Roster Finalized
Tui makes the team in place of Ichiro as a reward for his big spring. I guess Wakamatsu decided that he just wasn’t going to use the Ichiro replacement guy during the first eight games anyway, so we’ll essentially play with a 24 man roster for a week. I know there’s a place for rewarding hard work and improvement, which by all accounts Tui has done, but why play at a disadvantage if you don’t have to?
Okay, fine, Cedeno will cover the outfield in an emergency. He’s got some experience out there, and Chavez/Gutierrez/Balentien will probably get most of the playing time in the OF anyway. But from a practical standpoint, Tui doesn’t help you at all. He’s not fast enough to pinch run for anyone other than Johjima or Griffey, and defensively, he’s basically limited to third base, and the team should be hoping that Beltre plays every inning of each of the first eight games.
Why not carry Halman if you’re not going to play the last guy on the bench? At least he gives you a legitimate glove in the OF and can pinch run.
No, it probably won’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, but this seems to be unnecessarily making the team less flexible for… what, really? Tui has already made his big league debut. It’s not like the organization is giving him his first taste of the major leagues or anything. I guess I just don’t see the point.
I’m still totally on board the bandwagon for the direction the new guys are taking the team in, but this particular move is a head scratcher, for me.
Also, Corcoran makes the team with Delgado being outrighted to Tacoma. He cleared waivers, so that worked out nicely.
Oh, and Wakamatsu announced that Griffey will play RF on Monday, then DH the next two games, and not start against LHP Perkins on Thursday. For everyone who was afraid that we were going to get a steady dose of badly used Junior, this should be seen as a pretty big positive – even with Ichiro out, they’re only giving him a the ceremonial opening day start and acknowledging that his off days should be timed to match up with opposing pitcher handedness. So, hooray for that.
Spring training action, M’s at Rockies
In 10 minutes! It’s on MLB.tv!
On the other hand, it’s a beautiful Saturday for the first time in… I don’t even know how long. So if you decide to skip this, really, I’m not going to blame you. I got some outside time in early so I could watch, that’s the kind of fan I am.
Ichiro has Bleeding Ulcer
He’s on the 15 day DL to start the season. No word yet on who fills the roster spot – the team already returned Reegie Corona to the Yankees, so he’s out. Michael Saunders isn’t healthy enough to start the season as an outfielder. Greg Halman isn’t ready for the majors.
Mike Morse, Mike Wilson, Chris Burke, and Prentice Redman are the non-roster options that are currently with the organization. The problem, though, is that all of those options would require adding the player to the 40 man roster. Only Wilson could be optioned back to the minors without being exposed to waivers, and the team probably doesn’t want to waste a 40 man roster spot on Wilson all year just to get him up for eight games. Or, they could get crazy and keep Jamie Burke as the backup catcher and have Rob Johnson be the fifth outfielder – he has a decent amount of experience in the OF during his Tacoma days.
On the free agent front, Geoff Jenkins is available, but with Ichiro only expected to miss eight games, he’ll probably want to wait for a job where he won’t be changing teams in a week.
As for the first week outfield, Endy Chavez will almost certainly play RF and lead off, leaving LF to be split between Griffey/Balentien. They really need a guy behind those two, though, because Griffey’s knees could easily force him into the DH spot if he’s sore, and you can’t play without a backup outfielder on the roster.
Additionally, this is why I’m not a fan of 12 man pitching staffs. With a four man bench, the M’s are limited to having four outfielders available on any day that Griffey is DH’ing. When someone becomes unavailable for a game, even due to something minor, it limits the attractiveness of using Griffey at DH, because then you’re left with no outfielders on the bench that day. At some point, the team is going to have to be willing to go with 11 pitchers, because a four man bench creates a lot of problems.
Oh, and thanks for releasing this news right as I hit post on my long diatribe below. That wasn’t inconvenient or anything
A Quick Note On Predictions
Opening Day is Monday, so over the next few days, you’re going to be bombarded with season previews full of predictions. Most of them will have the Mariners finishing 3rd or 4th, somewhere between 70 and 80 wins. That’s the general consensus of most baseball observers, anyway.
You know what my prediction is? That eventually, we’ll all realize that predictions are rather pointless, and the 2009 Mariners are one of the obvious examples of why.
I think most of us reading this probably agree that this is a ~78 win team on talent level, as it stands right now. If you hate defense and are all about hitting, maybe you think it’s a ~75 win team. If you think Junior’s going to hit the juvenation machine and the bullpen’s going to sort itself out, you might think it’s an ~81 win team. But, we’re all kind of hovering around that 78 win average. So, then, we should all predict that the M’s will win 78-ish games this year, right?
Except there are about 4,000 variables that will play a significant factor in how the team does that no one has absolutely any way of predicting. If Ichiro’s fatigue turns out to be some kind of career-ending virus, the team just lost four or five wins. Are any of us knowledgeable enough to think that we have any insight into what is actually wrong with Ichiro? Of course not.
So, now, we have this significant variable that we have no insight on. If it turns out Ichiro is sidelined for a significant period of time, the team’s chances of contention drop dramatically, and the chain reaction leads to a significant increase in likelyhood of Beltre and Bedard being traded. But will they be traded in May or July? That matters, as two extra months of those guys in uniform is worth another couple of wins. Do any of us have any insight on when another team might become in need of a third basemen and offer the Mariners a package they can’t turn down? Of course not. We have no way of knowing if Team X is going to lose Player Y in May or June or July, but the timing of that injury could have a real effect on the roster the M’s put on the field.
Now, all of the sudden, the chance of Ichiro missing time has cost the team six to eight wins, thanks to the chain reaction.
Let’s play this the other way, just for fun. Say Ichiro’s fine, and the team starts the season out well, taking advantage of the injury problems the Angels and A’s are having. So now they’re in first place in mid-May, and while Russ Branyan is doing okay, Nick Johnson’s available and healthy. The M’s make a move to upgrade their first base spot, and all of the sudden, they’ve picked up another couple of wins. They continue to play well, they don’t trade Beltre or Bedard, and they’re adding pieces at the deadline. Now, maybe we see them as an 83 win team, thanks to the upgrades they make.
Just based on the resulting events of Ichiro’s health report and the actions it could spawn, we might be looking at +/- 10 games in the standings. And we’ve already said that none of us have any reason to believe that our prediction about Ichiro’s health is meaningful in any way. Any prediction we’d make would simply be a guess, because we just don’t have any real information.
So then, what’s the point of a prediction, if the entire premise on which stands can be unraveled by variables that we have no way of accounting for? The writers who predicted the Mariners would be contenders last year, for instance, obviously weren’t counting on the team giving thousands of at-bats to guys who started the season in Triple-A. The team that finished 61-101 isn’t the same one that started the 2008 season. How on earth could Baker and Stone and all the ESPN guys have incorporated into their prediction that the team would end the year with Jose Lopez playing first base in order to get a longer look at Luis Valbuena?
There are just so many things that can’t be known in April that matter throughout the year that predictions are basically worthless. There’s no point in pretending that we can know what other people are going to decide to do four months from now, and when those decisions have major impact on how the team will perform throughout the year, we have to admit that our ability to predict a final outcome is no more than a guess.
What we can do is estimate probability, based on what we know today. We’re pretty sure that the Rays are better than Royals, and we can make statements about likelyhoods based on today’s facts. But those facts are going to change, and we’d be foolish to not change the likelyhoods as they go. Most people would call that waffling on a prediction – I’d call it actual analysis.
So, how many games are the Mariners going to win this year? I have no idea. I think the team, as currently composed, is about a 78 win team, give or take five wins either way for normal amounts of luck. But if the Mariners trade Adrian Beltre in two weeks because the Cardinals find out that Troy Glaus is actually out for the year, I’m going to revise my estimate based on new knowledge.
Predictions are useless. I’d rather be in the analysis business.
Ichiro’s Health
So, we should probably talk about this a little bit. The M’s put out a press release saying that Ichiro had been seen by a doctor and they would update everyone on his health on Friday. If it was nothing, don’t they just come out and say that in the press release? The only reason to have to discuss it further is if they found something, right?
Call me officially nervous. Ichiro is one of three guys on the roster (along with Felix and Beltre) that the team can’t replace. If Ichiro’s ability to play is in danger, it’s a huge blow to the M’s.
The No Lefty Pen
Don Wakamatsu confirmed last night that the Mariners would open the season without a single left-handed pitcher in the bullpen. Tyler Johnson will eventually join the team and take over the LH setup role, but until then, Wak’s got an abundance of right-handers to choose from when he needs a relief pitcher.
Honestly, this shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Late game match-up pitching has been taken to the absurd extreme in baseball over the last ten years, and while having a variety of options to choose from is a benefit, the real key to managing a bullpen is to give your best pitchers as many high leverage innings as possible. What we saw from Mike Hargrove and John McLaren over the past few years was a slave mentality to decision making by handedness – an LHB coming to the plate? Bring me John Parrish!
Wakamatsu said early in camp that he wasn’t big on the late game bullpen shuffle, and this backs it up as much as anything else. It seems apparent that the Mariners are going to ask their relievers to pitch full innings – it’s doubtful we see nearly as many mid-inning pitching changes as we have in years past. That’s just fine with me. There’s a time to exploit platoon splits, but in general, the over-specialization of the bullpens hasn’t given teams a real advantage.
It willl be refreshing to see a manager make decisions for himself, rather than going by what small sample size matchups tell him he should do.
Morse Clears Waivers, Lugo Returned To Twins
The M’s have outrighted Mike Morse to Tacoma, which means he cleared waivers. He’s now off the 40 man roster – his spot will be handed to Mike Sweeney whenever they get around to purchasing his contract. I think most of us figured some team (like Houston or Florida) would grab Morse for free, but no one else saw much potential there either, so he stays in the organization. The question will be what they do with him now. Tui is going to play third base for the Rainiers, and first base will be occupied by some kind of Carp/Shelton/Clement/LaHair platoon, so Morse doesn’t really fit in there either. He can’t play the middle infield anymore. I guess they could use him as an outfielder in lieu of Prentice Redman, but he’s not an outfielder in any real way, shape, or form.
The M’s have a big logjam of Triple-A players. Some of them are going to have to go away.
In other news, the M’s decided against keeping Rule 5 pick Jose Lugo, and he was returned to the Twins. I liked the Lugo selection and would have liked to see the M’s keep a power groundball/strikeout LHP around, but it’s not the end of the world. The question, though, is with Lugo going back to Minnesota, Cesar Jimenez getting put on the DL, and Tyler Johnson not breaking camp with the team, are the M’s really prepared to go into the season with zero left-handed relievers on the roster? This could be something of a sign that the team is going to go with Jakubauskas as the fifth starter, which, honestly, would be a head scratcher.
Also, reading between the lines here, this means that Shawn Kelley has almost certainly made the team. The M’s are going to carry seven relievers, and Morrow/Aardsma/Lowe/Corcoran/Batista/Kelley seem to have nailed six of those spots, with the last choice being the loser of the RRS/Jakubauskas battle or Jesus Delgado. They could potentially carry both and send Kelley back to Tacoma, but that seems unlikely.
M’s Officially Choose Sweeney
The fight for the right-handed 1B/DH bench job officially ended today with the expected result – the M’s are going to keep Mike Sweeney on the 25 man roster, and Chris Shelton was assigned to Tacoma. He’s agreed to the assignment and will be with the Rainiers when they open their season next week.
Most of us feel that Shelton is a better player than Sweeney, but given the limited playing time that the role was going to offer either player, the difference in expected production between the two is pretty small. Sweeney got the edge due to his veteran leadership, and while we’ve been the leading proponents of the “talent is more important than chemistry” brigade, when the difference in production is this close, using off the field stuff as a tie-breaker is fine with me.
There’s also another aspect to this that hasn’t been touched on – if the team had gone with Shelton, Sweeney retires. He’d said from the beginning that he would hang it up and go home if he didn’t make the team. So, in reality, the choice was between having Shelton on the major league roster or having Sweeney on the major league roster and Shelton in Tacoma. What does the team do if they go with Shelton, Sweeney retires, and then Shelton gets injured in May? Morse is probably going to be lost on waivers, and there isn’t another obvious fit in the organization as a replacement for an injured Shelton in this role. With Sweeney on the team and Shelton in Tacoma, the team has a fall back plan if Sweeney gets hurt that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
So, there’s reasons to go with Sweeney. There are reasons to go with Shelton, too, and I think there’s a case to be made that this isn’t the optimal decision for a team looking to extract value from every spot on the roster. But, there are pros and cons to both sides, and this isn’t a case where there’s one obviously correct answer. It’s a coin flip. Can’t blame them for picking heads or tails.
A fine spring Felix Day to you
Far away from this horrid wind-driven heavy snow-rain that soaks me in minutes while waiting for my bus, it’s a breezy 80-degree day in Spring Training. And I can get there in time for the third inning or so for $300 on Southwest if I hustle. Of course, for that price, I could go to Mars (disclaimer: Expedia pays me the money that supports USSM).