Gary Matthews Jr is not a good baseball player. He’s also completely unaware of this. Here’s a quote from the LA Times:

“I don’t expect to be back; it’s time to move on,” outfielder Gary Matthews Jr. said as he packed his belongings in the team’s Angel Stadium clubhouse today. “I’m ready to play for an organization that wants me to play every day. This organization has other plans, and that’s OK.”

And about that contract of his?

“It’s definitely not as big as it was a year ago,” Matthews said. “Obviously, there are some teams that can’t afford it, but when I’m playing every day, I feel I can be a top-line center fielder, and that, I would think, is what a lot of teams want.”

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Well, he is right about one thing – his contract is not as large as it was a year ago. It’s still a boat anchor of a deal for a player who has basically no chance of ever starting for another major league team again. Over the first three seasons of his contract with Anaheim, Matthews has been worth -$5.3 million in salary. That minus sign is not a typo. Given his performance relative to the value that could have been found by playing any random Triple-A guy instead, Matthews owes the Angels $5.3 million for taking wins off the board. Even without the contract, he’d have a hard time convincing anyone to employ him in 2010 after two straight seasons of below replacement level production.

The contract makes it impossible for the Angels to trade him, so in the end, they’ll just end up releasing him, at which point Mr. Matthews may be shocked to learn that other teams do not share his optimism about his ability to still be a top-line center fielder. He’s 35 years old and hasn’t shown any ability to hit or field since 2006. The market for aging veterans has collapsed the last few years, as useful players such as Kenny Lofton, Ray Durham, and Frank Thomas have been forced into early retirement against their wishes. Teams simply aren’t willing to use roster spots on players that they feel will create problems in reserve roles, choosing instead to give opportunities to hungry twenty somethings who will work their tails off to live the dream.

Over the last three years, Matthews has proven that he’s not worthy of a starting job and not willing to accept a reserve role, so in the end, he’s probably going to find himself with a new job entirely – one that has nothing to do with playing major league baseball. Sorry, Gary, but you probably just talked yourself right out of the game.

Primum non nocere – the Latin phrase meaning “First, do no harm.” That sentiment is drilled into physicians from the beginning of medical school, but perhaps it should be emblazoned on every dugout wall in baseball as well. In the ALCS, we saw two managers over-analyze situations, causing harm to their own team time and time again, and now it appears that Charlie Manuel may be on the verge of following in their footsteps.

Manuel will send Cliff Lee to the hill on Wednesday for Game One of the series, as he should. However, he has not been willing to disclose the rest of his playoff rotation, and reports are surfacing that he may go with Pedro Martinez in the second game in lieu of Cole Hamels. The rationale appears to be based on recent performance – Hamels has struggled in the first two rounds of the playoffs, while Martinez was able to hold down the Dodgers in his NLCS appearance.

However, at some point, you have to step back and realize that recent performance simply cannot overcome what we know about the respective abilities of the two pitchers. Hamels is the better pitcher by a significant margin. It’s not even close.

The appearance of Hamels’ struggles this year are mostly just noise. His 2009 FIP of 3.72 is exactly equal to his 2008 FIP, as his walk, strikeout, and home run rates are nearly identical. The ERA jumped by over a run per game due to a 55 point increase in his batting average on balls in play. He was a bit lucky last year and a bit unlucky this year. Overall, he’s the same guy he was a year ago when he led the Phillies to a World Series title and was being crowned the new young ace of the National League.

Martinez simply isn’t in that league anymore. He did a nice job down the stretch for the Phillies, but even in a limited sample of nine starts, he wasn’t as good as Hamels. He pounded the strike zone and missed some bats, but his fringe fastball up in the zone led to a ridiculously low 29.5 percent ground ball rate. Not surprisingly, he gave up a bunch of home runs, which is consistent with his performances over the last several years. He throws enough strikes and has a good enough change-up to be effective, but he’s prone to throwing a couple of meatballs each game.

To decide to go with Martinez over Hamels, you have to significantly undervalue the gap in talent and overvalue everything else. Pedro may have a history with old Yankee stadium, and you might prefer a guy with his personality on the mound, but that stuff doesn’t make up for the fact that Cole Hamels is a far superior pitcher to Pedro Martinez right now. Mike Scioscia made a similar mistake by going with Joe Saunders due to non-talent reasons. It’s not a good idea.

The Yankees have it right – throw your best pitchers as often as possible. Hamels is the second best pitcher on the staff. He should start game two. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Last night was a continuation of the themes presented throughout the ALCS: Angel blunders in the field and on the basepaths, odd decisions on who should be pitching at certain times, Gary Matthews pinch-hitting for Mike Napoli, and the Yankees being carried by a few pitchers. Last night, it was Pettitte and Rivera doing the bulk of the work in shutting down the Angel offense, as the Yankees continued to lean on a very small core of trusted arms to get them to the World Series.

Over the six games played in the series, Yankee pitchers took the hill for 59 innings. 48 of those 59 innings were thrown by CC Sabathia, AJ Burnett, Andy Pettitte, and Mariano Rivera. The other seven pitchers used by New York combined to throw a total of 10 2/3 innings. 81.4 percent of the series featured one of the Yankees three starters or their relief ace on the hill, a staggeringly high total.

During the regular season, these four combined for 48 percent of all Yankee innings pitched. However, with the advantageous schedule of the ALCS (thanks Fox!), Girardi made the right choice to go with a three man rotation, and the frequent off-days allowed Rivera to pitch any time he was needed. By consolidating the innings into four high quality pitchers, the Yankees went from being a really good team to a juggernaut. The Angels hitters struggled, but given who they were facing 80 percent of the time, it’s surprising that they got any hits at all.

Girardi will have a decision to make regarding whether to try to repeat this strategy against the Phillies. The World Series doesn’t have the same quirky off day between Games Four and Five, so he’d have to be willing to use starters on three days rest in each of Games Four through Seven. He’s almost certainly comfortable with Sabathia pitching on short rest given how well he performed in the ALCS, but will he be willing to take the same risk with Burnett and Pettitte?

I think he should. The upside is really high, while the risk isn’t that significant – if Burnett or Pettitte struggle, you’ll have Chamberlain/Gaudin available out of the pen early, which isn’t that different from just starting them outright.

The three man rotation is a huge boost to the Yankees. It was one of the main reasons they’ve been able to roll through the first two rounds of the playoffs. It won’t be as easy to pull off in the World Series, but it’s still worth trying.

Yesterday, Keith Law confirmed an interesting old trade rumor, noting that he was in the room in 2002 when Steve Phillips offered J.P. Ricciardi a straight up swap of David Wright for Jose Cruz Jr, which Ricciardi then declined. Given how their careers have gone since, the obvious reaction is that this was a massive blunder by the Blue Jays. However, they didn’t have any way of knowing the future, so they were left to make decisions based on the information available at the time. So, let’s go back in time and look at the proposal as it would have been viewed at the time.

In 2002, Cruz was coming off the best season of his career and in the middle of his physical prime. While we don’t have UZR data for 2001 on the site, his career fielding numbers paint the picture of a guy with good enough wheels for a corner but not enough ability to play center field regularly – a classic tweener, basically. Combined with the best offensive performance of his career (a .367 wOBA that featured both power and speed), that kind of player is worth +3 to +4 wins, and Cruz had the kind of skillset that should have aged well.

He regressed in 2002, but was still an above average player, posting a +2.5 win season and showing the core skills that could have led to a rebound in the future. There were certainly reasons to value Cruz Jr as a player.

However, trade value isn’t just about the on field value, but factors in the contract status as well, and Cruz was headed towards free agency. So, in reality, the Mets were offering Wright for a several month rental during a season in which Toronto was not a contender (they stood 20.5 games out of first place on July 31st, 2002).

So, the Blue Jays wouldn’t accept Wright as enough value in return to deal Cruz in the final year of his contract, choosing instead to keep him for the remainder of the season and let him walk as a free agent after declining to offer him arbitration. Due to that decision, they didn’t receive any compensation when the Giants signed him as a free agent the following winter.

In other words, they basically didn’t value Wright as a prospect much at all. Should they have?

During the 2002 season, Wright was a 19-year-old in the low-A South Atlantic League, a year removed from being a supplemental first round pick. He hit .266/.367/.401 in the pitcher-friendly league, but the combination of little power and a lot of strikeouts were concerns. There were reasons for optimism and pessimism, which isn’t particularly surprising for a teenager that was several years from the majors, but Wright was a prospect, even if not an elite one.

If you want to compare that offer to a recent transaction, the current version of Felipe Lopez is actually not a bad comparison for what Cruz was – talented but inconsistent on an expiring contract, a solid player but not a star. Lopez was traded for a pair of fringe prospects, and the general consensus was that the D’Backs got as much as they could, given the market for Lopez’s services. Certainly, neither Cole Gillespie or Roque Mercedes were near the level of prospect that Wright was in 2002.

Even without the benefit of foresight, it really is tough to see what Ricciardi was thinking by turning the deal down. When you’re trading a guy with an expiring contract, you expect the player coming back to have some kind of issues, and Wright’s were of the kind that could be eliminated with further development. If Cruz Jr wasn’t in their future plans (as indicated by the decision to not offer arbitration), having a prospect like Wright in the system seems like a much better alternative to letting Cruz Jr play out the string before moving on.

There are a lot of reasons the Yankees lost last night, and most of them have to do with bad pitching. A.J. Burnett threw a lot of bad pitches. Phil Hughes threw some bad pitches. It happens. The Angels are a good team, and they pounced on some mistakes. New York is still pretty likely to win one of the last two games and go on to the World Series. In the end, last night’s game is probably a footnote.

However, that doesn’t let Joe Girardi off the hook. I’m not the only one who has called him out for over-managing in this series, but last night, he took it to an incomprehensible level. I’m going to gloss over the fact that Mike Scioscia intentionally walked Alex Rodriguez and put the tying run on base – that’s another post entirely. And while the decision was bad, you can at least kind of understand his thinking there. But then Girardi took Scioscia’s questionable managerial move and raised him all-in by sending Freddy Guzman in to run for A-Rod.

The Yankees were down by a run with two outs, so yes, maximizing the odds of scoring that baserunner is a good idea. However, any move you make in an attempt to improve your odds of scoring has to be proportional to the penalty of making the move. If you’re taking Rodriguez out of a game that could easily go to extra innings, you’re inflicting pretty significant harm to your team later on, so there better be at least some kind of real, tangible improvement in the likelihood of scoring.

Guzman is fast, no doubt, but so is Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod has 297 career stolen bases while succeeding at an 82 percent clip and he was 14 for 16 this year. Yes, he hits home runs, but he’s both fast and good at running the bases. The marginal improvement in speed from having Guzman stand on first base instead of Rodriguez is minuscule. There was essentially one play where the difference in speed could have come into play – a double into the gap or down the line that leads to a play at the plate.

In his career with the Yankees, Hideki Matsui has 207 doubles and triples in 3,820 plate appearances. 5.4 percent of his trips to the plate have resulted in an extra base hit that didn’t clear the fence. Over the last three years, he’s at 4.6 percent. So, let’s just say that the odds of Matsui hitting a ball in the gap or down the line was about five percent, or one in 20.

Now, we have to eliminate all the plays where speed won’t really matter – either runner could easily score on a ball that gets to the wall, given that they’d be running on contact with two outs. Neither runner likely scores on a blooper down the line that just finds the chalk or a ground ball past the first baseman that hooks into the corner. The ball has to get past the outfielders for there to be a play at the plate, but not so far past them that they couldn’t get it back in fast enough to make it close at home.

So now we’re talking about a fraction of those one in twenty odds. The real odds of that one specific play happening? One in 50? One in 75? It’s somewhere in there. And now, when that play occurs, what is the actual improvement in the odds of scoring with Guzman on base? Even if you think it’s a 50 percent improvement, now you’re staring at something like one-in-100 or one-in-150 that the move works out.

Joe Girardi took Alex Rodriguez out of a game that could have easily gone to extra innings for something like a one percent improvement in his odds of scoring. That’s just insane.

This makes replacing Robertson with Aceves look downright tame. Someone stop Joe Girardi before he manages the best team in baseball right out of the playoffs.

One half of the World Series is set as the Phillies will return to the Fall Classic to defend their title against either the Yankees or the Angels. The ALCS could wrap up tonight, with the Yankees holding a 3-1 advantage and looking in every way to be the far superior team at the moment.

But I’m rooting for the Angels tonight, because I like baseball, and I don’t want to have to wait a week to watch another game. Thanks to the scheduling of the World Series around the preferences of Fox television executives, the World Series doesn’t begin until next Wednesday. A Yankee victory tonight means a five day stretch from when both LCS’ end to when the World Series begins.

That’s lame. By setting the LCS schedules to ensure that as many of the games as possible begin at 8 PM Eastern, the playoffs have been stretched out to a degree bordering on tedious. Did we really need a 10 day schedule to play the league championship series? Do we need a minimum two day buffer between the end of the ALCS and the start of the World Series?

The only way we weren’t having a significant baseball lull at the end of October was if the ALCS went seven games. Even if it went six and the NLCS went the distance, we were still going to have three days off before the World Series started. Did MLB really think that re-creating the all-star break in October was a good idea?

I know that baseball is a business, but at some point, shouldn’t someone realize that beginning the Fall Classic on October 28th isn’t a very good idea? Especially with an expected New York-Philadelphia series, playing half of the games in November doesn’t seem like a very good plan.

I realize I’m tilting at windmills here, and that the business of selling advertisements has surpassed the best interest of the fans, so all we can really do is root for the Angels or prepare for a very boring five days.

The final score of last night’s game necessarily means that, in retrospect, the umpiring wasn’t a big deal. Tim McClelland could have called every play at third base in favor of the Angels and New York was still going to win that game. However, the amount of plays that were just totally missed is still a serious problem, and understandably, the performance of the umps has pushed the issue of replay back into the limelight.

There’s no way the status quo is the best we can do, right? I would imagine most of us can agree on that. There’s some combination of technological improvements with the current human subjective rulings that would give us a higher level of accuracy without sacrificing some ideal of purity – the arguments are more over how much technology we should be using. I can’t see too many people who watched the performance of the men in blue last night and said “I’m okay with this happening in a playoff series.”

The game should be decided by the players. It usually is, but as we saw last night, there’s potential for one team to outplay the other and still lose due to one umpire having a really bad night of judgment. That’s something that should be fixed.

If the umps are okay with two extra bodies being added down the lines for the playoffs, we can infer that they’re willing to trade some of the authority they have during the regular season in an attempt to improve accuracy of calls in the playoffs. They are not so defensive of their positions that they won’t make sacrifices in order to get more calls right.

They’re also willing to defer to each other. The home plate umpire asks the base umps for help on check swings. They gather to talk about home runs down the lines, with the guy who thinks he had the best view usually convincing everyone else to go along with him.

So, why wouldn’t they be okay with a seventh umpire that’s just watching the game on TV like the rest of us? It took us about five seconds to figure out that Swisher was out at second base on the pickoff play, and maybe twice that to figure out that he didn’t leave early from third base. It was plainly obvious that Cano was standing off the bag when Napoli tagged him. These are not decisions that required a five minute conference call under a hood.

Give an earpiece to the crew chief, and let the replay ump just tell him “hey, Tim, you missed that one. Cano was out, no question.” It is fundamentally no different than the home plate ump pointing down to third base on a checked swing. They’re getting help from each other in order to increase accuracy.

This is the kind of thing that could be implemented in a day. Bring in an extra ump and give him a room with a couple of TVs and a two-way communicator, and we won’t have scenes like last night again. We don’t need a complicated system with flags and challenges. Just have an ump watch TV and talk to his peers.

Writing about yesterday’s Yankees-Angels game is harder than it sounds. There are just way too many angles to cover, and because it’s the Yankees, most of them have already been beaten into the ground. But, let’s try anyway, and let’s focus on the one decision that stood out the most – replacing David Robertson with Alfredo Aceves in the 11th inning.

First off, let’s look at the two relievers. They’re obviously very different types of pitchers, with opposite strengths and weaknesses.

Robertson is a strikeout guy who uses his movement to induce swinging strikes at the expense of giving up some walks. He’s hard to hit, but if you let him, he can get himself in trouble with walks.

Aceves is the classic command guy who pounds the strike zone and pitches to contact. He’s much easier to make contact off of, but he’s not going to beat himself. He’ll let you get yourself out at the risk of putting the ball in play.

There are certainly scenarios where you would prefer one to the other. With a runner at third base and less than two outs, you want Robertson’s ability to get the strikeout and strand the runner. With the bases loaded and two outs, you want Aceves’ ability to throw a strike and not walk in the winning run.

But the bottom of the 11th didn’t present either of those scenarios. Instead, it was bases empty, two outs, with Howie Kendrick coming to the plate. Is there any reason to prefer Aceves to Robertson in that situation?

Not unless you’re relying on a number that doesn’t mean anything. Aceves’ ability to avoid the walk is essentially useless against Kendrick, because he refuses to walk on his own. Given how aggressive he is at the plate and how hard he hits the ball (the career .354 BABIP is no fluke), you’d prefer to have a pitcher who can make him swing and miss. He’s going to chase pitches. You don’t have to force him to swing by pounding the strike zone.

Robertson was the good match-up for a Kendrick type of hitter, not Aceves. Going beyond Kendrick, you’d still prefer Robertson to Aceves even if you assume that he’s not going to get Kendrick out, because now you have the winning run on base, and a ball in play is not what you want in that situation.

Girardi has consistently over-managed the bullpen in this series, using guys for one batter here or one batter there in order to try to get the best possible match-up. In this case, he already had it, and he ended up making a move that was neutral at best and a downgrade at worst.

Sometimes, less is more. The Yankees’ best chance of winning the World Series will come if Girardi is more willing to trust his relievers rather than making a move every time he thinks he can incrementally improve his odds by a couple of percent.

The Angels have done a lot of things wrong in the first two games of the ALCS. Most of them have been poor reactions on split second decisions that have cost the team in crucial situations. One of them, however, required thought and planning, and the result was still inexplicable.

Saturday night, 8th inning, 2-2, runners at 1st and 2nd, 1 out. The LI for this situation was 3.72. This was a critical juncture of the game, as the Angels needed to simply get a base hit to take the lead, and could give themselves a good chance of winning with an extra base hit that scored both runners.

Staring at that opportunity, Mike Scioscia sent Gary Matthews Jr to the plate to hit for Mike Napoli. Matthews, owner of a .315 wOBA in his three seasons as an Angel, pinch-hit for Napoli, who has a career .364 wOBA. With the game on the line.

I don’t even really know what to say. Matthews is a bad hitter. Napoli is a good hitter. Add in the pinch hitting penalty (players perform below their true talent level when coming off the bench to hit), and the gap just grows to a point where it’s unfathomable to think that Scioscia really believed that Matthews was the better choice to hit in that situation.

Their career batting averages are basically equal. Napoli’s OBP is 25 points higher, thanks to his better walk rate. Napoli’s SLG is 84 points higher, as he’s a legitimate power hitter who can drive the ball with regularity. There’s no way you can slice the numbers to come up with a scenario where this was anything but a downgrade.

As a bonus, by removing Napoli in a tie game, you were then forced to go with Jeff Mathis as the catcher if the game went to extra innings (which, of course, it did). Mathis’ career wOBA is .263. He’s got all the offensive punch of Rey Ordonez, yet because of the decision to hit for Napoli in the 8th, he’d have to finish the game behind the dish.

Matthews struck out, the run didn’t score, and Scioscia later asked Mathis to lay down a bunt in the 10th inning with the go ahead run on base and one out – he popped it up, and the Angels didn’t score that inning either. We won’t even talk about Matthews’ 12th inning strikeout that left two men on base where the Yankees intentionally walked Maicer Izturis to get to Matthews.

Letting an infield fly drop or throwing to the wrong base are mental errors that are frustrating but obviously not intentional. Mike Scioscia, on the other hand, has time to think about what he’s going to do, and he still managed to make a ridiculously bad decision. The Angels are down 0-2 in large part because their manager apparently can’t tell a good hitter from a bad one.

According to Jon Heyman, the Angels have offered a two year contract extension for Bobby Abreu worth $8 million a season. Adding Abreu has been one of the things that has pushed the Angels offense forward this year, and they’d understandably like to keep his bat around for the next couple of years. Is a 2 year, $16 million offer fair for both sides?

Over the last three years, Abreu has established a pretty consistent skillset – he draws a bunch of walks, has gap power, runs the bases well, but defends like an old man. His wOBAs from 2007 to 2009: .360, .368, and .367, which makes him worth around 20 runs above an average hitter over a full season.

Defensively, it’s another story. Even as a corner outfielder, he’s bad. His UZR this year was “only” -10 this year after a disastrous -26 in 2008, but a decent chunk of that was from throwing – the ARM portion of his UZR went from +2.4 to +6.8 runs this year, somewhat hiding the fact that he still can’t run down balls in the outfield.

At 35-years-old, he’s essentially straddling the border between outfielder and DH, being equally valuable in either spot. Regardless of which position he plays, he’s basically an average player, and while he’s getting up there in age, he’s shown enough young player skills that he doesn’t appear to be on his last legs.

At $8 million a year, the Angels are essentially valuing him correctly on the assumption of a $4 million per win market rate, which is pretty consistent with what we’ve seen over the last few years. The offer essentially pays Abreu a fair wage if there won’t be any inflation in the market this winter. Given the economy, betting on salary inflation seems like quite the gamble.

Abreu probably won’t get a significantly better offer than this. If he enjoys playing for the Angels, he should sign the deal. It’s a fair offer.