As we await the stirring finale of R.J.’s Contact Tales series (tentatively called “Who Shot R.J.?”), I thought it might make sense to revisit a post I submitted in these electronic pages just before the start of this shiny new decade.

In said post, I took a look at Matt Hanna’s work on Expected Strikeout Percentage (eK%) — a study that first appeared at DRaysBay and which resulted in this equation:

eK%=(ClStr%*.9)+(Foul%*.5)+(InPly%*-.9)+(InZSwStr%*1.1)+(OZSwStr%*1.5)

As I noted then, what’s particularly revealing about Hanna’s work is that it allows us to see (for the first time, so far as I know) the relative importance of inducing in-zone versus out-of-zone swinging strikes. The latter, if you can believe it, are actually about 2.5 times more important than the former.

Using this information, I then provided a contact leaderboard of starters from last season, weighting O-Contact% about 2.5 time more strongly than Z-Contact%.

The error I made in that post — and which reader dyross brought to our attention in the most agreeable way imaginable — is that I submitted for the reader’s consideration only the O-Contact% (and Z-Contact%). The problem with only providing the contact percentages is that it presupposes a constant O-Swing% among all pitchers — which, obviously, that’s not the case. From just the sample I picked, there’s a range of 12.30% (Sidney Ponson) to 32.80% (Hiroki Kuroda). Certainly, pitching outside of the zone in such a way as to induce swings in the first place — that’s important.

Without further ado, here’s that Top 10 list as it should’ve appeared in place of the one I actually provided. Here swinging strikes are posted as a percentage of all pitches. [TOZSS% = Total Out-of-Zone Swinging Strikes Percentage / TIZSS% = Total In-Zone Swinging Strike Percentage / SDTOZ = Standard Deviations from the Mean, Out-of-Zone / SDTIZ = Standard Deviations from the Mean, In-Zone / wAVG = Weighted Average of Standard Deviations, or (SDTOZ*2.5+ SDTIZ)/2.]

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Today’s projection targets are all either living free or dying: Chris Carpenter, Brian Wilson, and Sam Fuld

Carpenter overcame injury concerns to make 28 starts en route to a 17-4 record and 2.24 ERA. His 3.38 xFIP was almost exactly in line with his career numbers.

Wilson overcame regrettable facial hair and an unseemly faux-hawk to post a 3.23 xFIP and 2.4 WAR over 72.1 mostly high-leverage innings.

Fuld overcame, uh… Okay, Sam Fuld is a stretch, but it was either him or Chad Paronto basically everything, it turns out. And let the record show that he posted a 122 wRC+ in limited time with the Cubs last year!

[Thanks to readers Jon and JoeR43 for setting the record straight on Fuld.]

Note: Oinoanda is pronounced oy-NAN-da. Or, at least, it’s probably pronounced that way.

In my darker moments — that is, chiefly, between my last cup of coffee and first glass of the good stuff — I sometimes find myself asking the most ridiculous questions. Questions like: “What does it all mean?” or “What’s the point of life?” and other sorts of open-ended queries that are probably best left to the Russians of our species.

It’s not something about which I’m proud, but I mention it here because (a) it’s true, and (b) I’m not so special as to have something even remotely like original thoughts or experiences. Translation: The chance that you and/or you and/or you have had similar pangs of existential angst is pretty high.

Like just last week, I stopped while reading something at FanGraphs — Cameron’s piece about Casey Kotchman, I think it was — I stopped and wondered, “Why? Why read about this journeyman first baseman? Is this the most important thing I could be doing? Isn’t there some sort of cancer I could be curing?”

The questions had nothing to do with the merit of Cameron’s article itself — Dave Cameron, as everyone knows, is a sabermetric cyborg with no flaws — but rather the nature of the exercise. In other words, Why should I think about baseball in a time like this?

My guess is, if you asked a reader of FanGraphs or Hardball Times or Beyond the Box Score or any of those places why he reads them, he’d probably say something like, “Because it helps with my fantasy team” or “To read analysis about my team and my team’s rivals” or even just “Beats working.”

Those are fine reasons, but I don’t think they hold up to closer scrutiny. For me, personally, were I stripped of my fantasy teams, were I to possess nothing in the way of team allegiance, were I, in fact, to wake up in a roadside ditch, I would very probably wake up thinking about baseball. And depending on exactly how long I’d been in said ditch — that, and the extent of my injuries (had I any) — I’d most likely try to find a decent wireless signal so’s I could see what the Dave Camerons and Rob Neyers of the world were writing about baseball. In short, thinking about baseball is something I do with great frequency and urgency. And understanding the sabermetric implications of baseballing current events is important to me.

But why?

My guess is it has a lot to do with the Oinoanda Inscription. Not familiar? Neither was I till like a week ago, so don’t sweat it.

The Oinoanda Inscription, according to Epicurus Wiki, was

an inscribed limestone wall conspicuously located in an open marketplace… in the ancient city of Oinoanda. The inscription, commissioned by Diogenes of Oinoanda, proclaimed the wisdom of Epicurus, then deceased for five centuries.

Basically, it was a wall erected by this wealthy guy named Diogenes. Diogenes was a great follower of Epicurus’s doctrine of happiness, and it was owing to this love of Epiciurus that he erected this wall, onto which was inscribed the entirety of the latter’s ethical philosophy.

About the wall and its purpose, philosopher Alain de Botton says in the second of these videos

In order to live wisely, it isn’t enough just ro read a philosophical argument once or twice. We need constant reminders of it, or we’ll forget… We have to counteract the influence of advertising by creating advertisements that say we we really do want. And that’s why Diogenes put up his wall.

Of course, de Botton is using the term “advertisement” quite broadly here. Really an advertisement can be anything that takes your eyes off the figurative prize. For Epicurus, that prize was happiness, and the means by which you attained it was through friendship, freedom, and contemplation.

But, as you might agree, it’s sometimes hard to think about friendship and freedom and contemplation when Beyonce is shaking it and asking you to upgrade. So it’s important to have other “advertisements” that promote right thinking.

I submit that sabermetric blogging represents one such version of these advertisements. No, there are no walls set up in our city centers warning us against the baleful effects of excessive consumption or the pursuit of vain pleasures, but there are blogs — like this one, like a lot of others — designed constantly to remind us of the merits of reason, of the scientific method. The baseballing world provides lots of material to be analyzed and we are able — by virtue of sabermetrics and an army of dedicated, if poorly compensated, authors — to examine how a particular trade or free agent signing or breakout performance ought to be regarded in light of what we know about statistics. And it’s by virtue of these constant reminders that we are, essentially, philosophizing every frigging day.

In the event that you haven’t heard, the Houston Astros have gone and signed Brett Myers. The deal itself — one-year, $5 million with an option for 2011 — seems entirely reasonable to my semi-trained eye. As our man on the scene David Golebiewski notes, Myers has chronically underperformed his xFIPs, a fact almost wholly attributable to an inflated rate of home runs per fly ball, a fact itself that is likely attributable to Citizens Bank Park. Translation: Provided that he’s healthy — which isn’t a guarantee given his injury problems last year — but given that he’s healthy, Brett Myers figures to post a better ERA than we’ve seen from him in a while.

Here’s the thing, though: the signing of Myers gives the Astros six starters. Roy Oswalt, Wandy Rodriguez, and Myers himself are likely candidates to fill the first three spots in rotation. Which, that leaves Bud Norris, Felipe Paulino, and Brian Moehler to compete for the last two.

For a number of reasons, those two spots should go to Norris and Paulino. It’s not just that Norris (4.38 xFIP, 4.25 tERA*) and Paulino (4.10 xFIP, 4.07 tERA*) are likely better than Moehler (4.67 xFIP, 4.49 tERA*), but also that, if Houston has any sense of building for the future, it would make a priority of developing the two young pitchers with upside. Brian Moehler is the absolute knownest of the known quantities. It’s not a terrible quantity, but it’s no great shakes, either.

I’m worried, though. I’m worried that the Astros will somehow see fit to go with Moehler. Yes, there’s a chance that they’re creating the illusion of a competition so’s to prevent their young starters from becoming complacent, but I’m worried that’s not the case. I’m worried they like Brian Moehler. I’m worried he’ll be their fifth starter heading into the season.

Here’s how I’ll feel if such a thing were to happen: sad. Not joking-around sad, but legitimately sad. Way sadder than at the end of a Lars von Trier movie, for example. And while I recognize that may sound melodramatic, I should note that I’m not the sort of person who’s otherwise prone to strong emotion. But I care about baseball, and I look to baseball to provide ethical cues for my life. And it frequently does that. Jack Zduriencik? Yes. Andrew Friedman? Yes, awesome. Brian Myrow? Right on. But this particular move — should it occur — will only reinforce for me that people in charge are fallible to a greater degree than I’d care to acknowledge.

Of course, there’ll be ways to deal with it. As Matt Klaassen showed us on Friday, the power of snark is mighty. (I mean, seriously, that post is brilliant.) Fire Joe Morgan raised snark to the level of high art. But snark isn’t an end in itself. It’s merely one way of coping with flagrant injustice or misbehavior. Snark is the mode to which we resort when we are powerless to protest in any other way. It’s fun, sure, but it’s not ideal. Ideally, men in charge — that is, men whose acts are conspicuous and, for better or worse, provide a model for the rest of us — make decisions using the faculty of reason. Ideally, the Astros make Brian Moehler their long reliever. The alternative will be disappointing.

My friend Danny and I have harbored the notion over the last year or so that no single baseball player looks more baseball-y than Oakland outfielder Ryan Sweeney. Sweeney is 6-foot-4, muscular in a lean way, and is conspicuously in possession of what the scouting community refers to as “long levers.” And while I’m no expert on the subject, I’m almost positive that he has The Good Face, too. He is, essentially, a jeans model.

And here’s the thing about jeans models in baseball: we’ve been trained to be suspicious of them. Moneyball — a.k.a. the reason that many of us were called to sabermetrics — trained us to be suspicious*. The draft room scene in which Billy Beane and his nerd sidekick Paul DePodesta are forced to defend the relative merits of bad body catcher Jeremy Brown to the Old Scouts — that scene drew up the battle lines between old and new quite effectively (if a little dramatically). And Beane repeats multiple times in that scene the line that became a veritable mantra for sabermetricians in the early Aughts: “We’re not selling jeans here.”

*Mr. Dave Cameron discussed a similar point recently.

The thing about Sweeney is, regardless of how well he’d do selling jeans, he was more than just a decent player last year. You might be surprised to learn that he was, in fact, a four-win player last year, just below Kendry Morales — 46th out of 154 qualified batters — on the FanGraphs leaderboard for WAR. True, his offense is no great shakes for a right fielder, a fact to which his 104 wRC+ can attest. But defensively — defensively, he appears to have been magical. Regress it however much you want: a 15.5 UZR in only 600 innings is excellent. And it’s totally in line with his 2008 performance, during which he was worth 11.3 runs above average in 487 right-field innings. Overall, for his career, Sweeney has a 30.7 UZR/150 in right with a bit over 1100 innings of play afield.

Our understanding of Sweeney’s value — especially his defensive value — is indicative of a trend in baseball of which you, as a FanGraphs reader, are almost entirely aware — a trend towards run prevention. Certainly, MGL’s UZR metric — which I’m led to believe was referenced on ESPN the other day — has been an important part of that. So, too, Sean Smith’s TotalZone and Tango’s Fan Scouting Reports and John Dewan’s Fielding Bible. Being able to quantify defensive runs has allowed to see certain players in a new light.

What’s interesting about many of these players is that, beyond being toolsy as frig, they’re also what Beane would describe as jeans models. This phenomenon hasn’t gone unnoticed by the editors of Lookout Landing, for example, who’ve settled on a tagline in praise of Franklin Gutierrez: “Our Center Fielder Is Better And/Or More Attractive In A Sexual Way Than Yours.” Gutierrez is essentially the poster boy for this new understanding of defensive value, and he, like Sweeney, has the sort of tools that would — and probably did, when he was younger — enamor scouts.

Of course, the dramatic coincidence here (note: it’s not irony — but we’ll save that discussion for another day), is that Sweeney the Jeans Model plays for Billy Beane, the man who more or less trained us to look past tools (which we maybe conflated, mistakenly, with ignoring tools altogether). And physically, Sweeney and Beane are quite similar. Sweeney’s Baseball Reference page lists him at 6-foot-4, 200 pounds. Beane? Well, I don’t know from which point in his career it’s taken, but his specs are almost identical: 6-foot-4, 195 pounds.

So what’s the lesson here? The same as always, I guess, just in different words. Use all the information you have. Always try to get better information. Don’t be afraid to change your mind if the information suggests you ought to. As the great sabermetrician Ralph Waldo Emerson says:

Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

To the max, Ralph Waldo. To the max.

Commenter Derek mentioned last week that neither Dan Haren nor Brandon Webb had crossed our 30-ballot threshold, so this edition of our Fan Projection Targets goes out to him. Today’s targets, in no particular order, are: Dan Haren, Brandon Webb, and Billy Buckner. Now go project the hell out of them.

Haren cemented his place among the majors’ best starters last year, posting a 3.08 xFIP while topping 200 IP for the fifth consecutive year.

Webb, after having also having topped 200 IP for five consecutive years, pitched all of four innings last year while dealing with shoulder problems.

Though he had a 6.40 ERA last year, Buckner’s 3.95 xFIP suggests that he has the skill to succeed. He’s tentatively slated as Arizona’s fifth starter.

If you read FanGraphs, you’re probably familiar with Sean Smith’s work. Mr. Smith is the progenitor of the CHONE projection system, hosted annually here at FanGraphs and also at his own website, Baseball Projection, through which website you can also access the Projection Blog, where Smith makes periodical notes about or observations on the CHONE projections.

Mr. Smith is also the brain behind the TotalZone defensive ratings available at Baseball Projection and also, for minor leaguers, at Jeff Sackmann’s Minor League Splits.

Finally, it needs to be said, Sean Smith appears to be a genuinely kind person, with whom I am happy to have participated in the following.

Smith consented to be interviewed Sunday by means of EtherPad, a program that allows multiple users to create and edit a document. Hence, the “etherview” — the phenomenon that no one anywhere describes as “the single most important contribution to news media this year.”

Carson: Okay, so first things first: You live in Maryland and are one of baseball nerdom’s most well-known projectionists. That same description — Maryland, projectionist — also applies to Dan Szymborski. My first question is — and it’s super hard-hitting, so watch out — is: Are you and Dan Szymborski the same person?

Sean: You figured us out. Now we’ll have to dispose of you. Just kidding. Dan and I have met before — there was a Baseball Primer (now BTF) meetup for the 2003 world series. There are several witnesses to attest we are different people, not to mention we don’t even remotely look alike. Have not seen Dan since, just emailed a few times. There was a meetup in Baltimore, a group of us saw Manny Ramirez’s 500th homer, but Dan couldn’t make it.

Carson: Mystery semi-solved. But it is true: You live in Maryland. Baltimore or elsewhere?

Sean: About halfway between Baltimore and DC, in the suburbs. Don’t want to be too specific though. You never know about stalkers.

Carson: Were I more successful, that might begin to be a problem. As it is, I do know about stalkers, and I’m confident that I have none.

But here’s why I asked that: because you’re an Angels fan. I mean, even alot of people in Los Angeles aren’t Angels fans. What gives, man?

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With the excellent feedback we’ve had to the Fan Projections, it’s becoming more difficult to find players with too few votes. It’s for that reason that a couple of today’s targets are over the 30-ballot threshold. Still, none of these guys is close to the century mark, either.

Said targets are Kelly Johnson, Martin Prado, and Ryan Roberts.

Johnson has just inked a deal with Arizona for one year at $2MM.

Prado is the man who stole the starting second base job from Johnson last year in Atlanta.

Roberts took over starting duties in Arizona last year after Felipe Lopez left town, posting a 108 wRC+ in 351 PAs.

So long as you didn’t bring the party too hard over the Christmas holiday, there’s a chance you remember the article I submitted for the readership’s consideration last week. In said article, I roundly praised research conducted by Lookout Landing’s Jeff Sullivan this past August — research in which he explored the relationship between pitcher contact rates and strikeouts. Moreover, I posted a Top 10 Leaderboard of the starting pitchers (50 IP and up) with the best Contact%.

Well, in the comments section of said article, user Toffer Peak brought to our collective attention a study done by user matthan over at DRaysBay. Matthan is the user name of Matt Hanna, and his work is an exciting complement to Sullivan’s as it gives us some idea of the importance of Out-of-Zone Swinging Strikes (OZSwStr%) relative to In-Zone Swinging Strikes (InZSwStr%).

The relevant article provides all the answers your little heart would desire — complete with a Google spreadsheet of every pitcher from last year — but the relevant content for our purposes is this formula that Hanna concludes is the best fit for calculating Expected Strikeout Percentage (eK%). Said formula goes:

eK%=(ClStr%*.9)+(Foul%*.5)+(InPly%*-.9)+(InZSwStr%*1.1)+(OZSwStr%*1.5)

The Adjusted R-Squared is: 91.4%

The surprising result here is the degree to which OZSwStr% is weighted over and above InZSwStr%. Nor does that even account for the fact that the average for OZSwStr% (4.89%) is already about twice as a high as InZSwStr% (2.73%).

Once we adjust for that difference as well, OZSwStr% comes out to roughly 2.5 times more important than InZSwStr%. If I’m being honest, I’ll say right now that that runs counter to what I would’ve guessed. My impression has always been, if a pitcher can throw a pitch past a swinging batter but still place said pitch within the strike zone, then he (i.e. the pitcher) would be truly unhittable. What Hanna’s research suggests is quite the opposite, in fact: A pitcher who is able to induce swings (and misses) at pitches out of the zone is, in fact, most likely to tally big strikeout numbers.

This research is quite relevant to the present interweb site, as FanGraphs carries both O-Contact% and Z-Contact% on every player page and in the leaderboards section.

And though, much like Forrest Gump, I’m not a smart man, I thought it might make sense to create a leaderboard in which O-Contact% (or OZSwStr%) was given its due. To that end, what follows is a Top 10 list of the starting pitchers with 50+ IP who led the league in what I’ll call Adjusted K. In fact, what I did was to find how many standard deviations all such pitchers were from the mean in both O-Contact% and Z-Contact%. I then multiplied the O-Contact% standard deviation by 2.44 and averaged it with the Z-Contact% standard deviation. Here are the results (SDO = Standard Deviations from O-Contact% mean / SDZ = Standard Deviations from Z-Contact% mean):

This list greatly resembles the one we looked at last week — with one exception, that is: Freddy Bloody Garcia. Granted, he only pitched 56 IP through nine starts last year, but it appears to be a skill he’s carried throughout his career, as his 46.5% lifetime mark suggests.

So that’s one thing. Now here’s another question of some interest, I think: Which pitchers posted the biggest O-Contact%/Z-Contact% splits in 2009? In other words, which pitchers are best at getting swinging strikes outside the strike zone despite allowing somewhat frequent contact within it. Truly, this would be a list of pitchers who use their talents most efficiently, getting swings and misses outside of the zone, where they are more valuable. Here’s a list of such pitchers (SD O-Z = Standard Deviation of O-Contact% minus the standard deviation of Z-Contact%):

Some of those guys are what you might describe as a pretty big deal. Carpenter and Wainwright, certainly, were at least part of the Cy Young convo in the National League — and both accomplished the feat while conceding a below-average contact rate on balls in the strike zone.

There are certainly other questions to ask about this work. I’m in Paris right now, though, so I’m probably not gonna ask them for at least a couple days.

They’re not necessarily the sexiest names in town, but Coco Crisp, Brandon League, and Jason Marquis all changed teams in the past week and are all still below the 30-ballot threshold. Click here to cast your projections for the triumvirate.

Crisp suffered shoulder problems last season, and Kansas City declined his 2010 option. Oakland just signed the outfielder to a one-year, $5 million deal.

Kinda Disappointing Fireballer League is heading West in exchange for other Kinda Disappointing Fireballer Brandon Morrow. Has Baseballing Wizard Jack Zduriencik struck again?

Jason Marquis, uh, … has a cool last name? Also, he signed two-year, $15 million deal with the Nationals — which, that’s always a good sign.