It's Hard to Find a Stupid GM

While there are plenty of baseball fans and writers allergic to the new ideas of the sabermetric movement, there aren't any general managers left in that camp. They can't afford to be; they'll get their clocks cleaned by their more sophisticated competitors.

That one fact explains why Nelson Cruz spit the bit by declining the Rangers' qualifying $14.1 million offer to enter the free agent sweepstakes.

Cruz was banking on at least one GM salivating over his big bat (123 OPS+, primarily because he slugs 34 homers per 162 games) and inking him to a fat deal. 

He may instead be firing his agent. Cruz waited out the market until pitchers and catchers reported and settled on a one-year, $8 million pact that will allow Cruz to attempt a reset on his reputation following a 50-game PED suspension.

But that's not what cost Cruz his lottery ticket. Smart brass did. 

General managers are no longer chipmunks reacting to every shiny bauble. All 32 GMs looked beyond the home runs and saw a pile of mediocrity. Cruz is 33 and won't be younger next year. He makes a lot of outs. (OBP under .330 each of last three years.) He has batted in a friendly home park outside Dallas. He's a DH in right field clothing. Signing him requires the loss of a first-round draft pick.

Not many clubs are lacking in immobile semi-slugging defensive liabilities, and if they are, they can get 90% of Cruz's value for half the cost and keep their draft picks while they're at it. So Nelson Cruz's market value, which he and his agent pegged at somewhere above $14.1 million, turned out to be $8 million, and only then with an asterisk.

The Orioles could sign Cruz only because three conditions existed simultaneously. First, they had a help wanted sign on the DH slot. Second, Camden Yards, like The Ballpark, inflates offensive stats, so the O's could offer Cruz a chance at rehabilitation under sympathetic conditions.

Maybe most importantly, Baltimore already spent its first round pick on Ubaldo Jimenez, meaning the pricetag on a Cruz singing dropped to a #2 pick. That's a significant difference that allowed them to offer Cruz more than other teams could. 

Nelson Cruz is out $6.1 million because teams no longer see a player who batted .266 with 27 homers and 76 RBI in just 109 games. They see a defensive albatross worth two wins-a-year and headed in the wrong direction. 

Perhaps Cruz should make his case to a sabermetric-averse baseball writer. He'd have a chance at three years/$40 million with them. 

Catching Up . . . Awards, Goodbye Brian McCann, So Long Turner Field

Baseball events have continued apace despite a Braindrizzling hiatus. How can that be? Perhaps Joe Posnanski kept things afloat in the interim.

The Cy Young Awards were announced this week. There's not a whole lot of room for debate on Clayton Kershaw or Max Scherzer. Kershaw led the planet in ERA, and that includes Little League. Scherzer's 21-3 record and nearly six runs of support per start don't accrue to his credit, but he shouldn't be penalized for them either. Scherzer gets the prize because he dominated AL batters to the tune of a nifty 2.90 ERA, 240 strikeouts in 214 innings, and a best-in-class .97 WHIP.

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The same for Rookie of the Year awards. The trophy would have gone to Yasiel Puig in almost any other year. He punched balls all over the yard, 60% better than league average, and added dynamite to a moribund Dodger offense when he arrived. In years when such luminaries as Geovany Soto, Jason Jennings, Angel Berroa and Bobby Crosby earned top honors, Puig would have run away. Sadly for him, his freshman season coincided with Jose Fernandez's, which awoke ghosts of Fernandomania en route to a 12-6, 2.19 with more whiffs than frames pitched. 

In the AL, Wil Myers and his .293/.354/.478 in slightly more than half a season was the pretty clear choice over shortstop Jose Iglesias and a couple of nice pitchers. In all, not much to complain about.

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The MVP Awards went as expected to Andrew McCutchen and Miguel Cabrera. Both were excellent choices. That Cabrera wasn't the best choice doesn't change the fact that he had another  MVP-caliber season. It's difficult to be disappointed when a great candidate, the second-best of the league's 600 players, secures the honor. It's easy to be disappointed that Major League baseball writers don't know the difference between a great hitter and a great player, and can't fathom how one player's value isn't dependent on the performances of his teammates, but if being disappointed in baseball writers were a virus, we'd all have a permanent case of Ebola.

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You probably heard that teams made $14.1 million qualifying offers to 13 players, every one of which was declined. This is a ritual dance carried out by GMs and players under the new collective bargaining agreement. The players are now free agents who may seek multi-year deals. The teams may or may not want the players back but they will receive compensation draft picks if their former player is signed elsewhere.

Let's take the case of Braves backstop Brian McCann. The Georgia native is leaving by mutual decision, a net benefit for both him and the team even if he inks a five-year, $12 million/year deal with a catcher-starved franchise. (Hello Yankees! By the way, $12 mil is going to be cat pee compared to what McCann commands.) That serves McCann, who at 29 is headed into his decline years, but would guarantee the McCann family $60 million, rather than $14.1 million. It serves the good people of Atlanta -- or Marietta -- because the Braves have cheaper options and serious budget constraints. Leading the parade to replace the seven-time All-Star is Evan Gattis, whose above-average hitting comes with a half-million-dollar price tag and whose value is much greater behind the plate than in left field, where he attempted to hide in 2013. In addition, Atlanta would receive a first round supplemental pick from the signing team.

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Speaking of the Braves, they've flipped Turner Field into the trashcan after just 17 years, like it's a disposable lighter. Shame on the the various entities (which included NBC and the Atlanta Olympic Authority) for paying the massive retrofit costs to turn Centennial Olympic Stadium into Turner Field without requiring the Braves to sign a long-term lease.

The franchise and its new hosts, suburban Cobb County, claim the new home will be a "public-private partnership." This is code for an arrangement in which the public pays the bill and the team reaps the benefits.

In most "public-private" arrangements around sports stadiums, municipalities foot the bill and then lend their borrowing authority to the team for a portion of the costs. The team repays its loan at a discounted rate because the bonds are low-interest and tax-free. The municipality restricts its future borrowing ability for things like schools, hospitals, sewer systems and infrastructure that teams regularly complain about. 

Many econometric studies have demonstrated that even after accounting for all the possible spending resulting from relocated sports teams, municipalities rarely earn back the value of their investments in stadiums unless those edifices are key cogs in new downtown development. Baseball teams are relatively smal businesses whose payrolls generally leave the state from November through March. The stadiums lay empty roughly 250 days-a-year and their use often generates as many costs for the city as tax income, all while the bonds demand repayment.

So the Braves will begin play in their third home in 21 years when they move to Marietta while the Red Sox have competed in the Fens for more than a century.