Good luck finding a buyer who will give up a “big league shortstop”
Amazingly enough, they have these things called “three way trades”, where team A needs something, team B needs something else, and team C acts as an intermediary to help team A and team B pull off a trade that works for everyone.

Yes, but I think the point is that there is a very real scarcity of “big league shortstops” in baseball this year. I imagine plenty of suitors seeking infield help and relatively few sellers. Do the Mariners really want to compete in the deadline trade market for one of a very few potentially available SS (a Jack Wilson or Felipe Lopez or…)? Is that the best way to expend the team’s resources?

I’m not making conclusions. I’m poking a hole in the “Bedard/Washburn have been vital to the club’s success” theory, which just isn’t based on reality.

If Washburn and Bedard had pitched like replacement level pitchers, instead of like 3-4 WAR pitchers, the M’s would have been worse than 12-13 during the games they started (probably 3 games worse). If the M’s were 3 games further out of it, the discussion would be significantly different right now. C’mon, Dave, just admit you got one wrong for once.

Couldn’t agree more. I was surprised to see this ‘evidence’ used on this site. I agree that shipping one of them off for a ML ready SS could add more wins than it loses, but W/L… come on. Like CCW said, if you want to play the results-based game, look at how much worse we would be without Bedard and Washburn

I believe that’s wrong – WAR specifically separates position players from pitchers in a variety of ways per THE BOOK.

The Mariners have options open to upgrading the team by trading Bedard or Washburn. They can deal one of the two and still get better this year.

Emphasis on the last to words–’this year’. Given what everyone in baseball knows about their contract situations/injury history/under bus throwing, I think it’s wishful thinking to see us using either of the pitchers to get a major-league ready replacement for Beltre. Not someone as good as Beltre–just someone better than Branyan or Shelton or Woodward or whomever. If we do, let’s start the parade for Z early, no matter what the team does from here on out.

So what I’d like to see added to this conversation are the relative reversals we’re going to see trying to replace Beltre’s defense. In other words, how good do we expect any of the logical internal replacements to be with the glove…or for that matter, any of the hopefuls we might be able to pry away from other teams?

I’m not sure if that’s a very sound way to look at the question, but for what it’s worth, the opposite has been true for every year that Fangraphs has UZR data.

Agreed – it doesn’t tell you a whole lot. I was just pointing out the question whether position players or pitchers are more “important” or “valuable”, in the abstract, while maybe interesting on a theoretical level, has very little practical significance. If you want to answer a question that matters, you need to look at the actual value of the actual players you are discussing.

Yeah, but WAR is position-adjusted. The fact that Greinke/Lincecum are further above replacement relative to the population of starting pitchers than Pujols is relative to 1Bs says nothing about their worth relative to each other.

I don’t think that’s correct. The whole point of using the concept of replacement level, and WAR, is so you CAN compare the value of players at different positions, including pitchers and players at any position, against one another.

You’d rather have Greinke’s performance this year so far and a team full of replacement level players than Pujols’ performance so far this year and a team full of replacement level players. Greinke has been more valuable, worth more wins, more important, or whatever term you want to use, than Pujols, so far this year.

I think…

I’m not sure if that’s a very sound way to look at the question, but for what it’s worth, the opposite has been true for every year that Fangraphs has UZR data.