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Posted on Sun, Sep. 11, 2011
Marlins’ Beinfest has vision, but needs luck and money
BY DAN LE BATARD
dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com
David Santiago / El Nuevo Herald
President, Baseball Operations of the Florida Marlins, Larry Beinfest at Marlins' Town Hall Meeting at the 15th Annual Jiffy Lube Marlins FanFest on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, Florida.
How good is Marlins president Larry Beinfest at his job? Do we know?
The core responsibility Beinfest has — the very unscientific projecting of what talent might one day become — might not even be a human skill in sports, not if you define skill as an ability, something that can be recreated with consistency. Given that visionary Bill Belichick just waived what little remained of his entire 2007 draft, and given that the World Series champion San Francisco Giants wasted $126 million on Barry Zito, and given that magical Bill Parcells chose players for the last decade without winning a single playoff game, and given that all of baseball agreed in 1999 that Albert Pujols wasn’t good enough to be taken within the first 400 picks, one could argue that talent evaluating is a mix of poker, meteorology and metal-detector searches for coins on a beach — sprinkles of data and effort mixed with an avalanche of luck.
And if it isn’t much of a skill, if so much of it is random and/or educated guessing, the idea that this team has a better GM than that team is kind of like alleging this team has better fortune tellers and crystal balls, too. It is human to crave understanding and control, so leaders in sports get assigned wisdoms for things that are sometimes random. But if everyone in sports is working hard and armed with the same kinds of scouting departments and information, and projecting talent with vision isn’t really a skill, aren’t you essentially hoping that your general manager is better at winning the Lotto than the other GM? For all his mustachioed bumbling, is Dave Wannstedt still here if he drafts Drew Brees instead of Jamar Fletcher? Couldn’t anyone in baseball have had Jose Bautista?
In terms of perception, Beinfest has made the journey from genius to bum about as fast as the Marlins went from champions to last place. That doesn’t happen a lot in other workplaces, brilliant people suddenly appearing dumb, but the standings can be cruel and absolute. And winning a trophy in Yankee Stadium, especially winning it with coupons, is always going to make you look smarter than you are, even if Josh Beckett is the one holding all the real brilliance in his right hand.
So, for a long time, it was perceived that Beinfest knew something that others didn’t. Saw the unseen like that little kid in Sixth Sense. We like doing that in sports, turning the leaders into war heroes and movie action heroes, mythologizing, giving them magical and winning powers, because the definition of a hope-filled fan is to be a follower, and the nature of the follower is to want to be led. But now it looks like that faded 2003 trophy shines in ways that illuminated falsely. And much of what has happened in all the years since, well, Beinfest doesn’t want that anywhere near any light.
Every time the Marlins have given a long-term contract, something they hate to do because of how unpredictable baseball can be to even the best players (See Minnesota Twins, Joe Mauer), it has been a failure. Every time. Mike Lowell, Luis Castillo, Josh Johnson, Ricky Nolasco, Hanley Ramirez and John Buck, for reasons that range from injury to baseball’s cruel whimsy, have all been worse for the Marlins after getting paid big guaranteed money by them. Rather literally, the Marlins can’t afford those mistakes when competing against teams with so much more money (re: margin for error). The Marlins don’t spend big, but when they do, they haven’t gotten value, somehow overspending even while getting shredded for never spending.
Fixing mistakes
It is impossible to predict that Johnson and Ramirez are going to get hurt, or that Lowell is going to slump for an entire year and reinvent himself in Boston, just like it is impossible for the Giants to know that giving Zito $126 million is going to contaminate him. The trick is to build enough around your errors to cover them, which is harder to do in Beinfest’s financial handcuffs than it is when, say, Boston wonder boy Theo Epstein is throwing mountainous mistake millions at Daisuke Matsuzaka or John Lackey and covering it all up with more dollars.
How do you correct that cheaply? Trades and draft. But Beinfest’s best trade since Beckett and Lowell for Ramirez and Anibel Sanchez has been either Mike Jacobs for Leo Nuñez or Juan Pierre for Nolasco. This isn’t saying much given how much turnover there has been, given how many chances Beinfest has had at getting lucky, given that he had a trading asset like Miguel Bleeping Cabrera and got nothing for him. Nuñez and Nolasco being the best you get in more than 50 trades since 2003 isn’t nearly good enough, but Beinfest’s drafts have been a lot worse than that. The draft is where poor teams find their affordable riches. Teams hit big in the first round at about a 49 percent clip. But here’s what the Marlins have drafted in the first round over the last decade:
Jeremy Hermida, Jeffrey Allison, Taylor Tankersley, Chris Volstad, Aaron Thompson, Jacob Marceaux, Ryan Tucker, Sean West, Brett Sinkbeil, Chris Coughlan, Matt Dominguez, Kyle Skipworth, Chad James, Christian Yelich, Jose Fernandez, Pffffffffffft.
If you want to understand what you need to be doing in the first round to be competitive with limited dollars, consider what the Marlins did in the two years before Hermida: Beckett and Adrian Gonzalez.
They did get Mike Stanton in the second round, Johnson in the fourth and Logan Morrison in the 22nd. But that first-round list is damning and helps explain why the Marlins are nearly 30 games out of first today. The first round is where the risk is minimized, where you should fail least. Baseball’s best pitchers — Roy Halladay, Justin Verlander, Tim Lincecum, CC Sabathia, Jered Weaver, Cris Carpenter, David Price, Clayton Kershaw, Beckett — are all first-round picks. You can’t have your very best players from a decade of first rounds be Hermida and Coughlan. You can’t have the best arm be Volstad.
Beinfest has been good at identifying players in search of redemption — Dan Uggla, Cody Ross and a host of bullpen arms — but back to the original question: Is unearthing sports talent an ability? Or, more to the point, once you’ve climbed to the top of the game, where everyone is an expert and the difference in skill sets is negligible, can one team’s group of scouts really see the future more clearly than another team’s?
Where did it go?
Beinfest was assigned this ability once, with Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis, but he misplaced it? I know Parcells can see athlete potential better than we can, but can he do it better than Ozzie Newsome or Scott Pioli or any other expert running one of the other NFL teams? Who is good at it in sports? Seeing things others don’t? Finding value? The San Antonio Spurs? The Tampa Bay Rays? The Baltimore Ravens? The Spurs executives, who have found great players such as Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker late, stayed at Jimmy Johnson’s house in the Keys once, picking his brain about how to evaluate sports talent. But I remember distinctly standing close enough to Johnson that I could smell the Tostitos on his breath as he explained to me why Randy Moss shouldn’t have gone in the first round.
And I have to wonder how good the Spurs would have really been at drafting if not for getting a first pick everyone in the world would have used on Tim Duncan.
You know how to make drafting a skill? Get Peyton Manning. That way, every subsequent first-round pick you put around him will succeed. Marvin Harrison, Dallas Clark, Reggie Wayne, Edgerrin James, Joseph Addai and Anthony Gonzalez might have looked differently elsewhere. In Indianapolis, Ted Ginn Jr. might have been a success instead of a bust. Tony Dungy says a shopping cart with a mannequin arm would have averaged 40 catches and five touchdowns a season as the tight end in a Manning offense (that’s better, statistically than Anthony Fasano, by the way). Belichick’s drafts haven’t been very good since 2007, and he hasn’t won a playoff game in three years, but you can live off Tom Brady for a while the way Beinfest lived off Beckett and 2003.
Brady was taken in the sixth round, and Pioli, the former Pats GM, used to keep a picture on his desk. The photo was of the player the Patriots drafted the round before Brady, a player who wound up never playing a down in the league. You wouldn’t remember the player’s name, which is the point.
Pioli kept that picture on his desk to remind himself how smart he isn’t.
Beinfest isn’t dumber than he was in 2003. He has less money and less luck and fewer healthy players but not less vision. He just never had the ability we assigned him back when the scoreboard and standings and trophy reaffirmed our belief that he might.
Marlins’ Beinfest has vision, but needs luck and money
BY DAN LE BATARD
dlebatard@MiamiHerald.com
David Santiago / El Nuevo Herald
President, Baseball Operations of the Florida Marlins, Larry Beinfest at Marlins' Town Hall Meeting at the 15th Annual Jiffy Lube Marlins FanFest on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at Sun Life Stadium in Miami, Florida.
How good is Marlins president Larry Beinfest at his job? Do we know?
The core responsibility Beinfest has — the very unscientific projecting of what talent might one day become — might not even be a human skill in sports, not if you define skill as an ability, something that can be recreated with consistency. Given that visionary Bill Belichick just waived what little remained of his entire 2007 draft, and given that the World Series champion San Francisco Giants wasted $126 million on Barry Zito, and given that magical Bill Parcells chose players for the last decade without winning a single playoff game, and given that all of baseball agreed in 1999 that Albert Pujols wasn’t good enough to be taken within the first 400 picks, one could argue that talent evaluating is a mix of poker, meteorology and metal-detector searches for coins on a beach — sprinkles of data and effort mixed with an avalanche of luck.
And if it isn’t much of a skill, if so much of it is random and/or educated guessing, the idea that this team has a better GM than that team is kind of like alleging this team has better fortune tellers and crystal balls, too. It is human to crave understanding and control, so leaders in sports get assigned wisdoms for things that are sometimes random. But if everyone in sports is working hard and armed with the same kinds of scouting departments and information, and projecting talent with vision isn’t really a skill, aren’t you essentially hoping that your general manager is better at winning the Lotto than the other GM? For all his mustachioed bumbling, is Dave Wannstedt still here if he drafts Drew Brees instead of Jamar Fletcher? Couldn’t anyone in baseball have had Jose Bautista?
In terms of perception, Beinfest has made the journey from genius to bum about as fast as the Marlins went from champions to last place. That doesn’t happen a lot in other workplaces, brilliant people suddenly appearing dumb, but the standings can be cruel and absolute. And winning a trophy in Yankee Stadium, especially winning it with coupons, is always going to make you look smarter than you are, even if Josh Beckett is the one holding all the real brilliance in his right hand.
So, for a long time, it was perceived that Beinfest knew something that others didn’t. Saw the unseen like that little kid in Sixth Sense. We like doing that in sports, turning the leaders into war heroes and movie action heroes, mythologizing, giving them magical and winning powers, because the definition of a hope-filled fan is to be a follower, and the nature of the follower is to want to be led. But now it looks like that faded 2003 trophy shines in ways that illuminated falsely. And much of what has happened in all the years since, well, Beinfest doesn’t want that anywhere near any light.
Every time the Marlins have given a long-term contract, something they hate to do because of how unpredictable baseball can be to even the best players (See Minnesota Twins, Joe Mauer), it has been a failure. Every time. Mike Lowell, Luis Castillo, Josh Johnson, Ricky Nolasco, Hanley Ramirez and John Buck, for reasons that range from injury to baseball’s cruel whimsy, have all been worse for the Marlins after getting paid big guaranteed money by them. Rather literally, the Marlins can’t afford those mistakes when competing against teams with so much more money (re: margin for error). The Marlins don’t spend big, but when they do, they haven’t gotten value, somehow overspending even while getting shredded for never spending.
Fixing mistakes
It is impossible to predict that Johnson and Ramirez are going to get hurt, or that Lowell is going to slump for an entire year and reinvent himself in Boston, just like it is impossible for the Giants to know that giving Zito $126 million is going to contaminate him. The trick is to build enough around your errors to cover them, which is harder to do in Beinfest’s financial handcuffs than it is when, say, Boston wonder boy Theo Epstein is throwing mountainous mistake millions at Daisuke Matsuzaka or John Lackey and covering it all up with more dollars.
How do you correct that cheaply? Trades and draft. But Beinfest’s best trade since Beckett and Lowell for Ramirez and Anibel Sanchez has been either Mike Jacobs for Leo Nuñez or Juan Pierre for Nolasco. This isn’t saying much given how much turnover there has been, given how many chances Beinfest has had at getting lucky, given that he had a trading asset like Miguel Bleeping Cabrera and got nothing for him. Nuñez and Nolasco being the best you get in more than 50 trades since 2003 isn’t nearly good enough, but Beinfest’s drafts have been a lot worse than that. The draft is where poor teams find their affordable riches. Teams hit big in the first round at about a 49 percent clip. But here’s what the Marlins have drafted in the first round over the last decade:
Jeremy Hermida, Jeffrey Allison, Taylor Tankersley, Chris Volstad, Aaron Thompson, Jacob Marceaux, Ryan Tucker, Sean West, Brett Sinkbeil, Chris Coughlan, Matt Dominguez, Kyle Skipworth, Chad James, Christian Yelich, Jose Fernandez, Pffffffffffft.
If you want to understand what you need to be doing in the first round to be competitive with limited dollars, consider what the Marlins did in the two years before Hermida: Beckett and Adrian Gonzalez.
They did get Mike Stanton in the second round, Johnson in the fourth and Logan Morrison in the 22nd. But that first-round list is damning and helps explain why the Marlins are nearly 30 games out of first today. The first round is where the risk is minimized, where you should fail least. Baseball’s best pitchers — Roy Halladay, Justin Verlander, Tim Lincecum, CC Sabathia, Jered Weaver, Cris Carpenter, David Price, Clayton Kershaw, Beckett — are all first-round picks. You can’t have your very best players from a decade of first rounds be Hermida and Coughlan. You can’t have the best arm be Volstad.
Beinfest has been good at identifying players in search of redemption — Dan Uggla, Cody Ross and a host of bullpen arms — but back to the original question: Is unearthing sports talent an ability? Or, more to the point, once you’ve climbed to the top of the game, where everyone is an expert and the difference in skill sets is negligible, can one team’s group of scouts really see the future more clearly than another team’s?
Where did it go?
Beinfest was assigned this ability once, with Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis, but he misplaced it? I know Parcells can see athlete potential better than we can, but can he do it better than Ozzie Newsome or Scott Pioli or any other expert running one of the other NFL teams? Who is good at it in sports? Seeing things others don’t? Finding value? The San Antonio Spurs? The Tampa Bay Rays? The Baltimore Ravens? The Spurs executives, who have found great players such as Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker late, stayed at Jimmy Johnson’s house in the Keys once, picking his brain about how to evaluate sports talent. But I remember distinctly standing close enough to Johnson that I could smell the Tostitos on his breath as he explained to me why Randy Moss shouldn’t have gone in the first round.
And I have to wonder how good the Spurs would have really been at drafting if not for getting a first pick everyone in the world would have used on Tim Duncan.
You know how to make drafting a skill? Get Peyton Manning. That way, every subsequent first-round pick you put around him will succeed. Marvin Harrison, Dallas Clark, Reggie Wayne, Edgerrin James, Joseph Addai and Anthony Gonzalez might have looked differently elsewhere. In Indianapolis, Ted Ginn Jr. might have been a success instead of a bust. Tony Dungy says a shopping cart with a mannequin arm would have averaged 40 catches and five touchdowns a season as the tight end in a Manning offense (that’s better, statistically than Anthony Fasano, by the way). Belichick’s drafts haven’t been very good since 2007, and he hasn’t won a playoff game in three years, but you can live off Tom Brady for a while the way Beinfest lived off Beckett and 2003.
Brady was taken in the sixth round, and Pioli, the former Pats GM, used to keep a picture on his desk. The photo was of the player the Patriots drafted the round before Brady, a player who wound up never playing a down in the league. You wouldn’t remember the player’s name, which is the point.
Pioli kept that picture on his desk to remind himself how smart he isn’t.
Beinfest isn’t dumber than he was in 2003. He has less money and less luck and fewer healthy players but not less vision. He just never had the ability we assigned him back when the scoreboard and standings and trophy reaffirmed our belief that he might.
He didn't mention Cabrera was a Dombrowski guy. It's also too premature to judge the Buck signing.
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