Free Advice for Brian Cashman - UPDATED

UPDATE: Dammit, it won't work. This whole idea is predicated on the idea that by shipping Rodriguez and cash to another club, the Yankees can avoid the baseball "luxury tax" on Rodriguez's salary. I double-checked baseball's Collective Bargaining Agreement, and here's what it says about "cash consideration:"

Cash Consideration: An assignor Club that pays cash consideration in lieu of assigning an unnamed player or to defray all or part of the salary obligation of the assignee Club for an assigned Player shall include such cash consideration in its Actual Club Payroll in the Contract Year for which the cash consideration is paid; provided, however, that any such cash consideration included as part of a Player assignment made during the 2016 Contract Year but not payable until the 2017 Contract Year shall be included in the assignor Club's 2016 Actual Club Payroll to the extent that the assignee Club does not have equivalent salary obligations under Player contracts obtained in the assignment in the 2017 championship season or beyond. Any cash consideration that is, pursuant to the previous sentence, included in the Actual Club Payroll of the payor Club shall be subtracted from the Actual Club Payroll of the payee club in the same Contract Year in which it is added to the payor Club's Actual Club Payroll.

Let's hack through that a bit. Substituting Yankees for assignor Club, another team for assignee Club, and Alex Rodriguez for an assigned Player and getting read of extraneous words and silly capitalizations, you get:

If the Yankees pay cash consideration to defray all or part of another club's salary obligation for Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees shall include such cash consideration in its payroll in the year in which the cash consideration is paid.

So if the Yankees, as I suggested, trade the Marlins Rodriguez and $64 million for a twentysomething position player and an Amazon gift card, they'll have to pay a luxury tax on the $64 million. No escaping it.

Sorry to get your hopes up, Brian.

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I'm serious about this.

The Yankees can and should trade Alex Rodriguez.

I figured this out while reading this post by Rob Neyer, in which he argues that Rodriguez will not play in a regular season game for the Yankees again. I had a hard time squaring that with this analysis of mine, in which I argued that his contract, guaranteeing him $61 million over the next three years, makes him un-tradeable. 

What makes Rodriguez particularly onerous for the Yankees, I pointed out, is baseball's "luxury tax." Teams with a payroll in excess of $189 million must pay the league 17.5% of the amount by which they exceed $189 million in the first year they're over that level. In the second consecutive year, it rises to 30%. In the third consecutive year, it rises to 40%. In the fourth and all subsequent consecutive years, it's 50%. (I keep saying consecutive because it resets if a team's payroll drops below $189 million for a season.) The Yankees are at the 50% level, having exceeded the luxury tax threshold since time immemorial. 

Rodriguez's contract pays him $21 million in 2015, $20 million in 2016, and $20 million in 2017. Assuming the Yankees' payroll stays above $189 million--a pretty safe assumption given that is was an estimated $258 million in 2014 without Rodriguez--they'll have to pay a 50% luxury tax on the $27.5 million average annual value of ten-year deal he signed after the 2007 season. (I mistakenly got that amount wrong in my post Tuesday. I've corrected it.) Last year, when Rodriguez was suspended, the Yankees withheld all of the $25 million due him but approximately $2.9 million. This year, they'll pay him not only the $21 million he's owed (along with, in all likelihood, a $6 million bonus for tying Willie Mays's career home run total of 660) but also $13.75 million ($27.5 million x 50%) in luxury tax. 

That's a lot of money for anyone, particularly a third baseman who turns 40 next year, missed all of last season, and played an average of 88 games per year in the three seasons before that, compiling an OK-but-not-great .269 batting average, .356 on base percentage, and .441 slugging percentage. That's basically Padres outfielder Seth Smith (.266/.367/.440). Seth Smith will earn $6 million in 2015. Alex Rodriguez, between his salary, likely bonus, and luxury tax, will cost the Yankees $40.75 million.

The salary's the injury, the luxury tax the insult. But the luxury tax doesn't hit all teams, of course. Last year, only the Dodgers and Yankees were above the $189 million payroll threshold, and only the Phillies, Tigers and Giants were within $50 million of it. The luxury tax is a non-issue for most teams.

So here's my idea: Trade Rodriguez and a ton of cash to a lower-payroll team. By a ton of cash, I'm thinking $64 million, which would be enough to cover all but $1 million per year of his $61 million salary and the $6 million Willie Mays bonus. (Rodriguez will also get $6 million bonuses for home run No. 714 tying Babe Ruth, 755 tying Hank Aaron, 762 tying Barry Bonds, and 763 passing Bonds, though those all seem a stretch, given that the last time he hit even 19 in a season was 2010.) In return, the Yankees could get, I don't know, a position player under the age of 30 and an Amazon gift card? It wouldn't have to be much. Sending Rodriguez and a big check would cost the Yankees, obviously, that big check, but it would save them $13.75 million in luxury tax payment in each of the next three years. That's $41.25 million, almost enough to cover the $45 million they still owe first baseman Mark Teixeira!

The question is who'd take Rodriguez. He's not exactly what you'd call a fan favorite. Playing him every day at third base probably lands him on the disabled list more than you'd like, so that rules out teams like the Phillies and Padres that got limited production from their third basemen. First base? That's been a perennial problem in Milwaukee, but they already have Ryan Braun, which probably puts them at the roster limit for players with long drug suspensions who get booed everywhere. Houston and Minnesota got minimal first base production, but they're committed to youth. The A's Brandon Moss had a down year but he's cheap and nine years younger than Rodriguez. Rodriguez is best suited for DH, but it's hard to see him with a team like Kansas City, which didn't get much production yet seems to be leaning toward re-signing free agent Billy Butler.

So I think the most logical finalists are:

• Mariners: DHs hit .190 last year, primary first baseman Logan Morrison can play the outfield.
• Pirates: Their problems at first base rival those of the Brewers; Pirate 1Bs hit .226 the past season.
• Rays: Tampa Bay DHs hit .229 in 2014 and the team is a little bit of the Oakland Raiders of baseball, willing to take on controversial players.
• Tigers: They have a huge hole at DH if they can't re-sign Victor Martinez.

But I'm going to pick none of them. Instead, I think the Yankees should send Alex Rodriguez and $64 million to the Miami Marlins. Here's why:

1. Mariners owner Jeffrey Loria really doesn't care what you, or anybody else, thinks.
2. Rodriguez is from the Miami area and if he has any kind of fan base, it's in south Florida. He paid for a $3.9 million renovation to the University of Miami's baseball stadium, now called Alex Rodriguez Park. 
3. The Marlins were last in the National League in attendance. If I'm right about Rodriguez drawing some fans to Miami, that's good. If I'm not, it's not like they have a lot to lose.
4. Miami's incumbent first baseman, Garrett Jones, is signed to a relatively cheap contract ($5 million in 2015) but he'll be 34 next June, he's hit just .240/.300/.415 with 30 homers over the past two seasons combined, and he's pretty useless against left-handed pitching (.197 lifetime average), so Rodriguez could either replace him or be a right-handed platoon partner/pinch hitter/DH in American League parks/sometime third baseman.

There's one potential problem here. Baseball's Commissioner can review and veto trades for cash. That famously happened in 1976, when A's owner Charlie Finley traded three stars for $3.5 million (pitcher Vida Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million and outfielder Joe Rudi and reliever Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox for $1 million each) and Commissioner Bowie Kuhn disallowed the trade. I don't recall any trade reversals since, but a deal such as this would draw a lot of scrutiny, as it would be a pretty transparent attempt by the Yankees to evade the luxury tax. But would new commissioner Rob Manfredi be willing to draw the ire of the league's most marketable franchise? I'm not saying he wouldn't--after seeing the Yankees get out of paying all but $2.9 million of Rodriguez's $25 million salary last year, a lot of teams would be legitimately steamed by a move like this--but it's not at all clear.

So go for it. Rodriguez and cash to the Marlins. Do it, Brian.

Reality Check: Game Seven

Tonight's the last game of the 2014 season. Does history tell us who's going to win?

Yesterday (I'm sorry I didn't read it until today), ESPN's Jayson Stark had a piece about how the Royals, as the home team for the last two games of the Series, have an advantage. Specifically, here are two of his datapoints:

Starting in 1982, the home team has gone 22-3 in Games 6 and 7. And yes, you read that right. We said 22-and-3. That's an .880 winning percentage. Which makes no mathematical sense at all. If you subtract those 25 games, the winning percentage of home teams in all other World Series games, including this year, is just .540. Amazing.No home team has lost a Game 7 in 35 years, since the Pirates won their last title in Baltimore. Since then, road teams have lost eight straight Game 7s.

Now, my purpose here isn't to call out Jayson Stark. He's a great journalist. His coverage of the game is passionate and humorous, and he's an old-school print journalist who's not afraid to bring on new concepts. His latest book is on my reading list. And the statistics he cited have the virtue of being, you know, correct.

However, they're also selective. True, the home team, since 1982, is 14-3 (after last night, 15-3) in World Series Game Six and 8-0 in Game Seven. But that's only since 1982. What happened before then?

• From 1905 (when the World Series became a best-of-seven tournament, excluding 1919-21, when it was best of nine) to 1982, the home team was 27-18 in Game Six.
• From 1905 to 1982, the home team was 10-18 in Game Seven. Won ten, lost eighteen.
• So from 1905 to 1982, the home team was an unimpressive 37-36 in Games Six and Seven.
• Adding that to the Stark's figures, the home team, in all of baseball history, is now 60-39 (.606 winning percentage) in Games Six and Seven, comprised of a 42-21 (.667) record in Game Six and just 18-18 (.500) in Game Seven.  

Did something significant happen in 1982 that changed the way the game's played, making the post-1982 record more relevant to today's game? We'd already gone to the modern bullpen: In 1982, reliever Bruce Sutter got a win and two saves for the champion Cardinals, while Brewers reliever Bob McClure had two losses and two saves. It was the tenth year of the designated hitter, so that wasn't a new thing, though the practice at the time was that the DH used was used throughout the Series in even-numbered years and not at all in odd-numbered years. (The current rule of using the DH only at the American League park began in 1986). It's hard to see that minor DH change making the home team suddenly invincible. Stadiums have gotten a little smaller (shorter fences) and the fields slower (grass replacing artificial turf), but that shouldn't change the home-field advantage. In short, the game didn't really change. So neither should the outcome of the last two games of the Series.

So in looking at tonight's game, I don't think it's any less accurate, nor less predictive, to say "the home team is 18-18 in Game Sevens" than it is that the home team's 9-0 in the past 35 years (8-0 since 1982, and a winner in 1982 as well), the last home team Game Seven loss being the Orioles to the Pirates in 1979.

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On another Game Seven topic, a friend asked me, "Rob, I'm looking game 7 starters and thinking to myself 'whatever happened to aces that pitched games 1,4,7?'" My quick answer was, "That went the way of the four-man rotation." Turns out there's more to it than that.

There have been, including this one, 37 World Series that went seven games. That means there have been 74 opportunities for a pitcher to start games 1, 4, and 7. That happened only 14 times, just 19% of the time: Boston's Smoky Joe Wood and the Giants' Jeff Tesreau in 1912 (the Giants' Christy Mathewson started games 2, 5, and 8--the second game was an 11-inning tie); Washington's Walter Johnson in 1925; Brooklyn's Joe Black in 1952; Pittsburgh's Vern Law in 1960; St. Louis's Bob Gibson in 1967 and 1968; the Mets' Jon Matlack and Oakland's Ken Holtzman in 1973; St. Louis's John Tudor in 1985; the Mets' Ron Darling in 1986; Minnesota's Frank Viola in 1987 and Jack Morris in 1991, and Arizona's Curt Schilling in 2001. The golden era was 1967-2001, when there were 13 Series that went seven games, and eight of them had a pitcher go in the first, fourth, and last games, but that's still only 35% of the total (nine pitchers, including two in 1973, divided by 26 teams).

Part of the reason for the infrequency is that the current pattern of two games, off day, three games, off day, two games didn't emerge until 1957. Still, there have been 23 seven-game series since then, and pitchers started 1-4-7 only ten times (22% of possible). Prior to 1957, there were seven pitchers who got three starts in a seven-game series, but they weren't in games 1, 4, and 7. Since then, there have been 18 such pitchers, including three pitchers in each of the 1962 and 1965 World Series and the Cardinals' Chris Carpenter in 2011.

But I was wrong about the four-man rotation. The only pitchers among those to have started at least 39 games in a 162-game season or 37 in a 154-game season--reasonable indicators of a four-man rotation--were Wood and Holtzman. (Black was a reliever who'd started only two games in the regular season when he was called upon to start three games in the 1952 Series.)

So I suppose the answer to the question is that aces pitching games 1, 4, and 7 was never really all that common in the first place.

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And one other Game Seven note: Yesterday on SiriusXM, Steve Sax was speculating on whether Madison Bumgarner might pitch in Games Six or Seven after throwing 117 pitches in a complete game shutout on Sunday. Sax said that Bumgarner could, or even start one of the games. After all, said Sax, Babe Ruth, when a pitcher, would sometimes start both games of a doubleheader. 

Babe Ruth started 147 games in his career. On Tuesday, July 11, 1916, he started the first game of a doubleheader against the White Sox. The box score shows that he pitched to one batter and didn't record an out. I assume he was pulled after just a pitch or two. (The story is that the Red Sox starter that day, Rube Foster, wasn't ready for the start of the game, so Ruth threw some pitches while Foster completed his warmup.) Anyway, he started the second game as well, pitching a complete game in a 3-1 Red victory. That's the only game in which he started both games of a doubleheader, and it really doesn't count. 

Kiner's Korner Kloses

Ralph Kiner has died at age 91. People remember him as a longtime Mets TV announcer, but in his day, he was a devastating hitter.

Kiner played from 1946 to 1955, a fairly short career. Here are the leaders in various batting categories during those years:
    Home Runs                Runs Scored    
1. Ralph Kiner      369    1. Stan Musial    1,178
2. Stan Musial      289    2. Pee Wee Reese    978
3. Ted Williams     267    3. Ralph Kiner      971
4. Gil Hodges       239    4. Ted Williams     921
5. Hank Sauer       238    5. Jackie Robinson  886

    Runs Batted In           Slugging Percentage
1. Stan Musial    1,107    1. Ted Williams    .642
2. Del Ennis      1,029    2. Stan Musial     .595
3. Ralph Kiner    1,015    3. Duke Snider     .552
4. Ted Williams     955    4. Ralph Kiner     .548
5. Yogi Berra       898    5. Ted Kluszewski  .511

    On Base Percentage       On Base Plus Slugging
1. Ted Williams    .490    1. Ted Williams   1.131
2. Stan Musial     .431    2. Stan Musial    1.027
3. Ferris Fain     .424    3. Ralph Kiner     .946
4. Elmer Valo      .414    4. Duke Snider     .935
5. Jackie Robinson .411    5. Larry Doby      .892
6. Ralph Kiner     .398

In 1951, Kiner batted .309 and led the league in home runs, runs scored, walks, extra base hits, on base percentage, slugging percentage, and on base plus slugging. He was second in total bases and runs batted in. He finished tenth in the MVP vote. Among those ahead of him was his teammate, Murry Dickson, a pitcher who went 20-16 despite a worse-than-average ERA.

Why doesn't he get more recognition for being a great hitter? I think there are four reasons:

1. He played at the same time as Ted Williams and Stan Musial. As you can see, they completely dominated the mid-40s to the mid-50s, even though Williams missed all but 43 games in 1952-53 when he served in the Korean War.
2. As I noted, he played for only ten years. He was just 32 when back problems forced him into retirement.
3. He didn't hit for a high batting average: .279 lifetime, over .300 only three times. People focus on batting average, even though, as I've shown, on base percentage, slugging percentage, and on base plus slugging are all truer measures of run generation.
4. He played for some bad ball clubs. From 1946 to 1952, he was with the Pirates, who had one winning season during that span and a remarkable 42-112 record in 1952. In 1953 he was traded from the last-place Pirates to the second-to-last-place Cubs, who were 7th in 1954 as well. He ended his career with a good Indians team in 1955 that finished three behind the Yankees. He never played in the postseason.

He led the NL in homers every year from 1946 to 1952. Nobody's matched that streak. He hit 51 homers in 1947 and 54 in 1949, making him one of only five clean players to top 50 twice (Ruth, Griffey, Mantle, Mays).

As I said, people remember Kiner as a TV announcer. They should remember him as a great hitter as well.

Carlos Beltran and an Old-Timer

The ninth and tenth most prolific home run hitters in postseason baseball history:
                G  PA  AB  R  H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS  BA   OBP  SLG
Carlos Beltran 37 164 136 41 49 11  0 16  31 11  0 .360 .463 .794
Babe Ruth      41 167 129 37 42  5  2 15  33  4  3 .326 .467 .744

Yes, I know. Ruth put up his numbers in 41 World Series games, while Beltran has never appeared in the Series - his 37 games comprise a wild card game, 16 Divisional Series games, and 20 League Championship Series games. And, of course, Mets fans will never view him as clutch.

But still. Postseason is still postseason.