There was an interesting read kicking around baseball twitter this week, written by A’s fan and blogger Ken Arneson. In it, the computer scientist wonders about a great many things, the most interesting — to me — is his section on pitch selection. It’s Game Theory, I guess, but Arneson lays out four simple criteria for pitchers as they make pitch decisions:

1. Choose a pitch the batter is likely to predict incorrectly
2. Choose a pitch the pitcher is likely to throw with good speed, location, and movement
3. Choose a pitch which will result in a suboptimal swing path, resulting either in a miss or weak contact
4. Choose a pitch which, if not put in play, worsens the batter’s Prediction State for the next pitch

Makes sense, right? Easier said than done but it at least provides some food for thought. Not long after reading this, and for reasons that are entirely my own, I found myself watching highlights of old A.J. Burnett and Josh Johnson starts. Two power pitchers with filthy stuff, the videos or great starts from yesteryear showed what happens when pitchers like this have it all working.

One thing I observed made me think of the checklist above: both pitchers were able to freeze batters with 0-2 fastballs. Rather than waste pitches, these fastballs were seemingly thrown right down Main Street, middle/middle, over the heart of the plate.

Any pitch thrown in that location could be best described as “suboptimal” but, for pitches with stuff to spare on their best days, it worked as an effective pitch. They froze batters who twisted themselves into knots worrying about the hammer or an elevated fastball, the catalyst for chases.

This brought me to Baseball Savant and then it brought me here. I come bearing GIFs.

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The Colorado Rockies do weird things. Whether it’s reorganizing the front office in a way that puts the GM in charge of the farm system instead of the major league roster or having the new GM put an office in the clubhouse, they operate in a way that is unusual for an MLB franchise. Even their player personnel decisions can be a bit odd; heads were certainly scratched after the team made Michael Cuddyer a qualifying offer on Monday, for instance.

The big knock on the Rockies is that they seem unable to commit to a direction or a purpose. Despite four straight losing seasons, they’ve been unwilling to attempt to rebuild, rebuffing offers for not just their star players but for expensive role players like Jorge de la Rosa. Making Cuddyer the qualifying offer appeared to be yet another sign of a team that seems intent on trying to keep the pieces in place together, despite the fact that there’s mounting evidence that this roster just isn’t good enough to contend.

Except maybe extending the qualifying offer to Cuddyer didn’t mean that. A few days after that decision was made, Ken Rosenthal reported that the team has “their eyes and ears open” to potential trades for both Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez, a significant change in stance, as previously both players had been off-limits to suitors. You don’t let teams know that your two best players are finally available if you don’t think there’s a real chance you could trade either or both, and so it seems like the Rockies are finally ready to shake things up and try something different.

So, why make the 35 year old Cuddyer a qualifying offer if you’re planning on blowing things up? Because the calculations for making a QO for a rebuilding team are quite a bit different than for a team that expected to need to maximize payroll efficiency.

Cuddyer’s open market value is probably somewhere in the $10 million range on a two or three year deal, so making him an offer of $15 million for one year means that the team has committed to overpaying by a few million if he accepts the offer. But having an overpaid player that other teams still want isn’t the worst thing in the world for a rebuilding team, as they could simply pay part of his 2015 salary to make him a more desirable trade chip over the summer. With spending restrictions on signing amateur talent, paying the salaries of veteran players to acquire prospects in trade is one of the few ways left to essentially buy talent. Even if Cuddyer accepts the qualifying offer, the Rockies could likely flip him for something of value as long as they kick in a few million dollars, so having him accept isn’t really that harmful to the franchise.

And if he turns it down and gives a contender a discount in annual salary in order to get the multi-year deal he prefers, then the Rockies will receive a compensatory pick in next summer’s draft. Either way, they’d get the chance to add some young talent to the organization. Keeping Cuddyer at $15 million is only really an issue if having him on the books prevented them from making other necessary upgrades, but if they’re trading Tulowitzki and Gonzalez, few free agents of note would have been interested in taking their money to begin with. If you’re blowing things up, it’s better to have expensive trade chips that you can pay down in trade rather than having a bunch of unspent money that no one wants to take.

While it might seem counterintuitive, making the qualifying offer to Cuddyer actually makes more sense in the wake of the news about the availability of Tulowitzki and Gonzalez. It seems like perhaps new GM Jeff Bridich has finally convinced ownership of the need to rebuild, and perhaps the Rockies can start to commit to a direction and stick with it for once. While both Tulo and Gonzalez dealt with injuries again, and both have proven to be quite fragile, putting them on the market this winter actually seems to make some sense, rather than trying to let both prove that they’re healthy before accepting bids.

The idea of keeping both stars until they’re healthy in order to raise their market value seems wise, but let’s think about the logistics of what that might actually look like; in any scenario where both Tulo and CarGo are healthy and playing well, the Rockies are probably also probably a semi-competitive team. After all, they did go 16-12 in April when Tulo was tearing the cover off the ball, and even though this isn’t a great team when both are healthy, it will be a more difficult decision to move either player while the team hangs around the periphery of the Wild Card race.

With a healthy Tulo and CarGo, the Rockies are good enough to convince themselves to not blow things up; the reality of the necessary rebuild only becomes obvious when those two are not able to take the field, exposing a weak supporting cast that can’t make up for the loss of the team’s best players. The dream scenario of being able to trade both players at the peak of their value is probably unrealistic, because at the peak of their value, ownership is going to remember why they’ve been previously unwilling to trade them, and commence the annual spinning of their wheels.

The Rockies best chance to get out of this death spiral is to trade both players now. A weak free agent class on the position player side of things will help drive up demand for the team’s two star hitters, even as both have questions surrounding their health. Teams are more inclined to make blockbuster deals in the offseason anyway, and with teams like Boston actively looking to exchange multiple players for a controllable star, there are teams who will likely take the risk on the health of a younger star rather than taking the risk on a long-term deal for an aging free agent.

After all, while the talking points always center around Tulowitzki’s health, keep in mind that he posted a +5 WAR season in 2014 even while playing just 91 games, and he was over over +5 WAR in 126 games in 2013 as well. Over the last two years, while combining for just 887 plate appearances, Tulo still ranks 11th among position players in WAR. You pay for production, and Tulo’s health risks are offset by his absurd ability to play well when he’s on the field.

Even with the injury problems, Tulowitzki is one of the game’s premier players, and his contract is still well below market value. Shin-Soo Choo got $140 million over seven years last winter; Tulo is due $15 million less than that even if his seventh year option is picked up, which would likely mean that he stayed healthy enough to be worth keeping. Jose Reyes got $102 million over six years coming off an excellent season shortened by injury, and that was three years ago; baseball salaries have only gone up since.

There will be a strong market for Troy Tulowitzki, and Gonzalez should be able to fetch a decent return as well, especially if the Rockies pick up some of the cost of his salary. We’ll deal with a fair return for both players in another post, but for now, I’d suggest that Rockies fans should take this as somewhat promising news. A directionless franchise might actually be ready to commit to an overdue rebuild. Things might really be changing in Colorado for once.

The World Series is over, and though the San Francisco Giants have nailed down their third championship in the last five seasons, there is seemingly no time to savor the accomplishment. Qualifying offers are being extended, the first offseason transactions have begun to trickle across the wire, and hot stove season will soon begin in earnest. This week, however, let’s take one last look at the two World Series participants from a top-sided, macro perspective. How good were the Giants and the Royals, in various aspects of the game? Today, let’s take a look at the AL champion Royals. Read the rest of this entry »

You get a little more time to read in the offseason. Yesterday, I was reading some of the entries to Amazin’ Avenue’s classic AAOP competition, in which readers submit their offseason plan. And then, when Farhan Zaidi was hired by the Dodgers, I watched this video of Zaidi in 2013 at the Sloan Analytics conference. Then some synapses fired: considering Sandy Alderson’s roots, and the current financial state of the Mets ownership, doesn’t it make sense for the Mets to act just a little bit like the Athletics?

What would that look like, this offseason?

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Sometimes, a transaction is so immediately obvious you don’t have to spend any time at all trying to work out the rationale behind it. Other times, a transaction only seems that immediately obvious, because we’re not privy to all of the relevant information. In each case, though, we get to pretend like the move in question is immediately obvious, because we can’t know what we don’t know, and on Wednesday, the Astros made a trade. They got a guy they like, and they like him because of course they like him.

The Astros got one guy for two guys, giving up catcher Carlos Perez and pitcher Nick Tropeano. Perez might take over as the Angels’ backup, and Tropeano might manage to crack the Angels’ starting rotation. But the guy the Astros added is Hank Conger, and though Conger’s is by no means any sort of household name, you could say the Astros just got their Jose Molina. Have I mentioned lately that the Astros employ Mike Fast? Do I even need to?

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The Gold Glove Award winners were announced, and you probably noticed. You probably can’t recall off the top of your head all of the winners, but you can recall some of them. To whatever extent people care about awards, my sense is they care relatively little about the Gold Gloves, because the awards have a history of being stupid and because it’s just really hard, still, to measure defense. The Gold Gloves are the, I don’t know, Sporty Spice? of the baseball awards season.

There’s also the part where the Gold Gloves can just confirm what you already know. You have ideas in your head of the year-to-year best defensive players at each position. What gets a lot less attention are defensive improvements. There are reasons for that, but anyway, it’s interesting to know, for example, that Andrew McCutchen was an awesome hitter in 2014, but it’s differently interesting to know that the same could be said of J.D. Martinez. Baseball’s fun when expectations are met. Baseball’s fun when expectations are not met. Baseball’s fun! So let’s dedicate a little time to players who just took a defensive step forward. As much as we can measure that, I mean.

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The Boston Red Sox goal this offseason is pretty simple: upgrade the rotation. After trading away every member of their Opening Day rotation besides Clay Buchholz, Boston is in need of several quality starting pitchers. Undoubtedly, they’ll be talking with several of the best free agent hurlers on the market, and given how much money they have to spend, it’d probably be an upset if they didn’t grab one of the Max Scherzer/Jon Lester/James Shields trio, with most of the speculation centering around Shields, given the organization’s distaste for long-term contracts.

But given the poor history of throwing big money at players whose previous employers deemed them replaceable, the Red Sox probably shouldn’t try to rebuild their entire rotation through the free agent market. Especially because their in-season pitching selloff netted them a surplus of hitters, especially in the outfield. The Red Sox have set themselves up perfectly to trade a bat for an arm, or at least, a deal centered around those principles. And do I have just the suggested partner for them.

Last year, Cincinnati left fielders — mostly Ryan Ludwick, along with a sprinkling of Chris Heissey and Skip Schumaker — combined for a remarkably poor .233/.288/.339 batting line, one of the primary reasons why the Reds scuffled to a fourth place finish. Ludwick was so bad that the Reds decided to pay him $4.5 million to not play for them in 2015, and now they’re in the market for a new left fielder.

Meanwhile, nearly the entire Reds rotation will qualify for free agency at the end of the 2015 season, and with significant money already committed to Joey Votto, Homer Bailey, and Brandon Phillips, the mid-market Reds are simply not going to be able to keep this group of starting pitchers together. And that means that they should probably trade Johnny Cueto this winter.

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Do you understand how preposterous that title would have sounded last offseason? Ridiculous. You might still think it sounds ridiculous. But before you begin drawing conclusions, let me just present you with a few facts about each player and then some tables to support those facts.

Cliff Lee

• You might have forgotten, but Cliff Lee used to be really bad
• Like, for a while
• One year, he decided to stop walking people
• He also stopped giving up home runs
• As a result, he became very good
• Then, over the course of several seasons, he also started striking people out
• As a result, he went from “very good” to “most dominant pitcher in baseball“

Phil Hughes

• You probably haven’t forgotten, but Phil Hughes used to be really bad
• Like, for a while
• One year, he decided to stop walking people
• He also stopped giving up home runs
• As a result, he became very good

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Let’s stop beating around the bush. No more playing games. You’ve been thinking about it forever. I’ve been thinking about it forever. It’s always there in conversation, lingering somewhere just underneath. When it’s on your mind, you’re not sure how it’s ever not on your mind. It’s maybe the greatest trade hypothetical in baseball today. So let’s just try to figure this out, before the actual offseason starts happening. Would it make sense for the Angels to package Mike Trout and Albert Pujols together for nothing?

The actual question that gets asked gets asked in varying forms, but that’s what’s always right at the core. Does Pujols’ negative value cancel out Trout’s positive value? It’s not even that difficult a question to address. Last March, Dave Cameron referred to Mike Trout as the king of trade value, now and forever. During the summer, Dave asserted that Albert Pujols has the lowest trade value in the majors. This is why Trout and Pujols have been selected: They represent the very best and the very worst of something. Let’s proceed so we can never have to talk about this again — for a week or two.

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Nearly a year ago on these very electronic pages, I wrote a post entitled “The Dodgers And Too Many Outfielders,” investigating the fact that the Dodgers had four starting outfielders — Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier — for three spots, a situation that would only get more complicated when top prospect Joc Pederson arrived. A move, it seemed, was a necessity, and I counted down six ways it could happen.

A year later, a lot has changed, both in terms of how some of those players are viewed and in what outfield positions they play. But what never did change is that Ned Colletti wasn’t able to move any of his veterans, and now Andrew Friedman, Farhan Zaidi and company are left with an even more constricting situation. Puig, Kemp, Crawford, and Ethier are still Dodgers. Pederson put up the first 30/30 season in the PCL in decades on his way to winning the league MVP and Rookie of the Year awards before making his major league debut in September. Most unexpectedly, lightly-regarded backup Scott Van Slyke became one of the league’s most valuable bench players and clearly deserves more time.

Four outfielders? If only. These Dodgers have six, and if we thought a move last year was a probability, now it seems like more of an imperative. But how is this going to resolve itself? Here we go again.

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