Game 127, Athletics at Mariners
Smith v Rowland-Smith
Will To Win
One of the frequent criticisms of this organization by fans at large is that they’re not interested in winning, just in making money. In fact, the quantity of comments like that popping up here have increased dramatically over the last few weeks – we seemingly can’t have a thread about anything before someone pops in and says that the team is happy just being competitive and profitable. In this morning’s P-I, Chuck Armstrong responded to a similar question:
“I’d respond that that’s nonsense,” Armstrong said. “Look at the payroll. If you split the big city markets with two teams (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago), Seattle is the 18th-biggest market in the league. The payroll as of the All-Star break was sixth or seventh. That’s commitment of ownership.
“I keep scratching my head — what more could ownership do? If we’d made the right decisions along the way, we’d be right there. If what we were worried about was making a profit, we’d lower payroll, not raise it.”
Guess what – he’s right. The “ownership doesn’t care about winning” line isn’t based on any kind of actual evidence. The Mariners have consistently spent huge amounts of money on their payroll since moving into Safeco Field, and have had the financial edge over the rest of the division for the last decade. If winning was simply based on payroll, the M’s would be running away with the AL West for the 10th year in a row.
Simply because of population density, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets will always be in their own little stratosphere of payroll, with the other 27 teams lagging behind. Take them out of the picture for a second – who else has consistently outspent the Mariners in payroll?
Detroit has a $20 million higher payroll this year, but this was their go-for-broke season when they pushed it all in to try and win this year. It didn’t work, and they’ll be cutting payroll this winter.
Then, there’s a big cluster of teams all right around the $120 million payroll mark – the Angels, Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox, and Mariners. That’s the group the M’s find themselves in when it comes to spending – being dead even with the two Chicago and two LA franchises.
I’m not sure what more people want, honestly. The Mariners are supposed to outspend the Dodgers and Cubs now? Why? Quite simply, if you can’t build a winning team for $120 million, you don’t deserve any more money, or even a job. And that’s the conclusion the Mariners finally came to this year – the problem isn’t the lack of money available to sign talent, but instead, the people in charge of deciding who to give it to.
Now, I’m not a Chuck Armstrong/Howard Lincoln fanboy by any means – we have deep philosophical disagreements with them on how things should be run, and it’s clear that a good portion of the blame for how this franchise has been handled falls at their feet. But can we please put to rest this notion that somehow ownership doesn’t want to win? It’s ridiculous and unsupported by any kind of actual fact.
The Mariners want to win – they just don’t know how. Ignorance is not the same thing as apathy.
Starting Suckitude
Mariners starters versus White Sox this series:
11 1/3 IP, 24 hits, 21 runs, 7 walks, 0 strikeouts, 6 home runs
Washburn, Hernandez, and Dickey faced 63 batters – they didn’t strike out a single one. That’s only slightly worse than the weekend series in Minnesota, when Silva, Rowland-Smith, and Feierabend combined to strike out a whopping two batters.
The M’s starting pitchers have combined for two strikeouts in their last six starts. The odds of that have to be astronomical.
Game 126, Mariners at White Sox
11:05 AM our time. Dickey v Floyd.
Please cross-apply my previous post
I’ve been chewing over re-writing the “Imagine Sisyphus a Mariner” post for a while, and re-reading it, I think I’ll pass: it needs almost no update, though it was posted February of 2007.
How sad is that?
Game 125, Mariners at White Sox
Felix! Woooooooooooooooo! 5:11.
Try not to get whiplash, but check this out.
| IP | K/9 | BB/9 | HR/9 | GB% | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pitcher A | 140 | 5.01 | 2.76 | 1.16 | 36% |
| Pitcher B | 151 | 8.34 | 2.41 | .6 | 52% |
I’ll leave it at that.
USSM redesign request for recs
Hey, I’d really like to spiff up the place and get a nice site design up. Mine is… it’s not cutting it. So — we’re looking for a new WordPress theme, I’ll pay out for it, and rather than put this up on Elance or something, I thought I’d see if the readership had recommendations for design resources.
Random thoughts:
– cheap is good, as our coffers are almost entirely donation-based
– previous WordPress theme work a plus
– Seattle-based a plus
– support in case future WP versions break the layout is extra-good
So please, pointers appreciated.
Wait, wait, what just happened?
I see as if in a fog. My head is… it’s swimming. I… I’m disoriented. I thought he had turned a corner. Didn’t he? I saw it, I became a believer. He’d made improvements… hadn’t he? He had this new pitch, and had made adjustments that stuck, he’d put it all together and turned a corner, the evidence was incontrovertible by any weight of evidence or argumentation.
And then the game… I’ve been staring at the box score hoping that my memory was false, that I’d seen something besides another terrifying meltdown by Washburn, the improved Washburn no less. But no, there it waited until I was ready to accept it.
Washburn (L, 5-13), 4.1 IP, 7 H, 8 R, 8 ER, 2 BB, 0 K, 2 HR.
Woe! Woe is me! Woe is all of fandom! Stolen from us is Washburn the valuable commodity, so precious the M’s were right to hold onto, and now he is gone, replaced by another one of the endless prancing talentless fools that come streaming out of the clown car of the rotation — how did this happen? He was so good since May! Since May!
And then, reaching out for some kind of sanity, I find out that he’s sucked in August. How did we not see this? Why weren’t we informed? Once we sliced the season into the first ten starts and the rest, were we all so blind that the last few were so worthless? Was his splitter so split, his new changeup grip so gripping that it entranced us even as we had crossed another boundary zone, the nebulous post-trade-deadline wasteland where no hope resides?
August: 0-4, 22 IP, 28 H, 22 R, 18 ER, 9 BB, 11 K, 4 HR. 104 batters faced.
That’s a 7.38 ERA! O cruel Fates! Why do you torture us so?
I am lashed, lashed from side to side by the gusting monthly vagaries of Washburn’s successes and failures, I twist in pain as he struggles and exalt in his success, and now — how long will this new, retroactively bad Washburn last? A month? And then what, another roll of the dice to see how he’ll perform for the next thirty days? What kind of sadistic god metes out such punishment?
Is this our penance for some unknown offense to the baseball deities, to watch this month-by-month horror unfold before us, each lash of the whip spaced by four games to nearly heal, powerless to change the outcome, forced to watch other teams pay less and get so, so much more? Is this cruel fleeting talent of Jarrod only intended to torment us more, to give us hope, and let us savor and nurture it long enough that when it is taken from us our hearts are rent anew, and the pain returns to us fresh?
What is it? What did we do?
Yeah, we’re stuck with Jarrod
So I followed up on some of the info from today’s open call, and yeah… we’re hosed.
Major League Rule 10 (c) (4): unless you’re releasing them unconditionally (essentially) you can’t request waivers on a player for 30 days after you withdraw a request. So it’s not just 30 days, it’s 30 days from when when negotiations fell through and the M’s pulled him back.
Game 124, Mariners at White Sox
Washburn v Buehrle, 5:11
I’m tired of everyone hating on Jarrod Washburn just because he’s bad.
Did you know that if you drop starts where he didn’t go six innings pitched while giving up three or fewer earned runs, he has a 100% quality start percentage? Like the win and the save, the quality start should be your arbitrary statistical measure of choice in evaluating pitchers.
Speaking of arbitrary measures, you may have not noticed that Washburn’s been doing quite nicely lately. Despite not doing anything at all differently — his pitches are the same, he’s slinging them right over the plate as usual (see that great Lookout Landing coverage) and yet the results have changed. The answer is obvious: Jarrod’s doing better in a way we just can’t see in the way he throws, the way the pitches move, or in any other way — so he must be doing something different that we can’t quantify, and that non-quantifiable difference is resulting in quantifiable results. Sometimes analysis has to bow down to analysis, and this is one of those cases.
Furthermore, did you know he’s now throwing a splitter? Yup. Just like Silva was and then wasn’t, it’s a key reason why Jarrod’s success is sustainable, a fact now recognized by others).
How good is his splitter? It’s that good. Look through the pitch logs and check it out. It’s crazy. It’s seemingly logged as a changeup, a cutter, and a slider! It’s so deceptive that it has essentially the same characteristics as other pitches. That’s what’s putting the fear into batters. How can they know if a pitch that looks the same has one of two different names? That’s messing with their heads.
9″ of break on that splitter — that’s more than a fastball!
And what about keeping hitters off balance? Since June, they’ve put up a .271/.332/412 line, where before they were hitting .318/.363/.528. That’s crazy improvement! Sure, you’re going to hear from some people who want to tell you that pitchers don’t have that much control over what happens when opposing hitters make contact, and point you to studies by some Voros guy, or Woolner, or whoever, but I’m going to point you to this:
.318/.363/.528
versus
.271/.332/.412
The results don’t lie: when you look at the season in which the first ten starts are weighed against the second part, Washburn has obviously learned how to control the game. You can make up a theory to explain away whatever, but given two theories: Jarrod’s better since a selected date and now because of reasons, and Jarrod’s better for no reason at all, the view brokered by all those people who hate Jarrod for personal or statistical reasons, well, it’s pretty obvious that the first one’s the right one.