NL Teams That Did Least Often Did Best
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
With baseball’s winter winding down, we find ourselves in what I think of as the Lake Wobegon part of the calendar. Just like the children of the fictitious town, every ballclub seems, right now, to be above average. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates, who are closing in on the major league record for consecutive losing seasons, can squint and see a team that will win the pennant if they catch their breaks.
In the National League, though, the Lake Wobegon effect was inverted this winter. Rather than every team being above the average, every team has been below it. There isn’t a single club you can unreservedly praise. The best of them have not harmed themselves too badly; the worst of them have invited all manner of wrath from the baseball gods. For a league so weak that its best team might not have finished higher than fourth place in the American League Central, it has not been an auspicious few months.
The highest marks, in my estimation, go to four clubs who didn’t do much at all: St. Louis, Colorado, Arizona, and Florida. The Cardinals re-signed stalwarts Jim Edmonds and Mark Mulder to cheap contracts and picked up pitcher Kip Wells for $4 million, less than a one-tenth what many comparable pitchers got from more desperate teams. They get high marks for not doing what many championship teams faced with losing three fifths of their rotation would have done — signing players to absurd deals in a frenzy.
Colorado’s biggest move was trading solid pitcher Jason Jennings, a pending free agent, for couple of major league-ready Astros’ pitching prospects, Jason Hirsh and Taylor Buchholz. Neither is a stud, but both will be with the Rockies for years to come, and Hirsh has a good chance to be as good as Jennings. It was a shrewd deal.
The Diamondbacks picked up, on the cheap, two lefties, in Randy Johnson and Doug Davis, who will, at the least, give them passable innings, while opening up an outfield slot for one of their bounty of top prospects.
The Marlins did nothing at all, and thus showed real commitment to their bevy of talented young players while keeping their powder dry for that moment when they’re ready to compete. Like most things the Marlins do, this was sharp.
If this seems like weak tea, it is. None of these teams did anything particularly impressive, and the Cardinals failed to solve problems they needed to solve. The issue is that more or less every other team in the league actively hurt themselves.
The next class of teams, for instance, made praiseworthy moves — some much better than anything the teams above did — but also did some boneheaded things. The Cubs rank foremost here. Resigning star third baseman Aramis Ramirez, bringing in manager Lou Piniella, signing Alfonso Soriano, and snapping up a variety of starting pitchers and low-impact role players, they had the busiest winter of any team, but one can’t shake the sense that any club that spends $300 million ought to have a firm idea of what position its star acquisition will play. As the Cubs aren’t even sure whether Soriano will play center or left field, and as they signed Jason Marquis, the worst pitcher in the National League for $7 million a year, you have to mark them down for throwing around money with no plan at all.
The Dodgers made a great deal to sign ace Jason Schmidt with only a three-year commitment, but also made arguably the worst deal of the off-season when they signed Juan Pierre for five years. (I don’t think it was that bad a deal, but I understand why others do.)
The Braves, in picking up stud relievers Mike Gonzalez and Rafael Soriano and a good shortstop prospect while surrendering nothing more than solid but superfluous first baseman Adam LaRoche, did exceptionally well for themselves, but they also lost second baseman Marcus Giles and reliever Danys Baez, largely due to budget concerns, thus leaving themselves playing whack-a-mole with the holes on their roster.
Finally, the Phillies moved some prospects to Chicago for underrated starter Freddy Garcia, but then gave notedly horrible pitcher Adam Eaton $24.5 million to be horrible. They also signed second baseman Chase Utley, coming off what was probably a career year, to a deal that locks him up through the age of 34, showing they learned nothing from the mistakes of their past, when they unnecessarily signed players like Pat Burrell and Mike Lieberthal to market-rate contracts they would come to regret. Phie on the Phillies.
For the Brewers, Astros, Padres, Nationals, and Reds, the winter was one of malign neglect, the same phrase I’d apply to the Mets. In each case, these teams either did nothing or filled holes with merely decent players while creating holes elsewhere to do so. The case of the Mets has been perhaps worst of all — while re-signing Tom Glavine was a must, and signing Moises Alou was a good idea, the team’s rotation is a shambles. I understand the reasoning — paying absurd rates for overvalued pitchers is generally a bad idea —but the Mets are obscenely rich and coming off a season when they were inches from the pennant. If ever any team should have overspent for someone like Barry Zito or Jeff Suppan, this was the team. Picking up Jeff Weaver or making a good deal for some similar innings eater will move them up in the rankings, but for now the only word that comes to mind is, “Bleh.”
That’s better than what the Giants did, though. Here’s a team of old men, built around an ancient man who might be indicted this year. Their brilliant idea was to replace Jason Schmidt by signing the inferior, though more durable, Barry Zito for seven years and $126 million — an outrageous sum that just might have made sense for a contender with money and in need of immediate stability in the rotation (read: the Mets), but makes none at all for a team that will probably struggle to break .500 this year and might struggle to break .400 once Barry Bonds finally retires. Making that kind of commitment just in the desperate rush to squeeze a last good year out of the Bonds Giants — without, one notes, having bothered to actually re-sign Bonds — is completely inexplicable. More or less everyone in the National League might have done badly in one way or another; the Giants alone managed to saddle themselves with a Mike Hampton-like commitment to a player who won’t even make them better this year. Everyone might be below average. They’re way below.
