Garret v Griffey
DMZ · February 7, 2009 at 3:19 pm · Filed Under Mariners
An agent asking a team to sign one of their players shouldn’t count as a story.
Anyway, PECOTAs:
Garret: .275/.316/.422 in 418 PA
Griffey: .250/.343/.432 in 442 PA
And the only people who’d come out to see Anderson are the press people who keep singing his praises and telling us he’s underrated… and they don’t buy tickets.
I don’t have emperical data. Just a gut feeling. But the attendance increase was all about Safeco and Ichiro.
So why aren’t the Mariners packing it in to the tune of 3.6 million every year? Safeco is still Safeco. Ichiro is still Ichiro.
Oh, right, because they’re a bad team now.
Seriously, you’re arguing something that’s contradicted by all available evidence: the halo from a new park is VERY short lived, unless there’s a good team to go with it, and individual players have to be doing something quite extraordinary to have a significant impact on attendance.
Anderson has played lazy, uninspired ball for a contending team the past several years — I can’t imagine his output for a “rebuilding†team in a city that means nothing to him when he’s working for 1/5th of his 2008 salary.
Regrdless of being lazy or uninspired, GA is a league-average LF defensively, whereas Griffey’s one of the worst defensive OF’ers in baseball, and thus GA’s contributed MORE to his team then Griffey has since 2005. Basically, Anderson is about the same as Endy Chavez as an OF in terms of his value to his teams.
Obviously Griffey would be the superior DH, if we are looking to JUST sign a DH… but the problem is that the ONLY position that Griffey could contribute in is as a DH. It’s a fair argument to go “you know, I’d rather rotate Ichiro, Anderson, Beltre, Clement, Branyan and Shelton, Lopez, etc. through the DH spot and have more flexibility in filling out a lineup card”. DH does not have to be a set position- it can be the way to keep a hitter in a lineup while letting them not play the field for a day and get a semi-day off. Sparkey Anderson used to manage this way. Lou also used to rotate multiple players through positions, and it has advantages- it keeps your bench fresh and game-ready.
Of course, we already have Endy Chavez. Why then do we need Garret Anderson? Obviously not for his long term future. What do columnists get from Scott Boras for reprinting his fantasties as fact?
Why then do we need Garret Anderson?
We might want a better 3rd/4th OF than Wlad.
One thing about Garret Anderson is that he has the fourth lowest walk rate of any player with over 7000 PA in MLB history, ahead of only Garry Templeton, Ozzie Guillen and Bill Buckner. If there’s one thing I’d like to destroy utterly from the Bavasi era, it’s the idea that you only get one pitch to hit per at-bat and you’d better swing at it. Bringing in another of his Angels isn’t the right idea.