Vegas Watch

I am going to Tucson for the weekend. Hopefully they can hang with UCLA on Sunday. Probably not. At least it'll be warm.

Tiger at +1015 to win the Grand Slam? Not so fast.

Pomeroy with a fascinating look at shot selection.

A fan asked Steve Phillips to sign his jersey, "Steve Phililps, Met Killer". That is awesome.

60 Minutes is going to run a feature on Bill James.

Comparing this year's Rays team to the '69 Mets.

Jon Heyman makes up a new derogatory term for the sabermetric crowd: VORPies.

Yahoo:

A leaner, more muscular Victor Martinez stepped into the batter’s box Friday morning on one of the back fields at Chain of Lakes Park.

You know it. The Indians also won their ST opener.

Good work by MVP Tracker. If there was ten point deduction for DHs, it would have nailed the top 5.

Here's a shocker:

"The only two first-place votes that didn't go to Rodriguez were from Tom Gage of The Detroit News and Jim Hawkins of The Oakland Press in Pontiac, Mich."

Somebody put Abreu seventh? The guy had the worst year of his career, pretty easily. A 114 OPS+ from a right fielder just seems like it's hard to get excited about. And he didn't go nuts with the counting stats either- 16 HRs, 101 RBIs. Strange.

Sorry, but Vlad was not the third most valuable player in the league. I would like to see the logic in putting him ahead of Ortiz/Magglio/Posada.

Pena's line is weird- two third place votes, but wasn't higher than 6th on any other ballots.

Same goes for Putz- a 4th, an 8th, and a 9th. That's less surprising though- it's just someone valuing relievers more than others.

Polanco probably deserved more support- 12th in VORP, and Dewan's system likes his glove (+12 plays). He was definitely better than Jeter (although that hardly makes him unique; Jeter was 11th in VORP, -34 plays)

Sabathia beats Beckett again, this time 11-2. A convincing margin.

Lowest VORPs to receive a vote:

Frank Thomas 31.5 (31st among AL hitters)
Justin Morneau 28.8 (39th)
Bobby Abreu 27.9 (42nd)

Tomorrow's ballot should be very interesting.

This article in today's Boston Globe sheds some light on some of the details of yesterday's voting. Some interesting tidbits:

"Two writers - Mark Feinsand of the New York Daily News and Jorge Ortiz of USA Today - left Beckett off their three-man ballot. Each of them voted Sabathia first, Cleveland teammate Fausto Carmona second, and Angels pitcher John Lackey third."

That order looks strangely familiar...

2007 VORP leaders, AL Pitchers:
1. C.C. Sabathia, 65.2
2. Fausto Carmona, 64.0
3. John Lackey, 60.7

I don't know if Feinsand and Ortiz considered VORP in filling out their ballot or not, but that's really not the point. These are two guys that are clearly looking beyond the fact that Josh Beckett had *20* wins, which is encouraging.

Also, there's this:

"One writer, Kevin Sherrington of the Dallas Morning News, left Sabathia off his ballot, voting Beckett first, Carmona second, and Minnesota's Johan Santana third."

Every other voter had Sabathia either first or second; I really don't know how you can look at this situation and determine that C.C. Sabathia wasn't one of the three best pitchers in the AL this year. I just e-mailed Mr. Sherrington, asking for his thoughts on the voting.

In the comments yesterday, Matthew asked for yet another NL MVP analysis, this time using the Fielding Bible numbers rather than UZR. So here it is.

This first table is simply adding Dewan's numbers and each player's VORP. Dewan's numbers are in plays; each play is worth about 0.8 runs, thus the second column.

(I just used these six guys; the three who I think had the best years, and the three other leading candidates.)

Now, using adjusted WPA rather than VORP:

Either way, we get pretty similar results, although Wright and Utley switch places in the second table (I'm pretty sure this is because of Wright's 98 additional PAs; VORP is measured against replacement players, WPA vs. average players, so the month Utley missed hurts him more in terms of VORP).

The award (which will be announced next Tuesday) is going to go to someone in the bottom half of these rankings, most likely Rollins. I understand the arguments against the guys who were actually more valuable; Pujols' team didn't make the playoffs, Wright's collapsed down the stretch, and Rollins played 30 more games than Utley.

Having said that, when it comes down to it, the NL MVP isn't going to be one of the three most valuable players in the league, and that's pretty ridiculous.

I knew some people didn't like WPA, although I may have underestimated how strongly people felt about it. "The Real MVPs" has 35 comments so far, and only 14 of those have been me responding to people. There was also the BBTF discussion. Here's my favorite comment, from Anon:

"Interesting analysis. However, it is fundamentally unsound to include park effects in MVP considerations. For an award, players should be evaluated based on their actual performance rather than what they might have accomplished on a level playing field."

I cant say I follow that logic, but to each his own, I guess.

Since I don't entirely disagree with the complaints about WPA, I thought I'd go through the same exercise, replacing WPA with VORP. With the understanding that the excellent "On Baseball and the Reds" blog beat me to it on this for the NL, here goes. Once again, the fielding stats are a combination of UZR's midseason numbers, and THT's numbers.

Surprisingly close. THT hates A-Rod's defense (-10), although that's balanced out by UZR's +7 through the ASB. Magglio is at +3 and +8, respectively.

Rodriguez is actually only third in the AL in MLVr, but has about 30 more PAs than Magglio, and 40 more than Ortiz. MLVr is also before the positional adjustments. Interesting as well that Granderson and Ichiro are way behind in VORP, but jump into the top five with their fielding.

Regardless of what this list indicates, the only real race in the AL is whether A-Rod will win unanimously or not. Since the Tigers missed out on the playoffs, I think that's a possibility. Ortiz definitely isn't getting any first place votes (Side note: I'm looking forward to Papi getting a big hit this week, then all the "Ortiz had a down year, but he's clutch so he came up big when it matters" stories; .445 OBP, .621 SLG is some down year, as Neyer pointed out). Nobody on the Indians is getting a first place vote- maybe Vlad will get a couple (he's 8th on this list, 62.6/-1.9/60.7).

On to the race that's still undecided:

Wright's chances to actually win this award are slim to none. When I vote (don't worry, it won't be anywhere meaningful), I'm going with him. Did the Mets collapse? Obviously. But Wright hit .394/.516/.657 in August, and .352/.432/.602. in September. Really can't pin that on him.

Some notable omissions from the top 5:

Also, since a couple people didn't appreciate my exclusion of Ryan Howard last time, he's at 53.6/-6.1/47.5.

I'd love to campaign for Hanley to win the MVP, I really would. But every fielding number on him is really ugly. Time to move to CF, buddy.

Rollins is 15 runs behind Wright in VORP. I'm not saying these fielding numbers are perfect (although I'm pretty sure they're the best that are publicly available right now, please correct me if I'm wrong), but there's no way Rollins' glove is worth 15 more runs than Wright's (after VORP helps out Rollins for playing SS). I guess beyond the #s we're giving Rollins points for his team winning 13 of their last 17 games, rather than 5/17. But I try not to get too caught up in that- Rollins' .298/.333/.542 September line is right around his full year averages.

Also a factor is Rollins' January proclamation that the Phillies were the team to beat in the NL East. That has certainly helped build the hype around his campaign for the award, but does that really make him more valuable? It makes pretty damn cool, but I don't know that it makes the Phillies better.

Rollins' teammate Utley comes out higher in this ranking. He didn't exactly catch fire in the last month either (.301/.377/.496). Over the 28 games he missed in late July/August, the Phillies went 15-13, vs. 74-60 the rest of the season (about a .017 difference in W%). Not terribly meaningful.

If the Rockies win today, I think it probably goes to Holliday (RBIs!). If they lose, probably Rollins. More on that tomorrow though.

Photo: matttracy.com.

When I heard yesterday that Bonds won't be coming back to the Giants next year, my initial thought was "Wow, sucks for Matt Cain, he's gonna get even less run support."

But as I thought about it a little more, I realized this situation (obviously) is a lot bigger than Matt Cain's W-L record. The Giants' offense is pretty bad this year, even with Bonds. Here are the ages and VORPs of the Giants' most common lineup:

Not only is this offense terrible, they're all old. The only guy under 32 is Frandsen, and he's just not very good. At 4.14 R/G, they are second to last in the NL.

It gets worse though. The Giants have actually been really good with runners in scoring position this year- substantially better than in other situations. Here's the breakdown:


Overall, the Giants have hit .250/.318/.383. It's extremely unlikely that they will be this clutch(/lucky) again next year. They have actually scored 633 runs, but a team with that line would only be expected to score 573 to this point, and 607 in a full season.

And all of this is with Bonds. If the Giants replace Bonds with a player as good as their second best offensive player (Winn, 19.1 VORP), they'll lose 37 runs next year. Take that way from 607, and you have a 570-run team- 3.52 runs per game. To put that in context, the Nationals are last in the NL this year with 4.10 R/G. And in the last 10 years, the worst NL offense has been the 2003 Dodgers, who averaged 3.54 R/G.

Of course, this is all assuming that the Giants don't add anybody, which is unlikely. But Brian Sabean better get on that and acquire some legit hitters, because if he doesn't San Francisco is going to have a historically bad offense in 2008.

Picture: Deadspin