Mack’s Morning Report – 11/26 – Johnny Peralta, Garrett Jones, Charley, Best Roster Core

 

There isn’t that much on the agenda this morning. I’ll have the OF Organizational Report at noon and Reese Kaplan’s weekly column posts up at 10am.

 

One more thing on the Jhonny Peralta deal. John Heyman pointed out that Peter Bourjos was thrilled with the deal and said that St. Louis was always his first choice. One scout said that the Cards are a “players magnet”. This is an example of what I keep saying about how the whole free agent process works against teams like the Marlins and the Mets. No agent wants their players associated with organizations that are owned by bad baseball people and are going nowhere in the near future or smaller market teams where their clients won’t get their proper exposure.

Add to this Buster Olney’s comments this morning:

Buster Olney ‏@Buster_ESPN  - Mariners are said to be targeting Nelson Cruz and Carlos Beltran. A major question looms: Will elite free agents seriously consider Seattle?

Their age is usually in the higher range of players of this game and this time in their career usually represent the last big contract they can potentially sign. Free agency doesn’t play into Sandy Alderson and the Mets’ strength. Developing from within (the slow process) and trading does.

 

I saw that the Pirates released 1B-OF Garrett Jones. On the surface he seems like a viable candidate to add to the Mets’ glut at first, but a second look shows that over his last five seasons, he had a .256 batting average with 100 homers in 677 games. But he contributed a combined 1.6 WAR over the last four seasons after having a 3.2 mark as a rookie (15-HRs, .233 last year in 144-G). His currently projected salary after arbitration is around $5.3mil and he will play 2014 as a 32-year old. This just looks like another, older version of Ike Davis to add to the mix.

 

By the way, I heard from ‘Charley’. It seems he does all his online work from his Apple phone which, he says, is incompatible with the Blogger site. Thus, after countless attempts, he has given up and can no longer leave comments on our site. He said to say hello and wants everyone to know he’s still out there reading everything we write about here. Sorry to lose a faithful follower

Mets tickets -

Lou DePaoli, the Mets Chief Revenue Officer, said the there are currently 5,000,000 people who identify as being a Mets fan, according to Scarborough research. DePaoli talked by phone Monday night with a group of Mets fans and media. According to DePaoli, the team’s marketing strategy has shifted to be more weekend and family focused, based on 10,000 survey responses. Also, while regular-season, single-game tickets historically went on sale after Jan. 1, he found in Pittsburgh that when moving ticket sales to November – though there was rarely a big burst in early buying – it allowed for more time to buy tickets before the holidays. http://metsblog.com/metsblog/mets-chief-revenue-officer-talks-tickets-promotional-strategy/

 

Jared Diamond –

If the Mets have proven anything, it's this: Size doesn't matter. Big payroll, small payroll—what's the difference? The Mets are awful either way. No franchise has a longer current streak of consecutive losing seasons than the Mets, who have averaged fewer than 75 wins a year since this run of futility began in 2009. They couldn't win with a bloated payroll that approached $150 million back in 2011, and they can't win now with a payroll that is $50 million smaller. At this point, the Mets still have obvious holes in the outfield, at shortstop, in the starting rotation and in the bullpen. What's worse, they don't appear to have the financial wherewithal to fill them. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304281004579220100127683722

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Ranking the Major League Rosters
As mentioned above, I ran a Core Wins analysis for every team in baseball. I then ranked them in each of the three categories: (1) the total number of Core Players; (2) the total number of Core Players who were pitchers; and (3) Core Win Differential (the difference between a team’s aggregate Core Wins and underlying WARP, thereby isolating the value of additional player “wins” from “core”-type players). I then averaged each team’s ranking in each category to provide my overall rankings of the best roster cores in baseball. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=22309



Figure 1: Best Roster Cores, Ranked

Team	Core Players	Core Pitchers	Pos. CW / Pos. WARP Differential	Core Roster Strength
Cardinals	8	4	58	1
Braves	8	2	47	2
Rockies	6	2	40	3
Indians	6	1	41	4
Rangers	6	2	31	5
Nationals	5	1	41	6
Angels	4	1	48*	7
Pirates	5	1	38	8
Tigers	7	5	24	9
Dodgers	6	3	25	10
Giants	4	1	37	11
Reds	6	1	30	11
Mets	4	2	31	11
Rays	4	1	35	14
Brewers	5	0	37	15
Dbacks	3	1	32	16
Marlins	3	1	32	16
Phillies	3	2	23	18
Mariners	3	1	28	19
White Sox	2	2	26	20
Athletics	3	0	33	20
Orioles	4	0	29	22
Blue Jays	4	0	25	23
Royals	3	0	30	24
Padres	2	1	18	25
Red Sox	3	0	18	26
Cubs	3	0	15	27
Twins	2	0	23	28
Astros	2	0	22	29
Yankees	0	0	-3	30
MEDIAN	4	1	31