As Bill Ladson notes, the Nationals are giving strong consideration to the idea of shifting Cristian Guzman from shortstop to second base next year, due to what they consider to be diminishing range as he ages. For now, let’s put aside the fact that UZR doesn’t exactly agree with that sentiment and address what shifting across the bag will do to his value:

Nothing.

Over the last 10 years or so, the “advanced” statistics that became popular evaluated players against a position specific offensive baseline – VORP, for example. If a shortstop and a second baseman had the exact same batting line, the shortstop would rate higher by that kind of metric, due to the fact that second baseman hit better as a group than shortstops. As such, it’s become exceedingly common to see people write things like “he’s got enough offense to be valuable as a shortstop, but he doesn’t hit enough to play second or third”.

In fact, I guarantee you that someone will write that very thing about Guzman. The perception will be that moving from shortstop to second base will decrease his value. In reality, if the Nationals are right about his reduced range, it very well could increase his value.

Positions are essentially just a way to arrange players in a manner that produces the most efficient defense possible. You can literally play anyone anywhere – there’s no rule preventing the Nationals from sticking Adam Dunn at shortstop, for instance. They realize, however, that they will field a better team by minimizing the amount of times that Dunn has to move laterally in order to make a play, so they hide him at first base.

No one would think that Dunn would be more valuable if the Nationals lined him up at shortstop. The loss of defensive value would more than offset any gain the team got from getting an extra first baseman into the line-up. So, what I’m saying isn’t even controversial, though it may seem like it on the surface – everyone agrees that there is a point of defensive ability where a player’s value increases as he moves down the defensive spectrum.

If Guzman has lost significant range (again, we’re ignoring UZR and just assuming they’re right about this for the sake of discussion), then it is quite possible that the Nationals will get a larger benefit from reducing the amount of balls hit in his direction than they would by squeezing a marginally better bat into the line-up at second base.

This is where offensive position adjustment statistics, such as VORP, fail. If the Nationals would save themselves 5 to 10 runs a year by having a better defender at shortstop than Guzman, then they’re likely to get a net gain by moving him to second base (assuming that this better defender hits like a shortstop and not a pitcher, of course). And if the move produces a net gain for the team, then it’s impossible to accept that Guzman is getting less valuable in the process.

Now, the Nationals could be wrong about Guzman’s defensive abilities, and they could be marginalizing the value of a guy who UZR thinks is still a pretty decent defender at the position. But don’t just let someone tell you that Guzman is automatically losing value because his offense doesn’t compare as well to the average second baseman. That’s only part of the picture.

Among American League pitchers with at least 50 innings, name the guy with the highest strikeout rate. Not surprisingly, its Joe Nathan – he’s pretty good, as everyone knows. Who is second? If you knew that it was Robinson Tejeda, well, then you’re probably a Royals fan. In a disastrous season for Kansas City, Tejeda is standing as one of the reasons to find some joy.

Despite throwing three major league quality pitches, Tejeda was pretty lousy during his career in Texas thanks to Daniel Cabrera style command. He was the classic throw-hard-with-no-idea-where-its-going guy, and Texas got tired of his act after a couple of years. His stuff wasn’t even translating into missed bats – in 2006, he posted a 4.89 K/9, for instance. He was just a thrower with no obvious skills besides velocity.

However, he broke through as a reliever after being claimed on waivers by the Royals last year, racking up 41 strikeouts in 39 1/3 innings in his most successful big league season to date. His command was still bad, but at least he was offsetting it with swinging strikes.

This year, he’s taken it up another notch, as hitters are making contact just 69% of the time when they swing at one of his pitches. He was good enough out of the pen to convince the Royals to give him another try in the rotation, and so far, it’s worked out tremendously well.

Over his first two starts, he’s faced the Angels and Tigers, and he’s run up 14 strikeouts in 13 1/3 innings. He’s even thrown strikes around 65 percent of the time, which is a huge improvement from his usual close-your-eyes-and-hope approach to pitching.

Tejeda’s certainly in for some regression (that 1.8% HR/FB rate is obviously not sustainable), but now that he’s showing he can rack up strikeouts while pitching 5+ innings in a game, he’s a pretty interesting piece. Even with the crazy walk problems, he’s got enough stuff to work as a back-end starter.

This morning, when debating what to write about today, I thought about penning something about Albert Pujols. It’s tough to say anything new and interesting about the man, because after all, what is there to say? He’s the best player in baseball and everyone knows it. So, I wrote about the legendary Juan Uribe instead.

But then, Albert just insists on being covered. I was considering mentioning how unbelievably hot he’s been lately this morning, and now, he’s just finished an afternoon game against Milwaukee where he went 3 for 5 and launched two more home runs, giving him 47 on the season. His stretch of baseball the last six days has been obscene.

September 4th, @Pit – 2 for 4, HR, BB, .38 WPA
September 5th, @Pit, Pinch hit game winning HR, .33 WPA
September 6th, @Pit, 3 for 5, .10 WPA
September 7th, @Mil, 3 for 4, 2 2B, BB, .25 WPA
September 8th, @Mil, 1 for 3, HR, 2 BB, .15 WPA
September 9th, @Mil, 3 for 5, 2 HR, .17 WPA

13 for 22, 2 2B, 5 HR, 4 BB, 0 K. Not a bad week.

I guess we shouldn’t be that surprised. After all, we’re talking about a player who hasn’t had a single day all season where his OPS was less than 1.000. It hasn’t been under 1.100 since mid-June. His performance today pushed him over the +8.0 win mark for the season, and he’s now on pace to have the best offensive season of his career.

The man is an incredible player. He could go 0 for the rest of his lifetime and still be a first ballot Hall Of Famer. He’s one of the greatest hitters to ever live. He is amazing.

The San Francisco Giants win in spite of their offense, not because of it. However, they are getting some positive contributions from their position players, including the surprising Juan Uribe, who they picked up on a minor league deal in spring training. Uribe not only made the club, but has become one of the team’s more valuable players while swinging a ridiculously hot bat of late.

For the season, he’s hitting .282/.320/.492, good for a .344 wOBA. Toss in quality defense at second and third, as well as passable work at shortstop, and Uribe’s been worth 1.9 wins in 341 plate appearances this season. He’s going to end the year as around an average major league contributor, and the Giants got him for next to nothing. However, even with his struggles the last few years, perhaps we shouldn’t be totally surprised at Uribe’s production.

His overall profile hasn’t changed at all. Coming into the season, CHONE projected he would walk in 6.2% of his plate appearances, strike out in 18.3% of them, and hit for a .158 ISO. His actual marks? 6.0%, 20.1%, and .211. The power number is up a little bit, but he posted ISOs over .200 in 2004 and 2006, so it’s not like this is a new skill for him. His plate discipline numbers are practically identical across the board to his career averages. He’s the same guy he’s always been, but just getting better results.

Why? Our good friend BABIP. When Uribe posts a reasonably normal batting average on balls in play, he’s a decent hitter. From 2005 to 2008, however, he posted four straight years with below average numbers on balls in play, bottoming out at .244 in 2006. This year, he’s at .319 – the highest mark of his career.

Hitter BABIP isn’t nearly as luck related as pitcher BABIP, but it’s still subject to significant fluctuations around a player’s “true talent” level. That Uribe can run the following six BABIPs in succession is a great example of this: .311, .271, .244, .262, .289, .319.

The only major difference between Uribe this year and the one that the White Sox saw the last few years – and of course, the one no one wanted to employ this winter – was the amount of times the balls he hit found the fielders gloves. Even the most accurate projectors of BABIP will have fairly significant variation, and finding these types of players is a great way for teams to find hidden value. Not all low BABIP guys are “unlucky”, but if you want to find a guy who can take a pretty big step forward in a hurry, look for players like Uribe who have established levels of skill and could be productive hitters with some better results on balls in play.

The Giants are sure glad they took a shot on him.

A week ago, the Rays were still the defending American League champions, and while their playoff odds weren’t good, they had a chance. They stood at 71-59, five games behind Boston in the wild card race, but with a chance to show they could hang with the best the AL had to offer. They had eight games scheduled in the last seven days, with three against the Red Sox, three against the Tigers, and then a double-header against New York. A strong week would put them in position to chase down the wild card leaders this coming weekend when they travel to Fenway Park.

Instead, that series is now meaningless, because the Rays fell apart in epic fashion. Seven losses later and we can officially shut the door on Tampa Bay’s chances of repeating. The collapse was a complete team effort, with every part of the club destructing en masse.

The offense struck out in 29% of their plate appearances, which led to a .222 average and a .286 wOBA. The pitching staff ran up 40 walks in 70 innings, and didn’t even offset the damage with strikeouts, ringing up only 50 batters on their way to a terrible 5.45 FIP.

No one was worse than Andy Sonnanstine, whose miserable season somehow got worse. In two starts, he managed to give up 13 runs over 6 2/3 innings. J.P. allowed seven of the 13 batters he faced to reach base while pitching exclusively in high leverage situations. Grant Balfour walked four of the 10 batters he faced. Six members of their pitching staff posted a FIP higher than 6.00 in the last week. Given the disasters on the mound, its no surprise that the team allowed 6.4 runs per game.

Even improved pitching wouldn’t have helped that much, however, as the offense was nearly as bad. They managed just 29 runs thanks to the “contributions” of players like Carl Crawford (2 hits in 30 plate appearances), Akinori Iwamura (.201 wOBA), Ben Zobrist (one extra base hit), and Pat Burrell (4 for 25 with one extra base hit). The team’s best hitter over the last week was Carlos Pena, but even that ended badly when he had his hand broken while being hit by a pitch and is now done for the season.

With the collapse, the Rays have to wonder what could have been. There is no doubt that this is a talented team that they put together, with both tremendous ability and depth at most positions. However, it is not a team without flaws, and Tampa Bay will have to spend the winter addressing those flaws if they’re going to topple Boston and New York again.

2009 was a missed opportunity. If Tampa Bay wants to remain in the mix with the big money teams, they can’t afford more missed opportunities. The Rays need to reload their roster this winter, and if it takes a willingness to part with some of their young talent in order to do so, than so be it. Building for the future is great, but they can’t let too many chances to bring a World Series title slip through their grasp.

Perhaps watching the 2009 season go up in smoke in one week will instill the needed sense of urgency.

There might not be an easier player in baseball to project than Pedro Feliz. Always known for his glove more than his bat, Feliz has settled into a remarkably consistent pattern of offensive results.

2006: .709 OPS
2007: .708 OPS
2008: .705 OPS
2009: .706 OPS

That’s hard to do. Feliz’s skills have shifted around from year to year more than those numbers would suggest – he makes better contact than he used to, but his power has disappeared since May – but the overall effect has been about the same. As one pat of his game improves, something else declies in proportion, leaving him the same guy he was the year before. Literally.

One of the other interesting things about Feliz is his consistently low BABIP. This year, he’s running a .293 mark, around average for a normal player but 20 points above his career mark. His BABIPs the last four years – .273, .267, .259, and .258. In pretty much any given year, you could sort the leaderboard and find Feliz at the bottom.

Despie being a good defender, he’s not fast and he doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard. This combination conspires to rob him of hits on pitches most players would be able to capitalize on, which is one of the reasons that his offense usually ends up something less than the sum of his parts. A guy with his contact skills and gap power should be a better hitter, but Feliz has a pretty well established offensive track record by now.

His glove at third base is terrific and certainly justifies keeping him in the line-up on a regular basis. Just don’t expect different results when he’s batting – Feliz defines consistency at the plate.

Last night, Pedro Martinez reminded everyone why he’s going to Cooperstown when he retires. Unable to find a job until the second half of the season, Martinez was something of an experiment for the Phillies. Consider it a successful gamble.

His fastball hit 92 last night, and he’s averaging 88-89 with it again, not that far off from where it was in his heyday. His change-up is still as nasty as ever, and he had it working last night, getting swinging strikes with four of the 20 that he threw. Even after adjusting for the fact that the Giants offense is pretty miserable, Pedro was still terrific last night – 7 innings, 5 hits, 0 walks, 9 strikeouts, 87 pitches.

For the season, Pedro has now thrown 23 innings and ran a 4/23 BB/K rate. He’s still prone to the longball, but even giving up frequent home runs, his FIP stands at 3.74. Given his command of the strike zone and ability to keep hitters off balance, Martinez is still capable of shutting teams down on any given night. Durability is going to be a constant question with him, but his ability to get big league hitters out should not be.

The rejuvenation of a former ace coming off arm problems serves as yet another reminder that we don’t really have any credible way of judging when a player is washed up. Seemingly every time someone publishes a eulogy on an active player, he finds the fountain of youth and makes them eat their words.

Maybe Pedro wasn’t so crazy to ask for $5 million last winter. He’s still got the stuff to be worth twice that.

We talked a bit about Jason Bartlett yesterday, but in that, we glossed over the context of just how ridiculous the Rays infield depth is right now. Here’s a snapshot of their IF depth chart, as it stands currently.

1B: Carlos Pena, Willy Aybar
2B: Ben Zobrist, Akinori Iwamura
SS: Jason Bartlett, Reid Brignac
3B: Evan Longoria, Sean Rodriguez

Rodriguez could cover any of in the infield positions, and actually has experience at all three outfield spots as well, so he’s particularly well suited to a super utility role. That kind of jack-of-all-trades guy makes the two-deep-at-each-spot thing unnecessary.

Realistically, the Rays only need six of these guys. There just aren’t at-bats to go around for all of them, and while depth is nice, superfluous players could be better used to acquire others who fit the needs of the roster a bit more. So, of those eight, who should stay and who should go?

The obvious first candidate is Iwamura, who is only under contract for 2010 if the Rays want him to be, with a $4.5 million option for 2010. He’s been worth double that over the last couple of years, but as a 30-year-old coming off ACL surgery, he’s got some risks attached going forward. He’s not going to beat out Zobrist for a job, so his future would seem to lie in another city. The Rays could pick up his option and try to trade him, but I doubt he has enough surplus value above his $4.5 million salary that he’d command much in return. Either way, I’d expect to see Iwamura playing somewhere besides Tampa next year.

That’s one down, but still unnecessary depth up the middle. Aybar serves as a useful back-up to Longoria/Pena and wouldn’t carry enough trade value to command a lot in return, so he probably sticks around. Assuming the team won’t be moving Longoria, Zobrist, or Pena, they leaves the shortstops – Bartlett and Brignac.

We talked about Bartlett yesterday, so let’s focus on Brignac today.

At first glance, his numbers may not seem that exciting – .282/.327/.417 in Triple-A sounds rather weak. However, his .328 wOBA was actually above the International League average, and you don’t find many 23 year old shortstops who can hold their own with the bat. His overly aggressive approach and weakness against lefties limited his overall line, however, and proved to be problems in the big leagues as well.

There’s little chance that Brignac would match Bartlett’s 2009 production, but that statement is true of nearly every shortstop on earth. The question the Rays will have to ask is how much of a difference they expect between the two, and whether that performance difference is worth the cost difference. Given that they are running out of spots on the roster to upgrade, they might not be willing to take the drop-off at SS as they try to run down the Yankees and Red Sox, even if Brignac is the more cost effective solution.

Either way, it’s likely that one of them joins Iwamura in leaving Tampa this winter. They have two quality shortstops in a league lacking for guys who can play the position, and will have a strong bargaining chip to play with whichever way they decide to go.

September is usually a lot of fun, with pennant races heating up and teams fighting for every last win in an effort to grab a playoff spot. This year, though, it looks like we’re in for a fairly boring month.

According to Coolstandings, the Yankees are 95.8% favorites to win the AL East. Even if the Red Sox manage to run them down, New York is still likely to win the wild card. There is basically no chance that the Yankees miss the playoffs. They’re just playing out the string at this point.

Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Los Angeles are in the same position, essentially. All three NL division leaders have 95% or better odds of winning their divisions. Colorado tried to make the west interesting, but without a miracle, it was too little, too late. Even the two division races where one team isn’t a near lock still have the potential to be decided in the first part of the month. The Angels recent skid has put them at only 76.5% likely to win the AL West, but a strong week could end that race pretty quickly.

Likewise, the Tigers are 74% likely to win the AL Central, but with a 4.5 game lead on the Twins, this one could be over soon if Minnesota falters.

The only real race in baseball is the NL wild card chase, as Colorado and San Francisco are just a single game apart. That should be fun to watch, but one playoff chase left on September 3rd? That’s not cool.

This has been a fun season, but it looks like its going to end with a whimper unless one of these seemingly impenetrable forces falls apart in the next few weeks.

This afternoon, we talked about the surprising power surge of Kendry Morales, who is beating his projected ISO by about about 120 points this year. However, we always knew that Morales had some power – we just didn’t expect his doubles to turn into home runs like this. If we want to look at a guy whose really having an out-of-nowhere power surge, then we have to turn to Tampa Bay, where Jason Bartlett continues to have one of the craziest seasons in recent history.

Bartlett’s ISO by season, 2005 to 2008: .094, .084, .096, .075. He had 12 home runs in about 1,700 plate appearances. He was consistent in his lack of pop, which is kind of what you expect from someone with his physical build and defensive chops. Bartlett was a classic glove first middle infielder who drew some walks, stole some bases, and tried not to kill too many rallies.

This year, however, has been a totally different story. He’s at .338/.398/.522, and his ISO is .184. He’s doubled his career home run total in 109 games, and it hasn’t just been balls flying over the wall – he’s got 32 doubles+triples, one off his career high, which he set in 2007 with 120 extra plate appearances.

Even an injury can’t slow him down. He had a monstrous start to the season, then missed three weeks in June with an ankle injury. After coming off the DL, he looked like he was reverting to previous form, hitting just one home run and slugging .402 from mid-June through the end of July. But he’s found the power stroke again as of late, hitting .349/.432/.560 since the beginning of August.

As a 29-year-old with no track record of this kind of ability, it’s hard to figure what to make of Bartlett. For all the talk that Ben Zobrist’s breakthrough offensive performance has gotten, he’s not the only former slap hitter now whacking the ball down in Tampa. With Reid Brignac waiting in the wings and newly acquired Sean Rodriguez in the fold (plus the aforementioned Zobrist and Akinori Iwamura), the Rays have enviable middle infield depth. If they’re convinced that they’ve fixed Bartlett somehow, then he’s an all-star that they should be hanging onto.

More likely, however, is that Tampa’s going to try to shop him this winter coming off a career year and one season away from free agency. It will be interesting to see how many teams believe this version of Bartlett is for real.