At the age of 31, Chone Figgins is showing no signs of slowing down. He racked up four hits yesterday, three of them doubles, to raise his season line to .312/.401/.413. He’s also flashing the leather over at third base, and his total performance for the season has been worth +4.6 wins. He’s got a shot at finishing the season as a +6 win player, just in time for free agency.

Figgins began his career as an okay hitter, who hit for a high average, drew some walks, and stole a bunch of bases. Since he didn’t really establish himself as a regular until he was 26, his early career performance looked like it would be his peak. Instead, he’s getting better with age.

Here’s Figgins walk rates by season:

Every year since he arrived in the big leagues, Figgins has upped his rate of free passes. He’s done this without a corresponding increase in strikeout rate by just swinging at fewer pitches out of the zone. By getting more selective, he’s been able to increase his contact rate and draw more walks, which is a pretty nifty combination.

After bouncing all over the field, he’s also found a home at third base, and has settled in as one of the better defenders of the hot corner in the game. His +9.6 UZR for the season ranks him just behind Evan Longoria and Joe Crede but right in front of Brandon Inge and Adrian Beltre. That’s some pretty nice company.

In his first three and a half years in the big leagues (2003 to 2006), Figgins racked up a total of +7.3 wins, making him essentially a league average player. In the last two and a half years, Figgins has earned +10.1 wins, which is the kind of production teams get from all-star caliber players.

He’s not as big a name as Matt Holliday or Jason Bay, but Figgins is going to get paid fairly well this winter, and if the Angels don’t shell out the cash to keep him around, they’re going to have a tough time replacing his production. He’s turned himself into a very nice player.

Yesterday, in an effort to shake things up with their big league roster, the Brewers designated Bill Hall for assignment, fired their pitching coach, and shipped starting shortstop JJ Hardy to Triple-A. The first two are easily justifiable. The last one is not.

Hardy is certainly not having a season that lives up to his expectations. His .229 batting average is 30 points lower than his career average, and his power is off as well. The .294 wOBA he has at the moment is the worst of his five year career. It hasn’t been a good season for Hardy in any way, shape, or form.

However, he’s still one of the five or six best shortstops on the planet. His defense is as good as ever (+8.7 UZR) as he continues to be one of the top glove-men at the position in the game. Overall, in a miserable season for Hardy, he’s still been worth +1.5 wins in about 70% of a season. As bad as he’s been compared to his previous levels, he’s been a league average player overall this year.

So why did the Brewers send him down? Yes, Alcides Escobar is a nifty prospect and they understandably wanted to get a look at him, but September call-ups are a couple of weeks away, so it’s hard to imagine Milwaukee would have done this to Hardy to get an extra two weeks look at Escobar in the big leagues. But, there is another explanation, even though Doug Melvin denies it was a factor.

Service time. If Hardy would have remained in the majors through the end of the year, he’d have had five full seasons of service time, gotten a raise in arbitration, and been eligible for free agency after 2010. If he stays in the minors for three weeks, he will fall just short of a full year of service in 2009, which would make him a 4+ year arbitration guy again this winter and delay his free agency until after the 2011 season.

The Brewers are going to trade Hardy this winter – that is basically inevitable. He’ll have significantly more value as a trade chip if the acquiring team gets him for two years instead of one. Would the Brewers really make a move like this in order to bolster Hardy’s trade value over the off-season?

I hope not. As we’ve talked about with regards to Matt Wieters earlier this season, I hate this practice of service time manipulation. JJ Hardy has earned the right to be a free agent after 2010 – for the Brewers to game the system at this point in his career in order to push back his ability to earn a fair market contract would be a travesty of ethics. I know they’re legally allowed to do so, but that doesn’t make it right.

If the Brewers organization has any sense of right and wrong, Hardy better be back in the majors soon enough to earn his full year of service for 2009. If he’s not, the union should file the grievance to end all grievances, and I’ll be completely on the union’s side. Hardy is a high quality major league player who has earned a major league job and a major league payday, and regardless of Alcides Escobar’s presence, he belongs on the Brewers roster.

Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that he’s back in the big leagues post haste, or this could get really, really ugly.

Nearly three years ago, the Angels decided that Justin Speier was worth a 4 year, $18 million contract. Yesterday, they decided that he wasn’t worth keeping on the roster, as they chose to eat the remainder of the deal by giving him his unconditional release. The weird thing about those two decisions – he’s basically the exact same pitcher he was at the time of the deal.

His fastball averages 90 MPH, just like it always has. He throws it up in the zone, which serves to make him a guy who gets some strikeouts but also gives up a ton of fly balls. He throws his slider nearly as often as his fastball, which makes him a guy who is going to run an extreme platoon split – he’s death to RHBs but torched by LHBs. None of this is really new.

Nearly the entirety of the issues Speier has faced involve balls flying over the wall with increased frequency. In 2006, he allowed 0.88 home runs per nine innings, while this year he’s at 1.58 HR/9 after posting an awful 1.99 HR/9 last year. However, his balls in air rate is basically unchanged – he allowed more flyballs + line drives (69.9%) in 2006 than he has this year (65.0%). The difference – his HR/FB rate in 2006 was 6.9%, while this year it’s at 13.2%.

HR/FB rate, as you may know, is not particularly predictive, especially among relief pitchers (due to sample size issues). Just like Speier’s low-ish HR/FB rate in 2006 didn’t mean he had a special skill that allowed him to rack up 380 foot outs, neither does his 2009 performance mean that he’s missing the ingredient that allows major league pitchers to keep the ball in the park. It’s likely just noise, and certainly shouldn’t be the kind of thing that would make the Angels take such a dramatic turn in their evaluation of his value.

None of this is to say that Speier is particularly valuable – flyballing right-handed specialists with okay command are ridiculously easy to find in the minors, and that kind of limited skillset doesn’t provide a big boost to a bullpen. But Speier is basically the same guy he was in 2006, only a bit less lucky. Perhaps the Angels just figured out that he was never that great to begin with, but more likely, they’re just overreacting to a few bad performances that don’t really mean much.

Speier was never worth $18 million, but an outright release is a bit over the top. He’s still a decent enough bullpen arm, and if the Angels need to get a tough right-hander out in a late game situation this October, they might wish they still had him around.

When the Reds announced that they had traded David Weathers to the Brewers for a player to be named later or cash, I saw a few people scratch their heads. After all, Cincinatti just traded for Scott Rolen to bolster their roster for the rest of this year and next year, so why did they turn around and give away a veteran setup man with a 3.32 ERA a week later?

It’s not as confusing as it might look on the surface, however. Weathers just isn’t very good, and the Reds saved themselves just over $1 million in salary for the rest of this year, plus $400,000 they would have had to pay him to go away over the winter.

Despite the shiny ERA, he hasn’t pitched well at all this year, posting a 5.39 FIP. In addition to his usual spotty command and lack of strikeouts, he’s also added a home run problem this year, which completes the replacement level reliever trifecta. The only reason his ERA still makes him look useful is the massively unsustainable .200 batting average on balls in play he has run this year, which the Brewers shouldn’t be counting on going forward. Before you get all “some pitchers can outperform league average BABIP!” on me, Weathers career mark in the category is .309, so I humbly submit that while some pitchers can indeed limit hits on balls in play to some small degree, Weathers isn’t one of them.

In reality, the Brewers just traded for a rather overpriced reputation. At 39, Weathers career is teetering on the brink of being over, but the fact that he’s been good before and had a superficially low ERA made him look attractive enough as a waiver claim, I guess. However, with the team fading out of the NL Central race, it’s a little bit curious why they’d throw even a little bit of money at a guy who isn’t much better than generic Triple-A waiver fodder. The Reds were right to get rid of Weathers – he’s old, not good, and makes more money than he should.

Why the Brewers claimed him is the real head-scratcher.

With their fifth starter spot still something of a question mark, the Yankees added some more depth yesterday by acquiring Chad Gaudin from the Padres. It’s hard to believe the well traveled Gaudin is only 26 years of age, as the Yankees will mark his sixth different franchise in the last seven years. That kind of journeyman status is usually only achieved by 35 year old lefty specialists, but Gaudin has shown enough at times to keep getting jobs but never enough to convince his employer to keep him around.

For the Yankees, he’s a nice addition, though. Don’t be swayed by his ERA in the National League, which is driven by a high BABIP and a low LOB%, neither of which are particularly good predictors of future performance. Gaudin has a solid fastball/slider combination and is extremely tough on right-handed hitters. Unfortunately, his change-up kind of sucks, so lefties give him serious problems, which is why he’s never been able to hold down a job as a starting pitcher.

Seriously, check out his career splits:

Vs RHB: 8.3% BB%, 23.8% K%
Vs LHB: 13.2% BB%, 10.8% K%

Against right-handers, he’s terrific, using his slider to generate a ton of swinging strikes, which puts him ahead in the count and gives him a real out pitch. Against lefties, the slider doesn’t work, so he just nibbles the corners and ends up walking everyone. He does a good enough job of pitching away from the strike zone that lefties don’t light him up when they make contact, but by living on the edges, he ends up as a high-walk, pitch-to-contact guy.

In reality, he’s best suited to relief work, where his problems against LHPs can be minimized, but he’s got enough endurance to start, which is why teams keep running him out there as a member of their rotation. The Yankees have said he’ll start off in their bullpen, though he might transition to the 5th starter job if Sergio Mitre keeps struggling.

Whatever role he ends up filling over the last two months, he’s certainly going to be a reliever in October if he makes the playoff roster, and he could be a pretty good one if the Yankees use right. As a right-handed specialist, he could be a real asset out of the pen. Look at him as Jeff Nelson 2.0, and use him accordingly, and New York will have added a nice piece. If they continue to force him to face lefties, though, it won’t be as pretty.

Everyone knows the Washington Nationals are the worst team in baseball, right? They are the only club around with less than 40 wins on the season, and they’ve been the brunt of every joke about baseball for the last few years. However, right now, they might just be putting a better team on the field than the Kansas City Royals.

When the Nationals traded Lastings Milledge and Joel Hanrahan to Pittsburgh for Nyjer Morgan and Sean Burnett on July 1st, they were 23-54, sporting a .298 winning percentage that made them a virtual lock for the top pick in the 2010 draft. Since Morgan’s arrival, however, he’s significantly upgraded the team the Nationals put on the field, posting a .396 wOBA and +7 UZR in 30 games with the team.

Not surprisingly, the Nationals have played significantly better since the deal, winning 13 of 31 games for a .419 winning percentage. They’ve thinned out their glut of 1B/OF by dealing Nick Johnson and DL’ing Austin Kearns, which lets them go with a regular outfield of Willingham-Morgan-Dukes/Harris, with Adam Dunn taking his defensive butchery to first base. This gives the Nats their best defensive outfield to date, and with Morgan getting on base for the three big hitters in the middle of the line-up, they can actually score some runs.

The bullpen is still a disaster, but the current version of the Nationals are quite a bit better than the team they were putting on the field to start the season.

So if the Nationals aren’t the easiest team to beat in the game anymore, who is? How about the Kansas City Royals? Since starting the season 23-23, they’ve won just 18 of their last 61 games. Gil Meche and Coco Crisp has landed on the disabled list, taking two of the Royals better players off the field. Yuniesky Betancourt has been brutal since coming over from Seattle, continuing to make shortstop a massive hole on the roster. Even Zack Greinke has come back to earth a bit, walking 13 batters in his last six starts, all of which have ended with a Royals loss.

The reversal of fortune for these two clubs have actually given the Royals a decent chance at passing the Nationals for the worst record in baseball. They are 5 1/2 games ahead of the Nationals in the standings, but if they keep playing .295 baseball like they have for the last two months, they’ll finish with a record of 57-105. The Nationals, if they keep playing at the .419 clip they’ve put up since Morgan arrived, would finish with a 58-104 record.

Okay, so neither of those performances are likely to continue. But it’s kind of impressive, for lack of a better word, that the Royals have been able to collapse to the point where it’s even a race to the finish.

On August 13th of last year, 357 days ago, Gordon Beckham signed his first professional contract to play baseball, as the White Sox got him to put his John Hancock down two days before the signing deadline. Less than one year later, he might just be their best player.

Called up from the minors on June 4th, one week after being promoted to Triple-A, Beckham had a rough introduction to the big leagues. He went 0 for 13 in his first four games and looked a little rough transitioning from shortstop to third base. The was-he-rushed questions were inevitable, considering the White Sox had only let him rack up 250 plate appearances in the minors.

Beckham has answered those questions, and then some. Since he got his first major league hit on June 9th, he’s hitting .339/.398/.540 with 23 extra base hits and 17 walks in 197 plate appearances. He’s been even hotter than that lately – .416/.466/.675 since July 11th, spanning 88 plate appearances over his last 21 games.

Did I mention that this is his first year as a professional?

Even with the rough start and some struggles learning third base, Beckham has been worth +1.2 wins in 53 games with the White Sox. Calling up the youngster after just two months in the minors has been one of the main reasons the White Sox are still in the AL Central race. If the White Sox fans weren’t sold on their first round pick a year ago, they are now – this kid is the real deal.

With the Orioles promotion of Brian Matusz to start tonight’s game, the shift to a young starting rotation is nearly complete. Matusz follows fellow top prospect Chris Tillman, who was promoted last week and has now made two starts in the big leagues. Tillman, who the Orioles got from the Mariners in the Erik Bedard swindling, is the focus of this post.

One of the concerns I had about Tillman when he was coming up through the lower minors with Seattle was how often he pitched up in the strike zone with his fastball. It helped him rack up a good amount of strikeouts, but also spelled danger for his future home run rates when he started facing guys strong enough to put those pitches in the seats. Through his first two starts in the majors, he’s quickly learning that big league hitters like high fastballs.

Here’s his strike zone plot from last night’s performance against the Tigers, via Brooks Baseball.

That’s a lot of green in the high part of the strike zone. He did a pretty good job of not hanging the curve ball, but the fastballs are very heavily concentrated in the middle-high part of the zone, and unfortunately located in the middle of the plate to boot. The result?

Of the 37 balls in play he’s allowed over his first two starts, he’s only induced eight ground balls compared to 21 fly balls and eight line drives. Four of those 29 balls in the air have cleared the fence, as Tillman has been undone by the long ball.

Now, he’s not going to keep giving up home runs on 19% of his flyballs, but there’s little doubt that Tillman’s style of pitching is going to make him an extreme flyball pitcher, and home runs are always going to be an issue for him. As he matures, he’s going to have to spot his fastball down in the zone with some more frequency – it will cost him a bit off his strikeout rate, but the reduction in balls in the air will be worth it.

For the last few years, the Angels offensive game plan has been to try to get a few fast guys on the bases in front of Vladimir Guerrero and then hope he hits a three run homer. They could afford some offensive weaknesses thanks to their starting rotation, and they built a winner out of run prevention with just enough offense to get by.

Between injuries and age, Guerrero has struggled this season, as he currently has just four home runs. So, what happens to an offense who loses production from their best – and sometimes only – hitter?

They lead the league in scoring runs, apparently. After thumping Minnesota all weekend, the Angels have now scored 590 runs, or 5.73 runs per game, passing the Yankees for the #1 spot in offensive production. The Yankees still have the league’s highest wOBA, but the Angels are #2, so it’s not like this is some kind of clutch-hitting fluke. They really are pounding the tar out of the baseball.

The bulk of the credit has to go to Kendry Morales, Juan Rivera, and Mike Napoli, who all entered the season as question marks and have responded by hitting like All-Stars. The Angels have gotten a .383 wOBA from that trio, far outpacing their expectations. When you add in an on base machine like Bobby Abreu, a career year from Torii Hunter, and another strong offensive performance from Chone Figgins, the Angels have six guys who are among the best in the league in production at their respective positions.

Even their “weak spots” have produced league average hitters, as Erick Aybar is having the best season of his career and Howie Kendrick has been on fire since returning from the minors. The balance of having no holes in the line-up has given the Angels a multi-pronged attack that can exploit holes in different kinds of pitchers. Regardless of what kind of pitcher you put on the hill, the Angels have a couple of guys who can whack that pitcher type.

Toss in the fact that they have five switch-hitters, and the Angels can be a nightmare to match up with. Even with Ervin Santana injured or ineffective for most of the season and the loss of John Lackey for the first part of the season, the Angels have run up the best record in the AL West by bludgeoning other teams. This isn’t traditional Angels baseball, but it works really well.

The Red Sox were clearly not content with a roster that is already among baseball’s best – they wanted to upgrade, and they were willing to kick the tires on every all-star that might be available. The one they landed on, Victor Martinez, is a great fit for their roster.

Martinez can catch when Varitek isn’t, can play first when Lowell needs a day off, or can DH when Francona wants to give David Ortiz a breather. By adding Martinez to the C/1B/DH rotation, the Red Sox can essentially platoon Ortiz/Lowell/Varitek, giving them a constant platoon advantage and keeping the older legs fresh. Versatility and depth are often very useful in a playoff series, and the Red Sox now have that in spades.

The price to acquire Martinez hasn’t been officially solidified yet, but it sounds like its headed by Justin Masterson and Nick Hagadone. The Red Sox had held off on trading Masterson for several years now, but finally found a player they deemed worthy of giving up the right-handed sinkerball specialist.

For the Indians, Masterson is the kind of major league ready arm they needed to move Martinez. He should slide right into their rotation and help imrpove their run prevention immediately. As a groundball and strikeout guy, Masterson’s upside is something like Gil Meche. He doesn’t have the knockout secondary pitches to be an ace, but he profiles as a solid middle of the rotation starter. I’m a fan, and Cleveland should be happy to have picked him up in the deal.

Hagadone is more of a risk/reward guy, a big arm strength lefty who has already had Tommy John surgery and is working his way back to full health. He’s been used as both a reliever and a starter, but Boston always projected his stuff to work in the rotation if he could stay healthy. He’s a couple of years from the majors, but power LHPs with a chance to stick as starters are valuable commodities.

From Cleveland’s perspective, they get two good young arms, one of whom can step right into their rotation. That makes this a win, even if dealing Martinez away hurts their offense quite a bit. From Boston’s perspective, they dealt from depth that they could afford to lose in order to get an all-star caliber player who fits perfectly into their roster.

This is a win-win. Good deal for both clubs.