Dewayne Staats’s son-in-law, Dan Wheeler, had a much worse two-year FIP than ERA, so he is among the worst Type A free agents.

This week, we’re looking at the best of the Elias-rated Type A and B free agents, the worst of the A’s and B’s and the best of the players who were neither.

Yesterday, we reviewed some of the best deals, based on the disparity between the Elias rating and a player’s two-year average Wins Above Replacement (WAR), which we claimed was a better gauge of a player’s worth. Today, let’s look at some of the worst deals based on the same criteria.

First, the Type-A free agents for whom signing teams will have to surrender a valuable (as in $5.2 million, according to research) first-round draft pick, and for whom incumbent teams whose arbitration offers the player spurns will receive that pick:

As you can see, the list is exclusively comprised of relievers and catchers, which suggests an inefficiency in Elias or in WAR, though something else may be at work.Since Elias uses the less-than-informative Saves, we’re going to bet it’s Elias, at least to explain the relievers. The sinister combination of winning percentage and saves results in the ludicrous notion that Dan Wheeler is a better player than Hiroki Kuroda. And why would Bengie Molina be rated as an A but Miguel Olivo a B? From an incumbent team’s point-of-view, these players make less sense to offer arbitration to. On the other hand, since the Type-A status has value, it may be worth it for teams that hold options on these players to trade them, as the Rockies did with Olivo, to a team willing to take the gamble of either picking up the option or declining it, paying the buyout and offering arbitration. This of course would require finding a GM who values one of these players more than the incumbent team’s GM does. (As an aside, check out the number of players above who were on playoff teams this season.)

Okay, so what about the B-list? Since there’s really no penalty for signing one, understanding their value is more a concern for their incumbent teams. However, Type-B players also offer the biggest opportunities for signing teams (other than non-rated players), because they can be had with relatively little penalty.

It would seem that the same statistical principles that resulted in the bad-buy Type-A list apply to this group. With such bad recent performances, these guys fall into the category of "offer arbitration at your own risk." As we noted yesterday, only two of 24 players offered arbitration actually accepted, though we should also note that this was a self-selecting group; after all, not every player was offered arbitration. While most of these players will undoubtedly sign somewhere next year, GMs who look at WAR may decide it’s not worth the risk of offering arbitration. That was almost certainly a factor when the Cardinals jettisoned Felipe Lopez (whom the Red Sox signed likely with an intent to game the Elias system) with only a couple of weeks left in the season.

Speaking of the hometown nine, the Cardinals don’t have any free agents among the Elias ranks. Nonetheless, the classifications will impact their shopping list this winter. The good news is that the worst buys aren’t in the positions where we’ve heard the most concern — shortstop, second base, third base, right field and starting pitcher. With a bullpen chock-full of young talent, the Cardinals can for once hopefully avoid free-agent relief pitching, especially since most of the Elias-rated players would be rip-offs (by the way, the Cardinals should thank their dumb luck that Brian Fuentes spurned their offer a couple of years ago). On the other hand, if the Cardinals decide to hire an "offensive-minded" backup catcher, as Bernie Miklasz claimed John Mozeliak intends, we hope they at least avoid overrated Type-A’s like Ramon Hernandez and Bengie Molina and opt for Type-B’s like Olivo, John Buck or Yorvit Torrealba.

The Elias rankings, used to determine free-agent types, are now public, thanks to MLBTradeRumors. To the extent that teams consider these types when making decisions on which of their own players to offer arbitration to, which free agents to attempt to sign and even — in the recent case of the Blue Jays — which players to trade for without much intention of having them ever wear the uniform, the Elias ratings matter. But, as with any system that uses suboptimal statistics to assess player value, the Elias ratings — which use pitcher wins and losses, for example — offer a potential market inefficiency for general managers.

Elias reportedly uses player stats from the past two years in their ratings. Whereas they use their own proprietary melange, we ran the two-year numbers for free agents using their Wins Above Replacement. WAR is far from perfect, and many other factors are useful for determining a player’s worth, but our wager is that it is preferable to Elias’s system. If that’s true, we might expect that smart GMs will exploit this inefficiency, avoiding the "overrated" players and seeking "underrated" players.

This week, we’ll look at the best of the Type A and B players, the worst of the A’s and B’s and the best of the players who were neither.

Today, let’s look at some of the A-list players who appear to be worth their rating, listed by the ratio of their Elias score to their two-year average WAR:

These players would seem to be legitimate "A" players, more worthwhile for a team to lose draft picks for than the others. Given that these guys are legit and that in 2009 only two of the 24 free agents actually accepted arbitration, these guys should be locks for receiving arbitration at minimum from their most recent teams.

Okay, so what about the B-list? Since there’s really no penalty for signing one, understanding their value is more a concern for their most-recent teams. However, Type B players also offer the biggest opportunities for signing teams, because they can be had with relatively little penalty.

@ has re-signed with team

The B-list offers more opportunities than the A-list, since you can hypothetically get the same value for less cost. Among the best buys, Hiroki Kuroda is a textbook example of Elias’s loony system. He likely gets downgraded because of his sub-.500 win-loss percentage the past two years (.487), and yet along with Javier Vazquez (.556 Win%), has been a better pitcher than all but two of the 17 A-rated pitchers. We’ll see which savvy GMs sign them, assuming that they make it to free agency. Oddly, though, their current teams — the Dodgers and Yankees, respectively — will be less inclined to offer them arbitration, since they stand to gain “only” a sandwich pick as compensation for losing a type-B player.

Other notable B’s include Juan Uribe and Lance Berkman, each of whom averaged a higher two-year WAR than Type A’s at their respective positions: Miguel Tejada and Adam Dunn (though given Berkman’s decline, his higher average WAR may be misleading, especially since Dunn is coming off a 3.9-WAR season). To give you an idea of the dearth of free-agent talent at 2B, there are no Type-A second basemen, though Orlando Hudson and Mark Ellis represent good values as Type B’s.

As for the Cardinals, who have occasionally been rumored to be interested in Tejada for at least a year, we would recommend setting their sights on Uribe, who, ceteris paribus, represents a smarter move (though we confess neither excites us). O-Dawg or Ellis might, too, be low-cost (in terms of draft picks, anyway) options at second base, where the Cardinals have heard grumblings of dissatisfaction for more than a year now.

Former Cardinal shortstop Edgar Renteria won the 2010 World Series Most Valuable Player award , delivering the second World Series-winning hit of his career. If we didn’t know better, we’d think that Renteria had some special power to supersize his game during the final week of his contract years. In each of his three fall classics, he has produced at a much better rate than in that year’s regular season. Check it out:

The dude is so clutch! Just kidding, of course. But he does seem to have taken to heart (or gotten some good short-term luck) the sage advice of a great comedian to leave on a high note. Carlos Beltran would be proud.

We don’t have a particular axe to grind with Renteria, as we can’t remember if we as a Cardinal fan are supposed to like him or hate him. He did have a tremendous series for the Giants. But did he really deserve the MVP? We fear that in our ADD-addled society, even in a five-game series, the latest impression is the biggest, even though it may not be the best.

For MVP candidates, we like to look at win-probability added, and Renteria did lead all batters with .403. Mitch Moreland was a distant second with .273. However, three of the Giants’ pitchers each had more than Renteria: Matt Cain (.495), Madison Bumgarner (.477) and Tim Lincecum (.467):

Although much of pitchers’ WPA is dependent upon their defense, any of those hurlers’ performances was worthy of the MVP. If nothing else, the Giant pitchers could’ve shared a three-way MVP award. What more appropriate way to ring out the year of the pitcher and honor the storyline of the series?

As the MLB 2010 ends — with the game-winning hit from erstwhile Cardinal and current free agent shortstop Edgar Renteria — and the Cardinals’ offseason begins, one of recurring memes is that the team needs to do something about one or both of its middle infielders. As recently as last week, Joe Strauss had the following exchange during his weekly chat:

Just wondering why there seems to be more of a push for an upgrade at 2B rather than shortstop. I know it has mostly to due with Ryan’s defense but does that really make up for his offensive woes? Skip definitely had a down year with the bat but I thought he still did well enough to hang onto his job. Your thoughts?

Joe Strauss: Schumaker certainly played better late than early. However, many believe it difficult to field a championship club with a converted OF at second base and a player unable to amass a .300 on-base percentage in any of the previous six months at shortstop. The word, I believe, is consistency. The Cardinals need more of it.

Though carefully worded, the premise behind Strauss’s claim that "many believe" it difficult to win with the team’s current combo — Skip Schumaker and Brendan Ryan — is semi-verifiable. First, the fact that Schumaker is a converted outfielder is irrelevant — after all, Hall of Famer Red Schoendienst was technically a converted left fielder — and is merely an inelegant way of slamming Schumaker’s defense. As for the awkward, arbitrary-endpoint-laden description of Ryan’s on-base skills, well, whatever you need to do to make a point.

So is it true then that the Cardinals are hopeless with both Schumaker and Ryan as their everyday keystone combination? Does replacing one or both of them necessarily need to top GM John Mozeliak’s winter to-do list? Baseball history is instructive here: We checked to see whether any teams had ever made the playoffs with a middle-infield like what the Cardinals have today. Using Schumaker and Ryan’s career OBP and SLG numbers (Schumaker .349/.383 and Ryan .314/.344) and their career highs in games played at their respective positions (133 and 139), we found several teams, in fact, who had gone to the postseason with similar or worse performers:

* World Champions

Granted, pennant winners don’t generally build teams around light-hitting middle infielders. Also, many of the punch-and-judy hitters on playoff teams at least could flash the leather. But whatever defense Schumaker gives away is largely offset by his normal offensive production — remember, in his first year at the new position, he posted a positive WAR of 1.5. And Schumaker and Ryan together offer more offense than any of the middle-infield combinations from previous playoff teams — here’s a look at the combined wOBA for middle-infield duos of those playoff teams — plus a hypothetical 2011 Cardinals team:

So, contrary to conventional wisdom of "many," the Cardinals can return to the playoffs with their middle infield intact. Like any moves that Mozeliak makes this winter, he’ll have to consider tradeoffs. That is, if he sticks with the current pair, he’ll need to enhance the club in other places using the cost savings. On the other hand, if he trades for someone like Stephen Drew, a player that Strauss puts forth as a viable option, Mozeliak will have upgraded at shortstop but will likely be constrained in another place. The bottom line is simply that the team can win with Schumaker and Ryan. Will Mozeliak listen to the many?