Forgoing free agency is the new hotness. After already locking up his double play partner Howie Kendrick back in January, the Angels gave Erick Aybar a reported four year, $35 million contract extension today. Aybar is under contract for 2012 at just over $5 million, so this represents a pretty nice raise in annual average value, and assuming that the contract covers 2013-2016, it will keep Aybar in Anaheim through his age 32 season.

This also represents a pretty significant commitment from the Angels towards a player whose skills aren’t generally valued all that highly on the open market. While Aybar has averaged +3.2 WAR per season over the last three years, most of that value has come from his defense and baserunning abilities, as he’s hit just .280/.327/.391. Those aren’t terrible offensive numbers from a shortstop, but they came during his expected peak years and put him in the same category as guys like Jimmy Rollins, Stephen Drew, Jhonny Peralta, J.J. Hardy, and Cliff Pennington. There’s nothing wrong with any of these guys, but this class of ballplayer has traditionally not struck it rich in free agency.

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Read the methodology behind the ratings here. Remember that the grading scale is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

2012 Organizational Rankings

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago AL
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland
#20 – New York NL
#19 – Los Angeles NL
#18 – Colorado
#17 — Miami
#16 — Diamondbacks
#15 — Cincinnati
#14 — Chicago NL
#13 — Milwaukee
#12 — San Francisco
#11 — Washington
#10 — Tampa Bay
#9 – Toronto
#8 – Atlanta
#7 – Detroit
#6 – St. Louis
#5 – Philadelphia

Anaheim’s 2011 Ranking: 12th

2012 Outlook: 65 (3rd)

If you want to find a weakness on the 2012 iteration of the Angels, you can. It’s very possible, for example, that the team’s second-best position player is a prospect (Mike Trout) who’s likely to spend a great deal of the season in the minors. It’s very possible, moreover, that one of the players by whom Trout is blocked (Vernon Wells) will fight to produce something north replacement level. Finally, the team lacks a capital-S Starter both at third base and designated hitter, which isn’t — traditionally speaking, at least — a recipe for success.

Here are a couple things the Angels do have, though: probably the league’s best starting rotation and also Albert Pujols. The ZiPS projection system — which, like most projection systems, is conservative by nature — projects the Angels’ top-four starters (Jered Weaver, Dan Haren, C.J. Wilson, and Ervin Santana) to post a collective WAR of about 18.0. By comparison, only three starting rotations (Philadelphia, Chicago AL, Texas) posted WARs better than 18.0 in 2011 — and even the Angels themselves, sans free-agent signing C.J. Wilson, posted a fourth-place 17.8 WAR. As for Pujols, this is a player for whom a 5.1 WAR — what he posted in 2011 — is considered sub-par. All told, Pujols plus the team’s four best starters should be worth close to 25 wins. Were the rest of team to be average, the Angels would be expected to win ca. 96 games.

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One of the things we’re going to try to do more of at FanGraphs going forward is highlight good work from around the web. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, and if we can help more people see the work that’s being done, everyone wins. We’re still going to be doing our normal amount of original content, but we’ll add in some posts here and there that link out to pieces we think are worth reading. This is the first of those posts.

We’ve long known that Jered Weaver got a significant boost from pitching in Anaheim. It’s a park that significantly deflates home runs to right field, and Weaver gives up a ton of fly balls while facing a lot of left-handed hitters. The synergy between his skillset and his home park is one of the best in baseball.

Well, Jeff Sullivan pointed out this morning that there might be more to what’s going on than just a nice alignment of skills and outfield space.

I went through Weaver’s career game logs and identified 16 home starts made in the day time. One was at 3:30pm, and all the others were at or around 1:00pm. I assumed that the weather was always nice, the sun always bright.

That left 68 other home starts, almost all of which started around 7:00pm. The sample sizes here are different, but I think we have enough to make a comparison. When I put the numbers next to each other, my eyes opened wide. The numbers back up the anonymous Mariners player, and then some.

Time	Innings	Batters	ERA	BB%	K%	HR%	Contact%
Day	113	444	1.51	6.5%	28%	1.1%	71%
Night	444	1807	3.00	5.9%	21%	2.4%	79%

The fact that the data lines up with what an opposing hitter noticed instinctively by facing him in a certain situation lends some credence to the belief that this isn’t just small sample noise. It could be, of course, but it could also be that Weaver’s specific arm angle and the position of the rock pile in Anaheim combine to make it very, very hard to see the ball coming out of his hand.

It’s something to keep an eye on going forward, especially if we notice that the Angels suddenly begin to lead the league in afternoon home games.

Out in Hollywood, or even out in Hollywood of Anaheim where the Angels play, it can be easy to slip under the radar if you’re no longer the “it” thing. That may be the case with Dan Haren this season, and understandably so. A trip to the Angels’ spring training complex in Tempe this weekend saw a stadium draped in promotional banners sporting the visages of new stars Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson as well as home-grown hero Jered Weaver.

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With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.

League Trends

To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.

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The always-excellent John Perrotto recently reviewed some of the Spring Training position battles in the American League. He helpfully includes comments from scouts on each situation. One quote that caught my eye was with respect to the Angels’ third base situation:

This is very interesting. Callapso is a pretty good hitter, but he doesn’t profile as a third baseman. Trumbo has holes in his game, but he does have pop and I think he’ll play a passable third base. It would be hard to take a kid that hit 29 homers last year, send him back to Triple-A, and try to sell that to the fans. But I know Mike Scioscia, and I know Callapso is his kind of player, so I’d be really surprised if he started Trumbo ahead of Callapso.

What struck me was the idea that Callaspo does not “profile” as a third baseman, apparently (judging from the context) because of his offense. The scout is probably thinking of power. Callaspo had a .086 ISO last season (.108 career), while Trumbo had a .223 ISO and 29 home runs while playing first base for the Angels and coming in second in the American League Rookie of the Year voting.

The scout thinks that Mike Scioscia will prefer Callaspo, probably largely based on fielding, as Trumbo has no professional experience playing third. But does Trumbo’s offensive “profile” really gives him any edge over Callaspo?

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It is a simple question.

What is sabermetrics?

Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?

Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.

Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.

I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.

Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.
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Yesterday, as Part 1 of this post, I looked at the accomplishment that was Michael Pineda’s 2010 season in the minor leagues — an accomplishment, specifically, for his ability to limit walks while simultanously throwing a fastball with excellent velocity.

As was noted in that piece, no other starter with 50-plus innings in either Double- or Triple-A (again, in 2010) was able to sit at around 95 mph with his fastball while also walking fewer than 7.0% of batters faced. Pineda, in fact, accomplished this feat at both Double- and Triple-A, walking 5.4% of opposing batters in 77.0 innings at Double-A West Tenn and then 6.5% of opposing batters in 62.1 innings at Triple-A Tacoma.

In this post, I’ll be looking at which players performed similarly in the high minors last season to how Pineda did in 2010.

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Silly monkey, BRAINS ARE FOR ZOMBIES.

Casey Kotchman is in many ways a man without a home — a player equal parts under-appreciated and over-valued, who irks both old and new schools at the same time. Old school analysts say his defense is amazing, but they cannot quantify it, and in 2011, they claimed his cleared vision meant he finally learned how to aim the ball “where they ain’t,” but he’s still a .268 hitter with little power. The new school says he’s worth about 7.6 runs per season defensively, but worth ~1.1 WAR per 600 PAs — not good — and his BABIP was high 2011, so he should not be able to repeat his success.

Despite his inability to build a consistent following of fans in the baseball outsiders communities, Kotchman seems to have some insider communities very much interested in him, as Tom Tango points out:

Kotchman’s last four teams: Redsox, Mariners, Rays, Indians. Can we say that a team that signs Kotchman is saber-leaning?

Indeed, after spending five and a half seasons on the Angels’ and Braves’ rosters, Kotchman has begun to shuffle around with the Nerdz, most recently signing with the Cleveland Indians. It makes sense too — Kotchman’s lack of power keeps him cheap, and his strong defense keeps him amorphous for the old school teams, while the new schools might have different valuations on Kotchman, they can at least quantify his contributions and better know how he fits.

Then, on Monday, the Houston Astros signed Justin Ruggiano, long-time Tampa Bay Rays outfielder who was never good enough to stick on the Rays’ roster, but who possesses strong defensive chops and above average patience. His lack of power and ~.290 batting average, however, must make him a mystery — or at least an undesirable asset — to the old school teams.

Upon Ruggiano signing with the Astros, a once highly old school team, my reaction was all: “Welp, that’s one more team to compete with” — and then it occurred to me! No only have the Astros entered the realm of, so to speak, saber-minded organizations, but so have the long-backward Chicago Cubs.

Suddenly the league looks very different.

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Toward the end of his weekly Sunday notes column for the Boston Globe, Nick Cafardo included the following write-up on John Lannan:

Lannan, 27, is a terrific option as an end-of-the rotation starter now that Washington has signed Edwin Jackson. There is a lot of speculation that the Nationals will deal him to the Angels for center fielder Peter Bourjos, with Mike Trout on the way to play that position in Anaheim. But the Nationals could also move Jayson Werth to center and sign a right fielder. It now appears that Yoenis Cespedes is not in their plans and they have cooled on B.J. Upton. Lannan, who went 10-13 last year with a 3.70 ERA and a (high) 1.462 WHIP, would be a good option for a team like Boston, but the Red Sox don’t seem to have the center fielder to give back, especially with Ryan Kalish unable to play until June. “It doesn’t have to be a center fielder,’’ said one major league source. “They don’t have to get a center fielder in that deal as long as they get a center fielder some other way. The Red Sox make a lot of sense.’’

Again, with emphasis added:

There is a lot of speculation that the Nationals will deal him to the Angels for center fielder Peter Bourjos…

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