The Hot Stove and a statistically inspired meandering

Can you hear that Hot Stove sizzle!?!? It's hot! What's cooking? Baseball off-season excitement. That's what's cooking. Careful. It will burn the roof of your mouth. Hot trades with a side of steamed free-agents will be the dish that gets us through this cold winter. Some players will be on different teams next year than they were on this year! Players on different teams! But which players? Which teams? I don't know! Must refresh mlbtraderumors!

All mockery aside, it'll be interesting to see what the Twins will do this off-season. Bill Smith showed us last year that he is willing to trade away young pitching for hitting, something that was against Terry Ryan's religion. The Twins seem to be the best trading partners for other MLB teams looking for young starting pitching. And we need right-handed power hitters on the left side of our infield, desperately. In 2896 right-handed at bats last year the Twins had 46 home runs. Yeah, that's terrible. So a trade makes sense.

We're not going to go through the various scenarios, but one comment on Adrian Beltre. As you probably heard, he will be in a contract year this year. This is significant because he destroyed baseballs in his last contract year with the Dodgers in 2004. Perhaps this was due to new contract motivation. Or possibly it was steroids. But maybe it was just baseball. It's a weird game full of statistical anomalies.

I remembered Wade Boggs having a year with an abnormally high amount of homers, and I went to baseball-reference.com to check it out. He had 16 seasons where he hit eight or fewer HRs, but in 1987 he hit 24. To me this is about as unusual as Beltre's '04 jump in production. In '87, Boggs also hit .363 with 105 walks and 48 strikeouts, and an OPS of 1.049. A sick season, right? Well he was ninth in MVP voting that year. Ninth!

The cynic in me assumed that there were a number of players ahead of him with big names, big HR totals and little else. But that wasn't exactly the case.

Sans maybe Tony Fernandez, you could make the MVP argument for anyone of the top nine vote-getters. There are some really impressive numbers on that list. The production after the top nine drops significantly. Sorry, Rat, but it's true. Jeff Reardon followed his teammate at eleventh in voting. He was the highest voted pitcher that year, which seems odd since he went 8-8 with a 4.43 ERA and 31 saves. Roger Clemens that year was 19th in voting with a much more impressive 20-9 and a 2.97 ERA. Kent Hrbek also cracked the list at 16. Mount Crushmore, represent. Did you know that the Twins also won the World Series that year? Yeah, seriously. Look it up.

Wait, what were we talking about again? Oh yeah, the Hot Stove. Trade Cuddyer to the Rockies for Huston Street. Trade Nick Blackburn to Mariners for Beltre. Trade the Philip Humber and the New Britain Rock Cats to Philadelphia for Chase Utley and Cole Hamels. Move Alexi Casilla to short. Then trade Utley, Boof Bonsor, and Nick Punto to the Marlins for Hanley Ramirez. Move Casilla back to second. Hot Stove.