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I would rather take Jose Abreu first, but Morales is a fine second choice... and easier to get currently I would think.
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Q. [Regarding $14M for Kendrys Morales in 2014] If teams pay 4-5 mil per win in free agency, should they pay more for DH's because everyone is forced to have one? I'm honestly curious.
A. No, definitely not. Nobody should pay more for a DH because other teams have a DH.
That would be an incorrect reason to pay more than $5M per 1 WAR in free agency. But! Perhaps the WAR formula wasn't sent from On High and perhaps it is subject to revision.
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Q. Suppose I like the WAR formula as it is. WHEN would you pay more than $4-5M per 10 runs (1 WAR)?
A. There are some paradigms that become so pervasive that --- > the adherents become unaware that there are other paradigms.
And this one assumes that there is no other way to look at building a pennant winner, other than to pay $4-5M per 10 runs in free agency.
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Q. Like what other paradigm would there be?
A. Like the one real baseball uses, as opposed to the one you find on fangraphs for use in graphing by fans.
Just for openers: is that what teams pay for closers? Rafael Soriano has 0.3, 1.2, and 0.2 WAR (so far this year) the last three seasons, and pulls down $11M per.
Mariano Rivera has averaged almost exactly 2.0 WAR the last 19 years -- right about where Kendrys Morales is. Jonathan Papelbon scored 4/$50M for his two-WAR production.
That's just a f'r instance. If you're losing games in the bullpen, it could be that a given "hero" could affect the clubhouse by far more than the BRUTE FORCE, "bases-gained-and-lost" paradigm argues.
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We're not saying that you want to be ignorant of a player's Win Shares or WAR. We're saying that WAR is not ALL you need be aware of!
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Q. What's wrong with paying $4-5M per WAR, and just sticking to that?
A. We've got a major business fallacy here, a true rupture in logic:
- AXIOM 1 - the industry average for home buying, all 50 states, is $100 per square foot.
- CONCLUSION - the "correct" amount for Gates to pay, for his house, is $100 per square foot.
There weren't any premises, no theorems, just an axiom and then a silly conclusion from it.
You're "honestly curious"? Okay, pause and think, amigo...
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How did we get from "THE INDUSTRY AVERAGE IS" ---- > to ---- > "THE CORRECT AMOUNT TO PAY, IN EACH CASE, IS" ?
But that is exactly what Fangraphs does. I doubt very seriously they are even aware of the fallacy in the above line. But it is the difference between a 22-year-old ECON 253 student and a millionaire in real estate. No real millionaire is encumbered by industry averages!
College grads insist on believing that millionaires are not AWARE of the WAR formulas. Terrifying for them to contemplate the fact that millionaires do review the WAR formulas, and then move beyond them.
You don't even win a Monopoly game, much less a pennant, by paying industry average for Illinois Avenue. So the tournament average price paid for it is $330. You suppose no world-class Monopoly player ever won a game by paying $400 for Illinois?
Dr. D gets some of them wrong ... not this one, gentlemen, not this one. Fangraphs sees somebody pay over the industry average and, not one moment's extra thought given, down comes the hammer and the buyer is an idiot. If you talked that way to a Monopoly champion or a world-class poker player, he would look at you like you were something brown and unpleasant on his shoe.
Sorry to be pointed, but Fangraphs itself is pointed -- when scoffing at the poker champion who bets a certain pair of 10's harder than the industry average. If they dish it out, they gotta be able to eat it, too.
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Q. Okay, abstractions aside. Why exactly would Kendrys Morales be worth more than his WAR? (Hey, that rhymes!)
A. Because (1) he's the only guy right now who can drive in a blinkin' run. Him and Seager. And (2) the M's got no place else to spend the money.
The M's got ARod, Griffey, and Edgar? No way in the world you pay Morales $14M. The M's are trying to rebound from a 513-run scenario? Different conversation.
Baseball teams, all 30 baseball teams, pay more than $5M per WAR if it will fix a huge problem. Very often this occurs in the bullpen. But it can also occur in the middle of the lineup, if you got NOBODY who can hit. And it can occur in the rotation, if you got no "staff ace." That's when you see teams make white-knuckle decisions to pay Gil Meche or somebody. You gotta fix holes.
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Q. Supposing you could score 800 runs next year without Morales?
A. Show me. I'd rather see a 2014 roster that wins 90 games without Kendrys, than with him. I'm all ears.
In the meantime, there's a big difference between 4 years, $56M and 1 year, $14M. When you're talking Morales, don't forget the one year part.
ESPECIALLY WHEN YOUR ROSTER IS IN TRANSITION AND YOU DON'T KNOW YET WHAT YOU HAVE.
Cheers,
Dr D
Comments
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can you show your work?
The reason that Fangraphs is so convinced about their "rightness" re: the idea that your average MOTO hitter is overpaid for being a MOTO hitter is that they've done their math to back up the suggestion. They've got a WAR formula, they like it pretty well, and they're sticking by it. What I understand you're saying is, there's a disparity between the WAR formula and what the teams are doing, so therefore teams must know something WAR doesn't. Some people would call you out for "appeal to authority", but I do think there's some merit to the suggestion (I mean, these guys are paid to be good at understanding baseball...). Thing is, I'd like to see some evidence to support what you're saying.
It's great that you have confidence in your assertion, but I just can't buy into a claim like that without seeing ground-up evidence. You're sort of bringing me in at the end of the movie here: you're saying WAR undervalues RBIs, OK, got that, but why? What specific thing is wrong with the formula? What skill makes one guy a good bet to produce RBIs? Is WAR undervaluing clutch hitting, and if so, are all of these supposedly overpaid MOTO guys career clutch hitters? Is it undervaluing power? We know how well team wOBA correlates with runs scored, and how well team WAR correlates with wins... if you give a bump in wOBA or WAR to players with power, does it improve the correlation?
I'm interested in your idea, but I can't buy in until I see the work. I confess I've thought about writing this up myself a few times, but unfortunately I'm going to be laptop-less for about a week, so I won't be able to do it real soon. Don't mean to challenge you to write something; it's your blog... but I gotta say I'd love to see your math.
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... at least not in the sense that Fangraphs usually means it. You can show your work that Erasmo's ERA is misleading. You can't show your work that Kendrys Morales is or isn't the right signing for 2014. It was the Fangraphs* guys who made the assertion that --- > $/WAR, and $/WAR ONLY, wins pennants.
THAT is the thing to be proven. Show your work.
;- )
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Bill James is glad to tackle micro questions about baseball: Does a good first 5 starts mean that a pitcher has above-average chances? Is it a bad thing for hitters to strike out? Is it good to shift the defense?
As to macro questions -- predicting which team will win the pennant, he studiously avoids it. A famous quote: "We do not have near-perfect measurements of baseball players. It is foolish to assume that we do."
Another: "Theo makes 10 or 12 big decisions a year, and if they work out, he has a good year." Another: "If I'm ever given the chance to be a GM, I'll do the best I can."
I don't think I've ever seen Bill, since about 1997, make a forward prediction on a player that wasn't very hesitant.
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Statistics are BACKWARDS-looking. Pennants are won in the future. The idea that you could use algebra to "solve" human baseball players, as you would a chess position, is obviously .... ::shakes head::
Cameron showed his work on Nick Swisher, 7 years $105M, as the best possible deal of last winter. How's that looking for the 2018-19 seasons?
The assumption that you CAN 'show the work' on a Pat Gillick championship team is the problem here.
That's all probably harsher than I mean it; Thirteen's work, and style, we all thoroughly enjoy. The "show your work" posse, present company notwithstanding, can get my dander up pretty quick. :- )
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... it is not certain that he IS helpful at 1 year, $14M. Especially it's not certain that there won't appear other opportunities that are superior.
At SSI, we have respect for the complexity of the problem. Usually that involves our pointing out factors ignored by the simplistic $/WAR dogma. We've done so on Morales.
But would he turn out to be a good sign at 1 year/$14M? There's a good chance he wouldn't.
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Most real-world solutions ... the decision to move forward with the iPhone, the right move in a grandmaster chess game, the decision to get married ... require human intuition. The Morales decision will require human intuition. Mine is 60-40, maybe 70-30, that it would be a good move for 2014. Zduriencik's may be different.
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I'll start with two...
"Show your work" is one of my least-favorite phrases. It's right up there with "No evidence exists that..." Both phrases imply that we have captured the sum of human knowledge as it bears on a given question.
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"Make your case," that I like.
But "publish your proof," in a free agent decision context ... well, when did we start believing that we could surround everything there was to know about any given human being? Such as Kendrys Morales?
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It's not about the $/WAR, it's about the $/runs. If you look at Morales without the DH adjustment, he's right in line with the $/runs @1/14. If you let Morales leave you need an upgrade that will exceed his run total at DH while costing less.
And then you'll see there aren't that many better options on the market.
You have to fill the DH slot with someone. Everyone playing DH will suffer from positional adjustments. Therefore, there is a problem with the $/WAR paradigm.
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player analysis and roster construction can be viewed like one would evaluate a car. Now I don't know much about cars. I mean, I know they have an engine, four wheels, etc. But my knowledge is very "surfacy" in some respects. I can look at a car and tell you whether it looks good, at least to me. But I cannot tell you if it is a good car or a bad car on my own.
I can find out more about the car, though. I can look up all kinds of info on the internet and become more educated about the car. It's book value. It's engine displacement. The kind of suspension it has, though I couldn't tell you which is better without trying to dig up an article on the subject, and more than likely I'd find several articles, some of them with differing opinions on what is best. I can tell you various opinions about the car, and whether a famous site recommends it or not (but I'd wonder if the site is getting a kickback to recommend certain brands). So in the end I'd have a lot of information about the car, I'd know it better than I did, but would I really know it?
Then I start to ask myself an important question, what about ME? What would the car do for me? What do I need in a car? What do I want in a car? Commuting? Style? "Cool"?, Power?, Durability? Acceleration? It's not enough to know about the car in general, I need to know my point of view to properly evaluate the car. A car that might rate just fine might be irrelevant to my need, or a "meh" car might do me just fine.
But none of this is my real point. When you get to the big leagues in baseball you're dealing with the crème de la crème. Top shelf players competing. Most AAA'ers won't have a prayer of competing successfully on that level. So using the car analogy, we're talking the best of the "fine" automobiles. At this point it goes beyond the specs, beyond the general characteristics, which are useful, but only to a point. At that level you have to have the experience of driving fine cars to distinguish not only between models, but between different examples of the same model. Owner of such cars come to know them like people. One car of the same model might be tempermental and doesn't seem to drive as well when it's cold and damp, but drives fine when it's just cold. Another doesn't have this quirk.
There are a zillion things that go into baseball evaluations. To me WAR and that kind of stuff has it's use, but it is like evaluating a car by reading about it on the internet and never actually driving it. Some guys combine sabermetrics with what pretty decent eyes-on scouting they can do as a fan, so maybe they have the advantage of having test driven the car...for ten minutes. But they won't know the car like someone who owns one and drives it every day for years.
At a certain point we have to know the limits of our information and our abilities. Imagine me if I was a whiz at internet research about cars, and I went to an auction of fine automobile collectors (you know you're in another league when the word "car" just won't suffice), and started mingling with the bidders and voicing my opinions about the cars up for auction. Don't you think it would be quickly apparent that comparatively speaking I was a third-grader to those I mingled with? Don't you think my opinion would be (rightly) ignored? Even if I was right in what I said, it would have been categorized as irrelevant ABC's long since left behind in the sophisticated and EXPENSIVE world of fine automobiles.
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An even better comparison struck me. How many of you have had to take foreign language classes? The first week is rough. Often you have to learn letters or letter combinations that sound different than the English you are used to. Sometimes you have to learn a completely different alphabet. Sometimes you have to learn a completely different way of looking at the world.
After the first week or two, and you've figured out the sounds of the language, you're starting to feel a little better about things. You learn some nouns, maybe some adjectives. You memorize a few endings unique to the language. You memorize the definite and indefinite article. You start to think, this is going to be easier than I thought. Then you hit the verb, and you hit a wall. But you learn some elementary grammar which you were never taught in English class. It takes some time and effort and perseverance, but eventually you can successfully write and speak sentences a little more involved than "Mary is tired," or "The grass is green." You think you're starting to get things wired. You add some adverbs, you memorize the prepositions and their common uses. You gradually expand your vocabulary. Congratulations, you pass your first semester, or first year of your new language. But if you ever went to the country where the language is spoken, you'd quickly find out you don't know nearly enough to actually function in their society. In fact, you don't know much at all. All you have is book knowledge. And guess what? Life in that country is a little more complicated than that, and the way the language is actually used in real life reflects that complexity. Your head is spinning. If you go on to a second or third year in the language, you start to realize that language is incredibly complex. This "word" means "that," except in this circumstance where it may mean "this" or "that" or "the other thing." Oh, and there is an exception to that exception if you have certain word combinations, and there is an added nuance that native speakers clearly understand when it occurs in a certain context. Or the fundamental rules you learned in school are frequently broken by native speakers, who giggle at the "book" way you talk.
Baseball itself, not just it's terminology, is a language all it's own. Students proclaim "laws" and agree among other students that they are laws, but often in the end they are just students and not native speakers, and in real life things are not so simple. What is it they say, "A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing."
There's nothing wrong with being a student. That is a good and a worthy thing. We need more true students in our society and fewer propagandists and blowhards. But the best students, the true students, develop a profound sense of what they do not know, and it gives them appropriate humility. This is not just a way for older people to suppress younger people. There are plenty of older people who know less than plenty of younger people. But humility with respect to knowledge and wisdom is a fundamental necessity in order to progress in knowledge and wisdom. Young people: Challenge away. Ask questions. Try your best to ask GOOD questions, for they yield superior results. But always maintain a proper humility towards your subject.
By the way Thirteen, this is not aimed at you in particular. It is aimed at the general tone of strident sabermetricians who revel in making pronouncements beyond their true knowledge. I think you give plenty of evidence that you are not one of these. Oh, and I don't have one tenth the baseball knowledge that many here do.
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Someone with better knowledge of the tools and databases than me should do a small research project. If every team must fill the DH spot, why even have the positional adjustment in the first place? Every team must field a 3b, but there is a positional adjustment for that too. I mean the thing was created by Tom Tango and has been backed up by serious SABR guys since its inception. But if some around here seem to think WAR is broken, then lets see a better evaluation method proposed. WAR has shown to correlate with team winning % to around 80%. That's pretty strong, and that includes UZR, which is panned by many folks around here and other places. So to all these arguments that people like me and thirteen are WAR dogmatists, what's your better method for evaluating baseball players?
For the record, I agree, WAR is not the end all be all, it's not the end of the argument, game set match. There are problems with it, just as there are with any system. But just because it has its holes doesn't mean you can say the system is worthless, or now on par with any other means of evaluating a player.
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In a vacuum, the rules are different than they are in Circumstance X. If we were all drafting our rotisserie teams from scratch... absolutely amigo, tack on +12 runs for a guy at catcher providing the same stats as a guy at Default Position. (No position gets 0.0 adjustment, LOL.)
Perhaps you would even tack on -17 for the guy who can only play DH. Or not: a particular team's needs vary, but obviously IN A VACUUM a shortstop hitting .300/.350/.450 is worth a whale of a lot more than a DH doing the same. We all know that.
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A particular team -- say, the 2010 Mariners :- ) -- could be casting about for somebody, anybody to drive in a blinkin' run and if so, Babe Ruth at DH for $25M might be the straw that stirs the drink.
I'm a positional scarcity guy myself. More so than most people! It's just that specific teams might find themselves in idiosyncratic circumstances.
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Excellent series of posts LR. Keep 'em comin'.
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Yes I definitely agree that in this instance that positional scarcity is the key issue. Kendrys definitely has some major shortcomings but in the absence of good internal or extra options In a position of need then it makes sense to me to overpay. Unless a better option comes up. Morales is just more valuable to the Mariners then he is the general market.
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Okay, I know it's "average" not median ... so it's not exactly half that are overpaid.
But, I think it is important to remember that the $/WAR figure *IS* an average - NOT a ceiling.
I think that is where "some" of the friction comes from. Not that WAR itself should be adhered to dogmatically ... but that the $ per WAR figure is often treated as if it is a maximum.
When do you overpay for WAR?
About half the time.
Mostly, you actually overpay (versus the $ / WAR paradigm), in cases where you are competing with other bidders. This is one of the reasons why many of the underpaid players are underpaid --- they sign contracts in situations where no bidding is going on. That includes the obvious re-sign the guy currently on the roster BEFORE he becomes a FA (home town discount), but also applies to the discard pile where owners are sifting through retreads and reclamation projects (Bay ... Ibanez ... etc).
If you can overpay "a little" in a non-bidding situation, and land your guy, that could easily be preferable to overpaying a lot in a bidding situation - or (as has been the case most often in Seattle), losing the opportunity to overpay - and being stuck with no other option except to scrounge the discard pile. In too many cases, the reality is not - pay for the 4.0 WAR guy and settle for the 3.0 WAR guy. The reality is overpay for the 4.0 WAR guy (at 7.0 WAR prices) ... or pay for the 0.5 WAR guy that is actually available.