Astros, Beltran, FA roundup
DMZ · December 29, 2004 at 10:35 am · Filed Under Mariners
The Astros are reportedly offering a 7th year to Beltran, but it’s an option ($14m or $5m buyout), for a guaranteed 5/$70m + a year. If Beltran takes an offer in the neighborhood of this, it’ll almost certainly going to be a better value for the lucky club that gets him than Sexson’s over the life of a five-year deal.
Also, Milton, bleah, to the Reds, for a huge chunk of money. I don’t understand either.
Did we mention Alou? Because that’s a pretty crazy deal, especially if they’re really going to play him in center. [update: why did I type that? what was I thinking?]
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50 Responses to “Astros, Beltran, FA roundup”
The Giants are all about trying to win it all before Bonds retires. So it doesn’t matter if they hire old guys as long as their contracts don’t extend beyond that date: they’re going to have to hugely retool when he leaves anyway. Plus they get the “feel good” father-son story (the M’s aren’t the only team to use sentiment to try to put butts in seats and eyes tuning in). I think Alou is going to be RF, however (which do you trust less, his arm or his legs?) and he does give them a consistent bat in the lineup to help protect Bonds.
And yes, damn, if Beltran ends up going for $14M a year then Sexson was an even lousier deal than it first appeared. Of course that would leave a hole at 1st (though Delgado didn’t get taken off the market so no big rush there) and give you a surplus of outfielders, though who wouldn’t want that problem.
If you keep Winn in that case, you move Winn to left and Ibanez to first or DH. Or first and then Spiezio subs in every game after the fourth inning when Ibanez gets AB#2. Or you find another 1B lying around. There are options.
Re#3:
Ichiro played some 1st base in japan. So… You move Reed to right, Winn to Center, and plug Ibanez in at left, and put Ichiro at 1st.
If Beltran goes for anything less than $16m/year, I’ll feel pretty sick about the Sexson deal. Still, those who feel similarly would have to keep in mind (assuming you put stock in them) the other factors that may have gone into the Sexson signing, such as possibly leading to the Beltre signing, etc.
That said, the differences in the injury risk alone between Sexson and Beltran would essentially be worth the salary difference. When you start considering the necessity of a good CF in Safeco, it starts to really make you need to go in for some light therapy.
Matt: one of the factors that we, as outsiders, don’t get to consider is whether Beltran was even interested in coming here in the first place. It’s entirely possible that Beltran will sign a deal that looks great compared to Sexson’s but really, was only considering going to a couple of teams, figuring the money was going to be about the same no matter where he went.
But yeah, Beltre’s great player with many skills at an elite position, and compared to Sexson, with his potential performance and potential problems — I have to take the first one if there’s a choice.
OT but J. Wright finally signed with the Yankees.
I had read that Beltran already had an offer from the Astros for 17 mil/year. The Met’s are supposedly very serious about entering the bidding. With the Mets, Astros, and Yankees involved, plus dark-horse teams like the Cubs and maybe the Tigers, I don’t see Beltran signing for less than 17 mil/year.
At that value, I think that the M’s are best not going for Beltran. That is a lot of cash to invest in one player, and it will probably take a 6-7 year contract to sign him. That is a huge risk for a guy that will be 34-35 at the end of the contract.
Besides, I am not really sure that Beltran is a top-5 player. That price, and for that long of a commitment, means the team should get an elite player. I like Beltran, but I am not really sure that he qualifies as a ‘top-10 player in baseball’ type of guy. He does everything well but nothing exceptional, and the team that gets him will likely be overpaying.
Ichiro at 1st?!?!?! Um, I think that might make me need far more therapy than the Sexson deal.
Like DMZ said, it’s easy to sit back in our computer chairs and play Monday morning quarterback on the way things transpired with Sexson. Obviously Beltran would have been a better option and would have allowed the M’s to sign a cheap 1B (Phelps) to platoon with Ibanez and Bucky at first and DH.
Regardless, I still get an ear to ear smile when I think about Adrian Beltre manning the hot corner for the next five years.
All this leap-before-you-look spending makes me wonder if the 2005 spring training will see more roster maneuvers than usual. I wouldn’t be a bit shocked if, after a lull induced by the current free-agent bacchanal, there’ll be quite a bit of trading as teams actually take closer stock of what they have — and what they don’t — from a field perspective and not just a budgetary one. Winn may actually have the most value about three weeks into workouts when a bunch of teams suddenly figure out that, feel-good spending asides, they have some gaping wounds in the outfield that need high-end patching.
Well, he is the best percentage base-stealer of all time, I think that qualifies as exceptional.
Regardless of what Beltran signs for, I was already sick at the Sexson signing based its merits (or lack therof) alone. And I already got sicker when JD Drew signed with LA. Did the Mariners even talk to him?
J.D. Drew made it clear in interviews that he did not want to leave the National League. The Mariners had no chance.
Why are people so negative on the Alou deal? Sure he’s pushing 40, but it’s only a two-year deal. And he was the fifth best LF in baseball last year by VORP. Isn’t $6-7M reasonable for that? Seems like a better deal than the parade of #3 starters who have signed for 3 years and 20-25 million.
Thank you, Adam. I know everyone likes to use charts and graphs and bell curves on the blogosphere (not that it’s a bad thing, mind you) but not all players can be “categorized”. I mean, who thought 5 years ago that Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens would still be pitching now? Not only piching, but still aces of their staffs? Probably very few of us. I know pitching and hitting are different areas, but Paul Molitor, Dave Winfield, and even Edgar at 40, were still very productive. Let’s not forget the ageless wonders Rickey Henderson and Julio Franco. It seems like anyone over 35 who gets a decent contract, gets pooh-poohed on this site. It’s a 2-year which has a risk, sure. I think Sexson’s deal is way more of a risk than Alou’s however. I’m sure most would agree with me on that. I just don’t think Alou’s deal is outrageous like some on this site would argue. He’s still a solid ballplayer with plenty of life left in his bat.
But Alou as a center fielder? I mean… that’s crazy.
Where’d you hear they’re using him in CF? It’s been made pretty clear that next years OF is going to be Bonds-Grissom-Alou with Tucker as the 4th OF.
#16 — I’ll give you Julio Franco, who is that rare one-in-a-thousand-type player who is the exception to the rules of human aging (for a while), but Rickey Henderson didn’t really have a good year in his forties, and got more chances than maybe he should have out of blind fantasies that he would suddenly rediscover his 25-year-old self.
The reality, even with better conditioning and diets, etc., that continues to extend the productive portion of players’ careers with each year, is that an EXTREME minority of baseball players are productive full-time performers at Moises Alou’s age.
And thus, buying into the idea that they can keep it up for more than a year into the future defies everything we empirically know about decline phases. Contracts for ONE year at age 38 or 39 to virtually any ballplayer, be it Edgar Martinez or Steve Finley or Nolan Ryan or Moises Alou, are acts of shaky optimism … but contracts for two or three years are blind leaps into an almost religious void of sheer mystical belief that rarely have been rewarded to their full … and are extremely unlikely to be rewarded to their full now.
There’s just no objective evidence that these players — including Omar Vizquel, Pedro Martinez, Mike Matheny, and even Jamie Moyer, who signed a three-year deal after his age-40 season — are going to be productive ballplayers at their last-season level through the duration of their contracts. And there is a great deal of projectable-data evidence that says otherwise.
THAT is why we pooh-pooh contracts for these players.
Dave: I have no idea. What am I thinking? Grissom?
Here’s an even wackier thought: If Grissom has two more season like his last, and gets a Series ring to boot, he’s got a longshot Hall-of-Fame argument from a counting-stats perspective … which (as we know from the inane disrespect leveled at Bert Blyleven lo these many years), counts for more among HOF voters than it should.
A comparison of the Sexson and Beltran contracts would not be fair. But we could have compared contracts offered by Bavasi if he had made an offer to Beltran. Even though Carlos did not want to come here I can and will fault Bavasi for not making an offer. After all, most of us consider money when making a decision to move. Perhaps Beltran would have bit the bait if only Bavasi had cast the line.
What pitching moves do we hope or project prior to Opening Day?
What’s the point of offering if he’s not going to take it?
No, really — if Beltran tells Boras “I want to play for an East Coast team or Houston” and Boras tells the Mariners he’s not interested in playing here, there’s no reason for Bavasi and the front office to waste their time and energy on him unless something dramatic changes with the market for Beltran or Beltran himself.
What is the point of throwing money around if you don’t give it to the best players? As an owner of a business, if I want talent, I want to make sure they mean it when they say then want to work on the East Coast. And the way to make sure if to offer him a contract. If I were serious about my business I would enter a discussion such as: 1) Why do you want to work on the East Coast? 2) Did you know that Seattle is a great place to work and here’s why 3) Did you know we have some cash to spend? 4) What would it take for you to sign with us? If the anwer is outrageous and you feel it’s a sign he is blowing us off, then you move on. If he takes a day or a week to respond with his answer then you might want to start a serious negotiation.
I agree that no one should waste his or her time and energy.
I sort of assumed that the M’s would have that conversation with Beltran (via Boras), and would do that level of investigation.
You know, maybe it’s just me…but I really thought that Beltre was our best fit coming into the offseason. At $12.8 million per season, for a relatively short 5 years is an absolute half-court-buzzer-beating-kill-shot, and when you compare it to Beltran’s proposed (and often reported) price of over $16 million per season AND more seasons than Beltre, why would we make him our #1 priority?
I know, I know…there are still people out there who think that all the M’s have to do is write the check and everything will be alright…but look at the Yankers, guys. Their payroll is approaching critical mass, and they’ve shown absolutely NO signs of slowing down, and it hasn’t guaranteed them ANYTHING. If given the choice between Beltre and Beltran at the beginning of the offseason, I would have chosen Beltre without giving it a thought. And seeing as we got Beltre, I think the FO has done the heavy lifting of the offseason and ought to be congratulated. Beltran is a GREAT player, but is he worth 17% of our payroll? The answer is, without question, no. He’s not going to contribute on a level which even rivals guys like Pujols, Bonds, Guerrero, or Randy Johnson, and as such should not be paid at the same respective rate that those players are. Would I like to see him patrolling CF for the next 6-8 years? The answer is probably an ecstatic “yes,” but when you consider what signing him would do to the franchise…you really are putting all of your eggs in one basket. I’d prefer to sign another Beltre-type player next year than go blow all the money on the only position we are actually flush in, which is the OF.
Ok. I should have realized that. Are there ways to determine if they had that conversation? I assume they would have leaked details of it but it’s moot now.
Any speculation on why he would not have wanted to play in Seattle?
misterjonez – The Yankees guarantee themselves a 1st or 2nd place finish by paying what they do. And it could be that they guarantee a playoff spot by paying what pay.
Last offseason, right now, this offseason, 2005, 2006, the M’s are competing against a brilliant if not genius GM and an owner in SoCal who wants a championship. Until I feel confident in Bavasi’s ability to evaluate talent and pay a proper price for it, one course of action is to relegate Oakland to the second division by outspending them.
17% of payroll on one player is a risk. On that we can agree.
Let’s talk about risk for a while. Perhaps a financial portfolio is an apt analogy. If you need a higher return, then you are willing to take more risk. With baseball competition this principle still holds.
The M’s compete with teams who are driven to win, have competent management who know how to win and/or have owners who have the resources to do so. (We are quite unlucky that we don’t have Tampa Bay or Milwaukee in our division.) Taking a risk on one player having 17% or your payroll budget can be sound. If you know the return you need is 95 or 100 wins that is a risk that fits with the required return.
I have said that the M’s should either play the young guys until they can be sorted out or pay top dollar for the best available players. A middle strategy only works if your GM knows how to work it.
Especially considering that Boras represented Beltre, it’s not too far fetched to think that they at least asked pricing.
Lessee… about that Giants roster…this is a possible lineup for them next year, with 2005 ages:
C Matheney 35
1B Snow 37
2B Durham 34
SS Vizquel 38
3B Alfonso 32
RF Alou 39
CF Grissom 38
LF Bonds 41
I know one of those players is arguably the best player ever at his position, but doesn’t this remind you of any local teams in 2004?
good point. Risk increases as age increases. The M’s had a painful lesson about this last season.
Yeah, I think Sabean’s gone WAY too far out on a limb chasing after Barry’s WS ring. I don’t see how you can field a lineup with an average age of 36.75 years and NOT expect serious age-related decline and/or injury to throw serious spanners in the works, even if one of the players is Barry Bonds. Even if you put Feliz and Torrealba in there, it doesn’t help that much- they’re still expecting a HUGE amount of productivity out of players way on the wrong side of 30 to have a shot in the NL West. This is almost certainly going to end badly for them.
I also idly wonder if Bavasi would pick up Pierzynski. Hellooooo, platoon partner for Wilson! (I suspect, based on Wilson’s history of hot April starts he might do better platooned and held to about 150-200 AB’s against lefties and caddying for Jamie. He dies come June/July.) Plus it give you Olivo to either toss in for a trade with Winn or depth at the position.
I don’t understand why Pierzynski has become so undesirable lately. A decent lefty bat to stick in the lineup at the right price would be a great pickup. Does anyone know what he’s asking for in terms of salary?
#32: The thing that weirds me is that Sabean isn’t even saying, ‘Yes, yes, I’m overpaying and these people will fall apart when Barry leaves but at least we’ll be good next year.’ He’s just ignoring that he’s overpaying for sheer mediocrity. A lot of the contracts he’s giving wouldn’t be that good an idea even if the player in question were 26. The Giants won’t be (just) old, they won’t be good.
Barry aside.
Alou, Grissom and Vizquel were decent to pretty good in 2004. Matheny, not so much.
But I think we basically agree- this is watching your barrel get closer to going over Niagra Falls and deciding to add a jetski engine to it so you can get there faster. I think loading up so heavily on veterans will backfire pretty badly for the Giants- and I also think it’s dangerous to assume a 41 year old Barry Bonds can stay in the lineup even to the extent he did in 2004.
I tinkered around with team age and winning percentage a while ago, and while I won’t attempt to stick in the results I got (which seem to gag a filter around here), I can say that the oldest team I found from 1977-2003 was the ’82 Angels, who won their division at 93-69. According to http://www.baseball-reference.com, their batters averaged 32.2 years and their pitchers were at 31.9 (I used some weighting to combine those, and I’ve since lost exactly what I did). Last year’s Mariners model ended up at 31.5/30.5.
Hm, I just took a peek at 2004 (which hadn’t happened last time I looked at this), and the 2004 Yankees were even older, at 32.2/32.9. The lesson, of course, is that age isn’t necessarily bad, it’s decline that’s bad. And of course age leads to decline. But if you’ve got a bunch of old guys who can still play, despite possibly being in decline, you can still win.
While I’m not defending the Sexson trade, I don’t think it is logical to say because Sexson is an x quality player and Beltran is an (x + 4) and Sexson will be making x amount of dollars and Beltran will be making only (x + 2), that the Sexson signing was/is bad. Sorry that is so convoluted.
The point is that the pool of free agents is a continuously developing market where the value of an individual player changes over time. Sexson’s salary represents the number of teams in contention for his services, teams in contention for other first basemen, teams making deals or trades contingent on other signings, etc.
If Beltran does go for 14 million it will certainly have something to do with the decreasing number of teams who have a viable chance of signing him.
The point is no signing exists within a vacuum and you can’t critique it based on another signings perceived superior value (quality/price) when each signing occurred in a different economic climate.
If that were the case, there is no transaction of any kind, ever, that anyone should be able to evaluate. In a larger sense, no act of any kind, in the history of time, could be a good or a bad act — because each act would exist in its own unique moral context that made judging the value of that act impossible.
It’s one thing to say that these things are complicated. It’s entirely another to be paralyzed by that complexity and give up.
Much of baseball knowledge (like park effects, for instance) is based on the desire to be able to evaluate performances against each other, free from contextual bias and other problems.
Re: The Leaning Giants, I thought from the moment that Sabean signed Vizquel that that team’s lineup was going to be brittle as glass, next year, and a severe risk for age-related collapse. As per the thread topic, that trend has only been severely accentuated in the six weeks since. On top of that, their lineup isn’t even their biggest problem: pitching is. They have a great rotation #1 (who’s had his injury problems, but), and added a power-arm closer (who’s had his consistency problems, but), and . . . what? No depth in the pen. Nobody in the rotation after Schmidt and Reuter at #2, who’s not so young, either.
—But this is the NL West, where the ‘champ’ next year could do it with 86 wins. I don’t think that Sabean’s ‘new again’ team is about giving Bonds a ring: I think it’s about selling Bonds’ Last Chance to Dance to the Bay Area, making Magowan’s attendance projection, and going home in the first week of October after an 0-3 first round loss. I doubt that Brian really expects to win it all with that lot he’s put together; it’s a marketing scheme, and will pay as long as the Giants are ‘in it’ for the division down to the last week of the season, in my view. I wouldn’t pay to watch this, but this seems to be how many, if not most baseball franchises are being administered nowadays, think about it. Three of four organizations burn to win; the others burn to move 2.7M rubes through the turnstiles. It’s business. As usual.
Except winning’s more likely to bring 2.7 million through the gate than a strategy to fool people, even if you have Barry Bonds.
Yeah, it’s the NL West, but those moves have the potential to seriously backfire- to the tune of the Giants being a 70-75 win team if they get hit by a wave of injuries. Alou and Vizquel have them in the past, and even Barry’s sat on the DL for a while in recent history.
And the Yankees are a pretty outre example, since they have overloaded on skimming FA cream and fat contracts from the rest of MLB…and even at that, they have exactly ZERO world titles since 2000.
As delighted as I am by the Yanks failing to win the title in recent years, they’ve still been wildly successful. And my point is that age, in and of itself, is not a reason to write off a team. In fact, team age is positively correlated with winning (about .355). Teams with a team age of 31 and over have an aggregate winning percentage of .559, which is pretty spiffy. You can turn your nose up at that and say that the results are skewed by the fact that the older teams who are doing well are the ones that have spent a lot of money on free agents, and that would be true. But the point remains, age isn’t really the reason why teams fail. They fail because their players decline (yes, because they are getting older) or were never any good to begin with. If you have the right old players, you’re going to do just fine.
That begs the question of whether the Giants have the right old players. Personally, I would never have made the moves they did. But I also haven’t looked at any real projections for their team next year, and I don’t pay enough attention to the NL to really judge the moves properly. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as that expressed here: that they have gotten older to no purpose. But it’s a mistake to write off a team based merely on their team age.
Re: #33 Perhaps the stories last year about AJ being a clubhouse lawyer have some merit.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/01/SPG8N6EBDV1.DTL
How does understanding the context of a decision makes it impossible to judge? In fact I don’t know how one could hope to determine a signings value without the context.
What I meant is that it is immaterial the amount Beltran is eventually paid when evaluating the Sexson contract. The same teams were not competing for the two (along with a number of other ancillary but no less important factors), thus the market for each was different. One can not start with the fact Beltran will be paid whatever sum of money and then work their way backwards to say that means Sexson was paid too much.
Was Sexson paid too much? Almost certainly, but that is because the money the M’s spent on him could have been spent on potentially more valuable free agents (Nomar, Miller, Perez, Clement, Hidalgo or even Delgado for comparable jack, to name a few.) Sexson is overpaid because he is a high injury risk who may decline very quickly. Sexson is overpaid because he doesn’t play a premium defensive position and therefore his spot could be easily replaced for less money or from within the organization. Sexson’s signing is bad because his best years will likely come when the M’s are not in contention, but not because a player the team likely had no shot at will sign a more valuable contract somewhere else.
Not to mention the number of non-financial and/or non-immediate financial considerations that go into any player’s signing. Wade Miller, to name one player who was recently brought up as a potential Mariner sign, could play in Seattle and post a sub 4 ERA and still have a losing record. That same ERA in Boston could net him 15-20 wins on championship caliber team. That means signing with Boston may only mean 1.5-4.5 million this year, vs. however many more dollars the M’s may have been able to sign him for, but could net Miller a much larger free agent contract next year.
I could go on, but suffice to say we shouldn’t over-simplify a complex market and then cast stones at a GM because we can conceive of better deals.
And my point is that age, in and of itself, is not a reason to write off a team. In fact, team age is positively correlated with winning (about .355).
Several conflating factors:
– Good older players stay in the league from year to year. Bad older players don’t and drop out. This is more true than with younger players, since a number of them turn into better or good younger players.
– What does a team with a bunch of bad older players do in September when they are 20 games out? Why, play a bunch of AAA and AA callups…which would skew some results from where the team was STARTING the year. The M’s, IIRC, WERE the oldest team in baseball starting the year (I dimly recall an ESPN article about this). By the later part of the season, with Reed in for McCracken, Jacobsen getting time over Olerud, Lopez in for Aurilia, Putz for Guradado, etc., I’m not surprised that changed- most of the M’s moves made the team younger in-season. A good team in the race won’t do this. So that’s something that skews data.
I don’t doubt that age is positively correlated with winning- since a team full of cheap 24 year olds that haven’t reached arbitration yet are unlikely to be any good. But I’d also argue a team stuffed with 34-41 year olds like the Giants is courting disaster. Traditionally, that age range is an age where people fall off performance cliffs due to injury and age, even HOF players.
The coward’s right. I did a huge study a couple years ago on player age as it affected offensive performance and I couldn’t overcome the first problem there: while it’s possible to have an idea of what aging does to top players over time because they’re still effective and playing, it’s extremely hard to prove any kind of specific effect on all players because as they’re affected, playing time drops and the sample as a whole goes badly.
I spent a lot of time on that one, too, so this was a lesson hard-won.
#23– and to add to that– it isn’t as though Beltran needs to be introduced to Safeco and the AL. He knows all about it, and the organization– esp. as Boras has talked it up for Beltre’s sake. If he takes less to stay in Houston, it is because he wants Houston.
I’m well aware of all the factors that go into the fact that older teams do better than younger ones, I didn’t intend to suggest otherwise. My point is that you can’t just point at a team and say that they are going to fail simply because they are old. If it were that easy, we would all enjoy the sight of the Yankees crashing.
I look at their roster and I see the same thing looming. But that’s because it looks to me like they’re counting on a bunch of players to repeat performances that seem pretty fluky to me. In the end, I think we agree on their approach being very risky, but I was thinking the exact same things about the Diamondbacks not too long ago, and they hauled in the hardware in 2001.
Holy crap, I just put a comment earlier, but it looks like the boys here decided to delete it since I made a major point against them…what a joke.
#47 Yeah, D-Backs win it with age and they had two HOF pitchers. The Giants no way can match those pitchers or results.
Please try making your point again in a more civil manner and you’d note that it would stay up.