Are you just selectively applying endpoints?

And of course, in a neutral environment, almost all players will hit somewhat better at home than on the road. It’s a well-known and documented statistical effect. So Wiggy happens to be on the far side of the bell curve there? Big whoop.

1) I don’t know why you’re so “sure” that the Padres/Mariners would view someone like Karstens as an equivalent commodity to Olson. Teams have irrational preferences all the time, and it was widely reported that the Padres were very big on Olson for whatever reason (to the extent that they preferred him to Pie during the Peavy talks).

2) They’ve said that Veal will need to throw strikes in the spring if he wants to stick around. And he was a free pickup, not someone they had to trade to get. And his control problems last year weren’t nearly as serious as Hill’s. Veal had 81 walks in 145 minor league innings. Hill had 18 walks in 19 ML innings and 44 walks in 47 innings in the minors. You can sometimes hide a guy at the back of the pen if he’s got a walk rate around 4 or 5/9, but walking a batter per inning? That’d make Vogelsong look like Cy Young.

3) I think that the Pirates could use more power, but I also think that Moss and the LaRoches are locked in as starters at three of those four positions, and that the Pirates weren’t going to pay for two veteran bench bats/maybe RF starters. And I know that they approached Wigginton, because it was in all the papers months ago. If they tried, and the deal couldn’t get done for whatever reason, then it seems kind of cheap to criticize them for not trying to make a deal there.

1) The Cubs didn’t get next to nothing for Pie. They got a player who was essential to two separate sets of negotiations in which they were engaged. If you don’t personally rank Heilman all that highly, that’s fine. I don’t like him all that much either, but there are people in baseball who like him quite a lot, and the Cubs are apparently among that group. They’ve got him pencilled into their rotation ahead of several other solid options (Marshall, Gaudin, etc.), and their current front office (for whatever reason) has displayed a tremendous fondness for guys from Notre Dame. Just look at the bonus they gave to make Samardzija give up football.

I also think that you’re mistaken to view Cedeno as a much more significant piece of the deal than Olson. He’s useful because he’s cheap and can field, but he wouldn’t be a starter for a good team (which is why the Cubs were willing to move him in the first place). He makes sense for Seattle largely because Betancourt is such a weak option at short.

I don’t see any inconsistencies on the timeline with the Olson trade. At the time when the Cubs traded for Olson (January 18), the Padres’ ownership situation was still up in the air, and therefore Peavy was potentially still in play. By the time when the Cubs traded Olson to the Mariners (January 28), the Padres’ situation was mostly resolved, with the papers being signed yesterday. Of course, now that Rosenthal is claiming that Peavy may be dealt anyway, who knows what’s going to happen?

2) There are really two separate issues here. The first is whether Hill’s problem is primarily a mental one or primarily a physical one. The Cubs have given contradictory statements in this regard – Lou was on the record as early as the first week of the season in saying that Hill’s problems were all mental, while the Cubs used back problems as their stated reason behind sending him to the minors for his rehab assignment. I think that in order to tell which one is the primary cause, you need to consider the course of treatment he underwent. If his problems were caused by a physical condition, why would they have him continue pitching in successively lower levels of the minors after he continued to demonstrate his significant control issues (an approach last taken, to the best of my knowledge, when the Blue Jays were trying to help Halladay overcome psychological problems in the early part of the decade)? And why would they have him try to pitch in winter ball, risking further injury, once he demonstrated an initial ineffectiveness in the VWL? The treatment plan only makes sense if they felt that it was a mental problem, something that he could “pitch his way through”, and all he needed was additional reps with a confidence boost. Furthermore, when Hendry was talking about his reasons for trading Hill to the Orioles, he cited a desire to do what was best for the player, pointing at two of Baltimore’s coaches, with whom Hill was comfortable and with whom Hill had worked in the past as a prospect. That is a rationale that makes much more sense for a player having issues of approach than for a player having issues of health. In this light, I consider your example of Lee to be invalid, in that the Indians never attributed his 2007 struggles to mental problems, and he followed a more traditional rehab course for a pitcher with a physical injury.

The second issue is the idea that using the start of the season as an endpoint for my sample is somehow illegitimate. This is, to my way of thinking, absurd. The end of the 2007 season is a sensible and externally-imposed line of demarcation on his performance (following a gap of several months without pitching), and the difference between his performances on both sides of the line was drastically different (and noted as such by pretty much every scout who watched him). It’s perfectly fine to select start and end points for a particular sample under consideration, as long as there are independent, viable reasons for doing so. And in this case, there are.

3) Wigginton and Hinske are only complementary if one of them is starting regularly, or if they’re used as a platoon. If the team is planning on Hinske as a bench bat first and foremost, then roster constraints make it unlikely that they would carry two players with the same defensive skill set and offensive profile, instead of backups to cover other positions like C, SS, CF, etc. Personally, I expect Hinske to be at least a semi-regular this year, but there’s no way at this point for us to know whether the front office sees him that way, and if they don’t, that’d be one reason why they didn’t pursue him more aggressively.

The point that I’m trying to make is that our evaluations of the players going to the Cubs matter much less than the Cubs’ evaluations of those players. If the Cubs think that Heilman is going to be just as good a starter as Maholm this year, then it doesn’t matter whether we think the two are equivalent commodities or not. They aren’t going to settle for Karstens instead of Maholm just because we think that they’re overrating Heilman. The Cubs (and Padres, and Mariners) have guys they’re going to value more highly than the rest of the market, and guys they’re going to value less highly than the rest of the market. MacPhail was able to get himself Pie by finding several teams who valued Olson more highly than the rest of the market, and then help hammer out a deal to get the Cubs a pitcher that they valued more highly than the rest of the market. Which let him punch above his weight class in the trade and pick up a very good player in Pie. To do this, he drew in part on his past experience with the Cubs in determining what they would like and what they would not – experience that we don’t have, since our front office guys came from the Indians and the Tigers.

This is, to a certain extent, the Kazmir-Zambrano problem. After the Mets traded Kazmir for Zambrano, a lot of fans from other teams started vocally wondering why their team wasn’t able to get Kazmir, since Zambrano was a moderately crappy starter. The answer is that the Mets believed that Rick Peterson would be able to make a mechanical change that would greatly enhance Zambrano’s effectiveness, and as such, they didn’t see him as a #4 starter with control issues. If some other team had offered them a different #4 starter with control issues, they would’ve likely been offended and turned the deal down, because their valuations of those players were different, even if those players were in actuality going to deliver the same type of performance going forward.

Also, for the record, Olson was being mentioned as a person of interest to the Padres before the Cubs even threw their hat into the ring for Peavy (he came up as a possible return in the Khalil Greene-to-Baltimore rumors, for example). There were published reports more than a month ago that the Cubs put together a Peavy package that included Pie, and were turned down, because the Padres were not interested in Pie. As such, the Cubs put those two pieces of information together, and were willing to deal Pie for a player who was more to the Cubs’ liking.

I wouldn’t have had any problem with it if the Pirates had signed Wigginton to the deal that he got from the Orioles, but Roger was asking for reasons that they might not have wanted to make the deal, and so in order to play devil’s advocate I came up with a few – one of which was that they might have seen Wigginton and Hinske as redundant.