Greg Halman, 1987-2011
Terrible news to wake up to this morning – Greg Halman was murdered last night. Even with my own bout with mortality, this isn’t the kind of thing I know how to write about. A 24-year-old killed, and apparently by his own brother? Just horrible.
My thoughts and prayers are with the Halman family.
No Need For A Book
This probably doesn’t deserve a response, honestly, but for whatever reason, I can’t resist picking this low hanging fruit.
Years from now, if somebody can be bothered, they might write a treatise on how a franchise like the Mariners — flush with enough cash to fund payrolls in the game’s top tier for several years — could remain so mediocre for so long.
And if they get around to it, they might try reading some of the arguments against bringing in top players that permeate the Mariners blogosphere.
The rest of the piece – drivel is too strong of a word, but the right word is probably at least in that family – is your garden variety “those nerds don’t really want to win” argument. Good teams “man up” and “do what it takes” and “scratch their nuts” and all that crap. It’s bad baseball philosophy mixed with Type A machoism, and facts will not get in its way.
Over here, we deal in facts. So, let’s just set the record straight and tell whatever aspiring author is thinking about writing a book about why the Mariners have been mediocre for so long that the subject doesn’t need a book. In fact, it doesn’t even need an overly long blog post. You want to know why the Mariners have been bad for most of the last decade? It’s really easy.
November 7th, 2003 – The Seattle Mariners hired Bill Bavasi as General Manager.
January 8th, 2004 – The Seattle Mariners traded Carlos Guillen for Ramon Santiago.
November 15th, 2004 – The Seattle Mariners signed Richie Sexson to a 4 year, $50 million contract.
December 22nd, 2005 – The Seattle Mariners signed Jarrod Washburn to a 4 year, $37 million contract.
June 30th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Asdrubal Cabrera for Eduardo Perez.
July 26th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Shin-Soo Choo for Ben Broussard.
December 7th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Rafael Soriano for Horacio Ramirez.
December 18th, 2006 – The Seattle Mariners traded Chris Snelling and Emiliano Fruto for Jose Vidro.
December 20th, 2007 – The Seattle Mariners signed Carlos Silva to a four year, $48 million contract.
February 8th, 2008 – The Seattle Mariners traded Adam Jones, George Sherrill, Chris Tillman, Tony Butler, and Kam Mickolio for Erik Bedard.
For the sake of brevity, we’re skipping over other winning decisions such as signing Scott Spiezio to be the third baseman in 2004, deciding on Carl Everett to serve as the team’s DH in 2006, or bringing in Jeff Weaver to fix the rotation in 2007. These aren’t all the disastrous decisions that were made during Bavasi’s time at the helm, but they get the point across well enough.
From the winter of 2003 until the end of the 2008 season, the Mariners were the worst run baseball operations department in the sport. They did stupid thing on top of stupid thing, often justifying these bewildering moves with reasons like “he’s a clutch hitter” or “we think he’s a winner.” Talented young players were shipped off to succeed elsewhere, while the team threw money at “proven veterans” who were simply overrated by a group of people who were evaluating players the way it was done in the 1980s.
It had nothing to do with settling for mediocrity or accepting defeat. The Mariners tried to win, but they just sucked at it because the people in charge were unable to identify good players from bad ones. They threw money at free agents to try and cover up for the fact that they didn’t have enough homegrown talent on hand, often because they’d already traded away a kid who turned out to be exactly what they needed down the line. The rosters consisted of overrated, overpaid, and just downright crappy players who had jobs simply because they had experience and some athleticism.
The Mariners failures over the last 10 years have absolutely nothing to do with desire to win, commitment to doing what it takes, or any other emotional appeal that people who don’t understand how to construct winning baseball teams like to try and sell to the masses. The Mariners have spent a long time losing baseball games because they hired a bad General Manager and watched him systematically dismantle the overall organizational talent level. They lost because they thought it would be a good idea to spend big on aging mediocre talents and bet the farm on a high risk pitcher with significant red flags. They lost because they traded away good young talent for bad old talent in an effort to win in the present, and because the front office simply didn’t understand how to build a baseball team in the modern era.
The only book necessary on the failures of the Mariners over the last 10 years is a transaction log. Simply trying to paint it any other way is revisionist history, and in this case, it’s just agenda-pushing revisionist history. I guess when the facts are against you, make emotional appeals.
Don’t buy into any of that crap. Good teams win because they understand how to value player contributions on the field and figure out how to build a roster full of players who can produce beyond what they cost. Bad teams do things like sign a big name free agent to prove that they want to win to their fan bases and beat writers.
Doumit Signs With Minnesota
This afternoon, Ryan Doumit – part of my Off-season Plan B – signed a one year, $3 million deal with the Twins. First off, I wouldn’t suggest losing much sleep over this, as Doumit was more of an example of a low cost, average-to-just-above average hitter who could bat from the left side and share some time at 1B/LF/DH with Smoak, Carp, and Wells. It’s not that Doumit is any kind of great player or that not signing him was a big miss by the team – there are a decent amount of guys out there with a similar skillset that the team could pursue. So, there’s no reason to be all that upset that he signed with the Twins – he could have been a decent fit here, but he’s not the only option from that pool of players.
But, since he did sign for $3 million, I figured I’d use him as a stand-in to make one last point about the relative value of signing Fielder versus pursuing a more balanced approach to this winter.
If you look at the career offensive numbers for Doumit and Fielder side by side, you’ll see that Fielder has posted a wOBA of .391 compared to Doumit’s .336 mark. Because of how wOBA was designed, converting it to runs per plate appearance is actually quite easy (it’s just ((.391-.336)/1.2), which shows us that Fielder’s career offensive advantage has been worth an additional .045 runs per trip to the plate. Multiplied out over a full-season (600 PA), the gap is 27.5 runs – this is essentially how many more runs you’d expect Fielder to produce at the plate than Doumit given the same number of opportunities.
Now, you could argue that career numbers understate the difference a bit since Fielder is three years younger and has been substantially better recently than he was earlier in his career, but it’s even adjusting for age, the gap isn’t going to be more than about 30-35 runs over 600 plate appearances. Over the course of a year, a team will gain one win for about every 10 runs they add, so the offensive difference is between +3 and +3.5 wins.
Now, Doumit signed for $3 million plus incentives, but it’s fair to assume that he’ll hit every trigger in the contract if he actually gets 600 PA next year. So, let’s assume he negotiated in $2 million worth of incentives, and say his expected contract for 2012 is $5 million if he stays healthy and plays everyday. If his injuries limited him to less playing time, you’d have to weight the difference in expected performance by shifting some of those PA to a guy like Casper Wells, but you’d also save on the incentives not kicking in, so the two outcomes are pretty close to a wash – we’ll just compare using a healthy Doumit for ease of math, but realize that an injured/cheaper Doumit (with playing time being distributed elsewhere) isn’t that much worse of an option, really.
If Fielder signs for something in the $25 million per year range, that means that the marginal cost of adding Fielder just in 2012 salary (and not accounting for the extra risk associated with a long term contract) is $20 million, or right around $6-$7 million per extra win added. Besides the Yankees, there’s not a team in baseball that can afford to use a significant part of their budget to pay $6 to $7 million per marginal win.
Doumit wasn’t any kind of savior, but his contract shows exactly why the team can do better by pursuing value at the lower end of the talent spectrum than they can by throwing money at Fielder. Not just in terms of long term risk, but in making the 2012 team better. If Fielder is only +3 to +4 wins better than guys who you could get for $5 million or less, then it just wouldn’t be hard to come up with two or three players that would provide equal value to acquiring just Fielder by himself.
Once you factor in the long term risk, the risk/reward scales tip far in favor of the spread-it-around theory. Fielder just doesn’t provide anywhere near enough value over what the team could get by signing a Doumit-type of player and upgrading other places on the roster as well to justify the risks associated with giving him a huge contract.
Star Players and Attendance
During yesterday’s radio spot with Brock and Salk, Mike brought up the team’s lagging attendance as a point in favor of splurging on a star player like Fielder who could serve as a gate attraction. After all, the team’s revenues are tied to how many people they can get to the park on a nightly basis, and the organization can’t continue to lose fans at the rate they have been over the past few years. If bringing in a star player could actually have a substantial effect on attendance, there’s a case to be made that a guy like Fielder could pay his own freight in some ways, and reduce the overall total cost of acquiring him to begin with.
So, just because I’m curious and like evidence, I decided to look at the attendance of teams from one year to the next after they imported a star player – one with enough cache that you would think that fans would be incentivized to come to the park to see the new guy. Not all situations are the same, of course, and some acquisitions don’t really help answer the question we’re asking, as teams like the Yankees, Red Sox, and Cubs aren’t likely to see attendance boosts from star players because they’re already near their peak attendance levels to begin with. So, let’s focus just on situations where the fan base could use a shot in the arm, and where the park or the history wasn’t enough to draw fans itself.
2011: Washington Nationals sign Jayson Werth.
2010 attendance: 1.83 million
2011 attendance: 1.94 million
Net Gain: +110,000
2008: Detroit Tigers acquire Miguel Cabrera from Florida.
2007 attendance: 3.07 million
2008 attendance: 3.20 million
Net Gain: +130,000
2007: San Francisco Giants sign Barry Zito.
2006 attendance: 3.13 million
2007 attendance: 3.22 million
Net Gain: +90,000
2007: Houston Astros sign Carlos Lee.
2006 attendance: 3.02 million
2007 attendance: 3.02 million
Net Gain: +0
2001: Colorado Rockies sign Mike Hampton.
2000 attendance: 3.29 million
2001 attendance: 3.17 million
Net Gain: -122,000
2001: Texas Rangers sign Alex Rodriguez.
2000 attendance: 2.59 million
2001 attendance: 2.83 million
Net Gain: +240,000
2000: Cincinnati Reds acquire Ken Griffey Jr.
1999 attendance: 2.06 million
2000 attendance: 2.58 million
Net Gain: +522,000
There’s seven examples of mid-market teams making big financial outlays (in each case, the player signed $100+ million contract, even the ones getting acquired by trade) and seeing a rather mixed bag in terms of attendance increase.
The Reds got the biggest boost after acquiring Junior, but that was basically the perfect storm of a situation – he was a local hero whose Dad had starred for the franchise, and was the most marketable baseball player on the planet at the time. Perhaps no team could ever pitch their fans a more attractive acquisition than Griffey “coming home” to play in Cincinnati and follow in his father’s footsteps. The pitch worked, and they drew an additional half million fans in his first year with the Reds.
It’s worth noting, however, that the burst was extremely short lived. The Reds won 85 games in Griffey’s first year, but the fans didn’t stick around in 2001, and their attendance dropped back to 1.88 million, lower than it was the year before they acquired him.
The other big splash was the A-Rod contract, as the Rangers gave him the largest deal of any athlete in the sport’s history, and Tom Hicks sold the signing as the beginning of a new era in Texas baseball. They got about half the spike of what the Reds got, but still saw a pretty decent increase in Rodriguez’s first year with the team. However, just like with Junior, the shine quickly wore off once the fans realized the team still wasn’t very good. In Rodriguez’s second year with the Rangers, attendance shrunk back to 2.35 million – once again, a number lower than what the team drew in their final year before signing him.
The other acquisitions were followed by much smaller attendance gains to begin with. The Tigers got 100,000 extra fans in the year after they acquired Miguel Cabrera, but the story was the same there, as the team was still lousy and they saw a massive drop in attendance (-700,000 fans) in year two. The economy in Detroit is obviously a complicating factor, but it’s worth noting that the Tigers got a +500,000 fan boost in attendance last year compared to 2010, which coincides with the team actually being good again. There are clearly people in Detroit willing to spend money to watch baseball, but they weren’t willing to pay that money to watch Miguel Cabrera play on a losing team. They were willing to pay money to watch the Tigers play once they got good again, however.
Werth and Zito’s arrivals coincided with small attendance spikes (though Zito’s first year in SF was also the year Barry Bonds became the all-time HR champ, so how much of the spike was due to Zito is debatable), but nothing of the sort that would justify those contracts. Houston and Colorado saw no attendance benefit after bringing in Hampton and Lee, and of course, those contracts have been disasters as well.
Overall, the story over the last decade is pretty clear – when a mid-market team “shows that they’re serious about winning” by throwing a lot of money at a marquee free agent, it is usually followed by a small attendance boost in the first year of the deal. If the team doesn’t actually win in that first year, however, those fans flee very quickly, and the bad will fostered by a huge contract gone bad may actually have a negative effect on attendance.
These results jive with just about every study ever done on the effects of what drive attendance to Major League ballparks. Fans come to see winning teams, not individual players. If the Mariners want to get fans back in Safeco Field, the formula is easy – put a winning team on the field. Trying to buy yourself out of declining attendance by throwing money at one big name free agent just doesn’t work.
Going On With Brock and Salk
I’ll be reappearing on 710 ESPN with Brock and Salk today at 10:30. Given the post right below this and Salk’s preference for signing Prince Fielder, I’m pretty sure we can all guess what the topic is going to be.
Prince Fielder and Buying Wins
This afternoon, Jon Heyman sent out the following message on Twitter:
#Mariners are hoping to be in on Prince (but not Pujols). Unsure if there’s room in budget though. But will give it a run.
As Jeff noted in more depth than I’ll get into, this is basically not news – it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of prices up to which the M’s would happily sign Prince Fielder. $1 million a year? Obviously. $10 million a year? They couldn’t sign fast enough. $15 million a year? Yeah, they’d do that.
Of course, none of that matters, because Fielder’s actual price is going to be far above any of those numbers. He turned down a 5 year, $100 million contract a year ago (and reportedly didn’t even bother countering), and that was before he had the best year of his career and became a free agent. If he thought he was worth more than $20 million per season as an arbitration eligible guy coming off an okay year, he’s not going to settle for anything close to that as a free agent coming off a really good year. The reality is that Fielder’s probably going to get $25+ million per year, and the only real question is how many years he’ll get at that price.
That brings us back to Heyman’s statement that the M’s are not sure they can fit him into the budget. I know for a lot of you, the answer is as simple as “increase the budget”, but let’s look at the reality of that kind of roster construction plan.
As we’ve noted, a team full of league minimum replacement level players would be expected to win about 43 games, so to be a legitimate contender, a team needs 45-50 WAR. Tampa Bay had the lowest WAR total (+46) of any of last year’s playoff teams, so reality bears this out. The going rate for a win in the free agent market is about +5 million per win, give or take a bit depending on position and skillset. If a team attempted to buy their entire roster through free agency with a goal of accumulating +50 WAR, they’d need a $250 million payroll in order to make the strategy work. If they were really clever and took advantage of market inefficiencies, getting lower cost relievers and finding value with good defensive players, they might be able to buy +50 WAR for $225 million. Regardless, you’d need some kind of monstrous payroll to build a good team exclusively through free agency.
That’s why no one does it, and every team uses free agency as a way to add supplementary talent to cost-controlled players who were developed internally – even the Yankees. Teams can afford to pay $5 million per win for a few players on the roster, but the more market-rate players you add, the more it forces you to come up with quality low-cost performers elsewhere in order to make that kind of roster construction work.
A payroll of about $100 million means that your entire roster needs to be producing at an average of $2 million per win. That’s about where the Mariners are now, and that $2 million per win total has to be the goal. If they signed Fielder to go along with Felix, they’d essentially have two guys returning an expected +11 wins for about $45 million, or right around $4 million per win for the pair. That would leave the team with about $50 million to get the other 39 wins, which is simply not a reasonable request. Unfortunately, a team with a payroll under $100 million simply can’t pay the going market rate for wins to two superstar players unless they have an absolutely crazy amount of cheap young quality talent already in place.
You know how many teams in baseball had two players making $20+ million per year in salary last year? Two – the Yankees (Rodriguez, Sabathia, and Teixeira) and the Phillies (Howard and Halladay). The Yankees had a team payroll of $207 million, while the Phillies came in at $166 million. This year, the Red Sox (Crawford and Gonzalez) will join the club, and their payroll is expected to be in the $165 million range as well.
Even if the Mariners added $30 million to their payroll and came in at $125 million, they’d still be far below the spending threshold that other teams have achieved before they’ve committed market rate salaries to multiple star players. If you have the kind of revenues that the Yankees and Red Sox have, there’s enough left over to fill out the roster with good players even after spending $5 million per win on a few spots, but for 90% of the teams in baseball, that’s simply not the case.
This isn’t an issue of the M’s ownership just needing to kick a bit more into the pot so the team can afford a player like Prince Fielder. The M’s already have a player like Prince Fielder – he’s from Venezuela and he’s pretty good at that whole pitching thing. They’re getting Felix at a discount over his market rate, but he’s still getting paid at the level of a star quality player.
You want a roster with both Felix and Fielder making the kind of money the market has set for their services? Well, then, you either need a $150+ million payroll, or you need the rest of the roster to be made up of amazing players developed through the farm system who are making a fraction of what they’re really worth.
The reality is the Mariners don’t have either of those things. There aren’t enough low-cost kids producing at high quality levels to allow the team the ability to pay the market rate for two premium talents, and the Mariners simply aren’t in a position to have a large enough payroll to justify setting aside $45 million of their budget towards paying the market rate for wins. There just wouldn’t be enough left over to put together a realistic contender around those two, even if you decided that you weren’t re-signing Ichiro after the season and were going to allocate all of his money to Fielder’s future salary.
If the M’s have $25 million to spend this winter, they can’t simply just buy five wins, which is about what you’d hope for from bringing in Fielder. This is a team that needs to get something more like 12 wins for every $25 million it spends, and while Ackley and Pineda give them enough wiggle room to make allowances for extra spending in places, the M’s simply don’t have enough Ackleys and Pinedas to give them the room to have both Felix and Fielder and a roster around them that can be a viable contender.
At $15 million, the M’s could make it work. If you really stretched it and found value elsewhere this winter, you could maybe make $20 million work. $25 million, though? Sorry, but it just doesn’t make sense. Fielder will get his money, but he shouldn’t get it from the Mariners.
ROY Award
In about 10 minutes, the BBWAA is going to announce the winners of the AL and NL Rookie of the Year awards. Odds are pretty good the AL trophy will end up going to Ivan Nova, Jeremy Hellickson, or Mark Trumbo, while Dustin Ackley and Michael Pineda will get a token vote here or there.
Personally, I just don’t care. The results of the voting don’t matter to me at all. Ackley and Pineda were both better than whoever ends up getting the trophy, but it’s not like they were A-Rod in 1996 and the lack of recognition is going to go down as an historic screw job or anything. Pineda was excellent during the first half of the year and Ackley was excellent during the second half, but neither of them put together the kind of season that essentially demands that they be handed hardware at the end of it.
They had really good years. Other guys had less good years but are going to get rewarded because of antiquated measurements of performance. If that bothers you, you can make a pretty good case that either of them deserved to win it and have a pretty solid case on your side. Me? I just can’t get very worked up over it. Ackley and Pineda were really good – we know that, the world knows that, and whether the BBWAA voting reflects that or not, it doesn’t really change anything.
As expected, Pineda and Ackley finish a distant fifth and sixth respectively. Hellickson wins the award, Trumbo is second, Hosmer is third, and Nova is fourth. Ackley actually did get one first place vote. And now, on to things that matter.
’11 40-Man Preview Extravaganza
It’s that time of the year again. Leaves are dropping, everything is pumpkin flavoured, Christmas music exists prematurely as something for people to either enjoy or loudly complain about, and I come back from the dead to tell you all about setting the 40-man (deadline: Nov. 18th) in advance of the Rule 5 draft. So! This year, we’re looking at ’07 HS draftees and int’l signings and ’08 college draftees. Thrilling, right? This is the last year we’re going to be dealing exclusively with Fontaine drafts and I’m curious to see how the new administration will prioritize their own picks, but for now, we have a large pile of players among whom there aren’t a whole lot of locks. I’ll note before we get into it that the contracts of some of the international players can get a little confusing in that it’s not always easy to tell if they’ve signed a 2007 contract or a 2008 contract. If guys like Francisco Martinez and Erasmo Ramirez are eligible (I’m at least pretty sure Erasmo isn’t), you can bet that they’ll be added, but I believe both would be due next year.
So let’s take a more exhaustive look than we need to at some names here:
Dave’s Off-Season Plan, Part Two
So, last week, I laid out my suggestion for an approach the team could take to add the impact bat that everyone wants to see on the roster. Of course, the specific hitter targeted very well might not be available, so I said I’d introduce another plan that worked off the assumption that Joey Votto couldn’t be acquired. This is that plan, though you’ll notice it goes in an entirely different direction.
Essentially, in looking at what kind of offensive upgrades are on the market this winter, I simply don’t like the various paths the team could take. Yes, they could throw a huge amount of money at Prince Fielder, but given the costs associated with winning a bidding war for his services and the risks associated with his future production, it’s simply not a strategy that I think would be in the organization’s best interests. Beyond Fielder (and Pujols, who also isn’t coming here), it’s not a very good market for hitters. And so, while everyone wants the team to focus on upgrading the offense, I’m going the other direction.
The team still has a built-in competitive advantage for left-handed pitchers in Safeco Field. Because of how the park plays, LHPs garner a significant benefit from signing in Seattle, and the team can get a better return on investment from investing in left-handed pitching than just about any other type of player. There actually are some talented LHPs on the market this winter, and given the benefits the Mariners can offer southpaws, getting them to sign here is less challenging than trying to convince a power hitter.
So, this plan allocates most of the Mariners money this winter to rebuilding the pitching staff, and gives the team the opportunity to have one of the best run prevention units in baseball. It doesn’t do as much to fix the glaring problems on offense, but unfortunately, I’m not sure I see many good paths to do that this winter. Instead, by building out a potentially top-shelf pitching staff, the team sets themselves up to try to repeat the success of teams like the 2010 Padres. The goal – have the best pitching in the league and an offense that’s close enough to average to win enough low scoring games to contend.
I know people are tired of this kind of roster construction, and just want to see some people who can hit the baseball a long ways. But, forcing yourself down that path regardless of the wisdom of pursuing the available options is a great way to make mistakes that could hurt the franchise long term. Instead, the organization essentially kicks the can on the offense down the road, giving them further time to evaluate the young hitters that finished the season as regulars, and gives them enough pitching depth to make moves to acquire offense either in July or next winter, when better paths to rebuilding the offense arise and the team has a better feel for which guys already in the organization are part of the solution or not.
It’s the kind of off-season that likely wouldn’t be very popular in Seattle, but it would give the team enough talent to be respectable in 2012 while figuring out just how many of the offensive question marks can be useful pieces in the long term. This plan is more of a continue-to-evaluate option than an attempt to drastically upgrade the offense, but I’d prefer to see the team exercise patience than risk the long term viability of the franchise by going for a quick fix that just may not be possible.
With all that said, here is how the Mariners could spend the cash they have available this winter while keeping their options open going forward.
Transactions
Sign LHP Chris Capuano to a 2 year, $12 million contract.
Sign RHP Frank Francisco to a 1 year, $5 million contract.
Sign LHP Erik Bedard to a 1 year, $4 million contract.
Sign OF/DH Ryan Doumit to a 1 year, $4 million contract.
Sign C Chris Snyder to a 1 year, $3 million contract.
The money gets spread around rather than spent in one place, but Capuano gets the largest share of the available cash. I advocated the team sign him last winter too, when he was significantly cheaper, but all of the reasons for signing him that were true a year ago are true again. His inflated ERA will keep his price down relative to his actual talent levels, and with Safeco Field helping to alleviate his HR problems, he could be a pretty terrific pitcher for the Mariners.
The other largest chunk of change goes to a relief pitcher, which is probably a bit surprising given our insistance that teams can build a bullpen on the cheap without having to pay market rates for them. However, Francisco likely won’t be looking at a multi-year contract due to his home run problems, and on a one year deal, he’s the kind of guy that the team could get value from, especially if League ended up being traded for offense early in the season.
I talked about Bedard and Snyder last week, so we’ll mostly just skip over their places on the roster. That leaves Ryan Doumit as the final free agent signing, and unfortunately, as the guy who would receive most of the attention as the offensive upgrade of the winter.
You’ll notice first off that Doumit is not listed as a catcher – I’d ask him to turn in his catcher’s gear and transition to a OF/DH full-time. He’s not a good receiver anyway, and the wear and tear of catching has led to many of his health problems. Moving him out from behind the plate would hopefully keep him healthier and offer the potential for better offensive performance than he’s historically had, as there’s evidence that the rigors of catching hold down a player’s production at the plate. He’s unlikely to repeat the .360 wOBA he posted last year, but his offensive performance would likely be maximized by having him play the outfield, and he’d give the team an above-average switch-hitter with some power. He’s not any kind of life-saver, but he’d be a relatively low cost offensive upgrade and give the team some positional flexibility with the rest of the roster.
With those moves in place, the final roster would look like this.
The Roster
| Position | Name | PA/IP | WAR | Salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starters | ||||
| C | Chris Snyder | 300 | 1 | $3,000,000 |
| 1B | Justin Smoak | 600 | 2 | $450,000 |
| 2B | Dustin Ackley | 600 | 3 | $1,500,000 |
| SS | Brendan Ryan | 500 | 1.5 | $1,750,000 |
| 3B | Kyle Seager | 500 | 1.5 | $450,000 |
| LF | Ryan Doumit | 400 | 1.5 | $4,000,000 |
| CF | Franklin Gutierrez | 600 | 2.5 | $5,813,000 |
| RF | Ichiro Suzuki | 600 | 2 | $18,000,000 |
| DH | Mike Carp | 500 | 1 | $450,000 |
| Bench | ||||
| C | Miguel Olivo | 300 | 0.5 | $3,750,000 |
| IF | Luis Rodriguez | 200 | 0.5 | $450,000 |
| IF | Chone Figgins | 300 | 0.5 | $9,000,000 |
| OF | Casper Wells | 400 | 1 | $450,000 |
| Rotation | ||||
| SP | Felix Hernandez | 220 | 6 | $19,200,000 |
| SP | Michael Pineda | 180 | 3.5 | $450,000 |
| SP | Chris Capuano | 180 | 2.5 | $6,000,000 |
| SP | Jason Vargas | 180 | 2.5 | $4,000,000 |
| SP | Erik Bedard | 120 | 2 | $4,000,000 |
| Bullpen | ||||
| CL | Brandon League | 60 | 1 | $5,000,000 |
| RP | Frank Francisco | 60 | 1 | $5,000,000 |
| RP | Tom Wilhelmsen | 60 | 0.5 | $450,000 |
| RP | Shawn Kelley | 60 | 0.5 | $450,000 |
| RP | Charlie Furbush | 60 | 0.5 | $450,000 |
| RP | Josh Lueke | 60 | 0.5 | $450,000 |
| RP | Blake Beavan | 120 | 0 | $450,000 |
| Total | 39 | $94,963,000 |
Adding Doumit to the mix gives the team the ability to have 1B/DH/LF shared between two switch-hitters, a left-hander, and a right-hander – it’s setup well for Smoak, Carp, Doumit, and Wells to be placed in positions where they could perform the best, and then it’s just up for them to hit well enough to justify their spots in the line-up. The offense would essentially depend on those four providing power, and would sink or swim based on the level of production the team got from those players.
If they produce, and the team gets enough on-base ability from the likes of Ackley, Seager, and Gutierrez, the offense could be not-horrible, and the pitching staff would be among the best in baseball. Of course, we’ve seen that kind of plan go wrong the last couple of years, so there’s obvious risks associated with this type of strategy. However, it gives the team a chance at respectability in 2012, gives the team more time to evaluate the young talent already in house, and preserves the flexibility needed to make a move for a premium hitter should the right opportunity arise. With a strong, deep pitching staff, the team would be setup well to move pitching for hitting this summer, whether it’s dealing from the Major League roster if the team wasn’t a contender or moving from the supply of arms at the minor league level if they found themselves as buyers.
It’s not a flashy winter, but it’s a practical one that gives the team options and lets them continue along the path to rebuilding from within. It would require more patience from fans, but if a guy like Votto is out of reach, than staying the course is probably the best plan for the organization this winter.
One Last Thing On Votto
Why teams pay for wins on a linear scale. We’ll have a Votto-free plan up on Monday, so if you’re in “the Reds will never trade him” camp, sit tight until then.
If you want to keep crowing about how stupid I am, well, at least read the link first, okay?