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[#1 Dodgers] Prodigal Sons: The Dodgers regain the Hit List top spot as Manny Ramirez returns from a 50-game suspension. He goes 6-for-18 with two homers and seven RBI, drawing louder jeers for being ejected after an awful strike three call than for his transgression. With Juan Pierre sitting, Rafael Furcal is restored to the leadoff spot and feeling better about his swing via a 14-for-30 showing this month.
[#3 Yankees] Running the Table: A 13-2 run carries the Yankees back into a first-place tie with the Red Sox. They take a three-game set from the Twins in Minnesota, thus winning the season series 7-0; they've won 18 of their last 24 games against the Twins. Alas, the run is tempered by the loss of Chien-Ming Wang due to a shoulder strain. Not that he'd pitched well (9.64 ERA overall, 5.50 since returning from the DL, and still waiting for that first quality start), but his absence forces the Yanks to pull Alfredo Aceves into the rotation. Along with Phil Hughes, he's become a key player in a bullpen that's put up a 2.39 ERA and 3.3 K/BB ratio since the beginning of June; he's 18th in the league in WXRL.
[#10 Blue Jays] Break Up the Jays: J.P. Ricciardi opens the door to offers for Roy Halladay, though the ace won't be a free agent until after 2010. It's a consequence of a ridiculously top-heavy payroll; they have $74.45 million — 92 percent of this year's Opening Day payroll — committed to just six players for next year, including B.J. Ryan, whom they punt with some $15 million remaining on his deal. The bigger problems are their five-year commitments to Vernon Wells ($107 million) and Alex Rios ($59.7 million), hitting an interchangeably pallid .264/.313/.418 and .259/.314/.415, respectively.
[#30 Nationals] Dunn Deal? Adam Dunn's 300th career homer halts Tommy Hanson's 26-inning scoreless streak and helps the Nats snap their four-game losing streak. Dunn's the fifth-fastest to 300 homers, at least in terms of the fewest at-bats to reach that milestone, trailing Babe Ruth, Mark McGwire, Ralph Kiner and Harmon Killebrew. Acting GM Mike Rizzo has no plans to trade the curiously consistent slugger. Meanwhile, ex-Nat and current Pirate Joel Hanrahan earns the win in a suspended game against the Astros, with the winning run scored by Nyjer Morgan, who arrived from Pittsburgh in that deal.
Notes galore to these:
• That NBCSports.com link in the Dodgers entry, by Mike Celizic, may be the best piece yet about Manny Ramirez's return. Between that and Eric Seidman's piece on John Hirschbeck's lousy strike three call, that's a rather off night in the Mets' booth for the usually appealing Gary Cohen.
• The ease with which Hughes has taken up residence in the bullpen should be used to quiet those who continually pine for Chamberlain to return to the pen. Why? Because it shows that Chamberlain isn't so unique in his ability to dominate in relief. A pitcher with excellent stuff — Chamberlain, Hughes, even Aceves — can succeed down there by shortening his arsenal and attacking hitters more aggressively. Those same pitchers may struggle a bit in the rotation, but that's life in the big city; it's a much harder job getting hitters out three or four times a game, and it's no crime for even a pitcher with their skills to scale a learning curve. Particularly given the specter of a Brett Tomko start.
• As somebody who likes to dine on schadenfreude pie, metaphorically speaking — it's the term my friends and I use when discussing the pleasure of watching right-wing lunatics self-immolate — I'm continually amused by Ricciardi's brash displays of incompetence. I can't believe that guy still has a job.
• That Hanrahan-Morgan game is just so wonderfully weird I had to squeeze it into the last line of the Hit List. A box score for the ages.
Then, back in May, the test results came back. A chorus of moaning arose from the Church of the Perpetually Outraged. (This week's sermon: "What about the children?") But he slowly but surely made a goof even out of the Most Serious Crisis There Absolutely Ever Has Been. The drug for which he was nailed was only the beginning of it. Pundits were dispatched to the far corners of the minors to seek out the disheartened and disillusioned. Instead, they found fans who were just happy to see Manny Ramirez swinging for the fences of their little stadium. (My favorite was the guy who told Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times that he and his wife had, like Manny, used a fertility drug. "Manny got suspended," the man told Plaschke. "We got twins!") With Manny in town, the game was a happy, not haunted, place. This seemed to come as a surprise to some people.
Ramirez's weird pilgrimage to the bushes served as a living reminder that the great steroid hunt is almost solely an intramural problem between baseball and its various acolytes. The overwhelming number of baseball fans—who, given the economic problems of the moment, are filling ballparks in reasonably overwhelming numbers—have quite obviously made peace with what happened in the game over the past 20 years. Manny Ramirez was treated as though he'd pulled a hamstring or tweaked a tendon. Now, he's back. That's the way things are going to be from now on.
This isn't the first time the Massachusetts-based Pierce has taken up the poison pen when it comes to Ramirez's detractors. The day after he was traded to the Dodgers last summer, he marveled at the pitchfork-wielding mob which ushered him out of Beantown:
I was driving home late in the last afternoon of the Manny Ramirez Era in Boston, listening to the local ESPN radio outlet, when, suddenly, it seemed that the two hosts had decided that what the situation called for was the opinion of Margaret Hamilton's character from The Wizard of Oz.
... disgrace to the game ... I get sick of people in Boston adoring a guy who didn't play hard. ... blackmailed the Red Sox ... an affront and an embarrassment ... What about the integrity of playing the game right? ... When it comes to the Hall of Fame, there will be a lot of people who have a lot more questions about Manny Ramirez than they do about Mark McGwire.
And his mangy little dog, too, one supposes. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of the sources of this particularly violent magma displacement was ESPN's Peter Gammons. This is like being heckled by one of the heads on Mount Rushmore. It's also gloriously unmoored from reality. Gammons' own record on covering the Steroid Era is a decidedly mixed one. Not that I care, because that cause was never my frenzy of choice, either.
There's no question in Pierce's mind that Ramirez's positive test and suspension mark a turning point in baseball's battle against steroids. Without trying to belittle the need for that fight, I agree with him. Here we have a popular superstar who has been caught by Major League Baseball's increasingly sophisticated testing program; recall that he didn't test positive for a steroid but for elevated testosterone, which gave MLB license to examine his medical records, where they discovered a decidedly unkosher prescription for hCG. While certainly granted more coverage than was necessary, there was no innuendo, no violation of guaranteed anonymity, no illegal governmental leak. Just crime and punishment, the violation of baseball's drug agreement triggering a 50-game suspension served as eager fans awaited his return.
And not just Dodger fans; as Pierce points out, ESPN devoted plenty of space to Ramirez's day-by-day progress during his suspension and "rehab" assignment. For once, the chattering classes notably failed to agree that history's greatest monster was walking among us. Plaschke's curmudgeonly colleague at the LA Times, T.J. Simers, went so far as to call himself a Ramirez apologist because with Ramirez around, "The Dodgers are not only relevant again, but a show worth watching."
While there have been outbreaks of handwringing here and there since Ramirez returned to the lineup last Friday, a long last, it appears we're at least incrementally past the simplistic outrage that equates steroid users as Evildoing Cheaters Who Have Destroyed the Game and Should Be Banned For Life, Plus Spanked and Sent to Bed Without Supper. Ramirez broke the rules, the rules were enforced, the penalty was handed down, Ramirez served it unflinchingly, and the sun still rose in the East. That's healthy, and if somebody wants to Think of the Children, how about reminding them that after serving their punishment, people deserve their second chances.
As I write this, Ramirez has just been ejected in the fifth inning of Tuesday night's Dodgers-Mets game. Home plate umpire John Hirschbeck wouldn't stand for him tossing his elbow pad to express his disgruntlement with being called out on strikes via a ball that, conservatively speaking, was closer to Rockaway Beach than home plate. That's a punishment disproportionate to the crime, but thankfully, at least Manny is back to being Manny.
As to the first of those two statements, in fact every player who's been suspended for 50 games under baseball's drug policy has had the same right to such rehab stint, including Ramirez's Dodger teammate Guillermo Mota, who did so with the Mets' Triple-A affiliate back in 200, and the Phillies' J.C. Romero, who did so in the Phillies' chain last month.
As to the second statement, people seem to forget that the policy is the product of collective bargaining. MLB and the owners can't just unilaterally impose their will to punish the players — that's why there's a union, for crying out loud, and that's what the 1994 strike was all about, the prevention of the owners from unilaterally imposing working conditions.
There's nothing magical about the number 50 in a 50-game suspension other than the fact that it's a round number. It seems apparent that the Players Association would only accept such a length of time for a first-violation suspension if a minor league rehab stint were exempted from that count. Had they not agreed to such a stint, it's quite possible the players wouldn't have accepted a suspension longer than, say, 40 games, and Ramirez would be coming back cold, or forced to spend a week at the team's extended spring training complex or something. The overall timeline for his return to the majors might not have changed at all.
...Ramirez is eligible to return to the Dodgers' lineup on July 3, and barring a major collapse over their next nine games, which come against three .500ish teams, his team will have weathered his loss just fine. They were 21-8 when the news of his suspension broke, with a +55 run differential, both major league bests. Since then they've gone 25-16 with a +30 run differential, both National League bests, and they've held the Hit List's top spot since the first regular season rankings. At the time, they had a 6½-game lead over their closest pursuers, the Giants, an 8½ game lead over their expected rivals, the Diamondbacks, and an 83.3 percent shot at the playoffs according to our plain-vanilla playoff odds. Now they lead the Giants by 8½ games, with the Diamondbacks DOA at 17 games back, and their overall odds at 97.8 percent. That's about as pretty as a team can sit.
Pierre hasn't homered all year, but his overall slugging percentage is 50 points higher than [James] Loney, 98 points higher than [Rafael] Furcal, and 133 points higher than [Russell] Martin. Indeed, the supreme irony of this entire fiasco is that the ridiculously expensive slap-hitting speedster who had been relegated to fourth outfielder status has gone bonkers upon being restored to the lineup. Pierre collected multiple hits in 14 of the first 20 games after the suspension, and has now done so in 19 of 41, including a three-hit effort in the most recent ESPN Sunday Night Game of the Week against the Angels. Thanks to an unsustainable .368 batting average on balls in play, he's third in the batting race at .337, and his .392 OBP and .433 SLG would both be career highs.
Furthermore, his .198 MLVr trails only Ramirez (.641), [Casey] Blake (.249) and [Matt] Kemp (.211) among Dodger regulars, which raises the question of what happens once Ramirez returns. Last week, manager Joe Torre told reporters he'd be headed back to the bench, but given Andre Ethier's slump in Ramirez's absence (.233/.296/.404) and struggles against lefties (.195/.279 /.377), it's not hard to envision a potential Ramirez-Pierre-Kemp alignment working its way into Torre's rotation; Pierre is hitting .411/.476/.518 in 65 PA against lefties, the kind of small-sample performance Torre might find impossible to resist.
The larger question is whether Pierre's play has boosted his value enough to make him attractive to other teams, and the answer is "probably not." He's about halfway through his absurd five-year deal, owed $10 million this year, $10 million next year, and $8.5 million in 2011. It's unlikely any team is willing to assume the approximately $22 million he'll still have coming after the trading deadline; in the current economic climate, even half that might be a stretch, and with the Dodgers already eating $21 million worth of Andruw Jones pie between here and 2014, it's tough to envision them having an appetite for much more — unless Steve Phillips, who from the ESPN booth has lobbied for the Dodgers to take care of Pierre so often you'd think he was his agent, suddenly finds himself in a GM chair. Suffice it to say that there's no threat of that these days.
...Back to Ramirez, it will be interesting to see how the fan base and the mainstream media, both local and national, handle his return. Prior to his suspension, he had mostly enjoyed a nonstop lovefest even given this winter's contentious negotiations. So long as he can still produce — even if not at the level he had done since last August — the majority of Dodger fans will likely warm to him, rationalizing that he's paid his debt to society. His transgressions will almost certainly generate some boos in opposing ballparks, but that's hardly new given his tenure playing the villain in Boston; on the other hand, his sixth-place showing in the All-Star balloting suggests he's also got his supporters outside the city of angels. But expect that the moment the Dodgers finally lose three games in a row — amazingly, they've yet to do so — you'll see a spate of articles from the usual hacks on Manny's tired act and the way his return has disrupted the team chemistry, hanging poor Juan Pierre out to dry at a time his career was undergoing a renaissance. That train is never late.
Of course, as I note in the article, the team's pitching has plenty to do with their surviving without Manny; they're allowing fewer runs per game than any NL team, they lead in BP's starter- and reliever-based win expectancy metrics, and they're getting by with Jeff Weaver and Eric Milton having made eight starts. That those two as well as free agents Randy Wolf and Casey Blake and nobodies like Ramon Troncoso and Ronald Belisario have been contributors to the team's success even as the Loneys and Martins have disappointed reflect favorably on Colletti and his staff, for all of their various missteps. Even a blind chicken finds a few kernels of corn now and again.
The Diamondbacks fired their manager, so does a change of field leadership improve the team? Do the Giants try to trade for a bat to help their fine pitching staff win with a good ERA? If you think the Dodgers are going to run away with the division, maybe you don’t make moves to try to catch them. With Manny out, however, there’s an opening to catch them by improving your team.
I'm skeptical that this will trigger any big moves unless either of those teams close the gap significantly, because both are relatively budget conscious these days. The Diamondbacks spent the winter bracing for hard economic times, laying off around 30 front office employees and letting expensive free agents such as Adam Dunn, Orlando Hudson and Randy Johnson depart; they then turned around and signed Jon Garland for nearly the same price as the Big Unit. For all of their belt-tightening, their payroll rose by abut $7.3 million over last year; they ranked 20th in Opening Day payroll at $73.5 million.
The notoriously tight-fisted Giants, on the other hand, increased their payroll from $76.6 to $82.6 million (13th) this winter in an effort to break their two-year streak of 90+ losses. They made $37.25 million in salary commitments, the NL West's largest outlay and the eighth-largest in the game, though admittedly that's a rounding error relative to the Yankees' $441 million worth of commitments. Aside from a few untouchable blue-chippers, including giggleworthy pitcher Madison Bumgarner (yes, really) they don't have a lot to deal in a midseason prospects-for-veterans swap.
Both teams probably have some wiggle room to add salary if they're truly contenders, but recently we've seen a shift in the way teams value prospects in general. Even if either one pulls the trigger, the Dodgers have far more resources — prospects as well as mony — and more leeway, as they cut salary from $118.6 million to $100.4 million while still signing making an NL-high $105.9 million in commitments via free agents Hudson, Ramirez, Casey Blake, Rafael Furcal, Randy Wolf et al. Certainly, I don't think you'll see either of their competitors go to the whip early and trade for a CC Sabathia or an Adam Dunn until they make up considerable ground on the Mannyless Dodgers.
• • •
Here's this week's Hit List. That's my fourth article at BP in the last three days, breaking last week's record of four in four. Mixing things up from my usual selection, here are the Yankees as well as a couple of the more interesting entries:
[#13 Braves] You're a Dull Boy, Frenchy: After supposedly finding the religion of plate discipline over the winter, Jeff Francoeur is back to his old ways, drawing just four walks in 118 PA, and getting on base at a .305 OBP clip that's actually seven points below his career rate. "If on-base percentage is so important, then why don't they put it up on the scoreboard?" he muses, indicating that yes, there are questions so dumb they shouldn't be asked.
[#14 Angels] Nap Time At Last: Just three days shy of three full years in the majors, Mike Napoli finally gets a start at DH—three of them, in fact — and responds by going 8-for-11 with 13 total bases. You'd think such a move would have been glaringly obvious by now given the presence of a defensively superior catcher and the absence of Vlad Guerrero, the lone Angel with a higher OPS since Napoli hit Anaheim back in 2006. Alas, old-schooler Mike Scioscia labors under the notion that there are only two positions for a backstop: a-squattin' and a-sittin'. Napoli's hitting .328/.444/.642, just two points of batting average shy of leading the team in all three triple-slash categories.
[#19 Yankees] The Yanks lose five straight and fall to 3-10 within the AL East after defeats by Boston and Tampa Bay, and they lose Jorge Posada to the disabled list due to a hamstring strain along the way. The good news is that Alex Rodriguez will rejoin the lineup on Friday; in his absence, Yankee third basemen have hit .202/.248/.283. The bad news is that he can't do anything about the MLB-worst 6.3 runs per game the pitching staff is allowing.
Also at BP, in addition to my Manny math is my two-part series (National and American Leagues) on which April results are meaningful as far as the playoff races are concerned. From the AL piece:
In the East, history suggests that we ignore Toronto's hot start at our peril; 18-10 teams with three straight seasons above .500 tend to keep the good times rolling. On the other hand, particularly with three teams forecast to win at least 94 games, the PECOTA-based odds suggest a deck still stacked heavily against the Blue Jays, and last week I identified a handful of reasons they might regress. Forecast to have the league's lowest-scoring offense, they're suddenly and improbably the highest-scoring unit, fueled by an infield that's hitting a combined .303/.380/.479, with Aaron Hill (.360/.404/.552) and Marco Scutaro (.262/.400/.458) both particularly over their heads. Their rotation has been decimated by injuries, and it's possible that three starters who helped them post the league's top ERA last year — Dustin McGowan and Shaun Marcum, both rehabbing from off-season arm surgeries, as well as departed free agent A.J. Burnett — won't throw a single pitch for them this year. Through the end of April they had played the league's second-easiest schedule (.474, based on PECOTA-projections), but they'll face the AL's second-hardest (.513) overall. Not helping the Jays is the fact that the indicators suggest that neither the Yankees nor Rays have scuffled enough to rule them out, and both have substantial upgrades waiting in the wings — the former in the form of Alex Rodriguez, the latter via David Price, the game's top pitching prospect.
If you like the ESPN Insider flavor better, you've got your AL and NL versions too.
• • •
Thanks to Manny, A-Rod's latest controversy is old, old news. I don't feel particularly inclined to weigh in to great extent except to note that it seems clear the worm has turned for Selena Roberts, author of the dumpster-diving exposé which has rocked the baseball world with revelations that Rodriguez only tips 15 percent at Hooters. Where her discovery that the slugger tested positive during the supposedly anonymous 2004 survey testing was a legitimate (if rather unsavory) journalistic coup, her latest allegations reek of smear tactics and innuendo, serving to remind the world of her own tarnished past and her execrable writing style.
Before you close your mental drawer on the situation, here are a few must-read links:
• The Kansas City Star's Jason Whitlock reminds readers of Roberts' infamous handling of the Duke lacrosse rape allegations:
She claimed that the players’ unwillingness to confess to or snitch about a rape (that did not happen) was the equivalent of drug dealers and gang members promoting antisnitching campaigns.
When since-disgraced district attorney Mike Nifong whipped up a media posse to rain justice on the drunken, male college students, Roberts jumped on the fastest, most influential horse, using her New York Times column to convict the players and the culture of privilege that created them.
Proven inaccurate, Roberts never wrote a retraction for the columns that contributed to the public lynching of Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans.
In a follow-up column at Fox Sports, Whitlock continues his attack: "By refusing to acknowledge her mistakes in the Duke case, she creates the impression that her agenda trumps the truth." Ahem.
I don't trust Roberts' judgment, I don't trust her understanding of baseball, and I don't trust her motives in writing a book about Alex Rodriguez that surely would not exist were it not intended to be a hit piece. If Rodriguez was juicing in high school or kindergarten, it goes to character, not performance, and we have had countless reasons to know that he's not Mother Theresa in the clubhouse or off the field. Neither were Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, et al. Cobb's reward was to die friendless, Ruth and Mantle died young, the causes of their cancer probably not unrelated to their youthful carousing, and Williams' own son had him decapitated and stuck in a freezer.
...If Rodriguez used steroids in high school, that tells us a little more about Rodriguez the man but nothing of substance about Rodriguez the ballplayer. If he used HGH as a Yankees, well, HGH seems to help athletes with recovery time and healing, not performance. So does aspirin. Move on. Xavier Nady is having platelets shot into his elbow. The dividing line between these two therapies is entirely arbitrary.
As for Roberts' allegations of Rodriguez tipping pitches as a Ranger, they had best be better sourced than her work on the Duke case. According to SI.com, "Roberts said that over the course of a couple years, some people with the Rangers began to detect a pattern whereby Rodriguez would appear to be giving away pitch type and location to hitters, always middle infielders who would then be able to repay him in kind when he was at the plate, with his body movement."
It is extraordinary to think that "some people" would notice this and not alert management as to the practice. Unless there is videotape evidence, or Roberts' sources are willing to come forward and explain why they sat on their knowledge that Rodriguez was damaging his own pitchers, this must be dismissed as the worst kind of hearsay. That Roberts knows relatively little about baseball must be considered here -- her credulity and our skepticism must be of equal proportion.
Word.
• Of all people, it's noted blogger/blog-hater Murray Chass who offers the definitive takedown of Roberts:
In general, Roberts makes far too many serious allegations about Rodriguez to hide them behind anonymous quotes. Rodriguez deserves more, but more importantly readers deserve more. There is far too much in this attack book for Roberts to expect readers to take it on faith that her anonymous sources are real and they can be trusted.
The use of anonymous sources has come under increasing criticism from readers of all types of publications. Having used them frequently in my decades as a reporter and columnist, I am aware of the problems they pose. Reporters have to establish their credibility with their use of unidentified sources for readers to accept them.
Roberts and I were once colleagues at The New York Times, and I can’t say she established that credibility. She also didn’t strike me as being a top-flight reporter. As a result, I don’t feel I can trust her book full of anonymous sources. Even if every single A-Rod transgression she reports is accurate, it’s too easy for her to write one former teammate said this and another player said that.
...Roberts belies her understanding of baseball with an observation she makes in trying to offer an example of A-Rod on steroids. Citing the game in August 2002 in which he hit three home runs, she writes that his “performance set off the steroid alarms,” explaining, “In the dog days of the season, when players are wilting, A-Rod had fresh legs and a fresher bat.”
And she quotes an unnamed “Ranger teammate” as saying, “It’s that stuff that makes you say no (bleeping) way.”
No way? Both Roberts and the teammate should consult The Elias Book of Baseball Records,” pages 359 through 362. The list of players who hit three or more home runs shows that 76 players other than Rodriguez hit three or more home runs in August.
Gil Hodges slugged four for the Brooklyn Dodgers Aug. 31, 1950. Hall of Famer Jim Rice hit three in a game twice, both games being played Aug. 29. Other Hall of Famers who hit three in an August game were Ralph Kiner, Larry Doby, Ernie Banks, Roberto Clemente, Frank Robinson and Eddie Murray (twice).
It has never been suggested that any of those players used steroids.
Just as looked as though the Dodgers might run away with the National League West, they were hit with a bombshell on Thursday, namely Manny Ramirez's 50-game suspension for violating Major League Baseball's drug policy. Leaving the specifics of his violation to the reporters except to note that he won't be eligible to return until July 3, the question is whether his absence will put the division in play. The answer — sorry, Diamondbacks fans and Manny haters — is probably not.
Despite haggling with the Dodgers over his contract into early March and suffering a hamstring strain during his second week of spring training, Ramirez had picked up where he left off last year, hitting .348/.492/.641 and leading the NL in OBP and walks. His performance has helped power the Dodgers to the majors' best record (21-8), run differential (+55) and Equivalent Average (.286), not to mention a modern major league record 13-0 start at home. The team currently leads the Giants by 6.5 game and the Diamondbacks by 8.5 games.
At the outset of the season, our PECOTA projections pegged the Dodgers as a 93-win team with a 47.8 percent chance of winning the division and a 9.4 percent chance of taking the Wild Card, with the Diamondbacks at 88 wins, 34.7 percent, and 10.3 percent, respectively. Updating today's "Reality Check" piece to include Wednesday night's results and their ramifications in the PECOTA-based version of our Playoff Odds report, the Dodgers are projected to win 100 games (a .619 winning percentage), with an 84.1 percent chance of winning the division and a 4.7 percent chance of taking the Wild Card, while Arizona is projected to win 84 games (a .521 winning percentage), with 10.7 and 12.1 percent shots at the division and Wild Card. In other words, the Dodgers have widened the gap considerably on their closest rivals. The Giants, meanwhile, are still projected for just a 78-wn season, with a 3.4 percent shot at the division and 4.6 percent chance at the Wild Card.
After running through the Marginal Lineup Value Rate-based cost in runs of the Dodgers' three in-house candidates to replace him — Juan Pierre, rookie Xavier Paul, and third baseman Blake DeWitt, who would force Casey Blake to the outfield — I suggested another means of calculation:
As an alternative way to gauge the impact of Ramirez's absence, suppose we segment the Dodgers' season into three unequal parts, namely the 29 games they've already played, the 50 games they'll be without Ramirez, and the 83 games they'll have left once he returns. For the first segment we pencil in the team's actual scoring rates to date, and for the latter two segments, we use the team's PECOTA-projected scoring rates, applying the worst-case "Manny Hit" (-0.568 runs per game) for the course of his suspension:
Segment RS RA First 29 5.55 3.66 Actual Next 50 4.49 4.39 PECOTA minus 0.568 r/g offense Final 83 5.06 4.39 PECOTA Overall 4.98 4.26
Using Pythagenpat, that's a .573 winning percentage and a 93-win pace, or right where we pegged the Dodgers at the outset of the year. While this math is effectively saying that the cost of losing Ramirez may be enough to undo the extra advantage they've gained with their quick bolt from the gate, that still leaves the Diamondbacks having to find about 10 wins to overtake the Dodgers.
The bottom line is that Ramirez's absence likely won't cost the boys in blue the NL West flag. It could tighten the race, but the only real certainty is that it will be less colorful.
Before the day ended, I wound up doing radio hits for ESPN's Austin affiliate as well as my regular WWZN Boston spot, and this morning, like clockwork, I'm making the rounds on the Fox News Radio network. Catch me yakking with your local drive time host:
Our long dreadlocked drama is over. MLB.com and ESPN report that after more than four months of arduous negotiations and more spin than the 2008 presidential election, Manny Ramirez has returned to the fold. From MLB's Ken Gurnick and Barry Bloom:
The deal was closed, pending a physical, at a meeting in Los Angeles attended by Ramirez, his agents Scott Boras and Mike Fiore, Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, general manager Ned Colletti and manager Joe Torre, the latter duo both flying from Spring Training camp on Tuesday night for the session.
Torre and Colletti were already winging their way back to Phoenix this morning and are expected to arrive in time for Wednesday's Cactus League game between the Dodgers and Giants at Camelback Ranch.
The manager was summoned back to Los Angeles along with Colletti for what turned out to be the final negotiating session in a 4 1/2-month effort to get the free agent to return to the Dodgers.
Ramirez accepted the same deal the Dodgers offered last Wednesday -- two years, $45 million ($25 million in 2009, $20 million in 2010), payment deferred over five years without interest, with an opt-out clause after one season paid at $10 million each for the first four years and $5 million for the fifth.
But both sides indicated Tuesday night that the deal could not be completed until all primary parties met face-to-face in Los Angeles Wednesday. Ramirez flew in from Florida Tuesday night for the meeting.
Considering Manny and Boras went into the offseason seeking a four- or five-year deal at rates comparable to Alex Rodriguez ($27.5 million per year), this is a pretty huge win for the Dodgers, particularly on the emotional level; they get a great hitter, the best free agent of the offseason, they get him while screwing überagent Scott Boras fairly hard relative to those lofty initial expectations, and -- if the deferral info is accurate -- they get him at a dollar amount that's less than one of their recent, previous offers. Arguably, Manny bought himself the opt-out with that money, which doesn't bother me as much as it will some people. It's the cost of doing business, in this case.
On a baseball level, this is a great move even at that dollar amount. Lengthwise, it's tough to screw up too badly on a two-year deal, though the Dodgers do have the Andruw Jones deal as the exception that proves the rule (how often does a player who was on track for the Hall of Fame suddenly hit .158 with three homers in half a season?). As a win-now move it's even better. Baseball Prospectus' current, PECOTA-based projections have the Dodgers at 84 wins, five behind the Diamondbacks. That's with Juan Pierre as their regular left fielder. The difference in projected WARP values between the two (4.3 to 1.7) more than cuts that margin in half, and that's if you buy that Manny is worth -13 runs in the field, which is, to say the least, extreme; his historic defensive numbers have always been distorted by Fenway's Green Monster, while his numbers with the Dodgers last year were around average. Still, as a low-end estimate, that will stand. Figuring totally on projected VORP, the difference increases to 43.6 runs (49.0 to 5.4) -- more than four wins -- but even that doesn't get it right, since Pierre's VORP is based on his being a center fielder, where the offensive replacement level is theoretically lower than in left field. Marginal Lineup Value Rate (MLVr) numbers put Manny as worth .245 runs per game above an average hitter, whereas they put Pierre -.124 below, a difference of 59.8 runs, about SIX wins. Now, that's assuming the Dodgers can just bury Pierre in a ditch without him getting any playing time, which unfortunately isn't going to happen, and we've avoided the thorny issue of defense, but as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we can call that the high-end estimate.
So, we can estimate this move as worth between 2.6 and 6.0 wins. Considering the fact that the Dodgers are in the sweet spot where, as Nate Silver showed in Baseball Between the Numbers the marginal dollar values per win rise sharply, peaking around $4.5 million per win for the 90th win, this is essentially the point where the big-dollar incremental gains start to pay for themselves. Particularly so in this instance, given that this was 2005 dollars that Nate was figuring when he did that study, and that the bar for the current NL West is lower than your typical division. After all, 84 wins brought home the flag for Manny and the Dodgers last year.
As for Ramirez and Boras, it's tough to say they came out ahead given their efforts. As Paul SF at YanksFanSoxFan did some figuring himself:
Assuming Ramirez were to exercise the 2010 player option for $20 million (I think he will because anyone who thinks the teams will be in any position to pay players more money next offseason is kidding themselves), he will have received a whopping $5 million more than he would have gotten if he had simply stayed in Boston and put up his big numbers (thereby assuring that the Red Sox would have picked up their two options on him).
Except he changed agents, and Boras now gets a commission for whatever deal Ramirez accepts. Everything I've read assumes Boras gets a 5 percent commission (though no one actually quotes Boras or a player saying this). Five percent of $45 million is $2.25 million -- leaving Ramirez a net profit of less than $3 million over staying in Boston. If Boras' commission is 10 percent, Manny would have agitated his way off the Red Sox for all of $500,000.
If the net present value of the contract is less than $45 mil, as it must be if those terms are right (my crash course in the Excel Net Present Value function yielded about $41.5 mil assuming a 3% discount rate), those gains are even smaller. As my financial guru over the lifespan it took to write this piece, Neil deMause, put it: "Basically you're trying to figure out the cost of Manny giving the Dodgers a no-interest loan. You could argue that the Dodgers are a safer place to keep your money than a bank, or your mattress."
Indeed. No chance of the Dodgers being nationalized anytime soon.
