Snelling available, again
The Phillies are trying to sneak him through waivers. This nice article has details.. Long live the Cult of Doyle. ht to msb for the link.
Red Sox beat A’s a week early
I’m all for expanding the game’s reach internationally, but having the Red Sox and A’s play a live game a week ahead of the season’s actual start is ridiculous. The Red Sox won.
Another set of simulations using projections
From the Replacement Level Yankees Weblog: using DMB and the CHONE projections, 1,000 seasons of Mariner baseball came out with the M’s finishing 83-79 and making the playoffs 20% of the time.
Many caveats and disclaimers apply, as with all these kind of things — check out the article for more.
Thrill to the sight of Bob Melvin!
Yup, if you’ve got MLB TV, you can see the late game against the Diamondbacks at 4. Pretty exciting.
Other than that, not a whole lot going on, is there?
It’s speculation over news, but Jim Callis at BA wrote about the signs the draft slotting system may fall apart. This would be huge if it happened — especially since the M’s would likely be one of the last teams to abandon it in a year that appears to be talent-heavy. Their continued loyalty to the Selig line could be particularly costly.
There was a ridiculously cool interview Jonah Keri did with the A’s assistant GM on ESPN that I wanted to link to but they’ve apparently made it disappear, presumably to be flown secretly to a minor third party site to be tortured or something.
More cool stuff on the leaderboards
Erik Bedard threw the highest percentage of curveballs of any pitcher with over 100 IP, a whopping 34.2% of his pitches.
9% of Curt Schilling’s pitches are “unidentified”.
Jeff Weaver threw over to first a lot. But then, he did have a lot of runners over there.
Startling new trend in player-team relations
Players unhappy with team-assigned contracts providing less than players felt was deserved!
Another reason GMs are reluctant to sign Bonds
I neglected this in my writeup the other day, but there’s a huge reason that teams are reluctant to sign Bonds, no matter if he’s a bargain and if he’s a perfect fit: they’re human, and the sports press will absolutely tear into them for it.
A lot of the weird, small moves we see at the edges of transaction wires are due to things we don’t know about: some guy is such a colossal jerk that the team waives him even though he’s a left-handed hitting backup catcher who can steal 15 bases a year. A minor league organizational soldier is called up for a week and given spot at-bats until he gets a major league hit. Two teams that could make a mutually beneficial trade won’t even talk to each other because one side’s still too angry about being dealt a pitcher with a bum shoulder years ago.
No GM wants to have to deal with hordes of national press calling him, clogging the clubhouse interviewing all the players trying to get dirt on Bonds. It’s probably not a big factor — a GM, after all, is supposed to take the heat if it’ll improve the team — but I can see where it would make a big difference in whether they lobbied their owner hard over it.
And for that matter, it’s probably even a bigger deal for owners, who look at the franchise’s marketability and long-term reputation.
As a cautionary tale, I present Tampa Bay. By all indications, some Tampa Bay people, including the manager, talked about Bonds. There’s no evidence they said “I wonder what it would take” or even contemplated what they’d do to fit him into the lineup. And we know that Bonds’ agent’s been actively lobbying teams to bring his client in, so the conversation probably went
“You think we should sign Bonds?”
“What’s the point? We’re the Devil Rays.”
“Just the Rays now.”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting.”
“No Bonds, then?”
“No, we’re rebuilding and we’re already going to end up doing a lot of roster juggling, let’s pass.”
“Cool.”
For this, Tampa Bay became the story of the week. I present this SI.com article as an example of its kind.
“Bonds’ bat not worth taking on his baggage”
There’s a lot in the article about how Bonds is a jerk, a bad clubhouse presence, and then Omar’s quoted —
“Nothing against Barry, but having all the things that come along with having him here sometimes made it hard to concentrate on baseball,” says shortstop Omar Vizquel. “We’ll definitely miss a lot of the things that he brought to the table, but there’s a feeling now that we’re a normal baseball team again.”
That’s… well, I would have said nothing.
Do you hear that, Rays? A normal baseball team. There is absolutely no shot at normalcy for any team that signs Bonds.
What does normalcy get you, exactly? A congeniality pennant?
Which takes us to this gem:
For all the pop and on-base percentage he brings to your lineup, for all the fannies he puts in your seats, he brings more negatives.
I know we can argue about chemistry forever, but… really? If you’ve got a crappy DH and you put Bonds in and he’s only healthy enough to get to 300 at-bats and hits a little worse than last year, your team will win three, maybe four more games than they would have.
I don’t understand how you can possibly reason that press attention and having a surly guy in the clubhouse possibly outweighs that kind of contribution. Even if you want to say “it’s not worth it” or “you have a moral obligation not to sign him” I can’t see a reasonable weighing of the evidence that would lead you to the conclusion that adding Bonds to a team that needed him would make it worse.
To find players like that, you have to go back to the totally corrupt days of baseball and look to Hal Chase and Buck Weaver — people who were so dirty they threw ballgames for money.
But not to dwell on this particular article too much — I wanted to look at the larger point. You can find dozens of articles like this. It was an easy column for writers to churn out this week, and they took it.
My point is that Bonds has never had a good relationship with the press. Even when he’s tried to do better in interviews, make himself more available, the detente collapsed pretty quickly. His place as the lightning rod for steroid discussions is due in no small part to the obsession with making him out to be the worst villain.
Every team knows that Bonds’ signing will create exactly this kind of national story, multiplied — the Rays barely talked about Barry, after all — and that no matter how tame the local press is, Bonds and his successes, failures, and his effect on his teammates will be the story that’s told and retold, all season long.
If you’re a GM, or an owner, the possible payoff for signing Bonds and being right has to be immense for you to risk that kind of continual negative attention, knowing the only way you could hope to be redeemed in the public’s eyes would be to get to the playoffs – never a sure thing – and have Bonds perform extremely well in post-season play. And only a World Series victory would assure forgiveness from some fans.
The number of teams with strong ownership groups unafraid of that kind of sustained attack is smaller than the number of teams that could use Bonds. And moreover, you can understand why teams on the edge would be extremely reluctant to make it known that they were even mulling it, given the treatment Tampa Bay’s received for doing nothing.
Examining the Alex Rodriguez screwed Seattle legend
Part two of a long series of chunks o’knowledge to be cited in the constantly arising arguments. Suggestions, thoughts welcome.
I’ll start off by saying that the title’s chosen intentionally. In the first one of these I wrote, “Refuting the Randy Johnson quit on us canard” it’s entirely clear that Johnson played as well as he could under the circumstances, and the evidence against the myth is overwhelming.
This one’s a little more complicated. Things that have happened since he left have determined the perception of Alex-the-person, Alex-the-teammate, Alex-the-Yankee… we’ll get to that.
I’ll examine first the central assertion, and then move on to the secondary issues.
Alex Rodriguez chose to sign with the Texas Rangers because they offered him the most money.
Which comes with some secondary assertions:
– He was greedy
– He lied about wanting to stay with the Mariners
– He lied about wanting to sign with a team that was competitive
Was Alex greedy to take the offer with the most money? Greed’s used because it has such a negative connotation, but really, there are two questions: was greed his only motivator, and is it bad for him to be greedy?
There is are two important decisions that show Alex made his decisions on other factors than money.
When he signed with the Mariners after being drafted in 1993, he did so against the advice of his agent (uh, “advisor”) who wanted him to hold out and re-enter the draft later. Alex wanted to play, even for the Mariners, who hadn’t finished higher than fourth in their division in franchise history, who since 1977 had finished over .500 once. Sure, they had Lou Piniella, and Griffey, but he could have held out until he was drafted by a team that would give him more money, was told by his agent to do so, and he didn’t. No matter your feelings on the draft, he made a choice that clearly demonstrated he wanted to sign and play far more than he wanted a chance at a greater signing bonus, or a chance to play on a team in a better competitive position.
Then, his extension. Same deal: Alex signed a deal with the Mariners while being advised that the path to more money and faster was to turn it down, go to arbitration every year, and seek free agency as soon as possible. He didn’t do it then, either.
It’s clear that while his desire for money was less important to him in those decisions than other factors. The worst thing we can say about Rodriguez heading into the free agent year would be “He wasn’t greedy before he had a chance at free agent riches.”
He did turn down a 1998 extension offer of 7y, $63m to start in 2001. At the time, that salary would have made him one of the highest-paid players in the time, but it didn’t take much to see that when those years came around, that wouldn’t be much (and it wasn’t — in 2001, his extension wouldn’t have put him in the top 25 salaries). And then later, he turned down eight years, $117.5m starting in 2000 (this is all coming from Thiel’s book), which must have been at least somewhat tempting.
It’s reasonable to assume then that his decision on which free agent offer to take at least took into consideration other factors, like competitiveness. Alex twice demonstrated he was willing to make deals that traded potential salary for other factors, and he’d also shown that there was a limit to how highly he’d value those things.
Which brings us to those other factors, and particularly competitiveness. He’s often mocked for his comments about Texas being a competitive franchise as a factor in his decision. But whether or not he was being sincere, which is unknowable to us, there’s nothing in the fortunes of the franchises that contradicted that. Certainly, Texas didn’t accomplish much after he joined, but in the years leading up to his free agency in the 2000-1 off-season, the contrast wasn’t at all clear.
Both had relatively new, money-generating stadiums. The Mariners had moved into spacious Safeco Field, which generally punishes right-hand hitters, while the Rangers played in hitter-friendly Ballpark at Arlington. In 2000, Alex hit .306/.414/.573 in Safeco and .366/.447/.774 on the road. Looking ahead to his career marks, that must have been on his mind.
Both had been competitive, but the Rangers were the better of the two.
2000: M’s 91-71, second in the division, went to the playoffs. Rangers 71-91, fourth in the division
1999: M’s 79-83, third in the division. Rangers 95-67, first in the division.
1998: M’s 76-85, third in the division. Rangers 88-74, first in the division.
1997: M’s 90-72, first in the division. Rangers 77-85, third in the division.
1996: M’s 85-76, second in the division. Rangers 90-72, first in the division.
In the last five years, the M’s won one division pennant and went to the playoffs twice, while the Rangers won the division three times.
In terms of ownership groups, the M’s had the Baseball Club of Seattle, the majority share held by a Japanese owner who never attended games. How much they were willing to spend fielding a team was open to question: they had, after all, lost Griffey and treated Johnson badly in his departure. The Rangers, meanwhile, had a ton of money and were itching to spend it.
We know the M’s opened the pocketbooks that next year – their payroll went way up for that 2001 team – but at the time, it wasn’t clear that would happen.
There’s no reason to believe that Alex knew that the Rangers would spend their money horribly in the coming years, while the Mariners would not. Looking back, it’s clear that the M’s were the better choice from that point on, but to use that hindsight as evidence that Alex, armed with knowledge he had at the time, made an indefensible choice, is entirely unfair.
At the time, if Alex did value a franchise’s competitiveness, we can see why Texas at the least would have been on the same level as the Mariners.
Given that, the greed assertions are a little less damaging. If the Mariners offered him a rich three-year deal and the Rangers a much richer one, with escalator clauses, opt-outs, all kinds of fringe benefits and opportunities to make more money, and the other factors are equal, then Alex would have been weighting loyalty to the team against $170 million. The M’s offered three years, $54m, with a two year option bringing it to five years, $92m.
At that point, how greedy is it to take that deal? It’s difficult to come up with a valuation for loyalty that makes the two contracts comparable. Say Alex took the view that he liked playing in Seattle, it was great, and he’d take… 10% less. Or $5m a year. Any value you can reasonably assign to that is lost in the Texas deal.
And if that value difference was so huge as to be overwhelming, then it takes the life out of the other charges. Alex indeed talked a lot about his desire to play for his one team his whole career, and off-the-record charmed local reporters with his desire to be like Cal Ripken and other franchise players, and they were angry they fell for it when he signed elsewhere.
I’m reminded of the Office as I write this.
Would I ever leave this company. Look, I’m all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I’m getting paid for here is my loyalty. But… if there were somewhere else that valued that loyalty more highly, I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most.
— Dwight Schrute
Should Alex, knowing he would be testing free agency, have shut his yap about wanting to stay with the same team, and said nothing at all? He’d have been pilloried for his silence on the subject, and I don’t think it would have done anything to change the later perception. He said what he said. Perhaps he didn’t forsee that any team would make that kind of offer, and thought the M’s would be within shouting distance.
It did not help, though, to have the people in the Seattle media feel like he’d played them for fools, and that went a long way towards defining the narrative of his departure.
Many people say that he never had any intention of staying with the M’s. We don’t know that – we can’t know that. We can’t know what Alex was thinking that last year, or what he discussed with Boras. We can’t know what Boras told him about the potential contract offers ahead, and even then, they’d both know they were educated guesses about bidders, hopes and projections. What reason do we have to think that Alex was lying about his desire to stay, while omitting that there was of course the chance that the difference in salary and situation would be so great that he’d leave despite that desire?
This is the crux of the Alex-is-greedy argument, to me: Alex is disliked for having left the Mariners through free agency for an amazingly huge contract. He’s not credited for having signed and played for below-market value for so long, making the team ridiculous amounts of money. It’s assumed that the team, in drafting him, took the player with the most talent, who would be the most underpaid for their contributions and make the team the most money. But when the player is given the same opportunity, it’s greedy to make the choice for the most money.
The only way Alex could have escaped the greedy tag was to take their offer, and sign for much less, without the clauses, and so on. He’d have to have given up 50% of Texas’ offer right off the top.
If Alex placed a value on staying with the team and being a one-team franchise player like Cal Ripken, that value was somewhere between 0 and the difference in the two offers. He doesn’t have to place much of a value on the money before that value overrides the gap.
Which brings us to a larger issue: that the M’s offer, while dwarfed by Texas’, should have been enough. That Alex should have said “Seattle is so great, I want to be a franchise player, and the money they’re offering, while comparatively smaller, is still a huge amount, so I’ll take it.”
Yet we can here repeat the same reasoning, with more factors (how highly would Alex have to have valued playing and living in Seattle over Texas plus loyalty/franchise player mystique to make up for the gap?) but I doubt that would disprove the argument. This is really an argument about player salaries being out of line with their value, and ties into an important part of why Alex is resented: the contract he signed was so huge, so precedent-setting, that everyone who thinks it’s ridiculous that profession-of-more-societal-or-personal-value only makes x while Rodriguez signed a contract for a quarter of a billion dollars directed all their hate and resentment at him.
That argument’s outside the scope of this. We live in a world that, for better or worse, pays people with certain skill sets, particularly those in entertainment fields like top actors, athletes, and so on amazing amounts of money compared to the average salary. Whether that’s just is up for debate, but it’s a big part of the view of negative view of players. In signing that deal, Alex became the greediest of greedy.
And yet, if blogging about the Mariners suddenly became one of the most lucrative professions in the country and I had a chance to move from USSM to, say, an ESPN blog and make $quadrillion, my head would swim with all the awesome stuff I could do (buy a Lamborghini!), causes I could fund, and places I could travel. If I weighed those things and came to some private valuation that pushed me to the ESPN job, does that necessarily make me greedy for taking it?
This is complicated, of course, by Alex the person. Alex doesn’t get a lot of attention for his charity work, and certainly not as much as he’s gotten in New York for things like his penchant for redistributing wealth to working women through transactions at strip clubs (and so on). He did not come out looking good in his exit from Texas. The free agent saga this off-season was a massive PR disaster. The perception of Alex now does not put his thought processes back in 2000 in a kinder light.
Yet Mariner fans booed him at the time. I’ve never understood it. Alex was a consummate player, one of the greatest the franchise has ever seen, and played for years for almost no money, and then signed an extension to play for years for less money than he might have received.
How can anyone see Alex’s contract as an example of greed and not see his previous actions as an example of generosity?
Back to the original statement of myth.
Alex Rodriguez chose to sign with the Texas Rangers because they offered him the most money.
We don’t – and can’t – know that. We know that money was not the only factor in previous decisions, and it’s reasonable to assume that it wasn’t the sole factor then.
Which comes with some secondary assertions:
– He was greedy
– He lied about wanting to stay with the Mariners
– He lied about wanting to sign with a team that was competitive
The greed thing, we don’t and can’t know how much money it might have took to override the other factors, only that it did.
We don’t know if he was lying about wanting to stay with the Mariners, but it’s reasonable to assume that he was sincere, and that if he knew he’d leave for a sufficient difference in money, or even if he could see the future and knew that there would be offers that would overwhelm that concern, he understandably left that part out.
We don’t know if he was lying about wanting to sign with a team that was competitive, but all the evidence is that if he was telling the truth, it would might even have encouraged him to sign with Texas.
All of this leaves us in an ambiguous place. Did he lie? Was he deceptive? Is he greedy, and how much so?
There are a couple of interpretations we can take:
– Alex is a jerk, lied, and manipulated local reporters and fans to try and drive up support for the M’s to retain him, and then took the better offer
– Alex shares to some degree his critics’ values of loyalty, stability, and so on, but the value of the contract and possibilities offered by Texas outweighed them
– Alex made a choice we can’t know the reasoning behind, and made some statements we can reasonably believe were true
It’s hard to see where Alex did or might have betrayed the team. He played hard while under team control, and left when he had the chance. He didn’t hold out, or force a trade by making a stink about how underpaid and underappreciated he was, dogging it on the field, or anything like it. That the hatred for Alex has hampered the recognition of how great he was as a Mariner is disappointing, because he’s one of the true Hall of Fame talents the Mariners have seen, and was an amazing player to watch while he was here, even if he left to have a somewhat troubled and controversial career after he left.
Boone! There goes the Boone!
Ready or not
he strikes out a lot
Boone, who turns 39 in April, hasn’t played in the majors since 2005, when he spent time with Seattle and Minnesota. He went to spring training with the New York Mets the next year but called it quits before playing an exhibition game.
“There’s something still in there,” Boone said Monday. “I look at it as I’ve got nothing to lose.”
Ahhhh, I remember when Boone had those good years. Man, that was fun.
Hickey at the PI has standard reactions.
Re-running the seasons with Oakland hobbled
After running the sims with a healthy A’s team showed them as division favorites, to much hooting, I took a suggestion and ran it again after crippling Harden and Gaudin, taking them out for the year, and re-ran the whole thing. Not because Harden and Gaudin will miss the whole season (well, Harden might if he’s traded) as much as to try and severely degrade the rotation all year.
The gap between the A’s and the Angels goes way up (average wins between them was 87 to 83, the A’s chance to win the division plunges to 17% win and 6% tied for the title).
Particularly interesting to us here in Mariner Land, though — the M’s win an extra game a year to put in an average season of 78-84. Yayyy.