JAWS Attacks the 2009 Ballot

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Happy New Year, dear readers! It’s been about three weeks since I checked in here, a time during which I’ve been plowing through my winter workload, with a weeklong trip to England over Xmas and New Years thrown in as well. In the meantime, I’ve completed the entire JAWS series on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot for Baseball Prospectus:

• Oh Rickey You’re So Fine: Rickey Henderson

• A Rock-y Road: Tim Raines

• Throwing Rice: Jim Rice

• Andre and Onward: Andre Dawson and the other outfielders

• The Infielders

• The Pitchers

There’s also a WWZN “Young Guns” radio segment from last week, focusing on Rice as well as a two-part video series at Bronx Banter featuring Alex Belth, Cliff Corcoran and myself. In Part One, we discuss Henderson, Raines and Alan Trammell. In Part Two, we hit Rice, Dawson and Bert Blyleven.

But wait! There’s more! For those who didn’t feel like reading over 20,000 words worth on the topic, I penned an express version for SI.com which briefly covers the cases of the five players whom the JAWS system tabbed as vote-worthy (Henderson, Raines, Mark McGwire, Trammell and Blyleven) as well as the two players from outside that group who had polled more than 50 percent in the balloting last year, Rice and Dawson.

As you probably know by now, Henderson and Rice were the two who got the call, while Raines’ vote total actually dropped. I’m elated about Henderson — about whom Bill James once famously wrote, “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers” — making the Hall, but that was a no-brainer; what was surprising was that 28 writers left him off the ballot, thus committing mail fraud. As for Rice, I’ve railed against his candidacy and the late groundswell of support he received, support which is founded in mythology rather than performance (Joe Sheehan hit this one out of the park) and, in my mind, some amount of guilt on behalf of the writers who covered Rice and with whom he sparred. That he could get in while Raines is on the outside has me burn-an-overturned-car angry. Or it would if I didn’t need some sleep to catch up with all of this.

Anyway, I’m glad the JAWS project is done for another year, the sixth time I’ve done this for BP and the eighth time I’ve reviewed the BBWAA ballot at length overall. My timing wasn’t great this year, not only since I needed to deliver the last three installments covering 21 of the 24 players on the ballot in the span of five days. The system’s underlying valuation metric, Wins Above Replacement Player, is in the midst of a recalibration which has raised the offensive replacement level, with the conversion to a play-by-play system for defense still pending. The changes remain unpublished, so essentially I’ve been on the bleeding edge, working with a system that’s still in beta, with all of the hazards that entails.

In any event, I’m proud of the work but even more glad than usual that it’s done, as is my work for the Baseball Prospectus annual and the Fantasy Baseball Index. Might just find time for the occasional blog post now and then…

The Dock Is Out: Dock Ellis (1945-2008)

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“Dock Ellis was my first client in baseball, and he gave me as much joy as anybody outside of my family… He was so unique. He was viewed by some people as an outlaw, but he was far from that. He was so ahead of his time. He was so intuitive and smart and talented and independent. And he wasn’t about to roll over for the incredible prejudices that existed at the time.

“He was a very special person and he had an absolute army of fans and friends. He was at the cutting edge of so many issues, and he never backed down. I was proud to be his friend and stand with him.”

— Tom Reich, Ellis’ former agent

Pre-empting my posting of the first two articles of my Hall of Fame JAWS series here, the Futility Infielder home office flag will be at half staff for the remainder of the holiday season due to the passing of Dock Ellis. The following is an encore of the piece I wrote about him back in May, when the news that he was critically ill came to light.

Rock out to the SF Seals’ wonderful “Dock Ellis,” a song that for my money is the best rock song about baseball ever written.

• • •

Over the weekend, the news came down that one of my favorite baseball eccentrics, Dock Ellis, is critically ill due to cirrhosis of the liver, fighting for his life in the hope of getting well enough to be put on a transplant list. He’s had some problems with health insurance in recent years; Yankees president Randy Levine has pledged the club’s support in helping with his medical expenses.

Ellis had a few big years pitching for the Pittsburgh Pirates, notably in 1971, when he went 19-9 with a 3.06 ERA for a team that would win the World Series. That was the only season in which he made the All-Star team or received Cy Young consideration (he finished a distant fourth behind Fergie Jenkins, Tom Seaver and Al Downing), but he was a solid, intimidating pitcher who won 138 games in the majors and a key hurler on five division winners over the course of his 12-year career. He’s got a few other claims to fame:

• On June 12, 1970, Ellis pitched a no-hitter while purportedly under the influence of LSD. He walked eight batters and hit one.

• In the summer of 1971, Ellis was named to the NL All-Star team. With Vida Blue set to start for the AL, Ellis declared that there was no way NL manager Sparky Anderson would dare start him to create a matchup of two black pitchers. Wrote Kevin McAlester in a lengthy, worthwile profile for The Dallas Observer in 2005: “This launched the inevitable national sportswriters’ debate about how racism didn’t exist in 1971, and how dare he and why would he and so on and whatnot. The flap had its intended effect: Anderson, grumblingly, started Ellis, and the pitcher soon became one of the most reviled players in the league, branded a troublemaker and miscreant.” Ellis received a letter of praise from Jackie Robinson following the incident.

• On September 1, 1971, Ellis took the field as the starting pitcher for the first all-black lineup in major league history. It wasn’t one of Ellis’ better outings; he was knocked out in the second but the Pirates came back to win 10-7.

• In 1973, following a profile in Ebony magazine on his hairstyle, Ellis took the field for a pregame workout wearing hair curlers, a move that drew the wrath of stuffed shirt Bowie Kuhn. Said curlers were donated to the Baseball Reliquary upon Ellis’ induction into the iconoclastic museum’s Shrine of the Eternals in 1999.

[I visited the Reliquary this summer, shortly after this piece was initially written, for a fantastic retrospective of past exhibits called “The Tenth Inning,” one that included the curlers and so many other cool mementos. If you’re ever in the LA area, a stop to see the Reliquary’s wares at the Pasadena Central Library is a must.]

• On May 1, 1974, attempting to light a fire under his team, the Pirates, Ellis drilled the first three Reds’ hitters to come to the plate. Pete Rose, the first batter, actually rolled the ball back to Ellis upon being hit. Joe Morgan got plunked, as did Dan Driessen. Tony Perez was nearly hit as well; he walked. Finally, with a 2-0 count on Johnny Bench, Ellis was pulled by manager Danny Murtaugh. Bronx Banter has an excerpt of the story behind this from Ellis’ entertaining biography, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, (written by future US Poet Laureate Donald Hall).

• In December 1975, Ellis was traded by the Pirates to the Yankees for pitcher (and real-life MD) Doc Medich. Also in the deal was a second base prospect named Willie Randolph. Ellis would go 17-8 with a 3.19 ERA during his only full season with the Yankees, helping them to their first pennant since 1964. Randolph took over the starting slot at the keystone and hit .267/.356/.328 while stealing 37 bases. The deal, engineered by Yankee GM Gabe Paul, ranks among the best in Yankees’ history.

After being traded by the Yankees — to Oakland, in a deal for Mike Torrez — early in 1977, Ellis bounced around to Texas and the Mets before finishing his career with a few more games as a Pirate in late 1979. They would again go on to win the World Series, though he played no part in that. Drug and alcohol problems had hastened Ellis’ departure from the majors — he later said he never pitched a game without the aid of amphetamines — but upon leaving baseball, Ellis checked into a rehab facility and cleaned up. He went on to become a drug counselor.

Back in 1993, a band called the SF Seals, led by baseball fan Barbara Manning, released a three-song EP on Matador Records (run by Can’t Stop the Bleeding domo Gerard Cosloy). Two songs were covers, one devoted to Denny McLain, the other to Joe DiMaggio. The sole original “Dock Ellis,” is a chugging psychedelic rock number memorializing some of the pitcher’s signature moments. Rock out to Dock and spare a moment for him in your thoughts today.

Another Jerkass, Burnett

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Five PM on Friday is the start of the cocktail hour and the weekend for many. Not so for me during book season, and particularly not last week. At about 5:15, I got an email from the SI.com editor telling me that A.J. Burnett’s signing with the Yankees was imminent and asking if I could crank up the wordmobile one more time as I had for the CC Sabathia and Francisco Rodriguez signings. By the time most happy hours were over, voilà, another SI.com piece mirrored at BP.

As a Yankee fan, I’m not happy about the signing of Burnett to a five-year, $82.5 million deal. In addition to his lack of durability, he’s always struck me as a total jerkass; he made waves last summer by inviting the Blue Jays to trade him to the Cubs. As an anlyst, I’m none too impressed either:

Second, and of more relevance performance-wise, [CC] Sabathia has proven himself to be a durable workhorse during his eight big league seasons, reaching the level of 30 starts seven times, never throwing less than 180 1/3 innings, and making only one trip to the disabled list, that due to a groin strain in 2006. Burnett, on the other hand, has reached 30 starts just twice in 10 seasons — both times prior to entering the market as a free agent — and has topped 180 innings just three times. He’s got a long history of arm problems, one that includes Tommy John surgery in 2003 and more than four months on the DL in 2006 and 2007, the former for elbow pain caused by the breakup of scar tissue from his surgery, and the latter for a shoulder strain. Both times, he came off the DL for less than a week before returning, furthering the perception that he was unwilling to pitch through any discomfort. Burnett “has often needed reassurance that he’s healthy,” wrote BP injury analyst Will Carroll amid the pitcher’s 2006 elbow woes.

Burnett’s combination of fragility and perceived squeamishness calls to mind the darkest chapter of Yankee GM Brian Cashman’s tenure, the two deals he inked at the 2004 winter meetings with a pair of injury-riddled pitchers coming off rare healthy, effective seasons, Carl Pavano and Jaret Wright. The Yankees just cleared the former’s four-year, $39.95 million deal from the books this fall. A teammate of Burnett’s with the Marlins from 2002 through ’04, Pavano signed with the Yankees in December ’04 after a season in which he’d gone 18-8 with a 3.00 ERA in 222 1/3 innings — figures that were all career bests, but representing just the second time the pitcher had been healthy and effective over a full season. Pavano made just 19 starts in his four years in the Bronx, and his litany of injuries reached such an absurd level that his initials came to stand for “Can’t Pitch.” Wright was coming off his first healthy and effective season since 1998; he managed just 43 starts over the next three years (the last one in Baltimore) and was rarely effective. Suffice it to say that the Yankees’ recent record of banking on pitchers with sketchy track records isn’t a good one.

To be fair, Burnett is a good pitcher when healthy. Though he had never won more than 12 games prior to last season — a function of his lack of availability and the occasionally meager offensive support he had received — his ERAs have been 13 percent better than the park-adjusted league average over the past four years, which ranks 16th among pitchers with at least 700 innings in that span. His 4.07 ERA this past year was inflated by about half a run thanks to his .318 Batting Average on Balls In Play, 18 points above league average.

Burnett’s strikeout rate over those four years, 8.89 per nine innings, is even better, ranking third among that group behind Cy Young winners Jake Peavy and Johan Santana. As noted in discussing Sabathia, strikeout rate is the key indicator of a pitcher’s future success because it provides the window into his ability to fool hitters with his offerings. A pitcher’s strikeout rate generally declines as he ages, but a high strikeout rate gives him more headroom before he does so. To the extent that the Yankees must look five years into the future on Burnett’s deal, his strikeout rate offers some assurance of future effectiveness — if not availability.

Meanwhile, Cliff Corcoran — who within an hour of hearing the news about Burnett’s signing had made two irate Bronx Banter posts, one titled “Shit Sandwich” and the other “A.J. Stands for Awful Judgment” — gave SI.com a more measured take on the move’s impact upon the Yankee organization, one that recalled our recent SNY.tv video segment:

Rather than committing five-years and $82.5 million to Burnett (at an average annual salary of $16.5 million), the Yankees should have looked for shorter-term, more cost effective alternatives. Andy Pettitte, who may yet return on a one-year deal at a salary below the $16 million he earned last year, is one option. Former Sabathia teammate Ben Sheets, whose injury history resembles Burnett’s, would have taken a two-year, $30 million deal. Even converted reliever Braden Looper, who threw 199 innings of league average ball for the Cardinals last year and would be a perfectly acceptable, budget-rate fifth starter behind Sabathia, Wang, Chamberlain, and either Pettitte or Sheets.

Such less expensive, short-term deals would have allowed the Yankees to maintain the flexibility in their rotation that would have allowed the conga-line of starting pitching prospects in their organization to work their way up to the major leagues. Behind Chamberlain and Hughes are Ian Kennedy (24), Zach McAllister (21 and set to start 2009 in Double-A), 6-foot-8 Dellin Betances (a 21-year-old Brooklyn native set to start 2009 in High-A Tampa), 21-year-old lefty Jeremy Bleich (a 2008 draft pick out of Stanford who dominated in Hawaiian Winter Baseball and could move very quickly), 19-year-old Dominican Jairo Heredia, and assorted lesser prospects such as George Kontos (23 and set to start 2009 in Triple-A), Christian Garcia (23 and ticketed for Double-A), and the 6-foot-10 North Carolina State product Andrew Brackman (23), who is coming off Tommy John surgery.

With Sabathia, Wang, and Chamberlain already in place, the Yankees would only need two of the other nine pitchers listed above to pan out as back-end starters in order to field a young, cost-controlled rotation in the wake of shorter deals to pitchers such as Pettitte, Sheets or Looper. Instead, they’ve committed a rotation spot to an aging, injury-prone Burnett for the next five years (he’ll be 36 in the final year of the deal) and are paying $82.5 million for the privilege. That’s bad business.

That said, Burnett has better stuff than Pavano, Pettitte, Looper or even Sheets, he’ll keep the ball out of the hands of the execrable Derek Jeter-Robinson Cano keystone combo, and given that he’s 6-1 with a 1.35 ERA against the Yankees over the last two years, he’s one less tough pitcher they’ll have to face. But he’ll be from the Roger Clemens/Kevin Brown/Randy Johnson school of angry Yankee pitchers who aren’t much fun to root for. And when this blows up in Brian Cashman’s face, don’t say we didn’t warn him.

Running the Opt Out

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The Hardball Times’ Dave Studeman took issue with my take on CC Sabathia’s opt-out clause:

Jay Jaffe responds to Keith Law’s opinion about opt-out clauses, saying that he doesn’t think they’re a bad idea. Let’s be clear about this: opt-out clauses increase the cost of a contract to a club. Depending on the player, they could cost a lot.

Let’s take CC Sabathia, who can reportedly opt out of his new seven-year Yankee deal after three years. Two basic things can happen: Sabathia can go downhill and decide to continue playing under the contract because he’s overpaid compared to the “market” (bad for the Yankees) or he can continue to pitch well and the market for free agent pitchers can become even more expensive than it is now. In that case, he’ll opt out of the contract and the Yankees will have to replace him at the now-higher free agent rate (bad for Yankees).

Opt-out clauses impact the value of options in the financial market and the impact the value of contracts in baseball. For CC, that impact is positive. For the Yankees, it’s definitely negative.

Dave misconstrued some of what I had to say, so I responded via email:

[Y]ou’ve overstated my case regarding opt-outs; it’s not that “he doesn’t think they’re a bad idea.” It’s that I don’t think this particular one is a bad idea because of the way it could get the Yanks out of the back end of their deal after getting the more palatable portion of CC’s services.

Functionally there’s really no penalty for the Yanks in him going downhill and not opting out in year 3, because that’s what 99% of all long-term MLB contracts are anyway — guarantees that offer no leeway for such circumstances anyway. That’s not to say 7/$161M contracts are a good idea by any stretch, but it’s money the Yankees have already decided they need to spend to get the player. It’s a sunk cost, and anything they get back from that is a bonus — even if it costs more to replace him, they can spend it on a younger player with a lower injury risk, or on an area where they have more need circa 2011. They also get the draft picks at a time when he’s more likely to be a Type A, with zero incentive to accept arbitration.

It’s impossible to project pitchers very far into the future; if I get the next three years of prime CC but there’s a chance I get off the hook for his Age 32-35 seasons once I’ve ridden him for 700 more innings, I’m not sure I complain. And if I’m stuck with him for those years because I misjudged how well he might hold up over the first three, I’ve got no right to complain.

Back in Dave’s court, via email:

I didn’t mean to overstate your case — I guess I was confused because you also referred to other opt out clauses in the same paragraph. I thought you were making a judgment about opt out clauses in general.

I understand your argument but hey, I disagree. :) The opt out clause lets the Yankees get out of the back end only if it looks like it will be a good deal for them. They will stay in it if it looks like a bad deal for them. That’s taking the risk without keeping the reward. It’s basic finance, and not a good idea.

Thinking about this particular one, I disagree even more. The Yankees like to sign stars, and they pay more per talent than any other team in baseball. So if CC walks, that means that other teams are willing to pay even more than the Yankees are on the hook for — which means the Yankees are losing out even more, based on their terms.

The compensation choices are a good point, but they don’t offset the general argument to me (though I might be undervaluing them). Particularly for a team like the Yankees, which focuses on the “present value” of success. Sometimes the agents negotiate arbitration offers out of the contract in those situations — do we know those details yet?

So far as I know, no further details about the fine print on the contract or the opt-out clause have emerged, but the breakdown suggests that the salary remains a flat $23 million a year across the life of the deal, which to me telegraphs Sabathia’s intention to opt out because to stay in would mean he doesn’t expect his value to increase at all over that period, or even over the shorter increment.

The other factor in this is Sabathia’s stated desire to play in California. Let’s face it, seven years is a long time to commit to a new place, and if Sabathia is unhappy enough to want out of New York at some point, a standard guaranteed contract makes it highly unlikely the Yankees could move him for much value without eating a ton of salary; having the money and the draft picks is probably preferable. Newsday’s Ken Davidoff, for one, agrees that it’s quite possible CC walks just to get the chance to play in California:

While this technically is a seven-year, $161-million deal, it’s spiritually three years for $69 million. Is there any doubt Sabathia will use that opt-out after 2011? In signing this deal, he has sent a telegram to the Giants: “You have three years to get your house in order for my arrival! See you then!”

Back to what Dave wrote, I don’t think the Yanks “are losing out even more, based on their terms” because they’re always going to find something they value more than what they have just as surely as God made little green apples, and having the inconvenience of a current payroll obligation disappear works to their advantage. I also think that if Sabathia stays in the deal despite being unproductive and/or unhappy in New York, the final four years of his contract might wind up being a miserable experience that could destroy his market value once the full term of the contract runs, so I see him as that much more likely to exercise the opt-out barring a year-three arm injury and to keep in touch while it there are the over the counter appetite suppressant to not have an extra weight.

Anyway, Dave and I appear to be at the point of agreeing to disagree, and while I realize I’m probably in the minority here, I’ve got a bit of company in my foxhole in Joe Sheehan. While the two of us sparred when it came to our views about the real risks Sabathia’s unique physique carries with regards to the long-term deal, we both like the theoretical goal of the Yankees lowering their exposure to the back end of the deal by any means necessary:

One more time: I agree with everything Keith [Law] said. In *this* case, however, I see Sabathia as such a long-term risk that I don’t want his 32-35 years, even if he pitches well enough to make the opt-out a good idea. I would happily take the three good seasons and let him walk, even if the last four years of the contract looked reasonable come November 2011.

At the end of the day, none of this settles the argument, but it makes for an interesting debate. Time will tell, of course, whether the gambit pays off. The bet here is that it will, even if Sabathia leaves after three years.

The Big Man Hits the Big Town

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Less than 24 hours after filing the K-Rod signing story for SI.com, I awoke to an email from their editor asking me to prep a similar article on CC Sabathia given the reports that he was poised to sign with the Yankees — which was news to me at that early hour. By lunchtime I’d filed a piece for SI and Baseball Prospectus. Much of what I had to say centered on what his numbers said about his unique physique:

In all, Sabathia led the majors in games started, innings pitched, complete games, and shutouts, and was fourth in ERA, second in strikeouts, fifth in strikeout rate, and eighth in strikeout-to-walk ratio.

Those last numbers are very important. Strikeout rate is the key indicator of a pitcher’s future success because it provides the window into his ability to fool hitters with his offerings; a pitcher’s strikeout rate generally declines as he ages, but a high strikeout rate gives him more headroom before he does so. Furthermore, the more strikeouts a pitcher can notch, the less reliant he is upon his defense, which can vary in its ability to convert balls in play into outs. On that note, the Yankees were one of the majors’ least efficient teams in the field, ranking 25th out of 30 teams in both raw Defensive Efficiency (.682) and Park Adjusted Defensive Efficiency (2.42 percent below average). According to PADE, that’s about 30 runs—three net wins—below average, thanks in large part to poor up-the-middle defense by indifferent second baseman Robinson Cano, aging shortstop Derek Jeter (who’s always been overrated by the media for his abilities in the field but near the bottom of the pile in any advanced statistical system), and rag-armed center fielder Johnny Damon. Cano and Jeter are still in place, and while Damon may move back to left field, the Yanks still need to upgrade in center field.

Back to Sabathia’s numbers, his strikeout-to-walk ratio doesn’t just indicate excellent control (a pitcher’s ability to throw strikes) but excellent command—his ability to throw good strikes, to put the ball where he wants to with consistency. It’s generally an indicator of sound mechanics, because without those, a pitcher won’t be able to hit his spots with that level of consistency. That’s important when it comes to gauging the risk of a pitcher of Sabathia’s stature. He may be 6-foot-7 and pushing 300 pounds, but he’s very athletic, and his ability to repeat his motion ranks with anyone. Baseball history is full of oversized pitchers who have been able to succeed despite their girth, with names like Mickey Lolich, Rick Reuschel, Bartolo Colon, and David Wells coming to mind. All had excellent strikeout-to-walk ratios.

…Sabathia has managed to avoid arm troubles in his career, and over the last three years he’s become extremely efficient; his 15.1 pitches per inning last year ranked 75th-highest among ERA qualifiers. On the other hand, he’s coming off by far the two heaviest workloads of his career, and his only two years above 200 innings. His early 2008 problems were believed to be linked to his combined 256-inning 2007 workload extending deep into October, where he exhibited the rare struggle with his command. His combined 256 2/3 innings with an early exit in his only post-season start this year was more of the same, though at least he’ll have a couple of extra weeks’ rest this time around.

A spirited dicussion of Sabathia’s injury risk took place on BP’s internal mailing list last week, and apparently I convinced Joe Sheehan of something, which is no small task. As he writes of the deal:

Concern about Sabathia’s fitness for this kind of contract have nothing to do with whether his established level is good enough, but rather with how much longer he’ll be able to pitch this well. Above and beyond the standard concerns that come with any pitcher — his arm, his performance, the inscrutability of player performance more than a few years out — there’s the issue of Sabathia’s physique. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t think a pitcher with Sabathia’s size is a good investment. We had a great discussion about this on the BP internal list, with Jay Jaffe getting in the final word:
You’ve already decided that Sabathia won’t be a good investment due to his size (as you just wrote and as you’ve written before) and look to be reaching for something to support that beyond your gut instinct about his gut.

On the face of it, no pitcher is a good investment due to the injury risk, so you’re at least half right, but it’s important to separate skittishness about giving a long-term contract to any pitcher from the specifics of Sabathia’s case. All we really know is that Sabathia is very good now, with a strong track record of successful performance — including an impressive uptick over the past three years—and a negligible history of injuries, particularly arm injuries. Despite his immense size, he’s a very good athlete, and unless I’m wrong he doesn’t have any red flags regarding his delivery.

Jay is correct. I cannot back up my conservative opinion of Sabathia with data, in part because Sabathia is a rare case in baseball history, an ace pitcher of his size in the prime of his career. Most heavyweight pitchers have been softer and shorter than Sabathia is, with almost no pitchers tipping the scales at Sabathia’s listed 290, or whatever number pops up when he takes his physical in February. He is unique, and in evaluating him, I’m personally weighing what I know about weight’s effect on the back and on joints in deciding that he’s too big a risk. His performance level, durability, and athleticism argue for the signing, though I’ve become fond of noting that you’re never signing a free agent’s past. Put it all together, and what you have is an opinion — Sabathia won’t be durable enough over the length of his deal to make his signing for six years or more a sensible decision — that there aren’t enough facts to support.

As it stands, the deal is for seven years and $161 million, an extra year and $21 million beyond what the Yankees reportedly offered in their initial deal. Later in the day, it also emerged that the contract contains an opt-out clause: after three years and $69 million, Sabathia can choose to re-enter the market if he so desires. That didn’t sit well with ESPN’s Keith Law, who was the first source that I saw reporting the clause:

The problem for the Yankees is the so-called “opt-out clause,” better understood as a player option. The Yankees gave Sabathia a three-year deal, and Sabathia then has a four-year option worth roughly $100 million. Player options are universally awful for the signing clubs: They cede control of a big portion of a team’s payroll to the player, and they represent a pure downside play, since the player will choose to stay only if he isn’t performing well or if he gets injured. There’s never a good reason to give a player an opt-out clause, and giving a player one as long as four years is (I believe) unprecedented and (I know) a terrible idea.

While I understand some of Keith’s reservations, I disagree. So far as I can recall, all of the big-name players with opt-out clauses that come to mind (Alex Rodriguez, J.D. Drew, A.J. Burnett) have exercised that option when it came up because the market for annual salaries has risen faster than the general rate of inflation. It would seem to me that the likelihood of Sabathia going back to market in three years means a more favorable economic climate than the current global crisis, if nothing else.

Furthermore, any guaranteed contract is a sunk cost from the moment it’s signed; whether the player performs to expectation or not, that money is spent unless the guy pulls a Denny Neagle and gets caught with a surly hooker. Having already acknowledged that, the fact that there’s a non-zero chance that some 60 percent of that contract may not come to pass — may not be a sunk cost — increases my esteem for the deal. If Sabathia gets hurt and forces the Yanks to eat the back end of the deal, that’s no different than if he’d gotten hurt within a standard long-term contract. If he takes his ball and goes back to California after three years, the Yankees will get the two draft picks (since offering him arbitration is a no-brainer because he won’t accept) and have an additional $92 million to spend on the next big free agent. Yes, it may be a drag for the Yankees to be faced with renegotiating a deal with him (à la A-Rod) or losing him, but by that point they’ll be able to make a decision informed by their firsthand experience with him as a Yankee, from his performance to his medical reports to the way he handles the move to the big media market. I don’t see the opt-out as a downside.

That said, I have VERY mixed emotions about the deal, first based on my view that it’s the Yankee offense that needs shoring up via Mark Teixeira more than the staff needs Sabathia, and second based on how much fun it was watching the big man’s impact on Milwaukee, because I married into a family of Brewers fans and took a special joy at watching their first run to the playoffs in 26 years. The Brewers made a spirited five-year, $100 million bid to keep Sabathia, and the Dodgers even briefly flirted with him last week. While they’l get the Yankees’ first-round draft pick it’s a rough outcome for Milwaukee, but then they knew this might be the price when they traded for him last July.

Speaking of the Brewers, there’s word this morning that they’re working on a swap with the Yanks, one that would send 36-year-old center fielder Mike Cameron to New York in exchange for 24-year-old Melky Cabrera, who hit only .249/.301/.341, including a pathetic .235/.280/.286 after May 6. The deal isn’t official, and I have to assume there’s a pitcher thrown in to sweeten the deal for Milwaukee. With plenty on my plate at the moment, I’ll withhold judgment here.

Beyond that, yesterday brought one other very big and emotional piece of news, but I’ll have to save that until my next post.

The Daily Double

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Given that I woke up Monday morning with a fever of 100.8, I’ve gotten a lot done over the past 36 hours, including a pair of articles that went up on Baseball Prospectus today, with the second mirrored at SI.com. One piece is on the Hall of Fame voting, the other on the first big move of the Winter Meetings, the Mets’ signing of Francisco Rodriguez. Since the second one is the freebie and the moneymaker, we’ll start there:

In the first big move of the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, the Mets on Tuesday reached agreement with free-agent closer Francisco Rodriguez on a three-year, $37 million deal.

The signing addresses the most glaring weakness of a club that came up short of the playoffs on the final day of the season for the second year in a row. It brings the former Angels hurler, who broke Bobby Thigpen’s 18-year-old single-season saves record this past year with an eye-popping 62, to the Big Apple on a shorter and much less expensive deal than he had previously sought. This is a very good deal for Mets GM Omar Minaya.

As a unit, the Mets ranked 15th in the National League and 24th in the majors in Reliever Expected Wins Added, by far the lowest ranking of any playoff contender. With 4.9 WXRL, their total would have ranked among the 10 worst of any postseason team since 1988, a year chosen to represent the dawn of the one-inning closer era. By contrast, the two pennant winners, the Rays and Phillies, led their leagues with 15.4 and 15.2 WXRL, respectively. Rodriguez’s AL West-winning Angels were fourth at 13.3. None of the eight teams that made the postseason was ranked lower than 16th (Boston) this year. Having a good bullpen isn’t a requirement for a playoff team, but it certainly helps.

…As for the price tag on Rodriguez, three years and $37 million sounds quite reasonable given that he turned down a three-year, $33 million deal from the Angels in the spring and entered the offseason reportedly seeking a gargantuan five-year, $75 million deal. Obviously, the current economic climate, the slow free agent market, and the relative plethora of available closer options appear to have suppressed Rodriguez’s asking price.

The contract appears to be slightly below market in terms of the current big-dollar closer deals. It comes in well below the three-year, $45 million contract Rivera signed last winter in terms of its average annual value. It’s on par with the three-year, $37.5 million extension Brad Lidge signed with the Phillies in July, though Lidge’s deal includes a $12.5 million club option and $1.5 million buyout for the fourth year, whereas no option or other embellishment has been reported for Rodriguez’s deal. It’s also a shorter commitment than the four-year, $47 million extension Joe Nathan got from the Twins back in the spring and the four-year, $46 million deal pact the much less established Francisco Cordero received from the Reds last winter, to say nothing of the five-year, $47 million deal B.J. Ryan signed with the Blue Jays three years ago. As the Ryan and Wagner deals remind, it’s entirely possible for a reliever to lose a year to Tommy John surgery at a cost of $10 million or more. That can wreck a team’s budget in a hurry.

The short deal works both ways. It minimizes the Mets’ exposure to injury risk, something that any critic of Rodriguez’s violent mechanics might be relieved to see, though it’s worth noting that the pitcher’s springtime ankle injury led to some tweaks in his delivery that cost him a little velocity but lowered the stress on his arm, which should help him in the long run. The deal also gets the going-on-27-year-old closer back to the market sooner rather than later, with the chance at another big payday before his 30th birthday, likely in a more hospitable economic climate.

It makes a nice follow-up to the SI.com piece I did on the Mets’ bullpen collapse during the season’s final week, and a great gift for the disgruntled Mets fan in your life.

Next is a quick look at the Veterans Committee voting for the Hall of Fame, the results of which were announced on Monday:

The Baseball Hall of Fame announced its 2008 Veterans Committee voting results, and for the first time since 2001, the VC—which has changed constitutions several times since then —e lected a new member to the Hall. Alas, that player was not longtime Cubs third baseman Ron Santo, who has long been touted in this space and elsewhere. Instead, it was Joe Gordon getting the call, the second baseman for the Yankees (1938-1943, 1946) and Indians (1947-1950).

As you may have noticed, I did not run my usual JAWS-related breakdown to preview the ballot. This had less to do with the well-deserved ennui with which I greeted this year’s VC voting process after three straight oh-fers, and more to do with the timing of a development that in the long term will be very exciting for BP and its readers, but in the short term runs the risk of being extremely disorienting: we’re raising the bar.

Behind the scenes at BP, Clay Davenport has been hard at work revising the Wins Above Replacement Player system, our player valuation metric that covers the entirety of baseball history. Namely, he’s incorporating two major changes; first, he’s raising the replacement-level floor significantly beyond that of the bottom-of-the-barrel 1899 Cleveland Spiders or a current Double-A player to conform to a more modern definition of the major league replacement level, and second, he’s adding a play-by-play based fielding component for the years where it is available.

Alas, the tail end of this research and development is taking place during the chaotic and often stressful period known around these parts as “book season,” where our authors and editors are slaving away on player comments for our 2009 annual. The vanguard of Clay’s fielding changes are geared towards the book, and as such, the fielding side of things for the years outside of its purview is not yet ready for prime time.

This leads to an awkward situation when it comes to my 2009 Hall of Fame balloting analysis, since JAWS is based on WARP. I am eager enough to see what the new replacement level means to my system’s evaluation of the candidates, but the data I am using is not yet on the DT player cards available on our site, making it impossible for readers to play along at home, and furthermore, it’s still using an older version of the fielding system that will soon be replaced for the years in which we have enough play-by-play data. As such, I’m going to acknowledge out front that we’re on the bleeding edge as we briefly examine the VC ballot.

That’s a lot of inside baseball for those of you who read this space but aren’t BP subscribers, but to those who are, it’s an exciting development. As for the new system, it suggests that Joe Torre, 19th century shortstop Bill Dahlen, and pitchers Wes Ferrell and Bucky Walters are worthy enshrinement. In previous JAWS articles covering the VC, I had Torre as good enough, and my spreadsheets told me Dahlen was getting a raw deal by not being nominated. Ferrell fell short on my previous analysis; I’d never evaluated Walters’ case but it too fell short. In any event, it won’t be until 2013 when the pre-World War II players come up again, and 2010 for the postwar players. By that time, the WARP changes will presumably be old hat.

I’ll be rolling out a few more JAWS articles over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ve got Dayquil and pitcher capsules to keep me occupied.

Move Over, Brian Cashman

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At Baseball Prospectus, we’re running a GM for a Day series this winter, and the pieces are being mirrored on SI.com [link pending] and are thus free to non-subscribers. Taking a break from my bookwork, I’ve gotten back into the business of remaking the Yankees:

Back before joining Baseball Prospectus, I spent a lengthy portion of my winters writing for my own site, The Futility Infielder, systematically exploring the Yankees’ options for rebuilding in the hope of restoring their championship luster. I first did this in the winter of 2001-2002, and if you’ve noticed a dearth of titles since that point (or the year before it, actually), you can blame Yankee GM Brian Cashman for not taking my advice.

My duties on the BP annuals have overtaken my attempts to remake the Yanks, but today I take the reins from Cashman and put forth my blueprint for the 2009 club. For the purposes of this exercise, I’ll assume there’s no turning back the clock. Colleague Joe Sheehan rightly upbraided Cashman for failing to offer Bobby Abreu and Andy Pettitte arbitration, and those decisions are in the books; I won’t cheat by hitting the magic “undo” button. We move on.

…As for the price tag on this, with the Yankees moving into their new cash cow of a stadium, money is hardly their biggest concern. Even so, this is actually relatively restrained by their standards. Using the worksheet at the excellent MLB Trade Rumors, and contract data at Cot’s Baseball Contracts, the 25-man roster above comes in at $189 million before the raises due Wang, Bruney, and Nady, and generously assuming straight average annual value figures for the big-ticket free agents. Right there, that’s $20 million less than last year’s Opening Day payroll, and even if the free agent figures creep up a million here or there, the 2009 Yankees will be cheaper than their predecessors — and hopefully more successful.

You’ll have to read the article to see how I got to that point, and no, Underpants Gnomes weren’t involved. If you watched the recent Bronx Banter video series you had hints of where I could go with this, so a special thanks to BB’s Alex Belth and Cliff Corcoran because we’ve kicked some of these ideas around at length. Additional thanks to Nick Stone and Christina Kahrl for further sounding board duty as well. And apologies to Brian Cashman for reassigning him to the mailroom, at least for a day.

Hot Stove Video, Revisted

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Happy belated Turkey Day, everyone. Here are the third and fourth post from the Bronx Banter video series that ran last week, starring Alex Belth, Cliff Corcoran and myself: Part Three is about Derek Jeter’s future, and Part Four covers our take on Mike Mussina’s Hall of Fame case. Speaking of which, I’m still waiting for a new set of data to fire up this year’s JAWS series (grumble, grumble), and when I do, I’ll let loose a post about the Moose.

Also, here’s last week’s radio hit on Boston’s WWZN. I’m down to every other week during the offseason so the Basketball Prospectus guys can get a shot. Yes, there’s a basketball equivalent to BP, complete with Bradford Doolittle’s Hit List-style power rankings, the Hops List. Anyway, the WWZN crew is back to afternoon drive times, meaning that I can put an extra hour of sleep under my pillow on those Wednesday mornings.

Back to grinding away at player comments for BP09…

Hot Stove Video

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I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but my pals at Bronx Banter recently moved into some upscale new digs at Sportschannel New York’s website, SNY.tv. Congrats to them on the move and the recent expansion of their blogging staff.

As part of their arrangement, BB and SNY are collaborating with some experimental video blogging recorded in the latter’s studio, with Alex Belth playing host to two guests as they break down various issues of the hot stove season. I was honored to have Alex invite me to be on the debut show along with BB co-consipirator Cliff Corcoran; we covered the Yanks’ possible pursuits of Mark Teixeira and CC Sabathia, among other things, but technical difficulties prevented our first takes from being aired, and last week a series of new segments with YanksFanSoxFan’s Mark Lamster and the Daily News‘s Anthony McCarron went up covering those primary free agents. Alex invited Cliff and me back for a re-shoot, and we did four segments that will air this week.

The first two are already up. In Part One, we examine the Yankees’ options on the free agent market beyond Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Derek Lowe (the subject of one of our lost segments, alas). My Brewers-fan relatives won’t be too happy to hear me touting Ben Sheets as an option for the Yankees, but I laid it out there on the table. If the Yanks are silly enough to risk a long-term deal on the injury-prone Burnett — and they seem to be firm on not going five years, at least — they may be able to do better with a more incentive-based shorter deal with Sheets.

In Part Two, we look at some options for hitters beyond Mark Teixeira. I spent a lot of time talking about free agent second baseman Orlando Hudson, late of the Diamondbacks, and how the Yanks’ rumored interest in him points to the organization’s dissatisfaction with Robinson Cano. I am not a Cano fan, not anymore — he’s immensely talented, but completely vapid, and his strike zone judgment is, to put it frankly, for shit. He walked 26 times in 634 plate appearances last year while hitting .271/.305/.410, year-to-year drops of 35, 48, and 78 points in those triple-slash categories, and his fielding was awful as well. the Fielding Bible’s Plus/Minus system, which uses a panel of expert evaluators to review each play and compare whether an average player would have made it, saw Cano at -16 last year, “good” for the 35th ranking in a 30-team major league set; for comparison in 2007 he was at +17. Hudson was at -4 last year, down from +20 the year before, but he’s got a much longer track record of success.

Part Three should air tomorrow, and Part Four… I don’t know when it will air, actually; the two segments are re-takes on topics we covered the first time, one on Derek Jeter’s eventual destination on the diamond, and the other on the recently-retired Mike Mussina’s Hall of Fame chances. I’ll be back with a link when those air.

Mirror, Mirror

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Aside from being busy, busy, busy with Baseball Prospectus 2009 work, I’ve done a couple of articles for BP that have been, or will be, mirrored over at SportsIllustrated.com.

The first is on the AL MVP race, using BP’s Wins Above Replacement Player metric to evaluate the cases of the top-ranked candidates. The BP version is here with a running comment thread, the SI version, which cuts many of the external links and was re-edited after the fact (not my preference, but it’s their site) is here.

Dustin Pedroia wound up taking home the honor, and by the standards of the BBWAA electorate it was a fairly reasonable choice: though Cleveland hurler Cliff Lee (who won the Cy Young award last week) and Yankees closer Mariano Rivera both accumulated higher WARP totals and Toronto ace Roy Halladay (Cy runner up) matched Pedroia’s, Boston’s second baseman was the the most valuable (in WARP terms) player on a team that made the playoffs, with 9.8 WARP. Teammate Kevin Youkilis, who finished third, had higher OBP and SLG numbers, but even with the credit for sliding over to play third base during Mike Lowell’s absence, Pedroia’s strong fielding at second base elevated him above his teammate, who tallied 8.4 WARP, tenth in the league.

As a Yanks fan, I loathe both players, the latter with far more intensity. Every mannerism of his grates, from his painfully forced scowl to that ridiculous batting stance to that bushy beard, about which the less said, the better. But still, there’s no thumb on the scale here; SI wanted a WARP-based piece, and the players ranked how they ranked, so it was my job to shape the arguments around that.

The real winner, however, is BP subscribers, who now have access to sortable WARP statistics, something I’ve been clamoring for since the moment I joined the group. It lacks a position filter, and the key pitching stat, PRAA, is only available via a separate set of sortables (PRAR is in the first set. Don’t ask why), but it’s a big improvement upon what was there: nothing. Exciting changes to WARP are on the way in time for this year’s upcoming JAWS series, by the way, so don’t get too wrapped up in these numbers.

Anyway, the other mirrored piece is a Hot Stove preview of the NL West, which is already on BP and should be up on SI later today (at which point the BP version will become free). Just like at a Passover seder, four questions are asked. Here’s what I had to say about the Dodgers:

What Do They Need? Though the Dodgers won just 84 games, they showed in the postseason that they were a better team than that once their injured players had healed up. They begin the offseason with no fewer than 13 free agents, including three starting pitchers (Derek Lowe, Brad Penny, and Greg Maddux), three starting infielders (second baseman Jeff Kent, shortstop Rafael Furcal, third baseman Casey Blake), and left fielder Manny Ramirez, whose arrival from Boston at the non-waivers trade deadline catalyzed the offense and turned him into a mega-celebrity the likes of which hasn’t been seen in Dodger blue in decades. Despite the number of free agents, at most two rotation slots and two infield slots need covering, and while they have the resources to fill some needs from within, an offense that ranked eighth in the league in Equivalent Average and 13th in slugging percentage — one that hasn’t seen a hitter surpass 20 home runs since 2005 — could really use some muscle.

What Do They Have? They’ve got a lineup with five starters who will be 27 or younger in 2009, counting 23-year-old Blake DeWitt, a springtime surprise who began the year at third base amid a rash of injuries, and who was shifted to second once Kent was sidelined by knee surgery; where he’ll play depends upon how the winter unfolds. They’ve also got a premier player development system offering multiple options for their infield (Chin-Lung Hu, Tony Abreu, and Ivan DeJesus Jr.) and their pitching staff (James McDonald, Scott Elbert), and, further down in the system, talent to deal if they’re so inclined. Thanks to the handiwork of GM Ned Colletti, they also have two expensive, unproductive outfielders who want out of LA in Juan Pierre (owed $37.5 million through 2011) and Andruw Jones ($22 million for one year plus signing-bonus payments stretching into 2010), not that they’ll find many takers.

What are they likely to do? They’ve already started playing hardball with Ramirez, withdrawing an initial offer of two guaranteed years and $45 million that wasn’t going to get the job done anyway; headed towards his age-37 season and coming off a combined .332/.430/.601 line with 37 homers, he’s seeking a six-year deal. If he’s willing to go below four years, the sky’s the limit on what the Dodgers might offer, and if he settles for four, they could bite the bullet and re-sign him. Beyond Manny, it’s up in the air as to whom among their own free agents they’ll pursue. Blake is a possibility, and Furcal may return if he’s willing to re-up with a three-year deal, even though he was either absent or subpar for about half of his expiring contract; as the Cubs found out, the Dodgers are a different team when he’s atop their lineup. More likely, they’ll target a short-term deal for Orlando Cabrera. In the rotation, neither the injured Penny nor Lowe are likely to return, so the Dodgers will enter the high-stakes bidding for California native CC Sabathia — if the Yankees haven’t already closed that deal — and they may pursue Randy Johnson, who just filed for free agency after reaching an impasse in negotiations with the Diamondbacks. Contrary to early off-season rumors, they’re unlikely to deal Russell Martin or anyone else from their young nucleus to fill needs.

What Should They Do? The Dodgers likely can’t afford both Sabathia and Ramirez, and given their current posture, they’re not favorites to sign either. One alternative to the latter whose name has yet to surface is Adam Dunn, who’s reached the 40-homer plateau for five straight years and just turned 29. Though he lacks Manny’s charisma, even moving into the least hitter-friendly park of his career, he’d be an imposing middle-of-the-order presence, and he’s hardly a major step down defensively. Beyond that, and assuming no Sabathia signing, a one-year deal with Johnson could make sense given his 2008 performance, and a fungible inning-eater to account for the youth of Clayton Kershaw (and possibly McDonald) is in order—perhaps someone like Randy Wolf or Jon Garland. As for the infield, between Hu, DeJesus, DeWitt, and Abreu, the Dodgers can probably cover two of their three infield vacancies, so they should focus on signing the best free agent they can for one position and letting the kids fight for the remaining spots.

Furcal appears to be on several teams’ radars – the Giants, A’s, Cubs and Braves may all be in on him, making a return to the Dodgers on a deal of less than four years highly unlikely. The Ramirez front has been quite since open season began on Friday, with house yenta Peter Gammons backing my suggestion that Manny and the offensively anemic (in both ways) Giants may find love. Meanwhile, the Dodgers have expressed some interest in Sabathia, who would fill the Manny-sized void left via Ramirez’s likely departure. Between the Dodgers, Yankees and Brewers, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be rooting for the big fella somewhere next year.

Back with an actual link to the SI version later. Update: it’s here, with a sidebar offering handy links to the rest of the series.