MLB

Point/Counterpoint: Johan Santana

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Mets Geek

My friend Steve Hubbell and his host, John Patterson, debated on January 18th whether a Santana trade would be good for the Mets, or a disasterous miscalculation. The die is now cast, apparently, and the Mets made a slightly better deal than Patterson anticipated (Gomez not Martinez). I suspect this debate will have entertainment value for years to come. Nice job, guys.

2007 Payroll Efficiency

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The Baseball Analysts: Rich Lederer

The official numbers are out and Rich Lederer does us the favor of plotting the team salaries and games won on a chart, along with a sensible discussion of the implications. I’m assuming that revenue sharing numbers aren’t included, which would skew the chart in interesting ways. The Yankees would spend more per win. The Marlins would make more money per loss. But that’s not what’s at play here.

Click the link and find out how your team did converting dollars to wins.

On the other hand, the final numbers show that player salaries were less than 45 percent of total baseball revenues, a drop of nearly 10 percent since 1994’s cancelled post season, which was in large part a fight over a salary cap at something like 50 percent of revenues.

The Podsednik Paradox

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Sox Machine

Over three seasons the White Sox were better (they won more games, many more games) with Scott Podsednik in the lineup than not, even though Podsednik’s replacements generally played better. Sox Machine may have discovered this paradox, and attempts to explain it. His conclusions aren’t flabbergasting but his approach hints at baseball’s majesty.

Let Baseball Players Police Themselves

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JC Bradbury – New York Times

Before the ill-fated War on Terrorism there was the more-provenly ill-fated War on Drugs. One of those drugs wasn’t deco-durabolin, or HGH, or some other performance enhancing drug. But our approach to stopping the scourge of PED’s in baseball and other sports has been more akin to our failed approach to stopping cocaine coming from Columbia and heroin coming from Afghanistan than any actual strategies contemporary thinkers might have come up with.

Whether those strategies might be successful remains to be seen, but JC Bradbury’s approach has the virtue of actual incentives and our knowledge that it hasn’t failed before. I used to believe that because it was impossible to control the use of illicit drugs sports shouldn’t outlaw them, but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. But I’m totally sure that if you’re going to ban illicit drugs you better come up with effective ways of getting them out of the game.

If you don’t, the whole system will collapse. As it should.

No Discipline

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Baseball Musings:

I may have written about David Pinto’s story earlier, but I know that spent much of tonight arguing the same thing. Discipline in this case is futile, for the most part, and counterproductive. The right thing would have been to embrace the information anyone would have given without threat of punishment, the better to judge what happened.

We still want to know what happened, because so many players who feared punishment didn’t talk to Mitchell.

That was a mistake.

Mitchell Report to Name Names

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Newsvine

This post is mostly to express my weariness about the forthcoming Mitchell report. Since everybody else in the world seems to have an opinion, why not me? Mine is that all discussion before the report is released, including leaks of tantalizing tidbits that don’t actually include information, should be taken in the form of PR people spinning, since at this point none of us know anything real about the report.

My ears did perk up when someone leaked that there would be surprises. I’ll be surprised (but hardly shocked) if that’s the case.