One young-gun GM made his team better this weekend by focusing on what matters. Another made his team worse by losing sight of the same. Those two teams’ deals, and all the rest of the trades, inside.
The Cubs take a big step toward making the playoffs. The Red Sox make a deal for the wrong reasons. The Expos and Devil Rays land nifty prospects for expendable veterans. The Giants fail to help themselves much. These and many more trade deadline happenings in a special weekend edition of Transaction Analysis.
The Dodgers made big headlines and the Mets made big mistakes, but the real winners on Friday were two teams you’d never expect. Joe Sheehan covers a busy day of trades.
The calm before the storm, as bad teams make minor moves involving players your local beat writer has never heard of. That, and Francisco Cordero gets financial security for life.
Will covers the injury angles of yesterday’s big deals and checks in on UTK regulars Andy Pettitte, Jason Giambi and Mark Prior.
Who’s the best prospect in the game: B.J. Upton of the Devil Rays or David Wright of the Mets? A look at their minor league numbers might unlock the answer. Dayn Perry anoints his top prospect in all of baseball in Friday’s Can of Corn.
Keith Osik has met his destiny in the Tampa Bay organization, while Scott Erickson has gone from top-line starter to designated for assignment. This news and more in your Friday edition of Transaction Analysis.
Last week, inspired by the well-timed thievery of the 2004 Mets, we discussed the teams with the best stolen base percentages in recorded history. This week, we look at the other side of the coin– the teams with the worst percentages that the game has ever seen.
Do you think Jack McKeon gives Larry Bowa his ass back after the Marlins play
the Phillies, or do you think he just keeps it all the time?
Vaughn should have been solid for 1911, but a number of things were working against him. Hal Chase, the gambler, was the player-manager and is presumed to have subverted many games. Vaughn missed a month with an “illness,” and didn’t pitch well when healthy. He opened 1912 the same way, and manager Harry Wolverton–the New York Americans were going through a manager a year in those days–decided to send him to Providence of the International League. Vaughn balked, saying he would refuse to report unless given a small cash bonus and part of the sale price.
This simply wasn’t done in those days. Players were expected to accept their place as chattel. The Yankees waived Vaughn and probably expected him to drift back to the minor league fringes, but Clark Griffith, now managing the Washington Senators, put in a claim and added Vaughn to his staff. Griffith still liked Vaughn’s stuff and thought that Hilltop Park, home of the Highlanders, might have worked against the pitcher. Whether that was the case or not we will never know, but Vaughn found himself in Washington and was never lost again, though it took the scouts a while to figure it out.
Now that we’ve gotten to the 100-game mark on the season, I decided to take a look at how the park factors were shaking out so far in ’04. Park factors are noisy pieces of data–that’s the reason why we use three-year averages in the first place–and I expect that some of these 100-game factors will change significantly between now and the end of the season.
That caveat aside, let’s take a look at how pro baseball’s parks–from the majors down to A-ball–are playing.
I’ve been avoiding columns on columns lately, because I feel like every time I try, I dig myself in ever-deeper. But I got a ton of email on Tuesday’s column, and it ran about:
33%: “That was hilarious, loved it.”
33%: “I don’t get it.” or “I’m tired of your ranting.”
33%: “How can you say that Derek Jeter’s the AL MVP when he’s only ninth in overall offensive value and your own metrics….”
So skip ahead a couple paragraphs to get to the baseball if you’d prefer not to hear the meta stuff.
To 66% who didn’t get it: the column was intended to make fun of the sports talk radio Jonah and I had to listen to while we were driving back and forth to the Baseball Prospectus business meetings in San Diego last week. I don’t even remember the names of the personalities, but between San Diego and Los Angeles, every time we hit the seek button to get away from one of these guys, we ran into another broadcaster spewing the same stuff. They all talked in circles as they tried to figure out what they were going to say, and when they finally got to the point, you’d think, “I waited two minutes for that?”
The Phillies lose their most effective reliever. The A’s set Eric Karros free. The Twins bring up another prospect to torment. And a Curtis Pride sighting! All this news and much more in your Thursday Transaction Analysis.
ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS
Winless on the week, including a three-game series against the Rockies in which they scored a grand total of six runs. The only two players who actually reported to work were the two most likely to be exiled, Randy Johnson (15 IP, 13 H, 2 R, 1 BB 20 K), and Steve Finley (.934 OPS). The rest of them played as if they were Charlie Bucket’s dad, screwing the caps onto toothpaste tubes for a living… One thing that many observers miss about the Yankees is that they are not the only team that can afford to take on salary at the deadline, but may be the only team willing. The difference is that the Yankees’ owner, answerable only to himself, may decide in a given year to take home less money by cutting into his own profit margin (and that of the junior partners, who may take home relatively little as a result). Other teams, particularly those that are components of larger corporations, may fix a profit goal for the year and stick to it at the expense of winning. Most execs of public companies are uncomfortable telling the shareholders that they lost money on the sports operation this year because they decided to gamble on winning a World Series. Thus, if the DBs chose to dump salary and other objects of refuse in New York’s general direction, there’s nothing unfair about it at all. GRADE: F
As the trading deadline approaches and the hype surrounding a potential Randy Johnson deal reaches a deafening crescendo, I decided to take a look at how well the Yankees have done in dealing young players. I’m not concerned with who they get in return except as a footnote, nor do I care whether they “won” a particular trade according to a value measure. Those scales can wait to be balanced for another day. The question is whether the Yanks have let another Buhner, another unproven product of the Yankee system, slip out the door. How well did the players they traded turn out?
With pitchers, there’s always a fine line tread between health and effectiveness. Use someone too much and his effectiveness drops; don’t use him enough and the team loses value. As with Jason Schmidt last year, the Astros face a hard decision with Andy Pettitte. The injuries are extremely comparable. Schmidt elected to pitch through his last year, leading his team to the playoffs. Pettitte is asking the same of the Astros, but there’s some major differences to consider. First, Schmidt was (and still is) about the only pitcher the Giants had, while Pettitte is the third-best pitcher on his own team. Second, the Astros may be playing for the last time with this team, but they owe Pettitte a lot of money in the future. His backloaded contract simply has to be taken into consideration now and in the off-season when the team tries to replace what it’s sure to lose. Finally, the Giants were favorites to win the NL West and were coming off a World Series appearance; the Astros are losing sight of the wild card. It’s a decision I’m glad I don’t have to make.