Baseball teams and stupid contracts (aka a Jeff Cirillo rant)

The BBQ Pit
1

Mariner fan here, and while there really isn’t a whole lot to complain about this season (currently 2nd best record in majors), I’m quite annoyed with the fact that we have about $15,000,000 tied up in Jeff Cirillo for this year and next, for a guy that is striving towards maintaining a .250 batting average and .325 OBP, with very little power (slugging .330!), and with average or slightly above average defense. The worst part is that I think the M’s are sort of interested in shopping around for Mike Lowell (who is fast becoming a rare power-hitting 3rd baseman), but are inhibited by the amount of sunk cost in Cirillo. Obviously we’re making it despite Cirillo, but I can’t help but think that one more big bat in place of Jeff may help push the Mariners to their first World Series berth ever (this club looks a lot like the 2001 record-setting team that crashed and burned in the playoffs).

Of course, the M’s have it much better than some teams; the Met for example have untold millions invested in guys like Alomar and Vaughn, both of whom have been as anemic as Cirillo but earning more money. Taking the Cirillo example, I think the problem is that there is a tendancy to overspend for players by evaluating them at their peak potential, not expected output, which is really a sort of wishful thinking. Yes, Cirillo batted .300 the past few seasons, but that was in COLORADO! I mean, more balls fly out of Coors Field than talented ballplayers from Cuba… His road batting average was around .260 during his stint with the rockies, which should have been the metric used to evaluate his worth. Instead, they selectively took the stats that made him look good and ran with it, and now Jeff’s earning more than Ichiro. :eek:

I know that hindsight is 20/20, but it amazes me sometimes how money is thrown around so enthusiastically in baseball without a careful look at what they’re getting.

The Mets and Rangers have been the most idiotic, in my opinion, though I can’t really fault New York for the Alomar signing; Robbie is one of the all-time great 2nd basemen, and for some reason he just went kaput in New York. Texas signing of Chan Ho for that ridiculous sum ($60+ mill over 5-7 years, i forget which) based on one decent season in a pitcher’s park, with mediocore road numbers and numerous questions about his mental focus from his own team… Ouch.

The Yankees usually overspend for guys, but they do usually get good players (at prices that great players get on other teams), and if it ain’t working that well, ol’ Steinny will buy some more.

I guess I should count my blessings that Cirillo is the one major signing mistake for the M’s, and that we still have a good shot at making the World Series. Still, a guy like Lowell (who would cost just as much or maybe even less than Cirillo did) in the line-up instead of Jeff may just be that missing link to that elusive ring. Which is not to be because of a stupid contract…

2

I agree. I’m offering to give you guys Sele back, and all I want in return is Pineiro. That’s pretty generous right there. We’ll give you a veteran pitcher, someone who you can rely on to give you what you expect. In return, all we want is some untested young pitcher. He could collapse at any time. Sele is the better bet. That’s how generous I am.

Sele for Pineiro. Proven for unproven. Waddayasay?

3

Just a note – most of those big contracts for the Mets (Vaughn, Alomar, Burnitz) were inherited from other teams. Piazza’s big contract was worth it (he put the fans in the seats, after all), even though he’s on the DL this year.

Cedeno was the Mets’ fault, though. Glavine and Floyd seem to have been reasonable.

4

Detroit is still on the hook for Damian Easley for $14 million. Way too much money for a guy who had a statistically outstanding year in 1998. Too bad it was far and away out of the norm for him. He’s so bad, the Tigers cut him, making him the most expensive roster paring in MLB history.

How about Darren Dreifort? The Dodgers gave an offer of $55 million over 5 years to a player that has the following resume:
39-45 career record, never pitched 200 innings in a season, injury prone, no other buyers in that price range. The Dodgers reward for the contract? Initially a 4-7 record with a plus 5 ERA, followed by a blown out elbow missing the 2002 season, a 4-4 start to this season followed by knee surgery ending his season.

Jeffrey Hammonds - The Brewers don’t ooze baseball intelligence anyway, but this contract is especially ludicrous. The Brewers thought this was the guy worthy of receiving the largest contract in team history. Their reward for spending $21.75 million over 3 years? 187 games, 17 homers, 65 RBI, a .248 Avg. All this for a player who had never played more than 123 games in a season, often far fewer than that.

Denny Neagle - $41.2 million. Sure, he is a solid starter, but do guys that are probably #3 starters on teams deserve an albatross of a salary? Nope, especially when they are essentially a .500 pitcher other than a 3 year mid-career run.

The great part is that this thread could run on forever, because there is no shortage of greedy player/agent combined with dumb team owners willing to pay for a name rather than performance.

5

Although they weren’t good pickups (except Burnitz, who had a terrible year last year), and the Mets’ GM paid the price for it - and a number of other blunders - last night, with his job.

Tommy Glavine will always have a place in my heart from his many great years with the Braves, but right now he’s 5-6 with an E.R.A. of 4.82, and the Mets are paying him $35 million for 3 years. That’s nowhere close to reasonable.

6

Jeez, the Rangers have a gazillion bucks invested in guys that aren’t doing anything. Rusty Greer is earning his 7 mil by watching. He’s been hurt his whole life, it seems. They just cut Todd Van Poppel, again, and they are paying Rafael Palmeiro almost 5 million to DH. Juan Gonzalez is making 10 million, but he’s hurt again. This bozo gets an ingrown hair on his back and he’s shut down for 2 weeks. And maybe A-Rod is the best player in baseball, but he costs the team the ability to have a number one starter, two middle-of-the-rotation guys, and two guys in the bullpen.

[football hijack]
Some years ago, when the Dallas Cowboys signed Deion Sanders, my friends and I had a long discussion. We decided this was the beginning of the end for Da Boys. The reason? With salary cap restrictions, we figured Sanders’ contract cost the Cowboys four or five starters. [/football hijack]

7

When Steve Phillips went on his huge spending spree, trading for every expensive player he could get, and people were talking about how the Mets had become a powerhouse, I just had to laugh. It’s The Worst Team Money Can Buy, Part II, and you could see it coming fifty miles away.

Some GMs just seem to go nuts with money at times, and the problem sometimes grows like a fungus as the GM tries to spend more money to make up for the lousy players he’s already spent loads of money on. Look at Gord Ash in Toronto, who spent $80 million on a lousy team quite a bit worse than today’s pretty good $45 million edition, or the Dodgers’ Kevin Malone, who gave away money like potato chips ($55 million for Darren Dreifort? Was he on crack?) but could not actually assemble a ballclub that could hit. In almost all such cases the team’s payroll balloons out of control AFTER the first disappointing season; desperate to win something after a lousy and expensive debacle, the team hauls in even more expensive veterans. The result is usually disaster.

It happens in other sports too. The New York Rangers have become an absolute joke, a near self-parody of stupid spending. Every year, the Rangers suck and miss the playoffs, and then they go out and get even more expensive free agents. Then they suck again and miss the playoffs, and they go out and get even more free agents. It’s been six or seven years since they made the playoffs, and every year they just do the same thing over again, like the hockey version of Leonard from “Memento.”

Why teams do not wake up about this is one of the great mysteries of modern sport. Urban myth and commonly accepted but wrong wisdom pervades the game and it takes decades to get it out. Baseball teams STILL draft high school pitchers after hundreds and hundreds of them have failed. They still give multi-zillion dollar contracts to guys like Jeromy Burnitz despite mounds of evidence that such contracts are money pits. They still pay millions of dollars to mediocre relief pitchers and utility players when players who could do the same job for a fraction of the price are available off the waiver wire. It’s just amazing.

8

Heh, there’s one small difference… Sele is making $8.1 million, Pineiro is making chump change ($440,000). I have a no problem with unproven guys, so long as they aren’t getting paid upwards of a half a dozen million. A lot of rookies and youngin’s have high upsides, and sometimes you have to take a risk by having them on your team. Nothing says you have to give them a mint, though. And Sele has never been anything more than a mediocre pitcher, save for that 2001 Mariner season, which, quite honestly, made all of our guys look good.

When a rookies is good all through the minor leagues and through his entire rookie year, or if he’s good throughout two consecutive seasons, or shows continuous improvement over three seasons (and has a great third season), then a big contract becomes more reasonable. A guy like Mark Prior is definitely on the verge of being worth a big contract. If he shows he can last a full season in the bigs by finishing the year out strong, then he may be worth a big investment (noting his composure, mechanics, and control all throughout college and the minors as well as his big-league success). A guy like Albert Pujols is already worth a monster contract, as he has been incredible for 2.4 major league seasons, and has never really faltered; he may be having the best first 3 years of any player in baseball history.

About some more of the mets decisions, I think we can forgive them the Alomar bid, and can sort of understand the Tom Glavine signing (although they definitely overpaid… old pitchers having just decent seasons the year before are not worth $11+ mill, no matter how good they used to be). Signing Cliff Floyd and Mo Vaughn was pretty bad, but not absolutely unforgivable. Signing Roger Cedeno, a guy who has never ever been good at anything but stealing bases, on the other hand, was just throwing money in the toilet. Mets 2nd highest payroll, last place.

The Rangers signing good offensive players at premium prices… Now, most of the players they sign are actually good; Juan Gonzalez is definitely worth $10 million if he stays healthy, but of course that is just wishful thinking. But most of their pitcher signings are awful, and they seem to want to overspend on even more offense, as opposed to overspending on their achilles heel, their pitching (the rangers are dead last in the majors in ERA). I don’t understand this. They’ve had bad pitching for what seems like forever, yet they keep signing more sluggers at top dollar (if they saw opportunity for a bargain deal, then it’s excusable, but tell me what bargains exist on the Ranger team that are not very very young players, aka Blalock)…

9

The owner of the Rangers (and Knicks) is an absolute moron. You’ll notice the Knicks suck, too, and also totally lack direction. I think he may get lynched if this keeps up.

When a guy has a good year, especially in a contract year, his asking price goes up. There’s not much you can do about it. And as mentioned earlier, Burnitz is about the Mets’ lone veteran bright spot. He’s trying and having a good year.

10

It’s too bad baseball isn’t like the NFL, where contracts are not guaranteed.

11

All those here who are GMs of major league baseball teams, or who are good enough at it that they have some influence over the GM of a major league baseball team, please raise your hand. No? Didn’t think so.
It’s very easy to talk about bad trades in hindsight, but unless the GM’s name is Cam Bonifay (Pittsburgh) it’s a good bet that they actually put some thought into who they acquired. The Mets used a formula that has been proven by world champions in the past, picking up proven veterans. I don’t think that anybody can argue that Roberto Alomar was a bad gamble when he was picked up; he has only been (if not the best) one of the very best second basemen in the game for the past 15 years. And Mo Vaughn was problematic, but he and Jeromy Burnitz were both proven sluggers. It just seems that everybody on that team has underachieved. Which makes me happy, being a Braves fan. Glad to see Glavine didn’t work out for them so far!
GMs and owners fall into a trap when building and maintaining a team. The fans want results and they want results now. A few will understand when the team is going through a rebuilding phase, that the wins will come in a few years, and there will be plenty of them. But most times when a team wants to go into a rebuild, nobody wants to come and watch them, so revenues drop off. Think why the Red Sox can be competitive all the time. Fans will come and watch them (same goes for the Yankees) no matter how bad they are, and will fill the stadium every night, so there are no prolonged times of low revenue. They can always stock themselves with veteran talent.
Not everybody can be Billy Beane.
If I recall right (I think he was there at the time), Gord Ash did put together a world championship team, the only team besides the Yankees to win two straight World Series in a long long time. I’d say he had a pretty good track record in Toronto.
Some gambles pay off, and some don’t. And if you’re lucky enough to have almost all of them pay off (like the Mariners, who seemingly ludicrously overpaid Bret Boone before it turned out he was worth every penny), you’re going to go a long way.

12

Try again.

EVERYONE except Kevin Malone (form GM of the Dodgers) knew that signing Dreiffort to a 5 year, 55 million dollar contract was a boneheaded play. Everyone except Malone, that is. The day it was announced, there was much uproar on the Dodgers board (www.fanhome.com) There was uproar in the LA Times, The Daily News, ESPN and USA Today’s Baseball Weekly.

This was when Dreiffort was still healthy(foresight). All those voices were proven right within 2 months of the 1st season in that contract. Dreiffort blew out his elbow AGAIN and required 1 and 1/2 years recuperation. This is the 3rd year in the contract, and he’s pitched 4 months.

Everyone knew the deal for Roger Cedeno was idiotic except the Mets GM. And their voices were heard as soon as it was announced (foresight). He’d been a poor hitter and poor feilder all his career. His only plus was speed. But you cannot steal 1st base.

Most folks knew Chan Ho Park was hurt wasn’t gonna have a good couple of years. That was why the Dodgers passed on him. That should have been a clue to the Texas GM (that the guy’s current team didn’t even go through the pretense of trying to sign him).

So I think we can infer that the qualifications for being a GM are as follows:

  1. You must be a carbon-based life form.
  2. You must collapse like a house of cards when talking to an sports agent.
13

I agree with you ace; GMs have to take gambles at times. Notice how I did not blast the Roberto Alomar acquisition, despite the strangely poor results; in fact I thought that was a rather smart move, going for the 2nd baseman with a hall of fame career coming off a good season.

However, spending good money for marginal players, and signing them to long-term deals… that’s what I’m annoyed at. Roger Cedeno (low OBP lead-off man)… huh? Chan Ho Park (see Spooje’s comments)… doh! Cirillo (look at his non-Coors Field numbers)…

I guess the root of the issue is some GMs’ seeming inability to evaluate players based on criteria that matter. A guy hitting .300 at Coors Field does not neccessarily make him a good hitter! Look at his road numbers… is that so hard?

Your comment about Bret Boone is a good one; sometimes marginal signings do pay off. But I think the initial 2001 contract was only one year for not that much money. And Boone was already an established great defensive 2nd baseman with 20 HR pop. Certainly not the hitter he is now, but well worth signing for a couple million, which is what they got him for. After 2001, he has a solid history backed by a great season… $8 million a year for 3 years is definitely a risk, and one I’m not sure I would have made; however, even if he doesn’t perform like 2001, he’ll likely regress to his career average, which isn’t bad. Therefore it was a risk with a safety net; if Boone regressed, they would be overpaying by about 2-3 million, which isn’t the end of the world.

14

This is where you’re horribly wrong.

Beane isn’t doing anything spectacular. All he’s done is define…effectively…what level of performance he can get from an ‘average’ player and determine that they’re worth the minimum wage because if that players wants $2 Mill per year he can find someone else to do the job for $300,000.

He’s one of the first GMs to systematically identify and use the ‘replacement player’ concept. He allows very little value for an ‘established’ major league player because the one thing we know about players is that they go up in value for 3-5 years then slowly decline. Therefore an ‘established’ should, by definition, be on the downward slide. In other words, by signing such a player to a contract you should be aware that he will (barring and incredible fluke) never be better than he is right that moment. Odds are strong that he will get worse every year of his contract.

That shouldn’t be such a difficult concept to grasp. But many executives in baseball don’t seem to get it.

Really, it’s an economic extension of Branch Rickey’s famous line about ‘always trade a player a year too early so you don’t trade him a year too late’.

Get value and walk away when it’s not there. What’s the problem there?

And it’s not like Beane is even keeping quiet about it. Michael Lewis’s new book ‘Moneyball’ sums it up perfectly. It’s an excellent read and a great example of how a small group of people can see a different way of doing things and changing a culture.

I stand here and predict: In less than 10 years every single team in the majors will be operated on Billy Beane’s principles. This will lead to more opportunities for minor league players, more major league players forced out of the game before they’re 30, and an increased stratification in salaries where the true performers gets mega-millions and everyone else makes minimum wage.

15

“Inherited,” RealityChuck? That sounds like Milwaukee, Cleveland and Anaheim bequeathed the Mets Burnitz, Alomar, and Vaughn in their Last Wills and Testaments. “And to the New York National League ballclub, in recognition of their generosity in sending us Nolan Ryan lo these many years ago, we the Anaheim Angels present the team with our former superstar Maurice Vaughn…”

The Mets may not have handed out the contracts for these three men, but they certainly were more than happy to take them on. And while I don’t think anyone could have predicted what happened to Alomar, the overall trajectory should have been clear. You’re playing with fire when you have a team whose starting lineup has a median age of, what, 34? You’ve got people going downhill, you’ve got a higher rate of injuries…well, you’ve got trouble, my friend.

16

I can’t complain too much about my team’s GM, because Walt Jocketty has done a good job over the past few years. He got Jim Edmonds for Kent Bottenfield (out of baseball now) and Adam Kennedy (weak hitter who was an overrated prospect in the Cardinals system), then got him to stay long-term. He got Scott Rolen for a shaky pitcher (Bud Smith), an old pitcher (Mike Timlin), and an average utility player (Placido Polanco), then got him to stay long-term.

That said, his pitching moves over the offseason were kind of questionable. Signing Cal Eldred and Chris Carpenter when both are coming off surgery? Banking on Brett Tomko to have ANYTHING left? These are not exactly the moves of a GM trying to build a championship club.

Now, if ownership will give him some money in time, we can get another starter, move Simontacchi to the pen, and make a run on Houston and the Cubs just in time for the Cubbies to choke in another sweltering Chicago summer.

17

You do not recall correctly. The GM of the Toronto champions was Pat Gillick, who now helms the Mariners. Ash was, at the time, the assistant in charge of legal matters; he didn’t have any authority over player selection.

Ash did a dreadful job in Toronto. He only GOT the job mainly because he had worked for the team since its inception (he started as a member of the grounds crew) and it was, basically, his turn, and the team at that point didn’t precisely have an owner, so he won the job by default.

I suspect you will find, looking at GM’s records, that the great majority of them over the years were NOT hired because they were particularly smart or competent; they were hired because they were a member of the Old Boys Club. In the few cases where a team has actually hired someone new who had a plan and a vision - Beane, or his student J.P. Ricciardi - the results they’ve gotten have been astounding.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be statheads. Brian Sabean of the Giants isn’t a stathead, but he’s very good at identifying quality players he can get at bargain prices - he nabbed Ray Durham this year, for instance, for less than he’s really worth. He nabbed Jeff Kent at a bargain price, got huge numbers out of him, and cut him loose at the right time, IMHO. He’s a smart guy who seems to understand Rickey’s Law.

John Schuerholz isn’t a stathead, but you can’t deny the man’s ability to identify pitchers on the cheap whose careers can be turned around.

18

Pat Gillick was GM of the Toronto Bluejays in 92 and 93 when they won both world series. I’m pretty sure Ash must’ve played a big role in helping to shape the team as assistant GM though.

19

I’ll take this one, if you don’t mind.

Fugeddaboudit.

:smiley:

20

I would also like to bring into this discussion…Ken Griffey Jr. Who did a wonderful job in Seattle, but who has been on the DL list for pretty much the rest of his career.

The man is talented, granted. But he is being paid zillions of dollars for sitting on the bench most of the time.

I regret losing ARod. I don’t regret losing Ken Griffey Jr.