On the depressing nature of being an M’s fan these days
It’s a measure of how beaten-down we are that we look at transactions like “Frank Thomas to the A’s” and the thought process runs
– That’s fine, what the team really needed was a decent outfielder or two so Ibanez could DH
– Except they think his defense is fine, so we can rule out them shopping for left fielder
– Which means we have to limit ourselves to hoping they realize Vidro stinks
– Except McLaren just moved him up in the batting order, so they must not realize that
– Is their mistaken belief in Ibanez greater than their mistaken belief in Vidro?
– Probably, yeah.
– Then we have to hope that they’ll sign an upgrade DH.
– Except they had a chance at Frank Thomas and didn’t get him.
– And he’s now playing for the A’s for major league minimum.
– Which means Vidro’s even more likely to make his 400 plate appearances and vest his option for next year.
– I’m going to go get an early start on my drinking ahead of tonight’s game.
Frank Thomas to the A’s
Oakland will be on the hook only for about $337,000 — a prorated share of the $390,000 minimum — so this move was a bargain for general manager Billy Beane and a club looking to boost its power numbers.
If that’s all they gave up, this could frankly be astounding: they get his rebound year, let someone else eat the resulting FA contract, and get him back for prorated league minimum.
Prorated league minimum.
Depressed? Cheer up–
Fun While It Lasted
The Mariners offense drew at least one walk in each of their first 15 games of the season. Despite still having a team of lifelong hackers, the team was taking free passes. The newfound patience was fun.
Was.
In their last seven games, the Mariners have failed to draw a walk in four of them, including tonight, when they let Daniel Cabrera get through 8 innings on 95 pitches. Daniel Cabrera.
Regression to the mean sucks.
Game 22, Orioles at Mariners
7:10. Cabrera v Silva. They sure have been talking up Silva’s contribution, haven’t they?
This lineup…. ugh.
CF-L Ichiro
2B-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
DH-B Turbo, Professional Hitter
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
RF-R Bloomquist
SS-R Betancourt
Yikes.
(added:) Fun fact: in the AL, the #5 hitter hit .284/.355/.470 in 2006 (which I happen to have handy). Vidro managed that back in his peak years.
21 games into last season, the M’s were 11-10 too. It’s natural to look at mirroring last season as good, and certainly, over .500 is good. But there’s also a belief that the M’s last year were competitive until they swooned badly, as if there were two teams, and for a while, the bad one showed up, and if only they could keep those guys from taking the field they’d have kept winning at a good clip and won the division.
I understand why you’d want to think that, but it’s as silly as pretending that any arbitrarily selected group of wins was an aberration and they’ll stink because that stretch wasn’t representative.
Being as good as last year’s team isn’t good enough — it’s why they went out and got Bedard — they wanted to (as they saw it) shore up a weakness, and prevent a similar losing streak.
But here’s the thing, and I’ll use a coin flipping example I’m stealing from a professor. If I asked everyone to go do a hundred coin flips, and said I didn’t care if you faked it or not, I’d be able to tell with pretty reasonable certainty who faked them, because they wouldn’t have really long streaks in them. People who fake the results keep the streaks really short.
When the team’s losing, of course, we look for reasons why – do they look lost? Ill-prepared? And sometimes there are reasons like that. But often, like a pitcher looking for a flaw in their delivery they can correct, it’s often little more than rationalization (“Ah! My hat brim was too clean! Of course! … Yay, I threw a quality start! That must have been it!”)
Anyway, for their 22nd and 23rd games, last year’s team took two games from the White Sox. I’d love to see them repeat that.
News Bits
Two quick things to pass along.
1. Mike Morse had surgery to repair a torn labrum and is done for the year. Despite his huge spring training performance, this just isn’t a big deal to the M’s – Morse is easily replaceable. The minors are full of guys with his skill set (example – the A’s claimed Rajai Davis off waivers today. Davis > Morse) – not that the M’s would ever bother to look to upgrade their bench anyway.
2. Frank Thomas is probably going to sign with Oakland. I’ve been ambivalent about this from the start, and this doesn’t really get me worked up one way or another. He’d have helped a little bit, but at least now we can still hope that the M’s have an epiphany, get a real left fielder, and move Ibanez to DH.
Random Things
Woo Felix Woo! I love Felix Day. I wish it could happen every day.
I stuck up a post on Fangraphs this morning in which I compared Jeff Keppinger to Tony Gwynn. I expect someone to read it and think I have lost my mind, but Jeff Keppinger is a good player, and if it takes a bit of hyperbole in a comparative graph to make that point, so be it.
Reports are circling that the A’s are considering signing Frank Thomas to replace Mike Sweeney. While I’m still on the fence about whether to sign Thomas or not, this pushes the needle a little bit further towards the affirmative. We’ve been telling people all spring long that the A’s are better than everyone thinks, and adding Thomas to their line-up is probably a one win upgrade – that win might come at our expense, and I’m not sure the M’s should be sitting around watching their divisional competitors improve.
Speaking of divisional competitors, Jered Weaver got bombed for the Angels last night. I’ve taken some shots from some people over my stance on Weaver being a middle of the rotation guy and not anything close to a frontline pitcher, but I’m guessing they won’t be posting their Jered Weaver Update now that his ERA is up to 4.50, his strikeout rate continues to fall, and there are no results to build their results based analysis on. Pity.
Game 21, Orioles at Mariners
FELIX DAY!!!!!
Felix and some non-Felix cannon fodder. Festivities start at 7:10.
The Cliff
There’s an obvious running theme to the posts of the last several days, mostly inspired by discussions about Frank Thomas’ release and whether he would help the Mariners offense. The underlying question essentially boils down to this: “Is Frank Thomas, at age 40, finally just finished as a major league hitter?” I’ve written on this subject, both at Fangraphs and here, as well as talking about it on KJR yesterday. My conclusion is that Thomas is not washed up, and while he’s never going to be the Big Hurt of the 1990s again, he’s got more to contribute as a major league hitter.
However, the Thomas discussion simply leads to one larger point – how do we know when a player really is done? I wrote up a post on Fangraphs about this topic this morning, but wanted to delve into a little more detail here, since this is an issue that Mariner fans have some experience with and it relates strongly to the 2008 roster. As Derek noted yesterday, there are some signs that perhaps Brad Wilkerson is finished as an everyday player. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think Jose Vidro’s career is basically over at this point, and we’ve talked recently about Richie Sexson’s old player skills and what that might mean for the length of his career.
So, if we agree that there’s a point in time where a player’s skills just deteriorate to the point that he’s not longer a contributor, how do we know when a player has reached that point? What are the signs, and how do we see it coming?
As I said in the Fangraphs post this morning, I believe the first place you should look when determining how much a hitter has left to offer is his power. The ability to drive the ball is what causes pitchers to not just throw fastballs down the middle on every pitch, and once they’ve ascertained that a hitter can’t drive the ball with authority anymore, he’s not going to contribute for much longer. Now, every hitter has their own established level of power production that works for their particular skill set. We don’t want to look at an arbitrary number for every player, but instead, we’re looking to identify an erosion of that particular player’s established power level.
Thankfully, we have metrics available that measure power, and terrific sites like The Hardball Times and Fangraphs that give us historical data for research purposes. As Mariner fans, we’ve watched over the last decade as the M’s have hosted farewell tours for a lot of past-their-prime players. The M’s are notorious for trying to squeeze the last drops out of a proven veteran’s career, so we’ve had a front row seat to a lot of collapses. Among the notable ones we’ve seen are Bret Boone, Edgar Martinez, John Olerud, Jeff Cirillo, and Carl Everett, with bench players such as Mark McLemore, Eduardo Perez, and Dave Hansen also meeting their end here. We’ve seen a lot of career ending collapses, and we pretty much know what they look like. So, what do all these guys have in common? Take a look at these year to year changes in HR/FB rates:
Bret Boone: 2004 – 14.1%, 2005 – 6.5%
Edgar Martinez: 2003 – 16.6%, 2004 – 9.2%
John Olerud: 2002 – 12.2%, 2003 – 6.1%
Carl Everett: 2005 – 14.4%, 2006 – 9.3%
Mark McLemore: 2002 – 8.1%, 2003 – 2.5%
Eduardo Perez: 2005 – 22.4%, 2006 – 5.3%
Dave Hansen: 2004 – 10.0%, 2005 – 7.5%
All of these guys experienced significant dropoffs from their previously established levels of power. They were still hitting the ball in the air, but it wasn’t clearing the fence anymore, and that switch to having warning track power signaled the end of their playing careers. More than anything else, it’s this loss of power that we can look at if we want to know if a player really has anything left, or if his current performance is just a short term anomaly.
So, using HR/FB% as our window, let’s look at some of the recent subjects we’ve talked about.
Frank Thomas: 2006 – 17.4%, 2007 – 11.1%, 2008 – 11.5%
Jose Vidro: 2005 – 8.0%, 2006 – 5.3%, 2007 – 4.1%, 2008 – 7.7%
Richie Sexson: 2006 – 19.3%, 2007 – 16.7%, 2008 – 21.6%
Brad Wilkerson: 2006- 14.9%, 2007 – 19.4%, 2008 – 0.0%
I want to stress that the sample sizes for ’08 are really small and conclusions shouldn’t be drawn yet. If wind would have knocked down one of Vidro’s two homers, then his HR/FB% would be 4% instead of 8%. You just can’t make any kind of judgment about a power rebound when one fly ball with a different result changes the conclusion.
However, I think we can make some preliminary assessments based on the multi-year trends.
Thomas has clearly lost a good chunk of his power, but because he had such a high platform to fall from, he’s still able to be a decently productive hitter even after a pretty significant decline. Expecting him to turn back into the Frank Thomas of 2006 doesn’t look like a good bet, though.
Vidro’s collapse came in 2005, when he fell from a 12.8% HR/FB rate to the 8.0% you see listed above, and he’s been in slight decline from that rate ever since. His career has been on life support for a couple of years now, and I’d argue that he’s pretty obviously done.
Sexson’s power took a slight dip last year, but nothing even close to being large enough to constitute a collapse. Through this window, it seems pretty clear the he’s not done as a hitter, even though his old player skills suggest that he’s in the last stage of his career. There’s still life left in his bat, though.
Wilkerson is an odd case. His ’08 numbers aren’t particularly instructive because the sample is just so tiny (16 flyballs total), but there are extenuating circumstances with Wilkerson – he’s had old player skills for quite a while, and injuries have taken a toll on his body. If you were going to create a list of potential collapse guys before the season, he’d have been on it. But we’ve also seen his HR/FB rate nosedive and then rebound before (2004 – 16.2%, 2005 – 5.9%, 2006 – 14.9%), so drawing any conclusions based on the fact that he hasn’t hit a home run in the first few weeks of April seems foolish. He might be done, but we don’t have enough information to know for sure yet.
To summarize a post that turned out much longer than I expected, I believe we can usually tell if a player has really fallen off The Cliff by looking at his ability to drive the ball. HR/FB% stands in quite well as a proxy for his power, and significant changes in that can be a red flag that a hitter’s skill set has changed for the worse. It’s not definite, however, and you shouldn’t conclude that every drop in HR/FB rate is signs of imminent retirement. However, if a player is struggling to produce at the plate while posting a stable HR/FB rate, we could say it is unlikely that their career is really teetering on the edge of extinction.
Or, to put it back in player terms, Thomas and Sexson are not done, Vidro is, and we don’t know about Wilkerson just yet.
Jose Vidro’s terrible start, Pepe Vidro’s success
Last year, we saw Vidro early in the year ground out a ton, which didn’t work for him at all, and then start to lift it a little more and have a lot more success. So obviously, with only 79 plate appearances under his belt, it’s still too early to pass judgment, but what we’ve seen so far is not good.
I’ll focus on the big swing, since the walks/strikeouts are within a few plate appearances. He’s hitting a lot more fly balls, and not well.
His G/F ratio stands at .92, the lowest of his career. His line drive percentage is about the same, his ground ball percentage is way down (38.1% compared to last year’s 50.8% and a career average of 48.7%) and it went straight to fly balls – 29.7% up to 41.3%
The result’s been the ugly line you see now: .208/.278/.319 from the team’s DH.
Moreover, if you want to slice the data even further, his stats are propped up by Pepe’s success in 17 at-bats against lefties, where he hit .353/.389/.588. Against righties, Jose’s only putting up a .164/.246/.236. Maybe they should just have Pepe bat all the time.
Of course, David Ortiz is hitting .160/.267/.240, so we can take some solace from that. And you can pretty easily see what’s happening to him, too — his line drives are down, turned into ground outs, and when he hits line drives he hasn’t hit them hard enough to get over fences.
But that’s besides the point. Vidro is slow enough that he can’t make a living slapping the ball down and running to first as fast as possible, like Ichiro might — and here please cross-apply all my arguments last year on why his infield hit rate wasn’t sustainable. When we saw him successful last year, it was when he was getting his hits by spraying the ball into the shallow outfield and occasionally legging out a double once in a while.
If it’s a correctable problem, we can hope that Pentland’s working on it with him, trying to get Vidro to stop beating the ball into the ground, or find some kind of swing issue they can work on. I’m hoping.
Dave on KJR
Sorry for the late notice, but I’m on KJR in about 25 mintues – 2:05 pm PST.