“Chronological age does not have anything to do with a player of (Damon’s) genetics.” – Scott Boras

Well, sure. Had Jesus Christ been around longer, I’m pretty sure that he would’ve been able to OPS over 1.000 well into his sixties. He was just that special.

The Yankees signed Mark Teixeira today and the effects of the signing were wide ranging. Let’s take a look at who benefitted and who didn’t.

The Winners

The Yankees: They got the best first baseman on the market and, outside of Albert Pujols, probably the best first baseman in baseball. Teixiera will represent a major upgrade over prospective first baseman Nick Swisher, who can now be moved to a corner outfield spot (where his average power will be more forgivable). Or, the Yankees can trade him for something useful.

Teixeira: OK, so signing with the Yankees is horribly predictable. But Teixeira got a huge contract, a no-trade clause and he’ll play for a winner. That’s a pretty good deal. Something tells me he’ll be happy he didn’t sign with the Nationals.

Derek Lowe: The Red Sox say missing out on Teixeira won’t impact their search for more pitching. But you’ve got to think that some of the money they had earmarked for Teixeira could be spent on Lowe. Right now, it looks like the Mets are the only serious bidder for Lowe’s services. Getting the Red Sox involved could spark a bidding war that would culminate in an expensive contract.

Billy Beane: The Oakland GM is trying to field a winner in 2009. He took a hit when Rafael Furcal spurned his very generous four-year offer, but now that the Angels have missed out on Teixeira they are looking even more beatable. Beane must smell blood. Will he sign Adam Dunn or Jason Giambi and really put some pressure on the Halos?

Scott Boras: Now that his biggest client has signed, maybe Boras can shift his attention to the other five gajillion free agents he represents.

The Losers

Manny Ramirez: Now that the Yankees have signed Teixeira they’re extremely unlikely to sign Manny. Who is going to give Ramirez the longterm contract he wants? Probably nobody (unless Ned Coletti goes on a bender).

Red Sox: They missed out on a player that would allow them to vastly improve their middle of the order production. Moreover, that player signed with their chief rival. Burn.

The Angels: Who will play first base for Los Angeles next season? Who will provide protection for Vlad? (No, Tori Hunter. Not you. Please sit down.) This could be a blessing in disguise for the Angels, as Adam Dunn could be a great addition and will require fewer dollars and years.

Word on the street yesterday was that the Boston Red Sox had offered free-agent first baseman Mark Teixeira an 8-year, $175-180MM contract. Today, it sounds like Boston’s offer was closer to $165-170MM. The Angels’ rumored offer has been greater than $160 but less than $180, while some speculate that the Nationals have ponied up $200MM. All the same, everyone seems to be offering 8 years — and agent Scott Boras seems to be holding out for a $185MM offer from a team that doesn’t suck.

Recently, I kvetched about a feeling of “inflation” in baseball — Mark Teixeira’s good, but is he really a $200MM guy? I don’t happen to think so. But what do you think?

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I’ve been wanting to write about the playoffs, but I’m a little overstimulated by the prospect of a Phillies-Rays World Series. So I’m just going to throw some thoughts against the virtual wall and see what sticks.

• Last night, after the Rays emphatic victory over the Sox, Peter Gammons asked Tampa left fielder Carl Crawford how he felt about the win. And Crawford went through the usual scripted response, ending with something like, “and hopefully we can win one more and play in the World Series.” The look on his face when he said the words “World Series” was priceless — like he never said it out loud before. He was giggling.
• Inquirer columnist Bob Ford was wrong, and he’s not afraid to admit it. He says he shouldn’t have bashed Pat Gillick for signing Joe Blanton, Scott Eyre and Matt Stairs. Who’s going to be the next columnist to apologize? How about you, Jim Salisbury?
• Before this season started, whenever I would talk about the Rays’ loaded farm system, someone would remind me about Boston’s glut of young talent, most notably Jed Lowrie, Clay Buchholz and Jacoby Ellsbury, and about New York’s young guns Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy, as well as Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera. But all of a sudden Buchholz is unable to pitch with men on base and Ellsbury’s a shadow of his 2007 playoff self, while Hughes and Kennedy are constantly hurt or getting shelled. Cano, for his part, got off to a terrible start in 2008 and didn’t improve defensively, while Cabrera got demoted. I’m not saying that Boston or New York should give up on any of these guys. But if you’re a Yankees or Red Sox fan, and you’re watching the Rays kick ass this week, it’s probably hard to feel excited about your team’s youth movement.
• Bad sign for the Dodgers: Scott Boras is already talking about Manny Ramirez’s free agent negotiations.

If the Dodgers want to win in the NL West, they’ll have to run a very tight pitching ship as their offense is below the fold in almost all categories (nearing rock-bottom in RBIs for instance) and not looking to improve much in the next two weeks. Much of that offensive mediocrity, however, can be credited to the fact that three of the major (would-be) run producers and scorers in the team are on the DL. Nomar Garciaparra is out with a bad calf (and the genetic disorder that prevents it from healing quicker), Andruw Jones is coming off knee surgery to repair torn cartilage, and Rafael Furcal has been battling a stiff back for almost two months now. All three are scheduled to beign rehab assignemnts with Triple A Las Vegas on Monday.

So far the Dodgers have managed to remain two and a half games behind first-place Arizona (albeit with a 37-42 record) due in part to the strong pitching from (of all people) Chan Ho Park, who’s 1-0 in three starts with a 1.20 ERA (after being in the pen to start the year) and Eric Stults (2-0, 0.60 ERA). Manager Joe Torre wants to up the ante, announcing a six-man rotation after Hiroki Kourda comes off the DL, and specifically because of Stults’ results (trying saying that three times!).

I doubt the Dodgers will be buyers in the trade market, if only because they’ve already got a bloated payroll with nothing to show for it. In fact, they’ve been having “cryptic meetings” with Derek Lowe and his agent, Scott Boras, and its their young’uns that are producing (like Andre Ethier above).

Maybe if the coerce a few more wins out of Lowe and Chad Billingsley, and if they get their superstars back from Triple A rehab stints soon enough (not to mention the eventual return of Brad Penny and Jason Schmidt – but don’t hold your breath on Schmidt), they might be able to hold on to make it interesting in the NL West.

- What They Need Index -

So Kyle Lohse finally found a job, landing with the Cardinals at 1-year, 4.25 million, plus incentives.

I think it is safe to say that in NO WAY is this fair market value for a pitcher of Lohse’s abilities and background, not in an offseason when Carlos Silva extracted a 4-year, $48 million deal from the Mariners, and just one year after Adam Eaton got a 3-year, $28 million contract from the Phillies and Jeff Suppan got 4 years, $42 million from the Brewers.

To find a comparable deal, you’d have to go back a long time. In 1998, for example, the Texas Rangers signed 30-year-old starting pitcher Mark Clark to 2-year, $9.3 million dollar deal after Clark had given an extremely Lohse-like performance the year before, going 9-14 with a 4.84 ERA for the Cubs.

Of course, that deal was widely panned at the time, and didn’t work out very well for either the Rangers or Mark Clark (who was out of baseball after the contract), but the point is that it was more than TEN YEARS AGO, when baseball had far less money than it does now, that a Kyle Lohse-like pitcher was given less than $5 million a year.

So basically, this deal is a huge steal for the Cardinals. In the best case scenario, Lohse pitches well, saves the bullpen for half a season, and then the Cards can flip him to a contender at the deadline, getting one or two good prospects after having paid Lohse less than the typical signing bonus of a first rounder.

In the worst case scenario, if Lohse sucks or gets injured, the Cardinals will only be out 4.25 million bucks, which in this day and age is the kind of spare change major league teams can find in their clubhouse couches. The Cards wouldn’t even have to buy out Lohse’s option year, because they didn’t even give him an option year. And keep in mind, Kyle Lohse has never been on the disabled list for a even a single day in his whole career.

In fact, Justin Inaz over at “On Baseball…and the Reds” breaks down the numbers and shows that Kyle Lohse is probably worth about the same as Carlos Silva, and that in an ideal contract both pitchers should have gotten about around $7 or $8 million per year for a 3-year deal.

So given that the Cardinals seem to be paying Lohse a little over half of what he should be worth, at almost no risk, and may very well be able to flip him for prospects, why is Cardinals GM John Mozeliak so down about the signing? In fact, he actually laments to the AP reporter,

“If it were a perfect world, we wouldn’t have had to go down this path. But it’s not and we’re going to need someone to pitch every fifth day.”

And how the heck can we explain how Lohse lasted so long on the free agent market without getting a better deal?

I think part of the answer has to be Scott Boras. With messy, high profile breakups between Boras and players like A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, and Kenny Rogers hitting the newswires this offseason, and now Boras’s failure to get reasonable contracts for actually semi-valuable major leaguers like Jeff Weaver, Corey Patterson, and Lohse, we may be seeing a decline and fall of the once-mighty Boras Empire. It seems as if both teams and players may be tiring of Boras’s negotiating style, and while teams may still be willing to talk to Boras when it comes to signing superstars, they simply don’t want to deal with the bother when it comes to the mediocre players.

Another reason may be a glut of amazing young talent this year, as Sarah discussed in a recent post. But I think there is something else in this case, something that has to do with Kyle Lohse in particular. The USS Mariner and East Windup Chronicle have supported the theory that this offseason baseball front offices have suddenly discovered the sabermetric idea of “replacement level” players, who can deliver almost the same performance as the lower tier of major leaguers at a vastly reduced cost, but I have a really hard time buying that argument. While certainly there are a *few* GMs around the game that have embraced some sabermetric ideas, there are plenty of counterexamples of GMs who seem just as enamored of big names and veteran experience as ever.

No, I think what is going on here is that GMs are looking at the same old thing they have always been looking at, which is so-called intangibles. Kyle Lohse has long had a reputation as an selfish underachiever, going back to his Minnesota days, and the fact that he went with Scott Boras as his agent despite being a fifth-starter type only added to this reputation. I don’t think all that many GMs were looking too closely at Kyle Lohse’s actual numbers or his marginal value over a “replacement level” player. They were just considering his reputation as a guy who simply doesn’t have the right “makeup” to make the most of his talent, a guy who isn’t a “winner” or simply doesn’t have enough “heart,” and decided that that simply wasn’t the type of guy they wanted to be bringing into their clubhouse, regardless of the cost.

It would be nice to think that we are finally getting to an era when pretty much all GMs all around the game are finally coming to terms with spreadsheets and new statistics and are willing to break down numbers in a systematic way to evaluate players more rationally. But I don’t think we are quite there yet. I mean, this is an offseason in which JP Riccardi, a one-time disciple of Billy Beane who has long been touted as one of the more stats-friendly GMs in the majors signed David Eckstein to be his starting shortstop because he thought he needed to be bringing more “gamers” into his clubhouse.

I think that, ironically, the more statheads raise a hue and cry about how overrated a player is, the more attractive many GMs actually find that player. Because in their minds, if a player is outperforming what you would expect, that is not evidence of a routine statistical anomaly or a small sample size but actually just additional proof that that player has “heart,” “grit,” or “intangibles,” and that he is a “gamer” or “just knows how to win.”

Kyle Lohse is the opposite, a player who has consistently underperformed expectations, which I think goes far toward explaining why most teams wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole this winter, and why even the Cardinals are left feeling icky after signing him, despite the fact that they will probably be getting tremendous value out of the deal.

Professional baseball players are selfish. Everybody knows it. They’re greedy, money grubbing douchebags.

Except, for most of this offseason, they weren’t.

Don’t believe me? Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

This winter, Troy Tulowitzki, Matt Holliday, Robinson Cano, Brad Hawpe, Manny Corpas and a few others signed contracts that locked them up through their arbitration-eligible years. They left money on the table (possibly) in exchange for financial security. Nobody wants to go year to year.

Mike Lowell gave the Boston Red Sox a hometown discount. So did Curt Schilling. And the latter even promised to lose weight!

Alex Rodriguez negotiated his contract with the Yankees himself (with the aid of Warren Buffett), pushing aside Scott Boras and signing for millions less than many speculated he might get.

Kenny Rogers flat out fired Boras. Garry Sheffield called the super agent a “bad person.”

Manny Ramirez showed up to camp in great shape and told the media that he wanted to play until he was 50 and that he wanted to retire a Red Sox.

It all seemed too good to be true. Maybe it was.

Lately, the era of good feelings has come to a screetching halt.

First, Schilling announced that he wanted to have surgery, but the Red Sox wouldn’t let him.

Then Ramirez, fresh off his “I want to stay in Boston” speech, hired Boras as his new agent. Not that hiring Boras is a guarantee that Ramirez will sign elsewhere — but it’s certainly not encouraging.

This week, Jonathan Papelbon said he wants $900,000 — the same amount Ryan Howard got in his third year. The implication, as always: they can pay now or somebody else will get the chance to pay later.

Also, Prince Fielder and Cole Hamels got all bent out of shape when their teams renewed their contracts. Both players felt like they got jipped. Hamels called his $500,000 contract a “low blow.” Here’s what Fielder had to say about his $670,000 deal:

“I’m not happy about it at all,” Fielder said. “The fact I’ve had to be renewed two years in a row, I’m not happy about it because there’s a lot of guys who have the same amount of time that I do who have done a lot less and are getting paid a lot more.

“But my time is going to come. It’s going to come quick, too.”

Them there’s fightin’ words.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Tampa Bay CF B.J. Upton said all the right things after his contract was renewed by the Rays this week. Upton will make $10,000 less than he made in 2007, despite hitting .300-24-82 with 22 steals last year. But he says the slight won’t affect his play.

Upton’s tact notwithstanding, the last few weeks represented a bit of turbulance in the otherwise smooth sailing relationship between the players and management. What will the future hold? Your guess is as good as mine.

Nothing says “I want to stay here” and “I want to finish my career here” like going out and hiring Scott Boras as your agent, right?Oh Manny, you so crazy!