Blowing Minds, Wads, Cash: THT on the Bullpen Salary Explosion

Geoff Young posts an article over at The Hardball Times, asking essentially the same question that we’ve being throwing around (here, here, here, and here) : “Why do teams keep overpaying generic middle relievers?“  He actually tries to understand it, where we’ve just been generally ridiculing it: 

Do the Phillies and White Sox believe that they have done a better job of identifying relievers at which to throw their money? Do they believe that Baltimore’s strategy was sound but that the outcome couldn’t have been predicted given the available information (i.e., the Orioles were unlucky)? Do they even know or care what the Orioles did?

Throw out that last possibility. If you’re not studying the forces that create the market, then you’re not studying the market. No way that’s happening, right? Not with the money at stake.

How about the “unlucky” theory? Somehow the idea that the outcome in Baltimore couldn’t have been predicted seems naive to me. People who are charged with evaluating such things should be able to recognize a priori that guys like Walker and Baez aren’t going to save anyone’s team. Then again, the Orioles evidently reached that very conclusion, so maybe I’m the one being naive.

Honestly, the belief that one’s own staff has done a better job of identifying talent strikes me as most reasonable. I’m not sure how anyone could reach the conclusion that Romero and Linebrink are appreciably better than Walker and Baez, but I can understand the logic. The thinking is that the flaw wasn’t in strategy but rather in execution. Even if that thinking is flawed, at least it’s somewhat defensible.