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For great Padres coverage, be sure to check out Gaslamp Ball.

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For more Pirates coverage, check out Bucs Dugout.

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For Blue Jays coverage, be sure to check out Bluebird Banter.

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Ed. Note: Since we don't have proper regressed factors for Marlins Park yet I set run and home run factors to league average.

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After a horrendous sweep in Houston, the Mets (13-12, 3GB) return home for a three-game series agains the Arizona Diamondbacks (13-13, 4.5GB).

The boys from Queens were simply beaten down by the Astros, allowing 18 runs while only scoring 7. Granted, Minute Maid parks is generally much easier to hit home runs in, but the Mets pitching staff's struggles with the long ball were on display in Houston, giving up five home runs in three games in Houston. Adjusting for home park, the Mets have the worst HR/FB ratio against in the National League, third worst in all of baseball (worst on the road in the NL, 17.2%).

Combine their inability to keep the ball in the park with their sub-par defense (park-adjusted BABIP against of 92), and it's no wonder they are giving up runs at a terrible rate (ERA- of 129, where lower is better).

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After taking two out of three from the Colorado Rockies, the Mets (13-9, 1GB) travel to Houston and begin a three-game series against the Astros (8-14, 6GB).

One day shy of May, and the Mets have managed to play .591 ball. However, their expected record is actually 9-13, based on their runs scored and allowed. Why are they outperforming their expected record by four wins early on? Simple--they are 6-1 in one runs games. Offensively, the Mets have only scored 88 runs (not bad at all given their park, as you can see from the park adjusted numbers above), but their hitters have a WPA of 1.45 for the year, third highest in all of baseball. Even when controlling for leverage, Met hitters have the fifth-best WPA in the bigs.

Run prevention has been a different story.

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After a thoroughly enjoyable sweep of the Marlins, the Mets (11-8, 3GB) head to Colorado to being a three-game series tonight against the Rockies (9-9, 3GB) (8:40pm EST).

Before we jump into the game, a few notes about the preview above. First, some of the statistics are now park adjusted. Second, I have added a new category--shutdown percentage (SD%). This adds some context around the team's bullpen and simply looks at the percent of shutdowns out of a pen's total shutdowns plus meltdowns. This statistic answers the question, when the pen has a greater than 6% impact on the team's chances of winning, what percent was positive?

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, on to the match up.

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After dropping three out of our against the San Francisco Giants (including both ends of a double-header yesterday), the Mets (8-8, 4GB) begin a three-game series against the Miami Marlins (7-8, 4.5GB) tonight at 7:10pm EST.

Tonight will mark the return of Jose Reyes to Citi Field, in what I am sure will garner a mixed reaction from fans. Obviously, Reyes was one of the most electric and productive players to have played for this franchise and it will certainly sting to see him in a different uniform, particularly that of the Marlins.

In terms of the series, these teams have been quite similar so far in 2012. Both seem to be under performing offensively given their lack of power so far. The Mets have a better HR/FB rate, but their isolated power is still well below the NL average. That fact goes a long way to explaining their low run scoring despite the above average on-base percentage.

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Tonight at 7:10pm EST, the Mets (7-5, 2GB) begin a four-game series at home against the San Francisco Giants (6-6. 3.5GB).

The Mets lost their second series of the year, losing the last two games of their recent three-game series against the division-rival Atlanta Braves. Johan Santana looked very human, leaving a number of pitches over the heart of the plate which Braves hitters were more than happy to feast on. Additionally, Atlanta roughed up R.A. Dickey in the final game of the series, as Dickey was clearing lacking his best stuff. The offense averaged five runs per game against the Braves, scoring six runs twice. Over the past two seasons, teams that score six runs average a win 74% of the time, but obviously that rate decreases when you give up a 14-spot to your opponent.

Enter the Giants. San Francisco looks very similar to what we've come to expect from them; great pitching and league-average offense. However, after locking up ace-caliber Matt Cain and young star in the making Madison Bumgarner, the Giants front office has to be concerned with the recent performance from rotation-anchor Tim Lincecum.

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After taking the weekend series against the Philadelphia Phillies, the Mets (6-3, .5 GB) travel to Atlanta to begin a three-game series against the Braves (5-4, 1.5GB). The Mets managed to sweep the Braves in the first series of this young season, but since then the Braves have gone 5-1, taking two out of three against the Astros before sweeping the Milwaukee Brewers. Oddly enough, the Braves rode their bats to five straight victories while their pitching and defense has left much to be desired early on.

Meanwhile, the Mets have scored runs at a below average pace to start the season, but have done a very good job at preventing runs. Despite a few meltdowns here and there, the pitching and defense has been a pleasant surprise. If nothing else, the staff has decided that giving up home runs is just plain silly, and that's turned out to be a great strategy.

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I know what you are thinking and, yes, we are only six games into the regular season. However, as long as we understand that statistics at this point merely tell us what has happened and not, necessarily, what will happen, there is no reason to deprive ourselves of statistical-visual goodness.

So, behold, the return of the saber-stat series preview just in time for the first Mets-Phillies series of 2012:

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Remember, regardless of statistic, higher than 100 indicates the team is performing better than league average. Less than 100, worse. So, if a team has a runs against per game (RA/G) that comes in at 110, it means they are better than the league average when it comes to preventing runs.

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Last night, I talked about "clutch" hitting on MLB Network's Clubhouse Confidential. The discussion was based on this article here on Beyond the Box Score from a few months ago, which looked at how certain hitter characteristics impacted their performance in high leverage situations.

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Tuesday, I wrote about trends in negative WAR position players in the league since 2002.

Generally speaking, about 20% of all players that accumulate >=100 plate appearances in a season will finish with negative Wins Above Replacement (using FanGraphs' measure for WAR).

In that analysis, I ranked teams in terms of the percent of players with >=100 PA's with negative WAR they had on their rosters relative to their total position players during that time frame.

A number of commentators here and at other sites asked about the distribution of positive WAR players by team.

The graphic above shows the breakdown of total negative WAR players and then positive WAR players for various ranges for each team since 2002. The table is sorted on the negative WAR column, from least to greatest percentage. Each column is also heat mapped from largest (dark green) to smallest (white) percentage.

A few observations:

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Thanks to nifty constructs like Wins Above Replacement, we can tell when a player in the major leagues actually provided less value to a team than a replacement-level player available on the free agent market or within a team's minor league system.

Every year there are players that finish with a negative WAR--meaning their accomplishments (if we can call them that) actually provided negative value to a team compared to an available replacement. Now, some times this happens because a player succumbs to injury, but often times the player just had a plain bad year.

I was curious about the rate at which we find negative WAR players in the league and if the rate has changed at all over the past few years.

I decided to use the WAR calculation from FanGraphs--mainly because the data was much easier to download than Baseball-Reference--and looked for the rate of negative WAR seasons by year across the major leagues.

Generally speaking, since 2002 the average percent of position players with >=100 plate appearances in a season that will post a negative fWAR is right around 20%.

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(To read the previous article, click here )

Last week, I published an article that looked into whether having a certain type of park (hitter-friendly, pitcher-friendly, or neutral) affected a team's chances for success.

Digging deeper into the numbers based on some great comments from readers I discovered to errors in the data. To be specific, because of a few miscodings of stadiums (e.g. New Yankee Stadium, etc.) some years were counted multiple times. The new data set included 36 parks and stadiums and there were 6.7 seasons on average per venue.

I re-ran the analysis and here are the results:

As you can see, even with the mis-codings the results are very similar, aside from the neutral parks. Since 2004, there has essentially been no relationship between a team's home park run environment and their chances of winning. However, we still see the sizeable negative relationship when looking at extreme hitter parks.

(Now, I also have to note that we are dealing with a small N here as we have averaged performance across the 36 parks. The individual correlations certainly are not significant at the .10 level or higher, so take into that this is directional at best when thinking through the results.)

So the question still remains what explains the pattern. Why are extreme hitter parks seemingly such a structural disadvantage for teams?

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Roy Oswalt appears headed for St. Louis in 2012, joining the defending World Series champion Cardinals. The Red Sox, still in need of help for their starting rotation, were hoping to land Oswalt and had even traded Marco Scutaro away to make room under the luxury tax to sign the right hander.

In the end. Oswalt appears headed back to the NL Central where he spent most of his career. The Cardinals don't currently have room in their rotation for Oswalt and will likely have to move either Kyle Lohse of Jake Westbrook, unless one of them is willing to move to the bullpen (although that's a bit crowded at the moment).

Lohse is set to make a little over $12M this year and will be a free agent in 2013. Westbrook is under contract for $8.5M next year and his contract has an $8.5M mutual option for 2013 ($1M buyout if team declines the option). Over the past few seasons, Lohse has been the more valuable pitcher, racking up more fWAR per start compared to Westbrook. And even with a shortened season, Oswalt put up 1.4 more fWAR than Westbrook in 2011.

Given the modest buyout, my guess is that Westbrook becomes the more likely trade candidate here. He's a ground all pitcher that, while a tad overpriced for a 1 win starter (assuming 2012 is similar to 2011), will get you around 180+ innings each year.

So who might be interested? How about the Red Sox?

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(An updated version of this article can be read here.)

We are all familiar with the idea that across major league baseball some parks favor hitters while some favor pitchers. The dimensions of the park combined with other features can increase or decrease the run scoring environment.

After opening Citi Field in 2009, the New York Mets saw a significant decline in their ability to score runs. The team averaged 681 runs scored per year from '09-'11 compared to 812 over the previous three seasons. Additionally, management worried that pitchers were developing bad habits while pitching at their spacious home park that led to worse performances on the road.

Let's set aside whether we think that reasoning is legitimate. The question I came away with was whether the kind of home park a team has increases or decreases their chances of winning games. If a team has a pitcher-friendly home park, does that create issues for them on the road that they cannot overcome? What about a hitter-friendly park?

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It is now being widely reported that the Detroit Tigers have swooped in and signed a deal with Prince Fielder for 9 years/$214M.

My first reaction is that this never gets close to being done if Victor Martinez doesn't suffer a freak ACL tear while working out. Martinez is out of action for the 2012 season, and the Tigers don't really have an impact bat in their system that projects to be comparable to Martinez in the near-term, but is still under contract through 2014. Virtually all of Martinez's value is tied up in his bat, so going forward his most likely home is at first base or designated hitter.

Of course, he won't be playing first, since preeminent slugger Miguel Cabrera is signed through 2015 and already occupies that position. The big question is what will the Tigers do with three, largely offensive players in Cabrera, Martinez, and Fielder in 2013 and 2014?

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Innovation in any unmanaged market typically leads to the overturning of established practices and economic beneficiaries--simply put, innovation makes certain activities and skills obsolete that previous were highly valued. This process is usually described as "creative desctruction", an old term that is now generally attributed to Joseph Schumpeter.

Advances in player evaluation in baseball can certainly be viewed through this lens, as the integration of statistical analysis combined with advances in computing power (both software and hardware) make the evaluation of players more efficient and more accurate.

What's less known, I believe, is the actual destructive aspect of this creativity--namely, the impact on the scouting profession. I never really thought about the impact until reading this recent L.A. Times story about the Professional Baseball Scouts Foundation. The PBSF offers various kinds of assistance to scouts or their families based upon need (e.g. unemployment, lack of health insurance, etc.).

To be honest, I didn't think that the impact would be all that great, but as Ben Lindbergh recently pointed out, the weighting of advanced analysis relative to observational scouting as shifted in just about every organization in baseball. Some obviously weigh it differently than others, but the shift is pretty universal at this point.

What that has led to is a general decrease in scout staffing across the league.

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Beyond the Box Score has been operational since 2005, and if you take a few minutes to look through the archives (or if you've been around since then) you quickly see that there has been some tremendous writers that have graced the masthead over the past 6+ years.

Many of those writers have gone on to write and publish at sites such as Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, Hardball Times, and ESPN.com, to name a few.

I am hoping to put together a history of sorts that plots the activities of our alumni before, during, and after their stint at Beyond the Box Score. To do that, I'll need their help.

Why do this?

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Last night, the New York Yankees awoke from their long winter's nap, acquiring Mariners' starter Michael Pineda in exchange for Jesus Montero.

Montero is a highly touted hitting prospect with no real defensive position in the big leagues. He was likely to spend much of this year in the DH spot, which is highly unusual for a rookie. When you consider that the Yankees will have to move the aging A-Rod to that role in the near future, it made sense to move Montero if they could get an impact player back in return. And they certainly did.

The Yankees' biggest need was filling out the starting rotation. Last year, they managed to get by with some luck from Freddy Garcia and Bartolo Colon, but now they have two legitimate starters in Pineda and Hiroki Kuroda to compliment CC Sabathia at the top of their rotation.

The biggest question, of course, is how Pineda's stuff will translate to the hitter-friendly Bronx (and Boston, and Toronto for that matter).

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A while back, our own Julian Levine noticed something odd when perusing the leaderboards at FanGraphs--historically, power hitters seemed to be worse when it came to their Clutch score.

I took a quick look at roughly 800+ players (≥3000 plate appearances for their career), and sure enough, the higher a player's Isolated Power (ISO) or Slugging (SLG), the lower their Clutch score. A player's ISO had a -.414 correlation to their Clutch score, while SLG came in at -.336.

Lots of people have taken on the issue of Clutch in terms of whether such a talent exists and whether we can measure it. (This 2009 piece by Tango is a pretty good place to start.) I don't want to get into a debate about the existence of Clutch at the moment, but rather try to understand why this relationship exists at all.

So let's start out with some general correlations of other hitting outcomes/attributes and Clutch:

Generally, the correlations are not very strong. We see the negative relationships between Clutch and things like wOBA, ISO, and SLG, but even ISO only explains a little over 17% of the variance in Clutch performance.

What's interesting is that the strongest positive correlation we see is for ground balls (GB%).

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As a follow up to my previous article on hitting metrics, I wanted to take a look at those pitching metrics that correlate year-to-year. For this installment, I looked at starting pitchers from 2004-2011 with at least 162 innings pitched in year one and year two.

As before, this is just a straightforward correlative analysis--nothing fancy. I took a look at a bevy of metrics (courtesy of the fine, upstanding citizens at FanGraphs), and here are the results:

Pitcher repertoire generally has the highest correlation, year-to-year (Y2Y). The distribution of their pitches (i.e. four-seam fastball, cutter, change up, etc.) shows great consistency from one year to the next. Now, there are potentially coding errors in that data, but the consistency of those statistics reflects what I think is generally known--that once a pitcher makes it to the big leagues as a starter they rarely alter their portfolio of pitches. What they likely alter, more regularly, is speed, sequence, and location. But that's just a hypothesis, one that can't be confirmed or rejected with this data.

Moving on.

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Sometimes you just want a quick way to identify players that took big steps forward or backwards from year to year. Well, now you have it.

I've put together an interactive dashboard that shows the year-over-year change in 40+ hitting metrics for players with at least 100 plate appearances in both 2010 and 2011. The tool also includes Wins Above Replacement (FanGraphs), value (in dollars), and BsR.

You can sort by any metric and select specific ones to compare for all hitters. (Click on a column and then use the sort button at the very bottom of the visualization.) Using the filter on the lower right-hand side you can also limit the output by some range in changes in plate appearances.

At the bottom, you can also select a specific player and view every change for each category without altering the larger table.

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On New Year's Eve, the San Diego Padres traded two pitching prospects to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for Carlos Quentin.

This is just the latest in a number of moves by new GM Josh Byrnes to shake up the roster and improve upon the Padres' 71-91 record last year.

On the one hand, the move makes sense in that the Padres are essentially a powerless team. Last year, the Padres ranked dead last in team slugging. Even with Adrian Gonzalez in their lineup in 2010, the team still came in 2nd to last in terms of slugging.

Quentin is a no-doubt power guy, sporting the 12th highest Isolated Power (ISO) score in all of baseball since 2008. So at first glance this deal seemingly fills a big hole for the Pads.

However, the elephant in the room is Petco Park.

Soon after taking the helm as GM, Byrnes went on Clubhouse Confidential and was asked about how he would select hitters given the issues with Petco.

We know things like exit speed off the bat. So a ball hit at 108 mph off the bat, what are the rewards around major league baseball for that quality of contact and how is it affected at Petco.

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