The results of our second contract crowdsourcing are in, and while those who commented on the original post seemed willing to pony up for Dunn, they were a vocal minority. If Dunn is expecting a big paycheck this winter, the crowd think he’s in for a disappointment.

Average years: 3.18 years
Average salary: $12.40 million

Median years: 3 years
Median salary: $12 million

Standard deviation, years: 0.81 years
Standard deviation, salary: $2.73 million

As you can see, there was less agreement with Dunn than with Crawford, as people clearly have very different perceptions of his value. The standard deviation in salary is almost as high as it was with Crawford even though the average salary is 25 percent lower. Almost as many people voted that he’d have to settle for $7 million per season as the ones who thought he’d hit the jackpot and get $20 million per year. A whopping 52 people gave him an annual average salary of $20-plus million. Seriously.

I think those folks, and perhaps Dunn and his agent, are in for another rude awakening this winter. I had him at 3/33 before the community voted, putting him very close to that mark. While he’s a productive player, he faces some challenges, as follows.

1. His refusal to DH will scare off most AL clubs, limiting the number of teams that will seriously pursue him.
2. There are a glut of free agent 1B/DH types on the market this winter.
3. He’s going to be a Type A free agent, and the Nationals are almost certainly going to offer arbitration.

Given those three factors, you’re looking at just a few clubs that will be in the bidding. Rebuilders will not want to lose a good draft pick in a loaded class. Most contenders already have a good first baseman, or may be looking to leverage all the available options against each other to come up with a cheaper option. It’s just going to be very difficult for Dunn to find multiple teams that want to pay him a lot of money, and one heavily interested team won’t be enough, as he learned two years ago.

I’ll stick with my original thought of 3 years and $33 million, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if his eventual deal was less than that, or even if he ended up accepting the Nationals arbitration offer.

Same concept as yesterday, just with Carl Crawford’s polar opposite – Adam Dunn. Rather than being a speed and defense guy, Dunn is all about the power, swinging for the fences on every pitch. It works for him, as he’s having his normal season – .265/.358/.556, good for a .386 wOBA. His career wOBA? .385. He’s a pretty easy offensive player to project.

Defense has always been his bugaboo, but after agreeing to move to first base full time, he’s been passable with the glove now that he doesn’t have to run around the outfield anymore, but he’s still far from an asset defensively. How much will teams hold his history of butchery against him, or will they assume that playing first base full time has made him a guy that can carry a glove and be a valuable contributor?

Dunn turns 31 this winter, and there are some pretty scary comparable players that have had their careers veer over the cliff after their 30th birthday. Richie Sexson posted a .385 wOBA at age 30, then went .355, .305, .314, out of baseball. Mo Vaughn put up a .421 wOBA at age 30, then went .370, .369, .349, .291, out of baseball. These guys were paid handsomely for a skillset that is very similar to Dunn’s, and teams have become a bit nervous about giving long term deals to guys with old player skills. However, there are guys like Jim Thome that have remained highly productive, so we can’t assume that Dunn is certainly headed for steep decline.

Will Dunn find the market to be more friendly than the last time he was a free agent? He was essentially the same player two years ago when he had to settle for just $20 million over two years. Have teams become bigger fans of his since then, or is Dunn in line for another rude awakening when he asks for a long term contract? Let your voice be heard below, and we’ll talk about the results tomorrow.

2,000+ votes later, I’d say you guys are somewhat interested in this contract crowdsourcing idea, which is great. This will be a regular feature on FanGraphs leading up to free agency. We’ll try and do as many of the upcoming free agents as we can.

Let’s talk about the results of the Crawford survey. Just a few numbers to start off:

Average length: 5.5 years
Average salary: $16.4 million

Median length: 5 years
Median salary: $17 million

Standard deviation, years: 0.93 years
Standard deviation, salary: $2.91 million

Agreement was high among the group, especially in length. 78 percent of all submissions projected either a five or six year contract for Crawford, while 49 percent projected an annual salary of 14 to 17 million per season. It didn’t take long at all – about 25 ballots – before the data stabilized right around 5.5 years and $16.4 million, and it stayed there no matter how many additional ballots poured in.

So, I think we can say with some confidence that the crowd expects that he’ll get something around 5/80 or 6/100. This is why I’m glad we’re doing this exercise, because I figured the number would be a bit higher – I had him pegged at something like 7 years and $120 million.

Matt Holliday, a comparable player in value, got 7 years and $126 million with no bidding war to speak of last winter. Certainly, he benefited from the market’s premium given to power hitters, which Crawford will not get, but I’d expect that multiple teams will be bidding Crawford’s services up, which could drive the price beyond what the group consensus is. If I had to bet, I’d take the over on Crawford’s deal compared to the crowd’s average, but again, I’ve generally been lousy at estimating what players will sign for, and it’s likely that the crowd will be more accurate at projecting these deals than I will be.

Given these expected prices, though, I do wonder if Tampa Bay should make a serious run at keeping him. At least in the short term, $16 million a year for Crawford’s services is a bargain, and retaining him would keep their window of contention open longer. If they could get him to take a shorter deal, reducing the long term risk for the franchise, they might just be able to keep their franchise left fielder.

Today, I want to kick off an experiment of sorts. Over the last few off-seasons, I’ve noticed that the expectation of what I think a player will sign for is regularly not anywhere close to what he actually gets. Whether it was due to my misconceptions of what the market would value a player as, or just corrections inspired by the recession, we’ve seen guys sign for fractions of what they were expected to get, or not sign at all despite being pretty useful players.

So, rather than just go into this winter with my own observations of what the market may look like, I thought it would be a worthwhile effort to crowdsource the expected contracts for most of the major free agents who are looking to get paid this winter. We’re going to find out just how well the wisdom of crowds works in projecting the free agent market.

The first player we’ll throw out for discussion is the big fish of the winter, Carl Crawford. The Tampa Bay outfielder, who just turned 29, has established himself as one of the game’s best all-around players. Over the first nine years of his professional career, he’s averaged just under +4 WAR per season, and he’s been even better than that the last two years, posting a +5.5 win season last year and already reaching +5.6 wins so far in 2010. He’s in the prime of his career with a skillset that ages very well, and with a variety of abilities that are valued by every team, no matter their team-building philosophy.

Crawford is going to attract intense interest from multiple teams. There will be an inevitable bidding war for his services, with the Yankees and Angels most often rumored to be the teams ready to break the bank in an effort to lure Crawford to join their organizations. So, the question is, how much does he get, and for how long?

You can use the form below to submit your answers. Once we have a decent sample and the numbers seem to have stabilized around a length and figure, we’ll revisit the expectations. Assuming there’s enough interest, we’ll continue doing these until we get to free agency and find out just how much you guys actually know about projecting free agent contracts. It should be a fun experiment.

For the second year in a row, the White Sox have used the August waiver period to add a talented outfielder who has worn out his welcome with his current team. Last year, the White Sox took on the remainder of Alex Rios‘ contract, and while he struggled to finish out 2009, he has been one of their best players this season, and the move has certainly paid dividends. Will adding Manny Ramirez pay off as well?

There are a couple of ways to look at whether Ramirez will work out or not. The White Sox are a fringe playoff contender, with about a 13 percent chance of making the playoffs. Ramirez is a significant upgrade from their rotating DH platoon, a position that has been most frequently manned by Mark Kotsay and his .233/.307/.382 line. ZiPS projects a .292 wOBA going forward for Kotsay, which pales in comparison to the .400 mark projected for Ramirez.

Even if you bump up the projection a bit to account for the other guys who would rotate through the DH position, we’re still looking at a 100 point gap in wOBA in September, which is a huge number, and, over 100 plate appearances, it adds up to nearly an eight run difference. Even though it’s only for a month, replacing Kotsay with Ramirez should add almost a full win to the White Sox total.

Given their place in the standings, a one win upgrade could make all the difference in the world. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that Chicago ends the season within just one game of the Twins. Having Ramirez’s bat in the line-up could put them in the playoffs, and given how valuable that is, picking up his $4 million in remaining salary and not surrendering any talent is something of a no-brainer. The team gets significantly better in a playoff race and all they have to give up is cash. That’s the kind of move every fan should want their team to make.

But it does raise a question. If the White Sox had $4 million in their budget for 2010, why did they wait until August 30th to spend it? They gave Kotsay $1.5 million to occupy a fairly important roster spot, despite the fact that he’s been a replacement level player since 2006, and failed to make necessary upgrades to their offense over the winter. If they had the ability to throw another $4 million at this roster, couldn’t that money have been spent better last winter on a guy who would have been around for the whole year, rather than just the final month?

It’s a fair question, but the reality is that circumstances change and budgets are not static. I’d imagine, though I’m just guessing, that if Kenny Williams could have spent another $4 million last winter, he’d have done so, and probably made some different choices about what his team looked like. The uncertainty about a team’s overall performance is far greater in January than it is in August, and not knowing if a team will be a contender or not pushes teams to be somewhat conservative with their payrolls each off-season.

The team has information they didn’t have before, and Jerry Reinsdorf was willing to gamble some cash on a player who can upgrade the team in a playoff race. Perhaps that is cash he was not willing to gamble over the winter, not knowing what this team would look like come the stretch run. While it’s reasonable to ask Williams why he was willing to lean so heavily on Kotsay, I don’t think we can assume that the money that they just spent on Ramirez was available to him over the winter.

So, overall, kudos to the White Sox again. They made a bold, intelligent waiver claim last year with Rios, and they’ve done so again with Ramirez. I still think Minnesota wins the AL Central, but Chicago will at least make it interesting. Plus, Manny being managed by Ozzie Guillen? Let the comedy begin.

If you haven’t heard yet, Stephen Strasburg needs Tommy John surgery, and is probably out until 2012. There’s really one general reaction to this that everyone seems to be having – this sucks.

Whether you root for the Nationals or not doesn’t really matter. This makes baseball less interesting as a whole, as Strasburg was legitimately one of the most entertaining guys in the sport. Rather than getting to watch him throw 100 MPH fastballs, we now have to spend the next year and a half talking about whether he’ll ever be the same pitcher again post-surgery. While the success rate of TJ surgery is very high, it’s certainly possible that his velocity never comes all the way back, and we never get to see what a pitcher who threw that hard could have turned into.

This is a loss for the game. Obviously, it’s a pretty significant blow to the Nationals as well, who now have to re-think their path to contention and potentially push back their time-frame a year or two. If they were thinking of re-signing Adam Dunn before, they almost certainly shouldn’t now. Losing Strasburg for 2011 and getting a questionable version of him for 2012 pushes the Nats back into long-term building mode, as they just lost a player they simply can’t replace. This injury has a significant effect on the decisions Washington has to make this winter.

Someday, hopefully, science will catch up the with the sport, and we’ll figure out how to keep some of these great young arms healthy. Until then, we’ll just have to cross our fingers every time another phenomenal pitching prospect hits the show. We’re getting used to losing them early. Maybe pitching is just such an unnatural movement that it’s unavoidable, but I’m holding out hope that some smart guy will figure out how to keep these arms from blowing out. If MLB wants to find an area to invest in their long term future, this is where they should be throwing money.

Hurry back, Strasburg. The game won’t be as fun without you.

There are a lot of good comments in this afternoon’s post about how we should evaluate pitchers for the Cy Young Award. We’ll get into more detail about the FIP/WAR discussion tomorrow, when I have more time than I do right now to really talk about the issue in some depth.

One comment that keeps arising, however, is about the correlation between Trevor Cahill’s BABIP and his sinker, specifically his ground ball rate. Several people assert that Cahill is inducing weak, easy to field contact by pounding his sinker at the bottom of the strike zone, and that’s why his BABIP is just .217. There are a few problems with this assertion, though.

We know that BABIP on groundballs is higher than on flyballs, as a ball is more likely to sneak between two infielders than it is to fall in front of an outfielder. In general, groundball pitchers will post higher than average BABIPs, not the other way around, though the effect is generally pretty small.

The other problem… well, we’ll just demonstrate it this way.

Trevor Cahill: 56% GB%, 14.9% LD%, 29.1% FB%, .217 BABIP
Justin Masterson: 62.3% GB%, 14.9% LD%, 22.8% FB%, .344 BABIP

The argument that this particular skillset is the driver of a low batting average on balls in play falls apart when you consider that Masterson, who gets more groundballs and has an identical line drive rate, is posting one of the highest BABIPs in all of baseball. We cannot just see two variables and assume that one is the cause of the other. Cahill has a high groundball rate, and he has a low BABIP, but there’s just no evidence that the former is driving the latter.

The line drive rate is the real factor here. Among the nine starters who have a LD% under 15 percent, the average BABIP is .271, well below the league average. As you probably know, the lion’s share of hits in baseball come on line drives, and so a pitcher who doesn’t surrender that many hard hit balls will also not allow that many hits (though, this does not appear to be a skill, as the year to year correlation of LD% is very low).

Again, though, Cahill’s BABIP stands out as a crazy outlier, even in this no-line-drives group. If you take him out of the sample, the average BABIP for the remaining eight guys is .278, sixty points higher than Cahill’s, even though he’s at the high end of line drive rate for this subset of pitchers. Even if we also throw out Masterson to even things out, the other seven guys have a BABIP of .268, still way higher than Cahill’s mark. And, again, they have lower line drive rates than Cahill does.

Cahill is likely throwing pitches that are harder to hit than an average pitcher. He deserves some credit for that, even if he can’t keep it up. However, on top of that, he’s almost certainly just getting some good fortune, whether it be through assistance from his defense or just lousy hitting from his opponents. We cannot, and should not, give him credit for the .217 BABIP just because it happened. It isn’t all him.

After Trevor Cahill lowered his ERA to 2.43 last night, Buster Olney tweeted that his numbers made Cahill a top contender for the AL Cy Young award. Keith Law quickly responded, noting that Cahill was 31st among AL starters in WAR and had a 4.07 FIP, suggesting that Cahill was in no way a Cy Young candidate despite the shiny low ERA.

Olney and Law clearly approach the award from different angles. Buster is more traditional, and prefers to use the numbers that have always been the standard for evaluating pitchers. Keith just wants to reward the guy that he thinks pitched the best, and doesn’t care about the way things have always been done. But their discussion raises an interesting question: what role should our stats have in the Cy Young discussion?

The award is ostensibly about rewarding the best pitcher in a league in a given year. For most of history, we’ve judged pitchers by how many runs they’ve allowed, but over the last 10 years, there has been a shift to try to isolate the actual abilities of the pitcher from that of the teammates that surround him, which is a worthy pursuit, as I don’t think anyone believes that a player should receive an individual award based on the work of others. Metrics like FIP have gained popularity, and it’s the primary reason for Law is using it in his Cy Young argument.

But FIP was not designed to give us a better insight into what actually happened, but, instead, what is likely to happen in the future. FIP is part of the collection of metrics that do a good job of predicting what will happen in the future by focusing on things that are under a player’s control. FIP was never designed to be a backward-looking metric designed to tell us what actually did happen. And there’s a decent argument to be made that the Cy Young award should be awarded based on what did happen, not on what should have happened or what will happen in the future.

In Cahill’s case, the real sticking point is his BABIP, which currently stands at an absurdly low .217. The next lowest batting average on balls in play for an AL starter is C.J. Wilson, at .263. The gap between Cahill and the rest of the league is enormous, and it is the driving force behind his low ERA. That .217 BABIP is not sustainable in any way, shape, or form. Unlike things like strikeout rate, BABIP is simply not a skill that a pitcher has much control over, which is why it’s not included in the FIP calculation.

But it is highly unlikely that Cahill has had absolutely nothing to do with his low BABIP to date. Yes, that number is driven down by a combination of outside factors, including his home park, his defense, and some bad hitting by his opponents, but it would be folly to assume that Cahill hasn’t had anything to do with hitters having a tough time getting hits off of him so far. We certainly should not give him credit for all of the hit prevention, and we should not expect it to continue, but logically, I think we have to assume that he has contributed, at least in some way, to the amount of balls that have found their way into the gloves of his defenders. Perhaps he has just hit his spots really well for several months – history says he can’t keep doing it, but do we want to assume that he’s had nothing to do with the results? I don’t.

So, just like I would not rely solely on ERA to make a judgment about who deserves the Cy Young award, neither would I rely solely on FIP. When trying to evaluate how a pitcher did in the past, ERA includes too many things that aren’t under his control, while FIP strips out too much. If I had to choose one or the other, I’d go with FIP over ERA, because I think it gets you closer to reality, but we don’t have to choose. We can look at the whole picture, and that’s what I suggest people do with their Cy Young picks.

Look at a pitcher’s walk rate, strikeout rate, home run rate, batting average on balls in play, and his left-on-base rate. The summation of how well he has pitched will be found in these five metrics. ERA includes all five and is affected greatly by the last two, while FIP only deals with the first three. I think we should look at all five, but not weight them evenly.

Walk rate and strikeout rate have little outside influence – they should be weighted the most heavily. Those are the two areas where a pitcher has the most control over the outcome. Home Run rate is certainly something a pitcher has some control over, but park and luck can interfere here, so I would give it a little less weight than the first two. Batting average on balls in play gets even less credit than home run rate, since there are so many contributing outside factors, but pitchers should get a little bit of credit or blame for the results on balls in play. Left-on-base rate is generally going to follow closely with HR/9 and BABIP, as posting low numbers in those areas will allow a pitcher to strand a lot of runners on base, so it gets the least credit, to avoid double counting something a pitcher has already gotten credit for. But some pitchers have historically been better at leaving runners on than others, and they should get credit for that in retrospective awards.

If I had to quantify these weights, I’d suggest it should be something like this:

Strikeout Rate: 40 percent
Walk Rate: 30 percent
Home Run Rate: 15 percent
Batting Average On Balls In Play: 10 Percent
Left-On-Base Rate: 5 percent

Reward a pitcher the most for what we know he can control, but reward him at least a little for things he may have had some influence on, even if he can’t keep it up. Don’t just go blindly into the discussion quoting ERA or FIP. Neither tells the whole story. .

If we ran a poll, I’d imagine most people would tab the Yankees or the Rays as the best team in baseball. They have identical records at 78-48, and their .619 winning percentages are #1 in the game. However, neither of them lead MLB in WAR – that distinction belongs to the Minnesota Twins.

At +43.2 WAR, the Twins grade out as the top team to date using measures that don’t take contextual performance into account. As you probably know, WAR is mostly built on the foundation of wOBA, UZR, and FIP as the three main variables, representing offense, defense, and pitching, respectively. The Twins grade out well in each area.

Offensively, they have a team wOBA of .342, trailing only Boston and New York in offensive production. That is even more impressive than it sounds because of how pitcher friendly Target Field appears to be. We can’t make a declarative statement about exactly how the park plays with less than a partial season of data to work with, but all of the subjective evidence lends itself to the idea that it favors pitchers. Despite playing in a lower run environment, the Twins have still been able to put up some serious offensive numbers.

Their position players aren’t just lumbering oafs, either. Well, a few of them are, but they’re overshadowed by some high quality defenders, particularly on the infield. The Twins have posted a UZR of +24.3, 8th best in baseball. Their outfield isn’t much to write home about, but the quality around the infield is staggering. The Twins rank 2nd in UZR at first base, second base, and shortstop, and come in all the way down in 4th place at third base, two-tenths of a run away from a tie for second at that position as well.

Their run prevention isn’t just the defense, though – the pitching is legitimately good, too. They rank 6th in baseball in FIP, and all five teams ahead of them are National League clubs who don’t have to contend with a designated hitter. Their biggest strength is their annual refusal to walk anyone, as they have the lowest BB/9 (2.24) of any team in baseball. They are an evenly balanced staff, as well, as the starters FIP (3.83) and relievers FIP (3.80) are nearly identical.

So, if the Twins have performed well in nearly every aspect of the game, why don’t they have the best record in baseball? Well, the one area they haven’t been great at is the main thing that WAR excludes: situational performance.

As a team, the Twins are hitting .279/.342/.439 with no one on base. When they get someone on, then they’re hitting a nearly identical .280/.355/.428, and with runners in scoring position, it’s a similar .283/.365/.407 line. The problem is that most teams perform better with men on base and runners in scoring position than they do in bases empty situations, so the Twins offensive performance in run scoring situations is worse relative to the rest of the league than it is with no one on base.

The good news for Twins fans? That’s not really the kind of thing that is predictive in nature. That the Twins haven’t hit as well in those situations so far says little to nothing about how they’ll do in those situations going forward. If they begin to get the normal bump that teams see with runners on base, their offense could become even more efficient.

The Yankees and Rays are good teams. The Rangers are, too. But don’t sleep on the Twins – you can make a pretty good case that they’re the best team in baseball this year. I certainly wouldn’t want to play them in October.