“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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The Chicago White Sox are facing some tough decisions this off-season. Trouble is, those decisions have very little to do with their players. Due to the daily drama that surrounds this team — specifically between Manager Ozzie Guillen and General Manager Kenny Williams — rumors have surfaced that the White Sox front office might look drastically different come the start of the 2012 season. On top of potentially losing Williams and Guillen, Assistant General Manager Rick Hahn is thought to be one of the leading GM candidates this off-season. There’s no doubt that Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf faces some tough decisions this off-season — and that’s before he even begins to think about his 25-man roster.
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Mark Buehrle’s contract expires at the end of the season and the veteran lefty isn’t confident he will work out an extension with the White Sox before hitting free agency. It’s very possible that, for the first time in his 12-year career, Buehrle will test the market and potentially sign with another team.

Though Buehrle has hinted at retirement on numerous occasions, manager Ozzie Guillen believes he’ll pitch next season. Guillen thinks Buehrle has too much left to offer major league teams to simply walk away. Buehrle has never come across as an egotistical stats-monger or the kind of pitcher so wrapped up in his legacy to stick around for specific milestones. That doesn’t mean he will definitely retire while pitching at a high level, but it also makes his free agent prospects tough to predict.

What might Buehrle make if he hits free agency? And for how long would he sign? Despite a better career and more established track record than the likes of Ted Lilly, Randy Wolf and Wandy Rodriguez, might teams mistakenly lump him in with that group?

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Adam Dunn is having a terrible season, and now, even the White Sox are giving up on waiting for him to regress back to the mean – he’s been told that he’ll spend the rest of the year as a part-time player. With limited opportunities to dig an even larger hole, it seems likely that Dunn will end the year with a line not too far from his current one – a .163/.289/.290 mark that adds up to a dreadful .268 wOBA. For a DH, that kind of anti-production is nearly unheard of.

I wanted to put Dunn’s season in context, though, so I thought I’d look through history and see just how often some useful Major League player has just fallen down on the job. We’ve all seen guys fall off the cliff before, so I figured this probably wasn’t all that unusual historically. Using the nifty little “split season” filter on the leaderboards here on FanGraphs, you can choose to see the best and worst individual seasons at different types of things over a specified time period, so I filtered by the worst seasons of the last 50 years.

At -2.5 WAR, Dunn checks in tied for ninth on the list in terms of net negative performance over a full season. Ninth in 50 years doesn’t sound so bad, after all, and would confirm my initial suspicion that this kind of thing isn’t all that uncommon. But when you start to look at the context of the guys ahead of him, the story begins to change.

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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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Brent Lillibridge hit his 11th home run of the season during the White Sox 10-0 old-fashioned whoopin’ of the Rangers yesterday. It was just another highlight in a shocking power outburst for the utility infielder, who looked like a marginal major leaguer coming into the season. Lillibridge started off the season hot, cooled down in June and July, and is having his best month yet so far in August. Lillibridge is only 27 — not terribly young, but not old, either. Could this be another lasting power surge (.245 ISO with a .370 wOBA) out of nowhere in the vein of Ben Zobrist or Jose Bautista?

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Jim Hendry has been relieved of his duties as general manager of the Chicago Cubs. We’ll have plenty of time to look back on his place in GM history, but for now, let’s look forward. Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts gave us the checklist today, when he said that he was looking for a candidate who had analytical experience in a winning front office and who would focus on player development. Time to rank the potential replacements using those requirements.

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The American League Central is pretty weak. Of all the teams in the division, only Cleveland has a positive run differential as of today, and that’s by only one run. A number of factors probably contribute to the divisional weakness: lower average budgets than some of the coastal divisions, poor decision making, and perhaps some bad luck. The division, however, is surprisingly strong this season in one area: shortstops. Can any other division compare?

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The saber prescription for the bullpen seems clear: identify your best relievers based on their component skills and use them in the right matchups according to their handedness and arsenal. Ignore the inning and instead use your best pitcher in the highest leverage moment. Basically, have a relief ace who pitches in the most important moment in the game — and then find role players to fill in the blanks.

There’s some agreement that this would be an improvement over the current set-up man/closer plan. There might never have been a ‘pen that was truly run this way.

Well, until now. Check out Chicago’s South Side.

Is Ozzie Guillen running a saber pen right now?

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Ozzie Guillen is not a happy man. He hasn’t been all season, really. His team figured to play a big part in the AL Central race this year, but instead they’re the poster boys for the division’s mediocrity. The pitching staff has been fine¹, but the offense has fallen far afoul of expectations². Still, only five of their regulars are currently hitting worse than their ZiPS projections. Of those, one is close, one is a rookie, and one is performing about in line with 2010³. The Sox offensive deficiency stems mainly from two culprits who have dragged down the entire unit: Adam Dunn and Alex Rios. It’s because of these two that the Sox aren’t enjoying more of a competition with the Tigers for the NL Central crown.

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