Less than two weeks ’til pitchers and catchers head to sunny Florizona, and you know what that means: prospect lists!

• Kevin Goldstein
• Keith Law
• John Sickels
• MiLB.com

I think I have to agree with Law and say that Evan Longoria is the top prospect in baseball. There’s no way around the fact that the Tampa Bay Rays have an obscenely good farm system.

UPDATE: Added MiLB.com’s list, culled from 20 scouts’ lists.

ESPN.com is reporting that the Mets contract extension talks with Johan Santana have hit a snag regarding the length of the contract. Astute observers will recall that last winter the Mets (wisely) balked at offering Barry Zito more than five years. The ESPN headline claims a deal won’t be reached until tomorrow, if at all. C.C. Sabathia may not want to start spending like crazy quite yet.

For a debrief of the likely deal sending Johan Santana to the Mets for their numbers 2, 3, 4 and 7 prospects (as ranked by Baseball America), you can do no better than to consult Aaron Gleeman. Mr. Gleeman has been a Santana believer since his first Rule 5 days with the Twins. And now, he thinks, Twins’ GM Bill Smith didn’t maximize his return. Gleeman characterizes the rookie GM’s error in the following way:

In poker terms, Smith slow-played a big hand and ended up dragging in less than the maximum pot.

Scratching my head, I turned elsewhere on the internet. Two weeks ago, the Star-Tribune’s Joe Christensen had this to say:

Are the Twins overplaying their hand in the Johan Santana trade talks? It’s possible. That thought came Monday, when ESPN.com ran the headline, “Source: Yankees again backing away from Santana.”

Ben K, at our sister site River Ave. Blues, broke the deal down from the Yankees’ perspective:

Meanwhile, the Yankees laid their cards on the table but did so in a way to call the Twins’ bluff.

Now, I understand that some increasingly-prominent internet baseball figures are pretty good at gambling. And I will readily confess: I am terrible at gambling. Seriously, invite me to your next poker night; you will win money. But do we really need to tell our check-raises from our overcall fishes to analyze this trade? In reality, Smith’s hand was on the table for all to see: one year of Santana with the caveat that he could only be traded if he were signed to a long-term (and expensive) deal. Maybe the poker analogies aren’t quite so apt.

So, in the spirit of gaming diversity, I’ve come up with some alternative game analogies while we wait for the other six years to drop.

• The Twins did net some solid prospects with good upside (Deolis Guerra, Carlos Gomez), so we can’t quite say that Minaya sunk Smith’s battleship. His submarine, perhaps?
• You might say Minaya had a blockade in front of Smith’s nest.
• You might say Smith, having been assigned black, played the Sicilian Defense.
• You might say Minaya was in a position of sente, while Smith was in gote.
• You might say Minaya employed The Fistful O’ Dollars move (it took the 1967 Rock-Paper-Scissors World Championships by storm).
• You might say Minaya served with a cherry bomb.
• Staying on the bomb theme, you might say Minaya lined up at 1st and 30 and called “Da Bomb” (don’t play, you know it worked every time).
• You might say Bill Smith exhibited Andy Reid-like clock management.
• You might say Bill Smith’s strategy was to sit out the early contests, placing his hopes in Florida. (Too soon?)
• Then again, you might just say the interested parties (Yankees, Red Sox, Twins, Mets) are now in Nash equilibrium.

I think we could really take this too far. If you care to help, add your own in the comments!

As I was reading Dan Fox’s excellent introduction to version 1.0 of his new fielding statistic, Simple Fielding Runs (SFR, for short), I was struck at how it grades players on much the same scale as other defensive metrics. John Dewan’s Plus/Minus, UZR, David Pinto’s PMR and others are all based around the concept of being better or worse than the average fielder at a given position. Some of the systems (notably, Plus/Minus and PMR) are based on outs made above or below average, whereas UZR and SFR are calibrated in terms of runs prevented, but the focus on average performance is common to all of them.

In 1997, Keith Woolner (formerly of Baseball Prospectus, currently a member of the Indians’ front office) developed a revolutionary framework for evaluating baseball talent. It was, at root, an economic analysis. From Woolner’s introduction:

Any competitive advantage a team has must, in some way, translate to better on-field performance to be valuable.
A commodity which is easily available to all teams at no or low cost confers no competitive advantage, and therefore is of minimal value. Thus, baseball value comes from scarcity.
[…]
Average players have value. Measures that use average production as a reference point, such as TPR, incorrectly estimate the contribution of average players by failing to recognize the value of average playing time.
Replacement level is a less concrete mathematical concept, but it is an important economic one.

The heart of Woolner’s analysis is that a significant portion of a player’s economic value to his team comes from his on-field contributions. And the only reasonable way to value a player’s contributions is to determine the opportunity cost a team faces in giving a specific player an everyday role. Woolner’s breakthrough was the formulation of a “replacement level,” which he defined as “the *expected* level of performance the average team can obtain if it needs to replace a starting player at minimal cost.” In other words, replacement level is (roughly speaking) the baseball talent market’s analogue to opportunity cost. Developing metrics based on replacement level, as BP has been doing ever since, has been extremely useful in baseball analysis.

What does this have to do with defense? (more…)

…But at least Mark Hendrickson will be able to see all the way to home plate. Considering Lasik surgery isn’t very expensive these days, I really can’t figure out why the Blue Jays, Devil Rays or Dodgers never sprung to get him this in the past. I last wrote about Hendrickson’s signing here. HT: RotoAuthority.

I think playing a season opener in Japan is a fine idea. I’m all for globalizing the game and drawing a bigger fan base. But every time they do the godforsaken advertisements on the uniforms I just want to show them the baby seals they are clubbing with spiked maces. Honestly, who do EMC, Corp. think they are, and what right do they have to sully the American pastime? Be ashamed of yourselves, Red Sox, MLB and EMC.

I’m not sure how much I believe this, but I can’t think of another explanation (yet).

Research has shown that baseball players whose first or last names begin with the letter “K” strike out significantly more (9.3% increase) than their counterparts from the rest of the alphabet. The authors generalize that our feelings towards specific letters can influence outcomes in systems which assign letters tied to performance. For example, students whose names start with C or D and have positive attitudes towards those letters are more likely to get grades of C or D in school.

The baseball part of the study looked at professional players from 1913 to 2006. They controlled for ethnicity, average year of play and country of origin and found the effect to persist.

From the study:

Despite a universal desire to avoid striking out, players whose first or last names began with the letter K struck out more often than other players. For players with this initial, the explicitly negative performance outcome may feel implicitly less aversive. Even Karl “Koley” Kolseth would find a strikeout adversive, but he might find it a little less aversive than players who do not share his initials, and therefore he might be less motivated to avoid striking out.

As I said, I find this extraordinarily hard to believe. That said, Kevin Kouzmanoff has struck out a relatively high 106 times in 577 career major league plate appearances.

What do you think?

In the midst of steroid drama, statistical butting of heads, poorly run franchises, and desperate hopes and fears for the upcoming season, maybe we all need to detach ourselves a bit and remember why baseball is so sweet. Here is a blog presenting 792 reasons why baseball captured us as kids and never let us go. One of the only other reasons I can think of is Joe Castiglione. Enjoy your stroll through the Runnin’ 80s.

Bill Bavasi and the Mariners have flirted with trading their five-star prospect, Adam Jones, to gain a front of the rotation starter. The rumors have primarily involved Erik Bedard, with a few revolving around Johan Santana. These rumors have drawn varying degrees of resignation and fear among M’s fans.

Apparently, the deal was so close to fruition that Jones was held out of his Venezuelan Winter League games (for the Cardinales de Lara) this past weekend. (Curiously, that article claims Jones was hitting .402 through 19 games, when in fact he was hitting .304. This error was probably due to mlb.com’s confusing player pages, which make the OBP for BA swap an easy mistake to make.) Another peculiarity of Jones’ player page is that it has not been updated since the new year. Going through the box scores, I’ve compiled Jones’ line so far this winter:

The 22 year-old hit his first home run of the winter yesterday, so he seems largely unaffected by the trade talks. There are also whisperings that it may be Jones himself holding up the trade talks (see especially the sidebar).

Quoted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article linked above, Jones said:

I try to keep in contact with our organization, but the last time I talked with our GM (Bavasi), he just said, ‘You’re not going to play for a couple of days as we are in the process of doing all this.’ He said for me to hang tight for a couple of days and they’d get back to me.

So, Adam, I hope you keep your locker nice and clean down in Venezuela (not to mention Tacoma/Seattle). While acquiring Bedard would certainly seem like a nice pickup, Jones has as high a ceiling as any Mariners hitting prospect since Alex Rodriguez. I’m not convinced getting rid of him makes the team better even in the short term, as losing Jones raises the specter of Luis Gonzalez patrolling the outfield. With Bavasi’s itchy finger on the trigger, though, it’s a good bet that Jones ends up in B’more.

UPDATE (1-18-08): Kevin Gregg has signed for $2.5 million, making him the highest paid Marlin in 2008! Congratulations, Kevin! My condolences to Mark Hendrickson, whose brief run as BMOC ended today. Note: your team may be in trouble if its highest paid player is the closer. Just sayin’.

Proving once again that South Florida is where baseball talent comes from, not where it eventually ends up, the Marlins have purged nearly all their arbitration-eligible players. The remaining players (Kevin Gregg, Alfredo Amezaga and a few others) do not stand to make a significant amount in their first year of eligibility. Last year, the Marlins payroll stood at less than $31 million, and that was before they traded away their two most expensive arbitration players, Miguel Cabrera ($7.4 million in 2007) and Dontrelle Willis ($6.45 million in 2007), they have a very svelte salary indeed.

That is, they did until the big news trickled up from Miami that Beinfest and company had caught their most expensive Fish of the offseason. Oh, what’s that? You hadn’t heard about this free agent blockbuster? Maybe that’s because, in all likelihood, the Marlins’ most expensive player in 2008 will be Mark Hendrickson. Let that sink in. At $1.5 million dollars, Hendrickson is the highest paid player on the entire team. He has a career 5.01 ERA and is slotted in as the fourth starter. So unless Kevin Gregg parlays his 32 saves last season into an arbitration victory (a possibility, certainly, but his career 4.12 ERA, the fact that he only had one save before 2007 and his arb. defeat last season mean it’s no slam dunk), the Marlins highest paid player will make all season what Alex Rodriguez will earn in a week and a half.

Ah, but here we go, deeper down the rabbit hole. This is, after all, South Florida we’re talking about. Crazy stories happen there all the time. Just yesterday, the Marlins announced ticket and parking prices would be going up for the 2008 season. Per the Miami Herald:

As the Dolphins and Heat mull raising ticket prices, the Marlins already have authorized a hike, from $1 to $5 for all individual game tickets except batter’s box and $9 Fishtank seats, which are unchanged. Dolphin Stadium is raising individual Marlins game parking from $10 to $15.

Wow. I mean, that’s management right there. The Marlins drew just under 17,000 fans per game last season, which is less than half the National League average. What do you do when faced with that kind of disinterest from your fan base? Apparently, trade away your good young stars for a bunch of prospects and raise ticket prices considerably (except for the Fishtank, which are the cheapest seats available in the stadium, located in the upper deck). Is anyone else reminded of Major League, only without the cheeky shenanigans of Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes?

Really, I can’t say this enough. Get this team some real ownership and a real market already.