But never fear, intrepid reader, I’m not leaving the blogging buisness, I’m just moving to a new blog. I’ve taken up the position of co-author of Michael Nicks’ True Blue L.A. The decision to leave my own private realm was a tough one, but when both Jon Weisman and Athletics Nation’s Blez really wanted me to take the position, I couldn’t say no, despite the fact I hate the name. You’ll still be getting the same two minute break from work you get by reading here, just in a more corporate setting. I hope to see you all at my new home.

One of the many skills I need at my job is expirence with SQL databases. Since I have no clue what I’m doing with them, I’m looking for a project I can do to gain expirence. I figured the best way to do this was by making my own stat engine. The engine will be built by parsing the pitch by pitch data from ESPN.

Right now, the only thing I know I want to add is the ability to find stats within a specific date range. Other than that, I’m wide open so now would be a good time to mention what stats you would like to see that aren’t currently avialable. If you want to know things like how often a player swings at the first pitch, now would be a good time to ask. The only caveat is you have to be able to generate these stats from the ESPN pitch by pitch data, so you can’t find things like batting average against curve balls.

This project probably won’t get a workable build until the end of the season, but for now, let me know what stats you’ve always wanted to see, but aren’t available publicly.

When Jim Bowden traded for Alfonso Soriano for Brad Wilkerson and others, oh how we laughed. Soriano’s flaws stretched as far as the eye could see: he had no discipline, his numbers were vastly inflated by his home park, he can’t catch the ball, the Nationals already had a second baseman, and so on. But Alfonso Soriano would have none of that. Alfonso Soriano wanted to get paid, so he learned to do things like “take a pitch”, “hit the ball harder”, and “not walk out on your team when you get put in left field.” Suddenly, Soriano was no longer the most overrated player in baseball, and Bowden’s bold move paid off. “It’s so crazy it just might work” indeed.

With Soriano putting up near MVP numbers, it was clear what our flaxen haired hero needed to do: trade Soriano for players that would refill an barren Nationals farm system. But Bowden would have none of that. Maybe he got greedy after fleecing the Reds so badly and had unreasonable expectations (”okay Ned, I’ll give you Soriano for the entire roster of Jacksonville and Vegas. Oh, and your house too”), but whatever it was, Soriano did not move, bringing our story to a happy ending. Bowden’s stupidity will not get rewarded, and he lost a very generous package of players for two draft picks.

Ha ha.

With the losses of Willy Aybar and Odalis Perez, the Dodgers now have three players left on the 40 man roster from the Evans era: Cesar Izturis, Eric Gagne, and Hong-Chih Kuo.

A resources section has been added to the sidebar. For now, it contains the future payroll information, and the Big Board, which has finally been updated.

When you go 1-5 during a week, you can’t expect good production, but last night’s 13 run assult helped a lot. Andre Ethier’s week stood out, but Furcal’s producton was lost in the shuffle, and it brought him to above average production for the first time this season.

Meanwhile, Izturis took up what will likely be permanent residence on the bottom of the list, while Ramon Martinez continued his regression to the mean. Every other player on the players contributed varying degrees of suck.

Ned Colletti faced a dilemma. Brett Tomko just had to end up on the active roster, but there was no room for him. It was an agonizing decision, “do I send Carrara down? Should I DFA Ledee?” These thoughts wracked through Colletti’s brain as the clock counted down. Suddenly, an idea sprouted into his head “a trade, that’s what I’ll do! But with who? And for what?” Given the circumstances, I would expect him to trade Jose Cruz Jr. for a file cabinet, but Colletti actually did quite well for himself, acquiring Wilson Betemit for Danys Baez and Willy Aybar.

The first part of the trade, Danys Baez, is almost completely irrelevant. If you assume the Dodgers aren’t going anywhere this year, losing Baez doesn’t mean anything, and even if you think they are, the difference between Baez and Tomko in the bullpen for two months is about a run and a half according to their VORP rates this year, so Baez is no loss, plus it removes the risk that he accepts arbitration and we get stuck paying five or six million to a middle reliever.

That makes the trade Betemit for Aybar. Betemit has issues, but he looks to be having something of a breakout season this year, with his isolated power reaching almost .220 where prior to this year it was only .109. This can be largely attributed to a huge jump in home run to fly ball ratio, surging from 7.9% to 16.3%. I was a bit concerned this was a fluke, but an increase in doubles shows that he’s doing more than just getting a little bit more lift on his fly balls; he’s driving the ball much better than he had been previously. Also of note is Betemit’s defense. While he has a very terrible rate2 of 82, other defensive metrics love him. Probabilistic model of range ranked Betemit as the best defensive third baseman in 2005, Dewan’s system rates him at +7, and his career .830 zone rating would be third in baseball this year. Also in Betemit’s favor is his price, he won’t be arbitration eligible until 2008 since he had barely a year of service time heading into this season.

Of course, there’s a downside to all this, and it’s a pretty big one, Betemit is not a patient hitter. It’s not quite Carl Crawford level but his isolated patience is a slightly below average .059. When you consider that his BABIP is a fairly high .353 paired with a 22.5 line drive percentage, you have a guy that looks like he could contribute a .330 on base percentage, max. When you compare that with Aybar’s career .114 patience, Betemit looks rather pedestrian.

There are a few variables in this trade that could decide it one way or the other in the long run. The first question is will Aybar develop power? If he does any time in the near future, the Dodgers lose out big time on this deal by trading Aybar for his older twin that walks half as much. PECOTA is not all that optimistic about Aybar’s ability to hit the ball out of the park any time in the near future, and his comparables: Dale Sveum, Roy Smalley and Tucker Ashford make this seem like a reasonable prediction. Another big factor is Betemit’s age. You’d think in this day and age we’d be able to know how old a player is, but there are cases for Betemit being either 24 or 26. If he’s 24, I like him a lot, since he’s got a good shot at developing even further than he has this year. If he’s 26, it’s probably not going to get much better than this.

I like this exchange, even though it represents a trade off. This trade helps what little hope the Dodgers have in 2006 and Betemit gives the Dodgers a much needed power boost until 2007 while we wait for Andy LaRoche. After this, Betemit should transform into a relatively affordable utility player. After 2007, Willy Aybar will probably be the more productive player, but in this case, I’m okay with that. When you factor in the fact that Grady Little is not willing to start Aybar ahead of Izturis, I feel a lot more comfortable with Wilson Betemit as the third baseman in 2007 instead of Aybar. I haven’t liked many of Ned’s trades, but this is the type of move that he needed to do. It gives us a minor boost this year, and it will help in the coming years as well.

A couple days ago, I wrote about the trade that sent Odalis Perez to the Royals, and came to the conclusion that it was a toss up. Since then, some new details have emerged. Namely, the Dodgers would be receiving far less cash than I had originally figured, so the move needs to be reevaluated.

With so much money trading hands, the best way to do this is to use the expected value system that I explained this off-season. The basic idea behind EV is that every player has a chance to contribute X amount of runs for Y dollars. EV tries to determine how many runs per dollar a player will contribute on average. A GMs main goal should be making moves that give a positive EV. In this case, I’m going to look at how likely it is that Odalis is completely done for this to be a worthwhile move.

To simplify things, I’ll assume that Elmer Dessens will put up 20 pitching runs over replacement a season, which is close to what he’s put up since being converted to a middle reliever/spot starter. With 38% of the season remaining, it means Dessens will contribute 27.6 runs over replacement during his time with the Dodgers. Since the money we’re paying Odalis Perez has to go somewhere, I’ll give it to Dessens, so he’ll get paid $13,565,000 for the next season and a half. At this salary, we’re paying Dessens $491,485 per pitching run.

For simplicities sake, we’ll assume two outcomes for Odalis, that he’s completely done, worth zero pitching runs, or that he’ll be average, represented by 58 pitching runs (pulled from the numbers of the king of mediocrity, Jeff Weaver). All other cases are assumed to average out to 58 pitching runs. For example, I’m assuming that it’s equally likely that he’ll be worth 48 pitching runs and 68 runs. When you take this 58 runs figure and prorate it over the remaining 1.38 years on his contract, you end up with 80 runs.

With this information, we can find out done Odalis has to be to make this a good exchange. This is found with the formula 16,565,000/80x = $491,485. This equation finds the point where Odalis’ pitching runs per dollar will equal Dessens. The result is that if there is more than a 58% chance that Odalis’ time as an effective pitcher is over, this was a good swap. When I originally calculated the savings at 6.85 million, there had to be a 41.2% chance Odalis was done for this to work out.

I believe that there’s about a 50-50 chance of Odalis coming back for the reasons I pointed out in my last post (peripherals not abysmal, extremely high BABIP, and he was unfairly jerked around). At those odds, this becomes a slightly harmful, but still sensible trade for the Dodgers. Unfortunately, the Dessens for Odalis swap was not the only part of this trade; Blake Johnson and Julio Pimentel were also part of the deal. This means that the deal is probably harmful to the Dodgers. Like all of Colletti’s recent moves where he’s swapped second tier prospects for mediocrity, it probably won’t hurt the team, but if any of these players pan out, it negates all of the good made by the mediocre players that were acquired.

As Joe Shehann points out in his latest article, Colletti has now traded Johnson, Pimental, Dioner Navarro, Chuck Tiffany, and Edwin Jackson for Dessens, Mark Hendrickson, Danys Baez, Lance Carter, and Toby Hall. While this trade would have been decent if the Dodgers saved 6.85 million, or they only swapped Perez for Dessens, the combination of saving very little money and losing two decent prospects means that it’s another Colletti move. It provides a slight upgrade with the chance that the Dodgers could end up getting completely screwed.

Part of me wants to laugh. What else can you do when the opposing pitcher gets named the top batter of the game against your ace to send your team plummetting seven and a half games out of first. On the other hand, the other part me wants to be very angry and irrational, so let me get that out of the way.

STOP LOSING GOD

DAMMIT!

Anyway, I find myself strangely torn on the buy or sell issue. A week ago, I thought it would have been crazy to sell. The Dodgers were 47-48, and just 3.5 games out of first, plenty ready to make a run. My general thinking is it’s insane to change your mind based on one week of results, so I should still want to buy.

On the other hand, that was a really, crappy week.

The Dodgers are now 6.5 games out of the wild card and a 7.5 games back in the West. No longer can the Dodgers win the divison by being less mediocre than the other teams, they now have to be legitamtely good. Assuming it will take 85 wins to make the playoffs in this crappy divison, the Dodgers would have to go 38-22 in the last 60 games for a post season birth. There’s a chance the Dodgers could play .633 ball the rest of the way, but it’s not something I would risk the future for. Therefore, anyone with a one year contract must go.

Nomar would be a fool to not enter the free agent market this offseason, so he’s the first to go, I’m sure we could actually get some good players from them. Baez and Lofton are the next out the door, but I doubt that the Dodgers could acquire anything worthwile for them. If you can find a taker for Cruz, Ledee, or Martinez you can get rid of them too.

I was fully confident that the Dodgers could win a division that is probably worse than it was last year. I was wrong. I guess we’ll get ‘em next year.

Odalis Perez, Julio Cesar Pimental, Blake Johnson, and cash have been sent to the Royals in exchange for Elmer Dessens.

I don’t know how I feel about this deal until we find out how much “and cash” is, so stay tuned.

The “and cash” is reported to be eight million dollars. Odalis’ current contract is as follows:

Signed 3-year deal worth 24M thru 2007 season on 1/7/05- He receives a 4.5M signing bonus payable between November 2006 and Nov. 2007- + He will make salaries of 3M in 2005, 7.25M in 2006 and 7.75M in 2007- + The deal includes a Team Option for 2008 worth 9M or a 1.5M buyout- + he can earn performance bonuses in 2006, 2007 and 2008: 150K each for 185 and 200 IP and 200K for 215IP

All told, Odalis was owed his entire 4.5 million signing bonus, 3.625 million for the rest of this year, 7.75 million for 2007, and a 1.5 million dollar buyout, for a total of 17.375 million dollars. The eight million in cash drops that to 9.375. Meanwhile, Dessens is owed 2.55 million through the end of 2007, bringing the total money saved to 6.825 million. So, the question is, is Elmer Dessens and 6.825 million dollars worth Odalis, Blake Johnson, and Pimentel. It’s hard to say.

Neither Johnson nor Pimentel seem all that valuable in my eyes, as they both struggled in Vero Beach in their age 21 seasons. Pimentel’s strikeout rate is promising, but he has no control. Baseball America sees something in them, as they were named the number 16 and 17 prospects in the organization, ahead of players like Cory Dunlap, Xavier Paul, and Willy Aybar. Overall it seems rather silly to predict the future of people putting up mediocre numbers in A ball, so I can’t consider them a huge loss.

That leaves the question is Odalis Perez worth Elmer Dessens and 6.85 million dollars? Dessens is putting up his usual numbers, below average strikeout rate, decent control, and keeps the ball in the park relatively well. Perez, as we all know has been terrible. His strikeouts have declined to an even five per nine, and balls are leaving the park at a rather poor 1.36 per nine rate. In his favor, he still has a good walk rate, and his BABIP is an obscenely high .372. Anecdotal evidence seems to confirm he was getting unlucky, as he seemed to give up a lot of dinky singles, which he would make worse by giving up a home run shortly there after.

I hate to get into mental factors, but the way Grady jerked around Odalis has to be a factor. After pulling him from the rotation after only six starts, three of which were very good starts where he only gave up one run, OP went up to two weeks between appearances. That generally doesn’t lead to successful pitching. I’d like to keep Odalis around because he was a good pitcher at one point, unlike Hendrickson or Tomko, but it’s entirely possible he’s done.

Honestly, I can’t call this trade either way. If Odalis comes back, and is able to produce at even a Mark Hendrickson like level, the Dodgers probably lose, but it’s entirely possible that he won’t. I liked Odalis when he was here, he produced some good memories like his one hitter, and when he struck out Barry Bonds by quick pitching him, but watching him struggle this year was completely brutal. The upside seems to lie with the Royals, they’re getting two decent prospects and a guy who’s had far more success than any starting pitcher in their rotation, while the Dodgers side of the deal isn’t going to get any better than it is today. However, seven million bucks is halfway to a nice free agent, and I like nice free agents.