There’s been some confusion about my posts here about what the Mariners are saying and what they mean, what the exact meaning of “budget†and “payroll†are, and whether the M’s are really lying or just shifting their words around. So I’d like to go into detail on where exactly the issues are, on my particular disputes with the Mariners.
Part of the problem is that the local press and the Mariners have used both interchangeably at times. But we’ll get to that.
The Mariners Opening Day payroll was $86.9 m, as commonly defined as “salaries plus pro-rated signing bonuses.†Even as early as November 2002, Howard Lincoln was pushing the team’s payroll, saying “We’re actually up $2 million to $92 million.”
The big piece I’m going to focus on this April 4th article by Bob Finnegan in the Seattle Times, where he puts out the team’s view (he is not alone in this, though, there are other references to this breakdown). First, though, a note about how payroll v. budget gets confused: “With reliever Giovanni Carrara signing for some $400,000 plus incentives, the Mariners pushed their payroll to $95.85 million, well beyond their original budget of $92 million.”
But you’ll see that this magical $96m figure isn’t true payroll in any sense. But onwards. The article includes includes a handy chart, which I’ll clip down a little:
Mariners’ 2003 payroll
Player, Salary
Kazu Sasaki $8.5 million
[…]
Ichiro $6 million ($3M base)
Edgar Martinez $6 million ($4M base)
[…]
Gil Meche $375,000
Willie Bloomquist $300,000
Julio Mateo $300,000
Total salaries: $88.25 million
Buyouts: $2.1 million
Contingencies: $2.5 million
Pro-rated signing bonuses: $3.0 million
Total: $95.85 million
Ignore, for a minute, that there are discrepancies here compared to commonly-available salary information, and assume these are all correct. I’ll come back to the differences in a minute.
Please note already that you can’t count M’s payroll as $92m. You have a couple of choices:
Commonly-calculated: $87 to $88m
Payroll including buyouts, signing bonuses for salary cap purposes: $93.35 (using M’s math from above)
Wacky Math M’s Payroll including Contingency Funds: $95.85m
We can see the Mariners count contingencies and buyouts against “payroll†even as the bonuses for Ichiro and Martinez are included in their salary numbers there. This makes this hard to compare already: they stick that $5m (and more) into salary, and pull the $3m in signing bonuses out as if they’re not salary.
There’s my big argument – that’s $5m+ to the Mariners when they argue straight, strict, common-definition payroll: they would say that salaries plus rated signing bonuses came to $91.25m or thereabouts, when everyone else would (and did) calculate the team’s number as much lower, at about $87m. This is the basic deception I get worked up about: at every turn, the Mariners talked about their payroll as being $92m, and got everyone else to do it – Finnegan only a month later tosses it off casually while comparing them to the Devil Rays:
Tampa Bay has now dropped five players from its Opening Day team, including four pitchers. What is left is a $14 million payroll (Seattle’s is more than $92 million), with only a handful of players making more than minimum salary, including all the pitchers.
Here he’s comparing Tampa Bay’s low, normally-calculated payroll against the M’s inflated include-everything payroll (which still again, doesn’t equal $92m)
Now on the buyouts – the CBA counts buyouts against payroll (this is Article XXIII, 5(b)) (though they’re to be counted as ‘signing bonuses’ that’s just terminology). So for the moment, I’ll figure they indeed spent $2.1m on buyouts, and call that good.
But contingencies? Who counts money you haven’t spent yet as a contingency? Plus, the M’s said that Garcia’s arbitration win had wiped out their contingency fund, that there was no money there, zero, there would be no acquisitions that cost the team money (and there weren’t) and they probably said that if anything happened like too many players making the All Star team, triggering contract incentives, that all the players would be marched down to the plasma center to sell blood, and their subsequent woozy performance would all be Freddy’s fault.
Plus, the team claimed the contingency budget was $2.5m before Freddy’s arb win. Howard Lincoln said after they lost to Garcia: “”We budget for these things. The contingency fund will cover it, but it (the fund) will be smaller as a result.†After the win though, they still calculated contingencies as the full, once-announced $2.5m.
Say you figure they went back and found that money under the couch cushion. You still can’t count that as money you’re spending. Say I have $1,000 in my checking account and I decide to spend it on a computer. I put one together for $500, and it ends up meeting all my needs, so I don’t spend that last $500. Instead, I spend it on beer. Am I lying if I say I spent $1,000 on my computer? Would the IRS allow me do depreciate a $1,000 computer? That $2.5 million is not payroll money. If you believe everything the team feeds you up to that point, you still have to draw the line there, and then they’ve stopped at $93.35m total payroll expenditure.
You may have thought just there that there are other bonuses not included in that table, that may push it up. And I say, no. The salaries listed in the times are consistently higher than those found at outside sources, and we can only assume that as with Edgar and Ichiro, the difference is because the Times chart includes possible bonuses (Sasaki, for instance, is listed there at $8.5m, but other sources have his salary at $8m, down to Meche, who is $375k v $325k).
And I understand that this is annoying nitpicking, and that few people out there care whether the Mariners are subverting common definitions of terms because it makes them look good – I mean, I must be the only person who cares that by swapping in bonuses into salaries and holding out signing bonuses, they’re tweaking the way we compare their payroll to other teams’ payroll when we go to ESPN.com and look at the salary tables.
Mentions of $92 million payroll in the Seattle Times:
4/16/2003, Larry Stone
7/22/2003, Bob Finnegan, “Payroll already over $92 millionâ€
9/19/2003, Larry Stone , “The A’s, whose $50 million payroll is just over half of Seattle’s $92 million, are baseball’s biggest overachievers”
But! Redemption! Sort of!
On July 22nd, the Associated Press obtained (and released) the luxury-tax figures for teams, and the M’s had – abracadabra – a $92,268,063 payroll. And that was the CBA-calculated one or, as the AP article put it,
Payrolls are based on the average annual values of contracts, $7.6 million per team in benefits, money paid or received in trades and salary owed to released players.
So! Using a definition totally different than the one the M’s put forth, one instead spots the Mariners $7.6m in benefits, the salaries happened to come out to exactly what the team was pushing and the local guys were reporting. Now maybe, you’re thinking, the reporters ran these articles with the $92m and what they really were refering to was the CBA number, even though they’d published articles (like Finnegan’s early one there) that calculated payroll entirely differently. Nope.
When they were reporting, every time they quoted another team’s payroll, they didn’t quote the CBA-calculated figures for other teams: for instance, in the Tampa reference, they compare a pared-down $14m (which should, for CBA purposes, be much higher because it includes buyouts and benefits — $22m, at least) to the M’s $92m. Either the papers consistently compared one method that came up with high numbers to another that came up with low ones – apples to oranges, if you would – or they compared apples to what the team told them was an apple. And how could anyone have known with any certainty what that CBA number would be back in November? Why bother pushing the stories including contingency funds to the papers?
Either way, the papers screwed up hugely. The Mariners came out with a story at the end of last season: their payroll was $92 million, and they stuck to it. I don’t think you can find a quote where Lincoln or Armstrong or Gillick referred to the payroll as the commonly-calculated ~$88-8m, it was always the higher figures. Eventually the figure stuck, and everyone used it, no matter that it didn’t make sense, that it wasn’t what the payroll was, and certainly not what everyone else calculates payroll as. And at best, our local media was lazy in not using the same methods to compare the payrolls of teams, making the Mariners seem far more generous and spendy than they were, and at worst, they were complicit in pushing the team line in doing so.
For the Mariners, the best way to see this is that they wanted to push as high a figure as possible, and people bought it. And while some might argue you can’t blame them for trying, I think that’s wrong. The team can argue they’re investing in the team without confusing people about how much they’re spending, or by playing wacky games with funds they haven’t (and didn’t) actually spend.
We’ve gotten a couple of emails today in the wake of the Guardado signing, wondering essentially, “What does this mean for Rafael Soriano?” If you recall, every so often there’s talk — be it from coaches, front office, media, whomever — that Soriano has the “Closer of the Future” tag somewhere on his person. Now, personally I think that’s garbage, that he’d be much more valuable as a starter. But I digress.
I don’t think the M’s would have signed Guardado as their lefty setup man if they didn’t have concerns about Sasaki. Teams don’t generally have two closers sitting around, let alone three (two and a half, in the case of Shiggy?) like the M’s do currently. In some form or another — be it injury, ineffectiveness or a return to Japan — I think they expect, or are at least planning as though, Sasaki won’t be the closer for a significant period of time next season, and they certainly don’t expect that they’ll be picking up his $8M option for 2005.
Which brings us to Soriano. With Sasaki, Hasegawa and now Guardado on the roster, the chances of him closing games regularly over the next two or three years are extremely slim. To me that screams “rotation!” as his destination, be it this season (if Garcia gets the old non-tender) or next. In any event, to me his eventual future in the rotation appears much more certain at this point thanks to the signings of both Hasegawa and Guardado.
So… new Big Board, complete with Hasegawa and Guardado. Also, if you’re keeping track, the 40-man roster is now at 40 men (or 39 men and one boy, in the case of Willie Bloomquist) meaning the M’s won’t be able to select anyone in the upcoming Rule 5 draft. Ah well.
Guardado — they’re paying him too much money, but other than that he’s a pretty good pitcher. His numbers the past three seasons are extremely solid, including a nasty .195/.217/.262 line vs. left-handed batters. Over that same span (2001-03) he’s fanned just under nine hitters per nine innings (8.88, to be exact), a pretty good indication that he has something left, and his K:BB ratio comes in at a cool 3.58:1.
For those interested in pegging me with questions, I’m doing a chat at Baseball Prospectus tommorrow at noon EST (9 am pacific time). You can submit questions ahead of time, though. I’ll likely gravitate towards prospect questions, but will answer a few M’s related queries as well. Keep them brief, however.
I’d have preferred Rhodes, but the details of the contract make this a better signing than I’d imagined Guardado would be. According to the ESPN story, it is a 1 year contract with team and player options for 2005 and 2006. The main problem I have with locking up relievers is their inconsistency from year to year, and this gives the M’s an out clause if Guardado turns into crap overnight. I’d imagine the buyout probably isn’t more than $500,000, so absolute worst case scenario, this is a 1 year, $5 million deal. Its overpaying, but its not tying up future salaries with a dead-weight contract.
Well, it appears as if Arthur Rhodes has been replaced by one Eddie Guardado. The P-I’s John Hickey is reporting that a three-year, $14M deal will be finalized this week. I was surprised to see that Guardado is actually a year younger than Rhodes… I had thought he was a year or two older. In any event:
Guardado, age 33, ~$4M 2004 salary
Sasaki, 36, $8M
Hasegawa, 35, ~$3M
So much for a youth/bargain movement, eh? And did I mention he’ll cost yet another draft pick? I have to tell you, I’m having a hard time getting excited about what Bavasi has accomplished during his short tenure in Seattle.
For those of you who haven’t yet signed up, there is still space available at the first ever U.S.S. Mariner feed. If you’ve missed the previous postings and failed to get on the mailing list, here is a brief rundown.
When: Saturday, December 20th, 4 P.M.
Where: Piecora’s Pizza Banquet Room, Capitol Hill
Who: Derek, Jason, and Dave, along with a large group of readers and a special guest or two.
Cost: $15 per person, includes full dinner (not just pizza) and soft drinks. Alcohol will be available for seperate purchase.
We’re going to spend several hours hanging out, talking baseball, getting to know some folks, and generally just having a good time with other Mariner fans. If you’re interested in attending, send me an email with “Feed Information” as the subject. This will get you on the mailing list, where further details will be provided. Spots aren’t going to last forever, though, so if you’re interested, let us know and reserve yourself a place at the feed.
One of the more common criticisms we get about Cameron is that he struck out all the time in rally situations. I’ll assume for purposes of this argument that clutch hitting exists, etc etc.
Cameron’s splits:
None on: .240/.317/.408
Runners on: .267/.373/.457
Runners in scoring position: .293/.401/.503
If you believe there’s something to be read in those numbers, how can anyone argue he wasn’t clutch? He did dramatically, undeniably better in traditional clutch situations than he did otherwise.
No one is saying that losing Cameron’s the death of the team: as a righty who hasn’t hit well in Safeco, he’s not a particularly good fit offensively. He’s over the hump and on the down side of his career. I think he’ll do well next year for another team.
If there was one thing I would say about Cameron, it’s this: he was, by far, the most undervalued piece of these winning Mariner teams. Their fly-ball staff lived and died by their outfield defense, and it was Cameron-Ichiro-Winn last year that made Franklin & Co. look so good. If the M’s replace his bat and find someone who can play average defense in center, they’ll still drop two games in the standings. If you don’t care about those two games — you’d rather see someone ground out instead of strike out, even if it means the team loses the division — well, I guess that’s your right. But don’t tell me Cameron was some kind of team-killing scrub, because you’re wrong.
On Borders: everyone emailing says he means Garcia’s coming back, because Borders was so good at whipping Freddy into dominating shape last year. Borders is Pat Gillick’s personal catcher and organization man, though — I don’t think we should read anything into this. It would be hard to find space for him on the 25m, for one thing, and carrying three catchers is hard (not as hard as carrying Gipson-Bloomquist-Ugueto, but there you are). Don’t read too much into this: if Garcia doesn’t take the team’s offer, they’re going to decline to offer arbitration and then say they couldn’t afford to risk him getting $9m.
I don’t think there’s anything shocking about the decision they made on Cameron.
So what’s a bigger surprise — that they offered arbitration to Borders, or that they didn’t offer to Rhodes? Nary an article went by this off-season without a final line something like, “The Mariners are not expected to offer arbitration to their other free agents: Pat Borders, Mark McLemore, Armando Benitez and John Mabry.”
In any event, I’m disappointed about Rhodes. I pegged him as something of a bargain for next season, as his injury last year would likely hold his price tag down somewhat.
Recap of the Bill Bavasi era to date:
Sign Raul Ibanez. Bad move.
Re-sign Shigetoshi Hasegawa. Questionable move.
Fail to offer arbitration to Arthur Rhodes. Bad move.
Fail to offer arbitration to Mike Cameron. Bad move.
You never know how much you’ll miss something until it is gone. Mike Cameron, thanks for the great years. Good luck with your future team. Hopefully a better ballpark and an organization not obsessed with strikeouts will lead to a year that allows folks to realize the value you have to a club.
Oh, and the Mariners offered arbitration to Pat Borders “due to the special relationship he has with this club.” I am unable to rationally comment on this tonight, and will now proceed to go to bed.