Update:Newsday is now saying that the deal has been agreed to in principle, and that it will only involve Soriano and a minor-league pitcher. Some of A-Rod's money will be deferred, and the Rangers will be picking up some of the remaining $189 mil on Rodriguez's contract as well. Minor technical details need to be be hammered out, and the guy at the other end of my red phone tells me the deal will be announced on Tuesday.
Since there aren't any minor-league pitchers that the Yanks have who are anywhere near ready to contribute, and since it won't cost them any major league pitching at all, it's really hard to see this, if it goes down, as anything but an incredible coup by the Yanks. All the more so if it happens this quickly -- the fewer news cycles we have to endure where this is the top story, the better for everybody involved.
I was relentlessly critical of new Dodger owner Frank McCourt in his underfinanced but nonetheless successful pursuit to purchase the team. He didn't win too many points immediately afterwards for his treatment of GM Dan Evans, a man who's done a respectable job under the most trying of circumstances, yet is being given an invitation to leave. But if it's the new owner's prerogative to do things his way, then McCourt's first major decision looks like a bold and creative one, at least if the early reports are correct. According to ESPN's Peter Gammons, the Dodgers are going to tap Oakland A's assistant GM Paul DePodesta, Billy Beane's right-hand man for the past five years, as Evans' replacement.
Evans deserves better. Saddled with some ungodly contracts attached to physically unsound players -- thank you, Kevin Malone -- he handled the situation responsibly, resisting the temptation to throw good money after bad, helping to rebuild the farm system, and protecting the team's plum prospects in the face of considerable temptation to trade them for some lumber. All while assembling the league's best pitching staff, mind you.
Meanwhile, DePodesta is considered perhaps the top GM prospect in the game. A 31-year-old Harvard grad, he developed some serious analytical tools, as detailed in the smash hit Moneyball, which have keyed the A's rise to success on a shoestring budget. Whether he has the other skills -- particularly the ability to run an organization and to make deals with other GMs -- remains to be seen. But from the looks of this lengthy (and very corporate-speak) presentation, he certainly brings a thorough and well-crafted organizational philosophy to the table.
Some articles have spun DePodesta's hiring as all but a done deal. But McCourt seems to be backing away to interview other candidates. Since one of those candidates is Phillies assistant GM Ruben Amaro, Jr., this may be simply a CYA move to interview at least one minority candidate and avoid drawing the Wrath of Bud. Not that Amaro isn't legit; he's been highly touted as a GM prospect for a few years. But the opportunitiy to nab DePodesta, whose strategies and experience mesh well with the Dodgers' needs as they begin the McCourt era, should not be passed up.
DePodesta's familiarity with building a winning ballclub on the cheap will be a necessity if he takes over the suddenly cash-conscious Dodgers. There are several areas in which he can applying some lessons from the Oakland model and some sound sabermetric principles to reap some serious benefits for the Dodgers. If any team needs to be hit by the sabermetric 2" x 4", it's the one in Chavez Ravine.
First and perhaps foremost, the Dodgers need to develop a thorough understanding of park effects and the way they distort performance. Dayn Perry of Baseball Prospectus did a thoughtful piece last summer which shed some light on the team's inability to develop hitters:
In fact, for much of their history, they've been less offensive than a Billy Graham knock-knock joke. The Dodgers haven't finished in the top five in the NL in runs scored since 1991, and they've led the senior circuit in runs scored exactly twice since moving to Los Angeles prior to the 1958 season. Additionally, they've been one of the worst organizations in baseball in terms of identifying and developing hitters. The lineage of highly productive, homegrown Dodger hitters runs from Mike Piazza (himself a nepotistic afterthought when tapped in the 62nd round of the 1988 amateur draft) to...Pedro Guerrero? If I'm in a charitable mood I'll throw in the merely decent Raul Mondesi and the so-far-so-good Paul Lo Duca, but you get the idea.
So why is that? Part of it is the "Dodger Way" -- an emphasis on pitching, often to the detriment of the offense -- but part of it may be the developmental environment in which their young hitters toil. I'm talking park effects.
It's not exactly breaking news that the hitting clime at the Dodgers' Triple-A affiliate (now Las Vegas, previously Albuquerque) stands in sharp contrast to that of Dodger Stadium, arguably the toughest park for hitters in the majors.
Dayn goes on to crunch some numbers which show that in terms of park effects, the Dodgers had the second-largest difference between their major league ballpark, which favors pitchers in the extreme, and their full-season minor league affiliates. Regarding this, over the winter I've had several discussions with B-Pro's Ryan Wilkins, who wrote the Dodger chapter in the forthcoming book, about this phenomenon, and he said that farm director Bill Bavasi, now the Mariners' GM, hadn't even considered it. As far as I'm concerned, this is like your sexually active teenage daughter saying she hasn't even considered the idea of contraception -- it's dangerously ignorant on multiple levels. In light of Perry's study and Wilkins' anecdote, the Dodgers' failure to develop hitters becomes more clear. Failing to understand the terrain on which they reside, the expectations they place on their minor league hitters are unreasonable, and when a player like second baseman Joe Thurston doesn't pan out, they're left in a fall-back position.
Hand in hand with understanding the environment in which they're producing hitters, of course, comes identifying good young hitters in the first place. Here's another area the Oakland philosophy can help, both in the application of sabermetric principles -- getting down with OBP and searching for hitters who can control the strike zone, using performance analysis as a tool to aid this -- and in shifting the organization's emphasis from drafting high-school players (particularly pitchers) and infatuation with the tools/scouting side of things. As broached in Moneyball, those two concepts are united by the fact that it's much easier to analyze performance on a college level than it is a high school one, due to the longer seasons, the greater amount of data available, and a more even caliber of competition. From what I recall in Moneyball (which I don't have in front of me, having lent it out), DePodesta was the one in charge of the organization's analysis of college ballplayers in the first place. Check.
The Dodgers have largely emphasized high school rather than college players in drafting; both of Evans' first-round picks were high schoolers. In John Sickels' look at the Dodgers' top prospects on ESPN.com, of the 17 he profiles, only four played college ball, three of them in community college. All seven of the pitchers listed are high schoolers, and while Edwin Jackson and Gregg Miller are thought of as among the top prospects in the game, young pitchers will break your heart more often than not, and the Dodgers will be lucky if a few of the ones listed survive to contribute on a major-league level.
But looking over the team's #1 d(r)aft picks from the past 14 years, high school prospects are only part of the problem:
2003 Chad Billingsley, RHP, HS
2002 James Loney, 1B, HS
2001 (lost due to signing Andy Ashby)
2000 Ben Diggins, RHP, Arizona U.
1999 (lost due to ??)
1998 Bubba Crosby, CF, Rice U.
1997 Glenn Davis, 1B, Vanderbilt U.
1996 Damian Rolls, 3B, HS
1995 David Yocum, LHP, Florida State U.
1994 Paul Konerko, C, HS
1993 Darren Dreifort, RHP, Wichita St. U.
1992 (lost due to ??)
1991 (lost due to ??)
1990 Ronnie Walden, LHP, HS
That's five high schoolers, five collegiates, and four zeroes, one even bigger because it's attached to Andy Ashby. While scanning these top picks constitutes a pretty superficial analysis, the above is a pretty abysmal record unless Loney and Billingsley pan out. Only three of these players -- Dreifort, Konerko, and Rolls -- have had any significant major league career, and that's being generous in Rolls' case. More importantly, only one of these players has had any impact with the Dodgers, and that one, Dreifort, has been the bane of their existence ever since signing a five-year, $55 million contract that's so far seen them spend $31 million for eight wins and 155 innings of below-average pitching. That absurd contract mistake shouldn't fall directly on the shoulders of those who drafted him, but Dreifort has an ERA+ of 95 over the course of his career, and that's nothing to write home about for an overall #2 pick or the organization which picked him.
The bottom line is that even if the Dodgers have done a very good job of drafting lately, they need to get themselves on some fundamentally solid footing as they move forward, and DePodesta's emphasis on drafting college players and understanding what to look for in them would be a big boost.
Another feature from the Oakland model which the Dodgers would do well to emulate is not overpaying for replaceable talent. The Dodgers recently avoided arbitration with third baseman Adrian Beltre, who will turn 25 in April, by signing him to a $5 million contract. Beltre's a combined 7.8 Wins Above Replacement (WARP1) over the past three years, pretty measly, and by most sabermetric measure he's a below-average hitter and fielder. Meanwhile, as Dodger Thoughts' Jon Weisman pointed out, that money is only $400,000 less than the Yankees are paying Alfonso Soriano (who, to be fair, has less service time). Soriano is 21.7 Wins Above Replacement over the past three years. At this point in their careers, Soriano is a superstar with some flaws in his game, while Beltre's a flawed player with what many once believed was superstar potential -- and their prices are a wash. A cash-conscious team has no business paying $5 mil to a disappointing cipher like Beltre, and that move must be considered a black mark against Evans' name this winter. The DePo Dodgers would likely avoid those kinds of mistakes.
DePodesta would be an ideal GM choice for an organization that's desperately in need of change and facing some unique challenges -- particularly tight purse strings -- in the immediate future. McCourt's hiring of DePo would send a clear message that these aren't the Fox Dodgers, nor are they the latter-day O'Malley ones. There's plenty not to like about the McCourt sale, but if it drags this franchise kicking and screaming into the 21st century, then it won't all be for naught. And if DePodesta can apply what he's learned in Oakland, the Dodgers might actually have a chance to build something special and to instill hopes in the hearts of their fans once more.
Broken into two MP3s that are about 4.5 MB apiece, the roundtable is about 19 minutes long:
Part 1Part 2
The four shared some thoughts on the Yanks for the coming season and ruminated on the nature of success and failure in the Bronx. Particularly up for discussion was the popularity of Derek Jeter. The show came out well, and from my standpoint, it was a blast to do. But listening to my own performance, I can charitably give myself only a B- grade. The weakest link on a strong panel, at least on this particular day.
Content-wise, my only regret was not having a better example of a harsh back page tabloid headline, and I think I handled the last question, about the Yanks' aging lineup, the best (though I think Joe had some good points about Yankee money bailing them out if the roof caves in). But my form left something to be desired. I can't help but think that I sound rushed and nervous every time the mic comes around -- full of flubs, sputters, and excessive giggling (eek, everything but a Howard Dean shriek). You can hear the wheels spinning as I try to get a handle on the questions. Maybe it was the awkwardness of the conference call format or my inability to anticipate the questions, maybe it was that I didn't have notes in front of me like I did for my BPR debut on the Hall of Fame articles (sadly lost to the ether, but let me tell you I was perfect), maybe it was just the radio equivalent of a bad hair day. I wasn't relaxed and in the zone like I was the first time we did it, I was literally pacing around my apartment.
Oh well. Long season, pants one leg at a time, stay within myself and throw strikes... it was still fun as hell. For what it's worth, BPR host Will Carroll gave me a B+, chalking any difficuties up to the roundtable format. And Alex said he thought I sounded fine but that he stumbled over his own words. So maybe we're just being overly self-critical... you be the judge.
• • •
I've been having some real techinical diffficulties with my home connection over the past week, resulting in about 50% downtime since my little headhunting experiment last Friday. As a result, I've been taking it mobile with the laptop about once a day. So if my productivity is low here and my email response time lags, now you know why.
* One of the nicest things that's happened to me over the past year with relation to this site is that I've made a few face-to-face friends in my vicinity. Alex Belth was the first, and Greg Spira and I have hung out a few times as well. Now the past weeks have brought a couple more. Last Thursday, I had dinner with Alex Ciepley of ball talk at a Vietnamese restaurant in Chinatown. Alex and I had met once before -- I rousted him into an all-too-brief burgers-and-beers gathering with Alex B., Greg, and my pal Nick a couple weeks back, but this was just two guys chattering nonstop about the Cubs, the Yankees, DIPS, PECOTA, the postseason, and the offseason, you name it. Eventually the discussion turned to Alex's bold Baseball's Top 10 Gay Icons piece of a couple weeks ago, and he said the response had been overwhelmingly positive, which was very refreshing to hear -- hell, I got flamed for writing about Todd Jones' league-leading homophobia last summer.
Alex sent me a pretty funny email the other day, following Will Carroll's expression of support for my opening salvo in this past (lost) weekend's cyberbrawl. Will, who's been a helpful source of knowledge as I've gone through my shoulder surgery and rehab, wrote about me, "He may only have one arm, but he comes out swinging. I don't think I'm the only one that's got his back." Alex saw this and wrote me:
so i'm sitting here at my computer friday evening, thinking, "my god! am i the most clueless person ever? have i really spent two evenings with this guy and never noticed he had a FAKE ARM???"
embarrassed as all hell, of course, i wrote will for more information: he informed me of the running joke regarding your labrum surgery, much to my relief.
i seriously had thought i was going insane...
In the midst of all thiis weekend's tension, that had me ROTFLMFAO, as they say. Speaking of the shoulder, after a brief but scary setback caused by overly aggressive/ambitious physical therapy, it's been responding very well to a more moderate program, and while the light at the end of the tunnel is still a couple of months away, at least I can now see it. The key with the recovery is getting the muscles at the back of the shoulder to pull the scapula down so that the socket opens up and the arm moves correctly without impingement. When those muscles haven't been working right for about nine months, it's a bitch to re-teach them. Mine have finally been getting the education they so sorely needed.
* On the subject of meeting up, recently I discovered that I have a reader in my own building. Ameer's his name, and he saw a piece of outgoing mail I had left on the doorman's counter, paperwork headed to Baseball Prospectus, and realized that I was the same guy whose blog he reads and who had just written the BP articles. We've emailed back and forth, and on Monday night finally got together for industrial-strength pints at the German beer hall down the block. He's an A's fan with a very Moneyball/stathead take on the game, so we were right at home chatting about Billy Beane, Scott Hatteberg, the Big Three, the blog scene, and that insane Peter Gammons gossip report from Boston Dirt Dogs which I came across during Quotegate. Of course, we had some good laughs about that whole mess too. Very cool to find more likeminded folks in the neighborhood; now that I'm a minor celeb in my own building, my head can barely fit through the door.
* Long missing in action, Giants fan and Barry Bonds' personal statistician John Perricone has launched his redesigned Only Baseball Matters website. He's already got his gloves off, excoriating Jints GM Brian Sabean for overpaying some Grade-D roster filler while passing up a chance to sign Vladimir Guerrero. And speaking of Giants blogs and torn labrums, check out Fog Ball's Tom Gorman's take on reliever Robb Nen. Tom's a certified Emergency Medical Technician, and he knows his way around the old wing. Nen's had three surgeries to repair a torn rotator cuff and a torn labrum. The former's in pretty serious shape (40% torn or more) but from my understanding of the latter, Giants fans shouldn't get their hopes up about the guy ever being a productive pitcher again.
* Baseball Outsider got my attention with a snazzy-looking site. Time will tell about their takes on baseball. I'm going to have to disagree with Brandon Rosage's view of the Dodger sale, which was written a couple weeks ago:
And besides their beautiful gem of a ballpark in Chavez Ravine, I haven?t been able to get past one simple thing: the Dodgers are owned by Rupert Murdoch; a man that is perhaps more evil than George Steinbrenner, Al Davis and Carson Daly combined.
The biggest thing the Dodgers have going for them right now, besides Gagne and Dodger Dogs, is the pending sale of the team to Boston real estate developer Frank McCourt. MLB Chief Operating Officer Bob DuPuy said the baseball owners group will likely vote on the sale Thursday.
Is there an emoticon for "cringe"? Not once in the article is McCourt's shoddy cash-flow situation acknowledged, and for that matter, neither is Shawn Green's injury when discussing his relatively woeful '03 production or chances of rebounding. I won't even get into Rosage's pinning the Dodgers' hopes on Paul LoDuca jacking 20 homers and a .450 slugging percentage or Juan Encarnacion suddenly learning to get on base. Rookie mistakes, let's hope. He's just one of four columnists, however, and the site is chock full of features (somewhat confusingly so), so check them out and make your own call.
• Speaking of the Dodgers, I once held that you haven't lived on the edge until you've gone through a pennant race with Jose Offerman as your regular shortstop. Back in the abbreviated 1995 season, Offerman made 35 errors and fielded .932 as the Dodgers narrowly won the NL West (and if you think those numbers are bad, check out his BPro card). Offerman, who left the majors in a nasty huff in 2002, spent 2003 in the independent Atlantic League and just resurfaced in a minor-league deal with the Twins. The Sports Retort touches all the bases of his career and has a first-hand perspective on the torment Offerman has caused Dodger and Red Sox fans. It's Awfulman.
Final Thoughts on Beating a Hornet's Nest with a Baseball Bat
Sons of Sam Horn moderator Eric/Lanternjaw has apologized to David Pinto of Baseball Musings over the "unethical" charges in the comments to the original Schilling/Neyer thread. I don't agree with everything else he has to say within his series of posts there, but I'm glad to see that he apologized because really, I've got better things to do than continue an angry debate. No more bacon fat will be thrown on this particular fire by me, so if you're waiting for another snappy comeback from Red Sox Nation's Public Enemy #211,918, I'm sorry to disappoint you.
From where I sit, the root of all of this is a simple turf war, and it comes from a clash of two cultures. The Sons of Sam Horn is a members-only, moderator-driven site in which the great majority of the people use pseudonyms rather than their real names and expect a what's-said-here-stays-here manner of dealing with their content, despite the fact that it's publicly viewable to members and non-members alike. The blogosphere as typified by Baseball Musings, Bronx Banter, this site and the great majority of the ones linked at left is full of public sites run by individuals who use their real names, whose content is interconnected, and where properly-attributed direct quotation is not just the norm, it is encouraged as a means of discourse and cross-promotion of sites.
Both models are common on the Internet, and which one appeals to you is generally a matter of taste, not which hat you're wearing. Nobody has to choose one or the other any more than they should have to choose beer or tacos, stats or scouting. I honestly don't have a problem with the SoSH model, though it's not my particular cup of tea. I'd rather wade through a dozen blogs a day and even the Ackbar-and-Piazza-laden posts at Baseball Primer in search of interesting and intelligent baseball conversation, because I don't particularly care if somebody goes off-topic and takes a discussion in an entirely different direction. By this I don't mean to imply that there's not interesting or intelligent baseball conversation at SoSH; there's plenty of that there, and if I'm going to apolgize for anything in this whole fray, it's for suggesting that I would rather see SoSH destroyed or closed to public viewing. So on that matter, I am sorry.
When the two cultures clash, the results are, as we've seen, quite ugly. It's much easier to go on the offensive when you don't have a name, an email address, and a body of work to stand behind, but then that's what happens when one starts lobbing rotten eggs at an army spoiling for a fight, and I honestly expected even less courtesy in this one than I've received. The Red Sox Nationalists who've posted their comments here and elsewhere have likely decided that I'm an idiot, a bandwagoneer, and the anti-christ rolled into one. To attempt to convince them otherwise would be utter futility, the opposite of "preaching to the choir." They're predisposed to dislike what I have to say, whether or not I'm attacking them, and now that I've said what I've said, I'm beyond redemption in their eyes.
None of that has prevented me from sleeping either of the past two nights.
But as I've said, I don't have much interest in carrying this debate further, as the merits of it are too colored by partisanship on both sides. Writing angry isn't fun, which is why I turned to baseball from politics in the first place. Other elements of my body of work -- statistical analysis, news analysis, original research, first-person perspective, humor, etc. -- have (I hope) far more to contribute to the broad spectrum of freely-available baseball content on the Internet than my Howard Beale side does. So I'm going to move on back to writing about the things I enjoy; those of you who want to accompany me on that journey are welcome to do so, and those of you spoiling for a continued fight are encouraged to look elsewhere.
Just for the record, I do hope that Curt Schilling continues to patronize SoSH, that the results remain in public view, and that some kind of balance between respecting his wishes and remaining true to the spirit of the medium can be struck. Regardless of who we're rooting for, I hope that some bridge across these two disparate but equally passionate cultures can be built, and that everybody can act in good faith from here on. You will get nothing less from me on that front.
