Why Mike Moustakas’ Market Didn’t Develop
Free agency is supposed to be the reward. Of course, not every player gets treated the same, but, in general, free agency tends to reward good hitting. Mike Moustakas has blossomed into a pretty good hitter. Free agency tends to reward good fielding. Mike Moustakas has been a fine defensive third baseman. Free agency tends to reward winning experience. Mike Moustakas was part of a World Series champion. And, importantly, free agency tends to reward youth. Mike Moustakas is 29 years old. He’s just one year older than Eric Hosmer, who signed for massive terms with the Padres. It feels like it should’ve been there. It feels like Mike Moustakas should’ve earned his reward.
Moustakas is returning to the Royals. It’s a one-year contract, with a $6.5-million guarantee, and while there exists a second-year mutual option, those are never picked up. It was the Royals who extended to Moustakas a $17.4-million qualifying offer, which Moustakas, in turn, declined. Now he won’t come close to that money. There’s been talk for a while this market is strange, but the Moustakas terms in particular are jarring. It’s incredible that his free agency got to this point.
MLB Trade Rumors figured Moustakas would sign for five years and $85 million. The FanGraphs community figured he’d sign for five years and $85 million. Dave Cameron figured he’d sign for five years and $95 million. Now, Moustakas can still earn big money. He won’t have a qualifying offer attached next offseason, and another strong year would improve his stock. And, also, it’s easy to try to point things out after the fact. No one knew this was how Moustakas would end up. But, in hindsight, there were issues from the beginning. A variety of factors came together to prevent Moustakas from finding the commitment he wanted.
Right away, Moustakas has been a third baseman. This wasn’t a market with many teams in need of a third baseman. The best fit always seemed like it would be the Angels, but they enthusiastically added the defensively superior Zack Cozart. And while Moustakas would’ve also been open to signing with the Giants, they preferred Evan Longoria. Maybe the Padres could use a better third baseman than Chase Headley, but, Headley is fine, and they spent their money on Hosmer.
You can look at the landscape now. There are only so many teams where Moustakas might fit. The Tigers would work, but they’re rebuilding, and since they just went over the luxury tax, they’d have to give up their second and fifth-highest draft picks, as well as $1 million in international spending money. That’s too much of a deterrent. The Yankees would’ve had to pay the same penalty, so they went for Brandon Drury. They’re also not really looking to block Miguel Andujar. The Phillies could’ve signed Moustakas, but they’re still working on Maikel Franco. The Rays, Marlins, and Pirates have never been very involved in premium free agency, and they all have their own third-base options, anyway. Matt Duffy, Christian Arroyo, Martin Prado, Brian Anderson, Colin Moran, David Freese — small-budget teams always prefer the lower-cost options. Outside of the Royals, you end up left with the White Sox and Braves. Good teams just weren’t in position to be involved. Pretty much only mediocre or bad teams remained out there as destination possibilities, and those are the very teams with the least use for Mike Moustakas’ short-term future.
Moustakas is a Scott Boras client. A big factor, I believe, is that the right market just didn’t exist. A certain amount of that is just bad luck. No one can perfectly forecast how an offseason is going to play out. Yet it’s also Boras’ job to come up with the best forecast possible. So I think another factor was relatively poor representation. I think Boras generally deserves a lot of credit, and, clearly, he’s developed a strong reputation for finding money for his players. But in this case — in this particular case — it appears Boras misled Moustakas on what would be reasonably possible. Maybe Boras really has been representing too many quality free agents lately. Maybe he just hasn’t fully adapted to the changing evaluation practices. But when something like this happens, it’s typically not the fault of the player.
Look at the picture today. If not the Royals, the best fit would probably be the Braves. And yet the Braves were signaling they weren’t very interested in Moustakas all the way back in early November. Boras still came out with his initial high demands. Maybe, if not for a certain event, it could’ve worked. This brings us to the third factor. I think that it’s been largely under-discussed.
A screenshot will do:
I didn’t want to embed a video. You don’t need to see the video. In May of 2016, Moustakas ranged deep into foul territory, in pursuit of a fly ball. It was in foul territory that Moustakas collided with Alex Gordon. It was Gordon who came out of the game, but it was Moustakas who wouldn’t play again that season, having torn his ACL.
Moustakas, of course, returned, and just had a strong offensive season. And an ACL tear doesn’t have to be devastating. In 2015, Zack Cozart tore his ACL, and some other things for good measure. And yet, in 2017, Moustakas was different. Different in a way that I suspect would cause some otherwise interested teams to hesitate.
Statcast can come in handy here. We can look at sprint speeds, from Baseball Savant. In 2015, Moustakas’ average sprint speed ranked in the 38th percentile, and the 48th percentile among third basemen. In 2017, however, Moustakas’ average sprint speed ranked in the 7th percentile, and the 9th percentile among third basemen. Suddenly, Moustakas was moving slower, and it’s evident in his baserunning measures. In terms of moving up an extra base on hits, Moustakas just ranked in the lowest percentile. Moving from first to third on singles, Moustakas ranked in the lowest percentile. Moving from first to home on doubles, he ranked in the 3rd percentile. Moving from second to home on singles, he ranked in the 14th percentile. Moustakas, in 2017, didn’t attempt a single stolen base. Moustakas did very little running.
And that wasn’t the only casualty. Looking at third basemen between 2014 and 2016, and blending both DRS and UZR, Moustakas’ defense ranked in the 64th percentile. This past season, again among third basemen, his defense ranked in the 23rd percentile. Moustakas came back, and he hit. He hit a bunch of home runs. But while that was happening, Moustakas had slowed down. He was playing worse defense, at least statistically, and the Royals started him 17 times at DH.
A player might DH for any number of reasons. And it’s absolutely true that defensive metrics are noisy. What we can’t yet conclude is that Mike Moustakas is no longer a good defensive third baseman. It’s just suspicious. The timing of everything suggests that Moustakas has lost a good amount of his athleticism. Maybe 2017 was just a recovery year. Maybe everything is about to bounce back. But, look at this from a team’s perspective. How much would you really want to invest in this player as a medium- or long-term third-base solution? And then, look at this from an agent’s perspective. How hard do you really want to push this player as a medium- or long-term third-base solution, knowing there are so many athleticism-related question marks?
It’s easy to say now, but it seems like expectations should’ve been lower from the beginning. If Boras knew teams were concerned about Moustakas’ body, he might’ve even advised taking the qualifying offer. Now, I doubt it, but with real concern out there, $80 – 100 million just wasn’t going to happen. Lumbering sluggers haven’t been faring very well. Moustakas has to prove he’s more than just a lumbering slugger at this point.
It does make me somewhat hopeful. At least, by signing for just one year, Moustakas can get back out there, unencumbered, and maybe his defense will improve. We all know people who’ve benefited from putting another year between themselves and an ACL operation, and if Moustakas recovers any of what he lost, he could score in nine or ten months. He’s going to get a chance to play every day in a familiar setting, in front of fans who still love him. Remember, Moustakas is a guy who only got good as a hitter after learning to hit to the opposite field. Moustakas has already evolved at the major-league level before, which might be a good indicator of what’s ahead. The game smiles upon players who can adjust and improve. Moustakas has done that.
And from the Royals’ perspective, there’s nothing lost here, aside from some playing time for Cheslor Cuthbert. There’s nothing lost, and plenty gained, as Moustakas will take some of the sting out of what could’ve been a painful season. In that way, he’s similar to Jon Jay and Lucas Duda. The Royals probably won’t be very good, but they won’t be as bad as possible. There’s value in winning extra games, even if you play under .500. There’s value in keeping around a favorite, if only for a year, if only because the market didn’t work out the way that favorite wanted.
Mike Moustakas deserves more than this. Because of the positional landscape out there, because of his agent, and because of his injury history, he’s had to settle for something that would’ve been unthinkable in October. The reasons are right there. They are what they are. Nothing to do at this point but hit a bunch more dingers. And maybe field a few more grounders, and take a few more extra bases. If the athleticism doesn’t come back, a freak accident will have robbed Moustakas of his one free-agency splash. And if it does come back, at least we shouldn’t be having this conversation again in a year. Few things can motivate quite like another contract season.
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.
1) Isn’t St. Louis in the market for a Gyorko upgrade ?
2) Why wouldn’t he just wait until after the draft ?
Mike Moustakas ZIPS projection: 2.5 WAR
Jedd Gyorko ZIPS projection: Also 2.5 WAR
Steamer has Moose at 2.7 WAR and Gyorko at 1.7.
Which is fine…but last year Gyorko was the better player…in 2016 Gyorko was also the better player. Why would you spend money on a less athletic and less versatile worse player?
Because the price was so dang cheap.
Also Gyorko can play all over the infield if he must. Moose has a bigger bat, but not by a lot, and is nailed to the hot corner.
If they want a Gyorko upgrade, then they’ll need a player better than Gyorko.
Moose is much better against righties,
Upgrade != replacement
Of course perhaps Moose wouldn’t want to sit against lefties, but that’s a different question.
He’s not going to do a lot better than $8.7MM for just a few months of the season. Further, he’s trying to rebuild his value and he has to play to be able to do that. He might as well do so in a familiar environment.
I don’t know why this is getting downvoted so much. It seems like a couple of fair questions to ask.
I think the answer to #1 is that signing Moustakas improves the depth of the team by making Gyorko a super-utility guy, but doesn’t necessarily improve the top-end of the roster in the way that a stud 3rd baseman would. So the Cardinals were looking for a guy like Josh Donaldson, not a guy who would be a marginal upgrade.
I still actually think that Moustakas might have (maybe) been worth it at a higher price for the Cards to improve the depth of the team, but I think it’s hard to swallow losing a comp pick to improve depth. And also, the Cards might be planning on moving Carpenter around the diamond to fill the multi-position role. Signing Moustakas might have pushed Martinez off first base.
I think I posed the question wrong. “Gyorko upgrade” implies comparing the two.
It would probably work more like a platoon. If they repeated last year’s splits, a platoon would be an upgrade.
Possibly, but you’d also have to account for the defensive downgrade.
I take back 1. Gyorko had a better year than I remembered, although he wasn’t so great against righties, while Moose was.
Anyhow, always check those numbers before you shoot your mouth off kids !!!
Gyorko was also better defensively last year.
Me: collusion against players. This must be stopped!!
Also me: power is the most cheaply available commodity so why pay anything for it? Nobody wants a 3B version of Brandon Belt.
Hello, I’m someone who wants a 3B version of Brandon Belt.
Brandon Belt’s career 128 wRC+ would have placed him 6th among qualified 2017 3b.
I mean i get your post, but you might just wanna rethink the player that you’re comparing Mous to 🙂
He alternated between above and below average even before the ACL tear. Even if you take out the year he lost to injury, I don’t think ~2 war/year through your prime gets you a big contract at age 29. Essentially he’s been an average player, recovering from a serious injury, now entering his decline phase.
It worked for Eric Hosmer.
Yes, but the Padres are really stupid.
Why would you think Hosmer is in his decline phase? He is 28 years old. He also has been a 3 WAR guy the past 3 years, and doesn’t have knee problems. Not a good comparison at all. Better player, younger, better athlete = better gamble.
28 is the early part of the decline phase, peak is 26/27
Isn’t there a “plateau phase” in there for most players (did I just coin a new phrase?) Seems like ages 28 to 32 are typically productive years; and just because the player’s ceiling is already established doesn’t necessarily mean that he is declining.
No there is not, performance has a normal curve distribution with only a slightly sharper improvement slope than decline slope.
Peak is age 26/27 and then there is fairly sharp decline each year on. 26, 27 and 28 are fairly close, 29 is substantially lower than peak, and then fairly steep decline.
Performance does not have a normal curve distribution. See https://www.fangraphs.com/library/the-beginners-guide-to-aging-curves/
Using the lWts/age graph, players experience a 30pt increase from 21-26. The curve then plateaus for 3 years through age 28. Compare the 30pt increase in 21-26 with the approx 12pt decrease from 28-33.
Young players improve faster than old players decline.
Yes performance does have a normal distribution the graph you cite simply starts at age 21. Prior to age 21, players perform at a lower level- providing the early tail missing from the graph you cite.
We both mentioned and agreed that the ascent is steeper than decline.
Zimmerman’s work on age curves since 06 is interesting, but the larger sample set shows players growing from their professional debut through age 26 and then declining. This is especially true if ‘playing time’ is considered- as Zimmerman’s data doesn’t not control for the selection bias that 21 year old MLB players are, generally, very high quality players (the reverse of the ‘survivor bias’ and quite literally a selection bias), whereas the larger set of 21 year olds includes players performing much worse and at low levels. To the contrary, most 26 year old players (being peak age) reach high levels of baseball, with many more 26 year olds at MLB level than 21 year olds.
Moustakas is kind of doomed. His market did not develop this year. Next year, Josh Donaldson and Manny Machado are FAs, and will compete with him for 3B money (though Machado may target a SS job). He doesn’t make much sense to replace either of them with the Orioles (though they do seem to like that kind of player) or the Jays (who will not want to block Vladdy Jr).
And most of the teams who had no room still won’t have it.
Not at 3b.
Unless he recovers enough speed to play OF, he’ll be looking at the 1B/DH market. Which hasn’t been good for years.
Doesn’t make sense for the Orioles, even though they like that kind of player, will need a 3B, his skills are suited for that park?
When Machado leaves (sorry O’s fans) and Beckham moves back to short they will have a hole at third. I think you’re on the right track.
He’ll probably fare better on the market setting himself up as a lesser-version of Donaldson & Machado. I could definitely see a team saying, we don’t want to spend $200 million for Donaldson/Machado, so we’ll settle on $80 million for Moustakas. When Moustakas is the best 3B on the market, you find reasons not to spend on 3B.
I don’t know… First Machado and Donaldson get nowhere near the same contract. Manny is valued significantly more going into 2018. Second each year is different. Everything worked against Moose this year. I suspect he had 2-3 offers better than what he accepted- shame on Boras. We’re still figuring out the impact (unintended/misunderstood consequences) of the most recent CBA. Post steroids aging curve, enhanced analytics, impact of salary cap on top tier teams and perhaps most importantly of all the business (or tanking dynamics) of mid and lower tier revenue teams are yet to be understood. I really don’t mean to make the last comment sound pejorative. I actually think mid and lower revenue teams are some of the best business people in baseball- but we don’t always understand the impact on their business until it plays out.
It’s not completely true that his market didn’t develop.
He got a $17.5m offer. He projects to be a bit better than 2 WAR player, around 2.6 averaging Steamer/ZIPs. That’s an offer of about $7m/WAR- near market though ~20% below the commonly cited figure of $9m.
He rejected a roughly market offer, in part because agents have tried to organize near complete rejection of QOs. The lost difference between his QO amount and his 1-year deal amount is a difference that is an accepted component of the general industry strategy by agents to reject (near) all QOs. The agencies have rightly concluded, based on data so far, that it is in their clients’ best interests (and their own) to have a blanket policy against accepting QOs, although it may occasionally result in a given FA having to accept a weak 1 year deal.
I am surprised the post-QO market does not appear to have developed, but we cannot conclude that ‘Moustakas must have not had any better offers than 1/$6.5 all offseason, because if he had we know he would have taken it instead of this one:” since we know for sure that he has already turned down a deal paying $7m/WAR.
If he has a good year, he won’t be doomed.
Royals seem like the only fit given the draft pick compensation and the specific third base situation. Why is the mutual option there if it almost never gets picked up from both sides? To prevent him from being tagged next year?
To inflate the contract paper value.
Actually, this is one mutual option that might get executed.
Next year ‘s market doesn’t look any better than this year’s (worse If Andujar, Dever, and Guerrero establish themselves at 3B and Machado gets signed as a 3B) so he might end up a Royals lifer by default.
So why pick up the option for 15 when you can re-sign him for 7 or 8?
Well, you run the risk of failing to re-sign him because YOU misread the market this time round.
Probably a moot point because if there is enough of a market for him that the Royals couldn’t re-sign him, he would likely have already declined the option on his end.
Mutual options can convert to player options if certain thresholds are met. I would not be surprised if this deal included such a clause.
Negotiations often involve thresholds- I wonder what Moustakas/Boras’ thresholds were. For example, they might have said ‘no multiyear deals under 3 years unless it’s $20m AAV.’ In that case, they were running a solid chance of getting stuck with a 1 year deal- but the draft pick/int’l pool money penalty is proportionately more weighty for a 1-year rental rather than a multiyear acquisition, as the penalty is not reduced for 1 year deals.
So maybe a ‘no multi-year under $20m AAV’ stance limited the bidders to 1 year only, and that poor was limited by the draft/int’l FA penalty.
Still a strange one.
The thing is, even with the benefit of hindsight, I still think declining the QO was the right call for Moustakas.
I don’t think it is too unreasonable to think that he could have signed with the Angels before Cozart did for something like 3Y 42M.
YOU go be this philosophical about losing (at least) 11 millions dollars! lol
I admire your detachment, though I’m skeptical because it is another person’s money.
Not sure how many of us, even with the benefit of hindsight, would be OK with a $28k salary after previously turning down a $75k salary from the same employer to do the same job.
With the benefit of hindsight you think passing up $10 million was a good idea? the whole point of hindsight is that you know how it turned out.
Declining QO was a good idea.
Passing up presumably decent offers while Cozart, Frazier, et al. signed was not.
I was thinking this exact same thing. My understanding was that Moustakas was getting interest early in free agency, but when they heard the price tag (which was similar to the Dave Cameron projection, I think?) they backed far, far away.
I think it’s quite likely he could had an $17mil in AAV on a 3 year deal if he/Boras had been less stuck on the huge dollar figure early on in the FA process.
Of course, maybe he prefers that to the 3 year/42million deal you outlined because he gets another shot next year (there is still even a chance he gets a big deal next year, although I’d probably bet against that). But if that’s the case, then he definitely missed by not taking the qualifying offer.
Just a quick note–it looks like tung twista’s intuition was correct:
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mellinger/article204259794.html
For those who don’t click, the relevant quote:
“Early in the offseason, according to two league sources, he and his agent, Scott Boras, turned down a three-year deal from the Angels worth around $45 million.”
Agents work hard to keep rejected low ball offers out of the press, as they don’t want such offers to form a price point or anchor negotiations (even though clubs almost always figure out the best competing offers).
So nearly every ‘where are the offers?’ FA this offseason has actually been sitting on market value offers- Darvish, Hosmer, Moustakas, Holland, Arrieta, & Cobb for sure.
Actually they “had” been sitting on them, in the past tense. Those offers went away.
I also think it’s possible that he winds up signing a better deal next offseason with a team like the Orioles or Padres, especially if he bounces back in the field. I wouldn’t bank on it and I certainly wouldn’t advise it, but it is possible.
Mike Moustakas needs a new agent.
Declining the QO was a mistake, and people make mistakes from time to time.
Getting less than Todd Frazier got is professional malpractice.
Not sure this is accurate either. Todd is a more consistent player, defender, and close as a hitter. Also, Moustakas is a grown up. Im sure he expected to get a multi-year deal, like nearly everyone did.
I’m really not sure Frazier is more consistent at all, but he certainly is not more consistent to such a large extent to justify double the money while being 2+ years older than Moustakas.
Moustakas WAR last 4 years: 2.2, 0.7, 3.7, 0.5
Frazier WAR last 4 years: 3.0, 2.5, 4.5, 4.8
Certainly seems more consistent to me.
So not even going to mention that the 0.7 is from the season where he tore his knee up and only played only 27 games? Yeah, thats not disingenuous at all.
The past 3 seasons the difference between Frazier and Moustakas is pretty minimal.
Is it really double the money though? Frazier is getting $17mm for 2 years.
If the option gets picked up, Moustakas will get $22.7mm for 2 years.
If the option doesn’t get picked up but he gets over 450 at bats, Moustakas will get $8.7mm this year (more than Frazier) plus whatever he signs for next year.
The only way he actually gets half of what Frazier is getting, is if Moustakas gets less than 450 at bats and can only find a $1-2mm offer next off-season.
I just quickly looked at his FG page and they still have him listed as making 12 million for 1 year. My mistake.
Agents often waive fees in situations like this, to avoid litigation and to keep the client.
Blanket policies by agents of rejection QOs (and/or rejecting all extension offers) can and typically have been in their clients’ best interests, so it’s not malpractice.
We don’t know how many roughly market offers Moustakas may have personally rejected as well: although the lack of press reports of any offers besides the QO is notable.
Hard to imagine that he literally had zero offers other than the two by KC, the QO and $6.5.
I am in the actor representation business, so it is a little similar, but not exact.
Blanket policies are almost always bad, you really need to go client to client. What is good for one client is potentially awful for another client. I would never flat out advise all my clients in the exact same manner.
The second thing is that the client gets the final say. The agent works the deal, but if he presents an offer to the client that the client doesn’t like, he can reject it as he sees fit. The client can also take any deal that an agent would advise against. In the end, the decision falls on the client, and the agent can only advise. Yes, they make bad decisions and give bad advice at times, but you can only go with the information you have in your hands when the decision is going to be made. I have definitely advised clients in he past not to take a role because the pay was terrible and there was no one on the production team that was a known commodity, and then the film went on to win awards and we kicked ourselves afterwards. On the same token, I have a client currently in a play that I told him not to do, but he decided to do it anyway.
At the end of the day, the only way that there would be any grounds to really bring a lawsuit is if there was evidence that Boras did not bring all offers to the client (unless there was something in writing to the effect of “just turn down everything under $10MM AAV” from the client) or if there was evidence that Boras intentionally gave bad advice.
This was a case where the narrative got way, way ahead of the reality. Todd Frazier seemed to be struggling recently and Moustakas seemed to be playing well, but Frazier actually had a higher WAR last year than Moustakas and has a better track record overall.
This whole thing about Moustakas>Frazier was something that doesn’t hold up well the more you delve into the numbers. They’re more or less equivalent in terms of value.
This agrees with my view. I do not hang on the WAR of every player but I assumed that Moustakas had a much higher WAR than Frazier this past year. It was apparent that Moose’s speed was beginning to challenge Kendrys Morales but the power was far better and the defense, while I have less than zero use for the present metrics used, was not Pablo Sandoval level. At the same time Frazier was battling the Mendoza line and, while competent, never appeared to be in Arenado’s or Machado’s league with the glove. As a person who follows the game very closely, Moustakas’s inability to get a lucrative multi-year deal is the most surprising.
Still hard to believe that Hosmer got so much more than Moose, given that they both were facing weak markets and have had similar values throughout their careers.
Obviously Hosmer had the advantages of 1) being one year younger, 2) being healthier, 3) coming off a better year.
But it doesn’t seem like those advantages should have led to such a huge difference in contract value.
I agree. But the oddity is why Hosmer got so much, not why Moose got so little. Perhaps people are really buying into swing changes and believe if he improves his launch angle then he has more value?
4 WAR at age 27. As much as we here about his inconsistency, its just as likely that someones most recent year at that age, is them reaching a new level of their actual talent.
Age 27 is peak, it is not at all “just as likely” (i.e. 50th percentile) that a career year at age 27 represents a new normal, compared to his projections.
I doubt Hosmer is now suddenly a true talent .351 babip player. Hosmer is alsways among the league leaders in GB rate, so his babip drives his offensive production which is why his babips of .314, .255, .335, .312, .336, .301, .351 perfectly coincide with good year/bad year pattern.
I suspect we’re all on the same page with this, but anyone who pays that much money for a fixer-upper FA is doing it wrong.
I think that the Padres were paying for the “intangibles” and the idea that his prior year was somehow sustainable. Recency bias when a guy had a 2.2 fWAR year isn’t as potent as when a guy has a 4+ fWAR year.
Moustakas doesn’t walk, doesn’t hit for average, doesn’t run, and his defensive grade as per FG has been declining for 5 straight years (and is now negative). None of those things is likely to improve at this point. He has one skill, power, that is extremely plentiful right now. I am not sure why anyone would want to sign him for more than what he got.
But one-trick pony relief pitchers with checkered backgrounds are signing for deals worth more than Moustakas got. And excepting the truly elite ones relief pitchers’ performance can be wildly variable from year to year .
The difference is the manager gets to choose when he uses that relief pitcher for maximum impact. A position player just plays each game.
There are also a lot more bullpen spots to fill than there are 3b slots
Even as a one-trick pony in 2017 he was worth 2+ WAR. I get why a team wouldn’t want to give him long-term money, but if he couldn’t find a one-year offer for $10-11 that seems far more on his agent than the direction of his career.
Scott Boras should have known what the Angels were up to within half an hour of the World Series ending. If there was any chance Moose would have to take a cut-price one-year deal, he should have gone out of his way to sell the Yankees on his guy; they’d make all kinds of good use of left-handed power in the short term and not have to worry about blocking younger guys int he long term. He didn’t have another free agent client with a smaller number of potential landing spots before free agency even opened. Being patient was a disservice.
You may be right. Its hard to criticize an agent who has been so crazy successful, but he could have overextended himself here.
I understand a weak market for Moustakas, 6 or 7m per WAR for a deal of 3 years or less. 3/50 or so would make some sense, or 2/38. His QO at $17.4 made sense.
I wonder if this is Boras driven or medicals driven, because on it’s face it doesn’t make sense. His movement decline is a big problem but he was still near average defensively last year and is .263 BABIP was actually his 4th best mark in his career. ZIPS and Steamer are probably being over optimistic about his baserunning (only -0.7 by ZIPS, and -1.8 by Steamer), when a Statcast/Savant based projection might project closer to -5.0, thereby reducing projected WAR to about 2.
His power and K-rate are good enough to make him a safe bet for 1.5 WAR next year even if he moves down the defensive spectrum and is very poor on the bases. Strange deal.
Jeff I just want to say thank you. You are good at your job and I immensely look forward to reading each and every of your new posts and articles. You are one of the very best baseball writers working today. Keep doing what you’re doing.
The $2.2M in incentives are reportedly easily obtainable (450 PA). If he’s remotely healthy, this is really a 1 year, $8.7M deal which matches last year’s salary.
Seems crazy no one else would offer more than that. I mean, my twins have question marks at third with Sano and moose on a one year would have been perfect. Maybe if he wasn’t going to get a multi year deal he decided to stay put regardless of the money? Roll the dice again next year
I’d think it has to be something like that. The gap between the $6.5 and a roughly market QO offer of $17.4 is around $11m. What might have been done to close that gap?
The incentives mentioned may have a present-value of $1.5m, Boras might have waived fees having a value north of $2m, perhaps the mutual option is much closer to a player option (which adds some present-value), on top of other potential accommodations such as signing fees. Still, very surprising deal.
Moustakas did have an offer 3/45.
“Early in the offseason, according to two league sources, he and his agent, Scott Boras, turned down a three-year deal from the Angels worth around $45 million.”
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mellinger/article204259794.html
You might have added a screen shot of Moose taking a Rondon fastball to the knee last season. Might explain some of the lumbering slugger issues and also make sense of his splits last year.
I used to be an athletic baseball player, but then I took a fastball to the knee
Same knee as the ACL. Knee blew up like a balloon and he wasn’t the same after.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKx6EPimxPI
Fus Ro Dah!
If you create a custom player list and you select a group of husky, LH power bats who are slow, and not good baserunners or defenders – like Lucas Duda, Matt Adams, Mike Moustakas, Adam Lind, Seth Smith, etc., and look at their stats since 2014 or 2015….
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that signing Moustakas for something like 5yr/$85-95MM (plus draft compensation!) would be batsh*t crazy. Sure, he’s been decent as a defender at 3b in the past (though seemingly trending down), but it’s not like you’d want him there for much longer. He’s slow and getting slower and his xwOBA was much lower than his actual wOBA last year.
I wonder what the best offer he received was during the offseason (well, he was offered ~$17MM by the Royals). Oof.
3/45 it seems
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mellinger/article204259794.html
Boras is humorously denying any offer was made, by which he could only mean that no formal offer on watermarked paper was tendered: clearly he is vested in a PR campaign such that the 3/45 offer is inconvenient.
My guess is that Boras set red lines for negotiation, a la ‘no deals under 4 years unless $20m AAV.’ With the pick and int’l pool $ penalty, such a line probably made it likely that a 1-year deal would be the outcome.
Depending on the contract clauses (incentives, mutual option converting to player option, etc) and Boras potentially waiving his fee, this deal could be worth around $10m to Moustakas this year. Still an under-market contract for sure, but maybe high enough that the Braves et al might not have had the option of winning the bidding with, for example, 1/13.
With the recent provision that players can only receive a QO once in their careers, it seems like a low-risk smart move to take the offer unless you’re a solid lock to get a huge deal (i.e. Machado, Harper).
Kick the FA can down the road for one season and play for $17-18M, which is quite possibly a higher AAV than you’d sign for anyway. You’ll enter the market just one year older, unencumbered by the QO compensation requirements.
Of course, you’d be betting on yourself to perform, but even if you fell apart, it might not work out as badly as the alternative. If Mark Trumbo accepted the QO at $17.2M, he’d have cost himself less money than Moustakas did by rejecting it.
This makes a lot of sense. The other exception besides superstars might be players coming off a career year, if they think they can spin that into a multi-year deal for much more than they’d get if they regressed. But that’s just a matter of the agent knowing who’s a “lock” for a big deal and advising the player accordingly.
But in general, I think you’re absolutely right. Without looking it up, it seems like a lot of mid-range guys the past few years have declined the QO and signed for a significantly lower AAV on a 2-3 year deal. I’ve got to think most of those guys could have played a year for the QO salary and then signed a 1-2 year deal to put them in at least as good a position.
Even when players could just get slapped with the QO again, I’m not sure they wouldn’t come out ahead in a lot of cases. String a couple 1/17 contracts together, and 3/30 doesn’t look so good by comparison.
I dunno. I think if a player is told that they are worth $17M for one year, that they can reasonably think that they are worth more on a longer deal. All the “experts” predicted something like 5/90. I’m sure his agent floated an even bigger number. Hell, if he’d signed for 3/36 he would have considered it a massive disappointment but it still would have been double the QO in real dollars and be short enough to give him another chance at free agency before he got too old.
Even if someone suggested that Moose wouldn’t get a good deal and would have to settle for a pillow contract, we’d all assume it would be something in the 12-15M range.
This is shocking, and I think utter unpredictable.
The wild card IMO is that there is a known risk of disaster when non-star players reject the offer (Drew, Morales, ’15 Desmond), and while it’s hard to predict whether it will happen to a particular player, we’ve seen it happen enough that it should be baked into the decision-making process.
Even without taking the unusually slow market into consideration, it seems like the best risk-reward play for a player of Moustakas’ caliber would be to have $17.4M in hand with the guarantee of re-entering free agency just one year older with no strings attached.
I think players are more interested in QOs (and hometown discounts) than agents/MLBPA.
So, for an analogous example, the union often has to step in when players are interested in accepting well below market hometown discounts or other deals that create bad (from union’s perspective) precedent/price points for the market as a whole.
Just as the union has a bit of a policy against hometown discounts, many agencies have blanket policies against accepting QOs (or negotiating contract extensions). These policies- and not individual decision making- caused a complete rejection of all QOs for some time until the current norm prevailed, where only a few players per year, represented generally by small agencies, accept QOs.
The policy is probably strongly in the best interests of a given large-agencies clients in the aggregate, but as you mention- for the player projected under 3 WAR it is a fairly decent deal (especially since players can get insurance for injury with respect to future earnings).
Good points. You can understand an agency’s thought process for having an umbrella policy on rejecting QOs. They feel better about their clients’ results on the whole when rejecting the offer, even if some individuals are hurt by it.
I’d argue, however, that this stance is intuitive rather than evidence-based, and may actually be wrong. We don’t have enough examples of players who accepted the QO to compare the results of accepting vs. rejecting. I think it’s quite possible that, on the whole, players may do better when accepting and re-entering free agency a year later than when rejecting.
I also think it’s interesting that Boras clients often go “year-to-year” on arbitration salaries rather than lock themselves into an unnecessarily team-friendly extension. Yet the strategy seems to be flipped when it comes to the QO, with FAs angling for years and eschewing a high-AAV one-year deal.
This was just not that hard to predict, ACL or not. If teams don’t have a need, and several other third basemen are on the trade market, it does not matter how fast you run.
The market for left-handed sluggers has been adjusted for the fact that they are very vulnerable late in games – because of eight man bullpens and five inning starters. This pitching evolution has two effects – the first is there are more lefty specialists in those bullpens, and the second is there are fewer teams with 3B-capable right handed hitters on the bench that can be held in reserve for pinch hitting (there are only four position players on the bench). If a team does have such a RH player at 3B, how likely is it that the lefty slugging 3B is such a huge upgrade vs. RHP that it warrants a very big investment? If you had Wilmer Flores and only Wilmer Flores, that is a compelling case. But the choice is not to play Flores every day or add Moustakas, there was Frazier and Nunez and Harrison and Rodriguez and Freese and presumably Dietrich also avaliable, to name a few.
Disagreed. 3B can shift to 1B or DH, some can shift to 2B or LF.
There are plenty of clubs Moustakas would have represented more than 1 WAR upgrade. Even with the incentives included from the KC deal, 1/$8.7m is on the cheap side, even where he’d add just 1 WAR.
It’s a strange deal that probably has a bit more to do with what Boras is up to than what Moustakas is up to.
Well, I guess he didn’t want to play for any of those “plenty of clubs”
Yup, seems so.
It’s notable that KC is a uniquely regressive club. They celebrate being old fashioned and anti-empirical, maybe the only current MLB club that is married to being low-information or anti-information. They do have a WS trophy, so it makes some sense (though not really).
Moustakas might look at how willing KC has been to play underperforming players regardless of WAR, so long as they are ‘gritty.’ KC is probably the club least like to cut back Moustakas’ PAs if he posts a .290 OBP and declines substantially at 3B and on the basepaths. They also have no one coming up pushing for playing time.
I strongly disagree with KC being labeled “anti-empirical”. This was true in the early days of the Dayton Moore regime, but since then they’ve really changed.
They’re not the Astros, or the Dodgers, or the Rays, or the A’s, but they’ve become much more savvy since then.
Really, there are probably no more than 5 clubs (Tigers, Marlins, maybe Reds/Rangers/Rockies) that have really resisted this work.
First the market/all the teams are wrong for not fighting over 1-2 WAR players with big contracts, no matter how many free agent players this happens to.
Now the Royals do not know what they are doing despite being within a game of a second world series title in addition to the one that they won in one of the tiniest markets in MLB.
It sure seems like someone is anti-information.
What was his initial asking price? Was he asking for 5 yr $100 and couldn’t generate a counter or was he asking for something much higher – driving teams to explore other options until there was nobody left to take him?
Great work. Hadn’t thought of it that way. You made the whole thing make more sense.
I’m reminded of the story about a small plot of land in a sought-after area, whose owner refused to sell it so developers built all around that piece of land, making it totally worthless at the end.
Please tell me that Lucas Duda & Jon Jay are the big skyscrapers in this story.
whats really sad is he is a fit for the braves, but they are on YEAR 5 OF ULTIMATE TANK JOB. They need to start competing now, and they still look a few years away from spending money. SAD. havent spent a dime in 5 years trying to win.
Pretty awful all those small market teams didn’t jump on Mousse for $10m/1 when it became obvious his market cratered. It was an opportunity for a very large payoff. It’s insane they didn’t jump.
Teams might have offered $10/1.
We know Moustaskas/Boras turned down $17.4/1. As a poster noted above, the KC deal has some easily achieved PA incentives taking the deal up to $8.7m. If Moustakas’ best offer was $10/1 from Atlanta, for example, KC might have put together a package that matched that value, but is being reported at $6.5 for Boras talking-points purposes.
I’d expect a long and loud Boras campaign after this with Moustakas as the face of a major PR push.
If you have the Athletic, there’s an article about the Angels and Zack Cozart that may give us some insight here. Cozart agreed to his contract to play second, not third, and literally while he was on his way to the airport to go sign the contract, he got a call saying, ‘Kinsler unexpectedly fell in our laps, would you be willing to play third? Cozart actually didn’t want to at first, and had to be talked into it by his wife.
So, it isn’t hard to surmise plan A for the Angels was sign Cozart for second, and then get a free agent third baseman (probably Moustakas, like everyone guessed). But when the Tigers said ‘here, have Kinsler for free’ after their deal with Cozart was agreed to, but before pen was put to paper, it changed everything.
Obviously, who knows if the the third base plan WAS Moustakas. But it was someone, and then became Cozart. Cozart wasn’t the plan at third – at least according to Cozart. And Cozart’s wife.
Wow, admittedly these terms are a bit of a shock.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the qualifying offer wasn’t the only ‘better than this’ offer that Boras turned down for Moustakas. But still, even for a 1-year deal with KC, this number comes off as a bit of a shock. Perhaps the medical info coupled with the big post-injury drop in movement ability has clubs ruling him out. I can’t recall a nearly 3 WAR player going this cheap, so I admit that this is the first deal of the offseason that does fit the common Travis/Craig ‘FA spending is the new market inefficiency’ narrative.
I do wonder if Boras/Moustakas took less on a 1-year deal that they could have had with other clubs. Boras is invested in his PR campaign and may have his eye on taking over or putting a friendly associate into Tony Clark’s job. Moustakas presumably likes KC, moving is not free, and Boras might have been willing to drop his fee if Moustakas, as agents sometimes do when they’ve made a mess of negotiations.
Still very surprising and a point of evidence against what I’ve been arguing as far as ‘no major discounts’ so far this offseason. If he’s DH only, it makes some sense, but he was near average at 3B last year, so pretty bewildering why Hosmer gets $140m ($20+M AAV) but Moustakas gets $6.5m.
How is Todd Frazier’s deal for two-year $17M not a major discount?
Both Fangraphs crowd and Dave Cameron expected three-year $42M.
His last five year WARs were 3.1, 4.8, 4.5, 2.5, 3.0 and is projected for 2.1~2.9 depending on your choice of projection.
Good point, Frazier and Cozart can be argued to be major discounts IMO- but Frazier took a discount to stay in NY. Not sure what his other offers were.
I wonder if the Mets approached Moustakas before signing Frazier. always thought of them as pretty close.
Jeff, what do you think about the MLBPA pushing for the DH in the NL to get some more CI guys jobs?
I feel like one of the problems of Boras’ representation is that no one in Boras’ office will show up at Fangraphs to read this article critical of his representation.
Boas has a multi-million dollar analytics department staffed with dozens of full-time stat guys, I’m pretty sure someone in his office reads Fangraphs.
They may read it, but you can be sure that they can’t understand it.
Excellent article,it appears the ACL inj. has affected,both D,and BR.
2.7 war,was it now based solely on his offense.
He seems to be a rapidly aging example.
I can’t decide whether this or the Hosmer contract is more jaw-dropping. Less guaranteed money than Jarrod Dyson!
Maybe he’ll get lucky and the Orioles will move Machado. Moose is definitely an Angelos-type player.
Yep, less guaranteed money than Dyson. And less guaranteed money than Cargo is said to be getting from the Rockies this afternoon. Also less than Andrew Cashner, Wellington Castillo, Miles Mikolas, Mike Minor…the list goes on. Pretty stunning that this is the best Boras could get for one of his top clients.
Posted this in Carson’s article too:
Can we just stop anchoring to strict $/WAR figures now? Everything is about supply and demand and it’s abundantly clear that decent corner infielders are in abundance. If Moustakas is a 2.8 Win player in 2018 (and expected to decline from there onward) how many teams were in a position on the win curve / had a paucity of other candidates such that shelling out 10+MM a year contract would have been a good investment?
My pet theory lately is that we’ve got replacement level all wrong given recent advancements in actionable information being disseminated to the players. 1-2 WAR players are being created from replacement level profiles regularly as more players are making data-driven approach / mechanical changes.
If you have a pre-arb / arb eligible in-house option that has performed in the minors you can probably assume ~1 WAR production for ~1/10 as much as a Moustakas signing. Even if Moustakas is 3x better he’s 10x the money….. in a best case scenario.
I think this makes sense. I also think we need to be looking at $/WAR on a progressive scale. So a player that is reliably going to be worth 1 win (no real chance for much more or less) isn’t going to get $9m. They might only get $4 m. And a player like Trout who is fairly reliably worth 9+ wins isn’t going to get $80m per year.
It seems like $8m/win only works for the 4-6 win guys and not those at the top and bottom. I think this is an area that needs some new thinking.
I would argue more generally that a priori $/WAR figures aren’t very helpful in determining what is and is not a good deal. It’s more helpful to look at what people are signing for (which is, as you mention, obviously a function of supply and demand), what their projections are, and then generate $/WAR figures as we go along.
It’s not just a function of supply and demand though- wins have inherent value.
An added marginal win for any team in contention is worth about $6m. For teams out of contention, it falls to around $3-4m. Wins do product tangible, short-term revenue.
So while I agree that the $9m figure may be inaccurately high, and I also agree with what you’ve pointed out with regard to forward-looking projection based WAR values as opposed to the retrospective assessments- and while of course supply and demand is always relevant and can trump inherent value when the supply overwhelms the market: it still remains true that underlying revenue-based financials will drive a fairly predictive $/WAR metric.
This FA market actually has a scarcity of high WAR players, with the notable exception of 3Bs, so I don’t think its a case where supply is so abundant that the underlying ‘actual value of a win’ fundamentals are overwhelmed. $/WAR values should typically be around $4m-$7m in an efficient market, and I think what we generally see in large data sets strongly supports those fundamentals.
While we’re listing contextual factors that didn’t get enough thought here, something else to consider is that WAR is designed to be park-neutral but player performance isn’t. This was the subject of a whole FanGraphs piece earlier in the offseason **specifically about Moustakas** so it’s particularly weird to see that analysis seems to have been forgotten, but it’s totally reasonable for specific teams to put different valuations on a player with certain characteristics — say, fringey power to a specific field — even regardless of how he fits with the rest of their roster. No one plays their home games in the neutral context.
https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/third-base-looks-like-a-buyers-market/
I think the linked article probably had a lot to do with it. I actually assumed Jeff was referring to it in the subhead “someone probably should have seen this coming” and was surprised when he didn’t mention it. The talent at third base in MLB is just insanely deep right now.
$/WAR figures are highly predictive, around 0.6 explanatory value for some data sets.
Why throughout predictive metrics because of an outlier?
Especially Moustakas- given that Boras is working so hard on the ‘my client had no good offers’ narrative. Boras is denying the reported 3/45 offer from LAA, likely because it wasn’t formally tendered on legal paper.
It may very well be that Boras is trying to make this deal look less than what it is- for example, Moustakas might have readily achieveable performance targets that convert the mutual option to a player option. We already know he has easily obtainable PA incentives (450 PAs) that add $2.2m. Such incentives, at %33 of the base salary, are rare for a player coming off of a healthy season.
Boras is so invested in the collusion PR campaign that he might rather have the reported price be $6.5m rather than $11 or whatever the present-day value of the total contract is actually worth. I’ve seen deals in real life at amount X, which for various reasons have been reported as X-40%, to accommodate certain agendas or interests. Usually an agent or player will want to inflate their price point, but sometimes the opposite occurs. Given how hard Boras is working to deny the 3/45 offer, he might also be working hard to make Moustakas the face of his ‘collusion’ or ‘anti-tony clark’ or ‘strike’ PR campaign.
The outlier in this discussion is not the Moustakas contract, it is still the Hosmer contract. A massive overpay for a player who is very meh for his position and by a team no way near contention. The Royals figured out what that was worth, the Padres? Not so much. As a long suffering Padres’ fan, I can only hope they don’t compound this unforced error by signing Arrieta.
But maybe it’s time to say that Preller is just not the great judge of talent we were led to believe. The Myers trade, the Myers extension (!), the Kemp trade, the Shields signing, now the Hosmer signing. Far too often when he makes a big move he blows it.
I’ve long had a theory that if you–as a free agent–are like a collector’s item (like a fine painting), Boras is your guy. He will run the auction and bid you up and get you an amazing deal, because no one is willing to walk away from something that rare.
However, if you are a commodity of some kind–say, maybe a dishwasher?–Boras is not a great agent for you. People are willing to walk away from a nice but overpriced dishwasher and find another somewhere else. I am sure Boras does have a track record of getting guys good contracts when they’re commodities instead of a collector’s item, but he’s missed enough that I would prefer having one of the many other competent agents out there instead.
That may be, but I think a large part of Boras’s ability is that he convinces buyers they’re bidding on collector’s items, when in fact his clients are only commodities. It worked for Hosmer, but not Moustakas.
You can explain one guy. But when “market just did not develop” has to be used for 80% of players, then collusion just begs to be mentioned as a reason why it did not.
Also, look at his H-A splits the last 2 full seasons. Kaufman kills hitters. AL teams have DH spots and somebody could have tried him at 1B or traded away an inferior 3Bman. It happens every year that teams you didnt think needed a player at a certain position gets one. Not this year
Moore obviously has flawed, but it’s possible that Boras just has too many clients, and those clients expect him to be the point person on negotiations. In a market where everything is slowing down. and values for specific types of players seem to be cratering, this lack of focus might really have hurt.
Lucroy is an A. Also, great piece on Moose’s misfortune.
I’m curious. This article was posted less than 24 hours after the signing. All offseason, there was much discussion about why free agents such as Moustakas weren’t getting the big contracts that were expected. This analysis would have provided a pretty good answer to the question for at least one guy.
I find it a little hard to believe that it was only immediately after the signing that you did all this research. Was there a reason for sitting on this article until now?
Pretty sure Sullivan just writes that fast.
The writing is not the thing. You’re telling me that it was only after Moustakas signed that he had the idea to look up Moustakas’ speed scores & defensive stats and note the pattern?
One obvious answer for your question is that Jeff had a very, very well thought out THEORY. If Mous gets a multi-year offer at the last minute, the article wouldn’t be as compelling. All it takes is one team.
low confidence in any sort of definite story on this one. nobody really knows without the insider story.