Dodgers Sign 2015’s Other Massive Breakout
Because of who they are, and because of their extensive resources, the Dodgers have long been linked to Bryce Harper. When Harper’s market didn’t develop quite as expected, the Dodgers seemed a more likely fit. When they cleared some money by means of a large December trade with the Reds, the Dodgers seemed all the more likely a fit. Harper’s market at the moment isn’t entirely clear. We know the Phillies are in there. We don’t know who else is in there, if anyone. The Los Angeles connection has been increasingly easy to draw.
But now, it would seem the Dodgers have officially gone in another direction. Harper was maybe baseball’s best player in 2015, and while he’s been good since then, that season set the expectations awfully high. In a sense, Harper’s been a minor disappointment. Much of the same could be said of A.J. Pollock, who broke out to become a top-ten player in 2015. He hasn’t been quite the same player since. But he is now the newest player on the Dodgers. He’s getting, technically, a $60-million guarantee, spread over five years.
Pollock doesn’t completely close the door on Harper, in theory. The Dodgers could make it work if they wanted. We know they’re sufficiently creative. Yet it looks like the Dodgers are now focused on trying to add J.T. Realmuto. I wouldn’t say their Harper odds have improved. It’s Pollock who’s the man of the hour.
The structure of the contract hasn’t been fully made public, but Pollock will earn $55 million over the next four years. He can opt out after the third year, if he wants. And then there’s a fifth-year player option, worth $10 million. It also comes with a $5-million buyout, meaning Pollock would only pick it up if he doesn’t think he could earn at least $5 million back on the open market. I have no idea what the market will look like that far down the road — maybe there won’t be a market at all! — but the main function of the fifth year is to slightly lower Pollock’s average salary, for tax purposes. If the Dodgers just paid him $55 million over four years, the annual hit would be $13.75 million. At $60 million over five years, the hit drops to $12 million. It’s not much of a difference, but you figure the Dodgers will continue to run high payrolls, so every dollar matters if they’re going to obsess over not clearing the competitive-balance-tax threshold. It doesn’t seem like they should need to obsess over that, but I’m just a guy in an apartment.
Because Pollock declined the Diamondbacks’ qualifying offer, the Dodgers are also giving up more beyond just the salary. For one thing, they’ll be docked half a million dollars the next time around in international bonus money. And there is also a draft-pick penalty. I thought this would cost the Dodgers their second-highest draft pick, which is currently slotted in at No. 31, but that pick is compensation for not signing J.T. Ginn last year, and I’m given to understand those kinds of compensation picks are also protected. Assuming that’s true, the Dodgers are actually out the No. 64 overall pick instead. In terms of valuation, the difference between pick 31 and pick 64 is considered to be millions of dollars.
As for Pollock, and how he fits in LA — he’s 31 years old, and he’s a center fielder who bats from the right side. That was prioritized by the Dodgers, who felt they profiled to be too weak against southpaws. I don’t have a clear understanding of exactly how important it really is to be balanced, but it’s a first-world concern, and the Dodgers are a first-world ballclub. With Pollock handling center, that frees up Cody Bellinger to move around, spending time in the outfield corners. That’s bad news for at least one of Joc Pederson and Alex Verdugo, to say nothing of Andrew Toles. Pederson has been the subject of recent trade rumors, and it does look as if something has to give.
To Pederson’s credit, he’s developed into a plus hitter, and he’s improved his ability to make contact. Yet, compared to Pollock, he’s the inferior defender by a large margin, and he also has to be platooned, given his vulnerability against lefties. In part because of that, Pederson has struggled in higher-leverage plate appearances, so Pollock looks like more of a true regular. Pederson could now be expendable, in a move that would bring back something else. The Dodgers are forever going to churn.
It’s interesting to look at 2018 Pollock vs. breakout 2015 Pollock. Not *that* much has changed, from what we can see. He is, obviously, older, and therefore closer to the end of his career. His sprint speed has dropped a little bit. His exit velocity hasn’t fallen. He’s traded some contact for more balls in the air. Much of the same star skillset remains intact. The biggest problem for Pollock has been staying on the field. He’s averaged 79 games over the past three years, and fans loathe a player perceived as injury-prone.
By the results, absolutely, Pollock has been too injury-prone. That’s one of the ways in which this contract could go off the rails. But if you look at what’s actually happened — in 2016, Pollock missed almost the whole year after fracturing his elbow while sliding. In 2017, he strained his groin, and that might not be a fluke. But then in 2018, he fractured his thumb while diving. If you go back to 2014, pre-breakout, he fractured his hand getting hit by a pitch. In 2010, he missed almost the whole year because of a fractured elbow sustained on a dive. The word “fracture” comes up an awful lot in Pollock’s history, and it’s caused him to spend a lot of time on the sidelines. But Pollock hasn’t been going on the DL with constant strains and tears. It doesn’t seem like he’s got anything chronic. He might’ve just gotten unlucky. He’s already passed his physical with the Dodgers, so they’ve determined he’s worth the investment. I’ll take this injury record over a guy with recurring hamstring issues.
If Pollock can indeed stay healthy, there’s every reason to believe he’s still a comfortably above-average player. He won’t remain a comfortably above-average player forever, but he still moves well and swings well, and the Dodgers have their eyes on what’s right in front of them. They remain versatile in terms of what they can do with their lineup and defense, and now they have some additional excess, which could facilitate a trade for a major-league player, or for prospects. The Dodgers now might not be better than they were before the trade with the Reds, but they have gained in prospects, and unlike Yasiel Puig, Pollock isn’t going into his contract year. This is presumably one of those moves that will be best understood when it’s viewed within the overall offseason context.
The Dodgers could make Bryce Harper happen if they wanted. Even independent of Harper, it’s still unclear to me why staying under the tax threshold is so important for a team with so much steady revenue. But if the Dodgers are going to behave in this way, Pollock is a useful get, provided you think his injuries have been more fluky than chronic. He’s still a quality player when he’s able to play, and now the Dodgers have more expendable chips. It doesn’t at all feel that their offseason’s over.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
Now reportedly 4 years 55 million, Jeff.
Edit: Looks like you included this info in the second paragraph. Sorry for being a narc.
– Is this true? “Pollock would only pick it up if he doesn’t think he could earn at least $5 million back on the open market.” I may well be thinking about it wrong, but if Pollock thought he was worth 1x$8, wouldn’t he pick up that option? The two scenarios would be (a) LAD cuts him, he gets the $5M, and then gets the $8 or (b) LAD appreciates that they are only paying an *incremental* $5 for $8M of value and thus keep him.
Also – Is this true? “It’s interesting to look at 2018 Pollock vs. breakout 2015 Pollock. Not *that* much has changed, from what we can see.”.
2014-2015 Pollock was a 130+ wrc guy. And worth ~17 defensive runs over a season and a half. 2017-2018 Pollock was a 105+ wrc guy. And worth about 3 defensive runs over a similar amount of playing time. (Note: I get that defensive stats are noisy. And that I may even be interpreting them wrong). But I think there has been a change in the output
Also – forecast was for 64/4. His absolute worst-case downside scenario if everything falls apart is 60/4. That seems … about in-line to me? Particularly when you add in the value of a player opt-out after year 3 if things go well.
Also – thanks for the consistent alacrity in turning the transaction reports around. They’re a pleasure.
He gets 10 million if he picks up the option and 5 if he does not. It is a player option from what it sounds like so he controls if he is there for the fifth year or not.
So if he does not pick up the option and gets a one year, 5.1 million contract on the open market, than is a total of 10.1 million dollars.
if he does pick up the option he is paid a total of 10 million dollars. I don’t know why LA would cut him, they are stuck paying him anyways. I would guess the scenario where they do is where Pollock isn’t worth his roster spot, in which case he isn’t making five million in FA anyways.
So yeah, if he can get more than five million dollars financially he would be better off declining the option.
Player option, so his choices are:
– take the $10M and play for the Dodgers
– take the $5M and become a FA and go elsewhere (though I suppose he could still sign with the Dodgers)
Thanks for the responses. I read the option differently.
per MLBTR:
“There is also a player option for a fifth season that pays Pollock $10MM in 2023, with a $5MM buyout.”
IE: Pollock has the initial option (A) in for $10M or (B) walk and take his chances
then
if (A), Dodgers have the choice to either to pay him $10 to play or (B) exercise their buyout and pay him $5 to go away.
(I still don’t know which interpretation is right, honestly. Happy to admit if I am wrong, but from the term ‘buyout’ I still infer club-side discretion/optionality.)
Hmmm, now I’m not so sure. Maybe you’re right. I checked a couple sources and none were that specific.
The more I think about it, the more I believe I have it right.
As laid out by Jeff/others above, it would functionally be something 14×3, a player option at 1×18, a player option at 1×5.
I suppose that’s possible. But it seems awfully unlikely, even appreciating the Dodgers’ desire to lower AAVs/stretch this deal out.
I think the Dodgers’ maximum obligation is $60M, not $65.
I look forward to someone clarifying in the days ahead.
And here’s the clarification: I was wrong (ish).
It IS Pollock’s option – but it’s conditional on playing time.
I’m about 99.7% sure you are incorrect (and Anon is correct), I’ve followed the MLB for a while and never heard of a multi step player option. MLBTR appears to concur as shown in the Nunez section here: https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2018/09/mlb-opt-out-clause-decisions-clayton-kershaw-dodgers.html
Having to give up the #64 draft pick is a lot better than losing #31.
Assuming I understand this correctly, since Pollock signed for over $50M, the DBacks get a Compensation pick before Competitive Balance Round A, right? Dbacks are now looking at picks 16, 26, 33, 34, 56, 75 and 78 in this year’s draft (pending what happens with Keuchel, Harper and Kimbrel, who all turned down the QO).
As a DBacks fan, I’d rather have Pollock, Corbin and Goldschmidt (each of who brought back picks), but if you’re going to re-build, that’s not a bad start.
That’s likely a long-term rebuild.
7 picks in the first 78 huge. It will change the whole direction of the franchise and you almost never say that for an MLB draft.
The same thing was said about the Rays 2011 draft, and only Blake Snell panned out. He did just win a Cy, but I don’t know if one good pitcher transforms a franchise. The draft is just such a crapshoot beyond the first 10 picks.
Getting a Cy Young winner like Snell makes any draft year a win.
Considering how good the Dodgers are right now, you would hope it doesn’t change the direction.
the absolute key in this is can Pollock stay healthy?
And with Verdugo, will he now be a trade chip helping to get Realmuto?
It sounds like they are more actively looking to move Pederson, but can’t say that Verdugo (and others) for Realmuto is off the table at this stage. Another shoe will drop here.
If they can trade Verdugo as the centerpiece for Realmuto, they should do that yesterday. Lux, Ruiz, Smith, May…those guys are going to be good and I’d have more reluctance over them.
I don’t think they can do that though.
If you believe reports, didn’t the Nats offer Victor Robles, and the Marlins countered asking for Robles AND Kieboom? And the Braves something like Soroka and Riley, and that wasn’t enough either?
I get that they’re in the same division, so maybe that changes the return necessary a tick or two, but those would seem to be much stronger offers / counter offers than one centering around Verdugo. My guess is he’d have to be the second piece in order to pull it off at this point.
Verdugo+Ruiz or Barnes seem like the likely options if there were a deal to happen.
Still don’t think Verdugo + Barnes is close. It will need to be Ruiz, for starters, with Verdugo or someone else of that ilk as a secondary piece. Whether or not you agree with the asking price, or if it will need to drop in order to get a deal done, are other questions. But that seems to be what the Marlins would need at this point.
Barnes? No.
I agree but then again we are talking about the Marlins.
I truly hope the Marlins land on their face when this Realmuto sweepstakes is over. I get that they should be requiring team’s top-prospects, but Miami is being kind of ridiculous (if the reports are correct).
JTR has two seasons of cheapness left, and then he is gone. If he continues to play like he has for the past couple of years, he will be a catcher that can run, hit for contact and hit for power. Their is literally no other like him at the moment (if he stays healthy), so he will want a king’s ransom when he’s a free agent.
Trade Peterson, not Verdugo!
Obviously the Dodgers would prefer that. But you have to think on the Marlins side, who they would demand. It’d be Verdugo obviously.
What about Bellinger and Smith for Realmuto?
I think Pederson turns into the trade chip for LA. Him requiring a platoon-mate probably gives Verdugo the leg up, if the LA is indeed all-in on the kid.
Not about what the Dodgers prefer. The Marlins have made it clear, they’re sticking to their guns. Not saying Pederson sucks, but clearly Verdugo is preferable for a rebuilding team
also the split between halves is interesting from last year
1st half he had a wRC+ of 141
2nd half it was only 84
before you say it’s because of the wrist- his July wRC+ was 122. August and September it was only 69.
before you say the wrist did nothing, his July fastball rate was 25 percentage points higher than May, and 15+ percentage points higher than August or September. Even injured, he could succeed on the fastballs.
Don’t think this was mentioned, but Pollock actually hit the ball harder last year than any point in his career. Top 20 in hard hit % and top 10 lowest soft hit% among batters with 450 PA. Definitely seems a sub .300 Babip is a bit unfortunate for a guy that had a decent line drive rate, good speed, and not a ton of pop ups. If he can keep hitting the ball like last year it’s not hard to imagine a significant increase in his BABIP which could easily make him a 4-5 player as opposed to a 3 win player over a full season
so looked at that in August and September.
August he had a hard hit % of 53.0%. So yes a lot of bad luck…..
but then in September, his hard hit% fell all the way down to 34.8%
Of course the absolute key is for him to stay healthy. Acuna and Soto had about 30 mroe PA’s than Pollock did, and their WAR was only 3.7(or 1.2 more than he had).
I get the rhetoric surrounding injuries
Chronic, recurring injuries to the same body part / muscle = bad
One-time fractures = fluky
That said, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that AJ Pollock is injury prone. He’s broken both elbows. In separate incidents. He’s broken his thumb. And his hand. Again, separate incidents.
Four flukes does not equal fluky. It’s just plain clumsy.
The 2014 broken hand was the result of a HBP. I’m okay chalking that up as a fluke. The broken elbows (Again: ELBOWS!) and thumb were, to a degree, self inflicted and due to his own lack of coordination. I don’t mean to impugn the motor skills of a professional athlete, but he doesn’t exactly protect himself very well out there out there.
He’s the anti-Buzz Lightyear. He DOES NOT “fall in style”.
If he continues to play the way he does, I think we have enough historical data to say that he is likelier than others to be injured. Or he could change the way he plays. Run less. Be more timid defensively. How much value does he lose if that’s the case though? Legitimate question..
Your last question is an interesting one; in the same way as in Tennis, if you are getting all your first serves in, you aren’t serving hard enough. There must be an ideal injury risk/effort curve. I suspect Mike Trout is at the peak, as usual with one several-month outage due to thumb hyperextension.
Also, the 2018 wrist injury was sustained as he attempted to make a diving catch.
So, yeah, maybe karma just hates this guy. Either that or he’s a klutz.
It’s also possible that he just has genetically weak bones.
So he has a superhero mind?
I think it means that Nick Markakis is unbreakable.
Do the (few) other teams evaluating which teams will be competitors for Harper see this as reducing the probability that the Dodgers will make a high bid for him? Based on comments on the crowdsourced Harper/Machado salary projection, at least some people thought that the Dodgers were still a potential landing spot. Mr. Sullivan brings it up too.
It only takes two to make a market, but is there any way that the Dodgers signing Pollock hasn’t reduced Harper’s eventual contract amount by at least making it seem like another team has opted out? Currently, the Phillies seem like they are the only remaining team to have publicly said that they are interested in Harper.
So in general, I hate this kind of a move for big-money teams–it’s the kind of move a team makes when they get sticker shock about adding a huge contract, so they think, “we’ll pay 1/4th as much to add a player who is half as good.” The problem is that these mid-level FA deals–while limiting the downside–are far more likely to be a total zero because the player doesn’t have as far to fall as the normal aging process takes hold. This is particularly relevant since Pollock is a 3-win player over 600 PAs just by being a slightly-above-league-average hitter and slightly-below-average-defensive-center-fielder, but as has been mentioned in the comments, this guy tends to break bones with alarming frequency. Limiting the downside is good, but the chances of getting a zero here are a lot higher than if you sign Bryce Harper. There’s something to be said for trying to put the best field on the team instead of trying to look smart.
Okay, now that that’s out of the way…there’s good and there’s bad with this deal, and a lot of depends on what you think of Pollock’s and Bellinger’s center field defense. Pollock’s offense is pretty stable at this point, and it will likely decline eventually, but next season he’s likely the same guy he was the last couple of years: A little pop, not-too-embarrassing OBP, good baserunning. He’s probably not ever going back to the guy who ran .340 BABIPs. But his defense has also declined a bit since his all-star peak. Bellinger grades out similarly in a more limited sample size. You can say that this gets Bellinger out of center field, but there’s not a ton of evidence right now that Pollock is any better than him out there. You can think that maybe with better positioning Pollock would get better, but Bellinger would also potentially get better with more reps. Will Bellinger’s defense (or Pollock’s for that matter) take a big step forward in a corner? I don’t know.
There’s also the small issue that by trading Puig and installing Pollock in the outfield, they’re likely trading offense for defense. We can debate whether Puig’s reverse platoon splits are going to hold up forever (and if they didn’t, he’d be an everyday player mashing everyone most likely), but there’s no advantage to platooning Pollock (his career platoon splits are basically nonexistent). LA got tons of value out of platooning guys last year by letting players mash based on handedness, and this is definitely a step away from that. (It does also mean you have to carry one fewer person on the active roster, though).
In the end, trading Puig and signing Pollock doesn’t save any money, and it probably doesn’t make the team better in a bottom-line way unless Pollock plays a full season. There is some question about whether the Dodgers got those prospects for Puig or Wood; I’m inclined to think Wood, and that Puig was a salary dump. If that’s true, it looks like the Dodgers are making a lot of moves without any real effect on the balance sheet or win column.
ZIPS has Pollock at 2.6 WAR in 2019. As I’m sure you know, a plain 2 WAR player is considered to be of starter quality. The Dodgers got a useful player who projects to be above-average at a premium position for a reasonable amount of money. That’s not to be sneezed at.
Agree 100% with your last sentence but they are subtracting Puigs attitude which I think was a big deal for everyone in the front office and probably even Roberts – Puig and Kemp were NEVER going to dawn a dodger uniform again the day the World series ended last year
Darn. They were never going to darn a Dodger uniform.
It’s “don” and you darn well know it.
Excellent writeup. If this is who we get instead of Harper, I’m gonna be mad
So… if Pollock is worth (e.g.) $9M on the market in the fifth year, he can decline the $10M option (even though it is more than he would earn on the open market) and take the $5 buyout… and then sign with another team for $9M. He would be earning $14M overall.
DBA455’s comment up top has a different interpretation that seems more correct to me. Buy out’s are team options at a price. Pollock can’t choose the buyout, just the $10M to stay, and after that the Dodgers can buy him out for $5m.
A few thoughts:
– Quite a few teams are treating the luxury tax threshold as a fairly hard salary cap.
– Quite a few teams seem to be actively concerned about reducing/minimizing debt load. (San Diego, Miami, Cubs, Mets, and yes, Dodgers…)
– Outside the sports world, cable subscriptions have been declining and negotiations for carriage fees have gotten pretty heated.
– Disney is buying Fox assets but as a condition of the sale they have to sell the Fox regional sports networks. There have been bidders but they aren’t betting the farm. The Yankees are looking to buy the rest of YES but not alone. Rather with partners.
Might teams’ reluctance to spend “stupid ” money on free agents have something to do with concerns over existing debt and/or concerns that the RSN money might not arrive?
MLB has been awash with incoming money the future might not be as rosy and they would know before the rest of the world.
Just wondering…
That’s entirely possible. Or it could be a market adjustment based on increased analytical knowledge about player value.
The Nationals have already more than made up the WAR they lost when Harper turned them down by spending less money than Harper would have cost them on various other players. That may well be a new market efficiency: get the equivalent of Harper’s 4.6 projected WAR ( or whoever’s) for less elsewhere.
Few thoughts to add to yours…
By my math, the Homer Bailey trade cleared about $13.5mm of space under the CBT line, almost an exact fit for a Pollock-sized contract to slide in. Could be coincidence, but it seems to me the Dodgers never planned on awarding a Harper-type deal to anyone.
Regarding injuries, this move reminds me of the Red Sox signing Shane Victorino for his age 32 through 34 seasons. It made them look brilliant in 2013 when he played like an All-Star, but it hurt them considerably when he was unable to play for large stretches of the following two.
Finally, on the financials, I believe the Guggenheim Group made something of a pledge to investors that they would avoid paying the luxury tax. Now that their revenue is stable (that new 10 year/$400m local television contract), it makes more sense to cut costs, as it won’t hurt their bottom line to put out an inferior product. The group that owns the Dodgers bought into the cartel as an investment, not a vanity purchase, and the objective isn’t to win, but to maximize rents.
Fair to the fans? Not really, but the league collectively hasn’t done a particularly good job at selecting ownership groups that care about the sport as much as their bottom line.
Which is why corporate ownership should be restricted to the signs in the outfield.
I don’t know that the league’s goal is finding owners that care about the sport as much as revenue.
Obviously, I love baseball, but I am also 100% okay with these teams making money and maximizing their operational efficiency. While I see issues with the CBA which likely will be addressed, I also don’t have any problem with how the FA market is shifting based on the present construct.
That said, I’m not naive that MLB’s priorities, and all professional sports for that matter, have shifted away from maintaining the sport’s integrity and toward profit maximization, and that’s unfortunate, but it’s not going to change.
My hope is that the realization will be that maintaining that integrity is in the best interest of maximizing profits, and then we all win.
To give this much money and for 5 years to an always injured 31 year old? Wishful thinking.
Dodgers are deep, have a good farm, and the contract will have insurance.
Risk is low…
Occurs to me, do insurance premiums add in like salary for luxury tax calculations? If they don’t, you can bring in a risky guy on low AAV and insure away the risk to you. It’s not magic because you can’t turn around and spend the payout on salary without that getting counted, but you can pocket some money.
Insurance on players pays out like half the loss, though, not ~100% as is sometimes assumed.
Pollack has averaged ~50% games played the last three years.
Works out.
What happens to Chris Taylor’s role?
My guess is that Chris Taylor will be in LF once the Dodgers trade Pederson.
He’ll play all over the outfield and in the middle of the infield still, I’m guessing.
Super-Util. He could be the regular 2B, with Muncy at 1B. Or they could shift Muncy to 2B and have Bellinger play 1B. He’s Pollock and Seager insurance. Or he could play the corner OF.
He’s pretty valuable at utility
Maybe Seager’s arm isn’t healthy enough for him to start the season, so Taylor plays the first 30 or so games at SS? I wouldn’t be surprised.
Just for fun, I’m curious to see what the best projected bench is this season (the ~4 guys not expected to be in the starting lineup). I’d guess Barnes/Martin, Hernandez, Toles and Pederson is right up there.
That’s a decent bench for sure.
Good move by the Dodgers! They fill two needs (CF and RHB), don’t go over the cap, and get a good, well-liked player without breaking the bank. Now if they can just figure out a way get Realmuto then there would be no holes in their lineup.
If they get him the big question this year for the Dodgers would be lineup wise Seager and how he retuns from injury.
I guess I’m unimpressed since Pederson projects (Steamer) for 2.5WAR and Pollock for 2.6WAR… Pay $10M-ish for the 0.1WAR?
So there’s some logic to it. The Dodgers have, for a long time, been very heavy on left-handed everyday bats. They’ve been trying to fix this weakness on the cheap for a while now. First it was by swapping McCarthy and Puig for Ryan Braun (deal fell apart over the prospects involved); then it was Dozier (deal fell apart over the prospects involved); then it was Logan Forsythe (deal didn’t work out because Forsythe isn’t actually a big bat). It wasn’t until they got Machado (with one of their everyday lefties being injured) and lucked into Kemp being a good hitter for half the year that they really got to balance the lineup.
AJ Pollock is their latest attempt to do this. This is actually one of their more expensive gambits to fix this problem, and the guy isn’t exactly a feared hitter, but you can see the logic.
I understand that they possess some form of logic but 2.5WAR from LH is the same as 2.5WAR from RH.
It depends who is soaking up the innings when Pederson needs to sit vs. Pollock is hurt. Both Pederson and Pollock are unlikely to give more than 450 PAs, but for different reasons. Finding someone who complements Pollock means something different than finding someone who complements Pederson, and there are scenarios where you get more production out of the Pollock/backup combination as you do out of the Pederson/platoon partner combination, and vice-versa.
None of this, BTW, undermines your main point. This is a lot of work to arrive at a similar level of production. And if they do that, then they are back to a net negative in outfield offensive production, since they jettisoned Puig and his approximately-2-win value in right field. They could sign Brandon Guyer and theoretically wind up with better production, or sign Jake Smolinski had get comparable production to signing Pollock.
Not quite the way to look at it though. I doubt Pollock is taking the ABs Joc would’ve had.
2.5 WAR from Pederson comes during certain games (against RHPs). He is providing 0 WAR during games facing LHPs. Who is going to play OF in those games? Some 0 WAR AAA guy? Pederson at 0 WAR?
With Puig and Kemp gone, LAD had Taylor, Hernandez, and Bellinger as their likely OF vs LHPs, except that one of those two RHBs is going to be needed at 2B most likely. So they need one more OF bat vs LHPs. In steps Pollock. Maybe he will be used more as a platoon guy making starts against LHPs and pinch hitting and being a late inning defensive sub in games where opponent starter is RHP. That’d be somewhat of a derivation of the role Kemp played in 2018 for $10M instead of the $20M+ or whatever it was that Kemp made last year. So maybe LAD end up with 2.5 WAR from Joc plus 1.5 WAR from Pollock.
Or, maybe Pollock will be used as an everyday OF, allowing them to trade one of their LHB OFs as part of a package for Realmuto. Then the question becomes is Pollock + Realmuto more valuable than whichever OF they trade away? Probably, don’t you think?
According to recent reports, looks like Pollock gets a guaranteed $60MM over four years (if Pollock doesn’t exercise the opt-opt or the player option and the Dodgers exercise the 5th year buyout). Pollock gets additional value via a third-year opt-out based on being healthy (i.e., meeting a PA threshold).
Yet another FA deal right in line with the estimates by Kiley and fans in the pre-season fangraphs article, and further evidence of no significant impact in FA prices from a delayed market.
Also, why write this section below (and others like it)? It’s oddly pejorative.
“It’s not much of a difference, but you figure the Dodgers will continue to run high payrolls, so every dollar matters if they’re going to obsess over not clearing the competitive-balance-tax threshold. It doesn’t seem like they should need to obsess over that, but I’m just a guy in an apartment.”
Why would it be “obsessive” for a business to structure a fairly simply financial contract (player contracts are pretty simple financial deals, no matter how many opt outs ) to save hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars? It’s obviously not the difference between Pollock signing or not, because he still signed. So why wouldn’t the Dodgers structure the deal to save money in the normal course of business? Why make it so that very normal things that normal businesses do should be seen in a bad light.
Also, individual teams just aren’t that big as far as businesses go. If you live in a big city, there are lots of local corporations that take in similar amounts of revenues as MLB teams do, and it probably never occurs to most people that they exist, or that those other medium-sized businesses make so much money/profit that they should throw it around willy nilly. What is the basis for the idea that the Dodgers shouldn’t care about $2 million here and $2 million there in payroll, when it’s ~1% of player costs?
I get it that you’re not a business/finance writer and you probably don’t have a bunch of experience in structuring financial transactions or running medium-sized businesses (hence the guy in the apartment language). That’s all fine/good. But in the absence of that expertise, why have such negative opinions about these things?
A sports team is not the same as another local corporation with a similar revenue in many, many ways.
Agreed. And that point is relevant in lots of contexts, though it doesn’t have anything to do with the comment you responded to.
Not going to say you’re wrong, but I’d say most of us are here because we are fans of the game, not because we’re fans of the Guggenheim Group.
With that in mind, it’s hard for me to see why anyone would approve of increasing profits at the expense of the on-field product unless they’re a minority owner.
Don’t think you read the context for my comment, because it does not suggest approval of increasing profits at the expense of the on-field product. I even addressed that very point and why it wasn’t relevant to my comment (or Jeff’s comment in the article that I was pointing out) when I said “It’s obviously not the difference between Pollock signing or not, because he still signed.” The talent on the field is the same; Jeff is only commenting about how the Dodgers structured the deal to save them money versus not being “obsessive” about it (which again, is weirdly pejorative for the Dodgers doing something any team or business should do).
And moreover, saved money for the Dodgers is available to be put for other competitive uses.
“Why make it so that very normal things that normal businesses do should be seen in a bad light.”
Welcome to FanGraphs, where owners are devils, players are saints, where Scott Boras and his fellow agents are angels, where normal business practices are considered to be obscene, where extortionate unions are somehow seen as being benevolent, and where team owners are somehow oppressing the players whom they pay an average salary of $4 million a year. It’s a small child’s view of the world. Hardly anyone – it seems like only there’s only about three of us – actually understand how corporations work and how businesses routinely operate. The idea of owners making a profit as a return on their investments or from their business operations actually OFFENDS some of these people; they can’t understand why the players just don’t get all of the money.
To paraphrase an ex-Cold Warrior joke, Communism has finally been defeated worldwide—with the exceptions of Cuba, the Democratic Party, university English departments, and FanGraphs.
Part of my point in criticizing some of these articles (not usually Jeff’s, but others’) is that they spout off a lot of high-level “labor” vs “capital” narratives, but they actually don’t seem to understand the underlying economic and social welfare bases for that paradigm, so the articles end up unknowingly saying a lot of things that are at odds with it.
Thomservo took a lot of abuse here, but I think it’s clear that most who railed against him didn’t even understand his main criticism. He wasn’t taking the owners’ side per se, he was pointing out that the high-powered agents’ talking points (which are often just reflexively repeated by writers without skepticism) don’t actually serve the needs of minor league or minimum-salaried players. The focus on whether Eric Hosmer gets $175MM or $140MM or whether Machado gets $300MM or $200MM completely misses the point. Even if it’s true that owners are engaging in excess “profit-taking” that is bad for baseball (which is uncritically assumed by many in the absence of much evidence), the obvious labor-based answer to the alleged problem that the MLBPA isn’t getting their fair share is raising the minimum salary.
And any argument that it’s some kind of problem for baseball or baseball players that Machado isn’t being paid $350MM over 10years (and, say, only gets $250MM over 10 years) just shows the writer is a mouthpiece for other interests, but doesn’t really understand the actual virtue that s/he is trying to signal.
As someone who sometimes agrees with ThomServo, I think a lot of the frustrations with him was were around how aggressive he was. When you accuse people of being a mouthpiece for Scott Boras or ESPN or whoever, that’s not contributing all that much to constructive conversation.
Thomservo did go off into some weird directions as far as conspiracies with ESPN, et al.
Me thinks Pederson heads to Cleveland unless they also add Verdugo for Kluber or other dude
Jeff,
To quote you, “I’m just a guy in an apartment.” A great chuckle. You are so much more to us.
Thanks for all the insightful research and articles, plus an occasional chuckle.
It seems like the Dodgers’ goal is to be just good enough to maintain revenues, and adding Harper and his 3 extra wins or whatever wouldn’t matter much to increasing revenues. With more revenue sources not being directly tied to Wins, we may see more large market teams trying to get close to the maximum revenues from their markets but not go all out to build the very best team possible. It also may explain why the Yankees aren’t that excited about winning an auction for Machado. Of course they both may be bluffing and we could see Harper to LAD for 12/$400M and Machado to NYY for the same amount. On a pure baseball front, I think a 31 year old injury prone OF who gets much of his value from defense isn’t worth a 4+ year deal, but whatever.
Also, the Dodgers already HAVE the highest projected win total in the NL, the highest WS odds in the NL, and the highest attendance in the league every year – they’re “settling” for being the best team in the league!
There’s no pressure to push past that point, because there’s very few teams competitive with them and almost none of them are doing anything (and the ones who are aren’t in their division and are perceived as being substantially worse teams, IE MIL and WAS).
Folks bagging on the Dodgers for not doing everything they can to win probably need to reckon with the fact that, both prior to and after this signing, the Dodgers are the favorites and best team in the National League (again) and that their division looks substantially worse than last year.
Which is to say that, for the Dodgers, the main benefit of adding players is the playoffs. They’re going to be projected to win 95 games and be the best team in the NL again going into the season and will likely start the year as 80%+ favorites to win their division for a 7th consecutive season.
As a Dodger fan, I’d prefer they made a bigger, splashier move, because I’d like to see them be as gooda s possible (win 105 games! be the favorite in the WS if you get there! etc), but I think its hard to argue that there’s a significant marginal advantage to doing that right now. Position players simply don’t add as much value in a postseason series as pitchers who can be leveraged, and what kind of vulnerabilities the team will have can’t be anticipated now the way they can be dealt with at the trade deadline (see Corey Seager’s injury and the Machado deal just last year).
That is to say that if you can win your division, comfortably, and be the #1 seed in your league in the playoffs without breaking the competitive balance tax, why break the competitive balance tax?
This is the ‘other shoe’ of noncompetitive teams that people have been talking about for a while – there’s just no pressure on some of these teams (Dodgers, Indians in particular) because there’s no real challenger in their divisions. Last year went about as bad as it could for the Dodgers in a bunch of ways – injuries to major players (Turner, Seager, 2x Kershaw, Jansen, who are basically the core of the team), really awful high-leverage performance .. and they still were the favorite almost all year to win their division, did so, and advanced to the WS again. And their two main rivals have taken steps backwards.
I would imagine that if the Cubs were doing stuff, if the Rockies or someone else were a real threat, the Dodgers would be like ‘ok, sure, lets pay a bit of tax to make sure we win again’ .. but that pressure doesn’t exist, and they’re projected to win their division by 12 games (!!!) right now. (no other team has a .500 projection in the NL West!)
So this move doesn’t really surprise me, and I have long thought Pollock was a good player (which is to say I was actually nervous when he hit, because it frequently seemed like he was a very difficult out as an opponent), and I would like to see what the Dodgers’ impressive player development can do with him – along with their depth being able to protect him from injury and over-use, the way that they successfully protected Matt Kemp last year (Matt Kemp went a whole season without an injury guys! A WHOLE YEAR)
As a fan, I’d rather see Bryce, but i can also understand the many reasons the Dodgers might not consider him a slam dunk to be a 5 win player for all that long (his defensive performance; his inconsistent offense; he’s less likely than the average player to benefit from their player development because he is so established and successful). I have suspected for quite a while that the Dodgers’ interest in Harper was in the short-term, high AAV area, and if his market really doesn’t materialize and he ever looks that way, I still wouldn’t be surprised to see them give him a 4/160 type contract or something, tax or no.
The Dodgers have the highest attendance in the league, win their division every year and are the favorites in every postseason series until the WS. How much money are you willing to pay to be the favorite in the World Series too? Is it OK if they pocket the money now while it’s easy, when they have previously demonstrated a willingness to pay more when it is hard?
This is a more complex issue than just ‘team owners are cheapskates’. There’s no competitive pressure, and this ownership group has shown, in spades, a willingness to pay an enormous amount when it was necessary to be competitive.
We saw this argument a lot last season (I think we might have had this exact exchange), where the Dodgers were projected to win the division by 14 games or something like that and so there wasn’t competitive pressure to trade for Giancarlo Stanton. I have a few thoughts about this:
-I think how last season turned out for the Dodgers/Cubs shows that the projections are fairly fallible. Except for Cleveland, no team should feel secure in winning the division.
-The case for the Dodgers winning the division is similar this offseason as the last one–maybe a little better. On the plus side: The D-Backs, who looked like real contenders in the pre-season and much of the season itself, have lost a lot of production. The Rockies, who were the team who ultimately pushed the Dodgers to the brink, were one of the bigger overachievers in BaseRuns. On the negative side, the Dodgers have lost Grandal and Wood, so they’re also not as strong a team as they were before. But it’s just hard to imagine the Rockies repeating that performance, and so it’s hard to imagine another team rising to challenge the Dodgers.
-If we take this seriously and think the Dodgers should be upgrading for the playoffs, why are they tinkering with the outfield like this instead of getting relievers? Why are they trying to trade for JT Realmuto instead of Jose LeClerc? Why didn’t they bid on Ottavino instead of on Pollock? This would make much more sense if this is the line of reasoning.
Because reliever performance is inherently volitile?
They did add a reliever, which they almost never do (Kelly). Realmuto is a bigger upgrade over their current C than Harper over their current OF.
The thing about last year is that they went to the brink only with, net, exceptionally bad luck (much like 2016, when they set the record for number of starting pitchers used in a year, but still won the division). When the team doesn’t get extremely unlucky in some way, it wins 100 games (2017).
Again, I’d rather they added Harper, or Realmuto, or both. they can afford it.
But its hard to be surprised if they don’t, because the competitive pressure is very low.
Yeah. Except for in the World Series. Apparently.
“If we take this seriously and think the Dodgers should be upgrading for the playoffs…”
The current Dodgers are this generation’s 90’s Braves. They are designed from the ground up to win a lot of games and their division, and they do so with regularity. But they are a team that is consistently very poorly designed for the playoffs, and they always fall short there.
On the bright side, those Braves did win *one* World Series during their division title run, so maybe the Dodgers can actually match that. But I doubt it.
Consecutive World Series, falling short confirmed; the playoffs are extremely volatile so other than making a Yankees Bullpen there don’t seem to be many strategies to prevent it from being a coinflip (Baseball winning %’s are much closer to 50% than other sports), you can increase your odds of winning but there’s no magical way to be victorious when a successful player reaches base less than 40% of the time and so on.
This is a fairly common topic, but nominally a team like the Giants with their three recent World Series wins was mostly just lucky to have won that many with consistently passable regular season records.
In what way are they poorly designed for the postseason and what should they do to improve that area?
The other reason why the “owners are cheap” sentiment is over-simplified and misguided is that teams are simply responding to the changing financial incentives of the game. If you want to change behavior, you have to change incentives. Before massive TV deals, a team’s profits were closely tied to its on-field performance because the majority of a team’s revenue was driven by attendance, and attendance is highly correlated with winning percentage. Now that TV deals that pay the team the same amount for 10+ years regardless of how good the team is make up a large portion of every team’s revenues, winning is not as strongly linked to increasing profits as it used to be.
Owners are and have always responded to financial incentives, just like every other person on Earth. The incentives have changed and the result is that winning isn’t as important to owners anymore. This didn’t happen because any one group of people was too ‘greedy’ or consciously decided that they don’t care about winning baseball games, it happened because change happens. Don’t like that? Push for change to the incentive structure (perhaps make a league rule that all TV contracts have to have some mechanism to adjust the payments to teams based on winning percentage or TV ratings?) instead of complaining about greed.
Good signing, IMO. There’s health risk in Pollock for sure but the price feels right. If they get ~1500 PAs out of him over those 4 years, he should fairly easily return surplus value on his contract.
Pollock also missed the entire season in 2010 with a fracture of the same elbow as 2016. It was apparently “unrelated”, but frankly with this history of fractures and his age (31), I am doubtful that you could anticipate that he would play as much as (say) Rickey Henderson who would spend time on the DL (or play badly) for 2 or 3 weeks every year with a hamstring strain.
In other words, it’s a stretch to call his injuries “fluky”. They may not be chronic but his chances of suffering another season-ending injury are certainly a lot higher with this history than a 31 year old without it.
I’m not certain about this, because my Search-Fu is weak, but I’m fairly sure that injury history data on broken bones correlates much lower than does muscle/tendon/ligament issues when projecting the likelihood of future injury.