ashbury

Remember, folks, you heard it here first!

I forgot about the idea (perhaps necessity) of a buyout, and frankly it reduces my interest in going for that. It amounts to guaranteeing him $14M, in the hope of a $20M kind of 2019 season from him and another in 2020 at the incremental cost of the option, and that's just enough more risk to tip me away. The actual deal suits me better in that case. Though, now, I'm wavering just before I click Post...

That sounds low for an option year. Maybe the shine is off of Pineda after several mediocre years leading up to his surgery, but he used to be viewed as a front-of-the-rotation starter. So the deal as it is currently constructed amounts to $10M guaranteed money to the pitcher, in hopes of a $20M kind of season from him in 2019. That is not a long term contribution to our window of contention, but is better than a "stop-gap" and amounts to a Jack Morris kind of deal (different circumstances of course), where the long range plan is to have someone at that same caliber to step in, in 2020 and beyond. But I agree, this deal shoulders most of the risk on the player's behalf, and I would have liked a team option for 2020 at, say $14M or so. If he pans out, the team wins, and even from his perspective he still collects $24M, with the ability to go for another big payday after that. If he doesn't pan out, the parties part company on good terms. Oh well. As stated above, the player wasn't open to that.

Quad Cities, near the end of that video clip? I love that ballpark!

Bumping this one just to offer kudos for the foresight - are you our mole in the Front Office? Actual discussion of Pineda now belongs in the Article about his signing: http://twinsdaily.com/topic/28173-article-twins-sign-rhp-michael-pineda

Mod note: TD has an article on the subject of Michael Pineda now - please continue the discussion of that player there. http://twinsdaily.com/topic/28173-article-twins-sign-rhp-michael-pineda/

Mod note: TD has an article on the subject of Michael Pineda now - please continue the discussion of that player there. http://twinsdaily.com/topic/28173-article-twins-sign-rhp-michael-pineda/

Comparing a contract for a player who has bargaining power versus that of a player still under team control is not very relevant to anything. Bryan Shaw would be the fourth shortest pitcher on the roster, were we to have signed him. That's about equally relevant.

One of the intangibles that scouts supposedly used to look for, in addition to all the tools and so forth, is the "good face". Ben Rortvedt IMO (not that I have the faintest clue what they actually look for) has the good face - he looks mature above his age. Personally I think it's likely a worthless observation, but I still like this photo (borrowed from his Adopt-A-Prospect page) which was a pretty typical look you'd find from him.

April 23 - onto the 10-day DL May 9 - reinstated May 30 - onto the 10-day DL June 27 - to GCL for rehab July 1 - to FSL for rehab July 26 - returned to Boston After he returned to Pawtucket, he performed as in the past. Who knows what the evaluators were seeing, during that last month of supposed rehab that dragged on and on. So, ten games of low leverage innings, ending in failure like this due to physical issues combined with some unspoken dissatisfaction, makes sense if you're keeping a 22-year old like DIaz, who's understood to be not ready. I don't see the same excuse when it's a 25-year old starter whose limited upside is pretty well demonstrated already. And I still have seen no answer to what the Twins gained from all the monkeying around during the draft, to end up with this outcome, instead of just drafting Haley in the first place. What a waste of a 40-man spot. We might have used it to keep Stuart Turner, for instance - which arguably would have been better for his development, playing at AA or AAA, instead of rotting on Cincy's bench for a year. Or we should have just traded Turner (or similar) to Boston for Haley, and at least been able to option him. $50K isn't much, but the Haleys of the world don't cost much in trade either, and the inability to option someone is a large hidden cost.

I do not make that proposed trade for Cole instantly. I ask them for a medium-grade SS prospect in addition, and then failing that I ask for some International Free Agent cap money. I don't want them thinking I'm some barracuda by accepting their offer too fast - they might wake up and back out of it, saying "hey, waitaminnit."

I'm not real fond of W-L, but Slegers did have himself a nice AAA. season. For a little closer look at the game-by-game results, Baseball-reference.com provides a version of Bill James's "Game Score" in their game log, where a score of 50 and above represents something fairly close to a quality start, and Aaron had 15 of those in his 24 starts at Rochester, 4 so-so games with scores 40-49, and 5 stinkers below 40. Perhaps more importantly, he got 4 of those 5 stinkers out of his system by early June, and compiled a nice streak of 11 games of 40+ scores, most of those being 50+. That's the kind of consistency I imagined the front office was looking for before they would call him up, and they did indeed add him to the 40-man for a spot start in August, and then invited him for September as well. Come to think of it, 15 good starts and 5 stinkers comes pretty close to that 15-4 W-L, with the fluctuations happening to basically cancel out, but I still trust game scores a little better. I don't hype him as a future ace, obviously, but I see his upside as rotation workhorse more than just fifth starter.

You have to have 11, before you can have 12. That's just math.

That's the puzzling part. The rest just highlights that whatever it was, didn't work. And as already stated, the 25-man roster spot was the more valuable resource, than just the 18 innings. They saved some face with a stint on the DL, presumably stalling to let him gain some more benefit from coaching, and threw in the towel when out of choices. Take Haley first, I'm cool with that, because I'll trust that the FO felt he was the best pick to click. Monkey around during the draft like they did, and my tolerance for the misfire during the season is just that much less. Unless someone clarifies to me that it wasn't monkeying around at all. Even if it didn't work out like they hoped (because, say, some other team drafted in the interim in some unplanned way).

Assuming the demand doesn't still exceed the supply, in which case even the scraps cost more than they might have a few days/weeks earlier. It's a game of musical chairs, one chair and one contestant removed at each step - except that some years there are more chairs than contestants, and other years there are more contestants than chairs. Which contestant, or which chair, will end up left out at the end?

In advance of the Rule-5 draft, we have 14 position players on the 40-man roster. Fourteen! A team can't realistically go into a season with that number, can they? Something has got to be in the works to add to that quantity. Even with the number of pitchers exposed to possible drafting, we have 22 hurlers on the 40-man. That becomes a seemingly unsustainable 23 if a pitcher is added via free-agency. For comparison, a team like the Astros currently are at 18/20. Dodgers, 18/22. A ratio like 20/20 or 19/21 seems like the norm when the dust settles and the season starts. 14/22?!? I have to believe big changes are coming to pull these numbers for the Twins closer in balance, in a way not currently being discussed whatsoever.

I have clicked refresh approximately 100 times since reading this post, and still no Darvish. Come on!

It seems intuitive, since 25-man rosters are the limiting factor. You can't get to 100 wins with (say) 60 1-WAR players. If you sign two 2-WAR players, that ties up two roster spots, whereas signing one 4-WAR player doesn't limit you to a 0-WAR player for the other roster spot. Teams with championship aspirations would bid that 4-WAR guy right up. But the above-mentioned Matt Swartz wrote an article demonstrating that linearity is not a bad assumption, after all. I think the solution to the seeming paradox is to remember (again) that we are talking about the cost of signing players who have bargaining power, only. And we are discussing actual WAR delivered (in hindsight), not the (unknowable) forecasts that the contract offers are based on. Since any team with championship aspirations has a pipeline of cheap talent coming up too, with a precious few of those prospects forecasted to be above 3 or 4 WAR themselves, augmenting the roster with a 2-WAR player might be more valuable than it looks. Also, it's really important to avoid a 0- (or negative-) WAR player, and a couple of proven veterans at the 2-WAR level might be more appealing than taking a chance on a rookie. As Swartz (inelegantly ) summarized, "there are, in practice, many different options a teams has". Linearity aside, the table Swartz offers also show a trend over time toward teams paying more and more, for less and less return.

If someone can explain the masterstroke in last winter's Rule-5 draft, where we chose Miguel Diaz and then hilarity ensued all the way through July 24, I will be more inclined to decide on crushing versus non-crushing. What did we net, in exchange for the investment of a 25-man roster spot for more than half a season during which we wound up in post-season contention?

Yeah, I was about to recommend his series of articles. They are at: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/author/matts/ Probably should scroll down to the first of his July 2017 articles and work your way back up chronologically. Anyone with serious concerns about trying to understand the cost of acquiring MLB-ready talent on the open market should read these critically, along with the comments that have been posted there by readers. He says on his LinkedIn page he consults to a MLB team (the Nationals), as well as doing risk management for an insurance company (Cigna), so his POV should not be dismissed out of hand.

That's undisputed. I don't know why you keep coming back to this point. Even the largest market teams do not pay market prices for their entire 25-man rosters. Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, Aaron Hicks, Luis Severino, along with the various low-salary role-players, all make the Yankees' front office jobs much easier. Teams don't pay $8M (or whatever) per WAR. Full stop. They pay $8M (or whatever) per WAR to players who, by virtue of 6+ years of service, can more nearly control their own destiny. This includes free agency, but also players who agree to deals with their teams so as to buy out their free agency. Smaller market teams pay this same price, otherwise they get outbid for an individual player. They simply do it a lot less frequently, perforce, than the big boys.

I always applaud an analytic approach to decision making. You seem to be aiming toward a forecast of WAR, at the time the contract is signed. I think the studies computing $6M or $8M (or whatever) per WAR are doing it in terms of value delivered, looking back after the contract is signed (so the jury is still out on recent guys). That is, they are asking the question, what do teams typically get for their FA money? I think it stands to reason that front offices' forecasts are getting better and better, so as time goes along the actual value delivered (at least insofar as WAR represents "actual" value) becomes a better and better proxy for the forecasts. But even in trying to come at the question from the forecast WAR for these players, a simple average of previous years seems awfully far from what teams probably use. I don't think you would use that kind of average for a product life-cycle study, for instance, unless at a very particular stage (probably mid-life) - you would draw dangerous conclusions if in the early years, or if at the end in maintenance mode when you're trying to wean customers off. Ballplayers, as a "product", surely aren't static enough in their "life cycles" to try that with. With the horizon you specified, I would weight the most recent year more heavily than the prior year, and much moreso than two years back - almost ancient history in some cases. But I would also factor in growth or (more usually, for these free agents) decline relative to age. Injury risk also comes into play. It may be that teams are (in the privacy of their own processes) putting a very large downward factor on their forecasts over the life of the contract they intend to offer. That would move things in the opposite direction from your conclusion, since it makes the denominator smaller. Another thing that makes the methodology difficult is that players' "accurate" forecast of value, by whatever procedure you think best, is probably in the middle range of what teams will compute for themselves; and it's highly likely that whoever computes the highest value will make the largest offer, and in turn the player is highly likely to accept an offer very near the top of the range. This of course would move things in the direction you suggest, as it makes the denominator larger. All things considered, it's hard to approximate teams' forecasts with a simple average. Beyond hard, I think - misleading, or even not useful. We'd be dividing $$/WAR using something basically unknowable. Cespedes, the first guy on your list, seems like a good example. He was a highly sought Cuban free agent in 2012, and when he became available again in the 2016-17 offseason his resume was a bit spotty. He was coming off a 2.9-WAR season (I'm using b-r.com) after a 6.2, decidedly his best, and he had missed a few games in August after putting in two full seasons the prior years, after starting off with two injury-impacted seasons. I could imagine some widely differing forecasts by competent professionals in the field. When the Mets prepared their eventual winning offer, it's not preposterous to think that another 6-WAR season could be expected. But, he was already turning 31, and for the four-year contract the team was contemplating, a decline could be expected. An injury during any of those four seasons could further harm the value delivered in that season just due to his absence, while also perhaps accelerating his declining ability for future seasons. All in all, just spitballing here, a four-year WAR of (6,5,4,3), times an 80% chance each season for not having a really serious injury, comes out to only about 14 WAR over the life of the contract, or about 3.6 a season, rather than the 4.4 you came up with. That comes out to around $7.5M per. If I did the math right. Again, I'm only spitballing. Now, given that the Mets won this sweepstakes, it's fair to assume that most other teams* came up with a lower WAR estimate and made commensurately lower offers to the player. Unless you believe the Mets are super geniuses and have a unique ability to forecast future value, it's very likely that the actual value he returns will be more in line with the crowd and thus lower than they thought they were paying for. Ergo, the cost per WAR will likely be higher than their forecast (and perhaps this guesstimate). That's the so-called Winner's Curse in any free market, right? (Not that MLB markets are all that free. ) I'm not going to invest the time with my rinky-dink eyeballing methodology, on the other players you listed, but you probably see my point, that trying to infer MLB forecasts of WAR is harder than just averaging some recent seasons. * Even if you rule out the small market teams, there are enough other deep pocketed teams to make this line of thought work.

A project leader from one of my early jobs passed along this sage rule of thumb: "It takes about 10 Attaboys to make up for 1 OhSh[oo]t". Said another way, a chess player who grinds down the opponents through a sequence of small tactical positional advantages leading to small gains in material can still lose the game in the blink of an eye due to a careless blunder. I'm encouraged by a lot of these moves, but Terry Ryan was also adept at small-ball GMing, and we have yet to see a really big move by our new guys to start to tell what will happen under their regime. They aren't likely going to win a WS doing only what we've seen from them so far.

I don't think anyone's claiming that $8M (or whatever value) is the cost for all talent. Obviously young players under team control provide value at a far, far lower cost. The $8M figure amounts to the marginal rate on the spot-market. I like to think of FA contracts as the "Stupidity Tax" when you have to admit you didn't develop a suitable player of your own at a position of need. No one wants to build a team entirely this way. People have done amusing articles on what it would cost to build an entire car from parts purchased at a parts shop. No one sane would do that. Yet we all go to NAPA or Pep Boys when the need arises. One further analogy. I presume you are in the 39.6% tax bracket (soon to change). But you don't fork over 39,6% of your total income, because of deductions and a graduated tax rate. That 39.6 number is very meaningful, but also not very illuminating if you use only that one number for your thinking. As a side note, I also kind of doubt that true 1-WAR players get X, and 2-WAR players get 2X, etc. The value of a player to a team contending for the World Series isn't linear. So any number like $8M is just for back of the envelope calculations of players at a certain fairly high level of ability and demand for their services.