Year, Name (Rank)
1991: Rich DeLucia (5)
1992: Dave Fleming (3)
1993: Rich Amaral (5)
1994: Bill Risley (T4)
1995: no one
1996: no one
1997: no one
1998: no one
1999: Freddy Garcia (2)
2000: Kazu Sasaki (1)
2001: Ichiro (1)
2002: no one
2003: no one
2004: no one
2005: no one

Considering Sasaki and Ichiro aren’t really rookies in the player-development sense, and Freddy Garcia didn’t come through the M’s system, they’re really going on a 12-year stretch of jack squat coming up through the minor leagues.

And it should be “they’re” instead of “their” in the last sentence.

I’ll gladly click on a “buy the site a comment editor” button.

From 2000 to 2006, the M’s had 26 “starters” (as defined by Baseball-Reference) among position players. (these are the guys Baseball-Reference lists as “SS” or “C” etc for the year. Not perfect, but I was just looking to get a good sample, so I think it still works). Of those 26 players, 10 are now retired (Dan Wilson, John Olerud, Mark McLemore, David Bell, Rickey Henderson, Jay Buhner, Edgar Martinez, Brett Boone, Al Martin, Carl Everett – note, I’m not entirely sure of David Bell’s status, but he hasn’t played a game in 2007, so I’m counting him as retired).

I then looked at B-R’s HOF Monitor number for the 10 retirees. Anything > 100 is a HOF caliber player. Of the ten, two (Rickey Henderson and Edgar Martinez) are HOF caliber. Two more (Olerud and Boom) are >50, which I semi-arbitrarily declare “star caliber”. Three more (Wilson, Buhner and Everett) are >20, which I’ll (again semi-arbitrarily) declare “regular caliber” (regular in the sense Dave uses it in the Future Forty).

So, in a span of seven years, seven “regular starter or better” players retired from the M’s. That’s one per year. Every other year a “Star” caliber player retires. Every three or four years, a HOF caliber player retires.

What’s all this have to do with the post? Well, when guys retire, they have to be replaced. An individual team can replace them via trade or FA, but the league as a whole is a closed system and needs to replace them by promoting “unproven rookies.” As Derek points out, teams like the Braves figure out how to do that. Signing FAs (top quality ones anyway) means you give up draft picks, so you’re essentially just outsourcing the “find a rookie” job to the teams you’re signing the FAs from, and getting charged a premium.

If this holds for other team (and I suspect it does, at least within spitting distance), that means on average, a team needs to convert one “unproven rookie” into a “regular starter” per year, and every other year into a star caliber player. Every few years, a rookie needs to turn into a new HOFer. That’s just among the position players. Pitchers are another data set.

And the thing is, that happens. All the time. Every year. Every HOF player was a rookie once. Every All Star was a rookie. Every “proven veteran” McClaren and Bavasi dote over (use whichever definition you prefer) was an unproven kid with no track record of Major League success once.

I think the “oursourcing” analogy is the right one. They don’t know how to evaluate talent, so they outsource the job to others. Problem is, their outsourcing their talent evaluation to their competition.

For whatever reason, some franchises (e.g. Cubs, Orioles, and Mariners) seem perpetually to struggle with the concept. Edgar Martinez had been labeled a “can’t miss prospect” by Baseball America three years before the M’s actually gave him a chance.

Sigh. . . .

They rocked Kelly Johnson this year instead of paying Marcus Giles the 4 million or so that he would have earned. Johnson was quite servicable.

Having Smoltz, Glavine and some dude named Maddux holding down most of the rotation sure helped.
But it rings true: you can easily slide talented kids into various extensive roles, and they can help your team not just stay competitive, but contend.

Having the former allows you to do the latter.

And doing the latter helps you create the former.

Repeat. Lather. Rinse. Ring up those playoff games….

(Hm. You’d think that more than a few baseball teams would figure that out. ).

Maddux, awesomely, is a fine example of both: the Braves picked him up for 1993 during that long run, and at 27 Maddux replaced Charlie Leibrandt, who was 35 in 1993 and had a fine enough year.

But it rings true: you can easily slide talented kids into various extensive roles, and they can help your team not just stay competitive, but contend. Some of the biggest stars in the NL East alone, Utley, Miggy Cabrera, David Wright… were once kids whose teams went ahead and gave their talented selves a chance to contribute. Who is to say the Mariners don’t have an impact talent like that on their 40 man right now? We’ll never know if they insist on playing Ibañez in LF everyday and only using the kids in blowouts.

And the 1991 Braves ROY vote reminds me… did Dave ever get an answer on why Brian Hunter never tried to steal 1st base?