JABO: The Importance of Not Having Bad Players
Think you could be a general manager? I think, in the beginning, a lot of people think they could do the job. Then, later on, they come to learn of the complexity, and fewer remain so confident. Being a general manager is incredibly difficult, support staff be damned. But I’ve got a hot tip for you — every front office out there has the same strategy. I don’t know if it could be any simpler. The strategy of all 30 teams in major-league baseball:
- get good players
It’s that easy. There’s no disagreement over the strategy. The separator tends to be player evaluation. Which players are good? Which players will remain good? Which players will be the most good? The teams that have the most good players tend to be the strongest teams. You might not know why you bothered to read these paragraphs.
When it comes to team-building, so much of the emphasis is on accumulating as many good players as possible. And that’s good, that’s important, because that’s the biggest key to winning games. But there’s another side of this, one that tends to get ignored. It’s important to have good players, but it’s also important to not have *bad* players. That might seem like saying the same thing. They’re related, but they aren’t identical.
For example, let’s consider two hypothetical mini-teams. Team A has three players. Two of those players are both +4. The third player is 0. Team B also has three players. Two of those players are both +4. The third player is -1. Of Team A and Team B, you could say each has a pair of good players. But Team B also has that bad player, relative to Team A’s 0. So by this simple math, Team A comes out at +8, and Team B comes out at +7. The good players are critical, but a bad player still made a difference.
Reality isn’t quite that clean, in that teams are much bigger and we don’t have perfect measures of performance, but we do have Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. So for the sake of this example, let’s trust those 2015 WAR figures. It’s pretty easy to navigate over to FanGraphs and figure out which teams have generated the most and the least total WAR. It’s tougher to break that down. How much of that WAR is coming from good players, and how much negative WAR is coming from bad players? It’s the latter I’m going to focus on here — enough attention is already paid to the good-player side of the equation.
Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.
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.
Great article, very interesting.
You’d think that the Phillies committed some horrible crime to deserve being brought up every time the word “bad” is mentioned on this site. We know they are bad. We know it’s fun to say how bad they are. I’d rather read 100 more posts about the Red Sox than one more word about how awful the Phillies are.
I know I’m just being butthurt here but I get miffed when I’m trying to read an interesting article and I’m smacked in the face with a smartass comment about how much trash is on the team that I root for. I’m reminded of it every time I look at the outfield depth charts!
Well, when we want to write about objective ways to measure team performance, and they keep showing up on the bottom of the lists, in some instances it’s more conspicuous to not mention it.
Saying a team is bad is not an insult. The Phillies were the best team in baseball for a few years, and now they’re the worst. It happens. Sometimes it’s a necessary part of being good again.
I get it, it just seems poured on a bit.
PLUS, this team is impossible to watch, the Eagles are a mystery, and the freaking Lakers took D’Angelo Russell and now the Sixers are going to have 20 centers on the team.
…AND that stupid bell is cracked. Man, life is the worst in Philly.
dude tell me about it.
You forgot Mo’ne Davis got taken by the Harlem Globetrotters
I know almost nothing about basketball but that sounds… entertaining.
At least you still have cheesesteak. You do still have cheesesteak, right?
yeah we still have cheesesteaks. but for how long until a story comes out that actually New York invented cheesesteaks right?!
The Phillies didn’t win a World Series in 2013, have 0 prospects as good as what the Red Sox have, didn’t really make as bad of a colossal mistake either.
RAJ is the George Bush of GMs.
You’re exactly what I’m complaining about cuz.