MLB going to WAR with players
Lockout surely coming with asinine arbitration, free-agent proposal
Imagine the FOX broadcast with Joe Buck and John Smoltz, who spent so much of the MLB postseason talking about prop bets, watching a shortstop call off a center fielder for a mid-range pop-up and immediately analyzing the UZR rating and how much money the shortstop just made himself in salary arbitration.
A joke, this is not.
After a month-long postseason in which MLB sent a loud message to the country that it would rather spend what must’ve been at least 10% of the game promoting gambling than showcasing the sport itself, the league took another sadistic jump this week when it proposed to the players’ union that free agency shouldn’t start until a player is six months from 30, and that arbitration salaries would be determined entirely based on FanGraphs’ WAR calculation.
It would actually be laugh-out-loud funny if the sport hadn’t already made a habit of taking sharp objects and jamming them into its abdomen.
We’ve annihilated situational baseball by teaching young players that launch angle and spin rate are the fastest ways to the big leagues. Let’s take it one step further and tell the players that baseball instincts are worthless compared to your ability to impress a computer.
Maybe this column is just another old man yelling at a cloud, but the
league deserves a mouthful after this one.
This new payment structure, which should be rejected by the players’ union faster than Rob Manfred could lock in a prop bet on the number of days this looming lockout will last, is undoubtedly a farce. It must be MLB’S way of holding up a big red balloon and saying, ‘LOOK OVER HERE!’ while it crafts an actual strategy behind the scenes.
Because if this is the offer MLB is choosing to take to the players’ union just three weeks before the collective bargaining agreement is set to expire, a lockout is coming.
Why MLB thinks this is a good idea is beyond reason, particularly coming off a year in which it hired Theo Epstein to help make the game more watchable for young audiences. Epstein’s message was simple: let’s
tone back the analyticsdriven game and try to make this a more instinctual and athletic game designed to showcase the incredible talent of the modern player.
The modern player is slimmer, faster and more agile than MLB players have been in a long time, if not ever. Stolen bases are down, but that’s not because of a lack of speed. It’s because the numbers say if you aren’t stealing bases at an 80% clip, a remarkably difficult thing to do, it’s actually hurting a team’s chances of winning.
Defense has never been more valuable. Diving catches and Poppeyestrength throws are not out of the ordinary.
Unfortunately, putting balls in play is an act that’s going extinct. And if MLB thinks paying its players based on WAR will change that, the league is delusion
al.
WAR loves the three true outcomes — walks, strikeouts and home runs — which eliminate all the gray area of what happens when a baseball gets put into play, an act that scrambles the computer’s brain.
WAR doesn’t love pitchers who are masterful at their craft and rely on instincts and intellect over pure stuff. It doesn’t love hitters with Dustin Pedroia’s ability to read a situation and poke the ball in the direction it needs to go to advance a runner 90 feet. It doesn’t love timely sacrifices or knowing when to take a strike or paying attention to baserunners.
The finer details of the game aren’t calculable. And even the big ones are often calculated with bias.
Coaches of young players in high school or college are often obsessed
with getting their hands on a Trackman machine so they can measure their players the same way big league front offices do. It’s attractive for the kids to see how they stack up. It’s also imbecilic to think it’ll help them learn how to play the game situationally, instinctually and with the team’s result in mind.
Players like Pedroia could soon become extinct. Smart catchers who make a living off durability, framing and pitch-calling might lose their jobs.
Look at the Red Sox, for example. Second baseman Jose Iglesias, who was claimed off waivers in September and played 23 games, in which the Sox went 13-10, was worth 0.6 WAR.
Christian Vazquez, who managed a pitching staff that over-performed, ranked third in MLB in innings caught and played 138 games in which the Sox went 78- 60, was worth 0.5 WAR.
If both players were arbitration-eligible and being paid by WAR, Iglesias would go home with a fatter paycheck than Vazquez.
How about Kiké Hernandez? He had a nice season, playing 134 games while hitting .250 with 20 homers and playing great defense in center field. He was worth 4.0 WAR, or more than double that of Alex Verdugo (2.0 WAR) and Hunter Renfroe (1.8 WAR), who each had more hits, total bases and games played than Hernandez.
At least right now, teams and players can negotiate salaries with a panel of arbitrators who can go back and forth on which statistics are more valuable. Teams can use their eyeballs, players can tout their instincts and both sides can argue it out.
Trading in people for computers to decide on player salaries is not the answer.
MLB has to know this, right?