It's been a very quiet off-season for the Minnesota Twins. Though they were rumored to be involved in a number of free-agent and trade discussions, ultimately the only deals they swung to this point were to re-sign some of their own players to multi-year contracts. The most recent such deal, the signing of Jason Kubel to a three-year contract (two years guaranteed, one team option year) has produced the closest thing to controversy that the Twins blogosphere has seen.
The immediate reaction was positive; Twins bloggers like Kubel and seemed pleased that he'd gotten a deal that would pay him something like what they perceive him to be worth while also providing the Twins with payroll certainty over Kubel's last two years of arbitration and possible first year of free agency.
Then the cognitive dissonance began to set in, as outside observers critiqued the very deal Twins bloggers were applauding. First it was Dave Cameron of USS Mariner, posting on Fangraphs and using devastating comments like this:
"In what world is Jason Kubel a significnatly better player than Eric Hinske?
"Given everyday playing time at DH, we can estimate he (Kubel)’ll be worth between 0.5 and 1.0 wins for 2009."
"I know, I know, it’s only $7 million over two years. But it’s a needless use of resources. The Twins budget isn’t that of the Yankees or Red Sox, so to contend, they need to maximize the return on all the dollars they spend. Especially in this economic climate, where good players can’t find contract offers, giving a multiyear deal to Jason Kubel doesn’t maximize the return."
It's actually a fairly reasonable argument -- given the downturn in baseball economics (MLB teams aren't yet earning less money, but they're seeing the writing on the wall so many are tightening up payroll), plenty of players with demonstrated performance as good or better than Kubel's over the past two years are signing for much less money. So why Kubel?
The plot thickened when ESPN's Rob Neyer weighed in on his blog:
"If Jason Kubel were a free agent, it's not likely that the Twins would have thrown $7 million (or $12 million) his way. But Kubel's been a Twin for nearly nine years, and after nearly nine years (and a knee surgery or two) it's not easy to cut a guy loose. Especially a fairly productive guy. Even when the numbers say that's exactly what you should do."
Neyer supported his analysis with Fangraph charts showing that, based on sabermetric measures of value, Hinske was worth about $9 million playing for the Rays in 2008 while Kubel, even given that it was the best-hitting season of his big-league career, was only worth about $2 million for the Twins. The main difference? Hinske can play the outfield reasonably well and first base solidly, while Kubel has basically zero defensive value.
The blogosphere has started its response to Cameron, in Nick Nelson's essay on the eponymous Nick & Nick's:
"First of all, five years of age and 1,800 at-bats of big-league experience are not inconsequential. We know what Hinske is by this point, but the fact that Kubel was a minor-league stud who missed a year of crucial development time due to a devastating knee injury and has been steadily improving ever since makes it much harder to judge what he’s capable of. In Kubel, I see a player who is inching closer and closer to the monster hitter he was in the minors. In Hinske, I see a washout whose utility doesn’t stretch beyond left-handed pinch hitter."
Nelson's not alone -- even Aaron Gleeman goes to bat for Kubel yet again, even going so far as to point out that he "still hasn't had 500 at-bats in a season" (despite having had more plate appearances than any other Twins from 2007-2008 save for Mauer and Morneau, and more starts than any other Twins except Morneau alone; he's been in the starting lineup and at the plate more often than Gardy whipping-boy Nick Punto).
And while it isn't impossible for Kubel to finally have that 'breakout' season at age 27, the reality is that Kubel's had about a season-and-a-half of regular play since his 2006 'rehab year', and hasn't really impressed -- a hitting line of .272/796 looks impressive when compared to other Twins, but far less impressive when compared to the AL average for "offensive positions" as defined by baseball-reference.com (.270/785).
"As for Cameron’s suggested plan of using Hinske this year, then finding his “clone” next winter and continuing that path to keep the DH spot filled... it's fine in theory, but it's also something the Twins have shown absolutely no ability to do historically.
That comment seems to be inspired by ubelmann's list of Twins DH OPS's by year, which while interesting, has two major flaws:
1) It follows along with the apparently straight-faced suggestion that Kubel might actually manage to improve his OPS by another 70 points over his major-league career high (an improvement which, while not impossible, can't be considered a reasonable projection for any player), and
2) It suggests that a team without a good-hitting DH can't compete, which is ludicrous in comparison to the Twins record since 2002 (one game shy of six division titles in eight seasons), as well as the records of teams that have actually played well in the AL over those seasons. Example: The Twins DH OPS in 2008 was 782; the Tampa Bay Ray's DH OPS in 2008 was 751. If only the Twins had a better DH!
Finally, the biggest chuckler of the essay:
"As for the supposed risk associated with the contract, the Twins are paying Kubel about a million more than Hinske will make this year (inconsequential considering their budget surplus) and they’re on the hook for $4.1 million in 2010, which they can pretty easily afford."
Ah, yes, the infamous 'why aren't the Twins spending as much money as we think they should' argument.
The point, of course, is not to spend $90 million on payroll and have a mediocre ballclub -- the Orioles and Rangers have that niche pretty much filled, so if you're looking for that kind of team to root for, go ahead and feel free.
Though the Twins may be under their 'projected' payroll based on some factors, the point of having that extra money, to the degree that any amount of money is 'extra' money in sports, is to spend it on improving the ballclub. Mock the signing of Livan Hernandez in 2008 all you want, but he was the Twins best pitcher in April and helped keep the club close enough so that their mid-season rally made for a meaningful year instead of a year where they roared back from the cellar to .500 (as Cleveland did). And for every Sidney Ponson and Tony Batista, the Twins have signed a Kenny Rogers and Pat Borders, players who helped keep the club in contention and even win in years where they might not have been expected to.
Personally I'll be more interested what happens to Kubel after 2010, when the Twins have the option of picking up a $5 million+ contract or letting a player go who still hasn't fulfilled his potential. Maybe if Kubel were Hispanic the blogosphere would have an easier time cutting him loose...
Friday, January 30, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
Top Five Myths of the Twins 2008 Season - pt 5
One of the things that you realize when you start a series like this is that there are a whole lot more potential topics to discuss than there are slots to discuss them in. For instance, either of the following would make a viable Myth #5:
- Jason Kubel is a talented young player who just needs more playing time to blossom into a quality major-league hitter.
As of the end of 2008, the Twins have now invested over 300 starts and nearly 1300 career plate appearances in a soon-to-be 27 year old with a career OPS+ of 105, and whose last two seasons have been remarkably consistent:
With all the talk about how disappointing Delmon Young's season was, it should be pointed out that not only did Young have about the same OBP as Kubel (Young actually had a .336 OBP in 2008), Young also had better defensive numbers in left field (Young had a .973 fielding percentage and a 1.94 range factor, while Kubel had a .926 fielding percentage and a 1.39 range factor in left).
- Ron Gardenhire's ideosyncracies as a manager cost the Twins a division title in 2008.
Most of the people who seem to complain about Gardenhire's alleged incompetence as a manager can't seem to actually point to anything he does that's actually unusual about him: a willingness to use one-run strategies in the late innings of a close game makes him pretty typical among major league managers, and a preference for established veterans, even of relatively modest success, over largely unknown young players makes him pretty run-of-the-mill for a captain in almost any major professional sport.
In addition, Gardenhire nay-sayers also have the uncanny ability to ignore evidence that contradicts their favorite talking-points: they'll lambaste Gardenhire for being fairly cautious with Kubel in 2006 in his first season back from catastrophic knee surgery, without recognizing that Kubel's 269 appearances for the Twins in 2007 and 2008 ranks second on the team behind only Justin Morneau, and his 234 starts puts him third behind Morneau and Joe Mauer. (Nick Punto, the poster-child for Gardenhire's preference for ineffective glove-men over potent hitters, has just 249 appearances and 224 starts.) The nay-sayers will poke fun at Gardenhire for how long it took him to promote Johan Santana to the starting rotation full-time, but give him no credit for handing the closer job to a 29-year old mediocre starter (12-6, 4.71 ERA in 1999-2000) turned solid middle reliever (12-4, 2.96 ERA, 1.063 WHIP, but just 9 GF and 0 saves in 73 appearances in 2003). It doesn't even cover Gardenhire's handling of Morneau, who became the starter in 2004 over the complaints of the struggling incumbent and one of the team leaders from the successful Twins clubs of 2002-2003, and who remained the primary starter (126 starts) through a horrible 2005 campaign that saw him finish with a .239/741 hitting line that gave some serious doubts as to whether Morneau was really big-league material.
But the topic I want to focus on is one touched on in an otherwise excellent three-part series by Dan Wade at TwinsFix.com:
Wade's conclusion is perhaps the biggest myth, not just of the 2008 season, but of the Twins as a whole during the 21st century, so I'll use his words to frame it:
Myth #5: The Twins development strategy "does, however, leave holes, and unlike the teams who do play the free agent market, the Twins have a lot of trouble filing (sic) them."
I want to repeat that I very much enjoyed Wade's essays and thought he made interesting points, because by criticizing some of the underlying logic behind his essays, I'm going to suggest that he's relatively ignorant of history and unwilling to follow the logic of his own arguments, not traits I'd otherwise recommend in an analyst of any stripe.
For starters, the Twins strategy actually leaves fewer holes than a strategy of playing the free agent market regularly. Consider some of the most regular participants in the annual free agent sweepstakes: the Yankees and Dodgers, the arguably biggest spenders in each league (though the Red Sox in the AL and the Braves in the NL have payrolls which rival those of the Big Two).
Since 2001, the Twins have had three different regular starters at catcher (and one of those, Henry Blanco, was a fill-in for injured Joe Mauer), two at first base, and two in center field (with Carlos Gomez stepping in just this year). From 2001-2004 the club had one starter at second (Rivas), one at short (Guzman), one at third (Koskie), and two in left (Jones and Stewart, after Jones moved from left to right); the least stable positions in the Twins organization have been those positions where they've most relied on free agent solutions, mainly at DH, where Jose Offerman, Rondell White, and Jeff Cirillo were all free-agent acquisitions who spent much time (and not a whole lot of memorable time) being the designated hitter.
The Yankees, meanwhile, have had that degree of stability at only a few positions -- catcher and shortstop, certainly, and arguably second base and center field as well. They've had five different regular starters at first, two of which were recycled from previous stints. They've had three different third basemen (though the current guy is actually pretty good), four different leftfielders, and five different rightfielders.
The Dodgers have been even more chaotic, with nobody in the organization holding his position for more than four straight seasons, counting from 2001; the closest they get is Adrian Beltre, whom they had at third from 1998-2004 before losing him as a free agent to Seattle. In the past eight seasons, the Dodgers have had three different catchers, four different shortstops, five different rightfielders, six different firstbasemen, and seven different leftfielders.
Bill James (yes, him again) once made the point that being a major-league GM was kind of like being a janitor in a large institution. Investing in your minor-league organization and seeking out long-term solutions to your positional needs was like buying long-life bulbs for your building, while investing in quick-fix free agents was like buying cheaper, low-life bulbs. When your entire building is filled with long-life bulbs, you don't spend much time worrying about them, and it's not a horrible thing to bring in the occasional cheap bulb to tide you over. But the more you end up replacing long-term bulbs with cheaper bulbs, the more frequently you have to replace them, until eventually your entire job is just walking around looking for light bulbs that have burned out.
The astonishing thing about the Twins during the Gardenhire era isn't the holes they've had to fill, but the holes they haven't had to fill. While the more recent Twins don't look quite as good as their 2001-2004 predecessors in this respect, they're still way ahead of the Dodgers:
2006: Twins bring in Luis Castillo to play second, move Michael Cuddyer to right to replace Jacque Jones, and try Rondell White at DH, opening a 'hole' at third, which the Twins try to fill with Nick Punto.
2006: Dodgers bring in Russell Martin to replace Jason Phllips (who himself replaced Paul LoDuca the year before), bring in Nomar Garciaparra as a free agent from the Cubs, acquire Wilson Betemit from the Braves at mid-season to play third, bring in Rafael Furcal as a free agent to play short, trade Milton Bradley (who'd been signed two years earlier to be the answer in center) for Andre Ethier to play left, and bring in Kenny Lofton as a free agent to play center. This opens a 'hole' in right, which the Dodgers try to fill with J.D. Drew.
Of the Twins players given chances in 2006, Castillo and White are the only departures. Meanwhile, Garciaparra, Betemit, Furcal, Lofton, and Drew are all departed from the Dodgers, as is Luis Gonzalez, acquired as a free agent prior to the 2007 season.
The Dodgers are learning, though -- in 2008 they promoted youngsters Blake DeWitt and Matt Kemp, both highly-touted prospects who may lock down their respective positions for years to come and give the Dodgers time to find better fixes at their other positions where they are aging or otherwise deficient.
That's really the successful plan, after all. I wrote an essay earlier in 2008 about consistency, the point being that consistency for its own sake wasn't as good an indicator of quality as consistency as a side-effect of planning and good organization. The more good decisions the Twins make at first, catcher, etc., the fewer the holes they need to address in any given year, and the better the fix they can expect to look for to fill those holes and still remain competitive in the meantime.
After all, the history of patient franchises is a pretty good one:
- The benchmark of patient franchises, to a James fan, is the '70s-'80s Royals, who started with Amos Otis in 1970, then added John Mayberry in 1972, Hal McRae in 1973 (and won 88 games that year), George Brett in 1974, and Frank White in 1976 to form the nucleus of a team that would go to the World Series in 1980 and 1985, winning the latter, and be competitive for nearly two decades. Meanwhile, the club was also adding pitching -- Paul Splitorff became a regular starter in 1971, Dennis Leonard was added in 1974, Dan Quisenberry was a setup man in 1979, and finally Bret Saberhagen was a bullpen pitcher in 1984 and won the Cy Young in 1985. Charlie Leibrandt developed into a solid starter, and Danny Jackson and Mark Gubicza were young starters who seemed to have potential as well.
Starting in 1985, though, the Royals organization shifted from a strategy of bringing up talent to trying to shore up their perceived talent via free agency. It worked in '85, as Jim Sundberg and Lonnie Smith were acquired to help 'fill holes', but time went on and more holes developed, with the club looking for the quick fix instead of the sure fix: Jamie Quirk as catcher in 1987, Ted Power acquired in trade in 1988, Bob Boone brought in to shore up catcher again in 1989. This isn't to say that the Royals entirely gave up on youth -- they promoted Kevin Seitzer, Danny Tartabull, Kurt Stillwell, and Kevin Appier during this timeframe, but the longer the club went without winning, the less confident they felt in young talent. Jim Eisenreich came from the Twins in 1990, as did Pete Filson; the Royals more famously signed both Storm and Mark Davis as free agents that year. In '91 they brought in Bill Pecota and Kirk Gibson as well as pitcher Mike Boddicker. Wally Joyner and Kevin McReynolds joined up in '92, and they held on for a last gasp over the strike with the help of Gary Gaetti, Greg Gagne, and David Cone. They slipped below .500 after the strike, though, and though they've had good young players since (Johnny Damon in 1996, Jermaine Dye in 1997, Mike Sweeney in 1998, Carlos Beltran in 1999), they've been too reluctant to hold onto those players and too eager to go with veteran mediocrities (Chad Kreuter, a 37-year old Terry Pendleton, a 37-year old Chili Davis, a 35-year old Tim Belcher) to make those investments in youth pay off in wins.
- The New York Yankees have one of the most storied winning traditions in baseball history, and the start of the free agency era was seen as the chance for them to put their indelible mark on baseball's new era. Yet the Yankees, who improved enough immediately at the start of free agency to win a couple of World Series titles with rent-a-stars like Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter pirated from other champions, still had home-grown talent in Ron Guidry (3rd round pick, 1971) and Thurmon Munson (4th overall pick, 1968). But their need to stay 'on top' led them to make silly acquisitions, like 38-year old Luis Tiant, 40-year old Jim Kaat, and 41-year old Gaylord Perry on the pitching staff, while adding 34-year old Bob Watson, 33-year old John Mayberry (from the Royals), and 34-year old Don Baylor to the offense. They, like the Royals, weren't entirely without home-grown talent -- Don Mattingly came up in 1983, and Dave Righetti, acquired from Texas as a minor-league throw-in with four other players in 1978, debuted as Rookie of the Year in 1981, but their '81 AL pennant would be their last until the mid-90s, when they rediscovered the power of home grown talent. Oddly, that particular team had a lot of older free agents, including Tony Fernandez, Wade Boggs, Jack McDowell, and David Cone, but the keys were the developing Bernie Williams, Andy Pettite, and Mariano Rivera, joined by Rookie of the Year Derek Jeter the year after. Salting these home-grown stars with just enough free agents (Chuck Knoblauch, David Wells, Tino Martinez, Mike Mussina) helped the Yankees become a dynasty again; over-reliance on free-agents to patch holes (Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, Doug Mientkiewicz?) led eventually to the decline of that dynasty and its current state.
Which needs a bit of addressing in and of itself. The Yankees have outdone themselves this year, exchanging huge payrolls for huge payrolls and acquiring players who seem to have magically put the Yankees right back into championship contention, on paper anyway. On one hand, it's hard to imagine how CC Sebathia, Mark Teixeira, and AJ Burnett don't help the Yankees, but in another sense, it's easy to see how those deals might not actually help the Yanks, either. It has to do with the real difference between the Twins strategy and that of the 'big market' clubs: their treatment of risk.
What do you think the odds are that a given player will suffer an injury so severe as to impact his performance in a given season? That is, an injury that will cause him to perform below his established career norms. One in a thousand?
Well, what does 'one in a thousand' actually mean here? Does it mean that, for each inning a player plays, he's got a one in a thousand chance of getting seriously hurt? Probably not, given that most regulars play about a thousand innings or more in a given season, which would suggest that every regular should be noticeably injured much of the time. Still, the odds are probably better than you expect, and the risk you take by putting all your eggs in one basket increases with the size of the basket.
Now add in the odds that another player will simply slump in a given year. Then that a third will have a personal problem, say a divorce or drug problem, that impacts his play. Vanishingly small, right?
Except that teams are collections of players, and interact statistically in ways that are not really well understood.
Case in point: if you pick two people at random, the odds that they'll have been born on the same day (say, February 7, for example) is very small -- 1 in 133,225, not counting the possibility of leap days. That's pretty rare. So how many people do you need to put into a room before you have a 50-50 chance of finding two people with the same birthday?
About twenty-three. Yes, that's all.
Each person you add creates an exponentially larger number of possible birthday matches, thus increasing the odds of a match. Get up to 60 people, and your odds are nearly certain of finding a match, even considering leap days. And of course the real probability-expander in this problem is that you don't need your two people to match a given birthday -- you only need them to match any possible birthday.
So what are the odds of a player getting hurt badly enough to affect his performance, develop a problem that interferes with his play, get into an argument with a teammate that ruins clubhouse morale, or what have you? Did you know that in 2007, the Yankees used nearly 50 different players in game situations? If you accept that the players who play more are more likely to suffer problems, then it's obvious that the more players you have, the more likely you are to have problems, and the more 'great' players you have, the harder it will be to replace them when they do go down.
The strength of the Twins strategy is, to some degree, its resilience. If you spend $35 million to bring in a free agent and he doesn't perform, you probably can't replace that production. If, however, you have a $4 million super-sub (like Nick Punto) who goes down, you can almost certainly find somebody, with enough experimentation, to do nearly as well. And sometimes you even get lucky, as the Twins did last year when replacing the injured Michael Cuddyer with Denard Span. Odds are that Span won't do as well as he did in 2008, but if Cuddyer bounces back to where he was in 2006, what's the real difference?
Now keep in mind here that I'm not arguing that you should play a team full of 'replacement-level players', whatever that's supposed to mean. Such a team would be so uncompetitive that it wouldn't be worth watching. But a team of solid players, long-term solutions, backed up by more long-term solutions waiting in the wings, is going to do better in the long haul than a team that has to constantly re-invent itself from season to season. After all, how many World Series have the Dodgers won lately?
- Jason Kubel is a talented young player who just needs more playing time to blossom into a quality major-league hitter.
As of the end of 2008, the Twins have now invested over 300 starts and nearly 1300 career plate appearances in a soon-to-be 27 year old with a career OPS+ of 105, and whose last two seasons have been remarkably consistent:
2007 2008
Avg. .273 .272
OBP .335 .335
RC/G 5.4 5.4
With all the talk about how disappointing Delmon Young's season was, it should be pointed out that not only did Young have about the same OBP as Kubel (Young actually had a .336 OBP in 2008), Young also had better defensive numbers in left field (Young had a .973 fielding percentage and a 1.94 range factor, while Kubel had a .926 fielding percentage and a 1.39 range factor in left).
- Ron Gardenhire's ideosyncracies as a manager cost the Twins a division title in 2008.
Most of the people who seem to complain about Gardenhire's alleged incompetence as a manager can't seem to actually point to anything he does that's actually unusual about him: a willingness to use one-run strategies in the late innings of a close game makes him pretty typical among major league managers, and a preference for established veterans, even of relatively modest success, over largely unknown young players makes him pretty run-of-the-mill for a captain in almost any major professional sport.
In addition, Gardenhire nay-sayers also have the uncanny ability to ignore evidence that contradicts their favorite talking-points: they'll lambaste Gardenhire for being fairly cautious with Kubel in 2006 in his first season back from catastrophic knee surgery, without recognizing that Kubel's 269 appearances for the Twins in 2007 and 2008 ranks second on the team behind only Justin Morneau, and his 234 starts puts him third behind Morneau and Joe Mauer. (Nick Punto, the poster-child for Gardenhire's preference for ineffective glove-men over potent hitters, has just 249 appearances and 224 starts.) The nay-sayers will poke fun at Gardenhire for how long it took him to promote Johan Santana to the starting rotation full-time, but give him no credit for handing the closer job to a 29-year old mediocre starter (12-6, 4.71 ERA in 1999-2000) turned solid middle reliever (12-4, 2.96 ERA, 1.063 WHIP, but just 9 GF and 0 saves in 73 appearances in 2003). It doesn't even cover Gardenhire's handling of Morneau, who became the starter in 2004 over the complaints of the struggling incumbent and one of the team leaders from the successful Twins clubs of 2002-2003, and who remained the primary starter (126 starts) through a horrible 2005 campaign that saw him finish with a .239/741 hitting line that gave some serious doubts as to whether Morneau was really big-league material.
But the topic I want to focus on is one touched on in an otherwise excellent three-part series by Dan Wade at TwinsFix.com:
Because it is almost impossible to get the production necessary out a player to make a massive free-agent deal or the load of prospects required to make a blockbuster trade, seem like a good investment, the Twins have been able to field a high value team at relatively low cost.
Wade's conclusion is perhaps the biggest myth, not just of the 2008 season, but of the Twins as a whole during the 21st century, so I'll use his words to frame it:
Myth #5: The Twins development strategy "does, however, leave holes, and unlike the teams who do play the free agent market, the Twins have a lot of trouble filing (sic) them."
I want to repeat that I very much enjoyed Wade's essays and thought he made interesting points, because by criticizing some of the underlying logic behind his essays, I'm going to suggest that he's relatively ignorant of history and unwilling to follow the logic of his own arguments, not traits I'd otherwise recommend in an analyst of any stripe.
For starters, the Twins strategy actually leaves fewer holes than a strategy of playing the free agent market regularly. Consider some of the most regular participants in the annual free agent sweepstakes: the Yankees and Dodgers, the arguably biggest spenders in each league (though the Red Sox in the AL and the Braves in the NL have payrolls which rival those of the Big Two).
Since 2001, the Twins have had three different regular starters at catcher (and one of those, Henry Blanco, was a fill-in for injured Joe Mauer), two at first base, and two in center field (with Carlos Gomez stepping in just this year). From 2001-2004 the club had one starter at second (Rivas), one at short (Guzman), one at third (Koskie), and two in left (Jones and Stewart, after Jones moved from left to right); the least stable positions in the Twins organization have been those positions where they've most relied on free agent solutions, mainly at DH, where Jose Offerman, Rondell White, and Jeff Cirillo were all free-agent acquisitions who spent much time (and not a whole lot of memorable time) being the designated hitter.
The Yankees, meanwhile, have had that degree of stability at only a few positions -- catcher and shortstop, certainly, and arguably second base and center field as well. They've had five different regular starters at first, two of which were recycled from previous stints. They've had three different third basemen (though the current guy is actually pretty good), four different leftfielders, and five different rightfielders.
The Dodgers have been even more chaotic, with nobody in the organization holding his position for more than four straight seasons, counting from 2001; the closest they get is Adrian Beltre, whom they had at third from 1998-2004 before losing him as a free agent to Seattle. In the past eight seasons, the Dodgers have had three different catchers, four different shortstops, five different rightfielders, six different firstbasemen, and seven different leftfielders.
Bill James (yes, him again) once made the point that being a major-league GM was kind of like being a janitor in a large institution. Investing in your minor-league organization and seeking out long-term solutions to your positional needs was like buying long-life bulbs for your building, while investing in quick-fix free agents was like buying cheaper, low-life bulbs. When your entire building is filled with long-life bulbs, you don't spend much time worrying about them, and it's not a horrible thing to bring in the occasional cheap bulb to tide you over. But the more you end up replacing long-term bulbs with cheaper bulbs, the more frequently you have to replace them, until eventually your entire job is just walking around looking for light bulbs that have burned out.
The astonishing thing about the Twins during the Gardenhire era isn't the holes they've had to fill, but the holes they haven't had to fill. While the more recent Twins don't look quite as good as their 2001-2004 predecessors in this respect, they're still way ahead of the Dodgers:
2006: Twins bring in Luis Castillo to play second, move Michael Cuddyer to right to replace Jacque Jones, and try Rondell White at DH, opening a 'hole' at third, which the Twins try to fill with Nick Punto.
2006: Dodgers bring in Russell Martin to replace Jason Phllips (who himself replaced Paul LoDuca the year before), bring in Nomar Garciaparra as a free agent from the Cubs, acquire Wilson Betemit from the Braves at mid-season to play third, bring in Rafael Furcal as a free agent to play short, trade Milton Bradley (who'd been signed two years earlier to be the answer in center) for Andre Ethier to play left, and bring in Kenny Lofton as a free agent to play center. This opens a 'hole' in right, which the Dodgers try to fill with J.D. Drew.
Of the Twins players given chances in 2006, Castillo and White are the only departures. Meanwhile, Garciaparra, Betemit, Furcal, Lofton, and Drew are all departed from the Dodgers, as is Luis Gonzalez, acquired as a free agent prior to the 2007 season.
The Dodgers are learning, though -- in 2008 they promoted youngsters Blake DeWitt and Matt Kemp, both highly-touted prospects who may lock down their respective positions for years to come and give the Dodgers time to find better fixes at their other positions where they are aging or otherwise deficient.
That's really the successful plan, after all. I wrote an essay earlier in 2008 about consistency, the point being that consistency for its own sake wasn't as good an indicator of quality as consistency as a side-effect of planning and good organization. The more good decisions the Twins make at first, catcher, etc., the fewer the holes they need to address in any given year, and the better the fix they can expect to look for to fill those holes and still remain competitive in the meantime.
After all, the history of patient franchises is a pretty good one:
- The benchmark of patient franchises, to a James fan, is the '70s-'80s Royals, who started with Amos Otis in 1970, then added John Mayberry in 1972, Hal McRae in 1973 (and won 88 games that year), George Brett in 1974, and Frank White in 1976 to form the nucleus of a team that would go to the World Series in 1980 and 1985, winning the latter, and be competitive for nearly two decades. Meanwhile, the club was also adding pitching -- Paul Splitorff became a regular starter in 1971, Dennis Leonard was added in 1974, Dan Quisenberry was a setup man in 1979, and finally Bret Saberhagen was a bullpen pitcher in 1984 and won the Cy Young in 1985. Charlie Leibrandt developed into a solid starter, and Danny Jackson and Mark Gubicza were young starters who seemed to have potential as well.
Starting in 1985, though, the Royals organization shifted from a strategy of bringing up talent to trying to shore up their perceived talent via free agency. It worked in '85, as Jim Sundberg and Lonnie Smith were acquired to help 'fill holes', but time went on and more holes developed, with the club looking for the quick fix instead of the sure fix: Jamie Quirk as catcher in 1987, Ted Power acquired in trade in 1988, Bob Boone brought in to shore up catcher again in 1989. This isn't to say that the Royals entirely gave up on youth -- they promoted Kevin Seitzer, Danny Tartabull, Kurt Stillwell, and Kevin Appier during this timeframe, but the longer the club went without winning, the less confident they felt in young talent. Jim Eisenreich came from the Twins in 1990, as did Pete Filson; the Royals more famously signed both Storm and Mark Davis as free agents that year. In '91 they brought in Bill Pecota and Kirk Gibson as well as pitcher Mike Boddicker. Wally Joyner and Kevin McReynolds joined up in '92, and they held on for a last gasp over the strike with the help of Gary Gaetti, Greg Gagne, and David Cone. They slipped below .500 after the strike, though, and though they've had good young players since (Johnny Damon in 1996, Jermaine Dye in 1997, Mike Sweeney in 1998, Carlos Beltran in 1999), they've been too reluctant to hold onto those players and too eager to go with veteran mediocrities (Chad Kreuter, a 37-year old Terry Pendleton, a 37-year old Chili Davis, a 35-year old Tim Belcher) to make those investments in youth pay off in wins.
- The New York Yankees have one of the most storied winning traditions in baseball history, and the start of the free agency era was seen as the chance for them to put their indelible mark on baseball's new era. Yet the Yankees, who improved enough immediately at the start of free agency to win a couple of World Series titles with rent-a-stars like Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter pirated from other champions, still had home-grown talent in Ron Guidry (3rd round pick, 1971) and Thurmon Munson (4th overall pick, 1968). But their need to stay 'on top' led them to make silly acquisitions, like 38-year old Luis Tiant, 40-year old Jim Kaat, and 41-year old Gaylord Perry on the pitching staff, while adding 34-year old Bob Watson, 33-year old John Mayberry (from the Royals), and 34-year old Don Baylor to the offense. They, like the Royals, weren't entirely without home-grown talent -- Don Mattingly came up in 1983, and Dave Righetti, acquired from Texas as a minor-league throw-in with four other players in 1978, debuted as Rookie of the Year in 1981, but their '81 AL pennant would be their last until the mid-90s, when they rediscovered the power of home grown talent. Oddly, that particular team had a lot of older free agents, including Tony Fernandez, Wade Boggs, Jack McDowell, and David Cone, but the keys were the developing Bernie Williams, Andy Pettite, and Mariano Rivera, joined by Rookie of the Year Derek Jeter the year after. Salting these home-grown stars with just enough free agents (Chuck Knoblauch, David Wells, Tino Martinez, Mike Mussina) helped the Yankees become a dynasty again; over-reliance on free-agents to patch holes (Kevin Brown, Randy Johnson, Doug Mientkiewicz?) led eventually to the decline of that dynasty and its current state.
Which needs a bit of addressing in and of itself. The Yankees have outdone themselves this year, exchanging huge payrolls for huge payrolls and acquiring players who seem to have magically put the Yankees right back into championship contention, on paper anyway. On one hand, it's hard to imagine how CC Sebathia, Mark Teixeira, and AJ Burnett don't help the Yankees, but in another sense, it's easy to see how those deals might not actually help the Yanks, either. It has to do with the real difference between the Twins strategy and that of the 'big market' clubs: their treatment of risk.
Banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull. If they look conservative, it's only because their loans go bust on rare, very rare occasions. But (...)bankers are not conservative at all. They are just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"
What do you think the odds are that a given player will suffer an injury so severe as to impact his performance in a given season? That is, an injury that will cause him to perform below his established career norms. One in a thousand?
Well, what does 'one in a thousand' actually mean here? Does it mean that, for each inning a player plays, he's got a one in a thousand chance of getting seriously hurt? Probably not, given that most regulars play about a thousand innings or more in a given season, which would suggest that every regular should be noticeably injured much of the time. Still, the odds are probably better than you expect, and the risk you take by putting all your eggs in one basket increases with the size of the basket.
Now add in the odds that another player will simply slump in a given year. Then that a third will have a personal problem, say a divorce or drug problem, that impacts his play. Vanishingly small, right?
Except that teams are collections of players, and interact statistically in ways that are not really well understood.
Case in point: if you pick two people at random, the odds that they'll have been born on the same day (say, February 7, for example) is very small -- 1 in 133,225, not counting the possibility of leap days. That's pretty rare. So how many people do you need to put into a room before you have a 50-50 chance of finding two people with the same birthday?
About twenty-three. Yes, that's all.
Each person you add creates an exponentially larger number of possible birthday matches, thus increasing the odds of a match. Get up to 60 people, and your odds are nearly certain of finding a match, even considering leap days. And of course the real probability-expander in this problem is that you don't need your two people to match a given birthday -- you only need them to match any possible birthday.
So what are the odds of a player getting hurt badly enough to affect his performance, develop a problem that interferes with his play, get into an argument with a teammate that ruins clubhouse morale, or what have you? Did you know that in 2007, the Yankees used nearly 50 different players in game situations? If you accept that the players who play more are more likely to suffer problems, then it's obvious that the more players you have, the more likely you are to have problems, and the more 'great' players you have, the harder it will be to replace them when they do go down.
The strength of the Twins strategy is, to some degree, its resilience. If you spend $35 million to bring in a free agent and he doesn't perform, you probably can't replace that production. If, however, you have a $4 million super-sub (like Nick Punto) who goes down, you can almost certainly find somebody, with enough experimentation, to do nearly as well. And sometimes you even get lucky, as the Twins did last year when replacing the injured Michael Cuddyer with Denard Span. Odds are that Span won't do as well as he did in 2008, but if Cuddyer bounces back to where he was in 2006, what's the real difference?
Now keep in mind here that I'm not arguing that you should play a team full of 'replacement-level players', whatever that's supposed to mean. Such a team would be so uncompetitive that it wouldn't be worth watching. But a team of solid players, long-term solutions, backed up by more long-term solutions waiting in the wings, is going to do better in the long haul than a team that has to constantly re-invent itself from season to season. After all, how many World Series have the Dodgers won lately?
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