“Miracle at Minute Maid”
Courtsey of my friend David, who emailed me this one today, I present an article so heavy with cliches that it could have been written by a computer. Rick Rizzs, or Rico, as Dave Valle would call him, would be proud.
Of Pitching Coaches and Permissions
Meet pitching coach number one. Former Mariner. Re-united with previous boss. Apparently has pixelated face.
Meet pitching coach number two. Potential Hall of Famer. May be united with The Boss. Apparently this is Bizarro World after all.
File this under the “too much to hope for” department, but if the Braves will give the Yankees permission to talk to Leo Mazzone, why shouldn’t the Mariners ask for the same? What do they have to lose?
Talking point: “Leo, if you can do for Gil Meche what you did for Jaret Wright, how can they possibly keep you out of Cooperstown?”
How posting works
This comes up every time a Japanese player is rumored to be heading over (now with Matsuzaka), so here’s a quick overview. Not every Japanese player goes through this process. Players who are free agents in Japan can sign wherever they want. Players like Ichiro, who are still under team control (and team control in Japan is much longer and odious than MLB), must go through the posting process. Using Ichiro’s case as an example, here’s how this works.
(prelude: player asks their team to be posted, and team decides they’ll do so)
1. Japanese team notifies the Japanese Commissioner’s Office that they’ll let Ichiro be posted.
2. Japanese Commissioner notifies MLB
3. MLB notifies all teams that Ichiro is available
4. Teams have four days to submit a bid. The bid is how much they’ll pay the team not for the player but the chance to negotiate a contract with the player. The Mariners submit a bid of $12.5m.
5. The Japanese team, Orix, is informed of the highest bidder, the Mariners
6. The Japanese team has four days to accept or reject the winning bid
7. They make a decision:
If they accept, the winning team has 30 days to agree to a contract with the posted player
If they reject, no deal. They can’t then shop him to the second-highest bidding team or anything.
In Ichiro’s case, Orix accepts the posting offer, and the Mariners begin discussing contract terms with Ichiro.
8. Then the player and the winning team negotiate, and one of two things happens:
If the winning team and player can come to an agreement, the player signs and reports to spring training next season, and the Japanese team gets the posting fee. The Mariners and Ichiro agreed, and he signed his original 2001 deal.
If the winning team and player can’t come to an agreement, the player returns to the team that controls his rights, and the Japanese team does not get the posting fee. The player then waits for next year or to become a normal FA, when he can go where he wants
This is pretty bad for the player, who already has a tough lot as a Japanese player compared to his MLB peers. There’s also potential for abuse by MLB teams playing games with each other.
Matsuzaka Will Ask Seibu To Post Him
Seibu sounds unconvinced about doing so, but the Japan Times is reporting that Daisuke Matsuzaka will ask his team to post him this offseason.
It’s alive… ALIVE!
Funny thing happened over the course of the past two days — I updated the Big Board for the first time since April. If you’re new to the site, the Big Board is/was a full organizational depth chart, and one of the things I think made the USS Mariner unique among M’s blogs (and MLB blogs in general).
When we moved out to New York in April, I went without easy Internet access for about a month and just never got around to updating it. Baseball America’s lack of statistics didn’t help the cause any. So rather than have it be horribly out of date, I simply removed the link from the left nav. I’m pleased to report that both link and Big Board are back (and they’re baaad).
A few notes: The Big Board represents, more or less, the way the season ended and is based on Baseball America’s team rosters. This means you’ve got wacky placements like Michael Garciaparra in Tacoma, despite the fact that he spent the entire season at Inland Empire. So please no complaining about that. I also make no guarantees about position players — I mostly just threw guys in where I thought they fit. Starting rotations are much better, listing the five guys who started the most games.
It’s not perfect, but at least now you can see all the players who are in the system.
I’m sure there will be questions and corrections, so away we go.
Indians, tech, and Antonetti
You may recall that we’ve mentioned Cleveland’s Chris Antonetti as a possible GM candidate, and in general we’re fans of what that front office has done. Check out this article for some detailed info on the kind of information advantage they’re working with.
It does contain this:
This information, plus another computer analysis that showed no one player’s salary had exceeded 15 percent of a team’s payroll on any World Series champion club since 1985, overrode the Tribe’s emotional instinct to pay Thome the guaranteed salary he wanted for six years to allow him to finish his career in Cleveland.
I can’t believe that that really swayed anyone, it’s such an obvious failure of reasoning. It’s been circulated so widely it’s worn thin, but that doesn’t make it worth anything. I wonder if they spread that because it’s accepted wisdom by many of baseball’s writers and analysts so it can be used to justify unpopular moves, whether or not it’s true.
And yet, there’s a lot about it, including this :
Back in 2000, when the Indians were preparing for negotiations with then-Indians slugger Manny Ramirez, Antonetti examined championship teams’ player salaries. He found that no World Series champion between 1985 and 2000 allocated more than 15 percent of its payroll to a single player. In addition, he determined the higher percentage of payroll a team spent on one player, the lower its winning percentage.
For example, teams that spent 17.5 to 20 percent of their payroll on one player won 47 percent of the time. Teams that spent 7.5 percent or lower on one player won 53 percent of the time.
Antonetti concluded there was a significant decline in a team’s chances to make and advance through the postseason if it allocated more than 15 percent of its payroll to a single player. On average, his analysis found, successful teams spent a little more than 12 percent on their highest paid player.
Not surprisingly, then, Antonetti recommended that Thome’s contract should not exceed 15 percent of the Indians’ team payroll in any season in which management felt the club had a “legitimate” chance to contend for the playoffs. Why? Because they needed the salary flexibility to acquire other players to put together a winning team.
Ideally, Antonetti said, Thome’s salary should make up about 12.5 percent of the payroll.
To refute, briefly: this is the logical fallacy “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this)”. It’s like discovering the Mariners only contend for division titles when Lucent and Cisco stock is highly valued. Should the Mariners use their huge bank balance to buy up those stocks in an attempt to drive up their price?
Of course not. While “salarly flexibility” sounds good as an explanation (and, I’d argue, roster flexibility is a huge boon to a team) the issue is much simpler than that.
– Teams with high payrolls generally win more.
– High payrolls mean that one player with a big contract does not consume so much of the team’s total salary.
That’s it. Take the Angels, for instance. They have a $95m payroll, and they’re paying their star player Vlad Guerrero $12.5m this year. 13% of payroll.
Now say that he plays on the Royals, or the Devil Rays, or the Pirates. He’d still be the same player, but now he’s make up about 26% of the payroll and the team would be terrible.
It’s the same deal with the Cardinals and Pujols (and, for them, Walker-Rolen-Edmonds).
You can look at examples of teams that have one player who makes a ton of money. They’re bad to awful teams who’ve retained one marquee player, or someone who had a horrible contract they couldn’t dump off on anyone, or even a modest veteran picked up to plug a huge hole in the roster.
Or think about it this way: at a 40m payroll, the threshold for consuming 15% of payroll is only $6m. At the mid-point for teams, it’s about $10-11m. At $90-something, it can be about $13-14m, and at the Yankees’ level, they can have players making $30m without exceeding 15%. It’s not about proportion of payroll consumed at all, and it never has been.
I’m surprised to see someone as smart as Antonetti spending any signficant time researching this.
Still, it’s a good article, and intersting food for thought.
Rhetoric, Logical Fallacies and Baseball
Hey, all you kids out there! Tired of trying to collect every moral philosopher and rhetorician trading card? Wondering whether that fellow you’re arguing with in the comments is misleading you with ad logicam or post hoc ergo propter hoc? Would it help to have common errors in reasoning at your fingertips?
You can’t tell the players without a program. And you can’t always tell apart common logical fallacies without the help of this handy-dandy list compiled by Glen Whitman of Cal State-Northridge. With internal anchors for your direct hyperlinking pleasure!
As a public service, we’ve appropriated the list and applied it to common arguments over baseball matters. This should make comment dust-ups more erudite, or at least more weighty with links and Latin. Besides, what’s more fun than formal logic?
Now, on to the list … Read more
Campillo outrighted
Minor, slightly odd move: Campillo, who had elbow surgery in September, was activated from the DL and outrighted to Tacoma today. This clears a spot on the 40-man. MLB.com, elsewhere.
Free Agent Landmines
We’ve done several posts outlining free agent acquisitions that we think would be a great fit for the M’s. Don’t worry, we’re not done. I’ve got a few more individual posts to go before we reveal the giant overall offseason plan. Today, though, let’s talk about the guys to avoid, the albatross contracts just waiting to happen. One of the risks of the free agent market is the significant chance of buying a soon-to-be-sunk-cost. There are potential landmines everywhere in the free agent market. Last year, teams flushed money down the drain on Edgar Renteria ($40 million), Russ Ortiz ($32 million), Eric Milton ($24 million), Jaret Wright ($21 million), Corey Koskie ($18 million), and Cristian Guzman ($16 million). Those guys were basically replacement level players, not significantly better than a run-of-the-mill minimum salary performer. And they’re all signed for several more seasons, dragging their teams payroll down and being a millstone around the franchise’s proverbial neck.
These are the contracts you have to avoid. And there are some glaring landmine potentials in this free agent class.
Jarrod Washburn, LHP, Angels
Washburn had the greatest positive difference of any pitcher in the American League between his actual ERA and his fielding independant ERA. His 3.20 ERA was great. His 4.39 FIP is totally mediocre. His expected FIP, which normalizes his home run rate based on the amount of flyballs he allowed, was 5.01. His strikeout rate stinks, he’s an extreme flyball pitcher, and he’s got middling command. Run away, run away…
Matt Morris, RHP, Cardinals
Since the all-star break, Matt Morris has been, well, awful. His numbers across the board have taken a nosedive. His strikeout rate has fallen and he’s getting lit up like a Christmas tree. He has a history of arm problems, and at this point, wouldn’t be a good bet even on a one year contract. Given his reputation and his overall totals, someone is certainly going to overpay.
Kenny Rogers, LHP, Rangers
There’s no way the M’s pursue him, but Kenny Rogers is in for a massive collapse next year. His peripherals across the board this season were poor with one exception; his home run rate. He allowed just 7 percent of his flyballs to leave the yard. That’s not sustainable. His exepected fielding independant ERA was 4.88. I’d be surprised if Kenny Rogers was still a major league pitcher at this time next year.
Bengie Molina, C, Angels
He’s got the rep as the best free agent catcher on the market. That shows just how bad this free agent catching crop is, I guess. Anyone want to pay for the age 31-33 seasons of an out-of-shape catcher who has a career .272/.308/.395 line? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Other potential landmines include Todd Jones, Trevor Hoffman, Mike Piazza, Jason LaRue, and Jason Johnson. Also, Jeff Suppan, if the Cardinals decline his option.
If you see the M’s pursuing any of these players, it’s bad news. These guys are the prime candidates for the bad offseason signings of 2005. Avoid like the plague.
Are you kidding me?
There are two baseball games tonight, Game 1 of the NLCS and Game 2 of the ALCS. They’re both on at the same time, on the same channel. FOX, MLB, you guys are the best. No, really. I’d much rather have you tell me what game to watch than be given the choice. You guys know best, anyway. Thanks!