The Yankees take care of their own. Or something. Former Yankees, Rangers, Yankees (again), and Dodgers outfielder and designated hitter Marcus Thames has apparently retired, as the High-A Tampa Yankees announced that he will be their hitting coach in 2013. Thames was never a superstar. He was not even everyday player over even one full season in the majors, as the most plate appearances he ever received in a single season was 390 in 2006. However, he was surprisingly productive despite his limited playing time. During 2006, he hit 26 home runs for the Tigers on their way to the World Series. Thames was a good example of how hitter with a limited skill set can carve out a surprisingly long career, which included his share of dramatic hits.

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With the move of the Houston Astros to the American League, and the unfortunate fact that both leagues will have an uneven number of teams, interleague play is destined to change this year. As cross-platform play goes from something that happens in the middle of June, once a year, like some sort of strange exhibition mini-season, to something that happens every week, the National League will have to re-evaluate their past strategies for American League parks.

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Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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In 2012, four left-handed pitchers touched 93-plus on my radar gun. In Onelki Garcia and Chris Reed, Dodgers prospects accounted for half the list. This is nothing new. Two minor league baseball seasons living in the Atlanta area has yielded many hard-throwing Dodgers prospects. What’s new is every top prospect I’ve seen from the Dodgers has been right-handed before this.

Big arms, along with deep pockets have allowed the Dodgers to acquire three All-Stars in the past six months. Trading Nathan Eovaldi, Rubby De La Rosa, Ethan Martin, Josh Lindblom and Allen Webster would decimate most minor league systems. For the Dodgers, it’s simply a sign to reload.

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Remember when the Playstation 2 came out, and then Sony released a newer, smaller version of the original Playstation, called the PSone? After that, people started calling the original Playstation console the PSX, or Playstation X. Today, we are going back to the original console version of the De-Lucker, so grab your nearest mint copy of Final Fantasy VII and buckle in!

Why DLX?

FanGraphs recently re-did how we calculate wOBA for all the players. In an effort to give base-running its own stand-alone category and run/win value, we reduced wOBA to a hitting-only metric and took out SB and CS. That’s where the problem with the De-Lucker 2.0.

DL 2.0 used the Fielding Independent wOBA formula, which includes stolen bases. In order to keep things parallel, we now must revert back to the Should Hit formula — essentially:

The De-Lucker part comes in when we plop an xBABIP in the place of yonder true BABIP. Jeff Zimmerman and Robert Boden (slash12) have been working on and promoting what I believe is the best xBABIP formula out there, so let us once again use that.

Beneath the jump: More caveats! All sorts of data! Downloadable Excel spreadsheets! Fewer video game references!
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The Dodgers are rich. Very rich. After spending $2.15 billion to buy the team, the new owners have opened the checkbook again and again and again. First, in the trade with the Red Sox that netted Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Nick Punto. Next with the winning bid for Korean pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu. Then with the free-agent signings of Zack Greinke and Brandon League — and the contract for Ryu.

Over on his blog, my colleague Mike Petriello estimates the Dodgers’ current commitments for 2013 at $246.9 million. That figure includes deferred payments still owed to Manny Ramirez, Andruw Jones and Hiroki Kuroda, but excludes Ryu’s $25.73 million posting fee. Salaries for A.J. Ellis and Ronald Belisario — who are entering their first year of arbitration — still need to be added. And perhaps the Dodgers make another small move here or there. But let’s not quibble over pennies.

Instead, let’s assume the Dodgers’ Opening Day payroll is $250 million. A nice, big, round number. A quarter-of-a-billion dollars. Unprecedented, right? Blows anything the Yankees have ever done out of the water, correct? The most the Yankees ever spent on an Opening Day payroll was $209 million, back in 2008. But you can’t just compare $250 million spent in 2013 to $209 million spent in 2008 without adjusting for inflation. That’s not how money works. The value changes over time. Let’s take a look.

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Episode 285
FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron analyzes all baseball — and, in particular, the part of baseball concerning the James Shields-for-Wil Myers (etc.) trade. Also: the Dodgers. Also-also: how the guest refuses to read the host’s work even once.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 44 min play time.)

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On Saturday, the Los Angeles Dodgers gave one of the biggest contracts in baseball history to Zack Greinke. On Sunday, the Dodgers gave a big contract to Ryu Hyun-Jin, who has never before pitched in the majors. The Dodgers still might not even be done, and neither of the moves this weekend came as a surprise, because as we’ve established, the Dodgers have all of the money. The Dodgers have money and a baseball team, so it only makes sense that they would spend liberally to improve the baseball team. These Dodgers aren’t your daddy’s Dodgers. These Dodgers are your older brother’s Yankees.

As the Yankees have made a goal of exhibiting financial restraint, the Dodgers have been like “**** that” and they’re prepared to enter 2013 with the highest payroll that baseball’s ever seen. It was not very long ago that the Dodgers were bankrupt. Then there was the Hanley Ramirez trade. Remember the Hanley Ramirez trade? Then Brandon League, and Shane Victorino, and Joe Blanton, and acquiring the Red Sox. Then Greinke. Then Ryu Hyun-Jin. Yasiel Puig was in there somewhere. So was an Andre Ethier extension. Of course, like everyone else, the Dodgers have their limits, but we’ve been given no indication that the limits are being approached.

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One move over the weekend is getting all the negative attention today, but there was another big acquisition that might have an even slimmer chance of working out for the organization in question: The Dodgers signed Korean lefty Ryu Hyun-Jin to a six-year, $36-million contract. When added to his $25.7 million posting fee, that outlay means that the Dodgers are locked into more than $60 million for a pitcher that hasn’t yet touched the minor leagues. That’s starter money, and it’s unclear that Ryu is a lock to be a starter. But, yah, it’s only money… right?

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One of my favorite* old writer techniques was when people would try to analyze Zack Greinke’s decision-making process based on the fact that he had social anxiety disorder. It was as if the condition made Greinke more understandable, as opposed to less. “Greinke would never want to play in a large market,” people would assert. “He wouldn’t be able to handle it.” Zack Greinke, most recently, has been a free agent. Zack Greinke just reportedly signed a six-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers for $147 million. As markets go, Los Angeles is pretty big.

* least favorite

Greinke was the market’s best available free-agent starter, so in that sense it’s not a surprise that he wound up with the Dodgers, since the Dodgers have all of the money. Even your money is the Dodgers’ money now. They even took your laundry quarters. In recent days, this wasn’t so clear, though, as it was down to the Dodgers and the Rangers, and there were indications that Greinke preferred Texas. But those indications were just rumors, and the smart bet would’ve been on the team with all of the money. The team with all of the money was and is the Dodgers.

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