davearm2

step 1. Are you sure about that? -- snipped out lots of quotes that back up #1 -- Surely you can't be oblivious to how deeply the "Hendry wastes money" theme runs around here. surely you can't pretend to believe that's the only thing people have against Hendry. I don't, and haven't.

No, I don't really think you're correctly stating what it is that people want. Ok then where'd I jump the tracks: Chorus: "Hendry wastes too much money so we need a new GM." Davearm: "Hendry doesn't spend differently or less effectively than other big-market teams." Tim: "All big-market teams waste money." Davearm: "So the big-market thing is the problem, not the GM." Tim: "Wrong." Davearm: :confused: there is absolutely no way that you are this dense. no [expletive] way. I'm neither dense nor obtuse. But I can recognize and illustrate the logical flaws being espoused here. The best, and perhaps only way to avoid wasting money is to operate your club like the Marlins have. So don't get on Hendry for his foolish spending unless you would prefer that alternative, because all big-market teams have a few expensive, high-profile screwups on their resume. It goes with the territory.

USA Today's salary database. http://content.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salaries/default.aspx I had to extract them one year at a time, but that was no biggie.

No, I don't really think you're correctly stating what it is that people want. Ok then where'd I jump the tracks: Chorus: "Hendry wastes too much money so we need a new GM." Davearm: "Hendry doesn't spend differently or less effectively than other big-market teams." Tim: "All big-market teams waste money." Davearm: "So the big-market thing is the problem, not the GM." Tim: "Wrong." Davearm: :confused: step 1. Are you sure about that? Surely you can't be oblivious to how deeply the "Hendry wastes money" theme runs around here.

No, I don't really think you're correctly stating what it is that people want. Ok then where'd I jump the tracks: Chorus: "Hendry wastes too much money so we need a new GM." Davearm: "Hendry doesn't spend differently or less effectively than other big-market teams." Tim: "All big-market teams waste money." Davearm: "So the big-market thing is the problem, not the GM." Tim: "Wrong." Davearm: :confused:

Davearm is the one who brought $/win into this to show that Hendry is doing a decent job. Rob made a correction (and a valid one, btw). You questioned whether that would make the small market teams look artificially better (they're better using the average analysis in addition to the marginal analysis, btw). I pointed out why small market teams ARE better from an efficiency standpoint. The only one who is using any of this to justify anything is davearm. I'm not justifying anything. I'm just dispelling the misconception that Hendry's spending has been either more prolific or less efficient per win than other big-market teams around baseball. This notion that Hendry's constantly throwing away good money after bad just simply is not supported by the data. No, your data doesn't really say that. It means he's been around as efficient as the other top 10 spending teams, who also may have a habit of wasting lots of money. OK then, so apparently what folks really want is not a new GM, but rather for the Cub to no longer be a big-market team, since big-market teams inherently waste lots of money.

Davearm is the one who brought $/win into this to show that Hendry is doing a decent job. Rob made a correction (and a valid one, btw). You questioned whether that would make the small market teams look artificially better (they're better using the average analysis in addition to the marginal analysis, btw). I pointed out why small market teams ARE better from an efficiency standpoint. The only one who is using any of this to justify anything is davearm. I'm not justifying anything. I'm just dispelling the misconception that Hendry's spending has been either more prolific or less efficient per win than other big-market teams around baseball. This notion that Hendry's constantly throwing away good money after bad just simply is not supported by the data.

I'm not trying to support Hendry other than the fact that some of the suppositions about how easy his job should have been are probably incorrect. He didn't walk into a great situation and he didn't have this massive payroll advantage for his entire tenure. It would have been an amazing GM job to completely overhaul the offense (which is what was needed because when he got the team the offense was both not that good and the only good players were aging quickly) and have the team rebuilt to have them solidly in the playoffs during 05/06. Hendry did do a decent job of rebuilding that offense, but he also destroyed the one thing the Cubs had going for them when he took the job by hiring Baker and letting him destroy the young arms. That led to the terrible seasons in those two years. Since then, he's done a mediocre job of spending money and building a team. There have been some extenuating circumstances, but he still has plenty of reasons to lose his job. He's easily replaceable. But he hasn't done such a horrible job that it should be a no brainer that he loses his job either (we've seen several GM's around the country that are that bad). He's just one of those guys in the middle tier of GM's who is going to lose his job one day because he hasn't done enough. Hendry has to take the heat for turning a 97-win team into an 83-win team with an offseason in which every significant acquisition he made blew up in his face. That's on him, no doubt. Whether he deserves to be fired for it is open to discussion. However his track record from 03-08 is pretty easy to defend, IMO. Not that he didn't make some mistakes those years too, but on balance he did a lot more good than bad, and that's reflected in the fact that he fielded contending teams in 4 of those 6 seasons.

The key word being "slowly". I'd say "potential" is the key word there.

LOL [expletive] no. You clearly haven't been paying attention to the potential juggernaut they've been slowly building I've been paying attention, thanks. A bug chunk of their "potential juggernaut" is in pitching prospects, and we know from history that a good share of those guys are likely to be exposed before reaching the HOF. Seriously, for a franchise that's produced Brian Roberts, Mike Mussina, Erik Bedard, and Nick Markakis in the last two decades, it's hard to get too carried away with the "juggernaut" talk.

Totally agree, the thing that sucks though is that Hendry's such an idiot and gave NTC to Zambrano, Soriano and DLee. I mean eventhough you can't move soriano because of his contract, you would still have the option to trade him by eating up salary. Zambrano is still young, so in the case of Zambrano, best case would be to hope he has a all star season and his value increases dramatically or just keep him as your ace for years to come. I'm not to in line with trading Z but i do feel you have to deal Theriot, Ramirez, DLee, Soriano. As a cubs fan i wouldn't be dissapointed if the cubs started to rebuild because i would be excited about seeing some youth here and seeing that youth grow up. Kind like what the Blackhawks have done. I bet your excitement would fade quickly with the realization that the Cubs don't have nearly the young talent the Hawks do. Take away Ramirez, DLee, Soriano and the Cubs start to look more like the Orioles or Royals than the Rays. I'd give my left nut to be in the Orioles position right now LOL [expletive] no.

Totally agree, the thing that sucks though is that Hendry's such an idiot and gave NTC to Zambrano, Soriano and DLee. I mean eventhough you can't move soriano because of his contract, you would still have the option to trade him by eating up salary. Zambrano is still young, so in the case of Zambrano, best case would be to hope he has a all star season and his value increases dramatically or just keep him as your ace for years to come. I'm not to in line with trading Z but i do feel you have to deal Theriot, Ramirez, DLee, Soriano. As a cubs fan i wouldn't be dissapointed if the cubs started to rebuild because i would be excited about seeing some youth here and seeing that youth grow up. Kind like what the Blackhawks have done. I bet your excitement would fade quickly with the realization that the Cubs don't have nearly the young talent the Hawks do. Take away Ramirez, DLee, Soriano and the Cubs start to look more like the Orioles or Royals than the Rays.

Opening day payroll and win totals during the Hendry years: $79,868,333 88 $90,560,000 89 $87,032,933 79 $94,424,499 66 $99,670,332 85 $118,345,833 97 $134,809,000 83 Thanks for the effort. That's pretty similar to what I was looking for, but I do note Goony's observation that the payroll is affected by other parts. Since Hendry took over the team, only once has he been able to match the level of production he got from the 2003 and 2004 team. That's not good. Especially if you take into consideration the significant increases. 50m doesn't buy what it used to. And speaking of 50m not buying what it used to, if you take the Yankees out of the equation, how much of an increase do the other 29 teams show over that same timeframe. I'm not referring to each team individually, but rather all of them combined. I sense that payrolls are smaller today than they were in 2003. They were handing out ridiculous contracts on just about every team between 2000 and 2003. While the Cubs have enjoyed a nice increase over that time, most other teams have reduced their payrolls. MLB opening day payrolls, by year ($Billions): 2003 $2.13 2004 $2.07 -3% 2005 $2.19 6% 2006 $2.33 6% 2007 $2.48 7% 2008 $2.69 8% 2009 $2.67 -1% MLB opening day payrolls, by year, net of NYY ($Billions): 2003 $1.98 2004 $1.89 -4% 2005 $1.98 5% 2006 $2.13 7% 2007 $2.29 7% 2008 $2.48 8% 2009 $2.46 -1% Baseball payrolls grew steadily through the middle of the decade, ending in 2009. They're definitely not smaller now than in 2003.

Not sure why they would spin him off to the cubs, dont know if there is anything the cubs have that the braves need. To me, the braves received a really crappy package for Vazquez. Vazquez was pretty much one of the top pitchers in the NL last year and in the Majors. I mean come on, cabrera, Dunn and a prospect for Vazquez and Logan? The Braves i would imagine could've done better than that. Looking at it and not considering the money, the yankees got much better while the braves got worse. Not considering the money misses the point entirely, though.

Opening day payroll and win totals during the Hendry years: $79,868,333 88 $90,560,000 89 $87,032,933 79 $94,424,499 66 $99,670,332 85 $118,345,833 97 $134,809,000 83

I agree with everything you said in this post except for the third paragraph and the last sentence, so I have to believe you aren't that far off on judgment of a GM's value. You just apparently have a lower expectation than most. Jim Hendry's work might be done on July 31st, but every other GM in baseball is still looking to improve their teams all year long. There is a waiver trade deadline that extends to August 31. There is non-stop evaluation of the talent that will be available to fill your offseason holes, as well as evaluating other team's players that could potentially become available in a trade. There is the constant need to find quality scouts and areas that need to be scouted. There are needs to fill vacant managerial and coaching postions with personnel that are better than what you have now. It's a big job. A lot of what I just mentioned got ignored this offseason because Hendry was too busy attempting to fix mistakes from the previous year. He wasn't acting in the best interests in the team in any way, shape or form. He was undoing last year's catastrophe. HIS catastrophe. Whether you want to admit that Bradley needed to be dumped off of this team or not, 2 months of the offseason was dedicated to just that rather than looking at what will improve this team moving forward. I expect more from my GM. If he was coming off a 95 win season, I might be able to be more forgiving. If he had a big chunk of payroll coming off the books where he was the one looking at guys like Halladay or Holliday, I could probably write off the disaster that was Milton Bradley. But, that's not the case. He made bad decisions. Several of them. Too many of them. It's time to go. As bad as we thought Kevin Towers was in San Diego, he was limited by a very restricted budget, yet he was able to perform at nearly the same level as Jim Hendry with 1/3 of the payroll. San Diego got rid of him because that wasn't good enough. They hired a Theo Epstein disciple. Whether that will work in San Diego is hard to say, because that's a completely different type of work environment than what Epstein has to work with. The only other team in the NL Central that even comes remotely close to the Cubs in payroll is the Cardinals. Every other team is restricting their budgets even more during tough economic times. Hendry's budget has grown during that time. 3 playoff appearances in 7 years is not even half the time, and it's completely unacceptable given the resources he has to work with, the teams he is competing against and the team that was handed to him at the very beginning. Obviously the GM works all year long on various aspects of the baseball operation. (And FWIW, by all accounts Hendry works as hard as any GM in baseball.) The point of the starting pitcher analogy is, the amount of improving a GM can do to THIS YEAR's major league roster is severely limited after July 31. Minor trades can be made during August. That's about it. Certainly the GM is not impacting the outcome of the World Series by his moves in September and October, and probably not in August either. But of course those are the most critical months on the field. The activities you mentioned (bolstering scouting, evaluating potential trade candidates, monitoring the upcoming free agent market, recruiting coaches, etc. etc.) are obviously important, but when those activities are undertaken in the late summer, they don't have any effect on the current year's team, or their chances of winning the WS. And FYI, the Astros have been pretty close to the Cardinals in payroll, although the larger point is taken.

IMO the two critical considerations with Silva are the health of his shoulder and his ability to throw his sinker effectively. The guy's demonstrated an ability to be a useful backend starter -- based on his FIP numbers, he's been roughly league average in 4 of his 5 full seasons starting (4.36 4.18 5.76 4.24 4.63). Plus, that's been in the AL, so a move to the NL should theoretically help him. Now there's definitely a strong possibility that Silva is a complete washout with the Cubs, and his upside is limited, but I think you're right that folks here have been too quick to write him off as completely worthless junk.

I'm sorry, but this is pretty useless. What you would need to do is calculate marginal payroll (actual payroll minus league minimum times 25) over marginal wins (actual wins minus how many games a replacement level team would win [depending on the definition, usually between 30-50 games... probably on the higher side of that now that BP has adjusted their silly idea of replacement level fielding.]). And for what it's worth, the last few studies I've seen done like that had the Cubs in last or next to last. Switching from average to marginal $/win is going to have a trivial impact on the results. You're just subtracting a fixed amount of $$$ from each team's payroll ($10M), and a fixed amount from each team's win total (I used 40). So each team's numerator and denominator get smaller by the same amount. That will generate larger magnitudes, but the relative change will be negligible. Anyway, here are the results done your way: Marginal $ per Marginal Win 1 New York Yankees $3.2M 2 Boston Red Sox $2.1M 3 New York Mets $2.6M 4 Los Angeles Angels $1.8M 5 Los Angeles Dodgers $2.0M 6 Chicago Cubs $2.1M 7 Seattle Mariners $2.3M 8 Atlanta Braves $1.8M 9 Philadelphia Phillies $1.7M 10 St. Louis Cardinals $1.6M As you can see, the Cubs rank about in the middle of the 10 highest-spending clubs using either method.

Judging a GM by WS trophies is about as valid as judging a starting pitcher by wins. Commonly the starting pitcher is out of the game after the 6th inning. What happens in the three innings after that is out of his hands. For all intents and purposes, a GM's roster-building work ends on July 31st. What happens in the three months after that is out of his hands. As Dexter explained, the playoffs are a crapshoot, so all you can ask of a GM is to get the team there and give them a chance to get hot and catch the breaks needed to win it all. Hendry isn't lighting the world on fire, but three postseason appearances in seven seasons is nothing to apologize for either.

My first thought when I saw that is, Marquis must be sick of working overtime (in October).

Minnesota is building a new publicly funded stadium, partly to raise revenue for Mauer's new contract. There's no way the Twins won't resign their local hero. The citizens wouldn't let his car get to the airport. Does Mauer get a vote?

FWIW, here are the 10 highest-spending clubs over the last 7 years, and how much they've spent per win. 1 New York Yankees $2.0M 2 Boston Red Sox $1.3M 3 New York Mets $1.5M 4 Los Angeles Angels $1.1M 5 Los Angeles Dodgers $1.2M 6 Chicago Cubs $1.2M 7 Seattle Mariners $1.2M 8 Atlanta Braves $1.1M 9 Philadelphia Phillies $1.0M 10 St. Louis Cardinals $1.0M As you can see, the efficiency with which the Cubs have turned dollars into wins is right in line with the other big-payroll teams.

He's been the GM for 7 seasons and during that time the team has been no better than the Florida Freaking Marlins. Who cares about giving him credit for the occasional good get, he sucks at putting together good baseball teams with any sort of consistency despite having more than enough financial advantage to do so with what should be relative ease. I think if you were to take an objective look around the league, you'd see that most big-market franchises have struggled at putting together good baseball teams with any sort of consistency. The Yankees and Red Sox certainly have been perennial contenders, and so have the Angels. But the other 9 teams in the top 12 of MLB payroll in 2009 were the Mets Cubs Tigers Phillies Astros Dodgers Mariners Braves and White Sox. Rounding out the top half were the Giants Indians and Brewers. Which of those teams have *consistently* outperformed the Cubs during Hendry's 7 seasons? At that point it depends on how you measure performance, because none are no-brainers. The point being, you talk about taking a large payroll and using it to build consistently-winning ballclubs as if it's a simple task that any halfway competent GM could easily do. That's simply not true. Take that list and pare it down by comparing how many GM's have kept their jobs during that same time period from the teams you listed. The remainder of the people on your list should be fired just like Hendry. What this post implies is that outside of a few guys, no GMs have been able to achieve the consistent, sustained success that folks are demanding of Hendry. Hey maybe it is time for a change. I'm not particularly resistant to that notion. Just don't be surprised if the results produced by Hendry's successor aren't any better, just like has happened elsewhere.

He's been the GM for 7 seasons and during that time the team has been no better than the Florida Freaking Marlins. Who cares about giving him credit for the occasional good get, he sucks at putting together good baseball teams with any sort of consistency despite having more than enough financial advantage to do so with what should be relative ease. I think if you were to take an objective look around the league, you'd see that most big-market franchises have struggled at putting together good baseball teams with any sort of consistency. The Yankees and Red Sox certainly have been perennial contenders, and so have the Angels. But the other 9 teams in the top 12 of MLB payroll in 2009 were the Mets Cubs Tigers Phillies Astros Dodgers Mariners Braves and White Sox. Rounding out the top half were the Giants Indians and Brewers. Which of those teams have *consistently* outperformed the Cubs during Hendry's 7 seasons? At that point it depends on how you measure performance, because none are no-brainers. The point being, you talk about taking a large payroll and using it to build consistently-winning ballclubs as if it's a simple task that any halfway competent GM could easily do. That's simply not true.

The notion of trading Zambrano and Soriano (even if it's for nothing more than a PTBNL), then dumping Hendry and embarking on a full-fledged rebuild is a fascinating one. If they shed Z's and Soriano's contracts, after 2010 the Cubs would be virtually free of all their long-term, big $$$ commitments. All they'd have left on the books, not including their own arby guys, would be Dempster for 2 years, Fukudome for 1 year, and Ramirez for 1 year (assuming he didn't opt out), plus whatever they owe on Silva. For a team that can support a $140M payroll, that obviously creates a whole ton of available $$$ to spend on the 2011 free agent class. This roster could be vastly different in 12 or so months if they did this deal with the Yanks.