Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing: The Soriano Trade

"Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'. You gotta have somethin', if you wanna be with me."
Billy Preston, 1975

Reports out of everywhere but the Walterboro Pennysaver say that the Yankees will trade minor league pitcher Corey Black to the Cubs for a return of Alfonso Soriano to pinstripes. New York will pick up the remainder of this year's gargantuan salary and Chicago will cover all of next year's. That means Soriano doesn't count against the Yankees' payroll number when determining the luxury tax in 2014.

The word "blecch" comes to mind. Or perhaps "yuck." Or "blahhhhh." 

The Cubs could have flipped Soriano for some real prospects at the end of last season. Coming off an .821 OPS hitting year with newfound respect in the clubhouse, the 36-year-old Dominican had some value. Sure, he's roadkill in left field, but a weak-hitting AL team could have used him, assuming the Cubs would eat most of the salary.

But at age 37, his walk rate is back in the sewer, he's dipped below average as a hitter at his position and he's losing his wheels. A 70-point decline in OPS with the arrow pointing in the wrong direction has sapped Soriano of much of his trade value. And so the Cubs must pay $18 million for the privilege of watching Corey Black throw minor league middle relief. Baseball Prospectus says he projects as a seventh-inning guy. That's not much return for a player approaching 400 home runs and 300 steals.

The dearth of right-handed hitting in the Bronx has been well documented. Soriano has popped 10 homers in the last month; all of Yankeedom, eight. Righty batters have socked one home run for the Bombers since June 5th.  NYY's right-handed batting roster has the worst OPS in MLB by 30 points. And so on.

This could explain why Soriano might help the Yankees this year, but . . . do what? They have by far outperformed their ability as a team and are less likely to be relevant in October than Anthony Weiner. The injuries, the ARod soap opera, the careers in twilight, the empty farm system -- this team needs to retool, not buy old tools and reuse them.  At age 38 next year, Soriano will cause car wrecks in the field, but on the Yankees, with a plethora of aging DHs, that's where he must play. A team that ought to be cashing in expiring contracts and building for the future has saddled itself with yet another declining veteran.

In sum, this trade is a desperate move by both parties who each seem to have lost an opportunity in the bargain. Neither side sacrificed anything of value, but neither received anything of value either. Billy Preston would be proud.

More and More and More Playoffs: Blecch

My newspaper tells me that tonight's NFL tilt between Atlanta and Detroit will help determine whether the Falcons clinch home field advantage on the road to the Super Bowl. The implication is that the contest is significant for this reason despite decades of experience.

In fact, tonight's clash is a near total irrelevance. The last two Super Bowl champs staggered to 9-7 records and slipped into the playoffs in the last week before eliminating all those 13-3 and 12-4 behemoths with home field advantage.

In fact, in American professional sports today simply making the playoffs is the entire goal. Period. After that, flip a coin.

Don't believe me? The football Giants weren't the only team last year to parlay a mediocre regular season into a crown. The L.A. Kings stumbled into the NHL playoffs with more losses than wins, qualified last and then swept through their conference with easy wins over the #1, #2 and #3 seeds before winning the cup in six games.

The 2011 World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals snuck into the post-season on the last day of the regular season with the worst record in the playoffs. (The 2012 World Series champs, the division-winning S.F. Giants, were a legitimate champion.)

During a thankfully truncated NBA season, the Miami Heat faced boobirds and derision because of a 9-8 start before capturing the #2 seed in the East and winning it all.

So when the NHL announces that half its season is lost, even hockey fans should applaud. Forty games seems about right if all they're going to do is eliminate a handful of awful teams. (On the other hand, the league and its players appear on the verge of another Armageddon. All involved have a bright future in Congress, once they earn their American citizenship.)

And we should all laugh when the sport's advocates promote a meaningless match-up like tonight's Falcon-Lion snoozer, as a playoff positioner. Anyone paying the least bit of attention anytime over the last three decades realizes there's no such thing.

A good rule of thumb for playoffs should be this: Qualifying should be sufficiently difficult that some good teams get left out. That ensures that playoff qualifying is an accomplishment and that a good team will win the title irrespective of who catches fire for a couple of weeks in the post-season. Major League baseball and the NFL are both straddling the line, which the NBA and NHL long ago breached.

The NFL is reportedly considering the addition of two more teams to its playoff lineup. It is difficult to overstate how awesomely awful this idea is. Adding two more palyoff slots guarantees that an 8-8 team will parlay a couple of fluke wins into a Super Bowl championship. Blecch.

Cardinal Sins

A riveting World Series, no doubt. So why does it seem like such an anti-climax?

The postseason certainly didn't determine the best team in baseball: the Cards were outplayed over 162 games by three other teams in the National League alone, and by another five (you could argue six or seven in the superior AL) on the other side of the standings. What they won was the playoff lottery, where eight good teams start almost completely from scratch (the best teams do get a minuscule home field edge, until the championship) playing a tournament that rewards them for different strengths than the regular season through which they qualified.

The unintended consequence of this expanded playoff system is a serious dilution of the once-sacrosanct 162-game schedule. With two excellent months out of seven, St. Louis qualified for the tournament and then survived it. Conversely, six months of dominance in New York, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Dallas disappeared in puffs of playoff series smoke.

Given the current structure of baseball finances combined with the current playoff format, the World Series offers us three options, two of them unsatisfying:

1. Teams with considerable financial advantages buy the best players and march to the dogpile. Blecch.

2. Uninspiring outfits that stand atop the lowest division pile, or squeak in as Wild Card after-thoughts, put it together for three weeks and wear the crown. Blecch.

3. Franchises struggling with conflicting financial priorities like everyone else produce deserving squads that rise to the top and claim the championship. Yay.

For the second time in five years, Tony LaRussa's group planted its flag in option two and left an empty feeling in the rest of us. Only twice in those five years (Phils and Giants) has MLB finished its long half-year ride with a champion that could claim a)superiority and b)accomplishment unstained by a playing field tilting in its favor.

That's not to say we didn't learn some things in this series. We learned that Ron Washington, is a wonderful guy and excellent motivator who enjoys the respect of his players. We also learned that the in-game decision-making required in a World Series are beyond his capability, at least as currently constituted. Wash left a series of gaffes on the field that could have cost his team. He played his MVP at 50% effectiveness (.241/.258/.414 with limited mobility on the bases and in the field), which simply wasn't sufficient. He batted his best hitter seventh (Mike Napoli, .375/.500/.813), costing him at-bats during the series. He generally failed to take advantage of Lance Berkman's extreme platoon splits (1.010 OPS vs. righties; .744 vs. lefties), and he underutilized super-reliever Mike Adams, who'd treated MLB hitters of both leagues like his playthings over the past two years prior to the World Series. 

Washington's mismanagement rose to the fore in Games Six and Seven (or maybe that's when I noticed them.) As I've already documented, the pivotal moment in Game Six passed him by without notice because it arrived in the fifth inning. The rest of that evening's heroics could have thus been avoided. He left Nelson Cruz in the field in the ninth and was rewarded with Cruz's imitation of a wounded stork on the dramatic Freese "triple" that tied the score. In Game 7 he left Matt Harrison in well after his ineffectiveness had been duly demonstrated, though it's not as if his relievers acquitted themselves any better. 

In all, defense and relief pitching -- the most unheralded parts of the game -- carried the Cardinals to victory. Hail to them, but woe is our game, particularly if they add yet more less-deserving teams to the playoff stew.

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