Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about good and bad news for much-traveled pitcher Oliver Drake, the Dodgers’ signing of A.J. Pollock and the team’s perplexing offseason plan and lack of NL West competition, the Cubs’ signing of Brad Brach, and a report about the 10-day DL and the rules about optioning players to the minors, then (21:35) talk to Field of Schemes author Neil deMause about the financial calculus behind why teams aren’t spending more on player payroll, how the game got here and what the union can do, the rationale for rooting for a team despite subpar ownership, whether any progress has been made in educating the public about funding stadiums for sports teams, and more.

Audio intro: The Decemberists, "January Hymn"
Audio interstitial: Supergrass, "In it for the Money"
Audio outro: Old Sea Brigade, "Western Eyes"

Link to Jeff’s Pollock post
Link to Ringer article about the Dodgers’ offseason
Link to AP article about DL and option time
Link to Neil’s article
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Edgar Martinez sits at the center of my first really clear baseball memory. I have others, hazier ones, with moments that snap into more specific relief. I remember walking up the ramps of the Kingdome. I remember the brief moment of chill you’d experience when you entered its concrete chasm, separated suddenly from Seattle’s July warmth. I remember baseball guys doing baseball things, but which guys and what things are lost. Liking baseball, loving it, has persisted, but I don’t remember specific home runs any more than particular days of kindergarten, even though I still know how to read.

I have a hard time sussing out what of the rest of Game 5 of the 1995 ALDS is real memory and what is the result of having rewatched it, over and over and over, when I was in need of a good thing to hold on to. I do not feel confident that my impressions of Randy Johnson in relief, entering as he did to “Welcome to the Jungle,” are borne of the moment; nine-year-old me would not know to smirk at how much of his warmup was broadcast, would not have thought the hairstyles of those in the crowd funny. That’s what hair looked like in 1995.

But The Double is there. The Double I know. The Double I remember back through the years and into the corners of my living room. I recall the moment before the pitch was delivered. I remember my step-mom nervously fidgeting with the stakes of the moment and the gnawing concern about how long the game might go, how close to bedtime it would stretch. I remember yipping for joy, in that high-pitched way that kids have, annoying but pure. I remember, even if I didn’t yet quite have the vocabulary to talk about obsession and yearning, thinking, “Oh, I have to do this again.” I remember believing that Edgar Martinez was great. (I do not recall a single pitch of the Mariners loss to the Indians in the ALCS. Sometimes our memories spare us.)

I think much of baseball’s fastidious statistical chronicling is attributable to a native curiosity, a desire to be able to answer how this thing over here relates to that thing over there, even when the this and that are separated by generations. But I think a not-small part of our motivation to catalogue lies in an anxiety over the state of our own memories, whether we’re still sharp. We don’t just seek to make sure the deserving are immortalized; we seek to trust our own mortal lives, to know that we know things as they were. That we are reliable narrators. That the moments around which I built my fandom and my professional life, the root of this thing I sometimes recall more carefully than the details of my own biography, is as I thought it to be. That something so foundational need not be met with the same disquieting sensation I experience when I can recall what the third reliever on the Reds’ depth chart looks like, but for a moment, can’t muster up his name.

Edgar Martinez was a Hall of Famer, only for a long time he wasn’t one. And you start to wonder in those moments, despite knowing so many who agree with you, whether we haven’t all gotten it wrong, whether we aren’t a little less smart than we thought. Whether he was great.

And so I think it helps us to feel complete when we are affirmed in this way. We feel our memories and lives rich with detail, our mental pictures not only accurately rendered but placed in their proper context. Perhaps it takes me a beat longer than it used to to recall a player’s name from 1995, but this thing I know. I used to, as a very young person, think that Dan Wilson was a Hall of Famer. I was tiny and dumb and enamored with catchers, and there he was, our catcher and so the best catcher. But he was not the best. To Cooperstown he could only credibly go as a visitor, a witness to his friends’ greatness. I didn’t know what it meant to be great in any sort of a rigorous way back then; good childhoods aren’t often marked by an excess of rigor. I didn’t know. Except maybe on occasion I did.

After all, Edgar Martinez is a Hall of Famer, just like I remember him.

It was 84 degrees in Cleveland by the time Michael Fulmer, Detroit’s starter for a September 15 rumble with Cleveland, hit the showers without recording an out for the Tigers. Cleveland won that game 15-0, and Fulmer missed his last two scheduled starts of the season with a knee injury, apparently sustained in-game, that put him in surgery five days later. It was a fitting end to the 25-year-old’s 2018 campaign. Detroit had hoped, at the very least, that Fulmer would be effective enough to stabilize an aging rotation, one in which he and 27-year-old Matthew Boyd were the only starters under 30. At best, they’d reportedly hoped he’d be good enough to spin off to a contender at the trade deadline. He was neither, and instead posted the worst season of his three-year career.

I’d like to focus on Fulmer’s disappointing 2018 campaign for a moment because its presumptive cause — injury — means that a resurgent Fulmer, if he indeed rebounds next year, will probably look quite different than the young man who won 2016’s AL Rookie of the Year award and was an All-Star in the next season. If baseball’s beauty lies in part in the opportunities it gives its players to reinvent themselves, then Michael Fulmer is a prime candidate for reinvention, and with his success or failure rides some portion of the future success or failure of the Tigers. Other pitchers have reinvented themselves after early-career injuries effectively, and I’m always curious to see how they choose to fight their way back. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Hall of Fame election results from the BBWAA’s vote broke new ground with the unanimous election of Mariano Rivera, the first candidate to run the table since the voting began 83 years ago. With the late Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez, and Mike Mussina topping 75% as well, it also produced the institution’s fifth quartet in electoral history, and the third in five years, after these four:

In the six cycles since the 2013 shutout, the writers have elected 20 players, surpassing the 15 elected from 1951-56 for the most elected in a six-year span. With an eye toward electoral history and more recent trends, what follows here is both my rundown of the fates of all 35 candidates on the ballot (some of which will figure into my updated five-year outlook for Monday) and a clearinghouse for an assortment of relevant notes and links. One thing that stands out: all 15 holdover candidates gained ground, even if it was just by 0.2% (I’m working to confirm as to whether this is a first). None of those candidates’ share of the vote went down relative to 2018, though that doesn’t always mean that that they made real forward progress in burning a precious year off their eligibility clocks.

Mariano Rivera (1st year, 100%)

It’s still almost unbelievable that Rivera was the first candidate elected unanimously. That honor rightfully would have gone to any one of a few dozen players before him if not for the self-appointed guardians of the Cooperstown gate, but it took a perfect storm of voter accountability, transparency, a candidate who was the best ever at his speciality, and a man universally respected throughout the industry, one who lived up to the responsibility of being the last player to wear Jackie Robinson’s otherwise-retired number 42, in order for it all to come together. And oh, what a moment to behold.

Once upon a time, there was a thought that the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty might not produce a single Hall of Famer. Now they have three, namely Torre himself (as manager, of course), Tim Raines (admittedly, a role player by that point) and Rivera, with Derek Jeter on the way next year. Rivera is the eighth Hall of Famer to spend his entire career with the Yankees (Earle Combs, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey, Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, and Mickey Mantle are the others, and Jeter is next) and the second Hall of Famer born in Panama, after Rod Carew.

On Tuesday night, after the election results were announced, I did a spot for “The Big Sports Show” on St. Louis radio station WTRS, where hosts Ben Fredrickson and Brendan Wiese pointed out that I chose pretty well when it came to the cover subject for The Cooperstown Casebook.

Edgar Martinez (10th, 85.4%, up 15.0%)

The first modern candidate to post four straight year-to-year gains of at least 10 percentage points, Martinez took a much rougher, though no less rewarding, road to Cooperstown than Rivera. As previously noted, he’s the sixth candidate in modern electoral history (since 1966, when the writers returned to annual voting) to be elected in his final year of eligibility, after Red Ruffing(1967), Joe Medwick (1968), Ralph Kiner (1975), Jim Rice (2009), and Raines (2017). He’s the fifth Puerto Rico-born Hall of Famer, after Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, Roberto Alomar, and Ivan Rodriguez, and as La Vida Baseball’s Jose de Jesus Ortiz — a former president of the BBWAA — pointed out, his election alongside Rivera makes 2019 the first time the writers have elected two Latino inductees in the same year. Together, Rivera and Martinez run the total of Hall of Famers who spent their careers with a single team to 54.

As with the candidacy of Raines, the election of Martinez is somewhat personal. He was a favorite of mine when I was simply a fan, and I supported his candidacy from the outset in 2010. The Martinez profile I put together for Baseball Prospectus and ESPN Insider in December 2010 is the first version of a piece that was adapted for SI.com, the Casebook, and ultimately FanGraphs, reflecting the annual ups and downs of his candidacy.

There’s more to it than that. My uncle Harold Jaffe spent his retirement years as the gregarious “mayor” of the then-Safeco Field Diamond Club, but just as I was finishing the Casebook in January 2017, he passed away after a long illness. I had come to refer to that side of the family as the Edgar Martinez Wing of the Jaffes, and so Martinez’s candidacy took on an additional layer of meaning. In an appearance I did for the Mariners Hot Stove Show on Tuesday night (starting at the 13:20 mark here), I got a bit verklempt, discussing both Edgar and Harold, whom co-host Shannon Drayer called “an absolute Safeco treasure.” She had some kind words for me as well.

Roy Halladay (1st, 85.4%)

I’ve mentioned that Halladay was the first player posthumously elected by the BBWAA in a regular election since Rabbit Maranville in 1954, and the only other one elected by the writers in his first year of eligibility besides Christy Mathewson in the Hall’s inaugural election in 1936 (he died in 1925). I have more on that topic in a separate feature in the pipeline, so enough said about that angle for now.

Here’s one to ponder: who will be the next starter elected on the first ballot? Backstage at MLB Network in Secaucus, where I made a pre-announcement appearance on MLB Now, Jayson Stark (himself a Hall of Famer this year, via the 2019 Spink Award) and I pondered the question and concluded that the first pitcher to have a real shot would be Justin Verlander, since neither of us sees CC Sabathia as a slam dunk. I’m not yet sure Verlander is a slam dunk, either (let’s see how he finishes his career) and so upon further consideration, I might choose Clayton Kershaw as the next lock. We shall see…

Mike Mussina (6th, 76.7%, up 13.2%)

I didn’t catch this on Tuesday, but the 20.3% Mussina received in his 2014 ballot debut is the third-lowest percentage of any modern player elected by the BBWAA. The only ones lower? Duke Snider, with 17.0% in 1970, and Bert Blyleven, with 17.5% in 1998. It took Blyleven 14 years and a substantial grassroots campaign to gain entry; that Mussina only needed six is both a reflection of the growing impact of advanced statistics on the process and a testament to how overstuffed the ballots have been. Nonetheless, he made double-digit gains in three years out of the four since that debut, and now he has to figure out which cap to wear on his plaque (I lean Orioles – he was a perennial Cy Young contender in Baltimore, and represented the team in all five appearances). The link between Blyleven and Mussina is significant in another way. It took 20 years between the elections of non-300 win starting pitchers Fergie Jenkins in 1991 and Blyleven in 2011. We’ve had four since then: Martinez and Smoltz in 2015, and Mussina and Halladay this year. It’s about damn time.

Curt Schilling (7th, 60.7%, up 9.7%)

If not for his noxious public persona — the reprehensible things he’s said on social media and the radio, the cozying to white supremacists, the conspiracy theories — he would have beaten Mussina to Cooperstown, because he had a one-year head start on the ballot, and a 9.3% lead as of 2016 (52.3% to 43.0%). Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, however, and the voters gave Schilling a little chin music in 2017. As it is, he’s regained his momentum, receiving his highest share of the vote to date and putting himself within striking distance next year, particularly as he’s the top returning candidate by voting percentage. Of course, his capacity for self-sabotage doesn’t guarantee a smooth path to 75%.

Roger Clemens (7th, 59.5%, up 2.2%), Barry Bonds (7, 59.1%, up 2.7%)

If you were hoping that the Gruesome Twosome would regain momentum — which certainly appeared possible, given that both were about 6.5 points ahead of last year’s pre-election results in the Ryan Thibodaux’s (@NotMrTibbs) Hall of Fame Ballot Tracker — the answer is apparently no. The pair had public-versus-private differentials of 25.5% and 25.6%, respectively, the largest in Tracker history; those have since dropped below 20 points as more ballots have been revealed, but that still doesn’t count as good news.

ESPN’s Jeff Passan reached out to 60 voters who according to the Tracker excluded both players from their ballots. He got responses from 18, 15 of whom told him that they couldn’t ever see themselves changing their minds. Whether or not that group constitutes a representative sample of the electorate is an open question, but here’s some sobering data from the Tracker: each had net gains of just three votes from returning voters, with Clemens matching last year’s total and Bonds tripling his. First-time voters went 7-for-8 on both this year, while last year, they were 12-for-13 on Clemens and 11-for-13 on Bonds. But that math doesn’t help them as much as flipping a no to a yes.

In other words, it’s probably going to take another jolt akin to the 2016 decision to sunset inactive voters, and the 2017 election of Bud Selig, commissioner of the steroid era — which together helped Bonds and Clemens climb from the mid-30s to above 50% — for a substantial bloc of voters to change their minds. How about this: in 2022, their final year on the ballot, Alex Rodriguez, who served a full year suspension for PED violations, will be eligible for the first time, as will David Ortiz, who reportedly tested positive in the 2003 survey test, a result that commissioner Rob Manfred essentially waved off during the love-fest of the latter’s retirement tour, on the grounds of “legitimate scientific questions” about at least 10 samples, “issues and ambiguities were never resolved because they didn’t matter… [because] we knew we had enough positives to trigger the testing the following year.”

Rodriguez might be an obvious no in 2022, but neither Bonds nor Clemens are known to have failed the survey test or any other steroid test administered by Major League Baseball. As with Ortiz, both were beyond the league’s ability to discipline for any infraction, and let’s face it, they’re miles beyond Ortiz in terms of their overall caliber of play. How is somebody going to justify voting for Big Papi but leaving the pair off? We’ll find out.

Larry Walker (9th, 54.6% up 20.5%)

As noted on Tuesday, Walker posted the largest year-to-year gain of anybody on this year’s ballot and the ninth-largest in modern history; he’s also in the top five for two-year and three-year gains (32.7% and 39.1%, respectively). It’s a remarkable surge, no doubt, and again, the good news is that aside from current candidates, only Gil Hodges has received at least 50% and never gained entry.

Still, Walker finishing in the mid-50s instead of the high 50s was a sobering blow given the optimism of the past couple of weeks. He had a 25-point differential between published ballots (65.9%) and private ones (40.9%), the third-largest of any candidate this year after Bonds (25.6%) and Clemens (25.5%). Thus he fell short of the 57.1% projected by Adam Dore last week, an estimate that Dore described as “conservative.” Similarly, he fell short of the 57.2% median projected by Jason Sardell, the cycle’s most accurate projectionist. Can’t win ’em all.

As for next year, Walker needs to replicate this year’s jump almost exactly in order to get to 75%. Doing that would make for the third largest leap over the finish line in modern voting history, but here’s the thing: only one candidate has done so from below 60%, and he had a four-point head start on Walker.

Like Walker, Kiner was in his final year of eligibility when he made that jump, and as we’ve seen in the cases of Raines and Martinez, voters tend to close ranks around players in their final turn — as well they should, given that all three of these candidates were robbed of five years of eligibility by the Hall’s unilateral rule change in 2014, when all three were scuffling for votes.

Omar Vizquel (2nd, 42.8%, up 5.8%)

The gain doesn’t look like much and no, he’s not a candidate that I support based upon his low JAWS ranking, but Vizquel is actually in very good shape as far as the voting goes. Only one modern candidate has polled above 40% in his second year and failed to gain entry via the writers, and — again, as the exception that seems to prove every Hall of Fame voting rule — that’s Hodges. Bet on some voters to consider him for the first time based upon their distaste for the fact that Jeter won five Gold Gloves with defensive metrics that are horrifying.

Fred McGriff (10, 39.8%, up 16.6%)

In his final year of eligibility, the Crime Dog posted the ballot’s second-biggest year-over-year gain, which enabled him to surpass 25% for the first time in his 10-year candidacy and approach 40%. It’s a showing not unlike that of Alan Trammell, who in 15 years on the ballot back in the olden days (2002-2016) didn’t break 20% until his ninth year, topped 30% for the first time in his 11th year, backslid into the low 20s but gained 15.8% in his final turn to top out at 40.9% — and then was elected by the Modern Baseball Era Committee in his first try. Between the final-year surge and the easy statistical hook of his 493 homers, McGriff seems likely to travel the same path in front of the 2022 Today’s Game Era Committee.

On MLB Now, Stark and I sat down with host Scott Braun to discuss McGriff and various other ballot matters:

Manny Ramirez (3rd, 22.8%, up 0.8%)

Manny is three ballots into his candidacy, with less than two points of variance between his high (23.8% in 2017) and low (22.0% last year). Shorter version: Two suspensions, no chance.

Jeff Kent (6, 18.1%, up 3.6%)

He’s short in my system, and I gather that his prickly personality made him less than a media favorite, but I remain shocked that the all-time home run leader among second baseman is six years into his candidacy and has yet to reach 20%. For what it’s worth, this is Kent’s best showing yet, and according to the Tracker team’s Anthony Calamis, he had 10 mentions from voters who said he would have been one of their picks if they had more than 10 slots, tied for the second-highest total. Six of those were McGriff voters, and recent history says that the conversion rate on voters using those spots is pretty good (expressing it mathematically is complicated). Like McGriff, Kent’s best chance at reaching Cooperstown is probably to build to 40-50% and then hope for better luck in front of the Today’s Game panel.

Scott Rolen (2nd, 17.2%, up 7.0%)

Rolen didn’t double the support he received in last year’s debut, but he did make some headway, and he stands to make more as the traffic thins out. Not only did he lead all candidates with 11 mentions in the “If I had space” category, but now that Martinez and Mussina are in, and Walker has only one more year, Rolen’s candidacy stands to benefit from being a focal point for attention from the statheads.

Billy Wagner (4th, 16.7%, up 5.6%)

With three relievers elected in the past two years (Rivera, Trevor Hoffman, and Lee Smith) to bring the total enshrined to eight, standards are starting to come into focus. This time around, half again as many voters included Wagner as last year, and he tied with Kent with 10 “If I had more space” mentions. He should benefit from being the ballot’s top closer, for those who swing that way, but it’s still going to be an uphill climb.

Todd Helton (1st, 16.5%)

A Hall of Fame-related conversation at the Winter Meetings with a fellow writer (one who has a ballot) led to a gentlemen’s wager over Helton’s first-time percentage. With a pint of beer at stake, we agreed to set the over/under at 30.0%, and I — who eventually included the first baseman on my virtual ballot — took the under. That’s one less brew I’ll have to pay for next December. I’m a bit surprised that Helton did not fare quite as well as Walker in his debut (20.3%), though to be fair, this year’s ballot is deeper than 2011’s.

And don’t count him out just yet. He got nine mentions from the space cases, and I suspect next year’s focus on Walker — and that particular slot on the ballot freeing up for 2021, regardless of outcome — will benefit Helton in the long run as well.

Gary Sheffield (5th, 13.6%, up 2.5%)

He picked up a few votes among holdovers, and I know that two analytically included first-time voters, ESPN’s Christina Kahrl and Keith Law — both alums of Baseball Prospectus (as am I) — included him due in part to their suspicions over the extent to which his defensive metrics are such outliers. He went 0-for-6 among the other newcomers in the Tracker, however, and appears fated to remain in down-ballot limbo.

Andy Pettitte (1st, 9.9%)

Despite his high win total and strong postseason track record as part of the Torre-era Yankees dynasty, Pettitte did not make an auspicious debut. That almost certainly had far less to do with his appearance in the Mitchell Report and subsequent admission of HGH usage than it did his presence on a ballot with four clearly Hallworthy starters (the two elected, as well as Clemens and Schilling, warts and all). Other than postseason volume, which ain’t nothing, there’s no area where he stacks up as the best of the bunch, and it’s still a 10-slot ballot. I suspect his future is as a Kent or Sheffield-type candidate who gains enough support not to be in danger of falling off the ballot but doesn’t come anywhere close to 50%, let alone 75%.

Sammy Sosa (7th, 8.5%, up 0.7%)

Between the eye test and the New York Times report that he was on the 2003 survey test positive list (see above), Sosa can’t escape the perception that his career, and particularly his 609 homers, was purely PED-driven. He hasn’t been in double digits since his 2013 debut (12.5%) but he does have enough support to stick around on the ballot and remind the baseball world of the inconsistent standards voters have applied to PED-linked players.

Andruw Jones (2nd, 7.5%, up 0.2%)

Whether it’s due to ballot crowding, the quick fadeaway in his 30s, the post-career domestic violence allegation, or the Rule of 2,000 — nobody with fewer than 2,000 hits whose career took place in the post-1960 expansion era has ever been elected — Jones didn’t gain any traction. Still, it appears that the strength of his defensive metrics and position within the Braves’ dynasty will keep him on the ballot for further consideration.

Michael Young (1st, 2.1%)

Young fell below the 5% cutoff but did receive nine votes, including two from longtime Rangers beat writers Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News and T.R. Sullivan of MLB.com. Once upon a time, when ballots were less crowded and the process less scrutinized, such gestures of respect were commonplace. Grant, who took considerable heat for giving Young a first-place vote for MVP in 2011 (when Verlander beat out Jacoby Ellsbury), was prepared to to do the same for including him here, and explained his rationale at length, summarizing, “The Hall of Fame is a state of mind more than anything else, the qualifiers the things that make a player special in each individual fan and voter’s mind. In mine, Michael Young left an indelible mark on a franchise and the game. And if you want to laugh at me for that, it’s OK.” No laughs here, and no pitchfork.

Lance Berkman (1st, 1.2%), Roy Oswalt (1st, 0.9%)

Five votes for the former, four for the latter. There’s little doubt in my mind that both had Hall of Fame-caliber talent, but their bodies didn’t hold up long enough to yield careers that could stand out alongside those who lasted longer. Berkman, with 1,905 hits, is the latest victim of the Rule of 2,000, while Oswalt’s fate resembles that of 1980s Blue Jays great Dave Stieb, just as his career did. The good news is that the Astros are creating their own team Hall of Fame, and while this pair isn’t part of the inaugural class, there’s little doubt they’ll get their due soon.

Miguel Tejada (1st, 1.2%)

Between the various allegations connecting him to PEDs — the mention in Jose Canseco’s book, the desperation of Rafael Palmeiro trying to pin his own positive test on Tejada, the Mitchell Report mention, and finally his actual suspension for using a banned stimulant in 2013 — and the fadeaway in his mid-30s, Tejada never had a real shot at election. Nonetheless, the arc of his career, from its extreme poverty and age falsifying in the Dominican Republic to the highs and lows of the Moneyball years in Oakland to the big contract and the mess he got himself into later, is fascinating and instructive. “No one player encapsulates baseball’s modern era better,” wrote Sports on Earth’s Jorge Arangure in 2013, who called him “baseball’s version of Forrest Gump, an observer and participant in some of baseball’s most defining moments of the era.”

Placido Polanco (1st, 0.5%)

Not a Hall of Famer but a better player than you probably remember. Damn, could that guy pick it.

Rick Ankiel, Jason Bay, Freddy Garcia, Jon Garland, Travis Hafner, Ted Lilly, Derek Lowe, Darren Oliver, Juan Pierre, Vernon Wells, Kevin Youkilis (1st, 0.0%)

As the great Vin Scully often reminded viewers, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” There’s no shame in being shut out on the ballot; that check box next to these players’ names is the reward for their unique, impressive careers.

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan discuss the Hall of Fame results, including why (and whether) the Hall matters, Mariano Rivera’s unanimous election, the greatness of Mike Mussina, the stagnation of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, the perplexing case of Omar Vizquel, and other topics, then banter about the spread of multi-position players, the Braves bringing back Nick Markakis, the Mariners signing Ichiro Suzuki (sort of), improvements in player development, the Reds’ path to contention in the NL Central, Scott Boras’s role in the slow offseason, the worst seasons by Hall of Famers, and more, plus a Stat Blast about Rivera’s greatness and a parting word from Ben’s mom.

Audio intro: The Apples in Stereo, "About Your Fame"
Audio outro: Phil Ochs, "Chords of Fame"

Link to Hall of Fame voting results
Link to the Hall of Baines
Link to Ben’s article about multi-position players
Link to Jeff’s post about the Reds
Link to worst seasons by Hall of Fame hitters
Link to worst seasons by Hall of Fame pitchers
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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On the public side, there are few opportunities to see the precise financial machinations of major league baseball teams. The Atlanta Braves are a publicly traded company so we have some information on their inner-workings. And a recent piece by Kevin Acee at the San Diego Union Tribune provides a little bit more information. Acee was granted access to some of the Padres’ finances, though as Acee noted, the league keeps a close watch on financial information and generally doesn’t want it to get out:

The caveat from the club was that many of the numbers shared herein had to be “general.” The Padres are a private company and one of 30 members of a greater private organization. One member does not have the prerogative to make public financial data Major League Baseball has not approved for release.

The Padres’ decision to grant a reporter access to some of the team’s financial information is an unusual one, though the motivation is fairly clear. The Padres are still in the midst of a rebuilding process that isn’t likely to end this season. The club believes their window of contention isn’t yet open and as a result, they aren’t likely to spend big right now. A peek into the books, and the team’s debt, helps them provide further justification for that lack of spending. There is a lot of financial information disclosed in the article, and it is probably best to break things down a bit.

The Debt

The crux of Acee’s article involves a refinancing of the debt the team’s current owners have carried since purchasing the Padres. According to the article, that debt amounted to roughly $193 million at the time of the purchase back in 2012 — it was no doubt factored into the purchase price — and the interest rate on the loans was something like 8.5%. Due to the nature of the loan, which included a make-whole provision that would require paying extra for paying down the loan early, refinancing it to get a lower interest rate would have meant an extra payment of close to $70 million. As a result, the team elected to make payments on the loan, including interest payments of $13 million in 2015 alone.

By 2017, the make-whole penalty was down to $28 million and the club made a cash call for about half of that amount and used some of their MLBAM money for the rest. Reading between the lines here, the piece mentions a total of $68 million in money coming from the sale of BAMTech, with $50 million of that amount presumed to have been received last year. That means that the first sale of MLBAM to Disney, which netted the league one billion dollars, likely resulted in some smaller payment, perhaps $18 million, that was used by the Padres in their refinancing in 2017. The team appears to have further used about $45 million of the $50 million BAMTech proceeds to pay down additional debt. The club has now paid down 40% of the original $193 million, reducing interest payments to around $4 million, a savings of around $8 million per year, plus additional savings on principal payments. In short, the club took $15 million of owner money. plus nearly all the BAMTech money it received, and used it to make $10 million or more per year for the foreseeable future. It has obviously been a good investment for the owners, and the tenor of the article suggests that that money will be invested back into the club at some point in the future, likely, if team officials are to be believed, when the club is closer to contention.

The Minors

In 2016, the Padres were coming off a minor debacle in 2015 (more on that in a bit), having expended a decent amount of cash and prospect capital to attempt to contend. That attempt failed, and the Padres decided not to invest any more money in the major league ball club. Under baseball’s old international spending rules, teams could splurge on international prospects for a year before being restricted to more expenditures in the following two seasons. The Padres splurged like nobody had splurged before, spending around $40 million on prospects and around that amount on penalties. Between the major league payroll and the bonuses for the draft and international amateurs (and the penalties that followed), the team probably spent close to $200 million in 2016, with Acee’s piece indicating the owners pitched in about $20 million to make that happen.

As for the results, the Padres now have one of the best farm systems in baseball, and that 2016 class is a big reason for their success. As of the end of last season, the Padres had 12 players from that class alone receive a graded rank, including three who already project as average despite the fact that most of these players are under 20 years old. Those 12 prospects, including Adrian Morejon, Luis Patino, and Michael Baez, were already worth roughly $100 million by the end of last year. While it hasn’t impacted the results at the major league level yet, that investment should pay huge dividends going forward. As for investments that didn’t go so well…

The First Prellering

The Padres hired A.J. Preller in the middle of the 2014 season, and Preller aimed to make the team a contender the following year. He essentially traded Yasmani Grandal for Matt Kemp, then sent prospects to Atlanta for Justin Upton. He traded Joe Ross and Trea Turner, among others, for Wil Myers and others. James Shields was given a four-year contract. Right before the season started, he took on the money owed to B.J. Upton to get Craig Kimbrel. Those deals added about $20 million in payroll over the previous year and about $40 million over the 2013 campaign. The moves weren’t successful, although they weren’t quite the disaster the Union-Tribune piece and Padres ownership make them to be.

In the piece, the club claimed to have spent $40 million more for the season. That is partially true given they spent that much in new salaries, but when compared to the previous season, the additions were about half that much. Interestingly, the club indicated that all that movement netted the team an extra $15 million in ticket sales and concessions. While that number isn’t too far off from the payroll increase, we can glean more from that bit of information. From 2014 to 2015, the Padres increased attendance by 265,000 fans. Some simple math has the increase in revenue at about $57 per attendee. What’s interesting about that information is just how the attendance increase happened. The Padres’ gambit almost worked.

On June 13, the Padres had a .500 record, were five games out of first place, and three games out of the wild card. Over the next month, they went 9-17 and fell out of the playoff race. Through the trade deadline that season, the club was averaging 31,782 fans, but after the season went south, attendance the rest of the way dropped to 28,200. If the team had remained competitive and drawn the same amount, that potentially would have meant another $6.5 million in revenue, making the increase in payroll worth it. If the team had made the playoffs, the club would have come out ahead. Adding the declining Kemp, the unproven Myers, a one-inning closer in Kimbrel, and getting a below-average performance from Shields sunk the club in 2015, but the decision to go for it wasn’t necessarily bad; it just turned out that some of the players underperformed or were poor fits on the roster. And the added salary commitments ensured the team would spend millions on players who wouldn’t even be with the team after another season. Preller’s first go at building a contender failed; the second, as noted, had to take a different approach.

Revenue Estimates

The article doesn’t come out and say how much the Padres make, but there are a fair number of estimates. First, the piece says that interest payments went from 5% ($12.6 million in 2015) to 2% ($4.6 million in 2018) of the budget, which would put revenues somewhere between $252 million and $230 million, though a few decimal points of difference on the interest percentage significantly changes the total. Looking at their larger expenditures and the percentage of expenses might be more helpful. Roughly one-third of revenues have gone to major league salaries over the last four years, which would put average annual revenue at around $295 million. They have spent around 22% of revenue on operating expenses — that number is listed at $68 million, which would put revenues at around $310 million. Forbes last year estimated the Padres’ revenue at $266 million, which now looks like that might be a little low. I should also note that the team does spend money on stadium maintenance and improvements along with all those debt repayments, but that those amounts are taken out of net local revenue and serve to increase the amount of revenue sharing they receive from the league.

Looking Ahead

Acee’s whole piece is fascinating, and I recommend reading it in full. All of baseball has seen a considerable increase in revenue over the last few seasons, an increase from which the Padres have benefited. With their revenues, they have opted to pay down debt and make an international splash. Their payroll has been lower due to those decisions, and the amount of payroll we actually see on the field has been lower still, due to bad contracts taken on in trades and free agent signings for players who were later dealt with money attached. The explanation offered in the piece is pretty clear, and while the team wasn’t completely forthcoming, most of the information checks out. The team is asking fans to be patient for one more year. Building up the minor league system should eventually create a better on-field product at Petco, but the team’s debt reduction and refinancing does more to add to a franchise value that has already doubled since Executive Chairman Ron Fowler’s group took over seven years ago. The club will need to continue to invest in the big league product to demonstrate that this is more than just perpetually shifting fans’ expectations off into the future. It’s up to the fans to determine how much more losing they can stomach.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

Jerry Dipoto’s may be a one-man Hot Stove League, but at least based on the roster as of now — everybody could be traded by March — Seattle seems to still be in something of a no man’s land when it comes to rebuild. The Mariners aren’t actually bad, but it’s hard to envision them being that relevant in the AL West. There are a lot of older players here, but not many who really have all that much flip-potential. Sure, you can play some combination of Ryon Healy and Jay Bruce at first, or shift Edwin Encarnacion to first and make Bruce the full-time DH, or play Tim Beckham more than J.P. Crawford, but to what end?

ZiPS is still rooting for a Kyle Seager comeback, but I’m a little less sanguine at this point. On the plus side, it thinks Mitch Haniger is for real and sees at least some value in Dan Vogelbach, even if the Mariners don’t seem to. And yes, I know Ichiro is pretty much just coming back for the M’s and A’s games in Japan, but ZiPS doesn’t know those circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »