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July 2, 2012

Pebble Hunting

Non-Transaction Analysis: New-Money Ball

by Sam Miller

Los Angeles Dodgers
Did not acquire 1B-R Carlos Lee and cash for RHP Garrett Gould. [6/30]

“Ned, it’s Brian. Listen, I saw you got blocked on Carlos Lee this week. Yeah, I got a player who’s almost as good, and costs quite a bit less. Contract expires this year. We don’t even want any prospects back. And he can play center field! Yeah, definitely. Aaron Rowand. Good guy. Good hustler. Face like a skillet. No, right, we did waive him, so you just pick up the money we owe him and we’d do our best to encourage him to...”

Gosh, it’s hard to do an analysis of a deal that didn’t happen. It’s hard to do an analysis of a deal that does happen; without being in the rooms, without knowing each team’s budget forecasts, cable contracts, scouting assessments, ambitions, etc., what can we say for sure? Now throw in the facts that are obscured in a deal that doesn’t happen: how much cash was coming over, most notably, but also whether there were other players involved that never made it into the rumors, and whether there were any further plans for the players who would be replaced. So let’s start with that big ol’ disclaimer: we don’t, at this point, know how much cash the Astros were going to pick up. If the deal was Carlos Lee plus all the money, well, that’s a lot different than Carlos Lee plus none of the money. Did you know the money is an important part of analyzing a deal? It is! Now you know. We don’t know the money, so we don’t really know the deal.

But here’s what we know: the Astros “will do cartwheels” if the deal goes through, wrote Jon Heyman when the deal might still have gone through. The Astros “would be expected to pay the majority of the $10 million” Lee is still owed, Heyman also wrote. Let’s say that both of those things are accurate. The Astros would pay at least $5.01 million. And they would do cartwheels. Men in polo shirts don’t do cartwheels because they get to do a whole bunch of paperwork. They do cartwheels because they saved a whole lot of money and can maybe use that money to buy a falcon. So the Dodgers would pay a substantial portion of Lee’s contract, but not more than $4.99 million. Let’s just assume all that, and acknowledge that what we’re doing here is dumb.

That leaves us with the merits of the deal, and what it says about the Dodgers, about the National League, and about baseball. Taken one at a time.