Ben Cherington Thus Far

by Sully on December 28, 2012

in Red Sox

Ben Cherington inherited stewardship of a Red Sox roster that looked like the best in baseball just 27 games prior to his promotion. At that point, with little financial flexibility, he had a decision. Were those 27 games an aberration, or had something changed fundamentally for the Red Sox? Were those 27 games a leading indicator of what might lie ahead for that core group or could it be chalked, as Saberists will do, to “small sample size?”

Cherington figured September was anomalous, that the Red Sox were a good bet to improve via some minor bullpen tweaks, performance more in line with reasonable expectations from core players and better overall team health. The moves he did make were a mixed bag. On the good side, Cody Ross joined the team and would ultimately help at an incredible price tag of $3 million. He handed Mike Aviles the full-time shortstop job, a move that surprisingly worked out okay. Aviles’s hacktastic approach at the plate was offset by decent pop in his bat, his sure hands and impressive range. Will Middlebrooks was promoted at the right time. Not letting David Ortiz walk proved smart.

There were also missteps. Bobby Valentine…oof. What’s there to say? If we’re to believe most news reports, it sounds like Valentine wasn’t necessarily Cherington’s choice, so that one’s not really on him. Cherington did trade away talents Josh Reddick, Jed Lowrie and Marco Scutaro for returns that can charitably be described as “inadequate.” But even when it comes to these moves, Scutaro was awful for most of the year, Lowrie finished the year hurt and slumping, and Reddick was a black hole for the A’s offense over the last four months of the season and into the playoffs. Those deals shouldn’t be the black marks on Cherington’s record critics make them out to be.

So Cherington assembled a team that went to Fort Myers looking like it had improved after a 90-win 2011 season. But then everything was terrible. Adrian Gonzalez badly underachieved, Kevin Youkilis appeared finished, the starting rotation vacillated between injured and dreadful, the bullpen somehow was even worse, and Jacoby Ellsbury, Carl Crawford and Dustin Pedroia battled injuries. After watching the Red Sox suck for a long enough period of time, Cherington decided it was time to act. And when he decided it was time to act, he pulled off a masterstroke. He dealt Crawford, Gonzalez and Josh Beckett, three expensive and underachieving malcontents (Nick Punto too) for actual prospects and a staggering amount of salary relief. Predictably, the Red Sox once again limped to the finish line. Because they decided to hit the “reset” button, they ended the season 16-42 over their last 58 games and won just 69 overall.

With financial flexibility and a crop of Red Sox prospects looming that figures to form the next elite core of homegrown talent, Cherington had to balance Boston’s short-term obligation to supporters to compete in 2013, with the long-term interests of the club. It remains to be seen how this offseason’s transactions impact the club but the one projection system I have seen, Dan Szymborski’s ZIPS, has the Red Sox winning 85 games as currently constituted minus Joel Hanrahan (and including Mike Napoli). Maybe Hanrahan adds a win. With some health and bounce-back from the holdovers like Ellsbury, Lester, Buchholz and yes, John Lackey, a playoff run is not at all out of the question.

All of this begs the question, why do a lot of the Saberati hate Ben Cherington so? He’s kicked around by the usual know-it-all suspects like he’s Dayton Moore. Meanwhile, he’s been on the job all of 12 months with the most notable deal during his tenure netting Boston an unthinkably improved position. Cherington isn’t too concerned about bloggers and newsletterists, I don’t think, so don’t cry for him. I just think he deserves a little more intellectual honesty from the once-influential writers who like to beat him up.

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Really Quick on Joel Hanrahan

by Sully on December 27, 2012

in Red Sox

First, R.J. Anderson has the only strong analysis of the deal I have seen and Alex Speier, always well sourced, offers a nice take on why the Red Sox did the deal.

In short, they think Hanrahan is elite. Nothing more, nothing less. And since they believe Hanrahan is elite, they were willing to part with players who aren’t likely to amount to contributing MLB’ers, and Mark Melancon. Concerning Melancon, they made a different assessment than the one they made for Hanrahan. They don’t believe Melancon is elite. Not only that, I would even take it a step further and guess they don’t think his makeup plays well here longer-term in high leverage situations. That’s why they gave up the four years of team control in spite of Melancon’s promising bounce-back last year as the Red Sox limped to the finish line.

I have seen analyses pouring through Melancon’s and Hanrahan’s stats for comparison’s sake, as though their Fangraphs page might unearth some insight Boston’s front office failed to consider. It’s silly. The Red Sox simply made a call on Hanrahan, a call on Melancon and the stakes are pretty low. Given reliever unpredictability, is anyone really in a position to assert that a given approach is the wrong one? Try drafting and developing arms, try the scrap heap, try an FA deal or two, try some trades. Relievers are tricky, and so any means of acquiring dependable bullpen arms ought to be in play.

Anyone who’s managed to form a strong opinion on this deal is probably trying a little too hard.

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The Search For an Explanation

by Sully on August 7, 2012

in Red Sox

Lately fans and media alike have been assigning blame for the Red Sox struggles this season. John Tomase thinks Bobby Valentine should be held accountable, Peter Abraham thinks it runs deeper throughout the organization. There are calls for John Henry’s ownership group to sell the team.

It’s normal when things don’t go as planned to want to assign blame. After all, these are all professionals we’re talking about, and when professionals are working towards a common goal, there needs to be individual accountability. John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino own the PR nightmare that ensued after last year’s historic September collapse. Ben Cherington and his staff own the crummy returns on the Josh Reddick and Jed Lowrie deals.

But lost in all of this is the notion that the players themselves ought to be accountable. Sure you’ll hear rumblings about Josh Beckett’s attitude or off-the-field activities, and you may come across the occasional rumor that Jon Lester just isn’t happy in Boston, but nobody actually talks about how if Boston’s “stars” simply played the way they were capable of, the Red Sox would be one of baseball’s best teams.

Let’s get all the caveats out of the way here. WAR is imperfect. Boiling any one player’s impact down to a single number is probably too imprecise, but for our purposes it’s instructive. We’re just going to take five players: Jacoby Ellsbury, Adrian Gonzalez, Dustin Pedroia, Jon Lester and Josh Beckett. Never mind Carl Crawford, Kevin Youkilis, Clay Buchholz, Dan Bard, Mark Melancon, Andrew Bailey or other disappointments.

In 2011, as Baseball Reference’s version of the metric goes, the five players in question combined for 32.1 Wins Above Replacement. Since we’re comparing 2011 to 2012, let’s cut that by the percentage of games that have been played (67.9%) and we get to 21.8 Wins Above Replacement. So, if the five players had performed exactly the way they did in 2011, they would have contributed 21.8 WAR combined to date, through 110 games, in 2012. In actuality, that figure is 4.4, a 17.4 “win” difference. Really dumbing this analysis down, add those 17 wins to the 2012 total and that would give the Red Sox a record of 72-38, well clear of the next best MLB team.

“That’s ridiculous,” you say. “Expecting those five players to perform the way they did collectively in 2011 would be silly.” Point taken, they were awesome last year. So what were their projections coming into the season? What did ZIPS have them doing in 2012? Let’s just use OPS+ and ERA+. For the three position players, they were all projected to have more or less a full season’s worth of at bats. For the two starters, both were to make at least 25 starts.

Gonzalez: 138 ZIPS OPS+, 113 2012 actual, -25 difference
Pedroia: 118 ZIPS OPS+, 94 2012 actual (in diminished playing time due to injury), -24 difference
Ellsbury: 110 ZIPS OPS+, 89 2012 actual (in way diminished playing time due to injury), -21 difference
Lester: 127 ZIPS ERA+, 81 2012 actual, -46 difference
Beckett: 116 ZIPS ERA+, 96 2012 actual, -20 difference

So, there’s a comparison of actual output to a baseline expectation of what the five 2011 stars might have contributed in 2012. I am not sure how that translates into WAR, and I doubt it’s 17 wins, but want to call it 10? Because if it’s 10 wins, they’re 65-45 and up two games in the AL East.

==========

Every MLB team encounters injuries and superstar underperformance, but usually when you take a team’s five best, you can probably estimate with some degree of accuracy what they will in aggregate contribute. Some will fall short of expectations, some will exceed them but the total output will in all likelihood be roughly there. For the Red Sox, their five best players from 2011 have all fallen so far short of expectations that only Gonzalez and Pedroia even bump up against “league average.”

This is why I find the desperate search for some root cause of the organization’s failures so curious. I haven’t really seen anyone just say “their best players stink this year.” Because as you can see from the admittedly oversimplified analysis above, if the Red Sox had received simply disappointing output from Gonzalez, Ellsbury, Pedroia, Lester and Beckett, they’re probably right in the mix of the Wild Card and Division leaders. And if the Red Sox were in that position, are we calling for Valentine’s head, discussing cultural problems, demanding that John Henry sell the team? I doubt it.

Simple explanations are often at once unsatisfactory and accurate.

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Some Thoughts on Kevin Youkilis

by Sully on June 25, 2012

in Red Sox

Kevin Youkilis leaves the Red Sox as one of the very best hitters in franchise history. As former teammate Nick Punto so nicely put it yesterday, “Not too many Boston Red Sox players have two world championships and he was a heck of a player for this organization.” That pretty much sums it up.

Youk gained early fame in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball as “The Greek God of Walks” and for good reason. His strike zone command and pitch identification abilities were off-the-charts good. He had a career .442 Minor League on-base percentage.

As a four-year college player with limited raw athleticism, Youk seemed to understand his route to the Majors. It’s not that he was any sort of great Bill James disciple, it’s just he understood that his leg up on others would be to swing at better pitches to hit. In the process, he happened to walk a whole bunch, too. This determination and focus earned him a chance to play with the Red Sox in 2004. He was there at Yankee Stadium for Game 7, rushing the field for arguably the most jubilant moment Boston baseball fans have ever experienced.

If work ethic and clarity of purpose marked his Minor League career, professionalism defined his early Major League years. Youkilis had a skill set that likely would have played well in the big leagues as early as 2002 but it wasn’t until 2004 that Youk got his chance, playing in 72 games. He played just in 44 in 2005. Kevin Millar, Bill Mueller and David Ortiz were all in the mix, so where was he going to slot in full time? Youkilis was denied opportunities to accrue service time, and thus his chance at a big payday sooner rather than later. I don’t recall him complaining about any of this.

At the age of 27 Youkilis became a full-time Major League player and just like in the Minor Leagues it was his keen eye that distinguished him. He had a good glove at first base and could mix in a little pop, but his profile for his first two full-time seasons was as an “on base guy.” An “on base guy” gets more love now but back then there was still this notion that a pitcher issued bases on balls. Batters didn’t necessarily earn them. Youk’s skill set was underappreciated, even as he played pretty well in 2006 and 2007.

Youkilis came into the 2008 season with a career .434 slugging percentage and, that season, slugged .569. He found his power stroke and became one of the very best players in all of baseball. After that season, he and another elite first baseman, Mark Teixeira, were awarded new contracts. Teixeira’s total contract value was $180 million, and Youkilis’s was a little over $41 million in guaranteed money.

That wasn’t because Teixeira was more than four times better than Youkilis, of course. It was a matter of service time. While Youkilis was blocked in Boston, Teixiera was performing in the Major Leagues after shooting through the Minor League ranks as one of baseball’s best prospects. Even though he was a year younger than Youkilis, he had accrued the service time necessary to hit unrestricted free agency. Youkilis on the other hand had come too far to risk a lifetime of financial security for a shot at a payday like Teixeira’s when he would be three years older.

That doesn’t mean it sat well with him, though. He earned $3 million in 2008 while emerging as a superstar. In 2009 he played even better, outperforming Teixeira while earning about $13 million less than him. In 2010, even though his season was shortened by injuries, he once again put up some of the best rate stats in baseball. He knew he was a bargain, and he knew he was a bargain because as a youngster he was unheralded and a quiet team player who did what his employer asked when he could have been on his way to a bigger payday with another organization. Nobody should feel bad for Kevin Youkilis, but nobody could blame him for carrying on with a chip on his shoulder.

Back in college, it was his body type and mediocre draft prospects (Youk was an 8th rounder in 2001). A decade ago it was his questionable quickness and lack of power. Seven years ago it was an incumbency in Boston that Youk may or may not have been able to improve upon. Three years ago it was a relatively small pay check and stature that fell short of his productivity. Last year it was “sure I guess I’ll move over to third base.” And for the last couple of months it was a new manager who threw him under the bus early, and it was embarrassment over his health, output and bench role. Put simply, the Red Sox got WAY more out of Youkilis than he got out of them. I think Youkilis knows that, and I think Youkilis feels he deserved better than how things were playing out thus far in 2012.

That brings us to the trade. Basically there are two lines of criticism of the Red Sox that I have seen. One is that they are “selling low” on a player not far removed from superstardom. The other is that they could have accomplished the desired result of shifting Adrian Gonzalez back to first while making Will Middlebrooks the full-time third baseman without dealing Youkilis. He could ride the pine and be a potentially useful bat off the bench.

Both ignore the bigger picture. Youkilis is not a bench player. He’s too proud, he’s worked too hard, and he’s got that chip on his shoulder after all these years of feeling unappreciated. His departure may amount to “addition by subtraction” in that a clubhouse cloud is lifted but there’s something more important going on. This was the chance for Boston to do right by Kevin Youkilis. Thanks to paperwork, the CBA and the peculiarities of timing, Boston always enjoyed leverage over Youkilis. Up until his very last day working for the club, the Red Sox had it in that retaining Youkilis as a bench player had plenty of appeal. But it was time for him to go, plain and simple. He’s a full time player, albeit likely an aging and diminished one, and for once, the Red Sox did something for Kevin Youkilis not necessarily in their own team’s short term interests.

That opens Boston’s front office to criticism but I think it’s good policy to do right by people. In the long term, prospective employees recognize such things. Youkilis had earned a longer leash but declining health, a young star and a manager who seemed not to bother getting to know Youkilis or appreciate his personal history conspired to shorten it. To their great credit, yesterday the Red Sox set Youkilis free altogether.

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