No Antonetti?
So here’s the first word, from the blog of an Indians MLB.com writer:
“I hope I’ve been very clear how happy I am in Cleveland,” Antonetti said. “I’m looking forward to continuing to build a winning team here. Hopefully I’ve been clear with that. That’s not with respect to Seattle. That’s my situation here. I’m very happy.”
In the blog entry, it’s sold as him not being interested, but that quote isn’t quite that strong. Of course, I might just be reading it that way because I want there to be room there.
But the Anthony’s written probably 90% of the articles up on the Indians MLB site right now, so I’m inclined to trust his judgement in interpreting what Antonetti was trying to say. Unless heeeee’s biased because he doesn’t want Antonetti to leave… yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.
Resume: Chris Antonetti
For those of you tuning in, wondering who that button over there is for and why you should care, I was going to write a long post laying out the resume of Chris Antonetti for the Mariners GM job. Then, I looked over the post I wrote a year and a half ago and realized that it’s all still true, so I’m copying and pasting, with minor edits and additions. If you missed it the first time around, here you go.
You may have noticed over on the left sidebar that there’s an image that looks an awful lot like a political button. In a sense, it is a political button, though for an election that isn’t run by democracy. Due to the way the offseason is unfolding, it is becoming apparent to us that, barring an unforseen miracle, the Mariners
aren’t going to beweren’t contenders in 2007. Even in a best case scenario, where the young core takes a step forward and the aging veterans stave off decline, this is still an inferior team to that of the Angels, Rangers, and Athletics.Given a public ultimatum to win or lose their jobs, the Mariners current baseball operations department will begin the year as underdogs, and it’s a distinction they’ve earned with moves like the Horacio Ramirez acquisition. Simpy put, this regime couldn’t afford to have a bad offseason following the Jarrod Washburn and Carl Everett debacles of last year, and while we have yet to see a disaster along the lines of those two signings, it’s fairly evident that the Mariners are not going to be able to sufficiently upgrade the team this winter in order to expect to challenge for the division crown next year.
So, we believe that a change in management is inevitable. While we will be the first to say that Bill Bavasi is a good person, and he’s been kind enough to spend time talking with us the past couple of years, we’re endorsing Chris Antonetti as his replacement. Like any good grass roots campaign, you can never start too soon, and this is a cause worthy of your support.
So, without further ado, an introduction to the man we hope is the next General Manager of the Seattle Mariners.
Who is Chris Antonetti?
He is currently the Vice President of Baseball Operations for the Cleveland Indians and the annointed successor to Mark Shapiro as the next Cleveland GM. He was Shapiro’s go to guy on contract negotiations and evaluative analysis before being promoted and given a large raise (now, he’s just Shapiro’s go to guy for everything), as well as spear-heading most of the initiatives to create new programs that give the Indians a competitive edge on their opponents. The Indians have been the leader in using technology to their advantage for years, and they’ve leveraged their intellectual knowledge of systems into a sustained advantage on the field. Antonetti has been the man responsible for overseeing these areas and pushing for their use throughout the organization. A lot of the things that make the Cleveland Indians the best run organization in baseball are in place due to the work of Chris Antonetti.
Why is he qualified to be a major league GM?
Antonetti is going to be labeled as a “Moneyball” executive by the media, as he did not play professional baseball and has advanced degrees from elite universities. He got a bachelors in business administration from Georgetown and a masters in sports management from Massachusets, learning the academic side of how to be a successful manager. From there, he took a low level job with the Montreal Expos in their minor league operations department before joining the Indians organization in 1999 as, essentially, an intern. From 1999 until now, he has worked his way from the title of Assistant, Baseball Operations to Assistant GM (a position he earned in 2002) to his current VP of Baseball Ops and has held numerous roles during that time. The Indians have had him work in both administrative and player development positions, and he’s spent thousands of hours working with both scouts and statistical analysts.
No one understands how to use both subjective scouting information and quantifiable statistical data together as well as the Indians (Okay, maybe the Rays have caught up), and Antonetti has been successful in both sides of the baseball operations department. Under the leadership of John Hart and now Mark Shapiro, the Indians have become baseball’s most well-oiled machine. Antonetti has been a vital cog in that machine for the past nine years.
What are his unique strengths?
Antonetti has many things going for him, but a few notable traits set him apart. He’s brilliant, without a doubt, but there a lot of people in baseball who are extremely smart, and most of them would make terrible general managers. The most important responsibility a General Manager holds is to gain the respect of those who work for him and motivate them to do good work. In this respect, Antonetti is set apart from other executives with an academic background. He commands the respect of his employees, but also exudes humility with his soft-spoken manner. While he has his own set of convictions about truths as they apply to baseball, he seeks input from a variety of sources and seeks to find knowledge wherever it may lie, whether with new statistical research or old scouting truisms.
Antonetti isn’t the most outgoing person on earth, and he’s not the charasmatic figure that Billy Beane or even Bill Bavasi is, but he combines respect, humility, and intelligence in a package that makes him one of the best leaders of people in baseball.
Why do you want him to be the next GM of the Mariners?
The Mariners are an organization in transition and are looking for an identity. During the Pat Gillick era, the team focused heavily on the present success of the major league club at the expense of the farm system, and while they experienced short term gains on the field, the price was paid during the Bill Bavasi era, where the major league club was sacrficed in an effort to replenish the organization with young talent, both through trades and amateur acquisitions, and then built up again in a terrible manner that resulted in disaster.
Chris Antonetti understands player valuation at the major league level extremely well, and has had a hand in many of the Indians numerous good acquisitions over the years. While the Indians have shared the Mariners strong desire to build through the farm system, they’ve also been able to acquire quality players in trades and on the free agent market to put around their home grown talent, allowing them to contend in a competitive division despite restraints on their payroll.
The Mariners need a better philosophy of major leauge player acquisition. They need to do a better job of selecting pitchers, getting away from ideas of value based on not-useful statistics such as W-L record and ERA and moving towards a more realistic understanding of how to project pitching ability. They need to stop collecting athletes with impressive skills and start collecting ballplayers who contribute runs on the field.
Most importantly, however, they need a philosophy that permeates the organization, from the parent club through the minor leagues. They need cohesiveness in what is being taught to their players as well as what is valued in terms of abilities. They need to establish a foundation to work from and a strong identity in what being a Seattle Mariner is all about.
The Indians have refined organizational cohesiveness, and while no one is perfect, they do it better than anyone.
Well, if he’s so great, then why does he need a grassroots campaign to get the job?
Chris Antonetti is 33-years-old, is unheard of by almost everyone who doesn’t cover baseball for a living, and has no experience as a professional ballplayer. In the eyes of most of the media, this will make him just another laptop-toting seamhead who focuses on what their computer tells them and has no respect for the establishment. For every Theo Epstein, who gained a modicum of respect after building a World Series champion, we see scathing rebukes written by local scribes when teams have hired guys with similar backgrounds, such as Paul DePodesta, Josh Byrnes, Jon Daniels, Andrew Friedman, or J.P. Ricciardi. In a city where Pat Gillick and his traditional ways are honored with the highest esteem, it’s going to be a very tough sell to get the Mariners to change directions and hire someone too young to be elected president.
He’s also strongly committed to the Indians organization. In the past several years, he has turned down the chance to run the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates, as well as declining to be interviewed for numerous other GM positions because of his satisfaction with his role in Cleveland. In order to keep him away from St. Louis, the Indians gave him a defined role of succession where he was essentially guaranteed the role of GM of the Indians when Mark Shapiro steps down. However, that timetable is still up in the air, and it is possible that if presented with an offer that is simply too good to walk away from, Antonetti would relinquish his role as GM-In-Waiting for a chance to run his own club. It is, at the minimum, worth having that conversation.
In a division where Arte Moreno is willing to spend lavish amounts of money to leverage the Los Angeles market, Oakland is taking their highly efficient development strategy to a new ballpark, and Tom Hicks’ huge dollars in Texas are now being managed by a team of executives led by Jon Daniels, the Mariners cannot afford to be behind the eight ball in terms of player evaluation.
The Mariners have the revenue streams and talent in place to build a contending baseball club. Chris Antonetti has the skills it takes to transform this club from a rebuilding process into perennial contender.
Antonetti in ’09. Spread the word.
Our pitch to Antonetti
I’d like to encourage you to interview for the Mariner job, if you’re contacted. It’s a great gig, one of the best in baseball, and here’s why.
First, Seattle. It’s a great place to live. And unlike, say, New York, no one is going to throw rotten vegetables at you if they see you on the street after the team’s lost three in a row. No one even carries rotten vegetables around, that’s how nice people are. You can pick your neighborhood — and we’ll be happy to help you out with that — and you’ll be in walking distance of everything you might want. Our restaurants can go up against any other city in the country’s for quality, and the beer selection — if you haven’t been here, you’ll be shocked. We picket restaurants that don’t have at least two really good beers on tap.
I’ll let you in on a secret: the whole rain thing is something we spread to try and keep people from moving here. It’s a big conspiracy. The winters aren’t good, I’m not going to lie, but the summers are amazingly nice. Right now the sun is out, it’s seventy degrees with a little bit of a breeze, and it’s not too dry and it’s certainly not too muggy.
You get to enjoy perfect baseball days in a great baseball stadium all summer long. This is the place to be.
Second, you have a huge payroll to play with, and a lot of money coming off the books. If you want to go scrap-heap shopping next year, you can buy the scrap heap entirely. You can put out the best NRI package this off-season, pursue all your favorite minor league free agents and injury rehab picks. You can sign a new middle infield. Whatever way you want to go with the major league team, you’ve got the resources and flexibility to do it. You could to patch a winning team together next year, without having to wait out a long rebuilding cycle.
Third, the organization has a lot to support a new GM in rebuilding besides payroll: their international scouting organization is outstanding and has money to spend, the team has deep roots in Latin America and does well recruiting there, and while the amateur scouting side’s future may be uncertain right now, it’s made remarkable strides in the last few years.
Fourth, you don’t have to deal with the kind of media scrutiny you do in larger and east coast markets. We’ve got two papers in Seattle, though maybe not for long, a sports talk radio station that seems to be moving off local content, and that’s about it for media coverage of the team. National columnists pay about 10% as much attention to the Mariners compared to a comparable team on the other coast unless they’re contending.
And the print press here doesn’t include anyone who’ll be trying to sink knives into you from your first day. The beat reporters are high-quality, and the columnists include Art Thiel and Larry Stone. You’ll be able to explain what’s going on without having to worry about seeing twenty column inches misrepresenting you the next day, poisoning your relationship with the fan base.
Speaking of the fans, that’s five — look how many fans turn up now to see the worst team in baseball play another wretched team. They’re mad and disappointed, certainly, but they’re still coming out. The town wants to see the team succeed, and they’ve come out in droves when they’re competitive. The M’s have already avoided the kind of attendance drop the Indians saw, and given some realistic chance at hope — and again, next year’s a huge opportunity — they’ll be back cheering like crazy.
Moreover, there’s a huge contingent of smart fans here who know what you’re about and will be spreading the good word. The two biggest blogs, for instance (that’s us and Lookout Landing), have spent years trying to grow an educated, savvy fan base that can recognize good and bad moves, and debate moves reasonably (except Ichiro… don’t trade Ichiro, or think about trading Ichiro… trust me, all the guarantees are off in that case). You have, for want of a better analogy, a support network in place. If you want to talk about how you went after pitcher X because you thought they’d pitched better than their ERA and W-L record would indicate, people will be interested and listen. The groundwork’s been laid.
Which gets me to six — I don’t know what kind of technology the M’s have at their fingers, but they certainly don’t have the kind of stuff you’re used to in Cleveland. But you can build that, and fast. We’ve got thousands of readers who work at tech firms: when you start cranking that effort up, you will find yourself saturated in resumes from some of the best and brightest people out of an outstanding talent pool. I’ll help if you want. The only better place to try and start a project like this might be the Bay. The M’s are in a great position to be the smartest team about using technology to win in the major leagues within a few years.
Seven: we have Ichiro! You get to see Ichiro! play every day. You may have to just take our word on this: he’s unique and wonderful, and it’s a joy to get to see him at work.
Eight: the turnaround is not so hard. This team is worst in the league. You won’t have to do much in the second season to improve hugely, so you can look more than a year out. In a four-team division, even with the Angels and Athletics, getting a division title is reachable in the first few years. You’re not facing off against the Yankees and Red Sox, or even the Tigers and White Sox — though with the new A’s stadium, we’ll get there. But you only have to get past three teams to win a playoff berth. You can do that.
That’s the pitch: it’s a great city, it’s a great job, you’re set up for success, and we’d love to have you. Come on over.
Antonetti in ’08
You may have noticed over on the left sidebar that there’s an image that looks an awful lot like a political button. In a sense, it is a political button, though for an election that isn’t run by democracy. Due to the way the offseason is unfolding, it is becoming apparent to us that, barring an unforseen miracle, the Mariners aren’t going to be contenders in 2007. Even in a best case scenario, where the young core takes a step forward and the aging veterans stave off decline, this is still an inferior team to that of the Angels, Rangers, and Athletics.
Given a public ultimatum to win or lose their jobs, the Mariners current baseball operations department will begin the year as underdogs, and it’s a distinction they’ve earned with moves like the Horacio Ramirez acquisition. Simpy put, this regime couldn’t afford to have a bad offseason following the Jarrod Washburn and Carl Everett debacles of last year, and while we have yet to see a disaster along the lines of those two signings, it’s fairly evident that the Mariners are not going to be able to sufficiently upgrade the team this winter in order to expect to challenge for the division crown next year.
So, we believe that a change in management is inevitable. While we will be the first to say that Bill Bavasi is a good person, and he’s been kind enough to spend time talking with us the past couple of years, we’re endorsing Chris Antonetti as his replacement. Like any good grass roots campaign, you can never start too soon, and this is a cause worthy of your support.
So, without further ado, an introduction to the man we hope is the next General Manager of the Seattle Mariners.
Who is Chris Antonetti?
He is currently the Assistant General Manager to Mark Shapiro, working for the Cleveland Indians. He is Shapiro’s go to guy on contract negotiations and evaluative analysis, as well as spear-heading most of the initiatives to create new programs that give the Indians a competitive edge on his opponents. The Indians have been the leader in using technology to their advantage for years, and they’ve leveraged their intellectual knowledge of systems into a sustained advantage on the field. Antonetti has been the man responsible for overseeing these areas and pushing for their use throughout the organization. A lot of the things that make the Cleveland Indians the best run organization in baseball are in place due to the work of Chris Antonetti.
Why is he qualified to be a major league GM?
Antonetti is going to be labeled as a “Moneyball” executive by the media, as he did not play professional baseball and has advanced degrees from elite universities. He got a bachelors in business administration from Georgetown and a masters in sports management from Massachusets, learning the academic side of how to be a successful manager. From there, he took a low level job with the Montreal Expos in their minor league operations department before joining the Indians organization in 1999 as, essentially, an intern. From 1999 until now, he has worked his way from the title of Assistant, Baseball Operations to Assistant GM (a position he earned in 2002), and has held numerous roles during that time. The Indians have had him work in both administrative and player development positions, and he’s spent numerous hours working with both scouts and statistical analysts.
No one understands how to use both subjective scouting information and quantifiable statistical data together as well as the Indians, and Antonetti has been successful in both sides of the baseball operations department. Under the leadership of John Hart and now Mark Shapiro, the Indians have become baseball’s most well-oiled machine. Antonetti has been a vital cog in that machine for the past seven years.
What are his unique strengths?
Antonetti has many things going for him, but a few notable traits set him apart. He’s brilliant, without a doubt, but there a lot of people in baseball who are extremely smart, and most of them would make terrible general managers. The most important responsibility a General Manager holds is to gain the respect of those who work for him and motivate them to do good work. In this respect, Antonetti is set apart from other executives with an academic background. He commands the respect of his employees, but also exudes humility with his soft-spoken manner. While he has his own set of convictions about truths as they apply to baseball, he seeks input from a variety of sources and seeks to find knowledge wherever it may lie, whether with new statistical research or old scouting truisms.
Antonetti isn’t the most outgoing person on earth, and he’s not the charasmatic figure that Billy Beane or even Bill Bavasi is, but he combines respect, humility, and intelligence in a package that makes him one of the best leaders of people in baseball.
Why do you want him to be the next GM of the Mariners?
The Mariners are an organization in transition and are looking for an identity. During the Pat Gillick era, the team focused heavily on the present success of the major league club at the expense of the farm system, and while they experienced short term gains on the field, the price was paid during the Bill Bavasi era, where the major league club was sacrficed in an effort to replenish the organization with young talent, both through trades and amateur acquisitions.
Now, however, the team has the foundation of a potential contender in place, with guys that can be built around in their pre-arbitration years and a nucleus of young talent that should form the basis for the Mariners in the near future. Bill Bavasi and his staff have done a very good job of changing the culture of the club towards valuing building from within, and he has helped get the team through the painful process of rebuilding. However, in all his years of running a franchise, both in Anaheim and now in Seattle, he’s yet to show a particular aptitude for surrounding that young talent with quality major league players.
Chris Antonetti understands player valuation at the major league level extremely well, and has had a hand in many of the Indians numerous good acquisitions over the years. While the Indians have shared the Mariners strong desire to build through the farm system, they’ve also been able to acquire quality players in trades and on the free agent market to put around their home grown talent, allowing them to contend in a competitive division despite restraints on their payroll.
The Mariners need a better philosophy of major leauge player acquisition. They need to do a better job of selecting pitchers, getting away from ideas of value based on minimually useful statistics such as W-L record and ERA and moving towards a more realistic understanding of how to project pitching ability. They need to stop collecting athletes with impressive skills and start collecting ballplayers who contribute runs on the field.
Most importantly, however, they need a philosophy that permeates the organization, from the parent club through the minor leagues. They need cohesiveness in what is being taught to their players as well as what is valued in terms of abilities. They need to establish a foundation to work from and a strong identity in what being a Seattle Mariner is all about.
The Indians have refined organizational cohesiveness, and while no one is perfect, they do it better than anyone.
Well, if he’s so great, then why does he need a grassroots campaign to get the job?
Chris Antonetti is 32-years-old, is unheard of by almost everyone who doesn’t cover baseball for a living, and has no experience as a professional ballplayer. In the eyes of most of the media, this will make him just another laptop-toting seamhead who focuses on what their computer tells them and has no respect for the establishment. For every Theo Epstein, who gained a modicum of respect after building a World Series champion, we see scathing rebukes written by local scribes when teams have hired guys with similar backgrounds, such as Paul DePodesta, Josh Byrnes, Jon Daniels, Andrew Friedman, or J.P. Ricciardi. In a city where Pat Gillick and his traditional ways are honored with the highest esteem, it’s going to be a very tough sell to get the Mariners to change directions and hire someone too young to be elected president.
In a division where Arte Moreno is willing to spend lavish amounts of money to leverage the Los Angeles market, Oakland is taking their highly efficient development strategy to a new ballpark, and Tom Hicks’ huge dollars in Texas are now being managed by a high quality team of executives led by Jon Daniels, the Mariners cannot afford to be behind the eight ball in terms of player evaluation.
The Mariners have the revenue streams and talent in place to build a contending baseball club. Chris Antonetti has the skills it takes to transform this club from a rebuilding process into perennial contender.
Antonetti in ’08. Spread the word.
Indians, tech, and Antonetti
You may recall that we’ve mentioned Cleveland’s Chris Antonetti as a possible GM candidate, and in general we’re fans of what that front office has done. Check out this article for some detailed info on the kind of information advantage they’re working with.
It does contain this:
This information, plus another computer analysis that showed no one player’s salary had exceeded 15 percent of a team’s payroll on any World Series champion club since 1985, overrode the Tribe’s emotional instinct to pay Thome the guaranteed salary he wanted for six years to allow him to finish his career in Cleveland.
I can’t believe that that really swayed anyone, it’s such an obvious failure of reasoning. It’s been circulated so widely it’s worn thin, but that doesn’t make it worth anything. I wonder if they spread that because it’s accepted wisdom by many of baseball’s writers and analysts so it can be used to justify unpopular moves, whether or not it’s true.
And yet, there’s a lot about it, including this :
Back in 2000, when the Indians were preparing for negotiations with then-Indians slugger Manny Ramirez, Antonetti examined championship teams’ player salaries. He found that no World Series champion between 1985 and 2000 allocated more than 15 percent of its payroll to a single player. In addition, he determined the higher percentage of payroll a team spent on one player, the lower its winning percentage.
For example, teams that spent 17.5 to 20 percent of their payroll on one player won 47 percent of the time. Teams that spent 7.5 percent or lower on one player won 53 percent of the time.
Antonetti concluded there was a significant decline in a team’s chances to make and advance through the postseason if it allocated more than 15 percent of its payroll to a single player. On average, his analysis found, successful teams spent a little more than 12 percent on their highest paid player.
Not surprisingly, then, Antonetti recommended that Thome’s contract should not exceed 15 percent of the Indians’ team payroll in any season in which management felt the club had a “legitimate” chance to contend for the playoffs. Why? Because they needed the salary flexibility to acquire other players to put together a winning team.
Ideally, Antonetti said, Thome’s salary should make up about 12.5 percent of the payroll.
To refute, briefly: this is the logical fallacy “Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this)”. It’s like discovering the Mariners only contend for division titles when Lucent and Cisco stock is highly valued. Should the Mariners use their huge bank balance to buy up those stocks in an attempt to drive up their price?
Of course not. While “salarly flexibility” sounds good as an explanation (and, I’d argue, roster flexibility is a huge boon to a team) the issue is much simpler than that.
– Teams with high payrolls generally win more.
– High payrolls mean that one player with a big contract does not consume so much of the team’s total salary.
That’s it. Take the Angels, for instance. They have a $95m payroll, and they’re paying their star player Vlad Guerrero $12.5m this year. 13% of payroll.
Now say that he plays on the Royals, or the Devil Rays, or the Pirates. He’d still be the same player, but now he’s make up about 26% of the payroll and the team would be terrible.
It’s the same deal with the Cardinals and Pujols (and, for them, Walker-Rolen-Edmonds).
You can look at examples of teams that have one player who makes a ton of money. They’re bad to awful teams who’ve retained one marquee player, or someone who had a horrible contract they couldn’t dump off on anyone, or even a modest veteran picked up to plug a huge hole in the roster.
Or think about it this way: at a 40m payroll, the threshold for consuming 15% of payroll is only $6m. At the mid-point for teams, it’s about $10-11m. At $90-something, it can be about $13-14m, and at the Yankees’ level, they can have players making $30m without exceeding 15%. It’s not about proportion of payroll consumed at all, and it never has been.
I’m surprised to see someone as smart as Antonetti spending any signficant time researching this.
Still, it’s a good article, and intersting food for thought.
Game 123, Indians at Mariners
Kevin Millwood vs. Ubaldo Jimenez, 7:10pm
Ubaldo Jimenez was once a Cy Young candidate with one of the best fastballs in baseball. His dazzling 2010 season seemed to prove that his control problems were abating, and that he’d become one of the elite pitchers in baseball. He suffered through sub-par results in 2011, and his velocity seemed to be down, but as we’ve seen with Felix Hernandez, that’s not always a kiss of death. His FIP and xFIP were worse than his stellar 2010 season, but not by much, and the Indians paid dearly to get him as they attempted a late charge at the AL Central crown last year.
I think this move could get painted as a decisive victory of old-school scouting over “stats” guys who still bought Jimenez’s solid FIP. It was the new-school GM Chris Antonetti who pulled the trigger, and scouts had been grumbling for a bit about Jimenez’s lower velocities. In point of fact, just about *everyone* panned the trade, as Cleveland seemed to pay for an ace, and even assuming his ERA would drop down to his FIP, he wouldn’t be producing like one. Cleveland gave up what many considered its best prospect, along with a few more not-too-shabby ones, to get Jimenez, and the results have been stunningly bad.
With the Indians, Jimenez has pitched 203 innings, or about one full season. He’s given up 214 hits, 132 runs on 106 walks and 174 strikeouts and he’s served up 28 HRs. His RA over that “season”? 5.85, good for a -1.1 rWAR. Perhaps upset that his results were a bit worse than his peripherals, Jimenez now has ghastly peripherals as well. Since 2010, his average fastball velocity has gone from 96.3 to 93.9 to 92.5, and his swinging strike rate has fallen in lock-step with his velocity.
There are a number of theories about why he’s tanked – from mechanical to overuse. He appeared to be bouncing back earlier this season, with a string of solid outings in June/early July, but that hopeful sign’s gone, as he’s given up 35 runs in his last 7 starts (35 2/3 IP). Jimenez has cratered along with his teammates, who were once 11 games over .500 (they’re now 13 games under). It’s a stunning reversal, and no matter what Drew Pomeranz does in Colorado, this trade will be mentioned as the downside risk any time a big-name pitcher’s on the block; a ghost story for GMs.
Lefties have inflicted quite a bit of damage against Jimenez this year, which means the M’s have their lefty-heavy line-up on display today. Miguel Olivo’s something of an oddball here, though the team may have wanted to give Montero a break, and at least Jaso’s in the game as the DH.
1: Ackley
2: Saunders
3: Seager
4: Jaso (DH)
5: Smoak
6: Thames
7: Olivo
8: Robinson
9: Ryan
SP: Millwood
This article on Greg Halman’s murder is amazing, and crushingly sad. The Halman brothers evidently felt perceived slights very keenly, and there was pain and anger behind Greg’s wide smile, but I can’t get over how universal this story could be. We love that MLB is the very top, the tiny cap, of the talent pyramid, and we understand at some level that this entails thousands of broken dreams. The lucky ones will have their dreams end in placed like Altoona, Bradenton, Clinton, Springfield, and they’ll start to formulate new dreams, and a new life – perhaps beginning with how to pay off their debts, or how to get out of the lease on their apartment. I don’t want to make too much of this, because most of us think we’d love the chance to fail publicly as long as we could do it in a baseball jersey. But it’s still surprising that the anger engendered by failure, by misunderstandings between players and coaches (“he’s laid-back” versus “he’s lazy and disrespectful”) spills out so infrequently. Ultimately, the anger in Jason Halman may have come out no matter what; if he hadn’t been cut in the Netherlands, he’d probably have been cut in Everett, or Peoria, or Pulaski. This game is humbling, but only for those who allow it to be.
I never really got why Mike Carp and Greg Halman bonded, or why Halman *needed* someone as much as he apparently did. That story really explained a lot. Carp’s t-shirts honoring Halman went on sale to the public this week.
The Rainiers game looks intriguing tonight as Erasmo Ramirez faces off against Reno’s Charles Brewer (who’s a better prospect than his ERA might imply). The Jackson Generals are playing a doubleheader, with James Paxton starting in game 1. Everett and Tacoma are both at home, so if you’re in the Puget Sound region, you’ve got three chances to see a game tonight.
The Jan 10 Recap of sorts
First off, at a high level: four M’s front office guys turned up to talk baseball with ~240 M’s fans on a rainy Saturday afternoon and stuck around for almost three and a half hours.
Three and a half hours. And they refused breaks. What do you say to that?
Besides thank you.
It’s interesting Tony Blengino’s as stat-savvy as anyone you’re likely to see in a major league front office, but he’s also as much about player makeup and work ethic as the other player development folks. Carmen Fusco, the director of pro scouting, goes way back, and he talked about how he came to accept and use statistics. One of the things Dave and I mentioned over and over in the GM search was the need to not get a stathead GM or a scouting GM but a hybrid (and holding up Antonetti or others as examples) that’ll take all the information they can get. Dave’s right — we got one.
I would have paid a lot to see Zduriencik’s presentation to Lincoln/Armstrong before, and now I have a lot better idea of what must have been in it, and would pay more to see him pull it off.
But I think, and forgive me if this is a little touchy-feely, the really interesting dynamic was that they weren’t really always in sync, or on message together. One of the things (again) Blengino discusses is the desire to have different opinions, and you could see that dissent wasn’t couched in “you’re wrong” but “well, also here’s this other side to that…”
I found that telling. One of the disturbing things about the previous regime was the too-frequent refrain that “everyone agreed that was a good move — who could have seen the disaster that ensued coming?” Everyone agreed it’d be great to sign this guy, and he sucked, so wow, that must have been unforseeable. Everyone agreed we’d win the division, and we sucked, so wow, misfortune befell us.
Without giving examples, they talked about that a little, about different opinions and perspectives in the Winter Meetings. If nothing else, that there’s now more voices in the organization should be encouraging.
Generally: as you’d expect, they were a lot cagier about topics than Bavasi was. But then you have to figure the audiences are getting much larger, the M’s brass is aware of them, and the M’s had a dude there taking notes (Zach Taylor, Baseball Systems Coordinator, which they joked about). So no “I’m not going to tell you Carl Everett is misunderstood. Carl Everett is understood.â€
So I’m going to try and paraphrase and sum up as best I can. This is made more difficult because my notes on the questions got gleaned (or cleaned) off the podium.
No comments: free agents either way (so no Griffey), or possible transactions, generally no current roster composition/discussing players (so pretty much passing on Lopez-at-first). But kind of. The budget.
Fields: lines of communication are open, we’ll see (no comment, really)
Wakamatsu — they think Wakamatsu’s going to be tremendous. Raaaaaaaaaaved about Wakamatsu.
Changes in the way the team consults with their statheads, so the baseball research guys have an active part in discussions. The cultivation of reasonable dissent (which came up in the BP interview, if you read that) — they don’t want people to agree. Tango’s encouraged to push ideas and information up. There will be input into Wakamatsu’s strategies.
And on valuation: yeah, Tony’s up on this stuff. Like uh… yeah.
Defense is awesome. The potential to have a stellar defensive outfield again excites them. Probably be undervalued right now relative to offense, but you can see in the market for the no-field outfielders that more teams are catching on (obviously they didn’t say no-field, that’s me). They recognize Beltre’s value.
When’s the team going to be good? Didn’t say. They’re going to make all the good moves they can and push ahead.
Draft: draft the best guys. College/high school, pitcher/hitter, doesn’t matter. I asked about Bavasi’s “two sets of eyes on every prospect†and the massive investment in infrastructure the team’s made during his time. They’re pro-that.
On this draft: they didn’t say much. No hand-tipping.
Bullpen: less role-centric usage. No, really.
Player dev: sounds like it’s going to slow a little, and the push-until-dramatic-failure philosophy’s been at least relaxed. On position switches: as much as possible, they don’t want to move someone until it’s clear that they’ll be switching to the position they’ll be at long-term
On player dev and Felix and establishing the fastball: Iiiiiiiiiii… I’m not sure what to say about this. There’s both “establish the fastball†and “get the outsâ€. And I’m also not sure what to say about the view of Felix’s last year. Huh.
Anyway — yeah, they want pitchers to have a change and be able to throw a good mix of pitches. Talked about Morrow’s mix a little.
Player makeup: looooot of discussion about this. I think I would say “highly valued but they have to be able to play first and foremostâ€. Kind of. Yeah. Trying to find players that’ll reach their potential, all that good stuff.
Platooning: yayyy.
Clement: love the makeup, he’ll be a catcher until he can’t.
Orgs they respect: Twins came up w/r/t scouting and the continuity of philosophy. Atlanta and the continual reloading during contention.
I’ll have a much longer post soon about flying the “under new management” flag, but… yeah, at one point, I essentially said I’d sign up to build software, and I’m as deep a cynic as you’re likely to find without wandering the planet holding a lantern up to people one by one.
Yeah. Huge thanks to them, the Seattle Public Library for letting us rent their fine facility (and for being awesome), Cara and Chris for helping out, and Bill and Jeff for helping work the door.
M’s Hire Tom Tango
Derek noted it in passing in his thread on Blengino’s BP interview, but it deserves its own post. The Mariners have hired Tom Tango as a consultant to assist them in pushing forward their advancement into the 21st century of statistical analysis. If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know who Tango is – we’ve learned/borrowed heavily from his work over the years, and he’s stopped by to comment once in a while as well.
I think it’s fair to say that, right now, Tom is the leading analyst of the day in public advancement of statistical analysis. If you wanted to know what the best practice for current analysis is, you wouldn’t go to Bill James or Nate Silver, you’d go to Tom Tango. He’s the gold standard of analysts publishing their work, and he’s made significant strides in pushing forward the understanding of baseball through his writings.
Seriously, if you had given me a magic lamp before the new GM search began and said “you get three wishes”, one of them would have been “Let the new GM hire Tango”.
Really, we all wanted the M’s to hire someone like Chris Antonetti because we believed the organization needed a GM who understood the value of both scouting and statistical analysis, would place emphasis on technology, and create an organization that actively recruited intelligent people to develop a front-office talent pipeline that would push us forward for the next 10-15 years.
That’s all being done, and it’s being done without having to endure all the crap that comes along with hiring a “stathead GM”. Seriously, we’re getting everything we could have possibly hoped for, and our new GM even comes in a media-friendly package that keeps them from yelling “nerds!” every 30 seconds.
If you weren’t already completely convinced, this should do it – the M’s are now one of the best run teams in baseball. They’ve implemented processes based on logic, reason, and evidence that will lead to positive results. They understand good analysis from bad analysis, and are pushing forward the organization’s ability to create new information and exploit their resources.
Seriously, there’s never been a better time to root for the Mariners. After years of pounding our heads against a wall, we’ve got a front office in place that knows what they’re doing. We’ve got the organization we’ve always wanted.
Zduriencik hire can be good and still depressing
I’ve been really pretty nasty about the whole hiring process lately, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed, in particular calling out the people doing the hiring as bumbling fools unfit to decide what to order for lunch, much less pick who to be in charge of the operations of the franchise (Power structures and the GM hunt, Essential problems with the interview process, Target-rich environment, on and on).
There’s been some great discussion on the hire, particularly in the comments to Dave’s last post, Thoughts From Milwaukee which I highly recommend. I feel like many of the people there.
I come to this feeling, unfortunately, a lot like I did about the Bavasi hire — that hiring Zdurincik is about as good as we’re going to get out of the Mariners. It’s actually better than I’d feared, that they’d retreat into the safety of a name former GM retread. Zduriencik might work out great (and we don’t know, any or all of the others would have been awesome, too).
But I want to talk about why this pick is bad for us, in a larger sense than what the GM’s going to do soon.
The M’s organization has viewed advances in baseball knowledge with at best antipathy and often a heaping amount of scorn. This is evident in many of the moves we’ve seen in the last few years, but even removing the Bavasi years and focusing just on the views of the people who were going to make the hiring decision, it’s true. We don’t need to look any further than their comments on the A’s — they’ve continually refused to give the A’s any credit for anything, and gone out of their way to denigrate what Beane’s done even as year after year the A’s have handed the M’s their ass, sometimes on a nice silver tray as the protein course in a eighteen-game season meal of whooping.
At the same time, they’ve looked to the Twins as an example of an organization they admire. There’s nothing wrong with admiring the Twins. They’ve been successful running a team on a shoestring while pretty much discarding baseball research.
But the disdain for the A’s and other smart teams has always been one of the larger and more prominent symptoms of the team’s at time galling arrogance about how smart they are. Chuck Armstrong thinks, more or less, that because he has engineering training that he knows stats, and because they have a stathead on a consulting contract and once in a while ask him questions like “how many more games would we win if we brought Carlos Silva instead of playing Baek?”
It’s crazy. There are, as I think every serious fan of baseball would agree, many ways to put together a championship team. You can look down recent league winners and see some amazing contrasts both in how the teams play but how they were constructed.
The Mariners front office essentially decided that they preferred one way, and therefore that was the only correct path to follow in building a team. And teams that didn’t follow it and were successful were lucky, or cheating, or… I’m not sure what their argument was here.
This drove me nuts.
This off-season presented a chance for the team, and particularly the front office, to take a serious look at itself, where things had gone wrong, and change. Ownership did not change the people responsible for running the team. The people running the team made some noises about opening themselves to new ideas, new approaches, and there was hope.
The hope was that they would finally consider that perhaps they had something to learn from the teams that were getting more from much less payroll, much more from the same payroll, from teams that were using wholly different approaches.
The hope was that they’d hire one of the crazy-competent hybrid GM candidates, the people who are building organizations based on getting all the information they can out of the stats and the scouts, and weigh it appropriately. Someone who can look at a free agent pitcher and say “sure, he’s got a 3.50 ERA, but he got amazingly lucky stranding runners, and he wants $15m a year. Why don’t we take the guy with a 4.50 ERA who got unlucky for $8m and get something shiny for left field?”
This would have been the reason to double the celebration if the team had hired an Antonetti, for example:
– great hire
– clear demonstration that the team at a level higher than GM recognizes where the franchise has gone wrong
Zduriencik to me may check off the first box. But he doesn’t at all mark that second one.
In many ways, he’s what they wanted but did not get out of Bavasi. He’s a scouting and player development guy, well-respected within baseball. I joked at one point that if Bavasi had put on a wig, shaved the facial hair, and dummied up a resume to get onto the long list, he’d have made it all the way through the interview process again.
Moreover, the finalist list reinforces that worry:
– LaCava was fine, but he’s not a known hybrid-y guy
– DiPoto was fine, but he’s not a known hybrid-y guy
– Ng is a cipher
– Zduriencik is a scouting-side guy
I freely acknowledge that the team had a terrible time getting permission to talk to candidates and getting the candidates interested (which is another stunning indictment of them, but that’s a seperate argument). And that we have to throw up our hands on Ng a little. But there was no finalist who could have for certain turned the organization somewhere new, or someone who would have taken the M’s organizational strengths and helped meld it with an improved analysis side.
There’s the letdown — whoever the new GM is, we know that the people above them didn’t take this opportunity to do some serious thinking about what they’ve wrought. You could go ask Armstrong right now if he’d reconsidered his opinion on the A’s success, and I’d bet you pennies to dollars that he’d say the same thing he’s been saying for years.
As Dave’s said, they’ve decided to stick to their guns and shoot for becoming a well-funded Twins franchise, and if we’re lucky, the M’s look like the 90s Braves, or the good version of the Mets. And that’s okay by me. I have a ton of respect for what the Braves did.
Maybe Zduriencik is going to survey the franchise in the next week and decide to spend some money putting some serious technology people together to build some tools, get some quality stathead analysts hired and figure out how to make them a part of an organization that could badly use them. I don’t know.
But I worry that that’s not going to happen. I worry that even if he thought of that and decided that that was how he was going to run the organization, he’d have an impossible sell to Armstrong (why does the team need to beef up anything on that side of the house when they’ve received so little value from it in the past?). And I know that’s not rational, that the GM’s going to have the freedom to build their own staff and their own organization.
Again we’re back to that worry: that the Lincoln/Armstrong Return to Community means exactly that, and that Zduriencik’s brilliance may well be limited by the team’s unwillingness to back him financially in drafting players. Or that they won’t sign off on contracts that make sense, or will mandate extensions for their favorite players, and on and on. Because, and I hesitate to bring this up again, there’s years of evidence that they’re no good at evaluating deals. Sure, Armstrong was there to veto a Washburn dump, but where was he when we signed Washburn? Or any of the horrible deals up to the supposed hands-off 2007 off-season?
Certainly almost every GM operates with some degree of managerial control, but one of the greatest lessons of the Twins and A’s success is that the ownership gave good baseball people the freedom to operate as they should. Reading Moneyball, you’re probably struck as much by how unfettered Beane was allowed to operate within the financial bounds given him. He wasn’t told “You can increase payroll by $250k to improve the team but you have to get at least one good prospect back if you trade a current starter…” And the Twins have much the same latitude in baseball decisions.
Will ours? The evidence of this off-season points to them wanting to be more involved, and that’s bad.
And it points to the HoChuck brain trust as not having learned much from these last few years, and that’s bad too.
I wish Zduriencik all the success possible — I am, above all, a great fan of the franchise. And I’m wary of finding the downside to every decision, and in being too critical from being beat down these last few years. But what this season and the hiring process have shown us about the organization as a whole is worrisome. What if Zduriencik fails? Will they hire the super-super-Bavasi, the guy they thought they were getting when they got the guy they thought they were getting in Bavasi?
And if he succeeds, will they feel vindicated? Even more confident their renewed involvement was the key to success? What does that look like?
So, What Did I Miss?
I’m back, unpacked, and amazingly, didn’t receive a single toaster. Apparently, while I was away, the Cubs decided to throw away their season, the Rays and Red Sox proved that the 2008 AL East is the best division we’ve seen in a long, long time, and lots of people told the M’s “thanks but no thanks”. I know seeing good candidates turn away is frustrating, but despair not – the Pirates ran into this same thing last year, getting turned down by several of their top choices before settling on the other Cleveland Asst. GM, Neil Huntington. He clearly wasn’t their first choice, but since taking over, he’s completely reshaped the way the Pirates were run, even hiring Dan Fox to run their statistical analysis department.
To be honest, in catching up on what happened in the last 10 days, I’m encouraged. The list of people the M’s have wanted to interview reads like a who’s-who of USSM approved thinkers. The M’s didn’t even bother to talk to the guys who were holding the Forst-Hahn-Hoyer-Depo roles the last time around, but this time, an older school guy like Bernazard stands out as unique among the candidates. The M’s are clearly looking at the young analytical types as the group they’d like to hire from, and I don’t see how anyone can take that as a bad sign. Even though we’re not going to get Antonetti, it looks very unlikely that we’re going to get a guy who will continue the current practices of the organization. It’s quite probable that the M’s are going to hire a GM who is much more in tune with how baseball teams should be operating in the 21st century.
Of the guys we know they’ve interviewed (thanks to Larry Stone, who has done great work covering this so far), I’m throwing my hat behind Peter Woodfork. From talking with a couple friends who have interacted with Woodfork, the consensus seems to be that he knows his strengths and weaknesses well and is more interested in organization building than legacy building. Due to his time in labor relations with the commissioner’s office and his various duties in Boston and Arizona, he’s become quite proficient in the contract/arbitration/rules aspect of the game, and he has a good grasp on real analytical processes. His degree from Harvard is in Psychology, however, and his perceptions of players as people instead of numbers helps him in his interactions with scouts and player evaluation types.
More than anything else, Woodfork has developed a reputation as a team guy – he’s not the Billy Beane from Moneyball, a one man show who does it all, but instead, he’s much more like Theo Epstein, who built a management group with perspectives varying from Bill James to Allard Baird. While Theo’s in charge, the Red Sox have a heavily involved ownership, not that different from the Mariners structure. Epstein has figured out how to leverage that involvement into a positive, building a team that can work well in such an environment, and that’s what’s needed in Seattle as well.
Woodfork has essentially grown up in baseball in two organizations that are running their teams the right way. He’s the mix of an analytical mind with the personality to integrate with Bob Engle and Bob Fontaine that the organization could really use. There need to be significant changes in how the baseball operations department is ran, but the amateur talent evaluators are a strength, not a weakness, and Woodfork’s ability to work with them is a real positive on his resume.
The Mariners need a GM that is willing to build a team of decision makers that focus on finding the right answer as often as possible, and Woodfork comes with the reputation of a guy who will do exactly that. For that reason, he’s my candidate, and the guy I’m hoping they hire.
Woodfork in ’09.