Why signing Manny Ramirez would be a good business decision for the Mets.
Since there has been a ton of discussion on whether the Mets should sign Manny Ramirez in the last few weeks, I figured I should break it down quick.
As a pure stupid idiot, bleeding blue and orange, complete moron Mets fan I think the Mets HAVE to sign Manny. He is one of the best right-handed hitters in the history of the game and one of the few players who has the ability to change an entire lineup. Some people criticize him on his personality, and he can sure be an asshole, but honestly that’s something the Mets could use.
For better or worse, most of the Mets’ star players are not too outgoing when it comes to the press – they’ll answer a few questions, but not a single person in the dugout wants to be the center of attention, let alone take some heat after a bad loss. Whatever behind the scenes shit happened in Boston was probably a two-way street, and the risk it could totally blow up exists, but it’s a risk the Mets HAVE to take.
If they leave the lineup the way it is going into the regular season, it’s going to be lefty-heavy and weak in general. AKA the same fucking lineup as last year AKA another 88 win team AKA your New York Mets, who will string you along till the very last weekend of the year just to break your heart like every other fucking year. Or you open the checkbook, sign Manny and get in the playoffs and who knows who else. From a purely baseball perspective, the decision seems clear as night and day. However, good ol’ Jeff Wilpon had to say this the other day to Bloomberg:
I’m guessing that he is trying to be a SHREWD negotiator, as the idea that your GM hasn’t even brought the idea of the best available free agent to you as on option probably means you need a new GM. There’s a good chance they are just trying to play it down to drive down the price, but it looks more and more like he is sincere. If that’s the case, Mr.. Wilpon is your classic SHRODE.
That’s mostly emotion talking, but that’s what being a fan is all about and unfortunately for Mets fans, it’s usually disgust. However, baseball is a business and the Wilpons are businessmen. They received a lot of bad publicity when it turns out their investment firm, Sterling Equities, possibly lost hundreds of millions in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. The key words to me though, are “investment firm.” It takes money to make money, and Manny Ramirez is a good investment for the Mets. Here’s why:
Long story short, staaaaaaaats have been compiled that determines a player’s value added over your ‘replacement level player’ or your average shlub. On the site Fangraphs, they have added them for every player so you don’t have to try to compile them yourself, it’s all there (and downloadable to Excel), and honestly that is fucking awesome. There is a multi part series that explains all about “win values,” and Part Six correlates a dollar amount to each win over replacement level for a player. With the economy the way it is, lets be conservative and assume we last year’s $4.5m/win doesn’t rise, although it probably will. So now that we know how much a win is worth, we just have to figure out how many wins Manny will produce next year:
Over the last three years, Manny had a great year in 2008, a horrible season in 2007 and a decent one in 2006. Normalizing for the $4.5/m a win we’re using, he was worth $17.1m(3.8 wins) in 2006, $5.4m(1.2 wins) in 2007 and $28.4m(6.3 wins) in 2008. Assuming he will sign for $20m/year, if he can play either as good as last year or as bad as the year before it, its a pretty easy decision whether or not to sign him.
You could argue all day about how he’ll play, but if you average the three years together you get 3.75 wins per year. As mentioned before, Manny adds value to a lineup, so we’ll round that up to an even 4 wins/year, which makes him worth $20m/year, exactly what the Mets could sign him for. I assume if we signed him, we’d trade Murphy/Church and players received in return would make up for the value they would have provided otherwise. But with the variety of risks(bullshit) that the Wilpons are worried about in regards to “Manny being Manny,” I guess you could see how they would justify not taking the risk in that it is a break-even investment, in theory. But here’s the catch – this is no breakeven investment.
From this article on Portfolio.com, the Mets’ collapse in 2007 cost the team $3-5 million dollars, even if they only had two home games. If the Mets were to advance beyond the first round, having more home playoff games would earn the team “double-digit” millions. Of course anything can happen, but its’ pretty clear to everyone that the Mets will be a high 80 wins team and probably just miss the playoffs again as they currently stand. It’s also pretty clear that if the Mets do sign Manny, they get in.
Of course these are the Mets, so there’s always the possibility that everything will completely blow up. However, when there’s a more than likely chance of earning potential “double-digit” millions on what is normally a breakeven investment, you go for it. Simple as that. So stop pissing off your fans and try to win a World Series already – cut the bullshit and sign the dude, maybe you’ll make back some of that Madoff Money, who knows.
