The Mets extended lefty Jonathon Niese for five years and $25.5 million, and even without the two club option years ($10 and $10.5 million respectively), the deal should be a solid one for the front office. They’ve bought out all of his arbitration years, a year of free agency, and have two friendly options — and his comps suggest that he’ll make the deal look good.

Using the new age filters on the site, we can find all the pitchers between 23 and 25 years old that pitched in the PITCH F/x era (2002+). From there, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to all 23-25 year olds that managed to induce more than 47% of their contact on the ground (Niese career GB% 49.1%), strike out more than seven batters per nine (career 7.65 K/9), walk fewer than 3.4 batters per nine (career 2.99 BB/9), and amass more than 150 innings in a season. Suddenly, Niese is in good company.
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Remember back in the 2009-2010 off-season, when some people weren’t sure who was better between big-time free agent outfielders Jason Bay and Matt Holliday? That was awesome. The Bay contract may not have been the nail in the coffin of Omar Minaya’s tenure as general manager of the Mets, but it was pretty close.

It is unlikely that even the biggest critics of the Bay contract at the time (and I was not a fan) thought things would get this bad this quickly. Bay was paid to be a star, but he has not even been an average player in either of his seasons so far with the Mets. Perhaps he was about average overall when he played in 2010, but he missed more than a third of the 2010 season. In 2011 he played more, but went from overpaid average player to just a bad player. He has looked so poor in spring training that there is talk (understandably dismissed by the Mets) that Bay could be platooned if he starts slow this year. The talk may be baseless, but that it is even out there is a bad sign for the Mets given that Bay still has two years and $35 million guaranteed (including the $3 million buyout on the 2014 club option) on his contract, which also includes a full no-trade clause.

But for the sake of speculation, if the Mets did decide to platoon Bay, would it really accomplish anything?

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Dave Cameron laid out the methodology behind the rankings last Friday. Remember that the grading scale for each category is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

2012 Organizational Rankings

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago White Sox
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland

New York Mets’ 2011 Ranking: #21

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Carson Cistulli remains away, so us the other writers shall — as the Necronomicon suggests we might — play.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Selected Televised Games
2. Japanese Baseball Wonderments
3. Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Get Your Vote On

Selected Televised Games
Notable games available on MLB.TV.

Mariners at Athletics AL | 6:10 ET
By the time your eyes hit these digital words, this game will should have expired — because this Regular Season series is taking place in yonder JAPAN. But, through the magic of Internet, you can watch this game anytime today and at your leisure! The contest will also be re-broadcast on MLB Network at 9 a.m. (with a three-hour delay, that is), so people looking to get their Yoenis Cespedes / Ichiro Suzuki fix have some options here.

The game is still in progress at the time of publication. I don’t want to give anything away, but suffice it to say: The game involves pitching performances! and multi-hit efforts! and diving/jumping catches!

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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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I am too young to have followed Gary Carter. I never met him, never read any books about him, and I can’t claim to have any specific connection with him. I knew he was a great ballplayer and somewhat of an iconic figure, but up until yesterday, that’s around where my knowledge stopped and began.

So I’m not about to attempt to write an obituary for Carter; if that’s what you’re looking for, there are numerous touching obits out there. I can’t stop reading them myself, and I recommend you at least read one in remembrance of Carter.

I suppose I could use this space to do a career retrospective. To look at how Carter stacks up against other all-time great player. To celebrate some of the finer moments of his career. Matt Klaassen had one of these earlier today, but for some reason, I’m feeling very un-FanGraphs-y right now.

We spend a lot of time here focusing on facts. Statistics. Data. Scouting reports. Things that can help us better evaluate players and teams, and make judgement calls about how they will do in the future, if they belong in the Hall of Fame, etc etc. We analyse, we parse, we dissect. Whether our motivation is for improving our fantasy baseball skills, becoming a more knowledgeable fan, or gaining a more pure understanding about this childish game, we’re all here searching for a higher Truth.

But on moments like this, statistics get thrown out the window. Heck, baseball gets thrown out the window. And it’s in these sort of moments where I’m reminded why I first started following baseball to begin with.

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As you undoubtedly know by now, Gary Carter passed away yesterday. The Hall of Fame catcher had an outstanding career as a big part of the star-crossed Montreal Expos’ only playoff team and later a World Champion Mets team. My own first awareness of Carter was one Christmas or birthday long ago, when, although I did not collect baseball cards, someone gave me a pack, and a card bearing the image of a young Gary Carter was included.

Many pieces have been and will be written about Carter in the wake of his passing, pieces that will tell various stories of his memorable on-field exploits. Different people will have their own particular favorite Gary Carter “moment” for which there is no substitute. As a contribution to the ongoing tribute to Carter around the Web, here are Carter’s three biggest regular season hits as according to Win Probability Added (WPA).

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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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Baseball is a team sport. Between the foul lines, however, the outcome of the game is inextricably composed of multiple individual performances, and in today’s hyper-analytical and overly-critical society that places each individual performance under a microscope, stress amongst baseball players has — by all accounts — risen to never-before-seen levels.

For some players, that stress lacks a healthy outlet. It builds and builds until mental disorders begin to bubble to the surface, and in some cases, they can become debilitating for players.

Taylor Buchholz became the latest major league baseball player to come forward and announce that he will take time away from baseball due to anxiety and depression issues.

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