Chicago blunders....but I guess that's nothing new

Two Chicago sports franchises have made a couple facepalm moves today.

The Cubs traded OF Kosuke Fukudome to Cleveland for 2 prospects, a pitcher and an outfielder. While the Cubs can say they got rid of the Fukudome's hefty contract, they really can't, because they are still paying a big load of that contract. Of the estimated $4.5 million he's owed the rest of the year, the Cubs still have to pay all but $775,000 of it.

And what exactly are the Cubs getting in return? As I aluded to with this tweet and Keith Law confirms (sorry non-ESPN Insiders), not a whole lot of anything. Abner Abreu, a 21-year-old outfielder, is doing a whole lot of striking out this year in high-A, with 102 K's in 92 games this year. Also not helping is his low walk rate, with 22 BB in 363 PA. There's really not a whole lot of good I can say about him. He's batting .244/.294/.431, with 12 HR, and as Law mentions,

He's just 21 and is already repeating high Class A, so he's been moved aggressively, but has also shown very little development in his ability to recognize balls from strikes -- and the Cubs have not had success in teaching impatient hitters how to work the count.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. And also a distressing critque of the Cubs organization, as working counts and getting on base is one of the foundations of sabermetrics. Ultimately, this move demonstrates that Manager of Statisical Anaysis Ari Kaplan is either a) not doing a very good job, or b) doesn't have nearly enough say in deals made, and I'm guessing the latter.

The other prospect the Cubs received in the Kosuke deal was pitcher Carlton Smith, who has played all of 2011 in AAA Columbus. Smith, 25, doesn't look like he can hack it in anything above AA, posting a 1.606 WHIP in 94 AAA innings since his promotion last year. I've generally looked for high strikeout rates in the minors as a general indicator of "stuff," and Smith hasn't posted anything higher than 7 K/9IP in any full minor league season. It also seems that he struggles against lefties, allowing them to hit .292/.395/.508 this season, indicating that even if he does make the majors, he won't be any more than a specialist reliever.

And now allow me to air my beef on the Bears moves (and lack thereof) today. This evening the Bears traded away TE Greg Olsen, a fan favorite and one of the bright spots of the Bears offense. At 6'5", he was a big target for Jay Cutler in 2010, catching 41 balls for 404 yards and 5 TDs, tied with Johnny Knox for most on the team.

What really astounded me about the trade was that they traded him to Carolina....for someone not named Steve Smith. The Bears have been a complete nonthreat at wide receiver, and everyone and their mother knows that. Except Jerry Angelo. There's no reason he should be trading away Cutler's biggest target without getting a big or bigger target in return. I did see there was a draft pick involved, but with Angelo's draft history, it amounts to just about bubkis.

Hat tip to @Kimberly_Lucio for how I will close this post: Greg Olsen gone, NBA lockout, Bulls lose to Heat in playoffs, and the Cubs. Chicago sports fans need a big group hug right about now.

MLB Projections

I've tweeted a little bit about this earlier this week, so here's the fruits of my labor. I've developed a little bit of Excel programming skills over the past couple years, and wanted to find a way to see how bad the Cubs can b....I mean see where the MLB season might end up at the end of the regular season. The two main components I would need are a measure of teams true ability to win games, and a predictive formula for teams given their remaining schedule.

Enter the Pythangorian Win Expectation and Log5 formulas.

For those who are currently thinking of jokes of my dorkdom, Pythagorian Win Expectation (PWE) takes a team's runs scored and runs against, and spits out an expected win percentage. It gets its name from looking somewhat like that old Pythagorian Theorem we all learned in trigonometry (a^2 + b^2 = c^2):

PWE = (R^2) / (R^2 + RA^2),

where R is runs for and RA is runs against. Further research on the subject showed that a more accurate exponent is 1.81 instead of 2. A different exponent can also be used for college basketball (somewhere between 8 and 9) and the NBA (somewhere between 14.5 and 16).

The Log5 formula comes from the Godfather of Sabermetrics, Bill James. Based on the Bayes Theorem, this formula is used to find win probability of two teams when they meet. If Team A and Team B played each other, the probability of Team A is given by

P(A) = (A - A * B) / (A + B - 2*A*B),

where A is Team A's win percentage, and B is Team B's win percentage.

So now we have an decent estimation of a team's ability to win games, and a way to estimate the probability of who will win a game between two teams. All there is left to do is throw the remainder of the MLB schedule into the hopper and see what we come up with (h/t to Daily Baseball Data for putting the entire MLB schedule in Excel format).

American League
EAST	W	L
Boston	98.5	62.5
NY Yankees	96.1	62.9
Tampa Bay	84.8	76.2
Toronto	81.4	81.6
Balimore	63.4	96.6
CENTRAL
Detroit	84.5	77.5
Cleveland	84.3	77.7
Chicago Sox	79.3	82.7
Minnesota	72.6	88.4
Kansas City	67.1	94.9
WEST
Texas	93.5	69.5
LA Angels	82.0	81.0
Oakland	72.0	91.0
Seattle	70.5	90.5
National League
EAST
Philadelphia	100.6	62.4
Atlanta	94.1	68.9
NY Mets	81.3	81.7
Washington	79.3	83.7
Florida	75.7	87.3
CENTRAL
Pittsburgh	85.2	75.8
St. Louis	85.7	77.3
Milwaukee	84.2	77.8
Cincinnati	83.4	79.6
Chicago Cubs	64.4	98.6
Houston	57.3	105.7
WEST
San Francisco	91.1	71.9
Arizona	85.7	77.3
Colorado	79.7	83.3
San Diego	71.7	91.3
LA Dodgers	70.7	91.3

I do give my apologies, because this table was made in the middle of a day of games. I don't have time to wait until midnight for all the games to be over, nor the time in the morning to get it done before the early afternoon games start. This also skews the run totals a bit, but not a whole lot for our analysis.

In a showing of how the futile the Cubs are this year, the first thing I noticed was that they are, on average, not headed for a 100-loss season. Around the league, here now are the storylines I will be looking for the rest of the season:

• The reigning pennant winners, the Rangers and the Giants, will run away with their respective divisions.
• The AL East will once again take two playoff spots, leaving Detroit and Cleveland fighting for one spot while Boston, New York and Tampa fight for two spots
• With the East Coast Bias of the media, the watch will be on to see if the Phillies will win 100 games for the first time since 1977
• The exciting 4-team race for the NL Central, which includes the Pirates quest for their first winning season since Barry Bonds was skinny (1992).

#ISupportZ

It started as a Zambrano quote, turned into an avid Twitter discussion (and a trending topic that probably won't happen), and now I'll make it a blog post. I support Carlos Zambrano and his calling out of Carlos Marmol and the Cubs organization. I respect the decision because he seems to be the only on the the team with the cajones to take such action, as well as be one of the few who might get away with it.

Lately I've been lucky enough to have the Mets and their follies exist and for once, East Coast Bias worked in my favor as the Mets have taken at least some of the attention off the severely underachieving Cubs.

Big Z takes a highlight to one of the Cubs many problems. I've said blindly a couple times that the Cubs are one of the few teams that haven't embraced the sabermetric revolution of the past decade. This past weekend I took the time and I actually looked it up and found that when the Rickettses bought the team they hired a "Manager of Statistical Analysis," Ari Kaplan. Later that day I happened to be googling the book I'm currently reading, The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, and found in a forum for the book that Kaplan is one of the most critically panned sabermetricians out there, staying true to typical Cubs fashion. Now, the guy is obviously intelligent (graduate of CalTech in 1992), but I'll bet that either a) he doesn't have enough say to make a difference, or b) he's a hire the Cubs made for the sake of hiring someone to the position....or both.

Flat out, Jim Hendry needs to go. Period, end of story. There have been far too many ill-fated moves and throwing money around that at this point it's beyond ridiculous. A buddy of mine pointed out that as long as Jeff Samardzija stays in the bigs it's another problem altogether. I replied that I agreed, Samardzija is dead money, but he's an easy target simply because he went to Notre Dame. He's quite correct. The Cubs have been shelling out money for names instead of empirical results for years. I want to see the organization throw some money at something other than past-their-prime, over-priced free agents.

The Cubs need to decide whether they are trying to win now (which is obviously not working) or rebuilding and developing to win later. A team can't do both. Ownership put the Rays in that position of trying to do both and it did nothing but make them average nearly 100 losses a season. They should take a clue from from small market teams like the Rays (as well as the A's of the early 2000s and soon to be Royals of the mid 2010s) and stick some dough into old fashioned R&D. I remember, but not exactly when, that Tom Ricketts came out and said that he wanted to cut payroll. The teams mentioned have done nothing but prove that you dont need a $140 million payroll to put out a winner. I'm saying it can be done, but only with a big demolition of the current front office staff.

42 Club Watch/Leaders

In a way of classifying NBA players inspired by Bill Simmons, I've decided to take a stab at keeping track of who's in and who's out. The concept of the 42 Club is eerily simple. You keep track of the typical triple-double stats: points, rebounds, and assists, on a per game basis. Add 'em up, and if the number is 42 or more, you're looking at a someone who should be in the conversation as a transcendent playoff performance.

A further explanation is in this column from 2006 and in his book, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy.

Through the conference finals. The list only includes only includes players who won two rounds (sorry Zach Randolph, 35.5). Bold Italics mean still active:

ON THE CUSP: 40-42
Player	G	PPG	RPG	APG	42Club
LeBron James	15	26.0	8.9	5.5	40.3
IN THE ARENA: 35-40
Kevin Durant	17	28.6	8.2	2.8	39.6
Derrick Rose	16	27.1	4.3	7.7	39.1
Dirk Nowitzki	15	28.4	7.5	2.7	38.7
Russell Westbrook	17	23.8	5.4	6.4	35.5
Dwyane Wade	15	23.7	7.2	4.1	35.0

Big Z for DH? Fine by me

In light of Carlos Zambrano's 3-for-3 performance from the plate today and this tweet from Julie DiCaro, I'm going to move that Big Z play DH when we hit interleague play again. There's 6 games in AL parks (3 against the White Sox, 3 against the Royals).

Zambrano has shown himself to be a viable hitting pitcher throughout his career, hitting .271/.278/.458 since 2008 and 22 career home runs. Taking more of a sabermetric approach, Zambrano's ISO (SLG% - BA, which measures a hitter's extra base power) is .190, highest among pitchers with 20 PA. This would have been around the 70th percentile in 2010. This should come as no surprise, as he comes to the plate with the intention of hitting a home run every time. But it's not all in haste, when you consider the company he keeps in this stat. Comparable to Zambrano's ISO in 2011: Joey Votto (.202), Jayson Werth (.198), Jason Heyward (.193), B.J. Upton (.188), and David Wright (.178).

So obviously we've established that Carlos can hold his own at the plate both as a contact and power hitter. He's a very volatile guy though. When he's good, he's SOOO good. And when he's bad, Gatorade machines get destroyed. But he WANTS to contribute. He WANTS to win. He's the kind of guy who if asked would play DH if asked. I'd think he'd jump at the chance.

What implications might this have on his spot in the rotation is anyone's guess. But at the very least I would want to see him in a pinch hitting role more than a few times this season. And THAT'S something you don't need to be in interleague play to do.