By way of introduction...

I am completely uninformed and have no connection whatsoever to anyone who could be classed as an insider. I am perpetually indebted to a number of sources that I will depend on in order to offer my own uninformed analysis -- including Tim Dierkes' masterpiece http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/, http://www.baseball-reference.com/, www.sports.yahoo.com/mlb (which keeps batter vs. pitcher stats since 1987 and runs fantasy sports that are vastly more user-friendly -- in my opinion -- than the alternatives), http://www.fangraphs.com/ (the home of publicly accessible BABIP), and begrudgingly http://www.espn.go.com/, which despite its many deficiencies, does at least give me the opportunity to find stats like zone rating and pitches per plate appearance.

I'm generally fluent with baseball statistics but am not exactly a master of the unknown (see VORP). I only offer one statistic of my own that I think will be of any usefulness, which is MOPS -- oddly enough not a statistic for clean-up hitters. (Oh yeah, there will be bad jokes. Yeah, I know.)

MOPS is not-all-that-short for modified OPS, which is calculated by adding the number of stolen bases to the player's number of total bases and adding one at bat for each caught stealing. MOPS tries to roughly calculate (albeit in a clumsy fashion) the value of base stealing while simultaneously punishing those students of Bill Doran who get caught at high rates. While it certainly overvalues individual stolen bases by turning singles into doubles, I've yet to really contemplate what the appropriate modifier would be -- my gut says somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of a base, such that a single + stolen base would be a slugging quotient of 1.7. I generally don't use MOPS unless the person in question is a significant base stealer or pickoff victim, but it's bound to crop up when the Brewers decide to re-up Mike Cameron (which, incidentally just happened, despite the Brewers' apparent willingness to deal Prince Fielder once he costs something approaching the $10 million they're wasting on Cameron) or some such event.