Of all the installments in this series, this is the one where it’s most tempting to beg off and admit, this might just above my pay grade. I’ll be honest, I can’t say with much confidence whether Mark Shapiro should be fired. What I can say is that there are definitely good reasons to fire him.
Before we get to that, better face up to some hard facts. If you’re going to fire Shapiro, you have to believe that a better option is available. Chris Antonetti is the heir apparent, but you fire Shapiro and keep Antonetti only if you think that in keeping Antonetti, you preserve the best parts of Shapiro while rooting out his shortcomings. Heck, maybe that’s actually the case, but I personally couldn’t say. It doesn’t seem likely. And if Antonetti was the instant front-runner for most any GM opening, what would that make Shapiro if he were available?
...
The sum of these observations is this one, frightening, inescapable conclusion: Shapiro has not given us any concrete reason to believe that he knows how to put people into critical positions who are capable of evaluating, developing and coaching real talent — the kind that can thrive at the major league level. Without people in key roles who are possessed of that kind of judgment and talent, it doesn’t make any difference how good your organizational processes are or how much class-acting you do. We cannot contend on a diet of trade-acquired minor leaguers and recycled starting pitchers alone. If these things weren’t clear five years ago, or even one year ago, they ought to be crystal clear now.
I am just a scribe, neither scout nor coach, not a baseball executive and certainly not a former major leaguer. So I don’t really know what’s wrong with the Cleveland Indians. But it’s a problem if Mark Shapiro doesn’t know either. And as much respect for him as I have, I’m not at all convinced that he does.
The Pequod
Posted: October 15, 2009 at 05:50 PM |
23 comment(s)
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1. The Keith Law Blog Blah Blah (battlekow) Posted: October 15, 2009 at 06:00 PM (#3353015)I'm probably biased, but Let's Go Tribe is one of the best written team specific blogs out there. As awful as this season was as an Indians fan, they were one of the only reason I remained interested.
My only gripe is that they're a bit dogmatic and groupthinky at times - for instance, seemingly everyone there has this weird obsession with Andy Marte, and I've learned first-hand not to suggest that the reason he's failed at the major league level is that he's a bad baseball player.
He seems to have gotten off so easily because, even now, it's easy to come up with plausible excuses for most of the failures. Intelligent fans had a really hard time criticizing the regime because they say and do so many of the "right" things...they just end up with lousy results.
Heck, it's still hard to completely slam Shapiro & Co., as evidenced by all of the qualified of criticism in the article (see the first paragraph of the excerpt) and your own statement that you wouldn't fire him.
But then you take a step back and realize that, with a core of Sizemore, Sabathia, and Victor Martinez, plus some GREAT seasons from Millwood, Carmona, Lee, Hafner, Betancourt, etc, this team made the playoffs just once. Ouch.
To me, this is our stat-bias showing. I don't think an organization like the Twins gets enough credit around here because they emply Nick Punto and their manager likes to bunt while an organization that employs a stat-savvy GM has to prove he's not good at his job befpre we start to discredit him.
Until last year, I just kind of wrote off the failures as "good process, bad results". It's pretty reasonable to question the process at this point.
There were bad GMs before sabermetrics, though -- guys who talked a good game but couldn't get it done, for whatever reason. Maybe Shapiro is just the modern version.
1. He's generally been very good at trades.
2. Their development system probably deserves at least some credit for Sizemore, Lee and Phillips and, of course, Sabathia, Gutierrez, Cabrera, Peralta (I suppose he fully predates Shapiro) and some other useful players.
3. They have so far avoided any albatross contracts and while I don't think he's been a good FA shopper, he hasn't handed out 3/$36 to the Jose Guillens of the world or, to my memory, wasted real money on bullpen mediocrities.
What I guess I would find if I looked deeper is a lack of depth, especially pitching, which might suggest too much focus on developing hitters. And, per my FA shopper comment above, an uninspiring track record of filling in the gaps around the stars.
Whether I'd fire him now would probably depend on my assessment of their minor-leagues at the moment. If it appeared he was still running a strong program of drafting/signing/developing/acquiring young talent, I'd keep him around and point out where I think he needs to improve. But if I thought the state of the system wasn't good enough to produce a winner in the next few years, I'd probably can him.
1. He's generally been very good at trades.
2. Their development system probably deserves at least some credit for Sizemore, Lee and Phillips and, of course, Sabathia, Gutierrez, Cabrera, Peralta (I suppose he fully predates Shapiro) and some other useful players.
3. They have so far avoided any albatross contracts and while I don't think he's been a good FA shopper, he hasn't handed out 3/$36 to the Jose Guillens of the world or, to my memory, wasted real money on bullpen mediocrities.
What I guess I would find if I looked deeper is a lack of depth, especially pitching, which might suggest too much focus on developing hitters. And, per my FA shopper comment above, an uninspiring track record of filling in the gaps around the stars.
Whether I'd fire him now would probably depend on my assessment of their minor-leagues at the moment. If it appeared he was still running a strong program of drafting/signing/developing/acquiring young talent, I'd keep him around and point out where I think he needs to improve. But if I thought the state of the system wasn't good enough to produce a winner in the next few years, I'd probably can him.
From my observation, at a distance, he can't draft, and he can't add average MLB players around his core. Those are too important to overlook.
I'm not sure how much credit Shapiro deserves for Sabathia. He didn't draft him and he was on the team before Shapiro was GM.
ISTR James writing that teams with very weak bullpens tend to underperform their Pythags. That would describe that 78-84 Indians team of 2006.
Half-season closer Bob Wickman had an ERA+ of 108. The top two relievers by IP had ERA+'s of 83 and 87. Relievers 6-14 by IP had ERA+'s of 73, 99, 65, 153, 81, 82, 131, 78, and 73.
Their record in one-run games was 18-26, one of the worst in the AL. Of those 26 losses, they fell behind for good in the 7th inning or later 19 times.... in the 9th inning or later 11 times. I don't know how those numbers compare to other team one-run losses, but it's clear they had a big problem closing games out and the lack of bullpen depth points back to #9 and 10 and not being able to get enough average or near-average players to go with the stars.
So if you want to say the differences from pythag are real ability for the Angels or Mariners or Indians, I'm happy to listen and possibly agree. If you want to say the differences are real for ALL of them, I'm afraid I have to say that's unlikely. Because that theory would ultimately run contrary to the larger data set. The exceptions have to be small enough in number to get lost in a much greater number of instances that aren't exceptions.
To put another way, if you concede that an ability from an observed difference between numbers might be real in some specific instances, that does not now give you carte blanche to treat all such differences as real.
So, it would still come down to luck if a bullpen all happened to dice up poor seasons (relative to their historical performance levels), yielding a poor Pythag.
Maybe that's what V is saying or maybe not, but it is largely what I observe in this phenomenon.
So not impossible, but be judicious in accepting teams as exceptions.
Which have a higher LI on average, bullpen innings or starter innings? I'd imagine it's about even, maybe a slight edge to bullpen because if a team is up 10-1 the starter is more likely to stay in than if they're up 2-1 -- maybe.
The first is an issue but largely balanced out if he's able to keep picking up good young players in trades. After all, you could completely screw up 3 drafts and still come out ahead with one Colon trade. Not that I'm advocating poor drafting as a strategy just that what really matters is the number of good, cheap players your team can acquire.
On the latter ... again, maybe. Even on the awful 2009 Indians you have Shoppach, Choo, Hafner, DeRosa (106 OPS+ with the Indians). Casey Blake was exactly that kind of player and, while he ended up stinking, Dellucci had been that kind of player. Before that Ben Broussard and Ronnie Belliard. On the pitching front ... yeah, not much.
I'll agree with what I think was your main point on the average players which is that they had an excellent core there for a couple years and only had one good run. That was a huge missed opportunity.
battlekow - LaPorta isn't coming back to the Brewers. It's time you moved on. Was he even mentioned in this piece?
Dan - We miss your monthly visits. I couldn't find more than a mild disagreement with you re: Marte. Lots of folks @LGT think he's never gotten a fair shot, and the data supports this, though it doesn't seem so at a glance. Lots of folks think he sucks. Lots of folks think both of those things.
Walt - Hard to see how the Indians can deserve any credit for developing Brandon Phillips. Peralta doesn't predate Shapiro as GM, and Shapiro was Farm Director before that. The Hafner deal is a pretty significant albatross, but as I noted in the article, if that's the biggest albatross by far, it's not a bad track record on that one score.
I don't think you can screw up three drafts and then come out ahead with a Colon Deal, because for one thing, there are no more Colon Deals. The Colon deal was the ultimate "Colon Deal" even back then, and top prospects are more highly valued now -- back in 2002, Toronto's demands for Halladay get met, but not anymore. You can't make a strategic tenet out of a historically successful trade, any more than you can decide how to develop closers generally based on observing Mariano Rivera (READ THIS BUZZ).
Even beyond that, nobody has swapped vets for prospects as prolifically or successfully as Shapiro, but it's not enough. Obviously. Maybe the lesson here is that trades like that, when highly successful, can help you bounce back much more QUICKLY, but they aren't a long-term methodology. When the good 2005 and 2007 clubs emerged, they had Sabathia, Martinez, Peralta, and Carmona to go with the trade swag.
Last point to Walt, I don't think you can focus too much on developing hitters, and anyway, the Indians didn't. Anyone who follows that front office closely can tell you, they've preached internal development of pitchers non-stop since Shapiro's very first day. It just hasn't panned out. I do think Shapiro found it was easier to pry away big juicy position player prospects in trades than big juicy pitchers -- fully 1/3 of our starting lineup was shoplifted from the Mariners -- but in the minors, they've been emphasizing pitching all along.
I think some of the comments here generally do point up the difficulty the Indians collapse presents to sabermetric pundits. Here we have a super-sharp guy like Voros participating, and still, all we get is this half-hearted dissection of Pythagorean breakdowns -- the conversation quickly drifts away from the actual subject of the Indians. I think in fact the sabermetric community has been avoiding discussion of the Indians like the plague, essentially blocking them out. It's not a puzzle that's necessarily going to be solved by the numbers, and nobody really wants to talk about that.
Just my opinion, though. Thanks again for the feedback.
Maybe for Shapiro. The Twins, Tigers, and White Sox were all able to successfully identify good young pitchers on other teams and acquire them without sacrificing too much. It seems like there's a systematic inability in the Indians organization to recognize and/or develop pitching talent, whether young or old. You look at the 2009 team (which was widely considered a favorite to win the division), and even if you say that Carmona's collapse was something nobody could predict, the Indians were still coming into the season with two starting pitchers. That's something that any competent GM should have been able to see coming and do something, anything, to forestall.
I won't ever buy that Shapiro gets much credit for the haul in the Colon deal. Minaya had a short trial as GM, was looking in the face of contraction, and needed to make a splash. A serious GM would not surrender that package if they believed that their franchise had a future. I guess I credit Shapiro for being willing to trade the reigning Cy Young winner, but he mostly took advantage of a dire situation in Montreal.
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