"A pair of great seasons and a bunch of lousy ones may have more appeal than occasional blips above the .500 level and a string of false hopes."

Really? Is that why the Marlins can barely draw 10,000 people per game to their 'ballpark'? Sure, those two World Series were great for their fans, but trading away all your good players all the time does not create any goodwill towards the fans. Even when they're winning they have trouble drawing.

"This hypothetical scenario doesn't work if team owners pocket the extra $16.5 million or more that could be gained from taking the frugal road. It makes sense only if the savings are heavily invested in player development and scouting with a goal of future success."

Great post, and I love the concept of saving the money. You allude to another avenue to which the saved money can be spent, in the form of give-aways. Another idea, and it is something I am surprised many GMs with limited cash do not explore is, what is the use of adding $6-10M in replacement level players before the season begins? The Indians did this in 2007 with slightly above replacement level players in Nixon, Foulke, Borowski and Dellucci. While Joe had an important role in helping the Indians bullpen, and Nixon may have been the veteran glue that helped this young team, would some of that money not been better invested by sitting on it, and given the clubs modest income, saying it for the trade deadline. Presumably, $10M saved on opening day payroll is like having the ability to acquire $20M in salaries during the All Star break(ASB). That is, a $20M player on opening day, will simply be owed $10M from the ASB onward. And how many hapless franchises are willing to rid themselves of a huge expiring contract for some low level prospects, that, lets face it, don't have a shot at the show in the first place.

The Marlins didn't have "a pair of great seasons" - they had two good seasons (92-70 in 1997, 91-71 in 2003) where they finished second in their own division, wound up with a wild card berth (hardly guaranteed with 91-92 wins), and then won three short series to take home a World Series title.
They're the perfect example of the UPSIDE of "occasional blips above the .500 level," not a counter-example. The difference between the Marlins and Royals is payroll, not philosophy.

So basically, you're implying that small market teams shouldn't try next year, because they're guarenteed to miss a playoff spot? Sure, the odds may not be great, but weren't the Mets supposed to win the division last season? This is baseball, not an economics class. That's why they play the games.

Sure, the Guillen contract was bad. So was the Meche contract (though it's looking better this year). But maybe by the 2nd or 3rd year of those deals, the other pieces fall into place for KC (Gordon, Butler, Hochaver or however it's spelt) and Guillen and Meche DO become useful pieces on a team trying to make a run at the division. Should I point to the Tigers paying money to Guillen and Ordonez when they were bottom in their division?

And did you just call the Blue Jays a 73 win team?

"A pair of great seasons and a bunch of lousy ones may have more appeal than occasional blips above the .500 level and a string of false hopes."

This is what hardcore fans of teams would like you to believe. They claim to not care what happens as long as they get that one championship. But the market states otherwise. What people really want is contention, to be in it at the end. And if a baseball owner is a business man first thats what he or she is going to try to provide. I can't really blame them for that either.

You can compete on a low budget, as the A's and Twins have decisively proven. Getting to the postseason on the cheap doesn't happen by dumpings truckloads of cash at the feet of journeymen.

The point I'm trying to make is that overpaying for Jose Guillen and Kyle Lohse types isn't going to make a contender out of a small-market team. All it does is prolong the agony.

I got to watch the Twins a number of times in 2000, and it was painful to see how overmatched they were. The hopeful sign was how that young team consistently played fundamentally sound baseball and never slacked off under Tom Kelly's leadership. You could see better days ahead, but it took a couple of years.

Building a contender from the ground up takes a strong farm system, some time and picking up the right supporting players in trades and free agency. There's no quick fix.

So what were Ron Coomer, Dennis Hocking, Sean Bergman, Bob Wells and Hector Carrasco? All members of that 2000 Twins team. Or Butch Huskey and Midre Cummings? These are quintessential mediocre major league players. The Twins won the division after trading for Rick Reed, another mediocre pitcher who lead their staff that year.

I think the reality is that budgets are not the biggest constraint on teams. And budget decisions play only a small role in a team's success. Unless you have a budget like the Yankees, the amount of talent you can buy on the open market is pretty limited.

Every team - contenders included - has some mediocre players. The point is not to pay big bucks for ordinary performers.

There will always be roster fillers, especially for teams at the lower end of the payroll and standings. Any team that tries to build from within is also going to have a certain failure rate among its young prospects. Ideally, the stars, mid-level regulars and useful role players from the farm system outnumber the flops.

I'll go to the other end of the talent spectrum to explain this point. It would be unreasonable for the Rockies to expect Matt Holliday to put up better numbers than he did in 2007. It could happen, but I wouldn't put money on it.

Let's say Holliday does .340/36/137 again. The Rockies will have to keep giving him big raises for the same numbers. He would even get a nice raise for a .310/30/110 season under the current system.

Unless a team is the Yankees or Red Sox, there comes a point where even productive hitters like Holliday are just too expensive. I think that's even more true for journeymen.

I think you are missing cause and effect. Players get paid more because they are worth more.

Carlos Silva is a great example. Is he a better pitcher than Johan Santana? Obviously not. But he Seattle may end up paying him more next year than Santana will make unless the Twins trade him.

Why? Obviously because he is a free agent and is arguably the best pitcher available. That means, unlike Santana, they don't have to give up a lot of other players to get him.

Should the Twins have agreed to pay Silva that much money. No, I don't think so. But Silva is worth a lot more to the Mariners than he is to the Twins. The Twins have a lot of pitching prospects who can take Silva's place. The Mariners don't.

You can argue Silva is an over-paid mediocrity, but if he pitches like he did for the Twins, the Mariners have added one piece in the process of building a winning team. And they did it without having to give up any other pieces. Its just money.

So only 3 or 4 teams build to win, and the rest race to the bottom for the cheapest set of AAAA players? Wow, that is a sure way to send baseball down the drain. I suppose it would demonsrate that there is something terribly wrong with the competitive foundation of the game...showing that professional leagues like the NFL and NBA know how to maintain a better economic balance with salary caps and revenue sharing. Baseball may be able to survive 1 or 2 teams taking the Marlins approach each year, but if the majority of teams are not building teams which are intended at least to be competitive each season, why would fans find the sport even mildly interesting? How many fans want their team to be the Washington Generals playing the Globetrotters every year? And how many people show up to cheer the Generals?

And I didn't mention the fact that a mass movement by small/medium market teams to stay out of the free agent market probably would instigate a complaint of collusion by the player's association. And since baseball is awash in cash, that complaint might appear to have validity to an arbitrator.

Al did say that you would need to invest into developing young players. I might be wrong, but all he's saying is that rather than trading for Morris (and taking on his salary for 2008 for an improvement of... maybe 2 wins?) the Pirates would have been better off using that money to draft better players than Moskos. If you can get 3-4 really good prospects for the money that Morris is owed in 2008, then that's exactly what a small franchise has to do. I'm not sure how many Pirates fans are willing to trade their potential improvement from 68 to 72 wins (4 W is a lot of credit to Morris) in change for a hugely better farm system.

Because this is overpaying mediocrity. The Pirates have no chance to contend. They probably have no chance to finish above fifth place in that division and they are a lock to be below .500. Morris has no use for the long term (and you may argue that he doesn't at all), but he costs enough to take on a large portion of their payroll and prevent them from acquiring nice international talent or drafting quality players. So he gives them a mild improvement, so mild that fans won't notice it until they look at the year-end standings, but he does harm them in the long term because of the money he makes.

Because Meche has a long term contract and reasonable upside, because Guillen has been signed when Butler, Gordon, Hochevar and others are growing up, the plan of the Royals might make sense, but it might if and only if they believe that they're going to contend in 2-3 years time. If they don't think they will contend, but they only acquired these players to look more decent while not providing an actual long-term improvement, then it's the wrong way to go.

And that's what I believe the bottom line is: you shouldn't overpay for ANYBODY if you're a small market team, unless that guy is the one you think will give you the marginal improvement to contend or will boost your revenues to the point that he's not overpaid anyway. Otherwise, you should be investing heavily in developing youngsters. Will Guillen boost the Royals' revenues to that point? Will he be there when they expect to contend? If so, it becomes a judgmental issue (they might be right or wrong), but his signing has an explanation. If not, and they just got him to improve slightly but without a true look to the future, then it's a bad signing regardless of how he performs. When the Pirates finish below .500 yet again this year, Pittsburgh fans aren't going to be happy because they did it with Morris rather than -insert cheap mediocre pitcher here-. Now, if Morris took them from 88 to 91 W it would be a different story, but I hope you see what I mean, and what I believe Al means too.

Interesting point, but it only makes sense if a team doesn't ever plan to contend.

Like RS pointed out above, a signing like Guillen makes sense in the same way signing Pudge made sense for the 100 loss Tigers several years ago.

Because the plan is to contend in two or maybe three years, mediocre players can supplement talent already coming from the farm (Butler, Gordon, etc.) And by continually adding pieces both from the farm and the market, the team can grow into an actual contender. Like you said, quick fixes don't exist. But in a lot of cases these 'mediocre' players represent a willingness to keep building a winning team.

A team can't have a team full of prospects alone, and to get these role players/journeymen who are a piece of every successful team's puzzle, you have to spend big bucks in today's market.

Well, I have no intent on defending the Pirates' trade for Matt Morris. But my reaction was to the idea that only 4 or 5 teams have a realistic chance of contending, and that, therefore, the remaining 10 or 11 teams should undertake a Marlins-style approach to the season. To the extent that the A's and Twins have been successful with a "moneyball" approach to building their teams, it is not clear to me that it would be a successful strategy if the majority of teams were engaging in the same strategy. The A's, Twins, and Marlins had success because they gained an advantage taking a under-utilized path (analogous to exploiting market inefficiencies).

For instance, if all the non-contending teams chose to move their spending from the ML roster to amateur scouting and player development, would any of the teams gain a competitive advantage? The pool of amateur talent is limited, and a mass decision by all the teams to shift money to that area might have no real competitive impact other than to inflate signing bonuses for amateur players. If all but the top teams try to trade their veteran players for prospects, a la Marlins, then the trade value of prospects will soar to levels which are no longer attractive.

Similarly, the notion that teams are "overpaying" for Jose Guillen or Carlos Silva is a subjective judgement. Their price was market determined, and like most reasonably functioning markets, the price was based on current supply and demand. Given the large growth in baseball revenue, free agent salaries are growing at a vigorous rate. Guillen and Silva may not be superstars, but I don't see an objective criteria for deciding that they were "overpaid." Certainly a team with a stable of good young pitchers, like the Twins, is hedged against rising salaries for free agent pitchers. But if a team isn't lucky enough to have young pitchers to drop in the rotation, well... they face the market price for acquiring pitchers.

I also think that value exists for keeping a team "respectable" as opposed to being a "terrible" team. If a team is respectable, the fans feel like they can enjoy competitive games. It isn't enjoyable watching your team get pounded 8-1 every day. Also a respectable team which is likely to produce a .500 record might have, say, a 10%-15% chance that it will contend for a playoff spot if things happen to break right. It is this chance, though perhaps remote, which keeps fans hoping and supporting their teams each season.

Pittsburgh fans aren't going to be happy because they did it with Morris rather than -insert cheap mediocre pitcher here-.

Where are these "cheap mediocre pitchers" available? As far as I can tell they don't exist. The real Pirates alternative is more likely a series of cheap, terrible pitchers.

A team can't have a team full of prospects alone, and to get these role players/journeymen who are a piece of every successful team's puzzle, you have to spend big bucks in today's market.

I think this is the key point. The reality is that there are three categories of players. Those who aren't eligible for arbitration, those that are and those that are free agents. You can decide how to allocate resources between those, but the last category is the only one where money makes the difference.

the Pirates would have been better off using that money to draft better players than Moskos.

Is money really the barrier to drafting and developing better players? I don't think it is. And given that half the players drafted in the first round never make it as major league players, the draft is a bit of a crap shoot. How much money you are willing to spend on bonuses only has a marginal impact on how likely you are to get quality players out of the draft.

Earl Weaver and the late 1970s Orioles had perhaps the most intelligent approach to playing the free agent game.

After making the playoffs 5 of 6 years ending in 1974, Weaver's teams only made it to the playoffs once after that. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that free agency came into effect in 1975.

The pool of amateur talent is limited, and a mass decision by all the teams to shift money to that area might have no real competitive impact other than to inflate signing bonuses for amateur players. If all but the top teams try to trade their veteran players for prospects, a la Marlins, then the trade value of prospects will soar to levels which are no longer attractive.

Yes of course. We're back to exploiting inefficiencies though, and that's the bottom line. When we say that "poor teams should rebuild", we don't really mean that they should really all undertake exactly the same approach, because that would cancel out inefficiencies (thereby making more effective the use of other strategies). We mean that, with the current state of things in MLB, and provided that the other 29 teams keep going the way they are, the average "poor team" should be rebuilding and exploiting current inefficiencies. The market should be dynamic however, and if other inefficiencies are there to be exploited, then they should be. If everybody goes Marlins, then it's not going to work, but if it's just the Marlins (and maybe one or two more teams), it's a market inefficiency that is bound to work. There is no unique recipe for success, but with the current state of Major League, that's likely to be the best current way for a hopeless team to go.

As far as overpaying: I don't particularly dislike the Silva signing for example (actually, I think they did well). This is because when you take a look at the state of the organization, its division, its upside, its upcoming prospects (starting with Clement and Jones), they might have a chance in the not-so-distant future without hampering their payroll. And the upgrade over Feierabend, Ho-Ram and the like makes it logical. But I wouldn't have liked the same signing, under the same conditions, coming from other teams. That's because situations are different. If the Twins had signed him for that money, they would have overpaid. In my opinion, it's a matter of considering payroll, current and short-term possibilities and available alternatives that determine if a player has been overpaid. If he doesn't have a chance to make an impact, but takes away money that could be invested more efficiently for the future, then he's overpaid.

Where are these "cheap mediocre pitchers" available? As far as I can tell they don't exist. The real Pirates alternative is more likely a series of cheap, terrible pitchers.

You want cheap(er) mediocre pitchers? How much do you think the Red Sox would have asked for Kyle Snyder or Julian Tavarez who are going to be the eighth and seventh starters at this stage? They're groundballers who don't make any money. You could sign Jason Jennings (younger, with more upside, and overall similar last 4 years to Morris) on a "value-rebuilding deal". You could send McLouth to the Twins to play CF while getting their worst SP. You could go internal. I mean, 4/5 of the rotation are already Gorzelanny-Snell-Maholm-Duke. Is Morris that much of an improvement over Tavarez, Jennings, Bullington, G. Perkins, Youman, T. Armas, Fogg, Runelvys Hernandez, Odalis Perez, whoever, to justify giving him 25% of the whole Pirates' payroll? Really, I don't think so. 90, 90, 103, 90 ERA+ in the last 4 seasons aren't too impressive for a quarter of the payroll.

Is money really the barrier to drafting and developing better players? I don't think it is. And given that half the players drafted in the first round never make it as major league players, the draft is a bit of a crap shoot. How much money you are willing to spend on bonuses only has a marginal impact on how likely you are to get quality players out of the draft.

No, it doesn't. It has a pretty good impact. It has been shown many times (and you can check for yourself) that over-slot players have a better chance of making an impact. B-Pro has found such a correlation between bonus money and success that they're incorporating it into PECOTA. If you just want, you may ask the Tigers (Verlander, Miller, Porcello) how it worked for them or for the Angels (with Adenhart). If you don't spend any money in the draft, it's pretty silly to expect to have the same success as someone who is willing to attack the "tough signings". Sure, TINSTAAPP, sure, you still need to get really lucky, but if you pick a college reliever with mediocre upside that nobody likes, and you pass on Wieters and Porcello because you can't afford them (because you're committing 25% of your payroll to a poor, old fifth starter) even though they're better now and they have way more upside to begin with, then if Moskos doesn't pan out you really can't get too angry with your coaches or with bad luck. If you're getting poorer material as opposed to other teams, you're bound to fail. The draft is a crapshoot to some extent, but not all first rounders are created equal, and punting your choice isn't going to make it any easier to develop youngsters.

We're back to exploiting inefficiencies

Where is the evidence that those inefficiencies exist, muchless that anyone is able to identify and exploit them? This amounts to claiming "I'm smarter than everyone else, I know these players real value and others are mis-valuing them." I think in most cases a GM who thinks that is fooling himself. That's how you turn Jeremy Bonderman into Bobby Kielty.

How much do you think the Red Sox would have asked for Kyle Snyder or Julian Tavarez

They probably wouldn't have sold them for any amount of money.

You could sign Jason Jennings

There you go. A guy who was truly terrible last summer which is the only reason you could sign him cheap.

You could send McLouth to the Twins to play CF while getting their worst SP.

Sidney Ponson is available as a free agent. No need to trade anyone.

The reality is that in most trades you are going to have to give up equal value. You try to get players who are of greater value to you than your trading partner and both teams can benefit. But in the case of pitching, most teams are looking to buy not sell.

Inefficiencies exist. OBP has been underpaid for several years, and that's why only the Yankees won more games than the A's from 2000 to 2006. It hasn't been an inefficiency in the last few years perhaps, but that doesn't mean there are none currently. The first I can think of is the appropriate evaluation of fielding. Adam Everett was released and signed for virtually nothing, when he does a lot to help run prevention. He actually makes your pitchers better. I'm not saying that necessarily the Astros should have kept him, because of their team structure, but the point is that Everett provides an underpaid contribution as opposed to many colleagues of his who have slightly flashier bats (who doesn't?) and no glove. Inefficiencies will always exist in a dynamic market, except that they will cancel out after a while when the market catches up, but this will open up new roads. You just have to be ahead of the curve. It's not easy, and maybe it's impossible to do by a single person (Beane certainly doesn't seem to find those supposed new roads right now, for example), but that doesn't mean that there are no inefficiencies to exploit.
And pointing out single mistakes by somebody is absolutely pointless. Nobody makes only good choices, regardless of the method they use. Besides, it's not like giving away Jeremy Bonderman has hurt the A's. With Oakland, he would have been a FA by the end of 2008 (which is going to be, in fact, his sixth full season) and he has been poor so far: 77, 91, 93, 112 and 91 ERA+ (93 for his career, with 4.78 ERA and 1.38 WHIP). Bonderman still has potential, but at this point, IF he's going to fulfil it, he's going to do it past his theoric free agency, so it's not like Oakland would have been able to use him, given that they rarely are able to retain interesting players. They lost a subpar pitcher with potential they wouldn't have been able to use anyway. Basically, no harm done. Still, this doesn't mean that was a good trade, nor does it mean that Beane didn't make mistakes, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter because in his pursuit of inefficiencies he made more right than wrong. He broke some eggs while cooking an omelette. So what?

Finally: speaking of Jennings... that's exactly who you should sign. He's coming off a terrible year. Buy low. If he's fit (and before signing him you'll be able to access his medical records) then signing him at a below-market deal is excellent as a stopgap, while you invest in your farm. He's got a pretty good chance of being better than Morris anyway.

Then again, I understand that you have a different point of view and you believe that signing a 90 ERA+ guy (or acquiring him) and paying him 25% of your payroll while taking away money from the draft and international signings is a good thing for whatever reason. I disagree, but then again, we don't have to think alike.

only the Yankees won more games than the A's from 2000 to 2006.

I think Zito, Hudson and Muldur had a lot more to do with that than OBP. For instance, when Oakland won their most games in that stretch, 103 in 2002, they were 5th in the league in OBP.

More to the point, where is the evidence that OBP ever was or is now underpaid? How do you underpay a statistic? I understand that the idea is that teams undervalue the ability to get on base in players. But how exactly have you determined that and what does it have to do with how much a player gets paid?

the point is that Everett provides an underpaid contribution

The Twins are paying Everett slightly more than he was paid by Houston. What evidence is there he was underpaid, much less that he will be next year? What specific teams should have offered him more?

With Oakland, he (Bonderman) would have been a FA by the end of 2008

Why? Was he even on the Oakland major league roster when he was traded?

pointing out single mistakes by somebody is absolutely pointless.

It wasn't a single mistake. Oakland got Ted Lilly for Bonderman. Then they traded him for Kielty. It seemed to me that both trades that lead to that result were made because Oakland's GM thought he had a better handle than his counterpart on the player's real value.

He's got a pretty good chance of being better than Morris anyway.

No, he doesn't. Which is why no one is going to sign him on that basis.

If he's fit (and before signing him you'll be able to access his medical records) then signing him at a below-market deal is excellent as a stopgap, while you invest in your farm.

Yes, if he is fit and if he pitches well he could be a better pitcher than Morris. But the last time he pitched he was putting up an ERA over 10. If a that is what you mean by "mediocre" pitchers, then yes there are a lot of them. They can certainly fill out their rotation with pitchers will give up 10 runs per game while averaging less than 5 innings pers start.

Morris is unlikely to do that. Instead he has been consistently putting up 190 or so innings with an ERA under 5.00. Finding pitchers who you can expect to do that is not easy.

you believe that signing a 90 ERA+ guy (or acquiring him) and paying him 25% of your payroll while taking away money from the draft and international signings is a good thing

I would doubt the Pirates payroll has anything to do with their budget for the draft. Your argument apparently is that they should take money out of the major league payroll and spend it on draft bonuses. Again, success in the draft has very little to do with how much money you spend. And when getting one major league player out of a draft is a success, its hard to see how spending more money there is warranted.

But that is where this discussion started.

it has been shown many times (and you can check for yourself) that over-slot players have a better chance of making an impact.

I assume that "over-slot players" are those that are paid higher bonuses than the players below them.

But you missed the central point, less than half the players drafted in the first round made much impact at all. So even if you get a marginal boost by being willing to pay a slightly higher bonus, you are not getting all that much when compared to a major league player. No matter how much you pay, you still have less than a 50-50 chance the player will amount to anything - ever.

The Yankees can certainly afford to buy more tickets in that lottery. But a lottery ticket is still a lottery ticket - a lot of losers pay for the handful of winners.

Just to clear the over-slot idea, because the rest is going in circles: "over-slot players" (as I called them) are not players that merely get more than the ones below them, but they're the ones that want to be paid way more because they're vastly more talented. It can be Wieters, it can be Porcello, it can be Andrew Miller. Regardless of the fact that the draft is, in fact, a crapshoot, there is a notable difference between Wieters and Moskos to begin with. Passing on one reduces your chances to get a good product. Maybe you get lucky with Moskos, but you're not helping yourself by picking someone with less current ability, less physical upside and less projection overall.
Of course maybe something goes wrong with Wieters, and Moskos develops 2 amazing pitches and whatever happens, but you can't pretend that there is no difference in MLB-potential between Tim Stauffer and whoever the Padres passed on because of money reasons. If there is no difference, then why scout players? Shouldn't we just pull the names out of a hat and lowball everybody? Drafting is guessing, but you can make educated guesses, and when you're consciously making a poorer guess because of money reasons, you're hurting yourself.
And of course you really can't compare one-to-one draft picks with major leaguers (even poor ones), sure, but we're talking about 25% of the payroll, about the money with which you can fund more scouting, sign international players and possibly fund an entire draft - possibly a whole season of scouting and development. If Morris cost half as much (or less), or the Pirates had a lot more money, I wouldn't be discussing this. But we're talking about a team with no chance to contend adding a below-average player who won't make them sensibly better in the short or the long term but makes a ton of money by their payroll standards.

The objection I do agree with is that:
I would doubt the Pirates payroll has anything to do with their budget for the draft.

In my opinion a wise ownership would just allocate a budget to the (carefully chosen) GM and make him free to spend it as it suits him (basically, giving him independence), but I do take it that:
- The Pirates' ownership hasn't really been "wise".
- Many ownerships are willing to pay money for MLB players but won't spend in development and regardless of the payroll will still allocate very little money to the draft.

But otherwise, if those 9+ M could have been used in different ways (international players, extra scouting, draft, or even signing multiple players rather than just Morris) and they chose good old Matt, then they deserve another wasted season, which isn't going to really help neither in the short nor in the long term. If, on the other hand, it was Morris or bust, well it's another point, but I'm not really willing to make such an assumption.

T"over-slot players" (as I called them) are not players that merely get more than the ones below them, but they're the ones that want to be paid way more because they're vastly more talented./i>

Isn't this a complete circle? The reason they got paid more was the team that drafted them was willing to pay them more. That may be because they have money to spend, but more likely its because they think the player is worth more money.

And if you substitute your definition in the statement above it says "it has been shown many times ... that ("vastly more talented") players have a better chance of making an impact." We can all agree on that.

when you're consciously making a poorer guess because of money reasons, you're hurting yourself.

You can make that same argument for signing the "best", most expensive free agents out there. But passing on a player who wants more than you think he is likely to be worth is not hurting yourself. Again - there is a good chance that he turns out to be worthless. Trying to get rich at the casino is a bad investment.

Those 9+ M could have been used in different ways (international players, extra scouting, draft, or even signing multiple players rather than just Morris)

But where is the evidence they would have had better results? Morris will likely get about 1/7 of the outs for the team. You can't sign "multiple" players who will do that for every spot in the rotation. Development of a pitching staff requires some guys who can actually pitch.