Fun game of the day – mix and match collections of first baseman that equal Justin Morneau in value so far this year.

Morneau: +3.6 wins

Albert Pujols, Adrian Gonzalez, and Todd Helton: +3.6 wins
Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, and Adam Dunn: +3.6 wins
Kevin Youkilis, Paul Konerko, and Mark Teixeira: +3.6 wins
Joey Votto, Billy Butler, and Ryan Howard: +3.6 wins

No matter who you pick, you’ll need multiple all-stars to put together a group that can match Morneau’s season to date. He’s been that good.

After years of being just a good-not-great hitter, Morneau looks to be doing the same thing that Gonzalez did last year: combining a small power spike with a huge jump in his walk rate. In 2009, Gonzalez drew 45 more walks than he did the year prior, while holding everything else mostly the same, and the result was a wOBA that jumped from the .360 range to over .400, making Gonzalez one of the game’s best players.

Morneau’s career walk rate is just 10.1 percent, as he began his career as a pretty aggressive free swinger, but it’s inched up over the last couple of years. This year, however, his BB% stands at 18.5 percent. He’s tied with The Greek God of Walks for the league lead in bases on balls, and at this pace, he’ll beat his previous career high by more than 50 walks.

At age 29, it appears that Morneau has found the value of being selective at the plate, and it’s paying off in a huge way. He won’t keep hitting .383, of course (that .444 BABIP is as unsustainable as any statistic in baseball), but as we saw with Gonzalez last year, the improvement in his walk rate could be real. While he already has one MVP award under his belt, perhaps this new and improved Justin Morneau will actually deserve one some day.

The Baltimore Orioles are a shocking 17 games out of first place. Part of it is that they’ve played really poorly, but that has been compounded with Tampa Bay playing excellent baseball and opening up a canyon sized gap despite the calendar still reading May. However, while their playoff odds may be zero due in large part because of the division they play in, the fact still remains that the Orioles hold no realistic chance of playing baseball in October of this year.

With that being made clear so quickly, the Orioles should take advantage of the one silver lining in the cloud that is their 2010 season – the ability to be the first seller to market.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard multiple GMs explaining that there simply isn’t a market of available players yet. The oft-quoted principle of the first third of the season being for evaluating your roster has spread, and historically, there have been very few significant trades made before June. Organizations are reticent to wave the white flag too early in a given season, and prefer to wait until summer before becoming sellers.

This reluctance to trade, quite simply, an opportunity for the Orioles. They have several pieces who could be of interest to potential contenders who need to improve sooner than later, and could peddle the likes of Kevin Millwood, Luke Scott, Ty Wigginton, and Miguel Tejada without any serious competition from other teams who will join the market in a month or two.

Being the only seller in a market where there is demand for players can only be a good thing for the Orioles. While they have some attractive pieces, players like Wigginton won’t stand up as well once the market gets crowded with better players being made available. Right now, he would be the best right-handed hitter any team could acquire, though that almost certainly won’t be true in July.

There’s no point in waiting any longer. The Orioles should let every GM know that their players are available, and they’re willing to deal. They might not be selling grade A premium beef, but there’s a reason Taco Bell does so well at 2 am – they’re the only ones open.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Carl Crawford this week. Yesterday, it led me back to Rickey Henderson. Today, we go the other direction, as I’ve been struck by just how shockingly similar one of the game’s best young outfielders is to the Rays star.

First, here’s Crawford’s 2010 season line:

.316/.376/.510, 8.5% BB%, 18.5% K%, .194 ISO, .368 BABIP, 10/4 SB/CS .386 wOBA

And now, here’s Andrew McCutchen’s 2010 season line:

.327/.382/.487, 7.6% BB%, 17.3% K%, .160 ISO, .371 BABIP, 12/4 SB/CS, .390 wOBA

Both McCutchen and Crawford are guys whose most obvious tool is speed, but then offer a surprising amount of punch at the plate. They hit the ball hard, utilizing their gap power to sprint around the bases and rack up doubles and triples. They’re not identical, of course, as Crawford is a lefty and McCutchen is a righty, and Crawford is three inches taller as well, but they are very similar ballplayers.

Despite all the problems the Pirates have faced this year, they still have to be thrilled with how quickly their center fielder has turned into one of the game’s best. He’s still just 23 years of age, but has now racked up essentially one full year’s worth of playing time in the big leagues (148 games, 664 plate appearances), and he’s been worth +4.5 wins over that time. That’s an all-star level performance, and he’s done it as a rookie. In fact, over the last calendar year, McCutchen has the highest wOBA (.377) of any center fielder in baseball.

It might be a little silly to go looking for the next Carl Crawford when the current one hasn’t even turned 30 yet, but McCutchen has staked his claim as being the next in line to Crawford’s throne, ruling the land of excitement with line drives and triples. Pittsburgh has a lot of fixing to do, but they have one rock solid piece in place; their center fielder is already in the discussion for best in the game at a very young age.

Tommy Hanson has been tremendous this year. He was not tremendous today, giving up eight runs in the second inning, as the Reds chased him from the game. After Laynce Nix doubled in Jay Bruce and Ramon Hernandez, the Braves odds of winning stood at just 2.3 percent.

The Braves would mount a little bit of offense, eventually cutting the lead to 9-3 and seeing their win expectancy peak at 7.3 percent in the 5th inning. But, after a few more dead end rallies and a six run deficit heading into the 9th inning, the Braves odds of winning stood at 0.2 percent. In other words, not good.

Then, this happened.

Troy Glaus singles.
Eric Hinske singles.
Yunel Escobar singles.
Nate McLouth singles.
David Ross walks.
Martin Prado reaches on fielders choice/error

That brought Jason Heyward, hero of the Braves season, to the plate representing the winning run. The major league leader in WPA was given yet another chance to send Atlanta into delirium.

He struck out.

With their odds of winning back down to 18.5 percent, Brooks Conrad, he of the career .289 wOBA, launched a launched a walk off grand slam off Francisco Cordero.

Baseball – it’s amazing.

In looking at Carl Crawford’s career totals this morning, it’s hard not to be impressed by his consistent stolen base numbers. Since 2003, he has stolen between 46 and 60 bases in every year except one (2008, when he wasn’t healthy), and he’s already in the top 100 in all time base stealing leaders. He’s an excellent baserunner, one of the best in the game, and it’s part of the reason he’s going to become a very rich man this winter.

However, this post isn’t about Crawford. It’s almost impossible to look at the SB leaderboard and not be in awe of the sheer dominance of Rickey Henderson, who has 468 more steals than anyone else in the history of the game. Only 43 people have ever stolen 468 bases in their careers, and yet that’s the margin between Henderson and the next most prolific thief.

Once you start looking at Henderson’s numbers, you can’t help but be drawn to 1982: 130 stolen bases, a number exceeded by only four teams last season. In addition, he was caught stealing another 42 times for 172 total stolen base attempts. He was on first or second base with the next base open 225 times, and he attempted 172 steals.

Seventy-six percent of the time, when he had the chance, he ran. The league average, not including Henderson’s craziness, was 7.8 percent. Tim Raines, who led the National League in stolen bases that year, ran on 36 percent of his chances.

We hear talk about how the game has changed so dramatically in the last 20 years, switching to a home runs and strikeouts model. However, the league average attempted stolen base rate hasn’t fallen all that far, as runners in 2010 have taken 6.3 percent of their stolen base chances to date. It’s lower, but perhaps not as dramatically so as the hyperbole would suggest.

Twenty-eight years ago, the best basestealer in the world saw an open base and ran 76 percent of the time. Forget 511 wins or a 56 game hitting streak – that’s a number that will never be duplicated. Maybe the game hasn’t changed all that much – it’s just without the most aggressive runner anyone has ever seen.

In a few hours, Livan Hernandez will take the hill against the Mets, and he will look to continue one of the luckiest runs in the history of major league baseball.

A quick look at the gap between Hernandez’s ERA (1.46) and his xFIP (5.09) would tell that he’s gotten fortunate, but I don’t even think those numbers do justice just how incredibly Hernandez has walked the tightrope this season.

He’s thrown 49 1/3 innings in his seven starts and allowed just nine runs while putting 51 men on base. Well, that’s not really true, because he’s allowed six home runs, so those guys were never really “baserunners” in the sense that most of us think of the word. Take the home runs out of the picture, and Hernandez has put 45 guys on base. Three of them have scored.

Three. Out of 45.

And the hilarious part is that he hasn’t even pitched all that well with runners on base. He’s pitched to 71 hitters when there as at least one man on. Of those 71, he’s walked nine, struck out just six, and posted an okay-but-not-spectacular 47% groundball percentage. However, opponents have an .054 batting average on balls in play against him in those situations. Oh Fifty Four.

It’s even better when opponents have put a runner in scoring position. In the 38 batters who have faced Hernandez with a chance to drive in a run, one has gotten a hit, and it was a single. Opponents are 1 for 30 with seven walks and a sac fly against Livan in RISP situations. Only four of those 29 outs were strikeouts.

I figured I should write about this while I still had the chance, because every time he takes the hill, there’s a chance it will all just blow up. No one can sustain this for very long, especially not a guy who just throws the ball over the plate and hopes the ball finds one of his fielders. But yet, for seven miraculous starts, Hernandez has seen just that happen.

It’s one of the most amazing things we’ll ever see on a baseball field.

The chat begins at noon eastern. Keep in mind that RotoGraphs hosts a chat each Friday, so you’ll get your fantasy advice fix over there, and we’ll try to focus mostly on MLB stuff.

If you’ve ever listened to a broadcast when a struggling power pitcher is on the mound, you’ve inevitably heard the sermon on why good stuff isn’t enough to succeed in the big leagues, but that you have to know how to pitch, which only comes through years of experience and learning.

Sergio Santos would beg to differ. The former shortstop, drafted in the first round by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2002, gave up on hitting last year after an eight year minor league career. The White Sox turned him into a relief pitcher, hoping that his strong arm would translate into success on the mound, but it was a rough transition to say the least. He threw 28 2/3 innings, gave up 37 hits, walked 20, struck out 30, and posted an 8.16 ERA. The velocity was there, but the results were not.

It was just the first year of the experiment, however. He came to camp showing significantly better command and, mostly because he was out of options, made the White Sox bullpen. His performance to date has been nothing short of shocking.

His season line, including today’s performance: 14 1/3 IP, 8 H, 1 ER, 7 BB, 18 K.

This is a guy who entered the year with less than 30 professional innings under his belt. He was nothing short of terrible in his first exposure to pitching, and yet, here he is in the big leagues, blowing hitters away.

He’s mixing three pitches – a mid 90s fastball, a hard biting slider, and a surprisingly good change-up. He’s been good against both left-handed and right-handed hitters. He’s throwing strikes, getting ahead in counts, and forcing hitters to chase nasty breaking balls in the dirt.

Yes, it’s 14 innings, but so far, Sergio Santos is out-pitching almost every big name reliever in baseball. It’s a testament to how much improvement he made in spring training, the skills of White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper, and, truthfully, how very easy it is to be a relief pitcher if you have a good arm. And Sergio Santos has a very, very good arm.

Before the season began, some people (such as myself) expected the Milwaukee Brewers to at least give the St. Louis Cardinals a fight for the National League Central title. It wasn’t hard to look at an offense that featured Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder, and Rickie Weeks as one that could put runs on the board, and there were enough arms on the pitching staff that I liked to think that they could outscore the opponents on most nights.

It hasn’t happened. After losing last night, their seventh consecutive defeat, the Brewers stand at 15-23, seven games behind the first place Reds and six and a half games behind the Cardinals. They are one of only five teams in baseball with a winning percentage below .400. They are certainly better than they’ve played, but, at this point, the hole may be too large for them to climb out of.

With 124 games to play, assuming that they’ll need to win 92 games to give themselves a good chance of winning the NL Central or the Wild Card, they would have to play .621 baseball the rest of the way to make that happen. As much as I like some of the players on this roster, I don’t think anyone can realistically expect the Brewers to win 62 percent of their remaining games.

There’s also the problem of the Reds. It’s one thing to be trying to run down just the Cardinals, but when you add a second team to the mix, you limit the chance that you’ll win by default, as your competitors fall by the wayside. With just one team to overcome, there’s a chance that they could face serious injury issues or have a prolonged slump of their own, but that is far less likely to occur to both St. Louis and Cincinnati simultaneously.

Realistically, the playoff chances for the Brewers appear slim for 2010, and with that reality staring them in the face, it’s probably time for them to put Prince Fielder on the trading block. Ryan Howard’s crazy extension only served to make it even less appealing for the Brewers to attempt to re-sign their slugging first baseman, and with his 2010 value being diluted by his teammates’ poor play, it makes the most sense to deal him this summer.

It’s not the outcome that Milwaukee had in mind when they put this roster together, and they do have enough talent to right the ship and get back to a winning record, but they are far enough back in the NL Central where its getting to be time to change directions. Six weeks of bad baseball can sink a season, and in the case of the Brewers, it probably has.

This afternoon, I mentioned Jose Bautista’s power surge over the last week, where he hit four home runs and upped his season total to 10, tying him for the 5th most in the major leagues. While it’s easy to point to Bautista’s career numbers (and the leaderboards, where he’s joined by Kelly Johnson and Alex Gonzalez, among others) and write this off as a small sample fluke, Dan pointed out in the comments section that Bautista started this power surge last September, when he launched 10 home runs in 125 plate appearances.

How striking is the difference? If you run Bautista’s career numbers from 2004 through August of last year, he had hit 49 home runs in 1,913 plate appearances, or one every 39 trips to the plate. Since September of 2009, he has hit 20 home runs in 292 plate appearances, a rate of one every 14 trips to the plate.

That’s the kind of drastic change in results that warrants a closer look.

For his part, Bautista claims to have overhauled his swing with Blue Jays hitting coach Dwayne Murphy:

“I was getting ready so late,” Bautista said. “Now, I feel like I can attack the ball in any count, and I’m on the offensive at all times and I’m not going up there to the plate trying to fight for my life.”

Overall, his batted ball profile didn’t change much last September – the main difference was that 25.6 percent of his fly balls went over the wall, a drastic increase from the 10 percent mark he’d run earlier in his career. He hasn’t been able to sustain all of that power this year, though his 18.9 percent HR/FB rate is still nearly double his previous career totals.

While it’s tempting to stick the “New Ben Zobrist” label on Bautista, we’re still dealing with under 300 plate appearances and a HR/FB rate that would put him in the same category as monstrous sluggers like Prince Fiedler, Adam Dunn, and Carlos Pena. Listed at 6’0/195, Bautista doesn’t look like those kind of mashers, and we shouldn’t expect him to continue pounding the baseball like he has been.

However, we can’t overlook the fact that he’s put up 28 percent of his career home runs in the most recent 13 percent of his career plate appearances. While ZIPS had Bautista posting a .161 ISO heading into the season, the updated ZIPS projection for the rest of 2010 has him at a .192 ISO, accounting for the fact that Bautista is showing a new found power stroke that hadn’t been part of his arsenal prior to last September.

The sample size isn’t large enough to claim that Bautista is for real, but it is too large to simply ignore the performance and assume he’ll go back to being the player he was prior to last fall. He is one player worth keeping a close eye for the rest of the 2010 season.