Vowing not to take a bite of turkey until he’s done, Clay Davenport rolls out the new 2003 BP player cards just in time for the holiday weekend. Adjusted translations, tweaked fielding metrics, plus plenty of other fixins. Dig in.
The White Sox will regret hiring Ozzie Guillen. The Astros’ Brad Ausmus and Jose Vizcaino: how to flush $4 million down the toilet. The A’s and Jays hook up for yet another trade. The Phillies won’t solve their bullpen problem with Billy Wagner alone. The Mariners look poised for a fall. These and other news and notes in this edition of Transaction Analysis.
One of the reasons patience at the plate is encouraged is that it wears out opposing starters, allowing the hitters to chew into the soft underbelly of middle relief where they can really score some runs. It sure sounds attractive, and it seems to make sense.
But it’s almost a trivial advantage. The range in pitches seen per plate appearance runs from 3.6 (Devil Rays and company) to 3.9 (Red Sox, Oakland).
Take an average AL staff. Every nine innings, they give up nine hits, three walks, strike out six, and watch one lucky fan get a nice souvenir. Look at a nine-inning game pitched by an average staff against the most and least patient teams:
9.30 H + 3.16 BB + 27 outs = 39.46 batters/game (by average staff in average park against average hitters)
So 39.46 PAs * 3.6 P/PA = 142 pitches to get through a game against the most-aggressive team. And 153 pitches to get through a game against the most-passive team.
The 2003 HACKING MASS All-Star team is a fetching mixture of the young and the old; the highly-regarded defensively with a sprinkling of butchers thrown in; members of good teams and members of awful ones. Elderly Astros catcher (and recipient of a brand-new two-year contract) Brad Ausmus, young Dodgers glove merchant Cesar Izturis, Most Valuable Player and Texas Ranger Colby Lewis, and Blue Jay starter Cory Lidle, who missed his traditional second-half stretch of high-octane pitching, all scored in the triple digits. White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko, Orioles third baseman Tony Batista, Expos center fielder Endy Chavez, Athletics right fielder Jermaine Dye, and Lewis and Lidle were all selected for fewer than five HACKING MASS squads. A perfect roster was worth 937 points in 2003.
The Cleveland Indians think they have found a loophole in the CBA which will allow them to reserve Danys Baez while still cutting his salary by more than the maximum percentage allowed by the CBA.
In November 1999, the Indians signed Baez, a Cuban defector, to a four-year, $14.5 million contract covering the 2000-03 seasons, with an option for 2004. International players like Baez are anomalies in MLB’s salary structure, earning free agent money from their first day of major league service Through the 2003 season Baez has only two years and 102 days of major league service time, not even enough to qualify him for salary arbitration, yet he was paid $5,125,000 in 2003.
On November 15, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the Indians were buying out Baez’ 2004 option for $500,000. This left Baez in the same position as any other unsigned player with his seniority–except for his salary. Because the CBA forbids clubs from cutting the salary of a player under reserve by more than 20%, the Indians appeared to have the choice of offering Baez a 2004 contract for at least $4.1 million or non-tendering him.
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.
Beyond the baseball implications, Oakland was taking on a player with back problems and giving up their catcher and…well, losing Long makes some sense. Kotsay had a sub-par 2003 season, deeply underperforming his PECOTA, losing power and looking all the world like his Mike Greenwell comp was dead on. There’s hope though, A’s fans, because back injuries aren’t what they used to be.
Kim Ng started her baseball career straight out of the University of Chicago as an intern for the Chicago White Sox. After rising to take over arbitration duties with the Sox, she took a job with the AL league office. Ng then spent four years with the New York Yankees as an assistant GM, where at age 29 she was the youngest in that position in baseball when hired. After completing her second year as vice president and assistant GM for the Los Angeles Dodgers, she’s now one of only two women to hold such a position in baseball operations and the highest-ranking Asian-American executive in the majors. She was mentioned as a candidate for several GM jobs this off-season. Ng recently chatted with BP about learning the business, taking lessons from different mentors, and what it takes to succeed in baseball.
Next spring, the San Diego Padres and Philadelphia Phillies will take up residence in new stadiums, Petco Park and Citizens Bank Park respectively. It promises to be a momentous occasion, not just for Phils and Pads fans who’ll be inaugurated into the era of club seats and cupholders, but for baseball itself. Because it’s looking likely that once the Dog Bowl and the Big ATM Machine That’s Not The Vet throw open their doors, it will mark the first time since ground was broken for Toronto’s SkyDome in October 1985 that not a single new big-league ballpark will be under construction on planet Earth. It’s been quite an 18-year run: 19 new stadiums, 18 new corporate monikers (including such double-dippers as Enron Field/Minute Maid Park and Pac Bell/SBC Park) and around $5 billion in taxpayer money sunk into the cause. But is this the end of the new-stadium era, one we’ll one day look back on like the 1910-1915 era that produced the first wave of steel ballparks (if perhaps not as fondly)? Or is it just a statistical blip, a pause in the action before the next round of construction?
Steroids seem like a meatball for me to rant about one way or another. I’m chilling, though. For all of the hype about what a big deal this is, how tainted the game is, how Canseco and Caminiti were right…they weren’t. Not even close. The predictions of baseball’s critics have failed to come true: the number of positive tests includes some minor leaguers (who have long been tested for drugs), and it’s not 50% or 75%–it’s one-tenth that. It’s a guy per team. Well, probably not–it’s likely that like the drug-haven clubhouses of the past, there are going to be organizations who are much deeper in this, and others that will turn out almost entirely clean. One player a team. As people talk about what a rampant scandal this is, how terribly damaged baseball is, remember that a 5% rate means about one player a team. If everyone could try and be reasonable about this, the debate would be a lot more productive (though of course the column inches wouldn’t fill up as fast). Speculation, of course, is that if the positive results were x, then the real numbers are x times y, producing result z that someone wants to highlight to show how bad the problem is. For instance, I believe that given the random sampling and small number of tests per athlete, for every positive result, there are 25 more players that use steroids at some point in a year but go uncaught. So let me do the math: Over 100% of baseball players are on the juice! Players who are retired…dead players! Dead players are using steroids!
Major league fields are beautifully kept, which brings out the qualities of the grass–spongy or forgiving, fast or slow. Even beyond grass height, think about how the grooming of the field, the choice of grass, the mix in the blend, it all in some small way affects every ball put into play, from the way a ground ball plays or the color of the chlorophyll on a center fielder’s uniform.
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.