It Just Continues
If last year was the offseason of fiscal restraint, all signs point towards this offseason being a return to insanity. Omar Vizquel’s brutal three year contract has now been topped, as the Phillies have given Corey Lidle a 2 year, $6.3 million contract. This Cory Lidle. Apparently, a 4.90 ERA, just over 5 strikeouts per 9 innings, and a history of mediocrity weren’t enough to convince the Phillies that Lidle just isn’t very good.
For comparison, Lidle’s 2004 VORP was 12.3. Ryan Franklin’s was 22.7. There may just be a market for dumping Franklin’s contract yet.
Free Agent Writeups
Yes, I’m still going to write up mini-articles on the more notable possible free agent acquisitions. For those who may have missed them, here are the ones I’ve completed to date:
Matt Clement
Carl Pavano
Brad Radke
Richie Sexson
Troy Glaus
Corey Koskie
Carlos Delgado
Adrian Beltre
Hopefully, I’ll knock out Edgar Renteria, J.D. Drew, Nomar Garciaparra, Kris Benson, and Kevin Millwood before the end of the month. The M’s are pretty clearly not in the Beltran hunt, so I’m going to skip writing him up, as enough bandwidth has been spent on him already.
The Knapsack Problem and the Winner’s Curse
As I wait to see if Valve allows Halflife 2 to drop at midnight Eastern across the country (do it! do it!) , I wanted to write a little about two of the problems that face teams in the off-season and drive free agent prices that don’t enter into a lot of discussions: player scarcity as it affects roster construction, and the errors of player valuation. Many of you already know all this, so please– don’t mind me. Read more
USSM Pizza Feed Information
After a little bit of delay, we have the official details of the Second Annual U.S.S. Mariner Pizza Feed. Last year was a big success, and so we’re doing it again. I’m not sure there’s a better excuse to get out of Christmas shopping at the mall then “Sorry, I can’t today, I have to go hang out with a couple hundred Mariner fans for five hours”.
In anticipation of a much larger crowd than we had last year, we’re shifting venues in the hope of accommodating up to 200 people. If you want to bring your spouse to prove that you aren’t the only one who cares about on base percentage and the rule 5 draft, tremendous. Have some friends who think clubhouse chemistry is the ultimate factor in winning? Bring ’em along. Despite our sabermetric leanings, this isn’t baseball’s version of a Star Trek convention. It’s just normal folks with an abnormal love of baseball getting together in the dead of winter to talk about the boys of summer. What’s not to enjoy?
Anyways, that’s the sales pitch. Here’s the nitty gritty details that you need to know:
When?: December 18th from 12 pm to 5 pm.
Where?: Horace Mann Elementary School in Redmond.
Who?: Derek, Jason, Dave, you, and various special guests who you’ll enjoy meeting.
How much>?: $15 per person
Is there food?: Enough pizza, salad, and sides for lunch and a small dinner (New York Vinnie excluded)
Great! Now what? If you’re going to attend, you must do three things:
1. Email us with the name of each person you’re confirming attendance for.
2. You’ll receive an address in response to mail your check to. Payment in advance is required; your spot is not guaranteed until we receive your money.
3. Show up on the 18th.
We’ll work on getting a paypal account for those of you who absolutely abhor writing checks, but I’d prefer the paper trail of good old fashioned pen and paper.
If you have any general questions that may be of interest to everyone, put them in comments. Specific questions, send me an email. We’ll be announcing a few of the special guests as they confirm their attendance. Either way, it will be a great time, and you should come.
Many unanswered questions
Despite being sick as a dog this last week, I beat Halo 2 before the release of Halflife 2.
As much as I enjoyed Halo, and I like that Bungie creates huge, rich story lines, Halo 2 didn’t answer any of my questions about what’s going on from that game, and managed to confuse me even more. There’s a certain amount of mystery I appreciate, but at this point in the series, I feel like I should know much more about the fictional world and what’s going on than I do.
Free agent sweepstakes begins
Teams are making their runs at Beltran and Beltre as we speak. The M’s have an offer on Beltre in, I don’t know any details yet so I can’t tell you if it’s competitive or not.
First signing appears to be Omar Vizquez, who — I can’t stop giggling as I type this — signed a 3-year, $12.25m deal with the Giants. No, really, the Giants signed a 37-year old shortstop through his…. what are they thinking? This is the front-runner for the Raul Ibanez Signing Award for this off-season.
Also, over at the Seattle Times, Steve Kelley writes that the team should spend money this off-season, in a column that must have taken him seven, eight minutes to write. I weep for the poor squids that gave their lives so that Kelley could have the ink to run this stuff.
Managerial hiring
A reader submitted this New York Times article on how managers are hired, focusing particularly on the sham interviews minority candidates receive due to Selig’s mandate that all teams interview at least one.
It has a lot of interesting information on the Mariners hiring of Hargrove, and how Jerry Manuel feels he wasn’t seriously considered, in particular because his lunch meeting wasn’t long enough.
And while I’m sympathetic to his concern generally… maybe it was that he wasn’t doing so well. If I was interviewing managerial candidates, it’s almost certain that the more suitable I found them, the more I’d want to talk to them and get their thoughts on other aspects of their philosophy and managerial approach.
If the team sat down with someone and said “how do you deal with difficult personalities?” and (say) Terry Collins responded “I’m an aggressive guy, I’ll ride them pretty hard in the dugout, I’ll fight them in the clubhouse before the press came in…” that’s when the team’s probably signalling for the check.
What that doesn’t address, though, is some of the larger issues, like “Is Selig’s mandate helping?”
It’s a worthy goal. Beyond baseball’s shameful racial legacy, even today front offices do not reflect the composition of its fan base or players. There are far fewer managers who aren’t white than is reasonable. It isn’t only the “people hire people they’re comfortable with, and people are comfortable with those with the same background, by which I mean race.” Part of the problem goes beyond that: because GM and managerial positions are so heavily composed of retreads, it keeps the same dudes in the canidate pool forever, and if that pool’s mostly white dudes, the managers that come from it will be mostly white dudes.
Selig’s mandate is certainly well-intentioned: by saying that teams must interview a minority candidate, he’s hoping that in consistently altering the candidate set, he’ll alter the result set. And that he’ll get these candidates experience interviewing, which will make them better candidates for the next job opening.
And yet… it’s not working. The result is that a small set of guys (which varies by position and changes by year) get interviewed and then passed up for every job that comes up, and return to the pool. When Dave Stewart was getting a lot of GM interviews, for instance, it must have been like a series of very short vacations. Fly somewhere, take someone with him, stay in a nice hotel, see the sights, spend a couple of hours talking to some people who have little interest in him — and probably already know who they want to hire — and then fly home.
That’s the problem with the state of things: if teams are convinced that they know who they want to hire before they talk to the Selig-mandated candidate, there’s no point to the process.
If MLB really wants to make the sport a better reflection of those who play in its uniform and those who watch it, there are more things they can do that might help:
Find more coaching and managing opportunities for interested minority applicants in the minor league systems. Teams should be more willing to take risks on unknown candidates at the lower levels of the minor leagues than at the top, and it’s in the actual managing where quality managers prove their worth. As teams have more diverse candidates internally, moving up in the system, they should have more diverse candidates they’re comfortable with, know well, and are organizationally happy to see succeed.
Expand the candidate pool, and alter the interview process. Many teams, faced with a vacancy, go through a process like this:
– We want Manager X
– Let’s interview some guys we kind of want
– Oh, and find some minority guy to interview too
– Interview Manager X
– Boy, he’s good, and his contract demands were quite reasonable, let’s hire him
– Oh yeah, send the mail boy out to interview those other three guys
It’s like the way the Mariners pursued players last year, and it means that someone other than Manager X has, as Manuel observes, pretty much blow them away with a song-and-dance routine that convinces the team that they were all wrong from the start. Once a team, or anyone, has made a decision, it’s extremely hard to talk them out of it. Sometimes the decision leaks before they’re through with the process, which makes it even more of a farce.
I’m against interfering with the hiring process of anyone in general, but there’s a change baseball can make here. Teams should submit a list of candidates they intend to interview to MLB, and MLB should return the list in random order. It’s lame, but it’s potentially a huge difference. If Manager X doesn’t go first, the interviews to those who go before him will open up their strengths and weaknesses for consideration. Instead of every other candidate being interviewed as not-Manager X, who already confirmed he was a dreamboat, the situation may be reversed. Manager X will face a much different interview, even if they’re still high on him. Hopefully, teams will think “We still like this guy a lot, but both the first guy had a great background working with pitchers, which we need, and the second guy’s done a lot of good work rebuilding, like we’re doing…” Manager X has to really interview for the job against the strengths of the other candidates, and maybe with the cartoon hearts out of their eyes, teams will make different decisions.
And once they’ve had honest discussions with the other candidates, those other canidates will be given more consideration for coaching opportunities or managerial positions elsewhere in the organization, which then helps them expand their experience, and changes the candidate pool for the better.
Long Term Contracts
One of the popular themes in every offseason discussion is the inherent risk of multi-year contracts. MLB has gone through a market correction the past two years with contracts coming down in both annual average value and length. Every year, we see teams trying to dump albatross contracts from players who were supposed to be the keys to their franchise. On the other end of the spectrum, we also have seen the Mariners take the risk-averse nature to the extreme, losing out on opportunities to acquire impact players due to their fear of the bad contract.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a ton of research published on the topic. For all the time spent writing about baseball, I find it rather amazing that no one has spent the time breaking down the success rates of long term contracts. I don’t have the time to delve into this topic too deeply, so anybody looking for inspiration on a topic, take this as a suggestion; it’s work I’d love to read.
I was interested enough, however, to do a bit of cursory work. Read more
Sexson speaks
In an interview with the East Valley Tribune, Richie Sexson talks about his contract desires.
“I have so much confidence in my shoulder right now, it’s hard for me to sign a deal like that,” Sexson said. “Say I take a deal of that nature and sprain my ankle . . .”
Reports of a three-year, $30 million offer by Arizona are not accurate, Sexson said, because not all of the deal is guaranteed. According to sources, Sexson would get the maximum value in the contract by reaching a threshold of about 120 games played in either 2005 or 2006.
In 2001-03 with Milwaukee, Sexson played in 477 of a possible 486 games, so he believes his durability should not be an issue.
“There’s always a way to work around everything,” he said. “(But) it’s tough for me to sign an incentive-laden contract after all the (rehabilitation) time I put in.”
The D-Backs say their medical team estimates a 10 percent chance his shoulder injury — suffered on a checked swing and aggravated on another before surgery — could recur.
“I think everybody’s 10 percent,” Sexson said. “You’re 10 percent. You might bump into a door and it might come out. You can’t put 100 percent on everybody’s shoulder.”
Honestly, these quotes annoy me. Sexson is not like any other player on the market. He finished the season the DL and has not played an inning of baseball since tearing his labrum. For a team to believe he’s completely healthy, they have one option; believe the self-serving comments of him and his agent. Considering his shoulder is completely uninsurable, that’s not exactly a good foundation to be making a multi-million dollar guarantee on.
Sexson is damaged goods, and he’s going to be treated as such in the free market. His options, really, are to take a 1 year deal and prove that he’s fully healthy, then cash in next offseason, or take a longer deal at a below market rate with contingency plans for the club in case the shoulder isn’t healthy.
If Sexson and his agent demand a fully guaranteed second and third years of the contract, walk away. He’s just not worth the risk.
Dave’s long-term plan for 2004
Given all the discussion about Dave’s last post, I’m a little surprised no one’s looked at what Dave wrote about this last year, which I thought was awesome. And generally, while going back and looking at what-ifs is… pretty pointless, I thought this was interesting.
Read more