The Jones Gold Glove thing
So supposedly Adam Jones’ brother leaked that Jones won a Gold Glove. This is already being reported as coming over Franklin Gutierrez and a grave injustice and so forth… but it’s not, not yet, and I’m not sure why everyone’s jumping on this.
There are three Gold Gloves given in each league for outfielders, and they’re not position-divided. Jones could well win as well as Gutierrez. Just look at the last few years of AL voting, when we’ve seen two and even three center fielders win in a year (Hunter, Sizemore, Ichirio!)(and Vernon Wells).
Also, I don’t see why we should really get worked up about this if it’s true. It’s like bemoaning the Oscars, or NBA officiating. The surprise would be if the Gold Glove voting made sense for once.
Recommended reading: “Commie Ball”
Michael Lewis writes a long piece for Vanity Fair on Cuban baseball players and the conviction of Gus Dominguez. Check it out.
ObMarinersTie: Betancourt’s contract with the Mariners results in Gus Dominguez’s kids being threatened and, later, Betancourt’s varied stories and unwillingness to testify on Dominguez’s behalf leads to his conviction. Long quote on page seven:
it was the smuggler’s word against the agent’s, and there was really only one person who might have broken the tie: Yuniesky Betancourt. The Dominguez side never called him as a witness, mainly because they had no idea what he might say. He’d already told three different stories, two of them to immigration agents, about how and when he’d come to the United States. He declined to return phone calls, and slammed the door in the face of the private eye they’d hired to track him down. As his former agent went to trial, Víctor Mesa’s old shortstop was back in Seattle, playing in their home opener. And on top of it all, he’d unwittingly provided the U.S. government with an explanation for why Gus Dominguez needed to smuggle ballplayers in from Cuba: to make back the money he’d lost on Betancourt—for, having stiffed his smugglers, Betancourt then stiffed the agent who had fed and housed him for six months. He signed the contract with the Mariners that Dominguez had negotiated on his behalf, but paid whatever commission he paid to someone else. (A grievance regarding the allocation of the commission is ongoing.) The money Dominguez lost on Betancourt, the U.S. government argued, threw his business into disarray. He became desperate—so desperate that he ordered up five more players from Cuba.
Sigh.
Reminder:
The AFL Rising Stars Showcase is on right now at MLB.com. You can watch it live without paying or signing up for anything. Strasburg has been scratched and the West is down 7-0 in the first, but the good news is that Ackley led off with a walk and Fields got the final out of the top half of the first.
Recommended reading
Joe Posnanski on the frustration of the Yankees, a topic that leads people like me to only half -jokingly propose they be forced to eat other teams’ bad contracts. Check it out.
Hardy to Minnesota
You can officially cross J.J. Hardy off the list of possible options this winter. He was traded to the Minnesota Twins for Carlos Gomez.
Heck of a move for the Twins.
Getting to five hundred was hard too
To add something to Dave’s post on why the M’s approach this off-season will look different as involves different trade-offs, there’s something we should briefly touch on:
What just happened with the team is not common or easy. If we remember back to the start of this off-season, it’s obvious: all we really wanted is some forward progress. We should be overjoyed we got more than that. But there’s this perception that the first part of this, the rebound to respectability, is an easy first step, and sometimes it’s easier the worse the team did. It’s not, and it’s not. We should be heartened that the front office made it look like that.
Even excepting teams that are woefully underfunded by their ownership, look at how many teams stink and stink for long periods of time. The Pirates haven’t been over .500 since 1992, new stadium and all. The Orioles play in a tough division (but so do the M’s) and have a ton of cash, they haven’t been over .500 since 1997. Since 1996 (all the full-seasons post strike/lock-out), a quick rundown of teams who reached the depths the 2008 Mariners did:
Baltimore: bottomed out in 2001 at 63, then won 67, 71, 78… still haven’t made it to .500
Detroit won 53 (!) games in 1996, got to 79 the next year (+26) and then won 65, 69,79,65,69,79,66,55,43(!), 72 (+29!), 71, and finally 95 in 2006. And they had money.
The Royals have had 2008 Mariner-like win totals repeatedly and only once bounced back in 03, and immediately fell back.
The Twins won 63 in 1999, improved a little the next year and then won 85 in 2001.
Oakland won 65 in 1997 and steadily improved each year to their 103-win peak in 2002.
Tampa won 63 games or less five times and only turned it around in 2008.
Or just to take an example from our own recent history: the M’s won 63 games in 2004, and only improved 6 games the next year and 9 games the year after that.
If it’s so easy, why couldn’t the last bunch of guys do it? Why can’t various rotating crews of people, under cash constraints or not, do it? Why does it happen so infrequently?
Because it’s hard. Getting to .500 is hard. Building a championship team may be harder, and it certainly involves different tradeoffs. But last year’s roster rebuild was a huge victory, and one that we should value accordingly. Other franchises, you can be sure, wish they had had such success.
Griffey Decision Not Going To Drag Out
C. Trent Rosecrans, longtime sports writer in Cincinnati, passed along this story, where he basically just says that he talked to Brian Goldberg, Griffey’s agent, and he expects an announcement in a week or so. Rosecrans probably has the best relationship with Junior of any member of the media, so take this with fewer grains of salt than you usually would – this is about as close to from the source as we’re going to get.
The M’s potential free agents
For your discussion. They have to declare for FA in the next 15 days.
RP-R Miguel Batista
SP-L Erik Bedard
3B-R Adrian Beltre
1B-L Russ Branyan
OF-L Endy Chavez
DH-L Ken Griffey Jr.
DH-R Mike Sweeney
SS-R Jack Wilson
So expect extensions or FA announcements for all of those guys. Pravda doesn’t list Wilson, presumably because the M’s could pick up his option year so it’s out of his hands.
The Mistake Lottery
One of the greatest advantages the Yankees have is that they’re able to blithely make mistakes and move on from them. Their market advantage is so huge that they can afford to pay their players to play against them on other teams just so they can put someone even better in their place. And baseball’s ridiculous territory system protects the two New York teams’ unfairly huge revenue streams.
At the same time, the worst problem for teams trying to turn around their fortunes is that they’re saddled with massive salary drains the previous regime took on.
Therefore, I propose a new yearly draft. The Mistake Draft.
Here’s how it works for most teams. At the end of the year, you get to look over your roster and pick one contract (say, a terrible pitcher with 4y, $48m left). You submit that name to the Commissioner for Life’s office. Your team gets a number of ping-pong balls (because I love the classics), as follows:
(Number of losses in previous season + (17 – Population of team’s metro area in millions)) + Amount in millions remaining on deal
–
Number of seasons, partial and full, for current GM on that team if over 2 + (Number of years current ownership group in place/2) + Number of years remaining on that contract
Rounded up.
So Carlos! If the M’s had submitted him right off the back, it’d be 63 + 12 + 48 = 123, divided by 17 (Yamauchi bought the team in 1992, we’re not counting the transfer to Nintendo of America) + 4 = 21
123/21 = 5.8.. = 6 lotto numbers.
Going to be tough to beat. And your window closes pretty quickly. And feel free to play around with the formula to come up with something better: I’m offering this as a starting point for something that doesn’t favor stagnant clueless teams (or at least not for long) and also has some small incorporation of the market size inequality. KC needs to get rid of a bad contract a lot more than the Cubs do.
The balls go into the tumbler and… tada! Carlos is a Yankee. He gets to pitch mop-up innings or clap the team to victory from the clubhouse rail or enjoy a long stay on the 60-day DL for acute inadequacy or whatever they decide to do with him. Unless he has a no-trade clause, in which case he gets to waive the no-trade clause or become a free agent. Next year the Mets get to pick up someone’s mistake.
Now you might be thinking that this encourages incompetent teams to change their front offices and/or ownership. Good!
And you might worry that this encourages smaller-payroll teams with new people in charge to take wild gambles in the hopes that they can compete, in the hopes that even if the player doesn’t work out they can still dump them on the Yankees. Also good!
Or that teams might even look at the formula and figure the thing to really do is sign someone sort of good to a 2y, $80m deal loaded $2m, $78m, hoping that they can tag the Yankees with that second year. Good! I mean, uh, given a decent formula teams are still so likely to get stuck with a player that they aren’t going to do anything too crazy.
This might all seem silly on first read. But what are your other options? More progressive revenue sharing? Reform of territory rules to let broke teams bathe in the revenue-rich New York waters? Now who’s being silly?
M’s Claim Yusmeiro Petit
The M’s continue to collect moderately interesting, low upside pitching without expending any resources. This time, they’ve claimed Yusmeiro Petit off waivers from the Diamondbacks. Petit is a Cha Seung Baek kind of pitcher – throws a lot of low velocity junk in the strike zone, gives up a ridiculous amount of fly balls (and correspondingly, home runs), but gets a decent amount of strikeouts because he’s willing to go upstairs with the fastball.
He’s not good, but he’s not horrible either. Safeco could help reduce his HR problem, which is his biggest issue, but as a right-hander with a minor league fastball, he’s kind of a worse version of Doug Fister. He’s certainly not one of the 11 or 12 best pitchers in the organization right now, and he’s out of options, so he can’t be stashed in Tacoma without clearing waivers.
He’s not a bad guy to have in spring training. If his change-up or breaking ball improves or he learns a two-seamer or something, he might turn out to be an okay back-end starter. Otherwise, he’s just a replacement level arm. But he was free, so the M’s have picked up a guy who might turn out to be useful for a few innings without paying anything to get him.
This is what freely available talent looks like.
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