Cust re-signs with the A's

Two only semi-related thoughts.

Realistically, I wonder what it would take to get Beckham…Davis, Weeks, Doolittle, and Wuertz?

Beckham looks good but not superstar good. And since the White Sox are playing him at 3b/2b and the A’s could play him at SS, he is worth more to the A’s than the White Sox.

And overpaying is a necessity. I’m talking like grover’s Zimmerman package type offer.

To be a centerpiece of the Manny & Bay three-way trade. And he hit 5 of his 12 HRs last year in September – maybe he’s finally waking up? Anyway, of the three guys mentioned most often as third base trade options I would rank him behind Callaspo but ahead of Kouzmanoff since he still has an upside.

I am not willing to give up my stance that Pennington sucks. Wood probably is not available unfortunately. I would say Brignac is better than Pennington right now. Lowrie is still my #1 option.

Ultimately any trade we make would depend entirely on which outfielders we’re willing to give up, the needs of the team we’re dealing with and expected return value. I’m just stating that having the surplus doesn’t give us decreased leverage. On the other hand, if someone wants to say the outfielders we’re actually willing to give up puts us in a position of decreased leverage, that would be a pretty easy sell for me.

I commented above about Cust that “he’s getting market value for his services.” You responded that “He’s not getting market value for his services,” which certainly seems like a direct disagreement. I think part of this is a semantic disagreement, while part of it is substantive. Let me see if I can tease out the difference.

What I mean by market value (or price – in this specific case they amount to the same thing): Jack Cust was out on the open market, and what he got paid was market price. By definition. It wouldn’t make any sense to say that the market itself doesn’t pay “market price”; what the market pays is market price. If a glut of DHs affects the market price, that’s internal to the market (it’s the “supply” part of “supply and demand”), not some extraneous factor that illegitimately distorts the market.

Now, did Cust get paid in proportion to the WAR he projects to provide? No. And as you point out, that’s due to the abundance of DH types on the market. Teams don’t purchase WAR in the abstract; they purchase WAR in the form of players. WAR (or more precisely, the overall average marginal $ per WAR) can’t account for positional scarcity or abundance. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that Cust is “undervalued” or that the market misunderstood his true worth, but rather that $/WAR is not necessarily an accurate way to measure market value in specific cases even if it is a good measure of market value in general.

Here’s where I think we may disagree: I don’t think Cust is particularly unlucky here, being “screwed” by the market (or by circumstances); rather, I think this is the consequence of the relative market elasticity of the DH position. To elaborate, shortstop is a hard position to play relative to DH; that’s why players are continually moving leftward on the Jamesian defensive spectrum as their defensive abilities decline. Therefore humans who can play shortstop at an acceptable level are much less numerous than humans who can play DH at an acceptable level. Therefore DH talent, especially at the non-premium level, is “denser” than shortstop talent – that is, there is more “spacing” between shortstops talents than between DH talents. Therefore the market for DH’s is more elastic, meaning that they have a lot less leverage in pricing their services.

Another way of looking at it: say there are 10 non-premium DH’s out there looking for a job, all within about .2 WAR of expected value. Given that they’re all approximately interchangeable, they’re going to bid each other down, and as a consequence WAR at the DH position will be discounted relative to WAR in general. But since shortstop talent is scarcer in general you won’t find 10 shortstops clustered within that same range of value – let’s say you have 10 shortstops who are separated by 1.5 WAR from one end of the group to the other. Then the prices will be a lot firmer than with the DH’s, because now you are looking at a more significant upgrade or downgrade as you move from one prospective shortstop to the next. I’m a Cust fan, but I don’t know that he’s “undervalued” so much as he’s paying the price for having skills (non-premium abilities at the left end of the defensive spectrum) that are relatively abundant and therefore necessarily discounted. This is what Beane was getting at in Moneyball when he said (if my memory is not botching this) that he should be fired if he ever paid more than $1 million for a first baseman. Hyperbole, obviously, given what he paid Hatteberg, not to mention Giambi, all without offering to relinquish his job, but the point is that OK-level talent at the left end of the spectrum is abundant and therefore relatively cheap (premium talents like McCovey, Thomas, and Ortiz, would still be worth paying for).

That’d be weird, though – wouldn’t the team just vote for a player they didn’t have to pay? or am I just being too cynical?

either way, I’m making a papier mache trophy that I shall award him at the end of the season.