We’re officially to the halfway point, with most teams having logged 81 games in the standings by now. The second half will certainly offer some new stories, but here are the last batch of things we learned during the first semester of 2009. Just for fun, let’s focus on the pitchers this week.

Ricky Nolasco is just fine, thanks.

After a rough start to the season (compounded by some bad luck), the Marlins shipped the ace of their 2008 team back to Triple-A for some tune-up work, and he’s now returned with a vengeance. In two starts last week, he threw 16 innings, gave up seven hits, walked two, and struck out 20. I think it’s safe to say he’s back. I feel sorry for teams that have to face him and Josh Johnson in the same series.

Joe Saunders, on the other hand…

Early in the season, Saunders helped carry the Angels pitching staff while they waited for John Lackey and Ervin Santana to return from the disabled list. Regression to the mean smacked him in the head with a pretty strong stick this week, though, as he allowed six home runs in nine innings of work over two starts. He also walked eight batters, and not surprisingly, the combination of bad command and home run problems adds up to losing. Saunders’ FIP now stands at 5.50, and while he’s better than this, he’s getting exposed as a back-end starter. The Angels have some real pitching problems.

Maybe they should have traded for Brad Penny.

Last week, four starting pitchers had an average fastball of 95+ MPH. Ubaldo Jimenez, Felix Herandez, Justin Verlander, and Penny. If you look at his velocity chart, there’s been a big spike over the last five starts compared to how hard he was throwing earlier in the year. Daisuke Matzusaka’s problems have given the Red Sox a reason to keep him around, and now Penny’s pitching like a guy who doesn’t want to go anywhere. If he keeps throwing the ball like this with any kind of consistency, he’s going to be in heavy demand this winter when he heads back out as a free agent.

You should look at Carlos Zambrano’s velocity chart too.

Speaking of recent trends in velocity, this one isn’t going to make Cubs fans happy. Zambrano’s average fastball in his last start was just 88.6 MPH, the first time all year it’s been under 90. He topped out at 92.1. Considering his career workload and some DL stints with shoulder inflammation last year, this bears watching closely.

When I heard that the Padres had traded Scott Hairston for Craig Italiano, Ryan Webb, and a PTBNL, my first reaction was to wonder if they were trying to tank as quickly as possible to give themselves a shot at drafting Bryce Harper. There weren’t too many other explanations that made much sense, given that Hairston was one of only two guys on the Padres roster hitting his weight and that he made a total of $1.25 million this year while not being eligible for free agency until after 2011.

After a night to think it over and do some more research on the deal, I don’t have many more answers than I did last night. I still don’t get it.

Kevin Towers justified the trade thusly: “That’s the one thing we lack in our system is pitching depth,” Towers said, noting the lack of higher-level arms in the system. “We really didn’t want to give up Scotty. But for us, this is a move looking beyond this year.”

Not sure if you’ve noticed, Mr. Towers, but you play in the most pitcher friendly ballpark in baseball. You’ve picked up Chad Gaudin and Kevin Correia off the scrap heap and watched them turn into pretty useful arms in the expanse of Petco Park, after doing the same thing with Cha Seung Baek last year. Your ballpark is a veritable pitching factory, allowing you to take arms with some flaws and make them look all shiny and new.

What you don’t have is a major league offense. Sure, Hairston was over his head this year, so maybe you can convince yourself that you’re selling high. But even with an expected regression, he’s a league average hitter who had turned himself into a decent enough outfielder to handle center field or be above average in a corner spot. Hairston is a +2 to +3 win player, under team control for 2 1/2 years, and making a fraction of what he’s worth. That’s a really valuable asset.

In return for one of their best trade chips, the Padres get a couple of bullpen arms with upside in Webb and Italiano and a PTBNL that Towers called “the key to the deal”. Because Towers indicated that the PTBNL is going to be one of two pitchers, one of whom has major league service time, speculation has centered around Sean Gallagher or Dana Eveland. Gallagher is better than Eveland, but I’m not sure this deal makes sense for San Diego regardless of which pitcher it ends up being.

Call me crazy, but I think low cost, above average major league players should command more than a potential back-end starter and a pair of bullpen arms. It’s hard for me to fathom how the Padres could back away from really good deals for Jake Peavy over the winter, but then begin to sell off useful pieces like Hairston for spare parts.

From the A’s perspective, this is a no-brainer deal. Hairston will replace the soon-to-be-traded Matt Holliday in the line-up, giving them a right-handed outfield bat that they lacked going forward, and they gave up no real parts of their future to acquire a guy who can fit into their near-term core.

Easy win for Oakland here. Can’t say I’m a fan of whatever plan San Diego is putting in place.

Over the last few months, the Cubs have tried a hodgepodge of options to fill third base in Aramis Ramirez’s abasence – Mike Fontenot, Ryan Freel, and Bobby Scales got time there, but recently, Lou Piniella had settled on Jake Fox, star of the Free Jake Fox campaign. Fox’s bat had forced him into the line-up, and he’d done enough to convince the Cubs manager that his defense wouldn’t be worst-of-all-time at the hot corner.

However, with Ramirez set to return from his rehab assignment on Monday, the Cubs are going to have to figure out a new plan to get Fox’s bat in the line-up. His .379 wOBA since arriving in the majors is the best on the club (besides Ramirez), and based on what he was doing at Triple-A, there’s reasons to think he can keep swinging the bat this well. But, where will he play?

Derrek Lee has caught fire after a slow start, locking down first base, so Fox probably won’t play much there. Ramirez is the team’s best player, so as long as he stays healthy, it’s hard to imagine Fox getting much playing time at third. That leaves the corner outfield spots, manned by the under-producing Milton Bradley and Alfonso Soriano. With neither of them hitting as well as expected, Fox could get some time in their place, but it’s hard to imagine that he won’t be a pretty big liability chasing down fly balls. At third, you could hide his lack of mobility, but if he’s trying to run after balls in the gap, fans are going to see pretty quickly why he’s been labeled a future DH.

So, perhaps the best option for everyone involved is a trade. The Tigers are hunting for some offensive help to offset the collapse of Magglio Ordonez, for instance. Fox is the kind of bat that could help them in their pursuit of the AL Central title, and perhaps the best way for the Cubs to use him is as a chip to acquire something that fits their needs a little bit better.

Relief pitchers throw hard. This isn’t news. Jonathan Broxton, Brian Wilson, Matt Lindstrom, and Mark Lowe all average 96 MPH+ with their fastballs. Angel Guzman throws a 90 MPH slider. These guys are big, power arms who come in and light up radar guns. And compared to Joel Zumaya, they throw like nine year olds.

See, Zumaya’s average fastball this year is 99.4 MPH according to BIS, 99.1 MPH according to Pitch F/x. In fact, I’m going to just stop writing and show you a picture.

That’s Zumaya’s velocity chart over the last three years on a game by game basis. Look at the recent averages, then notice that they’re above the blue line that marks 100 MPH. Of late, Zumaya’s average fastball has been faster than 100 MPH. His average fastball.

This is just nutty. In his last appearance against the A’s, his fastballs went like this.

102
102.6
102.7
101.9
99.7 (I guess he took a little off)
99.9
99.2
100
100.4
101
101.3

12 fastballs, with an average velocity of 100.9 MPH. And he didn’t strike anybody out. In fact, he didn’t strike anyone out in the appearance before that, either, when he threw 25 fastballs that averaged 100.6 MPH. Despite throwing as hard as anyone ever has, it isn’t helping him much. Here’s Zumaya’s line for June, when he just started hitting triple digits on nearly every pitch.

10 1/3 IP, 12 H, 2 HR, 14 BB, 10 K, 8.43 FIP

As his fastball has edged up in velocity, his command has gone away entirely, and he’s been a Triple-A level reliever. Compare that with his 12 appearances in April/May, when he threw 16 innings, allowed 15 hits, walked 2, and struck out 15 for a 3.33 FIP. In his best outing of the year (May 19th vs Texas), he threw 10 fastballs and cracked 100 just once. He recorded three outs on 11 pitches, eight of which were strikes.

For Zumaya, there appear to be diminishing returns associated with his velocity. 99 with location is an awful lot better than 101 with no idea where it’s going. For his sake, and really for baseball’s sake, let’s hope the Tigers can help him ease back off the fastball a little bit. The game could really use a fun to watch relief ace who can hit 100 whenever he wants come October. It is less enjoyable to see him walk the world throwing 102.

Heading up to the draft, one of the main topics of conversation was how much Stephen Strasburg was worth, and how much he’d eventually sign for. Rumors of a $50 million bonus demand were floated, while the consensus seemed to be that he’ll sign for $15 to $20 million, because he lacks the leverage to negotiate with teams besides the Washington Nationals. The big “what if” question was how much a prospect like Strasburg would get if he was a free agent.

We might find out sooner than later, because Aroldis Chapman has reportedly defected from Cuba. R.J. wrote about his WBC start here, where Chapman showed off a legitimate power fastball from the left side. In their scouting report of the top 10 WBC prospects, Baseball America got the following quote from a scout:

“If you are looking for more than that in a pitcher, you’ll be searching your whole life,” an AL scout said. “He was so much fun to watch. If he’s 21 like he’s listed, the sky’s the limit. You’ve got honestly just one or two tweaks that could be made but he could go straight to the top of a big league rotation.”

Unlike with Strasburg, or even Japanese sensation Yu Darvish, Chapman has to be evaluated on his physical tools rather than his performance, but those tools are plenty exciting. It isn’t every day that a 21-year-old LHP with a mid-90s fastball becomes available for all 30 teams to bid on.

Let’s just hope, for the good of baseball, that he doesn’t end up with the Red Sox or Yankees.

Everyone knows the Rays can hit. Carlos Pena, Evan Longoria, Ben Zobrist, B.J. Upton, Carl Crawford… their offense is strong and deep. However, over the last month or so, their best hitters have been two guys named Gabe.

When Gabe Kapler was signed as a free agent over the winter to be Gabe Gross‘ platoon partner, the fellows over at DRaysBay gave the arrangement the nickname “Gabe Of The Day”. It didn’t start off so well, with a .321 wOBA between them in April representing a rather disappointing performance from Gabe Squared. As such, they lost playing time to Ben Zobrist, who was busting out in a big way (and hasn’t stopped since). However, when Akinori Iwamura’s injury forced Zobrist back to the infield, the Gabes responded in a big way.

Here are their June performances:

Gross: 68 PA, .333/.441/.491, .411 wOBA
Kapler: 32 PA, .444/.500/1.148, .632 wOBA

The Gabe Of The Day platoon put up a .482 wOBA in June, while playing their usual excellent defense in the outfield. For comparison, Albert Pujols has a .478 wOBA on the season.

On the season, Gross and Kapler have combined for +2.3 wins so far this year. If we do the ever so popular morphing thing and treat them as one player (Grapler?), that would rank them 5th in baseball among right fielders in win value, behind Justin Upton, Ichiro, Nelson Cruz, and Hunter Pence. Not bad company for a couple of platoon outfielders picked up on the cheap.

When the Nationals signed Adam Dunn over the winter to a 2 year, $20 million contract, the reaction from the sabermetric community was almost unanimously positive towards the move for Washington. For a fraction of his original asking price, they got the guy who had become something of a poster boy for the kind of player that statistical analysts have been claiming is undervalued for years. The walks and power skillset produces a lot of runs, and Dunn has a master’s degree in the walks and power skillset.

When the Nationals acquired Nyjer Morgan yesterday, the reaction from the sabermetric community was almost unanimously negative towards the move for Washington. He was routinely called a no-power fourth outfielder, easily replaceable, and a 29-year-old with no upside. The Nationals were destroyed for giving up on a “talent” like Lastings Milledge to acquire Morgan. Analysts I have quite a bit of respect for, like Keith Law, Dan Szymborski, and our own R.J. Anderson, hailed this as an easy win for the Pirates, as none of them see much value in Morgan.

Here’s the problem. Nyjer Morgan and Adam Dunn are nearly equals in value, and the polar reactions from the sabermetric crowd puts the blindspots that have been developed over the last 10-15 years on full display.

Let’s just break down the differences by role.

Hitting: Dunn has a massive advantage here, obviously. ZIPS projects a .394 wOBA going forward, which would allow him to finish the season as 37 runs better than a league average hitter. That’s really good. ZIPS projects Morgan for a .307 wOBA, which would lead him to finish the season as eight runs below average with the bat. Dunn is 40 to 45 runs better with the bat than Morgan is. It’s a big difference.

Baserunning: Despite comparing a beefy slugger to one of the fastest guys in baseball, the gap here is actually fairly small. By Dan Fox’s EQBRR, Dunn averages about -2 runs per year on the basepaths, while Morgan has totaled +2 runs in his one season’s worth of playing time. For all his speed, he hasn’t figured out how to steal bases effectively yet, so he hasn’t been able to maximize the value of his feet. There’s still a difference here, though, of about 4 runs per season in Morgan’s favor.

Defense: On Dunn, there really isn’t much of an argument. He’s legitimately the worst defensive player in baseball that is still allowed to wear a glove regularly. Since 2005, his UZR totals have been -18.8, -14.9, -18.8, -28.0, and -14.1 (in half a season!). That spans three teams and four ballparks, so it’s not like the context is causing Dunn to look bad in the field. Morgan, on the other hand, runs like he stole something, and covers all kinds of ground in the prcoess. His +15.4 UZR in LF/RF and +11.9 UZR in CF in partial seasons of playing time are amazingly awesome.

We have to use a fairly heavy regression for Morgan’s defensive projection, however, given that we only have one season’s worth of data. Giving 1/3 weighting to his current numbers and 2/3 weighting to a regression back to league average, we end up with Morgan as a +10 defender in CF. This is probably too strong a regression, but I’m trying to err on the side of caution with defensive data.

If Dunn is a -20 LF, and Morgan is a +10 CF, then the defensive difference between the two is 30 runs plus a five run positional adjustment, for a total of 35 runs. And honestly, I’m being kind to Dunn and harsh to Morgan – the reality could easily be -25 for Dunn and +15 for Morgan. But, we’ll go conservative for now.

Hitting: Dunn, +45
Baserunning, Morgan, +4
Defense, Morgan, +35

Total: Dunn, +6

The gap between Dunn and Morgan, going forward, is expected to be about half a win per season if you use conservative estimates of their respective defensive value.

I’m sorry, but there’s no way that the response from the sabermetric community around these two moves matches that reality. If paying Adam Dunn $10 million per season to be a +2.5 win player is a good idea, then paying Nyjer Morgan $400,000 to be a +2 win player is a great idea. There is no world in which Dunn’s production and salary is more valuable than Morgan’s production and salary. You could acquire 100 Lastings Milledge’s for the amount of money that Dunn is getting to be the big, power hitting equal of Morgan.

There’s just no way around the real conclusion – the sabermetric community, for the most part, has a blindspot when it comes to players with defensive skills at the extremes of the spectrum. Given the cost differences, Morgan is clearly a more valuable asset than Dunn, yet his acquisition is mocked while Dunn’s is celebrated.

Baseball is not just about who can hit the ball further. It’s time we stopped evaluating players on their offensive worth alone.

Over the last few years, one of the easier running jokes in baseball was to suggest that any available outfielder would interest the Washington Nationals. Jim Bowden couldn’t hide his love of toolsy, athletic underperformers, so every kid who had ever been ranked on Baseball America’s Top 100 and became available gravitated towards the nations capital. So, it would be easy to continue to chuckle right along with the old joke, as today, Washington traded for another outfielder, completing the rumored Lastings Milledge for Nyjer Morgan swap by agreeing to exchange Joel Hanrahan for Sean Burnett as well.

However, this move is different. Morgan doesn’t follow the previous pattern – he can actually play baseball, especially defense. Washington’s outfield has combined for a -24.5 UZR this year, easily the worst in baseball (the next lowest is the Blue Jays at -19.2). The combination of Elijah Dukes, Adam Dunn, Josh Willingham, Austin Kearns, and Willie Harris have been disastrous in the field, which is a pretty significant problem when you’re trying to develop a young pitching staff.

Morgan is far form a defensive liability. He has 743 innings between LF/RF and a career UZR of +15.4, along with 391 innings in center field and a UZR of +11.9. Those numbers are off-the-charts awesome. If Nyjer Morgan was really a +35 UZR/150 center fielder, he’d be in the conversation for the best defensive outfielder of all time.

Now, he’s almost certainly not that good. There’s a lot of noise in small sample UZR numbers, and we only have about one full season’s worth of data on Morgan as an outfielder. Odds are Morgan is just a good defensive CF, not the best that anyone has ever seen. If we were to project his defensive value going forward using a regression, we’d likely end up expecting him to be something like a +10 to +20 center fielder, which puts him in the category of guys like Carlos Gomez, Franklin Gutierrez, Mike Cameron, Rajai Davis, and Darin Erstad.

Given what we know about Morgan’s skillset and his status as one of the fastest players in the game, this shouldn’t be that surprising. He has the physical skills to be a terrific defensive player, after all, so when the metrics and the scouting reports agree, there can be increased confidence in the result.

Of course, guys that are this good at defense usually aren’t much offensively. Morgan follows the pattern of a slap-hitting groundball guy who tries to get on base via a horde of singles to compensate for his lack of power. Unlike Gomez and Erstad, though, Morgan has shown some adeptness at making this work for him – his career line in the majors is .286/.351/.376, which translates to a barely below average .322 wOBA.

That’s the high end of what the Nationals should expect going forward, however – it is based on a career .346 batting average on balls in play, and while fast guys do better than average at getting on via contact, .346 is still tough to sustain. If his BABIP falls down to .320 or so, about what ZIPS projects for him going forward, than he’s more of a .310 wOBA guy.

A .310 wOBA and +10 defense in center field is still a pretty nifty player, though. Over a full season, that would make him a +2 to +2.5 win player, or right around league average. Considering that his lack of service time means he’ll be making the minimum the next couple of years, the Nationals are getting a pretty significant value in this particular outfielder. The upside isn’t super high, but he’s instantly one of the better players on that team, and will make them better both in 2009 and going forward.

For the Pirates, they get to try to figure out how to extract some value from Lastings Milledge, who would have to take several steps forward before he was as good as Morgan is now. Can’t say I’m a fan of this move for Pittsburgh, but that’s getting to be a theme lately. The Pirates have made a series of head-scratching moves of late, and this one just continues that trend. Hanrahan is a nice buy low candidate, and a better bet for the future than Burnett, but relievers just aren’t that hard to acquire. The Pirates get worse now for some hope of getting better in the future, but that hope is tied to a belief in Lastings Milledge’s improvement that I don’t have.

Good trade for Mike Rizzo and the Nationals. For once, they finally acquired an outfielder with some usefulness.

For a guy with a pretty nondescript track record, Ian Snell sure is making a lot of news lately. Five days ago, the Pirates optioned Snell to Triple-A, at his request, so he could work on getting back to the pitcher he was a couple of years ago. The Pirates organization are clearly fed up with him, and it seems likely that the feeling is mutual. Today, Pittsburgh GM Neal Huntington was quoted as calling the contract extension he gave Snell a year ago “a mistake”, and then went out to say that while the contract made sense at the time, “you could argue very easily that we missed on the player.”

He finished the remarkably negative public quotes by talking about “salvaging” the deal, either by trading Snell to someone else or bringing him back to the majors as a relief pitcher. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of his future in Pittsburgh, is it?

Given the comments and the situation, you’d think that Snell had been the worst pitcher in the history of baseball or had physically assaulted a teammate or something. But, no, he’d just struggled a bit with his command and stranding runners, which has led to an ERA (5.36) that’s about a run higher than his FIP (4.56). That’s the kind of performance that gets you banished from Pittsburgh nowadays?

It’s not like Snell can’t pitch anymore, either. Yesterday, in his first start in Triple-A, away from the “negativity” of the situation at the major league level, he threw seven innings, gave up two hits, walked one, and struck out 17 batters. At one point, he blew away 13 Toledo hitters in a row. I know it’s Triple-A, but you can’t rack up 17 strikeouts against professional hitters without some talent.

If the Pirates are tired of Ian Snell’s personality, there should be a pretty decent sized line of teams ready to take him off their hands. The “mistake” contract that Huntington refers to pays Snell $3 million this year, followed by $4.25 million next year, which means that the total obligation to Snell going forward is about $6 million through the end of 2010. The contract then contains two fairly reasonable club options that would be no-brainer pickups if Snell stays healthy and shows a bit of return to his previous form.

In a market where a bunch of contenders are pining for a starting pitcher, Snell would make a really good buy-low option for practically all of them. At worst, he’s a capable #5 starter, and he’s got the talent to be significantly more than that. Maybe it won’t work out for him in Pittsburgh, but this seems like a case of the Pirates flushing an asset for reasons that better management would be able to overcome.

Don’t be surprised if you see Snell pitching well for some other team in the next few weeks.

We’re nearly at the end of June, and 23 of the 30 major league teams are within six games of a playoff spot. If you like parity, 2009 is your kind of season. Let’s see what we learned last week.

Chad Gaudin is still talented.

The well traveled Gaudin had his two best starts of the season last week, shutting down the Mariners and Rangers in succession. His line for the week: 15 IP, 5 H, 1 HR, 3 BB, 20 K. His FIP for the season now stands at 3.76, and he’s stayed healthy enough to throw 71 innings in the first half of the year. The Padres have thrown a lot of spaghetti at the wall in assembling their pitching staff, and Gaudin looks like he’s going to be one of the pieces that sticks.

We might have to start taking Joel Pineiro’s sinker seriously.

After years of struggling to find himself, it looks like Pineiro’s decision to become an extreme groundball pitcher has taken hold. Between two starts last week, 76% of his batted balls were hit on the ground, just a ridiculous total. He now has the highest groundball rate in the majors, at 61.9%, despite never being over 50% before. Whatever Dave Duncan had him adjust, it’s working tremendously well, and his renovation of his approach is one of the reasons St. Louis is fighting for the NL Central title.

Franklin Gutierrez isn’t just a glove guy.

After being given the Mariners center field job, Gutierrez has thrust himself into the conversation for the title of best defensive outfielder in baseball. He’s earned the nickname “Death To Flying Things” by catching practically every fly ball hit against Seattle. However, Gutierrez’s bat has been the aspect of his game making noise in the last week, as he’s hit .391/.462/.609 in the last seven days. When a gold glove center fielder posts a .472 wOBA, that’s a pretty awesome week, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the Mariners have been winning games of late – their center fielder is playing like an MVP lately.

Andre Ethier wants to be more like Adam Dunn.

A strange season for Ethier continued this week, as he went 3 for 18, but all three hits were home runs, and he hit them in the same game. He also drew four walks and struck out five times, so half of his 24 plate appearances ended with one of the three true outcomes. Up until this year, Ethier has always been more of a gap power/solid defense kind of player, but now his strikeouts are up, his home runs are up, and his UZR is way, way down. It will be interesting to see how he finishes the season, because it’s a bit strange to see guys just totally switch skillsets mid-career.