What Doyle Stands For
So, yea, Billy Beane traded for Chris Snelling last night. Now, this shouldn’t be any huge surprise – Beane is constantly looking for opportunities to make his team better both now and in the future, and when he has a chance to acquire a guy he feels is undervalued, he jumps on it.
Last week, he traded two players to be named later for Chris Denorfia, despite the fact that Denorfia is out for the season. Why? Because Beane believes that Denorfia can help them next year as a fourth outfielder making next to nothing, and he saw a chance to improve the 2008 Oakland A’s.
Then, the next day, he essentially bought Ryan Langerhans from the Atlanta Braves. Langerhans was a good defensive outfielder who has a history of being a decent enough hitter, but was in a terrible slump, and again, Beane saw an opportunity to help the A’s by picking up a guy with useful skills for nothing of value.
Yesterday, he flipped Langerhans to the Nationals for Doyle, who is a classic Billy Beane player. So, essentially, in the span of a couple of days, Beane picked up Snelling for some cash. With the injuries the A’s have suffered, he’ll get some at-bats at DH while Piazza is out and join the outfield rotation down in Oakland. The fact that Beane likes Doyle should be obvious – he can hit, he draws walks, he plays hard, and he was free. Beane looked at the things he can do to help a team and saw a potentially valuable player that cost him nothing.
Injuries have indeed taken a toll of Chris Snelling, and he’s unlikely to have the all-star career we all hoped he would have as he was coming up through the system. We know this. At this point, he’s probably a nifty role player, a guy who can help a team but shouldn’t be counted on as the everyday answer for a contending team. But our Doyle love was never just only about Snelling as a player and a person, but about what he stood for, and still does.
The dual Snelling trades over the last six months are a perfect contrast of two organizations. The Mariners fail to understand market dynamics or get beyond batting average and strikeouts when evaluating a player and make a disgusting deal that limits the franchise’s ability to contend both now and in the future. The A’s exploit the market, identify a player who is more useful than his current organization believes, and pick up a potentially useful player for nothing.
Doyle isn’t going to make the difference between the A’s and Mariners winning the AL West this year, next year, or any year. It’s what Doyle stands for. The A’s are an organization of smart, baseball savvy people who are constantly looking for any small advantage they can get over their competition in an effort to win every single year. The Mariners are an organization that throws money at bad players because of their incompetency and get taken to the cleaners by people who are better at their jobs than they are.
Doyle represents the different states of the Mariners and the A’s. I only hope that someday soon, the M’s may employ people who can turn those dynamics upside down.
#194
I started this by pointing out that I was simply agreeing with Geoff Baker. Take a look at #163
bah, i give up trying to post a link
http://files.samhart.net/humor/fail.jpg
I’m quite confused by this. I was always under the impression that every AAA team had “hulking brute†who doesn’t play the field but could go for 260/340/450. There must be a lot of clueless teams, I guess.
Well, let’s see. The teams worse than the Mariners in DH OPS are:
KC: crappy team for a long time, using craptastic overpaid veteran Mike Sweeney as their DH
Detroit: traded for 38 year old higly paid veteran Gary Sheffield to DH for them
Minnesota: going on two years of crappy DH, as their DH perf last year was WORSE than Seattle’s
Oakland: many, many injury problems that are totally decimating their lineup
Baltimore: crappy team for a long time, benched Kevin Millar so they can play Aubrey Huff and Jay Gibbons
Angels: using Shea friggin’ Hillebrand as their DH- so basically, he’s THEIR version of Vidro
So, basically the teams that are worse than us are also playing bad, old and overpaid veterans at DH, or have bigtime injury problems.
This is an argument for Bavasi being astute exactly how?
And we’re continually pointing out that this was not a good defense or justification. there are better ways to skin the cat. (And, of course, some experts may just be wrong)
You know, you’re not defending your point that well; that suggests you may want to rethink them a bit. And maybe….you may find that you don’t understand it as well as you think you do?
203: No defending of Bavasi coming from me. Sorry, that came across as sarcastic, but I was being sincere. My point/question was that there seems to be a lot of teams, including the M’s, who don’t understand that DH’s are so easy to come by cheap. We aren’t the only ones who overvalue experience.
I take offense to Baker’s statement about Snelling being jettisoned by the worsed team in baseball being a knock on him. The Devil Rays are also one of the worst teams, but they have a great outfield and would get rid of the majority of OFers in baseball in favor of what they’ve got. That the Nats didn’t get any thing for him is an indightment of their stupidity and Beane’s cold heart, not Doyle’s ability.
The arrogance factor is really very high here. Quite amusing.
205:
OK, that makes sense, and yeah, being in company with Baltimore and KC should make you go “hmmmm”.
And to further compound this:
Vidro’s OBP: .357
Composite AL DH OBP: .366
The skill that Baker is citing as being why Vidro is “doing his job” isn’t even hitting the composite mark for AL DHs.
Let’s toss in this, too
Vidro:
.315/.357/.391
MLB #3 hitters:
.281/.365/.453
So, is he doing his job as a 3 hitter, too?
Getting hits, setting the table, keeping innings alive.
No, actually, he’s not, since he’s actually below-average for OBP at his position in the lineup and in the “field”, despite the .315 average.
But thanks for playing.
Vidro’s OBP: .357
Composite AL DH OBP: .366
Injury-plagued, no-longer-anything-more-than-role-player Snelling’s OBP: .361
Im still not understanding why getting a decent/average player for a player that has been apparently been deemed not good enough to be on the worst team in the MLB and even here has now been downgraded to a guy who could hit in spurts and someone who would not make the difference between the As and the Ms over the next three years.
Does the Vidro that is currently playing for the Ms make them better or worse at this point?? If he makes them better than how is it a bad trade?
Again, the money argument is much smaller than you are making it out to be. He makes 6% of the teams overall payroll…if Billy Beane found a guy doing what he does for $2 million you would say he was taking a great flier…obviously I don’t think you will agree with me. Many people on here desperately want this trade to backfire because of their amazing devotion to Snelling…
I will admit that I wasn’t happy about the trade, but that was because I thought Snelling would actually perform. Until he starts performing this trade was not a bad trade and you have to give credit to the Mariners for figuring out that he wasn’t going to perform in enough time to get a player who could at least be productive instead of a player like Langerhans…and like I said in an earlier post. If you think that Langerhans is better than Vidro, then the true disappointment in the organization should be for not getting ahold of Langerhans…not for trading a guy who apparently isn’t a big league player.
210: So, it is smart to take the OBP of a player who only had 49ABs in a weaker league and translate them to our team and say he could’ve been a DH. That doesn’t seem to make much sense.
212:
Snellings numbers in 96 AB for us last year:
.250/.360/.427
Many people on here desperately want this trade to backfire because of their amazing devotion to Snelling…
I don’t believe it is a devotion to Snelling (per se).
I believe it is a devotion to intelligence. I’d love Vidro to be a success. It is just probabilistically less likely that he will be so over the course of this season than that Snelling will be.
I’d love all of Bavasi’s trades and signings to be successful. Intelligently looking at what he has done, however, clearly shows they are for the most part idiotic.
212: No, but it is smart to use the tools we have at hand to understand that we can project Snelling’s numbers in both the minors and majors out to what his likely performance will be, and that we can do the same for Vidro, and find that, factoring in age and historical evidence, they’re likely to have similar production this year (for a considerable chunk of salary difference) with Snelling out-performing Vidro going beyond this year.
I just want to mention that Vidro’s salary + Sexson’s salary ~= Snelling’s salary + Manny Ramirez’s salary.
And that’s why we like Snelling. More Snellings on a team, providing effective play for league minimum or near it is more truly elite talents signed as free agents.
Not really.
It’s really not hard to knock down really stupid arguments. Comparing Edgar Martinez to Bucky Jacobsen was really stupid. Takes no arrogance to show that it was stupid.
I really get the feeling that AuburnM is one of those people for whom batting average is the first and greatest thing they look for in a hitter, and the Edgar vs. Bucky comparison came out ’cause he thinks of Edgar as ‘that guy with the 330 BA’ and Bucky as ‘that big slugger with a 275 BA’. The fact that Edgar was a monster OBP machine with good power just gets overlooked, where Bucky’s power is noticed ’cause he’s got no BA to notice.
Also, AuburnM, when you say stupid things, people respond as if you said something stupid. I suggest that statements of the form, ‘So where is it written that a DH has to hit for power?’ aren’t helping your cause.
Ack, I did that wrong! I never get those darn tags right.
My point still remains!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/04/AS.TMP
They just picked up Cust, and seem to like him at DH.
This has been an amazing thread. I’d just like to say thanks to all those involved for making my night a lot less boring.
Who knew it would be so fun to watch people try to drive a square peg (reason) into a round hole (AuburnM’s head).
From Washington’s perspective (courtesy Barry Svrluga’s Nationals Blog at The Washington Post
Referencing that last paragraph in #223 above, I don’t suppose it’s a very good sign if the guy who wrote Baseball Prospectus’ “Hit List” refers to Doyle as “Crash Snelling”, is it?
(scroll down to #17 on the list)