The Dodgers Continue to Bet on Depth

On Friday night, Zack Greinke decided to take his talents to Phoenix, joining the Arizona Diamondbacks, who are now an interesting potential contender for 2016. That decision, of course, left a significant hole in the Dodgers starting rotation, and the loss of their alternate ace has set the team down a different course. Since the Greinke news broke, they’ve struck deals with aging veterans Hisashi Iwakuma and Chase Utley, traded for Aroldis Chapman, talked to the Marlins about Jose Fernandez, were named as a suitor for Ben Zobrist, and probably have a few dozen other alternatives that haven’t leaked out to the public yet. This certainly won’t be a boring winter in Los Angeles.

But it’s certainly possible that, for the second straight winter, the Dodgers are going to choose to acquire a larger quantity of potentially good players rather than banking on the elite performances of a few high profile stars. Andrew Friedman’s roster revamp a year ago saw the team acquire guys like Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson, Yasmani Grandal, Jimmy Rollins, and Howie Kendrick rather than make runs at All-Stars like Max Scherzer or Jon Lester. And then the Dodgers essentially affirmed that philosophy in July, when they were heavily linked to Cole Hamels, but chose to make a deal that brought in Alex Wood and Mat Latos instead. Capping their offer to Greinke at $160 million might have been surprising for a team that has seemingly unlimited payroll space, but while the Dodgers have spent extensively on acquiring young talent (particularly in the international market), this front office has not shown an inclination to pay a premium for high-end veterans.

In MLB, there are essentially two competing schools of thought about how to best construct a roster. The so-called Stars-and-Scrubs method is based around creating a core of elite players, then dumpster diving for role players in an effort to fill out the roster with minimal payroll commitments. The Detroit Tigers under Dave Dombrowksi were often the most obvious example of this philosophy, riding to the postseason on the backs of guys like Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, and Prince Fielder, but often finding themselves also leaning on guys like Delmon Young, Ramon Santiago, and Don Kelly in critical situations. Recent Brewers teams have also been stars-and-scrubsy, and the 2015 White Sox were an extreme version of this concept, with Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, and Jose Abreu surrounded by a bunch of guys for whom scrubs might even be too kind a term.

On the other end of the spectrum, but without a catchy short-hand name for the philosophy, are teams who prioritize avoiding obvious weak spots on their roster, spreading the money around to a variety of players. This balanced approach to roster construction is often born of necessity, as lower-revenue clubs can’t afford the long-term commitments that are attached to signing the best free agents, so they shop in the discount aisle to keep their financial flexibility in tact. The Kansas City Royals just won the World Series with no player making more than $12.5 million in salary, and the A’s have had a long run of success by using their best players as trade chips to acquire another wave of young talent to replenish the roster.

Both models can work, and there are examples of both types of teams winning the World Series in recent years. There are also examples of both types of teams failing, though, and certainly, the balanced roster approach is a more difficult sell to the fanbase in the winter than simply introducing a premier player as evidence of the team’s attempts to improve. The Dodgers have taken a lot of flak for their approach over the last year, and the failures of guys like Latos and Wood didn’t help the perception that the organization is simply outsmarting itself, and would do better to just focus on acquiring the best players on the market without continually searching for value at every corner. It certainly is a bit of a change to see a team with more financial resources than any other club drawing firm lines in the sand on player valuation, rather than using their big stack of chips to push around other teams and end up with the pick of the litter.

But it appears that the Dodgers perspective on roster construction leans pretty heavily towards the balanced approach. While Greinke likely could have given them something like +5 WAR 2016 for the $30 to $35 million in salary he would have required, the Dodgers instead will look to get +2-3 WAR out of Iwakuma for $15 million, then invest the other $15 million in a secondary player (or two) to make up the gap. Aroldis Chapman, acquired this morning to bolster the bullpen, will make about $13 million in his final trip through arbitration, so their two pitching acquisitions made since Greinke signed with Arizona still cost a little bit less than Greinke would have by himself. Adding in the $7 million that they gave to Chase Utley gets them just slightly north of what Arizona will pay Greinke next year, so from one perspective, this decision could be seen as the Dodgers trading Greinke and two prospects for Iwakuma, Chapman, Utley, and the prospect they’ll get from giving Chapman a qualifying offer next year.

Between Iwakuma, Chapman, and Utley, the Dodgers should get something in the +5 to +6 WAR range next year, maybe even pushing +7 WAR if Utley and Iwakuma prove healthier than they were a year ago. That’s basically the same range as you’d expect from Greinke and a couple of replacement level players, and for the same $35 million in 2016 salary, so the Dodgers aren’t so much saving money with this trio as they are avoiding a long-term commitment to a declining asset. But to avoid paying those extra decline years to Greinke, the team sacrifices two roster spots in the process, theoretically making it more difficult to upgrade the team’s ceiling by filling out the roster with good-but-not-great players.

This is the primary argument in favor of the stars-and-scrubs philosophy; the value of consolidating value into a single roster spot comes from the ability to replace the replacement level scrub with a decent role player. Rather than Greinke and two +0 WAR players, the Dodgers could get up to +8 or +9 WAR if it was Greinke and two league average players, and there are more league average players than stars, so the theory argues that it’s more important to focus on getting the elite player first and worry about finding the average role players later.

Of course, those average players aren’t going to be free, and the price for decent role players is skyrocketing right now. With even back-end innings sponges or platoon-player fourth outfielders like Mike Pelfrey and Chris Young getting multiple years for $6 to $8 million apiece, it’s not really fair to expect a team to be able to find valuable contributors who can actually contribute for the league minimum. While Greinke plus a couple of +2 WAR players has a higher upside than the Iwakuma/Chapman/Utley trio, it’s also going to cost more, requiring even further talent depletion if the team attempted to trade for those decent role players instead of signing them on the open market.

While the talent pyramid philosophy — a thin group up top with a thick base of supply near the bottom — has long held significant sway, the reality of the market in MLB right now is that, with nearly every team seeing themselves as contenders, there is more than enough demand for the lower-to-mid-tier players to get paid real money. When guys like J.A. Happ are landing $36 million in guaranteed money, it’s tough to argue that there’s an abundant supply of solid depth pieces who can be acquired on the cheap. And while there’s more upside to going with star-scrub-scrub based on potential upgrades at a later point, there’s also significantly more risk in consolidating value into fewer players rather than spreading it around across multiple players.

And when you’re already a contender with significant upside pieces on the roster, minimizing risk may be more important than raising the ceiling even further. There are diminishing returns on wins beyond 93 or so, and at around that point, it’s almost certainly better to narrow your range of outcomes rather than simply pushing the ceiling ever higher. Maybe losing Greinke and replacing him with three lesser pieces reduces the Dodgers upside a bit, but by spreading the risk across multiple players, it also likely increases their floor to a similar degree. The Dodgers balanced roster approach is less likely to make them a dominant 100 win team, but it also makes them less likely to be a flameout 75 win team win as well.

There’s positives and negatives to both approaches. Just like with players, there’s always a tradeoff between potential versus certainty. The Dodgers roster construction philosophy is more akin to drafting polished players with fewer physical tools over going after athletes who need to figure out how to play baseball. Every decision is a balance of risk and reward, and the Dodgers decided that the Diamondbacks offer to Greinke pushed the scales towards the balanced roster approach for this winter. That decision will almost certainly have its detractors, but with some elite talents already in place and a roster that looks like a contender even without Greinke, there’s nothing wrong with making moves to make sure that the team’s season doesn’t get sunk by having to rely on Carlos Frias again.