Matt Klaassen

A few months ago, I wrote about which front offices should get the benefit of the doubt, using the Tampa Bay Rays ‘ signing of mediocre reliever Fernando Rodney as my primary example. One of my negative examples of a team that had not yet earned the benefit of the doubt was the Royals.

Let’s play a little GM and look at recent examples of each team’s process at work, taking as our case studies Rodney’s production so far this season and the Royals’ call-up of second base prospect Johnny Giavotella.

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While fielding analysis has come a long way, pretty much everyone agrees that we still have a long way to go. Catcher defense is in many ways further behind other sorts of analysis (although on the most advanced level I think that gap is exaggerated).

There are several emerging sophisticated ways of evaluating a catcher’s defensive contribution. This is not one of them.

What follows is the output of a simple “system” (that is far from original) that I can put together relatively quickly in-season to keep track of how catchers seem to be doing relative to the rest of the league with respect to throwing out base stealers, blocking pitches, and making errors. Yes, it’s early in the season, but we have to start at some point.

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It is often asserted that 10 runs equals one win. What does that mean? Is it even true? Does it matter? Many good internet primers exist for this sort of thing, and I will not offer a full one here. But I think it’s worth a bit of non-technical discussion, and I will also offer a historical table showing how many runs “equal” a win over the years.

Hint: it might be time to start dividing by nine.

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The Minnesota Twins are in trouble. Coming off a 99-loss season, the Twins are off to an ugly 1-4 start. Now the news comes down that Scott Baker, probably their best starting pitcher, is going to miss the rest of the season with elbow surgery and rehab.

Does the Baker injury spell doom for the the Twins in 2012?

No, and not just because one player, even one better than Baker, does not make that much of a difference. The real reason is that the Twins did not have a real chance in 2012 (outside of “anything can happen” possibilities) before the season started.

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The real baseball season is dawning/has dawned, and for most fans optimism still reigns. Of all the things to look forward to, we are most optimistic about the players who had big seasons in 2011 — they “broke out” after all, surely they will retain that level of performance!

The rise of sabermetric analysis and its dissemination by way of the Interweb has dampened that sort of enthusiasm a bit, as the notion of “regression” looms. However, while the term is used a fair bit, in my experience people still seem to get a bit confused as to what it means in certain contexts. Rather than offering yet another primer, perhaps a few simple and concrete examples of regression would make things clear.

Or, if you simply think that it is all sabermetric hocus-pocus, remember the following principle: “Regression to the mean does not apply to my favorite player.”

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