Brian Sabean has fired his first salvo of the 2011 offseason, acquiring outfielder Melky Cabrera from the Kansas City Royals in exchange for starting pitcher Jonathan Sanchez and minor-league pitcher Ryan Verdugo.

Before we can even begin to analyze this trade, I believe we have to divorce the names of the players from their actual production. Melky Cabrera has been something of a punching bag among writers and analysts for a variety of reasons, ranging from his poor shape to his lousy attitude to awful production in 2008 and 2010.

Cabrera is, of course, coming off the best season of his life. He finished a remarkable fourth in hits in the American League. Part of this is the less robust production of singles hitting as opposed to high power or on-base percentage, but he still finished with a .349 wOBA, a 118 wRC+ and 4.2 WAR in his age 26 season.

There are certainly reasons to believe Cabrera will regress in 2012. His BABIP of .332 is a career high and there is little reason to believe he is like an Ichiro Suzuki or a Matt Kemp and can routinely sustain such good results on balls in play. His power level (44 doubles, 18 home runs, a .162 ISO) was also previously unseen, blasting his old career highs out of the water.

Read the rest of this entry »

From 2008 to 2011, Jonathan Sanchez has the fourth highest strikeout rate (24.1%) of any starting pitcher in baseball (500 IP minimum), ranking behind only Tim Lincecum, Clayton Kershaw, and Yovani Gallardo. Given this ability to consistently miss bats, Sanchez is often lauded as a pitcher with a lot of untapped potential. Pitchers who can post those kinds of strikeout rates are often quite successful, and if Sanchez could just refine the other parts of his game, he looks like he could turn into a dominant starting pitcher.

There’s just one problem – Sanchez isn’t even close to refining those other parts of his game, and we simply can’t ignore that he’s a massively flawed pitcher. Over the same time period (and again, 500 inning minimum), no starting pitcher has posted a worse walk rate than Sanchez’s 12.3% mark, and it’s not even all that close. The next worst mark is Gio Gonzalez, more than a full percentage point behind, and he is then followed closely by Barry Zito.

Sanchez’s high walk and high strikeout rates are the product of his propensity for pitching up in the strike zone, where contact is less frequent but so is the likelihood of getting a called strike. By pitching up in the zone, Sanchez is essentially choosing a strategy that increases the likelihood of deep counts, thus increasing both his walk and strikeout rates. Unlike some other high walk/high strikeout pitchers who simply need to improve their command of premium stuff, Sanchez is getting his whiffs through location, and if he began to throw more strikes, he’d likely see a significant drop in his strikeout rate as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

With a classic World Series — the most exciting in a long time, if not the best-played or best-managed — now over, it is time to hand out individual awards for the 2011 regular season. Sure, some people are anticipating the Cy Young, MVP, and Rookie of the Year announcements, but I bet true baseball fans really pumped for stuff like today’s award, which attempts to measure how much a hitter has contributed to his team’s wins beyond what traditional linear weights indicates. Who is 2011’s King of Little Things?

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the following twirlers can really play the game of ball called base!

In 2011, a total of 272 different pitchers started a game in the MLB — that’s an average of 9 starters per team. In other words, five starters is not enough. Successful MLB organizations need pitching depth — and lots of it. Some teams may need a 7th or 8th starter for only 1 game, but ask the Boston Red Sox how important 1 game is.

For teams in the need, the 2012 starting pitcher free agent list has some value and some worthy risks out there, but as with every year, no team should expect the free agent market to have all the answers. The following list, though not exhaustive, runs down the most important names of the 2012 free agents:

Top Tier — Starters who promise big contracts and big seasons.
C.J. Wilson (LHP, Age 31 next season, free agent)
CC Sabathia (LHP, 31, may opt out)
Hiroki Kuroda (RHP, 37, FA)
Edwin Jackson (RHP, 28, FA)
Mark Buehrle (LHP, 33, FA)
Javier Vazquez (RHP, 35, FA)

The Obvious One, Mr. C.J. Wilson, finally promises to pull in that contract big enough to purchase his long-awaited solid-gold rocket car. Wilson, the heat-hurling lord of the lefties figures to have at least two very impressive suitors — the New York Yankees and his present team, the Texas Rangers. Since becoming a starter two years ago, he has posted a combined 10.5 WAR, sporting an ace-worth 3.24 FIP this year.

Not only does Wilson have a shot to break the bank, but there appears to be a chance that twirling titan CC Sabathia may opt out of the final four years of his contract with the Yankees. Sabathia has been yawningly awesome through his 10-year career, never posting a FIP- higher than 96 and assembling a career-best 2.88 FIP in 2011.

Read the rest of this entry »

The corner outfielder often gets lumped into the mix with the first basemen / designated hitter types. You might call that part of the market the ‘last piece saloon.’ But, Raul Ibanez aside, corner outfielders need to be able to run a little bit, too.

Oh, would you look at that, Ibanez is a free agent. But who needs a corner outfielder at all? Depending on how they put their team together, the Braves could maybe use another outfielder. The Red Sox have an opening, but after their last high-priced acquisition in the outfield, and their plethora of in-house options, it might not be a priority. Both Chicago teams are a maybe, with the NL version more probable. Do the Dodgers have any money? The Giants will sign one for sure. The A’s will wait for a bargain, as they always do. The Mariners have to be considered dark horses for any piece of offense. The Nationals could try again. That pretty much defines your market, and it’s a pretty decent one in terms of demand.

What does the supply look like?

Read the rest of this entry »

A pitcher even finer than even these two upstanding gents!

Quick! There’s no time to waste!

Name the five best FIP- seasons in the history of MLB. (Minimum, a scant 20 IP.)

I’d imagine your list includes Eric Gagne‘s crazy 2003 and Pedro Martinez’s nutso 1999 season. And you’d be correct. But there’s another modern-day pitcher you’d have only guessed if you had cleverly looked at the title of this post:

1) Ed Cushman, 10 FIP- (1884, year of our lord)
2) Henry Porter, 13 FIP- (1884)
3) Eric Gagne, 20 FIP- (2003)
4) Sergio Romo, 25 FIP- (2011)
5) Pedro Martinez, 30 FIP- (1999)

I imagine there are a number of baseball fans who, like myself, had not even heard of Sergio Romo until they made him their setup man while playing Baseball Mogul 2008.

We’ll learn his name because he might be one of the greatest late-blooming relievers in the history of the game.
Read the rest of this entry »

With the season nearing its end (and my team out of the playoffs), I believe it is time to start thinking about the offseason, and more specifically; trades. Trading is something that has been deeply studied in economics and international finance and it may be informative to employ economic theory to baseball. The law of comparative advantage is one such theory, and I am going to try and apply it to baseball in away I haven’t yet seen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Join me! The rabbit hole is suspiciously warm.

The Tampa Bay Rays are now down 1-2 in the ALDS, placing their hopes for a Rangers rout on the shoulders of rookie right-hander Jeremy Hellickson. The so-called Hellboy takes the mound at 2:07 p.m. ET today, facing Rangers lefty Matt Harrison.

The match-up, to say the least, favors the Rangers. Not only does Harrison have the edge in FIP (3.52), xFIP (3.85), and SIERA (3.94), he has the added bonus of a seemingly normal BABIP (.290) and LOB% (72.3%). Hellickson has only an ERA edge (2.95); the rest suggests impending doom: 4.44 FIP, 4.72 xFIP, 4.63 SIERA, .223 BABIP, and 82.0% LOB%.

Well, Hellickson does have at least one major thing going for him: A serious and unusual strikeout regression.
Read the rest of this entry »

Pablo Sandoval hit for the cycle during the Giants’ 8-5 victory over the Rockies last night, ably and entertainingly broken down by Jeff Sullivan here. It has been quite a journey for Kung Fu Panda, who went from exciting young Giants third baseman to bench player during San Francisco’s run to the World Championship in 2010. Criticized by the organization for his weight, he came into 2011 slimmed-down and has returned to his impressive pre-2010 performance level. What makes the timing of the cycle so interesting is that it comes so soon after reports surfaced that he has gained back much of the weight he lost during the off-season. Sandoval is a big guy, but is he the biggest-boned player to hit for a cycle since the beginning of FanGraph’s play-by-play data (1974)?

Read the rest of this entry »

The MLB season is drawing to a close, which means it’s about time for rampant speculation about next year’s free agents. One of my favorite off-season storylines is that of the east Asian baseball markets both giving and absorbing talent.

This past off season, we witnessed the likes of Chad Tracy, Wladimir Balentien, and Micah Hoffpauer head west to the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league while Japan sent Tsuyoshi Nishioka and Ryan Vogelsong Minnesota and California’s way.

Let’s look at the present NPB league statistics, so we can start writing our wishlists and dreaming about next year’s rosters.

Read the rest of this entry »