John Bonnes

Vegas picked the White Sox to finish fourth in the AL Central this year, pegging them to win about 74.5 games. Chicago's season essentially ended last night when the Tigers clinched the division, but that means the Pale Hose' playoff hopes lasted until October, about four (five?) months longer than the Twins. They also made anyone who bet the “under” in Vegas look like a fool, exceeding Vegas preseason estimate by 10 games and counting. I am one of those fools. In our Gleeman and the Geek podcast, I predicted a miserable season on Chicago’s south side. They had won 79 games in 2011, but with a run differential that looked worse than that. And then they lost Mark Buehrle to the Marlins and traded away slugger Carlos Quentin and closer Sergio Santos. They had also lost manager Carlos Guillen, for better or worse. But the White Sox responded by getting career (or at least bouncback) years from several suspect veterans. Pitcher Jake Peavy, who had spent most of the last few years injured, led the team in innings. Adam Dunn and Alex Rios were much maligned last year when they were getting paid $24M to knock home just 84 RBI. This year they exceeded that number by 100. Kevin Youkilis came over from the Red Sox to fill a serious gap at third and AJ Pierzynski slugged a career high 27 home runs. However, none of those guys is less than 31 years old and several of them are going to be free agents. The White Sox had a fun year, but they really only had two younger players show they could contribute long-term. Pitcher Chris Sale became the staff ace while showing he could handle a starting pitcher’s workload. And center fielder Alejandro De Aza (who isn’t really young at 28 years old) posted very respectable numbers for a leadoff hitter and center fielder. Which means that this spring, Chicago is likely going to be wrestling with similar questions as there were last spring. Can they trust Rios and Dunn? How will eat Peavy’s innings? Who will play third base? Is Tyler Flowers ready to catch full time? And if things go right, will they still be a good, but not great, team that just misses the playoffs? Meanwhile, the Twins must decide this offseason just how jealous they are of the Sox success this year – because that might just be within reach. The Twins could grab two or three veteran arms and be a .500 club this summer. With a few breaks (which might include some regression from the Sox) they could challenge for the 2013 AL Central last into September. Like the Sox, it’s hard to imagine them winning 90 games, but meaningful baseball would be a welcome change after two years of futility. But if they did that, next offseason they would likely be back in a similar position as the Sox. They would be looking at losing Justin Morneau. They would have an aging roster. The departure of Denard Span and Josh Willingham would be a year away. They would have kept their team together and maybe missed the chance to add some pitching or middle infield prospects. They would have had success, shown they could fill some holes, maybe even given minor league talent time to work it’s way up the farm system, but they would still not have a widespread and deep foundation of a great team. They would still be missing that young and cheap core. Would that be enough?

Vegas picked the White Sox to finish fourth in the AL Central this year, pegging them to win about 74.5 games. Chicago's season essentially ended last night when the Tigers clinched the division, but that means the Pale Hose' playoff hopes lasted until October, about four (five?) months longer than the Twins. They also made anyone who bet the “under” in Vegas look like a fool, exceeding Vegas preseason estimate by 10 games and counting. I am one of those fools. In our Gleeman and the Geek podcast, I predicted a miserable season on Chicago’s south side. They had won 79 games in 2011, but with a run differential that looked worse than that. And then they lost Mark Buehrle to the Marlins and traded away slugger Carlos Quentin and closer Sergio Santos. They had also lost manager Carlos Guillen, for better or worse. But the White Sox responded by getting career (or at least bouncback) years from several suspect veterans. Pitcher Jake Peavy, who had spent most of the last few years injured, led the team in innings. Adam Dunn and Alex Rios were much maligned last year when they were getting paid $24M to knock home just 84 RBI. This year they exceeded that number by 100. Kevin Youkilis came over from the Red Sox to fill a serious gap at third and AJ Pierzynski slugged a career high 27 home runs. However, none of those guys is less than 31 years old and several of them are going to be free agents. The White Sox had a fun year, but they really only had two younger players show they could contribute long-term. Pitcher Chris Sale became the staff ace while showing he could handle a starting pitcher’s workload. And center fielder Alejandro De Aza (who isn’t really young at 28 years old) posted very respectable numbers for a leadoff hitter and center fielder. Which means that this spring, Chicago is likely going to be wrestling with similar questions as there were last spring. Can they trust Rios and Dunn? How will eat Peavy’s innings? Who will play third base? Is Tyler Flowers ready to catch full time? And if things go right, will they still be a good, but not great, team that just misses the playoffs? Meanwhile, the Twins must decide this offseason just how jealous they are of the Sox success this year – because that might just be within reach. The Twins could grab two or three veteran arms and be a .500 club this summer. With a few breaks (which might include some regression from the Sox) they could challenge for the 2013 AL Central last into September. Like the Sox, it’s hard to imagine them winning 90 games, but meaningful baseball would be a welcome change after two years of futility. But if they did that, next offseason they would likely be back in a similar position as the Sox. They would be looking at losing Justin Morneau. They would have an aging roster. The departure of Denard Span and Josh Willingham would be a year away. They would have kept their team together and maybe missed the chance to add some pitching or middle infield prospects. They would have had success, shown they could fill some holes, maybe even given minor league talent time to work it’s way up the farm system, but they would still not have a widespread and deep foundation of a great team. They would still be missing that young and cheap core. Would that be enough?

The Minnesota Twins release Tsuyoshi Nishioka, contemplate coaching changes, and the John and Aaron review the MLB season via their preseason predictions. Here are: the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.

The Minnesota Twins release Tsuyoshi Nishioka, contemplate coaching changes, and the John and Aaron review the MLB season via their preseason predictions. Here are: the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.

Oddly, a lot of sabrmetric geeks I know don’t like the Win Probability Added (WPA) statistic. I don’t want to speak for them as to why, but the comment I hear that drives me the craziest is something like “All you have to do is see that Erik Komatsu was more valuable then Ben Revere to understand that it is worthless.” It drive me crazy because 15 years ago, I would hear the same question from baseball traditionalists when I’d suggest that an on-base machine like Bobby Abreu was more valuable than a guy with 20 more RBI. And I would say “Yes, that’s exactly what that means.” And I felt confident because: wins for a team correlates closely with run differential and the runs a team scores mirrors closely their On-base Plus Slugging (OPS) and a team’s OPS built is on their players’ OPS and Bobby Abreu has a crazy good OPS. And they would say, “That’s nice that you have all those correlations and stuff, but Abreu only had 79 RBI last year!” They might agree with the method, but couldn’t accept the results. To me, that’s just being closed minded. Similarly, I believe in the method of computing WPA. Here’s how it works: Analyzing dozens of years of baseball, you compute every game situation and how often a team in that situation won or lost the game. So, for instance, a home team that has runners on the corners and one out and is down by a run may have won games 55% of the time. Give the batter and the pitcher credit for how much they change those probabilities. So if the batter bounces into a double play, and the percent chance drops to 30%, then the batter loses .25 points and the pitcher gains .25 points. Do this for every play of every game throughout the year. It’s not perfect – it doesn’t take into account fielding. If also isn’t especially predictive. And a player who plays a lot has plenty of opportunities for negative scores as well as positive scores. However, it also is not dependent on other players; the player who is on third isn’t affected by the batter who grounds into the double play. And it rewards players who make big hits – hits that change the course of the game. Finally, if you look at the players with the highest and lowest WPA at the end of the game, it is almost never a surprise. It lines up with who you, as a fan, thought the heroes and goats of the game were. In fact, I have rarely heard anyone criticize the method. It’s fairly simple to understand and, though it means handling a lot of data, the logic is straight-forward and elegant. But the results…that’s a different story. And that will be the case when you see the Twins WPA this year. Today we’ll start with the hitters and get to the pitchers next time: [ATTACH=CONFIG]2394[/ATTACH] I suspect few people have trouble with the top two names on the list. Willingham not only had an enormous positive impact in games amongst Twins, his is one of the highest in the majors. It is the 2nd highest, right now, in the American League, sandwiched between Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera. (Actually, Cabrera is fourth. Edwin Encarnacion is in 3rd, .05 points above Cabrera. And fifth in the AL belongs to the next name on that list – Joe Mauer. He’s currently above Prince Fielder but a few percentage points. For all the talk about how “clutch” Mauer might not be and how many double-plays he grounds into, Mauer has had an enormous positive impact on the Twins this year. Statistically, it’s not debatable. On the other hand, I suspect some folks are going to have trouble accepting that Ryan Doumit and Ben Revere have, offensively at least, cost the Twins several wins. Statistically, both have been fairly strong, but overall, they’ve had a lot more negative impacts on games than positive impacts so far this year. Because of that, they rank lower than subs that aren’t even with the team any more like …. well, Erik Komatsu. That doesn’t mean the statistic is worthless. It just means Revere (and Doumit) didn’t have the offensive impact that we would have like to have seen. Of this, I’m confident.

Aaron sips a pink libation. John begs their listeners to take a quick survery for recruiting sponsors. Then they chat about whether Sam Deduno belong, whether the Twins can and should re-sign Scott Baker, how one characterizes the starting pitching market, Liam Hendriks first "W," the MLB television deal and what it means for the Twins payroll, the switch from Beloit to Cedar Rapids, and honors bestowed by Baseball America on some Twins prospects. Then they answer mailbag about the Minnesota Twins and compare blogging to podcasting. the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.

Aaron sips a pink libation. John begs their listeners to take a quick survery for recruiting sponsors. Then they chat about whether Sam Deduno belong, whether the Twins can and should re-sign Scott Baker, how one characterizes the starting pitching market, Liam Hendriks first "W," the MLB television deal and what it means for the Twins payroll, the switch from Beloit to Cedar Rapids, and honors bestowed by Baseball America on some Twins prospects. Then they answer mailbag about the Minnesota Twins and compare blogging to podcasting. the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.

I may have exaggerated a little. I know – shocking for a blogger. For months I’ve been saying that this free agent class of pitchers is almost historically deep. That might be a little strong, unless you think history only goes back as far as 2007. Because based on the dollars that were thrown around, 2006-2007 was an unbelievably lucrative free agent starting pitching market – for the players. It didn’t work out nearly as well for the owners. The top two contracts given out that year were unmitigated disasters. San Francisco is still trying to get out from under the $126M contract they gave Barry Zito while the Red Sox are finally finished with the $100+M they paid to get Daisuke Matsuzaka. Those two contracts are legendarily bad, and that’s NOT an exaggeration. But the next two were almost equally dismal. The Royals invested $55M in Gil Meche, though he saved them some of that when he voluntarily retired only four years into the deal. The next biggest deal went to Jason Schmidt, who made $47M and pitched only 43.1 innings. (Read that last sentence again.) And it didn’t stop there. The majority of the pitchers who signed for big money struggled and there were a lot of them: nine pitchers signed guaranteed deals for at least $20M. The teams may have figured out something since then. In the five years since, only eleven pitchers have reached that $20M level. No class since has had more than three pitchers reach that plateau. In fact, no class has had more than seven pitchers even get $10 million contracts. Or it could be that the pitchers since just haven’t been that good. For instance, last year was the year those seven pitchers got at least $10M. The market had three big names – CJ Wilson, Yu Darvish and Mark Buehrle. But beyond them, there wasn’t much. Hiroki Kuroda got a one-year, $11M deal from Yankees. Three others got $10+ million contracts, but they were all for multiple years, so the fifth, sixth and seventh biggest deals went to Aaron Harang ($6M/year), Chris Capuano ($5M/year) and Wei-Yin Chen ($3.8M/year). Did you just say “Who?” Exactly. If you’re looking for a thin market for starting pitching, the last five years qualify. This year is different. There are as many as 11 pitchers who could garner a $20M offer from a team. In the first draft of TwinsCentric’s Offseason GM Handbook (which you’ll be able to order soon, I promise), I count six that are virtually locks to make that money There are five more that might, and each will almost certainly get at least $10 million guaranteed. That’s deeper than any class since 2006. But it’s deeper still than that. Because after those guys there are another dozen pitchers who qualify as “innings eaters” or “intriguing gambles” which are the domains in which the Twins are most likely to dabble. Scott Baker belongs in the latter category and ranks 22nd overall on our list. By comparison, there were only 18 starting pitchers last year that signed major league contracts – and that was the most since 2006-2007. So, yes, I might have exaggerated a little in the past, so I’ll try and be a little more precise. (John Dyer-Bennett would have wanted it that way.) Right now, this year’s free agent starting pitching class looks to be the best group we have seen in at least five years. It is also flush with mid-level talent, going at least 20 to 25 players deep. And I’ll go a step further. If the Twins were trying to time find an offseason where average starting pitching would be available at a discount, they couldn’t have done a much better job. (Provided they actually spend some money.)

I may have exaggerated a little. I know – shocking for a blogger. For months I’ve been saying that this free agent class of pitchers is almost historically deep. That might be a little strong, unless you think history only goes back as far as 2007. Because based on the dollars that were thrown around, 2006-2007 was an unbelievably lucrative free agent starting pitching market – for the players. It didn’t work out nearly as well for the owners. The top two contracts given out that year were unmitigated disasters. San Francisco is still trying to get out from under the $126M contract they gave Barry Zito while the Red Sox are finally finished with the $100+M they paid to get Daisuke Matsuzaka. Those two contracts are legendarily bad, and that’s NOT an exaggeration. But the next two were almost equally dismal. The Royals invested $55M in Gil Meche, though he saved them some of that when he voluntarily retired only four years into the deal. The next biggest deal went to Jason Schmidt, who made $47M and pitched only 43.1 innings. (Read that last sentence again.) And it didn’t stop there. The majority of the pitchers who signed for big money struggled and there were a lot of them: nine pitchers signed guaranteed deals for at least $20M. The teams may have figured out something since then. In the five years since, only eleven pitchers have reached that $20M level. No class since has had more than three pitchers reach that plateau. In fact, no class has had more than seven pitchers even get $10 million contracts. Or it could be that the pitchers since just haven’t been that good. For instance, last year was the year those seven pitchers got at least $10M. The market had three big names – CJ Wilson, Yu Darvish and Mark Buehrle. But beyond them, there wasn’t much. Hiroki Kuroda got a one-year, $11M deal from Yankees. Three others got $10+ million contracts, but they were all for multiple years, so the fifth, sixth and seventh biggest deals went to Aaron Harang ($6M/year), Chris Capuano ($5M/year) and Wei-Yin Chen ($3.8M/year). Did you just say “Who?” Exactly. If you’re looking for a thin market for starting pitching, the last five years qualify. This year is different. There are as many as 11 pitchers who could garner a $20M offer from a team. In the first draft of TwinsCentric’s Offseason GM Handbook (which you’ll be able to order soon, I promise), I count six that are virtually locks to make that money There are five more that might, and each will almost certainly get at least $10 million guaranteed. That’s deeper than any class since 2006. But it’s deeper still than that. Because after those guys there are another dozen pitchers who qualify as “innings eaters” or “intriguing gambles” which are the domains in which the Twins are most likely to dabble. Scott Baker belongs in the latter category and ranks 22nd overall on our list. By comparison, there were only 18 starting pitchers last year that signed major league contracts – and that was the most since 2006-2007. So, yes, I might have exaggerated a little in the past, so I’ll try and be a little more precise. (John Dyer-Bennett would have wanted it that way.) Right now, this year’s free agent starting pitching class looks to be the best group we have seen in at least five years. It is also flush with mid-level talent, going at least 20 to 25 players deep. And I’ll go a step further. If the Twins were trying to time find an offseason where average starting pitching would be available at a discount, they couldn’t have done a much better job. (Provided they actually spend some money.)

Yesterday, teams looking for free agent starting pitching this offseason were dealt a minor blow by the Texas Rangers. Colby Lewis, the solid starting pitcher of the Rangers, re-signed with them at the bargain price of $2 million plus incentives. If that sounds shrewd, it’s continuing a trend. Lewis has been outpacing the relatively meager sums the Rangers have been paying him since they signed him when he returned from Japan. In the three years since, he has thrown 500 innings for them with a 3.93 ERA. He was scheduled to be a free agent in a couple of months, his chance to make really big money. That changed back in July. Lewis came out of game with pain in his forearm. A few days later he was diagnosed with a torn flexor tendon which was going to cause him to miss the rest of the season. While he should be OK to begin next season, it was unlikely any team was going to offer him the big multi-year deal his recent performance deserved. They would want a shorter, incentive-laden deal to make sure they weren’t burned. But Texas beat them to that punch, signing Lewis to a $2M deal with the chance to make $4M in incentives. The Twins could face a similar opportunity with one of their own pitchers. Scott Baker is coming back from Tommy John surgery he had in April. He might be ready for the beginning of the year, or soon thereafter, though he’ll likely face an inning limit at some point next year. This offseason, he’ll also be looking for a deal like Lewis was – short, incentive-based, and looking to rebuild interest in his considerable talent. The Twins could offer him that right now, a month before any other team can consider it. A deal similar to that signed by Lewis would keep Baker in the organization during his rehab, give the Twins some cost certainty about the price of their rotation and cross off one more spot they need to fill on the free agent market. However, a Twins-Baker contract would need one additional aspect: a team option on 2014. It could be a fairly expensive option – perhaps $8M – so both Baker and the team feel like they would reap the rewards of a successful recovery. I don’t know if either side is exploring this kind of a deal, but it makes a lot of sense to a pitcher that needs a team and a team that needs pitching.

Yesterday, teams looking for free agent starting pitching this offseason were dealt a minor blow by the Texas Rangers. Colby Lewis, the solid starting pitcher of the Rangers, re-signed with them at the bargain price of $2 million plus incentives. If that sounds shrewd, it’s continuing a trend. Lewis has been outpacing the relatively meager sums the Rangers have been paying him since they signed him when he returned from Japan. In the three years since, he has thrown 500 innings for them with a 3.93 ERA. He was scheduled to be a free agent in a couple of months, his chance to make really big money. That changed back in July. Lewis came out of game with pain in his forearm. A few days later he was diagnosed with a torn flexor tendon which was going to cause him to miss the rest of the season. While he should be OK to begin next season, it was unlikely any team was going to offer him the big multi-year deal his recent performance deserved. They would want a shorter, incentive-laden deal to make sure they weren’t burned. But Texas beat them to that punch, signing Lewis to a $2M deal with the chance to make $4M in incentives. The Twins could face a similar opportunity with one of their own pitchers. Scott Baker is coming back from Tommy John surgery he had in April. He might be ready for the beginning of the year, or soon thereafter, though he’ll likely face an inning limit at some point next year. This offseason, he’ll also be looking for a deal like Lewis was – short, incentive-based, and looking to rebuild interest in his considerable talent. The Twins could offer him that right now, a month before any other team can consider it. A deal similar to that signed by Lewis would keep Baker in the organization during his rehab, give the Twins some cost certainty about the price of their rotation and cross off one more spot they need to fill on the free agent market. However, a Twins-Baker contract would need one additional aspect: a team option on 2014. It could be a fairly expensive option – perhaps $8M – so both Baker and the team feel like they would reap the rewards of a successful recovery. I don’t know if either side is exploring this kind of a deal, but it makes a lot of sense to a pitcher that needs a team and a team that needs pitching.

Aaron and John talk about Aaron's "healthy" new look, discuss next year's middle infield, tell listeners how they can get a free audiobook, and review the expected free agent starting pitchers and give Aaron's choices, John's choices, and the Twins probable choices. Here are: the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.

Aaron and John talk about Aaron's "healthy" new look, discuss next year's middle infield, tell listeners how they can get a free audiobook, and review the expected free agent starting pitchers and give Aaron's choices, John's choices, and the Twins probable choices. Here are: the podcasts the rss feed if you want to subscribe and the podcast on iTunes.