Johnny Mac: 2 years, $3.8M total

by Torgen on Sep 11, 2007 4:18 PM EDT Comment 10 comments

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070911&content_id=2201598&vkey=news_mlb&fext=. jsp&c_id=mlb

Myself and Hugo had a bit of discussion on this matter during last night's game thread. Are we paying $2M a year for a utility infielder, or has J.P. decided we only need to be strong 1 through 8? (Or is there some secret master plan to turn Johnny Mac into an Ichiro-style slash-and-dash lefty, like I jokingly suggested?)

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1-8

It's more like 1-7 since Zaun isn't that good with the bat as a starter.

I would hope it's $2M for a utility infielder and we'll see how the off-season goes...

Allan's World

by achengy on Sep 11, 2007 10:10 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

Zaun's OBP the last three years was ~.360

This was clearly an off year for AVG, although better than '04 and '05 slugging-wise.

"He almost has to start. Do you believe in miracles?"

by Torgen on Sep 11, 2007 11:49 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I don't see him getting better

age being the main factor. As slow as Molina was, the platoon between the two looks much better and I hope we can have that for next year.

Allan's World

by achengy on Sep 12, 2007 12:18 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Molina's OBP last year was .319.

That's worse than Zaun's managed this year, and Molina didn't break his hand.

"He almost has to start. Do you believe in miracles?"

by Torgen on Sep 12, 2007 4:12 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Zaun has been okay

I'd like to get Thigpen more ABs, but as long as we can avoid Jason Phillips, Zaun should be good enough next season. Macdonald, though, is troubling as an everyday starter. If he was merely bad as a hitter, it'd be okay, but Mac is awful with the stick. I really hope the Jays at least come up with a few more options, Olmedo is a cheap in-house option that might be as good as Mac defensively (given that Mac will be 33) and will likely be at least as good offensively. Apparently J.P. spoke with Hill and Hill prefers to stay at 2nd, so J.P. has ruled that out as an option. I just don't buy the argument that the Jays have enough offense at the 1-8 positions so they should focus on defense at SS. First, where does it say that offense is nonlinear (so that there are diminishing returns to adding offense at certain positions)? Second, what makes anyone think that the Jays offense is above average?

"Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms... The game of ball is glorious." - Walt Whitman

by hugo on Sep 12, 2007 10:16 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

The price of offense is nonlinear

and defense, for that matter, because a large part of the cost of a player is the roster/lineup/position they take up--that is, the opportunity cost of not having someone else there. On top of that, the slopes of the two curves vary by position because of differences in supply. Does that mean that what you give up in going from a $12M 3B to a $10M 3B is more than what you gain from going from a $2M SS to a $4M SS? Even if it's not, the non-liquidity of players (because of guaranteed multi-year contracts) means that you can't necessarily get the distribution you now want. If you only have $2M to spend on a shortstop, it makes sense to get the best $2M shortstop you can get. Vizquel is making $4M this year for basically the same bat as Johnny Mac (more OBP, less SLG, but he has 5 IBBs because someone preferred to face the pitcher). If he gets more than $2M/yr in the offseason, Johnny Mac was a good deal. That's obviously not the same as the best deal.

"He almost has to start. Do you believe in miracles?"

by Torgen on Sep 13, 2007 12:22 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

right

I agree the cost of offense is nonlinear, but that's not what I meant. What I mean is that saying that "we already have a good 1-8 so we can get with no offense out of the SS position" implicitly suggests that there is some decreased benefit to adding offense when you already have a lot of offense. For example, without regard to who they would be replacing, is, say, Jim Thome more valuable to the White Sox than he would be to a better offensive team? I don't think that's the case, which, I think, means the philosophy that a team can take an offensive sinkhole and that it even might be more efficient for the team to so long as they have good offense at other positions is probably wrong.

"Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms... The game of ball is glorious." - Walt Whitman

by hugo on Sep 13, 2007 8:34 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

It Is Nonlinear

Think about it this way: winning in baseball is defined simply by outscoring the opposition, not by how much you outscore them. In other words, if your opponent scores four runs in a game, there's tremendous value to you scoring a fifth run (we call that a "win" ;)), but absolutely no additional benefit to scoring a sixth.

Now teams, of course, have no way to know ahead of time how many runs the opposition is going to score on a given night, so you always want to push an offense to score as many as possible, in order to maximize the odds that at the end of the night you're on the right side of that all-important +1.

But over the course of an entire season you can easily figure out the average number of runs good or bad teams score in a game (as I write this, the Yankees are scoring 5.9 R/G this year, the Nationals an even 4 R/G, and the league average is 4.78 R/G). Moreover, I think it's reasonable to assume that the distribution of runs scored is at least somewhat normal - that is, that there are more times that teams score an average number of runs than a significantly above- or below-average number. Teams don't get shut out or score 13 runs in a game more frequently than they score somewhere in the 3-6 range.

It follows from that that you can win a lot more games by raising your R/G from 4.0 to 5.0 (because there are a lot of times that your opponent will score four runs, making the fifth one decisive) than you will from raising it from 6.0 to 7.0 (again, because there are presumably fewer occasions where a seventh run proves the decisive one).

So my back-of-a-napkin scientific opinion is that offensive value is non-linear, with the fewest wins to be gained at either extreme (going from 1.0 to 2.0 R/G is just going to mean your many losses are less embarrassing), and the most from going from a slightly-below-average to a slightly-above-average offense.

---

All of that said, however, your second and final point in your post was actually the decisive one: the Blue Jays are not an above-average offensive team. They're currently scoring 4.51 R/G, below that league average of 4.78 (a figure which includes the NL, FWIW). Thus, there would in fact be tremendous utility to improving our offense from SS - or C, or LF. We can't afford to start low-value hitters like John McDonald or Reed Johnson (leadoff hitter reputation aside, he's hit .238/.297/.336 this year, which is abysmal from any lineup spot) because the rest of our lineup simply isn't good enough to compensate.

It's the apparent inability of the management and the media to recognize that fundamental and underlying failing that is the real problem with the Jays, not the resulting decision to give McDonald $3.8 million.

- Ash

by Asharak on Sep 13, 2007 11:09 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Not above average this year

when most of our players are having down years, and Stairs got about three fifths the plate appearances he would on any other team. The AL average is 4.9 runs per game, and ours is 4.51. The AL average ERA is 4.5, and our team ERA is 4, including all those Victor Zambrano and Josh Towers and Tomo Ohka starts. (Remember, the AL won interleague again, which is probably a large part of why those numbers aren't equal.) If Overbay hits like he's hit in every single year except this one, and Glaus hits better than this year once healthy, and Wells hits better than this year once healthy, and we don't give Sal Fasano any ABs, and we give Stairs lots of ABs, and we don't have mediocre veterans start in place of our young guns, and an added bonus if we figure out how to win on the road, then we will have a pretty good offensive team. Most of these are regressions to the mean, and the rest are managerial decisions (oh crap). If our SS budget is fixed at $2M per year due to the other decisions Ricciardi has made and can't change now, maybe the extreme all-glove SS (and his run prevention) is a better value than the offensive shortstop we could get for that money.
Or maybe the season ticket holders told Riccardi to bring back Johnny Mac.
Or maybe Ricciardi sucks.

"He almost has to start. Do you believe in miracles?"

by Torgen on Sep 13, 2007 1:32 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

that's very interesting

but I'm not totally convinced it works that way. I'll have to do some research and put together a post. What you're saying makes sense, but it might only apply when a teams' average runs scored is very high or very low.

"Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our closed rooms... The game of ball is glorious." - Walt Whitman

by hugo on Sep 13, 2007 7:07 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs