Prospectus Today: Whee... (12/10)
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December 14, 2009 Prospectus TodayGetting Talent For Less Than It's Worth
Baseball's off-season calendar is something of a mess now, with the deadline to offer arbitration to your free agents coming before the Winter Meetings, the deadline for the free agents to accept coming during them, and the deadline for tendering contracts to players on your 40-man roster coming after everyone leaves town. (In this year, that deadline was a Saturday, which is something that should really be avoided if possible.) There should be some top-down effort to align these dates in a way that dovetails better with the meetings-even if they are something of an anachronism given modern telecommunications. If you're going to bother bringing everyone together, you should do so when teams have the best set of information for making trades and signings. Having a major deadline two days after the meetings is at best counterproductive, and at worst, silly. As it turned out, Saturday didn't yield any big news. The best players who might have been non-tendered, such as the Marlins' Dan Uggla and Josh Johnson, were offered contracts. For the most part, the best players who were not, such as the A's Jack Cust and the Pirates' Matt Capps, were cut loose for good reasons having to do with expected performance and expected price. Among the others, I get most excited about Kelly Johnson, who had a lost season while Martin Prado had a strong one, making Johnson a luxury. Johnson didn't hit as well as he had in '08, with line drives turning into fly balls, but the result, a nearly 100-point loss in BABIP that destroyed his rate stats, wasn't entirely reflective of how he played. Given the wrist injury he played through and loss of his regular status early in the year, I'm inclined to look at his 2009 and give him a mulligan. Johnson is a .270/.340/.440 guy who can play second base at about an average level. He does have experience in left field and can play some third base, so he's useful as a bench option. Of the newly-minted free agents, he strikes me as the one likely to have the most value in '10. The Dodgers need a second baseman, and any number of bad teams like the Padres, Nationals, and Pirates could be improved with the addition of Johnson. It doesn't seem like that long ago that Ryan Garko was a highly-regarded prospect, and even at last year's trade deadline, the Giants wanted him enough to deal a prospect to the Indians for him. At the time, Garko was hitting a serviceable .285/.362/.464 and had been better than that when getting regular playing time in the month leading up to the trade. Garko didn't get off to a great start with the Giants, however, and saw his role reduced in September, with Travis Ishikawa getting most of the playing time. The Giants may want to sign a third baseman and use Pablo Sandoval at first, and even without that would be inclined to play Ishikawa's glove, so Garko was turned loose. Garko is just 29 and has a career .313/.392/.495 line against left-handers; I'd certainly rather have him than, just to pick one name out of a hat, Mike Lowell. Heck, I might prefer to stick him back behind the plate twice a week-Garko was drafted as a catcher but last played there regularly in 2005-instead of signing Jason Kendall. If anything, I suspect teams were a bit generous in handing out contracts. I'm not sure that tendering Mike Fontenot got the Cubs anything they couldn't find elsewhere. Johnson's value is shaped differently, but he'll probably be a better, less expensive player in 2010. The Twins tendered both Jesse Crain (who finished the season strongly) and Francisco Liriano (who did not), and while they should get a revenue boost in '10, they have a lot of spots on the roster for which the inputs are greater than the outputs. Crain and Liriano could well add to that. The Royals kept Brian Bannister, although I suspect Joe Posnanski is financing that one, especially after the ridiculous Kendall contract. I keep coming back to the trend line of the last few offseasons. The industry is getting smarter, valuing things that matter-expected on-field performance, applied skills, proper evaluation-over a knee-jerk preference for experience. Teams are coming around to the idea, first expressed by Bill James in the 1980s, that talent in baseball is not normally distributed, that for every great player there are multiple above-average ones, and for every above-average one many average ones. There's no reason to pay extra money for average performance, and the vast majority of players are at that level or below. The majority of baseball players, even major leaguers, are fungible. If you pay $4 million each for three players who will produce $2 million worth of value, you've wasted six million that could be better spent on high-impact players. The key mistake that continues to be made-and we've seen it with Kendall and the Royals, Ivan Rodriguez and the Nationals, Brandon Lyon and the Astros-is money wasted in dribs and drabs on players who are fungible by teams that have no reason to chase wins. At the same time, most teams are correctly assessing that keeping a good player eligible for arbitration but not free agency is a good deal for them. For all of the industry complaints about arbitration, teams are well aware that a good player will make less in arbitration-and have corresponding trade value-than he will on the market. Arbitration does not inflate salaries above what the market would pay, it merely inflates them above the good ol' days of "play for this or stay home." The illusion of huge raises through arbitration is an innumerate construct sold by teams and bought by the media, which will report only that Bobby Fireball got a 600 percent raise by losing his arbitration case, and not that that salary represents about half his market value for next year, or that he was making maybe five percent of his market value the previous year. Even the Marlins, theoretically paying front-office employees in scrip while asking that everyone use both sides of the toilet paper, know that offering Uggla and Johnson arbitration is better for the franchise than letting them walk away. The exclusive rights to employ good baseball players without competing for their services and the exclusive rights to stage Major League Baseball games within a particular geographic area are, in fact, 99 percent of the value of a franchise. You don't just give some of that away, no matter if your fan base can cater a meeting with a bag of microwave popcorn and a six-pack of Squirt.
Joe Sheehan is an author of Baseball Prospectus.
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'The Principal Agent Problem' creates $$$ for the likes of Kendall and Lyons. I'm GM of a lousy team. The media and the casual fan base expect me to at least make them somewhat less lousy. Starting now.
I can put $$$ into the minor league system, pay down debt, etc., do all sorts of useful things with the money coming in. And leave a nicer foundation for my successor, who will replace me after the media and fan base force my firing after a couple of seasons. Even if the owner's in my corner, a deteriorating bottom line will still force him to bring in a 'new face' so as to sell season tickets, radio + cable + local TV, and so on.
Or I can try to catch lightning in a bottle. Fill the gaping holes with guys who will come here provided I give them a few extra bucks. If not sell a few extra tickets and ads doing so, at least stem the financial bleeding. And hope that a whole bunch of guys have good years.
And of course most guys ultra-rich enough to own ball teams think their genius will enable them to turn it around right quick anyways. So odds are the ego-monster owner won't be in my corner, won't hire me unless I promise him I can show results pretty quickly.
I quite properly have a short-term time span. Getting lucky is the only way I can personally succeed. So I sign Kendall/Lyons/so on and hope.
Richie- that is an excellent post. I have stated (less coherently) often some of the same points. What many of those who criticize the small market GM's ad nauseum for every move that doesn't pan out don't understand is that these guys aren't doing "franchise mode" on an XBox, they don't work in a vacuum. They have to show real results which often means in reference to FA's- plan F (cause plan A, B, C, D won't even return a call and sign with NYY/Bos/NYY/NYM).
The mlb economic system is set-up for the second tier teams to fight over and inflate the price of mediocre talent.
The problem is that a guy like Jason Kendall - a 37 year old catcher who hasn't hit in years - offers no possibility whatsoever of improving a team. He's not "lightning in a bottle" - he's a known commodity. "lightning in a bottle" would be signing somebody like Ben Sheets or Rich Harden or Khalil Greene or letting Kila Ka'aihue play first. Yes, all of those moves might fail. But they're not guaranteed failures like the signing of Kendall proved to be.
I've written this before and been mocked, but I should point out that the Royals spent as much money last year on Jose Guillen, John Bale and Mike Jacobs as the Yankees spent on CC Sabathia. You wanna guess who got more value?
Sorry typo:
"like the signing of Kendall will prove to be."
Not that I disagree with you about the general idea - but you have to consider this? why would CC Sabathia sign with the royals for anything close to what he'd be willing to sign with the Yankee's for?
He looses personal revenu hocking local products, he loses national recognition to improve the money he gets for hocking products, he gets lambasted in the press for valuing money more than winning for taking the exact same amount of money from a bad team vs a good team, and he kills his chances as a follow on big contract because a bad team will lead to worse numbers for him, mediocre win totals and no bidding war in his mid to late 30's.
Not that signing those FA's was a good idea for the royals but there was no way they got Sabathia for amount the Yankee's got him for.
And yes I know that is full of bad grammar and typoes. ;-)
I think players like Sabathia are mercenary; they go to the team that offers the most money, period. As far as press reaction, I suppose you're right, but the opposite is also true: Sabathia got blasted in the media for the contract he signed with the Yankees, too. And suppose he made the Royals good enough to compete in the weak AL Central? (Imagine a rotation featuring Greinke and CC). Wouldn't that give him all kinds of media brownie points?
I don't know how much money Sabathia makes "hocking" local products. I can't imagine it's much more than a drop in the bucket.
The point I was making, though, isn't really about Sabathia. It's more about terribly managed teams, like the Royals, who cry poverty while spending their money unwisely. Like, on Jason Kendall.