"...it's better to burn out, 'cause rust never sleeps/ The king is gone, but he's not forgotten..."

Sometime during the 2008 season, mauichuck made the prediction that Travis Hafner would either rebound and become the type of monster hitter he had been from 2004-2006, or flame out altogether. Hafner, of course, was in the midst of his worst season as a pro. Just two years removed from putting up an OPS just shy of 1.100, Hafner hit .197/.305/.323 in 2008, struggling with the after effects of a still amorphous shoulder problem. Chuck's prediction seemed reasonable enough at the time, but has proven to be completely wrong. The past three seasons, in a somewhat strange way, Hafner has been remarkably consistent. Here are his batting lines from 2009-2011:

• 2009: 96 games, .272/.355/.470, .826 OPS, 16 HRs, 1.63 K/BB
• 2010: 118 games, .278/.374/.449, .824 OPS, 13 HRs, 1.84 K/BB
• 2011: 94 games, .280/.361/.449, .811 OPS, 13 HRs, 2.17 K/BB

Hafner has become a steady part-time player, with moderately above average power and discipline. Not bad, though not great for a one-time monster slugger with the team's largest contract. Given his skill set, there isn't really any reason to expect a massive and sudden decline from Hafner in the immediate future, and most projections for him (fangraphs has a few here) show him putting up similar numbers in 2012 as he has over the past three seasons.

What is sort of interesting is the final number I put up in the lines above. In his prime, Hafner put up fantastic walk-rates partly because of his great plate discipline and party because of the unwillingness of pitchers to challenge him with pitches over the plate. Over the past three seasons Hafner's strikeout rates have increased incrementally each year (21.2% last season) while his BB-rates have been on the decline (his 9.8% rate last season was a career low). What I find interesting is that his decline has come almost entirely as the result of his performance against left-handed pitchers. His line against right-handed hitters in 2011 was .302/.404/.482 with a 13.1 BB% and a 20.8 K%, right in line with what he has done each of the past three years. But against lefties he dropped to a .233/.259/.379 line, with a remarkably low 1.9 BB% (dropping precipitously over the past three seasons) and a 22.2 K%. Travis Hafner can't hit lefties anymore.

And more importantly, Hafner shouldn't hit against lefties in 2012. Despite his struggles, Hafner still logged 108 plate appearances against lefties last season, good for more than 29% of his total PAs. This was actually up from the previous two seasons in which he had faced about 24% lefties. One of the reasons the Indians need to have a right-handed bat on the team who can hit lefties is so that Travis Hafner doesn't have to face them. Sadly, of the guys most likely to fill the role of Hafner's replacement against lefties (Duncan, Cunningham, Santana) - none of them really fit the bill of lefty-specialist. But even if they aren't fantastic against lefties, merely being good, which they all have at some point, could represent a significant incremental improvement in the 2012 Tribe.

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With the signing of Casey Kotchman, Cleveland has finally made a move to patch over the black hole that was 1B in 2011. The Indians cumulative OPS at 1B last season was 763, about 30 points below league average. It appears the Indians have already decided to send Matt LaPorta back to Columbus, barring injuries anyway, and there's no reason to complain about that. However, it's at least worth diagnosing exactly how the Indians have upgraded the Cold Corner. I'm going to chart out the 2011 1B, plus Kotchman, both by their 2011 numbers and career numbers. Santana's numbers will be 1B-only, while I'll use total numbers of LaPorta (who was horrible as a DH/PH last season) and Duncan. For reference, the total AL split at first for 2011 was a .340/452 OBP/SLG with a 116 OPS+ and a 2.09 SO:BB.

2011:

Career:

Let's run through each player's profile.

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This is the first in a series of pieces previewing the Indians starting rotation options heading into 2012

Derek Lowe

Derek Lowe was not a well-liked man in Atlanta, which is part of the reason the Braves were willing to pay $10M just to see him leave. This, despite the fact that Derek Lowe was quite Derek Lowe-like in 2011. A quick perusal of his peripheral numbers shows that he was his usual steady self in mixing an excellent GB-rate (59%) with a decent strikeout rate (16%), the mix he has used throughout his largely successful career. Lowe showed a bit of an upward tick in his BB-rate, moving up a notch from 7.4% to 8.4%, but some of his troubles last season were the result of bad luck. His BABIP was atypically high (.327 vs. .295 career average) and the Braves' bullpen didn't do him too many favors (65.9 LOB%). But Atlanta can be forgiven for not enjoying Lowe's role (0-5, 8.75 ERA) in their historic September collapse.

The bigger issue with Lowe is that over the past two seasons, while still being very much Derek Lowe, he has become something of a sink or swim pitcher. After holding a steady quality start % right around or above 60 for five straight years, that number has dipped each of the past two seasons to 45% and 41%. Part of this was the bullpen's fault a year ago, but it also reflects Lowe's declining consistency. Paralleling this is Lowe's declining usage. While he has been a steady 32+ game starter for every season over the past decade, his innings per start reached a low of 5.5 last season. Lowe's addition looks on paper to be an improvement to the Tribe's staff, but one that will also necessitate increased bullpen usage. Jordan Bastian was talking the other day about finding relievers to fill in the garbage time, and that might be nowhere more apparent than on days Lowe takes the mound.

Slowey is covered, after the jump.

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Editor's Note: Dan Hennessey will be joining Let's Go Tribe as a front-page author. He's blogged before at ESPN's SweetSpot, several independent blogs and SB Nation's Athletics Nation. Even though he's blogged about other teams, he's always been an Indians fan, and I think he'll fit right in here. Please join me in welcoming Dan to LGT. (Ryan)

On the surface, it could be a really simple answer. He’s a first baseman-type who isn’t a great hitter. As afh4 said yesterday,

Canzler has a lot of swing-and-miss in his game, and his power, while good looking the SLG column, is more tied up in doubles than any Canzler-devotees would like to see. Stop me if you've heard this one, but AAA doubles are often the product of poor fielding combined with some decent contact, and at the big league level, those balls stop finding inflated gaps.

Which is exactly right. Let's also not forget that the Rays expect to make the playoffs (three of the last four seasons) and have less room for error in the American League East. Giving away even 100 at-bats to someone who can't do the job hurts them more than it might hurt the Indians.

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The acquisition of Russ Canzler is the perfect segue into a look back at Matt LaPorta's 2011 relative to some of my thoughts from a year ago on what has ailed the disappointing "slugger." In the comments to that piece, I suggested a few positive indicators to look for from Matt in 2011.

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Yesterday, Tigers owner Mike Ilitch announced that his team had signed Prince FIelder to a 9 year, 214 million dollar contract—for those wondering this means Fielder, if paid in $1 bills, is going to receive about 471,790 lbs of money, or about 1716 Prince Fielder's worth of money. Diversions aside, when Fielder's deal was announced there were heaps of praise served to Ilitch and, in some cases, Detroit fans:

#Tigers fans show up in droves despite terrible economy and owner rewards them by signing a star. That's how it's supposed to work.

-John Perrotto via Twitter

First, let's figure out if the claim that Tigers fans supported the team to an unusual extent is credible:

[Source]

Detroit went to the World Series in 2006, the last time they had made the playoffs before 2011. In that context, my cocked-head guess is that Detroit is supported almost exactly at the level we ought to expect. Detroit is something like the 12th largest metro area in the US and, by these rankings for radio market size, about the 11th largest market. Obviously, all of the markets ahead of Detroit have (at least) one baseball team, so it follows that the Tigers, if they don't absolutely poison the well, ought to be about the eleventh best supported team in an average year.

That term 'average year' probably isn't a particularly useful one, and we could anecdotally point out how bad the Detroit economy is, but there's not much of an argument here. The stronger argument would be if Detroit pulled a St. Louis, which consistently ranks much higher by attendance percentage than it does by market size.

Anyway, point being: Tigers' fans don't appear to have done anything particularly inspirational to push Illitch to this move, as Perrotto asserts with his imagined virtuous cycle. Tigers fans didn't show up at any greater rate than they had the previous few years, and, just as expected, fan interest had waned as the Tigers became farther removed from the playoffs. If someone wants to do a more complex analysis (and one is certainly justified), I'm happy to be proven wrong.

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Later today the final member or members of the 2012 Hall of Fame class will revealed.

Last week, Chris Jaffe of the Hardball Times put forth not only his predictions for today's election results, but the percentages each candidate will receive on the ballot: Chris has been doing these predictions for several years now, and the results have matched them closely. One of the main components he uses is the strength of the ballot, which at first glance shouldn't matter, as voters can place up to ten players on their ballot. But the presence or absence of Hall of Fame-worthy players on a ballot has an effect on other more marginal candidates:

This is the single most important guideline. When the ballot’s overall strength goes up, the members of the backlog have their vote totals go down. If a ballot gets weaker, the backlog’s support gets stronger.

Two things change the strength of a ballot: guys arriving on it, and those departing from it. For example, in 1999 Nolan Ryan, George Brett, Robin Yount, Carlton Fisk, and Dale Murphy arrived on the ballot and the holdovers suffered considerably.

So what does that mean for this year's ballot? There are 13 new players on the ballot, but only one (Bernie Williams) that seems a lock to stick around a year. And while Williams does deserve a long look, he shouldn't hurt any of the holdovers. That should mean that the top holdover on the ballot, Barry Larkin, will probably easily pass the 75% threshold for induction, and Jack Morris should get a pretty big boost as well. This may be Morris' best shot of induction through the BBWAA ballot, as the next couple seasons will see a huge influx of HOF-worthy players.

But those are strategic considerations; what about the players' actual worthiness?

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