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February 12, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Most of the excitement in Philadelphia has to do with an improved bullpen, recent versions of which have been the perceived bane of the city's existence. So out with Jose Mesa, in with Billy Wagner. Given how much of the blame for the Phillies' disappointing performances the last two seasons has been placed at the foot of the relief staff, it's easy to understand why fans, media, and the team itself is so eager to have the hard-throwing lefty closing games. I actually agreed that the move would help the Phillies, although not exactly for the reasons generally given. Closers are overrated as a class, and as great as Wagner is, using him solely to protect ninth-inning leads and the occasional ninth-inning tie is a suboptimal application of his talent. However, I also know that Larry Bowa is one of the most temperamental managers in the game, and I strongly believe that his emotional style has been a detriment to this team over the past two seasons.
February 10, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
It remains one of my clearest memories of the winter meetings: A breathless Will Carroll coming up to a group of writers with the news that an MLB employee had just told him that Miguel Tejada, Ivan Rodriguez and Vladimir Guerrero were all ready to sign contracts with the Baltimore Orioles.
While Tejada did join the Os fold that night, the other two deals fell through. The Birds eventually had to settle for Javy Lopez instead of Pudge, and Rafael Palmeiro instead of Guerrero. Not quite as sexy, but still enough to help the Orioles, who got ridiculously little production from shortstop and catcher last season...
February 6, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Drew Henson, after a six-year baseball career, has elected to go back to football. He's walking away from $12 million owed to him over the next couple of years, although he's likely to make most of that up in a football contract.
I take no pleasure in this. My objection to Henson's baseball career had more to do with the outsized expectations placed upon him by the scouting community and the Yankees. It was very clear that Henson, despite his size and strength, lacked the skills necessary to be a productive baseball player. He was pushed to Triple-A despite considerable evidence that he didn't belong there. His prospect status as a baseball player was almost entirely a function of his ability as a football player; had he not had that particular trait, he would have been just another guy.
Credit Henson for how he managed his career. Two-sport athletes should always choose baseball first, because the skills required to play the game--to hit, specifically--atrophy quickly if they go unused. You can fail at baseball and go on to a career in football or basketball much more easily than you can take a few years away from baseball and come back to it.
February 4, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Under new owner Frank McCourt--who has about as much of his own cash invested in the team as you do--the Dodgers have embarked on a search for a general manager. Current GM Dan Evans, who has held the job since October of 2001, hasn't been fired, and has been told he is welcome to interview for his job, which is awfully nice of McCourt.
I can't even begin to describe how angry this whole thing makes me. It shouldn't; I have no emotional attachment to the Dodgers or Evans. However, the idea that Evans, who inherited a nearly impossible situation and has put the franchise on much more solid ground than it was when he arrived, could somehow find his job in danger just as his work could begin to bear fruit strikes me as patently unfair.
The Dodgers have been contenders in both seasons under Evans, and their two-year record of 177-147 is fifth in the NL in that time. The Dodgers have achieved that mark despite the crushing weight of former GM Kevin Malone's worst mistakes. In both seasons, the Dodgers got next to nothing for more than $20 million of their money. Darren Dreifort took home nearly $22 million over two years, and threw a grand total of 60 2/3 innings, all in '03. In '02, Kevin Brown made $15.7 million while throwing just 63 2/3 frames (to the tune of a 4.81 ERA). This past year, Andy Ashby closed out his three-year deal by providing 78 innings of 5.18 ERA ball, while cashing in for $8.5 million.
February 3, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Still, by this standard the Tigers could be as much as 11 wins better just based on these upgrades. Keeping in mind that they were a "true" 49-win team in 2003 (falling six games short of their projected, or Pythagorean record, based on runs scored and allowed), you can project 15-20 games of improvement even before considering the possibility that the returning players will get better. That's certainly a worthy achievement, but it's more important to evaluate the Tigers in terms of what they are now, comparing them not to their wretched performance of a year ago, but to their competition. Are the Tigers really comparable to the Twins, White Sox and Royals, or even the Indians?
January 30, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Who wants to be a Yankee third baseman? OK, so maybe that doesn't have the same ring of a certain game show that gripped the nation a few years back, but it's a question on many people's minds right now. Incumbent starter Aaron Boone blew out his left ACL playing basketball and may be lost for the entire 2004 season. While Boone is basically a league-average third baseman, maybe a bit better due to his glove, he looks like Mike Schmidt compared to the available replacements.
January 28, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
In Monday's column, I picked on Keith Foulke a bit, expressing the opinion that I didn't think he'd sustain his performance throughout the life of his new four-year contract. Buried in that criticism was the following: I haven't looked too deeply at this yet, but I don't think you can find a lot of relievers who stayed at Foulke's recent level for a seven- or eight-year period. I think the best relievers in the modern era have short, high peaks before slipping. Mariano Rivera is the exception to this, but when you look around at the best relievers in baseball, by any standard, there just aren't guys who are worth five or more WARP a year for most of a decade.
January 26, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
I'm going to pull some of the good stuff from my Inbox for today's column. Before I get into it, though, I want to thank all the people who wrote in with feedback on the Pete Rose piece. I meandered into that minefield with some trepidation, but the response from the readership was tremendous.
I can only hope that Bud Selig is hearing the same kind of groundswell against reinstating Rose that I am.
On to the more interesting stuff.
January 23, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Although it's been blamed for everything from higher salaries to the decline of the American family, arbitration has been a net benefit for the baseball industry. It has eliminated holdouts, which were an annual event in the not-so-long-ago days when salary negotiations were a one-sided affair. The romantic memories of the good old days of baseball tend to leave out the vicious treatment of holdout players by management, media and fans. General managers are often quoted as saying that they hate the arbitration process because it's confrontational. I don't mean to state the obvious, but salary negotiations are confrontational. The process of asking for a certain amount of money, and trying to employ someone for a lesser amount, is necessarily going to be adversarial. To point at arbitration and declare that it drives a wedge between player and team without acknowledging that it replaces a process that was responsible for some of the most divisive player/management confrontations in the game's history is both ignorant of that history and more than a little deceptive. The salary increases many players see through arbitration have more to do with the transition from having no leverage--the condition of all players in their first three seasons--to having some, as opposed to some structural problem in the system. Over the next month, you'll read about how some player lost his arbitration case and settled for a $3 million raise. (This is often reported as a percentage: "Jones lost his case and will be stuck with a 400% increase over last year's salary.") The eye roll is implied in print, explicit on television, but the skewed number isn't the new salary, but the old one, which is held down by the rules which leave players without recourse until they reach three years of service time.
January 22, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
One of the effects of the depressed labor market is that there are fewer bad signings by teams. The game's middle class, that group of players with more service time than value, has been taking it in the shorts the past couple of winters, and that's the subset that usually produces more howlers than any other. Nevertheless, we can still point to some free-agent deals and scratch our heads. Some things, I'd imagine, will never change.
January 20, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Ivan Rodriguez and Greg Maddux are still on the market. For that matter, so are Mark McLemore, Shawn Estes, Todd Zeile, and Dave Veres. But I think we've seen enough to evaluate this winter's free-agent signings. Today, the best. Tomorrow, the worst.
January 15, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
Rose violated rule 21(d) countless times and is serving the appropriate
penalty for doing so. Reinstating him would be an embarrassment to the game,
and a kick in the teeth to every player who obeyed the rule. There's a
rationale in play that Rose's admission is a step in the direction to
reinstatement. I actually see it as the validation of all the work Bart
Giamatti, John Dowd, and Fay Vincent did in researching Rose's activities and
their evaluation of them. It was only the small possibility that he actually
was innocent that had been the one bullet in Rose's gun.
That's gone now. Rose violated 21(d). The punishment for that is permanent
ineligibility. There isn't any gray area left.
January 12, 2004
by Joe Sheehan
With my contributions to Baseball Prospectus 2004 safely behind me, it's time to get back to filling this space with observations and analysis. Or attempts at same. I've missed writing my column, and while there's no way I'll get completely caught up on the events of the last two months, I can have fun trying.
I'm not a resolutions guy, but I am making two commitments for 2004: to emphasize a more quantitative viewpoint in my analysis, and to spend more time answering reader mail. The former I'll just have to work on every time I write, but the latter has now been dedicated a "Task" in Outlook. Nothing in my life is real until Outlook starts nagging me about it, so hopefully that will help me be better about a weak spot in my game the last few years. I can't answer all my e-mail, but I can get to more of it than I have been.
The big news over the weekend was that Vladimir Guerrero surprised everyone by signing with the Angels. No one saw this coming; the Angels had been rumored to be interested earlier this winter, but had faded into the background after signing Jose Guillen in December. Over the last week, the Mets and Orioles had been engaged in a low-scale bidding war for Guerrero, a weird situation in which the goal seemed to be to guarantee the fewest years and the lowest amount of money while showing the least interest. Throw in raging insecurity and a lousy sense of fashion and you'd have the way women "pursued" me in college. It was this atmosphere that allowed Moreno and the Angels to come in and pick up a Hall of Fame talent at a price that almost seems like a typo.
December 24, 2003
by Joe Sheehan
I usually complain that the lack of changes in the weather in southern California causes me to not get into the Christmas spirit. So this year, Sophia and I came east to spend the holidays with my family...and it's 57 degrees in New York City on December 23.
The California-native bride is happy that she can feel all her extremities, but I'm looking around for an open golf course, and still wondering if my Christmas cheer is going to make an appearance.
December 18, 2003
by Joe Sheehan
This deal validates the notion that the Rangers were somehow ruined by the signing of Alex Rodriguez, when in fact, Rodriguez has been worth the money. The Rangers' problems have more to do with wasted money on non-contributors, the failure of some B and C pitching prospects, and the absence of a center fielder for years on end. We've reached a point in the trade negotiations between the Rangers and Red Sox where the issues aren't players, but money. Money as in "how much less can the Red Sox pay Rodriguez?" The Sox have been negotiating that point with Rodriguez for some time, and the two sides appear to have an agreement that satisfies both sides, one in which he gets much less guaranteed compensation and assumes a lot more risk. Conceding that we don't yet know exactly how much money he might be giving up to make this happen, I think it's entirely possible that Rodriguez would be doing himself a disservice. Is it reasonable for someone to pay, for the sake of argument, $40 million just to change employers and base cities?
December 15, 2003
by Joe Sheehan
It was almost the greatest single-day performance in winter meetings history. Toward the end of a relatively quiet Sunday of minor deals and signings, word began to spread that the Baltimore Orioles were going to sign Miguel Tejada to a six-year deal. That wasn't entirely unexpected; Tejada had a limited number of suitors, and the Orioles were the wealthiest of the bunch. After being rumored at just about every number in a range of 20, the deal came in at an eye-popping $72 million. As with Mike Cameron, a late flurry of activity had been very profitable for the player. What was unexpected was the rumors that came attached to the deal. Not only were the O's signing Tejada, but they were also ready to announce that he'd be playing with Ivan Rodriguez and Vladimir Guerrero. That's right; the Baltimore Orioles were coming back with a vengeance, prepared to commit close to $200 million to the three best players left unsigned in an effort to return to relevance in the AL East and return crowds to Camden Yards.
December 14, 2003
by Joe Sheehan
The most interesting story, to my mind, was Mike Cameron's. Late Friday, it appeared that the Padres were in good shape to sign him. By Saturday evening, there was word that the A's had moved to the front of the pack, having beaten the Padres' offer. By early Sunday, though, Cameron was a Met, accepting a three-year deal for $7 million per, the highest average value that had been attached to Cameron's name, and it wasn't close. There was a round of "not about the money" talk after the deal. The Mets' players helped recruit Cameron, and the center fielder's Atlanta roots were played up. Maybe those things came into play, but the fact is, no one else was offering Cameron seven million bucks a year. He did well for himself in a market with lots of outfielders and more on the way. Cameron becomes the Mets' best defensive center fielder since...well, he might be the best in their history. The Mets have employed both Richie Ashburn and Willie Mays, but both well after their primes. Cameron is an upgrade over the Roger Cedeno/Timo Perez class, and like Kazuo Matsui, makes the team better.
December 13, 2003
by Joe Sheehan
With each passing day on which few or no free agents sign, the pressure on players and agents grows. Come next Saturday, the deadline for tendering a contract offer to players on the 40-man roster, it's likely that the number of players seeking employment will double, with a particular swelling in the ranks of outfielders and first basemen. That non-tender date is on everyone's mind, and it's an element in every negotiation with a player below the level of superstar. The recognition that baseball's middle class is filled with guys who don't have to be highly-compensated just because they have service time or tenure with your ball club has permeated the landscape, and even without getting into the C word, that recognition is driving supply up and demand down. So we may see a lot of the guys who weren't tendered arbitration, and the free agents on the second and third tiers, sign deals this weekend just to keep themselves out of that mass of humanity. It's an interesting, and positive, change, because it frees teams to use the bulk of their resources on players who do make a difference in the standings.
December 12, 2003
by Joe Sheehan
Joe Sheehan checks in from New Orleans for the first installment in the series of daily reports he'll be filing from the winter meetings. Today, a look at the Kevin Brown trade, the Miguel Batista signing, and the Mariners' botching of their outfield situation.
December 9, 2003
by Joe Sheehan
Two years ago, I wrote a column that lambasted a couple of teams which had neglected to offer arbitration to their free agents: The decision to offer arbitration to a player eligible for free agency is one of the few bright-line tests of a baseball team's front-office acumen. The elements of the decision are fairly simple, yet nearly every year a handful of teams do things that border on the bizarre, that reflect a lack of preparation for the problem or a misunderstanding of the issues involved. My first reaction to the news that Vladimir Guerrero, Gary Sheffield, Greg Maddux and others hadn't been offered arbitration was pretty much in line with the above. It seemed silly to decline even the option to continue to negotiate, and to forfeit the valuable draft picks that you get if the player signs elsewhere, as most free agents of this quality do when faced with current teams who show little interest in having them return. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that the thought process from two years ago no longer applies.
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