sonnanstine’s splits, this is exactly what we find.

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On Saturday night, news broke that Ryan Braun failed a drug test during the playoffs, and unless he becomes the first player to successfully win an appeal, he’ll be suspended for the first 50 games of the 2012 season. Braun’s camp has issued a statement claiming he’ll be exonerated, saying:

“There are highly unusual circumstances surrounding this case which will support Ryan’s complete innocence and demonstrate there was absolutely no intentional violation of the program. While Ryan has impeccable character and no previous history, unfortunately, because of the process we have to maintain confidentiality and are not able to discuss it any further, but we are confident he will ultimately be exonerated.”

Since the news broke, we’ve heard reports that the failed drug test was for a banned substance, not a performance enhancing drug. We’ve also heard that his testosterone levels were “insanely high“, and that a second test showed that the extra testosterone in his system was synthetic, not natural.

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With the Angels throwing a small mountain of money at Albert Pujols, a common justification for the expenditure is that the revenues he creates through gains in attendance and merchandise sales will make up for the costs of acquiring him in the first place. This argument is a pretty common one among people looking to defend free agent prices, but it has one fatal flaw – there isn’t much in the way of evidence to support the idea.

The merchandise argument is almost a total non-starter, in fact. As part of MLB’s revenue sharing plan, the profits from sales of jerseys, hats, and the like are pooled into the central fund and distributed equally to each team around the league. While about one-quarter of all baseball jerseys sold have a Yankees logo on them, each team shares equally in the profits from those sales. Even if every person to walk through the gates in Anaheim next year purchased a Pujols jersey, the Angels wouldn’t get much benefit from those sales.

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For the second year in a row, the “Mystery Team” has proven that they’re not a myth. This year, though, I’m having a harder time explaining the logic behind the move. Last year, Cliff Lee wanted to go back to Philadelphia, the Phillies were in win-now mode after compiling a roster that was just one piece away, and the two were able to work out a deal for an amount similar to what other teams were bidding.

This year, however, the Angels decided to blow the doors off the Albert Pujols sweepstakes, and they got their man by outbidding everyone else in a pretty significant way. The reported deal has the final dollar figure landing in the $250 to $260 million range over the next 10 years, nearly 13 percent higher than the next best reported offer (which has been disputed) and 25 percent higher than the offer the Cardinals reportedly made before the bidding got hot and heavy. And while I love Albert Pujols, it’s going to take a lot of things going right for this to work out for the Angels.

At $250 million over 10 years, the Angels are essentially paying for something close to 40 wins over the life of the deal. In order to believe he’ll produce at that level, you need to see Pujols as something close to a +6.7 win player now and will age fairly well, which is possible but is not the most likely outcome in this scenario. You also need to believe that he’s not lying about his age – if he is, there’s almost no chance this deal works for Anaheim. And, of course, you need him to stay healthy, which bigger guys often can’t do in their thirties. The Angels have absorbed a massive amount of risk by guaranteeing Pujols this much money for so long, and while the potential for him to earn it is there, it’s not clear that this is the best path they could have taken.

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This morning’s poll results on “How Much Is Too Much For Albert Pujols” make it a clear that a lot of you are out and out against long term contracts that will end with a player being drastically overpaid and underproductive at the end of the deal. More than 1/3 of our readers said they would not give Pujols a 10 year deal at any price, even when presented with an option as low as $150 million.

While I understand the desire to not guarantee big money to a 41-year-old first baseman, that kind of risk aversion is simply too extreme. Put simply, you can’t look at the expected return on investment in only the latter part of a long term contract and determine that it’s a bad deal if the player is not earning his keep at the end of the deal.

Because of the time value of money, Major League teams structure long term contracts in a way that makes most of these contracts winners at the front end and losers at the back end. This is by design, and is true of even the best contracts for the best players – in fact, if a team is getting positive ROI on the final year or two of a free agent contract, the player likely exceeded expectations to a tremendous degree.

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While we wait through the last few hours of the Marlins and Cardinals jockeying for Albert Pujols, the reported offers are going up, and it’s now looking like Pujols is going to get a 10 year deal for somewhere around $220 million or so. It might end up a little south or north of that, but that seems to be the general landing area for the deal.

We’ll have analysis of the deal once it happens, but for now, I’m curious as to the perception of the upcoming deal among our readers. We’ve already asked you guys to guess what Pujols would get, but now, let’s see what you think he should get – if you were a GM, what would your absolute best offer be?

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