You know, this phenomenon isn’t just happening in baseball. For example, can anyone from Boston tell us about Vin Baker?
Cheri, I think Griffey would have been okay if he had stayed in Seattle. Coming to Cincy only increased the pressure on him, and as a result he flailed. He then exacerbated the issue by seeming surly and unresponsive to the press and the fans. I don’t think it would have happened that way in Seattle, even if he did get hurt there.
Ok. I’ll be a sport and admit that much of what I said in my reply can probably be ignored. And my bad on the Gord Ash thing. Never mind me!
But what iratitated me into posting the reply was that there’s a huge knee-jerk reaction to blame the GM whenever a player doesn’t live up to their potential, or the prospects (who are generally a pretty big gamble) that they sent to another team to get a proven vet turn out to be big stars (Seattle has definitely gotten the better end of both the Griffey deal and the Johnson deal). There are a lot of factors that are just plain out of their control.
Steve Phillips became a victim of a mindset in New York, in my estimation. They were ok for many years, and very good for a few, eventually getting to a world series that nobody outside of the Empire State cared about. And once their players started getting older, they didn’t dismantle and rebuild, as they probably should have. Instead, they brought in more veterans, who failed, and to fix things brought in more veterans, who also failed. It seems to me that NY has too much of a “win now” attitude for a rebuilding project to be successful.
Good example with Cirillo, because that deal looked bad not only in hindsight, but at the time they made it. With the exception of Larry Walker and Todd Helton, I don’t think there’s a player on the Rockies that you could take away from Coors and still expect to produce decent numbers.
The other thing they should have recognized was that they were putting Cirillo into a new league. Hitters switching to the other league traditionally have a poor first season while they adjust, and while they have to learn a whole new set of pitchers to hit against. Some are never as good again as they were in their old league.
That said, you really should be happy with the Mariners management overall, as I know you are. How many teams can lose in consecutive seasons Griffey, Randy Johnson and ARod, yet still be in great shape a few years later?
I don’t think anyone’s going to blame a GM for an unfortunate injury or just sheer bad luck. It’s difficult to blame Jim Bowden for how Griffey has turned out in Cincy; nobody could have expected him to get hurt as much as he has. Maybe he overpaid for him, but you would have expected more bang for your buck than this. To use the Ash example again, he might have overpaid for Carlos Delgado, but you can’t deny Delgado has delivered big production, so at least you can say “Well, maybe Delgado isn’t worth $19 million, but he’s worth a lot.” You can’t blame Ash for Chris Carpenter getting hurt or Alex Gonzalez being uncoachable. That stuff can’t always be predicted.
But you sure as hell CAN bame him for giving Raul Mondesi a four-year, $45 million contract extension when anyone could see he wasn’t worth a tenth that money. You can blame him when his successor simply dumped Mondesi and acquired a better player for less than a fifth of the price.
Or Allard Baird has made moved in Kansas City that just utterly defy logic; they should have been expected to go horribly wrong, and they did go horribly wrong. There wasn’t any reason in the first place to think Damon-for-Hernandez or Dye-for-Perez were good deals. I don’t hear anyone blaming Baird for a number of their young pitchers not developing… it just happens sometimes, young pitchers break your heart. But I DO hear them blaming him for the stupid acquisitions of Perez, Hernandez, and (ugh) Chuck Knoblauch, and he should be blamed for it.
As a life-long Pirate fan, I can honestly state: Cam Bonifay raped the team. His decisions could honestly rank among the absolute worst in the history of mankind.
A short list of players he traded: Jason Schmidt, Esteban Loaiza, Jon Lieber, Ricardo Rincon, Elmer Dessens, Tony Womack.
Players Acquired: Armando Rios, Todd van Poppel, Brant Brown, Pete Schourek, Doug Strange, Mike Benjamin, and Wil Cordero (when he clearly did NOT want to be a Pirate).
He did aquire Scott Sauerbeck and Brian Giles, so I will at least concede that his mind was semi-functioning. Yet, because of his contracts the Pirates will never be able to fully operate efficiently. Terry Mulholland getting millions. DEREK BELL getting $9 million, Kevin Young making $24, Pat Meares getting $3million a year to NOT play ball? Most importantly, Jason Kendall’s albatross of $10million a year that won’t go away until 2007. Kendall’s contract is killing the team; they’re small market and these ridiculous decisions are killers.
He also went hard after “Tools” draft picks and high schoolers. Consequently, the Pirates have few impressive minor league prospects.
I hate Cam Bonifay.
things to read on the topic of Cam:
Old Hot Stove Heater. A sample: " Bonifay was the anti-Billy Beane, a guy who had no clue how to run a franchise with limited resources. He left Littlefield with the majors’ least-talented roster and most barren minor-league system. Simply put: Littlefield can’t run this franchise any worse."
I hate Cam Bonifay
Ouch. I can’t say how those players looked at the time of their deals, but those are some really ugly results. I recall Kendall having a run of great seasons for a catcher (3 years in a row of hitting over .300 with OBP over .400), which probably was the impetus for the signing. I assume he signed before 2001, and in this case it looks to be just bad luck. Although $10 million for a high OBP catcher with little power is still a pretty lousy deal.
But yea, some of those other signings are pretty hard to justify, even when looking at it at the time of the deal.
There really is no excuse nowadays not to hire a GM with really good baseball sense AND good business sense. Perhaps clubs are slowly learning this lesson? Despite Jeff Cirillo, all I can say is thank god for Pat Gillick. His home run to strikeout ratio has been excellent so far…
In fact, here’s an article detailing why he was inducted into the Blue Jays Level of Excellence for his GMing:
Some quotes:
“From a scouting standpoint, it’s just talent identification,” Gillick said of his continued success in Seattle. “That’s what it is. It’s going out and identifying those players that not only have talent but have a passion.”
While A-Rod was signing a monster 10-year deal for $250 million US with the Texas Rangers, Gillick was adding pieces like Brett Boone, Mike Cameron and Ichiro Suzuki.
“Our approach is that we’d rather have four players at five million then one player at $20 million,” Gillick said. "Because if that player goes on the disabled list, you’ve lost him completely. Where as if you have four players and one of them goes down, you still have three quarters of the equation.
“We’d rather have more bang for our buck.”
To Dreif’s credit, he’s a hard worker who has had bad luck with injuries. He was the first (or maybe second) pick over all in the draft and has shown potential. Also to his credit, he voluntarily restructured his contract, getting paid out over more years, to help the Dodgers with their salary cap.
Haj
But he’ll still make the same money. 33 million dollars for the 26 starts he’s made since the contract took effect. A grand total of 8 wins and 11 losses.
The Dodgers, or any other team, do not have a cap. Maybe you meant the luxury tax?
He was the 2nd overall pick (Nomar Garciapara was the 1st), the 1st pick of the Dodgers.
The deal was bad. BAAAD. A guy with a career losing record and a re-built elbow does not warrant a long term, big money deal. Long term, big money deals are for proven winners, not guys with potential. (and long term deals for pitchers are always risky) This deal rightly contributed to to the firing of Kevin Mallone. Some agent convinced him that he could lose this guy and would be the laughing stock when the reality was that losing him to another team would have been great for us.
He has potential. But after 8 years in the big leagues, he’s yet to realize that potential. Same problem with Adrian Beltre, another Malone debacle. They are paying this guy 3 million for his potential. He’s hitting .207 with 4 HR’s and 20 RBI’s. He hasn’t had an RBI in close to 2 weeks. As the FOX annoncers rightly said on saturday, “after 6 years in the bigs, he ain’t that young anymore”. Yeah, he’s 24, but he’s as good as he’s gonna get.
My only point is you don’t pay that kind of money for potential, only for their track record.
Now I’m a stat-head, no doubt.
But let’s be honest here. Brian Giles for Ricardo Rincon is one of the all-time most lopsided trades there’s ever been in the history of any sport ever.
Blast Bonifay if you will (God knows he deserves it for many, many reasons). But not for that move.
Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.
I strongly disagree that the Beltre contract is in any way comparable to the Dreifort deal. There are three rather significant differences:
-
Signing Beltre for $2-4 million a year made perfect sense at the time based on the information available. He was a terrific young player and even a conservative projection of his development suggested a lot of potential. Signing Dreifort for $11 million a year was just plain stupid; he was a decent pitcher but was already 28 years old, so he wasn’t even young, and he was and is prone to walking guys and giving up home runs, so his peripheral statistics did not suggest that there was untapped potential there.
-
Dreifort’s value was torpedoed by an injury anyone could see was a very real risk. Beltre’s career was seriously hampered by an injury that was a total fluke and could not possibly be predicted.
-
Dreifort is now 31 and injured again, so we can say with some confidence the Dodgers will never get their money’s worth. Beltre is only 24 and was a good player as recently as last year, so he still may become a fine player - in fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say he PROBABLY will end up being a fine player. I think it’s very foolish to assume a 24-year-old with a track record of success is finished just because he’s had a terrible two months.
I think Kevin Malone was a horrible GM, but the Beltre signing was a defensible move; he wasn’t entirely incompetent. Getting Shawn Green for Raul “Replacement Value” Mondesi was another good move.
We must define success differently. For $3,700,000.00, you should be pretty good. Matt Williams put up better numbers this year and got released.
I agree, getting Green for Mondesi was good for the Dodgers. But I think Malone got the Toronto GM drunk. Or Scott Boras got him drunk.