Reader Cliff Classen writes:
The Texas GM calls and says: “Hey, my nine for your nine, straight up.” Do you answer something along the lines of basically working out the transportation details?
Ah, John Hart, wacky team-swapper.
What are you getting? Assuming it’s the starting best nine —
Huge young stars: Hank Blalock, Mark Teixeira
Not as young stars who might not really be able to keep their level of productivity up but then again might be: Alfonso Soriano
Good prospect-y guys: Gerald Laird
Decent semi-young guys: Mike Young
Decent players still developing who might have promise and might not: Kevin Mench, Laynce Nix (I could write about that for a while, but I won’t)
Servicable regulars being paid as such: Fullmer
Floatsam: Delucci
And you’d be giving up
Stars: Edgar, Boone
Really good guys who maybe don’t contribute at that same level but are still cool and I like a lot: Ichiro!
Servicable regulars, some of whom are paid enormous amounts of money: Ibanez, Aurilia, Spiezio, Winn, Wilson
Old guys dragging boulders around: Olerud
Given too that this season looks like a wash, I take the offer and wonder what Hart’s been smoking. Then I deal Soriano off (because we’ve got Lopez & Friend to play next year). Well, no, I don’t, because I couldn’t bring myself to trade Edgar. I’d wuss out and have to have an assistant take the offer. If you’re going to play for next year, the Rangers offer you a bunch of players that will be better in a year that you can build your team around. The Mariners are built to win now, and they’re losing.
Tacoma News Tribune ran an article about Winn that contains some weird statements:
On the difficulty of catching balls in the sun:
In fact, that was the impetus behind [Griffey’s] famous “demand” that the Safeco Field roof be used for cover on an otherwise pleasant afternoon.
Look, no one knows. Griffey’s a guy who may have told many people many different versions of the story — I really do like Griffey, but following his career there’s a lot of post-event justification that goes on when he’s done something wacky.
During spring training, when Winn was being groomed for his return to center field – he alternated between left and center in Tampa Bay – manager Bob Melvin urged patience, as the veteran was adjusting to a position whose difficulties were masked by the elite likes of Griffey and Mike Cameron.
Small problem here. Winn’s defensive positions, by year
1998, 70 CF games, 16 LF games, 12 RF games
1999, 77 CF games
2000, 18 CF games, 29 LF games
2001, 48 CF games, 62 RF games, 9 LF games
2002, 138 CF games, 8 RF games
Soooooooooo he didn’t alternate so much between left and center in Tampa as much as he alternated all over the outfield… and then played center full time. Or focusing on his last couple of years, you could say he played center and right field.
I know that’s kind of picky, I’m sorry… but doesn’t anyone besides Larry Stone and David Andriessen fact-check their assumptions before they file their stories? We could write a “media watch” column every day where we go through the local dailies and point out things that are wrong in each story. Could do that with the broadcasts, except we can’t point to broadcast transcript URLs and there’s so, so much in three hours.
The point here being that Winn played 371 games in center field just at the major league level before this season, and many more in the minors. It’s not as if we’ve transported him to some wacky planet where the gravity is twice Earth’s and he has to run across uneven formations space crystals to get to the ball. He’s just not a good center fielder out there. He’s okay, but he’s not good. There’s a temptation (as in that article) to dismiss the downgrade as a perception thing, that he only appears to suck because Cameron was awesome, but that raises three issues:
– No
– He seriously is below-average in center field
– Where were these people when many M’s fans (like us) kept protesting that Cameron’s glove far outweighed his problems hitting at home?
So… what’s the solution? It’s crazy! It’s revolutionary! It’s something we’ve been pushing since Cameron was booted out of town:
Beyond a blockbuster trade – and it’s too early to talk about that – here’s a simple solution: restore Winn to his comfort zone in left, move Raul Ibañez to right field (he’s played it, on and off, since high school) and switch Ichiro Suzuki to center.
Ichiro is a world-class right fielder, but let’s face it, a world-class right fielder is a luxury when the center fielder is Mike Cameron. When the center fielder is a mistake waiting to happen, the best defensive player in the outfield should man the busiest station in the outfield.
It’s never too early to talk blockbuster trade, but beyond that… hey, here’s a problem, though: if veteran outfielder Randy Winn’s having all these problems adjusting to center field, wouldn’t Ichiro! have the same problems?
On today’s game:
What a tough game to watch. The rain delays, the length of time it took to get to a loss… watching the team chip away at the lead only to have Texas put up 3 in the seventh, and then see the Mariners answer that three but fall short… just watching I felt like I’d had a lot taken out of me.
Hard to find fault in the offense: they were patient and drew four walks off Drese and nine on the night, really whupping up on some of that middle relief. Problems again giving up the extra-base hits, which we almost never saw last year. But the real problem again came from the defense and the long ball, both problems that continue to dog the team. Tonight Pineiro faced 28 guys. He struck out six, walked one, and gave up two home runs (ow) (and they still count for a full run if they’re solo shots). Of the 19 batters he saw put the ball into play, 11 of those went for hits. 11! That’s crazy. We got to see balls get by Davis as well as the infield… just ugly play all around.
When your pitcher goes almost 110 pitches, throwing 61% strikes and racking up a strikeout an inning (even while getting slapped around), you’ve got to think he’ll walk away with a win. 11 hits on 19 balls in play. Ow, ow, ow.
I noticed, though, that the Rangers have a lot more electronic noise between pitches and stuff than Safeco does this year. It tends to grate on me, but I don’t seem to have noticed its absence. I’d gladly trade the dumb in-game annoyances for the “Rally Jig” even if I’d rather not have either. I want to watch the game, talk to my friends, maybe score, drink a beer, have an Ivardog. I see a ton of games every year, and I don’t like the hydros (though, again, I prefer the simplified hydros to the hyper-active, waving-camera hydro races of last season). And while people think that the casual fan comes to the game for the music and crazy videos, I think maybe they come to the Mariners game for the baseball, like me.
Note on the missing post:
Deleted a post today, a lengthy riposte to the Seattle Weekly letters to the editor about the stat rats article. One I disagreed with in a sort of civil manner, though I think the writer’s quite wrong. The other involved name-calling and threats to force-feed me my stats. My responses weren’t that great.
I wrote a long thing about how I was trying to elevate my work and hopefully the quality of debate. Umm… here it is.
I’m going to keep working on that. So if you see a lame post from me and later it goes away, that’s me trying to self-edit. Sorry. I planned a much longer article on the nature of chemistry at some point. But I’m going to defer to Rob Neyer, who hit this in his chat today:
Dan, Chicago: Whenever anyone talks to me about the Yankees’ lack of chemistry, I think of the 72-74 Oakland A’s. Is there any reason why chemistry should affect this Yankees team negatively if it didn’t affect the A’s?
Rob Neyer: No. And there’s a better example, closer to home: the 1976-1981 Yankees, who fought each other all the time. But you already know what I think about “chemistry.” Often discussed, never explained.
“Kevin Jarvis warm in the bullpen, Melvin’s got the towel ready… he’s wiping his hands off. I guess his hands were dirty, Dave.”
“No question about it Rick, you can see on the replay–”
“And there goes the towel! Jarvis is coming in from the bullpen and we’ll be right back after this time-out.”
Not to pick on Art Thiel, I’m just using this as a starting point. He writes about the team’s start (“Mariners’ early struggles cause for concern“)
“Indeed, 10 percent of a baseball season is a small sample from which to make sweeping conclusions. Teams have rallied from deeper holes to greater glories, none more recently than the 2003 Florida Marlins.”
You want to wait 30, maybe 40 games before you start to draw any conclusions about the overall strength of the team. Unbalanced play at the start of the season makes this particularly true right now.
That said, one of the reasons the Marlins turned their season around was they fired their manager and put Jack McKeon on the bench. It paid off all year long: McKeon’s so old-school his ideas seem new to people, but he’s generally been much less concerned about pitcher roles than the LaRussa managers, and also willing to flex his lineups around to fit as much talent on it as possible. The Marlins called up Miguel Cabrera, made trades to beef up the lineup… when McKeon got them back on track, they reinforced success.
None of these options seem likely for the Mariners. Melvin’s unlikely to be fired (and given the absence of more-qualified candidates we can be sure would be better, why would we?), so that kind of turnaround is unlikely. The team doesn’t have any impact position players in the high minors ready to step up and contribute in the way Cabrera did. They’ve been historically unwilling to trade for high-salary players, even those they really need, and to expend stockpiled farm system talent to win that year. The best thing we’ve got in that department might be Soriano, who could step into the rotation when he’s healthy, and maybe — and I’m reluctant to mention this — King Felix as a Francisco Rodriguez-type bullpen addition.
Generally though, while their are outliers (teams that start hot and suck, teams that start slow and win 102 games on the season), we find that teams that start slowly are indeed bad. We like to drag the A’s out, but again, the difference is so large: the A’s are a team that Beane constantly improves through the season, while the M’s play the hand they’re dealt on Opening Day, and have for years. When you look at teams that have started like the M’s have, you find a lot of teams that finished shy of 80 wins on the season, a few that broke .500, and very few that did well for themselves.
Because that deals with larger aggregates, it’s probably a more accurate indicator than (say) player comparisons, too.
Someone pointed me to this Art Thiel column. It echoes something in Levesque’s column. Bavasi’s trying to spread the word that he’s into stats, which if he believes that he is, is actually more disturbing than the alternative. The team tried to hire Craig Wright, but failed, and —
Bavasi is continuing his search, but the market is competitive.
Qualified analysts are in such demand that the best sign non-compete clauses so they don’t work for two clubs in the same division or league.
The Mariners are still looking.
“We do our own stats, but you need a guy who thinks out of the box,” Bavasi said.
If you want a guy who thinks out of the box, you can’t look in the box for him.
It’s moments like this I wish I hadn’t been a Mariners fan, and written so much publically-archived material on the team and my opinion of their management. I’m over here!! Look, and here’s Jason, and Dave knows the minors really well! Helllloooooooooooooo!!!!
Probably be a pretty short interview, though.
“Tell us what you guys bring to the team that we don’t already have.”
“A dissenting voice, first. We can make cogent arguments about why the moves you’re making might not be in the best interest of the team, offer better, cheaper alternatives, and help add a depth of knowledge the organization has historically lacked.”
“We’re really more of a team here in the front office… this dissent thing, it wouldn’t fit in with the team concept we’ve worked so hard to build.”
“Dissent doesn’t have to be personal, or divisive. Only good can come of honest discussion and arguments and it’ll make the organization better from–”
“Thanks for coming in.”
Here’s the big thing, though: Thiel makes a huge, huge error in his column:
He also knows that most of the recent A’s stars — Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, Jason Giambi, Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez — were acquired before Beane’s arrival, using traditional methods.
This is false. I mean it’s flat out, verifiably false, something that even the barest of fact checking would have revealed.
As Rob Neyer pointed out in this column, “Beane was the A’s assistant general manager in 1997, when Hudson was drafted, and he was general manager in 1998 and 1999 when Mulder and Zito were drafted.”
This is at best lazy writing by Thiel, taking something Bavasi said (which would still be wrong) and paraphrasing it without looking it up, followed by sloppy fact-checking (if any was done) by the PI. But I don’t understand how stuff this wrong gets printed, when it takes a couple of minutes and a web search to determine that.
Further, mocking Oakland’s skew towards college drafting, as Bavasi does earlier, should spur Thiel to note that of those guys, in order that he mentions them —
Hudson – Auburn University
Zito – USC
Mulder – Michigan State University
Giambi – Long Beach State University
only Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez weren’t drafted out of college.
Paul at the good ship S.S. Mariner writes a neat bit on Ibanez and the good-guy thing.
I’d like to add one thing: if the manager’s job is to keep the team running smoothly and massage personalities (because the bench coach handles strategy, and so forth), what’s the point of having him when your clubhouse is composed of all these happy-go-lucky clubhouse presences? Why not forgo the manager, throw his salary on the pile with Kazu’s money, and invest it all in bonds? And not Barry Bonds– that would be smart.
I’ll say that again:
I want to make it clear that this is intended to make a point, and I don’t support this at all
I don’t think Raul Ibanez’s contract was the worst ever. I don’t think he’s somehow responsible for their losses. My point was only that you could, if you wanted to, pretty easily construct an argument that that was the case, just as it’s been argued that because he contributed to some wins, he’s a great pickup and Bavasi’s amazingly keen for having picked him up.
Just for clarification, I don’t think Derek was really serious when he called the Ibanez signing the worst in team history. As much as we dislike his contract and think that it exemplifies everything that is wrong with the organization right now, he’d have to suck at astronomical levels to match the head-scratchers handed to Greg Hibbard, Pete O’Brien, or either of the last two contracts given to Dan Wilson, especially the 3 year, $13 million anchor that he got after the 1999 season.
My posting will be erratic (read: likely nonexistant) through the weekend, so, to make sure our tremendous readers don’t feel neglected, here is what is on top for next week at USSM: An updated Future Forty and more in-depth look at the team’s defensive performance in 2004, compared to the rest of the league, as well as your usual daily banter and game recaps.
Oh, and Chris Snelling missing yet another season just sucks. Seriously, baseball needs guys like Chris Snelling. The M’s need a guy like Chris Snelling. There was absolutely nothing bad about the Chris Snelling, major league player story, and for it to have gone this horribly wrong just sucks.
Derek and I were at the game today, so as you might imagine, a good time was had by all (despite the loss).
He’s not kidding when he says the defense was awful. And by defense, we mean “Randy Winn.” Well, primarily at least. Eric Karros’ “double” in the 7th was a joke — Winn was in position to make the play and simply dropped the ball. Honestly, I don’t know what the Safeco official scorer is smoking sometimes. Next up, Winn misplays a single to center, allowing Karros to score from second (note: I see they changed this one to an error, which I actually disagree with, because it’s debatable Winn would have thrown him out anyway). Finally, Bloomquist misplays a grounder between first and second, allowing Dye to score from second (another note: wouldn’t they be better off defensively with Bloomquist at second and Cabrera at first?).
OK, I’m not quite done yet.
Willie Bloomquist at first base. This is wrong on so many levels. How sad is it when your first baseman, who should be one of the two or three best hitters on your team, has to bat ninth? I’m glad to see Melvin sitting Olerud against a tough lefty like Mark Mulder, but the guy taking his place shouldn’t be Bloomquist. It should be a guy like Karros, who the A’s picked up for a mere $550K. Or Greg Colbrunn, who we even had once upon a time. These guys are around; you just have to find them.
At the same time, if you’re going to sit Bret Boone, why not do so against a tough right-hander? Arg.