Tigers 10 Indians 1: And the Bottom Drops Out
September 7, 2011Buckeye 12-Pack: The Akron Game
September 7, 2011Anyone who’s ever made a bad bet understands the concept of a “sunk cost”. Essentially, this is the moment you realize that you’ve blown your money or time or whatever on something ill-advised, and that there’s no way to get it back, no matter what you do. Maybe you bought a used car that turned out to be a lemon. Maybe it was a bad relationship that sucked up too much of your time. Or a bad investment in Bear Stearns. Whatever.
In baseball, we typically talk about sunk costs in reference to players who sign multi-year, mega-dollar contracts and turn out to be busts. Think of Barry Zito’s seven year, $126 million dollar contract.
Some background: Barry Zito has basically been worse than your run-of-the-mill, Triple-A starter for the bulk of his deal with the Giants, which he signed in December of 2006. During that time, he’s been paid about $85 million. After this year, Zito still has $46 million left on his deal, covering 2012-2013 as well as his buyout for 2014 ($7 million). Nonetheless, no matter what they do, the Giants are stuck paying Zito that $46 million.
And some people, using the notion of sunk cost, have argued that the team should cut Zito now—that the $46 million is gone anyway, and the Giants might as well free up a roster spot for someone who might not be a terrible pitcher. A young player perhaps, making the league minimum.
Which is an odd way of getting around to another player making the league minimum: Matt LaPorta. It’s not often that players making the league minimum are considered sunk costs. After all, they cost so little, relative to their free-agency-eligible peers, that it seems silly to even consider their salary a “cost” at all.
But the cost of Matt LaPorta goes well beyond his salary. His salary, actually, has nothing to do with his cost to the Indians.
The first and most obvious component of LaPorta’s cost is the price we paid to add him to the organization—CC Sabathia. You know, the guy who will come in second in the Cy Young race this year? This is not to say, obviously, that we’d still have Sabathia in the organization; we almost certainly would not. The point is rather that we had a valued asset in Sabathia and gave it up for what amounted to some magic LaPorta beans. The beans, needless to say, went rancid.
Even more than the cost of Sabathia (which is certainly “sunk”, despite the likelihood that Sabathia, in fact, floats), is the cost the Indians incur each day they keep LaPorta on the roster. Which again, has nothing to do with how much money he makes. Rather, the simple fact that he takes up a roster spot—which are limited in nature—hurts the Indians.
I wrote before the season, along with my accomplice Paul Cousineau, that this season was a make or break year for LaPorta—that I was willing to forgive his previous sins, if he proved he could be a mildly adequate first baseman. Somewhere around league average or even below would have been acceptable.
In response, Matt LaPorta managed to play worse in 2011 than he did in 2010, which was actually a considerable accomplishment. His WAR (wins above replacement, or how a player compares to your typical triple A player), already negative in 2010, actually decreased in 2011. Over that two year span, LaPorta managed to cost his team 2 wins more than a replacement level first-baseman would have. No first baseman in the Major Leagues was more costly to his team over this two year period than Matt LaPorta.
Wait, it gets better. From 2010 to 2011, only two players were more detrimental to their teams than Matt LaPorta was to the Indians, and both are currently not in the Major Leagues. The first is Pedro Feliz, whose career has been mercifully been euthanized. The second? Luis Valbuena. You can’t make this stuff up.
Consequently, before September the Indians got so fed up with LaPorta that they sent him to the minor leagues to finish out the year, despite the fact that rosters were to be expanded less than 48-hours after the move. Sure enough, when September call-ups arrived, LaPorta stayed in Columbus—a form of penance for his terrible production at the Major League level.
But what are we supposed to do going forward? I argued at the beginning of the season that we’d have to make a decision to fish or cut bait with LaPorta before the 2012 season. One way or the other, 2011 would make the decision for us. I truly believed that he’d make it, at least enough to stay on a team with no obvious replacement in the minor league system.
I was wrong.
Despite the fact that LaPorta costs next to nothing in salary, we are bearing quite an expense, both sunk (Sabathia) and redeemable (the roster spot). It’ll be interesting to see how the front office deals with LaPorta going into this off-season. Will they publicly acknowledge that the centerpiece of the biggest trade in team history is a complete bust by DFA’ing him off the 40-man roster? Will they scour the free-agent market for cheap first baseman who can at least do something reasonably well? Will they give him one more shot to succeed, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary outcome?
Last I heard, the Russ-Bus will be looking for a job this off-season. I’m just sayin….
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Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty Images
17 Comments
Bring back Branyan! Can you imagine a 3-4-5 punch of Shelly Duncan, Jim Thome, and Russel Branyan? Nightmarish
Trade him to Seattle.
Ahhh the frustration that is Matt LaPorta. I remember watching videos of him hitting monster HRs on youtube leading up to the trade. We can only hope that Brantley can stay healthy and at least provide us with SOME benefit following the CC trade. Well done Jon, still think we can’t get Pujols? The afternoon shows on 92.2 talked about Fielder coming here………..
typos…..
“Sunk cost” does not have a negative connotation…
I get the numbers on LaPorta, I really do. There’s gotta be something else going on. Yes, I know he’s been labeled as a “mistake hitter”, and I’ve seen some of his at bats where he just looks completely lost and then laces a liner off the wall (or over).
MY current theory is that he’s gotten so confused and out of sorts, that his confidence at the plate is almost completely shot. (And yes, that certainly translates into the field, as he’s delivered the same maddening mix of web gems and bone-headed plays with his glove).
I dunno Jon, his $450Kish cost just isn’t Barry Zito. And it isn’t like the Indians have a super-deep list on the 40 man that he clogs up that much.
But I’m thinking that dialing 1-800-SPORTS-PSYCHOLOGIST is way overdue. And a nice long stint in winter ball far from the judgmental crowds, with said psychologist on his speed dial.
The guy seriously had to delete his Twitter account because of Indian fan behavior? That’s rough.
Decline Grady’s option, take that money plus whatever money they had set aside for the “window of contention” and sign Prince Fielder. I don’t care that he’s a lefty and we will have an almost all lefty/Switch hitting line up. I don’t care that when the window slams shut in 3 years he will have an albatross contract in a small market with a brand new owner (I’m assuming the “window” will represent Dolan’s window to sell). They already put their cards on the table by trading off our pitching depth for Jimenez, go all in and get the bat that this team desperately needs.
My guess is that Laporta does not want to be an Indian or in Cleveland. Once he is DF’A he will be picked up by the team he really wants to play for and will have a great career. My guess is he already has an agreement in place with that team. Yes, you’d have to be pretty dumb and stuborn to do something like that, but Laporta has never convinced me he is anything but…
OK, I admit to being a “conspiracy theorist” at heart.
“CC Sabathia. You know, the guy who will come in second in the Cy Young race this year?”
Not if I have anything to say about it!
-Shelley Duncan
The reality is that roster spots are NOT valuable for the Indians, at least for position players. So they won’t sign a Shelly Duncan/David Delucci/Jason Michaels/Branyan/Austin Kearns-type player. Big deal. I’d rather have a .240/20/70 (projected over a full season) player with some diminishing upside than any of those guys. If LaPorta pick up LF in addition to 1B, he’s a valuable (relative term) player occupying a roster spot.
We don’t need a 1b unless they decide to overbid for one of the 2 premier free agents this offseason (ain’t. gonna. happen.). We already have enough utility guys in the mix to make a 1b hydra.
@10 dunc-a-dunc read your comment and used it as fuel to hit 2 jacks today
Alex Gordon says to move Matt LaPorta to LF and we’ll solve 2 problems at once (w/ Brantley playing CF and Sizemore cut).
Alex Gordon OPS+ by year: 90, 109, 87, 84, 142
Matt LaPorta OPS+ by year: 99, 87, 92
Both 1st round top10 picks that struggled mightily at first in MLB. Both ridiculously frustrating early in career. Just saying.
(yes, I know there are 1000 examples of players who busted for every Alex Gordon that had the switch turn on. I’m just holding out some glimmer of hope because there isn’t much else to do at this point and there needed to be a contrarian POV here)
I think its too soon to give up on LaPorta. The ability is there, every once in awhile you see him stay on the ball, and drive it with an effortless swing. He’ll take a pitch low and away and slap it out to right field, or out of the park. He hit a homer on an outside pitch to center/right center against the White Sox a few weeks ago. It was a short, effortless swing.
I think a good hitting coach could get through to this guy. That and he probably needs some time in the minors to get his confidence back. Like everyone else has said, lately he seems to be just guessing out there.
Maybe Im nuts, but I think hes fixable. We’ll see.
I was going to write a comment about how well LaPorta played in Columbus, and about how Mike Sarbaugh sure would make a nice hitting coach in Cleveland next year, and, you know, connect those two sets of dots. But even that would be a pretty risky experiment.
no way you can say that Laporta is a bust. How about if he was not traded for Sabathia in the biggest trade in Indians history? Would everyone still be so hard on him, his numbers and the struggles he has had having to deal with? Has any minor league player ever had the pressure to be worth being the center piece of a trade for the previous years CY Young winner? He never had taken a big league pitch? He shows flashes of greatness because it is in there. His power and fielding ability is destined to come out more often if everone would just let him progress without being so negitive and with the pressure of being traded for Sabathia. He went into this season with the promise of consistency at first base…they gave him anything but. He played in an out with Santana all year. Mark my words. The so called fans who give up on him will look pretty dumb when he goes to a team and is played every day in front of fans who appreciate him without the pressure of being traded for Sabathia. If we dont get off his back and let him develop some other team will and they will get the Matt Laporta we expected.
Right on but the Sabathia trade wasn’t the biggest trade in Tribe history. It was, after all, a short rental which is all we owned at that point.