Newsletter Extra: Perceived Problems and Actual Problems

The United States was eliminated from the World Baseball Classic last night by Puerto Rico 4-3. The loss means that the U.S. misses the semifinal round for the second time in three Classics, a result that has caused a substantial amount of hand-wringing this morning.

That the U.S. has not shown well in three WBCs is a perceived problem, not an actual one. The WBC isn't about showing what nation is the best at baseball. The design and timing of the event should make that abundantly clear. If you were serious about a global baseball tournament, you wouldn't hold the thing in March and you wouldn't play one-game round-robins and you really wouldn't invite China and Brazil and you wouldn't tell pitching-short teams they could only use their best pitchers for 65 pitches. The WBC's current design is like the MLB postseason, only much worse for gathering useful information about the relative quality of teams. Since the baseball media can't get their hands around the uselessness of a best-of-seven for determining relative quality, it's probably too much to expect them to not draw conclusions from a single game between the U.S. and D.R., or between the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

So we get this perceived problem of the United States not showing well in the World Baseball Classic. If there's one thing MLB does with passion and aggression, it's address perceived problems, be it pushing for increased penalties for positive drug tests despite a well-functioning testing program, or adding a ridiculous incentive to prop up the decaying All-Star Game, or introducing a one-game playoff round out of a sense of embarrassment that teams acted in their own self-interest in a division race. MLB loves fixing that which isn't really broken in an effort to placate a media completely unwilling to address complex, multi-faceted issues in all but the most simple of terms.

I make this prediction against that backdrop. The United States team at the 2017 World Baseball Classic will include almost all of the best American players at that time. The perceived failure of the U.S. team will cause the league and Bud Selig to place undue pressure on the game's stars -- most likely with a healthy dose of MLBPA-bashing -- to participate in the event regardless of how the players or their teams believe it may affect their preparation for the season. The perceived problem of the U.S. not showing well at the WBC  will be addressed by a faux solution that does nothing about the WBC's issues of timing and format.

The WBC is a marketing event, not a championship event. Anyone taking more than nine seconds to look at the thing -- held in March, including nations that absolutely suck at baseball but are included for their potential as markets, seeded in comical fashion, with far too few games to carry legitimacy -- can see that. Rather than address those problems, or better still, acknowledge that it's a marketing event, MLB will, in the grand tradition of the Coin Flip Game and "This Time It Counts", take the easy way out and raise up the issue of American player participation as the event's biggest problem. The 2017 U.S. team will be the best ever in the history of the World Baseball Classic.

And the WBC will still be a marketing event, not a championship one.

From 348 to 68: Friday, 2:30 p.m.

In a week when tournament bids are just there waiting to be taken by teams that can win a single game, yesterday featured missed opportunities at every turn. Baylor and Louisiana Tech played their way off the bubble. California, Colorado, Oklahoma and Minnesota left the door open for them to be passed. Only Illinois and Oregon pushed their way into the field, although you could argue I'm being overly conservative about Iowa State. As ever, I am reluctant to move teams onto the board, because I hate having to take them off of it.

Friday is moving day. Of the 19 teams I have on the bubble, Five are playing "win and in" games -- LaSalle, Iowa State, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia -- and seven others are playing games that they can't lose and remain under consideration. Tennessee/Alabama is pretty much an elimination game. For the record, I can't for the life of me ever remember having so few bubble teams this early in the process. It's just a strange year for this stuff.

Through the first four games on Friday:

On the Board (6): Wichita State, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Villanova, Marquette, Illinois.

Automatic Bids (14): Florida-Gulf Coast (Atlantic Sun), Liberty (Big South), James Madison (Colonial), Valparaiso  (Horizon), Harvard (Ivy), Iona (MAAC), Creighton (Missouri Valley), Long Island University-Brooklyn (Northeast), Belmont (Ohio Valley), Bucknell (Patriot), Davidson (Southern), Western Kentucky (Sun Belt), South Dakota State (Summit), Gonzaga (West Coast).

In (30): Duke, Miami (FL), North Carolina, North Carolina State, Saint Louis, Virginia Commonwealth, Butler, Temple, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Louisville, Georgetown, Syracuse, Notre Dame, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Memphis, New Mexico, Colorado State, Nevada-Las Vegas, San Diego State, UCLA, Arizona, Oregon, Florida, Missouri.

Those teams will account for at least 21 and no more than 28 at-large bids, leaving three to ten slots for bubble teams. I'm going to wait another day before writing a lot, largely because I think this picture is going to self-clarify a lot today.

Bubble (19): Iowa State, Colorado, Kentucky, Oklahoma, California, Minnesota, Virginia, LaSalle, Saint Mary's, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Middle Tennessee State, Boise State, Massachusetts, Southern Mississippi, Iowa, Akron, Stephen F. Austin.

From 348 to 68: Welcome Back

I'm getting a late start this year for a few reasons. One, Jerry Palm's move to CBS Sports was great for Jerry and for college-basketball fans in general, but lousy for the loss of collegerpi.com as a resource. His team pages, his entire site, were essential to my process, and even in starting the work I haven't found anything that apes it. As someone who uses baseball-reference.com and the Play Index about as often as I do hand soap, it's a reminder that we're very lucky to have Sean Forman's great work -- and very lucky he never made a similar move.

If you're new to this, hi. I mostly write about baseball, but since I was a kid I've loved college hoops as well, and for the past 20 years ago I've worked to figure out what teams would make the tournament as at-large selections. I'm not Jerry or Joe Lunardi or Andy Glockner; I don't build brackets and I don't start doing this the previous fall. I parachute in during Championship Week and do what I can, generally missing one or two teams a year, although I have nailed the field twice. I used to just have this conversation with my best friend (@MikeReganNC), and later I'd send out this stuff to a small group of friends. When Basketball Prospectus launched, I did it there for a couple of years. I got some attention a few years ago for 1) having Virginia Commonwealth in my field, and 2) for a bit of a screed I wrote when reacting to the reaction to their selection.

I'm trying to ape the committee here, not set up the Sheehan Invitational. I do have a preference for teams that do well in smaller conferences, because they get few opportunities to post quality wins, and they never get the kind of home opportunities majors do. If the choice is between the #6 team in a Big Six league and the MAAC champ, I'd like to see the committee choose the latter, even if the former beat a couple of top-ten teams at home. I try to keep that out of my predictions, and it's pretty easy to do so this year. For a variety of reasons, there just aren't very many viable candidates for at-large berths from outside the top nine conferences. Here's the complete list of teams below that line that are or would have been under consideration for a bid: Gonzaga, Creighton, Wichita State, St. Mary's, Belmont, Middle Tennessee State, Bucknell, Louisiana Tech, Akron, Stephen F. Austin. That's it. The Colonial tanked this year. The WAC has been ruined by realignment. Everybody else in the Valley tanked. Butler and VCU moved into top-nine conferences. Teams that have been in the mix in previous years -- Davidson, Long Beach State, Iona, Kent State, Brigham Young -- didn't make the cut this year.

There's also an odd dynamic in the power conferences, which split more cleanly this year than in other years. The combination could make for a week without much drama. There just aren't that many teams in contention for the available bids, and the ones that are will find themselves in fairly clear win-and-in, lose-and-out spots over the next two days. There is the unknown of how much the off-board metrics -- Ken Pomeroy, Jeff Sagarin, the fabled "eye test" -- are playing a role in the process. I think I had a better handle on the committee's approach five years ago. They may be doing a better job of selecting the field today, while making that job slightly more opaque while doing so.

As I start this process Thursday morning, I have one team already on the board in Wichita State. I have 33 locks, which will combine for somewhere between 24 and 31 at-large spots depending on who wins the conference tournaments. That leaves at least five, and as many as 12, slots for bubble teams. There are no bid thieves left in the Big East or Mountain West tournaments. I am exceptionally conservative; if there's a chance a team could lose its next game get left out, they stay on the bubble. We have some win-and-in games Thursday -- Minnesota vs. Illinois, Iowa State vs. Oklahoma -- where the loser is probably in as well, but I'm leaving both teams on the bubble this morning. Boise State vs. San Diego State was a similar game last night.

On the Board (1): Wichita State.

In (33): Duke, Miami (FL), North Carolina, North Carolina State, Saint Louis, Virginia Commonwealth, Butler, Temple, Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Louisville, Georgetown, Marquette, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Villanova, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio State, Michigan State, Wisconsin, Memphis, New Mexico, Colorado State, Nevada-Las Vegas, San Diego State, UCLA, Arizona, Florida, Missouri.

Those teams will account for at least 24 and no more than 31 at-large bids, leaving five to 12 slots for bubble teams. Here are those teams in rough order as of Thursday morning. We'll go deeper on them after the list gets culled Thursday. There's at least some chance we're going to be down to just a few spots by the morning.

Bubble (23): Oklahoma, Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Kentucky, Iowa State, Virginia, LaSalle, Oregon, Saint Mary's, Tennessee, Mississippi, Baylor, Alabama, Middle Tennessee State, Boise State, Massachusetts, Southern Mississippi, Louisiana Tech, Iowa, Akron, Stephen F. Austin.

Newsletter Extra: Mariano Rivera

I originally wrote this last May, after Mariano Rivera suffered a season-ending knee injury in Kansas City. With Rivera expected to announce his retirement tomorrow, it seems a good time to bring it back.

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My daughter is named for Mariano Rivera.

She was "Mariana," owing to her mother's deep and abiding love for the Yankees' closer, until about the ninth month of the pregnancy. As we got closer to her birth, my inability to correctly pronounce the name -- I couldn't quite get my accent around the "a" in the first syllable, leaving it flat -- led her mother to shift gears to "Marina," a name even my tortured diction couldn't butcher. Make no mistake about it, though -- her name is a tribute to the man.

That's who Mariano Rivera is: someone you can safely name your kid after, and, when some day she wants to know about why she has her name, be proud when you tell the story. Forget the baseball parts. Rivera isn't just about numbers -- 608, 2.21, 206 -- or even championships. He's not about a plaque in the Hall of Fame or a retired number on a wall. He's not even about a crowd standing and cheering in joy, in admiration, in love. No, Rivera is about the spaces in between the numbers, the equanimity with which he went about his job, the calm and the purpose and the class that I find myself in awe of. Rivera has given up series-losing home runs and World Series-ending hits, and was the same man in those moments that he was when in the middle of a pile of giddy Yankees celebrating yet another World Championship.

It runs deeper than that, though. In an era when we always wonder about the gap between the player and the person, when there's always that reserve, that reluctance to commit, that hesitation, there's never been a need to worry about Rivera. The quiet, hard-working, beloved man of faith who spent eight months trying to be the best teammate he could be spent the other four months as a quiet, hard-working, beloved man of faith trying to be the best husband, father and man he could be. In the latter days of his career, he's had to measure the pull of doing good outside of baseball against his loyalty to his teammates and the money he could make -- for doing that good -- in his career. Rivera has been responsible for so much good when he hasn't been holding a baseball in his hands, donating money and time and effort to make the world a better place for the people he could touch.

That's what made the scene so hard to watch. We know that Rivera has been struggling with whether to extend his career at each of the last few decision points. Since March, when Rivera said that he'd made his decision and would reveal it during the season, there's been a sense that this could finally be it, that we might be seeing the last days of Rivera. Yankee fans' panic over this has absolutely nothing to do with who would pitch the ninth inning; it's not a baseball loss, but a personal one. A generation of Yankee fans has no memory of a time when Mariano Rivera wasn't there at the end of baseball games, the evercool Bronx DJ mixing Metallica and Sinatra 60 times a year and getting 50,000 people to dance to his beat. Bernie Williams and Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada are missed. Derek Jeter is respected. Rivera…Rivera is essential.

We don't know how it's supposed to end. We know only that it's not supposed to end on a warning track in Missouri at 6:15 on a Thursday evening in May. It's not supposed to end with a stumble and a cry and a panicked round of Tweets. It's not supposed to end like this. Fans of the other 29 teams -- even fans of sports who don't particularly care for baseball -- know that it's not supposed to end like this. Mariano Rivera doesn't get carried away from baseball sitting on a cart wearing warmups and sneakers. He walks away from it in pinstripes, head held high, surrounded by teammates and fans, bathed in tears and cheers, and holding a baseball in his glove, one last 27th out, one last win secured, not for himself, but for everyone but him.

Selfishly, I want it to not be over. I don't ever want it to end, but when it does, I want to be there, on my feet, clapping until my hands hurt, tears streaming down my cheeks, trying to say, "Thank you for everything" from Section 414. I want there to be a little girl on my shoulders, taking it all in, who will grow up to display the qualities of her namesake: the dedication to others, the calm in the face of adversity, the endless reserves of inner peace. I want Marina to see Mariano and be proud to share his name.

Newsletter Extra: Mike Trout and Alex Rodriguez

Over the weekend, the Angels renewed Mike Trout's contract for a 2013 salary of $510,000, just $20,000 over the minimum salary. While a bit surprising, and certainly a hardball move, the Angels were well within their rights to renew Trout. In fact, it's the ability to pay Trout a tiny percentage of his market value or of his worth to the team that subsidizes the risks of paying Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton their market value to perhaps lose money on the deal.

No one other than Trout should have a problem with this decision. The Angels might have paid him more -- there's some precedent for teams with standout rookies paying those players more in the second year -- but there's no connection between Trout's 2013 salary and any decisions he might make five years down the road. An extra $300,000 now isn't going to influence a $30 million choice in the future, and thinking it will is one of the sillier myths in sports. There is no loyalty. Say it again: there is no loyalty. The Angels made the same business decision that Trout will have to make down the road, and that's the only relationship between the two.

The flip side of Trout making $510,000 off a season in which his performance was worth $30 million or more to the Angels in added wins isn't hard to find. Vernon Wells' 2013 salary is $21 million, after a season in which his performance was worth about 10% of that. Wells, however, is 34, at the back end of a career that will probably end soon, one that will get him a single appearance on a Hall of Fame ballot, maybe a token vote from a writer who liked him. (Criticism of his play aside, you can't find anyone to say a bad word about Wells.) Wells had five years banked as a regular and was 27 years old when the Blue Jays set him up for life with a seven-year contract extension worth $126 million. Since signing that deal, Wells has had two good years and four other ones, and at best he's a part-time player for a team with at least four outfielders better than he is.

This is the way MLB is structured. It was wholly unplanned -- arbitration came first, and that only for players with a couple of years in the league, then free agency and its six-year requirement -- and has created a significant disconnect between when a player is likely to produce the most and when a player is likely to get paid the most. From the start of his career through 2006, Vernon Wells made $9 million and produced 19 bWAR. Since then, he's made more than $80 million and produced a tick less than 7 bWAR. He's owed another $42 million and the ratio of salary to wins isn't likely to get much lower. This is the way the system is set up.

There are people, some of them working out of Tampa right now, up in arms over the fact that Alex Rodriguez is scheduled to make $28 million this year, and owed $114 million over the final five years of a contract signed after the 2007 season. That contract, due to Rodriguez's decline and increased susceptibility to injury -- things you never could have seen coming when you signed a 32-year-old, I guess -- weighs on the Yankees payroll. It has made Rodriguez a target of fan and media ire. Rodriguez isn't the first, of course, just the one taking the biggest shots today. Throughout the game there are players who are huge targets merely for signing contracts that included salaries they had little chance of being worth on the day they were signed. Alfonso Soriano and Jayson Werth and Barry Zito and Johan Santana. We rail at these players, call them overpaid bums and wish our teams would get rid of them.

Here's the thing: if you're not going to storm the barricades when Mike Trout makes 3% of his market value, then you lose the right to do so when Alex Rodriguez makes 300% of his. They're the exact same thing. Pay and performance are only loosely correlated in MLB, with service time a significant distorting factor. Players without it are systematically and in some cases violently underpaid, and those with it go the other way. Fans only get crazy over the latter class, though, an effect of the simplistic way in which baseball economics has been covered for 40 years.

Maybe Mike Trout eventually gets paid, becomes another Vernon Wells or Alex Rodriguez, making on the back end what he never made on the front end. If so, it's probable that there will come a time, 15 years down the road, when a local columnist will rail against this aging, broken-down guy who isn't worth his $40 million salary and who should just get out of the way so that the team can give the money to someone else.

Or maybe we'll all just be that much smarter by then.

World Baseball Classic predictions

First Round:

Pool A: Japan and Cuba
Pool B: South Korea and Taiwan
Pool C: Venezuela and Dominican Republic
Pool D: United States and Mexico

Second Round:

Pool 1: Japan and South Korea
Pool 2: United States and Venezuela

Semifinals:

Venezuela over Japan
United States over South Korea

Final:

Venezuela 6, United States 3

Tournament MVP: Miguel Cabrera