Some more follow-ups.

Have the Mariners miscalculated (and Fangraphs in the org rankings) by relying too much on UZR and other defensive metrics that end up being neither as predictive or descriptive as they were presumed to be?

To me, this is more narrative than reality. Because the Mariners got competitive using a great defensive team a year ago, and a lot of people wrote about it this winter, it has become popular to deride the Mariners for choosing defense over offense. That’s just not really the case, though.

Regardless of what you think of him as a person, Milton Bradley’s track record as a hitter can’t really be argued with. From 2007 to 2009, he posted a batting line of .293/.407/.495 over 311 games. His .389 wOBA during those years put him at the same offensive level as Adam Dunn and Magglio Ordonez and ahead of guys like Jayson Werth and J.D. Drew. He’s not much of a defender, though, and he’s unreliable, but the Mariners took a gamble on a guy who had proven that he was one of the best offensive players in baseball. It didn’t work, obviously, but the intent to acquire an offensive force was clearly there.

Then, there’s Chone Figgins. Yes, he was a guy who added value with his defense, but they got him for his bat, not his glove. His 2007 to 2009 line was .301/.386/.382, good for a .350 wOBA. Like Bradley, he’d established a track record of being a well above average hitter. They didn’t bring in Pedro Feliz – they spent a good chunk of money on a guy who had shown that he could get on base.

At first base, they only ended up with Casey Kotchman after attempting to sign Russell Branyan. They offered him more money than what he eventually got from the Indians, but he was holding out for a multi-year deal. They wanted him back for 2010, but didn’t want to guarantee 2011 to a guy with a herniated disc in his back. Everyone else in baseball agreed, and that’s why Branyan eventually settled for a one year deal with Cleveland. But bringing Branyan back was clearly the team’s primary choice to fill first base.

There’s just no real pattern of choosing defense over offense. The guys they brought in to provide offense failed. That’s different than not trying to bring in any offensive upgrades to begin with. Don’t buy into the narrative that the team decided to try to go balls out for defense. It’s just not true.

Some of the furor has to reside in the fact that a Front Office was praised for putting together such a high variance team to begin with. There was quite a bit of interweb pats on the back, so to speak for the way the 2009 offseason went, and yet they put out a team that, at best, was on the way to 83 wins.

I just don’t agree with this assertion. ZiPS pegged the Mariners for 86 wins, the most of any AL West team. When Replacement Level Yankee Weblog did their simulation blowout, running five other projection systems through 1,000 times each, the Mariners made the playoffs 29.4 percent of the time. The roster wasn’t high variance because they were .500 at best with a lot of downside – they were high variance because they were either going to succeed or flop. They flopped. However, I think that people who are taking the 2010 results as proof that the plan couldn’t have worked are overlooking evidence to the contrary.

The San Diego Padres are winning the NL West with essentially the same overall plan as the Mariners had – league average offense with league best run prevention. The Padres offense has been the definition of average this year – they’ve been worth +4.2 runs above average as a group in over 4,500 plate appearances. They’re in first place in spite of a just okay offense because they’re #1 in xFIP and #1 in UZR. The pitching and defense have both been outstanding, and have carried a mediocre offense into playoff contention.

We can disagree about the likelihood of Bradley, Figgins, Lopez, and Kotchman all performing as they were projected to by ZiPS or CHONE. I don’t think we can make the leap to saying that the team wouldn’t have contended if those guys would have hit as expected, however. We’ve got a team winning with the exact same formula that the Mariners were going for. You don’t have to field an above average offense to have a good team. I don’t think we can pretend that this roster was doomed from the start.

I think we as stat heads overrate the “process” and its ability to produce future results. There are several teams who on the surface really don’t look like they’ve had the best “process” but seem to make things work…

This is a conversation I had with several people up in New York – how much credit or blame should we apportion to a front office for getting unexpected results?

I go with not much. Let’s use the Giants for an example. They openly pursued Adam LaRoche to be their first baseman this year, offering him a decent sized contract to come in and help fix their offense. He decided to go to Arizona, and the Giants ended up signing Aubrey Huff instead. Huff, of course, has been much better than LaRoche, posting a +4.5 WAR compared to +1.8 WAR for the Diamondbacks first baseman.

The Giants preferred LaRoche to Huff. Had he taken their offer, they likely would have ended up with a lesser team. Instead, their back-up plan has blown away their first choice, and it has helped push them into contention. Should we give the Giants credit for signing Huff?

Some, certainly. But they obviously didn’t expect him to do this, or he wouldn’t have been the back-up plan. They’ve received far more than they thought they were going to get from their first baseman. I’m not sure why we should apportion credit to them for the performance above what they expected.

The reality of the situation is that a good process gives you a slight advantage over teams who are making sub-optimal choices. There’s a reason that Jonah Keri has entitled his book about the Rays “The Extra Two Percent” – that is the advantage that teams like Tampa Bay are trying to sustain through good decision making processes. It’s not a huge advantage, but it’s the one that teams can control.

Yes, teams with bad processes get lucky sometimes. If you watch enough poker, you’ll see a lot of bad players beat good players with hands they should have never been involved in to begin with. But the good players are good players because the understand that small advantages add up over time, and they’re willing to put their money on the line when they have an advantage because, more often than not, they’ll win.

More often than not, the good process teams beat the bad process teams. It won’t always work out that way, because there are far too many variables that clubs cannot control, but you want to bet on the teams that are doing things the right way, not on teams that are relying on career years from unexpected sources.

There’s no way I can answer all of the questions in the previous thread, but I’ll do my best to pick ones that seem to represent the population, and so hopefully no one feels left out. Without further ado:

Do you stand by your pre-season ranking? I.e. would you put them #6 again given the same information? Somewhere else?

For most people, I assume this is the big question. Honestly, though, the answer is complicated. Yes, I stand by the ranking, but no, I probably wouldn’t put them #6 if I had to do it over again. That’s confusing, I know, so let me try to explain.

I’m of the opinion that we should see everything in shades of probability. Since we don’t know what’s going to happen, I don’t find a lot of value in predictions. They are, for all intents and purposes, just guesses, some more informed than others. For instance, in my pre-season just for fun predictions post, I named Josh Hamilton as my AL MVP. I thought he was in store for a pretty good year. I had no idea he was going to go nuts like he has, of course, and I don’t think he’s proven that I had some special insight into how his season was going to go.

So, when people point to the Mariners record and how 2010 has turned out, I don’t look at it as proof that this result was inevitable. It was one of many possible outcomes, and one I tried to make clear was possible ahead of time. In the initial post, I talked about how I expected the team to either boom or bust, noting that the risks they had taken would either pay off and result in contention or flop and lead to a mid-summer sell-off. We saw the latter, obviously.

I do not believe that what we have seen invalidates the possibility of what we have not seen, however. I just don’t buy into the philosophy of the results of one season proving correct or incorrect a particular point of view. I believe that most of what I wrote about the team heading into the season was valid and logically sound. I stand by that logic. But, of course, with new information, we have to look back and determine whether or not our expectations were faulty, and there are a few areas where I would say I overestimated the organization.

Do you think you overvalued front office personnel, as opposed to player assets? (MLB and MiLB)

This is, I believe, where the largest disconnect in opinions comes from. I do believe that I value the non-player aspects of an organization more than most, or at least, that’s my perception based on the responses I’ve seen. In my opinion, the most important aspect of an organization’s future health is their continued access to capital and their ability to spend resources wisely. A large payroll team that knows what they are doing is, in many cases, in a better long term position than a team with better players in the organization that is either poorly capitalized or poorly managed.

It appears to me that most people think that I vastly overestimated the talent that the Mariners put on the field this year. I don’t think I did, to be honest. My best guess at the beginning of the season was that they would win 83 games and not make the playoffs, and we talked a lot about how they were counting on a lot of high variance players to perform well. None of them did, and the season has obviously not gone well, but I didn’t expect this team to win the division this year, and I went into the season knowing that a last place finish was entirely possible.

It seems that the consensus is that a team that I saw as .500ish in 2010 should not have ranked so highly, since their talent base is not as impressive as several teams ranked behind them. However, I see players as very fickle assets. You can easily have a franchise player like Grady Sizemore or Jose Reyes quickly lose almost all of their value, and I do not believe that an organization’s overall health should depend on the performance of a small handful of players.

A good team with a lot of resources can adapt to what the unpredictable future brings. We don’t know how players are going to do going forward, which ones are going to stay healthy, or who will follow a non-traditional career arc and play in a manner that is totally unexpected. We can make some educated guesses, especially for the upcoming year, but beyond that, we’re basically throwing dice. However, if you have an organization like the Yankees or Red Sox, who have sustainable resource advantages and know how to use those advantages to full potential, you can project contention further into the future even without knowing what players they’ll have or how the ones they currently have will perform.

Seattle is not a Boston or New York, but they’re a profitable organization that is consistently in the top tier of revenues and payroll, and has a management team in place that knows how to build a winner. Yes, I still believe that. I understand that some people will have skepticism of that belief. That’s fine. I’d argue that this is more of a “reasonable people can disagree” issue than a “oh my god you are a biased moron” issue, though. Yes, the Mariners got a lot of credit in the non-player categories, which pushed them to a level that I understand most of you feel they didn’t deserve. I hope that you can see the consistency of application of the approach throughout the list, however – well run teams with abilities to spend a lot of money ranked really well. My perspective is that the talent currently in an organization is not the primary driver of an organization’s overall health. I know that most people do not see things the same way. I’m okay with that. I just hope they understand where I’m coming from, rather than just assuming that the perspective was born out of a pro-Seattle bias.

Since the rankings basically read like a pre-season guess at who the best teams were this coming year – I acknowledge that wasn’t the intent, but that is how they appear at a glance – that caught attention.

We’ll finish up this post with this question (more answers coming tomorrow, I promise), because I think there’s an important distinction to be made here – the organizational rankings were not at all any kind of attempt at a prediction of the best teams of 2010. Certainly, there’s going to be a strong correlation between those two things for obvious reasons, but that was not the intent.

The organizational rankings are an attempt at a “state of the organization today” kind of analysis. Think of it kind of like the trade value series, only with teams instead of players. We openly admit that we have no idea whether Zack Greinke or Felix Hernandez is going to pitch better over the next three to five years – there are way too many variables in play to make that kind of projection much better than 50/50 either way. The best we can do is take the information we have today and say “if I had to pick one, I’d take this guy”.

The organizational rankings are the same, only with even more expected variance in on field performance because its dealing with significantly more than one player. As several people who hate the whole exercise noted in the comments, there’s no way to know what a team’s roster will look like in several years, or even how good players currently on the team will be. We can make some guesses, but that far out, we’ll be wrong more often than we’re right. I totally agree with the sentiment that projecting a team five years out is folly.

And so I hope that you guys will realize that’s not what we’re trying to do. It’s not a prediction. It’s an “as of today, here’s where they stand” analysis. We try to weigh what factors we can know at the moment and rank things in terms of probability. For all we know, the Astros and Royals may play for the World Series title next year. It’s highly unlikely, which is why those two teams are at the bottom of the list, but it’s possible.

Rather than seeing the list as a prediction of future results, try to see them as a state of the probabilities of success at a given point in time. Even the best organizations are going to be unlikely to win a championship in the next five years. We’re just trying to show which ones may have the best chance at continued success, based on what we can know at the time.

We’re not going to get everything right, clearly. I’d argue that I was more wrong about the Brewers than I was about the Mariners, and I can look back and see some serious issues that I overlooked or underestimated in Milwaukee, but clearly both of those rankings have been called into question, with valid reasoning. But, I think its helpful to at least agree on what the rankings are, and hopefully that can help alleviate some of the questions about why a team that wasn’t projected to be all that great in 2010 ranked so highly to begin with.

Bryan Smith will be be around a little after 4:00 pm to do his weekly Q&Q about all things in the land of prospectdom.

If you’ve read the comments of nearly any post I’ve written in the last few months, you’ve probably seen someone reference #6org, the popular twitter hashtag meme that was born out of our pre-season organizational rankings. A lot of people objected to that ranking when it came out, and the fact that the Mariners have been a disaster this year has only fueled the flames.

I’ve generally ignored the #6org crowd and just let them have their fun. I didn’t want to come across as defensive, and the comments were always off the topic of the actual post anyway. I don’t like encouraging people to hijack the comments of a post on a given subject, so we’ve just glossed over the comments and moved on.

That said, I know there are reasonable people who feel like the ranking is worth discussing in light of how Seattle’s season has gone. So, if you’re one of those people, the next day or two is for you.

I’ll spend the next few posts I write answering questions about Seattle’s placement in our organizational rankings series. How many posts that covers depends on the quality and quantity of the questions – I don’t plan on spending much time responding to trolls, but for those who have legitimate questions or valid points of view, I want to give them a proper response.

So, #6org’ers, this comment thread is for you. If you want to have a reasonable discourse on the issues surrounding the ranking, you can leave your remark in the comments of this post, and I’ll spend the next few days responding as best I can in future posts (trying to respond in enough depth in the comments section is a bit unwieldy). My hope would be that this provides an opportunity for us to see each other’s point of view a bit better. We’ll see how it works.

Fire away.

To celebrate the return of minor league stats to the site, let’s spend a few minutes looking at a guy who is having one of the most interesting seasons in AAA, and has put himself on the map as a guy who has earned another shot in the big leagues – Luis Rodriguez.

You may remember Rodriguez from his time with the Twins and Padres, where he served as the quintessential utility infielder for the last five years. He fit the cliche perfectly – little guy, played multiple positions, put the bat on the ball, no power. He was exactly what you thought of when the terms “backup shortstop” came to mind. After a miserable season at the plate with the Padres last year, where he hit .209/.319/.260, San Diego released him. He hooked on with the Indians over the winter, but was released at the end of spring training. He took a minor league deal with the White Sox and has spent this season with Triple-A Charlotte.

And what a season it has been.

In 354 plate appearances, Rodriguez is hitting .296/.360/.502. That is not a typo – the diminutive middle infielder is outslugging Jesus Montero. A guy who has slapped the ball on the ground for most of his career, he’s already launched 15 home runs in the International League, and 31 of his 90 hits have gone for extra bases. He’s done this while maintaining his excellent bat control, as he again has more walks (34) than strikeouts (30).

His Isolated Slugging (.202) is double what it was previously in his minor league career, and his next home run will give him twice as many longballs as he’s ever had in a single season before.

There’s a pretty good chance that this is a career year. Rodriguez is 30, and it is Triple-A baseball. Stuff like this happens sometimes, and most guys can’t carry it over to the big leagues. However, there’s a contemporary example of this exact same development path currently having a monster year in the majors – Andres Torres.

Like Rodriguez, Torres was a no-power slap hitter who had never really done much offensively in the majors or minors. In 2007, at age 28 and back in Double-A, he started driving the baseball, and carried that over to Triple-A when the Tigers promoted him. It didn’t earn him a big league shot, though, so he signed with the Cubs in 2008 and went back to Triple-A to prove himself. He slugged .501, continuing the power outburst, and the San Francisco Giants took a shot on him as a reserve outfielder for the 2009 season.

Good thing, too – he’s hit .285/.366/.512 in 602 plate appearances over the last two years, and he’s currently one of the few players in baseball having a +5 WAR season in 2010. Torres is the biggest reason that the Giants are still in playoff contention, as his mid-career power surge in the minors turned him into a pretty good player.

Don’t bet on Rodriguez putting up a +5 win season in the big leagues next year. Torres is the exception, not the rule. However, given the success that the Giants have had with their surprisingly strong small outfielder (he’s listed at 5’10, 190, the same size as Rodriguez), expect some Major League team to give Rodriguez another shot in the big leagues.

If by chance the power surge is even somewhat sustainable, Rodriguez could be a nice player for a lot of teams. Switch-hitting infielders who can make contact and drive the ball are not very easy to find. The White Sox may have lucked into one. If they aren’t going to give him a shot, someone else will.

Javier Vazquez’s problems this year have been well documented – his velocity is down, his performance isn’t good, and he’s been less than what New York hoped when they acquired him. However, hidden by the downturn of their newest starter is the fact that two other Yankee starters have also seen pretty dramatic drops in their strikeout rates this year, and are also different pitchers now than they were when the Yankees acquired them – CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett.

Take a look at the three graphs below.

From top to bottom, those are the K/9 rates for Burnett, Sabathia, and Vazquez. If you’re not sure when they joined the Yankees, just look for the year in which their strikeout rate tumbles. In all three cases, the players have become far more contact oriented upon arriving in New York, and for Burnett and Sabathia, its continued on for a second year.

This isn’t to say all three are the same. Sabathia has traded strikeouts for groundballs, as he’s posting the best GB% of his career, so his overall effectiveness hasn’t changed much. While he’s a different pitcher this year, he’s not demonstrably worse. The same cannot be said of Burnett or Vazquez, who have both failed to adjust to their inability to miss bats, and are having seasons far worse than their most recent ones.

There is one commonality between them, though – all three are using their fastball a little bit more often than last year. Sabathia has gone from 61.6% to 64.5%, Burnett from 65.9% to 70.7%, and Vazquez from 49.9% to 53.4%. These are not major changes, but they’re different enough across the board that, combined with the lack of strikeouts from all three, it may be time for the Yankees front office to sit down with their pitching coaches and say “hey, what exactly are you telling these guys?”

It could just be a coincidence. It might not have anything to do with what these guys are being taught. But if I worked for the Yankees, I’d certainly want to make sure that there wasn’t something going on at the field level that was changing all these high priced pitchers that we kept bringing in, and in several cases, making them worse.

Last week, Zack Greinke spoke pretty candidly about his thoughts on the Royals organization. Needless to say, he’s not a big fan of where the organization is currently at. Years of losing have a way of taking a toll on a player’s loyalty.

As I flew up to New York last week for our live event, I was pondering Greinke’s comments. As most people know, he’s part of the stable of pitchers that like advanced statistics, and will look at sites like this one to evaluate how well they’re performing. He quoted FIP at his Cy Young Award press conference last year. Odds are pretty good that not only does he look at his own stats here on the site, but he looks at some of the other metrics available and some of the commentary as well.

Needless to say, none of it has been very favorable towards the Royals the last few years. If Greinke is looking at his own FIP, he probably knows that Yuniesky Betancourt ranks as one of the worst defensive shortstops in baseball by UZR, and yet he had to sit and watch as his team traded for Betancourt to try and turn ground balls into outs. Imagine the frustration of a guy who is being told to pitch to contact believing that the shortstop his team is excited about acquiring has the range of a wilted fern.

So, when someone asked me at the event on Saturday what I thought the effects of sabermetric ideas and statistics gaining traction with players was, this was the first thing that came to my mind. It is certainly not our intent to cause discord between players and their organizations, but I have to wonder if part of Greinke’s frustration with the Royals stems from the fact that the advanced statistics that interest him paint a poor picture of almost everything that Kansas City does.

If more players begin to take an interest in evaluating themselves and their peers in this way, it will be interesting to see if there’s a trickle-up effect. In some sense, it’s easy for Dayton Moore or Ed Wade to dismiss the criticism of their moves as just the rantings of fans, but it is a much more delicate situation when that frustration is coming from your best player. Will owners be willing to continue hiring GMs who ignore UZR if their pitchers are using it to determine how good the defenders behind them are?

Perhaps Greinke, Bannister, and Scherzer are just outliers, and we won’t see any serious uptick in this kind of statistical usage by big league players. That’s certainly possible. On the other hand, though, if this becomes more prevalent in major league clubhouses, it could present an interesting dilemma for teams that don’t really want to use these kinds of numbers to make decisions. Pressure from your players is a lot different than pressure from your fans.

When all is said and done, I would be willing to bet that the rookie class of 2010 will go down as the best in the history of the game. The new wave of talent that has arrived in the show this year is off the charts. With Stephen Strasburg, Carlos Santana, and Buster Posey, we’ve seen three guys step right in and become premier players right away, and the depth of players behind those three is just nutty.

But rather than focusing on the class as a whole, I just wanted to look at the trio of underage guys who are making a big impact for their clubs. Jason Heyward, Mike Stanton, and Starlin Castro are all in their age 20 season (Heyward turned 21 a couple of days ago), and all performing well, which is a rare accomplishment.

In terms of performance in a year before age 21, this group (Heyward, Stanton, and Castro) is almost certainly the best in recent history. They have combined for +6.6 WAR, a staggeringly high total for three guys who can’t drink, especially considering two of them began the season in the minors. While guys like Alex Rodriguez had a great individual age 20 season, it’s rare to see three super young guys come into the league together and all play well.

In terms of talent, this is probably the best trio to arrive together since 1989, when Ken Griffey Jr, Gary Sheffield, and Sammy Sosa all hit the scene at the same time. Of those three, however, only Griffey was a good player that year- Sosa and Sheffield would develop into productive players later on in their careers.

The ultimate comparison, though, is the three guys who showed up together in 1951: Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Chet Nichols. Okay, fine, the last name in the group doesn’t really belong with the first two, but he was a sensation in his rookie year, posting a league leading 2.88 ERA and finishing second (to Mays) in the Rookie of the Year voting.

We don’t know where the careers of Stanton, Heyward, and Castro will go from here, though given their talents, its easy to suspect that all three are in line for some great things going forward. Whether they can match the ultimate star power of the 1989 group is something we’ll only know in 20 years. What we can say, however, is that we probably won’t see a trio of underage guys this good break in together again any time soon.

After making his start today against the Rays, Justin Verlander has now taken the hill 24 times this year, throwing 2,674 pitches on the season. Roy Halladay has also taken the hill 24 times, and has thrown 2,623 pitches, 51 fewer than the Tigers ace, and yet he’s thrown 28 more innings than Verlander – 185 to 157.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a knock on Verlander – few pitchers can rack up the innings like Halladay. It does, however, illustrate one of the big advantages that that groundball strike-throwers have over dominating power pitchers who get a lot of outs in the air. Because Halladay keeps the ball on the ground, he’s gotten opposing hitters to ground into 19 double plays, while Verlander has induced just seven twin killings.

In addition, since Halladay throws so many strikes, each batter is dispatched more quickly. He has more three pitch strikeouts than Verlander, even though his overall strikeout rate is lower, and he rarely works into hitters counts. And, of course, since he walks fewer batters, he faces a lower number of batters per inning, allowing him to work deeper into games.

I bring this up because, when talking about the quality of a young pitcher (especially one in the minors), the first thing that is usually referenced is strikeout rate. As Bill James noted back in the 80s, a young pitcher’s K/9 tells us more of what we want to know about how well he’ll do in the majors than any other single statistic, mainly because it is the best proxy for quality of stuff.

However, while strikeouts are certainly a positive event for a pitcher, the Verlander approach to pitching is not the ideal, because it leads to extremely high pitch counts and shorter outings overall. Halladay’s economic approach to getting outs has given him the equivalent of four extra starts compared to Verlander, a huge difference in value for their respective teams.

The strike-everyone-out approach comes with an inability to work deep into ballgames. Even though Verlander is once again among the league leaders in pitches thrown, he’s only tossed one complete game and gotten through eight innings on three other occasions. For comparison, Halladay has eight complete games and has gotten through eight innings in five other starts.

It might not be as sexy, but getting groundball outs and limiting walks is a far more efficient way of pitching than trying to blow every hitter away. Strikeout rate is nice, but don’t let it be the only tool you use to evaluate a young pitcher – not only are Ks not the only way to succeed, they aren’t even the best way.

Back from New York, I’ll be chatting about the event this past weekend and baseball in general.