The extremely early top probable GM candidate ranking
Here are the handful of people off that list I think have the best chance to make the initial cut and get the job. This is based on strength of their candidacy, what we know about how well they’ve interviewed in the past, what the M’s want to see in a candidate, and who’s doing the search. I have no more information than anyone else, and since the M’s haven’t started leaking names or process yet, and there’s no news on who’s been allowed or denied permission to interview, they’re just guesses.
I’d bet the M’s intentionally or not will group the candidates, and there’ll be at least one from each in their finalists. I’ve been thinking of them as:
– Internals
– Young whippersnappers
– Familiar, experienced faces, mostly from scouting
– Nice clean young men who remind them of themselves what seems like only a few years ago
I’ve picked who I think will be the top candidates in each group to produce the finalist group.
Impudent whippersnappers: Antonetti
Polite youngsters: Tony LaCava, Peter Woodfork
Familiar faces/scouting path: Al Avila, Logan White
Internals: Lee Pelekoudas
Retreads: Wayne Krivsky
Yes, I’m serious, I’ve got a bad feeling about Krivsky. Notable drops: I’m hoping they’d give Forst, DePo, and Ng a shot, but I don’t have a lot of confidence that’ll happen (or that they’d want the job). Forst has the the division problem I noted yesterday.
They’ll like Woodfork and LaCava a lot, and I’d bet Avila and Logan do well too. Pelekoudas gets waved to the final round as the internal guy and the interim GM. If Towers is seriously available, and I think it would take a lot for that to happen, he’d be on there.
I don’t think it’s likely that more than one of Antonetti/DePodesta/Forst gets to the final round, and even if they don’t intend to hire from that group, they’ll string one along for PR/brain-picking purposes. The ideal scenario, from my point of view anyway, is that they bring one of these guys in for the token interview and they absolutely blow away the competition with the level of thought and preparation they’ve put into it. I don’t know.
In retrospect, I should have given Jerry DiPoto his own writeup instead of bunching him in with the Diamondbacks/Red Sox comment in Woodfork’s writeup. Maybe I’ll go back for that.
And again, I’d bet Dave would come up with a significantly different list, as would anyone.
I hope that’s at all helpful — this is a pretty frequently-requested post, and I’m sure we’ll be updating it.
Hickey’s list
Hickey talks to a “former GM” who came up with eight people… I’m not sure why, exactly, the former GM would do that, and you can take your guesses at who this mystery author is. Anyway:
Towers (also mentioned by Stone, covered in our previous post)
Cashman (also mentioned by Stone, covered in our previous post)
Kim Ng (check, check)
Jerry DiPoto (mentioned in passing in my post as part of the Diamondbacks-Red Sox contingent)
Tony Bernazard, Mets VP of PD (neither us nor Stone had him)
Chris Antonetti (on Stone’s list, ummm…. we may have written something about him)
Mike Rizzo, Nationals AGM (neither of us had him)
David Forst, A’s AGM (check and check)
The continuing rumor-mongering that Towers might get out is going to get me to write a many-thousand word essay on the topic.
Potential GM Candidates, a gigantic post
I’m trying not to focus too much on who might get hired and who won’t, or what criteria the M’s will look at. I’ll write about that separately. At the same time, I tried to write up a brief explanation of why the team might particularly go for them or not.
So if you think they’re not going to hire someone who understands VORP, there’s a whole class of candidates that rules out, but it’s not noted in each one, and if you think they value a person’s long history in baseball, that’s also not listed in the pros for those candidates.
Again — as much as I agree that the hiring process is important, and people are right to be concerned about having Armstrong/Lincoln making the decisions, the intent here is to talk about potential candidates. Process and who they might or will hire will follow. We promise.
Glossary
AGM = assistant GM
AtGM = assistant to the general manager (“Assistant Regional Manager” “Assistant *to* the Regional Manager”)
SVP = Senior Vice President
DPD = Director Player Development
DPP = Director Player Personnel
Internal Candidates
Lee Pelekoudas
Current job: Interim GM, VP and Associate GM
In 1988, Pelekoudas was Director of Baseball Administration. Then in 1996-7, Senior Director. Then VP of Baseball Admin until 2006.
Why they might be hired: he’s familiar, the M’s organization is comfortable with him, by all accounts he’s done a good job within his area.
Why they might be turned down: if they’re serious about going in a new direction, and Lee was as involved in personnel decisions as they’ve said, then his involvement with these disastrous teams will keep him from ascending.
Retreads: former and current GMs
Jim Beattie
Current job: ?
GM experience: Expos, Orioles (sort-of)
Why they might be hired: his time in Baltimore for Angelos proved he was willing to stay in a humiliating job sharing arrangement where a powerful and sometimes irrational owner frequently made things even worse, so he might be viewed as reliable and pliable
Why they might be turned down: uggghhh
Billy Beane
Current job: Athletics GM
Not going anywhere, he’s a part-owner of the A’s.
Brian Cashman
Current job: Yankees GM
Stone-mentioned. I don’t think he’ll go anywhere. It’s hard to separate Cashman’s performance from the Yankee organization as a whole, the owners, and all that fun stuff.
Paul DePodesta
Current job: Padres AtGM
GM experience: Dodgers, 04-05
I want to preface this by saying that I really like DePodesta. You can check out his blog for some good, direct DePodesta knowledge.
The problem is that his time in LA didn’t go well, and was dominated by attacks from the local media and an inability to get along with people within the organization. I’ve heard that he’s a great front-office guy who may never be well-suited for the top role, and I think that’s too dismissive: it assumes that he didn’t learn anything from his time in LA, and that he’s incapable of growth. I don’t think either of those things are true, and at some point, he’ll get his shot if he wants it.
Why they might be hired: he’s smart, he gets it, he’s exactly the kind of GM candidate who would be able to sift through the organization and start figuring out what’s working and what isn’t.
Why they might be turned down: as publicity-conscious and conservative about decision-making as the M’s are, it’s easy to see them passing just out of fear over the media reception and those relationships, and that the M’s org as a whole, which includes a lot of old-school long-timers, might reject him in the same way the Dodgers did.
Dan Duquette
Current job: ?
GM experience: Expos, Red Sox
I mention this because I feel like Gammons will float the idea at some point. Rested! Ready!
Jim Duquette
Current job: ?
GM experience: Mets, briefly
Why they might be hired: As Stone points out, if they want to hire Valentine to manage, Duquette might help.
Why they might be turned down: what’s the compelling reason to hire him?
Dan Evans
Current job: agent
GM experience: Dodgers GM
Why they might be hired: The M’s almost hired him once before
Why they might be turned down: If they’re making a clean break with Bavasi, that may well preclude Evans from consideration, since Evans spent 2005-2007 with Seattle as an AtGM.
Pat Gillick
Current job: Phillies GM
Larry Stone mentioned this in his article, but I don’t see it happening. Gillick’s become something of a specialist GM, in that he takes jobs where a team’s close to contention, puts them in the playoffs a couple times, and then scampers off before the collapse. The 2009 Mariners aren’t the kind of team he’s chosen to pick up before. If Gillick wanted a challenge he’d have stayed on as Mariner GM.
Gerry Hunsicker
Current job: Rays SVP Baseball Operations
GM experience: Astros GM
Unlikely to be a candidate: he’s content in a nice job in an up-and-coming successful franchise.
Wayne Krivsky
Current job: ?
GM experience: Reds
Why they might be hired: he’s an old-school guy with a ton of experience, been around Griffey lately
Why they might be turned down: not a new approach, or particularly successful
Steve Phillips
Current job: well-compensated oxygen-to-carbon-dioxide converter for ESPN
GM experience: Mets
I’m sure this’ll be brought up eventually.
Why they might be hired: he almost signed Alex but then didn’t
Why they might be turned down: bad record
Kevin Towers
Current job: Padres GM
I hadn’t considered that he might be a possibility until Stone mentioned him. If he’s moving, he may be the best combination of “suitable for Lincoln and Howard” and “new school”. Towers is the only current GM who really bridges the perceived gap between old and new, and can live in both. He’s an experienced hand who just kept learning, he’s well-respected by both sides even as he’ll try and apply new tools and strategies.
I also really like Towers. If you’ve been to an event with him, you understand why.
Why they might be hired: he’s enough of an old-school trooper to ace the interviews
Why they might be turned down: may not be available, the Padres record is not great, so that might be an awkward conversation
Bob Watson
Current job: works for MLB
GM experience: Astros, Yankees
A Stone mention. I’m not sure why Larry threw his name out, but he has to have a good reason. Doesn’t he?
Why they might be hired: I don’t know.
Why they might be turned down: No special reason.
Current front office types
Ruben Amaro Jr.
Current job: Phillies AGM
Nope, he’s getting Gillick’s job when Gillick leaves.
Al Avila
Current job: Tigers AGM.
Why they might be hired: Did well the last time the M’s interviewed him. I don’t care about the Tigers fortunes this year, if there’s any way that Dombrowski’s magic rubbed off on Avila over the years, it’d be great.
Why they might be turned down: ?
Chris Antonetti
See here.
David Forst
Current job: A’s AGM
Why they might be hired: awesome
Why they might be turned down: Hiring someone from the A’s, who have year after year handed the M’s their ass on a fraction of the budget, might be too embarrassing for the higher-ups, an admission that all the scorn they’ve tried to heap on the A’s was misplaced.
Tony LaCava
Current job: Jays DPP
Regarded as a “rising star” and often mentioned in these conversations
Why they might be hired: he’s got the personal skills, he’s enough of a traditionalist to appeal to the M’s
Why they might be turned down: —
Kim Ng
Current job: Dodgers AGM
Why they might be hired: she’s sharp, she’s got a great resume, she’s respected, she’s been USSM-endorsed
Why they might be turned down: if they’re looking to really move forward and get one of the new uberGMs, the Antonetti/DePodesta/Forst candidates are more sabermetrically-inclined.
Bonus link: 2003 interview with friend-of-USSM Jonah Keri
Logan White
Current job: Dodgers AGM
Why they might be hired: comes from the scouting side
Why they might be turned down: not the huge break to new approach offered by other candidates
Bonus link 1, bonus link 2
Peter Woodfork
Current job: Diamondbacks AGM
There’s a whole Red Sox-Diamondbacks group that could go in here. Jerry DiPoto, AJ Hinch, Jed Hoyer, among others. I’m writing up Woodfork because he seems to be the most discussed among them.
Why they might be hired: personable, offers the Antonetti/Forst sales pitch without the baggage
Why they might be turned down: —
Not really that much of a bonus bonus link
Jack Zduriencik
Current job: Brewers AtGM, Director of Amateur Scouting
Why they might be hired: long scouting experience, awesome last name
Why they might be turned down: again, if they’re looking to break with the scouting/old school player dev approach, it’s a tough sell
Bavasi Fired
The M’s have fired General Manager Bill Bavasi. News conference shortly.
Lee Pelekoudas will take over as the interim GM and “a search for the new General Manager will begin immediately”. With as bad as this season has gone, it’s unlikely that they’ll promote anyone from within and try to call it change, so expect an outside hire. If Chris Antonetti isn’t on the potential interview list, we’ll burn Safeco to the ground.
And yes, with the new GM will come a new manager. McLaren’s being left in charge in order to not make the new GM feel obligated to keep around an interim GM in case the team starts winning immediately after Mac gets fired. The new guy will almost certainly bring in his own field staff.
Obviously, we’ve had our disagreements with Bill on roster construction and how to build a team, but as we’ve said repeatedly, he’s a really good person and it was our pleasure to host him at several USSM events in the past few years. I enjoyed all my conversations with him, and in the sense of having a good person to talk baseball with, I will miss him. But this is the right move for the organization.
A case for hope
Even after a deeply relieving win like today’s, it’s hard to look at the standings and have happy thoughts about the fortunes of the team. But as I constantly try to repeat over and over, while I’m not at all optimistic about this season, I have faith in the long-term future. Since so many of the recent comments here have focused on the futility of the team, I thought it might be worthwhile to talk again about why in the current circumstances I still hold to that.
First, the front office. Right now, they’re not the worst in baseball, but the gap between the Mariners and the growing number of smart, well-run franchises is growing. But front offices aren’t like franchise locations: you can hire a new front office. The owners, if they decided to make a change after this season (and please, it won’t be mid-season ahead of the draft, there’s just no way), could in one hiring change the fortunes of the team entirely. Having a bad front office is not an indefinite punishment. It can end.
Now, what triggers that is outside the scope of this, and often times changes there have little to do with any defined criteria. But as long as you know that the front office can be changed without the team leaving town, there’s hope for improvement. I’ll talk more about that in a bit, though.
Moreover (and feel free to mock me for this) I have not entirely given up hope in the current front office. I know, it’s like I’m screaming “Learn, dammit, learn!” at Joshua hoping that he figures it out before it’s too late to recall the B-52s, but there I am. The people in charge of the M’s are not dumb. They understand more about player development than I ever will, and they grasp some concepts, like sunk costs, that other front offices don’t. At the same time, if you’ve been here for a while, you’ve seen us make the case repeatedly that they’re too stuck on roles, on intangibles, that they’re not particularly good at talent evaluation or figuring out how to build a roster, and so on.
I was listening to Joe Morgan once, and he was talking intelligently about how to measure a player based on his individual contributions, and then he veered off onto pitchers, where — you know the drill. And I yelled at the TV “No! No! You were so close!” Eventually I gave up on Joe. I’m not there with the M’s, and maybe that’s just because I can’t tune them out so easily.
Bavasi’s a smart guy. He is. If you’ve been to the events, you know that. But he’s burning his brain power on problems like trying to figure out how to acquire a Bloomquist clone, and not processes that get the team a real right fielder to start the season. He goes looking for a (adjective)(adjective)(noun) to fill a perceived hole — he shops for an established middle-of-the-lineup presence because he really believes that you can’t stick an unproven player in the #4/#5 slots and expect to win, and doesn’t step back and look at whether or not that’s valid.
I can’t imagine that he doesn’t look even within his own division and see GMs taking much different approaches and not think that there are lessons to be learned.
I hold out hope that one of these failures is going to be the one that makes everyone get together and start talking about what’s not working, and what the fundamental assumptions they’re working under are wrong.
I’m realistic, though — there’s really one GM in baseball who has made that kind of change, and he’s running the Padres. Everyone else refuses to change and the dinosaurs get beaten by the furry little mammals. I know the chances are slim. And yet still I hope.
It’s likely it’ll come to a purge. The ownership team – the Baseball Club of Seattle which is, operationally, Howard Lincoln for Nintendo of America, and yes, I know it’s more complicated than just “Nintendo” – has an enormous incentive to right the ship. No matter what the front office says, there is only so much failure can be tolerated. Even if you think that’s a lot of failure, there is somewhere a limit.
And once they’ve decided to make a change, we’re a good interview away from a turnaround. Say there are four retread candidates and Chris Antonetti in the queue, and they ask them each the same opening question: “How quickly do you think the Mariners could compete for a championship, and what would it cost?”
Their answers would be more or less:
1-4: “Next year, with the core we have, if we make the right moves, sign some front-line starters, keep moving forward with the general strategy you already have in place…”
Chris: “It’s hard to say without more information, but if you’re willing to keep spending at the same level, we can find some short-term solutions that will put a .500 team out there while I spend to sign Felix to a long-term extension. Then I’d be looking to work younger, cheaper players into the lineup while making better free agent signings as we go – you’ve been burning your money, but you know that, we should talk about how we can do better – and every year we’d improve the core, try and pick up a couple of wins. We might get into the playoffs while we’re working on the team, but building a championship team will require us to build a young core of home-grown talent to build around, and that won’t come next year or even the year after.”
The conversation starts.
As set in their ways as they may be, as much as Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln may think Bloomquist is the true way to winning baseball, the next time they try and hire a GM, they’re going to be faced (if only in picking candidates to interview) with more of what’s gotten them into trouble and true change in the form of Antonetti or another dramatically different viewpoint.
I hope that if they face that choice, they’ll make the smart business decision and pick the different approach.
Say they don’t, though, and they pick a retread old-school candidate, they muddle around while attendance drops, their next media deals take a hit. How low can the franchise go? With their sweetheart lease, they’re guaranteed to be able to milk profits out of it.
Then there’s another set of criteria to consider: when does the team’s majority owner realize they’re getting an extremely poor return on their investment? What happens then? Do some of the extremely smart, long-neglected, don’t-even-get-a-desk minority owners step in? Or does the Baseball Club sell entirely to someone who thinks they can do better than squeak by? If the team’s making very little money, it’ll be a hugely attractive turnaround buy for someone — get the franchise winning, butts in seats, new media deals and they’ll be climbing the Forbes rankings soon.
We’re of course right to fear the kind of endless Royals/Pirates style purgatory. But the M’s aren’t saddled with parsimonious or micromanaging owners in the same way those have been. And it’s possible they could still do that – beautiful stadium, barely-attended games – but it’s unlikely. That’s a different post, though — this is about hope.
The current owners don’t have to change their minds, or decide to sell the team for financial reasons. Perhaps the owners decide they’d like to get out of owning a pain-in-the-ass franchise. It happens.
Either way, we’d get a change in management.
And there you have it, change and a new shot at success:
– Front office changes, either through person ell or enlightenment
– Ownership changes, in whatever form, resulting in front office changes
Once I started to think rationally about when and why changes would be made, I realized that changes were inevitable. They might not come as quickly as we’d like, but they’ll come. I have faith.
News of the weekend
Indians Assistant GM and USSM-Endorsed GM candidate Antonetti interviewed for St. Louis Friday. He’s passed up the chance to interview for other GM jobs, so we know at least that it’s attractive enough for him to pursue it.
LaRue in the TNT argues “Wretched Ramirez still worth keeping”
Ramirez is a 27-year-old left-handed pitcher with a career record of 38-29 and a lifetime ERA of 4.61. In 2007, he was wretched – by any standard – but the week the M’s release him is the week another team picks him up.
[…]
GM Bill Bavasi would dearly love to see Ramirez make that trade with Atlanta last year – sending Rafael Soriano to the Braves – look better. But the real reason Ramirez is still here is that he’s a living, breathing pitcher with a history of winning.
Mentioned at length is Pineiro’s contract with St. Louis. Not mentioned: Pineiro was still not good, and the contract given to him doesn’t make that less true. Mentioned? Ramirez’s overall winning record. Not mentioned: there is no evidence that Ramirez can be an effective major league starter. Unless he shows up at spring training with improved control and better stuff, preferably thrown faster, he’s going to be the same sucky pitcher he was last year. What are you going to point to as reason for hope? Stretches of effectiveness? Nope. Good strikeout rate? Nope.
I’ll stop harping on this. HoRam is a bad, bad pitcher.
And to circle back on our new pitching coach: the good
“I have stolen little bits and pieces from each one of the pitching coaches I have worked with,” he said. “One thing I took from all of them is they all tried to work with people individually and not make everybody the same, which is impossible.”
I do always wince when I hear about pitching coaches who insist that all their pitchers throw with a 3/4ths delivery, or whatever their fixation is.
“I am a big, big believer in pitching inside and I will tell you this, the Seattle Mariners will pitch inside next year,” Stottlemyre said from his Sammamish, Wash., home. “I am not afraid of going on record with that, because pitching inside is an absolute must. I think you have to pitch inside to be successful outside.”
Pitching inside is the pitching coach’s “improved situational hitting”.
The Seeds of Success
The four teams in the League Championship Series have been set – Cleveland vs Boston, Arizona vs Colorado. If every postseason tells a story, then so far, the story of 2007 is the dominance of the new school of baseball executives.
Theo Epstein is 33 years old. Josh Byrnes is 37 years old. Mark Shapiro is 39 years old. Dan O’Dowd is the old man in the room, coming in at 47 years old. All of them are running the team that gave them their first chance to be a general manager. None of them played an inning of major league baseball. And they all came from the same tree.
In 1998, John Hart was the General Manager of the Cleveland Indians, who were winning another division title in the middle of a mini-dynasty. His Assistant General Manger was a man named Dan O’Dowd, who had worked his way up through the ranks beginning in 1988. The Assistant Director of Scouting was Josh Byrnes. And the current Cleveland GM, Mark Shapiro, was the Director of Minor League Operations that year.
John Hart had three of the four GMs in the 2007 LCS working for him in the same front office that year. It gets better. When Dan O’Dowd was hired by the Colorado Rockies in 2000 to be their GM, he took Josh Byrnes with him, giving him an Assistant General Manager role. Byrnes stayed in that job for three years before taking an Asst. GM job with the Boston Red Sox, working for Theo Epstein – the GM of the other team alive in the 2007 LCS. After several years in Boston, the Arizona Diamondbacks handed him the reins of their organization.
Byrnes worked with Shapiro and O’Dowd, then for O’Dowd, and then for Epstein. These four organizations are all intertwined by the people who they have put in charge in the last decade. And they all have one singular goal in common – to gather as much information as possible and put it to use in the best possible ways in order to win baseball games. Cleveland, Arizona, Colorado, and Boston aren’t true “Moneyball” organizations – they’re Moneyball 2.0 clubs, the ones who have successfully integrated both scouting and statistical analysis into a cohesive organization and are leveraging every good piece of information they can find into a competitive advantage.
These are the organizations who won’t settle for time honored traditions. They won’t settle for doing things the way they’ve always been done. They question conventional wisdom and they look for empirical answers. They hire the smartest people they can find and let experience take a back seat to talent.
And they win baseball games.
This isn’t stats vs scouts – this is stats and scouts working together, building an organization that blends the best of both worlds. This is the blueprint for how a baseball organization should be run. And, whether the baseball men of the 20th century like it or not, this is where baseball is going. The John Hart family tree has branched out even beyond the Billy Beane family tree – the Pirates just hired Neil Huntington from the Indians, and Shapiro’s right hand man, Chris Antonetti, can essentially pick whatever job he wants whenever he decides to run a franchise. With Andrew Friedman as something of a second cousin down in Tampa along with Kevin Towers and Doug Melvin as the crazy uncles over in San Diego and Milwaukee, this is no longer a cute theory about how the Oakland A’s are winning with a small payroll. This is the 21st century of baseball management.
If you’re rooting for an organization that isn’t adapting to the changing face of how baseball teams are run (and if you’re reading this blog, you probably are), expect 2007 to be the norm. The good organizations are going to win a lot of baseball games, and the people who rely on analysis that was handed down to them from 1970s will sit at home in October, wondering which free agent pitcher they can overpay to try to save their jobs.
Responding To Baker, Yet Again
Yep – here we go again. Geoff Baker’s latest blog entry revives the dead horse of the Adam Jones story, and in it, he lays out his problems with the viewpoints held by most of the M’s blogosphere. So, here’s the response. Note – if you’re as tired of talking about Jose Vidro as I am, feel free to scroll down to Derek’s two excellent posts on Horacio Ramirez below this.
Okay, here goes:
The easiest thing, I realized very quickly upon beginning this blog, would have been to fall in-step with the anti-Bavasi crowd out there.
Is there an anti-Bavasi crowd out there? Absolutely. Am I part of it? I don’t think so. As I’ve stated repeatedly, on a personal level, I like Bill a lot. He’s engaging, funny, and honest, and he’s been tremendous to USSM during his entire time as GM of the Mariners. If he loses his job, there’s a very good chance that we won’t have the same kind of relationship with the next guy that we do with Bill, and to be honest, I like that he’s willing to come hang out with us whenever we ask him to. He’s a stand up guy, and in the grand picture of life, that carries more weight than his analytical abilities.
So, no, we’re not in the Fire-Bavasi-And-Replace-Him-With-Absolutely-Anyone-Else lynch mob. I know it exists, but for the most part, I think its a minoritiy of angry fans and does not represent the consensus of the Mariner blogosphere. Yes, we believe that the Mariner organization has basic fundamental flaws in the way they evaluate talent and build a roster, and we believe there are people in baseball who could do a better job than the current administration (hello Chris Antonetti), but we’ve also recognized a lot of the positives that Bavasi has brought to the organization and acknowledge that the team is in much better shape now than it was when Pat Gillick left.
We’re more accurately described as Pro-Antonetti than Anti-Bavasi. We think the team could do better, but that doesn’t mean that we’re out to get Bill Bavasi.
But not all of it. I do think some of it goes too far and has been thought out from a fan’s perspective rather than a truly analytical one. And that, I suppose is where our views begin to branch off in different directions.
Most of the time, I’m criticized for being too analytical and not enough of a fan. Now, we’re getting criticized for exactly the opposite. Awesome.
Nowhere do I part company more with some of the fan blogs out there than on the subject of Jose Vidro. And this is, believe me, a very important subject because it drives much of the debate where the offense is concerned. Vidro has been targetted for fan criticism from the moment he arrived in Seattle and I suspect much of it has to do with the fact the team traded Chris Snelling and Emiliano Fruto to get him.
I’m going to be totally honest here, Geoff – this statement bugs the crap out of me. With this comment, you’ve veered from disagreeing with our analytical methods into questioning our motives, and that’s something of a sore spot for me. So, if this comes across as defensive or perturbed, well, when it comes to this kind of assertion, I am.
I guarantee you that I would have written exactly the same things about Jose Vidro regardless of who he had been traded for. My opinion of Jose Vidro has absolutely nothing to do with the departure of Chris Snelling. As much as we all love Doyle and want him to succeed, we’re not blind – we knew his chronic injury history was a huge problem.
No – The Jose Vidro stuff is about two things: Jose Vidro’s skills or lack thereof and how became the poster boy for everything that is wrong with how the Seattle Mariners build their roster and evaluate talent. It’s zero percent about Chris Snelling or Emiliano Fruto (who longtime readers know I was never any kind of fan of).
Disagree with our methods all you want – no problem. But when you start going after our credibility and claiming that our analysis is based on a hidden agenda, well, that’s not going to sit very well with me.
So, what happened? Well, the next half of the season is what happened. Since July 1, about when my advocacy of Jones was published on this blog — guaranteeing me weeks of love from the local fan blogosphere — Vidro has produced a .423 on-base percentage and a .459 slugging percentage for an OPS of .882. Now, I don’t know about any of you, but in my book, an .882 OPS from a DH not counted on strictly for power is quite good. It’s excellent, as a matter of fact.
We said so many good things about Geoff during the offseason and spring training – long before this issue ever turned into any real discussion – that people actually asked us to knock it off. We’ve made no secret of the fact that we think Baker is the best beat writer that we’ve ever seen, and his coverage of the team on a day to day basis has been a huge positive gain for the Seattle Times and for the online Mariner community. We didn’t stop liking Geoff when he suggested trading Ichiro for Mark Buehrle or Adam Jones for Dontrelle Willis, even as we were repulsed by the disastrously bad ideas he was coming up with.
So, no, this isn’t an issue of USSM only endorsing those who fall “lock-step” in line with our opinions. We like well thought out rational analysis, whether it comes to the same conclusion we do or not. The problem with the other side of the Jose Vidro debate is that the defenses of Vidro that we’ve seen aren’t well thought out or rational. No, instead, they were based on a constant misuse of statistics and a lack of understanding of how to properly value contributions of different players.
I really don’t want to turn this post into another Vidro/Jones debate that we’ve had a million times, but here’s the short of it – it was plainly obvious by the beginning of May that Adam Jones was a better player than Jose Vidro and would do more to help the team win the rest of the year. That was true in May, June, July, August, and it’s true now in September. Jose Vidro is an inferior baseball player to Adam Jones, and the team is better with Jones in the line-up than it is with Vidro in the line-up.
Which of those numbers bothers you? For the entire season, he’s hit .350 with an .808 OPS against righties. And another .308 with a .786 OPS against lefties. Those are season-long numbers, where the OPS was dramatically impacted by the first three powerless months. And do you know what? Neither OPS split is all that terrible.
What bothers us about Jose Vidro is that he’s keeping a better player on the bench. “Not Terrible” should not be any kind of obstacle to putting a player the caliber of Adam Jones on the field.
So, what to conclude? I’ll let you decide. But I am not about to write off 10 consistent weeks of top-level production by a guy as a “fluke” or a “hot streak”. I’ve heard this same tune being sung for weeks now. It was a “hot streak” two weeks in, then four, then eight and now 10. At what point do we conclude that possibly, just possibly, the first three months of the season were a matter of Vidro adapting to being a full-time DH?
There’s a couple of significant misunderstandings about how to understand statistics in this paragraph. I’ll try to tackle them both without getting too long winded.
1. Jose Vidro hasn’t been “hot” for 10 weeks. You simply can’t look at the actual performances during that stretch and come to that conclusion. Breaking down his post all-star break, you see three distinctly different stretches of baseball.
July 12th to August 15th: 29 games, 125 plate appearances, .413/.484/.500
August 17th to September 5th: 19 games, 86 plate appearances, .263/.326/.395
September 7th to September 15th: 8 games, 34 plate apperances, .464/.559/.679
For a month right after the all-star break, Vidro was a singles machine, building a productive 125 plate appearance stretch out of a massive quantity of singles. We all said it couldn’t continue, since the way he was getting his hits was not any kind of sustainable skill. He proceeded to have a stretch of 86 plate appearances where the balls stopped finding holes and he was, once again, a total drain on the line-up. Recently, he has once again started hitting well, this time actually driving the ball for extra base hits.
But there’s no 10 week hot stretch there. You can use the mean average to make it appear like there is, but that’s not intellectually honest. There’s a four week hot stretch, a three week cold stretch, and a one week hot stretch. Yes, you can pull his numbers since the all-star break and claim he was hitting well the whole time, but I could put a $50 million house in a ghetto and claim that the average home value of all the burned out buildings just increased by 600% too, thanks to the increase in the average home value of the neighborhood. Of course, that wouldn’t actually be true – that would be a misuse of statistics, ignoring the fact that the outliar is skewing the data. Just like claiming that Jose Vidro is on a ten week run of good hitting is a misuse of statistics.
2. The biggest flaw in the quoted paragraph, however, is a lack of understanding of random variation. This is a key point that I plan on addressing whenever I get around to finishing the other post on how to project player performance, but if you don’t know how to account for random variation or refuse to acknowledge its possible existence, you really have no chance of doing statistical analysis correctly.
Over 200 plate appearances, the effects of random variation are still very significant. Thanks to the work done in The Book, we know that if we assume a .330 true talent level OBP, for instance, over 200 plate appearances, 95% of all players will fall somewhere in the range of .264 OBP to .396 OBP. That’s a 130 point swing in on base percentage over 200 trips to the plate that can be correctly described as nothing more than random. If you’re completely unwilling to ever look at a performance change that large in that kind of sample and determine that it’s too significant to be random, you’ll fail at using statistics correctly.
Plain and simple – if every small sample of performance change leads you to believe that there’s been a tangible change of the underlying skill of the player and should change how he should be projected going forward, then you’re making a basic analytical error. And yes, Geoff, this is one of the major problems you continue to run into in your analysis – you’re far too willing to believe that recent performance swings obviously mean something. It’s an analytical problem, and if you want to try to set up a dichotomy where you’re taking the objective analytical approach and we’re just the biased fanboys, you really should look into getting that fixed.
I mean, I looked at his slugging percentage career-wise, in years when his legs were healthy, and concluded that a mark of .450 or higher would not be out of the question. That and his traditionally good on-base numbers would make him a good DH as long as the home run power was acquired someplace else. Well, if you want to point fingers, point them at Richie Sexson, because Vidro has now morphed into exactly what was hoped for when acquired.
This is exactly what we rail against in the Mariners analytical process, as it’s completely and utterly wrong. The M’s organization continually divides production up into predefined roles and expects nothing more or less than what they’ve established from that. They decided last winter that they needed a guy who didn’t strike out to hit second in the order, and so they acquired Jose Vidro with the singular hope that he would “keep innings going” and make a bunch of contact. Power didn’t matter, since that was Richie Sexson’s job.
That’s a ridiculous way to build a baseball team. The goal of every single hitter, regardless of line-up spot or position, is to produce runs. There are different ways to get there – obviously, Ichiro and Albert Pujols both produce runs using totally different skills – but that’s the goal for every hitter. You should never, never, never sacrifice runs for a particular skill. If you’re giving playing time to an inferior player because he does a certain thing that you tend to value, but it puts less runs on the board than what you could get from the other guy, you’re making the wrong decision.
Deciding that Jose Vidro doesn’t need to hit for power because “that’s Richie Sexson’s job” is just a horrible conclusion. Jose Vidro’s job is to produce runs, and he’d produce more runs if he hit for more power. Narrowly defining his job as singles-machine, and then being happy with your below average DH because he performed in your narrowly define target, does not mean that Jose Vidro performed well – it means that you created a ridiculous side goal that was different from winning baseball games.
Name me a team that’s going to sit a hitter, any hitter with a .423 on-base percentage over any prolonged stretch.
Alternately, name me a team that has a player as good as Adam Jones sitting on the bench. There isn’t one. He’s literally the best player in major league baseball that doesn’t have an every day job.
Or “platooning” (Raul Ibanez) against lefties for that one game a week Seattle actually faces one? For what purpose? Maybe some of you would take that risk. I don’t know. But it’s funny, I never see that part of things — the “head game” — discussed when folks talk about moving a player here, or plugging him in there.
Part of the Raul Ibanez Mystique is that he’s this great clubhouse veteran, a true team leader that does whatever it takes to help the team win, right? But the man has so fragile of an ego that we’re legitimately supposed to worry about how he might respond if he was platooned or moved to designated hitter?
Give me a break. This happens all across baseball all the freaking time. Platoons aren’t some neo-con statistical theory dreamed up in a baseball simulation by some nerds who don’t understand human relations. Every other baseball team in the world runs platoons, including the ones going to the playoffs. There are literally hundreds of examples of successful platoons throughout baseball, where amazingly major league players show the mental fortitude to not turn into a pumpkin simply when asked to DH or sit against same-handed pitchers.
There is exactly zero evidence supporting the idea that Raul Ibanez’s performance against right-handed pitching is tied to how often he plays left field or hits against left-handed pitching. It’s a theory – nothing less – that is unsupported by any kind of factual basis and goes against what every other baseball organization on the earth believes in.
Jim Leyland platoons. Joe Torre platoons. Tony LaRussa platoons. I think its fair to say that these guys understand the affects of playing time on a player’s psyche better than any beat writer.
Remember, this is not spring training. The parameters for this discussion began the day Adam Jones was called up and ran through to right now. A six-week period. Who are the guys who can give you the best production over the next six weeks to two months of playoff contention. Over the six weeks since, Ibanez and Vidro have been ripping the baseball, as I’ve shown. There is no need to remove either of them to squeeze a Class AAA call-up into the lineup.
Adam Jones is a better player, right now, than Ibanez or Vidro, and you can’t really come to any other conclusion based on the evidence at hand. You can, I guess, if you create bogus theories about platooning and veteran clutchness and the predictive power of small samples, but those theories lead to last place finishes.
He didn’t run down enough line drives to the gaps, you say? Well, point them out. Tell me which ones lost the game. I’d probably tell you the chances of winning would soar if the starting pitchers stopped yielding line drives to the gaps, but that’s just me.
The idea that some runs are inherently unimportant and should be completely discounted in the analysis of a player’s abilities because of their context is so remarkably wrong that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it. Geoff goes through a few game scenarios where Ibanez came up with hits that he defines as important, showing how he’s won far more games with his offense than he’s lost with his defense, and essentially settling on the conclusion that the runs he’s allowed defensively don’t really matter.
It’s nonsense. Trying to decide which runs count and which ones don’t is a fool’s errand. Using this type of analysis, you’d have to conclude that Adrian Beltre’s home run yesterday was worthless, as the team ended up losing 9-2, but that Ichiro’s RBI single on Thursday night that put the M’s on the board, cutting the lead to 5-1 in a game that the team ended up winning 8-7, was critical.
Not every run is exactly as important as every other run, but there is no such thing as a run that doesn’t count, and deciding future playing time based on the context of past events is a great way to lose a lot of baseball games.
Geoff blames the pitchers for allowing these line drives in the gap (and, apparently, flyballs down the line, bloopers into shallow left, or routine flys to the alley that Ibanez also fails to catch) and discards any responsibility from Raul for turning those opportunities into outs. But here’s the thing – whether its the pitcher’s fault for allowing that hit or not, that ball in the outfield is still an opportunity to turn a hit into an out, and that has real tangible value. Every single ball in play is a chance to take a hit away from an opponent – some, obviously, better chances than others – and ignoring these opportunities is just a total waste of resources.
Again, I don’t have a stake in Jones failing or succeeding. But some of you want me to rip the team for not rolling the dice over the past six weeks. For me, it’s an easy argument to make. I don’t see there being enough of a justification to get Jones in there. To jolt folks around in the field or lineup when they’re batting well over .300 and hitting for power. You’re right, we don’t know what Jones would have done. Only what Ibanez and Vidro did do.
This is yet another logical fallacy that just clouds the issue. This idea that Adam Jones’ performance was this impossible to predict question mark, this massive risk, while we knew exactly what we were going to get from Raul Ibanez is just completely and utterly wrong. As we’ve shown with plenty of evidence, refuted by no evidence from the other side of the issue, there is no evidence that veterans are any less streaky than a similarly talented young player.
Jones numbers in Class AAA: .968 OPS
Shelley Duncan’s numbers at Class AAA: .957 OPSDuncan’s numbers since his first three games as an outfielder for the Yankees after a July call-up: 11-for-48 (.229) with a .275 on-base and .396 slugging percentage for a .671 OPS.
Hey – I have an idea. Let’s find the one guy who supports my preconceived belief and use him to demonstrate that minor league numbers don’t mean anything.
I could do this to.
Matt Kemp, AAA: .329/.374/.540
Matt Kemp, Majors: .337/.374/.528
Matt Kemp, of course, is far more similar to Adam Jones than Shelly Duncan. They’re basically the same hitter – same age, same skillset, same development track. Shelly Duncan is nothing like either one of them. But again, that’s not the point. The point is that using one guy who came up from Triple-A and didn’t sustain his numbers doesn’t mean anything in any kind of real analytical discussion. The predictive power of minor league numbers is a well established issue with years and years of evidence.
This isn’t analysis, Geoff – this is cherry picking to support a pre-established belief.
None of us know what Jones would have done short-term and putting him in there would be a risk.
Guess what – none of us knew what Vidro or Ibanez would have done short-term and putting them in there was also a risk. Until you grasp this, the rest of the discussion is moot.
I just don’t get it. Well, actually, I do get it to an extent. But like I said, if you come here expecting an “agenda” where certain players, like Lopez, Green, Morrow, Jones etc. can do no wrong, while others, like Ibanez, Vidro, Sexson, and Willie Bloomquist can do no right, you won’t find it.
You won’t find that here either, Geoff. It’s not hard to search through the archives to find all guys of good things we’ve said about all those guys. Now, we may say more good things about Adam Jones and Sean Green than anyone else around, but that is basically a reaction to the ridiculous amount of positive press the veterans get from the organization and the local media. The entire reason there needs to be a Free Adam Jones Society in the first place is because the organization fails to recognize how valuable he actually is. If the organization didn’t have so many blind spots in their analytical process, we wouldn’t have to continually lobby for them to make better decisions.
And finally, this quote is actually from Saturday’s Baker blog entry, but it’s along the same theme, so I’ll add it here.
Should we bother to point out why they did this? Well, in their absolute foolishness, they worried that a bullpen supported by such young arms — having never been through the stress of a playoff run or arm strain of a full major league season — just might not hold up. Well, guess what? Do I really have to keep pointing out the obvious? OK, I will. The arms in the bullpen did not hold up. Now, we can do one of two things:
We can twist ourselves into pretzels grasping for excuses, explanations, comparisons with older players and all types of theories to justify the conspiracy angle…or…we can simply say, hey, maybe on this one occasion, the folks running the team were actually right. I know it hurts to do it, but just take a deep breath and try it. The team guessed right. The bullpen arms did not hold up. That means, of course, that those who believed they would hold up were wrong about that. It hurts to be wrong, sometimes, I know. We’ve all been there. But this bullpen just wasn’t going to hold up with so many arms not used to throwing so many innings under this kind of pressure. Not with this starting rotation, that’s for sure.
I want this point to come across as clearly as possible, as it’s vitally important to understanding where the disconnect in the two opinions is coming from.
None of us can know the future. We can’t. We just do not have the ability to know what other people are going to do in days that haven’t happened yet. All we can deal with is probability and likelihood. We can make the best decisions possible based on the information we have at the time, and what happens after that is completely out of our control.
No one “knew” how the bullpen was going to perform down the stretch. You didn’t, Geoff, and neither did we. Nor did John McLaren or Bill Bavasi. We all had our opinions, obviously, but unless you just think way too highly of your own opinion (and I’m pretty sure you don’t), you know that there wasn’t a 100% certainty on that opinion playing out as you suspected.
Now, again, this is important – the fact that the results went as you suspected does not mean that you were right. I’m pretty sure you’re going to disagree with this statement, but it’s a key point to understanding how to objectively analyze things correctly, which you’ve already stated is your goal. Let me give you an analogy:
We have a coin that has been altered so that it will come up heads 60% of the time and tails only 40% of the time. It’s designed to give the advantage to the person who calls heads. If you know this ahead of time and call tails, you have made the wrong decision, regardless of what happens after that. That coin can come up tails 10 times in a row and you still made ten wrong decisions.
Why? Because you had no way of knowing what the result of that 60/40 coin flip was going to be. All you can do is make the best decision you can on the available information, and in this example, heads is always the best decision, even though that decision will lead to losing 40% of the time.
This is what I’m talking about when I rail against results based analysis. When you allow your opinion to be swayed based on the results of a small sample that contradicts the conclusion of probability that real analytical processes led to, you’re going to make bad decisions.
Yes, the bullpen melted down, just as you suspected. We could have an entire discussion about whether this was probable or not, but here’s the key – that’s not the discussion we’re having. You’re basing your probability on the results, and that’s bad analysis.
Ironically, however, you’re ignoring the results of the proposed solutions to the problems you perceived. Since lobbying for their acquisition to upgrade the bullpen, every single reliever you were in favor of bringing in has performed disastrously. Eric Gagne, Dan Wheeler, Al Reyes, Octavio Dotel… all of them. And guess what? Since I lobbied for the Mariners to acquire Jose Contreras, David Wells, and Brett Tomko, all three of them have been terrific.
Does this mean that I was right and you were wrong? No, it doesn’t. Why? Because combined, that group of pitchers has only thrown about 130 innings total since the trade deadline, and anything can happen over 130 innings. I didn’t know that Jose Contreras was going to turn it around immediately after I started lobbying for the Mariners to trade for him. I didn’t know that Eric Gagne was going to implode upon leaving Texas. And you didn’t know that Sean Green was going to start struggling as soon as the calendar hit August.
The only thing we can evaluate is the evaluative processes we take to reach the conclusions that we do – everything after that is out of our control.
This is where we differ from both you and the Mariner organization. And this is where, I believe, both you and the Mariners make the most mistakes. This is the heart of the thing that we’ve been arguing for years and years – the Mariners are behind the times in learning how to evaluate players because their processes are broken.
Until the organization learns how to do analysis properly, understand probability, and not buy into cliches that aren’t based on evidence, they’ll continue to lose to better run organizations who are winning with less resources.
Why did we spend so much time on the Adam Jones/Jose Vidro debate? Because it’s 2007’s shining example of the analytical flaws that the orgnaization holds. As long as the team continues to make decisions based on the analytical processes that lead to things like Vidro = Good DH and Jones = Class AAA Callup, they’ll never be able to compete in the AL West. It’s a symptom of a larger problem, and that larger problem is the one that we’re trying to fix.
Indians get smarter
The Cleveland Indians, the team I’ve often described as the best run franchise in baseball, today announced the hiring Keith Woolner away from Baseball Prospectus to manage their statistical research and analysis department. Keith’s a smart guy, and was always very helpful to me, so I’m happy for him. He’s joining a first rate organization.
What does this mean for Mariner fans? Maybe nothing… or perhaps, the Indians are simply preparing themselves for life after Chris Antonetti, who essentially built the department that Woolner will now oversee.
Some team will get to see Antonetti in ’08 become a reality. Here’s to hoping it’s the Mariners.
Adios to One Stiff, Bienvenidos to Another.
According to Geoff Baker, we’ve seen the last of Rene Rivera. Hallellujah.
Jamie Burke has made the team as the backup catcher. We’ll see how long he sticks, but anyone not named Rene Rivera is an upgrade.
Also, Jeremy Reed was optioned to Tacoma. The team apparently feels fine with Broussard as the backup corner outfielder and Bloomquist as the backup center fielder, and there’s a legitimate chance that Hargrove The Great carries 13 pitchers on opening day that frees up room for the (dis)organization to carry Rey Ordonez. No, I’m not kidding.
110 million dollar payroll, and the best these clowns can do is Rey Ordonez, Jamie Burke, and rushing Brandon Morrow to the show.
Fire them all. Antonetti in ’08.