Game whatever Angels at Mariners
Santana v RRS. WOOOOOOOOOOOOO RRS stop this losing streak please?
A Punishment of Weeks, Not Years
If you haven’t yet, go read Derek’s fine (but depressing) piece from this morning. Then, before jumping out the window, come back and read this.
There’s a sentiment, strong among many fans, that the Mariners organization is going to be completely terrible until Howard Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong are no longer in charge. They have been at the helm while the ship has run aground, and despite the massive failure of the franchise during the last five years, there are few outward signs that they have learned, well, anything. Their public quotes are still filled with cliches that have little basis in reality, and there’s no disputing the fact that the organization is about 20 years behind most of baseball in terms of evaluating talent and building a roster. When a business falls so far behind it’s competitors, it is always the bosses fault. There is no argument – they have done a bad job of managing this baseball franchise.
However, to go from that understanding to the doomsday scenario that Derek laid out, you have to make a few assumptions that simply can’t be supported by facts.
Assumption #1: They will exert their power over the new General Manager to make baseball decisions they agree with and withhold that GM’s ability to renovate the baseball operations department.
What actual evidence do we have of the ownership making unilateral baseball decisions in the last, say, 10 years? The Johjima extension, certainly. Nixing the Washburn trade. And… that’s about it. So we have an extension for a Japanese player (which I’ll get to in a second) and the overruling of an interim GM. But leaving out the specifics of the deal for a second, why are we so upset about Pelekoudas not being given full authority to do whatever he wanted at the trade deadline? How would our opinions of their actions be different if it was Beltre he was trying to dump instead of Washburn? Would we then hail Armstrong and Lincoln as wise enough to see through the foolishness of letting a temporary employee make decisions that would affect the franchise in 2009 and beyond?
Is it a sign that Lincoln and Armstrong don’t know how to evaluate pitching? Yea, probably. Is it a sign that they’re going to tell the next GM who he can and can’t trade? Unequivocally not. You cannot assume that their actions in overruling an interim GM will be the operating procedure for how they will act with a permanent GM when there is massive historical evidence to the contrary.
When Pat Gillick was GM, his personal theories on baseball were implemented throughout the organization – blow off draft picks, ignore the farm system, don’t sign any contracts longer than three years, spread the money around the entire roster, throw a ton of money at relief pitchers, and trust veterans implicitly while assuming that everyone under 25 is out to steal your wallet.
When Bill Bavasi was GM, his personal theories on baseball were implemented through the organization – spend more money scouting the draft than any other team in baseball, build through the farm system, take big risks with long term contracts in free agency, build a bullpen on the cheap, rush every single talented kid through the minor leagues as fast as possible, and trust implicitly in tools over performance with young kids and track records with veterans.
Bavasi and Gillick are remarkably different, with huge disagreements in how to run a franchise, and both of them were able to implement their ideas completely throughout the organization. The team went from widly risk averse under Gillick to not even bothering to measure risk under Bavasi. They went from holding every prospect in the world in Triple-A for years to carrying Brandon Morrow as a reliever after three innings of minor league experience. They went from an offense of guys who worked the count to the hackingest bunch of hacks who ever hacked.
Howard Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong were in charge of two very different regimes, and both Gillick and Bavasi managed to build their rosters in their own image. How do we reconcile that fact with this idea that they’re maniacal micro-managers who assert their own will over every player transaction? You can’t.
Yes, the Johjima extension happened entirely at an ownership level, and the baseball operations team had basically nothing to do with that decision. But that’s pretty much always been true of how the Japanese player/Mariner team relationship has worked, and to be honest, it’s been a huge boon to the franchise. The original negotiations to sign Kenji as a free agent in 2006 went something like this: “Bill, I want to sign right now. Please give me a contract for whatever you deem fair. Who has a pen?” The rumors about what went on with Ichiro’s posting fee are hilariously legendary, and there was clearly a significant ownership involvement in his decision to re-sign for a below market deal last summer as well.
Even going back to the Sasaki contracts, the Mariners have come out way, way ahead in terms of return on investment of Japanese players. Yes, the Johjima extension is a debacle and probably one the ownership wishes they could have back, but can we really look at the sum of the Japanese ownership meddling and conclude that it’s a huge barrier to the team winning? To the contrary, it’d be easier to argue that the ownership’s history of attracting quality Japanese players to sign for below market deals here has been one of the biggest assets this club has had in the last decade.
There just isn’t the evidence there to support the idea that Lincoln and Armstrong will assert their opinions on roster transactions over the will of the next permanent General Manager. There is evidence that the GM won’t have a very strong say when it comes to the Japanese players on his team, but you can’t really make a case that it’s a franchise crippling problem.
Assumption #2: No good General Manager candidates are going to want to work in a situation where they don’t have total autonomy.
Billy Beane is basically the only GM in baseball with anything resembling total autonomy, and he has an ownership stake in the A’s. Every other GM in baseball has restrictions on what they can and can’t do, and in many cases, they are far more heavy handed than whatever the next GM will have to deal with here.
Theo Epstein has had so many personal conflicts with Larry Lucchino in Boston that he’s already quit once and had to be lured back with contract promises to limit contact between the two.
Kevin Towers is the GM of the Padres, but everywhere he turns, there’s a former GM standing around – his boss, Sandy Alderson (whom he has an interesting relationship with) keeps hiring potential replacements for Towers and giving them positions of power and reporting lines that don’t go through Towers.
The Rangers liked Jon Daniels so much, they made him one of the youngest GMs in baseball – then hired Nolan Ryan to look over his shoulder. The D’Backs have given Josh Byrnes a long term contract as a reward for his job in rebuilding the franchise quickly, then signed Eric Byrnes to a 3 year, $30 million deal that Byrnes wasn’t in favor of. Walt Jocketty ended up leaving his post as GM of the Cardinals due to a division of power that came from ownership. Omar Minaya and Brian Cashman have two sets of demanding owners in NY that don’t really need to be covered here, as I think everyone understands the zoo that is NYC. Kenny Williams and Jerry Reinsdorf have had an occasionally adversarial relationship in Chicago. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Besides Beane, there’s basically no such thing as a GM with total autonomy. The guys who have worked their tails off to get a shot at a General Manager position are not going to pass on interviewing with the Mariners because of the ownership dynamics. This is a false worry – the M’s will essentially be able to pick from a pool of extremely qualified candidates. If their next GM is a bad hire, it will be because they made a bad decision, not because they didn’t have a good one to make.
Assumption #3: They’re going to stop investing in the on field product.
Say whatever you want about the competence, arrogance, and greed of Mariner ownership, but you simply can’t pretend that they’ve failed to properly fund the on field roster. The principle responsibility of ownership is to provide enough capital for a good GM to build a winning roster with, and the Mariners have had more than enough capital to build a winning team for each of the last 10 years. They’re consistently among the league’s top spenders, and during Bavasi’s administration, they supplemented a high payroll with the highest scouting budget in the industry. The Mariners spend a lot of money on acquiring baseball players, and they have for a long time.
They haven’t spent it well, obviously, but there’s no reason to believe that the resources will cease to be provided if a GM is able to spend them more efficiently. Will payroll go down in 2009? Yea, I’m sure it will. And it probably should – with Bedard’s labrum problem, the reality is it would take a perfect off-season to build a contender this winter, so they’re probably not going to play in October next year. When you know that ahead of time, spending a lot of money on the major league payroll isn’t the best use of resources.
But why should we assume that the ownership won’t pony up enough money to find competent placeholders while the new GM develops his next winning team? The Rays were able to pick up Cliff Floyd, Eric Hinske, and Trever Miller for peanuts this winter, filling holes with solid role players because they could offer significant opportunities for playing time. You think free agents were clamoring to sign in Tampa, or that the Mariners aren’t able to match their significant resources?
There’s a huge gap between “the team will probably cut payroll next year” and “the team won’t provide the next GM enough money to build a winning team”. The former is almost certainly true, while the latter is almost certainly false.
The Mariners face a critical winter, no doubt. If they choose poorly, Derek’s scenario below could certainly come true. It’s a possibility that we can’t ignore, but for those of you who want to treat it like inevitable fate, your assumptions simply don’t stand on actual evidence. You can be afraid that the team will screw up this winter, hire a bad GM, and continue failed policies that will result in more losing seasons, but you can’t pass it off as rigorous analysis of what will happen. Fear is not evidence.
The Mariners are hardly the most moribund franchise baseball. Tampa is riding the peak after a valley far deeper than anything we’ve been through. Pittsburgh abandoned their years of poor planning to hire a good GM and change the entire culture of their organization. If the Rays and Pirates can see the light and make the necessary changes, so can the Mariners. This doesn’t mean that they will, but it does mean that if you’re spouting the impossibility of success under the Lincoln/Armstrong regime, you’re wrong.
A punishment of years, not weeks
I like to think that our sentence is nearly over, that we’ve got a few more weeks and then we can enjoy the playoffs, start speculating about our new GM, and thinking about how the team might turn around and finish the season with their heads above water.
I worry that it’s not. I’ve been torn about whether or not to even voice this because it’s so negative, but in the end, I think we have to talk about this. Every time I seriously consider this it makes me want to throw up, or close up shop, replace USSM with a page that says “We’ve been promoting your shitty product for years and years now, and it turns out we have a limit. Call us when you’re ready to be smart.”
In a way, though, that makes it the most important thing to talk about.
Here’s the short version:
– They announce that there will need to be a rebuilding effort after all, and payroll will need to come down (check)
– In the off-season, Mariners hire seemingly decent GM
– No higher-up changes happen: Lincoln and Armstrong aren’t held accountable for their responsibility in the long failure of the franchise
– They dump Beltre for very little
– The team doesn’t make any other significant moves because L/A are unwilling to dump salary even when it’s clearly in the team’s best interest (see: Washburn) and goes into next season with this squad essentially minus Ibanez
– The new GM does a better job at assembling the overall roster and putting a working 25-man lineup together, but
– They stink next year, because there’s no money to spend on $2m-$4m stop-gap and injury-return contracts
– Attendance drops even further
– Wamu and other corporate sponsors are toast
– With a drastically lower payroll and a ton of MLBAM cash, the team makes money
– The “rebuilding” goes on, as the team cuts payroll again, so money rolls off (like the Washburn contract) but is not re-invested
– The team makes more money
– Maybe the GM gets fired at some point
– Four years from now, after nearly a decade in the dumpster, the Baseball Club of Seattle either sells out or is re-organized and new owners seize control
– The new owners take over a team with newly-horrible media deals, Felix gone, Ichiro gone, and the only good players in the farm system the products of continually high draft positions
– Hope
“Rebuilding” will be a cover for how bad they are at putting winning teams on the field, a continual excuse for bad records, and at the same time justification for not spending while taking money out of the team through the back door.
I’ve tried not to engage in the “as long as Lincoln and Armstrong are here, there’s no hope” pessimism, but it’s an entirely valid viewpoint. They hire the new GM. But they’re entirely unqualified to do so. And even if we’re lucky and the right candidate makes an absolutely stunning presentation and is hired on the spot, we’ve already seen that they believe their baseball judgment is better than whoever they have in the job.
Consider how depressing that is: the maximum effectiveness of any GM candidate is likely to be determined by the baseball incompetence of Chuck Armstrong. Or: they can’t be smarter in running the team than Chuck is dumb in approving or overriding their decisions.
A point I haven’t made much that backs this up– the Mariners ownership consists essentially of Lincoln for Nintendo of America (and really, for Yamauchi). They’ve recently tried to sell the idea that the minority owners are somehow involved in the team — probably to spread blame more than anything– but this isn’t true. They have minority owners who have massive tech chops, and they have no say at all in the team’s operations. They have a stake in the team, their interests are aligned, but Lincoln’s never reached out to them for help, say, the wholesale construction of the kind of data infrastructure the Indians have.
Armstrong believes himself a sabermetrician, good enough to justify his team’s horrible ignorance of new statistical methods, and he’s not.
Armstrong believes himself a baseball talent evaluator and a better negotiator and a better GM at least than the man he put into the job, when Lee Pelekoudas worked for the team since ’79, and worked himself into the front office, and Armstrong got his because he knew George Argyros.
And this is my greatest fear, that he and Lincoln will run and gut this team for the years no matter what name appears on the front office page as “general manager.”
Graphing Morrow 9/21
Morrow pretty much defined the “establish the fastball” mantra today. His first 12 pitches were all fastballs between 93 and 97 mph and Johjima put down one finger for 26 of Morrow’s first 30 pitches. The first time through the lineup, every A’s batter saw a first-pitch fastball.
It didn’t hurt Morrow this time, as he pitched well through the first six innings. But if he continues to start off every game with basically 30 fastballs in a row, well … we’ve seen how that can turn out.
Another interesting thing is this: look at how his fastball just dies after about 80 pitches. It’s a lot easier to get by throwing 70 percent fastballs when you’re blowing them past guys at 95, 96, 97 mph. When those fastballs dip down to 91-94, it makes it a lot easier for hitters to get around on them.
Game 155, Mariners at Athletics
Morrow v Gallagher. 1:05.
The horrible thing for me is that without looking, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you how many games in a row the team’s lost. I’ve accepted the losing without much complaint, and when I turn off the TV after each road loss, I think “Was Sims right– is that nine?” and then move on. But writing this, I realized that their longest winning streak was only four. How unbalanced. No wonder we’re so beaten down. Last year there was a 9-game, but they also put together sustained winning streaks we could get behind.
I wish Morrow the best of performances and a reasonable lineup behind him.
Felix 9-19 start in one graph
Looking at the Pitch FX data for yesterday, I wanted to do another series of graphs showing what Felix’s stuff looked like, and I don’t think you need them at all.
In the first inning of yesterday’s game, Felix threw three fastballs to Buck. Then two fastballs to Cunningham. Then two fastballs, two “splitters” and two fastballs. Looking at the list, I immediately saw a huge almost-purely fastball streak, and counted it. Of his first 33 pitches, seven weren’t identified as fastballs (and then he threw two changes).
Here’s a version of the graph Dave’s offered a couple times:
That’s the only thing you really need to know about the start. At about pitch 50 after Kurt Suzuki singled to left (fastball-slider-single), Felix started to mix his stuff up. The A’s didn’t score again.
To that point, Felix had 3k (two of Cust), and every other batter put the ball in play — Buck for a home run. 14 hitters, 3 strikeouts, 11 balls hit. After he starts to mix the pitches, he faces 17, strikes out five, walks one, and 11 balls are put in play.
Felix throwing almost nothing but fastballs is a pretty good pitcher. Felix mixing his pitches is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Why he, and the team, continue to think that he should work on establishing and relying on the fastball is beyond me. The scouting report on him must be “he’ll throw almost nothing but gas for three, maybe four innings — key up for that fastball and hack, hack, hack, because this defense sucks and the ball will find a hole.”
1198 days until Silva’s off the books*
Ichiro isn’t the only player on this team making history. Observe…
 Highest ERA for Mariners pitchers with at least 150 IP
- Carlos Silva (2008): 6.46 (and counting)
- Ken Cloude (1998): 6.37
- Joel Pineiro (2006): 6.36
- Joel Pineiro (2005): 5.62
- Jamie Moyer (2000): 5.49
- Sterling Hitchcock (1996): 5.35
- James Baldwin (2002): 5.28
- Glenn Abbott (1978): 5.27
- Jamie Moyer (2004): 5.21
- Ryan Franklin (2005): 5.10
I expected to see more guys from the early Kingdome years on the list. That’s pathetic.
Same thing, but looking at all pitchers from 1961-2008
- Jeff Fassero (1999): 7.20
- Jose Lima (2005): 6.99
- David Cone (2000): 6.91
- LaTroy Hawkins (1999): 6.66
- Jose Lima (2000): 6.65
- Darryl Kile (1999): 6.61
- Ken Schrom (1987): 6.50
- Eric Milton (2005): 6.47
- Carlos Silva (2008): 6.46
- Ken Cloud (1998): 6.37
Game 154, Mariners at Athletics
26 innings and counting
The M’s haven’t scored a run since the first inning of their game on Wednesday. The Tacoma quartet (Lahair/Tui/Valbuena/Johnson) just don’t resemble anything like major league players, which shouldn’t be a huge surprise, since none of them were all that great in Triple-A.
The new GM is going to have to bring in about 15 new players this winter.
Game 153, Mariners at Athletics
7:05, Felix versus Eveland.
I’ve been the “coordinator” for a project at the day job that’s devoured a lot of my life for the last couple of weeks. It’s why posting’s been off since that last deluge, and why I’ve probably seemed more curt than is usual even for me. This final week it looked like it was going to come in, crash, work out, and today, with ~18m to spare, it worked and we were waved on to release.
And now I get to sit back with a quality beer and hopefully watch Felix carve up the A’s. I’m really looking forward to this.