Welcome to the Mariners, your office overlooks a smoking crater
A partial list of challenges facing an incoming GM, and why whoever takes over needs be half-crazed with ambition and, preferably, backed by an equally insane staff.
As it stands right now, here’s what the team will look like in this offseason, moving around the diamond:
We have no DH.
We have a young, promising catcher and an older catcher who seems to have collapsed entirely after being given a three-year deal.
We have no first baseman.
The second baseman signed to a multi-year deal through 2010 has turned into a defensive sinkhole.
The shortstop signed to a multi-year extension through 2011 has turned into a defensive sinkhole who doesn’t hit either.
You have a year of a good third baseman in which to extend him or find the next one.
We have no left-fielder.
We potentially have a center fielder in Reed, but resolving his situation may depend on the GM’s evaluation of his play.
Then to the pitching:
The Felix dilemma.
Bedard’s around for another year, what do you do with him?
Batista’s signed through next year and stinks.
Silva’s signed through 2011 and stinks.
Washburn’s signed through next year and stinks.
Morrow: start or relieve?
Assembling the rest of the bullpen.
That’s a huge list of issues to be done in the rebuild. Feel free to assign them your own difficulty rating, but it’s clear that while some of these will have relatively easy fixes — finding a new DH may be asking Raul if he wants to hang out for another year, for instance, and first base and left — leaving a lot of that will require a lot of work, and possibly the rapid application of a lot of money.
When they interview GM candidates and ask them “What would you do with the team?” they’re going to need to schedule a lot longer than an hour to get reasonable answers.
Jeff Sullivan @ LL’s been doing some good articles on how to approach the scope of the problems. (one, two). I think any team with the current version of Betancourt/Lopez is doomed to suck horribly, so I wouldn’t rest until that’s resolved, but still– it’s good reading.
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I wonder if we’ll be able to cultivate a 3B replacement for Beltre or if we’ll end up having to re-sign him after next year. I know he’s one of our best players, but I really do not look forward to having to give him 4-5 more years and a raise after he passes 30. I just don’t see him becoming better than he is now after rolling past 30.
That’s what Jeff said. Let me quote: “Here’s the thing: these guys were expected to contend for a reason. And while a lot has clearly gone wrong, I still think the roster has enough talent to fill out the bulk of a 2009 contender.”
High-80’s is not good enough to contend. That’s what I mean about recalibrating expectations too low. The AL West champ has averaged 94 wins over the last five years. The lowest win total was 92. The Wild Card is even toughter – the average WC team has won 95.4 games, and the lowest wins for a WC team was 94.
Jeff fixes four holes in our lineup, and that’s good, but he only upgrades them from horrible to average, and an average team doesn’t make the playoffs. Back to what I said, right now we have maybe five guys who would qualify as at least average at their positions on a playoff team. Only two of them (Bedard and Felix) could, if healthy, be significantly above average (Ichiro as a CF would join them). We can’t upgrade 1B/DH/C/LF/SP3 to league average and be a playoff team.
Maybe instead of WAR (Wins Above Replacement), we should do WBC (Wins Below Cotention). Assume a playoff team has to be a 90 win team on paper, so that an extra 2 to 5 wins from luck can carry them into the playoffs. There are 15.5 impact slots (9 lineup slots + 5 starters + 1.5 for the closer, bench and bullpen). That’s approximately 2.6 WAR per impact slot. Once you calculate a player’s WAR, subtract 2.6 from it to get his WBC (or actually, Wins Above Contention). Every regular who is negative needs to be made up for somehow. Taking the M’s preseason projections from Dave’s Feb post, we’d have:
Pos player WAC
C Johjima -0.35
1B Sexson -2.28
2B Lopez -1.35
SS Betancourt -0.98
3B Beltre +0.07
LF Ibanez -1.85
CF Ichiro +1.15
RF Wilkerson -1.84
DH Vidro -2.19
SP Bedard +1.83
SP Felix +1.36
SP Silva -0.40
SP Batista -0.75
SP Washburn -1.14
Those are the pre-season projections. No one from that list has ourperformed projections, and almost no one has even lived up to projections. In particular, Johjima, Silva and Batista have been significantly worse.
But take a look: lots of negative numbers, and large negative ones. Ten out of 14 that are negative, six out of 14 that are -1.0 or worse. Look, in particular, at Felix and Lopez. They cancel each other out. By having Lopez on the roster, even pre-season-projection Lopez, it cancels out Felix. Washburn cancels out Ichiro. And Washburn’s the #5 starter, and as #5 starters go, he isn’t terrible. But there you have it – he still cancels out Ichiro. Having a #5 starter who isn’t terrible by league standards means a playoff team needs an Ichiro (and that’s an Ichiro playing CF, not RF) to balance it out.
That’s the jist of it. If you expect to be a playoff team, you just can’t have very many below-average guys. You can’t. If you expect to be a .500 team, you can offset a below average guy with an above average guy, but if you expect to be a playoff team, you have to offset him with a superstar.
And when I say “below average” above, I’m not talking about Sexson and Vidro. That’s replacement level. Below average is what we expected from Lopez, what we expected from Betancourt, what we epxected from Silva. If you’re running replacement level guys out there, well, you need two superstars to make up for each one of those.
Unless we can add two or three +4 win superstars to the roster, we’re 10 impact position upgrades away from being a contender. And even if we do add the superstars, we still have to upgrade four of five positions (assuming Silva bounces back and Clement is a league average C).
Assuming that when they take the mound they really are ‘healthy’ or a reasonable facsimile thereof, sure. This year Bedard’s innings per appearance is 2nd worst in his career (not a quality measure per se but surely putting such additional pressure on the bull pen doesn’t add to his value) and his walk rate is way up — both of which I would interpret as indicating he’s been pitching at considerably less than 100% even when he goes out there. So there’s ‘healthy’ and there’s healthy.
If he gets back to 180 innings and 6+ innings per start next year he’s a keeper. 150 innings at barely over 5 innings per start, and with walk issues, I’m not so happy.
Those AL West champs, and to a lesser extent the AL Wild Card teams, have gotten wins against some truly terrible Mariners squads (and some bad Rangers teams also).
So I don’t think it’s quite as easy as just cutting and pasting win totals from prior years.
I’m not going to quibble about the premises of Jeff’s (Sullivan) proposed roster overhaul, he’s got the right idea with his trade Betancourt post. I may keep harping on this, because I think it’s one of the best routes to improving this team.
Oh, I hadn’t seen that post previously, thanks for pointing it out. I agree that leveraging Betancourt’s inflated perception around the league is a good idea.
JM, I think you underestimate the impact of going from a Johjima/Sexson/Vidro/Ibanez’s-defense level of awful to average. Over a full season we’re talking well over 100 runs. It’s huge. And then you throw in a shiny new starting pitcher, and yeah.
But then, the intent wasn’t to build a champion. My (and Graham’s, and Matthew’s) point was simply to show that this team isn’t hopeless, and is by no means in dire need of being blown up. A team with this much money and a fair bit of talent is just never that far away from being good again, given the right ideas. Ditch the trash and add a handful of free agents and all of a sudden you have a team playing meaningful games in September, the construction of which required little in the way of future sacrifice.
what to do, what to do.
the theme of the last few days on KJR has been the oft-repeated word ‘soft’, and everyone was piling on.
Apparently, he should just pitch through it, whether it be mental or physical. Dammit.
Mike Snow,
From the ‘trade Yuni’ post:
Any idea which potential suitor teams this comment is referring to? Maybe two years ago, but who would be dumb enough to trade for him now? He isn’t worth much in return, if you ask me, and if I know that, and you know that, and the list of teams dumb enough to not know that actually includes the M’s, how many other rube suitors could there really be?
I don’t know, but he mentions the Dodgers as a possibility. I have no personal knowledge one way or the other about which front offices know Yuniesky has turned into a pumpkin (literally), and which don’t.
Thanks…yeah, the Dodgers are ripe for the picking…they signed Schmidt and Garciaparra in the recent past, so their talent valuation above the draft level seems somewhat lacking. I heard last night they were inquiring about Eckstein and some other potential fill-ins until they can get a better read on when Furcal will be back, so maybe the iron is hot with them right now. Betancourt and Lopez for Kershaw, Billingsley, Broxton, Kemp, and Loney. It’s a can’t miss!!
Oh, smb, you kidder.
But yes, I think you could probably get some talent out of the Dodgers for Betancourt.
And doesn’t this plan not encumber you too much with lead weights? That it can be upgraded the year AFTER with the +3, +4 win players—and you’re talking championships THEN?
We could be underestimating what it will take to get to respectability WITHOUT mortgaging long term chances.
62-
I’d trade The Double-Play Twins for any ONE of those Dodgers…
Jeff,
Ditch the trash, absolutely. I think we just disagree on where the line gets drawn between “useful part” and “trash”. Or rather, I’m just saying that too many “useful parts” eventually adds up to “trash” and that’s part of our problem now.
Holy Schmoly. Over a 100 runs from three positions? (I’m assuming you mean Vidro-as-1B and not Vidro-as-DH, since I think we can agree Jose Vidro is an average defensive DH(g)). Were Sexson, Ibanez and Johjima really -33 runs each defensively? I’d buy a 60 run improvement going from those guys to average defenders at their positions, but to get to 100, I think we’d have to sign significant plus defenders at all three positions, and plus defenders (especially at C) who aren’t offensive liabilities aren’t easy to find. I mean, absolutely I agree one of this team’s big problems has been terrible defense, but fixing that with average defense only gets us part of the way to the playoffs. If you’re right about the 100 run differential, then that’s about 10 wins, but that also means the 80-84 win projections at the start of the season were too high because the defense was worse than expected, so we’re adding 10 wins to something in the mid 70’s, and are still several wins away from contention. Upgrading Batista won’t get us there.
I guess my disagreement is that, if they’re going to spend that much money, they’d better be building a contender. Or let me just rephrase, if they want me to stick around as a season ticket holder, they’d better build a contender, because the only reasons to buy season tickets (seats at a sellout and playoff tickets) don’t apply to non-contenders.
I’m not saying they have to blow everything up or that there aren’t useful parts, but I am saying they have to blow part of it up and that a lot of what people think are useful parts are only useful parts to a .500 club and not to a serious playoff contender. At least not in large numbers. You can have one or two guys like Lopez or Betancourt, but you can’t have half your lineup filled with them unless the other half is made up of Mannys, Vlads and Ichiros.
An 88 win team is a contender.
Yep; even getting the 2009 squad to a point where they’re playing meaningful baseball in late September would be a big step.
People keep saying what a wonderful player Ichiro is… I wish there were statistics for “at bats resulting in the lead runner being out” and “total runners left unadvanced” kept for the season… Lately he has been doing better but for much of this year I would bet he either led the team or was close to it.
88 wins might be in contention, but there’s a good 88 wins and a bad 88 wins.
A bad 88 wins is the product of a few guys playing above their heads and some lucky breaks. It’s not something you can build on. The Mariners could repeat ’07 next year, but that doesn’t build toward the big picture goal.
I think the M’s have to look at winning the World Series as the ultimate goal, and then work backward from that. The team does have a lot more money to spend than many clubs, and that’s a huge asset. It lets them pursue free agents, pay good players to stick around, and draft guys that other teams can’t sign.
But I think the real key is that, if you look at the teams that have won it all over the past few years, they’ve been built primarily through the draft and the long term stockpiling of assets.
The team does have to be blown up, because as others have pointed out, there aren’t many world championship caliber players on this roster. If you stacked this team up against the Angels, Chicago, Boston, and Tampa Bay, how many positional players do you think those teams would swap, one for one, with the M’s?
Do the same thing with starting rotations, assuming you could only swap based on position (their #3 for our #3).
Well, half the time, yes. The other half the time, they’re close to a .500 club (talking pre-season true talent level 88-win clubs anyway). Right now, I guess a 50% chance would look fantastic, but I think a team needs to aim a little higher to be a perennial contender (NYY have averaged 98 wins per season this decade, BOS and OAK 92). The Angles have averaged 88 wins, but that’s dragged down by two sub-.500 seasons where I don’t think they were legitimate 88+ win teams.
That’s why I think they have to set the bar at 90 or 92 wins going into the season. A true-talent level 92 win team on April 1 will be a contender 85% of the time come September. That’s what I expect from a payroll like the M’s have. An 88 win team is a contender every other year, but doesn’t actually go to the playoffs very often, maybe once or twice in a decade (unless we can move to the AL Central).
JM (66):
(1) This was the roster we constructed given certain constraints, like “stick to free agents” and “keep the roster as realistic as possible”. If we had our druthers Yuni and probably Lopez would get traded, but we wanted to keep things conservative, so we kept the ol’ sack of crap shortstop on the team. Obviously, this is not ideal, but.
(2) 100+ runs overall, not 100+ runs from defense. Over a full season, replacing Ibanez’s defense with average gets you ~25 runs, and replacing Johjima/Sexson/Vidro’s bats with average gets you ~90-110 more (ish. I’m approximating). That is most substantial. Sometimes upgrading from awful to average is every bit as good as upgrading from average to awesome. I feel like I’ve been saying that about this team for as long as I’ve been blogging, but once again it holds true for ’08/’09.
(3) There’s that Billy Beane quote that gets thrown around all the time: “I’ve always said you’re either building something that’s special or you have something that’s special.” He’s absolutely right, and I can’t think of (m)any ways to make the 2009 Mariners look like something special, so that means they should be building for the future. BUT: this is a team that can build for the future while still fielding something pretty competitive. That team Matthew, Graham and I put together doesn’t cost us anything in terms of prospects, and it only costs us a little in terms of money. It in no way interferes with the organization’s development. So what’s the harm? If you can cobble together a reasonable team with a half-decent shot at the playoffs while not impeding your long-term progress, why not go for it?
Center field shouldn’t be included in the smoking crater discussion. Reed is here, he is hitting alright and he has the minor league track record that suggests he should continue to do so. He wasn’t a top prospect for no reason. He is entering the prime of his career and is affordable. He plays good center field defense. The only thing he hasn’t proven he can do is hit left handers. Addressing other, more severe problems should clearly come before replacing the spectacularly adequate Reed.
Does anyone know where minor league splits can be found? Has hitting left handers been a problem for Reed his entire career?
Oh, and Reed is “scrappy.” With him in the fold we won’t be completely devoid of tough-as-nails players who like to get dirty if Willy leaves via free agency.
Not to discount the whole discussion about what to do with the team, because that determines the team’s success (obvoiusly), and this has been mentioned before but…
…doesn’t this all depend on the hire Lincoln and Armstrong make at GM? And do we even trust them with making the right hire even if they know they have to change the team’s philosophy on players and they probably have no clue on the philosophy whatsoever?
And if that’s the case, do we hope that the rumors around Yamauchi-san selling is team are true, and he sells his interest in the team to Gillick, et al. who then cleans house in the FO?
I know that these discussions are out there to fill time so that we complain less and try to have productive discussion on what the team should do going forward, so please don’t hang me for the comment. But it does merit some thought about whether the best way the team changes is to get new “roots” that can help build a strong foundation for the team going forward.
*head in hands*
Exactly.
The reality is, this isn’t Cleveland (as evidenced by Ichiro not punching himself in the face on a daily basis).
There is zero chance that the team will go through a rebuild in the style that team did. The media won’t let them, if nothing else.
And even if they could…is that something you’d want to watch over the next few years? I know I don’t.
The LL plan (sorry for not crediting Matthew and Graham, didn’t realize you’d helped develop it) fields a reasonably competitive team while doing nothing that would impede further building of the team through the draft, international player acquistions, etc.
It doesn’t involve any ridiculous Soriano-for-HoRam style trades or locking up overpriced talent for long contracts.
There’s no downside, and possibly a pretty decent amount of upside. Why not go for it?
Jeff (Sullivan)
Ah, gotcha. I misread “Johjima/Sexson/Vidro/Ibanez’s-defense” to imply “defense” applied to all of them, and not just Ibanez. Sorry, thanks for clearing that up for me. 100+ runs from both bat and glove for those positions is more reasonable. But I’ll reiterate one point – that’s 100+ runs from what they did this year, not what we expected pre-season, so we’re still adding runs/wins to significantly sub-.500 club, and not the low-to-mid 80’s win club we thought we had pre-season.
I should back up a bit and first say I’m not arguing with the roster you constructed – given the constraints. And the one about being as realistic as possible is a major one! I feel like this team needs to add a Pujols and a Halliday, in addition to just patching the absolute sink holes, in order to be where they ought to be. And talking about adding Pujols and Halliday sort of blows through the realistic barrier pretty quickly.
Which takes me back to my main point – since we can’t realistically add a Pujols and a Halliday, we need to upgrade lots of positions a little bit.
No harm, I completely agree. I’m not so much worried about short-term efforts impeding the long-term progress (at least not intelligent short term efforts like the ones you guys proposed, as oppposed to boat-anchor deals like the ones that brought us Silva, Batista, Washburn, and to a degree, Bedard). What I’m really worried about is complacency impeding the long-term progress. Meaningful games in September would be fantastic, considering that meaningful games in early June have been hard to come by lately. But September is just a waypoint. Meaningful games in October has to be the goal, and this team is a long way from regularly playing meaningful games in October. With a few patches here and there, we could get lucky and make the playoffs a couple times a decade, but I want more than that.
I guess I’m greedy. I should think of the poor fans in Kansas City…
Okay, I’m chewing up enough bandwidth. Sorry for hogging the thread guys, I’ll shut up now.
A smoking crater is the perfect symbol for the Mariners. Either that or the USS Titanic as it is about to plunge to the bottom of the ocean.
you really think so? They seem to have all been on the ‘do something’ bandwagon for a while this year …
I’m not sure that I buy Baker’s notion that there might be a bidding war for Bedard this month, though.
blub blub blub
They’re on that bandwagon right now, but they’re not on the “win 60 games a year for the next three years” bandwagon, at all.
Nor will the fans be.
Cleveland had to do things the way they did primarily because of revenue constraints; even if they could get away with it, there’s no reason for the Mariners to follow the same model.
I think we get caught up in how bad this roster is and want to see the Mariners cut half the team because we’re frustrated with them; but it’s not necessary to do that in order for them to start building towards a World Series run in 2011.
Considering this smoking crater only reinforces my belief that, once time has passed and moves made sufficient to allow saving of face, Armstrong will be stepping down, and perhaps Lincoln retiring as well.
Of course that is predicated on my assumption that the board of directors has a keener sense of the obvious than may be acknowledged by others expressing opinions here.
Is Rich Dorman useless? He’s putting up good numbers at AA. However, he’s 30, and we have no shortage of back end starters/long relievers: Batista, RRS, Dickey, Washburn.
Does Michael Saunders have a future in the major leagues?
We’ve seen how burdening the contracts of Sexson, Washburn, Batista, and Silva have been. I’d be really hesitant to throw big bucks at free agents like Burnett, Sheets, or Teixeira.
The elimination of deadweights such as Sexson, Vidro, Cairo, Bloomquist, and the defense of Ibanez, Betancourt, and Lopez will improve the team far more than an addition of a high-priced, high reward, high risk free agent.
A team of Clement, 1B?, Punto (FA), Everett (FA), Beltre, Saunders?, Reed, Ichiro, Balentien or Ibanez–Felix, Bedard, Silva, Morrow, Washburn, wouldn’t hit very much, but then again do we now? The defense would be greatly improved, we wouldn’t be locking ourselves into any more big contracts, and we’d have a lot of average/mediocre talent that we could evaluate. And who knows, maybe we’ll stumble onto a (Nate McLouth, Carlos Quentin, Ryan Ludwick, Cody Ross, Jorge Cantu, David Murphy, Russ Branyan, Luke Scott, or some other surprise).
Really, this all hinges on the GM we hire, because the M’s player evaluation has made all of us fans believe that we could run the team better. If the M’s make a good choice and bring in any one of LaCava, Ng, Forst, Zduriencik, Hoyer, or DePodesta, the future will brighten immediately.
Dorman had his shot with the M’s a few years back. He was getting his sea legs in AAA after a promotion but left his last start due to being unable to get loose. Hopefully he’s fine and it was just a blip, but either way there’s not much expected of him and it isn’t known if he can be productive beyond the AAA level.
Saunders may be a year or two away at best, but his recent progress is quite encouraging.
Ultimately, any GM that doesn’t sell off good prospects for questionable veterans, while signing overpriced veterans, will be a huge improvement over Bavasi.
Not necessary; even though I might not agree with your premises, it’s productive discussion, and I can totally see your perspective.
Well, yeah, of course it’s an ugly situation. I’m reminded of a story attributed to various people:
Subordinate rushes into the boss’ office: “Sir, sir, we have a problem!”
“Hold up there,” the boss says, “There are no problems, just opportunities.”
“Ok, sir… we have an insurmountable opportunity!”
Actually, in some ways this has to be pretty liberating, assuming ownership doesn’t get stupidly parsimonious. As the incoming GM, you’d have about as close to a clean slate as you’re likely to find outside of an expansion team…and expansion teams don’t usually have a top-ten payroll to play with. So it’s a big job, but also a big — though not insurmountable — opportunity. Realistically I think you have to look at it as a two-year plan, because there’s just too much to do and while you’ll be plugging holes you don’t want to commit to long-term contracts based purely on what happens to be available this offseason. So for 2009 I think you give Lopez another year, and you sit on your starters unless you can trade them for some kind of value, and you throw some freely-available talent into the bullpen to see what sticks, and you focus on filling the biggest holes and improving the defense to make the starters look better (which may make it possible for you to trade them high next offseason).
It’s really unfortunate that there aren’t more interesting kids in the farm that they could bring up just to see if they can surprise us, because I think that could retain fan interest even when the team isn’t contending. Morrow fits into this category, if he’s moved to a starter, and 2009 may be an ideal year for him to go through his growing pains in that role. I’d be quite happy to see anybody (beyond the obvious 3 or 4 untouchables) get traded for interesting kids that we might hope to see in 2010.
It took Detroit 3 years to go from 100+ losses to the WS — and their payroll in all three of those years was below the league average. The M’s, with more payroll and the right GM, should be able to match that. But I’ll settle for contention in two.
Now, they just need to find the right GM.
Jeff, was this directed at me? And if so, I guess my comments aren’t welcome here then.
It’s a low bar. The Angels can’t hit.
Wait, what? You’re entitled to your opinion and I made a point of saying that I understand people’s skepticism about this team ever getting smarter.
I just think that it’s helpful to talk about ways that the team could get better if we can all start from the assumption that they WILL get smarter, because that’s what makes any subsequent improvement possible.
Disclaimering every possible roster fix suggestion with “assuming the Mariners learn how to evaluate talent better than a guy throwing darts at a dartboard” shouldn’t be necessary.
Uh oh, the LA Times is saying Colletti may not last out the season. Be afraid.
Ok, I get what you’re saying now, my apologies.
I guess I’m not as optimistic to think that the FO will get significantly smarter to make a subsequent improvement (although I hope they are).
I like the discussion, and the ways people are looking to improve the team. I also have become a beliver in SABR, but admit that I’m not as knowledgable in it as most of you. I guess it might have been off-topic for me to make those comments earlier, but I guess I wanted to look at another facet that could have a direct impact on how much the FO gets smarter. Perhaps since that is not a tangible thing to measure, it’s a bit harder to discuss.
Sure, it’s fine to be a skeptic considering the team’s history.
But we’re also seeing the strongest indications that we’ve ever seen from this team (well, aside from the puzzling Wilson trade, but whatever) that they recognize that their recent methods are putting them in a position where they might be the first team to lose 100 games with a $100 million plus payroll, and that that’s not something they’re OK with going forward.
We’ve seen:
-Bavasi gone mid-season
-McLaren gone mid-season
-Sexson gone mid-season
-Names being dropped as serious GM contenders that never would’ve been part of the discussion a year ago
So, maybe it’s naive of me, but I’m going to be hopeful about next year for as long as the team lets me.
Well, a signpost on whether to ease off or not is to see who will be given serious interviews by the higher ups. Lee P. is a given, but if the rest of them are sabre-friendly people, then I guess we can relax…
But the Salt Lake Bees can!
…
I know I’m late to the discussion (some of us work for a living ;-)), but I look at it like this:
In addition to the initial comments, the M’s also have no bench whatsoever.
They do, however, have a pretty decent and relatively cheap bullpen. And if there is one thing they’ve done recently they should continue to do it is to understand that you can cobble together bullpens without paying free agent salaries for it. If Putz came back and threw effectively after the ASB, I’d love to trade him (even if Morrow were to go to the rotation in 2009), because he is unlikely to be better in 2009 and going forward.
The surfeit of catchers ought to create an opportunity, too. You’d think the Red Sox would be interested in having insurance for Varitek breaking down, just make sure you don’t send them Clement.
I’ve always been a Jeremy Reed fan, but he’s not a longterm solution in centerfield, and a team that gets no power at all from rightfield, shortstop, DH or first base needs more power from centerfield than Reed will ever be capable of.
Has anyone here done the math to determine what it’s going to take to get up to “contention” … It seems not.
I think to just get up to .500, we would have to win the next 45 and lose 24 … that just ain’t gonna happen. And EVEN IF IT DID, we’d be like what … 80+ wins … ???
Vidro needs to be purged IMMEDIATELY as we’ll save money on the buffet (not to mention he’s a worthless piece of [bad word]) … and we need to play the kids to see what they can do.