Rolling contracts
Kris Benson to the Mets, 3y, $22.5m. I once hoped for great things from Kris Benson, and now $7m/year seems excessive.
Glendon Rusch signed a 2y, $4m deal too.
I don’t know what to make of these deals, except to say that hauling Meche to arbitration looks like a better idea with each pitcher signing.
MLB’s advise and consent policy
ESPN ran an innocous little feature which includes MLB’s advisory reply form. I always find things like this interesting, because I’m a rules geek, but what’s particularly cool about seeing this is thinking about how this is part of a larger campaign by MLB to keep salaries down. It’s putting a paper trail to what’s been going on for a while, and it’s part of a whole strategy that’s been effective to lower labor costs in any way they can.
Collusion, where the teams get together and conspire to control bidding on free agents, is strictly prohibited. Selig once led the owners in this and the player’s union won a complete victory in court. The fine of $280m was so large that it’s been used as justification for the last round of expansion, which is bunk but a whole other post.
I have to give credit to Selig for learning from his mistakes. Determined to lower the cost of labor however he can, Selig’s moved cautiously over his term to use his power as Commisioner to put pressure on salaries, and he’s done so without getting into legal trouble.
The draft has been the most obvious because the MLBPA doesn’t care about it. Every year, MLB is a little more involved, and puts more pressure on teams to make conforming offers to their draft picks. They’re trying to move towards unstated but de-facto slotting of the kind the NFL and NBA have as part of their rules, where pick #1 gets $a, pick #2 gets $b, and so on until down the line. Ownership groups dig this because it means that they pay less for those insociant youngsters, but front office sentiment is mixed. It means that if there’s an amazing draft coming up, those players get screwed, which is okay by GMs, but as slotting becomes inflexible it will also mean that in a bad draft, they’d be obligated to pay a lesser player the same amount. It would also mean less flexibility to look to signability guys if you have a ton of early picks from losing free agents, or to look to pay a potential pick a lot to not go to school on an athletic scholarship if you have local connections that might help.
We’ve also seen MLB deflate salaries by running a lot of information through the labor counsel office, which handles arbitration. What happens here is at the end of the year, say Bavasi’s thinking about offering arbitration to Dan Wilson. When he talks to MLB, he’ll say “I’m not offering contracts to these guys. Now this Dan Wilson guy, I don’t know, you should see the fan mail he gets…”
And MLB will say “Funny you should mention that. Having talked to some other guys, I think there will be six to eight free agent catchers on the market…”
So Bavasi declines, figuring Wilson would get more in arbitration then the M’s could re-sign him for, or find a suitable alternative. In doing this, baseball’s helped push more players each year into the free agent market, and kept players out of arbitration, and reduced their willingness to offer lucrative extensions. After all, why offer a guy a premium deal if he’s going to be a commodity in a month?
Now, this doesn’t technically violate the CBA… well, maybe it does. It’s certainly close. But that’s not for me to argue, it’s for the MLBPA, and they haven’t filed a suit yet.
This new wrinkle is interesting because it implies that teams thinking about, say, Carlos Beltran, would ask MLB what a reasonable contract would look like for four years. And MLB would return this form referenced by ESPN in which they’d say “30-40m, based on these other guys”.
There are are some intentional flaws even in this formal document. It neglects a rise in revenues, or inflation — say top center fielders are making $5m/year, and the league signs a deal to broadcast in holovision, and every team suddenly makes twice as much national broadcast money. The comperables will still be based on the old money. There’s also a couple issues of judgement and applicability in who MLB choses to pull as comperables, what their specific situations were, and then there’s the jump to the number they put at the top, which is also a judgement call.
Now the form’s filled with caveats and warnings about how every situation is different, but if this becomes widespread, it would help to bracket the initial offers from teams in a pretty narrow range.
And then, if MLB is reviewing contract offers themselves, they can start giving teams trouble if their offer is out of line with others. This would prevent the kind of Alex Rodriguez deal from occurring again, where the winning offer was far higher than the second-highest offer. This, again, doesn’t obviously violate the CBA, but it’s still not in the spirit of fair play. If someone wants to spend far too much money on a player, why not let them?
Part of this has traditionally gone on through back channels, which MLB’s trying to shut down. As agents like to play the disinformation game and inflate the number of teams, or offers they’d received, teams had the opposite intention, because they were best served by not over-bidding. So teams leaked contract offer information to the press, or even in discussions with other teams would mention they’d made an offer, or were thinking about making an offer… and it would get around pretty quickly. In the last bargaining agreement negotiations, MLB wanted to have a clearing house of offers — so a team could call up and say “who else has put in offers on Beltran, and what were they?” It was a formalization of this past back-channel network, and it got axed, so teams went back to using the press.
As MLB wants to keep that kind of thing quiet, they now made formal a process that they hope keeps the initial bidding in a small range, even if they don’t put pressure on the bidding that follows.
There have been rumors that MLB’s been doing something even more egregious than this, by actually controlling who gets what offers in, but information on even what specific allegations are is scarce — and if they were doing it, they’d be in court almost immediately. It’s worth mentioning as part of understanding why the players are so suspicious about the whole thing, and the MLBPA is particularly jumpy lately.
Even beyond those moves, Selig’s attempts at enforcement of the debt/equity rules (where teams can’t have debt, including futre contract obligations, in excess of a certain percentage of team value, which… well, you know how that can be manipulated) put a damper on team spending even beyond the salary cap itself.
There’ve been two major factors in the market correction of the last two years. The smaller’s that there are more smarter teams that understand the concept of replacement level and are good at the cheap scrap-recycling. The far larger has been the massive weight applied to the whole process by MLB, and seeing what happens this off-season is going to be interesting.
Rule 5 draft
Anytime you see it as “Rule V” you can safely assume the author doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s in the books as “Rule 5”. I have no idea why this misconception persists. I can tell you that there are writers out there that have their editors change the correct designation to the incorrect one.
Jason Cooper
Last year, I stumped for Chris Shelton, who ended up being selected first overall in the rule 5 draft by the Tigers. With most of the 40 man rosters being finalized already, it appears to me that this years potential rule 5 steal is Moses Lake’s own Jason Cooper. He had a disappointing season for Double-A Akron, but there’s still life in his bat. For those who trumpet the cause of Ryan Howard, I’d suggest that Cooper is actually a comparable talent. He’s a 1B/LF with some serious power who can be pitched to and will have to make adjustments against good breaking balls. He’s not a star in the making, but could be a nifty bat off the bench.
Jason Cooper, folks. Let’s get the bandwagon rolling.
Stoneman
Sort of Mariner related; big kudos to Bill Stoneman for the Jose Guillen trade he made today. A fantastic move for the Angels, which isn’t exactly good news for Seattle. In one fell swoop, the Angels:
1. Moved a player who had alienated himself from the coaching staff and drove a knife into his trade value by wearing out his welcome in yet another city. Guillen being traded was the mortal lock of the offseason.
2. Saved $3 million in payroll for 2005.
3. Aquired a player who should be reasonably expected to contribute a similar performance to the one he gave up at ten percent of the cost.
4. Got a solid utility-infielder prospect thrown in on top of it.
A gigantic home run for Bill Stoneman. He cut payroll, made his team better and younger, and simultaneously dumped a player everyone knew he had no interest in bringing to spring training. Contrast this with the way the Mariners butchered the Carlos Guillen situation last year, and its essentially night and day.
And yes, Jim Bowden is well on his way to breaking the major league record for worst week ever.
40 man moves
While everyone else is adding players to the 40 man roster to protect them from the Rule 5 draft, the M’s have moved one guy off, trading LHP Randy Williams to San Diego for non-prospect Billy Hogan. Hogan doesn’t have to be protected on the 40 man, so the M’s essentially picked up Hogan for nothing, as Williams likely would have been DFA’d if he hadn’t been traded.
The M’s also added Mike Morse, Wladimir Balentien, and Shin-Soo Choo to the 40 man roster to protect them from the rule 5 draft. Ramon Santiago was outrighted to Tacoma, meaning that we have traded Carlos Guillen for the crappy Juan Gonzalez.
Final tally: -1 40 man roster spot, -1 terrible shortstop.
What if it doesn’t end?
Dave’s post raises an interesting possibility, that early bad signings will later depress the market because it means there are fewer dollars in the pool, but it also reduces the number of potential players for that pool. Now, I hate using fantasy auctions as an example, but many people are familiar with what can happen next: say pitchers are hugely overvalued in your league. Top pitchers go for way too much money. Then everyone else starts worrying they won’t get any pitchers, and panic sets in. There are bidding wars for modest pitchers and the overpaid top guys start to look like bargains… but the fundamental distribution of talent remains the same. There will be few great guys, more good ones, many more okay ones. If you remain level-headed, you can still pick up a bunch of good values, but they’ll be at the low end of the spectrum, and you have to spend your money elsewhere.
So it is with this year’s free agent market. Say this trend continues, and teams continue to spend a ton of money on the worthwhile free agents. A team then faces a decision: do we too overspend to get something worthwhile, or is there a better application of this money?
If this scenario plays out as some of our readers fear, this may show the difference in the new front office versus the old one. I can objectively say that I have been too proportionally critical of the team’s failures in small matters over large ones. The team’s failure to pick up a decent platoon partner for Olerud, for instance: in the end, it’s what, a difference of 100 at-bats. Who really cares?
That was certainly Gillick’s attitude, and it showed — his Mariner teams had awful benches, with players badly suited to complement those on the field. By contrast, one of the things I love about Billy Beane is that, while he makes mistakes and has his problems, you know that Oakland pours over the minor league free agents, in the same way they obsess over the Rule 5 draft. They look for guys who might be good injury insurance, potential trade bait if they perform well, interesting injury rebounds, good drinking buddies, shiny objects of any kind.
They work the phones, talking to any front office that will answer, finding out who they’re thinking of moving, and why, and what they need in return.
That’s how you can do well if the market goes insane this year. If Bavasi & Co are smart and every position player starts to sign for way too much money, they can look to spend that money on the poor, the unwashed, the undervalued, but also they can look to find players on teams that are trying to dump contracts. If someone like Tampa Bay really wants to get rid of a veteran player to cut payroll, you can afford to take that on instead of filling that position in the open market.
If you’re good enough at filling the position with the random floatsam and stopgaps, and you retain payroll flexibility, you can also wait it out until later in the year, when teams may be trying to unload those same contracts (and others) and bulking up for the playoffs costs you much less.
I think Dave’s reasoning is sound — that bad spending on some players doesn’t have to result in the inflation of all free agent prices. But even if it created a one-year price spike, a smart team — especially one that’s not looking for a championship this year — can find ways to exploit market conditions and leave the free-spenders hurting next year and years after that.
The Market
Well, I don’t think anyone predicted this. 5 days into free agency, and we’ve had five rather, uhh, strange signings. We’re getting a sixth tomorrow when Arizona gives Royce Clayton a two year contract. A brief rundown:
1. Omar Vizquel: 3 years, $12 million
2. Cory Lidle: 2 years, $6 million
3. Cristian Guzman: 4 years, $17 million
4. Vinny Castilla: 2 years, $6 million
5. Troy Percival: 2 years, $12 million
Keep in mind, it was just five months ago that Carlos Guillen signed a three year, $15 million extension, passing up his first shot at free agency, to remain a Detroit Tiger. Carlos Guillen was worth about seven wins above replacement this year; Cristian Guzman one. Somehow, Guzman parlays that into a longer contract at just a bit less in annual value. And the Guzman signing is probably the most defensible of the bunch, honestly.
So, a few hours ago, I’m talking with a friend who works in a non-Mariners front office about this rash of deals. I express a bit of worry that these low-to-mid-tier players are setting a market value that will raise the rates the upper echelon players will expect to receive. His response, which I think is important (not word for word quote, since we were just talking):
“I disagree. I think this helps us sign (Player X) for less, actually. These guys aren’t setting the market; they’re simply allocating resources to players we weren’t going to pursue anyways. The supply of attractive free agents for us hasn’t changed one bit, but the amount of teams that will be pursuing them has probably dropped by two. Less demand, less leverage. Don’t worry about these signings; we’re still sticking to what we believe is an intelligent offer, and we’re glad that those who feel like overspending are doing so on guys we didn’t want anyways. (My GM) isn’t bound to match contracts given out by (Bowden, Dombrowski, Minaya, and Sabean). If (the agent) says that Omar is worth $4 million a year so (Player X) is now worth $15 million, I’ll gladly tell them to go ask Sabean for $15 million. He knows that he can’t, and so do we. This is good news, not bad news.”
He knows the baseball market, and how team’s operate, a lot better than I do, and what he says makes sense. So, his advice to me is my advice to you; don’t worry, be happy.
Mo Vaughn
I’m going to continue to do free agent writeups for guys you may have overlooked or for whatever reason haven’t been part of the conversation yet!
Your attention please: this, and the other post, are jokes. The joke being that unlike Dave, who’s been writing quite serious and in-depth profiles, given the keyboard I would write bizarre, error-filled, badly-reasoned profiles of the wrong people.
As we talk about the need for left-handed power in Safeco, one heavy name in free agency’s gone unmentioned: Mo Vaughn. He’s a huge left-handed power bat, he’s always drawn walks, and he’s been trying to get back in the game.
Now, the injury is an weighty issue — his 2003 was severely curtailed when his knee went out, but as late as 2000 he played in 161 games! And after a full season rehabbing, all the nagging aches and strains that slow most players down, nagging them through the off-season, aren’t going to be a problem. That he missed a year will raise some eyebrows, sure, but when he was with the Mets, he fought with their medical staff constantly to get back in the lineup — with their financial problems and their desire to shift Piazza to first, they wanted to collect the insurance money more than they wanted to have his monster bat in the lineup.
And if bringing Richie Sexson in isn’t an issue, why would Mo Vaughn be any different? Who wouldn’t want a career .293/.383/.523 hitter in the middle of their lineup?
Plus, Mo Vaughn brings intangibles. He’s a gritty player who thrived under pressure for East Coast teams. If we’re looking to bring grit and veteran leadership to the team, Mo would bring a ton of it.
Jamey Wright
Dave said I could write a free agent preview, so here goes!
Your attention please: this, and the other post, are jokes. The joke being that unlike Dave, who’s been writing quite serious and in-depth profiles, given the keyboard I would write bizarre, error-filled, badly-reasoned profiles of the wrong people.
One of the most coveted free agents this year is Jamey Wright. Briefly with the Mariners in spring training a couple of years ago, Jamey Wright is a high-upside young pitcher. For years limited in effectiveness by his team and injuries, Wright became a star this year under the tutelage of noted pitching coach Bob Apodaca in Colorado.
Jamey obviously knew exactly what he had to do to succeed: rely on the quality of his stuff and challange batters, and with the right coach he was able to do it. Wright went 15-8 this year, racking up 159 K against only 70 walks! And only 11 home runs all season! Ryan Franklin gave up 11 home runs in the time it took you to read this far in the post! Strangely, though, Jamey did not finish in the NL Cy Young voting at all.
Jamey’s overlooked kudos especially highlight the out-of-sight career he’s had. Along with robins, one of the first sights of spring is seeing the annual “Jamey Wright looks great in spring training” story, followed inevitably by another lost season.
This year’s almost miraculous comeback came at an especially fortiutous time for Jamey, as during his many short stints with different teams he had been at one point one of the worst pitchers in baseball, as measured by metrics like VORP, and ARP, and TOMA. Still under 30, his best years may lie ahead of him but one question remains: can Jamey Wright remain as good as he was this year, if he’s parted from the pitching coach that turned his career around? Or was this year a fluke, one that couldn’t be replicated even if he did stay with the Rockies?
And would that make him a bargain?
Jamey’s off-kilter eccentric nature may put off some teams more concerned with the right clubhouse fit, though, and those who are looking for a true #1 ace will likely look for a starter with a longer and more proven track record.
Is he cheap enough yet?
I don’t think he’s worth the risk. Even though he may live up to his potential and be a Cy Young candidate for years to come, the price he’ll command on the free agent market is so high that he would have to meet or beat this year’s performance every year in order to succeed.