What if it doesn’t end?
Dave’s post raises an interesting possibility, that early bad signings will later depress the market because it means there are fewer dollars in the pool, but it also reduces the number of potential players for that pool. Now, I hate using fantasy auctions as an example, but many people are familiar with what can happen next: say pitchers are hugely overvalued in your league. Top pitchers go for way too much money. Then everyone else starts worrying they won’t get any pitchers, and panic sets in. There are bidding wars for modest pitchers and the overpaid top guys start to look like bargains… but the fundamental distribution of talent remains the same. There will be few great guys, more good ones, many more okay ones. If you remain level-headed, you can still pick up a bunch of good values, but they’ll be at the low end of the spectrum, and you have to spend your money elsewhere.
So it is with this year’s free agent market. Say this trend continues, and teams continue to spend a ton of money on the worthwhile free agents. A team then faces a decision: do we too overspend to get something worthwhile, or is there a better application of this money?
If this scenario plays out as some of our readers fear, this may show the difference in the new front office versus the old one. I can objectively say that I have been too proportionally critical of the team’s failures in small matters over large ones. The team’s failure to pick up a decent platoon partner for Olerud, for instance: in the end, it’s what, a difference of 100 at-bats. Who really cares?
That was certainly Gillick’s attitude, and it showed — his Mariner teams had awful benches, with players badly suited to complement those on the field. By contrast, one of the things I love about Billy Beane is that, while he makes mistakes and has his problems, you know that Oakland pours over the minor league free agents, in the same way they obsess over the Rule 5 draft. They look for guys who might be good injury insurance, potential trade bait if they perform well, interesting injury rebounds, good drinking buddies, shiny objects of any kind.
They work the phones, talking to any front office that will answer, finding out who they’re thinking of moving, and why, and what they need in return.
That’s how you can do well if the market goes insane this year. If Bavasi & Co are smart and every position player starts to sign for way too much money, they can look to spend that money on the poor, the unwashed, the undervalued, but also they can look to find players on teams that are trying to dump contracts. If someone like Tampa Bay really wants to get rid of a veteran player to cut payroll, you can afford to take that on instead of filling that position in the open market.
If you’re good enough at filling the position with the random floatsam and stopgaps, and you retain payroll flexibility, you can also wait it out until later in the year, when teams may be trying to unload those same contracts (and others) and bulking up for the playoffs costs you much less.
I think Dave’s reasoning is sound — that bad spending on some players doesn’t have to result in the inflation of all free agent prices. But even if it created a one-year price spike, a smart team — especially one that’s not looking for a championship this year — can find ways to exploit market conditions and leave the free-spenders hurting next year and years after that.
Comments
53 Responses to “What if it doesn’t end?”
What a way to paint a rosy picture.
And to assert that Gillick didn’t put together good benches when they fielded guys like McLemore and Stan Javier … that’s wrong.
Sure, smart teams can succeed this way… but when was the last time the Mariners behaved like a smart team?
It’s also possible that this is a true trend upwards. Maybe prices will go up and stay up, and that the past few years of “market correction” were an aberration and not a correction at all, and that this upward trend is the correction. Certainly, if the teams were really losing so much money like they kept claiming, they wouldn’t be spending the money now. Of course, you don’t really want to be the first wave of spenders in a spike in case it is a mistake, but if it’s not, in a couple years, it might very well be the case that even beltre’s 100 million contract is considered a good value when someone inferior is making the same amount of money.
Good point about supply and demand, but it applies by position. Supply and demand are both high for SS, but only 3 or 4 teams are after a high end SS and there are only 2 available. They’ll get paid well.
Who needs a big 3B besides the Ms and Dodgers? and the Ms have more to spend, so….
Etc.
For reasons that would require a whole other post to get into, the long-term trend will not see the pricing trend of this off-season ($$$ for Omar) continue.
Good observations, Derek. The problem this raises in my mind is whether this espoused bottom-feeding (even informed bottom-feeding with potentially useful results) is of a cyclical nature. Avoiding a one-year salary spike may be in the organization’s best interests, but it also may not, if a) next year’s free agents are less of the cornerstone variety and b) they turn into a sort of high-cost orphanage with the attendant tendencies toward revolving doors and occasional unwished-for return tenants.
I see a Mariner dip in the trough as resembling recent forays by teams such as Pittsburgh and Colorado more than Oakland or even Cincinnati. We just don’t have the franchise pieces that swill-bits (Zauns, Huffs, what-have-you) complement so well. My opinion isn’t worth much, but our franchise seems practically to scream for cornerstone talent.
It’s difficult to avoid overpaying for a premium player. That being the case, does it really make a large difference to pay a little more in a spike year and get a talent of Beltre or Drew’s caliber? When you’d be overpaying anyway in whichever deadline deal/subsequent offseason you choose to spend your prudent cash?
I’m curious who next year’s top free agents are going to be. Do they match up with this year’s bin busters?
All the same, a thoughtful piece. I appreciate your work a lot.
I just don’t think we can ignore The Boras Factor in our fears of a one-year spike. He controls too many premium free agents, and he has always twisted market comparable figures into his price-settings. I think he has the power to run the table on baseball this winter — and even if he doesn’t, he’ll play insecure GMs off one another so brilliantly that by the time pitchers and catchers report. Chuck LaMar and Bill Bavasi and their ilk will be on their knees in obsequious gratitude for the privilege of overspending on whoever’s left.
It seems that this year, however, Bavasi has committed to spend (at least by Mariners standards) on free agents. So I don’t think he will comfortably follow the strategy you outline (the floatsam…). If he does and the club plays poorly again, he will likely lose his job and he knows this. Even though he says he will make deals to help the club over the next couple of years, he needs deals that help HIM in 2005.
If Chuck LaMar signs a Boras client then the market has REALLY changed.
Hey Jim, you ever going to sign up for the feed, or did you just bug us for a few months to have one so that you could skip it and go carroling instead?
How about a USSM caroling event in front of Bill Bavasi’s house?
I see someone else above already beat me to the obvious rejoinder to your post: The M’s front office is NOT smart. They’ll get eaten alive in this kind of market. I also agree with the previous comment that Bavasi will be in panic mode, trying to improve the team right away to save his job, and thus will make moves that make no sense.
I’ll be signing up.
But I said say “if they’re smart…”
This situation would be a test of their mettle, and we’d see either way.
I hope the Mariners get at least one stud(Beltre?, maybe Delgado?) in this free agent season. Otherwise, they should not waste their $s this year.
The upside to this continuing is that our bad contracts will start to look more attractive in the framework of the market, making it more likely that we’d be able to dump them. If Jeff Kent signs for a bunch of money, maybe we’ll be able to trade Bret Boone. If that happens, that gives us more money to spend on the now overpriced free agents.
There are ways to make this work regardless of which way the market goes. As long as some GMs make bad decisions, other GMs can take advantage of that.
Just to show how consistent Gillick was, check out the benches on the World Champion Toronto teams from ‘92 and ‘93. They were lousy, too.
Rebecca, why do you think they will get “eaten alive”? Don’t we have a basically new GM who has already pulled off one outstanding trade? Let’s see what happens before we jump off the ledge.
I agree with DMZ. It will test their mettle. And not just the M’s, but all teams are in the same boat. And if you get a chance, I’d love to hype my thoughts on a potential shift in Free Agency, posted over at NGFT. http://www.niceguysfinishthird.com/index.php
And Rebecca, you seem to always bum me. So negative. At least give Bavasi a chance. He hasn’t done anything incredibly moronic (w/o upper orders) yet, has he?
Maybe he is a smarter cookie than everyone gives him credit for, and has staying power. Kind of like another rather significant American figure, a guy that over the past 4 years many people wouldn’t have thought would be in the news for another 4.
I’m not talking politics here, just staying power. As Bruce Willis said in Pulp Fiction, “That’s how you’re gonna beat ‘em, Butch. They keep underestimating you.”
Don’t you mean “misunderestimating”?
In further rejoinder to Rebecca’s irritating drone, if Bavasi were “in panic mode, trying to improve the team right away to save his job, and thus [making] moves that make no sense,” the press conference to introduce Castilla and Guzman would have been in Seattle, not the other Washington, and Bavasi would have already “fixed” the left side of our infield.
I think if you continue with the rotisserie-auction analogy, this is sort of the part of the auction where everyone nominates all the players they don’t want and sit back happily as those players go to teams who have too much money to throw around for their own good. With the advent of the “strict budget” throughout much of baseball (not all) in the last few years, this may just be what is happening. When mid-to-low-level players go early in the auction for more than they should, it is possible to find value later in the auction (offseason) by being patient and waiting until teams are essentially forced out of the bidding because they’ve allocated resources elsewhere. I think this notion closely parallels what Dave’s front office source was saying and for now, with fingers crossed, I’ll buy into it. Anytime a portion or portions of the market are overvalued, it automatically by extension creates an undervalued area or areas. The GM’s that recognize which is which are the ones that come out on top. Here’s hoping Bavasi can do that…
#22: Exactly. Or put it another way: There has been no one signed so far that I would want to see in a Mariner uniform anyway. There’s still a lot of time, and each bad contract signed drops the number of potential suitors.
Acquiring talent via trade instead of signing free agents should always be considered a viable option of addressing a need… like 3B. Gammons stated that Tampa Bay is looking to move veterans, including Aubrey Huff.
Prices for commodities do not move in a straight line, but go up and down. It takes steely nerves to keep your cool when everyone else is losing theirs. If the first six signings are evidence that other GM’s have lost their heads it will be interesting to see if Bavasi
can keep his head pointed straight ahead, or whether it will revolve around like he just got out of the latest Exorcist movie. I will remain cautiously pessimistic….ready to jump on any bandwagon that will pass by.
I’m thinking teams would start to feel pressure by bad signings like Guzman and especially Vinny Castilla if those were the fall back guys, players who were alternative-c and on. Then they might start to overbid, just in case, for mid-level and upper-level guys, particularly for positions in need. But if the bad-contract guys were not options in the first place, I don’t see how the market’s upended. Also, if a month or a couple weeks go by without many signings or particularly bad ones, maybe the market could restart from a more reasonable point.
What would people think about this hypothetical? Let’s say the M’s are able to sign Beltre. Then instead of signing someone like Delgado who’s expensive and ready to start a career decline (if he hasn’t already), why not try to work a trade for some combo of minor and major leaguers to get Huff from Tampa Bay to play first? I know he plays more at 3rd, but he’s played quite a bit of first in his career. And he’s a left-handed power hitter. Assuming the M’s wouldn’t have to give up too much, he would be a bargain. Then you could take the rest of the money you have left and get a #1 or #2 starter and you’d have a pretty solid team. You might even have enough left over to get a decent relief pitcher. Anyone think this is at all possible, or would Tampa ask for too much?
I remember an analysis of the ARod deal whereby the Yankees made money by signing him. C’mon Bavasi, go big or stay home. Sign the Belt Brothers (and trademark that!) for 35M combined/7-8 yrs. Leverage the now-expendable Leone and Speizio (remember, he’s gritty) to get a quality shortstop or a decent reliever. Spend another 8-10M on Pavano or Clement. Retain Wilson for small $$ and the promise to be inducted into the M’s Hall of Fame someday (the last link to ‘95?). Raise ticket prices. Contend. Sell 3.5M seats and a cargo-hold of overpriced beer and hotdogs. Sell many many many Belt Brothers novelties. Market team aggressively in recently-scorned Portland and hockey-starved Vancouver. Make further adjustments next year with Moyer/Boone money. Win. Realize extra revenue from playoff appearances. Repeat.
Dread! I’m feeling dread. Just read Koskie might be coming here. Ugh! I can see it now. Koskie at third. Sexson at first. The whiff brothers. Probably cost us 17 mil to see that. I’d rather have who we have now.
…and ESPN now lists the Mariners as the leaders in the Russ Ortiz sweepstakes, too. Ugh…
I like belt brothers much more than whiff brothers.
This is what you can expect from the front office. It would great to have all the big names from the FA market, but that means Lincoln & Co. would have to dig deep into their pockets. That just isn’t going to happen. Bavasi can try to do what he wants, but if the money isn’t coming out then neither are the players.
I am coming from the outside looking in. I don’t see the moves that most people would like, being made. The front office could spend and spend and spend, if they wanted, to make the team better. Maybe even “take a loss” for a year. They have made enough in the past to settle, even though with a good team, more people show up, more items sell, etc — you don’t really “take a loss”. It is a supply and demand market, baseball that is. The demand is there. It is up to the front office to “supply”, which has cost them in the past few years becuase they have not done so.
I was wondering if it was possible that the M’s FO people would be floating interest in Koskie in an attempt to send a message to another FA, Beltre, that they would be willing to make a quick offer to someone else, thus reducing the market for the likes of Beltre, since he then would not have as many teams to play off one another? Would Beltre then be inclined to move towards the M’s position?
Or am I hopelessly trying to find a silver lining in the Seattle Times Koskie report?
Calm down, folks. The agent for a player said he “expects an offer to be made”. An offer hasn’t been made. The M’s haven’t made a public stance of interest in Corey Koskie. They haven’t brought Corey Koskie into town. They’ve had discussions to the point where the man in charge of raising as much interest in his client believes he’s going to get an offer eventually.
Am I thrilled they view him as an option? No. But this isn’t the end of the world.
#33, I hope you are right, but if that’s the Ms’ strategy then wouldn’t they be better off publicly flirting with Troy Glaus instead of Koskie? The notion that Corey Koskie would put a scare into Beltre and his agent doesn’t seem to fit. It would be like the Yankees using Jose Lima to scare AZ into trading them Randy Johnson. But I hope you are right – I’m trying to find a silver lining too.
I’ll retract my last comment (#35) in light of Dave’s analysis (#34). It’s a good point that the M’s haven’t publicly made a statement on Koskie, and the agent is just doing his job. Though it still worries me that he could end up in a Mariner uniform.
and FWIW, Bavasi has in essence has said they’d be looking at a lot of people, and floating a lot of offers so they didn’t wind up with no one by the end of the off-season….
Dave,
I agree with your points in regards to Koskie. However, I had heard over a week ago that the M’s were looking very hard at Koskie and were expected to tender him a good offer in the near future. I am in TX so it may be just wind, not sure. I don’t think he would be a bad pickup, but I don’t think he is the best out there. Hence what I said in #32. I don’t think the drive between everyone in the front office is to bring the best people that would fill the needed requirements.
I can easily see the R. Ortiz thing happening too. It just seems like the M’s.
#33-or the reverse, that Koskie’s agent may be floating this because (to quote the Pioneer Press) “The Twins are expected to increase their $7 million, two-year offer to free agent Corey Koskie to $7.5 million, and that might be enough for the third baseman to re-sign with Minnesota, depending on whether he receives a $5 million-a-season, multi-year deal elsewhere.”
I wish I could be so sanguine about “winning” the Corey Koskie Sweepstakes, but considering every frigging M’s beat writer on the planet had said the M’s are interested in him before this (from Pocket Lint to Street ad nauseam), I can’t help but think this is a Bad Sign, when combined with the “we’re so broke” tripe from Pocket Lint and the also widely circulated interest in Delgado. Both of these signings would be well in character for the team to have made in the past, and while I don’t doubt Dave’s source that the M’s might have considered going young and longterm, something tells me the front office decided to “cheap out” (because they still don’t grasp that midlevel FA’s in their 30’s are MORE expensive and risky than toplevel ones in their 20’s).
Now, maybe Koskie’s agent is just going off the press reports… but there’s WAY too much smoke here, in my view. Remember all the talk last year about how we were interested in Ibañez and Aurillia BEFORE we signed them? I think Delgado and Koskie plus a pitcher will be our signings, and we’ll be gnashing our teeth and rending our garments again- though I sure as hell HOPE I’m wrong.
I hope that others’ responses about Koskie’s agent trying to use the M’s as leverage instead of the reverse is true.
And I just read a headline that claims that the Washington Seligs (or whatever they are called) acquired Jose Guillen from the Angels. Even if Bavasi does sign Koskie, Delgado, and Ortiz, he will still have outperformed Bowden — by a large margin. And that is not a compliment to Bavasi.
For those who see only madness in the Giants’ decision to sign Vizquel to an ostensibly ridiculous contract, I refer you to the analysis provided at http://www.fogball.com. I continue to dislike the deal; however, I do not find it “giggle” inducing as Dave apparently still does.
I found it giggle inducing! Me! Don’t blame Dave for my comments.
I’ve been reading the Internet rumor mill as much as anyone, and it’s starting to dawn on me that there’s only one source I’ve read that indicates the M’s will be players in the Beltran-Beltre-Clement negotiations, and that’s this blog right here. Ask ESPN, Baseball Prospectus, or most anyone else, and the M’s are barely on the radar. So that tells me one of two things: either we’re the beneficiaries of an accurate information source that no one else is privy to, or we’re all kidding ourselves. I hope it’s the former; I fear it’s the latter.
I humbly offer my appologies to Dave for my slanderous comment. All Dave- directed accusations of induction of giggle are patently false.
Sorry
I, also, do not buy the idea that Vizquel was the best move possible for the Giants. Signing Julio Lugo to a one year deal doesn’t handicap the team with a 40 year old SS in 2007, which is the real downside risk. Basically, a mediocre one year stopgap lets you vamp for time while you try to come up with other options- but committing yourself to a 3 year slightly better than mediocre stopgap with high odds of collapsing is just plain dumb.
Elsid — great to see you back around the blogosphere! How’s the diaper-changing duties?
I think you have every right to believe what you do about the M’s — it’s hard not to ignore the bumblings of the FO, and how they’ve conditioned us Ãœber-fans to expect moves based on mediocrity and fiscal conservatism. Good news is that the M’s haven’t done anything too horrible yet. That in and of itself shows something positive is happening. I’m holding out hope that the M’s will finally learn from their most recent mistakes and Bavasi (who’s much more willing to take a gamble than Gillick) will be able to pull the trigger on at least one big-named free agent. I’m slanted to the view that they HAVE to get someone who your fence-sitting, non-blogging, season-ticket-buying fan would recognize (though that isn’t necessarily a good thing). Even Howard should be convinced by now that he cannot field a product of mediocre players.
One would hope…
Beltre’s only been mentioned here? Umm, no. Larry Stone mentioned it on the 12th, it was mentioned in the PI… you can go Google it, you’ll start turning up other cites.
Re #44–one thing I’ve learned is not to trust the published rumor mill; sometimes, they’d get better results throwing darts. (Thuck! OK, Dodgers . . . let’s see . . . Thuck! Oooh, bad throw–Richie Sexson! Folks, the Dodgers will sign Richie Sexson for . . . Thuck! five years at . . . Thuck! $9 million per year. Again, the Dodgers will sign Richie Sexson to a five-year, $45-million contract. What’s your analysis of this signing, Peter?)
I mentioned that this was the locus of speculation that the M’s would be major players when it came to Beltre. Of course other sources might mention the M’s as in need of a third baseman, but what I haven’t really been seeing is any serious speculation of the M’s as his likely destination … except for here.
But whatever. My larger point is that we’ve got something of a mob mentality here: by chewing so insistently on the smallest scraps of news — even when it isn’t news at all — and by passing the same judgments back and forth, I think there’s a tendency to build up, not just a belief that the M’s should sign certain players, but an expectation that they will do so. Meanwhile, it can be sobering to browse through other cities’ newspapers and see how different the conversations are in those locales. The M’s aren’t major players, if you’re reading columnists in New York, Boston, Chicago, or LA.
Is that conclusive? Of course not. As I said the first time ’round, in retrospect it might look like we were better informed than those guys were. If that’s the case, I’ll be as happy as anyone. But there’s a question of perspective winding through all of this, and I’m wondering how our perspective might be distorted simply by the process of returning to a website every day and discussing, ad nauseum, the very fact that we have nothing to discuss.
And I think you’re wrong. The authors of this fine site believe certiain things, like (for instance) that the Mariners will pursue Beltre, and that Koskie won’t sign unless it’s for $1 until they’ve failed to get Beltre.
As for our dear readers, many of them regard this with healthy and warranted skepticism. Many disagree entirely.
So in turn I disagree entirely with the characterization of this site as a self-satisfying mob. This isn’t freep by any stretch.
Mark,
I agree with what you’re saying, mostly. I don’t think everyone here is like that, but I do believe that a portion of the fanbase has attached their personal hope to some of the potential moves the team could theoretically make and have blown them out of proportion. I’ve seen three pretty distinct kind of Mariner fan over the past few months:
Bitter Fan. This is the one who is still pissed about the trade for Al Martin and Doug Creek and believes that the organization as a whole is never going to change. They’re the ones constantly reminding us that Howard Lincoln is cheap, that the team has no track record of signing big name free agents, and we’re all in for a big disappointment.
Hopeful Fan. This is the guy who took the reports I made about the teams interest in Adrian Beltre and Matt Clement and have decided that anything other than these signings will be a colossal failure. They see this as the offseason of restored dreams, a chance to bring in three or four all-stars, and will be very angry if the team “settles” for lesser players.
Ryan Howard Fan. By far the most annoying of all, this is the one who created the lame Ryan Howard rumor which has now permeated the blog, leading me to pull my hair out every time someone brings up his name. If I ever meet this fan in a dark ally, I might be blogging from the NC corrections department for the next 25 to life.
This is the one who is still pissed about the trade for Al Martin and Doug Creek and believes that the organization as a whole is never going to change. They’re the ones constantly reminding us that Howard Lincoln is cheap, that the team has no track record of signing big name free agents, and we’re all in for a big disappointment.
I prefer to think of this as being cynical. Goodness knows the past history of this management team has made it pretty deep. I just have a suspicion the faction that wanted a long term deal for kids got shot down by the bean counters at the Armstrong/Lincoln level, and Delgado and Koskie are the booby prize.