The two Cliff Lee trades, other trades, managing a bidding war and evaluating a general manager

                Amidst the general decline in opinion of the Mariners front office (although it is still justifiably quite high at least in the blogosphere) I sought to justify my original and continued optimism that their decisions represent a sound decision making process and skill at evaluating the market.  The easy solution is to be content that the decisions were for the most part sound and many things went horribly wrong in the luck distribution.  The argument could end here, but one feels uneasy after a season like this, and is tempted to analyze decisions on results as well as process.  I immediately sought comfort in both Cliff Lee trades as evidence of deal-making prowess.  I’m willing to believe that the first trade didn’t just fall into Jack Zduriencik’s lap and that it had just as much to do with awareness of what other teams were trying to do, skill in communicating the right information about what Mariners were after, and most importantly skill in evaluating an opposing GM (the limits of their idiocy) in order to sufficiently low-ball them without causing the discussion to collapse.  It seems like an easy call that the first Lee trade wasn’t completely luck and most likely demonstrates ability that fans should be enthusiastic about. 

               The second Lee trade is trickier because it seems like a much different scenario.  For one, dealing powerful position of having highly sought after talent that could still provide some value if not traded gave the Mariners tremendous leverage.  There was also a bidding war.  The first Lee trade could not have contained any kind of bidding war or else Amaro Jr.’s evaluation of talent is worse than we all thought.  Midseason 2010 however it was clear that Lee was available and multiple teams wanted him.  The existence of two known offers from smart teams seems like evidence of determined value rather than one team plundering another team who is desperate to distance their offer from others.  I guess my question is whether we can have enough information to assign skill to a trade where all the heavy lifting in negotiating a valuable return is essentially done by their negotiating position and the market.  One could argue it took skill to know when Lee’s value would be the highest, whether or not waiting could generate a higher offer, and whether this waiting is worth the injury risk.  It is also important to be able to judge whether another team’s “final offer” is really final.  One also must be aware of the possibility that an offer that is on the table will not last, because the offering team will realize that it is too high.  Bidding wars create a time sensitive scenario where an offer might be made before the offering team thought through and weighed every possible outcome.  The process is so complex, with so many changing scenarios and moving parts, that being able to choose the best offer cannot be as easy as simply waiting for an offer they like and taking it. 

In negotiating, both teams are essentially playing chicken and trying to figure out what the other’s true final offer will be.  Sure, Zduriencik could have simply waited until midnight on the trade deadline and took the highest offer, but I’m sure there were teams that said at various points that their offers were final.  I can see teams actually harming themselves in a short term trade outcome in order to establish credibility that they mean it when they declare an offer “final.”  There have probably been situations in the past where players that by all rights should’ve been traded aren’t because a team feels they have to uphold this credibility.  A trade for a gigantic haul vs. meager one could be the outcome of one team’s guess of another team’s limits or posturing.  It probably took skill to correctly value the potential for different teams to offer better and the risk in not accepting their offers.  Texas had the most to gain from trading for Lee, so they were the most desperate.  Waiting to see whether they would break and make the offer they did was a calculated gamble.  The Yankees and Twins both have a good shot at winning the World Series this year while keeping the talented players they offered/considered offering.  The Mariners waiting and saying no to them was obviously a risk. 

I guess the point of all this is to reject the notion that some of Zduriencik’s successes could be attributed to luck in a way that, in the wake of this disastrous season , could shine a new and distressing light on the deals that were failures as evidence of deeper flaws being unmasked.  The job of running a baseball team requires limitless time and effort and trades and free agent signings are time sensitive with  changing windows of opportunity.  The amount of time and effort put into deals that never happen, that we never know about, further drains the finite resources a front office can devote to its functioning.  A bad trade could be evidence of bad evaluating skills or lack of discipline, a bad process or simply not enough time spent contemplating and weighing the likelihood of possible outcomes.  Perhaps if Zduriencik had weeks to lock himself in his office and think of nothing other than the likelihood of Morrow reaching his potential or Jack Wilson turning to dust, those trades might have been different. The second Cliff Lee trade obviously took massive amounts of time and focus.  The variables are such that good and bad outcomes could be evident of the same level of skill and quality of process subjected to differing levels of time and focus.  Looking at process is valuable but needs to be weighted according to the importance of the trade. Because differing amounts of luck or skill can be assigned to any one deal, we need to look at all of Zduriencik’s deals as a whole before we can begin to put any kind of predictive value on them.  Zduriencik isn’t the GM that made the Cliff Lee deals, and he isn’t the GM that made the Jack Wilson and Brandon League deals.  He’s somewhere in between, a mixture of both, and that is a GM I’m comfortable with running my favorite team.