Assorted Baseball Thoughts

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Published on March 12, 2010

We had our 18-team Staff Keeper Auction last night - I don't have access to the results except through a google doc, and it's not worth posting my team (which has inflation-skewed dollar values sculpted by years of contending and/or dumping by various teams). But doing the auction and research got me thinking about a few things:

I had some cheap keepers and underestimated how much money I had. After letting players like Alex Rodriguez go for an outrageous $72, I started thinking maybe I should have bought him. I had $153 for nine players, and the pool of talent was depleted. Moreover, it's not necessarily a bad thing to run out of money and wind up with some $1 players. It hurts you for this year, but it's also how you get monster keepers - Tim Schuler (my co-owner) and I did well most years in large part because we had a $2 Carl Crawford when he was a prospect. Of course, you can bid less when you have more money and just leave some of it on the table. But one is far more likely to buy better and more expensive players in that case. Often when you're forced to settle for $1 or $2 guys no one else wants is when you get the best values.

It's important to remind yourself that past performance does not guarantee future results, and to be aware of the factors that make a difference. Obviously injuries are huge factors, as is a player's developmental curve based on age. But don't forget experience level, too. I had a talk with Lawr Michaels after our LABR draft, and he said he likes to draft players in their third seasons because the first one is usually a midseason call-up, the second is their first full one and the third is finally when they know the drill and can get comfortable. I have a similar criteria - it's when a hitter gets 700-1000 at-bats under his belt, he'll often "get it." In some ways baseball is like any other job - you're not comfortable and confident in doing it until you get the requisite experience. So never be surprised when a player like Mike Pelfrey, Gio Gonzalez or Jarrod Saltalamacchia takes a major leap that seems to come out of nowhere when you're analyzing his prior numbers. If you don't believe that's possible, consider Kendry Morales, Adam Lind and Justin Verlander, or the leaps Zack Greinke and Jon Lester made from good to great. Don't just assume last year's peripherals will stay the same, and only a player's luck will change for better or worse. That's only true if the player is an established veteran, and even then, it's not always the case.

Injuries are everything. Sure you're know that if a pitcher tears his UCL, he's done for at least a year, but there are more subtle nagging injuries, not all of which are immediately reported, that hold down a player's production. I was huge on Alfonso Soriano last year, and he came out of the gate quickly in April, but had a terrible season the rest of the way. It turned out that he banged his knee against the wall at just about the time when his season went south, but it wasn't reported as a serious injury until several months later, and he had to have surgery to fix the problem after the season.

Does that mean I really wasn't wrong about Soriano after all? That I just had bad luck. Well, yes and no. Yes, in that there's no way I could predict an injury completely unrelated to any ailment he'd had in the past, and no - it's tough luck - probably most of the bad calls we make are actually injury related and we just don't know about it, especially with pitchers. Brad Lidge was a disaster last year, but he had a bad knee that was affecting his delivery. If you paid top dollar for Lidge, you couldn't have foreseen that given how strong his 2008 was. And it's not simply a matter of avoiding injured players, either. Albert Pujols has had an elbow problem every year, and it hasn't affected his production at all. Soriano was healthier than ever last year before banging into the wall. And sometimes injured players come at a huge discount.
Bottom line - I believe that a huge amount of success or failure in professional sports including baseball is just about health. And that 75 percent or so of elite pitching prospects would be major successes if they never got hurt or lost velocity.

As a result, you can make a nice profit off of players recovering from nagging injuries like Todd Helton, Jorge Posada and Derek Jeter last year. Maybe Chipper Jones, Vlad Guerrero, Lidge and Soriano (among many others) will be good values this year.

Don't be a know-it-all. I can't tell you how many times people tell me: "Player x was a reach" or "Your pitching staff is terrible." How the hell do you know? I get that you disagree with my picks, or that you wouldn't pay x amount for a particular player. That's fine. But you should always keep in mind the possibility that you're mistaken and in fact those are great picks, or that I should in fact have been willing to pony up for that player. This is a simple concept but one that nonetheless is sometimes hard for people to grasp. You have to make decisions about who to buy and who to let go. So you have to have some kind of opinion in order to participate in a draft or an auction. Even if you're just an agnostic, taking what the draft gives you, you still have to decide which of the available undervalued players to go after.

But the issue is whether that opinion settles the question of player value completely, or whether it's loose enough to be held while seeing the opposite possibility. "I like player x, but I can see how that could be wrong" is usually how I'll want to frame it. "I don't like player y, but I can see the possibility that he'll have a huge year." You still have your opinion and are prepared to act decisively on it. But you're also cognizant that you could be wrong and susceptible to changing your mind. Because in every scenario, you have to know that your opinion cannot possibly have a 100 percent chance of being right. In even the best cases it's just 70/30 or 60/40, and just because you have to make a decision, doesn't mean you should delude yourself into pretending it's 100/0 simply to strengthen your resolve.

By purporting to be certain, you cut yourself off from other possibilities - players you're unsure about might merit a second look, a player you think will do well might falter, and you will be quicker to have a backup plan in place. Player performance is an organic thing like the weather or the stock market - it's very hard to predict. It doesn't subscribe to linear, logical rules - or at least any that we can easily decipher. You'll only have a chance to do well at it if you respect how difficult it is to do.