Category Archives: Baseball

Maybe it’s time to stop talking about the Johan Santana trade like it was a total steal

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Look: Johan Santana is an awesome pitcher. I love watching Johan Santana pitch. I have thoroughly enjoyed all 600 innings — even the bad ones — he has thrown in a Mets uniform.

But every time someone pens a lamentation for the Omar Minaya Era, it is qualified with an aside about Minaya’s obtaining Santana for “pennies on the dollar,” or something to that effect. (Jonah Keri’s otherwise strong writeup of the Mets’ ownership situation at Fangraphs is only the most recent example.) And I can’t see how that’s really the case.

The four young players the Mets traded for Johan Santana have not amounted to much, and may never.

But the Mets didn’t exactly trade four young players for Santana; the Mets traded four young players for the exclusive right to sign Santana to a market-rate contract. Santana was the best pitcher in the game when he was acquired, so that contract cost the Mets a lot of money.

To date, they’ve paid him $60 million. Fangraphs estimates he has been worth a little over $47 million in that time, but whatever. You pay a premium for top talent. Let’s say he has been worth it for these first three years.

On Opening Day of 2011, Santana will be 32 years old and on the disabled list recovering from shoulder surgery. And the Mets will owe him $77.5 million over the next three seasons. $77.5 million, with no guarantee he’ll ever be anything like the pitcher that dominated the National League in 2008. Will the exclusive right to give him that contract back in 2008 still seem so valuable by 2012? 2013?

And you can say: Oh but how could anyone have predicted an arm injury? Pretty easily, actually: He’s a pitcher. Pitchers get hurt, like, constantly. That’s why massive deals for free-agent pitchers tend to be bad ideas.

So while Santana has given the Mets more than the combined value of the four players they traded to the Twins, he is at this point unlikely to provide them anything like a full return on the resources they’ve invested in him. The deal seemed necessary at the time, with the Mets desperate for starting pitching and coming off the 2007 collapse, so this is not to say Minaya shouldn’t have executed it in the first place. But it’s probably time to stop talking about it like it was a total steal, since Santana’s contract seems likely to prove an albatross moving forward.

The pros and cons of prospective part-owners

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A number of candidates have emerged as potential suitors for the 20-to-25-percent share of the Mets the Wilpons are supposedly selling. Should Mets fans be rooting for any in particular to buy a piece of the team? Let’s investigate:

Vodka maven Martin Silver: As part-owner, Silver could be an entertaining side show in boring seasons. He has a thing for publicity stunts, which could perhaps forebode some Veeck-esque promotions at Citi Field. Another upside: He has access to an absolute ton of vodka. Plus he’s a lifelong Mets fan.

On the other hand, Silver wants a say in the day-to-day operations of the team and has previously said he would offer up decisions to Internet voting, which means we would say goodbye to all the best players on the Mets while a Joe Benigno-led junta cheered their departure because they were soft or unclutch or bad in the clubhouse. Also, Silver plastered pictures of his own daughter’s ass on Georgi ads all over city buses. That’s weird.

Vitaminwater founder Mike Repole: Repole obviously knows a thing or two about business, as he and his partners sold Vitaminwater to Coca-Cola for over $4 billion. And he loves the Mets and hates the Yankees.

But Repole has said that one of his goals in life is to be the GM of the Mets, and the Mets already have a GM that appears plenty competent. Also, another of his goals is “to win the Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown,” and that’s redundant. Plus, he made a fortune convincing people that sugary fruit drinks are good for them. That’s shrewd by business standards but perhaps not so tempting to the Wilpons if they’re looking to avoid future dealings with those prone to chicanery.

Martin Luther King III: The upside is that King is above reproach, mostly because you’re not allowed to say anything bad about someone named “Martin Luther King.” I think that might be in the constitution. I can’t tell you the downside.

Some more about this

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I don’t want to seem like I’m willfully ignoring this story, so here’s a link to a Times article about the Wilpons’ prior investments with fraudulent businesses.

I was on the conference call on Friday and it bored me near to tears. I hardly know what most of this stuff means, but it does seem like the particular case is perhaps a bit too nuanced for most of those covering and reacting to it to grasp (I don’t mean the Times piece, I mean columns like this one).

And I fear that trying my best to clear things up will either a) make it seem like I’m defending the Wilpons on account of my paycheck, which I’m not interested in doing or b) expose my ignorance of nearly everything pertaining to business and investments.

Prospective Mets owner proposes worst idea ever

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A lifelong Mets fan and season ticket holder, Mr. Silver organized a team of investors in 2009 after the team gave poor performances both on the field and financially.  He offered a multimillion dollar pledge and changes such as a computer-based system of voting for Mets fans, which would have been the first time in history that a baseball team would be ruled by popular opinion the internet.  Georgi Vodka is number one selling vodka in New York State, and Star Industries sells over a hundred different brands of liquor.

– Press release

I can’t tell which parts of this press release are tongue-in-cheek and which are serious, but basically this guy — Martin Silver, the owner of Georgi Vodka — announced his plans to make an offer to buy the Mets. He’s holding a press conference tomorrow at Jack Demsey’s bar in Midtown at 11:30 a.m.

I guess the upside to making roster decisions based on Internet voting would be that my job would suddenly seem much more important. The downside is the way that would inevitably shake out. And I mean no offense to anyone — I’m not saying I’d vote for the right decisions either.

Wilpons exploring adding a partner

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I caused a minor Twitter meltdown this morning by teasing this news, which I probably shouldn’t have done. Anyway, no idea if or how this affects the team on the field, since the Wilpons will retain majority control. The press release says it’s being done “to address the air of uncertainty created by” the lawsuit against them by the trustee in the Madoff bankruptcy. 

Twitter Q&A-style product

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Yesterday, when stuck for topics for this blog, I asked Twitter for help with suggestions and questions. Here are two:

If you haven’t heard, Gil Meche retired rather than continue to collect way too much money from the Royals to be a subpar or injured pitcher in 2011. Though he was owed $12 million, Meche said he didn’t feel right accepting money he wasn’t going to earn, even if the Royals understood the risk when they signed him to a big contract before the 2007 season.

What Meche did sounds noble, for sure, and it is such a distant outlier in the realm of regular human behavior that it has prompted a lot of hullabaloo the last couple of weeks. Mets fans, for one, are wishing that Ollie Perez opts to do the same.

But though that would be nice, neither Perez nor Meche should have any obligation to return money to the team that signed them. I never agree when fans fault players for the size of their contracts — the player should want as much money as he can possibly make, it’s the GM’s fault if it proves to be way too much.

Meche suggested he simply didn’t feel right taking money he didn’t deserve, and I appreciate that sentiment. But did he retire with the understanding that the Royals would re-invest his salary in the team? Because giving money back to an enormously wealthy person — Royals’ owner David Glass — seems a bit weird too.

I won’t into too much boring detail, but SNY is part-owned by Comcast and technically I am a Comcast employee. When news of the NBC/Comcast deal first came down over a year ago, I got a package at my house with a letter essentially saying, basically, everything’s cool, nothing’s changing for you and we should all be excited.

Something along those lines. I didn’t really read it all that closely; I was distracted because with the letter came — as special gift celebrating the deal or something — DVDs of Kindergarten Cop and The Bourne Ultimatum.

I figured they must have just sent an army of interns down to some DVD liquidation warehouse somewhere in the bowels of NBC and had them all shove two random movies into every package. And so I thought it was pretty funny that I happened to get Kindergarten Cop and The Bourne Ultimatum, since the former is absolutely hilarious in every way and the latter is a sequel and thus a funny thing to randomly send to someone.

Then  I came into work the next day and asked some of my co-workers what movies they got, and they all had Kindergarten Cop and The Bourne Ultimatum too. Why those two movies? You figure it had to be an overstock thing, right? But then does that mean they so overstocked those two movies that they had enough to send them to every Comcast employee? How many copies of Kindergarten Cop could they have possibly produced?