Game 72, Marlins at Mariners
A game thread! Remember those?
Tucker v Dickey. 7:10. I’m sure all the lineup problems will be worked out.
Update: Yup! The worst hitter in the AL has been moved out of the three spot. Problem solved!
Pearlman’s Dave Fleming profile
I saw Seth point out a nice ESPN piece on Dave Fleming done by Jeff Pearlman. I’m a huge fan, if you remember my 2006 “Rise and Fall of Dave Fleming” piece, and I really enjoyed reading it.
Brief clarification on the M’s statheads, our wrongness
Okay, so, the wrongness first then the rest. We thought and have been telling people that Mat Olkin now worked for the Royals and not the M’s, which is not true, and we apologize for the error.
So I reached out, and here’s the scoop: Olkin’s an outside consultant for the M’s. As discussed earlier, they call him up, give him a problem, he offers an opinion. His contract has a limited exclusivity clause, and when he went to the pitching conference for the Royals, he hadn’t changed jobs or stopped doing work for the M’s.
I was under the impression that he was working only for the M’s, for a variety of wrong reasons including but not limited to assumptions about his role on the team (which as you can tell from my BP essay back in the day I really wanted to believe was influential). So when Olkin was at the pitching conference (and appeared in the Wall Street Journal as a Royals consultant) I thought he’d hopped jobs.
Now, to the other issue that’s caused some confusion, the difference between staff/consultants, and this is going to get even more boring. If you look at the Indians front office page you’ll see Keith Woolner, stathead extraordinaire, listed as “Manager, Baseball Research & Analytics”. On the Rays roster, a couple spots below Don Zimmer is James Click, “Coordinator, Baseball Operations”.
In my mind, that’s “staff”. I’d even consider formalized arrangements like the Cardinals’ committee. I wouldn’t count people who get sent research questions. And in the M’s directory, there isn’t anyone on staff doing this stuff. So when Lincoln says he has two people on staff, skilled in all aspects of sabermetrics, I don’t know if they’re counting Olkin’s consulting as a staff member and there’s also another, unknown person, or what. But you can go through the directory and there’s no one there, and so far as I know, they’re certainly not present at research meetings like the one the Royals hired Olkin to attend. So my questions about their assertion that they’ve got a staff of statheads remain unanswered.
Is this at all helpful? Too boring? Minutiae-fixated?
Hickey: why is Ichiro in right?
Hickey takes a minute to express his bafflement at Ichiro’s move.
It is weird: they’re moving Ichiro to right to make room for a WFB/Reed platoon, it looks like, so they’re displacing Wlad, who was hitting an anemic .196/.265/.346, with WFB, a career .258/.313./.323 hitter, and Reed, who with this year’s rally is still at .254/.316/.368. Now potentially, you replace Wlad’s bad glove with Ichiro’s good one, and get Reed, a competent center, in there a lot, that’s a wholescale outfield defense upgrade.
And maybe they think that all the running in center’s caught up to him and is taking a lot out of Ichiro’s legs, which has affected his ability to run out infield hits, harming his offensive game, and putting him in right you get good defense in right, happy Ichiro, and his average will go back up. We’ll see if that’s the case.
Stone on the M’s stathead-y-ness, Olkin’s still consulting
Larry Stone has an interesting piece up about the M’s direction which includes some meaty quotes with Mat Olkin, who it would appear is still consulting for the team.
“I feel safe saying Bill was always interested in having that perspective,” said Olkin, who remains on staff. “The thing I can’t speak to is how he weighed that against other voices he listened to. I think he would have been a fool to listen to only me, and not to a lot of the other very qualified men he had on board.
I’m happy to be wrong and a little surprised to hear this — Olkin was repping the Royals recently at a conference where the Lookout Landing guys were, and it would be unusual for someone with an ongoing consulting relationship to work for more than one team. Usually, team consulting gigs are, to oversimplify, “Be on retainer to answer questions about stuff” (as you see Olkin’s job is) or “We want you to run a study on defensive deterioration in free agent first basemen.” (this is usually quickly followed with “Pay? Why would we pay you? You should be happy to run a study for us!” and “No, you can’t publish.”)(I am totally not joking). The contracts of the first kind that I know of are generally team-exclusive or through NDA/limited non-competes manage to effectively limit the work to one team… but on the other hand, I’ll freely admit my knowledge of this kind of thing is a couple years old.
Olkin’s role, traditionally, is not so much resident stathead (and does consulting count as “on staff”?) but as he described it:
“Part of that was by design. Bill always tried to protect me by not giving me any more information than he had to. He wouldn’t say, ‘I want to do this, what do you think?’ He’d say, ‘I have option A, B, C or D. I’m not going to tell you which one I like. You tell me which one you like and why.’ He always gave me the feeling he was very interested in what I had to say.”
One of the examples Olkin gave before was “here’s a list of minor league guys we’re giving you for no reason, are any of them particularly interesting?” and then later you’d find out that was the list of possible players the M’s could get back in trade.
Which is to say, in the sense of organizational approach, not a lot of influence, but they did seek his opinion on particular decisions.
Anyway, I’ve got a line out to Mat, so we’ll see what he says, and I’ll update everyone if I hear back.
Baker on the next GM
Geoff talks about what he thinks the M’s need to look at in a new GM, plugging Cashman (handling the big budget is important) and Tony LaCava.
Remember his name. If you hear it again later, you can’t pretend to be surprised.
Or you know, earlier and earlier still.
He also discounts the Rays success for a while, saying they had no choice but to go with youth over the last six years, which is a convenient timeframe because it clips the seasons where the Devil Rays spent a lot of money on overpriced free agents before learning a valuable lesson and turning to building internally. In 2000 they were #10 in baseball. It also ignores the complete 180 the Tampa organization did after the firing of Chuck LaMar, and the top to bottom philosophical overhaul that began with the hiring of Andrew Friedman.
Next shoes to drop off this octopus of sucktasticness
It’s interesting — with Bavasi gone and the pretense of contending this year essentially abandoned, Pelekoudas is set up for success for the rest of the year: as much as the team’s been underperforming, he won’t have to do much for his record over the rest of the season to look like improvement with signs of hope for the future, and Armstrong/Lincoln are all about the positive momentum.
We’ve seen reports that the team’s been in nonstop meetings about what to do next, and Sexson’s DFA is rumored. From the Herald:
According to one person familiar with moves that are planned, Sexson will be let go, possibly within days. The timing is not set because the team is dealing with other personnel issues that go beyond the procedures for moving Sexson.
There also is the delicate process involved with getting rid of Sexson, who’s making $14 million this season in the final year of a four-year, $50 million contract.”
Probably not so much a delicate process, if I may. You call everyone else, ask if they’re interested in Sexson, everyone says no, you DFA him and move on. The delicate part of this process took all last season and this one.
Anyway, just think about it: Lee gets to DFA Sexson, to general applause, throw Vidro out or bench him, hopefully get McLaren to come up with some kind of sane defensive alignment, which will make the pitchers look a lot better, and all of a sudden the team’s playing much better ball than they were up to that point, the fan base is happier…
This Is Why You’re Terrible
As always, Larry Stone checks in with a well written, well reasoned piece on what the conclusion of the GM search will say about the organization. In it, he talks to Mat Olkin (who, despite still being on retainer here, works for the KC Royals now), who the M’s hold up as their carrot that they understand real statistical analysis and its applications to roster management. He also talks to Chuck Armstrong about that side of the game and gets this quote:
In my own mind, I’ve used statistical analysis the whole time I’ve been in the game,” he said. “I will also say Bill Bavasi, among the various GMs I’ve had here, has used it the most of anybody.
“On the other hand, I’ve learned if you just keep going with the cold hard statistics, that’s not the optimal way, either. Talk to some of the old-line scouts, and they’ll tell you that of the top 10 things to look for, the top three or four are makeup, makeup, makeup. Then after that you start looking at tools.
Bob Fontaine is an old-line scout. Let me quote him from the USSM event on Saturday (you know, when those inflexible stathead nerds and their computers spent a few hours talking scouting with an old line scout): “I’m from the Branch Rickey school of scouting. My first word was tools.”
If you talk to Bob, you’ll know that while he believes that makeup is important, he also believes its nearly impossible to predict. He’ll tell stories of guys that admitted they weren’t fans of the game and everyone assumed they wouldn’t play hard, but once they put the jersey on they were the best makeup guys around. He will say, straight out, that Jim Abbott is the only guy he’s ever been 100% sure of on a player’s makeup, and he’s been scouting for 30 years. One dude, in 30 years, that he felt comfortable saying “yea, I have a good feel for that guy’s makeup”.
Until the Mariners organization decides to start valuing baseball players for their abilities and not their personalities, this team will always suck. The absolute must have quality the next GM must possess is the willingness to tell Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln to take their desire to see a team full of guys with the right kind of personality and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
Your top ten that includes makeup, makeup, and makeup at 1-3 on the priority list, Chuck? It’s ridiculously stupid, and you need to throw it away. This isn’t stats vs scouts – this is reason and intelligence versus your particular brand of drivel.
Hire someone who knows how to build a baseball team and get out of the way. Thank you.
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.
Small snapshots of a trip through ESPN.com
(thanks to Kevin for the email that wound up inspiring this)