Sometimes, even a GM gets it right...

Discussing the baseball draft, yesterday, I responded to someone's question over whether the Red Sox would "draft for need" or "take the best player available" with the following:

It's hard to see any reason to think that "drafting for need" would not be utter idiocy on the part of a Major League baseball team. Whoever you draft is at least three years away from making an impact at the Major League level and most of your roster will turn over in three-four years, meaning that whatever your current needs are, they're likely to be very different when whoever you draft reaches the Majors. And, of course, whoever you draft is unlikely to ever make an impact in the Majors anyway.

The only sensible draft strategy is to take the best player available. Period. If you end up with a glut at some position, you make trades to shore up weaknesses. But you don't draft a catcher over a superior prospect in the outfield because you need a catcher today. Taking the player you project to have the best career, regardless of position, is the only strategy that makes sense.

In this morning's Boston Globe, Theo Epstein agrees with me:

You certainly never draft for need.

Merry Christmas, Red Sox fans!

So not only do we find Adrian Gonzalez in our Christmas stockings, when we pull him out we find that there was room for Carl Crawford in there, too! Santa says, "Theo Epstein, you've been a very good boy this year."

A lineup of

Ellsbury
Pedroia
Gonzalez
Youkilis
Crawford
Ortiz
Drew
Saltalamacchia/Varitek
Scutaro/Lowrie

is a lineup that will score a lot of runs. It will hit for average, it will produce a ton of baserunners, it will produce a lot of home runs, a plethora of doubles and a slew of stolen bases.

I'll a fuller analysis when we get closer to the start of the season, when we know a little bit more about what the bullpen is going to look like, what the bench is going to look like. But even if the Yankees sign Cliff Lee, as everyone expects, the Red Sox are going to go into the 2011 season as at least co-favorites to be the best team in baseball. Again.



(Now, does Tony Massarotti spend the day claiming that "hey, they took my advice"?)

J.D. Drew again

I love that Theo Epstein gets it...

“Based on his skill set, he’s always going to have underwhelming RBI totals,’’ Epstein said last September in an interview on 98.5 The Sports Hub. “When you’re putting together a winning team, that honestly doesn’t matter. When you have a player that takes a ton of walks, who doesn’t put the ball in play at an above-average rate and is a certain type of hitter, he’s not going to drive in a lot of runs.

“If you look at a rate basis, J.D. scores a ton of runs. And the reason he scores a ton of runs is because he does the single most important thing you can do in baseball as an offensive player, and that’s not make outs.’’

Does this off-season represent a "change in philosophy?"

Chad Finn:

Bay's so-called replacement -- at the least Cameron will platoon with Jeremy Hermida in left while spelling Jacoby Ellsbury and J.D. Drew in center and right -- is the strongest suggestion yet that the Red Sox have made a philosophical change to emphasize pitching and defense, perhaps figuring they're not going to slug with the Yankees but that they can beat them with a well-constructed run-prevention model.

I like Chad, and agree with a lot of his stuff. I even (mostly) agree with this piece. But there's one comment there that I want to take issue with, and I bolded it. To repeat, Chad said that "the Red Sox have made a philosophical change to emphasize pitching and defense."

I don't believe that they've made any change of philosophy. Obviously, they've changed the makeup of the ball club, but that doesn't necessarily represent a change in philosophy. They've been focused on pitching and defense the entire time that Theo has been the GM. Pitching and defense. And offense. They have, in my opinion, tried to run a holistic ball club right from the beginning. They brought in Schilling 2004. They signed Alex Gonzalex in 2006 and brought him back again last year. They signed J.D. Drew, and his defense was a key part of that.

But they recognize that there are many different ways to build a successful team. If they'd signed Mark Teixeira last year, if Bay had taken their money, no one would be talking about a "philosophical change." Those were moves that they tried to make. Tried very hard, in the case of Teixeira. If they turn Clay Buchholz and Jacoby Ellsbury in to Adrian Gonzalez in the next two months, no one will be talking about a "philosophical change."

Their philosophy hasn't been "all OBP, all the time" - if it were, they'd never have signed Alex Gonzalez. They'd have handled their issues with Manny differently, extending him before the '08 season started. Their philosophy hasn't been "gather the best offense possible, period." Their philosophy has been to find the best value that they can at each position, balancing pitching, offense and defense, so as to put a competitive team on the field every season. They've spent as much as any team not located in the Bronx has done, and they've spent on both the Major league roster and the Minor league system.

Rather than demonstrating a "philosophical change," yesterday's moves demonstrate a philosophical consistency. They see Lackey as the best value for that money, more valuable to them than Bay. They see Lackey and Cameron available at the cost of money and a draft pick, not the kind of established minor league talent that Philadelphia had to give up to Halladay. They've see an opportunity to upgrade weaknesses, and they've done so. They've upgraded at SS, both offensively and defensively, over what they got last year. They've downgraded offensively in left but upgraded defensively. They're certain to upgrade defensively at 3rd base - how much of an offense downgrade there is awaits the event, but it isn't like Lowell was an offensive star last year.

In short, they've continued to spend money, tried to do so effectively, where they see value, to put a good-to-very good-to-great team on the field. Just as they've done ever since Epstein's been the GM. The values available are pitching and defense related this year, unlike earlier years when they added an Ortiz or a Mueller or a Bellhorn, and but the guiding philosophy is exactly the same.

Decision-making errors

(or "Why the Mirabelli re-acquisition was the worst decision of Epstein's tenure")

I made a post the other day in which I jokingly attributed a couple of Theo Epstein comments as a response to things that I wrote three years ago. Obviously, Theo hasn't a clue who I am or what I say, but it fit, and amused me, so I framed it that way. But there actually is a serious point that he addressed, and it is one that I've made before, and it seems about time to make it again.

All decisions must be evaluated on the information which is available at the time that the decision is made.

That's one of the reasons that I'm adamant about not second-guessing the manager after the result is known. I criticize a move, if I'm going to, before the next pitch is thrown. After that happens, the information available changes in such a way as to make it almost impossible to evaluate the decision. The informational asymmetry is that whatever happens, whatever it's ante-facto likelihood, seems like a post facto inevitability.

It is unavoidable. When the outcome is known, no matter how hard we try not to, we tend to evaluate the outcome of the decision, rather than the decision itself. And one of the primary results of that tendency is to introduce enormous amounts of "noise" into our ability to recognize decision failures, and improve decision-making processes.

But it is the decision, and the process that leads to the decision, that we want to evaluate. We went through a firestorm a month ago when Bill Belichick went for a first down in Indianapolis, and it revealed that there are a lot of people, many of them loud, a surprising large number of them with radio microphones, who aren't capable, or at least interested, in evaluating decisions, only results. And we can't do that.

As I said a few weeks ago, in the aftermath of that game,

An unlikely outcome can condemn a good decision, but cannot turn it into a bad one. It can redeem a bad decision, but cannot turn it into a good one.

This is obviously not a baseball, or football, or sports only, discussion. Decision-making is vital in all aspects of life. Here's Ramesh Ponnuru this past week, talking of Michael Gerson's defense of Mike Huckabee's clemency record:

...for Gerson's defense of Huckabee's record to work, we would have to have confidence in the process by which he made clemency decisions...

That's exactly right.

To illustrate what I'm talking about, lets consider a couple of ad absurdio situations. First, Tom, who takes empties his bank account and spends his life savings on lottery tickets. Next is Dick, who gets up at a reasonable time in the morning, eats a healthy breakfast, and goes to the gym before going to work.

I think it's fairly obvious to everyone that Tom has made a poor decision and Dick a good one. Agreed? Based on what we know at the time, Tom is squandering everything on a ridiculous long shot with almost no chance of success, Dick is behaving in a healthy and prudent fashion.

And then Dick gets hit by a bus and Tom wins PowerBall. What we're now looking at is one incredibly wealthy man, and a dead one. If we evaluate on results, well, Dick is a big loser and Tom a big winner. But when we look at their decisions, Tom was wrong and Dick was right.

Sometimes it happens. Bad decisions turn out well, good decisions turn out poorly. Rather than evaluating the results of decisions, we need to evaluate the process by which the decisions are made.

The word "process," in this context, tends to turn people off. Not only are we not as interested in processes as we are in results, we acknowledge it, and sometimes even brag of it. "I don't care how you do it, just get it done!" If we want a new car, we don't much care what the plant setup looks like. If we want a hamburger, we aren't interested in examining the knives at the abbattoir. And if we want a good baseball team, we don't much care what the GM's decision-making process consists of - we just want it to result in good players on the team.

But if you're evaluating a GM with an eye for what you can expect in the future, process is absolutely vital. How does he gather information? Which information is important to him? Where does he think his team is in the success cycle? How does he feel about free agency vs. trades? How much information does he gather? How does he use the information to make a decision?

There's far too much variation in human beings, baseball players and baseball player performance for anyone to get every trade or signing right. Every time you trade for someone else's asset, they're trading for one of yours. Every time you sign a free agent, you're valuing him higher than someone else did. No one wins them all, not all games, not all signings and not all trades. What's crucial for success is not that the GM keeps your favorite players or schmoozes the ad executives or sports radio personalities - it's that he has a rational process that works, that produces valid information, rational decision trees and maximizes potential while minimizing risk.

And that's where the Mirabelli trade is a disaster. As a decision. There have been many moves that worked out worse than that one. Bard wasn't much of a loss, Meredith's produced on the lower part of his expectations curve, and it just wasn't all that costly as a move. Not that Mirabelli provided much value, but he didn't have to for the trade not to be a disastrous result. The Julio Lugo signing probably cost the team more in terms of "baseball value." So, for that matter, did the Renteria signing and the Arroyo-Pena trade¹.

None of those moves worked. Each of those moves resulted in a greater "negative value impact" on the organization than the Mirabelli re-acquisition. Indeed, there were people that hated each one at the time that it was made. But they are all defensible based on what we knew when they happened. The Mirabelli re-acquistion, on the other hand, demonstrated a significant failure in the decision-making process. They a) fixated on a short-term problem, b) overrated the significance of that problem, and c) responded to public panic. As a result, they gave up two young players with upside for an older player with none, and paid for the privilege. I believe it was the worst decision that Theo Epstein has made as GM of the Red Sox.




¹ - There are still people that want to put the Drew signing on that list. Just smile and nod because those people are revealing to you a lot about exactly how they understand the game.

Posnanski on Epstein on Drew

Probably the best baseball writer working right now, Joe Posnanski, talks about J.D. Drew, Theo Epstein and the Red Sox, with this quote from Theo about Drew:

And the reason he scores a ton of runs is because he does the single most important thing you can do in baseball as an offensive player. And that's NOT MAKE OUTS. He doesn't make outs. He's always among our team leaders in on-base percentage, usually among the league leaders in on-base percentage. And he's a really good base runner. So when he doesn't make outs, and he gets himself on base, he scores runs -- and he has some good hitters hitting behind him. Look at his runs scored on a rate basis with the Red Sox or throughout his career. It's outstanding.

You guys can talk about RBIs if you want, I just ... we ignore them in the front office ... and I think we've built some pretty good offensive clubs. If you want to talk about RBIs at all, talk about it as a percentage of opportunity, but it's just simply not a way or something we use to evaluate offensive players.

Everyone who has read me on baseball for any length of time knows that this is exactly how I feel about it. It's very comforting to have a front-office that "gets it" the way this front office does.