→ September 11, 2008
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Quick links.

Working on a book writeup, but two links worth seeing:

  • Someone did, in fact, estimate where the Twins would be if they’d done nothing this offseason. I think the answer is pretty aggressive, but a three-win swing is probably the difference between playoffs and no-playoffs for them.
  • Tom Brady is worth 1.35 Albert Pujolses. Or something like that. Of interest: Matt Cassel went to the same high school that later produced Mike Moustakas and Matt Dominguez (corrected – never blog before the double-espresso).
  • If you didn’t get the Rob Dibble stuff in today’s chat, here’s what he said about me. I’m terribly broken up about it.
  • Bad news for libertarians … and anyone else who dislikes corruption and subsidies for billionaires.

More shortly…

Filed Under: News, Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ July 20, 2008
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On naming rights.

Richard Sandomir wrote a slightly polemical piece on Citi’s $20 million purchase of naming rights to the Mets’ new ballpark, arguing largely that it’s unfair to the Citi employees who’ve been laid off during the bank’s recent financial troubles. It’s the type of side-by-side comparison that offends our sensibilities: Big, bad, insensitive Corporation and its Greedy Executives light cigars with $100 bills, cackling as they sign pink slips for the proletariat.

The problem is that Sandomir doesn’t address the one question that underlies the comparison: Does Citi get a higher return from spending the $20 million on naming rights and cutting the employees, or would they get a higher return from foregoing the naming rights and keeping the employees?

I don’t know the answer. Neither does Sandomir, but he’s arguing that Citi’s executives have made a mistake without knowing whether or not they did. If the return on the naming rights option is higher than the return on the employee-retention option, then Citi’s executives made the right call for their stockholders, for the remaining employees, and for their own pockets as well. If the return on keeping the employees is higher, then the executives just screwed up. All Sandomir offers, however, is this:

Even in the flush times during which it was signed, the deal seemed questionable. With high name recognition and a place among the world’s banking leaders, Citigroup hardly needed the Citi name plastered on a ballpark to enhance itself. Will fans move their C.D.’s to a Citibank branch because of the Mets relationship, any more than air travelers will consider flying American Airlines because its name is on two professional arenas?

Will the corporate suite-holders at the Mets’ new home want to do more or new business with Citigroup because they share deluxe accommodations at Chez Wilpon?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, Richard. Do you? And if you don’t, why are you asking these questions as if the answers are all going to support your underlying argument that the naming-rights deal is a dud? The closest we get to this is a generic quote from an academic who raises the same questions I do without providing answers, although he misses one of the fundamental (presumed) benefits of stadium naming rights – the frequent repetition of the stadium name during game broadcasts, on news and highlight shows, and in print coverage of games.

Sandomir calls the deal “an investment that seems to thumb its nose at laid-off workers.” In reality, Citi is responsible to more than just the workers they laid off; they’re responsible to their stockholders, remaining employees, and maybe even their customers. If the naming-rights deal is a bad one, then the executives are putting more than their noses at risk.

Related: BBTF discussion of the article.

Filed Under: Economics, Media, Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ July 16, 2008
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In extra innings…

…you don’t actually have to tag a runner for him to be called out.

It’s a new rule. You just haven’t heard about it before.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With:
→ May 9, 2008
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Name-checked.

I’m working on that top ten cooking mistakes post I promised in chat – wrote six of them on the plane today – but in the meantime, here’s an interesting and slightly testy interview with St. Louis’ scouting director/director of player development Jeff Luhnow. Luhnow name-checked me in the following answer (the bolded section is the question, the unbolded section is his answer):

Pete Kozma wasn’t considered to be a “sexy” pick at the time he was drafted. A lot of different media outlets said that while he had solid tools across the board, other then power, he possessed no real standout tool. Yet so far Pete has been played extremely well. Are you surprised at how well Pete’s performed early?

If we wanted a “sexy” pick, we would read Baseball America, read Keith Law’s articles, and pick based on their opinions. But we don’t, and neither do any other clubs, because while the journalists are doing a good job of expressing their opinions based on the information they have, we have to live and die with our selections and the future of the organization is impacted by these picks. If the journalist is wrong, he just admits it (maybe) and keeps writing about the next guy or the next draft. They will still sell papers or get eyeballs. If we are wrong, we’ve missed a huge opportunity to make our organization better, and nobody wants to do that.

He’s dead on about two things there. One is that my process is nowhere near as thorough as a major league club’s process is on high draft selections. I might see a player twice – once over the summer, once in the spring – and the depth of my evaluation doesn’t match what a good scout will do by seeing a player five or six times just within a spring. I don’t have to worry as much about makeup and barely think about signability outside of the context of projecting the first round.

The other point Luhnow scores is on the consequences of a bad evaluation. If a scouting director doesn’t have productive drafts, he could lose his job. If my rankings turn out to be totally off base, the most I’ll lose is some credibility, and some pride as well, since I actually like to be right now and then.

Where he’s wrong … well, I think I’ve hit on it above. My looks are limited, and I make evaluations based on what I’ve got, but I take the task very seriously because I find it embarrassing when I make a poor evaluation, and I know that I do have to answer to the readers, including members of a lot of front offices and a lot of scouting departments. Their respect for me as an analyst is predicated on me getting stuff right, and making sure my opinions are backed up by strong arguments. And I feel an obligation to the wider readership to present objective opinions backed up by strong arguments, fact-based wherever possible.

I also think it’s silly to say that “the journalist” (first time I’ve been called that, I believe) won’t admit he’s wrong. If Pete Kozma turns into an above-average major-league player, of course I’ll admit I was wrong. And if I was foolish enough to try to finesse the bad evaluation, I doubt that futureredbirds or vivaelbirdos would let me get away with it anyway.

Luhnow, who is among the most intelligent people I’ve met in this industry, is using a lot of small verbal cues to put the “journalists” in their place, but really, isn’t our place on the outside anyway? I could shout from the rooftop that Pete Kozma was the worst first-round pick ever (he wasn’t), but it won’t have any influence on his career as a player. What I write and say doesn’t influence what happens on the field, so for any exec to worry about what I say is a waste of his time.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ May 6, 2008
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Want to lay odds…

… on whether, the next time the Yanks come to Fenway, some Sox fan throws an umbilical cord at A-Rod?

Filed Under: Humor, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ February 20, 2008
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Pittsburgh = Cleveland south?

So the Minor League Baseball site has this fluff piece up on the Pirates’ new scouting philosophy

Five people have been added to the amateur scouting side, and the areas for which each scout is responsible have been shuffled and restructured to ensure that no area goes uncharted. There has also been a complete revision in how scouts evaluate players.

“We’ve put a whole new structure and a whole new system in,” Huntington said. “We have established a Pittsburgh Pirate-type player and established what we’d like from a player at all different positions.”

With the caveat that I may be reading WAY too much into an eight-word quote, that sounds like 1) a recipe for bad drafting and 2) a lot like the problem Cleveland has had in its own drafts, where their criteria in early rounds are quite narrow and they’ve ended up with a lot of low-ceiling college guys who haven’t panned out.

Again, could be nothing, and my general belief on quotes from GMs is that they’re 90% bullshit (what incentive does a GM have to reveal details of his baseball strategy?), but this sounds a lot to me like they’re trying to re-create the Cleveland organization. If that means Huntington can flip Jason “Bartolo” Bay and Ronny “Einar” Paulino for some major building blocks, hey, great. But if it means they’re doing to adopt the same semi-closed drafting philosophy – not the best player available, but the best player available who fits into what we’ve already decided we’re looking for – then the draft is not going to be a major contributor to Pittsburgh’s future success.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ 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.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: , , ,
→ 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.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With:
→ 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 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: