This is a post I prepared shortly after the season ended but never put up for whatever reason. The recent Hardball Times article by Jeremy Greenhouse "Criminals of WAR", which correctly posits that we shouldn't be slaves to Fangraphs WAR, provided a reminder that this information was sitting in my hard drive. Using Fangraphs WAR as a baseline, I incorporated baserunning and other non-UZR defensive metrics to calculate adjusted WAR for 2009 Mets position players. Here are the components:

Batting: Identical to Fangraphs, park-adjusted wRAA.
Fielding: For non-catchers I averaged UZR and John Dewan's Plus/Minus metric. For catchers I used devil_fingers's numbers from Driveline Mechanics.
Replacement: Identical to Fangraphs, the adjustment for replacement based on playing time.
Positional: Identical to Fangraphs, the adjustment based on position.
Baserunning: Baseball Prospectus's baserunning stat, EqBRR, less runs from stolen bases (EqSBR) since stolen bases and caught stealings are already accounted for in the batting component.

Rather than posting the whole thing here, I uploaded the data to a Google Doc. Here are the top 5 players whose adjusted WAR (AWAR) increased the most as compared to Fangraphs WAR (FGWAR).

Comments:

• David Wright was dreadful in the field this year but terrific on the basepaths. 
• Angel Pagan, Daniel Murphy and Fernando Tatis's values increased mainly due to high defensive ratings from Plus/Minus: +16, +10 and +9, respectively. I stopped to think about having Tatis on the team next year but it's probably for the best that he isn't.
• UZR and Plus/Minus have historically agreed on Jeff Francoeur's defense but this year they strongly differed. In the end, it seems like he and Ryan Church provided similar value to the Mets in 2009, with Francoeur having more playing time.
• Jeremy Reed, Carlos Delgado and Josh Thole lost the most value between revised WAR and Fangraphs WAR, but it wasn't much.
• My fellow nerds and I will now retire to the nerdery with our calculators.

Matt Holliday is clearly the cream of the free agent crop, but there are a lot of other candidates for the Mets' supposed left field vacancy. Here they are, in the same format as the starting pitchers from yesterday.

Mike Cameron is the bargain on this list, as he will surely sign for far less than he is worth. Of course, if the Mets did sign him and move him to a corner (again) he'd lose some (possibly considerable) value due to the negative relative positional adjustment from center to left or right.

Johnny Damon and Jason Bay are fine players, but both are Type-A free agents and even though the Mets' first round pick is protected I don't think they want to give up a top-forty selection for the 36-year-old Damon. They might be inclined to do so for Bay, but he's likely make just a few million less than Holliday despite being the clearly inferior player, all-around.

Marlon Byrd is an interesting option, as he won't cost nearly as much as anyone above him, but he too loses some value by switching to a corner.

Fernando Tatis is also looking for work, so there's that.

This post was originally titled "Mets Sign Matt Holliday", which seemed funny to me at 1am last night but in retrospect is still pretty funny but also kinda douchey. I didn't think people would actually believe that Scott Boras's top client would sign a deal five minutes into free agency. My bad.

More photos » by David Zalubowski - AP

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Some are out watching the "New Moon" premiere and even fewer are at a midnight showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".  With the advent of free agency, we are here to amaze you with astonishing tales of Bengie Molina, courtesy of some of the best blogs around.  Let's do the time warp again:

Bengie NO-Lina: BlueAndOrange

Some Things About Bengie Molina: Tedquarters

Running The Bases - Part 3: The Laggards: Fangraphs

Mo'Lina Mo'Problems or: Why Bengie Molina To The Mets Is A Bad Idea: Amazin' Avenue

Note: I could probably link to about 1000 McCovey Chronicles posts on the subject but I won't.  Just go there and ask about Bengie if you need some guidance.

Update: hat-tip to user FlashFlood who sent in the question, Noble-bait of the year.

I swore I'd never make fun of another Marty Noble Mailbag Inbox. Patrick from Connecticut had other plans:

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More photos » by AARON J. LATHAM - AP

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Last season, Jason Marquis and Randy Wolf were good deals for their respective teams. The Rockies traded aging reliever Luis Vizcaino for Jason Marquis and got a 3.8 WAR ($17.1MM), all-star season out of the veteran. The Dodger signed Wolf for $5 Million plus incentives and he produced a 3.0 WAR ($13.6MM) performance.

Now, coming off career-years, both players are linked to the Mets, Marquis because of his hometown connections and Wolf presumably because of his shiny ERA. That alone is a scary enough, but there's a more important circumstance here that makes it almost impossible to talk about how these two could help the Mets. First consider Wolf's batted ball line:

LD%: 18.3 GB%: 39.6 FB%: 42.1 HR/FB%: 9.2 BABIP: .257 

Now a Mets pitcher's:

LD%: 16.8 GB%: 35.7 FB%: 47.5 HR/FB%: 8.6 BABIP: .296

The Mets pitcher is Johan Santana, and while he's obviously extremely better than Randy Wolf, it doesn't really matter for this exercise, because we're comparing their batted ball tendencies, and both are extreme flyball lefties. Notice how Wolf had nearly .40 points of BABIP in his favor, despite giving up more linedrives. 

Similarly, Jason Marquis' line:

LD%: 17.0 GB%: 55.6 FB%: 27.4 HR/FB%: 7.8 BABIP: .291

and Mike Pelfrey's:

LD%: 18.7 GB%: 51.3 FB%: 27.4 HR/FB%: 9.5 BABIP: .321

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More photos » by Paul Connors - AP

Pitchers like Jon Garland can be useful and cost-effective ways to upgrade a starting rotation. (AP Photo/Paul Connors)

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We haven't seen any numbers come out of the Mets' front office, but the consensus seems to be that they'll probably have a 2010 payroll comparable to that of the 2009 team, which is to say something in the $140-150 million range. I don't know why the consensus says that. I guess somebody inferred that since the Mets aren't in terrible shape financially (thanks to being one of the few investors to actually make money with Bernie Madoff), coupled with no apparent inclination to rival the Yankees' expenditures, they will probably just look to maintain the status quo. With a few contracts coming off the books, including those of Carlos Delgado, Billy Wagner, J.J. Putz, and Brian Schneider, rough estimates give the Mets around $30 million or so to spend this offseason. Those departing players are leaving holes, though, so that money has to be spread around to patch the roof, fix the shutters, put in a new garage door, and if there's money left over perhaps spring for those fancy pavers for the driveway.

The Mets finished 12th in the National League in both runs scored and runs allowed, so a cursory glance doesn't make clear whether the Mets should allocate more money to pitching or to hitting. Injuries tell part of the story, but pitchers and hitters alike lost significant playing time to the disabled list in 2009. The big ticket item is Matt Holliday, who should command $18 million or so all by himself. If the Mets dipped their feet in that pool they wouldn't have a lot of money left over for everything else. There's no obvious stud on the starting pitching market (a la CC Sabathia last year) but there are at least a fair number of interesting names to choose from. Here's a quick snapshot of the top eight available starters. I've included each pitcher's 2010 seasonal age, his 2007-2009 WAR, his mean WAR for those years using a 5-3-1 weighting, plus an approximate value for that mean using $4.5 million per win.

What's surprising to me is how decent some of these guys are. Really, they're all decent or better. It's easy to get hung up on the sexy names out there, but Jon Garland has been worth two-plus wins consistently throughout his career, and for a guy who isn't likely to get much in terms of money or years you could do a whole lot worse than him in the back of your rotation. I don't love the guy, but a two-year deal worth $5-6 million annually looks like a pretty good investment.

I like Rich Harden a lot. We all love his strikeouts and his age, right? But at some point you have to wonder whether he's the sort of pitcher worth gambling on, given his injury history and high walk rates. He probably has the highest upside of the group here, but it's not clear that he's a smarter investment than, say, Jason Marquis, who isn't really appealing to me at all but has still managed to be reasonably productive. High upside can be very enticing, but it's quite possible that three average seasons might be preferable to one poor season, one decent season, and one great season. In other words, there might be something to be said about consistency.

Let's not get carried away with the "C" word just yet. Consistency has no gravitas without some context to which it can be applied. A player who middles along at replacement level every year can be said to be consistent, but that doesn't make him in any way desirable. A player who alternates terrific and average years is fairly inconsistent, but cumulatively he's still well above average and therefore has plenty of value. A guy like Garland, who does little to distinguish himself -- but also little to embarrass himself -- is a valuable commodity, and his value is probably going to exceed his cost.

Garland and Marquis aren't great pitchers, but they're not bad pitchers, either. Livan Hernandez is a bad pitcher. Oliver Perez appears to be a bad pitcher. John Maine isn't a great pitcher, and he might never be especially good or healthy again. It's not always necessary to get the best players available, and part of what makes the smart teams so smart is that they maximize the investments they make, regularly seeing significant returns on those investments.

The Mets could go out and spend $16 million a year on John Lackey, and if he stays healthy they might actually get $16 million worth of pitcher once or twice over the life of the contract. That's not a bad investment: you got what you paid for. But if there are market inefficiencies that disproportionately value something -- say strikeouts or Cy Young votes -- the teams that exploit those inefficiencies in the other direction by identifying traits that are undervalued -- say a string of merely above-average seasons or good health -- can make up a lot of ground by taking on value in excess of their costs. That's one thing the Mets fail to do almost without exception*, and it's clearly an area of their roster and payroll management that could use some attention sooner rather than later.

* Buying out the arbitration and early free agent years for David Wright and Jose Reyes were shrewd moves

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For Internet baseball writers, cries of apathy have drowned out the usual complaining about the BBWAA Awards voting. What used to be "here's why Johan Santana was a much better choice for the Cy than Bartolo Colon" has become "holy crap I couldn't care less who wins the Cy Young Award". I touched on this awhile back but there is a significant reason why people should still care about getting these awards right - the important* Hall of Fame voting. Each Hall voting season, ballots are justified atleast partially on past MVP and Cy Young Award voting. I won't recap a ton of examples but here's a classic one for illustration, from Sean McAdam about Bert Blyleven:

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