Today on ESPN.com, one of the top baseball stories details Brian Cashman’s feigned interest in signing Carl Crawford over the offseason. This revelation isn’t actually new — Jack Curry of YES Network published the same news back in December — but the ESPN story does add one interesting quote to the story. Observe:

“I actually had dinner with the agent to pretend that we were actually involved and drive the price up,” Cashman said. “The outfield wasn’t an area of need, but everybody kept writing Crawford, Crawford, Crawford, Crawford. And I was like, ‘I feel like we’ve got Carl Crawford in Brett Gardner, except he costs more than $100 million less, with less experience.’

I made the claim earlier this season that Brett Gardner is an elite player, and it was met with mixed reactions. Some agree that Gardner’s decent hitting and great defense make him great; others find the claim of great defense too steeped in his great UZR. But now, courtesy of Brian Cashman, we have a suitable point of comparison from a person in a position of baseball authority. Carl Crawford was a four-time All-Star with the Rays and a gold glove winner. No sane person would argue he wasn’t an elite player with the Rays.

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Finally, awards season proper, perhaps inaugurated by last night’s Emmy Awards (more credible than the Grammys, less credible than the Gold Gloves), has begun. Perhaps the annual baseball awards would be more exciting if it somehow incorporated hours of inane red carpet banter, but instead we have to settle for seemingly endless arguments.

If you are reading this, you probably are at least somewhat aware of an added element to the arguments about baseball awards voting the last couple of seasons: the increasing popularity of Wins Above Replacement as a measure of player value. Although I personally have not experienced single-season WAR being used as a “conversation stopper” in player comparison, it seems that some people feel that happens far too often. That is unfortunate, because while WAR is a very useful tool for a getting a picture of a player’s overall contribution relative to his peers, it isn’t something that should be used to end those debates, but to recast them in a different, and hopefully better, fashion. Rather than explain WAR from the ground up (the FanGraphs Library has a good primer), or even to say who should win, today my goal is simply to show how I would use WAR in relation to the 2011 American League MVP Award in a way that probably isn’t too different from most other FanGraphs authors.

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The Red Sox are reeling. Over the last month, they’ve seen a 10-game lead over Tampa Bay shrink down to just three games. They’ve seen their rotation suffer from injuries and poor performances, and lately, even the normally reliable Daniel Bard has been blowing up at inopportune times. As hard as it would have been to believe even just a few weeks ago, the Rays could pull into a tie in the Wild Card race if they can complete the weekend sweep in Boston.

And yet, despite all the injuries, the poor performances, and the threatening kids from down south, I still don’t think the Red Sox really have all that much to worry about. Even if we presume that the Red Sox and Rays are of somewhat equal talent levels for the remainder of the season, the Sox still have a lot of advantages in this race for the final playoff spot.

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“You never know where help will come from — until you look for it.”

— Tobias Funkë, Arrested Development

News broke last night that Florida police arrested Manny Ramirez on battery charges concerning his wife. Just a few months ago, Ramirez was preparing for another MLB season and had a gold-plated opportunity for redemption.

Since then, though, the former Cleveland Indians and Boston Red Sox slugger has journeyed down a divergent path from his most recent team, the Tampa Bay Rays.

Rewind to the beginning of the season: The Rays management willingly admits 2011 would be a “reloading” year — which is to say the team anticipated a good, but not good-enough performance.

Sure, they had the pitching — what with David Price, James Shields and three young and above-average starters in Jeremy Hellickson, Wade Davis and Jeff Niemann — and they had the defenders — again boasting some of the league’s most valuable fielders in Evan Longoria, Ben Zobrist, and B.J. Upton — but they also had holes aplenty.

For one, the Rays lacked a legitimate DH and a proven first baseman. In hopes of putting power in the DH spot and getting the team a few lucky bounces away from the playoffs, they signed Manny Ramirez to a $2M, 1-year contract — deemed by many as a triumph of Friedmanonics — and Johnny Damon to a $7M $5.25M (excluding incentives), 1-year deal. But even with these additions, the Rays had little chance to out-talent the Red Sox and Yankees in 2011.

The story, as any good story goes, proved quite unpredictable.
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When we think of the prototypical Most Valuable Player, we think of a burly first baseman who slugs forty homers. But that’s not always the case, not in terms of sabremetric thinking, and not for the Baseball Writers Association of America either. Jacoby Ellsbury as MVP candidate isn’t a figment of the interwebs’ imagination — there are several players who won that have a similar profile as Ellsbury.

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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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Due to a back injury to veteran Kevin Youkilis, the Boston Red Sox club has promoted catcher/designated hitter Ryan Lavarnway to the Major Leagues. He made his debut Thursday night against the Kansas City Royals and went 0-for-4 with a strikeout. Lavarnway, 24, is not going to step into the Red Sox lineup and immediate produce at the star level that Youkilis has (4.1 WAR in ’11), but he should be slightly-above replacement level in the short term.

I’ve been eagerly anticipating Lavarnway’s arrival in the Majors. Out of the five pre-season Top 10 prospect lists for Boston [Baseball America, Kevin Goldstein, Keith Law, John Sickels], the scribe from minorleagueball.com and I were the only ones to place him on the Boston lists (Law earns mega points, though, for placing both Will Middlebrooks and Xander Bogaerts on his list).

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I was lucky enough to be in attendance for last night’s game between the Rays and Red Sox, where I got to see something rather rare: a triple play. In the fourth inning of the game, the Rays had runners on first and second with no outs, and Sean Rodriguez hit a sharp grounder right to Jed Lowrie at third base. Lowrie took two steps to the base and then started an easy 5-4-3 triple play. But as fate would have it, this play wasn’t even the first triple play turned this week. The Brewers turned an impressive 4-6-3-2 triple play on Monday against the Dodgers, the first time that sort of triple play has happened since 1972.

So naturally, these two plays have now turned my mind toward all things triple-play-related. Looking for some odd tidbits of information on these triple plays, or on triple plays in general? I’ve got you covered.

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Jacoby Ellsbury is having a terrific year, and has been one of the best all-around players in baseball this year. He’s been one of the main reasons the Red Sox have rebounded from a slow start, and is rightfully getting attention as a legitimate MVP candidate. He should absolutely be part of that discussion.

Over in the National League, though, Shane Victorino is performing at the same level and, at least by my perception, is getting roundly ignored. This should not be. Let’s put them side by side, shall we?

Ellsbury: .314/.369/.508, .387 wOBA, 142 wRC+, +11.2 UZR, +6.2 WAR
Victorino: .313/.390/.536, .406 wOBA, 157 wRC+, +6.5 UZR, +5.7 WAR

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A five home-run game has never happened for a hitter, but it has happened for pitchers plenty of times. It’s certainly less of a positive achievement there, but just as notable. Or more notable because it’s actually happened and I can note the times that it has. It happened another two times already tonight, as noted by Jeff Sullivan.

CC Sabathia surrendered five home runs to the Rays, all from different hitters, and Carlos Zambrano gave up five to the Braves, two coming from Dan Uggla and his now 32-game hitting streak. On their own, they are worth noting and then moving on. A pitching giving up five home runs is certainly unusual but it’s not incredibly rare. James Shields, Tim Wakefield and R.A. Dickey have allowed six in a game once and that’s only looking at the past decade. All in all, there have now been 34 instances of a five-homer game since 2000. For reference, over the same time period there have been a total of 39 triple plays turned. What I did notice however, is that Sabathia’s five home runs were all solo shots and that’s a much rarer event.

In the entire Retrosheet era, there are only 22 other cases of a pitcher giving up at least five solo home runs in a game. James Shields ruins a bit of the fun by having done it so recently as 7 August 2010 when five of the ultimately six home runs hit off him were solo dingers. More fascinating is that Tim Wakefield has actually done it twice. In the aforementioned six home run game in 2004, five of the home runs were solo shots in Detroit. The other was a two-run shot and Wakefield only allowed 2 non-HR hits over his five innings that game. Prior to that, in 1996 pitching at Fenway to the White Sox, Wakefield served up solo home runs to Frank Thomas (three times), Danny Tartabull and Robin Ventura. Similar to the other game, Wakefield only allowed a single hit that wasn’t a home run and completed six innings. Amazingly, the Red Sox won both those games.

Turning from the opposite of solo home runs, in case you needed another daily fun fact, the most amount of runs allowed by a pitcher via the long ball in one game is 11. Gio Gonzalez was responsible in July of 2009 by the Twins in Oakland of all places (and Oakland won despite being down 12-2 at one point) and Shawn Chacon was brutalized by the Angels in Colorado in 2001, which makes way more sense.