At the beginning of the year, I made a contribution to a discussion about the wisdom of Atlanta signing Raul Mondesi to a one-year deal. You'll find my initial take on the deal at post #10.

The reason why I have thought to revisit this is because my opinion has changed, quite dramatically. I originally used a slightly modified version of Pete Palmer's Batting Runs to make my assessment. Now, as my post of (14 January) indicates, Batting Runs uses as its baseline (or zero point) the record of the average player. But wait Ð Mondesi is being signed to fill a hole in the roster. The Braves did have J.D. Drew. But he became a free agent and signed elsewhere. So, Braves' general manager John Schuerholz has either to draw from his farm system, trade for a player or find some other free agent to sign. Furthermore, he's got to look at players who are probably hovering around average ability, unless the Braves have the money to sign or trade fore a star outfielder (assuming one is made available). Thus, Schuerholz is delving into the grey area that sits between the average major-league player, and the infamous Replacement Level.

One of the more difficult nettles to grasp in sabermetrics is the concept of Replacement Level. This hasn't stopped a lot of people from pulling on a gardening glove and grasping it, though. There has been lots of discussion about exactly where it lies, and everybody who thinks about it has an opinion. (For the uninitiated, the Replacement Level is that point that separates major-league quality from everybody else.)

You will find one lengthy description of one way of calculating Replacement Level in the 2002 Baseball Prospectus, by Keith Woolner (pp 455Ð466). Woolner concludes that Replacement Level offense is around 80 per cent of average, for most fielding positions. Mitchel Lichtman, famous as 'mgl' on Baseball Primer (a/k/a Baseball Think Factory), sets the replacement level in his highly regarded Super Linear Weights at +17 runs. Chris Dial, another Primer Primate (in the sense of the College of Cardinals, and I mean the ones in Rome, not St Louis or Louisville), has made a case for it being around 90 percent of the average major-leaguer.

One benchmark for where Replacement Level is rests on the concept that a team made up of Replacement Level Players would play about as well as the worse teams in major-league history. This is estimated as a winning percentage of about .350, or about as good as this team. It seems as good a standard as any.

So, as we can see, there are several different performance levels where a player has been, by expert sabermetricians, considered genuinely to be 'as good as the next guy'. Thus, when projecting the value of a player, and thus assessing the analytical ability of a general manager and his staff, it seems only fair to take into account the fact that we all have different ideas of where a replacement level is.

When we adjust the Replacement Level in trying to project whether Raul Mondesi will be worth the money he is being paid by the Braves (assuming he doesn't quit again). So, revising my projection of Mondesi for 2005 against a lowish and a high adjustment for Replacement Level, I find his Fra Paolo Rating comes in at either 1.8 or 3 wins above replacement. On either figure, the signing no longer seems daft, as I once thought it was. In fact, it has the potential to be shrewd, an illustration of how John Schuerholz has kept the Braves a contender for more than a decade.

Jeff Moorad used to be a player agent for baseball players, including Shawn Green, recently traded by Los Angels to the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Diamondbacks are a Major League Baseball franchise that owes US$200 million. Last August, Diamondbacks' chief executive Jerry Colangelo was forced out by a group of investors, headed by Ken Kendrick, who had ploughed a lot of money into the franchise in 2003. Kendrick and his friends Jeff Royer, Mike Chipman and Dale Jensen approached Jeff Moorad to become Colangelo's replacement. Moorad was happy to be invited to be chief executive officer, and offered to put some US$50 million of his own money into the franchise.

Well, wait a minute. It seems MooradÕs approval as a baseball owner has been sitting on the Commissioner of Baseball's desk for a few months, while he ponders the conditions for admitting Moorad into the club. It seems he was reluctant to allow Moorad to become what is known as the "control person" for the franchise. So the Diamondbacks suggested that Kendrick could fill that role. Still no movement. Could it be that the Commissioner of Baseball fears allowing a former player representative into a world where he might get access to sensitive material relating to negotiations with player agents and the players' association?

Given the conflict of interest shenanigans that have gone on during the Commissioner's tenure, which coincidentally have been the most successful era for the owners in negotiations with the players since organized bargaining between the two, one might think so. Of course, we tend to see others taking advantage of opportunities in the way we take advantage of ours.

And who might be pulling the commissioner's strings again? Could it be Jerry Reinsdorf, quoted here saying "I have enough problems with my own teams." Sounds like a non-denial denial, as a certain Mr Ben Bradlee once said.

Baseball America has been seen by the Sabermetricians as a bastion of the traditional scouting mentality, with its emphasis on five-tool players equipped with the Good Face. Periodically, it publishes articles that stir away at a bubbling pot, mixing things together again. Here, Alan Schwarz hosts an moderated exchange among scout types Gary Huges of the Cubs and Eddie Bane of the Angels, together with sabermetricians Voros McCracken and Gary Huckaby.

The debate stirred up an exchange on Baseball Think Factory that was notable more for the way it digressed into a debate about minor league walk rates being maintained in the Majors. It also was hard going in places for someone not familiar with statiscal methods, which is the kind of discussion that gets sabermetrics a bad name.

The initial exchanges got me wondering, though, whether we are seeing an interesting split occurring in the sabermetric movement. When Bill James began drawing the attention of a mass audience, he was more interested in analysis of what had happened. And, on Baseball Think Factory, one sees this tradition still maintained in discussions about the Hall of Fame.

However, the generation of sabermetricians, sometimes known as neo-sabermetricians, associated with Baseball Prospectus seem more interested in projecting what is likely to happen. One of the most vociferous spokesmen for this attitude is mgl, who like McCracken and Huckaby works for a major-league team. My headline overdramatizes this split, because I don't think there is really much hostility between the two camps. They co-exist happily, although not many of them talk with each other very much.

It will be interesting to see whether this trend persists over the coming years, or whether the Analysts will return to prominence if the Projectors' formulae turn out to be a baseball equivalent of the Philosopher's Stone - unable to turn the base metal of statistics consistently into the gold of Championships.