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ESPN.com: MLB – Report: Ishii, Dodgers agree to deal

How good will Ishii be?

He’s coming off a down year for him, in which he had a 4.01 ERA, struck out 7.6 per 9 IP while walking four. His career numbers are all better than that, which either means he’s on a downslide or he’s likely to bounce back.

He’s 28 years old and has been pitching for Yakult, a park that favors hitter, for seven years. He moves to a park that favors pitchers.

Clay Davenport at Baseball Prospectus recently published an indicative but not conclusive study of Japanese Baseball Equivalencies, using the stats of Major League and Triple-A hitters who have gone back and forth. You’ll find it here.

Roughly, he found that pitchers stats decline by about 10 percent when going from Japan to the Majors, which I think means that without taking into account park effects his ERA in LA in 2001 would have been about 4.40. Given the park effects both in Japan and LA it would more probably be about 4.20.

If he’s healthy and last year’s decline in strikeouts per nine innings was a blip, then I’d expect him to win 10-12 games with an ERA of about 4.20. But the blip is troubling (he’d never before struck out fewer than 9 per game since his rookie season). So while you can hope for those numbers, you have to be prepared for him to give up a lot of walks and nearly a hit per inning pitched, in which case he isn’t really draftable.

My bid price right now? $4.

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I think this link MLB Projected Stats will only work if you’re a RotoWire subscriber. It takes you to a page where they list changes they’ve made to the MLB projections that I did for the magazine.

You may not find it as interesting as I do, since for me it is a direct comment on the assumptions I made for the magazine. Some of these have changed: I projected Kelvim Escobar as a starter. It appears he’s going to be the Blue Jays’ closer this year. RotoWire fixes that.

Others are matters of opinion. The first change they made was to reduce Juan Encarnacion’s “counting stats,” which I had projected pretty modestly: 57 runs and RBI, 13 hr, 11 SB in 453 AB. We’ll learn a lot more during spring training, and the Reds have a lot of outfielders, but those numbers project out to $6. If Encarnacion goes for less than $10 you have to be all over him.

They’ve bumped Ivan Rodriguez up from 400 to 440 AB based on recent reports. I’m not sure what difference it really makes, but the last two years have amply demonstrated the danger of hoping that an aging catcher who plays every day won’t get hurt.

In the magazine I tout Mitch Meluskey strongly, but don’t give him a projection. I’m not sure what happened there, but my friends at RW fix that and reduce PT for Brandon Inge. They should also cut Javier Cardona while they’re at it.

I could go on and on. Jeff Cirillo gets downgraded, so does Todd Zeile! They boost Mark Johnson and bump Josh Paul. About that one I think they’re wrong, though I know Johnson is starting to show up on a lot of sleeper lists this year.

The bottom line is the projections in the magazine are really rough because of necessity they had to be done early. And they need this kind of massaging. You’ll find my massaging at rototouts.com in Statland a little later this spring, and at mlb.com before the season starts.

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Would you trade Ichiro Suzuki $27 and Jerry Hairston $8 for Magglio
Ordonez $33 and Kelvim Escobar $1? I am in a 4×4 AL $260 League.

By my reckoning Hairston and Ordonez are near their prices, which if I do the algebra right means this is a cheap Ichiro deal for a very cheap Escobar.

Escobar is expected to be the Blue Jay’s closer, a role he performed adequately as a rookie sensation in 1997. Since then he’s bounced around, relieving and starting. When he’s been good he’s been effective, but there have been a lot of down times, too. Last year he pitched well as a starter in the second half, which perhaps explains why the Jays have decided to make him a closer.

On top of all that indecision (for instance, after his rookie success, why exactly wasn’t he made the closer in 1998?), there are questions about his health. He suffered with numb fingers in September last year. The Jays attribute it to fatigue, but isn’t that what you’d hope for if you didn’t really know?

Ichiro, on the other hand, is coming off a great season, and is a bona fide steals and AVG producer. If he were available in a draft his price would be better than $40. For it to be a better deal for you to keep Escobar, his price would have to be more than $15. At least.

While I think you can expect, assuming he’s healthy all spring, that Escobar’s uninflated price will be more, somewhere about $17, there’s far more chance that he won’t earn his price than that Ichiro won’t earn his.

To give up a blue-chipper, you’ve got to get a blue-chipper, is a good rule of thumb. In this case, stand pat.

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On Carlos Pena: “He’s kind of like a poor man’s Keith Hernandez. He’ll hit more home runs than Hernandez. He won’t have quite the average. But he’s got great makeup, great poise. I like his swing. I like his approach. I think he could struggle for a couple of months. But in time, he’ll be a very productive hitter.”

That’s Jason Stark quoting a scout about Pena, about whom everyone is talking these days. The key words here are: “I think he could struggle for a couple of months.”

Everybody loves potential and Pena has it. But it would be crazy to bid on him this spring as if that potential was anything but unrealized.

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ESPN.com: MLB – Report: Angels’ Ortiz three years older than he claims

When we learned a couple of years ago that El Duque Hernandez was 35 rather than 32 our perception of him changed. He went from being a pitcher in his prime to being a pitcher who was racing the clock. Suddenly, his health problems became real problems, rather than the usual blips a hurler might face from year to year.

Oddly, the perception of the suddenly older Ortiz goes the other way. Suddenly his debilitating 1997 campaign, when he threw 170 minor league innings at age 21 becomes a developmental bump that happened when he was a much more reasonable 24.

Generally, pitchers have a better chance of burning out when young than once they’ve reached their late twenties. I don’t know if it’s because young arms are more vulnerable, or because the vulnerable arms have been weeded out when young, but as pitchers get older they get more durable. Up to a point, anyway.

I think this means that one may be a little less wary of Ramon’s health this year, though you still have to worry those hits he allowed. He isn’t yet dominating enough to be entirely confident of, but he certainly moved nicely in that direction last year.

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ESPN.com: MLB – Phillies’ Abreu undergoes emergency appendectomy

This is how Rotowire reported Adrian Beltre’s emergency appendectomy on January 17, 2001: “Beltre had surgery early last Friday and remained hospitalized Wednesday. Beltre is expected to be released within the next few days and should be fully recovered by the start of spring training according to Dodgers VP Derrick Hall.”

No, I’m sure not every appendectomy performed in DR results in a large hole in the colon and sudden and devastating weight loss. But Beltre’s was the first appendectomy that came to mind when I heard about Abreu’s, and he went on to miss more than four months.

Another recent baseball appendectomy was Brian Moehler’s. He had emergency surgery in April 2000 while the Tigers were playing the White Sox in Chicago. His next big league start was a month later.

That’s probably a more reasonable timetable for Abreu, but Beltre’s plight last year reminds us that accidents do happen.

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ESPN Insider: MLB Insider – Weekend Update

Okay, this page is probably password protected, too. So here is the relevant quote: Tigers: OF Kenny Lofton could be headed to Motown. The Detroit News reports that Lofton has no other suitors at this time and could sign with Detroit as early as today. The club is believed to have offered Lofton only a $1 million contract.

Yes, that’s the Members Only section at ESPN.com. And yes, Kenny Lofton signed with Chicago, perhaps even before that note was written.

The point isn’t that you have to pay to get bad info, ESPN was quoting their stringer at the Detroit News, but that even if you pay for info, you have to look at the context. And the fact is that until something happens, chances are good that the writers covering a team aren’t privy to a lot of information.

They are privy to some info. They cultivate sources on the team. But if you’ve ever hung around with baseball beat reporters, they are given pro forma access to the players and coaching staff, and they are sometimes courted by warring factions if a team is up for grabs.

What they are not able to get, unless someone is using them, is inside info from management. At least if management doesn’t want them to get it.

Sure, it’s important to follow what a team is saying about playing time and roles for all its players. But the real value of analyzing teams comes when you decide that a team can’t be so stupid as to believe what it’s saying.

That’s when you might find a reserve who gets a surprising shot at the show. And if you’re lucky, your reserve will take advantage of the chance.

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Rotohelp.com

Okay, I just plugged these guys in a comment, but then I read this story and rather loved the way he simply cut Frank Thomas. Splat!

Still, I think in spite of the writer’s willingness to speculate way out of bounds, his basic analysis is pretty much right on. AND he nails the Lofton signing.

The great ability of the world wide web is to allow anybody and everybody to be a publisher. This means that those who were once gatekeepers are cut out of the loop. It’s about time.

Let the new gatekeepers arise.