Position Roundtables: Starting Designated Hitter
Jeff: Starting Designated Hitter: Raul Ibanez and/or Bucky Jacobsen
Dear St. Patrick:
Are you there, St. Patrick? It’s me, Jeff.
Look, I know I don’t take much time to reflect on my Irish heritage, probably because all we know of it is that my great-grandfather fled from some trouble he got into, changed his name, and forbade anyone in the family from ever speaking of The Old Country again. But I come to you two weeks before your namesake holiday to ask a favor.
You’ve got to help Bucky Jacobsen out.
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Okay, so I’ve had a beer
I’m a little more coherent now. Let’s deal with some of the big arguments.
The M’s had to do something
I won’t argue there was a strong drive to make some statement signings. I think there are better things to do.
The M’s finally sign someone and you’re whining — you’re no fan
If to look good and impress fans now the team is signing players who will cripple the budget in 3-4 years when the team comes around to contention, they’re doing harm to the franchise.
How can any fan be happy about moves that don’t substantially improve the team’s short or long-term future? You can disagree with people who don’t see the move as good, but to argue that people who are dismayed aren’t fans is nonsensical. Anyone who cares enough about the team to pay attention at least deserves a respectful argument.
What’re you so wigged out about?
It’s rich for the risk.
Or, as Dave put it
Spending $12 million per season on Richie Sexson simply continues that tradition. Even ignoring the risks surrounding his injury (which is fool hardy, but is another post all together), his expected performance from 30-33 will not put him in the superstar elite class. He’s going to be a good player making great player money, returning less marginal wins than should be expected from a player with his contract.
Or, even further back, Dave’s free agent writeup on Sexson.
He’s only had one injury ever
Okay, first, not true, second, would that be okay if it was (for instance) a stopped heart? We can reasonably be sure that the shoulder passed the physical, however, we can also be reasonably assured that as a pre-existing condition, that shoulder is uninsurable.
This improves the team, anyway
As Dave’s pointed out recently, it’s not about whether or not any move is an incremental upgrade, it’s about whether or not it’s the best use of resources.
Or, to put this another way: what would Beltre or Beltran have to sign for to make him not worth the difference between him and Sexson? A front-line pitcher? Or even interesting gamble pitchers with upside, like Odalis Perez?
The Market
I want to address the issue of market value that seems to be coming up a lot lately. There seems to be a school of thought that MLB is a captialist ideal where each player’s actual value is determined by what the top bidder is willing to pay for his services. The comment “Player X is worth his salary because that’s what the market is.” is idealistic crap. Using a free market ideology to justify huge contracts for non-superstar players is flawed thinking.
The baseball market is a zero sum game. Because the 30 franchises each have 25 roster spots, all major league players are competing for one of 750 jobs. Every time a player who is not one of the 750 best available gets a job, someone gets bumped to Triple-A who has major league skills. Financially, it works the same way. MLB as an entity spends about $3.1 billion per year on player salaries. Those dollars aren’t evenly distributed throughout the franchises, however, that is still the total pie that must be divided 750 ways.
A player’s actual value, of course, comes from his performance on the field. In a perfect market, the best players would get the most money and it would continue on down to the fringe major league types making the league minimum. However, as we all know, MLB is not a perfect market. There are inefficincies that can be exploited for a competitive advantage.
The late Doug Pappas invented a system he called Marginal Wins, which basically holds that a team of players making the league minimum plucked out of Triple-A could win about 50 games in a season. Therefore, what teams are actually paying for are wins above 50, the theoretical replacement level performance of a team of fringe players. He published a slew of essays for Baseball Prospectus on the topic, and they’re worth reading if you haven’t already. I’ll skip the details and just move on to the summary, for brevity sake.
Essentially, most winning teams pay approximately $1.5-$2 million per Marginal Win as a whole (the 2004 Mariners paid about $5 million per marginal win). If you have a higher payroll, you can afford to pay a bit more for the marginal wins to reduce risk. A team like Tampa may have a good marginal win/dollar ratio, but that’s because they haven’t spent enough to be competitive. The goal, obviously, is wins, not optimal win/dollar spending. However, a team that spends its money efficiently is going to win more than a team that doesn’t, given equal payrolls.
This is the problem a lot of us have with the signings of players like Delgado, Sexson, Koskie, Glaus, Ortiz, Wright, Pavano, Vizquel, etc… The market in the 2004 free agent period is severely out of touch with intelligent spending. The difference in performance between most of the free agents and what can be obtained for a fraction of the cost simply does not support the dollars being paid out to these players. The middle class of baseball has become extremely overpriced.
Because of the way the system is setup for players who do not have service time to qualify for 5th year arbitration or free agency, the big values among the players belong to that group. It is a unique advantage for a team to get premium performance for small dollar amounts, giving themselves the ability to spend a bulk of their payroll on star players. However, a weird reaction to the Alex Rodriguez contract has caused the price of superstar players to fall while shifting that surplus money to average or slightly above average players. This is a market inefficiency and one that can be exploited.
Currently, the optimal roster construction would be a collection of highly paid, elite players surrounded by a roster of pre-arbitration eligible role players. The system is designed to reward teams who develop prodcutive players from within the organization. Attempting to build a roster through free agency, paying “what the market will bear”, is a great way to spend a lot of money on a bad team.
People criticize us for saying that we can never be pleased, no matter how good a player the Mariners sign. This is pretty obviously not true, as the feed on Saturday will be one giant party if Adrian Beltre is signed by then. However, it goes to a point; the Mariners have consistently struggled at filling out the roster from the two tiers of players that return value; unique superstar talents that cannot be replaced and homegrown players producing in their pre-arbitration seasons.
Spending $12 million per season on Richie Sexson simply continues that tradition. Even ignoring the risks surrounding his injury (which is fool hardy, but is another post all together), his expected performance from 30-33 will not put him in the superstar elite class. He’s going to be a good player making great player money, returning less marginal wins than should be expected from a player with his contract.
I realize a large majority of the fan base are just happy that we’re spending money. However, unspent money still has value. The choices are not Free Agent A or Free Agent B for whatever the top bidder is willing to pay. There are hundreds of options available, and limiting ourselves to a Sexson/Delgado comparison is missing the big picture.