→ February 19, 2008
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I don’t know the guy, but he needs a kidney and I have two, so…

Phil Sheridan: Phils should give Howard what he wants

Sheridan’s entire argument is as follows:

* The Phillies should lose their arbitration hearing with Ryan Howard on purpose, because…
* Fans will like it
* It will improve their relationship with Howard

I hate to trot out the old appeal to authority, but the truth is these are the words of someone who’s never worked in a baseball front office and doesn’t understand how the business works. Anyway, let’s get at the meat of his “argument:”

They win on public perception. You could do a master’s thesis in sociology on why so many sports fans get upset about the idea that a player like Howard – or Brian Westbrook, to cite another recent example – might be underpaid. Most fans, after all, could work a lifetime without earning what Howard will earn for playing baseball this year – even if he loses the hearing.

I have news for Mr. Sheridan: What fans think doesn’t matter. A GM who gives a shit what his fans think about a player’s salary is going to be out of work in fairly short order. What matters is winning. If the team wins, the fans don’t care how it came about. And paying a player more than you are required to pay him pushes you further from winning, not closer. So if you want to make the fans happy, beat Ryan Howard in arbitration and take the $3 million saved and try to put it towards the pitching problem.

Best of all, they can change the entire dynamic of their relationship with the best young power hitter they’ve ever had. Until now, for reasons ranging from the presence of Jim Thome to the Phillies’ own apparent inability to recognize Howard’s potential, they have paid very little for a lot of home runs, a rookie-of-the-year season, and an MVP season.

Yeah, again, this is what someone says when he doesn’t understand how the business works. He is correct that Howard’s pay did not match his performance during the last three years. So what? That’s the system. And there is absolutely ZERO evidence (not that Sheridan concerns himself with evidence here – the entire article is fluff) that overpaying a player at some point during his pre-arb or arb years buys you anything down the road. It doesn’t get the team a hometown discount on a long-term deal. It doesn’t make the player less likely to leave as a free agent. It just transfers money from the player budget to one player. The Cardinals gave Albert Pujols $900K in his last pre-arb year, and he still held their feet to the fire on a long-term deal twelve months later.

But here’s the worst part of all, the part that Sheridan doesn’t mention when he says, “Lose tomorrow and the Phillies make their fans happy, appease a superstar player, and set themselves up for a better relationship with him for years – all for $3 million.”

This just shows that he doesn’t get the system, because the cost is far more than $3 million.

You see, arbitration isn’t just about comparables, but it’s also about raises. If the Phillies lose their case against Howard – and they might lose anyway – then the baseline for his arbitration case next year becomes $10 million, rather than $7 million. This works against the Phillies simply because players always get raises in arbitration, even if they have awful years. (The only exceptions I know of are players who missed entire seasons and received the same salaries in the subsequent years.) Howard’s agent (Casey Close of CAA) will also be able to argue for a higher raise by looking at the raises comparable players received in percentage terms. For example, Alfonso Soriano received a 38% raise in his second year of arbitration eligibility. If Close argues for a 38% raise for Howard, then that’s $9.7 million if the Phillies win this year’s hearing but $13.8 million if the Phillies lose. The effect of a loss this year is cumulative.

No, losing an arbitration case on purpose is never a good idea, and I hope the Phillies put on a good show in a hearing where the cards are slightly stacked against them. Mr. Sheridan is going to have to show us at least one situation somewhere in baseball history where his idea didn’t come back to bite the team on the ass and leave it with a case of gangrene.

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→ February 9, 2008
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Adam Jones.

I often check out good team-specific blogs after a big trade or signing to get a sense of what intelligent fans think of a deal, although I have to say I knew what I’d get when I went to USSMariner.com after the Bedard trade. (They’re not exactly big Keith Law fans over there, but for my money it’s one of the smartest communities out there on a team-specific blog, even if they fail to recognize my greatness.) But here’s one comment that’s worth spreading:

Teej Says:
Speaking of PECOTA, I just looked again and Adam Jones had the highest projected VORP on the team for ‘08. (Well, second, if you assume that PECOTA is wrong about Ichiro for the millionth time.) That’s incredibly depressing. We are going to struggle to score runs.

If PECOTA has Jones as the leading VORPer on the 2008 M’s, I think it’s a reasonable guess that he would have finished in the top 3 on the club. This implies that 1) Jones is really freaking good, 2) the 2008 Mariner offense is going to suck, or 3) both, which would mean I should have been even more critical of the deal than I was.

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→ February 6, 2008
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I have seen this movie before…

Presented without comment, some thoughts from Mike Wilner on a J.P. Ricciardi statement from the Blue Jays’ fanfest thingy:

The other confusing thing was another bit of revisionist history. In response to a fan’s statement that it would be crazy to even consider trading a talent like Alex Rios, and, in his estimation, they Jays would never have thought of dealing Rios for Giants’ righty Tim Lincecum, Ricciardi responded by saying the following:

“When we were presented with that, we thought long and hard and obviously we value Rios more than we valued the other guy and that’s why he’s still here.”

Excellent answer. Except that’s not what happened. According to Ricciardi at the winter meetings in Nashville, the Rios-for-Lincecum offer was sitting on Brian Sabean’s desk waiting for the Giants’ GM to give the OK. According to Sabean in Nashville, he was considering doing Lincecum for Rios, but was really unsure about whether he should pull the trigger. He kept going back and forth on it for a week, and when the Giants signed Aaron Rowand to play centrefield, Sabean finally told the Jays the deal was a no-go.

I don’t understand why Ricciardi would have said that to the fans. Does it make him look good to the fans that he didn’t make a trade that they didn’t want him to make, even though he wanted to? Why give that answer when it’s obvious to anyone who turned on a radio, picked up a newspaper or looked online during the Winter Meetings that it’s simply not true? I just don’t get it.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ February 3, 2008
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Super Bowl picks.

Throw your picks in below if you feel like it. As usual, bear in mind that I know little about football and don’t pay much attention to it until the playoffs.

My instinct is to take the Giants and the points, although I would still predict a Pats win. Double-digit spreads always feel like sucker bets to me. That said, in this case, I think there’s a decent chance the Patriots will try to run up the score, on top of the fact that they’ve already seen the best the Giants can throw at them and have now had two solid weeks to prepare for it. So I’ll say the Patriots win and beat the spread – say, 41-24.

One other thought on the game. I’m a casual Patriots’ fan, since they’re the local team and they hired Parcells around the time I settled up here – I have always loved that defense-first style of football – and now it’s just habit to root for them, but it doesn’t ruin my week when they lose. This time, though, I’ll be rooting hard for them for a reason unrelated to the franchise: I like history.

When I was a kid, I followed all sports. If Newsday printed standings for a league, I’d pick a favorite team and follow it. (I always rooted for the Denver team when there was one. I still don’t really know why.) And every year, I’d root for an NFL team to go undefeated. There was just something so appealing about that zero in the “L” column – it hadn’t been done since before I was born, and to a kid who liked math, there was something beautiful in the idea of a team going 16-0. (And, yes, in a team going 0-16, although now I have a harder time rooting for anyone to fail to that degree. Well, except the Cowboys.) And every year, I’d get my hopes up, and some time in November, the last undefeated team would fall, and I’d see those idiots from the ’72 Dolphins with their champagne, celebrating someone else’s defeat. So the Patriots going 16-0 this year fulfilled that little wish I had as a sports-nut kid, and I’d love to see them finish it off today with a victory – and, since they’re already on Mercury Morris’ front lawn, to see them urinate in his flower bed and take a dump in his fish tank while they’re at it. Celebrating someone else’s failure is bad enough, but the way the mainstream media celebrates these jackasses’ annual celebration really rubs me the wrong way.

So I’ll be rooting for New England today, despite my New York roots, because I like to watch history happen. The guacamole is made, I’ve got the materials to make tacos for our small crowd, and there’s a chocolate cake cooling on the counter, waiting to be sliced, filled, and frosted. It’s time for football.

EDIT: Jake’s post reminded me of one thing – Tom Brady’s the obvious pick for MVP, but if it’s not him, I’ll take Wes Welker.

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→ February 1, 2008
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Farm systems, ranked, sorta.

So everyone’s asking me for a ranking of farm systems. This just a very rough cut, and if anything, I’m overvaluing my top 100 as an input to this, so take it for what it’s worth.

1. Tampa Bay
2. Texas
3. Boston
4. Cincinnati
5. NY Yankees
6. LA Dodgers
7. Chicago Cubs
8. Atlanta
9. San Francisco
10. Oakland
11. Seattle
12. Baltimore
13. Colorado
14. Florida
15. LA Angels
16. St. Louis
17. Milwaukee
18. San Diego
19. Washington
20. Arizona
21. Cleveland
22. Minnesota
23. Toronto
24. Pittsburgh
25. Detroit
26. Kansas City
27. Philadelphia
28. NY Mets
29. Houston
30. Chicago White Sox

The top two teams have insane prospect depth, and Boston isn’t far behind, especially if you believe in some of the guys in Lowell this year. The Reds really run four deep plus Mesoraco, and that’s about it, but what a front four. Atlanta impressed me when I looked at their system – they dealt a lot of ability in the Teixeira deal, and yet they still have a strong system deep in pitching. Keep an eye on Jeff Locke as a sleeper for ’08. San Francisco is a bit of a fetish of mine, as they have almost no talent in full-season ball, but I loved their draft this year, and I’ll roll the dice on a power bat like Villalona.

Seattle doesn’t get enough credit for their fantastic work internationally. They’ve consistently done well in Venezuela, they’re active all over the Pacific Rim, and former Toronto scouting director Bob Engle – who drafted Halladay and Carpenter – has done a really solid job in western Europe that I think is going to give the M’s a strategic advantage over there for several years.

The Angels and Cards are two teams I can’t get excited about. Wood and Adenhart both disappointed a bit this year, and they’ve lost so many high picks while doing diddly-squat in Latin America that their system is thin. The Cards have a ton of guys I project as extra players – fourth outfielders, utility infielders, middle relievers – and I’m not sure how to value that appropriately. The Nats are sort of the Giants Lite, in that their best players are all in short-season ball, and I like the Giants’ crop better.

I may have more to say on Cleveland in a day or two, but I ranted about them in chat yesterday:

John (Chi): Two questions: When you were in Toronto, did you ever read any Robertson Davies? If not, I really suggest Fifth Business. Second, your rankings seem to suggest the Indians farm cupboard is pretty bare? What’re your thoughts on their system?

Keith Law: It is pretty bare. I know it’s all chic to say that they’re the new “model franchise,” but their drafts have kind of sucked for a long time now, and their farm system has not been all that productive outside of prospects they acquired in trade. That speaks well to a pro scouting process, but I don’t know that that alone is a recipe for long-term success.

Seriously, look at Cleveland’s draft going back to 1998, the Sabathia draft. They haven’t kind of sucked; they have SUCKED. The 2007 division winner was built on several great Latin American finds, and a few ripoff trades in Colon, Hafner, and Eduardo Perez. That covers almost every major contributor except Betancourt, who was signed out of Japan as a free agent, and Sabathia, who was Cleveland’s last great draft pick. Since then, their next-best pick was Jeremy Guthrie, who did nothing for Cleveland before a nice rookie year in ’07 for Baltimore.

Minnesota would have been bottom three prior to the trade. Toronto has some promise in short-season ball, and of course I’m a big Snider fan. Detroit at least gets a pass for emptying their farm system to get two great big leaguers in Renteria and Cabrera, and the same goes for the Mets and Santana. The Astros and White Sox have drafted unbelievably poorly over the last few years – you could flip those two in the rankings and I wouldn’t argue, as both organizations deserve the ignominy of being called the worst farm system in the game.

There’s one consistent thing about the clubs in the bottom nine if we ignore the Tigers and Mets, who got to the bottom nine by trading their prospects: The other seven clubs have gotten nothing from Latin America in ages. The Twins, Pirates, Royals, Blue Jays, and White Sox in particular have done a horrid job in Latin America. The Astros had a great run in Venezuela that has cooled off a bit, and the Phillies might be bouncing back a bit there but haven’t had anyone come out of Latin America in ages. It’s really hard to have a top-flight farm system if you pretend the world stops south of Puerto Rico.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With:
→ February 1, 2008
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Drunk Jays Fans.

I love these guys, because they make me seem a lot funnier than I really am.

Filed Under: Chat, Sports Tagged With:
→ January 30, 2008
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Santana.

Feel free to post your comments/questions below regarding the Santana deal, since my ESPN column’s Conversation has been, um, overrun.

Meanwhile, my ESPN mailbag has been filling up. Three people wrote to say that Walter Johnson is the best pitcher in franchise history – technically true, but I don’t see that as a practical way of looking at the question, and I wasn’t using “franchise” in a business sense, but in a city/nickname sense. Several others wrote to say that Roberto Clemente was the best Rule 5 pick ever; he has Santana on career value, but Santana was the best pitcher in the American League for about a four-year stretch, and that peak crushes Clemente. One guy wrote in to argue both points and screwed up his own email address.

EDIT: One other point worth mentioning on the Rule 5 draft. In Clemente’s day, acquiring a player via the Rule 5 draft meant acquiring him for life, since there was no free agency and the reserve clause was treated as a perpetually renewing form of indentured servitude. Now, of course, if you acquire a player via the Rule 5, you only get his rights until he earns enough service time to become a free agent. So the return Clemente gave the Pirates will never be matched because the system doesn’t allow it. Adjusting for that context, the Santana pick is clearly the better return.

And then there’s this from a Twins fan:

(217) Paddy Boston 2008-01-30 07:43:00.0
Jack Morris, Jack Morris, Jack Morris. Johan Santana is not the best pitcher in Twins history.

Oooh-kay.

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→ January 25, 2008
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Vicente Padilla.

OK, looks like I need to clarify something. Andrew Johnson at his Defensive Indifference blog accused me of dropping an unsubstantiated allegation that Vicente Padilla has a drinking problem in my chat yesterday. I just want to point out that Padilla’s addiction to alcohol is no secret; he was driving drunk in Nicaragua two years ago with a friend in the passenger’s seat, got in an accident, and caused his friend’s death. Here’s an article from a Nicaraguan newspaper that says that he was drunk at the time of the accident and driving over 150 km/hour, and implies that the whole incident was smoothed over by local police. He was also arrested in Dallas in 2006 on suspicion of DUI. Now, on top of that, I’ve talked to plenty of people in baseball who’ve confirmed that Padilla has a problem, but that seems like icing on this cake. If you drive drunk and kill your friend, and yet get behind the wheel drunk again a few months later, isn’t that the very definition of a drinking problem?

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→ January 22, 2008
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Ryan Howard, again.

Bill Conlin, fun and fact-free!, weighs in on Ryan Howard:

There is one set of numbers, however, that fails to match the monetary implications raised by his stature as a power hitter – the numbers on his paycheck.

Conlin appears willfully ignorant of how baseball salaries work. Ryan Howard is eligible for arbitration this year as a Super-Two player, and he will and should be paid like a first-time eligible player. Conlin is making the argument that the Phillies should give Howard a long-term deal that pays him closer to his market value – in other words, he’s saying that the Phillies will be better off if they voluntarily pay Howard more than baseball’s economic system says he should get. Conlin points

You don’t need an economics degree and an MBA to realize that voluntarily overpaying for your inputs is a rather simple recipe for failure. For all the complaining you hear about baseball’s economic system, it is heavily stacked in the teams’ favor: Player salaries are below market value for the first six years of major league service, and for most players, that six-year period will include some or most of their peak years. In Howard’s case, because he reached the majors so late, the six-year period will include ALL of his peak years. By the time baseball’s economic structure allows Howard to be a free agent, he’ll be 32 years old, and given his profile as a hitter and body type, he’ll be paid a salary commensurate with his peak-years production during his decline phase, assuming that he becomes a free agent.

But hey, should we be surprised? Conlin’s own employer pays him the top salary at the paper plus his pension, and his peak years are behind him, too.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ January 20, 2008
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NFL picks.

Usual disclaimer – I am not much of a football fan, let alone any kind of expert, and I am not placing any actual bets on these games – but here are my picks:

San Diego (+14) over NEW ENGLAND – New England to win
GREEN BAY (-7) over New York

I’m leaning towards the under on both games – anywhere from 46.5-48 on the first game, and 40.5-41.5 on the second.

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