Johjima to Hanshin
As was already rumored from the moment he opted out, Kenji Johjima is signing with the Hanshin Tigers. It’s reportedly a 4-year deal for $21 million. So that’s more money than he’s giving up by opting out of his contract (more years too, obviously). We can speculate all we want about some quiet backroom payment, but the public stance that the Mariners paid no buyout is consistent with this, which pretty much shows none was needed.
And really, if Kenji was going to be a free agent again, in either the Japanese or American markets, he was probably better off doing it now than in two years when his extension finally ran out, with his body breaking down and performance declining even more precipitously. It’s also an indication of just how impressive his career has been that someone’s still willing to pay him this kind of money. How many catchers can you think of that signed two different multiyear, multimillion-dollar free agent contracts, let alone with a multiyear, multimillion-dollar extension in between? Okay, so he only played one year under the extension, but consider also that coming from Japan, he had to wait nine years for free agency.
For us, the extension was awful and its timing even worse, but we should remember what a bargain his initial contract was. The salary was about the same as his Hanshin contract, and if the terms of his extension had been along the same lines, well it’s still a bad idea to hitch yourself to an aging catcher, but it wouldn’t have been quite as horrible.
On Johjima’s power outage
I haven’t written much about Johjima, while taking time out of my day to take potshots at Vidro, McLaren, Ibanez’s defense, Sexson, and pretty much everyone except Ichiro.
So here’s the short version: Johjima’s performance at the plate so far has been just abysmal. But some this is that I’ve felt a lot like I do about Beltre: Beltre’s been smashing the ball around, hitting line drives, and they’ve been caught. His batting average looks bad, but he’s doing fine, I’ve got no complaints.
Similarly, if you look at Johjima, you see much the same thing: he’s still not taking walks, he’s striking out about as often, and the huge difference in terms of average/on-base percentage is that the balls he’s putting in play aren’t getting hits (this year his batting average on balls in play is .236, after being at .292 and .291 the previous two seasons). Normally, I’d just shrug that off.
What worries me is the missing power. What power he had hasn’t shown at all:
– He’s not hitting line drives nearly as often, and his ground ball and fly ball rates are both up
– When he’s hitting line drives, they’re not going anywhere: only 3% turn into home runs. That’s awful. Vidro gets twice that (this year, last year he was at 4%)
The only real difference between this season and the last two is that Johjima seems to be swinging at and making contact with a lot more pitches out of the zone. If you look at Fangraphs’ data, you see the one thing that really spikes this year is his “O-Contact” which is the number of pitches outside the zone they make contact with when swinging.
More baffling, though, he’s not swinging at those more often — he’s just hitting them a lot more often, not making good contact, and they’re going for outs. We’ve all seen this (and ended up screaming at him, or the TV, to please knock that off).
Is it a quirk of the season to date? When everything else seems stable except for one weird stat, my instinct is often to shrug and chalk it up to chance. Johjima’s stance isn’t changed from last year, and I haven’t been able to find anything about him switching to a longer bat, for instance, and if there’s a change at work it doesn’t seem to be affecting much else about his game. And yet between these two things:
– he’s making a lot more crappy contact on crappy pitches, and
– overall, his power numbers are way, way down, more than I’d even expect from the contact issue
I am worried. But I don’t have anything to offer that might help. I think I keep hoping that it’s just a random fluke, because the worst case is that the M’s just signed a catcher to a lucrative extension as his hitting game started to fall apart. We have enough bad news to dwell on already.
M’s Extend Johjima
Well, this is a bit surprising – the M’s have locked Kenji Johjima up through the 2011 season. No financial details to report, but I was told that this was “a good deal” for the M’s. Considering that Johjima took less money to play in Seattle initially, it’s not a huge surprise that he’d take a below market deal to stick around.
Despite his early struggles, he’s still an above average catcher right now, but I do wonder how much he’ll have left to contribute beyond 2008. Signing him through his age 35 season is a classic M’s move, as they consistently show willingness to have bad long term contracts in exchange for some short term rewards.
The bigger news is that this almost certainly means that Jeff Clement’s days behind the plate are numbered. The M’s wouldn’t have extended Johjima if they were optimistic that Clement was anywhere close to being ready (in their opinion) to be behind the plate regularly. Johjima’s extension means Clement’s going to end up at 1B or DH, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the organization start trying him out at first base in Tacoma in the not too distant future.
Frozen in time
Today in the Seattle Times, Geoff Baker has a helpful overview of the team’s ownership structure. It includes a list of the 17 participants in the ownership group and identifies those who sit on the board of directors (not completely clear is whether the board has any members without an ownership stake, or “independent directors” in corporate parlance, but from what’s been revealed in the past I don’t believe so).
Howard Lincoln is of course the most visible of these on a regular basis, since he acts as the team CEO as well, and as you probably know already, Hiroshi Yamauchi is (via Nintendo) the controlling shareholder. They are both significant people to be aware of in understanding team decisions – witness the Johjima extension a few years ago, or the noises already being made about Ichiro’s next contract. But perhaps the more important aspect this article gets across is just how fundamentally corporate this ownership group is. It’s embedded in their decisionmaking, how they present themselves publicly, the affiliations and even the personalities of the individual members.
What that means is that the team is inevitably going to be run using business principles and priorities, more than to gratify personal ambitions. We can argue about whether individual or corporate team ownership is a better model for operating a baseball franchise, but at any rate these characteristics aren’t going to change significantly unless the team is sold to a different person or group. Even if they had the resources, these owners probably would never spend like the Steinbrenners, but the team is also somewhat protected from the personal vagaries of things like a really messy divorce. This is also part of what leads to awkward expressions suggesting the team values being competitive (but profitable) over winning championships.
One other point to take from the article is that the ownership group has been remarkably stable. Death has produced the same amount of turnover within the group as has the sale of individual shares. And in describing who the owners are, it’s striking how often words like “former” get used. Even Yamauchi and the other Nintendo guys are largely retired or have emeritus roles at the company (although the way Japanese companies operate, they have much more influence than, say, Chris Larson has over the Microsoft of today). Some of the owners have gone on to second acts in business, particularly those in the wireless industry, whose institutions have morphed and evolved more frequently in the years since. But overall, it’s not just that the group looks like a Microsoft/Nintendo/Boeing consortium; considering that it was formed in response to calls for local business leaders to save the team from moving out of town, that’s to be expected. In reality, it’s a Microsoft/Nintendo/Boeing consortium that’s stuck in the early 1990s (remember McCaw Cellular?).
So if you wonder why the team takes detours from its rebuilding process to indulge in things like a Griffey farewell tour, it’s not just because the fans demand it, or that he has a great relationship with Chuck Armstrong. To a significant extent, the direction in which these owners have been taking the team is still defined by the times and the environment in which they bought it. I’m not saying that they’ve completely failed to adapt; payrolls did go up as the team brought in greater revenues from Safeco Field, and bringing in Zduriencik was somewhat of a shift from the past. But to really restore the Mariners as a competitive franchise, additional strides forward are required. The ownership group has been in place for nearly two decades; it’s time that they figure out how to move everyone beyond the glories of the first decade, and support further changes if they want the team to be relevant in their third decade.
A Punishment of Weeks, Not Years
If you haven’t yet, go read Derek’s fine (but depressing) piece from this morning. Then, before jumping out the window, come back and read this.
There’s a sentiment, strong among many fans, that the Mariners organization is going to be completely terrible until Howard Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong are no longer in charge. They have been at the helm while the ship has run aground, and despite the massive failure of the franchise during the last five years, there are few outward signs that they have learned, well, anything. Their public quotes are still filled with cliches that have little basis in reality, and there’s no disputing the fact that the organization is about 20 years behind most of baseball in terms of evaluating talent and building a roster. When a business falls so far behind it’s competitors, it is always the bosses fault. There is no argument – they have done a bad job of managing this baseball franchise.
However, to go from that understanding to the doomsday scenario that Derek laid out, you have to make a few assumptions that simply can’t be supported by facts.
Assumption #1: They will exert their power over the new General Manager to make baseball decisions they agree with and withhold that GM’s ability to renovate the baseball operations department.
What actual evidence do we have of the ownership making unilateral baseball decisions in the last, say, 10 years? The Johjima extension, certainly. Nixing the Washburn trade. And… that’s about it. So we have an extension for a Japanese player (which I’ll get to in a second) and the overruling of an interim GM. But leaving out the specifics of the deal for a second, why are we so upset about Pelekoudas not being given full authority to do whatever he wanted at the trade deadline? How would our opinions of their actions be different if it was Beltre he was trying to dump instead of Washburn? Would we then hail Armstrong and Lincoln as wise enough to see through the foolishness of letting a temporary employee make decisions that would affect the franchise in 2009 and beyond?
Is it a sign that Lincoln and Armstrong don’t know how to evaluate pitching? Yea, probably. Is it a sign that they’re going to tell the next GM who he can and can’t trade? Unequivocally not. You cannot assume that their actions in overruling an interim GM will be the operating procedure for how they will act with a permanent GM when there is massive historical evidence to the contrary.
When Pat Gillick was GM, his personal theories on baseball were implemented throughout the organization – blow off draft picks, ignore the farm system, don’t sign any contracts longer than three years, spread the money around the entire roster, throw a ton of money at relief pitchers, and trust veterans implicitly while assuming that everyone under 25 is out to steal your wallet.
When Bill Bavasi was GM, his personal theories on baseball were implemented through the organization – spend more money scouting the draft than any other team in baseball, build through the farm system, take big risks with long term contracts in free agency, build a bullpen on the cheap, rush every single talented kid through the minor leagues as fast as possible, and trust implicitly in tools over performance with young kids and track records with veterans.
Bavasi and Gillick are remarkably different, with huge disagreements in how to run a franchise, and both of them were able to implement their ideas completely throughout the organization. The team went from widly risk averse under Gillick to not even bothering to measure risk under Bavasi. They went from holding every prospect in the world in Triple-A for years to carrying Brandon Morrow as a reliever after three innings of minor league experience. They went from an offense of guys who worked the count to the hackingest bunch of hacks who ever hacked.
Howard Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong were in charge of two very different regimes, and both Gillick and Bavasi managed to build their rosters in their own image. How do we reconcile that fact with this idea that they’re maniacal micro-managers who assert their own will over every player transaction? You can’t.
Yes, the Johjima extension happened entirely at an ownership level, and the baseball operations team had basically nothing to do with that decision. But that’s pretty much always been true of how the Japanese player/Mariner team relationship has worked, and to be honest, it’s been a huge boon to the franchise. The original negotiations to sign Kenji as a free agent in 2006 went something like this: “Bill, I want to sign right now. Please give me a contract for whatever you deem fair. Who has a pen?” The rumors about what went on with Ichiro’s posting fee are hilariously legendary, and there was clearly a significant ownership involvement in his decision to re-sign for a below market deal last summer as well.
Even going back to the Sasaki contracts, the Mariners have come out way, way ahead in terms of return on investment of Japanese players. Yes, the Johjima extension is a debacle and probably one the ownership wishes they could have back, but can we really look at the sum of the Japanese ownership meddling and conclude that it’s a huge barrier to the team winning? To the contrary, it’d be easier to argue that the ownership’s history of attracting quality Japanese players to sign for below market deals here has been one of the biggest assets this club has had in the last decade.
There just isn’t the evidence there to support the idea that Lincoln and Armstrong will assert their opinions on roster transactions over the will of the next permanent General Manager. There is evidence that the GM won’t have a very strong say when it comes to the Japanese players on his team, but you can’t really make a case that it’s a franchise crippling problem.
Assumption #2: No good General Manager candidates are going to want to work in a situation where they don’t have total autonomy.
Billy Beane is basically the only GM in baseball with anything resembling total autonomy, and he has an ownership stake in the A’s. Every other GM in baseball has restrictions on what they can and can’t do, and in many cases, they are far more heavy handed than whatever the next GM will have to deal with here.
Theo Epstein has had so many personal conflicts with Larry Lucchino in Boston that he’s already quit once and had to be lured back with contract promises to limit contact between the two.
Kevin Towers is the GM of the Padres, but everywhere he turns, there’s a former GM standing around – his boss, Sandy Alderson (whom he has an interesting relationship with) keeps hiring potential replacements for Towers and giving them positions of power and reporting lines that don’t go through Towers.
The Rangers liked Jon Daniels so much, they made him one of the youngest GMs in baseball – then hired Nolan Ryan to look over his shoulder. The D’Backs have given Josh Byrnes a long term contract as a reward for his job in rebuilding the franchise quickly, then signed Eric Byrnes to a 3 year, $30 million deal that Byrnes wasn’t in favor of. Walt Jocketty ended up leaving his post as GM of the Cardinals due to a division of power that came from ownership. Omar Minaya and Brian Cashman have two sets of demanding owners in NY that don’t really need to be covered here, as I think everyone understands the zoo that is NYC. Kenny Williams and Jerry Reinsdorf have had an occasionally adversarial relationship in Chicago. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Besides Beane, there’s basically no such thing as a GM with total autonomy. The guys who have worked their tails off to get a shot at a General Manager position are not going to pass on interviewing with the Mariners because of the ownership dynamics. This is a false worry – the M’s will essentially be able to pick from a pool of extremely qualified candidates. If their next GM is a bad hire, it will be because they made a bad decision, not because they didn’t have a good one to make.
Assumption #3: They’re going to stop investing in the on field product.
Say whatever you want about the competence, arrogance, and greed of Mariner ownership, but you simply can’t pretend that they’ve failed to properly fund the on field roster. The principle responsibility of ownership is to provide enough capital for a good GM to build a winning roster with, and the Mariners have had more than enough capital to build a winning team for each of the last 10 years. They’re consistently among the league’s top spenders, and during Bavasi’s administration, they supplemented a high payroll with the highest scouting budget in the industry. The Mariners spend a lot of money on acquiring baseball players, and they have for a long time.
They haven’t spent it well, obviously, but there’s no reason to believe that the resources will cease to be provided if a GM is able to spend them more efficiently. Will payroll go down in 2009? Yea, I’m sure it will. And it probably should – with Bedard’s labrum problem, the reality is it would take a perfect off-season to build a contender this winter, so they’re probably not going to play in October next year. When you know that ahead of time, spending a lot of money on the major league payroll isn’t the best use of resources.
But why should we assume that the ownership won’t pony up enough money to find competent placeholders while the new GM develops his next winning team? The Rays were able to pick up Cliff Floyd, Eric Hinske, and Trever Miller for peanuts this winter, filling holes with solid role players because they could offer significant opportunities for playing time. You think free agents were clamoring to sign in Tampa, or that the Mariners aren’t able to match their significant resources?
There’s a huge gap between “the team will probably cut payroll next year” and “the team won’t provide the next GM enough money to build a winning team”. The former is almost certainly true, while the latter is almost certainly false.
The Mariners face a critical winter, no doubt. If they choose poorly, Derek’s scenario below could certainly come true. It’s a possibility that we can’t ignore, but for those of you who want to treat it like inevitable fate, your assumptions simply don’t stand on actual evidence. You can be afraid that the team will screw up this winter, hire a bad GM, and continue failed policies that will result in more losing seasons, but you can’t pass it off as rigorous analysis of what will happen. Fear is not evidence.
The Mariners are hardly the most moribund franchise baseball. Tampa is riding the peak after a valley far deeper than anything we’ve been through. Pittsburgh abandoned their years of poor planning to hire a good GM and change the entire culture of their organization. If the Rays and Pirates can see the light and make the necessary changes, so can the Mariners. This doesn’t mean that they will, but it does mean that if you’re spouting the impossibility of success under the Lincoln/Armstrong regime, you’re wrong.
Tragedy or comedy
Good things
Ichiro, three games in first place, McLaren fired, Bavasi fired, the improvement of Riggleman, Morrow’s development, Morrow going to start, Felix starts, nice return on Rhodes trade, RRS ascent to rotation, Vidro release, Sexson release, Beltre, Clement promotion, Clement re-promotion, Ibanez’s hitting, continued if diminished fan support, anger of the Lincoln/Armstrong post-Bavasi-firing conference, Lopez’s hitting, improved outfield defense, the most valuable Bloomquist season in years, Burke pitching, LaHair getting a shot, the return of a healthy Mark Lowe, the July 28th game where the M’s hit four home runs, three walk-off wins, Wilkerson released, Sean Green, four shutouts, twelve wins by five or more runs, hope (however small) for a organizational overhaul this winter, and 48 wins.
Bad things
McLaren started the season as manager, team offense, team pitching, team defense, Washburn versus Johjima (one and two), personal catchers, Bedard hurt, Silva starts, Batista appearances, Washburn not traded, Baek traded for no reason, Putz injury, Putz ineffectiveness, Putz re-injury, Vidro, Sexson, Johjima extension, Johjima’s season, Clement demotion, Ibanez’s defense, some Dickey appearances, continued if diminished fan support, Lincoln-Armstrong still in charge, Lopez’s defense, Betancourt’s collapse, Reed not hitting after promotion, Wlad not hitting after promotion, Clement not hitting after promotion, no towel service day, Bloomquist injured, Morse injured, Cairo, the division cellar, three seven-game losing streaks, eight times being shut out, twenty three losses by five or more runs, the 15-3 loss to the White Sox this last week, winless against the goddamn Yankees on the season, swept by the Nationals, “funk blasts,” the fifteen-inning 1-2 loss on July 6th, the thirteen games where no Mariner collected an extra-base hit, the thirteen games where no Mariner drew a walk, the one game where no Mariner had an extra-base hit or a walk, Valle and Fairly guesting in the broadcast booth, the Moose, 1-71 record when going into the ninth behind, nine walk-off losses, Drayer fired, Rally Fries, Bloomquist’s quest for historical futility in the field of hitting thwarted, and “no question about it” the 82 losses.
Horse First, Then Cart
I’m a bit sleep deprived after a long week in Dallas, but I wanted to make one quick point before heading to bed. I know that the Angels decision to spend big on Pujols and Wilson has caused a lot of people to turn their attention back to the size of the Mariners payroll, and calls are getting louder for the team to spend more money in order to compete in the AL West. I’m not against the team spending more money, but I do believe that we need to understand the actual causation that drives the correlation between a team’s payroll and their record.
It’s easy enough to look at a chart that includes total payroll and total wins and see that there’s a relationship. Teams that spend more generally win more – not always, but usually. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why this is.
However, that’s a correlation. That the two things are related does not mean that increasing payroll will increase your win total to the degree that the correlation would suggest – that conclusion requires causation, and you have to dig deeper to see the actual effects of increasing payroll on team wins.
In reality, there’s causation that goes both ways. Increasing your payroll does increase your expected winning percentage, but raising your expected winning percentage also raises your payroll. In order to win, you need good players, and good players demand more and more money as they get older. A team that has managed to successfully draft and develop a nice young crop of home-grown stars is going to win first, then see their payroll rise as a result of the success of those players. In that situation, the increase in team salary occurs as a result of the acquisition of talent, rather than the increase in salary causing the acquisition of talent.
This is why you have to be very careful concluding that the Mariners failures of late are because of the team’s decreasing payroll relative to the rest of the league. In reality, the poor decision making of the front office over the last decade has actually had more to do with the payroll going down than ownership getting “cheap”. Because the team drafted poorly and traded away most of the young talent they did manage to develop, the franchise simply hasn’t had many players worth locking up to long term deals that escalate the payroll organically.
Here’s the list of meaningful contract extensions handed out by the Mariners over the last 10 years:
Ichiro Suzuki – 5 years, $90 million
Felix Hernandez – 5 years, $78 million
Kenji Johjima – 3 years, $24 million
Bret Boone – 3 years, $24 million
Franklin Gutierrez – 4 years, $20 million
Mike Cameron – 3 years, $15 million
That’s it – that’s the list. In over a decade, the M’s have only given out a half dozen contract extensions to players they wanted to retain due to their quality performances. What young talent did make it to the big leagues generally failed to develop into players that the team wanted to keep around, and thus, the team has entered into very few payroll-raising contract extensions to keep talent on hand.
Put simply, the Mariners lack of talent has had a significant impact on their payroll – there simply haven’t been good enough players to pay to keep around to keep the team’s overall budget going up organically. And so, without good players to retain, the team was forced to hunt for talent in the free agent market, and we all know how well that has worked out for the organization.
Having a $150 million payroll simply shouldn’t be anyone’s goal. The goal is to accumulate so much talent that you need to raise your payroll to that kind of level in order to keep it all. Not every piece of the roster has to be homegrown, and there’s certainly a spot for acquiring veterans from other organizations through free agency or trade, but history shows that teams who increase their payrolls by trying to buy wins in those markets generally don’t succeed. The winners are the franchises who develop talent through the farm and then invest in long term contracts in order to keep those players around.
The correlation between wins and payroll is real, but don’t make the mistake of believing that the relationship between the two means that raising payroll will lead to substantially more wins. For sustained success, the winning comes first, and then the rising payroll follows.
The 50-man roster for the next two years
There’s been increasing talk about Jack Zduriencik’s future and whether his job will be on the line next season. At this point, we don’t know what the organization will really be shooting for in 2012, or what kind of budget they’ll be shooting with. The 17-game losing streak suggests that a lot more work is needed, while the respectable performance otherwise suggests that the team is tantalizingly close. Another way to look at things is to evaluate what Zduriencik has built (or rebuilt) and see how solid it looks, and after the trade deadline is a good opportunity for that.
Whether or not he gets five years to carry out his plan (not that it was meant to be a “five-year plan”), obviously it will take that long to see how some of the pickups in these deals mature. So I thought it would be good to consider the picture for the next two years, which includes some important transitional questions that a GM would need to anticipate and plan for. What follows is a sense of who’s currently in the organization and might play a significant role over that time frame. It’s not exactly a depth chart for each position, more a collection of who could end up helping fill different spots.
Since we’re talking about the future, the roster building is provisional and incomplete, of course. Only a couple spots are really solidly locked down, and more deals and signings will be needed to plug holes and upgrade positions, starting this winter. Part of this exercise is seeing what’s left if, say, you give up a particular player your trading partner really wants. Not everyone on the list will be part of the picture, as guys go away or get replaced. Some of the prospects would still need to make significant strides and their progress is uncertain, but there’s at least a scenario in which they might contribute.
Right Field
Ichiro: This position is no longer one we can realistically consider to be locked up long-term. Presumably Ichiro will hold onto it for the last year of his contract, but that only gets us to the beginnings of uncertainty. Will his performance recover, over the final months of this season or next year? Will ownership or fan sentiment require an extension even if he doesn’t recover, or at a price that isn’t warranted if he does? Will he decide to return to Japan to close out his career, like Sasaki and Johjima?
The Kenji Situation
Perhaps one of the more important stories of the winter that has gotten very little coverage so far is how the teams situation with Kenji Johjima gets resolved. We’ve all watched as he’s seen his offense take a step back the last two years, and while his work throwing out runners this season has been terrific, the fact that hardly anyone on the team likes pitching to him is no secret. He’s essentially been turned into a very expensive back-up catcher, and the only reason he’s still around is the contract extension he was given last year.
He’s scheduled to be paid $8 million in each of the next two years before the deal expires. However, with Adam Moore finishing up a strong season in Tacoma and the front office’s stated enthusiasm about his abilities, along with the pitchers fondness for Rob Johnson, and the Mariners would almost certainly prefer that Johjima spends the 2010 season with another team. How that plays itself out will be interesting and important to the reshaping of the club.
There have been rumors since the contract was signed that it contained an opt-out clause after the 2009 season, which would allow Kenji to go back to Japan if he wished. Other rumors suggest that the clause may not depend on his wishes at all, believing he could be asked to use the clause to void the rest of his contract and free the M’s from a burden they don’t particularly want Geoff Baker reminds me that he covered the opt-out clause last year, and that it exists, but is limited in what it covers. Read his story for better context. Given his current levels of production, salary, and age, along with the language barrier issue, and there’s approximately a 0.0% chance that another team would trade for Johjima and give him a starting job next year. If Kenji wants to play everyday, his only chance to do that is in Japan.
However, that assumes a lot of things. Primarily, that this opt-out clause even exists, but also that Kenji would choose regular playing time over a pretty nifty guaranteed salary the next two seasons Per Baker’s note, the opt-out can’t be used for playing time issues. The M’s got a pretty nice bargain on him the first two seasons he was here, so it’s entirely possible that he feels completely fine with being an expensive backup to finish out his career in America.
If that’s true, then Kenji is just the catching version of Carlos Silva – an overpaid old guy that the M’s don’t really want but can’t easily get rid of. And in that scenario, we’re really going to find out just how big of a magician Jack Z really is, because turning Johjima into something the M’s might be able to get some value out of will not be easy.
There’s also the possibility that this will get resolved in a way that we just won’t know the details about. Derek and I talked about this a little bit during the USSM event last month, but there’s a decent chance that Kenji ends up going back to Japan with a briefcase full of money, and while it may look like he “opted-out” of the deal, the M’s could still end up adjusting their budget to account for his stop at the ATM machine before he caught his flight. Even if Kenji does go back to Japan after the season, we can’t assume that all $8 million of his salary if off the books, and we can be pretty darn sure the M’s won’t mention how large of a going away present he got at the press conference.
Don’t bet on Johjima coming to spring training with the M’s next year. How that happens, I don’t know that anyone knows. How it plays out will be one of the more interesting stories of the winter.
And we’ll know Zduriencik from his off-season
Manager
This will consume a huge portion of press attention until it’s resolved, but it’s not that important. While the manager’s the public face of the team in some ways, and I’m sure we’ll hear about the importance of their ability to run a harmonious or winning clubhouse, there are really three kinds of managers:
– the good
– almost everyone
– the really bad
Almost every manager uses the same in-game tactics, more or less: it’s a matter of where they fall on the spectrum. Most managers follow the traditional book: they try to steal a little more often than is productive, sacrifice too often, and so on. The difference between the best and the worst managerial tactician is maybe twenty runs a year, and I mean utter incompetence against devious genius. And Earl’s not managing these days. They can be important decisions that backfire, but even then, bringing in one reliever over another might mean the chance of a game-losing hit goes from 30% to 20%.
The big difference a manager makes is in filling out a lineup card every day, putting the best team on the field, resting players, balancing offense and defense according to the needs of the day, and bullpen management.
I’ve always favored hiring someone with a lot of managerial experience, even if that’s in the minors. The failure rate of coach conversions is remarkably high. There’s no reason to risk it: there are tons of qualified candidates in the minors who’ve been grinding it out, and they’ve already dealt with more clubhouse madness than they could talk about.
Anyway:
Good sign: Anyone with more than a couple seasons under their belt. Bonus points for smarts, reputation, good player relationships, and so on.
Bad sign: Ned Yost.
Ibanez
Raul’s been the public face of the franchise and also one of the lesser problems. His defense in left is so bad it negates much of the value of his bat. He really should be a DH. As much as Ibanez’s swing is well-suited to Safeco, left-fielders and designated hitters, can be had on the cheap. The team’s really better off taking the draft pick. But the temptation to bring back one of the only productive and popular players of the last few years will be there.
Good sign: they offer Ibanez arbitration (and if he accepts, put him at DH)
Bad sign: Ibanez re-signed to a multi-year deal for a lot of money.
Bloomquist
Local boy and Ibanez’s public face assistant. Gets huge applause. Can’t hit. Can field decently. Can steal a base. Equivalent skills cost major league minimum. Like Ibanez, there will be organizational sentiment in his favor.
Good sign: Bloomquist signs a super-cheap deal or they let him move on.
Bad sign: Bloomquist gets a multi-year deal for too much money.
Left-field, DH
The team’s spent a lot of money these last few years for proven middle-of-the-order professional hitters. This is a poor use of resources. And in left they’ve punted defense entirely, though Ibanez was at least affordable.
Good sign: they bring in some cheap and effective players, especially if they make a break with the past and try to put together a nice platoon or pay for a glove in left field.
Bad sign: spending a ton of money on name players
First base
Like left field and DH, there’s no need to spend a ton of money on first basemen. My friend Jonah Keri, who is one of the most cheerful and even-keeled people you’ll ever meet, gets all agitated every time a team gives out one of these deals (“Free agent contracts never work! Never!” he says, though obviously he’s exaggerating a bit. But not much.) Fortunately,
Good sign: someone cheap and effective. Or Clement moving to first.
Okay: Bringing some rent-a-bat in for a one-year
Bad sign: One of those Mo Vaughn-style deals.
Center field
Wlad’s glove can’t play in center, and he’s not hitting. Reed plays but he’s not hitting either. But centerfielders who can hit don’t come cheap.
Good sign: someone who plays defense. Hitting would be nice, but cheap-and-effective fly catcher would be fine.
Bad sign: a season of Wlad, or a big contract to an immobile hitter.
Middle infield
Lopez and Betancourt have both turned into stone-gloved horror shows out there. But how do you solve this kind of a problem? Is it even a problem? They’re both cheap, and young. But then Betancourt’s defense went terrible and we’ve already seen him as good as he’s going to get, offensively. Lopez at least bounced back offensively — but his defense is so bad it makes him an overall liability. Do they dare hire a glove to play one or both positions and punt one of the two to another team?
Good sign: the team goes into next season with some kind of improvement at one or both positions
Bad sign: things get worse somehow
Catcher
They’re not likely to do anything about catching this season. They’ve got Johjima under contract and a host of backup options, even if they move Clement from behind the plate. I bet this is way down on the organizational to-do list.
Bench
They’ve got some internal options to sort through, but it’d be great to pick up, say, a good fourth outfielder, and if they toss Bloomquist, they’ll need a backup middle infielder.
Good sign: nice complementary pickups
Bad sign: Cairo comes back on a two-year, $5m deal
Starting pitching
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh. Cleaning this mess up would make anyone wince. Z may have the rotation declared a Superfund site. After all, it’s abandoned, hazardous waste is there… anyway.
Good sign: managing to get rid of one or more of the Washburn/Silva/Batista contracts. Signing some good reclamation or rehab projects for insurance or back of the rotation.
Bad sign: A huge contract to someone who sucks. Or, while we’re at it, a Washburn extensions.
Relief pitching
They don’t need to do much.
Good sign: if anything, small, nice pickups to supplement the current group
Bad sign: huge deals to veteran relievers
In all of these things, we’ll see some patterns emerge:
– How does he evaluate and value offense?
– How does he evaluate and value defense?
– Do things like clutch hitting, veteranosity, professional hitting, previous role experience, and the like make a difference?
– How much are they worth?
– Similarly, how are pitchers evaluated? For instance, are we going to see Silva/Washburn-style deals, or will our new GM possibly look for candidates who were unlucky in things beyond their control?
– Relatively, where’s the payroll at hand going towards?
– How good is he at evaluating and signing freely available talent: the minor league free agents, the rehab projects, the rebound candidates?
– How does he compare a free agent option to those freely available players?
– How well does he do in dealings with other teams?
… and on, and on.
Up next: looking forward to organizational changes.