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Since the Philadelphia Phillies traded four prospects for Hunter Pence last month, things couldn't be going better – Pence is at .344/.408/.557 in his first 16 games. Still, the price was awfully steep for two years and two months of Pence, a 28-year-old corner outfielder with a career OPS+ of 118.

The four players Houston received – Jarred Cosart, Jonathan Singleton, Domingo Santana and Josh Zeid – represented three of the top nine Phillies prospects heading into the season, according to Baseball America, with Zeid checking in at 23rd. If the Phillies win another World Series or two, all that is likely to be forgotten. But when compared to Rondell White, a strikingly similar player in terms of value at the time he was traded, it is hard to feel as if the Phillies got a proper return.

When the Montreal Expos traded Rondell White in July 2000, he was 28 years old, just like Pence is now. His career OPS+ at the time was 113, lower than Pence's 118, though his offensive WAR was virtually identical: 12.4 in roughly 3,000 plate appearances, to Pence's 12.6 in roughly 3,000 plate appearances. Add defense into the equation, though, and White's overall WAR jumps to 17.7; Pence's falls to 11.0.

With both White and Pence a year and two months from free agency, it becomes clear that White was at least as valuable an asset at the time of the deal. So if the Astros got four prospects, including three elite ones, what did Montreal get from the Chicago Cubs for Rondell White?

Scott Downs. Just Scott Downs. Already 24 years old, having been traded from the Cubs to the Twins and then back, Downs was deemed the proper compensation for the Hunter Pence of his time, Rondell White. This is no knock on Downs, who has since enjoyed a strong career and become one of the best, most consistent left-handed relievers in the game.

But the Astros didn't deal for Cosart, Singleton or even Santana hoping for the value of a middle reliever. That's what they are probably hoping for from Zeid, the fourth-best player in the deal. Downs didn't help matters by pitching just three innings for the Expos, then having Tommy John surgery knock him out until 2002.

The deal worked out somewhat well for the Cubs, though White didn't become the stretch-run contributor the Cubs wanted. He played in 19 games, all starts, before injury ended his season on August 26. At that time, the Cubs were at the outer edges of the 2000 pennant chase, 8.5 games behind the Cardinals in the NL Central and 10 games behind the Mets for the Wild Card. But by the time White gave way to a September of Ross Gload and Roosevelt Brown in left field, the Cubs were all but eliminated.

White contributed greatly to a 2001 Cubs team that finished 88-74, a respectable third place in the NL Central. His OPS+ of 134 was second among all Cub regulars to Sammy Sosa's 203, and his WAR of 2.0 placed him in a tie for third on the team with Bill Mueller. Still, White's injury problems limited him to just 95 games and after the season, the Cubs saw him sign as a free agent with the New York Yankees.

Obviously, the major advantage Pence has over White is durability, with at least 156 games played in each of his full seasons. The extent to which White's defensive value evens that out is noteworthy, however. Had the Phillies merely dealt a 24-year-old Scott Downs – say, Kyle Kendrick – for a player of Pence/White's caliber, the trade would have been an outright heist. Seeing four prospects go in such a deal could be remembered very differently, however.

We're more than three months away from the non-tender deadline, but many teams are certainly pondering the status of their arbitration eligible players.  For example, it's possible that the Twins sent Delmon Young packing this week because they did not intend to tender him a contract in December.  Let's take a look at a few prominent non-tender candidates, while acknowledging that the season is far from over.

• Luke Scott, Orioles: Scott's season, cut short by July shoulder surgery, wouldn't necessitate a big raise.  But he'd probably get some kind of increase and he's already at $6.4MM, so it's likely he hits the free agent market. 
• James Loney, Dodgers: He's likely to become a free agent at age 27, as the Dodgers will not want to pay him $5MM after the season he's had.
• Casey McGehee, Brewers: He's had a nice August and could still finish the season on a high note.  My gut says he will be tendered a contract.  However, his career body of work could lead to a $3MM arbitration salary, so the Brewers have to decide whether he'll be worth it.
• Ian Stewart, Rockies: Stewart will be earning at least $1.8MM next year if he's tendered a contract and not cut in Spring Training.  His track record and work at Triple-A this year suggest some team would strike a deal for him and the Rockies won't have to non-tender him.
• Ryan Theriot, Cardinals: A non-tender candidate last offseason, Theriot received a $700K raise following a season pretty similar to this one.  The Cards might not want him at a salary above his current $3.3MM.
• Andres Torres, Giants: He's had a couple of DL stints and has not approached his offensive production from 2010.  He's operating from a $2.2MM salary and the Giants could let him go.
• Angel Pagan, Mets: Like Torres, Pagan has fallen off big-time this year.  His current salary is $3.5MM.
• Tom Gorzelanny, Nationals: His strikeout and walk numbers are solid but the Nationals booted him from the rotation.  With his $2.1MM salary on the rise they may not keep him around.
• Mike Pelfrey, Mets: His salary next year could be around $6MM, and the Mets have to decide whether that's good value for a back-end rotation type.
• Jonathan Sanchez, Giants: While it's hard to picture the Giants losing Sanchez for nothing, he took a step backward this year and would surely earn more than $6MM in 2012.  
• Kevin Slowey, Twins: I doubt Slowey is in the Twins organization next year, but at a mild raise from this year's $2.7MM they should be able to find a taker.
• Luke Hochevar, Royals: Is it time to pull the plug?  Hochevar is due a raise on this year's $1.76MM but has made little progress from last year.
• David Aardsma, Mariners: He had Tommy John surgery in July and would earn at least $3.6MM in arbitration, so he's probably headed for free agency.
• Tony Pena, White Sox: He appears headed for Tommy John and is a likely non-tender.

Teams want their star free agents to be classified as Type As.  For example, the Mets know there is no chance of Jose Reyes accepting an arbitration offer, nor will the loss of a draft pick have a big effect on his market.  So, they can definitely expect two draft picks of some kind if he leaves.  But for other, lesser free agents, Type A status is a problem for the team.  For these guys it's understood by both sides that the loss of a pick will hurt their market, making the player more likely to accept an arbitration offer from their old team.  If the team wants the picks but has no interest in retaining the player, offering arbitration is dangerous.

Looking at our latest Elias Rankings projections, the following non-star impending free agents are currently classified as Type A:

• Nick Swisher, Yankees: There's a pretty good chance the Yankees choose Swisher's $10.25MM option over his $1MM buyout.  But if they decline the option in the name of moving on, Swisher could potentially accept an arbitration offer.
• Vladimir Guerrero, Orioles: If Vlad is a Type B, the Orioles have the chance of working out a handshake agreement for him to decline an arbitration offer, getting them a draft pick without hurting anyone.  If he remains a Type A, the chance for a pick is gone.
• Josh Willingham, Athletics: If the A's offer arbitration, there's a good chance Willingham accepts.
• Jonathan Papelbon, Red Sox: If the Red Sox decide to go in a different direction at closer, perhaps to save some money, will they get draft picks from Papelbon?  He'd probably prefer the security of a multiyear deal, but accepting arbitration and getting a raise from $12MM might have some appeal.
• Jose Valverde, Tigers: The Tigers will probably just pick up his $9MM option, but if not, they have to risk him accepting arbitration if they offer.
• Matt Capps, Twins: This situation resembles Vlad's.
• Darren Oliver, Rangers: Having Oliver around next year wouldn't be such a bad thing, so the Rangers could offer arbitration and be OK with either result.
• Ramon Hernandez, Reds: I think the Reds are safe here and Hernandez would decline an arbitration offer in search of multiyear security and a guaranteed deal.
• Brandon Phillips, Reds: If the Reds decide to decline Phillips' $12MM club option, snag some picks, and move on, they'd have to consider the possibility of Phillips accepting arbitration and actually getting more than $12MM.  I think the risk of the Phillies' Jimmy Rollins accepting arbitration is lower.
• Chris Carpenter, Cardinals: He's a quality pitcher, but if the Cardinals decline his $15MM club option, they won't necessarily get draft picks if he leaves.
• Heath Bell, Padres: Bell has publicly stated he'll accept arbitration if the Padres offer.  So much for the idea of hanging on to him at the trade deadline because the Padres preferred the value of two draft picks to the offers they received.  Owner Jeff Moorad said Bell accepting arbitration is preferable for the Padres in some ways, a statement that invites skepticism.
• Francisco Rodriguez, Brewers: The Brewers worked out a deal to eliminate K-Rod's vesting option.  But with his high salary an arbitration offer is not advised, so they probably won't get picks for him.
• Others who are not currently Type A but could get there include Jason Kubel, Marco Scutaro, Chris Snyder, Raul Ibanez, Lance Berkman, Kelly Johnson, Omar Infante, Francisco Cordero, Javier Lopez, and Octavio Dotel.

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2011 draft pick Trevor Bauer already received a Major League deal from the Diamondbacks, and a few more players might receive one today.  Via email, Baseball America's Jim Callis named Gerrit Cole (Pirates), Danny Hultzen (Mariners), Dylan Bundy (Orioles), and Anthony Rendon (Nationals) as candidates.  Be sure to follow Jim on Twitter to get all of the latest draft pick signing scoops.

In a 2008 article, ESPN's Keith Law explained that "a typical minor league contract signed by an amateur player will fix his signing bonus and his salary for the first year of his minor league playing career."  A Major League deal, meanwhile, benefits the player by placing him on the 40-man roster and therefore making it easier to promote him to the Majors later.  The player also has the potential of seeing a domino effect on future salaries, as his salary cannot be less than 80 percent of his total compensation from the previous year.  For example, the Tigers' Rick Porcello is earning $1.536MM even though he is not arbitration eligible until after the season, and that lifts up all his future salaries.

The team loses roster flexibility with a Major League deal for a draft pick, though it gains the advantage of lowering the average annual value by spreading it over multiple years.  This advantage can be gained through two-sport deals without the sacrifice of a 40-man spot.  Callis notes that Bubba Starling and Archie Bradley will get this type of contract.  

Players have three or four years in which they can be optioned to the minors without clearing waivers, and with a Major League deal the first option is typically going to be used in the player's first year.  This sometimes accelerates a player's timetable and forces the team's hand.

Nine teams currently have at least one opening on the 40-man roster, though as one baseball source noted, most teams have two or three guys they could easily remove this time of year.

If you're a regular MLBTR reader, you'll be familiar with our chats, our Week In Review posts and Mike Axisa's Baseball Blogs Weigh In feature. Here's some more detail on when you'll see our weekly features and exactly what to expect from them:

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This season, as during every season in recent memory, more Major League players come from the Caribbean island of Hispaniola than from any place outside of the United States. But for the time being, they come only from the eastern half of the island, the Dominican Republic. Prospects with origins in Haiti, Hispaniola’s western half, do exist, however. Most are first-generation Dominicans whose parents or grandparents emigrated from Haiti, as was the case with shortstop Miguel Sano, who signed with the Twins for $3.15MM in 2009 and is currently the team’s number three prospect, according to Baseball America. But as Neftali Ruiz at the Dominican newspaper El Caribe (link in Spanish) wrote in a highly recommended article this weekend, teams and scouts are showing decreasing willingness to sign or work with such prospects, due to what is perceived as a categorical opposition toward Haitian players from within the league itself.

The issue, as could be expected for a country with Haiti’s combination of poverty and ineffective governance, is reliable information. But even in the cases where the prospects have their paperwork seemingly in order, verifying the age or identity of Haitian players is a challenge the league can’t seem to master, explained Patrick Guerrero, the Latin American Scouting Director for the Mariners.

“The cases involving Haitians always get stalled in MLB. They usually get categorized as ‘indefinite’ and it takes three or four years for the player to receive a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ verdict,” Guerrero told Ruiz. “I don’t see them any more because I don’t want to waste so much time.”

Ruiz lays out the case of one such player, Cristian Pierret, who Guerrero calls “a player of great ability, but one of many players I’ve had to let go in order to avoid problems.” Pierret was born in the Dominican to a Haitian mother, and his father died when Pierret was two years old. As a player, Pierret began receiving offers upwards of $450K at age 15, and had an impressive tryout for then-Mets general manager Omar Minaya two years ago. However, the player, now 19, told Ruiz scouts have since stopped paying attention to him.

“Many people don’t believe my age. After July 2 [the start of the international signing period], two months went by without my lawyers presenting me to any teams, and I then I knew there was a problem,” Pierret recalled.

As Ruiz detailed in another article in El Caribe on Friday, there is a process for baseball prospects to seek Dominican citizenship and have their identity and age verified, even if they don’t have a birth certificate. However, Roberto Rosario, the president of the government office responsible for performing the research, told Ruiz that their work is limited to cases arising from specific requests by Major League Baseball—such as that of Sano, whose mother is Haitian. Over six months in 2009, Sano and his family were subjected to over six months of investigation, including DNA tests and a study of his bones, which placed his age as between 16 and 17.

The conclusion: He is who he says he is, but his age remains “indefinite.” Nevertheless, Sano signed with the Twins for what was, at the time, the second-largest signing bonus ever given to a non-Cuban Latin American player. This begs the question: is a matter of a year or two of age really worth all that trouble and lost time? After all, a process like Sano’s can seem particularly invasive and complicated when compared to high-profile Cuban players, for whom doubts about age persist as little more than joking asides in future columns. Mario Guerrero at the Dominican daily Listín Diario (link in Spanish) noted the discrepancy in an editorial on Sunday, writing:

"Just as Major League teams take the risk of recruiting Cuban players, having no idea of  their age and true identity, they should give the same treatment to Haitians. The team’s directors will argue that these young men are high-risk goods, and most times this may be true, but if that's the case, then the matter could be resolved by offering a lower bonus, instead of rejecting them as a commodity without any value."

As for the tortuous verification process facing Haitian players, Guerrero said reading about them made him “feel like I was living in the time before 1947.”

“The pieces Ruiz published reveal that, although more than 60 years have passed since Jackie Robinson vindicated the rights of black players to play baseball in the Major Leagues, in many respects the exclusion of people based on their ethnicity is still in force in the sport.”

Dominican lawyer David Toribio suggested to Ruiz that the Dominican government could provide a more open and straightforward path to citizenship, perhaps utilizing existing Dominican players and their hundreds of millions of dollars in annual earnings as resources. The Mariners' Patrick Guerrero is less clear about a solution, emphasizing instead simply that the talent is there, and that many players are missing out on their small window of marketability.

"They are paying for other people's sins," he told Ruiz. "There are lots of players, and there's no need for them to spend years in such a painful situation."

If you’re interested in contracts between teams and players, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the 40/60/80 rule (see below for explanation). It’s easy to remember and easy to use, but there’s a problem. It doesn’t work – at least not to the extent that some suggest it does. There’s a broad selection of arbitration eligible players – Michael Bourn, Brett Gardner (pictured) and Clayton Kershaw for example – for whom the approximation will not work this offseason.

So why do we use it? First of all, the alternative’s a whole lot more complicated. To accurately project arbitration earnings for individual players, teams and agencies use comparable players and traditional stats instead of the 40/60/80 rule. Yes, 40/60/80 works as a guideline, but too many players and types of players are exceptions for it to provide consistently accurate projections. Though that’s probably not reassuring for saber-minded readers and writers, it’s all in the name of more accurate estimates for players’ salaries.

Before we go too much further, let’s briefly return to the origins of the 40/60/80 rule. David Studenmund showed in the 2007 Hardball Times Baseball Annual that, as a group, arbitration eligible players earn about 55% of what free agent players do (on a per win basis). 

Tom Tango then built on Studenmund’s research and determined that, generally speaking, we can say first year arbitration eligible players earn about 40% of what free agents earn, second year arbitration eligible players earn about 60% of what free agents earn and third year arbitration eligible players earn about 80% of what free agents earn.

The points Studenmund and Tango make are convincing – the 40/60/80 rule works to describe what has happened to groups of players. “It’s a rule of thumb, and should be used generally speaking,” Tango explained in late July.

But when I asked Tango about the rule, he acknowledged that it has its limitations.

“If you look at specific players, you really should look at ‘comps,’” he said. 

That’s what Major League teams and MLB agents do each winter. To prove that the player in question deserves the salary their side is proposing, executives and agents point to comparable players. If the player goes to arbitration, the arbitrators who hear the case and provide the verdict take into account salary and service time information and, according to baseball’s collective bargaining agreement, must consider “all comparable players.” 

In other words, those in the baseball industry ensure that their comparisons are accurate by looking to the specifics. Generally speaking, the 40/60/80 rule works, but it doesn’t account for the nuances of baseball’s arbitration system. 

“If you are trying to figure something more robust, I would not rely on the rule of thumb,” Tango wrote on his blog. “You’d have to come up with something not so linear,”

That could mean a sliding scale that would adjust for role players, superstars and award winners. 

“Or, more likely, you can forget about WAR altogether,” Tango continued. Instead, we could do something similar to what teams and agents do – value players based on RBI, homers, saves, wins and other back of the baseball card stats.

Using WAR to project earnings can be deceptive for many types of players. Superstars don’t come close to earning 40% of their ‘market value’ as first time arbitration eligible players. Versatile utility types also pose problems. According to WAR, the Cardinals should have non-tendered Ryan Theriot after he posted negative WAR last year. Instead they traded Blake Hawksworth for Theriot and gave the infielder a $3.3MM contract. Since elite defenders aren’t particularly well-compensated in arbitration, you wouldn’t want to use WAR to project earnings for a player like Bourn or Ben Zobrist. The same goes for players with OBP-driven value; arbitrators don’t reward high on base percentages nearly as well as WAR does. Closers, on the other hand, can earn as much as position players through arbitration, even though WAR suggests they’re far less valuable. Super twos, the players who go to arbitration four times instead of three, complicate the 40/60/80 rule as well.

When there are this many exceptions to the rule, it's time to start questioning its effectiveness. Though it does work as a descriptor of the past, as Studenmund and Tango showed, it isn't a reliable predictor for individuals. The 40/60/80 rule starts with free agent value and works backward. But in reality, arbitration cases look back to performance, not forward to free agent value. As a result, significant discrepancies emerge when we use the 40/60/80 rule for individuals. 

Wins above replacement is a more sophisticated and meaningful statistic than saves or runs batted in, yet WAR’s role in arbitration is limited at best. The 40/60/80 rule describes earnings for groups of players from the past, so using the rule to anticipate earnings for individuals in the future will not produce accurate results. It may seem old-fashioned, but the best way to establish a framework for a player’s earning potential is the same as it's ever been: comparing him to his peers with traditional stats. 

What is the 40/60/80 rule?

The sabermetric principle suggests arbitration-eligible players earn roughly 40% of their free agent value as first-time arbitration eligible players, 60% of their free agent value their second time through arbitration and 80% of their free agent value while third-time arbitration eligible. Value, in this case, is determined by calculating the cost of obtaining wins above replacement on the free agent market (usually $4-5MM per win above replacement).

Photo courtesy Icon SMI.

Last year, we created the @closernews Twitter feed, a must-follow for fantasy junkies who are looking for an edge in the saves and holds categories. Presently, it has 8,800 followers and is still growing. Then, in July, we officially launched CloserNews.com, a place where we could expound on all the information found in the Twitter feed.

After only a few few weeks, the early returns on CloserNews.com are promising, and now we're looking for a few motivated, strong writers to contribute to the site as we build it into a must-read for fantasy fans.

Ideal candidates will:

• have some college education
• be familiar with Twitter and RSS feeds
• be baseball and fantasy experts
• be strong writers whose copy requires minimal or no editing

This position is unpaid with the potential to become paid as the site grows. So, it's probably best for someone who is breaking into sportswriting — either as recent or soon-to-be grad, or someone changing careers.

If interested, please submit a writing sample to closernewshelp@gmail.com. The piece should be roughly 300 words and written in a style similar to the posts published at CloserNews.com. It can be a reaction to news or an original analysis piece. As well, tell us briefly about yourself and why you'd be a good fit.