Kris Benson's long road back from injury took a detour today, as the veteran right-hander missed a scheduled start with an unspecified ailment he self-diagnosed as biceps tendinitis. Meanwhile, Kyle Lohse slips on his Cardinals uniform after signing a one-year deal with St. Louis for a bit over $4 million plus incentives. ESPN analyst Keith Law praises the Cards for the move:

Over at BackSheGoes.com, TGP poster MattS suggests that the Phillies were "afraid of having 6 starters." I think this is correct, with the slight modification that their real fear was "paying for six starters." Once they made their deal for Benson, the door closed on a Lohse return.

The problem is that Lohse projects for about 2.5 Wins Above Replacement Player (see here for the definition of WARP) in 2008, according to Baseball Prospectus; by comparison, Adam Eaton comes in at 1.7 (and BP is more optimistic about him than anyone else), Travis Blackley is under 1, Chad Durbin a bit over 1, and Benson himself at 0.6.

But at least the owners won't be out that $4 million and change for the ingrate Lohse. They sure showed him.

Just wanted to post an update to our league.  Changes a bunch of the settings around and I am going to post them here.  Any feedback would be great.  We have 13 teams (3 slots are open) and the draft is this Sunday evening at 8:15.  

Below the fold are the changes that I made.

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Last year, I wrote an entry called "The Cruelest Month?"  As most Phillies fans would have been able to tell you without reading anything other than the title, it was about April and the Phillies' woes at the start of the season.  I concluded that something bad or inept at the organizational level must be going on, as the team just can't perform well in April, despite huge roster turnover over the course of the past decade or so.

But in titling that piece, I neglected an even crueler month: March.  We're in the middle of another awful spring training this year, with the Phillies tied for the worst record in baseball (5-12 with the lowly Pirates).

If it seems like the Phillies have been here before, it's because they have.  Only once in the past 7 years have the Phillies had a winning spring training: a 19-11 record in 2006.  In the other years, their records have been 12-14, 12-14, 10-17, 10-21, 11-18, and 11-18.  Overall, in the past 7 years, the Phillies have a .429 winning record in the pre-season.  That's awful.

But should we really care?  During that same 7 year stretch, the Phillies have had a .530 winning percentage in the regular season.  Obviously then, the team's awful spring trainings have not carried over to the regular season.

Individual season comparisons show this even more starkly. For each year, this chart shows the team's record in spring training along with its winning percentage, followed by its record in the regular season and its winning percentage. The last column shows the team's improvement (or lack thereof if the number is negative) in winning percentage from spring to the regular season.

Thus, only in 2006, when the team was excellent in the spring, did its performance in the regular season not get markedly better. Moreover, in the last 5 seasons, the team's regular season record was over .100 different than its spring training record.

What does overall record in spring training mean for the Phillies? Nothing.

But maybe something else is going on. Maybe the Phillies' terrible springs translate to their performance in what I had previously thought of as their cruelest month - April. That theory sounds plausible - they may get better, even much better, over the course of the entire season, but their awful springs must carry over into the next month. After all, as every manager tells us in the newspaper at least once (or a hundred times) each spring, it's not like you can just flip a switch once April comes around. And the Phillies have been awful in April, as we all know.

The trouble with this theory is that it's not borne out by the numbers:

In five Aprils, the Phillies were better than they were in the spring; in three of those five, much better. In two Aprils, they were worse; in fact, in both of those Aprils, they were much worse.

At best, someone trying to make the argument that spring training records mattered could possibly claim that while the team gets better in April, it gets much better throughout the course of the year, so it seems to need time to rev up after its poor spring. That theory is also plausible, but at this point, I think we're getting too close to guesswork.

Until more is shown to develop that theory, it seems quite clear to me that the team's spring performance, which has been quite dreadful of late, does not carry over into the regular season. But it also seems quite clear that March is the team's true cruelest month.

Watching the mlb.tv broadcast today. Adam Eaton looked fairly sharp, throwing three scoreless innings--yes, you read that right--to start the game. Eaton allowed five hits, but two or three of them were wind-blown bloops. He had a few pitches working, the slider particularly, and recorded a couple strikeouts. On the offensive side, Ryan Howard mashed another opposite-field bomb before I turned the game on, then worked a walk after being down 0-2. Howard really could be primed to do some special things this year.

But Eaton's good mound vibes didn't carry over to J.D. Durbin, who came on in the fourth inning. The Real Deal escaped a leadoff walk in that frame, but did the same in the 5th and surrendered three runs, on an RBI double and a two-run homer, and then two more in the 6th, including a leadoff home run.

The Phillies are playing the Twins today, and the broadcast is on the regional sports network in the Twin Cities area. These announcers know Durbin, a second-round Twins draft pick, quite well, and they've come back again and again to the bewildering mystery of this talented and healthy pitcher. Durbin has a good fastball, sharp breaking stuff, very little command, and no idea how to pitch. The first homer he surrendered, to Twins outfield hopeful Carlos Gomez, came on a hanging slider right after he'd pumped a high fastball by Gomez for strike two. Later he gave up a bomb to Jason Kubel on the first pitch of the 6th, a hit-me fastball that Durbin offered in the hope that he wouldn't walk the leadoff guy for the third straight inning.

The Phillies remain desperate for someone to assert control in this fifth-starter race, and Eaton's solid work today--man, that's weird to write--probably puts him in the lead. J.D. Durbin, meanwhile, seems set up for another trip through the waiver wires. You don't want to give up on him--he certainly wouldn't be the first guy to have the light come on in his late 20s--but he can't help the team right now, and he's likely to get claimed. It's unfortunate that Real Deal and Rosario, the two guys with the best stuff in this competition, have the worst command (you could put Fabio Castro in this group too, but at least he can be optioned) and seem too much of a risk to throw in for a team with big hopes in 2008.

The more I think about this rotation kerfuffle the Phillies once again find themselves in, the more confused I get. I don't think I'm alone: at this point, choosing between Travis Blackley, the Durbins, Fabio Castro, Francisco Rosario, the rehabbing Kris Benson and the possibly injured and certainly awful Adam Eaton might be better left to a team of psychics than a clutch of coaches and front-office types.

Rosario, though, is about to start getting some buzz. After 3 1/3 scoreless innings in relief of Kyle Kendrick (himself looking like no sure thing in his first big-league spring camp) and John Ennis, Rosario's Grapefruit League ERA is 1.04, and he's got 3 walks and 8 strikeouts in 8 1/3 innings. As Beerleaguer noted the other day, he pitched well in a starting role this winter, including six shutout innings in the Caribbean Series. During his minor-league career in the Toronto organization, Rosario was exclusively a starter through 2004, and didn't fully convert to relief until the Blue Jays used him out of their bullpen in his initial two stints of MLB exposure during the 2006 season.  (This two year-old scouting report pegs the date at mid-2005.)

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It's about time we "sponsored" a league.  We are mostly calc-nerds here, so, it should be fun and chellenging.  Most teams die off towards the middle, but hopefully it won't since I'll post weekly updates here. Below the fold are the details.

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Hot on the heels of Bill Conlin's latest statement of the obvious--that Ryan Howard, Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins are the greatest Phillies ever at their respective positions--comes this series of philly.com polls on the greatest Phils ever at every position.

My votes, and thus my Phillies all-time team, went as follows:

P Carlton
C Boone
1B Howard
2B Utley
3B Schmidt (how dare they even ask this one?)
SS Rollins
LF Ennis
CF Ashburn
RF Klein
MGR Ozark

The only ones that gave me real pause were catcher, right field, and manager. Boone over Seminick or Lieberthal is a really close call; it ultimately comes down to my subjective memories of the old guy from the '70s and the fact that the team was so good then. Similarly, I voted for Ozark--whom I don't think was anything special as a manager--because the other options were Gene Mauch, who presided over the 1964 collapse; Dallas Green, wrecker of arms and enduring big mouth; Bowa, 'nuff said; and Jim Fregosi, who left Mitch Williams in to pitch the end of Game Six. In an open poll, my vote probably would have been for Eddie Sawyer, who skippered the 1950 Whiz Kids, or Uncle Cholly Himself. In right field, Klein seems to translate for all-time, but really who knows. It's probably a jump ball between him and Bobby Abreu--who has drawn a surprising 14 percent of the total vote as of this writing.

No closer is listed, I guess out of fear that someone would disrespect the Tugger's memory. Fair enough.

This isn't a big deal, I just thought it was funny. From a phillies.com story on Kris Benson:

Maybe an editor just pushed "SUBMIT" a few minutes too soon. I've been there, man...