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In our latest, exciting installment of Fortune 500 For You, we axed whether anybody had second thoughts about Nelson Cruz. NO WAY ARE YOU JOKING GET OUDDA HERE HOSER!, agreed the crowd, amicably.
If there is anything Dr. D prefers to a flu that keeps him in bed for 72 straight hours, it's waking up to all his best friends answering a question he didn't ask. SSI did not ask whether we blamed Jack. He asked whether we thought WE got anything wrong in the analysis.
:: blinks :: :: i don't get the question :: :: what did he say? :: :: who knows what this guy is ever talking about ::
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If you weren't confused enough, as to what the subject is, hang in there. Here's an intermission. Nothing like a musical counter-fugue underneath a tone you can't whistle anyway...
When somebody says "it's about process!" You know one of two things instantly and without possibility of contradiction. Either:
At Microsoft it is not about process. It is about being on time, under budget, with a low defect rate. Whatever makes that happen is fine by your boss.
The heart surgeon knows the process, but he's about getting it right (keeping the machine of the woman's body working for a while longer). The hospital bureaucrat, now THAT guy loves process...
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Can you have two "fugues" in one symphony? Where is Sandy-Raleigh when we need him?
Watch two Grandmasters going over a chess game, and ... the one who lost. He knows that there was something wrong with his thinking, somewhere: if there hadn't have been, he wouldn't have lost!
Bobby Fischer was supposedly ferocious in his self-criticism, even after his wins. He figured if he didn't criticize himself, the Russians would... a chess post-mortem consists of two players asking, "How could I have thought about this better than I did?"
You're talking to a man who has stood over 100's or 1000's of chess post-mortem's, who has watched the brutal self-honesty that led to real improvement in thinking processes. When I see sabermetric post-mortems -- SSI excluded -- I generally see the exact opposite.
If you're LrKrBoi29, you might be surprised to learn that F-500 execs, and all 30 General Managers, DO want to know the holes in their thinking. That's one reason that they have assimiliated saber knowledge, while (25 years on) sabers still chip their teeth about old-school wisdom.
GM's, and execs, love money. More than they love their egos. They'll swallow their pride in their lust for success. As did Fischer.
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Let me return to the root note here, and finish on the first chord.
We all thought Nelson Cruz was going to be a land mine. Is there anything about our thinking that could have been improved?
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As far as my own thinking: number one, (1) it's possible that Cruz still is a land mine. Jury's not out. However, the evidence that is in, so far in 2014, cannot be minimized. He's liable to hit 40+ homers this year, you realize.
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But: It could be that (2) I typecast Cruz as a quickly-aging RH slow bat ... thinking about him more flexibly, I might have done better to focus on his incredible Power Indexes (PX's).
I'm way too quick to put people into templates. Into stereotypes. That's a flaw in my thinking. I need to be aware of possible templates without being encumbered by them.
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You know another mistake I tend to make in my thinking? (3) Whatever bad has happened to the Mariners -- such as Richie Sexson -- I over-weight that. We'll remember Beltre for 20 years. But what's the sample size on that?
The fact that Ackley, and Smoak, and Montero, have disappointed... we need to be aware of it without having our thinking warped by it. The next uber-prospect in :: coughzuninocough:: isn't scripted to fail. Our next trade or draft shouldn't be warped in its approach.
We're preaching to the choir. :- ) You guys make these points more effectively than I do. But, hey, the choir's all we got. After 72 hours in delirium you're going to get stream-of-consciousness. We do have the money-back guarantee, at least.
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That's the process. "Trying to find out where you're stupid." But I'm not quite sure that's what everybody means when they say "It's about process."
Your friend,
Jeff
-- How much, if any, is/was our collective opinion of Cruz weighted by the PED thing?
-- Do we weigh that differently in Cruz's case than we would for a Melky or a Peralta?
-- Is the Seattle fan base different on this count than in other cities?
We certainly wanted Cruz at two years, $14-16 mil. and thought the collapsing market for him could help us land him cheaply. Lessons learned? Yeah, a right handed bopper is crucial, and if we couldn't compete with Baltimore for a one year, showoff what you got contract, we certainly could have re-upped Michael Morse for more than the $6 mil. the Giants got him for. Morse is OPSing .880, slugging .542 in a pitcher's park, and doesn't get to play DH for the Giants. As it turns out, we keep screwing up the Michael Morse thing.
I suppose the lesson we need to learn here may be not to count Corey Hart out, the way we did Morse. Let him heal, and don't forget what we brought him here for.
If so, we'll assume your questions are rhetorical and you know the answers better than we do.
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3. I agree.
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1., 2. The point I'd missed ... er, under-weighted ... , was that Cruz had always had outrageous power indexes.
Thanks,
Jeff
If it weren't for baaaa---ad luck, we'd have no luck at all... :- )
So, no lessons learned as they pertain to Cruz himself, you think? That's a possible entry under the "Lessons Learned" section, certainly: "We got this one right."
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Patience on Hart, that's a creative inference. Good stuff Rick.
Certainly moreso than the rest of the M's blogosphere. No one else wanted to touch him: LL, Sullivan, so when I read the original article, I read it more as "What was I trying to tell you all last winter?" You were tempering your enthusiasm a bit, not to look too out of step, but I certainly remember you pointing out the positives of a Cruz pickup, while everyone else was pointing out the negatives, with a "here we go again," attitude.
So, that's my lesson learned - stay out of the echo chamber. Tomorrow's news today here, baby.
A rare example of false humility on SSI's part here, maybe? LOL.
The rest of the blog-o-sphere was laboring under a disadvantage: it dislikes players whose primary skill is to change the scoreboard from inside the batter's box.
We at SSI (the whole community) were much more back-and-forth on Cruz ... mostly "back" due to the PED's, the age and the park. But IMHO, at other sites those concerns were a veneer that papered over the kind of scoffing that even Blengino published: "Zduriencik still goes by RBI."
Guys who can hit good pitching, better than they can stack up WAR? It's a light bulb that the M's and we have on. But as you say, it's not like the M's have missed out on RH bats with .500 SLG's on their baseball cards. They got one on the DL now.
:: fistbump ::
...I was willing to offer Cruz 3 years and 45 million. The Mariners offered him 3/30 and he turned it down. They are rumored to have offered 3/42 as well. And he turned it down if they did. They kept in touch with him til the end...and he spurned them.
The lesson I learned? Hitters in a weak position for their next contract are frequently myopic (read: stupid) in their decision-making process...assuming that they are better than people say they are and assuming that they can go out, prove it, and get paid later.
If Cruz gets hurt again (as he's done several times already) or doesn't finish strong..hes not going to beat what the Mariners offered him. Even if he hits 40 homers...teams will still be more skeptical of him than a younger man. He risked much and gained a bad one-year deal and not very much upside.. His "process" was that of an egotistical doof.
My 0.02.
My biggest concern was the PED thing and leaving Texas.
I must admit I started off believing the Cameron's of the world, and wanted nothing to do with Cruz because of their reasoning about Cruz being a Texas mirage, the stereotype of a aging power hitter not aging well, and that Safeco would destroy any confidence Cruz or any right hander had as a hitter.
In addition, I believed the information about how many PED users crashed & burned after they went off the PEDs... and I still believe Cruz will quickly crash, not a slow decline... I just have no idea when the crash will start.
However, later in the off season, I was further turned off by the rumor that Cruz has turned down a couple of reasonable offers from the Mariners... and the opinion's of some experts that Cruz did not want to play in Seattle. My reasoning behind this is similar to how Doc put it in the other article on hitting - if Cruz does not want to play here, he must not have the confidence to succeed here... thus stay away.
I really have not changed my mind on these topics, but I do see a few flaws with the thinking... although there is still time to be proven right on several of these as well.
The unreasonable position Doc is chafing against, I think, was the one suggesting he was bad because he was a bad fielder and one dimensional...the stuff you mention in this post is much more in line with a reasonable set of concerns for Cruz. The last one rings especially true to me at this point. If they don't want to play here...they shouldn't. Because they're weenies. We don't want a team of weenies.
Incorporating the post on hitting in Safeco...is it as simple as accepting that Cruz and Morales (and others) just don't want to hit here?
(Cano: "Sure I'll hit for you--for a quarter billion!")
I can understand not wanting to bog down your thinking with dogma and trying to avoid attacking a problem from a static list of angles, but if the position he is taking is that it's unreasonable to judge him as a bad fielding, one dimensional player, then I disagree with his critique of said position. Here's what we knew about Cruz on January 1, 2014.
1. He is entering his age 34 season having played a *full* season once through his entire career.
2. He IS a bad defender. This isn't up for debate. Not slightly below average, but bad. Poor defender.
3. He was coming off a 50 game PED suspension.
4. He has a slugging % over the last 3 years of .495. In Texas. His OBP over the same time frame was .320. In Texas.
I know this isn't news to anybody, I'm just trying to illustrate what the information we had at the time of valuating a player was telling us. It was telling us that Nelson Cruz, with the best prediction capabilities human beings have, is worth roughly x amount. If someone is now trying to say after he's hit 17 home runs in two months that we were all wrong and boxed in in our thinking, then I'd LOVE to hear WHY that person predicted Cruz would slug 100 points higher than his career for the first two months, and not just that our process was too limited. I would also love to hear his other predictions for every other FA before the season started. Did that person predict Corey Hart would be a bad hitter? Did he predict Mike Morse would tear the cover off the ball for his first two months as well? I would also love some advice for my fantasy baseball team, and whether I should take the Pacers getting 2 at home on Wednesday.
It just seems that this is classic hindsight is 20/20 thinking. I had a "feeling" that a player was going to have a great year, and now that he has, see I told you so. I'm going to assume that if he were on the DL, or was slugging .430 right now there wouldn't be a post up regarding how the consensus was right about Cruz. What we forget when we cherry pick which players we made "a call" on is the players we missed on. Did you think Brad Miller would be hitting .153 on May 28th? Did you predict that James Paxton would pitch 12 innings, then go on the DL, then have shoulder inflammation after a rehab start, or did you predict that since he's 25 and thrown a bunch of innings, his arm was past that phase that you worry about Taijuan Walker going through?
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So my question to people that like to trash "process" would be this. What would you replace the process that led to Nelson Cruz getting a 1 year/ 8 million contract with? If not projection systems and aging curves and player comps and the other things the 29 others GM's used in determining they didn't think Cruz was worth 15/year, then what? If you can tell me a better methodology for predicting player performance than the ones GM's are using, you should be working in a front office, or more aptly, running a team.
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Another thing that get's lost in this debate is the misinterpretation of the anti-Cruz position. Reasonable people weren't saying, "avoid Cruz at all costs". I was a guy that thought we could use a player like him in the 8-12 million/year range for less than 3 years. The figures being thrown around in early FA were 5/75 or thereabouts. The anti-Cruz side thought that would be a miniature disaster, but once his price came down to 2/28 or around that, anti-Cruz people, like myself, didn't think that would be terrible. It seems maybe his hitting 17 homers has made a few memories a little foggy.
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One last question. Would you sign Nelson Cruz to a 3/45 tomorrow if he were cut by Baltimore, obviously assuming there wasn't some weird issue? If so, why?
I can understand not wanting to bog down your thinking with dogma and trying to avoid attacking a problem from a static list of angles, but if the position he is taking is that it's unreasonable to judge him as a bad fielding, one dimensional player, then I disagree with his critique of said position. Here's what we knew about Cruz on January 1, 2014.
1. He is entering his age 34 season having played a *full* season once through his entire career.
2. He IS a bad defender. This isn't up for debate. Not slightly below average, but bad. Poor defender.
3. He was coming off a 50 game PED suspension.
4. He has a slugging % over the last 3 years of .495. In Texas. His OBP over the same time frame was .320. In Texas.
I know this isn't news to anybody, I'm just trying to illustrate what the information we had at the time of valuating a player was telling us. It was telling us that Nelson Cruz, with the best prediction capabilities human beings have, is worth roughly x amount. If someone is now trying to say after he's hit 17 home runs in two months that we were all wrong and boxed in in our thinking, then I'd LOVE to hear WHY that person predicted Cruz would slug 100 points higher than his career for the first two months, and not just that our process was too limited. I would also love to hear his other predictions for every other FA before the season started. Did that person predict Corey Hart would be a bad hitter? Did he predict Mike Morse would tear the cover off the ball for his first two months as well? I would also love some advice for my fantasy baseball team, and whether I should take the Pacers getting 2 at home on Wednesday.
It just seems that this is classic hindsight is 20/20 thinking. I had a "feeling" that a player was going to have a great year, and now that he has, see I told you so. I'm going to assume that if he were on the DL, or was slugging .430 right now there wouldn't be a post up regarding how the consensus was right about Cruz. What we forget when we cherry pick which players we made "a call" on is the players we missed on. Did you think Brad Miller would be hitting .153 on May 28th? Did you predict that James Paxton would pitch 12 innings, then go on the DL, then have shoulder inflammation after a rehab start, or did you predict that since he's 25 and thrown a bunch of innings, his arm was past that phase that you worry about Taijuan Walker going through?
...............................
So my question to people that like to trash "process" would be this. What would you replace the process that led to Nelson Cruz getting a 1 year/ 8 million contract with? If not projection systems and aging curves and player comps and the other things the 29 others GM's used in determining they didn't think Cruz was worth 15/year, then what? If you can tell me a better methodology for predicting player performance than the ones GM's are using, you should be working in a front office, or more aptly, running a team.
............................
Another thing that get's lost in this debate is the misinterpretation of the anti-Cruz position. Reasonable people weren't saying, "avoid Cruz at all costs". I was a guy that thought we could use a player like him in the 8-12 million/year range for less than 3 years. The figures being thrown around in early FA were 5/75 or thereabouts. The anti-Cruz side thought that would be a miniature disaster, but once his price came down to 2/28 or around that, anti-Cruz people, like myself, didn't think that would be terrible. It seems maybe his hitting 17 homers has made a few memories a little foggy.
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One last question. Would you sign Nelson Cruz to a 3/45 tomorrow if he were a FA, assuming of course that there wasn't some weird issue? If so, why?
We've seen players on roids and HGH play well until they are 40. And, the Balco case has taught us that a properly administered roid regimen cannot be detected with current tests. So, here we have Cruz, either on the end of his career, or on the verge of a lucrative $50 million payday. He has already been caught with PEDs. He has no Cooperstown reputation to tarnish. If he hits poorly, or becomes injured, he has to retire and doesn't get paid. If he gets caught using steroids, he is only losing out on money he probably wouldn't be making anyway. He won't face any legal problems, as low amounts of steroids are a misdemeanor in most states, and HGH is legal. If he doesn't get caught, he gets full gold and glory.
Verdict: Bid with confidence, just don't ask about the gummy bears.
In fact, economically, teams should target suspected roid users, because they can win some ball games, and under the current system, nothing ever happens to the team that employs a caught roid user, except the team doesn't have to pay a salary while the player is on the restricted list.
How much of Cruz's production is fueled by his mindset that he HAS to produce this season, and right away, rather than "I got my multi year, and I'm entering my twilight years. Time to settle in and enjoy it." Baltimore got a great deal, and they are going to milk it for all it's worth . The.next team: Not so good. The next team is going to pay for Baltimore's good fortune.
We need to find ways to milk similar situations here at Safeco: signing pitchers to one year, make good contracts.
Cruz at 3/45? Looking at it right now, it wouldn't be a bad decision. The guy can crush the ball, and right handed power seems to be a scarcity, especially for us.