Cactus League Game 1? M’s Vs. Padres, Average
Marco Gonzales vs. Adrian Morejon, 12:10pm
It’s the first cactus league game, so at this point the M’s are going to roll into 2021 with the team on display today. The line-up in today’s game looks more or less like what we’d all expect their opening day line-up to be. It’s…not bad. Jose Marmolejos and Shed Long look to cede their places to better options, while Dan Vogelbach, Mallex Smith and Austin Nola now ply their trade elsewhere, replaced by Ty France, the returning Mitch Haniger, and the returning Tom Murphy. There’s a bit less shrug-emoji in this line-up, but it’s also a line-up projected to score about 715-720 runs, one of the lowest totals in the league (714 by PECOTA, 711 by ClayDavenport, 731 by Fangraphs). What gives?
The Mariners are projected to have a terrible batting average. Yes, don’t adjust your monitor, I’m going to talk about batting average in this post. One of the earliest lessons any analytically-minded fan learns is that batting average can be misleading, hiding important information all over the place even as it’s held up as some sort of final word on a batter’s skill. We’ve all learned that batters can be fantastically productive despite a low batting average; OBP correlates more with run scoring, and hitting a bunch of dingers will do the trick, too. The M’s are composed of many such players – players with strong skills in one or more phases of the game, albeit with some pure bat-to-ball or batting average-type skills. For each individual player, we can shrug our shoulders and say, eh, sure, I’d love it if he hit .280, but his batting eye or power or up-the-middle-defense are more important to how we evaluate him.
The question the M’s asked in 2020 and haven’t exactly resolved is: What if you made the entire team out of players with the same flaw? The M’s are projected to bat in the mid .230s *as a team*. That can’t be much of a shock, given that they hit .226 last year. Sure, guys like Vogelbach and Smith have moved on, and Ty France and Dylan Moore will produce more base hits. But up and down the line-up, you see the same pattern. We are all excited about a healthy Mitch Haniger, but the man did hit .220 before his injury in 2019, and is projected to hit around .250 (which, for this team, is positively Ichiro-esque). He’ll be surrounded by the likes of Moore (.220 by ZiPS, .229 by PECOTA) and Tom Murphy (.221 by ZiPS, .219 by PECOTA). Both JP Crawford and Kyle Lewis, two guys who look like they’ll be hitting at the top of the line-up, project as sub-.240 hitters. Evan White…well, you get the point.
But what about all of the things those guys do well? That’s true, and you can go down that list and talk about why there’s plenty of hope for each player, or say that they could be league average or better even if those batting average projections are pretty close. The M’s have batters like Haniger and Crawford who are more than capable of drawing walks, and for all of his struggles, White demonstrated a solid eye too. They’re going to take their fair share of walks. Many of these players, especially Murphy, Lewis, and White, have demonstrated some power prowess. But here’s the issue: a solid walk rate won’t be enough to score runs if their average is so low. This is macro version of JP Crawford’s career: very good walk rate, but it pulls his OBP up to .325 for his career. The M’s solid walk rate produced an OBP under .310 last year, and that won’t work long term. If this continues, it’s going to be exceedingly hard to score runs without home runs.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with getting your runs via the long ball. Given where strikeout rates are going, it’s becoming much more of a baseball problem than a Mariner-specific one. With Murphy and Haniger back, the M’s are a good bet to improve upon last year’s disastrous .370 SLG% (again, decent-ish ISO, but added to a low, low BA). With league-wide trends in the game, and with research continually finding that teams that are dependent upon dingers score MORE runs than supposedly balanced teams both in the regular season and the playoffs, maybe the M’s roster construction is right.
If the ball stays similar to 2019-2020 models, the M’s have a chance to Oakland A’s their way to low-BA, highish-OBP, high-SLG% their way to success. If the ball were to change, somehow, though….OH, COME ON. If MLB is successful in reducing the baseball’s COR (bounciness) in a consistent way, it could reduce fly ball distance and thus home runs. Max Bay created estimates for this impact on *each player* given their batted balls in recent years. Kyle Seager’s name is among the top 10 most impacted by this change. A team with a .230s batting average and a low ISO is going to seriously, seriously struggle to score runs, especially if they strike out a lot. The M’s strike out a lot.
All of this puts a spotlight on players who might give the M’s some base hits on a consistent basis. Ty France is perhaps the best example of this, but it also means we’ll keep a close eye on players like Haniger and Crawford, who’ve had stretches as solid hitters, and other times where they’ve traded average for power or walks. Tom Murphy and Dylan Moore have both been very productive in their short M’s careers, but have done so despite high K rates – what will they do in 2021 in what looks like a full season? And which version of Kyle Lewis will we see? The average-and-power-and-defense five-tool stud we saw early in 2020, or the guy who really struggled to consistently make contact in the second half? The answers to these questions will go a long way to determining how long the M’s hang around in the expanded playoff chase.
Today’s line-up:
1: Crawford, SS
2: Haniger, RF
3: Lewis, CF
4: Seager, 3B
5: France, DH
6: Moore, 2B
7: White, 1B
8: Murphy, C
9: Fraley, LF
SP: Marco Gonzales
Marco will go one inning, I’d expect. Interested to see (er, not SEE exactly, as the game’s only on radio) Wyatt Mills and Rule 5 pick Will Vest, who may pitch an inning in relief. Vest opened eyes in instructs with the Tigers, gaining velo after he spent the 2019 season…gaining velo.
The battle for LF will be fascinating, and not just for the whole soap opera surrounding Jarred Kelenic. Jake Fraley will get another chance after a very disappointing couple of years, and Dylan Moore could see some time there if the M’s want to play Ty France at 2B, Sam Haggerty returns after an injury-shortened 2020, and Braden Bishop remains on the outskirts of this competition, too. None of these options looks like a sure-fire way to avoid a grievance by keeping Kelenic down, mind you.
The Wrong Question
You’re Jerry Dipoto. You’ve got a burgeoning farm system and an iffy big league roster. It’s not a shock that you’re in this position, but you’re constantly aware of the pressure to turn potential into major league production. How do you develop prospects during a pandemic? How do you balance developmental needs with maximizing the success of the big league club with financial forces? It’s a lot. About the last thing he’d need is his boss, erstwhile M’s president Kevin Mather, telling the entire world that the org is manipulating Jarred Kelenic’s service time to get an extra year of club control.
This is, to put it mildly, a tough spot. Mather essentially brags about it, saying that Kelenic would be up in late April. As detailed by Nathan at DomeandBedlam, Jerry’s response was to essentially question whether starting Kelenic in Tacoma (or Arkansas) is such an obvious violation of the letter or spirit of any rules – it’s quite rare for a player to debut in the majors with so few minor league at-bats and games, and that’s doubly true for a player drafted out of high school.
Maybe it’s the pressure, but Dipoto instantly shoots himself in the foot by arguing such a promotion would be essentially unprecedented in the past few decades (he seemed to use A-Rod’s 1994 debut as the exception that proved the rule). This, as several people instantly discovered, wasn’t true. Juan Soto made the Nats out of spring training as a teenager way back in 2018, and things seemed to work out – they even won the World Series in 2019, and Soto’s raked consistently. But is Kelenic really akin to the generational talent of Soto (who, let’s remember, was seen as the 2nd best Nats OF prospect back when he debuted!)? Luke Arkins at ProspectInsider examines that question, comparing the games and plate appearances for several prospects, from Tatito to Bryce Harper. He ends by arguing that Dipoto’s close to the situation, and thus has more of a sense of when a prospect’s ready than any of us reading news reports.
In a vacuum, I might agree with Arkins; it’s not that no prospects have debuted with so few at-bats, it’s that none of them debuted after a season without any official at-bats due to a global pandemic! However, we do not and could not live in a vacuum. We live in a world after Kevin Mather’s Hour of Candor went viral. Mather didn’t speculate, he flat out TOLD the Rotarians that Kelenic would be up in late April. Worse for Dipoto, Bob Nightengale’s interview with Kelenic and his agent not only confirms what Mather says, he goes further: Kelenic was offered a contract extension similar to the one Evan White got (but with more money), buying out his pre-arb/arb years and making the whole service clock argument moot. The M’s were perfectly prepared to let Kelenic make his debut in *2020* if he’d just sign a team-friendly contract. Caution is often warranted with Nightengale, but Ryan Divish confirmed the whole thing on the recent LookoutLanding podcast (which is well worth a listen).
Jerry Dipoto wants us to ask how we can be so sure that Kelenic’s ready. That’s the wrong question, because it’s one that Jerry himself was willing to answer affirmatively…a year ago. The M’s have been perfectly content to trot out a weaker big league team (Jose Marmolejos/Tim Lopes/Shed Long LF platoon) to keep Kelenic down. They’ve been caught red-handed essentially offering to trade an immediate big league promotion for a team-friendly deal that would hurt Kelenic’s leverage. They are not the first team to do so, and they likely won’t be the last. But they have to understand that they can’t get everyone to debate the perfectly-debatable question of Kelenic’s timeline in a post-Mather, post USA Today column, world.
The whole bit about keeping Kelenic down for 12-15 days to get another year of club control is about giving the team more leverage. It’s what we all expect teams to do, even after the Nats and Juan Soto showed it’s not literally required (which is a way many fans have come to see it). If Kelenic is all that Kelenic thinks he is, all of us would be happy – it would save Jerry’s job, the M’s would be compelling, and Kelenic would be the star he wants to be. Keeping him down those couple of weeks would knock several million off any long-term deal they’d offer. But to try and save those several million, they’ve royally pissed him off, making it less likely he’d sign a deal that…saved those several million. To sum up, the M’s saw Kelenic as their best option last year, but wouldn’t promote him in order to take away some contract leverage. They’ve been so utterly transparent that they’ve lost the leverage anyway.
Just as Kevin Mather flubbed the easiest question imaginable for an M’s exec (“Talk about Julio Rodriguez”), Dipoto flubbed the fall-out by talking about service time. The M’s desperately need to NOT talk about that right now, and to commit to fans that they take the longest playoff drought in US pro sports seriously. How hard would it be to say something anodyne like, “Jarred will show us when it’s time” or “We’ll have to wait and see” or something. Talking about his minor league at-bats let’s Mather’s statement that he would be ready in late April hang around, a juicy target for a future grievance or grist for the CBA negotiations in a few months. This is not a good sign, and not a good pattern. I swear I’ll talk about actual Mariners baseball stuff soon. I just haven’t stopped shaking my head at this franchise since last Sunday.
Kevin Mathers and Post-Competitive Baseball
There is one rule of operating a Major League Baseball team – one piece of wisdom passed down from owner to owner, executive to executive. Don’t do anything stupid. The definition of stupid can change, of course, due to changes in the CBA, long-standing practices being declared “illegal” by nosy judges, shifts in fan preferences/tolerance. But the central idea makes a heck of a lot of sense for a business with an anti-trust exemption from Congress: there’s no real way to lose unless you go out of your way to find one.
In the 1980s, teams colluded to limit player salaries. There wasn’t as much TV money sloshing around front offices, but teams still wanted a way to ensure that salaries stayed low, and that a fellow owner going rogue wouldn’t upset anything. Even within this system that illegally prevented competition, the Commissioner needed to crack the whip occasionally, berating owners for trying to win even if that meant :gasp: losing money for a year.
The owners got caught in 1987, the same year the perpetually down-on-their-luck Mariners drafted Ken Griffey, Jr. A year after the Kid debuted, MLB signed a multi-year deal with ESPN, and the TV gold rush began. By the end of the 1990s, MLB – a baseball organization – had developed the best media streaming system in the world, and soon would have TV companies and other sports leagues as *customers* for its services. For years, teams had to be somewhat competitive to attract fans to games. The M’s often failed at this, and that failure led to tight budgets, which led to failure.
The league accounted for this with things like the draft, giving awful teams the first shot at the best amateur talent at artificially low prices. That was great, but some teams didn’t seem to care too much, and the draft seemed kind of like a crap shoot. The M’s getting Al Chambers and Mike Moore #1 overall didn’t make them any less a laughingstock, after all. But you can see where this is leading: the TV gold rush began to weaken the nexus between on-field success and annual profit/loss.
Despite the big national deal with ESPN, baseball remains a very regional game, and so regional sports networks jumped in, paying huge rights fees for baseball and televising every game (a novelty at the time). This enabled them to compete with ESPN and other cable channels, and to charge cable companies more to carry their channel. This revenue stream was massive and varied tremendously from market to market. A team coming to the end of its agreement with its RSN was in for a windfall, and often tried to spend before the deal was up to give them extra leverage in negotiations with the RSN. There was still a vestigial connection to on-field success, or at least the perception of one.
In this environment, what does “stupid” look like? At the same time RSNs changed the economics of the game, the nascent sabermetric movement was making serious inroads in the game. Bill James wasn’t just a bizarre, nerdy secret anymore, and the internet brought attention to outsiders from Voros McCracken and Keith Woolner and Clay Davenport (and, yes, Dave Cameron and Derek Zumsteg!). They saw right away that teams were often making baffling decisions in player acquisition, overvaluing things a player didn’t control, and ignoring others that were more important to run-scoring/run-preventing. By the 2010s, the Players Union saw how much teams had incorporated the lessons from analytics, and wanted to try get more of the TV money flowing to veterans and not draft picks and international free agents.
It’s hard to overstate the owners’ luck here. Not only had the value of owning a club skyrocketed, but now you had really smart people telling you that the *worst* thing you could do is to give a big contract to a guy like Carlos Lee. You didn’t want to tie up payroll in an aging slugger when you could get 90% of the production for 1% of the cost from some unfairly-maligned AAAA slugger. And THEN the Players thought it would help if teams were *forbidden* to sign draft picks to over-slot bonuses. And THEN put hard caps in place on international signings. Competition was already kind of unnecessary and unseemly, but you got labor peace by limiting it further! You couldn’t even BE stupid anymore. This beat the old system in which some teams would break ranks and sign the best player to a big contract. We can’t have that.
This isn’t to say that there wasn’t an adjustment period. Clubs had to learn a new argot, and teach it to fans. Again, the analytic movement and, uh, blogs like this one was already doing that for them. WE taught that a club shouldn’t necessarily splash out for a big free agent. WE taught that an extra year of club control was super valuable, probably MORE valuable than a month or two of a very young rookie’s big league production. WE were always talking about undervalued commodities when we meant baseball players. We cared a lot about salaries.
The great Joe Sheehan has argued* that there may have been a time in which it was right or partially right to do so: in the 1990s-2000s, one really big move might have precluded others. Scarcity still existed at some level, and clubs watched their budget pretty carefully. But at this point, it is harder and harder to justify that kind of zero-sum thinking. The Padres just spent a ton on Manny Machado, but that didn’t in any way prevent them from extending Fernando Tatis Jr., nor should it. With this much money in the game, there’s no way you can really lose by committing a ton of money to Tatis, Trout, Betts, etc.
This is a depressing prologue to the central paradox of this age: if nothing matters, if doing just about anything, leads to well-nigh guaranteed money, why are teams so *similar*? Why are they all copying each other? Why do the ivy-league GMs and the Jerry Dipotos all talk the same way about “years of club control” and flexibility and competitive windows? I think it’s because all of us – myself, sabermetric people, casual fans, the players – overestimated the desire of baseball teams to actually win. The players assumed that all of the money “saved” on the draft would flow to them, just as they expected the luxury tax to create a ton of parity with multiple teams in contention each year, and thus bidding up free agents that’d put them over the top. At the same time, you had sites like this or Fangraphs or BaseballProspectus talking about the value of high draft picks, about trading veterans for prospects, and how fans shouldn’t necessarily hate it when a team is simply not competitive. Ooops.
Teams deemed exceeding the luxury tax “being stupid,” for the purpose of defining the one guiding principal. Teams have diverted more space and resources to luxury boxes, not only increasing revenue per seat but creating a revenue floor even when a team’s awful. Teams have taken some early sabermetric ideas and turned them into rigid dogma. It’s not just that you can get an extra year of club control by keeping a player in the minors for a month, it’s that you HAVE TO, in all cases, even if that player is better than the incumbent, and even if you might be in a playoff hunt. Not only that, fans will applaud you for it. Nothing is gained by reckless competition. All of the money, all of the insights that analytics gave – there’s still only one World Series winner, and there’s still 30 teams getting wealthy no matter what.**
This all gets to WHY a Kevin Mather can rise to the level of President of the Seattle Mariners, a point made more forcefully by David Skiba here. David’s point is dead-on: Kevin Mather is in no sense a businessman, because this is not a business. Mather’s job seemed to have been to count the money and to remind people that a little competition is a dangerous thing. I’m not sure even the baseball ops folks would argue for, say, Jarred Kelenic to start the year in Seattle, but if they did, Mather would be there to say, “No, let’s be smart about this.”
It’s only someone so insulated from real-world consequences that can nitpick minuscule expenses like a translator for a beloved ex-player and current coach. It’s only someone so steeped in the dogma of club control that can forget that you can’t talk about how it’s manipulated with the general public. Mather’s job was to enforce the one rule, and he ironically lost his job because he exposed it so clearly. Every M’s prospect knew, at some level, that the team would monkey with their service time to save a buck, but there he was, telling the Bellevue Rotary Club about it.
But he wasn’t content to merely say the quiet parts loud. He had to double down and take pot shots at things like Julio Rodriguez’s English, even as the M’s marketing department highlights Julio’s own English-language interview show on YouTube. He mentioned not allowing employees to park in the parking garage, because said garage didn’t have space for them, but also that the neighborhood made this lack of parking dangerous. The stuff about manipulating service time? Every single team does that. Every potential replacement for Mather will do that. What compelled Mather to take a completely unnecessary jab at the club’s hyper-charismatic future star? Why brag about banning employees from the garage? My initial thought was that he was trying out some new excuses for manipulating service time; that Julio’s English wasn’t quuuuuite where it needed to be in April of 2022, but would get a ton better by May. It’s dumb, but the Cubs holding down Kris Bryant for “defense” in 2015 was at least as dumb, and we all laughed, but let it go.
No, I think Mather was trying to communicate to an audience of business folks that he was one of the gang. He ran a business, just like they did, and he had the same kind of concerns – employees want too much, I don’t understand all of the accents I hear, and man, the city center’s kind of dangerous now, y’know? None of it is true, of course. He was the President of a big league club that’s valued at $1.6 billion dollars and which now owns the majority of its own RSN. The club is incredibly valuable because it is an MLB team, not because of anything they do on the field. It got to this point because the Mathers of the game recognized that competing was a fool’s errand. He wanted to fit in with the Rotarians, but nothing about MLB is analogous to the real world.
Patrick Dubuque (my favorite baseball writer) notes that the entire league is made of Mathery characters, and that much of what Mather said is standard operating procedure. That’s both true and depressing. I’m not sure what the club can do to rebuild trust with pretty much every level of the organization. I think of the language teachers in the M’s Dominican camp, the people that gave Julio Rodriguez such a great foundation that he could give interviews in English in the US at 18-19 years old. I think of the ushers who were told that the neighborhood they work in is dangerous, but that the costs for police to protect them is kinda annoying. I think of veterans called overpaid, and the real harm this can do to a club trying to make the playoffs for the first time in a generation.
Do the M’s *have* to break camp with Kelenic on the roster now just to show that Mather doesn’t represent their culture? I don’t know. I’m sure some are now rooting pretty hard for him to go 2 for his first 20. But even that – even forgoing their precious 7th year of control – would be a fig leaf. If the M’s want to show that Mather doesn’t represent “who we are” then they have to ditch the one rule. They have to stop talking about competing and actually compete. This team that hasn’t won a playoff game since 2001 spent the offseason picking through the waiver wire and nabbing a closer who might pitch in 2022. They did this in the most wide-open AL West we’ve seen in several years, and they’re pretty proud of it. Don’t like free agent deals? The Colorado Rockies are paying the St. Louis Cardinals to play Nolan Arenado, all-world 3B, in exchange for some low-level prospects and a swingman or two. Stop being driven by an artificial timeline to compete and actually compete. The bar has never been lower, just like the risk. I think Patrick’s right, and that every team in baseball has a Kevin Mather. Fine, then doing the right thing should be even easier, Mariners. Literally no one will stop you. Show us who you are.
* I subscribed to Joe’s newsletter this year, and it’s been a worthwhile purchase.
** I can see an argument here that I haven’t shown this, I’ve merely asserted it. This is true! But as teams won’t open their books, they can’t disprove it.