Fire Gardy

Frequent reader rghrbek posted a comment on yesterday’s Washburn post that I think is worth quoting and discussing in a new post:

I have this impending doomed feeling that the Twins will “get their man” and sign washburn right before spring training for 5 mil.

The twins could offer Lopez 10 mil over 2 years with a 5.5 mil option on the 3rd year, with a mil buyout. That is money well spent.

Bill Smith said that the reason the Washburn talks broke down was that Boras wants a multi-year deal, but — and this is important — the Twins feel they can’t commit any new money beyond 2010 in anticipation of the Mauer contract.

If that’s true, that would explain* why they’d consider themselves unable to offer such a contract to Felipe Lopez. If they can’t commit money beyond 2010, then they certainly can’t offer him a 2 year contract with an option for year 3.

* Which is to say that it would “explain it in such a way that it’s much more satisfying to me than the idea that the Twins don’t consider Lopez a viable 2B candidate for performance reasons.” Thought I should clarify that.

And if that’s really the case, it’s a disaster. Do they think Mauer isn’t tapped into the news surrounding his contract negotiatons? Mauer’s repeatedly said he wants to be in position to win, and he doesn’t want to sign a long contract with a team that’s not going to build a championship-caliber team around him. This offseason, I’d thought it looked like the Twins were doing everything they could in 2010 to show Mauer that they’re committed to winning.

But if they start sending signals that if they have Mauer’s big contract on the books then they can’t spend any money, all that work is thrown out the window. If Mauer even thinks the Twins aren’t willing to pull out all the stops to win a championship, it just got a whole lot more difficult to sign him. He won’t have such reservations about the Yankees and Red Sox, which will work in concert with their presumably much larger contract offers to convince him to leave the Twins.

I see this as another reason to try to get Lopez on a contract like the one proposed by rghrbek, beyond the simple fact that it’d be a good deal for both sides in a vacuum. I’m not at all confident in the Twins’ front office, though.

8 comments

According to LEN3 the Twins have made no offer to Washburn.  This is excellent news.  Smith has declined to comment, so we aren’t out of the woods yet.

We’ll keep an eye on this situation, hopefully Scott Boras fabricated the whole thing as a source of leverage for Washburn.

7 comments

According to something called Scott Miller over at CBSsports.com, the Twins have made an offer to Jarrod Washburn.  Here are the reasons Miller thinks the Twins think Washburn can help the team:

As for Washburn, 35, the Twins view him as a perfect fit in that he is left-handed, he’s got a reputation as being a good guy in the clubhouse, he’s pitched enough that he can help anchor a young staff and he’s an Upper Midwest native (he was born in Wisconsin and still lives in there in the off-season, in Webster).

As you can see, none of those reasons are “he is a good pitchers who can get people out and win games”.

I see no reason to sign Washburn if we already have Pavano.  Is Washburn really much of an upgrade over someone like Perkins/Duensing/Liriano (or Manship if you want to include right handers)? I say no.  Especially since the Twins seem reluctant to cut ties with failed free agent pitchers in a timely fashion (see: Hernandez, Livan, and Ortiz, Ramon).  Couldn’t you just see the Twins trotting Washburn and his 5.50 ERA out to the mound every fifth day until mid-July? I totally could.

Washburn was excellent for a few months in Seattle last year but he was a) playing in a massive park, and b) had one of the best outfield defenses EVER playing behind him.  Everyone claims his knee injury caused his 7+ ERA with the Tigers, but I think it was a combination of the knee and his inherent crappiness rising to the surface.

What do you think? Would Washburn help the team or are we better off filling in the last rotation spot internally?

 

9 comments

Tim Marchman usually isn’t totally off the mark, from what I can tell, but just because someone isn’t an idiot does not mean they can’t spew some idiocy from time to time.* Typically around this time of year, people post retrospectives on the year gone by, and what we can look forward to in the upcoming year; personally, I think that’s a bunch of crap. And it’s even worse since we finished a decade and are starting a new one.** That’s where Marchman comes in: he wrote an article about what we (as baseball fans) can “look forward to” in the next ten years.

* Triple negative? Yeah, we’re doing this thing!

** Don’t give me any of that “but the decade isn’t over yet, because what about year zero?!” mumbo jumbo. This is America, dude. The 70’s started in 1970, not in 1971. I’m just saying.

It will still be better than football

That was your title? Uplifting, and somewhat obvious.

The aughts generally were awful and a review of them could only have ended with a rope, a plastic bag, a bottle of wine and another of pills. What’s worse, the teens look to have potential in this line. We’ll hope the twenties arrive hurriedly.

Who’s trying to commit suicide here? Because it sounds like 3+ people just got handled. And as a matter of fact, no, we’re not hoping the next ten years go by in a flash. I’ll be an old man complaining about loud music and kids these days by then.

At least in the aughts we had good baseball to distract us, but I have five reasons to think the coming decade is going to be a crashing bore; you can surely add your own.

At least? So … the next decade will, as a whole, be extremely boring, and there won’t be baseball? Are you sure you meant to use the words “at least”?

1) Technological advances

Those are boring.

The installation of camera systems in ballparks that will, once refined, allow clubs to precisely measure every aspect of performance is not going to be a good thing. Every club looking at the exact same accurate information will lead to monoculture. Current evaluative metrics, which are quite crude, are already having a bit of that effect; truly granular ones will even more so.

What makes baseball a great sport is that there are shitty teams that are always doing stupid things! If it weren’t for the Royals and Pirates and Nationals and, occasionally, the Giants … well, baseball would just be boring. I mean, when the Twins have the day off and I flick on MLB.TV to check out another game that day, what do I say to myself? Do I say “Ooh, the Rays are playing the Red Sox, that could be good”? How about “Yankees/Angels, excellent”? No! Of course not! I eagerly flip over to the epic Nationals/Pirates showdown, because bad teams are what makes games exciting. Right? Wait, no? So … then what the fuck is Marchman talking about?

This won’t take the human element out of the game. When clubs have something near perfect information it will, if anything, make instinct and intuition much more important, as no team will be able to get an advantage just by noting that obviously good players are good, meaning teams will have to actually get creative.

Oh. So I guess what he was talking about was that the players would be better, the “human element” would still be there, and front offices will have to be more creative. Yup, sounds pretty shitty.

Still, the kind of smarts that allow one to read a boring actuarial spreadsheet properly are quite common

Are they?

while the kind that allow one to steal an edge on rivals by shrewdly picking out the drunks whose drinking won’t affect their development are quite rare.

So that’s why sportswriters and old people think scouts are so mystical and important? Because they have alcoholic radar of some sort?

I worry that just as the former were violently underappreciated in baseball for many years, the latter may come to be, which would be disastrous.

I actually agree with this. But rather than making up some doomeriffic crap, I’d actually think about this first. Just like most things, the stats/scouts dichotomy will eventually reach an equilibrium where both stats and scouts are seen as essential. For a long time, that equilibrium was nowhere to be found; there was a “technological” advancement that caused the popularity of stats to rise, and that continues to happen. In the upcoming couple of years, the see may well saw too far in favor of stats. Do not worry! It will only be temporary; markets always seek out an equilibrium, and I haven’t heard anything from the stats side of this argument saying “scouts are useless and should all be killed.” It’s not going to happen. By 2020, I’d guess that we’re close to a balance, and it’ll fluctuate year to year, but never very far. Not really much of a headline, I guess.

Far better a room full of drunk Bavasis than a room full of Wall Street washouts spouting MBA buzzwords, if you have to choose.

Why are those the choices? Because Bavasi was a pretty awful GM … and Jack Z has done a pretty tremendous job of replacing him and fixing everything he wrecked in Seattle in the short time he’s had there. I don’t know if anyone would consider Jack Z a “Wall Street washout spouting MBA buzzwords,” but if you do, that’s on you. Also, if owners continue to agree with Marchman about this choice, we’re guaranteed to continue with the “these teams are good every year” and the “these teams are terrible and getting worse and there’s no hope whatsoever” split that we currently have. But since having a significant portion of the league suck balls is good for baseball (see above), maybe Marchman’s got a point here.

2) Postliteracy

Do you mean “after becoming literate,” or “no longer literate,” or perhaps “more literate than ever”?

The beat writer’s job is devolving into the maintenence of a Twitter feed, ‘hits’ on TV and radio and quickly turned ‘takes’ on the issue of the hour,

Which is exactly what beat writers would have been doing since the beginning, if they were able to instantly publish to millions of people.

more substantive writing is supported by a half dozen or so outlets that probably won’t exist in recognizable form in 10 years,

Yeah, and they’ll be replaced by just as many (if not more) new outlets.

and for all I know the coming generation of writers will have grown up doing immense neurological damage to themselves by reading too much off screens.

For all you know? For all you know, the previous generation of writers did themselves immense neurological damage by looking at crappy newspaper pages while sitting under fluorescent lights too much. Or for all you know, screens might be so good in ten years that it’s far easier on your eyes than paper ever was.

Of course there will still be good writing—today’s average column or game story is incalculably better than one from 50 years ago—but there will be less of it than there is now and the best of it likely won’t be as good.

So you’re saying that the explosion of baseball-related content in this decade proves that all baseball-related content will disappear in the next decade? Wouldn’t it make more sense that, as the cost of publishing stays at zero, more people would create baeball-related content? Posnanski emerged as a national force during this decade — would he have become so ludicrously famous while writing only for the Kansas City Star? No, it would have been impossible. More access for more people will create both the demand for more content, and the supply of it. Why is it so hard for people to figure that out? Baseball writing will go away because technology makes it too easy to produce and consume baseball content? No.

And the constant need to feed the beast in an age when a print model has essentially been replaced by a broadcast model will have other effects as well. I can’t, for example, be the only one to think that the rightly admired Joe Posnanski is courting burnout by dropping multiple five to ten thousand word blog posts every week in addition to his real writing, though we’ll continue to hope he’s Iron Joe McGinnity.

You’re right, Posnanski should do less of what he loves. Fuck off, I love those Posnanski posts. And if he ever stops doing them, it won’t be because the internet killed his love of baseball with its inability to recognize which kind of drunk will get too drunk.

3) Death of television

Tasty.

This is a big one. If you thought the death of newspapers was ugly, wait until you see the death of cable as it converges with online, much to the latter’s advantage.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall, I suppose. But isn’t it possible that the television companies won’t be as comfortable with burying their heads in the sand and demanding that the world stop advancing as the newspapers were?

Do you really think baseball has a better answer for all that lost revenue than the Times did?

Well, MLB Advanced Media has this thing called MLB.TV, where they directly charge their customers for live video of the games. I gladly pay for it, as do millions of other people … and that’s just right now. Baseball is pioneering the post-television live video industry.

4) The economy

Yup, there’s no chance that improves in the next ten years.

If the economy has really turned Japanese we’re probably in for some hideous effects:

We’ll see.

A labor stoppage out of the next CBA negotiations for one,

Why would you assume this? Because of the unusually long stretch of labor peace we’re currently experiencing? Is this another one of those “the evidence proves the opposite of itself, therefore whatever I’m saying is proven” arguments?

and the death of some major league towns for another. No matter how wealthy its suburbs are, a city like Detroit where more than half the residents are unemployed cannot be reasonably expected to support competitive baseball.

This might happen. But it’s more likely that a city like Detroit will simply no longer be able to support all four sports; why assume it’s baseball that would lose out here?

5) Doping scandals

Yet another current problem that won’t go away in the next ten years? Creative.

I don’t know or really care what guys are on these days, but it isn’t nothing, and we’re in for a repeat of the world’s least interesting scandal once people figure out that various famous players held up as admirable because they claim not to use drugs actually do use them.

That’s it? That’s your whole analysis of the “upcoming” drug scandals? What if people realize that the old-fashioned fearmongers in the dead-press were the only ones screaming about this? What if the drug testing that’s in place continues to work (as it already has been)? What if once the newspapers are finally dead, baseball fans get their analysis from writers who think about their positions rather than just being angry that things are different from how they were in the 1960s, when people didn’t know about the drugs the players were using? I’d say this is another one that’ll just go away, rather than being one of the top 5 biggest reasons we should all stop being baseball fans within the next 10 years.

So in case you read this article and were worried about baseball dying, you can go ahead and relax. I’m calling bullshit on this whole thing.

No comments

After the news that Boof has been traded to the Red Sox for a PTBNL or cash, we also learned that the Twins have been actively trying to trade Perkins, and that Casilla is also available. That raised a question in the comments around here, based loosely around this premise:

** If the Twins are unloading backups like this, why would Casilla be “available,” why not try to trade Punto, who is a better player than Casilla, in an attempt to get more in return?**

First, a quick check into their values:

• Casilla peaked in 2008 with +1.2 WAR, but in 2007 & 2009 he was worth -0.9 and -1.4 WAR, respectively. In his career, he’s been worth a total of -1.0 WAR.
• Punto peaked in 2006 with +3.1 WAR, and also had +2.6 in 2008. He was +1.3 WAR in 2009. He’s never been below replacement level with the Twins (he did produce -0.1 and -0.2 in 2002-2003 in extremely limited time with the Phillies). In his career, he’s been worth a total of +8.7 WAR.

In addition Punto is at least capable of offering a steady hand at any infield position; Casilla has offered no more than a flashy but subpar glove at second base. It seems to me that there’s little doubt that Punto is the more valuable baseball player. So the Twins would have better luck trying to trade Punto, rather than Casilla, right?

Well, no. Not really.

The first thing to look at is their respective ages: Casilla is 25, while Punto is 32. Casilla could possibly improve and become a useful player at his peak in a year or two. Punto is almost certainly past his peak. Teams will definitely consider that kind of thing.

But the second, and arguably more important, thing: surplus value.

Punto will probably produce somewhere between +1 and +2 WAR this year; it’s possible he has a 2006/2008-esque great year, and it’s also possible he falls off a cliff and reverts to pre-2006 shit-Punto, but neither are particularly likely. At the same time, Punto will be paid $4M, which is right around what a team would expect to pay for 1 win worth of production on the free agent market.

This is important: if a team wanted a player who would provide as much value as Punto does, they could sign someone on the market for the same amount that Punto is making.

Similarly, if the Twins were to trade him, that team would then be paying Punto the same amount that he’s worth. So what kind of prospects can the Twins expect in return? Virtually nothing. Punto’s contract has exactly zero surplus value.

But Casilla is making considerably less. He’s before his prime. You can’t sign athletic 25 year old infielders on the free agent market. It’s feasible to guess that Casilla could be a useful player in a year or two, possibly with more time in the minors. If a team wanted to take a mild risk, they could acquire Casilla and hope to get some good value out of him.

The Twins could probably trade Casilla for a Boof-like haul, ie close to nothing. That represents his value on the trade market right now — but even though he’s a worse player than Punto, he’s worth more in trade.

Something to think about when you’re hoping for a trade or analyzing who your team is getting/receiving. You’re not just looking at the players involved — you’re also looking at their contracts.

4 comments

After Carl Pavano accepted arbitration, the Twins found themselves in a brand new bind — they had 41 players on their 40 man roster. So they had to get rid of someone, and there were certainly plenty of options.* But they chose to cut Boof Bonser, and I can’t say I understand the decision.

* Tolbert if you want to cut the worst player, Keppel if you want to cut the worst pitcher.

Boof pitched poorly enough in 2008 to lose his job, then missed all of 2009 with an injury. The Twins, it’s worth noting, gave him the typical Twins medical advice when he began having shoulder problems during 2008; rest and rehabilitation to waste a few months, then major surgery when it becomes clear rest & rehab never could have actually solved the problem. Hey, it worked for Neshek! So Boof ended up getting the Jesse Crain Special* and missed the year. Of course, he got a year of major league service time for that — just like Liriano and Neshek did — which means Boof would have been arbitration eligible this year, and would almost certainly have cost over $1M.

* That’s the “rotator cuff and torn labrum” surgery that all Twins pitchers seem to need after spending enough time with Rick Anderson. What? Did I say that out loud?

So yes, maybe the move was predicated on money, but it’d only be half a million more than Bobby Keppel makes, and I don’t see a reason to think that Boof couldn’t have bested Keppel’s 91 ERA+ in a long-relief/mop-up role. And given Boof’s arm and stuff and propensity for strikeouts, he certainly had more upside; a pitcher like that could have success as a 7th/8th inning setup man.

I don’t think this move was about money — there’s just not enough of it involved. And I don’t think it’s about talent either — even Gardenhire must know that Keppel’s no great shakes. I’d be somewhat surprised if we haven’t replaced Keppel by the time Spring Training ends.

I think this move indicated something else; that the Twins have soured on Bonser, perhaps much in the same way that they’ve soured on Perkins. I don’t know why they might have given up on him … maybe he put a bunch of weight back on, maybe his velocity is down, maybe he’s not taking well to his workout program, maybe he’s being an asshole, maybe the Twins are being assholes, there are plenty of options. But Boof’s stock has tanked over the last 18 months, and it can’t all be because of performance. (He’d need to have either gotten on the mound, or indicated that he can’t get back onto the mound, for it to be solely or primarily for performance reasons.)

It remains to be seen if there’s any interest around the league. How many teams have a roster spot available for a high-upside strikeout pitcher in his 20s on a minor league contract? Would they be willing to take the risk given his injury history?

If nobody wants Boof, the Twins can keep him at AAA, which is probably what they’re hoping for. But I can’t imagine any reason to take this risk given the option of simply cutting Keppel loose.

What do you think the reasoning here was? Are you happy to see Boof go, or not?

21 comments

Last night at midnight eastern was the deadline for players to accept or decline arbitration.  Carl Pavano took his sweet time, and acceptedlate last night.  I think this is a good thing for the Twins.  I was afraid they would foolishly give him the multi-year deal he was looking for.  However, but accepting arbitration, we now know that nobody wanted to give Pavano more than a one year deal.  Prior to 09, Pavano pitched just 145 innings over the course of his stay in the Bronx.  He will need to have a second consecutive 200 ip season to prove he is worth anything more than a one year deal. I obviously hope he does that for the Twins in 2010.

We now have 4 of our 5 rotation spots filled.  With Baker, Slowey, and Blackburn taking the other three.  The fifth spot in the rotation will most likely be fought over by Liriano, Duensing, Swarzak, Manship, and Perkins.  I hope Smith tries to trade the last one, as it seems Perkins and Management aren’t getting along.  At this point Perkins is the definition of expendable. We have 4 back of the rotation guys who have major league experience (3 if you think Liriano is a bullpen arm and nothing more).  We don’t need all four of them.  If someone is willing to give us much of anything for Perkins I say we do it.  Ideally we get some pieces that fill a hole, but the best move now is to just clear out the logjam at the back of the rotation and amongst middle relievers.

What do you guys think? Are you excited to have Pavano back? Who should take the fifth spot in the rotation? What should we do with Perkins?

38 comments

This is just paperwork at this point, but Miguel Angel Sano/Jean* has received his work visa and will be allowed to travel to the USA and work for the Minnesota Twins.

* When he was negotiating the deal, his name was “Miguel Angel Sano.” When he signed the contract with the Twins, he became “Miguel Jean.” When he got his work visa, he is apparently “Miguel Angel Sano” again. Sano is his mother’s name, and Dominican people typically use their mother’s name out of respect until they come of age and begin using their father’s name — but if you’re in the middle of an identity/age verification process, is this really the type of stuff you want to be doing? I’ll be calling him Sano/Jean for the foreseeable future.

Thus ends the first exciting ordeal of his professional baseball career — the process of proving his identity and age and officially becoming the property of a major league team. As everyone knows by now, Sano/Jean claimed he was 16 years old and few believed him (he’s 6′3″, 190 lbs, and very advanced for his apparent age); the Pirates were said to be most interested in his services, but refused to commit without proof of his age. When MLB said they could verify his identity but not his age, the Pirates submitted a lowball offer to his agent, and the Twins were able to steal him away by taking a risk on him.

“Miguel will pick up his visa on Monday and with that it ends a long and painful process,” [Sano/Jean's agent, Rob] Plummer said. “Many teams were interested in Sano’s talent, but Minnesota always trusted that everything was right and that’s why today they have one of the best young players in the world.”

Sano/Jean will most likely report to the Pacific Gulf Coast league to start his professional career in 2010.

The Sano/Jean signing was, in my mind, one of the three events that marked a turning point in the history of the Twins organization, from the “fill up with low-risk/low-upside middle infielders who can’t hit and supplement with the occasional low-baseball-IQ super-athlete who probably won’t make it” philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s, to a much more aggressive “focus on high-upside talent even if it costs more money and entails considerable risk” strategy that they’ve shown lately with these three moves:

1. Signing German teenager Max Kepler to the largest bonus in the history of European players
2. Signing Dominican teenager Miguel Angel Sano/Jean to one of the largest bonuses in the history of Latin American players
3. Going well above slot to steal Kyle Gibson with the 22nd pick of the draft after he slipped from the top 5/10 due to injury concerns

Obviously, the former strategy has worked well; the Twins rebuilt themselves from the disaster that was the 1990s into a model franchise by following it. But the time for a change had certainly come: it would be virtually (if not completely) impossible for the team to take the next step without focusing on higher-upside prospects. And after the Twins blogosphere clamored for years for the Twins to at least try to take the step from “annually contending within the division but incapable of competing with the top AL teams” to perhaps being able to make a title run and sustain a higher level of success, they’ve finally started to do it.

For now, 2008 and 2009 have been remarkable for the back-to-back Game 163s, and for the transcendent play of Mauer. But by the time Sano/Jean reaches the high minors, 2008/2009 could very well be remembered as the year the Twins changed course and altered their history for the better.

Over the long run, that’s much more significant.

No comments

With the latest rumor that Chone Figgins is close to signing a 4/$36M deal with the Mariners, I’m left wondering how in the world the Twins aren’t able to top that deal.

Figgins is the top infielder on the free agent market, and very well should have had his pick of suitors this winter — and given his value over the past few years and his stellar glove and his high OBP, the offers should have been pretty big.

I don’t know if the Twins offered him a contract, or talked to his agents, or even showed any interest in upgrading from a Tolbert/Harris platoon at 3B. I really, really hope so, but the Twins are being as secretive as ever* and we simply have no idea.

* That works great if you’re Apple or Google or something, and are constantly doing awesome stuff and springing it on people when they had no idea it was coming, and you keep on doing it over and over again. But when the secrets end up being “we signed Nick Punto to a multi-year deal” or a shit sandwich like “we traded our top pitcher and our starting shortstop for the worst player in the league,” or “we think the team that wasn’t quite good enough last year is good enough next year,” well, it doesn’t work quite as well.

But it’s at least possible that the Twins engaged Figgins; I’d like to hope that they offered him more than 4/$36M — he’s been worth more than $9M in every season he’s been a starter except for 2006, and his skillset figures to degrade slowly over time. I’d say it’s a good bet that he’ll be worth more than $36M over the course of the next four years. Like I said … I hope the Twins offered more than that.

But maybe it wasn’t good enough. People always talk about how “money isn’t always the biggest thing” for some players; that there are other things they take into account, and that the biggest offer doesn’t always get the player. At the same time, though, doesn’t it seem like players always sign for the largest dollar amount? Last winter, Teixeira was considering the Nationals and (moreso) the Orioles because he’s from the area, and they offered him a staggeringly large deal. The Red Sox offered a contract in the same ballpark, and he’d love to play for the Red Sox because he loves their history and their city and he wants to win. And then the Yankees came in, just about Boston’s offer, and it turns out that Teixeira’s dream has always been to wear pinstripes, so in the end he got exactly what he wanted … but he also got the biggest contract that anyone offered him. Is it all bullshit? Maybe. I don’t know.

Today, though, we learn that sometimes players do turn down the biggest offer to go somewhere they like more. In this case, the A’s offered the largest contract to Marco Scutaro, but he opted for the Red Sox instead because he “preferred the chance to win a World Series with the Red Sox.”* So sometimes, money isn’t everything.

* If someone had said that six years ago, what would you have said?

Realistically, of course, Figgins can’t think he has a better shot at a title with the Mariners than he would with the Twins. The Twins are very close to being built to win now, and as a playing situation, slotting into the 2 spot in the order between Span and Mauer can hardly be beat.

Maybe those things aren’t what’s important to Figgins. Maybe he wants to stay on the west coast rather than coming to the midwest. Maybe he doesn’t like the prospect of being the 6th or 7th best player on the team and would rather be the 1st or 2nd best — I think it’s believable that a guy would rather be the biggest fish. Maybe his postseason struggles, and the attention they’ve gotten, have effected him and he’d rather be in a situation where they don’t come up.

At the end of the day, we don’t know. It’s possible that Figgins would have loved to play for the Twins, but they just didn’t call, or they wouldn’t offer enough money, or years. Maybe the Twins do actually believe in Danny Valencia (despite some evidence to the contrary), and don’t want to block him with an expensive signing.

But at the same time, I’m torn. Is it promising that players might actually be considering more than money when it comes to signing long term contracts — thus lending hope to the idea of a Mauer extension? Is it a bad sign that free agents might choose to avoid the Twins, for intangible reasons? Is it a bad sign that the Twins won’t offer enough money to get key free agents, possibly sending a message to Mauer that they’re not dedicated to building a great team around him? Is it a good sign that perhaps they’re saving their money for Mauer’s contract, and don’t want to lock up money they may not have before they know about how much he’ll cost?

The only thing I’m sure about is that it’s a bad sign that I’m worrying so much.

What do you think?

4 comments

I basically wrote about this earlier this afternoon, but Sheehan’s article about salary arbitration this year is worth quoting:

These decisions, taken as a whole, reflect the evolution of a market. Not every team sees it the same way, but by and large, the industry is valuing experience less, valuing common talents less, and recognizing one of the first principles of performance analysis: talent in MLB isn’t a bell curve, but the right edge of that curve, with a few tremendous talents, and then a large pool of similar ones. There’s nothing special about Randy Winn or Jermaine Dye or Jon Garland, and what separates them from comparable players—experience—isn’t something worth paying millions of marginal dollars for. The industry is getting smarter, and it’s going to make for better baseball for all of us.

That’s exactly right.

This isn’t an issue of “stats vs scouts,” which is apparently how my last article was viewed. This is simply the market for baseball players evolving due to a change in player evaluation in front offices.

Part of that change is certainly due to a difference in evaluation methods — more teams are using statistical analysis to attempt to value both free agents and internal options. Another part of that change is probably economic: the guys signing the checks would rather their employees don’t throw their money around as much as they have in the past.

But, as Sheehan points out, another part of it is that front offices are simply getting smarter. They’ve realized that there really are only a small handful of players worth committing a large amount of resources — either in dollars, years, or roster spots. Beyond those few stars, everyone else in the majors (or, to a lesser extent, the high minors) is pretty close to equivalent. Why would you spend many millions of dollars on one when you can have another for half a million? It makes no sense.

Right now I think the front offices have swung too far in the opposite direction of their free-wheeling ways of yesteryear; this market, like any other, is operating like a pendulum on the way to equilibrium. But even still, the idea that this sort of analysis shows that “all free agents are basically worthless” is disingenuous at best; it smacks of sportswriter-like thinking, that “things were better back then,” and is clearly in opposition of change, no matter how inevitable or beneficial.

Ultimately, I agree with Sheehan (on this). This is going to make baseball better for everyone.*

*Except, of course, for the aging veterans who are no longer the beneficiaries of foolish contracts — but how much do you feel for those guys?

29 comments