Kevin Millwood Is Hungry, Baltimore. Hungry for Your Innings.

The most important thing to note about the news broken by Jeff Zrebiec of the Baltimore Sun that the Baltimore Orioles and Texas Rangers have agreed in principle to swap reliever Chris Ray and starter Kevin Millwood is that it is not yet a done deal. Both teams are reportedly reviewing the medical records on their proposed acquisitions, and one or both players may have to pass a physical before the trade is complete.

The second most important thing to note is the number .279.

That was the batting average opposing hitters had against Kevin Millwood in 2009 when they put the ball in play, excluding home runs. It's a statistic called BAbip, and it's generally used as a shorthand for measuring how lucky a pitcher or hitter is -- or isn't.

Let's say Scrapple McKracken, second baseman for the Central City Gold Stockings, is five years into a career as an above-average contact hitter with some pop; he doesn't hit a lot of balls out of the park, but he can scorch a double into right center just fine if a pitcher leaves a fastball up or hangs a curve. His first three years in the league he's a solid .310/.380/.430 hitter; one of the top fifteen starting second basemen offensively, if closer to the bottom of that list than the top. His fourth year, though, McKracken goes nuts: 62 doubles, 16 HR, 4 triples, and something like a .350/.430/.550 line. He gets top honors among all second basemen and takes the Gold Stockings to the pennant, and in the offseason signs a five year extension worth an ungodly amount of money. But then in his fifth year, McKracken falls off the table; he doesn't just revert to the solid bat he was before, but regresses to a .280/.350/.400 hitter. The columnists ask: What happened? And being columnists, they answer their own question: McKracken must be hurt, or has lost his drive since winning a championship, or is taking it easy now that he's gotten paid. They really like to talk about that last one, and they do it so much that the star second baseman does some public talking back, and eventually it reaches the point where McKracken, contract and all, is traded to the Coastal City Silver Knickers in the offseason for a 31-year-old pitcher that won 22 games with a 3.97 ERA.

Never mentioned even once are McKracken's BAbips for those five years with the Gold Stockings: .307, .312, .305, .372, .278. All those balls that magically started finding the gap in his fourth year? His fifth year, they were atom-balls hit right at an outfielder. Those hard grounders up the middle that made the opposing pitcher do impromptu jumping jacks on the mound, and the opposing shortstop get his jersey dirty for nothing as the ball rolled past into center? His fifth year, most of those were easily handled by the middle infielders; a lot of them turned into double plays. He's not hurt, he's not lazy, he's not out of shape; he's just horribly unlucky, one year after being ludicrously fortunate. Of course, McKracken doesn't help his own cause: as the bad luck starts piling up, he consciously changes his mechanics for the first time since he was a kid playing on the farm, trying to speed up his swing -- and he ends up losing his timing, turning some of those smoking line drives into loopers, pop-ups, and fly-outs.

The story has a happy ending, of course. With a fresh start in Coastal City and no one screaming at him about his lack of effort in the newspapers, McKracken, still using the new mechanics that actually lessen the percentage of line drives he hits, seems to resurrect himself from the ashes: .320/.390/.420 in his first two months. As the season goes on, he loosens up, gets his timing back, and gradually goes back to his old swing without even really noticing he's doing it; he ends the season around .320/.390/.440. Now, the Silver Knickers don't make the playoffs because they've got no bullpen, but neither do the Gold Stockings: the ace they traded McKracken for goes 9-15 with a 4.12 ERA, and is shut down in late September with a shoulder injury. And now the columnists want to know what happened to his drive.

So what does all of this mean for Kevin Millwood? Well, pitcher BAbip functions pretty much the same way batter BAbip does in terms of evaluating luck: it's a good shorthand, but it's not the be-all, end-all; it does require context, some of which was hinted at in the above story. For instance, if a hitter's BAbip drops off substantially, there's a good bet some of it's luck -- hard hit balls just seem to be finding gloves more often this year than they did last. But what if those hard hit balls are finding gloves because, well, they're not all that hard hit anymore? For instance, in 2006, Andruw Jones was an Atlanta Brave and still a respectable hitter (.262/.363/.531). In 2008, he was a Los Angeles Dodger, and he was abysmal (.158/.256/.249). In addition to all his other problems at the plate, his BAbip in 2006 was .264; in 2008 it was .229 -- and his career average BAbip before the 2008 season was .276. One might conclude that Jones was suffering a bout of sustained bad luck, but in 2006, 19% of the balls he put into play off his bat were line drives; in 2008, that number was 13.4%. Jones was suffering a power outage of sorts, and we know why; Jones actually had become a lazy piece of shit, and if not for the specific insanity of Dodgers GM Ned Colletti, it would have cost him millions of dollars. It's interesting to note that in limited 2009 action for the Texas Rangers, after being humiliated in the national press and cut by the Dodgers, Jones's LD% rebounded to 16% -- and even though his BAbip stayed roughly the same (.221), his line improved to .214/.323/.459, good for a 100 OPS+ last year. Lesson learned: when you hit for power, it helps your game if you work out every once in awhile.

For a pitcher, generally the biggest influences on his BAbip are going to be the defense behind him, the number of ground balls he induces, and the percentage of batted balls off him that are line drives. He's really got no control over the defense -- ask Jonathan Sanchez of the San Francisco Giants about that -- but the other stuff is a direct reflection of how good a pitcher he is. If his fastball's 88 MPH and a straight line, or if he loops his curves over the middle of the plate, a lot of those are going to be batted, they're going to be line drives, and they're going to more often that not land for hits. If he's got good stuff and commands it well, the hitters will more often than not make bad contact and hit the ball on the ground or pop it up. But then again, extreme groundball pitchers like the Yankees' Chien Ming Wang have learned first hand how feast or famine that can be, and what happens when you induce a bunch of middling grounders that the guys behind you aren't in position to come up with -- in addition to all his injury problems, Wang saw his .287 BAbip against from 2008 turn into an ungodly .397 in limited action. Watching the games was baffling, even for someone who hates the Yankees; everything seemed to find the outfield. Wang's LD% actually went down between 2008 and 2009, from 22.1% to 19.7%. It'll be interesting to see if he can fully recover from his injury problems and get his mechanics back; hopefully he will, and hopefully it'll be while pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals or someone.

With all this in mind, here are the last three years of Kevin Millwood's career:

2007: .348 BAbip, 21.3 LD%, 4.61 xFIP
2008: .366 BAbip, 25.3 LD%, 4.20 xFIP
2009: .279 BAbip, 19.2 LD%, 4.70 xFIP

The last stat, xFIP, is how we correct for defense. The stat normalizes home runs across the league and takes into account strikeouts, HR allowed, walks allowed, and hit-by-pitches, plugs it into a formula, and gives a number that you can treat roughly like an ERA. So according to xFIP, Millwood by himself was more like his 10-14, 5.16 ERA self from 2007 than he was the kind of pitcher we think of when we see an ERA in the mid-3s. Incidentally, xFIP also says he was -- I don't want to say "pretty good," but much better on his own in 2008 than he was in 2007 and 2009, despite getting hit a bit harder.

So Millwood lost almost a hundred points of BAbip against between 2008 and 2009 -- why? It probably wasn't that he pitched better, because his xFIP went up by a worrying margin. Well, what do the stats say about the Texas defense?

2007: -6.8 UZR
2008: -51.7 UZR
2009: 32.5 UZR

Oh. That...that might explain it.

So how was Baltimore's defense last year? Because if Millwood needs a good defense to maintain even the illusion of competent major league pitching, then --

2009: -23.6 UZR

Well then.

The news isn't all bad; the team is mostly young kids, and it's conceivable that if the Orioles acquire a good defensive third baseman, teach Felix Pie to play outfield properly, teach Adam Jones to play deeper in center, and let Nolan Reimold develop, they could have a defense that's only -10 or so. But that's probably the best case scenario.

The hope, then, is that Kevin Millwood gets lucky. Very lucky. The kind of luck that is usually reserved for major motion pictures and straight-up cheating. And then we trade him at the deadline for someone who can play first base in a year or two, and make sure we've already run cackling off to the Prospect Bank by the time Millwood turns back into a pumpkin. I'd say we're hoping for Millwood to be this year's Jarrod Washburn, but last year, the Seattle Mariners had the best defense in the league before trading Washburn to the Tigers, where he helped tank their otherwise promising season along with another disastrous mid-season Tiger acquisition, the Orioles' very own Aubrey Huff. Perhaps that's unfair to Washburn, and by extension, Millwood -- they're out there pitching the best they can, and somewhere along the line, someone did agree to give them money to do so. But you always want that to happen to some other poor fool's team, not your own.

Early reports have the Rangers eating $3 million of Millwood's $12 million salary, so the Orioles have essentially traded Chris Ray, a struggling reliever who was more or less done in Baltimore in all likelihood, for guy who will probably post a 5 ERA in the AL East with our defense behind him. However, I don't have to pay the man; I just get to watch him pitch, and if he pitches like that, he probably won't be around more than a couple months anyway. So I'm not too put out about it.

Because I know that Andy MacPhail is still talking to Erik Bedard's agent. And I know a secret. Would you like to know what it is?

Erik Bedard freaking rules.


For the love of God, no one tell the Mets.