During his chat last Wednesday, Dave Cameron ranked the top MLB shortstops as Troy Tulowitzki, Jose Reyes, and then a huge chasm before the next best guy. As we are no longer in the era of offensive shortstops, the guys who can swing a big stick like Tulo really stand out from the crowd. I agree with Dave for the most part, but there is one guy I would add to that list who is quickly closing the gap on Reyes: Starlin Castro.

Castro doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention other than when he is screwing up, but he is one of the best young pure hitters in the game. There have been a lot of knocks on Castro thus far in his young career which has led to the lack of respect. His defense is suspect at best, he doesn’t walk much and there have been some attitude/effort problems. These are legitimate concerns. Talented players can wash out if they don’t have their head screwed on straight, and he loses some serious value if he has to move off shortstop.

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Yesterday, it took Los Angeles Dodgers manager Clint Hurdle Don Mattingly* approximately 40 seconds — depending on where you start and stop your timer — to argue The Worst Call of the Season. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, it took the umpiring crew about 2 minutes and 50 seconds to gather in the infield, discuss Carlos Beltran’s hit, reconvene in their underground video review chamber, and then return to announce a home run.

* All white guys look the same to me.

Getting the calls wrong in baseball takes time. Managers — depending on their personality, the game situation, and the offense — take different amounts of time arguing both bad and good calls. The arguing, for the most part, exists because of uncertainty. My lip-reading skills inform me most arguments follow this general pattern:

Manager: “Did you really see X event?”

Umpire: “Most certainly did I see X event.”

Manager: “That statement you just made right there is tantamount to the excrement of bovines.”

Umpire: “You are ejected.”

Recent evidence suggests, however, that despite these conflicts resulting from close calls, instant replays still take more time than good ol’ fashioned shout-spittin’ matches.

Evidence furthermore suggests that in the time it takes to get in a healthy workout, a normal person could empty approximately ten Squeeze Cheese cans directly into his or her porcine gullet.

Which is to say: Quicker is not always better.

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“Without a mustache, a man must make a name for himself with a bat.”
–Ghandi

Since time forever, Chicago Cubs broadcaster Bob Brenly has joked good-humor’dly about how terrible a hitter he was. For years, I had just taken him at his word, assumed that Bob Brenly was the worst worst hitter ever — a hitter whose home runs came on windy days, whose singles bounced ten times before leaving the infield, and whose walks came only on failed beanings.

But that is simply not true. Recently Mr. Brenly remarked he wanted to see an advanced stat that said he was a good hitter. I’ll give him three.
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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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