This kicks off a position-by-position series that will look at the upcoming free agents. Because there are fans of 26 teams out there already thinking about next year and how their team can get better, that’s why.

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Ramon Hernandez
Not a single free agent catcher qualified for the batting title. Among those that managed 200 PAs, though, Hernandez led the crew in both batting average and wOBA. He actually managed offense that was 11% better than the league average, which is like wow for a catcher. The position managed a .245/.313/.389 line, and Hernandez had a .282/.341/.446 line. That would make him the offensive class of the free agent class. And by Matt Klaasen’s most recent catcher defense rankings, he graded out as top-tier as well. So why might the Reds let him go? Well they have Ryan Hanigan in hand and Devin Mesoraco on the way, so they don’t need to spend that money. Also, Hernandez is 36 years old, has averaged 337 PAs over the past three years, and is as likely to be below-average with the bat as he is to be above-average (or more likely below, given he’s another year older). Even though his defense is at least decent and the Dodgers are a possibility, the best fit for him might be an American league team that can shuttle him between catcher and DH to keep him fresh. Could he return to Baltimore? Replace free-agent-to-be Josh Bard in Seattle? The Mariners are looking for offense at any position they can get it.
Verdict: Mariners.

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With their backs against the wall, the New York Yankees clobbered the baseball around the diamond for a 10-1 victory and tied up the ALDS with the Detroit Tigers at two games apiece.

The two teams will now head back east to New York for a decisive Game 5. New York will trot out young Ivan Nova, while Detroit counters with right-hander Doug Fister. It will be a rematch of Game 1, in which Fister surrendered six earned runs in 4.2 innings and, ultimately, took the loss. Given that Fister’s dominating second half with the Tigers was so surprising, it’s natural to think that perhaps he was exposed by having to face a good line-up, and that the Tigers are in trouble asking him to try and get the Yankees out again.

After all, it’s become fashionable to point out that Fister didn’t exactly have the hardest road after Detroit picked him up from Seattle in July. This criticism is based in fact – his opponents in August and September, chronologically:

Texas, Cleveland, Baltimore, Cleveland, Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Cleveland, Minnesota, Oakland, Kansas City, Cleveland

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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.

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A fair amount of Most Valuable Player and Cy Young discussion has been going around lately, and while it seems a bit early with a month left in the season, I suppose it is understandable. There has been less discussion of Rookie of the Year. I don’t blame anyone for that. I really don’t get that worked up about the individual year-end awards. (I’m not quite brave enough to say that I don’t care, maybe if Greinke hadn’t won in 2009 the story would have been different.) And if I’m not that pumped about the MVP or Cy Young races, why should I be excited about Rookie of the Year?

Still, a number of rookies have been impressive this season, so it is worth discussing. Brett Lawrie, for example, has hit so well in only 26 major league games that he’s already at two WAR for the season, right of there with the best of the American League rookie hitters. What if he (or Desmond Jennings, or whatever player you want to pick) keeps this up? What if they put up more value than any other rookie in less than half of a season? Would you vote for them for Rookie of the Year?

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Ichiro Suzuki is having a down season and is nearing the end of his career. Many people would consider him an automatic hall-of-famer with the work he’s put together since joining the Mariners as a 27-year-old in 2001. But how good is he, really? Well, for comparison’s sake, I took the production of all hitters from 27 years of age and older and put them against Ichiro’s career numbers. The results are interesting and will only add to the debate.

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The Mariners won today, beating the Indians by a 9-2 score. Jokes about the Mariners inept offense aside, there’s not much usually inherently interesting in the typical line score of a 9-2 game. Where this game picked up a noteworthy angle was in the last column of the line score, the errors. The Mariners committed four of them while the Indians were charged with zero and yet, the Mariners still won and won handily.

Four errors in one game does not happen all that often, and the team winning happens even less often. In fact, digging into Retrosheet, there were 1,021 such games in their records and the error-happy team had prevailed in only 191 of them for an 18.7% winning percentage. As a side note, there was no meaningful split between the home and road winning records here.

My initial research was spurred by a request for similarly errored games, but if I open it up to games with four or more errors for one team and zero for the other then the sample size expands to 1,342 and a 17.3% winning percentage for the erroring team. It’s merely two data points – and there are far more robust studies showing the same effect – but it makes sense that as the sample lets in games with more errors, the winning percentage drops. Errors are not the greatest measurement tool we have given their subjectivity, but they do have a correlation with losing.

Of course, I had to carry it to the logical conclusion and find the game or games with the largest disparity between errors. That turned out to be this game between the Oakland Athletics and the Kansas City Royals with the Royals (of course) committing a whopping eight errors to Oakland’s zero. Unsurprisingly, the Royals were trounced 11-2 in that game, although only four of the Athletics’’ runs were deemed due to the errors. The widest spread still resulting in a victory for the sloppy team circles back around to the Mariners in this game where despite seven errors and a 7-2 deficit to the Brewers in Milwaukee, the Mariners came back and won 10-8 on the road. Now that’s winning dirty.

Earlier this season, I re-introduced the two statistics Shutdowns and Meltdowns. In short, these two stats are an alternative way of evaluating relief pitchers, providing an alternative from the age-old standbys Saves and Blown Saves. If a pitcher enters a game and makes their team more likely to win, they get credit for a Shutdown; if they make their team more likely to lose, they get a Meltdown. It’s a simple enough concept, no?

Shutdowns and Meltdowns are a great way to look at which relievers are under- or overvalued based on their Saves total, and it can also be a useful tool for evaluating middle relievers. So which relievers have are being sneakily good or bad this year? Let’s take a look.

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The Seattle Mariners are enduring a pretty miserable season. After last year’s stinker, the Mariners have followed it up with a .438 winning percentage and a pace-worthy of a scant 71 wins. Well, buck up West Coasters, because the Seattle Mariners should hit better through the season’s end!

In fact, the Mariners should be hitting a whopping 29% better.

For several weeks now, I’ve been playing with fielding-independent-hitting tools, specifically the aptly-named Should Hit metric.

Should Hit (ShH, for short) has a variety of uses, though its best used as a BABIP regressor. For your perusal, I created ShHAP!, a Google Doc that’s free for the world to download and allows anyone to regress a player’s present season (or any stretch of statistics), according to a different BABIP.

Well, today, let’s put this tool to use and look at the Mariners.

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Two years ago, the top two picks in the June draft were pretty obvious – Stephen Strasburg was going to go #1 and Dustin Ackley was going to go #2. Strasburg was the best pitching prospect in the draft’s history, while Ackley had comfortably settled in as the low-risk college position player option. Because of the enormous difference in perceived potential, there was no real question that the Nationals would take Strasburg #1, even with the greater chance of risk associated with drafting a pitcher. I made the case for Ackley at the time, but even I admitted that, given the #1 pick, I’d take Strasburg too.

Now, though, a lot has changed. Strasburg had a remarkable ascent and debut in the big leagues, but then also had to go under the knife and has spent the last year rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. Ackley, meanwhile, had some pedestrian numbers in the minor leagues, took longer to get to the show, but has made a pretty nifty little splash since he got there.

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Mercifully, the Mariners’ historically bad 17-game losing streak is over. Sure, Seattle didn’t play well for the last three weeks, but it found itself on the wrong side of probability on an incredible level.

If Seattle had a 50/50 chance to win every game, the chances that they would lose 17 games in a row can be calculated by using a probability chain. Taking 50-percent to the 17th power results in 0.0008-percent, or 1-in-131,072 odds.

However, the Mariners are not expected to win 50-percent of their games. Read the rest of this entry »