Lowell

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Red Sox - Dodgers MegaDeal

This from Ken Rosenthal a few months back:

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The Dodgers acquired Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckettand Nick Punto for James Loney, Ivan De Jesus Jr.,Allen Webster and two players to be named later, which turnd out to beRubby De La Rosa and Jerry Sands.

The thing I still don’t get — the thing that has yet to be fully explained — is why the Dodgers took on all but $11 million of the $275.69 million guaranteed the players they acquired.

If the Dodgers had said, “Sorry, we want $100 million, not $11 million, especially when we’re also giving you four prospects,” I’m guessing that the Sox still would have jumped.

But Sox president Larry Lucchino, in an interview this week, told me that I was incorrect, that the Sox wanted almost complete financial relief.

The Dodgers, looking to make a statement, were willing to provide it.

The size of their new TV deal increased from a proposed $3 billion over 17 years from FOX to a reported $7 billion over 25 years from Time Warner, in part due to the perception that the team’s new Guggenheim ownership — as opposed to the previous owner, Frank McCourt — was all-in.

So, who am I to quibble over $100 million?

Nearly one year later, the Dodgers and Red Sox lead their divisions.

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CRUNCH:  Dr. D hates, hates, hates to be predictable.  But this point is worth consolidating.  MLB teams do not use the pundits' WAR/$ paradigm as the end of the discussion.

In this case, the Dodgers did not use it as the middle of the discussion, either.  Nor the starting point of it.

You've got a massive cognitive dissonance here.  The Dodgers' side of that deal made no sense from the fangraphs paradigm.  But here they sit, apparently ready to dominate the National League for years to come.  The Red Sox deal wasn't the only thing pushing them towards that, but then again, their defiance of fans' wisdom didn't exactly torpedo their efforts, now did it?

The thing to do with a cognitive dissonance is to learn from it.  You've got a blind spot, well, open your eyes.  It's up to you.

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You might reply, there were meta-considerations here.  The TV rights, the value of the team, and so on and so forth.

Such meta-considerations apply in Seattle, too.

CRUNCH:  The Dodgers had their own projections for AGone, Crawford, et al.  They've got a right to them.  That's what makes a ball game.

Here's a win-win scenario, with a capital W-W, and it's one in which the initial, theoretical, WAR/$ returns were dreadfully imbalanced.

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Red Sox - Marlins, 2005

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No disrespect, I just don't think we can completely figure out baseball based off of sabermetrics alone.

Jack Zduriencik does not primarily use Baseball Prospectus or Fangraphs to decide whether Shawn Kelley is coming north.  Statistics are backwards-looking!  What Zduriencik needs is a reliever who will get outs in the 2012 season.

Most people would understand "sabermetrics," as Andrew uses it, to mean "the statistics you can find on Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs."  So, the comment would bring derision in some quarters.  But let's remember that Jack Zduriencik and Eric Wedge are in profound agreement with this.  Neither do they think that you can make roster decisions based on 2009-11 statistics alone.  

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It is not because we fail to understand WAR that we, at SSI, refuse to limit ourselves to its implications.  Tony Blengino his ownself comes, as the years go by, to see himself more and more as a scout/saber dual class.  Most of the stats-based, "pure sabermetrician" types who get hired, wind up blossoming into stats/scouting blended analysts.  Every GM who ever lived --- > used methods that transcend WAR.

My own approach is based on organizing our thinking about any given baseball question -- directing our attention to the right questions.  For example:  what are the causes of Felix' lack of velocity, and if he does lose velocity, what does that mean?  What patterns are there here, and what precedents apply to the problem?  

It's a chess paradigm.  Whatever position you've got, it's been played before.  Felix Hernandez' velocity loss has been seen before, in Pedro Martinez and in other great pitchers.  Find the games that have looked like this before, and review them from the standpoint of the masters who won those games.

We try to begin, sincerely, with questions, as opposed to beginning with what are in essence position statements.  If we find a good clear question, it is not so hard to find historical patterns that illuminate the questions.