California 2038.12 - An arrogant Jerk's Guide to Sustained Winning, Part 5
Posted: Tue May 14, 2019 12:06 am
You have to have an identity. Mine is this guy above, just angrier.
An Arrogant Jerk's Guide To Sustained Winning Part 5: Team Building Strategy/Indentity
In Part 1 we talked about make a big ol' pile of baseball value. Part 2 went into what that value is made of. Part 3 superficially discussed how to get it/grow it.
Part 4 was a pedantic diatribe about the difference between player value in a vacuum and player value in a system, while highlighting the differences between tactics (GM moves) and strategy (The idea of what your team is, the goals you set out to accomplish and the overarching plan to achieve them).
In part five we'll start talking about something that has to be a key part of any winning team's strategy. That's having an identity as a team. If you're going to play to your strengths, you need to have strengths. Pretty simple. Hopefully this is a shorter piece. I've been running a bit long.
You Can't Expect to be Good at Everything
Something you have to expect if you want to keep winning year after year is that your team won't be perfect. You likely won't have the young prospect capital to be strong everywhere. That doesn't mean you have to have holes. It just means you have to choose where to put your resources. Let's look at my team again. I think everyone knows California is pitching and defense.
I draft pitching. And more pitching. And even more pitching. Prospects get hurt. They don't develop. Pitchers more so. So I need lots of them if I'm going to keep churning them out of my minors to replace the ones that become ineffective through age, injury, or salary. I rarely trade away pitching prospects.
I supplement my pitching with strong defense. Some people think if you strike out everyone, you don't need to be as defensively strong. I doubt this is true if you want pitching to be a strength. The best pitchers strike out just under 30% of batters. More likely your team is running in the low 20% range, even if you have really good pitchers. That means lots of balls are still in play. So you need good defense if you want a run prevention team.
The cool thing about drafting pitching is you never have to pay for a bullpen. Your not good enough starters become your pen. You will have lots of them, because you drafted a boatload of pitchers to get your starters. However, this makes me weak in other places.
With all the effort I put into turning my minors into a pitching factory, I bring up very little top end offense from my minors. That means I have to relay on those 50-60 overall cost controlled players to be the majority of my offense. And I have to platoon all over the place to get as many lefty bats in as I can. Well rounded righty bats or lefty bats that don't suck against LHP are just too expensive. I can't afford to trade for them or buy them in FA. Most of those players have warts. If they didn't, they'd be 70 or 80 grade overall. I sign the occasional big bat to a short term expensive deal in FA, and trade any pitching surplus for strong offensive players.
So that summarizes my identity. I MUST continue to operate this way or I face a difficult transition that may make my team fall apart. Let me explain what I mean. I think it is probably easier to draft hitting and pay for 3/4 type starters and find an ace somewhere right now. The league just has more bats than arms at the moment. To get to this, I'd have to start drafting bats. That will kill my pitching pipeline. If I start this now, in four seasons I will not have replacement arms coming up. My bullpen will almost certainly implode. I'll suddenly be faced with the option of paying in FA for pitchers, or trading prospect capital for them. Well that prospect capital was supposed to be my new powerful offense. In all likelihood, I'll end up having to overpay some of my own players to extend them or overpay in FA to maintain wins. That will tie up my financial flexibility, and once you lose that, it gets really tough.
Now, it's possible that all the bats I drafted come in at the same time my pitching wanes, and there are vet 3/4 type starters in FA for me to pick up to complete the transition. But what are the odds of that?
You don't have to do things exactly like I do, but you do have to have a plan, and stick to it. Draft consistently. Or if you take the best player available, then trade prospects who don't fit into your system for ones that do. Don't weaken your strength to shore up your weakness. Figure out how to address your weakness while maintaining your strength.
Pick something you want to dominate at, either scoring runs or preventing them. Learn how to do that and sustain it. Then figure out how to build up the weaker part to just good enough. Baseball is a game of margins. There is literally a "tipping point" where it starts to snowball. If you look at California's history, there's a point where we went from 85-87 wins on average to 90+. That was when I figured out how to put together a "just good enough" offense to go with my elite pitching. Before that, I had elite pitching and bad offenses.
Learn how to keep either your position players or pitching staff intact in large part without overpaying for extensions. Learn how to anticipate aging and when to trade out older guys and groom replacements. Don't have a bunch of players at the same age. Always try to have a new young stud, some 25-28 year olds, and a sub 32 vet as your core. You should also have another player on the way. Make that the goal. If this sounds tough, then punt the other part of the game (either offense or pitching, whichever you didn't choose). You should be able to do this with only half your roster, and when you figure it out, you're likely a high 70 win team anyway and that means you probably have at least decent revenue, making the next part of the process easier.
When you figure out how to maintain a strength/maintain an identity, then work on addressing the weakness without damaging the strength. Don't alter your overall strategy for a "quick fix". That will have repercussions down the line. I actually tried this and got really lucky. A little over half a decade ago, I decided to take two bats in the first 3 rounds every year to try and supplement my offense. I figured my pitchers would still be around, and the extra bats make me really good in 3-4 years. It didn't work and almost screwed me. First, that wasn't enough hitting prospects to develop an offense. Too many just don't develop. I also am at a rare spot now where I don't have any young arms coming in. But Luis Gracia, Ricardo Diaz, and Cisco Morales aging gracefully saved my bacon. The fact that Brooklyn went full fire sale and made Miguel Anders available gave me my new young arm. I doubled back on the draft and went extra heaving pitching this year, and should have the next batch on the way now.
So what are some team identities? Well it really comes down to hitting versus pitching. Park effect matters, but that's probably a topic for another chapter. Nearly every top team that stays good for more than 5-6 years is always exceptional at one of the two, and if you look, they've just kind of decent at the other one. Players are too expensive to be awesome at everything unless you have a truckload of prospects come up around the same time, and usually you can only get to that point by being bad for awhile.
CAL - pitching and defense, just enough offense from lefty power bats.
JAX - Monster OBP offense with tons of power, one ace and a bunch of 3/4 types starters and one to two top bullpen arms
LV - has been both monster offense and elite pitching at times, but rarely both, and Recte transitions back and forth better than anyone I've seen, notice how Recte is now neither, and isn't as strong as he once was
If you want to look at teams that are more in the 6-7 year of goodness range
MEX - pitching and defense, high average offense to drive OBP
SFB - Monster offense similar to JAX. Once ace and warty arms everywhere else
YS - (maybe could be in the first group), Prioritizes top end talent in both the lineup and the rotation, and platoons and find roles for warty players in the rest of the positions. I have trouble describing this one. But Ron's teams really DO look the same year to year.
I'm sure I'm forgetting someone, but that last bit is the point. They feel the same every year. They have identities. Which means they've figured out how to maintain a strength through drafting, trading, and smart extensions.
Remember above we talked about punting the part you didn't pick until you figure out your strength? Well, you can't punt it forever. You have to learn how to make the warty part of your team "good enough". I don't think that's enough for another piece, and really that's more about tiral and error and leveraging your park effect. I think for the next chapter, we'll get into how to keep from losing value ... finally.