Tag: frontoffice

Cashman: Not Long for the Yankees?

You’ll recall that I’ve previously suggested that Brian Cashman’s tenure with the Yankees may be in some jeopardy: I believe the exact phrasing was, “short-timer.” Well, I have news. Good news, at least for the constituency that is of the opinion that a Cashman-less Yankee organization is, in all probability, a weaker organization.

First, there was the near shocking candor of Cashman at a joint charity appearance with Theo this week. I’m not sure what or if the Yankees GM had been drinking that day, but just…wow. First, he restated his preference that the Yankees keep their own pitching rather than trade for Santana. Ok, nothing terribly shocking about that; it could be gamesmanship, could be a statement for the record, but either way it’s contradictory to Hankenstein’s public commentary. But Cashman didn’t stop there. Regarding Yankees fan favorite and could-have-been-a-Sox Bernie Williams, Cashman claimed that the center fielder’s music “took away from his play,” and that his 2005 season was, not to put too fine a point on it, “terrible.” Continuing, he added that Joe Torre had inserted Williams “ahead of guys who could help us win.” Ouch.

Not enough for you? How about publicly calling out Abreu and Damon for reporting to camp out of shape? Or, when asked about the Yankees biblical encounter with the Cleveland insect life, responding “I thought our guys weren’t mentally tough enough to get through it.”

Good lord. Want your job much, Brian?

The presumed source of the friction hasn’t exactly been sitting on his hands during all of this either. Hankenstein, in an interview with the AP yesterday, issued what I’d agree with Olney could be considered a veiled threat to his GM. Unless you think the following is a ringing endorsement:

“I will be patient with the young pitchers and players. There’s no question about that because I know how these players develop,” [Hankenstein] said. “But as far as missing the playoffs – if we miss the playoffs by the end of this year, I don’t know how patient I’ll be. But it won’t be against the players. It won’t be a matter of that. It will be a matter of maybe certain people in the organization could have done something else.”

To recap, for the ADD afflicted:

  1. GM calls out former player
  2. GM calls out former manager
  3. GM calls out two thirds of his current outfield
  4. GM states preference for forgoing a trade that his owner has publicly admitted he wants to make
  5. Owner states that a playoff appearance is mandatory
  6. Owner states that in the absence of said playoff appearance, players are ok, front office is not

Anyone think this will end well? Anyone?

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Why I Don't Want Johan Santana, But Would Be Fine With Him

Look, if we end up with Johan Santana – and sign him – I’m not going to complain. Pick your metric, he’s been the best pitcher in the league for several years now…by a wide margin. And of course I’m just as geeked about the possibility of slotting Beckett/Santana/whomever in a potential playoff series as the next guy. Maybe more so, given my self-admitted “problem” with baseball. But at the end of the day, I hope he ends up with the Mets. Seriously.

The problem with this position is that if or when you take it, the uninformed or superficial assume that you’ve gone koo koo for cocoa puffs, where cocoa puffs = Red Sox prospects. That you haven’t considered the matter logically, but rather have a weird and deeply confusing mancrush on Jacoby Ellsbury.

My Navajo brother aside, there are two very good reasons to be at least concerned about a potential trade for Santana. The first is that it doesn’t seem to make economic sense:

For the Red Sox, a trade is even more difficult to rationalize, driven by the lower free-agent valuation of Santana in a sold-out Fenway Park. Santana’s financial value to the Red Sox is in the range of $18 million to $20 million versus his annual value of over $30 million to the Yankees. Starter Jon Lester’s value may be lower than Hughes’ value because Lester has fewer years remaining until free agency, and outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury’s value is likely less than Hughes’ due to the premium paid to starting pitchers. However, neither of these facts changes the reality that the free-agent cost of Santana alone is likely more than his worth to the Red Sox. It may be that the only reason they are involved in trade talks is to bid up the acquisition price of Santana for the Yankees.

That whole piece is excellent, incidentally.

Just as important as the cost, is the predictability of the returns on that cost: i.e. the injury risk. Like many, I’m concerned by his late season fade (check his September splits). I seriously doubt that he forgot how to pitch, meaning that the most logical conclusion is that he wasn’t entirely right. Keith Law seems to share those concerns, saying:

“I haven’t read any of the others (I was on vacation), but I’d take A-Rod, Beckett, and Sabathia (because I’m a little concerned about how Santana finished 2007).

The good news is that I trust our front office – as I would not trust some others, say Houston’s – to have thought about all of this in far more detail than I ever would or could. As Seth put it:

I will, however, say this: I’ve always been reticent about jawing off when I have no real idea what I’m talking about…and such is the case with all of the sundry Santana trade permutations. I don’t mean the specifics of a possible trade — no one knows those except for Theo, Bill Smith, and Brian Cashman. I mean that I don’t know enough (and what’s more, haven’t done the work) to be able to make any kind of responsible or intelligent observations about whether this or that scenario makes sense. I don’t have the drilled-down numbers on Jacoby; I haven’t run the projections on Santana; I sure as hell don’t have any sense of what the pool of pitching talent is like in next few amateur drafts; I don’t know where else the Sox (or the Yankees) would spend that $130 mil or so it’ll likely take to lock up Santana…well, you get the idea. And even if I did have all of this info and even if I had done all of this work, I still would be so many light years behind where the Sox front office is in terms of brainpower, man hours spent hunched over spreadsheets, cumulative knowledge, and on and on, that it would be silly for me to start soapboxing about why this or that scenario makes sense.

It’s important to know what you don’t know, and in my case vis a vis Santana and the possible trade permutations, that’s just about everything. But neither will I concede that trading for him is an open and shut “hand over whatever the Twins ask for.” That’s just the kind of thinking that kept us out of the promised land for decades, so let’s skip it. Though some might lament the invasion of the game by the guys with “pocket protectors,” I don’t happy to be one of them. But then, I like winning World Series.

Motto of the Red Sox Front Office: Whatever Works?

Like every front office in the league, the folks who call Yawkey Way home have their pluses and minuses. I confess to never understanding, as an example, the affection they had – for some years – for Julio Lugo, who is not a bad player but to me undeserving of that level of attention. Let alone contract.

But though Theo declined to take my advice on that score – or, admittedly, any other – I remain fundamentally impressed with his willingness to rethink everything, and borrow shamelessly from approaches that have yielded results. This openness to reinvention, not of the wheel but rather antiquated, archaic practices, was to me the primary philosophical takeaway from the once lauded if now clichéd Moneyball.

As a life philosophy, it’s a bit blunt, but more front offices around the league would benefit from the simple realization that if something isn’t working: try something else.

The latest datapoint supporting the conclusion that the Red Sox front office is the baseball equivalent of the English language – which for all of its other faults, steals liberally from other languages to augment itself – comes to us courtesy of Joe McDonald from the Providence Journal.

The piece describes in some detail our offseason rookie development program, which incorporates community exposure, media training and other non-baseball educational activities with the relevant workouts. The important bit, to me, that McDonald extracted from director of player development Mike Hazen is the admission that the program itself is entirely unoriginal:

“This is something that is fairly unique within the game…There are a few other teams that do this and we’ve adapted what we do from the Indians, who have been doing it for about 10 years. We’re not ashamed to say we’re trying to model some things after their player-development system and we’re trying to grow on it. I’m sure there will be other clubs that do it in the future.”

Nor should they feel any shame, in my opinion: quite the contrary. Sifting through the techniques and practices of competitors for ideas and potential improvements should be the most logical exercise in the world, but Hazen’s comment is reflective of a culture that has permeated baseball for years. A culture afflicted with what is known within the technology industry as NIH: Not Invented Here.

If we’re lucky, the Yankees will be unable to learn from what is working for their hated rivals, in spite of suggestions from its fans. As long as Cashman is in place, however, I don’t expect that to be the case, since he and Theo seem to be not just cordial but positively like minded. Which is why I count myself amongst Hank Steinbrenner’s biggest fans, because when his GM is saying things like:

“The dynamics are changing with us…When I signed up with this current three-year deal, and this is the last year of it, it was with full authority to run the entire program. George had given me that. But things have changed in this third year now with the emergence of Hal and Hank Steinbrenner, and that started this winter.”

I don’t know about you, but my first thought is: short-timer.

Which would be an excellent development, in this Sox fan’s opinion.

P.S. A belated thank you to Michael Dolan‘s Indians for their most excellent rookie program. Really came in handy last year.