One of the things that always piques my interest is a conversation in regards to “value”. It can be discussed in the abstract sense (leadership, personality, energy, grittitude) or more specifically (WAR, Runs Created, Runs Prevented, Ass Slaps Dished Out To Teammates).

But in my mind, whether you fall into the “pay for intangibles” camp or not, one thing we all ought to be agreeing upon is that salary matters. A guy on a rookie contract is far more valuable than a veteran making $20 million if their on-field production is equal. Having the former allows the GM to go out and spend that money on filling another need for the team.

So I hope to have several of these types of discussions throughout the early portion of the Hot Stove calendar. Today, I’m kicking things off with one guy who I think is one of the most interesting cases – Chone Figgins.

It would not surprise me to learn that the majority of baseball fans still consider Figgins to be a fairly young player. Fact is, he’s not. He didn’t get his first taste of the bigs until he was 24 and didn’t have his first full season until he was 26. By the time Spring Training comes around, Figgins will be 32 years old. For a player whose speed is often touted as the most desirable aspect of his game, this does not bode well for Chone nor anyone who signs him to a multi-year deal.

Looking at the greatest baseball website of all time, they have Bip Roberts, Patsy Tebeau, Jack Rothrock, Mookie Wilson, and Sam Mertes as Figgins’ top statistically comparable players through the age of 30. Out of those five, only Mertis was able to produce at the league average level once they hit 33 years of age and that year (1906) was still a steep dropoff from his previous levels of production.

Another aspect of Figgins’ reputation that I personally feel is overvalued is his versatility. Is there value to this? Absolutely, as long as he isn’t awful (I mean, Adam Dunn can call himself a shortstop. Doesn’t mean you want him there). It does give managers and GMs some flexibility when you know that a certain player can be moved around the diamond without much negative repercussions.

But is Figgins really that player? Or is it essentially a myth that continues to be propagated? We know that Figgins is a pretty good third baseman. Both UZR and +/- has him as above average at the position. He is also respectable at second base as well, although information is limited due to the fact that he doesn’t play second very often anymore. And as he grows older, we’ll see him there less and less. He hasn’t played SS or CF since 2006, and again, as he approaches his mid-thirties, we should expect this to continue. So at this point, he’s pretty much a 3B full time who can be a 2B in a pinch (think Mark Teahen, but, you know, good).

However, there is one aspect of Figgins’ game that does tend to age well. His plate discipline has actually been improving over these past couple of seasons. In 2007, Figgins swung at 22.3% of pitches thrown outside the stroke zone according to FanGraphs. For a guy with as little power as Figgins, this is too high. So he came back in 2008 and performed much better, to the tune of 16.5% and followed that up with a 14.9% this season, 4th lowest among all qualified hitters. This is important since not only has this resulted in a career high .395 OBP in 2009, it allows him to maintain a higher than normal BABiP (making contact with pitches out of the zone will often end poorly unless you are Vlad Guerrero).

So with all this information at our disposal, I ask – what’s the value of Chone Figgins? Since 2007, FanGraphs calculates that he has been worth a total of $50.9 million, with a high of $27.4 million in 2009 (while getting paid a paltry $5.78 million). But with Figgins finally eligible for free agency, would you pay Figgins $50 million over the next three years?

Let the discussion begin!

When the Tampa Bay Rays signed LF/DH Pat Burrell to a 2-year $16 million contract this past off-season, I thought that the defending AL champs had gotten a steal – especially in comparison to the 3-year $31.5 million deal that his replacement in Philadelphia, Raul Ibanez, would garner from Burrell’s old team. And while I won’t make final judgments until these two contracts are completed, it’s looking like I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

While Ibanez was posting career-best numbers as a 37-year old Phillie, Burrell was doing the exact opposite in Tampa. His walk rate is below career norms, he’s striking out more often than he has in several seasons and his power has seemingly disappeared (.385 SLG? Who are you?).

To his credit, the guy isn’t making excuses for himself. But that also means that we don’t quite know if there’s something wrong that can be fixed during the off-season.

There are, however, potential explanations for his dip in performance that could portend a much better season in 2010:

1. The talent gap between the AL East and NL East. Especially over the past few seasons, the quality of pitching in the NL East has been slightly underwhelming. Johan Santana didn’t enter the division until 2008 so the only top-level SP that Burrell had to face consistently over the last few seasons was John Smoltz. Now in the big boys league, he has to face the likes of C.C. Sabathia, Roy Halladay, Jon Lester and Josh Beckett. Can Burrell adjust to the higher quality pitching at the age of 33? I haven’t the faintest.
2. Hiding an injury. You wouldn’t expect a player to have such a dramatic drop in power numbers from one season to another and especially not at Burrell’s age. This is a guy who had slugged over .500 from 2005-2008. How does he become a sub-.400 slugger seemingly overnight? If he had a serious injury, that would explain quite a lot.
3. He’s done this before. The main reason why I don’t believe that Pat Burrell is washed up is because of his 2003 season. A year prior to that, the then-26-year old had a very strong line of .282/.376/.544 with 37 HRs. He had become on of the  better offensive threats in the National League. But he followed it up with a very disappointing season where he batted .209/.309/.404 with 21 HRs. And despite a wrist injury in 2004, his numbers rebounded very well and he was a solid hitter for the rest of his stay in Philadelphia. No actual reason (none that I saw, anyway) was ever really given for his sharp drop in production in 2003.

I am not going to say that any of these potential reasons are correct because at this point, I have no way of knowing anything. But I will say that Burrell most likely is not done, simply because it’s rare for a 33 year old hitter to fall off such a steep cliff. There’s got to be a reason aside from “decline” that ruined Burrell’s 2009 season. I just don’t quite know what that reason may be.

Because people will be upset if I wrote about Burrell and didn't include this photo...

So I’m watching Gary “Sarge” Matthews talk about today’s Phils-Braves pitching matchup, Cliff Lee vs. Tommy Hanson, and Sarge refers to Lee as “a certain, maybe, Hall-of-Famer.”

And I don’t know what certain-maybe means, but Lee is not a certain Hall of Famer, and he’s not maybe a Hall of Famer. Lee is a very good pitcher who seems to have finally figured it all out after a couple down years and a demotion to the minors in 2007. But Lee, who is 30, has had exactly one season with an ERA under 3.00, he’s never struck out 200 batters in a season, and if he averages 20 wins a year over the next 10 seasons, he still won’t reach 300 wins.

Sarge is the man because he wears cool hats and he’s friends with Obama. But jeez, that guy says some crazy stuff.

A while back, we questioned the notion that the Braves’ trade for Adam LaRoche was about 2010. Today we’ll take a look at who might play 1B for Atlanta next season.

The contenders:

1. Adam LaRoche, the team’s current 1B, will be a free agent at the end of the season and could be resigned.

2. Chipper Jones, who has had a horrid season at third base, leading the league in errors and posting a -10.1 UZR, might benefit from a move to first.

3. Freddie Freeman is a first baseman and one of the organization’s top prospects, but probably won’t be ready for the big leagues until 2011 or, at the earliest, late 2010.

4. Martin Prado has had a good year, playing mostly at second base but also spending time at 1B and 3B and hitting .291/.342/.429.

5. Nick Johnson and Carlos Delgado are two other free agent first basemen, and are both injury risks.

So what’s Atlanta to do? Let’s analyze the situation:

• Move Chipper to 1B. This seems obvious, right? The Braves need a first baseman and Chipper seemingly can no longer hack it at third. Moving him to first would keep his bat in the lineup and hopefully help him stay off the DL. But here’s the rub: if Chipper moves to 1B he’ll be blocking Freeman, who could be ready for the bigs as soon as June. And Chipper is signed through 2011, so Freeman would potentially be stuck at triple-A until 2012.
• Make Martin Prado the first baseman. Prado has had a pretty decent season serving as Atlanta’s super utility player, hitting .291/.342/.429. The Braves could move him to first, where he’s played decent defense in 2009, until Freeman is ready. Unfortunately, this move wouldn’t solve the problem of Jones’ deteriorating fielding ability, and Atlanta would be crossing their fingers that Jones’ bad year in the field was an anomaly. Jones had an almost equally bad season at third in 2006, but rebounded to play average defense in 2007 and was a stellar fielder last season. Maybe he’ll make a similar recovery in 2010? Maybe. But he’s at the age when a dramatic defensive improvement is unlikely.
• Bring back LaRoche. This would be the safe play, as you pretty much know what you’re getting with LaRoche. On the other hand, what you’re getting really isn’t that great, and there’s little reason to think that he’d be any better than Prado, who is already under contract.
• Sign another free agent. Other free agent first basemen include Carlos Delgado and Nick Johnson, but both come with injury concerns. On the plus side, signing a free agent first baseman would allow Atlanta to play Prado at second base in 2010, where he’d most likely represent an offensive upgrade over Kelly Johnson, who has never lived up to expectations.

My advice? Atlanta should sign a free agent 2B, shift Prado to 3B and move Chipper to first. Both Felipe Lopez and Orlando Hudson will be available this winter and both would represent a drastic improvement over Kelly Johnson, who started 2009 as Atlanta’s 2B before getting benched.

Sure, Chipper would be blocking Freeman, but only until Chipper strains an oblique or herniates a disk in his back, or comes down with some other inevitable injury. And when he does Atlanta can call up Freeman for a tryout with the big club. And if Freeman hits so well that Atlanta is forced to keep him in the lineup even after Chipper returns from the DL, well, that’ll be a good problem to have.

In tonight’s game between the Reds and the Cubs, Cubs starter Rich Harden had already run up a pitch count of 103 through 4 innings of work, despite only allowing 1 run, so Cubs manager Lou Pinella opted to remove him from the game (wisely, I would say, given Harden’s legendary fragility). Harden left with a 4-1 lead, but obviously could not get the win, since he had not pitched the requisite 5 innings.

Rookie reliever Jeff Stevens thereupon entered the game to start the 5th frame, pitching one inning and earning his first ever career win.

The only problem was, in his one inning of work Stevens gave up two singles and a three run bomb to Johnny Gomes, erasing the Cubs’ lead and leaving the game as a 4-4 tie.

The Cubs promptly came back and scored a run in the bottom half of the fifth, and scoreless relief by three other Cubs relievers, including 2 innings of hitless, 3-strikeout work by Aaron Heilman, preserved a 6-4 victory for Chicago, and saved the “win” for Stevens.

This is one of the worst cases of “vulturing a win” that I’ve seen in a long, long time. Stevens was far and away the worst Cubs pitcher in this game, posting a -.265 WPA whereas all the other four pitchers were positive, and yet he was awarded the win.

I know I’m just beating a long dead horse here, but why again do so many people hang so much of their evaluation of a player (not to mention Cy Young Awards), on this incredibly flawed stat?

WPA is the stat that old baseball men have always wanted.

If you believe in Wins and RBIs, if you believe that certain pitchers can “pitch to the score” and certain batters are simply “clutch” and can suddenly step up their game when it’s all on the line while somehow sucking the rest of the time, than WPA is the stat for you.

The problem that so many people have with stats like Wins and RBI is not so much with what they show, as indeed, they only show what they were designed to show, and do so quite well. Rather, the problem people have is with what other people think these stats show, which is actually pretty far from what they tell us.  Namely, which player really did the most to help his team win games.

But if your goal is to find out exactly which player did the most to help his team win games, than WPA is the perfect stat for you.

Actually, it couldn’t be more elegant. WPA, which stands for “Win Probability Added,” is derived by looking at the current game situation – what inning it is, what the score is, how many outs there are, and how many men are on base – and determining what percentage chance each team has of winning the ballgame in that situation, based on a computer crunching the numbers of all previous baseball games for which complete information is available.

In any given game, the two teams each have about a 50 percent chance of winning at the start of the game (slightly more for the home team, and slightly less for the visitors). With each outcome, whether an out or a base safely reached, one team’s chance of winning increases slightly, and the other’s decreases by the exact same amount, always adding up to 100 percent.

What WPA does, is it awards each batter and each pitcher a certain fraction of a win for each outcome they are involved in, in every game they play in.  For example, if a batter gets a single and it increases his teams chance of winning by 2 percent, he is awarded 0.02 of WPA, and the pitcher is docked negative 0.02 of a win. Naturally, getting big hits in crucial situations, or (for a pitcher) getting tough outs with the game on the line, is worth much more of a win than getting hits or outs in blowouts. Over the course of the season, all players’ totals are added to determin exactly how many wins they were actually worth to their team that season. That’s WPA.

WPA differs from WAR in that WAR attempts to assess the overall value a player has provided without reference to game situation.  Basically, WAR assumes that a player has little or control over exactly when he gets hits or outs, and thus attempts to assess true skill level, while factoring out random luck.  WPA, on the other hand, doesn’t care about true skill level at all.  It only cares about how much a player actually helped his team win, based on context. In other words, how “clutch” players were.

Which is why WPA is so perfect for the old school writers and baseball men. Because it is measuring *exactly* what people always thought they were trying to measure with Wins and RBI: how much you helped your team win.

So if we think about the traditional main criteria used by old-school baseball writers to award the two major awards, MVP and Cy Young, which are of course Wins (followed, to a lesser extent, by ERA) for pitchers and RBI for batters (followed, to a lesser extent, by homers), we see that WPA is actually the best way to determine these awards, if these people actually want to measure what they say they want to measure.

Because after all, if you are a crusty old baseball writer, you don’t really care that 50 homers in 1996 was not indicative of Brady Anderson’s “true” skill level – you just know he had a heck of a year.

So, looking at the WPA leaderboards for each league in this particular season (minimum 4.00 WPA), we get the following:

National League
Albert Pujols – 7.22
Prince Fielder – 7.06
Ryan Howard – 5.38
Chris Carpenter – 5.08
Joey Votto – 4.76
Chase Utley – 4.43
Tim Lincecum – 4.27
Andre Ethier – 4.04

American League
Zack Greinke – 4.81
Justin Verlander – 4.31
Johnny Damon – 4.27
Jason Bay – 4.04

No big surprises in the National League, where if you went by WPA, you’d wind up with Albert Pujols as MVP and Chris Carpenter as Cy Young, both of those players being the odds-on favorites to win if the season were to end today.

But the American League is a different story, as WPA shows how Wins and RBI fail to tell the whole story of who happened to be the most clutch. Zack Greinke is first overall in WPA, despite being behind the pack in Wins, and Johnny Damon is your leader among position players in WPA.

Indeed, WPA suggests that Zack Greinke was actually the most valuable player in the American League in this particular season, and probably should be the MVP, but if we adhere to the traditional rules that pitchers should not be MVPs and the MVP has to come from a playoff-bound team, than by all rights Johnny Damon ought to be your American League MVP frontrunner.

But in any case, Zack Greinke is far and away your AL Cy Young this year. Not only is he leading the league in WPA, showing his “clutchness,” but he’s also leading all AL players in WAR, showing his “true” skill level!

Guys like Bill Hall and J.J. Hardy have taken a lot of heat for the Brewers’ failure to make the playoffs this season. But a quick look at the Brewers WAR pie shows that the team’s biggest problem was a lack of pitching.

Just how bad was the team’s pitching in 2009? Milwaukee pitchers had the lowest WAR of any team in the majors this year (yes, including the Nationals). In fact, the Brewers pitchers were worth a full win less than the Nats.

Fangraphs says the Brewers pitchers were worth a total of $9MM in 2009. Meanwhile, Jeff Suppan alone was paid $12.5MM (and he’ll make $12.5MM again in 2010!).

Here’s a fun fact: Yovani Gallardo’s WAR is 2.8, but the Brewers’ pitchers combined WAR is only 2.2. How is that possible? Milwaukee can thank guys like Braden Looper, David Bush, Suppan and Carlos Villaneuva, who combined for 91 starts and a -1.4 WAR.

Thanks to terrible pitching performances from just about everyone not named Gallardo or Hoffman, Milwaukee was forced to rely heavily on its position players. Just look at this insane breakdown of pitchers’ WAR vs. position players’ WAR:

That pretty much says it all right there, doesn’t it? Despite outstanding seasons from Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun and Mike Cameron, the Brewers never really had a chance. You simply can’t win when your pitching contributes less than 10 percent of overall team WAR.

What should the Mariners do with Ken Griffey Jr. next season? The fans love Junior, and the Mariners love his positive impact in the clubhouse, but his declining performance hinders the ability of an otherwise pretty decent team to contend for a postseason berth.

Steve Kelley of the Seattle Times speaks to some of the value Griffey has had in the clubhouse this season:

He has been the godfather to the parade of young players who have come into the clubhouse. He has been a close friend to the veterans. He has offered advice on pitchers’ and hitters’ tendencies….

He has been good for the club, good for the city and great to have around again.

The thing is, there is a perfectly good way for the Mariners to get all of these benefits without wasting precious at-bats on him: they should simply make him a coach.  They could even pay him the exact same salary, if they think he is that worth it, but please, don’t waste precious at bats on a guy which could be given to better performers just because you like the advice he gives to younger players or his friendly presence in the dugout.

That’s the sensible part of my plan for Griffey. Now here is the slightly crazy part.

The Mariners should sign Griffey to a $1 million “personal services” contract or whatever, and then use him as a coach.  He’s not on the active roster, but he travels with the team, wears a uniform, sits in the dugout, gives advice, etc.  And as long as the Mariners are in contention, they should only put their very best players on the field.

But if Griffey is still interested in playing, here’s what you do.  Let him play in spring training. Let him take batting practice with the team during the season if he wants to. And then, if the Mariners actually do actually fall so far out of contention that they can’t possibly come back, the team should cut its worst player and install Griffey as the DH.  Or else, when the rosters expand in September, add Griffey to the 40-man and put him on the team for a few at-bats down the stretch.

Look, this plan is pretty silly, but if Griffey is already under contract as a coach, the only thing he really costs you is a roster spot, and only a 40-man roster spot at that, if you wait until September.  It’s still probably not the optimal use of resources, but in this darkened age of steroids, Ken Griffey Jr. is the one player who has emerged as still being beloved by pretty much the entire nation, and if he still wants to play a bit, and the fans still love to watch him (which they do), and the Mariners players and staff all love him, I say let him play a bit.

In any case, it’s a decent compromise with the foolishness of giving him so many at-bats this season when the Mariners actually had a shot at contention.