It’s Get Serious Time
At 14-23, the Mariners need some good news. They’re not going to get it from looking at their schedule, though. Over the next month, the Mariners play 29 games, with only seven of those coming against a team that is currently below .500 (the Angels). They have to play the Twins four times, the Cardinals three times, and the Rangers four times. They finish the stretch with 20 consecutive games without an off day.
There are no more games against the Royals or Orioles to look forward to. The M’s face a pretty grueling schedule for the next month, the kind of gauntlet that even a good team would struggle to finish over .500 against. And as we’ve all seen, the Mariners right now are not a good team.
Plain and simple, the M’s cannot wait any longer. If they keep trying to hold on with what they have, they’re going to sink. They need to get Milton Bradley and Jack Wilson back on the team as soon as possible. They need to make a trade (Ryan Raburn, please) right now. If Ryan Rowland-Smith struggles again tonight, he should probably head to the bullpen. The time for waiting is over. 29 games in 31 days, most of them against high quality competition… if the Mariners try to tackle that challenge with this roster, they don’t stand a chance.
The season isn’t over yet, but the time for patience is. It’s no longer a belief system to run Ken Griffey Jr out there – that’s just stubbornness. If the Mariners are serious about winning, they need to make changes, and they need to make them right now.
That would be wonderful. Tell me when we’re going to have even a half a season of a healthy Jack Wilson, and I’ll be all for it…
You don’t get to quote numbers from 40 plate appearances and then pretend like you have a handle on what regression to the mean looks like.
Before Jack winds up going from idol to scapegoat in a couple short months, I think it might be worth considering who he decided NOT to spend money/young players on this winter (all popular suggestions on this site):
Bay
Pena
Branyan
N. Johnson
Derosa
Delgado
F. Lopez
Sheets
Harden
Duchscherer
Washburn
I think it actually could be worse.
Hopefully it is soon. If not, Josh Wilson is what we got. But that doesn’t mean he is better than Jack. Jacks roughly plays 130-140 games a year. Josh Wilson has already cooled off and is showing why lots of organization has passed on him. He is a AAA player, always has been, always will be.
Chris_From_Bothell, I have to say I think gambler’s fallacy is being cited a bit too often (including in response to one of my comments, which makes me a bit testy.) You cited it in response to the statement “There is no way that Lopez and Kotchman will remain this bad.” That statement is likely correct, not a fallacy.
I think most of us understand gambler’s fallacy.
This from a Yahoo blog about Wak being on the hotseat….
.While it was obvious the Mariners lacked power, and therefore easy ways to score runs, few predicted the end-to-end flaccidness of league worsts in runs, on-base percentage and most of everything else.
Josh Wilson career UZR/150 in the majors at SS is -11.4. his career BA is .225 and his career WAR is -.5
apologies…
All right, “Chris_From_Bothell”, here’s the deal.
All this citing of statistics you’re doing is only accomplishing two things: 1) It’s showing very clearly what has happened in a VERY small sample size in the recent past; 2) It’s making you sound like a bloomin’ idiot.
What you’re trying to accomplish with all this citing of statistics is to give us a reasonable baseline for what to expect in the future. The only reliable evidence we have to predict the future is the glut of statistics accumulated over the entire careers of each respective player. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of basic statistics can understand that. And that glut of statistics tells us that A) Jack Wilson is a much better player that Josh Wilson; and, B) Casey Kotchman, Chone Figgins, and Jose Lopez are much better hitters than they have been so far.
I’m not going to go so far as to say that you can’t understand basic statistics. I’m just going to say that you’re clearly refusing to try to understand. You’re talking about gambler’s fallacy… well, here’s another one for you to munch on: “confirmation bias”. You’ve got it in your head that this notion of yours is correct, and you’re warping statistics to prove your point. We all have notions that turn out to be incorrect. We just allow the numbers to inform us, instead of trying to inform the numbers.
Numbers are our friends. Stop abusing them. 😉
Geez Mattlock, if I had known you were going to do that I wouldn’t have bothered…
I don’t think Ryan Raburn would be an answer to anything for our offense. I think that if we want to make a trade for a bat it should be for someone who is proven like a Konerko, or Berkman. Anything less would just be another flier like Brynes.
Wow tonight’s lineup is more of the same crap…
Ichiro, figgins, Guti, Lopez, Griffey, Tui, Kotchman, paperboy, Bard
Hope Hyphen is on his game tonight or were screwed.
Mattlock – Confirmation bias is also trying to say that this past offseason’s plan should have worked, could have worked, that hitters will turn it around soon really, etc. etc.
Be informed by these numbers then: 14 wins. 23 losses. 3rd worst winning percentage in the AL.
Looking at career numbers is all fine and good for constructing the roster – and I was behind the theory on most of these guys as of spring training, from Figgins to Kotchman to Bradley on down – but really, at some point in the actual season, while playing the actual games, we flip over from “Wilson, Kotchman, Figgins and Lopez are much better hitters, hold on” to “Wilson, Kotchman, Figgins and Lopez should have been much better hitters… whoops”.
If it’s too early to get a read on these guys, let me know when you believe it’s late enough in the season to measure what these players, this year, are or aren’t doing.
Perhaps Chris_from_Bothell is postulating the Sucker’s Fallacy, which is related to but distinct from the Gambler’s Fallacy.
The Gambler’s Fallacy says that if a coin flip comes up heads ten times in a row, then it’s due to come up tails several times in a row to even out the luck. This isn’t true. The coin still has a 50-50 chance of coming up heads or tails, regardless of what happened before.
The Sucker’s Fallacy says still believing the coin has a 50-50 chance of coming up tails after it came up heads ten times in a row is dumb, since the coins is obviously loaded.
Whether or not Lopez and Kotchman are Sucker’s Fallacies I don’t know. I hope not.
How many mound appearances does it take?
It would seem to me, reading some posts from earlier this year that we were all admonished not to expect Fister or Vargas to continue to pitch the way they did early.
Yet just last week someone, (was it Dave?) put up a thread saying, in essence, that that maybe those two guys were for real.
Are they now expected to drop back to being merely replacement level?
I believe Chris_from_Bothel has a point when he contends that Josh is as good as Jack.
Age and injury count for more than some arbitrary mean. The team is burdened enough with players in their twilight years. How many times do we have to relearn that?
An injured Jack Wilson still has produced more in his career than Josh. Seriously people,
Josh Wilson is the definition of a replacement level player. Stop buying into 2 weeks
of observations that somehow negate
the years of futility Josh Wilson has provided his numerous organizations.
Amen.
I don’t quite understand why folks don’t like Jack Wilson– especially in regards to Josh Wilson taking his place.
Jack is a gold glove-caliber shortstop, and has the THIRD best batting average on the team (discounting the AAA kids) and 7 extra base hits.
He has more errors than normal, but he also had an injured throwing hand– and a bizarre 3 error game, that was a complete anomaly.
He’s been rated 3rd in the league or better for “range factor” amongst shortstops, since 2002. And he’s actually #1 amongst active players.
And he’s been a +1 or greater WAR player since 2006 (other than his shortened stop- no pun intended- at Seattle last year). In fact, for his career he’s NEVER had a negative WAR.
There are some positions to worry about on this team, but SS isn’t one of them in my opinion. Other than his injuries, for which we– tu’dah– have Josh Wilson who can take his place, Wilson brings the goods. I love watching him make routine plays out of grounders deep in the hole.
That could be an example of confirmation bias if it was wrong. But it’s not.
Oh, that’s a good thing, considering that’s what we’re discussing.
Behind what theory? Playing players that are good instead of players that are bad?
So what’s your point? Of course, if they keep playing like this the rest of the season, then obviously we look back and say, “Wow, who would have predicted that several good Major League players would all completely tank at the same time? That sucks.”
Who cares? Discussing when to pull the plug on players for sucking for the majority of a season is stupid and pointless when there is absolutely NO evidence whatsoever indicating such a thing might happen. I don’t plan on what I would do if I walked out my front door and a plane crashed on my head, because there is no evidence such a thing might happen.
Remember, we traded a crappy, lazy, useless utility player for Kotchman and a crappy, lazy, useless, fat, ugly, stupid, obnoxious, idiotic pitcher for Bradley. Jack Wilson is a good player, despite his injury history, and despite the fact that your uneducated opinion tells you otherwise. Stop acting like Zduriencik passed up on a bunch of good options, because he didn’t. This is a team that lost 101 games a year and a half ago. Very rarely do any teams in such a situation ever come even close to thinking about contention like the Mariners are now.
We need to make a trade (Ryan Raburn, please) right now.
RYAN RABURN ? Don’t we have enough hitters that are flirting with the Mendoza line ?
From ROTOWORLD: Raburn is batting just .213/.315/.362 with zero homers and five RBI over 47 at-bats this season.
Hmm, but looking at his stats from last year, according to Fangraphs, he hit .291/.359/.533 with 16 homers and 26 walks in 291 PAs while playing some CF, some RF, some LF, some 3B, and some 1B. He’s also played 2B. He’s good.
but looking at [RABURN’s] stats from last year, according to Fangraphs, he hit .291…
CHONE FIGGINS hit .298 last year.
You’re right, he did.