Yeah, so Putz is injured
“hyperextended elbow”…. yup. He’s on the 15-day DL. Corcoran’s up. He’s been getting smacked around in Tacoma since being sent down, annnnnd here he is, back up.
Clearly, something was wrong with Putz before the incident that got him on the DL. Here’s hoping the two weeks helps them figure out what’s up, as well as heal this particular injury.
All-Time All-Mariner Roster: Catcher
Dave and I have decided to write about something fun this year, and since the 2008 Mariners won’t give us anything good to write about, we’re finding it ourselves. So, today, we launch out on a 25 part series where we build the All-Time roster for the organization, going from the starting catcher all the way down to the long man in the bullpen, picking the best single season at each position. In most spots, there are arguments for more than one season, so we’ll talk through our thoughts before coming to a conclusion.
Today we discuss the catcher: Kenji Johjima 2006 or Dan Wilson 1996?
Dave:
When we talk about the best seasons in franchise history, I think there’s an immediate expectation that the performances we’re going to be talking about are obvious, huge offensive years. However, we have to remember that value is relative, and that the scale for a quality season for a catcher is vastly different than at other positions. So, while Kenji’s 2006 batting line of .291/.332/.451 might not jump off the page, it’s actually a very valuable performance, especially considering the context. There isn’t a park on earth worse suited to Johjima’s offensive skillset than Safeco Field, and he still managed to perform well while transitioning to Major League Baseball.
In fact, his OPS+ for 2006 was 103, meaning that he was a better than league average hitter. Not better than average hitting catcher – better than average hitter period. This isn’t a regular accomplishment for a full-time catcher. This decade, there have only been 42 seasons where a catcher has accumulated 500 or more plate appearances and had an OPS+ of 100 or higher. That’s an average of six catcher seasons per year. 2006 Kenji Johjima is part of that class.
He isn’t the greatest guy at blocking the ball in the dirt, and when compared with Dan Wilson, he’s going to come up short defensively, but there’s no doubt that Johjima’s 2006 season was the best offensive performance the Mariners have ever gotten from behind the plate. With our ability to evaluate catcher defense still a work in progress, I think we have to acknowledge that Johjima’s performance as a rookie was the best we’ve seen from a backstop since the franchise began in 1977.
Derek:
Kenji’s 2006 is right up there, but Wilson’s 1996 is better. We may not know how to evaluate catcher defense nearly as well as other positions, but we know enough to establish that Wilson is superior, enough that it overcomes any differences in offense.
Having seen Dan Wilson’s long decline into awfulness, we forget just how good he was at his peak, and 1996 was absolutely primo Wilson: he was 27, had a great offensive year, and he played outstanding defense.
Johjima hit .291/.332/.451 in 2006, for an OPS+ of 103.
Wilson hit .285/.330/.444 in 1996, for an OPS+ of 94.
That’s a significant difference, but it’s not all that huge. And it’s the Kingdome, yes, but the Kingdome was never the offense-crazy haven it’s been made out to be. Looking at b-r, I see that in 1996, it rated out as 96, favoring pitchers, and the multi-year factor ran about even. That’s not a great park factor number.
Now compare defensive lines. First, the obvious: runners caught. Wilson allowed 61 stolen bases and caught 39, which works out neatly to a 39% thrown out rate (see how considerate Wilson was? He made sure the percentages were super-easy to calculate).
Johjima allowed 57 stolen bases and caught 29 runners, a 34% thrown out rate.
Wilson allows 4 more and nails 10 more in fewer innings. Using my handy run values from The Book, that’s about four runs worth of difference.
The difference isn’t in the staff, either — in 1996 the M’s got 66 starts out of left-handed starters, who generally dampen the running game, while the 2006 Mariners got 67 (as I count it – it’s Hitchcock + Mulholland + Moyer + 8 by Johnson against Washburn + Moyer + 8 Woods starts + 2 Feierabend + 1 Jimenez).
And that’s just with the running game. What about their ability as a backstop?
Wilson: caught 1130 innings, allowed 5 passed balls, 29 wild pitches, and made four errors.
Johjima: caught 1172 2/3 innings, allowed 10 passed balls and 39 wild pitches, and made seven errors.
I’m going to ignore the errors for a second. The run value of a passed ball or a wild pitch is about ~.285 runs (btw, not to plug Tango too often, but this chart is awesome). If we can credit those passed balls and wild pitches to Wilson, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t, that’s another four runs in his favor.
Already, not counting any mobility, foul-catching, pouncing-on-punt kind of more traditional defensive measures, you get +8 runs to Wilson. Was a 27-year old Wilson a better fielder than a 30-year old Kenji? It’s hard to make defensive comparisons, but yes.
Unfortunately, here the evidence fails me: I don’t want to get into separating out how many foul balls they caught, and when I look at the assists, plays where the catchers fielded the ball and then threw somewhere else to get the out He had 57 of them in 1996, while Kenji had 59 in 20 more innings caught. I wish I could get UZRs or PMRs or something useful for 1996 v 2006, but we don’t. I’ll throw my hands up here and call it even, but I suspect that if I really tried to suss an answer from the stats we can know, we’d find Wilson the more mobile and effective fielding catcher as well.
The eight runs saved we can easily grant Wilson make up for the offensive gap between them and more, and make his 1996 the better season.
Dave:
You know, when I was writing the pro-Johjima part, I had a feeling that I was arguing a losing position. Reading that, I know that feeling was right. 2006 Kenji was good, but 1996 Wilson was better.
Video is up of Sutcliffe’s crazy sexist chatter
w/r/t my rant about Rick Sutcliffe making all kinds of weird, inappropriate remarks about Erin Andrews
There’s video up now:
Someone’s already emailed to claim it wasn’t Sutcliffe but the other guy, but I went through the game thread on Atlanta Chop and one of the Cubs blogs, and they agreed with me at the time, so I think it’s correct — but now you can judge for yourself
Update: ESPN is wildly trying to suppress commentary on this by sending take-down notices whenever anyone posts video, which is a reprehensible use of copyright power to keep a story down. Fair use, folks, fair use.
Mariners Foibles
I wrote a guest post for The Baseball Analysts dealing with the roots of the failures of the 2008 team. Re-reading it, I think I might be a little bit frustrated with this organization.
Rick Sutcliffe is a horrible person and ESPN’s no better
This is still bugging me hours later, so:
I was watching ESPN’s broadcast of the Braves game tonight, and there was a really, really weird moment where they were discussing Rick Sutcliffe taking time off to go get cancer treatment, and Erin Andrews was in the stands and wished him well or something — I wasn’t really paying attention, it seemed totally pointless — at which point Sutcliffe went off on a bizarre rant about her, how good she looked, her skirt, and how everyone was watching her and her skirt and when they cut to the broadcast booth, his partner had this weird look of terror and shock on his face, and they chatted about how distracting she was around the batting cage.
This should be Rick Sutcliffe’s last job announcing anything. He shouldn’t be hired to do dog races. He shouldn’t be able to ever get a quarter for hawking wares at garage sales.
I don’t care that he has cancer.
I don’t care that Erin Andrews is attractive, or that she wore a skirt.
He should be fired for making comments like that. More than that, he should be fired for this rant, about her.
I don’t care what your opinion of her is: Erin takes an enormous amount of entirely unjustified personal crap. She’s been treated badly by players, awkwardly clutched by coaches. If you put her name into a search engine you need to get decontaminated within minutes of just looking at the results or your eyes will melt. Erin is objectified and degraded in a way that no male sports media figure has ever had to face, and Rick Sutcliffe, working with her, should know that and, if he can’t support her, at least shut up.
It is amazing and embarrassing that no one on the broadcast crew stopped Sutcliffe. No one cut his mike, nothing, and his partner didn’t stop him but instead ended up playing along. The broadcast team and the network let someone use game time to slobber all over another broadcaster for absolutely no reason.
That’s it, that’s all I have. Fuck you, Rick Sutcliffe. Fuck you, other guy in the booth. You’re embarrassments to my gender.
Update: here’s the video.
USSM/LL Event Information
As you probably know by now, we’re having our 2008 USSMariner/Lookout Landing get together on Saturday. I sent out a big email with information detailing when and where to those who have already registered – if you have signed up for the event and did not receive that email, please say so in the comments section of this entry, and that email will be forwarded to you on Thursday. If you have not yet signed up, we have a few more spaces available due to cancellations, so you can send an email to us and let us know that you’d like to attend. Because I will be traveling on Thursday, you won’t get a reply until Friday, but barring a huge surge of last minute registrations, I’m going to assume we have a spot for you and will get back to you on Friday with the details.
We hope to see you all on Saturday. It’s going to be a good time.
And, just to toss in a baseball fact, Felix Hernandez now has 500 career strikeouts, ranking 12th on the all-time Mariner list for career Ks. He’s 22 years old, and he’s 12th in franchise history in strikeouts.
Interview of The Interview
ESPN gets players to do their dirty work and ask Bedard questions. The answers are about what you might expect.
Piling on
For those of you wondering why Willie Bloomquist was batting second today, it’s becasue the team wanted Jose Lopez to hit fifth. He’s been their most productive guy for a while now and Adrian Beltre was supposed to get a full day off to rest. So, it wasn’t because Bloomquist is a great No. 2 hitter. It’s because the team needed a No. 5 guy and their options were limited. Hope that helps.
[sic]
* You want your best hitters up in the order. If you only did one thing to create a lineup and stacked your guys by goodness, regardless of power/contact/whatever, you’d be pretty close to the best possible one. They get more at-bats. You want your good hitters to get the good at-bats.
* If McLaren was entirely serious about that justification, he doesn’t understand the simplest thing about how to put a lineup together, is entirely unqualified for his job, and should be fired immediately.
* They pinch-hit with Beltre, so that full day of rest thing didn’t quite work out (not that I disagree with pinch-hitting him).
* Lopez is not the team’s most productive hitter lately. It’s Jeremy Reed, or Ibanez, or Ichiro.
* Or if you want the last month, it’s Betancourt (seriously, check out the last 30 day splits)
* Unless you’re evaluating productivity by some strange standard besides “hitting” which is the only thing that should matter in a lineup.
* It still makes absolutely no sense, if you’re going to stick the guy you think is the best hitter in the #5 slot (which itself makes no sense) to stick two absolute offensive sink holes into the #2 and #3 spots. Why not just go up before the game, set fire to your lineup card, and then go tell Felix he’ll have to allow -1 runs if he wants the win?
Someone please fire McLaren and lower the city’s blood pressure. It’ll save lives. I’m serious.
You’re all wrong! Cairo is awesome!
“Cairo’s numbers don’t measure his value”
subhead: Utilityman gets job done off bench even if stats say otherwise
Great headline, there, by the way. I’d love if my job performance was evaluated like that.
“Derek, you failed to do any of the tasks assigned to you all year.”
“Sure, but I got the job done in other ways. I made coffee in the morning, I always make sure the printer has paper on it, I volunteer to drive to lunch every day…”
Because right now, the actual doing-my-job part of the job is the hard part. I’d love to get paid for the peripherals.
TORONTO — If performance was always judged strictly on numbers, then it’s likely Miguel Cairo would no longer have a place in the Major Leagues.
He doesn’t — he plays for the Mariners.
But after listening to Mariners manager John McLaren rave about the 34-year-old, it becomes a little bit easier to understand where Cairo’s true value lies. He can play all four infield positions as well as the corner outfield spots and regardless of where he’s slotted into the lineup, McLaren knows what type of performance he’s going to get.
None?
Isn’t that exactly what they’re supposed to get out of Bloomquist?
“Stats are not what he’s all about,” McLaren said. “He has made plays defensively your best first baseman in the league would be hard to duplicate. He does the little things. Moves runners, he can squeeze, hit-and-run. I’ve always admired him.”
Um, assuming that second sentence is just clumsy and not a particularly ribald innuendo… no. He doesn’t move runners over. And as much as I’m a huge fan of the suicide squeeze and think it’s woefully underused, that doesn’t a player make.
So now we have two “super utility” guys, full of scrap and awesome little thing skills, and the team still can’t score runs, pitch, or play defense. I’m all for looking at the bright side, but could we maybe laud Felix or Ichiro or one of the players that has actually contributed to the team’s success?
He made a good defensive play and laid down a bunt. You could (and yes, this is frequently done) figure out how to make any player look good by citing a couple well-chosen examples. On Tuesday, they “sparked a rally” or “kept the pressure on” with a single, and their take-three-steps-and-fall catch becomes a “diving grab that saved a double” or whatnot.
Cairo is Bloomquist Lite. That as McLaren’s guy he seems to have eclipsed Bloomquist is sad, funny, and a terrible commentary on the state of the team.
This is exactly what I wrote about yesterday
Tie game on the road, top of the ninth. Ichiro’s managed to get on base. Who do you want up?
If you answered “Willie Bloomquist and Miguel Cairo” congratulations, you manage a major league baseball team. It was a near miracle that they managed to get to Raul, who knew what to do with that wood thing you take up to the plate.
In terms of offensive talent, here’s how McLaren constructed tonight’s lineup:
Ichiro!
ass
ass
good bat
contact hitter
unsure quantity
power-only slugger turned into open-stance singles machine
decent hitter mired in awful slump
contact hitter
How do you not get canned for this kind of insanity?