The Simmons Site

Also, side note: Probably best not to write the article using the Dallas Mavericks as your example. Cuban (allegedly) sinks a ton of money into statistics, and presumably has way more advanced shit than what some guys at ESPN thought up about a decade ago.

 

Using Rowland might be a bad example as well, becuase he is a member of the World Champion Giants.

No matter how "bad" the contract might look, and the same with Zito, they are the World Champions. And who is to say that they would still be World Champions without those guys?

 

Eh, I'm fine with him using them, because they both suck. The only way you can use them as positives is if you believe given them big contracts signified that the Giants were "serious" about winning, and thus it allowed them to sign Aubrey Huff, Tejada and others. (In actuality, the Giants have a fetish with any position player over 30 and will pay them more than other teams, and have no positional players in their system past Belt.)

 

I thought Cuban said he hired Carlisle in part because some formula showed players were quantifiably better under him.

 

Very easily, Zito wasn't even on the playoff roster. I think it is very easy to say they would have won without them, can you give me any reason why you think they wouldn't have?

 

Cuban also hired a guy from 82games.com who regularly meet with Carlisle.

 

It's not really how bad the contracts "look," it's how bad the were.

I get the whole idea that every players contributes, but when two players account for just under 1/3 of the payroll, you should be able to find something better to say than, "They were part of a title team." One guy was a crappy hitter who fell out of the starting lineup and had 11 postseason plate appearances. The other was a once-good pitcher who spit up all over himself during the stretch run and got left off the postseason roster all together. Perhaps the team would not have won without them, but when those two earn WELL more than the two best players on the team, they have BAD contracts.

And Deadspin summed up that silly Grantland article rather nicely: "There are enough straw men in the piece to field two whole straw basketball teams, have them play each other, and then measure their plus-minus to evaluate the relative strength of each straw man."

 

Props to Chuck Klosterman for mentioning DBT's Patterson Hood and referencing the band's "Let There Be Rock" in the intro to his Zeppelin piece. Not props for being Chuck Klosterman.

 

Zito has handled all of this very well. He didn't pull a Carl Pavano act and quit.

A lot of bad thinking went into that contract. All he did was sign it.

 

Nobody can blame him for signing that contract, who wouldn't have. He handled this better than most.

 

Beyond what Mr. Beauregard wrote, Zito did pitch pretty well for the first half. For a team that made the playoffs by a single game, you could argue a lot of deviations could have shifted that. Either way, it's not the point.

Mr. Zito and Rowand were not central players, but only played roles on the margins. They were compensated not just like central players, but like pretty good central players. Therefore, pretty bad contracts.

 

As a big baseball fan and a saber-skeptic, but one who has tried to educate myself at least on a few of its basic principles, I thought this was reasonable in response.

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/beating-up-the-sabermetric-strawman/