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.
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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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If you haven’t taken a statistics class, regression can be rather tricky to grasp at first. It’s a word you’ll hear bantered about frequently on sabermetrically inclined websites, especially during the beginning of the season: “Oh, Albert Pujols is hitting .200, but it’s early so he’s bound to regress.” “Nick Hundley is slugging over .700, but that’s sure to regress.” This seems like a straightforward concept on the surface – good players that are underperforming are bound to improve, and over-performing scrubs will eventually cool down – but it leaves out an important piece of information: regress to what level?

The common mistake is to assume that if a good player has been underperforming, their “regression” will consist of them hitting .400 and bringing their overall line up to the level of their preseason projections. I like to call this the “overcorrection fallacy”, the belief that players will somehow compensate for their hot or cold performances by reverting to the other extreme going forward. While that may happen in select instances, it’s not what “regression” actually means. Instead, when someone says a player is likely to regress, they mean that the player should be expected to perform closer to their true talent level going forward.

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It looks like it’s not an April Fool’s joke – Matt Holliday is having his appendix out Friday afternoon. A tough spring has just gotten worse for the Cardinals. Approximately how many wins has the team lost in the last month? Let’s count it up.

First they lost as many as five wins when Adam Wainwright went down. Even if Kyle McClellan can replicate his league-averageish FIP work from the rotation (which isn’t likely, considering the penalty usually associated with such a move), the team lost at least about three wins when their young ace grabbed his elbow in pain.

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Given that the injury is now being reported as a hamstring strain, we can be pretty sure that his workload last year didn’t cause this injury. Still, the point of the post stands.

The hits just keep coming for the St. Louis Cardinals, as Chris Carpenter left the mound with the team trainer after throwing 32 pitches today. Following the loss of Adam Wainwright and the devastating blow of Nick Punto’s absence – as well as some contract talks that might not have gone very well – the Cardinals just can’t afford to keep hemorrhaging talent.

Carpenter, of course, is no stranger to the DL. He’s had both labrum and Tommy John surgery, and essentially missed entire seasons in 2003, 2007, and 2008. Carpenter has an extensive history of arm problems, so today’s news isn’t entirely shocking. That said, when Carpenter has been healthy enough to pitch, he’s been a workhorse. In 2005/2006, he was third in total innings pitched behind only Johan Santana and Brandon Webb. Last year, he threw 235 innings, tied with Dan Haren for the fourth most in baseball.

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The St. Louis Cardinals have had a rough few weeks. First, they failed to extend Albert Pujols‘ contract before the spring training deadline. Then, they lost ace Adam Wainwright for the season. In the aftermath, Vegas sportsbooks moved St. Louis from the favorites in the division to third behind the Reds and Brewers. Can the Cardinals compete without their ace in an improved division? If so, how?

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In the last couple days several players – most notably Adam Wainwright, but also Vicente Padilla and Nick Punto – have come up lame. Naturally, the loss of each of these players will have different effects on their teams’ respective win totals, as the Cardinals loss of Punto isn’t nearly as dramatic a blow as the news about Wainwright today. This season, I plan on tracking all players headed to the disabled list during the season including information on the injury, the amount of WAR and salary that were lost, along with several other factors

First of all, here is the spreadsheet to be viewed or downloaded containing all the players on or heading to the Nick Johnson List for 2011. As of right now, no player is officially on the DL, but several players will definitely be placed on the DL by opening day. I hope to keep this sheet updated daily by adding players as their information becomes available.

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