Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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Why isn’t there more interest in Michael Bourn? A six-win center fielder is on the market, and our most recent article on the subject is whether or not his agent has waited too long to get him a deal. We don’t know what his asking price is, but the idea that a player coming off a career year and four straight seasons with more than four wins now needs a pillow contract seems to suggest that either there’s a reason to doubt Bourn’s work, or there’s a lack of demand for his services in the market place.

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As facts about Kendrys Morales go, here are a few of them. On Wednesday, Morales was traded from the Angels to the Mariners in exchange for Jason Vargas. Morales is and has always been a switch-hitter as a professional. Morales began switch-hitting when he was 12 years old, and the right side is his natural side. That is, Morales naturally bats right-handed, and he had to learn how to swing as a lefty. Every switch-hitter starts off with a natural side, but what’s interesting about the Morales case is this:

Career as a lefty: 127 wRC+
Career as a righty: 84 wRC+

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The easy thing is talking about what Josh Hamilton has done. For his career, he’s hit .304, with 161 dingers. Last year, his WAR was 4.4, and before that it was 4.1, and before that he won the American League MVP. Hamilton just signed a substantial contract with the Angels, and the season most relevant to the Angels during negotiations would’ve been Hamilton’s 2012. Hamilton started impossibly strong and cooled off, finishing with excellent numbers overall. If the Angels didn’t think Josh Hamilton is excellent, they wouldn’t have guaranteed him an eighth of a billion dollars.

The harder thing is talking about what Josh Hamilton will do, precisely because we don’t and can’t know. We can only try to guess, based on what we assume to be relevant information, and when talking about Hamilton’s future — which everybody’s tried to do — it seems worthwhile to take a closer look at those 2012 trends. For some time, Hamilton was practically impossible to pitch to. Then he became easy to pitch to, at least relative to the earlier version of himself. Random statistical fluctuation, or something the Angels ought to be thinking about?

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Remember when the Playstation 2 came out, and then Sony released a newer, smaller version of the original Playstation, called the PSone? After that, people started calling the original Playstation console the PSX, or Playstation X. Today, we are going back to the original console version of the De-Lucker, so grab your nearest mint copy of Final Fantasy VII and buckle in!

Why DLX?

FanGraphs recently re-did how we calculate wOBA for all the players. In an effort to give base-running its own stand-alone category and run/win value, we reduced wOBA to a hitting-only metric and took out SB and CS. That’s where the problem with the De-Lucker 2.0.

DL 2.0 used the Fielding Independent wOBA formula, which includes stolen bases. In order to keep things parallel, we now must revert back to the Should Hit formula — essentially:

The De-Lucker part comes in when we plop an xBABIP in the place of yonder true BABIP. Jeff Zimmerman and Robert Boden (slash12) have been working on and promoting what I believe is the best xBABIP formula out there, so let us once again use that.

Beneath the jump: More caveats! All sorts of data! Downloadable Excel spreadsheets! Fewer video game references!
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The acquisition of Josh Hamilton gave the Angels what they wanted, but it also left the Angels with a little problem: between Peter Bourjos, Mark Trumbo, and Kendrys Morales, they had too many good players for too few spots. This was, as they say, a nice problem to have, and the Angels also felt they had a need for another innings-eating starting pitcher. So in a move surprising only because it went down between two teams in the same division, the Angels and Mariners have exchanged Morales and Jason Vargas, straight up. With one move, the Angels solved two perceived problems.

The whole trade is simple. It’s easy to understand, like an example transaction in Trading 101. The Angels had too many bats and too few starting pitchers, so they traded a bat for a starting pitcher. The Mariners wanted a bat more than they wanted to keep one of their starting pitchers. Morales didn’t fit in one place and he does fit in the other. Morales has one year left until free agency, and he’s projected to make just under $5 million. Vargas has one year left until free agency, too, and he’s projected to make just over $7 million. There are no prospects, no cash considerations, no players to be named later. Few transactions are this uncomplicated.

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Prior to the 2012 regular season, Mike Trout and Jesus Montero would’ve been considered leading contenders for the American League Rookie of the Year Award. Both Trout and Montero were top prospects, and Trout was staring at some regular outfield playing time while Montero was looking to catch and hit designatedly in Seattle. Trout eventually won the award, turning in an all-time great season. Montero did not win the award, and his season, while not disastrous, was closer to being a disaster than to being magnificent. Trout didn’t beat out Montero because of his baserunning — he beat out Montero because of everything — but, my goodness, the baserunning. The differences in baserunning.

Baserunning is sort of WAR’s forgotten component. For position players, obviously, everybody’s aware of offense, and everybody’s aware of defensive position. The big controversy surrounds the defensive measurement, and UZR is why some people don’t pick up what WAR is putting down. WAR also includes baserunning, and most people don’t talk about it. It’s just there, making a small difference, or no difference. How important could baserunning be?

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Episode 289
FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron analyzes all baseball — and, in particular, the part of baseball concerning the trade of R.A. Dickey to the Blue Jays from the Mets for prospects. Also: how the Angels’ signing of Josh Hamilton doesn’t particularly represent a huge payroll spike for them. Also-also: the Phillies spend more on a relief than starting pitcher — why that might be.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 31 min play time.)

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Yesterday, in a surprising yet also entirely unsurprising maneuver, the Angels came out of left field (baseball term) to sign free-agent Josh Hamilton to a five-year contract, worth $125 million. Other high-profile free agents have just recently signed — Ryan Dempster! Anibal Sanchez! — but Hamilton was the big fish, and he’s the guy most people are thinking about. He’s been one of the league’s biggest bats, and he signed with the Angels instead of re-signing with the rival Rangers, as was expected. No move sends actual shock waves, but if certain moves were to send shock waves, this would have been among them.

There are almost countless reasons to be worried about Hamilton’s short- and long-term future. There’s a reason why everybody else was unwilling to guarantee five years, and there’s a reason this decision was apparently made over Jerry Dipoto’s head. A lot of people are worried that Hamilton could have an addiction relapse. A lot of people are worried that Hamilton’s body could break down, as he’s shown signs of physical fragility. At least one person is probably worried that Hamilton could morph into a butterfly and then what would the Angels do with a $25-million butterfly? What worries me, though, and what we’ve talked about here already, is Hamilton’s contact rate. For Josh Hamilton, 2012 was the most recent season, and it was a puzzling season.

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In yesterday’s post about the fallout from the Josh Hamilton signing, I noted that the Angels could use Peter Bourjos as a pretty attractive trade chip, and predictably, a decent amount of people responded that Bourjos is nothing more than a fourth outfielder or defensive replacement because he can’t hit. This sentiment has been around for a while, since Bourjos came up and hit .204/.237/.381 as a rookie in 2010, and Bourjos didn’t exactly light the world on fire last year either.

However, I think it’s worth noting that there’s another center fielder in baseball with basically the exact same offensive skillset and overall performance as Bourjos, and he seems to be doing just fine down in San Diego.

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