It was almost the greatest single-day performance in winter meetings history. Toward the end of a relatively quiet Sunday of minor deals and signings, word began to spread that the Baltimore Orioles were going to sign Miguel Tejada to a six-year deal. That wasn’t entirely unexpected; Tejada had a limited number of suitors, and the Orioles were the wealthiest of the bunch. After being rumored at just about every number in a range of 20, the deal came in at an eye-popping $72 million. As with Mike Cameron, a late flurry of activity had been very profitable for the player. What was unexpected was the rumors that came attached to the deal. Not only were the O’s signing Tejada, but they were also ready to announce that he’d be playing with Ivan Rodriguez and Vladimir Guerrero. That’s right; the Baltimore Orioles were coming back with a vengeance, prepared to commit close to $200 million to the three best players left unsigned in an effort to return to relevance in the AL East and return crowds to Camden Yards.
As promised, here’s a team-by-team breakdown of last week’s NorCal Mock Winter Meetings. With the real winter meetings in New Orleans winding down, it’s interesting to compare the two for like transactions as well as differences.
The most interesting story, to my mind, was Mike Cameron’s. Late Friday, it appeared that the Padres were in good shape to sign him. By Saturday evening, there was word that the A’s had moved to the front of the pack, having beaten the Padres’ offer. By early Sunday, though, Cameron was a Met, accepting a three-year deal for $7 million per, the highest average value that had been attached to Cameron’s name, and it wasn’t close. There was a round of "not about the money" talk after the deal. The Mets’ players helped recruit Cameron, and the center fielder’s Atlanta roots were played up. Maybe those things came into play, but the fact is, no one else was offering Cameron seven million bucks a year. He did well for himself in a market with lots of outfielders and more on the way. Cameron becomes the Mets’ best defensive center fielder since…well, he might be the best in their history. The Mets have employed both Richie Ashburn and Willie Mays, but both well after their primes. Cameron is an upgrade over the Roger Cedeno/Timo Perez class, and like Kazuo Matsui, makes the team better.
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.
It took me two weeks to wipe the surprised look off my face after I found out the Cubs got off. The Honorable Sophia Hall found on behalf of Wrigley Field Premium and the Chicago Cubs and dismissed the suit in what, I have to say, is one of the strangest decisions I’ve ever followed.
There’s a law on the books in Illinois that says if you hold an event, you can’t scalp your own tickets. The Cubs and their parent company, the Tribune Co., seeking to get around this law, set up a shell company, Wrigley Field Premium, with their own people, their own accountants running the books. They allowed the shell company to buy $1 million in tickets, then sell them at insane prices. Now, I don’t practice law, but that’s illegal. It’s also Chicago, though.
What’s weird is that the judge agrees with everything everyone’s said about the suit up until the point where she has to declare them guilty. Reading the opinion, it’s all there: “WFP is a subsidiary of the Tribune Company (p. 9).” In March 2002, this brand new ticket broker was allowed to purchase $1,047,766 of tickets (incidentally, go ahead and try that as an actual unaffiliated business and see what the Cubs tell you).
The opinion contains a nice little history of how Tribune formed it, the corporate officers overlapped, how WGN provided Premium free advertising…it’s crazy. And it contains this gem (on p. 13): “From the beginning Ball Club and Premium did not keep secret they were both owned by Tribune Co. […] To dispel possible confusion, Premium’s employees were instructed to tell customers that Premium is not a part of Ball Club.”
Gee, that’s not concealing ownership, or anything.
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.
Tuesday night, Gary Huckabay and I hosted the NorCal version of BP’s Mock Winter Meetings Pizza Feed. The feed was attended by several dozen very enthusiastic fans and one fan’s poor girlfriend, who spent the entire time sitting in the corner wondering how exactly she got mixed up with a group like us. The rules were essentially the same as the Chicago event: Each participant was given a team, constrained by that team’s real-life budget and talent restrictions, and was assigned the task of improving the product as much as possible in a few short hours. Unlike Chicago, we had a few added bonuses. First, our Feed was held after the arbitration deadline, meaning participants already knew whom they had cut and what players they could not sign. Second, we tried as best we could to approximate estimated arbitration awards on an individual basis. While this was much more time consuming, it provided more accuracy when accounting for payrolls and increased the likelihood that teams would simply release players who were likely to command significantly more than a comparable replacement. Third, we made no effort whatsoever to determine deferment of payments–like insurance coverage for injuries like Mo Vaughn’s knee or George Steinbrenner’s brain–or to adjust payroll based on the likely economic windfall that follows signing such marquee free agents as Olmedo Saenz. Besides, often the price of handling the deluge of fan demand for tickets offsets the gains of signing a guy like Olmedo.
Josh Lewin, 35, is a play-by-play announcer for Fox TV’s Saturday Game of the Week and the television voice of the Texas Rangers. As an announcer, he’s worked with legendary broadcasters Jon Miller in Baltimore, Harry Caray in Chicago, and Ernie Harwell in Detroit. He’s also a job-hunting survivor of the winter meetings. His first book, Getting in the Game: Inside Baseball’s Winter Meetings, published by Brasseys, tells the tale of three go-getters seeking their first paying jobs in professional baseball at the 2002 meetings in Nashville’s Opryland Hotel. With this year’s event starting this weekend in New Orleans, BP chatted with Lewin about the challenge of baseball job-hunting, the scene at the winter meetings, and how he found his own broadcasting career.
Fall and winter are times for football, basketball, and snow. For New Englanders, it’s a time to mourn another summer that died late, as Roger Angell once said. The only baseball news around for fans are awards announcements, manager firings and hirings and the Hot Stove League league, which doesn’t always burn so hot. But for a few million obsessed fans around the Caribbean basin and the Mexican pacific coast, it’s time for “the other” season, one that’s even more important in terms of passion and loyalty than the major leagues of the United States. We do have baseball year-round, but the only time we feel the sense of emptiness that the people in Canada and the United States are feeling right now is the 10 days between the end of the Caribbean World Series and the time pitchers and catchers report.
Following up on yesterday’s article, here is the definitive list of every transaction made at last weekend’s Mock Winter Meetings in Chicago. The list of moves includes a blockbuster trade for Mark Teixeira, cheap contracts for Trot Nixon and Juan Gonzalez, and a surprise new home for Vladimir Guerrero.
Sunday’s deadline to tender arbitration offers to free agents triggered a lot of surprise moves and non-moves. BP authors kicked around some of the biggies, including the Braves’ decision to non-tender Gary Sheffield, the Bartolo Colon signing, and the timing of the Michael Tucker deal.
A week before representatives from all 30 teams descend upon New Orleans for the annual winter meetings, a collection of equally knowledgeable but considerably less experienced men and women–our readers–gathered at a restaurant in Chicago with the same purpose: to craftily mold their teams’ rosters, through canny trading and judicious use of the free-agent market, into the best team that money–a strictly budgeted amount of money–could buy. And like any good reality TV show, there were a couple of twists along the way. The mechanisms of the event were simple. The first 30 attendees to sign up were assigned a team in advance, and instructed to pore over their team’s roster, look over the free-agent market, and come to the event prepared to wheel and deal. Each team was also given a firm budget number in advance that they could not exceed. The event began with each team announcing its list of non-tendered players, who then immediately went into the free-agent pile. All free agents were then represented by the remaining attendees, along with myself and Nate Silver. Will Carroll presided over the event, playing the unenviable role of Bud Selig.
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.
We still don’t understand how good Alex Rodriguez is. When he signed a $252 million, 10-year contract in December 2000, there were two prevalent reactions: “The sky is falling!” and “He’s really good, but Texas overpaid.” Still, you could argue that A-Rod was worth it at the time. The sky seemed the limit for salaries, and A-Rod at $25 million made a lot more sense than Manny Ramirez at $20 million or Derek Jeter at $19 million. Since the new CBA was signed in 2002 though, the market has corrected itself, and the days of the $20 million contract are over, no matter what Vladimir Guerrero’s agent thinks. In the new market, you’d think A-Rod can’t possibly be worth $25 million a year, no matter how well he plays. You can sign two A-list studs for that kind of money now, not just one plus Darren Oliver. So is A-Rod worth the money now?
The Yankees aggressively pursued Javier Vazquez, making him an early target of the Hot Stove/Cold War between the Bronx and Boston. Vazquez has always been someone who is both coveted and worrisome. Despite never being officially diagnosed with a significant injury, Vazquez has often run into a wall, but has always recovered quickly with a short rest. Over the last four seasons, he has been able to pitch over 200 innings with effectiveness. Given he started that streak at age 22, one could look at Vazquez’s history as a ticking time bomb or as proof that we have a new member of the Abuse Sponge Club (Livan Hernandez, Proprietor).
So the Yankees, trapped in their pro wrestling gotterdammerung plot line with the Red Sox, apparently have to go tit-for-tat in the wake of the Schilling deal. That’s not to diminish what they’ve achieved. Schilling might be more famous, and he might own Vazquez on a wargaming table. He’s also older, more fragile, and less likely to give his team 35 starts. In contrast, Vazquez is in his prime. At 27, he has endured and survived a heavy workload, and he’s far removed from an age when heavy workloads are sources of really desperate concern (take a look at Mark Prior’s workload if you want to be alarmed). It’s especially intriguing to see that Nate Silver’s latest PECOTA projections for him rank Vazquez as just about the most promising pitcher for value in the season to come. Then there’s Nick Johnson. We’ve touted Johnson for a very long time now, and we’ve seen that potential barely shine through a litany of worrying hand and wrist injuries. Nevertheless, he’s only 25, and his precocious progress through the Yankees chain deserves to be remembered for the promise it hinted at. It’s one of the reasons why the new PECOTA projections see him as the sort of player with tremendous breakout potential. Anybody who can reasonably project to hitting as well as Todd Helton without Coors Field getting an assist looks pretty valuable. There’s irony that among his closest comps, you’ll find a young Jason Giambi, but the blend of possibility and risk is perhaps best highlighted by the two most-comparable hitters: Darrell Evans (who went on to enjoy a career that deserves a lot more Hall of Fame consideration than he got) and Mike Epstein (whose fame endures for all sorts of reasons, some but unfortunately not all of them good).