Despite my personal impression that Tim Lincecum and his agent were content to go year to year until free agency, a report surfaced recently that the pair and the Giants were open to talking about a long term contract. Lincecum’s agent opined that his client was poised to be a Super Two after this season, a reasonable assumption, and that Cole Hamels‘ recent contract could serve as a baseline for Lincecum.

Of course, Hamels’ contract didn’t buy out any of his free agent years so that makes it tough to evaluate in a context that we are used to. Furthermore, the whole nature of Super Twos throws off our 40/60/80 evaluation scheme for the percentage of market value typically awarded to players in arbitration.

Projection wise, a plurality of systems come to a pretty consistent estimate of Lincecum going forward. He was otherworldly last year for sure, but he is due for some regression in his home run rate and it would be silly to project him to toss 220+ innings each season. Essentially, the systems agree that a good median line for Lincecum is represented roughly by the half way mark between his 2007 (3.2 WAR) and 2008 (7.5 WAR) seasons, somewhere in the high 4s to mid 5s. That amount of value is worth around $20 to $25 million a year on the free market.

The main question then is to figure out what would represent a fair value for Lincecum’s arbitration years. If he were a normal player, he would have a year of club control left plus a total of 1.8 years of arbitration in free market terms. So that you can refer back if/when Lincecum does get a contract, I will present a range of fair values based on differing parameters. The weighting refer to the percentage of fair market value paid to in arbitration.

3-year contract under 20/40/60/80 weighting: $25 million
3-year contract under 30/50/70/90 weighting: $32 million
3-year contract under 40/60/80/100 weighting: $38 million

4-year contract under 20/40/60/80 weighting: $42 million
4-year contract under 30/50/70/90 weighting: $50 million
4-year contract under 40/60/80/100 weighting: $59 million

No matter what, Tim Lincecum deserves much better than Cole Hamels got out of Philadelphia.

Ichiro Suzuki has been placed on the disabled list due to a bleeding ulcer that was affecting him with symptoms including extreme fatigue. The placement is retroactive to March 31 meaning that Ichiro is eligible to return to action on tax day, April 15th, at the earliest. For fans in Seattle, that means he will miss the home opener (April 14th) and it also means that Ichiro is going to miss a minimum of eight games.

This is Ichiro’s first stint on the disabled list during his American career. Remarkably, the minimum eight games that he will miss to start the 2009 season is equal to one half of the total number of games that he has missed over his previous eight seasons combined. From 2001-8 Ichiro played in 1,280 of 1,296 possible games.

This is obviously bad news for Mariner fans, and continues the incredible rate of attrition going on amongst name players in the AL West this Spring, but the good news is that it is nothing more serious than this. According to reports, the ulcer has stopped bleeding, and the DL move seems more precautionary than anything. Although the news is still too fresh to have a statement on the expectation for when he will return, at the moment, the language seems to lend itself toward suggesting that Ichiro will only miss the minimum amount of time.

How much time he does end up missing is going to have a big impact on the already small chances the Mariners have at post season contention this season. They’ve already lost the upside of Brandon Morrow in the rotation and decided to send Jeff Clement down to the minors to start the year. Losing any significant amount of games from Ichiro would pretty much torpedo their hopes for 2009.

Who is the injury bug going to strike next?

The Atlanta Braves and Chipper Jones agreed to a three year contract extension today, virtually assuring that Jones will retire as a Brave. The details on this contract are a little extensive so bear with me here. Jones will get a base salary of $13 million for 2010-2. In addition, he will receive bonuses of $750,000 each if he passes the 135 and 140 games played milestones. Those are curiously close together. Of course, Jones hasn’t tallied 140 games since 2003 and hasn’t reached 135 since 2004.

When 2013 rolls around, Jones has a vesting option of $9 million with the same pair of $750K bonuses. The option vests if Jones manages to appear in at least 123 games during the 2012 season or if he averages at least 127 games in 2011 and 2012. The base salary increases by $1 million at each of the following levels: 128, 133, 138, 140 games in 2012 or averages of 132, 137, 138, 140 games in 2011-2.

Got all that? Great. For purposes of evaluation, we’re going to keep it simple and evaluate it at three years and $42 million, his base salaries. We’ll assume that if he plays enough to reach his various bonuses, that he’ll be worth them. Now, on the face of it, it seems like a lot of money to guarantee a player for his age 37-9 seasons. However, according to our values, Chipper was worth $34 million last year alone!

It’s pretty unlikely for Jones to repeat his high level of performance from the past few seasons both because of expected regression and advancing age, but all five projection systems listed here expect him to post a wOBA of at least .405 this coming year. The Braves will be paying Jones at about a 3 to 3.5 win level, a level Jones has met or greatly exceeded in every season we record.

Given his decent defensive numbers, Jones’ offense could fall back to 2004-level, when he was the victim of some really harsh BABIP, and he would still be worth his salary. Throw in the sentimental value in keeping Chipper Jones in a Braves uniform and this looks like a risk worth taking for the Braves.

The playoff hopes for the Seattle Mariners, both in 2009 and beyond, took a dramatic blow yesterday when it was revealed that Brandon Morrow, the 5th overall selection of the 2006 draft, was moving to the bullpen full time. A myriad of reasons have been postulated for the move including health concerns over his arm, health concerns from his diabetes, a preference for closing and a sense that he would be more valuable as a reliever.

No matter which way you slice it, this is bad news for the Mariners. Brandon Morrow has the stuff to be an above average starting pitcher in the Major Leagues, someone capable of posting seasons worth three or four wins. Moving to the bullpen simply offers him no realistic shot at attaining levels that high. Even if Morrow morphed into a dominant closer, a big if, the likes of Joe Nathan, Mariano Rivera or even his now predecessor J.J. Putz, that level tops out at just over 2.5 wins a year on average. 2.5 wins is basically what an average starting pitcher tossing 200 or so innings would compile.

And remember, that would represent Morrow’s absolute best case as a closer. In pointed fact, those top notch closers have shown a much better track record of command and a higher ability to generate ground balls than Morrow ever has. A more realistic, but still optimistic, projection for Morrow would have him around the two-win mark. Suffice to say, Morrow is costing himself and the Mariners value by abandoning the role of starting pitcher.

Of course, it’s not so simple as to just leave it at that, because the health concerns are for real. Morrow’s Spring was under delay this year because of forearm issues. He also suffered from pronounced dead arm after moving into the rotation at the end of the 2008 season. He also has to battle Type 1 diabetes, an ailment that requires constant monitoring of his blood sugar level and one which is exacerbated by prolonged physical activity.

If we the public were informed that these reasons were the reasons Morrow was moving to the bullpen, I would have no qualms with it and would actually applaud Morrow for being willing to speak up when it came to his own health. The iffy part is that we are not sure those are the primary motivators. Morrow’s own words over the past few days have expressed a desire to return to the bullpen for the thrill of closing. If that, instead of his health, is why he’s making this decision, then it’s almost clearly a wrong call at this point in time. However, it seems unlikely that we will ever know and for now, the Mariners will have to move forward with their closing situation likely solved, but a severe blow to their upside in the rotation.

Last time I railed a bit on the act of carrying three dedicated catchers on a roster. Tonight, with real substantial baseball news still coming in at just a trickle as we lead up to the start of the regular season, I decided to continue the trend. This time, it’s not such a cut and dry case as I think the three catchers issue is. Tonight’s issue is the 12-man pitching staff.

I believe there are a number of circumstances where it is prudent to carry 12 pitchers. My beef is that seemingly every team does it all season long and that just screams wasted roster spot to me. One only needs to look through usage patterns to see the evidence; relievers going six or longer days between appearances, that is a surefire clue that there could be better uses for that roster slot.

Namely, it boils down to this; I think the game has evolved lately into a situation where managers are paranoid about treating each individual game as if it were totally independent. But it’s not, not on a usage level. What you do in one game does affect what your options are in the following. How many pitches does a reliever throw each time he gets warmed up? 20, 30? How many times does he make an appearance which involves less than that many pitches? My hunch would be a majority.

Why not just carry 11 pitchers and if you are facing a game after a particular heavy usage day, just swap one or two out with the best available Triple-A relievers for a short while. They’re RP, and not dominant ones even, they’re almost the baseball definition of fungible assets.

Managers seem too cavalier to me in making pitching changes to try and extract the greatest possible match ups at that particular moment. Of course, that sounds good, right? And it is good, if usage was independent from game to game, but it’s not. And endless pitching changes to eek out an extra percent or two of favorability on a single pitcher-batter battle is focusing on the micro level and missing that if you relaxed your standards in that regard, perhaps you would be able to go with an 11-man staff and thus carry another bench bat which can provide you with a greater total contribution.

This specific topic, and roster maximization in general, makes for a fantastic area of research that in time I plan to get around to analyzing with hard numbers, but for now I just wanted to present something that sticks out to me every March as Opening Day rosters get set. What are your thoughts?

There is a situation brewing with the Seattle Mariners 25 man roster that has me aggravated. I am unsure if it is also going on anywhere else, but it is by no means completely unique. Namely, it appears likely the Mariners are headed toward breaking camp with three bona-fide catchers on the active roster.

The reason seems to be that they plan to have games with both Kenji Johjima and Jeff Clement, the nominal candidates for the starting catcher role, in the lineup at the same time, one at catcher and one at designated hitter. The fear is that in those games, if whoever the starting catcher is gets injured, moving the other catcher behind the plate will vacate the DH and move the pitcher into the lineup.

My problem with this stems from my same disgust with the 12-man pitching staff. Teams are sacrificing bench bats for highly specialized positional players and I think its costing them efficiency. First, how often is it that the starting catcher gets hurt to the degree that he has to be removed from the game? Once, maybe twice a season on average? There’s also the case of the catcher getting ejected, but that is also a self-controlled factor. Then you have to factor in that it would not be 100% of the games where the backup catcher would be slotted as the starting DH, so only a fraction of those one or two times would a situation arise that you would need to replace the starting catcher and not have a backup catcher available on the bench.

For those rare cases, there appears to be two options. One is to go with an emergency catcher, a Chris Shelton type. In general, that’s a bad solution, but it’s also a solution unlikely to kill you over the course of a portion of a single game. It’s not akin to running out of pitchers in a long extra inning game for example. The other obvious solution is to just shift the backup catcher to catcher and lose the DH for the rest of the game. Remember, we only need a solution for the remainder of that game because after that, another catcher can be recalled from Triple-A if needed.

We also have the factor that this situation would on average happen toward the middle of the game. So if you went with the losing the DH option, you’re likely to be close to pulling the starting pitcher for the bullpen by then anyways and you could at that point revert to NL-style PHs and RP management. If you went with the emergency catcher option, you’re also dealing with only a percentage of a game.

None of this is to say that carrying a third catcher is always a bad decision. My beef is that the above discussion never seems to appear. Because incremental improvements, such as bringing in a better pinch hitter 20 times a year, are hard for us to process, even when they sum up to far more than a single instance of dramatic failure, such as having to use an emergency catcher for three innings once, the typical conservative management in baseball would rather use a roster spot all season long to avoid having a possible problematic situation arise once than to improve their overall efficiency.

I am obsessed with evaluating pitchers and pitches. As part of a data request from Jeff Sullivan on the percentage of swinging strikes that pitchers generated off fastballs last year, I went looking through the PITCH f/x data and ultimately ended up generating a chart grouping each different pitch type from every pitcher in the big leagues in 2008, separated by whether or not the pitch was thrown to the same or opposite-handed hitter and whether the pitcher was starting or relieving.

That is, I have the results (in terms of result of the pitch) and can compare the results of, for example, fastballs thrown by Joba Chamberlain:

As a starter against a right-handed batter.
As a starter against a left-handed or switch-hitting batter.
As a reliever against a right-handed batter.
As a reliever against a left-handed or switch-hitting batter.

And so on, across each different pitch that he, or anyone, throws. This dataset is going to form the basis for more than a few posts going forward*, starting with this one. Among the first things that I did was strip out all instances of pitch totals under 100, feeling that 100 is a pretty decent sample of pitches given my strict categorization. Sorting that data by the percentage of pitches swung on and missed, I encountered right at the top, an amazing number. Ryan Madson’s changeup (as classified by MLBAM), thrown to same-handed hitters generated a swing and miss a whopping 36% of the time, about 5% higher than any other pitch by any other pitcher in 2008.

Scrolling down the list, I also noticed (not to my surprise) a lack of fastballs showing up. So I decided to see which pitcher first popped up. That name turned out to be Brandon Morrow. His fastballs as a reliever to right-handed batters clocked in at an impressive 20% swinging strike rate. What’s curious though was the spread in his results across the four categories. Here they are, presented in the same order listed above.

SP, Same hand – 10% (135 pitches)
SP, Opp hand – 7% (183 pitches)
RP, Same hand – 20% (219 pitches)
RP, Opp hand – 9% (216 pitches)

The 20% figure suck sticks out, doesn’t it? It’s worth pointing out that the average rate for fastballs from starting pitchers last year was just under 6%, so even at his worst, Morrow’s fastball appears to be an above average weapon for him. Still, it will be interesting to begin contrasting and adding 2009 data to this when the season begins.

*If there’s a question you want answered that you think this data can help with, shoot me an e-mail and I might be able to look into it for you.

Rumors surfaced today that Pedro Martinez was nearing an agreement with the Houston Astros. While the rumors seem at press time to be holding no water, it does appear likely that Pedro Martinez is going to get a contract offer from someone relatively soon.

Pedro was also rumored to have turned down a one-year, $7 million deal back in January. If true, that was a catastrophic overestimation of the market as he’s not going to be able to get anywhere near that. Eric Seidman took a look at Pedro’s best case scenario’s back when the rumored deal was rejected.

Based on CHONE, ZiPS and Marcel, the likely performance for Pedro seems to be around 1 win with a spread of about a quarter win each way. Granted, a lot of that has to do with how many innings he will be able to log, being three years removed from his last season exceeding 140 innings pitched.

Regardless of their reported interest or lack thereof, Pedro does make quite a bit of sense for Houston. As it stands right now, they are relying on a lot of long shots and questionable health risks. Brandon Backe, Brian Moehler, Jose Capellan, Russ Ortiz and Mike Hampton are not a group that should be, making up the back end of your rotation without having contingency plans. Pedro Martinez could make up part of that contingency plan.

A friend of Manny Ramirez, Pedro might also find his way over to the Dodgers who seem to be giving up on the idea of getting anything out of Jason Schmidt. And apparently the Mets are not out of the question as a possible destination, possibly adding to the hilarious spaghetti of a rotation they have so far assembled behind Johan Santana. In any case, we can hope to find a resolution shortly as chances to audition come to close with the WBC ending.

We’d had an inkling before, but with a second slip of the tongue, it appears that we can now be confident that Angels’ OF/DH Vladimir Guerrero is in fact a year older than his listed age. That makes him 34 for the upcoming season, his final under the contract he signed with Anaheim back in the 2003 offseason.

Given the recent trend in market contracts for good hitting outfielders with lead gloves, it will be interesting to see what kind of extension talks take place between Vlad and the Angels, if any, during this season. Any new contract for Guerrero is going to start with his age 35 season and he is already showing signs of age-related performance decline.

In fact, Guerrero’s WAR has fallen every year since 2004, when he posted a 5.6 WAR, to last season’s 2.4 figure. All that results in Vlad being overpaid each of the last three seasons according to FanGraphs estimates.

CHONE, ZiPS, Marcel and Oliver combined to project a slight rebound in offense for Vlad this coming year, but that was before it turned out that he was a year older. An extra year at that age, and track record, may result in a non trivial adjustment downward in expectations. With his defense at an abysmal -10 to -20 range and injury concerns, Guerrero really needs to scale back the number of games he plays in the field even further than the 99 he was down to last year.

If Vlad isn’t able to rebound, there could be some serious offensive issues in Anaheim, something the team can ill-afford especially with the news that Ervin Santana has at least a partial tear of his UCL.

Right about the same time that Jon Lester got his recent deal from the Red Sox, Scott Baker signed a four year, $15.25 million extension with a $9.25 million team option for a fifth year. Like Lester, Baker is entering his final year of team control so it sets us up nicely for a direct comparison between the two.

Both pitchers receive similar playing time estimates, around 160-165 innings pitched, though there’s reason to believe that Lester could beat that given his 210 innings last season. Of course, that also comes with the risk of a young pitcher who took a big jump in innings will increase his odds at injury. Overall, I think the risk and reward balance out enough to call it a push.

Baker’s performance projections are remarkably consistent, ranging from 3.97 to 4.01 FIP among CHONE, Marcel and ZiPS. Lester is right around the same marks with a low of 3.95 and a high of 4.17 from the same three systems. Baker looks to have a slight (emphasis on slight) edge on projected performance, though again, there’s good reason to think the systems are undervaluing Lester based on his record before 2008.

That projection for Baker results in about a three-win player going forward, meaning that the Twins are paying less than $3 million per win going by the 40/60/80 arbitration award scheme. Even if the option ends up being exercised, the overall value only rises a bit.

Adding in Baker’s option to his contract to bring it up to the same time frame as Lester’s guaranteed years leaves Baker with $24.5 million compared to Lester’s $30 million. While I find the Lester contract to be pretty even for both sides, leaning a bit toward Boston’s favor but with a lot of possible variance. Baker looks like a more stable quantity, and a pretty good deal for the Twins.