It’s party time – we’ve got box scores again. Honest to goodness, real life, team against team box scores. This is fantastic.

Jeff Francoeur went 0 for 4 and left 3 men on base.
Gerald Laird hit a triple.
The Reds threw Edinson Volquez, Johnny Cueto, and Homer Bailey at the Rays in succession.
Jerry Hairston Jr hit a grand slam.
Horacio Ramirez couldn’t get out of the first inning.
And yes, Andruw Jones struck out in his only at-bat.

Welcome back, baseball. It’s been too long.

Yes, I know, spring training doesn’t mean anything. The records and statistics don’t matter. The games don’t count. In many cases, the game is decided by whether one team’s has-been is better than another team’s never-will-be.

I don’t care. It’s baseball. It’s box scores. We can say goodbye to our latest winter of discontent. Hooray baseball.

Here at FanGraphs, we’re big fans of Sean Smith’s CHONE projection system. It’s proven to be equally or more accurate than any other projection system out there, he provides the data for free on his site, and he’s a good guy.

So, today, with news from the game at a virtual standstill, I figured we should take a look at the projected standings that he recently put up, based on the CHONE forecasts and his playing time estimates.

None of the projections should be all that surprising. The East divisions are very good, the West divisions are not, and the AL is still better than the NL. Perhaps fans in LA will be surprised by the lack of wins projected for their two teams, but as we’ve talked about, the Angels win total was built on a house of cards last year, and the Dodgers haven’t re-signed Manny Ramirez yet.

I know that whenever a projection system is published, a bunch of you guys immediately look at the results and proclaim they’re too low, because the projected leaders have less wins/home runs/strikeouts/whatever than the previous historical leaders. As we always try to explain, that’s because of regression to the mean. We understand that the final AL West winner isn’t likely to have 85 wins. Even CHONE will agree with you on that.

Let’s walk through an example, shall we? The Angels are projected to win the AL West with an 85-77 record. But that’s just a mean projection, based on the range of probabilities of the Angels winning anywhere between 60 and 110 games. Obviously, at the extremes, the odds are very tiny, so the distribution of the probabilities will look like a bell curve. Actually, let’s just show it to you.

At each win total between 81 and 89, there’s a greater than 5% chance of that win total occurring, if we agree that the Angels are a true talent 85 win team. There’s less than a 1% chance of each win total at less than 72 or greater than 98, but those are still possibilities, even if they’re pretty unlikely. Those are the individual probabilities – now let’s look at the cumulative probability.

We find 76 wins at the 90% mark. In other words, we’d expect this Angels team to win at least 76 games 90% of the time. 50% gets you to 85 wins, while 10% gets you to 93 wins. So, while 85 wins is the mean for the Angels, and they have the highest mean of any team in the division, it is not predicting that the division winner will finish with 85 wins.

The Angels have a 19.3% chance of winning 90+ games, based on this distribution. But they’re not the only team in the division. The A’s, with their projected 81-81 record, have a 6.7% chance of winning 90+ games in 2009. The Mariners, with their 78-84 projected record, have a 2.4% chance of winning 90+ games. And the Rangers, projected at 72-90, have a .1% chance of winning 90+ games. The sum of these probabilities is 28.5%. In other words, despite projecting the best team in the division to win 85 games, CHONE is still saying that there’s a 28.5% chance that the division winner will win 90+ games.

Hopefully, this is somewhat helpful – when you look at projected standings, they are giving you relative strength from team to team. In every division, it’s pretty likely that some team will outperform their expected win total, and that the division winner will end up with more wins than the mean of the projected top team. This is not a flaw of projection systems – it is a reality of math.

In about an hour, the final World Baseball Classic rosters will be announced. Unfortunately, the bigger news is going to be who isn’t playing, rather than who is.

Johan Santana isn’t pitching for Venezuela. Albert Pujols isn’t playing for the Dominican Republic. Josh Hamilton isn’t playing for the U.S.A. Canada has to go forward without Rich Harden or Erik Bedard. Even lesser players, such as Ryan Rowland-Smith (Australia), Jose Mijares (Venezuela), Joel Pineiro (Puerto Rico), and Juan Rincon (Venezuela) have opted to decline invitations as well.

The finalized rosters aren’t going to look much like the provisional ones released earlier this year, as scores of players are opting to train with their teams this spring rather than represent their countries. I’m sure they all feel they are making the correct choice, and I’m not here to pass judgment one way or another. There’s certainly positives and negatives to be gained from participating in the WBC, and that’s heightened by the timing of the event.

I know there’s no perfect time to have this tournament, but the middle of spring training simply doesn’t appear feasible. There are too many conflicts of interest between what is good for the player, their MLB organization, and their country to have the event during March. There has to be a better time to do this.

So, here’s my suggestion. Cancel the All-Star Game, turn the three day break into a seven day break, and have a single elimination tournament that lasts a week. The top two teams would play four games, and everyone else less than that, so you’re simply not adding significant strain to the pitchers selected to compete. It’s a normal turn in the rotation for the four starters selected. They take the hill in mid-season form, because it actually is mid-season.

The whole point of the All-Star game has been to watch the best of the best compete against each other, and recently, MLB has tried to give it some meaning as more than an exhibition game. Just rename the thing the All-Star Tournament, and now, you have the best of the best playing against each for something that actually does matter.

The pointless All-Star game goes away, and the WBC gets to live out the dream of having international competition on a big stage with the best players in the world. We’ll get Johan vs Pujols. We’ll get 15 dramatic winner-take-all contests with all the drama of March Madness and all the talent of the World Series. It would be a ratings bonanza and a pretty huge cash cow.

MLB, WBC, make this happen please. The current situation just isn’t working for anyone.

Another day, another scatter plot. This time, I’ve taken the hitters who have racked up enough at-bats to qualify over the last three years and put their percentage of fastballs seen on the x axis and their percentage of pitches swung at out of the zone on the y axis. Or, to put it in FanGraphs stats terms, you’ve got Fastball% and O-Swing% plotted here, as we look to see how strong the relationsihp is between hitters who have proven a willingness to chase pitches and pitchers willingness to throw those same hitters fastballs.

Here’s the chart.

This chart actually looks a bit like the FB% and ISO chart from last week, though the slope of the line isn’t as sharp. Indeed, the correlation here is -.34, quite a bit lower than the -.59 that we found between a player’s power and the willingness of pitchers to challenge him. However, there is definitely still a relationship in play here – the more a player shows that he’s willing to expand the zone, the less incentive a pitcher has to throw something straight and hard.

The most interesting group on the graph, to me, are the five points in the 35-40% O-Swing% range (right below Vladimir Guerrero). These guys are some of the most aggressive free swingers in baseball, all with a I-Can-Hit-Anything approach to hitting. Included in this group are Alfonso Soriano, Jeff Francoeur, Bengie Molina, Ivan Rodriguez, and A.J. Pierzynski. Despite similar willingness to swing at anything, Soriano and Francoeur see the fewest number of fastballs of that group. They also are the two most powerful hitters of the group. That’s probably not a coincidence – even when faced with a batter who is willing to go out of the zone to swing the bat, pitchers are still selecting which pitches to throw based on the potential damage that could be done if the batter connects. Even though Pierzynski is just as likely to chase a curveball in the dirt as Soriano, he gets more fastballs because he’s not going to punish the pitcher in the same way if he gets around on it.

We’ve heard a lot over the years about the value of working the count in order to make a pitcher throw you a fastball that you can hit, and while there’s certainly some truth to the value of that approach, hitters like David Ortiz, Adam Dunn, and Jim Thome aren’t actually seeing more fastballs than the hacking types who swing at anything. Pitchers are willing to walk hitters who scare them, and their pitch selection is certainly based more on fear of power than manipulation of the count by patient hitters. Brian Giles does a great job of taking pitches, but he gets a lot of fastballs because his power has evaporated, not because he’s forcing pitchers into 3-1 counts.

David Ortiz gets 54.5% fastballs despite hardly ever chasing pitches out of the zone. Alfonso Soriano gets 52.3% fastballs while swinging at pickoff throws to first.

A good approach to hitting is important, but if we’re looking for evidence that hitters can significantly increase the amount of fastballs they see by not chasing pitches out of the zone, we’re not really finding it.

After I put up the graph on the relationship between fastballs seen by hitters and that hitters power rates, I started thinking about whether there might be some game theory issues that could be played around with. For instance, since we know that no power slap hitters see a lot more fastballs than guys with the ability to drive the ball, does this give us reason to think that traditional line-up roles are not optimized?

Most teams still use speed as a significant factor in choosing their leadoff hitter, and stolen base attempts from the #1 spot in the batting order dwarfs attempts from all the other line-up spots. There were 498 SB attempts from #1 hitters in the majors last year – no other batting order slot got more than 239.

So, since leadoff hitters are going to be stealing far more than any other line-up spot, we can infer that the #2 hitter will be at the plate most often when SB attempts occur. What’s the common wisdom on how pitchers defend against stolen bases? Throw fastballs. So which line-up spot should see the most fastballs? The #2 hitter.

Given that assumption, it would then follow that teams could setup a dilemma for pitchers by having a #2 hitter who pitchers do not want to throw fastballs too. If you had a high power #2 hitter, who pitchers only wanted to throw fastballs too 55% of the time, then you’d be forcing the pitcher to base his pitch selection on either the hitter or the runner. If you have a low power #2 hitter, then his desire to throw fastballs would align with both runner and hitter strategies, and there would be no conflict.

Despite this, #2 hitters had the second lowest ISO of any line-up spot in baseball last year, ahead of only #9 hitters. Indeed, the classic #2 hitter is a high contact hitter who is valued for his ability to give the manager confidence to call a hit and run or hit the ball to the right side if the leadoff hitter is able to steal second on his own. The current archtype #2 hitter is exactly the opposite of the kind of hitter that would force a pitcher to choose between pitching to the batter or the runner.

Now, I’m not suggesting that every team move their clean-up hitter to the #2 spot in the order. However, I do believe that players like Garret Anderson – moderate power free swingers who get a lot of breaking balls because they’ll chase them – could make a lot of sense in the #2 hole for a team with a prolific base-stealing leadoff guy. There’s value in making a pitcher choose between pitching to the hitter or the runner, and that value is being abandoned by teams who forgo any amount of power at the #2 spot in the order.

College baseball season kicked off over the weekend, and so while the news is pretty slow at the major league level, let’s take a look at what some of the interesting draft-eligible guys did this weekend, with the understanding that none of these statistics matter at all.

Stephen Strasburg, RHP, San Diego State

The presumed #1 pick in the country took the hill against Bethune-Cookman on Friday and continued to show why he’s everyone’s number one prospect. 5 2/3 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 2 BB, 11 K, and a lot of hard fastballs. It will be interesting to see how Strasburg’s junior season ends up compared with Mark Prior and David Price – the last two college arms who had these kinds of expectations.

Grant Green, SS, USC

The Trojans shortstop keeps getting compared to some kind of hybrid of Troy Tulowitski and Evan Longoria, though no one thinks he’s as good defensively as TT or offensively as Longoria. But a combination of an above average glove and above average bat at shortstop is a pretty valuable thing, and Green’s probably the frontrunner to go #2 right now. His weekend didn’t go so well, though – 2 for 11 with 1 HR, 1 BB, and 3 K against Long Beach State.

Dustin Ackley, 1B/CF, UNC

The Tar Heels opened with the Virginia Military Institute, which isn’t really much competition for one of the top baseball programs in the country. So, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Ackley – the best pure hitter in this draft – went 9 for 13 with three doubles and a walk over the weekend. The kid can hit. However, his bat won’t determine his draft spot, but instead, his potential position will. He’s a pretty good athlete, definitely good enough for the outfield, but arm problems (he’s coming off TJ surgery) have limited him to first base so far in his college career. He’s the Heels starting first baseman again this year, but they’re aware that scouts want to see him play CF, and he got a couple innings in center on Friday night. How well he shows he can handle center field will go a long way to determining where in the first round he ends up getting selected this summer.

Alex White, RHP, UNC

There’s some really good players over in Chapel Hill this year. Besides Ackley, White is the leader among non-Strasburg arms for this summer, and he’s Carolina’s Friday starter. His season opener probably wasn’t what he was hoping for – 5 IP, 8 H, 3 R, 1 HR, 1 BB, 9 K – but he still flashed his power fastball and showed dominating ability by striking out the side in both the first and second innings. He struggled a bit in the 4th and 5th innings, but it was the first game of the season, so no one’s worried. The stuff is still lights out.

Chalk up another free agent who finally cashed in his chips, thanks to a lousy economy and Type A free agent status, and settled for a fraction of his actual value. The Dodgers have reportedly signed Orlando Hudson to a one year contract with $3.4 million guaranteed, though incentives could push his total payout to $8 million.

Before the economy went south and free agents became beggers, Hudson looked to be in line for something like the 4 year, $40 million contract that Brian Roberts just got from the Orioles. After all, Hudson’s averaged 2.5 wins per year for the last four years. Even factoring in age, it’s hard to expect him to be worth less than two wins above a replacement level player for 2009, and wins were going for between $4 and $5 million apiece last year.

However, with the economy struggling, MLB teams not named the Yankees have drastically pulled back on spending, and so Hudson settles for a contract that pays him as if he’s a +1 win player. Even if you’re pessimistic about Hudson’s future (30+ year old second baseman don’t age very well, so there’s some concern here), this deal is still a huge bargain on the old dollar per win scale.

The question we have to ask ourselves, though, is what is a win going to be worth in 2009? If MLB teams are correctly assessing that people will be cutting their discretionary spending on MLB games, and revenue for the league is going to shrink in the upcoming year, then the value generated from adding wins on the field will be diminished as well. And, when we reach a point like this, we just kind of have to throw our hands up in the air and say “who knows?”, because nobody really has the economic future of the U.S. in the next 6 months figured out, and our assumptions of the value of wins are based upon models that don’t work for this climate.

So, what can we say about this signing, if we don’t really have an ability to forecast the dollar value of a win in 2009? That it makes the Dodgers better by about +1 to +1.5 wins (depending on what they do with DeWitt and Blake to make room for Hudson), that it cost them the #17 pick in the draft, and that if this move is coupled with re-signing Manny Ramirez, the Dodgers will have nine major league starters for eight positions.

It’s hard to not like this deal for the Dodgers, but like every signing this winter, that’s based on an assumption that MLB revenues aren’t about to go in the tank. If they do, everything looks a lot different.

One of the things we like to do in the statistical community is test common wisdom to see if the empirical evidence lines up with what is believed to be true. One of these truisms is that pitchers are not afraid to high contact slap hitters, and thus will feed them a steady diet of fastballs, knowing the worst case scenario is probably a groundball, even if they turn on it.

Since I’ve been in a graphing mood and we have pitch type stats for hitters on the site, I decided to take a look at this theory, plotting the data from the 121 batters who have racked up enough plate appearances over the last three years to qualify. On the x asis, I put percentages of fastballs seen, and on the y axis, isolated slugging percentage.

Here’s the chart.

As you can see, the data definitively supports the truism. The correlation between FB% and ISO is -.59, suggesting a strong inverse relationship – the higher your ISO, the lower your FB% will be, and vice versa. The average hitter sees fastballs 60% of the time, but that’s the upper bound for low ISO hitters – Melky Cabrera’s .108 ISO and 60.8% FB% are about as far left as you can go on the graph and still be talking about a guy without much power.

However, it’s interesting in that the limit isn’t symmetrical. Notice how there are some high ISO guys on the right hand side of the graph. Matt Holliday, especially, stands out – he’s got a .248 ISO and has still been thrown fastballs 64.8% of the time over the last three years. Coors Field is likely a factor there, but it isn’t with Carlos Lee – .237 ISO, 62.9% fastballs.

Two other interesting players are Johnny Damon and Garret Anderson. They have identical .161 ISOs over the last three years, but Anderson has seen the fewest fastballs of any hitter in the sample (48.9%) while Damon is up near the top (67.5%). Do pitchers perceived Damon as a slap hitter, due to his frame? Or perhaps Anderson just really struggles against breaking balls, and pitchers are exploiting this? Maybe both?

We don’t have all the answers. I’m sure there are scouting reports at play here, indicating some hitters are more vulnerable to bendy pitches than others, but the trend is still clear – pitchers really will challenge no power hitters with fastballs while sticking to their off-speed stuff against the guys who can launch a baseball 500 feet.

This afternoon, the Indians acquired Juan Salas from the Rays, who had been designated for assignment last week. Salas is a fairly nifty pickup for the Indians and could turn into a decent RH middle reliever if given a chance. However, I’m not here to write about Salas – I’m here to write about Andy Marte.

Marte was DFA’d to make room for Salas on the 40 man roster, which means the Indians now have 10 days to trade him or put him on waivers. If they put him on waivers and he goes unclaimed, he can be outrighted to Triple-A, which would keep him in the organization while removing him from the 40 man roster.

This completes a pretty dramatic fall from grace for Marte, who was once considered one of the premier prospects in the game. From a performance standpoint, his track record in the minors was terrific. He showed power early on (slugging .492 as an 18-year-old in the South Atlantic League), added patience (a .372 OBP in a terrible-for-hitters park at 19 in the Carolina League), and hit well in the upper minors (.269/.364/.525 as a 20-year-old in Double-A, .275/.372/.506 as a 21-year-old in Triple-A).

However, after his 2005 season put him on the cusp of the majors, the Braves traded him to Boston (who subsequently sent him to Cleveland), and his career completely stalled. He didn’t hit in Cleveland or in Buffalo, and has continued to struggle ever since. In 561 major league plate appearances over the last four years, he’s hit just .211/.265/.337, racking up a terrible -3.68 WPA/LI in essentially one season’s worth of playing time.

Now 25 years old, Marte is essentially available to anyone who has a spot on the 25 man roster to burn – he’s out of options, so if claimed on waivers, the claiming team wouldn’t have the option of sending him to Triple-A without re-waiving him and hoping he cleared.

His performance over the last few seasons suggest that he’s regressed significantly from the player he once was, but it’s still hard to ignore what he did from ages 18 to 21, where he was consistently one of the best young players in baseball. I have a feeling someone’s going to give him a second chance, and they might just find themselves with a pleasant surprise on their hands. It wouldn’t be the first time the Indians got rid of a 24-year-old busted prospect right before he put things together.

Sorry for the absence of posts yesterday – I was pretty under the weather.

Getting back to the charting from a few days ago, but with a little bit of a twist. This next graph is similar to the previous ones, plotting fastball velocity and strikeout rate, but in this case, it’s minor league K/9. I took all pitchers who threw at least 30 innings in the minors last year and at least 10 innings in the majors and tied the major league velocities (published here on the site) to their minor league K/9 rates.

Essentially, the goal is to see whether there is a bigger variance in K/9 from velocity in the minors, which is what we believe to be true based on anecdotal evidence. We’ve all seen plenty of junkballers with 85 MPH fastballs blow away Double-A and Triple-A hitters with command and movement, but not be able to repeat this success in the majors. If our anecdotal evidence is correct, and there are significant amounts of minor league pitchers who can post miss bats with questionable fastballs, they should hopefully show up on this chart.

Obviously, there are selection bias issues here, as we only have velocity data for guys who were given some time in the majors. Pitchers who don’t get a callup to the big leagues won’t appear in our data set. It’s a problem, but we deal with what we have. Anyway, here’s the graph.

First thing you should notice is that the starting point on the regression line is quite a bit higher than in the major league graphs. The really low strikeout minor leaguers just don’t get called up. The lowest K/9 in the sample of 183 pitchers is Brad Hennessey, who posted a 4.69 K/9 for Fresno. His fastball was 88.3 MPH in the majors.

The other thing to notice is that the trendline is much flatter, and while the r of .27 means that the spread isn’t totally random, there are a ton of data points that don’t fit the line. Clay Rapada, for instance – 86.5 MPH fastball, 11.57 K/9 for Toledo, or David Robertson’s 13.11 K/9 with a 90.8 MPH fastball. Jason Bulger had the highest strikeout rate in the sample at 15.7 K/9, and while he’s not a soft-tosser, his 92.9 MPH fastball isn’t that far from the median.

While this isn’t a perfect analysis, it does seem to confirm the common wisdom that velocity isn’t as necessary to rack up strikeouts at the minor league level. There are a good number of pitchers who miss bats without a big fastball. When looking at minor league pitching numbers, you have to keep this in mind – gaudy statistics do not mean that you can automatically infer major league quality stuff.