This is one of a series of posts in which we rip each team for their offseason blunders and praise them for their wily moves.

If the Dodgers had done absolutely nothing at all this whole offseason, I would have given them an “A” grade, because given this year’s free agent class and the incredible amount of talent already in the Dodgers system, I honestly feel that would have been the best course of action. Indeed, the Dodgers failed to contend last season, not because they didn’t have the right players, but because they had the right players and refused to play them until it was too late.

Just think: even if the Dodgers had not signed a single free agent, they could have put this team on the field (2008 ages in parentheses):

C Russell Martin (25)
1B James Loney (24)
2B Jeff Kent (40)
3B Andy LaRoche (24)
SS Rafael Furcal (30)
LF Delwyn Young (26)
CF Matt Kempt (23)
RF Andre Ethier (26)

Outside of Kent, that is an incredibly young, incredibly talented team with lots of upside and would have had no real holes anywhere in the lineup. The Dodgers would also have had an already set bullpen and rotation, and even if someone went down with an injury, they would have already had reasonable in-house replacements - Nomar Garciaparra at 1B and 3B, Juan Pierre and Jason Repko in the outfield, Chin-Lung Hu and Tony Abreu in the middle infield, and Hong-Chih Kuo, Eric Stults, and Johnathan Meloan in the rotation and bullpen.

Of course, we all knew that there was no way in hell that Ned Colletti would stand pat and run that lineup I have proposed out there, given his completely lack of trust in anyone younger than 30 and his deep, abiding love of the big name. And sure enough, Colletti ran out and splashed around in a pool of Frank McCourt’s money, signing new manager Joe Torre, centerfielder Andruw Jones, and Japanese starting pitcher Hiroki Kuroda. These moves drew a lot of positive press, but did they really help the team for 2008? Let’s have a look…

Joe Torre is one of the most respected managers in the game, and if the Dodgers had one spot they could have upgraded after last season, it was at the end of the bench, where Grady Little showed a disturbing lack of ability to keep control over his clubhouse, which fell into backbiting and bickering as the Dodgers fell out of contention. So it seems pretty hard to take issue with the Dodgers signing a manager who is widely regarded as one of the best around at handling a major league clubhouse.

But I am going to take some issue nonetheless. As I have argued previously in this space, I think that Torre’s in-game managerial skills are overrated at best, and downright suspect at worst. Also, as right as he may have been for the Yankees in the late 1990s, I am not at all convinced that Joe Torre is the right manager for this Dodgers team, now, in 2008, ie a team whose chances of contending absolutely depend on a manger who is willing to play largely untested but supremely talented kids over proven but inferior veterans, a manager I am not at all sure Torre is capable of becoming.

For example, Torre has already gone on the record as saying he is likely to view Juan Pierre as a starter:

“I’ve always been one to favor experience….Juan Pierre brings so many things. He plays all the time, he gets 200 hits, steals 60 bases. We know he has no power, but he’s a gamer. He’s the type of player that fits into a winning situation.”

Ouch. That is not a good sign.

Meanwhile, Torre remains the highest-paid manager in the game, and I am not sure that money wouldn’t have been better spent elsewhere - say signing a top-flight middle reliever or something.

Similarly, the press also rained praise upon Ned Colletti for signing Andruw Jones, despite the high price tag, hailing it as a case of buying low and minimizing risk by not locking the team in to Jones’s mid-30s decline years. But Andruw Jones was pretty helpless at the plate last year, and while he is extremely unlikely to repeat last year’s showing, and certainly represents a big upgrade from Juan Pierre in center, both offensively and defensively, it is not at all clear that the Dodgers have made themselves a better team by giving Jones Manny Ramirez money for the next two years, unless Colletti and Torre are committed to forcing Pierre into a bench role, which there is no sign that they are. If, as seems to be the plan, Juan Pierre is shifted to left field, the Dodgers may actually be a worse team for having signed Jones, because if Juan Pierre is allowed to take away even 200 at-bats that would otherwise have gone to Matt Kemp or Andre Ethier, the Jones signing becomes worse than a wash.

The third big offseason move the Dodgers made was to sign highly sought after Japanese starter Hiroki Kuroda to a 3-year $35.3 million deal. While Kuroda definitely pitched like an ace in Japan, most projections have him pitching more like a 4th starter in the major leagues, which means that at $12 million per year, he would be one of the most expensive 4th starters around. Evaluating the Kuroda deal comes down to the question of whether Kuroda would outpitch Esteban Loiza this year (the man he is bumping from the rotation), and even though he probably could, it is very questionable whether the difference in their performance would be worth all that money.

The only other move the Dodgers have made all offseason at the major-league level was to sign veteran Gary Bennett to be their backup catcher. While this deal didn’t make big headlines, I think it was another questionable move by Ned Colletti, signing a veteran where a rookie or a no-namer would do. I can’t help asking myself the question, “Is Gary Bennett even replacement level?” We are talking about a guy who has had an OBP under .300 for the last five seasons in a row, and has never walked more than 24 times in a season. And given that everyone recognizes that star catcher Russell Martin was probably overused last year and will need to be rested more often this season, it would have behooved Colletti to have come up with a backup catcher who could at least achieve replacement level output when he plays.

Sill, when all is said and done, the Dodgers’ offseason has to be accounted a success this year, because Colletti somehow resisted the temptation to trade away Matt Kemp, James Loney, and Clayton Kershaw, and didn’t make any truly terrible deals as he has done in past years with Juan Pierre and Jason Schmidt. Assuming Colletti can show similar restraint going forward, Dodgers fans have reason to be cautiously optimistic about this coming season, and especially the next few years after that.

Offseason Grade: B

Additions: Joe Torre, Andrew Jones, Hiroki Kuroda, Gary Bennett

Losses: Luis Gonzalez, Randy Wolf, David Wells, Mark Hendrickson, Mike Lieberthal, Olmedo Saenz

Projected Lineup, Rotation, and Closer:

SS Rafael Furcal - .270/.333/.355, 25 SB
LF Juan Pierre - .293/.331/.353, 64 SB
1B James Loney - .331/.381/.538
CF Andruw Jones - .222/.311/.413, 26 HR
RF Matt Kemp - .342/.373/.521
2B Jeff Kent - .302/.375/.500, 20 HR
C Russell Martin - .293/.374/.469, 21 SB
3B Andy LaRoche - .226/.365/.312

RHP Brad Penny - 16-4, 3.03
RHP Derek Lowe - 12-14, 3.88
RHP Chad Billingsley - 12-5, 3.31
RHP Hiroki Kuroda - 12-8, 3.56 (Japanese stats)
RHP Jason Schmidt - 1-4, 6.31

CL Takashi Saito - 1.40, 39 SV

- Hot Offseason Action Index -

So the Dodgers have signed Japanese starting pitcher Hiroki Kuroda to a 3-year, $35.2 million deal.

As a Dodgers fan, I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this. I mean, Kuroda was definitely the best Japanese pitcher on the market this year so that’s good, but how good is he really? We know his is better than Kei Igawa, but we also know he is worse than Daisuke Matsuzaka, so where exactly does that leave the Dodgers? Maybe he is a 4th starter in the Majors? But he could also turn out to be worse than a 5th starter. I’m not sure a pitcher falling into that range is at all worth $12 million a year or a 3-year commitment.

But one thing that really bugs me is the way pretty much the entire sabermetric community has been attempting to evaluate Kuroda and in fact all Japanese pitchers, namely by looking at stats like their strikeout and walk rates per 9 innings.

Now in fairness, in recent years, since we have come to understand the magic of BABIP and the fact that pitchers really have little control over what happens to a batted ball once it is put into play, things like strikeout, walk, and homer rates have been increasingly used to evaluate and project pitcher performance, dare I say with increasingly effective results. And in general, you can put me squarely in the camp of people who favor using these metrics to project performance by major leaguers from year to year and minor leaguers called up to the majors.

HOWEVER, I think that these types of stats begin to approach uselessness when evaluating Japanese pitchers. At least if they are used in isolation, and not part of a more considered approach.

Why? Because as anyone who has any real familiarity with Japanese baseball knows, there are real cultural differences between Japanese and American baseball that merely looking at stats cannot show you.

In this particular case, the difference is that in Japan, nothing a batter can do is worse or more humiliating than a strikeout. Japanese batters will do almost anything to avoid striking out, including choking up on the bat, slap-hitting, and bunting against tough strikeout pitchers. Japanese managers routinely bench players who strike out a few times in a row. In fact the swing they teach Japanese players from their youth is deliberately designed to sacrifice power in exchange for fewer strikeouts.

Walks are also somewhat more frowned upon in Japan than America. In many ways, the attitudes in Japanese baseball are what American baseball was like until about 15 years ago, where batting average is worshiped as the ultimate stat, and walks are seeing as almost disappointing.

Meanwhile, in America, while there are still the occasional grumbles about people who strike out too much and once in a while somebody like Dusty Baker says something like how walks “clog up the basepaths” (and gets endlessly mocked for it), pretty much everyone recognizes that strikeouts are not as bad as we once thought, and that walks are pretty much unequivocably good. And pretty much all players except Ichiro use the modern, full bodied swing designed to generate home runs and a lot of hard line drives, rather than the all-arms, slap-hitting swing which really hasn’t been seen much in America since the days of Ty Cobb.

So while looking at strikeout and walk rates work great for evaluating the chance for minor league pitchers to do well in the Majors, because those players are playing within the same baseball culture, it is completely foolish to do the exact same thing for Japanese pitchers. Hasn’t anyone noticed that basically all Japanese pitchers, from Hideo Nomo to Daisuke Matsuzaka and everyone in between, have seen their strikeout rates improve and their walk rates decline when they come over to the Majors?

This is why I get so sick of people saying that Takashi Saito was a fluke for being a mediocre middle reliever in Japan but an astonishingly good closer in America. No, he is not a fluke. His pinpoint command, and ability to miss bats just plays better in America, where people actually try to take walks, but also don’t mind striking out as much. In Japan, his always being around the zone was not as much of an asset because nobody was going to walk anyway, and his low-90s fastball with late life and back-door slider were not as effective either against slap hitters who would wait back an extra second on those pitches and just try to slap them into play.

Which is all to explain why I get so annoyed when people say things like this:

The thing is, Kuroda isn’t all that exciting of a pitcher. To best make my point, we’ll play the beloved compare Kuroda to a mystery player game.

Kuroda, age 32 season: 179.7 IP, 6.16 K/9, 2.10 BB/9, 2.92 K/BB, 1 HR/9

Mystery pitcher, age 28 season: 192.7 IP, 5.70 K/9, 2.66 BB/9, 2.14 K/BB, 1.03 HR/9

And the mystery pitcher is…a small Filipino woman. Have I just blown your mind?

No wait, it’s Kyle Lohse. Point is that while Kuroda is the superior pitcher, the fact that Lohse is four years younger, pitched in two of the biggest hitters parks in baseball, and actually was facing big league competition makes the gap mighty close. Now, since the general reaction to a Kyle Lohse signing would be Jonestown-esque, acquiring someone who might be a little better shouldn’t inspire much confidence.

Now the guy over at the True Blue LA blog (whom I actually respect in general) obviously thought he was being pretty clever by noticing this comparison between Kuroda and the much reviled Kyle Lohse, but while as I indicated above I’m not so sure that Kuroda is all that exciting of a pitcher either, I submit to you that the reasoning behind this kind of comparison is severely flawed, and that a rate 6.16 K/9 in Japan is much more impressive than it would be if it had been achieved in America.

Comparing home run rates is also silly, since Japan has much smaller ballparks than America does. And I’m not even going to get into the different strike zone in Japan, or the different ball, as this post is already getting quite long. The point is, when it comes to rates like these, Japanese pitchers need to be compared to other Japanese pitchers, or other pitchers who came to America from Japan. Comparing these rates directly to Kyle Lohse, who is pitching against batters with a completely different hitting philosophy, is truly comparing apples and oranges.