All of the necessary trades and paths that brought the 25 players on the current 25-man roster came to Seattle. Arrows indicate trades, with the arrow originating at the player (or package of players) given up by the M's and ending at the player(s) received. Inspired by a (much(!!!) more in depth) image I saw over at blazersedge.com

via i2.photobucket.com

Yellow border: Drafted

Red border: International/Amateur Free Agent signing

Black border: Originally signed to minor league contract

Green border: Free Agent signing

Teal border: Traded for

Purple border: Rule 5 guy

Filled in blue means still in the organization, filled in white means no longer with the org. The original Griffey is some sort of hybrid.

If any of those draft picks are compensation picks (as I think Jones might be), let me know, I couldn't find good info on that in any quick googling. Most info taken from Cot's and the Baseball Cube, with help from wikipedia at times. Let me know if you find any errors, I will probably be adding in the whole 40-man and re-organizing it a little in the next couple weeks.

So I'm actually an M's fan (but I did predict the Phils to win the WS last year!), but there was a discussion on fangraphs.com about how the phillies and mets compared, especially each team's "Big 4". Reyes/Rollins, Wright/Utley, and Santana/Hamels all compared very evenly it seemed, but the Beltran/Howard comparison seemed to meet alot of resistance, many claiming that Beltran was far superior to Howard and the comparison was silly (as Howard tends to be irrationally overvalued by people like the BBWAA and the general media, the sabr community tends to lash back with an equally irrational undervaluation of him). So I did some looking into it using Howard's fangraphs page. I have no idea if this is a very saber-oriented community or not, I haven't so much as read a post, but either way I went pretty in-depth and figured I'd come on and share what I found out. Since I'm not sure how saber-oriented you guys are here I'll give you a quick description of some of the less-obvious stats because I'm proscrastinating my homework, if you still have any questions I'll try to clarify them.

WAR -  "Wins Above Replacement" - a giant conglomerate stat that quantifies hitting, baserunning, and fielding in terms of wins provided over a replacement player. The idea is that a team of "replacement level" players would win about 52 games in the major leagues - replacement level being rule 5 draft guys, waiver wire pickups, trade-throw ins, super-cheap FA's, etc. As an easy example, a team with 24 replacement level players (or 0 WAR players) and a 4 WAR player would then be expected to win 56 games. 2 WAR is generally considered a league average player, at least for position players. Google it if you want to know how it's calculated, it's an intricate process.

O-swing% - percentage of balls outside the strike zone swung at

O-contact% - percentage of contact made on balls outside the strike zone

Z-swing% & Z-contact% - the same as above, but with balls in the strike zone

LD%, GB%, FB% - percentage of balls hit that are line drives, groundballs, and flyballs

HR/FB% - percentage of flyballs that are home runs. More useful for determining how lucky pitchers are actually, but the application here is that if a hitter's HR/FB% usually stays pretty constant over large sample sizes, so if a hitter typically has a 20% HR/FB%, but is on a streak where he's hit little or no HR in a while but is still hitting lots of FB, it's assumed that he's just getting "unlucky" and the HR's will come back without any real approach change. Conversely, if the same historic 20% HR/FB% player is on a tear where he's hitting 50% HR/FB he'll be expected to come back to earth very shortly. (BTW, Howard has the best HF/FB% in MLB in the last 3 years)

BABIP - Batting Average on Balls In Play - Essentially, a measure of how many non-home run batted balls turn into hits. It's typically calculated as (hits-HR)/(AB-K-HR), and is another stat used to tell if a hitter has been lucky or unlucky, as it, like HR/FB, tends to revert to that player's historic average. The theory is that hitters only have so much control over where exactly they hit the ball onto the field, and that if a hitter is hitting alot of line drives but they're going straight to fielders (lowering his BABIP), it's mostly "bad luck", and it'll average out in the end as the hitter will revert to his historic BABIP and balls will begin finding holes instead of gloves again. In essence, it's a calculation of how much the opposing defense effects the hitters traditional stats - a lower-than-normal BABIP means the defense is turning alot of balls into outs, through some combination of good defense and luck, and a higher-than-normal BABIP means the opposite.

Hope you enjoy the post, and thanks for finally getting Moyer the ring that he deserves.

Continue reading this post »