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May 27, 2008
The Employment Onus
I was thinking about the Mets’ lackluster first 45 games, and two things occurred to me: 1. Willie Randolph made as big a tactical blunder as you can possibly make in the 13th inning last Friday night. 2. Omar Minaya’s body of work over the last two years has been largely unimpressive. At first, I was a bit annoyed by the backlash against Willie Randolph. I just can’t see how a manager has such an extensive impact in a baseball season. General Managers assemble a team of players, who are charged with winning baseball games. Most of these guys, I assume, have very thick skin. Managers, I guess, are responsible for tactical management, personality management, and tutelage. I thought that Randolph’s tactical management was mostly OK, his personality management was excellent, and his tutelage was top-notch (Reyes and Wright, after all, have matured into superstars). Perhaps I’m simply overreacting to one bad night. But in the 13th inning of a marathon, with the winning run on second and two outs, Randolph had a choice: he could have Aaron Heilman walk righty Matt Holliday to get to righty Garrett Atkins, or he could leave Heilman in to face Holliday. Randolph opted for the latter. At 1:20 AM Friday night, I was shaking my head at the TV (”Don’t let the other team’s best player beat you!”). Heilman didn’t even pitch around him. The two pitches were in the strike zone. Both Atkins and Holliday are excellent hitters, but PECOTA clearly prefers Holliday, projecting him for a .296 EqA, with Atkins at .280. If we use those as a baseline, you face Atkins. Worse, though, was Randolph’s postgame justification:
Where do I begin on this? We’ll start from the statistical side. The Book, by Tom Tango, Mitchel Litchtman, and Andrew Dolphin, looked into batter/pitcher matchups and concluded:
I would like for my manager of choice to have read The Book, but if they haven’t, that’s okay. Even with their strong evidence to the contrary, I am compelled to think that if a manager has inside scouting information after a reasonable sample (say, 20 plate appearances) that a hitter really seems to see the ball well from a pitcher, I am out of my depth to criticize his decision-making. With that said, Willie Randolph chose to focus on two plate appearances. Let’s go to those plate appearances: July 26, 2005: On a 1-2 pitch with one out at Coors Field, Atkins led lined a single to right. Heilman proceeded to set down the next two batters and keep the Mets down by two runs. August 29, 2006: His most recent Aaron Heilman sighting, Atkins smoked a double to deep center at Coors Field in a blowout on an 0-1 count. Heilman, at this point, was just closing out another Met win; the score was 10-3 when he came in. Let’s imagine for a moment, what would have happened if Beltran had caught that ball in deep center on August 29, 2006, and if Mike Cameron, the Met right fielder, had caught Atkins’ ball on July 26, 2005. All of a sudden, the statsheet suggests that you pitch to Atkins, who is a lesser hitter than Holliday. Essentially, these two plate appearances were why the Mets pitched to Matt Holliday last night. However much you take statistics into account watching a baseball game, how many people are comfortable with two plate appearances from more than a year ago dictating game strategy? I am certainly not. Perhaps I was just incensed from watching too much frustrating baseball of late, but I’ve reached the point where I don’t think that firing Randolph would hurt the team. I would rather not see two plate appearances as a significant indicator of a performance level. Now, on Minaya. A lot of this is rehashing John Peterson’s excellent points, but I feel like it can be expanded a bit. Here’s a thought exercise: which of the following sets of players would you rather have?
Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but the Mets would be in better shape with the first group of players. Bannister, Lindstrom, and Bell would bolster what has been an embattled pitching staff. On that list of players the Mets traded for, only Church has been what was hoped for. This was a list of every player the Mets traded away and every player the Mets got in trade between the Oliver Perez trade and the Johan Santana trade. That was eighteen months of wheeling and dealing to nowhere in particular. If the Mets had simply stood pat, they would be a better club. We also have what I’ll deem “roster errors”:
And the ill-advised overpayments for “lightning in a bottle”:
Toss in the four-year deal to Castillo, who can’t play everyday, in a market where comparable talent got one- and two-year deals (here’s looking at you, David Eckstein), and the failure to bring in a competent stopgap to spell an aging Carlos Delgado, and you have a pretty bad run here. These moves add up, of course. The Mets found probably the biggest painkiller one could use for this type of malady: a relatively low-cost trade for an ace, which should count for something. But look around, and you can see that there’s a lot more bad than good that’s gone on in roster management over the past couple of years. My point: there’s a lot of blame to go around here. I don’t know what firing Willie Randolph would do, practically speaking, but such tactical flaps belie any explanations of the benefits of keeping him. While I don’t think he should be fired, necessarily, in a situation like this, it’s almost as if the onus shifts to Randolph to prove why he’s the right man for the job, even though he already has the job. I’ve written about my admiration for Randolph in the past, but when the hot coals are so close to one’s feet, you can’t just stand pat to protect yourself. The media and fanbase are essentially challenging Randolph to prove why he’s the best man for the job at this point. To me, relying on two plate appearances to dictate strategic decisions is not the best way to go about that. As for Minaya? I feel that Minaya has gotten something of a free pass as fans have focused their collective venom on the manager and Aaron Heilman. But really, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Dan is a student who writes for MetsGeek every Wednesday. He welcomes feedback at dscotto10@gmail.com. 22 Responses to “The Employment Onus”Leave a ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
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I would have to believe that the Gotay move was as much a reflection of Randolph’s clear and baffling distaste with Gotay, simply because he wasn’t a Gold Glove fielder, as it was Minaya’s choice.
Other than that, yeah, yeah, you’re basically right.
Minaya got Perez and Maine as throw-ins on other deals and… the Santana thing fell into his lap because the Yankees and the Red Sox cancelled each other out.
And other than those three moves, it’s been kinda uniformly awful.
Too much age, too much injury-proneness and too much Big Name worship.
Omar Minaya, it is not your job to keep the Mets in the press with “big name signings” in some kind of weird competition with the Yankees.
It is your job to win games on a long-term scale.
Do your damned job or go back to Montreal, do PR for the Canadiens or something.
It’s not so much that “the Yankees and the Red Sox canceled each other out” but that both the Yankees and Red Sox had strong young pitchers in their system for whom they opted over the price of signing Santana. Minaya, because his farm system is terrible, did not have that option. So even when he wins, it’s because he really lost. Minaya should be setting the Mets up to be like the Red Sox and Yankees (strong farm systems with the financial wherewithal to sign big name free agents), but instead he goes back to the same old veteran well. He’s good enough at that old school game, but the game has changed and left him in the dust.
Amen Dan, I agree with every point you’ve made. Omar Minaya hasn’t taken anywhere near enough heat for the shoddy roster construction he’s responsible for. Lots of blame to go around.
lfm, regardless of Willie’s use of Gotay, it’s on Omar’s shoulders that he was given away for *nothing*. In order to keep the likes of Brady Clark and Marlon Anderson. What is it that Omar felt that Marlon would give them that Gotay couldn’t, at half the price?
You’d be asking too much lol. I think only Yost has admitted to reading it so im not going to kill Willie for not lol.
Really all I would like is at the end of a game if someone askes him why he did something, for him to not be defensive and not use the “i went with my gut”….he’s a reasonable person, he makes moves for reasons……i wanna hear those reasons…..even if i dont agree with them i want to see the logic behind the move. Thats all.
Well, at last Willie was using stats with the decision to pitch to Holliday.
That’s a positive, right?
Ned Yost may have read The Book, but he didn’t understand it, at least according to the writers of The Book.
Minaya’s biggest blunder this year has to be the complete lack of insurance for Delgado and Alou. Everyone saw that Delgado was going to be terrible, and it should be no shock to anyone that Alou was going to be injured. It was pretty much Omar’s only significant task of the offseason and spring training, and he completely failed. He didn’t even go for guys who were released, like Kevin Mensch.
Yeah I think I remembered that blog post lol. Hey…..I guess just reading it is a start? lol
We did know this comming in but did anyone think he’d be THIS BAD?
Although im not entirely sure I believe it, I think alot of ppl felt getting a starting pitcher was most important. He did go out and get Santana. Whether he fell to us or not, you have to give credit for obtaining him.
But yeah he missed the boat completely on backup 1B and LF.
I agree that Omar has fumbled badly on the backups and the age of the roster. I also think that his worst blunder from a player evaluation/development perspective was losing Flores.
I still can´t argue with some of the trades (bell, banister)– he had to consider other issue, like options, which are never discussed on these pages. The jury´s still out too, on the Burgos deal, due to his injury.
And Gotay isn´t god… what´s he doing now exactly??? not exactly burning up the league or getting a lot of ABs. But relying on Easley and Anderson instead was a big mistake.
I also disagree that Maine and Ollie were throw-ins. I think Omar had those guys in mind as undervalued guys who could be had in a trade– kind of a moneyball approach to trading.
I agree that the Bannister trade wasn’t bad. Even now. Sure, it would be nice to have Bannister (he’s the perfect Mets Geek. What other pitcher talks about BABIP?), but he really got lucky last year and is regressing to the mean pretty bad this year.
Gotay is Gotay. The thing with him is that he is much cheaper than Anderson and Easley, fulfills the same roles, and is a much better bet to stay healthy. But the Mets tanked his defensive reputation based on one botched double play turn and concluded that he couldn’t play anywhere else, either.
I know a lot of people felt that getting a starting pitcher was important, and it sure was. But more important was solidifying the offense. Pitchers are unpredictable. I know people didn’t see it that way. But Minaya made sure that 1/4th of our lineup was offensively anemic in Brian Schneider and Luis Castillo. Then he completely failed to come up with a right-handed 1B/OF type, a need almost everyone saw.
You know I really dont fault him so much for NOT going out and getting insurance for Alou or Delgado…..no I fault him for adding offensive inept guys like schneider and giving castillo a 4 year deal.
I know people complained about PLD, but Schneider isnt the answer. And his defense which was supposedly good has even been a disappointment to me.
That being said. We all knew what this was at the beginning. We knew who would miss time, we knew who was likely to decline, who was likely to improve. Most projections taking this into account STILL had us 90+ wins. So im putting this more on Willie then Omar.
santana and milledge were horrible moves. i’d just like to reiterate that now that we’ve seen the club minaya put together for two months, and it’s clearly not the juggernaut some of us supposed. it is never a good idea to sign a pitcher (no matter how good) to a seven-year contract at free agent rates, and it’s an even worse idea to trade three of your four best prospects for the privilege of doing so. it’s also obviously stupid to trade a 22-year-old with loads of potential and a decent track record in limited major league at-bats for an older outfielder who’s more expensive, has fewer years before free agency, is more limited defensively, and has basically the same skill-set offensively except that he’s left-handed (along with a horrible catcher with a good defensive rep). what should be clear at this point, however, is just how horribly misguided those trades were. even with church hitting way over his head and santana remaining one of the best pitchers in baseball (though the peripherals and scouting are troubling), the mets are still not good. the FO misjudged the talent on the roster and decided to go for broke right now, and the strategy is failing. that is what happens when you build for now instead of for sustained success. just because church is getting luckier than milledge for the first two months of this season do not make that a good trade. the fact that santana is doing well right now does not make that a good move/signing. those moves were made not because those players would do well, but because minaya thought those players would help make the mets a championship team this year. he was wrong, and although it’s probably the difference between 23-26 and 19-30 right now, those were not good moves at the time, they are not good moves for this season, and they are not good moves for the future.
also, all of you who took my $20 action on delgado’s ops being below .800 this season will be expected to pay up. seriously.
This is known as the “Isiah Thomas Fallacy,” thinking your team is better than it is.
I think the idea of over-promoting players in the minors has been pretty well debunked at this time. The Mets’ three signature prospects of the last several years have been Lastings Milledge, Mike Pelfrey and Fernando Martinez. All three were handled very poorly. Milledge was constantly getting jerked around, Pelfrey was sent to the wolves at MLB without ever succeeding at the AAA level and the jury is still out on the apparently injury-prone Fernando Martinez.
It makes more sense to me to let a guy dominate a level before promoting him.
In regards to the point about losing Ruben Gotay “to keep Brady Clark on the roster”, there wasn’t room for all of Anderson, Chavez, & Gotay (all LH hitters) on a 4-man bench. Personally, I would have preferred to keep Gotay over Chavez or Anderson, but, regardless, they weren’t go with just one right-handed hitter on their bench.
e poc-
Church is MUCH better than Milledge defensively. No contest….
This has gotten lost in the past two years, but the Jesus Flores Rule V blunder was much worse than it seemed. It wasn’t a simple as releasing a worthless bench player like Franco for a kid headed to AA, or even trying to sneak an AAA pitcher that had been in the organization for while off the 40 man. No, it was as simple as DFAing Jason Standridge, a guy they had signed only a few weeks prior, and released anyway a few weeks later
The problem is, the Mets weren’t/aren’t built for sustained success. They haven’t had the farm system the past couple of years that teams like the Diamondbacks or the Devil Rays, or the Red Sox & Yankees, for that matter do (obviously, that’s an indictment of the Mets drafting). Given, on the one hand, the dearth of young talent, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, we have a team that won 97 games 2 years ago and was in first place last season until the collapse, there’s an argument for focusing on the short-term, even if means depleting the little bit of young talent we have.
Did the FO misjudge the talent we have? I don’t have the PECOTA numbers if front of me, but I’d venture that virtually every offensive player, starter or bench player, save Church & perhaps Schnieder & Pagan is performing below expectations. Pitching-wise, it’s a little bit better - I’d say that Smith, Schoenweis, Maine,& Wagner are all performing at or above expectations - but you still have a majority of the staff underachieving. That’s not to mention Pedro & El Duque being out the first 2 months of the season, which while not a complete shocker, has to be considered a worst-case scenario.
The Milledge-for-Church trade may very well prove to a bad one in the long run, but Church is a much better player, offensively & defensively, than Lastings is at this point. It’s not just luck - Lastings still hasn’t proven he can handle the outside breaking stuff.
the 2008 team is not the 2006 team, even if a lot of the players are the same. and not having built for sustained success in the past is not a good reason for continuing that policy.
although it’s true that a lot of players are underperforming, and the mets may end up being the best team in a weak division at the end of the year, it’s still manifestly obvious that this is not a championship team. perhaps the FO didn’t misjudge the talent, but the alternative is just as bad: they made seriously bad long-term deals in an effort to squeak out a division title this year.
i’m not sure why you think church is so much better than milledge. you brought up the PECOTA numbers in the previous paragraph; PECOTA and ZIPS both thought the were basically the same offensively, and milledge is playing competent cf while church is playing competent right field. if it’s the ~50 games of 2008 that are convincing you that church is better than milledge, you are making the same sorts of mistakes that omar has.
Just for the hell of saying it:
Yes. I definitely called Delgado being this bad.
Even in 2006, he was disgustingly streaky.
For an older player… one year, uncharacteristically streaky, next year, awful…
Means the next year after that, really goddamned unbelievably awful.
This is just how it works, in the Post-Roids era.
The Mets are not the same team they were in 2007, but they did win 88 games last year. You figure with Santana, a healthy Pedro, and a bullpen that had to be better than 2007’s, they’d be at least on track to win over 90 games. Hardball Times projected them to win 92 games. Baseball Prospectus projected them to win 96.
As for Lastings, I’ll guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. It’s not just this year he’s struggled - in his 3 years in the majors, he’s never shown he can handle the breaking stuff. In a couple of years, Lastings may be better than Church, but, at this point, it’s not even close, whatever the ZIPS/Pecota projections say.
“The Mets are not the same team they were in 2007, but they did win 88 games last year.”
I meant..the Mets are not the same team they were in 2006.
Another thing about the Santana trade/deal, e poc: you’re entitled to your opinon that it was a terrible long-term deal. However, the reality, given the Mets dearth of starting pitching after 2008, if they didn’t sign Santana, they’d be under tremendous pressure to overpay/trade the farm for somebody else. Better they do it for one of the best pitchers in baseball who’s age 29 with a history of staying injury-free, than somebody like AJ Burnett or Ben Sheets.
Also, I’d note that Humber is having a horrible year at Rochester right now, & both Mulvey & Guerra are not having good years. Obviously, it’s early now, but there’s certainly the possibility that that will continue to struggle, in which case their value will diminish. At this point, it looks like the Mets cashed in their chips at the right time.
yeah, i guess we’re going to have to disagree about a lot of stuff, peter.