The Rockies get some cash from the Mets to help pay Zeile; the Mets get some cash from the Brewers to help pay Burnitz.

You've heard of a trade that supposedly "helps both teams"? Well, this one just may help all three teams, at least on paper.

For the Mets, Burnitz and Roger Cedeno are pretty clearly an upgrade over Agbayani, Tsuyoshi Shinjo, Timo Perez and Matt Lawton in the corner outfield slots. Just adding the 2001 stats for all of those players together, we get this:

                 OBP   Slug    
Old Corner OF   .331   .386
New Corner OF   .343   .452

Big bump in slugging percentage. Not so big bump in on-base percentage, mostly because Cedeno drew only 36 walks last year and so posted a .337 OBP. Still, I think we should expect more production from the Mets outfield this season, especially if we assume that Jay Payton simply can't be as bad in 2002 as he was in 2001 (which, it should be said, is not a particularly safe assumption).

For the Rockies, Zeile fills a gaping hole at third base. Granted, he's 36 and coming off a poor season, but (1) Coors Field may do wonders for his swing, and (2) the Rockies were supposedly considering Shane Halter for the job.

And now the Brewers ... in my very last column, I wrote some pretty awful things about Milwaukee GM Dean Taylor, but I like this deal for the Brewers. Alex Ochoa is, of course, a pale substitute for Burnitz, though some analysts do think he'll bounce back from a lousy 2001 campaign. The guy I really like here is Glendon Rusch. Here are his first- and second-half numbers from last season, courtesy of Ron Shandler's Baseball Forecaster:

           ERA   H%            
1st Half   5.56   40  
2nd Half   3.86   32  

I would imagine that you understand the ERA column, but that other might not be familiar. "H%" is hits allowed per balls in play -- that is, every batted ball that doesn't go over the fence -- and Rusch's first-half figure is off the charts, while his second-half figure is essentially normal. And the difference between the two figures goes a long way toward explaining the difference between Rusch's first- and second-half ERA. It wasn't that he pitched all that differently, it's just that for three months a lot of balls were falling in, and then for the next three months a lot of balls weren't.

But wait -- you're saying, all over the world because the Internet knows few national boundaries -- 40 percent of the balls in play were hits because Rusch was making fat pitches, which got ripped for line drives!

Well, maybe. But probably not. I wrote extensively about this almost exactly a year ago -- January 24 and 26, 2001, to be precise -- so I won't delve deeply into the discussion now (though if you missed it the first time, those columns are still available in the January 2001 archives).

Suffice to say, a pitcher really doesn't have much control over how many balls in play become hits, home runs notwithstanding. I know that's counterintuitive and you don't believe me, so let me try something here ... You would expect, wouldn't you, that a relatively low percentage of the balls in play against the very best pitchers would become hits? Here are the hit rates against the top five ERA qualifiers in the National League last season:

              ERA  H%
R Johnson    2.49  33
C Schilling  2.98  31
J Burkett    3.04  28
G Maddux     3.05  29
D Kile       3.09  31

And you would expect, wouldn't you, that a relatively high percentage of the balls in play against the worst pitchers would become hits? Here are the hit rates against the bottom five ERA qualifiers in the NL last year:

              ERA  H%
D Mlicki     6.17  31
M Hampton    5.41  31
D Neagle     5.38  32
C Reitsma    5.29  31
L Hernandez  5.24  33

True, the average hit rate for the high-ERA pitchers is very slightly higher than the average hit rate for the low-ERA pitchers, but 1) the difference is, again, very slight, and 2) there is of course a selection bias here. That's a fancy way of saying that if you make a list of pitchers with low ERAs you're very unlikely to find among them a pitcher with a high hit rate, for the obvious reason.

Anyway, I hope it's obvious that the pitchers with the high ERA's did not give up a high percentage of hits on balls in play. Dave Mlicki, who had the highest ERA among qualifiers, gave up a lower percentage of hits on balls in play than did Randy Johnson, who had the lowest ERA.

More to the point, that 40 percent hit rate off Rusch in the first half of the 2001 season may have killed his ERA, but it really didn't have anything to do with how well he actually pitched. And so rather than getting a 4.63 pitcher -- that was Rusch's ERA last season -- what they're really getting is something like a 4.00 pitcher ... which means Rusch is the new ace of the staff. And it also means that the deal -- trading an aging slugger who makes a lot of money for a young pitcher who doesn't -- could work out nicely for Dean Taylor and his team.

And don't forget, last year Taylor swindled the Cubs out of Ruben Quevedo. Come to think of it, Taylor is operating a lot like his mentor, John Schuerholz: good with pitchers, not so good with hitters. And while that philosophy works pretty well when you can afford the best pitchers, it doesn't work so well when you can't. Which is why the 2002 All-Star Game is going to be the highlight of baseball in Milwaukee for a number of years.