Notes From The Nat

There’s been a lot of stuff written, and said, (and whined) about Oakland’s recent trades of former Vancouver Canadian Nick Swisher, and former ‘afterthought’ of the Mark Mulder trade, Dan Haren.

Some thinkers are liking the deal, understanding that the worst that will come of it is one player as good as Swisher coming through in the next season or so, while the upside could mean THREE Swishers dropping into the roster by 2009. Others think it stinks, and that it’s just a continuation of the Oakland habit of trading away stars for kids, being cheapskates, and looking towards a future that will never come.

One noted blog pundit, on Elephants in Oakland, thinks Oakland boss Billy Beane "has made so many bad moves that his ‘positive’ moves are really just scabs on the A’s organization wounds he himself inflicted," reasoning that  the two trades "are a stinging rebuke of Billy Beane’s management of the OaklandAthletics Baseball Club, and if you will - the populist Moneyballtheory."

Swisher was one of several first round draft picks for the A’s in 2002.While Lewis spent much of the book explaining (not very well) varyingstatistical analysis methods the A’s purportedly eschewed - NickSwisher was the player the scouting crowd and stat heads could ‘agree’on. The definable stats and the indefinable intangibles and the toolsin-betweens were all there with Nick Swisher.

What Swisherbecame for the A’s was a loudmouth, publicity-whore and/or the face ofthe A’s franchise. Swisher was not a disappointment if you read columnsby Susan Slusser and Mychael Urban. If you look at the projectionsbased on stats and the hopes based on talent and ability - Swisher hadfailed, to date, to live up to the expectations of both the stat headand scouting communities. Swisher’s ability and talent havedeteriorated into ‘old player skills’; power, walks, low average, lackof speed. In 2007 Jack Cust clearly showed that those old player skillsare not worthy of a 1st round draft choice - they could be had,twice-over, (the A’s had Cust in Sacramento for 2005) at the minorleague level.

Now, he makes a good point that the A’s got Cust for nothing, and ended up with someone as good, if not better, than first round draft pick Swisher when they did so. That, to me, would seem to indicate that there’s value in the A’s tendency to steer clear of big money draft picks, and find replacement parts on the market when the need arises.

But Mr EiO goes on to harp on the Octavio Dotel [seen right] and Arthur Rhodes trades (which nobody will deny sucked), decry Oakland’s scouts and draft team as being incompetent, and points out the obvious - that Eric Chavez is a giant hole of suck, in trying to demonstrate that Billy Beane is a very average GM.

In my opinion, he not only cherry picks his data, but he also misses some very important points.

The first, and most important point of all, is that Oakland hasn’t had a top 15 draft pick since Barry Bonds weighed 195. The draft is geared to punish ongoing success, and the A’s have been successful in an ongoing way for some time now, so of course they’re going to run low on ‘can’t miss’ draftees when they’re picking in the mid-20’s spots.

The second thing to note (and this is entirely down to my opinion, as such things are nigh impossible to quantify) is that Oakland’s draft-picking team are as good as, if not better than, anyone else. They haven’t ‘missed’ a swathe of top notch potential draftees that went on to greatness elsewhere - rather, they weren’t available to them, as the A’s have always picked within their means.

They’ve long ‘put a Milo’ on Scott Boras guys, prospects that would require huge sign-ons to keep them out of college, and high risk, high upside guys, in favor of consistency and economics, as an organization rule. They look for the desperate senior, or the kid with great tools who was playing out of position for a year, or for a crappy unknown school, or with a pulled hammy.

Should they have offered more money to Justin Smoak in 2005 when they took a flyer on him in the 16th round and the two parties were reportedly only a few hundy grand apart in negotiations (on a $950k offer)?

Maybe so, but Oakland drafts like they trade - looking for the best deal - and when you draft a high expense guy early (or late, in the Smoak situation), EVERY SINGLE PLAYER you trade subsequently wants more money as a result.

"You gave Superman $5m to sign on in the first round, and I’m a second rounder, so shouldn’t I get $2m instead of 750k?"

"You gave Batman $2m to sign as a second rounder, so how come you want me to sign for $500k and not a square million?"

Understand, that’s how these negotiations work. That’s why Landon Powell [seen left] took his sweet time signing his 2004 contract - because he was going to get ass money due to being a college senior, and didn’t want that to mean subsequent draftees would get less money based on his low signing bonus. Instead, he waited until the other draftees had signed, then took his cut-price offer and got to work (blowing out his knee).

To be sure, this isn’t about scrimping on one 1st rounder - saving two million on a firsty also saves you a million on the next guy, and a half million on the next guy, and so on down the line. And with a low budget team like Oakland, that money is important. Save a few million bucks on your draft, and maybe you can keep a Shannon Stewart around for another season, or not trade away a Scutaro or a Kielty.

They HAVE to draft like they trade; even if the payoff on a big ticket prospect could be potentially huge down the line, it makes more financial sense for them to be as sure of a return as possible, and the way to be sure of a return on a draft pick is to go for consistency - guys who have been through college and have a good track record of across-the-board skills, like say Cliff Pennington, or Travis Buck, or Suzuki, or Danny Putnam.

Getting value for their dollar is why they took Richie Robnett, Landon Powell, and Mike Rogers with their top three picks in the 2004 draft, and not any of a dozen other potentially better players who would have been looking for twice as much money. Of course, you can argue that all three of those guys are busts, with one perpetually injured, another swinging hard and missing more often than not, and a third recently cut… but look deeper.

Kurt Suzuki [seen right] was a 2nd rounder in 2004 who has been unstoppable in his march to the Bigs. When the A’s picked both Powell and Suzuki that year, several pundits complained that they were manufacturing a roadblock, and that it might make more sense to draft at a different spot, rather than go for two catchers, but the pair have pushed each other hard through the system, and when Powell’s knee blew out, the A’s had an insurance policy that has paid off in spades.

Go deeper still - sure, Rogers was a bust, but Robnett is headed for AAA this season, and has perhaps the most awe-inspiring physique in the A’s system outside of Anthony Recker (who, by the way, was drafted out of nowhere in 2005, from a school nobody had ever heard of, and has monstered pitchers at several levels since to become the A’s current #1 catching prospect behind Suzuki).

The odds are solid that, once Robnett [seen left] learns a little more contact-hitting expertise, he’s going to be absolutely filthy in the bigs. I saw him send Armando Benitez long against the centerfield wall in an exhibition game between the A’s and Giants a few seasons back, when he was in High-A ball, and you know he’s only got bigger and better since. Many write Robnett off, but sit behind him in BP and tell me there’s not something waiting to explode in him..

And deeper still; Jason Windsor came out of the 3rd round of the ‘04 draft, and even if he hasn’t lit up the Majors, he’s in AAAA territory right now and only going to get better. As is Kevin Melillo (5th round), Nick Blasi (PCL Champ Series MVP last season, and 2004 12th round pick), Dallas Braden (24th rounder, played in the bigs last season and may start there in 2008), and Jeff Gray (32nd rounder who just keeps climbing and is currently in AAA ball).

If you REALLY want to know why the A’s minor league system is depleted, it’s not lack of knowledge in scouting or drafting, and it’s not even really an issue of finances, since the A’s have done pretty darn well with those they did get (Street, Buck, Suzuki, and let’s not forget ‘the big three’ way back when).

What depleted the A’s system was two phrases; ‘injury-prone’ and ‘high school’. 

In 2005 and 2006, the A’s made two errors of judgment as an organization. First, they decided there was value in the market in high school pitching, and they went long in trying to get some. In fact, they lined up the high school players like nine pins, shocking the world and putting an end to the old "Moneyball is where you draft polished college guys with high OBP" assumptions. And they got plenty of talented arms, for a good price, in doing so.

But the problem was, by switching from ‘ready made’ college players to ‘gonna need a few seasons to learn the ropes’ high schoolers, you cause a gap in your system that means you’ll go maybe a few years before you get the production line working back at full speed again.

"That’s fine," thought the A’s. "We’ll grab some free agents (Loaiza, Piazza), make some trades (Kennedy, Witasick, Halsey), and keep afloat with retreads until the system catches up." And they might have got away with it too, if it weren’t for those darn injuries.

And that’s error number two in the A’s recent drafting plan - they figured they could find added value by exploiting other teams fear of injuries.

One after another, the A’s drafted guys who either were recovering from an injury, or who had shortened seasons after coming off bad injuries, or who had broken down previously and not quite got back to their peaks. They drafted guys with funky arm actions that would need correcting, and guys with blown knees and TJ’ed elbows, and took the stance that injuries will happen as a matter of chance - not because someone is more prone to them than another guy.

The theory was, find a bunch of guys who had been unlucky and hurt their shoulders in their final season of an otherwise great college career, offer them negligible money to sign on when nobody else will take a chance, and when their luck changes, you’ve got a superstar in the making.

And that theory works well if, indeed, there’s not such a thing as ‘being injury prone’.

Sadly, as is evidenced by the A’s in 2007 putting more people on the DL than any other Oakland team since someone last showed romantic interest in Bud Selig, there IS such a thing as being injury prone, it ISN’T always down to bad luck, and the A’s found themselves stuck with a M*A*S*H unit of crocks, both up top of the system, and down bottom, with very little in the middle.

So you’ve got a sudden need for reinforcements in the majors, but your system has a ‘developmental gap’ due to your recent switch to high schoolers, and as you cut your losses on the 2007 season and ditch big money guys like Piazza, Kendall, and Loaiza, the system is bare of folks who can replace them, leading you to grab at dudes like Lenny Dinardo… it’s official at that point: time to rebuild.

That’s how it happened. That’s why it happened. Two mistakes in planning over one season, and the whole freaking thing came crashing down. That’s how delicate a minor league baseball system can be.

But the recent decision to rebuild is NOT a sign that Moneyball is ineffective - indeed, the success of the A’s for so long is proof that it DOES succeed. Yes, they traded Swisher and Haren, and may also deal Joe Blanton, but Swisher was right out of the Moneyball draft (he was the poster boy for Moneyball, in fact), Blanton was ALSO a Moneyball draftee, and Haren was one of those ‘nameless prospects’ that came to Oakland when they traded away Mark Mulder (who went on to suck famously elsewhere, despite all those fans who ground their teeth down to gummy nubs when he was let go). 

Yes, Arthur Rhodes was ass. Yes, Octavio Dotel was a poop on poop sandwich. sure, I would have loved it if Eric Chavez had been traded three seasons ago… but to harp on those three situations now, when all three decisions were made in the context of being ‘this close’ to making the playoffs, and had nothing to do with whether or not a kid in the 2005 draft had the stones to get to the bigs by 2007, is futile.

If you want to say that, in 2005 and 2006, the A’s picked the wrong ‘market inefficiency’ to exploit, you’d be absolutely right. If you want to say that the 2002 Moneyball draft for Oakland was light on future major leaguers, you’d be absolutely right (though you might also want to consider the emergence of steroid testing, and how that might have changed the landscape for guys like three-time steroid positive and 2003 7th rounder David Castillo).

But look at it this way - Mark Mulder was a prospect once. He was let go for two prospects (Haren and Barton) and a reliever (Calero). One of those prospects (Haren) has now been let go for SIX prospects, which according to Baseball America, included the 1st, 3rd, 7th and 8th ranked prospects of the D-Backs.

That means Billy Beane and his incompetent drafting/scouting team turned one prospect into seven others, and one major league set-up man.

An indictment of Moneyball? You decide.

But I’m saying ‘Viva Beane’ as loudly as I can.