Winning the Offseason Doesn’t Always Translate to Winning During the Regular Season

If you want to bring fans to the ballpark and increase a teams revenue stream it’s really quite simple: make a huge splash in the free agent market or swing a blockbuster trade that lands a marquee player while simultaneously depleting your farm system. The assumption there is that the signing of a top player will lead to more excitement amongst the fans that put butts in seats and those butts stay in the seats because higher priced players get you more wins on the field. Not so fast. I don’t disagree that signing marquee free agents leads to higher ticket sales but if the past few years are any indication winning the offseason rarely leads to winning the division. 

A look around the MLB only reinforces this idea that winning the offseason doesn’t give you a rite of passage to wins on the field. The top teams across Major League Baseball as it stands right now are the Baltimore Orioles, Tampa Bay Rays, Texas Rangers, Atlanta Braves, Washington Nationals, St. Louis Cardinals, and LA Dodgers. Out of those 7 teams how many of them were listed amongst this past offseason’s ‘winners’? The answer there is possibly one in the Washington Nationals. Rather, namely, the Orioles, Rangers, Cardinals, and Dodgers were all generally listed as ‘offseason losers’ for either spending too much on an unknown commodity (Texas with Japanese import Yu Darvish), not spending any money (Dodgers who were hamstrung by their ownership situation that’s finally been resolved), or allowing their top player to walk away (Cardinals watching superstar Albert Pujols ride out of town).

The 2011-2012 MLB offseason winners? The Detroit Tigers with their signing of Prince Fielder, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim with their coup of Albert Pujols and CJ Wilson, the Miami Marlins who snagged Jose Reyes and Mark Buehrle, and the Cincinnati Reds who dealt for young stud Mat Latos and stole Ryan Madson when no one else wanted to offer a closer 4 yrs/$50 mil a la Jonathan Papelbon (for the record Madson blew out his elbow before ever throwing a pitch in a Reds uniform, not much you can do there). Month and a half into the season and only the Marlins and Reds has their heads above water, the Marlins at 18-16 and the Reds at 17-16. The Tigers and Angels who were supposed to be vying for the AL supremacy currently check in at 17-17 and 15-20, respectively. Now I’m not saying that those two teams won’t be duking it out for a ticket to the World Series in October but as of right now neither team is living up to expectations.

So what’s the difference between the teams who won the offseason and those who lost it? The teams who didn’t do much in the offseason were able to retool and get off to a good start through organizational depth and solid starting pitching. Nothing leads a team from worst to first like good pitching and that’s exactly what the Orioles, Rays, and Dodgers have done. Instead of lunging after a marquee free agent that they knew wouldn’t solve all their problems in one fell swoop they focused their resources on other areas like scouting, development, and digging diamonds out of the rough. They made the wise choice of not allocating all their resources into only a few players leaving other spots on the roster weak. The Cardinals are the poster child for having been called offseason losers after winning the World Series and letting their megastar Albert Pujols leave for the greener pastures of 10 yrs/$254 mil in LA. To replace Pujols’ offense the Cardinals went signed recently oft injured OF Carlos Beltran and looked towards David Freese to continue his hot streak that began last postseason and World Series. This far into the season the Cardinals decision has been a wise one with Pujols checking in at  .196 BA/1 HR/12 RBI/.234 OBP while Beltran is leading the NL in HRs at 13 and Freese is hitting .288 with 7 HRs and 26 RBIs. Advantage: Cardinals.

What do all the offseason winners have in common? They signed a marquee free agent that forced them to shift established players out of their comfort zones and into new environments and not everyone is adjusting well. In Anaheim CJ Wilson is doing a stellar job helping to head a starting rotation alongside Dan Haren and Jered Weaver but the man he displaced as the #3 starter Ervin Santana hasn’t fared so well. He’s been a wreck all year going 1-6 with a 5.09 ERA. And the man that Pujols moved off 1^st base? Well that’d be Mark Trumbo and he’s currently in no mans land. A 1b with power who’s being forced to try out LF, RF, and 3b in an attempt to keep his bat in the lineup (.321 BA, 6 HR, 16 RBI, .394 OBP) and defensively he’s been a mess committing 4 errors in 8 games at 3b, the main spot that the Angels hoped he’d be able to hold down instead he’s been a nomad.

In Detroit the main problem with signing 1b Prince Fielder was that it moved the guy they had at 1b, Miguel Cabrera who was in the bottom 5 defensively, across the diamond to 3b leaving their infield defense far below average. So far that prediction hasn’t been too far off with Fielder committing 3 errors over at first and Cabrera making 4 at third. The Tigers also haven’t been able to get outs at a good clip having turned only 22 double players through 35 games, a number in the bottom 3 in all of Major League Baseball. Offensively the team has also struggled as well with Fielder only going yahtzee 5 times and Cabrera 7 times. In order for this move to work the stipulation was that Fielder and Cabrera were going to out mash other teams and hide their defensive inadequacies. The Tigers and Angels made huge splashes during the offseason but so far results have been hit and miss with no consistency to be found on a day-to-day basis.

For all the Red Sox fans out there this message isn’t coming out of left field in any way as the Sox are the prime example for how reaching after big name free agents that don’t seem to fit doesn’t tend to end well. Take the 2009 and 2010 offseasons for example when the Red Sox reached for John Lackey (5 yr/$82.5 mil) and Carl Crawford (7 yr/$142 mil) when neither player was entering his prime, a la Pujols, and neither filled a hole or a team need. Last year Lackey was the worst starting pitcher IN THE HISTORY OF BASEBALL while Crawford wasn’t able to do what he was brought into Boston to do, steal bases and create offense from the top of the lineup. Instead Crawford was relegated to the bottom third of the lineup where he hit .255 with 11 HR, 56 RBIs, 18 steals. This year it got to the point where the best thing that happened this offseason to the Red Sox was John Lackey being shelved for all of 2012 after Tommy John surgery. The ultimate addition by subtraction, which is saying a lot for a team that once traded Carl Everett in his prime for Darren Oliver.

I know that the first 35 to 40 games of a year don’t equal an entire season but the trends we’ve seen developing throughout the beginning of the year aren’t new or abnormal. It’s been proven time and again that the best way to win in the big leagues and sustain that success is through good scouting, solid player development, and top notch starting pitching. Those are things that for the most part can’t be bought in a single offseason. Starting pitching tends to be highly volatile in the free agent market because teams are paying for what a player has done and generally they are actually buying a players decline years not his peak years, see: Pujols, Albert. If you want to win it’s actually quite simple: develop pitchers and watch them throw your team into the playoffs. Watch out Red Sox fans the Orioles, Rays, and Blue Jays seem to have figured this out while the hometown 9 were busy throwing money at overpriced, injured superstar free agents.

Geoff Jablonski