Matsuzaka winning bid: Red Sox, $51.1m
I know, but please, close your mouth before the flies get in.
This is, by the way, approximately 1/4th the value of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays franchise.
Free agent review: Gil Meche
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I hope the sucker that decides to give Meche a huge long-term free agent deal because they think they can fix him is in our division, because I would love to watch him get regularly shelled by the team for the next 3-5 years.
Unless they do fix him. That would suck.
Here’s your Daisuke post
since every thread’s been the subject of hijacking attempts all day.
Buster “Productive Out” Olney has reported the Red Sox won the posting with a $45m bid. Other sources are reporting the Rangers bid something between $20 and $30m. Other random rumors are a-floating.
I didn’t write this up because it’s all rumor and random stupidity, and there’s really not a lot of productive discussion to be had or analysis to be done until we know anything for sure.
Igawa posts
From the Yomiuri Shimbum, lefty pitcher Kei Igawa is going to be posted.
Igawa’s not going to attract nearly the crazed interest of Daisuke, on account of he’s not nearly as good. Still, in this pitching-starved market, someone’s going to toss some cash at him.
Igawa allowed two runs (and walked six) pitching against the traveling MLB team on Tuesday.
Sheffield to the Tigers
The Yankees get three (3!) pitchers: uber-prospect Humberto Sanchez, then two 22-yr old righties in Kevin Whelan and Anthony Claggett.
This is a shocking haul for a year of Sheffield’s petulant services. If they were willing to trade Ibanez, what would the M’s get, a whole farm system?
A’s moving to Fremont, California
Two papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, reported yesterday (while I was at the polls) that the A’s will be moving to Fremont, California into a new 36,000-seat stadium they’ll build with private money for about $300m.
This gets them out of the Al Davis Reconfigurable Hole, for one thing, and it’s also a fairly amusing way to move without going to San Jose, which the Giants claim as their territory, which
a) is a dumb claim in the first place and
b) is an excellent example of how stupid and counter-productive MLB’s territorial rights system is
Fremont, if you don’t have a map handy, is southeast of Oakland, a little more than half way between Oakland and San Jose. It’s across from Redwood City/Palo Alto. ESPN’s article includes a comparison table between Oakland and Fremont that includes a racial breakdown (no, really)
What’s this mean for the Mariners?
It’s bad. This is, in the long term, possibly the worst news of the off-season. Now, Billy Beane’s record with straight free agent signings is kind of ugly. Okay, it is ugly. And there’s an argument to be made that part of the A’s success has come from the restraints on their budget (which is like the Robert Frost argument that you had to write poetry using meter).
The people in charge of the A’s are smart. They’re not moving to Fremont unless they think it’ll substantially improve their financial situation from small, profitable operation into large, more profitable operation. Some of that money is going to go to the baseball side. And the team that beats the M’s like a drum over and over is going to be far better financed.
I’ve tried to think about what the A’s would do if they didn’t have to make signability picks. Would they look at the draft and still see players of essentially the same value, and pour money into international signings? Would they drop the pretense that drafting cheap guys in the first round is a good idea and go nuts, armed with more money and better slotting? Spend even more money dumpster-diving every year?
None of these possibilities are good news.
And at the major league level, are they going to open their pocketbooks to try and field a more-expensive team as they move in? Would the A’s even spend on free agents unless the market cools a little, or are they going to sign their guys to long-term deals to buy out free agent years?
The Mariners would be playing in a division without a poor kid, where every competitor they face in unbalanced play is well-funded. Things are going to get tougher. Hopefully the M’s will get smarter and be able to compete.
The amazing haul of the the Nationals
This came across the MLB.com transaction wire today:
Signed RHP Tim Redding, RHP Joel Hanrahan, INF Josh Wilson and OF Michael Restovich to one-year contracts. Signed RHPs Jermaine Van Buren, T.J. Nall, Colby Lewis, Felix Diaz, Eduardo Valdez, Josh Hall, Winston Abreu, Jim Magrane; LHPs Mike Bacsik, Billy White and Chris Michalak; C Juan Brito and C Danny Ardoin; INF Joe Thurston and INF Alejandro Machado; and OF Darnell McDonald and OF Wayne Lydon to Minor League contracts.
As Dave put it
Yea, Jim Bowden signed almost every interesting minor league free agent on the market. It’s amazing that they all signed with one organization. I’m guessing their standard NRI contract is better than every other club’s standard offer.
While my opinion of Bowden as a GM is pretty low, this is a great batch of signings.
I’ll try and briefly hit the highlights. Read more
Free agent reviews: Alfonso Soriano
Rumor on the street is that Alfonso is looking for $17m/year. And in M’s fandom, some fans want the M’s to sign Soriano and Schmidt which is clearly insanity.
Soriano’s 30. He’s made five straight All Star teams. His conversion to left field started badly but I’d bet the good end-of-year defensive stats are going to show him at average or not much below average (he’s a weird case for the bad, traditional stats: his fielding percentage is bad, his zone rating good). BP’s got him at 9 runs above average, which… well, RAA isn’t a great fielding stat. I’d be shocked if that was borne out by UZR/etc.
Reasons to sign him:
– Add offense, hopefully
– Add a little bit of speed
Reasons not to sign him:
– What the hell happened to him this year?
– He’s right-handed and they’re not moving the fences
– They already have a big roster issue with too many LF/DH/1B guys
– Soriano doesn’t look like a guy you really, really want to be paying $17m when he’s 35
– The Phillies supposedly want him, and every horrible move Gillick makes us feel good about his departure
The first question is the really unsettling one. David Pinto at Baseball Musings touched on this last week, so I’ll quote him
If I’m a GM interested in signing Alfonso, I’ll want to know what changed. Why did he draw so many more walks than in 2006 than in previous seasons? Did the Washington coaches get him to change his approach? Was it that with a poor offense behind him, he got less to hit? If it was coaching, it this something that he’s absorbed, or does he constantly need to be reminded?
At .350, with his power, he’s a very productive player. At a .330 OBA, he’s more of an out machine and certainly not a good leadoff hitter. My guess is that the teams convinced 2006 is real are the teams that wind up bidding for Alfonso. The other will find the money offered too rich.
I entirely agree with Pinto on this. My thought is it’s likely a combination of factors: RFK suited him, for one, it was a contract year and (as we learn in “Baseball Between the Numbers”) the contract year effect is real. I don’t think this is a new level of performance for Soriano, though as a Mariners-obsessed writer I haven’t spent the kind of time researching this that a team thinking about plunking down $17m would.
Let someone else overpay. The M’s have more important needs and even if you want to upgrade the offense somehow, there should be better ways to spend that money.
Soriano’s deal, though, will still be better than whatever Carlos Lee gets.
Roster management and why it’s important
(another in our series of more basic explanatory articles, like Dave’s excellent evaluation post. I’ve been chewing on this one for a long time, and am likely to substantially revise it again, so if you’ve got comments, suggestions, questions, please let us know)
Roster management is how an organization puts together the team on the field. It’s how to build a whole that is as great as possible given the parts available. Bringing the subject up for debate and study is one of the great and unrecognized contributions of the stathead community, and also one of the reasons it’s frequently mocked.
Bad roster management can be overcome with great talent, and great roster management can’t save horrible teams, but between those extremes it makes a great deal of difference to a team’s success. There are two ways this happens:
-Managing the 25 man and 40 man rosters
-Picking the day’s lineup (including role management)
The general manager does the first, with a lot of input from different people in the organization, and the team’s manager does the second, with the general manager’s influence depending on the organization.
I’m going to focus on the rosters and how they’re put together (roster construction). Lineup construction will be a different article.
Let’s talk about knapsacks. Or the knapsack problem. Here’s the knapsack problem as short as I can get it: the knapsack is small, and you need to put items in it to go camping. Start packing.
For any major league team, the knapsack starts partly filled. Even the worst organizations have players they’re committed to. They’re good and under contract, young and promising, or at least decent and cheap.
But as every team heads into the off-season, they really only have some portion of the puzzle assembled.
Here’s an example. A team’s headed into next season and it considers a few positions inked in:
1 starting pitcher, young, erratic, amazingly talented, still under team control
1 starting pitcher, modest in talent, signed to a long-term deal that makes him essentially impossible to trade
4 good young relief pitchers, all right-handers
1 center fielder, productive, immensely popular with fans
1 LF/DH, left-handed, the public face of the team, popular, with a long-term deal that makes him essentially impossible to trade
2 middle infielders, good, young, under team control
… and so on
Ideally now, the manager wouldn’t be a consideration, but realistically, he is. If a manager only succeeds with a veteran bullpen, the team’s shopping list will include “1 veteran relieverâ€. If they can’t handle platooning, it would include “regular starter for each positionâ€. You’d love to have a manager who could use any tool handed to them but they’re amazingly rare and generally not available.
What happens then for each remaining roster spot is a tradeoff. This is where serious baseball analysts and people who don’t commit a ton of thought to these kind of issues really clash. For every roster spot, there’s a tradeoff between:
– Player talent
– Player cost
– Player’s potential contribution to the team, given the team’s current composition
One way to look at this is to make a list of the team’s existing weaknesses and attempt to fill them. Some are easy: if you need a catcher, for instance, the number of people with that skill set are small. If you need defense in a backup catcher, there are more options than if you want offense from your catcher, but in both cases the list of potential candidates is fairly short.
In the same way, some needs are more naturally met from particular positions. If your team is slow, and you need some subs to play against weak-armed catchers and work into close games as pinch-runners, generally speaking you’re shopping on the outfielder/middle-infielder aisles.
This is why catchers with odd skillsets seem at times like fetish objects of the stathead community. If a generally unremarkable catcher steals 35 bases in AAA, he’ll be known to everyone who spends time thinking about this stuff. On a roster, by filling the “catcher†need as well as the “speed†need, you’re freed up to try strange things at other positions.
So we can look at an outfield and say “the left fielder really needs a glove for the late innings, so the primary use of a backup outfielder will be defense…†and whittle it down to a couple of names.
At the same time, you can see that obviously that means that certain qualities in bench players would be sought after and potentially valued far outside their actual value to a team. This happens. General managers love flexible players who can play multiple positions, for instance, and switch-hitters are often valued far above what you’d reasonably expect. Experience and the seeming certainty of next year’s performance mean that a track record sometimes nets a player a contract his talents don’t warrant.
This is why sometimes, teams throw up their arms and say “screw itâ€. They run out a bullpen entirely composed of right-handed relievers, or burn an extra roster spot for a second backup corner infielder to get a switch-hitter.
Pitchers fit into this a little differently, since they’re all throwing a ball to a catcher. The job of a any pitcher in the rotation is the same as the others, and the relief staff, invented and artificial roles aside, all have the same job. Some pitchers aren’t required to throw farther, for instance, or use a different-sized ball.
Within that, though, the same principles apply. Given the constraints a team has to work with, you want to find players who will help the team as a whole, and who will have the chance to make the most of their skills.
For instance, if a team knows that their pitching staff isn’t particularly durable and is likely to leave a lot of games in the fifth or sixth inning, it becomes more important to have some relievers who can pitch long relief well, because a bullpen entirely of one-inning wonders who burn out after 20 pitches would collapse quickly.
And knowing you’ve got a fragile rotation, it makes sense to spend more to stash a couple of reasonable starters on your AAA team (and the 40-man roster) for the probable breakdown of one or more of those guys.
You also will want to play to your home park and team. In a spacious home park with a good outfield defense, you can take on fly ball starters. In a much smaller one, you’ll want to find groundball machines, and hopefully your infield defense is up to the task.
To sum all of that up, then, the problems at hand are
-limited roster slots
-limited resources
-requirements of the manager
Why do fans grind their teeth over this stuff?
Right player, wrong role, meet wrong player, right role
Given a glaring need for a bench player who can play shortstop defensively, the team manages to turn up a perfect backup catcher they stick on the roster – even though they already have one.
Sometimes, this can be hidden opportunity: a team that can accumulate a surplus of a valuable commodity can trade it for what they need. Most of the time, though, it’s pointless gluttony.
Give a monkey a FN-FAL
I touched on this a little earlier, but managers have certain tendencies that put additional requirements on the roster. This shows up two ways – a manager who doesn’t get a defensive sub will find, somewhere on his roster, a guy he decides is the best man for the job and use him as that. The player may be the best defensive sub, relatively, on the bench, but may not be an effective player used that way. It’s like if a manager, with a staff of ace right-handed relievers, decided that he needed a left-handed reliever so badly that he forced two of them to throw left-handed. When this happens with position players, it’s sometimes just as weird to watch.
Similarly, if a manager doesn’t want or doesn’t know how to use a certain tool, it doesn’t matter if you provide them with the greatest tool ever. Finding a fragile slugger who’d make a stellar pinch-hitter and occasional left fielder or first baseman doesn’t help the team if the manager doesn’t pinch hit or rest his regular players.
(The issue of picking the right player for a position is going to be in the second post)
I’ll give you a million – no, no, two million – for that Camaro
This is where the most words are written and energy is expended – teams spending too much on something they think they need, showing that they’ve got a narrow focus and aren’t adaptable.
No matter how you define it, the concept of the replacement level player is pretty easy to understand: what do you get if you’re willing to pay next to nothing? Depending on who you’re talking to, there are different ways to measure how good that player is, but defense is the easiest thing to find. You could, if you were willing to, sacrifice offense entirely and find a best-of-class center fielder who hit .000/.000/.000 for the season, but that would kill your team (possibly the worst full-time center field season ever was Darren Lewis’ 1999, and he hit .240/.303/.309).
My point, though, is that finding a utility infielder who can’t hit is extremely easy. It’s easier than finding a random DH in the minor league free agent list. Or a pinch-runner who can’t hit or field. There’s no need to pay a ton of money for a skill set that’s easily replaceable.
How great is the effect of all of this, this seemingly trivial selection of players and Tetris-style fitting of skills to gaps?
There’s no good way to tell. The complementary skill part is smaller than we sometimes make it out to be, while the player selection for the complementary roles is significant.
Sucks, I know.
Here’s the problem. For many of the advantages of good roster construction, we can’t put numbers to it. If you have a good backup catcher who can play regularly to keep the starter well-rested, we can’t know how badly the starter would have declined through the season otherwise.
Say that there’s a catcher who can hit but can’t throw, and I argue that he needs a defensive replacement, especially for late-and-close games against a speedy team. The team instead picks a random cheap guy who is never used as a defensive replacement.
What does that cost the team? Say there are sixteen games a year that cry out for the catcher the team doesn’t have, and the manager is fully willing to do it if only he had the tool to use. During those sixteen games, during the innings the hypothetical backup catcher would be replaced by his defensive whiz counterpart (say two innings a game, so 32 innings), even against aggressive opponents, there might be six steal attempts. Heck, call it ten.
Astounding Arm will throw out half those guys, Horrible Arm will throw out 20%. A runner advancing from first to second increases the run expectancy ~ +.2, while throwing that runner out is good for ~ -.4 (and yeah, this is straight run and not “chance to score one run… bear with me).
AA gains two runs by throwing out five, loses a run for allowing five. HA gains .8 by throwing out two, and loses 1.6 by allowing eight. That’s only a difference of .8 runs between the two. A run! What’s that worth, really?
Now I would argue that it’s quite likely in a situation like that those outs are going to be particularly important, because it means the team’s better in close and late situations holding on to a lead (or a tie). And it’s also likely that one of those outs might be the difference in a particular game between winning and losing, which is worth a lot of money.
It’s still not huge. And the same thing holds for decisions like putting a good defensive replacement on the roster to sub in for a lead-gloved second baseman, or for that matter an immobile left fielder. A 4th outfielder who can get some quality pinch-hitting appearances as well is still only going to make a few extra runs in that capacity all season.
Picking the actual players is a lot more important than the kind of fine potential matches we like to speculate about (a left-handed outfield requires a right-handed 4th outfielder). The difference between a really crappy backup catcher and a really great one might be twenty runs, though – that’s two wins on the board, and it far outweighs considerations like whether one of them can switch-hit or not.
Given the choice, of course, you want the team to press every advantage and put together a harmonious unit with well-balanced skills. When they go shopping,
In assembling a pitching staff, it’s potentially huge. Take the example of stashing a decent backup pitcher in AAA. If that guy gets only sixty innings in ten spot starts over the season, the difference between getting those innings from a horrible pitcher and a not embarrassingly bad one is easily ten runs over those starts, and that’s a game.
Which brings me back around to the original point. Why care about roster construction if the difference is only a game in any of these choices? It’s because no team makes just one choice. Depending on where their starting point is, every team makes a handful of decisions on how to build a complete 25-man roster, and then another handful in who they choose to put on the 40 man (and so be readily available to sub in).
Each of those decisions isn’t that important, and it’s rare that teams have a choice between great backup catcher and horrible one, or awesome long reliever or no long reliever, but each of the decisions they make helps or hurts the team, and totaled, can determine a team’s success or failure.
Take, for one example, the A’s. The A’s spend an enormous amount of energy on this kind of thing. What happens if we lose our second baseman? Our outfield defense sucks, what can we do about it, and who’s available who might help us? Is it worth it to find a backup corner infielder? Who’s interesting on the minor league free agent list, and what’ll it take to stash them in Sacramento? Every waiver wire transaction gets looked at by someone, and if they think there’s a player available that’s better able to help the team than the guy they already have, they’ll start that conversation.
Sometimes they suck at it, and sometimes they decide not to take chances, but this is part of why the A’s only take so much damage from injuries: they’re rarely stuck running out guys who are significantly below replacement level, because they make roster management a priority. Many teams will look at a decision like the backup catcher and go “enh, the kid plays good defense, he’s cheap, let’s go worry about our rotationâ€. The A’s may end up accepting that that kid is the best option for now, but not because they don’t care, or because they don’t think it’s worth their energy.
What if the decision to get a perfectly suited fourth outfielder only means a few runs a year? Do you want to leave those runs on the table? I know if I was in charge of a team, if anything I’d run the risk of overthinking all of this stuff (“Undersecretary for Minor League Catching, find me all switch-hitting catchers in AA or AAA last year. I need names, stats, projections, and summary scouting report…â€)
It’s the same thing that makes me love the Earl Weaver-style managers, who look for any possible advantage they can find in matchups, strategy, or in-game tactics, trying to squeeze out an extra run they shouldn’t be able to get and turn those advantages into games, pennants, and championships.
All of the roster construction mistakes and successes a team makes might not amount to the difference that a breakout season by a young prospect or the collapse of an aging regular does. That doesn’t make it unimportant, though, because unlike the success or failure of any one player’s season, how successful a team is in managing its roster is almost entirely a product of how smart they are, how prepared they are, and how hard they’re willing to work at it. The wins are there. All teams need to do is work for them.
World Series Game Four, try two
First, how’s the weather in St. Louis? From the National Weather Service, it’s 54 degrees, 90% humidity, and their forecast should make you wince:
Tonight: Areas of drizzle, then occasional rain after 1am. Low around 50. South wind 5 to 7 mph becoming east. Chance of precipitation is 90%.
Friday: Periods of rain. High near 52. Breezy, with a north wind 6 to 9 mph increasing to between 17 and 20 mph. Winds could gust as high as 28 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%.
Niiiiiiiiice. Anyway, if this games goes off, it’s Bonderman v Suppan, which brings me back to my frustration with the Tigers rotation.
How would you order these pitchers in a playoff rotation that goes 2-off-3-off-2?
A. RHP 4.08 ERA, 2.69 BB/9, 8.50 K/9, .76 HR/9
B. RHP 3.63 ERA, 2.9 BB/9, 6 K/9, 1.02 HR/9
C. LHP 3.84 ERA, 2.74 BB/9, 4.37 K/9, 1.01 HR/9
D. LHP 3.84 ERA, 2.89 BB/9, 5.91 K/9, 1.25 HR/9
An average pitcher walks 3 guys in 9, strikes out 6, gives up a home run, more or less.
But wait- say the other team’s vulnerable to lefties, and scores a third of a run/game less against them. That might bump a couple guys around, but assuming that this year’s lines are a good measure of the talent level right now, I’d arrange this ADBC, with the thought that with this scheduling, you’re looking at AD(off)BCA(off)DB, with the added benefit that in Game 7, you could conceivably start A on three days rest, and certainly pitch him out of the bullpen, along with C.
That ADBC rotation is Bonderman-Robertson-Verlander-Rogers. Now, I don’t care how you weight the relative intangibles of these guys, Bonderman is clearly the pick of the litter, and if you start him #1 you may well wring three starts out of him if it comes to that. The other guys don’t really matter so much
What if there’s a rainout, say, for game four, and you lose the second travel day and you’re down in the series? If you were super-aggressive, you could go AD(off)B(off)ADBC and immediately get another start out of the best pitcher in the rotation to give you your best shot at evening the series.
This has been driving me nuts all Series. Bonderman is, by far, the best pitcher in the rotation, and he’s #4, so you get one start out of him and then maybe you can bring him out again in game seven.
Anyway. Hoping for a good game.