I don't know much about popular culture, so you'll have to tell me: is there a New Hot Thing out there at the moment? I know Jeremy Lin has quickly become the new Tim Tebow, but when it comes to anything outside sports, I'm at a loss. I'm actually somewhat proud of the fact that I know who Adele is, but that's around where my knowledge base evaporates.

I bring this up because in recent weeks, I've quickly become addicted to the New Hot Thing in the saber-sphere: the Brooks Baseball player cards. Brooks Baseball has always been a great tool for evaluating pitchers on a game-by-game basis, and we include their charts in our game recaps frequently. They've taken their site a step further, though, and their player pages are a treasure trove of Pitch F/x data.

In particular, I like to look at the stat Whiffs/Swing. In general, the more swings and misses a pitcher generates, the more strikeouts they should get. FanGraphs lists a pitcher's total Swinging Strike rate, but there aren't many places where you can find swings and misses broken down by pitch type. Brooks Baseball and the Joe Lefkowitz Pitch F/x Tool are the two places to find this data, but since Brooks has manually classified pitches, I feel more confident in their pitch classifications and results.

Why should we care about swings and misses? Whiffs are a good proxy for a pitch's "nastiness", and they can help us understand the strength of a pitcher's arsenal. Does Pitcher X only have one good out-pitch? Or is his entire repertoire above average? Is he using his pitches correctly? I may be a nerd, but I find this stuff fascinating.

Below the jump, you'll find the Whiff/Swing data from Brooks Baseball for the majority of the Rays' pitchers. But before you peek ahead, vote in the poll...who do you think has the single "nastiest" pitch on the Rays' pitching staff*? I'm curious to see how many people will be correct.

*At least, according to 2011 data.

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In this two part series, I will look at various aspects of James Shield's 2011 performance and how if could affect his 2012 season. In the first part, historical comparisons to Shield's workload increase will be examined. In the second part, I will attempt to see if James Shield's success in 2011 is sustainable.

Sabermetrics (and reasoning) always teach us to regress to the mean. Did player X have the best year in his career? Expect regression. Did player Y play dismally compared to his career numbers? Expect regression. Our objectivity depends on it, because our emotions often want us to believe that James Shield's 249.1 innings in 2011 are far more important than the 977.2 other innings he has pitched in his MLB career. Don't worry, though,the topic of this post is not an extensive, monotonous, and repetitive discussion regarding regression analysis.

The real issue at hand is to determine whether Shield's 2011 numbers, a year in which he posted his highest WAR, lowest FIP, and best K%, must be heavily regressed. As will be seen, the answer to that question is no. Regression to the mean is to be expected. But the real question is the following: what is the mean (average) for James Shields?

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Evan Longoria is not your typical young hitter, that goes with out much explaining. Playing through the 2011 season at the age of 25 he has already amassed 113 career homeruns and 147 career doubles. He is one of only 33 players to hit at least 110 homeruns and 145 doubles through their age 25 season.

In each of his first three seasons he amassed 60 extra-base hits or more. He had exactly 60 in 2008, 77 in 2009, and 73 in 2010. 2011 was the first season he fell below that mark with 58 extra-base hits.

We know that Longoria was a bit unlucky in 2011 by looking at the .239 BABIP he posted despite a career mark of .321 prior to the 2011 season. In 2011 his walk rate rose for the 4th consecutive season and his strikeout rate decreased for the 4th straight season. If a player can claim to have done both of those for four consecutive seasons it usually comes with a jump in his BABIP which in turn causes a jump in most, if not all, of his triple-slash categories.

Longoria, though, cannot make that claim. One would think that a player with a career high walk rate and career low strikeout rate wouldn't have posted career lows in batting average and slugging percentage but Longoria did thanks in large part to that horrid .239 BABIP led largely in part to an unsuccessful season of taking the ball to the opposite field.

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If you do a Google search for "Baseball Projection Systems," you get at least 3,300 results. These days, it seems that everyone has their own way of projecting what baseball players will do. Each season, someone sits down to review how the systems do; in 2010, Tom Tango did it and just this morning Matt Swartz reviewed last year's numbers. The Baseball Projection Project shows just how many systems are out there today for consumers to digest.

Earlier today, Erik posted a story about what the PECOTA projection system from Baseball Prospectus had to say about the 2012 Rays as their numbers were released yesterday. How you handle these projections are up to you, but projections are somewhat like batting averages. The best hitters in baseball fail to get a base hit 70 percent of the time while baseball projection systems can miss on 30 percent of their projections and still call it a banner year. If you have followed pre-season standings projections over the past four seasons, you know the Rays have often exceeded what the spreadsheets thought they would do, sometimes by as many as 12 games.

As Dayn Perry put it in 2010, "These systems use things like platoon splits, ballpark data, groundball percentages, line-drive rates, strikeouts, unintentional walks, aging patterns, league environment, pitch location and pitch speed data, and so on and so on. It's a science, if occasionally an inexact one.

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Yesterday, Baseball Prospectus released it's 2012 PECOTA player projections. I'm not going to comment on the quality of them one way or another -- there's a discussion at The Book Blog, if interested -- but they are yearly among the most accurate projection systems out there.

The Rays' PECOTA projections are below the jump and edited a bit as to not cram all the information into an unreadable table. Also, I only included the players with MLB experience currently on the roster.

There may be two stats in the tables that you're unfamiliar with if you're not fluent in Prospectus speak: TAv and WARP. We tend to be a more FanGraphs-heavy site, so, if it helps, think of TAv (True Average) as the BP equivalent of wOBA and WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) as the equivalent of WAR.

For reference, here's a chart of the average TAv from each position (1-11) in 2011:

Now, on to the projections

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In this two part series, I will look at various aspects of James Shield's 2011 performance and how if could effect his 2012 season. In the first part, historical comparisons to Shield's workload increase will be examined. In the second part, I will attempt to see if James Shield's success in 2011 was sustainable.

Last year, James Shields pitched 249.1 innings, faced 975 batters, threw 3576 pitches, and started 33 games. Back to 1925, that type of line wasn't so impressive. However, the game of baseball has evolved, and by today's standards, James Shields was a pitching machine last year -- a model of durability.

While Shields is praised for his endurance, there are some concerns that he could experience regression next year due to the heavy increase in his innings and pitch totals. Is there a need to be worried? A quick historical look tells us not to panic.

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As Jason Collette pointed out yesterday, the Rays have seemingly lost all of their former first basemen to the American League Central. All three also happened to be 2011 Triple-A Durham first basemen.

The Durham Bulls played a couple of guys at first base in 2011 that have since moved on from the Rays organization. Dan Johnson signed a minor league deal with the Chicago White Sox. Russ Canzler was traded to the Cleveland Indians for cash considerations. Casey Kotchman turned his magical 2011 season into a guaranteed $3M with the Cleveland Indians.

This leaves the Rays with Leslie Anderson as their lone first baseman in Durham. Why is this a problem, you ask? Because the Rays have no depth in case Luke Scott or Carlos Pena succumb to injury. Anderson is good organizational depth but there is little-to-no evidence that he would be able to handle Major League pitching if he were next on the depth chart to replace Pena or Scott.

The Rays still have plenty of arms to deal but it likely will not be for a Major League ready first baseman. Besides, with Pena and Scott on the active roster there really is not a lot of room to carry another guy relegated to first base duties alone.

If a trade occurs it will likely be for a player who can handle a few positions or, like Mr. Maniac pointed out yesterday, for an upgrade at catcher.

It may not seem like a big deal but imagine if the Rays did not have Casey Kotchman in Durham last year when Dan Johnson failed at the Big League level. Would the Rays have made the playoffs? What if it were Leslie Anderson who got the call? The Rays need to add a first baseman to Durham and who better than Russell Branyan?

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Today's Deep Thoughts guest is Ben Lindbergh, editor/author at Baseball Prospectus, analyst at Bloomberg Sports and recent BBWAA member. We discuss the Rays options on the starting pitching front and a possible new market inefficiency. Enjoy.

Erik Hahmann: The Rays have a problem. Sort of. They have seven viable starting pitchers (Shields, Price, Hellickson, Davis, Niemann, Moore, Cobb) and only five spots for them. The offense has some positions that could stand to be upgraded, so it would seem as if someone(s) has to be moved at some point. Matt Moore's recent contract seemingly assures him a spot in the opening day rotation. That leaves Davis, Niemann and Cobb has the most likely candidates to be traded. My first question to you, Mr. Lindbergh, is who should be moved?

Ben Lindbergh: First of all, I reject your rosteronormative contention that the Rays have only five rotation spots to fill. Who's to say what a rotation's supposed to look like in our enlightened times? But let's assume that Maddon doesn't decide to do something Maddon-y and sticks with the standard rotation we've all come to love. Shields, Price, Hellickson, and Moore seem like locks. Even if Hellickson was something of a mirage last season, you can't very well demote someone for being the Rookie of the Year, and Hellickson's the rare mirage with some substance--in other words, he's the kind of pitcher who may have had a fluky season, but whom you wouldn't necessarily expect to flop, since some improvement in his peripherals could counteract a turn for the worse in his luck. (Side note: I'm really going to miss all those "The Rays haven't had a single start by someone who's not in their 20s" stats. Shields just had to go and turn 30 this winter.)

So really, we're just talking about filling the fifth-starter slot here. Trading Davis now smells like selling low. I'm not telling DRB readers anything they don't know, but the Davis of the second half wasn't all that much like the Davis of the first half, either stuff-wise or results-wise. Unfortunately, the two Davises have the same Baseball-Reference page, and the first one is still making the second one look bad. That means the Rays might get less for him than he's worth. If you have to trade someone, I'd probably trade Niemann, and not solely because that's what R.J. Anderson thinks and I owe all my Rays-related knowledge to him. He's arb-eligible, he's older than all the other guys in the mix, and he can't seem to avoid breaking down. (Niemann, that is, not R.J.) Those all seem like good reasons to make him the one to go. Of course, those also seem like good reasons why you'd get a smaller return for him, but let's just ignore that for now.

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