Remember me?
I was saddened to read in the comments today that “Derek and Dave do a great job” here at the good ship USS Mariner. Not because I disagree — on the contrary, I think they do a great job — but because I realized it’s been so long since I posted regularly that we probably have a number of new readers who don’t even know I’m a writer here. Sigh.
All of which is to say… I’m working on it. In another week I should be finished living out of a suitcase, as I have been the last few weeks. My work schedule is working toward regularity. And my son (who turned four months old today, incidentally), while still a full-time job and then some, doesn’t take quite as much time as he used to and even occasionally sleeps for extended periods of time.
In any event, I haven’t forgotten about you guys (and gals), the great readers who make this whole thing go. There will be an updated Big Board before the end of the year, and I’ll be at the second annual USSM Pizza Feed next month in case some of you really don’t believe I exist. If that describes you, don’t feel bad. I have to send Derek and Dave email sometimes to let them know I’m not dead.
In the meantime, I suggest we all sit back and wait for the M’s to screw up their off-season once again. But hey, how about those Sonics?
Free Agent Madness
Here’s a signing that won’t get much notice but exemplifies why groups of fans on the outside often feel like the “old school” way of doing things is just so far out of touch with reality that it defies logic.
Juan Castro signed a two year, $2 million contract with the Twins. $1 million a year isn’t that much money for a major league player, really. Its only three times the league minimum. Overall, a pretty minor contract in the budget of the Twins. But look at Castro’s career.
1599 major league at-bats. Career line? .226/.269/.331. That’s worse than Ramon Santiago (.234/.303/.317) and far worse than Willie Bloomquist (.268/.329/.355). It’s worse than what Scott Spiezio (.215/.288/.346) hit last year.
The best comparison for Castro’s career offensive performance? The 2003 and 2004 versions of Jeff Cirillo. So let’s not kid ourselves; Juan Castro cannot hit. At all. He’s not even a replacement level hitter. He’s as close to an automatic out as you’re going to find at the major league level.
Now here’s the kicker. The Twins signed him to lock up his age 33 and 34 seasons, where he’s likely to decline, if that’s even possible. Imagine giving a two year contract to Jeff Cirillo right now.
Sure, Juan Castro can play some nice defense. But there isn’t a level of human defensive performance imaginable that could compensate for his abilities at the plate. Even in his prime, his glove was good enough to make him about as good as most Triple-A players. Now, as he slowly slips into being a shell of his former self, he’s going to collect $2 million from the Twins for the right to make their team worse.
Terry Ryan has done a lot of good things in Minnesota. But I just can’t imagine any justification for giving Juan Castro a two year contract. Just brutal.
M’s Q&A on MLB.com
As mentioned in the comments, always good for a chuckle.
My reactions every time I read this (and I can’t stop):
“What? Why would you ask that?”
“What kind of answer is — what?”
“What?”
I’m continually baffled that there are people out there who write in and want to air their pet theories — and their theories are like “should the M’s go get Ben Davis back… to DH?” (Street’s answer is awesome, by the way)
And then there’s every week’s token factual error, like
The switch-hitting Delgado would seem to fit the Mariners’ most pressing need, but all it takes is one other team to get into a bidding war and it’s goodbye Carlos.
Delgado learned to switch hit? When did he manage that? And considering his career success as a lefty… why?
Feed Reminder
Have you signed up for the Second Annual U.S.S. Mariner Pizza Feed? If the answer isn’t yes, you really should. We’ve already got a nice crowd, but the more, the merrier. We’re confirming special guests left and right, and we’ll start announcing them in the next few weeks. You really should come.
The details:
When?: December 18th from 12 pm to 5 pm.
Where?: Horace Mann Elementary School in Redmond.
Who?: Derek, Jason, Dave, you, and various special guests who you’ll enjoy meeting.
How much>?: $15 per person
Is there food?: Enough pizza, salad, and sides for lunch and a small dinner (New York Vinnie excluded)
Great! Now what? If you’re going to attend, you must do three things:
1. Email us with the name of each person you’re confirming attendance for.
2. You’ll receive an address in response to mail your check to. Payment in advance is required; your spot is not guaranteed until we receive your money.
3. Show up on the 18th.
Bring friends. Bring family. Bring yourself. We’ve got room, and we’ll have plenty of food. Its the best $15 you will spend in December.
Future Forty Updated
Prospect junkies rejoice; a new Future Forty is here. This is the first update since the end of the regular season. I will likely do one more update during the offseason as we head towards spring training. If you’ve got prospect related questions, this would be a great thread for those dicussions.
A few notes from the update:
I’m still pretty down on the farm system. We love King Felix, obviously, but there’s still a significant chance that he’ll suffer a major injury. Reed and Choo are solid prospects with limited potential; neither is a future all-star, to me. After those three, its a collection of guys with injury problems, gaping flaws in their games, or a lack of experience. The top tier of prospects aren’t very good. The strength of the system is the depth in the mid-level talent, as even the guys in the 20-35 range have potential as big league players. Unfortunately, roster limitations are going to make it likely that even if that potential is fulfilled, it will probably be with another organization.
I’m glad I don’t have to figure out who is going to play where in the infield at Wisconsin and Inland Empire next year. Finding playing time for Cabrera, Navarro, Jones, Chen, Tuiasasopo and Castro, all of whom believe they are shortstops or second baseman, is going to be a challenge. They also get to deal with the walking stiff that is Michael Garciaparra in that mix as well. Good luck.
If I had to peg three guys from the farm system as possible Rule 5 picks, I’d probably go with Rich Dorman, Cesar Jimenez, and Brett Evert. Ryan Rowland-Smith is a longshot possibility.
The M’s are going to have to do some more juggling as the offseason progresses. They’d like to bring five or six players into the organization and have only one free spot on the 40-man roster. I’m expecting Aaron Looper to get DFA’d and likely slip through waivers. The other choices will be interesting. Leone, Bloomquist, Dobbs, Rett Johnson, Taylor, Atchison, and Thornton are all vulnerable, but all have fans in parts of the organization. Due to the roster congestion, I think we’ll see several more minor trades made in an effort to clear spots on the 40-man roster.
Smoke does not mean Koskie
It doesn’t matter what Koskie or Koskie’s agent or dog or hairdresser or mother says at this point, he’s not signed until he’s signed.
I also want to mention that the Leone for Third thing on Koskie was a joke, a parody of MLB.com’s writing.
It was not an actual article. Koskie has not signed. Stop putting this article in the comments. I’m really tired of deleting them, and I’m || close to giving up and granting people the benefit of whether they’re trolling or confused.
Thank you.
Update: here’s Dave’s post on why Corey Koskie’s a bad idea.
Marginal wins
Ben Murphy, who is a fine fellow and highly recommended, wrote up this year’s Marginal Wins article at Baseball Prospectus, continuing the work of Doug Pappas, who I hung out with at the Mariners game where the power went out, and was a fine fellow himself.
To spoil the article for you: marginal wins is a measure of how well a team spent their money. It’s cool because it doesn’t care where you get your wins, or how you went about constructing the team. All that matters is how many wins you got, and how much money it took you go get those wins, compared to how much money you’d have to spend on a team of minimum-salary guys who’d lose many, many games.
The Mariners were second-worst in the majors, with $5,079,433/marginal win. The A’s spent $1,212,858. The average team spends about $1,855,682 for every marginal win.
There are some drawbacks to marginal wins in evaluating the worth of a front office, particularly in that a GM can inherit a lot of really bad contracts and that’ll show up (and conversely, a GM taking over a team with a good, deep farm system will have quality, cheap players they may not have been responsible for developing). But even then, it’s an excellent metric for how relatively good an organization has done assembling their team and running their operations.
And the 2004 Mariners were awwwwwwwwwwwwwful.
Rolling contracts
Kris Benson to the Mets, 3y, $22.5m. I once hoped for great things from Kris Benson, and now $7m/year seems excessive.
Glendon Rusch signed a 2y, $4m deal too.
I don’t know what to make of these deals, except to say that hauling Meche to arbitration looks like a better idea with each pitcher signing.
MLB’s advise and consent policy
ESPN ran an innocous little feature which includes MLB’s advisory reply form. I always find things like this interesting, because I’m a rules geek, but what’s particularly cool about seeing this is thinking about how this is part of a larger campaign by MLB to keep salaries down. It’s putting a paper trail to what’s been going on for a while, and it’s part of a whole strategy that’s been effective to lower labor costs in any way they can.
Collusion, where the teams get together and conspire to control bidding on free agents, is strictly prohibited. Selig once led the owners in this and the player’s union won a complete victory in court. The fine of $280m was so large that it’s been used as justification for the last round of expansion, which is bunk but a whole other post.
I have to give credit to Selig for learning from his mistakes. Determined to lower the cost of labor however he can, Selig’s moved cautiously over his term to use his power as Commisioner to put pressure on salaries, and he’s done so without getting into legal trouble.
The draft has been the most obvious because the MLBPA doesn’t care about it. Every year, MLB is a little more involved, and puts more pressure on teams to make conforming offers to their draft picks. They’re trying to move towards unstated but de-facto slotting of the kind the NFL and NBA have as part of their rules, where pick #1 gets $a, pick #2 gets $b, and so on until down the line. Ownership groups dig this because it means that they pay less for those insociant youngsters, but front office sentiment is mixed. It means that if there’s an amazing draft coming up, those players get screwed, which is okay by GMs, but as slotting becomes inflexible it will also mean that in a bad draft, they’d be obligated to pay a lesser player the same amount. It would also mean less flexibility to look to signability guys if you have a ton of early picks from losing free agents, or to look to pay a potential pick a lot to not go to school on an athletic scholarship if you have local connections that might help.
We’ve also seen MLB deflate salaries by running a lot of information through the labor counsel office, which handles arbitration. What happens here is at the end of the year, say Bavasi’s thinking about offering arbitration to Dan Wilson. When he talks to MLB, he’ll say “I’m not offering contracts to these guys. Now this Dan Wilson guy, I don’t know, you should see the fan mail he gets…”
And MLB will say “Funny you should mention that. Having talked to some other guys, I think there will be six to eight free agent catchers on the market…”
So Bavasi declines, figuring Wilson would get more in arbitration then the M’s could re-sign him for, or find a suitable alternative. In doing this, baseball’s helped push more players each year into the free agent market, and kept players out of arbitration, and reduced their willingness to offer lucrative extensions. After all, why offer a guy a premium deal if he’s going to be a commodity in a month?
Now, this doesn’t technically violate the CBA… well, maybe it does. It’s certainly close. But that’s not for me to argue, it’s for the MLBPA, and they haven’t filed a suit yet.
This new wrinkle is interesting because it implies that teams thinking about, say, Carlos Beltran, would ask MLB what a reasonable contract would look like for four years. And MLB would return this form referenced by ESPN in which they’d say “30-40m, based on these other guys”.
There are are some intentional flaws even in this formal document. It neglects a rise in revenues, or inflation — say top center fielders are making $5m/year, and the league signs a deal to broadcast in holovision, and every team suddenly makes twice as much national broadcast money. The comperables will still be based on the old money. There’s also a couple issues of judgement and applicability in who MLB choses to pull as comperables, what their specific situations were, and then there’s the jump to the number they put at the top, which is also a judgement call.
Now the form’s filled with caveats and warnings about how every situation is different, but if this becomes widespread, it would help to bracket the initial offers from teams in a pretty narrow range.
And then, if MLB is reviewing contract offers themselves, they can start giving teams trouble if their offer is out of line with others. This would prevent the kind of Alex Rodriguez deal from occurring again, where the winning offer was far higher than the second-highest offer. This, again, doesn’t obviously violate the CBA, but it’s still not in the spirit of fair play. If someone wants to spend far too much money on a player, why not let them?
Part of this has traditionally gone on through back channels, which MLB’s trying to shut down. As agents like to play the disinformation game and inflate the number of teams, or offers they’d received, teams had the opposite intention, because they were best served by not over-bidding. So teams leaked contract offer information to the press, or even in discussions with other teams would mention they’d made an offer, or were thinking about making an offer… and it would get around pretty quickly. In the last bargaining agreement negotiations, MLB wanted to have a clearing house of offers — so a team could call up and say “who else has put in offers on Beltran, and what were they?” It was a formalization of this past back-channel network, and it got axed, so teams went back to using the press.
As MLB wants to keep that kind of thing quiet, they now made formal a process that they hope keeps the initial bidding in a small range, even if they don’t put pressure on the bidding that follows.
There have been rumors that MLB’s been doing something even more egregious than this, by actually controlling who gets what offers in, but information on even what specific allegations are is scarce — and if they were doing it, they’d be in court almost immediately. It’s worth mentioning as part of understanding why the players are so suspicious about the whole thing, and the MLBPA is particularly jumpy lately.
Even beyond those moves, Selig’s attempts at enforcement of the debt/equity rules (where teams can’t have debt, including futre contract obligations, in excess of a certain percentage of team value, which… well, you know how that can be manipulated) put a damper on team spending even beyond the salary cap itself.
There’ve been two major factors in the market correction of the last two years. The smaller’s that there are more smarter teams that understand the concept of replacement level and are good at the cheap scrap-recycling. The far larger has been the massive weight applied to the whole process by MLB, and seeing what happens this off-season is going to be interesting.
Rule 5 draft
Anytime you see it as “Rule V” you can safely assume the author doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s in the books as “Rule 5”. I have no idea why this misconception persists. I can tell you that there are writers out there that have their editors change the correct designation to the incorrect one.