One of many, many, many books I've never read.

But, unlike you, I’ve been keeping track of all that’s being said. I’ve spent countless hours this offseason combing through every Phillies blog seeing who’s being talked about and what’s being said. My electric bill has been sky high as the rack of specialized servers in my apartment combed through the internet picking out data pertaining to the each individual player on the team. I’ve hired a team of interns from my alma mater Shippensburg University to compile this data into complex databases that software engineers put together for me at a cost that is absolutely staggering. (Chris, thanks in advance for approving this expense report. Also, I didn’t graduate from Ship so much as I was kicked out but I don’t know a fancy Latin term for that so… GO RED RAIDERS!)

The result of all of this work is that I can empirically prove which member of the Philadelphia Phillies won the offseason, and the result may surprise you.

Before I post the results let me tell you about the process I (actually) used to gather the data. Google has refined their search engine to a point where it allows for some really specific results. I searched each member of the team by their name (in quotes) and Phillies to cut down on irregularities like results for Ryan Howard from The Office and an author by the name of Carlos Ruiz Zafón. That result was then narrowed down to results created between November 4^th and February 4^nd. Finally, those results were limited to only blog posts. Google then displayed the total number of results rounded to the nearest ten (Unless there were less than a hundred, when the exact total was reported.)

However, simply saying who got the most mentions wasn’t enough for me. They had to be weighted somehow. I needed to put a value to each mention, because not each mention is equal. Of course Roy Halladay is going to be talked about almost constantly… isn’t that part of the reason he got so much money? So I took the number of mentions for each player this off-season and their 2010 salary (big ups to Cot’s Baseball Contracts) and made myself some statistics:

OSBM/$YR (Off-Season Blog Mentions Per Dollar of Yearly Salary): It’s a ratio of how much the player is talked about and how much money they make… and then multiplied by 1000 to make the number all pretty and readable. I don’t think it makes any sense to multiply it by 1000, I guess logically it would make as much sense to multiply it by 500, but the graphs are already made so there isn’t much I can do about it now.

CpOBM (Cost per Off-Season Blog Mention): This is a little more tangible and I’m pretty sure I didn’t screw this up too much. This number is how much it costs the Phillies every time this player is mentioned. You could also say its how much the player makes every time they’re discussed but then it would be “Earnings per OBM” and I’ve already made the chart so shut up. Essentially, CpOBM is a unit of “appreciation” or “relevance”.

First up is the list of players sorted by blog mentions. It’s not at all a surprise that Halladay tops this list; discussions about The Trade still dominate blogs and talk radio and we definitely won’t stop hearing about it at least until the season starts. God help us if Roy has a slow start because it might never go away. The rest of the list is pretty boring for the most part. The players go from top to bottom pretty much in the order you expect: superstars down to role players. But I can’t show you the goods without first showing you that list.

Side note: The number of blog posts that include the name “Roy Halladay” but not “Cliff Lee” is a massive drop off: only about 5000! Obviously the storyline is the trade so this figure makes sense, and it’s not fair statistically of me to point it out for one player and not the others. For example: “Danys Baez” but not “Cliff Lee”: 451, it’s just statistical noise, it’s sensationalistic, but it’s fun to point out anyway.

Oh yeah, there here’s the good stuff. I believe that there are two ways to look at this graph: it’s either meaningless and the rank is just arbitrary due to countless variables or there’s a deeper meaning in the figures and it represents a player’s worthiness of their pay. The first assertion is probably right, but it’s no fun. So for the sake of this article (Hey, it’s the beginning of February; what the hell else is there to read?) let’s pretend these figures really are representative of each player.

Superstar!

The team average CpOBM is $1614.61 which is pretty close to Chase’s CpOBM. Now, I’m fairly confident that the general consensus would be that Chase earns his keep with the team.  Greg Dobbs’ CpOBM is $1,626.51 and while Dobbs isn’t as “important” of a player as Chase Utley their similar CpOBM means that Dobbs’ earns his too. In fact, the combined CpOBM of Chase, Ryan, Shane, and Roy average out to be just two dollars less than the team average. I’m sure Dobbs ($12 over team average) would be thrilled to be considered amongst those other five players in any other situation. In other words, CpOBM is a measurement of how “appreciated” a player is in relation to how much they make. The ideal location for a player is right around the middle of the graph; indicating they are being talked about online in appropriate proportion to how much they’re making or appreciated. The higher a player’s CpOBM gets makes them over-appreciated while the lower makes them under-appreciated.

I want to reiterate that I don’t entirely think that what I said is the truth, but it certainly seems to make a little bit of sense. A majority of blog posts in the first part of the off-season and also around the New Year were season recaps and the frequency of a player’s name in these recaps certainly would seem to indicate the impact they had on the season. Using only the World Series as a sample size, you would surely see Chase Utley’s name mentioned more frequently than that of, for instance, Ben Francisco.

Sure there’s lot of holes in this idea: what about players like Danys Baez and Ross Gload who have yet to step foot onto the field at The Bank? Their CpOBM is pretty much meaningless, right? Perhaps not: CpOBM could possibly be a barometer of hype around the player. Gload didn’t get that big of a payday from the team, but his signing didn’t create that much of a buzz, (if it weren’t for his name sounding dirty everybody would have likely forgotten it already) while Baez’s signing took weeks to actually happen and when it did it created a lot of chatter about the length and size of the contract. What about negative posts about a player? Hamels has taken a lot of flak this off-season, but his score could be an indicator of the fact that the reason a player of his caliber makes so much money is to take that kind of heat. (There is no excuse for the dog-in-a-backpack picture though, Cole. For shame.)

The elephant in the room here is Raul Ibanez. Can an All-Star really be that over-rated? Ignoring the fact that Allen Iverson earned a starting nod in the NBA All-Star Game last month, Ibanez’s placement is probably because of his name’s total absence from the blogs this winter. J Roll got married, Chooch avoided arbitration by inking a new deal, nobody’s sure what’s going to happen to Werth after the 2010 campaign, and Ryan Madson was harassed by some fat guy on a cruise last month. But Raul has been almost completely off the radar since November which inflated his score. Based on what the other big-money players on the team did this winter, shouldn’t a player set to make $11.5 million this year be a hotter topic, be it be good, bad, or indifferent? Regardless of your interpretation, using this statistic I’m declaring Raul Ibanez WINNER OF THE OFFSEASON if for no reason other than he made a shit-load of money by doing nothing. Way to go, Raul. You’re an inspiration to us all.

Yep.

These are far from the most elegant observations ever made and even I don’t buy into them one hundred percent but they do hold at least a little bit of water. I’m sure it would take a true Sabermetrician fifteen seconds to pick them apart, and I truthfully hope that happens because I’m pretty sure I’m the last person that should be interpreting statistics and charts. But if nothing else, I at least found a way to eat up a few minutes of your time by talking about Phillies baseball in early February. And hey, in the end, isn’t that what blogs are all about in the first place? Stay tuned for my next post, where I will discuss VORP (Value over Rafael Palmeiro.)