Random post-loss thoughts
I have trouble feeling bad about losing when Ichiro! goes 2-3 with a walk. Ichiro’s second-half performance is really one of the redeeming things about this season for me as a fan.
It was weird to see Meche doing a Ryan Franklin impression (low K, low BB, dinger) except without going deep into the game. Meche’s big problem early looked like endurance and control, not stuff… starts like this make a case that he’s no better at keeping his pitch count low so he can go further into games, but he’s working around the strike zone and relying on his defense, an entirely opposite approach that’s no more likely to be successful.
I really don’t want to see Delgado here if the price is expensive. For $500k, maybe. I was thinking about this today, and if I wanted the Mariners to spend wisely and I could only give them one rule, it would be “no one over thirty”.
Seriously. Nate Silver, the guy who came up with the PECOTA forecasting system BP uses, likes to remind me that career paths take weird paths far more often then we think. It’s easy to say “ballplayers tend to peak at 27-28” but that doesn’t mean that any particular one won’t peak early, or late, or suck in those years but be good around them.
But in the aggregate, you can’t beat age. Players may age gracefully, but teams rarely do, and never for very long. If the Mariners invest in quality free agents, like Beltran and Beltre (hmmm… that sounds like a threat: “Don’t make me get the Belts”), they need to be reasonably sure those players will be healthy and productive through the life of their contracts, and that you’re not paying in five years for a level of performance the player’s not remotely capable of achieving.