Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

There is a wonderful new show on MLB the network.

It is called “Clubhouse Confidential” and is hosted by former ESPN Boxing maven Brian Kenny. The purpose of the show is to illustrate baseball from a sabermetric perspective and shine light on under appreciated teams and players. In recent weeks there have been many very interesting shows and I highly recommend it to those who can see it.

Like so much on sports networks, whether we’re talking ESPN or NFL Network or NBA network the majority of the content revolves around the eastern seaboard from Boston to Washington and everywhere in between, with occasional trips to Chicago and Los Angeles. It is tiresome. Similarly I extol and like Ken Burns Baseball series, but if you watch and listen to the folks that gave him money to do the series, lots of money in New York and Boston, lots of Boston and New York baseball in the anthology…duh. Should have been much more about St. Louis and Chicago teams. Rogers Hornsby was virtually neglected. But I digress.

Last night Kenny implored his guest Bob Costas to agree with him about the career of first baseman Keith Hernandez as one that should be enshrined in the Hall Of Fame. Costas demurred saying consideration might be warranted and Kenny went on to talk about Steve Garvey and asserted that Garvey would have taken more walks if he knew it was important. It occurred to me that Big Rude, John Olerud was maybe better than either of them.

I want to examine all three of them to see what the comparison holds.

Let’s just give their basic performance lines, frequently called their slash lines, it goes Avg/Obpct/Slug/OPS or Batting average/on base percentage/slugging percentage/OPS:

Olerud: .295/.400/.465/.863

Hernandez: .296/.384/.436/.821

Garvey: .294/.329/.446/.775

The batting averages are almost identical with Hernandez slightly ahead of Olerud, Heranandez and Garvey. Olerud then wins both the onbag and slugging pieces by significant margins. Garvey’s onbag is notably low and Hernandez did not hit for much power.

Hernandez and Olerud each played seventeen seasons while Garvey played nineteen and wished he played seventeen. Keep those two extra seasons in mind when you look at career totals. Runs/RBIs/Hr:

Olerud: 1139/1230/255

Hernandez: 1124/1071/162

Garvey: 1143/1308/272

This is kind of interesting. Olerud and Hernandez played the same number of years and the Big Quiet guy is better all around. Garvey with two more years wins the totals argument above all three of them. If you subtract his last two years, which you can’t or shouldn’t because he did them, but to do it anyway he falls behind Rude in runs and home runs and rbis. But here is why you don’t do that, in his eighteenth year Garey drove in 81 runs for the Padres. Not great, but doing that for the 2011 Mariners might have been noteworthy.

All of them were gold glove winners, my prejudice would be to Olerud who might have had the best hands of any first baseman I’ve ever seen.

Lastly I looked at the Offensive Wins Above Replacement Player or OWAR. Below is the best in English discussion of this measure.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2011/2/28/2019517/using-trammell-and-reuschel-to-explain-war

So looking at the best seasons for each guy is interesting, I will put OWAR and then OPS:

Olerud:

93 7.7/1.072

97 4.9/.889

98 6.6/.998

01 4.6/.873

02 5.0/.893

Hernandez:

79 5.8/.930

80 5.4/.902

84 5.4/.859

Garvey:

70 -.02/.911

75 4.1/.827

76 4.3/.813

78 4.1/.852

Garvey’s numbers are bizarre. He had a break out year in 70. His line in 95 games: .319/.376/.535/.911 71 runs scored and 87 rbis. -.02 oWAR. Smells bad.

In 75 and 78 he has an identical OWAR in 4.1 while the OPS for 78 is much, much better. Yet in 76 he has the worst offensive season and has the highest OWAR. UZR is also used in the calculation and clearly is a mess.

I put the numbers for Hernandez and Olerud there above and Olerud reaches a higher peak more often and despite the overstating of Hernandez relative performance with OWAR, he was good offensively, but not as good as Olerud. Garvey was productive, very productive. He was not as selective of a hitter as the other two and did not walk much. He was sterling in post season play as was Olerud, less so Hernandez.

At the end of the day Olerud should be in front of both of these guys, while in some respects I like Garvey more than Hernandez and while playing mostly at the same time Garvey was generally thought to be better.

Chris Parmelee of the Minnesota Twins was a first round pick in 2006 and showed up for a nice debut towards the end of last season. In twenty one games he strode onto scene with monster performance, 1.035 OPS composed of an onbag of .443 and a slug of .592. Swings and throws left while playing first base.

Twins are wrapped around the axle with respect to Justin Morneau and Joe Maurer. Morneau has not played a full season since 2009 and is signed through 2013 at a rate of $13.33 million per year, or $27 million left. He is a first baseman, who medically looks as if he should be a full time dh if his recovery is possible.

Mauer is signed at $26.3 million per year until 2018, seven seasons. He signed this enormous deal after posting a monster season in 2009. The team moved to Target Field and he quit hitting home runs both at Target and on the road, although was still a productive hitter and then last year he developed problems with his knees and stories have circulated that he will consider first base as a position he might enjoy playing.

Twins GM Bill Smith was fired and replaced with former GM Terry Ryan. Parmalee has huge upside. Twins I suspect would love to see a return to form of either Mauer and Morneau. It’s complicated.

Brett Lawrie of Toronto burst on the scene with a very impressive half season in the bigs last year as a great hitting, good fielding, high intensity third baseman. Posting gaudy stats of an OPS of .953, composed of an onbag of .373 and a slug of .580, the twenty one year old from British Columbia played with a gusto that old timers love. Drafted in the first round of 2008 by the Brewers he was traded in 2010 to Jays for Shawn Marcum who went 13-7 last year in Brewers playoff run. It is early, but I think folks will view that trade in the Jays favor.

Alejandro De Aza for the White Sox is a 27 year old outfielder from the Dominican Republic, which suggests that he might be 32 or 33 as age is computed elsewise in the World. Before last season he had played three partial seasons in the show, two with Marlins and one with Sox. He is fast and shows plate discipline and posted an OPS of .920, composed of a .400 onbag and a .520 slug via gap power and enough juice to hit a few homeruns. Center fielder.

Brent Lillibridge a local boy from Jackson High in Mill Creek and University of Washington is a 27 year old who has a physically gifted player good enough to play shortstop for the Braves and function as a credible centerfielder and second baseman for the White Sox. He burst on the season last year from offensive obscurity and posted an .845 OPS, composed of a .340 onbag and .505 slug. As Gordon Beckham slides away to ruining his career for lack of effort and adjustment, Lillibridge probably should be looked at as the everyday player at second base. Were I Lillibridge, I’d explore nicely the possibility of requesting a trade as he’s under team control until the 2016 season.

Savador Perez is a 21 year old catcher for the Royals from Venezuela who can play. .834 OPS composed of a .361 onbag and a slug of .473. Teams ran on him a bit at first and he seems to have adjusted. He bears watching.

More to come…

Matt Snyder of CBS Sports wrote an interesting post a couple of weeks ago that looks at what the roster would have been had the Mariners not traded away or released talented players.

http://eye-on-baseball.blogs.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/entry/22297882/33565888

Some more off key notes bouncing around in the ether regarding Fielder and Ms.

Best Sports Story of 2011.

Highlight of this season drilling the cheaters twice!

Go Vikings!

This past week Ken Rosenthal of FoxSports and MLB Network has said this about the Mariners:

1. Seattle is too far away for a good player to play.
2. Good hitters hate Safeco Field.
3. Trade Felix to the Yankees.

Rosenthal is allegedly a journalist. So was Bill Conlin.

But in order, Seattle is the most beautiful and best place to live in the country and has the best park and fans in the country. Ask Edgar.

In 2001 the Mariners scored 922 runs, must have been some hitting going on then.

Along with Jim Bowden, Rosenthal acts as if the Yankees are paying him. The Yankees deal talked about includes Jesus Montero a good hitting, horrible fielding catcher, Ivan Nova a thumber of a pitcher and a triple A pitcher for a 25 year old Cy Young winner.

The thing for Jack to do is wait two months and see if CC Sabathia pitches as bad as he did in August, September and the playoffs and then see what they’d give him for Felix. Then you got a deal. So far what you see offered up is chump change being shilled by a Monkey on a chain.

Texas reportedly bid $51.7 million for the rights to negotiate and sign Darvish, the 6’5″ right hander for the Nippon Ham Fighters.

Darvish who is Japaneses and Iranian heritage is thought to be the best Japanese pitcher right now.

No word if the Mariners bid on him.

So called “Boogey-man” of the NHL.

Through Dave Kindred and The National Sports Journalism Center an enthralling piece from the New York Times is there to read.

http://sportsjournalism.org/sports-media-news/new-york-times-in-depth-multi-media-series-on-hockeys-boogey-man-boogard-exemplary-of-ambitious-enterprise-journalism/

Mr. Boogaard participated in this piece and it is haunting as you think of his Faustian bargain playing out in his short life.

Great read both from Kindred and the article itself. Follow all the links.

When you get a chance to look at an appraisal of something be it a building or a business the appraisal gives you several vantage points to describe value and if the vantage points greatly differ the appraiser tries to reconcile the gap between the two values. The simplest way is to contrast other, similar businesses or buildings that have sold recently. They find five of them and say they sold for $100, $102, $100 and $107. Well you hope that yours compares closer to the last one more than the first one. Then the appraiser tells you what he thinks. That is version one.

Second version especially for commercial buildings and business is to look at the net operating income for recent years, establish a benchmark number and then divide that number by a discount rate and you arrive at the net value. The appropriate discount number is where the art lies in doing this, the higher the discount and the lower the value and vice versa.

The more sophisticated version of number two attempts to value such things as brand and the value of a stadium lease etc.

In the Times this weekend Geoff Baker of the Times revisited the War of the Larsons and trotted out an appraisal done for each of the Larsons and a third version by Forbes. From bottom to top its Forbes $449 million, Mr. Larson $551 million and Mrs. Larson $750 million.

So let’s see what that means. Last Friday the ten year treasury yield was 1.86%. How is that important well we can guess at the Mariners Net Operating Income by figuring out the discount rate and use it against the values. If you think the government will be around in ten years that is a risk free yield. If you don’t go read Ron Paul’s blog as baseball is not worthy of your attention. Let’s add 3.14% to the 1.86% and we get 5% as the discount rate.

So what does that say?

Well if the value is $449 million, couldn’t he have rounded up to $450 million? If Forbes is correct it says $22.45 million net operating income. If he’s right $27.55 million net operating income and if she’s right then it is $37.5 million income.

Baker does not make these calculations and they are very, very rudimentary. But here is his argument presented around this new information:

1. Ms have money to go after Fielder plus others.

2. Says there was paid in capital from owners equal to $212 mm.

3. Says Safeco has generated franchise value.

4. Says he’s written over and over about surplus money before.

5. Team should go over Fielder and more because of what the Appraisals show.

I don’t want to pretend to be a CPA that is specializing in sport’s franchises, but I think he has shown some very interesting information.

Net operating income is not necessarily cash flow. It would be possible to have positive net operating income but negative cash flow. The information is not there to say.

It does not mean that there is a pile of cash in a vault or in a savings account in a bank. It does not mean there is not a pile of cash in a vault or a in a savings account in a bank. That information is not out there in his posts or elsewhere.

Cash flow is the item that would dictate whether or not additional salary can be added. It is not presented in the article/post.

If you can set that aside for now, because it does not allow for any conclusion other than maybe or maybe not there are a couple of things in his post that are clearly on point and worthy of discussion and that perhaps get him to his conclusion, but through a different route than he takes.

No matter which valuation you use Forbes at $449 million or the divorce lawyer’s windfall of $750 million clearly the ownership has made a handsome investment when viewed from the paid in capital to any of these values, if there are buyers.

That they got there on the community’s back is also irrefutable and one wishes that the tools on the stadium commission say something at least about the awful management of the franchise from a baseball perspective.

The argument would be simple. The franchise would have way more value if you had good teams, which means accumulating and paying for baseball talent instead of steady diet of has beens and ham and eggers. If you had a good team you’d put three million people back in the seats and the net operating income would go up and the valuation would shoot through the moon. Wake up bozos.

If they do sign Prince and I’m not advocating that or equivocating it does not diminish the net import of what Baker wants them to do. You build franchise value by getting a bunch of good to great players, especially in the middle of the field. If you do that it is better than signing first basemen that can hit to enormous contracts.

Going in to this free agent panorama middle people available featured Jose Reyes and with his signing perhaps Hanley Ramirez via trade now, Alex Gonzalez, Rafael Furcal, Grady Sizemore and Carlos Beltran, not catchers and if you looke at Reyes, Sizemore and Beltran they’re damaged goods with a injury risk attached to them.

The emotions in this market suggest that the folks want Prince. These owners have SPENT money, just not on good players, always bargain bin, previously hurt guys.

At the end of the day if the owners can be viewed as stewards of the franchise then an investment in a good or great free agent is warranted and they will be rewarded financially. Is Prince a great free agent? If you could get the last six years from him for the next six years, for sure.

http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story/_/id/7359706/dale-sveum-chicago-cubs-interest-prince-fielder-media-talk

Above is a link to an article in ESPN about the Cubs and Prince Fielder. Here is what Cub’s manager Dale Sveum has to say about the whole issue of Prince Fielder and the Cubs:

“Manager Dale Sveum said talk of the Chicago Cubs’ pursuit of free agent slugger Prince Fielder has been overblown.

“‘At this point it’s a lot of media talk,” Sveum said Friday when he officially announced his first coaching staff as Cubs manager. “We haven’t had any talks with Prince. I haven’t had any conversations. Again it’s a lot of media talk.”

However, the Cubs remain involved in conversations with Fielder’s agent Scott Boras, a source familiar with the situation told ESPNChicago.com.’”

So they have one guy who comes out and says nothing is going on. On the record. Then he says, we have another guy described as “familiar with the situation”…that would mean not with the Cubs. Who else is familiar with the situation? Fielder? Scott Boras? I doubt Sveum was parsing his words, as this writer implies.

It looks to me like Scott Boras bought Crasnick a bottle of Old Overholt and asked him to say the Cubs are pursuing Prince.

Why would Boras do that? It makes the remaining teams in the Fielder derby, think a heavyweight buyer is coming into the pasture after Fielder. Boras can use that to bid up the deal for his client.

Why would Crasnick do that? Why not? Here he is with the decision point, am I better off with a bottle of Old Overholt or without? As most sportswriters will tell you, with, certainly.

With Rosenthal’s diatribe about Seattle the other day, Boras has probably depleted the inventory of Old Overholt in all of America.

Does this mean the Ms are hot and heavy after Fielder? Or for that matter, were they heavy bidders on Darvish?

The Ms executive management lives to sell tickets and other merchandise. If none of this is true in terms of trying to land either player, when they don’t land the player, the PR backlash will be large. It will hardly sell tickets, in fact quite the opposite. While Darvish would be potentially good or even great, he’s enough of an uncertainty that his effect on pre-season tickets might be nebulous. If they were to sign Fielder to a deal, it would be the first tier one guy they had ever signed. Big for tickets. REAL big. It would be against form.

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/story/16483475/indians-sign-free-agents-lopez-pie-to-minorleague-deals

CBS sports report. Fourth outfielder for next year.

Given the injury riddled recent years for Grady Sizemore this could result in a lot more playing time for Cunningham than he has had so far at the top of the heap.