May 19th, they say, was the turning point. Following a rough start against the Angels in which he gave up a bunch of hits and a bunch of stolen bases, Felix was called out by Don Wakamatsu for a lack of focus and determination, and from then on it was like night and day. Beginning the next weekend with eight innings against San Francisco, Felix ripped off a four-month streak the likes of which few have ever seen. Over his final 25 games, Felix would allow just 40 earned runs while turning in 24 quality starts, and Wakamatsu was praised by many as the manager that finally got through to our ace of frustration. Felix, it seemed, had arrived, and either because of Wakamatsu or by sheer coincidence, the sentiment has been that something clicked that night in May, turning Felix into the guy we'd been waiting for him to become.

And, sure enough, that guy is amazing. We've all heard of lucky ERAs, but it's hard to fluke your way to a 1.98 over 182 innings. From May 24th through the end of the season, Felix was both a shutdown righty and a workhorse, keeping the opponent off the board while not once throwing fewer than 101 pitches. It was like the best of both worlds, as Felix partnered Rich Harden's effectiveness with Roy Halladay-level durability, and it was a performance many feel would've won Felix the Cy Young had he been able to sustain it all year. It was that first month and a half, they say, that wound up holding him back.

They're probably right, in that had Felix run a 1.98 ERA over a full season, voters would've had a hell of a time placing him second. But while Felix's streak was extraordinary, it may actually serve to make the strongest case in Greinke's favor. Just look at the following comparison:

From May 24th through the end of the season, Felix pitched as well as we've seen him in four years. He proved himself to his coaches, he proved himself to opponents, and he proved himself to a fanbase that'd been waiting to see him take his game to the next level. Felix's turnaround is seen as his ascent. His ascent to the top, his ascent into the upper echelon of pitchers in the world. His ascent to the throne.

And Greinke was still better.

Greinke's ERA, Greinke's FIP, Greinke's tRA...not only was Greinke better than Felix in 2009, he was better than Felix at his best in 2009, and he was better than the 12 starts we got out of Felix in 2005. The hot streak that was supposed to legitimize Felix's candidacy instead works for Greinke, because Greinke was better than that hot streak, and he was better over a full season.

You could, of course, argue that Greinke kind of got lucky with his home run rate, that 11 in 33 starts for a flyball pitcher isn't a sustainable level of performance. And you'd probably be right. Greinke will almost certainly allow a higher rate of home runs going forward. But while projections and regressions look forward, statistics look backward, and the fact of the matter is that, along with all of his other achievements, Greinke only threw 11 pitches that got hit out of the park last year. Only 11 of his pitches had the necessary characteristics such that the opposing batter was able to hit a home run, and though that likely isn't repeatable, it's what happened, and it's one of the reasons why this will go down as one of the least-debated Cy Youngs of all time.

Felix's May 19th light switch was his strongest argument for the award. And when a player's strongest argument turns out to support his competition, that leaves absolutely no doubt as to who deserves to win. Would I take Greinke as the better starting pitcher going forward? I'm not sure. That one would require more thought. But an assertion that requires no further thought at all is that, in 2009, Zack Greinke was the best pitcher in the world. Congratulations to one eccentric son of a bitch.

Since 2000 - covering the last ten years - there have been 428 American League starter seasons with at least 150 innings pitched. Here's how Felix's 2009 ranks among them:

ERA: #5
FIP: #17
Combined*: #8

* (2*ERA + 6*FIP)/8. A quick and dirty way of still giving starters some credit for their context pitching. This stat sucks and please never use it.

Of course, neither ERA nor FIP are adjusted for park, so Felix gets a boost, but he was still excellent, and the unfortunate coincidence that Zack Greinke was better doesn't take away from the fact that Felix still had a Cy Young-caliber season. No reason to be disappointed.

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For those of you who are (justifiably) distrustful of the Bill James projections but still want to look at some numbers, the 2010 CHONE projections are live. For hitters, anyway. Here are the Mariners, here are the free agents, and here are the Yankees, in case looking at the Mariners didn't make you sad enough.

The first thing you should do here - as one should do with pretty much any forecasting system - is ignore the Ichiro projection. It's a well-known fact that forecasting systems hate Ichiro, and I mean literally hate him, in that they have a built-in hate factor that program creators activate for Ichiro because they feel threatened by his improbability. It's my understanding that CHONE took all the hits it stole from Ichiro and gave them to Prentice Redman.

Eventually Ichiro will decline and a few forecasters will give each other high-fives for nailing it, but it doesn't count when you project decline every year. It's like the computer version of me and Raul Ibanez. .305/.338/.400 isn't unreasonable - Ichiro did hit .310/.361/.386 as recently as 2008 - but just because it's possible doesn't make it a good projection, because projections are supposed to fall in the middle of the next year's probability distribution, and a .738 OPS is towards the bottom of Ichiro's. Feel free to bump that up a fair bit in your head. It'll help paint a slightly better picture of our currently miserable offense.

Among Mariners currently in-house, you'll notice that Jose Lopez forecasts well, while Franklin Gutierrez comes out looking a little worse. The former strikes me as optimistic, given the things I've talked about before with regard to Lopez's power, but the latter seems fair, given that Guti probably overachieved a little bit in 2009. But hey, he's young, so who knows? Not a lot of love in there for Michael Saunders or Matt Tuiasosopo, which you can believe in, or not believe in. Overall, man, do we need help. The Russell Branyan line looks good, but that won't be enough on its own.

Most optimistic projection of the bunch? Greg Halman's .193/.242/.334 with 17 walks and 147 strikeouts. Halman just ran a 29/183 ratio in AA. Methinks the decimal in "17" was put in the wrong place.

The following table shows what our payroll situation would be if we built a team from what we already have in-house. Some figures are exact, and others, such as those of the arbitration-eligibles, are approximations.

(Don't worry about things like, say, Jason Vargas showing up instead of Garret Olson. It doesn't matter.)

Right now we're looking at salary commitments totaling $65-70m. The 2009 Mariners cost about $99m, so assuming a fairly similar but slightly reduced budget going forward, that leaves us with $25-30m of room to play with, with a number of spots at which we could stand to improve. 

Damn you, Carlos Silva.

When the Mariners traded for Jack Wilson, we knew it a move fueled by defense. The front office and coaching staff made no secret of that. Wilson brought a glove, an excellent glove capable of making up for a lackluster bat, and this was okay, because we knew that he'd be able to field while remaining something above a black hole at the plate.

However, over the span of the next six weeks, Wilson would collect 116 plate appearances as a Mariner, and over those 116 plate appearances, he would hit just .224 with a .562 OPS. While no one expected Wilson to light it up, this was beyond terrible. This was a Ronny Cedeno level of bad, and in part because the whole Cedeno experience was still fresh in our minds, there developed this sentiment that Wilson's an "NL hitter," that he's a guy who can sort of hold his own on the other side but who becomes completely overmatched against the superior AL competition. Cedeno was awful here and successful with Pittsburgh. Wilson, some people have claimed, is a player in the same kind of mold.

I find this claim to be dubious for three reasons:

(1) There's no such thing as an "AL hitter" or an "NL hitter." While the AL is the better league and has the better pitchers overall, it's not so lopsided that NL hitters come over and lose tons of points off their production. I identified 42 hitters who switched leagues either last offseason or during the year and who accumulated at least 100 PAs on both sides. Those 42 players averaged a .315 wOBA in the AL (not park-adjusted) and a .323 wOBA in the NL. Over a full season, that's a difference of about four runs. It seems significant, but it's not colossal. Jack Wilson may have struggled over here, but what about, I dunno, Jeremy Reed? What about Endy Chavez or Alex Cora? It's not an idea that makes a lot of sense when you think about it, and it's not an idea that holds up to much scrutiny.

(2) Jack Wilson has collected 470 PAs during interleague play over his career. In those 470 PAs, he's hit .301/.334/.420, and he's been good in each of the last three seasons.

(3) 116 plate appearances. That's all we saw from Wilson in the AL, and for many of them he was playing hurt. 116 plate appearances barely tell you anything. If Wilson had come over and sucked that bad for a whole year, that would be one thing. But he sucked for a handful of weeks. A 3/4/5 weighting of his most recent seasons yields an un-adjusted wOBA of .301, which isn't that bad for a defense-first shortstop.

Jack Wilson may be a baseball player in the National League style, but there's no good reason to believe that his bat will continue to be this bad as long as he plays for an AL team. There is an AL adjustment that docks him a few points, but what we saw from him was extreme, a performance towards the lower bound of his probability distribution. It isn't realistic to expect him to keep that up. He's proven over the years that, while he's not a great hitter, or a good one, or an average one, he's a below-average one, and not a disaster. That's the player we traded for, and that's the player we almost certainly still have.

How Seattle will affect Wilson's offense is, of course, a legitimate question. Not only did he switch leagues, but he also moved to a park that doesn't treat righties very kindly. That's going to be an adjustment. However, for one thing, Wilson's power, like Jose Lopez's, is down the line to left, so he won't get killed by that power alley, and for another, the bulk of Wilson's production comes from line drives instead of fly balls anyway, so Safeco shouldn't hurt him as bad as it has guys like Mike Cameron. Wilson sprays singles. A single is a single in any ballpark.

Jack Wilson isn't a sexy, impact type of player, and at 32 this December, he's not on the way up. However, as a regular shortstop who can turn a lot of balls into outs and make a lot of low-to-the-ground contact, we could do a lot worse. Assuming his offense hasn't completely collapsed and that he's something like a +10 defender, we should see him end up in the neighborhood of a 1.5 - 2.0 WAR, and that's going to help. That's going to help quite a bit.

Writing is easier when you don't have to think up an intro.

In terms of things we know we can measure pretty well, Rob Johnson the defender doesn't stand out, at least not in a good way.

• His error rate, for whatever that's worth, is about average. His four in 754.1 innings matches up well with the league-average rate of 6.1 per 1000.


• His arm is decent. He's thrown out 20 of 71 would-be base-stealers - a rate of 28.2% - against a 27.6% league average.


• He kind of sucks at blocking balls. His 2009 rate of passed balls was twice the league average, and the Mariners were a bottom-third team in wild pitches. In addition, I couldn't tell you how many times I saw Johnson flat-out drop a pitch that hit him in the glove.
  

These factors were covered in devil_fingers' evaluation of 2009 catcher defense, and in that study, it was determined that, based on his errors, arm, and ability to receive, Johnson was about two runs below average in the field. Now it's obviously important to remember that understanding performance in a single season isn't the same as understanding true talent, but given these numbers and all of our own observations over the course of the year, I don't see any particular reason to believe that Johnson is a superior defender when it comes to things we can directly measure.

And yet he's developed this whiz-kid reputation. Why? Because, out of guys who caught at least 50 games last season, Johnson posted the lowest CERA - ERA against as a catcher - in the league, at 3.23. This versus Kenji Johjima's CERA of 4.86. Pitchers weren't giving up as many runs throwing to Johnson as they were throwing to Kenji, and this - pretty much this alone - earned Johnson both a lot of playing time and a generally favorable standing among fans.

So given that he doesn't really do anything else well, either standing at the plate or crouching behind it, one's opinion of Rob Johnson comes down to one's opinion of this statistic. Those who like Johnson do so because they feel he helps keep the opponent off the board, while those who don't do so because they don't believe CERA reveals an ability on the catcher's part to control a game. This should be examined.

The absolute first thing we have to do with CERA is consider the pitchers. Catchers don't catch an equivalent distribution of arms, and sure enough, Johnson was catching the bulk of the team's better talent. Felix Hernandez, Erik Bedard, and Jarrod Washburn made up more than half of Johnson's PA's caught, while for Johjima, they made up just 9.4%. For this reason, we should expect their CERA's to be considerably different. The guy who catches the better pitchers is almost always going to post the more flattering rate of runs scored.

However, we wouldn't expect their CERA's to be that different, so clearly there was an additional performance effect. I looked at how the bullpen did throwing to each guy a few weeks ago and, sure enough, their walk and strikeout rates were a little better with Johnson than with Kenji. The picture's a little messier with starting pitchers since the distribution was so skewed, but the take-home message here is that the difference in CERA's was more than simply the difference in pitchers caught.

So with that in mind, the question becomes one about sustainability, about whether or not this sort of thing is reflective of an actual ability and is therefore repeatable on a year-to-year basis. This being beyond my capability, thank goodness for Keith Woolner. All year long, when people have talked about the significance of CERA, others have referred back to work done on the subject a decade ago, and that work was done by Woolner at Baseball Prospectus. Here's the original study, here's a follow-up, and here's a later study done after receiving some criticism from Bill James.

Read those articles. I know they're heavy on the math and somewhat lacking in floral prose, but if you're interested in this subject, then Woolner's work is required reading.

There's too much in there for me to summarize point-by-point. But in the end, Woolner didn't find strong evidence of an effect. He didn't find weak, potentially insignificant evidence of an effect. He found no evidence of an effect. At all. Even just looking at the extremes, the absolute best and worst catchers in Year X, they regressed all the way to the mean in Year X+1. Woolner's ultimate conclusion:

For now, at least, the hypothesis most consistent with the available facts appears to be that catchers do not have a significant effect on pitcher performance.

Based on CERA and its component metrics, Rob Johnson had a much better season of game-calling than Kenji Johjima. But given that this effect has never been shown to be repeatable, we probably shouldn't label it game-calling at all, as doing so implies an ability. We don't actually know if what we're trying to measure exists, and until we do, the most responsible approach is to side with the null hypothesis. There's no proof. There's no proof that Johnson's alleged greatest strength is even the least bit significant, or real.

What's funny is that, if we're just scrounging for as much evidence as we can find, there's a lot more evidence that Kenji was bad than there is that Johnson is good. Kenji was here for four years. In three of those years, his numbers were a lot worse than those of his backup(s), and in the fourth they were about equal. For Johnson, we have one year. 80 games. With that in mind, it makes more sense to suggest that Rob Johnson looked good simply because he wasn't Kenji Johjima. There's more reason to dock the latter than there is to credit the former.

But we needn't focus on that paragraph, because Woolner's work trumps it. Nobody's ever verified that game-calling is a skill, and because of that, if one wants to believe that Johnson calls a great game, then one needs to provide a lot of evidence. Tons of it. Years and years and years' worth. Rob Johnson has started 82 games behind the plate in his Major League career. It is impossible for one to conclude anything about game-calling over a span of 82 games.

Working in Rob Johnson's favor is that pitchers like him. The reason he caught so much of Felix, Bedard, and Washburn is because that's what Felix, Bedard and Washburn wanted. If the pitchers feel like Johnson calls a good game - if the pitchers feel comfortable throwing to him - then that has value. You want your pitchers to feel comfortable when they're going to work. But then Greg Maddux felt most comfortable throwing to pretty much anyone but Javy Lopez, yet of the 12 catchers who caught Maddux for more than 25 games, opponents put up the second-lowest OPS with Lopez behind the plate. Comfort is good, but it's not proof of ability, nor is it a trump card. If you have two guys who're pretty much equal, and a pitcher would rather throw to one of them, then that's fine. But if you have two guys, and one of them is measurably better than the other, then the responsibility falls on the pitcher to feel comfortable with the guy who maximizes the team's chances of winning.

Rob Johnson is a 27 year old Major League catcher who, in his rookie season, became a favorite of some high-level pitchers and coaches. In that regard, he's off to a hell of a start. But a lot of fans have gone so far as to suggest that he's a valuable player, the reasoning being that he keeps the other team off the board. We can't say that. We can't say that and have it mean anything, because that statement has yet to be confirmed. We will know that Rob Johnson is a valuable player if and only if he improves in the areas we know we can measure. And while PITCHfx may allow for someone down the road to show that game calling is a legitimate, repeatable ability, it would really put my mind at ease if Rob Johnson would think about maybe swinging a bat.

Baseball players can make contributions in a number of different ways, the most obvious and talked-about of which is how they do at the plate. Defense, position, and baserunning tend to be brushed off as secondary concerns. What follows are the top and bottom 15 in the sum of these latter three values, as determined by UZR, Fangraphs' position adjustment, and Baseball Prospectus' EQBRR.

Note that catchers aren't measured by UZR, so the worst ones are getting a boost and the best ones are getting it in the shorts. However, no catchers are likely to deserve placement on either list, except maybe Gerald Laird. So.

Neither Guti's placement at the top of the list nor Dunn's placement at the bottom should come as a shock; Guti plays a mean center field and runs pretty well, while Dunn's an athlete in the way people used to think glass is a liquid. The 29-run gap between them with the bat is erased here by the nearly threefold difference in "hidden" value. Franklin Gutierrez is awesome. Adam Dunn is not.

I don't think any names here really stand out. At least, they shouldn't. Notice the three Mariners in the top 15 and the bottom 15 being 47% AL Central. Turns out Chase Utley can run well too.

The best way to look at this would be to take a multiyear window such that we could smooth out statistical anomalies or misleading UZR. However, for whatever reason I can't load BP's '07 and '08 baserunning data, so we're stuck with what we have. If you ignore baserunning and focus on UZR + Position, then the 07-09 top three come out as Utley/Gutierrez/Hardy, while the bottom three are Dye/Hawpe/Dunn.

We can just skip the whole background section, right? To many, Lopez's improvement as a hitter is a sign of things to come. To others, Lopez is a decent but by no means extraordinary bat that is approaching a plateau. Figuring out which it is will be of considerable importance as the Zduriencik front office works to move the team forward. So: is Jose Lopez turning into the guy a lot of people thought he'd be back when he was a prospect, or is the likelihood that he's just about maxed out?

I'll try to be as brief as possible.

The first thing to understand is where Lopez is as a hitter right now. And for this, it's imperative that you're able to look past the round, pretty 25 home runs he just hit. Over the last two years, Lopez has posted a .765 OPS, a .327 raw wOBA, and has been 0-5 runs above average after adjusting for park. Perfectly acceptable, of course, but far from great; for all intents and purposes, he's been about as good as Fred Lewis. Nobody considers Fred Lewis a great hitter or anything, right? Okay.

Now, Lopez has made it abundantly clear that he prefers to be aggressive at the plate. He's consistently posted above-average swing rates and O-Swing rates, with his Z-Swing rates fluctuating between average and above-average. What this means is that, while Lopez likes to swing, he doesn't always have the best judgment. Which should come as a surprise to no one. He's not exactly an injudicious hacker or anything, but he's a free swinger, and both Chone Figgins and Adam Dunn drew more unintentional walks in 2009 than Lopez has drawn since 2004.

Plate discipline doesn't usually change very much over a player's career, at least not until he gets old. You'll see some guys make incremental improvements and other guys lose their feel, but by and large, if you're aggressive when you come up, you're aggressive through your peak. With Jose Lopez, then, we shouldn't expect to see him learn a different approach. Better numbers could make pitchers throw him fewer pitches in the zone, but he's unlikely to get much better at identifying what's a strike and what's a ball. He is what he is.

Not drawing a lot of walks means that an aggressive hitter is leaving a source of potentially significant value on the table. In order to be successful and productive, then, he has to make up for this by doing one or some or even all of the following:

(1) Make contact 

(2) Run well

(3) Put the ball on the ground (closely related to #2, really)

(4) Hit for power

Vladimir Guerrero is perhaps the most obvious example of a hacker who's made it work. He's made it work by, throughout most of his career, pulling off #1, #2, and #4. Alfonso Soriano's gone with #2 and #4. Ichiro, of course, favors #3 over #4 to go with his #'s 1 and 2, allowing him to beat out a ton of grounders. It's a different path, but not necessarily a worse one. The point is, aggressiveness, on its own, is not a problem. You don't have to be Nick Johnson if you want to have a career.

Now let's look at how Jose Lopez does here:

(1) Check. Lopez's career contact rate is 86%, well north of the ~80% league average. He's a free swinger, but he's a free swinger who's able to get the bat on the ball an awful lot.

(2) No dice. Lopez may have stolen 31 bags as an 18 year old, but these days he's a big boy. Not that I'd call him slow or anything, but his 12 infield hits last year tied him with Kevin Youkilis, Dunn, and Jason Bay.

(3) Not anymore. Lopez used to have an above-average groundball rate, but he's trended away from that, finishing just outside the bottom third in 2009.

(4) Check, sort of. Lopez hit 17 homers in 2008 and 25 homers in 2009, posting a .191 Isolated Slugging Percentage well above his career mark. This power has been what's elevated Lopez from what he was in 2006 to what he was this past season.

In order for Lopez to improve on what he was in 2009, he could improve his discipline. Conceding this as unlikely, however, he then would have to improve on one or some of those four points. Looking at them again:

(1) Lopez's contact rate is already high, and his rate in 2009 was not significantly different from his rates in 2005 or 2006. I find the suggestion that Lopez could make more contact than he already does to be dubious.

(2) Players don't get faster. As Lopez ages, he's only going to lose footspeed, not gain it.

(3) Possible, but then since he's not blessed with the best speed, this isn't going to help him anyway.

(4) And now we've gotten to the heart of the matter. Those who say Lopez's star is only on the rise believe that he's packing more power potential. Those who say he's near his ceiling don't see it.

So which is it? Just how much more power can we expect to see out of Jose Lopez going forward?

The thing about power spikes is that, generally, they don't come out of nowhere. They're preceded by flashes of power to all fields, and occasional glimpses of considerable strength. Wladimir Balentien, for example, only hit seven homers this year, but his 489-foot dinger off Daniel McCutchen was the longest hit by anyone all season. This is evidence that, while Balentien's far from a complete hitter, he has the potential to drive a lot of pitches out of the park. One also notices that, of Balentien's 15 career homers, six have gone up the middle or the other way. Combine these bits of information with his famously long swing and I don't think anyone would be surprised if a year or three from now he ended up on or near the longball leaderboard.

There are signs. Which makes me wonder, where are Lopez's signs?

Yes, he hit 17 homers in 2008 and 25 homers in 2009. Each added significantly to his previous career high. But home runs, by themselves, don't necessarily tell you that much. How is his actual *power*?

To answer this, I think we realistically only need to consider three things:

• Jose Lopez has hit 70 home runs in his Major League career. He has pulled 66 of them to left field. Three have gone up the middle, and one has gone the other way. Every single one of his 42 homers these last two years has gone to left.


• Hit Tracker Online provides data going back to 2006, covering 63 of Lopez's 70 home runs. Six of them had a standard distance of more than 400 feet. The longest came in at 415. The fastest, meanwhile, came in at 109.8mph off the bat.
  


• He has a pretty quick, compact swing.

Lopez isn't weak. Weak guys don't hit 25 homers while spending half their time in Safeco Field. But when you go through the data, you can't help but feel like, if Lopez were packing more power potential, he would've demonstrated that ability at least a couple times at some point. Where are the deep flies to right field? Where are the two or three fastballs he just stepped into and slaughtered to left? It's clear that Wlad has a high power ceiling. We know that Franklin Gutierrez has some raw strength. But Lopez? Rob Johnson hit a ball 430. Mike Carp hit a ball 426. Jose Lopez has yet to hit a ball beyond 415, with the majority of his homers just clearing the left field fence.

When you go through Lopez's numbers looking for signs of more power, what you come away with are signs to the contrary - indications that he doesn't have much further to go, suggestions that perhaps even reaching 25 was a stroke of good luck. Of all the players to hit at least 25 home runs in 2009, Lopez had the lowest average distance, finishing just below other anomalies Ben Zobrist and Aaron Hill. Just because he hit 25 doesn't mean this is his new level of true talent. If anything, I'd say that we should project Lopez to hit for a little less power next year, not more. Because he just hasn't flashed the kind of ability more befitting a 25-homer sort of guy.

I don't want to say there's no chance, and I certainly don't intend to convey the impression that I think Jose Lopez is bad. As far as the former is concerned, unlikely doesn't mean impossible - baseball analysis is just probability. And as for the latter, Lopez has been a ~league-average player these last two years, and at 26 years old, there's little reason to believe he's about to get worse. This is, after all, supposed to be his career peak. He's a fine player.

It's just...Jose Lopez has been teasing Mariner fans since he was a teenager, but at this point, I think we have enough evidence to say that he's probably not going to turn into a big-time power threat or run producer. There's always a chance that he develops more pop, and who knows, he may even get better at telling balls from strikes, but the odds say he's better suited for a supportive role, rather than a featured one. And that's something that, as they examine all the different possibilities this offseason, Jack Zduriencik and his assistants are going to have to take into account.