With just 331 Major League innings under his belt, Ricky Romero has to be feeling quite pleased with his new contract, the largest ever given to a pitcher with his service time. The five-year deal begins in 2011 and so it buys out all of Romero’s arbitration years, one of his free agency seasons and even contains a club option on another. There is no solid word yet on the breakdown of the salaries, signing bonus or any information on the option. Still, we can offer a rough evaluation of the deal from just the 2011 through 2015 part.

Romero will finish his second year of service time in 2010 and would have been on a club-controlled contract for 2011. He would then be arbitration eligible for 2012, ’13 and ’14 and a free agent or 2015. Given the standard guide of 40%/60%/80% of market value expected for arbitration rulings, the five years of Romero’s contract add up to 2.8 seasons of free market worth plus one year at the league minimum. That is what Toronto and Romero are surrendering by not going year-to-year.

With a payment of $30.1 million guaranteed, that works out to the Jays paying Romero $10.75 million per market year. With current trends pegging the market dollars paid per win at around $4 million we have an estimation of about 2.75 to 3.0 wins per season for the contract’s middle point once we factor in the discount Romero should be offering for the security of a long-term deal.

Romero produced 2.7 WAR last season and is already at 3.4 this year so on the face of it, this looks like a possible win for the Blue Jays already. With just two seasons of data to judge with, we must be careful about sniffing out any possible regression however. Luckily for Toronto, there does not appear to be any red flags with Romero’s Major League numbers. His FIP is close to his xFIP and his BABIP and HR/FB rates are normal. He misses bats and gets ground balls giving him a safety net if his stuff diminishes over the course of the deal.

With the club option details unknown, I believe that if Romero can stay healthy, this contract is likely to end up being slightly favorable to Toronto. I don’t see Romero getting ripped off though, especially with so much uncertainty lingering in how future free agent markets are going to shape up. This is a fair deal to both sides.

Cliff Lee is having a season for the ages. His prodigious strikeout to walk ratio this year has been well documented, but it practically deserves a note after every one of his starts. I am going to bring it up again, but in my own way. I don’t particularly fancy walks as the ideal denominator in this ratio.

For one, it includes intentional walks and I don’t like that. Though it is less of an issue for starting pitchers than it is for relievers it is still a relevant distinction to make for National League pitchers who might see more intentional walks given to the hitter in front of the pitcher. Secondly, it leaves out hit batsmen, which I think should be included. After all the result is the same, a free base to the hitter. I have mentioned previously that I favor a number that I deemed “free passes” and someone else offered “net walks” which is unintentional walks and hit batsmen. Not coincidentally, that is the number used in the FIP formula and others.

After Cliff Lee’s recent 11 strikeout, no walk performance against the Yankees, I decided to see where he was currently stacking up against the history books. Now I already knew that his traditional strikeout to walk rate was among the best baseball has ever seen, a remarkable feat in and of itself. Pundits owe it to the public to discuss frequently anytime anyone in baseball manages to best an all time record. With so many years of history behind it, breaking any baseball record is a difficult task. Cliff Lee’s 15.2 strikeout to walk ratio is on that pace with the current best mark (minimum 160 innings pitched) being Bret Saberhagen’s strike-shortened 1994 season where he struck out 143 and walked 13 for an 11.0 ratio.

15.2 is a whole lot better than 11.0 but it gets even more impressive. Cliff Lee has two intentional walks and just one hit batter. By contrast, Saberhagen had no intentional walks in 1994 and plunked four batters. Utilizing net walks, Cliff Lee’s ratio increases to an overwhelming 17.1 strikeouts per free pass issued while Saberhagen drops all the way to 8.4.

Saberhagen is not the only one to experience a sharp change in ratio with this tweak in the walk number. Pedro Martinez hit 14 batters in 2000 (and 15 in 2002) and including those drops his rate from 8.9 to 6.2. That is still impressive, but is no longer one of history’s best. On the other side, Greg Maddux had 11 intentional walks (witness that pesky NL factor) and just three hit batters so his ratio jumped from 6.1 to 8.6, turning an otherwise ordinary Maddux season into the fourth best mark in baseball history.

Just in case you were wondering, the projected top spot on this revised list doesn’t change. Cliff Lee is still dominating the records, but now he is doing so by a bigger margin, a seemingly impossible accomplishment. While before there was Saberhagen at 11 and a couple other pitchers above the 9.0 threshold, take a look at the top ten when using net walks:

Two things jump out to me. Fergie Jenkies was really ahead of his time and Cliff Lee is nearly doubling the greatest mark ever. That’s dominance on an incredible scale.

One of the benefits of never walking anyone is that you generally throw fewer pitches per batter and get to last deeper in games. With Cliff Lee running 1910-like walk rates his bullpen can figuratively safely go get smashed the night before any of his starts. Lee’s last start lasting just 6.1 innings was his shortest outing since equaling that total on May 21. Those two are the shortest he has worked all season long.

It’s not just that Lee has consistently gotten into the 7th inning, it’s that he’s consistently gotten into the 9th. 15 of his 20 starts so far have gone at least eight innings. Seven of those have gone a full nine. That sort of efficiency puts Cliff Lee in some rarefied air. With 161.1 innings pitched over those 20 starts, Lee is averaging 8.1 innings for every start the he makes.

I do not have historical numbers on how that exactly ranks, but I can use the slightly more general number of innings pitched per game to put Lee’s performance thus far into greater context. Since 1950 (a rather arbitrary year chosen to get past the early years and the World War II years), there have been just 49 pitchers to hurl at least 160 innings and average at least eight innings per appearance. Lee currently sits 40th on that list nestled between Tom Seaver’s 1973 season and Alex Kellner’s 1953 campaign.

Obviously, pitchers threw more innings the further back we go in history. Complete games used to be the norm instead of the exception. To get a sense of this one just needs to look at those 49 pitchers arranged in chronological order. Aside from Lee, the last pitcher to cross that eight-inning barrier was Greg Maddux in 1994. And before him, the last time it occurred was in 1983 when both Ron Guidry and Mario Soto did it.

Over the last 27 baseball seasons, only Greg Maddux has done what Cliff Lee is currently doing in terms of eating innings.

In a move more inevitable than surprising, Jack Zduriencik fired Manager Don Wakamatsu, Bench Coach Ty Van Burkleo, Pitching Coach Rick Adair and Mental Coach Steve Hecht from the Mariners yesterday afternoon. Several coaches received promotions to fill the vacant roles, including Triple-A Manager Daren Brown becoming the Mariners’ interim manager.

It seems that whenever a manager is fired, the question of whether he deserved it will arise and usually the first point brought up will be the team’s record to date — usually a poor one — followed by someone countering that a manager rarely has much of an effect over a team’s record. For instance, the Mariners were 42-70 at the time of Wakamatsu’s firing. Was he responsible for that? He wasn’t at fault for all 70 losses. He was probably to blame for more than zero. He was also probably to credit for more than zero of their wins. Where does the scale balance out? I don’t know, but I do find it odd that this sort of back-and-forth is almost exclusively applied to coaches only.

Sticking with the Mariners, earlier this season Eric Byrnes earned his release after a brutal stretch of play. There was some discussion about whether he deserved that release given the roster make up and what his future projections looked like, but I do not recall anyone stating that the Mariners were 11-14 at the time and thus he deserved to be let go.

We don’t apply the same expectations for managers as we do for players, and we shouldn’t. Players are paid to produce on the field and we’ve gotten pretty good at isolating one player’s contributions to a team’s wins so we generally disregard the team’s overall record when talking about a single player. We do not have a good way to evaluate the impact of a manager, though, and so a team’s overall record becomes sort of the default metric.

On its own, using a team’s record as justification for firing the manager implies that he had direct control over said record. I would contend that no matter who helmed the Mariners this season, they were unlikely to post a meaningfully different record. I think most people agree with that. I think most people agree that the brunt of the blame falls on a combination of random variation, the players themselves for not producing up to expectations and on the front office for assembling said players. To those that disagree, however, to those that believe that a manager has — or can have — a major impact on a team’s wins and losses, I have a question. Why are managers paid so little?

We assume that all teams seek to maximize their number of wins for their expenditures. If managers could routinely positively or negatively affect their teams by more than a few wins, then it would stand to reason that they deserve exorbitant salaries.

We do not have good up-to-date data on manager salaries, but as recently as 2007 the average manager made $1.4 million and the median salary was just $850,000 due to Joe Torre’s $7.5 million really busting the curve. Torre no longer makes that much and I doubt there’s been any major inflation in the salaries paid to managers during the past three years. If we apply the same dollar-to-win conversion that we use for players, then front offices are valuing a manager’s contributions to the team’s won-loss record at around a quarter of a single win on average and even the highest-paid managers clock in around a single win worth of salary.

Front offices should have the best insight into how much chemistry and leadership in the clubhouse matters. If it’s too unpredictable to judge, then why use that to justify hiring and firing of managers? If it matters and is predictable, then my question is, why aren’t they paying for it?

Erik Bedard made it all the way to, what was supposed to be, his lone Triple-A rehab start before breaking down again. Bedard had progressed so far that he even had a scheduled start for the Mariners before suffering from shoulder pain after his Triple-A outing. Medical imaging and three surgical opinions later and Bedard heads back under the knife today. Though no official word came out, it appears from quotes that the procedure aims to clears out some bone spurs in Bedard’s shoulder. A normal recovery for that procedure would put Bedard on track to be ready for Spring Training in 2011 but it is difficult to put faith in the normal time line at this point.

The Mariners invested $1.5 million guaranteed dollars in Erik Bedard this season. That investment has not paid off. The Mariners are used to that this season, but in the case of gambling on an injury-prone pitcher they are not alone in the AL West this season. The Rangers gave $7.5 guaranteed million to Rich Harden coming off his two reasonably close to full seasons and the Athletics gave a whopping $10 million to Ben Sheets even though he hadn’t thrown a competitive Major League pitch in 18 months.

Neither team has had the risk rewarded. Harden became a shell of his former self with half his swinging strike rate and a career high walk rate. Over 72 innings pitched so far, he’s been below replacement level. Rehabbing another injury, Harden is likely to end up in a relief role if he manages to make it back.

Ben Sheets is also spending his days on the disabled list right now. Seeking other opinions on his elbow injury, Sheets is hoping to avoid missing the remainder of 2010 but the picture remains murky on that front. In his 119.1 innings tossed before being shelved, Sheets also suffered from a reduced swinging strike rate and a career high walk rate. A pitcher once renowned for his strikeout to walk ratios posted just a 2.0 ratio in 2010. His 0.7 WAR is valued at just under $3 million leaving Oakland currently with a $7 million shortfall.

The conclusion isn’t that injured pitchers aren’t worth the risk. All pitchers are risky, even the seemingly healthy ones and getting anyone with talent at a discount is always an avenue worth investigating. The point is to remember why teams consider these pitchers high risks to contribute in the first place. It’s to remember the other side from the too-easy story of redemption and coming back. Sometimes people don’t get off the mat. And it’s because not everyone does or even can that makes those that do special.

Pitchers are not afraid of Jack Wilson. One way that might be illustrated is by the percentage of pitches he sees that are located within the strike zone. With 55.9% of the pitches he faces being located in the strike zone, Wilson would rank first in that category were he qualified. The following does not entirely capture the decision process, but I believe offers a good outline of how a pitcher might approach any given hitter:

If the hitter lacks patience at the plate then the pitcher has less incentive to throw strikes, knowing the hitter is more likely to chase after anything. However, that is counter-acted upon by the hitter’s raw power. If the hitter lacks power then even if you throw him a strike, the pitcher has less worry about how much damage the hitter can do and so it becomes better to throw strikes.

The above should be obvious enough, but I wanted to put some specific numbers behind it. Like most of my statistical investigations, I had a particular player acting as the impetus. In this case, it was Jack Wilson. Wilson is one of the weaker hitters out there with isolated slugging peaking around the .100 mark and projected to be more in the .075 range now.

These thoughts had been on my mind for a few days when it took the next step to noticing just how many 0-2 counts Jack Wilson subsequently found himself facing. Again it should be obvious how difficult it is to hit once in an 0-2 count. Hitters average a .454 OPS if they arrive at 0-2. Therefore, avoiding 0-2 counts by either laying off pitches out of the strike zone or by being enough of a threat that pitchers skirt more of the strike zone should be considered an admirable goal for a hitter.

Which hitters are the best and worst at that? To determine that I took the number of plate appearances for each hitter that went to 0-2 and divided it by the number of plate appearances for that hitter that lasted at least three pitches. I wanted to avoid having the numbers skewed by hitters that are swing-happy and contact-prone. While this method by no means sparks a metaphorical light bulb in ranking hitters, I did find it interesting.

Among the hitters most adapt at avoiding 0-2 counts are the high-power and high-walk sluggers you’d expect. David Ortiz leads the list at 14.5%, Jim Thome is 4th, Alex Rodriguez is 5th, Albert Pujols is 8th. There are some surprises though like Casey Kotchman being 2nd. Unsurprisingly, much worse hitters populate the other end of the ranking. Aaron Rowand has the worst mark at a whopping 40% followed by Wes Helms (37%) and Mark Ellis (35%). In fact, there are virtually no successful hitters above the 30% mark aside from maybe Cody Ross.

Getting into 0-2 counts is borderline crippling for a hitter’s chances to succeed. Avoiding them, however, does not guarantee success. A hitter still has to possess the ability to turn those hitter’s counts into something productive and that largely requires slugging power.

Wow, what a trading deadline that was! One for the ages certainly and one that people will remember whenever trade deadlines are mentioned, forgetting that the vast majority are closer to snoozefests than the shop-a-thon of this year’s.

Given how active it was, it is easy to have July 30’s Chicago-Colorado game get a bit lost in the shuffle. To recap, here is what happened with two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning:
Carlos Gonzalez single
Troy Tulowitzki double
Brad Hawpe double
Chris Iannetta triple
Ian Stewart home run
Clint Barmes single
Melvin Mora double
Dexter Fowler home run
Ryan Spilborghs single
Carlos Gonzalez single
Troy Tulowitzki double
Brad Hawpe walk
Chris Iannetta walk
Ian Stewart fly out

Thirteen consecutive hitters reached base spanning three pitchers: Sean Marshall, Andrew Cashner and Brian Schlitter. Cashner was the worst of the offenders, coming in after Hawpe’s double and being relieved after Spilborghs’ single. He faced six hitters and recorded no outs on six balls in play. Here Cashner’s pitch location chart, courtesy of BrooksBaseball:

Note the light blue marks representing balls put into play of which there were six and none resulting in an out. Five of the six were centrally located vertically and the one that wasn’t was over the middle of the plate at the knees. Four them could be called center-center. Suffice to say, that’s not the great place to try and live for a pitcher and it’s no wonder that the Rockie hitters were able to tee off so effectively.

If you had to guess which team in baseball had played the best overall game so far this season, who would you guess? The Yankees? The Rays? The surprising Padres? How many teams do you guess before the Twins?

The Twins host the Mariners this weekend for a three game set and while previewing that series over at a local Mariner blog, I took notice of just how good the Twins were ranked across the four team categories –hitting, defense, starting pitcher, relief pitching—that I break teams down by. By my rankings, I have the Twins as the second best offense, sixth best defense (rated by UZR) and fourth best in both starting and relief pitching. The WAR rankings here at FanGraphs agree exactly on the position players but differ slightly, to third in starting and 11th in relieving, on the pitchers. Even still, both of our rankings agree, there has been no better team in baseball this season than the Minnesota Twins.

So how come they are only 56-46 and currently out of the playoff picture? Partly they have been unlucky in allowing runs. Despite a very good defense and a home park that, while too early to tell, seems to be leaning toward pitcher friendly, the Twins have an ERA that is 17 points higher than their FIP.

On the hitting side, Minnesota has also been hurt by some unclutch performances at the plate. Their team -1.40 clutch rating is 11th worst in baseball. They have also been unlucky when it comes to turning runs into wins. According to BaseRuns, the Twins should be expected to have about a .586 winning percentage to date worth between three and four extra wins over their current record. That would put them on par with the Rangers and just a few games behind Tampa and New York, which is more in line with where they belong.

The Twins were a preseason favorite for a reason and even with the loss of Joe Nathan they have played up to the level expected of them. All that is left is for the wins and losses to catch up to the individual at bats performances.

It looks increasingly likely that the Rangers will win the American League West division. If that happens, a big reason for their success will be Josh Hamilton and his monstrous season at the plate. How has Hamilton gone from his disappointing 2009 season to this dream season of anyone who ever once discussed what Josh Hamilton might look like if he reached that rarified air of a prospect’s ceiling?

In one word: power. Hamilton’s walk rate is unchanged from last season and his strikeout rate, though improved, is equal to what it was in 2008 and on balance with his overall career rate. However, his isolated slugging which went from .226 in 2008 to .158 last season has not only regressed to but has exceeded his prior numbers. Hamilton’s .279 iso ranks fifth in all of baseball. Helping to reinforce the notion that Hamilton is hitting the ball harder, Josh’s BABIP has ballooned to an eye-opening .399.

Is this increase in power resulting from better hitting, stronger hitting, good luck or some combination? What I call better hitting is more precisely defined by his line drive rate, a measure of how often he squares up on the ball. While line drive rate is prone to fluctuation and issues with scoring bias, since Hamilton has stayed with the same team I feel it a fair comparison. And what that comparison shows is very little difference. Given that, I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting Hamilton to hold on to that AL-leading batting average all season.

As a proxy for stronger hitting, I turned to HitTrackerOnline to get numbers on Hamilton’s home runs. In 2008, Hamilton sprayed home runs to all fields. Last season he hit all ten to either left or right field. None were within 15 degrees of the straight to center field line. Hamilton is back to dispersing his home runs this year, and more concretely his distance numbers are much higher. 2009 Josh Hamilton had an average true distance on his home runs of 412 feet. That’s pretty impressive, but pales against this year’s average of 423 feet. It indeed appears that Hamilton is stronger or in some other way making better contact this season.

The idea of this is to present Arizona’s side of the trade but frankly I have been sitting here for an hour and still cannot even come close to justifying this. The argument that I have heard is that the Diamondbacks needed to shed payroll. I do not have any special insight into their balance sheets so I won’t bother refuting that. I will point out that they were already losing some $30 million in contracts this winter so I’m unsure how low they feel their payroll needs to get. However, even granting that premise, this trade is horrendous.

Make no mistake, Dan Haren is still a very good pitcher and he wasn’t a drain on their payroll. Haren was more than worth his contract. That value obviously makes him an easier commodity to move, but the point then would be to get good assets back. We do not yet know the identity of the player to be named later but have heard that it is not Mike Trout, the Angels only really exciting prospect. The known portions of the trade return range from intriguing but far away (Corbin) to generic (Rodriguez) to downright horrendous (Saunders). Joe Saunders probably doesn’t even make sense to retain given that he’s making almost $4 million this year and would expect to see a raise to the $6 or $7 million mark if he went through arbitration.

That is not a good haul; it’s not even a decent haul. It’s downright bad. It’s the sort of return you’d more expect if the person getting traded was a liability due to his contract, not an asset. The Diamondbacks just acted as if they have no understanding of Haren’s .350 BABIP or that their home park is prone to serving up home runs. The Diamondbacks just acted like Dan Haren was Scott Kazmir. He’s not and whoever eventually takes over as the full time GM in Arizona will rue this day as one that set back the organization significantly.