And a sign of hope, too
Steve Nelson made this comment late in the discussion of Dave’s post:
But, but .. this is team carefully assembled with a core of gritty veterans who know how to play the game. The kind of players who don’t panic and get thrown off when things don’t go right. The kinds of players who know how to do the little things to win games.
That the Mariners handily beat their Pythag record last season wasn’t a fluke; it was the direct product of filling the roster with players of character, integrity and veteran savvy. [/sarcasm]
I think the current team situation directly relates to perceptions of last years team. Many fans, and apparently the Mariners FO as well, believed that last year’s team was a valid contender (or almost contender) – that the record at the end of 2007 was a true reflection of the ability of the team. Buying into that notion leads directly to the conclusion that if a few holes are patched (primarily in the rotation) the team is a true contender. Clearly, that’s the way the FO saw the team last winter. I’ve mentioned in several posts over the last several months that the I think the FO viewed the 2007 season as vindication for their thoughts about roster construction, viz. that a roster assembled with the proper intangibles will outplay their true talent level – said team will win more than their “fair share†of games because the will do the things needed to win games and will play as greater than the sum of the parts.
This season can be viewed as a test of that notion. Many here (myself included) saw that belief as a misperception; the Mariners were not as good as their record and that they Pythag record was a better indication of the teams true talent level. I will gladly eat crow if I am wrong, but so far this season would seem vindication.
I heartily agree on most counts, and we’ve talked about a lot of those issues and the differences in how we viewed the team and how the front office viewed this year’s team coming into the season.
But we need to point out that something interesting just happened in the Wilkerson move: they recognized a problem, adjusted, and they did it early. We can certainly argue over whether or not it was the right move, but just a few years ago they were clinging to the belief that Carl Everett would turn it around any day now (depressing fact: Everett’s 2006 line would be a dramatic improvement over Vidro this year, or, unfortunately, Johjima) much later into the season. The offense was struggling, and they did something about it.
Sure, they may have gone into this season with unreasonable expectations of building from an 88-win season and decided to go for it, but at least we’ve seen they’re not looking at the roster with blinders on. If we take nothing else away from that, we should be happy that they’re not letting that initial assumption blind them to the glaring problems they face right now.
Now, whether that leads to trading the remaining prospects for proven veteran relievers, that’s a whole other topic.
Season Salvaging Time
It’s May 4th, and believe it or not, the Mariners season is on the verge of extinction. They currently stand six games behind the Angels (who are winning 4-2, which would push the deficit to six and a half games) with 130 games to play. That sounds like a lot of time until you realize just how large of a hole that really is.
To win the division, the Mariners would have to outplay both the Angels and A’s by a significant margin. To put some context to this, here are the winning percentage pairs from here on out that would lead to the M’s ending up with just one more win then Los Angeles (ignoring the A’s for right now), ranging from 89 wins to 95 wins for the Mariners.
Angels – .527 – Mariners – .585
Angels – .535 – Mariners – .592
Angels – .543 – Mariners – .600
Angels – .550 – Mariners – .608
Angels – .558 – Mariners – .615
Angels – .566 – Mariners – .623
Angels – .574 – Mariners – .631
The Angels have played .594 baseball through their first 32 games without John Lackey or Kelvim Escobar and with Vladimir Guerrero off to the worst start he’s had in years. Even assuming they aren’t going to get Escobar back this year, Lackey takes a while to regain his previous form, and Guerrero doesn’t rebound all the way back to his prime levels of production, it’s still hard to see this Angels team playing much worse than .550 baseball the rest of the way.
A .550 winning percentage is an 89 win pace over a full season, and that’s about what I expected the Angels to finish with before the year started. If the Angels playing .550 ball from here on out, they’ll finish with 91 wins, and the Mariners would have to play .608 baseball to end the year at 92-70. No team has played a full season of .608 baseball or better since the 2005 White Sox and Cardinals won 99 and 100 games respectively.
It’s really freaking hard to play .608 baseball for any sustained period of time, even if you’re a truly excellent team. And let’s be honest, this Mariners team isn’t excellent. For a team of this quality to play .600 ball for five months is almost unheard of.
So, the M’s simply have to start winning, and doing so soon. They need to beat up on Texas, the White Sox, and the Padres, who they play their next 13 games against. They need a 9-4 or 10-3 stretch to make up some ground or else it just becomes too prohibitive to think they can close this gap.
It’s May, but it’s getting late for the Mariners. They don’t have any more time to struggle. They have to start winning, and they have to start tomorrow.
Game 32, Mariners at Yankees
Silva v Rasner. 10am our time.
Silva leads the Mariners in wins, he’s got the second-best ERA (behind Bedard), he’s getting a lot of ground balls, he’s running a K:BB ratio of 2, which is nice, and doing it Franklin-style: not giving up the walks and not getting the strikeouts.
Which makes it particularly interesting, to loop back around, that Silva’s leading the M’s in wins and has the second-best ERA, given the team’s defensive troubles. While the focus is on the errors (they’re tied for 5th-most at 24) and fielding percentage (tied for 25th), they also look bad in terms of raw balls-in-play-into-outs, the M’s are currently 22/30.
An interesting contrast is that the Yankees, in terms of raw defense, are slightly worse than the Mariners — but in fielding percentage they’re 7th-best, so there’s not the wide perception that they’re no good at catching the ball.
Mussina should be in the Hall of Fame discussion indeed
I usually roll my eyes at phrases like this. When people say that a player belongs in the MVP discussion or whatever, they almost always mean “He certainly isn’t the MVP, but we might talk about him as the MVP if the other ten all caught fire tomorrow.”
What’s that conversation like?
“Who are you voting for on your ballot? Say, at the 8th or 9th position?”
“Joe Shlabotnik, he’s done a lot to keep the Pirates from losing 110 games.”
“I have him at 7.”
“Seven seems high. But I’m glad we both have him in the conversation.”
In rough order, here are the active pitchers who should get in:
Greg Maddux (twice, if possible)
Randy Johnson
Pedro Martinez
Mike Mussina
(Then the cloud of possibles: Glavine, Moyer, Smoltz, Schilling)
Pedro and Mussina provide a great contrast: Pedro’s peak was just astonishing, even though he’s been fragile and his time as a Met’s been injury-ridden while he struggles to hit career marks. Against that, Mussina’s a Hall of Fame candidate by being consistently excellent, often in Pedro’s shadow. If you’re ever willing to buy that a player can get in by being one of the best for a long time, this is your player.
Mussina’s been in the top ten for ERA ten times in his career. Eight of those times he was in the top five. He’s the 91st-best pitcher ever at not walking guys, the 75th-best at striking them out. And remember, when we talk about those, he’s going up against guys like Al Spalding, John Ward, Pud Gavin, Candy Cummings — every pitcher in every era, while Mussina’s debut was in 1991 and he’s toiled in an offense-heavy game.
He hasn’t piled up his career wins by grinding out season after season of ineffective baseball, either — he’s got those rate stats and is fifth on the active pitcher list for innings pitched.
I don’t see how anyone can look at Mussina’s amazing career and not see someone who deserves induction as one of the best pitchers in baseball.
Game 31, Mariners at Yankees
Hernandez vs Mussina, 10:05 am.
Happy Felix Day!
John McLaren is starting Miguel Cairo at second base, telling Geoff Baker that Cairo has some history of success against Mussina.
Here’s their history, and yes, note that they haven’t faced each other since 2003.
7 for 28, 1 double, 0 walks, 1 strikeout – .250/.250/.286. Cairo is a career .258/.315/.368 hitter, so to the extent that you believe that 28 at-bats means anything at all (they don’t), you have to conclude that Cairo is worse than he normally is against Mussina.
To come to the conclusion that Cairo should play because he has a history of success against Mike Mussina takes a special blend of ignorance. Here’s to hoping that McLaren has another reason for playing Cairo today and is just using the 7 for 28 thing as the public story, because if he’s actually playing Cairo because he thinks it gives the team a better chance to win, then he’s not qualified to manage a lemonade stand.
Felix Day Felix Day
Felix Felix Felix Day!
Only ten hours to Felix Day as I type this. WOooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
Deep, deep sabermetrics
The M’s have a bad record in games they score fewer than five runs. This is because the average AL team, in an average game, scores just under five runs (right now, it’s 4.48, but it’s early in the season… it’ll perk up).
If you score fewer than that in any given game and you have average pitching and defense, you’re likely to lose. You won’t lose every game, because sometimes the other guy scores three, or two, or one, but in general, you’re going to lose.
I know, shocking, isn’t it?
Here’s a 2005 Studeman article, “Runs Per Game” that helps illustrate this, and includes this handy table of runs, team win percentage, and how much that last run increased their chances
RS Win% Diff
0 .000
1 .077 .077
2 .208 .131
3 .339 .131
4 .471 .132
5 .593 .122
6 .686 .092
...
Going from no runs to one run is good, but it’s not nearly as good as runs 2-5, or even six. The importance of piling on only really goes down at run 8.
So here’s the M’s so far
Or, as Studeman put it,
For instance, if your league averaged five runs a game, and your team scored exactly five runs in every game, it would typically have a .600 winning percentage instead of .500, even though it had scored the average number of runs. That is the power of looking at distributions instead of averages.
Yup. Of course, as I ranted recently, you can’t build a consistent offense like that. Power-and-walk teams slump, contact-and-steal teams slump. All offenses are inconsistent.
But to return to the meandering point — if a team only scores four runs consistently with average pitching, you can expect them to win only about 45% of their games (and that’s me taking a guess looking at the win percentages).
Moreover, though, looking at Studeman’s research, and others, the thing that really sticks out is not that the fourth or the fifth run is particularly important — it’s that scoring that next run is always important. If you’ve got an anemic offense, scraping out that extra run a game however you can do it, be that player upgrades, an improved lineup, or whatever you want, makes a huge difference in how often your team will win. You don’t have to go to being an offensive powerhouse.
Hopefully the M’s can juggle Clement and the rest of the lineup and start winning games with the bats.
Deep thought for the day
I liked watching Bedard pitch so much, I’m watching the FSN Instant Replay of the game.
Game 30, Mariners at Yankees
Bedard v Wang.
Sorry I didn’t get this up earlier, I’m still battling with the plumbing at Haus Zumsteg (I hate compression fittings, btw)
Next Need: Lefty OF/1B
Now that the Mariners have made some line-up changes, they’re going forward with a line-up that looks essentially like this:
1. Ichiro – LH
2. Lopez – RH
3. Ibanez – LH
4. Beltre – RH
5. Clement/Vidro – LH / B
6. Sexson – RH
7. Balentien – RH
8. Johjima – RH
9. Betancourt – RH
They might shuffle the batting order, but you get the idea. That’s an awful lot of “RH” notations in there. Even when they run up against a right-handed starting pitcher, they’re running out six right-handed bats and just three left-handed bats. This makes them a very easy matchup for right-handed sinker/slider arms who do well against same handed hitters but are vulnerable to lefties. The M’s just don’t have enough LH bats to exploit that type of pitcher. The imbalance allows them to really pound southpaws, but considering that 75% of all pitchers out there are righties, that’s not the side you want to beat up on.
The M’s offensive splits bare out the results of this overly right-handed line-up:
Vs RHP: .238/.303/.364, OPS+ of 82
Vs LHP: .321/.371/.491, OPS+ of 136
Having Clement replace Vidro will improve the offense vs RHPs, but the improvement there isn’t large enough for the team to contend. It’s a start, not a finish. This team simply needs another left-handed bat in the line-up, or they’ll keep getting shut down by the likes of Paul Byrd (career .692 OPS vs RH, .852 vs LH), and those are pitchers they simply can’t afford to not beat up on.
The team has options. Richie Sexson’s entire value so far this season has come from whacking southpaws (.364/.417/.682 vs LHP, .192/.304/.397 vs RHP), and his skills are tailor made for a platoon. Ideally, I’d like to see Sexson take over the role of Clement’s platoon partner and DH vs LHP, which would put Vidro permanently on the bench where he belongs. That would free up first base for an acquisition of Nick Johnson, simultaneously adding a quality left-handed bat with plate discipline and upgrading the defense.
However, I know that’s unlikely, so the next best move would be for the team to pick up a left-handed hitting outfielder. Balentien simply isn’t as likely to help this team win as Clement is, and getting him regular playing time shouldn’t be a priority compared to winning baseball games.
Until the M’s add some balance to the line-up, we’re going to continue to see things like last night, where marginal right-handers shut the team down due to a lack of quality lefty bats in the line-up. The M’s made a good step forward by promoting Clement and admitting that Wilkerson was a mistake, but they can’t stop now. This team needs another bat from the left side, and the sooner, the better.