Travel Schmavel
As Mariners fans, we often read quotes like this…
“With our travel schedule, tougher than anyone else in baseball at more than 50,000 miles a year, we have to have a bench, guys who can step in and do the job. If you don’t, you can’t rest regulars the way you have to and you pay a high price in the long run.”
-Bob Finnigan quoting Lou Piniella, Seattle Times, Sept. 27, 1998
 And this…
“Armstrong says 2008 features the worst schedule in club history, and while that’s largely because of travel inequities, the home schedule didn’t do them any favors, either.â€
-David Andriesen paraphrasing Chuck Armstrong in the PI, Aug. 20, 2008
I always kind of brushed these types of comments off, thinking that it was just the Mariners crying in their coffee. I mean, I knew being in the Northwest somewhat secluded the M’s from the rest of baseball, but I figured that the claims were a bit overblown. It’s not like they’re the only team west of the Mississippi—there are other teams on the west coast that have to make road trips to Boston and Chicago and down to Tampa, just like the M’s. But just thinking it was hogwash wasn’t enough for me—I had to be sure. Since I had never actually seen travel distances for major league teams, I had to do the legwork myself…
I created a spreadsheet and started inputting travel distances based on teams’ 2009 schedules. As you may imagine, this is pretty time consuming, so I didn’t do every team, I just tried to get a sample of teams across the country. Obviously I started with the Mariners. In 2009, the M’s will fly approximately 47,183 miles. Not having anything to compare this to, I didn’t really know what to think, but I was glad that the number was close to the 50,000 Lou mentioned.
Next, I decided to see how the travel schedule of an east coast team compares to that of the Mariners. I chose to look at the Phillies and, not surprisingly I suppose, their schedule is a lot lighter. The World Champions will fly about 36,112 miles next season. That’s still a ton and I think about this every time I get off a plane.
But, with so many teams in close proximity, I thought perhaps the Phillies were an outlier and decided to look at a team in another corner of the country—the Tampa Rays. Turns out it wasn’t an outlier and their mileage is nearly identical at 37,685 miles next season. How about a team in the middle of the country? Well, they have it even easier. The Rockies will travel about 31,040 miles this season. I then thought that the only team that probably even had a shot at getting close to Seattle was another west coast team, and I was right. The Angels will travel approximately 43,407 miles next year—still about 4,000 miles shy of Seattle, but it’s a lot closer.
We all know that flying can result in sore joints and muscles, sickness and loss of sleep. Obviously the Mariners are taking more luxurious trips than me, sitting in a cramped coach seat, listening to people coax their whining pets while trying to avoid watching “The Longshots.†I’m serious about the pet thing by the way and, as a side rant, since when are dogs are cats allowed on planes? What if they end up sitting next to each other? And what other animals can you bring? Snakes?
Still, no matter how cushy the seats, how many songs on your iPod or how fun it is to listen to Jarrod Washburn’s ice fishing stories, flying takes it’s toll and a team flying 25% more than others certainly isn’t a prime selling point.
But is it really as bad as they make it out to be? Some quick Googling indicates that it’s only about an extra 20 hours in the air. Over the course of a season, that doesn’t seem like much (just a little over 3 extra hours a month?). Plus, I don’t know about everyone else, but for me the worst part about flying is taking off and landing and the M’s take the same number of trips as all the other teams.
Using the same quick math, the Angels only spend about 8 more hours in the sky than Seattle…over six months. Pretty negligible, if you ask me. Do California teams complain about travel schedules, or just us?
On top of that, what kind of impact, if any, does the extra travel even have? Although I would love to talk to players and coaches about it, signs point to “pretty much none.†One semi-bogus sleep study (from reputable source “e! Science Newsâ€) claims that teams with a three-hour circadian advantage win about 60% of the time (though I’d prefer to see if those numbers hold up over multiple seasons). The only other data I found was from Gary Huckabay several years ago at Baseball Prospectus and he found that hitters put up nearly identical numbers the first day of a road trip to those accumulated during the rest of the trip.
So, much like team chemistry, travel schedules seem like something losing teams tend to blame and winning teams simply don’t talk about. You only hear the M’s talking about the disadvantages to their geographical position, you don’t hear them saying, “You know, we really enjoy the longer flights because it gives our guys more time to bond and build the chemistry necessary to win over the long haul.”
Here’s how the M’s have done on the road the past 10 seasons…
Spring Training Invites
Here’s the list of NRI’s the M’s are going to have in big league camp in Peoria.
Catchers: Jamie Burke, Adam Moore, and Luis Oliveros.
Infielders: Callix Crabbe, Chris Woodward, Oswaldo Navarro, and Chris Shelton
Outfielders: Freddy Guzman and Prentice Redman.
Pitchers: Shawn Kelley, Eric Hull, Chris Jakubauskas, Luis Munoz, Chris Seddon, Dennis Stark, Tracy Thorpe and Sean White.
The guys who have a shot of making the team are Burke, Shelton, and maybe Eric Hull.
Kelley is a potential mid-season callup, depending on how he does in the minors. He’s coming on strong after blowing hitters away in the Venezuelan Winter League to close a very successful 2008 season. If you’re looking for the next out-of-nowhere closer candidate, he’s probably the best bet in the organization. It’s not completely impossible that he’d make the Opening Day roster, but there’s so many pitchers in front of him that it’s pretty unlikely.
Projecting The Staff
We did this with the position players in the aftermath of the Putz deal, but now that we have a pretty decent idea of what the pitching staff is going to look like, I figured I’d follow up with some back-of-the-envelope projections for the staff as a whole.
Based on the current make-up of the roster, I’ve projected out a full season’s worth of innings and various roles from guys in the organization. These projections aren’t based on any intense data crunching, but are more to serve as an instructive overview of what you could expect from the pitching staff as a whole.
Felix is good, Bedard is good when healthy, and then there’s a lot of average or below guys. Maybe you think I’m shorting Brandon Morrow, but I think there’s good reason to expect him to have both struggles and successes as he converts back to a starter full time. Besides, I’m probably more optimistic about Silva than most of you, so that likely cancels out.
Overall, you’re looking at a pitching staff that would project to allow something like 780 runs if given average defensive support. In total, that’s worth about +11 wins above a replacement level pitching staff, with about 40% of that total belonging to Felix. He’s pretty good.
It’s certainly not a great pitching staff. Most contending teams will get between +15-25 wins from their pitchers, so the M’s lag behind a bit. However, remember, these are defense independent metrics. With Zduriencik stating that as it currently stands, he’s looking at Chavez-Gutierrez-Ichiro in the outfield on opening day, the M’s have a chance to get some of these runs back with defense. Even if you think that Betancourt and Lopez will continue to be problems and Branyan/Shelton is unlikely to provide great defense at first, you have to expect the defense to be at least a bit above average. Knocking 10-20 runs off the RA total is reasonable.
So, if we take a few runs away for defense, we’re looking at a team that projects to allow about 765 runs or so. Depending on how many runs you expect this team to score, here’s the projected records you’d be looking:
700 RS/765 RA – 76-86
725 RS/765 RA – 78-84
750 RS/765 RA – 80-82
775 RS/765 RA – 82-80
800 RS/765 RA – 84-78
I currently have the offense projected around a 725 run level, though it seems likely that the team is going to acquire one more position player, and where he fits will affect that total. That’s why I keep saying that this looks like a ~78 win team to me right now.
A contender? No, probably not, unless they get a ton of unexpected breakthrough performances. But this also isn’t a bottomless pit of a roster that’s going to slog through a 90 loss season and has no chance for decency. A true talent 78 win team will win 88+ games about 5% of the time, so even if the team doesn’t improve the current roster at all, there’s a non-zero chance that the M’s could make it interesting next year.
Pay up
I remembered to go back and look at an old post today: “Here’s the Bet”
This off-season, at least one free agent pitcher who has superior numbers to Washburn will sign a one-year deal for under Washburn’s 2010 salary of $10m. And here, I mean numbers indicative of a pitcher’s ability:
* Strikeout rate
* Walk rate
* Line drive rate (and HR rate)
* Ground ball/fly ball split
I predict this year we’ll see at least one pitcher who is clearly superior enough to Washburn to make arguing moot, but here’s our specific criteria: at least 180 IP in 2008, K rate equal or better than Washburn’s, walk rate equal or better than Washburn, LD/HR rate equal or better than Washburn’s. They will sign a deal for one year for less than $10m. Bonus points for 2y under $10m.
Oh, there were skeptics. Dave was one. But I claim my rightful victory.
Randy Johnson pitched 184 innings in 2008. He struck out 22% of hitters who faced him, Washburn got 13%. Randy walked 6% of hitters, Washburn 7% (I knew this would be the toughest hurdle). Randy’s line drive rate was 18%, Washburn’s 23%. Randy’s ground ball rate was 40%, Washburn’s 36%. And they’re both lefties, so there you are.
Randy signed a one-year, $8m deal with the Giants. Sure he wouldn’t have signed here but that’s not at all the point. We were right back in August when we were screaming about what a dumb move Armstrong made to veto his interim GM because he wanted “value” back.
Here’s the value you’re not getting, at current market value: for the money Washburn will cost next year, your new GM could have gone out and signed Daniel Cabrera, Tim Redding, and Brad Penny for next year’s rotation. There’s some potential value for your dollar.
Or, to view this another way, given current market prices to replace Washburn, that move’s value was -$2.5m at the very least. Given what we’ve already seen them do, we know the front office would have been able to spend that bringing in a host of quality minor league free agents, non-roster guys, rehab projects… whatever.
Arrrgghhhhh.
Wheel of mystery Hall of Fame contenders
I wanted to talk about something in the context of the Rickey-inspired Rice and Tim Raines discussions. Here’s a couple of players, but you have to promise you’re not going to hit Baseball Reference and work out who they are before it’s time.
Player A: 12 seasons, .271/.390/.406. 5,015 at-bats, 1,051 hits, 221 doubles, 34 triples, 129 home runs, 974 walks. 100th-best OBP ever (just behind Dave Magadan!). 119th all-time in walks. Five all-star games, finished second in one MVP vote.
Player B: 13 seasons, .291/.401/.444 line. In 6,483 at-bats had 1,888 hits, 311 doubles, 51 triples, 184 home runs, and 1,1191 walks. That’s 60th on the career OBP list, 57 on the career walk list, down in the mid-300s for doubles, the HRs almost doesn’t count. Nine all-star game appearances, one MVP.
Player C: 23 seasons, .294/.385/.425. 7 all-star game picks. OBP is ~130 all-time career. SLG almost #600. 113 in doubles (about to be passed by Alex). 33rd in total walks.
Player D: 16 seasons, .298/.352/.502. Eight all-star games, one MVP. SLG is the 89th-best career mark. HRs the 55th-best ever.
Player E: 13 seasons. .279/.399/.419. 255 doubles, 33 triples, 149 HR. 1,095 walks. 60th-best career OBP. 74th all-time walks. Seven all-star games, one MVP.
Baserunning:
A – 638 SB, 174 CS (15th all-time)
B – 994 SB(!), 229 CS (2nd all-time)
C – 808 SB, 146 CS (5th all-time)
D – 58 SB, 34 CS
E – 703 SB, 168 CS (11th all-time)
So which of these guys belong in the Hall of Fame? Player B is clearly deserving, obviously one of the best hitters and base-runners ever. Player A, Player C, Player E… depends, but those are pretty good cases. If you’re taking the top 100 hitters ever, you’re going to be waffling over whether they get on the list. Maybe you wouldn’t shed a tears if they didn’t make it, but clearly you’re going to look when they played, how great their defense was, and so on. Player D, when you put it like this, and knowing you’re leaning towards denying A, C, and E… well, no.
Player A is 12 randomly-picked Rickey Henderson seasons (79, 81, 82, 86-88,91, 92, 94, 96, 01, 02). Player B is the first 13 years of Rickey Henderson played. Player C is Tim Raines’ career. Player D is Jim Rice, who was just elected. Player E is half of Rickey Henderson’s career numbers.
Rickey Henderson to the Hall of Fame
Awesome. He’s unlikely to wear an M’s cap. Still, I enjoyed seeing him play here, and beyond that as a fan of the game, this makes me happy.
And I don’t want to be a jerk about this, but the people who didn’t vote for Rickey Henderson should have their votes taken from them and given to people with demonstrable brain activity. There is no way not voting for Rickey can be justified.
Win Values For Pitchers
Now available on FanGraphs. Here are some of the relevant M’s pitchers:
Felix Hernandez
Erik Bedard
Brandon Morrow
Carlos Silva
Jarrod Washburn
Miguel Batista
J.J. Putz
Aaron Heilman
Roy Corcoran
Ryan Rowland-Smith
These win values are based on FIP, so if you’re used to evaluating pitchers by ERA, you’re going to get shocked by some of these. I’ll be walking through the process of explaining the calculation over at FanGraphs, so if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts, read the posts over there. Otherwise, knock yourself out.
Innings Eater Value
I know a lot of fans out there are holding out hope that the Mariners will be able to move one of Washburn, Silva, or Batista at some point this year. After all, it was only a few months ago that the Yankeees were willing to take Washburn’s entire salary, and even though the market has taken a big step backwards, the M’s should still be able to pawn off some of the salary due to one of these guys, right?
Maybe not. Tim Redding, the closest free agent resembling Washburn, has agreed to sign with the Mets for $2.5 million for 2009. Redding was worth about 0.9 wins over a replacement level starter last year, while Washburn was worth about 1.1 wins over replacement. Redding got 25% of what Washburn is owed for 2009.
You could make an argument that Washburn has a better health track record, was a little bit better, and is left-handed, so he’s worth a little bit more than a guy like Redding. But not much more. Really, the Redding signing probably caps Washburn’s market value at around $4 million or so. In other words, to move Washburn, we need to assume that the M’s would have to eat about $6 million of his contract right now. For Batista, it’s probably more like $8 million of the $9 million he’s owed, and Silva’s just not tradeable right now.
The team has an overflow of potential starting pitchers, but the ones they’d like to get rid of, no one is going to want. Right now, it’s pretty safe to say that Felix, Bedard, Morrow, Washburn, and Silva is going to be the starting rotation coming out of spring training. Ryan Rowland-Smith and Aaron Heilman should both be prepared to begin the season as relievers, because there’s just no room at the inn.
The first two months, comparatively
With light commentary
Bill Bavasi was hired 11/7/2003
11/18/2003 – Raul Ibanez signed as a free agent, a move all but done on his arrival. We didn’t like the signing, and spend the next five years saying “Pat Gillick was right about his swing and we were wrong”. The timing still stunk, costing the M’s a first-round pick.
12/7 – Hasegawa signed. Lucky season rewarded with two-year deal, Hasegawa didn’t maintain those results. Also, Mike Cameron officially non-tendered to make room for Ibanez in the outfield.
12/15 – Borders signed, Colbrunn dumped for McCracken
12/16 – Guardado signed. Provides a “proven closer” after Sasaki’s injury year and retirement. Contract works out great and then not as well.
12/19 – Spiezio signed to provide proven clubhouse leadership and grittiness. We know what happened.
1/6 – Cirillo dumped to the Padres.
1/8 – Aurilia signed to provide proven clubhouse leadership and grittiness. We know what happened.
Carlos Guillen traded to the Tigers. As Bavasi said, the organization was tired of him. Still, it’s the GM’s job to weigh the potential headache against benefit and get value. We know what happened.
What’s clear in two months of the new GM: huge value on roles like closer, on veteran leadership and proven ability. Some of those moves work out, some don’t matter, and a lot are terrible.
Jack Zduriencik was hired 10/22
…nothing happens for a while
12/3 signed Russ Branyan in a nice value pickup
12/9 signed Chris Shelton in a nice value pickup
12/10 traded JJ Putz, proven closer, in a 12-player, three-team deal that brought in a lot of outfield defense, an interesting pitching gamble in Heilman, and prospects.
12/11 picked up Reegie Corona in the Rule 5, bought Jose Lugo from the Royals
(and didn’t give new contracts to Raul Ibanez and Willie Bloomquist but offered Ibanez arbitration so he could reap the draft pick)
What’s clear in two months of the new GM: little value on roles like closer, on veteran leadership, and proven ability. Premium on defense, willingness to take on limited low-profile players.
The Jan 10 Recap of sorts
First off, at a high level: four M’s front office guys turned up to talk baseball with ~240 M’s fans on a rainy Saturday afternoon and stuck around for almost three and a half hours.
Three and a half hours. And they refused breaks. What do you say to that?
Besides thank you.
It’s interesting Tony Blengino’s as stat-savvy as anyone you’re likely to see in a major league front office, but he’s also as much about player makeup and work ethic as the other player development folks. Carmen Fusco, the director of pro scouting, goes way back, and he talked about how he came to accept and use statistics. One of the things Dave and I mentioned over and over in the GM search was the need to not get a stathead GM or a scouting GM but a hybrid (and holding up Antonetti or others as examples) that’ll take all the information they can get. Dave’s right — we got one.
I would have paid a lot to see Zduriencik’s presentation to Lincoln/Armstrong before, and now I have a lot better idea of what must have been in it, and would pay more to see him pull it off.
But I think, and forgive me if this is a little touchy-feely, the really interesting dynamic was that they weren’t really always in sync, or on message together. One of the things (again) Blengino discusses is the desire to have different opinions, and you could see that dissent wasn’t couched in “you’re wrong” but “well, also here’s this other side to that…”
I found that telling. One of the disturbing things about the previous regime was the too-frequent refrain that “everyone agreed that was a good move — who could have seen the disaster that ensued coming?” Everyone agreed it’d be great to sign this guy, and he sucked, so wow, that must have been unforseeable. Everyone agreed we’d win the division, and we sucked, so wow, misfortune befell us.
Without giving examples, they talked about that a little, about different opinions and perspectives in the Winter Meetings. If nothing else, that there’s now more voices in the organization should be encouraging.
Generally: as you’d expect, they were a lot cagier about topics than Bavasi was. But then you have to figure the audiences are getting much larger, the M’s brass is aware of them, and the M’s had a dude there taking notes (Zach Taylor, Baseball Systems Coordinator, which they joked about). So no “I’m not going to tell you Carl Everett is misunderstood. Carl Everett is understood.â€
So I’m going to try and paraphrase and sum up as best I can. This is made more difficult because my notes on the questions got gleaned (or cleaned) off the podium.
No comments: free agents either way (so no Griffey), or possible transactions, generally no current roster composition/discussing players (so pretty much passing on Lopez-at-first). But kind of. The budget.
Fields: lines of communication are open, we’ll see (no comment, really)
Wakamatsu — they think Wakamatsu’s going to be tremendous. Raaaaaaaaaaved about Wakamatsu.
Changes in the way the team consults with their statheads, so the baseball research guys have an active part in discussions. The cultivation of reasonable dissent (which came up in the BP interview, if you read that) — they don’t want people to agree. Tango’s encouraged to push ideas and information up. There will be input into Wakamatsu’s strategies.
And on valuation: yeah, Tony’s up on this stuff. Like uh… yeah.
Defense is awesome. The potential to have a stellar defensive outfield again excites them. Probably be undervalued right now relative to offense, but you can see in the market for the no-field outfielders that more teams are catching on (obviously they didn’t say no-field, that’s me). They recognize Beltre’s value.
When’s the team going to be good? Didn’t say. They’re going to make all the good moves they can and push ahead.
Draft: draft the best guys. College/high school, pitcher/hitter, doesn’t matter. I asked about Bavasi’s “two sets of eyes on every prospect†and the massive investment in infrastructure the team’s made during his time. They’re pro-that.
On this draft: they didn’t say much. No hand-tipping.
Bullpen: less role-centric usage. No, really.
Player dev: sounds like it’s going to slow a little, and the push-until-dramatic-failure philosophy’s been at least relaxed. On position switches: as much as possible, they don’t want to move someone until it’s clear that they’ll be switching to the position they’ll be at long-term
On player dev and Felix and establishing the fastball: Iiiiiiiiiii… I’m not sure what to say about this. There’s both “establish the fastball†and “get the outsâ€. And I’m also not sure what to say about the view of Felix’s last year. Huh.
Anyway — yeah, they want pitchers to have a change and be able to throw a good mix of pitches. Talked about Morrow’s mix a little.
Player makeup: looooot of discussion about this. I think I would say “highly valued but they have to be able to play first and foremostâ€. Kind of. Yeah. Trying to find players that’ll reach their potential, all that good stuff.
Platooning: yayyy.
Clement: love the makeup, he’ll be a catcher until he can’t.
Orgs they respect: Twins came up w/r/t scouting and the continuity of philosophy. Atlanta and the continual reloading during contention.
I’ll have a much longer post soon about flying the “under new management” flag, but… yeah, at one point, I essentially said I’d sign up to build software, and I’m as deep a cynic as you’re likely to find without wandering the planet holding a lantern up to people one by one.
Yeah. Huge thanks to them, the Seattle Public Library for letting us rent their fine facility (and for being awesome), Cara and Chris for helping out, and Bill and Jeff for helping work the door.