While he’s at it, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig should take this opportunity to realign all six divisions and allow National League teams to use the DH (allowing for traditionalists, at a competitive disadvantage, to continue allowing pitchers to hit).  The discrepancy between the AL and the NL would essentially disappear and bouncing a few teams from league to league would not be such a big deal.

Geographically, the MLB is heavily weighted by teams on the East Coast and in the MidWest.  There is another nice cluster of teams out on the West Coast, but Between Kansas City and California there is pretty much a baseball wasteland.* I know there are a lot of reasons why there are no teams out there, but it seems like a missed opportunity to add two more teams and have two 16 team Super Conferences, but I digress.

  *If a metro area of at least 1.5 million people is what’s needed to support a MLB franchise (That’s what they have in the Milwaukee area, the smallest metro area that is home to a team), then you should add a team in Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas, Nevada; maybe even stretch to get a team in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Salt Lake City, Utah; if you were really trying to expand to “western markets.”  

In the unlikely event that Bud Selig and the owners adopt such a strategy, here are the 6 new divisions they should adopt.  (more…)

So, former Twins farmhand Garrett Jones has three homers in only ten plate appearances. He’s also coming off a breakout 2009 season, in which he batted .293/.372/.567 with 21 home runs in 358 plate appearances as a 28 year-old rookie. Naturally, Twins fans are a bit upset that the front office seemingly allowed a diamond in the rough to slip away. But was his breakout 2009 season somewhat of a fluke? Let’s look at the numbers:

Honestly, I would be surprised if Jones had a repeat of his monster season. First of all, his batting average on balls in play was well above the league-average, suggesting that he was getting a little lucky with some of his balls in play falling in for hits. It’s more likely that fielders didn’t know how to play him, and pitchers had yet to make adjustments to him, than that Jones suddenly found his swing when given more playing time. Most telling, however, is his fluky 21.2% HR/FB ratio compared to his rather average 0.98 GB/FB ratio. Jones was not hitting a ton of fly balls, but the ones he did hit happened to leave the park at a much higher rate than average, which suggests again that he was more lucky than good. However, Jones did display a little power in the minor leagues, so while he probably won’t have another .274 ISO season, he should still put up some pretty average power numbers this year.

Last year, Garrett Jones was a 2.6 WAR player for the Pirates. CHONE projects Jones to take a huge step backward to 1.5 WAR, but that isn’t at all terrible for someone Pittsburgh picked up off the scrap heap. As for the Twins, well, it’s hard to fault them for giving up on a player who had batted a miserable .208/.262/.338 in the major leagues (albeit in an extremely small sample size of 84 plate appearances), and who struck out 18.6% of the time in the minors. On top of that, there really wasn’t a position for him at either first base, where Justin Morneau is firmly entrenched, or the outfield (Go-Go was the fourth outfielder at the time, and Jones certainly didn’t project to be any better than Jason Kubel or Delmon Young). Sure, Jones would look nice as a backup outfielder now, but I’m sure he’d rather be a starter in Pittsburgh.