Some big news coming out this morning about the severity of Alex Rodriguez’s hip injury – according to MLB.com, Rodriguez is going to have surgery that will keep him out of the line-up until at least May. Regardless of how you may feel about Rodriguez, this is clearly a blow to the Yankees.

CHONE has Rodriguez projected for a .417 wOBA, and if he misses the entire month of April, that’s approximately 100 plate appearances that they’ll have to replace with… no one really knows. Cody Ransom is listed as the backup third baseman on the Yankees depth chart, but but the odds of Ransom starting on opening day for the Yankees have to be pretty slim. He’s just not a major league quality player, and especially not good enough to start for a team with playoff aspirations.

So, I think we have to assume the Yankees are going to make a move to bring in a temporary replacement at third base. Mark Grudzielanek is the only free agent with any real experience at third base, and that’s even being generous – he played 236 innings at the position in 1995. But, as a quality defensive second baseman, he could be expected to handle the hot corner fairly well.

However, CHONE has Grudz projected for a .299 wOBA, predicting a fairly massive fall for the 38-year-old. Even over just 100 plate appearances, the difference between Rodriguez’s projected offense and Grudzielanek’s projected offense is 10 runs. Ten runs in a month. And that’s assuming that Grudzielanek would want to play third base for a month before moving into a bench job.

In reality, even if Rodriguez isn’t affected by his hip injury at all past April, and plays a full season from May-September, this injury is going to cost the Yankees around one win off their projected total unless they can trade for a quality third baseman. In the AL East, losing a win is a pretty big deal.

This is bad news for the Yankees. Cashman is going to have to pull a rabbit out of his hat in the next few weeks.

Originally, this post was going to be about the San Francisco Giants starting rotation – with Tim Lincecum, Randy Johnson, Matt Cain, Jonathan Sanchez, and Barry Zito, the Giants are going to rack up a ton of strikeouts. I wondered how they would compare to other recent pitching staffs in K/9, and started to look at the leading teams in strikeout rate over the years. I quickly noticed a trend.

Year, #1 Team In K/9, K/9 Rate

2001 – Chicago Cubs, 8.42 K/9
2002 – Chicago Cubs, 8.32 K/9
2003 – Chicago Cubs, 8.68 K/9
2004 – Chicago Cubs, 8.27 K/9
2005 – Chicago Cubs, 7.85 K/9
2006 – Chicago Cubs, 7.82 K/9
2007 – Chicago Cubs, 7.53 K/9
2008 – Chicago Cubs, 7.84 K/9

The last time the Cubs didn’t lead the majors in strikeout rate was 2000 – they finished 5th.

Granted, strikeout rate is one of the pitching statistics that correlates best from year to year, but it’s not like the Cubs haven’t had significant roster turnover on their staff during this decade. In 2001, it was Kerry Wood, Jason Bere, and Kyle Farnsworth racking up the strikeouts. 2002 saw Matt Clement, Carlos Zambrano, and Mark Prior join the squad. 2003 was similar to ’02, but added Joe Borowski and Mike Remlinger as high strikeout relievers. As Wood and Clement faded away, Ryan Dempster and Mike Wuertz joined the scene. Then came Prior’s demise, but the rise of Rich Hill, Scott Eyre, Will Ohman, and Bob Howry. 2007 brought Ted Lilly and Carlos Marmol. 2008 was all about Rich Harden.

That’s eight years of league leading strikeout rate, with nearly wholesale turnover of the pitching staff during that time. That’s pretty remarkable. It is clear that the Cubs value pitchers who can generate swinging strikes and eschew a pitch to contact philosophy, but valuing something and maintaining a stranglehold on the league lead are two different things.

Eventually, the Cubs will fall from their perch. They’re not going to lead the majors in strikeout rate forever. However, with a projected rotation of Zambrano, Harden, Dempster, Lilly, and Marshall/Heilman, they are geared up for another run at it. Can they hold off the Giants addition of the The Big Unit? It will be fun to find out.

With this crop of prospects for the 2009 MLB draft this summer being college heavy, a lot of fans of teams with high picks are following the performances of guys like Stephen Strasburg, Dustin Ackley, and Grant Green very closely. Right now, D.J. LeMahieu is getting a lot of buzz for his blistering start for LSU. Because baseball is such a statistical game, this is only natural. I just want to issue a word of caution – college statistics are just not that valuable of a predictive tool.

From the use of metal bats, the huge variances in quality of opponents, some parks that heavily impact run environments, and the smaller sample of games played, there are all kinds of adjustments that need to be made to try to translate NCAA statistics into something that resembles context-neutral. And, once you’ve done all that work, there is still limited value in the numbers.

For instance, let’s take Dustin Ackley – scouts rave about his advanced approach at the plate, and he’s universally acknowledged as the best hitting prospect in this draft. He has a compact, line drive swing and makes excellent contact. The only real questions surrounding him are how much power he’ll develop and what position he’ll play in the majors.

Since I have a database that contains a significant amount of college statistics dating back to the 1980s, I ran a query to try to find some comparable players to Ackley statistically. I wanted to see how many of these high BB/low K/gap power hitters there were, and how they did in the majors. Some of the names on the list may surprise you.

For instance, Brad Wilkerson was an absolute monster in college. His junior year at Florida, he hit .347/.538/.743, drawing 85 walks and striking out just 29 times in 222 at-bats. He also launched 23 home runs as 49 of his 77 hits went for extra bases. Oh, and he pitched, too. From a pure numbers standpoint, Wilkerson was as good offensively as anyone in recent college history. Obviously, that didn’t translate to the major leagues, as he’s been just a decent hitter, posting a career .341 wOBA.

It’s not just Wilkerson, either. Khalil Greene (.470/.552/.877) and Chris Burke (.435/.537/.815) had two of the best offensive seasons for a middle infielder in college history, and neither of them have been able to duplicate their success with wood bats. Mark Teixeira was a monster in college, but his numbers were surpassed by Dan Johnson. Alex Gordon and Michael Aubrey have virtually indistinguishable seasonal marks. Ryan Braun hit the snot out of the ball at Miami, but so did Jamie D’Antona at Wake Forest. If I showed you Chase Utley’s 2000 season next to Greg Dobbs‘ 2001 season, you couldn’t tell them apart.

Good hitting prospects hit well in NCAA ball, but so do less good hitting prospects, and just using numbers, it’s basically impossible to tell them apart. We’re big fans of statistical analysis here, obviously, but we also need to know the limits of what numbers can tell us. When it comes to college performances, scouting reports are what you want – the guys hitting the fields everyday and looking at swings and athleticism do a better job of predicting which college players will hit in the majors and which ones won’t.

Dustin Ackley is probably going to hit in the majors. I’m saying that because scouts think so, not because he’s hitting in college.

The Red Sox, Yankees, and Rays are the three best teams in baseball. The AL East is a powerhouse division like we haven’t seen in a long, long time. When you look at their rosters, you see all-stars and MVP candidates abound. But the strength of those teams doesn’t just lie with their everyday regulars, but also in the depth that they have accumulated to safeguard themselves from injuries. The Red Sox and Yankees build up strong reserves by flexing their financial advantage, but the Rays have done it through numerous shrewd acquisitions and player development over the last few years.

In fact, I think there’s a case to be made that Tampa Bay’s junior varsity squad could hold their own against some full scale major league clubs. Take a look at this potential roster of guys who don’t have regular gigs with the Rays and their wOBA projections from CHONE.

Catcher: John Jaso, .323 wOBA
First Base: Chris Richard, .326 wOBA
Second Base: Adam Kennedy, .296 wOBA
Shortstop: Ray Olmedo, .301 wOBA
Third Base: Willy Aybar, .336 wOBA
Left Field: Ben Zobrist, .330 wOBA
Center Field: Fernando Perez, .312 wOBA
Right Field: Matt Joyce, .318 wOBA

Bench: Morgan Ensberg (.329 wOBA), Justin Ruggiano (.333 wOBA), Elliot Johnson (.286 wOBA), Chris Nowak (.319 wOBA), Michael Hernandez (.300 wOBA)

#1 Starter: Mitch Talbot, 4.57 FIP
#2 Starter: Jeff Niemann, 4.96 FIP
#3 Starter: Jason Hammel, 4.98 FIP
#4 Starter: Jeremy Cummings, 5.27 FIP
#5 Starter: Wade Davis, 5.28 FIP

Closer: Jason Isringhausen, 4.73 FIP
Setup: Jason Childers, 4.50 FIP
Setup: Jason Cromer, 4.65 FIP
Middle: Dewon Day, 4.62 FIP
Middle: Dale Thayer, 4.56 FIP
Loogy: Randy Choate, 4.27 FIP
Long: Jeremy Hellickson, 4.62 FIP

That’s a complete 25 man roster from the extra parts that the Rays don’t have jobs for.

Overall, the offense projects to about a .320 wOBA, assuming the manager was smart enough to run platoons with Richard/Ensberg and Joyce/Ruggiano and everyone stayed healthy – 8 major league teams finished with a wOBA of less than .320 in 2008.

The defense projects to league average or a little bit better – Perez, Joyce, and Kennedy are plus defenders, Aybar, Zobrist, and Olmedo are average-ish, while Jaso and Richard are below average.

The pitching projects to about a 4.8 FIP – there’s some useful arms there, but it obviously lacks a top notch talent, since it’s a collection of #5 starters and middle relievers.

Still, though, a .320 wOBA, average to above average defense, and a 4.8 FIP – we’re looking at a team that would score about 700 runs and give up about 825 runs. That’s a .415ish winning percentage, or about a 66 win team over a full season.

The collection of guys the Rays have in camp that they don’t have jobs for projects to be only marginally worse than the Royals and Astros.

The AL West continues to get more interesting. Capitalizing on a winter of depressed salaries, the A’s today signed shortstop Orlando Cabrera to a one year, $4 million deal – according to our dollar values here on FanGraphs, Cabrera has been worth an average of $13.5 million over the last four years, and hasn’t been worth less than $10 million in any season since 2004. In any other market environment, Cabrera would have received a significantly larger contract, but the combination of an imploding economy and his Type A free agent status drove down the suitors, so Cabrera had to settle for the best offer from the only team that expressed serious interest.

That suitor, of course, was an A’s team that has clearly shifted it’s focus towards trying to steal the AL West in 2009. With the Angels likely to take a significant step backwards in terms of wins, the winner of the AL West could finish with less than 90 wins. CHONE has the Angels as the best team in the division, but only projected to finish 85-77. The A’s, before signing Cabrera, were projected at 81-81, clearly within striking distance of a playoff berth.

So, how much ground do the A’s make up on the Angels with this move? Cabrera’s playing time will come at the expense of Bobby Crosby, so we simply need to take a look at their respective projected performances to see how much of a boost Oakland should expect.

We’ll start with Cabrera. CHONE is down on his offense, as 34 year old middle infielders don’t age particularly well. He’s projected for a park adjusted -13 runs offensively over a full season, slightly worse than the -11 he posted last year.

However, the A’s are acquiring Cabrera for his glove, not his bat – his UZR of +16.4 last year was the best in baseball among shortstops. Of course, it was also a significant leap over his prior two years performance, and we’ve consistently cautioned against using a single year’s worth of defensive data to project future performance. Over his career, UZR has Cabrera at +7.2 runs per full season, and he’s +7.9 over the last three years. A more accurate assumption about his defense going forward is that he’s above average to good, but not likely to be +16 again.

If we project Cabrera as +5 defensively at shortstop to go along with his -13 offensively, add in the +7.5 run position adjustment, and the +20 run replacement level adjustment, it adds up to +19.5 runs above replacement. Basically, that makes Cabrera a league average shortstop. If you think we’re underselling his defense, you can add half a win, but the A’s should expect Cabrera to be something like +1.5 to +2.5 wins above a replacement level shortstop in 2009.

However, while Crosby has struggled the last few years, he’s still been slightly better than replacement level. He hasn’t hit, but he’s played average defense for an SS, and his combination of -19 offense, +0 defense, +7.5 position adjustment, and +20 replacement level adjustment adds up to +8.5 runs above replacement over a full season, or a little less than one win.

In total, Cabrera should be about a +1 win upgrade over Crosby at shortstop for the A’s. Given their new roster, you can bump the A’s up to 82 or 83 projected wins, but they’re still a couple of games behind the Angels.

Is that win worth $4 million and a second round draft pick? Probably. The marginal value of wins rises significantly as a team gets close to playoff contention – the revenues generated from playing in October are significant to every organization. The A’s still aren’t the favorites in the AL West, but they’re not that far behind the Angels, and this move gives them one more weapon to try to bring down the Angels.

For $4 million and a second round pick, it’s a gamble worth taking.

Over the weekend, the guys at Fire Jim Bowden got the result they’ve been asking for – while he resigned instead of being publicly canned, Bowden is out as general manager of the Washington Nationals. While he was able to survive 100 loss seasons and a reputation in the game as one of the least liked front office people around, he couldn’t sidestep the mismanagement of the team’s Dominican operations and the scandal surrounding Jose Rijo’s academy and the signing of Esmailyn Gonzalez.

So now, the Nationals have to pick a new leader, a new direction, and try to right a ship that is honestly quite damanged. Despite a new park, fans haven’t responded by paying to watch a bad team, and the farm system isn’t brimming with young talent ready to lead the team into the future. The roster is a mix of underachieving outfielders, overachieving outfielders, correctly achieving outfielders, a couple of backup outfielders, and some role player-type outfielders in camp on minor league contracts. There’s also a couple of pitchers hanging around.

For whoever inherits the GM job, whether it’s Mike Rizzo, Tony LaCava, or someone else entirely, they’re going to have to make some significant adjustments quickly. This roster just doesn’t make a team, and there are too many pieces that just don’t fit together. The Nationals need to shuffle some pieces around.

That starts with Nick Johnson. In the last year of a three year contract that has seen him barely take the field, he’s owed $5.5 million for 2009 and then will hit free agency. He just doesn’t fit into the team’s future plans in any way, shape, or form. Meanwhile, the signing of Adam Dunn made an already crowded outfield even more confusing, and his defensive limitations really should keep him from having to chase fly balls around. In short, Dunn needs to play first base, which puts Johnson out of a job. The new GM would be well served to find a spot for him on another roster, even if it means picking up some of his contract in order to get a potentially useful player at another position in return.

Once you get Dunn out of the outfield mix, the logjam frees up a little bit – Milledge and Dukes play when they’re healthy, with Kearns/Willingham/Harris splitting the remaining outfield spot between them. You’d hope that Kearns plays well enough to re-establish some trade value in the summer, so getting him playing time should be a priority.

And, speaking of the summer, perhaps no decision will loom bigger for the Nationals than how to spend the #1 pick in the draft this June. Stephen Strasburg is everyone’s number one prospect, and while he’s going to demand significant money, the Nats just aren’t in a position to pass on him. When you’re attempting to re-establish credibility for your franchise, and there’s a consensus top talent available in a draft where you have the pick of the litter, you have to take that guy. The new GM would be wise to make that a prerequisite for accepting the job – he has to have ownership approval to draft and sign Strasburg this summer.

It’s not going to be an easy job patching the holes that Bowden put in the ship, but it can be done. It just has to start quickly.

If you haven’t heard, Scott Boras and Manny Ramirez have rejected the Dodgers latest offer of a two year, $45 million contract due to the amount of deferred money in the deal. They rejected the offer despite the fact that it reportedly guarantees them $25 million for 2009 with a player option for 2010 at $20 million, giving Ramirez the best possible deal he could hope for.

Under this deal, he is guaranteed far more than his market value for 2009 (to be worth $25 million in a normal economic environment, he’d have to be a +5 win player – he’s not, and the environment isn’t normal), and he has the option of terminating the contract if he has a successful season. All the risk is transferred to the Dodgers here. If he declines in performance or gets injured, they’re still on the hook for the extra $20 million for 2010, in which case they could be looking at a $45 million deal that brings them a net of five or six wins. If he has another great year, he can hit free agency against next winter and try to cash in with an even better deal.

This is, without a doubt, a fantastic offer for Ramirez. And his camp is turning it down over deferred payments? This is ridiculous.

Time value of money isn’t very hard to calculate. Let’s assume that capital is worth 5% per year in this economy, just for the sake of argument. The rumored offer has the $25 million in deferred payments being setup to be paid at $10 million in 2010, $10 million in 2011, and $5 million in 2012, with no interest accruing.

Using the present value formula of PV=FV/(1+i)^n, where i is the interest rate and n is the number of periods of deferment, we can easily figure out how much money Boras and Ramirez are actually haggling over.

First Deferred Payment

$10 million / 1.05 = $9.52 million, $480,000 difference

Second Deferred Payment

$10 million / 1.1025 = $9.07 million, $930,000 difference

Third Deferred Payment

$5 million / 1.1577 = $4.32 million, $680,000 difference

The sum of the differences between present value and future value is $2.09 million. Manny’s $25 million deferred is worth $22.91 million in today’s dollars.

They’re haggling over $2 million dollars in value. They’ve got a sweetheart deal on the table, and they’re haggling over $2 million.

Give me a break. Sign the contract and get in camp. You aren’t even worth this contract, much less a better one.

Today, the Rocky Mountain News published their final edition. Scripps, their owner, couldn’t find a buyer who wanted into the struggling newspaper business, and so Denver has become a single paper town. This will happen shortly in Seattle as well, where the Seattle Post Intelligencer will cease printing in a month or so. The San Francisco Chronicle is in a similar position and is unlikely to survive 2009, which will leave San Francisco without a daily newspaper.

Meanwhile, yesterday, Newsday announced that they are moving away from a free web content system towards a subscriber-pay system in an effort to generate more revenue.

For journalists, the world is changing, and it’s changing very quickly. The old business models don’t work anymore, as the internet has conditioned people to expect significant content to be delivered online for no additional cost beyond what they pay their local ISP. With ad revenues plunging, media companies simply haven’t been able to find a way to make money. Without profit, there’s no viable business, and the resources we enjoy go away.

With the Rocky Mountain News folding today, it got me thinking – where is the online baseball community headed? Between The Hardball Times and blogs like ours here at FanGraphs and Tango’s work at The Book Blog, there is a remarkable flow of tremendous content being put out simply for the sake of improving the quality of baseball knowledge available. For guys like Studes or Tango, this isn’t their career – it’s a hobby, and something they do because they love it.

The same goes true, I would suspect, for most of the new analysts we’ve seen rise up in various sites over the last year or two. From guys like Sean Smith to Sky Kalkman, Colin Wyers, Josh Kalk, Mike Fast, and all the rest, there is a deep well of talent that is advancing baseball knowledge for everyone. And they’re doing it without charging for their efforts.

Much like the open source movement in software, there’s been a revolution in the baseball community. The best content available isn’t being written in books or newspapers, or even behind subscription walls that require payments to access – the best knowledge available is free to everyone who wants it.

And, while it’s sad to watch newspapers fold and business models fail, it’s exciting to be living in an age where anyone who wants to educate themselves on the game can do so.

The change-up is my favorite pitch in baseball. I could probably come up with some kind of logical explanation for why I have more affection for that pitch than others, but in the end, it’s still more feeling than rational observation. I just love a good change-up.

I’m not sure MLB talent evaluators share my fondness for it, however. This afternoon, I was browsing through the Pitch Type leaderboards here on FanGraphs, and something jumped out at me. Here’s the starting pitchers who threw the highest percentage of change-ups in the majors last year.

Edinson Volquez, 31.8%
Cole Hamels, 31.5%
Johan Santana, 28.7%
James Shields, 26.3%
Jair Jurrjens, 26.2%

Besides throwing a lot of change-ups, those guys all have significant success in common. That’s a list of three all-stars and two of the breakout young pitchers of 2008. For them, quantity of change-ups was part of being an extremely good major league pitcher. Every team in baseball would gladly pencil any of these five into their rotation for 2009.

However, they also have something else in common – with the exception of Hamels, they were all deemed expendable to one degree or another at some point in their career.

Volquez worked his way up the ladder with the Texas Rangers, and while he was one of their top pitching prospects, they cashed him for Josh Hamilton when they had the chance.

Santana was famously a Rule 5 draft pick, selected by the Marlins and then traded to the Twins for Jared Camp.

Shields was a 16th round draft choice by the Rays back in 2000. Despite some quality performances in the minors, he was never considered one of their top prospects.

Jair Jurrjens was signed and developed by the Tigers, and like with Volquez, he was traded for major league talent, or at least the promise of it, in the form of Edgar Renteria.

Of the five, Hamels is the only one who was acquired at a high cost and stayed with his original franchise. The other change-up artists, among the best in the game, simply weren’t valued as highly as pitching prospects who build their resume with a dynamite breaking ball.

From guys like Josh Beckett, Kerry Wood, Scott Kazmir, Felix Hernandez, and now David Price, the pedigree for a great pitching prospect has been a high velocity fastball and a knockout curveball or slider. That’s the kind of repertoire that gets a young pitcher noticed and that teams simply don’t trade away. Those guys cost a ton to acquire, and they’re very rarely made available to other clubs.

But, it just isn’t all that uncommon for the change-up artist to develop into a better pitcher than the breaking ball guy. Right now, if the Rays had to keep either Kazmir or Shields going forward, I’m not so sure that they wouldn’t keep Shields.

As we look to the wave of future young arms reaching the majors, perhaps we should make a conscious decision to give the change-up artists a bit more due than they’ve gotten in the past?

Ever since Voros McCracken’s DIPS theory came to light in 1999, people have begun to look at a pitcher’s batting average on balls in play, or BABIP. As Voros noted, variations in BABIP from league average regress heavily to the mean in future years, and it’s value as a predictive measure is quite low. This insight helped paved the way for things like FIP and evaluating pitchers by the outcomes they can control and a movement away from metrics such as ERA.

As more research was done, though, it was found that BABIP isn’t entirely random. Knuckleballers have significantly lower BABIP than a traditional pitcher. Left-handers tend to have some minor BABIP advantage, as do flyball pitchers (though what they save in BA they give back in SLG). However, when looking through the major league splits pages on Baseball Reference, I noticed one other type of pitcher that has a significant BABIP advantage – the home team pitcher.

Here’s a chart to illustrate what I’m talking about.

In every year from 1995 to 2008 (and probably before – I didn’t bother going back any further once I found this obvious of a trend), the batting average of balls in play allowed by the home team’s pitchers was lower than the road team’s pitchers. The two lines generally move together, so when league BABIP is up or down, it’s up or down for both home and road in proportional amounts. But the home line never crosses the road line. It gets close in 2004, when the gap is just two points, but then diverges back to the more normal five to 10 point spread.

Over that 14 year period, home team BABIP allowed is .295, while road team BABIP allowed is .302. We’re talking millions of plate appearances here, so a seven point spread is certainly significant. It’s essentially impossible for this to happen randomly. There is something inherent to being the home team that allows you to reduce the amount of hits you allow on balls in play. This is, for lack of a batter term, a home field advantage.

What could be causing this spread in BABIP between home and road pitchers? Isolating a single factor is going to be next to impossible, and in reality, it probably isn’t a single factor. Outfielders learn how to read the ball off the bat in a specific lighting based on repetitive experience. Infielders learn how the grass makes a ball spin at different speeds. Pitchers figure out where the ball carries and where it doesn’t and pitch away from the areas that can hurt them the most. Hitters pick up the ball coming out of the background quicker. GMs acquire players who fit the quirks of their specific ballpark. It could be any of these, none of these, or all of these.

But we know this – there’s a distinct advantage in being the home team in turning balls in play into outs. If a pitcher gets an inordinate amount of home starts, we shouldn’t be surprised if he beats his career BABIP.