Podcast: Best Half Ever
Matthew Carruth · July 14, 2014 at 10:51 am · Filed Under Mariners
Monday Morning Podcast!
Jeff and I review the first half, Friday’s biggest (sort of) ever King’s Court, and again talk trade stuff.
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One thing I never hear talked about when it comes to a Walker for Price trade is that if Price walks away, the Mariners get a 31-40 range draft pick. So does 1.5 years of Price + a 31-40 range draft pick = Taijuan Walker? I guess it depends on what else the Rays would want, but I’d be okay with a Walker for Price deal thanks to the surplus value of a draft pick UNLESS Price would extend.
I would want nothing to do with Price at all. He is going to be 29, the pick is a crap shoot or paying to resign him will cripple the budget to sign a real bat someday.
If Walkers name is being thrown around it should be with another top prospect to free Stanton from Miami. Wishful thinking, but a RH bat that has proven he can hit in a pitchers park for more than one year (sorry Adrian) is what is needed.
I guess it depends… I think you could win a World Series with David Price, King, and Iwakuma pitching, and very little offense… Folks say you need 3 quality starters to win it all, all the time.
Not sure I’d say the same thing about Walker, King, and Kuma… Maybe… And maybe for 3 or 4 years in a row…
But Price is a known quantity, and a World Series caliber starter. Hard to talk down TWO Cy Young winners still in their 20’s in your rotation. And what sort of numbers would Price have in Safeco Field?
I honestly think I’d be happy either way… Keeping Walker OR trading him for David Price… Especially if we also pick up Marlon Byrd (who I wasn’t high on until I saw his numbers against LH pitching… OPS of .950)
Byrd has quietly been a freak for a couple years, but his time with the Mets, while cherry picking included .249 .297 .415 at home and 318 .361 .614 away, suggesting Safeco would eat him alive as the Mets park is equally as brutal on hitters as well (best comparison I can think of to how he would do as an M). But a massive upgrade over Endy either way.
I’d gladly trade Erasmo Ramirez for Byrd at this juncture. And I’d also gladly pay a bus ticket fare to ship Dustin Ackley off to the Sally League and never ever hear from him again.
Does Ramirez even have value? Byrd is getting up there I’d love it we could give away something as simple as Ramirez for an upgrade. Ackley needs to get out of Seattle, I don’t know what went wrong with him, some reason I could see him thriving on another team.
Anyone watching the Home run derby? who’s the guy hanging out with Cespedes wearing the Felix Jersey and Mariners hat, because he certainly is not Felix.
mksh21, I was responding to Matthew saying he wouldn’t deal Erasmo for Byrd in the podcast. I disagree with his valuations of our players pretty vehemently and would likely do all the trades he said he wouldn’t do in the podcast (Erasmo for Byrd, Walker for Price, etc.) Matthew has the classic overvaluation of his own team’s players (which is fine and something most of us are guilty of at one stage or another).
“The race is a door” — Jeff Sullivan
Bodhizefa: you’re right, overvaluing one’s own team’s prospects is a common problem. But you know what that means? It means our prospects are worth less than we think. Which means it takes more of them to get Price.
How would you feel if you woke up to the headline Mariners trade Walker, Franklin, and Peterson for Price? Or Walker + Paxton + Franklin? Or maybe even more than that?
Because we now know that the A’s were willing to give up Addison Russell plus pieces, and that wasn’t enough to pry Price out of TB. Meanwhile Taijuan Walker’s value has dropped, at least temporarily. So it’s going to take even more of package to get Price now; one top ten prospect (which Russell currently is and Walker isn’t) won’t be enough. How much future value are you willing to gamble on winning 2014 Game 163?
And the other teams around baseball now know Addison Russell wasn’t enough either; one of them is bound to step up and overpay. I’m not sure I want that team to be the Mariners.
“Endy, Ackley, and Jones are the same player.” Well, not really. Endy is old. Ackley, as you said, is inexplicably awful. Jones at least has potential. Especially on the basepaths, and in this new low-scoring era, that’s more valuable than it used to be when teams could just sit back and wait for home runs. Jones is on track to steal 30+ bases this season and has only been caught once. That’s not as valuable as a high wOBA, but it is something, and it’s something that the other players really don’t bring to the lineup. And it’s also exciting to watch. All those years of watching boringly bad M’s teams may have set my standards too low, but I watch baseball games to be entertained, so I’d rather have exciting loses than boring ones.
Nobody’s going to be Rickey Henderson (probably ever again), but a poor man’s Rickey would be a valuable top-of-the-order player on a contending team. Jones has a long way to go to be even that (starting with better plate discipline) but he plays a good CF right now and, unlike Ackley, we haven’t yet given up on him at the plate.
How valuable is a draft pick in the 31-40 range? Not worthless, but historically not super valuable (you’re talking about Tier 6 and Tier 7 in this article). Especially when you’re the kind of team that pulls Jeff Clements out of historically great draft classes.
I know who could fix a lot of the problems this team has. Adam Jones! Sigh…
Yeah, but “Bedard can win games if we just score 3 or 4 runs for him” whereas Adam Jones “hasn’t proven anything. In his ABs at the major league level he has done absolutely nothing.” Where have you gone, cossgo17? Mariners prognosticators turn their lonely eyes to you, woo woo woo. And Shin Soo Choo too, woo woo woo.
Nice to see Mike Trout beating the National League.
Interesting articles joser. I’m wondering if any of that changes with the slot amounts and teams underslotting college guys early so they can blow the doors off of signability high schoolers with big upside due to the leftovers? Also, remember: Walker himself was drafted below where the hypothetical Price-comp pick would be selected.
You talk about plucking a player from someone’s AAA affiliate who is either old or blocked… I know little about him except his stats, and his very Mariners backstory – from Everett, WA (check), tested positive for performance enhancers (check), briefly ‘retired’ (check)… Does anyone here have any info or an opinion on Steven Souza? He is a RH hitting OF, and is presently annihilating the International League. And the Nats have a crap-ton of outfielders. He’s not gonna break thru there.
Thanks guys, these are always great!
tourist: I don’t know how much the changes in slotting affect this. Certainly we don’t have enough data yet (and won’t for a while, until a cohort drafted under the new rules arrives in the majors) but I doubt it will change it much. The reality is that even the top of the draft produces a lot of busts, and that just increases enormously as you go down the order. (Have a look at B-Ref’s draft info by position, and sort by WAR; sure, at #31 you have Maddux and Washburn… but then look at everybody else. That’s two, over 50 years. That’s a 4% chance at a payoff. And it just goes down from there.)
And sure, Walker was picked below that. So, famously, was Albert Pujols. There are always a couple of golden tickets scattered around the higher draft numbers; that’s what makes people keep coming back to the lottery. But it is a lottery, and very few tickets pay off. For that matter, Walker himself hasn’t, yet. Pitching prospects are busts until they aren’t. I remember the early 2000s when the Mariners had a “big three” in Travis Blackley, Clint Nageotte, and — the Taijuan Walker of that group, the “can’t miss” guy — Ryan Anderson.