Coors Field is a good place to hit. That’s been true since it opened, and even the most casual baseball fan is generally aware to take numbers put up at altitude with some grains of salt. Thus, it wasn’t a big surprise that Matt Holliday’s abilities to hit away from elevation were greeted with skepticism, especially after he got off to a slow start in Oakland this year. But now, with his playing time in 2008 and 2009 nearly identical, let’s take a look at how he’s performed without playing half his games in a hitters paradise.

2008: 623 PA, .321/.409/.538, 38 2B, 2 3B, 25 HR, 12.1% BB%, 19.3% K%, .217 ISO, .361 BABIP
2009: 612 PA, .311/.389/.522, 37 2B, 3 3B, 23 HR, 10.6% BB%, 17.1% K%, .210 ISO, .341 BABIP

It would be challenging to find a player who has had more similar statistical seasons over the last two years. His numbers are practically identical, with the rates being marginally lower due to a slight reduction in batting average on balls in play. There’s no evidence there whatsoever that he was traded by the Rockies over the winter.

This doesn’t mean that Coors Field has no impact, of course. We know it’s a good place to hit, and one data point doesn’t disprove that. It should, however, serve as something of a reminder that not every player who puts up good numbers in a hitters park is going to immediately start performing at the rate at which they played on the road in previous years.

For whatever reason, it has become normal for people to adjust for park effects by looking at a player’s historical road numbers. Lots of people did this with Holliday, who had massive splits while a member of the Rockies. Those projections, based on his personal home/road numbers, significantly undershot how well he has played this year.

Personal splits can be quite enlightening, but by definition, a “split” is a fraction of a dataset. By making the sample smaller, you’re inherently making it less reliable. A home/road split gives us the effect of a player’s home park on his performance, but jumbles it up with a lot of other stuff that gets in the way.

Splits can be interesting, but be careful with them. When projecting future performance, you’re better off using one of the well tested systems, such as ZIPS or CHONE, which include park adjustments, rather than relying on that player’s previous home/road history.

This winter’s free agent class is full of guys with significant amounts of both talent and risk, especially on the pitching side of things. Rich Harden, Ben Sheets, Erik Bedard, Brad Penny, Brett Myers, John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez – the talent pool is very deep in guys with All-Star upside and spend-the-year-rehabbing downside. But it’s not just pitchers, either – there’s a first baseman who offers a similar problem for GMs with a shopping list.

I’m speaking of Mr. Disabled List himself, Nick Johnson. His list of health problems is longer than a typical Joe Posnanski column and not nearly as entertaining. With 542 plate appearances this year, this is only the third season in his career he’s topped the 500+ PA mark. But, as usual, he’s been an on base machine when on the field.

His .427 OBP ranks 3rd in baseball, behind two guys named Pujols and Mauer. He hasn’t posted an on base percentage below .400 since 2004, when he played for the Expos. Once again, he has more walks than strikeouts, and even without his usual power this year, he’s still been one of the league’s better hitters.

However, Johnson turns 31 tomorrow, and given his various surgeries and skill set, it’s fair to suggest that he’s walking around with the body of a 50 year old. He can hit, but his abilities to run and field have diminished, and his ability to stay on the field will always be in question. Just because he was healthy this year doesn’t mean he’ll be healthy next year. Unless the team invests in a protective bubble for him to walk around in, guaranteeing multiple years to a guy with his injury history is a pretty big risk.

Johnson’s production this year has been worth 2.5 wins, and the way he’s hitting in September, he could end the year as a +3 win player. Without all the injury concerns, we’d expect that level of player to get a multi-year deal for something between $10 and $15 million a year after a bidding war for his services broke out. But is anyone really giving Nick Johnson $30 to $35 million for his age 31 to 33 seasons? I doubt it.

My guess is Johnson will have to go year to year for the rest of his career, and teams will attempt to entice him with more dollars rather than more years. But an on base machine that doesn’t require a long term deal to sign is going to be a pretty popular target, so Johnson could find himself in the interesting scenario of having a whole bunch of teams bidding up his 2010 salary.

If you ever need to convince someone of the uselessness of the save statistic, make them watch Brian Fuentes pitch. Fuentes leads the major leagues with 41 saves, and is simultaneously on the verge of losing his job. And for good reason – he’s been pretty bad this year.

After dominating the National League with his unique brand of walks, strikeouts, and non-HR flyballs (while pitching in Colorado, nonetheless), Fuentes has seen the critical component of that trio abandon him in the switch to the AL. His strikeout rate has fallen from 11.78 a year ago to 7.71 this year, a precipitous drop that he simply could not afford.

As a flyball pitcher (47.3% of his balls in play this year are FBs) with below average command, Fuentes has to limit the amount of contact he allows. When he’s not striking batters out, bad things happen. And bad things are happening to him a lot lately.

He blew another save last night, costing the Angels a win over the Red Sox, and Mike Scioscia had already been talking about working Kevin Jepsen into some ninth inning situations. Given the difference in how the two are pitching, that’s not a bad idea.

Jepsen has a similar strikeout rate to Fuentes, but he’s walking a batter less per nine innings and is an extreme groundball guy, which helps him limit the number of soul-crushing home runs he gives up. And for a closer, that’s a pretty important factor.

If the Angels want to win the World Series, they probably need to stop giving Fuentes so many high leverage opportunities. He’s not their best relief pitcher, even if he does lead the league in a remarkably meaningless statistic.

When you think of the guys who swing and miss the most, a few names probably pop into everyone’s minds – Mark Reynolds, Jack Cust, Ryan Howard, Carlos Pena, Adam Dunn, and Russ Branyan have been the kings of whiffing for a while, and they are always at the top of the strikeout leaderboards.

Not surprisingly, these are the names that show up when you sort contact% from lowest to highest. Contact rate and strikeout rate are very highly correlated for obvious reasons. But they aren’t perfectly correlated, and if you look at the two leaderboards next to each other, you’ll notice something strange.

Nelson Cruz has the fifth lowest contact rate of any hitter in baseball this year, with his 67.9% rate sandwiching him right between Howard and Cust. However, his K% isn’t anywhere near those guys. In fact, despite a massive drop in contact from last year, his strikeout rate is basically unchanged.

Last year, Cruz made contact 77.8% of the time, which led to a 24.3# strikeout rate. This year, he’s contact rate is down 10 percentage points, but his strikeout rate has only increased by eight-tenths of one percent. He’s swinging through pitches he hit a year ago, but apparently not in situations with two strikes on him.

I don’t know what this means, honestly. My instincts would suggest that the decrease in contact rate is more “real” than the stability of strikeout rate, and that his K% will increase if his contact% doesn’t return to prior levels, but I haven’t studied the issue close enough to prove it. It is at least possible that Cruz has adopted an extreme shift in how he swings the bat based on the count, where his two strike swing is further away from his regular swing than any other hitter in baseball, but that seems like the kind of thing that would have been picked by up the team’s fanbase, and I haven’t seen anyone talk about this before.

So, Ranger fans, help me out here – am I missing something you guys have already figured out? Why is Nelson Cruz making contact like Jack Cust but only striking out like David Ortiz?

If you remember back to the stone age, before FanGraphs existed and we had a veritable cornucopia of batted ball stats at our disposal, you may recall a time when pitchers were judged by their ratio of ground balls to fly balls. G/F rate was often used as a tool to describe a pitcher’s type of batted balls allowed. In general, it works fairly well. At some extremes, however, it breaks down.

Take Lenny DiNardo, for instance. He returned to the majors last week, being called up by Kansas City to fill a hole in their rotation down the stretch. DiNardo’s primary skill has always been an ability to rack up groundballs, and his first start of 2009 was no exception. In fact, if we looked at his 8.0 G/F rate, we would think that hitters were pounding the ball into the ground all day.

They weren’t, however. There’s an additional batted ball type – line drives, and DiNardo gave up six of them. When you include those in the balls in play denominator, his GB% is 53.3%, which highlights the fact that he got a majority of groundballs but doesn’t suggest the same crazy performance than an 8.0 G/F rate implies.

Now, this is obviously a tiny sample, and the correlation between G/F rate and GB% is very high. 95% of the time, either one will give you the same answer. But it’s that 5% that G/F rate may lead you astray. Let’s use a slightly more realistic scenario, also from this year.

Who has been more of a groundball pitcher this year – Jason Hammel or Brett Anderson? Hammel has the higher G/F rate, 1.46 to 1.36, though the difference is small enough that you might just conclude that they’ve been basically the same. However, when looking at their overall batted ball profile, Anderson has a 48.8% GB% and Hammel has a 45.5% GB%, which is a big enough gap to say that Anderson has clearly been better at getting ground balls.

Their line drive rates (23.4% for Hammel and 15.4% for Anderson), not included in the G/F measurement, hide the fact that Anderson has been more of a groundball guy than Hammel. In fact, by ignoring the line drives that Hammel is giving up, it actually gives an incorrect answer to the question.

In practical terms, this is more of a current issue with minor leaguers, where we don’t have the same quality of batted ball data, and a pitcher’s G/F rate is still quoted with some regularity. Just think of this as a word of caution – while G/F rates work when line drive rates are equal, line drives are not always equal.

At the risk of digging up the carcass of a dead horse just to kick it again, I want to take a second and point out something Joe Morgan said about the A’s in his his most recent chat on ESPN.com. Yes, I know, highlighting things from a Joe Morgan chat isn’t exactly a new idea, but my aim is not to ridicule Morgan, so hopefully you’ll travel down this well worn path with me.

Morgan’s comment:

Otto (CA)

Hello Joe. What do the Oakland A’s need to do be competitive again? Maybe Billy Beane should quit writing books and start acquiring some athletes.
Joe Morgan (11:07 AM)

Become more athletic. Sometimes, when I look at the A’s players, I think they’re playing softball. They have some big guys who try to hit the ball out of the ballpark. They strike out a lot. They just are not in position to make things happen on the basepaths. They’ve never really been a team to run or steal bases, bunt guys over or hit and run. They’ve always tried to hit the big home run. Now they have one guy in Davis. Their philosophy was working for a while, but now that philosophy doesn’t work any more. You have to be more athletic, steal some bases in order to be a well rounded team. You don’t have to steal a lot of bases, but you have to have the threat there.

Among American League teams, the A’s rank last in home runs and fourth in stolen bases. They are eighth in the league in strikeouts, in a virtual tie with the Minnesota Twins, one of the most athletic teams in baseball.

Joe is wrong about the A’s, of course. For whatever reason, he still believes the A’s are built around players like Matt Stairs and Erubiel Durazo, but that hasn’t been the type of player Oakland has been putting on the field for several years now. The A’s are a very athletic team.

Rajai Davis, as Morgan notes, is exactly the kind of player he’s pushing for. But so are Matt Holliday, Ryan Sweeney, Orlando Cabrera, Adam Kennedy, Mark Ellis, and Kurt Suzuki. The A’s built their 2009 team as a club that they expected to be excellent defensively with enough offense to get by. The failure of Jason Giambi and Jack Cust to carry their part of the load doomed the offense, but there certainly wasn’t a lack of athleticism or base stealing in Oakland this year.

The A’s haven’t been the slow, methodical, base-clogging mashers for quite some time. Despite the public perception of that being the “philosophy” of Beane and statistical analysts everywhere, Morgan has actually missed the bigger picture that most numbers crunching teams have begun to play his style of baseball. As smart teams realized that defense was being undervalued, they began to shift towards quality athletes who could create runs in the field as well as at the plate.

The humorous thing about Morgan’s comments is that, by and large, we’re fans of the same kinds of players that he is. And so is Billy Beane. Can’t we all just get along?

Not much has gone right for the Cubs this season, as a team that many thought would be among the league’s best has fallen on tough times. However, despite the disappointing season, there have been a few things that have gone right, including the continued success of Ryan Dempster.

Last year, Dempster surprised the world by moving from the bullpen to the rotation and improving significantly in the process. His breakthrough season was so unexpected that it wasn’t hard to find people who considered him to be a fluke, just the latest in a series of guys having great years before they are eligible for free agency. Dempster certainly did cash in on his success, signing a 4 year, $52 million contract with the Cubs after the season ended.

And he’s been worth every penny so far.

Dempster has retained almost all of the skill-based value he showed last year. His walk rate and strikeout rate are both down a bit in proportion, so his K/BB is basically unchanged from 2008 to 2009. His HR/9 is up, which accounts for the higher FIP and ERA that he’s posting this year, but that was to be expected – his 7.7% HR/FB rate from last year was unsustainable, and regression in that would have been expected even if Dempster had pitched exactly the same as the year prior.

His groundball rate is the same. His contact rate is the same. His percentage of strikes is the same. Dempster is basically repeating his 2008 season, just with a little less good fortune in HR/FB and BABIP. If you were concerned with 2008 being a fluke, 2009 should have eased your minds a bit. He’s now put together two very good seasons in a row and is establishing himself as one of the game’s better starting pitchers.

Between Dempster and Cliff Lee, we’ve seen two pretty compelling cases for the ability of pitchers to take big steps forward in the middle of their careers and sustain them thereafter. Not all out of nowhere seasons are unsustainable flukes. Sometimes, they just really did get better.

Over the winter, the Cardinals made the controversial decision to release Adam Kennedy and replace him at second base with Skip Schumaker, a career outfielder with almost no experience at the position. They felt he was athletic enough to make the conversion and could handle the duties of the keystone well enough to justify the experiment.

Early in the season, they were taking a beating for it, as the move looked like a disaster. As RJ noted in mid-May, Schumaker had the worst UZR of any second baseman in baseball, standing at -7 runs in just six weeks of baseball. He just wasn’t making the plays necessary at the position. The learning curve had proven steep.

Schumaker’s UZR since May 17th? -0.7. After a rough start, the best defensive metric we have thinks he’s been basically average for the last four months. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Cardinals themselves have improved a great deal since then as well, running away with the NL Central in the process. And they’ve done it by preventing runs with a heavy ground ball pitching staff.

Knowing Dave Duncan’s desire to spread the gospel of the two-seam fastball, the Cardinals know the importance of infield defense to their success. Despite the risks, they were still willing to take a gamble on Schumaker’s ability to turn himself into a decent defender at the position, and they held to their convictions even after a really bad start to the season. Their reward? A league average hitter who can hold his own as a middle infielder.

The Cardinals deserve a lot of credit for not just making the move, but sticking with it. I have a feeling they won’t be the last team to get away from strict mindsets about what types of players can play certain positions. As teams experience success moving guys like Schumaker to second base, I have a feeling we’ll see this trend take off.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but there are a lot of really good center fielders in baseball right now. There is so much talent in center field that we could be seeing the dawning of the greatest group of talent to ever play the position at the same time. Seriously, just take a look at the current crop of players manning the position.

Established All-Stars: Grady Sizemore, Carlos Beltran, Torii Hunter, Curtis Granderson, Mike Cameron

Breakout Stars: Matt Kemp, Franklin Gutierrez, Denard Span, Shane Victorino

Potential Stars: Adam Jones, Colby Rasmus, BJ Upton, Josh Hamilton, Andrew McCutchen, Dexter Fowler

Flycatchers: Nyjer Morgan, Rajai Davis, Ryan Sweeney, Michael Bourn, Coco Crisp, Brett Gardner

Solid Players: Nate McLouth, Marlon Byrd, Jacoby Ellsbury, Kosuke Fukudome, Melky Cabrera

That’s 26 players with some real value to their teams. Twenty-Six, and I didn’t even include guys like Chris Dickerson or Chris Young. Usually, you expect to find 10-15 pretty good players at any given position, some others guys who fill a need for a while, and then a bunch of old guys at the end of their careers. But this crop of center field talent is just unbelievable in its depth and youth.

Sizemore, Beltran, and Granderson aren’t exactly old men, but they’re the elder statesmen of this group that is overflowing with young stars in the making. There’s so many good players roaming CF right now that you could state that a guy like Adam Jones is a below average player for the position this year. And Jones went to the all-star game, and his place as one of the game’s best young talents is not in question.

I’m not sure I have ever witnessed this kind of influx in talent at a single position before. This is the golden age of center field.

If you want to put a scare into a baseball fan, the easiest way is to tell him that his team’s best pitcher has undiagnosed arm soreness and has to go on the disabled list. The combination of the unknown with the historical rate of pitcher attrition will make most of them go immediately to the worst case scenario. Even when the MRI comes back clean, it’s common for pitchers to see decreased performance while they work through their issues.

Thus, worry about John Lackey was pretty widespread this spring. He spent 53 days on the disabled list with a “triceps strain” last year, and developed a bit of a home run problem when he was on the mound. This spring, he was diagnosed with an “elbow strain” and a “forearm strain”, and he spent the first two months of the season on the disabled list. Three different strains and two lengthy DL stints for a 30-year-old who carried a heavy load early in his career? You could almost hear Dr. Andrews sharpening his knives back in April.

But, after another complete game shutout last night, Lackey has shown that he’s just fine. It is almost scary how close his current numbers are to his career averages.

His career FB velocity? 91.0. His 2009 fastball velocity? 91.6.
His career K/9? 7.22. His 2009 K/9? 7.23.
His career GB%? 43.1%. His 2009 GB%? 44.1%.

Across the board, this is just a classic Lackey season – 3:1 K/BB rate, average batted ball profile, just under one home run allowed per complete game. Not only is he not having surgery, but you would be hard pressed to find any evidence that he was ever unable to pitch this year.

By beating the odds, Lackey has put himself back in line for a big payday this winter. He doesn’t do any one thing exceptionally well, but he’s above average across the board, and the total package has made him one of the most consistently solid starting pitchers in baseball. As a guy who has already proven he can get American League hitters out, he’ll be in high demand this winter. Even with a two month stay on the DL to start the year, you have to imagine that multiple clubs will be lining up to woo Lackey out of Los Angeles.