Instead of going team by team this off season, I will review the divisions as a group. And whereas last year, I used a version of BaseRuns, with some modifications for strength of schedule and the like thrown in, to determine the ranking of teams’ true talent levels, this year I will use WAR as provided here on FanGraphs.

Part Five: The AL West

The ranks last year were Anaheim (13th), Texas (17th), Oakland (20th) and Seattle (28th). Clearly not a strong division in 2008. A lot of changes took place over the winter between 2008 and this past season. The Mariners cleaned house in the front office, the Rangers embraced defense and the Angels shifted from a run prevention focus to a run scoring one. The Athletics gambled on retread veterans, a rotation from Double-A and an out of left field trade for Matt Holliday.

In the end, the division as a whole, one predicted to be evenly mediocre, turned in a vast improvement over the year prior. Every team improved their relative rank. The Angels once again led the way and, with 46 WAR, were fourth in baseball, a legitimately great team this season. The Rangers stayed in second place in the division and moved into the top ten in baseball with 41 WAR, ranked 9th.

The Mariners edged the Athletics for third place, with their 37 WAR moving them all the way to 14th. Oakland was not far behind, though, at 36 WAR and 15th in baseball. The entire division finished in the top half of teams in 2009.

As previously mentioned, each team focused on new areas in 2009 and, amazingly, all those focuses worked out. The Mariners’ re-tooling around defense gave them baseball’s best. The Rangers’ similar moves netted them the 6th best defense and promotion of youngsters into the bullpen contributed to one of the league’s better units.

It wasn’t as good as the Athletics’ bullpen, though, which blew away everyone in the league. And the Angels’ focus on offense resulted in the third-best hitting squad in baseball. In the end, the WAR standings matched the actual won-loss standings for 2009. Here’s a summary of the ranks for the AL West teams, with 2008 first:

ANA: 13, 4
TEX: 17, 9
OAK: 20, 15
SEA: 28, 14

The Angels agreed to terms with relief pitcher Fernando Rodney today on a two-year, $11 million contract. This might mean that the rumor that the Phillies were interested in Rodney as well at up to $12 million for the two years was false. I hope not, because the notion that the Phillies could not afford Cliff Lee’s $9 million salary and so trade him away and then go out and offer $6 million to the mediocre Rodney is hilarious.

Either way, Rodney’s an Angel now and there will be a certain set of fans that love this move. Most of them will love it because of Rodney’s save percentage. They’re wrong — saves are an awful way of measuring a pitcher’s value, probably even worse than using wins.

Anaheim gets Rodney’s age 33 and 34 seasons, but as a reliever and with the duration of the contract, his age is not too much of a concern. Rodney had fantastic strikeout numbers the last couple seasons but those took a dive in 2009. Whereas Rodney used to maintain a solid 11-12% swinging strike rate, it was just 9% in 2009, and at least partly because of that, his strikeout rate dropped from about one out of every four batters to less than one out of every five.

That’s a pretty big red flag for me, but not to overstate it, even without that drop in strikeouts, Rodney just isn’t a great pitcher. His walk rates have just been far too high to make the overall package consistently better than average, even at the old strikeout levels. We have Rodney worth about 0.5 WAR a year throughout his entire career and I see no compelling reason for him to better that going forward.

For that half-win, the Angels are paying over $5 million, an astonishingly poor return. And given that the Angels bullpen isn’t particularly weak, I wonder if Rodney is even an upgrade at all. Furthermore, Brian Fuentes has a $9 million option for 2011 that vests with 55 games finished this coming season, so I can see it a likely scenario that the Angels use Rodney to close to avoid that option and thus push high leverage innings further out of reach of Anaheim’s better pitchers.

At best, I think the Angels might be a couple runs better for this move. Most likely, they’re exactly the same and there’s a worrisome chance that Rodney continues his strikeout slide and gets worse.

Instead of going team by team this off season, I will review the divisions as a group. And whereas last year, I used a version of BaseRuns, with some modifications for strength of schedule and the like thrown in, to determine the ranking of teams’ true talent levels, this year I will use WAR as provided here on FanGraphs.

Part Four: The NL East

Last year, eventual World Series champion Philadelphia clocked in as the 8th best regular season team according to BaseRuns, which was tops in the NL East. The Mets were right on the tails though finishing 10th overall. The Marlins put up a good show with their $3.99 payroll with a 16th overall finish. The Braves were just behind them, at 18th. Meanwhile the worst of the worst, the Nationals came in at 30th.

2009’s worst team again hailed from the NL East, but you might be surprised at the name. Obviously the Nationals are the first guess, as they managed to finish with a worse record in 2009 (59-103) than in 2008 (59-102). And that guess would be close, for the Nationals came in 29th in this year’s WAR rankings with 19.7 WAR.

But not to be out done, and surprising given their 70-92 record, the Mets managed just 19.4 total WAR and were dead last in baseball. Johan Santana was the only above average starting pitcher and the bullpen, while better than its’ 2008 counterpart, was by no means re-built with Francisco Rodriguez and J.J. Putz. The hitting and fielding was wracked by injuries and ineffectiveness and in the end the Mets ended up with the fourth worst group of pitchers and fourth worst group of position players.

For the Nationals, the hitting was not the problem, they were actually around average there. And the fielding, while not stellar, was not atrocious either. It was the pitching that crippled this team, second worst in baseball at just 3.7 wins in total. The Nationals registered just four pitchers with at least 20 innings pitched and an above average tRA and the four combined to be a total of 9.2 runs above average. Just an incredibly deep group of suck.

Here’s a summary of the ranks for the NL East teams, with 2008 first.
PHI: 8, 8
NYM: 10, 30
FLO: 16, 17
ATL: 18, 7
WAS: 30, 29

Instead of going team by team this off season, I will review the divisions as a group. And whereas last year, I used a version of BaseRuns, with some modifications for strength of schedule and the like thrown in, to determine the ranking of teams’ true talent levels, this year I will use WAR as provided here on FanGraphs.

Part Three: The AL Central

The ranks last year were Chicago (6th), Cleveland (11th), Minnesota (15th), Detroit (19th) and Kansas City (24th). Overall, about an average division in 2008 which the actual won-loss records would indicate as well as the division total was just two games over .500. 2009 saw some upheaval as the leaders of 2008 fell off a cliff.

Thanks to a one game playoff, the Twins came ahead of the Tigers to advance into post season play. In WAR land, Minnesota and Detroit were also evenly matched. The Twins totaled 38.1 WAR, good for a tie for 11th place overall. The Tigers were right behind in 13th place with 37.8 WAR.

After those two though there was a sizable gap until the White Sox appeared at 33 WAR, in 19th place. Then in rapid succession came the Indians, 30 WAR and the Royals at 27 WAR, at 21st and 23th overall respectively.

The White Sox were actually one of the better pitching teams in 2009, with an almost flawless rotation and Matt Thornton and D.J. Carrasco providing great bullpen efforts. It was the position players that torpedoed their season. Second worst in all of baseball (the Royals were worst), only four players topped two wins (Paul Konerko, A.J. Pierzynski, Alexei Ramirez and Gordon Beckham) and none topped three. The fielding (-35.6 runs) was just as much of a culprit as the lousy hitting (-40.6 runs).

Here’s a summary of the ranks for the AL Central teams, with 2008 first.
CHW: 6, 19
CLE: 11, 21
MIN: 15, 11
DET: 19, 13
KCR: 24, 23

Instead of going team by team this off season, I will review the divisions as a group. And whereas last year, I used a version of BaseRuns, with some modifications for strength of schedule and the like thrown in, to determine the ranking of teams’ true talent levels, this year I will use WAR as provided here on FanGraphs.

Part Two: The NL West

The ranks last year were Las Angeles (9th), Arizona (14th), Colorado (21st), San Diego (25th) and San Francisco (27th). Like their Western counterparts in the American League, the NL West teams were largely poor and the Dodgers took the division with just 84 wins.

The Dodgers captured the division title once again in 2009, but it took a lot more work to do so, as they finished with 95 wins, three games ahead of Colorado. They stayed atop these rankings as well, with 43 WAR to land them in 5th place. Matching the close finish in the actual won-loss records, the Rockies, at 42 WAR, were just behind the Dodgers, 6th overall in baseball.

Now comes the first curve ball. While in actuality, the rest of the division went Giants (88 wins), Padres (75 wins) and Diamondbacks (70 wins), the WAR rankings have the Giants, then Arizona and finally San Diego. Now that’s not a huge surprise. The interesting part comes in how close San Francisco and Arizona are. The Giants, with 34 WAR, are 16th in baseball, while Arizona, at 33.5 WAR, are 18th. Separated by 18 wins, the Giants and Diamondbacks are just 0.5 WAR apart. The Padres accumulated 22 WAR, for 28th in baseball.

The Rockies’ high rating came as a result of their pitching staff, which graded out by WAR as the best in baseball, just barely ahead of the Red Sox. The Giants also had a strong pitching staff and were generally great at the whole run prevention deal with really good defenders as well. It’s a good thing they could field because the Giants could not hit a lick. Their -121.1 runs to average ranked as baseball’s worst group.

Here’s a summary of the ranks for the NL West teams, with 2008 first.
LAD: 9, 5
ARI: 14, 18
COL: 21, 6
SDP: 25, 28
SFG: 27, 16

Instead of going team by team this off season, I will review the divisions as a group. And whereas last year, I used a version of BaseRuns, with some modifications for strength of schedule and the like thrown in, to determine the ranking of teams’ true talent levels, this year I will use WAR as provided here on FanGraphs.

Part One: The NL Central

The ranks last year had the Cubs as one of the better teams in baseball, at third overall. The Brewers followed at a respectable 7th place with the Cardinals also above average, in 12th. The dregs of the division were Houston in 22nd, the Reds at 26th and the Pirates a lowly, but not quite lowliest 29th.

For all the preseason talk about the western divisions being boring and lacking good teams, it turned out to be the two central divisions that were the real purveyors of lackluster baseball in 2009.

The Cardinals tied the Twins for 11th place overall at 38 WAR and after them, much as in the real standings, nobody appeared for quite awhile until the Cubs show up with 31 WAR, in 20th place. Then comes the rest of the division; Milwaukee at 22nd with 29 WAR, Cincinnati at 24th with 25 WAR, Pittsburgh at 26th with 22 WAR and the Astros at 27th, also at 22 WAR.

For the Cubs, the collapse was hitting and fielding based. Just 13 wins out of their position players had them near the bottom in baseball as outside of Derrek Lee, they had no player above three wins. It was the opposite for the Brewers, who had the sixth best collection of hitters and fielders in baseball but the absolute worst group of pitchers. Loads of innings to Braden Looper, Jeff Suppan and Seth McClung did them no favors and as a group the Brewer pitchers amassed a staggeringly low three wins. Yeah, three wins total.

Here’s a summary of the ranks for the NL Central teams, with 2008 first.
CHC: 3, 20
MIL: 7, 22
STL: 12, 11
HOU: 22, 27
CIN: 26, 24
PIT: 29, 26

A couple hours after reports surfaced stating the John Lackey was taking a physical with the Boston Red Sox, the rumors are now saying that a contract has been reached between the two. Jon Heyman writes that it’s a five-year deal worth $85 million.

As a fan of a team (the Mariners) linked to just about every free agent on the market, and in particular to John Lackey, I’ve been skeptical of his value all winter long. There are two main red flags that I have when it comes to Lackey.

First is health. Profiled as a top of the rotation arm, Lackey has made just 51 starts the last two seasons, averaging 170 innings. Before that he was more durable sure, but on the wrong side of 30, I lean more toward recent history than past when it comes to injury risk.

Second comes with Lackey’s pitch results. More of his pitches have been resulting in balls lately and dropping rates in finding the strike zone and in starting hitters off with a strike portend a rise in the amount of walks that he allows, long his strong suit. More worrisome to me is this: 10.2%, 9.7%, 8.8%, 8.5%, 8.3%. Those are Lackey’s swinging strike rates from 2005 to 2009 in chronological order. That is a downward trend and not a subtle one either. In other words, projecting Lackey, I’d expect slightly more walks and considerably fewer strikeouts.

John Lackey’s tRAs have ranged from 3.7 to 3.9 to 5.5 and back down to 4.5 over the last four seasons, a difficult path to project. His xFIPs (and tRA*s) on the other hand, regressing his fluctuating home run rates, peg Lackey at a consistent 4.1, 4.0, 3.9, 3.9 from 2006 through 2009. That’s a much easier trend to deal with.

That trend, with the other information above leads me to think that Lackey is about a 4.1-4.2 FIP pitcher going forward. CHONE’s projection agrees mostly, seeing Lackey at a 4.1 FIP and 186 innings. That amount of production is worth about 3.2 wins, roughly a little less than Lackey’s 2007-9 average on a 5/4/3 weight, reasonable for an aging pitcher.

You cannot assume Lackey holds on that 3.2 WAR level either and over five years, you’re probably looking at a total expected contribution of three wins per year, or 15 wins in total. At the slightly depressed market value for wins and with the long term contract discount, a roughly fair number for Lackey at five years would be about $60 million.

Now, as Dave Cameron brought up a few days ago, not every team should pay the same rate for wins. The Red Sox are in a similar position as the Rays wherein each additional win means more to them. Also, they’re a super high budget team with the resources to offer more money per win. Even still, this looks like a vast overpay in terms of annual value. And possibly worse than that is guaranteeing five years to a pitcher, much less for his age 31-35 seasons.

The Astros continued their spending this week with the addition of third baseman Pedro Feliz, signed today to a one year contract for a reported $4.5 million. He is likely to take over full time duties at the position.

The Astros got a combined .241/.308/.356 line from their third basemen last year split between Geoff Blum and Jeff Keppinger mostly. In that respect, Pedro Feliz’s 2009 line of .266/.308/.386 is a clear improvement, as sad as that is. Though Felix is aging — 2010 will be his age 35 season — he still posts consistently good defensive numbers at third base, numbers that coincide with a good fielding reputation from scouts.

Granting that Pedro Feliz might be the Astros’ best option at third base next year, I still do not see the point in this deal. The 2009 Astros finished 74-88, 17 games out of the divisional lead. At best, Feliz’s 2009 was worth about a half win more than the Astros’ 3B combo platter was in 2009.

Blum and Keppinger are still under contract with the Astros, so it looks like Houston just added $4.5 million to their payroll in order to get a couple runs better, at best. At worst, Feliz is no better than Jeff Keppinger, who would have been by far the more cost-effective starter.

Addressing the hole at third base is a good idea for Houston, but you don’t address a hole by filling it with air. You already have plenty of air; why bother paying money to import premium air from Philadelphia?

Since a promising 2006 season, Mark Teahen’s career has been on a downhill slide. Perhaps this off season will mark a turning point for him professionally. Traded away from Kansas City to the White Sox right after the conclusion of the World Series, Teahen today signed a lucrative three year contract with Chicago.

Teahen was entering his fifth year of club control, meaning 2010 and 2011 would have been arbitration years, and 2012 his first year of free agency. Using the standard 40%/60%/80% of free market value for arbitration estimates, the White Sox would be expected to dole out 2.4 years worth of Mark Teahen’s expected value in this contract.

The next step then would be to formulate a projection for Mark Teahen. He clearly has the talent to be an above average player, his 2006 and 2007 seasons speak to that. Since then Teahen’s bat has stagnated and his fielding numbers have taken a turn for the worse. Seasons of 0.1 and 0.2 WAR ensued. Teahen’s walk rate fell to its lowest mark of his career in 2009, at least partly as a result of a three-point increase in his swinging percentage. Most projections are going to regress the walks back up slightly, and in turn, an overall average package of hitting stats seems where most projections are clocking in.

Projecting defense is a bit tougher, but when you factor in position adjustments, Teahen was average for two years followed by two years of -12 runs, so even giving him some credit for re-adjusting to third base (if that is indeed where he ends up) and some credit for regression yields no better than an overall -5 run or so projection. Add it all up and 1 to 1.5 WAR is where I’d feel comfortable tabbing Teahen. Fair value then for the next three seasons would be about $13 million, a touch under the actual value of this contract (reported for $14.4 million).

However, the above paragraph assumes some free market principles not in play here, mainly because of the backwardness of how arbitration salaries are usually awarded. Teahen made $3.575 million last season and players rarely get paycuts going to arbitration so even though fair market for Teahen next year would be about $2.5 million, there is no chance that is what he actually would have made. By dint of how the process works, Teahen was essentially guaranteed about $9 million over the next two years regardless, and that’s if he didn’t bounce back this upcoming season. If the White Sox factored the likely arbitration awards into their cost estimates, then the price they just paid for that 2012 season comes down into a very reasonable range.

All in all, this deal makes sense for Teahen, who gets financial security after laying two goose egg seasons. It also makes some sense for the White Sox. Their risk is not really in overpaying, but rather guaranteeing money to a player who they had under control anyways and who they might not want to have around two years from now. The reward is if Teahen returns either his prior hitting or fielding skills, then the White Sox have a cheap asset on their hands.

Although it has not officially come full circle, it appears that Oakland is moving on from Jack Cust with the acquisition of Jake Fox from the Chicago Cubs last evening. Fox is built in the same mold as Cust, a batter who has showed some remarkably good hitting skills in the minors, is past prospect age status, has yet to get an extended Major League shot and is not well regarded for his glove. With Cust about to get expensive, there were already rumors that Oakland would be non-tendering him.

Coming along with Fox to Oakland is Aaron Miles and $1 million, making Miles’ cost to Oakland $1.7 million in 2010. Aaron Miles went four years being a replacement-level player with the Rockies and Cardinals before having a breakout (for him) season in 2008 with a BABIP-fueled .317 batting average. Signed by the Cubs, he immediately plunged into his worst offensive season to date and a poor defensive showing in a small sample as well. Just as a lucky high BABIP inflated Miles’ 2008 average, an unlucky low BABIP depressed his 2009 average. Expect a small bounce back if given the chance, though moving to pitcher-friendly Oakland and the AL probably will not be doing him any favors.

Heading back Chicago’s way are three players: Jeff Gray, Ronny Morla and Matt Spencer. Gray is a useful relief pitcher. He generates ground balls, misses some bats and keeps his walks under control. He can bring a mid-90s fastball and a mid-80s slider and with little service time accrued can make for a decent and cheap bullpen option for the next few seasons.

Morla, 21, also has some good velocity and has been in Oakland’s short-season program the last two seasons working as a starter for the majority of the time with some success. Spencer, 23 and originally a Phillies draft pick who came to Oakland by way of Joe Blanton, reached Double-A last year and has shown some decent hitting skills but his defensive position is currently up in the air.