2012 MLB Second Half Predictions

As the Atlanta Braves open the second half of their season tonight against the San Francisco Giants, we here at That Braves Blog bring you our second half predictions.  With eight teams within 2 games in the AL and seven teams within 6 games in the NL, this new wild card format is sure to go down to the wire.  Some of these picks you might consider bold given what we've seen from the first half of the season, while there are certain teams you just can't pick against.  Weigh in with your questions and comments and let us know what you think.

Who should be starting for the AL All-Star team? OR AL fans are twice as smart as NL fans

The 2012 All-Star game will be starting in just a few moments, so I thought I would put up my second blog post about which players should have been selected by the fans to start for the American League All-Star team.

If you would like to see how I made up my team, check out my blog post on who should have been selected by fans for the NL team here.

Here is my "Should Have Been" AL team contrasted with the team selected by the fans.

If you compare the two lists, you see that the fans only selected two players that should be on the team, Robinson Cano and Josh Hamilton.

Robinson Cano is a very strong player and he has the Win Above Replacement Player (WARP) of any second basemen.  Cano also has the second highest WARP of all American League players, exceeded by only Mike Trout.  Cano is a big name player from a big name market, but he is truly deserving of being picked by the fans, unlike his Yankee team mates Curtis Granderson and Derek Jeter.  I can hear the Yankee fans getting rile up at the suggestion that Jeter should not have been selected by the fans.

Another fan favorite, Josh Hamilton, is also deserving of his selection by the fans to the AL All-Star team.  Despite his own personal struggles, Hamilton continues to put up huge numbers, and fans love the idea of a redemption story.  While Hamilton is having a great year, he should not have been the number 1 vote getter in the OF for fans.  That distinction belongs to Mike Trout who is having a stellar year and has WARP of 4.8 as a rookie.  Like Cano, Hamilton is more deserving of the fan selection than his Ranger team mate, Mike Napoli. Napoli has a paltry 0.9 WARP, and his selection baffles me since last I checked the best AL catcher, Joe Mauer, is a big star in his own right.

So the fans got two of the picks right for the AL All-Star team which is twice as many as the one that they got right on the NL team.  Hopefully, fans will get smarter before next year's All-Star selection.  But I doubt it.

How to win the World Series on a Budget

13 Relievers (pronounced: closers) and 12 position players.

It's a crazy idea that you've probably thought about, but no team has the guts to try it.  Nine closers every night instead of a conventional 5 man rotation with a closer, a setup man or two, a long reliever, a mop-up guy, or whatever combination of the above you're going with now.

The Braves currently carry 12 pitchers and 13 position players, so you do sacrifice one bat off the bench, and for the sake of resting pitchers, you might prefer to go with a 14 reliever, 11 position player active roster, further limiting your utility options, but lets explore this and figure out if it might just be worth the sacrifice.

Let's pretend we committed to this 5 years ago and our elite young relievers we drafted in that time are making their way to the big leagues.  You'll recognize some names here, but most you won't.  We were able to get these guys because we drafted them higher than other teams because they fit our strategy better than the conventional one.

Based on first-half numbers lets say these are our 13 guys:

1. Aroldis Chapman 

2. Ernesto Frieri      

3. Kenley Jansen 

4. Craig Stammen 

5. Tom Wilhelmsen  

6. Vinnie Pestano  

7. Jason Grilli  

8. Josh Roenicke 

9. Craig Kimbrel 

10. Ryan Cook 

11. Pedro Strop 

12. Tim Collins 

13. Fernando Rodney 

Carrying 13 pitchers you will have to use one guy 3 days in a row before he gets rest, but everyone else will get a day off 1 out of 3 days.  Carrying 14 pitchers you wouldn't have to use anyone 3 days in a row.

For the most part these are young guys, and therefore inexpensive.  You get a lot of innings per dollar here.  There is also an expensive veteran thrown in for leadership in Fernando Rodney.  I chose him because he is expensive and having a good year.  A guy with an attitude like Papelbon could be more beneficial for the leadership role, but Rodney is having a better year right now.

Now, this is a collection of some of the best players so far this year, so I won't compare them to the Braves pitching staff.  I'll compare them to the team that has given up the fewest runs this year, the Washington Nationals. (Braves are ranked 12th)  The Nats have some elite starters, middle relief, and a closer, so their performance this year is about as good as you can get from a conventional pitching staff.

INNINGS PITCHED:

All-reliever rotation  505.2

Nats pitching staff:   745

This is the biggest issue with this strategy.  Few relievers are actually throwing the 112 and 2/3 innings (assuming no extra innings) per year it would take to finish a season with 13 relievers.  But, all of these guys do throw every day as part of their conditioning, it's just not always in a game.  With the right conditioning, the right personnel, and a deep minor league system, this can be done successfully.

ERA:

All-reliever rotation  1.89 = 157 derived total allowed (1.89 ERA x (745 innings / 9)

Nats pitching staff:   3.19  = 264 total allowed (3.19 ERA x (745 innings / 9)

This is the biggest attraction to the strategy.  Assuming you can condition these guys to perform at the same high level while pitching more often, you will give up a lot fewer runs, 1.32 per game in this case.  Want to win those 1 run games?  Try giving up 1.32 fewer every single game.  Relievers always say they'd rather pitch more often than less often anyway, and since we've stockpiled all these young arms, our guys can handle it.  This is arguably a big part of Venters' struggles this year.  Last year he was everyday Jonny and he was lights out.  This year Freddy is trying to save him for September/October, and he sucks.

MONEY:

All-reliever rotation = $9.8M

Nats pitching staff = $34.5M

If ERA is the biggest attraction, this is attraction 1A.  This frees up $24.7M to spend on offense.

Here are some examples of what $24.7M can get you on offense in terms of 2012 salaries:

Prince Fielder = $23M

Matt Holliday = $17M

Jose Bautista = $14M

Robinson Cano = $14M

Josh Hamilton = $13.75M

Joey Votto = $9.5M

Ryan Braun = $6M

Carlos Gonazalez = $5M

Andrew McCutchen = $500K (this kid is in for a payday)

The game has been moving in this direction as starters go 5 to 6 innings max and relievers are brought in for matchups between the 6th and 9th innings.  This would allow you to play matchups every single inning based on the 3 hitters you know are about to come up against you.

You have to commit to this strategy as an entire organization, from the draft throughout the minors.  You draft pitchers with the best stuff, even if they don't have stamina or 4 solid pitches.  You're looking for young Mariano Riveras who have one pitch that is so disgusting they can pitch an inning at a time almost every day and no one can hit it.  You use the off-season and spring training to condition your pitchers to throw 20 pitches at a time at maximum effort, two days in a row, with a day off after that.  

You also have to have a huge pipeline flowing, as you'll see guys like Jonny Venters dominate in 2011 and can't get anybody out in 2012.  Good relievers, other than Rivera, are mostly flash in a pan type guys.  You also want to let them go when they get to the point in their careers where they're not cheap anymore.

I think within the next 50 years a team will try this, and when they do, they'll win the World Series.  Then everyone will adopt the same strategy, and the economic advantage will disappear.  That's why I say we all pool our money, buy the Braves, and be the first movers on this.  Who's with me?

Who should be starting for the NL All-Star Team? OR How Michael Bourn got jipped.

The All-Star game frustrates me more than almost anything else in baseball.  The Mid-Summer Classic used to be a fun exhibition where you could see the biggest names in the game play against each other.  Before Interleague play, the American League played the National League twice a year.  The All-Star Game and the World Series.  When the game was only an exhibition game, there was nothing wrong with fans voting for the teams, but now that the game determines home-field advantage, the fans need to be taken out of the process.

Using the stat Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP) is a pretty darn good way to figure out how good a player really is.  I used this stat to figure out which players should be on the All-Star team by picking the player with the best WARP at their position and the top three Outfielders since All-Star voting does not distinguish between outfield positions.

A good place to read more about WARP is at FanGraphs here.

Since this is a Braves blog, I will pick the "Should Have Been" National League All-Star team now and will make another post in a couple of days with the real American League All-Star team.

Without further ado, here is my Should Have Been National League All-Star team contrasted with the team that fans selected.

How much better is the "Should Have Been" team? If you add up the WARP for each of these teams, the Should Have Been team has a total WARP of 32.8 and the actual team has a WARP of 20.0.  This means that these players combined would be worth almost 13 more wins to a team than if the team had the players selected by fans. Clearly San Francisco fans did a really good job voting since they got three Giants onto the All-Star team when no Giants are on the Should Have Been team.

What the Fans got right: Joey Votto.  As you can see in the table above, Joey Votto is the only All-Star that the fans got right.  This may be because he has the greatest WARP spread between him and the next best player at his position.  Another possible reason is that Cincinnati fans are great and did a great job getting him voted onto the team. 

Who was jipped by the All-Star process? There are two players who should have been starters because they have the best WARP at their respective positions.  Aaron Hill did not make the National League team at all.  While he has the lowest WARP of all the players who should have been selected to the NL starters, he has the highest WARP of any NL second basemen.  Second base seems to be one of the least appreciated position because Brandon Phillips has a WARP of 2.1 which is the same as that of Dan Uggla who is the NL starter and Phillips also got the snub.

We will end this Braves blog post by talking about the Brave who is by far the player jipped the most in the All-Star Game process.  Michael Bourn was passed over twice by baseball fans in the first round voting and also in the last roster spot voting.  Bourn has the highest WARP of any outfielder in the NL and the third highest WARP in the NL behind Joey Votto and David Wright, which just goes to show Bourn played the first half of the season at an MVP-like level.  I know Bryce Harper moves the needle more than Michael Bourn, but the All-Star game should be about celebrating the players having the best season.  Thankfully, Bourn has been added to the team to replace Ian Desmond.  This is better than Bourn not being recognized at all, but he should have been selected from day one and not as an after thought.  Either the All-Star game needs to go back to an exhibition, or the selection process should be taken away from the fans.  It is pretty disappointing to think that a game designed to celebrate the best players in baseball would have been without one of the game's elite players - all because of a broken process.

You Know We Want it Bud...

We've all read the clammer surrounding whether or not to institute more instant replay into the game.  The issue is a hotly debated one, but there seems to be only one right solution...add more of it to the game.  The main problems I've gathered deal with increasing the time it takes to play a game, the "human" factor that umpires add to the game, and where do you draw the line on what can and cannot be reviewed?

If presented with statistics of game length in the NFL from before instant replay reached its pinnacle to pre-instant replay, I think we'd all be surprised to find that the length of the game did not increase drastically.  In fact, instant replay, itself, seems to be getting more and more efficient as umpires and referees get used to the system.  The biggest issues impacting the length of baseball games obviously rest with the media and the simple fact that there are no timers in the game of baseball.  Sure sure, you can tell me that there's a 30 second time limit per pitch but have you actually seen that called in a major league game?

As far as the other two concerns about instant replay, it's safe to say that as technology increases and becomes more prevalent in society, fans are going to want it implemented in the game.  Eventually it will be implemented, but if done properly by Bud Selig, it can be slowly added to leave baseball with that good ole "human factor".  If he appointed a committee to compile a list of scenarios that could or could not be reviewed, that list might be exhaustingly long, but it would provide a good starting ground.

The NFL has provided a great example and precedent.  While it may not be original for MLB to copy the NFL's system, it sure would help quiet all the noise surrounding controversial plays.  Give each manager a red flag and let him choose when to challenge.  You win your challenge, you earn a second one...it's as simple as that.  The longer you wait to add further instant replay to the game, the longer you look foolish Bud Selig.  Give the players, managers, umpires, and most importantly, the fans, what they want.

Bryce Harper Should be Catching

Whether you are a Sabermetric follower or not, everyone can agree that some positions on the baseball field are more difficult to play than others.  There is an obvious difference in the overall athletic ability of Andrelton Simmons compared with that of say, David Ortiz.  They're both great athletes, but it takes a more well-rounded skillset to play shortstop the way Andrelton does, than to play first base or step on the field 4 times in a game as a DH.  There are going to be a lot more athletes who are capable of learning to hit at the major league level, without worrying about defense, than there are who are capable of playing a demanding position like shortstop while also learning to hit at the major league level.  Sabermetrics calls this the defensive spectrum, and they rank each position by difficulty, which will also correlate to scarcity of players.  There is more scarcity of players at the more difficult positions.  You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_spectrum

Ideally you would have a dominant pitcher who can hit grand slams like little league and college baseball, and elite defenders at every position who can also hit like Barry Bonds in his prime on steroids.  We will never see a team like this, but if you're a GM, that's what you should be shooting for.  In reality you will only be able to achieve some percentage of this ideal team's production because of the scarcity of high skill position players who can also hit at an elite level.  The goal should be to pack your lineup with as many of these dual-threat guys as you can find and afford.

Bryce Harper is a guy who is going to hit at the highest level in his prime, and is already showing us a lot as a 19 year-old in the big leagues.  He is also a 5-tool athlete who can, and has played every position on the field except pitcher.  Since that is the case, why wouldn't you play him where he can make the most difference on your team?  That spot, after pitcher, would be catcher, according to the defensive spectrum.  How many teams have their best hitter playing catcher?  Maybe one or two, with McCann being up there.  This gives you a huge advantage over a team that has to play Kurt Suzuki (.215/.256/.268) at catcher because they don't have a better hitter who can also play there defensively.

It also allows you to put someone in left field, the second easiest position, where there are many replacement left fielders who can play defense AND hit.  You'll find them easier and cheaper, by a lot, than a Bryce Harper.

To be fair, the Nats have played him in center field a lot, which is the 5th hardest position to play (slash find players) but why wouldn't they play him at catcher to put their best possible team on the field?