U.S.S. Mariner

I hope you’ve enjoyed these year-end posts. I know the off-season tends to drag, and it means sometimes we’re talking about music and doing USSM Endorsements or whatever, so I thought this might be cool. After all, we wrote 785 articles this year, not including this one, and there were 75,286 comments. It’s easy to [...]

11-6: Discussion of reasons teams supposedly didn’t bid on Matsuzaka
Also: the a review of the Nationals’ amazing haul of almost unnoticed signings, an example of what you can find if you go fishing.
11-8 What the A’s move to Fremont might mean for the M’s.
11-9: Dave on the concept of budgeting wins, not money, and how [...]

10-1: The first version of Dave’s 2006 off-season plan. Manny the DH! Edmonds in left field!
10-3: Jeff semi-live-blogs from the Twins playoff game.
10-8: A preview of what would happen if this Daisuke Matsuzaka guy posted.
The only thing we can know for certain is that if he posts, it’s going to get crazy.
10-11: Why losing [...]

September was all Dave, all the time.
9-1: In a pointer to a really great article about Ichiro and Johjima. Dave:
Ichiro is disliked by most of the American media who follows the team around on a regular basis. Perhaps they should all spend more time with Brad Lefton and learn about why he does some of [...]

8-1 Dave evaluates Gil Meche’s season through July. Then on 8-9 he does a similar breakdown for Felix.
8-8 Dave’s random notes include a section titled “My mother could beat up Willie Bloomquist” on WFB’s isolated slugging of .032
8-11 Dave on Hargrove’s appalling ignorance of his own staff.
8-14 Dave’s great write-up of Byran LaHair
8-15 Catcher defense [...]

Aubrey Huff agrees to a 3y, $20m deal with the Orioles
Mulder has some teams after him
Ryan Howard fired his agent and isn’t eligible for arb until after 2007 but still appears to be in line for a “big raise,” the Phillies said.
The Mariners can still make the playoffs with a Cincinnati loss and a Denver [...]

Update: they’ve pulled the content and site before we got lawyered up, so that’s good. Read the comments for more.
Seasons greetings from Instamariners! We’re jacking all of the content on your site and re-branding it as our own! With lots of ads!

(handy mirror of the page source if they change it is here)
Yup, and that [...]

7-2: Dave says it’s time to move Ichiro to centerfield.
I loved my “Ichiro clips on YouTube” but MLBAM went through and cease-and-desisted them all. Thanks, MLBAM.
7-3: Jeff versus John McGrath in “McGrath: Ichiro Crippled Reed, Cost Mariners Share of First Place”
7-6: Dave’s “What I would do” ideas for improving the roster.
7-8: Worst outfield of the [...]

6-2: Dave’s draft preview.
6-5: Dave does “Good News, Bad News”
6-6: I’m all excited about draft day.
6-7: “Why not Miller?” Dave explains the politics of the draft and how it led to the Mariners passing up Andrew Miller.
6-7: The wider view of the draft and economics. “Level the field, let them play.”
6-20: In “Abandoning the catch-up” [...]

In an “Unfiltered” blog post at Baseball Prospectus (”Barry Zito and “Smart” versus “Dumb” Projections“), Silver makes a really interesting point: he argues that Zito’s contract is entirely reasonable if you think ERA is awesome and predictive of future performance. Over the life of his contract, he should be good enough to earn that $100m [...]