Off-season to-do list
I’ve been asked “So what are you going to do in the off-season?”
A brief summary:
– spend time with the Mrs.
– write my chapters for Baseball Prospectus 2005
– research, writing for Secret Project 1, details forthcoming
– research, writing for Secret Project 2, details not forthcoming
– improve the site some more
– possibly launch bizarre, ill-fated site features
– research stocks
– read books
– play video games
I also may watch some football.
The off-season doesn’t do a lot to lighten my workload. Anyway, back to the keyboard.
Site work update
It’s close to nine now, and I’ve completed all the stuff I felt I had to get done. Comment protection is now… well, it’s pretty brutal, though until it can actually reach out and beat the stuffing out of people it’s not as brutal as I’d like.
I have not yet relaxed the controls I put in the first time, so the caveats about AOL issues still apply. All told, today’s site upgrades probably took 2 hours of actual futzing with stuff beyond time spent figuring out how to get them to work and integrated without there being anything obvious that you, the reader, would notice. Which now that I write, that, seems kind of dumb. I should have put blinking “Derek pwnz!!” tags everywhere or something. Anyway–
Let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary, particularly with comments. I did not get to some of the more wonkier stuff I’d hoped to get to, but that’s life. Anyone who wants to talk to me about MySQL, WordPress, and the stranger corners of performance optimization can drop me a line. I’m off to worry about the election but I’ll be back soon enough.
More M’s accounting in the media
From MLB.com
How much money do the Mariners have available to work with for free-agent signings this offseason? Also, who are the M’s players that are currently scheduled to be returning to the 25-man team (and their salary commitments)? — David Smirnow
Howard Lincoln, the team’s CEO, has said that the payroll budget would not be cut this season, which suggests that the organization will spend about $93 million next season. As of Nov. 1, the team has 11 players under contract next season for $53.68 million. They also owe Jeff Cirillo $4.78 million, and will pay $500,000 to buy out pitcher Kevin Jarvis. Starting pitcher Gil Meche is eligible for free agency and figures to get at least $1 million. With the remainder of the 40-man roster expected to make at least $7 million to $8 million, it is believed that general manager Bill Bavasi will have between $13-15 million to lure free agents to Seattle.
Okay, so factual error #1 is that Meche isn’t eligible for free agency.
#2 is that the Mariners spread a $92m number last year, but that was fictional and they never spent the “Sasaki money”. Actual payroll was much lower.
Assuming you grant him everything else, though, as our readers point out, the numbers still don’t add up.
53.68m + 4.78m to Cirillo + .5m for Jarvis + Meche at 1m + “remainder of roster” at 8m = ~70m, which would mean the team would have, by the logic at the start of the article, $23m to spend on luring free agents to Seattle.
That’s a 8-10m math error *even if you agree with all of the assumptions there*.
I want to point this out to make two points, though:
First, errors like this occur all over the place if you pay attention. That the editors couldn’t be troubled to add the numbers up and see there was a huge error should tell you a lot about the standards of MLB. This wasn’t even a subjective judgement call, either.
Second, when Finnigan runs an article with random numbers in it to justify a weird conclusion, well, he’s not alone.
Update 11/3: they pulled the Q and the A from the page.
Around the Majors
Two hirings on the major league front today with very different overtones. A quick look:
1. The Arizona Diamondbacks hired Wally Backman to be their next manager. Think Larry Bowa; than take away logic, sanity, and strategical knowledge. Wally Backman is instantly the worst manager in MLB. Well done boys.
2. Gerry Hunsicker resigned as GM of the Houston Astros, announcing assistant GM Tim Purpura will immediately become his successor. We talked about Purpura a bit last year during the Mariners GM search, and he’s a pretty bright guy. Hunsicker never got the recognition he deserved for building quality teams in Houston, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up taking a more high profile job in a few years.
Also, there’s some rumblings coming out of Atlanta that the Braves and Yankees are working on a deal that would send Kevin Brown, Kenny Lofton, and a truckload of cash to Atlanta for Andruw Jones. This would likely signal the end of any interest the Yankees have in Carlos Beltran.
Amazing Race! Wooot!!
Just when I thought I would be mostly bored with patches of uninterested through this off-season!, it’s the return of the Emmy-winning Amazing Race on November 16th! Best show on television*! I’m totally psyched, and dearly hope that they move back from the Fear Factor-style eating contests etc they got into last time. I also hope they recruited people who actually want to be on the show and do well, rather than (say) advertise their taco stand for a couple episodes and then quit when it gets rough.
For your convenience, here’s your short guide to this year’s teams and where they fit on the Amazing Team Slotting, TAR6 team (TAR5 equivalent)
—
Married couple: Jonathan/Victoria (Chip/Kim)
Beautiful people dating 1: Freddy/Kendra (Colin/Christie)
Beautiful people dating 2: Hayden/Aaron (Brandon/Nicole)
Best friends: Avi/Joe aaand Meridth/Maria (Linda/Karen)
Siblings, women: Lena/Kristy(Kami/Karli)
Siblings, men: n/a (Lance/Marshall)
One non-standard contestant: Lori/Bolo (Mirna/Charla)
Older couple: Don/Mary Jean (Bob/Joyce)
Father/Daughter: Gus/Hera (Jim/Marsha)
Dating with twist: Kris/Jon (Alison/Donny, Alison sort of cuckolded Donny on a Big Brother)
Dating with broken relationship: Adam/Rebecca (Dennis/Erika)
Also, I know you have to look good on television, but I’d much rather have some normal dudes who are funny and smart than all these models/beauty pageant contestants every year.
ESPN’s potential free agent list
Comment attacks
We’ve been coping with one for a couple days now. At least Party Poker only went after us for a day. Seriously, what’s the scoop, a guy can’t run a site in peace? This is like having door-to-door salespeople break into my house and try to sell me vacuums or cosmetics.
Oh! My point — at some point tonight or tomorrow, I’m going to be building some new anti-comment-spam stuff into the site. Should be transparent to you, but you might notice some weird behavior in the comments if you happen by at the wrong moment.
I’d apologize for the inconvenience, but why? It’s not my fault I have to spend time on this BS.
Costumes
I’m not picky about these things. I went as a baseball player year after year. And I think it’s important to teach kids that they can satisfy their sugar craving through implied blackmail.
But this year, in my new digs, we’ve seen a lot more trick-or-treaters of the “sullen teen with jeans and backwards-cap” costume.
If you’re going to trick or treat late into life, I’m okay with that. But put some effort into it, please. When I answer the door in a hooded sweatshirt and messed-up hair because I’ve been at the keyboard all day and my haggard writer costume is better than whatever they have on, it’s embarassing for us both.
Meche and arbitration
Many people have commented that the Mariners won’t pay Meche more than, say, $3m next year. Whether or not that’s true, Meche heads into arbitration with a 2004 salary of $2m. Now, normally that can’t go down by more than 20% — it’s in the CBA — except that I found a rule that says they can submit lower if in the last year his salary went up over 50% through arbitration.
So maybe I was totally wrong there, and the M’s could submit a arbitration figure of $600,000 if they wanted.
Arbitration doesn’t work on merit, though, as much as you’d think it would. It is, by and large, an issue of service time. Players headed into arbitration are compared to other players with equal service time and that’s the single largest determinant.
Other factors include performance (including clubhouse leadership and community love! no, really!), the player’s past compensation, “existence of any physical or mental defects” and the performance record of the club.
They’re unlikely to argue that Meche is injured, obviously.
They’ve got a performance argument to make, yes.
Meche isn’t known as a leader or pillar of the community.
The performance record of the club similarly provides the team with ammunition, though I’ve never heard of this being a factor in an actual arbitration hearing.
We should remember that even Brian Hunter, after his awful season as a Mariner, beat the team in arbitration. The M’s thrashed him and the arbitration panel said “if he was so bad why’d you play him so much?”
The argument for taking him to arbitration’s a lot like the Freddy Garcia argument, exceppppt.. if Meche was available for a minor league contract, many teams would bite. Given that teams were unwilling to trade for Meche last year, or claim his contract for nothing when they had the chance early in the season, it seems unlikely that they’d be able to take him to arbitration and move him.
In that case, the team’s going to face the same decision they did with Freddy, sort of: do you take the gamble on the money and hope he performs well enough that you can get something shiny in trade, or keep the money and see if it can’t be put to better use elsewhere?
Continuing expectations game
Ahhhh, just when you might be getting excited about the team picking up some good young players… not so much! Bob Finnigan (dubbed “Pocket Lint” previously for other articles of this sort) breaks the exclusive news, as he does frequently, that the Mariners don’t have as much money as you’d think! No, really! Like $13m. Less, actually.
You see, it turns out that the clubhouse boom box is Jeff Nelson’s, so they have to mail that to him and then buy a new one. Then a recent audit turned up some deferred payments to Russ Davis the team has to pick up. After all the expenses and related fees, they’re looking at having seven dollars and change to spend this off-season.
What we’re going to need to wait for, according to Finnigan, is neeeext year, when even more contracts roll off the books and — I’m sorry, I can’t type any more of this without laughing.
Seattle Times, dear readers. They’ve won Pulitzers.