ESPN Rob Neyer Blog

According to reports, the Cubs and Rockies have agreed on a deal that will send Jason Marquis to Denver and Luis Vizcaino to Chicago. The Denver Post's Troy Renck offers some context:

The Rockies made the math work to get a starter they have coveted for a month, while removing a setupman who asked to be dealt at season's end after expressing unhappiness with his role.
The Rockies will ship the $4 million remaining on Vizcaino's deal for the $9.875 million left on Marquis' contract. The Cubs are expected to eat around a $1 million on Marquis' contract, leaving the Rockies to pay approximately $5 million for one season of the right-hander.
Chicago, meanwhile, still nets a $5 million savings, crystallizing the motivation for both clubs.
--snip--
Vizcaino, 34, was given the richest Rockies' contract ever by a free-agent reliever a year ago -- two-year, $8 million -- after attempts to re-sign LaTroy Hawkins failed. Vizcaino struggled mightily, never assuming his predicted eighth-inning role. He finished with a 5.28 ERA, with lefties hitting .372 off him with eight home runs. During the last week of the season, he told The Denver Post that he wasn't happy with the way he was used  citing work in mopup duty -- and questioned his future with the organization. In late October, he was arrested in Tampa and charged with a misdemeanor DUI.

When the Cubs signed Marquis for three years and $21 million -- after a season in which he'd won 14 games but posted a 6.02 ERA -- we did little but mock. But Marquis reverted, as players usually do, to his usual self, and for their $21 million the Cubs got 23 wins, a league-average ERA, and now a season's worth of Luis Vizcaino. Actually, the Cubs are getting all that for around $16 million, because of the difference between Marquis' and Vizcaino's 2009 salaries.

I don't guess that this transaction will help either team much. But it's not really supposed to. It's just an exchange of headaches. But the Cubs got their money's worth. Mock that.

I know I touched on this last week -- by way of explaining why the Red Sox wanted to spend so much money on a first baseman when they already have a good one -- but I think Fred Claire's piece about next winter's thin crop of free agents is worthwhile …

One of the key factors on the free agent front this offseason has received little attention.
It has to do with the list of players who will be eligible for free agency following the 2009 season. It is, at best, a thin class in comparison with the current group.
It is a factor that the New York Yankees had to have in mind when they placed first baseman Mark Teixeira and pitcher CC Sabathia in the rather exclusive $100 million-plus club.
--snip--
Team executives have no interest in talking about individual players who could be free agents in 2009 since these players currently are under contract and thus we turned to two young Web site operators who follow free agency and contracts closely to get their views of what the future may hold -- Tim Dierkes of MLBTradeRumors.com and Jeff Euston of Cot's Baseball Contracts.
Both Dierkes and Euston placed [Matt] Holliday at the top of their position player list, with Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves second. They agreed that Lackey figures to be the leading pitcher if he doesn't sign before becoming a free agent.
Dierkes also made mention on his preference list of Jose Valverde (Houston), Brian Roberts (Baltimore), Jayson Werth (Philadelphia), Brian Giles (San Diego), Todd Wellemeyer (St. Louis), Adrian Beltre (Seattle), Mike Cameron (Milwaukee), Brett Myers (Philadelphia), Jason Bay (Boston), Troy Glaus (St. Louis) and Vladimir Guerrero (Angels).
Euston followed his top three selections of Lackey, Holliday and Jones by listing Guerrero, Carlos Delgado (New York Mets), Roberts, Rich Harden (Chicago Cubs), Myers, Valverde, Bay, Adam LaRoche (Pittsburgh), Beltre, and Justin Duchscherer (Oakland).
This is not a group of players that figures to generate a great deal of excitement and the number of potential free agents likely will dwindle.

First a few bullets …

• Chipper Jones will turn 38 shortly into the 2010 season.

• Brian Giles is a year older than Chipper Jones.

• I agree that Lackey will probably sign an extension with the Angels.

• I suspect the Red Sox will sign Jason Bay to an extension.

So whom does that leave? It'll be a strong market for third basemen, for second basemen named Brian Roberts and for 33-year-old DHs named Vladimir Guerrero. Matt Holliday is going to make a lot of money, and may well slot in nicely as the Yankees' left fielder in 2010.*

*Which reminds me of something. Or rather, two Yankees somethings: Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui. Both of them will earn $13 million in 2009, and both of them will be looking for new contracts after the season. I know they're both going to be middle-aged a year from now, but both can still hit a little and I would expect them to draw some real interest.

Claire is right, though: Next winter isn't going to be nearly as exciting as this winter. And that is actually a good thing, because we probably won't have to hear any owners in huge markets talking about salary caps.

Well, they've gone and done it again. They've invented another omnibus number that's supposed to describe a baseball player's performance. The new metric? "Win values," introduced here and further explained here by Dave Cameron.

Essentially the method is this: Add batting runs and fielding runs, throw in a positional adjustment, divide by 10 -- because 10 runs equals one win -- and voila, you've got "win value" (or "value wins," depending on which page you're looking at). Makes sense to me, and I suspect the results are at least as good as "wins above replacement player" (WARP) and "win shares".

Of course, the comparisons aren't so simple. The "win values" method doesn't consider timing -- a solo home run counts exactly the same as a grand slam -- while "win shares" does. Win Value doesn't consider an outfielder's throwing arm or a middle infielder's ability to turn the double play (though I understand they're working on both). As far as I know, none of these methods (or any other) consider baserunning other than stolen-base attempts. And, of course, nobody knows what to do with the catchers' defense.

We're getting better all the time, though, and I suspect that "win value" is now the best we've got.

What does the method say about 2008? It says the MVP voters had a pretty good year. National League MVP Albert Pujols led the majors with 9.0 value wins; American League MVP Dustin Pedroia finished second in the AL with 6.6 value wins (behind only Grady Sizemore's 7.0). You might recall that I argued for Joe Mauer to get serious consideration, and he finished fourth in the balloting, which now seems about right, because Mauer was fourth in the AL with 5.7 value wins. What doesn't seem right? Justin Morneau finished 28th in the league with 3.1 value wins -- dead even with Kurt Suzuki and Curtis Granderson -- and somehow finished second in the MVP balloting. Oh, and speaking of overrated first basemen, Ryan Howard finished second in his MVP balloting … and 32nd in his league with 3.4 value wins.

One can certainly argue with the method. I wonder, though, how likely it is that a player who comes in 28th or 32nd, according to this method, really was the second-most valuable player in his league. I'm not an expert or anything. But it does strike me as somewhat unlikely.

(If you want to play around with value wins, here's a good start.)

Today's links were composed while counting anachronistic expletives in Deadwood …

• The Dallas Observer's Sam Merten offered a Christmas wish list for the Rangers. Granted, No. 3 on the wish list -- sign Randy Johnson -- is no longer an option. But trading Michael Young and moving Ian Kinsler to left field remain … intriguing.

• Will the Giants be competitive, having signed The Big Unit? According to Jorge Says No!, much depends upon whether Travis Ishikawa and Pablo Sandoval are the real deal. Well, Sandoval's for real. At least as a hitter; it's not clear that he'll find a position anytime soon. As for Ishikawa -- who plays Sandoval's most likely eventual position -- his track record isn't bad, but John Sickels recently rated him as a C+ prospect (and by the way, John's book, as essential as ever, is now available for pre-order.

• With the Red Sox apparently close to signing their No. 6 starter and No. 2 catcher, they may turn to their attention to a No. 4 outfielder, and Fire Brand of the American League today begins a three-part series on the top candidates for the job.

• Who hit the last home run in Yankee Stadium? I don't actually know. But as Alex Belth reports, Ray Negron gave it one hell of a shot.

• I've never watched one of those outdoor games that hockey fans get so worked up over. But I don't care much about college football and I do care about Wrigley Field. So I believe I'll be watching this hockey game on New Year's Day.

• Sean Lahman, who's done a great deal of good work over the years, has been working on a method to predict Hall of Fame voting. As he admits, there's not a great deal of practical value in such a method … but that doesn't mean it's not fun.

• Joe Posnanski is J.P. Ricciardi (and I'm not, though we do share an affection for the first two Godfather movies, which, by the way, are currently playing around the country in new prints, and the theater is really the only place to see them).

The Red Sox are in trouble. Just ask Nick Cafardo …

The Red Sox never needed Mark Teixeira.
That's what I kept hearing from Sox defenders after the Yankees scored a knockout punch in the heavyweight fight with Boston. The Yankees, as we warned all along, swept in and grabbed the prized free agent of the 2008 offseason.
Of course the Red Sox needed Teixeira.
If they didn't, they wouldn't have offered an eight-year deal for $170 million. If they didn't, they wouldn't have flown to Texas to meet with Teixeira, then kept talking right up until yesterday afternoon when the Yankees came in and trumped them.
--snip--
The Sox were willing to invest in Teixeira long-term, even with young Lars Anderson about a year or two away from the big leagues, because they believed a player of his caliber would not be available again in free agency for a while.
--snip--
Those who think the Sox didn't need Teixeira can make the argument that they already have a pretty formidable team that reached Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. But they had targeted Teixeira as the piece that could take them over that hump.

Right. The Game 7 hump. Because everyone knows that winning one game depends on replacing one player with another, slightly better player.

I don't mean to pick on Cafardo. At least he does list all the counter-arguments, and falls short only in failing to realize that the counter-arguments actually carry the day this time.

Look, there's a big difference between needing and wanting. First, make a list of the things you want. Then make a list of the things you need. The second list is a lot shorter than the first, right? The Red Sox obviously wanted Teixeira. They've got an immense amount of money to spend, and there aren't actually many players worth spending it on. Teixeira is worth it, and the Red Sox know the math a lot better than I do. So, of course, they wanted him.

Needed, though? Hardly. Last season, the Red Sox outscored both the Rays and the Yankees handily, and (more impressively) they led the American League in OPS in road games. The Red Sox featured a championship-quality attack in 2008, and figure to do the same in 2009.

And then, of course, there's young Lars Anderson, who just turned 21 and has already spent half a summer tearing up the Double-A Eastern League. The odds are against Anderson becoming anything like Mark Teixeira; few prospects do. But there is a considerable chance that Anderson will, in four or five years, be (roughly) as good as Teixeira.

The Red Sox wanted Teixeira, I think, because he was the best player out there, and next winter the free-agent crop will be exceptionally thin. The best available infielder next winter might be Adrian Beltre, and the only eligible outfielders worth mega-deals might be Jason Bay and Matt Holliday (and I suspect the Red Sox will try to lock up Bay between now and then). The Red Sox, I think, were worried about that $170 million burning a hole in their pockets.

Which leaves me to wonder: Where can the rest of us sign up for a "need" like this one?

Mark Teixeira's new contract? In addition to making Teixeira exceptionally wealthy and the Yankees exceptionally solid at first base, that contract has won a bit of Dan Graziano's respect for Scott Boras. Why? Well, it's sort of complicated, but it seems that Teixeira's deal might cost Manny Ramirez -- and by extension, Boras -- a fair amount of money …

At this point, [Ramirez has] basically got to go crawling back to the Dodgers, who offered $45 million for two years two months ago and got laughed at. Sure, there's a chance Scott Boras can get him a deal we can't currently foresee -- that somebody unimaginable like the Reds or Mariners or Marlins will show up with a four-year offer and Manny will get what he wanted all along.
But right now, it doesn't look good for Manny. Right now, it looks like dogging his way out of Boston was a bad play, and that he might not be as beautifully positioned in the free-agent market as a 500-homer guy who hit .396 over the last two months of the season and carried a team into the postseason should be.
Which actually says something decent about his agent -- a guy for whom "decent" is generally a laughable adjective.
Think about it -- if Scott Boras truly were the chess master he is often portrayed to be, Teixeira would have signed with the Red Sox. Had that happened, the Yankees would be bidding hard for Ramirez. As it stands, by signing with the Yankees, fellow Boras client Teixeira has practically wiped out Ramirez's market.

Doesn't this sort of presuppose that players simply go where their agents tell them to go? I don't believe that's the way it usually works. Boras is a chess master … but that doesn't mean he's going to leave $20 million for one client on the table just to boost the offer for another client. Besides, we really don't know what Teixeira wanted (other than a great deal of money). Maybe he really wanted to play in New York. Maybe he really didn't want to play in Boston. There are just too many variables for us to make any sweeping conclusions about his agent's motivation.

The market for Manny certainly has thinned, though. I don't know that Boras will crawl back to the Dodgers, as I suspect he's still got a trick or two up his sleeves. But that four- or five-year deal for $25 million per season that was bandied about last month? That's probably gone. As it should be. There are just too many questions about Manny's attitude and his future to merit that sort of contract. Two years and $45 million? He should be happy to have it.

Today's links were first eaten, and then (fortunately) regurgitated by Santa's Little Helper …

• Mark Attanasio thinks maybe MLB needs a salary cap. I wonder … Will the Brewers owner's sentiments be worth more than the dozens just like them, uttered by owners of (relatively) poor teams since the 1970s? Meanwhile, at least one calm head points out that the Yankees may actually have a smaller payroll in 2009 than they did in 2008.

• Meanwhile, the Brewers' GM isn't real happy, either, but his beef is with the system used to determine the compensation draft picks awarded to teams that lose players to free agency. As Doug Melvin told ESPN's Buster Olney, "The Elias rankings have never been changed, and there are so many smart statistical gurus -- Bill James, etc. -- that could create a fair model for both players and teams, who should be compensated fairly according to the value of each player to that team."

Well, yeah. This really is ridiculous. When I played in a serious Strat-O-Matic league -- National League players only -- we came up with a system to compensate owners who lost players to the American League. We were just amateurs, but it was so easy that a caveman could do it. So what's MLB's excuse?

• Rich Lederer interviews Dave Studenmund, one of our national treasures (and the editor of a pretty good darned book, if I do say so my darned self).

• What's winter ball all about? Just ask Doug Glanville.

• WasWatching on Tex:

I'm calling "Ken Singleton" on this one -- since he and Teixeira are/were the same kind of hitters. That would mean that Mark Teixeira should be a solid offensive performer for the next five seasons -- and then we'll start to see a pretty good drop-off from him with the stick during 2014, 2015 and 2016. And, that's where it's going to get ugly -- when he's not going so well and making a ton of money. Add a (then) 38-year old Alex Rodriguez to the mix in 2014 and the Yankees will be paying two past-their-prime former All-Stars mucho denaro.

Well, sure. But that's what the Yankees do. They overpay in the "out years"; they did it with Bernie Williams, and they're doing it with Derek Jeter and they'll do it with Jorge Posada. Why do they do it? Because they can. When Teixeira's time comes, they'll sign Justin Upton or Travis Snider or whoever, and they'll live with Tex's declining production or they'll trade him for pennies on the dollar. This isn't necessarily a winning strategy. But it can be.

• I'm not sure I buy the Baseball Ethicist's argument that baseball is different (has the B.E. never heard of Willie Wilson or Elijah Dukes?). But I did enjoy the lesson about cognitive dissonance.

• Did you, like me, wonder why Willy Aybar got so much playing time in October? Wonder no more.

And just like that, the equation has changed.

Just like that, the conventional wisdom is now going to be that the Yankees are the team to beat.

You know what, though? I'm here to tell you that the conventional wisdom … is, as usual, exactly right. Of course the Yankees are the team to beat. The Yankees won 89 games this past season, and they've added the best pitcher in the majors and the second-best first baseman. They're also likely to get more production next year from Robinson Cano, Derek Jeter, Hideki Matsui and Jorge Posada, and Chien-Ming Wang is probably going to (roughly) double his eight wins of this year.

And what have they lost? They've lost Mike Mussina, with Andy Pettitte perhaps to follow.

We should not minimize their absences, but at the same time should note that many of the innings pitched last season by Darrell Rasner (5-10, 5.40 ERA), Sidney Ponson (4-4, 5.85), Ian Kennedy (0-4, 8.17) and Phil Hughes (0-4, 6.62) will be replaced by those of A.J. Burnett, who went 18-10 with a 4.07 ERA as a Blue Jay.

It's worth reviewing in detail: In 2008, Kennedy and Hughes combined to start 17 games, and the Yankees lost 12 of them. That simply won't happen again. Even if Kennedy and/or Hughes are pressed into duty again, it's exceptionally unlikely that either will pitch so poorly again.

Possible problems for the Yankees? Good luck. They're not likely to have much speed in the outfield, and the bullpen may be a little soft after the top three, especially from the left side (though rookie Phil Coke was fantastic in September).

But when your biggest problem is that you've got too many hitters, you're probably in good shape. A week ago, the Yankees were merely another of the fine teams in the American League East, no worse but no better than the Red Sox or the Rays. Today, though? If you pride yourself on holding unconventional views, then by all means, you should predict one of those other teams will win the East. Just don't bet good money on it.

While we wait for the puff of smoke that will signify, finally, Mark Teixeira's employer for the next eight or nine years, we can chew on Ted Robinson's take on Tex, his big bad agent, and the big worse economy …

In SoCal, there is panic about life without Teixeira and Manny Ramirez. There is hype and then there are facts. Like these: the Angels were 66-40 (.622) BEFORE Teixeira, 34-22 (.607) WITH Teixeira. Atlanta was 49-56 with Teixeira and for the record he has played in exactly one All-Star Game.
The Angels acquired Teixeira for October and in four playoff games, he had zero extra-base hits and one RBI. The Los Angeles Times characterized that performance this morning as "shining," a passage obviously ghost-written by [Scott] Boras.
No one in the real world can get money right now but the best players in baseball are immune to reality. And make no mistake, baseball is healthy -- for now. But I have talked to savvy sports businessmen in the last week and they see NBA games in many cities played before scads of empty seats, they hear whispers that at least one NHL team may have trouble meeting a payroll, they see Tiger Woods (TIGER!) lose a sponsor, they see General Motors drop out of sports and they wonder how long before baseball feels the pinch.
This year is safe for MLB but will sponsors, suite-holders and ticket buyers who are locked in for 2009 quickly renew for 2010 and beyond? Boras cares not about these questions for his mission is to squeeze every last dollar for his clients. And squeeze he must for he turned down that seven-year offer from Texas for Teixeira. And he convinced the Dodgers to obliterate two option years on Ramirez's deal.

A lot to wrestle with here …

First, Tex: The Angels had already just about locked up the AL West when they got Teixeira. After they got him, they scored more runs and he was a big part of that. Now, one might attribute the Angels' lower post-Tex winning percentage to their new first baseman's defense, except (1) there's only so much defensive damage a first baseman can do, and (2) Teixeira is by most accounts an excellent defensive first baseman. So those before-and-after records are twin red herrings.

So is the stuff about Teixeira's "shining" postseason performance. Look, it was only four games. But in those four games, he reached base 11 times: seven hits (granted, all singles) and four walks. Say what you want, but a .557 OBP looks pretty good to me.

Now, the All-Star thing is a fair point. After six seasons, you'd expect more than one All-Star Game for a guy who's about to sign one of the two or three richest contracts in the game. Does it mean anything, though? Over the past two seasons, Teixeira has the fifth-best OPS+ (151) in the majors, right between David Ortiz and Carlos Pena. And Tex is a better defender than Ortiz and younger than Pena.

I don't know if the second-best first baseman in the majors is "worth" whatever he's going to get. But I don't think there's much point in trying to tear down his record. Because his record, from where I sit, is close to impeccable.

Next, Boras: Look, we get it. Agents are somewhat disreputable and occasionally dishonest. But their "mission" is not to "squeeze every last dollar" for their clients. Sure, that can be a part of it. A big part. But their mission, their job, is to get their clients what their clients want. Whether that's money or security or an endless supply of bathtub toys, the ultimate goal is peace of mind. If an agent doesn't accomplish that mission, he won't have his clients for long.

Finally, Baseball and the Economy: Everybody wants to know what this recession is going to mean for the game, but mostly we're reduced to guessing. We can guess that franchises are going to tighten their belts in the front office, which means some good people will lose their jobs. We can guess that players' salaries won't rise their usual (or rather, their average) 10 percent over the next couple of years. But we can also guess that for us, as fans, baseball will plow along like it always does: lots of sunny baseball in March, followed by the 162-game marathons and the usual October drama. All the while, baseball will rank among one of the very cheapest entertainments, particularly if you're happy to enjoy all those games from the comfort of your own rumpus room.

Mark Teixeira's new contract won't kill baseball, nor will whatever the tattered economy throws at us. I'm not sure if anything can.

The latest on Tex:

According to multiple sources, the Washington Nationals have sweetened their proposal to first baseman Mark Teixeira, offering him an eight-year deal worth $178 to $184 million.
The Nats were believed to have an eight-year, $160 million offer on the table. They apparently have increased the total value, putting them ahead of the other contenders, based on the numbers that have been reported.
I'm also told that they're willing to go nine years -- and there's been talk of 10 -- which could be one reason why agent Scott Boras is dragging along negotiations. He's also trying to get the Red Sox back in the game and see if the Yankees and Orioles will react.

I believe that multiple sources have also assured us that Teixeira was going to sign with the Red Sox, the Angels, the Yankees and at one point the Mudville Nine. So let's not start measuring Teixeira for his Nationals uniform quite yet.

But let's assume for a moment that Teixeira does sign with Washington, and let's also assume that we learn the Nationals' offer was the most lucrative. I can see the columns already; can't you?

Teixeira's a mercenary … Doesn't care about winning … Everything that's wrong with the game …

Well, OK. Maybe. But let's say Teixeira signs a nine-year deal. Does anyone really know how many games the Nationals will be winning in 2017? Or even in 2012? A lot can happen in four years. I'm sure the sales pitch included something along the lines of "Tex, you make us 10 games better all by yourself, and we've got some kids in the minors …" You can fill in the rest.

And yeah, maybe he'll just wind up taking the best financial offer, which might make sense for most of us, except is there really any difference, lifestyle-wise, between nine years and $200 million and eight years and $180 million?

Of course there isn't. If Teixeira simply goes where the money is -- and we're ignoring for the moment the fact that he grew up not far from the District of Columbia -- we may safely assume that his ego was involved, not to mention the always-gentle prodding of Mr. Boras. But dare I say that another factor might be … love?

When weighing attractive offers, one is often attracted to the offer that most suggests longing … appreciation … love, even. Maybe the Beatles were right; maybe money can't buy love. But money sure can suggest love. Just ask any girl wearing a diamond engagement ring.

Last week the New York Times' Dan Rosenheck proposed a fairly radical change to the Hall of Fame's voting procedures:

Hall of Fame voters are a fickle bunch. Neither Jim Rice nor Bert Blyleven has done anything to bolster his candidacy for enshrinement in Cooperstown since retiring. Yet their shares of the vote have increased to 72.2 percent and 61.9 percent last year from 29.4 percent and 14.1 percent 10 years ago. Clearly, the hundreds of baseball writers who determine who receives a plaque need every one of the 15 years they are given to consider each player to render their verdict.
Yet a little-noticed quirk of the Hall's voting procedures has denied a vast majority of candidates their due period of deliberation. To prevent the electorate from being swamped by an overwhelmingly long list of choices, the organization permanently removes everyone from the ballot who fails to attain 5 percent of the vote in any year. This condemns those players to obscurity because their names will be excluded from the annual ballot debate among baseball pundits nationwide.
--snip--
Perhaps the single most egregious victim of the 5 percent rule is Bobby Grich, who makes for a fascinating comparison with Rod Carew, his rival for the title of top American League second baseman of the 1970s.
Carew was unusual for the concentration of his value in a single skill, batting average. Grich did absolutely everything in the game brilliantly -- except hit for average.
Although Carew actually spent more time at first base than at second, and was merely adequate at second, Grich was one of the top defenders at his position. Carew's aggressive style limited his ability to draw walks, but Grich was one of his era's most patient hitters. And although Carew had little extra-base pop, Grich was a feared slugger.
On balance, Grich and Carew were equally useful to their teams over their careers. Yet Carew was chosen for the Hall on the first ballot in 1991, and Grich dropped off after receiving 2.6 percent of the vote in his first year of eligibility, 1992.

I believe this analysis overstates the case for Grich, just a bit. He finished his career with 329 Win Shares (not that we knew it then); Carew finished with 384. But it's absolutely true that the Hall of Fame voters treated Grich terribly, and all because they didn't fathom the value of Gold Glove defense and a .373 career on-base percentage. I mean, seriously: 2.6 percent of the vote should stand as one of the great blots on the reputation of any voting body ever.

Of course, giving Grich 15 years on the ballot wouldn't have been enough to get him into the Coop. All we have to do is look at Tim Raines' "support" a year ago to know that. Going forward, though, eliminating the 5 percent rule might someday help an underappreciated player like Grich.

In response to Rosenheck, here's Baseball Ink's take:

The article attempts to reveal a so-called flaw in the Hall of Fame election process. On the contrary, Rosenheck exposes the farce that is the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA), whose members do the actual voting.
How is it that support for Jim Rice and Bert Blyleven has "increased to 72.2 percent and 61.9 percent last year from 29.4 percent and 14.1 percent 10 years ago"? Rosenheck admits that the players qualifications have not changed but does not question the illogical mindset of the BBWAA writers. Instead, he contends that other "worthy" players -- who could not even get five percent of the vote -- are unfairly eliminated.
Poppycock. Rather than doing away with the five percent rule, the Baseball Hall of Fame should do just the opposite: A candidate gets one year to get the 75% of the vote required for election. Period. None of this 15 years of "getting better with age" crap. If a player is (not) good enough five years after retirement, that player is not going to be any better (or worse) a decade and a half later. (Egregious oversights can still be corrected by the Veterans Committee.)

I don't believe that either Rosenheck or Baseball Ink has this exactly right. If you never take anyone off the ballot, it becomes simply unmanageable for the voters. If you restrict every candidate to just one year on the ballot, you might wind up basically electing everyone because voters like to vote.

I've never quite figured out how Jim Rice goes from 29.4 percent to (probably) getting elected, or how Luis Aparicio goes from 12 percent to 85 percent in three short years. But what I think happens is that many voters often vote for 10 candidates, the maximum allowed. Maybe Aparicio was 11th or 12th on many voters' lists, but moved up as other candidates were either elected or became ineligible. What would happen if this year's ballot contained only the 10 first-timers?

I don't know, and I don't believe that Baseball Ink knows, either.

What bothers me about the BBWAA ballot is that nobody in Cooperstown seems to be thinking about it. I don't know if a radical change is necessary or advisable. I do know the current system is not perfect, and has not changed in many years. I know we can never achieve perfection. But it seems to me that you'd at least want to try.

Today's links were compiled and approved deep within a secret cavern beneath America's largest pyramid …

• Remember last week when John Henry wrote (in an e-mail message) that the Red Sox were out of the running for Mark Teixeira? Well, according to Kat O'Brien, the Red Sox never actually pulled their eight-year, $180 million offer from the table. And if all the other reports are solid -- here's a nice rundown -- Teixeira's other suitors are becoming scarcer by the minute.

• MLB Trade Rumors points to a report in a Dominican Newspaper that says Manny Ramirez is about to sign with the Yankees for three years and $75 million. Tim Dierkes doesn't think the money and the years seem quite right, and he knows more about this stuff than I do … but what's wrong with three years and $75 million? A (nearly) 37-year-old left fielder who's going to be a DH soon if not immediately? Seems like a pretty fair deal to me. More than fair, actually (which means the Yankees are perfect).

• BaseballGuru's Jim Albright is back with his annual major league equivalencies for prospective Japanese imports (and be sure to check out Yu Darvish's numbers).

• I really do have to get into the habit of reading Statistically Speaking's World Famous StatSpeak Roundtable every week. It's a great way to really focus on the sabermetric topics of the moment.

• Speaking of sabermetric topics, I'm going to take a little break -- in this space, at least -- from talking about positional adjustments. But if you just can't get enough, you're welcome to geek out with this many-faced discussion of the subject, featuring many of our leading lights.

• What's that? You're still shopping for the perfect gift for that special baseball fan in your life? Everybody (over the age of 40) enjoys a good book, and David Laurila has a list of his favorites from 2008.

• Video of the Week: It's been snowing in Portland, and here's how we roll.

As you know, I've been wrestling with this notion of positional adjustments, which on Thursday led to the following e-mail exchange with FanGraphs' Eric Seidman …

Eric: Rob, I thought I would try to see if I could clarify the adjustments for you. Basically, it is all due to defense. Tom Tango likes to refer to the adjustments as "Runs Over Willie" (in honor of Willie Bloomquist, who can play everywhere). Essentially, the idea is that if you took Willie Bloomquist and put him anywhere on the field, what would an average fielder produce, runs-wise, compared to his production?

So, if you put Willie at 1B, the average 1B would cost his team 12.5 runs more than Willie. If you put Willie at shortstop, the average SS would save 7.5 runs more than Willie.

It's really just a quantifiable way of showing which positions are the toughest to play. Catcher gets +12.5 runs because not everyone can play there. Shortstop gets +7.5 runs because it is the toughest non-catching position. Then comes 2B/3B/CF, at +2.5 runs apiece. LF/RF are docked -7.5 runs, and 1B docked -12.5 runs. Using these adjustments allows us to compare Carl Crawford in LF to Chase Utley at 2B.

If Crawford is +15 runs via UZR and Utley is +19 runs, it really isn't as close as it seems, given that LF are docked -7.5 runs and 2B gain +2.5 runs. Before even factoring in offensive contribution or adding two wins (20 runs) to be above replacement level, Utley would be a +21.5 run defender, Crawford a +7.5 run defender.

Hope that makes some more sense. It is a very confusing concept, but basically it just allows us to make cross-positional comparisons so someone like Crawford doesn't have an overstated defensive value.

Me: Is this a new thing? I don't recall seeing any discussion of positional adjustments before the last couple of weeks. I'm just wondering if everything we thought we knew about player valuations have been wrong. Is Dave Concepcion worth more than we thought? Tony Perez less?

Eric: I wouldn't necessarily call it two weeks new, but definitely new in the last year or two, as far as I know. Granted, I didn't really "come onto the scene" until May 2007, but I can recall as far back as June 2007 reading Tango's positional adjustment work.

I don't think it means that everything we have already done is wrong, per se, because defensive stats weren't really ever taken into account outside of Fielding Percentage for the longest time.

What it does mean, though, is that the gap between Concepcion and Perez, offensively, is likely made up for more so by defense and adjusting for the difficulty of the position.

If Concepcion in a given year with 700 PA was -8 runs batting and +10 runs fielding, and Perez is +15 runs hitting and +3 runs fielding, it looks as though Tony was vastly superior. However, the adjustments need to come into play, because +10 at SS is MUCH better than +3 at 1B. It's not an advantage of +7 runs, it's +7 runs added onto how much more difficult it is to play SS. Via Tango's work, SS is +7.5 runs vs. -12.5 runs for 1B, so we're talking about a +20 run swing.

Therefore, in this theoretical season, Conception is -8 + 10 + 7.5, or +9.5 runs above average (+29.5 above replacement), and Perez is +15 +3 -12.5, or +5.5 runs above average (+25.5 above replacement). Even though he was much better offensively and not sluggish defensively in this hypothetical, because 1B is not nearly as difficult as SS, the gap diminishes, or even goes in the other direction.

Me: Let's continue on this line of reasoning … Wouldn't we wind up concluding that there are too many first basemen in the Hall of Fame and not nearly enough shortstops? Do we now believe that Omar Vizquel belongs in the Hall of Fame and Jim Thome does not?

Eric: Yeah, that would essentially be the case, assuming that the HOF voting takes everything into account. Unfortunately, it doesn't, so you have guys who stunk in the field but hit 500 HR making it into the HOF, while tremendous fielders who were likely much closer in overall value (factoring in baserunning, as well) having to become icons in the field to even get noticed.

I always come back to Adam Everett when I talk to my dad or [grandfather] about this. It is very easy to see who was the best offensive player from 2004-07, but I would say 95 percent of this country has no idea just how good Everett was on defense. I would really have to see Vizquel's numbers defensively to ensure they match his reputation, and I don't know when [Baseball Info Solution's John] Dewan started doing the +/-, but in terms of overall value, yeah, there are bound to be plenty of SS/2B who are vastly undervalued compared to 1B.

If you had a 1B and an SS who could put up identical offensive lines, wouldn't you want the SS because it is a much tougher position? That's really the point of this, and it definitely means the answer to your question is a yes. I would rather have an average-hitting SS with a fantastic glove than a 1B with above-average (not Pujols or Berkman, but above-average) offense yet a poor glove.

Me: Understood, but I'm still trying to get a handle on the utility of all this information. Is it simply about accurately measuring the real-world value of Adam Everett? And would you argue that Everett (for example) has been terribly underpaid in his career, in terms of dollars per win?

Eric: Yeah, in terms of measuring the OVERALL value. The basic point is that, if you have a +10 run SS and a +7 run LF, the SS has an advantage of way more than just 3 runs, because the position is so much harder to play. Tango's research showed that it's a swing of about +20 runs. So a +10 SS, with positional adjustments taken into account, is actually closer to +18 runs better defensively than the LF. A stat like VORP is already adjusted before you see the final product, but in using UZR or Dewan's system, we would need to adjust for the difficulty level of playing certain positions; so (for example) Ryan Howard's +1 run at 1B isn't even close to a +5 by Feliz at 3B.

As far as Everett is concerned, his offensive runs from 2004-06 are -6, -18, -26, but with UZR numbers of +10, +13, +24.

With the adjustments and value over replacement prorated, he comes out at +2.3 Wins Above Replacement, +1.8 WAR and +2.1 WAR, so his fair market values in those years were north of $7 million (granted, he's been under team control for most of his career). As a free agent this year without the injury last season, we may have seen a more reasonable deal, but at just $1 mil he is a steal.

So the utility is that it levels the field of play between fielders at different positions. Two players with identical runs saved, but one at 1B and one at SS, are by no means equally valuable fielders, and the adjustments help us understand that.

Me: Thanks a mil, Eric. If you're saying what I think you're saying and you're right, inevitably a number of teams are going to use the same math when valuing players, and we may see a real surge in the salaries of great shortstops, particularly.

The Seattle Times' Geoff Baker asked Raul Ibanez about his defense (and ask yourself if you would have read this in a newspaper even two or three years ago) …

I broached the topic of Ibanez's defense with him and some of the newer metrics that suggest he's a poor outfielder. Ibanez is aware of some of the conversations that have taken place in the blogosphere about whether the Phillies were foolish to have given him so much money and might actually be worse off defensively.
"I have to say a number of things," he said. "Number one, with sabermetrics in general, it's a statistical probability thing," he said. "And the way they come up with the defensive measurements, or ratings, is flawed. It's as flawed as the Gold Gloves. One of the reasons is, they don't consider things like ballpark factors, defensive positioning or alignment for certain hitters."
Ibanez added that most of the people taking down the statistics that measure defense are doing so "off a television" and are "not equipped to assess talent on the baseball field."
He mentioned a friend of his in Kansas City, who, he said, is deeply into sabermetrics and some of the new-fangled defensive metrics. But, he added, he's not a scout. And when it comes to measuring defensive talent, Ibanez said: "None of these guys has had a baseball background per se."
It's not just the location of batted balls that has to be judged, Ibanez said, but also the speed and angle at which they are hit.
"Trying to judge accuracy on a camera view is not the same," he said.
He also feels that some of the people looking at the numbers have already figured him a below average defender in their minds and discount anything good that he does.
"Some of those biases that are pre-determined biases come into that mindset,'' he said. "Those are things that I'm going to have to continue to battle throughout my career. But if you go around the game, and you ask the players, you ask quality major-league scouts, you ask managers, they'll tell you I'm the type of player they want on their team."

Three points:

1. Is Ibanez the first player ever to use the term "ballpark factors?"

2. I suspect that as smart as Ibanez apparently is, he has little notion of what the best analysts are considering, or what can be measured with the help of a camera view.

3. Ibanez's take on fielding metrics is exactly what one would expect of a well-informed-but-poor-fielding professional baseball player. If he believes the metrics, he can't admit it because he just got $30 million to play left field for three years. But he probably doesn't believe the metrics, because he knows he's trying hard, he knows he's made any number of great plays (by his standards) and if he were really so awful, would a World Series-winning team have just given him $30 million to play left field for three years?

One more point: We could all be wrong about Ibanez's defense. After reading his comments, I sort of hope so. (Probably not, though.)

(Tip of ye olde chapeau to BTF's Newsstand.)

Today's links were compiled while eating eggs and hash browns at the most beautiful restaurant in the world …

• This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.

• By the time you read this, the news may have been superseded already. But I can't say I'm surprised that the Red Sox dropped out of the Mark Teixeira sweepstakes. The Red Sox obviously wanted Teixeira; with the exception of the Cardinals and a few other clubs, who wouldn't? But they don't need Teixeira, and, in fact, if they sign Teixeira they'll actually have a bit of a problem -- trading Mike Lowell -- on their hands. The Angels, on the other hand, do sort of need Teixeira. Remember how lame their lineup looked before they got him? I have to think the front office remembers even better.

• Then again, maybe the Red Sox haven't really dropped out. As Adam Kilgore points out in the Boston Globe, John Henry might simply be calling one of Scott Boras' famous bluffs. The Red Sox reportedly offered eight years and $184 million ($23 million per season). It's not hard to imagine Boras telling the Sox that another team offered $200 million, and that Teixeira would love to play for the Red Sox but only if they match that higher offer. It's not hard to imagine Boras doing this, even if that $200 million offer doesn't actually exist.

• Joe Sheehan's absolutely right about the BBWAA and the Hall of Fame: the system's broken but it wouldn't be all that hard to fix. All you have to do is change the process and educate the voters. The former really isn't so complicated. Instead of a five-year waiting period and 15 years of eligibility, Joe suggests three years and seven years (I might suggest four and eight, but that's probably just the contrarian in me). The latter -- the education -- is a bit trickier, because it depends on how you define "educate." But I would send each voter a packet of materials that included, for each candidate, home/road splits and a list of statistically similar players.

• Lance Niekro -- son of Joe, nephew of Phil -- is going to attempt a comeback next spring, at 30, as a knuckleball pitcher. As the piece notes, "Phil and Joe Niekro had their best seasons in their 30s." I'm not sure if that's relevant, though. Phil and Joe had been throwing their knuckleballs, many thousands of them probably, since they were teenagers. That's a lot of muscle memory that Lance doesn't have, but probably needs.

• Since the publication of Moneyball, walks are down. You got that? Down. Just one of the many fascinating nuggets in Posnanski's latest opus (which I urge all of you -- and especially all of you who have Hall of Fame ballots in your hands right now, just like Joe -- to read in full).

• I'll send you out today with yet another Cardboard Gods gutshot. Excelsior!

Once a month I see something on this very site that I just have to mention, and today it's Jerry Crasnick's piece about a certain corner outfielder's seeming inability to draw much interest this winter …

As outfielder Bobby Abreu prepared to hit the open market this offseason, his agent, Peter Greenberg, thought a little promotional effort might be in order. So Greenberg's group assembled a 28-page statistical tribute filled with red and blue bar graphs and comparisons linking Abreu to the game's elite hitters.
Sift through the charts and headlines proclaiming Abreu an "Offensive Force" and "Amazingly Consistent" and you're left with a distinct impression: For a guy who's widely regarded as a complementary-type player, Abreu sure keeps elite company.
Baseball has its franchise players and go-to guys, its middle-of-the-order "aircraft carriers," as Rockies bench coach Jim Tracy likes to call them, and Albert Pujols, who's a walking antidote to concession-stand visits.
And then there's Bobby Abreu -- serial compiler.
--snip--
Abreu's alleged price tag is contributing to the inertia. The word in baseball circles is that he wants a three-year deal or two years with a vesting option for $15-16 million annually. The Phillies just signed Raul Ibanez for three years and $31.5 million, and Adam Dunn, Manny Ramirez, Ken Griffey Jr., [Milton] Bradley, [Pat] Burrell and [Garret] Anderson are among the outfield-DH-types still available, so Abreu's salary aspirations are destined to get squeezed.
"He's still a dangerous hitter," said an American League front-office man. "I just think that as a complete player, he's starting to go backwards. He's not the outfielder he used to be. He still has a decent arm, but it's not the cannon he used to have. And he doesn't have the foot speed he used to have. He's a solid player, but not a $14-15 million a year player."

In the same vein, I would like to submit for your approval (or not) four free-agent outfielders, along with their 2008 salaries, and their Ultimate Zone Ratings (per 150 games and averaged over the last three seasons):

Manny Ramirez  $20M  -19

Bobby Abreu    $16M  -15

Pat Burrell    $14M  -14

Adam Dunn      $13M  -14

Atop those scary numbers, you've got the positional adjustments. For corner outfielders, it's -7.5 runs. So now Burrell and Dunn are more than 20 runs in the hole before they even get a chance to run (ugh) or hit (yea!). Sure, they can dig themselves out of that hole … but not far enough out to justify raises. This is, in my opinion, why neither of them were offered arbitration: Arbitration leads to raises, and neither the Phillies nor the Diamondbacks believed their left fielders deserved raises.

I think they were probably right.

Does this mean those guys won't get raises? Hardly. Ramirez will get a raise because of what he did with the Dodgers, and Dunn may get a raise because he's still a year shy of 30. And also because it takes only one team to blow all our analysis out of the water. But as more and more teams buy into modern defensive metrics and the notion of positional adjustments, more and more sluggardly sluggers are going to be disappointed by the contract offers that do come in.

Eventually, these things do find some sort of natural balance. In this case it just happens to have taken more than 30 years.

Over at Baseball Analysts, Chris Green writes about a certain top Hall of Fame candidate and the numbers we're allowed to use:

And so, finally, we come to [Bill] James' most recent, most influential, and perhaps most complicated estimate of player value: win shares. I won't go into the calculations here (you can find it on the Internet if you are interested), but win shares is supposed to tell us how many additional wins a given player was responsible for with his bat, his fielding, and (if applicable) his pitching. It is well-tested and well-known. It has its quirks, to be sure, but it is generally accepted to do a good job at measuring player performance.
How many win shares did Jim Rice have over the course of his career? 282. How good is that? It is tied with Boog Powell, the one-time MVP, mostly-Oriole LF-1B of the 1960s and 1970s. Powell is not, it should be noted, in the Hall. Fred Lynn is two win shares below Rice. He is not in the Hall. Minnie Minoso and Sal Bando are one win share ahead of Rice. They are not in the Hall. Amos Otis and Toby Harrah are a little further ahead (+4 and +5, respectively). George Sisler is 10 ahead and Dale Murphy (another notoriously tough HoF case) is 12 ahead, tied with Shoeless Joe Jackson. Then Cesar Cedeno (+14), Frank Howard (+15), Home Run Baker (+19), Ken Singleton (+20), Bobby Bonds (+20), Harold Baines (+25), and finally Orlando Cepeda at 310 win shares, a full 28 ahead of Rice. At last, we have some solid evidence that Rice's career contribution was, in cold reality, just a little below that usually needed to make it into the Hall; that perhaps his presence in Boston made him more visible nationally than Cepeda, who labored mostly in San Francisco and Atlanta (where he worked in the shadows of Willie Mays and Hank Aaron), but not actually quite as good a player.
--snip--
And so we come to the real point of this column, which was not, it may surprise you to learn, to contribute to the Jim Rice HoF debate but, rather, to discuss the justice of using modern statistical tools (like win shares) to decide historical questions (like whether Jim Rice was so great a ballplayer that he belongs in the Hall of Fame).

I'm trying to keep an open mind, but it's not easy.

No, I don't mean about Jim Rice. It's easy for me to keep an open mind about a player, because a player's record can be analyzed objectively with tools that are always changing, so I have to be willing to change my mind. I don't think it's likely that you'll be able to convince me in 10 years that Rice is a worthy Hall of Famer. But I would be foolish to discount the possibility.

This other thing, though, is a matter of philosophy. And while I might budge on that one, too, right now I have a hard time imagining that.

For me, the Hall of Fame shouldn't be about who was feared, or impressive, or even famous. There are a few players in the Hall of Fame because they were those things, but the vast majority of them were elected -- by the writers, at least -- because they supposedly were great players. When someone's not elected, the reasoning is never that he wasn't scary enough or famous enough; it's that he wasn't great enough.

So doesn't it follow that what we want to know about a player is whether or not he was great? Win Shares is one tool that helps us do that. There are many others. But it seems strange to me, this notion that we might freeze the analysis at exactly the point at which a Hall of Fame candidate's career ended. Is Babe Ruth's on-base percentage irrelevant because nobody was paying attention? Will Ty Cobb's stolen-base percentage not count for anything, once we figure it out? One of the nice things about getting smarter is that we can, you know, be smarter.

I believe this ties into the similarly strange notion that we shouldn't hold Jim Rice's extraordinarily low number of walks against him because a) he wasn't asked to draw walks, or b) nobody was paying attention to walks in the 1980s. This is strange because a lot of people were paying attention to walks in the 1980s, and also because a lot of great hitters have drawn a lot of walks for a long time without being asked.

Another thing I've noticed about the argument for Jim Rice … One of the standard arguments against guys like Alan Trammell and Tim Raines is "If you have to construct a complex argument for him, then he's not a Hall of Famer." Yet some of the same voters who say that will also happily construct complex arguments to explain away Rice's lack of walks, his lack of defensive value and his relative inability to pile up big numbers away from Fenway Park.

And you know what's really odd about all this? The smarter we get, the more votes Jim Rice gets. Maybe in 10 years I'll be able to figure that one out.

If you come straight to the baseball page, you might have missed the news: Sammy Baugh died. A few snippets of his obituary:

Baugh was the best all-around player in an era when such versatility was essential. In 1943, he led the league in passing, punting and defensive interceptions. In one game, he threw four touchdown passes and intercepted four as well. He threw six touchdowns passes in a game twice. His 51.4-yard punting average in 1940 is still the NFL record.
"There's nobody any better than Sam Baugh was in pro football," Don Maynard, a fellow West Texas Hall of Famer who played for Baugh, said in a 2002 interview. "When I see somebody picking the greatest player around, to me, if they didn't go both ways, they don't really deserve to be nominated. I always ask, 'Well, how'd he do on defense? How was his punting?'"
--snip--
Baugh's reputation blossomed as a star high school football, baseball and basketball player in Sweetwater. It began to grow during his college days at TCU.
It was there that he picked up the nickname "Slingin' Sammy" -- but it wasn't for his passing. It was for the rockets he fired to first base as a shortstop and third baseman.
"Everybody thought I was a better baseball player growing up," he said in 2002. "I thought I was going to be a big league baseball player."

For my first 27 years, all I knew about football history was that my Vikings lost every Super Bowl in which they played. But then I went to work for Stats, Inc. We did football, so I jumped into football history with both feet. I learned a great deal of interesting things about the old days, but the one thing that has stuck with me in the years since was Sammy Baugh's 1943. Granted, some of the best football players were by then serving their country, but he led the NFL in passing yards. And punting average. And defensive interceptions. In the 1940s, giants walked among us.

Of course, Baugh was a baseball player, too. I don't know how good a baseball player he was, but I suspect he would have been pretty good if he had really applied himself. Baugh played just a little bit of professional baseball, and didn't play well. But he was fresh out of college, and got his brief shot in two Double-A leagues (at that time, Class AA was the highest in the minors).

I wasn't around in the 1930s. Not quite. And I'm sure I wouldn't particularly enjoy going back for long. Painful dentistry. Everybody smoking. Segregation in much of the country. But there's something appealing about a time when the greatest athletes did everything, if only because nobody told them they couldn't.

Today Dave Cameron wrote about positional adjustments, and I'll try to summarize the first few paragraphs …

Carl Crawford's defensive numbers in 2008 were fantastic. According to Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), he saved more runs than any other player in the majors. Does that mean he was the best fielder in the game?

No, because he's a left fielder, and most sophisticated defensive metrics compare left fielders only to other left fielders. And we know that left fielders, as a group, are not exactly wizards out there. We can guess that if Crawford were a center fielder, his numbers wouldn't be nearly as impressive. Now here's Cameron:

If Carl Crawford was put into a room of 5'5 people, he'd appear tall. If he was put into a room of 6'5 people, he'd appear short. Think of left field, right field, first base, and designated hitter as positions of short people. You don't have to actually be the best defensive player in the league to look like a defensive whiz when the standard you're being held to is so low.
This is why, when you see us talking about total value of a player, you'll see position adjustments come up in the discussion. Since each player is being rated by UZR relative to average at that position, we have to come up with a scale that neutralizes all of the averages so that they're somewhat similar to each other.
Tom Tango has developed the most commonly accepted set of positional adjustments out there right now, based on historical data of how players perform when they move from one position to another. His scale is as follows:
Catcher: +12.5 runs
Shortstop: +7.5 runs
Second Base: +2.5 runs
Third Base: +2.5 runs
Center Field: +2.5 runs
Left Field: -7.5 runs
Right Field: -7.5 runs
First Base: -12.5 runs
Designated Hitter: -17.5 runs
Essentially, the width of the spectrum of major league players being used at their best positions is about 30 runs -- if you have a league average defensive catcher and you make him a full time DH, you've whacked about three wins off of his value.

Granted, I'm not the smartest kid in the room. But I've been trying to wrap my noodle around these positional adjustments for two weeks, and I'm afraid I'm just not there yet.

I do understand the math. I do understand that a shortstop is intrinsically more valuable with the glove than a first baseman, and that a good center fielder should be a great left fielder. I get that. What I can't figure out -- and I've tried; oh, how I've tried -- is exactly how that impacts a player's overall value. Yes, we have to take Crawford's UZR in left field with a big grain of salt … But overall, don't those runs balance when we compare him as a hitter to other left fielders?

Again, I don't mean to be thick. I have asked people to explain this to me, and they've done their best. But I'm still a little lost, so now I'm hoping that you might help …

Furman Bisher, who's been writing about the Atlanta Braves for as long as they've existed, isn't real impressed with their latest moves …

What appears to be quite obvious is that the Braves aren't in any position to build a championship team with what they can pick up on the open market. Also, what was wrong with the system that produced all those division champions -- and one World Series -- around the turn of the century? Out of the farm system came [John] Smoltz, Tom Glavine, Steve Avery, Mark Lemke, Jeff Blauser, Andruw Jones, Ron Gant, Javier Lopez, Chipper Jones, Greg McMichael and prospects that allowed them to trade for Fred McGriff.
Has the farm system gone fallow? Where are those artful producers of prospects of Paul Snyder's crew who turned up all those champions? A last look, I saw that the Braves have about 45 scouts scouring the world, from Australia to the Caribbean. Have they lost their touch? The best they have turned up lately are Brian McCann and Jeff Francoeur, right under their noses around Atlanta. Sic 'em, you guys. Get out there and turn up some stars, for it's obvious this is not an operation geared for the lofty money market. Just look at what they did. Traded for Mark Teixeira, gave him a stage and he's now in the $160-million class, and what did that do for the home team?

Bisher seems to have forgotten about Kelly Johnson and Yunel Escobar, both of them productive products of the Braves' farm system (though Fidel gets an assist for Escobar). But you can understand the frustration of a longtime Braves follower who's wondering what in tarnation's been going on for the last few seasons.

I have a book called Scout's Honor: The Bravest Way to Build a Winning Team, written by Bill Shanks. Essentially it's intended as a 376-page rebuttal to Moneyball. Here's the second-to-last paragraph in the book:

The Oakland A's didn't reinvent the wheel with their emphasis on statistical analysis, even though Moneyball and [Michael] Lewis want you to think they did. While it can't be called a "fad," it may be better to compare it to the Atkins diet. There might be a short-term benefit, but just like diet and exercise, the traditional scouting approach is still the best way to construct a consistent winner. Short-term success is the easy way out. It takes guts to build a team for the long haul.

Scout's Honor was published in the spring of 2005. In the four years since, the Braves have won 325 games. The A's have won 332. While playing in a tougher league. And spending less money.

Scouting and scouts are important. I've never met anyone in baseball who said they weren't. But these days it's awfully hard to win without a fair piece of solid objective analysis, too.

Nice bit from Calcaterra on the Yankees' geriatric lineup if they wind up signing Manny Ramirez:

In response to the Yankees' reported interest in Manny Ramirez, Jason at IIATMS says, "But three years? On THIS team? With this many 35 year olds who will need to have a day or two in the DH role? Good lord, no!!!!"
Good point! Everyone knows that the Yankees are getting old, but it's worth remembering that, if Manny signs, the Opening Day starters would look something like this (2009 season-age in parentheses):
C Posada (37)
1B Swisher (28)
2B Cano (26)
3B Rodriguez (33)
SS Jeter (35)
RF Nady (30)
CF Cabrera or maybe Cameron (24 or 36)
LF/DH: Some combination of Manny, Damon, and Matsui (37, 35, and 35).
That's not a baseball team. That's the cast of "The Big Chill," with Cano playing the Meg Tilly character. Between innings they can listen to oldies and talk about what happened to their vanished youth.

It's an old lineup, no question. But Posada's a catcher, and would need a reliable backup anyway. A-Rod and Captain Jeter are future Hall of Famers and historically quite durable. Cameron has played 150 games just once in the last six seasons. And those other guys? Well, that's why you want three of them, right?

As I wrote yesterday, the Yankees will score plenty of runs, even if they don't get Cameron and Manny. Sure, Joe Girardi is going to spend a lot of intellectual energy figuring out how to keep everybody fresh. But old talent is still talent.

The Yankees do have a chance -- not that they're likely to take it -- to get younger in 2010. Jeter is signed through 2010, Posada through 2011, and of course A-Rod is signed forever. But Damon and Matsui are both free agents after 2009, and whoever plays center field in 2009 -- Cameron, Cabrera or someone else -- is likely to be replaced by young Austin Jackson in 2010.

The Yankees will never be a young team. They just don't have the patience for it. But they might never again be quite as old as they will be in 2009. Enjoy the old geezers while you can.

Wednesday's links were routed through Missouri and Arkansas via Highway 61 (and for you old-timers out there, check out the photo credit; total coincidence and totally cool) …

• Walk Like a Sabermetrician makes a point. (And I'd like to make one, too: Some power hitters in the 1980s did draw walks, even without being told.)

• Tangotiger likes the way a certain Detroit center fielder (and ESPN.com blogger) thinks.

• Last week the Dodgers non-tendered Takashi Saito, who as recently as July was one of the best relief pitchers in the National League. Why would they let him get away so easily? For one thing, he'll turn 39 this winter. For another, with Jonathan Broxton, Hong-Chih Kuo and Cory Wade, the Dodgers are well-stocked in good relievers. But as Dave Cameron points out, there might be yet another reason: The Dodgers have a secret weapon.

• In what is apparently its last post, The Baseball Card Blog goes out with a big bang.

(H/T: Cardboard Gods)

• Why hasn't Andy Pettitte signed that one-year deal with the Yankees yet? Because he's left-handed, only (only) 36 and can still pitch. So why not hold out for a three-year deal?

• J.C. Bradbury writes about the difference between being a sabermetrician and being an economist.

• You say you want to work in baseball? Adam Guttridge does, and he was in Las Vegas last week to pursue his dream. He's kind enough to share his advice to fellow job seekers.

• Via video, Vin Scully talks about terrorizing small children while the wolves circle the campfire.

• More video: Rocco Baldelli got a second opinion, and apparently he's not nearly as sick as everyone thought. Does this mean he'll become the next Joe DiMaggio after all?

With Mark Teixeira still out there, enticing all those teams that have more money than they know how to spend, I ran across this now-ancient item from Jon Heyman:

The Angels intend to make a quick-strike offer to their biggest winter target, star first baseman Mark Teixeira, which means a fair proposal with a deadline. The offer has not yet been made, and it's unclear when it will be or how much time Teixeira will have to respond, but the Angels used this method successfully last offseason to lock up Torii Hunter for $90-million on a five-year deal.
But the stakes are even higher this time. Word is, Teixeira's agent, Scott Boras, is using the $153.3-million, eight-year contract that Miguel Cabrera got from the Tigers before last season as a baseline for negotiations, and Boras makes the points that Teixeira is a leader and also a free agent (Cabrera had two years to go before free agency when he signed that Tigers deal).
Teixeira is also drawing interest from the Nationals, Orioles, Red Sox, Mariners, Yankees and Giants, among others. One owner predicted Teixeira and CC Sabathia are two players who will get their price even in the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Heyman wrote that nearly a month ago, and it's funny how little seems to have changed. Sabathia did indeed get his price (at least), and the teams supposedly going after Teixeira remain the same (except there's been no mention lately of the Mariners).

What else do we know now? We know the Angels' "quick-strike offer" wasn't enough and probably wasn't even nearly enough. We know -- or rather, we've been told -- the Red Sox will offer more than they've ever offered anyone: eight years and something between $145 million and $175 million (and possibly more). We know the Red Sox don't like to offer contracts that extend into a player's middle 30s, but an eight-year deal for Teixeira would still pay out when he's 36.

But every player is different; every situation is different. If you'd had a chance to sign Hank Aaron or Willie Mays through the season when he turned 36, wouldn't you do it?

Teixeira's not that good. In the past four years, he has averaged 27 win shares per season, just short of MVP caliber. By way of contrast, Albert Pujols has averaged 34 win shares per season. And Miguel Cabrera has averaged 27.5 per season. Why is Cabrera relevant? I'm not sure he is. Yes, Cabrera got $19 million per season. And yes, his eight-year deal bought out two years of arbitration. But Cabrera is three years younger than Teixeira and might improve. Teixeira no doubt has some great seasons ahead of him, but it's possible that we've already seen his best.

I suspect that whoever signs Teixeira will be thrilled to have him for at least four or five years but will wind up regretting the contract in the out years. But that's just the nature of big-time free agency, right?

OK, so the deal's not done yet. But for the moment, let's assume that Rafael Furcal really is returning to the Braves. What happens next? From David O'Brien in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The Braves are on the verge of bringing back veteran shortstop Rafael Furcal, a move that signals the likely return of Kelly Johnson to the outfield.
--snip--
When news broke late Monday of his possible return to Atlanta, it seemed like a precursor to a trade of shortstop Yunel Escobar or second baseman Johnson for a starting pitcher.
Escobar was a centerpiece in the offer the Braves made to San Diego for 2007 Cy Young Award winner Jake Peavy before those talks stalled in November.
However, a person familiar with the situation said the Braves plan on using Furcal and Escobar as the middle-infield duo and moving Johnson to left field.
Furcal has played one game at second base in the past six years; Escobar played 21 games at second as a rookie in 2007. But [the] younger Escobar (25) could stay at shortstop if the Braves believe Furcal might reduce stress on his back by playing second base instead of shortstop, where more throws are tougher and the range requirements greater.
Escobar and Furcal rank as two of baseball's strongest-armed infielders, and their athleticism has the makings of a dynamic duo up the middle.
Moving Johnson to left field would provide an upgrade at a position the Braves have not been able to fortify from outside the organization this winter. He played the outfield before switching to second base after the 2006 season.

It's been a long time since we've seen Furcal play second base, and we haven't seen enough of Escobar there to have a good idea about how he would fare. But it seems to me that a competent organization (the jury's still out on that one) would be able to figure out who belongs where.

Kelly Johnson isn't anyone's idea of a prototypical left fielder, but he'll do in a pinch. Last year National League left fielders combined for an .802 OPS: .350 on-base, .452 slugging. And Atlanta's left fielders? Thanks mostly to Gregor Blanco and a cast of dozens (well, three), they on-based .330 and slugged .352 (gack). Meanwhile, Kelly Johnson's career numbers are .356 and .440, and we probably haven't seen his best yet.

If the Braves sign Furcal and send Johnson to left field, the Braves will still have a big hole in center field, and another in right field if Jeff Francoeur doesn't come around. But at least they can start to dream a little.

Non-sabermetricians tend to think of the sabermetric community as a monolith. Which certainly makes it easier to throw out generalizations about moms' basements and never watching real games or talking to real players. But sabermetrics is a science of sorts, and just like every other science, if you bother to check you'll find all sorts of disagreements (most of them friendly, I'm glad to report).

Today's example … Here's J.C. "Sabernomics" Bradbury on the Phillies' new left fielder:

The Philadelphia Phillies unceremoniously dumped Pat Burrell last week by not offering him arbitration and replacing his roster spot with Raul Ibanez. Ibanez has reportedly agreed to a three-year $31.5 million contract ($10.5 million/year) with the Phillies. The differences between Ibanez and Burrell are subtle: Ibanez will be 37 next year and is left-handed, while Burrell is 32 and right-handed. They are alike in that they are both poor-fielding outfielders with good bats, both with OPS+ consistently in the 120s during the past few seasons.
With Ibanez, the Phillies will get output similar to what Burrell gave the team. Given his age, injury may be a bit more likely for Ibanez, but I project their values to be close over the next three years. I project Ibanez to be worth $46.5 million ($14.5 million/year) and Burrell to be worth $48 million ($16 million/year) over this time span. I'm unsure of what Burrell was willing to work for, but Ibanez appears to have offered the Phillies a good deal. Burrell may be worth the $14 million he earned last season with the team, but I suspect he was a going to be more selective than Ibanez, who's used to making about half the current annual salary of his new contract.

Got that? According to Bradbury -- a smart guy who has written a well-received book on the subject -- Ibanez will be worth more than $10 million per season.

But of course there are other smart guys, too. Tangotiger is a smart guy who has also written a well-received (at least by me) book, and he has Ibanez's value at around $10 million. Oh, but not per season. For all three seasons.

It will always be like this. One of the fears, I think, of smart guys like Dan Shaughnessy is that when every team is run by smart guys like Theo Epstein and Andrew Friedman, the game will be stripped of character and diversity. But that can never happen, any more than paleontology or physics will ever be so thoroughly defined that there's no longer room for differences and disagreements.

Baseball's just as interesting as it's ever been. More interesting, probably. It's just become interesting in different ways. And you can either get on board or you can fall off, screaming all the way to the ground.

Yeah, I'm thrilled for Jamie Moyer, too. It's not many 46-year-old pitchers who get two-year contracts. Let alone two-year contracts worth (at least) $13 million. But that's just what Moyer got, and in case you're wondering how the Phillies' front office justifies the deal, wonder no more:

"I'm sure if you ask Jamie, he'll say that he will play out a few more contracts," Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. said Monday. "I know on paper it probably says this is his last contract, but it will be fun to see how it plays out."
Amaro is confident Moyer will find a way to win at an age when some players are in their second decade of retirement. Moyer depends on pinpoint control and offspeed pitches.
"If his stuff does go backward, he'll try to figure it out and how to pitch through it," Amaro said. "That's the beauty of Jamie Moyer."
Possibly the oldest player to receive a guaranteed multiyear contract, Moyer would earn $20 million over the two years if he pitches 190 innings and makes 31 starts each season.

Fun to see how it plays out, huh? Well, it'll be fun for disinterested observers like me and (most of) you. I'm not sure how much fun it'll be for Amaro, Charlie Manuel and the Phillies' phans.

This doesn't represent a huge financial risk for the Phillies. If Moyer flops, the Phils are out only $13 million (the amount that's guaranteed). Actually, I suppose that is sort of huge; if they spend $13 million for one lousy season and the first year of Moyer's long-delayed retirement, that won't be much fun at all.

But it's not the contract per se that concerns me. What concerns me is that the Phillies, having won a World Series, seem to have very little interest in improving. Granted, they're not likely to win another World Series no matter what they do. But don't you have to at least try?

Let's review the Phillies' big moves. First, they spent $30 million to get worse in left field. Now they've committed $13 million and who knows how many innings to a 46-year-old pitcher. What's next? Trading Brad Lidge for Brian Wilson? A three-year contract extension for Eric Bruntlett?

Jamie Moyer's an incredible pitcher, and he deserves to pitch until he can't pitch. I'm just not sure if the defending world champions should be risking being the team without a chair when the music stops. Francisco Rodriguez made news the other day when he said the Mets are the team to beat in the NL East. Perhaps that seems rash of him, but you have to admire his analysis.

Writing in the New York Observer, Howard Megdal really likes the CC Sabathia deal. A.J. Burnett, though?

Not so much:

The signing of Burnett leads to two other potential problems. One is that $16 million per season could have gone a long way toward improving an offense that declined from outstanding in 2007 to merely good in 2008, and is counting on too many older players to be certain of 2009 production. Rather than signing Burnett, the Yankees could have grabbed Mark Teixeira, or likely any two of Adam Dunn, Pat Burrell or Milton Bradley. All four players are Burnett's age or younger, and all four, to varying degrees, address New York's biggest problem with Sabathia in the fold: offensive upside.

The move also probably closes the door on opportunities for New York's prized pitching prospects Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy, and the underrated Alfredo Aceves. The Yankees, who seemed determined a season ago to build around those pitchers, will be left without a rotation spot once Pettitte re-signs. Either those pitchers waste away in AAA, or New York will turn to them once Burnett gets injured, and pay $16 million for the privilege of watching their young pitchers perform. Given Burnett's fragility, New York can't very well deal the young pitchers for offense -- the backup plan is needed.

The week was an epic one for the Yankees. In C.C. Sabathia, the team undid the mistakes of the recent past which saw them pass on elite players Johan Santana and Carlos Beltran to fill positional needs. But A.J. Burnett seems to be a return to the unsuccessful late-1980s New York model, of overpaying veterans whose success is questionable at best.

I completely agree with Megdal's reservations about Burnett's performance. He's not reliable, and the Yankees have pretty obviously overpaid. Too many dollars, too many years. If the Yankees wanted an impressive fifth starter, they probably could have spent a little less money for a slightly better pitcher. But what's a few million dollars to the Yankees?

As for Hughes and Kennedy and Aceves, not one of them has yet proved that he's up to the rigors of pitching 180 league-average innings in the majors. I hate to see any of them waste away in the minors, but there will be the inevitable injuries to the veterans, and if those guys are pitching well in Triple-A, they'll get their chances eventually (if they're not traded first for a center fielder).

And the offense? Yankee Stadium is (or rather, was) a pitcher's park. Considering only road games, the Yankees finished third in the American League in OPS last year. Maybe that doesn't qualify as "excellent," but it's certainly somewhere between "good" and "excellent." Granted, everybody's a year older and we might expect a slight decline next year. So yes, the Yankees should try to improve their offense … and I'm not at all convinced they can't still afford to do exactly that. Has Brian Cashman suggested that he's finished spending money? If he has, I missed it. In fact, I'll be surprised if the Yankees' Opening Day lineup doesn't look better than it looks right now.

And right now it looks pretty darn good.

I know I addressed this topic last month, but Oliver Perez is still out there looking for a job and Oliver Perez's agent is still out there looking for a huge contract. So, I'd like to revisit his agent's arguments, via Craig Brown's piece in the Hardball Times:

Perez is represented by Scott Boras. (Seriously, when is Boras going to represent internet baseball writers?) So it should come as no surprise that Perez is reportedly seeking a five-year deal worth around $70 million. By comparison, previous members of the second-tier club earned much less. Meche signed a five-year, $55 million deal and Lilly was inked to a four-year, $40 million package. Lohse (also represented by Boras) couldn't find a buyer last winter and signed a bargain basement deal at $4.25 million for one year with the Cardinals. Apparently, St. Louis liked his production, so they extended him to four years at a total of $41 million last September.
Since Boras is involved, teams that are interested in signing the lefty can expect to get a spiffy binder showcasing his talents. Obviously, the purpose of the binder is to sell the player to the prospective team, so it takes a little digging to get to past the sales job to find the truth. The New York Times "Bats" blog actually got their mitts on the presentation package for Perez.
According to the Times, the binder contains eight chapters extolling the virtues of Perez. Let's take a look at a few of those claims and see if they hold any truth.

Summarizing those claims and Brown's analysis:

1. Perez is durable: True.

2. Perez is an innings eater: False, but not grossly exaggerated.

3. Perez's career to this point is similar to Sandy Koufax's: Outrageous.

4. Perez is one of the five best left-handed pitchers in the majors: Absurd.

Craig Brown doesn't address this, but another of the chapters is titled, "Dominates on the Biggest Stage." I don't have the binder, so I can't say exactly what that means. The biggest stage might be the World Series, except it can't be that because Perez has never pitched in a World Series. It might be postseason baseball in general, except it's probably not that because Perez has pitched in only two postseason games, and while he pitched well in one of those games, he didn't pitch well at all in the other. The biggest stage might be New York, except Perez's performance since joining the Mets has been merely good (if certainly better than his pre-Mets performance).

Scott Boras employs plenty of whip-smart people, and I always wonder how they feel about putting together these binders that are loaded with lousy analysis and specious claims. I don't mean to suggest that it's morally wrong. It just seems like a strange way to spend one's days.

As for Perez, did you know he's spent his entire career pitching half his games in pitcher-friendly ballparks? He joined the Padres as a rookie in 2002, their last season in Qualcomm Stadium, an excellent park for pitchers. Perez pitched poorly for the Padres in 2003, and in late August was traded (with Jason Bay) to the Pirates for Brian Giles. Pittsburgh's PNC Park is also a friendly place for pitchers. Perez pitched poorly for the Pirates in 2005 and 2006, and in late July '06 was traded to the Mets. New York's Shea Stadium, year in and year out, has been a pitcher's park.

Perez's career ERA when pitching at home is 4.12. Not Sandy Koufax, perhaps. But in today's environment, not bad. His ERA in road games, though? 4.70, which really is bad. Or close to bad. There's a reason you haven't heard much this month about Perez signing a big contract: teams are getting smarter. Those binders that Scott Boras so carefully compiles? I don't think they're meant to convince the teams. I think they're meant to convince the players that Boras is earning his commission.

What are they saying in Seattle about officially losing their longtime left fielder?

The Phillies gave Raul Ibanez a 3 year, $30 million deal to replace Pat Burrell today. It was pretty much a lock that the team that signed Ibanez was going to be an old-school type, but honestly, I'm a bit surprised that Philly was dumb enough to make this move. With guys like Jayson Werth, Shane Victorino, Geoff Jenkins, and Pedro Feliz, it was clear that they knew a good defensive player when they saw one. I guess they just feel that it's totally fine to have a lumbering oaf running around left field. They'll regret this contract by July, though.

So the Seattle blogger isn't upset about Ibanez leaving.

What about the Philadelphia blogger? Hope springs eternal, right? Here's Beerleaguer:

I'm in total agreement with the majority of posters that said this deal makes very little logical sense. To borrow what's been written on FanGraphs.com, "it makes no sense to sign someone with similar skills that is less productive, older, and almost as, if not equally, costly." Perhaps more costly, when you consider the lost draft picks, tallying three when you consider the forfeitted pick to Seattle and the two lost picks that would come from offering Burrell arbitration a week ago.
The fact that the Phils get together with Ibanez, a very good player but no superstar, and decide to set the bar this way in a saturated market for corner outfield is a thing of Phillies beauty. There was little to seperate Ibanez, who isn't an exact fit for their needs being another lefty bat and will push 40 by the end of this contract, from Burrell or many of the other options, including lesser players who could have served a platoon role. I think Amaro and his men are basing this decision on clutch hitting and a high batting average -- areas of typical fluctuation -- while ignoring many of the negative aspects of Ibanez's game, areas like defense that more and more clubs deem crucial. Above all, I can't get past his age, adding years -- five over Burrell -- to a team that's starting to have a few too many. Thumbs down.

Familiarity can do strange things to one's mind.

Pat Burrell is a good player. Not a great player, mostly because he's such a lousy outfielder. The people who run the Phillies watch Burrell every day all season long, and decided, reasonably enough I suppose, that they didn't want to spend $16 million per season on more of that.

Meanwhile, the people who run the Phillies have not been watching Raul Ibanez play every day. Sure, they've got their scouts. And outgoing Phillies GM Pat Gillick is certainly familiar with Ibanez, having worked for the Mariners as a part-time consultant in 2004 and '05 when Ibanez was playing (and playing well) for the M's. But unless the Phillies look at (and trust) the sophisticated fielding metrics, they probably don't know that Ibanez is just about as lousy in left field as Burrell.

Will they figure it out by July, though? Hard to say. We tend to see what we want to see. Ibanez is regarded as a good guy in the clubhouse, and he does hit for a higher batting average than Burrell (and Ibanez's average has now hovered within a 21-point range for seven years running). But regardless of what the people who run the Phillies might think over these next few years, the bottom line is this: They've just committed to spending $30 million on a player who won't help them win a great number of games.

Today's links were compiled while I was still feeling happy and lucky immediately after seeing this movie …

• Best. Story. Ever.

• You know how CC Sabathia is listed at 290 pounds here? And 250 pounds here? Well, we have a new figure: 311 pounds. At the beginning of a seven-year contract. I'm just saying.

• Did Ryan Howard actually deserve all that MVP support he got? Well, no. But is it possible that he was a lot more valuable than we thought? Well, maybe.

• As Joe Posnanski points out -- in his inimitable way -- no Hall of Fame candidate has ever received 100 percent of the vote (unless you count Lou Gehrig, which I don't because we don't know exactly what happened in 1939). And it's not going to happen in 2009. But man, it should. It really, really should.

• Josh Wilker wonders what it was about those pitchers of the 1990s that allowed them to post those crazy-low ERA's relative to their leagues. Were they really that good? And so many of them at the same time? Josh thinks maybe they weren't, and I'm inclined to agree with him. I don't think he's quite figured out the mechanism of those bizarrely brilliant ERA+'s; I don't think I have, either (though I think I've come a little closer than he has). What I really think, though, is that it's almost certainly not possible that all the best pitchers of the last 50 years just happened to pitch at almost exactly the same time.

• The Padres were active in Thursday's Rule 5 draft, and Paul DePodesta's got all the gory details. Now if I can just convince Paul to stop calling it the Rule V draft, I'll have accomplished my first big thing since being anointed (and yes, I'm going to continue mentioning that for at least another few months, if not years).

• Wow. First Nate Silver, and now Jonah Keri. It's really great cough to see these talented young cough writer/analysts getting lucrative book deals while my most recent cough bestseller is still available for less than $11 cough. I wish Nate and Jonah all the luck in the world in their authorial endeavors. Honest.

Dugout Central's Thomas Wayne interviews Bill James, and I'm surprised to find myself caught short by something Bill says …

TW: As a baseball historian it must be troubling to see the steady decline of the American-born Black player in the big leagues over the last decade or so. Any thoughts on how to get young African Americans interested in the national pastime again?
BJ: Baseball has by far the best athletes of any sport. We always have had. I don't see what difference it makes what color the players are. If there was a generalized shortage of opportunities for African American athletes, maybe we should worry about that, but I don't think that's true. If we're not doing our part to move forward toward a less race-conscious society, maybe we should worry about that. But I don't see how worrying about the color of the athletes helps us move toward a less race-conscious society.
TW: How does it feel to know you've influenced a generation of stat heads in their quest for baseball knowledge?
BJ: Well, it is nice of you to say. But productivity is inversely proportional to self satisfaction.
TW: What advice, if any, do you have for that would-be statistician out there who is trying to 'crack the code' -- so to speak -- on the next great statistical creation?
BJ: Listen carefully to the discussion, and try to figure out what it is that people don't know that could be known.

I'm not sure how Bill defines "best athletes," but baseball's getting the best of them only if you heavily weight hand-eye coordination and arm strength, both of which are highly specific attributes and not usually associated with general athleticism. I don't mean to suggest that Jamie Moyer and Manny Ramirez aren't fabulous athletes. But we can probably agree that "athleticism" is mostly about strength, speed and agility. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's more "athleticism" on one NFL roster or in one NBA division than you'll find in the entire National League next year.

Granted, there was a time when many of the best human-sized athletes wanted to play baseball, tried to play baseball, because that's where the money was. No more, though. Now most of the best athletes gravitate toward the sports that require the greatest general athleticism.

Leaving that quibble aside, I agree with everything else Bill says (at least here). And if you just can't get enough of Mr. James, here's another recent interview.

In the Boston Globe today, Dan Shaughnessy makes (or regurgitates) a Hall of Fame case for Jim Rice, then writes this:

On the other hand, we have members of Bill James Youth who've never been out of the house who believe Rice has no business being in the Hall. ESPN.com's Rob Neyer ran the numbers and came up with Rice as the equal of Ken Singleton (James himself established that Rice was not as good as Roy White). Neyer states that Rice was not a dominant power hitter and disputes the idea that Jim Ed was the most feared hitter of his day.
Guess you had to be there. Or maybe talk to some of the players and managers who were there. Rice was dominant. Rice was feared.
Last year Neyer wrote, "With Rice clearly lacking objective Hall of Fame credentials, they [Boston baseball writers] are forced to fall back on the ill-founded, untestable notion that he was the 'most feared' hitter for more than a year or two. What I don't understand is why so many voters in so many other cities believe it."

Is this a BBWAA initiation rite, like paddling me on the rear 50 times or making me drink a dozen cups of cheap beer in five minutes? And if so, now may I have my spiffy new membership card, please?

Seriously, though. Jim Rice did some things that Hall of Famers do. I've written about his qualifications many times before, and today's not the day to rehash that conversation once again. Whatever I might think, Rice will be elected next month, and then we can move on to someone else. But you're going to read a lot of things about the guy over the next month or so. And here's a little tip: If you do read that Rice was "feared" and you don't read anything (substantive) about his defense or the significant advantage he gained from playing half his games in Fenway Park, then what you're reading is not serious. What you're reading is propaganda. Ad hominem attacks like Shaughnessy's can be a lot of fun, and they've always enjoyed a place of honor in newspaper columns. But they don't do a great deal to advance the discussion. Nor are they meant to.

Murray Chass with some passionate thoughts on the latest incarnation of the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee:

Mazeroski was inducted in 2001, after which the Hall's directors abandoned the veterans committee as it was constituted. Since then, the directors have searched in vain for a format that could get somebody elected.
They went from the small committee to a large committee, giving the vote to all Hall of Famers plus winners of the annual writing and broadcasting awards. That didn't work either because the new committee, numbering around 85, didn't give anyone 75 percent of the vote.
For the most recent election, another change: The Spink and Frick winners were dropped and only Hall of Famers, 64 in number, received ballots. But again, no one was elected. Of the 10 candidates on the ballot, Santo came closest with 39 votes, [nine] short of the necessary 75 percent, and Jim Kaat was next with 38, followed by Tony Oliva 33, Gil Hodges 28 and Joe Torre 19.
Writers were criticized for years by Hodges supporters for not electing the Brooklyn first baseman, but now those supporters know that his contemporaries don't think he belongs in the Hall.
But one obvious reality has emerged from the four shutout elections (2002, '04, '06, '08). The occupants of the Hall of Fame don't want anyone else to join them.

This is a common refrain: "Oh, those selfish Hall of Famers don't want anyone joining their exclusive club. At least anyone among these unworthies on the ballot."

Except that's not true. It's not nearly true. And Murray Chass must know this, somewhere inside his mind. Because two paragraphs later he writes this:

This year's 64 voters wrote players' names on their ballots a total of 213 times, an average of 3.33 players per ballot. They could vote for a maximum of four candidates. But vote though they did, the players couldn't agree on which player or players merited inclusion.
That's the beauty of the 75 percent requirement. No one can sneak into the Hall of Fame. He has to be viewed overwhelmingly as a worthy member.
"It's the first time we've tried it with a small electorate and a smaller ballot," [Hall president Jeff] Idelson said. "The question becomes, how do we refine it? And if so, when? And that's something the board will have to determine."
From this point of view the board has to determine only one thing: Why belabor this foolish exercise?
"The process was not redesigned with the goal of necessarily electing someone, but to give everyone on the ballot a very fair chance of earning election through a ballot of their peers," said Jane Forbes Clark, the board chairman.
But everyone on the ballot had already been judged three times by their peers, and their peers' rejection of them followed 15 years of rejection by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. How many times does a player have to lose before he accepts defeat?

Did you catch that? Maximum candidates voted for: four. Actual average of candidates voted for: 3.33.

Given that some of the voters must have voted for zero, one or two candidates, I believe we may assume that most voters voted for the maximum number allowed. How can that possibly square with the notion that the current Hall of Famers "don't want anyone else to join them"?

Answer: It cannot. The great majority of Hall of Famers would happily welcome a few of their old colleagues. They simply can't quite agree on which colleagues those should be. This shouldn't come as any big surprise. The best players on the ballot were probably Ron Santo and Joe Torre. But Santo and Torre both played in the 1960s, and there are two problems for candidates who played in the 1960s. One, their numbers were depressed by the pitcher-friendly environment in that decade. Two, a fair number of the living Hall of Famers -- that is, the voters in this case -- either never saw the players of the 1960s, or saw them after their primes.

Fundamentally, the problem is that we're asking players to be analysts, a job for which the great majority of them simply are not qualified. We're also asking them to be objective -- to vote for the most deserving candidates rather than for their friends -- and any time you ask someone to ignore his friends you're going to be disappointed. If you want rational analysis to be a big part of the process, anyway.

Chass believes the Hall of Fame wants to see more new Hall of Famers. He's right, but "more Hall of Famers" is just one of the things the Hall wants. The Hall also wants to keep the old Hall of Famers happy, and one way to do that is by making them a big part of the process (check). The Hall also wants to keep the old baseball writers happy, and one way to do that is by applying the 75-percent standard of the BBWAA's ballot to the Veterans Committee ballots, too. And the Hall also wants to keep the fans of Ron Santo, Joe Torre, Tony Oliva, Luis Tiant and all the rest happy by keeping the Cooperstown door open, even if by just a little.

It's always been a tough balancing act, and always will be.

Today's links, for the first time ever, come with the full endorsement of the Baseball Writers' Association of America (and their eye-popping Web site):

• Just a few quick takeaways on Wednesday night's many-tentacled trade: 1) If the Mariners add Endy Chavez and Franklin Gutierrez to Ichiro Suzuki as every-day players, they'll have one of the greatest defensive outfields we've seen; 2) it's not clear why the Indians were involved, unless they have a serious man-crush on Joe Smith; and 3) if the Mets really are going to keep J.J. Putz and use him as their set-up man, this trade has probably cost Putz many millions of dollars in future salaries. Because teams don't pay ninth-inning money to eighth-inning pitchers.

• Matt Joyce for Edwin Jackson? Really? Seems like most of the guys who write about the Tigers -- including here, here and here -- aren't real thrilled. Hard to blame them. Apparently Jim Leyland hasn't been a big fan of Joyce, but is that a problem with the player? Or the manager? Because Matt Joyce will still be drawing a tidy paycheck for playing baseball long after Leyland and Jackson have retired.

• Granted, it's probably not for the sabermetric neophytes among you. But if you're wondering about the newer of the newfangled statmetrics, I think you'll really enjoy Tangotiger's primer on the stuff available at FanGraphs.

• With the second World Baseball Classic only a few months away, Team USA now has a manager and a shortstop: Davey Johnson and Derek Jeter. It's hard to quibble with the manager, since the team needed a proven winner who doesn't actually have a job, and that's Davey Johnson to a T. The shortstop, though? All I know is that if I were managing the Japanese or the Cubans or the Dominicans, I'd be a lot more scared of Jimmy Rollins or J.J. Hardy.

• How Wade Boggs' 3,000th hit led to Doug Glanville meeting Tyra Banks (with a small-but-essential appearance by our man Jayson Stark).

• Analyzing from Las Vegas, Joe Sheehan believes that CC Sabathia's "build" makes him too big a risk, and that if Francisco Rodriguez's new deal makes sense for the Mets, Kerry Wood's (reported) deal with the Indians makes even more sense (and lest you think we sabermetric types always stick together, here's Eric Seidman with a completely different opinion).

• I dropped this sort of sideways into a post earlier this week, but you probably missed it and you shouldn't: As Rich Lederer writes, If Joe Gordon, why not Bobby Grich? I think it's safe to say that the only answer is that Gordon's teams won five World Series, while Grich's teams lost five American League Championship Series. Which is not a reason that I find compelling (though I do feel compelled to mention that Grich batted just .182/.247/.318 in those five ALCS).

• This is no rumor: The Rays are interested in Bobby Abreu. What might be mere rumor: the Rays' interest in Jeremy Hermida, Rick Ankiel, Nelson Cruz, Jason Giambi and Ken Griffey Jr. But I love the thinking here. As talented as the Rays are, if they just sit on their hands this winter they'll be lapped by the Red Sox or the Yankees or both. But they really have only two positions at which they can significantly improve: right field and DH. They might have taken care of right field by trading for Matt Joyce. Some teams might stop there. If they can find a truly productive DH too, though? Break up the Rays …

Last year around this time, I was hanging out with Mike McClary in Powell's City of Books when I got the news: I had been snubbed by the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

This news was surprising for a couple of reasons. One, I didn't have any idea that I had been submitted for membership. And two, I had been writing about baseball for a long time, and in fact I had (and still have) written more words for ESPN.com than anybody, ever. So it seemed a little surprising that if the BBWAA did bother to consider me, they would still reject me.

On the other hand, the news wasn't so surprising at all. I got my start working for Bill James, who in the 1980s often wrote nasty (though usually fair) things about the traditional media's failings in the general area of baseball analysis. I think it's fair to suggest that most baseball writers, in the 1980s and well into the 1990s, believed that the game's most important statistic was batting average. And that they believed this well past the point at which the notion had been soundly disproven in publicly available sources.

Anyway, this is how I was raised. And when I was hired to write for ESPN's Web site in 1996, nobody told me to respect my elders. So I didn't. If I thought Tracy Ringolsby was writing foolishly, I said so. If I thought Tom Verducci had crossed the line from intelligent analysis (of which he's highly capable) into subjective dim-wittedness, I said so. And usually not with any surplus of grace. I believed then (and believe now) that my job, my responsibility, is to entertain and to educate, and that "not ruffling feathers" falls way, way down on the list somewhere.

Maybe that had something to do with what happened last year, or maybe it did not.

So what's next? Again this year, I didn't know if my name would be submitted for membership. I considered asking my boss to not submit my name this year. Not because I was worried about being snubbed again, but because I wasn't sure that being a member would actually be a good thing. But eventually I did what I usually do, and waited to see how things played out. If the BBWAA blackballed me, I could probably get another blog post or two out of it. If they didn't, I would always have the option of turning down their generous offer.

Well, apparently this year I'm in:

Slowly but surely, the Baseball Writers Association of America is becoming more inclusive. The organization just held a meeting here at Bellagio and, for the second straight year, humbly voted to add a few Internet writers to their newspaper-dominated ranks. Joining the inaugural crop from last year will be Will Carroll and Christina Kahrl of Baseball Prospectus and Rob Neyer and Keith Law of ESPN.com.
Though it seems the BBWAA has already become more progressive and finally realizes the impact that Internet writers can have, the move to include Baseball Prospectus is a big one, seeing as how it expands the Internet wing past the usual titans -- Yahoo! Sports, ESPN.com, SI.com, etc.
Meanwhile, the admittance of Neyer and Law comes a year after they were the only 'Net writers to be denied entry, a move that prompted a critical post from Law himself and plenty of tsk-tsking around the 'sphere.

I should mention that I haven't heard anything official from the BBWAA. A couple of hours ago my inbox began to overflow with congratulations, apparently based on that note above. But if it's true, I have to decide: Do I want to belong to an organization I've been criticizing for so many years? More to the point, if I'm a member will I lose my edge? Will you, Dear Readers, suffer as a result?

I don't know. I do know that life is more interesting when it's dynamic. I've been an Outsider for my entire career -- I mean, if you can be an Outsider while working for the biggest and bestest Web site in the galaxy -- and it's been great, but I figure that being just a little bit of an Insider for a while might be interesting. It might be interesting for me and it might be interesting for you, in ways we don't even know yet.

That's my hope, anyway. But I'm going to ask for your help. If you think I've lost my edge -- become assimilated -- please don't be shy about letting me know. And you can be nasty about it.

I haven't seen a manager backtrack this enthusiastically since Lou Piniella tried to turn Russ Davis into an outfielder …

LAS VEGAS -- Ron Gardenhire's public comments Tuesday about Delmon Young resembled last week's about as much as Fargo, N.D., resembles Las Vegas.
The Twins' manager, almost sheepish about "the fire I accidentally lit" by suggesting at an appearance in Fargo last week that Young won't be in his starting lineup next season, insisted at baseball's winter meetings that "we're blessed to have four talented outfielders" and that nothing is settled about the Twins' 2009 outfield.
"I'm backpedaling; can't you see?" Gardenhire said. "That was me sort of screwing up. … Everyone knows the players are the ones who will decide that. They're the ones who have to go out and earn (their jobs)."
The Twins' manager told the Fargo Forum newspaper last week that Michael Cuddyer, Denard Span and Carlos Gomez "have to play every day," pointedly leaving out Young, 23. That Young became the focus of stories after Gardenhire's visit to Fargo surprised the manager, he said.
"It wasn't a shot at anybody," Gardenhire said. "I was hunting. And I saw my picture in the Aberdeen (S.D.) newspaper, and I said, 'Whoa.'"
--snip--
"A lot of clubs might read that and say, 'Hey, we can get Delmon Young for nothing.' And I can tell you right now, that ain't going to happen," Gardenhire said. "We gave up a lot for Delmon Young, and we're not out to give him away. He's a very talented player with a lot of upside."
Still, the manager hinted that the Twins are at least listening to offers for the former No. 1 overall pick, who hit .290 with 10 home runs after being acquired in November 2007 in a trade that sent right-hander Matt Garza to Tampa Bay.
"If there's an area where we could move a person and somebody came after us strong for one of our outfielders, that's an area where we have a little more depth than other places. If we have to do it, we have to do it," Gardenhire said. But, he hastened to add, "there's never anything wrong with going into spring training with a little depth."

I'm not exactly sure about this "depth" Gardenhire is talking about. It's certainly true that the Twins have four outfielders who saw significant action last season. It's also true that those four outfielders combined for 26 home runs, and that the Twins finished last in the American League with 111 homers. If the Twins had any money to spend, their first priority would (or should) be finding a corner outfielder with real power.

But that's not going to happen. And while Cuddyer might be that guy, it doesn't seem likely. Yes, he did hit 24 homers in 2006. And no, he's not really as bad as his .249/.330/.369 line in 2008 might suggest. But 2006 was an outlier, and Cuddyer just isn't good enough with the bat or the glove to play every day. In fact, according to both +/- and UZR, Cuddyer is one of the worst defensive right fielders in the majors.

The Twins seem to really like Cuddyer. Fine. But he's suited for just two roles: platoon DH (with Jason Kubel) and fourth (or fifth) outfielder. And while Delmon Young and Carlos Gomez both have obvious weaknesses, they're both very young and do have the Twins' beloved "tools." Is this a championship-quality outfield? Probably not. But it's probably the best the Twins can do, and sometimes the kids will surprise you (in a good way).

(H/T to BTF's Newsstand.)

As you might guess, Ron Santo was one disappointed ex-Cubbie on Monday …

"Everybody felt this was my year," he said. "I felt it. I thought it was gonna happen, and when it didn't … What really upset me was nobody got in again. It just doesn't make sense. It'll be eight years now that they've voted and not let anybody in. And personally, I feel like there's a lot of guys that should've been in, not just me."
--snip--
Santo would like to see a change in the system, with a vote taken every year instead of every other year, and perhaps a smaller voting committee. If they continue to have elections and no one is getting in, what purpose does the Veterans Committee have?
"They have to change it," he said. "They're going to still have a veterans committee, but I think it should go back to where it was [in the '90s] when Bill Mazeroski got in. I think they should have a committee of maybe 12 guys that vote, that's the way to do it. Evaluate everyone, but instead of having all the [Hall of Fame] players vote, maybe just a couple players, a couple broadcasters, a couple writers … a much smaller group. That's how [Joe] Gordon got in."

Well, yeah: That's the problem. You want to get guys in, you get a smaller group. I promise you, I could put together a group of three smart baseball fans and come up with a dozen new Hall of Famers in about five minutes. And while one can certainly make compelling arguments for both Mazeroski and Gordon, the truth is that the great majority of marginal (or worse) Hall of Famers were elected by just this sort of "smaller group."

It would be exceptionally easy to design a process that resulted in the election of Ron Santo. The problem is coming up with a process that results in the election of only Ron Santo. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, my friend (and blogger) Mike McClary suggests that Santo isn't the only cause célèbre, and he's right. Not including the four newest franchises, below are the favorite neglected Hall of Fame candidates from every team …

Angels: Bobby Grich
As it happens, Grich's candidacy has just become particularly compelling; today Rich Lederer writes, If Joe Gordon, then why not Grich? And it's true: Grich has been terribly underappreciated. In 1992, his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility, 11 BBWAA members voted for him and he fell off the ballot forever. But he was probably better than everyone on this year's Veterans Committee ballot with the exception of Santo.

Astros: Jimmy Wynn
Rated a few years ago by Bill James as the 10th greatest center fielder in major league history, due to his stunning blend of power, walks and defense. Like Grich, Wynn was one-and-done … but Wynn got zero votes from the BBWAA; somehow, 374 voters voted, and not even one believed that Wynn belonged in the Hall of Fame.

Athletics: Mark McGwire
I'm not sure how many A's fans get misty-eyed about McGwire, particularly since his most famous seasons came with the Cardinals. But nostalgia being what it is, I'm sure that eventually there will be some effort to revisit McGwire's candidacy.

Blue Jays: Dave Stieb
There's no room in the Hall of Fame for a starting pitcher who never won 20 games or a Cy Young Award. But when Jack Morris' supporters say he was the best pitcher in the 1980s, a Blue Jays fan might reasonably point out that while Morris did lead the majors with 162 wins in the decade, Stieb was No. 2 with 140 wins, and Stieb threw more shutouts and posted a substantially better ERA (especially when accounting for context).

Braves: Dale Murphy
When he was playing, Murphy was universally regarded as a future Hall of Famer. That's what happens when you win consecutive MVP Awards and hit 218 home runs over six seasons and grab a few Gold Gloves. But when the end came for Murphy, it came suddenly, and that's apparently what stuck in the Hall of Fame voters' minds.

Brewers: None
Paul Molitor and Robin Yount are the only viable candidates who spent many seasons with the Brewers, and both are in already.

Cardinals: Ted Simmons
Another player whose candidacy was terribly wounded by the later stages of his career. Before he turned 30, Simmons was a six-time All-Star, and only the presence of Johnny Bench kept him from being roundly hailed as the best catcher in the National League. But between his last few desultory years with the Brewers and his reputation for having a terrible throwing arm, Simmons' greatness had been almost completely forgotten by the time he appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot. And he appeared just once, falling off forever after getting only 17 votes.

Cubs: Ron Santo
I'm not sure what else to say about him. He's one of the 10 greatest third basemen ever. You can also find Cubs fans who will argue for Mark Grace, who led the majors in hits in the 1990s. But that's not really a serious argument.

Dodgers: Steve Garvey
Maury Wills was on the Veterans Committee ballot, but it's Garvey whom Dodgers fans are passionate about, mostly because Garvey drove in a lot of runs and because he, like Dale Murphy, was for a long time considered a lock for the Hall of Fame someday. For me, Garvey falls short because of his .329 career on-base percentage and his relatively short, relatively unimpressive peak.

Expos: Tim Raines
You probably know how I feel about Raines. You probably feel the same way. And someday, I think, 75 percent of the voters will agree with us. (If you're one of those voters and you're on the fence, please look at this.)

Giants: Darrell Evans
Once described by Bill James as "the most underrated player in baseball history, absolutely." Like Grich and Wynn, Evans' value as a hitter was built upon power (which writers appreciate) and walks (which they don't), and so he has also been treated shabbily by the voters. Eight votes in 1995 and gone forever (but not forgotten).

Indians: Albert Belle
Mel Harder has his fans, too. But that was a long time ago. The memories of Belle remain fresh in the minds of the Indians fans who saw him terrorize American League pitchers for six years. While it's true that Belle's career was terribly short by Hall of Fame standards, it's also true that there's not a great deal separating Belle from Jim Rice, who's going to be inducted next summer.

Mariners: None.
Nobody yet, though you're going to hear a terrible cry from the northwest corner of the U.S. upon Edgar Martinez's first appearance on the Hall of Fame ballot next year.

Mets: Keith Hernandez
I'm not sure if anyone but Brian Kenny is out there making the case for Hernandez. It's a case worth making, though. Hernandez finished his career with nearly 2,200 hits and drew more than 1,000 walks. He also finished with only 162 home runs, which is what quickly finished his Hall of Fame candidacy. But Hernandez's 128 career OPS+ is comparable to Tony Perez's and Orlando Cepeda's, and Hernandez was one of the greatest defensive first basemen ever. I wouldn't vote for Hernandez. But then, I wouldn't vote for Perez or Cepeda, either. And they're both in.

Orioles: Ken Singleton
Speaking of players who were just as good as Orlando Cepeda and Jim Rice …

Padres: None.

Phillies: Dick Allen
Do Phillies fans really fantasize about seeing Allen inducted? Maybe this is a product of my upbringing, but if he's ever been lionized by fans, I suspect they were White Sox fans during (and after) Allen's MVP season (1973). But who else do the Phillies have? Larry Bowa? Sherry Magee? (At least Magee was actually on the latest ballot, though it's hard for fans to get worked up about a guy who played before there were televisions. Or radios.)

Pirates: None
With Mazeroski in, Pirates fans are officially prohibited from complaining about the Hall of Fame until the year 2037 (though I suppose I can mention that Dave Parker was better than Jim Rice).

Red Sox: Luis Tiant
Tiant is the guy people talk about, but is he really more qualified for the Hall of Fame than Dwight Evans? Evans played forever, won a bunch of Gold Gloves and led the American League in OPS twice (which never fails to surprise me). He also did better in MVP voting than you might guess, finishing third in 1981, fourth in '87 and in the top 10 two other times. Granted, there's nothing about Evans that screams "Hall of Fame!" at you. He simply played exceptionally well for most of the 1970s and all of the '80s.

Rangers: None.
Rafael Palmeiro will have his supporters, when he's eligible.

Reds: Dave Concepcion
I mean, not counting Pete Rose, about whom I don't have anything to say (except I wish they'd let him into the Hall of Fame already so we wouldn't have to say anything about him anymore). I don't want to say anything negative about Concepcion, who was a little better than shortstops Maury Wills and Vern Stephens, both of whom appeared on the various Veterans Committee ballots this year. Oddly, his career now looks almost exactly like Omar Vizquel's. If you think one of them belongs in the Coop, you basically have to admit that the other does as well.

Royals: Frank White
When Mazeroski was elected, suddenly White's case started looking a lot better. After all, White was the better baserunner and perhaps just the slightly better hitter, and he won exactly as many Gold Gloves (eight) as Mazeroski, who was elected almost completely because of his defensive reputation. But while I tried to put a positive spin on Mazeroski's election, he certainly did not meet the standards of a Hall of Fame second baseman. What's more, all Gold Gloves are not created equal. Frank White was an outstanding fielder; Mazeroski was the Ozzie Smith of second baseman (similarly, Omar Vizquel's Gold Gloves don't mean he's exactly as great as Ozzie Smith).

Tigers: Jack Morris
Morris gets the nod here because people talk about him, and people talk about him because he's drawn a good deal of support from the voters, picking up 43 percent in the last election. Is he really the Tigers' best candidate, though? No way. Not even close. That would be Alan Trammell, who's been on seven ballots and hasn't yet reached 20 percent.

Twins: Bert Blyleven
Don't get me started.

White Sox: Harold Baines
I would say Shoeless Joe Jackson, except it seems like nobody cares except politicians in Iowa and South Carolina. I'm not sure if anyone cares all that much about Baines, either, but recently there were some choice quotes from White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. If not Baines, though, White Sox fans can more reasonably complain about Dick Allen or Minnie Minoso.

Yankees: Don Mattingly
Now that Rich Gossage and Joe Gordon have been elected, Yankees fans should really shut up. And for the most part, they have (about the Hall of Fame, anyway). Eight or 10 years ago, though, I would get ripped eight ways to Sunday for suggesting that Mattingly's résumé might be a little thin. I think what has happened is that there's room for only one saint in the Yankees fan's heart, and Cap'n Jetes has grabbed that title from Donnie Baseball.

You know what's really a shame? There's not a real movement to get Alan Trammell or Tim Raines elected. Nobody's really talking about Bobby Grich or Jimmy Wynn. Not in the traditional media, anyway. I suppose we'll get there someday. But it's difficult for me to see these Veterans Committee ballots filled with players who weren't as good as Grich and Wynn.

Today's links are sponsored by our good friends (and corporate partners) at Buy N Large …

• Javier Vazquez is one of the game's great underperformers, relative to his apparent abilities. The Hardball Times' Josh Kalk checks those abilities (they're impressive) and offers some advice to Vazquez and his new pitching coach.

• Between trading for Gerald Laird and signing Adam Everett for $1 million, Monday was "a heck of a day for Dave Dombrowski." At least according to Dave Cameron (who does the math to prove it, here and here).

• Oh, I almost forgot … with all this talk about defense lately, some fantastic news: via FanGraphs, Mitchel Lichtman's Ultimate Zone Ratings -- going all the way back to 2002! -- are finally available to all (and I'm grateful for everyone's generosity).

• I seriously considered attending the winter meetings this year, mostly because I've never been. But then I remembered how much I loathe Las Vegas, and how many people at the winter meetings believe (some with good reason, some not) that I'm a cretin. So I decided to stay home and putter around my happy place instead. But Joe Posnanski's there, and fortunately for us he's got enough time on his hands to come up with the 20 Year Rule.

• According to Tangotiger, if Dustin Pedroia was a free agent and got a reasonable six-year contract -- as opposed to the deal he actually just got, he'd be worth … wait for it … $137 million for six years. That would buy a lot of animal crackers.

• According to Joel Sherman, Francisco Rodriguez's agent is "disappointed" that his client won't be fully rewarded for racking up 62 saves last season. Yes, it's a real shame when a ridiculously inflated statistic isn't the complete basis for determining salary. It's just not fair, paying a player based (loosely) on how well he actually pitched.

• Instead of traveling to Las Vegas, I've been watching a lot of movies. As you might recall, I had some reservations about Wall-E the first time around, and resolved to see it again (in the theater). Last weekend I finally did, and while it's obviously a beautifully made film, I still have those reservations (including these; here's a sort of counterpoint). I'm as big a Pixar fan as you'll find, but I still say this one's an A rather than their typical A+ (though Cars was a B+).

• I don't suppose I've mentioned this before, but I suspect you might have guessed: I was, in a previous incarnation, a big fan of comic books featuring men wearing tights and (sometimes) capes. It's been a long time since I read an issue of "Spider-Man," but I do catch most of the superhero movies. Usually on opening weekend. Last summer, I loved the latest "Batman" and was shocked by how much I liked "Iron Man." And when I finally saw the rebooted "Incredible Hulk" last weekend (at home), I was pleasantly surprised. Solid script, good actors, just a reasonable suspension of disbelief necessary. … Kudos to everyone involved, including whoever convinced a certain shellhead to make his cool cameo appearance.

Movies can be so much more, though. Genre films, no matter how well-crafted, are bound by fairly rigid conventions. Last weekend, I also saw an old movie, "Fitzcarraldo," and a new one, (the perfectly titled) "Synecdoche, New York." Those movies with the men in tights (or in the Hulk's case, stretch pants) aim to change your evening, maybe take you to a different place for two hours. These others, though? They might change your life. I watched "Fitzcarraldo" twice and I can't stop thinking about it (and if you don't stop thinking about "Synecdoche" you might go mad). For me, that's what movies should be.

Dan Quisenberry once said, "I found a delivery in my flaw."

Well, today the Hall of Fame found one Hall of Famer in its flawed system.

To quote my friend Rany Jazayerli: "The best way I can sum up Joe Gordon's HoF credentials is that he's one of those guys I always had trouble remembering was not a Hall of Famer. Now they've saved me the trouble."

There's just always been something about Joe Gordon that felt like a Hall of Famer. Maybe it's all those home runs, before second basemen knew how to hit home runs. Maybe it's the nine straight All-Star Games. Maybe it's the six World Series rings. Maybe it's the brilliant defense. And maybe, just maybe, it's because some of Gordon's best years were with the New York Yankees.

Of course, it's really all those things. Now, he's actually the Hall of Famer he's felt like for so long.

Gordon missed two prime seasons because of World War II, and I would like to think the voters took that into account. But then, how to explain the fact that another Yankee who benefited from World War II fell just one vote shy of election? Allie Reynolds needed nine votes but got eight. He won 182 games in his career -- an exceptionally low number for a Hall of Fame starting pitcher -- and 40 of those came during the war, when most of the best hitters were wearing khakis or Navy whites. There were 10 players on the pre-1943 ballot, and if I were ranking them, Reynolds would have finished ninth or 10th.

But then, that's the danger of a small committee (in this case, 12 members): It takes only a few odd decisions to throw the entire process into question. Particularly when the committee actually meets (as this one apparently did). That opens up the possibility of horse-trading and various forms of cajoling, just like the bad old days of the Veterans Committee, the members of which happily elected their old cronies, most of whom dragged down the standards of the institution.

The most qualified player on the pre-1943 ballot was probably Bill Dahlen. According to the Hall's news release, Dahlen got fewer than three votes. Looks like we're back in the bad old days.

Now, the post-1942 results are an entirely different matter. Instead of 12 members, there were 60. Which means little or no horse-trading or arm-twisting. So the process was, if nothing else, relatively pure. It's just not designed to actually elect anyone. From that news release:

"When our board of directors restructured the Veterans Committee after the 2007 election, it did so with the goal of ensuring the voters -- the living Hall of Famers -- would review their peers," said Jane Forbes Clark. "The 10 post-1942 ballot finalists all spent a substantial part of their playing career in the 1960s or the 1970s, and a vast majority of the voters were either actively playing, managing or involved in baseball in those two decades.
"The process was not redesigned with the goal of necessarily electing someone, but to give everyone on the ballot a very fair chance of earning election through a ballot of their peers. The vote reinforces the selections of the Baseball Writers' Association of America and maintains the high standards set by the BBWAA. A 75-percent threshold is extremely difficult to attain, but the highly selective process helps ensure that enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame remains the greatest honor in the game."
The 64-person Veterans Committee electorate was comprised solely of the living Hall of Fame members, including 2008 inductees Goose Gossage and Dick Williams. The final ballot was determined after the Historical Overview Committee of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, comprised of 11 veteran baseball writers and historians, selected 20 finalists from all eligible players whose careers spanned at least 10 Major League seasons and ran between 1943 and 1987. Concurrently, a screening committee comprised of six Hall of Famers selected five names for the ballot, and the two lists were merged for a total of 21 candidates. The 64 living Hall of Famers served as their own screening committee and then narrowed the ballot to the 10 finalists.

The ballot was smaller this time around, which should have helped the top candidates. It didn't. In 2007, Ron Santo got 69.5 percent support; this year, he got 61 percent. Last year, Jim Kaat got 63 percent and Gil Hodges 61 percent; this year, they got 59 percent and 44 percent, respectively.

What happened? The ballot was smaller, which probably helped them. The pool of voters also was smaller, which hurt them. Previously, the pool included all living Hall of Famers, plus the living Spink Award winners (broadcasters) and Frick Award winners (writers). But those broadcasters and writers are no longer voting, which leaves only the ex-players. And because the players have less historical perspective than the broadcasters and the writers, it's become even more difficult for a player like Santo -- who spent all but one season of his career in the National League -- to pick up the 75 percent support necessary for election.

I'm disappointed for Santo, who's more than deserving. I'm not particularly disappointed for the Hall of Fame. Because if you rig the process to allow for Santo's election, you're going to wind up rigging it for other, less deserving candidates. That said, there's probably not much point in going through this process every year or two if the results are going to be the same.

Continuing our discussion of Hall of Fame candidates, next we have the 10 players on the pre-1943 Veterans Committee ballot…

Twenty years ago, Bill Dahlen was merely another long-ago baseball player for whom there existed little reputation, even among the cognoscenti. In 1938 he'd been considered by Hall of Fame voters and garnered exactly one vote. He'd spent the prime of his career in the 19th century, and later was sort of lost in the crowd while playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. When the time came, decades later, to honor the game's early stars, Dahlen was hardly mentioned.

A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion, though. A few years ago the Hall of Fame decided to revisit the 19th century, and a committee decided that a shortstop named George Davis belonged in the Hall. Statistically, the most similar player to George Davis is our man Dahlen, which got people talking. Also, our modern methods for evaluating defense are practically unanimous: Dahlen was a brilliant shortstop. And it's not just our modern methods; John McGraw supposedly said, "There were mighty few better than Dahlen."

I don't know why Dahlen was ignored by the Hall of Fame's various voters and committees in the 1930s and '40s, when they were electing players from Dahlen's era. But I believe we're smarter about some things than they were. And I believe Dahlen was among the dozen greatest shortstops who have played the game.

Wes Ferrell is probably the best-hitting pitcher who's played the game, but it's hard to see a pitcher with eight good years and 193 career wins in the Hall of Fame, especially without any postseason juice (he pitched for just one pennant-winning team and didn't see any action in the World Series). Ferrell, a great pitcher for eight years who was basically finished before he turned 30, would have a Sandy Koufax sort of case, except he never had one season as good as Koufax's third best.

I go back and forth about second baseman Joe Gordon. He finished with only 1,530 hits and played in only 11 seasons. But Gordon missed prime two seasons during World War II, and in nine of his 11 seasons he was an All-Star. In those 11 seasons he hit 253 home runs, still good for sixth among second basemen on the all-time list. And he was, by all accounts, a brilliant fielder. Does all that add up to Cooperstown? Ask me next week.

I'll bet a quarter of you have never heard of old Sherry Magee, who starred for the Phillies in the dead ball era. The guy could hit, though. In 10 of his first 11 seasons, Magee finished in the top 10 in the National League in slugging percentage. From 1904 (his rookie season) through 1915, Magee might as well have been the National League's second greatest hitter (trailing only the great Honus Wagner). After a subpar 1916, Magee bounced back with solid numbers in 1917 and '18, then struggled in 1919 because of a serious illness. He was fine in 1920 … but he was fine in the minor leagues. Though still only 35 and with plenty in the tank, Magee never got back to the majors, instead putting together a few more big seasons in the minors. Things were different back then.

Carl Mays' career looks a lot like Wes Ferrell's, except Mays pitched roughly a decade earlier and Ferrell didn't kill somebody. Mays' top qualification for the Hall of Fame is his sparkling .622 winning percentage, but he did benefit from spending most of his career with the Red Sox and Yankees when those teams were winning pennants. It's long been rumored that Mays would have been elected to the Hall if not for the pitch that killed Ray Chapman. It's also been rumored that he didn't give his best effort in an early-1920s World Series game. It's indisputable that he essentially deserted the Red Sox in 1919. Some or all of these things may have kept Mays from being elected a long time ago. Most of today's voters have little or no knowledge of such things, but they do know Mays won only 207 games in his career.

Frankly, Allie Reynolds has little business on this ballot. He won only 182 games in his career, and 40 of those came during World War II when most of the world's best hitters were serving their country. He spent most of his career pitching for the great Yankees teams of the late '40s and early '50s, and was truly dominant in just one of those seasons (1952). If Reynolds hadn't been fortunate enough to pitch for the Yankees, he simply wouldn't be allowed anywhere near this conversation.

Just as Reynolds took advantage of wartime hitters, Vern Stephens took advantage of wartime pitchers; in a relatively brief career, three of his best seasons were 1943 through '45. After the war, Stephens was traded to the Red Sox and, somewhat famously, averaged 147 RBIs per season from 1948 through '50. Oh, and did I mention he was a shortstop? But Stephens was 29 in 1950, and afterward was never able to put in a full season.

Mickey Vernon is an interesting case. He missed two prime years because of the war, but played forever and finished his career with nearly 2,500 hits. If he'd played a key defensive position, he'd have been a superstar. But he was a first baseman who drove in 100 runs just once (in the same season he scored 100 runs for the only time). He did have enjoy a few other big years, but mixed in a few real clinkers, too. If not for the war, Vernon probably would have wound up with a career something like Harold Baines', except with more defensive value.

Occasionally I get a letter about the Hall of Fame from one of Bucky Walters' closest relatives. Granted, Walters had a nice run, particularly in 1939 and '40, when he won 59 games and lost only 21. But he spent the first few years of his career as a third baseman, and some of the middle years padding his record against wartime hitters (sound familiar?). Throw in just 198 wins and a 115 ERA+, and I'm afraid Walters' relatives are in for another disappointment this year.

And finally, the ballot's nod to (almost) prehistoric baseball: Deacon White, who played in the first season (1871) of the first major league (the National Association) and in the first season (1876) of the National League. White began his career as a catcher in a time when catching was nearly impossible, and he spent his entire career playing in a time when teams played significantly shorter schedules than they would later. Nevertheless, White somehow managed to collect more than 2,000 hits, and he routinely finished among his league's leaders in various hitting statistics (not that anybody knew it then). I don't know if there are any more 19th century players who deserve to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame. But if there are, Deacon White might be the best choice.

Later today, the Hall of Fame will announce the results of that body's latest and greatest version of Veterans Committee balloting. This time around, the ballot comes in two parts: post-1942 and pre-1943 (with those years corresponding to the middle of the U.S. participation in World War II), with 10 players per ballot.

Once the results are announced, I might have some thoughts on the process itself, but this morning I'm going to run through all 20 candidates. And while I could write 1,000 words about each of them, instead I'll limit myself to 100 words apiece. First, our post-1942 stars in alphabetical order …

Dick Allen is not only the greatest hitter on the post-1942 ballot, he's also one of the greatest hitters ever, with a 156 OPS+ that puts him in the company of guys like Stan Musial, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. But he was terribly erratic and unreliable in an era when an erratic, unreliable black player risked becoming a pariah. Which is what happened to Allen (granted, he deserves a fair amount of the blame for this), and which goes a long way toward explaining why the BBWAA's Hall of Fame voters never gave him even 20 percent of their support.

Gil Hodges certainly was a fine player. He was not, on the other hand, a Hall of Fame-quality player. And it's not just me who thinks that way. Hodges was an RBI man for a perennially contending team, yet he never did better than eighth in MVP balloting. Essentially, Hodges was Tony Perez but without Perez's incredibly long career (and Perez was a marginal Hall of Fame candidate who probably shouldn't have been elected). And yes, it's true that the voters are free to consider Hodges' accomplishments as a manager … but if they do that, they'd better measure Dusty Baker for his Hall of Fame plaque, too.

Jim Kaat's case comes down to one question, really: Should we lower the Hall of Fame bar from 300 wins to 280? Every eligible pitcher with 300 wins has been elected; three pitchers with 280 wins -- Kaat (283), Tommy John (288) and Bert Blyleven (287) -- have not. Of course Kaat was a very good pitcher, but he was mentioned in Cy Young balloting just once (and finished fourth). His case is built almost entirely upon his admirable durability and exceptional longevity (he pitched until he was 44). Perhaps that's enough, but the line for 280-game winners should probably form behind Blyleven.

It's often said of Tony Oliva that if his knees hadn't given out on him, he'd have been in the Hall of Fame long ago. Sure, but roughly the same may be said for dozens of other players (not to mention hundreds of sore-armed pitchers). And the facts are Oliva played only 12 full seasons, was good in only eight of those, and was great in only three or four of those. Purely in terms of value, Oliva was almost precisely as good as Albert Belle, another excellent player whose career was abbreviated by a debilitating injury.

Al Oliver first became eligible for the Hall of Fame in 1991. He picked up 19 votes and fell off the BBWAA ballot forever. Now he's back, thanks to 2,743 hits and his reputation for hitting line drives in his sleep. The only problem is Oliver was not a great player. Because he rarely walked, Oliver never scored 100 runs in a season. Because he didn't have a great deal of power, he drove in 100 runs only twice. He wasn't much of a fielder, didn't score or drive in a lot of runs. The math just doesn't work.

Some years ago, I wrote something uncomplimentary about Vada Pinson's Cooperstown credentials, and shortly afterward I received an uncomplimentary e-mail message from one of Pinson's closest relatives. Fair enough, but I'm afraid nothing has changed since then. Pinson remains a fine player who didn't make a single All-Star team after turning 22 and by his late 20s had become merely an adequate player. His 2,757 career hits are impressive, but his .327 career on-base percentage is not. Maybe that wouldn't matter if he'd won a bunch of Gold Gloves or hit a bunch of home runs. But he still hasn't.

Ron Santo is the best and most deserving candidate on the post-1942 ballot. Santo was an All-Star nine times, more than anyone else on the ballot. He hit 342 home runs, which at the time of his retirement was No. 2 all-time among third basemen. Santo also drew so many walks that he finished with a .362 on-base percentage, higher than those of Jim Rice and Andre Dawson. The one legitimate knock against Santo is he was washed up at 34, but before that he was perhaps the most durable third baseman ever. He has my whole-hearted endorsement.

I don't get the Luis Tiant argument. It's true that he won 20 games four times, which is impressive. But did you know he won more than 13 games only six times? He has the four 20-win seasons, an 18-win season, and a 15-win season. That's it. Otherwise it's a bunch of 12s and 13s. The problem for Tiant is he never won a Cy Young Award (or came close), he won only 229 games, and he was never a dominant pitcher for even two straight seasons. Those magical few weeks in 1975 can take him only so far.

My take on Joe Torre is it's not hard to find a spot for him in the Hall of Fame as a catcher, because for a catcher he was one fantastic hitter … except he was a catcher for less than half of his career. He played nearly as many games at first base as behind the plate, and he played a few seasons worth of games at third base, too. As a catcher he's a Hall of Famer, easy. But as a C/1B/3B he should have to wait for the nod as a manager. And that will come eventually.

The flaw in Maury Wills' Hall of Fame case is simple: He enjoyed his first good season in the majors when he was 27, and his last great season when he was 32. Wills gets credit for "changing the game" with his speed, which might be compelling if only it were true. In 1962, Wills destroyed the single-season record with 104 steals. But he wasn't the first player in his era to steal bases; in 1959, Luis Aparicio had stolen 56 (and stole 53 more in 1961). Wills didn't change his era; he was merely a product of his era.

In my next post, I'll review the list of pre-1943 candidates, some of them far from household names …

Dave Cameron on fielding stats:

This afternoon, I talked about why defensive statistics are not like offensive statistics, and closed with a statement about why I believe that defensive metrics should be viewed as inferential statistics, rather than the results of something that actually occurred. The definition above states it as well as anything I could write -- what we want to do with metrics like the advanced defensive statistics we currently have is to make conclusions based on probability that go beyond the data that we have.

Let's use a baseball example. The +/- system spit out a +47 rating for Chase Utley for 2008, calling him 47 plays better than an average defensive second baseman last year. It's such an amazingly high number that, on its own, it's basically unbelievable. Did Utley really display such amazing defense that he got to 47 more balls than an average fielder? And if so, how did such a remarkable performance go basically unnoticed by baseball observers?

Perhaps your initial reaction to such an unbelievable number would be to throw it out and discredit the system. After all, if I invented a metric that said that Chase Utley hit .434 last season, you'd just point to the facts and tell me I was wrong. But with defensive metrics, one of the basic tenets we have to accept is that we just can't know for certain whether an average fielder would have actually fielded a particular ball, because this mythical average fielder didn't have a chance to field that ball -- only the fielder that we're watching got a chance to field that ball. Whether anyone else could have fielded that ball has to be inferred, since it cannot be known.

This is the fundamental point to accepting defensive statistics -- they know very little and infer an awful lot.

--snip--

With several years worth of data, we can be confidant [sic] that the sample is large enough that the noise in the data can be reduced to the point where our inferences can be at least generally accurate. Viewed by itself, Utley's +47 is highly questionable. When viewed in concert with his +20 ratings in both 2006 and 2007, we can infer that Utley is probably something like a +25 defender compared to an average second baseman.

The human factor is still there, and we can't pretend like a larger sample eliminates noise entirely, but we can begin to be confident that we can describe a player's defensive value within a given range and be fairly accurate. Maybe we can't prove that Utley's a +25 fielder, but we could say that the probability of his real defensive value being between +20 and +30 is very high.

When someone tells you that defensive statistics simply aren't as reliable as their offensive brethren, they're right -- there's no doubt that the tools we have to measure offense are more precise than the ones to measure defense. But as statistics like UZR and +/- have come along, our ability to infer reasonably accurate conclusions about defensive value has grown immensely. They aren't perfect, but when viewed as a data point, and analyzed as an inferential statistic, we can gather all kinds of information that we've never had before. And that's exciting.

Indeed.

I've referenced, many times, various defensive metrics, particularly John Dewan's +/- and BP's Fielding Runs Above Average (FRAA). There are others, probably equally as relevant. But when I'm filling out my Fielding Bible ballot, I don't rely on just one season of them. What I'm striving for is confidence. And the more data I've got, the more confidence I have. What I do is sort of combine everything I've got, haphazardly.

There is an obvious next step, though, and I'm surprised nobody's taken it (publicly, at least). As you probably know, baseball analyst Nate Silver took the political media by storm this fall with his polling analysis, which is based on analyzing a large variety in sophisticated ways. Well, why hasn't the same thing happened with reputable defensive metrics?

The answer, I think, is that many of the people smart enough to carry off such a thing have already come up with their own methods, and they don't want to admit (publicly) that there might be a better way. Silver probably can't do it because BP's already got a proprietary system. Mitchel Lichtman probably can't do it because he's invested a great deal of energy in his Ultimate Zone Ratings. John Dewan probably can't do it because he's written entire (excellent) books predicated on the efficacy and reliability of +/-.

I'm not at all sure that an enterprising young sabermetrician should spend any time trying to top all those smart guys with a new system for analyzing raw fielding data. But taking all the smart guys' work and mashing it up, Nate Silver-style, to get something loaded with confidence? That has to be worth a few hours.

Paul DePodesta on trading Khalil Greene to the Cardinals for a Triple-A reliever and a mystery player:

First and foremost, Khalil created a lot of great memories here in San Diego. The first round pick of the Padres in 2002, Khalil quickly made his way through the minor league system and made his Major League debut at the end of 2003, never to return to the minors. In addition to stellar defensive play at shortstop, Khalil's five full seasons here resulted in 82 homers and more than 300 rbi. The Cardinals got a good player, and I would guess he's going to have a very nice year for them.

For the Padres, we bring back RHP Mark Worrell and a PTBNL. A 2004 draft out of Florida International, Mark has spent the past two seasons at AAA Memphis: 126 ip, 103 h, 56 bb, and 146 k's. Mark is a sidearmer with some funk to his delivery, but he'll still run it up to 92 mph and typically pitches around 89-90. Despite his sidearming delivery, Mark has been very tough on both left-handed hitters and right-handed hitters, and we think he has a good chance to contribute to our Major League bullpen in 2009 and beyond. He is currently protected on the 40-man roster and has options remaining.

--snip--

In all candor, the other part of this deal is the trade of Khalil's contract which was due to pay him $6.5 million in 2009. There are times when we have to make tough choices, and unfortunately finances do play a role. The Padres certainly aren't alone in that reality. Fortunately for us, this move provides us some flexibility in our other dealings, which could be very helpful going forward through this winter and provides us some more definition as we approach next week's Winter Meetings.

DePodesta overstates Greene's case a little. In his five seasons with the Padres, Greene was a pretty good player in three of them. I can't find anything to suggest that he was ever a "stellar" defensive player, but he was fine in 2006 and 2007 (otherwise, not so much). But I'm not surprised that DePodesta wrote such nice things about Greene. We're lucky to have DePo blogging, but the one downside (for us) is that he really has to maintain a positive outlook whenever possible. And in this case he can at least claim plausible deniability.

Now, about the rest of this … $6.5 million is not a great deal of money to spend on an everyday shortstop, and if that $6.5 million is really an issue for the Padres, then things are even worse than I thought. Between DePodesta talking about $6.5 million and CEO Sandy Alderson admitting that owner John Moores' impending divorce could impact the budget (sorry, I can't find a link), it seems clear that the financial situation in San Diego is bleak, and Moores' minions are preparing everyone for another bleak season.

Today's links are brought to you with peace, love, and understanding …

• Did you know that David Kingman started 18 games at Fenway Park and hit 13 home runs? I didn't. But Joe Posnanski does, and so much more.

• T.R. Sullivan runs though the top contenders on his Hall of Fame ballot and, after dismissing Bert Blyleven, writes, "Somebody explain to me what I'm missing?????" All I can say is that we've tried; oh, how we've tried.

• I've referenced this already, but I have to again recommend Chris Dutton's and Peter Bendix's newfangled analysis of batters and BABiP. I'm not smart enough to know if their work is essential … but I'm fairly sure that it is. And while maybe not essential, Josh Kalk's answer to the question "What makes Jamie Moyer effective at 45?" sure is interesting.

• I'm guessing that half of them are apocryphal, but that doesn't mean we can't still enjoy these 25 best Rickey Henderson stories of all time.

• Consider this my annual salute to the amazing Len Kasper.

• Read this (including the update), then this, and then tell me if anybody really knows what's happening. With any degree of significance, I mean. We can revisit if the Tigers eventually do get Jack Wilson …

• Speaking of crazy rumors, Joel Sherman says there was never anything at all to the stories about the Mets trading for Bobby Jenks and Jermaine Dye. But Sherman says the Mets are interested in J.J. Putz, who the Mariners have made "available." This wouldn't surprise me at all, because the M's have been making a fair amount of sense lately, and trading Putz for two or three young players would make a great deal of sense.

Robothal on what might be a fascinating turn of events in Oakland:

The A's remain the front-runner to sign free-agent shortstop Rafael Furcal, but that might not be their last major off-season move.
Picture Randy Johnson in the green and gold, winning his 300th game in an Oakland uniform.
The idea is not as bizarre as it might sound.
The A's are targeting Johnson to be their fifth starter, major-league sources say, figuring he would give their rotation a veteran presence while commanding only a one-year deal.
At the moment, the A's top four starters are Justin Duchscherer, Dana Eveland, Gio Gonzalez and Sean Gallagher. None of them threw as many innings last season as Johnson did for the Diamondbacks -- 184.
Johnson, who is only five victories short of 300, could boost attendance as he approached that milestone. With Johnson, Furcal and left fielder Matt Holliday, the A's would gain not only star power, but also the chance to contend.
Don't look for free-agent designated hitter Jason Giambi to join that group. Rather than bring him back, the A's might prefer to take a chance on a trade for Nationals first baseman Nick Johnson, who missed most of last season with a right-wrist injury.

Here's what I want to write about this:

If the A's sign Rafael Furcal and Randy Johnson and Jason Giambi (oft-injured Johnson is the last thing the oft-injured Athletics need), they'll be my front-runners in the American League West. Particularly if the Angels don't sign CC Sabathia or bring back Mark Teixeira. Furcal, if he's healthy, would represent a huge upgrade over Bobby Crosby. Johnson and Giambi's underlying performances in 2008 both suggest they'll be relative bargains in 2009.

I've written about Johnson before, but just to review a few key points:

• He started 30 games this year, and in fact has started at least 30 games in four of the last five seasons

• His underlying stats were even better than his 3.91 ERA

• Relatedly, his strikeout rate this year was the sixth best in the National League.

I don't know that I've written about Giambi, so I'll note here that Giambi hit 32 homers and drew 76 walks in 2008. As a hitter, his only weakness was that he batted only .247. … But according to this important study (about which more later), Giambi was terribly unlucky in 2008 and was fundamentally a .280 hitter rather a .250 hitter.

Johnson's 45 and Giambi's almost 38. But the best predictor of future performance is not age, but past performance. And each player's past performance suggests he'll perform effectively in the majors in 2009.

So why can't I write what I want to write? Because while I'd be more than comfortable with Randy Johnson as my No. 5 starter, I'm worried that he might wind up as the A's No. 1 starter. Duchscherer was hurt last year, and the combination of Eveland, Gallagher and Gonzalez have combined for the thrilling total of 15 wins as major league starters: nine for Eveland, five for Gallagher and one for Gonzalez.

I don't care who the A's sign this winter. Considering their projected rotation, I think it's impossible to rate them as anything but possible contenders before next June or July.

Hard to figure how this isn't a great deal for MLB's No. 1 organization …

The Red Sox wasted no time locking up American League MVP Dustin Pedroia with a six-year, $40.5 million contract, with an option for 2015, that takes them through three arbitration and two free-agent seasons.
--snip--
It is one of the four biggest nonarbitration deals ever, along with the contracts given to Hanley Ramirez, David Wright and Ryan Braun.
The 25-year-old second baseman will receive a signing bonus of $1.5 million and a salary of $1.5 million in 2009, followed by salaries of $3.5 million, $5.5 million and $8 million in what would have been his three years of arbitration eligibility. Pedroia would earn $10 million salaries in 2013 and 2014.
The deal, negotiated by agents Sam and Seth Levinson, also includes a team option to pay him $11 million in 2015 or buy him out for $500,000. If Pedroia is traded, the option would be voided.
If he wins another MVP, his 2014 salary and 2015 option would increase by $2 million each. If he finishes second or third, they would go up by $1 million each, and he can accomplish that escalator twice.

Just to be clear about a couple of things …

This sort of deal is fantastic for teams like the Marlins (Hanley Ramirez), the Brewers (Ryan Braun) and the Rays (Evan Longoria), because it's vitally important for teams with serious budgetary concerns to lock up their great players for as long as possible. In each of those cases, the team is highly likely to be receiving great value for their dollars in the out years of the contract.

I believe it's just slightly less fantastic for the Red Sox, who don't have to worry nearly as much about cost control. This is still a great move, though. They probably won't have to worry about second base for many years, and -- considering that he turns 32 in 2015 -- Pedroia figures to be a good player, at the very least, throughout the life of the contract.

The MVP kickers are practically irrelevant for the Red Sox -- the term "rounding error" comes to mind -- but historically the notion of Pedroia's winning a second MVP Award is somewhat startling. Do you know how many second basemen have won two MVPs?

One: Little Joe Morgan.

Is Pedroia heading for the Hall of Fame, too?

Quite possibly. But let's not get too carried away. When Morgan was 21, 22 and 23, his OPS+ numbers were 131, 132 and 131. When Pedroia was 21 and 22, he was in the minors; at 23 and 24, his OPS+ numbers in the majors, even while winning Rookie of the Year and MVP awards, have been 112 and 122. Morgan's career was sidetracked for a few years by an injury before he peaked in his early 30s. But my opinion is that Morgan's underlying talent was greater than Pedroia's.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Little Joe is the most talented second baseman we've ever seen. Pedroia doesn't have to be Joe Morgan, or even a Hall of Famer, to more than justify his new contract. He just has to stay healthy and happy.

As far as I know, Tom Krasovic confirmed it first:

The Padres and Cardinals have agreed to a trade that will send shortstop Khalil Greene to St. Louis.
The Padres are expected to get pitching in return for Greene, but this move appears to be more about moving Greene's $6.5 million salary in anticipation of a much smaller payroll in 2009.
The move could improve the club's chances of retaining ace pitcher Jake Peavy or gaining leverage in trade talks involving Peavy, who is guaranteed $11 million next year and $63 million over the next four years.
The Padres have shopped Peavy for three months without finding a deal. Braves shortstop Yunel Escobar was part of talks involving Peavy, but as of Tuesday the Padres and Braves had not revisited those talks.
Greene, 28, has been the Padres' primary shortstop since 2004. A first-round draft pick of the Padres in 2002, he batted .213 with 10 home runs and 100 strikeouts last season, one year after hitting 27 home runs and 44 doubles.
His frustration over a season-long hitting slump boiled over July 30, when Greene punched a storage chest in a clubhouse tunnel at Petco Park, fracturing his left hand. He missed the final two months of 2008 because of the injury.

This year, Greene was an utter disaster, maybe the biggest disappointment in the majors aside from Andruw Jones. Last year he was pretty good (with all those homers and doubles balanced by a .291 on-base percentage). Two years ago he was good enough to play regularly, but not by a lot. But as a 29-year-old shortstop next season with a $6.5 million salary, Greene's the sort of guy a budget-conscious team like the Cardinals can easily justify acquiring. Especially considering their shortstop last season was Cesar Izturis.

Anyone see a connection between these two items from my colleagues?

First, Peter Gammons:

"There's no question this is a dual market situation," says one GM. "The corner bat/DH market is flooded, and the stock market is drowning. Not a good combination, not when pitching rules the market."
"The other thing is that teams are moving away from the base offensive statistics," says another GM. "They are pouring through defensive studies and seeing that below-average defenders like [Manny] Ramirez and [Pat] Burrell in the field depreciate their offensive numbers because of what they give up."

Next, Jerry Crasnick:

In addition, Dunn's price might be dropping in a down market. Two NL officials wondered whether Dunn would command even a Jose Guillen-caliber, three-year, $36 million deal from a team other than Washington.
"[The Nationals] might have to pay a bit of a premium for him to go to a team that has not won recently," one of the executives said.

I agree with Craig Calcaterra: "if Dunn can't get a Jose Guillen deal we've gone from a tough market to comically irrational pessimism."

There's also this, though: Dunn, like Ramirez and Burrell, is a pretty lousy outfielder (though not as lousy as them, yet). All of these guys are worth a great deal of money. But while Ramirez might be a $25 million hitter, he is not a $25 million baseball player because he gives away a bunch of runs when he's in the outfield. Same goes for Burrell, a $12 million hitter but an $8 million player.

For years, everybody in baseball paid a great deal of lip service to defense but paid very little attention at contract time. Sure, Ozzie Smith got his money, but that's only because he was so awesome that nobody had to guess. With everybody else, though? Your scouts might tell you that Jose Canseco was an awful outfielder, but you couldn't put a number on his glove so you just didn't worry about it too much.

Now, though? Some teams have numbers, and most of the teams that don't are smart enough to at least glance at John Dewan's Fielding Bible data or Baseball Prospectus' Fielding Runs. According to Dewan, Burrell's been the worst-fielding left fielder in the majors for three years running, roughly 25 "plays" worse than average over the course of a season. According to BP, Burrell over the last two seasons has been 15 runs worse than average per season. It's such a fundamental thing but is so often ignored: all those plays lead to runs allowed, and those runs count, too. Doesn't mean he's not a good and valuable player. Does mean that if you ignore his defense when you're figuring out how much he's worth, you're going to overshoot by a big chunk of change.

Teams are figuring this out. Of course there's always going to be a dummy out there who hasn't gotten the memo yet. But there might not be enough dummies for all the sluggardly sluggers to get the contracts they believe they so richly deserve.

Today's links were ferried across the Mississippi from Modoc, Illinois to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri …

• Do you have some time to kill? If not, don't bother checking out Maury Brown's interview of Rick Peterson. I'm not saying it's not well worth reading. I'm saying that Peterson loves to talk about pitching. (I once interviewed him in an alcove off the A's locker room. He said he could give me a couple of minutes, and we wound up running through both sides of a micro-cassette. I was distraught when I later discovered that my recorder picked up little but the droning of the nearby air conditioner. Lesson learned.)

• In the Philadelphia Daily News, Stan Hochman takes a few shots at Bill James while making a Cooperstown case for Dick Allen, who's on the Veterans Committee ballot (the results of which will be announced next week). For many years, Bill's point has been that Allen was so difficult to manage that he hurt his teams more than his big bat helped them. Any number of people have attempted to rebut Bill's charge, and to some extent I believe they've been successful. I'm still not sold, though. Not only because Allen could be a hard guy to manage. But because often he wasn't available to manage; Allen didn't enjoy a particularly long career, and during that career he managed to play more than 130 games in only six seasons (including his first three seasons). My problem with Allen isn't that he didn't play well enough or hard enough; it's that he didn't play often enough.

• This is the first I've seen of blogger "wezen-ball", but he's off to a good start with this look back at a 1981 preview of 2000. What jumps out is MLB's labor relations guy -- i.e. hatchet man -- saying that baseball wouldn't be able to survive in 2000 if players were making a million dollars a year. Good times …

(Tip of the chapeau to BTF's Newsstand, but now I've got wezen-ball bookmarked...)

• Dave Cameron's take on the reported Javier Vazquez trade: Vazquez is wonderfully durable but can't seem to strand runners as often as he should, and it's not at all clear that he's worth $11.5 million per season and the four prospects the Braves gave up to get him. If the Braves don't win something with Vazquez or a couple of the prospects pan out, I suppose the deal won't look so hot.

• According to Danny Knobler, the Rays are willing to trade Jason Bartlett -- supposedly their most valuable player -- and they're interesting in trading for Delmon Young (who of course they traded to the Twins just a year ago). It's hard to put a great deal of stock in these rumors, but neither should they be all that surprising, as this is classic financial strategy: buy low, sell high. Bartlett's value will never be higher than it is right now (and as Knobler notes, the Rays have two younger shortstops waiting in the wings). And it's quite possible that Young's stock will never be lower (at least not until 2023 or thereabouts). My guess, though, is that the Twins will swear off trading with the Rays for a while, as the last time didn't go so well for them.

• Bronx Banter's Alex Belth just keeps piling up his series of Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories. Lately he's featured star turns from Charlie Sheen (?), Joe Posnanski and, in case you missed it, here's my humble contribution to the project.

Harold Baines a Hall of Famer? Well, no. But he certainly has his supporters:

Those in the know with the White Sox believe Baines deserves a better Hall of Fame fate. Along with Baines' tremendous RBI total, placing him 28th all-time, the left-handed slugger finished with a .289 average, 384 home runs, 488 doubles, 1,299 runs scored, 1,062 walks against just 1,441 strikeouts and a most impressive 2,830 games played. Baines also checks in at 2,866 career hits, ranking him 40th, but also leaving him 134 short of what has been considered the magic number for enshrinement.
This particular number bothers [White Sox owner Jerry] Reinsdorf more so than Baines. [Reinsdorf], who counts Baines as one of his favorite people, feels somewhat personally responsible for Baines coming up short of 3,000.
"What really has bothered me for a long time is that if we hadn't traded him, he would have his 3,000 hits and he would be a lock for the Hall of Fame," said Reinsdorf, who oversaw Baines' trade to Texas on July 29, 1989 and to Baltimore on July 29, 1997. "We traded him twice and into bad situations where he was a platoon player.
"If he stayed with us, he would have gone over 3,000 hits. If he doesn't get in, it would really bug me. I talk to him about it, and he just shrugs it off."

By all accounts, Harold Baines is a classy sort of fellow, and I enjoyed watching him play (which meant watching him hit, mostly). I don't think you need me to tell you that he wasn't really a Hall of Fame sort of player. He was slow -- he stole 34 bases in 22 years -- and was a full-time outfielder for only seven seasons before shifting to a less demanding role (DH). I have questioned Gil Hodges' Hall of Fame credentials based, in part, on the fact that he never finished better than seventh in MVP voting. Well, Baines never did better than ninth. Quite frankly, for the great majority of his career of his career he was considered a good player rather than a great one.

Oh, and while Baines' clutch hitting is repeatedly held up as perhaps his greatest credential, when you actually look at Baines' clutch stats you find exactly what you would expect to find in a player with a career as long as Baines': His clutch stats look almost exactly like his overall stats.

Anyway, I'm not so interested in Baines' Hall of Fame credentials (or not). What's interesting to me is the notion that if Baines had reached 3,000 hits, he'd be a Hall of Famer. In 2007, Baines' first year of eligibility, he got 29 votes; to be elected, he needed 409.

Is it really reasonable to think that if Baines had just been able to cobble together another 134 hits over 22 years, he'd have picked up the support of another 380 Hall of Fame voters?

I've got a pretty lousy track record when it comes to reading the minds of the voting BBWAA members. But I have to say no. Baines certainly would have gained a great deal of support, with hundreds of writers and many thousands of White Sox fans getting exceptionally emotional about their 3,000-hits guy. I'm not at all sure he'd have fared as well as Reinsdorf seems to think. While it might seem unimaginable to see a non-steroids-tainted 3,000-hits guy left out of the Coop, I'll bet it becomes a lot more imaginable Edgar Renteria or Johnny Damon becomes one of those guys.

(Tip of the bowler to BTF's Newsstand.)

Rich Lederer's got a team-by-team rundown of which players have been offered arbitration and which weren't. Remember, if you offer a player arbitration and he doesn't accept, you may well be eligible for free draft picks if he signs with another club. If you lose a Type A you (usually) get the signing team's first-round pick and a "sandwich" pick (between the first and second rounds of the June draft). If you lose a Type B, you get just one, lesser pick.

First, a couple of snippets about players who were not offered arbitration:

The Adam Dunn trade no longer looks favorable for the D-Backs. Losing Dallas Buck, Wilkin Castillo and Micah Owings for two months of Dunn seems silly in the face of not re-signing or offering arbitration to the slugger who has hit 40 or more homers and walked at least 100 times in each of the past five seasons.
Kerry Wood just became more attractive to other teams now that they won't have to give up a first-round draft pick.

Agreed on every point. Except to say the Adam Dunn deal "no longer looks favorable" might be the understatement of this offseason (so far). I believed it was a reasonable move at the time, and without even thinking much about the draft picks the Diamondbacks would eventually pick up after Dunn signed with some other team. But now, though? No division title or draft picks? It might have been a decent bet, but man, did that one not pay off.

And now, a couple of snippets about four who were offered arbitration, all of them Type A free agents:

The Red Sox really can't lose with Jason Varitek. Either he agrees to arbitration and comes back for one year (which is the max Boston cares to go at this point in his career) or the Sox pick up a couple draft picks.
There is no chance that Mark Teixeira or Francisco Rodriguez accept arbitration. On the other hand, the Angels will get a boatload of draft picks should Tex and K-Rod move on. Hard to believe that Darren Oliver is a Type A free agent. That designation will limit interest from other clubs. Look for him and Jon Garland (who would be assured of getting at least $9.6M if he returned) to take the Angels up on their arbitration offers.

I'm not completely convinced it's either/or with Varitek. What if he doesn't want to sign for just one year, but is willing to play for two years and accept a backup role? Wouldn't the Red Sox at least consider that? I do agree that the Sox are playing this perfectly, as now they really can't lose (unless they do re-sign Varitek and let him waste 400 plate appearances next season). Same for the Angels, except I'm not absolutely convinced they should have offered arbitration to Jon Garland, a Type B who won't net them a big-time draft pick if he signs elsewhere.

Anyway, it's worth reading the whole thing. It's not like there's anything else going on today.

In his Pinstriped Blog mailbag, Steven Goldman answers a couple of pointed questions about Derek Jeter's future in the 'stripes …

If Jeter's 2008 stats represent a trend, his bat and his glove and rapidly converging on the point where there is no position he can play -- his bat will only be suitable for the middle infield and his glove will only play at a corner. The guy turns 35 next year -- this is to be expected, yet I imagine it's difficult for some to write so honestly about an icon. There is no prospect pushing Jeter from within the Yankees organization, and no free agent shortstop so good that one could make a reasonable argument for signing him, with all the controversy that would entail.
In the absence of alternatives, many of the same writers who should be out in front of the Jeter story will be making the sentimental case for granting him a contract extension a year from now.
-- snip --
There is no guarantee that Jeter can learn to play second base at his advanced age, and even if he could, there's a good chance his lack of range at short would hamper him at the keystone as well. There's also not much likelihood that Jeter would entertain the thought.

First of all, while it's true that "Jeter's bat and glove are converging to the point where there's no position he can play," in a sense that's true of every player, right? Jeter's more talented than most, but he's subject to the ravages of aging just like everyone else. By the standards of Western society, Jeter is still a young man. But by the standards of Major League Baseball, he's almost eligible for full Social Security benefits.

That said -- and I'm surprised to find myself defending one of the more overrated players ever -- I wouldn't be too worried about Cap'n Jetes' performance in 2008, any more than I was terribly excited about his brilliant performance in 2006. Here are Jeter's Win Shares for the past nine seasons:

23 28 24 19 26 26 32 24 18

It's more likely that Jeter's relatively poor performance this year was due more to randomness than decrepitude, and I expect him to bounce back nicely next year with something like 25 Win Shares. Well, more than 20, anyway. And if you can rack up 20 Win Shares, you can play every day for just about anybody.

Which isn't to suggest the Yankees should throw a billion dollars at Jeter next winter (or sooner). Because if they're paying him a ton of money for five years, they're going to feel like they have to play him regularly for five years, and in four or five years he will not be good enough to play every day. For the Yankees the money isn't the issue; the issue is the games, the at-bats, the plate appearances.

And as Goldman suggests, second base probably isn't the answer. Even if he can actually play second base, whatever you gain in defense you're likely to lose in positional scarcity. What you're trying to do is win games, and you don't win any more games with Jeter playing second base than you win with him playing shortstop. Essentially it's quite a simple thing: Aside from the likely uptick next season, Jeter's going to become less and less valuable over the next five or six years because there's really no other way for the math to work.

Do you think the Steinbrothers will have the courage to let him become less and less valuable for some other team?

Last week, I raised an unanswerable question: What happens to a 290-pound pitcher as he ages? Well, shortly after I wrote that blog post, I opened up the latest Sports Illustrated and found that Ben Reiter tries to answer the question …

Sabathia is listed at 6'7" and 290 pounds, although one wonders if the scale involved in that measurement was borrowed from an especially disreputable pawn shop. He is a behemoth -- only 295-pound reliever Jumbo Brown, who began a 12-year career in 1925, is heavier among pitchers in big league history. Sabathia's bulk has long caused baseball pundits to question his long-term durability, and a subset of Red Sox fans has even begun to express hope that the Yankees (who two weeks ago offered him a six-year, $140 million contract, a record for a pitcher) will sign him, the Sox supporters believing that he'll either break down or eat himself into oblivion. In a recent ESPN the Magazine column in which he listed several reasons why he loves sports, noted Red Sox fan Bill Simmons wrote, "Reason No. 947: The thought of 365-pound CC Sabathia laboring through a 98 [degree] game at Yankee Stadium in 2012 with four more years and $105 million remaining on his contract. Please, God. I don't ask for much."
But the message from each of the half-dozen experts contacted for this piece -- a group that included doctors, academics and pitching gurus (none of whom know or have personally examined Sabathia) -- was uniform: Be careful what you pray for, Mr. Simmons. While signing a pitcher to a free-agent deal always represents a gamble, they concede, the odds that he'll stay healthy aren't lengthened as you move from L to XXXL. In layman's terms, one can effectively be both a pitcher and a belly-itcher. "I'm not aware of any evidence that directly correlates size with injury," says the University of Washington's Dr. Stanley Herring, who is a team physician for the Mariners and the Seahawks. "It's not just size. It's lean body mass, training, conditioning, power, strength, endurance. There are a lot of pitchers who make you want to say, 'Hey, man, put a shirt on -- this isn't pretty.' But it's not just what the package looks like; it's what's inside."
"Mass is just one piece of the puzzle," says Jill McNitt-Gray, a professor in the University of Southern California's department of kinesiology and the author of such beach reading as "Landing Strategy Adjustments Made by Female Gymnasts in Response to Drop Height and Mat Composition." "The key issue is, can the athlete control all the mass that he has, through the proper coordinated muscle action? You have to have the physical preparation -- the training -- that leads to that result."
Despite his outward appearance, Sabathia's training regimen has rarely been questioned, and it's something on which he prides himself. "I work my ass off every day," he told me two springs ago, in the only moment during a 45-minute interview during which the good-natured lefty got a bit testy. "So whoever wants to criticize me, tell them to come work out with me one day and see if they can hang."

I suppose sumo wrestlers have tough training regimens, too. Doesn't mean they can throw 220 innings every season for the next five or six years.

OK, so the analogy isn't particularly instructive. My point is that everyone seems to be sort of guessing. And while perhaps 290 pounds is no problem at all, do we know what Sabathia will look like in five years? Will he still be 290(ish)? What if, despite his training regimen, he naturally moves up to 320(ish)? What if he gets tired of working so hard, and decides his ideal fighting weight is closer to 350? Is that all right, too?

I just think all these questions are worth asking and -- if you're thinking about signing Sabathia -- worth answering. If I were running a team, I would be comfortable signing Sabathia to a three- or four-year contract, and less comfortable with going farther.

If I were running the Yankees (or the Mets), though, I would be less comfortable even with the shorter term. Can you imagine how much fun the guys who write the headlines for the Post and the Daily News would have with Sabathia if his weight ballooned and his ERA followed? New York's writers, broadcasters and fans love a big target, and a struggling Sabathia would be the biggest target in baseball that anyone has ever seen.

Apparently this worry has not dissuaded the Yankees, and maybe it shouldn't. But I believe it might dissuade the potential target himself.

How much is Gil Meche worth? According to FanGraphs' Eric Seidman, maybe more than you think …

Following the 2006 season, Gil Meche inked a [five-year, $55 million] contract with the Kansas City Royals. The deal underwent immediate scrutiny due to Meche's below average performance throughout the previous few seasons. His ERA ranged from 4.48 to 5.09, with [a] FIP entrenched in the 4.60-4.70 area. Simply put, an average annual value of [$11 million] did not seem appropriate for someone with his credentials. Perhaps Dayton Moore, who apparently goes by the nickname DMGM, knew what he was doing, because Meche has established himself as a solid and consistent pitcher over the past two seasons.
--snip--
Last year, the average dollar figure per win was around [$4.5-4.75 million]. With inflation, I'll call this year's amount a firm $5 million per win. [That's] 2.5 wins multiplied by $5 million per win amounts to $12.5 million. That is, if Meche were a free agent right now and signed a [one-year] deal, $13.8 million would be an appropriate fee. For multi-year deals, we usually factor in a 10 [percent] discount rate, since players tend to sacrifice a bit of their monetary value for some security. With that in mind, a [three-year] deal for Meche would come out to $37.3 million. A [five-year] deal would be valued at $62.1 million.
Meche may not have seemed worth the money back in 2006, but as of right now, his average annual value would be somewhere around $12.4 million, above the 11 mil in his actual contract.

I have absolutely no issues with Seidman's math (and by the way, if Seidman really is 22 -- as his bio says -- this kid's got some future in this game). But dollars per win can take you only so far. In a vacuum, there's no better way to evaluate a contract. But contracts don't exist in a vacuum; they exist within a particular context, and that context is different for every team.

Does Mariano Rivera's $15 million salary make sense for the Yankees? Absolutely.

Would Rivera's salary make sense for the Rays? Absolutely not. You can't spend a third of your payroll on a 70-inning pitcher.

I will happily admit that I've been wrong about Gil Meche's performance. After never throwing more than 186 innings in six seasons with the Mariners, he has topped 200 innings in both seasons with the Royals, posting sub-4.00 ERAs in both years. I was not, however, wrong about Meche's contract, which was not a good one for the Royals.

Why not? Because big contracts don't make sense for losing teams. In Meche's two seasons the Royals have finished 69-93 and 75-87, with a .500 record still just a fantasy. Now, the argument that has been made is that while Meche might not push the Royals into contention all by himself, signing him "showed the Royals are serious" and would thus attract both fans and free agents.

Fans? The Royals finished last in attendance this year, next-to-last the year before. Free agents? The only notable free agent they've signed since Meche came aboard is Jose Guillen (about whom the less said, the better).

Now, it should be said that Meche's contract still is quite valuable. He's signed for two more years for reasonable figures, and if the Royals were a Strat-O-Matic team you would trade his card to someone in your league for two or three prospects. But of course now we're getting back into that vacuum. Of course the Royals should trade Meche. They would have a better chance of someday winning 90 games if they traded him this winter, or perhaps next summer. But there are only a few organizations bold enough to make such a move, and the Royals pretty obviously aren't one of them.

Someday, the historians will look at Gil Meche's statistics and his salaries and conclude that the Royals got their money's worth, and then some. Today, though, those dollars are just another example of the mismanagement that has plagued the franchise for nearly 25 years.

Today's Mendozas were conceived, discarded and reconceived deep within a Cold War-era bomb shelter near Sapulpa, Okla.

• Nationals manager Manny Acta seems like a super-smart guy. I hope he actually wins some games someday.

• As many of you know, Cot's Baseball Contracts is the go-to site for information about contracts, salaries and potential free agents. Last week John Donovan wrote about the brain behind the site.

(H/T: BBTF's Newsstand)

• How much control do pitchers really have? As John Walsh writes, maybe not as much as you think. Speaking of which, I once read a quote from a major league pitcher -- I wish I could remember which one -- in which he addressed this very point. People think major leaguers can throw the ball wherever they want every time, but they really can't. The difference between a good pitcher and a lousy pitcher is that a good pitcher can throw the ball within six inches of where he wants, but a lousy pitcher might often miss by a foot.

• Finally, Chris Carpenter gets his five minutes of fame.

• The Rule 5 draft is next week, and Marc Hulet reviews the best pitchers likely to be available. He also lists the best players actually drafted in each of the past 11 drafts, and I'm reminded again that we've seen an amazing run recently. From 2004 through 2006, Shane Victorino, Dan Uggla, Josh Hamilton and Joakim Soria were grabbed in the Rule 5 draft, and that has to be the most productive three-season run in the draft's history. I'm not sure it means anything. But it sure is interesting.

• A year ago, Tim Kawakami advised the Giants to trade Tim Lincecum for Alex Rios. … OK, now that you've stopped laughing, give Kawakami a few cups of credit for revisiting that (now) odd-looking opinion.

• Amid Doug Glanville's birthday wishes to his big brother, we find yet another reason to like little brother: He won a Strat-O-Matic championship before he turned 10!

• "The Hardball Times Baseball Annual" is out, and after spending some time with my copy this past weekend, I can heartily recommend the book (and that would be true even if I weren't in it).