In 2002, at the tender age of 18, Andy Marte led the Appalachian League in RBI, was second in home runs, and had a composite line of .281/.344/.492. That performance made Marte an interesting prospect to be closely followed in 2003. This past summer in the Carolina League, Marte had another solid performance and jumped to grade-A prospect status. Baseball Prospectus minor league expert David Cameron said that Marte was the player “that most amazed me” in his most recent chat.
Marte is getting regular playing time at the Dominican Winter League as the third baseman of the Azucareros del Este club, and he was kind enough to have a brief conversation with Baseball Prospectus. We interviewed Marte before his team most recent game at the Estadio Tetelo Vargas in San Pedro de Macoris.
With just eight games left on the schedule, the Dominican Winter League is entering in the final and decisive stretch to decide which four teams are going to the playoffs beginning January 2nd. Two teams are already in: the Licey Tigers and the Cibao Eagles and three others are fighting for the final two spots. Two-and-a-half games separate the Giants, Toros and Estrellas, yet the Estrellas are at a marked disadvantage.
Before the season started, there were signals that the team from San Pedro de Macoris was working with a different agenda than the other five ballclubs. Most of their foreign players were from the Japanese League (Masato Yoshii, Takahito Nomura and Brian Mallette) or the Taiwanese League (Jeff Andra). Only three played the whole summer in organized baseball: Greg Bauer, Koyie Hill and J.D. Closser. The clear motives for this curious strategy were economic, as the ballclub was not in the same financial position as the two previous seasons, when their payroll was almost at the same level of the big-market clubs in Santo Domingo and Santiago.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, it’s been a pretty interesting couple of weeks in the news. If you’ve been feverish, like most of the populace of California’s scenic Contra Costa County, you may have observed that a bombastically hirsute Alex Rodriguez was liberated from a sort of cave/hutch just north of Tikrit and west of Odessa by a U.S. Army strike force, who then checked him for ticks, packaged him in a box, and shipped him to Worcester, where he was unpacked by Larry Lucchino and Gene Orza, then shipped back to Houston, Texas, where he was awarded a Hummer by noted conservative talk show host Michael Savage.
The more coherent among you are aware that the Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers have been discussing a deal that is, at its center, Manny Ramirez for Alex Rodriguez.
Since both players have very long, lucrative contracts, money has been a significant component of the deal. So let’s dive in and take a look…
Rather than just adding another thousand-or-so words to the million which have been written this week about Alex Rodriguez’ negotiations with the Boston Red Sox, the Texas Rangers, the MLBPA, Scott Boras, Bud Selig, and a bunch of angry Red Sox fans, I’ll focus on a few specific issues which often seem to be misunderstood.
This deal validates the notion that the Rangers were somehow ruined by the signing of Alex Rodriguez, when in fact, Rodriguez has been worth the money. The Rangers’ problems have more to do with wasted money on non-contributors, the failure of some B and C pitching prospects, and the absence of a center fielder for years on end. We’ve reached a point in the trade negotiations between the Rangers and Red Sox where the issues aren’t players, but money. Money as in “how much less can the Red Sox pay Rodriguez?” The Sox have been negotiating that point with Rodriguez for some time, and the two sides appear to have an agreement that satisfies both sides, one in which he gets much less guaranteed compensation and assumes a lot more risk. Conceding that we don’t yet know exactly how much money he might be giving up to make this happen, I think it’s entirely possible that Rodriguez would be doing himself a disservice. Is it reasonable for someone to pay, for the sake of argument, $40 million just to change employers and base cities?
We can be pretty hard on front offices sometimes, whether they’re deserving of it or not. For instance, during a Roundtable recently, I stated the following: “I don’t think the Mariners have enough brain power to light a bulb, much less think through the intricacies of market dynamics.”
I doubt this comes as much of a surprise to anyone. It was a comment born out of frustration at an off-season that started with bringing back Edgar Martinez, but has gone downhill from there. Sometimes it seems like the people running major-league clubs are as clueless as that one owner in your fantasy league who just traded Rafael Soriano for Terrence Long.
Take Pat Gillick, a man who was frequently mentioned as one of the best general managers in the game. Gillick’s a smart guy; he and the Blue Jays set up a tremendous player development system in the Dominican Republic back when people thought they were a little loopy for doing it, and it paid tremendous dividends. His teams have won championships. So, to call him dumb… well, that was stupid of me, and it sparked some arguments.
Ivan Santucci, 32, is project manager for the Umpire Information System (UIS) created and administered by QuesTec, Inc., of Deer Park, N.Y. He manages technical issues, training, installations, upgrades, and maintenance in the U.S., Korea, and Japan. He’s on the road for 80 percent of the regular season, but when he’s at home (down Beacon Street from Fenway Park) Santucci is also one of three QuesTec technicians who handle the pitch-by-pitch UIS duties for home Red Sox games.
The UIS, which has been a topic of much controversy in its brief MLB lifespan, is a system of video cameras used to evaluate umpires’ strike zone accuracy. Baseball Prospectus interviewed Santucci in a series of emails before and during the 2003 winter meetings.
It was almost the greatest single-day performance in winter meetings history. Toward the end of a relatively quiet Sunday of minor deals and signings, word began to spread that the Baltimore Orioles were going to sign Miguel Tejada to a six-year deal. That wasn’t entirely unexpected; Tejada had a limited number of suitors, and the Orioles were the wealthiest of the bunch. After being rumored at just about every number in a range of 20, the deal came in at an eye-popping $72 million. As with Mike Cameron, a late flurry of activity had been very profitable for the player. What was unexpected was the rumors that came attached to the deal. Not only were the O’s signing Tejada, but they were also ready to announce that he’d be playing with Ivan Rodriguez and Vladimir Guerrero. That’s right; the Baltimore Orioles were coming back with a vengeance, prepared to commit close to $200 million to the three best players left unsigned in an effort to return to relevance in the AL East and return crowds to Camden Yards.
As promised, here’s a team-by-team breakdown of last week’s NorCal Mock Winter Meetings. With the real winter meetings in New Orleans winding down, it’s interesting to compare the two for like transactions as well as differences.
The most interesting story, to my mind, was Mike Cameron’s. Late Friday, it appeared that the Padres were in good shape to sign him. By Saturday evening, there was word that the A’s had moved to the front of the pack, having beaten the Padres’ offer. By early Sunday, though, Cameron was a Met, accepting a three-year deal for $7 million per, the highest average value that had been attached to Cameron’s name, and it wasn’t close. There was a round of "not about the money" talk after the deal. The Mets’ players helped recruit Cameron, and the center fielder’s Atlanta roots were played up. Maybe those things came into play, but the fact is, no one else was offering Cameron seven million bucks a year. He did well for himself in a market with lots of outfielders and more on the way. Cameron becomes the Mets’ best defensive center fielder since…well, he might be the best in their history. The Mets have employed both Richie Ashburn and Willie Mays, but both well after their primes. Cameron is an upgrade over the Roger Cedeno/Timo Perez class, and like Kazuo Matsui, makes the team better.
With each passing day on which few or no free agents sign, the pressure on players and agents grows. Come next Saturday, the deadline for tendering a contract offer to players on the 40-man roster, it’s likely that the number of players seeking employment will double, with a particular swelling in the ranks of outfielders and first basemen. That non-tender date is on everyone’s mind, and it’s an element in every negotiation with a player below the level of superstar. The recognition that baseball’s middle class is filled with guys who don’t have to be highly-compensated just because they have service time or tenure with your ball club has permeated the landscape, and even without getting into the C word, that recognition is driving supply up and demand down. So we may see a lot of the guys who weren’t tendered arbitration, and the free agents on the second and third tiers, sign deals this weekend just to keep themselves out of that mass of humanity. It’s an interesting, and positive, change, because it frees teams to use the bulk of their resources on players who do make a difference in the standings.
It took me two weeks to wipe the surprised look off my face after I found out the Cubs got off. The Honorable Sophia Hall found on behalf of Wrigley Field Premium and the Chicago Cubs and dismissed the suit in what, I have to say, is one of the strangest decisions I’ve ever followed.
There’s a law on the books in Illinois that says if you hold an event, you can’t scalp your own tickets. The Cubs and their parent company, the Tribune Co., seeking to get around this law, set up a shell company, Wrigley Field Premium, with their own people, their own accountants running the books. They allowed the shell company to buy $1 million in tickets, then sell them at insane prices. Now, I don’t practice law, but that’s illegal. It’s also Chicago, though.
What’s weird is that the judge agrees with everything everyone’s said about the suit up until the point where she has to declare them guilty. Reading the opinion, it’s all there: “WFP is a subsidiary of the Tribune Company (p. 9).” In March 2002, this brand new ticket broker was allowed to purchase $1,047,766 of tickets (incidentally, go ahead and try that as an actual unaffiliated business and see what the Cubs tell you).
The opinion contains a nice little history of how Tribune formed it, the corporate officers overlapped, how WGN provided Premium free advertising…it’s crazy. And it contains this gem (on p. 13): “From the beginning Ball Club and Premium did not keep secret they were both owned by Tribune Co. […] To dispel possible confusion, Premium’s employees were instructed to tell customers that Premium is not a part of Ball Club.”
Gee, that’s not concealing ownership, or anything.
Joe Sheehan checks in from New Orleans for the first installment in the series of daily reports he’ll be filing from the winter meetings. Today, a look at the Kevin Brown trade, the Miguel Batista signing, and the Mariners’ botching of their outfield situation.
Tuesday night, Gary Huckabay and I hosted the NorCal version of BP’s Mock Winter Meetings Pizza Feed. The feed was attended by several dozen very enthusiastic fans and one fan’s poor girlfriend, who spent the entire time sitting in the corner wondering how exactly she got mixed up with a group like us. The rules were essentially the same as the Chicago event: Each participant was given a team, constrained by that team’s real-life budget and talent restrictions, and was assigned the task of improving the product as much as possible in a few short hours. Unlike Chicago, we had a few added bonuses. First, our Feed was held after the arbitration deadline, meaning participants already knew whom they had cut and what players they could not sign. Second, we tried as best we could to approximate estimated arbitration awards on an individual basis. While this was much more time consuming, it provided more accuracy when accounting for payrolls and increased the likelihood that teams would simply release players who were likely to command significantly more than a comparable replacement. Third, we made no effort whatsoever to determine deferment of payments–like insurance coverage for injuries like Mo Vaughn’s knee or George Steinbrenner’s brain–or to adjust payroll based on the likely economic windfall that follows signing such marquee free agents as Olmedo Saenz. Besides, often the price of handling the deluge of fan demand for tickets offsets the gains of signing a guy like Olmedo.
Josh Lewin, 35, is a play-by-play announcer for Fox TV’s Saturday Game of the Week and the television voice of the Texas Rangers. As an announcer, he’s worked with legendary broadcasters Jon Miller in Baltimore, Harry Caray in Chicago, and Ernie Harwell in Detroit. He’s also a job-hunting survivor of the winter meetings. His first book, Getting in the Game: Inside Baseball’s Winter Meetings, published by Brasseys, tells the tale of three go-getters seeking their first paying jobs in professional baseball at the 2002 meetings in Nashville’s Opryland Hotel. With this year’s event starting this weekend in New Orleans, BP chatted with Lewin about the challenge of baseball job-hunting, the scene at the winter meetings, and how he found his own broadcasting career.
Fall and winter are times for football, basketball, and snow. For New Englanders, it’s a time to mourn another summer that died late, as Roger Angell once said. The only baseball news around for fans are awards announcements, manager firings and hirings and the Hot Stove League league, which doesn’t always burn so hot. But for a few million obsessed fans around the Caribbean basin and the Mexican pacific coast, it’s time for “the other” season, one that’s even more important in terms of passion and loyalty than the major leagues of the United States. We do have baseball year-round, but the only time we feel the sense of emptiness that the people in Canada and the United States are feeling right now is the 10 days between the end of the Caribbean World Series and the time pitchers and catchers report.