The Default Option
What happens if nothing happens this off-season? No, really, let’s say the M’s make no moves at all. None. They wake up the day before spring training, slap themselves on the collective forehead, hand out NRIs to anyone walking by, and head into the season. How bad are things, really? Or, to put this another way, what’s the baseline?
C: Johjima/Burke
1B: Sexson! WOOHOO!
2B: Lopez
SS: Betancourt
3B: Beltre
LF: Ibanez
CF: Ichiro!
RF: Jones
DH: Vidro
Overall, that’s likely to be a bit of an offensive step back, though we can argue about the why (Sexson rebound versus Vidro regression, Ibanez slide against Lopez progression, Jones’ ability to replace Guillen…). Defensively, you’re going to do better with Jones over Guillen, but then Ibanez isn’t getting any faster. So small step forward.
Rotation:
Felix
Washburn
Batista
Scrub
Scrub
Hey, it’s just like last year! Wheeeee! There’s a chance Morrow’s ready for one of those slots, if a small slot, but really, the team would be picking from the Baek & Co. Assortment Pack of Back-Rotation, Low-Cost guys.
Amazingly, this would not be an appreciable step back from last year.
Bullpen
Putz & a ton of dudes
I have every confidence they can put together a quality bullpen without spending on some veterans with longer resumes than Sean Green.
Where do they finish? That’s a 75-80 win team, and just scanning it over, though, it doesn’t inspire a lot of hope.
However, you can see where if they want to make improvements, the places where they really need help are quite obvious. Here’s the question, then — will the M’s, spending a ton of money this off-season and likely making moves, manage to improve on the team they’d field if they did nothing? A Sexson move would go a long way to start things in the right direction.
So while using statistical means to make judgements and evaulations of baseball has an inherent challenge to it, it doesn’t mean we can’t use it.
Yes, but you’re doing it wrong.
Nathaniel-
We are not going to look up numbers and try to understand your argument. You need to bring the numbers to the table and state your argument that way instead of telling us to look at his batting record.
To that I imagine we will state some other numbers and shut your reasoning down because there is no way Sexson is the 2nd best hitter on the team next year.
Just as an aside, isn’t this going to be a contract year for Sexson? Isn’t he going to be looking for one more contract to finish his career? I’d like to assume that we could expect good things from him this year. I feel like moving him at this point would be foolish since in any case that I can imagine moving him we are going to have to pay for it. We certainly could see Sexson bounce back.
Nathaniel’s positive view of Sexson made me curious, so I did some research on B-ref, as he suggested (BR PI is awesom, BTW). I ran this search for 1Bs/DHs/OFs
Age 30-35 HR>15, BA<.220, OBP<.325, OPS+<100
with these results.
Player Age BA/OBP/SLG OPS+ OPS+ Next 3 years
R. Sexson 32 205/295/399 84 ???/???/???
D. Kingman 33 204/208/432 99 79/132/104
G. Vaughn 31 216/332/393 93 156/117/118
R. Deer 30 179/314/386 92 144/84/OUT
D. Henderson 34 220/275/427 91 78/OUT/OUT
G. Thomas 32 209/310/379 89 53/112/86
R. Deer 32 210/303/386 84 OUT/OUT/OUT
J. Burnitz 33 215/311/365 80 105/121/94
L. Stevens 34 204/305/377 79 OUT/OUT/OUT
While there is some precedent to hope for a bounce-back,there is also reason to think this year could signal that Sexson’s career is over.
Sorry for the format, it looked fine in the entry box.
Well, BR has Cecil Fielder and Willie Stargell as Sexson’s most comparable through age 32. Fielder was already on the downhill slope of a rapidly accelerating slide in his age 32 year (’95); Stargell was actually in the middle of the best three years of his career (’72-’74) and had another 5 or 6 great years after that. But Sexson just had the worst year of his career — the kind of year Stargell never had, and Fielder didn’t have until the end of his career, so I don’t know how comparable either of those are at this point. (And the next most-comparable to Sexson are Tino Martinez and Darryl Strawberry, which is its own kind of good-news-bad-news pairing).
Now, I don’t think anybody is denying Sexson might do better next year. It’s not like he could do much worse and remain on the team; $15M or not, the Brett Boone memorial news conference beckons. This is especially true if he was hurt most of last season, and he either hid it (a la Ibanez) or was run out there to “play through it” regardless. If that was the case, and he’s healthy now, and his mechanics and his psyche didn’t get screwed up in the process, then certainly he could rebound. But that’s a lot of ifs. And even if he did rebound, there’s no certainty he would rebound to the point where he was the “second best” hitter on the team; after all, we would hope that everybody else improves too, not to mention any new additions to the lineup. And it’s almost impossible for him to rebound to the point where he’s worth his ’08 salary, “second best” hitter or not.
That said, I share Derek’s opinion that Sexson probably is tradable, but only because there are other players out there with contracts of equivalent awfulness. And given that every GM hopes for a rebound, and every GM thinks a “change of scenery” might help, and every GM gets sick of looking at his bad decision sitting on the bench every day, it’s quite possible there’s a trade partner out there.
Oh, look: the A’s traded their Bloomquist for a couple of hard-throwing minor leaguers. Who wants to lay odds one of them turns out to be another Haren? Or at least a Gaudin?
That said, I share Derek’s opinion that Sexson probably is tradable,
I would think so too……and if the right trade scenario came along, I could see it being good for the M’s. But that would sure be dependent on finding a 1B and DH that would give us Sexson’s level of performance. If we can’t, we save $14MM (or whatever the exact number is), but reduce our chances of winning, which doesn’t seem like the best move to me. well, like I said, maybe under the right scenario where the pieces fall in place and we improve our lineup as a whole, but that sure seems to require a lot more things to happen than just a Sexson bounceback.
snapper, I really hope you’re not serious with pulling a list like that out. I don’t mean to single you out, because a lot of people seem to like doing that and thinking that it’s really telling us something we can accept with confidence. The main problem with that kind of approach is that when you using statistics to try to narrow things down to that level, the less likely you can be that you’re getting some kind of applicable data. I mentioned earlier certain principles of using statistics to evaluate baseball (or anything, really), and one of the most important is realizing that statistics work great for studying really large sets of data, but they start to break down the more you limit your scope. As it applies to baseball, if you start narrowing down your scope to include a small subset, such as 8 players, you are reducing your confidence that it has any meaning to what you’re studying. There are about 15,000 players (or something like that) in the history of baseball, and even with that many, it’s hard to get a really good study of the effects of aging that we can accept as being any more a rule of thumb. Making a narrow study of 8 players to try to tell you something about one other player just doesn’t give us any confidence that it’s accurate.
But since you did bring up Kingman, there are some parallels to Sexson, at least superficially. In particular, notice Kingman’s age 32, 33, and 34 seasons. He went through a period that looks like what someone might call “a precipitous decline”. Yet it apparently wasn’t, as he carried on quite substantially better over the next 2 seasons. And as bad defensively as he was (you know the old Letterman joke — “why did Dave Kingman put pinetar on his forehead?……To catch those line drives! [badda boom]), he still had major league teams interested in his services until he was 37.
But that’s only one player — I’d be the last one to tell you that it has any significance when discussing Richie Sexson. But since you brought up his name, I couldn’t resist saying something about him. Dave Kingman is just like that, I guess.
FWIW, ZiPS project Sexon at .234/.323/.441, which is just terrible for a 1B. Also, this is sorta important:
Year HR/Fly ball
2004 32.7%
2005 25.0%
2006 20.0%
2007 16.8%
That isn’t a one year fluke, that’s a serious, continuous drop off in power. Granted, his BABIP was low last year, but given how often he strikes out, you really aren’t going to see much of a bounce back in production even if it does normalize.
PS. Sorry in advance if the formatting doesn’t work out.
FWIW, ZiPS project Sexon at .234/.323/.441, which is just terrible for a 1B.
Yeah, I’ve seen that. You might also notice how it projects the Mariners as a whole with a pretty negative slant. Ichiro, as I recall, was at about a .780 OPS, while most of the other regulars were below that. It doesn’t think much of the Mariners’ hitters next year. I can’t remember where that is right now, could you point us to it?
As for the HR/FB ratio, it may mean something, or it may not. Certainly you would expect Safeco field to be responsible for some of that reduction. Much of the rest of may well be the result of random occurence, which can heavily influence results. Or maybe not, and Sexson really is suffering from a reduction in power. What we know mostly is that he has been a really good power hitter for his career, and most players don’t lose their ability to hit for power that rapidly.
Uhh, Sexson has been hitting in Safeco since 2005. Unless you’re somehow arguing that Safeco has become a different hitting environment since then.
As far as the rest goes, you’re not going to get much traction for your concept of statistics here.
nathaniel, what is the difference between a player’s performance and his production? Granted, he can be unlucky and continually hit balls to defenders, thereby losing hits. That’s kind of the BABIP thing. Are you saying there are no metrics that separate the two?
Do you reduce his offense performance by his defense, or are you one who thinks his defense is average to above?
Nathaniel,
The sample is only 8 because Sexson had a truly miserable year. I guess its not easy to hit that bad and keep your job.
re Kingman. I said there was reason to hope for a bounce back. Vaughn was excellent, Deer was very good, Kingman was also very good(though it was two years later) and Burnitz also bounced back.
I think Sexson could bounce back to 260/340/500 but that just mediocre for a poor defensive 1B.
But, I don’t think you can dismiss the possibility that his career is effectively over.
A player’s performance are the actions he takes on the field. Things like tracking pitches, selecting pitches, swinging at pitches, running the bases, tracking a ball off the hitter’s bat, running after the ball, feilding the ball, throwing the ball. Things like that. He performs these actions.
As a result of those actions, baseball events happen, such as being safe at first, or being out because the ball bounced on the ground and was thrown to a man covering first base before the batter could reach it, or hitting the ball over the wall and being awarded a trip around the bases, or being called out by the Ump on the bases, or being out after three pitches are determined to be strikes.
We then define and name some of these results and keep track of them as statistics, which is what we see as the statistical record. So the statistical record is our measurement of the results of a player’s performance.
I’m not sure what your question is about seperating the two with metrics. We have only a few accurate metrics that directly describe performance, and most of those are focused on the pitcher’s performance, such as velocity and some of the new fx data that give us movement and release point. Until very recently, evaluating performance has been relegated almost entirely to the scouts, with almost no reliable standards that have been applied uniformly. Even the radar guns that have been in use for many years have varied in their method and reporting, and are quite often calibrated too infrequently. For hitters, there is still very little in the way of metrics, and it’s my opinion that scouting, while certainly very useful in some ways, is wildly inconsistent and lacks in measuring many things that can make a hitter successful or not. Can you measure things like tracking pitches, distinguishing type of pitch and speed, reaction time in certain situations, commitment to learning, ability to learn, memory, co-ordination? Is there a metric that is going to tell you these things?
Scouts can be pretty good at seeing those things with thier eyes, but there have been so many misjudgements of players talent and abilities throughout the years that you can’t say that scouting catches everything.
You asked my opinion of Sexson’s defense. It sucks, pretty much. I think most people around here, and most scouts, would be in agreement with me.
Jeff, I was refering to the difference between his HR/FB rate from 2004, when he played for Arizona (for 90 at bats) and 2005-2007, when he was playing for the Mariners. Unfortunately, we were only presented with the years from 2004 going forward. I don’t know what his rate was before that time, and whether or not his rate from Arizona for 2004 is a good representation of that.
(and stop being so snooty or I’m going to roll my eyes at you)
I widened my search criteria to get some more comps for Sexson.
Player Age BA/OBP/SLG OPS+ Next 3 years OPS+
Gerry Martin 31 227/281/419 88 85/96/neg.
Ed Sprague 30 222/280/403 76 104/90/neg.
Dale Murphy 33 228/306/361 89 99/103/neg.
Ron Gant 32 229/310/388 83 114/97/106
S. Brosius 33 230/299/374 70 105/OUT/OUT
T. Brunansky 30 229/303/390 87 118/58/89
G. Gaetti 31 229/274/376 76 86/70/92
neg. means negligible playing time (<100 AB)
Again, a good number of rebounds to average OPS+, but a bunch of guys who were near the end. And not a lot of performances that would be acceptable for a very poor defensive 1B.
If the Mariners can get rid of Sexson, and get any talent or salary relief at all, they probably should.
Well, I hope you’re right, but I still can’t figure out what you’re basing it on and I’ve already used up my off-season thinking-about-Sexson time.
“But that would sure be dependent on finding a 1B and DH that would give us Sexson’s level of performance.”
current performance or hoped-for performance?
All we can hope for is, Richy Has a fair to good opening 2 months in 08. Which has never happened for him, In hopes the trade will come before the deadline. So we can go forward with the youth movement and not lose any more time on gritty Vets that can no longer cover their ground.
Allas, I am pretty sure that will not happen. And the old man Richy will be stuck in Seattle tell the end. He reminds me of a player that has lost his sight of the ball and can no longer see spin. He is up there guessing…
The argument that “players as a whole don’t drop off dramatically” seems to have gone unrefuted in the general sandstorm of crazy statements in this thread, so let me just say this:
That the player population on the whole doesn’t suddenly drop at age 36 does not mean that players, as individuals, don’t suddenly have their careers end at 36.
There are many reasons this is so, which will occur to anyone who takes some time to think about the issue.
Beyond the larger logical fallacy, I just can’t believe that anyone who’s been around for the Mariners of the last five years wouldn’t realize that immediately.
“But that would sure be dependent on finding a 1B and DH that would give us Sexson’s level of performance.â€
current performance or hoped-for performance?
As far as I know, Sexson doesn’t have a current performance. It’s the off-season for the major leagues. What I was refering to was Sexson’s expected level of performance next year.
Well, I hope you’re right, but I still can’t figure out what you’re basing it on and I’ve already used up my off-season thinking-about-Sexson time.
So I’ll keep this brief for you, then. I’m basing it really on two specific things: 1) the fact that Sexson, for the bulk of his career to this point, has been a very good hitter, who happened to suffer through an uncharacteristically bad year; 2) from what we know about aging patterns for players as a whole, a player with his level of hitting ability should not have lost such a significant portion of that ability to hit.
Which leads me to conclude that last year was just simply a bad year, which if you are familiar with how players careers can show great variance from year-to-year, is not something very unusual at all. Players have bad years once in a while. It’s just a fact of life in baseball. Absent of any other obvious contributing factor, such as debilitating injury or poor conditioning, random occurence is the likely culprit for being the primary driver for years like this that are wholly inconsistent with a player’s career as a whole. When we see a player exhibit results like this that are so anomalous from what is usual, we should expect the player to rebound back to “more or less” the level they were at before.
Oops. Shortness, I said.
He had a bad year, as have many players before him, most likely due to random occurence (and in Richie’s case, quite possibly injury dragging down his performance). No reason to think he all of a sudden has lost his ability to hit.
I just captured a crow the size of Madagascar and am holding it in my barn, where I’ll be fattening it up on McD’s all winter so it’ll be nice and juicy for you to eat throughout all of ’08.
Sexson can put up an .820 OPS next year, and keeping him will still be a bad idea.
This is whacky enough as it is, but let me just say that if Sexson “rebounds” to the “low-to-mid 800s”, with his terrible defense at first base he will still be a liability on the roster.
This is whacky enough as it is, but let me just say that if Sexson “rebounds†to the “low-to-mid 800sâ€, with his terrible defense at first base he will still be a liability on the roster.
I’m not going to disagree with you there. Well, at least not strongly. He should be “around league average” if he plays 1B and hits at that level. I don’t know if you could call that a liability, but if you build a team around a bunch of “around league average” guys, like the M’s did last year, well, that’s what you’ll get. Around league average, which the Mariners were last year.
Sexson can put up an .820 OPS next year, and keeping him will still be a bad idea.
Not if he does that at DH. That actually is pretty good production from the DH position. I still wouldn’t be able to buy into the idea that he’s worth the money they’re paying him, but are we really going to be able to unload his salary, get something of value in return for him to replace a lost position, and use the savings to upgrade in another area ?
Hey, I’d be all for that, if it could be pulled off. Can it be done?
Realistically, Sexson isn’t going to DH. And since Vidro isn’t going anywhere, trading Richie’s our only hope for getting Raul out of left field.
We should expect Sexson to be among the best hitters on the team. Actually, the best expectation for him would be comparable to Ichiro as the two best hitters for the team.
I don’t see why we should expect that, since Raul outhit him in 2006 and 2007, and Adrian Beltre outhit him in 2007.
So I’ll keep this brief for you, then. I’m basing it really on two specific things: 1) the fact that Sexson, for the bulk of his career to this point, has been a very good hitter, who happened to suffer through an uncharacteristically bad year; 2) from what we know about aging patterns for players as a whole, a player with his level of hitting ability should not have lost such a significant portion of that ability to hit.
Richie Sexson wouldn’t be the first Mariner 1B to go pfft pretty fast.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/d/davisal01.shtml
Sexson’s the classic “old players skills” kind of ballplayer- slow, game based on power and walks. These sorts of players don’t age well (Bill James did research on this, comparing them to younger, faster ballplayers). While I won’t be surprised to see a dead cat bounce to his stats, I don’t think you can assume he’s going to be his .345/.520 self next year.
Richie Sexson wouldn’t be the first Mariner 1B to go pfft pretty fast.
He certainly went pfft for about one year worth of play at the age of 30. Of course, we have no way of knowing what his 30’s would have looked like because he didn’t play anymore after that. I have no idea how this applies to Richie Sexson, other than it’s somehow a reply to one of my posts and Alvin Davis was a Mariner firstbaseman.
Is this supposed to mean something?
Sexson’s the classic “old players skills†kind of ballplayer- slow, game based on power and walks. These sorts of players don’t age well (Bill James did research on this, comparing them to younger, faster ballplayers). While I won’t be surprised to see a dead cat bounce to his stats, I don’t think you can assume he’s going to be his .345/.520 self next year.
I’m sure most younger, faster ballplayers will last longer than Richie Sexson. But I think I know what you really mean. I’m not sure I agree with you, or what you think Bill James says, but I understand that many people hold that view.
So who’s assuming he’s going to be his .345/.520 self next year? That seems to be a pretty high projection, given what we’ve seen of him so far in his career. That’s right about at his career totals, and considering his age and his home park, you really can’t expect him to hit at that kind of level next year. Maybe more along the lines of about an .830 OPS, give or take +/- 30 points.
Use some goddamn component stats rather than just the slashes, show your mathematics and your assumptions, and then maybe we’d have some incentive to take your new and revolutionary method of player projection seriously.
Because right now it looks like you’re taking a look at OBP/SLG and then having a bit of a guess, and we prefer to do analysis that isn’t 10 years out of date in these parts.
Here, I’ll even help you: pitch data courtesy of baseball reference and ball in play numbers from fangraphs.
Graham, are you saying I have a new and revolutionary method of player projection that’s 10 years out of date?
You know what? Having a bit of a guess is about the best anyone can do, and you have perhaps seen that if you’ve looked at any of the projection systems (Marcels, Pecota, Zips) that are published over the last few seasons. They all have their hits and misses, so it’s anything but an exact science right now.
Sign Kuroda from Japan(this guy can pitch forever with that rubber arm); Trade Ibanez to Detroit for Nate Robertson; Trade Balentien to Pittsburgh for Jason Bay(bring him home)(they are looking for a deal and he is fairly cheap LF)) move Broussard to 1B; Move Horam to Bull Pen or trade him for a bullpen arm and hope Lopez will hit again and that our SS will not make 30 errors in 08. Whew!
130
and trade Sexson for Santana
I’m game for a new projection system where all I have to do is look up a players OPS. Here’s Sexson’s as a Mariner:
2005: .910;
2006: .842;
2007: .694;
I’m a novice at this new system, but I’m having trouble seeing how it suggests an OPS of .840 next season…
#131 – That with 10 Mil wouldn’t even work for the cheap Twins but we can dream. Send Sexson, Baek and Sean Green to SF for Lowery and their “old 2B”
Nathaniel, I am lost on your reasoning as well. Perhaps what we are all missing is what you consider to be good batting statics & numbers for a 1stbaseman and DH, what you think are reasonable numbers for Sexson in 2008. My thinking would be
AB 500
Hits 145
Extra basehits 70
Hr’s 30
Walks 90
Which all works out, if my math is correct…
BA 290
OBP 400
SLG 540
OPS 940
Nathaniel is mystifying people over at LL with his analysis of Vidro as well.
Jesus, they can’t really bring Sexson back, can they? That’s not even a remote possibility, is it?
“The Ghost”: They can and they will probably have to. They owe Sexon 14M in 08 and no team will take him in trade w/o giving you their bad contract or the Mariners will have to include Sexon’s salary almost completely.
dear god this post is scaring me.
bring on bedard!!!!!