The Peter Bourjos trade rumors have started to circulate again. The primary discussant in the linked article is the Nationals, but the Royals, Diamondbacks, and Blue Jays are also mentioned. With super-prospect Mike Trout in the majors, the Angels already having something of an outfield crunch and Bourjos flat-lining on offense so far this season, there is a surface rationality to the idea of trading him. Let’s briefly look at how Bourjos might fit into the plans of the teams allegedly interested in Bourjos before turning to the question of how this makes sense (or nonsense) for the Angels.

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From the moment Trevor Bauer‘s name was announced as the third overall pick in the 2011 draft, the pitcher with my favorite twitter handle (@BauerOutage) has been in the conversation for best pitching prospect in all of baseball. Against Chattanooga, the former UCLA ace (sorry Gerrit Cole) carved up double-A hitters at times, but struggled to command a fastball up in the zone, leading to mixed results in the stat column.

Video after the jump.

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Way out in the National League West, the much-mocked Barry Zito and the much-debated Trevor Cahill are both off to good starts. Both players got their starts with the Oakland As before moving the to National League. Of more interest is that both players have, at different times, been held up as examples of pitchers for whom DIPS stats like FIP are inadequate. Without getting into lengthy discussions of each pitcher or the whole debate about DIPS (of which FIP is just one variety), let’s take a look at Zito and Cahill’s early-season performances with a glance at their past performances and see if there is anything of interest.

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To write that Arizona Diamondbacks pitching prospect Tyler Skaggs is very good isn’t exactly going out on a limb. However, with the young lefty ranking no lower than number-21 on major prospect lists and posting gaudy double-A numbers this season, readers expect Skaggs to rank among the truly elite pitching prospects in the game. For me personally, it was Skaggs being universally ranked above Mariners Danny Hultzen this past off-season that left me anticipating he would become my standard bearer for southpaws. In this particular start, he fell a bit short.

Video after the jump

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Willie Bloomquist has been playing baseball for a long time. This will be his 10th full year in the Majors, and in the previous nine, he has never been even an average hitter. Despite this, Bloomquist has started the season as the D-backs’ leadoff hitter, a role he filled nearly half of the time last season. He has started the season hot, but history tells us that will not last, and when he reverts back to form, the D-backs may have trouble scoring runs.

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Read the methodology behind the ratings here. Remember that the grading scale is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago AL
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland
#20 – New York NL
#19 – Los Angeles
#18 – Colorado
#17 – Miami

Arizona’s 2011 Ranking: #29

2012 Outlook: – 55 (12th)

Combine an offense that is well above average with a pitching staff that is a touch above average, and you have a playoff team. It wasn’t enough to get the D-backs into baseball’s final four, but they came about as you could come, taking the Brewers into extras in the deciding Game 5 of their National League Division Series. Most of the principals from that team are intact this year. They are once again faced with mediocre competition in the NL West, and are in a position to win the division in consecutive years since the Randy Johnson-Curt Schilling-Luis Gonzalez-mountains of debt years. And while Ian Kennedy and Daniel Hudson may be in for a bit of regression, the team may be better this year than last.

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Contract extension talks between catcher Miguel Montero and the Arizona Diamondbacks reportedly ended without a resolution this spring. Montero is said to be looking for something like the four-year, $50 million contract Victor Martinez received from the Tigers in free agency prior to the 2010 season. The Diamondbacks do have Montero under contract for 2012 (the last of his team-controlled arbitration seasons), but at the moment it looks like he will become a free agent after the World Series. Is Montero’s desire for such a contract reasonable?

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Last weekend, as many may have noticed, Arizona Diamondback prospect Trevor Bauer was engaging his twitter followers in regards to fastballs both in the upper and lower part of the zone. Well, to be more accurate, he was suggesting that the fascination with throwing your fastball down in the zone was overrated and generally just wrong. It all began with this:

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With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.

League Trends

To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.

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Stephen Drew could miss the start of the 2012 season. The soon-to-be-29-year-old has been slow to recover from a devastating ankle fracture, which ended his season in mid-July. With the Arizona Diamondbacks defending their National League West crown, Drew’s return will play a big role if the D-Backs plan to repeat.

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Intentional walks (IBB) are usually given to good and/or unprotected players in a lineup. Pitchers would rather face the next, weaker hitting batter. The IBBs lead to an inflated walk rate (BB%) for hitters. By removing IBB from a player’s BB%, a true walk rate emerges. A problem I noticed was that when a player’s IBB% increases so does their non-intentional walk rate (NIBB%). Here is an attempt at putting some numbers behind the assumption.

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It is a simple question.

What is sabermetrics?

Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?

Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.

Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.

I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.

Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.
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Silly monkey, BRAINS ARE FOR ZOMBIES.

Casey Kotchman is in many ways a man without a home — a player equal parts under-appreciated and over-valued, who irks both old and new schools at the same time. Old school analysts say his defense is amazing, but they cannot quantify it, and in 2011, they claimed his cleared vision meant he finally learned how to aim the ball “where they ain’t,” but he’s still a .268 hitter with little power. The new school says he’s worth about 7.6 runs per season defensively, but worth ~1.1 WAR per 600 PAs — not good — and his BABIP was high 2011, so he should not be able to repeat his success.

Despite his inability to build a consistent following of fans in the baseball outsiders communities, Kotchman seems to have some insider communities very much interested in him, as Tom Tango points out:

Kotchman’s last four teams: Redsox, Mariners, Rays, Indians. Can we say that a team that signs Kotchman is saber-leaning?

Indeed, after spending five and a half seasons on the Angels’ and Braves’ rosters, Kotchman has begun to shuffle around with the Nerdz, most recently signing with the Cleveland Indians. It makes sense too — Kotchman’s lack of power keeps him cheap, and his strong defense keeps him amorphous for the old school teams, while the new schools might have different valuations on Kotchman, they can at least quantify his contributions and better know how he fits.

Then, on Monday, the Houston Astros signed Justin Ruggiano, long-time Tampa Bay Rays outfielder who was never good enough to stick on the Rays’ roster, but who possesses strong defensive chops and above average patience. His lack of power and ~.290 batting average, however, must make him a mystery — or at least an undesirable asset — to the old school teams.

Upon Ruggiano signing with the Astros, a once highly old school team, my reaction was all: “Welp, that’s one more team to compete with” — and then it occurred to me! No only have the Astros entered the realm of, so to speak, saber-minded organizations, but so have the long-backward Chicago Cubs.

Suddenly the league looks very different.

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Arizona Diamondbacks catcher Miguel Montero narrowly avoided his arbitration hearing today, agreeing with the club to a one-year, $5.9 million deal for 2012 — i.e. Montero’s last year of team-control.

Per Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic, both the Diamondbacks and Montero are interested in discussing a long-term deal to keep the catcher in Phoenix for the foreseeable future.

Projecting a market-value contract for the Montero depends on what you think about his true-talent level. He finished fourth per WAR among catchers last season (counting Mike Napoli as a catcher) — and is sixth among catchers between 2009 and ’11. Still, a lot of that value comes from Montero’s strong 2011.

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After an offseason of three-year contract demands and reported interest from every team in need of a pitcher, Joe Saunders wound up re-signing with the Diamondbacks yesterday, taking a one-year contract worth $6 million. He’ll presumably step into the rotation alongside Ian Kennedy, Daniel Hudson, Trevor Cahill, and Josh Collmenter while Tyler Skaggs, Trevor Bauer, and others bide their time in the minors. The contract itself is appropriate for Saunders — 116 FIP- in 97 starts and 601.1 IP over the last three years — from the team’s perspective, but the player ended up making a pretty egregious error.

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Wine and cheese make for a delectable combo. But the two foods don’t age the same. Wine takes much longer to turn to vinegar than it does for your cheese to grow fuzzy green mold. That’s why wine is the one used in sayings by older men verifying their remaining virility.

Power, patience and contact are the components of a delectable (productive) hitter. And yet, like wine and cheese, it turns out that these different skills age differently. Ages 26 through 28 are often used to represent a hitter’s peak, but not all of their different faculties are at their apex in that age range. Let’s check the aging curves, once again courtesy stat guru Jeff Zimmerman.

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Sometimes, we can just have a little fun with the numbers. And now that our Dark Overlord has been studiously typing away in that basement of his, we that play in the light can have a little more fun. Yes, he gave us Minor League leaderboards that have all sorts of delightful little snippets of knowledge — what they all mean in sum, who knows, but each is a nugget of beauty in baseball.

* Junior Lake was third-fastest player in all of the Minor Leagues by Bill James’ speed score. He even hit 17 out and showed a .175 ISO, so he’s got some tools. If only he could walk, limit the strikeouts or show some defense. The Cubs could move him to the outfield if he can’t handle the infield, but that only solves one of the problems. And let’s not forget this is the team that drafted Corey Patterson, so even center field won’t solve all of his woes.

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There are some crazy-good ballplayers who ply their trade at second base. There’s Dustin Pedroia, Ian Kinsler, Chase Utley, Howie Kendrick, Brandon Phillips, Robinson Cano, and Ben Zobrist. There are other good — if not crazy-good — second basemen, like Rickie Weeks and Danny Espinosa. None of these good-to-crazy-good second basemen plays for a team in the National League West.

Which raises two interesting questions:

• Who will play second base in the National League West in 2012?

• How do you think they’ll perform?

In other words, it’s time to get in your 2012 Fan Projections for NL West second basemen.

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For more on the Venezuelan Winter League, check out Carson Cistulli’s final SCOUT leaderboards for said league.

With the MLB in the middle of its winter hiatus, we of the baseball-addicted must roll our listful eyes towards the winter leagues. One such league is the wildly popular Venezuelan Winter League. It is hard to say what exact level the Venezuelan league constitutes — but it certainly has a few veterans of both leagues, as well as a few MLB guys (though usually nobody who is already well established in the majors).

This year, Chicago Cubs fans have had the delight of being able to keep tabs on their… exciting… pitcher Carlos Zambrano. Big-Z — perhaps in an effort to ingratiate himself with the new Cubs regime, perhaps in a move to showcase his talents to the league — has now pitched five games for the Caribes de Anzoategui, but according to some recent rumors, Zambrano may be calling it a winter.

And maybe he should.
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Last year, the Arizona Diamondbacks were baseball’s biggest surprise, winning 94 games and the NL West title just a year after finishing 65-97. The team’s turnaround was driven by strong performances across the roster, but among the key factors in their success was the excellent defense delivered by their trio of outfielders. Chris Young (+14.1), Gerardo Parra (+9.6), and Justin Upton (+7.7) all posted UZRs that ranked among the best in the league at their positions, and the Diamondbacks posted the best team outfield UZR (+31.1) in the National League. With the help of their strong gloves, the team was able to post an ERA (3.80) that was 22 points lower than their FIP (4.02), the fifth largest positive differential in the game.

Well, today, the team decided to change course, signing Jason Kubel to a two year, $15 million contract that will see him take over as the team’s left fielder. By acquiring Kubel, the D’Backs have essentially chosen to displace the incumbent Parra, and in looking at the two players, it’s not actually clear that the team is going to get any better.

Kubel’s addition signifies that the Diamondbacks wanted a bit more power from the left side to balance out the right-handedness brought by Upton, Young, Paul Goldschmidt, and Aaron Hill. While Miguel Montero and a potentially healthy Stephen Drew offered some power from the left side, the middle of the team’s batting order still skewed towards RHBs, and Kubel will give the team more thump at the plate than Parra would have. However, if the team thinks they’re getting a monstrous offensive upgrade in making the switch, they’re likely overestimating the difference between them.

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