Return Of Dave To Brock And Salk
At 11:00 this morning, the dulcet tones of my nasally voice will return to 710 ESPN, as we resume our segments with the boys over at Brock and Salk. This year, I’m sharing the spotlight with the tremendously awesome Jeff Sullivan, as he and I will alternate writing pieces for the 710Sports.com site and appearing as guests with Mike and Brock to discuss the pieces that we wrote and the team as a whole.
In fact, my first piece for their blog is up now. I’ll throw the first few paragraphs in here, but you can read the whole thing over at their site. We’ll have a piece up here from Salk in the not too distant future as well.
After last season’s debacle, the focus on the 2011 Mariners is understandably on the offense. After all, we all had to suffer through one of the worst offensive seasons in baseball history, and this year’s line-up isn’t exactly the 1927 Yankees either — witness Adam Kennedy hitting third yesterday as an example.
This team has real offensive problems, and their inability to score runs will continue to cost them wins going forward. However, if we do an honest appraisal of how the team has played so far this season, we find that it’s actually run prevention, not run scoring, that has been the real problem.
Read The Rest At 710Sports.com.
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8 Responses to “Return Of Dave To Brock And Salk”
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I was happy to see this arrangement last season, and I’m glad it’s continuing. My only disappointment was that Salk didn’t write more often than he did – but then I imagine his incessant tweeting wears his fingers out. 😀
Please continue to link your posts here! Brock and Salk isn’t on my usual reading list, and I’d love to see links when these things appear. (This is one of LL’s format advantages: Stuff like that tends to show up on Fanshots.)
And I hope to see more from Salk here on USSM. One of the things I miss these days is Derek’s whimiscal fun posts on various bits of baseball. Maybe Salk can bring a little of that, even if he isn’t as talented a writer as DMZ.
The first comment on that post is freakin’ hilarious.
Here is the link to Dave’s segment today (@6:30).
Good work, Dave! Can you do us all a favor and flatly accuse Salk of making it his life’s passion to see Felix in Yankee pinstripes? He wants to see Felix traded for prospects so badly…it makes me sick.
It’s also on their (Brock and Salk) iTunes podcast.
Good to hear you doing this again, Dave (and much easier to listen to after they fixed whatever was creating those painful drop-outs).
This is purely speculation, of course, but I think Brock is way optimistic with his assumptions that the team will maintain a $90-$100M payroll next year. Unless attendance picks up this summer (and why would it?) the team isn’t going to turn a profit in 2011 (subject to all the caveats about the opacity of their true financials). With money coming off the books this winter (Bradley etc) I don’t think we should assume that all of it will be available to sign free agents in the offseason. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jack Z is asked to do more with less (fortunately, with some of the kids coming up, that may be possible)
But Salk is from Boston and is something of a Red Sox fan, so I don’t think his life’s passion is to see Felix in pinstripes. Rather, I think his passion is to see blockbuster trades happen every week so he has plenty of material to talk about. Barring that, he’s quite happy to speculate about blockbuster trades and to suck everybody else into the fantasy as well. He has a lot of airtime hours to fill.
Yeah, 75% right is about right for Jack. The problem is the AL West grades on a curve. We’ve lost ground to Texas and LA, and Billy Beane actually knows how to put together the team Jack Zduriencik wants to put together (decent pitching, good defense, enough offense), but can’t.
I idly looked at B-R and saw the M’s have an age of 31.2 for their batters. The 2004 team? 31.4- actually OLDER than in 2010, by two years. Uh-ohs. Yes, this is unfair since Moore and Guti are gone right now. On the other hand, outside of Smoak and Saunders, the lineup’s all over 30. Gee, they can’t hit and a bunch of over-thirty hitters are having disappointing years. Whoocodanode? Hey, didn’t a sabermetrician write about players on the wrong side of 30 once? So much for playing the kids.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Jack Z is asked to do more with less (fortunately, with some of the kids coming up, that may be possible)
Brandon League and Chone Figgins have combined to give the Mariners about 1 win above replacement- and Figgins’ ZiPS projections for his offense going forward should depress you. These moves aren’t ones anyone can blame Bill Bavasi for, and they are going to soak up about 20 million from the 2010-2011 teams combined.
Maybe Jack Zduriencik hasn’t earned the privilege to do more with more, or even more with the same, so he’s going to end up with less while Figgins turns into a nine million dollar bench player for a couple of years. That is, if he isn’t fired if the Mariners pratfall to someplace they haven’t been since their expansion years.
And yes, a lot of this season is irrelevant… but it is nearly impossible to go from really bad to decent team. Jack had two goals: develop kids AND be at least somewhat decent while doing it. Failing one of them isn’t a passing grade.