Last night was the night of the big inning, as several teams pounded out runs in bunches. In particular, two games saw huge offensive outbursts.

The Dodgers jumped on the Rockies early, putting up an eight spot in the first inning. Kip Wells managed to retire just one batter – Andruw Jones, naturally – before Matt Kemp drove him from the game with his second double of the inning. The eight runs Wells allowed in the first inning was one more than he had allowed in his first 19 2/3 innings of the year.

Up in Kansas City, the Tigers outdid the Dodgers by having a 10 run 8th inning, but their offensive outburst redefined diminishing returns – they were already ahead 9-0 at the time they pummeled Jimmy Gobble, so their ten run inning increased their win probability by a whopping 0.1%. Detroit’s explosion was the baseball equivalent of kicking Barbaro while he’s down.

Interestingly, big innings are usually associated with bases clearing home runs, but the Dodgers and Tigers only needed one long ball between them to total the 18 runs they put up in two innings of offense. On the night, they combined for 35 runs of offense and only hit two home runs. You don’t have to hit the ball over the wall in order to round the bases – especially when you’re facing Kip Wells and Jimmy Gobble.

The National League is seeing some terrific performances from a few center fielders this season. Nate McLouth got to his first all-star game with a great first half, while Rick Ankiel has continued to write the script for a Hollywood movie with his successful comeback. And, of course, there’s Carlos Beltran, flying under the radar as a star who no one ever talks about.

But unless you live in Milwaukee, you might not realize that Mike Cameron is quietly putting together another pretty terrific season himself. Yes, he’s hitting .235, so if you’re stuck on batting average, he’s not the player for you. However, he does so many other things well that the batting average simply doesn’t tell the story.

Cameron’s .825 OPS is built upon a lot of power – he’s hit 15 home runs in just 226 at-bats, obviously quite happy to be liberated from Petco Park, where he spent the last two years. The low average is somewhat offset by a solid walk rate, giving him a .330 on base percentage that’s more than respectable considering his power and the position he plays.

In fact, if you didn’t know Cameron was 35 years old, there would be no reason to think he’s supposed to be declining in skills. Take a look at his production since 1999, when he first established himself as a major league hitter.

A few dips along the way, but basically, he has sustained a similar level of performance for the past ten years. Even an increasing strikeout rate hasn’t been able to lower his offensive output, as he’s simply just doing more with the ball when he does make contact to offset the swings and misses.

Mike Cameron has spent most of his career being under appreciated, so it’s not a big surprise that baseball still doesn’t realize just valuable he is. The Brewers signed him to a 1 year deal for $7 million this year and a team option for $10 million next year – they’re a smart organization, so they’ll probably pick that option up, and continue to have one of the game’s more productive CFs under contract at a bargain rate.

Yesterday, Francisco Rodriguez became the faster pitcher ever to get to 40 saves, doing it on July 20th, in the Angels 98th game of the season. Last year, he didn’t get his 40th save until the Angels’ 162nd and final game of the season. He’s on pace for 66 saves, which would shatter the record of 57 that Bobby Thigpen set in 1990.

Some may guess that K-Rod has just padded his total, racking up cheap saves by coming in with two or three run leads, but it just isn’t true. Rodriguez has a pLI of 2.63, giving him the highest leverage index of any reliever in 2008. A 2.63 pLI is extraordinarily high – the second highest season total in the last 10 years belongs to Troy Percival in 2000, when he had a 2.57 pLI that year. Thigpen had a 2.05 pLI, by the way.

However, despite successfully converting 40 saves with the highest leverage index in the league, K-Rod is still just 3rd among major league relievers in WPA, behind both Joe Nathan and Brad Lidge. Why? Two reasons:

In those two games, Rodriguez racked up a nifty -1.55 WPA. Ouch. That’s rough.

However, two bad games don’t spoil a season, and K-Rod is having one of the best relief seasons in history. At this point, it will be a minor upset if he doesn’t break the all time single season save record, and he’s done it while leading the league in leverage – that’s impressive.

Every winter, major league teams spend a lot of money on free agent pitchers. It doesn’t even matter if those pitchers are good or not – because they’ve survived at least six years in the majors to achieve free agency, they receive the proven veteran label, and teams fight for the right to lean on that kind of experience. One of the main reasons we’re told that veteran starters are so important is because young pitching is too inconsistent and unpredictable, and having proven veterans on your staff prevents the kind of disaster performances that scared minor league kids can give.

Now, with that in mind, here’s a list of the worst pitchers in baseball this season, sorted by WPA.

Miguel Batista, -2.86 WPA
Brett Myers, -2.62 WPA
Ian Snell, -2.54 WPA
Barry Zito, -2.20 WPA
Andrew Miller, -2.04 WPA

Zito, of course, signed the largest contract in history for a free agent pitcher. Batista signed a 3 year, $24 million deal before the 2007 season. Myers signed a 3 year, $25 million contract that bought out his final arbitration years and his first year of free agency. Snell signed a 3 year, $9 million deal to buy out his first few arbitration years and gave Pittsburgh team options that could eliminate his initial free agent season.

Andrew Miller is the only unproven youngster of the bunch.

Last winter was a perfect example of this phenomenon. Carlos Silva, Kenny Rogers, and Livan Hernandez were paid a combined $25 million for the 2008 season (and Silva was given a lot more beyond that). Those three are being outpitched by every inexperienced minor leaguer their team has brought up this season.

Need more evidence? The Twins traded away Johan Santana and let Silva leave via free agency, replacing them with unproven youngsters Nick Blackburn and Glen Perkins. The Twins team ERA has gone down after losing their two veteran horses, and they’re contending on the strength of a pitching staff of inexperienced youngsters. The Mets and Mariners, the two recipients of these proven veterans, have had disappointing first halves.

The idea that championship clubs are built on the backs of proven veteran starters is a massive myth, perpetuated by out of touch old men and the equally outdated writers to talk to them. “Proven veteran” has become a synonym for “old and crappy”, and as better front offices take hold in MLB, we’ll see teams that cling to these cliches continue to finish in last place, shocked that the experience they built their team around failed to bring them success.

Coming to the ballpark on April 27th, Carlos Delgado was the scorn of New York. He was hitting .186/.276/.256 with just four extra base hits in his first 98 plate appearances of 2008. Coming on the heels of his .258/.333/.448 mark last year, and in his age 36 season, the “Delgado is finished” bandwagon got full in a hurry. I even jumped on, noting that his disappearing power was a classic sign of an aging player who just didn’t have anything left to contribute.

Most people suggested that the Mets begin looking for Delgado’s replacement, because the team needed a real power hitter to keep pace in the NL East, and he just wasn’t going to be able to get the job done. We were all wrong.

Since April 27th, Delgado’s hit .276/.353/.536 with 34 extra base hits (nearly half of his 73 total hits since then), including his July surge that has him posting a 1.212 OPS since the beginning of the month. He’s absolutely torching the ball right now, and looks anything but finished.

Delgado’s resurgence is yet another data point in favor of the belief that we simply have a long way to go before we can identify a player who really has “fallen off a cliff” ahead of time. Both visual evidence and trend analysis suggested that the grim reaper may have come for his power during the off season, but it just wasn’t true. Delgado was slumping, and slumps happen regardless of how young or old a player is. However, we have pre-written narratives about what slumps mean when they happen to young players (he’s not ready for the majors, he’s getting exposed the second time around the league, etc…) and when they happen to old players (he’s done), but we need to remember that those narratives aren’t based in as much reality as we would like to believe.

I’m speaking to myself as much as I am to any of you. While the tools we have are useful in predicting the future, we have to remember their limitations and not jump to conclusions that can’t be supported by evidence.

So, last night, the Phillies traded top prospect Adrian Cardenas, solid prospect Josh Outman, and long shot prospect Matthew Spencer to Oakland in return for Joe Blanton. Cardenas is the best second base prospect in the game and, in my view, Philadelphia’s best minor league talent, so in parting with him and the potentially useful Outman, the cost to acquire Blanton was fairly high. Is he going to push them over the top and help them hold off the Mets down the stretch?

Let’s take a look at Blanton’s skills in graph form.

His strengths and weaknesses are pretty clear – he has well above average command, pounding the strike zone but not missing bats. He’s a classic pitch-to-contact starter with a very slight groundball tendency, whose approach is to put the ball in play and let hitters get themselves out. There’s a lot of pitch to contact starters out there, but most of them haven’t experienced the same kind of run prevention success that Blanton has. The main reason can be best seen through the following chart:

Blanton’s allowed less than 1.0 HR/9 in each of the last three years, including a 0.63 HR/9 that ranked 11th lowest in baseball last year. The guys ahead of him were almost universally extreme groundball pitchers (except Chris Young, who pitches in Petco Park), which is intuitive – its hard to hit a groundball over the wall. But since Blanton isn’t really an extreme groundball guy, his home run prevention over the last few years is a bit surprising. In fact, his HR/FB rates are shockingly low.

2005: 9.6%
2006: 6.8%
2007: 6.5%
2008: 8.0%

Oakland Coliseum is a tough place to hit the ball out of the park, so part of these low rates are explainable as a park effect, but not to this extreme. Over the last two and a half years, Blanton has consistently beaten his projection for what we’d expect his HR/FB rate to be, even when we include the park factor into the equation.

If you think this is a sustainable skill, you’re probably pretty bullish on his ability to rebound to his 2007 form and return to above average starter status, especially with the move to the weaker NL. After all, his 4.11 FIP suggests that his 4.96 ERA is mostly bad luck, and Philly may have bought low on the 27-year-old.

However, there’s a pretty good mountain of evidence that shows that pitchers have little control over their HF/FB rate, and it varies significantly on a year to year basis. If you think (as I do) that Blanton’s low HR/FB rates the last couple of years were more of an outlier than a skill he’s going to take to Philadelphia with him, then you’re a bit more bearish on his future. In general, pitchers whose performance is built on a low HR/FB rate don’t have the same consistent success that pitchers who control the strike zone, and a move from Oakland to Philadelphia could exacerbate the regression in HR/FB rate that Blanton likely has coming.

For the price they paid, the Phillies should have gotten a borderline all-star, but from my perspective, Blanton’s more of a back-end innings eater who isn’t likely to perform in the future as well as he has in the past. This looks like the kind of trade the Phillies fans will be looking back on with frustration for years to come.

Ever since Dennis Springer retired after the 2002 season, Tim Wakefield has stood as the game’s sole remaining knuckleball pitcher with a secure role in the major leagues. Charlie Haeger has bounced back and forth between the White Sox and their Triple-A affiliate in Chicago, but his inconsistency kept him from locking down a role in the windy city.

Don’t look now, but Wakefield may finally have someone to pass the torch too – R.A. Dickey spent the last few weeks leading up to the all-star break attempting to force the Mariners to keep him in their rotation. Of course, only in an organization as screwed up as Seattle’s would a guy with a 4.13 FIP in 61 innings of work be trying to cling to a role in the starting rotation for a team that is headed nowhere, but it looks like even the Mariners might not be able to screw this up.

The M’s selected Dickey in the Rule 5 draft last December, and then worked out a deal with Minnesota allowing them to option him back to Triple-A to start the season. He cleared waivers before the trade could be consummated, and right now, 29 teams have to be wondering what they were thinking.

Dickey’s transformation from a traditional pitcher to a knuckler is paying dividends, as he’s pitched quite well for the Mariners since he was called up. His 1.5 K/BB rate is pretty much in line with what established knuckleball pitchers run, as their success is derived more from their ability to cause weak contact, limiting their hits on balls in play. Dickey’s .301 BABIP may appear right at league average, but when you consider that the Mariners have had the league’s worst defense, that’s actually something of an accomplishment.

It’s too early to call Dickey the next Wakefield – and at 33, he’s not exactly a spring chicken – but he is showing some promise with the knuckleball, and is giving us a reason to hope that there will be another to carry on the art of the dancing pitch after Wakefield decides to hang it up.

I love the “Last X Calendar Year(s)” option that David added to the leaderboards here, and so this morning, let’s take a stroll through the past 365 days and look at some performances that might surprise you.

Miguel Tejada: .278/.331/.440, 600 AB, 21 HR, 40 BB, 69 K
J.J. Hardy: .281/.332/.454, 570 AB, 21 HR, 44 BB, 70 K

The narrative of Hardy as an inconsistent youngster and Tejada as a slugging star can probably be put to rest.

Brian Roberts: 50 SB
Carl Crawford: 49 SB

I know Roberts is a good baserunner, but would you have guessed that he was fourth in baseball in stolen bases over the last year?

Ryan Howard: 153 RBI
Mark Teixeira: 133 RBI

These guys are #1 and #2 in baseball in runs batted in over the last year. Just a reminder that no one’s catching Hack Wilson. Speaking of Howard, he’s also struck out 231 times in that time frame. Yeesh.

Yuniesky Betancourt: 10 walks
Bengie Molina: 19 walks

Yuni has drawn half as many walks as the guy with the second fewest over the same time frame. Stop swinging you hack.

Ryan Braun: 7 triples
Ichiro Suzuki: 6 triples

That just made me laugh.

We all know that Jamie Moyer doesn’t throw very hard. He’s thrown 3,700 innings over his 22 year career, and at 45 years old, the guy who was known for his soft tossing ways is throwing even slower than ever. His average fastball so far this year has been 80.9 MPH, and according to the Pitch F/x tool by Josh Kalk, he’s thrown 518 pitches with a velocity below 80 MPH, compared to 566 pitches with a velocity greater than 80 MPH.

In other words, it’s just as likely that Moyer will throw you a pitch in the 65-79 MPH range as a pitch in the 80-85 range. Those are the kinds of velocities that will make scouts stop watching you in high school – almost everyone who played varsity ball in school faced a guy who threw harder than Moyer does now.

And it doesn’t matter. Moyer’s running a 4.35 FIP and 3.95 ERA, his lowest marks since his 2003 season in Seattle. His 5.53 K/9 and 46.8% GB% are more in line with a guy who throws a sinker and pounds the bottom of the strike zone with 90 MPH two-seam fastballs. Take a look at his career K/9 graph, and see if you can identify the decreases in his velocity:

While now throwing a fastball that routinely sits at 78 or 79 MPH, he’s striking out just as many batters as he always has. It’s unbelievable.

Jamie Moyer is amazing, and while he’s not the best pitcher we’ve ever seen, he might be the most remarkable.

As Eric noted in his post about the Futures Game, the starting pitcher for the World Team was Carlos Carrasco, widely accepted as the best pitching prospect on the international team roster. His name is brought up often in trade speculation, as the Phillies contemplate making a move to improve their major league roster, and he’s universally accepted as Philadelphia’s best prospect.

I’m just wondering, though, if we’re ever going to stop and realize that he’s just not that special?

During the Futures Game, we heard Steve Phillips gush about his electric stuff, all while Carrasco was throwing 88-92 MPH fastballs up in the strike zone. On the big stage, where he can go max effort for one inning, he tops out at 93. That’s not special – that’s average. It’s not just yesterday, either – Carrasco really does possess a fastball that averages around 90-92, which is inherently unspecial.

His calling card is a nasty change-up that sits in the low-80s and with sink that makes it a real weapon against left-handed batters. That’s a premium pitch, no doubt. However, his breaking ball is average at best, and just isn’t a knockout pitch. Realistically, he’s a fastball-changeup guy with a breaking ball that he’ll mix in occasionally.

That one plus pitch repertoire shows up in his minor league performance to date, which simply doesn’t match the hype he’s received. In 396 innings of work over four seasons, he’s racked up a grand total of 350 strikeouts for a 7.95 K/9 mark. That would be a fine mark in the majors, but once you adjust that performance to account for the inferior competition, it’s about equal to 6.0 K/9 in the major leagues.

That’s about a major league average strikeout rate, and there are certainly pitchers who are very effective with that kind of swing-and-miss percentage, but it’s almost always because they have another elite skill – either great command or a fantastic sinker that creates a lot of ground balls in most cases. Carrasco doesn’t possess either of those things. His command is average at best, a problem at worst, and while his fastball has movement, it’s not a sinker.

Realistically, Carrasco projects out right now as a 3.5 BB, 6.0 K, 45% GB% guy. That’s not an ace in the making – that’s the current iteration of Kevin Millwood. Toss in the injury concerns (Carrasco isn’t a picture of health) and we really have to ask ourselves what the big deal is.

Carrasco has a chance to be a nice back-of-the-rotation major league starter, and his change-up should allow him to keep lefties from beating him up, but I fail to see any evidence that he’s a premium prospect, or that teams should be lining up to convince Pat Gillick to give them Carrasco in exchange for their all-star major leaguers.