One of the local FM radio stations here in Houston is celebrating “Baseball Week” all this week, with baseball-themed interviews (including Jose Canseco and the guy who is auctioning off Barry Bonds’ 762nd home run ball and who sounds like he is perpetually stoned), Astros updates, and other various items. And, God bless ‘em, they are really trying. In fact, on Monday they posted a poll on their website that had the question, how many games will the Astros win this year?

So I figure this will look like most of these things I have seen before and have some options like less than 70, 71-75, 76-80, 81-85, etc. But that is assuredly not what I found. You had four options that looked like this:

1. 0-40
2. 41-80
3. 81-120
4. 121-162

Huh? I mean winning 40 or less or 121 or more - is that even possible? And of course a few real smart folks voted for those top and bottom two, but otherwise it was like 45% for number 2 and 45% for number 3. One of the more scientific polls ever created, if you ask me.

But that got me thinking. What would it really take for the 2008 Astros, or any team, to win 40 or less or 121 or more. So I decided to first look back in history. First, the worst teams in major league baseball history, by number of wins:

1. 1899 Cleveland Spiders - 20 Wins, 134 Losses
2. 1916 Philadelphia Athletics - 36 Wins, 117 Losses
3.  1962 New York Mets - 40 Wins, 120 Losses
4. 2003 Detroit Tigers - 43 Wins, 119 Losses

And now the best teams, by wins, in MLB history:

1. 1906 Chicago Cubs - 116 Wins, 36 Losses
2. 2001 Seattle Mariners - 116 Wins, 46 Losses
3.  1998 New York Yankees - 114 Wins, 48 Losses

Essentially, we have had three teams win 40 or less over a full season (though 2 of those teams played 154 game seasons), and no team has ever reached 120 wins. But I did not want to stop there; I wanted to look at how futile or magnificent a team would have to be to reach these win milestones. First, the 40 win or under plateau.

Using our trusty Pythagenpat formula again, we can work backwards to find out how many runs a team would have to score and allow to only win 40 games.

Winning 40 out of 162 gives you a winning percentage of roughly .250 or 25%. So let’s say for arguments sake you have an average park, pitching staff and defense, and your team allows exactly the average number of runs in a season to their opponents. From 2001-2007, the average runs allowed by a major league team was 768, so we will start with that number.

With the formula being to first solve for the exponent, using: X=((rs+ra)/g)^.285. With X being the exponent, you then calculate rs^X/rs^X+ra^X = Winning Percentage. Working backward, and sparing you the math, a team that allowed 768 runs (thus being an average team in that department) would need to score about 415-420 runs to fall right into that .250 winning percentage.

For some context, no one this decade has had fewer than the 574 runs the Dodgers scored in 2003. So we are talking about more than 150 runs less than that team, assuming an average runs allowed total. 420 runs scored only means 2.59 runs per game. Now I don’t want to steer you in the wrong direction here. In the dead ball era, this number was routinely matched and even bested. Your NL record for fewest runs is 371 by the St. Louis Cardinals, led by the great Red Murray and his .282 batting average and 62 RBI. For the AL, the record for fewest runs is 380 by the 1909 Washington Senators, captained by Bob Unglaub and his .265 average with 41 RBI.

Now for the other side. To win at least 121 games would mean a winning percentage of 75%. We will use our same 768 runs to define our average defense/pitching staff/park. Working backwards, using the same formula as before, we can find that a team that allowed 768 runs over a 162-game season would have to score right at 1300 runs (give or take 10 or so on each side) to equal a .750 winning percentage.

This number certainly is more than any team has ever scored in one season in major league baseball, and would equal more than eight runs per game for 162 games. Although, it doesn’t outpace the historical leaders in runs scored by one team by that much. In the AL, the 1931 New York Yankees (did you think it would be anyone else?) scored 1,067 runs, led of course by Ruth and Gehrig. More surprisingly, in the NL, the 1894 Boston Beaneaters scored 1220 runs, led by an amazing nine players who batted .320 or better - and five of them had better than 100 RBI. Of course that was a different time and game, so just in the context of this decade, no one has scored more than 978, the 2000 Chicago White Sox, still more than 300 runs behind our 121-win team.

So certainly both of these situation are unlikely to happen this season, or in any season in the near future. Seeing what a team would have to achieve to accomplish these makes it seem as though we may not see either happen the way the game is played today.

In another one of my posts that will interest exactly nine other people, I plan to look at the recent 10-team fantasy baseball draft in which I participated on Monday, March 24 and make my predictions as to who will be the picks that give each team the most value over the 2008 season as well as the picks that will have the worst value relative to where they were drafted.

First of all, the league format: We play in a 10-team Yahoo! custom points league. Categories for offense are HR, RBI, SB, R, BB, 1B, 2B, and 3B. For pitchers, the categories are W, L, ER, IP, K, Hld, and SV. We have a MLB universe roster of 20 players (5 of which are bench) plus two DL spots per team. There are unlimited trades (with an August deadline) and unlimited other moves as well. The league is a daily league that has been running for five years (with a bit of turnover), but it is not a keeper league.

And by value I am, again, talking about relative to the spot where they were picked. A-Rod will have tremendous value going with the first pick, but that is expected value - what we are looking for is unexpected value or expected value not achieved.

So without any more rambling, here are (in my opinion) the best and worst value draft picks by team, in order of how we drafted.

1. Eric Ramirez

Best pick - Josh Hamilton - 13th round

In half a season last year, the rookie with the troubled past totaled 19 HR and 47 RBI in only 337 plate appearances. This year, he has a guaranteed starting spot on the Rangers and is going to a park that might be the best in the majors for left handed power hitters. Some of the OF taken in the two rounds before Hamilton include Jermaine Dye, Matt Kemp, Jose Guillen and Delmon Young. My guess is that Hamilton out-homers all those guys. In a quick glance at eight popular projection systems, his average home run prediction from all of those is 21. If he stays healthy, he will fly past that number in Arlington

Worst pick - Derrek Lee - 6th round

Not so much that it was a bad pick in the 6th round, but because power is the most sought-after commodity in our league, it was a questionable strategy to wait until the 6th for a 1B - the premium power position. At that point, it may have been wise to wait and grab Carlos Pena, Paul Konerko or Ryan Garko - all of whom went in much later rounds. At age 32, Lee is not the 46/107 guy from three years ago, but he is also not the 22/82 guy from last year. His mean lies somewhere in the middle - but he is just too inconsistent for me as a sixth pick.

2. Kirk Kornegay

Best pick - Joakim Soria - 20th round

I almost had this pegged as Scott Kazmir in the 9th round, but his current injury gives me just a little bit of concern, so Soria is the choice. The Royals play a lot of close games due to an offense that is in the bottom half of the AL. And that is good for a closer, especially one with Soria’s numbers. Soria posted a VORP of 26.4 in 2007 - higher than any of his other Royal teammates. His ERA, WHIP, K/9, K/BB, and BAA were all outstanding in 2007. His BABIP was .264, showing he was a bit lucky, and therefore likely causing a slight bump up in his other peripherals in 2008. However, a closer with 25+ save potential in the last round is a steal.

Worst pick - John Lackey - 7th round

We all know how incredible Lackey has been as a pitcher recently. He was the third best pitcher in the AL last season, and thanks to a significant decrease in his BB/9 and a sharp increase in his LOB%, Lackey made the jump from 13-14 wins per season to 19, and an ERA in the mid-3’s to exactly 3.01. But a strained triceps injury on his throwing arm currently leaves Lackey on the shelf for all of April. Five months from Lackey could still make up for the lost time, especially with an improved offense, but pitchers such as Harang, Oswalt, Beckett and Matsuzaka were still on the board for this pick.

3. Jeremy Gibson

Best pick - H. Bell and R. Betancourt - Rounds 16 and 17

The combined numbers for these two pitchers in 2007 looks like this:

11 wins, 172 IP, 34 ER, 182 Ks, 65 holds, and an ERA around 1.80

Those are fabulous numbers for the amount of innings they account for (out of our 1200 total). Betancourt has some numbers from 2007 that make you feel like the numbers will dip a little, such as an astonishingly low BABIP of .246 and astonishingly high LOB% of 86.4%. Bell also makes you think a little bit because his ERAs in 2005 and 2006 were in the 5’s and his 102 Ks more than doubles anything he has ever done, but even if these pitchers see their numbers decrease by 20% across the board, the 16th and 17th rounds are great for their stats.

Worst pick - Chipper Jones - 6th round

Jones is a great player, and after last year, he clearly has plenty of offense left in that bat. Despite missing almost 30 games, Jones was 6th in the Majors in batting average and VORP and also top 12 in Runs Created (keep in mind, a cumulative stat). So while normally this would be a great pick, there is just too much injury concern for me. Jones has not played in more than 137 games since 2003 and in 2005-2006 he missed at least 50 games each season. Jeremy has an admirable back-up plan with Mike Lowell also on the roster, and I just have this feeling that he will definitely be forced into active duty on Jeremy’s team before too long. But of course this could easily end up being his best pick if it pans out and Jones stays healthy.

4. Ryan Kirksey

Best pick - Dustin McGowan - 19th round

The one pitcher I was targeting most in the late rounds this year, and I kept waiting and waiting, forcing myself to be patient in hopes on one else would take him. McGowan, now 26, saw so many things trend upward from 2006 to 2007: namely his K/9, BB/9, ERA, and WHIP. Plus, he is an extreme groundball pitcher (a great thing seeing as he will be facing some of the toughest lineups in the league on a regular basis) to the tune of 53% in 2007. An improved Blue Jays lineup certainly won’t hurt his case for wins, but a questionable bullpen might. Still, if his Ks and IP continue to go up and his BB and earned runs continue to go down, I should be happy.

Worst pick - Francisco Liriano - 12th round

I will be the hardest on myself. This was a stupid pick here. I thought a lot of people were looking for him about this time, but it turns out most people were going to wait a couple more rounds. They had probably all seen the note that came out Monday that I missed: Liriano will likely open the season with some starts in Triple-A before moving up. Guys like Carmona, Wang and Bonderman went around at that time, and I probably would have been better off with one of those. Even for a talent like Liriano, there are too many questions surrounding a return from Tommy John that I should have waited a few more picks or waited to see how he responds in real game action.

5. Regan Boudra

Best pick - Chien Ming Wang - 12th round

Probably the hardest draft to pick a best/worst value. Every pick seemed to be pretty much in line with the perceived value of the player, so these may be a stretch in a couple of areas. Regan’s quote during the draft of “I’ll take 17 wins even if he only gets 17 strikeouts” was one of the highlights, but it also rings somewhat true. Actually, Wang’s K rate improved to 4.70 per nine last year, up from 3.14 in 2006. Your standard for acceptable K/9 rates for a starter really should be around 5.6 or so, but when 59% of your balls in play are grounders, you are getting plenty of people out that way (even with Jeter and whatever lead glove they will play at first). So 17 wins is certainly achievable, I might even go one or two more for him.

Worst pick - Carlos Guillen - 6th round

I am lukewarm on Carlos Guillen as I had him in the second half of last year (the half he was just good, and not incredible), but he is just a bit too streaky in my opinion. His HR the past 5 years have been 21, 19, 5, 20, 7. His OPS: 859, 920, 803, 921, 753. RC: 99, 112, 51, 107, 55. Still, playing first should keep him on the field more and cut down on his pesky injuries. Guillen is not a bad pick here by any means, but he was the fifth SS taken after Rollins, Ramirez, Reyes and Tulo - so there were options available.

6. Tim Miller

Best pick - Kerry Wood - 20th round

Wood was officially named the Cubs’ closer earlier that day, and the Cubs look to compete in the division, so Wood should factor in many of those decisions albeit if he remains healthy. A K/9 rate of 8.9 last year in limited work is very promising (especially since it was 5.95 in 2006), but a BB/9 rate of 4.81 is decidedly not promising. He has not had a number that high since 2000, so he can certainly get it under control, but with Marmol and Howry breathing down his neck, Pinella does have options if this arm-saving move of having Wood close does not pan out.

Worst Pick - Justin Verlander - 5th round

This may be a bit of a reach on my part, because Verlander is going to be great, but he was the fifth pitcher taken overall in our draft. Only one fantasy preview source that I found (out of about 15) had Verlander ranked fifth. The average of all of those pegged Verlander at 9.4. Still on the board when Verlander went were Beckett, Sabathia, Harang, and Haren - all of whom could make a case to go ahead of Verlander. A couple of things to watch would be the interesting fact that despite the velocity of Verlander’s fastball decreasing the past three years, his K rate has increased. Watch that and his innings count (high for a young pitcher), but the offense behind him should support plenty of wins. Still, JV is Tim’s ace, and should serve him well

7. Joel Ramirez

Best pick - Edgar Renteria - 15th round

While nothing with the glove, Renteria has again turned into a force with the bat. Hitting in that stacked Detroit lineup won’t hurt anything, either. Since our league does not have a middle infielder spot, once the top ten SS went, it was a while until number 11 (Renteria) went off the board. While Joel also drafted Hanley Ramirez, a quick check of his roster shows that Renteria would be a better fit at the Util spot that anyone else in his lineup (Giambi, Rolen, etc.). Renteria has always been a great source for hits and average (although last year he was off the charts and won’t repeat that), but his OBP has also improved four straight years, something that is vital to the Tigers and to fantasy points leagues.

Worst pick - Jacque Jones and Derrick Turnbow - 17th and 18th rounds

Jones also has the benefit of being in the Tigers’ lineup, but he will be batting ninth and is generally projected with a line around .265/.325/.410 and 10-15 HR - in other words no real value in our league. Jones’ Runs Created numbers last year dropped from 85 to 58, thanks in part to a 100-point drop in SLG. His best days are behind him.

Turnbow is in line to replace Gagne if he fails in Milwaukee, but he has two years of overall numbers that are just bad. Actually, the strikeouts have been great at over 11 K/9 the past two years, but the walk rate has been over 6 BB/9 over the same two years. Value comes only if he gets the chance to save again.

8. David Gilly

Best pick - Chad Billingsley - 15th round

There is only one real number I can find where Billingsley did not improve from 2006 to 2007 (his first true chance to start), and that is his HR/9 number of .92, up from .70. Billingsley’s career FB% is around 37.6% or just better than average, so the HR rate is not too much of a concern, especially pitching in Dodger Stadium. Besides that, all of his rate stats such as ERA, WHIP, K/9, BB/9, BABIP, LOB%, and BAA all made significant increases in 2007. And he is only 24 - which means he is still maturing.

Worst pick - Jorge Posada - 8th round

Posada is a fine catcher and should put up great positional numbers in the Yankees lineup. But he was taken as the fourth catcher overall behind the 3M’s - Martinez, Martin and McCann. Fourth is not crazy for Posada, but I think it started a run on catchers too early. In fact, 6 teams drafted their catcher before the 10th round was over. And that may not sound so bad, but that means that 6 catchers were drafted in the top 100 players. And that just can’t be justified. For example, in MLB.com’s top 100 fantasy list, only three are catchers. I imagine David drafted with a few thoughts of Posada’s 2007 numbers in his head. We have discussed this before, but Posada’s 2007 base stats just do not coincide with the rest of his career, and at 37, he can’t be expected to be that lucky again - especially with his incredible .389 BABIP.

9. Justin Jones

Best pick - Curtis Granderson - 8th round

News of Granderson’s broken finger dropped the value of this CF who had a 20-20-20-20-20-20-20-20-20 season (or something like that) in 2007. So this is a guarded pick, but even if Granderson misses three to four weeks from the time of the injury, he should be a steal in the 8th round. Granderson led all AL leadoff men in OPS in 2007 with .926 and the projections of Bill James, CHONE, Marcel and ZiPS all feel that Granderson will repeat his 2007 numbers in 2B, HR and RBI - all very valuable in our league.

Worst pick - Nick Swisher - 4th round

Again, I sort of understand this because first basemen were flying off the board so he had to have somebody, but Atkins, Adrian Gonzalez, Lee, and Konerko were still on the board - all of whom will probably have better power numbers than Swisher. Swisher is famous for his ability to get on base, but with his power, he might be sacrificing some HR (which were down by 13 from’06) for walks and other hits. That’s great in real life, “get on base….help the team,” but doesn’t do too much for us. He can play 1B or OF, so depending on how Justin’s other 1B (Todd Helton) does, this may all be a moot point.

10. Jason Kirksey

Best pick - Adam Wainwright - 15th round

I was all ready to put his pick of Kelvim Escobar in this slot, but then word comes today that his injury might be career-threatening, so that shot that idea. Anyway, Wainwright’s move from reliever to starter was an overwhelming success. While most of his numbers saw a bit of an uptick, understandable due to his innings being almost three times that of 2006, the one number that decreased significantly was his HR/9 from 0.72 to 0.58. This is promising for someone who is going to be the veritable ace of the staff at least until the all-star break. Wainwright is another groundball pitcher (48%), but with more than a third of his batted balls being flyballs, it is good that he is developing a skill of keeping balls in the park at a better rate.

Worst pick - Dontrelle Willis - 14th round

We all like looking for great value in the last quarter of the draft, but…

And now he moves to a tougher league for pitchers, albeit with a stellar offense behind him. There is also always talk of Comerica being a pitchers’ park, but in 2006 and 2007, it was very average, and actually a better park for hitters on average over the last three years than the Marlins’ stadium in Miami. That could spell trouble.

So there you have it, too much information that too few people don’t care about. I will do a brief recap mid-season of how things are going and then do a seasonal review looking back at these picks and deciding what the REAL best and worst value picks were for 2008.

I would love to hear your complaints or praise on your thoughts on the picks in general.

Using a relatively new tool on BaseballReference.com known as the Batting Order Outcomes, I thought it might be fun to go back and look at last season and construct the ultimate lineup, spots 1-8, using each team’s production in each of those spots as our data.

The way this page works is you can put in any team and any spot in the lineup (1-9) and BR will pull up a page with stats on how that team performed in that season at that spot in the lineup, with all PA included throughout the season.

So, I can quickly go back and see that in 1972, The Boston Red Sox had an OPS of .625 in the 7th spot, with the famous Doug Griffin getting the majority of the plate appearances that year.

Using OPS as our gauge, I will lay out the ultimate 2007 batting order from across the Majors. While the batting order page has incredible splits and breakouts of stats per month, player, inning, relative score, and more, the stats used are pretty basic, so OPS is probably our best bet for this exercise.

Starting with the leadoff position, here is the best from each spot in 2007, with a couple of my random comments associated with each:

1. Florida Marlins - .897 OPS

This one makes sense especially when you consider that Hanley Ramirez was given 706 of the 780 plate appearances for the Marlins in the leadoff spot in ‘07. May and June were actually not kind to Ramirez and the Marlins’ leadoff spot; the OPS totals for those two months in that spot were .738 and .694, respectively. But the next three months had totals of 1.094, .875 and .944 - so he certainly finished strong. In comparison, Ramirez’s two counterparts, Rollins in Philly and Reyes in NY, both contributed to .869 and .772 totals for their teams. Ramirez is expected to move to third in the order in 2008, so don’t look for the Fish to repeat in this spot.

2. St Louis Cardinals - .870 OPS

This one mildly surprised me. No Derek Jeter, Kevin Youkilis, Placido Polanco, or even Hunter Pence took this spot. Rather, the combination of Chris Duncan and Rick Ankiel give the Cardinals the top spot. Certainly helping the cause, Ankiel slugged .603 batting second. Also contributing to the solid .870 number were the OPS numbers by Scott Speizio and Skip Schmaker, who both had an OPS over 1.000 in 131 total plate appearances.

3. Boston Red Sox - 1.034 OPS

No surprises here. David Ortiz ate up 89% of the 751 total plate appearances in the third spot. I have heard some people say that Ortiz had a down year last year because his homeruns and RBI were down from the previous two seasons, but that argument is truly ridiculous. His batting average, OBP, OPS+, Runs Created, and Runs Above Replacement were all the best of his career. His 52 doubles made up for “only” 35 HRs - a number which will likely trend upward in 2008. And in September, during the playoff push, Ortiz’s OPS was a mere 1.355.

4. New York Yankees - 1.069 OPS

Again, no surprises at this spot. Of 744 2007 plate appearances in the #4 spot, A-Rod had 700 of them, with OPS of 1.081. In the few times someone else actually hit in this spot, Jorge Posada, Miguel Cairo and Hideki Matsui all had an OPS of at least 1.000 as well. And quite possibly even more impressive, the Yankees who had the number four spot come up with RISP 243 times, totaled an OPS of 1.127.

5. Toronto Blue Jays - .939 OPS

I probably could have given you a dozen guesses to this one, and you wouldn’t have said the Blue Jays. But there they are - with big Frank Thomas leading the way with his .935 OPS. Actually, while Thomas had the most PAs in that spot, he only accounted for about a third of the total plate appearances. Some of the other notable names hitting in that spot: Aaron Hill, Troy Glaus and Matt Stairs totaled OPS scores of .946, 1.145 and 1.003, respectively. All of these numbers represent significant increases over their seasonal totals.

6. Colorado Rockies - .908 OPS

This spot makes sense as well, with Brad Hawpe demanding 73% of the PAs for the Rockies in 2007. And while Hawpe’s OPS in 2007 in that spot was an incredible .918, it is severely overshadowed by Ryan Spilborghs who had an OPS of 1.212 over 74 PAs in the six hole. In another interesting note, the Rockies only had one month all season (April) where they did not slug at least .500 from the 6th spot in the lineup. Perhaps not surprisingly, that was the month they had a losing record.

7. Philadelphia Phillies - .850 OPS

This spot in the Phillies’ lineup was distributed pretty evenly amongst Abraham Nunez, Jayson Werth, Wes Helms, Greg Dobbs, and Aaron Rowand. Except for Nunez, all other batters had an OPS of at least .847 in the seven spot, with Rowand leading the way a 1.070 over 87 plate appearances. One entertaining and interesting note here looks at when throughout the course of the game the Phillies really produced in the 7th spot. In the 1st-6th innings, the Phillies had an OPS of .885 in the seventh spot, but that number drops to .783 from the 7th-9th innings.

8. Pittsburgh Pirates - .800 OPS

I could probably give you 25 guesses and you would not have picked the Pirates in this spot. I certainly thought it would be Robinson Cano or some other powerhouse offense, not the team that was 12th in the National League in runs scored. But with Jack Wilson and his .825 OPS getting exactly half of the plate appearances, the Cesar Izturis’s, Jose Castillos and Jose Bautistas of the world could not drag down the total number below .800. The second half of 2007 is what tells the story for the Pirates earning this spot - as a team the OPS in the 8th spot after the All-Star Break was an amazing .899.

In an exercise like this, the Magglio Ordonezes, Matt Hollidays and Miguel Cabreras unfortunately get stuck on the outside. But I certainly think that a team composed of this lineup would score an astonishing amount of runs. But just how many? Well, using the basic Runs Created formula, we can come up with a good guess as to just how many.

Formula: ((H+BB)*(1B+(2*2B)+(3*3B)+(4*HR)))/(AB+BB)

Total estimated Runs Created: 1024

In context, the team with the most runs in 2007 were the Yankees with 968 and the average across MLB was 777.

So in other words, we have quite an offensive machine on our hands, even including batters from the Pirates, Cardinals and Blue Jays.

Wrapping up the AL now with the four-team AL West. In this, the division in baseball with the fewest teams, some of the biggest moves of the off-season have taken place. But, the balance of power seems to have stayed where it was at the end of the 2007 season, with two teams standing out and two teams struggling to reach the next level.

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

11-19-2007: Acquired RHP Jon Garland from the Chicago White Sox in exchange for SS Orlando Cabrera and cash.
We have discussed the trade from the White Sox perspective already, so now for the Angels’ side. In my opinion, this trade does two things to the Angels’ rotation. 1. It gives them a capable fourth starter behind John Lackey, Kelvim Escobar, and Jered Weaver. And 2. It bumps Ervin Santana down to sixth on their rotation, meaning they will not have to suffer the horrible home/road splits he puts up year after year. In case you forgot, I will give you three simple numbers to remind you of his amazing, almost mind-blowing splits:
Home ERA - 3.27 Road ERA - 8.38
Home OPS - .696 Road OPS - 1.005
Home BABIP - .293 Road BABIP - .360
But, this move also leaves Erick Aybar at SS instead of Cabrera. Fortunately, the Angels picked up another big bat this offseason, because Aybar had an OBP and SLG% last year under .300 in almost 200 PA.
Garland moves to a team that should have a bit more of a stable offense than the White Sox had the past three years (the White Sox scored about 180 runs fewer in 2007 than in 2006), at least helping his run support somewhat.

11-21-07: Signed free agent OF Torii Hunter to a five-year contract.
The past two seasons, Hunter has been fortunate enough to bat just behind Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau of the Twins, two very capable and outstanding hitters. Fortunately for Hunter, he really won’t experience too much of a dropoff when he lines up for the Angels batting just behind Chone Figgins, Gary Matthews, and Vladimir Guerrero.
The Angels will have Hunter locked up for his age 32-36 seasons, so there is a bit of concern there, but not as much concern as there should be with Hunter’s offensive trends. In 2002, Hunter had a fantastic year where his line was .289/.334/.524, he made the All-Star team (remember the catch on Barry Bonds?), and was 6th in MVP voting. He had a bit of a down year in 2003, but from 2003 to 2007, Hunter’s numbers in RC/G, OPS+, and EqA increased every single year, culminating in a top-15 finish in MVP voting again last year. A five-year span of that happening is very impressive and, I would guess, quite uncommon. That is something that simply can not keep happening over the next five years now that Hunter is leaving his “prime” age range. Hunter also never, EVER walks (career .324 OBP), showing that he is a free swinger, something that also doesn’t bode well for him growing older unless he learns more patience.

Two other quick notes about Hunter’s deal:
Assuming either Matthews or Garrett Anderson will be the DH, that essentially eliminates Reggie Willits and Juan Rivera from the lineup. Willits was fantastic as a rookie last year, with a line of .293/.391/.344, And while he will never be the power threat Hunter can be, Willits walked 69 times in only 136 games - 19 more walks than Hunter has ever had in a season in his career.
For all the hype you hear about Hunter’s defense and all the catches he made running into that big garbage bag in the Metrodome, Hunter’s fielding runs RATE (imagine it like OPS+ where 100 is average, so someone with a RATE of 110 saved 10 runs in the field over what the average player would) over the past five seasons have been 94, 102, 92, 104, and 99. In other words, less than average for five years.

Oakland A’s

12-14-2007: Traded RHPs Dan Haren and Connor Robertson to the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for LHPs Brett Anderson, Dana Eveland and Greg Smith, INF Chris Carter and OFs Aaron Cunningham and Carlos Gonzalez.
Everyone is familiar with the A’s and their moneyball reputation and BillyBeane’s philosophy of getting as much as you can for the least amount of money possible, so this move interested me from the Oakland perspective. I have referenced a couple of these articles in previous posts, but I want to go back to Baseball Prospectus’ Future Shock series looking at the top minor leaguers in each system. From this article on December 17, just after this trade, you can see that Oakland’s top 11 prospects were:
Daric Barton
Carlos Gonzalez
Brett Anderson
Trevor Cahill
Chris Carter
James Simmons
Aaron Cunningham
Henry Rodriguez
Andrew Bailey
Corey Brown
Jermaine Mitchell
In other words, four of Oakland’s new top-11 prospects came from this trade with Arizona. Daric Barton will be their 1b on opening day this year, barring something catastrophic, and the rotation still consists of Joe Blanton, Rich Harden, Chad Gaudin, Justin Duchscherer, and Leo DiNardo. All in all, not a bad way to significantly improve the farm.

1-3-2008: Traded OF Nick Swisher to the Chicago White Sox for LHP Gio Gonzalez, RHP Fautino De Los Santos and OF Ryan Sweeney.
And then came this deal - another player who would soon demand quite a bit more money, so the A’s dealt him for more prospects. So another update of the top 11 prospects was needed. You can find it here, or here is the new list:
Daric Barton
Carlos Gonzalez
Fautino De Los Santos
Brett Anderson
Gio Gonzalez
Trevor Cahill
Chris Carter
James Simmons
Aaron Cunningham
Henry Rodriguez
Andrew Bailey
So while this deal leaves Oakland with an OF of Emil Brown, Chris Denorfia, and Travis Buck, if you are counting at home, six of their top 11 prospects are direct results of these two deals. And some people wonder if Billy Beane really is a genius or not…

1-17-2008: Signed RHP Huston Street to a one-year contract.
A must-do move for the A’s to lock up a 24-year-old closer for at least another year who was the 2005 ROY, and who has never had a WHIP higher than 1.09 or and ERA+ lower than 134. Avoiding arbitration was also another factor.

Seattle Mariners

12-12-2007: Acquired Minor League INF Tug Hulett from the Texas Rangers in exchange for 1B Ben Broussard and invited Hulett to Spring Training.
I documented some of this last year, but the Mariners must really be counting on a huge Richie Sexson rebound to get rid of Broussard and his capable bat. Sexson can’t get any worse or any more unlucky than he was in 2007 (.217 BABIP), but Mike Morse is now the only legitimate backup at first. For more than $15m, the M’s better hope Sexson can rebound.

12-20-2007: Signed RHP Carlos Silva to a four-year contract with a mutual option for 2012.
Not to the extreme of an Ervin Santana, but Carlos Silva has quite the home/road split for his entire career. His ERA, OPS allowed, BABIP line at home for five years is 3.76/.736/.292 while it jumps to 4.93/.849/.326 on the road.
A lot is made of what a great pitcher’s park Safeco field is in Seattle, and how it will help Silva. But in reality, Safeco and the Metrodome both ranked a 96 on multi-year park factor in 2007, so those two parks are equally advantageous to the pitcher. What Silva has to do is keep his incredible walk rate where it has been the past few years, when he was in the top 5 in the AL from 2004 to 2007, including leading the AL with a .43 BB/9 ratio in 2005.

*And as of now, the Mariners are also actively trying to trade for Baltimore’s Erik Bedard. More on that if it happens.

Texas Rangers

12-12-2007: Signed OF Milton Bradley to a one-year contract; Acquired 1B Ben Broussard from the Seattle Mariners in exchange for Minor League INF Tug Hulett
Say hello to the new RF and 1B for the Texas Rangers. With no Mark Teixeira or (insert name of any Rangers’ many ‘07 RF), someone had to be found to man those positions. We have talked in the Mariners section and in a previous post about Broussard’s capabilities last season, but we will have to wait and see if he can stay productive over 550 PA or more.

And on Milton Bradley. First of all, the bad things:
He has played in more than 101 games once in his career
He has played for five teams in seven seasons
He can disrupt a clubhouse better than anyone
He is a bad guy - and I just don’t like him.

And now the good things:
Posted an OPS+ over 100 each of the last five seasons (when he played)
He does take walks and get on base (lowest OBP over the past five years was .350 in 2005, corresponding to the year when he had his highest batting average)
At least he is playing for another contract, whether with the Rangers or someone else

12-21-2007: Acquired OF Josh Hamilton from the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for RHP Edinson Volquez and Minor League LHP Danny Herrera.
And the Rangers new CF is the infamous Josh Hamilton, he of so many drug and addiction problems, but with so much talent the Reds took a shot on him last year and Texas does the same this year. Finally sober and cleaned up, Hamilton, as a rookie, had 56 RC in limited playing time due to injury. That’s roughly the same number Luke Scott, Moises Alou, and Matt Diaz produced in 2007. Hamilton’s line was also .292/.368/.554 - good numbers for anyone, much less a rookie.
Hamilton is 27 now, but has been given the starting job in Texas, so watch what he does this season assuming he doesn’t have the recurrence of injury problems that he had last year. This is just an all-around good story for a former #1 draft pick who everyone gave up on. And to think, when he was drafted, the debate was whether he or Josh Beckett would turn out better. Hamilton certainly has a ways to go…

1-11-2008: Signed LHP Eddie Guardado to a one-year contract
No more Gagne and no more Otsuka means the Rangers needed to find someone for the closer’s role. For a two year stretch, Guardado was THE MAN. Unfortunately, those two years came in 2002-2003, not in 2006-07. In his two best years, Guardado had 86 combined saves and an ERA+ of 155. But in the last two years with Seattle and Cincinnati, Guardado saved 13 games, has an ERA+ under 100, while being hit with multiple injuries. His 2007 ERA was 7.24 with an equally awful WHIP of 1.463.
Now 37, Easy Eddie will compete with C.J. Wilson for the closer’s role on the Texas staff. Wilson has better peripherals all around, especially against left handers, but he might relegated to the left-handed specialist role if Guaradado proves he still has any gas in the tank.

1-17-2008: Signed RHP Jason Jennings to a one-year contract
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/HOU/HOU200707290.shtml
I’m just warning you, Rangers fans…

We will come back and start the National League side of things next week.

There are not many things more beautiful to me than a ballpark open for the first time in the spring, or a perfectly executed hit and run, or a majestic homerun that clears a park. I can always find beauty in the simplest of forms at a baseball game, and there are not many things that rival what I see at the park.

But something that tops everything on that list is my new baby girl.

I have taken the past eight weeks off from doing something I love that in the end means nothing to spend time with someone I now adore and that now means everything. Now that things are starting to get back to a normal schedule (or as normal as it will be), I hope to be able to pick back up where I left off and get back to some research.

While I will never doubt the beauty of my new daughter, beauty on the baseball field or in the box score is something that has been debated for more than a century. Specifically with statistics, as we have seen in the past, the naked eye can often lie when it comes to observing and, in turn, trying to qualify a “good” player. Everyone knows the old quote from Bull Durham about the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter:

“…one extra flare a week, a ground ball, a dying quail… you’re in Yankee Stadium.”

Essentially, it’s VERY hard to tell between a mediocre, .250 hitter and a great .300 hitter. So when fans, announcers, managers, or anyone make general statements about how hitters perform based on what they see or what they believe, it’s always best to take it with a grain of salt.

A situation like this came up towards the end of the 2007 regular season as I was watching an Astros/Brewers game in late September.

In a game that featured two of the Majors’ top rookies for the season, the announcers on Fox Sports began discussing the value that Hunter Pence and Ryan Braun had on their teams this past year. In noting that both of them had very good batting averages (Braun finished the year at .324, Pence at .322) a comment was made along the lines of “rookies will typically hit for a higher average when they arrive in the majors because the quality of the pitchers is much better in the majors and they are able to be around the plate much more than their minor league counterparts.”

I don’t have the transcript of the game in my possession, so please don’t take that word for word, but the general idea is there. That because hitters see more hittable pitches when they come to the majors, they will be better hitters when it comes to average.

So I immediately thought, can this be true? Never mind that pitchers in the majors hit their spots better and their fastballs are faster and their breaking balls have more movement. And forget that defenses are better, travel is more brutal, and playing time for rookies is usually more sporadic; does that actually translate into better stats for rookies when they are facing tougher competition? That got me thinking about 2007 and using it as a case study for rookie production in the majors vs. their minor league numbers.

These broadcasters did not qualify their statement by specifying any level of the minor leagues, so it is pretty easy to pull a list of rookies and their 2007 MLB batting averages and compare them to their minor league career averages. I chose rookies with at least 150 plate appearances so we could see hitters who at least had routine/daily at bats. Here is the list of the 55 who qualified (actually there were 56, but Akinori Iwamura has no minor league stats to work with) ranked in order of their 2007 MLB batting average:

A simple count of these rookies shows that only 14 out of 55 (or 25%) out-performed their career minor league batting averages in their first major league season. And out of those 14, four of them beat their minor league total by .005 or less. Running a simple correlation of the two sets of numbers shows that the two sides (minors and MLB 2007) are not statistically significant (with r=.191 and p=.162). Simply speaking, looking at a player’s minor league average before 2007 would not be a good way to predict or even estimate their batting averages as a major leaguer in 2007.

You will always have your studs coming out of the minors who find a way to translate that talent into almost instant success in the majors such as Ryan Braun, Hunter Pence, and Troy Tulowitzki. But does everyone remember all of the experts’ preseason Rookie of the Year, Kansas City’s Alex Gordon? He was actually being hailed as the next Mike Schmidt. But after a few benchings and a .247 average on the year, he did not receive a single vote in the category. And what about Justin Upton, Elijah Dukes, and others who were supposed to pay immediate dividends? There are plenty just like them who did not pan out as originally advertised. And not to say Gordon won’t become Schmidt….just not this year.

So, if average is not a good predictor of success from the minors to the majors, what might be? We need to look at a more cumulative offensive statistic, not just one that says, “I got this many hits in this many at-bats.”

What I want to propose is Runs Created per Game or RC/27. We are all pretty familiar with the stat Runs Created. It simply takes into account a player’s offensive production based on runs he created for himself and for others on his team and tallies it into a calculable, sum total. What RC/27 does is ask the question, “what if there was a whole lineup of X player? How many runs would that lineup score per game?” For example, in 2007, the top three in the category were David Ortiz (surprisingly first at 10.86 runs/game), Alex Rodriguez (10.49), and Magglio Ordonez (10.12). That tells you how good these guys were - can you imagine a team that would average more than 10 runs per game? The Yankees had the highest average in 2007 with 5.83 runs per game (and their best month was September at 6.67).

Anyway, RC/27 will take into account not only the runs created by the batter by themselves as well as opportunities presented to that player by teammates and how he performed in those circumstances. Using the same 55 players, here is the list of their career minor league RC/27 numbers vs. their numbers in their rookies seasons of 2007:

Running the correlation again, we see that the numbers for RC/27 comparing minors to 2007 MLB ARE statistically significant (r=.268 and p=.05). So while not perfect, Runs Created per Game would be a much more reliable stat to judge performance across levels of competition.

My guess is that this would be partially due to the fact that a player’s pure talent should eventually translate across the levels he plays in, whether good or bad, in looking at how he performs on offense individually. Average only accounts for one piece of the offensive puzzle: how many times did I get a hit in my times at bat? It doesn’t account for walks, what type of hit it was, who was on base, whether they got the hit with one out or two outs, etc.

Another theory of mine is that in the majors, these rookies will be playing and batting in a lineup of players that (should) actually belong in the majors. I imagine that would lead to more consistent opportunities of plate appearances with men on base, men in scoring position, and also competent hitters batting behind them, allowing something like RC/27 to stabilize quicker with less variance than something like average where it is solely reliant upon batter and pitcher; one at bat. But, then again, that’s just my opinion, and the topic of a whole other post with different numbers to crunch.

Unfortunately, this is a difficult study to continue to quantify. The statement proposed by the announcers about the averages in their rookie seasons qualifies the research and limits the set of data we can use for the players. Once their second year comes around, they are not rookies anymore and their MLB numbers can’t be used anymore.

But if someone wanted to take on the task of comparing the numbers from say 1986 to 2006 for rookies and see how they correlate, I would be very interested to see it. Would average then become significant over 20 years? Would RC/27 become less so? I would be curious to know.

Just be sure to always question what you hear if it doesn’t sound right to you. There’s a good chance it’s not based on facts.

And welcome back to Baseball Notes. More to come soon…

With another regular season come and gone, you will hear a lot of debate amongst the experts over the next couple of months as to who should win the particular offseason awards. But, let’s face it, besides AL Cy Young and NL MVP, the names are already engraved on the trophies for these prizes.

So I thought it appropriate to recognize those that never get their due, those that won’t even come close to being mentioned, those who don’t even deserve to be mentioned. And what I came up with was the 2007 Worsts Team. This team defines the absolute worst there is in offensive baseball. The most god-awful at each position on the diamond, save the pitcher. But there is one caveat; for some unknown reason, their respective teams stuck with them.

To qualify for this list, you had to qualify for MLB’s offensive categories, which means 3.1 PA per team game, or 503 PA on the season. That means that no matter how bad the player was (and we will see some bad ones), their team sent them to the plate more than 500 times over the course of the season.

The stats I will be using are Value Over Replacement Player and Runs Created for the season (remember, if you need a definition of each, check out the Stats Glossary tab). I looked at the list of the worst qualified performers in each and took the composite score of the two rankings for each player on this list, ranked by position. With only one exception, you will see the eight players with the worst overall rankings in VORP and RC for 2007. One for each position.

First, the boring stuff. Here are the top ten for both VORP and RC in 2007:

VORP
Alex Rodriguez - 95.1
Hanley Ramirez - 90.2
David Ortiz - 86.6
Magglio Ordonez - 85.7
David Wright - 81.3
Chipper Jones - 76.6
Matt Holliday - 74.2
Albert Pujols - 73.8
Jorge Posada - 73.8
Miguel Cabrera - 71.4

RC
Alex Rodriguez - 164
David Ortiz - 156
Magglio Ordonez - 149
Matt Holliday - 148
David Wright - 146
Prince Fielder - 143
Hanley Ramirez - 142
Albert Pujols - 133
Carlos Pena - 132
Jimmy Rollins - 132

These end up being petty consistent lists, with seven of the top ten being the same in both lists (and all of the top ten in VORP are in the top 20 of RC). But that’s not why you are here.

So without further ado, the worst of 2007:

Catcher

A.J. Pierzynski
9.8 VORP, 53 RC

Only nine catchers qualified with at least 503 PAs, and five of those only beat 503 by 15 or less PA, but Pierzynski was the worst of the lot. With an OPS that barely reached .700, Pierzynski was one of several White Sox that succumbed to their inevitable decline after great years in 2006. His average dropped by more than 30 points from the previous year and he ended up being only 10 runs better than the catchers Chicago had on the bench.

First Baseman

Kevin Millar
12.1 VORP, 73 RC

A major league first baseman with 16 HR and 62 RBI over 558 PA might be OK if he was playing for the 2007 Yankees or Red Sox, and they didn’t need his bat. But that is not what the 2007 Orioles were. Baltimore ranked 10th in the AL in OPS, and could have used a first baseman with some legitimate power. His 75 walks are commendable, however.

Second Baseman

Jose Lopez
-10.9 VORP, 48 RC

Yes, that is a negative VORP you see there, meaning any old scrub playing second would have been 11 runs better than Lopez given the same PAs over the season. 538 PAs for this kind of production is unexcusable, as his VORP and RC numbers were both in the bottom five for all of MLB. The fact that Seattle was once so close to a playoff spot makes this even more of a head-scratcher. Why would they leave Lopez in the lineup for so long?

Shortstop

Tony Pena, Jr.
-7.8 VORP, 47 RC

Another player with bottom five numbers in both VORP and RC for all of MLB - and that is over 533 PAs. Actually Pena and Omar Vizquel both had the same composite ranking score of 4.5 on the lists, but since Vizquel is once again tops on everyone’s list of the best defensive shortstops, the award goes to Pena.

Third Baseman

Nick Punto
-26.9 VORP, 41 RC

Here we are, the worst of the worst for 2007. Punto, in 533 PA, was the worst in both of these categories while batting .211 and posting an OPS below .600. This means the Twins must have had absolutely NO ONE on the bench whom they thought could replace Punto, because his numbers are by far the worst amongst MLB regulars in 2oo7. Forget talking about extra runs here, the Twins could have had almost three extra wins if Punto had never been in the lineup and some other replacement-level player was. A horrible year.

Left Fielder

Jason Bay
4.2 VORP, 78 RC

The rotisserie darling of so many for two years, Bay struggled mightily this year, batting only .248 in 2007 with an OBP of .328 and SLG of only .419. His power numbers of 25 doubles and 21 HR dropped significantly compared to the past two years. And forget the 21 SB from two years ago. He had but four this year. And he stayed in the Pirates lineup all year, totaling 613 PA over the season.

Center Fielder

Andruw Jones
5.2 VORP, 74 RC

Here is the one exception to my rule of the composite rankings, because Bill Hall actually was worse than Jones according to those rankings, but Hall totaled 503 PA (for his 6.6 VORP and 60 RC) while Jones did it over 659 PA, the most for any player on this list. So much for players having that extra little something in contract years. Jones has not had numbers this poor since his 20-year-old rookie season of 1997. His strikeout rate increased this year as well; he finished with the third highest total of his career. See my other thoughts on Jones here.

Right Fielder

Brian Giles
10.8 VORP, 72 RC

Another former All Star makes the list in 2007. I wonder if moving Giles to the leadoff spot midway through the year had anything to do with his decline in numbers this year - I guess we will have to see what the Padres do in ‘08. Missing a significant amount of time due to injury surely hurt Giles here, and could move Delmon Young up to this spot, but Giles did post the lowest OBP and SLG numbers of his career when he was in the lineup. Even Giles’ BB rate, something he has been famous for, dropped to a career-low 11.6% this year.

So there you have it: My Worst of the Worst team for 2007. Not surprisingly, only one of these players is on a (potential) playoff team - Giles. Teams with a hole as big as these players in their lineups generally will have a tough time making up for the missed production elsewhere, particularly in the NL, where these batters are always asked to bat higher than ninth.

Any disagreements? Let me know in the comments.

On September 11, I attended the Astros-Cubs game here in Houston that the Astros won 5-4 in 11 innings thanks to a Luke Scott walk-off triple off of Ryan Dempster. During games, as is my custom, I will usually try to pick up on some interesting trend, or notice something I have never seen before, or try to predict pitches, etc. You know, nerdy stuff. Well, something caught my attention that day and I have been thinking about it since.

Perhaps it is because I have Carlos Lee in my most competitive fantasy league, but I was noticing that night how many times he led off an inning. So when I got home, I checked the play-by-play, and sure enough, he led off an inning four times in his five at bats that night. In fact, the only time at bat where he did not lead off an inning was in the first inning. As a cleanup hitter, you would think that his first at bat would have been the most logical to lead off an inning if the first three batters were sat down in order in the first inning. But just like I thought, he led off the 4th, 6th, 8th, and 11th. One of the reasons this caught my attention was because a caller on a local radio show called about this same topic a few weeks ago and it stuck with me. But, not wanting to trust what that guy said or just my observation from Tuesday night, I went to check the numbers.

Carlos Lee has led off an inning 142 times this season including the Sept. 11 game. Is that a lot? A little? Somewhere in between? Obviously, leadoff hitters will have a lot more times leading off an inning because they do it every game. Number 8 and 9 hitters will do so much less frequently because they have so many fewer plate appearances than the guys in the top of the order. So Carlos Lee needs some peers to compare him to. And since inevitably I will quit rambling and look at how these many times leading off an inning led to decreased numbers of opportunities with men on base, I figured I would compare him to his fellow run-producers. I have included a list of the top 31 RBI leaders in the majors as of the Sept. 11 games (that is to say, everyone who had at least 90 RBI by that point). And, yes, I am aware that RBI is always a flawed stat to use to compare players, but since this ties in directly with the conclusion of my previous post where it was found that plate appearances with men on base, and not average or OBP with men on base, has a higher correlation with strong RBI numbers, it seems like an appropriate list to use.

Here is the list, with their homeruns and OPS when leading off an inning included:

As you can see, Carlos Lee is tied for third when counting both leagues and comes in first overall in the NL for number of times leading off an inning. Other interesting trends here:

1. As might be expected, the highest numbers of those leading off innings come from cleanup hitters like Lee, Morneau, A-Rod, Ordonez, Martinez, etc. Conversely, the lowest numbers are held by hitters in the third spot such as Utley, Hafner, Ortiz, etc. This makes sense because three-hole hitters are guaranteed that they will have at least one at bat per game where they do not lead off.

2. Of these 31 players, 16 have an OPS higher than their overall number when they lead off an inning, and 15 have a number lower. So in this small group of statistical data, no definitive conclusion can be drawn using OPS that this elite group of hitters are any more clutch when they come up with men on base as opposed to no one on. In this exercise, you know they are coming up with no men on in the plate appearances.

3. The four guys that typically hit in front of A-Rod, Morneau, Lee, and Wright are Bobby Abreu, Torii Hunter, Lance Berkman, and Luis Castillo (since he was traded), respectively. Of those four, you can definitely argue that three of them had significant portions of their seasons where they struggled or were in slumps (Berkman, Abreu, and Castillo). Could it be that the leaders in PA while LOI simply just fell into that because pitchers challenged the guys in front of them more frequently because they did not want to face these sluggers with men on base?

But getting back to Lee for a second, how do the numbers represented above affect Lee’s personal season statistics, or the Astros’ numbers for that matter?

According to Baseball Prospectus, there are only eight major leaguers who have had more PAs this season with runners on base than Carlos Lee. This surprising stat comes while Lee plays for a team that is 27th out of 30 teams in runs scored this season and a team that is 23rd in OBP. The other eight players ahead of Lee all play on teams that are in the top eight in the majors in runs scored. And if my addition is correct, only Alex Rodriguez has more plate appearances leading off an inning plus PAs with runners on than Carlos Lee.

What does all of this tell us? Nothing, really. Just that Carlos Lee has had some absolutely fabulous bad luck this year, his first as an Astro. Lance Berkman has gone from from a Hall of Fame type year in 2006 to merely just a good year in 2007, which apparently has included plenty of rally-killing third outs. Nothing could have helped the Astros this year - not even 142 more plate appearances for Lee with men on base. Lee would have to have created 120 more runs to account for 12 more wins, the number of games out of first the Astros currently find themselves.

But to have some fun with the numbers, we can certainly do some predicting here. Here is what we will use:

1. Maybe not so surprisingly, only Vladimir Guerrero has driven in a greater percentage of his team’s runs than Carlos Lee at 16.8%

2. In 2007, 50.3% of Lee’s PAs have come with men on base.

3. Lee has an OBI% (others batted in) of 17.5% - around 35th in the majors for qualified batters.

4. Lee’s breakdown of runners on each base per PA with men on and his percentage of driving runners in from those bases looks like this:

1B - 74% of PAs with men on - drives them in at a rate of 6.8%
2B - 43% of PAs with men on - drives them in at a rate of 18.2%
3B - 23% of PAs with men on - drives them in at a rate of 50.7%

5. The mean number of PA leading off an inning of the 31 listed above is 115.

So, let’s give Lee 115 PAs leading off an inning instead of 142. This gives him an extra 27 PAs throughout the season. Based on the the 50.3% from above, 14 of those will now come with men on.

Using the other percentages, 10 PAs will come with men on first and he will drive in one of them. Six of those PAs will come with men on second, and he will drive in one of them. Four of the PAs will come with men on third, and he will drive in two of them.

In the end, if we make Carlos Lee the average slugger/run producer, we only add four more RBI to his Sept. 11 total, and he now has 109.

When you have fellow batters like Lance Berkman in front of you all season who are constantly making inning-ending outs, there is not much you can do to change your luck. A lot was made here in Houston at the beginning of the season about having such a great tandem of 3-4 hitters in Berkman and Lee. But hindsight and Berkman’s “down” year and OBI% of only 16.3% shows that the Astros perhaps could have done a bit more damage with those two in the opposite spots in the lineup. But, again, it would have taken a lot more than “a bit more damage” to save the Astros’ season.

__________

Of course, as I write this, Lee just led off an inning with a homerun for the Astros on Thursday night.

In 2003, the Michael Lewis book, Moneyball, opened the eyes of a lot of baseball fans, insiders, and analysts as Lewis described the thought processes of GM Billy Beane and the 2002 Oakland Athletics in their quest to remain competitive in the American League despite a payroll significantly less than the Yankees, Red Sox, and Angels of the world. By valuing offensive traits such as on base percentage, slugging percentage, and walk rate, Beane was able to identify players that could be had at a tremendous value to the team through the draft, trades, and free agency. Using this philosophy of valuing skills many teams overlook (Moneyball emphasizes runners moving from station to station via hits, walks, etc; getting on base is valued more and expected more than moving runners along at the expense of outs), Oakland was able to make the playoffs every year from 2000-2003 and again in 2006.

Fast forward to 2005, and using a variation of smallball (sort of the anti-moneyball) called Ozzieball, the Chicago White Sox swept the Houston Astros to win the World Series. In smallball, teams use the hit-and-run, stolen bases, sacrifice bunts and hits, productive outs, and runner advancement to score runs whenever possible, and rely on quality pitching to always keep their teams in games. The 2005 White Sox finished with the best record in baseball, and a team 3.61 ERA on their way to the title.

Needless to say, the debate over which style of play is better has just begun - with countless numbers joining each side. Or is having a little bit of both the best? In 2007, teams such as the Boston Red Sox, Oakland Athletics, and the Cincinnati Reds continue to use the Moneyball philosophy, while others such as the Los Angeles Angels, St. Louis Cardinals, and Seattle Mariners rely less on the homerun and extra-base hit and move runners along however they can.

Looking at 2007, the White Sox are now one of the worst teams in baseball and the Athletics are struggling to reach .500 in a division that has had two teams run away from them. So while both teams that experienced such great success with their respective style of play struggle this season (something that was probably expected due to natural regression, especially for the White Sox), other teams using the different styles of play have risen up to take their places and are primed for the postseason.

So I thought an interesting study might be to look at 2007 offenses (pitching at another time) and see which teams are using the two separate paths, which teams utilize some of both, and how those correlate with winning percentages across Major League Baseball.

Then the question becomes how do you define teams using Moneyball, and how do you define teams using Smallball?

On the ESPN website, Rob Neyer concocted a fun little tool called the Beane Count (after Billy Beane) to tell which teams are playing the Moneyball style using hitting and pitching numbers that are reflective of that philosophy. Using reverse rotisserie style (the team in first place in a certain category gets one point, the last team in the NL would get 16 points, for example), he uses total HR and total BB for team offenses, and total HR allowed and total BB walks allowed for team pitching staffs to rate teams who at least unintentionally use Moneyball tactics the most. As of Sept. 3, Boston, Cleveland, and Oakland lead the AL, while San Diego, Colorado, and Cincinnati lead the NL.

What I tried to do was take that Beane Count concept and expand it a little bit, run the data for only offenses, and create an alternate set of comparative statistics for smallball stats. What I ended up with was a set of data that I call Money Count which ranks each team’s HR, BB, OBP, and ISO (Isolated Power; SLG-AVG); and Small Count which ranks each team’s Stolen Bases, Sacrifice Hits, AVG, and POP (productive out percentage; productive outs being any out that advances a runner with the first out or scores a run with the second out). I then ranked each team’s offense by these four categories the same way Neyer does in Beane Count, reverse rotisserie style.

The results for the separate spreadsheets are below (click on the link to enlarge, numbers are as of 9/2):

money-count.jpg

small-count.jpg

And here is the chart with each team’s winning percentage as of September 2:

From the two charts comparing moneyball to smallball, you see a few expected and a few unexpected things. In Money Count, slugging, slower teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, Reds, Indians, and A’s all show up in the top 12 or so. Similarly, faster, less powerful teams such as the Angels, Mariners, Cardinals, and Dodgers all show up in the top 12 of the Small Count chart.

What is interesting to see is teams where it is apparent that they have a combination of both sets of offensive traits. Teams such as the Phillies (with Howard, Rollins, Utley, Burrell, Victorino, et al), the Mets (Reyes, Wright, Beltran, Delgado, etc.), and the Devil Rays (Crawford, Pena, Upton, Young, Iwamura) have all developed players and qualities of being able to succeed offensively on both sides of the debate. They can beat teams with speed, out production, and the one-run inning; or they can mash the ball, reach base in a number of ways, and pile on the runs.

So looking at these two charts and then looking at team’s winning percentages. Can we compare the two and expect them to give us a significant correlation towards winning? Can we look at just 2007 offensive numbers and ask them to tell us how teams win or which way will contribute more towards a team winning? Offensive numbers from just 2007 is still a small sample size even when you are talking about five months worth of data - so a model built around 10 or 20 years of data would be better, but not having access to a database like that has limited me to 2007.

With the help of the brilliant Dr. Jared Benge, we ran multiple statistical tests to try and prove or disprove the theory that moneyball or smallball can correlate to or be a predictor of wins and winning percentage. What we found looks like this:

Trying to directly correlate moneyball style or smallball style to winning percentage proved difficult. Neither philosophy proved to be statistically significant based on 2007 numbers, but with the goal being p<=.05, Moneyball came in at .149 while Smallball came in at .912. Again, not enough data to make it significant, but Moneyball clearly comes closer to the goal of correlating to winning percentage.

So what we decided to do next was run a regression model to try and determine the explained variance of each of these philosophies to winning. The way it was explained to me was to think of a win or winning like a whole pie. By running a regression test for each style of play, we should be able to see what percentage of the variance or outcome (read:win) comes from each style. In doing this, we found that Moneybal received a variance of .073 or 7%. Smallball’s was essentially zero. The conclusion from this is that using this small sample size, 7% of a win can be explained by Moneyball, while Smallball essentially can not explain any part of it.

The bottom line is that regression is used to try and determine how much a predictor (the two different styles in this case) predict an outcome (which we want to make winning percentage). Trying to use either of these sets of data to predict winning percentage proves to be futile, and we see very little significance from Moneyball and even less from Smallball.

Our hypthesis is that over 10 or 20 years, if these numbers remained somewhat constant, Moneyball would eventually become statistically significant in determining a higher variance for winning percentage, or in predicting wins for a team. I will save that project for another day, but if someone wants to undertake the legwork, please feel free.

But in looking at individual teams, a pattern begins to show when comparing teams that populate high spots in both sets of rankings. Some of the best teams in the majors (Philadelphia, New York Yankees and Mets, Detroit, etc.) seem to have grasped an overall offensive approach: one that serves them well when needing to play a specific type of game that the circumstances demand.

So the debate will continue to go on until further proof can be produced. Perhaps someday we will undertake that. Someday we will collect all the data, modify our Count charts to more exact specifications, and run more tests. But for this year, the slightest of edges is given to Moneyball. For whatever that’s worth.

__________

If you want the full set of tests run for this project, let me know and I can find a way to get them to you. RK

In the spring of 1994, I was a skinny 8th grader living in Brussels where I wrote for the school paper for the first time. Being a school with mostly Americans, the paper had a sports section dedicated mainly to American sports, so when I was asked where I wanted to spend my time learning how to write, of course that is what I picked. More specifically, baseball.

I was asked to write a preview of the upcoming baseball season - and I gladly accepted. I wrote until my fingers hurt, only to have my article cut in half because I had made it “way too long” for the upcoming edition. Not knowing or understanding anything about a pending strike or labor stoppage or salary cap, I wrote about some of my favorite players like Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas and Ken Griffey, Jr. Little did I know what kind of season those three respective players would have, two of them winning the MVP award before the season ended on August 11. And while Bagwell, Thomas and others were downright god-like that season, it was two other men that had their chance at history ripped out from under them after their evening games ended that Thursday night in August.

Matt Williams and Tony Gwynn were both on pace for phenomenal, record-breaking numbers in 1994, despite the fact that both played for losing teams a mere 500 miles apart.

Through 115 team games, Matt Williams had played in 112 and already had 43 homeruns, leading all of Major League Baseball. At this pace, Williams would have played in 158 games, and with his pace of one homerun every 10.35 at-bats, he was on track for exactly 61 homeruns - which would have tied the current record of 61 homeruns by Roger Maris. Bagwell was the closest to Williams with 39 homeruns. Unfortunately, if Williams had hit 61 or 62 or 63, his record would have only stood for four years before McGwire and Sosa battled in their epic summer.

So we turn our attention to Tony Gwynn. In 117 San Diego games, Gwynn had missed seven and was on pace for 152 for the season. With 165 hits through 419 at-bats, Gwynn ended August 11 with a .394 average, the highest since Ted Williams’ .406 in 1941. With 45 team games left, Gwynn had approximately 180 plate appearances left to raise his average six points. To put his average in perspective, Gwynn could have gone hitless for his next 131 at-bats and his average would still be .300. If Gwynn had played a full season and had reached .400, he would accomplish something no one had done for 53 years, and something no one has come close to since.

Lately, I have been wondering what would have really happened? Just saying Gwynn was on pace for a .394 AVG is too easy and no fun - with no strike he would actually have had to play those games. What if he did? After exhaustive research by my pal Jeremy Gibson (including calling the Padres’ archive departments), we were able to track down a schedule of games that were not played in 1994 - the rest of the canceled season (45 games) for San Diego.

Using Gwynn’s past numbers against the teams and pitchers with whom they had games remaining, I think we can get a better idea of how he might have performed (with a STRONG emphasis on “might”), and if he would have come close to .400. But since this is just for fun, and we’ll never really know, we might as well try.

Here is the portion of the Padres’ schedule that was canceled in 1994:

August-
12-14 vs SF
15-17 vs STL
19-21 @ ATL
23-25 @ FLA
26-28 vs ATL
29-31 vs FLA

September-
2-4 vs PIT
5-7 @ STL
9-11 @ PIT
12-14 @ SF
16-18 vs CHI
19-21 vs HOU
23-25 vs LAD
27-29 @ CIN
30-Oct.2 @ COL

In order to do this, there are a number of factors that have to be considered first. To begin, we will keep Gwynn on the same number of games played schedule. So if he was sitting out once every 20 games, we will do the same thing with the remaining 45 games. Also, Gwynn was averaging 4.32 plate appearances per game, so since every series left is three games, we will assume 13 plate appearances per series, or 195 left before we take away PA for games he sits and walks. We will also keep the same walk rate he accumulated versus these remaining teams for the 1994 season. So if he was averaging a walk per game against the Pirates, we will grant him that to try not to inflate or deflate his number of at-bats too much. We will also have to assume that the teams he is facing keep the same starting pitchers all season, and the batting averages he accumulated through the first 117 games against those pitchers will remain constant when he faces them again.** Gwynn had only two HBP and one sacrifice hit all season to that point, so those are statistically irrelevant to what we are going to do. So let’s get to it.

First, the games he will miss. Gwynn only missed one game all season after April 12, and that was on July 6. The other six games he missed were from April 5-April 11 because of injury. So, only missing one of the team’s final 109 games during the regular season tells us he probably was not going to be sitting at all in those final months. Especially if he is chasing .400.

Walk rate: here is a list of Gwynn’s BB/G rates for the teams on his schedule from Aug. 12 to Oct. 2. Next to that is how many walks we will take away from Gwynn’s plate appearances for three or six games against those teams, and how many plate appearances he has left in a three or six games series after we subtract those walks:

SFG - .286 - 2 walks - 24 at bats left
STL - .50 - 3 walks - 23 at bats left
ATL - .25 - 2 walks - 24 at bats left
FLA - 0 - 0 walks - 26 at bats left
PIT - .50 - 3 walks - 23 at bats left
CHI - .111 - 0 walks - 13 at bats left
HOU - .40 - 1 walk - 12 at bats left
LAD - .70 - 2 walks - 11 at bats left
CIN - .30 - 1 walk - 12 at bats left
COL - 1.20 - 4 walks - 9 at bats left

Now we have our best guess that Gwynn has 177 at bats left to add to his 419 up to this point in the schedule to equal 596 for the season. The next step is to translate the number of at bats Gwynn has left against each team into the number of hits, using his 1994 average against that team, and extrapolate his total average from these numbers.

Below is the average Gwynn totaled against each team remaining on his schedule in 1994 before the strike. Listed after that is the number of at bats and therefore hits he should have accumulated against each team in that series rounded to the nearest hundredth.

SFG - .429 avg - 24 at bats - 10.30 hits
STL - .391 avg - 23 at bats - 8.99 hits
ATL - .273 avg - 24 at bats - 6.55 hits
FLA - .231 avg - 26 at bats - 6.00 hits
PIT - .364 avg - 23 at bats - 8.37
CHI - .324 avg - 13 at bats - 4.21 hits
HOU - .417 avg - 12 at bats - 5.00 hits
LAD - .514 AVG - 11 at bats - 5.65 hits
CIN - .333 avg - 12 at bats - 4.00 hits
COL - .378 avg - 9 at bats - 3.40 hits

The total comes to 62.47 hits over his final 177 at bats or a .353 average. Even if we bump him up to 63, it is only a .356 average.

Therefore, adding 63 hits to his total of 165 and adding 177 at bats to his total of 419, we get 228 hits in 596 at bats, or an average in 1994 of .383. So, while it’s not .400 or even .394, Gwynn would still have had the highest batting average in the National League since Arky Vaughan all the way back with the 1935 Pirates when he hit .385.

A couple of things worked against Gwynn if you are using 1994 performance as a measurement for the rest of the unplayed season. First, he didn’t have any games left against the Phillies, whom Gwynn batted .571 against for the season. Second, he had too many games left against the Marlins, who held Gwynn to his lowest batting average against any team at .231; plus he did not draw a single walk against them all season. Third, Gwynn only hit over .400 in one month the whole 1994 season, and that was August where he only played in 10 games. For six weeks, he would have had to keep up a pace he had only been able to accomplish for 11 days throughout the season.

I, for one, would have loved to see the rest of that season played out so we could definitively know what would have happened. But since those 45 games are lost forever, we are left to hope for what might have been - and the greatness we might have missed.

___________

** And as a disclaimer, yes, I have read “What Does Mike Redmond Know about Tom Glavine” from Baseball Between the Numbers by the Baseball Prospectus team. So I know that just because Gwynn performs a certain way against pitcher in the past, it has no relevance on how he will perform in the future. But there really is no other way to effectively guess, so we will leave it this way for now.

If you know some of my thoughts on baseball, you know I am an RBI skeptic. I admit it, I am not taken aback by massive RBI numbers like so many of our media and fantasy players these days. RBIs, as I hope to show you, are not a very telling statistic, but they so often contribute to a player getting more All Star votes or MVP votes at the end of the year, or recognition on fantasy teams, etc.

Any good sabermetrician can tell you that RBI are purely circumstantial. They depend on so many different factors: where you bat in the lineup, are you in the NL or AL, who bats in front of you, who bats behind you, how many times you come up with players on, are they in scoring position, how many times do you drive yourself in, how many times do you lead off an inning, etc.

Even in his Sabermetric Manifesto, David Grabiner points out one of the problems with RBI that make them incomplete. And that is simply that “they measure a lot of things which are not the players’ own contribution.” You can’t drive in players who don’t get on base (except by home run. He correctly points out that players who bat behind teammates with high OBPs (”better players” as he puts it) tend to get more RBI.

But it was something he wrote next that made me want to run some numbers to test some things. He states:

In fact, the league leaders in RBI are much more likely to be the players who batted with the most teammates on base or in scoring position (not the batter’s contribution) than those who hit the best with runners on base or in scoring position. Thus RBI are a better measure of who had the most chances to drive in runners than of who was the best at driving in runners.

This is probably quite contradictory to what many people think. It seems logical to think that those who are the best at driving in runs, or who have the highest average with runners on or runners in scoring position (RISP), would accumulate the most RBI. But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it’s all about opportunity.

So that’s where I want to go from here. I am going to take some of the top RBI men from each of the past three seasons to see which side they fall on. Fortunately, with some helpful tools, we can do this quite simply. Of course, you can find anywhere the league leaders in RBI for the past three years, so that is easy. Our biggest help here will be the RBI Opportunities page on Baseball Prospectus’ website. It lists, amongst other things, plate appearances every player had with men on, the percentage of men driven in, who came up to bat with the most men during a season, and more.

So we will start with the top five RBI leaders in each league from 2004 to 2006:

Geez, I sure didn’t remember that Castilla led the league in RBI just three years ago. Anyway, these are their numbers. So now I will, year by year, break these down by each batter’s average with RISP and then the numbers on base they had during that season and the percentage of those numbers they drove in. I also was able to dig up averages w/ RISP ranks from The Hardball Times for those three years. Now, we can see how each hitter fell into the separate categories. I have included notes on this chart to explain all of the different stats.

What becomes obvious after looking at this chart for a few minutes is that, without even running the numbers, there is a much stronger correlation between high RBI numbers and runners seen on base than there is between high RBI and a high average with RISP.

For the league leaders for each league during these three years, the ranks of number of men on base for the player’s plate appearances are fourth, first, third, second, first, and first. Conversely, the ranks of average with RISP for the RBI leaders in those three years are 42nd, 55th, 5th, 75th, 12th, and 54th. Only one of the six is even in the top ten in avg. with RISP, that being Ortiz in 2005.

Further study of the number shows some pretty telling signs as well. Only three times in the 30 players above was there a batter who was not in the top 17 for ROB during their plate appearances (Dye in 2006, and Rolen and Beltre in 2004). Adrian Beltre, at 27th, has the lowest ranking for any player when determining ROB. For the ranking on average with RISP, there are nine players lower than 27th for their respective year - almost a third of our subjects.

So, apparently, David Grabiner and all other sabermetricians are on the right track. Batting averages can be deceiving and misleading with looked at without any context, even averages as specialized as BARISP. You could have someone who batted .500 with runners in scoring position over 100 plate appearances - but what does that tell you? If that player only had 14 appearances with RISP, you would rather be in the situation with a hitter that bats .315 with RISP but has 44 appearances over 100 PAs.

When batting, circumstances create opportunity, and it is what hitters do with that opportunity that makes them great versus just mediocre. But, like we mentioned earlier, a batter can not control what the players ahead of him do, he can not put runners on base ahead of him who are not there, he can not control how fast they are, and he can not control whether he leads off an inning three times in a game. As with so many things in baseball, how many runners a batter sees on base when he is up has a whole lot to do with luck. A manager knows this, but tries to generally manage that risk by setting his batting order by placing the highest OBP guys in front of the guys who have the most power or the highest SLG% (at least that is how it would work in an ideal world).

Hitters with the most opportunity will have the greatest success rate in driving runs. Whether you are Albert Pujols of 2006 (.397 with RISP) or Andruw Jones of 2005 (.207 with RISP) - you need the hitters ahead of you to do their job before you can start worrying about how good you are at driving them in.