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.
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.
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.
For the first time in a while, I didn’t think there were any major mistakes in the BBWAA awards. Or more accurately, I didn’t find any outcome that I couldn’t understand.
That’s not to say that everything was perfect. The one award that clearly went to the wrong person was the NL Rookie of the Year honor. Dontrelle Willis had the story, though, and combined with his clear advantage over Brandon Webb in the W-L column, there wasn’t much doubt that Willis was going to win. It was the wrong choice, but one that had been a fait accompli for some time.
American League voters got their rookie honors right, although perhaps for the wrong reasons. Angel Berroa came from behind to grab the award, something that rarely happens with this particular balloting. Berroa was helped by the refusal of two voters to put Hideki Matsui on the ballot, despite Matsui being eligible by the rules of the voting and pretty clearly one of the top three rookies in the AL this year. The two writers, Bill Ballou and Pat Souhan, both cited Matsui’s experience in Japan as a factor in their decision, and both are wrong for doing so. Matsui was a rookie, and acceptance of a ballot in this process should mean acceptance of the eligibility rules, not an opportunity to make a statement against them.
Five days in Phoenix would have been a lot more enjoyable if MLB hadn’t gutted the Arizona Fall League schedule. No night games, no Sunday games, and no doubleheaders meant that I saw just three games in five days, as opposed to the five games in three days I saw during 2002’s trip.
Nevertheless, the visit to Arizona was enjoyable, not least because I was again a part of Baseball HQ’s First Pitch Arizona. Ron Shandler puts on a great program for fantasy players, more than 100 of whom were treated to analysis and opinion from John Sickels, Rob Neyer, Brent Strom, Rany Jazayerli, Jim Callis, David Rawnsley and a host of HQ’s own experts.
Here’s bunch of semi-connected thoughts from the weekend…
On Monday, The Phillies and Astros kicked off what should be an interesting off-season by making a four-player deal. The Astros swapped long-time closer Billy Wagner for three young pitchers, the most accomplished of them Brandon Duckworth. My knee-jerk reaction was that the Astros had done well for themselves. Wagner is a great closer, but he’s a closer, and as such is limited in what he contributes to a team. The ‘Stros have Octavio Dotel to replace those innings, and an assortment of arms to replace Dotel’s workload. Moreover, I’m high on Duckworth, even after his second straight disappointing season. The deal allows the Astros to take the $8 million they had committed to Wagner and use it on a #3 starter, something they’d been playing without the last couple of years. Andy Pettitte is the likely target. A rotation of Roy Oswalt, Wade Miller, Pettitte (or another free agent), Duckworth and Jeriome Robertson would be one of the better ones in the NL. The more I thought about it, though, I didn’t mind the deal from the Phillies’ standpoint.
Monday, the Red Sox announced that they would cut ties with manager Grady Little. The decision wasn’t a big surprise; Little wasn’t fired as much as he wasn’t re-hired, given that his contract was just about to expire. Little was never the choice of the revamped Red Sox front office. He’d gotten the job as something of a little-known compromise candidate in early 2002 and guided the team to a 93-69 record in his first season. He was inherited by the new, performance-analysis-driven front office a year ago, and kept the job as much to provide some continuity as because of any particular skills to brought to the position.
I think too much is being made of the influence on this outcome of the last major decision Little made. Little isn’t unemployed this morning because he left Pedro Martinez in too long in Game Seven of the ALCS. Certainly, that decision will stick in memory for years to come, but I doubt there are a half-dozen cases in history where a manager lost his job for making one wrong move. I expect more from Theo Epstein and Larry Lucchino, and to say that Little isn’t the Sox manager today because of that decision is to give them far too little credit.
The Marlins have a cleanup hitter too young to drink and a manager too old to drive. They’re owned by a man who was a key part of one of the ugly episodes that marred MLB’s integrity in the late 1990s. They drew 8,362 fans to a Memorial Day home game as years of neglect, deception and wheedling continued to hold down interest in the team. And yet, they’re the champs, and they stood on one of the game’s sacred spaces last night and beat back a team that was supposed to be too experienced, too well-paid, and too blessed by the gods to lose to such an upstart. As a Yankee fan, I hated it. As someone who despises the way in which Jeffrey Loria came to own the Marlins, I hated it. As a baseball fan, it was hard not to love it.
It’s official: Josh Beckett will start Game Six for the Marlins on three days’ rest, with Carl Pavanoscheduled to do the same if the Fish can’t put the Yankees away tonight. I strongly disagree with this decision. It’s a move you make when you’re down 3-2, not up 3-2. It’s a decision you make when the difference between your best pitcher and the rest of the staff so large that going with anyone else in Game Six almost guarantees a Game Seven. Neither of those apply here. The Marlins need to win just one game to be champions, and they don’t get style points for winning in six. The Marlins have at least one pitcher available, in Mark Redman, who was arguably their #3 starter during the season. They certainly have Dontrelle Willis available for at least a few innings, and Willis was lights-out for a good part of 2003 and has been tough on Yankee lefties in this series. Frankly, outside of Game Five starter Brad Penny and Beckett (assuming you hold him back), the Marlins have nine pitchers who can give them at least a couple of innings, and some of those are the better pitchers on the staff. It’s Pavano’s throw day, so even he can give the team a couple of innings. Deciding that you’d rather start someone–two pitchers, actually–on short rest rather than use those guys is an inexplicable vote of no confidence.
How many people, with Ruben Sierra standing on third base Wednesday night, Aura and Mystique shaking their moneymakers just behind second base, and Mariano Rivera getting loose down the left-field line, would have figured this World Series would not only be going back to New York, but going back with the Yankees down three games to two? Other than Jack McKeon, I mean. The idea that the Yankees have some stash of special skills that only come into play in October took a huge hit the last two nights, as the Marlins not only bounced back to win Game Four in 12 innings, but took advantage of the Yankees’ bad fortune and bad baseball to move within one win of their second championship in seven seasons.
Dear Aaron Boone: It was a home run, not diplomatic immunity. Love, Joe Boone, whose Game Seven home run won the ALCS and sent the Yankees to the World Series, has been swinging at pitches he has no hope of hitting ever since then. I looked it up, expecting to see that Boone has taken about four pitches in the World Series. It turns out that he’d actually let 25 baseballs go by in the first three games, just shy of half of the 51 pitches he’d seen. He’s pushed counts to 3-2 in a number of at-bats, so it’s hard to make the argument that he’s not being patient enough. That said, he was horrific last night. The Yankees’ three biggest chances to win the game landed in his lap, and he approached his at-bats as if it were fifth-grade gym class or a co-ed softball league with some goofy rules like “swing or you’re out.” Against Carl Pavano in the second inning, with the bases loaded, one out and the Yankees down 3-0, Boone swung at the only two pitches he saw and flied to center field on the second one. Sacrifice flies down three runs with the pitcher coming up aren’t team baseball, they’re a lifeline for the opposition. Boone got another chance in the ninth, after Ruben Sierra’s triple tied the game. Boone again went up hacking, fouling off the first and third pitches he saw to fall behind 1-2, then grounding out weakly to shortstop after two more foul balls. Finally, in the 11th inning, Boone again batted with the bases loaded and one out. And just as he had against Pavano and Ugueth Urbina, he made Braden Looper’s job easy by hacking at fastballs up and in, pitches he doesn’t have the bat speed to hit. Boone swung at six of the seven pitches he saw, looked completely overmatched, and struck out. Three at-bats, two pitches taken out of 15 seen, three times falling behind in the count, three outs. Boone needed to have a solid approach last night, and his mental effort was completely lacking, leading to wild swings that gave the pitchers all the leverage they needed to get out of jail.
I tried to get inside Roger Clemens’ head before his last final start, which turned out to be a mistake. I won’t do that this time; I have no idea how this being his current final start will affect him. None. I do know that, this being Game Four, it is his final final start. There can’t be a next final start unless.you know, I don’t even want to imagine what kind of scenarios Bud Selig and Jeffrey Loria might concoct to bring us a Game Eight.
I do know that he was up in the zone in his Division Series outing against the Red Sox, which was his seventh or eighth “final start” after his final regular-season start, his final start at Fenway Park (which was only his next to final start at Fenway Park), his final start in the All-Star Game, his final start at Yankee Stadium (also just his next-to-final), his final start in a foreign country, his final start in front of a record-low crowd and his final start with nasty heartburn.
This matchup isn’t as bad for the Marlins as Mike Mussina was. Clemens works up and down with the splitter and fastball, and has shown a fairly persistent reverse platoon split since joining the Yankees. With a bunch of right-handed hitters who can drive a good fastball but who will chase once they fall behind in the count, Clemens’ success will again come down to getting ahead in the count and avoiding leaving his fastball up in the zone. There’s not a lot of middle ground here; look for a 3.2-7-6-6-4-2 line, or a 7-4-1-1-2-10 one.
With no baseball games last night, I watched, or tried to watch, Monday Night Football. I cannot for the life of me fathom how people can directly compare baseball and football and conclude that baseball is boring. The pace of a pro football game is completely unbelievable, with television timeouts after nearly every possession in some stretches, regardless of length. Play, play, play, punt, break. Play, play, turnover, break. Or my favorite: towards the end of a drive, one team calls a timeout. Commercials. On the next play they score, kick the extra point, commercials. Kickoff, touchback, more commercials. You end up with one actual play run in a 12-minute stretch.
If it’s interminable watching at home, what’s it like at the game? I haven’t been to a pro football game in nearly a decade, and the idea of sitting through that kind of stretch–10 minutes without any actual football in some spots–isn’t likely to push me into breaking that streak anytime soon.
It’s been so long since we’ve seen a nondescript baseball game that when we finally got one, it felt strange, and I’m left not knowing how to write about it. Think about it. For the first time in weeks, we had a day of baseball that provided no real tension, no elimination hanging over a team’s head, and no question as to who would win. Other than Friday, when no games were played, we’d been riding a red-stitched roller coaster for two weeks, spoiled by games that left us on the edge of our seats, holding our breath and repairing the damage to the walls of our homes and offices. (OK, so that last one is just me.) In fact, the only think we learned yesterday was how Hideki Matsui, with just 16 home runs and a .435 slugging percentage, Matsui turned on a 3-0 fastball from Mark Redman and launched a three-run home run over the 408-foot marker in center field that put this game away early for the Yankees.
As you might expect from managers Joe Torre and Jack McKeon, there were plenty of decisions made in advance of Game One that provided cause for discussion.
The most significant of these was McKeon’s decision to make Dontrelle Willis a reliever. This move addressed one of the Marlins’ key disadvantages in facing the Yankees: the lack of a good left-handed reliever to counter the team’s left-handed power late in the game. Michael Tejera is neither a specialist nor a safe bet in high-leverage situations. Willis’ motion makes him tough on lefties (.216/.293/.307) and he is good enough against right-handers that he can be used for multiple innings.
The move paid immediate dividends, as Willis threw 2 1/3 shutout innings last night with the Marlins protecting a one-run lead.
It’s 2:32 a.m. PDT. Let me check again. Wow. It really happened.
It still doesn’t seem real. Game Seven of the American League Championship Series, even now, feels more like a weird morphing of Game Six of the NLCS and Game Four of the 2001 World Series.
Three runs down… five outs left… best pitcher in the league… tiring suddenly… manager riding him… extra innings… solo home run… Yankee Stadium bedlam.
It’s like a playoff edition of Mad Libs.
I gave up. I carried hope through the seventh inning, but when Alfonso Soriano was allowed to face Pedro Martinez as the tying run–I was begging for Ruben Sierra, to give you an idea of the desperation–with as much chance of hitting Martinez as he did of spontaneously combusting, I packed it in. The Sox had outplayed the Yankees, they had the best pitcher in the game pitching well, and for the umpteenth straight game, the Yanks hadn’t looked good at the plate. Jason Giambi’s two home runs only served to taunt Yankee fans with the thought of how either of those blasts, in one of his many high-leverage at-bats, could have made all this unnecessary.