Was a trade any good, and how it relates to evaluating Bavasi
The Foppert release provides a good opportunity to talk about something that frequently comes up in discussions here as an object of contention. When evaluating a trade, there are, to horribly oversimplify, two schools of thought.
1) Each trade should be evaluated on what’s known at the time. If a trade turns out much better than expected, or much worse, that shouldn’t affect our opinion of the trade.
2) Each trade should be evaluated on the results of the trade. If a trade looks like it’s an amazing rip-off, even if at the time everyone acknowledges it as such, but the victim turns out the winner due to unforseen circumstances, the victim’s still the victor.
Obviously, in practice it doesn’t work out that way. Members of the first camp are willing to concede that results are why you make trades, and members of the second camp might well admit that you make the best deal you can and then it’s a bit of a crapshoot.
Generally speaking, I’m almost always in the “time of trade” camp. The example I always cite is “if I walk into the Bellagio, find a roulette table and bet everything I own on number 23 and win, was that a good move?”
People who say yes because it turned out regardless of the odds I received are crazy.
People who say that there are situations where it makes sense – I need to raise money in five minutes to pay for a million-dollar medical procedure, for instance – make sense.
If the Mariners traded Ichiro tomorrow for a can of Sprite, and next week Ichiro tore his hamstring while the can of Sprite turned out to be delicious, that wouldn’t make that trade any better.
There’s a whole other dimension to this, though. The way we evaluate “how a trade looked at the time” means that we’re making a best guess based on all kinds of factors we know, without having knowledge of other factors the teams involved do know, and situations out of the GM’s hands. As Bavasi put it when talking about having to move Guillen and others for nothing when he took the job, “There were a lot of people who were just tired of these guys.” It’s the same as when a GM is well-aware that when they’re ordered to sign a particularly popular player to a new deal that it’s too much money for too long. They’re dinged for the signing, in the same way they’re dinged for releasing a player for off-field reasons.
Evaluating based on what we knew at the time fails in another important way. Teams like the A’s believe that by being smarter in their player evaluation than other teams, they can win what appears to be an even swap. So they want to make many even swaps. If that was true, the “at the time” evaluation would fail: we’d say “Wow, looks like Beane’s making a ton of trades that are okay… and they sure do end up good down the road. I guess he’s an okay trader, based on what we know at the time.”
And the same thing if the reverse was true, and he was being fleeced every time. “Sure looks like he’s making a ton of decent trades… even if they all fall apart a year later.”
“At the time” evaluation’s clearly a lot more reasonable, but it’s also obvious that the results-based can show us something much more valuable, if we’re smart about it.
Take the Braves. For a long time, the Braves ran up an almost unblemished record of giving up pitching prospects in trades that turned into dogs. Every trade, it would look like they might even have given up too much, and those guys would turn to dust. It starts to look suspect: that they knew so much that they gave up pitchers where they knew the perceived value far exceeded the actual value.
And this is where I think the people grinding an axe about the M’s trades in the last… uh, forever… have a good point. As much as we can say that the Garcia-for-Reed trade looked great at the time (and we did, you can look it up), or they got good value dumping guys off left and right during the last three seasons, the total of everything they’ve received in trade is Mike Morse, Jeremy Reed, and Jon Huber. As a group of trades, you’ve got to look at that and wince.
I still think that given the circumstances he was working under, Bavasi got great value for Garcia. And I don’t think there was a lot of value to be milked out of the other guys he shipped off, and he did a fine job there, too.
And I’m going to pretend that this off-season didn’t happen, because I’ll just start yelling and that’ll stop reasonable argument.
There’s no evidence that we should be hopeful that they’ve got a particularly fine eye for spotting hidden talent in other organizations, that they’re picking the “live arm” to get back that has an above-average chance to turn into something interesting, or insisting on getting the unremarkable prospect the owning team secretly covets.
As the team must, even without talking about it even among themselves, be tossing over scenarios where Ichiro’s traded, there’s reason to hope, because they’ve seemed to do well when pressed into these situations, and to worry, as the record of results has not been impressive.
Afternoon awkwardness, Foppert farewell
M’s pitchers will hit in their game against Milwaukee at or about 1:05. If you can tear yourself away from the NCAA tournament. Maybe put the radio on while you watch?
The team released Jesse Foppert. John Hickey at the PI summed it up:
“The Mariners now official have notthing to show for the mid-2005 trade of Randy Winn to the San Francisco Giants”[sic x2]
Foppert looked for a while like he might be returning to form, and then… didn’t happen.
Weirdness about today’s supposed lineup:
Reed in right
Ordonez at short
Bloomquist at third
Guillen misses another game, Vidro sits without the DH.
Cult of Doyle update
Snelling hit *two* home runs today off Chan Ho Park and a double off Jorge Sosa to go 3-5 with 3 runs scored and four RBI.
Snelling’s spring training line is now 8-26, 2 doubles, 3 HR, 10 RBI, 19 total bases, 3 walks, 6 K.
.307/.379/.731
Spring training stats don’t mean much, of course.
M’s with more than 20 ABs in spring training and higher rate stats:
AVG: Bloomquist (.500!), LaHair, Vidro, Ibanez, Ichiro!
OBP: Bloomquist, Ibanez, LaHair, Vidro
SLG: —
If Snelling were still in Seattle and had an open shot at the job, well… he’s not.
Go get ’em, Chris.
Putz status uncertain, Vidro will bat third
ObBookPlug: Amazon’s got the introduction to Cheater’s Guide to Baseball on the book page. Check out the excerpt here
Baker in a pretty amazingly information-packed blog entry:
Seems that manager Mike Hargrove was a tad premature in declaring an “all clear” scenario for pitcher J.J. Putz. That’s because the team’s medical director, Dr. Edward Khalfayan, hadn’t even seen Putz’s MRI results when Hargrove spoke to us just before 9 a.m.
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. As long as we’re talking about Hargrove statements that don’t turn out so well… Baker quotes Hargrove as saying “There’s a pretty good bet he’ll hit third”.
The team’s batting him #3 for his high average (.350+) and high OBP (.400+), which normally, if you thought he was going to hit that well all season, you’d put him even higher, except that Ichiro’s the leadoff hitter and Beltre, for whatever reason, does seem to hit better pushed up into the order, and they’re not going to mess with that.
So Vidro as #3.
AL #3 hitters last year hit .281/.356/.467
If the team gets 2004 Vidro, and he hits .294/.367/.454, he’ll be fine. Yeaaaaaaaaaah.
If they get the projected Vidro, will, they’re conceding some on-base and a ton of power.
Now, I don’t think lineups matter all that much, though that’s a whole other super-long post. But it seems strange, given that the team’s got a set of hitters who are consistent, good, and not injured, that you’d totally gamble like this by putting a potential out machine in the middle of the lineup. If he does an Everett, well, we know what that looks like, but if he’s awesome and you started him out at #6 or 7, then he’d still be hitting with men on base and contributing.
I don’t get it.
Notes from Peoria, Day Two
Man, am I glad I spent a few hours over at the minor league fields this morning, because today’s game was lackluster to say the least, minus one very odd experience which I’ll get to in a little bit. On to today’s notes.
1. The team will address the Putz situation in the next 24 hours, most likely, but rumblings around camp aren’t good. It’s hold your breath time. Update: Hickey and Baker both say the preliminary diagnosis is good news – woo!
2. I got to see 17-year-old Carlos Triunfel take some hacks in the cage this morning and was extremely impressed. You can only tell so much from a guy taking swings in batting practice, but when a kid has a major league swing, it tends to jump out at you. This kid just has a different swing than the guys in his group (which included solid prospect Alex Liddi, by the way) and the ball absolutely leaps off his bat. Very effortless swing – little excess body motion and power coming from his batspeed and hips. He’s thicker in the lower half than most kids his age, so I expect we’ll hear a lot of suggestions that he won’t stick at shortstop simply because of his frame. I didn’t see him take the field, so I don’t have anything to say about his defense, but he’s obviously someone to keep an eye on. Sounds like he’s going to break spring training with Wisconsin, and if he’s as good as he looked in the cage today, he’ll be fine there.
3. Speaking of Alex Liddi, he was interesting to watch – he has a totally different swing than most of the M’s, as he drops his hands, dips his shoulder, and has a pretty noticable uppercut as he attemps to drive every pitch he swings at. It works, too, as he generated significant power and hit a lot of rockets to the deepest parts of the outfield. The swing was somewhat reminiscent of guys like Ryan Klesko. If he makes the majors, you’ll hear a lot of comments about how he doesn’t get cheated at the plate. I’d like to see him against real pitching and see if he makes adjustments to handle the low-and-in pitch.
4. The Royals sent their F team to Peoria for todays games. Ross Gload hit third. At least I got to see Billy Butler swing the bat, but man, that was a bad squad they put on the field. The game itself was pretty unventful, at least until the 5th inning. I was watching the game with a friend from Seattle who I get to see about every other year or so, and we were catching up on things – how’s his family doing, stuff with his job, normal friendly conversation. There was no drinking going on, nothing that could even potentially be construed as offensive conversation, and yet, the lady in front of us turns around and says (paraphrasing): “I’m sorry, but you guys have been talking the entire game. We’re trying to enjoy the game, and we can hear everything you say, and its pretty irritating. There’s some great seats in other sections – why don’t you guys go sit over there.”
I was so stunned, I didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t complaining that we were being loud or vulger or drunk – she just was annoyed by the fact that we were talking to each other. My friend offered up an apology for distrubing her, and rather than cause a scene, we moved to another location. We didn’t say anything rude as we left, and yet, as we walked down the stairs, she applauded us leaving in the same manner you see people applaud when someone is arrested and taken from the stadium. This is the first time in my life I’ve ever had any kind of negative encounter with the fans sitting around me, and to have someone get so annoyed because I was conversing with a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of years is still just stunning to me.
5. Overheard in our new seats a few innings later after Willie singles to give him yet another spring training base hit.
“Man, Willie runs hard. I don’t think I could do it if I was him – be that dedicated to the game, be such a good player, a good person, and never get a chance. He always hustles, always does his best. You can just tell he’s special, but they always find someone to play ahead of him. He’s just like Ibanez, where we used him as a utility guy and never gave him a job, and then he went elsewhere and became a star. But he just works so hard. Buhner was like that too. I’d love to have a team full of guys like Buhner and Bloomquist.”
We joke around here about comments like this to the point that you almost forget that most of the Mariner fans out there actually think this way. We’re in the vast minority when it comes to Willie – people really think he’s a terrific player who has just never been given a fair shake. I don’t even know what to say anymore. We’re never going to convince people that Willie’s not a major league starter. The things that they love about players aren’t things that make players good, and for the casual fan, that’s never going to change. As long as Willie keeps running hard, he’s always going to be held up as a great player in Seattle. It’s a fight we just can’t win.
Red-hot evening update!
Putz underwent his MRI, results will/should/might come out tomorrow.
USSM is the 2007 Seattle Blog of the Year in the Metroblogging poll, narrowly beating out Lookout Landing 56-44%. I’d like to point out, though, that Lookout Landing would have utterly dominated the competition on its own… their losing vote count in the final was nearly 10x the winner’s tally in the poll for 3rd place.
The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball didn’t place first in Entertainment Weekly’s review of new baseball books
THE CHEATER’S GUIDE TO BASEBALL
Derek Zumsteg
The Pitch
An irreverent history of (and instructional guide to) spitballing, bat corking,
sign stealing, and other practices that “made baseball into what it is today.â€Curveball
Using performance-enhancing drugs “is not nearly as wrong as game fixing,â€
insists Zumsteg. “Someone using steroids is trying to play better, not tamper
with the essential nature of the contest.†Somewhere, Barry Bonds is smiling.Final Score
A stand-up double. B
So so far it’s “a sure hit” and “a stand-up double” in print reviews. I’m betting the hit metaphor continues.
Part of why spring training’s great: I met Ryan’s parents at the M’s-Padres game in Surprise. He runs Sportables, which has an M’s preview up.
Putz peril, Morrow earns notice, White wishful
Putz’s elbow “tightened” up after his bullpen session yesterday. Yeagh. Times.
Echoing Dave’s notes yesterday, Brandon Morrow’s performance is praised by Johjima in the PI, and others carried the tune.
Also in the PI, Sean White wants to make the team.
In what is likely really good news for the M’s, the Rangers put Sosa on their 40m, and seem likely to go into the season relying on him for offense. Woooo! Chances of that panning out… 10%? 12?
Mark Shapiro agreed to a 5-year extension in Cleveland. Not that I wish them ill, but I’m hoping they don’t go through the rest of the front office and make those guys offers they can’t refuse.
Update! Cuts! Looks like C Rob Johnson’s headed to minor league camp, which at this point pretty much means you’re assured Rivera’s the backup catcher this year. I don’t think Burke or Johnson are going to be given a realistic chance.
Also tossed off the team: IF-R Garciaparra, IF-R LaHair, IF-R Navarro, OF-B Wilson, OF-R Balentien
Notes From Mesa and Peoria
I didn’t sleep much last night and its 1 am my time, even if I’m temporarily back on the west coast, so no fluffy intro – let’s get right into the interesting things I saw and heard today, in no particular order.
1. Brandon Morrow looked tremendous in Mesa against the Cubs. Perhaps some of it was coming in to relieve Cha Baek, who looked as bad as I expected, but he showed the power arsenal that got him selected #5 overall last summer. In his first inning of work, against the bottom of the line-up, the breaking ball was pretty slurvy and didn’t have much bite, but his fastball was overpowering. He pitched almost exclusively on the outside corner to both sides, Tom Glavine style, but it worked to perfection because the bottom of the Cubs order sucks.
During his second inning, against the meat of the Cubs line-up, he showed a real understanding of setting up hitters. He suckered Soriano with a fastball out of the zone early, then just busted off breaking balls out of the zone to induce a weak chopper. He then continued throwing harder, biting breaking balls to Jacque Jones, Derek Lee, and Aramis Ramirez. The slurviness of the last inning was gone, and his second inning breaking ball (honestly, I don’t know if it was a curve or a slider) was very tight and dove hard, making it a great out pitch to go with his mid-90s fastball.
This is the kind of outing that gets guys noticed in spring training. I had a brief conversation with a scout afterwards and asked him what he thought of Morrow’s appearance, and his answer was essentially “why are you guys sending him to Double-A again?” He could use the work, but I guarantee you he opened some eyes today, and with the M’s bullpen suddenly a huge question mark, Morrow has to be considered a legitimate option to join the pen at some point later this year.
2. Bryan LaHair’s home run binge last year was either the greatest fluke of all time or he just has several different swings and approaches at the plate. The swing he had today couldn’t hit a home run off a tee – his entire focus was making contact and hitting a flare over the outfielder. I’m still a skeptic that he’s ever going to be more than the new Randall Simon.
3. Adam Jones took several good routes going back on the ball. He’s a lot better now than he was a year ago with the glove.
4. If there’s not a job opening for PA announcer at the Peoria Sports Complex, there really should be – the current guy, yea, he isn’t good. He had no idea how to pronounce basic names like Beltre (he says Bell-tree) or Feliz (Fee-lez), screwed up ad announcements, said “uh” about 30 times, and when announcing NCAA tournament scores decided that Weber State knocked off UCLA, generating a huge “ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh” from the crowd before correcting himself. He needs to be reassigned to minor league camp.
5. If you drew up a list of Mariner pitchers I wasn’t interested in seeing, it would probably go something like this: Aaron Small, Jake Woods, Cha Baek, Jarrod Washburn, Jeff Weaver. I got four of the five today. Thanks guys! At least they threw me a bone with Morrow.
6. Betancourt’s bomb got out in a hurry. His home runs last year were all cheapos, sneaking over the wall by a foot or two – not this one. He crushed it.
7. The Cubs got 12,700 fans at HoHoKam park on a Thursday afternoon when the opponent sent one regular – the Mariners couldn’t pull 10,000 for a night game when essentially the regular team was taking the field and playing most of the game. The difference in atmosphere between the two parks was striking.
Back to Peoria tomorrow afternoon, and I’m hoping to spend several hours at the minor league fields, so look for another post like this tomorrow night.
First televised game of 2007 thread of awesomeness
Wooooo! M’s on television! Yayyy! I’m so excited I’m posting hours early!
Rumored M’s lineup, from the Times blog:
CF-L Ichiro
3B-R Adrian Beltre
DH-B Jose Vidro
LF-L Raul Ibanez
1B-R Richie Sexson
RF-R Mike Morse
C-R Jeff Clement
2B-R Jose Lopez
SS-R Yuniesky Betancourt
For the Giants: some guys. Who cares.
Edit: Also, Dave’s at the game, so if you see someone throwing rocks at Jose Vidro in the background, that’s probably me. Will have notes up late tonight. Brandon Morrow looked awesome in Mesa today, by the way.
From the Times blog:
Good thing the Cubs can fold their laundry and have a packed stadium come to watch, otherwise, the M’s would have some explaining to do
Hee hee hee.
USSM job-hunting
The last time I made a post like this, it was almost three years ago and it worked out really well, so I’m returning to the well — I quit my full-time Program Manager job to write my book in July. I finished writing the book and also cranked out 306 USSM posts (which works out to ~1.5 posts/day ). And I sold some fiction. Anyway – if you’re in IT or work someplace cool that’s hiring, read on. I’ll spare everyone else the rest of the post appearing on the front page.
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