Three Spring Training Questions
It’s almost spring time! Kind of… Pitchers and catchers started reporting nearly two weeks ago, and spring training games are now officially underway. (Juan Soto has already homered for the Mets…) In that spirit, here’s a quick roundup of socialist topics that have already emerged from the early rumblings of baseball season:
Did Steve Cohen kill the Yankee facial hair policy?
At last, our long national nightmare is over: The Yankees have officially changed their grooming policy, finally allowing “well-groomed beards” after nearly 50 years of requiring players to be clean-shaven. I wrote long ago about how stupid this policy was…
… but today I want to consider the question of what finally caused the change. In his press conference explaining the decision, team owner Hal Steinbrenner acknowledged the cultural change around facial hair:
“This generation, the vast majority of 20s, 30s, into the 40s men of this country have beards. The Vice President has a beard, members of Congress have beards, the list goes on and on in this country and in this world. It is part of who these younger men are. Part of their character. Part of the persona. Do I totally relate to that? It’s difficult for me. I’m an older guy who's never had a beard in his life, but it's a very important thing to them.”
Except these cultural changes have been underway for a while1, so it can’t simply be that.
It seems like the straw that broke the camel’s back was Devin Williams’ vocal displeasure at having to shave the beard he’d worn for several years. Williams, the team’s new closer who was acquired by trade this offseason, was the first player in recent memory who didn’t simply accept the rule in stride, reportedly requesting a meeting with Steinbrenner and GM Brian Cashman to make his objections known. Notably, Williams, who is going to be a free agent after this season, told the team that the grooming policy would affect his decision on whether or not to re-sign with them next year.
This possibility — that the team might lose out on free agents it wants to sign because of this silly, outdated tradition — finally killed the policy. Team captain Aaron Judge said he wasn’t planning to grow a beard and didn’t personally mind the policy, but objected to anything that might hurt their chances of winning.
Of course, free agency has been around for almost exactly as long as the grooming policy was in place. Having to shave didn’t deter bearded stars like Jason Giambi and Johnny Damon and Gerrit Cole from signing with the Yankees.
So I can’t help but feel this is somehow related to the Yankees’ failed pursuit of Juan Soto. As I wrote at the time, this was the first time I could remember the Yankees getting outbid on a free agent they really wanted. And while Soto’s decision didn’t have anything to do with the grooming policy, it showed that the Yankees have lost their competitive advantage in free agency: They can no longer count on simply being able to offer the most money.
It’s easier to make new free agents comply with dumb rules about hair length and beards when you’re going to pay them more than anyone else. But now that the Dodgers and the Mets are around to throw just as much if not more money at star players, why would any of them submit to this bullshit? In other words, if other teams are going to play in the Yankees’ financial realm, then they cannot afford rules like the grooming policy…
Where should Rafael Devers play?
The early days of spring training have seen a few controversies about players changing their position or shifting their roles. As a Yankee fan, I rolled my eyes when Marcus Stroman said he wouldn’t pitch out of the bullpen, even though he’s clearly not one of the team’s five best starting pitchers. But the bigger news around the league involves Rafael Devers in Boston.
Earlier this month, the Red Sox signed Alex Bregman to a three-year, $120 million contract. Bregman is the reigning Gold Glove winner at third base, and by basically every metric, a significantly better defensive third baseman than Devers, who has helmed the position for Boston since the end of the 2017 season. In fact, Devers has led all third basemen in errors every year since he became the starter, and has never recorded a positive defensive WAR.
And yet when Devers was asked if he would move positions or DH to make room for Bregman at third, he not only refused, but was quite defiant: “No, I play third.”
What to make of this? On the one hand, it is certainly off-putting to see a player like this be so stubborn and refuse to put the team’s needs first. In Devers’ case especially, it’s not like he needs to protect his future earning potential: Devers just signed a $313.5 million deal that will take him through his age-37 season.
On the other hand, a player SHOULD have pride in his position, and the specific craft that comes with it. As baseball has changed in recent years, I feel like teams have gotten too comfortable moving guys around the diamond and playing them at unnatural positions, basically treating guys like interchangeable parts. It’s obviously good for players to do whatever they can to help the team, but it’s silly to pretend like moving positions is just a matter of standing in a new spot — these things are skills that take years to learn and cultivate, and it’s hard to just discard them like that.
Which leads to my basic confusion about this: Why didn’t Red Sox management ASK Devers about this before signing Bregman? This conflict was eminently foreseeable, and yet it feels like the team did not plan for it at all. Position changes happen all the time, and they can work out quite well — look at how Bryce Harper has transitioned to first in Philadelphia or Fernando Tatis Jr. moving to right field in San Diego — but you need buy-in from the players in question. And it looks like Boston just did not get that, which is frankly the sign of a badly managed team.2
What killed pitcher wins?
Justin Verlander, who just turned 42 and is entering his 21st season in the big leagues, sat down with USA Today’s Bob Nightengale to talk about how important it is to him to get to 300 career wins (he’s at 262 right now, meaning he’d likely need to pitch at least three more seasons…), and he made some interesting comments about the decline of starting pitching in baseball. Most of what he said is very insightful, but there was one stray comment that bothered me: “Devaluing the win is just another way that analytics are trying to not value something that they have a hard time quantifying.”
People often say stuff like this, but it strikes me as completely backwards. It’s not that analytics have a “hard time quantifying” the value of wins — it’s that analytics are GREAT at quantifying the value of wins. And what they’ve quantified is that pitcher wins are VERY VALUABLE. If you look at the pitchers who have accrued the most wins in the free agency era — Greg Maddux, Nolan Ryan, Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Mike Mussina, etc. — they all made A LOT of money. Pitchers who pitch deep into games and amass wins are very good for your team, so teams pay a lot of money to acquire players who can do that.
This basic fact often gets overlooked because analytics have also been good at identifying situations when a pitcher’s win totals inflate or underrate his overall value. But those situations are exceptions. In general, pitchers who win a lot of games tend to be pretty valuable. And it is in REACTION to that fact that teams are trying to devalue them by giving as many as possible to cheap, replaceable bullpen guys instead of experienced, highly-paid starters like Verlander.
I bring this up because, too often, people who want to defend traditional baseball feel the need to invoke mystical value that “analytics” simply cannot capture. But the problem with analytics is the opposite — that they are too GOOD at capturing value, therefore allowing owners to manipulate the game in a way that results in them not having to pay workers for that value.
Justin Verlander is the active leader in wins and possibly the last pitcher who will ever reach 250, or have a plausible shot at reaching 300 career wins. He has also earned nearly $400 million in salary over the years. Those two facts are intimately related. It is not that teams do not know the value of wins; they know all too well. They are just willing to change the game so none of that “value” is paid out to the players, because the interests of owners are in opposition to the interests of players and fans.
Although my suspicion is that JD Vance’s role in this is bigger than anyone would like to acknowledge
The situation with Stroman and the Yankees is more difficult, perhaps, but the explanation is much more clear in that case: The team wanted to trade him this off-season, and just couldn’t find any suitors.