Podcast: Mariners’ Train Stalls
Matthew Carruth · June 16, 2014 at 9:17 am · Filed Under Mariners
Monday morning podcast(s) continues/begins.
Tony Gwynn 🙁
Is not covered in the podcast, but obviously is very sad news. The podcast is Mariners-stuff as usual. We found ourselves surprisingly chipper given the past week. I suppose the Sunday result inordinately affects our podcasting mood.
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Thanks again to those that helped support the show and/or StatCorner work in general last week, and in the past, and hopefully in the future. It’s truly appreciated.
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“I Feel Like Chicken Tonight” for all the youngsters out there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnjcVvO40bg
The passing of Tony Gwynn at age 54 is a heart breaker. He was one of the truly great hitters of our time, a fine outfielder and far and away the best point guard in the National League. (If memory serves–it often doesn´t–his predecessor in this regard was Dick Groat.) He was also one of the classiest human beings in the game, a mensch´s mensch. I confess that I´m not a fan of George Will, but his chapter on TG in Men Working gives us the exact measure of the player and the man. RIP.
The exact title of the George Will book is Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. That sort of mixup happens inevitably when, as Santa Teresa of Ávila says in her autobiography, you write “a vuelapluma”, with pen flying. Sorry!
Oh you guys saying the idea of the Cubs trading Anthony Rizzo is retarded…. That was for me, wasn’t it? Anyway, it all depends on what the Mariners organization would be willing to give up for a cornerstone offensive piece. The Cubs do have a Kris Bryant destroying shit in the minors, and is likely a 1B long term as well. And with some major pedigree. Anyway, Cubs seem to have a small 1B logjam in their system.
But Mariners… he’d come here and suck anyway.
I think I need to say “anyway” one more time. For posterity sake. Heh.
Not that it matters but the real life Rudy Ruettiger aside from getting caught for stock scamming is a successful motivational speaker and also has a hand in the success of some sort of medical company. So…there you go!
With Olt currently struggling, I don’t see the Cubs willing to change Bryant’s position right now. Plus they have that Schwarber guy to potentially play first. The bigger issue is dealing with Castro and Barney. With Baez and Alcantara possibly being called up sometime next year, deciding whether they want to bring them along slowly or not will be the first huge decision Epstein will have to make with the Cubs.
“What the hell has this team been for 12 years?”
Indeed.
I was at the last “Jeter Game” — which had very few empty seats (especially for a 2014 M’s game) — and while I was sitting out near the Ichi-Meter Lady in RF, a long way from the deep-pocketed Yankee die-hards around the 3B dugout, there were plenty of Yankees fans scattered around nearby. This created sort of an interesting dynamic whenever Jeter came to the plate: the Yankees fans were of course cheering their heads off, whereas the majority of M’s fans seemed torn between polite appreciation of a departing future HoFer and the normal healthy hatred of a damned Yankee, leaving them in a very Seattle puddle of passive apathy. Fortunately, the stadium was also peppered with Mariners fans who — whatever their response might have been to Jeter’s first plate appearance two nights earlier — were quite certain about where their cheering interest lay, and made it quite apparent by attempting to drown the Yankees fans with their boos.
The only Yankee who got a universal cheer in that game was Ichiro, who didn’t start but came in as a late-inning replacement in his usual RF spot (classy move by Giardi) and gave the Ichi-meter lady and the RF bleachers a little wave of acknowledgement in what could very easily be the last professional game he ever plays in Seattle.
As somebody who was in almost the same seats during the weird games against the Yankees immediately after Ichiro was traded, it was a bittersweet little coda kind of lost in the whole Jeteriffic Victory Overture.
With regard to the tepid trade deadline and the loss of excitement that came with blockbuster trades, I think the altered draft compensation (ie no draft pick for a rental player) may have had more of an effect than the (mostly false) promise of the wildcard. Afterall, the wildcard is now just a sure ticket to one extra game and not necessarily the postseason as a whole, and that has to be a muting factor on even the dumbest, most win-now front offices.
And of course (as you mentioned) teams generally are locking up their good young players to contracts before they get close to free agency, so there simply are fewer sellers with that impetus to dump those about-to-get-expensive players.
Also, I particularly enjoyed this podcast for some reason. I’m not sure why — maybe precisely because so little of it was about the Mariners — but the rants and digressions and tangents were especially amusing to me this time.