The Mariners used their first selection, 93rd overall, on Matt Tuiasasopo out of Woodinville High School. Yes, he’s the younger brother former Huskies QB Marques, and he’s also the 9th rated QB prospect in the country. Scouts are torn on whether he’d be more successful at baseball or football, but regardless, the leverage he has with his football skills are going to make him a very high priced sign. This is a classic Mariners pick, blending in a tools player from the local area with the need to overpay to get him signed. I’ll stop short of calling it a bad pick, but it’s certainly not a great value pick, and there’s a pretty good chance that Tui never plays a day in the M’s system.
I want to point out something weird in last night’s game that I still don’t understand.
Koch comes in and can’t throw strikes. Bocachica grounds out, Ichiro gets a single, Winn doubles, Olerud walks, Boone singles.
The Mariners are beating up on Koch. Bloomquist’s running for Olerud at second, Boone’s at first. Team’s down by one, only one out.
Now Edgar hasn’t been hitting like Edgar, but Edgar still walks, he still hits. He’s got many years of fine hitting experience, and is willing to work deep in counts, which is exactly what Koch doesn’t want.
Behind him sits Jolbert Cabrera. Now, believe what you may about Cabrera, but given the choice, any manager wants to see Cabrera over Edgar with a shaky closer showing bad control.
Melvin double-steals. This opens up first, and the White Sox take him up on his offer and walk Edgar to pitch to Jolbert.
One out. Edgar’s now on first and Boone on second, Slowest and Sorta Slow on the basepaths. Jolbert Cabrera over his career’s been a ground-ball hitter, this year more so than ever (1.5 G/F). He strikes out, but almost never walks, so you’re almost guaranteed that Cabrera’s going to hack at Koch’s pitches and put something in play, and most of the time with Edgar on first you’ll be able to turn two. Or even two nailing Boone-Edgar.
Now, Koch still sucked enough to blow the game, and Cabrera took a walk for once. These things happen. But instead of having Edgar up facing Koch in a game-winning situation with a reasonable chance of a double-play, Melvin handed the White Sox an easy way out. I don’t get it.
So, I’m laying in bed, beginning to get my first good nights sleep in a few days, when my dream is interrupted by a loud inferal repetitive beep. Very few things in life make my skin crawl like repetitive beeping, so of course, they’ve been implemented into nearly every walk of life. This particular annoyance was courtesy of my phone, which I really should turn off when I go to bed. I received a voicemail from my friend Clark, encouraging me to post that the comeback on June 6th is what is going to turn the team around and send them to the World Series. Sorry Clark, I’m tired, but I’m not drunk.
But, you know what, its games like this (I assume, I slept through innings 7-9) that make baseball a heck of a lot of fun. Yea, Billy Koch is the most worthless closer since the dawn of time, but come on, Jolbert Cabrera drew a game-winning walk, doubling his total on the season (yes, Hole-Bear now has 2 walks in 103 at-bats). That’s just good times. Come from behind wins rock, and the 15,000 or so who stuck around til the end got a night of enjoyment.
The team stinks, the organization is still a ship without a rudder, but you know what; tonight, walking out of Safeco Field, I’m sure Clark didn’t care. Baseball’s pretty cool that way. Even in the midst of one of the more depressing seasons in team history, there are good times, fun comebacks, and walk off walks by guys who treat the base on balls like a plague. It’s phone calls like the one I got that is why baseball is the best game ever invented. Even with the infernal beeping of my phone, hurray for comeback wins and the joy they bring.
Update! I’m |this| close to buying a Mac. XP has been the Dave Fleming of my operating systems.
So my desktop computer can’t get on the network — something’s seriously wrong with XP’s networking — so I’m not going to be around as much until I wrestle this elephant down. Funny aside: when it starts up, Symantec throws an error up (“TCP/IP is not installed — Click here to go to Symantec Technical Support Knowledge Base” which opens up a web browser that can’t go anywhere.
I don’t have much to add to Dave’s comments except that I don’t think it’s a “sabermetric” error that leads to picking a ton of college players. The A’s made a conscious decision to do so in the past, knowing that while they may limit their upside, they feel that getting guys closer to the majors makes more sense for a team that can’s now and won’t for the forseeable future be able to retain players for long periods of time. Last year, they had a ton of picks and were probably limited on how much money they could spend as well.
As all the statheds look at what makes good drafts and what got teams good returns, we’ll get better. Stathead-ism learns. Or I hope it does, anyway.
With that said, even then we’re only looking backwards. The major league record of the last ten drafts of first-round players tells you nothing about whether this other Weaver kid’s going to make it. There’s no answer to the college v high school question.
My own opinion after reading everything I can get my hands on is that teams should draft college pitchers over high school pitchers, because I think you can mitigate health risks and college pitchers have just as good returns. I’d only draft high school position players that play premium defensive positions. As players go through the minors and develop, they almost never move up the spectrum, while they frequently move down as they develop more muscle and face stiffer defensive competition. And there is a point where an inability to play a position causes players to stall out in their advancement up the ladder.
That said, no one knows. The A’s had a bad draft, so did pure scouting teams. Drafting is a lot like gambling, I think — many people go to Vegas with a bankroll and a system, and after a couple of days they’re left in Vegas. Billy Beane thought he’d draft all college kids with good prep stats who’d also take low bonuses, and the A’s flopped. But pure scout organizations flopped, too. Take the Mariners. Ugh.
Reader Larry Haas asked if there was a way to judge just how much teams were paying for their wins, to help show just how poor the roster management has been this season. The late Doug Pappas invented just such a tool called Marginal Payroll/Marginal Wins. There is a great essay on this in Baseball Prospectus 2004, and you can read the archived works of Doug’s stuff (free of charge) at baseballprospectus.com.
Here’s a brief synopsis of MP/MW. It works on an assumption that a roster of major league minimum players could win 30 % of their games, finishing the season with a 49-113 record. Before last years Tigers, this was worse than any club had ever finished. Its safe to say that Doug’s assumption here is correct, and a team could theoretically win about 49 games on an $8.4 million payroll (28 roster spots at $300,000 each gives a full roster and 3 spots for injury replacements). Therefore, every win over 49 is considered a Marginal Win, and the team’s payroll minus the mandatory $8.4 million is their marginal payroll. Marginal Wins divided by Marginal Payroll gives us a number in dollars for how much each team paid for their wins. It’s a great proxy to realize just how well or how poorly teams spent the money they had. As Doug breaks it down in BP04, there are four groups of teams demonstrated by this method:
Low Marginal Payroll, Low Marginal Wins, good record: Efficient ballclub. (A’s)
Low MP/MW, bad record: not spending enough to win. (Devil Rays)
High MP/MW, good record: Spending its way to the top. (Yankees)
High MP/MW, bad record: Poorly run club. (Mets)
Obviously, the goal is to win games, and if you have more resources, its going to be nearly impossible to have as good an MP/MW as a low-revenue team who succeeds, and you can’t penalize teams like the Yankees or Red Sox for having money to spend. So, as long as we realize that MP/MW isn’t perfect across the board, but gives us a good idea of where to group a team, its a great tool.
Through the site and BP04, Doug ran the numbers from every team from 1977 through 2003. Obviously, with the way the game has changed, there are huge differences in the numbers. In 1977, Atlanta was the least efficient team, paying $1.1 million for 61 wins, or $95,337 per marginal win. 10 years later, in 1987, the Orioles were the least efficient club, spending $635,049 per marginal win, and every team spent at least $140,000 per MW. 1991 saw the big leap where 5 teams broke million dollar mark, led by Cleveland paying $2.1 million per MW. The Indians paid $18 million for 57 wins that year, while Atlanta paid $19 million for 94 wins.
With more recent history, we can look at how the ’04 M’s stack up in terms of financial efficiency. Last year, the M’s paid $1.77 million per marginal win, a pretty solid number for a 93 win team, slightly less than Boston’s $1.97 million for their 95 wins and far less than the Yankees $2.75 million for 101 wins. In 2002, the M’s paid $1.68 million per MW, again a solid number for 93 wins. The 2001 season brought a great $1.04 million per MW number. 2000 was $1.26 million per MW. So, the M’s during the Gillick regime had a pretty clear, consistent standard of performance. They would pay between $1-1.75 million per marginal win, and spend enough to turn that into a 90-95 win club.
So, how about those 2004 Mariners? Cover your eyes. Right now, the M’s are paying $6.87 million per marginal win, which is the second highest number in baseball history. Last year, the Mets were the most inefficient team, spending $6.11 million per MW, and the Rangers were a distant second at $4.25 million per MW. Only the 2002 Tigers, who spent $55 million ($49.5 million considered marginal payroll) to win 55 games (or 6 marginal wins), paying $7.33 million per MW, performed worse than the ’04 Mariners. As it stands now, the M’s are going to win 58 games, or 9 marginal wins, on a $73 million payroll, with $64 million of that considerd marginal.
$64 million bought the team 9 wins. Last year, $74 million bought the team 44 wins. That’s ineptitude of historical standards. Any rational analysis of how poorly the team managed their budget would lead to massive wholesale changes. Someone forward this to Howard Lincoln please.
With the draft Monday, I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t spent more time talking about draft philosophies and such, but really, we don’t pick until the third round, and I’m having a hard time getting excited about what the M’s might do with the 93rd pick. But I still find the draft itself fascinating, and have spent a good amount of time the past few years discussing the merits of traditional drafting vs a more statistical approach, especially since Moneyball took over the world. While I don’t have time to go into everything right now, here’s a few brief snippets of beliefs that I hold about the draft, and some of them might surprise you.
1. The A’s “college-only” philosophy is wrong, flat out. Ignoring high school players as an entity because of their risk fails to allow you to recognize the times when the reward does indeed outweigh the risk. Putting yourself in a box and refusing to see the limitations of a hard-and-fast set of evaluation techniques raises your likelyhood of making a mistake. And, this isn’t retrospective piling on, as I wrote a column about this last year, but the famed Moneyball draft was basically a disaster for the A’s.
2. That said, college players are significantly safer picks, and should make up the majority of early selections. The long range potential of college stars is not any lower than that of high school stars, and the reduced risk makes selecting a college player with your top pick usually the intelligent way to go. There have been numerous studies on the draft in the past year, none more thorough than the work done by a poster at Sons of Sam Horn, with a lot of interesting stuff revealed through his conclusions.
3. Repeatedly giving away first round picks is insane. As the research linked above shows, a huge percentage of major league stars come from the first round, and tossing away the opportunity to pick in one of the top 30 spots reduces your chance of getting one of these players down to nearly nil. Not surprisingly, since the Gillick regime started intentionally throwing away draft choices, the farm system has gone to hell in a handbasket.
While we’re basically branded as statheads here, this is one area where I think the sabermetric teams have been mislead by outdated information. Bill James work on the draft was good 20 years ago, but times change, and the newer research does not support his conclusions. Attempting to imitate the A’s or Blue Jays simply to be in tune with the statistical crowd would be akin to the blind following the blind. Hopefully, on Monday, the M’s draft the best players available. Just as they need to not focus solely on athletic bodies, speed, arm strength, and physical projection, they also need to not focus on college walk rates and on base percentage. Just as a team of nine Neifi Perez’ won’t get you far, neither will a team of nine Jeremy Browns.
Ahhh, I worked up a good head of steam over this at the game only to find Dave had already covered it admirably.
Probability of scoring 3 runs for the tie:
Runners on first and second, no outs — 11%
Runners on second and third, one out — 9.9%
Probability of scoring 4 runs for the win:
1,2 no outs — 5.9%
2,3 no outs — 6%
Tie or win, no sac– 17%
Tie or win, sac– 16%
I’m as surprised as anyone that it’s even that close. Thaaaaaat said, sacrificing’s still a stupid move, as James Click showed in the research he did for Baseball Prospectus, especially considering that sacrificing means that the other team can pitch around Ichiro if they choose in order to get to Randy Winn for the second out, where your best-case scenario is probably that he gets a sac fly and you’re two runs down, two outs, men on 1,2 and your chances of scoring two runs is 5% and three runs for the win is 4%
Aaaand particularly considering that despite his reputation, Wilson’s not a good bunter, and the sacrifice means the White Sox make a pitching move.
Get this; the M’s are down by 3 runs heading into the 8th inning. Rich Aurilia walks, Jolbert Cabrera follows with a single, and the M’s bring the tying run to the plate. They have 6 outs to get 3 runs.
And Bob Melvin bunts. Amazing. He uses Wilson to move runners up so that the White Sox can bring Ichiro to the plate. We’ve demonstrated before how stupid Melvin’s obsession with playing for one run is, but when you’re down 3 with only 6 outs to go, it’s insane.
Why do I care? The M’s have the worst record in the AL, the season is in the tubes, and this game really doesn’t matter. But this still drives me nuts. Bunting Bob has no business making the decisions on in-game strategy. He’s just abysmal at it.
Randy Winn is just a freaking terrible center fielder. Leading off the 7th, Jose Valentin hits a fly ball into the left center field gap. Using our limited blogger abilities, here’s a drawing of Winn’s route to the ball:
Ball
| CF
|_____|
|
---|
|---
Winn
LF RF
Freddy just shakes his head, muttering “Donde Esta Mike Cameron?”