I was browsing through the Baseball Analyst’s Bill James Baseball Abstracts pages, and came up with a couple of interesting tidbits from James:
1978
“When you acquire any player over 28, you are getting about 40% of a career–and that on the downhill slide. You can do that, perhaps, to fill a hole. But what happens when you try to build a whole team that way? Your replacement-rate goes out of sight. If you’ve got eight players on a downhill slide, two of them are going to slip and fall–either that, or you’re defying the law of averages.”
This is your San Francisco Giants. Run with a game plan that was known to be flawed over 30 years ago.
1983
A lot of the public, I think, has the idea that arbitration hearings are sort of bullshit sessions in which the agent tried to convince the arbitrator that Joaquin Andujar is Steve Carlton’s brother, and the club tries to convince him that he is Juan Berenguer’s niece. It’s not really like that. The first and foremost rule of an arbitration proceeding is that you never, ever, say anything which can be shown to be false.
The second rule of an arbitration case is that you don’t start any arguments that you can’t win. . .Stick to the facts. . .Tell the truth. It’s the only chance you’ve got.
How many of you think the Giants will be able to handle this situation with the delicacy and foresight needed to avoid getting their dicks caught in the zipper?
Additionally, I’d like to point out the flat-out absurdity of all of these articles and op-ed pieces talking about how the Giants are worried about signing Lincecum to along-term deal because of concerns about his long-term health. This is a lie, an absurdity, a ruse, a smoke screen. If the team is spreading crap like this, it is just one more indication of how unprofessional and poorly run it really is. If it’s not, Sabean should come right out and deny it.
It is ridiculous to suggest that it’s Lincecum that the team has to worry about. RIDICULOUS!!
Sabean wasn’t worried about being upside down on any of these old, broken down mediocrities he keeps shoveling money at? Sabean wasn’t worried about the possibility that he might be paying the 36-year old Dave Roberts to watch TV? He wasn’t worried about the two-year deal he gave to 35-year old Bengie Molina in 2007? Wasn’t concerned at all about the possibility that the 40-year old Omar Vizquel might not be able to live up to his contract? Not worried about the 34-year old Aubrey Huff, coming off an injury-plagued 2009 season? Really?
Nothing to see here when Sabean signs an already injured, 32-year old Freddie Sanchez to a contract extension he’s not even up for? No concerns at all about throwing $55 million dollars at He-Who-Runs-Into-Walls? No issue whatsoever at giving a declining Barry Zito the biggest contract in baseball history?
No, the player Sabean is gonna hold the line for is Tim Lincecum. REALLY!?!
This is where you’re gonna draw the line on cover-your-eyes bad contracts?! Tim Lincecum? TIM LINCECUM!?! He’s the guy the team is worried about? The 25-year old, two-time Cy Young Award winning, once in a generation pitcher, the ace of your staff? That’s the guy who’s gonna break the bank? After all these horrible fucking contracts, after all the money Sabean has literally THROWN ON THE GROUND!!!!! It’s Lincecum they have to worry about? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!!! What a joke. What a bad, stupid joke.
The fact that the sportswriters who cover this team have the gall to parrot this absurdity is bad enough, but even decent bloggers are buying into the line. This would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.
Let me be the one to say what everyone should already know:
IF YOU ARE GOING TO GO BANKRUPT BECAUSE OF A BAD CONTRACT, LINCECUM IS THE GUY TO DO IT WITH
It is the equivalent of going all-in with pocket aces. If you’re gonna lose with aces, so be it.
1984
In Logic and Methods in Baseball Analysis, James states axioms, corollaries, and the known principles of sabermetrics in the following order:
Axiom I: A ballplayer’s purpose in playing ball is to do those things which create wins for his team, while avoiding those things which create losses for his team.
Axiom II: Wins result from runs scored. Losses result from runs allowed.
First Corollary to Axiom II: An offensive player’s job is to create runs for his team.
The Known Principles of Sabermetrics. Item 1: There are two essential elements of an offense: its ability to get people on base and its ability to advance runners.
Axiom III: All offense and all defense occurs within a context of outs.
The Known Principles of Sabermetrics. Item 2: Batting and pitching statistics never represent pure accomplishments, but are heavily colored by all kinds of illusions and extraneous effects. One of the most important of these is park effects.
The Known Principles of Sabermetrics. Item 3: There is a predictable relationship between the number of runs a team scores, the number they allow, and the number of games that they will win.
Ok, so here’s my two cents. Brian Sabean has no knowledge of these concepts. He can’t. Either he’s read Bill James and thinks he knows better, or he’s never read him. Either way, he’s obviously completely out if his mind.
He has been trying to build a team with old, soon to be out of baseball players, which is why, of course, the Giants never have any money for real players, because –as James illustrated 30 years ago– your replacement costs are gonna be sky-high, and you’re gonna be facing those costs every year.
And if you build an offense that consists of players who don’t get on base, and don’t have any power, you sure as hell will not be able to seriously compete, even if you have one of the most dominant pitching staffs of the last twenty years.
It just hurts my head to realize that I read this stuff 30 years ago, and the team I root for operates as if these simple concepts are still waiting to be discovered.
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Lincecum is signed. Here are the current contract figures for 2010. Payroll is alread 5 million over 2009 total and only 14 contracts signed.
Zito 20
Rowand 12
Renteria 9
Lincecum 8
DeRosa 6
Sanchez 6
Affeldt 4
Cain 4.25
Molina 4.5
Wilson 4.44
Uribe 3.25
Huff 3
Sanchez 2.1
Medders 0.82
Tot: 87.36
Thanks for this. Looking ahead another year, we should liberally have about $75mm committed to 2011 payroll, which includes the known bumps for Lincecum & Cain, along with expected arbitration raises. That’s a lot to have locked up.
Supposing that Sandoval and Posey are the top offensive producers in 2011, just think about how much money is committed to players that do nothing to help us score. Well, at least Renteria and Molina SHOULD be gone by then.
It won’t make any difference if the same guy who put those free agent homeless bums in the first place is still doing so. It will just be same stench, different shitbags.
Zito 20
Rowand 12
Renteria 9
Molina 4.5
DeRosa 6
Sanchez 6
$57 Million for fucking garbage and hefty trash bags. ALL OF IT FREE AGENTS
The Giants already have younger personnel who could fill all of those positions for less than ~$6MM. Many of those younger players will be playing those positions come mid-season when these old FA’s start to break down. The team is in free fall.
I think what’s happened is that during Sabean’s glory years (1997-2003) the Giants had an abnormal number of players who played well into their mid-to-late 30s (Bonds, Kent, Burks, Santiago, Grissom). Even though these players likely had some, um, pharmaceutical help in extending their primes, Sabean now thinks this is the expected pattern. So as far as he is concerned Derosa and Huff and Molina and Rowand and Freddy Sanchez will likely retain their value for another 2-3 years. Everybody else knows this is nonsense, of course, but Sabean believes it, and he is the one in charge of the team…
Well, the thing is that there are still plenty of peds around; its just that there is no credible test in place for a lot of them, HGH being the most notorious. And it appears that a number of the peds that can be and are tested for under the constraints of the current cba may be more palliative and recuperative than what was the conventional wisdom.
The ludicrousness of the situation is that because Bonds was forced out of baseball, and Selig has pronounced an end to the steroid era, that in fact everybody went back to vitamins and the occasional bayer aspirin and that just isn’t so.
I’m not necessarily convinced that the drop-off in older guys is primarily attributed to enhanced testing, but rather these guys were marginal guys to begin with and once injured the margin for error shrunk completely, and the drop-off is considerable. Just look at Sanchez and Huff and DeRosa. The higher the ceiling on a player, the further away from the basement he is.
Bonds blasts his knee apart for the better part of a year and he still pops OPS of 1.071 in 2005, .999 in 2006 and 1.045 in 2007, his last. Lincecum has back spasms and is merely great as opposed to supernatural. Edgardo Alfonso has back spasms and he falls off the face of the earth; albeit it with ill-gotten millions courtesy of Brian Sabean.
To put it another way, the difference between 1st place and last place in a Nascar race is maybe 5 mph or 2 percent. Now two percent may not seem like much, but it is the difference between 1st place and 43rd place.
That theory doesn’t really hold water. The players you mention weren’t in their mid-to late thirties during those years. They were in their early thirties, a big difference. And they were all established, everyday players. DeRosa and Huff and Sanchez don’t have anything like the kind of track records guys like Kent or Burks or Grissom had. Not to mention, a 31-year old Kent is likely to have a nice year even with his decline, since his peak was so high.
A guy like Huff has had one good year in the last four. What’s his decline gonna look like? Is he even gonna be able to play every day?
These last few years, the old guys that Sabean has accumulated have all been huge crap shoots. Dave Roberts? Freddie Sanchez? Aubrey Huff? Whatever you think we got from Molina these last couple of years (Sabean’s version: a .280 hitter with 20 home runs. My version: a little power and a huge number of outs), it’s still been a mixed blessing, because it’s been just enough to convince Sabean that he is on the right track.
These guys are nothing like the players that Sabean signed during the late-nineties and early-aughts. These guys are bounce around, or arrived late; they are just huge question marks.
And the amount of money is just obscene, money that could have, that should have been used to acquire one or two good young players.
To follow up on your last sentence John, is that even if guys like Ramirez, Holiday and the top 5 percent of players drop off, they are still better players than the crippling overpaid flotsam that Sabean signs, year in and year out. Bonds HR total dropped by 40 percent between 2001 and 2002, he still hits 45 jacks. He was still the MVP. Rowand, gets ouchy hits 14 fewer jacks and 150 points less of OPS between 2007 and 2008 (27 to 13) and he becomes a hole in the lineup, never mind an MVP candidate.
Manram has what everybody determines to be an off year in 2009 and still ops at .949. If you have the money to spend you’re just so much better off risking it on one older star than spreading it out over 3 older guys who have no margin for error as Sabean has repeatedly demonstrated for the last 7 years at least. I’ll take one older Barry over any 3 of Sanchez, DeRosa, Huffs, Rowand, Winn, Renteria every fucking day of the week and double my bet against Sabean while I’m at it.
Grissom was 36 when Sabean acquired him, Burks was 34, Santiago was 36. Anyhow, my point is that Sabean acquired (or inherited) several position players who aged amazingly well, and he now thinks this is the rule, not the exception. If Huff and Sanchez and Derosa and Molina age as well as the Giants’ veterans of 1997-2003, they will be bargains. And the odds of this happening are about the same as the odds that Lady Gaga wins the Nobel Prize in physics…
I like Bill James. Maybe it’s his style, but I like that kind of summing-up. Thanks John.
The one that hits me is #1 – aging players. Not that I think that the Giants brass actually looks at those things, but individual Pecota aside, it’s really only true as a whole. There may be that 10% (or whatever it is) decrease per year, but that also means if DeRosa is career average, Huff is gonna drop 20%. I’m not speaking about those players in particular, but it is an unavoidable fact – you’ve got – jesus, 6 – vets: some will crater or at least in toto they’ll be worse.
This is why (not to even mention the money part) why I’m pleased about Nate apparently being the RF, and get annoyed at Ishikawa etc getting effectively benched. I know some of the names might be on the age-cusp, but still, Nate has a CHANCE at being really really good, while Huff is what Huff is. Or less than that with decline. That signing in particular just strikes me as paying more for the same thing – completely befuddling. I’m not a believer that any of the young players is the next coming or anything, but then again I could be wrong and so could the team – so why go out and get somebody that you KNOW isn’t? I don’t get it.
I wouldn’t count on Nate being the RF (I hope I do this block quote thing right):
http://blogs.mercurynews.com/extrabaggs/2010/02/05/pre-fanfest-giants-news-posey-could-work-at-other-positions-lincecum-tries-to-take-contract-haggling-in-stride/
nice to see bochy and sabean on the same page….hahahahahahaha
velez in right???…hohoho
and i love bowker…but nate has more skills
of course, not one of the high paid vets has to compete for his position
what a joke