So, we have splits now. We’ve talked about how to use them and how not to use them. Today, I want to talk about why our splits matter. After all, Baseball-Reference has a great splits section, and has for a while. But, B-R is focused on providing factual data (which they do very well – this is no knock on the site that Sean has built), and as we’ve talked about before, sometimes what actually happened is not the best predictor of what is going to happen.

Let’s use an example of why having split data for metrics like xFIP is important. If you go to Jered Weaver’s page at Baseball Reference, you’ll notice his career L/R split is pretty large. Righties have hit just .232/.283/.365 against him, but lefties have managed a significantly better .267/.327/.449 mark. There’s a 126 point gap between his OPS against RHB and LHB.

Now, look at Weaver’s splits page here.

Vs Left: 7.17 K/9, 3.01 BB/9, 36% GB%, 4.51 xFIP
Vs Right: 7.47 K/9, 2.30 BB/9, 28% GB%, 4.42 xFIP

That’s a pretty different story. In terms of the numbers that measure skills, Weaver’s not actually all that much better against RHBs than LHBs. The things that drive Weaver’s large career platoon split? HR/FB and BABIP, two of the least predictive metrics out there.

For his career, lefties have turned 10.6% of their flyballs off of Weaver into home runs. Right-handers have just managed 5.6%, causing a big gap in home run rate. Also, lefties have tagged him for a .307 BABIP, compared to just .282 for righties.

Maybe more research into these issues will reveal that handedness effects these two metrics more than we currently know, but right now, Weaver’s profile is not that of a guy who will continue to post big splits going forward. He’s no Vicente Padilla. He’s a little bit better against right-handed batters, but not much more than the norm.

You’d have a really hard time knowing that from his results. This is one of the great things that we’ll be able to flush out with split data here on the site, and one of the reasons we’re so excited to have them now.

The fall of the newspaper business is not news anymore. In nearly every city in the country, papers are scaling back coverage of everything, including baseball, in order to save costs. In some cities, such as Washington, the scaling back represents almost a complete removal of day-to-day coverage of the team. This is, simply, not good news for anyone. Basic capitalism demands competition to get the most efficient outcome, and even in a business where there isn’t necessarily a tangible product being sold, quality declines when people leave the industry.

To combat this, Mark Zuckerman, a laid-off writer from the Washington Times, is raising money to go to Florida and cover the team on his own. I asked Mark to sum up why he’s doing this, and this was his answer:

“Between the Times eliminating the entire sports section and leaving all of us unemployed, and the Post still searching for a new beat writer, there’s been a real lack of quality Nats coverage outside of websites owned by MLB and the team. I’m hoping I can at least somewhat fill the void and provide the kind of comprehensive coverage fans have always counted on from newspapers.”

He estimates that it’s going to cost about $5,000 for him to spend six weeks in Viera, covering the Nationals on a daily basis. If you’ve ever planned a trip to Florida, you know that $5,000 doesn’t go very far, so Mark is clearly cutting corners in order to get down there and give Nationals’ fans another option in their coverage of the team. He’s not making a profit on this.

I know there are a lot of worthy places for us to give our money right now, and the economy still sucks, but I highly encourage you to donate to Mark’s cause, even if you are not a Washington Nationals fan. It’s in the best interest of fans everywhere that the information stream about baseball news is not restricted solely to those who work directly for an organization. That Mark is willing to do this beat for such a pittance is an opportunity that we should not pass up.

As of this writing, he’s almost halfway there. If you have some disposable income, consider giving to Mark’s cause, and let’s all make sure that the Nationals fans can enjoy spring training news – no matter how mundane it may be at times – just like the rest of us.

There are a lot of interesting tidbits of information that can be gained through the new splits pages found here on FanGraphs, but there is one that shines above all the rest – Joe Mauer. The Twins star catcher is not just a tremendous hitter; he’s also a tremendously weird hitter.

Take, for example, Mauer’s career spray chart numbers for balls hit to different areas of the field.

There are a few things that should jump off the page immediately. How about that crazy 10.09 GB/FB ratio when he pulls the ball, which is the result of that even crazier 7.6% FB% on balls to right field. Seriously, seven point six percent of his balls to right field are categorized as fly balls. When Mauer turns on a pitch, he’s beating it into the ground. That flips entirely when he hits the ball the other way, though, as nearly 50% of his balls in play to left field are fly balls. That latter number is entirely normal, actually – it’s the batted profile on pulled balls that is so nutty.

Actually, for reference, let’s just give the league averages for all hitters on their spray chart data.

That’s the norm. You’ll see the obvious pull power, with both LH and RH hitters posting .280 ISOs when they hit to their pull field. That gets cut in half when a normal hitter goes up the middle or the other way. For pretty much every hitter in baseball, their lowest wOBA is going to be to the opposite field, where fly balls are high but home runs are low, leading to a lot of weak fly outs. Mauer, though, is no normal hitter. His power is almost entirely to left field.

When he goes the other way, he runs a .410 wOBA, and his ISO is twice as high to LF (.257) as it is to RF (.122). When he pulls the ball, he’s pretty terrible, posting just a .289 wOBA, thanks to the copious amount of ground balls. The difference between his pull/opposite field numbers are stunning, especially in comparison with how pretty much every other hitter on earth functions.

In fact, given this data, there’s actually a case to be made that teams should consider employing two different shifts against Mauer; an outfield shift playing him as if he was a pull-heavy right-handed batter, and an infield shift treating him as a pull-heavy left-handed hitter. Groundballs to the left side and flyballs to the right side comprise such a small percentage of Mauer’s batted ball profile that a straight-up alignment is an inefficient way of defending him, and he’s made a living by taking advantage of it.

If you employ the traditional infield shift, with three defenders on the right side, you should be able to limit his hits through the hole from the crazy amount of grounders. At the same time, shifting your outfielders the other way, shading towards left field, will cover more of the areas where he traditionally racks up his extra base hits. By having the outfielders shifted towards left, you’re also more likely to cut off balls that roll past the third baseman, who is left to defend that side of the infield by himself, before they get to the wall.

It would look really weird, and Mauer’s a good enough hitter that he may just render the whole thing moot by changing his swing and swatting balls to the right field corner, but I’d love to see a team give this a try. The current way of trying to get him out certainly isn’t working, and his batted ball profile is so unique that it almost demands a radical change in how you position your fielders when he’s at the plate.

So, stat guys working for MLB clubs reading this, this is your challenge for 2010 – convince your manager to give the double-shift against Mauer a chance. Make him change his approach in order to get on base. Stop letting him beat you just because he’s so different than a normal hitter.

As you’ve probably noticed, David unveiled split data as the newest addition to the site yesterday. This is something that has been in the works for quite a while, and David worked long and hard on getting this on the site. For the first time, we’ll be able to really break down how a player performs against different pitcher types, as things like xFIP by handedness of batter have not previously been available.

However, as RJ noted a bit this morning, we do want to encourage wise use of split data, because these are the types of numbers that can be abused at times. In practicality, any split is going to be a smaller subset of a larger sample, and when you reduce your sample size, you increase the amount of noise in the number. There’s no way around that.

In fact, you can slice and dice numbers enough ways to always find some way that a player performed abnormally. Whether it’s batting average against lefties on Tuesdays or FIP in alternating months, these are the kinds of numbers that really mean nothing. They are the kinds of splits that give rise to things like the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” cliche. When looking at split data, we’d suggest limiting your conclusions to effects that are well known – platoons, parks, pull or opposite field results, etc…

Finally, you also want to keep the overall performance of the league in a specific situation in mind when looking at split data. We’ll get league averages by situation on the site in the not too distant future, but here’s a sneak peak at some batted ball league averages (2002-2009), so that you can compare players against a baseline for each type of struck ball:

Bunts: .376/.376/.377, .336 wOBA
Grounders: .231/.231/.253, .214 wOBA
Flies: .217/.212/.602, .328 wOBA
Liners: .727/.723/.974, .734 wOBA

It really is stunning how important hitting line drives is. Unless you’re regularly pounding fly balls over the wall, any other batted ball type is just not very productive. In fact, when you look at the BABIP split for fly balls, you see that 87 percent of non-HR flies result in outs. Line drives are where it’s at.

We’ll have more on the proper way to use split data over the next few days. Enjoy them, find interesting nuggets hidden away, but also remember to use them judiciously. You don’t want to voluntarily cut your sample size in half if you don’t have a reason to.

When people talk about teams that have had good off-seasons, the usual names that come up are the Seattle Mariners, the Boston Red Sox, and people that hate the New York Mets. For all of them, this has been a productive winter full of good news. But there’s a new contender in the mix for best off-season in baseball: the Minnesota Twins.

They were able to retain Carl Pavano on a one-year deal, solidifying their starting rotation. They picked up J.J. Hardy on the cheap to solve their shortstop problem. They added Jim Thome as a bat off the bench and to provide depth at DH and, by extension, the corner outfield spots. And they’re reportedly on the verge of signing Joe Mauer to a long-term contract that will keep him in Minnesota for the rest of his career – or most of it, anyway.

They capped their winter yesterday by signing Orlando Hudson to play second base, getting him for the bargain rate of just $5 million. His abilities with the bat, as a switch-hitter no less, make him a perfect fit for what the Twins needed. He’ll slide in between Denard Span and Joe Mauer, breaking up the string of lefties and giving their line-up depth that it did not have before.

With Hudson, Hardy, and Thome, the Twins have improved their offense significantly. By retaining Pavano and watching Francisco Liriano return to form in winter ball, their pitching rotation has the chance to be among the best in baseball. Their bullpen is still good, anchored by a relief ace and some quality arms in front of him.

It’s hard to imagine the Twins could have had a better winter. They used this off-season to upgrade the team, and while the roster isn’t perfect, they are clearly the class of the AL Central at this point. Adding Hudson is just the cherry on top of what was already a very good winter.

Pretty much every year, there’s a team that the projection systems are optimistic about, relative to the general feel of baseball fans and analysts at large. This year, it looks like that team may be the Reds, who haven’t been seriously talked about as contenders by too many folks, but who look like they could be pretty good on paper.

Despite winning just 78 games last year, there’s quite a bit of talent on the roster. Scott Rolen and Brandon Phillips are established All-Star caliber players, while Joey Votto certainly looks like a guy who should be able to perform at that kind of level, given how well he played in 2009. Beyond just those three, the roster is littered with upside.

Jay Bruce, as we’ve talked about, was a league average hitter despite a fluky .222 BABIP last year. His skill metrics suggest he’s a premium power hitter, and just needs more balls to find holes in order for everyone to realize it. Drew Stubbs has been regarded as an elite defensive center fielder since his days in college, and his first appearance in the majors did nothing to diminish that reputation. Chris Heisey and Wladimir Balentien have destroyed minor league pitching in the past.

Not even counting the useful Chris Dickerson or somewhat-less-useful Jonny Gomes, that outfield has a chance to be really good. And we’ve already mentioned three potential all-stars on the infield. Even their weak spots, catcher and shortstop, are manned by not-horrible players in Ramon Hernandez, Ryan Hanigan, Orlando Cabrera, and Paul Janish.

On the position player side of things, the Reds stack up well with just about any team in the National League. And while the pitching staff lacks an ace, the quartet of Aaron Harang, Bronson Arroyo, Johnny Cueto, and Homer Bailey are far from disastrous. As a group, they’re roughly league average. Micah Owings is coming off a bad season, but of course, makes up for some of his problems on the mound by hitting well, and few teams have a reliable #5 starter anyway.

I guess I’m just surprised at the level of, well, surprise surrounding talk of the Reds as contenders. They have some good hitters, some good fielders, and some good enough pitchers. They were nearly a .500 team a year ago while wasting at-bats on the likes of Willy Taveras, and he’s thankfully been excised from the roster.

The Reds have the makings of a pretty good team in 2010. We shouldn’t be all that surprised to find them right in the thick of things come September.

The Blue Jays are in rebuilding mode. That much is pretty clear, given that they weren’t good enough to contend with Roy Halladay, and their chances of doing so in the AL East without him are slim and none. They’ve spent the off-season making trades for young, cost-controlled talent, reloading their farm system and attempting to put themselves in a better spot in the future.

But, there’s an interesting wrinkle to their rebuilding plan – they don’t really have much of a line-up for 2011 and beyond right now.

Here are their current projected starters for this year:

C – John Buck
1B – Lyle Overbay
2B – Aaron Hill
SS – Alex Gonzalez
3B – Edwin Encarnacion
LF – Travis Snider
CF – Vernon Wells
RF – Jose Bautista
DH – Adam Lind

Buck, Overbay, and Gonzalez are free agents at the end of this season. Encarnacion and Bautista are pretty good non-tender candidates, as both will likely be worth less than they would receive in their final arbitration season. Of their starting nine, only four are certain to be back next year, and if Wells has another poor season, he might find himself relegated to a reserve role, or potentially released.

Toss in free-agents-to-be in the bullpen, such as Scott Downs and Jason Frasor, and a huge chunk of the Toronto roster will probably be playing elsewhere next year. This leads us to two conclusions:

1. Expect a really large fire sale from the Great White North this summer. Once the mid-season trading season kicks into high gear, everyone’s going to be calling the Blue Jays. It doesn’t matter what you need, they’ll have one available.

2. The Jays are going to have a ton of money to spend next winter.

That second point is the interesting one that I want to focus on. Right now, the Jays have three players under contract for 2011: Vernon Wells ($26.6M), Aaron Hill ($5M), and John McDonald ($1.5M). Those guys total just over $33 million in commitments. That figure will increase significantly once they hand out arbitration raises to virtually their entire pitching staff (they have a stunning 11 pitchers who will be arbitration eligible next winter), but you’re still looking at only between $40 and $50 million in salaries for the guys who should be Blue Jays next year.

Assuming that ownership doesn’t pare their payroll back significantly, that should give Alex Anthopolous and his crew a pretty decent chunk of change to spend next winter. And, if there’s one thing that’s been pretty evident over the last two winters, it’s that a shrewd GM can do pretty well filling out his roster in free agency these days. Starting shortstops, even good ones, are going for $5 to $6 million per year. Power hitting first baseman are getting less than that. Good defensive outfielders with some power are signing for peanuts.

The young talent that the Blue Jays acquired this winter will be the core of the team that they try to contend with going forward, but they’re not going to be limited to just the guys they develop from within. Thanks to the payroll flexibility they now have, expect to see Toronto give their rebuild a jump start next winter.

Gabe Gross, Ryan Garko, Reed Johnson, and Eric Byrnes have all signed contracts in the past week or so, each settling for under $1 million on a one year contract after shopping their skills around. Each of these guys have some value in part-time platoon roles, specializing in hitting pitchers who throw with a certain hand, but lack a necessary skill to play full time.

Because of the ever increasing size of bullpens, these types of hitting specialists have fallen out of favor. The meager salaries that these guys have had to accept highlights the lack of value that teams are now placing on platoons. With only 13 of 25 roster spots dedicated to position players on most teams, it is becoming far more difficult for teams to accommodate left-right platoons and still have the necessary reserves for their starters in case of injury.

Is that a wise use of roster allocation? I’m honestly not sure. I know there’s been a backlash against the ever increasing bullpen sizes among the sabermetric community, but I haven’t seen much in the way of evidence that specializing your bench is more efficient than specializing your bullpen.

Yes, the 12th pitcher on any given team is usually not very good, often producing at a near replacement level. Even if they pitch decently, the leverage of the innings they are given is usually so low that their overall value is quite low. So a straight comparison between value of platoon guy versus value of the 12th reliever will naturally lead one to conclude that teams would be better off with a larger bench and smaller bullpen.

I think there’s more to it than that, however. While mop-up relievers may not pitch well or handle many important innings, having them around allows managers to use their better relievers in different ways. As we’ve seen in the last decade, the larger bullpens allow managers to mix and match based on handedness in higher leverage situations, using pitchers who are far more effective against same handed hitters.

The goal of platooning a pair of hitters or using bullpen specialists is really the same – get as much value from exploiting left/right splits as possible. So why are managers going more towards pitchers when attempting to exploit those advantages?

I think it’s because they inherently understand the pinch-hitter penalty. As Matthew noted on ESPN a few weeks ago, guys perform at a level nearly 10 percent below their true talent level when being used as a pinch hitter. There is significant evidence that the act of sitting around for a few hours, grabbing a bat, and trying to get a hit is just very hard.

If you try to exploit platoon advantages from the offensive side, you get less than the full value of the hitters you are using when pinch-hitting. Thus, any hitter with a large platoon split can be devalued in high leverage situations in a way that is tough to counter. Even if you pinch hit for the left-handed half of your platoon when the opposing manager brings in a LOOGY, you’re still at a disadvantage, because your right-handed bat now has to overcome the penalty of inactivity.

While it may be annoying to watch the parade of relievers bog down game from the 7th inning on, I think there’s a pretty decent chance that managers are making the more efficient decision. It’s an area that needs more study, certainly, but I think we should acknowledge that there is value to platooning your relievers that is not found in platooning your hitters.

It’s February, finally, so spring training is just around the corner. Teams are putting the finishing touches on their rosters, filling out benches and bullpens, giving jobs to role players and evaluating the walking wounded. And now that the off-season is mostly finished, you should expect to be inundated with the buzzword of the month – projections.

CHONE. ZiPS. MARCEL. PECOTA. CAIRO. And yes, FANS. (Side note: are we capitalizing it, even though it’s not an acronym? I think we should. It’s not like anyone has any idea what CHONE stands for.) There will be no shortage of projection systems tossing out expected performances over the next month or two.

It won’t stop with just individual players, either. The guys over at Replacement Level Yankee Weblog have already run the CAIRO projections through the Diamond Mind simulator 100 times and posted the aggregate results as projected standings. Spoiler alert – the Yankees are good, the Blue Jays are not.

However, we need to make a distinction: projections are not predictions. Projections are information about what we think we currently know, while predictions are speculation about things that we probably cannot know.

This may sound like semantics, but there is an important difference here, and it’s often lost in the way projections are discussed. Too often, projections are treated as predictions of the future. You’ll see people say things like “CAIRO thinks the Blue Jays are going to only win 67 games this year,” for instance.

But that’s not really true. CAIRO thinks that the Blue Jays are on course to win 67 games, and if they don’t do something about it between now and the end of the season, that is their likely destination. But, like a map, the entire point of a projection is to inform the the user so that he can then alter the course if he so desires.

You would never look at a map and say “I’m traveling east on I-40. This map expects me to drive into the Atlantic Ocean.” The map just informs you that the course you are on will eventually lead to the ocean, and if you decide not to exit, wetness awaits. (Obviously, there’s some hyperbole here, as I realize that the freeway doesn’t end with a pier). The map has no expectation of what will happen. It’s just informing you of the course you are on.

Just like you control where you car goes, so do front offices control where their team goes, to a point. It is quite possible that Alex Anthopolous will look at his team’s internal projections and say, “Hey, we kinda suck; someone go find me a third baseman.” And then, after his assistants find him a third baseman, the team will be better. And people will say that the projection was wrong.

But it wasn’t wrong, because it wasn’t predicting anything. It was giving an evaluation of what was true at the time, to the best of its abilities. Its abilities may be flawed (and how you evaluate projection systems is another post for another day), but the intent was never to suggest what will happen, but rather, what could happen if nothing changes, knowing full well that things will change.

So, if you see a projection that you don’t particularly like, don’t get too bent out of shape about it. It’s just information about a path that a team may currently be on in February. By July, there’s a really good chance that the team will be on a different path, and a new projection accounting for that change in course will be available. Most of all, don’t assume that the people behind the projections hate your team. In fact, if your team gets a terrible projection, you may want to thank the system’s creator – that may just be the information that prods the front office to go out and improve the team, thus proving that the stupid system was wrong all along.

Let’s do some quick hits on transactions that didn’t get their own post this week, but are still interesting enough to talk about.

1. Randy Winn signs with the Yankees. This is a somewhat odd move, not because Winn isn’t useful (he is), but because of Winn’s unbelievably terrible line against LHPs a year ago. We’re talking about a switch-hitter with no platoon split over his career (.765 OPS vs RH, .758 OPS vs LH) who just posted one of the single worst lines against LHP of any player in the history of the game.

.158/.184/.200. That’s unfathomably bad. Most pitchers hit better than that. But for 125 at-bats, Winn was utterly useless at the plate, going 19 for 120 against southpaws.

And despite that, the Yankees signed him to be their fourth outfielder and presumably split time with Brett Gardner, who is a left-handed batter that has been fairly heavily platooned as a major league player. It’s just strange that in a winter where lefty mashing outfielders are plentiful, the Yankees chose a reserve outfielder who performed so poorly against LHPs to backup their starting LF who they may not trust to start against LHPs.

Its not a bad move. Winn’s a useful player, the price is right, and his 2009 performance against lefties looks like a fluke. But it’s just a weird one.

2. Jim Thome signs with the Twins. This makes a lot of sense for Minnesota, as they got insurance for both Jason Kubel and Delmon Young on a bargain contract. You could make a case that Thome is even Kubel’s equal, though I fear the wrath of the great white north if I ever say another disparaging word about Kubel again, so I won’t make that case.

Thome gives them depth at two positions and offers a patient bat-off-the-bench that makes starting Nick Punto more palatable, knowing you can pinch-hit for him late in the game. For less than $2 million, this is a no-brainer. It’s a good player at a low cost, giving them options in case of injury or poor performance. However, it also adds another LH hitter to a line-up that is already overly left-handed. Somewhere along the line, the Twins will have to add a right-handed stick who can break up the L-L-L-L top of the order. But, assuming that this move doesn’t preclude them from doing that, this is still a good addition.

3. The Mets re-signed Fernando Tatis, and are apparently going to go into 2010 with a first base platoon of Tatis and Daniel Murphy. I don’t even know what to say. Really, Omar? This is your plan? You couldn’t have used that million dollars you gave Gary Matthews Jr, combined it with the Tatis money, and gotten a younger, better first baseman instead (someone named Garko, perhaps)? You spent approximately 40 bazillion dollars on the core of your roster, and then seem intent on surrounding them with guys who just don’t deserve jobs.

I’d say I don’t get it, but maybe The Contest just has a better grand prize than a World Series trophy.