http://www.nysun.com/article/54545?page_no=1
The New York Sun
The Shrewd Craft of Building Depth
By WILL CARROLL
May 16, 2007
They play a game in the Boston Red Sox front office each off-season. A giant
magnetic whiteboard is arranged with hundreds of small tiles. Each tile has
the name of a player on it, and each tile's slot on the board gives that
player's position and his location in the organization — Boston, Pawtucket,
or Fort Myers. It is more than a depth chart, it is a list of assets as real
as the balance sheet or the Green Monster outside.
In this game, one of the team's operations staff turns away from the board
for a moment, and another surreptitiously takes a tile or two off the board.
The first staffer then turns around and adjusts the chart to fill in for
missing tiles. If Manny Ramirez pulls a hamstring, they've played the game
enough times to know that Wily Mo Pena takes over in left, that Kevin
Youkilis gets slotted in as the emergency left fielder, and that prospect
David Murphy is only a phone call away and posting an OBP over .400 down on
the farm. If it's Curt Schilling bleeding from the ankle, the Red Sox quickly
shift Devern Hansack up from Pawtucket, or later in the season, they know
they will have Jon Lester available.
I was told this story of the whiteboard at the 2005 Winter Meetings by a Red
Sox staffer with a sly grin. I'm still not sure if they actually play this
game, but every team has its version of the whiteboard, and every team at
least considers what happens when — not if — injuries hit. The reason that
it's believable with Boston is that they never seem to be caught unprepared.
At any position on the diamond, in the rotation or the bullpen, the Sox have
not just one option, but a range of possibilities that cascade out —
shifting a player here, another player there, or start the web of phone
calls from the front office to other teams when a trade is needed.
In contrast, Brian Cashman and the Yankees have a whiteboard or something
similar somewhere in their offices, but when Cashman looks at it, he must
only see more problems. The fish-eyed stare that he often gives to a
particularly obtuse question must return to his face when he looks at his
organization's depth chart. When they had an injury in the outfield, an
organizational filler like Kevin Thompson was their best option. Before
turning to Phil Hughes, the Yankees turned to a Double-A starter and then a
lesser prospect first; $200 million buys many things, but it doesn't always
buy you depth. In fact, money doesn't even seem relevant to the process.
Instead, it's a matter both of planning and understanding a couple of simple
concepts that seem to get most teams into this bind. While the Yankees have
been stocking up on superstar-level talent, they've struggled to fill out a
roster — no one wants to be stuck behind a superstar. The ragtag bunch of
players that are known as journeymen or "Quad A" players usually don't come
to the Yankees as minor league free agents, both because the team has
neglected their value and because when you've got Derek Jeter, how much hope
can a guy like Andy Cannizaro have when he's 28 and still stuck in Triple-A?
Minor league veterans tend to notice that sort of thing.
These so-called replacementlevel players are freely available and wind up a
resource that gets overlooked by an organization like the Yankees. A recent
spate of injuries to the starting outfielders in Oakland didn't force A's
General Manager Billy Beane to make repeated calls to his affiliate in
Sacramento. Instead, he looked for help on other people's rosters, like San
Diego and Atlanta, combing for the unwanted toys they might have lying
around. The Braves had no idea that Ryan Langerhans would only have a short
stay in Oakland, being flipped quickly for a fragile slugger ( Chris
Snelling) from a NL East division rival, Washington.
More tellingly, the Padres — a team with six former general managers on
staff — had no idea that Jack Cust would go from Triple-A journeyman to MLB
Player of the Week after they sold him to Oakland. Cust's home run binge is
unsustainable, but his value has already well exceeded his cost. In today's
game, studies done by Baseball Prospectus have shown that a win is worth
about no less than $800,000 and can be worth up to almost $5 million to an
individual team. Last year, teams paid on average just more than two million
dollars for the equivalent of one win from a player. Using the sabermetric
law that 10 runs equals a win, with his six homers in seven games Cust has
already provided almost a win's worth of runs, and Cust isn't making much
more than the minimum of $380,000. That's an arbitrage spread any trader
would be happy to use as pocket lining.
Like any number of minor leaguers that don't make prospect lists, the Jack
Custs of the world are available at a relatively insignificant price. Any
team could have made the same trade for someone like Cust, and even had he
not had his prolific power streak, playing up to his value would be easy. The
same could be said for phenom Josh Hamilton, coming back from personal
travails and now outperforming the much higher-paid players in the Reds'
outfield, Adam Dunn and Ken Griffey Jr. The game has reached a point where
its inability to maximize available resources and fanatical avoidance of risk
is in and of itself a risky drain of resources. Creative solutions like Cust
or Hamilton are easier, cheaper, and less risky because of the low cost it
takes to add them, an expense the team can absorb a lot more easily than a
big-money bust from the free agent market.
Around the league, roster problems abound and cost their teams wins. The
Twins go eight deep in major league-caliber starting pitchers but wind up
using a hitter like Jason Tyner at DH despite his oh-fer-career homerless
streak. The Cubs can't find a slot for their prodigy center fielder, Felix
Pie, but also can't find serviceable middle relief help. The White Sox have
four hurlers that could close for many teams but are left using someone like
Darin Erstad in the outfield, providing terrible production. Even the Mets, a
team who has both one of the smartest collections of talent in the front
office and the checkbook to buy almost anything, are still struggling to find
a couple guys for the back end of their rotation. You don't have to break the
bank to find options, as long as you invest the time up front to accumulate
them.
There's certainly more than one way to fill a roster. Whether it is the
whiteboard theory in Boston or exploiting the free talent pool like Oakland,
the best way to win is to have a plan.
Mr. Carroll is a writer for Baseball Prospectus. For more
state-of-the-art commentary, visit baseballprospectus.com.
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