You've heard it all year long, and I heard it again in the Angels/Tigers pregame: "The red-hot Twins, the World Champion White Sox, and the Tigers: First place in baseball's toughest division."  This got me thinking, so I did a little research.  Let's look at the average win totals by division.

AL East: 68.0 wins per team
AL Central: 71.4 wins per team
AL West: 71.0 wins per team

For fun, here's the NL:

NL East: 69.0 wpt
NL Central: 63.2 wpt
NL West:67.6 wpt

So there you go.  The AL Central is the toughest, but not by as much as you'd think.  If the Angels win tonight, which they may with Escobar on the hill (7-0 lifetime vs. Detroit), our WPT would be at 71.25.  That's less that 1 division-wide win.  Why hasn't the west been hyped?  Besides East-coast bias, I think it's because the west doesn't have 100 game winners every year, we rarely have the best team in baseball.  I believe the last time that happened it was the Mariners.  What we do have is four decent teams that have a legitimate chance of winning every night no matter who they play.  The East and Cetral have punching bags at the bottom of their division, all we have are the very capable (except against us) Mariners.

Here's a fun fact: using this measurement, the NL East is stronger than the AL East.  What a difference Ortiz and Ramirez make.

So I was reading through Moneyball the other day and I came across this passage:

An extra point of on-base percentage was clearly more valuable than an extra point of slugging percentage - but by how much?  He (Paul DePodesta) proceeded to tinker with his own version of Bill James' "Runs Created" formula.  When he finished, he had a model for predicting run production that was more accurate than any he knew of.  In his model, an extra point of on-base percentage was worth three times an extra point of slugging percentage.(p.128)

DePo saw that adding OBP and SLG together meant they were of equal importance.  He knew this couldn't be true, that's why he created this formula.  So, I have calculated this value for a handful of A's players.  I call this value OPS/3 since the formula is a player's OBP plus 1/3 his SLG.

Player   OBP    SLG    OPS    OPS/3
Kendall  345    321    660    452
Johnson  355    451    806    505
Swisher  322    446    768    470
Ellis       384    477    861    543
Kotsay   325    421    746    465
Crosby   346    456    802    498
Bradley  350    484    834    511
Chavez   329    466    795    484
Payton   306    444    750    454
Kielty   350    395    745    482

Looking at these numbers, a few things jump out at me.  Kendall was widely considered to have had a terrible 2005 at the plate while JayPay was praised for picking up the offense.  Looking at their OPS, one could easily agree that Payton was a better hitter than Kendall this year, but if you look at their OPS/3, you see that their run production and, in turn value as a hitter is about equal.  The reason for this is that OPS/3 focuses much more on OBP, and Kendall is a much more patient hitter than Payton.
I wondered what the corellation between OPS and OPS/3 was, if a player had a high OPS it meant he had a high OPS/3. I figured if the corelation was high, then this whole experiment was a waste of time.  I found the r^2 to be .787 which is a poor correlation.  I know, I know, small sample size, but I still think there's something to this OPS/3 stat and we SABRANers should use it along side OPS not only because it's in Moneyball, our bible, but also cuz we should use the most accurate stat possible to calculate offensive production.  If it's good enough for DePo, it's good enough for me.

The leap from small market to big market team, that is.  I've noticed a lot of criticism on this site for giving up a first round pick for Loaiza, saying this is not what a small market team should do.  Billy definately knows this: a World Series can make any team a big market team.  People will come see a World Champion A's team.  Dolla dolla.  Maybe BB sees his chance to get the team to the WS and he's doing it without having to spend much extra money.  We have several young guys that have the potential for breakout seasons and the addition of Loaiza and a bat for Zito could be enough to get us there.  In order to stop having to be a small market team, you need to start valuing immediate results a little more and potential a little less.  Our minor league system is still loaded with talent, but nobody is gonna go see a team play because they have a stacked farm system.  I don't mind giving up a first rounder, It'd probably be a few years before he could produce at a major league level, and then if we keep being a small market team, we'd probably trade him away when he hits a peak for more draft picks.