SB Nation User Blog: Charlie

Matt Capps Signs With Nationals

Charlie — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:20:36 -0000

More photos » by Gene J. Puskar - AP

8 months ago: Pittsburgh Pirates closer Matt Capps, left, celebrates with first baseman Adam LaRoche (25) after getting Florida Marlins' Cody Ross to ground into a game-ending double play in the ninth inning of a baseball game in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, April 21, 2009. The Pirates won 3-2. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

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$3.5 million plus some performance bonuses.

I wasn't in favor of the Pirates' decision to non-tender Capps, but the contract he got from the Nats is roughly comparable to, or maybe a little greater than, the amount he would have gotten in arbitration. If he'd recovered from a poor 2009 season, he probably would have generated some trade interest, which I think would have made taking him to arbitration a good idea. But at least it's now clear that the Pirates didn't undervalue him by much.

It's interesting that the three teams most interested in him were the Nats, Cubs and Mets. None of those are particularly well run franchises. I wonder why more intelligent teams weren't among the top contenders.

Sadly Bad Articles Will Continue to Doom Terrible Writers

Charlie — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:49:44 -0000

More photos » by Mark J. Terrill - AP

2 months ago: Los Angeles Dodgers' Doug Mientkiewicz, left, hits an RBI-single as Colorado Rockies catcher Chris Iannetta, lower right, and home plate umpire Brian Gorman look on during the first inning of a baseball game, Sunday, Oct. 4, 2009, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

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Jeff Pearlman is writing about the Pirates again, this time about how they're going to sign Nomar Garciaparra, a player they have never been connected to and have no particular use for:

You are wondering if any team would be crazy enough to sign an unproductive, uncooperative utility infielder stripped of his range, his pop and his health.

Your question can be answered with a single word: Yes.

And yet, perhaps it won't be Nomar. Perhaps it will be Jermaine Dye or Rocco Baldelli; Melvin Mora or Orlando Cabrera; Carl Pavano or Miguel Olivo

Nobody, however, outdoes Pittsburgh. Seemingly year after year, the Pirates complete one boneheaded off-season move, then overhype it in an effort to hoodwink naive loyalists into thinking the organization is on the right track. Last year it was bringing in Eric Hinske, the long-ago AL Rookie of the Year who now evokes comparisons to a middle-aged Hensley Meulens. In 2008, it was the addition of Mientkiewicz (when it comes to bad teams, big Doug gets around). In 2007, it was the addition of Elmer Dessens. In 2006, it was the addition of Jeromy Burnitz, Sean Casey and Joe Randa (ie: The Holy Trinity of quintessential Pirate signees). The list goes on and on -- a Wayne Krenchicki Tribute Band brought to fruition.

What? I didn't care much about Mientkiewicz one way or the other, but how was signing him in any way "boneheaded"? Why was signing Hinske a dumb idea? And what does Elmer Dessens--who was signed to a minor league contract, never even played for the Pirates in 2007, and never presented even a small amount of risk to the Bucs--have to do with anything?

And, uh, why would signing Jermaine Dye, who hit 27 homers in 2009 and was a borderline MVP candidate in 2008, be boneheaded? Weird for the Pirates, sure, but boneheaded?

For those of you who have seen Pearlman's ridiculous, fact-challenged and inflammatory articles before, his apparent misunderstanding of the way baseball transactions work probably comes as no surprise. But just in case he happens to read this--he seems like the type who Googles himself daily--I'll spell it out: every team signs players to inexpensive contracts and minor-league deals to fill out its AAA roster and the back of its major-league squad. For example, the Yankees signed Angel Berroa before the 2009 season! In 2008, it was Chris Woodward (and Billy Crystal--talk about your inane, attention-hogging signings)! Before 2007, they signed Mientkiewicz! Whatever, I'm sure somehow it wasn't "crazy" or "boneheaded" when they did it.

Huntington: Neil Walker Hasn't Earned Big-League Job

Charlie — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:06:27 -0000

More photos » by Gene J. Puskar - AP

3 months ago: Pittsburgh Pirates third baseman Neil Walker, left, takes the late throw from right fielder Garrett Jones as Chicago Cubs' Kosuke Fukudome advances to third on single by Cubs' Ryan Theriot in the second inning of a baseball game in Pittsburgh Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009. Cubs' Koyle Hill scored on the single. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

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This is about as mean as the usually-circumspect Neal Huntington ever gets:

"Sitting here today, we feel like we have one Major League third baseman, and that is Andy LaRoche," general manager Neal Huntington said. "[Walker] needs to continue to mature and get stronger. He still hasn't really dominated the Triple-A level to show that, 'Hey, I'm ready to be a Major League player.' He hasn't necessarily earned his way to the Major League level."

I mostly agree, of course. I think it's interesting, though, that both Huntington and John Russell say that Walker needs to get stronger. Other than his defense at third base, Walker's power is the one aspect of his game that has clearly developed well since he was drafted in 2004. His isolated slugging averages have been very good the past couple of years. He's also shown a good arm. If the references to Walker's strength don't have to do with his power or his arm, then I'm not sure what Huntington and Russell are talking about.

The real problems with Walker are that he doesn't hit for enough average, and he doesn't draw enough walks. He's had exactly one OBP above .345 in any year since he was drafted, which is terrible for a former first round pick. Walker hit .194 in a very small sample in the majors last year; while that shouldn't really be held against him at this point, an extremely low average would be a very likely outcome if he were allowed to play much in the bigs next year.

There is reason for some hope, though--Walker hit well down the stretch at Indianapolis last year, and he kept hitting in Venezuela this fall, posting a .267/.370/.448 line in 116 at bats there. The average is still too low, but he did draw a bunch of walks for the first time since 2007, when he was with Altoona. A line like that at Indianapolis might convince me that Walker is ready to help the Bucs, at least in a bench role.

Light Posting This Weekend

Charlie — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:40:42 -0000

Light posting this weekend--for whatever it's worth, my band is heading to Columbus tonight, then opening for the excellent Meeting of Important People at the Thunderbird Cafe in Pittsburgh on Saturday.

UPDATE: Won't be in Pittsburgh tonight after all, since the roads in Lawrenceville are apparently a mess. We're rescheduling the show, hopefully for March.

Small-Payroll Teams Don't Need Jacuzzis

Charlie — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:37:05 -0000

More photos » by Al Behrman - AP

Teams like the Pirates--and Reds--can't really afford closers like Francisco Cordero.

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Some odd point-counterpoint from Neal Huntington and Dejan Kovacevic. Huntington:

History has not been kind to teams in markets like Pittsburgh that have invested heavily in a closer. As a result, we will build depth, give ourselves options and see who steps up to take the ball and get the final outs in our close wins.

Kovacevic:

Here again, what do Pittsburgh or anyone's market size have to do with this concept?

If the Reds regret signing Francisco Cordero to close at his huge contract, how is that different than the Mets regretting signing J.J. Putz or Billy Wagner?

Sure, the Mets absorb the loss more easily because of a bigger payroll, but the history is no less kind to the Mets than it is to the Reds. It's still a lousy move on both counts.

Kovacevic gets it right with "Sure, the Mets absorb the loss more easily because of a bigger payroll...", but actually the conversation begins and ends there. Huntington is dead on.

First, and this is a minor point, the Mets didn't sign Putz, they traded for him. As for Wagner, the Mets paid him $10.5 million in 2009--but after they paid their team-controlled players, they also had room to spend $9 million on Francisco Rodriguez, $12 million on Oliver Perez, $12 million on Carlos Delgado, $20 million on Johan Santana, and $20 million on Carlos Beltran. They also paid $6.25 million to Luis Castillo and $6 million to Putz. None of those players were developed by the Mets.

The Reds spent $12 million on Cordero in 2009. After that, they paid $11 million to Aaron Harang, as part of a four-year deal that bought out two option years. They paid $9.5 million to Bronson Arroyo.

That's it. Every other player was either under team control (Brandon Phillips was signed to a long-term deal, but 2009 would have been one of his arbitration years) or cost them less than $5 million. (Thanks to Cot's Contracts for the data for both teams.)

That's almost $100 million in what we might call expensive-player spending for the Mets, and about $30 million for the Reds. It is absolutely clear that a team like the Mets can afford to drop $12 million for 80 innings if it wants to, while a team like the Reds just can't. And if the Reds sign a player to a contract they end up regretting, it hurts them much more than it hurts the Mets. This is really elementary stuff--a doctor can probably afford that jacuzzi, whereas someone like me just can't. Closers are like jacuzzis. I think that's all Huntington was saying.

History won't be kind to recent versions of the Mets. That's true. But to suggest that has much to do with their decisions to spend heavily on closers is strange and confusing. History won't be kind to them because they were expensive, poorly-constructed teams who suffered two straight September collapses before coming completely unglued in 2009. But their decisions to invest big bucks on closers are only small parts of that, probably very small parts. While the Wagner signing in particular wasn't the world's best idea, it was far from the worst--after all, he pitched brilliantly for the Mets for the better part of three years.

The Mets had a jacuzzi in Wagner, and for several years it worked just fine. And if Minaya had bothered to build a bathtub by having some other relievers handy, the loss of the jacuzzi in 2008 wouldn't have caused the Mets to stink so badly. The problem with the house the Mets built was that it didn't have a roof, or even very many functioning appliances. With their payroll, they could have built the roof and the bathtub and the jacuzzi, but they didn't.

The 2009 Mets devoted broad swathes of playing time to non-hitters like Daniel Murphy and Omir Santos and Alex Cora and Brian Schneider and Ryan Church and Cory Sullivan and Wilson Valdez. They had so many injuries, and planned for them so poorly, that were times when their lineup resembled a Triple-A team's. Their rotation was also a complete mess behind Santana, with Perez, Livan Hernandez, Tim Redding and Mike Pelfrey all imploding along the way. However history may treat the Mets, if they'd run the rest of their team well, they could have spent exactly as they did on closers and probably had three straight playoff appearances from 2007 to 2009. Not so for the Reds, who simply can't afford to spend 40% of their expensive-player spending on an 80 inning guy. They need to spend that money on stuff like heating and water, not on a jacuzzi.

By the way, you may be wondering what this has to do with Matt Capps, since Huntington addressed the Capps matter elsewhere in his chat and the beginning of Kovacevic's post was about Capps. The answer is, nothing. While a small-payroll team shouldn't pay a closer $12 million, it can certainly afford to pay $3-4 million in arbitration.

Jeff Clement Penciled in at First

Charlie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:30:17 -0000

by Kathy Willens - AP

The Bucs are comfortable waiting until late in the offseason to target free agent corner players like Xavier Nady.

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The Post-Gazette has an interesting item about Jeff Clement and the first base job. The Pirates seem not to mind that some of their top targets for extra corner players (Xavier Nady and Rick Ankiel in particular) are unlikely to sign until late in the offseason. This means they're probably relatively happy with the players currently at the top of their depth chart (Clement at first, and Garrett Jones in right) and want an extra guy mainly to provide competition and to guard against a flameout by Clement or someone else.

This seems sensible. As a fourth-outfielder / insurance policy, Nady is actually fairly interesting to me, since he's right-handed. But Ankiel is a lefty like Clement. And it's not really clear that Nady or Ankiel are better than Clement right now anyway. ZiPS, for example, predicts Clement will have an .801 OPS next year. (Incidentally, it also predicts Matt Capps will have the lowest ERA on the staff. Oops.) Nady is at .780. I don't think a ZiPS projection for Ankiel has been published yet, but Bill James has him at .763.

Now, both Nady and Ankiel would be doing the Pirates a service by keeping Jones out of the outfield, so they provide more defensive value than Clement probably would. And certainly projections can turn out to be wrong, particularly with injury magnets like these three guys, etc. etc. etc. (Don't think you're being original by pointing that out, either.) The point, though, is that if the Bucs have resigned themselves to second- or third-tier free agents like Nady and Ankiel (as is probably appropriate at this point), they're right to not feel much urgency about this. Clement might well end up being better than the available options anyway, and if things get bad, there's also Steve Pearce, Delwyn Young and Brandon Moss--and possibly Jose Tabata and Pedro Alvarez--to fall back on. An additional benefit of starting Clement is that the Pirates can control his rights for several years if he succeeds, and since Tabata and Alvarez could begin to complicate things staring in about July, it behooves the Bucs to see what they have in Clement.

The best reason for the Pirates to sign a free agent outfielder or first baseman is not to replace someone currently penciled into the starting lineup, but to guard against a complete failure, and I don't just mean by Clement. Not to take a shot at someone who thoroughly proved me wrong throughout 2009, but last season Jones played like he knew how to fly. Maybe he really can fly, but given his lengthy and undistinguished history, the Pirates also have to consider the possibility that instead of flying his legs were just moving really fast for a few seconds, like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. Clement, Jones and Lastings Milledge should all be in the starting lineup, but if possible there should be legitimate fallback options too.

John Sickels' Top 20 Pirates Prospects

Charlie — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:01:28 -0000

John Sickels' Top 20 Pirates Prospects

Wow. Von Rosenberg at #4. I have no idea why Jeff Locke and Quinton Miller aren't in the top 20.

My most recent top 30 list is here, if you're curious. If I were doing another one today, I'd bump Jose Tabata up to #2 after his awesome AFL performance, move Chase D'Arnaud up a couple of spots, and put Rogelios Noris back on the list after an eye-opening performance in a tiny sample in the Mexican Winter League.

Pirates' New Bradenton Team to be Called "Marauders"

Charlie — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:08:21 -0000

Pirates' New Bradenton Team to be Called "Marauders"

And their logo is of a Pirate. Cool.

More on the Capps Non-Tender

Charlie — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:29:32 -0000

More photos » by John Amis - AP

6 months ago: Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Matt Capps, left, and catcher Jason Jaramillo, congratulate each other after a baseball game against the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, in Atlanta. Pittsburgh won 3-2. (AP Photo/John Amis)

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The Matt Capps non-tender represents a busted opportunity. The reasons why may be obvious to some of you, but I'm going to spell them out anyway.

The best way by far for the Pirates to get ahead of other teams is by graduating players from the minors and employing them cheaply for several years. The best way to get those players is through the draft, but this has limits. Whenever the Pirates make a cost-cutting move at the major-league level, some fan will say, "Well, they should just spend that money on the draft anyway."

That's true, to a small degree, but for the most part it's a fallacy, for reasons outlined nicely by Matt Swartz. Draft picks are cheap relative to their actual value, and that arrangement is beneficial to small-market teams like the Bucs. If the Pirates went crazy and spent $30 million on next year's draft, picking the best available player in every round, that could be a boon for them in the short term. But the next year, a team like the Yankees that uses $30 million as toilet paper might notice what the Pirates did and spend $30 million too. And the next year, the Red Sox would do it, and then every team would, and then the Bucs would be completely hopeless, because they wouldn't be able to pay for good players in the draft.

So the Pirates are in a tough situation. It is to their advantage to be among the top teams in draft spending every year, and to Frank Coonelly and Neal Huntington's eternal credit, they have been among those teams in the past two years. It is not to their advantage to go completely kamikaze and start spending $30 million in each draft. Latin America works in about the same way--the talent is cheap, and that's to the Pirates' advantage. They don't want to rock the boat to much, or they'll hurt themselves in the future.

So the Pirates' abilities to improve themselves in the draft really are limited to spending about $10 million each year and relying on their scouting department. There are no such limits on the use of resources to acquire minor leaguers in trades, though, and this is where Capps comes in. If the Bucs take Capps to arbitration, no one bats an eye, and the Pirates come out ahead if he pitches well, because a young guy who can close clearly has value on the trade market. And it's important to recognize that the financial risk here is actually quite small--Capps probably would've made around $3 million in arbitration, which isn't much, and anyway his one-year arbitration contract would not have been guaranteed. So the Bucs could have taken him to Spring Training and, if things still weren't working out after some more work with Joe Kerrigan, cut Capps for a loss of only a few hundred thousand bucks' worth of termination pay.

So the Pirates are throwing away the potential that they can trade Capps for prospects in order to save a few hundred thousand bucks. That seems like a very poor tradeoff to me, and the strong interest in Capps that other teams have expressed since his non-tender seems to bear this out. Pirates fans obviously throw out this allegation way too often, but the Capps non-tender really does seem to be an example of them being cheap. The payroll is at rock-bottom, so it isn't as if they can't afford him, and they should have tendered him because of the potential reward later if he were traded. Since the amount of damage the Pirates can do in the draft is not unlimited, it's to their advantage to keep potentially tradeable players in the hope that they can augment their draft hauls with minor leaguers acquired in trades. This time, they didn't do it, and they really should have.

Should Ramon Vazquez Keep His Roster Spot?

Charlie — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:32:32 -0000

More photos » by Gene J. Puskar - AP

Pittsburgh Pirates' Ramon Vazquez (5) connects for a two-run single against Cincinnati Reds' Micah Owings in the first inning during a baseball game in Pittsburgh Saturday, May 2, 2009. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

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Interesting tidbit in the Post-Gazette today:

Looks like Rule 5 pick John Raynor will be in a one-on-one battle with Brandon Moss for reserve outfield duty this spring. Locked into the bench for now are Jason Jaramillo, Ramon Vazquez, Bobby Crosby and Delwyn Young. That leaves room for one outfielder, preferably one capable of backing up in center. And Raynor might be better there than Moss.

Unlike Dejan Kovacevic, I can only speculate on what will happen, but what should happen here? Vazquez is vaguely useful in that, you know, he can play a bunch of infield positions and isn't Brian Bixler, but Vazquez hit a sub-Bloomquistian .230/.335/.279 last year, making 2009 the fourth season in the past six in which he failed to top a .620 OPS. I mostly admire Vazquez's patient approach at the plate, but that's really all he had in 2009--he looked like was praying for pitchers to accidentally walk him. I liked the Vazquez signing when it happened, but his strong 2008 campaign with the Rangers now looks very fluky. With Bobby Crosby in the fold, there doesn't seem to be any reason to break camp with another utility infielder, especially since Young can also sort of play second.

There are probably five bench spots available, and one probably will go to a catcher, and another to someone who can play shortstop. Jaramillo, Crosby and Young look very likely to make the bench, at this point. Maybe Kovacevic knows something I don't, but if I were in charge, it wouldn't be particularly likely that Vazquez would make the team next year. Assuming for now that Jeff Clement starts at first base and Garrett Jones is in right field, Moss isn't an ideal fit for the bench because he's left-handed like both of those guys. But Moss is out of options, can remain under team control for several more years if he sticks, and (despite his terrible 2009) has some prayer of hitting in 2010. There's really no upside in keeping Vazquez, except as insurance in case Crosby or Ronny Cedeno gets hurt or doesn't make the team. And even leaving Moss aside for a second, I'd probably rather keep Raynor and Steve Pearce as the last two bench guys than give a spot to Vazquez.

Of course, worrying about the Pirates careers of Vazquez and (probably) Moss is a deck chairs / Titanic situation. If Pedro Alvarez comes up, Vazquez will be gone, and if Jose Tabata comes up or the Pirates acquire another corner player, Moss will probably be gone. In the meantime, though, I think he could be a pretty decent bench outfielder--I think he's a bit better as a hitter than he showed in 2009, and his defense is good. It would be nice to stick with him for a couple more months before dumping him completely.