The Futility Infielder

In the words of the Onion's immortal Jim Anchower, "Hola amigos! I know it's been a long time since I last rapped at ya..."

• Late Wednesday night I was thumbing through this week's issue of Sports Illustrated and came across a Tom Verducci piece about the Sammy Sosa situation that grabbed me:

In mid-January, after the Chicago Cubs essentially put their winter business on hold for three months while trying in vain to trade outfielder Sammy Sosa, Cubs president Andy MacPhail and Adam Katz, Sosa's agent, began discussing the damage control needed to bring Sosa back. There was talk of hiring public relations people with expertise in crisis management, a long past overdue meeting between manager Dusty Baker and Sosa, and the possibility of Sosa's addressing his teammates in spring training. It all smacked of trying to glue together a porcelain vase that had smashed into hundreds of pieces. The beauty was gone, and the awkward attempt at restoration would serve only as a mockery.

...Remember this: Sosa is the Cubs' alltime home run leader, is the only man in history to hit 60 homers in a season three times and, for many a day since he became a Cub in 1992, actually surpassed the warm sun and cold beer as the most compelling reason to go to Wrigley Field. You went to see Sosa make that exuberant dash to rightfield in the top of the first and that wing-flapping home run hop at the plate the way you went to see Old Faithful gush at Yellowstone. He satisfied thousands whether or not the Cubs won.

All that seemed forgotten among the dry-eyed Chicagoans who bid Sosa good riddance. As Rick Telander wrote in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times, "Never in my life have I seen an athlete go from being the heart and soul and spirit of a team to an utter pariah -- without point-shaving or outright felonious crime involved -- as swiftly as I have with Sammy."

Verducci's porcelain vase metaphor really hit home. In Sosa's fall -- sadly, largely his own doing via the corked bat and the early exit of last season's final game -- something quite special was broken beyond repair, not just for Cubs fans but for fans all around the game.

I have a few fond Sammy Sosa moments. I recall the great pleasure and satisfaction I felt in visiting Wrigley Field back in 1999, watching Slammin' Sammy and how much joy he brought to the crowd, even though he didn't homer in either of the games I saw. Like Verducci wrote, he really did seem to outrank the sun and the beer.

Back in 2002, I championed Sosa as the cover icon for the 2003 World Almanac for Kids, for which I was the creative director, a choice that met with a high five from one of my clients, a diehard Cubs fan. The end result was a project that was a career highlight, one for the front page of my design portfolio.

While attending the 2002 All-Star Game's Home Run Derby in Milwaukee, I had a great opportunity to marvel at Sosa's blasts:

Then Sosa began one of the most amazing hitting displays I've ever seen. Six straight swings produced epic home runs which rattled off of the Miller Park furniture, two off of Bernie Brewer's yellow slide in high leftfield (where mascots from all around the league--the Phillie Phanatic, the Oriole Bird, Youppi, and the Miller Park Sausage Racers, among others--slid down Bernie's slide after each homer). From our perch in upper right, we had a magnificent view of each blast's arc. The shortest of the six shots was 496 feet, the rest over 500, the longest a Derby record 524 feet. The crowd gasped each time Sosa launched another moon shot and cheered wildly when the distance was announced. By the time he'd used up his final two outs, he had 12 homers and 40-some-thousand jaws hanging open.

...[In the next round] He even hit one literally out of the park, as the ball traveled through the open left-center roof panel and into the parking lot, where a young fan holding a sign that said "hit It Here, Sammy!" retrieved the ball in the rain. With 7 outs (doesn't that sound weird?), Sosa blasted a shot that everybody in the park knew was gone. Without even following the ball's trajectory, Sosa flicked the bat with a dramatic flair, the winner of the round.

Watching Sosa get traded to the Orioles is like watching a married pair of friends divorce; you don't really want to take sides, you don't want to hear about the real dirt that lay beneath the veneer of a relationship you once envied, you just want relief for everybody involved. I feel for my friends who are Cubs fans, and at the same time hope that Sosa finds some measure of redemption in Baltimore.

Jon Weisman has an unique take on the Sosa trade, comparing the chemistry-laden takes of many pundits to the roasting Dodger GM Paul DePodesda received over trading Shawn Green:

When Dodger general manager Paul DePodesta traded Shawn Green (2004 OPS: .811) and $10 million to Arizona for four minor league prospects and release of the remaining $6 million on Green’s contract, not only did most mainstream reporters criticize the move, many questioned DePodesta’s credentials to be general manager, period.

Cubs general manager Jim Hendry this week is trading Sammy Sosa (2004 OPS: .849) and $12 million to Baltimore for infielder Jerry Hairston, Jr., two minor league prospects and release of the remaining $5 million on Sosa’s contract. Realizing that Green wasn’t the outward clubhouse problem in Los Angeles that Sosa had become in Chicago, the contrast in press reaction is strong.

...Chemistry still reigns in the press. Most of the reviews of the Sosa trade have nothing to do with on-field performance, but instead the dugout, the locker room and admittedly, the car driving away from Wrigley Field.

And so, Hendry gets a free ride on this deal. If Sosa knocks out 50 homers in Baltimore, well, today we say Hendry still had to make the trade. Forget about the relative values of the players involved - it’s all about peace and quiet.

• February is arbitration month, the time when players and teams square off for a good old-fashioned grudge match to determine the salaries of a select group of players for the coming season. Every year about this time I chuckle as I remember a line from one of the Bill James Abstracts in which the bearded bard discussed the misconceptions the public holds about arbitration. James' words were to the effect that as fans see it, the player's side tries to convince the arbitrator that player X is Steve Carlton's brother, while the club side tries to frame said player as Joaquin Andujar's niece.

There's little reason to be so in the dark about arbitration in this day and age. Just this week, a fine pair of articles on the topic have surfaced. First up is a piece by Studes at the Hardball Times called All About Arbitration. Studes begins by providing some historical perspective on arbitration's early years, noting that the process became part of the baseball landscape via the 1973 Basic Agreement. The Reserve Clause was still in effect, and free agency was still a twinkle in Marvin Miller's eye, but the owners had unwittingly agreed to allow independent arbitrators to decide which of two salaries, one submitted by the player and the other by the club, would be determined by a hearing. According to Studes, Reggie Jackson won the first case for $135,000 after winning the 1972 AL MVP award.

As one would expect from the proprietor of the Baseball Graphs site, Studes provides a handful of graphs to illustrate arbitration's evolution over the years. Nowdays, only a handful of cases are actually heard each year (seven in each of the past two winters, down from a high of 35 in 1986), with the rest being resolved prior to the panel rendering its verdict. A couple of other nuggets:

a) from 1979 to 1996, the average arbitration award rose from $68,000 to $2.3 million, a compound average growth rate of 23%.

b) teams have won 59% of the cases overall.

I do wish that Studes had given a figure indicating by what percentage the average winner and loser salaries increase, because to me the real point to be made about arbitration is that almost invariably even the players who lose receive hefty raises.

While Studes spends a bit of time discussing the mechanics of arbitration, Tom Gorman gives them a more thorough going-over at Baseball Prospectus (it's a premium piece). His article is set up like a Frequently Asked Questions piece, providing easy answers to vexing queries such as "What the heck is a 'Super Two?'" (that's a player with between two and three years of service time who also accumulated at least 86 days of service in the previous year, and was in the top 17% among all two-year players in service time).

Gorman notes early in the piece that "Final Offer Abritration" as the process is technically called, is designed to produce a settlement, not a verdict: "The arbitrator cannot "split the baby" and settle on a salary in the middle of the spread between the club's figure and the player's. One side leaves the arbitration a winner and the other a loser, heightening risk and encouraging negotiation and settlement."

He devotes a good deal of space to the process of selecting the arbitrators, how the hearing proceeds, and what criteria are in and out of bounds:

The following evidence is admissable:

1. The quality of the player's contribution to his club during the past season (including but not limited to his overall performance, special qualities of leadership and public appeal).
2. The length and consistency of his career contribution.
3. The record of the player's past compensation.
4. Comparative baseball salaries (the arbitration panel is provided with a table of confidential baseball salaries for all players broken down by years of service).
5. The existence of any physical or mental defects on the part of the player.
6. The recent performance of the club, including but not limited to his league standing and attendance.

The following evidence is inadmissible:

1. The financial position of the player and the club (though player representatives often try to get this information in the back door by presenting attendance information that implies the health of a club's revenue streams).
2. Press comments, testimonials or similar material bearing on the performance of either the player or the club, except for recognized annual player awards for playing excellence.
3. Offers made by either the player or the club prior to arbitration.
4. Cost to the parties of their representatives.
5. Salaries in other sports or occupations.

Gorman, who also runs the Giants-themed Fogball blog, has remarked in email correspondences that the Giants are terrified of the arbitration process, noting the team's loss to A.J. Pierzynski last year and their recent handout of a generous two-year, $6.1 million deal to the easily replaceable Pedro Feliz rather than going to the mat with him. Such fear of arbitration appears to be a trend. Dodger GM Paul DePodesta, who confronted Eric Gagne at the tables during his first week on the job last winter, was adamant about reaching a settlement with the begoggled closer before the case began, and he recently signed his star to a two-year, $19 million deal. DePo also reached deals with Cesar Izturis (3/$9.9 million) and Brad Penny (1/$5.1 million), clearing his docket this time around.

Gorman concludes in his piece that while the owners view arbitration as a means of inflating salaries, they find the process much more manageable than full-scale free agency, and because eliminating the process would require adjustments to that whole rigamarole -- concessions that neither side appears willing to make -- it isn't likely to disappear any time soon.

• Finally, I want to thank my readers for their response to last week's rant about the Yankees. Apparently I really touched a nerve; I can't recall many of my blog entries getting linked in so many places. Bronx Banter, Baseball Musings, Baseball Think Factory, Baseball News Blog, and The House that Dewey Built were some of the sites calling attention to it, helping to generate a single-day record for traffic at FI (on a Friday, no less -- typically low ebb for my readership) and still, via a Soxaholix comic strip, giving Red Sox Nation plenty of yuks a few days later.

While I certainly enjoy letting off steam in print, and hardly wish to shun the attention my rants can bring, I'd like to reassure the rubbernecking element among my readers that I am not, in general, an angry person, a violent one or, as Soxaholix tried to put it, "starting to go rabid froth at the mouth." Rest assured that the only chairs and tantrums I throw where baseball is concerned are metaphorical (the caps are another story...). I'm actually rather happy, healthy, and levelheaded, if a bit cynical and not entirely sane. I do have a tendency, especially when frustrated, to be blunt and somewhat caustic with my written words, which combined with the freedom to write any damn thing I want in this space, can amplify my message quite a bit. Kind of like Wile E. Coyote with his dynamite and his ACME contraptions, though this one didn't actually blow up in my face. For which I'm grateful.