Today was a day of finalizations for Atlanta as Kenshin Kawakami passed his physical and was announced and Derek Lowe’s signing became sufficiently official. We’ve covered Derek Lowe in pretty substantial detail prior, so suffice to say that his reported 4-year, $60 million contract is right around market value. Not too bad for the Braves who, after losing Smoltz, needed to bring in another man for the rotation.

But who is Kenshin Kawakami? The Braves have the right-hander signed for his age 34-6 seasons at an apparent cost of about $24 million, meaning that as a starter, the Braves are valuing him as a roughly two-win pitcher, akin to about Oliver Perez’s projection for the same time frame.

Kawakami throws a fastball around 88mph, relying on command of the outer part of the plate. He also has a big loopy overhand curveball that clocks in around the high 60s. A cut fastball around 85mph completes his repertoire. Kawakami’s throwing motion will remind some of Daisuke Matsuzaka’s though without Daisuke’s trademark hip thrust during his pause when his hands are at their peak altitude.

It will be important to see how Kawakami’s curveball, a big weapon for him to change the hitter’s eye level and disrupt their timing, given the vast difference in speed from his fastballs, reacts to the slightly bigger baseball used in America. If he’s unable to make that transition smoothly, it could prevent him from being effective out of the rotation.

Combined with the breakout, but still speculative, Jorge Campillo, the emerging youngster Jair Jurrjens and the often under rated Javier Vazquez, the Braves have built themselves a rotation that could end up solid top to bottom or could flame out in several spots.

The Hall of Fame inductees were announced today. I was not aware that today would be that day and upon learning who got in, I found myself with two reactions: good for Rickey, he was a Hall of Fame worthy player no matter what rational criteria you use and disappointment that Jim Rice finally made his way in. Mostly though I was left with a resounding apathy. Like every award that is voted on by the writers association or by the general fans, I can no longer get emotionally invested in it. The process is too broken, the voters too uninformed.

People who I was (and mostly still am) willing to defer to had by and large made the relevant cases for why Jim Rice did not belong among the game’s supposedly greatest elites. That was fine enough for me since my aforementioned lack of caring about the Hall of Fame (other than to be happy for the people that I wanted to get in since I imagine they do still care about the honor) gave me little motivation to investigate otherwise.

But it’s worth a little bit of work now that Rice is officially in. Granted, we only have sketchy information for that time period, and I don’t have historical weights off-hand, so I’m going to present a range of possible values for Jim Rice’s career and we’ll see how that stacks up.

Rice’s career wOBA ends up at .373 or so depending on which formula you use, which is quite a good number, especially since the league average on base percentage (which wOBA aims to be scaled against) from 1975 through 1988 is roughly .328. Over the roughly 9,000 plate appearances of Rice’s career, we’re left with Rice generating just shy of 360 runs, or to put it a more familiar context, about 24 runs per 600 PAs.

Seems pretty good but there’s a giant missing part here and it’s green and very tall. A right-handed hitter in Fenway Park enjoys a tremendous boost to his hitting stats. Given Rice’s hitting profile, his overall numbers are likely to have contributed to a 2% increase in his wOBA. That sounds small, but when adjusted, Rice’s wOBA drops down to .366, and his value per season to 20 runs. As it turns out, that would mark Rice down for roughly 300 runs over his career, a number very much close to Baseball-Reference’s Batting Runs (294.7) which is park and league adjusted.

Positional wise, Rice spent three-quarters of his career in a corner outfield spot and the remainder at DH meaning that he averaged a ten run penalty per season for his position. Left is to make guesses about how much his defense was worth. If you thought he was an average defender, Rice grades out at about the three-win level. Having never seen Rice play, I cannot attest to any valid opinion on his defense, but even granting Rice average defensive skill, is 15 seasons of three wins worth a Hall of Fame induction?

One of my more peculiar fascinations is with the first pitch of at bats. Specifically, I seem to pay an inordinate amount of attention to players and teams that swing at the first pitch more or less often than you would expect. With the pitch-by-pitch database that I happen to have, it is actually a trivial exercise to extract that information, so for tonight I decided to take a look at the first pitch on a team level for 2008.

Namely, I wanted to investigate the percentage of first pitches that a given team swung at. For additional context, I included that team’s walk rate under the theory that you would expect some negative correlation between how often a team swung at the first pitch and how often they drew a walk. The difference between the two is included as the final column with a positive difference expressing that the team drew more walks than expected.

Despite the promising sign of the top and bottom teams matching up perfectly, the dataset (limited as it is to just 30 data points) shows little correlation.

However, visual inspection reveals a possible pattern. It looks like a majority of the teams do follow a roughly a linear pattern between not offering at the first pitch and drawing walks, there might be two clumps perpendicular to the hypothetical trend line. There are two teams (Seattle and Pittsburgh) that took first pitches often but didn’t translate those into walks and a clump of six teams (Atlanta, Texas, Tampa, Chicago(N), St.Louis and Cincinnati) that drew walks at an above average pace despite offering at the first pitch more often than average.

Is there something (like a higher or lower percentage of free-swinging, high-slugging hitters) about the make up of the teams in those two groups that helped distinguish them from the other 22 teams, who show a correlation of 0.78 between the two axes? In part two, we’ll add in some data from past years to get a bigger sample size and if the pattern holds, see if we cannot tease out a possible explanation.

A cautionary tale to all of us never to under estimate the impact of injuries on a pitcher, John Patterson has retired from baseball after two surgeries and nearly three years were unable to rid him of the pain he was suffering in his throwing forearm.

Patterson was originally drafted by Montreal with the 5th overall pick back in 1996, but agent Scott Boras found a loophole that enabled him and a few others (also notable: Matt White), to declare free agency and sign with whoever they wished. For Patterson, that was the Diamondbacks at the even-impressive-today figure of $6.075 million.

Patterson came up through Arizona’s system and spent his first two Major League seasons with them, but just prior to the 2004 season he was traded back to his rightful owners Montreal for relief pitcher Randy Choate. Patterson would be slotted into the Expos’ rotation and begin showing signs of at least adequacy with a 5.06 FIP.

2005 was certainly the crowning achievement of Patterson’s career. He stayed healthy enough to log 31 starts and just under 200 innings over which he maintained his lofty strikeout rate and managed to cut his walk rate from over 10% of batters faced to under 8%. He turned 27 that season and it looked like Patterson was entering his peak.

He began 2006 looking for all the world as if he might even take that peak further. Four starts in Patterson had a ridiculous 32:5 strikeout to walk ratio in just 25.2 innings. But the injury bug hit and Patterson was on the shelf until June. He made four more starts upon his return, was near as effective and then was shut down for the remainder of the year.

2007 was another brief flirt at the big league level before more forearm pain sent him to the operating table. Thinking or hoping that he was finally clear of the troubles this season, Patterson signed a minor league contract with the Rangers after being cut loose by the Nationals who didn’t take to his poor Spring Training results. He wouldn’t last long with the Rangers either, just till May, when his forearm pain returned and he was forced to call it quits on 2008 and hope that rest would fix the problem.

Earlier in December, Patterson began again on a throwing program, but with a return of forearm troubles, Patterson has called it good. Part of the inaugural season for the Nationals that saw them surprise many by finishing 81-81 and leading the NL East for a period of time as late as July 24th, Patterson’s 2005 will always stand though as a far too short glimpse of what might have been.

It is easy, and comfortable for some of us including myself, to frequently talk about numbers in isolation, but sometimes I enjoy taking a step back and fitting things into a real life model that I hope anyone can relate to. One such issue that I was bantering about with fellow analyst, Graham MacAree, is how to put super valuable players into context. It’s easy to talk about Albert Pujols being worth so-and-so many wins, and the introduction of win-based stats is a boom for relating complex mathematical analysis to casual fans, but sometimes even that is not enough to get the story across.

Barry Bonds posted possibly the two most valuable seasons ever in baseball history back to back in 2001 and 2002. Bonds was worth 14 wins in 2002, garnering 116 runs above average with his bat and 10.5 with his glove. FanGraphs BIS data doesn’t cover 2001, so we cannot fully attest to his fielding back then, but given his numbers over 2002-3, it strikes me as safe to assume 2001 was around that level as well. Bonds’ increased plate appearances that year helped his bat be about eight or so runs more valuable than 2002, so Bonds was probably pushing 15 wins in 2001. That’s an mind numbing number on its own, but I think it helps to establish one more piece of information.

In logical practice, the least possible valuable member of a team would be a DH that couldn’t hit. Sort of like Jose Vidro this past season. But let us take it further than that and replace Jose Vidro with something that has a bit better running speed, like a papaya. Assuming the worst, that an umpire would simply call any pitch a strike, our new DH would post a Jason Bergmann line of .000/.000/.000. If he racked up 600 PAs, the papaya would be worth a fabulous 177 runs below average with its’ bat. It would incur a 17.5 run penalty for playing DH, and be gifted 20 runs for replacement level. All told, it would equal about negative 17 wins.

Taking it up to a spec of realism, the average pitcher in 2008 posted a .174 wOBA. Over 600 PAs, that would be 86 runs below average. So if you took the average pitcher and made him a full time DH, he would have been worth around negative 8 wins.

You could take 2001 and 2002-circa Barry Bonds and pair him with either a single papaya (or inanimate object of your choosing), or a couple of average pitchers slotted as DHs (ignoring the impossibility of that for a second), and you would still come out around replacement level. That is some kind of value.

Milton Bradley and the Cubs have agreed in principle to a three year, $30 million contract sources indicate. How does this signing rate?

For one, it comes at the same time as the Rays nabbing Pat Burrell on a fantastic contract which should have helped depress the market a bit for players of Bradley’s ilk. First of all, Bradley is a fantastic hitter, capable of being worth around 40 runs over average per 600 PAs. Now, we shouldn’t and won’t project Bradley to hit that well, but he has shown in the past that his ceiling is around that mark. He’s also an above average fielder (though not by much). Those are the good bits.

The bad bit is that 600 PAs is not going to happen. It’s never happened before and it’s extremely unlikely to happen starting at age 31. Here’s a list of Milton Bradley’s games played in the outfield over the years, and as a percentage of total games played

Until 2008, Bradley has been devoted to playing the outfield, and in a vast majority of those years, he has suffered from injury. He has logged over 100 games in the field just once, 2004, his entire career. As an outfielder, Bradley could potentially still play center field and be adequate, or be above average in a corner slot. All in all, giving him a neutral rating for defense and position is a safe enough projection. It’s likely to be within five or so runs of his final tally. As a hitter, his projection is for about 25 runs over average per 600 PAs. Add in 20 runs for replacement, and you have yourself a 4.5 win player, exceedingly valuable and worth $20 million a year on a one-year deal, $18 million on a multi-year.

The problem is that as an outfielder, there is little justification for projecting more than 300-400 PAs per year from Bradley, and even that strikes me as potentially too optimistic. As a DH, we could have been more optimistic and looked at him as close to a full time hitter. Then again, as a DH, Bradley would lose around 20 runs worth of defensive value so the increase in playing time would have to immense to make it worth it. Of course, Bradley cannot DH now that he has signed with a National League team, so outfield it is. Given that we have to chop his projected value in half. Coincidentally, or not, that leaves us with almost an exact match to Bradley’s contract, meaning that for the value that you expect Bradley to provide, the Cubs appear to be correctly factoring in his health concerns.

That’s not to let them completely off the hook though, because there’s still the matter of what to do with the other 300 PAs while Bradley is on the disabled list and ignores that in order to clear payroll room for Bradley, the Cubs markedly undersold on Mark DeRosa, a player who, by the way, has been more valuable than Bradley each of the past three seasons and was signed for just $5.5 million and only through 2009.

Ryan Howard is overrated by the general public and media, one only has to look at the 2008 Most Valuable Player Award voting compared against his actual value and performance this past season to see that.

Much ruckus was raised last winter when Ryan Howard went from a club dictated salary of less than $1 million to an arbitration-awarded $10 million. There were calls that this was an insane leap and would do much to upset the balance of the market for future and current players.

Ryan Howard has a down year in 2008. He lost about ten runs off his offensive totals from 2007, which was down a little less than 30 runs from his peak in 2006. That would seem to be a recipe for an under performance on the whole.

If you buy the park adjustments and UZR as adequate measures, than Ryan Howard put forth about $15 million in value during the 2008 season, for which he was paid $10 million. In other words, Ryan Howard was the prototypical player to be over rated (heavy on power offense and short on position and defense), he was coming off a record arbitration award and he had a down season. All that and he was still only paid at about two-third of his worth.

This is not to say that a long-term contract for Howard would be a good idea; the Phillies have an incredible opportunity thanks to Howard’s advanced age at premier to squeeze most, if not all, of his fruitful years out while under team control and then let him become some poorly-run team’s mistake during his mid 30s. This is, however, to provide yet another illustration of just how valuable getting team-controlled players is.

Ryan Howard is about to embark on his second arbitration experience and buoyed not by performance, but by hype this time, he might engineer another extraordinary raise. But with his performance projected to return back to 2007 levels, there’s still a good chance that Howard will remain a net asset for the Phillies.

Luck and a poor free agent economy paid off for the Angels as they managed to avoid being hamstrung to a long-term deal with Francisco Rodriguez put on the table early in the 2008 season and when the winter rolled around, the once boggling contracts for closers that were in vogue during the previous winter were now already out of style.

Rodriguez got considerably less from the Mets than he was hoping for and with few other teams bidding, the Angels have found their replacement in Brian Fuentes. According to Buster Olney, the contract is for two-years, totaling $17.5 million and comes with a $9 million option for 2011 that vests depending on 55 games finished, which is probably about a 50/50 shot.

Evaluating the deal on the premise that the option will vest leaves us with a three-year, $26.5 million and the Angels’ first round draft pick as the cost to Anaheim. This covers the age 33 through 35 seasons for Fuentes so there has to be some concern about age-related decline in the mix.

Fuentes rebounded last season to post a 3.25 xFIP. His more reported rates, FIP and ERA, were artifically low thanks to a unsustainable home run per fly ball ratio. All in all, 2009 projections for Fuentes are going to land between his 2007 and 2008 numbers, and look a lot like his 2006 season. We have a nice (but not so nifty) way of determining the value of relievers thanks to Tango (links here and here). Please refer back to Tango’s threads for the worhtwhile explanations and to point any mistakes that I am likely about to make.

Projecting pitchers is difficult and messy so I like to gather inputs from a variety of sources, much like on defense, to see if I can establish a reasonable consensus. Looking at Marcel, tRA and others and throwing in pixie dust for the NL to AL switch, I get a projection of 3.71 against a league average of 4.49. Plugging that into the winning percentage formula (reproduced below) leaves us with a .585 winning percentage. I looked at only RP when coming up with my league averages, so I need to deviate slightly from Tango’s stated 0.470 replacement level down to 0.451. Taking the difference between those two figures and multiplying by his projected playing time yields 0.92 wins.

Fuentes is going to be used as a closer, so his expected leverage is about 2. Chaining that (refer to the second of Tango’s links) adds a 50% bonus to his win total and we arrive finally at a 2009 projection of just under 1.4 wins. Knock off 10% for the security of the contract and for aging and over the brunt of the contract, it appears that the Angels are paying Fuentes at a rate of $7 million per win.

The contract initially looks like a bargain because of the numbers that were bandied about last winter and the start of this one, but the simple truth is that relievers have to be very, very good to warrant big salaries and while Fuentes was superb in 2008, he was average in 2007 and merely good in 2006.

The formula for computing a pitcher’s winning percentage:
A = (RA + leagRA) ^ 0.28
B = (leag RA / RA) ^ A
Win%= B / (B + 1)

There is still a lot of off season to go, but as it stands right now the AL West division might be a tougher battle than most would think given how it shaped up this past season.

The key to understanding that is to go back to the season in reviews that I did earlier, which ranked teams based on their BaseRuns Pythagorean record. According to those, here is the revised 2008 AL West Standings:

1. Anaheim 83-79
2. Texas 82-80
3. Oakland 78-84
4. Seattle 66-94

The Angels will get some players back from injuries in 2009 but they have also lost their 1B combo of Casey Kotchman and Mark Teixeira and their closer in Francisco Rodriguez, who although he had an over-rated season because of his saves total, was still an asset. Vladimir Guerrero and the rest of the Angels’ outfield being a year older doesn’t bode too well either. All in all, the Angels profile around a 83-88 win team by talent at the moment.

The Rangers are likely losing Milton Bradley, but should be looking at some regression from their starting rotation and more at bats to Chris Davis. Other than that, they’ll remain close to intact from their 2008 squad, so them holding around the .500 mark seems likely, in the 80-85 win range.

The Athletics benefit from the extra year as that goes to development rather than aging as is the primary case for Anaheim. They lose the innings from Harden and Blanton, but also should have a more robust offense this time around rather than the one that many were hard pressed to pick out of collegiate lineup. Along with Texas, 80-85 wins is about where they look right now. If they can pick up a Jason Giambi on the cheap you could add another win or two to that spread.

Those three alone wouldn’t make for much of a story, but the Mariners are now no longer fit to be completely left out of the question. Due for some pretty massive positive regression in both the lineup and starting rotation, new General Manager Jack Zduriencik also did a makeover on the defense. They are likely not finished dealing, but as it stands now, they appear to be in the 75-80 win range.

What we have is all four teams being within about a 10-win spread of each other heading in to the new year. Whether that gap stands when Spring Training rolls around is obviously yet to be determined, but for a division that the Angels won by 21 games last season, there is merit to paying attention again.

With the Mark Teixeira saga now appeared to be over and the Yankees the victors, there are a handful of teams that thought they were or might have been in the running for Teixeira’s services at first base that now have to move on to other plans.

Boston seems like the easiest. They never had a hole at first base, they seemed to be pursuing Teixeira more out of pure interest and payroll room than any pressing need. All signs point to them simply staying at the status quo with Youkilis at first base. If Mike Lowell’s recovery doesn’t go smoothly, they could end up moving Youkilis back to third to cover there and that would open up a hole at first base, but reports so far have been positive for Lowell.

Anaheim has an in house candidate, Kendry Morales, for first base (how does that Kotchman trade look now?), but with a line-up hurting for offense there is still the chance that they pursue one of Pat Burrell or Adam Dunn and stick him at first base. Dunn would make the more sense of the two as Anaheim’s lineup is already stacked with right-handed hitters, but adding either of them to first base (or even the outfield) would further worsen their defense and almost certainly wouldn’t be worth the overall cost.

Baltimore could turn back to Kevin Millar for another one-year go-around or they could aim to try acquiring and giving auditions to some languishing AAAA players like Tampa did with Carlos Pena a few years back. With the Rays, Red Sox and a newly reloaded Yankees in their division, it’s not like the Orioles have to be fully focused on trying to fight for a playoff spot this season.

In the nation’s capital, the Washington Nationals are already under the financial burden of Dmitri Young, currently on their Triple-A roster, at $5 million and Nick Johnson for $5.5 million. At least losing out on Teixeira means they will have the opportunity to give Johnson a fifteenth chance to stay healthy. And never fear, because they just signed Corey Patterson!