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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Monday, October 24, 2022On The Whole Dombrowski Situation
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: October 24, 2022 at 04:41 PM | 18 comment(s)
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1. DL from MN Posted: October 24, 2022 at 05:38 PM (#6102416)This kind of hand-wringing is always weird to me. Oh no, you're winning now, but what if you weren't in the future?
To hand-wring right now about how the team might suck in 2023 and beyond is silly. This is your teams time - enjoy the ride and worry about 2023 and beyond after the WS is over.
My Philly friends would trade some years in the gutter for this one and maybe next being fun seasons.
GM of Expos 1988-1991 (set up the powerhouse 1994 team)
GM of Marlins 1991-2001 - won a WS there
GM of Tigers 2002-2015 - handed a mess, got worse (119 losses), got to a WS and made the playoffs 4 years in a row plus 1 more, twice to WS - team hasn't been back since. It hadn't been to the playoffs after 1987 until 2006 (after Dombrowski tore it apart and rebuilt it).
GM of Red Sox 2015-2019 - team was 25 games out of 1st the year before he took over, won the division 3 years in a row including a WS win then fired 10 months after that WS win.
GM of Phillies 2021-now - in WS this year for the first time in over a decade - heck, first time in the playoffs in a decade (2011).
Dombrowski has a pretty strong track record when it comes to trades. He didn't really part with any prospects that came back to haunt the Sox.
EDIT: ...then again, there was the Mookie ordeal.
If the magic stops working you go out and get another Dombroswki
That's a deal most fans with take 10 out of 10 times.
Speaking as a Tiger fan, Dave Dombrowski was the best GM we ever had, and I don't blame him a bit for the mess he left behind (which, honestly, should have been cleaned up by now anyway). Those were great years to be a fan, even if we never won a World Series. The Tigers were interesting and fun and successful.
and in those two seasons, they might rank as the two worst Super Bowl-winning teams of all time.
the response from Giants fans always is - "who cares?" and rightly so !
flags indeed fly forever.
especially given the sheer number of teams these days, even one championship is worth a huge tradeoff from the other seasons. and the Phillies already have an unexpected pennant, so this will not be a "wasted season," no matter what at this point.
As a tip to writers, if you're gonna whinge about the GM do not start your whinge with a 3/$28 M deal. Those sorts of deals are simply meaningless to any team these days. Every team starts with at least $250 M (give or take) in revenue these days -- that Kyle Gibson is eating up 1/25th of team revenue is of zero consequence. You come off even worse when the guy made 31 starts of 168 innings.
Finally, unless you don't want any FAs, you're gonna have some players in their 30s. It's not a death sentence. Decline doesn't generally start until 32-33 and it's usually not a nosedive. I can agree that Schwarber was probably a bit over-priced at 4/$79 but Schwarber 29-32 will be a perfectly solid baseball addition 9 times out of 10. Now after that age 32 season, you probably don't want him around anymore but that's moot.
Mea culpa: I also thought Wheeler, Castellanos and Realmuto were over-priced although Realmuto falls into the "among the best in the game, I'm not gonna stress about this one" category.
It's okay to "lose" a trade if you win the game.
He doesn't promise he will build a sustainable winner.
He doesn't promise to build a top-notch farm system.
He doesn't promise to create a "window" where you can win multiple championships.
Whatever the team's budget is, he will spend to it, and then lobby hard to get the owner to spend more. If the money needs to be pushed into the out years, he'll do it - after all, he knows he probably won't be there to have to deal with the balloon payment-styled salaries, if that's what it took to win the World Series right now.
Look, the 2020 season was about as awful for the Red Sox as it gets. Zero farm system, ravaged salary structure, awful pitching depth, and a team that played .400 ball. There were times in 2020 it seemed impossible that we had been a dominant, 100-win, World Series champion less than two years earlier! But that's Dombrowski. In 2022, we were paying Sale and Price over $43m to basically not pitch for the Red Sox - and we had to trade Betts to prevent the team from paying another $16m to Price last year!
But 2018 was awesome. For most people, you'll only get a handful of times in your life where your favorite team is the Big Bully of their sport. I can remember the smallest details about key moments of the years my teams have won the whole thing, and it stays with you (in a good way) for your whole life. If hiring Dombrowski means you've got a legit chance of experiencing one of those moments, but in exchange, you've got to deal with several years after it of roaming aimlessly in the sports wilderness, I'd make that deal again.
It's not so much that inefficient spending causes greatness** as it is that big contracts are nearly always inefficient in the long-run, often in the short-term too so your choices are (a) avoid inefficiency by never having established good players around; (b) accept inefficiency in order to have established good players around -- i.e. if you want 1 star and 2 good players then you get them by signing 5 expensive guys; (c) hoping you get reallly lucky for the next 3 years and none of your big contracts go belly-up ... in which case you might as well push your luck and sign 5 expensive guys.
Add "trade these prospects who are 3 years away from being good players and most of whom will never produce much for some wins now" in place of "sign expensive guys" to taste.
Which is not to say that the argument is proved (it certainly should be questioned) but the argument essentially is that you're not likely to get JDM (6.7 WAR in 2018), Pearce (1.1, 0.5 WAA), Sale (6.5), Price (3.7), Porcello (2.5), Kimbrel (2.1 ... erratic but 42 saves and 1.1 WAA) without having to suffer through Hanley et al. (Was DD responsible for Hanley et al?) It's also true the team doesn't dominate without Mookie, X, Devers, ERod and guys who cost essentially nothing and thankfully weren't traded away years ago for expensive stars but all that inefficiently spent money brought in 24 WAR, 12 WAA ... 12 WAA is a lot, enough to get you to the playoffs most years (if you can be average elsewhere). Of course the expensive flops will give back some WAA if you give them playing time.
Because of the payroll structure of the game (even leaving aside how revenue is distributed), internal resources are inherently efficient and external resources are inherently inefficient. Even a 55-win tanker is getting good return on their pre-arb and arb players. GMs aren't distinguished here in terms of efficiency exactly, it's more a question of whether you can consistently develop internal resources such that your returns are insanely good, not just crazy good. Most obviously in pre-arb where Mike Trout costs you no more than some 105 ERA+ reliever who hasn't gotten hurt yet.
Similarly, pretty much no GM is financially efficient when it comes to external resource acquisition. If nothing else, it's the winner's curse that operates in every auction. But further in the real world, you have little choice but to overpay in the long-term to acquire short-term assets, via trade or FA. The most efficient are probably the ones who mostly refuse to play. The key question here is would you rather waste a heap of money acquiring 10 marginal WAR or three heaps of money acquiring 20 marginal WAR. The first is clearly more "efficient", the second wins you more ballgames. It would be great to look at whether the long-term cost/short-term beneift ratio is better in prospect trades or in wasting money. I wouldn't be surprised if, on average, teams are better off spending prospects but, when you lose, you lose big.
The big issue becomes when a GM makes obvious mistakes in the external market -- which to the extent they under-valued their own prospects in a trade might also be a failure in the internal resource department too. Sandoval was clearly a risky player to sign long-term and that was something everybody knew in trying to determine what he should get. Trading top prospects for Sale is completely different IMO but that doesn't mean they didn't overpay, it just means Sale was a "guaranteed" stud at the end of a cheap contract. (Extending Sale is yet another kettle of fish.) So Sandoval might have been an obvious mistake but trading for Sale is easily defensible (again, doesn't mean you have to accept it was a good idea). Not at all obvious to anybody I don't think is that he'd collapse immediately. Signing the over-rated Ryan Howard two years before FA to a long, expensive extension was obviously a mistake by ... I've forgotten the Phils' GM's name. Anyway, pitchers get hurt and apparently one long-term contract every year or two goes all Crawford/Sandoval/Heyward immediately.
** I'm not sure anybody claimed "greatness" but that's not really the issue here ... I'll just substitute "2-3 years of comfortably making the playoffs" for "greatness."
EDIT: Before this thread, I'd completely forgotten DD was in Philly. Back when he landed there, I'm pretty sure I thought it would go quite badly. I wasn't overly impressed with the idea of Schwarber, Castellanos, Hoskins and Harper all on the same team. But chances taken, dice rolled and once again DD has hit his point.
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