Us
Meta
Reference Material
The Future Forty 3/19/09
Evaluating Defense Evaluating Pitcher Talent
Evaluating Managers
Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever Selected for Best American Sports Writing!
The Attrition WarDisclaimer, Copyright
The U.S.S. Mariner is in no way affiliated with, condoned or given any notice by the Seattle Mariners baseball team, who have their own website. Similarly, we have no association with the ownership group or any businesses related to the Mariners. All article text is written by the authors, all pictures are taken by the authors, who retain copyright to their works. No copying or reproduction of any content here, photographic or otherwise, is authorized. Please email us if you wish to reproduce our work.
-
Recent Posts
- The AI Has Taken Over
- ’22 40-Man Preview Extravaganza
- ALDS Game 3: Astros AT Mariners – Welcome Home
- ALDS Game 2: The Pitch and What Follows
- ALDS Game 1 – Series Preview
- Recent Events Fill Mariners Fans With Unexpected Emotions
- AL Wild Card Series Game 2: The Ray Game
- AL Wild Card Series, Game 1: Here We Go
- AL Wild Card Series Preview: The Battle of Robbie Ray
- Game 162, Tigers at Mariners
Author Links
Local M's Coverage
M's Blogosphere
M's Official Sites
Resources
Twittah
I voted Batista. I didn’t watch games when he pitched.
Dylan, that was awesome.
I went with Batista on gut feeling, but then thought “hey, use WPA/LI to decide it.” While I’m off gathering the numbers, I check here and see you’ve already done it. Bravo!
Yes, Batista. Put another way, he’s appeared in 35 games so far. He’s had a positive WPA in 9 of them, and 5 of those were in relief (nice of him, but he’s paid to be a starter. Not even Proven Closers get his kind of money). Of his 20 starts, 4 – four! – have had positive WPA. In half of them, his WPA was -20% or worse. HoRam last year had 20 starts, and posted 6 with postive WPA. So Batista < HoRam.
#50 – “Players say and do stupid things all the time, so I’m not sure why I found Silva’s antics so particularly sickening.”
4 years/$48M with a $5M signing bonus and a suite when on the road would do a nice job of magnifying the sickening for me.
I’ve read all of the debates and just have to ask: Do I really have to pick just one?
Results after 1660 votes:
Silva 33%
Batista 13%
A comparison of their respective FIP:
Silva: 4.59
Batista: 5.96
I disagree with the result of the poll for those two players. Silva has pitched about as well as can be expected (roughly league average) while Batista has plainly sucked.
Where’s the love for Batista? His numbers are far worse than Silva’s. I didn’t know that was possible…
Seeing that the question was “worst performance” — with no mention of it being relative to contract or expectations — I find it amazing that Batista is only at 13 percent. He’s been far worse than Silva.
That was very difficult…and add on top all of the write-in possibilities (Sexson, Wilkerson, Betancourt, the injury twins Bedard and Putz)…
It was between Batista and Silva. I went with Silva. For what he is being paid, and what he was expected to be able to contribute…he deserves the vote more then a 38 year old, who at least can pretend like age has something to do with his abysmal collapse.
I don’t know if the contract question should matter much between Silva and Batista, seeing as Miguel isn’t exactly making chicken scratch this year. Silva’s been dreadful, but Batista has been nothing but a drain on the bullpen and opponent’s legs as they keep getting to jog to first base.
For vj @55
Silva has pitched worse than his FIP suggests. He has a LD rate of 22.5%, which is actually higher than his disastrous 2006 year. He simply has not given up as many home runs, which is why his FIP shows him pitching league average, but a 22.5% LD rate for a no-longer-ground-ball-pitcher is not good. Much worse than “average” or “mediocre.” That said, Batista has been worse, but let’s not pretend that Silva has been pitching as advertised. Graham’s tRA is a better stat overall, but it is especially better for people like Silva that are pitching worse than their FIP suggests.
That said, Batista is still probably the worst, followed by Johjima and Betancourt.
This was incredibly difficult, but in the end I went for Batista. Silva I honestly didn’t expect much out of (though he hasn’t even given that), but Miguel has gone from serviceable to “Holy God I never want to see him on the mound ever again, it’s just too painful to watch.”
Joh, for being the biggest disappointment. We knew the other guys could suck. Well, EOF I thought would be good but relievers have bad seasons so there’s that.
I picked Johjima cause he is the only one I didn’t expect to suck atleast a little.
Tuuurrrrrrbooooooooooo! The Designated Hitter who was a Professional Hitter who couldn’t manage to hit much of anything.
By far Vidro. I’ve been watching the team since the late 80s…I can honestly say Jose Vidro is my least favorite player to EVER wear an Ms uniform…I’ve never yelled at the tv over another player as much as I did when that waste of oxygen was batting clean-up and he’d hit into the double play…I’m getting worked up thinking abou it right now!
I don’t see how contracts or expectations have anything to do with it. I guess it’s just a matter of interpreting the question. Turbo was clearly the Least Valuable Player, for what that’s worth.
I think it says a lot about the lack of smarts in team leadership that the first half season starting DH and starting firstbaseman, both of whom were right in the middle of the lineup day after stinking day, are both out of baseball in the second half of the season.
Silva at least provided a decent start or three out of the gate before he started sucking and threatening teammates. Vidro, aside from sporadic WTF moments of productivity, was a black hole from wire to wire.
“Silva at least provided a decent start or three out of the gate before he started sucking and threatening teammates.”
Greatest qualifying statement ever.
Without Richie the poll lacks legitimacy.
I disagree, I think it makes it more interesting. Like asking who is the best golfer in the world, but excluding Tiger Woods. Okay, so maybe there should be an explicit Richie exclusion clause below the radio buttons.
We USSM readers really excel at turning even the simplest things into a big orgy of semantics, eh?
And it says even more about the lack of smarts that there wasn’t a Plan B for either one of them. Even after Sexson’s disasterous second half last year, the M’s broke ST without anyone to take his place if he didn’t rebound. Or was that Mike Morse? At least there are guys to plug in for Batista and Silva.
My order:
Yuni
Batista
Joh
Vidro
Sexson
Silva
EOF
I’m with Graham — how can Yuni NOT be on this list???
“Without Richie the poll lacks legitimacy.”
Yes, because if there’s one thing online polls have, it’s legitimacy.
To everyone who voted for Vidro: Johjima’s VORP is a team-worst -11.4. Granted, some of that is probably due to the fact that Kenji is still being allowed to play, and Vidro isn’t. But consider also that Johjima, unlike Vidro, was pretty much a complete surprise. His four-year contract extension was nuts for a catcher at his age, but he had a VORP of 22 last year, and 24 the year before that. He is already 20 runs below his 50% PECOTA. We all pretty much knew that Vidro was headed in this direction, even if Bavasi apparently did not. But Johjima? He is underperforming his 10th percentile VORP. His suckage with the bat almost defies description, and I actually like the guy. And I freely admit that his defensse compensates a lot for his bat. His WARP-3 is actually positive (1.9).
But his performance has still probably been the most damaging on the team, because management could not have expected it.
I admit I voted for Eric O’Flaherty…
I figured (from the players perspective), how could it have been much worse then coming off a good season, getting totally blown up, everyone thinks you suck, and you end up in Tacoma for the final 5 1/2 months of the season.
Man that would be the worst… You just gotta feel for the guy, at least the other guys are still in the league.
Runners up: Kenji, Batista.
Vidro aught to know he’s on borrowed time, and should be simply enjoying the fact that he gets to continue to play baseball professionally.
I was torn between Batista and Silva — on one hand, Silva has allowed an amazing number of hits per innings pitched, but then I realized how awful the defense behind him is. Batista has more walks than strikeouts…73 in 106 innings! Ugh. So Batista won my “ugh” vote.
Kenji has defensive value at catcher, Vidro didn’t have the worst numbers ever (although for a DH, pretty abyssmal)…and O’Flaherty was a result of a small sample size.
I still vote for the guy who had ONE job and couldn’t come close to doing it, an albatross in the cleanup spot.
“But (Joh’s) performance has still probably been the most damaging on the team, because management could not have expected it.”
Could not have expected it based on what? Past performance being a guarantee of future returns? Competitive advantage comes from the ability to make the proper adjustments as the season unfolds more so than from accurately predicting what everyone’s output will be and then riding your predictions to the bottom of the sea, don’t you think?
Joh wasn’t hitting and neither was Turbo, but Turbo was starting almost every game while at least Burke was spelling Joh and getting his non-bat out of the lineup on semi-regular occasion. At this point Joh only has 6 more at-bats than Vidro did before he was DFA’d, and his offensive numbers are only marginally worse. Vidro for Captain Suck 2008.
4-14, $2,125,000 per win (if he doesn’t win another game this year, and that’s a better than even possibility) and then add in the losing starts where he didn’t make it through the 4th… Silva gets my vote
I chose Johjima because he was on the verge of being an all-star last year and now has worked himself into a back-up role. I do have a question. Isn’t Burke the best defensive cather we have? What do you think will happen to him in the off-season?
I used hope as my evaluation basis….
Silva sucked out my hope.
-Batista gave me hope that he’s done as a starter but could still be useful as one of the most overpaid relievers in history.
-Joh had a bad year, but so did Roy Campanella imbetween his MVP years so I chalk it up to being a catcher, and I don’t expect much of catchers anyway.
-EOF was monumentally disappointing, but how much does 1 reliever really affect a team? (Ayala not withstanding.)
-Vidro was a black hole and perhaps the worst DH the M’s will ever see, but he was still (sadly) one of the better hitters available. I blame him more on the managers. He should’ve batted in the 7-9 hole area prior to his release. And, at least he was released….hope for a new DH is preserved.
Silva doesn’t have the stuff to move to the bullpen like Batista could. And he was the third crappy contract the M’s committed to the rotation, thereby destroying more hope than any of the other shitty performances on this list combined.
Nobody said anything about a guarantee, as you well know, and it takes a full season’s worth of date to determine that someone has fallen off a cliff. Joh was well above average in the other years he played. Competitive advantage comes from taking the right risks, and Johjima for this season was one of those. Not so much for next year, which is why you don’t give a catcher on the wrong side of 30 a four-year deal. But ANYONE should have given Joh the benefit of the doubt until at LEAST the all-star break this year. It is doubly painful since management has been so bad at evaluating other players. Johjima was a no-brainer they couldn’t help but get right, and still it went wrong.
Which isn’t to say Vidro was a bad choice for worst, of course. As many people have said: “6. All of the above” or “7. All of the above, plus Yuni, Sexson, and your favorite other sucky player”. There’s no lack of choices on this club.
I’m surprised. I think Batista’s clearly been worse than Silva and Kenji.
It’s a fairly narrow line between Batista and Vidro, though. Either of those could credibly be said to be the worst.
I don’t understand how Silva is leading. Batista has been quite the worse pitcher. I still think Vidro’s the best answer; I just wish it was possible to vote for “all of them”.
(imo)
Biggest disappointment: Johjima
Worst performance: Vidro
Silva silva silva. A million times Silva.
OK I almost voted Vidro, but at least he had a “hot streak” (didn’t completely suck) before we released him. And the fact that we actually released him gave him a couple brownie points.
Silva’s worse for the team (because he makes a ton of money and we have him forever), but Batista’s clearly performed worse this season.
Silva’s tRA+ is 84
Batista’s tRA+ is 64
#52 Glad you liked it. Here are the rest of the M’s regulars (starters and position players).
Player Games WPA/LI *WPA/LI*
Felix 25 +1.45 +1.74
Wash 26 -0.25 -0.29
Bedard 15 +0.41 +0.82
Player PA WPA/LI *WPA/LI* Position Defense Total
Raul 581 +1.41 +1.69 +0 -1.5 +0.19
Lopez 568 -0.13 -0.16 +0.5 -0.5 -0.16
Ichiro 616 +0.03 +0.03 +1.0 +0.5 +1.53
Beltre 556 -0.53 -0.67 +0.5 +0.5 +0.33
To sum up both posts:
Your 2008 Mariners
Stars
Felix +1.74 wins above average
Ichiro +1.53
Average Players
Bedard +0.82
Beltre +0.33
Raul +0.19
Lopez -0.16
Washburn -0.29
Below Average
Silva -1.64
Below Replacement Level
Kenji -3.05
Yunni -3.20
Vidro -3.97
Sexson -4.56
Batista -4.61
Remember this is extrapolating everyone out to a full season.
Of course it was Vidro for me.
I’m shocked that Putz is not on this list… anywhere.
Wait, no I’m not.
The denial continues…