Nelson Cruz Saga Illuminates Shrewdness of Falvine

That’s a very optimistic take. Could it be that other clubs weren’t that interested?

The clubs that refused to bite on a $100 million dollar deal for Donaldson look like the tactical ones at the moment. He’s taking up the largest proportion of our payroll. He’s played in 28 games, was just OK at the plate, and wasn’t on the playoff roster. It’s really difficult for me to call that a resounding tactical victory at the moment. If he can’t stay healthy, it’s very debilitating roster wise. That’s a big risk, and probably not much more shrewd than playing more to get someone you can count on to anchor the lineup for a full season.

That’s where I get nervous about Cruz having a down year. There’s a reason why front offices around the league with unlimited analytical resources weren’t interested. If any contenders out there thought he was going to give them 130+ games of a .950 OPS on a one year deal, I don’t think he’d be here.

It’s extremely risky to have your team built around a 42 year old that can’t play defense and a guy with chronic calf injuries. Could work out well, but it’s more gambling than tactical. Which, at the end of the day, is better than doing nothing I guess.

Darius, I think the article was about negotiating strategies. Not bidding against themselves to get their player. The article was not about whether that player had risks or was a risk to sign as all players are risks.

I just think they should crown Falvey and Levine as the best baseball executives EVER in the history of Major League Baseball ...yep its true.

Well, they are doing a fairly decent job at this time. The time to reflect on the efficacy of their work is after the teams the front offices put together make a sustained run at competing for the league championships. The Twins have had a few runs: the 1960s, the late '80s/early '90s, and the first decade of the current century. Time will tell if the current team and those to follow come close to those competitive runs. I sure hope so and I am always hopeful for the Twins. The current front office has a ways to go before their reputations match their predecessors in the eyes of national judgment but currently their story is an open book.  Like i said, I am very hopeful of a sustained run. The Dodgers are on a run right now.

I agree with the article regarding the F.O.s patience and savvy.   

They knew that:

1) From all reports Cruz likes playing in MN (with the current players and for the current coaching staff and the team is competitive) and the prospect of him not wanting to adjust to a new team/city played in their favor.

2) The odds were low that the Universal DH has going to happen, so Cruz' options were going to be limited.

3) Cruz had already made over $110M in his career, so money would like not be the biggest factor in his next contract.

All of this (plus likely other factors) helped to contribute to how the negations went/ended up.

Cruz did the right thing by waiting to see if the NL got the DH.  He was right to try and get the Twins to give him two years as he just gave them two years of outstanding production.  If I was in charge of the FO i probably would have bent for the two years.

The FO came out OK on this one only because they had a solid plan B.  Although I think that plan might have back fired if they lost Cruz but I guess we will find out this year when we see if Cruz continues to Cruz or regress.  It is the best outcome the FO could have gotten IMO and if Cruz does well this year I think this works out well for him as well as there will be big bidders for his services once the NL has the DH likely next year.

So Kudos to both sides I think in the end they both will get what they wanted.

That’s a very optimistic take. Could it be that other clubs weren’t that interested?

The clubs that refused to bite on a $100 million dollar deal for Donaldson look like the tactical ones at the moment. He’s taking up the largest proportion of our payroll. He’s played in 28 games, was just OK at the plate, and wasn’t on the playoff roster. It’s really difficult for me to call that a resounding tactical victory at the moment. If he can’t stay healthy, it’s very debilitating roster wise. That’s a big risk, and probably not much more shrewd than playing more to get someone you can count on to anchor the lineup for a full season.
 

I would like to point out, that 28 games was half the season.  I am not saying Donaldson would have played a full half, he may have played more, may have played less.  But to just say he played 28 games, in a 60 game super short season, is a little misleading.  I could use same data and say he only missed 32 games last year.  Which is also true, but leaves out the fact it was half the season.  

"The Cruz saga was the culmination of the Falvine era" Well If this statement is true we are in trouble.

With few exceptions, free agent contracts are like this. It's called the Winner's Curse; if you bid high enough to win, you've outbid everyone else's analytics models.

 

This is a good point, and I think it's probably true in general, but with free agents there are are additional factors that lead to those exceptions. There may be teams that make a bid or want to make a bid but aren't considered because the player doesn't want to play there. Teams adjust their analytics based on need, so multiple teams may have essentially the same assessment of a player but one team may make a higher bid than another. And there may be intangibles that affect a bid, such as a player wanting to play for a hometown team or for a particular manager.

...But in exchange for this risk at DH, consider that the Twins led the AL in 2020 by a large margin at the DH slot in the lineup.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/team_compare.cgi?request=1&year=2020&lg=AL&stat=OPS

Incredibly, the league as a whole obtained only an OPS of .719 from their DHs. The Twins had a .200+ OPS advantage at that spot in the lineup, most games. It would be an interesting study, which I won't undertake right now, to understand why teams did so poorly in a role they collectively have the most control over. Anyway, what's a natural way to try to replicate that unfair advantage? Maybe ask the same guy to try it again. And even if he slides a bit, it would be down to league average, where we no longer have an advantage but merely are competitive, and hope some of the other 8 batters step up. If he fails completely? See the contingency planning above.

 

As a wise man named Lieutenant Frank Drebin once said, you take a risk getting up in the morning, crossing the street, or sticking your face in a fan. Signing Cruz is a $13M risk I happen to like, even as I recognize that Cruz could finally turn into a pumpkin and we end up turning to alternatives.

Ash, we've been in agreement on the Cruz signing. But it's still a topsy-turvy world, and maybe the (logic) of two people don't amount to a hill of beans. But this is our hill. And these are our beans!

It's small sample size with just 60 games, but here's what I found in a look-thru of the league's OPS at DH. (In case you didn't catch it, you can hover over a team and see the OPS and the number of PAs by each person who played the position.)

Minn (Cruz, .997), KC (Soler, .809), Cle (Reyes, .800), Det (Miggy, .743), Bos (J.D. Martinez, .709), LAA (Ohtani .657), and Chicago (Encarnacion, .631) all had one person who got at least half the team's PAs. Without knowing how injuries played out for teams, it appears that those were the teams that used the "primary DH" approach. It's just that Cruz was so much better than them. Three of the others were above the league average and three were worse. 

Whether by design or the result of injuries, the other eight teams were using the "rotate guys through the spot" approach. The issue is that to do that, you have to have enough good hitters to make it work.

No team did, apparently. The most regular DH for NYY (Stanton), Balt (Nunez) and Tor (Vlad) all were at least .867, but none had more than 94 PAs, so that left about 150-160 PAs to be spread out over other guys. Each of those teams scattered those PAs over at least nine guys. When you do that, you're almost certainly going to have some guys that were lousy, and they each did. (FWIW, the Twins had seven guys besides Cruz who got DH PAs, but they only totaled 38 PAs. Three had just one and two more had four apiece.) 

The five remaining teams not only spread out their PAs out, they did it among lousy hitters. The OPS of the most common DH for those teams was .717, .704, .654, .485 and .455.

You noted that on average the Twins more than a .200 advantage at that spot. Also worth is noting is that even if Cruz drops .100, the Twins would still have had the best DHs in the league by .033 over the second-best team and at least .081 over every other team. 

So to your original point, if you can spend $13M and have a reasonable likelihood of creating that kind of significant advantage at any spot in the batting order, do it.

That’s a very optimistic take. Could it be that other clubs weren’t that interested?

The clubs that refused to bite on a $100 million dollar deal for Donaldson look like the tactical ones at the moment. He’s taking up the largest proportion of our payroll. He’s played in 28 games, was just OK at the plate, and wasn’t on the playoff roster. It’s really difficult for me to call that a resounding tactical victory at the moment. If he can’t stay healthy, it’s very debilitating roster wise. That’s a big risk, and probably not much more shrewd than playing more to get someone you can count on to anchor the lineup for a full season.

That’s where I get nervous about Cruz having a down year. There’s a reason why front offices around the league with unlimited analytical resources weren’t interested. If any contenders out there thought he was going to give them 130+ games of a .950 OPS on a one year deal, I don’t think he’d be here.

It’s extremely risky to have your team built around a 42 year old that can’t play defense and a guy with chronic calf injuries. Could work out well, but it’s more gambling than tactical. Which, at the end of the day, is better than doing nothing I guess.

That’s a very optimistic take. Could it be that other clubs weren’t that interested?

The clubs that refused to bite on a $100 million dollar deal for Donaldson look like the tactical ones at the moment. He’s taking up the largest proportion of our payroll. He’s played in 28 games, was just OK at the plate, and wasn’t on the playoff roster. It’s really difficult for me to call that a resounding tactical victory at the moment. If he can’t stay healthy, it’s very debilitating roster wise. That’s a big risk, and probably not much more shrewd than playing more to get someone you can count on to anchor the lineup for a full season.

That’s where I get nervous about Cruz having a down year. There’s a reason why front offices around the league with unlimited analytical resources weren’t interested. If any contenders out there thought he was going to give them 130+ games of a .950 OPS on a one year deal, I don’t think he’d be here.

It’s extremely risky to have your team built around a 42 year old that can’t play defense and a guy with chronic calf injuries. Could work out well, but it’s more gambling than tactical. Which, at the end of the day, is better than doing nothing I guess.

Hindsight is 20/20.  There wasn't a fan in this state who disagreed with the Donaldson move a year ago, yourself included.

That’s a very optimistic take. Could it be that other clubs weren’t that interested?

 

This was a major point of leverage for the front office. The point of the article seems to be that they had good awareness of the situation and used that awareness to negotiate a pretty team friendly contract.