Early Thursday afternoon, Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reported that the Texas Rangers were working on a long-term deal with starter Derek Holland. As an unabashed fan of Derek Holland (yes, despite his performance against the Rays in the playoffs) and a loather of all things having to do with the Rangers (the playoffs may have something to do with this), this news caused conflicting emotions to simultaneously flit across my mind. Sweet, great move locking him up! Arg, but why does it have to be the Rangers?

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Why is locking up Holland a great move? If you take a cursory glance over his statistics, you’ll notice he had an impressive 2011 season: 3.95 ERA, 3.86 SIERA, 3.6 WAR. It was a breakout year for Holland, but it’s not exactly an unexpected development. He has dominant stuff — a 94 MPH fastball with plus movement, a hard slider that destroys lefties, and a changeup and curveball for attacking righties — and he was a top ranked prospect when coming up through the minors. He’s durable, throwing 198 innings last season, and he’s a mere 25 years old.

Also, it’s worth considering that Holland improved dramatically over the second half of 2011. As I noted during the playoffs:

He started off the year posting a 6.7 K/9 and 3.4 BB/9, but over his final 14 starts, he posted a 3.06 ERA while increasing his strikeout rate (8.2 per nine) and dropping his walk rate (2.7 per nine).

It’s difficult to say how much of those improvements Holland will carry over into 2012, but over the tail end of last season, he was arguably as good or better than C.J. Wilson. The Rangers have resigned themselves to losing Wilson in free agency, but they just might have the next Wilson already on their roster.

But since the terms of the agreement haven’t been released yet, what should we expect? How much will Holland get in this deal? That question is a lot easier to answer than you’d imagine.

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Obviously it is the horse talking.

News broke Monday night that the Texas Rangers signed once-great, maybe even possibly still-great, reliever Joe Nathan to a 2-year contract for $7M a year, plus a $9M option.

FUN FACT: Over the last two years, Joe Nathan and I have the exact same WAR — we both have been worth precisely 0.0 wins! Which makes us ask: Why did the Rangers choose Nathan?

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While the MVP award announcements are normally used as an opportunity to make snide comments and question the intelligence of writers, I prefer to think of them a different way. We know that we’ll never be able to convert everyone to sabermetrics, and there are always going to be one or two people that make questionable decisions on their ballots. Instead of focusing our attention on them, why not move that focus back to where it’s supposed to be: the players.

The MVP award (and the subsequent conversation surrounding it) is a chance for us to recognize players for having impressive, noteworthy years. Twenty-three players received a vote during this year’s AL MVP voting, but there were still more out there that had seasons worth remembering. These players aren’t necessarily “snubs”, since each player in the MVP voting also deserved recognition for their seasons; it’s simply there are sometimes more players doing exceptional things than can be highlighted.

So even if the BBWAA missed these players, let’s give a few of them the spotlight they deserve.

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Early Friday morning, Texas Ranger owner Nolan Ryan turned some heads with a surprising comment about the Rangers’ offseason plans. While the Rangers had made it clear earlier this offseason that they are focusing on acquiring pitching, as one of the large market teams with a weak first baseman, most people expected them to be players in the bidding for Prince Fielder or Albert Pujols.

Well, think again:

“Making a seven-or-eight year deal for Fielder or Pujols is not something our organization is prepared to do,” Ryan said. “I very much expect Mitch Moreland to be our first baseman next year.”

Mitch Moreland may be a solid first baseman and a young player with good upside, but to state the obvious, he’s no Fielder or Pujols. Is Nolan Ryan making a mistake to write off pursuing either of them?

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On Tuesday, we took a quick look at the competitive balance in the MLB, and I made the claim that baseball may have more parity than most leagues, but it also has want of greater balance. During the course of the piece, I made this statement:

The NFL has decided it wants payroll to have essentially no impact on winning, so teams basically trot out the same amount of money every Sunday and hope their money was better-spent. Is that what the MLB wants?

Aft’wards, Paul Swydan pointed out to me that indeed NFL salaries are not flat. Despite their hard cap, their hefty revenue sharing, and their tight spandex pants, the NFL still exhibits nearly a $77M gap between the biggest and lowest payroll — impressive, but still nothing compared to the MLB:

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Previous entries:
Primer
The Full Story
Batters

In a series with a 16-7 game and an 11-10 game, and one in which the big moments were dominated by the hitters, it can be easy to forget about the pitchers. And although the performances of Chris Carpenter and Derek Holland pale behind those of David Freese and Lance Berkman, they deserve to be remembered.

On the other side of the coin, Jason Motte, who was so excellent in the first two rounds of the playoffs, was bailed out by his teammates in the final two games. As poorly as Motte pitched, it was the entire Rangers bullpen that collapsed, with Scott Feldman, Neftali Feliz, Alexi Ogando, and Mark Lowe all coming up well negative for Ron Washington and the Rangers.

Observe, the leaders and trailers in pitcher series probability added for the 2011 World Series:

Click to see the fully functioning visualization and follow the jump for more.

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Yesterday, Cubs President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein announced the Chicago Cubs and manager Mike Quade have parted ways. Kudos to Theo Epstein for not doing what we all expected him to: Fire Quade immediately.

It appears Epstein — like he has approached most everything in his young Cubs reign — decided to withhold judgement until he had fully investigated the matter himself. Like Joe Maddon is wont to say, “Tell me what you think, not what you heard.”

Quade’s managerial time with the Cubs was both short and possibly undeserved. Taking the helm when Lou Piniella suddenly retired in 2010, Quade inherited a team that was predisposed towards failure. But, despite that, the team went 24-13 to close out the season. That was enough proof for Jim Hendry to vault Quade not only into the manager discussion, but the manager’s chair:

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In yesterday’s primer, I introduced the basics behind World Series win probabilities. Today, we begin looking at the 2011 World Series through this lens.

The first natural use of win probabilities, especially on FanGraphs, is the win probability graph. Observe, the graph of series win probability for the St. Louis Cardinals throughout the World Series:

Click to view the graph in a new window with all the bells and whistles provided by the Tableau software.

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Thanks to Patrick Newman for his help in writing and researching this article.

Judging from the first responders to the coming storm over the Pacific, this title bears repeating: Yu Darvish is not Daisuke Matsuzaka. The natural search for comps, paired with the disappointment that was Matsuzaka’s career, will lead to suspicion when it comes to the newest ace slated to come over from Japan. Why should it work out this time if it didn’t work out the last couple times? But there are real differences between the two pitchers that could use a little emphasis.

Consider this list your consolation if you are dumbfounded by the posting fee that your team will spend simply for the right to speak with Darvish.

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Over the next few days, I will be running out a series based on win probabilities from the World Series not only using single game win probabilities like the ones in our game graphs, but also using overall series win probabilities, which will be introduced today.

The idea behind the series win probabilities is based around the same idea as the single game win probabilities we use here: both teams have a 50% chance of winning each game. As such, this flow chart describes every possible path for a team through the World Series (or any other seven game series; the part from 1-1 up would describe a five-game series):

Click to embiggen, and then follow the jump for more on what’s inside.

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