Case Study #1:
From MC the question is asked:
Both Lackey and Harden have been linked to the Mariners this offseason. Setting aside any consideration of signing both, or other teams in the mix... let's say for a moment that Jack Z is going to sign ONE of these two starters (presumably to go with Felix, RRS, Morrow, and Snell).
Considering all aspects of these guys... performance, age, injury risk, cost to sign and probable length of contract, amount of 2010 cash left over for other acquisitions and Felix uber-contracts... which would you rather have?
Why sign up Lackey for multiple years when you have young talent at the MLB level and SP talent soon to follow? Instead of tying our hands with a longer contract, sign Harden to an incentive-laden contract. If he does well and stays healthy, he takes a roster spot all year. If not, bring in one of Morrow or RRS to finish the season of starts. This would help the issue of increasing the innings too quickly for our young starters.
What I would do is to sign two players with this in mind. I would try for both Harden and Bedard for the same reasons. Bedard might not be completely ready at the start of the season anyways and we can run RRS out there right from the start.
My .o2 cents.
God bless, Michael
One of the anonymous posts, discussing Capt Jack's agility, clanged off the LF scoreboard. (grrrrr... sign 'em in the text area you pokeys. It's five letters.)
This is really the difference between a great executive and a guy that has been promoted one level beyond his competency. Bavasi always seemed to have one plan and one plan only. He went into each off season projecting what he wanted ("left handed sock; innings eating starter, et al) and seemed to have no flexibility at all.
Jack, on the other hand, seems to have contingency stacked upon contingency. I doubt that there is any malice involved - he's probably got three or four other irons in the fire for the 1B/DH slots that we have no inkling of. His flexibility is unbelievable.
Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett's right hand man) talks a lot about having different "mental models" for various business strategies and being able to switch one's mind between the models on the fly. He swears that's what makes Berkshire Hathaway so powerful - they don't have one rigid philospohy that they are captive of; he and Buffett have layer upon layer of these "mental models" and it allows them to analyze each situation or investment through multiple prisms and from wildly different angles. Munger's former right hand man uses the same techniques at his little startup (Overstock.com).
I think Jack is like that. It's fascinating.
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And, as Michael brilliantly delineated, when a sports team develops a short, fat player talent pyramid, it gives you all sorts of upward back-pressure towards fine performance.
The ants are scrambling all over each other to reach the top, your options are going to be much different. :- )
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Conversely, when you use a box-shaped Pat Gillick player pyramid -- let's entrench 20 entitled Honda Civics and freeze out the bush leaguers -- your options sort of ossify. Which is why Gillick bails after three or four years.
Of course, that's a testimony to Gillick's unbelievable talent judgment, that he makes such a static plan work so well.
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The 1997 Mariners must have had the tallest, skinniest, most fragile, Eiffel-Tower shaped pyramid since WWII.
Can you think of another team that had literally 3 of the top 50 players ever, two more fringe HOF'ers* ... and was constantly running out #4-#5 starters with 6.00 ERA's? Absolutely nobody in AAA to help with any problem at the big-league-level? You had 5-9 dominating ballplayers backed up by the Pay'n'Pak slo-pitch team. Ever seen that?
Maybe these guys were the next-closest thing. With Pudge, Raffy, Juan Gone and Kevin Brown, the 90's Rangers could never develop the supporting cast.
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The recent Angels have emphatically endorsed the short, squat pyramid. The Angels often OPS+ 102, or something, but they've got 35 legit ML players doing it. That creates a 'hardened target' for rival franchises and with Scioscia, their self-belief and roster agility creates all kinds of problems for the enemy...
Beane's Oakland A's were the same way before the dropoff. Beane liked having 9 players to make 5, in the non-glove positions.
Both teams were willing to flex for a true 'Maypole' superstar -- Giambi, Vlad -- but those were variations on the basic paradigm, the short, fat talent pyramid.
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What is really interesting here, was that in 2009, Zduriencik and Wakamatsu managed the season as though they had a short, fat talent pyramid, when they did not.
Silva was powerflushed in the first month, and Wakamatsu started shuffling Vargas, French, Fister, etc etc into the rotation as though these players were blue-chip AAA'ers groomed for the job.
Similar things happened in the #3-4 outfield positions, and SS, and DH -- although Capt and Wok had to use $1-2M castoffs scrounged off the scrap heap (Chavez, Langerhans, Hannahan, Sweeney, etc) to simulate a "talent pyramid."
In 2009, the M's talent judgment was Gillickian.
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And that means what to me?
It will sure be cool to watch Zduriencik and Wakamatsu manage a season after the short, fat pyramid is in place.
Cheers,
Dr D
Comments
And that is exactly the dilemma. The best minds, James, Epstein, Gillick, Jocketty, whoever, they would come up with opposing views on the question you just posed.
The short, squat player pyramid gives you (1) quality scrubs, and by the law of averages gives you (2) more internally-grown Stars.
The question of the size of the talent pipeline is a separate question, IMHO, from the issue of 25-man roster agility.
You can have as much talent feeding in as you like but you're not going to be able to plan on getting John Lackey coming through it. You can plan on getting Ryan Rowland-Smith.
Not going to replace a healthy Bedard or Harden very often, either....