Back with the second part of his three-part series is Dan Wade, from Bleacher Report. If you missed section one of this series, it’s worth your time look over the foundational principles Dan laid out. They will be referenced again below.
Carl Pohlad
One of the many comments I received about Part One was that I was somewhat of an apologist for the Family Pohlad and their skinflint ways. I just want to start out by nipping that idea in the bud; nothing can be further from the truth.
In fact, the Twins’ mentality has been successful in spite of the Pohlads as much as because of them.
Baseball has essentially three classes: The Big Spenders, The Vultures, and the rest of the league. For the teams like the Cubs, Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, and a few others, free agency is a way to make a huge leap by adding one of the top players at a position of need.
No matter what they think about the Yankees’ huge splurge, no one can deny that the Bombers have substantially upgraded their rotation, which was a weak point for much of the 2008 season.
When the Cubs added Alfonso Soriano in 2007, he seemed to be a huge upgrade over Matt Murton, who spent the remainder of his Cubs career bouncing between Iowa and Wrigleyville.
For these teams, free agent failures hurt, but they are mistakes that can easily be rectified by trade or by adding someone else during the next off-season.
For more “economically efficient” (read: Cheap) teams, hearing about the Mets’ or Yankees’ big free agent mistakes is like a shark hearing about a giraffe’s sore throat; the concept is about as foreign as can be.
The middle-class teams, the Clevelands or San Diegos of the world, play a dangerous game when they enter the free agent market. A long-term deal worth a substantial portion of the team’s projected payroll is a game of Russian roulette. If the player works out, the team improves and the GM looks savvy.
Milton Bradley’s $5 million deal with the Rangers was a risky move, considering Bradley had appeared in just 61 games the previous season, but the slugger posted one of the highest OPS marks of his career and helped Texas to four more wins from 2007 and second place in the AL West.
On the other hand are the deals given to Barry Zito, Carl Pavano, Andruw Jones, and myriad other deals which seemed foolish at the time and now seem downright asinine.
If a team with a limited payroll signed one of these players, the contract could handcuff them for years and rather than push them ahead in the division, might act as the anchor that weighed a good team down.
There’s no indication that the Giants pulled out of the CC Sabathia chase because of what happened with Zito, but I will promise you this: Had the Zito fiasco never happened, the Giants would have pursued Sabathia longer than they did.
More money would have been available for the cause, and any lingering doubt in Brian Sabean’s mind about big money free agent pitchers wouldn’t exist.
The Twins are one of these middle-class clubs, even though they spend and act like a vulture. Market size and stadium revenues both put the Twins in the lower end of the major leagues, but higher on the list than their payroll would lead observers to believe.
One bad, Zito-level signing would cripple the team for years, even when if the payroll were to expand when the new stadium opens. This is, of course, hypothetical, since the Twins’ biggest free agent signing since 2002 was probably Dennys Reyes, who originally signed with the team on a minor-league deal.
The simple truth of the current free agent system is that it is much more likely to produce a bust rather than a boom. A list of free agent failures is substantially easier to populate than a list of impact signings, due in large part to the astronomical expectations generated by contracts in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Expectations aside, it is simply unrealistic to think that one player could push a team into the playoffs or to win a World Series.
(There is much more! Please click the link below to read the rest.)
