It's a one year, 2 million dollar contract with the potential to grow into 4 million.

Before signing an oft-injured player, teams must ask themselves a line of questions.

Does player, when healthy, help our team?
    If yes, can we expect at least 50% playing time?
           If yes, will player still help our team?
           If no, pass.
               If yes, can we expect 75% playing time?
                   If yes, is the player's value equal to his asking price?
                   If no, is the player's value equal to his asking price?
                        If no, pass.

I would suspect the Astros went through this conversation, and they arrived at yes multiple times. Despite this, I'm not sure I agree with their thinking. Houston won 86 games last season despite being outscored and having 75.8 third order wins. Since they aren't in a position to win 90 games or honestly compete for a playoff spot, barring unforeseen miracles, they should be shielding themselves against overpaying for slight upgrades that will only push them to a fourth place finish.

Since 2003, when Hampton was traded to the Marlins and then the Braves, he's thrown 190, 172.3, 69.1, and 78 innings. Observant readers will note that two seasons worth of innings are missing those being 2006 and 2007, which Hampton missed in full. When Hampton has pitched lately, he hasn't been his usually self. Even in 2005, only 9.51% of Hampton's plate appearances resulted in strikeouts. That number was back up to pre-injury days in 2008, at 11.48%, but Hampton was still only generating 6.3% swinging strikes with his 87 miles per hour fastball.

While two million is hardly going to sink their budget, this is a team that had better options on hand. It's not that Hampton is overpaid or a poor risk, but rather a redundancy. At this point, the Astros have Roy Oswalt and Wandy Rodriguez who are clearly superior to Hampton, Brian Moehler and Chris Sampson who are arguably better, and Brandon Backe, who is special in his own "snowflake" sort of way. Will Hampton's contributions even make that much of a difference over Backe?

In order to project Hampton's value we have to make assumptions about things like his FIP and innings workload. Marcels has him at 4.77 and 99 innings pitched. If that's the case, Hampton is 10.78 non-leveraged runs saved. Backe projects for 146 innings of 5.39 FIP ball, or 5.84 non-leveraged runs saved. That's a difference of just over a half of a win. On a .500-at-best team, is that worth 2 million? Even more so, Claudio Vargas is a free agent who can likely be had for 800k. If Vargas simply pitched to his career 5.22 FIP for 160 innings, he would compile 9.42 NLRS. Almost equal to Hampton, and for 1.2 million less that could've went towards the draft or amateur signings.

The deal isn't bad, at least not in the sense that Houston will regret signing Hampton. Instead, it just seems like a questionable usage of resources for a team that apparently has some payroll cutting concerns.

Disclaimer: I had no intention of taking this angle, but after about 400 words noticed it was a worthwhile one.

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Digging through assorted Rays history in a database, I wanted to find out how often Carl Crawford attempted a steal. More specifically, I wanted the percentage of times on base that Crawford ran. If you recall I figured something similar a few weeks ago, but I wanted to also see where he ranked in Rays history.

Much to my surprise, when I lowered the times on base threshold to 10 (SSS, I know) Nathan Haynes name popped up. Haynes reached based 13 times this season, and attempted five steals. Of course, that doesn't account for Haynes pinch running, and I don't have the play-by-play database abilities to filter that down, so take it for what it is.

After my near Haynes experience, I turned back to the original question. You shouldn't be surprised to learn that Crawford dominates the list, with his highest being 33.5% in 2004. Here's a list of the top 10:

On the other hand, how about the guys who got on base 100+ times, aren't catchers, and got the steal sign the least? Here you go:

Cantu is the only one of these players who was not in the latter stages of his career (or at least older than 28), yet somehow he was listed twice. God blessed that Human Lawn Statue, just not with speed.

Boston Globe's Nick Cafardo:

5. Jermaine Dye: The White Sox right fielder fits so well with a few teams, including Philadelphia, Tampa Bay, and the Mets. Dye was a player the Red Sox were hot after before pursuing J.D. Drew. The Rays are trying to deal the back of their starting rotation - Andy Sonnanstine or Edwin Jackson - for a power-hitting righthanded [sic] bat, but the White Sox would want more.

Dye makes 11.5 million in 2009. Let's do the math, assuming the soon to be 35 year old loses some hitting and fielding ability.

Position: -0.75

Fielding: -0.8

Hitting: 1.0

Replacement level: 2.25

Wins above replacement: 1.7

Estimated value: 8.6 million

That's without talking about the one million dollar buyout (I'm guessing the Rays would rather not have a 36 year old with a 12 million dollar contract around.)

Assume Edwin loses a run or so off of his tRA and becomes a 4.5 reliever, who throws 75 innings as a long-man/mop-up type. He's a 0.5 WAR player just like that, and we're assuming he doesn't improve by much more than the average transition.  Plus Edwin's going to be paid right around what an ARB1 0.5 WAR player should be (~1.2 mil) and they want more?

No thanks, I'd rather take my chances on Nick Evans.

Sometime ago, Nate Silver did a series of Tufte-inspired articles with graphical representation of a team's 40 man roster. Unfortunately, Silver was too busy with some election this past November to do the 2008 version. Instead of living on a prayer, I've decided to apply his style to our 40 man situation. The graphs are pretty simply, but here's a key:

Green = Good. The darker the green, the better the player.
Red = Bad. The darker the red, the worst the player.
Blue = Average or unknown.
A = Arbitration eligible.

Think of it as the salary chart I stopped updating, only in visual form.

As always, a lot of this is subjective and I didn't attempt to project prospects, so you won't see a red brick in Brignac's 2009 cell, then light green in 2010, ect. This chart serves two purposes: A) giving an idea of who's here and for how long, and B) giving an idea of how much (or little) talent we have at each position.

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From Peter Gammons' blog:

Padres GM Kevin Towers went to Sunday's Chargers game with Brad Ausmus and hopes to bring him back to the Padres as a mentor to Nick Hundley

Towers is smarter than buying into the "veteran catcher" non-sense, at least to the point of Ausmus. With the Padres being a little cap strapped he likely has a different motive in mind. Like so:

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