Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 253: Brian Cashman and the Meddlesome Steinbrenners/Revisiting the Justin Verlander Extension

Episode Date: July 29, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss whether an owner overruling a GM can ever be a good thing, then revisit the Tigers’ decision to extend Justin Verlander well before he was a free agent.

That is a lucid, intelligent, well-thought-out objection. Thank you, Your Honor. Overruled. Good morning and welcome to episode 253 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus. I'm Sam Miller and moving a stool is Ben Lindberg. Ben, how's that stool doing? I'm not actually sitting on a stool that'd be weird if i if my computer chair was just a stool i sit on a stool i work from a stool all day every day really wow yeah

i i stand near a stool a lot of that time but yeah it's either stool or near stool is it a does it revolve is it a rotating it's not it's like from it's like from like 1908 it's it's literally like a 1908 stool don't you want some back support sometimes it's just that's that's where my computer is right i'd said i keep my computer at a counter because then it's easy to sort of glance at it as i'm walking around the house and you, you know, if I want to move to a desk, I could, but then I'd have to unplug a thing and plug it in. That sounds like a lot of work. I would say that the situation is not the best case right now, to be fair.

I would say that also. Okay. What do you want to talk about today uh i want to talk about whether it's ever a good thing if an owner overrules a general manager and i want to talk about justin verlander okay um i like yours let's go with yours all right uh so this was inspired by the latest Yankees move that seems to have been dictated by a Steinbrenner over Brian Cashman's wishes. It kind of, he's been very direct about this, Cashman,

in the past when it's happened, say, with Rafael Soriano. He didn't want to sign him. He wanted to keep the draft pick and was overruled and was very open about it, surprisingly open about it. And the same thing seems to be the case with Soriano. He wasn't quite so open about it, but he was asked about it by Joel Sherman of The Post, and he said, I would say we are in a desperate time. Ownership wants to go for it. I didn't want to give up a young arm, but I understand the desperate need we have for offense,

and Soriano will help us. The bottom line is this guy makes us better. Did ownership want him? Absolutely yes. Does he make us better? Absolutely yes. This is what Hal wants, and this is why we are doing it.

Cashman can say anything he wants. He's a wild card. I mean, he has quite a lot of tenure. He's been there forever and I guess he must either not care so much about his job security or have really great job security. I wonder what Cashman, if Cashman, let's say Cashman got fired for this. I mean, he's not going to, but like, let's just say that Steinbrenner was so mad that he fired Cashman. I wonder how in demand Cashman is. It's always been sort of hard to get a read on, on how good he is. And it's also hard, like if you were a small market team, would you look at him as a guy with great success or would you go, well, we can't give him nearly what he's had. I mean, he's never, he's never been a GM of a team like ours, so maybe he doesn't have relevant experience.

Yeah, I think he's a good GM. I think he's done a lot of good things. And just the fact that he's survived this long in this market speaks to his skills at something, whether it's managing the media or managing ownership or whatever it is, just surviving this long. Yeah, I like him too. I generally think he's good. It's a little harder to tell.

Yeah, it is. But also, like you wonder. I hope we get to see him in a different situation someday just to kind of see how he would handle a smaller budget and that'd be fun. Is he a guy who you think would have to take another GM job or does he just go straight to, you know, team president territory? Is he, is he, is he now, has he now like is, is Yankees GM now the way that he's done? And especially considered like the top GM job and there's nowhere to go but

higher in the front office. Yeah, maybe I could see him not wanting to have to do a small market thing with all the restrictions after he's had a big payroll for a long time. Or maybe he would want to prove that he could do it because people are always saying that we don't know whether he could do it. So maybe he would see it as a challenge. I don't know. But so this is kind of a pattern. Um, but so, uh, so this is kind of a pattern, uh, in 2005, there was kind of a power play where he was going to leave maybe. And he basically told George Steinbrenner that he wanted to have more control over, uh, baseball decisions.

And, and it seems like he did and kind of expanded their, their department and, uh, did things in a slightly different way. But there are still these times when it seems like he is overruled. And this article mentions some others that make him sound smart, that in most of these cases, it would have been better if they had done what he recommended. According to this article, he recommended that they not re-sign Alex Rodriguez after he opted out. That obviously would have saved them quite a bit of trouble these days.

It's been going pretty well. Yeah, right. He also, this says, advised ownership to re-sign Russell Martin and sign Nate Sheerholz. And they didn't want to do that. And he was against the Ichiro Suzuki re-signing, which has not been a disaster or anything. But Sheerholz maybe would have been cheaper and just as good. So I wonder, because, you know, when we hear about these things, I feel like we automatically assume that it's a sign of dysfunction that you want either everyone to be on the same page, or you want the general manager

to have the final say, and you want the owner to get out of the way and let the GM do his thing. And if he thinks that the GM isn't doing a good job, he can get a new one. But as long as he's around, and he's the guy, he should be making these sort of decisions. And I wonder whether there's ever an exception to that, whether there is something that the owner might consider or another interest of the team that the owner might consider that the general manager might not consider, that could be something that you would want to take into account. Just, you know, like attendance is down in New York this season and they're not scoring any runs and Yankees fans seem to find it kind of hard

to watch them score two runs every day. And so maybe it's the right kind of baseball decision to hold on to your young arm and not trade for another guy who's 37, 38. You know, like if you were in a smaller market, it wouldn't be the right move. And so maybe the owner looks at it and says, well, Ichiro, he gets us all these, you know, he gets us a lot more interest in Japan and we get a lot more advertising and people buy Yankees caps and we make a lot more money that way. And maybe that's something that an owner should be taking into account since baseball teams are a business. And the idea, at least partially, is to make some money. And there could be times, I guess, when when the right baseball decision might not be the right decision to sort of maximize the profitability of the team.

decision to sort of maximize the profitability of the team. Although, you know, you would think that long-term winning is probably the best thing you could do to make money. But I wonder whether there are ever times when it's not automatically a sign that something is amiss and, you know, it's a dysfunctional organization and they're not communicating. You wouldn't think that the GM would be blind to the need to make money, though, either. I mean, just as winning generally leads to more money, the GMs all want more money and they know that more money in their mind probably leads to being able to do more things. So you wouldn't think that that's like a totally foreign idea to Cashmint either. Although I don't know how much it comes into play.

Maybe because the owner and other departments are looking at these things, he doesn't really have to think about it. Maybe he sort of chooses to outsource that to other departments. That's hard to say. But yeah, I mean, I feel like there probably are instances like that. My guess is that they are a lot rarer than probably, you know, people maybe, particularly people whose job, okay, let's say hypothetically that Steinbrenner in his head goes, Hey, anytime there's a baseball decision, that's, that's Cashman's job. But you know, when it comes to things like branding and promoting the brand, well, that's, that's my job. Cashman's not thinking about that. That's my job. And so you wonder whether, whether there's a, uh, there would be a tendency like the, the, you know, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail kind of a thing, where if that's where he's focused, maybe like if he considers that his responsibility, he might be thinking that there's a lot more of those opportunities than there really are.

Like I would imagine that Soriano, for instance, I don't know if Soriano is necessarily an example of this, but either really either Soriano, Raphael, or Alphonso, neither one is going to be pushing season ticket sales or merchandising other than if they think, well, if we have a lost season and we spend the last month and a half 15 games out, that hurts us. But Cashman basically knows that too. 15 games out, that hurts us. But Cashman basically knows that too. I guess that it's probably more... I would say that I would consider ownership's role in balancing long-term versus short-term financial things, branding things, to be a significant area where they would have some expertise. And if you think that there's a long-term penalty to losing, then

maybe you'd step in. Generally, I don't really hold it against owners. They want to have fun. This is what they're into. But also generally, you figure not only is the GM theoretically hired because he's better at this stuff, but the GM is surrounded by people who are advising him constantly. And the ownership is surrounded by marketing and concessions and facilities. They're not necessarily talking to the scouts and looking at reports and reviewing video and getting the input of 30 guys in the front office. So there's that, too. Yeah. And the Yankees don't really ever get mentioned in the same breath as the smart sabermetric teams.

Like, no one ever lists them along with the Rays or the A's or the Indians or all these sort of early adopters. But I mean, just having worked there for a while and I'm not giving anything away, but I mean, they do all of the same things that those teams do and they have all the same smart people doing the same smart things. So I feel like they're just as capable of finding those inefficiencies and making smart moves and being on the cutting edge of everything. But you don't really hear of other teams. I guess, I mean, you never hear like Stu Sternberg intervened and told Andrew Friedman to sign some guy. And when people talk about why the Rays are so successful, they often mention the idea that everyone is on the same page and everyone has the same philosophy from Sternberg to Madden, top to bottom. It's like everyone is kind of in lockstep one way or another.

And so it's something that we, I guess we don't think about enough. Like in a couple of days, we're going to be running a piece at BP, a guest piece on how well GMs have done in the trade market, just kind of comparing the wins they got to the wins they gave up over time. And it's not always totally fair to attribute all of that to the GM. Sometimes there's this other stuff going on where it's not really their call. And really throughout Cashman's tenure in New York, there's always been this kind of divide between Cashman moves and Steinbrenner moves and trying to figure out which was which.

And I wonder if maybe this is why the GM getting bumped up to team president role is a good thing. You know, like Epstein or Mark Shapiro or Kenny Williams kind of graduating from GM to that president role where he kind of has a role on the business side and the baseball side. Maybe that's sort of the ideal arrangement where you could have that person who then has both perspectives and is paying close attention to both things and can kind of be the liaison between the owner and the GM or, you know, the baseball people will trust him when he says that the business thing matters and the business people will trust him when he says the baseball stuff matters. Maybe that's why that role has become more popular lately, if it has.

The tricky thing is that I'm sort of in my head trying to think about what it's like in other industries or in another company. And you do want the buck to stop at the top. And in a lot of cases, that's really smart. But I think what's different here is that nobody works their way up. I mean, a couple people have, but basically nobody works their way up to owner. These are not the best baseball minds who have just graduated to ownership. They didn't start the company. They didn't invent the product.

They bought it because they were rich in something else. They're essentially just super fans. Or maybe they look at it as investments, but really they're super fans. Or maybe they look at it as investments, but really they're super fans. And so in this case, the GM is the closest thing to the self-made CEO in an organization, or maybe the president is, but the baseball guy is, right? And the owner is just not that. It's just not really comparable to other industries. It's much more like – well, it's not like other industries at all. It's not like really any organization at all in that sense.

And so I think that's probably why it's so tempting for owners to do this and probably why we don't generally find it good business. Yeah, and it's a GM skill that's maybe underrated. And maybe it's underrated because we can't analyze it very well. Maybe it's underrated because we can't analyze it very well, but to finesse your owner or to stop a meddlesome owner from intervening and convincing him that your move is the right move or convincing him to spend a little more money when you think you need to spend a little more money, that's an important skill for a GM to have. It's not just about evaluating players better than everyone else and finding undervalued guys. It's also about kind of managing that GM-owner relationship. I wonder who provided that list of Cashman unapproved moves. I wonder if it was Cashman. Well, I wouldn't put anything past him at this point. Because it's pretty nicely cropped. Yes, right. He's never recommended a bad one.

I mean, Nate Sherholtz. When Nate Sherholtz gets in there, that's suspicious. When I heard that Nate Sherholtz was good enough to make that list, it was suspicious. Yeah, a little bit. All right. I i mean how many players has cashman wanted over the thousands that he has wanted and didn't get right but nate shirlds conveniently makes the list uh not not that i'm casting aspersions on anybody who i'm sure everybody is acting in good faith here all right my turn yep all right so episode 171 of this podcast uh after opening night,

we talked about extensions and we talked about Justin Verlander. And I'm going to quote from the transcript. When Ryan Howard signed his extension, one of the things that was so criticized about it was that it wasn't even going to kick in for two years and the Phillies didn't get much of a discount and they didn't have to sign him so early. They didn't have to jump two years into the future to make this move.

Some of the same criticism was lodged against Travis Hafner's deal with the Indians. One of the nice things about having a player under club control is you get to wait two years. Is the only difference between this move and the Howard move that we didn't like Howard and that we do like Verlander? At the time, that was considered bad management. Now it's considered great management. And so neither one of us concluded that that was the case. I threw that out as sort of a discussion starter, but we decided that we liked the Verlander deal on its merits a lot more than the Howard deal on its merits, timing aside. And the timing isn't necessarily the crucial issue in either one. Justin Verlander is now – he is also a year and a half from his extension kicking in,

and he is also kind of not doing very well. And I'm going to cherry-pick a time period, and that time period is his last 15 starts. In his last 15 starts, 5-2-2 ERA, 8 strikeouts per 9, 4 walks per 9, two ERA, eight strikeouts per nine, four walks per nine, 1.1 homers per nine. Just sort of law non-dominating stuff. And his velocity is down about a mile and a half this year, more than two miles from two years ago, almost three miles from three years ago.

And so I just wanted to revisit. Do we think that this is simply you can't predict baseball at work and that Verlander is either having a unpredictable slump that he will bust out of or is done, but who could have seen it coming? Or was that point correct? Should the Tigers have been scolded for giving big money to a guy who was two years away from free agency? Yeah, I wrote an article when they signed him to that extension. And I think if I remember right, my conclusion was basically that it's always risky to give this kind of move to anyone, to any pitcher for that long a period. But I tried to find comparables for Verlander, and there weren't all that many just because he had been so good. But looking at people who were

kind of in the same range at roughly the same age, a lot of them aged pretty well, and a lot of them kind of would have been worth this sort of deal and maybe declined, but still pitched at a pretty high level. And that kind of just combined with the fact that he was still pretty much pitching more or less at his peak. He hadn't shown a huge sign of decline really. And I remember there was a slight velocity decline and we were kind of talking about whether it counted or not because Berlinder seems like a guy who kind of uh will at times throw less hard than he has to um and then and then save it up for

the end of a game and suddenly he'll be throwing even harder um I think I said that I was I was less worried about a guy when his peak velocity hasn't declined, even if his average velocity has declined a little bit. So I guess he didn't seem like a terrible candidate for this kind of thing, if anyone is a candidate for this kind of thing. But I guess I'm kind of, I've sort of soured on the idea of extending anyone, I guess, that long before you have to. Because the idea is that you should get some sort of sizable discount on the deal when you do that because you're taking on this risk. And I don't know that teams have gotten discounts that are commensurate with the risk that they've taken on for these kind of deals. Yeah, I sort of feel that way too.

I think with Pedroia they probably did. And I think that's one thing. It felt like when Pedroia signed his extension there was a lot of talk about what a discount he had taken and what a great deal the Red Sox had gotten. And it does seem like if you look at those years and what they will be, right now he's clearly worth much more than that. And he deserves a lot more than that, or I guess he's worth a lot more than that, but it's hard to know exactly how much to calculate the two years in the future kind of unnecessarily doing this factor. And I don't know that Pedroia actually got that much of a discount.

He might have. I'm not saying that he didn't. I'm saying that it's like I would have to sort of think through how to do that math to figure it out. But I don't take it as a given that he did. And, yeah, I think that there's a tendency for these guys to basically get what they should get only – I don't know. Like Verlander signed this extension, and you tack it on to the two years that he he still had and you look at it and you go, yeah, that's about right. That's what he should be making for the year.

And I think that's how people see it. They go, oh, well, it's six years or seven years and $20 million a year and that's what he's worth. But it's just – it's not really that. The two years are so valuable for a club to evaluate what the player is. And I don't know that you can quite put a price tag. Well, you can, but I don't know that we have quite put a price tag on what those two years of waiting are actually worth. They're probably worth a ton. Yeah, I think so, especially for a pitcher. Yeah, I'm glancing over what I wrote and I said that he would he would basically have to pitch like a hall of famer to justify the contract which is kind of logical because he had been

pitching like a hall of famer and so he was paid to continue pitching like he was pitching and I guess when you when you have a when you have a guy like Verlander, who it's not one of those very early career extensions where a guy hasn't gotten paid yet. And it's like, now this is the contract that is going to make him and his family financially secure forever. You know, Verlander had already made a lot of money before that. I mean, he made $20 million last season. So when you have a guy like that who's coming off a Cy Young Award win and then a Cy Young Award runner-up finish and is already making a lot of money, doesn't seem like a great candidate for a guy who's going to take a discount.

Even if he should, he's probably at that point, he's thinking, I already have a ton of money and a professional athlete and a pitcher who's been so successful probably isn't so inclined to weigh the risk and say, my career could end tomorrow. He's thinking, I've been the best pitcher in baseball for a few years now and I feel fine. And in a couple of years, I'll get a massive contract and cash in. And probably, I mean, he might in the back of his head, I'm sure every pitcher is thinking something could happen and my arm is sore and what does it mean? But after having that much success and being so durable,

I would think his confidence would be at a high water point and he's already financially secure. So I don't know if that's a great candidate to get a discount from. Yeah, when the young guys do it, when you sign a young guy, what you're doing is taking advantage of baseball's collective bargaining agreement. But it seems like when these sort of guys who are already post-free agent sign these extensions a few years in advance, what it feels like, and I don't know that it is, but what it feels like is just the club is so afraid of losing him. That the clubs say, well, we can't afford to let this guy go.

He's the face of the franchise. And so it feels like maybe GMing scared more than taking advantage of what you have. And there's value to that, which kind of goes back to what we were talking about with the first topic. When you have a face of the franchise guy there's there's a lot of extra value to that in terms of just you know fan loyalty and people spending money on jerseys and and all that sort of thing um some people like vince genaro have made some attempts to to calculate what the value of that is and and come up with fairly large numbers for some players who are famous and have been with the team their whole career, like Verlander.

So there's something to that, but yeah, I don't know. I'm trying to think of a contract that has been structured like this and has worked out really well. I mean, the Howard deal kind of colors everything that I'm thinking about. But it does seem like there is just a lot of value to that extra evaluation time with a pitcher who's, you know, 30-ish and could start falling off or breaking down or losing velocity. And I wonder what Verlander would make now or would make this offseason if they were to sign him to an extension. I would think it would be a smaller number, or it certainly should be.

So, yeah, in retrospect, seems like a risky move. He's still pretty good, though. Yeah. I mean, I'm not writing him off or anything. Howard was still pretty good at this point, actually. I mean, he wasn't as good as Verlander. But Howard didn't really collapse until, like, what, basically it was his injury, which I think was the last play before his new contract kicked in, I think.

Yeah. But yeah, he probably had a less encouraging group of comparable players, I would think. Yes. Or his skill set was not. Yeah, it still remains that Verlander is better than Howard and that the deal was on its face better for Verlander than Howard. But anyway, all right, that'll do. Does that do? Yeah, just about.

I have such dread about pitchers now. Whenever a pitcher is kind of at his peak, I'm sort of savoring it because it feels like you're one start away from it just being over. It could come at any time. It seems like a guy like Verlander seems invincible for three seasons or so, or four seasons, and then suddenly he strings together a few bad starts

and his velocity is down, and it's scary. It's like Halliday just kind of falling apart all of a sudden after seeming immortal. Yeah, if you ever want to depress yourself, just go look at Clayton Kershaw's comps. You'd use whatever metrics you want. Just go look at his comps and see how many didn't make the Hall of Fame. Yeah.

It's a bummer. Yes. All right. All right, now we're done. See you tomorrow. Email us, podcast at baseballperspectives.com. We will answer them in a couple days.