M’s spend, skimp, as 2007 approaches
The M’s are going to claim they’re way over $100m in payroll this year. Larry Stone covers the new old math
The team is using a working budget figure of $111 million, which includes about $103 million in raw salaries, another $6 million or so in pro-rated signing bonuses, and their annual “contingency fund” of $2 million for prospective deals and minor-league callups.
The M’s monetary woes are reflected in their interviewing process.
Spring training almost starting… almost… almost…
“I’m more excited going into this spring than I’ve ever been. In my heart, I believe we have a chance to [win the division].”
— Hargrove, quoted on MLB.com
or, even better
“We feel like we had a good season last year — notwithstanding the 11-game debacle,” Hargrove said. “We were able to establish a winning attitude here, an attitude where when we take the field every day, we expect to win that ballgame.
“A lot of people pay lip service to that, but there’s a difference between saying it and believing it. Our players, certainly by the end of the year, got to that point and got over that point.”
almost as good as
“Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize just as I did that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. ”
— Morpheus
Larry LaRue in the News Tribune has health updates and the first “it’s an open competition” story.
“For me, the challenge in camp is to give every pitcher here a fair chance at making the team,†Chaves said Tuesday. “Later in camp, when the innings disappear, that’s tougher. Early on, I want to give everyone a fair shot.â€
Note that they’re already looking at a seven-man bullpen. Hooray for Hargrove.
Community Projection: Yuniesky Betancourt
143 of you have spoken, and Yuniesky Betancourt is apparently going to experience deja vu this season. I’d imagine that his projection will look closer to his 2006 season line than any other projection we end up doing. Take a look at this:
2006 Actual Performance: .289/.311/.403, 558 AB, 161 H, 28 2B, 6 3B, 8 HR, 17 BB, 1 HBP, 54 K
Community Projection: .289/.320/.410, 562 AB, 162 H, 29 2B, 7 3B, 8 HR, 23 BB, 3 HBP, 59 K
4 more at-bats, 1 more double, 6 more walks, 2 more hit by pitches, and 5 more strikeouts, but other than that, it’s the exact same line. I’ve been spearheading the “Betancourt has essentially maxed out his skillset” argument for the past six months or so, and while I agree with the general sentiment that there’s not much room for growth, I didn’t mean that he’s literally going to just repeat last year over and over.
The other projections of note:
Low Projection: .218/.247/.318 – probably the least believable “real projection” we’ve had yet.
High Projection: .311/.351/.461
Dave Projection: .279/.314/.374
Community Projection: Jose Lopez
As of last night, we had 155 entries in the Jose Lopez projection, which figured to be one of the more interesting assignments of this whole project. He’s a young player with significant talent who had a Jekyll/Hyde season in 2006, and the extremes at both ends of the projection scale are believable. This is a kid with a wide range of possible performances. Let’s see what you guys expect:
Community Projection:.285/.330/.435, 588 AB, 167 H, 32 2B, 5 3B, 15 HR, 32 BB, 7 HBP, 81 K
High Projection: .310/.366/.511
Low Projection: .241/.288/.347
Dave Projection: .280/.324/.443
I actually expected to be in the optimistic segment of the population, as I know Lopez’s terrible second half soured a lot of people on his abilities, but in the end, I basically came out dead in the middle. This projection, by the way, might not look like much, but a .765 OPS from a second baseman playing half his games in Safeco Field and not being a total butcher with the glove – that’s a hell of a player. If Lopez performs as the community expects, he’ll be a borderline all-star.
Another weak news week
Fortunately, the spring training news machine cranks up as soon as… Thursday? Really? Awesome.
Young star Mauer signed a fat four-year deal with the Twins
Bernie Williams declined to return to the Yankees on a minor league deal. Fortunately, the M’s aren’t even mentioned as sniffing around.
Also, I talked to Jonah and it looks like we’re going to be able to take additional RSVPs for the March 3rd pre-game feed with M’s GM Bavasi and Padres GM Towers. Details after the break. Read more
How I would be a national baseball columnist
My rant about “managers about to be fired” goes to a problem national writers face: they can’t possibly be as informed about the state of 30 teams as a dedicated, smart fan of one team unless they’re cultivating inside information. But the age of the national columnist isn’t over – there’s still a call for people who can talk about industry-wide issues, compare team A to team B, and speak intelligently about things that cross team lines, like potential managerial changes, or trades.
How do you do that job well, then?
First, you have to make a choice about which side of the fence you’ll be on. Will you be peddling insider information, cultivating relationships within the industry so you can attempt to break news, with the inevitable compromises that come with that, or forsake that knowledge to be the informed outsider, and try and offer as much insight as you can without wearing your press pass into the locker room?
If I got a job as a full-time national baseball columnist, I’d be the latter (uh, obviously).
Then how to do that job well? Here’s what I’d do:
Find the good newspapers in every market, either bookmark them or subscribe to whatever electronic distribution they offer.
Throw every decent team blog that offers a feed into an RSS reader. Skim the headlines at least once a day. Repeat with decent high-level general baseball blogs. Seems like a huge load, but you’ll be able to blow through the repeat stories really fast, and still stop and read good pieces of analysis.
Send everyone of those people – everyone, beat reporters to the Batters Box – a nice email and say “hey, I’ve got this new gig, and while I’m going to try, I know I’m not going to be able to cover your team as closely as dedicated fans, so please, if you see me going wrong or if I’m not realizing a basic truth about the team, like their PR attachment to a player that makes trading him unlikely, please let me know.”
Then when you get things wrong, as much as possible, fess up. Unfortunately, unless you have a regular column that allows notes-style tidbits, that’s tough to get out there. If the outlet allows you to have a short-form blog, at the very least write them up there. Characterize someone’s platoon splits wrong, or read a statline badly? Fess up. Learn. One of the things that drives fans batty about columnists is they’ll do something like say Raul Ibanez is the only right-handed hitter in the outfield and you never know if they realized the error or not.
I’d say “answer emails” but I tried to do that at BP until I got overwhelmed and we can’t even manage it at USSM. Then again, as a full-timer, maybe you can pull it off.
Take notes. Tons of notes. I should be able to quickly summarize what the major strengths/weaknesses are of every one of the thirty GMs and managers, and even better, their ownership groups if they’re at all active in decision-making.
Research. Take the time to look stuff up. Even under deadline, I shouldn’t toss off a line about someone’s platoon splits to support a conclusion if it’s wrong. If I had an intern, that’s totally a great intern task: every time there’s a fact like that, do the three clicks to go to baseballreference.com and look it up. If you come across any other interesting nuggets, let me know.
Write about good stuff. The remaking of the Devil Rays isn’t news to their fans, but what happens there in the next few years is a great story: how do you fix a broken franchise, and how long does it take? What lessons are there for fans of the Royals, for instance? How did the best teams last year build their staffs? Where do all the closers come from?
And for worn story ideas, make them good. Eight managers on the hot seat doesn’t have to be a nearly content-less piece. What qualities do those managers share? What are they criticized for, and are those complaints valid?
In a way, USSM is easier than being a national columnist. We don’t draw a salary, the money’s bad, but if because of the forum, when I mess something up (see:yesterday) I can fix it myself in minutes. It’s not in print for everyone to see forever. And in my experience, not getting a paycheck every two weeks means generally people are understanding when I mess up a stat. If I was writing for Sports Illustrated, there’d be an expectation that my salary paid for me to do fact checking.
It’s interesting that better-informed local fans have made the national writer’s job much harder, subject to quick, withering, valid criticism, but it’s also true that the changes that have made those local fans smarter about their teams offer national writers a chance to acquire the same knowledge and write wider-reaching pieces of higher quality than their predecessors did. I hope that we’ll see some take up that challenge and succeed. Baseball could use more prominent, sharp, and insightful voices in the mediums that reach most fans.
And if I could fly, I would be a superhero
ESPN.com’s baseball page lead story blurb for “Best In The Biz” story.
Gary Matthews Jr. had a career year last season for the Rangers. And if he can have another huge campaign in 2007, Matthews could help make the Angels’ outfield tops in the majors.
Yeaaaaaaaaaah.
Chan Ho Park signed somewhere.
Corey Patterson got a one-year, $4.3m deal from the Orioles
Jeff Fassero retired. I remember when he was pretty bas-ass. Good times.
Arroyo signed an extension with the team the Red Sox traded him to after they said they wouldn’t trade him.
Jon Heyman, over at SI, put Mike Hargove at #1 on his list of managers on the hot seat.
Seattle ownership has made clear that the small improvement the team made last season, from 69 wins in 2005 to 78 in ’06, wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. Hargrove, an all-time survivor and one of baseball’s nice guys, got a reprieve when few figured he would. But he won’t get two.
all-time survivor? What does that even mean? And one of baseball’s nice guys?
A) no
b) What does that even mean?
It’s times like this that I think there’s some coded message in there that I lack the necessary background to hear, like dog-whistle politics. It’s like when Peter Gammons writes about some prospect and says “Jerimiah Jake Johnson, of the Massachusetts Johnsons..” I always stare at the sentence and think “huh? What should that convey to me? Who’s he writing to there?”
Let me take a stab at this.
all-time survivor: he’s repeatedly walked away from horrible plane crashes caused in no small part to his failures as pilot
one of baseball’s nice guys: he’s deigned to be interviewed by me.
Feel free to submit your own interpretations.
Mariners GM Bill Bavasi didn’t get Barry Zito, despite offering close to $100 million and finishing second, but he did rebuild the rotation with the additions of Miguel Batista, Horacio Ramirez and Jeff Weaver. While none of the three is Zito, improvement will be expected. The Weaver signing could prove especially worthwhile, with a superb left side of the infield of third baseman Adrian Beltre and shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt.
Improvement will be expected. By you? By the team? By fans?
DMZ: Updated to delete this paragraph on account of I totally screwed it up in the most basic, obvious way possible
Especially worthwhile. Okay.
Hargrove’s strategy has come under fire in all three of his managerial stops, but he did right by moving Ichiro Suzuki to center field. What he needs most, though, is improved production from Beltre and Richie Sexson.
More of the passive-voice thing. Plus, Hargrove doesn’t have a strategy. He doesn’t. His strategy is “I’d like to win”. If you want to argue about his in-game tactics, or his player managing, or his horrible talent evaluation skills, sure, but to say that Hargrove’s strategy is under fire… I don’t understand.
And what he needs most is improved production from Beltre and Sexson? Where do you even get this stuff?
Hargrove has:
– a second baseman with a once-promising bat he’s turned into some shadow version of his own glory days
– a starting pitcher the Angels put out on the curb with a “free” sign taped to his forehead and no one picked him up
– another starting pitcher who has never struck batters out but the team thinks might be a #1 starter
– a broken-down, beat-up DH who hasn’t hit well in years that the team is praying will somehow rehabilitate his legs and return to glory
– a notorious clubhouse cancer also coming off injury and a wretched year at the plate
What he needs most is Beltre to play better? Beltre? Or Sexson? The team has two everyday lineup spots occupied by longshot gambles, with another two in the rotation, and he really needs Beltre and Sexson to step up.
Argh.
Community Projection: Richie Sexson
140 of you guys have chimed in so far, and there was far more agreement in the projections than I expected. Let’s go to the numbers:
Community Projection: .260/.344/.512, 548 AB, 34 2B, 0 3B, 34 HR, 65 BB, 4 HBP, 153 K
Low Projection: .220/.297/.411
High Projection: .281/.378/.606
Dave Projection: .260/.327/.474
Jeff will provide you with all the gritty details in cool graph form, I’m sure, but I find it interesting how close the absolute best case projection is to the overall assessment – basically, the community thinks there’s a really good chance that Richie’s going to have the same year he had last year, and has almost no upside beyond that. There’s a few people that foresee a major collapse, but no one has him performing at an MVP-type level. Basically, Mariner fans think that ’07 Richie Sexson is essentially going to be a repeat of ’06 Richie Sexson with some real chance to underperform and not much of a chance to overperform.
The .850 OPS he’s projected to have in Safeco Field is a pretty good offensive performance, but even with that line, he’s still a bad defensive first baseman making $14 million a year with significant downside. They should have dumped him when they had the chance.
Coming tomorrow – the Jose Lopez projection opens its doors.
M’s make meaningless trade
The M’s have traded Yorman Bazardo to the Detroit Tigers for Jeff Frazier, a 24-year-old outfielder who is a longshot to be a major leaguer. Frazier was a 3rd round pick in the 2004 draft out of Rutgers University, and wasn’t horrible in his first two years of professional baseball, but didn’t exactly light the world on fire either. When given an assignment to the high-A Florida State League last year, he hit about as poorly as anyone in baseball not named Tuiasasopo. His .228/.279/.346 line, as a 24-year-old in A ball, is horrible, even for the pitching friendly environs of the FSL.
Now, one bad year doesn’t end a career, and scouts have always liked Frazier, so maybe he’s a late bloomer who just needs to get out of a pitcher’s park to remember how to hit. But, it’s not likely. The M’s made this deal after designating Bazardo for assignment last week (to make room for Jeff Weaver), as they figure Frazier is better than losing him on waivers. Bazardo had never impressed them after coming over from the Marlins, so they’d have taken anything they could get for him.
In this case, what they got is a 24-year-old outfielder who couldn’t hit A-ball pitching. You’re unlikely to ever care about this trade again.
Sexson projection sent out
The community projection for Richie Sexson has been emailed to those on the list. It will be open until tomorrow afternoon. If you’re having problems editing the sheet and find yourself in “view only” mode, make sure you are signed into Google Accounts – you don’t have to use a gmail address to receive the spreadsheet, but you must be logged into Google to perform edits.
Also, if you’re interested in helping the guy who runs Hit Tracker Online, he’s looking for some extra eyeballs this year. Here’s his blurb to attract volunteers:
So, here’s how a volunteer could help. First of all, to become a volunteer, a person has to be willing and capable to accurately make “observations†of batted balls. This involves having access to MLB video (via MLB.TV and/or MLB EI, Directv says hello), owning a stopwatch and some spare time. Needless to say, it also helps if you are a baseball and sabermetric fanatic…
To the volunteers I have provided an observation program (in Excel), and then checked them out on some homers to make sure they were doing an acceptable job of timing and spotting. Closer to the start of the season I am going to provide each volunteer with some additional programs to pull weather and box score data, and to put the observation data in the right format for upload to the site. Once the season starts we’ll figure out who’s going to cover which games, and hopefully we’ll all be able to take time off when we need it .
I would be delighted to have anyone who’s interested contact me about volunteering! You don’t have to do any set amount of games; if you’re able to make solid observations, I’ll be happy for any contribution you can provide.
If anyone has suggestions, questions or comments about Hit Tracker, please send them to grybar@hittrackeronline.com