Minnesota Twins Fanatics

http://www.cbssports.com/mcc/blogs/
entry/20167131/30963300

Posted to my blog. I'd be in favor of moving Slowey, Kubel, Cuddy, Mijares, Capps, Delmon Young, Carl Pavano and more - even at discounted prices given recent facts like the bullpen's breakdowns - in return for an influx of new talent.

Running under .500 and in fourth place, they aren't going to make the run this year. This isn't the team - doesn't have the offense or the frontline starters. It's time to give this farm system some outside help. 

Category: MLB

Tyler Hugunin

Writing 1301 Sect 32

Professor Bush

12/08/10

Research Paper

Joe Mauer Less Than Twenty-Three Million Dollars

In the last few years, baseball fans have changed the way they changed they looked at statistics of their favorite players. Fans used to judge a player’s skill based on their home run total, runs batted in total, and batting average. However, Fans are now in-depth in their analysis of baseball players. They use intricate statistics like on base plus slugging (OPS), which is calculated by adding OBP and SLG percentages together. Another statistic used is wins above replacement (WAR) which is the computation of the total wins a player can add above when compared to a normal player would add. BA, OBP, and OPS are the three categories I choose to judge the skill of a player because they only use the factors that the player himself can control. For example, a player cannot control the amount of runs batted in he has because he cannot control whether or not his teammates in front of him in the lineup will get on base.

The topic of Joe Mauer’s contract had been under heated debate long before the final terms were signed and agreed upon. His expected contract guided financial decisions for the Twins management years prior including the management not signing equally skilled players Torii Hunter and Johan Santana. The leaders of the franchise decided not to sign these players because they were in need of a substantial amount of money in order to sign Mauer. However, many fans feel that this money is going to be returned to the Twins tenfold, through increased popularity from the team success because of his tremendous skills. When Mauer signed the 184 million dollar agreement, fans everywhere rejoiced because he was going to stay a Minnesota Twin for the next eight years. On the other hand, I know that for a fact that many fans are starting to get upset about the consistent playoff failure of the past few years, and I feel that Mauer’s contract will ultimately limit the Twins potential of winning a World Series Championship.

Contract debates are extremely intense in all of the four major sports, but in baseball they intense for different reasons behind the deliberation between players and the franchises. All the four major sports except baseball have a salary cap, which limits the total amount of money each team can spend on their players. The salary cap creates a more balanced playing field for the teams because its limits how many great athletes each team can potentially sign. However, with baseball not having a salary cap, a team’s management is able to spend as much as they want to create the best team that money can buy. No salary creates an unfair playing field, which directly correlates to the market size where the team plays because the largest markets in baseball include New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and these same cities contain the largest team salaries in baseball. This is because they each have large television contracts. With this being stated, each franchise has two factors to consider in a situation of signing a player when the contract is as large as Mauer’s contract. On one hand, are the managers willing to put a major portion of their salary into one player, which limits the potential amount of money to sign other players for the team. Or do they not want to sign the player and risk losing support from the fans because fans see the management being unwilling to spend the money necessary to win a championship.

Sports writers call him one of the greatest hitters they have ever seen. At the same time, Twins fans throughout Minnesota admire Joe because as Tom Verducci explains, “Joe Mauer is a Gold Glove catcher, batting champion, homegrown icon, and now, having closed the last loophole in his game by adding power, Mauer might well be the most valuable asset in baseball.” In the quote, Tom showed the importance of Joe Mauer to the Minnesota Twins franchise. Mauer was born in April, 1983 in Saint Paul, Minnesota where he became a high school sports star excelling in multiple sports (Shane Carney). After high school, he was drafted number one overall by the Minnesota Twins and was expected to bring back the franchise to prominence and for the most part he has done so by having career averages of a .327 batting average, a .407 on base percentage, and a .888 on base plus slugging percentage (MLB Player Stats). Those stats rank him in the top five all time among catchers in those categories, according to David Vincent and his career statistics for catchers. These stupendous averages made it seem mandatory for the Twins to sign Joe Mauer to a contract extension in early 2010. Fans continually argue how a franchise shouldn’t let a great player out of their grasps. The management prevented this by signing Mauer to an eight year 184 million dollar contract, which breaks down into twenty-three million dollars a year making him one of the highest paid players in the league.

On one hand, fans feel that with playoff success Joe Mauer will bring more fans to the stadium each night. Fans argue that the reason that the Twins were able to sell out each game this season was partly due to the popularity of Joe Mauer. However, the first year Joe consistently played an entire season with the Twins was in 2005, and they saw a five percent increase in the total attendance when compared to the average of the two previous years before Joe Mauer was playing for the team (2000-2010 Attendance).¹ I do admit that the five percent increase can be credited to the popularity of Joe Mauer, but the true reason behind the large increase in attendance between 2009 and 2010 is due to the opening of the new outdoor stadium called Target Field. With the Twins finally playing baseball outside, they saw a thirty-three percent increase in one season (2000-2010 Attendance). The large increase in attendance is just above the average increase for teams opening a new stadium, which is approximately a 25 percent increase in attendance.² The argument by the diehard Twins fans that Joe is the reason for the attendance increase is mute because the true reason for the significant increase is the effect a new stadium has on the total attendance for a professional sports team.

I do agree with fans that Mauer is one of the best catcher’s playing professional baseball because he is the only player to be ranked in the top three in BA, OBP, and OPS in the last three years (MLB Player Stats). Joe Mauer’s career average are .327, .407, and .888 respectively in the categories already rank in the top five all-time among catchers (David Vincent). His accolades also include three batting titles during the first seven years of his career and one MVP award in 2009. The three batting titles by a catcher are the most all-time and his .365 batting average in 2009 is the highest batting average all-time for a catcher in either league (Joe Christensen). These stats alone are the reason that many Twins fans demanded that the management re-sign Joe Mauer. I agree that the only way to compete with the high spending Yankees and other big markets in baseball is to spend money, but how can you compete with a team that is willing to spend double on team salary, which comes one year after the Twins saw an approximate thirty percent increase in their own team salary.

However, the many of the positions on the Twins roster were ranked in the bottom half in the categories: BA, OBP, and OPS (Sortable Player Stats).³The only position that they were located in the top five in 2010 in those same categories beside catcher was shortstop. The positions that the Twins were extremely bad were second base and third base; both were located in the bottom half among all American League teams. The balanced spending on players would ultimately erase deficiencies at position, but I do admit it would hamper a team having one great player to lead the team to a championship. According to his essay, Michael Hurley realized a starting lineup of descent players could be bought with twenty-three million dollars that will be Joe Mauer’s salary in 2011. He explains “the newspaper took a closer look at what $23 million can get an MLB team in 2010.The answer? A team of nine players who are pretty good.” Michael used WAR to compute the value of every player in Major League Baseball, with this he found a group of nine respectable players that would have a total WAR that was larger than Mauer’s, while at the same time the total salary for all nine players was less than his total salary. Now I’m not saying that the Twins should only spend twenty million dollars on an entire team, but I am saying that the Twins could put a more balanced team onto the field each and every day. Management could do this by signing multiple players to ten million dollar contracts instead of twenty-three million in one player.

I agree that Mauer is one of the greatest catchers currently playing baseball, but to argue that he is one of the best all-time only seven years into his career is absurd. A player cannot be compared to past great players until he has won a world series or is retired. According to Rob Neyer, the catchers in the discussion for the greatest all-time, in no particular order, are Roy Campanella, Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra, Johnny Bench, Mickey Cochrane, and Gabby Harnett. I bring this up because fans always argue that Mauer is going to be if not already the best catcher of all time, so this would be his competition for the title. These catchers were great in their own right, and all of the catchers won a World Series title except Gabby Harnett. On the other hand, Mauer has never been out of the first round of the playoffs. I decided to look deeper into their career statistics to find out how they played during the tail end of their career. Those same catchers averaged sixteen seasons playing professional baseball (Encyclopedia of Players).⁴ I found some very tell-tale signs of old age in all the catchers, which included them playing on average twenty two percent less games during the final four years then when compared to their prime years of playing baseball(Encyclopedia of Players). The sixteen season average played by the all-time great’s means that only twelve of those sixteen years the players played statistically to the best their athletes abilities. I also found that the catchers had an average 5.49% dip in batting average and a 6.4% dip in OPS in the final four years of playing baseball (Encyclopedia of Players).⁵ When these drops in average are compared to Joe Mauer stats for his career so far, we would see his batting average drop 18 percentage points from .327% to .309%. At the same time, his OPS would drop to .831% from .888% while his games played per season would drop from 135 to approximately 105 games. I know that all figures are just rough predictions for how Mauer’s statistics could possibly look like for his final four years of playing baseball. That point aside, I really want to bring up the point that during the final three years of Mauer’s gigantic contract, he will be playing worse and less often than he did at the beginning of his career. This is because Joe Mauer just finished his seventh season of professional baseball, so at the end of his eight year contract he will be finishing up his fifteenth year of baseball. This means that he will still be earning the twenty-three million dollars a years while not performing to how fans have grown accustomed to during these past years. Joe Mauer has already shown signs of suffering from the rigorous position that is playing catcher on a regular basis. Along with this, Catchers including Mauer usually struggle near the end of the season as Tom Verducci explains, “He is a .305 hitter in the final two months, when the toll of catching comes fully due.” The quote also supports the fact that Joe shouldn’t be paid that much money because many catchers do not play the same amount of games on a consistent basis as compared with other position players. I do admit this is not Joe fault but the fault resides on the position he plays; however; it supports my belief that Mauer shouldn’t have been signed to such a large contract because the maximum amount of games he has ever played in a season is 146 and that was a year where he didn’t have injury problems (MLB Player Stats). His maximum total of games played in a season is considerably lower when compared to other players who are as talented as Mauer. His injury problems were talked about in Joe Christensen’s article and it reads, “He had a knee injury as a rookie, a quadriceps injury in 2007 and a puzzling lower-back injury that kept him out last April.” The quote shows how injury prone Joe is even though it is so early in his career; it is only a matter of time until Joe has a career ending injury while playing catcher. Along with an injury, the contracts in Major League Baseball are guaranteed so if Joe were to have an injury, the Twins would still have to pay him his money, which limits the amount of money they could spend on people actually playing for the team.

Major League Baseball teams that have twenty percent of their salary in one player have had poor winning percentages. In 2010, there were ten teams that had at least twenty percent of their team salary in one player on their opening day roster (USA Today Salary Databases).⁶ Those same teams combined to win forty-nine percent of their total games which equates to about eighty wins in the entire season in the total of 162 games (Regular Season Standings).⁷ Along with the poor winning percentage, only two teams, the Giants and Rangers, of the ten were able to make the playoffs, however; I would like to mention that the two teams also were able to make it all the way to the World Series with the Giants winning the title. If the Minnesota Twins were to have a winning percentage of 49% in the last ten years they would have never made the playoffs as either a wildcard or division winner (Regular Season Standings). This potentially means that while Mauer is under the contract where he is being paid around twenty percent for the next eight years; the Twins will have a winning percentage that will not be good enough for them to make the playoffs. The fact is that many Twins fans will expect great things from Joe including winning one if not many multiple championships. The facts above support the opposite that putting all that money into one player will produce unfavorable results that including not even making the playoffs.

The Twins should not have signed Joe Mauer to the large contract. I do agree that Joe is a very good player, but the Twins shouldn’t have locked up twenty percent of their team salary into one player. The team should have put a more balanced team together so they wouldn’t be dependent on one player to carry them to the championship. The Twins management have run the franchise the same way for the past thirty odd years, and they have consistently put out successful teams even winning two World Series. So let Joe Mauer go to the Yankees or whoever is willing to take the risk on such a large contract and keep running the franchise the same way. Why change something that works?

Notes

1. I wanted to find the potential increase Joe Mauer had to the attendance. I added the total attendance of the Minnesota Twins in 2003 and 2004 (1,946,001 and 1,879,222 respectively). This number was then divided by two to find the average of the two years, 1,912,611.5. Then, I found the total attendance for Mauer’s first full year playing with the Twins (2,013,453). This number was subtracted from the previous year’s average resulting in 100841.5. This number was then divided by the 1,912,611.5 to find the percent increase in attendance, 5%.
2. I wanted to find the average percent increase in attendance for teams. I compared the last year in the old stadium to the first year in the new stadium for all teams who opened a new stadium in the last decade. For example, I computed the percent increase for the Pittsburgh Pirates when there last year’s attendance in their old stadium was 1,709,119 while the attendance in the first year of their new stadium was 2,428,661. To compute the percent increase, I again went new minus old then that number was divided by old. The Pirates percent increase was 42 percent.
3. I added up the all the statistics needed in order to compute the average in each BA, OBP, and OPS for each position in baseball for the Minnesota Twins. The statistics included walks, hits, total at bats, total plate appearances, bases reached, and total bases, however; I only added up players that had a total of one hundred at bats for the season. Once I computed the averages for each position; I compared these averages to the best players in each position to find out how the average would rank in the MLB. For example, the Twins first basemen had an average of .295 which ranked ninth in the MLB.
4. I computed the average statistic for each of the all-time great catcher in MLB. I did this because I wanted to see how they performed in their final four seasons. For example, I computed the average amount of seasons they played by adding up the total seasons played of each players then dividing this number by six, which resulted in an average of 16 seasons played.
5. I computed the average of BA, OBP, and OPS for each catcher in the final four years of their career and then compared them to their career average to see how they played in the final four years. For example, Bill Dickey had a batting average of .297 in his final four seasons, but his career batting average was .313. I computed the percent change by doing .297 minus .313 then dividing this by .313 resulting in 5% decrease in batting average for Dickey in his final four years.
6. I found which teams had approximately twenty percent of their salary locked up one player. For example, the Houston Astros had an opening day strategy of 92,355,500 dollars and had one player, Carlos Lee, being paid nineteen million dollars for that year. To calculate the average, I took the player’s salary divided by the team salary, which results in 20.5% percent of the total team salary.
7. I wanted to find the average winning percentage of all the teams who had twenty percent of their salary in one player. Once I had the winning percentages for all the teams I found an average by adding the winning percentages together and then dividing that number by the amount of teams, which resulted in a winning percentage of 49%.

Works Cited

"2000-2010 Attendance." BallparksofBaseball.com. Ballparks of Baseball, n.d. Web. 21 Nov 2010. <http://www.ballparksofbaseball.c

om/2000-03attendance.htm>.

Carney, Shane. "The Biography of Baseball Player Joe Mauer." Yahoo.com. Yahoo! Inc, 29 Jul 2006. Web. 27 Nov 2010. <http://www.associatedcontent.com

/article/46009/biography_ of_baseball _player_joe_mauer.html?cat=49>.

Christensen, Joe. "Is Mauer Worth the Long Term Risk?." StarTribune.com. Star Tribune, 16 Feb 2010. Web. 29 Nov 2010. <http://www.startribune.com/sport

s/84420522.html>.

"Encyclopedia of Players." Baseballreference.com. Sports Reference LLC., n.d. Web. 27 Nov 2010. <http://www.baseball-reference.co

m/players/>.

Hurley, Michael. "Joe Mauer Making More Than a Decent Starting Nine." New England Sports Network 23 Mar 2010. Web. 21 Nov 2010. <http://www.nesn.com/2010/03/joe-

mauer-making-more-money-than-a-dece

nt-starting-nine.html>.

"MLB Player Stats." ESPN.com. ESPN, n.d. Web. 21 Nov 2010. <http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/ batting/_/position/c/sort/atBats/or

der/true>.

Neyer, Rob. "The Men in the Masks." ESPN.com. ESPN, 27 Jan 2010. Web. 27 Nov 2010. <http://members.tripod.com/bb_cat

chers/catchers/neyer.htm>.

"Regular Season Standings." MLB.com. Major League Baseball, n.d. Web. 21 Nov 2010. <http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/standings

/>.

Rosenthal, Ken. "MLB Owes it to the Teams to Level the Playing Fields." Sporting News 225.16 2001. 17. Web. 21 Nov 2010. Academic Search Premier. Retrieved at Library of University of Minnesota. <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/d

etail

"Sortable Player Stats." Twinsbaseball.com. MLB Advanced Media, L.P., n.d. Web. 21 Nov 2010. <http://minnesota.twins.mlb.com/s

tats/sortable_player_stats.jsp >.

"USA Today Salary Databases." USAToday.com. n.d. Web. 21 Nov 2010. <http://content. usatoday.com/sports/baseball/salari

es/totalpayroll.aspx?year=2010>.

Verducci, Tom. "Joe Mauer Will Serenely, Politely Crush You ." Sports Illustrated 110.26 2009. 40-5. Web. 21 Nov 2010. Academic Search Premier. Retrieved at Library of University of Minnesota. <http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/d

etail

Vincent, David. "Career Batting Leaders." Encyclopedia of Baseball Catchers. Encyclopedia of Baseball Catchers, n.d. Web. 27 Nov 2010. <http://bb_catchers.tripod.com/ca

tchers/careerld.htm>.

Category: MLB

How can a Fan group not talk about a team during the season especially about a team that is the Hottest baseball. 

Suffered a tough loss yesterday to the Giants because we couldn't give Nick Blackburn any run support. 

Joe Mauer is back to keep this hot streak going, but as of now the huge contract he signed we are paying him just under 4 million dollars a RBI. Joe Nathan and Jim Thome are set to come back to the Twins this weekend in Milwaukee. Things are looking good lets revive this group. Please favorite a fellow Minnesota Twins fan page so I can increase my level Thank you!!

Category: MLB

Come check us out.


http://goldytalk.com/index.php


Category: MLB

Nishioka looks awfully good in Number One. Let's hope the hit parade begins here. The Twins infield did just get quicker, but did it drop its batting average as a tip of the cap to Mendoza?

Category: MLB