The Twins are Winning, and Baseball Minds are Angry

    The Minnesota Twins are the surprise of the 2015 season so far. With a record of 30-19, they lead the AL Central and are in a virtual dead heat with the Houston Astros for the best record in the American League. It is very possible that meaningful summer and fall baseball will be played in the Twin Cities for the first time since 2010. After all, the Twins have lost at least 92 games in each of the past four seasons. Twins fans are understandably excited at the prospect of their team emerging from the doldrums behind underrated guys like Trevor Plouffe and Brian Dozier and old mainstays like Joe Mauer and Torii Hunter. And if they have a few holes to fill? They can dip into their robust minor league system to cobble together offers for a trade piece or two. Or better yet, they can call up those big-time prospects like Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano if the major league club needs a boost.
    AHHHH but hold up there, sparky! According to the sabermetric baseball prognosticators, who seem to be morphing into Buzz Killlington more and more every day, this hot Twins start is not sustainable! They have a point. It’s true that Minnesota is winning more often than not due to close games, usually the result of a stout bullpen. And those stout bullpen guys are pitching much better than their career norms. It may last, but it most likely won't. The Twins have also benefited from very good hitting with runners in scoring position, and are killing it at the concept known as “cluster luck,” where hits come in bunches much more so than the norm, thus leading to more runs.
     Don’t believe me? Let’s get the rundown on this from the baseball interwebs. Cliff Corcoran of SI warns Twins fans not to get too excited and even took them to task on Twitter for the cardinal sin of rooting for their baseball team.

Have I taken a break from drinking this refreshing glass of water to consider whether this water would be "sustainable" if I left it outside in 102-degree heat? No, all I know is that I like to drink water, and I damn well better if I expect to, you know, live, and maintain proper electrolyte balance and stuff.
    OK that's an exaggerated metaphor, but Cliff’s far from alone. The boys over at Fangraphs are throwing cold water on this fire immediately before it gets out of hand. ESPN's Christina Kahrl seems agnostic about it, and at least Grantland's Michael Baumann throws Twins fans a bone by saying "This 28-18 start isn’t for real. But something doesn’t have to be real to make you feel good." Fair enough, but pretty much every major online baseball publication has taken its turn pointing to the Twins' record and going all Admiral Ackbar on it, screaming "IT'S A TRAP!"
    When Corcoran (whose writing I mostly enjoy) chastises Twins fans for not considering why the Twins are winning, what he’s really saying is that Twins fans shouldn’t be excited about their first-place ballclub, which is the antithesis of rooting for a baseball team in the first place. It suggests that fans of unsurprisingly good teams like the Cardinals or Dodgers are more worthy of excitement than teams who are winning just as much, but in a flukier fashion. It suggests that you can only be happy for your team if they win when they're supposed to. It gives credence to every old and jaded sportswriter who claims that the "cybermetrics are taking all the fun out of the game."

   First of all, wins are wins…there is no such thing as style points in Major League Baseball, and unlike college football or basketball, you don’t get any credit for blowing out your opponents. The Twins, as of this writing, are contending for a playoff spot in June. We are one-third into the season, and believe it or not, flukes like this can carry through an entire season, with the 2012 Orioles being one of the most recent examples. While it’s not likely, it’s certainly possible that the Twins ride this same formula all the way into October. And I guarantee you Twins fans won’t care about how they got there, just that the bunting for Target Field can come out for more than just opening day this year. After all, it's the hottest team that wins it all in October, not the best.

   The Twins’ success, and the reaction to it, really grinds my gears because it’s indicative of a larger trend in baseball player/team evaluation and writing. It is a symptom of a mentality taking over the game where process is more important than results, where if your moves don’t work out they were at least the right moves at the time you made them, and therefore you're still doing a good job. This does not fly in too many industries. But it seems like it’s starting to fly more and more in MLB.

   Take Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington. He is routinely considered to be one of the best and brightest in the game. However, most of his moves made this offseason have been horrendous failures.  He inexplicably signed Hanley Ramirez, a shortstop by trade (and a bad one), to play a position he’s never played before (left field) in the oddest left field in the majors (Fenway Park). He traded for or signed four number #4 starters, all of whom are pitching more like #5 starters or mop-up relievers. He even gave one of them (Rick Porcello) a massive contract extension, an extension that drew some praise throughout baseball despite the fact Porcello has a career ERA+ of 96 (four points below the average of 100) and has struck out more than six batters per nine innings for exactly two seasons in his career, one of those seasons being this year. Offseason rumors centered on the Red Sox trading for Cole Hamels to give themselves a legitimate top-of-the-rotation starter, and the Red Sox's unwillingness to part with the blue chip minor leaguers that would be necessary to obtain a pitcher of Hamels' caliber in any reasonable universe. Instead, we’re entering June wondering if the Red Sox are even good enough to pursue Hamels for the 2015 stretch drive. Makes you wonder whether the Red Sox were intent on punting 2015 all along.

     Cherington has been the Red Sox GM since the 2011-2012 offseason. Try to spot the outlier in his record since then:

On a results-oriented assessment, Cherington is dangerously close to being shown the door, in my estimation. Especially considering the Red Sox payroll has averaged fourth-highest in the AL over those four years, with three last-place finishes to show for it, and one fluky World Championship boosted by career years for guys like Shane Victorino, Clay Buchholz, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Daniel Nava, and Mike Carp, most of whom were not Cherington acquisitions. Even if you’re evaluating by process, what kind of process compels you to sign a notoriously-ungifted fielder to play a new position for five years and over $100 million? What kind of process compels you to trade or sign four back-of-the-rotation starters when your team doesn’t have an ace, a #2, or a #3? Yet Cherington gets a pass from most baseball writers for reasons I have yet to fathom.

    Compare this to another GM who is badly losing the results war, the Phillies’ Ruben Amaro. By all objective accounts (that means everyone other than you, Bob Brookover), Amaro is a woeful GM. He took a perennial contender and drove them into the cellar in less than a half decade by signing the team’s aging core to over-market deals, presiding over awful drafts and thin farm systems, while being the last team by a long-shot to integrate modern analytics into their decision making. However, Amaro has one key thing he can hang his hat on as he begins the Phillies’ long and painful rebuild: Hamels. Hamels, you see, is a legitimate ace, the one legitimate ace you can trade for this summer knowing you can keep him past the end of this season. And Hamels is only getting better: his velocity has never been higher, and his strikeout totals and durability are the stuff of envy. For all Amaro has done wrong, it seems he has played his trump card perfectly: instead of trading Hamels at first blush, he has held on to him while other team’s needs have simmered around him like a pressure cooker.

     But Yahoo’s Jeff Passan decided to take some shots anyway, this from an article ostensibly conceding the point I made above:

“The Philadelphia Phillies, an ill-constructed, iller-conceived punch line of a baseball team, are gearing up to enhance their disastrousness even further. June is nigh, which gives us the gift of trade season, that glorious intersection of truth, fiction and feverish, carpal tunnel-inducing refresh-button clicks on MLB Trade Rumors.
 Starring in this summer’s show is Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ general manager who has overseen the systematic implosion of a franchise that won five consecutive National League East titles. A half-decade streak of dominance is impressive. The ability to turn upwards of half a billion dollars into a pair of 73-win seasons and wherever this year ends up when it’s done circling the toilet bowl is eminently tougher.
 How Amaro has kept one of the best gigs in baseball is the sort of business-school case study that belongs alongside New Coke.”

I am far from an Amaro apologist, but this is starting to seem like the elementary-school power structure I was all too happy to leave after eighth grade graduation: the “cool kids” can do no wrong, even when they shit their pants in class, and the “geeks” can do no right, even if they hit the game winning shot in gym.
     We can all agree analytics play a key role in building a great baseball team. Again, just look at the Phillies to see what happens when you don't use them. But getting back to the power structure anaology, Cherington hasn’t done all that much better than Amaro when it comes to putting together actual successful baseball teams on the field. And I repeat, the Red Sox have had payrolls in the top third of their league the whole time, just like the Phillies, which brings me to my final point:

     Billy Beane is unquestionably the patron saint of the new breed of general managers, with good reason. If we’re measuring results over process, Beane has produced results: eight playoff appearances since 2000 are proof enough. What continually gets lost in this is that Beane was forced into a corner by virtue of the A’s playing in a literal toilet of a ballpark with none of the modern revenue streams available to most clubs. In order to field a team worth a damn, Beane had to get creative and find value in assets that the rest of the market was ignoring. Macklemore wrote a terrible song about this once, but it doesn't make it any less true.  If you can’t shop at Barney’s, you need to find the deals at the consignment shops.

      No such excuse exists for the Red Sox of the world. These teams have endless revenue streams at their disposal, from cash cow ballparks to lucrative TV rights deals. So what’s their excuse when they don’t win, or at least contend? More and more, these teams are run with the same penny-pinching, bargain-hunting M.O. of the Beane-led A’s, with all of the madcap transaction "creativity" of small market teams but with none of the actual capital constraints that necessitated such ideas in the first place. So where does that extra money go? To the billionaire owners, who already, by virtue of being a major league sports owner, practically own a U.S. Mint all to themselves. How else do you explain stocking up on #4 starters when Max Scherzer, perhaps baseball’s best pitcher, is out there for the taking? How else do you explain Jon Lester, a two-time Red Sox World Series winner who beat cancer and is still at the top of his game, getting an insulting below-market offer from a Red Sox team that desperately needed his brand of services?

      What we are seeing is an over-correction of the marketplace, where “efficiency” and “process” trumps “results” and “success.” Since nobody wants to be the next aging and expensive Phillies, teams are trying to load their rosters with the cheap and young, in the hopes that some of them turn into a Max Scherzer, a Jon Lester, or a Cole Hamels, even if the original models are just a phone call and a check away. They hold down ready-for-prime-time players like Kris Bryant to manipulate salary and player control, or in order to get better results in an already-unfair arbitration game. They make completely asinine moves like signing Hanley Ramirez to be a left fielder in Fenway Park because they’re convinced they’ve stumbled onto some market inefficiency when really they’re just outsmarting themselves, with diminishing returns. All the while, billionaire owners collect the savings on player payroll and fans like us are still paying $11 for Bud Light. Unfortunately, the FanGraphs and Baseball Prospecti of the world cheer these mad scientists on at every turn. Witness the slobbering over the Houston Astros, a surprise team much like the Twins, but one that willingly sent their player payroll and talent to third-world levels and alienated their personnel at every turn in order to gain a few bucks that, to my knowledge, have certainly not been invested back into the product.

So, if there are any Twins fans out there reading this, don’t let these guys diminish what your team has already done this season. The Twins’ luck may run out tomorrow. So what? These past two months still happened, and you’ve got a great farm system that will be plying their trade at Target Field very soon. Enjoy it while it lasts, however long it lasts. Your team is winning, and it doesn’t matter how. Wins are wins. They count just as much as wins for the Astros, the Royals, the Tigers, or anyone else, and you are allowed to be every bit as excited as a fan.