Game 87, Tigers at Mariners
Bonderman vs Washburn, 7:05 pm.
Mariners run out the same line-up they did last night. Last night, they faced a lefty. Tonight, it’s a righty. Line-up unchanged.
Contrast that with Jim Leyland, who has Ryan Raburn in CF, Marcus Thames at first, and Craig Monroe in left field tonight, with Granderson and Casey on the bench and Thames switching positions after starting in left field last night. Why? Because Jim Leyland believes in the value of platoon splits and stacks his line-up with right-handed hitters when facing LHPs, such as Jarrod Washburn. If it’s good enough for Jim Leyland, who isn’t exactly a nerd with a blog who doesn’t understand the value of team chemistry and structured line-ups, it should be good enough for the Mariners. /end soap box.
This is a big game for the M’s – Bonderman’s a terrific pitcher with lights out stuff, and the Tigers destroy left-handed pitching, hitting .304/.361/.503 against southpaws this year. Safeco should keep some of his flyballs in the park, but still, if the M’s can pull this one out tonight, it will be a steal, and the M’s need to keep stealing games they shouldn’t win if they’re going to get into the playoffs.
Ichiro Press Conference Thread
Sorry Sean Green – your personal thread will have to wait until another day. Ichiro has bumped you.
Press conference starts in about 15 minutes. Commence WooHoo’ing now.
Some thoughts
(Quick Roster Note – M’s have signed Tomo Ohka to a minor league deal. He’s going to hang out in Tacoma and act as Horacio Ramirez insurance for a few weeks.)
Good win for the M’s last night. Felix pitched better than the box score will show, consistently lighting up the radar gun for the first time in a couple of months and getting a ton of ground balls. Curtis Granderson’s double was the only well struck drive of the game, and everything else just found a hole. When he got in trouble, he busted out the knockout slider to get some swinging strikes, showing that the Felix we saw in Boston is still in there, ready to be summoned when help is needed. If it keeps him healthy, I’m totally fine with Felix not trying to throw a perfect game every start. Note to Rick Rizzs, however – Felix’s fastball command is still terrible.
Sean Green deserves his own post. I’m going to give him one eventually.
At what point do we ask if J.J. Putz has put himself into the Cy Young race? Through the awesomeness of Win Probability (which accounts for high leverage performances, making it a reliable indicator of what actually happened but not a great estimator of talent), we can show that J.J. has added 4.2 wins to the team so far, a full run better than any other reliever in baseball (Takashi Saito, at 3.1 wins, is second), and a win and a half better than the next AL reliever (Hideki Okajima, 2.7 wins). In fact, J.J. Putz is #1 in the majors in Win Probability Added, with Alex Rodriguez being .3 wins behind him at 3.9 Wins Added.
Because of the way they’re used, closers get a WPA boost thanks to the high leverage nature of their innings, but no matter how you slice it, J.J. Putz is currently having a remarkably valuable season. When Eric Gagne won the Cy Young award in 2003, he posted a WPA of 6.74 – Putz is on pace to blow that number out of the water. In general, starting pitchers are far more valuable than relief pitchers, but J.J. Putz is not your average reliever, and he’s not having your average closer season. The guy’s a true relief ace, and if you’re wondering how the Mariners are 14 games over .500 with this roster, he and Ichiro and reasons 1A and 1B.
And, finally, let’s talk about John McLaren for a second. Remember all the hand wringing over the team suffering a letdown when Hargrove left? Yea, that didn’t happen. This team hasn’t played any differently since the resignation. They also haven’t been managed much differently. McLaren’s used his bench a little bit more, but overall, he’s just maintained the status quo. And watching him set the line-ups and employ his bullpen, I have to point this out, because it just defies logic.
John, when it comes to platoon splits, pick a fricking side. Either they matter or they don’t. When you set your line-up, they clearly don’t. Left-handed hitters are 2 for 28 against Andrew Miller this year, a ridiculous .071/.156/.107 line that makes even George Sherrill envious. Right-handers, meanwhile, are clipping along at a .260/.356/.425 rate. So, who did you hit third last night? Raul Ibanez, he of the .245/.258/.298 line against lefties. Ibanez, predictably, went 0 for 4 with 2 strikeouts, with his first three outs coming in rally situations with a runner on base. When you turned in your line-up card, you made a clear assertion – the left/right match-up is not as important as having your “best hitters” face their guy as much as possible.
Then, in the 8th inning, you faced a decision. You used Sean Green to get Magglio Ordonez and Carlos Guillen out to end the 7th, and he looked like his typical awesome self, mowing down the two-all stars. Due up for the Tigers – switch hitting Mike Rabelo, left-handed hitting Sean Casey, and right-handed hitting Omar Infante. Sherrill has been the team’s best setup guy, and with a switch hitter and a lefty due up, he might seem like the natural guy to go to.
But here’s the rub – the Tigers had Craig Monroe sitting on the bench, and while he’s not having a great year, Monroe does have one skill – mash lefties. In fact, he’s hitting .333/.342/.609 against them this year, and he has a career OPS of .830 against LHPs versus .728 versus RHPs. Sherrill vs Monroe isn’t a good matchup in a one run game – Sherrill’s a flyball guy, Monroe’s a home run hitter, and one mistake ties it up. So, if you bring in Sherrill, you know they’re pinch-hitting for Casey, and you’re going to have a bad matchup, based on platoon splits, on your hands.
You brought in Sherrill anyways, sending Sean Green to the showers. Sherrill got Rabelo out. The Tigers pinch-hit Craig Monroe for Sean Casey.
And then you decided platoon splits mattered. So, out comes George Sherrill and in comes Chris Reitsma. Reitsma, of course, is a far inferior pitcher to Sherrill. But he’s right-handed, and Monroe doesn’t hit right-handers very well, and he’d be followed by two more right-handed hitters (even if not particularly good ones in Infante and Inge). With three righties due up, you went and got the team’s fifth best relief pitcher and stuck him in the game. Why? Because of the right-right matchup.
Why do platoon splits matter so much that you remove a dominant lefty for a mediocre righty in the 8th inning of a one run game, but they don’t matter enough to not hit Raul Ibanez third against a 6’7 flamethrowing southpaw who is absolute death to left-handed hitters. How do those two opinions coexist? Either platoon splits matter or they don’t. Right now, we’re getting the worst of both worlds, with line-ups configured to put automatic outs in the middle of the line-ups and inferior pitchers replacing our dominant lefty setup guy.
In the end, the decisions you made last night worked in that you won the game, but let’s look at their actual results. In the first inning, Raul Ibanez’s strikeout took 3% off the team’s win probability, as you handed Andrew Miller an easy out with a runner on base. In the 3rd inning, Raul Ibanez’s fielders choice took 3% off the team’s win probability, forcing Vidro out at second base and again hurting a rally. In the 5th inning, Raul Ibanez’s flyout to right field took 4% off the team’s win probability, again harming a rally by making an out with a man on.
Ibanez’s first three at-bats combined to make the Mariners 10% more likely to lose the game. This is what ignoring platoon splits gets you – a bad hitter in situations where the team needs a good hitter. I’d love to hear a rational explanation for this. How do you continue to justify hitting Raul Ibanez third in the order while tacitly acknowledging the power of platoon splits with your bullpen management? I just don’t get it.
Game 86, Tigers at Mariners
Miller vs Hernandez, 7:05 pm.
Happy Felix Day. No, really, this might be the happiest Felix Day in a long time, because I can finally hang up the Mix Your Pitches soapbox and just enjoy the ballgame.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the kid the Tigers are throwing tonight, well, you could say I’m something of a fan. I wrote this report in March of 2006, and I then spent the next few months trying to convince anyone who would listen that Andrew Miller was a left-handed Roy Halladay, and clearly the best pitcher in the draft. The Mariners picked 5th overall and selected Brandon Morrow. The Tigers then proceeded to take Miller with the next pick. (There were extenuating circumstances surrounding the draft, covered here, so I’m not criticizing the scouting department for not selecting Miller.)
Of course, Morrow has since been turned into Matt Thornton 2.0, a hard-throwing reliever with no command or secondary pitches. Meanwhile, despite pitching issues of their own, the Tigers refused to alter Miller’s development plan, having him begin the year in A-ball while refining his overall game until he was ready to step into their rotation. A month ago, they made the call, and Miller’s solidified himself as a key member of their pitching staff, and a guy who will be counted on to start for them in October should the Tigers make the playoffs.
Meanwhile, Brandon Morrow’s lost his job as the right-handed setup man to Chris Reitsma and Sean Green, and will now pitch the middle innings when the ability to throw the ball over the plate is not required.
Had some different decisions been made, the two guys taking the hill tonight could both be Mariners – the 21-year-old right-handed prodigy and the 23-year-old left-handed phenom. Andrew Miller could have been starting for the Mariners tomorrow night. On the brightside, if we need someone to come in and issue an intentional walk, we’re set for the next 15 years, so that worked out well too.
But you know what? As much as I like Andrew Miller, he’s not Felix. Let’s hope the ace the Mariners actually do have shows up the rookie tonight.
New Readers, Comments, and Moderation
As you’ve probably noticed, USSM continues to grow, and especially lately, we’ve seen an influx of new readers and commenters through widespread references to the site. To those of you who have recently found the blog, welcome. We’re glad you’re here and hope you stick around.
However, when we experience significant growth in a short timespan, inevitably, we attract some folks who aren’t aware of the groundrules for being part of the discussion here at USSM. So, this post will serve as a primer for the new guys and a refresher for those of you who have been around awhile.
USSM/Lookout Landing Event Announcement #2
Here’s announcement #2 about the USSM/LL trips to the park next month. We’ve still got some spots open, and we’re going to be locking in the ticket purchases soon, so if you’re interested in going, you should sign up now. Information below.
Interest level was high enough that we’re going to make this happen. Jeff Sullivan and I are both going to be flying into town and hosting a pair of trips to the ballpark at the beginning of August. We’ve been putting on USSM events for several years now, and without fail, people always suggest that we should do them more often, so this year, we’re doubling the fun, and throwing in some minor league action to boot. Here are the official details:
Where: Cheney Stadium, Tacoma
When: Thursday, August 2nd
How Much: $25 per person
Includes: Ticket to game in USSM/LL seating area, hot dog, chips, and soda
and
Where: Everett Memorial Stadium, Everett
When: Friday, August 3rd
How Much: $20 per person
Includes: Ticket to game in USSM/LL seating area, fun time to be had by all
If you’ve ever been to a USSM event before, you know that we generally try pretty hard to make sure you get your money’s worth, and I’d expect these two games to be no different. Seeing as how the games occur just a couple of days after the trade deadline, we’ll certainly have no shortage of interesting topics to discuss, as well as just enjoying some Rainiers/Aquasox baseball.
Due to the nature of buying tickets in advance, we’re asking people to pay when they register so that we can avoid taking a bath on last minute no-shows. So, if you want to reserve a spot to either (or both) games, you need to:
Send an email to ussmarinerfeed@gmail.com.
In the subject, put Everett or Tacoma, followed by the number of guests you’re registering – i.e. Everett, (2)
In the body of the email, give us the full names of the people you are registering for.
If you are registering for both games, please send two seperate emails – it will make it easier for me to keep the registration accurate if I can separate the emails by event.
After your registration has been received, I’ll send out a confirmation email letting you know how to send payment. You are not officially registered until your payment has been received, so please plan on having your payment sent out in a timely fashion. We’re going to cap the attendance of the events in order to make it a more enjoyable experience for everyone, so if you want to attend, I highly suggest getting on the list as soon as possible.
Questions about the events, feel free to use the comments below, and I’ll answer them as best as I can.
Jones/Triple-A All-Star Game
The News Tribune shoots down the Adam Jones promotion rumor, but confirms that he’ll be up “soon”, whatever that means. We’ll have to hold the celebration on that front for a little while longer.
Also, the Triple-A All-Star game kicks off at 4:30 pm pacific and can be seen on ESPN2. Adam Jones will be taking part in the ASG, so if you need your AJ fix, here’s your chance.
Ichiro, $20 million a year
Once the euphoria of the realization that Ichiro is sticking around, and will probably spend his entire major league career as a Mariner wears off, we’re going to see the questions begin to arise – is Ichiro worth $20 million a year for his age 34 to 38 seasons? If you’ve read the blog for any length of time, you probably already know my answer to that question, but let’s take an analytical look at it anyways. (Caution: Long Post, Some Math Ahead)
The first thing you have to do when evaluating a signing like this is to come up with a projection of value for the duration of the contract. Before we can know how much money a player’s performance is worth, we have to know what we expect them to do. In order to come up with an accurate projection, we essentially have to answer two questions:
A) What is the player’s true talent level right now?
B) How do we expect that talent level to improve/decline?
Let’s answer the current value part first. How good, relative to his peers, is Ichiro as a player right now? Let’s start with his offense, using Runs Created as the sum of his hitting and baserunning value.
2004: 143 Runs Created
2005: 114 Runs Created
2006: 113 Runs Created
2007: 77 Runs Created (Season Pace: 146 Runs Created)
We only go back 3 1/2 years because data beyond that has generally been show to have little to no value in projections, and we can almost certainly get an accurate true talent assessment of ability with that data sample. The most recent performance is the most important, but since 2006 is a full year sample and 2007 is still only half a year, we’re pretty close to the point where the 2006 and 2007 values can be weighted evenly, with 2005 and 2004 carrying less importance.
We’ll weight the years as 10% for 2004, 20% for 2005, 35% for 2006, and 35% for 2007, which gives us a four year weighted average of 128 Runs Created. We can safely say, accounting for a +/- 7 runs margin of error, that Ichiro’s true talent offensive level as of today equates to something like 120 to 135 Runs Created per season. Still with me? Good.
Now, we need to know how that compares to other center fielders. Teams win games by being better than their opponents, and players provide competitive advantages by generating more runs for their team than their positional peers. So, here’s a list of the Top 100 center field seasons in baseball, by runs created, from 2004 through 2007, with the caveat that Ichiro’s time in right field means you won’t find him on the list.
At the top of the list are two performances from last year – Carlos Beltran and Grady Sizemore both had fantastic seasons last year, garnering them significant MVP votes and establishing themselves as the two best center fielders in baseball. Beltran created 125 runs, while Sizemore created 124.
You read that right. Ichiro’s weighted average the past four seasons of 128 Runs Created per season is better than every offensive season major league center fielders have had for the past four years. Read that sentence again. Even if we just look at Ichiro’s raw totals without the weighted average and included them on this list, his 2004 season would be #1, his 2005 season would be tied for #5, and his 2006 season would be 6th. That, is, of course, until the year ends, when his 2007 total would almost certainly become #2.
In other words, unless Ichiro entirely falls apart in the second half, his last four years, had he been a CF full time, would have ranked as the 1st, 2nd, 6th, and 7th best Runs Created seasons of all major league center fielders in the last four years. In the mix with the four Ichiro seasons are one Carlos Beltran season, one Grady Sizemore season, one Jim Edmonds season, and one Johnny Damon season.
That’s your top 8 center field seasons the last four years – Ichiro, Ichiro, Beltran, Sizemore, Ichiro, Damon, Ichiro, Edmonds. He’s a pretty good hitter, I think.
Okay, anyways, let’s get back to quantifying things, which was the original point of this post. The average Runs Created total of those 100 CF seasons the last four years (weighted for plate appearances) is 75.1 RC per season. Essentially, that’s what we’d expect an average offensive center fielder to give us in a full, healthy year. Ichiro’s weighted average, remember, is 128 RC per year, plus or minus a few runs.
Ichiro is something like 50 runs better than the average center fielder offensively in a typical Ichiro year. He was 70 runs better than average back in 2004, then dropped off to just 40 runs the last two years, and is on pace to be 70 runs better again this year.
50 runs better than average. Just with his offense.
Quantifying defense is a bit tougher, especially since we have less than one full season of data with Ichiro playing center field. Personally, I think Ichiro is something 10 runs better than an average defensive center fielder over the course of a full year, but the advanced defensive metrics we have don’t really agree with each other, and it’s nearly impossible to build an airtight case, statistically. So, as much as you guys know how much I love harping on the value of defense, I’m actually going to leave that part to you guys. We know he’s something like +50 with the bat. If you think he’s overrated defensively, maybe you want to adjust his total value down to +40. If you think he’s the greatest center fielder ever, you can adjust his value to +70. Or, if you just want to ignore defense entirely, you can leave him at +50. That’s your call. Personally, I think he’s something like a +60, meaning the total package of Ichiro’s offensive, defensive, and baserunning value is 60 runs better than an average center fielder, and that’s the number I’m going to use going forward.
To convert that runs figure to dollars, we have to figure out how many wins 60 runs above average is worth, and how much a win is worth. Thankfully, smarter people than me have spent hundreds of hours on these issues, and so I can just give you the short answer and keep this post from becoming any longer than it already needs to be. It’s generally accepted that 10 runs is equal to 1 win, which makes Ichiro something like 6 wins better than the average center fielder. Now, teams just don’t have average center fielders hanging out in the minors making the league minimum, which is why the concept of replacement level is so vital to contract valuations. What we really want to know is how many wins Ichiro is worth above the league minimum player, so we can know how much he should be paid above the league minimum player.
Again, smarter people than me have done the research on the typical performance of replacement level players, and have found that you can generally find a guy who is 2 wins below average with little effort. So, basic math says that Ichiro is something like 6 wins above average, and average is 2 wins above replacement level, so Ichiro is worth about 8 wins more than a replacement level center fielder. Depending on your opinion of his defense, you might have him as low as 6 wins or as high as 10 wins. But I’m pretty comfortable with the 7-8 win range as Ichiro’s current talent level.
Now, finally, we’re going to put a dollar figure on that. Harkening back to the research done by those smarter than me (basically, Tango, who I’m borrowing heavily from in this post), every marginal win is worth something like $2.5 million dollars to a team. Now, teams have to pay significantly different figures for those wins, with pre-arbitration players making just a couple hundred grand per win and free agents costing ten times that, but overall, the league as a whole spends about $2.5 million per marginal win added. Last year, free agents were commanding a little over $4 million per win, showing why I’m generally a big advocate for avoiding long term free agent contracts.
So, using $2.5 million per win as actual value and $4 million per win as market value, we can use Ichiro’s win totals to figure out exactly how much he is worth right now.
Actual Value: 8 wins * $2.5 million per win = $20 million
Market Value: 8 wins * $4 million per win = $32 million
Hey, look at that – Ichiro’s actual value to the team is worth something like $20 million this year. If he was a free agent last winter, and had signed a one year deal, we’d have expected it to cost about $32 million, based on the going dollar per win rate. Man, the final year of his last extension was a massive bargain.
Man, this post is long, and I’ve only answered the first of my two questions from earlier. I need to make the second part shorter or no one’s going to finish reading this thing. Remember question #2 from an hour ago when you started reading this post? Well, now that we have a pretty good idea of Ichiro’s current value, we want to know how we expect that to change as he ages.
Originally, I was going to go through the whole process of aging curves, when skills peak and decline, Ichiro’s uniqueness and how his health should alter our projections, but I need to wrap this up, so here’s the Cliffs Notes version. Tango has five good articles on player aging on his site, so if you want the math behind all this, that’s a great place to start.
A typical aging pattern for players would have Ichiro lose approximately 15% of his value each of the next two years, then about 20-25% in each subsequent year before the end of his career. Starting from his current level, then, you’d have something like the following projections of wins per season for Ichiro:
2008 – 7.0 wins
2009 – 5.9 wins
2010 – 5.0 wins
2011 – 3.7 wins
2012 – 2.8 wins
If he ages fairly normally, we should expect Ichiro to be worth something like 25 wins over the course of the contract extension. Of course, he’s Ichiro, and there are all kinds of reasons to think he’s going to age better than normal players, but that will be a discussion for another day.
Teams were paying just over $4 million per win last offseason, and free agent inflation has been rising at almost 10% per season. Based on normal inflation, and teams agreeing with my analysis of Ichiro’s value in terms of wins, we would have expected Ichiro to have signed for something like $121 million over 5 years this winter.
5 years, $100 million for Ichiro. It’s a lot of money. It’s also a pretty massive bargain at the same time.
Congratulations to the Mariners for signing a true superstar to a below market contract.
July 10th, 2007
Let’s recap:
Morning: Ted Miller quotes USSM in the P-I, then jumps on the Adam Jones bandwagon.
Afternoon: Ichiro re-signs with the Mariners.
Evening: Ichiro goes 3-3 with the first inside-the-park HR in all-star game history. Wins All-Star game MVP award.
Late Evening: Jason Churchill reports that the team will give Adam Jones a starting job and bench Jose Vidro on Thursday.
I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the best single day this franchise has had since October 8, 1995. On the heels of Felix Hernandez mixing his pitches after reading our open letter, the Mariners winning 3 of 4 in Oakland while going 14 and 4 in their last 18 games, and Mike Hargrove resigning as manager, it feels like we’ve been granted access to our own personal genie.
As a lifelong Mariner fan, I’m used to finding a pot of crap at the end of the rainbow. I like this better.
Ichiro to re-sign
Rumors abound, including by the always reliable Larry Stone, that Ichiro is on the verge of re-signing with the Mariners. The number I’ve heard all along is 5/100, so when it becomes official, that’s about what I’d expect the contract to come in at.
A great first half just got even better. Huzzah for Ichiro. Huzzah for the Mariners re-signing him. Huzzah for winning.