On Brian Burke: Autonomy doesn't mean No Accountability

Brian Burke didn't have to make excuses. Explaining himself would've been enough.

According to James Mirtle's excellent Globe and Mail write-up this morning on the Burke firing, MLSE's new bosses found Burke "difficult to work with" as soon as they met him. They wanted to know about the team's direction; they wanted to know why they should trust him after the Leafs had done nothing but lose during his tenure.

Burke could have explained that. A lot of people could. The cupboard was bare when he arrived: from 2003 to 2007, the Leafs had two first-round picks; the other three were traded away. The two picks that were kept were used to get Tuukka Rask and Jiri Tlusty; Burke's predecessor, John Ferguson Jr., let Rask go in a trade to get Andrew Raycroft, who had been a pretty mediocre OHL and AHL goalie before having a great rookie year in Boston.

Yet Burke did himself in by refusing to account to the MLSE board. I had the chance to hear Burke speak this time last year while the Leafs were visiting Vancouver. Burke talked about the importance of autonomy. He needed to be the one driving the bus - no meddling from above. He had seen the problems the Leafs had had before his arrival and didn't want the higher-ups meddling with hockey decisions.

In this conviction, Burke was right. He knew team-building better than an executive board. Happily for him, the bosses agreed. Burke would have final authority on all hockey decisions. It was the right way to run the team, given his wealth of experience.

Yet Burke forgot that autonomy doesn't mean that there is no accountability. He reacted brusquely when questioned by media on his decisions; he refused to explain himself but was more than happy to explain how hard his job was. According to the accounts coming out the last few days, he had a similar approach to the MLSE board. Despite the fact that he could have explained his decisions, he saw the questions from above as intrusive.

Burke had insisted that the team was capable of making the playoffs in the near term, despite the fact that its core players were past their prime and the youngsters were nothing to write home about. Burke stuck to his guns.

Burke made moves to add pieces to the team; in need of first-line scoring, he traded two first-round picks and a second-rounder for Phil Kessel, who delivered as promised, scoring 30 goals every year since his arrival. Last season, he scored 37 goals and 82 points overall, sixth-best in the NHL. Yet despite Kessel's success, the trade has been seen as a failure for Burke: the Bruins used the picks to get future stars Tyler Seguin and Dougie Hamilton.

Yet at the time the trade was made, it seemed more like an acceptable risk. The picks weren't expected to be high in the first round; the Leafs expected to make the playoffs and so the pick used to get Seguin wasn't going to be a second-overall; it was going to be a 20th overall. The Hamilton pick was supposed to be similarly late. A surprise collapse by the Leafs in 2009-10 caused the trade to go bad, not bad judgment by Burke.

Analysis of the Kessel trade at the time was favourable to Burke - it seemed like a reasonable risk to take. We shouldn't confuse the outcome with the decision: at the time, no one foresaw how valuable the picks would turn out to be. It's not fair to blame Burke with revisionist history.

And then there were injuries. Burke continued to build rosters that, on paper, had a shot at the playoffs. He started the 2011-12 season counting on James Reimer to backstop a winning team, but then Reimer got concussed. The team again missed the playoffs, though perhaps Burke could have done more to replace his goaltender and make a playoff push, or could have cleared the lineup for the first-round picks that were supposedly on offer via trade. Instead, Burke chose the middle route: stay the course, and build around the current group.

Burke could have explained all these things to his MLSE overlords. The Kessel trade, the Reimer injury - most people understand these events as containing a lot more luck than they do bad judgment on Burke's part. Yet Burke felt no need to account to anyone, because he needed to be autonomous.

I find it hard to blame Burke: he has had a lot of success as a GM in his career and shouldn't have to take a lot of the abuse he gets. He might've done well to insulate himself with someone in the 'Team President' role - the role Paul Godfrey played for a long time with the Blue Jays. The man who is best at making the hockey decisions might not be the best person to answer the questions from the corporate guys. Godfrey took on the role of translator and mediator in his role; Burke and the Leafs needed someone to do the same. Perhaps this whole mess could have been avoided if they had the foresight to do that, to have someone to stick up for Burke without disenchanting the Board.

Why the Vancouver Canucks need a 'Team Mom' (seriously)

Deadspin put out an article today profiling the mess that was Tyler Seguin's bachelor apartment while he was in Germany for the lockout. Needless to say, it wasn't pretty:

"Coca-cola bottles, garbage and dirty linen lay scattered across the floor, while rotten bananas were left on a table...Blick said the hockey player was "not versed in appliances" and as a result tried to wash his clothes in the dryer.
"He also did not know how to operate the dishwasher . . . when he ran out of clean plates, glasses and cutlery, he bought plastic tableware."

Disgusting, yes - but we shouldn't be too hard on Seguin. He's 20 years old, and frankly, sounds like a lot of roommates I've had. When I was an undergraduate at UBC, I had a roommate who left - I kid you not - a full glass of milk on his desk over the winter holidays. His bedroom door was locked for that time, and when he came back, some mutated science experiment was waiting for him when he opened the door. I had been suspecting something worse, given the smell of lactic death emanating from the room, but yeah, newsflash: young men are slobs. Some are worse than others.

This creates a host of problems. One, they're going to get sick. Having rotting food strewn about your living space and dirty laundry piling up invites all manner of germs to attack the people that live in these places.

If you're paying these guys multi-millions, would it kill you to spend a few bucks on helping them around the house? We've seen the Canucks smartly giving players access to a 'team chef', who provides players with take-home meals with real nutrition. There's room to expand on this concept, by setting up a full-on service that does housecleaning, laundry, even grocery shopping for the players. This could be the sort of thing that the team could provide as an added benefit that might elude cap-circumvention scrutiny. The 'Team Mom' could also provide a little coaching on household skills, too.

In-house moms are common in college fraternities; they help to ease the transition from living at home to moving out, which is a drastic change for a young male. Given that many young hockey players live like frat boys, they could really benefit from a little help around the house. Anything a team can do to keep the players healthy, fresh, and happy will help on the ice and will make Vancouver an even more attractive destination for free agents. This strikes me as the sort of thing that could provide a useful payoff.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

One more way Tim Raines is underrated

It's no secret that Tim Raines is a baseball stathead favourite. He gets a lot of ink for being underrated, which he is. His OBP and stolen base % made him one of the finest leadoff men of all time, but he had only modest power and didn't drive in many runs in an era where RBI was valued perhaps above all else. Unlike many other top leadoff men, Raines only had 2605 career hits and fell short in most other counting stats. He had a lot of good seasons but never hit 20 homers, and never put up more than 71 RBI.

We've since seen past all that, noting his career .385 OBP and consistent production into his late 30s that made him an always-valuable leadoff man.

But there's one more thing we've missed: Raines' career numbers suffer considerably because he was used mostly as a leadoff man. No, I'm not talking about his RBI totals; those obviously would have been higher.


Like just about every hitter in history, Raines' numbers were better with men on base than with the bases empty:

	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG
Bases Empty	6358	0.289	0.369	0.424
Runners on	4001	0.301	0.411	0.427

 
Raines came to bat with men on base only 38.6% of the time.

Let's compare Tim with another recent inductee, Jim Rice.

	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG
Bases Empty	4429	0.291	0.344	0.495
Runners on	4629	0.305	0.359	0.509

Like Raines (and most players), Rice sees a nice boost in his numbers with men on base. There's a number of things at work there. Both players got a decent number of intentional walks (148 for Raines, 77 for Rice) with men on base; neither player was ever intentionally walked with the bases empty. This boosts OBP (about 3.7 points for Raines; 1.7 points for Rice).

There's also sacrifice flies: 76 for Raines, 94 for Rice. With the bases empty, a fly out hits your average, OBP and SLG. When it scores a runner on third, your OBP falls, but not your average or SLG. If sac flies were scored as outs, both Raines and Rice would lose 7 points of average and SLG with men on.

What's different, though? Rice had men on base for 51.1% of his career plate appearances. That's a clear advantage over a leadoff hitter like Raines. Though Rice certainly faced pressure to succeed with men on base, it's a more statistically favourable situation for any major-league hitter. You're going to get more walks and your average and SLG will be protected by sacrifice flies that don't count against you. What's more, you have all the benefits of a pitcher under pressure who is distracted by the men on base, and will probably have to throw you more fastballs.

Here's an experiment: what if Raines had batted more often with men on base? What if he had been used as a middle-order hitter?

Rice's 51.1% of plate appearances with men on base is a high number - typical middle-order guys see more like 48%. Here's a totally non-random sample:

	Bases Empty	Runners On	% w/ men on
Jim Thome	5347	4966	48.2%
Albert Pujols	4162	3941	48.6%
Carlos Delgado	4430	4227	48.8%
Vernon Wells	3597	3157	46.7%
Bobby Abreu	5301	4625	46.6%

So let's imagine what would happen if Tim Raines had come to bat with men on 48% of the time rather than 38.6%.

		AVG	OBP	SLG
Bases Empty		0.289	0.369	0.424
Runners on		0.301	0.411	0.427
Career Total (38.6%)		0.294	0.385	0.425
Career Total (48%)		0.295	0.389	0.425

I know, it doesn't look like much. One measly point of batting average? Four points of OBP? What's that worth?

A lot, in fact. Over a 10000 plate-appearance career, that's worth an extra 41 walks and 41 fewer outs; which is worth 24.6 offensive runs - and about 2.5 extra WAR. No, it's not earth-shattering, but it means Raines would be valued at 68.7 career WAR rather than the 66.2 Baseball-Reference has him at.

That would move Raines up 12 spots on the all-time WAR leaderboard to #85, leapfrogging guys like Reggie Jackson, Johnny Mize, Jim Thome, and Barry Larkin. It doesn't make him inner-circle; but it does help to cement him as a sure-fire Hall of Famer.

Raines is typical in this regard. By playing most of his career as a leadoff hitter, his rate stats will underrate him because he took tougher at-bats than middle-order guys. He's not alone: the numbers turn out the same for other leadoff men like Biggio, and basically every modern leadoff man (except Juan Pierre, but that's for another article). OBP is much harder to come by when the bases are empty, and the guys that are tasked with the job - are being underrated for more than just a lack of RBIs.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston

Some quick NHL pensions math

Lots of talk today about a pensions issue that is holding up NHL-NHLPA CBA negotiations. To many on twitter, it seems like this sounds like small pototaoes. It's not. Here's why:

Let's say you run a business with 700 employees. As part of their compensation, you've agreed to set up a pension plan for them.

For the sake of keeping things simple, let's assume the following:

Every single employee will earn $45,000/year in pension starting at age 65.
Every one of those employees will collect that pension until he dies, which will magically be age 80 for all of them.

The contributions to fund the plan come out of the employee's salary until age 35 - so there's a 30 year gap between his 'stop-funding' date and his age 65 pension payout date.

The money paid in until age 35 will grow, thanks to compound interest, such that there is enough money to pay the full pension benefit when the employee is 65.

How much will it grow? It depends on the interest rate the pension plan gets on its investments. Let's say the plan earns a steady interest rate of 5% for the 30 years between ages 35 and 65.

(1.05)^30 = 4.32

So the money paid in will quadruple in that time. If the total paid out per employee is $45k/year * 15 years (again, i'm really fudging numbers here, and cutting actuarial corners for sake of simplicity), the fund will need to pay out $675,000 per employee. A fund worth about $500,000 per employee at age 65 will grow enough in the retirement years (again, at 5%) to meet those obligations.

Here's the problem: what if the plan doesn't grow at 5%? What if it grows at 4%?

(1.04)^30 = 3.24

So with the same initial contribution, you don't have $500k in the plan per employee; you have $375k per employee. Your plan is short by $125,000 per employee - that's $87.5 million for the 700 total employees.

You can see the big risks created by the uncertainty of interest rates. What if the economy continues to stagnate? What if the pension plan makes some bad investments?

Pension plans run into this sort of trouble with alarming frequency. In good scenarios, such failures are backstopped by the company behind the plan (which may be what the NHLPA is asking the NHL to do). In other scenarios, the plan is protected by a large insurer or by purchase of derivatives, but this can be very expensive to cover for such distant future events...or, the plan members suck it up and get 75 cents on the dollar, or whatever it is they end up with.

Who are we to say, though, where the NHL will be in 30 years? Maybe interest in the sport will fade, or a rival league will take over, or the sport will become less profitable, and so on. Maybe massive concussion lawsuits from former players will destroy the league...who knows.

The players, earlier in negotiations, agreed to put up $50 million of the make-whole money towards the pension-shortfall backstop - but that doesn't cover all potential risks. The $87.5m figure I quoted above is from just a 1% shortfall; what if it's 2 or 3%? I only counted 700 pension plan members - granted, all of those 700 will be receiving full pension under my model (in reality, I believe NHLers with short careers get a fraction of the full pension), but what if it's a 10-year CBA and hundreds more players are affected by a shortfall? The potential liabilities are huge.

Follow Rory Johnston (@rnfjohnston) on twitter: twitter.com/rnfjohnston