The hot rumor is Jeff Weaver to the Dodgers for Kevin Brown, which seems to make sense for both sides — the Yankees get the better pitcher, while LA unloads a big salary. Watch out for Weaver if this deal goes down… he never seemed comfortable in New York, but could put up some very nice numbers in Los Angeles.
In any event, that’s quite a bit of rotation turnover for the Yankees. Last season they opened with a rotation of Mussina, Clemens, Pettitte, Wells and Weaver. So far, next season looks like Mussina and Vasquez for sure, with Contreras, Wells (who signed a minor league deal recently) and perhaps Brown if the deal goes down. There’s also potentially Jon Lieber, who missed almost all of last season after Tommy John surgery.
Pettitte to the Astros. The Yankees are said to be in new discussions to get Kevin Brown from the Dodgers, but I think we’re all hoping that Gillvasi’s going to unload Garcia on them for something shiny and Drew Henson (don’t ask). I’d love to see the Yankees trade for Tom Glavine or someone equally silly with a huge contract, though.
I’ll be even more specific: Ibanez was a pursuit in progress when Bavasi was brought on, and much of this off-season is stuff that’s all Gillick’s doing. It’s my contention that for all practical purposes, Gillick remains the head of the baseball side of the front office.
I find it amusing when I come across the sentiment that it’s unfair to criticize if we’re not three major league GMs ourselves. Doesn’t that mean no one should be able to criticize us unless they’re also putting their work out in public for people to kick? I don’t understand. But to quote Ivan “Official Teamster of the U.S.S. Mariner” Weiss: “I never laid an egg, either, but I know a rotten one when I smell it.”
And yeah, I know, I shouldn’t care. But look at this from the National Weather Service:
TODAY…CLOUDY WITH A FEW SPRINKLES. HIGHS IN THE MID 40S. SOUTHEAST WIND 5 TO 15 MPH.
FRIDAY…SHOWERS LIKELY…DECREASING IN THE AFTERNOON. HIGHS IN THE MID AND UPPER 40S. SOUTH WIND 15 TO 20 MPH.
SATURDAY…RAIN DEVELOPING BY NOON. HIGHS IN THE UPPER 40S. SOUTHEAST WIND 10 TO 15 MPH BECOMING SOUTHWEST.
SUNDAY…SHOWERS LIKELY. HIGHS IN THE MID 40S.
MONDAY…MOSTLY CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF RAIN. HIGHS IN THE UPPER 40S.
It’s a wonder anyone manages to be optimistic about anything in these conditions.
Dave’s chat transcript from yesterday @ Baseball Prospectus is up, if you missed him live. Check it out.
Pocket Lint reports in the Seattle Times that the M’s may go after Guerrero if talks with Tejeda fail. I’d like to say “Oooooh yeah,” even though really the M’s told him “well, if Tejeda didn’t come through and the planets aligned and we found $50m on the street, sure, we might go that way….”
The interesting bit is this: “Pat Gillick, the former Seattle general manager whom the club is using as a point man on several free agents, met with Guerrero as well as Miguel Tejada when he visited the Dominican Republic last month.”
This is why I refered to Gillick’s off-season yesterday, and why I’m still looking for a good nickname for our double-headed GM… Gillvasi’s the best I came up with. Gillick’s still our GM, like it or not. At best you might say Bavasi’s a particularly prominent assistant GM that’s taken on a lot of the team’s duties.
Over at the PI, they’re reporting that Franklin and Winn have both agreed to deals that will avoid arb, signings to be announced today. We’ve pointed this out before, but as much as I like Franklin, he’s a guy who leans heavily on his outfield defense, got really lucky last year, and seeing Cameron flipped for Winn is going to make him look really bad. I’d flip him for something interesting if I was Gillvasi. And Winn might be okay in center field, but adequecy isn’t what gets a team to the playoffs.
And a totally off-topic note on the breakdown of society related to my inability to post last night: Many of the problems the country (the world!) has is due entirely to the failure of people to think about things from other perspectives and to at least consider that they’re wrong. For instance, let’s say you’re a software company (say, Apple) and you manufacture WidgetX. You’re so sure WidgetX is the most useful thing ever that you want it thrown in the system tray, running all the time, and even though you make a couple tweaks to the networking stuff, you know that because WidgetX is so great, and your programmers so awesome, no one will ever object. If you don’t stop to consider the other side — that there’s me out there, and I’ve finally had a month where, more or less, my Linksys stuff held a connection without too much trouble, a delicate balancing act of drivers and settings — you (as this software company) might go ahead with your plans and totally screw over some poor sucker and make it so he can’t uninstall your stupid software without using some deep, nasty, rusty system tools, and mess up his internet connection so writing about the M’s becomes really, really hard.
I don’t understand why software companies (like Intuit!) all install their crap all over the desktop, the system tray, utterly without regard to user needs. If you ordered a subscription to the paper and the paperboy came to live with you, eating your food, running up the utility bills, couldn’t be removed from the house, and when you called the paper they told you “oh, you’ll love him, and he has to be in the house to deliver the paper” you’d go insane and hurt someone — and you’d probably be acquited. Why do people at software companies think it’s ethical to make these same kind of loony decisions because they want to ensure their product’s running at all times? Do they really not consider that on the other end, people are getting screwed?
So.. um… sorry.
What’s Gillick done this off-season? Where does the team stand? Both good questions. There’s still a ways to go before we know what this team will look like on opening day.
DH: Martinez
C: Wilson, Davis
1b: Olerud
2b: Boone
SS: —
3B: —
LF: Ibanez
CF: —
RF: Ichiro
Bench: Colbrunn, Bloomquist
Under contract: Cirillo
Arbitrartion questions: Winn, Guillen
Possible internal additions: Leone, Ugueto
Three big question marks in the lineup and a couple possibilities between them that could determine the outcome of this off-season.
Rotation (5):
Moyer, Pineiro, Meche
Arb questions: Garcia, Franklin (should he be counted on as a sure thing?)
Possible internal additions: Soriano (yay), Putz/Sweeney/many others
Bullpen (6):
RHP Sasaki, Hasegawa, Mateo
LHP Guardado
Possible internal additions: Putz/Taylor/many others
If the M’s spend another million on this bullpen I’m going to scream.
But the point I want to make is that the team has a lot left to do, and while the initial signs are that Gillick’s making the same kind of choices we’ve yelled and screamed about before, there are other moves — Soriano into the rotation, for instance, swapping Franklin while his numbers are Cameron-assisted, doing a good job filling the infield — that could make this a productive off-season and produce a contender. I haven’t lost hope yet.
There’s been some confusion about my posts here about what the Mariners are saying and what they mean, what the exact meaning of “budget†and “payroll†are, and whether the M’s are really lying or just shifting their words around. So I’d like to go into detail on where exactly the issues are, on my particular disputes with the Mariners.
Part of the problem is that the local press and the Mariners have used both interchangeably at times. But we’ll get to that.
The Mariners Opening Day payroll was $86.9 m, as commonly defined as “salaries plus pro-rated signing bonuses.†Even as early as November 2002, Howard Lincoln was pushing the team’s payroll, saying “We’re actually up $2 million to $92 million.”
The big piece I’m going to focus on this April 4th article by Bob Finnegan in the Seattle Times, where he puts out the team’s view (he is not alone in this, though, there are other references to this breakdown). First, though, a note about how payroll v. budget gets confused: “With reliever Giovanni Carrara signing for some $400,000 plus incentives, the Mariners pushed their payroll to $95.85 million, well beyond their original budget of $92 million.”
But you’ll see that this magical $96m figure isn’t true payroll in any sense. But onwards. The article includes includes a handy chart, which I’ll clip down a little:
Mariners’ 2003 payroll
Player, Salary
Kazu Sasaki $8.5 million
[…]
Ichiro $6 million ($3M base)
Edgar Martinez $6 million ($4M base)
[…]
Gil Meche $375,000
Willie Bloomquist $300,000
Julio Mateo $300,000
Total salaries: $88.25 million
Buyouts: $2.1 million
Contingencies: $2.5 million
Pro-rated signing bonuses: $3.0 million
Total: $95.85 million
Ignore, for a minute, that there are discrepancies here compared to commonly-available salary information, and assume these are all correct. I’ll come back to the differences in a minute.
Please note already that you can’t count M’s payroll as $92m. You have a couple of choices:
Commonly-calculated: $87 to $88m
Payroll including buyouts, signing bonuses for salary cap purposes: $93.35 (using M’s math from above)
Wacky Math M’s Payroll including Contingency Funds: $95.85m
We can see the Mariners count contingencies and buyouts against “payroll†even as the bonuses for Ichiro and Martinez are included in their salary numbers there. This makes this hard to compare already: they stick that $5m (and more) into salary, and pull the $3m in signing bonuses out as if they’re not salary.
There’s my big argument – that’s $5m+ to the Mariners when they argue straight, strict, common-definition payroll: they would say that salaries plus rated signing bonuses came to $91.25m or thereabouts, when everyone else would (and did) calculate the team’s number as much lower, at about $87m. This is the basic deception I get worked up about: at every turn, the Mariners talked about their payroll as being $92m, and got everyone else to do it – Finnegan only a month later tosses it off casually while comparing them to the Devil Rays:
Tampa Bay has now dropped five players from its Opening Day team, including four pitchers. What is left is a $14 million payroll (Seattle’s is more than $92 million), with only a handful of players making more than minimum salary, including all the pitchers.
Here he’s comparing Tampa Bay’s low, normally-calculated payroll against the M’s inflated include-everything payroll (which still again, doesn’t equal $92m)
Now on the buyouts – the CBA counts buyouts against payroll (this is Article XXIII, 5(b)) (though they’re to be counted as ‘signing bonuses’ that’s just terminology). So for the moment, I’ll figure they indeed spent $2.1m on buyouts, and call that good.
But contingencies? Who counts money you haven’t spent yet as a contingency? Plus, the M’s said that Garcia’s arbitration win had wiped out their contingency fund, that there was no money there, zero, there would be no acquisitions that cost the team money (and there weren’t) and they probably said that if anything happened like too many players making the All Star team, triggering contract incentives, that all the players would be marched down to the plasma center to sell blood, and their subsequent woozy performance would all be Freddy’s fault.
Plus, the team claimed the contingency budget was $2.5m before Freddy’s arb win. Howard Lincoln said after they lost to Garcia: “”We budget for these things. The contingency fund will cover it, but it (the fund) will be smaller as a result.†After the win though, they still calculated contingencies as the full, once-announced $2.5m.
Say you figure they went back and found that money under the couch cushion. You still can’t count that as money you’re spending. Say I have $1,000 in my checking account and I decide to spend it on a computer. I put one together for $500, and it ends up meeting all my needs, so I don’t spend that last $500. Instead, I spend it on beer. Am I lying if I say I spent $1,000 on my computer? Would the IRS allow me do depreciate a $1,000 computer? That $2.5 million is not payroll money. If you believe everything the team feeds you up to that point, you still have to draw the line there, and then they’ve stopped at $93.35m total payroll expenditure.
You may have thought just there that there are other bonuses not included in that table, that may push it up. And I say, no. The salaries listed in the times are consistently higher than those found at outside sources, and we can only assume that as with Edgar and Ichiro, the difference is because the Times chart includes possible bonuses (Sasaki, for instance, is listed there at $8.5m, but other sources have his salary at $8m, down to Meche, who is $375k v $325k).
And I understand that this is annoying nitpicking, and that few people out there care whether the Mariners are subverting common definitions of terms because it makes them look good – I mean, I must be the only person who cares that by swapping in bonuses into salaries and holding out signing bonuses, they’re tweaking the way we compare their payroll to other teams’ payroll when we go to ESPN.com and look at the salary tables.
Mentions of $92 million payroll in the Seattle Times:
4/16/2003, Larry Stone
7/22/2003, Bob Finnegan, “Payroll already over $92 millionâ€
9/19/2003, Larry Stone , “The A’s, whose $50 million payroll is just over half of Seattle’s $92 million, are baseball’s biggest overachievers”
But! Redemption! Sort of!
On July 22nd, the Associated Press obtained (and released) the luxury-tax figures for teams, and the M’s had – abracadabra – a $92,268,063 payroll. And that was the CBA-calculated one or, as the AP article put it,
Payrolls are based on the average annual values of contracts, $7.6 million per team in benefits, money paid or received in trades and salary owed to released players.
So! Using a definition totally different than the one the M’s put forth, one instead spots the Mariners $7.6m in benefits, the salaries happened to come out to exactly what the team was pushing and the local guys were reporting. Now maybe, you’re thinking, the reporters ran these articles with the $92m and what they really were refering to was the CBA number, even though they’d published articles (like Finnegan’s early one there) that calculated payroll entirely differently. Nope.
When they were reporting, every time they quoted another team’s payroll, they didn’t quote the CBA-calculated figures for other teams: for instance, in the Tampa reference, they compare a pared-down $14m (which should, for CBA purposes, be much higher because it includes buyouts and benefits — $22m, at least) to the M’s $92m. Either the papers consistently compared one method that came up with high numbers to another that came up with low ones – apples to oranges, if you would – or they compared apples to what the team told them was an apple. And how could anyone have known with any certainty what that CBA number would be back in November? Why bother pushing the stories including contingency funds to the papers?
Either way, the papers screwed up hugely. The Mariners came out with a story at the end of last season: their payroll was $92 million, and they stuck to it. I don’t think you can find a quote where Lincoln or Armstrong or Gillick referred to the payroll as the commonly-calculated ~$88-8m, it was always the higher figures. Eventually the figure stuck, and everyone used it, no matter that it didn’t make sense, that it wasn’t what the payroll was, and certainly not what everyone else calculates payroll as. And at best, our local media was lazy in not using the same methods to compare the payrolls of teams, making the Mariners seem far more generous and spendy than they were, and at worst, they were complicit in pushing the team line in doing so.
For the Mariners, the best way to see this is that they wanted to push as high a figure as possible, and people bought it. And while some might argue you can’t blame them for trying, I think that’s wrong. The team can argue they’re investing in the team without confusing people about how much they’re spending, or by playing wacky games with funds they haven’t (and didn’t) actually spend.
We’ve gotten a couple of emails today in the wake of the Guardado signing, wondering essentially, “What does this mean for Rafael Soriano?” If you recall, every so often there’s talk — be it from coaches, front office, media, whomever — that Soriano has the “Closer of the Future” tag somewhere on his person. Now, personally I think that’s garbage, that he’d be much more valuable as a starter. But I digress.
I don’t think the M’s would have signed Guardado as their lefty setup man if they didn’t have concerns about Sasaki. Teams don’t generally have two closers sitting around, let alone three (two and a half, in the case of Shiggy?) like the M’s do currently. In some form or another — be it injury, ineffectiveness or a return to Japan — I think they expect, or are at least planning as though, Sasaki won’t be the closer for a significant period of time next season, and they certainly don’t expect that they’ll be picking up his $8M option for 2005.
Which brings us to Soriano. With Sasaki, Hasegawa and now Guardado on the roster, the chances of him closing games regularly over the next two or three years are extremely slim. To me that screams “rotation!” as his destination, be it this season (if Garcia gets the old non-tender) or next. In any event, to me his eventual future in the rotation appears much more certain at this point thanks to the signings of both Hasegawa and Guardado.
So… new Big Board, complete with Hasegawa and Guardado. Also, if you’re keeping track, the 40-man roster is now at 40 men (or 39 men and one boy, in the case of Willie Bloomquist) meaning the M’s won’t be able to select anyone in the upcoming Rule 5 draft. Ah well.
Guardado — they’re paying him too much money, but other than that he’s a pretty good pitcher. His numbers the past three seasons are extremely solid, including a nasty .195/.217/.262 line vs. left-handed batters. Over that same span (2001-03) he’s fanned just under nine hitters per nine innings (8.88, to be exact), a pretty good indication that he has something left, and his K:BB ratio comes in at a cool 3.58:1.
For those interested in pegging me with questions, I’m doing a chat at Baseball Prospectus tommorrow at noon EST (9 am pacific time). You can submit questions ahead of time, though. I’ll likely gravitate towards prospect questions, but will answer a few M’s related queries as well. Keep them brief, however.
I’d have preferred Rhodes, but the details of the contract make this a better signing than I’d imagined Guardado would be. According to the ESPN story, it is a 1 year contract with team and player options for 2005 and 2006. The main problem I have with locking up relievers is their inconsistency from year to year, and this gives the M’s an out clause if Guardado turns into crap overnight. I’d imagine the buyout probably isn’t more than $500,000, so absolute worst case scenario, this is a 1 year, $5 million deal. Its overpaying, but its not tying up future salaries with a dead-weight contract.