A-Rod's contract

Everybody seems to acknowledge that if Alex Rodriguez opts out of his current contract to negotiate a new one, he'll make more money. In other words, he is currently underpriced. Every story about his contract also includes the fact that the Rangers are scheduled to pay the Yankees $3M/year of that contract if A-Rod sticks with it. I haven't seen any story draw this conclusion: the Rangers made a trade that has them paying the Yankees to employ baseball's best player at a bargain price.

February 2004 is not that long ago, after all: "Texas will pay $67 million of the $179 million left on Rodriguez's $252 million, 10-year contract, the most cash included in a trade in major league history." Well played, Rangers! No wonder you're so good!

Shining when the lights are brightest

I was going to write recently about Livan Hernandez's undeserved reputation for postseason excellence, but I just heard an even crazier example. Indians GM Mark Shapiro just said on the Baseball Today podcast that Kenny Lofton is a proven postseason performer who shines when the lights are brightest and whatnot.

No. The only good thing you can say about Lofton in the postseason is that he's gotten to the playoffs a number of times. In fact, I hypothesize that any player who makes the playoffs with a bunch of different teams and manages not to be memorably awful will gain a reputation for clutch postseason play.

But here (scroll down) is the real story of Lofton's playoff performance: 19 series over 11 years, with a solid sample of 360 at-bats, producing at a clip of .253/.323/.353 including the current hot streak. He's been putrid.

The last day of the regular season

The extraordinary lack of close series in the playoff so far make me recall one of the many components of the great drama of the end of the NL regular season: Jayson Stark wrote for ESPN.com that the Philadelphia crowd gave the visiting scoreboard a standing ovation when it posted the Marlins' seven-run first inning against the Mets. On that Sunday afternoon, two crowds--those in Philadelphia and Colorado--had the extraordinary pleasure of watching the loss of the key rival go up on the scoreboard while the home team in front of them won the crucial last game. That's a tough combination to beat.

Torre's job

Many media reports today say that George Steinbrenner will fire Joe Torre if the Yankees lose their current series against the Indians. I dislike the Yankees anyway, for most of the usual reasons, but such stories add fuel to the fire. The result of a short series in baseball conveys almost no meaningful information about a manager's performance, especially when the manager in question has experienced great postseason success and disappointment by turns. I can think of a few legitimate reasons to fire Torre, but Stenbrenner's would be an especially stupid one.

Shape stats and consolidation stats

As has been widely noted in the sports media, Jimmy Rollins last weekend became only the fourth Major League Baseball player to join something called the 20-20-20-20 club: at least twenty doubles, triples, home runs, and stolen bases in a season. I think that's great. I've liked Rollins since I followed him through the Phillies system, including catching him alongside Pat Burrell at the wonderful minor league park in Reading, and the 20-20-20-20 thing offers a quick narrative-in-a-number describing the kind of player Rollins has become.

I would contend, however, that joining this quirky "club" should have no bearing at all on Rollins's ranking among players, including his candidacy for the MVP award. The 20-20-20-20 number is what I'll call a shape stat: it describes the shape of Rollins's production, the way his value manifested itself, rather than the amount of value he produced. Homers are worth more than triples, which are worth more than doubles, and all of those are much more valuable than stolen bases. 20 homers and 20 steals is not as valuable as, say, 27 homers and 2 steals; the former totals are just less common. For evaluative purposes, we need exactly the tools that most sportswriters gleefully ignore, the ones such as VORP that assign informed weights to each of these statistics and then sum up the player's performance.

For the purposes of description and narrative, I've got no problem with shape stats. But if we're talking about the MVP or other ways of ranking players, setting aside the shape stats is a good starting point for any serious discussion.

The low-payroll pennant race

I recently heard a friend claim that the Cubs don't deserve their underdog status because in spite of their history, they are today just another big-market behemoth stomping the true underdog: his beloved Brewers. That argument made me wonder whether you could argue that the current Brewers are doing about as well as a team can given Milwaukee's payroll.

I translated that curiosity into a testable question: do the Brewers have the best record of any team with their payroll or lower? According to Ben Fry's chart, the answer is no, but I found the stats interesting beyond the simple question, so I constructed the standings of the Brewers-or-lower-payroll teams:

TEAM         W-L     SALARY   GB
Cleveland    93-63   $62M     0
Arizona      88-69   $52M     5
San Diego    86-71   $58M     7.5
Colorado     85-72   $54M     8.5
Milwaukee    81-76   $71M     12.5
Texas        74-84   $68M     20
Cincinnati   71-86   $69M     22.5
Washington   71-87   $37M     23
Kansas City  68-89   $68M     25.5
Pittsburgh   67-90   $39M     26.5
Florida      67-90   $31M     26.5
Tampa Bay    65-92   $24M     28.5

Obviously, Cleveland has had a remarkable year. Milwaukee is just above the TEX-CIN median of the twelve. The selection criteria exclude a handful of higher-salary teams doing worse than the Brewers, so Milwaukee looks better in the context of the whole MLB, but still only a little above average for their payroll. I'm surprised by how competitive the mid-level payroll teams are. Arizona and (in the truly low-payroll division) Washington stand out as teams producing a lot of value for the money. And to go back to an old hobbyhorse of mine, Tampa Bay must be a very, very profitable team given that puny payroll and revenue sharing, and that is a great shame.

A bottom line: if the season ended today, these 12 teams at the bottom of the payroll standings would produce three of the eight playoff squads. Not bad.

Generality, meet example

Today's guest on the Baseball Today podcast made this sensible and important remark:

"Teams are never as good as they appear to be on hot streaks and never as bad as they appear to be when things are going badly."

Right on, brother!

One minute later, he made the case that the Padres are the best team going in the National League because "over their last dozen games or so," they're averaging about six runs per game. And "if they're going to hit the ball, they're going to be good." "I think the Padres, right now, might be the best team in the National League."

I leave it to you, reader, to put those two moments together and see what happens.