Game 121, Mariners at Twins
Silva’s joyous return to Minnesota. Faces Liriano.
Seriously, the Twins offered to give the M’s $10m and the M’s wouldn’t take it. And now they get to face Silva. Their cup runneth over.
Washburn for GM
Because half-bad is better than no good.
From Larry Stone, writing on the Seattle Times blog:
On the rumors that the Twins were offering Boof Bonser, Washburn said: “If that was the case, how much more do you think you’re going to get? A young guy with a great arm who’s cheap.â€
Washburn and the Winner’s Curse
We’ve mentioned this around here before, but the Winner’s Curse is one of the most important concepts to grasp around baseball valuation. In short: the person who wins an auction is most likely wrong, because they have the highest opinion of the value of the object. Take an oil field, probably the most common example: if ten companies survey it and make a guess at the value, how much oil they can extract from it, of what kind, and how much it would cost, the one that offers the most came up with a set of assumptions that deviated the most from everyone else’s expert consensus, and while they’ll win the auction, they’re probably screwed in how well they’ll do.
Or take Tejada — the M’s thought he was worth x, the Orioles thought he was worth x+y. The Orioles were much less likely to get a good return on their investment.
So here’s the problem with Washburn. One of the arguments about keeping Washburn is that his $10m next year is a bargain in this market, he’s a left-handed innings eater, and so on.
Here’s the problem with that… no one else believes that Washburn’s next year is worth giving up a decent prospect. If they did, someone would have made a deal before the trade deadline. If $10m was a bargain, every team in baseball with a remotely malleable rotation would have lined up to bid.
So we know at least that the remainder of Washburn’s contract isn’t valued highly enough by the rest of the league that many teams will offer a nice package for it.
Moreover, we also know that teams in a pennant race who could use Washburn, where Washburn’s remaining potential contribution could have an enormous return in getting into the playoffs instead of missing them, still didn’t line up to offer prospects for Washburn before the deadline.
So in the mind of 29 other teams:
Washburn 2009+2010 = not worth a decent prospect
Washburn 2009+2010+increased chance of playoff contention = not worth a decent prospect
If the Twins were indeed willing to give up Bonser, that would make them the team outside the M’s with the highest opinion of Washburn’s potential value.
At this point, a rational organization, or one with some kind of internal variety of opinion, would stop for a second and think “I wonder if we’re over-valuing his services. After all, 29 other teams, almost all of which are more successful than us, are coming in far lower than we thought, and that includes teams that we know are really smart and have more to gain from Washburn’s services than we do.”
They might even consider whether this disparity ties into the horrible contracts they’ve been handing out to pitchers for years and years. They might rethink their assumptions, look ahead to next year, and realize that the default option of letting Washburn go for nothing helps the team in the long term.
Not the Mariners. The M’s can manage to lose bidding wars to themselves. And it’s us, the fans, who are going to pay for this continued incompetence until there are massive organizational changes, including those who represent the team’s owners.
Because the Washburn issue isn’t bad enough
Chris Tillman tops Baseball America’s Prospect Hot Sheet this week. You might remember Tillman from such trades as Jones-Sherrill-Mickolio-Tillman to the Orioles for Erik Bedard.
Tillman’s fanned nearly ten hitters per nine innings at AA this year while allowing a mere nine homers in 118.2 innings, Sherrill’s saved 31 games, Jones has hit better than (I personally) expected, and Mickolio’s pitched well in relief (again).
Ugh.
From Minnesota, the other side
What’s an indication?
From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
I received indications that the Twins offered Boof Bonser. Makes sense, as he is out of minor-league options, and the Twins would need to clear a spot for Washburn. As I wrote recently, Bonser is only 26, and it makes sense for a team that is way out of the race to let Bonser make 10 starts down the stretch.
Bonser isn’t even eligible for arbitration, so the Mariners could have found a pitcher for their 2009 rotation who will make less than $500,000 next year.
Oh no. I have indications the Mariners insisted on getting one of the Twins’ current starting pitchers. Yeah, like Nick Blackburn or Kevin Slowey. That, friends, is sheer lunacy.
I’m interested to see what the Mariners leak in response to this. Blackburn or Slowey for Washburn and Washburn’s contract would, indeed, be total, howl-at-the-moon insanity.
Funny random thought
After writing the waivers explained post, in which we discuss waivers, no-trade clauses, and whether Washburn’s no trade clause would prevent the M’s from even requesting irrevocable waivers (unless they bought out the clause ahead of time), I thought “I wish Kim Ng was around, she worked in the MLB transactions office for a while and is notorious for knowing this kind of thing inside and out.” There’s always hope.
How waivers work
Getting a waiver
A team must receive a waiver in order to do some things with a player’s contract. Like:
– assign it to a minor league team, if a player meets some conditions
– trade it to another major league team, under some conditions
– give a player his unconditional release (we saw this with Sexson and Vidro, for instance). We’re not going to discuss this one as we walk through this.
To get a waiver, a team notifies MLB. Waivers are batched up by the day they’re received (days run from 2pm-2pm eastern time). A team can only request waivers on seven players in any day.
Making waiver claims
Then other teams can enter waiver claims. They essentially have two business days to make the claim.
So if tomorrow I request a waiver for Carlos Silva and get that in before 2pm Eastern, other teams have until 1pm Eastern on Tuesday to notify the league they’d like to make a waiver claim.
If no one claims the player, the team requesting waivers gets them and can do whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place. They get a nice waiver notice which presumably is emailed to them.
Who gets a claim
One team claims, they get the waiver claim
More than one team claims, the precedence order goes worst record in the same league to best record in same league and then the other league. This is a dumb rule. The way the precedence is determined is also complicated, and not “record at time of claim”.
Then MLB sends a nice note to the requesting team that tells them what claims were made. The rule is “any claims”.
The requesting team now has a couple of options:
Let the claiming team take the contract
If no action is taken, the player’s assigned to the claiming team. The team losing the player gets a token amount of cash.
This seems to be frequently overlooked. If someone puts on a claim on Carlos Silva in the previous example, and when I call them up they tell me they want an extra player, or they’re just blocking a trade, or they made a mistake and meant to claim another player, well, it really sucks to be them, because in a month I’m going to sympathize with them about how hard it is to get sour cream out of the clubhouse carpeting.
Make a deal
Work out a means of compensation, either in prospects who don’t have to go through waivers, cash, or gift certificates to the Body Shop. There’s a time limit on this.
Withdraw the waiver request
This is the only leverage the requesting team has: threatening to keep the guy.
If the team requesting a waiver on a player can’t work out a deal with the claiming team, they can withdraw their request. The player stays on their team, and if they were requesting waivers for purpose of a transaction, they’re stuck unable to make that move.
If they do that, they can still try this trick again, but with an added twist:
Requesting waivers again
If a player’s pulled back, a team can request a waiver on the same player again (this is kind of confusing in the rules, by the way, which says “no you can’t request waivers twice” and then “requesting waivers twice in the same period…”)
In this case, the waivers are irrevocable: the requesting team can’t pull the player back. So if you request again post-August 1st, the second time whoever wins the claim war automatically gets them. They don’t have to make a deal or anything.
That doesn’t mean that if the player clears, they have to release him.
The Worst Run Organization In Baseball
In case you weren’t sure, today was a great reminder that we’re all rooting for the worst run organization in baseball. There’s not another franchise with worse leadership or more incompetence in positions of power. From the CEO on down, these people don’t know baseball. They don’t know how to run a baseball team, build a roster, or win baseball games.
This organization is a massive collection of failures. They pile ridiculous decisions on top of each other, only outdoing their stupidity with an arrogance that refuses to learn from their mistakes. They are the Pets.com of MLB, only they refuse to go out of business.
I’m far too attached to the childhood memories I have to ever root for another team, but if the M’s screw up this offseason and don’t completely overhaul the baseball operations department, hiring somebody who actually understands baseball, I’ll spend the next few years rooting for these people to fail miserably and be embarrassed publicly.
These people don’t deserve success. They deserve to be looking for new jobs.
Fire them all.
SI reports no deals for Wash, Ibanez
Heyman reports the M’s failed to work out a deal and both players will be returning to the team.
If true — The M’s could have just rid themselves of Washburn’s horrible contract for next year. This is absurdly horrible mistake of the team that should disqualify our interim GM and anyone associated with the decision from even being considered for a leadership position in the future.
Dave adds: Seriously, this is an indefensible position. None of the people involved in this decision deserve to work in baseball. Fire them all.
USSM Public Service Announcement
The next… oh, let’s say three… people to comment that free agents won’t sign with Seattle, particularly in discussions about getting rid of dead weight free agents that signed in Seattle, will be shown the door.