A week ago over on USS Mariner, Dave Cameron brought up the Seattle Mariners current glut of starting pitchers and, explored a little further in the comments, brought up the topic of what to do with Erik Bedard’s future might or might not be. It is a fascinating case study for what was perhaps the best pitcher in the American League in 2007.

For the purposes of brevity, I am going to assume that you are aware of Bedard’s general playing history to avoid doing any kind of detailed recap of the past. Where it stands now is that Bedard is coming off just 81 innings last season after now-departed GM Bill Bavasi traded an ark of talent to Baltimore for his services. With free agency looming after 2009 and a laundry list of past injuries dogging him, Bedard gives the Mariners little in the way of trade value. As a comparison, look at how well Rich Harden had to pitch in order to net the Cubs anything of value at the deadline, and Harden came with a year and a half of team control.

So it seems that the only hope along the trade front for the Mariners is that Bedard recreates 2007 this season and Seattle is able to flip him in July to a team hovering on the edge of a playoff run. Even then though, it seems like the best comparison would be the Angels’ trade for Teixeira this past summer but with a well-discounted return for Bedard being a pitcher and a fragile one at that. That’s hardly a return to write home about.

Another side effect of Bedard’s injured 2008 campaign is that in order to regain Type A free agent status at the end of 2009, he would have to mirror 2007. Bedard barely finished as a Type A after this past season and with 2007 coming off the books, he would have to replace it with a season of roughly equal value according to Elias.

So if Bedard does manage to replicate 2007, the Mariners might have some options; either to try and trade him or hold onto him and hope he garners Type A status at the end of the year and gain them some draft pick compensation that would take some of the sting out of taking in the shorts when they traded for him. But we have to be realistic and note the chance of that happening is minuscule.

More likely, Bedard performs at a level that will only net him Type B compensation and no team will offer much for his services at the deadline. So, what to do? Well, there is a third option and that’s approaching Bedard with the hope of signing him to an extension. Throwing out the unknowables, such as whether Bedard would even want to stay in Seattle where he was identified in part with the collapse from 2007, would it be a smart idea? There’s rarely a clear answer to a question like that, and mostly it lies in what kind of contract it would take.

SafeCo Field would be a terrific place for Bedard to pitch and the new Mariner outfield would help to further deflate his ERA and possibly raise his strikeouts. There are some performance-based reasons for Bedard to consider sticking around. The Mariners aren’t likely to contend in 2009 and they clear a lot of salary off the books after this year, so having a reduced-price Bedard on hand for the fruition of a re-tool in 2010 might be tempting. Normally, you’d expect a breakdown here of Bedard’s projected future value and some solid analysis on what kind of contract the Mariners should be willing to offer and Bedard be willing to accept, but I think the projections, already sketchy enough for pitchers, aren’t going to be useful, so I am just going to leave it up as an open question.

Would you try to extend Bedard and if so, for how long/much? Would you try to lock him up before the season starts when he might take less or wait to see how healthy he is? Take whatever you can get in June/July? Let him walk at the end of 2009?

Following up on Eric Seidman’s piece today. Beyond my own skepticism on the wisdom of taking a three-year flyer on Juan Rivera, I would like to delve a little further into the defensive impact this has on the Angels.

Garret Anderson is gone, but with Rivera now signed, the Angels have Torii Hunter, Vladimir Guerrero, Rivera and Gary Matthews Jr. hanging around as the likely suspects to man the starting outfield and designated hitter spot. There’s a chance the Angels demote Matthews out of full-time duty, but that’s a tough $33 million pill to swallow.

Assuming they don’t do that, the Angels are left with a defensive problem. Guerrero has been a stiff in the field for awhile now and his knees could really use the rest from tramping about the outfield grass. Hunter isn’t the fielder the Angels thought they were buying, as a three-year weighted UZR rates Hunter as about average for a corner outfielder. Similarly, Sarge Jr moved from an above average fielder in center to now well below average in a corner according to UZR.

Their “ideal” alignment looks like Vlad at DH, Rivera in LF, Hunter at CF and Matthews in RF. Using our above (and Seidman’s) estimates on defensive prowess, that alignment would be roughly 25 runs below average, and that’s assuming none of this post-30-year-old group gets any worse, which is optimistic to say the least. This puts some pressure on the roster flexibility, since DH gets locked up in this situation, but also on the infield to hopefully make up for the deficiencies of the outfield.

Unfortunately, if the Angels fail to re-sign Teixeira, they’re faced with another plus defender leaving and there’s already some questions as to how well they defend up the middle. In short, the Angels were lucky to win as many games as they did in 2008 and if they lose out on Tex, a big chuck of offense and defense goes away and they might be caught resting on their laurels too much.

Mark Teixeira looks like he’s down to the wire in terms of finally inking a contract and hoping pushing the remainder of this off-season forward. With the set of bidders narrowed down and the contracts tightening up, it appears that we can hone in on an expected contract for Teixeira, something in the eight-year, $175 million range. That’s not so much an overpay in annual average value, but rather just an overpay in years.

Teixeira is probably a 4-5 win player for 2009, worth between $20 and $25 million. Taking 10% off for a long-term discount and you have a fair value price of $18 to $23 million, which Teixeira seems about to get. That’s what you would be comfortable paying him if you felt he was going to stay a 5-win player throughout the duration of the contract. What’s not being taken into account though is aging curves. While Teixeira is young, when you sign someone for eight years, you better be factoring that in and any reasonable aging projection would have Teixeira losing a considerable amount of value over the life of the contract.

Teixeira’s soon to be inked contract got me thinking again about Todd Helton and since we’ve added some new stats to FanGraphs since I last looked at Helton, I felt like a brief revisit of him was warranted. Helton had a crummy 2008, no doubt, but even in a crummy year he posted a .391 OBP. And with his BABIP under .300 despite a 23.4% LD rate, that screams for some positive regression in 2009, which would help drive his overall line up back toward his 2005-7 numbers, which average him out to be worth around 40 runs over average with the bat if he could play a full season. Park adjusting his final line (only looking at away numbers is the wrong method), moves that number to about 34 runs. How likely are either of those things to happen? Helton’s been durable throughout his career, but you always worry about injuries to aging first baseman so there’s surely a non-trivial likelihood that he will not fully require. How much you want to knock off, I’ll leave up to you the reader.

Helton’s defense according to UZR plays slightly north of neutral with just enough positive trend for me to say that his glove plus his 12.5 run penalty for playing first base would come out to a negative 10 run total. Again, over a full season. Adding those up and throwing in replacement level, we arrive at 44 runs over replacement per season for Helton, roughly mirroring Teixeira. Helton is considered an anchor with either a three-year, $57 million or a four-year, $75 million contract. Yes, there’s a six year difference in age between the two, but if Helton returns to 2005-7 form (a safe-ish bet) he just has to be able to log between 400 and 500 plate appearances to justify his contract for 2009. Seems surprising for a guy many have written off at this point.

About six weeks ago, Dave Cameron profiled Randy Johnson as a potential free agent bargain because teams were still too bent on using things like wins and ERA to quantify pitchers.

Johnson is still unsigned and not generating as much interest on the open market as one might expect for a guy who had so much success last year and only has leverage to hold out for a one, maybe two-year deal. Arizona CEO Jeff Moorad recently expressed that the team was in need of another starting pitcher, but it sounds as if the bridge between the Big Unit and the Diamondbacks has been, if not burned, then at least made impassable for the time being. Arizona wanted Johnson to take a massive pay cut from his 2007 salary despite a performance not justifying such a demand. In fact, let’s compare two pitchers:

Pitcher A threw strikes 62% of the time and generated a missed bat 6.7% of the time.
Randy Johnson threw strikes 68% of the time and made batters miss on 10.6% of his pitches.

Pitcher A, traditionally a neutral pitcher, generated 1.25 groundballs for every flyball, but also yielded a line drive on 21.1% of batted balls.
Johnson, traditionally a slight GB pitcher, was neutral on groundballs in 2008, but allowed only 18.2% of batted balls to be line drives.

Pitcher A struck out just under two batters for every walk he yielded.
Randy was almost double that, at just under four strikeouts per walk.

Pitcher A’s FIP was 4.32 over 196 innings and his Marcel projects his FIP at 4.73 next year.
Johnson’s FIP was 3.76 and he pitched 184 innings. His Marcel projects him for a 4.11 FIP in 2009.

Who would you rather have based on those numbers? Seems pretty simple right? Here’s where you’d expect me to name some random 30-year-old pitcher so that naysayers could point to Randy’s age as a means behind the snubbing. Well, Pitcher A is Jamie Moyer. Like Randy, he’s left-handed and Jamie is about 10 months older than Johnson. Moyer just signed a two-year deal guaranteeing him $13 million with easily reached innings-based bonuses likely worth an additional $1-2 million per year.

According to what we know, Johnson offered to take a 50% pay cut and sign a one-year deal in the range of $7-8 million for 2009. His Marcel projection has him worth around $15 million on a one year deal. The Diamondbacks reportedly offered him about $3 million. They made a huge, potentially division-costing mistake and Johnson still looms on the open market, an insane bargain just looking for a savvy shopper.

One of the more silent names on the winter market thus offseason has been of Orlando Hudson’s. While the demand for shortstops appears strong amongst contending teams, the second base market is considerably dryer and Hudson is suffering from that.

Like Rafael Furcal, Hudson lost a significant portion of 2008 to injury, but much less so, still appearing in over 100 games and performing well. Marcel isn’t willing to up Hudson’s projected PA total much in 2009, but he still clocks in at 488 PA and an above average offensive projection, around 7.5 runs above average when pro-rated out to 600 PAs.

Second baseman get 2.5 runs for their position over a full season, so just like with Furcal, if we project Hudson for a full slate of games, we arrive at a figure of 10 runs over average if projected for 600 PAs. Moving to Hudson’s defense, UZR loved him while he was with Toronto but cooled on him as soon as he moved to Arizona. In the end, we’re left with him rating as roughly a +8 defender in Toronto and roughly a -4 while with Arizona. Now that could just be aging or injury, or just a fluke of the park or league and UZR is just one measurement so it’s really up to you to decide where to peg his defense.

Using -4 and +8 as the range of possibilities, we are left with a player between +6 and +18 runs over average, or between +23 and +35 runs over replacement per 600 PAs (we normalized to 700 last time, but I am using the more realistic 600 PAs this time since the offensive projection was not as well suited to 700 PAs as Furcal’s was.). Sticking with the $5 million per win as the market rate, we get an acceptable range between $11 and $17.5 million per year. First, yes, that’s quite a big range, but I think it’s interesting that for someone with such a high projected value, there’s been tepid interest at best for his services so far. Perhaps teams are really scared about his wrist injury and what that could do to his offense.

Given the deal Furcal is likely about to sign, three plus a vesting or four years outright, a three year deal seems a reasonable estimate for Hudson. If Hudson’s deal ends up being for less than Furcal’s on average, that might turn out to be a steal for whichever team capitalizes on the down market.

Going by the frequency of rumors, it seems that Rafael Furcal might be on the verge of signing his likely last big payday. Since we haven’t yet done it here at FanGraphs, let’s go through what he should be worth.

2008 was obviously injury-shortened, leaving just 36 games worth of data, so projecting Furcal forward not only has to deal with a limited sample size in recent times, but also needs to account for his raised injury concerns. Marcel projects Furcal for just 310 at bats next season, roughly half a year’s worth of performance. It is also highly skeptical of his 2008 batting lines, painting him with just a .336 wOBA, giving him 1.2 runs above average, or about 2.5 over a full season.

Shortstops get 7.5 runs for their defensive position so if we want to be optimistic and give Furcal credit for a full season at shortstop, we have him so far at 10 runs above average. Looking at his past UZR’s, it seems clear that UZR rates him between 0 and -5 runs on average. Split the difference and we get those 2.5 runs back from his bat. In other words, Furcal grades out as exactly average when you combine his bat and his glove and what we are left with is how much time he is able to log at shortstop.

Therefore, we have Furcal projected at roughly 28 runs above replacement (splitting the difference between 10 and 10.5 runs per win) per 700 PAs for 2009. Assuming $5 million per win on the free market, that would make Furcal, over 700 PA, worth about $13.5 million on a one-year deal if you think he can play a full season. Marcel would have him worth half of that.

Furcal seems destined to ink a four-year deal, so we’re looking at roughly $12 million a year if you think he’s healthy enough to be a full time starter. Current rumors have the Athletics leading the bidding at $10 million per year over those four years with other teams potentially interested. If I were to guess, I’d put money on a four-year deal in the range of about $44 million for Furcal, which prorating against the $48 million 700 PAs would command means that the signing team would need Furcal to produce exactly league average offense and defense for 640 PAs a year to break even on value.

Of course there are other factors. If healthy, Furcal’s bat might be worth a lot more as it was in 2005 and 2006. His defense, which other metrics love, might be a lot better. His health might be fine. Of course, there’s the flip side to all of those as well. In the end, it looks like Furcal’s market value is coming in right around the projections, but with full health, a common occurrence that we see in baseball; GMs are rare to properly account for injury concerns.

A continuation of the series of retrospectives looking back at the regular season and how teams fared. They will be presented, from first to last, in order of their run differential as given by the BaseRuns formula and adjusted for strength of schedule, which I feel is the best measurement of a team’s actual talent level.

Number Thirty: Washington Nationals

And so we come to the end and with little fanfare and even less surprise, we finish off our run of reviews with the Washington Nationals. It may not be surprising that the Nats finished last, but it was closer than you probably thought. Going by straight BaseRuns differential, the Pirates actually finished worse than Washington by a full win, 62.5 to 63.5. However, Pittsburgh had some mildly stiff competition in the NL Central while the Nats faced a weaker overall schedule and there was enough of a spread to help push the Nationals back into the bottom slot.

Washington finished dead last in scoring according to BaseRuns, accruing just 639 runs against 808 runs allowed, which was actually good (bad?) enough to rank 24th overall, though given that they’re a National League team, that’s still pretty bad. Only two other teams in the league (the Reds and the Pirates) were slated to have allowed more. What might be horrifying is that these Nats were all together a better group of players than last year’s version.

Last year, the Nationals defense finished 17th overall according to John Dewan’s Plus/Minus ranking. This year, they improved by 42 plays and ten slots, coming in 7th with almost the entire difference coming out of the middle infield. The return of Cristian Guzman meant that Felipe Lopez could be moved back off shortstop, which helped to solidify the team up the middle. Though perhaps they should have just ditched Lopez on another team sooner as his offense wasn’t up to par while Belliard continued to be adequate at the plate. Guzman even finally put together a respectable season in the final year of his heavily-mocked four-year deal. Nick Johnson and Dmitri Young had too brief roles in the 2008 team, but both were positive in nature and newcomer Elijah Dukes chipped in as well.

The one area that the Nationals did falter in 2008 was in the bullpen. Last year they received an astounding amount of support from the duo of Jon Rauch and Chris Schroder. Together they were worth something around 30 runs over average covering about 130 innings of relief. That’s tremendous, one of the best relief pairs in baseball. In 2008, Schroder was back in Triple-A for some reason and though Rauch was still effective, he was hard-pressed to match 2007 and also ended up in Arizona by the end of the season.

The rotation however boasted zero, that’s right zero, members with above average core numbers. And amazingly, that group was still better than their 2007 counterparts by a good 30 or 40 runs, underscoring just how wretched the 07 rotation was. The change in 208 was that while everyone was mediocre, they were all mediocre. Mike Bacsik was gone and Matt Chico saw his innings cut dramatically. Tim Redding and Odalis Perez actually did fair jobs holding down a regular rotation spot and eating enough innings at just a below average pace.

Washington is a deeply flawed team filled with a farm system that needs help and time. They’ll get some help with the upcoming draft in which they have the first overall pick and though they have signed no one of substance as of yet, they remain constantly linked to big name free agents and thus might make a splash before the winter is done (or started, to be seasonally accurate).

Holy moly.

In case anyone still had doubts, I think the Winter Meetings have officially passed the trade deadline for the most exciting transactional period in the baseball calendar. A day after the Mets inked Francisco Rodriguez and mere hours after the defending AL champion Rays fleeced the Tigers in a Dontrelle Willis-redux trade, the Mariners, Mets and Indians got old-school on all of us with a blockbusting three-team, twelve-player deal!

Here’s how it appears to be breaking down:

To the Mets goes J.J. Putz, Jeremy Reed and Sean Green from the Mariners.

To the Indians goes Joe Smith from the Mets and Luis Valbuena from the Mariners.

To the Mariners goes Franklin Gutierrez from the Indians and Aaron Heilman, Endy Chavez, Mike Carp, Maikel Cleto, Jason Vargas and Ezequiel Carrera from the Mets.

Where to start? In the simplest part I suppose, the Indians. They lose a terrific defender in Gutierrez, but he was blocked from full value by Grady Sizemore and the emergence of Ben Francisco and some intriguing at bats from Shin-Soo Choo made him expendable. In return they get a serviceable relief arm in Smith and another intriguing middle infield prospect in Luis Valbuena to pair with Asdrubal Cabrera who they got two years ago. Solid move for them.

The Mets continue to re-shape their bullpen adding Putz and Green. If Putz rebounds close to his 2006 or 2007 form, that’s a tremendous revamping for the next couple years. Green provides solid support against right-handed hitters. Heilman and Chavez weren’t pieces the Mets were going to miss and Reed adequately fills in the reserve outfielder role. The other assorted minor leaguers, while not total flotsam, also weren’t likely to end up on anyone’s top prospects list either. For a team competing in the short term, as the Mets are, this is a win for them.

From the Mariners point of view, Heilman might be more useful than Green since he’s not so limited to only right-handed batters, and Endy Chavez is pretty comparable to Jeremy Reed, so knocking those off the Ms get four minor leaguers and Franklin Gutierrez for JJ Putz and Luis Valbuena. While that may seem underwhelming to most, Gutierrez’s defense is legitimately outstanding. Good enough to probably make him a rough equal to JJ Putz in terms of projected value. The four-for-one prospect swap further cements this as a good deal for the Ms, who are clearly building with an eye to the future but also maintaining some view on the present.

All in all, this seems like each team comes out ahead, so kudos to all three GMs.

A continuation of the series of retrospectives looking back at the regular season and how teams fared. They will be presented, from first to last, in order of their run differential as given by the BaseRuns formula and adjusted for strength of schedule, which I feel is the best measurement of a team’s actual talent level.

Number Twenty nine: Pittsburgh Pirates

By BaseRuns, the Pirates managed just above 700 runs scored which actually wasn’t too poor for the National League, about 20 to 25 runs below average. However, it was on the the defensive side that the Pirates became the Pirates that we have known for the past fifteen or so years. At an estimated 894 runs allowed, the Pirates were 60 runs worse than any other National League team and ahead of only the Texas Rangers in all of baseball. The 191 run spread between their runs scored and allowed was the worst in all of baseball, 22 runs worst than the Nationals.

The Pirates outfield went bonkers this season as Jason Bay, Nate McLouth and Xavier Nady went from 14 runs above average to 66 in 2008 for the Pirates, which given that both Bay and Nady were traded mid-year to the Red Sox and Yankees respectively makes the improvement even more significant. Ryan Doumit helped chip in some good production out of the catcher position. Of course, that leaves the infield as the primary cause for the Pirates offense being below average.

The bullpen in 2007 benefited from good contributions from Matt Capps and Damaso Marte and while they both stuck around and were both still above average in 2008, they lost about a win and a half in value. Their supporting cast did them no favors, specifically Marino Salas, Evan Meek and Franquelis Osoria were collectively in the range of 23 to 30 runs below average.

As poor as the bullpen was, it was the rotation that torpedoed the Pirates hope for breaking the consecutive streak of below .500 seasons. Zach Duke rebounded from his disastrous 2007 campaign, but that was of little solace when Ian Snell and Tom Gorzelanny completed collapsed, leaving the Pirates with Paul Maholm and little else capable of posting even respectable lines.

The Pirates have some promise in their system, but much like the Giants, any hope of contention in the near future is going to hinge on their young group of starters fulfilling their promise. A hope that looks especially dimmer after a bleak 2008.

A continuation of the series of retrospectives looking back at the regular season and how teams fared. They will be presented, from first to last, in order of their run differential as given by the BaseRuns formula and adjusted for strength of schedule, which I feel is the best measurement of a team’s actual talent level.

Number Twenty Eight: Seattle Mariners

A victim, yes victim, of good luck in 2007 and the misfortune to not have enough foresight in the front office to properly weight their own assets. It’s not they there were far off base in thinking that they had a chance at the AL West title in 2008. While they did over perform in 2007, so did the Angels and a revised division standings had all four teams within just a few games of each other.

Seattle’s collapse in 2008 was the product of a multitude of failures. The trade for Erik Bedard improperly judged their own prospects and over valued Bedard’s 2007, glossing over the valid injury concerns. The signing of Carlos Silva showed continued ignorance of how to evaluate past pitching and a complete misjudgment of the free agent market.

The Mariners failed to plan for Richie Sexson not bouncing back, resulting in having Bryan LaHair and Miguel Cairo splitting time after Sexson was released. They inexplicably gave Kenji Johjima a three-year extension, tying up their catching position. They failed to notice that Yuniesky Betancourt‘s defense was slipping or that Raul Ibanez’s defense had already collapsed.

Yes, they faced some bad luck. The number and extent of the injuries they encountered were unfortunate and would have hurt any team. They also dealt with unlucky hitters in the form of line drives not going for hits as often as would be expected. Those unlucky breaks would have turned any good team into an average one, but combined with a lack of planning reminiscent of FEMA-circa Katrina, it created a crater so large as to finally swallow the front office.

Going forward, the new front office will benefit from a bar set so low that they would exceed expectations simply by not doing anything and thus not actively damaging themselves. It’s likely to be a few years before serious contention can come again, but with some real talent in the organization and loads of financial resources finally paired with competence in management, that day may come sooner than most think.