There’s an old joke about a guy who’s just lost everything — marriage, job, home — and decides to end it all, so he goes to the top of the Empire State Building and jumps. As he’s plummeting to his doom, at the last possible second he performs a triple somersault and lands on his feet, completely unharmed. Two cats are watching across the street and one says to the other, “See? That’s how you do that.”

Since taking over the Cubs front office in October, 2011, Theo Epstein has been carrying out a three-pronged rebuilding plan: (1) acquire a stable of fast-developing power hitters; (2) find a #1 starter; and (3) rebuild the roster with a yard sale. The first prong is coming along well, with Arismendy Alcantara joining Anthony Rizzo in the majors and another wave (including but not necessarily limited to Kris Bryant, Javy Baez, and Jorge Soler) on the way soon. The second prong has borne no fruit yet; there is still no one in the Cubs system that realistically projects as an ace.

The jury is still out on the third prong, which has involved international signings of, and trades for, young players who in some cases are several years away from the majors. But at least on the surface, Theo has made the most out of the tattered wares in his basement. This is especially true of the parade of pitchers (some he inherited and some he acquired as reclamation projects) that he has, for the most part, successfully sold high.  For the most part the folks stopping by Crazy Theo’s Pitching Palace have walked away happy, only to soon suffer buyer’s remorse.

Here’s a list of pitchers Theo has traded away, together with the principal player received in return. In this post, all slash numbers are ERA/FIP – the first pair is the player’s numbers with the Cubs, and the second are his numbers with the team that acquired him.

Sean Marshall  (3.96/4.02 , 3.27/2.67 (CIN))

Swag: Travis Wood

Skinny: Marshall’s thrown just 24 innings since 2012.

Andrew Cashner    (4.29/4.84, 3.08/3.25 (SDP))

Swag: Anthony Rizzo

Skinny: Trade could end up helping both clubs, though Cashner’s durability is still questionable.

Paul Maholm  (3.74/4.14, 4.14/4.09 (ATL))

Swag: Arodys Vizcaino

Skinny: Vizcaino could be a future closer, but the T.J. survivor has logged just 34 IP in the minors this year.

Ryan Dempster (3.74/3.78, 5.09/4.08 (TEX))

Swag: Kyle Hendricks

Skinny: Hendricks is already benefiting from the long Wrigley grass.

Scott Feldman  (3.46/3.93, 4.27/4.13 (BAL))

Swag: Jake Arrieta

Skinny: Arrieta won’t defy gravity forever, but some of his improvement may be for real.

Matt Garza  (3.45/3.45, 4.38/3.96 (TEX))

Swag:  C.J. Edwards

Skinny: Rangers got little from this deal, in which they also gave away Neil Ramirez, Mike Olt, and Justin Grimm.

Jeff Samardzija  (3.97/3.80, 3.19/4.00 (OAK))

Swag: Addison Russell

Skinny: Sharknado 2 is about as good as the original, but his 2014 FIP jumped a run after the trade.

Jason Hammel  (2.98/3.19, 9.53/7.31 (OAK))

Swag:  Addison Russell

Skinny: Might be time to try pine tar, Jason.

Epstein hasn’t been able to spin all the lead into gold: he may have held onto Travis Wood past the sell-by date, and Edwin Jackson, inked to a union-appeasing contract, has been barrel-bomb bad and is now unmovable. Taken together, however, these trades brought 60% of the Cubs’ current rotation, two guys (Rizzo and Reed) who may have numerous all-star seasons in them, and a potential closer of the future. In virtually no case except Cashner did the player traded improve after the trade. (Marshall had one good year in the Reds’ bullpen, but he’s spent the bulk of the last  2 seasons in the trainer’s room.)

See? That’s how you do that.

The Red Sox made some noise this trade deadline.  On a day that was similar to August 25, 2012 when the Red Sox and Dodgers completed the Nick Punto trade, Boston unloaded key pieces to the 2013 world championship team.

The players they acquired show a clear stance to contend in 2015, just as Dave and Paul stated before.  Yoenis Cespedes and Allen Craig add something the Red Sox have lacked for quite some time now: right-handed, power hitting outfielders. However, these additions add question marks to the surplus of outfielders the Red Sox now have.  With Mike Carp designated for assignment, they now have Cespedes, Craig, Victorino, Bradley, Holt, Nava, and recently called up Mookie Betts who have all seen time in the outfield this season.

Cespedes will occupy one of those spots, most likely in right field with Victorino moving back to the DL.  Craig will probably take over in left.  Holt will be a super utility man who can fill in for literally any of the seven positions not called catcher and pitcher.  Nava will most likely be a fourth outfielder, or he could possibly platoon with Craig in left.

Craig has had a down year, but has had injury woes and still has a 110 wRC+ against LHP this year.  He owns a career wRC+ of 136 against lefties.  That figures to be an ideal platoon situation with Nava who owns a career 126 wRC+ against RHP.  It was Nava and Gomes platooning in 2013, and with Gomes out and Craig in, it looks as if Craig could be an option to replace Gomes and provide an upgrade in that role.

That leaves center field: Betts or Bradley.

Bradley has shown he’s one of the premier defensive center fielders in all of baseball.  He has been worth +17.7 runs defensively and has a UZR/150 of 28.2, which makes him the third best outfielder in the game behind Heyward and Gordon.  The problem is his bat.  He has a decent walk rate of 8.3%, but he strikes out far too often (27.6%) for a hitter with no power (1 HR, .083 ISO).  If he wants to stay the center fielder of the Red Sox he needs to cut down on his strike outs and show that he can at least be an 85-90 wRC+ guy (he’s at 67 in 2014).

Betts figures to be more of an offensive force.  Although he struggled during his brief major league stint, Betts has absolutely torn up the minor leagues.  In 54 AA games he hit .355/.443/.551 and in 34 AAA games he has hit .321/.408/.496.  He will not be what Bradley is in center field defensively, but that’s a lot to ask.  If he can be an average to above average defender, he looks to be the better choice heading forward.  With his recent call up, he will get two months to show what he can do at the big league level.

As far as 2015 goes, it seems like Shane Victorino doesn’t fit into what the Red Sox are planning to do.  After a breakout 2013, he has just not been able to consistently stay healthy.  He has one year remaining on his contract, but he may be dealt in August or sometime in the offseason. In my opinion, Betts will eventually win the center field job and Bradley could potentially be a part of a trade package in the offseason for a starting pitcher, which is another need for Boston moving forward. These new pieces will go along with their core of Pedroia, Ortiz, and Napoli to help boost an offense that has been abysmal in 2014.  Boston also has money to spend and a boatload of prospects.  According to ESPN Boston, Ben Cherington recently stated that “My expectation is that we would be active in the starting pitching market this winter with trades, free agency, whatever.”

Once they add some pieces to the top of their rotation, the Red Sox will be in prime position to contend again in 2015.

The other day, the Rays traded David Price — 2012 Cy Young Award winner, homegrown star, and overall great guy — to the Tigers in a three-team deal that netted them soft-tossing fifth starter Drew Smyly, former top prospect turned utilityman Nick Franklin, and 18 year old Dominican shortstop Willy Adames.

On the surface, it looks absolutely atrocious, and there’s no way to avoid that. Most people look at the Rays’ previous trades, and compare their return from Matt Garza and James Shields. Since both are good-but-not-quite-Price caliber pitchers, one would think the Rays should have gotten a much better return than they did. And they didn’t. There’s no sugarcoating that. It is widely accepted that the Royals overpaid for Shields, and you could argue the Cubs did for Garza. But history is history. Heck, we even got more out of Victor Zambrano!

I wish we could see if the Garza or Shields trades worked out, but the minor leaguers that determine this are still hanging in the balance. Hak-ju Lee, from the Cubs, is in AAA Durham after recovering from a nasty ACL injury. He was the centerpiece of the Garza deal. Chris Archer, also from the Cubs, has yet to finish a full season. Similarly, from the Shields deal, neither Wil Myers nor Jake Odorizzi has played a full season; Patrick Leonard and Mike Montgomery have shown promise but are still a ways away from making a big league impact. So we have to resort to analyzing this year’s trade as it looks right now.

Drew Smyly has an obvious role: he will fill in the spot Price vacated. No, he’s not Price, but he’s a legitimate young big league starter right now and that is important. The consensus has him as a high-floor-low-ceiling type, not likely to develop too much further but not likely to be relegated to long relief. Over the past three years, his WAR is at 1.8, 1.9, and on pace for 2.0 this year. So if you have him under team control for four years, you could reasonably expect him to bring a total of 8.0 WAR to Tampa Bay. I will use the conservative (and inaccurate) yet convenient figure of $5 million per WAR and put the 4-year value of Drew Smyly at $40 million.

Nick Franklin was a 1st round draft pick and blossomed into a top 100 prospect….who currently holds a career .214 big league average and an even more atrocious 0.34 BB/K ratio. Upon his acquisition, Tampa Bay talking heads proclaimed him to be the next Ben Zobrist. The comparison is not unfair — utilityman, can play multiple positions, solid all-around, a nice touch of power and speed. FanGraphs has him in the mid 3’s for WAR over the next four years. As it was with Zobrist, this is entirely possible if he can draw walks at the big league level, post consistent power numbers, and maintain his defense and speed. If. He could be a quad-A player if he doesn’t put it together. But still, let’s assume he will hold a starting job and mark him down to a total of 12.0 WAR over four years. Using the same constant as above, we get $60 million for four years of Franklin.

Rumor has it that Andrew Friedman wanted Willy Adames as the key piece of the deal. Sure enough, Adames instantly found himself slotted as the Rays’ #2 prospect. As an 18 year old in a league with guys well older than him, Adames has held his own and then some — posting a 112 wRC+. Being better than average as one of the youngest players in the league is promising. Here, the Rays are testing their player evaluators. They evidently believe in Adames, but a lot can go wrong between now and his projected MLB debut. Adames is the crapshoot, the pie-in-the-sky. While I could, I’m not going to assign him a WAR value, mostly because of the abnormally high risk and my inability to calculate it. But it is something, and he could even turn out to BE the key piece of this deal.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

David Price is having a career year — while the traditional numbers are lagging, he has a career-low FIP at 2.93, and is on pace for 6 WAR in 2014. In previous full seasons he has averaged 4.3 WAR (that’s it?), and he is projected to be right around there for the next four years. Let’s put him at 17 WAR over the next four years. That means his services would be worth $85 million were he to become a free agent today.

Price, while being a bargain over the past few years, could earn $20 million per year next year. That is barely less than he is worth on the hypothetical free agent market, and that is approximately the market value of his next four years. That’s great for a team that can pay that, and on the open market someone WILL pay that, but the Rays simply can’t. He is also likely to be a depreciating asset who will be a worse and worse bargain for whatever team he signs with. Price leaves at the height of his career and at the point of the Rays’ most leverage. Meanwhile, Smyly and Franklin are much more flexible and can be under team control for the next four years. Rays fans are getting used to this pattern of salary dumping, and they will have to — unless their available payroll magically doubles sometime soon.

This trade is a reminder that the Rays are one of the most efficient teams in baseball because they have to be. They cannot just look for the best players; they must look for the BEST VALUE players. A player is only valuable IF AND ONLY IF the player is under team control. Smyly and Franklin, on paper, add up to be just as valuable as David Price right now, for a fraction of the cost. So while it was no secret that the mediocre Rays had to dump salary this year, what shocked me was how actually valuable these three players could end up being.

This is still not a perfect trade, even if the trio performs as expected. What took everyone by surprise was the lack of name recognition. Where were the “untouchable” prospects? Where’s the upside? While Bryant, Buxton, and Correa are all legitimately untouchable, it was presumed that the Rays would get a combination like Taveras/Miller, or Gausman/Harvey, or Pederson/Seager. All six of those were floated among the talking heads of baseball, with many more possibilities abound, all six stayed put. Did the Rays wait too long to pull the trigger? I personally would have taken Russell and McKinney for Price, but instead the Rays lost one buyer when the A’s landed Samardzija.

Did they ask for too much in return? It is possible that they tried to, and they lost another potential buyer in the Cardinals upon their acquisition of Masterson. It is very plausible that the Rays, in trying to rip off Major League Baseball like they have previously, forced themselves into a buyers’ market instead of a sellers’ market. While the arithmetic above shows that they didn’t get totally ripped off, it is absolutely plausible that at one point they were offered much more than what they ended up getting. This is a disappointment, because the Rays HAVE to maximize every asset that they have to compete.

Finally, the David Price trade also puts this good ol’ fashioned arithmetic to the test one more time. By trading for two big-league ready players that add up to Price’s value, Friedman is not-so-subtly hinting that he plans on contending right now, but on a budget. Even if Smyly and Franklin add up to Price’s mid-4 WAR per year in 2015, will the Rays end up contending? If they are good enough to make the playoffs, will their plethora of #3ish starters be good enough to match up against Hernandez/Iwakuma, Kershaw/Greinke, or…uh….Scherzer/Price? I doubt it. And this is where Friedman’s arithmetic meets it match. The Rays have been right at the top of the pack in regular season wins after 2008, but have not won a playoff series in that stretch. Friedman’s math could very well be just fine for the regular season, when there are large enough sample sizes for a team to tend to be better than the other guy over 162 games, but not for the postseason, where if you’re not better than the other guy in this exact five-game series, you’re kicked to the curb.

We are still waiting on word whether a trade from before the 2011 season has worked out, so it will be a long time before we know for sure who “won.” Therefore, the only way to truly measure success is by on-field performance, and Drew Smyly and Nick Franklin surprisingly do add up to David Price’s value as far as we can tell. Before we know who won for sure, the Rays will probably have to make more tough decisions with more players to make the most of their precious money. They will probably contend, too, but if the last few years are a precedent, there won’t be any ring deliveries to St. Petersburg anytime soon. Maybe this is the tragedy of being a small-market team. Maybe, as we’ve seen with the Moneyball A’s, small-market teams just aren’t normally destined to go deep into the postseason. We should feel somewhat sorry that teams like the Rays have their hands tied, and feel sorry that Friedman only has so much room to maneuver. Meanwhile, the rings go to St. Louis and San Francisco and Boston.

With every stars-for-prospects trade as a contending team, Andrew Friedman bets on the Rays being more valuable than the sum of their parts.

With every year the scrap heap Rays rumble and tumble into contention, Andrew Friedman proves his mettle as a wise, pragmatic GM that can overcome the odds.

But with every good-but-not-great season, Andrew Friedman also cements his legacy as the genius whose arithmetic didn’t quite add up.

Stats in this post are current up to right before the July 31, 2014 PIT-ARZ game.

The MLB non-waiver trade deadline just passed. I’m not interesting in debating what teams should or should not have done except to say the price for quality players was very high this year. The whole supply & demand, free market thing really worked in the favor of teams that were already out of the post season race. It was suggested that the Pirates needed a right-handed batter (RHB), since they don’t do well against left-handed pitching (LHP). I had my doubts this was really true believing adding an additional RHB won’t improve the team much. MLB teams generally do better against LHP, since most batters are RHB and the RHB/LHP split favors the batter.

Before getting into this, LHP make up only 21% of the Pirates’ season-to-date plate appearances, out of all the problems the Pirates could have making a roster move to address this isn’t necessary unless you are looking to platoon. More on that later.

Looking at the team batting splits, the Pirates have an overall .722 OPS and a LHP .670 OPS. On the surface, it appears they are performing worse against LHP, and I will concede the argument the Pirates HAVE performed worse against LHP so far in 2014, but this shouldn’t continue going forward.

The Pirates have 4,152 plate appearances racked up thru July 30th, but only 867 of them have occurred against LHP (~21%). To put this in perspective, that is equivalent to less than one month of games. How accurate are batting statistics at the end of April? They aren’t. Put simply the Pirates ‘struggles’ against LHP can mostly be attributed to a small sample size.

I went and laid out all the outcomes (1B, BB, 2B, etc.) in a vector of plate appearances and had the computer randomly draw 900 samples from the entire Pirates season and computed the OPS 1000 different times. Then I plotted them below.

Due to the central limit theorem the mean should hover around .720 (the overall OPS) and the data should be normally distributed. Because of this I constructed the normal distribution curve and then used that to calculate the probability that a 900 plate-appearance sample can be drawn from the Pirates’ total plate appearances. It turns out 9% of the time the program will select plate appearances that total a < .670 OPS. 9% isn’t that likely, but it is not outrageous to conclude the Pirates’ low vsLHP OPS is due to small sample size.

This is not just applicable to LHP vs overall splits, but any low-percentage split including RISP. I wrote about this previously and came to a similar conclusion.

The composite distribution curves below illustrate what happens when sample size increases and why small small sizes are problematic. The vertical line is the .670 OPS mark. On the 900-sample distribution (vs LHP) there is a 9% probability of drawing a .670 OPS from the Pirates’ total plate appearances. This is the area underneath the curve to the left of the red line. Using the 3000-sample distribution curve, it’s 0.0016%. There is barely any area under the 3000-PA curve at that point, and this is a huge difference. (3000 samples are approximately how many the team has had against RHP.)

One more graph! This is a histogram of the differences between the LHP OPS and the overall OPS. The Pirates are on the low end of it. Not great, but there’s a lot of variation there.

Switching from statistics to baseball, the Pirates have the second-fewest plate appearances against LHP in MLB. They are 11-9 in games started by a LHP. That alone should discount the poor-performance-against-LHP argument, but obviously the team batting stats suggests that they are and it has been woven into a narrative.

Looking closely at the Pirates’ roster there are many solid RHBs, McCutchen (their best hitter), Martin, Marte, Sanchez, and Mercer/Harrison are pretty good against lefties. Now, some of these player are underperforming against LHP this year, but this is where the small sample size comes in again. You wouldn’t determine any of these batters lost their platoon advantage after only 80 plate appearances. Going forward almost all of these bats should regress to their normal platoon splits.

Pedro Alvarez, Gregory Polanco, Ike Davis. Their platoon splits are pretty atrocious both for 2014 and career-wise. For example, Alvarez has a .787 OPS vs RHP and a .517 OPS against LHP this year. I don’t want to get into analyzing what’s wrong with the Pirates’ left-handed bats, except to say they are terrible against LHP. The argument should change from the Pirates don’t do well against LHP to the Pirates’ left-handed batters are terrible against LHP.

What can be done about this? The simple answer is to get better left-handed batters. Since that’s not really possible, the next best option would be platooning the left-handed batters. Ike Davis is already platooned with Gaby Sanchez, and Pedro Alvarez is barely starting any games. Polanco has regressed from his debut, but I think the best idea is for him to play everyday and deal with LOOGY relievers. I also don’t know how many fans actually want to see or are suggesting that he’s should be platooned. With all this in mind I’m not quite sure what acquiring a right-handed bat would accomplish. The Pirates are already trying to find a place for RHB Josh Harrison to play. He’s been having a good season, no matter what you think about Harrison. Furthermore, the Pirates have a guy who’s been killing LHP this year and has decent splits against them for his career. And that’s Jose Tabata.

Bottom line, adding a RHB wouldn’t help much because the team splits are still a small sample size against LHP. Beyond the statistics, the two big left-handed bats have terrible splits against LHP, and these problems have been already addressed by platooning and benching.

I am currently in the process of finalizing a MLB/MLBPA licensed board game, in the realm of Strat-o-matic.  However, with the license, I will be able to offer player cards with player photos, team names and logos.

The game has been about 90% developed, and I’d like to hire someone to review all of the statistical calculations, to ensure that they make sense for providing the most accurate and realistic gameplay.  In addition, there are a handful of statistical elements within the game (primarily defensive ratings, etc), for which I could use your thoughts on the best way to calculate the rating.

I’m looking to hire someone (or a group of people, if you’d like to play the game and test it amongst yourselves) for approximately $2000 for this project.

Please email me at pdurkee7528@msn.com if you’re interested in the job.

Thanks!

Earlier this week, Hall of Fame outfielder Carl Yastrzemski told the media that he believes that DH David Ortiz is second to only Ted Williams as the greatest hitter in Red Sox history. Many people believe that Yaz is the next-best hitter after Teddy Ballgame. I want to determine who is the better hitter.

To do this, we have to look at the wOBA or weighted on base average which weighs the values of the many different ways a player gets on base based on each way’s ability to produce a run and puts them into a single analytical number. The formula for this statistic is listed below:

wOBA = (0.690×uBB + 0.722×HBP + 0.888×1B + 1.271×2B + 1.616×3B +
2.101×HR) / (AB + BB – IBB + SF + HBP)

The graph of the wOBA for Ortiz, Yaz, and the average player at each of the ages that they have played at can be seen in the graph below:

Source: FanGraphs — David Ortiz, Carl Yastrzemski

Although it was only a slightly better wOBA in his best ten seasons (non-consecutive), Ortiz’s .409 is superior to Yaz’s wOBA of .404. I only used their best 10 seasons because Ortiz’s career is not over yet so Yastrzemski would have a larger sample size of seasons. However, these numbers are just the beginning. Below is a graph of each player’s wOBA for a specific year compared to the league average of that year:

Source: FanGraphs — David Ortiz, Carl Yastrzemski

Using this graph, I determined each player’s ten seasons in which they had the greatest range between their wOBA and the league’s wOBA. In this situation, Yaz had a .107 greater wOBA than the league did in those ten seasons, compared to Ortiz’s .092. That is a .15 difference, which is greater than the .05 difference for the wOBA for each player’s ages shown in the first graph.

If I could take either one of these players based solely on offensive production, I would choose Yaz because his production compared to the league average of the era that he played in is greater than that of Ortiz.

Thanks for the selfless comments Yaz, but you are the second-best hitter in Red Sox history.

Social media is fun a tool to use. It makes following the news a lot easier. You can find hundreds of stories within a matter of minutes on Twitter. I was scrolling through my twitter feed when I found this cute little rumor:

#Royals and #RedSox could match up on a trade, as Kansas City reportedly likes Andrew Miller and John Lackey: http://t.co/Sw8ipEDAm6

— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) July 29, 2014

This is just rumor, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Royals are in  hot pursuit for those two arms, but  it is a rumor worth exploring.

Dayton Moore wants his team to win this year, and that’s not completely unreasonable. After all, Moore gets paid to build competitive teams, and if he consistently put lousy products on the field he wouldn’t hold onto his job very long. However, the Royals situation isn’t as competitive as Moore would like to think.

The problem appears to be that the Tigers have the AL Central locked up with nearly a 90% chance of winning the division. That would leave the Royals in the midst of a wild-card race. A wild-card berth is not as valuable as it used to be because it results in a one-game toss up. This year, that one-game toss-up would be a difficult one for a team like the Royals to win because they’re likely to face one of the two of the best teams in baseball: the Angels and the Athletics.

In a hypothetical situation where the Royals somehow secure a wild card, they get to face either the Angels’ dynamic offense — including Mike Trout — as well as a fortified bullpen, or they could face the all-around, well-built Oakland A’s. While it’s extremely hard to predict the result of one game, and I don’t possess a magical crystal ball, the odds that the Royals advance to the ALDS don’t look very promising. Given the likelihood that the Royals a) don’t make the playoffs and b) if they do it would most likely be through a wild card matchup that they’re unlikely to win, they should probably not be looking to acquire the services of John Lackey and Andrew Miller.

Based on the work that Jeff Sullivan did a couple of weeks ago, we know that a team that acquires an ace like David Price would roughly increase their playoff odds by about 10%. This is a rough estimate, but that’s the upside of adding someone like Price. I doubt that Lackey would increase playoff odds by 10%, but ZiPs/Steamer projects Lackey to have between 0.9 and 1.1 WAR for the rest of the season. For context, Shields is projected have a WAR of 1.3 for the rest of the season, and Price is projected to have a WAR of 1.5 for the rest of the season.

The difference between Price and Shields is marginal for the rest of the season. However, the difference between Lackey and Price is somewhat significant, so just to be a little more accurate, we have to scale back those increased playoff odds — for Lackey — from 10% to 8%.  I have done no calculations; we’re just simply guesstimating here.

Say that the Royals decide to add a guy like Lackey, and they get the upside of a 8% increased chance of making the playoffs. That still only puts them at roughly a 22.7% chance of making the playoffs. That’s assuming that Lackey performs the way the projections expect him to perform. There’s still a chance that they make a run for a wild-card spot, but the other thing to take into consideration is the price of Lackey and Miller.

Relievers are considered extremely valuable assets if you’re going to the playoffs — so the price on Miller is going to be high — especially if you plan on being in wild-card games, as the strategy in those one-game matchups is to empty the bullpen.

Boston controls a large part of the market, because as the Rays have started winning they’re probably having second thoughts on moving Price. Boston has many arms, and as we’ve seen this week with the Peavy trade, they’ve committed to being sellers at the deadline. They have two of the best available pitchers on their roster: Lester and Lackey.

Therefore, since they have two of the better pitchers on the market the asking price is probably going to be high even on Lackey, given that the next best pitchers available are Bartolo Colon and A.J. Burnett. Rumors have been circling that the Red Sox want at least an average major-league starter in return for a package of Lackey and Miller. There would probably have to be some sort of prospect thrown in, as well. Selling the farm to increase your odds of making the playoffs that aren’t that high to begin with isn’t the best use of the Royals’ resources.

You could make the argument that trading for Lackey is justifiable because he has 2015 club options for a team-friendly $0.5 million, and if the Royals are building for 2015, then they would be bolstering their rotation. The problem is that Lackey’s contract is done after one year — at which point he would be 36 years old — and his skills would be declining. Trading a young player that you could control for multiple years for an aging veteran that you control for one year doesn’t sound like a very good deal.

The Royals simply are not in the position to upgrade with the present in mind. They should probably think about selling rather than buying, but they still want to be relevant in 2014. If the Royals are set on hanging around for a wild card, they should follow the model that the Yankees have set of acquiring low-cost/high reward upgrades; a guy that you hope to squeeze two months of good baseball out of. Otherwise, paying a premium for a pitcher when your team is unlikely to make a run at the playoffs is not the best move that the Royals could be making right now.

Streaks in sports are looked at a lot, just Google hot hand baseball, basketball, etc.  There is a lot out there on whether or not players can actually get into a groove or if it is completely luck-based.  I want to look at team streaks though, not that this hasn’t been done before, and see which teams are the streakiest so far of 2014 to see which teams might have a run in them as they are chasing the playoffs.

To measure this I wanted to treat all games as part of a streak, so each game was given a value.  A loss is defined as -1 and a second loss in a row would then become -2 and so on until the team won which would then be given a value of 1 with additional wins adding on top of that until a loss occurred.  If you then just look at the standard deviations of each team by this measure it should be easy to see who has been the most streaky.  One of the expectations of this measure would be that this would lead toward higher values for teams farther away from .500 as you have to have to string together wins (losses) to diverge significantly above (below) that mark, but those teams also don’t tend to have long losing (winning streaks) so their one-directional streakiness keeps them from being at the top of the list.

Streakiest (St.Dev.)                                              Least Streaky (St.Dev.)

Tampa Bay (3.14)                                                  LA Dodgers (1.62)

Boston (2.89)                                                          Baltimore (1.89)

Kansas City (2.76)                                                 St. Louis (1.89)

Detroit (2.75)                                                         Pittsburgh (1.91)

Atlanta (2.70)                                                          Arizona (1.97)

*data through games on Sunday, July 27th

Streakiness, or lack thereof, does not make you a good or bad team.  Detroit and Atlanta are streaky and good, Boston is streaky and bad, and Tampa and KC are streaky and near .500 on the season.  On the not streaky side Arizona and the Dodgers are on extreme opposites of the spectrum.  Just to make sure the measure didn’t bias a lot as you moved away from .500 in either direction I modified it by taking the standard deviation as a percent of the greater of wins or losses.  The top 5 still included Tampa Bay, Boston, KC, and Detroit in a slightly different order with Atlanta falling to 6th and being replaced by Miami.  The low end behaved similarly, so I will stick with the first measure as it looks like there is no bias toward good or bad teams.

One of the other things I wondered was whether or not streaky teams had high volatility in their runs scored or given up.  Looking at both standard deviation of runs scored and allowed, and then those as a percentage of average runs scored/allowed it does not look like this is the case.  The correlations for volatility in runs scored or allowed with streakiness are low, so I took it a step farther and looked only at teams that have high relative volatility in both runs scored and runs allowed.  This group has an average streakiness rank of 11.3 versus and expectation of 15.5, so maybe there is something there, but it is not even close to convincing.  I am going to need a lot more than one partial season of data to see what makes a team streaky.

As we head into pennant chase season this idea of streakiness may make things more interesting.  For instance, Kansas City and Detroit are atop the AL Central and streaky, which could make that race a lot more fun to watch as the standings are likely to vacillate more than most, especially since Cleveland has been relatively streaky as well.  On the other hand, the Dodgers might be harder to make up ground on as they consistently avoid long streaks.  Tampa Bay and Baltimore are on opposite ends of the spectrum with Baltimore hoping the Rays will fall back into the negative streaks after gaining a lot of ground recently.  They of course have an average streakiness Yankee team and a little bit streaky Blue Jays team to worry about as well.

Baseball has spoiled us. For the past two years baseball teams, spectators, and analysts have been in awe of the young talent in the game. Last year,  the likes of Yasiel Puig and Jose Fernandez came out of nowhere and dominated the league. The year before, Mike Trout and Bryce Harper came up  and were beyond exceptional baseball players.

This year has been a little bit dry in terms of top prospects coming up and turning into the best players in the league. George Springer has been an exciting player to watch but not dominant like Trout, Puig or Fernandez. There’s a case to be made for Jose Abreu, but he was an international signing. Abreu wasn’t developed in the White Sox’ farm system for multiple years. Instead, Abreu was major league ready upon signing his contract.

The other top prospect whose performance hasn’t been captivating — at least during his first month in the big leagues — is Gregory Polanco.

Polanco is considered an extremely toolsy young player. Most scouting reports agree that Polanco has a pretty good glove — profiling as a corner outfielder — and he has a good arm.  Polanco’s bat has been more of a projection than a reality. In the minors it was easy to see that he had some talent. In his minor league career he put up an .842 OPS. There were still some rough edges around Polanco’s game as his ability to hit for power fluctuated during his time in the minors.

There were times in Polanco’s minor-league career in which he hit for decent power, but he definitely bounced back and forth between having above-average power and power outages. In his 2014 Pittsburgh Pirates Top Prospects post, Marc Hulet described some of Polanco’s difficulties:

“At the plate, he flashes the ability to hit for both average and power but he’s still learning to identify and handle breaking balls.”

Polanco has been in the big leagues for about 40 games. In his first couple of plate appearance he looked like a pretty dynamic toolsy outfielder. However, as he has accrued more plate appearances, it has become apparent that he is still an unfinished product. Polanco has hit .247/.324/.352. which has been good for a WAR of 0.2. This is a pretty small sample size of only 183 PA’s, however Polanco has been having difficulty hitting for power. Right now Polanco is getting on base a decent amount, but his lack of power offsets the value of his ability to get on base.

Pitchers have mostly fed Polanco fastballs. In his first 40 games, Polanco has seen a fastball around 60% of the time, and that’s the pitch against which he seems to be able to have the most success. Polanco also doesn’t hit for a lot of power when he does make contact with a fastball (.044 ISO against fastballs). Despite that, Polanco was known for not being able to handle breaking balls — in the minors — so far he has actually been able to take advantage of some curveballs, cutters and sliders. All five of the home runs he has hit have come off of either a slider, a curveball or a cutter.  The story seems to be that he can catch up to the hard stuff, but doing something meaningful with it is a different story.

We’re dealing with a small sample size,  so we don’t know whether Polanco has a propensity for hitting sliders, cutters, and curveballs a long ways. Other off-speed/breaking pitches — such as sinkers and splitters — have been difficult for Polanco to hit.

Polanco is still showing good knowledge of the strike zone as he’s drawing a lot of walks this season. Despite his proclivity for drawing walks, there are some issues with his plate discipline stats. These mainly have to do with his ability to make contact. While Polanco does swing at lower number of pitches outside of the zone  — with an O-Swing%  of 28% — he only makes contact with those pitches 53% of the time.

The only good part of Polanco’s offensive performance has been his ability to draw walks. However, if you’re not making enough contact and not hitting for power, that doesn’t make you a productive major-league hitter.

Polanco has not necessarily been a great hitter in his first couple of months in the majors. I’m sure some people expected Polanco to step in and be one of the best hitters in the game. The truth is that this game is incredibly hard, and there are certainly growing pains when it comes to young players. Polanco has to figure out how to hit for more power to be a useful major leaguer. He hasn’t done that.

That doesn’t mean that Polanco won’t do it; we are dealing with a small sample size of just 183 PA’s, and it’s completely plausible that he makes the adjustment necessary to fix his problems. Polanco showed that he could adjust quickly.  That’s why he rose so quickly through the minors; he was able to adjust to the new challenges each level presented him. Demoting Polanco is completely pointless as he hasn’t been bad, and he has nothing left to prove in the minors.

Polanco now needs to prove himself in the majors, and that might just take some time.

At the time of writing, the Seattle Mariners are 54-50 and 0.5 games back in the race for the second wild card spot. With rumors flying as to the upcoming trade deadline, the benefit of selling prospects to improve their odds varies heavily based on how view their current roster. Dave Cameron rang the warning bell for all the of the second wild card contenders, pointing out that these teams are vying for a one game playoff in Anaheim. Not such a great prize.

But. The Mariners haven’t made the playoffs in 13 years and the prospect of a wild card spot has made this most exciting campaign in a decade. So how good are the Mariners? At 54-50, the Mariners have won at a clip of .519, but FanGraphs’ projection models paint a very different picture of the team. FanGraphs’ playoff odds page believes the Mariners are a .503 team going forward. Not so hot.

But. The Mariners’ season-to-date-stats projection from FanGraphs is a lot more favorable, suggesting the true talent level of M’s, based on CoolStandings’s version of Pythagenpat adjusted for remaining schedule, is .557. To put that in context, it’s the 4th best in baseball, behind the third-place Angels (.572) and 5th place Dodgers (.549). The Mariners, by this measure, are the both the 3rd best team in the AL West and the American League.

The CoolStandings model, like that of Baseball Prospectus, relies on base runs and a modified Bill James Pythagorean W-L. As best I understand it, this means that the Mariners, by base runs, have been ‘unlucky’ to the tune of the gap between their projected rest of season W% and their current W%, for a loss of 0.038 W%. 3.8% of the M’s 104 games already played comes out to 4 wins, so the Mariners’ ‘true talent level’ record would be 58-46. That’s still a good margin worse than the Angels, but it’s also well above all the other wild card contenders. By this model, the M’s would be expected to win 86.1 games this year, beating out the next-best Blue Jays by almost 2 wins.

Conversely, by the FanGraphs Zips-Steamer projection system, the M’s should win 83 games and come a game or so short of the Blue Jays. By these numbers, the M’s still finish the as the best team not to make the playoffs.

There is a huge gap between these projections, coming out to about 8 wins over a full season and 5 over the roughly two-thirds of the season already played. The rest of this article is an amateur attempt to account for that gap, and to assess how good the Mariners might actually be.

The CoolStandings model relies on past performance and therefore absorbs some mathematical ‘luck.’ For example, the Mariners’ runs allowed this season has to have been impacted by a league high strand-rate. For that reason, the figures are probably overly optimistic of the M’s chances.

But that isn’t to say the M’s look like a .503 ballclub either. To account for the difference between the M’s .519 W% and their .503 Zips-Steamer talent level, I looked at the ZiPS projections for the rest of the season, but in ignoring Steamer, this is only a rough guess at how the projection could be too pessimistic .016% of 104 games is about 2 wins, so that’s the extent of the disagreement between reality and luck against the projections. For the remainder of the season, that .016% is worth about one win.

For example, Michael Saunders has been worth 1.7 fWAR this year in 219 PAs, a pace of approximately 4.2 fWAR over 550 PAs, but Zips says he’ll be worth 0.7 fWAR over 161 PAs the rest of this year, a clip of 2.39 fWAR/550. If we say the M’s have played two-thirds of their season already, that says that Saunders should’ve been worth 1.6 fWAR this year, and has overperformed to the tune of .1 of the M’s wins.

Looking a little deeper, we can see that ZiPS doesn’t punish Saunders playing time projection very much despite his injury trouble, in that it sees him basically playing full time the rest of the way. If we take the ZiPS projection and put it over his 219 PAs of 2014 service time, the picture is a little clearer: ZiPS says Saunders should’ve been worth 0.95 fWAR this year. So Saunders has already given the M’s almost a full win more than he should’ve, says ZiPS.

Other contributors to the M’s supposed over-performance include Felix and Ackley.

Ackley’s defense has been fine so far, per UZR, but ZiPS says it should be bad. So despite underperforming at the plate by 9% per wRC+, ZiPS says Ackley’s glove has already given the M’s a full half-win more than can be expected.

A topic of some discussion, Ackley’s fielding is hard to assess. To the naked eye he’s looked ok, not terrible, and UZR seems to agree. There was his spectacular catch the other day, and there’s also his mediocre arm, which possibly has been taxed at a below-average rate, but this is all speculation. But if we trust Ackley’s to date figures and performance, we can give the Mariners a third of a win back over their remaining schedule.

And then there’s Felix, who has already contributed a remarkable 5.5 fWAR. ZiPS penalizes Felix quite a bit, expecting him to regress quite a bit. If Felix continues pitching at his current level, the M’s again would be expected to win another half game more than ZiPS suggests. Felix both has reached new highs with his changeup and has benefited quite a bit from Zunino’s pitch framing, as have the M’s, and Zunino’s framing is neither accounted for by the projection systems nor his season-to-date fWAR.

Then there’s Chris Young. Young has been worth 0.6 fWAR and 2.7 rWAR. Young alone can account for the gap between FanGraphs’ and ZiPS’ perception of the Mariners and their current performance. A lot has been written about Young’s season, and going back to 2009, the last season ZiPS looks at for their projections, Chris Young’s 2014 is the single greatest overperformance of ERA against FIP. Young probably hasn’t been as good as his ERA nor nearly as bad as FIP, but I can’t speculate at his true talent.

Between Young, Zunino’s framing, Ackley’s defense, Saunders’ somewhat expected improvement, and Felix’s dominance, the Mariners seem like an especially tough team to project. For a counter example, the Blue Jays are expected to win 84.3 games by ZiPS-Steamer and 84.9 by Cool Standings, versus the Mariners 3 game swing between the projections. Clearly ZiPS-Steamer is the more reliable model and clearly it’s missing a significant piece of the picture. But were I a betting man, I’d certainly bet the M’s finish better than 83 wins.

What these numbers suggest is that by both the models the Mariners are close enough to be competitive for the wild card, and that acquiring marginal talents like Marlon Byrd or a DHing Matt Kemp (not going to happen) could have a real impact on the team’s chances. By both models, going all in for Ben Zobrist at SS and a right-handed OF might not be be such a bad idea, nor would be so ludicrous to pursue David Price. That said, a bad trade is a bad trade no matter the context of standings, and the M’s suffer from an overpay in any event.

What the holes in the ZiPS projections say, however, is that maybe the M’s recent slide isn’t especially important, and that while this probably isn’t the 4th best squad in baseball, it’s still probably a good team, and a team to be excited about. Because even if the M’s fail to make another roster move, they should be a competitor.