Okay, good. This post is actually about the Washington Nationals. Scary as this might seem, they appear to be putting together a team with some nice pieces, one that will definitely be competing in a couple of years, maybe sooner! The best example of this is how they just fleeced the Minnesota Twins!

The Nationals, who picked up Matt Capps off of the scrap heap after the Pirates non-tendered him over the winter, just parlayed him for stud prospect catcher Wilson Ramos, and a relief pitcher on top of that in Joe Testa! Yes, the Twins could "afford" to do this since Joe Mauer will be their catcher for the next ten years, but still, do you trade the best prospect you have for a relief pitcher that you hope isn't your closer next year? 

The Nationals now have a very nice looking nucleus if they can get Bryce Harper signed. They have him, Strasburg as their ace of the future (and pretty good now too), Ryan Zimmerman at third, and now Wilson Ramos who ought to be brought to the MLB level right now and put in as the catcher. Just like with the Reds and their good drafting and trading, all you have to do is get rid of Jim Bowden, and good things happen. 

Simple as that. 

(Why hypothetical? Cliff Lee missed the first month of the season due to injury, which actually makes his numbers look far more impressive)

* Innings Pitched - If you projected their current per-game inning averages (Cliff Lee at a sensational 8.17, Roy Halladay at 7.7), Cliff Lee would throw 286 innings, and Halladay would throw 272. Our basis is that a full season for a current-day major leaguer is 35 games started. No pitcher has pitched 272 innings in a season since 1988, when Dave Stewart did it (275.2 innings in 37 starts, a 7.45 average). These guys are both well outpacing Stewart in per-game innings!

* Complete Games - You will hear every old school baseball guy harp on the fact that complete games have gone the way of the dodo, they're extinct. As it stands right now though, both of these pitchers have a sensational amount of games that are not just complete, but 8 and 9 inning outings. 

Halladay: 22 starts, 8 complete games (36.3%) plus one 9 inning start, the duel against Travis Wood (40.9% if you include it), and 13 total starts of 8 innings plus (59%). Almost six out of every ten starts, your bullpen either gets a night off, or one inning of work. 

Lee: 17 starts, 6 complete games (35.3%), plus two 9-inning starts (47.1%), and 13 total starts of eight innings plus (76.5%). He's only failed to go 8 innings four times, to go 7 innings once, and that was a 6.1 inning start. Wow!

How impressive are these numbers, especially Cliff Lee's? The last time a pitcher threw 300 innings was 30 years ago, Steve Carlton. He threw 304 innings over 38 starts, 14 of these starts on three days rest (was at the crossroads of a different era no doubt). That's exactly 8 innings per start. 13 complete games (34.2%), plus one 9 inning start (36.8%), and 25 starts of 8 innings plus (65.8%). Only four times did he fail to go 7 innings, and none of those four starts were bad (all under two runs, so all quality starts). In 38 starts, he failed to give a quality start by game score twice (49 and 39), by non-SABR stats, he had 32 quality starts. I don't have B-R Play Index to check this, but 

What I'm getting at with this comparison is that I believe Cliff Lee is having a renaissance season 30 years after it was last done. I can't recall any time in these last 30 years that I can think of a pitcher averaging eight innings per start, much less with the efficiency of Lee (seven walks?!). Halladay's work shouldn't be shrugged at either, he's on pace to set a career high in innings pitched, and even if the win-loss record doesn't show it, is on pace to have the best season of his career by a nice margin (and still only be the second best pitcher in his league). 

So, one day maybe two weeks ago, MLB retweeted that Mike Leake, stellar Reds rookie starter, wanted more followers and would be giving away an autographed baseball should he hit 3,000 followers. Mostly because he was a member of my beloved Reds, I added him to my list, didn't give it a second thought. I figured, I'll see some cool tweets, hear more about a Reds player, it's all good. So, imagine my surprise at what I saw on Tuesday!

I don't get a ton of mentions or use Twitter for a lot of direct messages, although it has been nice for getting info to the Wezen-Ball blogger when he "kinda" got a mention a month or so ago, so when I see a mention, it's actually a big deal to me, not just something that gets lost in the shuffle. So, my phone told me I had two mentions, and as it turned out, one of them was from Mike Leake! I had won the autographed baseball!

I can't wait to get it, since I'm having it signed to Anthony and not to me, it'll be his first baseball to go into his room. He's got some Bengals gear in there right now, not a ton of it, but some, and now we'll begin to build up a little bit of Reds gear too.

The convergence of getting a signed baseball from a rookie pitcher to our rookie fan (literally) is really cool, and you can be assured there will be pictures, that is, if you know where to look for them! My thanks to Mike and the Reds, this was a very cool and unexpected surprise. 

It's a different ballgame now, completely. 

Emulation has made the prospect of bringing back anything that's retro very possible again, even to the point of emulating something that your system can, in theory, already do! DOSBox on a PC is that weird kind of parallel, since it's emulating an old x86 processor on an ... x86 processor?! Yes, a much faster one, like hundreds of times faster, but nonetheless, a similar architecture. That said, we know why it's done, it's done because older programs aren't tolerant of 64-bit, or even 32-bit architecture, and not even close to being tolerant of the speed differences. Thus, we have an emulator that is no different than pushing a clock back 20 to 30 years, but yet doing it so perfectly. 

Why my sudden interest in wanting to play some old DOS stuff? Two games came to mind, and I promptly went and got them to try out. The first was Stunts, a basic acrobatic racing game made in the early 90's. The object was simple: build a stunt track, race it against the computer or against the clock, and don't wreck. Of course, wrecking was pretty fun too, as much as cheesy VGA graphics would let it be. That said, plugging it back in was still fun and rewarding, still a blast to play, even with a keyboard! The next step is for me to plug in a PS2 controller and really have at it, maybe even with analog controls. 

The second game was IndyCar Racing. I have extremely fond memories of this series being the first "complete" simulation for, at the time, CART racing. Tremendously realistic, and extremely advanced for its day. I remember being frustrated because my 486 had issues playing it sometimes. Trust us, that's a non-issue now! But anyways, in giving it a very quick test, something became very clear to me: this game will take more of an adjustment period, and it's that change in graphics as the reason why. We've grown so used to very easy-to-see tracks that in places like the Cleveland track, built from an old airfield complete with runway, it's not clear to see where you should turn like it would be with a modern game. This is realism we're talking here, but when you get used to super-perfect graphics, going back to pixelated, even if it's still fun, is a change. Stunts is so dirt simple, it doesn't suffer from this, but a racing game shooting to be realistic sadly does. 

I've definitely not given up on IndyCar Racing, and can't wait to give it some more time, but it'll definitely need it. That said, I've been very pleased to go back and try these two classic games. 

Editor's Note: Both of these games are freely available on many abandonware sites, and I'll be posting a huge Stunts track pack in the near future from another site.)

We could do this ad nauseum, but my question would be this. Knowing these metrics, what could the Reds have given up to successfully land this guy? Knowing what we know now, it looks like it would have been less than anyone ever expected!

Starting Pitcher - The Diamondbacks wanted a major-league or major-league ready pitcher, something the Reds have a wealth of right now. The kicker is, the guy we have who looks like Joe Saunders in effectiveness is named Aaron Harang, and he's on the DL (and has a $10m salary, less desirable unless the Reds covered some of it). So, we could offer one of our lower-end guys like Sam LeCure, sell them on how long they'd have him under team control, and maybe reduce the need for other prospects. Matt Maloney would fall in this realm too, but I shudder to give up a decent left handed starter. 

Mid-Range Prospect - Pick a half-decent player at the AA level, include him, non-pitcher. I'm not knowledgeable enough on our roster down there, so I trust your judgment. 

Surely, compared to what the Angels "gave up", this would look really tempting to a franchise wanting to save some money! But, you say, Dan Haren is going to make in the low 8-figures the next couple of years! What about that? Simple, Aaron Harang will be off the books most likely, and even if they exercise the 2011 option for Bronson Arroyo, the salary figures would appear to be similar to what they are now. Move to 2012, Arroyo and Harang are both likely gone, and your young starters have moved up, and you're looking at a rotation of Haren, Cueto, Bailey, Leake, and Chapman, and limitless other possibilities.

Seeing how it all went down in hindsight, this could have been a nice gain. 

Editor's Note: I wrote this before Haren went down with a bruised forearm last night. Apparently, forces much more important than me must know something!

I've just past real time again, at July 31st, 2010, and a (grumble) member of the Pawtucket Pawsox. Why do I put up with this? Simple, my contract runs out after this season and I may be able to move to a new organization! Anyways, over 300 innings in my career, my ERA is right around 2.00, with a 28-8 record. In almost 130 innings this year in Triple-A, I've walked six guys.

So why stick with this when I could be playing MLB 10? Simply put, why move to the next game until I can at least complete one career or accomplish something in this game! My character is a mere 19 years old, he's about to make the majors, and if I stick with this game, it's more than possible I could pitch for 20 "virtual" seasons, and win 300 games. Sure, there would be plenty left for me to do with the game, like a batter RTTS, or even a Reds franchise (I have one ... in Spring Training ... of year one), but to be able to actually accomplish something of that magnitude of a game would make it worth it. 

And that, friends, is why I still play MLB 09 instead. Oh, I'll get MLB 10, even if it is just a rental, before the season is up so that I can download updated rosters ... those are all not available anymore on MLB 09, they shut off the servers at the start of the next season. 

• There is a lot of good reason to heap praise upon Mike Leake. In my opinion, he's the Rookie Of The Year right now only because Stephen Strasburg doesn't have nearly the innings, and because Jason Heyward has been hurt. The 6-1 record is impressive, but it could be so much better. He's been the solid starting pitcher, well in line for a win, both times this season that the Reds bullpen have blown six run leads late in a game. His GSIP (look at my previous posts for this) is at 0.293, and a 2.1 combined WAR is very impressive for a rookie, just as much because he's closing in on 1.0 ... as a hitter! Let's hope the Reds can get him to 13-15 wins and he continues his very solid pitching. If he gets there, maybe he can win this thing come October. 
   
• It's been well publicized, at least on ESPN, but the Reds have the easiest schedule remaining in all of Major League Baseball. Just 25 games against teams above .500 right now. Three of them are this weekend against the Rockies, and they get to miss Ubaldo Jimenez. Yes, the Cardinals have the second easiest schedule, but it still sets up for a great chance at 90-95 wins, and that might just be enough. 
   
• What moves do you think the Reds will have the guts to make to help them stay on top? I was shocked to look on Baseball-Reference to see that Chris Heisey has just as many batting runs in WAR projection as Jonny Gomes does. Add in the defensive differences, and somehow Heisey has a 0.8 WAR, and Gomes has a .... minus 0.3?! Has a player ever been Top 10 in the league in RBI's with a negative WAR on a season?! My heart doesn't like it as much as my brain does, but I hope Heisey gets more play in the second half. Wouldn't Gomes make one hell of a good pinch hitter when he doesn't start? 
   
• We know that the first two starters are Arroyo and Volquez, but who fills out your five, or even six starters? If the Reds are serious about limiting Mike Leake's innings, and they go 6-man as a result, I hope it's a case where it's like college for him and he becomes the "Sunday pitcher" and goes once a week, that way it will not disrupt him drastically because of the college baseball experience, and it will keep the other pitchers closer to a normal 5-day rotation. Off days will help that too, and I'm not factoring them in. As for who those other three should be? Johnny Cueto for sure, Travis Wood should stick for now, and I'm sure Aaron Harang will be in that mix eventually. They'll need everyone as it plays out, and Dusty Baker said it in a quote I heard him say about his Giants in 2003. They started with 8 solid starters for five spots, and ended up with three. 

Hopefully these will make you think of things you hadn't thought of before to go along with all of the well thought out Reds blog posts already made about the first half. By all means, add your thoughts here, let's hear 'em!

• The people that Cleveland really should be mad at are Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen. Three years ago, these were the guys who showed that in the NBA right now, you can win with three big players. Yes, the method that they came to be was different (this was through trades as opposed to free agency), but by the time September rolls around, the roster makeup could be strikingly similar. Those '98 Celtics has some excellent young talent either in rookie or second-year form (Glen Davis, Rajon Rondo), and veterans who joined on at a discount seeing it as a chance to win a ring (James Posey, Sam Cassell), and a few role players in between. It's hard to find an instance where a single guy wins a title, even if there is one true alpha-dog on the team. Pau Gasol might not be the "name" guy Kobe is, but I have to think he's a Top 10 player in the league, and the Lakers don't own two titles without him. 
   
• Using that roster structure, the three guys who might be the most important are their three second round draft picks. Dexter Pittman, Jarvis Vanardo and Deshaun Butler (provided his knee heals) are all good fits because they have specific talents, come from good college programs and have a winning pedigree. If one of them becomes a solid player, not even as good as a guy like Rondo, they'll be in much better shape. 
   
• John Hollinger is the NBA's version of a stat-geek. I'm a baseball guy at heart, and that's a game that revolves so perfectly around numbers. While I don't claim to understand his NBA metrics nearly as well, the ones I do are well thought out and I give them credence. In his recent ESPN Insider articles, he has the Heat team projected at around a 60-win team with these three guys on there. Yeah, that's a heck of a team, these guys are damn good, it should be. But, there's other teams of that quality out there. The Thunder, the Lakers, and the Magic all automatically come to mind as teams that could project to be that well right now. So, we could give this team the conference finals as a show-in, but after that? This dynasty thing isn't a gimme!
   
• My other big thought was this: has a player of his calibur, Top-5, ever jumped to a new team in the NBA during the prime of his career? The only one I cound find comparably in the last 20 years was Charles Barkley, and yes, it did get the Suns into a NBA Finals, and you didn't hear from the Sixers again until they drafted a new alpha-dog star in Allen Iverson. The detractors have a point that players like this just don't move in the absolute peak of their prime, but this also isn't your dad's NBA either. 

So with all of this thrown out there, my belief is that from a strictly technical standpoint, as long as LeBron doesn't mind his name being forever linked with two other guys in his own "Big Three", then good for him. There's a small part of me that chuckles when Cleveland gets hosed in sports deal like this (I am a Cincinnati kid at heart), but I'll even leave that at the table. No qualms with him making the move, no qualms with Cleveland's reaction, and a happier life for me since I did NOT watch The Decision.

(These numbers are accurate as to Monday, so they may be slightly different now) 

NATIONAL LEAGUE

Ubaldo Jimenez - 1.16 ERA - 2.679 GSIP
Jaime Garcia - 1.49 - 1.631 GSIP
Josh Johnson - 1.91 - 2.094 GSIP
Roy Halladay - 1.96 - 1.941 GSIP
Matt Cain - 2.05 - 1.863 GSIP
Livan Hernandez - 2.28 - 1.101 GSIP
Adam Wainwright - 2.30 - 2.064 GSIP
Mike Pelfrey - 2.39 - 1.284 GSIP
Tim Hudson - 2.43 - 1.102 GSIP
Chris Carpenter - 2.66 - 1.415 GSIP

Stephen Strasburg - 3.081 GSIP

Stuff To Know: Number one, if Strasburg maintains this for the 100 innings he's supposed to pitch this year, he's the Rookie of The Year, and he gets some 2nd or 3rd place Cy Young votes. This pains me since I want Mike Leake to be that guy, but let's face it, Strasburg would be better. If he did this for a full season, he'd be the MVP, much less the Cy Young!

Secondarily, it tells me that a marker for a pitcher having an excellent season would be a 1, where a 2 would represent a top-level season. No doubt people would be willing to say that the four best pitchers in the NL right now are Jimenez, Halladay (he's so close), Johnson and Wainwright, with Matt Cain pretty close.

AMERICAN LEAGUE

David Price - 2.23 - 1.426 GSIP
Doug Fister - 2.45 - 1.392 GSIP
Andy Pettite - 2.46 - 1.394 GSIP
Clay Buchholz - 2.52 - 1.004 GSIP
Jeff Niemann - 2.83 - 1.326 GSIP
Cliff Lee - 2.88 - 1.631 GSIP
Francisco Liriano - 2.90 - 1.438 GSIP
Jason Vargas - 3.05 - 0.874 GSIP
Phil Hughes - 3.11 - 1.301 GSIP
Jon Lester - 3.18 - 1.341 GSIP

Stuff To Know: The fact that the ERA's are higher in the AL definitely brings this group into a much closer range, including the fact that Jason Vargas, much like Mike Leake for my Reds (with a very similar GSIP number) might have traditional stats a little bit better than he's actually pitching. Just as interesting that Cliff Lee has a GSIP much better than anyone but has a "comparatively high" 2.88 ERA, that appears to be on the strength of five very strong (70+) starts out of nine and only one poor one, which he still got 6-1/3 innings out of. Mitigates the fact it wasn't that good. The other thing I noticed here is that without fail, every one of these pitchers has gotten badly rocked once this year, even when consistently good otherwise. In the NL, Jimenez hasn't failed to have a game score quality start, and as the numbers above two would indicate, those pitchers are just not giving up games under 40 at all.

So as a follow-up, I feel this metric, and maybe the soon to be looked at GS-per-pitch stat definitely exposes who is having a good year. Yes, there's a ton of other sabremetric type stats to do this, but hey, I don't know if anyone else has gone this route yet, so why not be happy about it! It also, tying another blog post in, only continues to validate Strasburg's great start. Oh yeah, the guy he's being compared to, Karl Spooner? His first two starts with those 27 k's in 18 innings? An unsustainable (and really incredible) 4.5 GSIP! Two shutouts will do that for ya.

HYPOTHESIS - My Impressions:

Bronson Arroyo - Always decent, innings eater
Mike Leake - Excellent and consistent
Aaron Harang - Better than he's been, still average
Johnny Cueto - Better this year but not good with longevity
Homer Bailty - See Johnny Cueto!
Sam Lecure - Not enough starts to find an opinion, but at least serviceable so far.

TEST 1 - Game Score / Innings Pitched - As a starting metric, I added up the game scores of all starts, and then divided by innings pitched. Often, an "off the charts" Game Score would be 90 for a complete game, so theoretically, a pitcher who averages 10 points an inning should be really good. Simple enough. The results of this were as follows, rounded to 2 decimal points:

Bronson Arroyo: 7.52
Mike Leake: 8.52
Aaron Harang: 7.82
Johnny Cueto: 8.63
Homer Bailey: 8.25
Sam LeCure: 8.88

Running this the first time shows my first major flaw: the 50 points you get as a starting point mean that this formula favors pitchers who don't go deep into games. Sam Lecure's last start, a score of 57 over 6 innings, is not as good as a comparable 85 or 86 score over a complete game, as you could imagine. While we certainly want a formula that will lessen the impact of shorter outings, we don't want to eliminate or reverse the effect completely. So, we tweak.

TEST 2 - [Game Score - 50] / Innings Pitched - To fix this problem, we'll just take out the 50 points you get to start, so that the only points recognized are ones earned or taken away. That changes the numbers to these:

Bronson Arroyo: -0.037 (his combined game store in this method? -3 total!)
Mike Leake: 0.763 (his starts are consistently in the 60's, meaning he's netting a positive score more often than not)
Aaron Harang: -0.652
Johnny Cueto: 0.306
Homer Bailey: -0.632
Sam LeCure: 0.231

Ubaldo Jimenez: 2.851
Roy Halladay: 1.941

1968 Bob Gibson: 2.908

Craig Stammen: -1.176 (worst qualifying ERA in NL)

If you ever needed to know how dominant these top-shelf guys are, this might be a good indicator. Every inning Ubalso Jimenez throws, he's worth 2.851 game score points. Not counting the 2-point bonus for working later into games, if all he did was get three guys to hit the ball in play and be putout, that's 3 points. That's an incredible number! Because I had read his early season performances compared to that of Bob Gibson in 1968, I did that number too. It's awful close, and shows his this can help even out the complete-game eras with the modern era of 6-8 inning starts.

But back to the Reds. This definitely validates that Mike Leake has been the most efficient pitcher on the staff so far. I'm not sure how his number relates to that of the other top pitchers (he's 12th in ERA and his WHIP is higher than anyone around him), but it cements that's he's been very good. It puts Bronson Arroyo that (in theory) average, Cueto pitching better due to some of his domating appearances, and Harang and Bailey below average. I've felt like Bailey was pitching better than this, but that's due to his shutout last month, it's obviously not consistent.

The further follow-up to this is that I think it might be more extensable, all the way down to a score-per-pitch rating. The idea being to take that efficiency all the way to a pitch count level. It's a work in progress, expect to see more posts on it.