The Hardball Times -- Jacob Jackson http://www.hardballtimes.com/main Baseball. Insight. Daily. en studes@hardballtimes.com Copyright 2013 2013-06-19T08:32:15+00:00 Rule 5 Draft http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/rule-5-draft/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/rule-5-draft/#When:18:26:15
Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-11-19T18:26:15+00:00 The Yankees still CAN buy the World Series http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-yankees-still-can-buy-the-world-series/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-yankees-still-can-buy-the-world-series/#When:04:05:15
1.) Re-up Joe Torre, or pick a new manager from among three highly regarded applicants.
2.) Enter the ring with Alex Rodriguez and Scott Boras, or take a pass.
3.) Protect their precious young prospects, or trade them and go for broke in '08.
4.) Pony up for new assets on the free-agent market, or rein in spending to a level below the luxury tax threshold.
5.) Retain the services of the aging old guard—Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte—or symbolically usher in a new era of post-George Steinbrenner Yankee baseball.

Of course, questions one and two already have been answered, and they couldn't have been answered any better. Torre was offered more than twice the annual salary of the next highest-paid manager, and deemed the offer an insult. A-Rod was equally unflattered by the team's extension offers, and clearly didn't want to be a Yankee anymore anyway, simplifying that decision.

I think the team is the better for both decisions. They had the unique opportunity to replace Torre, who has at most a few seasons left in the tank, with the brightest managerial candidate in baseball, a man who is batting 1.000 at winning Manager of the Year awards. Had they acquiesced to Torre and offered a multi-year deal, Joe Girardi likely would have taken an attractive head post elsewhere, and they would've lost him forever.

Re-upping Torre, who clearly is burnt out already, would have wasted more than $5 million, a potential exhaustion-based retirement midseason in '09, and the eventual turnover to Don Mattingly, who still would have no managing experience.

Instead, with the 43-year-old Girardi (who will make about a third of what Torre made last year), the Bombers may have their managerial situation solved for the next decade or more. This way, Brian Cashman and the rest of the Yankees' brass can create the next managerial icon instead of having annual power struggles with the previous one.

The decision to hire Girardi was further validated by what happened in the aftermath. Clearly inferior to Girardi in terms of resume and experience, Mattingly's greatest selling point was his apparent lifelong, undying loyalty to the Yankees ... and yet, the day the Girardi decision became public, Mattingly's camp announced that he wouldn't consider staying a part of the Yankee coaching staff.

I hope for Torre's and Mattingly's sake that they don't follow Grady Little as Scapegoats Nos. 2 and 3 respectively in Los Angeles in the wake of Ned Coletti's past, present and future missteps. Both—especially Torre—deserve better.

As for A-Rod, it was never a great fit, even this year as his numbers soared to new heights. If all is right with the world and both parties accurately recognize a perfect match when they see one, he's destined to become an Angel, where he'll help the Halos become the third virtual lock for an AL playoff berth in '08, joining Boston and Cleveland.

That leads us back to the Yankees, and their quest to become not only the fourth entrant into next year's ALDS, but also the next World Series winner. To get there, they'll have to prove to be better than the Tigers in the regular season and win two difficult series against two of the three AL juggernauts. (Of course they'll have to pummel the I-AA champ in the World Series too, but that's hardly the biggest hurdle at this point.)

How well the Yankees answer questions 3, 4 and 5 from above will go a long way in determining whether they can return to the winner's circle in '08 and beyond.

Step 1: Trade Melky Cabrera, Wilson Betemit, Shelley Duncan and Darrell Rasner for Johan Santana.

This package might not get it done, especially if Coletti decides he wants to win the A-Rod sweepstakes and simultaneously sell off the Dodgers' prize jewels to make a desperate run at the playoffs in '08. This actually wouldn't be a bad idea from Coletti's perspective—long-term health of the franchise be damned—since his job is probably on the line. Bottom line, if the Dodgers decide they want Santana, they'll get him, because Coletti will give up more than Cashman will—and kudos to Cashman for his discipline.

But if the Dodgers aren't involved in the bidding, the Twins may find this is the best package they'll get. It doesn't include either of the two names who would get Terry Ryan begging for his old job back—Philip Hughes and Ian Kennedy—but a deeper look reveals how many holes the Twins can fill with this trade:

*Cabrera fills the void left by Torii Hunter in free agency and can provide good defense and a .750-.775 OPS in center field.
*Betemit provides much-needed pop at third base and mercifully ends the Nick Punto era.
*Shelley Duncan fills the Twins' never-ending black hole at DH with—you heard it here first—25-30 homers as next year's Jack Cust. Yeah, he'll strike out 150 times too, but the .500 SLG will be worth it.
*Rasner replaces Carlos Silva in the rotation and admirably fills the fifth starter role for years to come.

Sure, none of these four guys are marquee names ... but the Twins are smart enough that they don't worry much about that stuff. They can't afford to, and besides, they already have Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer to be franchise faces. What they need is to plug a lot of holes with league-average production on the cheap. Strangely, the Yankees, of all teams, are the perfect team to help them.

Here's what the Twins do see in that package: nearly 20 total cost-controlled years among those four players, in exchange for one year of Johan Santana, who has undeniably already peaked.

Another factor in this deal is that the draft picks Santana would yield if the Twins held onto him through next season would be less valuable to the Twins than to most teams, because of how the Twins draft. Philosophically, the Twins loathe drafting high-ceiling, high-risk players who command the biggest signing bonuses. Look no further than this year's questionable decision to draft and sign lightly regarded Ben Revere late in the first round for a paltry $750,000.

It's unlikely that the Twins would be able to turn the draft picks they'd receive as compensation for Santana into a star-quality player, because they often don't draft with that goal in mind, even in the first round. They want a low-risk pick who is likely to justify their minimal investment.

That's why the Twins, perhaps more than most teams, would be enticed by four cost-controlled, low-ceiling, MLB-ready regulars who wouldn't require the additonal expense of signing bonuses or minor league grooming, as Santana's compensation draft picks would.

Now look at the benefits of this deal from the Yankee side:

*They avoid giving up Hughes or Kennedy, which is critical because the upside of both players is still relatively unknown, and an ace pitcher is the hardest commodity to acquire. As the Yankees have found out the hard way with Randy Johnson, Kevin Brown and others, a pitcher is usually past his prime by the time he reaches the open market. Money will always be able to buy the Yankees productive hitters in their 30s, but in today's economy the mid-to-late-20s elite starter is virtually unbuyable...

*...which is what makes Santana—even for one year—more valuable than he appears on the surface. No, he's not as unhittable as he was two years ago. But he's still one of the five best starters in the game. The Yankees' biggest hurdle the past few years has been getting out of the five-game Divisonal Series; how much more confident would they be if they had Santana throwing games one and five, instead of Chien-Ming Wang?

We just watched a playoff in which Josh Beckett showed the value of having one of the game's best starters on your team. If C.C. Sabathia was as good as Beckett, there would've been a parade in Cleveland a few days ago. Swap Beckett with Wang, and perhaps that parade is in New York. But Beckett isn't on the trading block, and neither are Roy Halladay or Jake Peavy. Only one of the game's top five starters is. If the Yankees have Santana throwing two of the five ALCS games, regardless of their opponent, I like their odds.

*They get to audition Santana in New York, and/or sign him to a favorable long-term extension before he hits free agency. Either way, the team wins. If the Yankees don't sign him to an extension, they get to find out if he is a good fit in New York in a one-year trial run, before making a disastrous $100 million mistake in free agency and finding out the hard way that their ace pitcher is miserable riding in taxis and seeing his name in gossip columns. They offer him arbitration and still get the draft picks, which are more valuable to the Yankees because they can afford to draft high-ceiling, top-dollar talent.

On the other hand, if the Yankees do sign him to an extension upon acquiring him, they get a discount by keeping him off the open market (see the case of Zito v. Zambrano, '07). It would be hard for Santana to leave five years, $100 million sitting on the table, even if it is $30-40 million less than he could get on the open market. Even the best pitcher knows he's only one pitch away from never being the same again.

*The final benefit for the Yankees: They really don't have to give up anything they can't buy elsewhere. No offense to Melky Cabrera, but a cost-controlled .750 OPS in center field just isn't as valuable to the Yankees as it is to most teams.

Step 2: Re-sign Posada and Rivera, and persuade Pettitte to exercise his $16 million option.

It's pretty simple: After these three guys choke on their corn flakes while reading about the Santana trade in The Times on the morning after, they'll know the Yankees have no intentions of trifling with their twilight years. You could put a blank check in front of Posada and Rivera at that point and they'd fill in a figure similar to the overtures other teams were making, maybe even slightly less. They've earned it. And once they're on board, Pettitte—who provided the Yanks with their best postseason pitching performance this year—won't be far behind.

Step 3: Sign Andruw Jones to a five-year, $95 million free-agent contract. This would cap the Yankees' offseason with three Type A/B free agents.

(Quoting a little-known rule: "If 39-62 players qualify as Type A and B free agents, no team may sign more than three, with the limits increasing accordingly for higher totals.")

By my count, 47 players qualify as either Type A or B free agents this offseason, which means that the Yankees can sign three. Thus, they should use their financial power to sign the three they should want most—Posada and Rivera, and Andruw Jones.

As for the $95 million figure, sure, it sounds absurd for a guy coming off a terrible year, but ask yourself this: When was the last time you weren't surprised by the value of the headline deals during the Hot Stove season? Every year people think salaries can't inflate further and every year they exceed expectations.

There's a lot to like about Jones, especially compared to the rest of the free agent outfield class: He's a type B free agent, so the Yankees won't lose their first-round pick (and in fact they may get two, thanks to A-Rod bolting), there's no concern about how his numbers will translate (as with Japanese star Kosuke Fukudome), there's no concern about his inflated home stats in a launching pad or his reckless style of play (Aaron Rowand), there's no blatant reason for PED concern (Mike Cameron), and he's slightly younger than all of them.

A free agent's perceived value is inordinately tied to his most recent-year performance, and Jones' one-year dive will make him one of this year's best free agent bargains in the long run. He's a terrific defender, he's posted a 50-homer season, and his tremendous raw athleticism (he became a fixture in the bigs at a much younger age than Rowand, for example) leads me to believe he's a much better bet to hang on to his skills into his mid- and even late-30s than Rowand or any other available free agent.

The rebuttal to an Andruw Jones signing would be, "But the Yanks already had a crowded outfield. Why spend money there, when they have a more glaring need at third base and need pitching help?"

To me, this thinking represents a fundamental error that most teams make in assessing the free agent market (and the Yankees are perhaps the only team with the resources to exploit it annually):

Due to the scarcity of quality resources on the free agent market, it is less important what the team's needs are than where the actual talent exists.

This means that a wealthy team like the Yankees should always target the position of greatest depth in free agency, even if that doesn't coincide with the team's immediate need. This year, the position of greatest depth is the outfield, and therefore, that position is likely to yield some of the better values and production. Those teams that feel forced to address their third-base needs via the free agent market will be held hostage by the A-Rod and Mike Lowell sweepstakes, and they'll both be grossly overpaid.

For a creative thinker, it's too simple to say that the Yankees already have a full outfield. What they have is a very tradeable asset—Cabrera—and the money to make a sound investment when they replace him via free agency.

The Yankees haven't leveraged their financial resources this way nearly enough. They've often invested in the pitching market even when it was painfully thin (Carl Pavano, Jaret Wright), they've only passively pursued the biggest prizes because they didn't have tremendous need at the position (Vladimir Guerrero—how much of a bargain did he end up being?), they've occasionally settled for second-best (Kei Igawa instead of Dice-K), and worst , they've given out no-trade clauses to their free agents like they were Halloween candy. That made the team unable to eat some salary and acquire prospects for Pavano, Jason Giambi and, eventually, Hideki Matsui.

If the Yankees never offered no-trade clauses, and the baseball economy stayed strong, they could use their money to create a nearly unstoppable cycle: a.) Make sound choices on a few free agents each year and offer them multi-year deals, b.) trade those players for prospects during the last year of their deals for prospects (as they did with Gary Sheffield), when other teams can swallow the one-year hit to help them make a run for the playoffs, and c.) trade the prospects—the game's most liquid asset—for whatever needs the team has in a given year.

This would be the ultimate leveraging of the Yankees' wealth, but because of all the no-trade clauses on their roster, they haven't been able to enact it. This is unfortunate for them, especially now, because teams have a need and desire for the one-year rentals the Yankees could constantly be offering.

Step 4: Face reality and accept that Johnny Damon is the game's highest-paid fourth outfielder

This is the next evolution of the game, and it's happening already: The richest teams will have a few $8-12 million a year backups. Isn't it kind of weird that every year, the Yankees have the wealthiest team, and yet always have a few guys like Miguel Cairo? Teams will pay starters seemingly anything, but even the wealthiest organizations seem loathe to pay top dollar for quality backups.

This leads to political decisions, where the highest-paid guy always ends up getting the playing time, because if he's riding the bench, it makes the general manager look bad. It's as if it's Little League all over again, and because Timmy's mom works the Snack Shack every week, he's playing six innings. It amazes me that these petty salary politics sometimes override common sense in a business where small decisions can have multi-million dollar ramifications for every team each year.

Making a basketball analogy, if it's OK for Adonal Foyle to make $10 million a year and never see the floor, what's so bad about having Johnny Damon at $12 million coming off the bench and getting 400-450 at-bats?

It would be a mistake to let politics play into the construction of the Yankees' starting outfield in '08. Yes, Damon is making starting outfielder money. But the team needs to be honest about what he'll provide and fill its three starting outfield slots with guys who are better bets to have an OPS higher than Damon next year—Matsui, Andruw Jones and Bobby Abreu.

Step 5: Trade several mid-level prospects to acquire Richie Sexson and Jack Wilson, swallowing all their salaries

This is another example of the Yankees using their financial leverage to acquire talent without giving up key players. The Mariners would welcome the salary relief and Sexson would be annointed the Yankees' starting first baseman heading into the season. A contract-year drive and the guarantee that he'd see strikes in the potent Yankee lineup would help him enjoy a renaissance.

Thanks to his second-half surge, Wilson would come at slightly steeper price, but he's also not going to be part of a playoff team in Pittsburgh anytime soon, and the new management already has shown a willingness to trade veterans for younger assets. As for Wilson's role—well, that leads me to the heresy I intentionally left for the end of this article so that people would at least read this far ....

Step 6: Move Derek Jeter to third base, and install Wilson as the Yankees' starting shortstop.

Blasphemous! Impossible!

Well, maybe to the first ... but no to the second. The moment Team A-Rod announced his opt-out, it was a given that whoever manned the hot corner in the Bronx next year was going to be an offensive downgrade. So why not at least use it as an opportunity to improve the defense?

Moving Jeter to third and Wilson to short is likely to improve the left side of the Yankees' infield significantly. Jeter was one of the worst defensive shortstops in the American League this year, and he won't get any better as he reaches age 35 in 2010, the final year of his contract.

Do Yankees fans want him to retire a Yankee? Undoubtedly. Far different sentiment for him than for A-Rod.

Will Jeter able to play shortstop effectively until he does retire, in, say, eight or 10 years? Absolutely not.

Inevitably, this seemingly blasphemous move—displacing Derek Jeter—is bound to happen at some point. The circumstances surrounding A-Rod's departure give Cashman the perfect opportunity to make this transition now, and save Jeter's ego in the process. It's not hard to imagine reading this quote from Yankees' brass: "Derek is such an unselfish player, a true champion—we had the opportunity to acquire a player who could play shortstop, and since Alex left us high and dry, Derek volunteered to unselfishly fill the void."

Jeter's bat will still play at third for the foreseeable future, and third base will help mask his range deficiencies. Wilson strikes me as the gritty type of player who will respond well to playing in New York and become a fan favorite, while playing stellar defense and maintaining league-average offense for the position. That's all New York's offensive juggernaut needs from him. He's already dealt with the pressure of being the highest-paid player on his team in Pittsburgh; he'll fit right in with the Yankees, who have a few players who held that role on their former teams.

Step 7: Filling in the Gaps

The previous moves lead to the following potential R-L-R lineup:

Jeter 3B
Abreu RF
Jones CF
Matsui LF
Posada C
Giambi DH
Sexson 1B
Cano 2B
J. Wilson SS

Having Damon as the fourth outfielder provides all kinds of additional lineup flexibility. As for the final three members of the bench, remember that the Yankees can't sign any more Type A or B free agents, but that doesn't prevent the team from nabbing these three, none of whom has A or B status:

Mike Lamb (3B-1B), Cuban defector Alexei Ramirez (MIF, OF) and Jose Molina (C).

Again, I see this as a look into what the future will be for the wealthiest teams—signing multi-million dollar backups. None of these three players would cost any draft picks, and they practically would ensure that the Yankees would have one of the best benches in the American League. This could represent the all-important difference between, say, 91 wins and 94 wins. Those three crucial wins justify a $30 million outlay those three,. And there's the added assurance that a replacement-level, Cairo-type player would never be soaking up at-bats if one of the regulars went down.

As for the pitching staff, the addition of Santana might be enough to make the Yankees feel comfortable leaving Joba Chamberlain in the bullpen—where he might end up being sorely needed. On their own, a relief corps of Rivera, Edwar Ramirez, Chris Britton, Brian Bruney and Kyle Farnsworth won't strike fear into any team's heart, but Chamberlain would change the complexion of that group entirely.

If I had my way, that leaves an Opening Day rotation of Santana-Wang-Pettitte-Mike Mussina-Pavano, with the immortal Igawa in long relief.

Notice two glaring omissions? Perhaps it's the penny-pinching A's fan in me, but I'm using the flexibility of Philip Hughes and Ian Kennedy's option years to leave them in Triple-A to open the season, knowing they'll be up with the big club eventually in '08. A lot of good baseball fans would wonder why anyone in their right mind would do this, and our own sharp Jeff Sackmann has the answer here .

Basically, if the Yankees open the year with Hughes and Kennedy in the rotation, there's no place to put Pavano or Mussina, because they can refuse to be sent down. But if Hughes and Kennedy begin the year in Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, they can become the team's sixth and seventh starters, ready to fill in for any of the five starting pitchers when injury occurs.

Sackmann has written at length about the importance of sixth and seventh starters over the course of the season. Every team needs them, but few teams adequately budget for that need. Die-hard Yankees fans who weathered 20-plus starts from Sean Henn/Chase Wright/Matt DeSalvo/Igawa/Rasner last year know what I'm referring to.

In a much-rosier scenario next year, those injury-replacement starts could go to Hughes and Kennedy.

(To the bewilderment of many pundits, the Twins used exactly this play with Ramon Ortiz, Sidney Ponson and Matt Garza last year. They never believed that either Ortiz or Ponson was better than Garza; they simply knew that if they could ride Ortiz and Ponson for a few months, they'd cost Garza just enough service-time days to ensure cost control over him for another full year. Pretty sneaky, huh? That anecdote might make it easier for fans to understand why many players seek every last dollar when they finally get the chance in free agency.).

The Outlook

This team won't score as many runs as the '07 version did. But it won't need to, and it'll be much better built for the playoffs. It's also probably going to be a mentally tougher team, exactly what Girardi would want—winning lots of close games, which is great preparation for the tests the playoffs will bring. If any shortcomings do arise, there's so much starting pitching depth that not only will the team not need a midseason Roger Clemens burst, but it'll even be able to hold Wang over other teams' heads as the big, cost-controlled prize of the trading deadline.

The infield and outfield defense will be much better, without creating any replacement-level holes in the lineup. And a playoff rotation of Santana-Pettitte-Hughes-Wang or Chamberlain-Santana has a great chance of winning a five-game series.

As for the '08-'09 offseason, the Yanks could shed a staggering $90 million in payroll from Sexson, Giambi, Pettitte, Abreu, Mussina, Pavano and Farnsworth coming off the books. Next offseason, it'd be wise to leave the DH open long-term for Posada's eventual hibernation there, but that wouldn't preclude the Yankees from chasing Mark Teixeira to replace Sexson at first base. Chamberlain would have to move the starting rotation for '09, joining an ultra-talented, relatively cheap staff led by Santana-Hughes-Kennedy-Wang, with Tyler Clippard as the sixth starter.

Losing Chamberlain from the bullpen would be a tough blow to the relief corps, but the new Yankees blueprint calls for pursuing only what is bountiful on the free agent market, and next offseason that will be bona fide relievers. Joe Nathan becomes the heir apparent to Rivera, and either K-Rod or Rafael Soriano completes the three-player heist along with Teixeira to ensure yet another World Series contender on paper.

The nature of being the Yankees is having countless options, thanks to their resources. This offseason they could instead trade for Miguel Cabrera, make a play for Mike Lowell, move Cano to third base or Chamberlain to the rotation, stand pat or go for broke, or go literally dozens of different directions in between. I've proposed only one approach, and it's certainly not guaranteed to work.

But if I saw that team on the field next April, it would be my World Series favorite. That's all a front office can hope for when the offseason is complete.


Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-11-02T04:05:15+00:00 The 50/20 club http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/the-50-20-club/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/the-50-20-club/#When:05:20:15
Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-08-26T05:20:15+00:00 Suspending a Starting Pitcher http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/suspending-a-starting-pitcher/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/suspending-a-starting-pitcher/#When:02:27:15
Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-08-15T02:27:15+00:00 How to fix the Pirates http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-to-fix-the-pirates/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-to-fix-the-pirates/#When:04:08:15 Can one play—one second—change the course of two franchises for a generation?

Perhaps this one did.

That's a link you simply have to click—1992 NLCS, Game 7, Pirates leading the Braves 2-1, bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, and little-used reserve Francisco Cabrera, the last man on the Braves' bench, hits a seeing-eye grounder into left field. Then comes an epic battle of early-'90s mustaches: That skinny guy who fields it and throws home is 1992 NL MVP Barry Bonds, the runner from second with the piano on his back is Sid Bream, and catcher Mike LaValliere fields the throw a few feet up the first base line, allowing Bream to slide in safely by a fraction of a second under the tag.

(Look closely at that video one more time...why was Bonds playing so deep? Francisco Cabrera hit 17 homers in his entire major league career, and there were two outs with the winning run on second. The outcome most likely to burn them was a single, and Bonds never had a terrific arm. On a side note, if the good folks of MLB get that video clip taken down before you get a chance to see it, you can find another one on YouTube if you're resourceful enough).

Okay, are you back from that trip down NLCS memory lane? Good. Of course the rest is history—the Braves' 3-2 victory sent them to the World Series, further establishing them as the new class of the National League en route to an unprecedented 14 straight division titles; conversely, the Pirates' mini-dynasty of three straight NLCS apearances crumbled immediately.

In the '92-'93 offseason the Giants, on the verge of being moved to Tampa, signed Bonds to arguably the greatest free-agent contract in major league history—a then-record six-year, $43.75 million deal—helping to reinvigorate the fanbase and save the franchise from relocation. Bonds wins the '93 NL MVP, the Giants win 103 games, the groundwork is eventually laid for a downtown ballpark with Bonds and "Splash Hits" as the main attraction, he leads them to the World Series in '02, and 15 years after it all started, the Giants and AT&T Park are one of baseball's better generators of revenue.

And the Pirates? Fifteen years later, they are the on the verge of their 15th straight losing season, one shy of tying the major league record.

One play. What if it had gone differently? What if Bonds' throw is dead-on, or even if he was just playing normal depth? What if the Pirates win Game 7 in extra innings, and somehow ride that momentum (like the '06 Cardinals did) to shock the Blue Jays in the World Series? Does Bonds then reach cult-hero status in Pittsburgh, and make it politically necessary for the Pirates to match any offer and re-sign him? Does Bonds achieve the greatest statistical peak in major league history for the Pirates?

Do the Giants end up in Florida, after being unable to build enough fan support to justify staying in San Francisco? Do the Devil Rays never come to exist? Does MLB find itself instead with only 28 teams, nary a word about contraction and less scheduling headaches? Do the A's, free of the Giants' territorial rights, have a market all to themselves, complete with a beautiful stadium in downtown San Jose and all the wealth of Silicon Valley at their fingertips?

A Seemingly Unfixable Problem

Let's save the suspense—the Pirates aren't going to crack .500 yet again this year, for the 15th straight season. They opened the second half by losing 14 of 16 games and now sit at 20 games under .500, 44-64, the only sixth-place team in baseball.

Next year, the Pirates are a great bet to tie the 1933-1948 Philadelphia Phillies' record for consecutive losing seasons by a major pro sports franchise, and they're a decent bet to own that record outright after '09; even if there's a radical front-office shakeup on the horizon, there's a lot of work to be done to stave off ignominy in time.

The company line from Pirates' brass is that the team's young pitching will continue to improve and coalesce with the team's established hitters to form a contender, presumably in the near future. The problem with that logic is that the Pirates' top 4 leaders in Runs Created this season - Jason Bay, Xavier Nady, Freddy Sanchez, and Adam LaRoche (basically, the entire heart of the order if you're scoring at home) all happen to be free agents at the same time after the '09 season.

All four will continue to get more expensive in the next two years and beyond, which means they'll probably be ex-Pirates soon. So when the team's young pitching has matured and is dominating the NL in two years, the team's offense, already the second-worst in baseball, could conceivably be even worse. That's gonna greatly hinder the, uh, coalescing.

We'll come back to this point later, but its significance can't be overstated: In the current baseball economy, all the large and mid-market teams have closed the Moneyball information gap completely, just within the last few years. Every GM has a pretty good idea what on-base percentage and good defense are actually worth, or they've smartly hired someone to study those things for them. The big "undervalued commodity" windows have been closed, which was inevitable.

The Twins and A's have taken a step back, in small part because the Royals and Devil Rays are now very well operated, too. The same types of little-known bargain players the A's built their reputation on are now spread fairly equally amongst half a dozen savvy, small-market clubs (owners weren't going to be giving GM jobs to old buddies and their family friends forever, given how much money is at stake in this business). Now, the only way for a truly small-market team to make the playoffs is to have a great crop of position and pitching prospects arrive on the scene almost simultaneously.

The division-leading Brewers are the new model for this. They've developed an entire infield of high-ceiling prospects that are making a combined $2.5 million this year, led by Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun, on whom they shrewdly saved themselves millions by finding a way to control him for an extra year through 2013. Meanwhile, Milwaukee's top pitching prospect, Yovani Gallardo, has shone since his midseason call-up as well. It remains to be seen if the Brewers prove to be one Gallardo clone shy of a playoff berth at season's end, but clearly their success shows us one version of the blueprint for small-market success.

With that in mind, we quickly see why the optimistic public outlook perpetuated by the Pirates' front office is a mirage for their fans. They get excited about the young pitching, but by the time it asserts itself, the team's best hitters will be gone, because the two groups are 2-3 years apart in service time. That cycle will continue on, again and again as it has since Bill Clinton was stumping for votes on his sax.

If the uninspired decision-making status quo is maintained, this franchise will register 70 wins a season into perpetuity. Meanwhile, as Nate Silver astutely observed last week, the gap between the haves and the have-nots only continues to grow, and even teams with fresh, innovative decision-makers like Andrew Friedman's Devil Rays are struggling to see how they'll ever ascend to postseason glory.

The Pirates are a mind-boggling 281 games below .500 since Barry Bonds patrolled left field in that history-altering NLCS game. It's a sad state of affairs for a charter franchise with 115 years of history in the city of Pittsburgh, five World Series titles, and the most beautiful home park in the game. But at this point plenty of people have bagged on the Pirates, bemoaning a series of seemingly indefensible personnel decisions. The goal here is to try to avoid falling into blogosphere vitriol, and instead do exactly the opposite - propose some actual solutions.

How can this small-market team make it back to .500 and eventually into playoff contention—especially with an ownership group that seemingly prioritizes profit and financing stadium debt over investing their piece of the revenue sharing pie directly back into the product on the field? How can the Pirates keep their rightfully fed-up fans from retreating permanently into an Operation Shutdown of their own?

The ownership group, led by new majority owner Bob Nutting, is there to stay. Nutting is a businessman first and owning the Pirates is a profitable venture even as they struggle, thanks in part to revenue sharing, the new stadium, and ever-increasing Forbes franchise valuations. He's sitting on a cash cow, and has no incentive to sell, so there's no reason to expect he that he will, or that he even should for that matter.

But let's focus on some things that can be changed.

1. Hire Mark Cuban to be the team's new CEO

Yes, Mark Cuban has already put in an application to bid for the Chicago Cubs. No, he cannot have a vested interest in two major league teams simultaneously. But the Internet's best authority on the Cubs situation, the esteemed Maury Brown of The Biz of Baseball, has written recently that Cuban doesn't stand much of a chance of being awarded the franchise. And really, it makes all the sense in the world that Cuban would be denied, despite his incredible wealth ($2.3 billion, according to Forbes).

Cuban has several factors working against him getting the Cubs:

*He doesn't have Chicago roots. The recent trend of ownership sales in MLB has been that local bids get top priority, which appears likely to happen again in this case.

*He's not a part of Bud Selig's Good-Ole'-Boys Network (GOBN). John Henry, Jeffrey Loria, Lew Wolff, Stan Kasten/Ted Lerner, and now John Canning, Jr. - it's increasing clear that before anyone is awarded a franchise, Selig has to know you and like you. Bonus points if you've intentionally run a franchise into the ground in order to expedite its no-bid sale and eventual relocation to Washington. Mark Cuban is Jay Gatsby—all the money in the world, but he can't buy what he wants, because he apparently hasn't had his money long enough or didn't acquire it the right way.

*He'd end up being Steinbrenner Part II. Who wants to win more than Mark Cuban (have you ever seen a Mavericks game on TV)? With the Mavericks, Cuban arguably has invested a greater combination of time, thought, creativity, energy, and money into his team than any other professional sports franchise owner. To a fan those are all great attributes; to the 29 other owners, they represent the ultimate red flag. See, the other 29 owners don't want to invite anyone into the club that wants to win too much. If Cuban made the Cubs his philanthropy and invested tons of his own wealth into the club, profitability be damned, he would increase the price of labor (players) for the other 29 owners, just as Steinbrenner has for decades. That, of course, affects the owners' collective profit margin—having Cuban own a team is akin to making a concession to the Player's Union that they didn't even have to ask for, because Cuban helps them to raise their salaries by driving up FA prices in his desperation to win. For this reason, it's unlikely that another Steinbrenner-esque owner is ever annointed into the GOBN.

All of these factors conspire against Cuban ever owning not only the Cubs but any major league team, thereby blocking him from getting his pass into the Good-Ole'-Boys Network—which, incidentally, if it was a real cable network, would probably have home games blacked out locally and be tight-fisted with profit sharing.

Without the Cubs as a viable option, I believe Cuban's best chance to break into MLB is to replace outgoing Pirates CEO Kevin McClatchy. To be hired as CEO, Cuban doesn't need Selig's blessing, or the majority vote of the 29 other owners. He only needs the approval of the ownership, specifically Nutting. We'll discuss why Cuban is a far more intriguing choice than either of the two names that have been whispered publicly thus far—former Diamondbacks GM Joe Garagiola, Jr. and current Cardinals GM Walt Jocketty.

Cuban as CEO could end up being a win for all three parties involved:

1. Cuban gets to pour his passion for sports and competiveness into the day-to-day operations of his hometown team. He's obviously an astute baseball fan already, but he'd be too competitive to rest on the laurels of his current baseball knowledge. He'd hire an All-Star staff, some straight from the Internet, to teach him the minutaie—the Rule 5 draft, waiver priority, option rules, etc. Just as he has looked for inefficiencies in the NBA economy and found ways to win, he'd do the same with baseball. His competitiveness may even lead him to invest his own money in the team.

To Nutting: You write the checks for the major league roster, John, and I'll pay for our draft every year out of my pocket. Never again will we pass on a player because of signability concerns. Instead, we're gonna become the Yankees of the draft—we pay top dollar for top talent, and the best players in the draft will come to know that, and drop to us in the supplemental and second rounds. As of today, we're doubling our annual draft budget, and I'm hiring the best scouts I can to help me. In exchange, the draft is my baby and I have carte blanche—I pull the trigger on signing bonuses, bid high dollar for the best talent, and pore over the data with my GM. I'm like Jerry Jones with the Cowboys, minus the awkward face lift.

Plus, as CEO, Cuban gets to know the powers-that-be throughout the league, has the opportunity to change his image in the eyes of the fellow owners, and positions himself as the no-brainer candidate to buy the Pirates if they ever are put up for sale by Nutting.

2. Selig gets to evaluate Cuban as a potential owner without ever taking the risk of handing him the keys to one of the league's most beloved franchises. If Cuban becomes a headache—which I doubt he'd do, given what's at stake—Selig just leans on Nutting to fire him.

3. Nutting makes out the best in this deal—once again he can slip into the background where he prefers to be and avoid scrutiny as Cuban absorbs the credit, fame, and blame. Most importantly for Nutting, he gets to have someone else pay for his draft, which allows him to continue his hobby of watching the franchise valuation grow - and the value will grow more rapidly as the team improves. All of which positions Nutting to eventually sell the team free of stadium debt and with a nice chunk of profit. All he sacrifices in the interim is a little bit of control, over to Cuban—but Nutting doesn't appear to want to be front and center, anyway.

2. Hire Paul DePodesta to be the General Manager and reassign Dave Littlefield within the organization

Ironically, if you could put these two men together, you might have something close to the perfect skill set for a general manager.

Littlefield, for all his criticisms, does a few things very well:

*He publicly toes the company line like no one else. That goes a long way with a boss—especially an owner that knows he could be facing greater accountability and scrutiny than Nutting currently is. You'll never read a negative or frustrated Dave Littlefield quote in the paper; there's always a positive spin on the struggles, and hope for the future. He also never throws the ownership under the bus with a "well if we just had more payroll" or "that wasn't my decision" quote. That shows class.

*He's very good at P.R. How many GMs have a picture of themselves smiling in a suit on their team's home page, with an "Ask the GM" recurring feature? That kind of access to the fans is terrific, and it's smart reputation management - which anyone in a cutthroat business has to be cognizant of. As for the questions Littlefield responds to, they're also very skillfully crafted...and awesomely homeriffic. Like this recent one, taken from Part Six of the "Ask the GM" series:
I like the Matt Morris trade. We got a veteran starter without the long-term contract risk. Why did you make the move now rather than in the offseason?
-- Joe M., Cranberry Twp, Pa.

Before we get to Littlefield's response, kudos to him for hunting down the Pirates fan who liked the Morris trade. Always nice of Uncle Joe M. Littlefield to email in some support for his embattled nephew.

All kidding aside, it's a skillfully worded P.R. question: already presented in a way that validates the move, and sets the reader up to buy into the logic of Littlefield's response. Here's the response from Littlefield:
We've tried the last couple of offseasons to acquire a veteran pitcher through a trade or free agency because we felt it would be a very good fit with so many young starters. At one time, we were the only Major League team to have a starting rotation consisting of players that we drafted and developed ourselves, but it is a tough task to have all of your starters lack big-league experience.

We felt all along that it would beneficial to have a player who was durable, could give us some innings and who obviously was productive, as well. Morris is a good fit not only because he fits this profile, but he also will be very beneficial for our young pitchers and help us become a better team. In this situation with Morris, we have him for the rest of this season, next season and we also have a club option in 2009. A guy like Morris is someone we've tried to get in the offseason, but did not because it usually takes a three- to five-year contract to acquire such a player.


Sounds reasonable, right? We'll break down why it isn't a little later on, but that's not the point right now—the point is, it sounds reasonable, if you don't read it too critically. It's actually pretty smart reputation management: preventative damage control. Littlefield spares himself at least a little bit of the typically caustic treatment he'd receive in cyberspace because the blogosphere instantly knows what his rationale was for the move, whether the masses agree or not.

Fans and pundits alike feel more comfortable with a move when they at least have a rationale. Not coincidentally, when the mainstream media outlets weighed in on this trade in the following days, the criticism came in droves but it also offered a rationale for the deal that was seemingly taken straight from the team site.

But even excellent P.R. skills can't mask the fact that the current regime has made a litany of personnel blunders, and more importantly, doesn't appear to be learning from them. It's clear that Dave Littlefield has many skills that are useful in a major league front office. But it's even more clear that he's not adequately equipped to lead the task of managing a franchise's payroll or evaluating player personnel.

Now, we had a pretty good philosophical debate over at Baseball Think Factory about what every team should want in a GM here, after I wrote a piece last month stating that Paul DePodesta is the best future GM candidate in baseball. The consensus from that debate, and from a few emails I received from people within the game after writing it, was that DePodesta struggled at handling many of the P.R.-related tasks of the job in his brief Dodgers' tenure.

Those same tasks, including reputation management, appear to be some of Littlefield's greatest skills (obviously Littlefield doesn't have a good reputation, but the fact that he has still has his job is nonetheless a testament to this skill. Most people with his track record would not still be employed).

I still maintain that the skills that DePodesta possesses—the ability to predict market changes in advance, accurately value the worth of players, and predict future performance relatively well—are the most important skills for a general manager, especially a small-market one, to have. It's an unfortunate paradox: a general manager with DePodesta's skill set will have more success, and yet one with Littlefield's skill set will be better able to keep his job. That's probably true in a lot of work fields, though. Anyone who's ever expended effort trying to look like they were working, or at least seen the movie Office Space, can at least vaguely relate to that sentiment.

So why does DePodesta need to call the shots? Why can't he play puppeteer to Littlefield's good-looking face of the franchise, and spare the conflict of firing a good man? For one, DePodesta certainly wouldn't accept the position otherwise, not after failing to get the uniquivocal support of his manager, owner, or personnel in his 18 months with Dodgers. Pittsburgh's small market and desperate situation are the perfect opportunity for DePodesta's ingenuity to get the five-year window it needs - but he wouldn't go back into a situation where he lacked creative control all over again. It's the Howard Roark in him.

More to the point, the smartest and most valuable guy should be calling the shots. DePodesta's skill set is more in demand than Littlefield's. You can hire a lot of intelligent people who love baseball to represent the franchise publicly, keep DePodesta organized, and be the media's sound bite. It's much harder to find someone who recognizes and correctly predicts the future of a lucrative financial market (in his case, it was pitching) two years in advance. On Wall Street, the people who can do that are multi-millionaires. In baseball, they should be small-market general managers.

3. Philosophical Changes in the Roster Composition

Let's revisit the Littlefield quote posted above, because it's revealing:
We've tried the last couple of offseasons to acquire a veteran pitcher through a trade or free agency because we felt it would be a very good fit with so many young starters. At one time, we were the only Major League team to have a starting rotation consisting of players that we drafted and developed ourselves, but it is a tough task to have all of your starters lack big-league experience.

We felt all along that it would beneficial to have a player who was durable, could give us some innings and who obviously was productive, as well. Morris is a good fit not only because he fits this profile, but he also will be very beneficial for our young pitchers and help us become a better team. In this situation with Morris, we have him for the rest of this season, next season and we also have a club option in 2009. A guy like Morris is someone we've tried to get in the offseason, but did not because it usually takes a three- to five-year contract to acquire such a player.


If there was a study that suggested that adding a $10 million "veteran presence/innings-eater/gamer" to a pitching staff would definitely lower the collective era of the staff significantly, this statement would be acceptable. In fact, unlike some scouts vs. stats debates, that's something that can be studied—certainly there have been enough thirtysomething pitchers changing hands in the last 20 years to determine if having old farts on the staff helps the spring chickens pitch better.

I suspect, however, that if that were the case, there would already be a famous study proliferating the Internet baseball world that hailed that eye-opening discovery. And there isn't. So I'm skeptical that Matt Morris can somehow sprinkle his veteran crafty pitcher pixie dust all over the Pirates' youngsters and turn them into Cy Young candidates.

The Pirates already have someone to coach their young pitchers—his name is Jim Colborn, and he is their pitching coach. He probably makes $100,000. A team with an Opening Day payroll of $38.5 million can't throw an additional $12 million-plus at their 4th or 5th starter, even if he moonlights as a pitching coach on the side.

The Marlins, Nationals, and Devil Rays all currently have teams that are better, cheaper, and with more potential going forward than the Pirates have. None of them see fit to acquire an expensive "veteran presence" to bolster their staffs—and they haven't for a while. They correctly see that this would not be a wise allocation of their limited resources. If any of the them were lucky enough to already play in the crown jewel of a stadium that Pittsburgh does, they'd be absolutely crushing Pittsburgh competitively, because undoubtedly, they're running a better operation.

Littlefield's quote also shows why the Pirates have been treading water for so long. He's been trying to acquire a veteran starting pitcher for a few offseasons? Why? All else being equal, why would the type of established free agent pitcher that Littlefield covets (like a Jeff Suppan, whom he shouldn't be pursuing anyway) pick the Pirates as their destination? They wouldn't, and that's why Littlefield's search hasn't borne any fruit—until he finally acquired a player who had no choice but to come.

But the biggest problem is that with the Morris acquisition, the Pirates have admittedly already spent any money that was going to go toward offseason acquistions. Which is a shame, because Matt Morris, while offering some degree of certainty, offers absolutely zero long term upside.

And this next group of players do have upside.

4. Creating Value And Selling High

Morris is now an untradeable asset; no one would have paid nearly as much for him as the Pirates did, and he will never become more valuable over the remaining life of the deal, as he turns 33 this week. That can be instructive in showing us what types of players the Pirates should instead target on the open market.

A few free agent premises that we have to accept:

1.) All other things being equal, no free agent really wants to be a Pirate.
2.) Therefore, in order to sign a free agent, the Pirates need to either a) pay more than everyone else or b) provide a unique opportunity to that player.

Unique opportunities include getting to be a starting pitcher instead of a reliever, the opportunity to be a closer, getting the opportunity to play and prove your value and inflate it for your next free agent contract. Granted, this may build a mercenary mentality. Far more important, though, is that it’s building motivation to succeed, regardless of how pure the intentions.

As for point a) This is incredibly important – paying more than everyone else does not necessarily mean overpaying. The Gil Meche deal was criticized at first, because the Royals offered more than anyone else. By the same logic, the Jason Schmidt deal was praised, because the Dodgers appeared to get Schmidt for less years than he might've received elsewhere.

But even though the Royals offered more than anyone for Meche, it now looks like one of the best of the large free agent deals signed last offseason. Which means that even if the Royals aren’t contenders in the next three years, they can deal their “top of the rotation starter Gil Meche” to a contender pretty easily. They bought “top of the rotation starter Gil Meche” at “back of the rotation starter Gil Meche” sticker price.

By signing a healthy pitcher under the age of 30 who hadn't pitched very well in his career yet, and putting him in a position that instantly creates value (top of the rotation starter), the Royals gave themselves the best chance to succeed of anyone who played Free Agent Pitcher Roulette this past offseason. At this point, Matt Morris and Gil Meche make a similar salary and are both "durable veteran pitchers", but one is a very tradeable, liquid asset - and the other clearly is not.

That’s what I’m advocating Pittsburgh do annually in free agency, only on a smaller scale. These are five pitchers on the upcoming FA market, none of whom is the least bit sexy: Jeremy Affeldt, Joe Kennedy, Joel Pineiro, Kyle Lohse, and Casey Fossum.

What do they have in common? All five are under the age of 30, healthy, and have struggled mightily at times in the last three years. They've also never had the opportunity to be starters in a low-pressure, NL pitcher's park environment, where they may be able to outperform their perceived expectations. The switch to the friendlier NL is still underestimated on the market—look no further than the success of Ted Lilly this season and Bronson Arroyo before him.

All five of the above pitchers could also be had for three-year deals and less than $15 million, meaning that the Pirates could diversify their risk and perhaps sign their two or three favorites from that group for the price of one declining Matt Morris. Better yet, if one of them enjoyed a surprising, poor man's Aaron Harang-like resurgence with an opportunity to start, he could easily be traded for prospects, because the team bought low when they signed him to a contract.

On the other side of the coin, the Pirates need to attempt to copy Larry Beinfest's model and trade the arbitration-eligible major league assets they do have while they still can get some value in return. Right now, Freddy Sanchez is "two-time All-Star Freddy Sanchez", and he should be traded while he still has two years left of control for players with less service time and more upside, before he's lost even more sheen off that 2006 batting title.

The Pirates would be wise to explore these deals with all their abitration-eligible position players to see what younger, cheaper value they could command in return. Then, after creating an outfield opening or two, they should fill their holes with the best two or three pieces of freely available talent, to see if they can stumble upon the next Jack Cust and benefit from a few years of a 400K player posting an .800 OPS. Creating perceived and real value in players who previously had none—that's what the A's did with Cust by giving him an opportunity, and the Pirates would be wise to try to do the same.

This can also be done creatively by cutting the fat off the 40-man roster—in the Pirates' case Brad Eldred, Yoslan Herrera, Nyjer Morgan, Josh Phelps, and Masumi Kuwata—to allow the team to take two or three Rule 5 picks and to always be ready for the next potential Jeremy Guthrie to be DFA'd and swooped up to improve the fringes of the 40-man roster.

5. The Rule 5 Draft—The Final Frontier?

Unfortunately the Rule 5 Draft, which is one of the last frontiers of significantly undervalued talent,was never David Littlefield's specialty. It's never a good sign when the other general managers are openly laughing at your personnel decisions.

But there's great value to be found there. I consider studying the Rule 5 draft one of my biggest hobbies. I have a list of players throughout the league who fit the profile of Joakim Soria, Jesus Flores and some of the other most recent Rule 5 successes that are currently unprotected, but there’s no use in posting it until teams set their 40-man rosters in the offseason and we see who’s left off. If my drivel still isn’t worthy of being proprietary by then, I’ll post it here on THT prior to the Rule 5 draft in early December, and preview it beforehand. As much of a pipe dream as it is, I’d much rather something like this happened first.

6. Hope in Pittsburgh

It's long since been time to end this opus. Bottom line, the fans of Pittsburgh deserve better. An entire generation has grown up with uninspiring Pirates baseball.

Instead, it's time to restore this franchise to the penthouse where it belongs. In Pittsburgh's market, and without an owner that views the team as his philanthropy, that won't ever happen with a Peter Keating-esque, follow-the-leader, I'm-afraid-to-make-mistakes mentality.

This is meant to be a bold and yet feasible blueprint to get the Pirates back to .500 or perhaps better on exactly the same ownership budget. In a way, Pittsburgh's on-field turmoil and front-office turnover is a unique blessing—it gives Bob Nutting and the future CEO/GM carte blanche to make the radical changes necessary to succeed, because a new regime and ideology is virtually guaranteed to fare better than the status quo.

For their fans, the good of the game, and the intrigue of seeing Mark Cuban in MLB, I hope the Pirates' ownership uses that opportunity to enact some version of the ideas expressed above. I would bet that the product on the field would soon be better if they did.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-08-08T04:08:15+00:00 Jason Botts gets his chance http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/jason-botts-gets-his-chance/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/jason-botts-gets-his-chance/#When:22:23:15
Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-08-01T22:23:15+00:00 Jason Botts - The next Jack Cust? http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/jason-botts-the-next-jack-cust/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/jason-botts-the-next-jack-cust/#When:08:32:15
Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-07-16T08:32:15+00:00 Ichiro’s Inside-the-Park Homer http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/ichiros-inside-the-park-homer/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/ichiros-inside-the-park-homer/#When:02:06:15
Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-07-11T02:06:15+00:00 The best unemployed GM in baseball http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-best-out-of-work-gm-in-baseball/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-best-out-of-work-gm-in-baseball/#When:04:03:15

  • Helped construct a roster that produced the 2004 NL West Divison title, the Dodgers' first playoff berth in eight years.
  • Acquired Brad Penny, who has become one of the National League's best starters this season (10-1 record, 2.04 era and 1.16 WHIP).

  • Correctly foresaw the explosion of the free agent pitching market one year in advance, signing Derek Lowe to an excellent deal, as well as extending Penny through ’08 with an option for '09 at below-market value.

  • Signed Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew to favorable contracts, both of which yielded effective performance relative to the size and length of their deals.

  • Avoided the temptation to out-bid all comers for Adrian Beltre, who has yet to justify the five year, $64 million deal given to him by Seattle after one of the greatest contract-drive walk years in history.

And what was DePodesta’s reward for leading the Dodgers to the playoffs, for being a visionary who foresaw the pending explosion of the free agent pitching market one year early, for striking gold on three free agent acquisitions, and for showing incredible discipline to avoid inking any huge, terrible contracts, despite having an owner who would’ve green-lighted them?

A pink slip. That was his reward.

DePodesta was fired on Oct. 29, 2005, ostensibly for failing to make a repeat trip to the playoffs in his second season—a surprisingly Steinbrenner-esque directive from owner Frank McCourt. Certainly the Los Angeles media never warmed to DePodesta, specifically L.A. Times columnist Bill Plaschke, who never wrote anything intelligent or worth reading about DePodesta, but unintentionally sent the sabermetric world into hysterics, anyway (thank you, Ken Tremendous and Co.!).

Perhaps it's a good time to look back on DePodesta's tenure, especially given the recent stumbles of his successor, Ned Colletti. Colletti's Dodgers resume now includes $47 million man Jason Schmidt (one win, one ruined arm), $44 million dollar Juan Pierre (.274/.307/.327 thus far, and unlikely at age 29 to improve upon those numbers in the next four years), and an unnecessary $18.5 million, two-year expenditure on the rapidly declining Nomar Garciaparra.

To be fair, Colletti, like DePodesta, presided over a playoff berth in his first season with the Dodgers last year, and his team currently stands at 43-33, just a half-game back of the pace-setting Padres. But he's also enjoyed an increase in team payroll and an obviously higher tolerance from ownership for mistakes than DePodesta enjoyed. A Colletti apologist might point to Schmidt's clean off-season MRI and say that blaming him for Schmidt is unfair. But Schmidt's uncharacteristically low velocity and poor performance in the second half of '06 were obviously better indicators than a clean off-season MRI.

The point isn't to blame Colletti, or Plaschke for that matter. It's to point out that, the farther removed we are from DePodesta's short tenure as Dodgers' GM, the smarter the man looks.

How many high-dollar, multi-year free agent pitchers have worked out better than Derek Lowe? DePodesta was near-universally mocked for the dubious $36 million, four-year contract he awarded the Red Sox hurler after he posted a 5.42 era and a 1.61 WHIP in '04. Since then, Lowe hasn't missed a start, is currently in line for his third-straight 200-inning season, and has posted an ERA+ numbers of 112, 121, and 132 over the past three seasons.

The opt-out clause in Drew's contract was probably more calculated and smart than anyone gave DePodesta credit for at the time. Critics howled when Drew's off-season opt-out left the Dodgers devoid of a starting right fielder last winter. Given the condition of Drew's shoulder, the Dodgers should feel relieved to be freed from the final three years of their commitment to him. Who's to say that DePodesta didn't forsee milking two productive years out of Drew during his peak, after which Scott Boras could be assured of leading Drew out of the contract and onto another team's hands during his post-age-30 decline?

Perhaps the biggest reason for DePodesta's ouster revolved around the '05 trade deadline deal involving Penny and fan favorite Paul Lo Duca as the principals. Sure, the Dodgers had a vacuum at catcher for the remainder of the year, but it didn't prevent them from making the playoffs, and Penny undoubtedly remains the better bet going forward. The trade might've looked even better for the Dodgers had Hee Seop Choi not suffered injuries that derailed his career and ultimately headed back to Japan.

But trading away the "heart and soul" and a fan favorite of the team (Lo Duca) only reinforced the media's permanently ingrained image of DePodesta.

The perception of DePodesta as a cold, dorky, numbers-cruncher was fueled, ironically, by the same beast that made him famous: Michael Lewis’ seminal classic Moneyball. In 2002, of course, DePodesta was still Beane’s right-hand man, and several of the scenes within the book reveal Beane holding court over his staff, with DePodesta hunkered down in a corner of the room, “finding players in his computer.” (A computer that told him Kevin Youkilis was one of the best prospects in baseball, incidentally.)

Reputation is a huge factor in the public perception of GMs, and so are initial impressions. Make a good one, and you can ride through a lengthy period of decisions that turn out poorly (Brian Sabean). Make a bad one, and it’s almost impossible to recover.

The fact is, much of the non-sabermetric baseball writing crowd had already decided that DePodesta was a nerd, buried in a computer, who knew nothing about "real baseball" when he was hired, and inevitably that was the perception that lasted.

In reality, DePodesta still has just about everything you’d want in a general manager:

1.) Experience. He’s been a GM, was an assistant GM under Beane, worked for the Padres as a special assistant, and worked under John Hart in Cleveland before that. That’s a pretty impressive baseball acumen for a 34-year-old, which brings us to No. 2...

2.) The right age. This may ruffle some feathers, but frankly, I don’t want a GM who is 65-70 years old, for the same reason that Bill Simmons has eloquently argued that it doesn't make sense to hire NFL coaches at that age. Being a good GM probably requires 70-80 hour work weeks several months of the year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find many senior citizens who are still able to work as hard or as long as they did in their 30s and 40s. And there’s only so much that you can delegate in the decision-making process. DePodesta will undoubtedly be filled with plenty of motivation to prove people wrong in his next GM job, and his work ethic will be there.

3.) He’s played plenty of baseball himself (and perhaps not too much? More on that later). Contrary to the public perception discussed earlier, DePodesta is a very good athlete himself. He played baseball and football at Harvard. That’s plenty enough baseball-playing experience to understand a player’s mentality and to be able to relate to his players, both of which are valuable attributes for a GM.

4.) He's highly intelligent. The guy's a Harvard economics grad—it's a safe bet that he has a very high IQ, which is important for GMs because their success ultimately depends not upon how much baseball they've seen or how much they've learned about baseball over their lifetime, but if they can make very good decisions when faced with a complex set of new information. All other things being equal, if I give two people a generic new problem (say, the pending explosion of the pitching market and finite resources to invest in it), I'd rather have a very high IQ person solving that problem.

I'm hesitant to list this as No. 5, but we could even argue, perhaps, that having played college baseball is the perfect amount of baseball for a GM to have played. A GM's pro baseball experience could bias his acquisitions of players. (That's making a leap to baseball from a Malcolm Gladwell argument regarding Isiah Thomas, as cited in the link). Will he try to get players like himself? Will he arrogantly believe that he “sees” things in players that other people who didn’t play pro baseball don’t see? Will he overvalue those “hidden” attributes that don’t show up in stat sheets, like grit? I’m not ready to say that, but perhaps it's an idea worthy of consideration. Certainly a good, metacognitive GM, not unlike a good fantasy GM, needs to be aware of what his own personal biases are and which players he tends to favor to avoid irrationally committing to players who fit a mold he likes, but aren’t likely candidates to succeed going forward.

The bottom line:

Is it possible that a team’s GM is one of the biggest factors, if not the biggest factor, in a team’s long-term success? Yes. In fact, without a great GM its nearly impossible for a small-market team to succeed.

Is it very possible that Paul DePodesta would be in the upper-half (top 15) of best general managers in the game of baseball? Yes.

Is he definitely, unquestionably better than at least three general managers in the game? Yes.

Is he the best available GM (not currently running a team)? In my opinion, yes, and that’s the premise for this article.

If a franchise has the chance to instantly hire the best person available to handle one of the most important controllable factors in the long-term health and success of the organization, shouldn't they? Even if it means terminating the contract of their current GM mid-year, just to ensure that they get to be the sole competitor for DePodesta's services, and give him plenty of time to prepare for his real work in the offseason (Rule 5 draft, free agent acquisitions, etc.)?

Paul DePodesta never should have been fired in the first place. The further removed we are from his ouster, the better his past decisions look. It's only a matter of time before another franchise reaps the benefits of giving him a second chance - and this time, with a long enough timetable to fully enact his vision.

You might call him the best free agent on the market. And surprisingly, he's still there, waiting for that second chance.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-06-28T04:03:15+00:00 In search of the next Jack Cust (Part 2) http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/in-search-of-the-next-jack-cust-part-2/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/in-search-of-the-next-jack-cust-part-2/#When:04:08:15 Last week, we looked at the surprising success of A's designated hitter Jack Cust, who rose from Triple-A obscurity to major league masher in early May after being acquired from the Padres for cash considerations.

Cust endured a cold spell after his torrid A's debut, but appears to be back to on track after collecting nine hits in Oakland's weekend series against the Cardinals. Through 116 at-bats, his line stands at .276/.425/.578, with an OPS just over the magical 1.000 mark. Not bad for a guy who had been written off completely by 29 other big-league teams just two months ago.

Cust's success begs the question: How did five teams—including the A's once before—give up on this guy? And how did the other 25 teams never even give him a sniff?

The answer to that question could be a full-length column in itself, but it boils down to the following:
1. Cust was promoted too aggressively, on the basis of small sample size successes and the eager anticipation that comes with being a former No. 1 draft pick.

2. He was then judged prematurely on the basis of poor performance in a small sample size, both in the minors and the majors.

3. It took him 10 years from the day he was drafted to get to this point. No team can afford that kind of patience when millions of dollars and front-office job security are constantly at stake. (This is in fact one of the best, and yet least-publicized, reasons for drafting college hitters instead of high schoolers. Four to five years after the draft, when a team eventually has to protect the best members of its draft class on the 40-man roster or risk losing them to other teams, it's easier to "know what you have" with a 25-26 year-old than it is with a 22-23 year old. The uncertain, unforcastable future of players in their early-20s makes it difficult to evaluate them, and explains how a talented, raw player like Johan Santana gets left off the Astros' 40-man roster and becomes a Rule 5 pick).

Baseball people used to really like Cust—the Diamondbacks made him the 30th overall selection of the 1997 draft—they just gave up on him a little too soon. A determination was made that 23-year-old Cust couldn't hit big league pitching in 2002, and clearly that opinion was very hard to change. But a 23-year-old hitter is not yet what he will one day become, as the 28-year-old version of Cust can attest.

Which brings us back to our initial quest: to find a neglected player with a resume similar to Cust's, who might duplicate his success given the opportunity. We discussed the parameters for our search in last week's column, but the premise is simple: finding promising players whose dreams of becoming a major league regular have been quashed prematurely, before they honed their plate discipline and hit their late-20s physical peak.

Now, onto our subjects. Here is a short list of players who might be candidates to have a Cust-like impact. Remember, this isn't to suggest that each or even any of these players would instantly post a 1.000 OPS over a six-week span in a major league lineup; in fact, they may not even represent the best of the neglected minor leaguers in the game. They are simply test cases, who have some similarities with Cust. The bigger lesson to be learned is to start keeping an eye on these types of players and giving more of them legitimate big-league opportunities. Cust, who will make approximately $400,000 next year and could conceivably provide league-average DH production or more, has proven that they can potentially become tremendous bargains, whereas once it was thought they couldn't.
Shelley Duncan, OF, Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre: Duncan, 27, has hit to the tune of .284/.372/.560 for the Yankees' top minor league affiliate this year. He's also seen his walk rate improve this season. He's not on the Yankees' 40-man roster, and probably not in their plans anytime soon, but perhaps he could provide quality, inexpensive outfield depth for a team with a need.

Mitch Jones, LF, Triple-A Las Vegas: Eye-popping numbers this far, but Jones is a great example of why early-season Triple-A stats don't tell us enough of the story. He's 29, and just last year he managed only a .234/.317/.447 line in Columbus. Jones doesn't make enough contact in Triple-A to suggest that he could ever contribute to a big-league team.

Jason Botts, OF, Triple-A Oklahoma: Botts is an example of a guy who is doing well for his league, but perhaps not well enough for his age. Part of our goal is to predict future MLB success, and although Botts' .307/.421/.490 line looks good, his numbers can't afford the drop-off one would expect from a move to the next level. If he was 24, he'd be someone to be excited about, because it would be reasonable to expect him to improve upon those numbers. But a player Botts' age probably needs to be absolutely dominating Triple-A pitching for us to hope that he'd ever contribute in the show.

Chris Shelton, Triple-A Toledo: It's probably unfair to be bearish on Botts and not have the same outlook on Shelton, who's experienced a similar power outage this year. The difference is that Shelton has already had two productive major league seasons at young ages for a power hitter (25-26) in '05 and '06, and he's improved his walk rate this year. Unlike Jorge Cantu, he
hasn't gone public with any hard feelings about being sent down to the minors, either, which suggests that he's humble and willing to work at being a consistent major league hitter. Shelton, 27, could perhaps follow Carlos Pena's path and fall off the radar for a while before rewarding a team that takes a chance on him in '08 or even '09.

Ryan Mulhern, 1B, Triple-A Buffalo: Good numbers (.308/.365/.540), and still young enough (26) to improve upon them. He doesn't walk enough yet (65/19 strikeout to walk ratio), but if he can improve his plate discipline he could have a breakthrough within three years, probably for a different organization.

Ryan Raburn, OF, Triple-A Toledo: Raburn gets impressive power out his small frame, and has hit very well this season (.295/.401/.563). He's done a terrific job of cutting down on his strikeouts this year without sacrificing power, and he's continued to walk as well. With that success at 26, I'd expect a healthy big-league career. If he's still not on the Tigers' 40-man roster come Rule 5 draft time in December, a team would be wise to snatch him up.

Several readers emailed suggestions for players to discuss in this article:

Jorge Cantu, IF, Devil Rays: Cantu is intriguing because of his power potential: He slugged .497 and slugged 79 extra-base hits for the Devil Rays in 2005 at age 23. The problem both then and now is his lack of patience, and pitchers have adjusted accordingly, and as a result his numbers have suffered across the board. I consider it a caution flag that Cantu was publicly furious at being demoted at the end of spring training. Clearly, he had things to work on as a player both offensively and defensively, and a better response would be to simply take the demotion as a motivator. Yet he went down to Triple-A Durham and posted a .239/.295/.324 line to open the season. Somehow, that earned him a recall to the big club before the end of April!

The thing is, Cantu may be a future Cust at age 27 or 28. Instead, he's burning service time unnecessarily at the big league level, when he obviously hasn't gotten it all figured out. He began the season with 2.079 years of service, and if doesn't get sent down again he'll be arbitration eligible by the end of the year. At this rate, when he finally peaks (which appears will be in his late 20s), it will be for another team via free agency, and it won't be for a bargain price anymore.

Given that the Rays aren't in contention anyway, why not leave Cantu on the farm until he proves he can improve his walk rate and his defense, or post a 1.000 OPS season in Triple-A, as Cust did last year? If the Rays had taken that approach this year, they'd be more likely to preserve Cantu's prime at a bargain price down the road. Nonetheless, he's worth mentioning in this space, because he is a player that people have soured on at too young of an age. Twenty-five year old Jorge Cantu is probably not yet the player that he will one day be at 28-29. But he has been up in the majors long enough for baseball people to form a negative opinion of him, and that will weigh down his perceived value longer than it should, just as it once did for Cust.

Jonny Gomes, OF, Devil Rays: Gomes is a less egregious case than Cantu, because he's slightly older and has actually done well this season. I don't think we can include him in the discussion here, because he's probably sticking in the league for good and it's unlikely that his contributions would go unnoticed.

Craig Brazell, 1B, Triple-A Omaha: The 27-year-old Brazell has posted a very impressive .309/.337/.673 line for the Royals' Triple-A affiliate after being promoted from Wichita early this season. His 27/7 strikeout to walk ratio isn't pretty, however, and neither is the fact that just a year ago he put up barely a whimper (.247/.283/.463) in Double-A Jacksonville over a full season at age 26. Nonetheless, he's obviously seeing and hitting the ball well now, and baseball is a game of streaks.

It would be interesting to see teams acquire more players like this on the cheap and immediately give them at-bats while they are hot, rather than trotting out players who are banged up or slumping horribly but making salaries that make it politically impossible to bench them. Brazell would be a low-risk acquisition that could be acquired for a pittance, and if he doesn't hit, its an easy decision to release him.

Mark Saccomanno, 1B/3B, Triple-A Round Rock: Similar profile to Brazell: 27, late bloomer, terrific season thus far, alarming strikeout to walk ratio. Another case of a guy who would appear to be extremely low risk to provide a moderate reward for a team willing to give him at-bats. Easy to acquire, easy to cut, and yet the potential to catch lightning in a bottle while he's hitting well and potentially fill a position many teams have struggled to get offense from this season.


Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jacob Jackson 2007-06-21T04:08:15+00:00