What would it take for a pitcher to win the National League MVP award?

Really there are two questions here: What would it take for voters to vote a starter into the award? And what would it take for a pitcher to be worth more than a position player?

First, a bit of history. Twenty-one pitchers have won the award since 1911, meaning it happens about once every 10 years. The last time it happened for a starter was 1986, when Roger Clemens won the award with a 24-4 record and 238 strike outs. Those benchmarks won’t be hit this year, but is it possible that some of the conditions will be met? Could Roy Halladay or Clayton Kershaw find themselves with two pieces of mega-hardware after the season?

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As of this writing, Bronson Arroyo is making his 31st start of the season. Remarkably — perhaps because his opponent is the hapless Houston Astros — he hasn’t given up a home run (or even an earned run) through eight scoreless innings (as of press time).

This is remarkable because through Arroyo’s first 30 starts and 182 innings he had allowed a whopping 44 home runs. He is only the sixth player in history to ever reach this mark and only the 23rd pitcher to ever allow even 40 home runs in a season. Of both groups, Arroyo’s 182 innings is the lowest (second is Eric Milton‘s forgettable 2005 campaign, also coming as a member of the Reds). Only Shawn Boskie’s 1996 campaign featured fewer starts (28), and he also made nine relief appearances.

Interestingly enough, this 40-homer club actually features some of the best pitchers of all time, and it even includes a few very solid seasons. Among these 23 seasons we see Hall of Famers Bert Blyleven (twice), Robin Roberts (thrice), Ferguson Jenkins and Phil Niekro (twice), as well as Jack Morris, who remains on the ballot. And although giving up home runs is obviously the worst possible outcome for a pitcher, most of these guys still managed to perform well even with 40 or more homers allowed.

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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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Ichiro Suzuki is getting old. In life, that’s not a bad thing. In baseball, it is.

He is now in season 11 of the MLB portion of his career and season 20 of his professional career. Despite his age, he has played in 102 of the Seattle Mariners’ 103 games this year (not counting today). Moreover, he has more plate appearances (457) than anyone over age 35 in 2011. The next closest, Paul Konerko, is over 30 PAs behind him.

Ichiro may look as healthy and athletic as ever, but his numbers this year have been very un-Ichiro-like:

wOBA: .285
wRC+: 80
UZR: -8.4
Bsr: 2.3

All, except for the base-running (UBR) numbers, are career lows for Ich-dawg. We have long-anticipated Ichiro would slow down his ageless mastery of baseball at some point, but the depreciation in his 2011 statistics seem rather sudden. Worth noting:

BABIP: .289
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The opening salvo of the last week of trading season has been fired… and by the Washington Nationals, who sit 15 games back of the Phillies for the NL East race and nine games back of the Braves for the NL Wild Card. The Nationals pulled the trigger on a deal with the Cincinnati Reds acquiring left fielder Jonny Gomes for minor league pitcher Chris Manno and outfielder Bill Rhinehart.

Wait, what?

The impetus of this deal for the Reds is simple. Chris Heisey has been an above average hitter and has earned time in the left field hole for Cincinnati. With Gomes’s usefulness limited to his performance against left-handed pitching, Heisey has made him redundant. The movement of Gomes makes room for Yonder Alonso to come up and add another left-handed bat to the outfield mix and to the bench.

The thought process for the Nationals, however, is not so clear. The reward for the Nationals appears to be a right-handed platoon partner for Laynce Nix. Gomes does crush left-handers to the tune of a .382 wOBA for his career and a whopping .426 wOBA so far this season. He’s effectively worthless against righties — a .319 wOBA career and .296 this year — and in the field, where he carries a -38 career UZR in about four seasons’ worth of plate appearances in the corner outfield positions.

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…or at least since 1974, since that’s how far the play-by-play database goes back at the moment.

All non-masochistic fans hate watching a hitter from their team ground into a double play. It is almost always (that’s right, almost, as we’ll see in a post later this week) devastating for your team’s chances. In terms of linear weights, the average double play in modern baseball is about .37 runs worse than a normal out because it costs another out and takes a runner off of the bases.

Of course, the actual effect of a double play depends on the game situation in which it occurs, it’s place in the story. While Win Probability Added (WPA) isn’t a good way to value individual players, it is a good “story stat,” as it gives a quantitative sense of the ebbs and flows of the game play-by-play by seeing what the teams chances of winning before and after each event are. So let’s take a look at the worst (from the perspective of the hitter’s team) three double plays (just grounded into double plays, as things like lining into a double play are a different sort of beast) according to WPA since 1974.

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Whence we last examined yonder batting orders, we came away with several expected observations (Jose Bautista plays baseball like a video game, the Oakland Athletics do not care much for scoring runs, Rick Ankiel and Ian Desmond are not feared hitters, and so forth) as well as a number of curious findings (the Cubs lead-off combo was tops in the majors, the 7th hitters on AL teams were worse than the 9th hitters, NL managers effectively managed the bottoms of their lineups, and such).

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In a somewhat surprising move, the Cincinnati Reds have announced that Dontrelle Willis will be their starting pitcher for Sunday’s game against Milwaukee (as reported by Jerry Crasnick). The Reds have been dealing with pitching depth issues which have only been exacerbated by Wednesday night’s 13 inning game as well as the demotion of Edinson Volquez.

It’s only been a little more than one calendar year since we’ve seen Dontrelle Willis pitch in the Major Leagues — he pitched an inning in relief for the Diamondbacks on July 3rd, 2010 — but it feels like much longer. Willis hasn’t looked like a productive Major League pitcher since 2007, his last year with the Marlins, and even at that point we could sense the beginning of the end. After four straight seasons of 2.9 WAR or better, including a stellar 2005 season in which Willis threw 236 innings with a 2.63 ERA and a 2.99 FIP, Willis only managed a 5.17 ERA and a 5.13 FIP in 2007, and it was all downhill from there.

After his inclusion in the Miguel Cabera trade, Willis’s career collapsed. Willis has started 27 games in the major leagues since 2008 and has walked 119 batters against 82 strikeouts. That should be all one needs to know, and it should come as no surprised that his WAR over these 123.1 innings sits at -0.8. His minor league track record hasn’t offered much in the way of hope either. From 2008 to 2010, Willis has struck out 68 batters against 50 walks in 101 innings between the minor league systems of the Tigers and Giants.

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Quite often we hear that a relief pitcher does or does not have what it takes to get the high pressure outs. Certain pitchers have “it” while others melt under the spot light. Ryan Madson could not be a successful closer because he lacked the vaunted “closer’s mentality.” I’m sure on a case by case basis you will find players who simply cannot handle the pressure; however, studies have shown that a reliever should perform to his talent level regardless of the leverage. After all, they are just roles not skill-sets.

As a fan of the Rays, I have watched Kyle Farnsworth transform from a guy who also lacks the closer’s mentality in to a true relief ace pitching in high leverage situations. Farnsworth is not the only middle reliever to graduate to the high life with success. Including Farnsworth, I found five relief pitchers who moved from the mid-to-low level situations up to a higher level. All five pitched at least 50 innings last season with a pLI less than 1.0. In 2011, they have tossed 30 or more innings with a leverage index of 1.3 or higher (basically set-up man or more). Here is the list…

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A few weeks ago, we looked at a few of the arms who might be available for mid-season trades, and it wasn’t exactly a list of Cy Young candidates. Jason Marquis, Kevin Slowey, Jeremy Guthrie… useful pitchers all, but not exactly the kind of sexy addition that a team looking to make a big time push for the World Series is dreaming of. Looking around the league, there just didn’t seem to be any high quality arms with front-line starter upside who would be on the market this summer.

But then, June happened to the Marlins. After looking like a surprising contender in April and May, they’ve gone 3-22 in June, changed managers, and are now 14 1/2 games behind the first place Phillies. Even their Wild Card hopes seem long gone, as they stand 10 games back of the Braves and would have to leapfrog over 10 teams to claim the consolation playoff berth. The 2011 Marlins are going to be also-rans, and that puts a pitcher on the market who could change a lot of playoff races.

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