Kuzul

Mike Ozanian is a senior editor at Forbes, and this is a guest column for Bleacher Report.

Baseball has emerged from the recession with a big bang.

The average MLB franchise is now worth $523 million, an all-time high and 7% more than last year. All of the league’s teams rose in value except for three: the New York Mets, San Diego Padres and Cleveland Indians. The increase in team values is the result of greater revenue for teams playing in new stadiums, like the New York Yankees (up 6% in value to $1.7 billion) and Minnesota Twins (up 21% to $491 million) as well as the Florida Marlins (up 13% to $360 million), who are scheduled to move into their new stadium in 2012.

Strong attendance and local television ratings boosted the values for teams like the Philadelphia Phillies (up 13% to $609 million) and Cincinnati Reds (up 13% to $375 million). The Yankees are baseball’s most valuable team for the 14th straight year (since Forbes began valuing franchises in 1998). The gap between the Yankees and No. 2 Baltimore in 1998 was 12%. Today the Yankees are 86% more valuable than No. 2 Boston.

The top 10 MLB teams:

#1 New York Yankees: $1.7 billion

#2 Boston Red Sox: $912 million

#3 Los Angeles Dodgers: $800 million

#4 Chicago Cubs: $773 million

#5 New York Mets: $747 million

#6 Philadelphia Phillies: $609 million

#7 San Francisco Giants: $563 million

#8 Texas Rangers: $561 million

#9 Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim: $554 million

#10 Chicago White Sox: $526 million

Yankee Global Enterprises is a three-engine money-making machine. The baseball team generated $325 million in revenue from regular-season tickets and luxury suites in 2010. Sponsorship revenue at the stadium is $85 million annually thanks to deals with PepsiCo, Bank of America, MasterCard, Delta Air Lines and others.

The YES Network, the team’s 34%-owned regional sports channel, is the most profitable RSN in the country and had over $400 million in revenue last year. The Yankees own a stake in Legends Hospitality Management, which manages stadiums, and generates $25 million in operating income. The enterprise value for the Yankees, YES and Legends is $5.1 billion.

Another big winner was the Texas Rangers (up 25%, to $561 million). Ray Davis and Bob Simpson bought the team, the lease to Rangers Ballpark in Arlington and some nearby real estate from Tom Hicks in a bankruptcy court auction for $593 million in July. Not only are the Rangers, which needed assistance from MLB to meet payroll last season, much better capitalized (the new owners infused the team with $225 million of equity), the team also has a new, richer cable deal. It signed a 20-year TV deal with Fox Sports Southwest that is expected to pay more than $1.5 billion over the life of the contract. The afterglow of the team’s first World Series appearance in October will also boost sponsorship and ticket revenues this year.

A year ago baseball teams were still fretting about the recession and what it might mean for attendance. Yet 73 million fans showed up at the ballpark last summer, which was the sixth highest total of all-time and down just 0.4% from 2009. Twenty teams drew at least 2 million fans, while nine teams topped the 3 million mark, led by the Yankees at 3.8 million. An overall improvement in the economy and better lending conditions boosted the average multiple of revenues that teams are valued at slightly to 2.5.

Overall, revenue for baseball’s 30 teams increased 4%, to $6.1 billion. Total operating income (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) fell 5%, to $494 million as rising stadium (rent and operating costs) and team (marketing and player development) expenses ate into profits.

The most profitable team was the San Diego Padres, which had an operating income of $37 million in 2010. The team’s attendance surged by 200,000 at Petco Park as the Padres finished just two games behind the San Francisco Giants in the National League West. The Padres managed to post a 90-72 record despite a payroll of just $38 million, which was the lowest in baseball. The Padres also benefited from a revenue-sharing check of more than $30 million.

Thanks to more than $400 million sent from high-revenue to low-revenue teams, several teams with low attendance were able to post operating profits of at least $10 million. Among them: the Pittsburgh Pirates ($25 million), Kansas City Royals ($10 million), Oakland Athletics ($23 million) and Marlins ($20 million).

Only three teams had a negative operating income in 2010: the Detroit Tigers (-$29 million), Mets (-$6 million) and Boston Red Sox (-$1 million), which collectively spent $475 million on players (including benefits and bonuses). Each ranked among the top six biggest spenders last year, but the Mets and Red Sox own stakes in regional sports networks, which offset any losses on the diamond.

Bad news in baseball? Two marquee franchises, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Mets, are suffocating from debt and legal issues. The Dodgers, owned by Frank McCourt and his estranged wife Jamie, have $433 million of debt, while the Mets, owned by Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, owe creditors $450 million. Both teams are begging lenders for more money and are looking for investors.

The Dodgers and Mets problems could seep into the rest of the MLB. The Mets’ overall revenue fell 13% last year thanks to a 25% drop in gate receipts. The Dodgers’ total revenue was flat. Problems among big-market teams caused baseball’s revenue-sharing pool to shrink last season for the first time since the new sharing system was put in place in 2002. Low-revenue teams divvied up $404 million compared to $433 million in 2009, with the Yankees writing the biggest check of $119 million. The Mets’ revenue is expected to fall further in 2011, which could dent revenue-sharing even more.

Kurt Badenhausen and Christina Settimi of Forbes.com also contributed to this story.

See the Full List Ranking MLB’s Most Valuable Teams

Plus, check out more great content from Forbes.com:

MLB’s Highest Paid Players

NBA’s Most Valuable Teams

NBA’s Highest Paid Players

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Last week, John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, stopped by Bleacher Report to post three eloquent essays in which he aptly demonstrated his knowledge of and passion for our national pastime.

Unfortunately, much of what he wrote was based on a false premise that permeates much of the discussion about baseball today. In “Farewell to Stats,” Mr. Thorn wrote:

“Amid today’s…sabermetric analysis, I miss the fun.” 

This is not a malevolent attack or an angry outburst, but it is emblematic of a misguided opinion popular among analysts across the country, most of whom are far less thoughtful and diplomatic than Mr. Thorn.

The prejudice we number-lovers face comes from all directions, from Sports Illustrated’s Jon Heyman calling us “VORPies” (apparently that was supposed to be an insult) to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Patrick Reusse’s politically incorrect comparison of statistically inclined bloggers to homeless people.

Even here at Bleacher Report, any article involving BABIP or xFIP is sure to get a few angry comments. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve had my playing experience questioned (I earned a .533 OBP in fourth-grade kid pitch, thank you very much), been accused of bias towards the team I most despise and even had someone threaten to call Brown to tell them to revoke my admission.

These kinds of ad hominem attacks aren’t worth worrying about—no one takes them seriously. But there is another accusation that is much more damaging because even people as respectable as Mr. Thorn have bought into it: the idea that sabermetric analysis is irrelevant to—or worse, the antithesis of—enjoying the game.

This idea is baseless, condescending and, most of all, completely wrong.

Perhaps there are some masochistic statisticians who study baseball even though they don’t care for it, but I’ve never encountered any of them. In my experience, people who appreciate sabermetrics are actually some of the most passionate fans—objective analysis does not interfere with subjective enjoyment.

Consider my firsthand anecdotal evidence. I was ecstatic the first time I heard Tom Hamilton’s voice on the radio this spring a couple weeks ago. This weekend, I was completely enraptured the first time I got to watch a game on TV.

I even planned my trip to see my girlfriend over spring break around the Indians’ schedule so I could go to a game while I was home. Yes, I’ll probably be calculating Justin Masterson’s FIP in my head while he’s on the mound, but if Shin-Soo Choo makes a diving catch to save a double, I will appreciate the play for more than just its effect on Masterson’s BABIP.

Moreover, Mr. Thorn’s comparison of sabermetrics to Thoreau’s “count[ing] the cats in Zanzibar” is incredibly misleading. We who study these things do not do so for the sake of memorizing numbers, we do it so we can better understand the game.

As someone who has spent a significant amount of time typing numbers into spreadsheets, I can tell you it’s not fun. It’s boring and tedious. There’s no thrill in it for anyone.

The fun part comes when you hit “enter” for the last time and the results tell you something you didn’t know about the game; that relief pitchers are impervious to DIPS theory, or that Power Factor is a better measure of a hitter’s raw slugging ability than is ISO.

The specific stat that led Mr. Thorn to quote Walden was “a list of the all-time leaders in receiving intentional bases on balls with no one on base.” Now, that sounds like a terrible ordeal, and I would never have the patience to take on such a project. But even if it wouldn’t be worth my while, I would definitely interested in seeing which batters opposing pitchers feared so much that they preferred giving them free bases than letting them hit with no one on.

More importantly, though, apparently someone decided it was worth his or her time to do it. Why is that wrong?

Mr. Thorn began his third piece by saying, “Statistics are something of a fetish.” I disagree. The real problem with the way people talk about baseball today—and, to be clear, I don’t count Mr. Thorn in this—is the fetishism of ignorance.

These are the militant traditionalists who dismiss sabermetrics without a rational explanation and think Billy Beane wrote Moneyball to brag about how smart he is. They are the Heymans and the Reusses, who lash out at those who use advanced statistics with childish ad hominem attacks while giving no indication that they actually understand what it is that they are rejecting.

This is a world in which Joe Morgan, the former lead color commentator for the number one sports media network in the country, wears the fact that he has not read the most influential baseball book of our generation as a badge of honor. And we blame sabermetrics for being misleading?

What’s worse, people reject advanced stats while simultaneously observing the effects they explain. Many fans dismissed the discrepancy between Ubaldo Jimenez’ ERA and his xFIP early on in 2010 while simultaneously saying he couldn’t keep up his torrid pace forever. I had one commenter dismiss an analysis of an overachieving rookie’s unsustainable BABIP, then say he was scared that the player would fall victim to the “sophomore jinx.” It’s like condemning the theory of gravity while at the same time wondering why things keep falling down.

If you aren’t interested in sabermetrics, that’s fine. But know that by ignoring them you are deliberately stopping yourself from understanding the game as best you can.

I won’t make Mr. Thorn’s condescending implication that those who enjoy baseball differently than I do are wrong, but willful ignorance will make you a poor analyst. In the words of John Locke: “He who judges without informing himself to the utmost that is possible, cannot acquit himself of judging amiss.”

But you shouldn’t take my word that UZR and xFIP work any more than you should take Reusse’s. Read up on what they mean, where they come from and how they’re derived, and see for yourself. Keep an open mind and surely the logic will make sense to you. They’re not perfect, but they’re the best we’ve got.

Don’t fall for buzzwords like “you can’t measure everything a hitter does in one stat” or “you can’t put an objective value on a player.” That’s exactly what wOBA and WAR do. The sabermetric revolution has allowed us strip away luck and context to quantify the unquantifiable.

Yes, Kevin Youkilis’ plate matters more to me than David Eckstein’s scrappiness, and I care about Francisco Liriano’s strikeout rate much more than Derek Jeter’s “calm eyes.” Why does that make me a bad fan?

If you don’t care about statistics, that’s fine, but know that you’re missing out on something big. If Ozzie Guillen wants to play small ball and Dusty Baker fears “clogging the bases,” go ahead—let them whittle away valuable outs.

But please don’t tell me that I’m not enjoying the game just because I own a calculator.

For more of Lewie’s work, visit WahooBlues.com. Follow him on Twitter @LewsOnFirst or @WahooBlues.

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John Thorn, official historian for Major League Baseball, wrote a three-part article titled “Farewell to Stats” last week. Stats happens to be a close friend of mine, so she asked me to publish this rebuttal on her behalf—MT

No one wants to be dumped publicly, especially after a 30-year relationship. So I was shocked when John Thorn aired the dirty laundry of our relationship in his Bleacher Report columns last week. Hell hath no fury like a set of abstract mathematical principles scorned, and I believe it’s important for sports fans to know both sides of the story. John can’t break up with me, because I broke up with him first.

When I met John in the mid 1980s, I had not yet blossomed. I was still awkward and unsure of myself, unaccepted by the sports community. Those were heady days, when John and Pete Palmer and Bill James realized my full potential, turning a guttersnipe into a full-fledged citizen of the sports world. I became a subject of fascination, even obsession.

Boys growing up in the 1980s had two passions: Madonna and me. Runs Created, Total Average, The Hidden Game of Baseball…I get a thrill just thinking of all the wild things we did. We were revolutionaries! We changed the world!

Now John wants to cast me off as just a jilted lover, tossed aside so he can chase floozies like Folklore and Tall Tales. John wrote that he thinks of my charms “not as indices of merit but as artifacts of play to which story adheres.” In other words, he loves me, but he’s not in love with me. Fine. The fact is that I outgrew him long ago.

Over the years, the good times got away from us. I get sad when I see a player’s pinch-hitting OPS against lefties with runners in scoring position flash on the screen. “That’s not what I am all about!” I gasp. But part of growing up is accepting your flaws.

I have so much to offer, like VORP and BABIP in baseball and DVOA in football. You just have to overlook the excesses, like real-time fantasy results for middle relievers and goofballs who think they can measure an offensive lineman’s performance to three decimal places by watching television tape.

Despite a few missteps, I matured and grew over the decades. While I still have the utmost affection for John, he was just a darling little fellow toiling away with his encyclopedias while I conquered television, the Internet and the world.

I guess John grew too focused on my faults and lost sight of my beauty. A lot of long-term relationships end that way. But I was hoping for a quiet separation, not a Bleacher Report divorce. I don’t appreciate being called “something of a fetish,” especially by someone who knows me as intimately as he does.

For the record, no one coveted my OPS or Range Factor until John and the boys polished them up and displayed them to the world.

And the “shrunken head” remark was a low blow. We all get a little wrinkly with age. To express our relationship in terms John can understand (unnecessarily complicated literary references), Pygmalion has grown to resent his statue, Higgins to feel contempt for Eliza and the Dreamgirls have outgrown the guy Eddie Murphy played in that movie Dreamgirls.

Here’s what saddens me most, John. I understand your need to see other people or pursue other research styles. We always had an open relationship. No one way of looking at sports—or the world—can fulfill anyone. I always worked well with stories and folklore: I helped to tell the tales, explain the setting, fill in the gaps and, most importantly, separate fact from fiction from fantasy.

I play an important role, but nobody believes I should play the only role. You know darn well it doesn’t have to be an either-or. You can have all of us. Stats, legendary tales, word etymologies, weird literary references…we make very happy sister wives. If you don’t want me involved, it will ultimately hurt you much more than it does me.

Soon, you will come crawling back. Your job demands it. It’s easy to say “good riddance” and wax philosophical in the first carefree days after you get over a relationship, but soon life intervenes. You are an official historian, and a historian cannot afford to ignore solid evidence from the past. I am as solid as you can get.

You will be chasing down information about Wee Davy Force or some other 1870s ballplayer, looking to place a particular player into a precise location and a specific date, and you will come face to face with me in my simplest form: the newspaper box score.

You’ll struggle to explain the significance of some player or event to a wider audience, and when Spencer and Joyce fail you, I will be there to tell a story your audience can understand: 1,029 games, a .402 batting average, a 252-65 record. You will realize that I have always been a dutiful companion: helpful, trustworthy, flexible, relatable, relatively low-maintenance, yet surprisingly deep and nuanced.

Do not worry about me. I will be fine until you come to your senses. The sports world is full of people who love me and treat me well. I will get over this public betrayal. If you need to talk, you know where to find me: Nate Silver’s house. 

Michael Tanier is a senior writer for Football Outsiders, a regular contributor at The New York Times and NBCSports.com and the author of The Philly Fan Code, due in stores and downloads this summer. 

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Do strikeouts really matter with a big time slugger? Many fans groan and complain about the strikeout rates. Players like Carlos Pena, Adam Dunn, Dan Uggla and Mark Reynolds have made this statistic very visible year after year. It appears Mark Reynolds can out do himself for the single season strikeout record on an annual basis.

This article is going to focus on Dunn and Pena in specific. The main reason for this is to remove the variable of stolen bases and speed. The fact that Reynolds can steal 20 bases a season varies the results. The assumption of this article is that Dunn and Pena will rely on others to knock them in from first base.

I took a look at the benefits of these sluggers taking a walk versus striking out. In 648 plate appearances, Dunn walked 77 times. In 582 plate appearances Pena walked 87 times. How beneficial were these walks to the team? I went through the game logs and highlighted any games where one run made a difference in either a loss or a win. It turns out in 23 games won or loss by a run, Pena drew a walk which resulted in a run only four times. Two of these were wins. Out of 71 games where Pena drew a walk, only two wins were decided by the resulting run. On the other hand, Dunn scored after walking in eight of 18 games decided by one run. Only three of those eight games were victories. So Dunn drawing a walk only helped his team win three times. These figures show that walks do not make a significant impact on their team by the slugger.

Couple these figures with the fact that the two players likely to hit behind Pena this year combined to hit into 22 double plays. This year Dunn will have two players who combined to hit into 37 double plays, hitting behind him.

This article obviously does not adjust for the variable effects of players keeping a rally alive or killing it.

After everything is said and done, these statistics tell me walks don’t win games for these two slow moving sluggers. So the next time you feel like groaning about another strikeout, don’t. The free pass probably wouldn’t have mattered anyways.

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A great deal of attention has been paid this spring to the open slots in the New York Yankees’ pitching rotation.

The failure to sign Cliff Lee as a free agent and the retirement of Andy Pettitte are thought by some to leave glaring holes in the Yankee ranks.

The Yankees have three established pitchers at the top of the rotation in C. C. Sabathia, Phil Hughes and A.J. Burnett. 

Sabathia is the ace, a pitcher who can be counted on to go out every fifth day and pitch spectacularly most of the time.  He finished with 21 wins last year against only seven losses.

Hughes, though still young, is durable and dependable.  He notched 18 wins in his first full season as a starter in 2010.

Burnett is always a concern as he is Forest Gump’s proverbial “box of chocolates.”  You never know what you’re gonna get.

After those three, the competition has been wide open for the other two starting jobs.  Ivan Nova, Sergio Mitre, Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia have all been given a chance to start in the back end of the rotation.

And some young kids named Manny Banuelos and Dellin Betances have had Yankee fans salivating with the idea that these baby arms might be just what the Bombers need.

It might be a good idea to analyze just how important the fourth and fifth starter positions are in baseball, and to the Yankees in particular.

This analysis includes a look at all major league teams in 2010.  The Top Three starters on each team were excluded, and the remaining pitchers who made a significant number of starts for each team were considered in terms of wins and losses.

In the American League, the pitchers who saw regular work at the back end of rotations garnered 261 wins against 291 losses.  That is a winning percentage of .473.  If that were the winning percentage for a team over a 162 game season, that team would win just short of 77 games.

In the National League, back end guys got 277 wins against 334 losses.  The winning percentage is .453 which would translate to 73 wins if the percentage held for the entire staff.

Okay, that doesn’t necessarily mean very much, because you are including the pitching staffs of the Pirates and Mariners and all the other ne’er-do-wells.

So, let us analyze the playoff teams.

The Giants won the World Series, of course.  Through their regular season, the back end of their rotation had 23 wins and 20 losses.  That is a winning percentage of .535 or 87 wins if it were true of their entire staff.

The Rangers lost in the World Series.  Their back end had 25 wins and 20 losses for a winning percentage of .555 or 90 wins if applied as though the entire staff performed at this rate.

The Yankees lost to the Rangers but had a better record in the 4-5 slots in the rotation.  Javy Vazquez and Andy Pettitte combined for a record of 21-13 which is a .617 percentage which is better than the staff as a whole and would have meant 100 wins.

The Rays won the AL East and had a back end record of 24-18 or .571 percentage worth 92 wins if the staff average had been the same.

The Twins had a 23-18 average almost identical to the Rays in percentage and projected wins.

Let’s get back to the NL.

The Braves had a much worse performance at 14-18 for a percentage of just .437 which would have given them only 70 wins if the other pitchers had not been much better.

The Phillies were 25-16 for a .609 percentage or 98 wins.

The Reds were 15-14, and so they were just barely over .500 which would have been 84 wins.

For a little bit of fun, and to give Yankee fans a look at what the fourth and fifth starters have meant to the Yankee teams from 1996 through 2009, let’s look at the World Series champs for that period and how well their back end of the rotation did.

In 2009, Joba Chamberlain started 32 games and was 9-6 with a 4.75 ERA.  Sergio Mitre started nine games and went 3-3 with a 6.79 ERA.  Chien-Ming Wang started nine games and was 1-6 with a 9.64 ERA.  Chad Gaudin started six games and was 2-0 with a 3.43 ERA.

So for the most recent Yankee champions, the back end of the rotation was 15-15. 

In 2000, David Cone, Denny Neagle and Ramiro Mendoza filled out the back of the rotation for the Bombers.  They combined for a record of just 18-25.

In 1999 Roger Clemens and Hideki Irabu started 62 games and combined for a 25-17 record.  No one would think of Clemens as a fourth or fifth starter, but he had fewer starts that year than any other regular.

In 1998 Irabu and Orlando El Duque Hernandez started 47 games and had a combined record of 25-13 on perhaps the greatest team in major league history. 

In 1996 David Cone, Dwight Gooden and Ramiro Mendoza were a combined 22-14.

So, what does the analysis show?

To this writer, who did the research, there is no conclusion. 

The results are really all over the board.

Last year, some good teams had better winning percentages with the back end than with their top starters.  In the Yankees case, that is primarily because AJ Burnett was so horrible. 

No one who is a Yankee fan would want Javy Vazquez back.  It was Andy Pettitte who had the great winning percentage that elevated the Yankees’ starters last season.

In some winning seasons, Yankee 4-5 starters have been very good.  In other years, they are less than mediocre.  The same is true for other teams.

Ivan Nova has looked very good this spring, including a no-hitter over the Orioles for six innings on Wednesday.  Garcia, Colon and Mitre have certainly shown they are all at least serviceable.

But for the Yankees to win, they cannot depend on any of these guys.  If Sabathia and Hughes don’t match or come close to last year’s numbers, there has to be a pick up somewhere. 

Perhaps Burnett gets his head on straight and shows what a guy with great stuff can really do.

Perhaps, Jeter, A-Rod and Tex all bounce back to have years far superior to last season, and the offense makes up for weakness in the starting rotation.

Perhaps, the bullpen, with the addition of Soriano and Feliciano and the maturation of Robertson, reduces the pressure on starters to win.

At least for now, although it is intriguing, the fourth and fifth starters don’t necessarily mean very much to a major league team.

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For the last few years, the Philadelphia Phillies have made their name as an offense-heavy team that occasionally pitched well.

That’s not to say they had no good pitching—they just didn’t have very much of it. Cole Hamels carried the team in both 2007 and 2008, and Cliff Lee was lights-out down the stretch in 2009, but beyond that, Philadelphia’s rotation didn’t scare anyone.

Even in 2010, manager Charlie Manuel sent Roy Halladay to the mound every fifth day (not “every fifth game”) because he didn’t trust anyone else to take the ball.

But by the end of last season, something had changed. The Phillies were the near-unanimous favorites to win the National League pennant not for their bats, but for their arms.

While assertions that the Phillies’ tremendous trio would be unbeatable in a playoff series were quickly proven false, this was a clear shift in the composition of their roster.

Philadelphia still had the offensive prowess to win in a slugfest, but opposing teams were more worried about scoring enough runs than allowing too many.

Now with Lee back in the fold, Philadelphia’s 2011 rotation is undoubtedly the best in the game, and may end up among the greatest of all time. In the minds of baseball’s talking heads, the Phillies have already wrapped up the NL pennant.

But it’s too soon to crown them the champions. The Phillies have a problem that could end up costing them a playoff berth: the lineup.

The Phillies managed just 772 runs in 2010, down from 820 in 2009 and 890 in 2007. Part of that can be blamed on the league-wide drop in offense last season, but the team’s 99 wRC+ shows Philadelphia’s bats to have been slightly below average.

Surprised? Check the stat sheets. Jimmy Rollins battled injuries and continued his descent into mediocrity, tying or setting career lows in nearly every offensive category as his OPS dropped to .694.

Thirty-eight-year-old Raul Ibanez slumped through his worst offensive season in a decade, finishing with an OPS below .800 for the first time since 2005 and missing the 20-homer mark he had cleared the previous five years.

Even Shane Victorino’s game took a turn for the worse; he hit just .259 and posted the worst full-season OPS (.756) of his career.

Even the mighty Ryan Howard looks like he may be past his prime. After averaging 50 homers and 143 RBI from 2006-09 (never dropping below 45 and 136, respectively), he managed just 31 homers and plated only 108 runs last season. His .859 OPS was the worst he’s ever posted.

Throw in his abysmal defense and his premium offensive position, and he finished the 2010 campaign with 2.0 WAR. That’s right, folks—Ryan Howard was a league-average player.

The outlook is even worse for 2011. The Phillies already lost their second-best position player, Jayson Werth, to free agency, and his replacement, young right fielder Domonic Brown, is out for at least a month with a broken wrist.

But now, Philadelphia faces an even bigger problem. Face of the franchise Chase Utley’s knee problems are turning out to be worse than we’d thought.

They are understandably hesitant to let Utley undergo surgery for his tendinitis, but with the non-surgical treatments failing this far, things don’t look good for the five-time All-Star.

Utley is almost assuredly going to miss Opening Day, and while the front office doesn’t expect him to miss the whole season, there is no timetable for his return. If he ends up needing surgery, it could take him months to recover fully.

The salient question is: are they still the favorites without their keystone man? Thanks to some sabermetric projection systems, we can get a good idea of the answer.

The easiest system to use for measuring players’ projected impacts on their teams is FanGraphs.com’s FAN Projections.

Here, the Phillies hold a five-game lead in the NL East over the second-place Florida Marlins; a six-win drop would put them in a four-way tie for the Wild Card.

The fans project 7.9 WAR per 162 games for Utley and -0.2 WAR/162 for his chief replacement last year, Wilson Valdez. In other words, for every 20 games Utley misses, the Phillies lose a win.

By that standard, if Utley misses a month or two, the Phillies are still the favorites in the NL East, but it’ll be closer than they’d like.

If he’s back at 100 percent capacity after the All-Star Break, the Phillies will be in the thick of it, but a playoff berth is far from guaranteed.

And if he misses the whole season or comes back before he’s fully recovered and plays poorly, the Phillies will be lucky to win a Wild Card spot.

What of the more advanced projection systems? CAIRO’s latest projections have the Phillies 6.5 games ahead of the second-place Braves, while PECOTA has them ahead by four.

Using a 5-4-3 weighting system for the last three years, we get a projection of 7.9 WAR/162 games for Utley; making the generous assumption that whoever replaces him will be worth 1.0 WAR/162, the Phillies here lose a little more than a win each month Utley is out.

By CAIRO’s standards, the Phillies still win the division as long Utley comes back by September, Meanwhile, PECOTA says the Phillies will fall to second unless he’s back by the trade deadline.

And that’s assuming the rotation stays healthy, Rollins and Howard don’t slip any further, and Utley is feeling comfortable upon his return—far from a given with this kind of problem.

There’s no way to know how Philadelphia will fare in 2011 until we know more about how serious Utley’s injury is, how it can be fixed, and how long he’ll be out.

Barring a complete disaster elsewhere on the roster, the Phillies should be serious contenders, but in spite of their amazing starting pitching, a less threatening offense and the loss of their best player mean they are far from clear favorites for the pennant.

For more of Lewie’s work, visit WahooBlues.com. Follow him on Twitter @LewsOnFirst or @WahooBlues.

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On July 27, 1994, a 22-year-old outfielder named Garret Anderson made his MLB debut with the California Angels. Now, 17 years and 2,228 games later, he is calling it a career.

Angels fans will also remember Anderson as the owner of the franchise record books. In his fifteen years with the Halos, he set club records in almost every major offensive stat, including hits (2,368), RBI (1,292), runs (1,024) and total bases (3,743).

To be fair, though, that’s to be expected from a player who also has the most games played (2013), at-bats (7,989), plate appearances (8,480) and outs made (5,936) in team history.

For those fans who live outside Anaheim, he will be best remembered for the 2002 season, when he helped the Angels to their first-ever World Series championship and finished fourth in the AL MVP voting (albeit undeservedly).

He finished his career with 287 homers, 1,365 RBI (good for 77th on the all-time list), and an average just a hair under .300 (.293). So even if he wasn’t one of the defining offensive machines of his era, he’ll doubtlessly be remembered as a good hitter.

Except he really wasn’t.

Yes, Anderson finished with a solid batting average, and even if his power declined quickly, he still finished with an above-average .168 ISO. And yet, according to his 99 WRC+, he was actually a below-average hitter for his era.

What gives?

The answer is his .324 career OBP. If you’re thinking that a .324 OBP seems a little low for a guy who hit almost .300, you’re right. You don’t need to see the numbers to know that Anderson didn’t walk much.

But in this case, “doesn’t walk much” seems like an understatement. We’re not talking a guy like Ichiro Suzuki who makes contact with everything, or Pablo Sandoval, who swings at everything.

Anderson has never walked more than 31 times in a season. In 2002, when he was an MVP candidate, he walked 30 times in 678 trips to the plate.

Yes, Anderson’s most enduring legacy will be having one of the worst batting eyes of all time. 

Anderson’s career walk rate will stand forever at a putrid 4.7 percent. When you sent him up to the plate, the odds of him letting four bad pitches go by were less than one-in-20.

Want some perspective on that? In the history of Major League Baseball, 256 players have accumulated at least 8,000 plate appearances. Of those men, Anderson finishes 251st in walk rate. More than half (140) have career walk rates of at 9.4 percent or higher, or more than double Anderson’s mark. Twenty-seven players in that group walked thrice as often, and three men—Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds and Ted Williams—worked free passes with over quadruple Anderson’s frequency.

Of course, the game has changed dramatically over the last 100-plus years; the modern game has a new emphasis on plate discipline, so putting Anderson’s walk rate in a historical context isn’t quite fair. What happens if we instead compare him to his contemporaries?

Anderson’s career spanned 17 seasons, from 1994-2010. Over that span, 101 MLB players accumulated at least 6,000 plate appearances. Of those, his plate discipline is dead-last.

Vladimir Guerrero, the master of swinging at everything, has a walk rate of 8.5 percent. Miguel Tejada, who was quoted in Moneyball saying that, if he didn’t take more walks, “Billy Beane send me to Mexico,” has walked 32 percent more often than Anderson.

Things get even worse if one considers that nearly a quarter (24.2 percent) of his free passes have been intentional. Counting only the walks he earned while the pitcher was actually trying, his walk rate drops to just 3.6 percent.

A base on balls every 28 plate appearances? That’s about the rate at which my MVP Baseball 2005 team walked, and I could pretty much hit home runs at will.

Baseball lost a good player today—three All-Star appearances, a pair of Silver Sluggers, and 15 consecutive seasons of at least 108 games played is nothing to shake a stick at. But the only thing about Anderson that should be remembered in the annals of history is his complete inability to take ball four. 

For more of Lewie’s work, visit WahooBlues.com. Follow him on Twitter @LewsOnFirst or  @WahooBlues.

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This past November when new Diamondbacks general manager Kevin Towers admitted that he would be willing to move star outfielder and former No. 1 draft choice Justin Upton, many people were slightly confused.  Not only was Justin Upton only 23 years old, but he was also clearly Arizona’s top player and had just inked a long-term deal (with the Diamondbacks former GM) to stay in Arizona with a relatively team-friendly price tag of only $50 million over the next five seasons. 

However, Upton was coming off what some people were calling a down year.  In 2009, Upton hit 26 home runs and .OPS’d a MVP-esque .898.  However in 2010, Upton only clubbed 17 home runs and saw his .OPS drop to a more modest .798.  In the following days after Towers admitted he had floated Upton to other teams, a flurry of rumors flew around about teams calling for the Diamondbacks star youngster. 

Fast forward to spring training, and the rumors have died down; it has become quite clear that Kevin Towers will not find a new home for his (now) 24-year-old right fielder.  One executive said the asking price for Upton was, “ridiculous.”  The price was, then believed to be at least four or five talented MLB ready players.  The kind of guys who only get moved for the best of the best or not even traded at all.

Sound ridiculous?  Consider this: Justin Upton may very well be the next Barry Bonds.  Not the Bonds who while using steroids in 2001 hit 73 home runs…and only 49 (!!) singles.  But more along the lines of the Bonds who was a perennial MVP candidate from about 1989-1998. 

In Upton’s first 1,700 plate appearances, he has shown just that, in fact, his numbers are surprisingly similar to Bonds’ first 1,700 PAs.  Upton’s .OPS was .828, Bonds’ was a slightly lower .814.  Upton belted 60 home runs (one every 25 at bats), and Bonds drilled 65 (one every 23 at bats).  Bonds only collected 165 RBI while Upton plated 208 runners. 

Their slash lines were remarkably similar: Upton hit .272/.352/.471, while Bonds hit .258/.343/.471 over the same stretch of their careers.  The only significant difference between the two comes to us from WAR (wins above replacement), and this can be attributed to Upton’s average defense versus Bonds allegedly elite D.  Upton was worth 7.7 WAR while Bonds was worth almost twice that at 14.4 WAR. 

However, we can certainly question the reliability of all ways for accounting for defense into WAR for players who did not play in our current sabermetrics era.  Today, WAR uses the defensive metric UZR which has only been around since 2002; UZR comes from batted ball data.  For all calculations of past players’ WAR, defense is measured with a much-less reliable formula which takes fielding percentage, assists and putouts into play. 

So, how can we determine what to expect from the younger Upton brother over the next few seasons?  I believe that we can simply look to Bonds as a good indicator of how Justin will fare next season.  (His projections may be of particular interest to anyone out there who plays fantasy baseball.) 

Over Bonds’ next 1,900 plate appearances, he hit .279/.388/.496, and in addition, he averaged 26 home runs and 96 RBI.  His .OPS was a solid .886 and his WAR was an astronomical eight-plus a year.   The home run and RBI totals match Upton’s career high, so we know he is capable of producing at those levels in 2011, probably with just a little bit of a drop off in the HR department. 

The .388 on base percentage is probably a bit out of Upton’s reach due to Bonds over his next 1,900 PAs had a BB% well over 12 percent which is ridiculously high.  He even peaked at 15 percent in 1990.  That BB% is so high that only six players in 2010 had a BB% of over 14; they were: Daric Barton, Prince Fielder, Carlos Pena, Albert Pujols, Jose Bautista and Jason Heyward.  So while Upton’s career base on ball percentage is better than 10.5 percent, he will probably not reach the same status as Bonds.  But how much of a difference will the BB% difference of probably about 2 percent make on .OBP?

I looked to the stats to find out.  In 2010, three players made 675 plate appearances: Matt Holliday, Austin Jackson and Michael Cuddyer.  Holliday’s BB% was 10.2 percent, Jackson’s was 7 percent and Cuddyer’s was 8.6 percent.  When I subtracted the players’ .OBP from their batting averages (.AVG), I came down to a stat that I imagine is similar to .ISO (isolated slugging percentage) which for brevities sake, I will call “.ISOBB”. 

Holliday’s BB% was 1.6 percent greater than Cuddyer’s, and when I subtracted their .ISOBB from one another’s, I came to find that the 1.6 percent BB% rate was good for .013 points in .OBP.  To check this, I compared Austin Jackson and Michael Cuddyer, whom also have 1.6 percent difference in their BB% and came to find that the difference in .ISOBB was also .013.

The next step to determining Upton’s .OBP for 2011 is to determine his .ISOBB; Bonds’ was .109 which is pretty astronomical, and we have already established the fact that Upton’s will be around .013 to .020 different based on his lower BB%.  Upton’s .ISOBB should end up around .093.

The .279 average that Bond’s posted was lowered significantly by a .248 average one year.  In fact, over the course of both players’ earlier careers, Upton has shown that he possesses a far better batting average.  He hit over .300 in his second full season, a feat Bond’s didn’t accomplish until his fourth season.  So Upton, we can assume (safely), will probably hit higher than .279 in 2011; let’s say .284.  Which when adding in his .ISOBB, puts his .OPB at .377. 

The last thing to consider is slugging percentage, and Bonds probably edges out Justin Upton in this category like in BB%.  How much? Well, during their first 1,700 PAs, Bonds’ .ISO was .014 better at .213, compared to Upton’s .199.  Over the next three seasons, Bond’s didn’t improve much, rising to about .219.  If Upton follows the same improvement, he should float in around .205 which would put him at a .489 slugging percentage.

All in all, Upton’s 2011 season should look something like this: .284/.377/.489 with about 25 home runs and 95 RBI.  I’ll be curious to see exactly what he does end up doing.  As for the predictions by the mathematicians/computers that are paid/designed to do predictions, when the average of fangraph.com’s “Marcel” and “Bill James” predictions are taken, it results in a .285/.367/.489 line…pretty similar to what I came up with actually. 

So is Justin Upton the next Barry Bonds? We’ll have to see, but I would say yes.

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Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Placido Polanco is approaching two noteworthy milestones in 2011, but he is not the only one. Let’s take a look at some of the milestones that some Philadelphia Phillies are closing in on this upcoming baseball season. Slideshow adapted from this original post on Second String Blog.

Begin Slideshow

I had the great pleasure of speaking with former Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson Saturday at the Strat-O-Matic 50th year anniversary. Before speaking with me, Peterson took the stage with Stats, Inc. founder John Dewan to talk statistics in front of hundreds of Strat-O-Matic fans. Of all the fascinating figures that these two men presented, one statistic particularly startled the crowd.

Peterson mentioned that every year, over 25 percent of the money spent on Major League Baseball pitchers is spent on pitchers on the disabled list.

Stop for a second. What comes to mind immediately upon hearing that fact?

Maybe it’s Carl Pavano, who signed a four-year, $40 million contract with the Yankees in 2004. Injuries and a secret car accident prevented him from pitching any more than 145 2/3 innings in his four seasons in pinstripes. (By contrast, CC Sabathia pitched almost 100 more innings in 2010 alone.)

Or maybe Barry Zito comes to mind, who signed a seven year, $126 million contract with the Giants in 2006. Don’t tell Giant fans, but the contract is still not over. Thus far, he has won just 40 games. And, oh, he missed out on their championship last year.

It’s a startling statistic, yes. And the emotions that come with it are fierce. Almost every fan can relate in some way to this astonishing fact and not one of those fans is happy with it.

But what are the implications?

Given that figure, that 25 percent of the total salary for pitchers is spent on injured pitchers, there are two possible explanations: 1.) a lot of low-paid, mediocre pitchers are often injured or 2.) fewer, high-paid pitchers are often injured.

Looking at data from FanGraphs.com, 1.) is likely the answer. Since 2001, 39.1 percent of the 947 total pitchers have spent time on the disabled list. Because that number is higher than the 25 percent of total salary, that means that quite a few low-paid players are on the disabled list.

Indeed, this is quite encouraging to hear. If 2.) was correct and fewer, high-paid players were often injured, then we would conclude that being a good, dominating pitcher meant that you would be injured more often.

However, that is not the case. Rather, we find that the true cost lies in mediocrity. In other words, being a bad pitcher increases your chances of getting injured.

This makes sense. Bad pitchers usually have something wrong with their mechanics. If you throw a baseball 90 miles per hour even remotely wrong, not only will you be unsuccessful, but you will be destroying your arm.

There are other explanations as well. Maybe it is a matter of intelligence. Smart pitchers will usually be more successful and will also be more likely to protect their arms and prevent injuries. If this were true, it would be seen across all positions, not just pitchers.

Nevertheless, this is good for pitchers to hear. Constantly, we hear about how unhealthy it is to be a Major League pitcher. But if you are a good Major League pitcher, it may not be all that dangerous. It’s the bad pitchers we need to worry about.

If success correlates with injuries, how should it be put into practice? Maybe when managers are looking at pitch counts and protecting young arms, they should take into account their level of success: bad pitchers get less pitches than good ones. In practice, that probably happens anyway, because who wants a bad pitcher to stay in the game?

So, why has this fallen through the cracks? Why haven’t we heard this before?

Simple: when Carl Pavano, Kevin Brown, or Barry Zito goes down after signing a lucrative contract, we hear about it. Those rare situations are so inflated by fans that we think they happen often. Conversely, when a young, low-paid, decent pitcher gets injured, nobody hears about it. But the reality is that the latter happens much more often.

Ultimately, the lesson is simple: the best defense against Tommy John surgery is not ice, or a good trainer, or fewer pitches. It’s a good ERA.

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