Richie Sexson: Albatross
I’ve talked about this in other posts the last few months, but never laid out a complete case for it to the point where I feel people actually understand where I’m coming from. Talking with other Mariner fans, I certainly don’t get the sense that very many people agree with me on this issue, so, let me lay it out as plainly as I can and see how many of you I can convert:
Richie Sexson isn’t worth anything close to the $28 million he’s owed the next two years. His contract is an anchor that the Mariners should be actively trying to unload on someone else, and the sooner he’s removed from the roster, the better this team will be. Trading Richie Sexson for a bag of baseballs would be addition by subtraction. If you can con someone into giving you something of value for him, all the better, but just removing his contract from the roster should be a priority.
Let’s take a look at his production and what we should expect the next two years. We’ll begin with the sole strength of his game; hitting.
Sexson’s last three healthy seasons, he’s posted EqA’s of .308, .307, and .280. He turns 32 next month, so he’s likely at the end of his prime and entering the decline phase of his career. That said, his raw power is still among the best in the game, even if its only 90% of what it used to be, so we shouldn’t expect Sexson’s value to collapse over night. A reasonable projection for the next two seasons would be a .295 EqA, or something in that range. He should be better than he was in 2006, but a little worse than he was in 2005.
That kind of offensive performance is worth about 90 to 100 runs, depending on what kind of run conversion formula you want to use. We’ll go with 100 because it makes the math easier, and I always like giving the benefit of the doubt to the side I’m not on. Replacement level for a first baseman is the highest of any position in baseball, and you should be able to find a player who can create about 70 runs with his bat without too much of a problem. That makes Sexson worth something like 30 runs offensively each of the next two years. As we talked about yesterday with Beltre and Ramirez, 30 runs is a pretty valuable player.
But we’re not done with Sexson just yet. He’s about +30 offensively, but he also takes the field and runs the bases. And he does both very poorly. His UZR for 2006 was -7, and most other systems have him in the -5 to -10 range. He’s among the worst defensive first baseman in the game. And he’s also a lousy baserunner. Mitchel Lichtman’s calculations had him as costing a team two runs over the course of a season running the bases, so his defense/baserunning are probably in the -10 range, give or take a couple of runs.
That makes the total package worth about 20 runs. For the next two seasons, the Mariners are going to pay Richie Sexson something like $7 million per win. $7 million per win! That’s one of the worst values in baseball. Based on his actual run production, Sexson should be making something like $6 or $7 million next year. His salary is double what it should be.
One of the common responses to this is “who cares what he’s paid – he produces, and it’s not my money” or something to that effect. But, of course, this argument is foolish, because the Mariners operate on a budget, and every decision comes with an opportunity cost. The $14 million that Richie Sexson will earn next year is about 15% of the entire team’s payroll, and his occupation of first base fills a position where it is easy to find major league quality hitters. The opportunity cost of having Richie Sexson far outweighs his actual onfield value. It’s not even close.
The Mariners need to capitalize on this market and trade Richie Sexson. A first baseman who is worth 20 runs over the course of a season isn’t worth anything close to $14 million, and that money could be easily allocated to any number of other, better players. Take whatever you can get for him. Just trade Richie Sexson.
Free Agent Review: Aramis Ramirez
If you haven’t heard by now, the first free agent signing of the winter was actually a re-signing. Aramis Ramirez stayed with the Chicago Cubs, collecting a cool $73 million over the next 5 years, or about $14.5 million per season.
So why am I posting this on the blog, since it doesn’t have much to do with the Mariners?
Because Aramis Ramirez is not even a better player than Adrian Beltre, and the reactions to this signing are going to point out how even the statistical analysts of the day incorrectly evaluate players. And they make the same mistake nearly every time. Ignoring – or undervaluing, really – defense.
Now I know some of you are rolling your eyes as you read this, thinking I’m an idiot for believing that the guy who posted a .291/.352/.561 line last season and has hit 105 home runs the last three seasons could actually be a worse player than Beltre, whose offensive production hasn’t been anything close to that since the 2004 season ended. So, let me do the math for you guys, just so you know I’m not completely crazy.
Aramis Ramirez, the last three years, has posted EqA’s of .306, .301, and .293. It’s fair to say that a .300 EqA level is his established record of performance, and that’s what he’s being paid for. He’s entering his age 29 season, so the decline in offensive production shouldn’t be severe for a few years, at least. What’s a .300 EqA worth over a full season? About 100 runs, give or take a few. That’s about 40 runs more than a replacement level third baseman would contribute offensively.
However, Aramis Ramirez is a butcher with the glove. He’s a bad defensive player. By bad, I mean terrible. Every defensive metric we can find agrees with this. UZR, the best of the defensive metrics, has had him at -15 runs per 150 games played in the past. It’s unlikely that he’s consistently that bad, but if you average together the consensus of all the metrics, the scouting reports, and what Cubs fans believe about his work with the leather, marking Ramirez down as about 10 runs below average is pretty fair.
So, offense and defense, Aramis Ramirez is worth something like 30 runs a season over a replacement level player. That’s a good player, certainly, and one contributing to a team.
But let’s look at the oft-maligned Beltre, shall we?
He posted a .268/.328/.465 line this season, giving up 130 points of OPS to Ramirez. But he did it in Safeco Field in the American League (even though the difference is overstated, the AL was clearly more talented than the NL this year), so after making context adjustments, Beltre’s offensive performance was worth something like 80 runs over a full season. That’s 20 runs less than Ramirez, but 20 runs more than replacement.
Defensively, Adrian Beltre’s one of the best third baseman in the game. He’s not the best – that’s probably Brandon Inge right now, or maybe a healthy Scott Rolen – but he’s in the discussion of guys in that next tier. Scouts love his defense, fans love his defense, and the stats love his defense. He’s basically the anti-Ramirez with the leather, and his defensive value is something about 10 runs above average over the course of a full season.
Guess what? 40-10 and 20+10 are equal. They were both something like +30 runs for 2006.
However, you’ll never see anyone write that Adrian Beltre and Aramis Ramirez just had similarly valuable seasons, and if Beltre was the one with an opt-out clause, there’s no way people would be talking about him as a premier talent lining up for a monster deal.
For whatever reason, mainstream analysts simply fail to grasp the importance of defense, especially at the extremes. Beltre’s one of the best gloveman at third base around and Ramirez is probably the worst. That fact wipes away the whole of the difference between their 2006 offensive performances.
When you factor in that Adrian Beltre is a year younger, has a pristine health record compared to Ramirez, and that it’s not at all clear that a .267 EqA isn’t a low-end projection for Beltre’s offensive performance the next few years, and you have the reasons that I believe Adrian Beltre is a slightly better bet for the next few years than Aramis Ramirez.
Even if you hate Beltre and love Ramirez, the best you can do is call it a pick-em. It’s close enough that trying to decipher the margins here is basically a waste of time. The question of which one is better isn’t important – the key is that they’re basically equal.
And you’ll never, ever see a mainstream sports writer come to that conclusion. Instead, the Beltre contract will continue to be lampooned, while Ramirez is talked about as an all-star who the Cubs can build around.
Free agent review: Gil Meche
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
I hope the sucker that decides to give Meche a huge long-term free agent deal because they think they can fix him is in our division, because I would love to watch him get regularly shelled by the team for the next 3-5 years.
Unless they do fix him. That would suck.
Here’s your Daisuke post
since every thread’s been the subject of hijacking attempts all day.
Buster “Productive Out” Olney has reported the Red Sox won the posting with a $45m bid. Other sources are reporting the Rangers bid something between $20 and $30m. Other random rumors are a-floating.
I didn’t write this up because it’s all rumor and random stupidity, and there’s really not a lot of productive discussion to be had or analysis to be done until we know anything for sure.
Igawa posts
From the Yomiuri Shimbum, lefty pitcher Kei Igawa is going to be posted.
Igawa’s not going to attract nearly the crazed interest of Daisuke, on account of he’s not nearly as good. Still, in this pitching-starved market, someone’s going to toss some cash at him.
Igawa allowed two runs (and walked six) pitching against the traveling MLB team on Tuesday.
Sheffield to the Tigers
The Yankees get three (3!) pitchers: uber-prospect Humberto Sanchez, then two 22-yr old righties in Kevin Whelan and Anthony Claggett.
This is a shocking haul for a year of Sheffield’s petulant services. If they were willing to trade Ibanez, what would the M’s get, a whole farm system?
J.D. Drew opts out of his contract
J.D. Drew walked away from the Dodgers today, opting out of the remaining 3 years and $33 million he had left on his contract. He’s bound to get more money in the craziest free agent market since Denny Neagle and Mike Hampton cleaned house, but he also was unhappy in Los Angeles and wants to relocate.
So, the question for Mariner fans is should we be interested?
My answer is a conditional yes. If the Mariners are willing to think outside the box, there’s an easy way to make this work.
Trade Richie Sexson for whatever you can get. Give him away if you have to. He’s clearly inferior to Drew and a worse fit for this team, yet the team still owes him $14 million each of the next two seasons. Find a team (like San Francisco) who like Sexson and take whatever they’ll give you for him.
J.D. Drew steps in as the new left fielder (or right fielder, whichever he prefers) and Raul Ibanez moves to DH. Voila. Team better with no extra cash output.
Trade Richie Sexson for J.D. Drew – sort of.
Budgeting Wins
I was reading an article by Nate Silver a few weeks ago when I ran across a paragraph that articulated many of the thoughts I’ve been having on how teams should approach their offseason plan. Essentially, Nate put my thoughts into words, and then expressed them in a way that made sense of the jumble I had going on upstairs. Here’s what he wrote under the context of suggesting moves for Walt Jocketty in keeping the Cardinals as contenders in 2007:
Set a wins budget, not a payroll budget. It’s my belief that most major league baseball teams go about their budgeting the wrong way. Sometimes it’s worth spending more than you might have been planning on if you can acquire a player who will get you over the hump and into the playoffs, since the financial rewards for making the postseason are substantial. Other times, your team is so far from making the playoffs-–or such a cinch to make them-–that paying market price for free agent talent just doesn’t make sense.
Put differently, rather than figuring how much money they want to spend, baseball teams should determine roughly how many wins they’ll need to make the playoffs, and spend on payroll until that they have the talent on hand to realistically reach that goal. For the Cardinals, the magic number is probably 90 wins; it would be higher if they played in a tougher division.
This is a wildly different concept than most teams operate under. Because almost every major league team is run as a corporate operation, the baseball operations department is given a budget for player payroll that fits into a fiscal year line-item for the corporation as a whole. Essentially, the accountants tell the front office how much money they can spend and tell them to do as well with that as they can.
While acknowledging that there are some issues with what I’m suggesting, I believe this design for setting payroll is inefficient and could be vastly improved. Instead of trying to cram as many wins as possible into a preset number of dollars spent, teams should figure out how many dollars they need to spend to reach their preset number of wins targeted.
Basically, Nate and I (independently, as we haven’t talked about this) support a 180-degree change in the way the baseball operations departments interact with the organization’s accountants. Rather than handing the baseball ops people a similarly sized check every year, baseball teams would be better off going to requisition-style budgeting concept.
How would this work?
We’ve talked a lot about marginal win values on the blog. Essentially, the concept of marginal wins is that a team of league minimum players would win 50 games or so, and every dollar spent over the league minimum is being used in hopes of gaining wins 51 and up. These wins are the marginal wins, and the excess payroll is the marginal dollars spent. This kind of analysis allows us to look at the league as a hole and say that a marginal win is worth about $2 million in salary.
However, league wide averages of marginal win values start to lose some of their importance when applied specifically to one team. Every team has a different roster of committed salaries and budgets for the following season, and so each team will have a different marginal dollar amount to spend on building their roster. The Yankees can blow the $2 million per win number out of the water and not blink an eye, while if the Marlins tried to spend $2 million per win, the ownership would flip out and demand a firesale.
In a win-budget concept, a team would do a rational, honest evaluation of how many games the current roster could be expected to win if each additional hole was filled with a replacement level player, and then request a player payroll budget based on the amount of marginal wins they’re going to attempt to add that offseason. For a team that believes it has a 60 win team in the organization, spending $30 million to buy another 5-10 wins is pretty foolish. However, if a team has 90 wins sitting around, spending $30 million to make yourself a 95-100 win team is well worth justifying. A team operating on a win budget system would spend significantly more when their team is contending and significantly less when their team is rebuilding.
A move away from a fiscal year budgeting system would give the baseball operations department much more flexibility in their long term planning and allow organizations to allocate resources much more efficiently. Let’s use the Mariners as an example of what I’m talking about.
For 2005 through 2007, the Mariners are going to end up having spent around $270 million on their player salaries. They essentially spent it in equal chunks, with about $85 million going out in 2005, $88 million in 2006, and a projected $95 million or so in 2006.
If they had shifted to a win budget system after the debacle of 2004 and correctly analyzed the talent they had on hand, they could have fielded a 65-70 win team in 2005 for about $70 million. Last offseason, the goal was to get to 80-85 wins, which could have been accomplished on a payroll of about $80 million.
That would leave them with $120 million dollars, not including the accrued interest gained from the money not spent in prior years, to spend on the 2006 Mariners, the year that they’ve been mandated to win or lose their jobs. Would you like the M’s to have $120 million payroll next year? Yea, me too.
A win budget system systematically shifts payroll dollars away from years where the team is rebuilding and into years where the team is challenging for the World Series. It maximizes the impact of the wins the teams are paying for, and acknowledges that a 95th win in one season is worth more than the 72nd win in another season.
Someday, someone in a front office is going to convince their owners to shift to a win budget system. And their economic advantage is going to be staggering.
A’s moving to Fremont, California
Two papers, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, reported yesterday (while I was at the polls) that the A’s will be moving to Fremont, California into a new 36,000-seat stadium they’ll build with private money for about $300m.
This gets them out of the Al Davis Reconfigurable Hole, for one thing, and it’s also a fairly amusing way to move without going to San Jose, which the Giants claim as their territory, which
a) is a dumb claim in the first place and
b) is an excellent example of how stupid and counter-productive MLB’s territorial rights system is
Fremont, if you don’t have a map handy, is southeast of Oakland, a little more than half way between Oakland and San Jose. It’s across from Redwood City/Palo Alto. ESPN’s article includes a comparison table between Oakland and Fremont that includes a racial breakdown (no, really)
What’s this mean for the Mariners?
It’s bad. This is, in the long term, possibly the worst news of the off-season. Now, Billy Beane’s record with straight free agent signings is kind of ugly. Okay, it is ugly. And there’s an argument to be made that part of the A’s success has come from the restraints on their budget (which is like the Robert Frost argument that you had to write poetry using meter).
The people in charge of the A’s are smart. They’re not moving to Fremont unless they think it’ll substantially improve their financial situation from small, profitable operation into large, more profitable operation. Some of that money is going to go to the baseball side. And the team that beats the M’s like a drum over and over is going to be far better financed.
I’ve tried to think about what the A’s would do if they didn’t have to make signability picks. Would they look at the draft and still see players of essentially the same value, and pour money into international signings? Would they drop the pretense that drafting cheap guys in the first round is a good idea and go nuts, armed with more money and better slotting? Spend even more money dumpster-diving every year?
None of these possibilities are good news.
And at the major league level, are they going to open their pocketbooks to try and field a more-expensive team as they move in? Would the A’s even spend on free agents unless the market cools a little, or are they going to sign their guys to long-term deals to buy out free agent years?
The Mariners would be playing in a division without a poor kid, where every competitor they face in unbalanced play is well-funded. Things are going to get tougher. Hopefully the M’s will get smarter and be able to compete.
Go vote
Hey, I’m going to be out today volunteering at the polls, so here’s my non-partisan plea: if you haven’t mailed a ballot in, find the time to go vote today. If you’re in the metro area, especially if you’re on the eastside, there’s a good chance you’re in the 8th, which looks like it’s going to have one of closest elections in recent history, and if you’re in eastern Washington, the 5th (map of Washington’s districts). And really, no matter where you are, the difference in who represents you comes down to whether you drag yourself to the polls.
I’m not going to ask you to vote for Darcy Burner, or lobby for support for some proposition. Just vote. If your vote is the opposite of mine, I’ll be happy you went out. If you’re a reader, I’m relatively assured you’re a reasonable, smart person, and I trust your judgment.
And maybe I’ll see you out there.