Kuzul

There are more skills required to play baseball than there are for any other sport.

Just think about what it means to be a “five-tool player.” Only a few dozen people in the world can both hit and hit for power, let alone run, throw, and catch. That’s without even considering pitchers.

Yet, the MLB All-Star Game features just one skill competition: The Home Run Derby.

In this slideshow are 10 contests that MLB could add to its All-Star festivities that test some of the game’s neglected skills. A description of the event, five players who could compete, and my predicted winner. To prevent guys like Carl Crawford and Ichiro from dominating everything, I decided that players can partake in only one competition each.

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Last week, I wrote an article comparing MLB players to Pokémon.

After the article was published, I started thinking: if similarities can be found between athletes and fictional quasi-animals with superpowers, surely connections could also be drawn between the people who control them.

Each Pokémon trainer is in it for a different reason. Some want fame, some want power, and some have other ridiculous reasons for turning innocent creatures into effective gladiators (a majority of characters are one-dimensional hacks who exist for the sole purpose of getting beaten by Ash).

Different GMs have different goals as well. Executives of spendthrift clubs are expected to win, year in and year out, while those in charge of small-market teams are under constant pressure from frustrated fans to field contenders in spite of their disadvantages. Each has a different philosophy, and each goes about his job in a different way.

In this slideshow are the MLB front office counterparts of eight of Kanto’s most prominent trainers. If you’re like me, by the time you finish this article you’ll have a strong desire to go back and replay Yellow.

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If you are under the age of 25, you remember Pokémon. That’s not a question, that’s a fact.

You watched the TV show. You played the video games. You even collected the trading cards, but you mostly just looked at them because the card game kind of sucked.

Even if you never cared that Nidorino needs a Moon Stone to become Nidoking, you’d probably recognize a Pokéball and Ash Ketchum’s trademark “L” hat if you saw them. Unless you’ve been living under the stairs for the last decade-plus, you undoubtedly know who the yellow mouse on the left is.

There are now 493 Pokémon (back in my day, there were only 150), each of whom has different powers and a distinctive personality.

Here’s a look at how 10 characters from the Kanto universe match up with Major League Baseball stars.

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Welcome to the Cleveland Indians Trading Post, a weekly segment meant to help my fellow Tribe fans sort out which of the few familiar faces left on the team won’t be around much longer.

This week’s potential trade bait is Fausto Carmona.

The basics

Three years ago today, Fausto Carmona was in the midst of a breakout season. With nine wins and a 3.21 ERA in his first 14 games, he had teamed with Tribe ace CC Sabathia to give the Indians’ rotation arguably the best one-two punch in baseball.

But in 2008, just months after finishing fourth in AL Cy Young voting, Carmona’s game went down the toilet (13-19, 5.89 ERA in 2008-09).

This year, the 26-year-old right-hander is enjoying a resurgence (6-5, 3.31 ERA), though his peripherals (1.58 K/BB rate, 4.46 xFIP) indicate that his success is largely due to luck. He’s under team control through 2014, with just under $9 million guaranteed through 2011, followed by three years of club options.

Why he has value

Did you miss the last paragraph? He has a 3.31 ERA, good for 15th in the American League. When a player like that becomes available, teams take notice.

He throws 97 mph (92.7 average fastball velocity this year, 14th in the league) and can burn worms with the best of them (56.6 percent groundball rate, behind only teammate Justin Masterson).

As we discovered in 2007, he has Cy Young-caliber upside. He’s only 26 and is under team control until he’s 31. Wake up—I think you’re drooling.

There’s always a chance that he’ll bust again, but if that happens the team can cut ties with him after next year. So what is there to lose?

Why he’s expendable

First, let me make it clear that if I were Mark Shapiro, I wouldn’t be actively shopping Carmona. But I’d listen carefully if another GM called with an offer.

Carmona’s 2007 campaign looked like a fluke even before his collapse. That year, a .281 BABIP and 78 percent strand rate kept his ERA down at 3.06—almost a full run lower than his good-not-great 3.94 FIP.

Not much of a strikeout pitcher to begin with, Carmona struggled with massive control problems the next couple seasons; in 246 innings from 2008-09, opposing batters actually saw ball four more often than strike three.

He’s definitely made some improvements this year, but he still doesn’t look like an ace.

With a 3.2 BB/9 rate, Carmona appears to be getting the walks under control. But his strikeout rate (5.1 K/9) has actually decreased since last year (5.7 K/9).

The difference between his sterling 3.31 ERA and mediocre 4.46 xFIP shows that the winds of fortune have been blowing in from the Progressive Field bleachers. His .262 BABIP, 72 percent strand rate, and seven percent HR/FB rate are well below, above, and below his career averages, respectively.

More importantly, though, the Indians have more exciting young pitchers than we know what to do with—guys like Carlos Carrasco, Nick Hagadone, Jason Knapp, Hector Rondon, and even Justin Masterson. All probably have higher upside than Carmona and will be available at or near the league minimum for the remainder of his contract.

It’d be nice to keep Carmona around for a while, but if we can get a solid package in return, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

Where he’d go

Any team looking for a solid middle-of-the-rotation starter with the ability to absorb a bit of salary would likely be interested in Carmona.

As mentioned earlier , the Mets would love another starter to bolster their rotation. While they have yet to engage the Indians in trade talks, the Mets are already discussing Carmona internally.

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim could use some pitching help as well. Joe Saunders and Scott Kazmir are scuffling; each has an ERA over 5.00.

The Halos’ edge over the Texas Rangers was supposed to be their pitching. If they’re going to complete their comeback, they’ll need to solidify their staff.

An intriguing sleeper candidate might be the Arizona Diamondbacks. They won’t be trading for any two-month rental stars, but having a proven player under team control through 2014 could certainly pique the interest of GM Josh Byrnes.

The D-Backs have plenty of talent and were a popular sleeper pick coming into the season. They could turn into contenders in the near future, and Carmona could make a solid deputy for ace Dan Haren.

What do you think? Will the Indians trade Carmona? Where will he go, and who will we get in return?

More Trading Posts

May 13: Austin Kearns

May 20: Jake Westbrook

May 27: Mitch Talbot

June 3: Jhonny Peralta

June 10: Russell Branyan

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

With the season almost halfway over, it’s a great time to start thinking about the end-of-season awards, so this week, Bleacher Report’s featured columnists have prepared a mock Cy Young vote.

Using a scoring system identical to that of the BBWAA, we have determined an idea of not only the best pitcher in the AL, but how the other top arms rank. The top five vote-getters are featured here with commentary submitted by different writers. The full results of the voting are included as well.

Ubaldo Jimenez unsurprisingly ran away with the NL voting in yesterday’s results.

There’s a clear favorite it in the AL too, but the results are much more interesting; his margin of victory is smaller and there’s a four-way dogfight in the second tier.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

Note: I sent this survey only to the Featured Columnists who have been active in previous polls. If you are a new FC or you have changed your mind about wanting to participate, send me a message and I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop for next time!

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Last year’s NL Cy Young competition was quite the horse race. Chris Carpenter, Tim Lincecum, and Adam Wainwright all received significant votes from the BBWAA as well as vocal and passionate support from fans.

While this year’s race is far from unanimous, there is one obvious favorite who would win hands-down if a vote was held today.

Need proof? Well, Bleacher Report’s MLB Featured Columnists had a vote last week, so you can see for yourself.

Using a scoring system identical to that of the BBWAA, we have determined an idea of not only the best pitcher in the NL, but how the other top arms rank. The top six vote-getters are featured here with commentary submitted by different writers. The full results of the voting are included as well.

Thanks to everyone who participated, and look for the AL results to be posted Wednesday!

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Soccer is the most popular youth sport in the United States. In 2002, 17.5 million American kids played in organized soccer leagues, not to mention the countless other children who gather for street scrimmages or spontaneous exhibition matches. Compare that to the classic pastime of Little League baseball, which had only 2.2 million participants in 2006.

But while soccer dominates the amateur market, most serious athletes in the U.S. have to switch sports if they plan to play professionally.

Let’s be honest: American soccer is a joke compared to baseball, football, basketball, and even hockey.

It’s not nearly as lucrative, either. David Beckham, the most expensive player in American soccer, is earning $6.5 million this year. By comparison, the Houston Astros are paying Carlos Lee nearly triple that to hit .223.

With all the excitement of the World Cup, it’s only fitting to think about athletes who might have been soccer superstars had the sport been more popular in their home countries—not just in the U.S., but in places like Venezuela and the Dominican Republic.

In this slideshow are the 10 current or recent MLB players who I think would have been most successful in professional soccer. Each player on this list has some combination of skills and attributes that are important in the game the rest of the world calls “football.”

There’s no way to predict with certainty what would have happened had things been different. But it’s still worth a try.

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There probably isn’t a single baseball fan in the country who hasn’t heard Ubaldo Jimenez  called “lucky.”

For several weeks now, analysts have devoted countless hours and vast amounts of energy to debunking the theory that Jimenez is—as his 13-1 record and 1.15 ERA suggest—one of the best pitchers in the history of the game. And with good reason.

There’s no question Jimenez is a talented pitcher entering the prime of what will certainly be an impressive career. But he’s not an all-time great, and he’s definitely not the greatest of all time.

Jimenez’ 7.8 K/9 rate is impressive (though not legendary—he’s looking up at not only Tim Lincecum and Josh Johnson, but guys like Javier Vazquez and Felipe Paulino), but it’s not enough for us to turn a blind eye to his occasional control problems (3.2 BB/9). A 2.44 K/BB ratio is nothing to sneeze at, but he’s got nothing on Dan Haren (5.05), Roy Halladay (5.63), or the superhuman Cliff Lee (16.75).

As a result, Ubaldo’s FIP (Fielding-Independent Pitching—an estimate of what a pitcher’s ERA would be with a neutral defense, based solely on strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed) is an impressive but significantly less godlike 2.93. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and it’s the seventh-best mark in the game. But it’s more than two-and-a-half times his ridiculous 1.15 ERA.

And that’s before you consider Jimenez’s ludicrously low 3.8 percent HR/FB rate. That’s why his 3.61 xFIP (same as FIP, but with home runs allowed replaced by “expected” home runs allowed, based on the pitcher’s fly ball rate and the league average HR/FB rate) is significantly higher even than his FIP. And that’s normalized for a pitcher in a neutral park, not one who plays half his games at the launching pad of Coors Field.

Substitute his xFIP for his ERA and ignore the wins (naturally, he wouldn’t have as many if he gave up more runs) and you’ve got a questionable All-Star, not a unanimous Cy Young.

I don’t think that Jimenez really deserves an ERA approaching 4.00, but his true talent is probably a lot closer to his xFIP than his ERA.

So where is all this luck coming from?

The fishiest thing about Jimenez’s season so far is his 91.2 percent LOB rate. In other words, fewer than one out of every 11 baserunners he’s allowed have ended up crossing the plate. The discrepancy between his strand rate and the norm (72 percent) is greater than the overall range of qualified pitchers’ LOB rates in 2008.

It makes sense that a better pitcher would strand more runners; the better the pitcher, the better the chance of making an out, so the other team has fewer opportunities to score. But Jimenez’ 91.2 percent figure places his performance well outside the reach of logic and fully inside the realm of luck.

Consider the case of John Candelaria, whose 88.8 percent strand rate in 1977 stands as the closest anyone has come to pulling a Ubaldo over a full season since at least 1973. The year before that, his strand rate was 72.5 percent; the year after, it fell to 76.8 percent. Simply put, you can’t sustain a number like that for long unless you’re playing Xbox.

Then, of course, there is the issue of Jimenez’s BABIP. I’m a firm believer that pitchers have some degree of control over where and how hard the ball is hit. I wouldn’t think it noteworthy if Ubaldo’s hit rate had merely slipped to .290, or .280, maybe even .270. But if you think the ability to induce weak contact is the reason his hit rate stands at an historically low .239 mark, I’m going to have to stop you right there.

It takes a lot more than talent for a pitcher to sustain a hit rate that low for more than a few weeks. Since 1989, only one pitcher (Chris Young in 2006-7) has posted a hit rate at or below Jimenez’ current .239 mark over a full season without it ballooning 50 points or more the following year.

Now, some say that Jimenez’ hit rate is explained by the kind of contact he’s induced—his 13.8 percent line-drive rate is the third-lowest in the league, and his 54.9 percent groundball rate ranks fifth. But there’s no refuge in that argument, either.

Looking at tRA, a statistic similar to FIP but which also takes a pitcher’s batted-ball profile into account, Jimenez is expected to give up 3.09 runs per nine innings. That’s not a bad number by any stretch, but it’s not good enough to put Ubaldo in the history books.

So even if you assume that his low line drive and HR/FB rates are the product of sustainable skill and not felicitous chance (statements which many statheads would vociferously rebut), Jimenez could be expected to give up nearly three times as many runs as he is now if he had neutral luck.

There’s no question Ubaldo Jimenez is a good pitcher, or that his is an arm to watch for years to come. But once the winds of fortune stop blowing in from the Coors bleachers, no one will mistake him for the best pitcher in the game.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

A Phillies fan leafing through his Philadelphia Inquirer on May 23 would have seen his team sitting atop the NL East with a 26-16 record—the best in the NL. The Phillies had a fairly comfortable 3.5-game lead on the second-place Atlanta Braves, and that was only after the Tomahawks had amassed a five-game winning streak.

The Phillies were the all-but unanimous favorites to win the division, if not the pennant, for the third year in a row. Nothing had happened in the team’s first 42 games to change that.

That afternoon, the Phillies were to play the Boston Red Sox, who found themselves in a very different situation.

The Red Sox had taken a seemingly endless amount of flack during the offseason for the loss of Jason Bay. Mainstream analysts blamed Boston’s lineup for the team’s early exit from the 2009 playoffs and pulled no punches when the Red Sox did not upgrade their offense (that they had instead exploited a glaring market inefficiency, the undervaluation of defense, made no headlines).

The doubters were given fuel for their fire when the Red Sox struggled out of the gate, dropping nine of their first 13 contests and falling six games behind the Rays in just two weeks.

On May 23 Boston sat in fourth place, behind not just the Rays and Yankees, but also the hapless Blue Jays. The Red Sox were 8.5 games out of first place; the last time they had fallen so far behind so early was 1997.

At 1:35 p.m. Phillies ace Roy Halladay (6-2, 1.64 ERA) was set to take the mound against the Red Sox’s fifth starter Tim Wakefield (0-2, 5.31 ERA). If you had bet on Boston, you would have been called a stupid man.

But you would have come out of it a rich man.

Doc Halladay turned in his worst start of the season, giving up seven runs (six earned) on eight hits in 5.2 innings. He walked two Red Sox, striking out only one. Meanwhile, the volatile Wakefield shut out the Phillies, giving up just five hits in eight innings.

Things have changed drastically since that day.

The Phillies have gone 8-15 since their aforementioned hypothetical fan scanned his local sports page. They didn’t just lose their first-place spot to the streaking Braves; they then were overtaken by the Mets. Philadelphia—the team to beat in the Senior Circuit less than a month ago—is now just a losing streak away from the NL East basement.

The Red Sox, meanwhile, have looked like a completely different team since that fateful day. They’ve gone 19-7 over the same time period, nearly matching their previous win total in 18 fewer games.

Just a few weeks after being left for dead, Boston has risen from the ashes and reemerged as one of the best teams in the game. At 40-28 the Red Sox are just two games behind the Rays and Yankees. They would be in first place in any other division.

That game didn’t really change the course of the season—that’s just not how professional baseball works. To put things in perspective, Halladay, the man who had the best excuse to be rattled, threw a perfect game six days later.

But if the Red Sox complete their comeback and the Phillies complete their collapse, it won’t take long to identify the turning point in their seasons.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

No other sport comes close to baseball’s enthusiasm for and appreciation of individual accomplishments. Every MLB follower knows that Barry Bonds was the last player to eclipse 70 homers in a season and that no one has hit .400 since Ted Williams.

This week, Bleacher Report’s Featured Columnists have weighed in about which players are most likely to reach nine legendary baseball milestones before the end of 2015, from stealing 100 bases in a season to striking out 20 batters in one game.

Voters were discouraged from naming the same player in more than one category and prohibited from picking the a player more than twice. To reinforce the spirit of thinking outside the box, two FCs submitted commentary for each question: one for the top vote-getter and one for an “interesting pick” who received only one or two votes.

Just to be clear, no one is saying that any of these predictions will come true. Someone picking Pablo Sandoval to hit .400 doesn’t mean he or she thinks Panda will hit .400; it simply means that, if someone was going to do it, he or she believes Sandoval has the best chance of doing so.

Without further ado, let’s find out what players are most likely to…

Note: I sent this survey only to the Featured Columnists who have been active in previous polls. If you are a new FC or you have changed your mind about wanting to participate, send me a message and I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop for next time!

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