Sustainability and the TWins

[Mike Sixel]

I got permission to copy paste this form Craig Calcaterra's newsletter today....it talks about the Giants and Mariners and sustainable teams, and applies to the Twins. Which is why I don't think they'll ever win with this ownership group, IMO, they won't get permission to go for it at the deadline (or even the offseason). 

Screw “sustainable” 

Yesterday Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer spoke to the press about the just-concluded season and the winter ahead. In the course of his comments he said something you hear from most baseball executives these days: ". . . The goal is to build something that's sustainable."

"Sustainable" in this context is almost always a euphemism for "we want to turn a nice profit with a roster that is not too expensive, but we don’t want to be so bad that we catch a lot of hell for it.” The word, often paired with the concept of “financial flexibility,” is almost always deployed as a means of dodging a direct question about payroll and its use strongly implies that the team doesn’t want to shoot for 100 wins or anything approaching dominance, because doing such a thing would be inefficient.

Sometimes it’s not just implied. Here was Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto, infamously stating that goal in explicit terms a little under a year ago:

"If you go back and you look in a decade, those teams that win 54% of the time always wind up in the postseason. And they, more often than not, wind up in the World Series. So there's your bigger picture process. Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, 'We're going to win 54% of the time.' Because sometimes 54% is -- one year, you're going to win 60%, another year you're going to win 50%. It's whatever it is. But over time, that type of mindset gets you there ... If what you're doing is focusing year-to-year on, 'what do we have to do to win the World Series this year?' You might be one of the teams that's laying in the mud and can't get up for another decade."

 

He added, "We're actually doing the fanbase a favor in asking for their patience to win the World Series while we continue to build a sustainably good roster."

First off: do you think any fan actually thinks they’re being “done a favor” by being told by the team’s GM that he does not plan to go all-out in an effort to win? I sure as hell don’t. The Mariners have existed for pushing 50 years now and are the only team in baseball which has never been to the World Series. I feel like they’ve exercised plenty of patience by now, don’t you?

While most other executives are not stupid enough to explicitly say “we’re shooting for 87 wins and asking for more is unreasonable,” most of them basically behave that way. They do so by deploying that word Dipoto deployed last year and Hoyer did yesterday: “sustainable.”

The idea of sustainability, when a GM says it, is an exercise in expectation-reduction. It’s a means of conditioning fans not to expect anything more than just Wild Card contention. If they make it, great, we fulfilled expectations! If they fall short, hey, at least they continued to be financially prudent. These efforts at fan conditioning have been greatly aided by 20+ years of “Moneyball’s” influence which has convinced a great many in and around the game to equate wanting to aggressively improve a baseball team with stupidity or recklessness. This idea was perfectly captured by Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus nine years ago:

Whatever the current breed of baseball executive, their media surrogates, and a small core of sabermetrically or ownership-oriented fans want to believe, most fans just want to watch a winner. It doesn't even have to be every year. They just want the GM and everyone who works for him to ****ing try harder, to stop hiding behind quant-speak, and to make protecting the billionaire owner’s checkbook less of a priority. This is especially true for the Chicago Cubs who almost literally print money.

Most of us have to approach life in a sustainable manner because if we don’t we’re gonna go broke and be in deep ****. No professional sports team is in that boat and even if some claim otherwise, the Chicago Cubs sure as hell aren’t. So spare me, Jed Hoyer, about your and your ownership group's desire to turn a consistent, predictable profit. That’s not why anyone roots for the Cubs.

[USAFChief]

I wish I'd written that.

[Mike Sixel]

22 minutes ago, USAFChief said:

I wish I'd written that.

Craig's amazing

[insagt1]

for me thats like many fans (especially in hockey for example) so eager to jettison veterans to get those 'prospects'...always playing for draft picks and 'next year' we'll be great. Always chasing next year and not paying attention to 'this year'. The day is long gone when one team wins multiple championships. In baseball there is a new WS winner every year it seems.

So when you have a chance to win, go for it. Teams today can and do go from 100 losses to the playoffs the next season. So what really is 'sustainability'...discussed so well in the above article.

Orioles have won 192 games the past 2 seasons and are 0-5 in post season. Thats all the fans care about. Twins blew their season in 2024. No one wants to hear the platitudes. They take the pain and stench of a failure season over the long off-season. No one really wants to hear 'we'll get 'em next season. We'll be ready'.

[stringer bell]

To be consistently competitive is a worthy goal for small and mid market teams IMHO. However, if the idea is to always be looking three years in the future at the expense of the current team is a copout, especially if this is meant to argue against “going for it” when there’s a chance to make a playoff run.