A year ago, I wrote a piece called “Quality Should Be Job 1” but quality also comes via employees you hire. The high risk / high reward model usually fails if you do that as a standard. That is a gambler’s mentality. Risk management needs to be measured and controlled. Signing Matt Barnes, Joey Gallo, Eddie Rosario, Nick Senzel combined for about $15.5 million of wasted total payroll last year. Do you know that Gallo and Senzel actually got paid incentive bonuses on top of their salaries? While you could say the signing of Jesse Winker worked out, that isn’t a good ratio.
This year, general manager Mike Rizzo had even more money to spend — and besides the Nathaniel Lowe acquisition and re-acquiring Trevor Williams and low risk moves for Paul DeJong and Jorge Lopez, it was the same type of high risk / high reward moves for the rest of the $50 million spent. There was enough budget to go “Quality is Job 1” and not risk a lot of money on bounceback players like Michael Soroka as a starter for $9 million, Josh Bell for DH at $6 million, Lucas Sims for $3 million, and Amed Rosario for $2 million. Even the nearly $6 million for Kyle Finnegan after his late season struggles made him a bounceback candidate. That’s $26 million of high risk signings. Sure, you could throw in Shinnosuke Ogasawara and Colin Poche too for another $3.3 million combined. Will you find a Winker or two in there? Wasn’t Sims just a more expensive version of Tanner Rainey? Rosario had a great game yesterday so maybe that works. Soroka might pitch like a star. Bell might figure out how to hit like he did in his prime. Might, maybe, if.
Maybe I can close my eyes, click my heels together three times, and repeat the sentence, “There’s no place like home” to get to the magic formula of winning. Or go the quality route and just build a better roster. Shortcuts and throwing #### against the wall rarely works. Again, let’s not panic two games in. There are a lot of positives that we have seen so far.
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