Today, Albert Pujols was named the National League MVP, and rightfully so. Giving it to anyone else would have been some kind of travesty, as Pujols is clearly the game’s best player, had a season that no one else can even come close to, and carried a pretty bad group of teammates towards contention for most of the season. He clearly is the game’s most valuable player.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the guy who finished 15th in the NL MVP voting – Chase Utley. We’ve known for quite a while that Utley’s value was greatly underestimated by the average fan and the mainstream media, but this just drives the point home even further.

Utley hit .292/.380/.535 on the way to posting a 3.63 WPA/LI for the season. The next closest second baseman to Utley in terms of offensive value was Dan Uggla, who posted a 2.27 WPA/LI. That’s basically a win and a half difference between the next best guy at his position. Dustin Pedroia, who is getting all kinds of support for AL MVP, and will almost certainly finish in the top three when voting is announced tomorrow, had a 2.03 WPA/LI. Utley is so far and away the best offensive second baseman in the game, it’s ridiculous to even consider anyone else.

That’s not all – he’s also an elite defender. The +/- system has Utley as a +47 defender in 2008. That’s not a typo – plus 47!. They expected him to make 338 outs on ground balls this year – he actually made 384. Now, a +47 ranking is so insane that it almost certainly contains a good bit of noise that isn’t actually measuring Utley’s real defensive value. He’d been ranked as a +16 and +22 defender in each of the last two seasons, so so it’s nearly impossible that he improved to a level where he was actually 47 plays better than an average second baseman this year.

So, let’s just assume that there was all kinds of sample error in the +/- data and call Utley a +25 defender for 2008. This assumes that he was very good, slightly better than in previous years, but takes out the extreme portion of the Fielding Bible numbers and gives us something we can swallow a little easier.

If Utley was really +25 plays, that’s about 20 runs saved over an average defensive second baseman, which translates to about two wins.

+3.5 wins for his offense, +.25 wins for the position adjustment (second baseman hit a little bit worse than average), +2 wins for defense, and +2 wins for replacement level = +7.75 wins.

You can quibble with the numbers to some degree if you want, but no matter what kind of adjustments you make, you can’t get away from the fact that Chase Utley was something like a +7 to +8 win player this year, compared to a replacement level second baseman. He’s obviously the Phillies best player and the main reason they are the World Series Champions today.

Pujols was better, but Chase Utley was the second best player in baseball this year. That he finished 15th in the MVP voting just shows how amazingly underrated he really is.

Like we did this afternoon with CC Sabathia, let’s take a look at what we think Mark Teixeira should sign for this winter if the market is somewhat rational. The first step in ascertaining a player’s worth in dollars is figuring out his worth in wins, so let’s take a look at Teixeira’s on field value.

While he’s had some ridiculously hot stetches of hitting, in the aggregate, Teixeira has been quite consistent the last two years: .306/.400/.563 in 2007 and .308/.410/.552 in 2008. As a 28-year-old in his prime, he’s established a level of performance that clearly reflects his abilities, and we shouldn’t expect him to either improve or decline significantly from these marks. This is what Teixeira is – a .300 hitter with power and walks, and one of the game’s best switch hitters.

We see that he racked up 6.46 WPA/LI over the last two seasons, for a 150 game average of about +3 wins compared to a league average hitter. That’s impressive. We can dock him one win for the position adjustment, since first baseman hit quite a bit better than the league average as a group, put that still makes him +2 wins compared to an average offensive first baseman.

Teixeira’s not just a hitter, though – he’s also a pretty good defensive first baseman. How good is up for debate – the +/- system had him at +24 in 2008, but -4 in 2007, while other systems have him as somewhere between above average and very good. I’m comfortable calling him a +10 defensive first baseman. That adds a win right back to his total.

He’s at +3 wins compared to average, and adding in a +2 win adjustment for replacement level, Teixeira comes out as a +5 win first baseman. That’s a true all-star. He’s not Albert Pujols, but he’s clearly in the next tier of players.

If Teixeira is a +5 win player, and we use the $5.5 million per win projection for off-season spending, that gives us a $27.5 million figure for 2009. Again, we’ll factor in a 10% discount off of his current value for the safety of a long term deal, and that gives us something like $24.5 million for Teixeira. Teams are more comfortable giving longer deals to hitters than pitchers, so let’s pencil him in for a 7 year, $171 million contract.

Now, with the Yankees acquiring Nick Swisher yesterday, that might take one big bidder out of the market. Will Arte Moreno have to go this high to keep T-Rex if the Yankees aren’t trying to lure him away? I doubt it, so my guess is he’ll sign for something more like 6/150. But if the Yankees get back involved, don’t be surprised if he ends up closer to our original figure – 28 year old, +5 win position players don’t hit the market every year.

Welcome to the Free Agent Frenzy – starting today, GMs can rush around with their owner’s checkbooks, signing available players for massive contracts that they’ll probably regret in a year or two. But while free agency, as a whole, is a bad way to build a team, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a good deal if you understand what a player’s value is likely to be going forward.

So, today, we kick off a look at some of the big free agents, and what they should be expected to sign for if the market is rational. The market isn’t rational, so bet on almost everyone getting a lot more than the figure we come to, but consider it a baseline for a fair salary. First up, CC Sabathia.

As we all saw, Sabathia was a monster last year, throwing 253 innings with a 2.93 FIP, combining quantity and quality into a package that was one of baseball’s most valuable. He ran a 4.25 K/BB rate and limited the long balls, which pretty much guarantees success at a high level. He was a dominating, MVP caliber pitcher. But what can we expect going forward?

He’s 28, and he’d never been that good before, so some regression has to be expected. We can’t expect him to perpetuate his career year into infinity. However, his last three seasons have established a level of excellence that few in the game can match – a 3.30 FIP in 2006, a 3.14 FIP in 2007, and a 2.93 FIP in 2008. Those are best-in-the-league type numbers, and he’s been pitching at an elite level for quite a while now, so while we expect some regression, we can only regress him back to a Cy Young level.

Let’s put his true talent level FIP at 3.10 – it will be slightly higher if he signs with an AL club, slightly lower if it’s an NL team, but that’s a pretty solid estimate of his current abilities. And, because he’s proven more durable than most pitchers the last two years, let’s project him as a 210 inning starter going forward. How valuable is a 210 inning, 3.10 FIP starting pitcher?

I’d argue that a replacement level starting pitcher is something like a 5.50 FIP, but that pitcher certainly wouldn’t be allowed to throw 210 innings in a season. He’d get taken out for relievers much earlier in his starts, and so we’ll split the replacement level performance between 160 innings at 5.50 FIP and 50 innings at 4.50 FIP, which we’ll call our estimated replacement level for a reliever.

Now, to compare the two.

Sabathia: 210 innings, 72 runs allowed

Replacement Lever Starter: 160 innings, 98 runs allowed
Replacement Level Reliever: 50 innings, 25 runs allowed
Replacement Level Total: 210 innings, 123 runs allowed

That’s a 51 run difference in Sabathia’s favor, which translates to about 5 wins. One could potentially argue that there’s some additional value in having Sabathia eat those innings instead of relievers, which takes a load off the bullpen and allows the higher leverage relief aces to work more often when the other four starters pitch, so let’s toss another half a win into the pile to account for the cascade effect on the pitching staff.

That puts Sabathia as a +5.5 win pitcher. That makes him a legitimate MVP candidate, and right there with Johan and Halladay as the best pitchers in the game. So what’s a 5.5 win pitcher worth?

Last year, the going rate for free agents was $4.5 to $5 million per win. Not everyone got exactly that, of course, but the aggregate was pretty close. Free agent salary inflation has been near 10% per year for quite a while, so we’ll call this year’s marginal win rate $5.5 million just to be safe. I think the economy might shrink some spending and it could end up closer to $5 million, but we’ll see – for now, we’ll say it’s $5.5 million.

5.5 million * 5.5 wins = 30.25 million. That’s what we’d expect Sabathia to be worth if he signed a one year deal, which he clearly won’t do. In exchange for the security of a long term deal, he’ll give teams a slight discount off his current value. At a 10% discount for the safety of a five to seven year deal, that would put his annual average salary at $27 million.

So, that’s the baseline – six years, $162 million for Sabathia. If he signs for significantly less than that, whoever gets him is getting a relative bargain.

Two trades in MLB today – Matthew will tackle the ridiculous Nick Swisher trade a little later on tonight, so for now, let’s focus on the less absurd Kevin Gregg deal.

The Marlins continue to dump anyone who will make more than minimum wage next year, sending their closer to the Cubs for minor league arm Jose Ceda. Gregg is the epitome of the “closers are made, not born” philosophy – he’s a decent enough reliever with a good fastball/slider combination and lousy command, who succeeded in the 9th inning because pitching one inning with a three run lead isn’t all that hard.

However, after two years as a successful closer, he’s going to get between $3 and $4 million in arbitration, thanks to his 61 saves in the last two years. Above all, that one statistic still does more to determine a reliever’s paycheck than any other number – if Gregg had pitched exactly the same way in the 8th inning, racking up holds instead of saves, he’d be looking at a fraction of the pay day. Such is the privileged life of the anointed closer.

For the Cubs, however, they acquired Gregg as a replacement for Kerry Wood, and odds are he’ll be slotted into the closer role in Chicago. The idea that Gregg is a suitable replacement and they won’t take a hit in terms of effectiveness is a bit laughable. Here are their 2008 performances:

BB/9: Wood, 2.44 – Gregg, 4.85
K/9: Wood, 11.40 – Gregg, 7.60
HR/9: Wood, 0.41 – Gregg, 0.39

FIP: Wood, 2.32 – Gregg, 3.84

Now, Wood is certainly something of a significant health risk, and there’s a decent case to be made that giving him a multi-year contract wouldn’t have been a great idea. But the Cubs are taking a huge step back in terms of quality of pitcher they’ll be using in the 9th inning by going from Wood to Gregg. Wood was, on a per inning basis, one of the game’s best relievers, blowing hitters away with his overpowering stuff. Gregg is just a guy, a fungible reliever who won’t kill you but isn’t a huge asset either.

Considering the leverage that closers get, it’s fair to say that the difference between Wood and Gregg could be 1-2 wins in 2009. I’m not sure the Cubs are in a position to be giving away wins like that. For a contending team with a big payroll, they should have done a lot better for their new relief ace.

With free agency kicking off tomorrow, the off season is just about to kick into high gear. Teams are going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire new talent, and potential contenders are going to be trading away young players to acquire the proven star to put them over the top. If you think your team has a chance to win in 2009, you’ll probably witness a press conference where your GM introduces you to the guy who will make the difference – the final piece of the puzzle.

As you’re watching, keep in mind that the hyperbole rarely matches reality. Let’s take a look at the big moves last year, and how the teams both gaining and losing the star performed in 2008.

Mets acquire Johan Santana from Minnesota for a group of prospects.

After winning 88 games and losing the division to Philly thanks to a late season collapse in 2007, the Mets went out and got the game’s best pitcher in order to shore up their rotation. The cost was four prospects and a $140 million contract, but it was Johan Santana…

The Mets won 89 games and lost the division to Philly thanks to a late season collapse.

The Twins, meanwhile, had struggled to just 79 wins in 2007, and were looking at a rebuilding effort. Santana was traded away, Torii Hunter and Carlos Silva left via free agency, and the team had to replace a lot of production with unproven minor leaguers.

The Twins won 88 games, a ten win improvement, and missed the playoffs by a single game.

Mariners acquire Erik Bedard from Baltimore for Adam Jones, George Sherrill, and a group of prospects.

I don’t know that I can write about this trade again without punching a wall, so here’s the short version – the Mariners collapsed, the Orioles improved, and it’s going down as one of the worst trades in franchise history. Let’s just move on.

Diamondbacks acquire Dan Haren from the A’s for a group of prospects.

The D’backs had just won 90 games and the N.L. West, so by adding Dan Haren to bolster their rotation behind Brandon Webb, the hope was that he’d be the guy who could make them a legitimate World Series contender. Instead, they won 82 games and ceded the division crown to the Dodgers.

Meanwhile, the A’s had won just 76 games with Haren the year before, but kicked off a big rebuilding by dealing away a lot of major league talent. After replacing them with prospects and low cost acquisitions, the A’s won 75 games, almost equaling their win total with Haren.

Tigers acquire Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis for Cameron Maybin, Andrew Miller, and a group of prospects.

Coming off an 88 win season, the Tigers wanted to track down the division winning Indians and added one of the game’s best young hitters in order to do so. Cabrera’s presence was supposed to make Detroit’s offense the most feared in the game, allowing them to just go toe to toe with their opponents and win by slugging. Instead, the team fell apart, the offense underachieved, and the Tigers won just 74 games, a huge step backwards from 2007.

The Marlins, perennial cost savers, had won just 71 games in 2007, even with Cabrera and Hanley Ramirez providing an offensive spark. With his big payday coming, they moved their best hitter and the team’s highest profile starting pitcher for a bunch of guys who weren’t quite major league ready. This step back in talent led to a 13 win improvement, as the Marlins won 84 games and hung around the wild card race for most of the summer.

Four big trades of all-star caliber players, and in every single case, the rebuilding team either held steady or got significantly better while the contender didn’t improve at all, and in some cases, got a lot worse. Clearly, this isn’t to say that the new players were the cause of the change in performance, but it should be an object lesson – teams are not built around one or two players. You need a good roster, not just a single all-star, to be a true contender.

Friends, Coloradans, baseball fans, lend me your eyes – I come to bury Greg Smith, not to praise him.

Okay, that’s a bit melodramatic, but a eulogy for the near term success of Smith’s career is probably not out of place. For Rockies fans hoping that they just got a solid young starting pitcher in return for Matt Holliday, I’m sorry, but I have some bad news.

Yes, Greg Smith just posted a 4.16 ERA in 190 innings as a 24-year-old rookie. But unfortunately, those results just aren’t all that predictive, and the markers that we look for in identifying his true talent level, which is predictive, are not nearly as positive.

Here’s what we know about Greg Smith that could inform us about his future in Colorado.

He doesn’t throw very hard. His average fastball was just 87.6 MPH – the 9th slowest average fastball of any pitcher in baseball who threw at least 180 innings last year. Toss out Tim Wakefield because of the knuckleball factor, and the guys with sub-88 MPH fastballs are all command artists who pound the strike zone and don’t walk anyone.

That doesn’t describe Smith, unfortunately. 40.1% of his pitches thrown were balls, which is below average. Compare with fellow soft-tosser Andy Sonnanstine, who threw just 32.9% of his pitches out of the strike zone. Because Smith doesn’t throw hard, and he doesn’t throw strikes, he combines the bad mixture of both an above average walk rate (4.11 BB/9) and a below average strikeout rate (5.25 K/9).

It’s possible to succeed without a great BB/K rate, but it’s not easy. You have to limit the amount of home runs you allow, and the easiest way to do that is by pitching low in the strike zone and not allowing fly balls. If they hit it on the ground, it’s not going over the wall, after all. Well, Greg Smith isn’t very good at that, either – he posted a 45.5% FB% last year, third highest in baseball. Only Oliver Perez and Wakefield allowed more fly balls last year, and both of them have struggled with the long ball throughout their career.

So, we could describe Smith as a soft-tossing flyball machine with below average command and no out pitch. That’s not a great package to start off with, but then you transport that particular set of skills to Coors Field, where lazy fly balls go over the wall and breaking balls don’t move as much, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

Honestly, I feel bad for Smith. After a successful rookie season, he has to be thinking that there’s some good stuff in store for him in the major leagues. In reality, he’s now been put into the absolute worst context he could possibly try to survive in, and his uphill battle to fight regression has now become something like climbing Mt. Everest.

Good luck, Greg – you’re going to need a lot of it.

On Monday, we looked at Matt Holliday’s potential value to the A’s, and how his acquisition could boost Oakland’s chances for the postseason in 2009. We know the A’s are getting a good player. But what about the Rockies? Is the haul they’re getting for Holliday going to allow them to get back on the winning track?

Let’s start with Carlos Gonzalez, the centerpiece prospect of a major trade for the second time in as many years. Gonzalez is an extremely athletic, left-handed hitting center fielder with power, and that skill set doesn’t grow on trees. It’s those tools that have made him valuable enough to be dealt for both Dan Haren and now Holliday, as it’s pretty easy for scouts to see the potential for an all-star center fielder.

However, the flip side to that coin is that Gonzalez has now had two organizations deal him away in 12 months, and it’s pretty rare to find an elite player who two organizations passed when he was near major league ready. It happens (Jason Bay, Adrian Gonzalez), but it’s rare. So, what might the D’backs and A’s have seen that would lead them to give up on Gonzalez’s upside?

Well, to start, his approach at the plate can only be described as poor. In 316 major league plate appearances, he swung at pitches out of the strike zone 32% of the time and only made contact in 45% of those swings. In other words, he just swung and missed at a lot of pitches that were going to be called balls. Now, there are players who swing at pitches of the strike zone a lot – Vladimir Guerrero is famous for this, swinging at 45% of all balls he sees. However, he makes contact 70% of the time he swings at a pitch out of the strike zone.

In fact, among major league players who swung at balls 30% of the time or more, every single one made contact half the time (okay, Aaron Rowand’s 49.71% is not exactly half, but let’s round up). Most of them made contact 60-70% of the time, showing that they were chasing pitches because they could hit them, not because they didn’t understand the strike zone.

Perhaps it was just nerves, and he’ll adjust as he grows, but in his first taste of major league pitching, Gonzalez showed a minor league approach. That approach is going to significantly limit his offensive upside, and giving him a narrow path to success. Essentially, with that kind of swing-at-anything mentality, his upside is narrowed to something like 2008 Torii Hunter – a .280/.340/.470 guy who combines power and good defense to be a +3 to +3.5 win player.

There’s certainly a lot of value in having a 23-year-old with +3 to +4 win upside, but if that’s his peak, he’s not quite as shiny as he may have appeared previously.

The good news for Rockies fans is that he does appear to be a quality defender – the A’s fans rated him a 74 on the Fan’s Scouting Report, and the +/- rankings had him at +10 plays in only half a season of work, so while the sample is small, it looks like he’ll be an asset with his glove. That might be necessary to keep him in the line-up, however, because the questions about his bat look legitimate.

Overshadowed by the Matt Holliday trade was a smaller deal pulled off yesterday beteween the Marlins and Nationals. While it doesn’t contain an all-star, it’s an interesting deal nonetheless.

The Nationals acquired LHP Scott Olsen and OF/1B Josh Willingham from Florida in exchange for 2B Emilio Bonifacio, RHP P.J. Dean, and SS Jake Smolinski.

At first glance, the Nationals would seem to be the big winners here. They get the two players that most baseball fans have heard of, and both Olsen and Willingham are young and theoretically headed for their prime. Willingham’s a career .266/.361/.472 hitter, combing walks and power into a package that makes him an above average hitter. Olsen, meanwhile, is a 24-year-old lefty with nearly 600 major league innings under his belt, and he was considered one of the game’s best pitching prosepcts a few years ago. Both guys the Nationals got have some abilities.

But clearly, the Marlins determined that they’d be better off without both, and they might not be wrong. Let’s start with Olsen – superficially, his 4.20 ERA in 200 innings last year has value, especially as a young southpaw, but that was a complete fluke. He actually took a huge step back in his performance, thanks to a drop of 2.3 MPH in his fastball and a corresponding collapse of his strikeout rate. Take a look at the graph of his career K/9 marks:

That’s not exactly what you consider improvement. Olsen’s turning into a pitch-to-contact flyball starter with bad command, and pitchers with that skillset struggle to be anything better than a marginal #5 starter.

As for Willingham, the bat is nice, but his glove in the outfield is absolutely atrocious. By pretty much every defensive metric out there, Willingham gives back 10 to 15 runs a season with his poor glove work, essentially canceling out the decency of his bat. Terrible defenders with just good but not great offensive performances are not particularly valuable players, and that’s the category Willingham falls into.

Neither of the guys the Nationals got back are as good as their reputations, and they’re both unlikely to help turn around the fortunes of a struggling Washington ballclub. That doesn’t necessarily make this a bad deal for them, however – the three guys they gave up are nothing special either, so they’re essentially taking a flier on Olsen’s velocity returning or Willingham improving his defense – if either happens, they’re the clear winners of this deal, as the Marlins just didn’t get much upside coming back their way. For Florida, this was a clear salary dump.

The real lesson from this deal may be that Jim Bowden continues to not care about defense or actual performance, and continues to acquire players on the strength of their minor league reputations. It didn’t work in Cincy, it hasn’t worked in Washington, and I wonder how many more chances he’s going to get to keep rebuilding past Baseball America Top 100 lists and call it a roster.

The off-season is officially underway, as thanks to the always entertaining and somewhat unpredictable Billy Beane, we’ve got our first big trade of the winter. While all the details aren’t known as of yet, pretty much every big media outlet is reporting that the Oakland A’s have acquired Matt Holliday for a potpourri of young players whose identities we will eventually learn.

Holliday is an interesting player. Thanks to the Rockies miracle run in 2007, he got all kinds of media attention, even finishing 2nd place in the MVP balloting last year, but because he plays half his games in Coors Field, there’s an underlying skepticism about his real abilities that hangs over his head.

His detractors will instantly point to his enormous career splits between his performance at home and on the road – .357/.423/.645 in Coors, .280/.348/.455 everywhere else. He has almost twice as many home runs in Colorado as he does away from the thin air, and given what we know about park effects and the offensive environment a mile high, we shouldn’t be surprised that Holliday has benefited significantly from his home environment.

However, when you see people pointing to his road numbers as a proxy for his true talent level, you should immediately reject the rest of their conclusions, because despite the ease of that kind of analysis, it simply isn’t accurate. You cannot just throw out Holliday’s performance in Colorado and pretend that it didn’t happen simply because the park is hitter friendly. Instead, the correct way to project his future performance is to adjust his past results to account for the park effects, and use the entire sample of data that we have.

Thankfully, the offensive metric of choice around here is WPA/LI, which expresses offensive wins (without the context leverage that WPA includes) and is park adjusted. By using a linear weights metric like WPA/LI, we can evaluate Holliday’s past offensive value, adjusted down for the Coors effects. Here’s his WPA/LI for each of the last three years.

2006: 3.37 WPA/LI
2007: 5.05 WPA/LI
2008: 3.98 WPA/LI

His WPA/LI boost in 2007 was more about the extra playing time (he cracked 700 PA for the first time in his career) than it was about a huge improvement in his abilities. For the last three years, he’s been a pretty consistent excellent hitter.

Even with the move out of Coors Field and into pitcher friendly Oakland Coliseum, Holiday should be expected to be something like a .300/.380/.500 hitter. Considering he’s been both durable and a quality defensive outfielder, that makes him something like a +4 win player for 2009.

Is he the best player in baseball? No, definitely not, but he’s definitely one of the better outfielders around, and if the A’s think that they’re within four wins of contending next year, he could be the piece that puts them over the top.

If you were happy for the election to end so that you could stop having people asking for your vote, I’m sorry, but I’m extending the vote request window.

Over the weekend, I was nominated for a $10,000 college scholarship thanks to the work I’ve done over at USSMariner, and weirdly enough, the winner is chosen by public voting. So, if you’ve enjoyed any of my writing and want to help out, just click the link, vote for David Cameron, and I’ll be one step closer to $10,000.

All your support is greatly appreciated.