Francona out as Boston Manager

If I'm looking at those numbers and I'm the Red Sox ownership, I'm keeping the scouting and development staff and letting Theo go.

 

WAR? What is it good for? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

 

Good God, y'all.

 

Some old crab said the same thing when that thar newfangled "RBI" stat first came into being.

 

Find one other team that got a poorer return on investment.

They flushed $70M down the toilet and got beat by a team that spends basically a quarter to their dollar.

 

The first team that jumped to mind was the Cubs. For $86.5 million in free agency spending, they got 12.8 WAR:

Name WAR Contract ($M)
Alfonso Soriano 1.3 18
Carlos Zambrano 0.9 17.875
Aramis Ramirez 3.6 14.6
Ryan Dempster 2.5 13.5
Carlos Pena 2.6 10
Marlon Byrd 2 5.5
John Grabow -0.5 4.8
Kerry Wood 0.5 1.5
Ramon Ortiz -0.1 0.75

With the money paid to just make guys go away, I imagine the Mets and Yankees have similar track records. Regardless of team, when you go to free agency, you always get burned, unless you stick solely to players making less than $2 million.

 

This is why I think a team like Toronto is better off developing trade routes than throwing money at free agents. People are going to be talking about "Prince Fielder" and "bad contract" in about five years.

 

Agreed. Fielder seems like an especially poor gamble - players with his body type have a way of cratering in terms of performance, either via increased risk of injury in their 30s or just old age; he's going to want 5 to 7 years; he'll cost you a draft pick; etc.

 

There's an astronomical difference between $82 for 12 and $67 for 2. Plus I think you missed a few on the Cubs. Reed Johnson and Fukudome, off the top of my head.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the article, the point wasn't that you could cherrypick out Boston's worst free agents and make a list like that. It was that those were *all* their free agents (who saw a significant amount of playing time, it looks like they skipped guys who got only a few at-bats or IP).

Free agency is definitely the least efficient way to acquire talent. It's primary use should be for teams who already feel like they are close to being a playoff team, because those are the teams for whom marginal wins are worth the most. But Boston's recent track record under Epstein has been hideous even by FA standards.

 

Epstein has spent more than a billion dollars in his tenure. He should have won the World Series twice.

And the Red Sox ought to be penalized for not making the playoffs, with everything so advantageous to them.

 

RBI isa statistic, capable of being proved with mathematics. WAR is an unprovable theorem, not a statistic.

 

So?