Date: Sun, 8 Mar 1998 11:10:36 -0600 Reply-To: Discussion of Texas Rangers Major League Baseball Team <RANGERS@TAMU.EDU> Sender: Discussion of Texas Rangers Major League Baseball Team <RANGERS@TAMU.EDU> From: Beau Sharbrough <beau@CONNECT.NET> Subject: Commitment to Defense (long rant)
An article about the Rangers' defense in today's DaMN started me thinking about this whole commitment to defense. I think that it has been a smokescreen in the past, a lie to put fans in the stands, but I see some hope for it to get better.
When GM Doug Melvin came in and traded Jose Canseco for Otis Nixon, he said that he wanted to build a team around pitching and defense. Since that time, two power hitters have left via trade (Canseco and Dean Palmer), a starting pitcher has come via free agency and left via trade (Ken Hill), and two of the best defensive players have left via free agency over money (Kevin Elster and Darryl Hamilton).
I have been bothered by the actions of the team during this time
and I think that the reason is that there is an inconsistency
between what they say and what they do. On the other hand, their
behavior has been very consistent to date if you assume that they
are really about money.
If we assume that the management is trying to build a winner out
of pitching and defense, then we should see an improvement in
each area, and an effort to sign and keep the players that are
seen as being important in that scheme. I don't think that their
track record has shown that tendency at all. Let's examine these
four cases -- Canseco, Palmer, Elster, and Hamilton -- and see if
they have a common thread, and compare it to the team's stated
goal of building a winner thru pitching and defense.
You can't separate a team's goals from the realities and
economics of the game. By that I mean that at any given point in
time, a team has certain assets -- player talents -- and if they
don't fit into your plans, you have a fiscal obligation to get
value for them when you part with them. A really obvious case of
this is the Palmer/Fernando Tatis case. The other side of that
argument is that you can't trade just because you want to. When
then-manager Bobby Valentine asked then-GM Tom Grieve to trade
Pete Incaviglia, he asked him to "trade him for a broken bat."
They were not able to get any offers, and cut Swingcaviglia, the
King of Swing and Miss.
DEAN PALMER
Dean Palmer had shown 50 homer potential, but never realized it.
He'd developed into a very steady everyday ballplayer. He
improved his defense a lot, we really DID forget about Steve Buechele. He improved his average from about 250 to about 280,
and had streaks where he was unstoppable. Nevertheless, we felt
that we had seen all there was to Deano, and Tatis, as Gary
Pearce has pointed out, was not learning anything in Tulsa. So
we traded Palmer for Tom Goodwin. This is not an even trade.
The talent difference in the two players is not enough to call it
anything other that what it is, an impoverishment of the team.
If you traded a Mercedes for a Cavalier, and they were the same
age and mileage, you wouldn't call that even, would you? It's
hard to quantify ballplayers, but I sure that trading one of the
top two or three third basemen in the league for one of the
bottom two or three center fielders is not close to even. Palmer
was also one of the top 25 offensive players in the league, and
Goodwin is one of the bottom 25 offensive players in the league.
Palmer was traded because a deadline was coming up, free agency was coming up, he didn't fit into our plans, and we got a broken bat for him. This trade made the team money. Palmer is a $5 million a year player, Goodwin is a $1.5 million dollar a year player. What Melvin did with the $3.5 million that we saved was to spin it as a trade for Tatis, too (who the Rangers already had and could have played any time they wished). Tatis was just re-signed for the 1998 season for the league minimum of $170,000. His salary for 1997 was about $60,000. Did I mention that the Rangers paid almost all of Dean Palmer's salary for the rest of 1998 after the trade? They traded Palmer and a million dollars for Goodwin. A Lexus and cash for a Hyundai.
JOSE CANSECO
It's no secret that Jose was one of my favorite ballplayers. He
had his good days and bad days, but excitement swirled around
him, and I think that when he wasn't thinking of his own
greatness, he was a really great ballplayer. The first $5
million dollar man, one of the great power hitters of his time,
and a man who wasn't ashamed to choke up and shorten his swing
and put the ball on the ground with two strikes and men on base.
Trading Canseco for Nixon was the first shot fired in the battle
for defense and pitching here. The Rangers needed Otis Nixon for
our big outfield, and Canseco was not going to be signable in
another year anyway. Much was also made at the time that the
Rangers signed Bob Tewskbury and Fruit Loops (Mickey Tettleton)
with the money that they saved. That was a convenient fiction.
The trade was made well before either of those players became
available. A large number of players were declared free agents
by a court ruling, salaries for them plummeted, and Fruit Loops
was available for $500,000 that year.
Nixon was allowed to go free agent after his two years were up. Didn't we sign him because he was a key part of our commitment to winning with pitching and defense? Why didn't the Rangers keep him afterward? Because he was to expensive, or because his defense wasn't good enough?
DARRYL HAMILTON
When Nixon left because of money, we found a cheap free agent we
could replace him with. Doug Melvin has a talent for finding
inexpensive talent to help a team. I don't have that confused
with a talent for building a team. It appears that some
businessmen think that you can change ballplayers like car parts
and keep the machine running. Baseball teams are not machines,
and it ain't like that. Darryl Hamilton was one of the most
important players on the 1996 AL West Championship team. He led
off, he played great defense, and he glued the rest of the team
together. He became one of my favorites.
At the end of the season, the Rangers did not offer him a
contract. He went to the Giants. Why didn't they try to keep
him? It made the papers that the owners told Doug Melvin to go
find another one just like he did the year before. I felt bad
about it at the time but thinking back on it, it was a decision
to risk losing ballgames over money. As a fan, this lesson is
brought home more clearly every year. Letting Hamilton go was a
public statement that the Rangers wanted to make money more than
they wanted to win, and that they were NOT trying to build a team around pitching and defense. They were trying to use that as an
excuse to field a cost effective team, and if they win a few
games, then team President Tom Schieffer will take credit for
them anyway.
They tried to replace Hamilton with Damon Buford, who did play great defense, but didn't hit his weight. Later, they traded Dean Palmer and a sack of money for Tom Goodwin to fill this hole. Wouldn't it have made more sense to sign Hamilton? The Rangers STILL don't have a center fielder who belongs in the majors, and they don't have an effective leadoff hitter, either.
KEVIN ELSTER
The Kevin Elster story is a great example of the difference in what a team tells the public thru the media and what the truth really is. Kevin Elster was known for having a great glove, a bad bat, and a glass chin. The Rangers signed him knowing this, and one of the great things in baseball happened. He gelled with Deano and Mark McLemore to become the best defensive infield in the American League. With the defensive leadership of Hamilton and Elster, and the coaching of Bucky Dent, the Rangers set a record for consecutive errorless games.
The funny thing about it, though, was Kevin's hitting. He'd been bulking up, and with his new strength and his spot behind Rusty Greer and McLemore in the lineup, he started piling up RBI and homers. He had 20 homers and 90 RBI in August. Batting ninth. When the Rangers clinched with ten days remaining, Kevin stayed in the lineup trying to get to 100 RBI. He should have been resting.
I sat by Gary Collard during the playoffs with the Yankees, and watched him let ground ball after ground ball go thru that I think I could have reached. He appeared really stiff. I began to wish for Benji Gil. I didn't know that Benji would not hit any better than Goodwin, or that he never went to the right spot on relay plays, or that he ran the bases like he was stoned. I bet a dollar that Bucky Dent knew the difference in Benji Gil and Kevin Elster. I'd bet a dollar that Doug Melvin did, too.
They let Elster go after the 1996 season, and the defense fell apart. Nothing was said in the press all year about how much better off we would have been with Elster instead of Gil. TODAY, they are saying it. They sold a lot of tickets to see a team play with a worse defense without even telling the public that they knew that the team would be worse. It's like the midway at the circus -- you can't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see. The Rangers conned the public into seeing the defending ALWest champs, and fielded the cheapest team that money could buy. If a defense starts up the middle, why did they let two key defenders go over money when they had just won the West and had a shot at getting better?
I don't believe that the reason was that they wanted to build a winner based on pitching and defense. I think it was that they wanted to build a money maker. I'm sure that the owners felt better on payday until the fans quit coming out.
PITCHING
Having wondered why the Rangers dump expensive players for cheaper ones and call it building defense, I asked myself the same question about the pitching.
If they were building pitching, they would try to keep the good ones, in my opinion. But the first year, they lost Roger McDowell and Bob Tewksbury while they waited for Rogers to decide to sign. The story that they told the press was that they wanted to get him signed so they'd know what was left over to pay the other players. In retrospect, that's clearly the truth. They weren't going to keep good players for a fair amount of money because they were going to keep stars at eye-popping salaries and surround them with inexpensive warm bodies labeled as pitching and defense.
So they let Rogers go and signed Ken Hill. Then what happened? They traded Hill for Leyritz and Perisho, and traded Leyritz for someone, was it Marc Brandeburg? Rogers was a good pitcher when he left here. He's a head case now, but I hope he comes back strong.
Last year, they let Stanton and another reliever get away, and this year they tried to throw away Bobby Witt. To their credit, the signed a really expensive closer, but I think that's the bread and circuses attitude of appeasing the masses. It makes no sense to me to bring in an expensive closer if you have to gut your defense to do it. We didn't need a closer much last year.
In summary, I'm losing interest in a team that seems to say one thing and do another. They have promised the fans a winner, but they have given the fans entertainment. I like home runs and strikeouts, but I'd rather see good baseball than to have those things at the expense of sound fundamentals. And I REALLY don't like being lied to and treated like I'm too stupid to see thru it.
I said that there was reason for hope. That reason is that Elster is back this year. There is a new owner on the horizon. There is hope that the Rangers will finally do what they have promised since the taxpayers of Arlington gave them a nice new playground: build a winner around pitching and defense. I'm still ready for it, and ready to cheer for the team even if I don't like everything that they do every day.
-- Beau Sharbrough | GENTECH99, Salt Lake City, 22-23 Jan 99 Grapevine, Texas | <beau@connect.net> | Keep gambling out of the game, and www.connect.net/beau | keep Rose and Jackson out of the Hall.