2012, Part II

There was a book called “Moneyball” that had large parts of it written just about this.

Beane’s problem was, unlike the current owner, Scholt (the owner at the time) put huge money restrictions on what Beane could spend. There was one chapter in the book where Beane had to offer to cover the salary of a reliever himself if he couldn’t find the money for that player in the budget. Scholt is also responsible for pulling out of a long term extension with Jason Giambi at the last minute, after Jason had already flown his family to Oakland for the signing. (This is why all the people complaining about Wolff (for any other reason then hurt feelings over a San Jose move) are full of BS, they selectively forget how bad they had it 5 years ago).

Anyway, even though Beane had gone around collecting all these high draft pick, Scholt put such huge money restrictions of the draft, that Beane and Co., unlike Tampa Bay or the BoSox, were forced to overreach multiple rounds in quality while drafting. Now, Wolff has taken those restrictions off and the A’s have been drafting over-slot the last few years, but they haven’t had the windfall of early picks that the previous owners forced them to waist. However, there is a reason for that too, which NSJ didn’t touch on.

The reason the A’s haven’t had the picks, is the players the A’s would get those picks from have been traded before the A’s had a chance to collect draft picks for them. The theory behind that strategy, is a player a team gets from a trade will have a 1 to 3 year minor league track record to look at and will have much less risk involved then those draft picks NSJ wants the A’s to collect so badly.

The real reason teams like the Tampa Bay and the BoSox collect so many draft picks, is that they are in contention, which would make it suicide to trade key players for prospects during the season. So a contending team, like the 2001-2004 A’s, the current BoSox, or Rays will collect draft picks, while an out of contention team, like A’s the last few years, will have only a few because they converted all their key players to less risky prospects mid season.

So, does Beane do this? Yes, he does, but only when the A’s are in contention.

If you want an injured high upside player there’s Carlos Beltran

If I recall correctly they have 11 of the top 100 in the 2011 draft which is supposed to be one of the more deep drafts in recent years. Can the A’s afford to hand out ~$15M-$20M to sign these potential picks in 2012 and compete?

Like the Rays will have in ‘11, the A’s have had one of these amazing opportunities before. It was the Moneyball draft. How did they use that opportunity?

I’m just going to quote dwishinsky here directly, because his blog post at his own site (check it out) is excellent:

The A’s had the 16th, 24th, 26th, 30th, 35th, 37th and 39th overall picks which allowed them the ability to get a lot of top draft picks to quickly replenish a team that found itself unable to afford the likes of Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon. In those spots respectively the A’s would draft (all out of college), Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, John McCurdy, Ben Fritz, Jeremy Brown, Steve Obenchain and Mark Teahen. Of these players only three would truly become major league ballplayers: Swisher, Blanton and Teahen (though Brown made it to the majors for five games).

Not surprisingly, the guys that the A’s paid slot-level money to in the first round – Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton – panned out very well, far better than any of the others.

Here would be my question for Beane, that the Moneyball narrative poorly addresses:

Would you have drafted much differently in 2002 if you had an unlimited draft budget?

I have long suspected that Michael Lewis tells the breathless tale of Jeremy Brown marching to the top of the draft board to simply enhance the narrative. It’s a lot less sexy to write, “The team took a fat guy with the No. 35 overall pick because they only had $350K to spend.”

I wonder which players the team liked best in that spot if they could’ve spent a million. I wonder how much that draft would’ve yielded with a draft budget of $15-20M.

I suspect that, with the benefit of hindsight, the Rays won’t make the same mistake with their historic opportunity – they’ve stripped their major league budget for ’11 to about $42M so that they can afford to spend $15-20M on this historic draft opportunity they have. They will pay slot for all those dudes is my guess.

I, too, have not written off Jackson and I think the team likes his versatility as a backup 1b and corner OF. As a Cal guy he probably also likes the East Bay more than the typical free agent recruit, so the team will have that going for them if they indeed want him back after ’11.

Ordonez’s range will be poor by ’12 but he is a very good athlete with more than 1,500 games of experience in right field in American League ballparks. This would figure to help his reads off the bat and perhaps mitigate some of his physical decline. I would expect him to be a true talent -5 out there, with 0 being his best-case scenario and -10 being his worst.

You’d be signing him for his bat though, to be sure.

But Ordonez would be a far lower priority than Crisp or DJJ. One of them simply has to be re-signed, because there’s no decent internal candidate to be an everyday CFer. Sweeney’s defense numbers are poor out there. Whereas there are least some logical internal candidates for 2b and Rf.

I disagree with you about the Rays. Their contention window is still very much alive, and will be in ‘12. They are a better team on paper than the A’s in both of those years. And yet they still very much see the value in restocking the system with those high picks, as evidenced by their machinations with Hawpe and their relievers to garner extra comp picks.

We should form a support group.

But I like where you are going with the idea of draft picks, but at the same time the Red Sox and Rays are very different. The Rays of course are more similar to us, but their window of contention is to a degree done. They are restocking. In 2012 we will not be in that position and with the dearth of availability on the free agent market, I don’t know how we recoup from losing 5 starters (Ellis, Matsui, DeJesus, Willingham, Crisp) with no clear replacements.

None of this is a bad plan, but why would we punt a year in which we still have our pitching in order to have some future nebulous gains of draft picks? Especially when it comes to DeJesus and Willingham, their replacements may either be too expensive or not as good as them. Indeed, if either of them (but especially DeJesus) can stay healthy and put up good performance, why not sign them at whatever discount we could extract? While we don’t gain a draft pick, we also don’t lose a draft pick that would happen if we went and signed someone else’s FA.

And that’s the fate that might await the A’s in 2015-2016 if they don’t have good drafts for the next 2-3 years.

The best way to increase the likelihood of having a good draft is to get more high-level picks and pay the best talent available.

It’s not like I’m advocating gutting the team. Far from it. Ordonez is a better player than Willingham. And I’m advocating bringing back Crisp to play CF.

Basically, it sounds like we disagree on bringing back Ellis and DJJ. I think that extra $12M-15M will be prohibitive. I’d rather spend a fraction of it on some comp picks for DJJ and Willingham, and perhaps to re-sign CoJax and Matsui.

It should have read, “Like Miguel Carbrera avoids driving sober.” That would have made more sense…

Balfour, Fuentes, Matsui, Crisp (recently); Thomas, Piazza, Dye? Tejada refused to sign with the A’s while in his prime?

Clearly there are teams who can and do outbid Oakland. Clearly some players would rather play for a recently perennial contender and (if they’re hitters) in a hitter’s park. But let’s not overstate some “horror of Oakland”. Many of us enjoy living and working in Oakland, and this IS a fan site for the Oakland A’s.

Yeah we wont see him around after this year, no matter what.

but i think crisp is here for his defense not his offense. cody ross would be here for his offense, not his defense.

jay payton was a top quality defender. i’m not sure ross is.

as for trading for him…the giants don’t trust torres. he had an off the charts career year last year. i think they’re keeping rowand and ross around for depth and in case torres crashes back to earth.

Look at that OBP the last three years. All his offensive value is tied up in power numbers, which would get worse in the AL and in our park.

You may not be interested in who is better over 150 games, but “Crisp + Sweeney” is probably better in CF than Cody Ross. You can penalize Crisp for the games he misses, but his rate stats are much better than Ross’ over that time frame, and a decent injury replacement for Crisp moves the combo above Ross in terms of production.

honestly either one could end up at 2B. I can kind of see us re-signing Ellis one more time until Green is ready, but that depends of how Ellis hits this year. I hope and pray Parker sticks at 3B and can play better than Kouzmanoff, because it looks a little shallow at 3B, depth wise, as well as CF.

There’s no point in rushing offensive prospects, especially when the incumbent is already doing a good job.

The rare case I can think of the A’s quasi-rushing an offensive prospect is Tejada, and that’s because there was such a vacuum at short at the time.

With pitchers it’s different. Their arm could snap off at any time. It’s more justifiable to bring them up at 21 or 22 if they are effective, because you want to get six healthy, cost-controlled years out of them.

With hitters their development curve is more predictable. We can predict that Grant Green’s age 28-29 seasons will be better than his age 22. So we’d rather not waste that age 22 season at the big league level as a backup or replacement-level player.

I think Green will spend the next two full seasons in the minors.

Ive had that happen to me with Fangraphs before

by PL78 on Feb 26, 2011 10:30 AM PST up reply actions

Hopefully your family and friends are all safe and well back home.

Earthquakes suck, except for the San Jose Earthquakes.

California Golden Blogs had the same problems a couple days ago.

and don’t call me Shirley.

I don’t see the possibility of the team ending up with egg on its face here. I think the timeline will be such that we (and the team) will learn the results of the new CBA in terms of draft pick compensation, and then they will make their free agent decisions.

My post is assuming that compensation still exists in its current form or a very similar one. If it were to be entirely done away with, then yes, I’d advocate bringing the whole band back together – Javid JeJesus, Willingham, Crisp, Matsui, maybe even Ellis if he has a good 2011.

But I think we will know the results of the new CBA prior to being forced to make decisions on those. I also think the team will be privy to the Owner’s sticking points in negotiations; they may even already know with 80% confidence what the next CBA will include in regards to this issue.

;)

meant for this to be a reply to Future Ed

Sweeney is the Hottest hitter.

Choice was not ranked.

but couldn’t you say that “hard slotting on draft picks” would also, in essence, work to suppress player salaries as well? I mean, if unproven player x gets a 3.5 million dollar signing bonus out of college, it has to act somewhat to drive up the asking price of established free agent or arbitration eligible player y.

And I think that though they are not represented by the union, couldn’t the agents’ lobby (not that an actual organized body acting on their behalf exists) try to exert some influence in how the union sides on the matter? While draftees are not union members, they are usually represented by (though at the time of the draft NCAA players are only “advised” by agents, which is a sham) or represent assets to agents. I know agents are the lowest guys on the totem pole in a labor matter like this, but I would think they might have some influence, if not directly, then through the players they represent – and even though free agent compensation can hurt agents as well since it suppresses salaries, I don’t think they’ll be too happy about guys being forced to take slot money in the draft. After all, for a large portion of their players, that draft money is the only significant pay they are going to see. I don’t know if this makes sense at all, but I would think it could be a factor.

Because they have a long term winning team, they can pick up expensive type A players on a 1 year deal and not blink if they walk.

Also, those type A players are more likely to come to a winning team, netting them a draft pick.

It pretty much comes down to the fact that winning begets winning, and baseball has a system set up to keep winning teams winning and loosing teams loosing.

A’s and Rays “have about 300 players between them”?? Are you counting every minor-league scrub in both farm systems? That’s not much of a league.

Besides that, the “ownership” the teams hold over the players only lasts as long as the current contracts. All that business about draft rights and arbitration and such are agreements with the union and MLB. Take them out of MLB and all that goes poof. I’m not even sure the regular contracts would stay good if the teams leave the league.