Organizational Rankings
As we talked about in the Seeds of Success post the other day, there are a lot of organizations that are moving forward with efficient, highly successful philosophies and are putting their teams in a great position to win a lot of the games in the future. Which teams are doing this better than others?
Here is my take. This is based on management personnel and organizational cohesion, not on field talent or recent success. Essentially, this is my opinion of which organizations have laid the strongest foundation between their ownership, baseball operations department, and coaching staffs to insert a winning DNA into their baseball teams. I included a grade with the numerical ranking because, in a lot of cases, there’s no real difference between a few spots on the list.
Rank Organization Grade 1 Cleveland A+ 2 Boston A 3 Tampa Bay A 4 Milwaukee B+ 5 Oakland B+ 6 NY Yankees B 7 Detroit B 8 San Diego B 9 Arizona B- 10 Atlanta B- 11 NY Mets B- 12 Anaheim C+ 13 Colorado C+ 14 Minnesota C+ 15 Florida C 16 Chi. Sox C 17 Washington C 18 Toronto C- 19 Chi. Cubs C- 20 Los Angeles C- 21 Texas C- 22 Pittsburgh D 23 Seattle D 24 Philadelphia D 25 Kansas City D 26 St. Louis D 27 San Francisco F 28 Cincinnati F 29 Houston F 30 Baltimore F
No surprise here – I’ve been calling the Indians the best run organization in baseball for about four years, and that hasn’t changed. Boston is perfecting the big market, high salaried bully approach in contrast to Tampa’s load-up-on-cheap-talent philosophy, but both are the correct direction for their organizations to go in, considering their relative financial positions. The Brewers are quietly putting the pieces together to dominate the NL Central for the next decade, Billy Beane keeps doing his thing in Oakland while waiting for a new stadium, and the Yankees have transformed themselves into an organization with foresight, planning, and rationalization to go with their $200 million payroll. Scary.
On the other side of the coin, there’s a couple organizations that are going head first off the cliff at full speed. The Baltimore Orioles have a meddlesome owner, a front office that lacks necessary power, outdated analytical techniques, and, oh yea, they play in the A.L. East. Barring a one season fluke where everything just breaks right, I’m not sure Baltimore makes the playoffs in the next 10-15 years. If you’re raising a child near the nation’s capital, make them a Nationals fan.
Houston’s not a whole lot better, honestly. Meddlesome owner? Check. Retread failure of a GM? Check. Completely ignoring the farm system? Double Check. The Astros spent a mind-boggling $600,000 in signing bonuses in the first 11 rounds of this summer’s draft – combined. Houston spent about as much on the draft as the Mariners did on Matt Mangini. With some aging, overrated players tied up to long term contracts and no help on the way from the farm system, Houston’s poised to be terrible for a long, long time.
The Mariners come in 23rd, buoyed by their strength in amateur scouting and ownership’s commitment to giving the front office a payroll advantage over most of baseball. The front office? Well, we’ve covered their flaws in detail. Under Bill Bavasi, the Mariners have done a good job of resurrecting what was a horrible farm system, but their major league transactions have been brutal, and there isn’t a winning organizational philosophy in place.
So, if you’re a fan of the Indians, Devil Rays, Red Sox, or Brewers, you should be pretty happy with your club. If you’re allegiances lie with Baltimore, Houston, San Francisco, or Cincinnati, well, you might want to find something else to do with your summers for the next ten years or so.
Schuerholz stepping down in Atlanta
(links everywhere)
He’s going to become team president (which here, is Chuck Armstrong). While the Braves don’t have a huge number of World Series rings, I wanted to take a second to talk about the scope of his achievement.
I too often gloss over how amazingly hard it is to be a GM. Everyone in every front office works crazy hours for pretty bad pay considering what they do. Being competitive requires many factors out of a GM’s control to come together, and as much as I rag on teams for not exploiting every advantage, there aren’t enough hours to do it, and not enough people to help.
It doesn’t matter if you’re one of the smartest baseball minds in the world, you’ve got to better than the other 29 guys, trade after trade, season after season, even if you’ve got money to work with. Getting to .500 consistently is hard, and that gets lost in transaction analysis of why they picked up one guy on the waivers instead of my favorite guy, or they didn’t ask after someone who later got traded. If .500 was easy, the incompetent clubs would do better and we’d see team records much closer together. Teams like the Royals haven’t struggled for so long because they’re not working at it, or even because they don’t have talented people working for them. We look at teams who experience success with an eye towards whether they’re peaking, and search for signs that they’ll soon be brought to earth, and with good reason: fielding a competitive team, especially one that can get into the playoffs, can cost so much in building it that it can’t be kept up for long.
With that in mind, I look at the long record of success in Atlanta with all kinds of teams, rebuilding constantly, overcoming injuries and issues, always making progress, and I’m a little awed. Few baseball people have been had such success for so long. I don’t know who the Braves might replace him with, but really, there’s no replacing him. Even from the other league, I’m sorry to hear that the game’s going to be a little less competitive
Best American Sports Writing 2007 out
Featuring the Bugs Bunny piece (which runs second!) and a nice plug for USSM in the editor’s intro.
The Seeds of Success
The four teams in the League Championship Series have been set – Cleveland vs Boston, Arizona vs Colorado. If every postseason tells a story, then so far, the story of 2007 is the dominance of the new school of baseball executives.
Theo Epstein is 33 years old. Josh Byrnes is 37 years old. Mark Shapiro is 39 years old. Dan O’Dowd is the old man in the room, coming in at 47 years old. All of them are running the team that gave them their first chance to be a general manager. None of them played an inning of major league baseball. And they all came from the same tree.
In 1998, John Hart was the General Manager of the Cleveland Indians, who were winning another division title in the middle of a mini-dynasty. His Assistant General Manger was a man named Dan O’Dowd, who had worked his way up through the ranks beginning in 1988. The Assistant Director of Scouting was Josh Byrnes. And the current Cleveland GM, Mark Shapiro, was the Director of Minor League Operations that year.
John Hart had three of the four GMs in the 2007 LCS working for him in the same front office that year. It gets better. When Dan O’Dowd was hired by the Colorado Rockies in 2000 to be their GM, he took Josh Byrnes with him, giving him an Assistant General Manager role. Byrnes stayed in that job for three years before taking an Asst. GM job with the Boston Red Sox, working for Theo Epstein – the GM of the other team alive in the 2007 LCS. After several years in Boston, the Arizona Diamondbacks handed him the reins of their organization.
Byrnes worked with Shapiro and O’Dowd, then for O’Dowd, and then for Epstein. These four organizations are all intertwined by the people who they have put in charge in the last decade. And they all have one singular goal in common – to gather as much information as possible and put it to use in the best possible ways in order to win baseball games. Cleveland, Arizona, Colorado, and Boston aren’t true “Moneyball” organizations – they’re Moneyball 2.0 clubs, the ones who have successfully integrated both scouting and statistical analysis into a cohesive organization and are leveraging every good piece of information they can find into a competitive advantage.
These are the organizations who won’t settle for time honored traditions. They won’t settle for doing things the way they’ve always been done. They question conventional wisdom and they look for empirical answers. They hire the smartest people they can find and let experience take a back seat to talent.
And they win baseball games.
This isn’t stats vs scouts – this is stats and scouts working together, building an organization that blends the best of both worlds. This is the blueprint for how a baseball organization should be run. And, whether the baseball men of the 20th century like it or not, this is where baseball is going. The John Hart family tree has branched out even beyond the Billy Beane family tree – the Pirates just hired Neil Huntington from the Indians, and Shapiro’s right hand man, Chris Antonetti, can essentially pick whatever job he wants whenever he decides to run a franchise. With Andrew Friedman as something of a second cousin down in Tampa along with Kevin Towers and Doug Melvin as the crazy uncles over in San Diego and Milwaukee, this is no longer a cute theory about how the Oakland A’s are winning with a small payroll. This is the 21st century of baseball management.
If you’re rooting for an organization that isn’t adapting to the changing face of how baseball teams are run (and if you’re reading this blog, you probably are), expect 2007 to be the norm. The good organizations are going to win a lot of baseball games, and the people who rely on analysis that was handed down to them from 1970s will sit at home in October, wondering which free agent pitcher they can overpay to try to save their jobs.
We will not do a Cleveland-style rebuilding
…or whatever Lincoln said. Seems appropriate right now.
Starting with their last competitive seasons as year one:
Whether the M’s got lucky this year or when which team outperformed, they both came back to putting up wins at a competitive level at about the same time.
Dave and I (mostly Dave) argued all through these years that the M’s didn’t need to undergo a slash-and-burn rebuilding: their crazy revenue streams meant that they could afford to bring in quality stop-gap veterans, develop players, and sign young guys like Beltre to long-term contracts if the opportunity came up. They ended up spending a ton more money than the slash-and-burn Indians without any return on that investment.
Here’s the big one, though:
Maybe Howard Lincoln and all his people are far more savvy than we give them credit. Sure, we (and USSM readers) mocked their payroll figures, rolled our eyes at claims that the teams would be competitive, but the fans kept coming out. Maybe it’s the park, or something else at work, but they managed to keep the turnstiles spinning while putting up horrible records and some almost unwatchable teams.
Or maybe Cleveland’s just a lot smaller market with a park that doesn’t seem new and exciting anymore, so they don’t have a lot of room for error when the populace isn’t excited.
Anyway, it’s interesting to compare the Indians of 2005 with the Mariners of 2007 (hey, Broussard’s on both teams!) and think about how the Mariners match up as a franchise looking to compete.
Defining the offseason challenges
So let’s talk off-season, and what the M’s are going to face.
The big issue is that the M’s have a long ways to go if they’re going to compete against the Angels next year, and not a lot of places they can do it.
Position players
C: Johjima, Burke will likely return.
1B: Sexson’s under contract, and they’d probably like to dump him
2B: Lopez is under contract, but they’re really not happy with him and will certainly consider upgrades.
SS: Betancourt
3B: Beltre
LF: Ibanez, but even the M’s must recognize his range is destroyed and he’s killing the defense.
CF: Ichiro
RF: ?
DH: Vidro’s under contract and may be too brittle to play the field everyday. Spot 1B starts, sure, but his lateral range is too horrible for 2B. Whether they’re considering playing him at second over Lopez would depend on their opinion of whether he could handle the wear, as well, and I don’t know what their thinking is on that.
Stashed:
C: Clement’s glove isn’t ready by all reports, and his bat’s probably not ready either. No worries if he goes to Tacoma again.
1B: Broussard’s a question mark – there’s really no place for him next year either
OF: Jones has gotta, gotta start. Balentein might be able to play a decent corner, but the team’s said pretty strongly they want to avoid having two rookies in the outfield. That’s a whole other discussion, though.
And Bloomquist for the bench. Whee!
What’s up?
If they pass on Guillen, it works out pretty well. Ichiro might want to move back to right, but you can play Ichiro in CF, Jones in RF no problem — Jones has range and a great arm.
If they re-sign Guillen or they sign a different OFer, then you need to push Ibanez out of the outfield in favor of Jones.
Pushing Ibanez requires you move him to DH or 1B, which requires you to move Sexson or Vidro, with Sexson the more likely of the two.
What’s going to happen:
A 2B upgrade may not be their highest priority (we’ll get to that) but they’ll be listening. I’ll be stunned if they don’t find some veteran infielder to come in and challenge for the job. Take your pick of whoever they might be able to sign to a minor league contract or even bring in for a couple million, depending on how soured they really are.
If Guillen or an OF signs, still think Sexson gets dumped somewhere and Ibanez will move to first.
If they don’t, they’ll leave Ibanez out there to stink up the place defensively.
Starting pitching:
SP Hernandez
SP Washburn
SP Batista
SP ?
SP ?
They’ve got some candidates to start, guys like Baek, and the plan to get Morrow into the rotation may… well, it’s a possibility. They may see if HoRam can turn it around in spring training. But they’ll be looking to bring in a starter. If you don’t think they want to see two kids in the outfield, what do you think the chances are they’ll go into next year taking two gambles in the rotation?
The pressure to sign someone or trade for a name – Barry Zito! – is going to be high, and they may be willing to part with some top prospects for a Horacio Ramirez-level acquisition. Not funny? Too soon?
Bullpen:
Not a big issue. You’ve got Putz and a ton of guys like Green that can pitch on the cheap. We’ll probably see them try and pickup a veteran or two for “stability” or whatever, but that’s easy enough.
In terms of priority/what we’d be trying to fix
I know everyone’s screaming that we need starting pitching, but the best thing the team could do is to turn the defense around. It’s an easy way to make the team better and you get Jones’ bat into the lineup. That, in turn, makes it a lot easier on the pitchers, who can go deeper into games, saves the bullpen, it’s a whole cycle of awesomeness. Which means I’m arguing you try and get Jones in and upgrade again after that — so you have to move Sexson.
Or, to put this another way, moving Sexson gives the team many more ways out this offseason and more money to do it with, and they shouldn’t stop trying to make it happen, ever. They should be calling other GMs at Christmas hoping they’re loopy on eggnog. The sooner you can do it, the sooner you can tell Raul to start working out there and hope he’s passable by Opening Day.
Signing starting pitching from the free agent market’s a fool’s errand. Dave’s written about this, but your chances of getting anything approaching value form a free agent pitcher are really low, to the point it’s not worth it. Don’t do it! Go for the scrap heap! Trade for some of Tampa’s excess! Don’t lock us up to a huge, horrible deal because it’s a bad year for pitching talent! Please?
I’d be a lot more willing to take a one-year flyer on Mike Mussina, even with that dying strikeout rate (this is even more attractive if you improve the defense). But I’ll freely admit I’m a raving Mussina fan and have been for years. I may not be entirely rational – I mean, as I write this, I’m watching the Indians beat him up and I’m still thinking “pick up that 2008 year on his deal? Better than taking on Zito’s contract…”
But there’s the challenges at a high level:
– defense sucks
– starting pitching sucks
– Jones needs a spot cleared
– Sexson sucks, Ibanez sucks defensively
Be assured we’ll be getting into a lot more detail about pitching candidates and so on soon enough.
Ibanez may fill Tigers’ needs
Muwahahahaha. From the Detroit Free Press and Jon Paul Morosi:
Could there be a better solution to the Tigers’ leftfield needs than Raul Ibanez?
Detroit president/general manager Dave Dombrowski acknowledged last week that he will look for a left-handed hitter this winter. Ibanez was among the top outfield run producers in baseball this year — and he’s left-handed.
Ibanez, 35, had 105 RBIs for the Seattle Mariners this season. That’s one less than Adam Dunn, with 68 fewer strikeouts.
It’s cool, Tigers. You can have him. We don’t even need a starter in return.
Warning: The above link contains a weird, artsty sort of black-and-white picture of Ibanez, which you can re-size and move around your browser. I don’t get it.
M’s purge coaching staff
The M’s overhauled their coaching staff today, relieving everyone except for hitting coach Jeff Pentland of their duties. Gone are pitching coach Rafael Chaves, third base coach Carlos Garcia, bench coach Mike Goff, and bullpen coach Jim Slaton. First base coach Gary Thurman has been reassigned back to the minor leagues, where he’s spent most of his time with the Mariner organization before this year.
This is basically all about letting John McLaren choose his own staff. None of these guys were his hires, and it’s standard practice in baseball to let a manager surround himself with coaches of his own choosing. Some advice to the people McLaren chooses, however – rent, don’t buy, because your future is tied to that of your manager, and you better win a lot next year or this will be a twelve month gig.
Random Playoff Thoughts
Some disjointed musings from the first couple of days of playoff baseball.
1. The starting pitchers of games 1 and 2 so far: Josh Beckett, John Lackey, Jeff Francis, Cole Hamels, Carlos Zambrano, Brandon Webb, Franklin Morales, Kyle Kendrick, C.C. Sabathia, Chien-Ming Wang, Doug Davis, Ted Lilly.
Davis and Lilly are both 31 years old. Everyone else is under 30, and a third of the group are under 25.
When push comes to shove, the MLB managers who found themselves in the playoffs will take talent over experience every single time. Let’s hope John McLaren’s taking notes.
2. I’m rooting for the Indians to win it all, and I’m rooting for Asdrubal Cabrera to have a good long career, but still, every time he does something like hit a fastball 400 feet in the playoffs, there’s a part of me that wants to throw something. Thanks Bill.
3. How can anyone watch last night’s game and still think Derek Jeter isn’t the worst defensive shortstop in the American League? There were a couple of balls that are routine plays for most shortstops that he didn’t come within three feet of. That Chien-Ming Wang has been able to achieve any real success with Jeter behind him is remarkable.
4. Chip Caray showed off some righteous indignation last night when Derek Jeter didn’t lay a bunt down with runners at 1st and 2nd and nobody out trailing by two, calling this “an automatic bunt situation” in the National League. He completely failed to grasp the fact that Derek Jeter isn’t Mark Lemke, and bunting with a hitter of his caliber is rarely a good idea. Bobby Abreu followed Jeter’s non bunt with an RBI double, further showing how bad an idea bunting would have been in that situation, especially for the Yankees.
Then, a few innings later, when Chien-Ming Wang is getting rocked by the Indians as they turn the game into a blowout, Carey actually outright states that the momentum of the game turned when Jeter decided not to bunt, and that perhaps if he had laid one down, the Yankees would still be winning.
They gave up 12 runs, including four homers, and Chip Carey wants fans to believe that the Yankees lost because Derek Jeter didn’t bunt right before Bobby Abreu doubled down the left field line, rendering any theoretical bunt pointless. There’s nothing like ignoring reality to try to drive home an agenda, eh Chip? Maybe learn something about baseball strategy before you try to lecture fans who know more about the game than you do.
5. Has anyone ever stopped to think that if Ryan Howard is really as good as the media told us he was last year, and Jimmy Rollins is really as good as the media is telling us this year, why is Chase Utley still obviously the best player on that Phillies team?
These playoffs suck
This is the worst playoff schedule ever, another great example of how MLB is willing to sacrifice fairness and the long-term interests of the game in order to make a quick buck and satisfy their broadcast partners.
Simply, the more crazy rest days there are in and between series, the more thin teams, particularly thin teams with one or two ace pitchers, are rewarded, and the more they make the playoffs into a different competition than the regular season.
For example: if you can put together a team with a good bunch of starting position players (however you want: offense, defense, it doesn’t matter here) but hampered by a horrible bench, where the starting rotation goes great-great-suck-suck-suck and the bullpen has one or two lights-out pitchers, you might struggle to win 90 games in a season. A better-balanced team — a better team — with deeper pitching and quality reserves — might win far more games than you over a season.
In this playoff format, though, it doesn’t matter: they can ride those two starters, those two relievers all series long, because with all the rest days they don’t need a deep staff. Reserves aren’t as important in a playoff series anyway, but with that many rest days they’re almost entirely irrelevant. The roster construction that made for a consistent, successful team are in some ways opposed to those that make a team that can thrive in this crazy scheduling.
Baseball, boredom, baseball, a rhythm that forms a paradise for the 1997 Marlins — this isn’t what I want out of the playoffs.