PUTTING IT ALL TOgETHER Chris Antonetti talks about the challenges of building a champion by Jay Levin
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hris Antonetti’s present job title is vice president, baseball operations, and many in the industry consider him the premier general manager prospect in all of baseball. His boss, current Indians GM Mark Shapiro, often describes him as “my co-GM,” a very unusual gesture of respect for a subordinate. Fans of other teams openly campaign for Antonetti to take over their front office, and he interviewed for—and according to some reports, was about to be hired for—a major league GM position in 2007. Antonetti removed himself from the running, however, when the Indians announced that they had renegotiated his contract and, according to some reports, named him Shapiro’s eventual successor. I spoke with Antonetti over four sessions in late December and early January, smack in the middle of the team’s busy and widely praised series of off-season moves. The first session came two days after the Indians signed Kerry Wood, and the last one was two days after they signed Carl Pavano. The Indians are notoriously tightlipped about the proprietary statistics they’ve developed to evaluate hitting, defense, and pitching. On the other hand, they also emphasize strong, candid communication, and Antonetti often seemed to be fighting his own natural cordiality in order to protect the team’s trade secrets. The Indians also adhere to a strict code of professionalism, rarely talking specifics about any one player or other ball club, so our talks were utterly bereft of gossip. Antonetti was willing, however, to discuss in detail the Indians’ overall approach to player evaluation and decisionmaking. The Indians’ first and last noteworthy acquisitions this winter were pitchers, and both decisions centered around not just performance analysis and scouting, but assessments of each player’s medical condition and personal character. As it
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tribe time 2009 turns out, the Indians have deeply held views on each one of those subjects.
JL: Can you talk about some of the other things you look at? CA: I’d prefer not to.
kerry wood and the big picture Jay Levin: I imagine you guys are feeling pretty good about
JL: Can’t throw us a bone?
the deals you made last week.
position now than we were at the start of the offseason. I don’t think, knowing the volatility of reliever performance specifically, that we’ll ever feel comfortable about the bullpen until it’s actually out there and pitches for a full season, but I think we feel better about our alternatives. Kerry Wood was a guy that we targeted specifically, and he was at the top of our list of closing alternatives, for a variety of reasons. Obviously the stuff that he provides, the way that he’ll fit into our clubhouse, he was just the ideal fit for us. So we’re hopeful that the ninth inning for us will be a source of a little less anxiety than it has been at different points in the past.
JL: What things put him at the very top of your list? Given that there were quite a few credible candidates, what differentiates him?
CA: Well I think the best way for me to answer that would be
CA: I can’t. Strikeout rate’s obviously one of ’em, I mean, that’s no secret. If you strike a guy out, you’re removing a lot of luck from the equation. You don’t have to rely upon defense, you don’t have to worry about a ground ball getting through a hole, you don’t have to worry about a jam shot falling in between your second baseman and your right fielder. If you strike a guy out, bad things can’t happen typically. JL: Okay, so that’s one part of your objective analysis. CA: So we’re looking for the objective information to line up with our subjective information, and the economics are obviously an important component, that it fits in terms of annual values and term—and makeup, how a player will fit within our environment, will he succeed here, how will he contribute to our team chemistry, what type of teammate is he, how does he handle certain situations. All of those things go into our assessment of a player, and then obviously the medical component as well.
to say that, as we go through our process of assessing player values, we look for things to line up on a variety of fronts. So from an objective analysis standpoint, we look for some attributes that would point to future success.
JL: For example? CA: I’m gonna digress a moment. We view it as there are two different types of statistics. There are statistics that are assessment and evaluative statistics, that give you a good idea of what a player did in a particular year, of what his contribution was in that year. There may be another set of statistics that are more predictive statistics, that give far better insight to future performance, rather than just assessing what that guy did that year.
JL: You’re talking about stats that are more projectable, that tend to have less deviation from one year to the next.
CA: Exactly. JL: So, the really obvious one is strikeout rate, but it must go beyond that for you guys.
CA: It goes well beyond that.
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Kerry Wood was a major part of Chris Antonetti’s work this offseason.
Photo on previous page: Ron Vesely/MLB Photos via Getty Images Photo on this page: Dan Mendlik/Cleveland Indians
Chris Antonetti: Well, we certainly feel like we’re in a better
Putting it All Together JL: How do you evaluate makeup? CA: Through a network of contacts within the game. Actually, one of Kerry’s closest friends, Jason Bere, is a special assistant with us, and they were teammates in Chicago. So that’s a firsthand account, and baseball’s a very small world. There are a lot of interconnected people, and it’s not that difficult to get a sense of what type of teammate a guy may be, whether it’s from someone else who’s played with him, and there’s maybe one or two degrees of separation, to how they handle things publicly when different issues have arisen with a team—what are their comments either on the record or off the record, how are they handling themselves?
CA: I don’t want to mislead and say that’s as important, or that’s a determining factor, but what we’re trying to do is get some idea of that, and in the ideal case, we get all those factors to align. It’s a factor, but it’s not like the deciding factor, and for each guy, it may weigh a little bit differently. If you’re looking for a bench player, he’s gonna get 150 or 200 plate appearances. His understanding of his role, the makeup, how he fits on a team, the chemistry he provides may be more important than if you’re looking at a guy who’s got numberone starter stuff with a great track record and great scouting reports, but he pitches once every fifth day and just happens to be quiet, and just not really a team leader. That’s okay, too.
JL: So, talking about how Kerry fits into some of those JL: You take a lot of notice of that.
things…
CA: We take a lot of notice of that.
CA: We’re looking for all those different attributes to align,
JL: Do you actually track that as part of your data analysis? CA: We track it, and when we get to a decision point, what we try to do is get the most information—actually, not just the most information, the most relevant information, because there’s a ton of information out there, it’s almost information overload at this point. JL: A lot of times, a player will get a certain reputation… CA: Yeah, we don’t want it to be on hearsay. It’s not just based on, a guy had a bad experience with a writer, and that writer has something disparaging to say about him. We’re not gonna use that as our makeup grade, we’re looking for more firsthand accounts of how a guy handles himself.
and in Kerry’s case, obviously his great scouting reports, his ability to have dominant stuff and carry that dominant stuff not only one day, but on back-to-back days and three days in a row. When you look at what he did on the field, he was very successful, both in terms of going out there and pitching, where he threw some 66 innings, and obviously 84 strikeouts in 66 innings is appealing, and he did a very good job of limiting walks, too. So he didn’t give up many baserunners, and those chances when he did get into difficult situations, he was able to get out of them with a strikeout. He had very good scouting reports, all the makeup work we performed on him came back very strong, very positive about his influence in the clubhouse, his maturity, his ability to handle the blown save, all of those things came back very positive. So we had an alignment of all those different areas of information.
JL: So if you were cataloguing press accounts, for example, you wouldn’t be interested in the way a writer was characterizing a guy, you’d be interested in what the player was actually saying.
JL: It was reported that Kerry’s medical reports had fewer
CA: Yeah. It would be somewhat of a red flag if there’s a pattern in his quotes of excuse-making. For a pitcher to say, using the example of a closer, hypothetically, “Hey, it wasn’t my fault, the wind was blowing out, it was just a fly ball that happened to go over the fence, and that’s why we lost the game.” Or, “Hey, you know what, that was a routine ground ball that we didn’t make the play on.” Because he’s calling out a teammate, he’s not accepting accountability. And those cases are out there.
CA: I’m not sure it’s productive to make comparisons, but our medical due-diligence process is very extensive. We’d like to think it’s as comprehensive as any medical process in the game, and being done by one of, if not the, best medical staffs in the game. Again, we’re dealing with different levels of risk. We know with every player we’re going to have some degree of risk, and what we’re trying to balance is, the level of risk versus the potential reward, giving consideration to contract term and contract amount. And so when we evaluated all of those factors in this case, we were comfortable enough with the risk to make the commitment we made. JL: Is it fair to say that in most cases, the medical due
JL: Why do you guys feel that that kind of public accountability is so important?
red flags than what had come back for Kevin Millwood or Joe Borowski.
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tribe time 2009 diligence puts the Indians off certain players, because other teams will feel that it’s appropriate to offer more years?
CA: Well, that speaks more to our market, too. Because we have less margin for error, we can’t have the same risk tolerance as if our payroll was twice what it is, because if we make a decision, and it’s a high-risk decision and we allocate significant dollars, and that guy is not performing for us, either for medical reasons or other reasons, we don’t have the ability to just replace that guy with a similar player. If we sign Kerry Wood, and he gets hurt, we have to replace him with internal options, rather than signing or acquiring another top closer. We can’t allocate $30 million or $25 million to our closer spot. If we were a club with a much higher payroll, we would have a higher tolerance for risk.
JL: So it’s not so much the medical due diligence reducing the number of years; it has more to do with risk tolerance because of the market.
CA: Well, I think it’s a combination of both. We want to have the best medical information and understand what the probabilities are of the guy staying healthy for a year or two years or three years, based upon the most recent medical research and information and studies. That’s important to us. But at the end of the day, what you come out with once you do a physical is an idea of how likely it is the guy’s going to perform, and at what level, for the duration of the contract. If we had more margin for error, we could say, “Hey, you know what, yeah, we know it’s a little bit more risk, but we can afford to take it.”
Kelly Shoppach is a luxury.
CASHING IN ON CATCHERS JL: Would it be fair to say that Kelly Shoppach is a perfectly good major league starting catcher, very possibly an aboveaverage one?
CA: Yes. JL: But it seems like in Kerry Wood’s case, the assessment of his 2008 season emboldened you guys to offer him the same length of contract as other teams.
JL: So, do you consider it a luxury to have both Victor and
CA: It’s a little bit speculative, because we don’t know how
CA: [Cautiously.] Yes. [He laughs.] I mean, you’re asking me,
other teams assessed his risk or whether or not another team would have committed three years or two years. I think in this case, we were also able to look at the closer market and recognize that there were a number of very attractive alternatives for teams. Other teams may have wanted K-Rod or Brian Fuentes or Trevor Hoffman or someone else who was available. So this closer market was a little bit atypical. Usually, especially in free agency, there are fewer alternatives, demand exceeds supply, and in this case, supply exceeded demand. The end result of that was that we were able to get a player that we thought could make a significant impact, at a contract level and a risk level that made sense for us. Oftentimes in our market, and the way we assess risk, those values don’t line up.
do you... yeah. Yeah, we’re in a fortunate position to have very good major league catchers, and that allows us some versatility as we look at different ways of building the team.
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him on the roster?
have that luxury, or whether you need to find a way somehow to utilize the capability of both players to produce on the field, whether through a trade or a position switch or a change in roles? At what point do you look at it and say, “It’s been great having that luxury, but we really have to cash that in?”
CA: We have to have the ability to cash it in, that’s part of it. And to do that, you have to have a baseline and understand what value those particular players have to you as you build
Photo: Nick Laham/Getty Images
JL: How do you evaluate whether you can really afford to
Putting it All Together your team as a whole, and then look and see how the market values those guys. And in order for us to make a decision, either a positional switch or a trade, there has to be compelling reason to do that, and that compelling reason is, it has to be able to make our team or organization better. To this point, we have felt that our best position going forward, at least at this point, is to have Victor and Shop both be on the team in meaningful roles.
JL: But it’s fair to say that until Victor went out last season, Shoppach was not in that meaningful of a role.
CA: Right. We were fortunate though to have an All-Star catcher who was catching every day, but that’s one of the reasons why you have to build depth in an organization. When Victor went down, Kelly stepped up, had an opportunity, and performed exceptionally well. JL: But he almost makes himself a problem by being that good.
CA: No, no, not at all, he actually gives us flexibility, he allows us to potentially build a better team. But going back to your point, in order to “cash in” a luxury or surplus in value, you have to have another team that values a player enough to give you a compelling return, and to date, we have not found that.
our run prevention, and obviously there are different ways to do that and different combinations that could contribute to that.
JL: Is there any player on the roster that you wouldn’t consider a potential return for?
CA: No. I think for any player in baseball, you can find an appropriate return that would compel you to trade him. I mean, there are certainly some players that are more difficult to trade than others, in terms of how you value them, how they fit for your team, your organization, your community, all of those things, and what role they play.
MARK DEROSA AND LUCK VS. SKILL JL: Other than the obvious, filling a hole at third base, what was it that you liked most about DeRosa?
CA: Well, he complements our team almost perfectly; a very productive bat that has the versatility to play a number of different positions, and it should help solidify our infield. And beyond that, he’s an exceptional makeup guy, a very tough competitor, one of the most respected and well-regarded players and teammates in the game.
JL: You’ve found that with center fielders more than with catchers.
CA: Correct. And whether we ended up identifying the right guys or the trades worked out, that’s exactly what happened with Coco Crisp. Another team valued him as a center fielder, he was going to play left field for us, and we were able to capitalize on that marginal value, but that has not yet happened for other positions, and I don’t mean just to focus on catcher.
JL: Well, but there’s just really obvious depth when the backup catcher hits 21 home runs.
CA: Right, that’s the most obvious one at this point.
Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
JL: The team had some significant problems getting production out of the first base and DH positions last season. Does that become a significant factor in thinking, “Maybe we don’t need to trade one of these catchers”?
CA: I think the way to look at that is, we try to look at the returning guys and what we expect their level of productivity to be. We’re looking at how can we best help our runs scored and
With 21 home runs in 2008, DeRosa bested his previous high by eight.
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tribe time 2009
Many are convinced Chris Antonetti will eventually follow in Mark Shapiro’s footsteps and become GM. ing in trades, where the discussions really got serious?
available, but for the guys who we thought could make that type of impact on our team, we did contemplate that, yes.
CA: Trades and free agents, we were involved in a lot of other
JL: It seems like DeRosa had a relatively late-career shift in
infielders.
his approach at the plate. He started drawing a lot more walks in his 30s, and he seems like a different hitter than he was in his 20s. Is he that rare guy who became a better hitter late in his career?
JL: Thinking specifically about guys like Brian Roberts and Adrian Beltre, realistically, were you seriously considering giving up a top prospect or two for one year with an All-Star type veteran?
CA: We seriously considered everything. We try to measure the player’s impact on our team in the short and long term, and weigh that against what we have to give up prospect-wise and what it will cost us dollar-wise. If it’s a player that could make a significant impact on our team, and maybe appreciably more than another alternative, then our tolerance for giving up talent in return may be a little higher. I would say any infielder of impact, we contemplated this offseason.
CA: Yeah, there are reasons to believe that he has made adjustments. I think if you talked to Mark, he would credit Rudy Jaramillo in Texas with a change in his approach and some things that he did fundamentally that have allowed him to be a more successful major league hitter. Mark seemingly carried forward those adjustments through his time with the Cubs, and we think that’s part of the hitter he is now.
JL: So, trying to factor luck on balls in play out of the equation, you think that he’s basically a league-average or a little better hitter, right now.
JL: Even giving up one of your top five prospects, for a guy with only one year left?
CA: Again, there are very few of those guys that are actually
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CA: Well, last year he was well above league average, but we do look at batting average on balls in play, we understand the favorable hitting environment in Wrigley Field—although
Photo: Dan Mendlik/Cleveland Indians
JL: Were there other infielders that you were seriously target-
Putting it All Together he hit more homers on the road than he did at home—but we understand Wrigley Field has played as a very favorable hitters’ park for right-handed hitters. So we factor all those things in when we look at what we expect him to be offensively next year, but all that taken into account, we still think he has a chance to be an above-average hitter.
JL: You guys track “hard-hit balls,” regardless of outcome, and you actually give an award for hitting them in the minors. At this point, are you primarily looking at stats that reflect how hard a guy hit the ball, and not paying much attention to stats that show the result of a play, like hit vs. out?
CA: I think it’s safe to say that we look at a combination of factors. We certainly make adjustments and try to separate out skill from luck, and there are a variety of different ways to do that. But I think in the end, you still need to make sure that there’s a bit of sanity check, because any adjustments are also approximations. So you want to always make sure that your approximations are somewhat managed, tempered by, okay, what actually happened? Especially if a player has a large sample size of multiple years of performance.
part of that is using advanced metrics and adjusted metrics to give us some baseline of what we think his objective information tells us. Then we look for that to align with our subjective information, what our evaluators are seeing when they watch and observe a guy play, and then how those two components come together. And the third component is medical, is there a medical explanation for a potential deviation in performance from one year to the next.
THE MEDICAL PROCESS JL: There were injuries to four critical players that just cut the legs out from under the team last season. How do you reconcile the sterling reputation of the medical staff with those results?
a little bit overstated when it comes to the destiny of balls in play?
CA: Well I think that there are a number of ways. I think there are some injuries that are more preventable than other injuries. Hey, the injuries like Victor Martinez, where he has bone chips in his elbow? That’s a structural issue that’s been building over some time, and Victor’s a 30-year-old baseball player who’s thrown out a lot of players, and physiologically his body broke down in that area. Our medical staff did what they could to manage those symptoms for as long as they could, but ultimately it got to a point physiologically where he needed to have surgical intervention to get that repaired. That’s not, in our view, a controllable injury.
CA: No, I just think there’s a lot of noise in the data, that it’s
JL: So then how does an organization like the Indians
very hard to precisely say, especially in a limited sample size, what is skill and what is luck, and what’s repeatable. I think what we try to do is distill down as much information as we can to separate out the two components, skill vs. luck, but there’s still no perfect way to do that. Everything we do is still an approximation.
evaluate the effectiveness of the medical staff? On what basis
JL: Are you saying that the effect of luck has maybe been
JL: So I’m assuming you have your own formulas for adjusting for luck.
Photo: Gregor y Shamus/Getty Images
CA: That would be accurate. JL: Do you feel that ultimately, those adjusted numbers are the most authoritative in terms of telling you how good a player really was?
CA: We try to have a balanced approach in projecting what we expect a player’s performance will be going forward, and
“Wear and tear” injuries cost Martinez most of last season.
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tribe time 2009 would you continue to think that they’re effective, or on what basis would you become concerned that they were not being very effective?
CA: I think there are a few things that you have to look at. One, you have to look at the risk assessment for the time you acquire a player. We acquire players at different points, and they all come with different risks. So for some of the guys, we’ve acquired them externally, we’ve done our risk assessment, and we’ve gone in eyes wide open that, hey, this is a risky sign, there’s the potential and a probability, especially over multiple years, that at some point during that contract, he’s going to break down. And even with the highest quality of care and the most cutting-edge resources and cuttingedge techniques on the sports medicine side, we recognize there’s a risk over a period of time that those guys are going to break down. So we’re cognizant of that, and we’re also cognizant, hey, some of the guys have come through our minor league system, and they have structural defects that are outside the ability to be controlled. I think we try to focus on the “controllables”—what are our processes for rehabilitating guys, what are our processes for pre-hab.
JL: Pre-hab?
and not just for the process?
CA: Oh, absolutely, and I think that that’s where you have to be careful not to look at it in isolation. I think if you go back and look at our track record, our disabled list track record, over the past five years, since we’ve had our medical staff, I would put it up against almost any team in baseball. JL: Beginning with the 2004 season? CA: Yeah, 2005, maybe 2004—the staff came in December 2003—because part of that process, again, it’s not just the treatment process, it’s the screening process at the outset, and we still had a lot of residual players left over. We made a change with our medical staff to change our practices [prior to the 2004 season], to take us in a different direction, and we were hopeful that in time, those would lead to better outcomes for us, and we think we’ve seen that result.
PAVANO IN THE CLUBHOUSE JL: I imagine there were lots of guys who were available for something in the neighborhood of $1.5 million guaranteed. Why Pavano in particular, as opposed to one of those other guys, like Paul Byrd for example? Why roll the dice on this particular pitcher?
CA: Yes, trying to understand where there may be some deficits in players, and what they can do to strengthen particular muscle groups, primarily, to allow them to potentially stave off an injury. For instance, if a guy has a deficit in his shoulder, there are some things we can do with a shoulder strengthening program that would minimize the chance of him suffering from a shoulder-related injury. It’s not gonna completely wipe out those chances, but there are things you can do to minimize it.
JL: Kerry Wood mentioned that he’d gotten some helpful information from the physical in terms of areas that needed strengthening. Is that the kind of thing we’re talking about?
CA: I think there were a number of alternatives in this range, but I don’t think the number was as large as you suggested, at least at this point in time. That certainly could change. JL: You guys were looking to do this particular type of signing, this scale, this amount of risk, right?
CA: I mean, ideally, you’d be looking at guys that were top of the market that didn’t maybe have the same degree of risk, but economic expectations have to come into that, and you know our reality is that we’ve allocated a lot of our dollars already this offseason on some significant acquisitions in Kerry Wood and Mark DeRosa, and did not have a lot of economic resources left to try to address the starting rotation.
CA: Yeah. I think one of the things that’s a common theme for us is that we try to focus on our processes, on what we can control. And sometimes the outcomes, as you know, there’s going to be variability, even if you have the best process— whether it’s a decision-making process or medical process or player development process—you can have the best processes in place, but you can still have bad outcomes. That’s not necessarily a fault of the process.
JL: So this week, you were looking to do a deal of about this scale, if you were going to add a pitcher at all.
CA: Right, and candidly, it took a little bit of extending to get us to be able to even do this, given what else we had done this offseason.
JL: So in particular, you’re saying that at this point in the JL: Is there a point where there’s accountability for outcomes,
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offseason, there was only a certain type of contract you could
Putting it All Together
Photo: Al Bello/Getty Images
The Indians don’t think Pavano’s time in New York represents who he is as a pitcher or a person. do, and there really weren’t that many guys that you felt were legitimate targets for that kind of contract.
think that would concern you guys, given your emphasis on accountability.
CA: Correct, and we feel like we’re getting him at the
CA: Sure, and the fact of the matter was—I think if you
right time. Carl’s a guy that did pitch healthy at the end of last year after coming back from Tommy John surgery, and hopefully the surgery corrected what had been an underlying issue for some period of time with Carl in his elbow. And based upon the medical due diligence that we’ve done, we’re hopeful that’s the case. Additionally, he came in and had a very good physical, checked out very well from a strength and conditioning standpoint and from a medical standpoint, with all the tests that we do, and we feel like there’s some upside left in him. When he was healthy and took the ball every fifth day, he was a very good major league starting pitcher, and granted, it’s been some time since then, but most of it’s been due to injury, and we’re hopeful that now with the surgery behind him, he can get back to being the guy he was before.
talked to Yankee executives, they would confirm this—that when Carl did indeed say he was hurt, he was. And as evidenced by his Tommy John surgery, when he noted that his elbow was bothering him, and when they did the examination and Dr. Andrews did the surgery, Carl did need to get his ligament replaced. So I think his situation in New York was certainly very difficult, for a lot of reasons, primarily because he wasn’t able to live up to the exceptional expectations of the contract that he signed. I think if you talk to Carl and the Yankees, everyone was frustrated by the circumstances. Based on the work that we’ve done, it wasn’t from a lack effort or a lack of wanting to be out there.
JL: Pavano was called out by Mike Mussina and other teammates for, essentially, not being willing to take the field when he possibly wasn’t hurting all that much. I have to
JL: Yankees officials don’t feel that there was ever anything illegitimate about his sitting out?
CA: It’s safe to say that we did our due diligence on that specific topic, and we do feel comfortable with the person that Carl is, and that we feel like he has the ability to go and
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tribe time 2009 contribute, and hopefully help solidify our rotation. The other thing is that we now have a culture where our players have taken accountability for the makeup of the team, and they hold each other to those same types of standards. So we can be less concerned with policing that, because the players do an exceptional job of policing it themselves.
JL: That gets back to Mussina. You’ve done your due diligence, so you’re comfortable with the legitimacy of the injuries. But even so, for whatever reason, Pavano’s teammates obviously felt that something wasn’t right about him. Are you really not at all concerned that that could be an issue in your clubhouse?
record on acquiring veterans—and there haven’t been that many, but going from Matt Lawton through Dave Dellucci—hasn’t been that great. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
CA: I think it’s been inconsistent. I think that’s somewhat a nature of the process—free agency almost by definition is an inefficient process. And so when you actually look across organizations—and we have—there are very few if any that systematically outperform the market on free agents.
JL: Okay, but it seems like the most significant signings from a dollar standpoint, at least the most high-profile signings, have tended to not really pan out at all.
CA: We’re certainly cognizant of the history, but we’ve also talked to a number of players who have been his teammates at different points, not only with the Yankees but with other teams, and we’re comfortable that Carl will be able to fit in within our clubhouse. You never know that until someone’s actually in the environment and begins interacting with people, but we don’t think that that will be a negative in any way.
JL: Did you guys spend any significant time talking with Carl? CA: Yes, we did. Mark [Shapiro], prior to signing, and I actually know Carl from Montreal a little bit. When he was coming up in the Expos system after the Pedro Martinez trade, I was with the Expos. But beyond that, Eric [Wedge] and Mark individually spent a lot of time talking with him prior to the signing. When he was in town, Eric went out to dinner with him individually. So we did spend a good deal of time talking to Carl, and we talked about his New York experience.
DECISIONS AND FREE AGENTS JL: Do you ever feel that in retrospect, you placed too much emphasis on a player’s personal qualities when you were making a decision?
CA: I think it’s fair to say that we retrospectively look back at our process on all decisions, to say, regardless of the outcome, was our process good? Are there things we should have done differently in our process, whether that’s weighing specific attributes more or less, or potentially modifying the steps we took to reach that [decision]? I think it’s fair to say that, yes, there are times we’ve looked back and said, hey, we’ve weighted one factor maybe too much in this case, and we probably shouldn’t have weighted it as much as we did. JL: It seems like since Mark took over as GM, the track
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CA: Well, I think it’s also important to provide a context of the guys that we’ve targeted. We understand because of our market realities that free agency is a method to complement our existing core. We can’t build a team around free agents. So by definition, that typically leads us to look at a different caliber of the free agent market than other teams. Within that, you’re going to be dealing with some imperfect alternatives, and when you’re dealing with imperfect alternatives, you typically have more variability in performance, and sometimes that plays out and other times it doesn’t. JL: Has your process for making those decisions changed and evolved in any significant ways over the last seven years?
CA: Conceptually, our process has been similar. We try to evaluate each domain and balance all of those domains’ contributions to the overall decision. We try to be the absolute best we can be in each of those domains—to have the best analysts doing the objective analysis, to have the best scouting staff in the world doing the evaluations—and for our own guys, we spend a lot of resources in player development, helping those guys achieve their potential. We’re trying to have the best medical staff in baseball, and we’re trying to have the best psychological staff in baseball, and to couple all of that with the economic considerations about strategic team building. If we’re the best in each subset, then hopefully, when all of those variables contribute to a decision and the decision lines up, we consistently make better decisions. MSP
Akron native Jay Levin is a writer, technology analyst, and recording producer in Philadelphia. He is the co-proprietor of LetsGoTribe.com, and his work has appeared on Esquire.com and a variety of baseball websites. Although he is the editor of this book, he is not considered one of the more knowledgeable sports fans in his own immediate family.