Just For Fun
Marcel Projections for 2009:
Raul Ibanez: .277/.342/.461, .344 wOBA, +6.2 Runs Above Average Hitter Per 600 PA
Ken Griffey Jr: .248/.336/.434, .334 wOBA, +1.1 Runs Above Average Hitter Per 600 PA
Russ Branyan: .234/.327/.465, .338 wOBA, +3.1 Runs Above Average Hitter Per 600 PA
Branyan is the best defensive player of the three in that he’s the only one who should ever be allowed to wear a glove at any position. Offensively, they’re all pretty similar, especially since Branyan doesn’t have the clout to try to fight a platoon. They’re all below average players, with the pretty common skillset of decent-but-not-great-hitter-with-minimal-defensive-value.
The Mariners just replaced Ibanez’s bat in the line-up, and duplicated whatever you thought they might get from Griffey (for better or worse), for $1.4 million.
This is what we’ve been screaming about for years. Undervalued talent is very easy to find if you know what you’re doing.
Adam Dunn gets you to two problems
There’s a lot of chat in the Russell Branyan comments about Adam Dunn. Dunn reminds me of this Jamie Zawinski quote about Perl.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.†Now they have two problems.
There’s a whole class of free agent players like this, and the M’s have made too many of these signings in the past. Dunn’s going to get at least a three year, $30m deal, as Dave noted. It’s likely it’ll be more expensive if not longer as well. In return he’ll produce a nice .250/.380/.510 line next year. Hey, it’s the first year of Richie Sexson’s contract! YAYYYY!! Oh wait.
Say you sign Dunn and put him in left field. He’s maybe and probably not a defensive upgrade on Ibanez when the Mariners need at least a competent glove out there and can get outsized benefits by playing a quality defender. And you get a modest offensive boost over Ibanez. In that first year.
All it costs the team is most or nearly all of what remains of this year’s free agent budget.
Say you DH him instead, and he’s somehow willing to accept the position switch. The average DH hit .256/.339/.435 (and that’s a pretty bad year for DHs, too). That line of Dunn’s would put him in the top tier at his position, and he’s be worth ~30 runs over what the M’s got out of the position all season (actually, more than that, I always forget how wretched Vidro was — 30 runs over what any team should have received by playing a random AAA slugger).
Then the next year, and the next — Dunn’s not fast and doesn’t make contact, and those guys age badly. Maybe you escape the collapse on a short enough deal, but the risk’s going to be there. Just like Richie. We can’t be that far away from that lesson that it’s not on everyone’s mind when you look at Dunn.
At 3y/$30m, maybe you can justify paying him to DH. I don’t think you should, because you can spend that money and get a lot more for it. But you can at least say “we’re going to get one or two wins over an average DH every year, and that’s worth it.”
That’s the minimum it’s going to take to get Dunn. Worse players have in recent years received much better deals, and there’s enough money and interested teams that I can easily see him getting 5/$60m. And that seems low on the money as I look at it. It doesn’t take much to get to 5/$70m. We’ve seen that teams don’t value defense properly — after all, Beltre’s widely regarded as a bust and he might have been the best player on the team last year. Why wouldn’t Dunn’s bat get him something at least that lucrative?
At five years you might as well start thinking about the bread and steak sauce you want on the shit sandwich you’re going to be eating in the last years of that deal.
Meanwhile, think about the M’s long-term situation. We don’t know what’s going to happen with Clement. At the very least the team’s going to need to find a way to get him a lot of at-bats while sharing catching duties. Logistically, that’s a lot easier to work out if he’s getting those plate appearances as DH, though as you’d suspect I’d love to see the team do something a lot more complicated with a multi-headed platoon arrangement (which I’ll spare you). If you don’t know if Clement winds up as a first baseman or DH a year from now and you’re looking out for the long-term, why block another potential position for him with a declining player weighed down with a massive long-term contract?
The Mariners need to be looking to hugely upgrade their defense, and that rules out playing Dunn in the field. If they’re not playing him in the field, they can find a lot more value for their DH and spend that money on other free agents who can help them more.
And moreover, if you think the M’s have a bad clubhouse atmosphere now, and you think it’s important to the rebuild to put together a new winning attitude and cohesive team of positive, hard-working players who work together towards a shared goal, you should not be able to so much as hold the thought “The Mariners should sign Adam Dunn” for long without a matter/anti-matter reaction exploding your skull.
Dunn: your life isn’t worth thinking about it for too long.
Russell Branyan
So, there’s some rumors kicking around (Baker confirms – signing is official) The position player that Zduriencik confirmed has been offered a contract by the M’s is Russell Branyan.
Branyan turns 33 in a few weeks, so he’s not a spring chicken, but he’s got serious power – a career ISO of .255. When he hits a fastball, he hits it a really, really long way. Like a lot of sluggers, however, he swings and misses. A lot. More than anyone in baseball not named Jack Cust – his career K% of 39.8% is staggeringly high. When you make contact that rarely, you just can’t hit for much of an average without a lot of luck – not surprisingly, Branyan’s a career .230 hitter.
He’s all about walks and home runs and hoping you can live with the strikeouts and the low batting average. Most teams can’t, so he’s never been given a full time job in the majors, but he’s been productive in limited action.
His MARCEL projection for 2009 is .234/.327/.465 – that’s probably pretty close to what you should expect from Branyan if the M’s made him their regular first baseman against RHP. He can’t hit lefties to save his life, so he’d have to be platooned. You’d probably want to have a defensive replacement for him as well, as he’s not a great glove guy.
Overall, Branyan’s a nice little role player, probably a +1 win guy compared to a replacement level first baseman. His ability to kinda sort play third base in a pinch is a nice bonus, and he’s the kind of hitter that Safeco was built for. On a one year, low money deal, he could be a decently productive stopgap until the organization finds their first baseman of the future.
The nice thing about a Branyan acquisition is that it wouldn’t stop them from getting other, more talented players at a later date. He’d fit in nicely as a reserve infielder/pinch hitter if they found a better, long term option at first base, and he’s used to coming off the bench, so you don’t have to worry about him throwing a fit if he’s not the starter come next summer.
Thumbs up for Zduriencik’s first signing – this is exactly the kind of move the Mariners need to be making.
The one-week check-in on the scholarship
Before the holiday, I started the Dave Cameron Memorial Scholarship Drive after my co-author Dave lost out in an internet polling for a $10k blogging scholarship (an outcome which still makes me angry). Anyway, in response to suggestions I launched the drive, and I offered to match the first $500 in contributions, someone else set up a tracker widget on Pledgie…
So, a second and probably final pitch: all contributions go to Dave except what Paypal skims.
We’re actually somewhat ahead of that, by at least my match. This whole thing fills me with happiness towards humanity (which if you know me is probably disconcerting) but the way that whole poll saga unfolded left me pretty disappointed and angry… and to see this directly positive and helpful response from the community, both in the suggestion and the follow-up, is heartening.
Instead of being click-based, this is merit-based, where you can directly contribute to his college education and down the road, when Dave posts some gigantic, awesome economic analysis of player contributions or team win values, you can read it and think “I helped with that”.
Unless he gets into Ayn Rand and leaves us all to the free market or something. I’ve obviously bet against that myself, so… join me in contributing.
And again — if you want to give Dave some cash directly, email us and we’ll work something out. Contributions are not tax-deductible because I have no idea how to arrange that on short notice.
The Mariners and the Sounders
I’ve been thinking about this coming season and the new team in town.
First:
I may be one of their ideal target fans: I find some of my favorite qualities in baseball in soccer (really), in particular the unbroken action unfolding, along with some of what I like when I watch football. I can see how I’d be recruited into watching the first season. And it may be a product of where I work, but I know more people there who are soccer fans than follow the M’s actively any more. And the place goes nuts for the World Cup. I personally know more people who have put down money for Sounders tickets than I do remaining Mariners season ticket holders. All anecdotal, of course — and yet it was strange when I realized that.
Still, I’m not sure concern about possible M’s impact are justified. How much business could an expansion soccer team really be expected to pull off the Mariners, anyway? The M’s have drawn well when the Seahawks have drawn well, they did well before the NBA decided to stab the town in the back repeatedly.
But the Sounders season runs April through October. Their draft is in January, when the M’s new rebuild will be in full swing and I may have cranked up the USSM Labs server to start doing sims with Diamond Mind again. They have a broadcast deal in place to televise the games on KING or KONG. They’re entering the market at a time when the Mariners have been sucking, and sucking in a not-at-all-entertaining way, for years, with that season of false hope thrown in for extra soul-crushing measure.
And admittedly this will be anecdotal and probably say more about where I spend my days and who my friends are, but I know more soccer fans at work than baseball fans, and I know more people who have no interest in baseball who put season ticket deposits down for the Sounders than I know current season ticket holders for the Mariners. So Expedia’s soccer mad, and the M’s fans I know probably run towards the dissenting, but it was still shocking to realize that.
But LA only draws 26,000 a game and they’re huge in MLS terms. That didn’t hurt the Angels or Dodgers any. The MLS average is about 16,000. The lowest, Kansas City, was under 11k. Florida, the worst draw in the 30-team MLB, drew better than the average MLS franchise as they try to expand into lucrative, hospitable markets one at a time.
The M’s drew 28,761 a game last year to see a wretched team I’d only have sent people to one or two games out of five, and I’ll watch any baseball I come across. While they might see another decline, especially if they clearly shift into rebuild-for-the-future mode (and there’s some segment of the fan base that sincerely bought the yearly song-and-dance and purchased tickets based on that), it’ll be hard for them to drop below two million as long as Seattle has nice summer days for people to head out to Safeco Field and enjoy. And right now, as interested as I am to see how the Sounders fare, there’s no way I’d miss a Felix home start over a Sounders game.
But this is the Sounders’ opportunity: if the M’s don’t win next year after these miserable seasons, maybe novelty can compete for mind share, get coverage on the sports pages, and start to build something. Maybe some portion of the disaffected season ticket holders move over and like it. And then they’re competing in the same season for seat and box revenue, for media money, and eating into the M’s base. This may be the best chance a soccer team has: a unique opportunity to open new as a major sport franchise has left town and the one playing next door in the same season sees its fanbase erode over five years. We’ll see if they capitalize on the opportunity, but this is going to be an interesting year in Seattle sports.
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M’s Officially Offer Arbitration To Ibanez
Per LaRue: Woo! Draft picks, here we come.
Also, Lee Tinsley was hired as the first base coach, and Ty Van Burkleo will be officially introduced as the new bench coach.
Obvious question
This signing could be significant for the Mariners beyond the mere numbers Tazawa does or doesn’t put up. It used to be that Seattle was considered the destination of choice for Japanese players. At least, that was the perception. But I don’t think we can say that’s the case any longer. Whether it was Kei Igawa choosing the Yankees over the Mariners two years ago, Hiroki Kuroda picking the Dodgers over Seattle a year ago, or now Tazawa opting for Boston, it’s becoming obvious the Mariners can no longer rely on reputation or connections from ownership alone to lure Japanese players.
This team has taken a hit image-wise. And in the end, today’s modern Japanese players may be more like Americans than we think. In the end, they may pick the places offering the best money and the best chance of winning. The Mariners might do well in one of those aspects. But the other one has not been a factor in these parts for several years. One more thing at stake for Jack Zduriencik and company as they move forward. Because Tazawa, no matter what he turns into, was certainly not a bank buster.
Do you think that no-longer-sterling reputation has anything to do with the controversy generated by a blind-sourced story which alleged that the clubhouse fractured against the Japanese players, that Ichiro was so hated that his safety was in jeopardy and the team called a meeting over it*?
Because that seems like the kind of thing that would hurt a club’s ability to recruit talent from that country.
Weird it’s not mentioned there.
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Last day to offer Raul arbitration!
Rumor over at Pravda is that they’ll do it. We’ve written about this before, it’s a gimmie. He accepts — unlikely — and the team gets him back on a one-year deal, can plunk him down at DH, and pays a good rate. If he declines, they get some draft deliciousness thanks to MLB’s crazy compensation system.
Do it! Do it!
Also, they could offer to go to arbitration with Bloomquist and Cairo, if they were crazy. Bloomquist has made just shy of $4.5m wearing a Mariner uniform so far. It’d be great if they could stop giving him money.