Mariner Trade Value
Last year, I did a post on players trade value across MLB, an idea stolen from Bill Simmons annual NBA trade value article. The basic gist of the idea can be summarized like this; if a team called you and asked for a player in return, who would you rather give up? Service time, salary, and performance all factor into the equation.
In essence, who has the most trade value in the Mariners organization? We’ll count down the top 25 in reverse order. Because this is what we do during the all-star break when you take real baseball games away from us for four days. Jerks.
25. Steve Uhlmansiek, LHP
Working his way back, mostly throwing well. Could be a breakthrough guy in ’07.
24. Greg Halman, OF
A younger, better version of Balentien. Has less value around the league, but more to me.
23. Wladmir Balentien, OF
He’s an all-or-nothing prospect, but his power is legitimately rare. I’d cash in before he busts.
22. George Sherrill, LHP
Lefty one out guys aren’t tough to find, but good luck finding one this tough on LH hitters.
21. Jeremy Reed, CF
His stock has tumbled a long ways. Hasn’t adjusted to majors, looks to be on the outs.
20. Justin Thomas, LHP
Better stuff than other southpaws in organization, missing bats like crazy.
19. Emiliano Fruto, RHP
Stuff is good, command is not, results are mixed. Needs to take a step forward.
18. Mark Lowe, RHP
Transformed himself from a thrower into a pitcher in less than a year.
17. Francisco Cruceta, RHP
Fantastic waiver claim a year ago. Command needs work, but stuff is good enough to help team.
16. Matt Tuiasasopo, SS/3B/RF
Organization has pushed him fast, but it would be nice to see results eventually.
15. Ryan Feierabend, LHP
Makes the most out of average stuff. Scouts love his make-up and approach to pitching.
14. Shin-Soo Choo, OF
Does everything well enough to play in majors, none of it well enough to start regularly.
13. Gil Meche, RHP
His value will likely never be higher, but ironically comes when club needs to keep him the most.
12. Raul Ibanez, LF
What a weird, weird career path he has taken. But we’re enjoying the fruits of that.
11. Chris Snelling, LF/DH
Every time he’s healthy, we get excited. When he gets hurt, we cry. Please stay healthy.
10. Brandon Morrow, RHP
With future rotation totally up for grabs, organization is hoping he comes fast.
9. J.J. Putz, RHP
Hurts me to have him this low, but closers are easy to find. But man, he’s good.
8. Rafael Soriano, RHP
Still has the potential to move back to the rotation at some point.
7. Jeff Clement, C
How badly could this team use a guy who can hit .280/.400/.500? He might be that guy.
6. Kenji Johjima, C
Already an above average catcher and signed at way below market value.
5. Adam Jones, CF
Establishing himself as the premier prospect in the organization.
4. Yuniesky Betancourt, SS
Hard to find another league average shortstop making as little as he is.
3. Jose Lopez, 2B
All-Star second baseman at age 23, doesn’t make anything for several years.
2. Ichiro, RF
If he was willing and eager to play center field, he’d be untouchable.
1. Felix Hernandez, RHP
Obviously, he’s not going anywhere.
Guys who have value to the team, but not value in the trade market, include Richie Sexson, Adrian Beltre, and Jarrod Washburn. While the team would be instantly worse if they were removed, let’s be honest, we’d gladly unload their contracts if we could.
Live game thread for the home run derby!
There will be no live game thread for the home run derby. Chris Berman and Joe Morgan analyzing a novelty contest — no, please, I’ll be over here gouging my eyeballs out with a spoon and puncturing my eardrums with a railroad spike. Ugh.
Warm Your Heart, Satisfy Your Snark
Warm your heart on this Monday with a touching story about Katie Morris, a fan who visited Safeco Field with the help of the Make A Wish Foundation.
To cleanse the palate and chill those cockles, we have an effort by Jonah Keri. For all who complained about Eddie Guardado not making Jonah’s No-Stars Team, I offer the following: Hidden in this column like the delicious center of a Tootsie Roll pop is a shot at the Mariners’ erstwhile closer.
What Is Gil Meche?
Another day, another good start from Gil Meche, resulting in a Mariners win. With the performance today, he lowered his ERA to 3.83 for the season and has been essentially annointed the team’s current ace by the coaching staff, as he will start the first game after the all-star break.
What a difference a month makes. After his May 30th start, Meche had a 4.87 ERA, a 5-6 record, and less than stellar peripherals. On a per 9 inning basis, he was allowing 1.28 homers, 4.39 walks, and 7.51 strikeouts. The K’s are nice, but everything else is poor, leading to the mediocre run prevention. At that point, we’d seen two more months of the typical Gil Meche.
Since June 5th, he’s started 7 games and pitched significantly better. In those 7 games, he’s thrown 45 innings, posted a 2.39 ERA, and the improved run prevention is matched by improved ratios. His HR/9 has been 0.80, his BB/9 a much improved 2.79, and his K/9 has held steady at 7.37.
You can see the improvement in his Fielding Independant ERA as well. In his first 11 starts, his FIP was 4.84, almost perfectly matching his 4.87 ERA. In his last 7 starts, his FIP has been 3.64. His ERA of 2.39 is over a run lower than you’d expect based his normal peripheral numbers, but a 3.64 FIP is nothing to be sneezed at, and is a marked improvement.
So, what has Meche done better the last 7 starts to lead to this improvement?
Two things, quite simply: He’s throwing more strikes and keeping the ball in the yard. The decrease in walks has kept runners off the bases, and the lack of home runs allowed have kept the ones that have gotten aboard from scoring. However, it is quite rare to see a pitcher simultaneously put the ball over the plate significantly more often and cut his home run rate nearly in half. Generally, strikes equal long balls, unless you just have awesome unhittable stuff, and Meche does not. Looking at the numbers as a percentage of batters faced, we see the following pattern:
First 11 starts: BB – 11%, K – 19%, HR – 3%
Last 7 starts: BB – 8%, K – 20%, HR – 2%
Less walks, slightly higher strikeout rate, less home runs. It is rare to see a pitcher simultaneously throw more strikes, put the same amount of balls in play, and still cut his home run rate. As we’ve discussed previously on the site, historically, we’ve seen no evidence of starting pitchers being able to sustain HR rates lower than their FB rates would suggest. Essentially, if Meche’s new found ability to keep the ball in the yard is real, it’s going to show up in his GB/FB%. If this is a repeatable skill, his recent run of home run stinginess will be accompanied by a raise in GB%. Let’s see if thats true:
First 11 starts: 42% GB rate, 36% FB rate
Last 7 starts: 41% GB rate, 44% FB rate
Well, that’s not what we wanted to see. He’s cut his HR rate in half despite a significant uptick in balls hit in the air. Looking at it another way, we see his HR/FB rate was 13% in his first 11 starts, but is just 7% in his last 7 starts. 11% is the league average, which pitchers have shown to regress towards over time. Pitchers in Safeco will post slightly lower HR/FB rates due to the home park, making 10% more of a realistic marker. So, he’s basically been 3% high in his bad stretch and 3% low in his good stretch.
It’s pretty obvious that his current style of performance is unsustainable, however. That isn’t to say the results aren’t sustainable, but he won’t continue to get these kind of results pitching this way. If he wants to keep posting a 2.39 ERA (or anything below 3.5, really), he better start missing a lot more bats and getting a lot more groundballs in a hurry.
Good Gil Meche is throwing the ball over the plate a lot, missing bats at a slightly above average rate, and keeping the ball in the yard. You won’t find starting pitchers who have sustained that kind of profile for a long time – if you’re not missing bats a lot and you’re throwing strikes, you’re going to get taken deep more often than this.
So, realistically, even if Gil Meche continues to throw like he has his last 7 starts, and does not regress back to what he was in the 123 major league starts that came before it and say he’s not that good, he still can’t sustain his performance with the way he’s pitching. Either the walks are going to go up or the home runs are. He’s not going to be able to keep both at their currrent low rates. It’s not a repeatable skill.
That isn’t to say Gil Meche can’t pitch well. If we put the HR/FB rate back to 10% for the rest of the year, and assume that he’ll continue to post 8% walk and 20% strikeout rates, that can be an effective enough pitcher. Noah Lowry, last season, posted numbers almost exactly identical to what Meche has posted in his last 7 starts, and he ended the year with a 3.78 ERA, 4.05 FIP, and 4.34 xFIP.
That’s what Gil Meche’s last seven start skillset projects out to. Not many walks, some homers, and enough strikeouts to make him valuable enough to pitch in the middle of a decent rotation. If Gil Meche continues to pitch like he has since the calendar turned to June, a performance similar to what 2005 Noah Lowry put up is about what we should expect.
If Gil Meche reverts to previously established form and throws like he has from 2000 through May of this year, well, he’ll be significantly worse than that.
All that to say, no, Gil Meche has not turned a corner. He’s not an ace, and he’s not pitching like one. He’s a back-end starter having a nice run aided by some performances that are unsustainable.
Edited to add: Should have included this in the original post, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Gil Meche become this kind of pitcher. In the second half of 2004, he ended the year with a 13 start run that saw him pitch very similar to this. Because his HR/FB rate was 12% in that run, his ERA was 4.02, but the style was very similar.
It obviously was not sustainable. This is nothing new – Meche has done this before. It’s just not a recipe for long term success.
Game 89, Tigers at Mariners
LHP Nate Robertson v RHP Gil Meche. 1:05.
Meche makes the last start before the All-Star Break and, according to Hargrove, will start the first one after it. He’s an ace! An ace!
Today’s anti-LHP lineup for you:
RF-L Ichiro!
3B-R Beltre
2b-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
DH-R Perez (no, really! Everett tempter tantrum scheduled to follow the game!)
CF-R Bloomquist the Ignitor
C-R Rivera
SS-R Betancourt
Mariners make mystery moves
From the Seattle Times today.
Petagine gets DFAd after making an appearance:
After the game, the Mariners designated Roberto Petagine for assignment, and called up catcher Luis Oliveros from Class AA San Antonio. The move bolsters the catcher spot while Kenji Johjima takes a brief absence from the team. Johjima will fly to Japan today to visit his wife and new baby boy, who was born June 30.
Nice to get Johjima the time off, and yet — really? Petagine doesn’t get used but one, twice a series if he’s lucky, and now he’s dumped? This requires the team to put Oliveros on the roster, while Quiroz is still off? I don’t get it.
Hargrove’s got a new rotation after the break:
Hargrove promised he would alter the rotation after the All-Star break. He said the new order will be Gil Meche, Jamie Moyer, Felix Hernandez, Jarrod Washburn and Joel Pineiro.
Also, Ichiro talked for seven minutes, according to the article, about his argument with Barrett.
“I reacted that way because it was obvious,” Ichiro said. “I hit it. Besides that, if I had missed the ball, I would have run to first base. Basically for him to say what he did is that he’s saying that I’m lying. So I’m disappointed and kind of sad that he saw me as a player like that, that I would lie in a situation like that.”
And Choo’s working on his defense.
In the Tacoma News Tribune, Larry LaRue writes on the team’s recent swoon and says that after the break, the M’s will ditch Oliveros so they can bring up a center fielder. Really? Who? Jones/Doyle seems unlikely. I’m not sure what he means.
Of course, that same article contains this:
This is the same Petagine deemed so valuable off the bench in April that Seattle let center fielder Joe Borchard go.
You could argue that any player is a choice between all other players, but that’s not really how things happened. Petagine’s contract was picked up 4/1. Borchard was DFAd on 4/23 and Nageotte was called up (for a game). It was Hargrove picking up more pitchers.
Update: John Hickey, in the PI blog, scratches his head over the Petagine move (and his usage). He also believes it was Petagine-or-Borchard, which may be the common wisdom but I still think is a false choice that requires you to make a set of assumptions about the way the M’s managed their roster through April.
Game 88, Tigers at Mariners
RHP Zach Miner v LHP Jarrod Washburn.
I… I… here.
DH-L Ichiro!
3B-R Beltre
2B-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
RF-S Everett
C-R Johjima
CF-R Bloomquist
SS-R Betancourt
I can’t think of the last time the M’s have fielded an outfield defense this bad. And behind Washburn? This is a meltdown in the making and all we can do is watch. This is worse than early-2004 Ibanez/the start-of-the-season lost Winn/Ichiro. Maybe a 2003 McLemore/Winn/Mabry? I know, I’m reaching here.
At the end of this game thread, the person who comes up with the most recent outfield alignment that’s comperably bad will get a congratulatory email and a year’s subscription to USSM.
Game 87, Tigers at Mariners
Bonderman, who is awesome, vs Pineiro, who is not.
Mark Lowe up
The M’s have called up Mark Lowe, originially ticketed for Tacoma, to replace Eddie Guardado on the 25-man roster. Unfortunately, the only story I can find is here.
Here are Lowe’s 2006 numbers.
Future Forty Update for July
(Sorry about the earlier glitch – the draft wasn’t done, but somehow got published.)
The Future Forty has undergone its monthly makeover. Asdrubal Cabrera goes away, so the system is a little more thin at the top, but the fact that Steve Uhlmansiek, Anthony Varvaro, and Brandon Morrow are all throwing in short season ball helps the lower level talent base. Overall, I’d say the system is improved from where it was a month ago, as several players have taken steps forward and the short season level talent is above average.
New faces include Travis Chick (6/6 reward/risk), Steve Uhlmansiek (7/9), and Greg Halman (7/9). Joining Asdrubal Cabrera in leaving the Future Forty were Nathanael Mateo (5/9) and TJ Bohn (5/8). I also shifted a few players from one category to another – notably, Ryan Feierabend went from a projected contributor to a projected regular, as he’s been pitching his way to the top of the team’s list of young left-handed pitchers.
Rather than rehashing what I’ve said about veterans of the Future Forty, I wanted to use this post to talk about some of the new guys. I gave a brief overview on Chick yesterday, but a little more in depth profile is probably in order. Plus, Uhlmansiek and Halman are two of the main guys to see (along with Kuo-Hui Lo) up in Everett, so, here’s some info on the newcomers to the list.
Chick’s an interesting guy. He just turned 21, but he’s now on his fourth organization, and he’s been rather up-and-down in his short professional career. Back in 2002/2003 with the Marlins, he was sitting 89-93 with his fastball but had problems with his command and hadn’t developed any secondary pitches of note. He had a breakthrough 2004 season in low-A, tightening his slider and his command and missing bats regularly for the first time. He had problems leaving the ball up in the zone, which resulted in flyball tendancies and home run problems, and the Marlins dealt him to the Padres, where he shined in the Midwest League after the trade. He was named the #4 prospect in the Padres organization in the spring of 2005 by Baseball America.
That was a bad farm system, though (Josh Barfield and Freddy Guzman 1 and 2 respectively? Yech.), and he was the number one arm in that farm system by default, really. He struggled in ’05, losing velocity and sitting 88-90 and only occassionally touching 92 or 93. Hitters at higher levels stopped chasing the slider out of the zone, and his strikeout rate went down while the walk rate went back up. After being traded to the Reds in midseason, he was terrible for Chatanooga, as his velocity waned late in the season and his command was non-existant. A lack of a knockout pitch and endurance had most scouts projecting him as a reliever.
He rebounded fairly well while repeating Double-A this year, improving the command of his fastball, but his velocity is still not where it was in 2004. He’s still sitting 88-91 and the command of his slider is still too poor for it to be a true out pitch. His change hasn’t come along, and with his current arsenal, he still projects better as a relief pitcher than a starter.
His splits tell an interesting story – lefties have hit him for a high average the past 18 months, but his GB/FB rate against LHB’s is basically even and he’s kept them in the yard. RH batters have a significantly lower batting average, but he’s been an extreme FB pitcher against RH batters, and he’s given up 18 homers vs RHB’s vs just 10 homers vs LHB’s in the past year and a half. Lefties hit him for average, righties hit him for power. It’s a little odd, honestly.
When going through the guys the M’s have had in the system in the past few years trying to find a comparison for Chick, one name stuck out the most, even though its not a perfect comp – J.J. Putz. While Putz was a college pitcher and older at age stop along the way, his pro experience matches Chick pretty well, and they’re numbers and arsenals are quite similar. Putz was 89-94 as a starter without a good outpitch and mediocre command. He missed less bats as a starter than Chick does now, in fact. Obviously, the big key for Putz has been the addition of the splitter, which has made him an ace reliever, but even with just his fastball in the pen, he was a decent cheap middle man.
Chick is now where Putz was about two years ago. A move to the pen would likely up his velocity to the 93-95 range (most pitchers gain velo when only throwing for an inning or two), where he could be effective in short stretches, even without the slider being a strikeout pitch. If it improves (he just turned 21, after all), he could be a very nice setup man. And occassionally, these guys learn a new pitch and become J.J. Putz. It’s not common, but it happens, and it’s why you like to have these guys in your system.
So, Travis Chick, nice arm to have around. He’s not the pitching equivalent of Asdrubal Cabrera, as Bavasi claimed in the press release, but he’s better than most of the arms the M’s had in the system before, and he’s got a chance to help the club in a year or two.
Moving on to the Everett guys, Uhlmansiek was a steal by the M’s in the 12th round of the 2004 draft as he was recovering from Tommy John surgery. His arm is back in throwing shape, and while he’s not rushing it up there at 94 like he was in college, he’s sitting 89-92 and showing good command. He knows how to pitch, has solid average secondary stuff, and locates his fastball well. He’s not going to have any problem with the Northwest League, and if his fastball returns to his college level, he could climb the ladder in a hurry. He’ll be fun to watch next year.
Greg Halman is an 18-year-old outfielder with plenty of juice in his bat. Like pretty much every other Mariner prospect, he swings at everything, and his plate discipline needs a lot of work. But he’s a high school kid playing in a league of college arms, and driving the ball with authority. The M’s have him playing center, though most scouts project him to a corner. He’s got a better approach at the plate than Wladmir Balentien, and if you’re looking for an impact power corner outfield bat, he’s probably the best bet in the system. He’s young, he’s raw, and he’s far away, but he’s got a chance to thump. It’s nice that the M’s finally have a kid like this.