Fire Gardy

Joe Mauer announced today that he will likely miss opening day.  This is not good for the Twins.  So, who will share catching duties with Mike Redmond for the start of the season?  My guess is either Butera or Morales.  I would choose Morales, because he is the better hitter.  The bigger question, is how will the lineup be affected?  Who will take Mauer’s place batting third?  

Do you move Morneau up?  Slide one of the right handed hitters (Cuddyer or Young) in between Casilla and Morneau?  That might be the best solution.  Another option is Kubel.  This would be my choice, considering he is the third best hitter on the team, after Mauer and Morneau.  I don’t feel its necessary to alternate righties and lefties, moving Kubel up makes sense.  Whoever is catching should probably be batting 7th or 8th.  Losing your #3 hitter is a terrible loss, and it probably hurts the Twins more than most teams.  However, I think this team is deep enough, that we can survive a few weeks without Mauer.  The pitching is good , and  if we get decent production out of Cuddyer and Young, we should be able to keep our heads above water. 

If Mauer’s absence stretches beyond a week or two, we might be in trouble.  Having Redmond/Morales/Butera in the lineup everyday is no good.  Does anyone think if we need a better catcher for an extended period, they might allow Ramos to make the jump?  Or is there no way he will be ready to contribute in 09?  

I know this is a subject nobody wants to discuss until we absolutely have to.  Speculating about losing your starting catcher/best hitter for a long time is never fun.  So I will try to make this the last post about it.  Unless some real news breaks.

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Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Dave Cameron’s organizational rankings over at FanGraphs. He’s been rating the organizations based on their ownership, front office, major league talent, and minor league talent, in the interest of determining which organizations are in the best position going forward rather than a measurement of past performance. The main problem everyone seems to have with the process is that Cameron is diverging from his typical methods, and instead of using any objective measures is simply going based on his opinions, and ranking the teams essentially randomly, or at best based on personal prejudices for and against the various teams. In this way, he managed to determine that the Seattle Mariners are a better run franchise than the Minnesota Twins, which I’d say is one of the best examples of the absurdity of his endeavor.

While many of us, myself included, have simply been screaming into a deaf windstorm about this, and pointing out the flaws in his methodology and explaining why he ranked individual teams incorrectly, valued Fire Gardy reader thrylos98 decided to take matters into his own hands and actually come up with a system of objective measurements to rank the positioning of an organization going forward. Let’s take a look.

First, the criteria:

• Front Office: The idea is to create a winning team spending the least amount possible. The metric I am using for this is the sum of a team’s wins the last three years (multiplied by 5 to emphasize that wins matter more than payroll) over what the team spent as player payroll to get those wins
• Major League Talent: Remember this is forward-looking. My measurement for this is the sum of a team’s wins in the last three years (multiplied by 2 to add more weight to wins, because that’s what it matters) over the average age of the team’s hitters and pitchers in 2008
• Minor League Talent: This was probably the easiest thing to calculate. I am using the overall winning percentage of an organization’s minor league teams. Top prospects and minor league stars are great, but organizational depth is very undervalued and those are the guys who would potentially bail out a team if its starting short stop got a finger caught in a base (sounds familiar?)

In this way he puts together a system whereby teams can actually be ranked based on ownership/front-office acumen, major league talent, and minor league talent, based on the franchise’s ability to win actual baseball games, rather than arbitrary opinions based on secondhand knowledge of owners, executives, players, and prospects.

He ran every team in baseball through his system, and came up with an ordering. If you want to see the intermediate results, I recommend you go and take a look at his article. Here, we’re just going to look at the final results.

1. Twins 2. Marlins 3. Angels 4. Indians, Athletics 6. Rockies 7. Rangers 8. Blue Jays, Red Sox 10. Yankees 11. Diamondbacks 12. Nationals 13. Padres, Giants 15. Cardinals 16. Rays, Mets, Cubs, Philies 20. Brewers 21. White Sox, Braves 22. Reds 24. Dodgers, Royals 26. Pirates 27. Tigers 28. Mariners 29. Orioles, Astros

Given that the system values winning ballgames without overspending, and having an actual core of young players, it emphasizes well-run franchises. Thus it’s no surprise to see teams like the Twins, Angels, Indians, and Athletics clustered at the top of the list: these are the best run organizations in the league. And the Twins top the list.

However, the Florida Marlins are #2, and I think that highlights one of the failings of these criteria. The Marlins are generally regarded as a joke franchise, and while the front office does a remarkably good job of putting together a team on a shoestring budget and seem to be constantly generating high-level offensive talent, they’re rarely actually a good team. The fact that they spend just $20M on their team, and that their entire team is young (pre-arbitration players are cheap!), really help them fly up the rankings. I don’t mean to single out the Marlins (well, maybe a little, but that’s not really the point), but I think there’s a good way to improve the system that might measure the franchises more accurately.

The system weights wins/$ and wins/age on a linear scale. In reality, the value of wins does not increase linearly as you increase the number of wins. 90 wins is a lot more valuable than 85 wins; a lot more than 5.5% more valuable. What I would like to see is a non-linear multiplier, whereby a higher number of wins gets multiplied by more than a lower number of wins. (Think about it like a progressive tax rate: the more money you make, the higher your tax rate.)

That change would focus the system more closely on the teams that actually contend every year. Doing it on a budget and with a young team would still be valued, but putting a mediocre product on the field would no longer be rewarded just because you do it with 21 year olds making the minimum solely because you’re not interested in winning as much as you are in saving money.

I suspect this would push the Red Sox and Yankees a little higher in the top 10, the Twins, Indians, and A’s would be largely unaffected, the Marlins would plummet back to where they belong, and the White Sox would probably jump into the top 15 (it would also help the Angels, I suspect).

Also, I don’t know if I see the value of minor league winning percentage as an organizational-health metric. It seems to me that a) it focuses on depth at the expense of upside, and b) wins in the minors are largely meaningless. On the former, consider that while there are hundreds of minor leaguers in every organization at any time, there are only 25 major leaguers. It’s more important to have a handful of potential superstars than it is to have a gaggle of organizational fillers; and I think this system’s reward system has that backwards. On the latter … consider the case where a team promotes a couple of its good young players from AAA to the majors in midseason. Immediately, that minor league team starts losing more games than it had been (its best players have just been yanked away). That weakens the minor league system in this ranking, when in reality the system had just proved its positive value to the team in supplying good young players. I think this, too, is backwards.

I don’t have a realistic solution to the problem of measuring minor league talent across an entire organization. But hopefully by pointing out my problems with it, someone else can come up with a metric that might be better.

So that was an objective look at the health of the franchises going forward, essentially taking another look at the question of efficiency from a different perspective. The Twins, Indians, and Blue Jays were found to be the most payroll-efficient teams in baseball; weighting wins more heavily and valuing youth pushes the Blue Jays down and the Twins up. And like any system that values wins, a low payroll, and a young team, the Twins end up #1.

The Mariners? #28. Amusingly, Cameron couldn’t have been more wrong about either of these teams, in opposite directions.

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Is anybody else in the mood for reading about the Twins being criticized by another self-described statistical analysis for not having the patience of the nation’s average drug-addled 10 year old? Because I sure do!

This time around it’s Jay Jaffe of Baseball Prospectus, recapping the offseason moves made by each of the teams in the AL Central.

Testing, testing… is this thing on?

Nice little bit of humor there to start out; I’m guessing he intends to focus on the fact that, as an analyst following baseball, he finds our lack of activity boring.

The Twins may have had the quietest winter of any team in the majors in terms of departures and arrivals, particularly considering that one of the three players they’ve brought in was a Rule 5 pick (Jones) who may or may not stick.

Aren’t the Twins usually one of the quietest teams every winter? I mean, given that they don’t really participate in the free agent market? I continue to wait for people to stop being surprised that the Twins act the same way every year, and every year it works. I guess I’ll have to keep on waiting.

Then again, given the way Ayala was run out of Queens by a pitchfork-toting mob, it makes a certain type of sense that he wound up with a team that itself seems to be laying low.

I wasn’t huge on signing Ayala, either. But given the state of our bullpen he could be a valuable piece. And I don’t know if operating by a philosophy of “well our entire team is under 25 years old and we expect them to keep getting better, so we’re going to go ahead and let that happen without doing anything stupid to mess it up” should be considered “laying low.” Maybe it should. Your call, Jay.

While the Twins lost relatively little this winter—a pair of lefty relievers and a light-hitting shortstop—it’s not at all clear that when they spent, they spent wisely.

Leave it to a balanced analyst to bend “lost relatively little,” usually a compliment, into an insult. This is exactly the kind of article that should be hidden behind BP’s pay-me-and-enjoy-it-you-dumbasses subscription wall.

Crede’s last two years have been marred by back woes, and he’ll likely have to surpass his 75^th-percentile PECOTA performance (.258/.316/.436) in order to outdo the impact of the .283/.330/.399 combined showing the Twins got from last year’s third basemen, Brian Buscher, Brendan Harris, and Mike Lamb; the first two would have handled the job this year, while the latter is still on the payroll (although playing for Milwaukee) after being cut less than halfway through a two-year deal. As a one-year gamble, at least it’s not a horribly expensive one.

In other words, this was a completely boneheaded move that never should have happened and the Twins have to get absurdly lucky in order for Crede to come close to matching last year’s Buscher/Harris/Lamb platoon. What a huge waste of money! And why compare Crede’s 2009 PECOTA projection with Buscher/Harris/Lamb’s 2008 actual performance, rather than some combination of Buscher/Harris 2009 PECOTA projections? Don’t want to open up the possibility that a) Buscher/Harris could be a viable option on a team which cannot possibly have any viable options, or b) that signing Crede might have been a good idea. Oh yeah, and … it’s a one year deal that isn’t expensive, so it’s not much of a risk. Either way, don’t disregard my criticism!

What cost far more while making less sense was the need to spend $8.5 million to replace Everett with two years of Juan Castro Nick Punto, who will have to surpass last year’s 90^th-percentile PECOTA to approach his 2.8 WARP;

Burn! Nick Punto is Juan Castro! Ha ha! I literally have no idea why Jaffe would talk about Punto’s 2008 PECOTA projection, other than to point out that PECOTA was simply way off on that projection. And, um, I don’t think that was his point. (It’s true, though. PECOTA totally missed on Punto.) I mean, why not point out that PECOTA projects Punto’s 2009 campaign to be execrable? As in, 0.5 WARP. And if he hits the 90th percentile, just 2.2 WARP. Seems like that would have been a more effective argument for Jaffe to make here.

What would have been considerably less effective is to point out that $4M per season is the going rate for a good utility player these days, most teams don’t have one, and Punto is ours. So … this signing is not a disaster. The only problem with it is that we seem to think Punto can be the shortstop, day in and day out, and that’s just not what he does. That’s not where his value lies. And that’s not what we’re paying him for. Not having a shortstop is a mistake — but Punto is better than Everett. 

as ever, nobody gives themselves a leg down (as opposed to a leg up) in competing for a division title like this franchise.

Whoa! I guess now is the time to pull out the big guns. After all, the Twins simply haven’t competed for a division title this decade, and the reason is because they continue to fail to follow the tried-and-true SPEND-MORE-MONEY playbook. If only the Twins threw big money deals at aging home run hitters who can’t play a position in the field, they might have been able to contend more than zero times in the last eight years.

What? You’re telling me the last decade hasn’t been an unmitigated disaster for this franchise? Well, then I think Mr Jaffe might just be going a little overboard in criticizing a team he (and his employers) don’t particularly care for.

The drop from 88 wins last year to a projected 77 suggests a lot of regression, particularly in the rotation, not to mention the possible limitations of Joe Mauer due to back woes.

What would be quite a regression. After all, it’s reasonable to suspect that a group of talented 23 year old players with athleticism and tools would start their decline at age 24. And it’s pretty much unquestionable that replacing Livan Hernandez with Francisco Liriano was an unforgivable move; Liriano’s career is over, whereas Livan’s future is bright! Wait a minute … did he say the rotation figures to get worse this year? I think he did.

Does that invalidate everything else he said about the Twins?

Not necessarily, I guess. But it sure doesn’t help his credibility.

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I know we’ve talked about it before, but Dave Cameron’s look at the organizational rankings deserves another look, now that he’s covered the Mariners (which is the team he roots for). He placed the Twins at #18, and the Mariners at #15.

Of the M’s ownership, he attempted to claim that the meddling in the team’s affairs including forcing them to sign Japanese players to lucrative extensions (due to the fact that they are Japanese, and the ownership is also Japanese) is a good thing. That Johjima’s disaster of an extension is not a problem. That they “convinced Ichiro to sign a below market contract extension during the summer of 2007,” when in reality they’re paying him as a CF when he’s really an RF (with zero power) and he’s signed until he’s 39 years old. If the Twins’ ownership gets a C-, then the Mariners’ certainly does not merit a B.

Both front offices are new, which makes his take on them interesting. His take on the Twins is basically “Terry Ryan did a good, if old fashioned, job … but now he’s gone and we don’t know what Bill Smith is going to be like. Uncertainty is bad, therefore their front office situation is also bad.” Conversely, the Mariners’ situation is more along the lines of: “He’s new, he’s great, everything is looking up. Uncertainty is good, therefore the front office situation is fantastic!”

But by far the biggest problem in his analysis is major league talent. Of the Twins, he points out the entirety of our “core,” saying: “Joe Mauer is an MVP candidate, Justin Morneau is a minor star.” That’s just about as pessimistic as you can possibly be about the Twins’ major league roster, if you’re looking at it from a forward-looking perspective. So, we’re being pessimistic, right Cameron? Well, he talks about “a significant core of young talent – Felix Hernandez, Brandon Morrow, Jose Lopez, Jeff Clement, and Franklin Gutierrez are building blocks under team control for years to come.”

Felix Hernandez looks like he’s going to be a stud someday. Which is exactly how he looked at the start of 2008. And the start of 2007. And the start of 2006. He’s definitely a great talent, but at some point he’s going to have to put it together. Brandon Morrow is a talented young pitcher that they’ve been using out of the bullpen for the last two years, despite the fact that they ultimately want to use him as a starter; they’re very excited about him, but he doesn’t have much of a track record. He’s only thrown 46.2 IP in the minors, including 23.1 at AAA (exactly half). And his ERA at AAA? It was 5.01 … which is not exactly, you know, good.

Jose Lopez is a second baseman with a career OPS+ of a whopping 86. He put together his best season in 2008, with a .297/.322/.443 line that was worth a 104 OPS+. Jeff Clement is a “stud” catcher who’s so bad behind the plate they’re desperately trying to move him to 1B or DH. And he batted .227/.295/.360 last year for a 76 OPS+. The only way Clement is going to contribute positively in 2009 is if he doesn’t get any at bats; which is likely given the aforementioned Johjima and his contract playing catcher, and Ken Griffey Jr playing DH. Frankling Gutierrez is renowned for his good outfield defense, and I expect that they’re planning to play him in CF; too bad they don’t really know what they’re getting, since he’s played just 29 games in CF in his entire career (they acquired him via trade from the Indians, where Grady Sizemore is entrenched in center). And also too bad that he can’t hit. In 2008 he went .248/.307/.383, for an 80 OPS+ (his career OPS+ is 86). The only season in the minors in which he was able to hit adequately was his third consecutive year at AAA.

And this is the Mariners’ solid core for the next several years? If that’s their core, then to get the Twins’ core you’d take Mauer and Morneau, and you’d add Denard Span, Carlos Gomez, Delmon Young, Alexi Casilla, Scott Baker, Kevin Slowey, and Francisco Liriano. Span is better than Gutierrez in the field, and can hit. Gomez is a lot better than Gutierrez (and everyone else) in the outfield, and looks like he might be able to hit (though he’s already hitting just about as well as Gutierrez). If Clement is going to be considered a power hitter based on his minor league record, then Delmon Young (who is 2 years younger than Clement) should be considered a central piece of the future core of the team. Casilla is better in the field than Lopez at second base, is a year younger, and hits just about as well. In what sense can Lopez be considered a future star if Casilla isn’t?

The Twins’ rotation is filled with guys who are barely older than Hernandez and Morrow, and have demonstrated more success in the majors. If the Mariners have two young pitchers in their core, then the Twins have five. Oh yeah, and Cameron mentioned Liriano’s health problems, and was pessimistic that he could get back onto the field and be effective. I think it’s more than worth pointing out that Hernandez and Morrow have both had significant injury problems over the last couple of years.

It seems to me that the Twins’ major league talent eclipses the Mariners’ by a wide margin, and if the Mariners have any players in their future core, then the Twins have NINE, two of whom are legitimate superstars. (By which I mean, everyone knows their names, they were two of the top four MVP candidates this year, they’re All Stars, batting champions, MVPs, home run derby champions. Those are superstars. Not an “MVP candidate” and a “minor star.”)

I’m not saying, of course, that the Twins have nine members of their future core on the team right now. That would be absurd. But if these are the standards, then they do. And if that were the case, and we’re evaluating teams in a forward looking manner, then there is no way the Twins don’t have one of the best collections of young major league talent in the majors.

Cameron protects himself by saying this at the end of the article:

Oh, and one final note – I fully expect the “you’re a biased Mariner fan” claim to show up early and often in the comments section. Just so you’re aware, though, the historical complaint about my writing from Mariner fans have been that I’ve been too pessimistic about the team. So, while it will be nice to be accused of the opposite kind of bias for once, how about we try to rise above analytical laziness and discuss the organization’s strengths and weaknesses and get away from statements about the credibility of an author who writes something you might not agree with?

So now we’re not allowed to claim that he’s biased in favor of the Mariners. Right?

Well, I don’t buy it. Given a more in-depth look at the situation, I think it’s quite clear that Dave Cameron was wearing different colored glasses when he looked at these two teams.

We’ve already covered that we think the Twins are unreasonably low on this list, and in this article we’ve also demonstrated that the Mariners are unreasonably high. I just don’t think his analysis holds up.

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On Tuesday the Twins got some rare love from a non-local writer; Mike Lupica of the NY Daily News wrote a standard spring training puff piece on something other than “Why is Derek Jeter So Sexy and Clutch … and Also What is A-Rod’s Deal?!” I believe he’s re-used that headline about 8 times in the last three years. The point is, he’s venturing a little out of his comfort zone, which is good to see.

An old Met named Ron Gardenhire, a scrub who would eventually become a great baseball manager

This is one of those turns of phrase that describe someone so well. He wasn’t much of a player in his day, which is probably the source of his weaknesses as a manager: a soft spot for weak-hitting middle-infield-utility-players, a prejudice against players with natural talent (preferring players who “grind it out” over a long and unsuccessful career, mostly in the minors), etc. But given the Twins’ perennial presence at the top of the division leaderboard, there’s no doubting Gardy’s prowess as a manager. (Although I’d say “great” might be pushing it. Until we win a World Series or two.)

Gardenhire was talking about his division, the Central, and talking about how the Indians have reloaded and how he still doesn’t know how anybody ever gets through the Tigers’ batting order and when you ask him about his own team he says, “If we stay healthy, we’re going to be there.”

On paper, sure, the Tigers have a strong lineup. But the thing is that too many people make the mistake of seeing names rather than players. And the Tigers are old. And beyond that, is it possible that Miguel Cabrera is over the hill? (They paid him huge money because he hit like a DH but played 3B … and then discovered he was so awful at 3B they had to move him to 1B … and then he went back to hitting like a 3B. If I were in Detroit, I’d be pissed about that contract. Look at it this way: Is Miguel Cabrera twice as valuable as Justin Morneau? What if you didn’t know their names and just looked at their numbers?)

And he’s right about the Indians, of course. Because they’re just like the Twins, except their farm system is built hitting-first vs the Twins’ pitching-first philosophy.* A guy like Gardy cannot possibly miss the Indians, and probably overrates them, due to their Twins-like ability to contend despite annual offseason disappointment.

* Did I just give a major hint as to the difference in philosophy between the two most consistently efficient baseball teams in the league. Yes. Yes I did. I still hope to write about that soon.

Gardenhire comes out of a different division than the Yankees and Red Sox, not the Central as much as the baseball division that doesn’t have their money and never will. Somehow the Twins, with their tough, old-school manager, always hang tough. Somehow a team from baseball’s low-rent district always aims high.

Now this, I take exception to. Baseball’s low-rent district? Seriously? Is that just a playful shot at the midwest, or is Lupica being ignorant?

For one thing, the AL Central has 4 of the top 11 winningest teams over the last 3 years. We are the only division that can say that. So … winning more games than the other divisions. Doesn’t sound low-rent to me. But let’s look at dollars, because that’s all the New Yorkers understand.

Here are the combined divisional averages over the last three years:

AL East: 574.57 (2 in top 10) (avg $114.914) AL Central: 407.69 (2 in top 10) (avg $81.54) AL West: 372.77 (2 in top 10) (avg $93.19) NL East: 406.32 (2 in top 10) (avg $81.26) NL Central: 514.12 (1 in top 10) (avg $85.69) NL West: 420.31 (1 in top 10) (avg $84.06)

Obviously the AL East is the most expensive division. The Yankees and Red Sox play there, and they have free global publicity from Red Sox Nation ESPN. And the Orioles aren’t exactly thrifty with their cash.

The other division with a New York Team? Well, it’s the only division in baseball that averages less payroll per team than the AL Central. Sure doesn’t sound like the AL Central is the low-rent division, right? Also, averaged out over three years, the difference between $81.26M, $81.54M, $84.06M, and $85.59M is just not that big. In fact, these salaries represent the average MLB payroll, and they’re the bottom four divisions.

And the AL Central has two teams in the top ten in payroll. Which is tied for first along with the AL East, AL West, and NL East. If the AL Central were truly the low-rent division, surely they wouldn’t have as many Top 10 Payrolls as the vaunted super-spenders of the AL East and NL East? Right?

The AL Central has 4 of the best 10 teams in baseball (based on winning baseball games, rather than the opinions of ESPN writers). The AL Central spends money in line with the rest of the league, rather than significantly below some kind of budget watermark.

Even when a New York writer takes it upon himself to try to compliment Gardy and the Twins, he can’t help but demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge of how the league works outside the Yankees / Red Sox rivalry. And I think that’s sad.

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Joe C reported today that there are “no red flags” in regards to Joe Mauer’s back.  I guess that is good news.  The Doctors say it is nothing surgical (or at least Smith said the docs said this), so hopefully we can treat it and it goes away for good.  I’m somewhat skeptical that it took this long to come out with this news.  However, I won’t jump to any conclusions.  Until someone comes out and says “Joe will start the season on the DL”, I’m going to believe he will be good to go.  

That being said, if he isn’t good to go, I hope they just bring Morales north and don’t do something stupid.  Thank God Pudge already signed with Houston, or that speculation would start to piss me off.  Sign Pudge this, sign Pudge that, it pisses me off just thinking about.  

Anyway, that is all. We will keep our eyes peeled for any Mauer news.  Enjoy the first day of March Madness tomorrow.  I’m sure we will all be productive at work these next two days.

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Over the past few weeks FanGraphs has been ranking every organization based on front office, ownership, major league talent, and minor league talent.  The Twins ranked 18thoverall.  We received a C- in ownership, a B- in front office,  a B- in major league talent, and a C+ in minor league talent.  I personally think that each of thses grades is a notch too low.

The ownership, while very, very cheap, hasn’t gotten in the way.  Many teams have spent roughly the same amount as the Twins over the years, but haven’t performed as well due to an overbearing owner. 

The front office probably deserves the grade it got.  Maybe it should have a B instead of a B-.  We draft and scout better than almost anyone in the game, but our free agent signings have left a lot to be desired. 

The one that irks me the most is the major league talent.  A B-?  We have an all-star closer, and all-star catcher, an all-star starting pitcher,  and an all-star/MVP first baseman.  How is that roughly average?  Calling Morneau a “minor” star is borderline insulting.  Just because he plays in Minnesota and is from Canada doesn’t make him a minor star.  He is a HR derby champ, an MVP and an all-star.  We have one of the best young pitching staffs in the game, does “major league talent” equal ”star power” thats the way it seems.  He failed to even mention Kevin Slowey or Scott Baker, who were both very good starters last year on a team that nearly made the playoffs.  I would chalk this up to east-coast bias, but Dave Cameron is from Seattle.  Maybe he is bitter we stuck him with Carlos Silva or something. 

The only teams ranked behind us are: Nationals, Marlins, Astros, Royals, Pirates, Padres, Reds, Rockies, Tigers, Cardinals, Blue Jays and Giants.  I think we have a better organization than the White Sox.  While they have better international scouting, and they spend more money I would hardly say they are top to bottom a better run organization.  Hopefully they come in at around 17 or so.  Because they really aren’t that much better than the Twins.  The Mariners should be ranked pretty low too.  Until the hiring of a new front office staff a few months ago, they were a total mess.  They have done some good things this offseason, but even though this is a forward looking exercise, they will be haunted by the recent bad decisions that have been made.  More specifically Carlos Silva and jarrod washburn. 

I also don’t think these rankings give enough credit for not making moves.  How many times have we cheered for Bill Smith when he passed on a certain player.  Eric Gange or someone of the like. 

Cameron also doesn’t give enough credit to our minor league system.  While it isn’t stocked with studs like other teams.  We have many solid players who are close to contributing to the majors. 

Going back to the ownership grade.  Now that carl is gone, Jim seems very willing to extend our young homegrown players, whom we had previously refused to pay.  Jim was behind the Morneau and Cuddyer contracts, Scott Baker was just signed a few weeks ago.  If this truly is a “forward thinking exercise” why does it seem like our low ownership grade is based on the reign of a man who has been dead for several months?  Jim has shown his willingness to spend on player who can contribute for the life of their contract.  If “good ownership” means giving a huge contract to a player who will be bad for more than half of it, then I don’t want good ownership.

What do you guys think of the Twins grades and overall ranking?

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Just a quick post here … I was reading the take on the Twins’ team health report from Baseball Prospectus and came across this gem:

If I were asked to point to a player as a model of “how to develop a pitcher,” then Slowey is one that would come to mind. Just look at how he has progressed, and how all of his stats seem to follow. He’s going to be huge this year.

It’s just great to read lines like that about one of the young pitchers we’re counting on for a big year.

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In the last couple of weeks, people have been looking intently at payroll efficiency, or how much a team spends per win. Unless you have unlimited funds (see: Yankees, Red Sox), it is virtually impossible to be consistently competitive unless you can sustainably keep the payroll from growing out of control as you climb the wins rankings.

One interesting way to measure a franchise’s payroll efficiency is the concept of marginal dollars per marginal wins, from Baseball Prospectus. Take it away, Steven Goldman:

In 2002, Baseball Prospectus’s Doug Pappas proposed the concept of marginal dollars per marginal wins. Pappas suggested that a team playing entirely replacement-level players would win about 30 percent of its games, or 48.6 wins in a 162-game season. This team would be paid the major league minimum ($390,000 in 2008) and was assumed to have a 25-man roster, plus three players on the disabled list. In 2008, that team’s payroll would have been $10,920,000. Every dollar a team spends over that minimum is more than it “has” to, but those marginal dollars do also earn the team marginal wins—victories they would not have earned had they only spent the minimum. The question is, how efficiently did the teams spend to get those extra wins?

So there is an absolute minimum a baseball team can pay for its team, around $11M. And statistically speaking, you’d have about a 48-49 win team for that amount. Any amount you spend above the minimum (ideally) increases your team’s win total, and that’s what we want to look at.

Goldman then looks at the marginal dollars per marginal wins ratios for all teams in 2008. The Twins came up with the third-lowest value in the league (where lower is more efficient), with a ratio of $1.1M per marginal win. They were behind the Marlins at $0.3M/MW, and the Rays at $0.68M/MW.

He immediately dismisses the Marlins’ accomplishment: “(The Marlins were even more efficient than the Rays, posting a .522 winning percentage with a payroll of just under $22 million, but this was more a fluke event than an item for future study.)” And frankly, I don’t have a problem with that. No team should ever model itself after the way the Marlins are run. They’re a pox on the league, and are going to be as long as Jeffrey Loria owns them.

He’s high on the Rays, apparently believing that they demonstrated “intelligent drafting and strong farm system production [...] augmented with intelligently spent free-agent dollars,” and that their method is one to be admired. Although he does acknowledge that it remains to be seen if this method will continue to be successful and efficient as the years pass and their current crop of players shoot up the salary scale.

Goldman’s analysis only touches on the Twins in comparing them to their similarly (but slightly less) efficient AL Central rival, the Indians.

Over the last three years, the AL Central rival Cleveland and Minnesota teams have averaged about $67 million in payroll each, while averaging 85 and 88 wins per team, respectively. This is even more impressive in the light of the bad contracts both teams have to live with. In Cleveland’s case, that would be the four-year, $57 million contract the team signed with designated hitter Travis Hafner in July of 2007, one which cost them $8.05 million last season and will ding them for $11.5 million this year. The Twins have made smaller-scale errors, anchoring themselves to replaceable talents like Michael Cuddyer and Jason Kubel through 2010 for a combined total of $22.1 million, not counting the price of 2011 options for both players. The Twins will also be paying $3.1 million to Milwaukee Brewer Mike Lamb this year.

I’m not going to get too snarky about this, nor am I going to defend the Cuddyer/Kubel contracts. I feel I’ve done that enough. I’m just going to go ahead and point out that in no way is this an examination of how the Twins and Indians have been able to build successful franchises on a small payroll. It is, in fact, the opposite in that he provides the only evidence that exists to show that the Twins and Indians are poorly run, without offering any insight into what they’ve done right. And clearly both teams have done something right.

Seriously, in what sense are the Twins and Indians not exactly the model by which every small- and mid-market team should build their organization? Why is it that whenever someone looks into payroll efficiency the numbers tell them “The Twins and Indians are really efficient at this,” and their subsequent analysis says “The AL East is the greatest!”

Maybe I’ll get to that at a later date. Moving along.

But to be honest, looking just at last year is misleading at best. Anything can happen in one season — a team can have a big breakout season or luck can fall their way and they can look like a really efficiently-run franchise when in fact you may not want to model your organization after them based on a multi-year study. If only someone would look at payroll efficiency over a period of multiple years …

Enter Rich Lederer, at Baseball Analysts, who looked into MLB Payroll Efficiency, 2006-2008 for us. He looked at essentially the same data, but averaged it out over three seasons, which minimizes the effects a breakout (or collapse) has on the organization’s overall efficiency rating. (See the 2008 Mariners vs the 2006-2008 Mariners. Seattle’s 2008 was a truly terrible season, but it was probably an outlier. While they did run the franchise poorly enough to allow that to happen, 2008 is not almost certainly not indicative of a typical season for them.)

Let’s take a look at his data:

As you can see from the chart, the Twins are sixth overall in wins over the last three years, and are the only team in the top 7 with an average payroll under $100M. In fact, the Twins’ payroll is the lowest among the top 12 winningest teams in baseball.

By any measure, that’s impressive. Another interesting finding that I did not expect to see is the overall quality of the AL Central; 4 of the top 11 winningest teams are from the Central. (Which four? If you guessed “Everyone but the Royals, duh,” you’re right on.) That’s the most of any division, obviously. The AL East has 3 in the top 12, the NL East has 2, and the AL West, NL West, and NL Central have 1 each. This does not explain why the AL Central gets no national respect and is consistently considered one of the weaker divisions in the sport.

Looking at this chart, I think you can only call three teams consistently efficient: the Twins, Indians, and Blue Jays. These are the only teams in baseball that have averaged 85+ wins with average-or-under payrolls. In fact, these are the only teams in baseball that have averaged 83+ wins for under $100M per year.

Compared to the Twins’ $1.1M/MW value for 2008, they have a $1.4M/MW efficiency ratio for the 2006-2008 period. (The reason the ratio improved in 2008 was because the payroll dropped to $56M and we actually improved. Just like I said we would at the beginning of the season, despite losing Santana and Hunter. Just wanted to point that out so all the pessimists know what’s up.)

For the overall period, the Rays’ M$/MW ratio is not 0.6, but is instead 1.1; while that value is still extremely impressive, what’s less impressive is where they rank on the most-winningest list. 25th. Over the last three seasons, the Rays have won the 25th most games in the league.

Looking forward, the Rays are obviously in great position to win games and move up on the wins list. As that happens, though, they will obviously have to pay more as their players move up the salary scale and hit arbitration. It remains to be seen how willing they’ll be to increase their payroll to sustainable levels, and how efficient they can stay as they inevitably have to pay more and/or replace players. I’m not here to take anything away from the Rays. But there is no doubt in my mind that, looking backwards, the Rays’ method of building a winning team by stockpiling high draft picks (through a devious strategy of being awful for a decade) is not the way you should want to model your franchise.

Instead, the model franchises are the beasts of the AL Central, the Twins and Indians, who have shown an ability to be consistently successful with consistently low payrolls. The teams at the bottom of this chart should be looking to Minnesota and Cleveland for advice, rather than the Rays, Rockies, or any other team.

Sometime soon, I think I’ll look into the successful models of the Twins and Indians. For now, though, it’s enough to know that these franchises have earned considerably more respect than they get. Given that averaging just 83 wins per year costs other teams upwards of $100M, winning more than that for under $70M is extremely unusual and impressive.

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Time for an update on some trivialities before the game today.

First, it seems Punto’s injury may not have been as serious as I initially feared. I’m still not happy about it, but at the very least we probably won’t be missing Punto much longer. He’s able to take some light swings and could return to action in a few days. Good news.

Blackburn is apparently still not ready to start, and so Humber’s getting his start instead. I wonder if pitching at the beginning of the game will make a difference for Humber. Some guys need a while to get used to coming out of the bullpen and don’t perform as well if they’re not starting. Maybe Humber is one of those guys right now — so hopefully he looks good on Monday.

Denard Span hasn’t gotten many hits — his average is just .107 — but there’s no reason to be worried. For one, this is spring training, and it’s meaningless. (Buscher and Young aren’t really going to hit .500 this year, in case you were wondering.) Secondly, he’s still been drawing walks; he has a team-leading 4 walks, and LEN3 passes along info that he was called out on a 3-2 count twice when the ball was out of the zone. (I do not know if this is true, but I believe it.)

Span’s timing is off, or he isn’t making good contact, or he’s getting unlucky on balls in play (or some combination, or whatever, it could be anything), but his eye is still working fine and he is maintaining his good discipline despite a temporary lack of hits.

This is what people mean when they say a player can still have value without a good batting average, or that a player’s value is contingent on a high batting average. Plate discipline and the ability to draw walks is less variable than batting average, and is closer to a consistent “skill” rather than “luck,” which is a big part of a player’s BABIP. If Span were batting .107 with no walks, it’d be time to worry — that’d be evidence that he might be regressing. But no. Span’s OPS could very well be disconnected from his batting average, much like a guy like Grady Sizemore (although Span has quite a bit less power). So if Span’s batting average this season drops to .250 or something, it doesn’t necessarily mean he had a bad season.

Finally, I particularly like this line from LEN3:

Interesting lineup today. You replace Gomez with Span, Mauer for Crede, Kubel for Young, Crede for Harris, Young for Butera and Punto for Tolbert and you might just have your Opening Day lineup.

Really? So this is pretty much the Opening Day lineup, if you just make these six changes? Doesn’t that make it extremely close to absolutely nothing like the Opening Day lineup? I’m probably the only person who finds that amusing. Oh well.

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