With the All-Star Game coming up tomorrow — and with my already-exposed love of flipping leaderboards on their head — I figure it’s about time I put together an anti-all-star team. Baseball coverage is dominated this week by talk about the best players in the game, so why not spend some time looking at which players have been the worst in the majors this season?

There are many different ways to choose who’s been “the worst” player at each position — just like there are multiple ways of choosing the best player — but for the sake of simplicity, I used Wins Above Replacement (WAR) to compile this list. I didn’t simply choose the player with the lowest WAR at a position, though; I gave preference to players that had more playing time, and I chose to put less weight on defensive performance. I try to explain any slightly odd selections that I made, but feel free to make arguments for different players in the comments.

Without further ado, here are your 2011 starting American and National League All-Flub teams:

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What a tough question. What are the top rivalries in baseball? I’m sure Yankees fans will claim it’s Yanks-Boston, but if you went out on the West Coast, I bet you’d hear plenty of fans saying Giants-Dodgers deserves more consideration. How exactly do you declare one rivalry “bigger” than another? How do you measure fan excitement, and compare one fanbase against another? Is it possible?

Probably not, but regardless, I’m going to take a stab at it anyway. My methodology is very simple: I’m ranking rivalries based on the amount of Google hits returned for the search “(Team name) (Team name) rivalry”.  I freely admit that I’ve stolen this idea from other people, notably Nate Silver who in the past has used Google hits as a proxy for voter awareness of presidential candidates.

Is this method perfect? No, of course not. It enters in certain biases, as the media undoubtedly shapes which rivalries are written about over others, but I think the results are nonetheless fascinating. Take them with a grain of salt if you will, but overall, I’d say these rankings come close to modeling reality.

This first chart ranks the top rivalries in the American League, separated out by division. The AL East is on the left, AL Central in the….center, and AL West on the right.

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The following is the first and behemoth installment of a three-part (or more) series concerning baseball’s next great market inefficiencies.

The STRIKE ZONE is that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.

—Official MLB Rulebook, Page 22

On Tuesday, in the sixth round of the MLB Draft, the San Diego Padres selected outfielder Kyle Gaedele (who the Tampa Bay Rays had previously drafted in the 32nd round of the 2008 draft). Gaedele plays center field and shows good signs of hitting for power, but what most writers, sports fans, and guys named Bradley talk about is Gaedele’s great uncle.

Casual fans probably do not know about Kyle’s great uncle, Eddie Gaedel (who removed the e off his last name for show-business purposes). We nerds can forgive the casual fan for forgetting a player who outdid, in his career, only the great Otto Neu. Gaedel took a single at-bat, walked to first, and then left for a pinch runner.

What makes Eddie Gaedel a unique and important part of baseball history, however, is not his statistics, per se, but his stature. Gaedel stood 3’7″ tall, almost half the height of his great nephew. Gaedel was the first and last little person to play in Major League Baseball, and the time has come for that to change.

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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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With several recent discussions (here and here and here and here) on home team advantage (HTA) – which began with Tobias Moskowitz’s and L. Jon Wertheim’s new book Scorecasting – I decided to see if I could find any reasonable causes for the advantage. I decided to look into areas that I thought home teams may have an advantage, namely errors (not much – about 2 wins league wide) and base running (some), but the number that caught my eye was the differences in batting average on balls in play from the home and away team. Here are the differences in BABIP for the home and away teams over the last few years:

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It’s been a while, so let me refresh your memories: Hisashi Iwakuma and Oakland were unable to come to terms on a contract, and the righty will remain in Japan next season. Iwakuma earns the somewhat dubious distinction of being the first posted NPB player not to sign with the team that had won his rights.

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At the winter meetings this week, John Coppolella, the Braves Director of Baseball Administration, was kind enough to sit down with me and answer some questions about the Braves, his role on the team, and the current state of statistical analysis in the game. He’s a bright young executive in the game, and has a great perspective on the work that front offices do, so this was nothing but a pleasure.

Eno Sarris: What is your role with the Braves exactly? Can you describe what you do?

John Coppolella: I help out [General Manager] Frank Wren and [Assistant General Manager] Bruce Manno. I help them by executing our depth charts, prospect lists, arbitration cases and our statistical analysis. When we break down players, we will use stuff that we find on sites like FanGraphs sometimes. We were in the room a few days back, and we were sorting guys by UZR/150. There’s probably about 10 or 15 we will take from your site, five or 10 from here, from there. We’re always trying to find new information.

Eno Sarris: That’s interesting. I was going to ask you about how aware you are of the stuff that is out there. In particular, valuing defense – there’s a lot of work being done right now trying to figure out how far we’ve gotten with defensive statistics. How do you feel about defensive statistics – do you have any advice for those that are working on defensive numbers?

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In one of the World Series chats I hosted, it was stated that Matt Cain gave up weak fly balls and that is the reason that his xFIPs (2010 = 4.19 and lifetime = 4.43 ) are higher than his FIPs (2010 = 3.65, lifetime = 3.84). After finally getting all the wrinkles worked out, I am able to get the average distance for fly balls given up by a pitcher. So, does the fly ball distance given up by a pitcher help to explain the difference between his xFIPs and FIPs?

I took just the pitchers that threw over 60 innings in 2010 and subtracted their FIPs from their xFIPs. Then I got the average distance of all the fly balls for these pitchers and here are the top five leaders and laggards:

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Last month, I previewed the pennant races in Japan. The Central League is still winding down, but the Pacific League’s season is in the books, so let’s take a look at how things shook out.

Here are the final standings:

The first thing you’ll notice is that the League Champion, the Softbank Hawks, won fewer games than the second-place Seibu Lions. Softbank won the title by virtue of out-tying Seibu, thus losing fewer games and having a higher win percentage. In this case, “win percentage” is defined as “percentage of games not resulting in a tie won” rather than “percentage of games played won”. I must say, I don’t mind the presence of ties but I’m not crazy about the team with the most wins finishing second.

The pennant race was somewhat of a battle of attrition, with neither Seibu nor Softbank really putting the other way until the end. Seibu maintained a comfortable lead until mid-September, when they were swept in a three-game series by Softbank as part of a larger five-game losing streak. Softbank continued winning, and took the league lead on September 25, with Toshiya Sugiuchi out-dueled Yu Darvish with a masterful 1-0 shutout. That game not only put Softbank into first, but bumped Nippon Ham out of the third and final playoff spot. Lotte won its last few games against Orix, hanging on to the third spot and relegating the Buffaloes to a just sub-.500 record. Despite finishing outside of the top three for the first time in five years, Nippon Ham picked up the most ground in September, finishing a half game behind Lotte after being five back at the time of my earlier post.

The also-rans were interesting this year. Orix finished fifth, but put up a real fight in a rebuilding year, that included the unfortunate suicide of outfielder Hiroyuki Oze during spring training. And Rakuten took a big step back after a second-place finish last season, a result that cost first-manager Marty Brown his job. Rakuten boasted a respectable rotation, led by MLB-bound Hisashi Iwakuma, but a shallow bullpen, an anemic offense, and, ultimately, Brown took the fall for it. Despite that, Rakuten could have a strong draft and find a couple of import sluggers and get back into reasonable contention next season.

The Pacific League plays begin on October 9, with Seibu and Lotte playing a three-game set. A three-game series can obviously go either way and the teams are pretty evenly matched, but I’m giving Seibu a little bit of an edge. I think their top three starters are a little better than Lotte’s.

The self-proclaimed greatest pitcher there ever was returned to HBO last night to try his hand in a Mexican League (not to be confused with THE Mexican League, as far as I know).

Clearly Kenny Powers doesn’t read FanGraphs because Kenny Powers “f**king hates computers, all kinds.”

But, if he did, besides calling the site something heinously profane, he might remember that for his career he averaged just above .5 wins above replacement per season — not to mention that, even in his best season, he would have only barely cracked the top 20 relief pitchers according to WAR.

Season Team   G    IP  W   L  SV   SO  BB  ER    ERA  WAR
2001   GWT*  15  23.0  4   0  12   28   0   1   0.39    ----
2002   ATL   62  66.1  7   3  49  106  30  21   2.85    1.75
2003   NYA   64  62.2  7   3  39   79  20  33   4.74    1.13
2004   SFG   52  54.2  3  10  30   44  27  40   6.59   -0.46
2005   BOS   15  12.2  0   6   3    6   9  12   8.57   -0.31

The good news is, that assuming Kenny Powers is between the age of 29-31 (based on being drafted in 1999), he still has plenty of time to make it back to the big leagues!