The Starting Rotation: St. Louis Friction

Get your weekend off on the right foot with an eclectic look around the major leagues from Pat Lackey and Andrew Johnson in The Starting Rotation.

The Ace: Colby Rasmus' Cardinal Sin

How long is too long for a manager to be in one place? How soon is too soon for a budding young hitter to request a trade when he isn't getting the playing time he feels he deserves? Those are the questions we're left with now that the apparently growing rift between Cardinals center fielder Colby Rasmus and manager Tony La Russa has been dragged out into the light of day.

We don't know the full details of what happened between Rasmus and La Russa. Probably only a handful of people ever will. Did Rasmus do more to wear out his welcome than simply asking out of town? Did La Russa push a few of the wrong buttons as he seems to have done in the past with the likes of J.D. Drew, Jim Edmonds and Scott Rolen?

That's for the Cardinals to know, and for us to wonder about, and there's no question that the folks in the front office at Busch Stadium are best equipped to make all the important decisions on this situation.

But that doesn't mean we don't know a few things looking at the Cardinals from afar.

Start with the cold, hard dollars:

• Rasmus, a second-year big-leaguer, is making just above the league minimum. He won't be eligible for arbitration until after the 2011 season. His .846 OPS is the second-best in the National League among qualified center fielders, behind only Rockies MVP candidate Carlos Gonzalez.

• Assuming the contract options on each player are picked up, Albert Pujols is due to be a free agent after the 2011 season, Chris Carpenter after the 2012 season and Adam Wainwright after 2013. Combined, those three players are chewing up close to $37 million a year in payroll based on the average annual value of their respective contracts. (With the escalating value of each player's contract, it's actually significantly more going forward.) Barring injury or dramatic decline, all will be due raises over the next three seasons, and in the case of Pujols and Wainwright, both could easily argue they are worth twice as much per year as they are getting now.

• Left fielder Matt Holliday is owed more than $17 million a season through 2016.

• Since 2003, St. Louis' team payroll has not been below $83.2 million or above $94.2 million.

Get the picture? The Cardinals are an upper mid-market team based on payroll. They have a handful of vital stars who are going to deserve contract extensions, and another who is already signed long-term to an enormous deal. Even if they let Carpenter go after 2012, when he will be 37, they could have $50-$60 million a year tied up in three players -- Holliday, Pujols and Wainwright.

Whether they keep all three or not -- but especially if they do -- the Cardinals need every quality, cost-controlled player they can find to fill out the rest of their squad, something that already seems to be a challenge when you scroll up and down a roster that currently counts Skip Schumaker (.678 OPS), Brendan Ryan (.563 OPS) and Pedro Feliz (.528 OPS) as regulars.

St. Louis has to hope there's a resolution here that involves keeping both Rasmus and La Russa, because every other possible end would leave the franchise in a lousy spot.

Odd as it feels to say, Rasmus might be more important than La Russa to the Cardinals' hopes of fielding a World Series contender annually going forward. On the other hand, jettisoning any manager, let alone a future Hall of Famer like La Russa who has been a constant for 15 seasons, to even in part appease a young player that might have an attitude problem is a completely untenable situation for any franchise.

-- Andrew Johnson

The No. 2: Don't Forget Francisco

Toward the end of our FanHouse Roundtable on wins and the Cy Young Award earlier this week, something interesting happened that caught my eye. The co-author on this weekly column mentioned that though Felix Hernandez had garnered mostly universal support from our crew and has the backing of most of the stat-oriented crowd, Francisco Liriano was actually the best pitcher in the American League this year according to advanced metrics like xFIP and WAR.

Ostensibly, our debate was over whether a pitcher like Hernandez, who only has 11 wins but sparkling stats otherwise, should be considered for the award over Clay Buchholz (15-6 and the current AL ERA leader) and CC Sabathia (the likely AL wins leader, possibly the league's only 20-game winner and holder of a solid 3.14 ERA). The argument for Hernandez is that as of Friday he's thrown nearly 70 innings more than Buchholz and nearly all of his other rate stats (from the traditional ERA to more saber-oriented numbers like strikeouts/walks/homers per nine innings, etc.) outpace Sabathia's by a good measure. He's obviously been better than both Sabathia and Buchholz in every category but wins, and his candidacy is gaining a lot of steam.

But what about Liriano? It's true that Liriano has thrown 172 1/3 innings, which puts him a good 40 behind King Felix, but with a good five starts remaining he'll likely eclipse the 200-inning mark, so he's not exactly slacking off in that department. His strikeout rate is better than Hernandez's (9.50 K/9 to 8.58), his walk rate isn't much worse (2.72 per nine to 2.46), his groundball rate is slightly better (53.9 percent to 52.9), and his miniscule home run rate leads the AL (0.21 homers allowed per nine to Felix's still excellent 0.57). In all of the things that pitchers do that we can directly measure, Liriano has excelled and yet he's a distant third (at best) in the Cy Young discussion. The reason, besides the innings gap, is that Liriano's ERA is 3.24. It's excellent, but it's higher than any of the three pitchers that have gotten most of the discussion so far.

Liriano is excellent at doing things that we know pitchers can control (striking batters out, not walking batters, and keeping the ball in the park and on the ground), but he's struggling a bit with the part of pitching that's harder to define. On balls put in play (that is, not strikeouts, walks or home runs), hitters are batting over .340 against Liriano. Sometimes that's the pitcher's fault (Liriano allows more line drives than Hernandez, which typically lead to more base hits), but sometimes it's a fielder's fault, the ballpark's fault, the scorekeeper's fault or anyone else but the pitcher's fault that a hit drops or an earned run scores.

As a result, Liriano's xFIP (which is calculated from strikeout rate, walk rate, and flyball rate and normalized to approximate an ERA) is 3.04 and better than Hernandez's 3.25, even though Hernandez's ERA is a full run better. And this is where the philosophical question comes in: When we give out awards, how should we weigh real runs vs. theoretical runs?

Liriano is excellent at doing things that we know pitchers can control, but he's struggling a bit with the part of pitching that's harder to define.
Runs win games, and the teams that win the most games make the playoffs. That's easy to measure and there's no disputing it. The problem comes in figuring out who's most responsible for those runs. Besides home runs, nothing is directly attributable to any one player. It's why RBI isn't a great stat for hitters and why wins aren't great for pitchers. At the same time, while a stat like xFIP does measure performance and makes a great predictor for the future (for example, I'd tell you right now I fully expect Liriano to have a better year than Buchholz in 2011, even though Buchholz's ERA is 80 points lower than Liriano's), it doesn't measure the actual runs allowed on the field, and those are what decide the games.

And it's true: good performances from pitchers keep runs off of the board and good performances by hitters put them on the board and what the sabermetric movement is all about is using numbers that individual players can control to estimate how many they're really, truly worth on their own. But those numbers don't actually directly represent the runs scored on the field, and that's where the big disconnect exists. I wouldn't have spent as much time explaining sabermetric stats here if I obviously didn't put some serious stock in them, but I also find it hard when considering the Cy Young Award to completely dismiss the point that runs simply score less often when Felix Hernandez is on the mound than they do when Francisco Liriano is on the mound.

-- Pat Lackey

Back-End Filler

• Is it crazy to think the Rockies might be in the driver's seat in the NL West? Well, yes, and one of my FanHouse colleagues has already told me so, but the schedule favors Colorado if it can stay hot, and I'm not even referring to the strength of its remaining opponents. The Giants and Padres play six more times this season, while the Rockies will play six more games combined against San Francisco and San Diego. Let's assume the Giants and Padres split their remaining games, while the Rockies take two of three in each of its remaining series with those two clubs. If the teams play to their Pythagorean record in their other remaining games, the final NL West standings would look like this:

NL West	W	L	GB
Padres	91	71	-
Giants	90	72	1
Rockies	89	73	2

That's tight enough to make me believe that this is truly a wide-open, three-team race, in which Colorado may very well be the the best club. and I didn't even mention that the Rockies will play 12 of their final 22 games at Coors Field, including all six against San Francisco and San Diego. Colorado is 47-22 this season at home, the second best mark in the National League behind Atlanta.

-- Andrew Johnson

• It's true that there doesn't look like even one exciting pennant race in the American League this year. The closest division is the AL East and the Rays, who trail the Yankees by 2 1/2 games, have a 6 1/2 game wild-card lead on the Red Sox. The Twins are up six in the Central. The Rangers are 7 1/2 up in the West. Things didn't look much different a year ago, though, when the closest race on the morning of Sept. 10 was the wild card, which saw the Red Sox with a two-game lead on the Rangers. In the end, the Twins closed down what was a 5 1/2-game gap on the Tigers on that day and beat them in a one-game playoff for the AL Central title.

So maybe it's not too late for the White Sox, Red Sox or A's to make a move, but if they're going to do it, they'd best get started right now.

-- Pat Lackey

• Eric Chavez sounded like a man set to retire earlier this week, serving as a sobering reminder of why every long-term deal is a huge risk, and why so many players are willing to sign pre-arbitration extensions that are below market value. With injuries, you just never know. Take Chavez. He signed a six-year, $66 million extension before the 2004 season that began in 2005 and now seems like general manager Billy Beane's great folly. Chavez played 297 games in the first two years of that extension and has played just 154 since. He played more games in the first year of his extension than he did in the final four.

Yet, is there any doubt Beane made a smart move extending him at the time? Chavez's 121 OPS+ at the time of the extension was the 22nd best ever by a third baseman in his first six seasons, according to Baseball-Reference.com. He had just won three straight Gold Gloves and was considered the best defensive third baseman in the American League at the time. FanGraphs.com pegged his value in 2003 at $11 million. In 2004, it was $16.9 million. This is the type of player, large-market or small, that you try to keep around as long as possible.

Sometimes things just don't work out.

-- Andrew Johnson