The Expos and Giants have some creative payroll massaging to do if they’re to field contenders while cutting payroll. Plus the Blue Jays keep a close eye on their prospects at the Arizona Fall League. These and other news and notes out of Montreal, San Francisco, and Toronto in this edition of Prospectus Triple Play.
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…
Which organization has the best farm system in baseball? This is a fairly pedestrian question that’s normally answered with an amalgam of various and sundry top 10 lists in tandem with thumbnail estimations of depth and projectability. Depending on which tools you’re wielding, evaluations of this nature can be all shades and hues of accurate.
Another common approach to this question is to look at the cumulative records of each system’s affiliates. If nothing else, it’s objective, and it’s this tack that informs my attempt at ranking the farm systems. But my angle is not without modifications.
Baseball is reducible to components beyond the run, but it’s the run–both scored and prevented–that is the fundament of the game. It’s also the run that forms the basis of many of the more useful metrics you’ll find at Baseball Prospectus. A team’s run differential plays a vital role in determining its record and is even more instructive, when plugged into the various flavors of the Pythagorean run formula, in predicting a team’s performance in forthcoming seasons. However, this method is most often confined to the major league level. So why not use run differential to evaluate an organization’s minor league system? (Rhetorical; don’t answer.) This may not resolve abstract notions of “best” and “worst,” but it will bring us reasonably close to knowing, and it’ll do so by dint of objectivity.
The rumblings about collusion, and specifically about whether Major League Baseball implemented a contract clearing house they wanted in the last Collective Bargaining Agreement but did not get, continue. What’s been largely overlooked is the “slotting” of draft pick signing bonuses in recent years as MLB has taken over more of the negotiation process from teams.
Slotting is the practice, codified in other sports, of giving draft picks certain dollar amounts according to their draft position. It eliminates negotiation almost entirely, and for owners in the NBA, for example, it means that their labor costs are certain and low.
I am frankly surprised that a good agent who represents premium talent–Scott Boras, for instance–has not hauled baseball into court over this. Even if you buy that the Players Association can bargain away the rights of players it doesn’t represent and doesn’t look out for (minor league players are not union members), nowhere in the latest CBA is anything mentioned about the slotting of picks.
Coming off a career season is one point on the “good” side and a broken wrist that required surgery must go on the “bad,” right? Not necessarily. Jose Guillen remains someone that some teams should consider. Of all the injuries one can have, a fracture might be the most predictable in all but the most severe, Jermaine Dye-type instances. Wrist fractures in particular are easily fixed with relatively minor surgery. There’s a long list of players that have come back–and quickly–from these types of injuries with little or no effect, even in-season. The question is more whether Guillen just experienced a career year or a career turnaround. They call him “Everyday Eddie”, and looking at Eddie Guardado’s career line, he looks like the rubber-armed reliever that everyone wants. After two years in the closer’s role with great results, he’s ready to head out into the world with a couple other good closers and see if he can shake loose some silver from a GM who can be distracted by that shiniest of baseball objects, the closer. Past elbow problems are past enough that they shouldn’t be a serious concern, but Guardado’s work habits have never been a selling point. Guardado’s next team will get what they get–an effective reliever who can finish games–but paying the closer price isn’t necessary.
An update on BP happenings, including baseballprospectus.com’s redesign, the latest on Baseball Prospectus 2004, and BP-related events.
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.
As free agents make their filings, General Managers across the game are starting the process of figuring out how they will put together their teams. An important part of that process is figuring out which free agents they should pursue. Part of the equation is expectations of health. Signing a Jeffrey Hammonds and expecting 160 games a year is pure folly and likely to cause a team to drastically overpay. On the flip side, the team that correctly assesses the risks, and prices accordingly, is much more likely to find the next Esteban Loaiza. While the factors that must be considered go far beyond health, it is one major component–one we’ll look at here with the Free Agent Health Report. Remember, this is not an exhaustive list–players not on this list are neither completely healthy nor completely screwed. They just didn’t make my cut.
Powered by a renewed sense of fiscal responsibility and Pom 100% Pomegranate Juice, here’s your 2003-2004 NL Free Agents…
Manny’s price tag was too rich for the taking. The Marlins mull the year after. The Sox say goodbye to Grady. Start printing those 2004 DRays playoff tickets: Julio Lugo is back. Frank Thomas returns to Chicago for more kvetching. These and other quips in The Week In Quotes.
The recent case involving Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) has brought the word steroid back to the forefront in a post-World Series baseball community. In a case that involves not steroid-trafficking, but tax evasion, a number of high-profile athletes, including five MLB players and a heretofore unknown anabolic steroid called THG (tetrahydrogestrinone), is perfect for the media but tells the fans nothing they shouldn’t already have known. The sexy sheen of a steroid probe involving Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi is a story that lays itself out on a silver platter for a lazy journalist that will not allow the thought to cross his or her mind that there have been no accusations of usage by these athletes or any other baseball players. Worse, by putting the word “steroid” and “Bonds” or “Giambi” in the same headline, the color of impropriety is almost impossible for these athletes to overcome. There is simply no way to ever give either a fair trial or even a reasonable testing, but there’s nothing wrong with this fact. Innocent until proven guilty is not a doctrine in American athletics; we’ve moved to a tabloid-style stoning by innuendo and rumor.
Today I’m going to indulge in one of the hoariest media traditions known to humankind: It’s my How to Fix the Yankees Column. Every year that the Yankees’ World Series aspirations come to grief, writers near and far offer up their prescriptive takes on just what needs to be done to restore the glory of yore. I’m no different. Whereas some deluded Gotham types concoct wild hypotheticals that involve swapping Drew Henson, Jeff Weaver, Amsterdam brothel vouchers, an “A Man Apart” DVD and a suitcase of unmarked bills for “Insert elite, untouchable performer here,” I’m going to do my best to remain grounded in reality. In the Yankees’ case, reality means profligate spending on the free-agent market.
Ah, free agent filing season, the most exciting time of the baseball season. What sports fan doesn’t eagerly check the Web several times a day, an ear to the radio and an eye on ESPNews, hoping to find out if Kenny Lofton beat Marvin Benard in the race to file for the millions their agents have assured them is waiting for each. Yes, faster than you’ll hear someone sing “baby” after tuning into your local pop/R&B station, the long quiet is on us. We’re left to looking over the free agent lists and trying to come up with funny teams. Like: How much would you have to pay to lose more games than the Tigers next year?
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.
As many of our readers were submitting their ballots for the annual Internet Baseball Awards, 11 Baseball Prospectus authors went into the polling booths themselves, voicing their opinions on who should win the major baseball awards this year. Here are the results…
Fans of other teams face the off-season and have a thought process that runs (more or less) like this: “We have some good young players, they should be OK. We have this high-paid guy that sucks, boy, it’d be nice to get rid of him. We have some decent pitchers, that might work out if they stay healthy. There are a couple of obvious weak spots, I hope we get a good free agent or two. Yeah, we might be pretty good next year.” Whereas the mob of angry Yankees fans runs: “We’ve got some good young players, but they’re not good enough. They’re gone, we’ll send them to some god-awful team in exchange for their best players coming up on free agency. We have this high-paid guy that sucks. He’s gone. We have some good pitchers, if they get hurt we’ll find more. There are a couple of obvious weak spots, and we’ll go get the best free agents out there. That should do it.” Where’s the fun in that? It’s like solving a Rubik’s Cube but being encouraged to paint the sides one uniform color.
The Angels need to upgrade at CF and DH. The Cubs need players who get on base. The Tigers need an intervention for their pitching staff. These and other news and notes out of Anaheim, Chicago, and Detroit in today’s Prospectus Triple Play.