Changes in Lattitude

I'm off to all points south. Have a great week!!

Baltimore Orioles- Team Preview

2008 Record 68-93

Projected Lineup

C-Matt Weiters- Rookie

1B-Aubrey Huff 32-108-304

2B-Brian Roberts 9-57-296

SS-Cesar Izturis 1-24-263

3B-Melvin Mora 23-104-285

LF-Felix Pie 1-10-241

CF-Adam Jones 9-57-270

RF-Nick Markakis 20-87-308

DH-Luke Scott 23-65-257

Rotation

Jeremy Guthrie 10-12-3.63

Koji Uehara

Rich Hill 1-0 -4.12

Matt Albers 3-3-3.49

Mark Henrickson 7-8-5.45

Bullpen

George Sherrill 3-5-4.73 31

Chris Ray Injured all Last Season

Jim Johnson 2-4-2.33 1

Whats to Like

1.Catch This-Matt Weiters is the consensus #1 hitting prospect in baseball. Catchers who can hit are a rarity. And by all accounts he will be an all star for a long time. His ETA is at some point this year
2.Signing B-Rob-Roberts has been the subject of trade rumors going back a couple of years now. Signing him to a 4 year deal makes sense. Even if Baltimore continues to struggle every team needs a veteran to give the franchise credibility

Whats Not to Like

1.It All Starts With Pitching-The Os staff should be locked in a duel with their Beltway neighbors the Nats all year long for the worst staff in baseball. Right now I'll give the nod to Baltimore as the worst. Having to face the lineups of the AL East just compounds the problem. Jim Palmer could probably move from the teams broadcast booth today and claim a rotation spot.
2.Why Bother-Let me get this straight the Os actually put more into Cesar Izturis to start at SS. Then spent some money on Greg Zaun to catch? While I can get behind Ty Wigginton Baltimore wasted what little money they spend this off season.

Fantasy Focus

Brian Roberts-Since there is very little to talk about here. I want to use Roberts as an example of something else. If your reading this chances are you will be looking at some projection for players before our draft. Lets face it, we all do it. But just how accurate are those projections. In my opinion some are much better than others. I really think some are made up without any basis in fact. For the Os Adam Jones may be 10-70-260 OR 25-90-300. Any projections are just educated guesses. But with Brian Roberts you know exactly what you are going to get. Roberts is about a consistent a player as there is in all of baseball. With the lack of quality 2nd baseman guys like Roberts are invaluable.

Fun Fact

Not much so this is a stretch. Baltimore pitchers led the MLB last season with 687 walks. And this season they have a good chance to walk even more hitters.

Outlook

In a word ugly. The Os are the worst team in the AL. If I was in charge of this mess I'd wait until the trading deadline and then trade most of the veterans that can bring me any kind of prospects. As good as Aubrey Huff was last year he should probably be moved. I'd add Melvin Mora to the list. And guys like Ty Wigginton are much more valuable on good teams. I'd then start the rebuilding process with the 2 cornerstones of the Os in the future Matt Weiters and Nick Markakis.

Atlanta Braves-Team Preview

2008 Team Record-72-90

C-Brian McCann 23-87 - 301

1B-Casey Kotchman 14-74- 272

2B-Kelly Johnson 12-69-287

SS-Yunel Escobar 10-60-288

3B-Chipper Jones 22-75-364

LF-Matt Diaz 2-14-244

CF-Josh Anderson 3-12-294

RF-Jeff Francouer 11-71-239

Rotation

Derek Lowe 14-11-3.24

Javier Vazquez 12-16-4.67

Jair Jurrjins 13-10-3.68

Kenshin Kawakami

Jorge Campillo/Tom Glavine

Bullpen

Mike Gonzalez 0-3-4.28 14

Rafael Soriano 0-1-3.58 3

Peter Moylan 0-1-4.79 1



Whats To Like

1.New Starters-Atlanta long known for starters were awful last season. Frank Wren went out and got Lowe,Vazquez and Kawakami. Just think in the past two seasons they have turned over all 5 starters.
2.Help Is Closer Than You Think-According to Baseball Prospectus 2009 Atlanta has 2 of the top 13 prospects in all of baseball. Tommy Hanson is a pitcher who is probably be in the show this year and Justin Heyward who has been described as a 6ft 4in toolsy outfielder. He is probably 2 years away which may be when Atlanta will be close to contending

Whats Not to Like

1.Can I Please Have Some Relief-The bullpen is a mess. No closer saved more than 15 games and the top 3 guys Gonzalez, Moylan and Soriano all have histories of injury.
2.Power Outage-If you look at the key power positions 1B,LF and RF the Braves have a serious lack of power. Last season the Braves playing in a neutral park hit 33 HRs less than the NL average. And they did nothing to address this need.

Fantasy Focus

Jeff Francouer-As you can see from the above stats for Francouer he was awful last season. The big question will be will the 2009 Francouer be closer to the disappointing 2008 version or the promising 2007? Looking closely at his numbers shows two major problems. Firstly his plate discipline has not developed at all. For every walk he stuck out close to 3 times. At this point in his career that stat should be moving in the other direction. The other disturbing number is only 8% of his fly balls went for homers. This stat is rarely goes backwards for a player still in his mid 20s. My feel is Francouer will be better than last year. Its hard to imagine him being worse. But I don't see him being the player most of us thought he was going to become at the end of the 2007 season.

Fun Fact

The Braves had 9 Starting Pitchers start at least 5 games last season. Think back to the Leo Mazzone days their pitchers never seemed to get hurt.

Outlook

The Braves did a good job vastly improving their starting pitchers. But did nothing to address their needs in the outfield and the bullpen. Oddly enough that was the two places this off season where the most free agent bargains were. So my question would be was it cost efficient to pay Derek Lowe all that money when they could have taken that money and a got a power hitting outfielder and a solid reliever. Lets face it they won't contend this year. Atlanta will improve by a few wins but still finish 4th in the NL East.

Arizona Diamondbacks-Preview

2008 Record 82-80

Projected Lineup
C-Chris Synder 16-64-237

1B-Chad Tracy 8-39-267

2B-Felipe Lopez 2-25-234

SS-Stephen Drew 21-67-291

3B-Mark Reynolds 28-97-239

LF-Conor Jackson 12-75-300

CF-Chris Young 22-85-248

RF-Justin Upton 15-42-250

Rotation

Brandon Webb 22-7 3.30

Dan Haren 16-8 3.33

Doug Davis 6-8 4.32

Jon Garland 14-8 4.90

Max Scherzer 0-4 3.05

Bullpen Saves

Chad Qualls 4-8 2.51 9

Tony Pena 3-2 4.33 3

Jon Raush 0-6 6.56 1 - these stats just with Arizona

Whats to Like
1.The core of the offense is all young-Young, Drew, Upton, Jackson and Reynolds should all be improving.
2.Webb and Haren are about as good and risk free as any 1-2 in all of baseball.

Whats Not to Like
1.Strikeouts-Arizona was second in the NL in Ks last season. Mark Reynolds fanned 204 times
2.Losing O-Dogg- Orlando Hudson was a stabilizing force both on defense and in the locker room. He will be missed more than they anticipate. After Hudson went down on Aug.10 the D-Backs were a sub .500 team

Fantasy Focus
Conor Jackson-Jackson is eligible for both 1B and OF. While alot of the young Snakes hitters have awful K/BB ratio Jackson walked almost as many times as he struck out. Also his 22% line drive rate makes his .300 BA something we can expect year after year. Also he is still in the growth phase of his career development arc. The only downside is his HR/FB ratio was only 9%. If he can up that by a few points he can have a nice season.

Fun Fact
The Diamondbacks have cost me more sleep than any other team thanks to their very informative and extremely entertaining broadcasts. Darren Sutton and Mark Grace make baseball fun to watch. While not speaking down to knowledgeable fans.

Outlook
I like this team alot. The NL West is the weakest division in the NL by far. While I fully expect Manny to sign with the Dodgers I still think Arizona will be the class of the division. I see about 90 wins and a division title.

Team Previews On The Way

After speaking with a few of you I've decided on a format for my team previews. The idea is to give important info in a quick compact report. I'll start with the teams projected lineup. rotation and bullpen. Then I'll talk about whats good about the team and then whats not so good about them. Then I'll talk about one player from that team that I like for fantasy purposes. And finally some random thought about them. I hope you enjoy it. Arizona will be up first.

A New Capitol Punisher

The Nats in need of a pure power hitter signed one of the best getting Adam Dunn for 2 years and about 20 mil. Last season the Nats only hit 117 HRs in what looks like a very good hitters park. With a dreadful pitching staff scoring runs will be critically important if they will have any success whats so ever. Whats a bit complicated is exactly where does Adam Dunn fit in? Popular opinion has the big guy playing everyday at 1st base. Even thought they have the always injured Nick Johnson and Dmitri Young already there it seems Dunn will get the job. I read Jim Bowdin is trying to move Nick Johnson but the interest has been lukeworm at best. Oakland has showed some interest. The Nats outfield is about as crowded and chaotic as The Magic Kingdom on a busy July day. So lets meet the contestants. First we have the talented and very unstable duo of Lastings Milledge and Elijah Dukes. Then we have Josh Willingham who the Nats got very cheaply from Florida. Then we have the duo of talented but underachieving OFs Austin Kearns and Willy Mo Pena. And finally we have Willie Harris. While having depth is a good thing especially if Dukes and or Milledge goes off the deep end this group is a mess. Somehow I can't see Kearns or Pena being happy on the bench. Maybe they can deal Pena for a Starting Pitcher. Getting back to Dunn there is no mystery what the Nats are getting. Dunn hits 40+ homers every year. He also averaged 109 walks a season for the past 3 years. His on base average for the past three years is an outstanding 379. The downside is Dunn has averaged 176 Srikeouts a season. Also Dunn will probably be a below average 1st basemen. Dunn will probably turn into a poor mans Frank Howard. A huge slugger who plays on lousy teams from Washington. If he stays interested for 162 games in that ballpark he could hit 50 HRs.

Do the Math

Its time to play the always fun game of lets compare players. I picked two players. Who are both 35/36 years old that play left field. Player A is a way below average LF, while player B is about average. The stats I'm using are a average of the past three seasons. So lets compare

HR RBI BA R SB OBA SLG

Player A 26 113 291 89 1 355 491


Player B 17 103 292 107 26 389 459


Pretty Close. If your teams needs a little more power you go with Player A. If you need better defense, more speed and a guy who gets on base more you go with Player B. Anyway you look at it there is not a huge difference between the two players. So what if I told you both guys were free agents this off season. You would probably have expected them to get about the same contract, right? Oh how wrong you would be. If you haven't guessed yet Player A is Rual Ibanez who got 30 mil for 3 years. While Player B is Bobby Abreu who only got 5 mil guaranteed for 1 year. I remember very early this off season when the Phils signed Ibanez I commented that the 10 mil a year is pretty much in line with what his market value is probably worth. But I'm uncomfortable giving him the 10 mil in the year he turns 39. Ibanez has been a proven run producer but a decline has to come soon. Players don't continue to produce at a steady pace reaching their 40th birthday. So the Phils knowing they were going to lose Pat Burrell took steps to fill the hole right away. In the process they way overpaid. To think they guaranteed 25 mil more for Ibanez than Abreu. That extra money may impede them on signing a free agent in the next year or two. Or may not allow them to take on extra payroll at the trading deadline to help the year like they did with Joe Blanton this past year. Hindsight is 20/20 but it made a questionable signing an awful one. So Abreu only gets 1 year for between 5-7 mil. Are you kidding? This guy can still be a very productive player. And he fits in absolutely perfectly with the Angels. The Angels outfielders, Vlade, Torii Hunter, Juan Rivera and Gary Matthews are all right handed. Abreu's being a lefty will balence the lineup. He makes immanent sense replacing Garrett Anderson. While his days of stealing 40 bases are behind him he still is a very good base runner. And we all know Mike Scoascia is one of the most aggressive managers in the AL. If Abreu has a good year he could almost double his salary in 2010. I love this move!!!! With the AL West being so close this keeps the Angels ahead of the pack. And looking down the road only paying him 5 mil gives the Angels payroll room to add a player and the trading deadline to fill in any holes they may have.

Let the Fun Begin

Our Fantasy Baseball League is up. The league ID is 39768 and the password id dananddev. The draft is scheduled for March 21 @9:00.
Scheduled Managers
1.Mitch
2.Daniel
3.Mike
4.Ray
5.Howie
6.Erik
7.Pat
8.Art
9.Skizzo
10.Steve-Rookie

I think we should keep it at 10. Any thoughts

Please Help!!!!!!

Starting about March 1st I plan on doing team previews for all 30 teams. I'm reaching out to anyone who reads this and asking you what would you like to see in team previews? There are many magazines on the newsstand. And tons of info online. So if you were to invest 3-5 minutes reading a team preview what form would you like it to take? Stat heavy? Odd facts? Some historical stuff? Let me know!!! PLEASE.

Just In Case You Missed It

The past week has been marked by alot of players avoiding arbitration and resigning with their current teams. The largest contract going to Ryan Howard. The Phils bought out his remaining arbitration years for a cool 54 mil for 3 years. But during the past week three players changed uniforms. While none of these signings set the baseball world a blaze they are all interesting for one reason or another

Ty Wigginton-Orioles Is there one player who always seems to have great games when you are at the park? Anytime Daniel was at the Trop Wigginton always did well. If he stayed in Tampa and gave him season tickets Wigginton would be making 10 mil a year. But anyway Wigginton signing with Baltimore is a bit odd. There really is no regular place for him to play. Defensively he plays about the same positions as Aubrey Huff who was fantastic last year. Ideally you platoon Wigginton at third base but both he and Melvin Mora are righties. Other options are have him getting ABs against lefties and benching Luke Scott in left. Or have him DH. In the end Wigginton probably gets about 400 ABs playing various positions. To me in a perfect world he would be much better suited to be a part time player on a better team.

Tom Gordan-Diamondbacks-Gordan joins Chad Quallis, Jon Rauch and Tony Pena at the back end of the Arizona pen. If Gordan is healthy he adds another arm, if not there is not much lost. The only problem I see is all four of the above pitchers are all right handed. It should be very interesting to see how Bob Melvin manges the end of games. This situation lends itself to playing the hot hand. The NL West should be very close and any little improvements may lead to winning the division. All I know is I'll probably be up way too late watching them listening to my favorite broadcaster Mark Grace.

Andruw Jones-Rangers-This move surprised me. While Jones is costing Texas next to nothing it seemed Texas was looking to have youth in their outfield. Assuming Jones is somewhere between the guy who hit 51HRs and the guy who hit 158 he would be their CF. If thats the case Josh Hamilton then probably gets moved to right. And Nelson Cruz who they seemed to like the RF either goes to left and competes with David Murphy or goes to DH. In addition the Rangers also have Marlon Byrd in the outfield. And the DH position will probably be manned by Hank Blalock and Frank Catalanotto. Anyway you look at it they have no shortage of bats. Jone's main value may come in if he can give them gold glove quality play in center. Thus cutting down the amount of runs a very questionable Texas staff gives up. As an FYI while I can handle most D-Backs questions any Rangers questions I'll defer to Mike who knows alot more about them than I do.

Its Greek To Me

Back in the early days of sabermetrics we found out you can very accurately predict a team won-loss record by knowing how many runs a team scores and gives up. This is called the Pythagorean Formula. Over the years this formula has proved to be very accurate. Of the 30 teams last year only 5 teams were more or less than 5 games from their predicted result. It has also been proven that in virtually all cases a team that gets alot more wins than their Pythagoreean formula ultimately regresses. While teams that have less wins end up winning more games the next year. So who are those 5 teams.

Teams that Should Improve
1.Toronto Blue Jays -7
2.Seattle Mariners-6
3,Atlanta Braves -6

Pythagorean does not account for free agent defections and injuries. With that said I don't see Toronto improving. But I see the other two improving by more than six wins each

Teams that Should Take a Step Back
1.Los Angeles Angels+12
2.Houston Astros +9

I think the Angels can drop 10-15 games this season. And I also think the Astros back track.

The reason why I introduced this is I saw a interesting article that used Pythagorean to predict the 2009 season. What they did was estamate playing time for the players that are now on each team and had a computer estamate the amount of runs scored and runs allowed. As the article said signing a Manny, Adam Dunn or Bobby Abreu can significantly alter the results. But here on a chilly Florida night its fun to see what we got.

AL East
1.Tampa Bay Rays 95 67
1.NY Yankees 95 67
3.Boston Red Sox 93 69
4.Toronto Blue Jays 82 80
5.Baltimore Orioles 73 89

AL Central
1.Minnesota Twins 90 72
2.Cleveland Indians 86 76
3.Detroit Tigers 84 78
4.Chicago White Sox 78 84
5.Kansas City Royals 73 89

AL West
1.LA Angels 92 70
2.Oakland As 84 78
3.Texas Rangers 78 84
4.Seattle Mariners 74 88

NL East
1.Philadelphia Phillies 96 66
2.NY Mets 92 70
3.Atlanta Braves 86 76
4.Florida Marlins 83 79
5.Washington Nats 66 96

NL Central
1.Chicago Cubs 95 67
2.Milwaukee Brewers 88 74
3.St. Louis Cards 85 77
4.Houston Astros 83 79
5.Cincinnati Reds 74 88
6.Pittsburg Pirates 70 92

NL West
1.LA Dodgers 88 74
2.Arizona D-Backs 84 78
3.Colorado Rockies 82 80
4.SF Giants 78 84
5.SD Padres 68 94


Just something to think about. As of now its pretty close I think.

First 3 Rounds

With only about 1 week away from pitchers and catchers the mock draft season is starting to heat up. Yahoo had a mock draft and the following was the top 3 rounds. By the way it was for a 12 team standard 5x5 league

Round 1
1.Hanley Ramirez
2.Alex Rodriguez
3.Albert Pujols
4.Jose Reyes
5.David Wright
6.Ryan Bruan
7.Grady Sizemore
8.Josh Hamilton
9.Miguel Cabrera
10.Ian Kinsler
11.Jimmy Rollins
12.Mark Teixeira

Round 2
13.Tim Lincecum
14.Ryan Howard
15.Chase Utley
16.Evan Longoria
17.BJ Upton
18.Johan Santana
19.Prince Fielder
20.Carlos Beltran
21.Manny Ramirez
22.Lance Berkman
23.Dustin Pedroia
24.Carlos Lee

Round 3
25.Ichiro Suzuki
26.Alfonso Soriano
27.Matt Holliday
28.Justin Mourneau
29.Carlos Quentin
30.Brandon Phillips
31.CC Sabathia
32.Brian Roberts
33.Carl Crawford
34.Jason Bay
35.Aramis Ramirez
36.Nick Markakis

Ollie Stays Put

Oliver Perez resigned with the Mets today for 36 mil over 3 years. The bottom line is the Mets are a better with him than without him. The lenght of the contract and the money is a fair deal for both sides. The Mets rotation is now Johan, Maine, Perez, Pelfrey and either Redding, Garcia or Niese. Overall its not bad. But after Johan their are questions about everyone else. As for Perez he is inconsistent. Saying Perez is inconsistent is like saying Shakespeare can write. Perez has terrific stuff. And any 27 year old lefty who can throw 90 will garner interest. So lets look objectively at Perez. The good is he is capable of throwing unhittable stuff at any time. When he is on few lefties are better. But his main problem is twofold. Last season he averaged close to 5 walks a game. That figure makes it very difficult to be a consistent winner. But even looking past the 5 walks Perez tends to be wild in the strike zone. When he gets behind too often he'll throw a pitch with terrible location which turns into a longball. Which brings us to Perez's second problem. Ollie is a flyball pitcher and when he makes mistakes they tend to cost him runs. Less walks and better control can turn him in a allstar. An interesting thing to look for early in the season will be how will Citi Field play? If its like Shea and is a pitchers park Ollie will be more valuable but if the ball carries it could spell trouble.

How Do You Spell Releif Part 3

Over the past two blog entries I have talked about relief pitching. The first essay told of my disgust how bullpens are managed today. And in part 2 I went over a quick history of bullpen usage in MLB. This morning in the final part of this series I want to compare usage levels of todays best with yesterdays best and make a final plea to reason.

I have two main gripes with bullpen usage now. The first is how much these guys are used. Simply put closers today are babied. While I'm certain teams will tell you since these guys are now highly paid we need to carefully manage their workload. So my question to those guys is does only having your best relieve pitcher pitch 1 inning 3 to 4 times a week prevent injury? While I'm no doctor I can say with virtual certainty teams are not preventing injury to closers with such limited work loads. Over the past few seasons we've seen injuries to closers with very carefully manged workloads like Billy Wagner, Trevor Hoffman and Brad Lidge. If you go back into history and go to what I call the Golden Age of Relievers those guys pitched much more and most of the successful ones had long careers. The injury rate of relievers in the 70s did not seem to be any worse than today. So if you throw out the injury argument why are those guys only facing 3-4 hitters per game? Yesterday I had some free time and decided to do a little experiment. I choose 5 of the most successful closers of the last 5 years, Mariano Rivera, Francisco Rodriguez, Johnathan Papelbon, Joe Nathan and Jose Valverde. I looked at the average number of batters they faced per appearance. I took numbers for the last 5 years(3 for Papelbon and 4 for Jenks). And then I did the same thing for 5 closers of the golder era. For these guys I picked the 5 year period they were most effective(they had to be 5 consecutive seasons). The 5 guys I selected were Bruce Sutter, Goose Gossage, Dan Quizenberry, Rollie Fingers and Mike Marshall.

Today Average Batters Faced Per Appearance

M. Rivera 4.30

K-Rod 4.46

J. Pabelbon 3.94

J. Nathan 3.92

B. Jenks 4.45

It does not take a genius to figure out that if you are averaging about 4 batters faced per outing you are probably getting 3 outs and allowing 1 baserunner. Which makes sense because these guys WHIPs are around 1

Golden Age

B. Sutter 6.59

G. Goosage 7.02

D. Quizenberry 6.99

R. Fingers 6.65

M. Marshall 7.93

Looking at the above chart shows are very large difference. Also think about the 3 under 7 Sutter, Fingers and especially Quiz were EXTREME groundball pitchers who probably threw alot of double play balls which would suppress the batters faced per appearance a bit. As a group the above averaged facing 7.10 batters per appearance while todays closers faced 4.21. Their average appearance is 41% shorter than the 70s group. The 3 extra batters translates into 1 inning when a team does not have to use a middle of the road reliever. And if a team like the Red Sox have a key part of the game in the 6th or 7th they can bring in J-Pap to preserve the lead or not let the game get away. Let him go 2 or 3 and then they can have Manny Delcarmen finish or Francona can play matchups. If they are up by 2 or 3 runs at that point the chances of surrendering the lead is minute. Make Sense.

The other area that I find illogical is when to use your best bullpen weapon. Only bringing closers in the 9th if your up by 1-3 runs is great if they are on your fantasy team but makes no sense in real life. Like I said earlier the idea should be to win games NOT get your closers saves. Teams can win or lose games during all 9 innings not just the 9th. While planning ahead an inning or two is critical in baseball. Recognizing the key point in a game is also critical. If a manager botches innings 6-8 the closer becomes a non-factor in the 9th. If your closer is really your best reliever shouldn't he be in during the most important parts of the game? Knowing that each game is different. This crap that its important for all members of the bullpen to know exactly what their role is garbage to me. These guys are all highly skilled very competitive people or they wouldn't by Major Leaguers. Their job is simply to get hitters out whether its the 2nd, 5th, 7th or 9th inning. Teams are missing the boat/ Think about this. If you owned a business and had to send one of your salesman out on a critical sales call that can mean big bucks who are you going to send? I would think your best salesperson. Another smaller example is when I write the schedule for the store its no accident my best employees get the most hours while my worst employees get the least amount of hours. Bullpens should be the same way. Out of 30 teams last season only 6 had their save leader throw the most innings. And oddly enough two of those six teams leaders were guys that lost the closers role at some point in the season.

So thats my case. I'm sure its more than most of you have ever thought of managing the bullpen. So can things change? Sure. But we will need one team to rip up the "book" and try something different. You just do things the way they used to be done when it was done correctly. Younger fans who don't know any better and older broadcasters know don't know any better will yell and scream. All it takes is one team. But if there is something we all know about baseball is it does not like change.

This 3 part series was aimed at making everybody think a little. I really hoped you enjoyed it. Comments are very much looked foward to.