You may have heard by now, but today, the Baseball Writer’s Association of America officially opened their doors to FanGraphs. We would like to thank Jack O’Connell and the board of directors for allowing us to present our case before them and for considering our application despite our status as something of a non-traditional source of baseball coverage. We are honored by their decision, and look forward to being part of their organization going forward.

From a practical standpoint, we hope that you guys will see the fruits this decision over the coming year. By renewing David Laurila’s membership, the association ensured that you will be able to read his fantastic series of Q&As, and that his insights will continue to grace the pages of FanGraphs going forward. Additionally, I plan to spend significantly more time at ballparks next year, and will look for opportunities to provide perspectives from both the analytical and the on-field viewpoints.

A good example of what we’re hoping to do more of with our new found access are the Brandon McCarthy posts (part one, part two) from October, where Ryan Campbell combined Pitch F/x analysis with McCarthy’s own insights to produce a fantastic pair of articles about his transformation into a quality starting pitcher. We believe that having access to talk with players and coaches will enhance our coverage of the sport, and we look forward to supplementing what we’ve been doing with more of those types of articles, and providing the best overall coverage of the sport that we possibly can.

Down here in Dallas, speculation about Albert Pujols‘ future has hit a fever pitch. The Marlins have apparently offered a 10 year contract, and are pushing for a decision in the not too distant future. You’ll probably be reading a lot more about Pujols in next few days.

But, for now, I want to address one lingering question about him that hangs over the question of how many years is too many years for a guy in his early thirties, and that’s whether we should buy into the speculation that Pujols fudged his birthday and is actually older than he claims. This rumor has been around forever, as Pujols didn’t look anything like a 21-year-old when he broke into the game back in 2001. If you combine his appearance and his early development into one of the game’s best hitters with a somewhat unorthodox background, you have a prime recipe for age-related speculation.

I see two significant problems that prevent me from buying into the speculation, however.

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Today, Ron Santo finally got into the Hall of Fame. It’s a long overdue honor, as Santo is clearly deserving of a spot in Cooperstown, and FanGraphs would like to congratulate the Golden Era committee on getting this one right. The Hall of Fame is better for having Santo in it.

However, you probably know all that already, as smarter people than me have been advocating on his behalf for years. So, today, I’d like to use Santo’s induction as a launching off point to ask whether his election might help voters put Scott Rolen into Cooperstown when his name hits the ballot.

I wrote about Rolen’s resume back in March, and we ran a community blog post extolling his virtues last summer, so this isn’t necessarily new territory, but the recognition that Santo got today may suggest that voters are more willing to accept the value in this player type than they have been in the past. And make no mistake, Rolen and Santo are pretty similar in a lot of ways.

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Before the off-season started, we asked you guys to project how much the primary free agents would sign for this winter. The FanGraphs Crowd tabbed Jose Reyes for a six year, $101 million contract. Tonight, he signed with the Marlins for six years and $106 million, so you guys can count this as a feather in your cap — the crowd figured out what the market for Reyes would be quite well.

So, now, the question is simply whether the Marlins were wise to throw $106 million at Reyes to begin with. Paul Swydan tackled how Reyes would fit into the Marlins roster a few weeks ago, and covered those issues pretty well. So instead, let’s talk about Reyes’ value as a player, and whether giving him this much guaranteed money is a good idea.

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Last week, reports began to surface that the Marlins were interested in acquiring Gio Gonzalez from the A’s. Depending on how much credibility you put in various rumors, the A’s have asked for the likes of Mike Stanton and Logan Morrison in discussions, and no matter who you believe, they’re clearly not going to sell Gonzalez on the cheap. Any team looking to acquire his services is going to pay through the nose to get him, so being the helpful soul that I am, I’d like to suggest a significantly cheaper path to acquiring a pretty similar talent.

Gonzalez debuted in 2008, and since then, he’s posted the following career numbers:

BB%: 11.3%
K%: 21.9%
GB%: 47.5%
BABIP: .293
LOB%: 73.9%

Over those same four years, here are Edinson Volquez’s numbers:

BB%: 12.4%
K%: 23.3%
GB%: 49.0%
BABIP: .292
LOB%: 73.7%

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While baseball fans have been able to celebrate the fact that their sport is enjoying a long run of labor peace, and the negotiation of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement hasn’t threatened any on-the-field action or turned acrimonious in any way, the release of details of the new CBA show that this labor peace does not come without significant cost to fans of teams in markets other than New York.

The details of the new regulations on the draft and international free agents were first reported by Jeff Passan on Twitter. As laid out by Passan, the league is now going to enforce the following changes:

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At some point today, Major League Baseball is expected to announce the details of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement that was negotiated with the player’s association. While there are some pretty major changes to several areas of the game, perhaps the most influential move is the addition of a second wild card team in each league. While qualifying to participate in a one-game play-in isn’t quite the same as being awarded a spot in the Division Series round, the new rule does essentially give two extra opportunities to play in October, and while it may not seem like a drastic change, I do think we’re going to see significant repercussions in how and when teams acquire talent.

An additional playoff spot has the obvious effect of increasing every team’s chances of making the playoffs, and as a byproduct of that result, the value of short-term wins just increased. Under the old system, a team needed to win at least 90 games to have a legitimate chance at winning the Wild Card. Of the 32 teams to get into the playoffs via the extra playoff spot since 1997, only three had finished with 89 wins or fewer – in fact, in the American League, the 91-win 2011 Rays had the lowest win total of any AL Wild Card team since the 2000 Seattle Mariners. The average wild card team has won 93.3 games per season, so the non-division-winning playoff team has still been quite excellent in most years.

The new system lowers the barrier to entry by a significant amount, however. Back in April, our own Wendy Thurm looked at how interleague play would have affected a hypothetical second wild card team for the National League had it been in place since 1998. As you can see, more often than not, the runner up in the NL Wild Card race finished with a win total in the 80s, and the average win total was just 89.2 wins. There has historically been a pretty significant drop-off in quality between the wild card team and the runner-up, but now that runner up will also get a chance to continue their quest for the World Series.

The result will be a shift in the curve that measures the value of a win. Right now, the value of a win is fairly linear up until about win #85, at which point each additional win (up until about win #98) becomes significantly more valuable, as those wins have the greatest impact on a team’s odds of making the playoffs. The new wild card is going to dramatically increase the value of wins starting at around #82, while also flattening the win curve a bit sooner, as the second wild card will all but ensure that a team with 95+ wins will make the playoffs, and the value of each additional win beyond that will diminish slightly.

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The American League Most Valuable Player Award is going to be announced at 2:00 pm today, and there’s a pretty good chance that Justin Verlander is going to become just the 10th player to win both the Cy Young and MVP in the same year. Unfortunately, the reasons that Verlander is probably the favorite to win the award aren’t great – the two best position players both played for teams who failed to make the playoffs, and voters are historically preferential to players who came from teams who played in October. He’s also a stronger candidate to actually win the award because of his 24 victories, and it is too bad that pitcher wins are still hanging on to some influence.

However, you don’t have to buy into the traditional criteria for MVP voting to cast a ballot in favor of Justin Verlander. Even without some tortured logic about rewarding a player for the performance of his teammates, a strong case can be made for Verlander as the most valuable player in the American League in 2011.

Let’s start off with the elephant in the room: with how we calculate WAR here on FanGraphs, Verlander’s +7.0 season is pretty far behind both Jacoby Ellsbury (+9.4) and Jose Bautista (+8.3), so an argument for Verlander seems to require a rejection of FanGraphs WAR, right? I would suggest that it does not. We think WAR is a great tool that has helped push forward the understanding of the relative value of players with very different skills, but we’ve never suggested that it’s perfect or entirely comprehensive.

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When Carson Cistulli asked the collective crowd of FanGraphs readers what they thought Heath Bell would receive as a free agent this winter, they picked out 2.8 years and an annual average value of $9.6 million. Rounding up, we’d get an expected contract of three years and just shy of $30 million, and yesterday, Dan Hayes reported that’s almost exactly what he’s looking for.

Bell is hoping that his resume will earn him three guaranteed seasons, and given what Jonathan Papelbon just got from Philadelphia, it seems like the market for relief pitchers is still going very strong. Given Bell’s success in the ninth inning, 3/30 might strike some as a relative bargain compared to what Papelbon signed for and Ryan Madson is reportedly seeking.

However, before any team ponies up for Bell’s services, I’d hope that they’d ask themselves just how much of Bell’s success will follow him if he leaves San Diego.

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