Otto von Ballpark

I'd say a championship (or even just playoffs) are also big for marketing and visibility, giving a team more leverage in local media contracts too.

You do realize that the projections I have been referencing are based on exactly that? I think you are arguing a straw man at this point, so I will bow out.

First of all, Gibson was 0.2 WAR in 2017. If he performs up to this projection, he adds 2 wins over our 2017 record, just by himself. Add Darvish and his 4 WAR on top of that (replacing Santiago/Colon?), and that's another 4 wins. 6 total. Why are you assuming we'd lose Gibson if we added Darvish? Hughes and Mejia are still listed in our top 5 SP at the MLB.com depth chart. And even if they did, for some unknown reason, cut Gibson for Darvish, the correct comparison would be Gibson's 2017 vs Darvish's 2018, which would still net 4 wins for the Twins. (It could only be a net 2 if you assume that Gibson will hit his 2 WAR projection and you still cut him, which doesn't make any sense.)

That's not really what this means. A team would not be paying Darvish $150 mil or whatever "just" for 4 WAR in 2018 (although 4 WAR is nothing to sneeze at, the 20th best SP in baseball). They would be paying that for an X% chance at 4 WAR in 2018, a Y% chance at 6 WAR, a Z% chance at 2 WAR, etc. The 4 WAR is just the median if you distill all of those probabilities down to one number. Maybe another way to look at it, roughly, with Darvish at 4 and Gibson at 2 is that Darvish is twice as likely to be a "plus" pitcher in 2018, and Gibson is twice as likely to be replacement level.

No one is arguing that, okay? What you seem to be missing is that Darvish doesn't HAVE to do that to justify a 5/125 contract. The projections do NOT have him doing that, and yet they show he can still be worth 5/125. He could fall short even of those modest projections, and STILL more or less justify the contract just on the shape of his diminished production (i.e. if he manages to produce most of it in the first season or two, like Anibal Sanchez did). And you're not being "pragmatic" when you're refusing to even try projecting the guy for ANYTHING. I'm glad that's not how the Twins are approaching it.

Wainwright basically had peak seasons at age 31 and 32. (And he's an August birthday like Darvish, so that means he actually turned 32 and 33 in those seasons ) John Lackey almost had a career best season at age 36 (also after TJ). These guys still fit the general overall trend of being worse in their 30's than in their 20's, but that doesn't mean they were valueless. In fact, both proved worthy of the long-term deals they received around age 31. Of course, Darvish is a different person, and his future hasn't happened yet, so Wainwright and Lackey are no guarantee of Darvish's future results. But in no way do they support your position either, that a long-term deal for Darvish should be avoided like the plague.

Honest question: do you think the Darvish projections here have anything to do with Verlander, Wainwright, or Sabathia? Because they don't. They are based on Darvish's own record, plus aging curves based on the entire sample of MLB pitchers. That means Mike Pelfrey counts just as much as Justin Verlander or any other pitcher who survived to pitch in MLB at ages 30-31.

How do you explain Darvish's great starts in the 2017 DS and CS rounds? Also, consider that in the WS, Darvish was pitching into November for the first time in his life, is his first full season back from TJ, no less. It was a terrible performance in the WS, and I am not making excuses for it, simply suggesting that drawing conclusions about his professionalism and his future from that tiny sample is probably not warranted. Also worth noting that Darvish has been healthy for the first half of the MLB season 4 times, and all 4 times he has been named to the all-star team (which I believe is done by player vote?). The opinion of his peers would seem to be a better indicator of his professionalism than the results of his last 2 starts.

Perhaps, teams might want to budget more for relievers. But if, say, a 10% reduction in innings meant a 10% reduction in salary, it would only take a couple years of inflation to wipe that out. And a 5/125 deal for Darvish could already be a downward adjustment from, say, 6/155 for Lester 3 years ago.

A future decline can be assumed to be a "fact" over a large enough sample, but 1 year of 1 pitcher is not a large enough sample. Darvish himself saw a 56% increase in WAR from age 29 to 30. Does that invalidate aging curves? No, 1 year of Darvish is just one data point among thousands. The average over all the thousands would be a decline, but a substantial number each year improved or held steady. Even over a sample of 5 years, for 1 pitcher, just through normal statistical variation, you might see 1 year of a notable increase, 1 year of small decline, 1 year of small gain, 1 year of holding steady, and 1 year of notable decline. This isn't really dependent on pitcher quality either -- just picking a past Twins name at random, Kevin Tapani's 2nd best WAR season was age 32. Age 34 was virtually the same WAR as age 28. Age 36 was the same WAR as age 30. Age 33 was actually the 2nd best season of his career by rate, but only 13 starts. Over 5 years, you could see the decline, but he still had valuable seasons within those 5 years.

Darvish was 24th in MLB in innings in 2017 (not counting postseason). That would be over 200 innings for most of MLB history, but the game is different today. Analysis has to adjust.

I read another analyst who used 0.8 for pitchers: https://www.si.com/mlb/2015/01/08/whats-he-really-worth-max-scherzer Although the same analyst now uses WARcel, based on Marcel, which only assumes 0.4: https://www.si.com/mlb/2018/01/11/yu-darvish-free-agency-value

They could announce the signing but not make it official until Feb. 13.

Actually, your original claim about age 32 felt overly "technical", to me. There is nothing special about age 32, or age 31, or age 33. In the aggregate, they are just points on a gradually declining aging curve. A pitcher is more likely to decline than improve in those seasons, but anecdotal evidence of individual pitchers having precipitous declines at a particular age overstates it. The aggregate decline, our best guess projection at this point, is about -0.8 WAR per year for pitchers in their early 30's. Of course, the fact that 2 of your "age 32 decline" examples had fantastic seasons at age 33-34 highlights just how much this can vary on an individual basis. There is a non-trivial chance that Darvish doesn't decline every year, a chance which should be reflected in any contract offer. Such a result wouldn't contradict history, or break aging curves, or anything like that -- he is just one data point out of many. Bottom line, the best we can generally do, as fans, is project the median decline and ask ourselves, "are we comfortable with that, with a chance to be better, plus a risk of being worse?" Given the position of the 2018 Twins and the alternatives, my answer is yes. Yours is no, which is fine, but I'd be curious if you have an alternate plan to improve the 2018-2019 Twins staff (and if you've considered the risks associated with it).

Is it your position that TJ surgery is a chronic condition? Because that's the only reason Darvish didn't exceed 4.0 WAR from 2014-2016 (he pitched to about a 4.5 WAR full season pace in both 2014 and 2016). And his first full season back was 3.9 in 2017, with no loss in velocity. (I'd also caution against reading into the 3.9 as a meaningful drop from 4.5, because players are not robots and some variation in performance is to be expected.) Past TJ surgery is obviously a consideration, but it isn't right to simply treat the time lost to the surgery as equivalent to, say, Hughes' shoulder, or Shannon Stewart's plantar fasciitis, etc. No one has a crystal ball, but with the TJ surgery in the rear view mirror, Darvish seems like a decent bet to post around 4.0 WAR in 2018 -- that's where ZiPS and Streamer both have him -- which would be about the 20th best SP performance in MLB. That seems like it would be pretty valuable to a Twins team whose current depth chart at MLB.com features Gibson, Mejia, AND Hughes ALL in the top 5. From there, the standard pitcher aging curve is estimated to be -0.8 WAR per season, so our best-guess projection today still suggests Darvish being pretty good in 2019 and useful in 2020 too (when hopefully some of our SP prospects are ready to shine). And that's without any terribly favorable assumptions -- that's just a median projection. The Twins wouldn't be ponying up $160 mil or whatever to lock in that performance, but rather to get X% chance of that, plus Y% chance of him being better than that, and yes, Z% chance of him being worse. There's always risk involved, but given we have the cash resources available and no better alternatives where to invest it, I prefer to take that risk on Darvish, rather than save a few bucks with no place to spend them and face a greater risk of our suspect SP corps sinking our 2018-2019 seasons.

If you want to get that picky about "age 32", shouldn't you assume that Darvish will be good until August?

Looks like the Rangers have found their Darvish replacement: "Rangers, Bartolo Colon Nearing Minor-League Deal" https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/02/rangers-bartolo-colon-nearing-minor-league-deal.html

I hope he never signs!

A lot to unpack here. First, Darvish is entering his "age 31" season as commonly define (his birthday is after July 1st). Now, if you want to parse the 6 month difference between Darvish's and Verlander's birth dates, go ahead, but you'd be assuming a lot of precision on those 6 months for someone who doesn't even accept common projection systems as meaningful. Even so, Greinke posted a 9.3 WAR in his age-31 season, and 6.0 in his age-33 season. Verlander posted 6.6 WAR at age 33 and 6.3 at 34. And you are citing them as examples why NOT to sign Darvish? Also, you "don't like" Darvish because he changed his mind about a career decision between age 22 and 25? And his 2017 postseason, which featured 2 outstanding starts in the DS and CS before 2 poor ones in the WS? The Twins should be so lucky as to have the opportunity to see Darvish's poor starts in the WS.

Just seems weird, why would the team leak that over a month later when they couldn't actually sign him? Darvish didn't leak it, he actually denied the report. I'm guessing the Yankee broadcaster who reported it had the same source as Dave last winter.

Trout's AAV should be -10 too. My earlier link was pre-Upton as well.

The Yankees acquired Stanton on Dec. 9. The Darvish offer wasn't reported anywhere until Jan. 11. Unless it was really old news, I think it was incorrect or incomplete (maybe contingent on an Ellsbury trade).

Obviously it's better to develop an ace than to sign one. But that's not really the choice here -- it's sign an ace*** or go without one indefinitely. Plenty of teams choose to do the latter, but given the position we are in, with the rest of our roster, and our payroll room now and in the future, I would rather not be one of those teams. *** and before anybody quibbles with calling Darvish an "ace", he was a top 20 SP in MLB last year, is apparently fully healthy, only 31 years old, and projected to be a top 20 SP in 2018 by Steamer and ZiPS. And if your definition of "ace" is so narrow as to exclude him, the odds of the Twins developing are even more remote too.

The Hughes extension is working out poorly concerning Hughes specifically -- but it has barely been a speed bump for the team as a whole. We still made the postseason last year, and we still have enough payroll space to add Darvish this winter if we want and still more space next winter. (And insurance might be covering a portion of Hughes' contract too.) Keep in mind, Hughes was never a top FA. The problem with his extension was that we were so afraid of bidding on top FA that we actually tore up Hughes's remaining 2/16 contract and replaced it with 5/58 -- essentially bidding against ourselves! -- on the basis of one good (but not great) year, after a string of mediocre ones. I think the lesson from that might be, putzing around with the likes of Hughes and Nolasco and Ervin isn't necessarily any safer or better from a risk perspective than aiming high (and might be worse from a reward perspective).

Spotrac has the Angels 2018 payroll at $171.5 mil. http://www.spotrac.com/mlb/los-angeles-angels-of-anaheim/payroll/ But, luxury tax is actually based on the AAV of each player's entire contract, which according to this link might drop that figure by $14 mil, to around $158 mil: https://www.halosheaven.com/2017/10/9/16380104/angels-2018-payroll-outlook So they should have plenty of room for Darvish, if they want him. (Additionally, the Angels have never exceeded the tax threshold before, so they don't even need to reset escalating penalties like the Yankees and Dodgers do. They could go over this winter without triggering the steepest penalties, as long as they could get back under in a year or two.)