Today’s targets are: Gregg Zaun, Rich Harden, Dan Uggla.

Zaun is a popular target among teams who are looking for a veteran catcher and has said he will sign this week. What will he do at age 39?

Harden is being pursued by several teams lured by his upside, but his durability is always a question. How many innings do you think he’ll throw?

Uggla is the most likely player to be traded at the winter meetings next week. Do you see him as a 2B or a 3B next year? How will he hit?

Yesterday, you guys projected Kelly Shoppach at +2.5 wins, Josh Johnson at +5.3 wins, and Jake Peavy at +3.8 wins. It looks like you guys are expecting good things from all three.

Let me just quote the lead paragraph of this LA Times story.

The decision by the Dodgers not to offer arbitration to pitcher Randy Wolf or any of their other free agents Tuesday should not be viewed as a sign that their uncertain ownership situation is affecting them financially, General Manager Ned Colletti said.

“Our decision was made strictly from a baseball perspective,” Colletti said.

If that’s true, Dodger fans should be pretty upset today. If this was a baseball decision, then Ned Colletti either doesn’t like draft picks or he doesn’t like Randy Wolf, who really should have been an easy arbitration offer decision.

Wolf, as a Type A free agent, would have netted the Dodgers two draft picks had he signed elsewhere. He’s made it known that he’s looking for a multi-year deal this winter, and coming off a strong 2009 season, he’s very likely to get one. The odds of Wolf accepting arbitration to take another one year deal were not very good. This is his chance to cash in with some long term security, and he wasn’t going to give that up to get a few million extra in 2010.

Even if Colletti disagrees with that assessment, the downside of Wolf accepting arbitration is not that high. He’d probably end up getting somewhere around $14 or $15 million in arbitration – our valuation says he was worth $13.6 million last year, and he’s likely to be a $10 or $11 million pitcher in 2010. The risk that they would have taken was to pay slightly more than his actual value for a quality mid-rotation starter on a one year deal.

And the Dodgers are not exactly overflowing with starting pitching. In some cases, you could make the argument that an arbitration offer could muck up the roster if a player accepts when the team had another player ready to take his job. The Dodgers have no such player ready to take Wolf’s rotation spot.

As a baseball decision, this is a bad one. Of course, there’s a pretty decent chance that this was not a baseball decision, and that the Dodgers are being hamstrung by the McCourts’ divorce, leading to uncertain budgets and the need to count pennies carefully. That would make a lot more sense than believing that the Dodgers thought that Wolf would accept arbitration over pursuing a multi-year contract as a free agent, and that they would be unhappy with that result.

After getting a putrid .274 wOBA from the catcher position in 2009 (thanks Navi!), the Rays picked up Kelly Shoppach from the Indians today in exchange for the ubiquitous player to be named later. As an arbitration-eligible 30-year-old coming off a mediocre season, and with hot catching prospect Carlos Santana nearly major league ready, the Indians weren’t overly attached to Shoppach, so the price in talent was right for the Rays.

What will Shoppach offer the Rays? Significantly more power than you expect from a catcher, for certain. Shoppach has a career ISO of .208, lining him up with players such as Nick Swisher and David Wright. The ability to drive a fastball is what got him to the big leagues, but it comes with a flaw – Shoppach is an all-or-nothing hitter who strikes out an awful lot.

His career K% of 37.3% puts him in the company of notable whiffers such as Mark Reynolds and Jack Cust. Given how often he misses when he swings, low batting averages are inevitable. It might be tempting to look at Shoppach’s career .241 BA and think that last year’s .214 means he’s in for a bounce back, but in reality, last year may represent more of his true talent.

Shoppach’s .257 batting average from 2006 to 2008 was propped by an insanely high .366 batting average on balls in play. It would be one thing if he was a guy who could run well, but as a big slow catcher, that number was just shocking. Not surprisingly, it fell to a more normal (for his speed) .286 BABIP last year, and his average went south with it.

So, Tampa fans shouldn’t expect too much of a bounce in the batting average. He’s a guy who will hit in the low .200s, simply because of his contact issues. But the reward for all this striking out is some serious power and a decent amount of walks, adding up to a better offensive package that you usually get from a catcher. Even with the .214 average a year ago, Shoppach’s wOBA was .329, making him a league average hitter.

Catchers who can hit at a league average rate are pretty valuable. Given his overall production, Shoppach projects as something like a +2 win catcher if given regular playing time. He’s likely to be worth $7 to $9 million next year, and due to his poor 2009 season, he won’t get anything close to that in arbitration. The Rays picked up a nice player at something of a discount, as they have been known to do.

One last note on Shoppach – don’t read too much into his huge L/R splits. He has less than 300 career PA against LHPs and the numbers against them are inflated by that flukey high BABIP. In general, you need some pretty large samples to start making real decisions on whether a guy has abnormally large true talent platoon splits, and we just don’t have that kind of data for Shoppach. It’s much more likely that his numbers against LHPs will regress next year and his platoon split will end up looking fairly normal. Don’t write him off as a part-time player just yet.

Here’s an interesting twist to the Red Sox off-season; Peter Gammons reports that they have asked Dustin Pedroia whether he would be willing to move to shortstop next year, and he told Gammons that he’s all for it. Shifting Pedroia to the left side of the infield would allow Boston to pursue a second baseman, which are plentiful this off-season, rather than being forced to meet Marco Scutaro’s demands to land the only decent shortstop on the market.

Could Pedroia play shortstop effectively? It seems likely.

His career UZR/150 at second base is +7.4, and the observed effect of players shifting between the two middle infield positions is between 5 to 10 runs. Pedroia’s UZR would suggest that he would be something like an average defensive shortstop.

The fan’s scouting report offers a similar picture. Pedroia graded out as the fifth best second baseman in the game, coming in above average in every single category. Often times, arm strength is a reason a shortstop is moved to second base, but the fan’s think his arm is just fine.

Experience wouldn’t be a problem, either. He played shortstop in college at Arizona State, then played an additional 132 games at the position in the minor leagues. He actually played more SS than 2B in the minors. While he hasn’t played the position in three years, he wouldn’t be learning a new position – he’s spent most of his life playing shortstop, and the reactions would come naturally.

Ironically, Scutaro himself may be providing the necessary optimism for why this move could work. He was primarily a second baseman early in his career, but was shifted to play mostly shortstop in 2005 at the age of 30, and has held his own at the position since. Alexei Ramirez also made the transition across the bag last year with success, so this isn’t a move without some precedent.

This move won’t make Pedroia significantly more valauble, as what he adds in offensive scarcity compared to the average shortstop, he’ll probably give back with the glove, but it would give the Red Sox significantly more flexibility this winter. Rather than having to pay for Scutaro, they could set their sights on a second baseman such as Orlando Hudson, Placido Polanco, or Felipe Lopez.

It sounds like it is still in the conversation stages, but it is an idea with merit, and the Red Sox should strongly consider going forward with Pedroia as their starting shortstop.

Tomorrow represents the first real day of the hot stove league, as teams are required to make arbitration decisions on their respective free agents. Once teams understand who will and who will not require draft pick compensation to sign, the process will accelerate, as teams will be able to more accurately assess the cost of signing a particular player.

For some players, the decision to offer arbitration or not is an easy one. The Angels will certainly be offering it to John Lackey and Chone Figgins, while the White Sox will not be offering it to Jermaine Dye. It doesn’t take much in the way of analysis to reach those conclusions.

However, there is a large pool of players for which the decision is not so cut-and-dried. Should the Dodgers offer Orlando Hudson arbitration, even though they don’t really want him back, in order to secure the compensation he would bring as a Type A free agent? How about Mike Cameron, who has already been replaced in Milwaukee and been told that he is not in their plans, but has the type of skillset not likely to be correctly valued in arbitration? Injury prone pitchers such as Rich Harden and Erik Bedard also present dilemmas to the Cubs and Mariners respectively.

For many of these players, teams will decide that the risk of an arbitration offer being accepted is too high, cutting ties with a player they either don’t want or don’t believe they can afford. However, in many of these cases, I believe that teams may be incorrectly valuing the actual cost of the offer.

The marginal cost of the arbitration offer is not the full value of the player’s potential 2010 salary. It is not even the dollars beyond that which a team would be happy to pay the player. It is only the dollars beyond what any one team in baseball would be happy to pay for that player that are actually being risked.

Let’s use Adrian Beltre and the Mariners as an example. Based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’m presuming that the Mariners have approximately $25 million to spend this winter as they shop to fill various needs. That is one of the main reasons why Beltre probably won’t be back in Seattle next year, as he would eat up a significant chunk of that budget, limiting the team’s options when pursuing other positions of need. In reality, Beltre would probably make at least $10 million if he accepted arbitration, and likely closer to the $13 million he earned in 2009.

However, the Mariners aren’t risking $10 to $13 million by offering Beltre arbitration. His market value is significantly north of $0, and on a one year deal, it’s probably somewhere between $8 and $12 million, I’d imagine. So, in reality, the Mariners would be risking something like $4 million, as that would be the potential difference between the arbitration award and his free market value. Remember, a team is free to trade a player who accepts arbitration, so it wouldn’t be particularly hard for the Mariners to then ship Beltre to, say, Philadelphia along with some cash to cover the difference between what Philly wants to pay him and what he may get in arbitration.

So, if the risk if ~$4 million, what is the actual cost of assuming that risk? That requires a probability calculation of how likely the player is to accept the offer. In many of these borderline cases, I’d assume the actual probability is probably around 50 percent, plus or minus 10 percent or so. That’s why they are borderline cases – it isn’t easy to figure out how the player would react to an arbitration offer.

With a probability of around 50 percent, that cuts the total risk in half. In the Beltre example, that would lower the cost of assuming that particular risk to $2 million, once the potential that he wouldn’t accept is factored in.

Is a supplemental pick in the #35-#45 range worth $2 million to the Mariners? Most of the research done on the subject would say yes, and that given these numbers, Seattle is better off taking the risk of Beltre accepting their offer to receive the potential reward of the compensation.

This is the calculation that teams should be doing – figuring the cost of a potential arbitration award over the market value of the player, adjusting for probability that he accepts the offer, and comparing the cost of that risk to the benefit of the compensation pick.

If a team is assessing their actual risk as the full potential salary that they would have to pay out if a player accepts, they’ll be overstating their own liability and miscalculating the costs and benefits of an arbitration offer. I would suspect we will see multiple teams do just this tomorrow, leaving value on the table by being overly risk averse.

Today, David announced the newest addition to the site, and one we’re all pretty excited about it – Fan Projections. We’ve hosted the forecasts of most of the various top projection systems over the last few years, and you’ve probably become accustomed to hearing various writers quote CHONE, ZiPS, or Marcel. With FanGraphs now offering the ability to aggregate projections from various sources, we’ll have a new set of projections to offer this winter – those of the crowd.

If you’ve read James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”, you’ll no doubt recognize the theory behind the endeavor. As Surowiecki suggests, there is evidence that certain groups of lay people can give better estimates than any single expert, due to the unique experiences we all have in life. By blending our understandings together, we can eliminate some of our individual biases and enhance the shared wisdom of the population.

Tom Tango has done some research on this as it pertains to projections in baseball, and Surowiecki’s theory holds up pretty well. In a four part series that matched up six projection systems against 165 fans, the aggregate projections of the fans was essentially the equal of the complex statistical models. Individual fans by themselves didn’t fare so well, but when all fans were combined into a single projection, they held their own.

This is, essentially, Surowiecki’s argument in a nutshell. We all have our limitations of understanding, but the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

So, in that spirit, we offer you the opportunity to make your voice heard. Use the Fan Projections to add your personal wisdom the crowd, based on your insights and experiences. Despite the fact that this is site is statistically inclined, we have a fairly broad base of readers, offering a wide variety of opinions and views – the kind of crowd where the wisdom of many can really shine through. Try projecting some players every day, putting real thought into what you expect from each player in 2010.

If we have the diverse, intelligent crowd that I think reads this site, don’t be too surprised if the Fan Projections end up hanging with the big boys. Let’s put the wisdom of the FanGraphs crowd to use and see what happens.

My latest Wall Street Journal piece that went live today looked at other Placido Polanco situations from the last 20 years, where a down-ballot MVP vote just makes you scratch your head and wonder what point the writer was trying to make. There’s no way that someone really thought Polanco was one of the ten most valuable players in the AL, right? There had to be some kind of subtext that the vote represented, I would imagine.

Anyway, in researching the article, I found quite a few of these types of votes, where you can tell that a writer is just trying to shine a light on someone whose skills they may feel get overlooked. Scott Podsednik got a lot of credit for his base stealing, even though he wasn’t any good in 2005. Deivi Cruz got a vote for his defense, even though he couldn’t hit to save his life. Scott Eyre and Jeremy Affeldt got votes because one SF writer likes left-handed middle relievers.

But there was one guy on the list who I just can’t figure out. In 1995, Charlie Hayes got four points, good enough to finish 16th in the MVP voting. Four voting points equals four tenth place votes, two tenth place votes and one ninth place vote, two ninth place votes, or one seventh place vote.

Hayes hit .270/.340/.406 in 1995, making him the exact definition of a league average hitter. He hit 11 home runs. He played third base. The Phillies finished below .500 and did not make the playoffs. Trying to figure out what the voter(s) saw just leads to bewilderment.

He did finish 23rd in the National League in RBIs, I guess. He led the league in… double plays grounded into. That’s probably not it. He made 14 errors and never won a Gold Glove while playing a non-premium position, so it doesn’t seem likely that they were rewarding his defense.

What happened here? This isn’t a George Bell scenario, where an overrated slugger is racking up counting stats. Hayes didn’t do any of the things that normally generate MVP votes. He was a pedestrian player who had a mediocre season on a team that didn’t win.

Did he just have the best personality of all time? And if so, why didn’t that matter two years prior, when he hit .305/.355/.522 in Colorado, led the league in doubles, and drove in 98 runs?

If there’s an explanation for multiple voters putting Charlie Hayes on their ballot, or one guy thinking he belonged in the top seven, I’d love to hear it. Because, from this point in history, it doesn’t make any sense at all. It doesn’t matter of course, but it is one of those things that you have to wonder what happened.

In an article on Yahoo Sports yesterday, Tim Brown discusses Tim Lincecum’s upcoming arbitration filing. Brown argues that, as a two time Cy Young winner with super-two status, Lincecum blows up the system of comparable pitchers used to determine salaries in the arbitration process, and that Lincecum may just file for $23,000,001 (one dollar more than Sabathia’s AAV) to drive home the point of how unique his circumstances are.

It’s true that very few pitchers achieve this much success so quickly in their major league career. It is not true that Lincecum is an historically unique player without comparison, however. We saw this same scenario unfold 22 years ago in Boston, when a guy named Roger Clemens took the baseball world by storm.

Clemens debuted in the majors in 1984 at age 21, but didn’t pitch a full season until 1986. He threw 254 innings with a 2.48 ERA, winning both the Cy Young and MVP awards. He followed that up in 1987 by throwing 281 innings with a 2.97 ERA, winning another Cy Young Award (but inexplicably falling to 19th in MVP voting).

At age 24, after the equivalent of three full seasons in the big leagues, Clemens had two Cy Young awards, 60 career victories in 104 starts, and a 3.08 ERA in about 767 innings of work. For the numbers that arbiters are likely to care about, Clemens’ case was even stronger than what Lincecum can offer today, with 33 percent more wins and an MVP award to go with his multiple Cy Youngs.

His 1988 salary? $1.5 million, a 230 percent raise from his 1987 salary and a 567 percent premium over the league median salary, which was $265,000. That was a nice paycheck back in the day, but it didn’t even crack the top 25 salaries of the season, nor was Clemens the highest paid player on the Red Sox team that year – Wade Boggs ($1.7MM), Jim Rice ($2.2MM), and Dwight Evans ($1.6MM) all earned more than Clemens.

If we just took those percentages and applied them to Lincecum, the numbers wouldn’t come out as rosy as his agents might like. Lincecum interestingly made the same $650,000 last year as Clemens did in 1987, and the median salary in 2009 was $1.4 million. A 230 percent personal raise would slot Lincecum in at around $1.4 million, while a 567 percent premium over the 2010 projected median (2009 median with 1% inflation) would put him at $7.9 million.

Its safe to say that Lincecum will file for a number north of those two, and no doubt his agents will argue that the economic climate of the game has changed in the last 20 years. While that is true, it’s also true that the 1987 version of Clemens had a better resume than the 2009 version of Lincecum, so an argument that he should be treated significantly better is unlikely to be convincing.

If we agree that Lincecum shouldn’t get more (relative to today’s dollars) than what Clemens got 22 years ago, then a realistic cap for his 2010 payday looks to be about $12 to $14 million, which would put him in the same area in ordinal rank of payroll (just outside the top 25), but would also reflect that baseball players are earning more money now.

He can take his two trophies to arbitration if he wants, but he’s not getting free agent money as a guy with two years of service time. He’ll get more than Ryan Howard did in 2008, but probably not much more. He’s a great pitcher, but there are comparable performances for the arbiters to look at – you just have to go back a little farther than normal.

Cultural norms are a powerful force. Even though we have different backgrounds, we were raised with similar understandings of how certain aspects of the world work, and we agree to abide by these rules without much thought. We eat three meals a day because, well, that’s what we do. I can’t tell you why I sit around waiting for lunch time when I’m hungry and my body is asking for food – I just know I’m supposed to eat around noon. I’m sure there’s a reason for it, but I have no idea what it is, even though I’ve been eating for 29 years now.

It occurred to me today that our discussions about what constitutes a player’s value at award time is kind of like that. Especially if you’ve been a part of the statistical analysis crowd for any length of time, you have a pretty well defined idea of what the parameters of value are. Offense counts the most, obviously. Most people will adjust for the expectations of the defensive position you play, even if they won’t factor in how well you play that position. How well your team performs as a whole matters to some more than others, which is also true of stuff that gets labeled as intangibles, leadership, chemistry, etc…

Not everyone weights everything the same, but the things that we’re attempting to measure are all pretty much agreed upon. I’m wondering, though, is this a case where we agreed to the definition without really thinking about why we did it?

Specifically, I’m wondering why salary is not included. By anyone. Ever.

In terms of practical value to a team, there is no real difference between a player’s salary and the position he plays. The entire point of adjusting for position is to account for the opportunity cost of occupying that spot on the field. If the Tigers didn’t have Miguel Cabrera, they’d get some other decent hitting first baseman, because it’s not all that difficult to find a guy to play that position and hit competently. This matters, and we account for it. Almost everyone does, anyway.

Yet, we never factor in the opportunity cost of a player’s portion of his team’s budget, even though it is the exact same concept. If a player makes $15 million and his team has a $100 million budget, he comes with a significant opportunity cost, as he has effectively lowered the budget for his 24 teammates to $85 million. If he made the league minimum, the franchise would have $99.5 million to surround him with talent, and he would invariably have more talented teammates, given that the guy picking them was not named Dayton or Minaya.

We hear players lauded all the time for “making their teammates better”, yet we ignore the one instance where the player actually does directly influence the performance his teammates are likely to offer. Why? Is there any real good reason why salary shouldn’t be considered in our discussions of value? It matters at least as much as the position they play, and in many cases, a lot more.

This is made plainly evident in trade negotiations with high salaried players. Often times, a team trading the player of value with a significant contract will offer to pay a portion of the remaining amount due to the player in order to increase the return they’re getting in talent. There is no way around it – teams are explicitly stating that they value player X at a certain threshold when he’s paid salary Y, but they value him at a higher amount if he only has to be paid salary Z instead. His value is inextricably tied to how much money he earns.

This is why teams that trade away stars so often come out of it looking just fine – they take the money they would have spent on the traded player and give it to some other talented player, replacing a portion of his value in the process. Just like if a team loses a first baseman, they go out and find another guy who can hit okay. Filling the first base spot isn’t very hard, and neither is getting a valuable player when you have $15 million to play with.

Yet no one accounts for this in any MVP discussion. Why? Because we’ve never cared about salary, so why start, I guess.

I’d write more about this, but it’s noon, and I think that means I’m supposed to go eat now.

For Jon Heyman and the rest of the reactionary “Keith Law should lose his ballot” crowd, I present the following comparison between Joe Mauer and Miguel Cabrera.

Singles: Mauer +2
Doubles: Cabrera +4
Triples: Mauer +1
Home Runs: Cabrera +6
Runs: Cabrera +2
RBI: Cabrera +7
Walks: Mauer +8
Outs: Cabrera +87

In terms of raw production, you’d be hard pressed to find two guys who had more similar years than Mauer and Cabrera. The differences in practically all of the counting stats is single digits, making those numbers a virtual tie. The only counting stat where there is much in the way of differentiation is outs. Essentially, the difference in playing time was entirely consumed by the equivalent of Cabrera enduring the worst slump baseball has ever seen.

If Mauer had played through his back problem in April without reaching base once, going zero for the month, then Cabrera and Mauer would have had approximately equal offensive seasons.

Seriously, there is no argument for a first place vote for Miguel Cabrera. Mauer’s team made the playoffs, beating out Cabrera’s team for the last spot. Mauer hit better. Mauer fielded better. Mauer played a more important position.

None of those facts are disputable. A vote for Cabrera being more valuable in 2009 is like a vote for the sum of two and two being five. It’s not an opinion – it’s a lack of understanding.

So, writers who criticized Law for his vote and pointed to it as evidence that he’s screwing up the process, you are hereby required to do the same thing to the Cabrera voter. At least Keith had a reasonable explanation for his vote. There is no reasonable explanation for a Miguel Cabrera first place MVP vote. It’s just stupidity on display.

To the other 27 voters – congratulations on continuing the trend of this awards season and giving the player the award he deserves. The BBWAA has done itself proud this year.