Here’s the list of AL stolen base leaders, as the Rays announcers just put up in my face:
Juan Pierre, CHS (39)
Carl Crawford, TAM (38)
Rajai Davis, OAK (32)
Brett Gardner, NYY (30)
Scott Podsednik, LAD (30)
Do you see it? Do you see the issue? Here’s a hint: do you remember when the Dodgers moved to the American League?
On Wednesday, Batista sent flowers and made a phone call to apologize to Connors, and the Nationals invited the pageant winner to participate in the first-pitch ceremony, where she shared duties with a guy dressed as rum pitchman Captain Morgan.
Baseball!
But it’s the trade deadline, and Jeff Passan is on his soapbox again, busily searching through the data for more evidence to support his pet theory: that the only thing that matters in baseball is money. How people can continue with this conceit in the year 2010, after seeing small-market teams going toe-to-toe with the behemoths year after year, escapes me. But here we are, playing the same exact tune all over again.
The acquisition of Berkman to become designated hitter was the biggest on a Friday replete with chatter, rumors and deals at a busy trade deadline with a common theme: big boys buying big toys.
The context for this statement was in like four fucking paragraphs I didn’t feel like quoting, since I was afraid that Steve Gibson would sue me for infringing somebody else’s copyright in order to protect society and maybe he’ll accidentally make a shitload of money in the process. But basically, it’s about how Fat Elvis just got traded to the Yankees, because the Astros are ridiculously bad and need to shed payroll and rebuild. Of course, in an amazing coincidence, the Astros swallowed almost all of Berk Man’s contract, and so they didn’t really end up saving any money at all. Because maybe if the Astros had a decent front office they wouldn’t be so deep in the shitter.
Between the Yankees getting Berkman (and adding $3 million of his remaining salary on top of their $206 million opening day payroll) and Philadelphia tacking Roy Oswalt onto its $142 million team, the Astros have unloaded two franchise players, one to each league’s powerhouse franchise.
The notion that the Phillies are the NL’s "powerhouse" franchise is a weird one. They don’t have the largest payroll. They don’t have the best record in the league — or, hell, even in their own division. I guess the main thing they have going for them is that, well, they’re the only big-payroll team in the NL that’s in contention right now.
Whoops! Spoiler! I gave away the surprise ending.
The Los Angeles Angels swallowed Dan Haren’s big contract in acquiring him from Arizona, and of all the teams chasing the Diamondbacks’ other desirable starter, the soon-to-be-pricey Edwin Jackson, the Chicago White Sox ended up with him. The White Sox and Angels rank seventh and eighth, respectively, in payroll.
Dan Haren’s "big" contract pays $8M/year through 2012. And how pricey Edwin Jackson will be later isn’t very important in terms of how much he costs now, which is: $4.5M. Neither of these is exactly a bank-busting contract, and, frankly, it seems like their destinations had less to do with the payroll on the Angels and White Sox than with the Diamondbacks’ front office being blind stinking drunk when the trades were made.
This is not coincidence. This is not a trend. This is baseball, circa 2010. The have-vs.-have-not chasm that for the last 20 years has existed is as wide as ever, even with revenue sharing trying to artificially imbue the game with balance.
Yeah, turns out that redistribution doesn’t help, huh. Who knew?
Also, here are a few fun things Jeff has failed to mention. Some other teams who have been recent "acquirers" are the big-market monoliths the Minnesota Twins, Los Angeles Dodgers, Texas Rangers, and San Diego Padres, who rank 11th, 12th, 27th, and 29th in payroll, respectively. And the selling teams? The Cubs, Mariners, and Astros (3rd, 9th, and 14th) are having a damn fire sale, and only sheer stubbornness is preventing the Mets (5th) from following suit.
So what’s my point, then? That some middle-to-bottom teams are buying? And that some top-to-middle teams are selling? Yes. That is exactly my point. Since it utterly contravenes what Jeff’s cherry-picking has told him, you know, about how the rich teams are doing all the buying and the poor teams are doing all the selling.
Berkman waived his no-trade clause to join the Yankees because even though he’s a born-and-raised Texan, he sees what’s happening to franchises like the Astros, where they’re slashing payroll and kowtowing to a sport with room for only a few alpha teams.
Alpha teams like the San Diego Padres, you mean? Who have the best record in the NL thanks largely to their colossal $38M payroll? No, Jeff. It’s not because Berkman sees what’s happening to franchises "like" the Astros, who, by the way, have a fucking gigantic payroll — it’s because Berkman sees what’s happening to the Astros specifically. Which is to say: they’re tearing down and rebuilding. He ain’t staying past this year regardless, and he knows that, so he’s off to greener pastures.
Also, I do not think that word means what you think it means.
The reality of baseball today goes something like this: seven financial monsters – the New York teams, the Chicago teams, Boston, Philadelphia and the Angels – control much of the game’s power structure with their financial might.
Which is why the Mets and the Cubs and the Angels and the Red Sox are doing so well right now.
Other teams will come in and out – Houston and Seattle dropped themselves and Detroit is likely to join soon, while the Los Angeles Dodgers eventually will return under new ownership – and the rest fall into two categories: the got-a-chances (Minnesota, St. Louis, San Francisco, Atlanta) and the say-a-prayers (Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Arizona and the patron saint, Tampa Bay).
Oh, wait, you’re aware that Houston and Seattle are big-payroll teams entering a rebuilding phase? So why did you write this article, then?
San Fransisco’s payroll is $7M lower than the Angels’. What makes the Angels a powerhouse and the Giants a got-a-chance? Jeff isn’t saying. And, wait, Atlanta is a "got-a-chance" team? Didn’t Atlanta just recently snap a streak of like fourteen consecutive playoff appearances — the longest such streak in MLB history? That seems pretty well past "got-a-chance" territory to me.
Baseball, amazingly, seems OK with this.
That’s because it’s working. I can’t stress this enough. It’s fucking working, Jeff. Baseball has amazing parity right now. All kinds of crazy shit happens, and $38M teams lead the NL with .600 winning percentages. The Rays go from being the dog’s breakfast of the league to the World Series in one season. The Marlins win the World Series twice with a payroll I could personally cover out of pocket. There’s nothing here that needs fixing.
Its labor-relations situation is the most stable in American sports. Teams recognize their places in the hierarchy and rarely complain. There is too much money being made for anyone to fuss.
Well, sure, that and:
Compound that with the fact that a well-run, low-payroll team can succeed – Tampa Bay ($72 million), Texas ($55 million) and San Diego ($38 million) all should make the postseason – and the air of competitive equilibrium remains.
It’s not the "air" of competitive equilibrium, Jeff, on account of that is not a thing. It’s the real thing. Those teams really are competing. This is why your argument — and we have this discussion nearly every time the Yankees so much as goddamn make a sound — makes no goddamn sense at all. You’re mainly arguing that baseball needs to be completely changed because it’s offending your theoretical model, and not noticing that apparently your model doesn’t accurately reflect reality.
Still, it’s impossible to ignore the teams landing the biggest names. Aside from Texas swooping in to steal Cliff Lee out from under the Yankees – a Rangers team, remember, funded these days by Major League Baseball as its bankruptcy proceedings continue – the sort of players who make and break pennant races have ended up in the places with cash to burn.
Actually, that’s a lot more indicative of the fact that the places with cash to burn are currently struggling to keep up with the smaller teams — as I write this, the Yankees are one solitary game ahead of the Rays, the White Sox 1.5 ahead of the Twinkies, the Phillies 3.5 back of the Braves, and the Angels a stunning nine games behind the Rangers. It’s not big guys snatching up these players just because they can — it’s big guys fighting for survival any way they can. And, at least in the case of the Angels, it ain’t working. We’ll see how the rest play out, I suppose, but Berkman is projected to be worth about one win to the Yankees over the remainder of the season, and Jackson will probably add nothing to the White Sox over what they traded for him.
Because so many teams run themselves similarly today, a monetary advantage amounts to a philosophical advantage, too.
Fuck the heck?
New York can operate its player-development department like the Rays’ – and then go out and get Lee or Berkman or pay nine figures for a free agent.
Actually, they couldn’t get Lee. Did you miss that? The Rangers got him. They couldn’t get Oswalt or Haren either. Turns out that just being the Yankees doesn’t give you first dibs on every player.
The Yankees don’t win because of where they are. (See: the Mets.) They win because they’re on the intellectual level of other teams and compound it with a big, green hammer.
But mainly it’s the bit about the intellectual level, which is why cheap teams can win all the goddamn time too. Look. Money’s great. But the lesson that baseball has taught us over the last ten years (or the last hundred years for us Cubs fans) is that all the money in the world doesn’t matter if your team is run by retards. The Mets — the very Mets you make fun of in that sentence right there — have the fifth largest payroll in baseball. And my Cubs? Third. And they suck.
As wonderful as Adam Dunn would look hitting fourth for the Rays, GM Andrew Friedman built the team by not going for the short-term fix. To deviate from that takes a great deal of conviction that a trade within the next 24 hours won’t somehow bite the Rays next year, or the year after, or in 2016. The Rays, like all other have-nots, run their team with a crystal ball.
And the haves that don’t run their team like that do things like give Alfonso Soriano an eight-year, $136M contract. Or sign Carlos Zambrano for five and $91.5M. And then they spend the whole season ten games under .500 and lose to the Fat Louis Fatinals and the goddamn Cincinnati Reds.
Which reminds me: fuck you, Dusty Baker.
Which is why despite far less talent to offer Washington, the White Sox remain the likeliest destination for Dunn going into Saturday’s 4 p.m. ET non-waiver deadline.
Well, actually, Jeff, rumour has it that the principal component in the Dunn deal will be Edwin Jackson — the same Edwin Jackson you were complaining about earlier, because the evil White Sox were preventing those noble, innocent small-market teams from getting him.
The White Sox don’t think twice about the cost, about the prospects, about the future. They act in the now.
Which is why the White Sox suck on ice year-in and year-out. They were at .488 last year. .444 in 2007. Every once in a while their random stabby-stabby management style hits a lucky spot, and they float up near the top of baseball’s worst division, and then get wiped out in the first round of the playoffs. Exactly once has it gotten them any farther than that.
After that, Jeff just tells a weird anecdote about Berkman that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his article. So I’m going to ignore it, and wrap up like this:
Jeff. Here’s the deal. It seems so odd to me that somebody so clearly intelligent can get so massively turned around. Every time you open your mouth on this subject, it seems like you’re declaring that baseball needs to change everything to get more competitive, since year after year it’s just the rich teams crushing the poor teams — and it’s like you haven’t even noticed that that’s always wrong. I mean, always wrong. The San Diego Padres have the best record in the National League, Jeff. Their payroll is $38M. That is amazing, and it totally obliterates your article. The Texas Rangers trail only the Yankees and the Rays in the American League, and they have a $55M payroll. The Cincinnati Reds are tied for the lead in the NL Central, and are beating the Phillies for the NL Wild Card. Did you know that their payroll is almost exactly half that of the Phillies? It’s true. This article — just like every time you write it — does not reflect the state of things in the real world.
Sometimes I think you just don’t listen to me.
