Pedro and Sexson
Since we’re sort of commenting on the FA season as it develops… Pedro’s 4y-$48m is crazy. The Red Sox had sentimental reasons to pay him more and for longer than anyone else, and if press reports are to be believed, even those in the front office that argued in favor of making their last rich offer to him were reluctant and admitted they might be better off in the long term if he turned them down.
Here’s the thing, as I see it (and how it applies to Sexson).
A team will make a guess at a player’s value — Pedro is worth four wins a season over our other options. Then, based on the team’s individual situation (see “Knapsack Problem“) and whether that player will push them into the playoffs (where the team makes a lot more money), they’ll make some other decisions about how much those four wins are worth.
Now, in the valuation process (he’s worth four wins a season) and during the other discussions (how much would a replacement cost?) the issue of injury risk has to come out.
So let’s say you look at Beltre. You figure he’s worth four wins a year, and you really need a star there for a number of reasons (no 3B talent in the system, crowded OF/1B/DH situation, fans massing outside offices with torches and pitchforks), and your alternative is Spiezio, who’s already under contract… you come up with a figure of $10m/year. If he performs like you think he will, he’ll be worth it.
What if Beltre, instead of having some random injuries and a brush with death unrelated to his on-the-field health, had bum knees? Like Mo Vaughn bad. 25% chance his career ends in two years, 25% chance he’s a DH in three. You chop the offer, because his expected contribution’s much lower.
Or, better yet — how much is a lottery ticket worth? If you’re a strict odds person, it’s payoff/chances of winning. There are circumstances that might make that value higher (I have $5 I don’t need, but a relative needs an experimental kidney transplant that I could only afford if I won the lottery), but in general, the more you pay for the same ticket, the more money you’re losing needlessly.
So it is with baseball players. The chances Pedro’s going to contribute $12m a year worth of pitching to the Mets over the next four years are slim. The Mets bought every ticket for the cakewalk at $50/piece. They paid $4 for a $1 lottery ticket with an expected return of 50c.
This is why the Sexson deal makes me blanch. Like Raul’s deal, like Spiezio’s deal, it’s paying a player handsomely to play at a level they’re unlikely to play at, with the added problem that with Sexson we get the added uncertainty of a nasty shoulder injury. Sure, he’ll have passed the medical exam, but we’re not going to know if he re-injures that labrum until it happens or he finishes out the contract. And no matter what chance you put on it (10%, as the Diamondbacks are rumored to have guessed?), it looks like the team didn’t factor that into his offer.
Beltre or bust. Beltre or bust.
The Market
I want to address the issue of market value that seems to be coming up a lot lately. There seems to be a school of thought that MLB is a captialist ideal where each player’s actual value is determined by what the top bidder is willing to pay for his services. The comment “Player X is worth his salary because that’s what the market is.” is idealistic crap. Using a free market ideology to justify huge contracts for non-superstar players is flawed thinking.
The baseball market is a zero sum game. Because the 30 franchises each have 25 roster spots, all major league players are competing for one of 750 jobs. Every time a player who is not one of the 750 best available gets a job, someone gets bumped to Triple-A who has major league skills. Financially, it works the same way. MLB as an entity spends about $3.1 billion per year on player salaries. Those dollars aren’t evenly distributed throughout the franchises, however, that is still the total pie that must be divided 750 ways.
A player’s actual value, of course, comes from his performance on the field. In a perfect market, the best players would get the most money and it would continue on down to the fringe major league types making the league minimum. However, as we all know, MLB is not a perfect market. There are inefficincies that can be exploited for a competitive advantage.
The late Doug Pappas invented a system he called Marginal Wins, which basically holds that a team of players making the league minimum plucked out of Triple-A could win about 50 games in a season. Therefore, what teams are actually paying for are wins above 50, the theoretical replacement level performance of a team of fringe players. He published a slew of essays for Baseball Prospectus on the topic, and they’re worth reading if you haven’t already. I’ll skip the details and just move on to the summary, for brevity sake.
Essentially, most winning teams pay approximately $1.5-$2 million per Marginal Win as a whole (the 2004 Mariners paid about $5 million per marginal win). If you have a higher payroll, you can afford to pay a bit more for the marginal wins to reduce risk. A team like Tampa may have a good marginal win/dollar ratio, but that’s because they haven’t spent enough to be competitive. The goal, obviously, is wins, not optimal win/dollar spending. However, a team that spends its money efficiently is going to win more than a team that doesn’t, given equal payrolls.
This is the problem a lot of us have with the signings of players like Delgado, Sexson, Koskie, Glaus, Ortiz, Wright, Pavano, Vizquel, etc… The market in the 2004 free agent period is severely out of touch with intelligent spending. The difference in performance between most of the free agents and what can be obtained for a fraction of the cost simply does not support the dollars being paid out to these players. The middle class of baseball has become extremely overpriced.
Because of the way the system is setup for players who do not have service time to qualify for 5th year arbitration or free agency, the big values among the players belong to that group. It is a unique advantage for a team to get premium performance for small dollar amounts, giving themselves the ability to spend a bulk of their payroll on star players. However, a weird reaction to the Alex Rodriguez contract has caused the price of superstar players to fall while shifting that surplus money to average or slightly above average players. This is a market inefficiency and one that can be exploited.
Currently, the optimal roster construction would be a collection of highly paid, elite players surrounded by a roster of pre-arbitration eligible role players. The system is designed to reward teams who develop prodcutive players from within the organization. Attempting to build a roster through free agency, paying “what the market will bear”, is a great way to spend a lot of money on a bad team.
People criticize us for saying that we can never be pleased, no matter how good a player the Mariners sign. This is pretty obviously not true, as the feed on Saturday will be one giant party if Adrian Beltre is signed by then. However, it goes to a point; the Mariners have consistently struggled at filling out the roster from the two tiers of players that return value; unique superstar talents that cannot be replaced and homegrown players producing in their pre-arbitration seasons.
Spending $12 million per season on Richie Sexson simply continues that tradition. Even ignoring the risks surrounding his injury (which is fool hardy, but is another post all together), his expected performance from 30-33 will not put him in the superstar elite class. He’s going to be a good player making great player money, returning less marginal wins than should be expected from a player with his contract.
I realize a large majority of the fan base are just happy that we’re spending money. However, unspent money still has value. The choices are not Free Agent A or Free Agent B for whatever the top bidder is willing to pay. There are hundreds of options available, and limiting ourselves to a Sexson/Delgado comparison is missing the big picture.
Sexon AND Delgado, yay!
Jim Street’s latest at MLB.com has it happening. And in case you thought he might get through it without saying something implausible:
Think about that. Sexson and Delgado in the middle of Seattle’s lineup. All of a sudden, a team that hit the fewest home runs and scored the fewest runs in the American League last season looks like a Murderer’s Row.
A historically great offense, wow! Like the Yankees of the 30s!
Best-case Recreation of Best Previous Year Jim Street Memorial Mariners Murderer Row:
Richie Sexson (2003) : .272/.379/.548
Raul Ibanez (2002): .294/.346/.537
Carlos Delgado (2000): .344/.470/.664
Bret Boone (?)(2001): .331/.372/.578
Wow, that suuuure is powerful. Except that relative to the rest of baseball, the best of those isn’t close to Ruth’s 1927 season, which makes Boone’s 2001 look like Boone must have been hitting with a wet noodel. Or Gehrig’s season, which was equally good.
Even Earle Combs and Bob Meusel, who get short shrift, beat the best of the M’s. Combs put up a line in 1927 where, relative to the league, he was as good as the career years of *any* of the M’s players. Meusel was as good in 1927 as Ibanez had ever been.
The only way I can come close to expressing this in modern terms: the 1927 Yankees had two Barry Bonds performances backed by Albert Pujols and David Ortiz.
And while we can argue a little about what our metrics for relative comparison is, no matter what you choose, it totally neglects the issues of injury, effectiveness, and how slim the chances that all four of those guys would put up career lines.
Adding Sexson and Delgado at their best wouldn’t make a Murderer’s Row. Next season’s lineup would be more like a snowball fighter’s reading club.
oooof
Good to be back home. I don’t have any good rumors or anything.
It was weird to read the San Francisco Chronicle and read that the Giants may be pursuing a trade for Randy Winn (and that they’d been interested in him for over a year, which… what?). As much as I mock the Times, it was weird to read a paper where there were agenda pieces on the front page (like “the city may be backing off this bad idea, which is for the best anyway because we like this other idea…”) and containing a sports column of the “notes and stream-of-consciousness” written by someone who had lost their notes and was working against a severe upstream current.
Downtown Wi-Fi and Food
I’m in need of a suggestion. I’m going to need a couple of places downtown to spend Thursday and Friday working via VPN using my wireless laptop. I’ve checked out Wi-Fi Freespot and WifiMug, but it’s hard to tell how comfortable these places are or how well they’d put up with me hanging out there for 6-8 hours.
So, if you’ve got some recommendations for somewhere downtown with free wireless access, decent food in close proximity (if it’s a coffee shop, a solid not-too-expensive eatery nearby), preferably with an outlet available to the public, I’d love to know about it. I’m going to the Sonics game Friday night, so perhaps one in the general area of Key Arena for that day might work out best. Oh, and parking would be a bonus, but I’m probably pushing my luck there.
And, since I’m asking, anyone know if they allow backpacks in the Key, or am I going to have to find somewhere to stick it during the game?
My head hurts
The winter meetings are over, but the last half hour is threatening to make me turn my phone off. Pedro Martinez is supposedly going to the Mets, which is reportedly setting off a monstrous chain reaction that could lead to everything we’ve discussed the past 24 hours getting blown apart. Sexson’s agent is saying the deal is still not done (which is true, as nothing has been signed, but a tentative agreement has been reached) while the Dodgers have supposedly called a press conference to either announce that they’ve re-signed Adrian Beltre, they’re dropping out of the Adrian Beltre sweepstakes, or that they’re moving the franchise to Lake Titicaca, depending on who you talk to.
It’s insane, honestly. I don’t know that anyone has a good idea what’s really going on right now. And this was supposed to be the boring day.
Update: It appears that the talk of a Dodgers press conference was either incorrect or it was delayed/canceled. Who knows. I’m just ready for all this to end.
Koskie to Jays
Well, he won’t be a Mariner. Three years, $17m pending the physical, ESPN and others report.
I don’t understand this, either — the Jays are a reasonably smart team, but I agree with Dave’s write-up on Koskie. On a shorter deal, I still think he’d be okay as a fill-in if he came cheap, but this is a long commitment for a lot of money, and it’s unlikely he’s going to be worth what he signed for.
Rule 5
The Mariners passed in today’s major league portion of the rule 5 draft, as expected, thanks to their full allotment of the 40 man roster.
Minnesota selected lefty Ryan Rowland-Smith, who was #26 on the Future Forty. I’d say its a longshot they’ll keep him the whole season.
Sexson
Ken Rosenthal reports that the M’s are closing in on a deal for Richie Sexson.
Considering the offers he’s gotten to date and walked away from, here’s to hoping this one doesn’t materialize.
Update: Yep, this one looks to be true. As long as the physical pans out, we could see a press conference tonight. If the numbers being tossed around are true, too much money for too many years. I’m actively rooting for Sexson to fail the physical.
Updates
There’s a lot of untruths floating around out there surrounding the Beltre situation. Without getting into too much detail, the M’s have the best offer on the table, and if nothing changes, he’s probably going to be a Mariner next spring. Obviously, things change on an hourly basis, though, so that doesn’t mean much. Remember that patience we asked you to exercise? Just a few more days, folks.
In a related note, a lot of people believe that Tim Hudson is going to be a Dodger by night’s end. The A’s would reportedly get Edwin Jackson and Antonio Perez. DePodesta wouldn’t include Jackson in the Randy Johnson deal last summer, so I’m surprised to see him willing to move Jackson just a few months later. If the Dodgers acquire Tim Hudson and extend his contract, they will be very hard pressed to meet the asking price for Beltre.
This should be an active afternoon for other clubs, though I don’t expect the M’s to finalize anything today. There should be several deals going through that put the wheels in motion for the big dominos to start falling, however. Interestingly enough, it appears that Edgar Renteria may be the lynchpin in this whole thing. Should be another fun day.
And remember folks; patience.