The ’09-’10 Offseason and Player Development
This offseason has seen a shift in our expectations in terms of roster composition. Back around November, we talked about the possibility of running out multiple rookies on the field, and how many would be too many for the team to remain competitive. Now those positions have been locked up to the point where the team is likely to field few rookies, if any, and not likely as starting players.
Where in left field, we thought we might see Saunders roaming, we now have the Bradley/Byrnes/Langerhans cerberus aiming to snap up most of the at-bats. At third, Tuiasosopo’s window was shut by the acquisition of all-star Chone Figgins, though I doubt many would complain over that. Carp has been rendered extraneous at first by the acquisitions of Garko and Kotchman. The Bedard re-signing will eventually push Hyphen and Snell back, and likely pushes Fister and Hill to Tacoma as a by-product of the rumored six-man bullpen. Even at catcher, as much as the org has praised Adam Moore, it seems probable that Bard might come in and take the back-up job during spring training. Prospects of all kinds, from future contributing regulars to more fringe types, have been shut out. One might get the impression that the organization is deemphasizing player development in favor of bringing in known quantities.
I’m here to tell you that this conclusion is false. The M’s are just as strong on player development as they ever have been, and I’ll tell you why.
Earlier in the week, Kirby Arnold, great friend of local minor league watchers, wrote an article for the Kitsap Sun discussing a new training camp devised by the M’s for this spring training. Forty-one prospects (Fields, Poythress, Liddi, Franklin, and Triunfel among them), two dozen coaches, and a month of time in Peoria working on fundamentals. Similar camps are taking place in the Dominican and Venezuelan complexes.
This is something that makes sense on an intuitive level. After all, teams have fall instructs where they teach pitchers a new offering or hitters how to play a new position on the field, so why shouldn’t they have something set up to ensure that the season starts out right? Nevertheless, this is something that just doesn’t happen. Most teams set their mandatory report dates in March, well after all the big league players have arrived and drawn off all the attention of the coaches.
The basic point-by-point details of the camp should be impressive enough. The Mariners singled out their guys they like and increased the ratio of coaches involved in their instruction. Good for them. What makes it really interesting is what they’ve been working on in the camps. The camp is not a replacement for the fall instructs, but a complement to it, emphasizing conditioning and routines over picking up new skills. As Grifol says in the article, the players won’t be taking the field for some time, instead working on general physical well-being and strength over the first couple of weeks. Conditioning has not been a glaring problem in the system, at least not in the past five years or so, but it’s an easy area to improve upon, and the Mariners have targeted just that.
Another interesting detail that comes out in the articles is that the M’s have brought in Dr. Marcus Elliott to work with their minor leaguers during this span. Perhaps you haven’t heard of him. I hadn’t really heard of him before reading this either. Elliott is a Harvard-educated physician, specializing in biomechanics, physiology, and injury prevention. His credits include a research institute he founded several years ago, the Peak Performance Project (P3), and training work for U.S. Olympic teams and at the national sports institutes of Australia and South Africa. He was also the physiologist for the New England Patriots during their Super Bowl runs. Elliott develops training regimens designed on an individual basis for each athlete he works with. The Mariners are bringing him in to work with their minor leaguers. Pause on that for a second.
The Mariners are combining Elliott’s efforts with their own, taking what knowledge they’ve gained from coaches and player visits during the offseason to develop programs for their best and brightest. These programs will be geared towards making sure everyone involved is healthy and strong throughout the grind of the minor league season, through which there’s a likely payoff in performance. And when you look at it from what we already know about Zduriencik, it all makes a kind of sense. Zduriencik loves depth and makes every effort to reduce the number of variables he has to account for. Why shouldn’t this carry over to the development of the minor league system, where the org can at least be certain that players have tools they need to succeed physically and are working under the eye of coaches rather than on their own time?
At the beginning of Arnold’s piece, there’s an important quote: “If we’re going to be a really, really good organization, our best players should come through our system,” Zduriencik said. “The core of our team should be guys we’re building, developing and training ourselves. This is a step in that direction.” In case anyone thought that Zduriencik’s perspective was going to change after he moved away from directing the farm system, well, this is your proof that it hasn’t. We have a general manager who knows the value of bringing young, talented (and cheap!) players up through the system, and his efforts to establish a “Mariners way” of playing baseball is going all the way down to the lowest parts of the depth chart.
Minor league fans, be excited. The good times look like they’ll keep on rolling.
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33 Responses to “The ’09-’10 Offseason and Player Development”
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Awesome stuff, Jay. I was just thinking about how we’ve gone from talking about three rookies in the lineup to zero the other day.
Zduriencik is my hero.
Z is yet again, “the man.” Can we make that nickname stick?
Maybe I’ll have to run out and nab some Tacoma tickets this year.
This is as good as news as anything that has happened this offseason. You talk about a team getting it from top to bottom.
Very nice.
Has a “Tuiasosopo For Third” blog sprung up yet?
Nicely done Jay. I read that article earlier this week. Although I recognized the change in philosophy, you’ve really shown how dramatic that change is. Thanks.
Absolutely. This is not an organization that will favor one area of team building over another, as Gillick often worked at free agent acquisition to the detriment of the draft. This is an org that wants as many resources available to them as they can get, and has the money to provide a lot more than a token effort. It’s awesome.
That would imply an association between Figgins and Cirillo to which I will make an angry face >:( .
But no, not yet. Positive Paul is actively working the Rich Poythress and Adam Moore angle though.
No problem. It’s one of those thing I think that would be easy to gloss over without really understanding how ambitious the project is. As I said, on some level, it seems kind of obvious. Why wouldn’t teams do this? But at the same time, no one’s really done it before, and here we have the M’s on the forefront of the efforts. I think it’s exciting, but of course, I would.
Thanks for reading, all.
Thanks for this article. This is great news for the team, the players and the fans.
Outstanding post, Jay! I hope we see more from you.
One thing: my money’s on Moore becoming the starting catcher. I’ll be very surprised if that doesn’t happen.
Very cool to see the increased emphasis on full development of minor leaguers.
I wonder if they are making any changes to the nutrition available to the minor leaguers. A year or two back Cleveland was one of the first to start offering more than peanut butter & jelly and friend chicken to their minor leaguers.
It never made much sense to me the poor quality of food that players at the lower level received.
Here’s an article about the poor quality food available @ the MLB level as well
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-08-16/sports/17175946_1_clubhouse-spread-dish
That’s another matter, but I don’t think that it would make for a particularly riveting post topic. One thing to note is that MLB did increase the per diem allotment by $5, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that the previous allotment was just $20. Speaking from experience trying to live on that kind of budget, it doesn’t lend itself well to nutrition. For athletes, it would be all the more crucial as they’re going out and exerting themselves whereas I’m only metaphorically hitting the books.
So there’s that, but it should be another process that’s going trickle down over the course of a few years. Keep in mind that nutrition is something that’s only fairly recently made its way into major league clubhouses, where before it was basically guys eating whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.
Conditioning is well and good, but I’ll get a lot more excited when I hear that the Ms plan to target multiple signability guys in the draft to make up for their lack of a first-rounder this year. There’s no reason the Ms shouldn’t be one of the teams acquiring multiple top-3 round talents every year in the draft. The scouting budget is there, and the Red Sox have shown that paying for elite amateur talent in the Rule 4 draft is a really, really good path to contention.
Thanks Jay. This tells me that the M’s are not only looking to get to the top this year but to stay there for many years to come.
Naturally. Conditioning is more of a means to an end, improving on the existing materials, so to speak.
I think that it would be reasonable to assume that the M’s are going to be a bit more ambitious with their picks this year with Ackley not eating most of the cookies. Not that they’d ever tell us that, or even give us the slightest hint of who they might be hot on the heels of.
One thing I did find to be slightly curious is that at the Benaroya Hall shindig, McNamara nearly jumped at the opportunity to spin a vague question into a defense of his draft selections. I had been operating under the assumption that they stuck to a budget and opted for some signability picks as a result, so that got a raised eyebrow from me. They also brought up later in the papers that they went after certain hitters because everyone else went with pitching and it was a matter of getting the 20th best pitcher or the eighth best hitter. That also got a raised eyebrow from me, but I think I’m willing to give them the benefit of doubt for the moment.
Come June, we’ll see.
Yeah, I trust the powers that be, but I think the slot issue is more a question of convincing Lincoln/Armstrong that it’s worth risking annoying the folks at MLB to get better talent. I’m getting annoyed watching a handful of teams treat the draft as a completely different game than the rest of the league. I want the Mariners to be one of those teams.
Hey, the new crew has been able to sell Armstrong/Lincoln on all kinds of other things. In the Arnold article, you even have Armstrong saying, and I [block]quote:
I don’t think convincing them to go overslot is going to be outside the realm of possibility. They try to be all buddy-buddy with the powers that be in the league, but at this point everyone and their mother knows that the slotting process is a joke, so there’s no compelling reason to play nice, in my opinion.
Yeah, I’m hopeful. Bavasi/Fontaine were able to convince them to spend high first-round money on Tuiasosopo back in the day, and for some reason Luke Burnett got an over-slot deal last year. I’d love to see much, much more of that (targeting better talents than Burnett, though).
We tried with Griggs last year, but it became pretty clear that he was going to be heading to college. There were a few others like Nelubowich and Phillips which didn’t exactly pan out, but you’re right in that they could stand to be a little more ambitious, both in who they target and how much they aim to offer.
The notion of individually tailored conditioning, and the overall notion of paying attention to talent development, is great but I wonder about the increased time commitment being asked of the minor leaguers. The Kitsap Sun article mentions this
Most minor leaguers are paid only a pittance and have to have off-season jobs to make ends meet. This mini-camp takes time away from them that they could be using to work and earn money. But OTOH that passage says they are getting paid for their time — and possibly getting paid more than they make in their outside jobs? But at an average minor leaguers’ monthly salary, quite possibly not.
It depends. The minor league finances are rather tricky, but on the whole, most players I’ve known of that have worked jobs in the offseason end up with temp-type work in offices because their employers know that they can only be in for half the year at most and then they’re gone again. There’s not a huge incentive to pay them a lot in the first place because there’s only so much training they can invest in. It’s a rough gig.
This sounds like a really smart way to go about player development. Do any other organizations have a similar program, or is Jack Z’s front office breaking new ground?
Good and thanks for the post. I for one have been tired of our prospects coming up and doing little. I remember when the pressure for bringing young Griffey was high and the front office said they preferred that a player get 1500 at bats before promotion to the bigs. Very exciting and is check balance to a Morrow fiasco again.
This is fantastic news. We have seen plenty of evidence that this administration gets how to use all the available tools for player evaluation. Hopefully this means that they will also be on the leading edge of player development. Tailoring strength, conditioning and skills training based on each individuals specific strengths and weaknesses is where all top level sports are headed. Likewise with nutrition and medical support. When are they going to add mental strength coaches and eye strength coaches?
If it’s not the only one of its kind, it’s at least pretty uncommon. Not many organizations have the sheer scope you see involved in this project.
I think that 1500 at-bats prerequisite is still applicable in a lot cases. You can improve on a player’s conditioning habits and make sure they’re doing the right thing for their particular situation, but there’s not so much of a scale as far as changing the rate at which a player develops or learns. Part of the program works on individual weaknesses though. We’ll see if it does allow for speedier development, but I think the initial goal is just better quality in development in general.
I don’t know about eye strength coaches, but they have had the catching guru, Roger Hansen, also working in a [very] minor capacity as a mental strength coach. It’s a start.
Introducing Edgar Martinez, eye coach!
Yes, and have fun convincing a bunch of 20-somethings that they’ll hit better if they don’t watch TV during the regular season.
After reading this article and hearing about their systemic changes at the minor league level, on top of everything else that JZ has been pulling off, I am more confident than ever that if we stay on the Z-path, the M’s will –sooner or later– bring home a championship. Finally, the odds are growing in our favor!
Branyan credited his improved performance last season to a course of eye exercises he took in the prior off-season and a series of eye exercises he did every day during the season. I believe he claimed they allowed him to pick up the ball and identify the pitch faster and respond to it better. It would seem worthwhile to explore this additional avenue of training and its value in this program.
Given the moves this offseason, programs like this, and even just the performance last season, it does appear that the ownership is behind Zduriencik. Many of us were significantly concerned that the new manager would be handcuffed by the thinking and tinkering of the higher ups, but it really seems that they have provided the decision making and financial resources to Z to try to move the team forward. That is part of what makes this as fantastic as it is.
I love that the M’s will be providing personalized training regimens to their top prospects based specifically on each player’s biomechanics. This just makes sense on so many levels. What I like most is its potential to begin addressing some of the systemic injury issues that the organization has faced over the years. In particular, it seems likely to reduce our casualty rate in the ongoing Attrition War.
I remember spending years of my childhood waiting for the arrival of Ryan Anderson (the next Randy Johnson!) in vain. Partly this was just me falling for the hype (there will never be another Randy), but the team likely could have done a better job in managing Anderson’s (and others’) development.
Jay, glad to see some stuff from you after a few weeks (other than another blog that they may not want me to mention here).
Does/is the MarinersMinors blog still exist now that the MVN is gone? It would sure be disappointing if it does not (or won’t) now with all this positive talk about the farm system!
Yes, it still exists, it’s been online officially since Friday, but I haven’t yet had time to send around e-mails.
Should anyone care for the sneak preview….
Mariners Minors
I’ll try to update everyone in the next 24 hours. I’m kind of in a grind right now.
Link updated!
That was quick.
Thanks, Derek!