The M’s in Pinto’s defensive model
“I’d like to patronize your store, and by that I mean I’d like to buy something.”
“I know what it means! Don’t patronize me.”
— Sam & Max: Culture Shock
We’ve talked a lot about defense here at USSM lately, particularly with regards to Sexson the Albatross, and it always generates a lot of discussion about how we can, or can’t, measure defense. It’s true that defensive tools aren’t nearly as fine as offensive tools are perceived to be, but as we’ve learned in the last few years, those aren’t quite as good as we thought. And, in general, I agree with what Dave’s been trying to say: that while none of the defensive systems people are working on is as good as we’d like, you can look at the good ones and immediately get a reasonable idea of a player’s contributions, and by looking at several, you can get more confident. And when there are contradictions, it’s worth thinking about how those can arise, and what they reveal about the systems and the players.
But if you look at some player and various defensive systems rate him at +5 runs, +10 runs, +12 runs, and +8 runs, you can be reasonably assured he’s good with the glove.
All of which is a long introduction to this: David Pinto’s been working on “Probabilistic Model of Range” and he’s published some cool stuff at Baseball Musings.
Here’s his team breakdown by air/ground stats.
The M’s are the fourth-best on ground balls. Woo-hoo! Go Betancourt/Beltre!
They’re in the middle of the pack in fly balls. Boo Ibanez! Yay Ichiro and Snelling!
(Okay, so I’m clearly introducing unsupported allegations there)
Overall, the team came out sixth overall in total rankings.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in this yet – from early comments it appears that the numbers Dewan’s going to put in the Hardball Times annual will be a lot different, and moreover, the whole baseball community is only really starting to figure out how to use the better data, particularly play-by-play data with hit location and speed. Pinto’s model is based on 2002-2006. The systems will get better.
Defense rocks.
M’s sign nine
Read all about it (scroll down, it’s at the bottom, notes-style).
The Mariners signed nine players to minor-league contracts Tuesday, including SS Rey Ordonez, who hasn’t played in the majors since 2004. Also signed to Class AAA contracts were pitchers Renee Cortez and Jesse Foppert, outfielder Tony Torcato and infielder Brant Ust. Signed to AA or A deals were pitchers Cibney Bello, Josh Kite, Michael Wagner and Jared Eichelberger.
Yes, that’s the Rey Ordonez. Gold Glove Winner Rey Ordonez. My buddy Seth over at Seattlest has a funny take on this one. This is the kind of signing people might get too worked up about, but it’s really not a big deal. He’s AAA insurance at best. He’s not taking Betancourt’s job.
Today’s news, tightly edited
$42m Red Sox bid wins Matsuzaka posting (link)
Verlander wins AL RoY, Johjima places fourth
NL RoY announced
Teams flatter Meche
Karim Garcia courted by M’s, others
Webb wins NL Cy Young
M’s sign scrubs
Read more
Random Monday Musings
The GM winter meetings start. Rumors a-flurry! We’ll see if the M’s look to make any moves, or if they sign Jason Schmidt this week (which, if I may, seems likely).
We find out Tuesday whether the Seibu Lions accepted the highest bid, whatever it may be, for Daisuke Matsuzaka. The Hardball Times has a piece today worth reading (“When Will Daisuke Matsuzaka’s Arm Fall Off?“) as food for thought. The summary contains this gem.
I am surprised that so many baseball fans are worried about how Matsuzaka threw over 200 pitches in a high school playoff game. That kind of stress on an arm probably isn’t a good thing, but it isn’t a death sentence either. Strenuous 150-plus pitch outings for high school and college pitchers happen, even in the United States.
I’m surprised that people are frightened of playing Russian Roulette. Many people play and are not killed…
We find out Thursday (or earlier) whether the Yakult Swallows accepted the highest bid for 3B Akinori Iwamura, who we haven’t discussed here at all since the M’s aren’t in the market for a 3B.
The interesting news is that the Yankees, rather than pay $4m to opt out of Jaret Wright’s contract, agreed to pay $3m of it so they could ship him to the Orioles, re-uniting him with Leo Mazzone, who is guy who managed to last wring a nice season out of Wright.
Also interesting is the M’s are converting some suites into one large super-suite (thanks to eponymous coward for the pointer). Sounds kind of like the Diamond Club, only higher. This is a really weird thing to do. You’ve seen the team push the bizarre press box seats before, but this means that the team’s been unable to get any companies to bite, aaand didn’t have much success selling them for individual games, either. Look forward to having Dave Valle pimp these seats endlessly during broadcasts.
Richie Sexson: Albatross
I’ve talked about this in other posts the last few months, but never laid out a complete case for it to the point where I feel people actually understand where I’m coming from. Talking with other Mariner fans, I certainly don’t get the sense that very many people agree with me on this issue, so, let me lay it out as plainly as I can and see how many of you I can convert:
Richie Sexson isn’t worth anything close to the $28 million he’s owed the next two years. His contract is an anchor that the Mariners should be actively trying to unload on someone else, and the sooner he’s removed from the roster, the better this team will be. Trading Richie Sexson for a bag of baseballs would be addition by subtraction. If you can con someone into giving you something of value for him, all the better, but just removing his contract from the roster should be a priority.
Let’s take a look at his production and what we should expect the next two years. We’ll begin with the sole strength of his game; hitting.
Sexson’s last three healthy seasons, he’s posted EqA’s of .308, .307, and .280. He turns 32 next month, so he’s likely at the end of his prime and entering the decline phase of his career. That said, his raw power is still among the best in the game, even if its only 90% of what it used to be, so we shouldn’t expect Sexson’s value to collapse over night. A reasonable projection for the next two seasons would be a .295 EqA, or something in that range. He should be better than he was in 2006, but a little worse than he was in 2005.
That kind of offensive performance is worth about 90 to 100 runs, depending on what kind of run conversion formula you want to use. We’ll go with 100 because it makes the math easier, and I always like giving the benefit of the doubt to the side I’m not on. Replacement level for a first baseman is the highest of any position in baseball, and you should be able to find a player who can create about 70 runs with his bat without too much of a problem. That makes Sexson worth something like 30 runs offensively each of the next two years. As we talked about yesterday with Beltre and Ramirez, 30 runs is a pretty valuable player.
But we’re not done with Sexson just yet. He’s about +30 offensively, but he also takes the field and runs the bases. And he does both very poorly. His UZR for 2006 was -7, and most other systems have him in the -5 to -10 range. He’s among the worst defensive first baseman in the game. And he’s also a lousy baserunner. Mitchel Lichtman’s calculations had him as costing a team two runs over the course of a season running the bases, so his defense/baserunning are probably in the -10 range, give or take a couple of runs.
That makes the total package worth about 20 runs. For the next two seasons, the Mariners are going to pay Richie Sexson something like $7 million per win. $7 million per win! That’s one of the worst values in baseball. Based on his actual run production, Sexson should be making something like $6 or $7 million next year. His salary is double what it should be.
One of the common responses to this is “who cares what he’s paid – he produces, and it’s not my money” or something to that effect. But, of course, this argument is foolish, because the Mariners operate on a budget, and every decision comes with an opportunity cost. The $14 million that Richie Sexson will earn next year is about 15% of the entire team’s payroll, and his occupation of first base fills a position where it is easy to find major league quality hitters. The opportunity cost of having Richie Sexson far outweighs his actual onfield value. It’s not even close.
The Mariners need to capitalize on this market and trade Richie Sexson. A first baseman who is worth 20 runs over the course of a season isn’t worth anything close to $14 million, and that money could be easily allocated to any number of other, better players. Take whatever you can get for him. Just trade Richie Sexson.
Free Agent Review: Aramis Ramirez
If you haven’t heard by now, the first free agent signing of the winter was actually a re-signing. Aramis Ramirez stayed with the Chicago Cubs, collecting a cool $73 million over the next 5 years, or about $14.5 million per season.
So why am I posting this on the blog, since it doesn’t have much to do with the Mariners?
Because Aramis Ramirez is not even a better player than Adrian Beltre, and the reactions to this signing are going to point out how even the statistical analysts of the day incorrectly evaluate players. And they make the same mistake nearly every time. Ignoring – or undervaluing, really – defense.
Now I know some of you are rolling your eyes as you read this, thinking I’m an idiot for believing that the guy who posted a .291/.352/.561 line last season and has hit 105 home runs the last three seasons could actually be a worse player than Beltre, whose offensive production hasn’t been anything close to that since the 2004 season ended. So, let me do the math for you guys, just so you know I’m not completely crazy.
Aramis Ramirez, the last three years, has posted EqA’s of .306, .301, and .293. It’s fair to say that a .300 EqA level is his established record of performance, and that’s what he’s being paid for. He’s entering his age 29 season, so the decline in offensive production shouldn’t be severe for a few years, at least. What’s a .300 EqA worth over a full season? About 100 runs, give or take a few. That’s about 40 runs more than a replacement level third baseman would contribute offensively.
However, Aramis Ramirez is a butcher with the glove. He’s a bad defensive player. By bad, I mean terrible. Every defensive metric we can find agrees with this. UZR, the best of the defensive metrics, has had him at -15 runs per 150 games played in the past. It’s unlikely that he’s consistently that bad, but if you average together the consensus of all the metrics, the scouting reports, and what Cubs fans believe about his work with the leather, marking Ramirez down as about 10 runs below average is pretty fair.
So, offense and defense, Aramis Ramirez is worth something like 30 runs a season over a replacement level player. That’s a good player, certainly, and one contributing to a team.
But let’s look at the oft-maligned Beltre, shall we?
He posted a .268/.328/.465 line this season, giving up 130 points of OPS to Ramirez. But he did it in Safeco Field in the American League (even though the difference is overstated, the AL was clearly more talented than the NL this year), so after making context adjustments, Beltre’s offensive performance was worth something like 80 runs over a full season. That’s 20 runs less than Ramirez, but 20 runs more than replacement.
Defensively, Adrian Beltre’s one of the best third baseman in the game. He’s not the best – that’s probably Brandon Inge right now, or maybe a healthy Scott Rolen – but he’s in the discussion of guys in that next tier. Scouts love his defense, fans love his defense, and the stats love his defense. He’s basically the anti-Ramirez with the leather, and his defensive value is something about 10 runs above average over the course of a full season.
Guess what? 40-10 and 20+10 are equal. They were both something like +30 runs for 2006.
However, you’ll never see anyone write that Adrian Beltre and Aramis Ramirez just had similarly valuable seasons, and if Beltre was the one with an opt-out clause, there’s no way people would be talking about him as a premier talent lining up for a monster deal.
For whatever reason, mainstream analysts simply fail to grasp the importance of defense, especially at the extremes. Beltre’s one of the best gloveman at third base around and Ramirez is probably the worst. That fact wipes away the whole of the difference between their 2006 offensive performances.
When you factor in that Adrian Beltre is a year younger, has a pristine health record compared to Ramirez, and that it’s not at all clear that a .267 EqA isn’t a low-end projection for Beltre’s offensive performance the next few years, and you have the reasons that I believe Adrian Beltre is a slightly better bet for the next few years than Aramis Ramirez.
Even if you hate Beltre and love Ramirez, the best you can do is call it a pick-em. It’s close enough that trying to decipher the margins here is basically a waste of time. The question of which one is better isn’t important – the key is that they’re basically equal.
And you’ll never, ever see a mainstream sports writer come to that conclusion. Instead, the Beltre contract will continue to be lampooned, while Ramirez is talked about as an all-star who the Cubs can build around.
J.D. Drew opts out of his contract
J.D. Drew walked away from the Dodgers today, opting out of the remaining 3 years and $33 million he had left on his contract. He’s bound to get more money in the craziest free agent market since Denny Neagle and Mike Hampton cleaned house, but he also was unhappy in Los Angeles and wants to relocate.
So, the question for Mariner fans is should we be interested?
My answer is a conditional yes. If the Mariners are willing to think outside the box, there’s an easy way to make this work.
Trade Richie Sexson for whatever you can get. Give him away if you have to. He’s clearly inferior to Drew and a worse fit for this team, yet the team still owes him $14 million each of the next two seasons. Find a team (like San Francisco) who like Sexson and take whatever they’ll give you for him.
J.D. Drew steps in as the new left fielder (or right fielder, whichever he prefers) and Raul Ibanez moves to DH. Voila. Team better with no extra cash output.
Trade Richie Sexson for J.D. Drew – sort of.
Budgeting Wins
I was reading an article by Nate Silver a few weeks ago when I ran across a paragraph that articulated many of the thoughts I’ve been having on how teams should approach their offseason plan. Essentially, Nate put my thoughts into words, and then expressed them in a way that made sense of the jumble I had going on upstairs. Here’s what he wrote under the context of suggesting moves for Walt Jocketty in keeping the Cardinals as contenders in 2007:
Set a wins budget, not a payroll budget. It’s my belief that most major league baseball teams go about their budgeting the wrong way. Sometimes it’s worth spending more than you might have been planning on if you can acquire a player who will get you over the hump and into the playoffs, since the financial rewards for making the postseason are substantial. Other times, your team is so far from making the playoffs-–or such a cinch to make them-–that paying market price for free agent talent just doesn’t make sense.
Put differently, rather than figuring how much money they want to spend, baseball teams should determine roughly how many wins they’ll need to make the playoffs, and spend on payroll until that they have the talent on hand to realistically reach that goal. For the Cardinals, the magic number is probably 90 wins; it would be higher if they played in a tougher division.
This is a wildly different concept than most teams operate under. Because almost every major league team is run as a corporate operation, the baseball operations department is given a budget for player payroll that fits into a fiscal year line-item for the corporation as a whole. Essentially, the accountants tell the front office how much money they can spend and tell them to do as well with that as they can.
While acknowledging that there are some issues with what I’m suggesting, I believe this design for setting payroll is inefficient and could be vastly improved. Instead of trying to cram as many wins as possible into a preset number of dollars spent, teams should figure out how many dollars they need to spend to reach their preset number of wins targeted.
Basically, Nate and I (independently, as we haven’t talked about this) support a 180-degree change in the way the baseball operations departments interact with the organization’s accountants. Rather than handing the baseball ops people a similarly sized check every year, baseball teams would be better off going to requisition-style budgeting concept.
How would this work?
We’ve talked a lot about marginal win values on the blog. Essentially, the concept of marginal wins is that a team of league minimum players would win 50 games or so, and every dollar spent over the league minimum is being used in hopes of gaining wins 51 and up. These wins are the marginal wins, and the excess payroll is the marginal dollars spent. This kind of analysis allows us to look at the league as a hole and say that a marginal win is worth about $2 million in salary.
However, league wide averages of marginal win values start to lose some of their importance when applied specifically to one team. Every team has a different roster of committed salaries and budgets for the following season, and so each team will have a different marginal dollar amount to spend on building their roster. The Yankees can blow the $2 million per win number out of the water and not blink an eye, while if the Marlins tried to spend $2 million per win, the ownership would flip out and demand a firesale.
In a win-budget concept, a team would do a rational, honest evaluation of how many games the current roster could be expected to win if each additional hole was filled with a replacement level player, and then request a player payroll budget based on the amount of marginal wins they’re going to attempt to add that offseason. For a team that believes it has a 60 win team in the organization, spending $30 million to buy another 5-10 wins is pretty foolish. However, if a team has 90 wins sitting around, spending $30 million to make yourself a 95-100 win team is well worth justifying. A team operating on a win budget system would spend significantly more when their team is contending and significantly less when their team is rebuilding.
A move away from a fiscal year budgeting system would give the baseball operations department much more flexibility in their long term planning and allow organizations to allocate resources much more efficiently. Let’s use the Mariners as an example of what I’m talking about.
For 2005 through 2007, the Mariners are going to end up having spent around $270 million on their player salaries. They essentially spent it in equal chunks, with about $85 million going out in 2005, $88 million in 2006, and a projected $95 million or so in 2006.
If they had shifted to a win budget system after the debacle of 2004 and correctly analyzed the talent they had on hand, they could have fielded a 65-70 win team in 2005 for about $70 million. Last offseason, the goal was to get to 80-85 wins, which could have been accomplished on a payroll of about $80 million.
That would leave them with $120 million dollars, not including the accrued interest gained from the money not spent in prior years, to spend on the 2006 Mariners, the year that they’ve been mandated to win or lose their jobs. Would you like the M’s to have $120 million payroll next year? Yea, me too.
A win budget system systematically shifts payroll dollars away from years where the team is rebuilding and into years where the team is challenging for the World Series. It maximizes the impact of the wins the teams are paying for, and acknowledges that a 95th win in one season is worth more than the 72nd win in another season.
Someday, someone in a front office is going to convince their owners to shift to a win budget system. And their economic advantage is going to be staggering.
Matsuzaka: what the hell?
If you’ve been around here for very long, you know that we’ve been rabid for the team to go after Matsuzaka. We were happy knowing they were ready to do it. I’d sum up the USSM consensus as: his arm’s either going to explode or he’ll do great. I don’t think any of us buy the “his arm is made of adamantium so there’s no way his ligament snaps” – that argument’s been used for many, many pitchers who later went under the knife.
But they’re not going to even bid for him. Why? Let’s hit the big ones.
Too expensive
The posting fee on top of what Matsuzaka is looking to sign for is going to be a ridiculous total package, even for an ace. Say he gets an AJ Burnett contract, plus the team has to pay $30m for the right to give him that contract. Even in a ace-scarce environment, that’s terrifying.
The M’s might look at Schmidt and see a known quantity they can count on who, even on a 4/$45m deal would be much cheaper than Matsuzaka will be.
No accounting hijinks
While the posting money doesn’t count against the salary cap (making this particularly attractive to the Yankees), it looks like the M’s didn’t get a special dispensation from Nintendo to make a bid and still spend $whatever on payroll and player development. Whatever the M’s have said in the past about accounting differently for foreign players acquired as undrafted free agents, it appears that today it’s just another line item, and they decided that they could get more from the money than they would from putting it in a Matsuzaka bid+contract.
Matsuzaka doesn’t want to play with Ichiro
… and he told Boras who told teams, so the M’s said “okay, we won’t bid, then.” I don’t even know how we would start trying to prove or disprove this one.
Waiting it out
Accusations are already flying that teams are trying to tamper with the process, considering posting an immense bid and then telling Boras to stick it. Before the hijinks started, I would have thought that the chance Matsuzaka went on the market as a free agent next year were slim. Now, it’s a real possibility. Maybe, especially given the other factors, they’d rather sit this one out.
He’s repped by Boras
Boras is not a factor. It’s not. Bavasi and Boras are friends, and they’ve come to easy agreements with Boras clients before. The team isn’t afraid or even reluctant to pursue his clients.
The Mariners hate us and want us to be miserable
Between this and Hargrove’s retention, I have to admit that this is pretty persuasive.
(I’ll add more if there’s any suggestions for additional things)
—
I really don’t know that going after Matsuzaka, especially through the posting process, is financially responsible. It’s going to be a ridiculous amount of money. But in trying to fill holes through free agency, GMs are trying to make the least bad decisions possible. Matsuzaka + random minor league free agents to fill out the rotation is almost certainly going to be a much better decision than Jason Schmidt+Adam Eaton, for instance, even if it’s a pretty wild bet.
The big question that remains, though is that if it’s financial, why not submit what they consider a reasonable bid, even knowing it’ll lose? Even if you think Matsuzaka is going to demand $100m, you can bid $12m, offer him 5y/$35m, and let him go if by some miracle your bid wins. Unless you think he’s not even worth a shot in the dark, and he clearly is, why not buy that free lottery ticket?
I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t understand why you’d want to look apathetic about the best pitcher on the market this off-season, especially given the team’s poor showing these last few years.
Free agent reviews: Jason Schmidt
Heyyyy, Jason Schmidt. That guy’s supposed to be pretty good, right?
Nope. There’ve been a number of good write-ups on this I’ll point you to, particularly Jeff Sullivan’s writeup on this at but to sum up: he’s not a #1 starter. He hasn’t been in years. The last really good season he had was 2004. Since then, he’s been an average pitcher.
The bait many, many people are biting on – is that his raw stats from last year look just fine. 3.59 ERA, 180 K, 80 walks, only 21 home runs allowed? That’s pretty good. Part of the problem is that, like Jarrod Washburn, he got really lucky with runners on, which made his ERA look good. Some supporters of him pick up on this as some kind of skill but, as we discovered with Jarrod Washburn, it’s not.
Plus, as Jeff mentions, he’s not a spring chicken. You’d be giving a power pitcher clearly on the decline a huge long-term deal that will probably pay out $10m+ for his age 38 and 39 seasons.
Or, they’re trying to make arguments that he’s got some magic glow, that somehow Schmidt is special, that his stuff will translate well, or… or whatever. The argument that he’s somehow the exception is lazy. We can go to every pitcher and by hand-picking our statistics or our scouting reports find a way to support the contention that that pitcher is special, and will be awesome forever. And maybe one of them pans out. And maybe the Mariners have scouted this all out and have reason to believe he’ll succeed in Safeco, so they give him his money, Schmidt comes to Seattle and he’s an ace for five years and we look dumb (hey, look at Raul Ibanez). The point isn’t that that can’t happen – but it’s whether it’s a good gamble or even, as I put this last year, he’s the least bad free agent choice available. For a reasonable amount of money, I’d take the chance, but I’m with Dave (and Jeff) – I wouldn’t bet more than $10m a year, and on a fairly short contract. That won’t land him.
Schmidt’s going to demand ace money and he’s not going to be worth it. Do we really want another Jarrod Washburn on the roster, being paid far more than his contributions warrant? We should hope that the Mets or some other team with even more money than sense makes Schmidt a ridiculous 5/$50m offer and the M’s let him go.