First, Alex Rodriguez was having surgery to repair a cyst in his hip and would be out about 10 weeks. Then it turned out he had a labral tear as well, surgery for which would normally cost him 4-6 months. Then the Yankees and Alex decided to try draining the cyst and playing through the season with the injury, waiting until after for surgery. Now, we find out that Rodriguez is in fact going under the knife, having arthroscopic surgery to try and repair the labral tear.

However, the current estimate/best hope is that Rodriguez will only miss 6-9 weeks. How is that possible? Well, for one, the surgery is set just to repair the tear itself. The 4-6 month rehab from a typical version of this injury comes from issues with the hip and femur bones that result from the tear. For now, Alex Rodriguez will wait on that part of the surgery, if needed, until the off season.

However, it’s still not all candy hearts. According to Stephania Bell the normal rehab for just a labral repair is 10-16 weeks. Granted that A-Rod is a motivated professional athlete and thus, we would expect a shorter time frame, it is not unrealistic to expect that nine weeks may be optimistic, much less six. Another good point that Bell brings up is that A-Rod has already and will miss the rest of Spring Training with the surgery and rehab. How fast will he be able to jump right back into baseball?

All told, I think 10 weeks, about mid-May is the best reasonable case for the A-Rod we expect to come back. That’s about 25% of the season gone. If he does manage six weeks, he might only miss 15-20 games, but if there’s any delays in the rehab, or he takes more than a week to get back to full speed after recovering, we could be looking more at a June return. And if there are any major set backs, still possible, it could end up being a lost season entirely.

10 weeks was/is going to be a big blow to the Yankees. If it turns out to be longer than that, well, I don’t know in what looks to be a super tight AL East race.

Stephen Strasburg entered the Spring baseball season as the consensus number one selection for the upcoming MLB draft in June. Many people were quick, and correct, to point out however that there was still a lot of baseball to be played until June 9th arrives and that there was still a couple roads that would lead to a different name being called first by the Nationals.

One of those roads is an injury. That hasn’t happened yet and despite what some people will try to sell you, injury prediction based on pitching mechanics is a science in its infancy and if anything, that’s granting it more credibility than it warrants. While it is certainly possible to grade mechanics for things like deception, repeatability and the like, predicting injuries is unreliable. It hinges so much on the physiology of the individual and has yet to be subjected to enough scientific testing that any attempts at it should be at best taken with enough grains of salt to fill the Grand Canyon and probably is best just ignored.

Signability might play a factor, but that’s incredibly difficult to predict all the factors involved. Therefore I feel it best to box it up with injury concerns, something we can only react to in retrospect.

The other main divergent to Strasburg being named first overall would be some other player emerging on the scene. That would require someone to either eclipse Strasburg, Strasburg to struggle, or some combination of the two. Well, three starts into his season and Strasburg’s star certainly isn’t dimming and in fact is only getting brighter (supernova jokes here not applicable). Here’s the pertinent stats in chronological order of starts:

23 BF, 11 K, 2 BB
26 BF, 16 K, 1 BB
29 BF, 18 K, 1 BB (against top 20 team)

I don’t have good batted ball breakdowns so I cannot report on his groundball percentage and other assorted numbers of note. Frankly though, the above is enough. 78 batters faced and 45 have been struck out. 45 of 78. Stephen Strasburg has struck out 58% of all batters that he has faced so far. Oh, and he’s done that while walking just 5%. Oh, and he’s been better with each start. Oh, and he was reportedly clocked at 102mph in in second start.

Good gracious.

Finally! Manny Ramirez (or should I say Scott Boras?) and the Dodgers finally agreed to contract that the Dodgers have been offering and the Ramirez camp have been rejecting for going on three months now. Apparently the Dodgers subscribe to the “if at first you don’t succeed, try the exact same thing again and again” philosophy. Anyways, it worked, at least to their values and Manny is now on his way to the Dodgers Spring Training facility.

The biggest part of this whole mess that gets me is that we heard early on in the off season that many teams were scared off of bidding for Manny Ramirez because they were afraid of his antics. They were afraid that unless Manny got what he thought he was worth, that he wouldn’t focus on his play. That seemed like a reasonable fear. So what does Boras/Manny do to ally those fears? They embark on one of the most dragged out, public, nutty negotiations of recent history. Way to go there fellas.

The deal is for two years and $45 million, the second year and $20 million being a player option. Given the mercurial nature of Manny, it is hard to assume that he will either exercise or deny that option so we’ll look at both results.

Offensive projections for Manny next year range on the lower side of the average of his 2007 and 2008 seasons, which is reasonable given his age. Though, there is the move to the National League to consider. Moving on for the moment, that appears to be about 35 runs, give or take five or so, above average with the bat. Manny will be full time in a corner outfield spot in the NL, so he gets -7.5 runs for that and +20 runs for replacement level.

What’s left is how much to dock Manny for his defense. He was pretty consistently -15 to -20 runs from 2005-7, but climbed all the way up to -2.3 last year. That looks like a fluke to me, but I will regress his projection back to -15 runs. Adding that all together, and we arrive at 3-3.5 wins. Again, that’s about smack in the middle of his 2007 (1.0 win) and 2008 (6.5 wins), and on a reasonable path from his 2004-6 path.

That would make Manny worth a little under $15 million for 2009 so right away we can see that this is a sizable overpay by LA. A second year of Manny would only up the expected value to LA to slightly over $25 million. It appears to be in the best interest of the Dodgers if Manny declines his option after this season, allowing them an out from the deal and from hopefully the brunt of the PR mandate that called for them to make sure they kept Manny.

As an analyst, one of the aspects that I am obsessed with is boiling down seemingly complex questions into the simplest possible situation. Take evaluating pitches for example. John Walsh of the Hardball Times has an excellent method for identifying and ranking pitch types but a data request from my friend Jeff Sullivan got me thinking about a simpler model.

What is the best result for a single pitch, from a pitcher’s point of view? Clearly, the pitcher prefers a strike to a ball. An out would be best, but since we’re talking about a single pitch, an out means a ball in play which in turn means the possibility for a whole range of other outcomes.

A principle that I have been harping on for a few years now is the benefit in splitting up pitch results at a level beyond ball, strike and in play. In particular, I tend to categorize pitches as one of the following: ball, intentional ball, called strike, swinging strike, foul or in play. Why do I think it’s important to split things up like that? Because of graphs like these:

That’s strikeout rate on the vertical axis and league normalized swinging strike and called strike rates on the horizontals.

Going back to the question then, would anyone disagree that a swinging strike is the best overall pitch outcome for a pitcher? Not only does it result in the best possible singular outcome (a strike), but it adds a lot more information about the pitcher’s ability to get strikeouts, the best possible outcome of an at bat for the pitcher.

Looking at fastballs only and the percentage of them that a pitcher gets a swing and a miss on, there’s some names in interesting places. It’s probably no surprise that Scott Kazmir and Rich Harden were at or near the league best in 2008, but would you have guessed John Danks and Micah Owings would be right with them?

It’s probably not surprising that Dallas Braden had the lowest rate of fastball swinging strikes amongst starting pitchers last year given his typical 87-88 mph velocity, but would you thought Bobby Jenks and his mid-90s fastball would be near the bottom for relievers at a rate roughly half that of Ramon Ramirez? In fact, Bobby Jenks saw a significant decline in the amount of swings and misses he managed across all pitches in 2008, something to watch out for in 2009.

There’s no end to the amount of interesting (to me) data that can be looked at concerning pitchers.

And so begins, sort of, another baseball season. I mostly loathe Spring Training because of the sheer amount of fluffy writing it signals that is about to arrive as story-starved journalists (hey, that’s me now too!) need to fill the same number of column inches each day no matter that nothing of actual importance happened. Hence, we get the countless cliches about who lost weight, who gained muscle, who is ready to put last season behind him, who is ready to build off last season, and so on. It’s a rite of passage now to wade through that stuff.

But I cannot be down today. Games were played. As Dave Cameron mentioned, they don’t even begin to mean anything stats-wise. It doesn’t matter. Baseball is being played again between competing teams and I can start my countdown to Opening Day, that most glorious of all days. It’s a little more special for me this year with the new face of the Mariners front office and the emotional return of Griffey Jr in a Seattle uniform.

The great part of this part of the year is that usually nearly every team can see a glimmer of hope. Going by CHONE’s projected standings, there are 20 teams projected to be within ten or fewer games of a postseason berth and 26 within 15 games. Sorry Toronto, Baltimore, Chicago and Kansas City. I am sure fans of those four teams can come up with legit reasons they might contend though.

Hope abounds in Spring. It’s baseball and it’s coming back.

A couple quick notes since not much news happened today with the first spattering of games. The Dodgers added a $20 million player option for 2010 onto their offer to Manny Ramirez. I am not sure that will be enough, but I also do not see any other team making a play for the slugger so I think we can all hope for this drama to just be done with. Also, the exploratory surgery on Boof Bonser did reveal a tear in his shoulder so his 2009 season is over. Ditto for Mariners SP Ryan Feierabend who will undergo Tommy John surgery. He was a long shot to make any impact on the 2009 team, so his loss mostly just lessens Seattle’s rotational depth.

The Minnesota Twins used all of seven starters during the 2008 season, the fewest number in the Major Leagues along with the Phillies and Angels. It looks like two of those seven are now gone as Livan Hernandez is signed with the Mets and news today comes out that Boof Bonser is still experiencing pain and is now set to undergo exploratory surgery on his throwing shoulder.

That type of surgery is rarely good news and it seems likely to expect Bonser to miss most of, if not all of, the 2009 season. On the surface, that would not seem to be that big of a deal, as Bonser was not favored to be in the Twins rotation breaking camp. Scott Baker, Francisco Liriano, Kevin Slowey, Nick Blackburn and Glen Perkins are the oft-reported rotation.

The top four is fine, but supporters of Perkins and detractors of Bonser are ignoring the effects of BABIP and batted ball profiles; Bonser’s FIP (4.19) being almost a full point lower than Perkins’ (5.14). Bonser was better than Perkins in 2008 and projected better than him in 2009, no matter the Twins reluctance to acknowledge that fact.

The loss of Bonser not only spells a loss of opportunity to upgrade from Perkins at the back end of the rotation, but also the loss of depth in the rotation. It is rare, as you may have noted above, for teams to avoid using a number of starters beyond their original five. No matter which of the two ended up outside of the rotation, the presence of both helped to assure the Twins of some insurance in case parts of their young rotation falters.

In what looks like a possibly tight AL Central, these young starting pitchers are the Twins biggest competitive advantage, and a blow to that, is a blow to their overall playoff chances. Hopefully, for them, Bonser’s surgery does not reveal any structural damage.

No, I don’t really think so; even with my irrational following of Erik Bedard.

Jeff Francis hoped that rest and rehab would rid him of the shoulder pain that dogged him throughout the 2008 season. It did not and now he is headed to exploratory surgery under the assumption that the surgeon will find a torn labrum. Thus ends any realistic hope for Francis pitching in 2009.

As a result of this, we learn for certain a possible cause for Francis’ rather poor showing this past season. Francis had been a pitcher on the rise, posting increasing values each year from 2005 through 2007 and seemed poised to break into the upper echelon of pitchers following his, and the Rockies, success in 2007. That was not to be as both the Rockies and Francis faltered badly.

Interestingly enough, Francis’ stuff did not exhibit much difference in 2008 as compared to previous years. His control was a tad worse, but nothing even noteworthy. His velocity stayed constant and his batted ball and pitch result profiles did as well. Yet, the walks went up and the strikeouts down.

Francis provides a nice counterpoint to what has seemed like an endless stream of ridiculously team-friendly arbitration buyouts signed this winter. Not to say that Francis’ contract (he signed a four year deal in November of 2006 that bought out his arbitration years and comes with a $7 million team option on his first market year) isn’t a good one for Colorado; it is just that we need to be reminded about the risk in securing contracts to pitchers. They get hurt a lot.

Lucky for the Rockies that they have that amazingly attractive team option on Francis that allows them to keep him around through 2011, because it gives them all of 2010 to evaluate post-surgery Jeff Francis and if they can, or will still want to, count him as a pillar of the organization going forward.

We have almost all the facets of the game covered here at FanGraphs. We have wOBA for hitting, UZR for both fielding range and fielding throwing, FIP for pitching and some nifty WAR calculations for positional and replacement value. Sure we can quibble over the effectiveness of this metric over that metric for measuring pitching or what have you, and we will, but a recent story by Sky Kalkman at Beyond the Box Score reminded me of one component that we’re missing right now, base running.

The wOBA formula at FanGraphs does incorporate stolen bases so that aspect is already taken care of, but there’s more to base running than just swiping bags. There is also being speedy and heady enough to take the extra bag when possible off hits or sacrifices or really any situation.

Dan Fox does tremendous work in baseball research and he’s compiled some base running figures for Baseball Prospectus. The figures are free of charge and accessible here. Just make note that the final figure, EQBRR includes the stolen base component (EQSBR) so if you want to make some adjustment to FanGraphs values, you’ll have to add in the difference between EQBRR and EQSBR, not the whole of EQBRR itself.

Anyways, I just wanted to point out a few people. Ian Kinsler, Ichiro Suzuki, Jose Reyes, Chone Figgins, Shane Victorino, Matt Holliday, Curtis Granderson and Nate McLouth all chime in with five or more runs added via these base running events. Bengie Molina, Dioner Navarro, Prince Fielder, Casey Kotchman and Mike Lowell were all five or more runs subtracted.

The spread from best (Kinsler/Reyes) to worst (Molina) was a whopping 13.5 runs. It’s just another example of stuff that doesn’t really show up in the box score or even among most analysts discussions, but is important to consider nonetheless.

Nate McLouth became the latest player to join the trend of signing a contract that buys out his arbitration years. Entering his fourth year of service, McLouth today inked a deal that guaranteed three years (all of his remaining arbitration years) and $14.5 million. There’s also a team option on his first free agent year at what works out to be $10.65 million with $1.25 million of that assured to McLouth via a buyout.

McLouth has spent the majority of his career thus far in center field, and not done too well there according to UZR, looking like his ability falls in the -10 to -15 runs per 150 games range. He was -40 plays according to John Dewan’s Plus/Minus last year as well. On the other hand, he won a Gold Glove last season and we all know how those are only given to the very best fielders in the game. I will assume for now that McLouth is going to stay in center field as the Pirates do not seem to have anyone to press him out of this role. Splitting the difference on his fielding rating and adding in the +2.5 positional adjustment for center field leaves us with an even -10.

On the hitting side, McLouth maintained the gains he made in a half year during 2007 and even improved on them slightly over the course of a full slate of 2008 plate appearances. Marcel still sees some significant regression with McLouth’s dismal 2006 on record, but CHONE thinks McLouth will hold on to being a .360-70 wOBA hitter. We also have to project a reduction in at bats going forward to account for injury possiblities. Lumping all those together and we get a figure of about 10-15 runs above average for McLouth’s bat. I think that’s a bit low myself given that the projection systems are seeing McLouth’s part-time work in 2007 as a reason to keep his expected at bats in 2009 a lot lower than seems prudent.

Throwing in the 20 runs for replacement and McLouth’s total value for 2009 looks to be in the 2 to 2.5 win range, worth $8-11 million on the open market per season. However, McLouth is still tied to arbitration, so his expected compensation is diminished by the 40/60/80 estimation to 1.8 years of open market seasons for the three years. With the 10% reduction in total value you expect players to take off for the security of a long term deal, McLouth warrants around $15.6 million for his arbitration years according to Marcel and CHONE. Including the option buyout, McLouth is guaranteed %15.75 million.

To me, there’s good reason to expect McLouth to outperform his projections next year simply by dint of staying healthy and getting 500+ at bats. Because of that, I think the Pirates did well here, though McLouth isn’t getting fleeced either. However, I wonder how much money he leaves on the table were he to have a 2009 similar to that of his 2008?

Reports are leaking out that Ervin Santana, heading into his first arbitration hearing, and the Angels have agreed to a four-year contract with a team option on a fifth year. If the length is right, that buys out Santana’s three arbitration years plus his first free agent year with the option covering a second. Santana recently turned 26 so that contract would cover his 26-29 seasons with the option year being his 30th. That’s a nice age to lock up a pitcher.

Moving to the dollar figures, the numbers being reported is a guaranteed $30 million with the option being for another $12 million or so. Given the 40/60/80% breakdown on arbitration rewards, this comes out to 2.8 market years or 3.8 with the option. Either way, it breaks down to the Angels paying Santana at the 2.5-win level, give or take a little.

Santana certainly had a wide volatility in his performance in the past two seasons, moving from a low 4 FIP previously to one well over 5 in 2007 and then down in the low 3s this past year. From 2005 through 2007, Santana was throwing fewer strikes and missing fewer bats each subsequent year until his complete transformation in 2008 which also saw him post a career high groundball rate.

The question is going to be if that’s sustainable. If so, then Santana is legitimately one of the best pitchers in the American League and worth around five wins a year, giving the Angels a tremendous value. If he regresses all the way back to 2007, he’s only worth about one win. CHONE and Marcel have remarkably similar projections, both suggesting that he’s going to return to his 2006 performance level; a level worth about 3.5 wins.

It looks like in all but the worst case scenario, the Angels make out well here with an upside of this becoming one of the most team-friendly contracts on the books. No doubt, fantastic move for Anaheim.