This afternoon, I mentioned that there may be an opportunity for teams to improve their rosters through diversification rather than purely pursuing upgrades. Let’s take a look at one of the specific opportunities and how this could work practically.

Atlanta, Left Field

The Braves want to upgrade their output for 2010, and the natural spot to do that would be left field. Garret Anderson didn’t produce at all in the position last year, posting a .305 wOBA while UZR hated his defense. They can certainly do better, and there are some big name run-producing outfielders on the market this winter.

However, they also have Jason Heyward, the best prospect in baseball, who happens to be a corner outfielder. He’s just 20 years old and has less than half a season of experience above A-ball, but his natural abilities and 2009 performance put him squarely in the 2010 picture.

There’s some real upside to handing Heyward the left field job and letting him run with it, but his projection necessarily has to include significant amounts of risk as well. He’s a classic high variance type of player, and the relatively high probability of failure drives down his expected value to the point where you can make a good case that he should be replaced, at least for 2010.

However, this is a situation where I’d argue for depth rather than replacement. Instead of bringing in an established player to perform at a level above what you’d expect from Heyward, the Braves may instead be able to bring in a player that allows them to minimize the cost of Heyward’s downside while still allowing them to give him an opportunity.

Randy Winn, for instance, is a low upside, low variance veteran that won’t command a large contract as a free agent. You generally know what you’re going to get from him – good contact, good defense, and no power. Having Winn on the team would allow the Braves to give Heyward a shot without bearing the full risk of collapse, as his steady but unspectacular production would serve as a stop loss if Heyward proves to not be ready for the big leagues.

By adding a player like Winn, the Braves minimize the variance that would be attached to giving Heyward a real look at the LF job. Removing risk in that way is significantly cheaper than doing so by pursuing a superior player with a steadier projection. It’s not free, of course – Winn will require some money to sign, and carrying both Winn and Heyward would cost the Braves an extra roster spot that consolidating into a better player would not.

In this case, though, I’d argue that the benefits probably outweigh those costs. A Winn/Heyward pairing in left field for Atlanta could provide a similar expected return to pretty much any of the non-Holliday free agent outfielders at a fraction of the cost.

This is just one example of a situation where pursuing depth is preferential to upgrading talent. Hopefully, it helps illustrate the point I was trying to make this afternoon. We’ll talk more about this next week, as we flesh out some of the issues that we didn’t have time to cover today.

Free agency started 10 hours ago, and as of today, teams are free to spend money in the market to upgrade their rosters. A lot of teams will do just that, selecting from the available pool of free agents to fill holes on their roster or replace players that don’t live up to their standards. This is the traditional way of improving the organization’s odds of winning – get better players than you already have. It’s generally a really good strategy if you can pull it off.

However, I think there’s an alternate path that may see some gains in popularity as teams attempt to keep their costs down during a tough economy. Rather than focusing purely on maximizing the potential positives, there is value to be had in minimizing the potential negatives. Let me use pictures to explain this better.

Here’s a sample win curve of the probable outcomes for a +1.8 win (roughly league average) player – the probabilities are made up to demonstrate the theory, though I’d bet they’re in the neighborhood of reality.

You’ll notice that this is not a normal distribution. The chance of injury make a disappointing outcome more likely than a breakout, so its not a traditional bell curve, but there are possible outcomes on both sides of the player’s actual talent level. The traditional replace-with-a-better-player method would lead a team to look for a guy who is closer to a +3 or +4 win player, pushing the entire curve to the right. However, +3 to +4 win players are expensive, and if you already have a +1.8 win guy on the roster, the marginal cost is probably going to outweigh the marginal benefit. In turn, you will not be willing to pay full price for those extra wins, and that good player will go sign with a team that has a giant hole at the position, thus receiving the full benefit of their talent level.

But there are a decent amount of teams that don’t have glaring holes on their roster, yet still want to improve their chances of winning. Rather than paying full price to upgrade from a +1.8 to a +3.5 win player, only netting +1.7 marginal wins in the process, perhaps there’s a more efficient way of buying wins, focusing on minimizing risk rather than maximizing return. Or, in graph form, doing this.

Rather than replacing the average player with a superior option, this new graph represents the result of simply having more options. This is a strategy to pursue depth rather than premium talent. It is the baseball version of diversification. Rather than pursuing a single, high-end player with a big contract that still leaves them vulnerable to total loss in case of an injury or inexplicable drop in performance, pairing different types of players can offer similar upside and risk at a reduced cost.

At 5 pm, we’ll look at some teams that may be in the position to do just that this winter

Two days ago, the BBWAA ignored win totals and gave Zack Greinke the American League Cy Young award. Today, they did it again, giving Tim Lincecum the NL version despite having only 15 victories, the fewest of any Cy Young winner in the history of the award. Despite my long-winded explanation for why I don’t really care about the BBWAA awards, I feel like it would be silly to not give honor where it is due.

Congratulations to the members of the BBWAA, who have been willing to adapt as the game changes. They deserve recognition for being willing to accept the shift towards better analytical methods. And getting away from wins as a measure of the value of a pitcher is a big first step.

Five years ago, Lincecum wouldn’t have stood a chance in the voting. He might not have even stood a chance a year ago. But there are clearly members of the Writers Association who are not clinging to the analysis that they grew up with. It isn’t just that they gave Keith Law a vote this year. It’s writers like Larry Stone who have been in the newspaper business for 20 years and are helping to educate their fellow scribes.

Today, the BBWAA took a pretty big step back towards credibility. It obviously isn’t a wholesale change, and there are always going to be people resistant to any sort of change, but the shift is taking place. And it’s a welcome occurrence.

If they keep voting like this, I’ll have to start caring again.

According to Paul Sullivan, the Cubs will announce later today that they have re-signed John Grabow to a two-year contract. Previous reports have put the value of the deal at $7.5 million.

Once again, we’re witness to the power of ERA as a negotiating tool. Over the last two seasons, Grabow’s thrown nearly 150 innings and posted an ERA of 3.09, giving the impression that he’s a high quality LH reliever. Yet again, ERA misleads.

Grabow’s FIP the last two years? 4.37, thanks to an atrociously high walk total. The entirety of his low ERA over the last two years is driven by an 82 percent rate of stranding runners, which is just not sustainable. He’s succeeded by putting men on base and then wiggling out of jams, but that’s not the same thing as pitching well.

It would be one thing if Grabow had developed this knack for stranding runners by elevating his strikeout rate, but he’s not any different now than he has been for his entire career.

Instead, he’s just posted artificially low BABIPs the last two years, and by not giving up hits, he was able to keep the guys he walked on the bases. That’s not a recipe for success.

Grabow is a generic left-handed middle reliever, the kind of guy you’re fine having for the league minimum but that you don’t really want to pay any real money to. He’s eminently replaceable, but the Cubs have decided to commit real money to him over multiple years because he has a low ERA.

The Cubs have money, and $3.75 million isn’t going to drastically alter their budget, but this is just a waste of cash. Betting on reliever ERA is a great way to get burned, and given Grabow’s actual talent levels, the Cubs are unlikely to be very happy with how this deal turns out for them.

Jerry Crasnick has an excellent article on defensive metrics as they relate to valuing free agents, especially diving into how they affect Matt Holliday and Jason Bay. It’s no secret that, as the hosts of UZR, we’re big proponents of its usefulness. However, I still agree with essentially everything in Crasnick’s article.

There are aspects of defense that zone-based metrics won’t capture. There are results from UZR that make you scratch your head and say “really?” There is value in having the experienced eyes of a scout watch a player and offer an opinion on the abilities that he saw. We agree with all of that.

The cases where the value of metrics like UZR are the most contentious are when the results diverge significantly from what the perceived scouting wisdom says about a player. Often times, the reaction to counterintuitive data is to dismiss it entirely, offering up the example as evidence that the metric is flawed beyond use. Or, on the other side, to offer up the player’s numbers as proof that scouts just don’t get it, and that subjective opinions are worthless. Simply go back and re-read the threads about Mark Teixeira’s defense over the summer to see this effect in full force on both sides.

In reality though, both positions are wrong. Re-quoting the assistant GM from Crasnick’s piece:

“If there’s some kind of discrepancy, you need to use your best judgment,” the assistant says. “If a scout says, ‘This guy stinks,’ but the numbers say he’s excellent, the truth probably lies somewhere in between.”

This is essentially a paraphrase of the concept of regression to different means. If we have two players with identical UZRs, but scouts love one and abhor the other, our projection for their relative UZRs going forward should favor the one preferred by scouts. The fact that observational information is available gives us a useful data point to add to the calculation, pushing forward analysis that leads to “best judgment”.

I said last week that I think Teixeira is probably a bit better defensively than his recent UZR scores have indicated, and the foundation of that belief lies in the value of scouting information. Teixeira is revered by almost every scout in the game as an exceptional defensive first baseman. That matters when we’re projecting future defensive performance. There is no reason to simply ignore those opinions simply because they don’t line up with what UZR has measured. We account for those opinions by regressing Teixeira’s UZR projections to a different mean than a player that scouts are less enamored of.

UZR is a tool. Scouts are a tool. They can be used together to produce better information than either can on their own. It is not an either/or proposition. Use both.

I don’t have much to add to this article. It’s just fun.

“That’s pretty much how I pitch, to try to keep my FIP as low as
possible,” Greinke said.”

You’re pretty good at it, Zack.

You may have heard that Bill Belichick, the head coach of the New England Patriots, made a controversial decision in Sunday’s night nationally televised game against the Colts. I’m not going to get into the details of the play here – there are tons of football blogs out there that can do a better job of discussing the context than I can. However, the reaction to the decision has some ties to baseball, and that’s what I want to talk about.

Belichick is a stats guy, sort of the NFL version of Billy Beane, only with championship rings to support his beliefs. He has built a dynasty in New England by eschewing traditional football truisms, and he has found great success with his methods. In general, he’s extremely well respected as a football guy, if not so much as a person to interact with.

So, I find the reaction to Belichick’s fourth down strategy interesting. Pretty much every member of the traditional media, including the announcers calling the game, immediately destroyed him for the call. There was no gray area. It was the wrong call because every other coach in America would have punted, and had punted, in that exact same situation. Belichick went out on a very thin limb, then watched it break when his team failed to convert and the Colts won the game on the final drive.

So, now, we get columns like this, decrying the statistical movement in sports as too rigid and not respectful enough of those with experience. The appeal to authority has been out in full force – Belichick was wrong because the majority say he was wrong, and the merits of his argument are generally ignored.

This is despite the fact that Belichick is part of the authority that should theoretically be appealed to. He’s been the head coach of three Super Bowl champions. He’s a football guy who appreciates numbers, not a numbers guy who appreciates football. Yet, for whatever reason, his credential cease to matter.

We see this in baseball all the time as well. Despite the fact that about half the teams in the sport are now run by people who could accurately be described as having a strong analytical background, the anti-statistical movement still paints people like us as a fringe movement on the outside looking in. Meanwhile, they’ve missed the fact that the inside is now a lot different, in large part due to the acceptance of the value of analytical methods of evaluation.

If the Patriots had made the two yards and won, would that have validated the entire statistical movement in sports? Of course not, because it was one play with an approximately 50-50 chance of success. Yet, when it doesn’t work, it becomes “proof” that the nerds have gone too far.

Let’s be better than that. Not every good move works out, and some bad moves end well. The end does not justify the means, however. Nobody can predict the future, so all we can evaluate is the ability for teams to give themselves a maximum probability of success. Sometimes, that means making choices that go against what everyone else is doing. Those choices aren’t wrong just because everyone else thinks they are.

Merit, not authority, should rule the discussion of the day. If the person in authority is right, he should be able to explain why using logic and reason. If he can’t, then perhaps he shouldn’t be considered an authority on the subject.

When we talk abut a player’s value above replacement level, such as referring to stats like WAR, one of the questions that commonly arises is who these mythical replacement level players are. The best example of freely available talent – guys who can be had for nothing and still produce at an acceptable level in some role on a major league team – are minor league free agents. These players receive non-guaranteed contracts, are not placed on the 40 man roster, and teams have no requirement to keep them beyond spring training.

Their acquisition cost, for all intents and purposes, is zero. They represent the group of players that you really can get for nothing. The list of players eligible for minor league free agency has been made available, so with that, let’s take a look at some of the more interesting guys available for free this winter.

Ruben Gotay, 2B/3B

A second baseman for most of his career, Gotay spent more time playing third base in Reno this year, and that position may be a better fit for his particular skill set. He’ll never win a Gold Glove, but his bat is interesting enough to get him back to the big leagues.

While playing for the Diamondbacks affiliate in the PCL, Gotay racked up a .272/.429/.450 line that shows off a strong ability to control the strike zone. He drew 102 walks and struck out just 69 times, and unlike some minor league walk aficionados, he actually flashed some power – 42 of his 101 hits went for extra bases.

As a switch-hitter with plate discipline and power, Gotay has a good enough bat to play in the majors. His defense is the question mark, but teams with an opening at 3B or a willingness to sacrifice some range at 2B should be willing to give him a shot. Heading into his age 27 season, his best days may still be ahead of him.

Ben Davis, RHP

You may remember Davis as a busted catching prospect. These days, he’s working on a late career comeback as a knuckleball-throwing pitcher. While he’s new to the craft, his first impression on the mound was a strong one. He pitched well enough in independent ball in 2008 to catch on with the Reds last year, and he pitched well in nine games for Sarasota out of the bullpen. He even racked up 14 strikeouts in 11 2/3 innings, which is not something you usually see from knucklers.

Knuckleball pitchers are lottery tickets – for every Tim Wakefield, there are a bunch of Charlie Zinks. But there’s always a chance that Davis’ knuckler is better than the guys who wash out in the minors throwing the pitch, and if it is, he could be a pretty decent innings eater for a major league club. Plus, he could always serve as an emergency catcher.

Bobby Brownlie, RHP

At one point back in 2002, Brownlie was considered the best college prospect in the country. He was getting buzz for the top overall selection in the draft, but questions about his health pushed him down to the 21st pick, where the Cubs snatched him up. His career has been a frustrating series of injuries since then. However, through persistence, he’s managed to work himself up to the doorstep of the majors.

He split time between the rotation and the bullpen with the Braves Triple-A affiliate this year and pitched fairly well. His stuff is no longer what it used to be, but he can throw strikes and miss bats occasionally. His command of the strike zone makes him an interesting option as a middle reliever with some long term upside if he can stay on the field for an entire season.

Jerry Owens, CF

Owens has been the focus of scorn and derision from White Sox fans who had to endure Ozzie Guillen’s attempts to make him an everyday player, which he simply isn’t cut out for. However, as a fourth outfielder, Owens is actually a useful player. His defense is a real positive at all three spots and he’s a very good base stealer. He doesn’t have any power, but he’s an excellent contact hitter who is willing to draw a walk from time to time, so he won’t kill you at the plate.

For a team with a lumbering corner outfielder who could use a pinch runner/defensive caddy, Owens is a good use of a roster spot.

These aren’t the only four interesting players on the list – they’re just the four I wanted to talk about today. Teams looking for value will be perusing this list very carefully, looking for guys who offer a bit of potential and come at no real cost.

Over the last couple of days, the rumor mill has flared up in Detroit, suggesting that the Tigers were open to moving Curtis Granderson and Edwin Jackson in the right deals. The rationale offered for making them available would be cost reduction, as the Tigers have a bloated payroll and are more vulnerable to the current economic climate than most clubs. With Justin Verlander eligible for arbitration, their payroll isn’t going down without making some moves.

But, let’s just take a step back and evaluate the rumor on its face – the Tigers are looking to reduce their costs by trading Granderson, who is owed a whopping $5.5 million in salary in 2010? Really? The actual cost savings, once you factor in that they have to replace him, would be in the low single millions, or about the same amount as they could get by just non-tendering Gerald Laird.

To save a few million bucks, the Tigers are going to give up one of the best values in baseball? Keep in mind, Granderson has been worth an average of $19.4 million over the last four years, and never less than $14 million. He’s a +4 win player under the age of 30. He’s essentially the equal in value of John Lackey, just without all the injury risks, and he’s due a total of $36 million over the next four years.

This is a franchise that just let Magglio Ordonez’s $18 million option for 2010 vest in pursuit of a playoff spot. Now, we’re supposed to believe that they’re going to turn around and ship off one of the game’s best center fielders to save a fraction of what they wasted on Maggs?

This just doesn’t pass the smell test. Granderson is a star and a massive bargain. When you’re cutting costs, you don’t start with the guy producing the highest return on investment on the roster. It doesn’t make any sense.

There’s merit to trading Edwin Jackson while his ERA is still shiny and he’s not overly expensive. There’s logic behind that. There’s no logic behind trading Curtis Granderson unless you’re getting a monstrous package of talent in return. And that wouldn’t be a cost savings decision, but instead a talent decision.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Tigers trimmed payroll this winter, but I’d be stunned if Granderson was traded. Unless some team is going to take every bad contract the Tigers have with him, he’s more valuable to them as a player than as trade bait.

Since Dayton Moore has taken over as the Royals GM, he’s taken a lot of flak from the sabermetric community for acquiring guys who make a lot of outs. He built an offense around tools players who don’t get on base, ranging from the likes of Jose Guillen to Mike Jacobs and Yuniesky Betancourt. He talked about the importance of OBP, but when push came to shove, the evidence that he valued players who could get on base just wasn’t there.

So, now, there are rumors that the Royals are considering shipping Alberto Callaspo to the Dodgers in exchange for AJ Ellis, a 28-year-old minor league catcher whose biggest selling point is his on base percentage. The last two years in Triple-A, he’s posted OBPs of .436 and .438, racking up more walks than strikeouts. His career OBP in the minors is .398. For once, the Royals appear to be pursuing a player whose best skill is controlling the strike zone.

Unfortunately for Royals fans, even when Moore pursues a high OBP guy, he still finds one with a fatal flaw. With Ellis, that would be a complete lack of power. His ISO in the minors is an unimpressive .097, and that’s despite playing in hitting environments that are very conducive to offense. Over the last two seasons, he’s managed just 40 extra base hits, or 22 percent of his total hits. He’s a slap hitter without the ability to make the pitcher pay for making a mistake.

Guys who run up high OBPs in the minors without much in the way of power generally just don’t do well in the big leagues. It’s one thing to work the count against minor league pitchers who lack the command the pound the zone with good stuff, and another to try that same tactic in the big leagues. Without the ability to make the pitcher afraid to leave one over the heart of the plate, the ability to draw walks is severely limited.

This is why minor league walk rates actually don’t correlate all that well with major league walk rates. There are some guys who have the ability to make this work (Chone Figgins, Luis Castillo), but those guys can run. You just don’t find slow, no power guys in the big leagues who maintain a high on base percentage.

This doesn’t mean Ellis is worthless. He’s got a decent defensive reputation and can make contact, and as a catcher, the bar for offense in the majors is pretty low. He could probably be a useful backup catcher and maybe even a not horrible starter for a couple of years.

But, if Moore really wants to get KC’s OBP as a team up, he needs to acquire some good hitters, and AJ Ellis is not a good hitter. It should be refreshing to Royals fans that Moore is interested in a guy who gets on base, but it shouldn’t be an OBP or power trade-off – the goal is to get guys who can do both.