In opposite corners of the country, two large-market teams have bullpen aces with tenuous holds on their closer jobs despite years of dominance. In Boston, Jonathan Papelbon might be a few more bad outings away from seeing young flamethrower Daniel Bard replace him. In Los Angeles, Jonathan Broxton has already lost the role, at least temporarily.

Papelbon first earned the job of closing games for the Red Sox in 2006. He punished hitters that year with a 0.92 ERA and 75 strikeouts against just 13 walks in 68⅓ innings. Not much changed over the next couple of seasons. He saved lots of games, struck out lots of batters, and, despite a slowly rising ERA, his supporting numbers remained top notch. According to calculations at FanGraphs, he added 8½ wins above replacement from 2006-2008, a gigantic total for a reliever and comparable to Mariano Rivera at his best.

There were some warning signs of decline in 2009, when Papelbon’s impressive ERA masked a sharp upward spike in his walk rate. This season, his supporting statistics are moving in the wrong direction. His walk rate has climbed further, he is giving up more home runs, and for the first time in his career he is striking out less than a batter per inning. Meanwhile, Bard, his potential replacement, has been blowing hitters away with a 100 mile per hour fastball.

“You can have the closer job when you pry it out of my cold, dead, slider-throwing fingers.”

Single seasons are small samples for relievers, who don’t pitch very many innings. After three years of total dominance and another very good season last year, Papelbon’s 50 mediocre innings should not cause panic in Boston. However, he is expensive, and Bard is a young, impressive alternative who may already be the better pitcher. The Red Sox will have an interesting decision to make next season.

The situation in Los Angeles is far less murky. Interim closer Hong-Chih Kuo is a fantastic pitcher, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with Jonathan Broxton. He is young and durable, he throws hard, he has adequate control, and he strikes out a ton of batters—nearly 12 per nine innings for his career, and more than 11 per nine this season. Broxton is one of the best relievers in the game, and his performance this year has been qualitatively equal to his performance in previous years. His ERA is a little higher—3.42 compared to a career mark of 2.99—and he has blown a few saves, but bad luck will strike for every reliever once in a while. He is striking batters out, limiting walks, and keeping the ball on the ground, all at comparable rates to years past. In demoting Broxton, the Dodgers’ manager appears to be seriously overreacting to a few bad bounces.

It’s tough being a closer. Despite years of dominance, Papelbon, who is not even 30 years old, is facing possible replacement by a younger, harder-throwing pitcher. Broxton is 26, in his prime, and clearly an elite pitcher, and all it took was a little bit of bad luck and a few poor outings in a row for him to lose his job.

Starlin Castro, just 20 years old, is having a fine season at shortstop for the Chicago Cubs. Metrics vary on his proficiency with the glove, but he has not been bad in the field. Meanwhile, he has been impressive with the bat, especially given his position and age.

A natural comparison is another 20-year-old rookie, Jason Heyward of the Atlanta Braves. Heyward came into spring training universally ranked with Stephen Strasburg as one of the top two prospects in baseball. Despite just three games of triple-A experience, he made the Braves’s opening day roster and proceeded to hit a home run in his first major league at bat. Castro, meanwhile, started the year in double-A. After he spent a month destroying Southern League pitching, the Cubs promoted him straight to the majors and installed him as their starting shortstop. He also proceeded to hit a home run in his first major league at bat.

Arky, from Arkansas, one of the greats.

Apart from membership in the home-run-in-first-at-bat club, Heyward and Castro have very different offensive games. Heyward has the makings of a patient, home run-hitting slugger, and could quickly become one of the best power hitters in the game. He hit 17 homers and walked 51 times in 99 minor league games last year, and his 11 homers and 56 walks this year have led to a .261/.375/.443 line (all numbers from Baseball Reference). Castro is much more reliant on batting average, using great contact skills to spray singles and doubles around the field. While his .312/.360/.449 line is impressive, with just three home runs and 21 walks, his performance will vary with his luck on balls in play. His game was similar in the minors—high batting average, few home runs, walks, or strikeouts. Castro is likely to improve as he gets older, stronger, and more experienced, but Heyward is in an entirely different league in both the power and patience departments.

Heyward clearly has the stronger track record and future as a hitter. However, there is an important difference between the two. While Heyward plays right field, one of the easier spots on the diamond and one populated by great hitters, Castro is a shortstop, the most difficult defensive position apart from pitcher and catcher. There have been some great hitting shortstops over the past decade, but historically the position has been a wasteland for offensive talent. This season, shortstops are batting .264/.322/.371, compared to .263/.332/.413 for all non-pitchers. Right fielders are the second best group of hitters after first basemen, putting up a .272/.345/.447 line so far.

A-Rod, 600 home runs ago.

Combine his position with his age, and Castro’s rookie season becomes especially impressive. Since 1900, only 18 shortstops have spent at least half a season in the majors at age 20 or younger, and only a handful of those have been better than an MLB-average hitter with the bat. The first to do it was hall of famer Arky Vaughan, who debuted in 1932 for the Pittsburg Pirates. It did not happen again until 1996, when Edgar Renteria had a nice season for the Florida Marlins at age 19. His production declined significantly the next year, however, and he was well below average in his age-20 season. Also in 1996, Alex Rodriguez, age 20 but not technically a rookie, had a truly incredible season. He batted .358 that year with 36 home runs and 54 doubles in 146 games.

Castro is nowhere near A-Rod’s universe, but as just the fourth person in history to hit so well at shortstop at such a young age, he is in rare company.

They can’t really call him “Zorilla” anymore. But he’s still good.

On February 24, I examined the sudden, late-20s power surge of Ben Zobrist and concluded that, while he was unlikely to continue his monster pace of the 2008 and 2009 seasons, he would be a very solid player going forward. In 2010 the power has evaporated. After slugging 39 home runs in his previous 699 at bats, he has only five in 306 at bats this season. He has, however, remained a very valuable player by taking walks, hitting a few doubles, playing great defense in the outfield and at second base, and stealing more bases than ever before.

On March 3, I took on Tom Verducci and his bogus Year-After Effect. Verducci’s supposed link between high workloads for young pitchers and injury or ineffectiveness relies on the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean to give the appearance of a causal relationship. Regression has struck again this season, with most of the players on his 2010 list either injured, suffering steep declines from 2009 performance, or banished to the minors. My response is still the same: don’t buy into it.

The legend grows, one K at a time.

On March 17, I looked into the value of some of the biggest whiffers in history. Mark Reynolds is moving up the list, striking out in an astonishing 41 percent of his at bats this season. With 119 strikeouts already, he is well on his way to breaking the season record for the third consecutive year. He has still provided plenty of value by walking more than average and slugging 20 home runs. Jack Cust has continued his trend from last season, cutting back further on his strikeouts but displaying the weakest pop of his Oakland A’s career.

The following week, I compared the early careers of Scott Rolen and Eric Chavez. At 35, Rolen is enjoying a fantastic late-career season that is helping his push for the Hall of Fame. Just two or three more decent seasons will make him a sure bet. The 32-year-old Chavez, meanwhile, made it through only 33 poor games at designated hitter before suffering what may end up as a career-ending injury.

In April, I looked at two catchers who were inexplicably riding the pine. Chris Iannetta was buried on the Colorado Rockies’ bench, and Mike Napoli was splitting time for the Anaheim Angels with the light-hitting, defense-first Jeff Mathis. Iannetta has not received a fair shot this season, even spending some time in the minors. He is a major-league quality catcher. Napoli snagged the Angels’ full-time job when Mathis broke his hand, and he responded by slugging 14 home runs in the first half.

“Hey, come down here, I gotta ask you something. Can you tell them to put me in more often? This is fun.”

Jamie Moyer’s successful age-47 season has continued. He has now made 17 starts, thrown more than 100 innings and two complete games, and picked up nine wins. He is not a particularly good pitcher at this point, but he can still compete with major league hitters less than half his age.

On May 19, I wrote about an offseason bad contract swap between the Seattle Mariners and the Chicago Cubs. Milton Bradley has had slightly better luck recently, but his poor season for the Mariners has continued. Carlos Silva, the other player in the deal, has completely resurrected his career with the Cubs. After striking out fewer than four batters per nine innings in over 1,000 innings pitched, he has whiffed more than six per nine this season while maintaining the excellent control that has been there throughout his career. He is unlikely to hold his ERA under three, but he has quickly gone from a completely expendable part on the Mariners to a useful starter on the Cubs.

Finally, in the week since I wrote about the greatness of Cliff Lee, he has started two games with 17 total innings pitched, 13 strikeouts, and one walk, and has seen the Mariners deal him to the Texas Rangers for prospects. It was the third time a team has traded Lee in the past calendar year, which is remarkable considering that he has been one of the top five pitchers in all of MLB over the past three seasons.

Thanks for reading Ball Your Base. The full archive is here.

“You are mine now! You belong to me!”

Cliff Lee is in the middle of what may turn out to be one of the most amazing seasons in history. No, he is not as utterly dominating as Pedro Martinez was in 1999 and 2000. He is not on pace to strike out 300 or to post an ERA under two. However, the combination of power and control he has showcased so far this year is among the best we have ever seen.

Despite missing April with an injury, Lee pitched 95⅔ innings in the first half of the season. He whiffed 78 batters for a ratio of 7.3 strikeouts per nine innings, which is just a tad above average. Meanwhile, he has walked only five batters, or 0.47 per nine innings. Only once in history has a pitcher qualified for the ERA title—which requires at least 162 innings pitched—while walking less than ½ a batter per nine innings. In 2005, Carlos Silva walked nine batters in nearly 200 innings, but he did so by pitching to contact; he struck out only 71 over the course of the entire year. This season, Lee has generated plenty of strikeouts while exhibiting some of the best control for a starting pitcher in the history of the game.

It bears repeating: Pedro was the greatest.

If Lee pitches a reasonable number of innings during the second half of the season and holds his strikeout-to-walk ratio anywhere near its current level, he will obliterate all previous marks for starting pitchers. His current ratio of 15.6 strikeouts per walk would easily top Bret Saberhagen’s record. Saberhagen whiffed 11 batters for every free pass in 1994, when he struck out 143 while walking only 13 in 177⅓ innings. In fact, only five pitchers have put up a ratio above eight to one while qualifying for the ERA title, with Pedro doing it in both 1999 and 2000.

Lee’s ratio is still remarkable when taking into account shorter seasons. Even after removing the lower limit to innings pitched, only six other pitchers have posted a strikeout-to-walk ratio above 12 to one, and all six were relievers. The following numbers are from Baseball Reference.

Lee is unlikely to walk as few batters in the second half of the season as he has in the first, so his ratio will probably drop. One projection system, available on his FanGraphs page, projects 18 walks in 106 innings the rest of the way. But through half a season, Lee has exhibited one of the best pairings of power and control in history.

The Washington Nationals drafted one of the most hyped prospects in history last season, and proceeded to hand him the largest deal a draftee had ever received. The hype around Stephen Strasburg was so intense that it seemed inevitable that he would disappoint, at least at first. It just did not seem possible for a rookie with a couple of months of minor league experience to come in and dominate big-league hitters.

Four starts into his career, Strasburg has actually exceeded expectations. He is not only dominating hitters, he is pitching like Pedro Martinez in his prime. He struck out 14 batters in his first major league start, and he has now racked up 41 punchouts in just 25⅓ innings, for a rate of about 14½ per nine. Meanwhile, he has walked only five total batters, giving him a power-control combination that ranks with the best pitchers in the game. He has a 1.78 ERA, and batters are hitting .202 against him. And he is only 21 years old. How much better can we expect Strasburg to get?

According to one researcher, he is going to have a hard time just running in place over the next few years. Mitchel Lichtman, co-author of The Book, wrote an article earlier this season exploring how pitchers age. For all of us that had an ingrained belief that young pitchers get better with age and experience, the results were astonishing. Lichtman found that, taking injuries into account, average pitcher performance does not improve at all from ages 21-26, and then enters a steep dive with steady performance declines every year.

Mark Prior was the Stephen Strasburg of 2002.

What does this mean? If we take any particular pitcher and try to project his performance, we have to expect that on average it will stay flat or decline over time. Some pitchers will improve, but many will decline or get injured, and we do not yet know how to distinguish between the two possibilities before the fact. As Lichtman explains, “for every Felix Hernandez there is at least one Mark Prior.” Prior, of course, signed his own record deal after the 2001 draft, had an incredible season at age 22 when he struck out 245 in 211⅓ innings, and then quickly succumbed to injuries. He made nine poor starts at 25, and has not seen the majors since.

Strasburg may end up one of the lucky ones who stays healthy and improves as enters his mid-20s. If that happens, he will develop into one of the best pitchers of all time. But that is not the safe bet. As amazing as it may sound for a 21-year-old who has just made a smashing major league debut, we may actually be watching the high point of Strasburg’s career right now. There is a significant chance that his performance declines or that he gets injured, and both the Nationals and everyone else should take care not to bank on the best-case scenario.

Barton is really good at bunting. Unfortunately, he’s not quite as good at hitting home runs.

Daric Barton, first baseman for the Oakland Athletics, is currently tied for the Major League lead in sacrifice bunts. And a lot of people really do not like that.

Over at Athletics Nation, an A’s fan site, statistics-savvy contributors have been calling for manager Bob Geren’s head for months. Joe Posnanski agrees. He wrote a column the other day suggesting that, among other things, “[s]omebody tell that man to stop doing that immediately.” Matt Klassen at FanGraphs also agrees, arguing that every single one of Barton’s bunts has been a bad idea. How could the team that led baseball’s statistical revolution in the late-1990s and early-2000s be so stupid? How can Billy Beane sit back and let his manager throw away out after out by allowing Barton, a good on-base hitter, to sacrifice his plate appearances?

As Tom Tango explains, it is not so simple. Tango makes two points: 1) Barton may have a chance to reach base when he bunts; and 2) all the bunting may force infielders to play in, giving him more hitting room and making him more successful when he does choose to swing.

“This is how many aneurysms I’ve caused among A’s fans so far.”

The latter point is difficult to measure, but Tango has provided help with the former. His run expectancy calculator is a wonderful tool that allows some analysis of Barton’s bunts. It is based on the idea that every combination of baserunners and outs has a certain average “run expectancy.” There can be zero, one, or two outs in the inning, and there are eight possible configurations of baserunners (empty, first, second, third, first and second, first and third, second and third, loaded). Multiply the three out states by eight baserunner states, and there are 24 different situations that can come up in an inning. For each of these states, a team can expect to score, on average, a certain number of runs to the end of the inning—the run expectancy. Input a batting line into the calculator, and you get a table that shows the run expectancy for all 24 states.

One more consideration before we plug in some numbers: the current A’s team is not good at hitting. Since they score fewer runs per game than most teams (in other words, fewer runs per 27 outs), each out is worth a little less than it would be for an average team. Their lack of offensive punch also magnifies the value of a runner moving 90 feet closer to home.

“Dude, I know what I’m doing. They wrote a book about it. Stop whining.”

I plugged the A’s season batting line through Monday into the calculator, and all run expectancy numbers come from the resulting tables. Let’s first look at the numbers when Barton bunts with a runner on first and no outs. On average, the A’s should expect to score 0.873 runs between this situation and the end of the inning. If Barton successfully bunts the runner to second, the state changes to a runner on second and one out—a situation which yields an expectation of 0.648 runs. So by successfully bunting in this situation, it would appear that Barton has cost his team, on average, about a quarter of a run. However, a successful sacrifice bunt is not the only possibility. Barton could reach base, resulting in runners on first and second with no outs (run expectancy: 1.493). The bunt attempt could also fail, resulting in a runner on first and one out (run expectancy: 0.499). Barton is a good bunter and always bunts with the speedy leadoff batter on first, so his chance of failure is probably very low. For the sake of argument, let’s say he can expect to pop his bunt up or fail in some other way only about two percent of the time. What about reaching base? Using all of these numbers, a little algebra can tell us how much of a chance Barton needs to have to make this a good play.

P(Bunt Fails) * .499 + P(Bunt Succeeds) * .648 + P(Barton Reaches) * 1.493 = .873

I suggested that P(Bunt Fails) is perhaps .02, so we can set P(Barton Reaches) = X and P(Bunt Succeeds) = .98 – X to make the probabilities add up to one. Solving for X gives about .27, or 27 percent. This means that if Barton has a greater than 27 percent chance of reaching base when he bunts with a runner on first with no outs, then he is actually increasing the number of runs his team should expect to score. If he has a less than 27 percent chance of reaching base, he costs his team runs and would be better off simply swinging away.

Reaching base could include a bunt hit or a fielder error, but a 27 percent chance still seems like a stretch. How about when there is a runner on second and no outs, the situation in which Barton has most often been successful? Posnanski specifically blasted the decision to bunt in that situation, but the numbers are actually a bit better. Here is the equation:

P(Bunt Fails) * .648 + P(Bunt Succeeds) * .895 + P(Barton Reaches) * 1.715 = 1.044

With a runner on second and no outs, again assuming a two percent chance of total failure, the threshold ends up at 19 percent—if Barton has better than a 19 percent chance of reaching, he is helping his team score more runs. The number still seems high, but, contradicting Posnanski, it appears that bunting in this situation is a better play than when there is a runner on first.

Actually, Rajai can get to second on his own, thank you very much.

Barton has appeared to be bunting for a hit on many of his sacrifices, and though he has not succeeded, he must believe there is some chance he will get on base. And there are two other factors at work. First, the fielders must play further in if he is likely to bunt, making his non-bunt appearances in these situations far more valuable. Second, Tango’s tool also gives the chance of scoring at least one run for each state, and this value stays constant at about 41 percent when Barton successfully bunts a runner to second, and actually rises from 58 percent to 65 percent when he bunts a runner from second to third.

Indeed, Barton’s bunts are far more complicated than some commentators have made them out to be. As Mitchel Lichtman explained during the playoffs last year, when a few Yankees sacrifices left viewers baffled, we cannot simply analyze the before and after state of a “successful” sacrifice bunt. The range of possible outcomes includes the bunter reaching safely; the effect on the fielders should the batter choose to swing is also a factor. The A’s may actually know what they are doing here.

After Armando Galarraga’s performance Wednesday, articles started to pop up questioning whether three perfect games in 25 days meant that pitching had risen to dominance in Major League Baseball. While it certainly is possible that pitchers are better now than they ever have been, those suggesting that the numbers or specific performances from the first third of the season have a larger meaning are using flawed logic to make their case. For a look at one aspect of this argument, let’s explore the claim that there have been an abnormal number of dominant performances so far this season.

First, three perfect games did not occur in a 25 day span, because Armando Galarraga did not throw a perfect game. In order to make 27 straight outs, a pitcher must get very lucky in a multitude of ways. In a game against the Padres last season, Jonathan Sanchez was just about perfect, retiring every batter he faced except for Chase Headley who reached on an error by the third baseman. Sanchez did everything right, and a little bit of bad luck turned his perfect game into a mere no-hitter. An analogous situation happened with Galarraga. He did everything right, but some bad luck took his perfect game away. Just as the error behind Sanchez prevented a perfect game 13 days before Mark Buerhle’s for the White Sox, a blown call for Galarraga prevented a third perfect game in 25 days this season.

Good mullet, great fastball: unhittable.

There have been plenty of other dominating performances this season. Baseball Reference’s pitching game finder turns up 20 complete game shutouts already this season. Johnny Cueto, Mat Latos, and Matt Cain have all thrown one-hitters. Ricky Romero struck out 12 Rangers in a five-hit shutout. Jamie Moyer, at 47, threw a two-hit shutout. But do all these great performances in the first two months of 2010 mean anything? Before making any claims, we need, at the very least, to see how 2010 stacks up against recent years. There were 63 complete game shutouts in 2009, 54 in 2008, 43 in 2007, and 63 in 2006. Against these numbers, 20 in one third of a season does not appear out of line.

Just for fun, let’s go back a decade and look at 2000, when balls were flying out of parks like they never have, before or since. Major League batters hit 5,693 home runs that season, 165 more than in any other season in history, and about 600 or 700 more than they have in recent years. In 2000, there were 71 complete game shutouts (I am discarding a five-inning, one-hit, rain-shortened complete game by Gil Meche). There were six one hitters, 13 two hitters, and 14 three hitters. Pedro Martinez and Mike Mussina struck out 15 twice each, Ron Villone K’d 16 Cardinals, and Pedro lost a 1-0 game to Tampa Bay in which he set down 17 batters on strikes. And some of the season-long performances were just as impressive. Pedro put up a 1.74 ERA in 217 innings, Randy Johnson was in the middle of four straight 300-strikeout seasons, and five pitchers threw at least 240 innings. There were dominating pitching performances at both the single-game and full-season level all over the place in 2000, despite hitters absolutely pounding the ball.

Sure, in 2010, home runs are down and scoring is down. Does this necessarily mean that pitchers are better relative to hitters than they have been in the recent past? No. As Tom Tango remarks, we need a lot more evidence before we can come to that conclusion. Most importantly, we need to wait until we have more than one third of one season of data. A handful of dominating performances is woefully insufficient for making the case.

They traded the best pitcher in the game and suddenly they’re good. Baseball is weird.

Two months of baseball are in the books, and there are some real surprises in the standings, particularly in the American League East and the National League.

Everyone knew that Tampa Bay had a good team before the season started, but at 35-18, with two and a half games of space between themselves and the Yankees, they have exceeded expectations. The Toronto Blue Jays have obliterated expectations for their club, winning 31 of their first 54 games and keeping pace with the Red Sox. Boston struggled greatly in April, but turned things around in May, and even die-hard fans probably are not surprised that they sit two and a half games behind the Yankees. The real shock is that they are in fourth place in the division. Apart from the East standings, there are not many real surprises in the rest of the AL, with the possible exception of Seattle. The Mariners added some really nice players this offseason—particularly Cliff Lee, Chone Figgins, and Milton Bradley—and were a popular pick to compete for the West this season. They have sputtered to a 20-31 record and are probably out of contention.

One third of the way through the season, the real wackiness is happening over in the National League. The preseason consensus for the San Diego Padres was that they were headed for one of the bottom spots in their division. At 31-21, they are sitting in first place and lead the Dodgers by a game. The Cincinnati Reds looked like an improved team this off-season, but it is still a surprise to see them at 31-22 and on top of the powerhouse Cardinals. The two-time NL champion Phillies have faded badly recently and currently trail Atlanta, and the Arizona Diamondbacks and Milwaukee Brewers, both of whom looked like .500 teams prior to the season, have been terrible.

The Padres also traded an awesome pitcher, and now they’re good, too. What’s going on here?

Of course, teams have played only 50-something games thus far, so there are bound to be some fluke results. It is far more unlikely for inferior teams to stick at the top of the standings for 162 games, or for good teams to languish at the bottom over the course of a full season. Let’s take a look at the underlying performances teams have received and make some predictions about who will rise and who will fall as the season drags on.

In order to do this, I will look at Wins Above Replacement (WAR), aggregated at the team level. The concept behind WAR, as I have explained in earlier posts, starts with the idea that a player’s performance should be measured against a standard baseline. This baseline is not zero, because teams cannot play without a full squad. Removal of any player from the field necessitates a replacement, and there is value simply in having bodies occupy each spot in the lineup. WAR is based on the assumption that there is an unlimited and freely available supply of borderline major leaguers or decent minor league players teams could insert into the lineup if necessary. The theoretical level of production that such players would provide becomes “replacement level,” and we can then measure the value actual players provide over and above this level.

The details of how to calculate WAR are rather involved, and are available here. For our purposes, it is sufficient to know that a team full of replacement-level players would win just under 30 percent of its games. Using this benchmark, and adding the WAR numbers for pitchers and hitters that FanGraphs lists on its team pages, we get a picture of team performance with some of the lucky bounces and well-distributed hits stripped out. I compared these underlying wins from WAR totals to the actual wins and losses teams have compiled so far. The teams with the largest gaps between the two are in the following table.

The Cubs, Brewers, and Diamondbacks have actual winning percentages significantly lower than one would expect from the individual performances of their players. The Cubs would be a good team, the Brewers average, and the Diamondbacks passable if their win-loss records matched actual performance. All three are likely to perform significantly better going forward. On the other end are the Dodgers, Pirates, and Rays, who have records far better than expected. Some luck—timely hits, line drives against them going directly at fielders, etc.—may have contributed to the hot starts of the Dodgers and Rays. The Pirates’ actual performance was already bad, but they appear lucky not to be the worst team in baseball. These latter three are likely to regress. It may be difficult for the Dodgers to stay near the top of the NL West and for the Rays to hold off the Yankees in the AL East.

Reorganizing division standings by WAR, the Yankees lead the AL East, Minnesota remains on top in the Central, and Texas has the West. In the NL, the Florida Marlins lead the East, Cincinnati the Central, and San Francisco is in a virtual tie with the Padres in the West. Thus, underlying performance lends some support to the records that two of the league’s biggest surprises have compiled. The Cincinnati Reds and San Diego Padres may stick in contention for most or all of this season. It would be a huge upset of preseason expectations if either were to win its division, but both are in first place and appear to be in solid position going forward.

Sweeney has “warning track power,” but he looks good doing it.

The Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants, who play just a few miles from each other on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay, have very similar players manning right field. Ryan Sweeney of the A’s and Nate Schierholtz of the Giants are young, tall, rangy outfielders who hit from the left side. Both are quite good at making contact, and both have the range to handle center field, though only Sweeney has played the position in the majors. Both look the part of the big, power-hitting, major league corner outfielder. However, neither actually hits for much power.

A big part of the reason these players lack power is that the balls they hit in the air do not travel very far. Baseball Reference provides batting splits by hit trajectory. I compiled the MLB-wide numbers from 2008 through 2010, the years in which Sweeney and Schierholtz have had most of their appearances. During that period, 8.9 percent of fly balls and 2.2 percent of line drives went over the fence for home runs. Those are averages for all players, and are modest compared to the rates of true power hitters. Ryan Howard, for example, has had more than 27 percent of his fly balls carry out of the park.

“Hey buddy, don’t wait so long for the next one, okay?”

By contrast, Sweeney’s 13 career home runs make up just 4.4 percent of fly balls. Schierholtz has seven career homers, and they have come on 4.2 percent of his fly balls. Neither player has hit a home run on a line drive. Despite lacking power, both are valuable players. Sweeney, due mainly to great defense, was worth nearly four wins above replacement in 2009, putting him in the company of Justin Morneau and Raul Ibanez that season. However, the minuscule power numbers hold both players back. What would Sweeney and Schierholtz look like if their home run rates were just league average?

Taking Sweeney’s fly balls and line drives and giving him league average home run rates would bump his career total up to 31 homers, an additional 18 home runs over about two seasons worth of playing time. Doing the same for Schierholtz results in 17 home runs, or an extra 10 in about one season of playing time. I took these extra home runs and factored them into the players’ batting lines, and I got the following results. All numbers are through Saturday’s games.

The actual batting lines for both players put them right around, or perhaps slightly below, league average. They make good contact and take a few walks, but they have power typical of middle infielders. Both slot somewhere between Adam Kennedy’s .277/.330/.391 and Orlando Hudson’s .283/.349/.429 career lines. Adjusting their home run rates suddenly makes them both .300 hitters with some pop. Their adjusted numbers are solidly above average and better fit the mold of an outfielder with a decent bat, somewhere between Shane Victorino and Johnny Damon.

As with my post on Ichiro’s groundballs, these adjusted numbers should come with a warning. Both players probably derive some value from not swinging too hard, which hurts their power but may help them achieve good contact numbers. However, it is interesting to see just how much value they leave on the table due to their weak power numbers. Both are young—Sweeney is just 25 and Schierholtz 26—and still have time to develop power. Until then, they will need to continue to play great defense and make good contact to remain valuable players.

Silva has never been big on strikeouts, but he was effective for the Twins.

The Chicago Cubs and Seattle Mariners swapped bad contracts back in December, when the Cubs sent left fielder Milton Bradley to the Mariners in exchange for starter Carlos Silva. At the time, the general consensus was that while the Cubs had to deal Bradley, the Mariners won big by dumping Silva on them. Here, after a quarter of a season, is a look at how the two sides have fared thus far.

The Cubs signed Bradley to three years and $30 million after his great 2008 season in Texas. Chicago was Bradley’s eighth team, and he had demonstrated a tendency to make things difficult for his employers. Bradley was not bad, but not great, on the field in 2009. Off-field problems were what made it impossible for the team to keep him. For the Mariners and Silva, the problems were based on performance. They had signed him away from the Twins for four years and $48 million prior to the 2008 season. His first season with Seattle, despite looking bad on the surface (4-15 record, 6.46 ERA), was in line with his performance in previous years. He was injured and ineffective in his second year, allowing 29 runs in 30⅓ innings and walking more batters than he struck out. The following table compares his career rates before and after Seattle signed him.

The Mariners may have thought that Silva was finished, and the Cubs had to get rid of Bradley. So they swapped problems, with the Cubs also receiving cash. Accounting for salary differences, the Mariners ended up paying $6 million to swap Silva for Bradley. As writers and bloggers noted at the time, Seattle likely thought that they had already lost the money they owed to Silva, so in a sense this was like picking up two seasons of Bradley at $3 million per year. He had been inconsistent in his playing time over the previous few seasons, but had been a very good hitter when on the field. Here is his recent performance and 2010 CHONE projections.

The early results heavily favor the Cubs. After his terrible 2009, Silva has rebounded over the first quarter of 2010 to post some of the best numbers of his career. As Table 1 shows, he is giving up walks and home runs at around his usual rates while striking out more batters than he ever has before. Bradley, meanwhile, played only 21 games before taking himself out indefinitely for emotional reasons. In those 21 games, his batting line was .214/.313/.371, much closer to 2009 than to performances in past years.

The Mariners clearly thought it was not worth their time to fix Silva, and that they would be better off using young pitchers like Doug Fister and Jason Vargas, who have done well this season. They took a relatively small financial risk, but so far things have not worked out. Bradley, only 32, is a talented hitter, and perhaps he has some really good baseball left. However, he has been unable to stay on the field over the years, and he has worn out his welcome with eight different teams. Things are already starting to unravel after just a couple of months in Seattle. Unless the club decides to bail out early, they are stuck with him through 2011.