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November 22, 2005

Lies, Damned Lies

Defending Jeffrey

by Nate Silver

With the impending trade of Josh Beckett, and everyone from Carlos Delgado to Billy the Marlin rumored to be following Beckett out of town, we are sure to hear a lot of griping about the fire sale in Florida. The case against the Marlins is pretty easy to make. This is a team won the World Series just 25 months ago, that stayed in the wild-card hunt until the final weeks of last season, that isn't especially heavy on payroll, and that has finally started to recover credibility after its purge in 1998.

In the face of all that, I'm here to make the case for the Great Florida Fire Sale.

You only have one chance to get trading a young player like Beckett right. The Marlins have come about a Reggie Bush 40-yard scamper from doing that. Hanley Ramirez, in my eyes and in the eyes of a lot of my colleagues at BP, has always been more a product of the Red Sox Nation hype machine than a legitimate star in the making. There is reason to wonder why the Marlins didn't wait, work the lobby at the Wyndham Dallas in a couple of weeks, and take advantage of perhaps the best sellers' market in recent memory.

But if the execution is lacking, the decision to build down rather than up is the economically correct one. Each team can enter the hot-stove season with one of three potential strategies: buy additional talent, sell off talent, or hold about the same level of talent as before. A fourth strategy, I suppose, is to lay low, evaluate market dynamics, and try and arbitrage whichever side of the coin looks more favorable, but for every Kenny Williams who is reasonably adept at this, there is a Dan O'Brien who uses this as an excuse to dawdle and avoid giving his team any direction at all.

The key behind this choice of direction is performing an objective evaluation of how many wins the existing stock of talent is likely to provide, and the attendant probability of making the playoffs. The Marlins won 83 games last year. They had a couple of players, like Juan Pierre and Mike Lowell, who underperformed, but others like Dontrelle Willis and Todd Jones who overachieved. PECOTA projected the Marlins to win 81 games; their Pythagenport record was 79-83. By all indications, they were a .500 club.

But that is before the inevitable subtraction of A.J. Burnett, who was roughly a five-win player last year. That put the Marlins somewhere in the range of 76-78 win talent, prior to their dealing Beckett. How often is a team with this level of ability going to sneak into the playoffs? How much are they sacrificing by punting on the season?