Off-Season.....and Contracts
by David Todd on Oct 23, 2009 11:49 AM EDT
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PrintI think there has been a reasonably interesting debate going on as an undercurrent to some of the discussions we've had here. (I'm going to try to express the views here and what I think some people have as expressed as their opinion. Please correct me if I misrepresent something.)
My opinion and one I think is shared by WTM is that the free agent market corrected last year and I think will continue to correct this year. As a result values presented by WAR, etc. are misleading, if not completely off-base. I am probably in the extreme in that I think we've seen the peak and player contracts will not continue to spiral upward. I expect the cumulative amount paid out in player salaries to remain pretty constant over the next five years. I also think franchise values in virtually all sports excluding football have peaked. Understand that does NOT mean the next time the Pirates are sold they won't be sold for more than they were when Nutting, et al bought the team. It means that the franchise value five years from now won't be appreciably different than it is today, even correcting for inflation (very low at the moment).
The basis of my opinion is that owners have become more rational and GMs more intelligent and thus are not willing to shell out as many ridiculous contracts as they have in the past. Sure there will still be the occasional terrible one, but even those tend to be shorter in duration than the six years that Mike Hampton got or the seven years that Barry Zito got. I even think we will see a slow down in the outrageous arbitration awards that are given as top players salaries stop rising. And, certainly young talent is valued more highly than ever before.
Vlad and JRoth, on the other hand, don't share that opinion. They note that the free agent market did correct last off-season and I think they view that as more of an anomaly based on the disastrous economic climate of the day. They think contracts will continue to move higher over time. Albeit, maybe at a slower pace.
Vlad has at times suggested that if this does occur that it will be because the owners are colluding. History is on his side in that argument as the owners have twice lost court cases on just that topic. I don't agree. More than half of the teams in the game are under different ownership than they were at the time those cases came about. I would argue that most of today's new owners, like John Henry or even Bob Nutting, are smarter businessmen dealing in a different economic climate than their predecessors. (Please don't make answers to this post be about whether Nutting is a smart owner. We don't have access to the books. Clearly the product on the field has been terrible under his stewardship, but he is most likely making a large amount of money each year as he pays of his debt, thus increasing the value of his ownership stake.) Sure Barry Bonds couldn't get a job, but I don't think anyone wanted anything to do with the SOB and all that he brought with him. Vlad thinks it was collusion. I certainly don't think Abreu, Orlando Hudson, Randy Wolf and many others got contracts lower that expected because owners were colluding. I think tremendously hard economic times caused a shift in the market that neither owners nor players expected. However, I do think this dramatic economic collapse showed the owners the folly of their ways and they are smarter for it.
So, what will we see going forward this off-season and over the next five years? I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I've posted a poll for your amusement. Also, WTM, Vlad and JRoth, I apologize if I mischaracterized any of your opinions. Please correct any misstatements on my part or take your shots at my opinions where you think appropriate. Thanks.
I couldn't publish a second poll, but I'll throw out my opinion for discussion. I think Jack and Freddy will earn less than $8 million combined next season. Thoughts?
This is a FanPost and does not necessarily reflect the views of the managing editor (Charlie) or SB Nation. FanPosts are written by Bucs Dugout readers.
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A Note on Collusion
I saw an item in the paper the other day saying the union and owners have agreed to an extension of the deadline for the union to file a grievance over alleged collusion in the last off-season. Player agents have been clamoring for the union to claim collusion, but the union seems hesitant. They’ve never hesitated to sue the owners before, and they’ve never needed the agents to push them, so it’s a pretty reasonable assumption that they don’t have much evidence.
Which does not, of course...
…mean that the agents are necessarily wrong. After he gets arrested a couple of times, even the dumbest burglar in the world starts checking for alarms before breaking the window.
True, but you can pretty much go team-by-team through the financial situations in MLB and see it reflected in their FA signings. And the market itself is largely drying up because teams are learning either to extend their good players or trade them to teams that can extend them. The players who end up on the market are generally there because they’re problematic in one way or another. If you analyze extensions and the FA market together you get a more realistic picture, which is why payrolls overall continue to increase. Agents focus only on FAs.
I think the average $cost/$value will increase even though less will be spent. There aren’t going to be as many quality FAs out there that there were last year.
In the long run, players will be paid more and more. Even adjusting for inflation, player salaries have increased with relative consistency over the past 100 years and I see no reason that would stop now.
If in the long run, players get paid less while MLB grows, it will be because of collusion.
That is like saying....
microsoft’s earnings will go up 20% every year. The law of big numbers says no. Because it happened in the past is a good argument for the future. Give me a good reason other than "that’s how it’s always been.’
I think it is a matter of spinal cords. The idea that “that’s how it’s always been” may have some merit, if (IMHO) the MLB continues it’s idea that there is no disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest teams. A “league” cannot be compared to a company like Microsoft because Microsoft is in a (kinda) free market system. ‘Leagues’ are not a free market system. Leagues have always (in a historical sense) relied on the fact that the players in said ‘league’ are playing with the same rules and on the same field. The MLB has totally missed this. The acceptance of such an insane disparity in player payrolls basically says that the money is much more important than any thing else, too both the owners AND the players. (I blame having an owner/now former owner/in charge of the now crazy situation, but that is a completely different post).
But again, LEAGUES, historically have only survived if everyone in the league, competes with the same amount of resources (i.e. they can only spend the same amount).
Even John Henry said (at some point last year) that the MLB needs a salary cap.
The MLB needs to change. Period. Making comments like “but so-and-so got into the playoffs” is a smoke screen; and it is 100% wrong.
So have I just shown my intense hatred of Bud Selig? Oh well, he really does deserve it.
Paul.
"I choose to gamble with my life
Twice the risk, four times the prize
Nothing knocks me over"
by lighthouse913 on Oct 25, 2009 3:41 AM EDT up reply actions
sorry— “too both the” should read “to both the” and some of the sentences should have been moved about. It is such a drag being the only drinker in a crowded room. Paul
"I choose to gamble with my life
Twice the risk, four times the prize
Nothing knocks me over"
by lighthouse913 on Oct 25, 2009 3:51 AM EDT up reply actions
I don't understand
the difference between the first two options.
Jack and Freddy <= $8m!! Other GM’s are so cheap! Clearly too cheap to hire scouts that could come watch the Pirates and see how those 2 carried us to 60 wins.
I think that for the purposes of the poll...
…#1 means that salaries will continue to decline, and Player X will get a lower contract this year than he would’ve gotten last year, while #2 means that salaries will hold relatively steady with last year’s figures.
I could be wrong, though.
I can't vote for any of those poll options.
Too much of the language is subjective, and thus prone to interpretation/misinterpretation. I think that player salaries will continue to closely track the sport’s gross revenues, as they have always done in the free agent era. If teams have positive revenue forecasts for 2010, then they’ll spend more on players. If they feel that the economy will continue to decline, then they’ll spend less. Since I think that last offseason’s salary adjustment was out of proportion to the sport’s revenue growth (although a risk-averse strategy was certainly understandable at the time given some of the economic scenarios and the high premium on liquidity at the time due to the state of the commercial paper market), I think there will tend to be a bit of an upward bounce in salaries, purely in isolation from the other factors. That also said, the relative lack of marquee players in this year’s class will probably keep us from seeing any individual deals that match the Sabathia signing last year, or the A-Rod one before that.
Oh, the nattering nabobs of negativity...
.J/K, Vlad.
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Oct 26, 2009 9:27 PM EDT up reply actions
Well, that stuff matters.
If I were to pick a choice without knowing who posted the poll, I’d probably go with #1: I think salaries will correct upward toward the gross revenue line, and players like Lackey will get big contracts. But because ddtoddwin and I have different ideas about what “correct” means, he’s intending the exact opposite meaning.
Thus, I’m left with #3 and #4. But if Jack gets a two-year deal for $4.5M per, is that a “feeding frenzy” or an environment “the dramatic increases we have seen in the past”. And in the latter case, from where are we measuring these “dramatic increases”? A 2009 baseline, or a 2007 one, or a 1980s one, or something else?
I was just
trying to get a R.I.P. for Safire in there, really.
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Oct 27, 2009 8:55 PM EDT up reply actions
Which is why I used the pic I used...
Agreed on the politics.
His columns were awesome, though.
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Oct 28, 2009 2:40 PM EDT up reply actions
Excellent!
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Oct 28, 2009 6:18 PM EDT up reply actions
I should also add...
…that part of the reason that contracts Hampton and Zito look terrible in comparison to more recent contracts is that the more recent contracts haven’t had a chance to go bad yet. How can we reasonably assess at this point whether C.C. Sabathia is going to still be worth $23M per in 2015, for example? All it takes is one surgery, and it’s not like he’s a titan of conditioning…
No, the reason the Hampton and Zito contracts look terrible in comparison is they were never as good as Sabathia in the first place. If you look at when Zito left Oakland, he had slipped greatly from his Cy Young season in 2002. Hampton had several good seasons before his big payday, but his decision to go to Coors Field was just moronic and then he had health problems.
Of the free agent pitchers who have hit the market and gotten a big payday, how many can you think of who were “worth it?” And how would you define “worth it?” Pitching effectively till the end of the contract? Right now, I can only think of Mussina.
I think you're engaging...
…in some 20/20 hindsight there, at least as far as Hampton is concerned. Sure, he got hurt, but there was no more reason to think that he would than there is to expect the same from Sabathia or A.J. Burnett. It’s just one of the big risks that’s part and parcel with a 5+year FA commitment.
A better analogy to the potential problem with a Sabathia or A-Rod -type deal might be Todd Helton’s contract. Helton was, in his prime, an indisputably elite-level player, but it’s almost impossible to forecast nine years’ worth of production and health with any reasonable degree of accuracy. Now, after a gradual (and inevitable) decline, he’s going to be a 38-year-old making $23M in 2012. What are the odds that he’ll be “worth” it? And once you know those, what are the odds that A-Rod will still be worth $20M as a 41-year-old in 2017?
Hampton sure had our number this season. And Helton was my second most productive 1st baseman in my fantasy league (Morneau was best for me – until August)
by BlindSquirrel on Oct 26, 2009 8:03 PM EDT up reply actions
I don’t think its 20/20 hindsight to say that a pitcher signing in a hitter’s paradise like Coors Field isn’t going to be as effective, especially when he was moving from Shea Stadium. I’m not saying it was a bad contract because of the injuries, because those types of things are difficult to predict. Look at his numbers when he was healthy in Colorado…they weren’t very good. Hampton was Pavano before Pavano.
Sorry my post wasn’t clearer as far as a player’s worth. I’m referring to worth as in this type of definition: if said team wins a couple of titles or has an extended postseason run for the first four years of the pitcher’s contract with him as a big part of the success…and then he gets hurt and the team bottoms out for the last three years.
So Colorado should never spend on pitchers?
A generic pitcher in a hitter’s park isn’t “less effective” because his raw numbers are worse – he’s still providing the same value that he would over a replacement-level pitcher in the same park.
Now, if you want to argue that Coors had a disproportionately bad effect on Hampton, insofar as he totally lost the feel for his sinker and change due to altitude, that’s another thing… but at the time of the Hampton signing, the question of which types of players were best-suited for Coors was still very much open for debate, so I’m not sure that Colorado would’ve/should’ve known that he’d blow up. Particularly since he had about as much non-pitching value as it’s possible for a pitcher to have – in his first three seasons under the new contract, he won three Silver Slugger awards and a Gold Glove.
I know he’s technically the same pitcher as he would be in a neutral setting, even if the numbers are skewed. Darryl Kile was more of a power pitcher than Hampton (though he was reliant on that huge hook that disappeared in the Coors Field air) and they shipped him out after two years, which was two years BEFORE they signed Hampton in 2001.
I don’t think its a stretch to say that Hampton was more of a finesse guy, and I don’t think its a stretch that those types of pitchers have less margin for error than power pitchers, and that Hampton would have an even tougher time in Colorado than Kile. As for the types of players being suited for that type of field and altitude…come on. They’d been playing in Colorado for 8 years by that point.
They'd been playing there for a while...
…but hadn’t found any combination that worked, and O’Dowd used to break out a new plan pretty much every spring. Look at this, for example. It was written in 2002, after the Hampton signing, and yet O’Dowd’s large-scale plan for the franchise is still clearly in flux.
Hampton’s signing was part of a conscious experiment to see what would happen with a guy with an elite changeup. Kile failed because his breaking ball didn’t get any bite in the thin air, so they wanted a pitch that didn’t rely as heavily on tight spin. As it turned out, the answer wasn’t what they would’ve wanted.
With all of this being said, how much, if any do you think Colorado’s reputation as a homer/hitter’s paradise is deserved? I ask this using Fenway as an example…for years, Fenway was viewed as a hitter’s paradise. Put an average hitter there and he put up above-average numbers. But recently, I read that the numbers no longer support that. Is the same happening to Colorado?
Colorado plays closer to neutral now than it did in the past...
…mostly because newer parks have shifted the league’s midpoint upwards.
With all this talk (mostly complaining) about Cit Field’s large dimensions, it makes me think about pitcher’s parks in general. I don’t know if they will move the fences in, but I don’t think its really such a big deal to have lower-scoring games, especially since a lot of the new parks have played out as launching pads. Call me old-fashioned but I think its a lot of fun watching someone trying to leg out a triple…
By the way...
Sure to generate discussion (actually ridicule is a better word). Since the Buccos are moving towards a trend of picking up and trying to riducle past or busted first rounders, try this one on for size…Mark Prior.
Sure, take a look.
But he hasn’t even picked up a ball since April, due to continued shoulder pain. At this point, the chances of him ever making it back to the majors are very, very small.
It’s always a shame to see a dynamic young arm out of the game by his late 20s. Anyone else remember Nick Neugebauer? He was always a favorite of mine…
Don’t remember the guy, but you have to root for someone with a name like that. I know its a longshot, but he’d cost next to nothing.
Neugebauer was all kinds of fun to watch.
Killer heat, killer breaking ball, killer lack of control.
The patron saint of that breed is, of course, Steve Dalkowski. Click the link if you don’t know him – he’s worth the read.
Holy Crap!
What a great, tragic story.
Free your ass and your mind will follow.
by cocktailsfor2 on Oct 27, 2009 9:12 PM EDT up reply actions
Dalkowski
First time I heard of him was in Bill James’ book about managers. I think he did his best pitching, by far, in the minors under Weaver in the Orioles system. Going back even further, into the 50’s, are two guys I think are very interesting as far as talented guys gone by the wayside: Ron Necciai and Karl Spooner.
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