This year's team, as close as they came to winning a World Championship, was a rebuilding effort waiting to happen, with Tino Martinez, Paul O'Neill, Scott Brosius, and Chuck Knoblauch all in the final year of their contracts. Those four players, despite their accomplishments, their popularity, and their big-game experience, were drags on the Yankee offense last season. Now that they've scattered to the four winds (O'Neill retired immediately after the World Series, Brosius on Monday [November 26]), the Yanks are left with holes to fill and money to spend.
And the Yankees spent. They bought a new cornerstone for their offense in Jason Giambi, signing him to a 7-year/$120 million contract. They filled in their leftfield gap with Rondell White, signing him for 2 years/$10 million. They rounded out their rotation by signing a fifth starter in Sterling Hitchcock at 2 years/$12 million, and then a SIXTH starter in David Wells for 2 years/$7 mil. They shored up their bullpen by signing setup man Steve Karsay for 4 years/$22.25 mil.
As if to prove that money grew on trees, they rewarded their catcher, Jorge Posada, with a 5-year/$51 million pact. This after having spent the previous winner locking up Derek Jeter (10 years/$189 mil) and Mariano Rivera (4/$39.99 mil), not to mention Andy Pettitte (3/$25.5 mil), Drew Henson (6/$17 mil) and their free-agent marquee signing, Mike Mussina (6/$88.5 mil).
The result was not only the highest payroll in baseball in 2002, but the highest by a wide margin. The Yanks' Opening Day payroll was $125,928,583, $17.5 million more than the second-highest, the Boston Red Sox. They added to that significantly during the season, acquiring Raul Mondesi and Jeff Weaver, and pushed their payroll over $135 million. They even paid out the largest performance bonus for any player, $4 million to David Wells for making 30 starts.
But regardless of the cost, it didn't add up to another Yankee World Championship. And with a new Collective Bargaining Agreement in place -- one specifically aimed at curbing the Yanks' spending via a competitive-balance tax and revenue sharing -- money in the Bronx no longer grows on trees. Brian Cashman has been given explicit orders to trim payroll. In last year's "Remaking the Yankees" series, I avoided addressing the fiscal consequences of the team's needs until the final installment. But given Cashman's current marching orders, it seems only fitting we examine it at the outset this time around.
In 2003, the Yanks (and any other team) will pay a 17.5% tax on all salary above $117 million. It should be noted that for those purposes, "salary" includes the average annual contract value of all players on the 40-man roster, plus $7.7 million in benefit costs. This is an important distinction; it penalizes the Yanks for those hefty long-term contracts, which were structured to permit the team near-term flexibility while taking advantage of the long-term revenue increase that YES will presumably bring. Thus Jason Giambi costs the Yanks $17.1 million for tax purposes, even though his 2003 salary (including signing bonus) is "only" $13 million. Ouch.
By my calculations, based on the information at the MLB Contracts Page, the Yanks have $114.1 million committed to 15 players in 2003. This includes signing bonuses but not performance clauses, and includes Andy Pettitte (who's got an $11.5 million team option which the Yanks must decide whether to exercise by Friday) but not Roger Clemens (whose $10.3 million buyout made him a free agent). They have eight free agents (including Clemens but not Pettitte), and at least five other significant players whose salaries are yet to be determined. Here is a chart (all salary costs in millions of dollars):
Arias FA
Clemens FA
Coomer FA
Mendoza FA
Stanton FA
Vander Wal FA
Ventura FA
Widger FA
OHernandez ARB
Spencer ARB
Wilson ARB
Soriano < 3 y.e.
Johnson < 3 y.e.
Choate < 3 y.e.
Alfonso Soriano, Nick Johnson, and Randy Choate, because they have less than three years of major league experience, aren't yet eligible for arbitration; the Yanks can renew their contracts unilaterally. Orlando Hernandez, Shane Spencer, and Enrique Wilson, with between three and six years of major league experience, are without contracts but not eligible for free agency unless the Yanks decline to offer them arbitration. Between those six, the Yanks figure to add another $10-12 million to their payroll, assuming they sign Soriano to a longer deal and exercise their rights on El Duque. That puts them at around $125 million without a starting third baseman, two of their three setup men, and any kind of bench, to say nothing of the remainder of the 25- and 40-man rosters or considering the average annual value of these contracts. To keep payroll down, they're going to have to get creative. Already, the Yanks have discussed moving White, Hitchcock, and Mondesi -- $18 million worth of mostly dead wood -- with other teams. They've made noises about trading Pettitte and even Posada, and letting mainstays such as Clemens, Stanton, and Mendoza walk. Clearly, this is not business as usual in the Bronx.
I'll begin examining the Yankees position by position needs and options in the next installment, hopefully this weekend. Starting it off? Starting pitching, of course.
I've added a new feature to this page, a blogroll, courtesy of blogrolling.com. At left, below the not-so-Recent Updates section is a list of links to other baseball-related sites, mostly weblogs. I've still got my Links page, which is much more extensive and contains short descriptions of each site (the applicable descriptions pop up in balloons if you hold your mouse over the links at left, which is kinda neat). I had to abbreviate some of the names on my list due to the narrow column width; when Futility Infielder 2.0 rolls out this winter, that will be taken care of.
The nice thing about this blogroll feature (which I'm calling The Roster) is that, like the blog itself, I can update it instantly from any computer. I got the idea from Dan Lewis' dlewis.net blog, which is among the featured links, of course. It's still a work-in-progress, but it's a handy little device. Enjoy!
Bill James being hired by the Sox is another sign of the foothold that sabermetrics has gained in baseball's front offices. Make that a toehold -- after all, James has been influencing the game for 20 years from the outside with his revelatory takes on statistics, while most "baseball men" resisted what he had to say. Statheads can fondly point to Oakland GM Billy Beane and Toronto GM J.P. Ricciardi in part because there simply aren't that many sabermetrically-inclined baseball execs. Which isn't to say that they're completely alone or unprecedented. Neyer offers up a rough history of sabermetrics in the front office, starting with the work of Branch Rickey and statistician Allen Roth (Rickey's proto-sabermetric essay for Life magazine in 1954, "Goodby to Some Old Baseball Ideas" introduced On Base Percentage and Isolated Power as meaningful statistics, and pointed to the predictive power of run differential with regard to a team's success; Roth, employed by Rickey when he ran the Brooklyn Dodgers, pioneered the tracking of situational statistics, or splits).
Among those Neyer writes about in his sidebar are James' peer Craig Wright, author of The Diamond Appraised, who worked for the Texas Rangers; Eric Walker, who worked for the Giants and A's in the '80s and now runs a baseball analysis site called High Boskage House; Eddie Epstein, who worked for the Orioles and Padres and more recently co-authored Baseball Dynasties with Neyer; Mike Gimbel, who worked for GM Dan Duquette in both Montreal and Boston, and about whom Neyer wrote one cautionary tale of a sidebar, and Keith Law, who last season left Baseball Prospectus to work for Ricciardi in Toronto.
Even James himself has worked within baseball before, or at least skirted its perimeter. In the '80s he worked in salary arbitration cases representing players, and he worked as a consultant for his beloved Kansas City Royals in the late '90s. His relationship with the Royals bore little fruit, however, and the typically small-minded team never found a way to bring him fully into the fold. Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski writes that the team's attraction to catcher Brent Mayne is what finally broke him:
Mayne is a fine fellow. But he's also a 34-year-old catcher who hit .236 with no power, ran like he was a mime fighting the wind, guided the Royals pitchers to the second-worst ERA in baseball and got paid $2.5 million.
This year, the financially strapped Royals will pay him $2.75 million.
Meanwhile, catcher A.J. Hinch, who hit .298 the last two months of the season, banged the ball with significantly more power than Mayne and had a much better record behind the plate -- plus, he's a bright, loyal team player who got paid $250,000 -- was cut during the off-season.
And that's when James threw his hands up in the air. It's not that he thinks Hinch is Johnny Bench or that he blames Mayne for the Royals' downfall. It's not that this was the dumbest thing the Royals have done, or even in the top 100.
No, it's just another spectacularly illogical move by a team that has become the new sports leader in spectacularly illogical moves. This is just the move that finally pushed Bill over the cliff.
The news that James was hired by the Red Sox was greeted with particular elation among Sox fans at Baseball Primer, as readers threatened public drunkenness and all but fit their Beantown team for World Series rings. But how much impact will he really have? Assistant GM Theo Epstein stressed that James' role would be significant but limited, telling the Boston Globe, "Bill James will represent one voice in a chorus that includes all our major league scouts, the GM, the assistant GM, and our manager. We've added an important voice but by no means is his voice going to shout over everybody else's.'' Epstein was more specfic in discussing James' potential role with Neyer:
I think he's going to be most valuable in the areas where we do a good job of keeping him up to speed with current information. For instance, we might point out to him that there is a certain opportunity for a trade, or a certain way we can use a player. Then he comes back with an initial reaction based on a quick study. Next, we might play the devil's advocate by giving a traditional baseball response to his commentary, or asking if there's a general rule that we can take from this conclusion. And then he goes off and does a tremendous amount of research, after which we may end up with something very useful that we didn't know before.
Over on Baseball Primer, Charles Saeger, who's done some extensive work in defensive analysis which runs parallel to James' recent work, put himself in the man's shoes. His hypothetical agenda: steering the Sox away from poor gambles, ridding them of bad prospects ("pitchers who strike out 4 men a game, the outfielder who walks 16 times a year in AA, the player who had a good year at A ball at age 23 and the scouts are gaga about"), and using "sabermetric darlings" to fill minor holes ("The Bill James Red Sox would stress walks and knuckleball pitchers for these guys. They might take a chance on a pitcher who had many hits allowed the last year but whose other stats are okeh, or a player who hit poorly in 136 major league at bats but who had hit well in AAA for many years."). Solid suggestions not out of line with Epstein's remarks.
Myself, I have mixed feelings about James' hiring that hearken back to the way I felt back in the early '90s when Nirvana and other indie-rock bands broke through to the mainstream and became household names. If every front office takes on a sabermetrician, then a sabermetric approach may effectively be neutralized. It won't be a competitive advantage for a team to horde high-OBP players (for example), and we may well be left with too many teams which emulate Oakland's occasionally less-than-scintillating wait-walk-wallop brand of baseball. And we statheads won't have sabermetric illiterati such as Allard "Lets Sign Donnie Sadler" Baird and Randy "Let's Trade for Brad Ausmus" Smith to ridicule, no Bob "Bunt 'Em Over Unless It Breaks Up a Perfect Game" Brenly or Tony "Twelve-Man Bullpen" La Russa to second-guess. If a perfect world leaves us without any targets for our barbs, then it's not a very perfect world, is it?
Given the glacial speed and lack of foresight with which "baseball men" move -- we're in the Age of Selig, after all -- I'm not too worried. James may bring some new thinking to the Red Sox which, in time, could give the team a leg up. Along with the impressive signs Ricciardi's Jays are showing, that may make for a more competitive AL East. God forbid the Sox actually win anything, it might bring James a smidgen more credit than he's gotten from the general public ("Can Bill James Lift the Curse of the Bambino?"). But if he's not the GM or the manager, he's not going to be the lightning rod for the Sox success or failure (and neither is Billy Beane, apparently), particularly if he heeds the painful lessons of Mike Gimbel and avoids shooting his mouth off.
I do think sabermetrics has more to give the game than just a competitive advantage to the Sox, the A's and the Jays and anybody else who's on board (Brian Cashman and the Yankees organization have been ahead of the curve with their recognition of the importance of OBP, among other things, but they don't pay quite the lip service to it than the aforementioned orgs do). I think that an understanding of the major tenets of James' work (for example) is THE key for teams to hold down payroll costs, as they gain a better understanding of the market for replaceable talent and avoid paying past-prime ballplayers huge, franchise-crippling salaries. If that contributes to a healthier, more stable pastime, I'm for it.
Willie Randolph is having another tough winter. The former Yankee star and current third base coach has interviewed for five managerial openings since the season ended, and thus far he's 0-for-5. The Brewers, Devil Rays, Mariners, Mets, and Tigers have all passed over Randolph, sometimes for more experienced candidates (Lou Piniella, Art Howe), sometimes for names more familiar to the local fan base (Alan Trammell, Ned Yost).
Sadly, it's a familiar story for Randolph, who's been interviewing for jobs for the past three offseasons in Milwaukee, Minnesota, Colorado, Philadelphia, L.A., and Cincinnati. The Reds actually offered him their job two years ago, but Randolph turned them down, not only because the salary offered was less than his annual World Series share, but also because the Reds wouldn't let him choose his own coaching staff. Bob Boone eventually got that job and still has it, but some of the other jobs which Randolph didn't get have since turned over. Buddy Bell came and went in Colorado. So did Davey Lopes in Milwaukee. Larry Bowa is a ticking time bomb in Philly.
Unlike many other managerial candidates, Randolph has never piloted in the minors or the majors. He's never even managed in the Arizona Fall League, on account of the Yanks' annual postseason runs. But as shown by the 0-fer track record of Chris Chambliss, who has coached for several teams including the Yanks AND managed successfully in the minors, a prospective employer can almost always find a reason to stay within the old-boy network of managerial retreads. Among the initial list of candidates for the Mariners job is a Who's Who of mediocre (and white) managers: Buddy Bell, Lee Elia, Terry Francona, Tony Muser, and Jim Riggleman. That sorry-assed quintet's combined record: 1670-2154, a .437 winning percentage (equivalent to 23.6 71-91 seasons), zero playoff appearances, three seasons above .500, one season with over 90 wins, nine with over 90 losses (including Bell's 109 with Detroit in 1996), and one of the most famous tirades in modern managerial history. At last report, Bell and Riggleman, but not Randolph, were still in the running for that seat, while Elia, Francona, and Muser had accepted coaching jobs with other organizations.
One way or another, whatever formula Willie's using doesn't appear to be selling. His rejection of the Reds job may have backfired, causing other organizations to shy away from him. Or it may have convinced him, falsely, that teams ARE willing to hire him, and it's just a matter of a favorable situation laying itself at his feet. But several writers, including NY Daily News' Bill Madden have suggested that Randolph's lack of experience is a real stumbling block: Writes Madden:
This is what one GM said about Randolph: "It would be very hard for me to hire a manager who has never managed anywhere. For one thing, my owner would ask me: 'Can he run a clubhouse?' 'Does he know how to manage a pitching staff?' In Randolph's case, I can't answer those questions because there's no track record. Even Randolph can't answer those questions."
Randolph isn't completely out of options yet. With Dusty Baker leaving, the Giants' managerial seat is vacant, with no obvious successor in sight. Additionally, Dan Graziano of the Newark Star-Ledger has speculated that if Frank Robinson steps down as manager of the Monteal Expos, the commissioner's office could consider Randolph for that post.
But there's an even closer and more surefire option at Randolph's feet. Luis Sojo told the Yankees this week that he will not return as manager of their AA farm team, the Norwich Navigators, with whom he stepped in midway through the season and won the league championship. The status of Stump Merrill, who started the season in Norwich and moved up to AAA Columbus when Brian Butterfield was fired, is also in question, according to Brian Cashman. If Randolph is serious about managing in the majors, and if he continues to get shut out this winter, he should bite the bullet and toss his hat in the ring for one of those positions. After nine years of coaching for the Yanks, going down to the minors would put Willie in a lifestyle to which he's unaccustomed. But it's a golden opportunity knocking at his door. And as Randolph has probably figured out by now, opportunity doesn't knock every day.
