Though the Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations between the MLB Players Association and Major League Baseball are not expected to infringe upon the 2012 season, the issue of instituting a hard-slotting system for the amateur draft has come to the forefront of the discussions. In fact, it is largely considered the only true roadblock in negotiations at this point.

The players view hard-slotting as the beginning of a salary cap in baseball, as it begins to limit how much teams are able to spend on amateur baseball players. Major League Baseball, on the other hand, is pushing a hard-slotting system as a way to curb the ever-rising bonus spending — teams spent a record $236M on the 2011 Draft — and to better ensure that the best amateur prospects are dispersed to the worst teams in an effort to increase parity.

With those two opposing viewpoints on the table, is hard-slotting good for baseball?

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The Phillies are the best team in baseball this season. Their pitching staff is amazing and the hitters are good. Here is a look at how many bad teams would need to be combined to make a team that would be comparable to the Phillies in talent.

Note: The WAR values used in the article are from 9/21 have changed a bit since I collected the data.

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In case you live under a rock — which I have been accused of many times in the past — the new “Moneyball” movie comes out in theaters next Friday. Many baseball writers have already seen the movie in private screenings, and reviews are starting to trickle out. From what I’ve seen, the movie is drawing mixed reviews — some people like it and some hate it, but overall it sounds like a fun movie that won’t be terrible. And you know, that’s better than I had originally expected.

But one review has currently caused a bit of a skuttlebutt. Keith Law wrote a fair-handed takedown of the “Moneyball” movie on his person blog a few days ago,  and his review drew enough attention that Michael Lewis himself responded. Law’s criticism touched on both the movie and baseball aspects of the film, and in general, he felt that both were lacking. Some of the comments seemed nitpicky to me — inaccuracies I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed, even as a pretty big baseball and “Moneyball” fan — but one of his comment has really stuck with me:

…[T]he lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page; they are set up as dim-witted bowling pins for Beane and Brand to knock down with their spreadsheets. It’s cheap writing, and unfair to the real people being depicted.

Man, how far we’ve come since “Moneyball” first came out. It makes me wonder if this movie is going to end up being a bad thing for the public perception of sabermetrics.

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What exactly is “power”? Is it the ability to hit home runs? Doubles? Triples? Should we consider how far a player hits a ball, or are we just concerned with the outcome? How would you define it?

If we were to try and define power from the ground up, obviously you’d have to start with home runs. Power hitters are guys that mash lots of home runs, right? When I think power, I think of players like Jose Bautista, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds. Home runs are so flashy, they steal the show.

But there’s more to power than a player’s raw home run total. You can’t completely ignore other extra base hits, which is why there are statistics like Slugging Percentage and Isolated Power. Slugging Percentage measures a player’s total bases and Isolated Power measures a player’s extra bases*, so both statistics count doubles and triples as well as home runs.

*Quick refresher course for everyone. Slugging Percentage = Total Bases / At Bats ; Isolated Power = Extra Bases / At Bats

Or if you prefer to think about it another way, Jose Bautista has a .330 ISO this season. That means he averages nearly one extra base every three at bats. 

Both these stats have the same problem, though: not all bases are created equal. If a player has accumulated 30 extra bases in 100 at bats, isn’t there a big difference if those extra bases were accumulated through 10 home runs versus 30 doubles ? Both players have the same Isolated Power, but which one has provided their team with more value through their power production?

Good question, I’m glad you asked.

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It’s Friday, two days before the trade deadline, and I officially have rumor-induced ADHD. I keep catching myself peeking at my Twitter feed ever couple minutes, and I don’t think I’ve closed my MLB Trade Rumors tab in four days. Sunday needs to come and go already so I can go back to having a life.

As I can barely focus on anything for more than 15 minutes, I figured I’d write up some of my assorted musings on the big rumors floating around out there. Original idea, huh?

The Ubaldo Jimenez Rumors

I don’t get it. If I was the Rockies, there’s no way in heck that I’d trade Jimenez. I can understand the logic behind shopping him, considering they have lots of holes on their roster for 2012 and no surefire prospects ready to fill them, but the Rockies had better be sure they’re getting back an absurd haul for him. How often do 5-6 WAR pitchers come along, nonetheless ones that are signed for only $18 million over the next three years? Pitchers like Jimenez are rare commodities, and no matter how good a prospect is, they’re still only a prospect.

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Bobby Abreu’s insane run at the 2005 Home Run Derby and the power-outage that quickly followed has spurred the same discussion each year at this time: Did swinging for the fences on that one night in Detroit hurt Abreu’s gameday swings every night thereafter?

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I’m a little bit late following up on this, but I absolutely loved this quote from Tom Tango during a recent Baseball Prospectus Q&A:

Q: I like to flatter myself that I’m an ‘early adopter’ to the sabermetric perspective on the game, even though it’s been so many years since its introduction and uptake by those like yourself. Is sabermetrics already ‘mainstream’ in your mind, or how long do you think it will be til it is? What was / will be the tipping point to #2?

Tango: Sabermetrics will always be on the leading edge. There’s no need for it to be in the mainstream. If the mainstream wants to adopt, they know where to find us. If they want to ignore us, they can. We’re there to make sure they don’t misuse numbers, that’s all.

I hope [the tipping point] never happens, actually. You look over to your left and right to make sure that whoever wants to be part of the movement has the tools and knowledge to join in. There’s no sense in looking over your shoulder to make sure everyone comes along. They aren’t in a burning building they are trying to escape. They are on the beach, and they can decide if they want to come surfing with us or not. But I don’t need them to tell me that I’m drowning people with numbers. We’re giving out surfboards, and they can decide if they want one. And then we’ll be happy to make sure they don’t drown.

I couldn’t agree more, but I realize that might seem counterintuitive for those that have followed my recent Saber-Tips series here. A large part of my writing and work here seems geared at making sabermetrics more mainstream – or at least, more widely used – but that’s not my intention. Let me explain.

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Have you ever noticed how debates have a tendency to polarize a conversation? I sometimes feel like engaging in a debate with someone makes it less likely that we’ll find a common ground on some issue, as both sides dig in, believing they are 100% accurate while the other side is spewing garbage. Points get exaggerated in an effort to prove the other person wrong, and the debate becomes a black-or-white affair with none of the all important shades of gray. I’ve noticed this before with players: if the mainstream media likes a player more than I feel they’re worth, I have a tendency to push back against that and over-exaggerate the player’s flaws in an attempt to balance out the other side. Jason Bartlett didn’t deserve to be named the Rays’ MVP in 2008, but he was certainly more valuable than the amount of flak he received from saber-Rays fans as a result.

When the Luis Castillo news came out last Friday, I was immediately reminded of the old sabermetric discussions over “grit” and team chemistry. Up until a few seasons ago, many mainstream writers (and fans) loved to tout the importance of chemistry in leading a team to success, and they had a tendency to treat gritty players that work hard and play the game “the right way” as demigods. That’s not say that these type of arguments have vanished; there are still plenty of writers and fans that value chemistry and grit, but it’s become tougher and tougher to find articles espousing that point of view. For the most part, this is a debate that the saberists have won: it’s not that character attributes don’t exist, but that they have a very small influence on performance and are impossible to separate from all the surrounding statistical noise.

But just because something has a small and indeterminate effect doesn’t mean we can ignore it completely.  In fact, I’d argue that a General Manager should take a player’s makeup into account…just not as much as the grit lovers would have you believe.

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Even since Dark Overlord Dave Appelman updated the FanGraphs leaderboards to allow multi-year analyses, I’ve been meaning to do something fun with them.  The feature lends itself well to answering questions with a large scope, like: who’s been the best first baseman over the last five seasons? What team has had the best bullpen over the last three seasons? What’s the highest single-season strikeout rate any starting pitcher has had over the last ten years? The possibilities are nearly endless.

While this feature obviously has analytical purposes, I feel it has a larger, much more important use: trivia! As pointless as inane baseball statistics can be, what baseball fan doesn’t love their trivia? It’s something we all grew up with, as you can’t escape digesting large amount of pointless facts if you watch or listen to baseball, and I’ve found that even the most ardent statheads love a bit of mindless fun every now and then. Numbers don’t always have to mean something; sometimes, it’s enough for them to merely provide a chuckle or a shake of the head.

So let’s use this amazing multi-year leaderboard to take a look back through time. What sort of fun superlatives will we find if we flip open the yearbook to The Aughts (2000-2009)?

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One of the finely bound tomes to which I appeal more often than the many other finely bound tomes in my impressive collection is Epictetus’s Discourses. Epictetus, a Stoic who thrived in the early second century AD, unsurprisingly trumpeted those virtues prized by Stoic philosophy — in particular, the ability to make decisions which would free one from the shackles of painful emotion. The particular joy — or at least one of the joys — of reading Epictetus is his voice, which is kinda a cross between Oscar Wilde and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, if you can imagine that.

In a passage I’ve just recently read, and which I’ll share with you post-haste, I think Epictetus has something to offer those of us who concern ourselves with player valuation — especially when it comes to assessing some aspects of a player’s “true talent.”

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