The Futility Infielder

Tim Marchman was one of the many smart people I met at the Winter Meetings in New Orleans and spent hours with hanging out and talking baseball. For those unfamiliar, Marchman writes about baseball in a weekly column for the New York Sun, which is subscription-based in the online realm. He's one of the sharpest knives in the drawer when it comes to discussing off-the-field topics such as game's labor situation and economics, and can talk your ear off about Marvin Miller. If you don't mind a few days' delay, his writing is now available for free at a politics-and-culture site called The New Partisan. Add this man to your roster of frequent reads.

In the wake of the Alex Rodriguez trade, Marchman's February 17th piece for the Sun calls for another baseball team in the New York market, a common plea from Brooklynites who still feel the nearly half-century-old sting of abandonment. But his motive is based on economics, not nostalgia. Examining the three two-team markets in major-league baseball, he shows how far ahead New York is of Chicago and Los Angeles based on a combination of population, fan interest, and income:

According to the most recent census, the New York metropolitan area is 21,199,865 strong. The figure for Los Angeles is 16,373,645; for Chicago, 9,157,540.

According to a survey performed by Scarborough Research for MLB, 21% of New Yorkers who describe themselves as "very interested" in major-league baseball, as compared with 15% of Los Angelinos and 13% of Chicagoans. According to the most recent figures I was able to find (they're from 1999), per capita income in the New York metropolitan area is $38,539. The figure is $28,050 for Los Angeles and $33,857 for Chicago.

With these numbers it's easy to make a very crude estimate of the potential dollars each team has access to: Figure the number of avid fans in each city, and multiply it by per-capita income... [T]he total income of avid baseball fans in Chicago is around $40 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in Los Angeles is around $69 billion. The total income of avid baseball fans in New York is around $172 billion. This means, then, that the Yankees and Mets inhabit a fiscal universe where they are, theoretically, drawing from a resource pool of around $85 billion apiece -- more than four times that available to the two teams in the massive city of Chicago.

Adding a third team to the New York market would reduce the resource pool to $57 billion per team, still an advantage over the other two big cities and hell-and-gone ahead of the rest of MLB, of course. Obvious remedies such as moving the Expos to Brooklyn -- "nothing more than a recognition that there is significantly more demand than supply for baseball in New York, and a correction of that situation," says Marchman -- would be beyond the power of the Yankees and Mets to prevent if the other 28 teams wanted to make that hapen, since the Big Apple teams could only file an anti-trust suit. As we have been constantly reminded every time baseball's labor situation is addressed, MLB enjoys an archaic anti-trust exemption.

Summing it up, Marchman harshly criticizes the non-Yankee teams for their approach when it comes to the luxury tax: "I think that by expressly jury-rigging the most recent collective bargaining agreement against the Yankees, Major League Baseball and the other 29 clubs have lost all moral right to complain about Yankee spending." That sentiment was echoed the other day by none other than the Big Boss Man himself when Red Sox owner John Henry put one in his wheelhouse.

A former limited partner of George Steinbrenner's (which brings to mind one of the all-time great quotes), Henry was allowed to hold his 1% share of the Yankees even as he owned the Florida Marlins, and turned a handsome profit in the millions for finally selling them when he bought the Sox. After the Rodriguez-to-NY deal closed, Henry conveniently saw the light and proclaimed that the Yankees needed to be dealt with. According to the A.P. report, "Henry, whose team failed to obtain Rodriguez from Texas in December, said in an e-mail response to reporters Wednesday that he is changing his mind on whether the sport needs a salary cap 'to deal with a team that has gone so insanely far beyond the resources of all the other teams.'" Apparently, taking on A-Rod's contract is all a matter of whose ox is being gored, and if he couldn't justify the finances of it, nobody else should be able to either.

Predictably, the so-called Evil Emperor struck back as only he could:

We understand that John Henry must be embarrassed, frustrated and disappointed by his failure in this transaction," Steinbrenner said. "Unlike the Yankees, he chose not to go the extra distance for his fans in Boston. It is understandable, but wrong that he would try to deflect the accountability for his mistakes on to others and to a system for which he voted in favor. It is time to get on with life and forget the sour grapes."

Bud Selig put the zipper on both owners for further comment before Henry could offer up another sour glass of whine. But for those of us watching the fray, it's just another round of a good, old-fashioned grudge match scored to the Yankees. Bambino's Curse blogger Edward Cossette referred to the exchange as an "NYC Smackdown" and called Steinbrenner's response "one of the best retorts I've heard in a long time." He also pointed to David Pinto's tart assessment: "Oh boo-hoo. Cowboy up the money, John. Or stop whining and use your sabermetic brilliance to beat this team with a cheaper payroll." Pinto's readers see Henry's response as just part of the payback he owes Budzilla for the Boston bag job. My man Alex Belth calls Henry's words "Bringing A Knife to a Gun Fight" and runs down the writers' reactions in two cities. Fun stuff.

Back to Marchman, who's surely clipped this exchange for his files as he works on a book about Selig. In addition to his own writing, he's also an editor at Ivan R. Dee Publisher, a name I'll be dropping here in the future because they're publishing books by both Will Carroll and Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus. I've been granted the honor of previewing and commenting on Will's manuscript for Saving the Pitcher, a task I look forward to undertaking. I'm even in the book -- Will liked my piece on my torn labrum so much that he asked permission to use it, and reported that Dr. Jim Andrews, perhaps the top name sports medicine, really enjoyed my contribution. Wow.

Speaking of the shoulder, yesterday was the three-month mark since surgery, and my physical therapist opined that my shoulder mechanics were "at 95%" and now it's more a matter of slowly building strength. The corner's been turned, so tell Brian Cashman I may be able to get some innings in Columbus by mid-summer in time for the stretch run.

* * *

Speaking of Nate Silver, whose PECOTA system is the foundation of BP's performance predictions, I emailed him Wednesday to ask if, in the wake of the news that Alfonso Soriano lied about his age, he'd had a chance to re-run Sori's numbers. Sori aged from 26 to 28, and since the statistical peak age of a ballplayer is 27, that has a great effect effect on the long-term outlook of this trade; he'll be 30 when it's time to sign his big contract instead of 28, so whoever signs him will likely overpay for the downside of his career. But short-term, according to Nate (who hadn't rerun the prediction yet), it won't make much difference. The 26-28 years are the flat part of the age curve, and there's considerably less variation in the prediction than if he jumped from 22 to 24 or from 33 to 35.

Sori's original weighted mean forecast called for a normalized .295/.349/.533 line, which isn't too shabby (for purposes of comparison, A-Rod's forecast is .299/.398/.604), but now the question becomes whether he's too old to show such improvement in his plate discipline. Optimists point to free swinger Sammy Sosa's latter-day improvement which has coupled with his amazing power run, but he's the exception, not the rule.

One more angle on Soriano-for-Rodriguez worth mentioning is that the two players' stats were dramatically influenced by their home parks. Arlington is a favorable environment for hitters, while Yankee Stadium plays as a pitchers' park, especially for a righty such as Sori. Here's their home-and-away splits over the last three years, conveniently the tenure of both Soriano's stay in the Bronx and Rodriguez's stint in the Lone Star State:

Soriano

.268/.305/.466 with 40 HR at home

.305/.346/.543 with 55 HR on the road



Rodriguez

.333/.416/.666 with 86 HR at home

.278/.375/.564 with 70 HR on the road

Hold the phone, Mabel. Sori's three-year road OPS (.889) is really not that far off from A-Rod's (.939). Rodriguez is still the superior player, of course, but if you can stand next to him and not look ridiculous, that's saying something. For all of the bluster around this deal, what remains to be seen is whether the ratio of the expensive A-Rod's marginal value to marginal contract dollars (box office dollars is another story) is significantly better than that of Soriano, who will likely be making less than half the dinero of A-Rod come his next contract. Years from now, that will be a fascinating analysis to undertake.