Pitchers and Injuries: The Biomechanics of Baseball

Note: The formatting is a bit bollocksed in this post, sorry. Haven’t been able to fix it

If you spend any time at all reading about baseball players, you’ll have seen comments like this regarding certain pitchers:

“[player z] has a very violent delivery, putting too much torque on his elbow, and is therefore a huge injury concern.”

How do the experts in the field come to these conclusions? How much weight should we give to their opinions? These are important questions, and to answer them we’ll have to go right back to the beginning.

The first question we should ask ourselves is this one: What is the goal of a pitcher’s delivery, in the purely physical sense?

The answer’s fairly straightforward – to impart angular (spin) and linear acceleration to a baseball using just the pitcher’s body to do so. The amount of linear force imparted to a ball will manifest itself as the velocity of a pitch, while the angular acceleration more or less controls the spin. We won’t get into the physics of a ball in flight here, rather we’re concerned with a very different problem.

How does a pitcher apply this acceleration?

In essence, what a pitcher does is store up energy in his body, and then release it all at once. The first part is pretty easy to understand, albeit with some gross simplifications along the way…

Muscle systems are more or less paired springs for the purposes of an analysis like this. When you compress a spring, it stores the energy you use in pressing on it as potential energy (the exact amount is determined by what’s called a strain energy function, but as this gets absurdly complicated for biological tissue, we’re going to gloss over that one here), and then releases it as soon as it’s free to do so. If you think of the upper body of a pitcher as a series of springs, you can see that the the windup is accomplishing more or less the same thing. Note that this has very little to do with the leg kick, as that’s exploiting a different type of potential energy: gravity.

So that’s actually pretty straightforward, and really not where pitchers get hurt. Rather, injury occurs in the process of transferring all of that stored up energy to a baseball. Limbs twist, the body gyrates, and the elbow and shoulder are having to hold the whole arm together through what is really a very violent motion. So it is reasonable to say that the more energy which a pitcher has to transmit to get results, the more likely he is to be hurt?

No, it’s not, and doing so is actually quite lazy. Remember, the best pitchers are the ones putting as much acceleration on the ball as possible, so in terms of pitching performance, maximising torque and such around the joints is a good thing. What we have to do is look at some anatomy. I’m going to specifically examine the elbow here, since it’s far less complicated than the shoulder, but the same principles will generalise to other joints as well.

(source: Gray’s Anatomy)

The elbow is theoretically a biological hinge, but it doesn’t really work the same way your door hinges do. The joint allows for two kinds of motion: flexion/extension, or basic hinging, which everybody is familiar with, and pronation/suppination, which is the rotation of the forearm relative to the upper arm. Three major ligaments provide structural integrity to the joint as it performs these movements. The Ulnar Collateral ligament (UCL) is undoubtedly the best known to baseball fans, due to its place as the ligament rebuilt in Tommy John surgery, but the other two are decidedly less familiar – the Radial Collateral and the Annular. The reason these are less familiar to us is because they’re rarely what goes wrong in an elbow (this is unsurprising if you actually look at where the annular is and what it does).

Anyway, the point of this brief digression into anatomy is to show that far from being a simple hinge, the elbow is actually a fairly complicated system, with each movement stressing many different elements of the joint. None of these ligaments works in torsion, either – they’re designed to generally take tensile stresses (i.e. pulling). In addition, elbow failure will occur when any ligament in the elbow begins to fail, as even if a minor one begins failure, it will put incrementally more stress on the major ones, leading to their eventual yield as well. In essence, what a pitcher ideally does is tailor his motion to take advantage of the capacity of every element in his elbow.

Still, no problem, right? We have models of the elbow that will turn the relative movements of the upper and lower arm into stresses  inside the elbow, right? Uh… Not so much. Same goes for the shoulder, but the main problem here is that we don’t even know the general engineering properties of many of these  ligaments, which causes problems when looking at how to distribute forces in a computer model. Honestly, it probably wouldn’t help much if it did, because of the actual failure mechanism involved. Yep, it’s time for another anatomical tangent.

In order to accommodate the tensile stresses they have to take, cartilaginous bodies are reinforced by fibres running in the same direction as the primary loading they received (this is loosely analogous to rebar in reinforced concrete). These collagen fibrils greatly strengthen the material matrix they lie in, but can themselves fail. And they do, one by one, with each failure causing their neighbours to take on additional stress until they fail as well, which is how tears propagate.

Of course, we don’t really care about the material’s true yield strength, because a pitcher isn’t just throwing a single time and then calling at a career. Hell, a starting pitcher might throw 50,000 pitches over 15 years. What we have instead is cyclic loading, which leads to fatigue failure (or the biological analogue, at any rate).

The danger stress for cyclic loading is, without exception, significantly lower than for a time deal, but here we again run into the problem of lack of research. About all we know is that ligaments can indeed suffer fatigue failure (which will be made manifest as a slow, growing tear), and that they suffer it significantly faster if the stresses that said ligament takes are out of plane with its fibril reinforcements (this is fairly intuitive, and is probably why throwing hard breaking balls is bad for most pitchers). Apart from that, it’s all a bit up in the air.

What doesn’t help is that all pitchers aren’t created equal, in both pure ability and their bodies’ capacity to take punishment. Biological parameters are one of the few things that actually turn up as a true bell curve, and so we’ll have fragile guys, average guys, and indestructible guys in the pool of pitching talent (NB: for the most part, the really breakable pitchers will never get as far as the majors before blowing out their arms). Mark Prior was said to have perfect mechanics until his arm exploded repeatedly, but that doesn’t actually mean the people who said so were wrong. Pitching is an exceptionally violent activity, and a ‘perfect delivery’ will not reduce stress to zero or anywhere close to it, it will merely minimise the damage done while throwing a baseball at 90+ mph, or with obscene spin, and Mark Prior could have been doomed from the start.

So. We don’t know how much stress goes into each element which might fail, we don’t know how much it would take them to fail in the first place, and even if we did we wouldn’t know where a specific pitcher might fall on the bell curve of ligament toughness anyway. Oh dear.

How do we tell if a pitcher is going to get hurt then?

Well, we wait for them to start hurting, and if it’s bad enough, they put them through an MRI and look for tears. If they find them, it’s rehab/surgery time. Otherwise, it’s back to the grind until they actually break.

No educated guesses?

Well, yeah, you can make some, and this is really all the experts are doing, unless they’re holding back key information from academia at large. Watching for guys with painful looking deliveries is a start. Fransisco Rodriguez instantly jumps to mind. Liriano is another example, and he’s one of the few guys I’m comfortable with predicting future injury problems before if he keeps throwing the same way he does (after all, he’s already busted his UCL once). Honestly, if you start watching closely enough, your guess is as good as anyone else’s. It will take a lot of research and work before anybody’s really qualified to look at a pitcher throwing, stick the numbers in a computer, and give him [x%] chance of damaging [ligament y] in the next 10,000 pitches. I can’t wait for it to happen, though.

Man, that was a lot of writing, and I didn’t even touch on some of the subjects I’d have liked to, like development and the injury nexus. I think I’ll leave it at that, anyway. Feedback is more than welcome.

Graham MacAree is currently working on a Masters degree in Biostructural Engineering at Cambridge University in the UK, specialising in structural failure of cartilagenous material

The Calm Before the Storm

Things have been deathly quiet on the news front but given todays news I think all-you-know-what is about to break loose.

 Hiroki Kuroda may or may not be heading to the Dodgers (depending on who you believe)- This is the big rumor for the Mariners front office. Kuroda signing with the Dodgers throws the offseason into chaos. The M’s need upgrade the rotation and Kuroda would have allowed the Mariners a position of strength in negotiating for Erik Bedard. Even the threat of signing Kuroda gives/gave the Mariners the leverage that it took to avoid being fleeced.

Tad Iguchi signs a one year deal with the Padres- If the Mariners were to package Jose Lopez in a trade, Tad Iguchi would have made an interesting stopgap for the club in 2008.

Fukudome is a Cub- If the Mariners need an outfielder after all the offseason wheeling and dealing, Fukudome would have been nice to have in the outfield.

The Real Story: Three Japanese players in potential positions of need for the 2008 Mariners are going elsewhere- Mariner fans are fond of the notion that Japanese players want to play in Seattle and that the ballclub can choose what Japanese players it wants. We have told ourselves that the exceptions are the players that want to go elsewhere. Maybe I was the only person to have this thought but I am re-evaluating this position: Ichiro and Kenji are the exceptions. The Mariners need to find new advantages because the Japanese pipeline appears to be drying up.

I expect dominos to begin falling (in Seattle anyway) sooner rather than later, because much of the Mariners offseason plan is wrapped up in Kuroda. His decision will force the Mariners to react. Reacting to the actions of others is not something this front office does well. They are good at drawing up a plan A, but they aren’t very good at Plan B’s.

Thank you for reading the site- Bookmark it, keep checking back and join in on the conversation. We (myself and the rest of the guys) love writing about baseball, but we also like discussing it with others. Join in on the conversation.

Welcome Aboard- I’d like to take the opportunity to welcome Matthew Carruth to the site. After several months of emailing back and forth (consisting of 4 total emails), Matthew decided to join the site and is a welcome addition. Great article on Bedard yesterday.

Erik Bedard, Pros and Cons and Strikeouts

Here is a quick list of what I find positive and negative about the possibility of Erik Bedard in a Mariner uniform.

PRO

1. 4:1 K to BB ratio in 2007
2. Jump in 2007 K rate
3. Not flyball heavy
4. Pitches with his left hand
5. Steadily decreasing walk rates
6. Perennially low home run rates

CON

1. Only under team control for 2 more seasons
2. Turns 29 next season, will be 31 for his first free agent season
3. Seems determined to hit the free agent market no matter what

Overall, the pros outweigh the cons by a healthy margin. Some of these points deserve further fleshing out though. While often cited for durability concerns, has pitched 190 innings on average the last 2 seasons. While that’s not a workhorse by any means, it is not a problematic total. If we traded for Bedard and got 380 innings and roughly 60 starts out of him before 2010, I would be pleased with that.

The main elephant in the room Bedard’s K rate and it’s heliumitic rise last year. Bedard was always a solid pitcher who ran mid 7 K rates, a sub 1 home run rate and had high but declining with experience walk rates. All in all, it was the profile for a high 3/low 4 FIP pitcher. What would be considered a solid #2 in the American League. But in 2007, while the walks continued to fall, the home runs picked up a skosh and the strikeouts went nutso up from 171 in 196 innings in 2006 to 221 in 182 last season. That’s a rise from 7.8 Ks per 9IP to a staggering 11.7. People are justifiably worried that we’d be acquiring Bedard expecting him to repeat an unrepeatable 2007, much like Beltre after 2004 and Washburn after 2005.

Well, those people are right and wrong. They are right that 11.7 strikeouts per 9IP is not sustainable. It just flat out isn’t in the AL these days. There’s also considerable worry as to how much of an impact pitching guru Leo Mazzone had on that, and what kind of residual you could expect Bedard to keep up leaving Mazzone behind as he would be if he headed to Seattle. Those are both valid points. However, here’s the counterpoint and it’s a biggie: Bedard’s swinging strike percentage jumped three points in 2007; up to a delicious 18% of all pitches thrown. Bedard did pretty much nothing different in 2007 than he did in previous years, but suddenly batters were missing his stuff much more often. He didn’t throw more first pitch strikes, get more strikes called, induce more foul balls, throw less or more balls or even induce more swings in general. No, the only thing that happened was that of the pitches that batters swung at, they missed a lot more of them.

The reason that is the key is that the percentage of swinging strikes is the best indicator out there for predicting future strikeout rates. Swinging strikes is to a pitcher’s strikeout rate as line drive percentage is to a hitter’s batting average. When you see a pitcher gain or lose strikeout rate and don’t see a corresponding change in swinging strike percentage, you’re better off betting for a regression next season back towards a pitcher’s career norm. But when you do see an increase (or drop) in swinging strike rate, the possibility that pitcher has taken a step forward (or back) is much more likely and that the new strikeout rate has a higher chance of holding.

An example of this would lie in J.J. Putz, who in 2006 exploded on to scene, going from a middling relief pitcher into closer extraordinaire and doubling his strikeout rate. Entering 2007, many analysts predicted a fallback for Putz, because they were spotting what they felt was a fluke. However, what most Mariner fans knew was that Putz’s success was driven by the mastering of a new pitch; the splitter. This pitch turned Putz into basically a completely new pitcher, giving him something other than the mid to high 90s fastball to occupy the minds of opposing batters. Writing back in the Spring, I noted that Putz’s 2006 swinging strike rate jumped from hovering around 15% all the way up to 23% in 2006. It was a mind boggling jump and there was almost zero way that it was a fluke. Even if I had not spent all summer watching Putz in 2006 and knew about the new pitch, knowing what I did about the driving factors in his increased strikeout rate I would have, and did, predict continued success in 2007. We all know how that worked out.

It should be noted that this is not a catch all statement, like everything in probability. And there’s nothing to say that Bedard doesn’t take a step backwards in 2008 and lose those extra swings and misses. All I know is that the best evidence I have available says that Bedard was a sustainably better pitcher in 2007 than he was previously.

R.A. Dickey

All I wanted from the winter meetings was an ace and all the Mariners gave me was a lousy knuckleballer.

Yesterday, I drove up to Bellingham to watch the Cougars play Gonzaga and see one of my fellow bloggers (who just so happens to be my brother in law). The Cougars didn’t play their best game but they beat a good team on the road. I was hoping that the Mariners would make a splash move for Bedard (or Santana) to make it a truly great day for my fandom. Unfortunately, the only player the M’s have acquired has been from the rule V draft.

I’m of the opinion that knuckleballers haven’t caught on because you don’t know what you are getting pitch to pitch. When I play catch, I’ll break out the knuck from time to time. Sometimes it dances and hits the person I’m throwing to, other times it’s the juiciest meatball you’ve ever seen in your life. Imagine being a manager watching Tim Wakefield give up 7 runs in the first two innings: Do you pull him or do you leave him in? With a traditional pitcher, a manager goes to the pen to clean up the mess. With Wakefield (or any good knuckleballer) they can put it together on any given pitch. The other dilemna is when to pull a knuckleballer. Managers don’t like making those kind of decisions.

R.A. Dickey must pass two tests for the M’s to profit big from this move. First, he must play well in the small sample size theater known as spring training. Dickey will need to impress in this brief audition, even though his success will largely hinge on where batted balls drop. A few balls bounce the wrong way for Dickey and he’ll be blocked in the Twins system. Second, Dickey needs to actually be good. Depending on who he matches up against in spring training, he may face a bunch of kids who have never seen a knuckleball before. Hard to tell from a month.

 If Dickey is good enough to survive in the major leagues, he will be a no. 3 starter. If not he will be worthless. Should be fun to watch.

Santana and Bedard (and Kuroda)

I’ve enjoyed watching Johan and Erik revitalize the blogosphere in the last few days. It’s nice to see the Mariners on the move and seeing them, if only in theory, get carried away in an attempt to bring one of baseball’s best pitchers to Seattle.

The (potential) Kuroda signing is a relatively safe move for the Mariners. In the 30 year history of Mariners baseball, the Mariners have had 20-30 pitchers on the level of Kuroda or better. I’d take him, but the fact of the matter is that pitchers of his caliber are availible on the market almost every year. All a team needs to do to acquire such a pitcher is to be willing to fork out the cash to sign him. Kuroda can help a team wins but he isn’t a piece that you build a playoff team around. Still he would improve the ballclub considerably and it opens up the possibility of trading Washburn or Batista next season, in the final year of their deals. It’s not like these two guys are impossible to deal.

Edwin Jackson, Bartolo Colon and every other pitcher who has been sold to the fanbase by the blogosphere falls into the category. They are guys who fill holes. Teams acquire a Bartolo Colon to plug a hole that could prevent them from winning a championship. Ditto almost everyone else. Except two.

Johan Santana and Erik Bedard are pitchers that create a window to win a championship.

In the Mariners 30 year history the Mariners have had exactly one pitcher on the level of Johan’s preformance. Players like Johan are rare and the opportunites to acquire such a player are few and far between.

If you want to argue that Erik Bedard has only had one good season, I will conceed that. Even if you bump Bedard down a notch the M’s have maybe had 3 pitchers at, or above, his level in 30 years . Randy Johnson and maybe Mark Langston or Jamie Moyer (during his better years with the club). I’m projecting Bedard to be an all star pitcher for the next few years. Given the way Bedard dominated his opponents last year, the biggest risk associated with Bedard is injury. I’ll take it.

Adding Bedard or Santana to Felix would leave the Mariners in the position of finding someone who isn’t horrible to be the 5th starter. Now you can add Bartolo Colon or JP Howell and magically the rotation is awesome.

Right now the Mariners have no window to win the division. Gripping about the “mortgaging the future” would make sense if the Mariners had the prospects in place to make a serious run in a couple of years. Unfortunately, we have a front office that has said it won’t rebuild so that means we won’t see an extreme youth movement. We also lack the prospects for such a youth movement.

PrOPS

I’ve been asked to give an explanation of PrOPS. Since it is a stat that I expect will be used frequently, at least by me, at this site, I’ll oblige with a little crash course in PrOPS. PrOPS is available at the stats section of The Hardball Times.

First, lets think way back to a time when we thought ERA was the best measure of a pitcher’s talent, ouch! Finally, as I assume most people know, Voros McCracken came up with DIPS, defensive independent pitching. His most basic conclusion is that you can better predict ERA by taking away hits then including them. As time progressed it was David Gassko who finally gathered coefficients for all the batted ball types and came up with a new dips formula that relied on the type of batted balls. The difference between DIPS 3.0 and what McCracken came up with was the same as the difference between McCracken’s formula and just using ERA. Basically, the improvement was huge. This is one of the most important concepts in the evolution of Sabermetrics, the luck of the single. By establishing that pitchers did not have control of balls in play, things changed. Could this work for hitters. Enter PrOPS.

First, let me post this table once more, from fangraphs.com and Dave Studeman.
Type AVG SLG OPS
FB .265 .720 .978
GB .236 .259 .495
LD .719 .948 1.667
This is what PrOPS is based on. There is clearly a relationship between the type and outcome.
PrOPS was invented by JC Bradbury, using batted ball data from BIS. He developed a formula that includes the following information: LD rate, GB: FB ratio, walk rate, HBP rate, K Rate, HR Rate, and home ball park. It was discovered that PrOPS was a very good indicator of what a players OPS would be minus luck. Most importantly, PrOPS explained OPS the next year better than actual OPS did. The basic result is that players who got abnormally lucky on batted balls got their numbers normalized. If you hit more line drives than another player, you should do better. Since most of the value of a flyball is dependent on homeruns, player’s averages on those should differ more than any of the others. Clearly Sexson is going to have more productivity from his flyballs than J-Lo, and PrOPS factors that in.

One of the reasons I love this stat is that, obviously, it works. If there were 1million game seasons, PrOPS would be unnecessary, but for stats like BABIP to stabilize, they need much more than the 600 pa’s in a season. If you asked me to predict Jose Guillen’s stats for next year, I could better do it with his HR rate, LD rate, etc than I could by actually looking at his OPS. That’s pretty important. Almost all players that severely over/underperform their PrOPS will return towards the total by PrOPS. BABIP (a factor in OPS) is a horrible stat to predict future performance, and this does better. There is a huge relationship between over/underperformance and rise/decline in the following year. JC hints that the formula is something close to [PrOPS-OPS)*.80]+OPS. Basically take 80% of the difference between PrOPS and OPS and add it to OPS. I believe this only works after a season, not during.

There are criticisms. Shouldn’t Ichiro! have a higher BA on GBs than Jose Vidro (there is no adjustment for speed). JC insists that there is no long-term correlation between speed and over/under performance. I would speculate that players that are faster tend to be weaker, and perhaps have lower averages on their FB’s and LD’s and it might tend to even out. Another criticism is that players do in fact have some control over their batting averages on batted ball types. This control is small, however, and except in a few severe cases (Ichiro! perhaps) I wouldn’t guess it would be a huge deal. It could also be a subject of improvement in the future.

PrOPS is one of the best, if not the best at spotting luck in a player. Most good sabermetricians are not going to be happy simply saying that Richie Sexson got unlucky, they want a number. I assume most people can look at a site like fangraphs and decipher that if Yu-Bet is hitting .254 on BIP, he was getting unlucky, but how unlucky, what should his BABIP be, given how he has hit the ball? That is where you use PrOPS. It is not good, however, for what has already happened. If you are trying to evaluate the past, things like linear weights and base runs are what you should use in those cases. What should have happened is irrelevant after it does happen, and PrOPS tells you what should have happened. So naturally it would be a good projection tool, right? Well, it kind of was. Tom Tango ran regressions with it and found it scored up with the PECOTAs and ZIPs of the world, but JC was not very compliant with using it that way. A real system might be slightly limited by a lack of batted ball knowledge. PECOTA is using 100 years of data, PrOPS at the most would use like 8. Also as far as I know it never included injury or age adjustments, which would be important. That it still scored as high as other projections with these limitations tells me something good was going on there. I believe there will be a stat that comes out sometime soon that uses batted ball data even better than PrOPS, and hopefully whomever does this will make a projection system out of this. For now PrOPS is what it is though. It is a great way to both identify and quantify luck, so we can say that Richie Sexson was one of the unluckiest guy in baseball last year, and he was this unlucky. I am very sure I will be using it a lot at the beginning of the year when Beltre is hitting .150 or William F. Bloomquist is up around .450. After this year I’ve already used it to say Sexson is better than Vidro, regardless of last year. PrOPS is a limited stat, but certainly a good one to add to your repertoire, when used correctly it can give good information as to what is likely to go on in the future.

My Interview With Seth Stohs

Here is my interview, as it appears at www.sethspeaks.net:

Six Questions with Brandon Warne

 

We are back with another Twins bloggers who has taken time to answer some questions for us. Brandon Warne writes about the Twins for the Hardball Review. In the past, I have received several e-mails from Brandon and he has occasionally participated in the Comments section. Again, I originally sent these questions before the Twins/Rays trade, so I added a question at the end regarding that trade. Of course, I sent that too early as the trade wasn’t finalized yet, so his response still counts Juan Rincon into the deal. But still, Brandon did a nice job with these questions and you should check out his site.

 

SethSpeaks: You’re the GM, what do you do about Johan Santana? To trade, or not to trade? If your answer is “To Trade”, what would it require in return to make it happen?

Brandon Warne:  Honestly, I extend him.  7 years, 126 million dollars.  This team is a reasonably productive (to throw out a number, roughly .750 OPS in each spot would do) 3B, DH, and CF away from being very, very relevant in the AL Central.  Even filling those holes with modest additions like Mike Lamb at 3B, Rocco Baldelli at DH or CF, and maybe someone like Cliff Floyd, Luis Gonzalez, or perhaps my favorite choice of all, Milton Bradley (who was an absolute stud offensively last year) for the CF/DH spot that Baldelli wouldn’t fill would make us relevant.  These are all guys that can produce .750 or better OPS numbers, a far cry (as far as DH and 3B go) from the .562 put up by Punto (off the top of my head so don’t quote me) and whatever we got out of Tyner, Redmond, Cirillo and co. at DH last year.  You simply can’t go shopping to directly replace Torii Hunter.  You can’t afford to, and you don’t need to (although if you look at Bradley’s stats, it’s a reasonable scenario that he could easily replicate at least Torii’s career OPS of .793).  Not only that, but the mentality that you should shop for HR and RBI is silly.  HR and RBI don’t translate from park to park, from league to league, and besides that, they’re overpriced on the market.  There are plenty of bargains to be had on the market each year, we just need to find ourselves a Dmitri Young, Matt Stairs, etc. type of player.

If, however, I do trade Santana, the package that entices me most is to the Dodgers for Kemp, Kershaw, and LaRoche. Kemp and LaRoche can step in immediately and provide productive service at their respective spots (CF and 3B respectively) cheaply, and Kershaw is probably the best pitching prospect of those that haven’t seen ML time.  That’s a fantastic trade for us, and might still allow us to contend because we’d simply need a bat for the DH slot (for which I’d still LOVE to see Milton Bradley play as he recuperates from his ACL injury).

SethSpeaks: The Twins have been hesitant in the past to trade young pitchers. It sounds like that theory may be somewhat altered this offseason. Are there any of the Twins young pitchers that you would call untouchable?

 

Brandon Warne: Liriano is the lone one that I wouldn’t trade for anyone, and I probably would object very strongly to dealing anyone named Garza, Slowey, Perkins, Baker, Manship, or Swarzak.  So I would troll the market with Bonser, Blackburn, and Duensing, most likely.  If any of them could fetch Baldelli or better, and I think Bonser should be able to since he’s probably worth more than that to us, then I do it.  Blackburn looks nice, as does Duensing, but in all reality they’re probably 8-10th on our totem pole as far as starting pitchers to go to.  If Garza can net B.J. Upton or someone like that, I’d have a hard time saying no.  Anything of value for Garrett Atkins is a big NO for me.

 

SethSpeaks: As of today, where would you rank the Twins in the AL Central?

 

Brandon Warne: 3rd.  Better than the White Sox, behind the Indians and Tigers. The Royals are making strides, too.

 

SethSpeaks: What would you consider the top three things that the Twins need to do this offseason?

Brandon Warne: Settle the Santana situation.  Find starting CF/DH/3B.  Long term extensions for Kubel/Cuddyer/Morneau.

SethSpeaks: On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that Bill Smith will be able to do the things that the Twins need to compete?

 

Brandon Warne: So far he’s talked a pretty big game, but until we see some results I’m going to go with a cautiously optimistic 7.

 

SethSpeaks: Tell us a little about what you do on your blog, where we can find it and what you write about during the offseason?

Brandon Warne:   I write at www.hardballreview.wordpress.com.  We are a Twins/Mariners blog, and I’m the lone Twins staff writer.  The main guy is a dude that went to the same schools (AFLBS in Plymouth, Northwestern College in Roseville) I did, but a little earlier.  One day he was trolling around campus and happened into my room, saw the Baseball Prospectus’ on the shelves, and I don’t think we’ve stopped talking baseball since.  He called me “the best Minnesota Twins baseball mind he’d ever met”.  Yes, of course, he never met Gleeman or Stohs, but it’s still a nice consolation prize.  I write about potential moves, and their ramifications.  Also, lately I’ve done an offseason preview, an update (Monroe trade/interest in Tony Clark update), and I’m working on a “Johan Santana/2B options” post that should be up in the next couple days.

If you’d like to contact me, hit me up at brandonwarne52@hotmail.com or brandonwarne52 on AIM if you’d like.  I’m always up for a Twins game (if you buy me a beer I’ll pay for parking) or to chat baseball, or whatever you got.

Take care and God Bless

SethSpeaks: What are your thoughts on the Twins and Rays trade (Matt Garza, Jason Bartlett and Juan Rincon for Delmon Young, Brendan Harris and Jason Pridie)?

 

Brandon Warne: Well, the deal isn’t final yet, but I absolutely love it.  This is a write off of Rincon’s salary, and Harris is a superior offensive player to Bartlett, so it comes down to Pridie and Young for Garza, and I’ll make that deal any day of the week.  I would be absolutely thrilled if this spurs a Santana extension, but I’m still not opposed to loading up on prospects for Nathan and Santana and letting the kids play.

Either way, it’s a step in the right direction.

 

Thank you to Brandon Warne and to all the readers for stopping by this site. If you have any questions, comments or ideas for future postings, please e-mail me. 

Meet Delmon Young, Franchise Cornerstone

Wednesday the Twins pulled off a blockbuster trade with Tampa Bay, acquiring OF’s Delmon Young, Jason Pridie, and IF Brendan Harris (all ML level) for SP Matt Garza, SS Jason Bartlett, and minor league P Eduardo Morlan. Earlier rumors suggested that MR Juan Rincon would be included rather than Morlan, but that fell through when the Rays expressed concerns regarding the condition of Rincon’s elbow. Operating under the idea that you know all you need to know about Garza, Bartlett, and company, here’s what you should know about your new Twins:

What should be taken from the deal? Well, for the Twins, they gain an incredibly talented 22 year old OF who may or may not be capable of playing CF in Young. Whether or not Young can play CF doesn’t really change the value of the trade, primarily due to the fact that LF/DH was another spot the Twins needed to fill with a quality regular, something that Young would appear to do. There is a chance, however, that the Twins fell in love with a name. Young is a former first overall pick, back in the 2003 amateur draft. That alone can gain a player some instant notoriety, and a veritable plethora of undeserved chances to prove yourself. Think Dewon Brazelton. As for Delmon, Young’s Triple Crown stats of .288 13 HR and 93 RBI will make the less informed baseball fan feel warm inside, but there’s little in the way of positives to glean from an overall mark of .288/.316/.408. Add to the fact that he’s got a history of less than stellar isolated discipline (.047 in 1413 minor league AB would be a pretty good indicator here), and he’s probably going to have to post a .320 average year in and year out (nearly impossible to do) to have an OBP worth telling mom about. Is he still a potential, perhaps even probably franchise cornerstone, especially given that next season will be his age 22 season? Heck yes, but perhaps we should temper the enthusiasm for next year, anyway.

Brendan Harris poses an offensive upgrade and a defensive downgrade to Bartlett. This is, of course, if the Twins view him as a SS going forward. Harris graded out nearly 30 runs below replacement level last year, but apparently projects well at either 2B or 3B. While producing a .286/.343/.434 line, Harris smacked 50 extra base hits and drove in just a shade over 60 runs. He would probably look pretty good in the 2 hole, and would be a smart solution for the 2B or 3B problem if the Twins felt Casilla could handle the load at SS at least for now. It’s a real shame Plouffe isn’t a bit closer, otherwise he’d provide some stiff competition for Casilla in camp.

Jason Pridie was property of the Twins for a short time prior to the 2006 season, having been selected by the club during the 2005 Winter Meetings. Pridie was strangely stronger in AAA last year in AA, especially since his AA numbers (.290/.331/.441) are pretty much exactly in line with his minor league numbers to date (.279/.327/.432), especially more so than his AAA numbers (.318/.375/.539). This was the first time since Pridie was an 18 year old in Rookie Ball back in 2002 that he posted an OPS higher than 900 in any significant amount of time. Sounds an awful lot like Brian Buscher. Pridie could make a good, cheap option to start in CF (certainly light years better than Tyner and Span) as long as the Twins don’t stop here with the additions, and make an upgrade at the 3B/2B spot, whichever isn’t filled by Brendan Harris.

From this writer’s standpoint, the deal is pretty good for both clubs. The Rays have a horde of young, useful OF, so it makes sense to thin the herd by dealing for a weak spot. Strangely, though, they dealt their seemingly most valuable asset, a very, very cheap and talented OF who could be the next Twins OF darling, on the coattails of Torii Hunter and the late Turkey Bucket, *ahem* Kirby Puckett. Garza looks to be a solid 2 or at worst a 3 in this league with a ceiling rivaling perhaps Ian Kennedy, and perhaps a bit higher than fellow prospect pitchers Jon Lester, Glen Perkins, and Kevin Slowey. It remains to be seen if Garza will live up to the hype, but he’s joining a stable of SP anchored by Scott Kazmir that is young and improving. Don’t sleep on the Rays this year.

For all your sports discussion needs, hit up www.prosportsdaily.com/forums and join me (brandonwarne52) on the Twins, Vikings, Wild, and Timberwolves boards and support your local clubs. GO TWINS!

The State of Play

First off, sorry for the lack of posting. It’s been a difficult term at school. Now it’s the holidays, and I’ll be good.

The Mariners, as things stand, are not a good team. They might not even be an OK team – they fluked their way into a nice little season last year, but now the big worry is that the front office sees us as a true 88 win roster that needs minor tinkering to make the playoffs. This would be a pretty horrific mistake to make.

Where are the problems with our roster?

LF, 1B, DH, and 2 starter slots. If we accept Jose Vidro as essentially unmovable, we then have 4 problem spots on the roster. Not good.

Raul Ibanez is a liability in left field. He makes the occaisional spectacular (looking) play, sure, but he’s not very fast and takes some Byrnesian routes out there. Most defensive metrics have him as one of the worst left fielders in the game (and we’re talking Adam Dunn/Manny Ramirez territory). Replacing Ibanez in left with a merely average defender is probably a two win move by itself. However, rumours of the demise of Raul’s bat were heavily overstated. He absolutely carried the team from early August onward, and he’s exactly the sort of hitter that can thrive in Safeco – left handed and with reasonable pop, helped out immensely by the short porch in right. The Mariners really cannot afford to lose that from the lineup, unless someone seriously thinks Ben Broussard is the left handed sock for which we’ve been yearning.

At first, we have the much maligned Richie Sexson, who had the misfortune of slumping for the entire season, whilst playing first like his feet had been nailed to the ground. Will he bounce back offensively next year? Yep. He might even put up an OPS+ of over 100. But he’s being paid like a star, and if we’re really lucky he might end up as a below average first baseman next year.

As for the starters, is there anyone who wants Jeff Weaver or Horacio Ramirez back next year? No? Well, let me make a few points in their favour. Weaver first.

Jeff Weaver is a known commodity, and historically bad start aside, he was a decent #5 pitcher for us last year. Another point in his favour? He’d come really cheap, which is always nice.

Horacio Ramirez is young, relatively cheap, and left handed. If he magically acquires some talent this winter, I’d be all in favour of bringing him back. As it stand right now, he’d make an excellent ligament bank in case some of our players get hurt.

So what do we do?

Here’s my ideal scenario:

Milton Bradley on a 2 year deal, with Jeremy Reed/Wladimir Balentien as injury backup. When healthy, Bradley’s an excellent defensive outfielder with a good arm, and a very solid switch hitter. Unfortunately, he’s crazy and has a habit of breaking all the time, most recently while being tackled by his own manager. I still think he’s worth the risk: getting three centrefielders in one outfield would give us a defense the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2003, and they can all hit a bit too.

Richie Sexson to San Francisco, with us eating $8M of the contract, for whatever we can get. I know there’s a lot of scepticism around the blogosphere about Richie’s trade value, but if Brian Sabean doesn’t jump at the chance to add Sexson to his team for $6.5M, I’d be really surprised. That frees up some payroll to play with and also opens up first base for Ibanez to slot into. One think we have to watch out for here is getting a bad contract back – if you can’t completely get rid of him without getting something useless in return, keep Sexson on the bench and let him walk at the end of the season. Ibanez is a terrible defensive outfielder, and he’ll probably be a pretty bad first baseman, but that’s still a better package than Big Richie.

Re-sign Jeff Weaver for to two year $4M deal. No, I’m not insane, or at least I don’t think I am. This isn’t a huge investment. If he sucks again (I don’t think he will with the defense improved), just DFA his sorry ass and make him go away. If he doesn’t, well we’ve just bought low and patched up a spot in the rotation in an offseason where everyone’s clamouring for pitchers. RRS would be my first choice to replace him if things go pear shaped, and to that end he’d assume the long-guy role in the ‘pen. Morrow’s in AAA in this little dream-world of mine.

Explore some trade possibilities with the Rays (have you seen their new stadium, by the way?It’s absolutely gorgeous). Dave Cameron favours J.P. Howell, and I agree. I’d love Sonnanstine too, but that would be a bit of a stretch. The Devil Rays have a lot of starting depth, but they need a bit more bullpen help and perhaps a catcher too. I’d start at Eric O’Flaherty and Rob Johnson and see where that ended up (Clement, however, is off limits).

On paper, that’s a much better team than last year, and done without mortgaging the future away. We’d still be relying on Ichiro, Beltre, and Felix (and now Bradley’s health) to get us into the postseason, but I reckon that if Bavasi could execute the plan above, it’d be a very successful offseason.

Will he? Of course not. Hopefully nothing goes too badly wrong.

Feel free to flame me over the Weaver thing.

-Graham

Market Realities

Two days and three eyebrow raising signings.

1. Angels ink Torii Hunter to a 5 year 90 million dollar deal

2. White Sox sign Scott Linebrink to a 4 year 19 million dollar deal

3. Reds sign Francisco Cordero to a 4 year 42 million dollar deal.

 The (almost) universal reaction has been to call the GM’s responsible for these signings idiots. This nothing new, every offseason baseball fans and scribes discuss the latest round of “terrible” signings. These signings of course end up working out and as a whole aren’t the reason a team fails to compete.

 This leads me to believe two things: Major League General Managers are good at what they do and the market realities are far different than what most of us on the outside realize.

1. Major league teams have placed a premium on club controlled players

Prospects like Adam Jones are viewed as about as valuable as superstars like Johan Santana. I realize that this is an exaggeration but in order to trade a top prospect for a superstar, that team is going to make sure that a number of other factors have aligned before the team pulls the trigger on such a trade. Teams don’t trade top prospects for rent a players anymore. As a result, the only way to get young cheap talent is to grow it yourself.

2. Teams are flush with cash

Major League Baseball is quietly sneaking up on the NFL is the biggest cash cow in professional sports.  I’m not sure if the MLB will ever pass the NFL, but I am pretty sure that each major league team has tons of cash to spend. Each team enters every offseason with a ton of cash to spend on the open market.

3. Teams are pretty good at keeping homegrown stars at below market rates.

Ichiro signed a hometown discount to stay in Seattle for about the same amount of money that Torii Hunter just signed for to play in LA-Anaheim. Ichiro is clearly superior to Hunter so does this make the Hunter signing a disaster? My answer is no, but I will explain this later.

4. Teams enter the free agent signing period with the previous 3 factors in place, and Free Agency is easiest way to get better

Teams have lots of money to spend in order to improve themselves. Free Agency is pretty much the only way to do it. The open market contains a bunch of left overs. These leftovers can still help ballclubs win games so they are throwing enormous sums of money at these players because it is the only way they can get better.

 Players like Torii Hunter and Francisco Cordero can be a big part of winning a division pennant (Hunter more than Cordero), and major league GM’s realize this so they dump considerable sums of money into the free agent pool. This isn’t going to change until big name players start refusing to give hometown discounts and demand market value contracts in free agency. Almost all the top free agents in this (thin) free agent class took themselves off the market before they hit the open market. As a result, any team hording cash in hopes of landing Mark Buehrle or Ichiro must now spend that money on Carlos Silva or Torii Hunter. More supply would lower the demand on free agents.

 In light of this I view the Torii Hunter trade as an overpay but a justifiable one. Anaheim has a window to compete and they have decided to take advantage of it. They are in a good position to win the division for a few more seasons before the team gets old and before that happens they can make a few moves to blunt the impact of father time. They will need to be aggressive, but I can see this team becoming the long term dominant force in the division. Too bad the Mariners didn’t do this at the beginning of the decade.

Scott Linebrink is a signing that hurts because it is a four year deal. Relief pitchers are probably the easiest thing to find in major league baseball and relief pitcher implosions are just as common managers bringing in the lefty to face Ichiro. I don’t like giving long term deals to RP’s unless they are truly relief aces and I’m not sure Linebrink qualifies.

Fransisco Cordero hurts. This is a contract I would never do because it has far too much downside. The arsenal of a relief pitcher is far less refined than that of a starter. If a starter flops, their is always the chance they can become a good relief pitcher. If a reliever flops they are done being an effective major league player until they get better. I think it is a much wiser use of resources to use the trial and error method in the bullpen (which provides many opportunites for trial and error).

Lots of contracts handed out this offseason will cause us to shudder, but lets not be too hard on the GM’s. Remember, bloggers try to sound smart while GM’s try to win pennent races.