The St. Louis Cardinals moved today to lock up one of their important young pieces, signing pitcher and potential ace-in-the-making Jaime Garcia to a four year contract worth $27.5 million. The deal also includes two club options in 2016 and 2017, the values of which have not been released as of this writing. As Garcia is currently in his second year of service time, the deal guarantees his third pre-arbitration season as well as all three of his arbitration seasons, with the two club options covering his first two years of free agency.

Read the rest of this entry »

…even if they want to.

Does anyone recognize this player?

Centerfielder.
Former top prospect, ranked as one of the top 5 in baseball at one time.
Great plate discipline (11% walk rate), but strikes out at a high rate (20+%).
Batting average hovers around .250.
Above-average power, posting around a .160 to .180 ISO.
Called out in the past for “attitude” issues.

Oh, you were thinking of Colby Rasmus? Sorry, I was describing B.J. Upton.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why do so many Major League Baseball players come from the Dominican Republic (DR)? Why does economically strong, population-rich Japan produce so few MLB players? Why does baseball-loving Colombia have so few MLB alums (nine total)? Well, as it turns out, the answers are not so easy to find.

My previous two articles — one on East Asian talent, th’other on the relationship between height and OBP — have generated a lot of good discussion about what determines where a baseball player comes from.

In the first piece, I proposed that teams should invest in Chinese (and Indian) baseball academies to take advantage of the exceedingly large pool of athletes in those areas. However, several commentors suggested that baseball culture, not population size, determines the talent pool.

I found this a most intriguing analysis, so I went back to the ol’ opening day roster/injury list of foreign born players.

This is how it breaks out:

It does not require an electron micrometer to see the DR and Venezuela give the MLB lots o’ players. These two nations composed 17.5% of opening day rosters, but have a combined population smaller than Korea or Columbia individually.

So what does determine MLB talent sources? Well, it certainly does not appear to be population:

Read the rest of this entry »

News came out about an hour ago that Albert Pujols has a fracture in his left forearm and will miss four to six weeks while recovering. Any time you lose the best player in baseball, it’s a pretty big blow, but given the short timeframe and the Cardinals options, this shouldn’t end up affecting the standings too much.

The obvious answer for St. Louis is to shift Lance Berkman back to first base during Pujols’ absence. While Berkman has been a revelation offensively, he’s been as lousy as expected in the outfield, posting a -4.8 UZR in just 463 innings out there. Historically, he’s been an average to above-average defensive first baseman, and it might be nice for the 35-year-old to get a rest from chasing down balls in the outfield for a while anyway.

Moving Berkman to first base opens up right field for Jon Jay, who has been producing enough to get a larger role on the team anyway. Jay is hitting .313/.364/.436 in limited duty, and while UZR hasn’t liked his glove so far, it’s hard to imagine that he won’t be at least a small upgrade over Berkman in right field.

The drop-off from Pujols to Jay in the line-up (and from Jay to whomever replaces him as the team’s fourth outfielder until Allen Craig gets healthy) is still significant (probably about half a win per month), but over just one month’s worth of games, the difference shouldn’t be so large as to really swing the NL Central race one way or another. Every game in the standings is precious to the Cardinals in their bid to hold off the Brewers and Reds for the NL Central title, but a going from Pujols to Jay for 100 or 150 at-bats won’t be the end of the world, especially with the benefit of getting Berkman back to first base for a little while.

If Pujols ends up missing two months and Jay is unable to sustain his BABIP-fueled batting line, this could cost the Cardinals a full win. That’s certainly a loss, but it’s one they are equipped to deal with.

Former Milwaukee, Colorado, Cleveland, St. Louis, Washington, and Los Angeles infielder Ronnie Belliard announced his retirement yesterday. This probably won’t garner too much attention. That is understandable, as Belliard was mostly an unspectacular player at a position that is perhaps the most frequently overlooked. This isn’t a “Belliard was a hidden superstar” post, but he was somewhat underrated, and he certainly had his moments.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following data is current through 5-30-2011.

If you, dear reader, are like me, then you agonize unnecessarily over every lineup on every team in every game. Aaron Rowand leading off?! Yargh! No! Carlos Gomez batting second for the Brewers?! WRONG. Aaron Miles batting anything?! Unforgivable.

Holding egos constant, inefficiency is the greatest enemy of success. With regards to lineups, however, teams can really only lose a handful of runs over the course of full season, but a handful of runs, in real terms, can mean the difference between the division or a boring October. So it’s a dicey proposition. A mismanaged lineup on the Royals team does not mean a whole lot because they will lose the division by several trillion runs. A few lost runs for the Rays, Yankees, or Red Sox, though, can mean the season.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for interleague play, again. Even moreso than the interminable disputes about which “style of play” is aesthetically superior, complaining about fairness of the presence/lack of the DH in away games, perhaps the most contentious debate among many fans (contentious despite the overwhelming evidence on one side) is that interleague play proves that the American League has been significantly stronger than the National League for at least a decade, no matter what this fine representative of the Best Fans in Baseball believes:

The American League’s domination of interleague for an extended period of time is good evidence for its superiority, whatever the causes of that superiority might be. However, some will point to individual players as being independent demonstrations. For example, Matt Holliday was a great hitter with the Rockies through 2008. He started the 2009 season in Oakland and “struggled” relative to what he’d done before. Some people attributed that simply to him being a product of Coors Field (sigh), but when he was traded to St. Louis, he started raking at almost the same level. It must be the league, right?

Or how about Pat Burrell, who came off a number of successful seasons in Philadelphia, signed with Tampa Bay, then bombed so badly for a season-and-a-half the Rays let him go for nothing in 2010. He then signed with San Francisco and tore the cover off the ball to help the Giants on their way to a World Series Championship.

Naturally, it is silly to argue from individual cases to a league-wide issue. However, I wondered if taking all the cases like Holliday’s and Burrell’s and putting them together might show us something about the relative strength of leagues, both now and in the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Holliday is one of the best players in baseball. Joey Votto currently has a so-slight-it-is-meaningless lead in Wins Above Replacement among National League players over Holliday despite Holliday missing time at the beginning of the season recovering from an appendectomy. Holliday (201) is second only to his teammate Lance Berkman in wRC+ (213), and plays superior defense to Berkman.

Holliday’s excellence isn’t a recent development. From 2007 to the present, Holliday has accumulated more WAR (27.6) than any other position players in baseball other than acknowledged-best-in-the-business Albert Pujols (34.3) and the similarly underrated Chase Utley (28.6). Of course, there is a distinction between true talent and observed performance, and the uncertainty involved, e.g., with defensive metrics means that we don’t know “for sure” where Holliday ranks, but you get the idea. It is easy enough to see how good Holliday has been and continues simply by looking at his player page. He’s been just about as good or better than Carl Crawford each of the last few years; Crawford has been an excellent player (and very probably still is, despite his dreadful start in Boston), yet, unless I missed it, despite the big eventual payday, Holliday’s free agency did not receive the hype that Crawford’s did. Indeed, relative to his peers-in-performance, Holliday has not received much national attention lately. Why might that be?

Read the rest of this entry »

Going into this season, I thought I’d made a huge mistake. During the auction draft in my ottoneu league, I got distracted and ended up putting in the highest bid for a pitcher I hadn’t heard about much: Jaime Garcia. I knew enough about him to know he’d had a great 2010 season  (2.70 ERA, 3.41 FIP) and was still quite young, but due to being a Rays fan, I’m not as well versed on the National League. The more I looked into him after the draft, I saw analysts spelling doom for Garcia everywhere. He outperformed his peripherals. He struggled against righties. He got an artificial boost from Busch Stadium. He increased his innings total by around 120 IP from 2009 to 2010. The popular consensus seemed to be, “Don’t touch this guy!”, so I just added the incident to my long list of  “Reasons I Don’t Write About Fantasy Baseball” and moved on.

After his near perfect game on Friday night, though, it’s time someone pointed this out: Jaime Garcia has been darn good so far this season. And when I say good, I mean 1.99 ERA / 2.36 FIP good.

Read the rest of this entry »

That the Cardinals lead the majors on wOBA is not that huge a surprise. They brought back an elite core of hitters in Colby Rasmus, Albert Pujols, and Matt Holliday, and then added a number of complementary pieces. The most prominent, of course, is Lance Berkman, who currently leads the NL in wOBA. But there is also David Freese, who, for April at least, was back on the field. And so the Cardinals offense, ripping through the league, currently sports a wOBA 16 points higher than the next closest NL team, and leads batter WAR by 3 wins.

What might surprise you is that they’re doing all this without a significant contribution from Pujols.

Read the rest of this entry »