From Wikipedia:

During the 1980s, a variation of the Chicago-style hot dog called the Vance Law Dog was sold at Wrigley Field. It featured a traditional Chicago-style hot dog topped with cole slaw and ketchup. Some fans incorrectly referred to the dog as ‘The Vance Slaw Dog’ because of the inclusion of cole slaw. The dog was a personal favorite of the late broadcasting legend Harry Caray.

Mr. McElroy pitched in 654 games over a twelve year career in Major League Baseball.  In 1991, he pitched over 101 relief innings for the Cubs, with 92 K’s and an ERA+ of 199.

Can there be an explanation for the disparity between left-side-mustache and right-side-mustache?  And I don’t know how to properly address the pattern of neck hair.  We’ve all seen pictures of Mr. Buckner before, and he has always looked like a normal guy…so what happened here?

Order of business #1: You can cover that umbrella hat in Budweiser cans all you want, but that doesn’t detract from the nerdiness of wearing it in the first place.*

Order of business #2: We need more “Jay Johnsones” in Major League Baseball. From Wikipedia:

[Johnstone] pulled off a number of infamous pranks during his playing days, including placing a soggy brownie inside Steve Garvey’s first base mitt, setting teammate’s cleats on fire (known as “hot-footing”), cutting out the crotch area of Rick Sutcliffe’s underwear, locking Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda in his office during spring training, dressing up as a groundskeeper and sweeping the Dodger Stadium infield in between innings, nailing teammate’s cleats to the floor, and replacing the celebrity photos in manager Lasorda’s office with pictures of himself, Jerry Reuss and Don Stanhouse. He also once dressed up in Lasorda’s uniform (with padding underneath) and ran out to the mound to talk to the pitcher while carrying Lasorda’s book and a can of Slim Fast.

As a baseball announcer, he once covered a microphone with a scent of stale eggs then proceeded to interview Dave Stewart, Mickey Hatcher and other players.

Johnstone struck out looking against Dave Spiwack in the top of the first inning in the movie Naked Gun.

*Let it be noted that I’m anticipating a return of the “nerd vs. dork” controversy in reference to the umbrella hat.

Major League Baseball player, or "Bad News Bears" extra?

Mr. Zahn is a major league baseball player turned Christian motivational speaker.

Mr. Davis broke a New York Yankees record by striking out eight consecutive batters in a single relief appearance. He also co-owns the record for most blown saves in a single season, with 14. He actually had 5 seasons throughout his career (’79, ’80, ’81, ’83, ’85) that I wouuld categorize between “good” and “great.” In two of these he actually averaged over 10 K’s per 9 innings. For a nerd, this is the eqivalent of hall-of-fame level production.

Price Per WARP via Free Agency

Let’s get the grains of salt out of the way…this table only takes two seasons of free agency/performance into account (thats how many years of free agency data I was able to find on ESPN.com). For some teams that’s only a half-dozen signings, not the biggest sample size. I only considered free agents who were given guaranteed major league contracts. If players were traded mid-season, I had no way of tracking how much of the remaining season salary was paid by the original team (though I don’t think that these few occasions would have had much effect on the overall numbers).

Despite these caveats, there are some interesting numbers to be found in the above table. First of all, the average price per WARP paid to free agents over the past two years was $2,374,331. This is not far off from the median price, which was $2,285,947. Of the major market teams, the Cubs have done the best job of finding value in free agency. Only the Dodgers, Braves, and Pirates fall more than one standard deviation from the mean (approx $4M…not including Atlanta’s infinite price).

Since these three teams are pretty big outliers, I ran the standard deviation numbers again without these teams involved (we’ve already identified that they’ve done an extraordinarily poor job over the past two years). Without them, the mean only dropped to $2,309,728, but the standard deviation dropped to $895,192, and some more interesting comparisons can be made.

In this set, the Marlins, Rays, Phillies, and Rockies all fall outside one stdev on the “finding good value” side of the curve. Of those four, the Rays, Phillies, and Rockies were World Series representatives during that same time period.

On the “we’ve been wasting money” side of the curve, the Mariners, Nationals, and White Sox fell outside one stdev, and the Twins fell over two stdevs of the mean! While the Mariners and Nationals had abysmal 2008s, Seattle did have 88 wins in 2007, and the White Sox and Twins actually tied for the 2008 AL Central title before their one game playoff (being in the same division was certainly beneficial for these two).

Back to those outliers…In the case of Pittsburgh, the team only spent about $6.6M in free agency over the past two seasons. However, their $22M per WARP shows that this money was not spent very efficiently. My initial reaction was to give them some additional leeway since they are a small market team, and don’t have the funds to target the top free agents, or mask any mistakes with additional signings. However, Oakland, Tampa Bay, and Florida all had lower payrolls than Pittsburgh, and they each paid less than $1.75M per WARP. Pittsburgh fans, avert your eyes. Otherwise, take a look at these signings by the Pirates: Tony Armas got paid $3.5M for 0.6 WARP, Yosian Herrera got paid $1.28M for -0.4 WARP, Chris Gomez got $1M for 0.1 WARP, and Byung-Hyun Kim got $850K for 0.0 WARP. If there’s any slack left to be given, it’s that the lack of recent success and the wild Pittsburgh nightlife and weather don’t stand much of a chance of attracting those lower-salary free agents against South Beach or the Bay area.

The Dodgers, on the other hand, have no excuse. Major market attraction? Check. Sunny California attraction? Check. Laid-back west coast attraction? Check. Enough money to mask mistakes with more transactions? Check. Recent playoff appearance? Check. Yet over the past two years, the Dodgers have spent over $122M on their free agents’ salaries, and still have an average price per WARP of over $9.5M. Juan Pierre at $8.8M per, Nomar at $9.25M per, Jason Schmidt at $15.7M per, and Andruw Jones at $18.1M per, I’m looking at you…No wait. Actually, Ned Colletti I’m looking at YOU. No one better complain about Manny’s contract when he’ll be the one high-paid player on the Dodgers who actually puts up big numbers.

One major surprise for me was that the Giants didn’t have a terrible price per WARP. I would’ve thought that the Rich Aurillia, Dave Roberts, and Barry Zito contracts would’ve created a hole that was too deep to dig out of. And Atlanta…what happened? Paying $11M over two years for the production of replacement players is quite an accomplishment

So where to go from here? It will be interesting to revisit this list after the current season, when so many teams spent so much less on free agents, and the Yankees spent so much more than usual but signed three players with star potential. It would also be interesting to track this data from the start of each current GM’s reign, and ranking their careers in free agency signings. Anyone know where I can find all of this data easily?