King Felix running loose?
From CBS Sportsline’s Scott Miller:
PEORIA, Ariz. — Psst, pay attention here. Because something is about to occur in the quiet Pacific Northwest that could — could — positively rock the baseball world this summer, shake the AL West and rattle the Cy Young cages.
The Seattle Mariners are about to remove the leash from The King.
And long live Felix Hernandez.
There are quotes about his conditioning, his desire to finish games, his desire to be “the man.” The King himself says he was fat last year. But the best quote is this one:
“He’s stupid young,” Bavasi says. “It’s ridiculous. That is so forgotten because he’s as big as a house, he’s sure of himself and he’s never done anything wrong.
“People look at him like Bob Gibson. But he was a child last year.”
Did Bavasi really say “stupid young”? I guess he did.
I am still puzzled by the whole transformation thing. Wasn’t just this past December when the local media showed him laying in bed eating potato chips watching TV between his feet and sounding all the “you can’t change me so bug off†spoiled kid? I know many who watched his body english on the mound last year, not to mention his dragging pant bottoms, and wondered if the whole “package†was really there that so many “experts†kept telling us about and was bursting to break out. Well I sure hope your right because if this report is correct, then we are about to find out the truth.
So in addition to letting him throw more innings and finish games, does this mean they’re going to let him throw all his pitches? Are they going to stop insisting he “establish his fastball”?
I wonder if this means Hargrove will be allowed to let Hernandez pitch 24 complete games, a la Ralph Houk & Mark Fidrych in 1976. Fidrych was 21, for those who don’t recall, and blew his arm out the next year.
This is a defensible parallel because Houk at the time was suffering through the same endemic synaptic sluggishness as Hargrove is today.
OK, maybe he’s “stupid young”. But is he really “big as a house”?
The saddest thing about the M’s? They have a pair of superstars but no depth. Or don’t they?
The M’s have some parallels to unnamed seasons past:
A staff ace
An ace reliever
Two MVP candidates
A slough of supporting characters
A lot of teams could do a lot worse.
“Only” four things have to happen for the M’s to contend for the World Championship:
1. Ichiro has an MVP season (more feasible with him in CF)
2. Beltre has an MVP (or at least a Silver Slugger/Gold Glove) season
3. Ibanez has an Edgar-type supporting season
4. Felix has a Cy Young-season
Nothing else about the club is so vulnerable that we have to accommodate the risk. If those four things happen, the M’s are in the playoffs.
So goes my fearless projection.
I’d add just one more thing to that list: nobody above, say, the contribution level of Rene Rivera gets more than a hang-nail all season long.
um, no.
Um, yes. Kind of, at least. No mention of potato chips and he didn’t seem particularly spoiled, but it also didn’t exactly seem like he was working his ass off. Glad to see he’s put it in gear since then though. Long live the King!
well, Geoff Baker wrote one article about Felix, after visiting him during the first week of the off-season.
Back when Felix first arrived in Spring Training this same question came up. The answer then, as I remember it, was that Felix was supposed to relax for a while and then get himself in shape. So when the local media went to see him, he was still in his relaxing mode. Since then he has been working hard on becoming the ace he is supposed to be. Hence the change.
Maybe I’m not remembering this correctly, but didn’t Grover and/or management insist Felix use his frozen rope fastball as his out pitch and not his curve…and wasn’t the curve his out pitch in AAA?
For those of you who have ESPN Insider, Rob Neyer just started up a blog (climb on the bandwagon, Rob!) and his first entry reads like Scott Miller was looking over his shoulder, but missed all the USSM-like sarcastic remarks about Bavasi and Hargrove… 🙂
what does that make Bavasi stupid old?
8 – If you read the Baker article you’ll see that, although the article was written in November (not December), it says his visit to Felix in Venezuela was in the second week of October. If Felix wanted to lie around and watch TV for a few days in the second week of October before kicking in his offseason workout regimen, I have no problem with that. It’s a long season and he’s entitled to a few days off.
Bavasi has a stupid big forehead but he does seem like a real nice guy.
Who are the two MVP candidates that we have?
Those would be Eric O’Flagherty and Gookie Dawkins.
Who are the two MVP candidates that we have?
I think Ichiro and Felix. Really, I think Ichiro should be a lock with a continuance of past performance, and if Felix performs up to what he can do he should be a lock as well.
He was referring to Beltre having another contract-year-esque season I believe. Felix would be having a Cy-Young quality season.
Come on. I was asking a serious question, and I get Ichiro and Beltre? A leadoff hitter who hits the same amount of doubles last year as the slowest player in the league doesn’t scream out “MVP candidate” to me. And some people were predicting the same things for Beltre last year after his meaningless World Cup (or whatever it was called) performance. I’ll believe it when I see it.
WHen he’s your centerfielder, he does.
Will Felix get to throw his slider this year?
Doubles? Doubles are your criterion for how good your leadoff hitter is? If you’re going to compare his doubles to the slowest player in the league you might factor in the 45/2 SB/CS.
When he won the MVP in 2001, Ichiro hit 350/381/457. In 2004, he hit 372/414/455. That’s an MVP candidate in my book, particularly if he plays CF. Last year at 322/370/416 not so much.
Unless he was the first coming of Chien-Ming Wang, Fydrich wasn’t going to be much of anything anyway. 97 Ks in 250.1 IP does not spell long-term greatness.
Anyway, the pendulum has turned way over the other way in terms of handling pitchers. Nobody’s going to go the route of Ralph Houk in ’76 or Billy Martin in ’80 because the current conventional wisdom is that you never, ever let kids pitch throw more than 100 or so pitches every 5 days because that’s what a bullpen is for. At this point I’m convinced that with only a few exceptions what pitching injuries you see are the result of mechanics or genetics, not overuse. Well… I will say that if you train a guy’s arm to last 95 pitches and then you try to run him out there for 115 a night, he might get hurt due to something similar to “overuse” but I don’t like the term there.
dola,
Beltre had a very solid season last year, exactly the kind of year we ought to be expecting him to have. Is it the same as that monstrous 2004? No, but if anybody thought he was going to have lots and lots of years based on that single anomalous season, they probably weren’t thinking very clearly or at least were very optimistic. As it stands, we’ve got an above-average bat for a 3rd baseman with a killer glove that would be getting accolades if it weren’t for the presence of Eric Chavez. The team overpaid, yes, but not half as badly as they overpaid for Richie Sexson, who always seems to be left out of these sorts of discussions.
With the market the way it is Beltre was actually maybe fair market value in todays FA market Gil Meche ,J.D. Drew, etc.