Even as the Brewers have faded from playoff contention, Prince Fielder has continued to mash the baseball. He’s become more selective at the plate this season, as his next walk will match last year’s total in 150 fewer plate appearances. He’s hitting .300 for the first time since reaching the big leagues. His .419 wOBA is better than the mark he posted in 2007 when he launched 50 home runs. His UZR is -1.5, the best of his career.

At 25-years-old, Fielder is showing strong signs of improvement, and he was already a good player. His season might be so good, however, that he could be playing his way right out of Milwaukee.

Unable to come to terms on a long term contract last winter, the Brewers bought out two of his arbitration seasons with a two-season pact that paid him $7.5 million this year and will pay him $10.5 million next year. After the 2010 season, he’ll have five years of service time and be eligible for arbitration for the last time before hitting free agency after the 2011 season.

So, the Brewers essentially control his rights for two more seasons. $10.5 million is a bargain for a player of Fielder’s caliber, but that’s going to go way up in 2011 – he could easily break records for an arbitration award with another strong season as a 26-year-old next year. He’s looking at something like a $15 to $20 million payday in 2011 before he hits free agency and commands a massive contract.

$25 to $30 million for two years of Fielder is a good deal, but considering their infield depth and holes elsewhere on the roster, it might be in the Brewers best interest to field offers for their star slugger. Even without Fielder, they’d have Mat Gamel, Rickie Weeks, Alcides Escobar, J.J. Hardy, and Casey McGehee as infield options for 2010, and Felipe Lopez is certainly making a strong impression since coming over in trade.

Gamel’s defense at third has never been considered a strong point, and McGehee’s strong season plus the surplus of middle infielders gives the Brewers a lot of options at the hot corner if they shifted Gamel across the diamond. Fielder could certainly command a strong return, bringing in the kind of starting pitching help the team could use behind Yovanni Gallardo.

Trading a star player coming off a disappointing season is never an easy sell to a fan base, but given the parts that are currently in place in Milwaukee, it may very well be the best idea. Brewers fans should enjoy the rest of Fielder’s 2009 season – it might be their last chance to watch him play every day.

Mike Hampton has always been a good hitting pitcher, and even as he approaches his 37th birthday, he’s continuing to provide value with his bat. On the season, he’s hitting .324/.350/.432 for a .340 wOBA in 41 plate appearances. His offense has been worth half a run over that of an average hitter.

But, of course, Hampton isn’t replacing an average hitter on the days he swings the bat. He’s replacing an average hitting pitcher, and they perform far worse when they are called upon to hit. As a group, pitchers are hitting .145/.187/.186, which is good for about a .160 wOBA. Hampton’s rate stats are more than double what an average pitcher is producing at the plate this year.

How much does that matter? Well, over 41 plate appearances, a 180 point difference in wOBA is worth about six runs. If we knocked six runs off of Hampton’s earned runs total, his ERA would drop from 5.30 to 4.82. I’d say there’s a pretty significant perception difference between those two numbers.

In most cases, the value of what a pitcher contributes isn’t that significant. With players like Hampton, though, they really can add to their value at the plate in a way that reflects on the scoreboard, and ultimately, on their teams ability to win when they take the mound. While a .340 wOBA isn’t Hampton’s true talent level, of course, he has posted a .287 wOBA over 845 plate appearances, so we shouldn’t be totally shocked when he has a good hitting season every once in a while.

Pitcher hitting – it’s one of those small, usually overlooked parts of the game, but in some cases, it actually matters.

For whatever reason, statistical analysts have a strange fascination with guys who throw the knuckleball. Whenever anybody shows a remote amount of success throwing it, he immediately generates articles from around the world. So, despite the fact that he’s only made two starts in the big leagues this year, I’m guessing you’re aware of Charlie Haeger.

After turning back the clock to give starts to Eric Milton, Jason Schmidt, and Jeff Weaver, the Dodgers have decided to look forward and see what Haeger can offer. The early results have been outstanding, as he’s racked up 14 innings and allowed just three runs so far. His knuckler has been moving, but more importantly, he’s been able to throw it for strikes.

Saturday’s start was a bit different than his first one, however. In his season debut against St. Louis on the 17th, just two of his 80 pitches were fastballs. He went almost exclusively with the knuckler, and it worked. His second time out, he worked in 14 fastballs, mixing speeds a bit more and giving hitters a different look. Unlike most knuckleball specialists, Haeger’s fastball actually can be described as one without being ironic.

He throws it between 81 and 87, and I’ve seen him as high as 89 in the minor leagues. If Tim Wakefield ever threw a pitch at 89 MPH, Jerry Remy would fall out of his chair. Having a fastball that can be described as “just below average” in velocity sets Haeger apart from others who practice the knuckler.

Is he the next Wakefield? Probably not. But I think we’re all hoping he will be. His fastball will be a big key in seeing just how far he can go.

Perhaps more than any other free agent this winter, Joel Pineiro should be a fascinating case to watch. You probably know the story by now – journeyman with a checkered history buys into Dave Duncan’s two-seam fastball plan, becomes an extreme groundball strike-thrower and, at age 30, has the best year of his career.

No one thinks he’s a 3.04 FIP guy going forward (his HR/FB rate will regress, of course, driving his FIP up with it), but his ZIPS projection from here on out has him as a 3.87 FIP guy, which is a well above average starting pitcher. But it’s also a very weird version of one – the strikeout rate is low even for an extreme sinkerball guy, and teams historically have rewarded pitchers for missing bats when it comes to handing out contracts.

Pineiro is going to hit free agency coming off a season where he pitched like Derek Lowe, but teams were reluctant to throw big money at Lowe last year and he had a 10 year track record of succeeding with this skillset. So, I don’t think he should be holding his breath waiting for the $15 million per season that Lowe got from Atlanta, but that raises the question of what, realistically, he should get?

If you believe that he’s really reinvented himself into being the new Aaron Cook, then you’re looking at Pineiro as a ~3 win pitcher, and that’s probably worth around $12 to $13 million per season on a two or three year deal. But how much confidence do you have in his ability to retain a good chunk of this year’s value, considering it’s a radical change from everything he’d ever done before.

There’s certainly more risk factors with Pineiro, so that will lead to a discount of some sort. But how much?

I honestly have no idea. Last year, Milton Bradley was the free agent who had a ton of positives and negatives on both sides, and he ended up at 3 years, $30 million. And that might look like a realistic target for Pineiro, except Kyle Lohse got 4 years, $41 million for posting an inferior season for the same team. Does Pineiro really take less than what Lohse got last winter? Will anyone really give him a 4 year deal?

I have no idea, honestly. Watching Pineiro navigate free agency, and seeing how teams view him, is going to be a lot of fun to watch.

After watching Stephen Strasburg break a record for the largest bonus signed through the draft, it’s not a big surprise that Bud Selig is talking tough on mandatory slotting and saying that he’s going to be “very aggressive” in trying to implement a worldwide draft in the next round of CBA negotiations. The commissioner has continually seen the draft as a place to reduce labor costs for the owners, and the MLBPA is more agreeable to bargaining away the rights of non-union members than making concessions that effect players already in the union.

However, I think there’s a better way than a worldwide draft. So, since the commissioner is looking for options other than the current system, here’s my proposal for how to overhaul the acquisition of amateur talent.

This year, teams spent about $160 million on signing their draft picks, pretty much the same as last year. Baseball as a whole spends a little less than $50 million signing international free agents every summer as well, so the current output of bonus money for those two pools of player is around $200 million per season. The revenue sharing agreement currently in place, which transfers money from big market teams to small market teams, shifts more than that around each year.

My proposal would take $200 million from the revenue sharing pool and redistribute it for the purpose of creating budgets for yearly amateur talent acquisition. The draft is eliminated all together, and instead, a worldwide unsigned player auction would be held each summer. College kids, high school kids, international kids – all of them would be eligible for open bidding, where agents could negotiate the best deal they could get for their client with any team that is interested.

Each team would be capped at spending no more than allotted through the revenue sharing pool, which would be based on a two year moving average of their ranking in winning percentage. So, for example, the $200 million could be split up like this.

Average Win% over last two years, descending order.

Teams 1-5: $2 million each
Teams 6-10: $3 million each
Teams 11-15: $5 million each
Teams 16-20: $8 million each
Teams 21-25: $10 million each
Teams 26-30: $12 million each

The top tier teams who have been winning recently would receive small sums of money that would essentially take them out of the running for the premium talents. Given that the teams that finished in the bottom half would likely be willing to bid ~60-70% of their budgets on the top guys available, the Strasburgs of the world would probably command bonuses in the $7 or $8 million range, which the winning teams would not be able to match.

By giving each team a player acquisition budget, you also open up new strategies for teams to pursue. Like the international crop a lot more than the American kids? You could sign practically everyone you want with $10 or $12 million and skip the domestic players entirely. Want to load up on the best kids from your home state? Sign them all if you want. Think your team needs an infusion of pitching immediately? Bid on college arms and college arms only.

Teams would have flexibility to pursue the types of players they wanted, which would allow for more efficient team building strategies. The system would still funnel the best players to the teams that needed help the most, while also simultaneously ensuring that a massive part of the revenue sharing money did not go into the pockets of the owners.

It would be good for the players, giving them a choice over which organization to join and letting market forces dictate their bonus money. It would be good for the owners, giving the system a fixed cost that they’ve been pursuing for years. It would be good for the front offices, allowing for more options than currently available in shaping the strategies of how players are brought into the organization. And it would be good for the fans – every single team could theoretically have a shot at signing their local star talent, encouraging enthusiasm in high school and college ball that doesn’t currently exist.

If the two-prong goals of the draft are to put a ceiling on amateur talent costs and redistribute the talent to teams that need it, this would accomplish both goals as effectively as mandatory slotting without the whole Scott-Boras-Suing-Us-Every-Year thing as he looks for reasons to blow up the draft. There would have to be details to be worked out, of course (how are major league contracts handled? Can teams roll money over from one year to the next? What do you with Japanese players?), but I think the overall structure could work really well.

Abolish the draft, set budgets for teams to sign players via a pool of money pulled from revenue sharing, and open the bidding for any player not under contract to a professional team each summer. It’s a total 180 from the direction that Selig is headed, but I think it would work.

Today, the Cardinals signed John Smoltz to occupy the #5 spot in their rotation for the rest of the season, after he officially cleared release waivers and was let go by the Red Sox. With an 8.32 ERA at age 42, it might be easy to say that Smoltz’s eight appearances in Boston signify that he’s done as a major league pitcher.

But the sample was just 40 innings, and anything can happen to practically anyone in 40 innings. For example, here’s Smoltz’s career in Boston compared with Jered Weaver’s last 8 starts for the Angels.

Smoltz: 8 GS, 40 IP, 59 H, 9 BB, 33 K, 8 HR, 8.33 ERA, 4.94 FIP
Weaver: 8 GS, 46 IP, 51 H, 18 BB, 54 K, 10 HR, 6.50 ERA, 4.93 FIP

Over the last couple of months, there’s very little separating how Weaver and Smoltz have pitched. Their FIPs are nearly identical, even if they’ve gotten there slightly different ways. Both of them have been stung by the longball, which has outweighed strong BB/K rates. And neither have deserved results as bad as what they’ve gotten.

For Smoltz, there’s an easy narrative – he’s old, he’s washed up, he can’t pitch anymore. For Weaver, there isn’t an easy explanation for his struggles, so the Angels just keep rolling him out there and expect him to get better. But, for both pitchers, our expectations should be similar going forward.

A bad ERA over 40 innings, driven by a high BABIP and HR/FB rate, does not mean that Smoltz is finished any more than it means that Weaver is finished. And, of course, no one thinks that Jered Weaver is washed up.

Cardinal fans just picked up a pretty good pitcher for the league minimum, thanks to the continued overestimation of the usefulness of ERA. The sooner people realize that it’s an obsolete pitching statistic, the better off baseball will be.

Yesterday, I talked a little bit about why I don’t really care who baseball writers vote as the AL MVP, because we pretty much all realize it’s Joe Mauer, and it’s not particularly close. In fact, Mauer’s having such a good season that there’s a pretty good chance it will go down as the best season any catcher has ever had in the history of the game.

Mauer is currently hitting .383/.448/.653, good for a .464 wOBA in 415 plate appearances, the best mark in baseball. His +46.5 wRAA is better than any non-Pujols player in baseball, and he missed the month of April. The next best catcher in wRAA this year – Victor Martinez at +15.9, and he’s not really a full-time catcher. Mauer is a catcher hitting like a DH, and that just doesn’t happen very often.

The current standard for best catcher season of all time is probably Mike Piazza’s 1997 campaign. He hit .362/.431/.638 for a .454 wOBA, and because he played almost every day, he racked up 633 plate appearances and a +63.9 wRAA. Mauer’s rate stats are better, but he’s not going to match the counting numbers that Piazza put up thanks to his one month stint on the disabled list.

However, that’s just the offensive side of the game. Piazza wasn’t a defensive asset, even early in his career. Runners advanced 187 bases against Piazza in 1997 (via stolen bases, wild pitches, or passed balls), while he only nailed 45 runners attempting to advance. Mauer’s only had runners take 74 bases on him this year, and while his 16 “kills” aren’t that impressive, his reputation is keeping guys from running at will.

How much does that stuff matter? Well, in 1997, Piazza was rated as a -2 defender by Sean Smith’s catcher defense formula, while Mauer has been +10 or better in each of the last two years. Mauer’s ability to keep guys from running on the bases saves his team runs, and that goes in his ledger as well, to the tune of something like 10 extra runs that Piazza didn’t provide.

Remmeber, Piazza’s lead in wRAA is +17.4, but Mauer makes up most of that with his defensive abilities. As of right now, it’s pretty close to a push between ’97 Piazza and ’09 Mauer, but if Joe keeps hitting in September, he’s going to pull away. This very well could go down as the best season any catcher has ever had.

You’ve probably read part of the kerfuffle from the weekend regarding Mark Teixeira, the MVP award, UZR, defensive statistics in general, and the usefulness of valuation metrics like WAR. It feels like half the world has weighed in on the issue, with pretty much every possible viewpoint represented. Instead of weighing in on that discussion, I wanted to branch off it just slightly.

The annual debate over what the Most Valuable Player is comes up every year. Because the BBWAA gets to vote on the award, and the rules governing how they should vote are vague at best, we are treated to a yearly exercise in listening to people attempt to define value. For many years, the majority of the BBWAA has defined value as “driving in runners on a winning team”, which is why high RBI sluggers on playoff teams almost always win the award.

With the advent of the internet and the coalescence of passionate, enthusiastic baseball fans who like to quantify everything, that definition has come under fire, and rightfully so. As a result, every fall, we see the same articles pop up, just with different names. Stop me if you’ve read this sequence before.

Beat Writer: “Joe Ribbi proves he’s the MVP with another clutch home run. Where would Team Win-All-The-Time be without him?”

Sabermetric Blogger: “Look at this ridiculous article about Ribbi being the MVP. What a moron. Deosn’t Beat Writer know that Sam Shortstop is the one getting on base all the time?”

Beat Writer: “I’m at the games, I travel with the team, I talk to the guys in the clubhouse, and we all agree – it’s Joe Ribbi. Sometimes, you just have to realize there’s more to the game than numbers.”

Sabermetric Blogger: “When does this fool retire? If I had a subscription to the paper, I would cancel!”

Reasonable people take swipes at each other, bridges are burned, Joe Ribbi wins the MVP, and life goes on. Rinse and repeat, every September.

In the end, it isn’t an argument about baseball. It’s an argument about the perspective of how the game is seen through various lenses, and in many ways, a disagreement about the progress of a generation. Most of us see baseball in a way that is very different from how our fathers and grandfathers saw it, which is not unlike the generational gap in almost every other area of your life. Does your dad use twitter? Is your grandpa a frequent visitor to the local tapas bar? Do you yell at them for their “ignorance”?

This isn’t meant in any way to disrespect people like Tyler Kepner (who I met briefly when he worked at the Seattle P-I, and I have heard is a good guy and a smart man), but I’m just not sure why we engage in annual argument about how he and his peers define the word valuable. Really, why does it matter to us?

I get why baseball players might care, since they have financial incentives tied to who actually gets the award and such. I get why their families might care, as shiny trophies are always fun to hand down through the family. I get why the writers care, as it gives them a chance to have their opinion heard. I just don’t know why we’re supposed to care.

With the invention of the internet (thanks Al!), we don’t need to look back through a list of MVP awards to remember who was good way back when. We have baseball-reference for that. History isn’t recorded in trophies, but in data and stories, and we now have the capability to store a massive amount of both. No matter who wins the AL MVP award this season, we’re going to have a ridiculous amount of information about what happened on the field in 2009, and we’ll be able to show our kids and their kids just how much fun it was to watch Joe Mauer play baseball. The history of the game, as told by us, won’t be changed one iota by how the BBWAA votes in six weeks.

If they want to think that Teixeira was the most important player to his team in the league this year, that’s fine. Most of us probably disagree, and we’re under no obligation to report that as any kind of factual statement. I’ll be telling people that Mauer was the most valuable player in the American League for 2009, and I’ve got a mountain of information to back it up. How other people view the definition of the word value has no real world impact on me.

Twitter isn’t dying because people over 50 aren’t using it, and Tapas bars are doing just fine without an early bird special. Mauer’s legacy, and the history of the game, will be just fine without Tyler Keper’s vote, too. We’ve got better ways of capturing what happened on the field than through an award based on an esoteric argument about the definition of a vague word.

Let them vote for whoever they want. I don’t care.

After nearly a year of hoopla surrounding just how large of a signing bonus Stephen Strasburg would command, we finally got the answer last night – $7.5 million in up front signing money and $7.5 million in guaranteed salaries from 2010 to 2012 (along with the pro-rated league minimum for what’s left of 2009), bringing the total package to just over $15 million. This is the largest contract ever given to a player signed through the draft, breaking Mark Prior’s record of $10.5 million from the 2001 draft.

However, after all the hoopla, the deal isn’t that much different than what Prior got, once you adjust for present value. The annual inflation since Prior signed has been about 2.4%, so adjusting Prior’s deal to present day dollars would put his original contract at about $12.7 million. Strasburg’s $15 million in guarantee is “only” an 18% premium over the adjusted value of Prior’s deal.

Now, beating a record by 18% isn’t bad, and of course Strasburg would have been a bit nutty to walk away from that kind of money as a 20-year-old pitcher. But, really, after all the talk of shattering previous draft records – 18% over Prior’s deal was the best Scott Boras could do? Maybe he’s lost a step.

Anyway, congratulations to the Nationals organization for getting the deal done. You have a franchise player. Now, the question is what to do with him.

Because of the way the deal is structured, Strasburg is only under contract through 2012, and then will have his three arbitration years before he qualifies for free agency. If the Nationals stick him in the major league rotation next spring, they’ll control him through 2015. Despite the strong fan interest in seeing him, however, there are several compelling reasons to let him begin 2010 in the minors.

For one, there’s the issue of workload. In his two years of starting for San Diego State, he threw 97 and 109 innings respectively. Given the significant potential value he holds to their long term future, Washington has every reason to be cautious with Strasburg next year, and holding him under 150 innings is probably in everyone’s best interests. That’s very hard to do if he starts the year in the big league rotation.

Secondly, there’s still the transition to professional baseball that needs to be made. His stuff is overwhelming, but he’s still going to have to learn how to pitch on four days rest, and how to respond if he isn’t hitting 100 with the fastball every time out. Working on pitching without his best stuff will be a far easier experience if he isn’t being saddled with the weight of an entire fan base watching.

And, yes, there’s the free agency issue. The Nationals could add an extra year of club control by holding him down for approximately three weeks next season. While I’m not a fan of using that as a decision making tool in most cases, when it comes to a kid straight out of college, there are significantly less ethical issues here than with the J.J. Hardy case, for instance.

For a variety of reasons, it makes sense for Strasburg to begin 2010 in the minor leagues. Washington fans, I’m sure you want to see this kid in D.C. as soon as possible, but I hope you’re willing to wait until May of next year for his big debut.

For all the talk about how large of an impact Orlando Hudson has had on the Dodgers (and he has, with a +2.5 win season that has made him a great pickup for LA), it seems that one of the other bargain free agents signed by Ned Colletti last winter flies under the radar. Randy Wolf, who signed for $5 million in February (plus some performance incentives that he’s likely to reach), continues to give the Dodgers consistently steady work and is basically matching Hudson’s production with a +2.4 win season of his own.

Wolf isn’t a frontline starter by any stretch of the imagination. As a strike-throwing flyball lefty, his performance is heavily impacted by the variations of HR/FB and BABIP rates. In his last years in Philadelphia, these numbers were terrible and served to make him look like a batting practice pitcher. A little regression on his side has allowed him to slot in as a nifty mid-rotation starter the last few years, and some positive luck this season has made him appear even better than that.

Through it all, Wolf has basically the same guy all along. Other than a one season dip in 2006 (when he legitimately was awful), his BB/K rate has been basically steady for his entire career. In graph form, it looks like this:

Wolf strikes out more than twice as many guys as he walks, which is necessary to survive as a guy who puts the ball in the air a lot. He is the classic good-command-of-blah-stuff southpaw, though despite pitching well the last two years, he hasn’t been viweed as more than a fungible arm by most of baseball. Now that he’s got a sparkly 3.43 ERA (thanks to a .270 BABIP, of course), that should change this winter, as Wolf should be line for a pretty decent payday.

But for this year, at least, Wolf was a pretty big bargain, and signing him on the cheap is one of the reasons the Dodgers are on top of the NL West.