I’d also like to deny rumors that we’ve been holding Jason out of the lineup because we intend to trade him to the “Sports and Bremertonians” team pending him passing a physical.
Anyone else see that the smart, hip new Red Sox front office signed Tony Freaking Womack? I was honestly stunned, I thought it was a misprint. Womack has been for years the worst shortstop in baseball. He’s at the bottom of the pack defensively, by almost any metric you want to look (which is unusual, for complicated reasons) and he’s awful piled on awful offensively. He makes Ramon Santiago look like a good baseball player. I can see signing a guy like that as organizational filler for AAA, but I understand Womack can get out of his contract if they don’t keep him on the 40-man.
Justin Spiro of the Detroit Sports Net is reporting that Ivan Rodriguez has decided to join the Mariners, and the details that need to be worked out are simply technicalities.
Not that I question the integrity of the great Justin Spiro, but I’ll say flat out that this is just not true. If Rodriguez is still available when Sasaki is officially released from his contract, I would be surprised if the Mariners didn’t talk to him. But, to say a deal at this point is anywhere near done is so far from the truth that, well, I can’t believe it was printed. To borrow a phrase, this is journalistic irresponsibility.
So, Bob Melvin is pondering some line-up changes. Peter White over at Mariners Musings already gave his two cents. I’m still not sure what to make of the Box’s comments, and, considering the value usually derived from quotes at functions like this, maybe we shouldn’t care at all.
However, it got me thinking. Assuming the M’s spend their new found box of gold on a pitcher or two and leave the offense in tact, how should the M’s construct their line-up? Most people agree the clumping method is most effective, stacking your good hitters together to create rallies and letting your out-machines to hack their way out of the 7-8-9 spots. However, there are some more subtle advantages that can be gained by positioning people in the line-up to maximize their skillsets. I believe one of Melvin’s biggest mistakes so far has been getting hung up on an individual players abilities and ignoring the big picture. He does not want to consider Ichiro in center field because he considers him “the best right fielder in the game”, and I think we all know he means defensively. So, rather than considering the possible benefit of acquiring a right-fielder who would have been a vast improvement over Randy Winn offensively, we get to keep Winn in center to best utilize Ichiro’s individual skill package, even if he was more helpful to the team in a more challenging position.
Rather than breaking down the line-up by “who best fits the preset criteria for this spot”, the M’s should evaluate their nine man offense as a whole and look for ways to compliment each players strengths. Ichiro is the best option the M’s have for leading off, but he’s also the best option they have for hitting second. Edgar is the best option for hitting 3rd, 4th, or 5th, because he’s the best hitter on the team. Obviously, choices have to be made, and rather than slotting a player into what you feel his best spot is, match it up with the abilities and limitations of his teammates. So, in that sense, here is how I would roll out the line-up on opening day.
1. Randy Winn, CF, Switch
Ideally, I’d like a higher OBP from my number one guy, but the M’s don’t have the luxary. John Olerud was given consideration for the spot, but I felt that his base-clogging would impede Ichiro’s ability to run, which is a significant part of his value.
2. Ichiro Suzuki, RF, Left
As Peter noted, Ichiro has dramatic splits with runners on base. There are several theories for this, but the most obvious explanation is that he benefits from the giant hole that comes on the right side of the infield while the first baseman is holding a runner. Maximizing his at-bats with runners on base is important, and getting him one step away from the bottom of the line-up should help that.
3. Edgar Martinez, DH, Right
Boone could make an argument for this spot as well, but I prefer the high OBP preceding the high SLG rather than the other way around. Both Martinez and Boone kill left-handed pitching, which will discourage teams from bringing in a high-leverage ace lefty reliever to go after Ichiro. I know Ichiro doesn’t have a platoon split overall, but 25 of his 29 career home runs have come against right-handed pitching. I’m more comfortable with him facing a tough righty than a tough lefty in crucial game situations.
4. John Olerud, 1B, Left
This is about maximizing Olerud’s abilities against RHP’s, though I realize it puts a weak hitter into a typical power hitting spot. Olerud was still a force against RHP’s last year, hitting .281/.392/.422 against them. While the SLG isn’t great, he gets on base at a good enough rate to keep the rallies alive. By putting him behind Edgar and in front of Boone, he’ll face a minimal amount of left-handed relievers, and should be able to get a majority of his at-bats against pitchers he still has a chance against.
5. Bret Boone, 2B, Right
Ideally, you’d like to have your second best hitter higher in the order than this, but Boone’s high SLG fits well behind Martinez/Olerud. His lefty-mashing prowess protects Olerud to some degree, and he’ll still get a significant amount of at-bats with runners in scoring position. He’s the best guy to hit behind the base-cloggers, since he’s the most likely to allow them to trot home on a longball.
6. Raul Ibanez, LF, Left
Not my favorite #6 hitter in the American League, but he wins the battle of 30+ mediocrities, especially when playing at home. Hitting behind Boone should assure that a right-hander will usually be on the mound when he comes up late in games. If the opposing manager wants to bring in a lefty to go after Raul, then you live with it, and hope he can come through. Not ideal, but as our readers know, we don’t consider his acquisition ideal either.
7. Rich Aurilia, SS, Right.
Like Boone, Aurilia is a certified lefty-masher. If a team brings in the LOOGY to go after Ibanez, they’re likely only in for one batter, and those strategies can wear down a bullpen rather quickly. Most of Aurilia’s production comes from driving the ball rather than getting on base, so having him lower in the order should maximize his skill set.
8. Scott Spiezio, 3B, Switch.
He could theoretically flip-flop with Ibanez in the six spot, depending on which one proves they can’t hit first. He couldn’t hit lefties last year, but that could have been sample size noise. Either way, sticking him behind Aurilia (and, more importantly, keeping him and Ibanez seperated) is a guard against a lefty ace reliever mowing through several batters and ending rallies.
9. Ben Davis, C, Switch.
By the way, Ben Davis sucked eggs last year. Just thought I’d mention that we’ve noticed, since we stumped pretty hard for him to get more playing time. A .140 second half average? Yech. Anyways, whoever is catching will be the worst hitter on the team and you want to limit their AB’s as much as possible. Sticking them in the ninth spot is the easy call.
The main key would be to make sure that the Box doesn’t simply play cut and paste when regulars are taking the day off. Just because Randy Winn hits leadoff doesn’t mean Quinton McCracken should, just because both have CF penciled in as their position. And, in the end, I’m a bit worried that Melvin’s new professed love for tinkering is going to lead to some overmanaging, but setting the line-up the right way could eek a few extra runs out for a team that will need every single one they can get.
I finally finished watching Princess Nine (and for those of you here for posts about real live baseball, I think you might want to skip ahead to Dave’s fine post), and… I liked it, but I didn’t like it as much as I thought I would at the start. I have some problems with it, and it’s not so much “Koharu can’t have a Wave Motion Swing! Only the Yamato has Wave Motion anything!” but more…
—[SPOILER WARNING: SOME SPOILERS IN THIS CHUNK]—
- Yoko’s amazingly annoying until she displays any kind of talent, and then remains annoying
- There’s a multi-episode plot involving what you think is schizophrenia but turns out to be extra-terrestrials (or, alternately, a physical manifestation of schizophrenia) that makes little sense
- The animators seem increasingly unable to draw Ryo the same twice later in the series, sometimes making her perfectly normal and then grossly distorting her facial features in exactly the way that people who make fun of Japanese animation describe it
- Ryo is abused like a star high school pitcher in Texas, and is expected to get over that through spirit
- Ryo must pitch a complete games every time because the team has no one else that can pitch, despite obviously having players with the arm strength who could relieve her when she’s pitching (say) hurt
- The love story thing takes over more and more of the series rather than being an amusing sideline
- The coach has a story line where he pretends to be inept but is really ept, but if you pay attention, he actually is inept on a whole other level they’re not looking at
- The coach’s other story line goes nowhere either
- A multi-episode story line revolves around her dad and the gambling scandal that cost him his career, which threatens to get Ryo tossed from school (because she’s an embarassment) and the whole team disbanded, but Ryo decides to believe in him, it’s suggested that her dad was framed, and then it’s considered resolved and never brought up again. If your dad was, say, Shoeless Joe Jackson, wouldn’t that just be the begining of your troubles?
- At the end of the series, they reflect that the team will have two more years to win the tournament. No, they won’t. A) Ryo’s arm will fall off, B) With only nine players, no matter how good, any injury ever means they lose all their games…
—[END SPOILERS]—
The real hero of the series (as Hermione Granger in the Potter books) is not Ryo at all, it’s Izumi. Ryo’s a natural on the mound, and gets a scholarship to pitch, thus honoring her dead dad, a former star pitcher. In taking up baseball, she goes to school, gets into a relationship with the “genius slugger” at their brother school, and finds fufillment.
Izumi is the daughter of the school’s chairwoman. Her dad is also mysteriously absent, and her mother (unlike Ryo’s) is unavailable and distant. Izumi’s a tennis prodigy who is almost guaranteed to go on to a lucrative pro career. She abandons tennis to play baseball, cuts her long hair, and becomes Ryo’s rival, making Ryo better. Izumi studies baseball relentlessly, taking batting practice and fielding grounders until her hands bleed, never complaining, until she is a great hitter and fielder. The love of her life, who she’s been friends with through childhood, starts chasing Ryo around. When Ryo is in the hospital dying, it’s Izumi who has to (in a sort of ludicrous development) hike in the rain to get to her and help bring her out of a coma. Uncomplaining Izumi, who constantly drives the team to work harder and quit whining, is passed up for team captain in favor of Ryo, but Izumi says nothing.
—[HUGE SPOILERS AGAIN]—
In the finale, when Ryo has brutally and utterly failed the team, it’s Izumi who comforts her on the mound. Izumi gave everything she could to the baseball team and still is able to offer Ryo a shoulder.
—[END HUGE SPOILER]—
And what’s worse (to me, anyway) is that while Izumi’s a complicated character, on ADV’s site she’s pegged as the one who writes the season highlights, which make her out to be the worst kind of arrogant, stuck-up…. rrrrr, even though there’s no evidence in the series that she’d write like that at all.
Overall, I liked Princess Nine a lot, and if you can watch animated shows (and I say that because I know there are those who can’t/won’t) check it out this off-season, or next.
And now, I’d like to drag my wife into this for a second. For all the good clean baseball fun Princess Nine offers, it suffers from many of the same Japanese animation shortcuts. There is, for instance, a character who looks like this:
There’s a scene in the show where Ryo, having heard startling revelations about her dad, has.. um, something happens, and Ryo ends up in the hospital and may die. The team and everyone shows up, waiting… oretty tense stuff. I was on the couch, watching, and my wife enters and says “Hey, her hair has built-in cupholders.”
Yup.
Update: I just found out someone out there has a quiz to see “Which Princess Nine player are you?” Sooo, taking the quiz now… fudging a little because I’m a guy and it doesn’t always… well, I sort of expected this:
Which Princess Nine
Player Are You?
Eternal Green Field: A Princess Nine Fan Site
Boy, that’s weirdly embarassing. I swear I had no idea when I wrote this post the first time that there was a quiz or that’s how it would turn out.
Well, the results of the Maels Rodriguez tryout are in. Good luck getting through the agent double talk, though. He didn’t get above 90, but this apparently proves he’s healthy in the mind of Henry Villar. I’ve only touched briefly on Rodriguez on the blog, but here’s my basic stance:
1. There are maybe three relievers in the game who are worth between $8-10 million in a particular season. Wagner, Gagne, Rivera. Thats it. I’m almost always against giving large contracts to relievers. They are too inconsistent and easily replaced. Giving a multiyear contract to a reliever is even worse. Inconsistencies are the expectation, not the exception, and locking yourself into paying a reliever 3 years down the line is just not a good idea.
2. Maels Rodriguez is, by all reports, a two-pitch pitcher when he’s going well. Fastball with velocity and a vicious slider. We really don’t have any idea what his command is like, how well he sets up hitters, how he changes speeds, or his ability to locate his fastball. These are the things that seperate an arm from a pitcher. Colt Griffin was paid a lot of money because he threw 100 as an 18-year-old. Two years later, and he’s been a below average pitcher in A ball, getting banged around by hitters far inferior to anything he’ll ever face in the majors. Maels Rodriguez comes with the same assurances, assuming his velocity ever returns. Investing in Rodriguez is essentially like paying a whole heck of a lot of money for another Clint Nageotte. The Mariners are overloaded with interesting RHP’s who may or may not be ready to contribute at the major league level. Maels Rodriguez simply isn’t a need for the M’s.
3. Cubans have an absolutely awful track record. Here is a list of every Cuban defector who has reached the majors. This list doesn’t include the flameouts who never even got to the big leagues (hello, Evel Bastida-Martinez). A quick rundown of the results for the pitchers:
Busts:
Rene Arocha
Rolando Arrojo
Danys Baez
Jose Contreras (so far)
Osvaldo Fernandez
Adrian Hernandez
Hansel Izquierdo
Vladimir Nunez
Ariel Prieto
Michael Tejera
Successes:
Livan Hernandez
Orlando Hernandez
Calling these two successes is being pretty generous as well. The Marlins got some use out of Livan early, then the Giants absorbed a lot of money paying him to be a below average pitcher, before the Expos reaped the benefits of a monstrous 2003 season. For most of his career, he’s been a disappointment, but has shown flashes of dominance. Orlando Hernandez is similar, but his struggles have come thanks to repeated injuries, and he’s been a quality pitcher when healthy. He is, ironically, available to any team who wants him, and if the M’s really want to sign a Cuban right-hander, he’d get my support. He’ll be cheaper, has less question marks surrounding him, and won’t command more than a one year commitment. Watching him pitch, I always thought he could make a dynamite Tom Gordon-style reliever. If there’s anything left of his right arm, he’s an interesting flyer for some team.
Adding those three factors together, I can’t support any effort to sign Maels Rodriguez. Yea, there’s a chance his velocity comes back and he’s the most dominant pitcher to ever come out of Cuba. But the odds are about as good as if Bavasi took the money to Vegas and played slots til it ran out that he’d hit the monster jackpot. Its a giant gamble, and not one that this team needs to take. Put the money elsewhere. Just say no to Maels.
Hey all. I’m guest-hosting Baseball Prospectus Radio this weekend. Lots of local stuff in this one:
January 24: What’s replacement level for radio hosts? BPR investigates as columnist Derek Zumsteg steps in for Will Carroll this week. We’ll talk to former Astros manager Larry Dierker about pitching, managing, and his book This Ain’t Brain Surgery. We’ll take a trip to the high minors to talk to Mike Curto, the broadcaster for the Tacoma Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League, and to rookie ball when we catch up with Pat Dillon, who does radio for the Everett Aquasox of the Northwest League.
It’s on early in the morning (our time) on Saturday if you want the life web feed, unfortunately, but hopefully we’ll post clips on BP.com and I can point you to those when they’re up.
Ooooooooooor…. feel free to call or write your local sports talk station and ask them why they don’t have such a fine program available.
On my way to post an explanation of some of the intricacies of the negotiations to allow Sasaki to play in Japan, I saw that Steve Nelson beat me to it. Go read his post, then come back, and I’ll clear up a few of his assumptions.
1. He’s right about the working agreement between MLB and the Japanese Professional Leagues. Players under contract with a team from either league are not eligible to play for any team in another league. This is why you’ll see players having their contracts sold to Japanese teams. According to the agreement between the leagues, there has to be a legal transference of ownership of the contract.
2. This situation is more complex because Sasaki wants to play in Japan next year and not just spend his free time boating. Retirement is not an option, as he would still be contractually obligated to the Mariners for the 2004 season and unable to pitch in Japan. The process for selling a players contract to a Japanese team includes placing said player on waivers and allowing each team to take a pass. In this instance, I imagine no team would claim Sasaki. We should not expect a repeat of last years Kevin Millar fiasco.
3. As Steve noted, the union will not allow unilateral termination of the contract. However, as has been suggested in several places, the Mariners are unlikely to place Sasaki on the suspended list. Under the current rules, a suspended major league player is still considered under contract, and they would have to amend the working agreement to allow him to play in Japan next year. This is possible, but unlikely.
4. The scenario getting the most support so far would be an Albert Belle-style retirement. The Mariners will keep Sasaki on the 40 man roster until spring training, then place him on the 60 day disabled list with some form of “personal issues” as the reason. An addendum will be written into the working agreement allowing disabled players for that specific reason to play in the Japanese Leagues while still under contract to Major League clubs. He will voluntarily forfeit his salary, so the Mariners will not be responsible for any of the $9.5 million they had earmarked for him (and, for those who are seeing conflicting numbers, that includes his $8 million base salary, $500,000 in incentives that he was going to reach barring injury, and $1 million buyout of his 2005 contract) this year.
Everyone I talk to says its going to get done, and the union won’t stand in Sasaki’s way of returning to Japan. Their main concern is to make the language specific enough to not allow the owners to funnel players with unwanted contracts to Japan. They want to make sure the agreement allows only for this specific exception to the rule, and that will be the complicated part.
However, any claims that the Mariners make that they cannot spend this money now is either ridiculous overconservatism or just lying. The $9.5 million is essentially like a tax refund; you know its coming, and as long as you can guarantee payment won’t be due before you receive the money, there is no reason not to allocate that money to your present budget.
Things Gillvasi is considering doing the money they’d planned on spending on Kazu in 2004
—
- Go to dollar store, buy 22oz sodas, give two to every fan entering Safeco Field, all year long
- Buy ownership group Oyster Perpetual Datejust model Rolex “timepieces,” stash remaining millions, laugh behind their back as they try on and admire their new watches, because that model’s for the ladies
- Fund highly speculative but interesting biotech firm interested in exploiting critical phenomena in phase transitions
- Spend it on weather control to get Jim Foreman a real storm for once
- Eight $1m outfielders who can out-perform Raul Ibanez, reserve for mid-season acquisition
- Crash program to build heated shelter for predicted crowds of picketers before they show up mid-season demanding his firing
- Former president Clinton made $9.5m on speaking engagements last year, see if he’s available for whole season to give pre-game pep talks
- Buy the Expos
- Grant program to support the importation of Mariners merchandise into hat-starved eastern Europe
- Head down to Indian casino, play roulette
- Buy up every ticket in nation for upcoming “Win a Date With Tad!” then giggle on Monday when box office tallys are announced
- Purchase 711,610 copies of Baseball Prospectus 2004 from Amazon.com, read at least one of them.
- Buy Faberge egg at auction, put it on tee for Boone to hit really far.
I think I’m on the Ivan Rodriguez bandwagon. With Sasaki off the books, that’s nearly $10M ($8M for 2003 plus a $1.5M option buyout) to spend in 2004. After the 2004 season, there are a number of guys coming off the books: Rich Aurilia, John Olerud, Edgar Martinez, Dan Wilson, Freddy Garcia… the money is there, both for this season and beyond. I’m thinking of a three-year, $35M deal.
Alternately, I’d be happy to trade, say, Garcia and Winn for Magglio Ordonez. Or perhaps Jim Edmonds.
ESPN has a translated interview with Sasaki. One part in particular caught my attention:
Question: When did you reach the decision?
Answer: I started thinking about two years ago I wanted to live with my family, and when my agent told me I may have a chance to leave the Mariners before my contract is up, I decided that continuing my playing career in Japan would be the best thing to do. It became a reality this offseason.
Somehow I’m not buying that. If he really was thinking about this two years ago, he wouldn’t have signed that mid-season contract extension.