[The Astros' Owner and G.M. Have Long-Term Plans]

The Astros are 14-10 over their last 24 games.

They are 19-17 over their last 36 games.

For many teams, that's not a big deal, but for the Astros, going 19-17 over a 36-game span means that they have held their own for almost 1/4 of the season.

THAT is a big deal.

The 2004 Rays won 12 games in a row, but still finished 21 games below .500. I doubt if the 2013 Astros will better that record. They're 18 games below .500 right now.

I enjoy seeing the Astros beat up on teams like the Angels who thought they'd be pushovers, but it happens.

[Adam Wainwright Signs a 5-Year Extension with the Cardinals (6 Years Later)]

Wainwright seems like a classy guy, but I think 5/$97 mm is too much for him. I guess we'll see.

Maybe. Cards beat writers don't think so. Quite a few fans would have liked to wait until after they see how he pitches this season.

Post Dispatch

Wainwright, who will start opening day against Arizona on Monday, debuted with the Cardinals in 2005, shined for the Cardinals in 2006 as the rookie closer for a World Series title, and ascended to ace with two top-three finishes in National League Cy Young Award voting. He led the NL with 19 wins in 2009 and then 20 games in 2010. Wainwright finished second to Phillies righty Roy Halladay for the Cy Young in 2010.

Only five starters in baseball have an ERA better than Wainwright?s 3.14 since 2007. All five have won at least one Cy Young award, including Wainwright?s mentor, Chris Carpenter.

Miklacz

... Wainwright pitched better in 2012 than he?s generally been given credit for. After being away from year to rehab from Tommy John surgery, he got off to a sluggish start as he tried to regenerate muscle memory, find his arm slot, and sharpen his pitches, etc. But from May 22 until the end of the regular season, Wainwright had a 3.43 ERA in 24 starts. His fielding independent ERA (2.79) over that time was second-best in the NL to Atlanta?s Kris Medlen. Over those final 24 starts, Wainwright had a healthy strikeout rate (8.4 per 9 IP) and was 12th among NL starters in strikeout/walk ratio.

... Wainwright personifies the Cardinal Way.... Generally speaking, I believe that all of the ?good in the clubhouse? talk is overblown. We sportswriters tend to whip up these narratives and pump them until the point of absurdity. But in this case, the intangibles do matter when assessing Wainwright?s value to this team.

With Chris Carpenter?s career ruined by chronic pitching-health issues, and Jaime Garcia not possessing the hard-wiring to be a leader type, the Cardinals faced a potential void at the top. If Wainwright had left as a free agent after the 2013 season, who would guide the young pitchers?

This is a exciting but delicate time in the team?s evolution. The Cardinals have never had such an impressive collection of young arms as they do now. But this isn?t all about talent, velocity, the break of a curveball. Lance Lynn, Shelby Miller, Joe Kelly Michael Wacha, Trevor Rosenthal and Carlos Martinez have the arms to succeed. But there?s more to it than that. They have to learn about what it takes to be a true professional. How to be a good teammate, to be a tenacious competitor. How to handle adversity, how to handle success, how to keep your head aligned.

Wainwright is the natural successor to Carpenter.

Waino learned a lot from Carpenter, and now he?s in place to teach the new generation, and the next generation, of Cardinals starting pitchers.

... When Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan moved to St. Louis in 1996, the Cardinals changed the way they go about their business. A collective team personality formed. The Cardinals became a hard-nosed, relentless bunch that rarely deviated from pushing and grinding through a long season. The Cardinals were a team that didn?t back off, that played with a sharp competitive edge. Again: not always. There were lapses, but those lapses were corrected.

There?s a reason why the Cardinals rank second in the majors to the Yankees for most postseason games played in, and postseason games won, since 1996. This wasn?t an accident. This organization has a strong mindset that carries through this day, with chairman Bill DeWitt Jr., GM John Mozeliak, manager Mike Matheny, pitching coach Derek Lilliquist, and the veteran leaders.

It?s really important for this Cardinal Way to go on, and to keep the high standards in place, and Adam Wainwright represents the very best of those qualities, those ideals. The Cardinals are taking a turn toward youth in the coming years, and the keepers of this intense flame will be more valuable than ever.

I think if you look at the Lohse situation and contract, there's a lot of pressure on pitchers/agents to negotiate favorable extensions prior to entering the free agent market. There's 3 more years left on the CBA and free agents with qualifying offers are going to struggle to find teams willing to take the draft pick/slot money hit and still give the FA a multi-year contract consistent with those being signed as extensions.

[Adam Wainwright Signs a 5-Year Extension with the Cardinals (6 Years Later)]

According to Joe Strauss, of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, it had to happen because anything else would have been wrong.

Fighting emotion, [Wainwright] thanked his mother who raised him alone, his older brother who mentored him, his agent and his teammates.

He cited the contributions of his former pitching coaches, Dave Duncan and Marty Mason, and his current one, Derek Lilliquist. He thanked his former co-ace, Chris Carpenter, for teaching him about tenacity. He then hugged club chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. and general manager John Mozeliak for a second time.

?I?m a hugger,? Adam Wainwright said a bit haltingly.

... ?It makes me feel I?m way too blessed ? more than I deserve,? Wainwright said about continuing his career within sight of the Arch at Busch Stadium.

Coming from someone else the words might seem like so much hokum. However, Wainwright insisted talks be conducted without rancor and without becoming personal. Even when the talks? pace seemed to drag earlier this spring, Wainwright addressed the matter with a smile. ?If it didn?t work out, there were no hard feelings.?

If some wanted to attach his value to the five-year, $120 million deal signed by Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Cliff Lee, let them. This was about what comes first rather then squeezing the last nickel.

?I just realized I have complete peace about staying in St. Louis. That?s worth more than a few extra dollars,? Wainwright described shortly after leaving Roger Dean Stadium on Thursday afternoon. ?The opportunity to keep Cardinal tradition alive means a tremendous amount to me. This is honest stuff. It?s sincere. I?m not saying it because I feel any need to say it. If it wasn?t true, the situation might be different.?

At 31, Wainwright projects stability, professionalism and a track record within a rotation that next year may feature three pitchers yet to reach arbitration. Wainwright has won 19 and 20 games in a season. He has twice achieved a podium finish in balloting for the National League Cy Young Award. He owns the lowest career ERA (3.154) among active starting pitchers with at least 1,000 innings pitched. He also carries a career .625 win percentage, which ranks 10 among veteran starters.

Wainwright assures the Cardinals of an ace beyond this season to go with Jaime Garcia (26), Lance Lynn (25), Shelby Miller (22), and possibilities Joe Kelly (24), Seth Maness (24), Trevor Rosenthal (22), Michael Wacha (21) and Carlos Martinez (21).

Don?t weep for Wainwright offering a smidgen of a home-team discount. As he said, ?I?m definitely not getting scammed by the deal.?

Wainwright received the fifth guaranteed year that he demanded. The club, which initially offered $18 million per season within the five-year structure, talked Wainwright down from an AAV approaching $22 million.

?My teammates were a big factor in me wanting to come back here,? Wainwright said. Indeed, five veterans had attended the morning press conference along with manager Mike Matheny. ?I love our clubhouse from the attendants to every player in there. I just don?t know if it gets better anywhere else. I?ve had opposing players come up and say, ?You don?t know how good you have it here.? Actually, I do realize how good I have it.?

This contract is a perfect marriage between a buttoned-down organization and its appreciative player. Wainwright?s representation kept his promise that ?there wasn?t going to be any yelling and screaming? during talks, a blissful counter to when DeWitt threatened to walk away from contentious negotiations for Holliday in December 2009. Failed talks with Team Pujols in 2011 left marks still visible. Wainwright thought his process ?super relaxed? super cordial.?

A man of faith, Wainwright recited a verse from the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy and allowed, ?To whom much is given, much is expected.? Wainwright found it difficult to read from handwritten notes during Thursday morning?s press conference. Eventually he spoke extemporaneously. He promised himself he wouldn?t ?cry like a baby? but at one point bowed his head to hide emotion. Near the end he looked to the front row and asked his daughters to come help their dad get through it.

Wainwright at one point referred to agent Steve Hammond as a spiritual advisor and a friend. He reflected on the December 2003 trade that sent the Georgia native from his beloved Atlanta Braves to the Cardinals. (The only minor leaguer in a five-player deal that included outfielder J. D. Drew, Wainwright represented the trade?s pivot point.) Once a trauma, the trade now strikes him and his team as a godsend.

My grandsons have a baseball autographed by Wainwright when we attended a game in Pittsburgh last season. He's a real nice guy toward fans, much friendlier than Pujols ever was. Despite being an infidel myself, I can appreciate Wainwright's dedication to his faith. Besides, we both have a high appreciation for baby back ribs.

Long term contracts for pitchers are horrible, but that's the nature of today's game. If anyone deserves a contract like this, it's Wainwright.

And his primary personal objective for the 2013 season? Not the CYA, but the Silver Slugger award. Adam says he should have won it in 2007 (.290/.323/.387/.710)and ought be be a lock now that Micah Owings is doing a "Rick Ankiel".

Oh, I was also thrilled to see that Ankiel will be the starting center fielder for the Astros on opening day, having hit .432/.481/.864/1.344 this spring. Of course, Cactus League stats mean even less than they do in the Grapefruit League.

[Super Stat Sticky: Get Your Learn On!]

... I'm not sure what correcting for league differences means. Judging by the results' date=' it sounds like they established a separate replacement level for each league, which is lower in the NL. I say this because the top of the rankings are full of NL players. There are only three AL players in the overall top 10, and that's if you count Manny Ramirez (not sure how they dealt with him).[/quote']

I think it means that they're adjusting the production of NL players down by some factor which relates to the perceived average level of ability in the NL versus the AL. In other words, those NL players who dominate the top 10 would rate even higher if not for the league factor adjustment. However, if you look at the players in the bottom half of the overall group, you will probably find a significantly higher number of NL players in that bottom half than AL players.

Replacement level players are cheap, so the skill level of replacement players ought to be similar for either league. The only way that they would be significantly different would be if one league had substantially superior farm systems than the other league.

However, in reading more carefully, I do see that they've defined replacement level differently for each league, 73 percent vs 78 percent. I think that means that they've normalized replacement level to correspond to the average performance level of each league, but I'm not completely sure. In other words, "replacement level" is approximately equal for either league, but that value of performance corresponds to 73 percent of average offensive production in the stronger American League and 78 percent of average offensive production in the weaker National League.

NL pitchers don't have to face the DH, except for interleague games, so the NL pitchers ought to post higher strikeout rates, lower walk rates, lower WHIP, and lower ERAs -- on average. This would tend to depress the average number of runs scored and driven in by NL hitters.

The other factor which affects the level of ability in the 2 leagues is the disparity in team payrolls. We know that payrolls correlate somewhat weakly with actual production, but there is a correlation, and that correlation increases when taken over the entire group of players in a league, instead of just a single team. The average payroll in the AL was over $13 million higher than the average NL payroll in 2008, and that payroll disparity naturally equates to slightly stronger teams in the junior circuit. This means that the average 5th starter on an AL team will likely be a little better than the average 5th starter on an NL team, and likewise for the hitters at the bottom end of the batting order and on the bench.

[Super Stat Sticky: Get Your Learn On!]

I'm not following.

For an individual batter, when you add RS to RBI, the only thing counted twice is a home run, which goes under both.

But the run scored and the RBI also get counted for another player, so they are getting counted twice, just against different players.

There is no other player involved in the run scored by the guy who hit the home run, so that run gets undervalued by the RP formula. To be a mathematically consistent tally of actual runs, the sum of runs scored and RBIs should be divided by two.

The "counted twice" argument for subtracting home runs is a mathematical fallacy. Tango's argument for subtracting home runs isn't to avoid counting the run twice; it's to make the output of the RP formula correlate more closely with the RC formula.

When you subtract the number of home runs, you aren't taking all the runs from those home runs out, just one run from each, which was the batter driving himself in.

Again, the argument is based upon a mathematical fallacy.

If you divide the sum of runs scored and RBIs by two for all of the players on a team and add up those values, you should get the actual runs scored by the team, less those runs for which no RBI is awarded (scored on DP or WP).

Once you accept that there's no mathematical justification for subtracting home runs, then the test becomes whether the results provide a valid measure of the run scoring value of a hitter. Tango's test is that the results are close to those obtained by using RC. Tango also proposes additional adjustments beyond subtracting out home runs to make the results correlae even more closely with RC.

[Super Stat Sticky: Get Your Learn On!]

Because on a wide variety of scales and contexts runs created is very close to runs actually scored. On a game level, team level, season level... whatever, you figure out runs created from other events and components and it's going to be close to actual runs scored.

However, when you start tweaking a formula (RP, RPA) based upon team dependent values (runs, RBIs) attempting to develop a team independent assessment of the values of individual players, how do you know if your tweaks really reflect individual player values or are just completely arbitrary?

[Super Stat Sticky: Get Your Learn On!]

Just looking at that, it seems that since a home run counts as both an RBI and a run scored, it shouldn't be counted twice in that system.

But every other run is counted twice -- once as a run scored and once as a run driven in. Why should the run scored by the batter who hits the HR be devalued by 50 percent compared to all other runs scored? If anything, it should be valued more than other runs because it gets scored independently of what any other hitter in the lineup does.

That the HR shouldn't be counted twice is a fallacy. If it should only be counted once, then all other runs scored and runs batted in should be divided by two as well.

Tango's argument doesn't hinge on the HR being counted twice. He contends that subtracting the home runs yields values for RP which correlate more closely with the values produced by the Runs Created formula. To me, that's a bogus argument; how do we know that the RC formula itself is valid?

[Super Stat Sticky: Get Your Learn On!]

I've gotten involved in a knock down, drag out online argument with another Cardinals fan over RPA (Runs per Plate Appearance). This is not the same as the RPA which Mike Gimbel trademarked in an article posted at The Think Factory, which stands for Run Production Average. It's what Tom Tango defines as Runs Produced (RP=R+RBI-HR) and I'm having difficulty following the TangoTiger explanation why subtracting home runs makes it a more valid stat for comparing the value of a hitter.

I'm assuming there have been a lot more discussions of this on the internet, but I've not been able to find any and would appreciate any links to such discussions, or thoughts one way or the other on the issue.

[Super Stat Sticky: Get Your Learn On!]

Unfortunately, Baseball Info Solutions decided not to release the +/- fielding system they published in The Fielding Bible last year. So no Fielding Bible.

At least they're now saying that they will publish an updated version in 2009.

When I bought the Bill James Handbook for 2008, which was supposed to have all the stats from the 2007 season, I thought it was going to give all the +/- ratings for the year too. Nope! It only provides the same leaders and trailers information which is already posted on The Fielding Bible website for free! In my view, the handbook provides very little value and the detailed tables are hard to use and read (fine print). Most of the information is available on the internet free and much of it is even sortable. I am really disappointed with the handbook and won't be buying any more of them from Bill James. 20 or 30 years ago, it would have been a fantastic resource, but now it's an anachronism.

[Super Stat Sticky: Get Your Learn On!]

Great idea! Need to fix your link on Winshares. The current link points to Runs Created.