The unstated problem with the Yankees: Brian Cashman is a bad GM

In the last 48 hours, the Yankees have signed Brian Roberts to a $2 million dollar, one-year contract to be their starting second baseman. They have signed left-handed reliever Matt Thornton - most recently seen being left off of the Red Sox postseason roster - to a two-year, $7 million dollar deal. And Rany Jazayerli, one of the best baseball analysts alive, wrote a fantastic piece over at Grantland about the Yankees problems and the lack of a coming correction. 

In his piece, which is quite long but deserves the full treatment, there were two passages that I found especially telling.

Cano was worth 7.6 Wins Above Replacement in 2013. McCann, Beltran, and Ellsbury were worth 10.4 bWAR combined. Losing Cano wipes out most of the gains made by signing the other three players, and while Cano will make $24 million in Seattle next year, the Yankees will pay the other three $53 million

 And, the conclusion:

The culprit in the Yankees' downfall is mundane, but real: They're simply not talented enough to contend. Talent was something the Yankees could always buy in the past, but no one's selling it anymore. With few ways to acquire that ability, it looks like the Yankees will be living unhappily — if not ever after, then certainly for a lot longer than their front office and fans are prepared to stomach.

Talent. That makes it sound so simple - but the piece overlooks the major point. Yes, it's less easy now to buy talent, but there is still talent available. The Yankees just don't have any of it. Why is that? Because they are failures at identifying talent. They can't draft. They don't sign international free agents of any quality. They don't get contributing scrap-heap pickups. They've been building their team, for 10 years, almost exclusively on paying top dollar for other teams free agents.

While a Red Sox vs. Yankees comparison may seem overwrought, it reflects an important point of how these teams have been built. A note about terms: "Blockbuster Free Agent" is anyone signed to an AAV of $20 million. "Big Free Agent" is anyone between $10 million. "Mid-level" is over $2 milliong. Bargains are less than that. I've taken all the players projected to be at least 1.0 WAR players from Fangraphs "STEAMER" projection. It's not perfect, but I'm not looking for a perfect projection, just to illustrate a point.

Name	WAR	How acquired
CC Sabathia	3.9	Blockbuster Free Agent Signing
Jacoby Ellsbury	3.7	Blockbuster Free Agent Signing
Hiroki Kuroda	3.5	Big Free Agent Signing
Brian McCann	3.3	Big Free Agent Signing
Ivan Nova	3.1	Rule 5 Draft
David Phelps	2.1	Drafted 2008
Mark Teixeira	2.0	Blockbuster Free Agent Signing
Brett Gardner	2.0	Drafted 2005
Carlos Beltran	1.8	Big Free Agent Signing
David Robertson	1.4	Drafted 2006
Derek Jeter	1.4	Drafted 1992
Alex Rodriguez	1.2	Blockbuster Free Agent Signing
Kelly Johnson	1.1	Bargain signing

Name	WAR	How acquired
Dustin Pedroia	3.9	Drafted 2004
Jon Lester	3.5	Drafted 2002
John Lackey	3.4	Big Free Agent Signing
Xander Bogaerts	3.0	International Signing
Shane Victorino	2.6	Big Free Agent Signing
David Ortiz	2.4	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Will Middlebrooks	2.4	Drafted 2007
Clay Buchholz	2.4	Drafted 2005
Jake Peavy	2.4	Trade
Felix Doubront	2.4	International Signing
Jackie Bradley	2.1	Drafted 2011
Mike Napoli	2.1	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Koji Uehara	2.1	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
A.J. Pierzynski	1.3	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Daniel Nava	1.2	Undrafted free agent
Jonny Gomes	1.1	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Junichi Tazawa	1.1	International Signing
Brandon Workman	1.0	Drafted 2010
Ryan Dempster	1.0	Big Free Agent Signing

The first thing that stands out is how many more good players the Red Sox have than the Yankees. The second, though, is the varied ways the Red Sox acquired their talent. Some were drafted over a decade ago, others quite recently. There are international signings, mid-level free agents, everything. The Yankees? Their top four players were all major signings. Ivan Nova was the one "find" in the group. They have three chosen in the draft in the last ten years. Let's resort the list, filtering out all of the Big and Blockbuster free agents, and players drafted 10 years ago (note - this works quite well, since it eliminates both Jeter and Lester, who were chosen by previous regimes).

Name	WAR	How acquired
Dustin Pedroia	3.9	Drafted 2004
Ivan Nova	3.1	Rule 5 Draft
Xander Bogaerts	3	International Signing
Clay Buchholz	2.4	Drafted 2005
Will Middlebrooks	2.4	Drafted 2007
Felix Doubront	2.4	International Signing
David Ortiz	2.4	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Jake Peavy	2.4	Trade
David Phelps	2.1	Drafted 2008
Jackie Bradley	2.1	Drafted 2011
Mike Napoli	2.1	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Koji Uehara	2.1	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Brett Gardner	2	Drafted 2005
David Robertson	1.4	Drafted 2006
A.J. Pierzynski	1.3	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Daniel Nava	1.2	Undrafted free agent
Kelly Johnson	1.1	Bargain signing
Junichi Tazawa	1.1	International Signing
Jonny Gomes	1.1	Mid-level Free Agent Signing
Brandon Workman	1	Drafted 2010

There is a lot more red there than blue, including seven of the eight best players. 

The Yankee problems are often attributed to the Steinbrenners or the nature of sports in New York or Alex Rodriguez's ego or other such things, but the only good players they can identify are the ones that the league has already identified as good. It doesn't take any skill at all to figure out spending more money than every other team on the best players.

Note: As Jazayerli points out, this offseason they failed even at that - they replaced their best player with a series of inferior expensive ones. The combination of Ellsbury, McCann, and Beltran will probably produce more than Cano, but they are being paid more than twice as much, and do it while taking roughly 2.5 times as many at bats. 

Instead of filling additional spots with minimum cost youngsters or flawed players looking for a shot, it seems Cashman's go-to player is simply old guys that aren't nearly as good as they used to be. In the last year and a half he's brought in Vernon Wells, Ichiro Suzuki, Travis Hafner, Alfonso Soriano, and now Brian Roberts. He's like Montgomery Burns, who tries to fill his company softball team with ringers, but only knows of players from the previous century. I'm waiting for the Yankee equivalent of Waylon Smithers to inform him that "your right-fielder has been dead for a hundred and thirty years."

The general managers job is talent identification. He doesn't do all of it himself, but he puts the team in place that does. Cashman's team has failed. The Yankees are bad not just because the economics of baseball have changed, but because their general manager can't identify good players. 

Frequent special elections are not the way to run a democracy

So here in Massachusetts, my old congressional district (MA-5) elected a replacement for Ed Markey, who became Senator over the summer. I find the winner, Katherine Clark, to be rather uninspiring, but that's another story for another time. The issue I have here is the turnout. Clark won with just a tick over 40,000 votes of the almost 61,000 cast. That sounds like a dominating victory, until you sit back and wonder why we're electing someone to represent roughly 705,000 people with only 40,000 votes.

It is often the inclination to self-righteously proclaim that people are not active enough, and that they don't care enough about their democracy. This is the wrong place for that. Democracy is hard. High turnout levels reflect voter engagement in part, but they also reflect the ease of the process - that's why those polling place changes down south often wouldn't get through the voting rights act preclearance. Making it harder for people to vote makes it less likely for them to vote. That having frequent elections for single seats rather than a main election day suppresses turnout is not a controversial statement.

In Massachusetts there has been a real hullabaloo in the last decade about how to replace a Senator who leaves mid-term. When John Kerry was almost elected President in 2004, many were scared that Governor Romney would appoint his replacement, who would serve the next four years. So they changed the rules to have a special election.

Then in 2009, Senator Edward Kennedy died, and we realized they'd done, excuse my French, a shitty job writing that law. So they changed the law on the fly, having an appointed representative in place until the special election. That election had something of a surprise result but the system worked because people were very motivated to turn out for a variety of reasons.

In 2013, we had yet another special election to replace Kerry. It was won, with fairly poor turnout, by Congressman Markey. (Full disclosure: I was once an intern in Markey's office and volunteered on his Senatorial campaign). That set off the need for ANOTHER special election to fill his seat. Nobody showed up to vote in it. Well, not quite nobody, but check out the town by town comparison with the 2012 election. I use 2012 because with a Presidential race and a hotly contested Senate campaign, that's probably as close to full turnout as we're going to get.

City/Town	2012 Total	2013 Total	% Turnout
Winchester	12767	7205	56.43%
Melrose	15427	3810	24.70%
Arlington	25799	5605	21.73%
Lexington	18257	3750	20.54%
Lincoln	3660	741	20.25%
Belmont	14077	2750	19.54%
Sherborn	2653	458	17.26%
Wayland	8260	1245	15.07%
Winthrop	8895	1323	14.87%
Malden	20968	3100	14.78%
Framingham	27704	4008	14.47%
Medford	27401	3898	14.23%
Holliston	8267	1175	14.21%
Stoneham	12368	1747	14.13%
Watertown	16716	2314	13.84%
Weston	6621	893	13.49%
Woburn	19243	2553	13.27%
Natick	18642	2304	12.36%
Ashland	8512	998	11.72%
Revere	16897	1973	11.68%
Waltham	25066	2880	11.49%
Southborough	5804	622	10.72%
Sudbury*	10482	1306	NA
Cambridge*	48787	4279	NA

Cambridge and Sudbury are only partially in the fifth district, so they are marked with asterisks - the 2012 total is city-wide.

The results are kind of gross. Malden (which Clark represents as a State Senator!) had 3100 votes cast, compared to nearly 21,000 in 2012. Medford, which for whatever reason I've always considered the "district seat" due to its large population and politically-connectedness, had less than 4000 voters. Medford could get 4000 voters if they announced were electing the town dump manager tomorrow - I've never seen anything close to that low in that city. Waltham, something of a bellwether in the state, had only 11.5% of its 2012 turnout! The big outlier was Winchester. Were they more politically active in Winchester, you ask? No, they voted on their new high school at the same time.

There is a very minimalist view of democracy, forwarded by Joseph Schumpeter and others, that essentially reduces democracy to free and fair elections. (Schumpeter specifically has a pretty detailed definition of "free and fair" but we shan't go down that road at this time). This, I think, is wrong - an elected tyrant is still a tyrant, and elections, even fair ones, can be non-democratic. Robert Dahl outlined additional rules for democracy, with one including effective participation (emphasis added). Having an election in December, four weeks after municipal elections, months after another special election, failed on its face. A United States Representative was chosen by 40,000 people.

What is the alternative? Appointments and empty seats are unpopular, but perhaps sometimes necessary. The 2004 rule change was put into effect because an appointed Senator would have served all of Kerry's remaining term, until January 2009. I agree that an unelected appointee should not serve for four years as a Senator, but I also don't want to be sending people to Congress with less than 40,000 votes, So what is the alternative?

Here is my proposal.

1. Special elections are held on election day. That is, the Tuesday following the first Monday in November. Turnout is naturally higher then - people know that it is time to vote, and they do the proper preparation to do so.

2. Empty seats are filled by a governor's appointee between the open date and election day. I understand the push to institute a rule that the appointee must be filled by the same party as the departing representative, but I don't think it would do a lot of good - it won't take much for someone to change their own party designation and have the D or R label while voting the opposite. I also understand why people want these appointees to not be able to run for the open seat, so as not to gain an incumbency advantage, but I doubt the Constitutionality of such a rule. The enforcement of such a thing would need to come at the electoral level.

3. If there are no elections between the date a seat is opened and the date the seat expires, then there will be no special election. This may be seen as a flaw, but is actually an advantage. We seem quite worried about incumbency advantage here, but Clark is now going into 2014 as an incumbent after gaining only 40,000 votes. By contrast, Governor Patrick who received about 140,000 votes (very rough estimate) in the 2010 election from the communities that now compose MA-5, would be appointing the interim Congressman. Which is the undemocratic process?

It was a good idea to change the rule in 2004 - an appointed choice should not get a four-year term as Senator. But a one-year term is preferable to an election that features poor participation. A democracy is only as good as its rules, and the rules in MA-5 have produces a result that is insufficiently democratic.

Happy Birthday, Grandpa

Today would have been my grandfather's 97th birthday. He passed away in January, and I didn't have the words then to speak about it. Eleven months later I still don't, and it's likely that they will not be soon forthcoming. His life seemed like something of a storybook, growing up in early 20th Century Manhattan, going out to Williams College, eschewing Harvard Business for Yale Divinity. He and my grandmother were married 68 years. A stroke in the 1980s took much of his physical strength, including his ability to drive, though he still enjoyed croquet and his evening walks. And pruning. Every time I visited their house in the summertime he seemed to be pruning something. Another stroke about six years ago took much of his ability to speak, which was hard, but the twinkle in his eye and a shrug of his shoulders communicated more than most people could in 10,000 words.

I love him, and I miss him dearly.