Dear American League Middle Infielders,

You suck.

Truly,

The Year 2008.

Seriously, what is up with the junior circuit’s middle infielders this year? It’s early, yes, and there’s a couple talented players who will do better as the year wears on, but this is one ugly start to the season. Brian Roberts is the only second baseman in the AL with a positive WPA/LI, and he’s coming in at a whopping 0.07. Way to set the bar high there, Roberts. Every other second baseman is running a negative WPA/LI, and as a group, they’re running a -5.39 WPA/LI. That’s terrible. Robinson Cano is the main culprit, as he’s been the worst hitter in baseball so far this year, but he’s just one among a group of slackers that make him feel welcome.

The story is slightly better when you look at shortstop. Over there, two guys have positive WPA/LI marks through the start of the season. The problem – they both play for Texas. Michael Young and Ramon Vazquez are #1 and #2 on the list among players with at least 50 plate appearances, and they both get the benefit of playing their home games in a very friendly offensive environment. Once we get past the Rangers duo, though, it’s right back to the lousiness, with Derek Jeter being a little bit less terrible than everyone else and Tony Pena Jr giving Cano a run for his waste-of-money.

Everyone knows the bar for offensive production from premium defensive positions is lower than at a corner spot, but right now, the bar is just sitting on the ground. The all-star game is two months away – does anyone want to play like they belong there? Please?

Today, Brad Penny played a game of “anything you can do I can do better” with Jon Lieber, seeing his four homers allowed in one inning and raising him 10 earned runs allowed in a single start. His ERA jumped from 3.19 to 4.79 with this single performance, as the Mets just throttled the Dodgers all-star starter. It’s not everyday that you see a team allow a starter to stay in long enough to give up double digit earned runs, so using Baseball Reference’s Play Index, I decided to see just how rare it is for a pitcher to take this much of a beating on a single day.

Turns out, it’s more common than I would have guessed. Justin Germano and Mark Redman both pulled it off earlier this year (they apparently don’t care about pitchers’ psyches in the NL West), and it’s actually happened 136 times in the last 20 years. The worst of those drubbings belonged to Mike Oquist back in 1998 – he gave up 14 runs (tying the major league record for runs allowed in a single game) in just five innings of work for the A’s on August 3rd of that year. If only Oquist was some sort of household pet, Tony LaRussa would have taken better care of him on that day. This joke would have worked much better if this had happened in 1988, as I originally read it, so that LaRussa would have actually been the A’s manager at that time. Whoops!

The list of guys who have had this happen to them is more distinguished than you might guess, actually. Last year, the double digit performance was put up by Jeremy Bonderman, James Shields, and Jon Garland, and Ben Sheets, Roy Halladay, and Randy Johnson have all had it happen to them at one point in their careers.

I’m sure Brad Penny won’t take solace in this knowledge, but at least he’s not the only good pitcher to take a beating for his club.

If I asked you who the best setup men in the American League were, I’d imagine you’d probably rattle off the list of usual names: Joba Chamberlain, Rafael Betancourt, Scot Shields, and Pat Neshek to name a few. It might take you a while before you got to Santiago Casilla, but 2008 has been his coming out party, and he’s quickly establishing himself as a potential relief ace.

Always a guy who could get swings and misses, he’s blowing hitters away with increasing frequency, but more importantly, he’s now commanding his power fastball/slider combination, walking just three of the 62 batters he’s faced this year. With that combination of command and swing-and-miss stuff, he is yet to give up a run in 2008, and his dominance in the 7th and 8th innings is one of the reason the A’s are hanging with the Angels in the A.L. West race so far.

Relievers are fickle by nature, but Casilla’s always had the arm, and he’s showing now that he’s able to pound the strike zone with dominating stuff. If Casilla continues to throw strikes and not get himself in trouble, the A’s will have found themselves another legitimate high leverage weapon to help them win close games.

Last year, Fausto Carmona was a sensation, coming from out of nowhere to become a frontline starter and help propel the Indians into contention. This year, Carmona has been more of an enigma, posting an excellent 2.60 ERA but with a horrendous 26 walks and 13 strikeouts in 34 innings pitched. His command has deserted him, and while his famous “turbo sinker” is still getting ground balls, he’s putting a lot of men on base and is lucky to have been able to leave so many stranded.

When looking over Carmona’s pitch selection data here on fangraphs, one thing jumped out to me – he’s throwing the fastball 81% of the time, which puts him behind only Daniel Cabrera and Aaron Cook among guys who just huck fastball after fastball at the plate. While Cook has impeccable command, most pitchers don’t really want to be compared to Daniel Cabrera pretty much ever, and it’s possible that Carmona is simply trying to hard too put his fastball over the plate.

He’s always thrown a lot of fastballs (last year, he was at 75% versus a league average of 59%), but he’s throwing fewer of his off speed pitches this year in order to make room for the uptick in hard stuff, and despite the shiny ERA, it’s not working very well. With Carmona’s fastball command deserting him, he’d be best served not relying on it almost exclusively, because right now, hitters are far too willing to let him give them the free pass.

With Cleveland’s offense struggling, they’re going to rely on their pitching to get them through, and Carmona is a huge part of that rotation. They have to get him going, and they don’t have a whole lot more time to get him straightened out.

For years, the Angels have had a couple of all-stars at the front of their rotation, anchoring their team and leading them to playoff contention. With John Lackey and Kelvim Escobar starting the year on the disabled list, however, it looked like 2008 would be the year where the Angels had to win by scoring runs and getting consistent pitching every five days, rather than being carried by a couple of Cy Young candidates.

Well, apparently, traditions are harder to break than expected, because once again, the Angels have a couple of guys pitching like aces at the front of their rotation. Joe Saunders and Ervin Santana are reasons 1A and 1B for why Los Angeles is 21-13 to start the year, ranking 2nd and 4th respectively in the American League in WPA among starting pitchers. Santana was brilliant again last night, throwing a complete game shutout against the Royals to lower his ERA to 2.02.

While these two have provided a big April lift for the Angels, the question of whether they’ve actually reached a new level of performance is unanswered. For that, let’s take a look at their relevant peripherals.

Santana: 6.98 K/9, 1.65 BB/9, 34.5% GB%
Saunders: 3.91 K/9, 1.86 BB/9, 46.5% GB%

Both of them are pounding the strike zone like never before, significantly reducing their walk rates from their major league career averages. That command improvement could certainly be legitimate. However, neither of them are striking out more batters than usual, and Saunders has actually seen his strikeout rate nosedive so far this year. Additionally, neither of them are getting any more groundballs than usual, so they’re not trading strikeouts for weak grounders. Those peripherals simply don’t match what you’d look for in a guy getting ready to contend for a Cy Young award. In fact, if we look at the numbers that affect run prevention and have very little predictive value, we see that both Saunders and Santana are leaning heavily on factors that are mostly beyond their control.

Santana: .236 BABIP, 4.7% HR/FB, 80.4% LOB%
Saunders: .253 BABIP, 6.3% HR/FB, 82.3% LOB%

All of those numbers are jumping and down, volunteering to regress to the mean. Those performances aren’t indicative of a true change in skill for either of these guys, and as those numbers shift back towards their career averages, both Santana and Saunders are going to give back a lot of the gains they’ve appeared to make early on.

If you’re an Angels fan, you have to be thrilled with what those guys have given you in the first month of the season, but you also shouldn’t expect it to continue for much longer. They’re both capable major league starters, but neither one is an all-star, and their early performances are built on a house of cards.

I’d imagine that most of you have probably heard of the term “AAAA player”, the characterization given to guys who achieve success in Triple-A but haven’t shown that they can sustain success in the major leagues. These guys put up gaudy numbers in the Pacific Coast and International Leagues, but for various reasons, they get exploited by major leaguers.

Perhaps the best of these Quad-A guys currently is Nelson Cruz, a power hitting outfield in the Rangers organization. Cruz has been destroying Triple-A arms for years, starting with Nashville in 2005, when he hit .269/.382/.490 as a 25-year-old. That wasn’t enough to get him a job in Milwaukee, so he went back to Nashville for 2006 and hit .302/.376/.528 before being traded to Texas in the Carlos Lee deal. The Rangers gave him 138 plate appearances after the trade, but he didn’t impress, putting up a .223/.261/.385 mark that got him sent back to Triple-A for the 2007 season. In response, he went bananas on the PCL, hitting .352/.430/.698 before Texas decided to give him another shot. He failed again, however, posting a .235/.286/.384 mark that was similar to his ’06 time with the Rangers. Between 2006 and 2007, Cruz accumulated 570 underwhelming plate appearances, showing an overly aggressive approach at the plate and an inability to hit breaking balls. These flaws saw him head to Oklahoma again to begin the 2008 season.

They apparently don’t throw breaking balls there, because if you thought he was good down there last year, you haven’t seen anything yet. Through the first 129 trips to the plate this year, Cruz is terrorizing the PCL to the tune of .375/.520/.781. In addition to his prodigious power (he’s leading the PCL in home runs with 11), Cruz has adopted a more selective approach at the plate. His walk rate has nearly doubled and he’s cut his strikeouts down as well, leading to an impressive 27/18 walk to strikeout ratio. By letting pitchers put him on base and waiting for his pitch to drive, he’s gone from a cleanup hitter to a monster. No one in Triple-A is good enough to get him out, and they’re doing well if he doesn’t just end up rounding the bases on his own.

At some point, some organization is going to have to decide that perhaps Nelson Cruz has earned another shot to shake the “AAAA player” label. He’s 27, entering his physical peak, and his power is being wasted on the Pacific Coast League. Clearly, there’s a major league job somewhere for this guy, isn’t there?

Most teams have played about 30 games so far, so through the first baseball month of the season, let’s take a look at the guys who have performed the best at the plate. We’ll do it all-star team style, with one player representing each position. I’m using WPA/LI as the determinant for offensive production.

Catcher: Geovany Soto – 0.64
First Base: Conor Jackson – 1.49
Second Base: Chase Utley – 1.78
Shortstop: Rafael Furcal – 1.33
Third Base: Chipper Jones – 1.49
Left Field: Pat Burrell – 1.77
Center Field: Nate McLouth – 0.91
Right Field: Ryan Church – 0.75
Designated Hitter Hideki Matsui – 0.73

The thing that jumps out to me is that all eight position players represent the National League. Lots of NL hitters going nuts in April, but none more so than Chase Utley, who was clearly the best player on the planet for the first month of the season. Furcal, Chipper, and Burrell had special months as well, especially if you give Burrell credit for the fact that he leads the league in clutch hitting.

As David announced earlier this week, fangraphs now has swing data for hitters, giving us a breakdown of who swings at what and how often. This is just another great resource he’s added to the stat pages. And, as always, more data means a chance for more research.

One of the first things I wanted to look at in this data was the effects of swinging at pitches outside of the strike zone. It’s been a sabermetric credo for a while now that good hitters are selective at the plate and don’t chase pitches out of the zone, but players like Vladimir Guerrero, Nomar Garciaparra, Ivan Rodriguez, and Ichiro Suzuki have all had tremendous careers despite swinging at pitches that no sane person would think they could hit. If you can be a hall of fame hitter without being selective, how important is it?

So, I decided to take the list of qualified hitters for 2008 (197 in all) and look at the correlations between their O-Swing%, which measures how often they swing at pitches out of the strike zone, and their BB% and K% rates. Intuitively, I would have thought that the more often a player swings at pitches that would otherwise be called balls, he’d have a lower walk rate and a higher strikeout rate. Here are the results:

O-Swing%/BB% correlation: -0.67
O-Swing%/K% correlation: -0.10

The walk rate correlation matches up with expectations, as there’s a strong negative correlation between swinging at pitches outside the strike zone and walk rate. This, of course, makes sense – the more often you swing at pitches that would have otherwise been called balls, the less likely you are to draw four balls in any given plate appearance. Guys like Matt Diaz eschew the walk through sheer determination.

However, look at the correlation between O-Swing% and K%. I’d have expected a fairly strong positive correlation, as you tend to think of guys flailing at sliders in the dirt as more prone to strikeouts. However, the correlation barely exists at all, and it goes to the negative to the point that there is any correlation. We see this manifest in guys like Erick Aybar and A.J. Pierzynski, who both swing at 37% of pitches outside of the strike zone but strikeout just 7% and 6% respectively.

It appears that players who swing at pitches outside of the zone do so because they can hit them – it is the ability to make contact that creates the aggressive approach, and not just a player’s desire to hack at anything.

The Reds have seen some flashes of brilliance from 22-year-old Johnny Cueto since handing him a rotation spot coming out of spring training. His debut was nothing short of sensational, giving up just a solo home run over seven innings of brilliance, striking out 10 guys on the way. However, after a couple of starts that weren’t as effective, Cueto is now sporting a 5.40 ERA.

However, his peripherals don’t look like that of a young kid adjusting to life in the majors – 6 walks and 33 strikeouts in 35 innings shows that he’s commanding the strike zone, and even with his home run issues, his FIP stands at just 4.14. So why doesn’t Cueto’s run prevention match his peripherals?

Take a look at his splits.

No One On Base: 98 PA, .170/.204/.351, 4 HR, 4 BB, 28 K
Runners On Base: 45 PA, .421/.442/.711, 2 HR, 2 BB, 5 K

That’s a remarkable difference, even in a sample of 143 plate appearances. When he’s pitching from the wind-up, he’s blowing hitters away – 28.5% of the batters he has faced have struck out when no one is on base. Once he starts pitching from the stretch, however, that rate drops to just 9%. The walk and home run rates are similar in both scenarios, so it seems unlikely that his stuff takes a nosedive when pitching out of the stretch (this sounds like a great case for a Pitch f/x analysis), but someone in Cincinnati might want to work with Cueto on his approach to pitching once a guy gets on base.

Over the winter, some big names got new addresses, as we saw one of the more interesting offseasons of trading in recent history. Miguel Cabrera ended up in Detroit, while Johan Santana relocated to New York, and Erik Bedard found his way to Seattle. It’s pretty rare to see that much talent traded in one winter.

However, it’s quite possible that the most valuable asset traded this winter wasn’t involved in any of those deals. In fact, his trade didn’t garner much of a reaction at all, but in retrospect, it was one of the more interesting baseball trades we’ve seen. It was a pure baseball move, with two rebuilding organizations swapping talented pieces, with each preferring the others talented player to their own. A challenge trade for the ages, the Josh Hamilton for Edinson Volquez deal is reaping significant rewards for both clubs.

After launching his first career grand slam last night, Hamilton is now hitting .330/.379/.591, and his 12.84 BRAA ranks him second among American League outfielders through the first month of the season. Hamilton has retained his elite power while shredding some of the strikeouts that kept his average down last year, and that combination of more contact and sustained power has led to Hamilton building off of his already impressive 2007 season. At this point, everyone knows Hamilton’s back story, but it’s his play on the field that is making the human interest side of things an afterthought.

It’s not too often that a franchise can pick up a 26-year-old power hitting lefty outfielder with Hamilton’s ability right as he enters his prime, but that’s what the Rangers were able to do this winter. When you combine his skills and seemingly limitless potential with the fact that he’s years from free agency and not making any money, Hamilton’s one of the most valuable commodities in baseball today. The Rangers couldn’t be happier with how his acquisition has gone so far.

That’s not to say he came for free, of course. In Volquez, Texas gave up one of the better arms in their organization, and he’s moved right into Cincinnati’s rotation and excelled. His stuff remains top shelf, as evidenced by his combination of groundballs (57%) and strikeouts (10.1 K/9), so even with spotty command, he’s still a quality major league starter. Just 24 years old himself, and also years from free agency, the Reds are excited about the returns they’re getting from their newest pitcher.

However, when given a choice whether to build around a star outfielder or a young pitcher, the safe bet is almost always with the hitter. Even with Hamilton’s checkered past, he’s a lower risk proposition than Volquez, and the Rangers have found themselves a guy they can build the rest of their team around. Not a bad little move for Jon Daniels and company.