The Template For Success in 2009
We’ve talked a lot so far this winter about how well we think the new regime has handled the roster, rebuilding with quality young major league talents, finding low cost players with real upside, and aligning the team so that the defense complements the pitching staff. However, questions still remain about how the team is going to score runs, and ultimately, win games. Can you contend with a shortage of offense, a good defense, and mediocre pitching?
The 2003 Mariners say that you can. Six years ago, the Mariners ran out a line-up of defense-first position players and surrounded them with an average rotation and turned it into 93 wins. Seriously, take a look at some of the production the M’s got that year.
Catcher (Wilson/Davis): .235/.276/.354 in 610 PA
Third Base (Cirillo/McLemore): .243/.321/.340 in 654 PA
Left Field (Winn/McLemore): .277/.330/.401 in 687 PA
First Base (Olerud): .265/.361/.389 in 701 PA
The Mariners got a combined 42 home runs and a .372 SLG% from those four positions. They had a first baseman with no power, a left fielder with no power, and got nothing offensively from either catcher or third base. Ichiro had the third highest slugging percentage among the starting nine. Ichiro!
The offense was essentially Bret Boone (.387 wOBA), Edgar Martinez (.386 wOBA), five guys right around league average (Cameron, Ichiro, Winn, Olerud, and Guillen), and two huge holes. The team hit 139 home runs, 13th out of 14 AL teams, and only 2 HR ahead of the least powerful team, Tampa Bay.
Despite the lack of power and only two guys who could claim to have had legitimately good offensive seasons, the team scored 795 runs. Boone going nuts and Edgar’s last stand, mixed with a bunch of guys who didn’t have any power but didn’t make a lot of outs, along with two black holes in the line-up added up to an above average offense.
However, the strength of the team wasn’t at the plate, but instead, at the field. They were the best defensive team in baseball, racking up a +52 UZR. Thanks to their outstanding gloves, the team had the second best ERA in the American League despite a pretty mediocre pitching staff. The rotation just wasn’t that good – Pineiro (3.93 FIP), Moyer (4.01 FIP), Meche (4.79 FIP), Garcia (4.82 FIP), and Franklin (5.17 FIP) comprised a group of a pair of decent mid-rotation starters and three guys who were on the fringes of being bounced from the rotation entirely.
However, the M’s got a 3.92 ERA from the rotation despite their 4.54 FIP. The Winn-Cameron-Ichiro outfield made mediocre pitchers look excellent, and the team kept runs off the board as well as any in the American League. By only allowing 3.9 runs per game, the M’s won a lot of low scoring contests, making up with their gloves what they lacked with their bats.
13th in the league in home runs. A 4.54 FIP from their starting pitchers. 93 wins.
The 2009 Mariners aren’t going to score 800+ runs. They might not score 700+ if the team doesn’t land one more quality hitter. But, if they commit to running out a Chavez-Gutierrez-Ichiro outfield and the middle infield gives some better glove performances (either by improvement or by more innings for Cedeno), this defense has a chance to be very, very good. The pitching on this team is better than the pitching that was the ’03 staff. There’s run prevention talent on this roster.
If the Mariners are going to contend this year, it’s going to look a lot like 2003.
Comments
68 Responses to “The Template For Success in 2009”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
This is basically a .500 team. The “path to success”, as it were, is a little bit of luck for the team where we get into an 85 win range, plus a down year for the division- basically, we need the 2009 AL West to look a lot like the 2006 NL Central, or 2005 or 2008 NL West.
Since full seasons in 1996, there’s only been one year where the AL West winner has failed to win 90 (1998), but it’s a new year.
The number that stands out (which of these is unlike the others) in the four positions where we got minimal offense in 2003 is still Olerud’s OBA. Carlos always also had a good OBA (.359 in 2003) as well. Dave describes it as not making a lot of outs, but I’d say that the characteristics of that team were getting to a lot of balls, handling them well and getting on base. The teams OBA of .344 was fourth in the league.
I’d love to have all of those characteristics in 2009, because they’re all good foundations to build on.
Bees!
The thing I remember the most about that season (besides the low 65 errors) was that we were MORE than 35 games above .500 at one point (116 wins) in the second half but then finished only 12 games over (93 wins).
I don’t have any new fancy numbers to throw out, just what I know. I have a hard time seing the comparison. The 2003 team had older guy’s that knew how to win close games. We are loaded with young guy’s with “alot of upside” and not much experiance.
The bullpen was great in 2003. Can anyone explain to me with your numbers how this bullpen we have right now isn’t going to be one of the worst in the league?
The only way this team does anything this year is if the West is horrible and we win alot of close games. I don’t see either happening like everyone else does. Angels still look alot better than us even with all of our upside.
What am I missing here? This team looks horrible to me besides our SP. I’m already looking forward to next year. Maybe I just need to spin it another way…that’s the new thing right?
If i remember correctly the 2003 bullpen was pretty outstanding. Shiggy had a career year with alot of great appearances by Mateo, Rhodes, Nelson, Soriano and Sasaki. This probably has to do with the great defense behind them.
Yes, that was the final year of that Nelson-Rhodes-Sasaki-SIT BACK DOWN! bullpen.
I don’t have any new fancy numbers to throw out, just what I know. I have a hard time seing the comparison. The 2003 team had older guy’s that knew how to win close games. We are loaded with young guy’s with “alot of upside†and not much experiance.
Experience is remarkably overrated. Old or young doesn’t matter. Good or bad matters.
The bullpen was great in 2003. Can anyone explain to me with your numbers how this bullpen we have right now isn’t going to be one of the worst in the league?
Sure, the bullpen was good. But you know who the best reliever in the ’03 bullpen was? Rafael Soriano, an inexperienced pitcher who hadn’t proven anything in the majors before that year. When you get past ERA, you can see that this current group is a talented bunch that can miss bats, get groundballs, and protect leads. The bullpen is a lot better than you think.
What am I missing here? This team looks horrible to me besides our SP. I’m already looking forward to next year. Maybe I just need to spin it another way…that’s the new thing right?
You’re missing that the team isn’t horrible. If you evaluate a team by experience, winning character, and ERA, the Rays would have looked like crap to you before last year too. There’s better ways to understand how baseball works now.
I realize old or young doesn’t really matter. I do know that experience and mental toughness is an important part of baseball and you can’t do that with numbers. If you knew the Ray’s were going to be good last year I would change my mind about sabermetrics and maybe even buy a Bill James book.
I looked at FIP for the first time and it makes more sense than ERA to me. Top 6 IP for the Mariners BP in 2003 were Hasegawa(3.78), Rhodes(3.27), Mateo(4.13), Nelson(3.03), Soriano(1.80) and Sasaki(3.51). For the most part those were experienced pitchers. This year our bullpen is young and they don’t have alot of IP so I know their career FIP’s are a small sample, but Olsen(5.28),Corcoran(3.93),Batista(4.89),Lowe(4.36),Walker(4.33),Aardsma(4.90),Huber(3.36)28IP,Messenger(4.60) and Vargas(5.11. I realize a few of these guy’s probably have a good future ahead of them, but your going to need to see some serious improvements and fast to get close to the 2003 BP.
I haven’t even started on the offense, I would probably be wasting my time there. I like your articles because it’s a different way to look at things but I just don’t see this team going .500 this year. You know more than me though and I hope your right about this BP.
Lol, wasn’t it Dave who said the Rays would be at least the fifth best team in the American League? I would classify that as predicting they would be good.
If you knew the Ray’s were going to be good last year I would change my mind about sabermetrics and maybe even buy a Bill James book.
Okay, change your mind. I called the Rays an 85+ win team in 2008 at the end of ’07, even before they had a good off-season and drastically improved their defense. It wasn’t that hard to see coming.
I’ll take your word for it then. But i’m going to stick with M’s BP is the reason we don’t win 81.
Hmmmmmmmmmm, building a team around pitching and defense at a ballpark where you’re supposed to build around pitching and defense?
Makes sense to me.
I do kind of wish we had some more thumpers in the lineup though.
Just not at the expense of trades like Jeff Clement for Delmon Young as has been rumored and signing power guys with low batting averages like Adam Dunn for too much money.
My question is, how many GMs around the league are familiar with FIP and related pitching stats? Or more to the point, how many are *not* familiar with them? 10 years ago you could probably build an outfield like the one the M’s have, use a guy like Washburn every 5th game, and then cash in when teams don’t look past the ERA. Is that a worthwhile angle to pursue in today’s game?
As for the bullpen, I agree with Dave on this one. One of the little things that a good GM can do is cobble together a decent bullpen from a bunch of spare parts. To an extent I think that’s what Z is doing with Aardsma and all the #5 starters he’s picked up. Will it be the best bullpen in the history of mankind? No. Is the pen an area the Mariners should be working on improving. No, and as a matter of fact if teams are willing to toss in potential starting middle infielders in exchange for “veteran grit” (or whatever Heilman provides the Cubs what Olson doesn’t) in the later innings, this is a good year for the M’s to sell off their better-known parts.
I’m not trying to fill this blog with nothing but [deleted, off topic]
A year ago the Mariners didn’t believe in FIP. Chuck Armstrong apparently still doesn’t. Do you really think the Mariners were the last team in baseball to get on the clue train? There are still some pretty bad front offices out there, still well-mired in past decades.
Given Bavasi, it actually wouldn’t surprise me if the M’s were the last team to figure that sort of thing out. Anyway, last or 15th or what have you isn’t so much important; it doesn’t matter whether Washington thinks highly of Washburn or not because they won’t be able to afford him anyway. The intended market for a guy like Jarrod is a contender or a darkhorse contender with a need to fill at starting pitcher.
Anyway, that wasn’t really a rhetorical question I asked earlier. I would really like to know how many GMs in the league pay attention to stuff like this besides ERA. While I’m not convinced that betting your opponents will be less informed than you is a good strategy to take, if it’s just the M’s who understand this or just the M’s and Theo and Billy, then great. I have an inkling that the hardcore scout-heavy GMs might have reached this way of thinking as well, albeit by other means.
I think it’s easy to see which GM’s do not buy into modern statistical analysis. Look at the teams that continue to make indefensible moves. San Fran, Washington, Houston, Both Chicagos, Detroit, Kansas City, and, to a lesser extent, Philly (no way to defend the Ibanez signing) and the Mets.
Washburn isn’t old enough to play for San Fran. :p