Yoan Moncada

Having grown up surrounded by Yankee fans I can add that, for them, perhaps the most startling thing about the Moncada signing is that the Yankees were out bid on the open market on a major free agent their baseball ops people really wanted - and the tea leaves said they would likely get - by The Boston Red Sox. This has never before occurred in their reality. They want home grown players as much as we do (hence the absurd "True Yankee" moniker that they bestow on certain players with all the effete exclusionary snobbery as Edwardian-era British peerage), yet, because of the Steinbrenner years, they also think that they have some sort of de facto first right of acquisition or denial deal in place for every top free agent who hits the open market. Being outbid like this never happened before in their world, so many of them are in a full, maniacal Kubler-Ross seizure right now. It really is a lovely thing to watch - kind of like a grease fire in a dumpster on top of a clown car that keeps driving around in circles.

From Kiley McDaniel's chat: www.fangraphs.com/blogs/kiley-mcdaniel-prospects-chat-22715/

Kiley McDaniel: NYY really flubbed the Moncada process. Almost all of what’s been reported is accurate, including many of the “characterizations” along with a couple other things I may reveal next week that I’ve uncovered, some of which is embarrassing for NYY.
11:08
Kiley McDaniel: It sounds like NYY genuinely didn’t think Moncada was worth what BOS paid, but they approached it the wrong way and there’s one bigger question they can’t/likely won’t answer.
How are a bunch of 16 year olds are worth $34 million but the best 19 year old in the world is worth exactly $50 million but not $60 million? It’s a ridiculous line in the sand to draw and there are some multi-year, overarching trends in what NYY has been doing that should’ve made this easier to see coming.

George Steinbrenner would’ve never let this happen and there’s more than just undertones of the PIT/Miguel Sano fiasco with NYY/Moncada. Teams that are run well and efficiently with clear delineations of who is in charge aren’t scared they might overpay relative to the 2nd highest bid if they think the price/player line up with their internal values.


Comment From The Bronx Empire
At the risk of sounding like a Yankee fan/elitist, I think Moncada was their guy to lose and they did exactly that. Everything that’s been said by Steinbrenner and NY media types on his behalf are obviously just attempts to take cover from their upset fan.
11:50
Kiley McDaniel: Yep, which is pretty sad given how little money would’ve delivered the player to them and taken him from the Red Sox.
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I don't think the odds of projecting top 30 16 year old players are as good as it would seem. There were no Sano/Devers types available this year. The Yankees have been pretty consistently among the top DR spenders and have come out with some pretty well thought of prospects. On the other hand, how well have Montero, Sanchez, the killer B's worked out for them ? Name any DR prospect they developed and brought to the majors.

It's the idea that you allow the market to set the price, and fear the fallout of your personal evaluation far outpacing where the rest of the market was. It sounds like the Yankees were concerned with the perception that they'd be "splashing the pot."


Good organizations don't worry about that - they focus on results. If one team places the value of a championship at $70 million, but you feel that value is $100 million, you go to where your valuation is - and don't care what the other team thinks.

I think that supposed valuation capped at $27m is part of the spin that Kiley is alluding to.

McDaniel is just being super ambiguous. He starts off by saying "It sounds like NYY genuinely didn’t think Moncada was worth what BOS paid" but then later implies that the Yankees had a higher valuation on him, but thought they had the winning bid anyways so didn't up their bid:
I agree that if the latter was what actually happened, then they were being dumb. But if they just didn't think he was worth what he got, it's tough to criticize them for setting a limit and keeping to it.

Right. If the way they got into this mess is because they've drawn lines much higher than they should have in the past, it's hard to turn around and criticize them for actually doing the thing that you think they should do (i.e., set an appropriate line and sticking to it).

Also, I think the idea that Moncada can't hurt the Yankees because he doesn't take a 40-man spot is exaggerated. The Yankees have shown that they're happy to pay a guy to go away-- see, e.g., trading A.J. Burnett or releasing Alfonso Soriano. Teams do a better job of recognizing sunk costs than you're suggesting.

Weighing in here... My take on the two pieces of the McDaniel's chat that have been posted are that
1) they did have a valuation, and that
2) they thought the agent was giving them BS about other offers and so they called his bluff.

If that's the case, they lost that gamble in a big way, and it represents a serious misreading of Hastings, the fellow who was acting as Moncada's go-between with the teams. Early on he indicated that he'd been entrusted with doing this, and that he was stunned at the interest. He seemed like a straight-up guy, almost naive about what he was getting into. If he did walk the Sox' offer back to the Yankees and they told him they wouldn't go there (because they thought he was trying to make his agent bones and making it up), it says an awful lot about the NY front office, and not in a good way.

The unwillingness to take someone at face value could mean a lot of things, of course. One of the more disturbing readings is that they spend too much time around people who play those sort of games for a living. They've lost their ability to tell the difference.

Maybe having all those Wall Street moneybags - the ones that got a free refill from the Fed - hanging around and buying up all those empty $2500 box seats isn't such a good thing after all.

I certainly understand the idea of valuation and agree with what you guys are saying, but I can't help but think asset scarcity and valuation uncertainty are being, well, undervalued in the way the Yankees approached this.

Moncada is unquestionably one of the most unique assets to come around in a while. His combination of age (19), status (international free agent), timing (declared a free agent the year the Yankees already exceeded the IFA cap), and talent (elite "top 10" prospect) just doesn't happen very often. His age and path mean there is uncertainty, but the likelihood that he is worth $27M and not $31.5M is very close to zero. I think the Yankees really missed the boat here. When such a rare asset comes to market, at such an opportune time, and with such limited competition - and that asset has a highly variable expected value - you HAVE to be willing to bid an extra $5M to bring him in. This is especially true when you consider that almost any other investment opportunity what also be taxed at 50% (free agents) or 100% (IFA). And the later won't even be an option at all 4 months from now.

They chose the worst possible player to exercise restraint on. One which would have added a top prospect to a poor system, would not have cost anything but money and one which would not handcuff the team whatsoever moving forward unlike all of their albatross contracts that they've handed out.

This is what I think, too, in the particular case ... and going to the general outlook, my problem with the Yankees (and I suspect their real fans' problem, too) is that I can't really discern a consistent pattern to their behavior. They seem to pinch pennies in some cases and say during 2013 season that they're going to stick to $189 million during the 2013-2014 offseason, but then they spend a ton of money to get McCann, Ellsbury, Tanaka, etc. They blow everyone away with a bunch of 16 year-olds on the IFA market this J2 period, but then won't go just a little bit higher to grab a super-elite 19 year-old talent when everything lines up to create a sui generis situation tailored for them. I mean, you can make separate decisions in separate situations, but it's just oddly frugal in some cases, and incredibly profligate in others, with no real pattern to any of it.

To me, it seems clear that there's no coherent vision to what they're doing. It's a dysfunctional organization that makes ad hoc decisions that don't add up to any strategic direction. I suspect their internal decision-making processes are broken, with multiple inputs on everything and no clear understanding of roles. Or, the decisions are being made by a person or few people that don't have any vision at all. Can't really tell from the outside ...

Two things:

First, it's far from guaranteed that if they bid $32M, they would have gotten him. What if the Red Sox up it to $35M? $40M? The whole point of setting a hard and fast valuation is to make sure you don't get stuck in a slippery slope like that where next thing you know you've overpaid and gotten stuck with the winner's curse. You can't go into any bidding situation without a rational maximum bid. It's a fair criticism to say that they undervalued him (and one that, for the record, I somewhat agree with; see below), but again, that's totally different from the criticism that they shouldn't have had a maximum number at all, and we shouldn't conflate the two (insert deadhorse.gif here).

Second, what you're suggesting here (i.e. that they didn't properly value his age/status/timing) is one possible interpretation for why they weren't willing to go more than $27M, but it's also possible that the Yankees just disagreed that Moncada was as talented as the McDaniel/Badler top-10 consensus. And who knows, they might be right-- Moncada had only one public workout, and public scouting consenses have certainly been wrong before. A good organization trusts its own scouts, even when they disagree with the public at large. Hell, the Yankees had three private workouts with him and almost certainly had all their top people take a close look at him-- you could make a case that you should trust them over McDaniel/Badler, who are mostly relying on sources that could be wrong or be pushing an agenda.

I guess my broader point is that the Yankees' unwillingness to be the high bidder does not necessarily mean that that front office/organization was irrational or inconsistent or stupid. It certainly could mean those things, but you could follow all the right processes and still reasonably conclude that he wasn't worth it. If I had to handicap it, I'd say it was 40% they were undervaluing him, 5% they negotiated poorly, 20% internal dysfunction (those Cashman quotes are pretty damning), and 35% they just didn't think he was that good.

How many years have the Red Sox operated the team in the Dominican Republic? I don't know, but it has been quite a while. How many of those teenagers have made it to the majors? The attrition rate of these players seems even higher than that of the drafted players.