You’ve probably heard by now that, at 80-years-old, Jack McKeon was just named the Marlins manager once again. This makes him the second oldest manager in baseball history behind only the legendary Connie Mack. While I don’t have any pithy SABR-analysis about how McKeon might help turn around the Marlins (seriously, the next person to figure out how to predict a manager’s impact on a team will be the first), McKeon’s return to the game gives me an excuse to look at what Major League Baseball looked like the first time a team hired him to be their skipper.

The year? 1973, when the Kansas City Royals made McKeon a manager for the first time at age 43. There were 12 teams in the American League, the Designated Hitter was being tried out for the first time in history, and he had a 29-year-old left fielder named Lou Piniella. Yeah. (Side note – how weird was Piniella’s prime? wRC+ from 26-31 of 107, 90, 138, 74, 111, and 39. He was Aubrey Huff before Aubrey Huff came along.)

Other fun fact from the 1973 Royals – their best player was John Mayberry, the father of the Phillies outfielder of the same name. But, really, that’s nothing – that team also featured Hal McRae, the father of Brian McRae, who retired from the game twelve years ago.

There are going to be a lot of age-related jokes about McKeon, and a few of them will even be funny. But while I can’t say anything about whether he’s going to help them win more games, McKeon is a character, and having him in the dugout will make Marlins games more interesting. And for that, I say welcome back Trader Jack.

Last year, Josh Beckett posted a 5.78 ERA in 21 starts, and his struggles were one of the main reasons the Red Sox missed the playoffs. This year, Josh Beckett has a 1.86 ERA in 14 starts, and his dominance is one of the reasons that the Red Sox have the best record in the American League. A look beyond ERA, however, shows that Beckett is the poster boy for why metrics like xFIP were created in the first place.

Last year, Beckett had an xFIP of 3.86, 8% below league average. This year, Beckett is posting a 3.69 xFIP, 8% below the league average. In fact, his K/BB ratio is almost exactly identical (2.58 last year, 2.63 this year) to what it was a year ago. His ERA has been slashed by over four runs thanks to huge reductions in two factors that are counted in xFIP – BABIP and HR/FB.

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Last night, Yorvit Torrealba accused Andruw Jones of stealing signs from second base as the Yankees lit up Derek Holland. Holland’s final line (5 IP, 7 H, 6 R, 5 BB, 0 K, 2 HR) would support the idea that the Yankees knew what was coming before he threw it, but it would also support the idea that Holland just pitched really badly. So, to test the theory of whether the Yankees have seen a boost in offensive performance when they had a runner on second base (who could steal signs), I decided to look at the data.

Yankees, 2011:

Bases Empty: .256/.349/.436
Runner on First: .268/.320/.530
Runner on Second: .209/.355/.328
Runner on Third: .368/.403/.561
First and Second: .207/.261/.378
First and Third: .390/.415/.805
Second and Third: .171/.397/.371

With one runner on base, the Yankees have performed the worst if that runner is on second base. With two men on base, the Yankees have performed worst in the two situations where a runner is on second base. Their two best performances, by far, have come when they do not have a runner on second base.

This isn’t a definitive study, of course, but if the Yankees were stealing signs and that actually helped them hit, you’d expect to find some evidence of improved performance in that situation. That we find exactly the opposite, even in a small sample of data, suggests to me that Torrealba is either reacting to nothing or that sign stealing is a really terrible idea.

With three weeks remaining until FanGraphs Live makes its west coast debut, I wanted to remind you guys about the fun we were going to have on Thursday, July 7th. We’re proud to be teaming up with SABR to host an event at the same location as their national convention, giving you the chance to take your baseball nerdery to a whole new level.

Our event will take place from 7 to 10 pm, and include three interactive panel discussions:

Jon Weisman (Dodger Thoughts), Eric Stephen (True Blue LA), and Rich Lederer (Baseball Analysts) will answer questions and converse on the status of the two local teams, so we’ll begin the evening with an interesting look at the Dodgers and Angels. You will have a chance to ask questions of the panelists, as well as hear them talk about the various topics surrounding those two franchises.

After the local teams panel has concluded, we’ll transition slightly into looking at the national landscape and the game as a whole, and will bring Rob Neyer (SB Nation) and Vince Gennaro (President of SABR, author of Diamond Dollars, consultant to MLB teams) into the discussion. We’ll talk about what we’ve seen during the first half of the 2011 season, as well as some of the more interesting aspects of the current landscape of statistical analysis of the sport. I’m sure Jonah Keri will also promote his book once or fifty times during this panel.

Finally, we’ll have a FanGraphs-centric Q&A with members of our staff, including the aforementioned Mr. Keri, David Appelman (President of FanGraphs), Carson Cistulli (NotGraphs specialist), Eno Sarris (RotoGraphs wizard), and myself. There’s also rumors that Patrick Newman (JapanGraphs expert) might make an appearance.

The event should be a blast and well worth the $20 admission fee. However, the goodness doesn’t end there – anyone who registers for FanGraphs Live is eligible to use the FGNonMember-41 discount code when registering for the SABR convention. That code will give you 15% off any conference registration, whether it is a one day pass ($59, pre-discount), two day pass ($93, pre-discount), or full conference registration ($159, pre-discount). Those of you who are good at math will take note that the registration discount for the full conference is actually more than the cost of attending FanGraphs Live, so if you’re planning on registering for SABR as a non-member, it is actually cheaper to register for our event and then use the discount code than to not attend our event.

Even if you can’t make the whole weekend, however, I’d highly recommend at least a one day pass if you can get away from work. There are a lot of interesting things planned for July 7th, and if you can’t get enough of me on discussion panels, I’ll be participating on a baseball media panel with Russ Stanton (Editor of the LA TImes), Sean Forman (Owner of Baseball Reference), and Bill Squadron (General Manager of Bloomberg Sports) in the afternoon, and Scott Boras will be giving the keynote speech in the morning. You could spend the whole day geeking out about baseball, and no one there would judge you.

You can purchase tickets by using the widget below. We look forward to seeing you guys in three weeks.

Just like the NL crop this afternoon, let’s take a look at where the AL voting would leave us as of today, and then I’ll give my picks below.

Catcher: Russell Martin
First Base: Adrian Gonzalez
Second Base: Robinson Cano
Shortstop: Derek Jeter
Third Base: Alex Rodriguez
Left Field: Josh Hamilton
Center Field: Curtis Granderson
Right Field: Jose Bautista
Designated Hitter: David Ortiz

The moral of this story? There are too many Yankees fans currently occupying the planet. Also, they have a lot of money and some pretty good players. That said, if I were picking the team, the line-up would be significantly less Yankee-centric, and I think most of us could agree that that would be a great thing.

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The All-Star Game is about a month away, and the latest batch of voting results for the National League were released yesterday. If there are no changes, the NL will roll out the following team to begin the midsummer classic:

Catcher: Brian McCann
First Base: Albert Pujols
Second Base: Brandon Phillips
Shortstop: Troy Tulowitzki
Third Base: Placido Polanco
Left Field: Matt Holliday
Center Field: Ryan Braun
Right Field: Lance Berkman

That’s not a bad line-up, certainly. There are no egregious errors there (except for the hilarious defensive alignment of the outfield, but that’s the ballot’s fault), and you could make a good case for everyone listed above to deserve their spot on the roster. But my personal ballot would look a little bit different, and while I’m extolling the virtues of the starters, we might as well look at all the players who I think should be on the team this year.

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As Dave Allen noted this afternoon, Buster Olney reported over the weekend that Major League Baseball is considering a realignment proposal that would equalize the number of teams in each league at 15 and potentially eliminate the current divisional format completely. While I’ve been trained to believe that nearly every “improvement” MLB suggests is probably a bad idea, this actually seems like a pretty fantastic idea to me, in large part due to my desire to see increased fairness in the sport.

Right now, all four AL West teams have an inherent advantage in the chase for a playoff spot due to the size of their division, while all the NL Central teams have an inherent disadvantage. While it hasn’t manifest as a significant problem in most years (mainly thanks to the ineptitude of the Pittsburgh Pirates), there’s just no way around the fact that the NL Central teams have to beat out five opponents to win the division while the AL West teams only have to beat out three. A smaller pool of competitors simply makes it easier to make the playoffs, and it’s hard for me to come up with a good reason why some teams should have an easier path (structurally, if not always in practicality) to a division title than another.

Getting rid of the divisions entirely eliminates that problem, and while it may not have been the intention, it also creates the other massive inequity in baseball right now – the fact that the Blue Jays, Rays, and Orioles have to overcome baseball’s two behemoths to make the playoffs. While baseball is cyclical and I’d generally suggest against creating rules that react to current organizational strengths and weaknesses, it is a reality that the Yankees and Red Sox have long term, sustainable advantages over the rest of baseball. Their markets and their history have given them the ability to generate large amounts of revenue, and they use that revenue to build rosters that other organizations simply could not afford.

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Last week, ESPN invited a group of 30 contributors – including myself and Jonah Keri – to take place in what they called the Franchise Player Draft. The directions were straight forward – throw out real life contracts and situations specific to Major League Baseball and simply evaluate the players for their abilities, deciding which one you would most want to build a franchise around if you were starting from scratch. We picked 1 through 30 and selected the player we would most want as our cornerstone going forward.

The concept was a lot of fun, and after the picks were revealed, many of you guys suggested that FanGraphs should do our own version – so we did. This week, we conducted an internal version of the same concept, asking 30 of our writers to pick the player left on the board that they would most want as their franchise player.

The results of that draft are below. I’m sure that, just like the ESPN version, you won’t agree with all 30 selections, but this is undoubtedly a fun exercise and hopefully gives some insight the perspectives of a variety of the staff members here.

1-1: Matthew Carruth

Evan Longoria. He was the first name to pop into my head when told I had the first pick and though I considered others, nobody knocked him off. Really wanted to take Felix, but couldn’t justify a pitcher at 1/1 and frankly, Longoria is just more valuable.

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There are undoubtedly some great pitchers in baseball right now, but the ones who generally command the most attention — Roy Halladay, Felix Hernandez, and Tim Lincecum i- are all right-handed. Those three have each won a Cy Young Award in the past two years, and are usually the first names mentioned in a discussion of the best pitchers in baseball. However, there are some pretty terrific left-handed pitchers in baseball as well, and in particular, there are four spectacular southpaws in the National League right now.

If you look at the lowest xFIPs in the NL, you’ll see Halladay and Lincecum, but you’ll also see Cole Hamels (2.50), Cliff Lee (2.51), Clayton Kershaw (2.84), and Jaime Garcia (2.98) — they are each one of the six pitchers in the NL with an xFIP below 3.00. While all four have been excellent in prior seasons, each is doing something new this year that has made them even better than they were previously.

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