Santana gets his extension
Reportedly a seven-year, $150m deal. Nice work if you can get it.
Bam! Santana trade!
From ESPN, the Mets got him. Deal’s held up as they see how many dump trucks of money they’ll need to drive up to Santana’s house. The cost:
If New York can work out a contract agreement with Minnesota, the Mets will send outfielder Carlos Gomez and pitchers Phil Humber, Deolis Guerra and Kevin Mulvey to the Twins.
Presumably, they mean “with Santana” there.
Wow. I didn’t see that coming. What’s that mean to the Bedard market?
Dave adds: This package of talent isn’t even close to what the M’s are giving up for Bedard. Gomez is a nice prospect, but he’s nothing close to Adam Jones. He projects as a solid CF down the line, but he’s not an elite young player. Guerra is the Mets version of Chris Tillman – good arm, not close to the majors, work to do. Humber and Mulvey are both moderate upside guys who might make decent back-end starters someday.
The M’s equivalent of this deal would be something like Jeff Clement, Chris Tillman, Wladimir Balentien, and Matt Tuiasasopo (they don’t have pitchers that are good comps for Humber/Mulvey, as they go for more high upside/risk arms).
The Yankees and Red Sox didn’t budge on their stance to not include their studly young major league players. The Mets didn’t even give up their best prospect! Next time someone tells you the M’s are paying market price for Bedard, you can send a swam of bees after them.
Photo from .A.A.’s photo stream at Flickr, used under the Creative Commons license
Selig to remain commish through 2012
News only if you believed him when he said he’d retire after 2009.
Whee.
A’s sign Emil Brown and a related long player development rant
May be an indication they’ve all but dealt Kotsay to the Braves (update: yup, Kotsay’s gone). I’m going to burn a lot of words on this.
My favorite quote from the MLB.com story:
Hitting with runners in scoring position has been a problem for the A’s in recent years, and Brown could help in that area, as well. He batted .316 (37-for-117) in such situations in 2007.”That’s obviously a plus,” Forst said, “but I wouldn’t say that was a factor in our decision to sign him.”
Hee hee hee! Oh, the A’s. You guys are so awesome.
Emil Brown’s an interesting player from a team-building and a development view. He’s a decent player, but moreover, he’s a great example of the kind of guy you can get for free if you’re paying attention. Brown started in the A’s minor league organization, then the Pirates took him in the Rule 5 draft. He kicked around the Pirates system for a while, not getting much playing time, then was traded to San Diego in 2001. In 2005, at 30, he signed a minor-league deal with the Royals and in that thin system got a full-time job and hit .286/.349/.455. And the next year he hit .287/.358/.457 — and this is a player the Royals got for free. Read more
Silva’s contract, free agency, my general economic pessimism
The Silva contract has brought up again the question of whether any free agent signing is a bargain in a world where free agent contracts are ever-increasing. I’ll call this the Washburn Effect: today’s overpayment is tomorrow’s good deal. One of the arguments I’ve had here with Tom Tango is that his valuation of a contract’s worth is based on a formula that, to vastly oversimplify, goes
year N expected contribution * value of that contribution in the year N market
for each year of the deal. It assumes that salaries will continue to inflate as we’ve seen the last couple of years over the value of every deal, and so it hinges on whether you think that MLB revenues can continue to grow at 10% year over year for the foreseeable future. Many people believe they can, and I disagree with the certainty of those assumptions entirely and to a lesser extent, about what we should expect of the next few years.
I see two things I see stopping that escalation.
First, as we’ve argued many times here with different players, there’s often a similar skillset available for very little money. A team can sign Silva to a massive deal or find a reasonable facsimile on the minor league free agent market for $1m or so. That price isn’t increasing with the price of free agents. At the same time, we’re slowly seeing a replacement of more traditional major league front offices with smarter personnel who understand replacement value. They’re going to take the cheap option. If nothing else, that’s going to reduce the number of bidders for guys like Silva. Certainly, it doesn’t take many to keep the prices high, but even in the next few years we should start seeing the effects — and even ownership groups who don’t get it will start asking difficult questions about why they’re paying so much for so little. Just moving Texas from dumb to smart takes a huge spender on bad FAs (Chan Ho Park!) out of the market.
That may not have a huge effect, though. The larger is economic. Major league sports are entertainment, and while they have a loyal audience, in a larger sense they compete for dollars with movies, concerts, bowling alleys, nights on the town, and so on. And their sales of super-high-revenue luxury suites depends on the local corporate economy.
You can take your economic indicator of choice against MLB payroll or revenue in the post-collusion era and you’ll see they’re pretty tightly bound (I ran payroll against the price of the S&P 500 since 1989 and it came out at .86, which is amazing considering there are labor issues included). The error I see everyone making is that they’re looking at the last couple of years and seeing MLB developing new sources of revenue, especially in the web subscription money, and drawing a straight line out forever.
And that’s where I part ways. We can’t assume the economy’s going to go up, up, up. If it doesn’t, revenues don’t go up and payrolls don’t go up, and the whole model falls apart. I can’t think of any mature entertainment business – really, any major discretionary spending category – that can sustain 10% year over year growth through an economic downturn.
To our current situation specifically — we’re seeing the real estate market decline, severely so in many parts of the country. The immediate fall out’s been in the mortgage markets, affecting liquidity, credit, taking down hedge funds, and a huge increase in the number of foreclosures. Now, whether you think it’s all going to bottom out later this year and be hunky-dory from there out (it won’t) or what, you can already see some effects. People who feel less wealthy cut back on spending, and you can watch Applebee’s and Chili’s and Whateveree’s revenues taking the hit already.
I’m no economist, but if national real estate values are headed back to 2000 levels, however slowly, it’s going to be painful and tough, and between people spending less and the banking industry trying to ride the whole thing out, baseball’s revenues won’t be going up 10% year over year the whole time.
And if that doesn’t happen, today’s overpriced contract becomes tomorrow’s overpriced contract.
I don’t think the economy’s going to do well over the next couple of years. Now, you’re free to disagree, but none of us can know for certain the direction it’ll take. Maybe we’ll all be happily serving new robot overlords in a money-free economy by the time Silva’s contract expires. If it does, and salaries stagnate, today’s free agent mistakes are still going to look bad. If the free agent market gets more rational, they look even worse.
Arguing that Silva’s deal is okay because the market’s going to continue to go up forever is at least making a set of assumptions that aren’t tenable, and certainly aren’t knowable with that degree of confidence. Washburn’s contract may look decent now, in the same way getting into a house in a booming market in 2004 might have. That doesn’t mean that deal didn’t involve risk — or that you’d be right to not take that risk again in 2007.
And the teardown continues
If you, like me, wondered if Beane was going to have the energy to tear down the A’s and rebuild this off-season, well… this just goes to show us, O we of little faith.
Gio Gonzalez is a top-tier pitching prospect, and they also got RHP Fautino De Los Santos and OF-L Ryan Sweeney.
They may move into the new park is ready to reel off another series of pennant runs.
Stone on Jim Rice’s Hall of Fame candidacy
You know here at USSM we’re fans of Larry Stone (“Official Seattle Sports Writer of USS Mariner”) so I want to point you to his piece with Phil Rogers on ESPN about Rice.
A’s trade Haren to Diamondbacks
The A’s have been in a weird situation: unable to keep reeling off division titles for $1/year, they were looking at having to rebuild. The squad this year was almost certainly not going to reach the playoffs, especially with the Angels looking so strong again. It may take over 90 wins to finish the season in the wild card race, and they’re just not 90-win good. But they don’t have a lot to rebuild on, either, and any effort should be targeted at putting the best team possible on the field when they open in their new stadium.
So they dealt Haren to the Astros, and got back… let’s see here
Oakland gives up
RHP Dan Haren
RHP Connor Robertson
and gets back
OF Carlos Gonzalez (#1)
LHP Brett Anderson (#3)
OF Aaron Cunningham (#7)
1B Chris Carter (#8)
LHP Dana Eveland
LHP Greg Smith
That number’s the Baseball America prospect rating.
I’m not the minor league talent evaluator Dave is, but it certainly looks way, way sweeter than the Tejeda deal, say, but not as good as what the Twins were rumored to be getting for Santana.
Mitchell Report
Soon the results of baseball’s oft-halting, sometimes stymied, pearls-clutching investigation into how in the world those steroids got into the game will be announced. It supposedly includes some eighty names, and will probably include past Mariners. Possibly present Mariners, who knows. If advance leaks are to be believed, it credits MLB with trying to impose testing without noting how baseball squandered previous opportunities to implement a program with receptive players, or the circumstances that led to the union being so adversarial.
After which, Selig has his own conference, in which he’ll say “we appreciate these findings and all the hard work, so on and so forth, and we’ll do what we can.”
Most of the advance recommendations of the report I’ve seen are quite good, and baseball would be well-served to implement them — though I’ll wait on talking about the pros and cons at length until we see them. And, despite my reservations about the whole exercise, I’m pleased that those recommendations are reasonable, and don’t involve, say, torturing randomly-selected players until they finger others before banning them for life.
Inevitably, though, the story today’s going to be names, which is unfortunate. Still, I hope after the initial hysteria, there’s progress made.
And Tejada moves
The Orioles get five players for the declining, expensive, and increasingly immobile shortstop. Wow.
Dave adds: The five players aren’t very good. A couple of back-end starters without much upside, a run of the mill corner OF, and a pair of fringe prospects. Of course, I don’t think much of Tejada either. Both teams still stink, but the Orioles save some money and don’t get demonstrably worse, so I guess they win the trade.
Also, Jeff Kent’s agent on Kent’s return:
“He is actively pursuing his customary and rigorous offseason conditioning and weightlifting program, and is very focused on helping his team win the World Series this year,” Klein wrote. “He asked me to wish all of you and your families a happy holiday season.”
Doing a lot of truck washing, then?