The Dodgers have somewhat surprisingly been the most active team so far this offseason, signing Juan Rivera and Mark Ellis as free agents while shelling out huge bucks to retain Matt Kemp long-term. They added another free agent earlier this week, signing catcher Matt Treanor to a one-year contract worth a guaranteed $1 million. There’s also a club option for 2013.

The 35-year-old backstop spent last season with the Royals and Rangers, mustering an 82 wRC+ in 242 plate appearances, both numbers representing the second highest totals of his career. Treanor did shatter his previous career highs in walks and walk rate, drawing 34 free passes (none intentional) for a 14.0% rate. From 2004-2010, the first seven years of his career, he walked in just 8.9% of his plate appearances. Treanor nearly doubled his career walk rate in 2011 by simply not swinging the bat; he went from offering at 50.9% of the pitches he saw in 2009 to just 40.9% this year. Part of that may be explained by batting eighth ahead of the punchless Alcides Escobar for most of the season, but Treanor may have decided he just wasn’t a good hitter, so he wasn’t going to swing unless he absolutely had too.

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The Dodgers, in the midst of a difficult transition period and sale, may have trouble getting approval to sign a big-ticket free agent. That doesn’t mean they can’t affect change in the free agent market place. As the team engages their 27-year-old once-maligned center fielder in extension discussions, they might be preparing do just that. Will the rumored numbers that will keep Matt Kemp off the market — eight years, $160 million — count as an asset for the team in the future?

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Earlier this week I posted about the best bunts of 2011. Taking some of the comments to that post into consideration, the obvious follow-up is the worst bunts of the 2011 season according to Win Probability Added (WPA).

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On Tuesday, we took a quick look at the competitive balance in the MLB, and I made the claim that baseball may have more parity than most leagues, but it also has want of greater balance. During the course of the piece, I made this statement:

The NFL has decided it wants payroll to have essentially no impact on winning, so teams basically trot out the same amount of money every Sunday and hope their money was better-spent. Is that what the MLB wants?

Aft’wards, Paul Swydan pointed out to me that indeed NFL salaries are not flat. Despite their hard cap, their hefty revenue sharing, and their tight spandex pants, the NFL still exhibits nearly a $77M gap between the biggest and lowest payroll — impressive, but still nothing compared to the MLB:

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October is the month. October is the month you have to survive if you are a general manager of a losing team. Survive that month and your chances of making it through another season skyrocket. In fact, looking through the prism of past firings, the distance between October (Andy MacPhail) and November (Bill Smith) is greater than a mere sum of the days.

Comb through the Baseball America executive database and add in the missing information, and you’ve got something like 59 general manager firings since 1950. That might not seem like a large sample, but a firing is a rare occurrence. Many general managers come to the end of a contract on a flagging team and are allowed to leave. Most others resign if the writing is on the wall. A firing suggests a difference in opinion about the team. It’s a jarring, rare moment, born of conflict.

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Yesterday afternoon, Jayson Stark considered the question, “Is the MLB’s competitive balance a joke?” His answer was a rather blunt no:

MLB’s competitive balance is NOT a joke.

It beats the NFL.

It beats the league formerly known as the NBA.

And … I can prove it.

Stark’s method of proving it — plucking facts from the recent playoff series and comparing them generally to the NFL and other major leagues — was less than rigorous. In general, I agreed with his assertion: Parity in the MLB exists naturally far more than any other sports league.

HOWEVER, if my foot has less gangrene than your foot, does that mean I don’t need a doctor? No. I probably still need a doctor, and I probably need to stop playing barefoot tag on Rusty Nails Pier.

Relative success does not necessitate absolute success. And frankly, I feel the “parity” in the MLB indeed has a gangrene of sorts, a disease that is causing only specific segments of the league to rot while the rest hum along uncaring.

Of course, it is one thing to suspect something and demand more research, but it is another to pull the sabermetrician stocking over your head and answer that suspicion with a Falcon Punch of data.

Let’s do just that.
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The news out of Los Angeles is that the Dodgers have inked outfielder/first baseman Juan Rivera to a one-year guaranteed deal worth $4.5 million, with a club option for 2013. This deal is puzzling for several reasons — among them Rivera’s age, his offensive production over the last two seasons, his mediocre defense and the ramifications for other potential Dodger moves.

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Converted shortstop Allen Webster served as the icing on the cake of my 2011 season as a September playoff appearance afforded me the opportunity to scout the young right-hander versus the Tennessee Smokies. And while Webster failed to make it out of the fourth inning, he showed enough for me to consider him a more complete pitching prospect than former teammate Nathan Eovaldi.

Armed with a usable four pitch mix, Webster displayed three big league pitches and a fourth with potential. And while command was an issue throughout the start, Webster may have simply been tired after a long minor league season. After a seven hit shutout in his final July outing, Webster sputtered the rest of the way ending with this particular appearance.

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In the dog-bites-man story of the week, the Dodgers announced that lefty Hong-Chih Kuo will have surgery on Friday. This time, the surgery is not major: arthroscopic surgery designed to remove some loose bodies. Nevertheless, the unique reliever has mentioned retirement as a possibility. That would be a shame — no pitcher has ever overcome so much before his 30th birthday.

His story is one saturated with injury. It even starts with an injury — after his very first minor league baseball game in America, the Taiwanese lefty was shut down with elbow pain. He would eventually need Tommy John surgery that year. Kuo was an 18-year-old, though, and these things happen. He even managed 19-plus innings in 2001, with 21 strikeouts against four walks in rookie ball. Maybe he’d be fine.

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Last off season, I looked at the chances of a SP going on the DL. I have finally had time to go back and look at how my predictions fared.

The predictions used logistic regression to find the percentage chance that a pitcher would end up on the DL. I used age, games started in the previous 3 years and how many of the previous 3 years did the pitcher go on the DL. The equation I ended up with was:

1/(1+e^(-z))
where:
z = (.2209)(Years with Trips to DL)+(-0.0040)(GS in last 3 year)+(0.0509)(Age in previous season)-1.7692

Using the equation, I projected the chance that a starter would go on the DL and here is a list of those projections.

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