Word is breaking that the Mets have traded their once-top prospect, Lastings Milledge, to the Nationals for Ryan Church and Brian Schneider. The Mets have already acquired one catcher in the last two weeks, so I’m not sure I see the wisdom in this deal. Church is a nifty player, but he doesn’t have the ceiling that Milledge does.
Was Milledge’s rapping that bad? Or maybe Milledge has just gotten an unfair shake all his life. Either way, I think you have to score this as a serious win for Jim Bowden. Carlos Gomez will likely get many more starts for the Mets this season.

With hot stove season well under way, it’s easy to get dazzled by the large, risky or downright headscratching deals being thrown about. Hidden in the rough, though, have been some deals that will most likely look like bargains in a few months.

For a generation of baseball writers whose baptism in ink came at the hand of Bill James and his venerable Abstracts, Billy Beane epitomized the hard-nosed and cost conscious attitude small market teams could adopt to succeed. Having missed the postseason three out of the last four years (and having signed the likes of Esteban Loaiza to three-year deals), Mr. Beane seems to have lost his luster. Thankfully, Cleveland’s Mark Shapiro has been anointed as the heir-apparent to the throne of shrewd general managing. Shapiro has not only rebuilt the Indians on the cheap, his former front office associates are a virtual who’s who of baseball executives. So, baseball watchers, what has Mr. Shapiro done since losing the ALCS to the Red Sox?

Find out after the jump. (more…)

The Twins and Rays just completed the biggest deal of the young Hot Stove season by swapping a total of six young players centered around RHP Matt Garza and OF Delmon “Demon” Young. Filling out the deal, the Twins sent over right-handed relief prospect Eduardo Morlan and starting SS Jason Bartlett, while receiving outfield prospect Jason Pridie and starting SS Brendan Harris.

This deal is interesting because it was brokered between two teams that are notorious for hanging on to homegrown talent. I love it because it makes so much sense, even though it departs from the usual prospects-for-high priced veterans deals that feel like the MLB equivalent of U.S. trade policy. The Twins have a surplus of young, powerful pitching (BP has six of their top seven prospects as pitchers), while the Rays develop young, toolsy outfielders (Crawford, Baldelli, Dukes, Upton, Gomes, etc.) like they are going out of style. Last year, the Twins suffered through a season where they were 12th of 14 AL teams in runs scored, wasting a strong staff that allowed the 4th fewest runs in the league. Meanwhile, last year’s Delmon Rays were dead last in runs allowed, but in the middle of the pack on offense.

The result of this match made in heaven? The ideal swap of pitching and hitting. Each team gave up a future all-star in Garza and Young, accompanied by a role-player (24-year old Pridie, who projects as a reserve outfielder, and the relief prospect Morlan). Just for giggles, the two suitors swapped 27/28-year old starting shortstops. All the players involved are under control for 4 or more years, with Jason Bartlett the first to be eligible for free agency in 2012. With Delmon Young the most likely to be Jeff Bagwell-good, it is fitting that the Rays got the more valuable minor league property in Morlan, who is a three-star prospect according to Baseball Prospectus, and still only 21.

There is some concern that the Twins gave up too much, as Garza is likely to fully develop into a number 2 starter, and Morlan has the stuff of a closer, while Delmon Young could stay in the familiar Twins rut of low-OBP flailers. The reality is that Young is only 21, and he never even saw AAA. Obviously, he is still developing, and if 51 extra base hits is the starting point, I am as excited as anyone to see where he will be by the time his team plays in a real ballpark.

Before going AWOL, I looked at the free agent talent at the two most challenging defensive positions, catcher and shortstop. I mentioned that GMs will need to adjust to this year’s market by changing their strategies to match the available talent at each position. For example, smart GMs will leverage the presence of so much starting catching talent to get more favorable deals and hopefully create a better product on the field. I am going to take advantage of the silence surrounding the failed Torrealba to Mets deal to surmise that Omar Minaya had a stroke of sanity and did just that. Meanwhile, the sorry Giants gave quadragenarian Omar Vizquel a raise after he gave them their team’s worst offensive performance by a regular since 1969. I don’t care what the man does with the leather; a .246/.305/.316 line is unacceptable in today’s game, let alone from a player clearly at the very end of his career.

Today I’m going to run down the options at second in the same format.

Second base was expected to be a thin position across the leagues last year, with the phenomenal play of Chase Utley likely to be more than counterbalanced by the declines of aging stars like Jeff Kent and Craig Biggio. Naysayers were taken aback, however, by a number of big years and breakouts at the keystone. Bursts of power came from Dan Uggla and Brandon Phillips, while guys like Aaron Hill, Dustin Pedroia and Kelly Johnson had breakthroughs. Meanwhile, Orlando Hudson and Placido Polanco enjoyed career years.

This year’s class of keystone free agents is limited to three players who can be considered for starting jobs, with all those above (with the obvious exception of Biggio) under control for 2008.

Second Basemen

The Good: Tadahito Iguchi is the strongest free agent at the keystone. Despite the transition from Japan, he has maintained useful on-base percentages, while knocking a reasonable number of extra base hits each year. He struggled last year before being traded to the Phillies, where he rediscovered his stroke in the bandbox that is Citizen Bank Park. I can see him really succeeding in the National League, where 4th and 5th starters like Josh Fogg make it to the World Series.

The Bad: Kazuo Matsui is bad, and it isn’t just negative publicity from his over-hyped, under-whelming debut with the Mets. In Japan, he was a slugging Iron Man, not missing a game for 8 years, while developing home run power and hitting at a .300+ clip for seven years in a row. He signed with the Mets at 28, a peak age for a slugger, and the first Major League pitch he saw ended up in the center field bleachers. In 1,521 plate appearances since then, he has hit 16 more HR, or slightly less than half his total from his final year in Japan alone. His batting average and walk rates have predictably plunged in the Majors, and even his modest .747 OPS of 2007 seems to be a Coors Field-induced mirage; his 2007 away line reads .249/.304/.333. To add injury to insult, he is yet to appear in more than 114 games in a MLB season. Like Torrealba, KazMat has the chance to truly disappoint a team shelling out money for a newly minted World Series persona.

The Met: Luis Castillo hits for average every year, which keeps the casual fans happy, and his plate control is very impressive for a guy with no pop. He really is quite good at getting to first base, and his patience (4.00 career P/PA) batting second will give Jose Reyes ample time to shoot up the career stolen bases leaderboard. Maybe a 35-year old Luis isn’t what the Mets will want in 2011, but a four year, $25 million contract is certainly not awful if he can just keep doing what he has been doing for the last six years and avoid the injury bug.

The Cardinals are being sued by a 17-year-old girl and her mother for failing to screen text messages that fans can send to the video screen at Busch Stadium. For a small fee, fans can relay messages to the board to be displayed in-game to thousands of fans. On this particular day, 48,000 fans saw a message that said “[A.B.] has an STD! Eww!”

Eww, indeed. My favorite part of the article?

The teenager never has had a sexually transmitted disease, according to the suit.

Really, my only question is how the Cardinals are able to draw 48,000 fans for a night game in May versus the Royals where the temperature was just 46 degrees. That’s impressive.

According to the Boston Globe, 11 players currently on the market will be named in the Mitchell Report set to drop this winter. This sounds quite sensational, as we expect a stain to appear on the names we have been discussing as saviors for our teams. I say relax. Don’t expect the revelations to be as shocking as they are being played up. Remember when Will Carroll told us we would actually care that Matt Lawton was on the juice in 2005? Yeah, that was ridiculous. So, before you and the New York Post start salivating over the media circus if A-Rod ends up in the mud, keep in mind some of the free agents that may not be on your A team.

That includes 7 or 8 major league free agents who are nigh certain to be on the list. The others are as yet unidentified, and likely to remain so for at least a few weeks.

Tabloid writers have no fear: there is still possibilities for shock value. Here are two of the best, but not totally out of the blue possibilities.

Once again, baseball is marketing its own perversity, milking the witch hunt for all it’s worth. After all, it’s like a car accident or a heinous YouTube video: people have to look, over and over again. That stuff sells, and even if A-Rod won’t drop to Matt Lawton’s level, those who write about baseball would love to pretend otherwise.

Someone needs to give Bob DuPuy (chair of MLBAM’s board) and Bob Bowman (its President and CEO) a hug. First, MLBAM lost its suit against CDM Fantasy Sports, effectively making baseball stats part of the public domain. Then, on appeal, MLBAM lost again. Good news for consumers, bad news for MLBAM, baseball’s web and high-tech presence.

Then comes this news that previously downloaded games from MLB.com no longer work, as MLB.com has changed digital rights management (DRM) providers. As a technology, DRM is designed to limit unlicensed copying by the consumer. In theory, that is a defensible goal. In reality, as Sony discovered, DRM often causes innumerable hassles for the consumer. In this case, changing the company MLB.com used to lock down their video content caused everyone who had paid $3.95 for the right to download (and on the face of it, own) a copy of the game to be deprived of the product they had paid for.

In my mind, MLBAM is at a crossroads. On the one hand, they offer a number of excellent services which have become indispensable to my daily life: mlb.com, mlb.tv and their ilk. On the other hand, they are exhibiting a tendency to be extremely litigious (not surprising, considering DuPuy is a former attorney) and antagonistic toward their customers. At this point in time, MLB is rife with cash, attendance records are being set every consecutive year and player-owner relations are enjoying one of the longest periods of quiescence since Marvin Miller was hired by the MLBPA to negotiate the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968.

Why they would get greedy in such obnoxious ways is utterly beyond me. If I were running MLBAM, I would offer an unparalleled fantasy baseball experience, replete with as many statistical options as possible and free live updated stats. Then, I would offer MLB’s complete video library for streaming as a subscription service, similar to mlb.tv. What do you think? Am I being too harsh on this corporate powerhouse which brought in $300 million in revenue in 2006?

***UPDATE***
Juan Uribe signed a one year, $4.5 contract with the White Sox today, ending any speculation that he will be awful for another team this year. Meanwhile, the Giants are doing their best to give Omar Vizquel another chance to make Pedro Feliz nothing more than a pleasant memory.

***************

Ah, ’tis the season for the GMs to flock to Orlando and commence the classic human mating pattern of taking potential matches out to fancy dinners and getting them drunk. Although this elaborate dance has a different motive for the Major League GM subspecies of homo sapien, the courtship element is certainly there. Scott Boras certainly won’t be missing this opportunity to sit on the business end of a company card or six. I continue to visit Rotoworld 8-10 times per day in an endless cycle of ignorance-producing research on the process.

I am struck by the diversity of this free agent class; its talent is distributed in strange places, and it will be interesting to see which GMs can adapt and compete without being foolish. For example, the traditionally steep market on serviceable catchers is flooded with five plausible candidates to be offered starting jobs, while Sean Casey is the only option in the usually robust market for starting first basemen (um, and he’s awful). Let me do a little rundown of position players to show you what we have on our hands. I’ll include a few players reported to be available via trade, as well, although obviously those guys are less likely to change teams.

Catchers

Analysis after the jump…
(more…)

ESPN is citing “sources,” though it remains unclear what exactly that means. In any case, the Padres and Greg Maddux have agreed to a one-year, $10 million deal. This essentially splits the difference between Maddux’s $8.75 million player option and the Padres’ $11 million team option.

No more information at this time. Then again, do you need any more?

Take a look at the following list of free agent pitchers (ages in parentheses):

• Kris Benson (32)
• Matt Clement (32)
• Bartolo Colon (35)
• Jason Jennings (29)
• Joe Kennedy (29)
• Jon Lieber (38)
• Kyle Lohse (29)
• Rodrigo Lopez (32)
• Odalis Perez (31)
• Carlos Silva (29)
• Jeff Weaver (31)
• Kip Wells (31)
• Randy Wolf (31)

Okay, okay. So these guys don’t really seem poised to set the world on fire. Nevertheless, they have a little something in their pocketses. What is it, you ask?

Well, ever since the owners and players reached an agreement in 1981 to use perhaps the most arbitrary of proprietary rankings, the Elias Sports Bureau Player Rankings have dictated the return teams get on free agent departures. Many of you probably already know the deal, but a quick refresher. Players are ranked as A-type (top 20% in each position group), B-type (next 20%) or not at all. Type-A free agents, if offered arbitration and sign with another team, net the previous year’s team two compensation draft picks in the first two rounds (it’s actually more complicated than that, but we’ll spare you the nitty gritty). Type-B free agents are compensated with lower draft picks, placed between the first and second rounds. You can see the rankings of all the AL players here and NL players here. The upshot of this is that signing Types A & B free agents has an extra cost associated with it. Nate Silver estimated in 2005 that Type A picks were worth about $12 million (subscription required). Type B picks are worth less, as the drop off from late first round pick to sandwich pick (between the first and second rounds) is significant. However, the best type of free agent is that which doesn’t have any compensation associated with it at all, either because the former team failed to offer arbitration or because they were not ranked in the Elias “system.”

All of the above pitchers were not ranked as Types A or B. Paradoxically, that may mean that they have more value than pitchers who came in as Type B free agents (such as Paul Byrd, Freddy Garcia and Livan Hernandez). What I’m saying is, Lieber, Lohse, Silva, Wolf, Benson and even Colon could be very, very rich men come the winter meetings, only by virtue of being hurt and/or ineffective last season. And the team that signs Freddy Garcia? There may actually be no long-term upside AT ALL. And Japanese free agents like workhorse Hiroki Kuroda? Well, all the better for them?

CORRECTION: The original version of this post claimed Hiroki Kuroda would go through posting. He will not, and will instead be treated as a normal free agent (albeit without Elias ranking, just like the above pitchers).