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.
Bulk in baseball is a source of constant amusement. Just think about late-career Cecil Fielder, or the guy who ate Mo Vaughn. How amusing was it to watch those bulky fellows try to move around the basepaths. And yet, for too long this has been a neglected area of research. Until now. Today, Baseball Prospectus proudly presents VORPSkin, a new innovation in performance analysis that attempts to answer the questions “Who is the biggest waste of skin in baseball?” and “What happens when Keith Woolner gets really bored during the offseason?”
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.
Periodically, Baseball Prospectus pays homage to the “Three True Outcomes” and those players who excel at creating them. A long-time inside joke at rec.sport.baseball, discussion of the Three True Outcomes (or TTO) has appeared on the pages of BP for years. In short, the Three True Outcomes are plate appearances that end with events that do not involve the fielders: the home run, the walk, and the strikeout. Somewhat ironically, the TTO have gained prominence in recent years with Voros McCracken’s controversial (and oft-misstated) theory that pitchers do not differ significantly from each other on their ability to prevent hits on balls in play; thus making their primary differentiators of value the rates of strikeouts, walks, and home runs they allow. But the Three True Outcomes are, at their core, a celebration of hitters, epitomized by the patron saint of the TTO, and the prototype for early BP book covers, Rob Deer. With that in mind, we start with a list of the top hitters for 2003, according to the percentage of their plate appearances that ended with a True Outcome.
Kris Benson had a difficult end to his season in 2003, spending the last two months not only on the shelf, but answering hard questions about the injury–or, as the Pirates medical staff insinuated, lack thereof. Benson finally got back on the mound last week, pronouncing himself fit and pain-free. While the Pirates don’t expect to contend, their hopes lie in Benson asserting himself as the ace everyone expected him to be coming out of Clemson the better part of a decade ago. If Benson can prove himself healthy and effective–something he hasn’t been since returning from Tommy John surgery–he could be this year’s version of Sidney Ponson: a comeback candidate who’ll likely finish the season on a contender.
The Pirates are also hoping two acquisitions from last season–Jason Bay and Bobby Hill–will be ready to go for Spring Training. Both were unable to participate in a recent mini-camp. Bay is recovering from labrum surgery while Hill is still not cleared for baseball activity after suffering a stress fracture in his lower back.
Robb Nen comes back to his closer role this spring after missing the entire 2003 season. While he is throwing pain-free and from the mound, it’s still a long road back from labrum surgery. At this point, we’re simply left to guess–and pay close attention during Spring Training–if Nen in 2004 will be anything close to the Nen in 2002 who was so key to the Giants’ run to the Series. With a much thinner pen, the Giants need him.
Baseball’s adoption of interleague play and the unbalanced schedule has presented analysts with some new challenges. Quality-of-competition concerns have mostly been overstated, but they do exert a substantive influence over what happens on the field. Frankly, the way the schedule is arranged doesn’t make a whit of sense, considering teams from different divisions compete for a single Wild Card spot, but that’s the system we’ve been given. Much has already been done in terms of calibrating statistics to reflect the injustice of MLB’s scheduling policies, but one thing I’ve yet to see addressed is the quality of defenses lineups are facing around the league. That leads me to TAD. You might recall James Click’s piece on Team Adjusted Defense (TAD) from a few months ago. By dint of some mathematical acrobatics, James has added some sorely needed alterations to Bill James’ defensive efficiency metric. What we’re left with is a valuable snapshot of team defense. In any event, what I’m attempting to do this week is come up with strength-of-schedule rankings based on the quality of the defenses they’ve faced.
In the late 90s, D’Angelo Jiménez was considered one of the best prospects in baseball. Minor league experts ranging from ESPN.com’s John Sickels to BP’s Rany Jazayerli rated Jiménez as a better prospect than Alfonso Soriano, another young infielder in the Yankee system. But in January of 2000, Jiménez suffered severe injuries when his car collided with a bus on a highway in the Dominican. The injuries sustained robbed him the opportunity to compete for a position in the Yankees infield, as Jiménez was coming off big seasons in the Triple-A International and Dominican Winter leagues, and was expected to make the big club that season. He’s since moved through the White Sox and Padres organizations, with both clubs souring on him due to periodic struggles at the plate and on defense. His overall profile remains that of an effective hitter with moderate power and good plate discipline, making Jiménez one of the most underappreciated players in the game. In 2003 he landed in Cincinnati, putting up a solid line of .290/.365/.421 in 290 at-bats with the Reds. This winter in the Dominican the 26-year-old infielder had arguably the best offensive season for a second baseman in the history of the league, winning the batting title (.360), flirting with the single-season OBP record before finishing at .485, and also slugging an even .500, all while playing half his games in a pitcher’s park. Baseball Prospectus recently chatted with Jiménez before a game between the Azucareros del Este and the Licey Tigers.
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.
This past December, the Texas Rangers and Boston Red Sox almost pulled off a swap of Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, with assorted lesser players and suitcases of cash also reportedly involved. While this was going on, there were countless media references to this deal being “the biggest trade in baseball history.” This is a pretty bold statement, obviously, but these are some pretty big names so you didn’t hear a lot of protest or debate about the claim.
Teams have been trading baseball players for 140 years or so, and many of these trades have involved 10 or more players changing sides. Of course, that is not what makes the A-Rod/Manny trade “big”; its bigness rests with its star power, with both principles being among the best players in the game and somewhere near mid-career. Setting aside Ramirez for a moment, how often is a player of the caliber of Alex Rodriguez traded at all? Not bloody often, obviously, since there have not been very many players as good as Rodriguez, traded or not.
This article will attempt to identify these rare deals, where a team has a superstar talent and decides to trade it away. For our purposes a “trade” requires one or more players to move in each direction. Babe Ruth was not traded from the Red Sox to the Yankees, he was sold. Eddie Collins and Frank Baker were sold by the Athletics. What’s more, we are not interested in deals where money was an overriding component of the transaction. In 1935, Jimmie Foxx was dealt from the Athletics to the Red Sox in a two-for-two trade, but a check for $150,000 came the other way. The players the A’s received were of little import–Connie Mack wanted the 150 grand. This codicil similarly eliminates deals involving such superstars as Tris Speaker, Joe Jackson, Pete Alexander, Lefty Grove, and Johnny Mize.
The Angels go on a spending spree. The Dodgers frustrate their fans. The A’s wheel and deal. The Padres are bullish about 2004. Our tour of major league transactions continues with a visit out West.
Last year at this time, when we were first unveiling PECOTA, I was besieged with questions about the system’s accuracy. From the very start, the system has always had its believers and its skeptics; all of them wanted to know whether the damn thing worked. My evasive answers to these questions must surely have seemed like a transparent bit of spin doctoring. One of my readers suggested to me, quite seriously, that I had a future in PR or politics. But I was convinced–and remain convinced–that a forecasting system should not be judged by its results alone. The method, too, is important, and PECOTA’s methodology is sound. It presents information in a way that other systems don’t, explicitly providing an error range for each of its forecasts–which, importantly, can differ for different types of players (rookies, for example, have a larger forecast range than veterans). Its mechanism of using comparable players to generate its predictions is, I think, a highly intuitive way to go about forecasting. Besides, all of the BP guys seemed to appreciate the system, and getting the bunch of us to agree on much of anything is an accomplishment in and of itself. Now that it has a season under its belt, however, we can do the good and proper thing and compare PECOTA against its competition.
It’s possible to be selfish and arrogant and help your team. If a player hits a home run in an arrogant matter, that’s still worth at least one run. If Rickey selfishly stole second, that puts his team in a better position to score. Certainly, if he got himself thrown out all the time, he’d have been a detriment, but he was successful more than 75% of the time in his record-setting, 130-steal year. Baseball’s one of the most individual team sports. The game’s crux is a one-one-one battle, batter against pitcher, and even the most complex plays are serial actions–pitcher to batter to shortstop to first for the out. If everyone on a team was as good as Rickey and acted selfishly, they’d score 2,000 runs a year. In a strike-shortened season, where every game was rained out after the fifth inning. Playing in the Astrodome.