In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a Red Sox fan by any means. Despite having grown up in Northern New Jersey, right across the river from New York City, I am, in fact, a diehard fan of the Kansas City Royals, for reasons I will not get into in this post. I am also an avowed Yankee hater, and my hatred of the Evil Empire is second only to my love of the Royals. If I can't see the Royals win the World Series (and for the foreseeable future, that seems like it will be the case) then I at least want to see the Yankees not win the World Series. I want to see them go 0-162. I want to see them not reach base once over the course of an entire season. Aside from the Royals' successes, which are few and far between, I enjoy nothing more than the Yankees' failures, for better or worse. In this regard, then, while I am not a Red Sox fan in a technical sense, I feel some connection with the team as they are the Yankees' rivals, and their success usually means the Yankees' failure.
This offseason, one of my happiest moments was seeing the Yankees offer a positively ludicrous contract that essentially boils down to four years at $56 million plus incentives for Derek Jeter. For a guy who will be 37 next year, whose bat speed and foot speed have gotten markedly worse and who hit career lows in batting average, OBP, and SLG last year, that is an absurd amount of money, and likely at least $30 million more than he would have gotten on the open market. Granted, it was an economic quirk; because of the Yankee fanbase's loyalty to "The Captain" and their proclivity toward buying tickets and merchandise because of him, Jeter was essentially worth a lot of money only to the Yankees, but he was worth a lot to them. So one imagines that even if this contract makes New York worse on the field, they at least have a chance to earn much of it back by selling a lot of #2 jerseys. This didn't stop the rest of the baseball-loving world, i.e. the Yankee haters, from crowing about the complete waste of money the Yankees had just committed. Many of those fans, of course, were Red Sox fans.
It positively baffles me, then, that so many Red Sox fans were celebrating a deal made just this week wherein Boston gave Carl Crawford the second highest average yearly salary for any outfielder in baseball history (behind Manny Ramirez, whose deal barely counts because it was $22.5 million per year for only two years with the Dodgers). Crawford got 7 years for a total of $142 million from Boston.
One thing to make clear is this: Carl Crawford makes the Red Sox a better team. But that means surprisingly little when dealing with baseball contracts and their relative sizes. I have no doubt that the Yankees are a better team with Derek Jeter at shortstop, even with his deflated numbers, than they would be with Ramiro Pena, who OPSed .504 in 167 plate appearances last year; however, that doesn't mean they should have paid the premium they did, as they would have also been better if they had signed, for example, Juan Uribe, who the Dodgers nabbed for 3 years, $21 million. Unlike the NBA, where one big splurge on a guy like Amar'e Stoudemire can turn perennial losers like the Knicks into a team that looks able to go deep into the playoffs, baseball is a game of prudent spending, as teams are large and no one player can make that kind of difference. That's why one shouldn't care about whether a player makes a baseball team "better," but whether he makes them better relative to his contract size, since teams need to parse their money out over 25 roster spots in order to build a truly competitive club.
Crawford is expected to hit leadoff this season for the Sox. Last year, Boston's Marco Scutaro led off 134 games, and for the season he hit .275/.333/.388, hardly impressive numbers. By comparison, Crawford hit .307/.356/.495 for the Rays last season; obvious improvements all around. Offensively, few would argue against the notion of Crawford making Boston better. But take a look at the differences between Crawford's stat line and Scutaro's:
.032/.023/.107
The most eye-popping difference to most is in slugging percentage. Crawford belted a career-high 19 homers last year to go along with his 30 doubles, giving him relatively impressive power numbers for a leadoff man. But the most eye-popping number to me is the one in the middle: on-base percentage. That is the number in which Crawford least improves over Scutaro, besting him by only 23 points. While I (hopefully) don't need to extol the virtues of on-base percentage, as it has been done quite articulately by many before me, it bears mentioning that OBP is chiefly important for players at the top of the order. If Crawford had been on the Red Sox last year, his .356 OBP would have ranked only fifth among regular starters, behind Kevin Youkilis (.411), David Ortiz (.370), Dustin Pedroia (.367), and Adrian Beltre (.365). Jed Lowrie, who missed the first several months of the year, also had an OBP of .381 in 55 games to end the season. Two other Red Sox had OBPs at a nearby .351: Victor Martinez and much-maligned left fielder Daniel Nava. Yes, Crawford would have had a positive impact on this lineup had he replaced Scutaro at the top, but statistically he may have had just as great an impact-- and arguably a greater impact, if Baseball Prospectus' theory of setting the lineup in descending order of OBP is to be believed-- if he had batted sixth, behind those four everyday players and Lowrie. Over $20 million per year for a player whose value arguably would have been greater in the bottom half of the lineup?
But something to also consider is that while Crawford's OBP last year would have placed him behind several others in the Red Sox lineup, that OBP, like many of his stats last year, exceeded his career numbers. Granted, it was not a career high, as he had an OBP of .364 the prior year. And it's certainly reasonable that Crawford is simply hitting his prime as an offensive player; he was only 28 last season, after all. But this contract will take him through age 35, an age where he will almost certainly be in decline. This isn't a problem if you're signing a guy like Alex Rodriguez, whose "decline" still means putting up numbers that most other players would be envious of. But the best year in Carl Crawford's career, 2010, saw him put up an OPS of only .851, 35th among regular major leaguers last year. There is no reason to believe that will rise significantly. Another touted aspect of Crawford's game is his speed on the basepaths; unfortunately, this is typically one of the first skills to diminish as a player ages, so Crawford will likely not be a huge stolen base threat for the bulk of this contract. Even if you took Crawford's career highs in every category, he'd have a line of .315/.364/.495 (.859 OPS). It seems reasonable to say that when giving out a massive contract, you should look at the best a player has ever done and decide whether you'd pay that amount of money every year for that exact production; if you wouldn't, then the contract would just be for what you hope he can do, not what you know he can do. We know Crawford can be a very above-average hitter. But the Red Sox are hoping he can be a $20 million hitter. When the absolute best case scenario is that a hitter merely earns his contract, and there is virtually no chance he exceeds his projected value, the contract is a pretty poor investment.
But the other aspect of Crawford's game that has been getting a lot of attention is his defense. Among regular LF last year, Crawford had a UZR of 18.5, second in the ML behind the Yankees' Brett Gardner. The eye test vindicates him as well; he is clearly a very good, if not great, fielder. The problem is that he was signed by the one team whose home stadium could serve to severely undercut his defensive abilities. The Green Monster, Boston's famous scoreboard that hulks over left field, has long served to alter the way left fielders must play in Fenway Park. Hits that would be outs in many other stadiums turn into doubles. Balls play off the wall in a manner unlike any other wall in any other stadium. If anything, the Green Monster tends to mitigate the abilities of left fielders and bring them closer to neutrality. Jason Bay, a notoriously poor left fielder, had his best UZR season (2.0) in 2009 playing left field in Fenway. Manny Ramirez's fielding numbers during his time with Boston are unreliable since he clearly stopped caring in the outfield and had a big enough bat to keep himself valuable, but the effect that the Monster has is visible when visiting left fielders find themselves neutralized by the wall's odd effects. Given Fenway's ability to neutralize left fielders, Boston would be better served going after a power hitting LF whose value is diminished by his poor fielding; that way, they could spend defensively in more important areas and get an offensive power who wouldn't cost them much in the field. The approach they took with Crawford doesn't quite sync up with Theo Epstein's usual Moneyball-esque tendencies.
Finally, people seem to be making a lot of the economic impact of this deal as it relates to the Yankees, namely that it will force them to offer the moon to Cliff Lee so the Yankees can say they made a big splash in the market this winter. This is somewhat odd considering the Yankees were already offering the moon to Lee and probably would have offered him seven years and a ridiculous salary regardless of whether they signed Crawford. The more alarming aspect of this deal for the Red Sox is what it will do to them over the next few winters. Prince Fielder, Jose Reyes, Jimmy Rollins, Aramis Ramirez and Mark Buehrle are a few of the players who will likely be free agents next year. Will they have the same capacity to bid against the Yankees with Crawford's contract on the books? This is why a player has to be a true franchise cornerstone to warrant this kind of money; even for a wealthy team like the Red Sox, it makes it a lot more difficult to buy another such cornerstone in the future.
Of course, maybe Crawford will be the sole difference between a World Championship this year and not, and in that case, one could argue that the Red Sox did spend appropriately because they bought the player that helped them to achieve their ultimate goal. But it seems unlikely. Adrian Gonzales will undoubtedly have a much greater impact on the Red Sox lineup than Crawford, and the Sox could have spent a lot less to get a guy whose talents would have resembled Crawford's for a fraction of the cost. Perhaps they paid a premium for a big name, and perhaps that's all Boston fans really want, but on the field, it will be nearly impossible for Crawford to ultimately live up to this contract.
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