THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I’ve wasted the last 15 minutes trying to think of other deals that could be included on the list.  Most of my suggestions are negative, despite the fact that I generally like Shapiro, so that either says something about my memory, my summary judgements, or more likely about how thankless a job GM can be.

The first move that came to mind was Luke Scott for Jeriome Robertson, but at the time of that trade Scott was coming off an age 25 season in which he hit 342/486 between A+ and AA, and an age 24 season in which he hit 336/479 at two A levels.  So that’s probably not fair to Shapiro.

The Kerry Wood signing was probably ill-advised, but I see that it wasn’t even really addressed in last year’s Pre-Season Moves thread here, and I didn’t object too strenuously myself.  There’s the Rickey Gutierrez signing--I didn’t check the dollar amounts, but given the fact that the team was unlikely to contend in ‘02...Kevin Kouzmanoff for Josh Barfield looks like a loser at this point, but seemed reasonable at the time. 

On the asburd level: From the reaction of some ridiculous fans at the time, you would have thought Karim Garcia and Dan Miceli to the Yankees for cash was the new Colavito/Kuenn.

It’s fun to poke around B-R for this kind of exercise.  How else would I have ever remembered that Jason Beverlin pitched for the Indians?

I was telling people 3 years ago that Toyota reliability was headed seriously downhill because of their engine oil sludging issue at that time.  It didn’t get the press that these latest blunders have, but it affected millions of vehicles and Toyota behaved in the same coverup and deny until forced to do otherwise fashion that they have in this latest set of recalls.  Of course, people told me at the time that I was an idiot and Toyota was still the class of the industry.

I know defending Toyota wasn’t your point, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that sometimes a few people can see what’s coming even if the broader public doesn’t know.  Maybe there were signs with Westbrook that weren’t obvious to the layman but should have been apparent to a good scout or pitching coach or would have been uncovered if the Indians were sending all their pitchers to ASMI for biomechanical analyses.

Patriot: what was Indian fandom reaction to Gutierrez being traded, and what is it now?

Did they then (or now) see Gutierrez the way Mariners fans saw then (or now) Adam Jones?

No, I don’t think fans thought much of Gutierrez at the time.  Since Sizemore up until this season was essentially an ironman, he never got a chance to impress fans in center (although I assume he did pretty well in your fan scouting report).  Also, the bullpen was bad in ‘08, and so I think fans were happy to see a bullpen arm (Joe Smith) come in the trade.  Although Smith had a bad season, Indians fans also seem to like Luis Valbuena, which for now is keeping the front office from getting too much heat for the trade.

Disclaimer: I listen to less talk radio and read less team specific media now then at any other time during my fandom, so my handle on what the masses seem to think isn’t too strong.

I can’t speak to the Cleveland fans, but when asked about why he would give up Valbuena in that trade, Jack Zduriencik has basically said that he absolutely had to give up value to get Gutierrez, with the implication that he could fleece Omar Minaya but he couldn’t fleece Mark Shapiro.  The M’s would love to still have Valbuena.

I don’t know if it was too much faith in scouting director John Mirabelli or what, but I always thought consistently lousy scouting and player development was a major knock against Shapiro that isn’t often mentioned in these kinds of analyses.

Mirabelli ran the last two drafts (2000 and 2001) under John Hart.  Neither were terribly successful - the best players are Ryan Church and Luke Scott - but when Shapiro moved up from Asst GM in 2002 it would have been difficult to really assess the job that Mirabelli had done.  Either way, Shapiro was a key part of the FO when Mirabelli was hired for the 2000 draft and he was obviously comfortable with him in that position.

Mirabelli continued to run the Indians draft through 2007.  Here are the key players from all of his drafts:

2000 - Ryan Church
2001 - Luke Scott
2002 - Jeremy Guthrie, Ben Francisco
2003 - Kevin Kouzmanoff, Ryan Garko, Aaron Laffey
2004 - Jeremy Sowers?
2005 - Trever Crowe (only semi-decent prospect)
2006 - David Huff (another middling finesse LHP)
2007 - no hot prospects as of now

That’s not much of a track record.  Kouzmanoff is a solid player and Guthrie had a couple good years.  There are no difference makers there.  I’m not sure I even see that many 3+ WAR seasons from this group of players. 

And ironically considering Shapiro is known for very good deals and poor drafting, most of the decent picks from these years were lost in trades for very little.

I don’t know how much of a factor the scouting budget was.  The Indians at the time were known for favoring safe, low ceiling collegians.  For much of this time though that was the fashionable thing to do, so I’m not sure how much of an issue budget constraints really were.

After the 2007 season Mirabelli was *promoted* to overseeing all of scouting including the Indians international operations.  Btw, it’s also true that the Indians international scouting which had a couple huge hits with Bartolo Colon and Victor Martinez under John Hart mostly dried up under Shapiro. 

Under the Indians current SD Bud Grant they have started to draft more aggressively with an increased signing budget.  The first rd picks look pretty good, but of course it’s too soon to really say much about his tenure as a SD.

I’ve always thought that Shapiro was very similar to Kevin Towers.  Both had very good trading records and were generally considered good and “smart” GMs, but both also oversaw very shallow scouting and player development operations.  It’s incredibly hard for a small revenue GM to continue to look good and “smart” without that internal talent pipeline. 

I agree with Tango that the lopsided Sizemore/Lee for Colon deal is going to make it very hard for any accounting system to come out with a negative for Shapiro, but without an internal development pipeline I’m not sure you can look at Shapiro’s trade record and conclude that his methods of success were likely to be sustainable.

In evaluating deals, what exactly counts against the GM, as opposed to bad luck? Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. This off-season, Frank Wren of the Braves signed Wagner, Saito, and Glaus, all in their thirties with a recent history of injury problems. If one or more of them fails to perform this season, or misses significant time due to injury, does that count against Wren’s performance as a GM? I think it has to.

Yes, it has to, if you are evaluating a group of 30-50 deals.

This is just like buying stocks.  You can’t fault someone from buying Toyota 4 years ago.  But, if he buys Toyota and Lehman and City and a bunch of other stocks where, overall, he ends up in last place of a group of 30 stock buyers, then, yeah, you fault him for buying bad stocks.  Even if each and every one might have been somewhat defensible.

You can evaluate GM deals strictly by how we would, as sabermetricians, evaluate them at the time they are made.  That makes sense for any small sample.  It also makes sense for a large sample, but in doing it that way, you ignore the possibility that the GM knows something that we don’t know, or doesn’t know something that we also don’t know, but he should know, doesn’t know something that other GM’s know, knows something that other GM’s don’t know, etc.

In using outcomes, however, you have way too much noise in the short run for that method to be worthwhile.  In the long run, you are trading some “noise/sample size” issues (you are never going to have a VERY large sample for any one GM) for the possibility of evaluating the GM based on things that WE don’t know at the time of the signing.

Personally I don’t like using the outcome method even for 20 or 30 players.  Too much noise and not enough potential gain.  I would stick with the “at the time of the trade” method, which is basically just the type of analysis of worth that we do here all the time.

Now, of course, a proper analysis of GM moves is way more complex that that.  There are roster issues, backlog issues (do they have too many or too few players in the organization at certain positions), playoff contention issues, supply and demand issues, revenue issues (for example, a marginal win to the Yankees might be worth 10 mil), payroll constraints by the owners, meddling in decisions by the owners, etc, etc.  It is not just, “This player is worth 12 mil based on 3 WAR at 4 mm per win (or whatever the going rate is), so anything less than that is a good deal and more than that is a bad deal.” That is a very simplistic way of looking at it, and not very effective at evaluating GM’s.

I did one for Kenny Williams.

http://www.southsidesox.com/2010/2/20/1318120/kenny-wiliams-hits-and-misses

As noted here already, there’s pros and cons to doing this. I think it elicits good discussion, though, which I always find to be a positive.

MB21 over at Another Cubs Blog did an extensive one on Jim Hendry, including both FA signings and trades:

http://www.anothercubsblog.net/analysis/articles/jim-hendry.html

It’s a really good analysis, based on WAR paid for and WAR received.  He seemed to conclude that Hendry does better in trades than most, and not as poor as people think with FA signings.

Michael Jong has part one of a similar analysis of Larry Beinfest up at Marlin Maniac.
http://www.marlinmaniac.com/2010/02/19/the-hits-and-misses-of-larry-beinfest-pt-1/

He’s an interesting GM to analyze considering the unique constraints on him from being with the uber small market Marlins.

I updated the main blog entry with these three.  Thanks…