Tuesday’s baseball news and rumor
Ryan Klesko signs with the Giants. I’m going to bet he either gets in a fight with Bonds by June or they become best friends.
Werth signs with Philly.
The Yankees and Igawa have reportedly agreed on a deal.
Crasnick’s got an article on ESPN on potential free agents next year who might be signed to long-term extensions before then. Ichiro’s on there. But I noted this quote, on Carlos Guillen:
Guillen is Detroit’s clubhouse “glue guy,” and manager Jim Leyland regards him as a future managerial candidate and one of the smartest players he’s ever been around.
Remember when he was a bad clubhouse guy and needed to be run out of town at any cost? Ahhh, those were the days.
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Re: tuberculosis, you forgot Indian reserves/reservations. Also, Venezuela is technically still 3rd world.
Derek, I’d like to see that list.
Derek, I’d like to see that list.
Indeed. Good timing with the questionable moves recently made by Bavasi as well.
What the heck is with all the “reliable sources” slandering Guillen and Garcia in this thread? Nose candy? Looking high all the time?
Come on.
Ms threw away both players for garbage. Idiots.
#54 My ‘idiots’ reference was to Ms management, by the way. I don’t mean to personally insult other posters.
I always liked Guillen as a player. Freddy too. Frustrating that they are gone with so little return.
I wasn’t being entirely serious that Bavasi should be blamed for Gillick’s moves. However, even though Gillick may have ordered him to trade Guillen and put him in a tough spot, Bavasi still made the bad trade (unless Gillick brokered that too?). From the perspective at the time (not in retrospect) Guillen for Vizquel would have been ok. Not a trade you wanted to make, but if the M’s were determined to dump Guillen it was acceptable. However, just sending Guillen away for nothing after the Vizquel deal fell through was infuriating to us all. This seems consistent with Bavasi’s two recent trades, that he underestimates the trade value of his young players (of course I have no actual knowledge of what GM’s were willing to trade, so I’m making a big assumption here, I may be wrong).
Anyway, giving away Guillen for nothing was more justifiable at the time than the Snelling/Fruto for Vidro trade. Even if Snelling’s left leg knee explodes tomorrow and Fruto never throws another pitch in the big leagues, it is a bad deal because you have to pay a weak-hitting middle-infielder who doesn’t play defense $17+ million. Ramon Santiago may have had no value, but at least he wasn’t detrimental to the team.
I agree mostly with 49, not all of Bavasi’s trades have been bad. The ones during the season this year were pretty good overall, and the Garcia trade was good (even if it hasn’t worked out). Still, these last two negatively impact the future of club so much, without positively impacting the present, that he deserves a bad grade in trading.
#50: You bent over backwards, twisted sideways and contorted in physically impossible ways to put everything about Carlos Guillen in the worst possible light.
I, for one, have never heard any rumors about Carlos Guillen and drugs. And none of the rumors I have heard have been substantiated in the slightest. That the Mariners chose to put credence in those rumors and dump him says something BAD about the organization … as does the fact that Guillen has been playing at a Hall of Fame level ever since he left Seattle.
The Mariners are like a man who’s in love with a woman, but, out of deep-seated insecurity, chooses to listen to the friends who are whispering in his ear about what a whore and a gold-digger she is, and not believe what he sees with his own eyes. They were Ben Affleck dumping Joey Lauren Adams in “Chasing Amy.”
Uhm… Excuse me Mr. T.I. Fan, but in #49 you said,
I recall many of us complaining about those trades, especially Cabrera. I can’t swear that the word horrible was used specifically, but certainly words to that effect.
There have been some good trades, some mediocre trades, and too many bad trades, but the Soriano and Doyle+Fruto trades were abysmal. I, like many who heard him at the “feeds”, gave WFB (William F. Bavasi) more slack than seems reasonable in hindsight. My opinion of him was cemented with the retention of Hargrove, but these last two trades… suck like a Hoover. This FO is beyond redemption.
#57 This is the 1st time of posted, however, if your are going to argue that Freddy and Carlos did not have a problem with coke and salsa clubs and this being the major reason for their departures, You will be laughed off these boards. I know for fact that they both loved to “indulged”. They were both young and Carlos has done MUCH better without Freddy. Make whatever conclusion you will. But don’t argue the obvious. The rumors are there for a reason. I love these boards and I like to read all you guys argue all this stuff. But this arguement is played. All of baseball knew about these two and that is the reason they couldn’t be traded. Garcia is the player that you all should be blaming….the kid loved to party.
No more on purported drug use of Garcia/Guillen, please, that’s a road to nowhere, conversationally.
lol, anyone who says that the garcia trade was not a good one does not deserve to think about baseball. Equate your selves with bavasi, cause thats the baseball knowledge you have.
This just in:
M’s meet with Zito in California.
My question is….are they really looking at this as a way to make a big splash and put butts in seats after the upheaval of the last few weeks? If so, would they have to move Sexson to make it happen, or are they willing to go way above their previous payroll limits?
How does USS Mariner feel about Zito, and how do they feel about Zito at $100 million bucks?
OK … so now I know how the new link button works.
Yes, and if you could get that done before 3pm on Friday so that I have something to read (other than what I should be reading that is) while sitting in the airport, i’ll put in a good word to Santa for ya… 🙂
Back in the day of the Cabrera trade, which particularly annoyed me as I saw it as the start down the path towards ‘Doyle can’t fill that spot; we need a proven veteran’, and, well, because Cabrera had an awesome wickedly accurate throwing arm….
Well, I made a list of BJB (Bill J Bavasi or maybe just BJ Bavasi)’s trades. I was just feeling like loads of folks were giving the man way too much of a free pass on his actions and either blaming Gillick or Mattox, or pointing to Fontaine as a reason for keeping him around. Of course, I don’t have access to the insider info, but the list was, well, abysmal at a gut level for me.
It’s hard to know how to evaluate a trade – do you evaluate from the day it is made and whether it helps the team for the rest of the season, or in a larger frame, whether it helps the team in the long-run, and then you’d have to define ‘help’ and ‘long’ – as well as taking into consideration what we lost in the trade…..But a lot of his Hail Mary passes (where he snagged us what he terms high risk high reward folks like Foppert) just ended up being for nothing…
I’ll be fascinated to see the list you come up with DMZ, in part because the insider info – if accurate – lends additional insight, but in part because I want to see the criteria you’d use to evaluate a trade (short vs long-term and how to measure ‘benefit’ vs ‘cost’). I struggle with such metrics when I think too long about them.
And as far as the insider info piece of it goes…isn’t part of BJB’s JOB to make a successful case against Howard and Chuck on instances where he disagrees with what they’re essentially telling him to do? I mean, even THOSE moves lay partially at Bavasi’s feet…
#60– esp. as we don’t know what they may or may not have done and we also don’t know what if anything the front office believed …
Heh, BJB’s JOB…nasty.
Garcia and Guillen:
When Mickey Mantle came up his drinking buddy was Billy Martin. The Yankee brass looked at that and decided that Billy was a bad influence and traded him.
The irony is that it didn’t really change anything — Jim Bouton wrote about Micky’s excessive drinking in Ball Four. Mickey’s liver eventually failed him. Billy was killed as a passenger with a drunk driver.
My perception at the time was that Guillen was traded because he enabling Garcia’s partying. Maybe Garcia didn’t need the help.
I always thought he was traded because of health issues…
Mickey did have Hepatitis C. It is unknown (unknowable?) how much of his liver failure should be attributed to the disease as opposed to the alcohol.
Most of life isn’t a clearcut morality play, it turns out.
Didn’t know about the Hep C thing….how’d he get it?
#57 – I contorted and twisted? Remove the last bit about the white stuff, which was in reference to a previous post, and everything else is cold, hard, unspun fact. I didn’t make up anything in relation to his OPS or the way he was perceived by others around the league at the time he was dealt.
I know a lot of us saw potential in those long AB’s he would have as a Mariner, but I’m tired of people pretending like they knew Guillen was going to blow up the way he did. His OPS jumped 200 points, almost magically – and he stayed healthy. Nobody saw that coming.
So you are right. Guillen’s OPS wasn’t below average. It was almost exactly average, which made him replaceable all the same. Fellow light hitters Omar Vizquel and David Eckstein were each posting higher OPS during those years, while many of the shortstops with lower OPS brought other skills to the table, like speed/leadoff abilities, better defense, and/or a quiet nightlife that wasn’t interfering with the development of their top young arm.
Uh, keep in mind that you need to make a park adjustment there. If you look at OPS+ (adjusted for park), Guillen comes out better.
#72 – Park effects need to be applied with a grain of salt in regards to OPS. Deep fences will have a more negative impact on a flyball hitter than it will on a linedrive hitter, who can actually benefit by having wider alleys and more room down the lines. Conversely, shorter fences will have a greater positive impact on a flyball hitter than it will for a linedrive hitter. Running a straight line average across every hitter who plays 50% of his games in Park X certainly helps paint a picture of general performance for each specific ballpark, but it’s not indicative of how Park X actually affected each specific hitter. It can only represent how Park X affected the average of all offense that occurred in that park without further consideration to things like quality of pitching, and more importantly, variables in fence dimensions.
For example, Yankee Stadium shows up as X% on the park effects chart, but X% doesn’t discriminate between its effects on left-handed hitters (positive) vs. right-handed hitters (negative). Between 1982 and 1988, Mattingly and Winfield each played 50% of their games at Yankee Stadium. The same ballpark had opposite effects on their performance, but BPF requires that both players have the same number applied. So by the time you take those disproportionate numbers and compare them to the disproportionate numbers generated by other ballparks, the end result is a compounded mess.
#72 – Park effects need to be applied with a grain of salt in regards to OPS. Deep fences will have a more negative impact on a flyball hitter than it will on a linedrive hitter, who can actually benefit by having wider alleys and more room down the lines. Conversely, shorter fences will have a greater positive impact on a flyball hitter than it will for a linedrive hitter. Running a straight line average across every hitter who plays 50% of his games in Park X certainly helps paint a picture of general performance for each specific ballpark, but it’s not indicative of how Park X actually affected each specific hitter. It can only represent how Park X affected the average of all offense that occurred in that park without further consideration to things like quality of pitching, variables in fence dimensions, etc.
For example, Yankee Stadium shows up as X% on the park effects chart, but X% doesn’t discriminate between its effects on left-handed hitters (positive) vs. right-handed hitters (negative). Between 1982 and 1988, Mattingly and Winfield each played 50% of their games at Yankee Stadium. The same ballpark had opposite effects on their performance, but BPF requires that both players have the same number applied. So by the time you take the disproportionate statistics from one ballpark, compare them to the disproportionate statistics generated by all of the other parks, and blanket every player in the league with those numbers, the end result is a compounded mess.
That was muchas cervezas ago. The Detroit Guillen is a kinder, gentler… soberer?… Guillen.