Fighting For Scraps
Yestrerday, Chuck Armstrong confirmed what everyone had assumed going into the winter – the payroll will be about the same as it was last year, meaning that our projections that the team has about $10 million or so to spend should be about right. If they move Aardsma, they might have something more like $14 million. Their total spending allowance this winter is going to be somewhere in that range.
The problem is that we’re seeing prices go crazy right now, so $10 million may not buy what we thought it would a few weeks ago. Ty Wigginton just got a two year deal at $4 million a year this morning, and Ty Wigginton is terrible. Even beyond the Jayson Werth contract, we’re seeing significant inflation for marginal players. It looks like we might be back to a market where a mediocre bench player costs a few million bucks, and even lousy everyday players are getting deals that would eat up half of the money the team has to spend. Given that the Mariners really need to acquire at least three or four players, that’s a huge problem.
So, if you’re wondering why the M’s are in on guys like Gregg Zaun, blame the market. Until all these teams blow through their cash and everything calms down, the M’s simply aren’t going to be able to make a reasonable signing. A quality DH isn’t going to take less money than Wigginton just got right now – they’re going to need to come to the reality that it might be one of the last few jobs available this winter. Much like Russell Branyan had the market set in on him late, the Mariners are probably going to need to have a guy find himself unemployed in January before they are able to get someone to agree to a deal on their terms.
Barring a trade, this is probably going to be a pretty boring week for the M’s. The shift in the market has made it impractical for them to try to land a starter in free agency right now.
Mariners Sign Esteilon Peguero
As first reported by Baseball America’s Ben Badler on Twitter, the Mariners have signed 17-year-old Dominican SS Esteilon Peguero to a $2.9 million signing bonus. That’s the largest bonus any international prospect got this year. His write-up is here. I’ll see what I can dig up on him from down here.
Mariners Writers Twitter List
I made this last year and it was pretty popular, so I’ve updated it for this year’s winter meetings – a Twitter list of Mariners-centric writers. If you’re not on Twitter yourself, you can simply read the feed on this page to see the information from just those who write about the team, so you’ll get all of their tweets in one place without actually having to join Twitter or load their pages individually.
Here’s the link. If you want constantly refreshed news about the team, that’s your place to sit.
Rumors, Inaction, And This Crazy Market
Today, we saw Adrian Gonzalez officially get traded to Boston, Jayson Werth shock the world by taking a massive deal from the Nationals, and the Blue Jays ship Shaun Marcum to Milwaukee. And the winter meetings don’t even officially start until tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the Mariners have done very little so far this winter, and there have been next to no rumors involving the organization kicking around. This can lead to a sense that the front office is sitting on their hands, and I know some of you are getting frustrated by the lack of movement so far. I will say, however, that the lack of rumors don’t mean anything at all. While many organizations routinely leak stories to local media for various reasons, the Mariners simply don’t play the same game. They don’t share information with local press in the same way as many other clubs, and this directly leads to fewer rumors surrounding the club.
In fact, since Jack Z took over, most of the moves the Mariners have made have been broken by members of the national media or by local writers in the cities of the organization that the team is dealing with. And many of them have seemingly come out of left field, as deals that were never rumored before they happened. It’s just the nature of how the organization handles themselves now.
So, don’t get frustrated if you don’t hear a lot of talk about what the M’s are working on. We never do, and they’re usually still doing stuff.
Also, given the prices we’re seeing teams pay for free agents this winter (spectacularly evidenced by the Werth contract), the M’s are almost certainly best served by staying out of these early bidding wars and waiting for the market to calm down, or simply pursuing other avenues to acquire talent. The organization simply isn’t in a position where it makes sense to be bidding against some of these crazy offers. It might not be much fun to sit on the sidelines and watch other teams add premium players, but given the costs, most of these deals are going to go south, and we’ll be really happy that we don’t have those long term, big money commitments in 12 months.
Patience is going to be a very important virtue this winter.
Meetings Coverage
As you guys almost certainly know, the winter meetings are down in Orlando this week, and for the first time, I’ll be in attendance. What that means for the site is that I probably won’t be around to write ridiculously long missives on each deal as soon as they happen, but I will try to make up for it with some interesting content that can only be gathered by being down there. We’ll probably do a live chat or two, though they might be a bit shorter than the ones we’ve done previously. I might toss up some video responses, since I’ll have a camera down there and it will be faster for me to record and upload a reaction than to type one out.
It’s going to be different, and I don’t totally know what it will look like, honestly. But, if you want immediate coverage from the home front, I suggest checking out Lookout Landing, where Jeff Sullivan will almost certainly be covering trades as they happen with his unique brand of analysis and MS Paint. He and I have the same opinion on everything anyway.
Hyphen Non-Tendered
Rather than offer Ryan Rowland-Smith a slight raise in arbitration, the Mariners non-tendered him today, making him a free agent. If they weren’t able to come to terms by now, it’s unlikely that they’ll agree after this. He’ll probably end up signing elsewhere to try and get a fresh start. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him land in San Diego.
I will say that I don’t really get this. Given his 2010 season and the fact that he was a first year arbitration eligible, he wouldn’t have gotten more than a couple hundred thousand more than the league minimum. The team isn’t really saving any significant money here, so they’re basically just choosing to let him go try and reboot his career somewhere else. Unless they were completely convinced that he wouldn’t make it in Seattle, it seems like a waste. He’s never going to be a star, but there’s enough there to think that he could be an effective reliever, and Safeco is the perfect park for him to pitch in.
Given that the team found room for the completely useless Josh Wilson, I don’t see why they found it necessary to non-tender Ryan Rowland-Smith.
Mariners Trade Jose Lopez To Colorado
We had speculated about the Rockies being a landing spot for Lopez if he was non-tendered, but they decided they’d rather not take the chance that he signs elsewhere, so they sent the Mariners 24-year-old right-hander Chaz Roe to acquire him before the non-tender deadline.
Roe is basically what you’d expect in return for a guy the team was going to release in a few hours – a former first round pick, he’s got a curveball that flashes potential but is inconsistent at best and not a lot else. Without the curve working every time out, he doesn’t have a true out-pitch, and he lacks the great command needed to succeed without one. He’s probably more Triple-A depth than anything else, though he is on the 40 man roster.
Mariners Sign Erik Bedard
Yep, again. This time, after missing all of the 2010 season, Bedard gets a non-guaranteed contract, meaning that they can cut him before spring training ends and only owe him a fraction of the base salary. It’s no-risk, some reward. So, he’s back for another year.
M’s To Non-Tender Lopez
So says Mike Salk. This isn’t a surprise, really, though it is kind of funny that the M’s couldn’t find a trade partner for him during a winter where Geoff Blum gets a two year deal and Miguel Tejada gets a raise for having the worst year of his career. He’ll likely end up in a park where his right-handed power will play better and get his career back on track, but it was just never going to work here.
Why It Would Be Okay To Trade Michael Pineda
The last few weeks of Justin Upton related conversations have given rise to perspectives on the relative trade value of most of the M’s young talents, including the three young guys who seem close enough the majors that you should expect to see them at Safeco this summer – Dustin Ackley, Justin Smoak, and Michael Pineda. Besides Felix, these are the three guys in the organization that get people excited about what the future might hold, and for many of you, the idea of trading any of them away is painful. As Shannon Drayer wrote on her blog, initial reaction is often “hell no” when the topic of moving two of those players for Upton is broached.
However, Shannon came around to the idea of making a move with some limitations – for her, the guy she wants to keep is Michael Pineda. Personally, I’m of the exact opposite opinion – he’s the guy I’d be most willing to deal, and given the Mariners situation, I think it might actually make sense for the M’s to use Pineda as a bargaining chip this winter.
I realize that this might sound crazy. Pineda is the organization’s best pitching prospect by a country mile, as the drop-off after him is pretty substantial. He showed front-of-the-rotation stuff and potential in Double-A and Triple-A last year, and is widely expected to have a real chance to break camp with the team to start the 2011 season. After Felix, the M’s rotation options are a bunch of slop-throwing, pitch-to-contact guys, none of whom have anything resembling Pineda’s upside. If the M’s did trade him, they’d need to acquire two starting pitchers to fill out their rotation this winter, and it’s never easy to get two useful big league starters in the same winter.
However, while Pineda is full of upside, he’s also brimming with risk. Pitching prospects are notoriously fickle, as they are the most likely players on the field to get hurt and don’t follow traditional development curves. Just as an example, here are the pitching prospects that Baseball America ranked in their top 25 prospects before the 2007 season began.
Daisuke Matsuzaka (#1)
Phil Hughes (#4)
Homer Bailey (#5)
Andrew Miller (#10)
Tim Lincecum (#11)
Yovani Gallardo (#16)
Mike Pelfrey (#20)
Matt Garza (#21)
Adam Miller (#23)
Clayton Kershaw (#24)
Despite being a really strong year for pitching prospects, that is a decidedly mixed bag. Dice-K is generally considered a bust, and is nothing more than a #4 or #5 starter at this point. Hughes has turned into a good starter, but it took him four years and a trip to the bullpen in between. Bailey has mostly struggled, finally showing some progress in the second half of last season. Andrew Miller is a bust, as he’s battled arm injuries and is now a reclamation project with his third organization. Lincecum is the big success story, though Gallardo and Kershaw have also developed into high quality starters as well. Pelfrey has established himself as a decent mid-rotation guy, as has Garza, though it took him a change in organizations to live up to the hype. Adam Miller rounds out the bust group, as finger problems have derailed his career.
This is basically how it goes with pitching prospects – even premium ones. There’s a chance that Pineda turns into a really good starting pitcher, but there’s an equally large chance that he gets hurt or simply can’t translate his minor league success to the big leagues. In fact, given Pineda’s history of arm problems and limited workloads, chances are almost certainly better that he busts than that he booms. He’s a high risk prospect even by normal pitching prospect standards.
Volatility is the nature of the beast when it comes to prospects, but the Mariners have some circumstances that suggest it might not make sense for them to be the ones to take the risk on Pineda’s development. The big factor here is Safeco Field. As we’ve talked about ad nauseum, the stadium’s asymmetrical alignment makes it a pitcher’s paradise for southpaws, but it isn’t nearly as friendly for right-handed pitchers. The team has a built-in competitive advantage with left-handed pitchers, where they can take a guy who would be marginal in another park and make him a viable starter because of how the field plays. This gives them a chance to get value out of players who won’t command a huge return in the market, as their skills don’t work in other places as well as they do in Seattle.
This isn’t to say that the Mariners should only have left-handed starting pitchers, but filling the rotation with right-handers does come with an opportunity cost. With Felix and Fister already around, adding Pineda to the rotation leaves a maximum of two spots for lefties, which prevents the team from using the dimensions of its home park to full advantage. Or, to put it another way, replacing Pineda’s production may actually not be all that hard for the Mariners, given their unique ability to extract maximum value from pedestrian left-handed pitchers. If you could get a 4.25 ERA from a guy like Jeff Francis simply because of how the park plays, you would not lose all that much from what Pineda is likely to give you, even if his true talent level is significantly lower.
The other factor is that a team in the Mariners position can’t afford to see one of their primary assets lose a large chunk of his value overnight, as would happen if Pineda’s arm started hurting at some point this year. For a team that needs to be adding value to their major league roster, having two of their five most valuable pieces be pitchers under the age of 25 exposes them to significant downside. Swapping Pineda for a position player, or using him as a piece in a trade that brings the team an everyday player, would reduce the likelihood of the team facing a catastrophe.
I’m not suggesting that the Mariners should give Pineda away, of course. As one of the best pitching prospects in the game, and a guy who could step into a big league rotation right away, he should have a substantial amount of trade value. I’d simply suggest that the Mariners may want to consider cashing in that value if an opportunity to get a quality young position player presents itself. The risks of Pineda flopping are pretty large, and the organization would lose a big asset if he doesn’t develop as hoped. For where they are in terms of roster construction, it may be wise to take a little less reward to minimize risk.
If the Mariners are going to trade any of their premium young talent this winter, Pineda should probably be the one they move.