With a two-out, two-run walk-off single off St. Louis closer Jason Motte, the Cubs’ Joe Mather became Monday night’s unlikeliest hero. But all you had to do was ask him — before the traditional shaving cream pie to the face, of course — and he’d tell you (as he told WGN after the game) the man truly responsible for the Cubs’ ninth-inning rally was Bryan LaHair. The 29-year-old Cubs project worked a 12-pitch walk off Motte with one out, fouling off six consecutive offerings on a 3-2 count. Motte would eventually blow the save on his 31st pitch of the night. Only one other time has Motte thrown over 31 pitches in a single-inning appearance — July 16, 2010 against Los Angeles — and he gave up two runs in that outing as well.

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On Sunday night against the Washington Nationals, Jeff Samardzija pitched the game of his career. Not the game of his MLB career, but his professional baseball career. After coming to the Chicago Cubs in the fifth round of the 2006 draft, the former wide receiver prospect has never quite lived up to his substantial rookie contract (substantial for a rookie, that is).

But on Sunday night, in a season already treading down the expected and all-too-familiar road of disappointment, Samardzija gave Cubs fans an unfamiliar feeling of great hope. The long-locked, mustachioed twirler stymied hitters and did something few fans thought possible: He pitched 8.2 innings without walking a batter.

Is one start enough to know if a player has turned around his career? No. But there’s more evidence out there, and the signs are pointing up for Chicago’s 27-year-old bust.
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Read the methodology behind the ratings here. Remember that the grading scale is 20-80 (50 representing league average) with extra weight given to 2012 and Revenue rankings.

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
#18 – Colorado
#17 – Miami
#16 — Arizona
#15 — Cincinnati

Chicago’s 2011 Ranking: #19
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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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Athletes that I would call both “fast” and “huge” are relatively common in football. I will try not to embarrass myself by talking about football at length, but take a guy like the 49ers’ Vernon Davis — a very fast tight end who weighs around 250 pounds. Some baseball players are that heavy and heavier, but they are not known as “fast” players. That is obviously connected to the different skills required for “game speed” in the respective sports.

Like many fans, I find “big-boned” baseball players quite entertaining. For example, Adrian Gonzalez and Pablo Sandoval are both wonderful players. Overall, Adrian Gonzalez is probably superior, objectively speaking. However, subjectively, I would much rather watch Pablo Sandoval, and I would be lying if I said that his “body type” had nothing to do with it.

While special events sometimes happen, the big guys in baseball rarely pull off “speed moves,” especially the main move — the stolen base. Leaving the (obvious and no-so-obvious) reasons for this aside, I thought it would be fun to look at the the top stolen base seasons by “big-boned” players in baseball history.

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So far as Long National Nightmares go, the Theo Epstein Compensation Saga has been neither the longest nor most nightmare-y. However, in terms of handwringing and electronic ink spilt relative to notable developments, it’s been pretty formidable.

And, in fact, despite reports of a resolution late this morning, the matter will remain curiously unresolved even after today. According to the Red Sox official Twitter feed (and the entire rest of the internet), Boston has acquired 26-year-old right-hander Chris Carpenter and a player to be named later from the Cubs in exchange for a different PTBNL.

In terms of the actual value of the deal for either club, Dave Cameron provided the conceptual scaffolding for that conversation back in early October, noting generally that, whatever marginal value Epstein provided over, say, a “freely available” general manager such as White Sox Assistant GM Rick Hahn, it likely wasn’t worth an actual player.

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On Monday morning, I wrote an article that revealed the top five teams in Major League Baseball at drafting and developing talent for their big league club over the past decade, starting with the 2002 Draft.

Several people commented that they wished to see the entire list of teams, ranked by total accumulated WAR and also including average WAR per homegrown player. Here is the entire league:

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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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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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This morning I was scrolling through some of Dan Szymborski’s projections over at Baseball Think Factory, and I noticed that he had run a projection for Matt Stairs. I had not heard any news about the guy we all know now as a pinch-hitter. As I scoured the internets (read: typed “Matt Stairs” into Google) I quickly realized that Stairs had retired, though since he will be a studio analyst for NESN this year, all is not lost. Still, it will be disappointing to not see him on the field any longer.

Few pinch hitters struck fear in my heart the way Matt Stairs did. When Stairs came to the plate against a team for which I was rooting, I always sure that something bad was about to happen. Even still, I couldn’t hate him. A portly slugger with a great sense of humor — I will always remember Will Carroll forwarding the Baseball Prospectus email group an email from Stairs with a picture of his flexed calf muscle and promptly doubling over in laughter — Stairs was exceedingly easy to root for, and in the latter, pinch-hitting days of his career he became somewhat of a nerdy folk hero.

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