Lookout Landing

Community Projection: Raul Ibanez

2008-12-02T04:14:07Z

The sixth in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .276/.343/.447
Actual Line: .293/.358/.479

I'm tired of writing the same stuff about Ibanez over and over again so today I give you the illustrated version of what should at this point be common knowledge.

Yes, Raul Ibanez is a good hitter. Over the last three years he's been the best hitter on the team. But hitting is only half of his job, and while he's been able to hold his own in that department for a while, his defense has slipped to the point at which he could leave his glove in the outfield and go get some snacks during play and still provide a reasonable approximation of his physical ability. Overall he's been a below-average player these last two years, and at 36 years old, his best days are behind him, meaning whoever gives him a three-year contract to reward his professionalism and RBI totals will be paying a guy who simply doesn't help the team win. A small drop in his offense going forward will get him pushing the boundary of 1 WAR, and any significant age-related decline will sink his value in a hurry. He's just a bad gamble. Shame on the team that gives Raul the money he's going to get.

Raul, I appreciate all the run production and hard work, but your canonization is a shining example of everything that was wrong with the prior front office. Although I like you fine as a guy and as a role model for some of the younger players, I am beyond ready to move on and replace you with someone who gets more done, so with that in mind, good luck, and thanks for the laughs. Your defense may have contributed to the killing of a season, but your .gifs were what saved it. And that counts for something.

First Speculation Opportunity Of The Winter

2008-12-02T00:10:29Z

About damn time.

Baker:

Also, Zduriencik has had conversations about another free-agent and may have an answer in 48 hours.

LaRue:

As the coaches were being introduced, GM Jack Zduriencik said he had one contract offer on the table to an unnamed free agent...

Hickey:

GM Jack Zduriencik said in a conference call Monday afternoon that he has one offer out to a free agent. He wouldn't say who it would be, but did say he hoped to have an answer ''in the next 24-48 hours.''

The free agent is:

-a position player
-not Mark Teixeira
-not Griffey
-not Manny Ramirez
-not Barry Bonds

...which leaves us with but several dozen possibilities.

If it turns out to be Ben Broussard my heart will melt.

Arbitration For Raul

2008-12-01T20:47:35Z

Good news from Larry LaRue. After Raul declines and goes away to be someone else's hilassacre, we'll land a pair of picks, and thereby avoid the retarded Jose Guillen mistake we made last winter. You want evidence that the new administration is better than the old one? There you go. Good heavens was that ever stupid.

In addition, we're bringing in two new coaches. Ty Van Burkleo comes over from Oakland to be Wakamatsu's new drinking buddy, and Lee Tinsley will regale baserunners and first basemen alike with stories of how he totally sucked in Sega's World Series Baseball '94. I expect he'll also give good advice, because if Tinsley learned anything from his own career, it's that standing on first base is a rare privilege, not a right, and you shouldn't try to pull anything stupid because you never know if you'll ever be back there again. Isn't that right, Lee? You were a bad little player, weren't you? Weren't you? Yes you were. awww

Fun fact: in 1996, Tinsley was successful on eight of twenty steal attempts.

Community Projection: Adrian Beltre

2008-12-01T02:17:17Z

The fifth in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .288/.340/.506
Actual Line: .266/.327/.457

Healer of sick and slayer of evil, in 2008 Adrian Beltre put in yet another strong and underappreciated full season of work. He flew out of the gate with a scorching first month, almost singlehandedly keeping a bad lineup good enough to remain competitive, and while a lousy May pulled him back down to Earth, he was done in by a .156 BABIP that in no way reflected how well he was hitting the ball. Things started to even out over the rest of the summer, and although Raul Ibanez finished with the numbers, a convincing argument could be made that for much of the year Beltre was making the best contact on the team. And all the while he was doing it with a torn ligament in his thumb, an injury to which he finally succumbed in September so that he can be ready for spring training.

Playing through injuries is nothing new for this team. Much to my chagrin, it seems like half the guys have done it. But the difference is that, where the Silvas and Batistas and Ibanezes of the world either directly or indirectly used their injuries to explain away ineffectiveness, Beltre downplayed his pain and somehow managed to sustain around the same level of performance as before. The discomfort was obvious whenever he caught a line drive or got jammed by a pitch, but he never talked about it, and he never made excuses. He just went out there and played, celebrating his triumphs and accepting responsibility for his mistakes. If you're determined to play through an injury, this is the way to do it. Make sure it doesn't kill your performance, and then don't talk about it. If people play through pain to look tough and heroic, pointing it out all the time kind of negates the whole idea. In this sort of circumstance, the strongest leader is the silent one.

It wasn't just Beltre's offense that he managed to keep up despite the injury - for five and a half months, his defense was absolutely out of this world. And I mean that. Just look at what he did:

UZR: +29 runs
PMR: +17 plays
RZR: +32 plays
+/-: +32 plays

Altogether, those stats paint the picture of a guy who was 20 or 25 runs above average for his position in the field last year. 20 or 25 runs. Now obviously that isn't his true talent level, since that would be borderline insane, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. While Adrian Beltre's offense was hurt by a little bad luck in 2008, he made up for it in the field, and the overall package came together to make him the best player on the team. Which I understand is kind of damning with faint praise, but it's true nevertheless. Beltre was better than Ichiro, he was better than Lopez, he was better than Felix, and he was better than Ibanez. In 2008, Adrian Beltre was the greatest Mariner.

As of next April, he's in line to be the greatest Mariner once more. Or he might be ~tied with Ichiro and Felix. But the point remains. Beltre may not repeat as the +29 run UZR third basemen he was in 2008, but he's established a true talent somewhere between +10 < x < +20, and his offense should get a boost from a healthy left hand and a BABIP that improves on last year's .279. Put it all together and you've got a 3.5-4 WAR star player, a guy who'd be worth a good $17m or so on the open market. Adrian Beltre may not get his results in the most obvious way, but he still gets his results, and he's set to be a hell of a value, just as he's been for the last three years. Which answers the question of why we love him so much. We don't love him because he's funny, or because he has weird little ticks. We love him because he's one of the best baseball players this team has had in a good long time.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what puts him front and center this offseason. As maybe the best player on the team, Beltre stands as one of our most marketable assets, and when you're looking to rebuild an organization, desirable veterans with one year left under contract tend to be the first to go. And why wouldn't they? Veterans generally don't want to stick around and re-sign with a rebuilding franchise, so if they're going to leave down the road anyway, you might as well make them available, just to see. It only makes sense.

As painful as it is to think about, the front office needs to make a decision on Beltre, and they need to make it soon. Either they want him to be a part of this team's future or they don't. If they want him to stick around for the long run, they need to approach him, make their rebuliding intentions clear, and ask him if he'd be willing to re-sign. If he were to say yes, they'd need to start negotiating an extension before he has time to change his mind. If he were to say no (or maybe), they'd need to deal with it the same way they should if they didn't want him to stick around in the first place - make him available, take some offers, and pull the trigger on the best one if the return is better than whatever compensation picks they could get after the year. Because if Beltre doesn't want to re-sign with a project, it doesn't really do us that much good to keep him.

Assuming that we're getting ready to tear things down and start over, I can't imagine that Beltre has much interest in staying. He wants to win. He's only been in the playoffs once - for four games - and a player only has so many opportunities to pick a new team while he still has something left to contribute. So while I'm not going to draft my tearful goodbye just yet, I'm preparing myself. I expect to hear Beltre's name surface in a new rumor pretty much every morning. I expect to hear at some point that discussions are intensifying. And before too long I expect to hear that a deal went down. There're no guarantees, but given enough demand that there's a good enough return on the table, it seems like the best course of action for all parties involved. Including me. Even if it feels like someone ripping my heart through my ribs.

I guess I shouldn't get ahead of myself. As of this writing, Adrian Beltre's still a Mariner, and he's one of the best Mariners we've got. But because that may not last much longer, all I ask is that with every passing day, each and every one of you appreciates him. That each and every one of you appreciates the shit out of him. If only because somebody has to, and one man can't do it alone. No matter how fucking insane he might be.

Replacing Yuni Would Be Easier Than You Think

2008-12-01T00:21:57Z

Felix Hernandez Hit A Grand Slam Off Of Johan Santana

2008-11-29T21:54:06Z

Jesus

Community Projection: Yuniesky Betancourt

2008-11-28T21:55:52Z

The fourth in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .291/.321/.424
Actual Line: .279/.300/.392

Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2005: This guy's going to be a hell of a player. A franchise cornerstone.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2006: Building block. There might not be 25 other players in baseball for whom I'd trade this guy tomorrow.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2007: A good player, and a good value. Useful regular to have on the team.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2008: trade trade trade trade trade trade trade

There is no more compelling evidence that people are beginning to understand how important it is to be good in the field than the fans' total 180 on Betancourt over the past couple seasons. Yuni came up as an exciting sparkplug of a shortstop who was beloved by casual fans and statheads alike, but despite remaining the same offensive player he's always been, slowly but surely people have turned against him, because the wizard who was once capable of turning any groundball into an easy play has morphed into a fat sack of crap in a pointy hat with stars and moons on it.

It's difficult to overstate just how significant an impact Yuni's defensive decline has had on his local reputation, because again, seriously, his hitting hasn't changed. I know last year's .691 OPS looks a lot worse than 2007's .725, and that his wOBA* has bounced around between .301 and .335, but his skillset's pretty much exactly the same as it was when he first came up as a rookie. Yuni swings. At everything. Then he runs. Some of the time he gets to first base. He's an aggressive hacker who always makes contact and rarely hits the ball into the seats. His swing rate has changed a little bit over the years, and the same goes for his groundball rate as well, but these aren't really significant, and altogether we get the sort of hitter who's mighty easy to project. .280-.300 BA, a handful of walks, and a handful of homers. Bam. Done. For years, Dave's been talking about how Betancourt's skillset gives him a low offensive ceiling, and that's exactly what we're dealing with. The Yuni we've seen at the plate is about as good as we're ever going to see him, and there's not really anything anyone can do about it.

Oh, people thought something was up in 2008. When Yuni's OPS flirted with .600 a few times over the course of the season, there was mounting concern that he had just all-around suffered a total collapse. But at least offensively, those concerns were unwarranted, as Yuni rode a hot 200 at bats down the stretch to end up within his established range. His triple slash line drop was driven almost exclusively by BABIP, and that's just the nature of the beast when you put the ball in play as often as Yuni does. There wasn't anything wrong with his bat in 2008 anymore than there was anything wrong with his bat in 2007, and going forward, I don't see any reason to believe that things will be different in 2009.

But the defense. Cursed defense.

	2006	2007	2008
+/-	-3 plays	-10	-19
UZR	-6 runs	-3	-31*
PMR	+9 plays	-4	-14
RZR	-4 plays	-18	-30

* - projection as of early June; final number not posted

Egads.

It's easy to argue with one metric. UZR and I, for example, seem to disagree on Ichiro, and given that the other metrics back me up, that argument is as yet unresolved. But when pretty much all of the big players when it comes to defensive quantitation come together to hold a big flashing neon sign that says THIS GUY IS FALLING APART it's way more difficult to maintain that they're wrong. UZR thinks Yuni collapsed. Plus/minus thinks Yuni collapsed. PMR thinks Yuni collapsed. RZR thinks Yuni collapsed. If you're a Betancourt supporter, what're you supposed to do? How is anyone supposed to look at this data, combine it with visual observation, and come away thinking that Yuni's any better than a mess in the field?

It's borderline unfathomable to consider that Yuni got this bad this quick, but here we are, and this is our reality. If we apply a smoothing curve, over the past four seasons Yuni's gone from great to average to bad to terrible. Four seasons. He did that in four seasons. Between 23-26 Yuni's aged like twice as hard as Omar Vizquel in one-fifth as long. He appears to the naked eye to be visibly larger than he was back in the day, and while some of that is muscle, some of it isn't, and it's not hard to imagine that this has had a negative effect on his range. Range that is an entirely different kind of jaw-dropping now than it was when Yuni first came up.

In 2008, Yuniesky Betancourt was a disaster of a defensive shortstop, and combined with below-average defense, the overall package was a replacement-level player. Replacement-level players aren't assets. They are, by definition, easily replaceable. The magician around whom we thought this team would be building back in 2005 took four years to turn into the sort of guy you can pick up for free, and were I to compose a list of the biggest Mariner-related letdowns since I started blogging, Yuni's career would be somewhere near the top. We basically just lost a blue-chipper for nothing. It's like we packed a suitcase for vacation then mistakenly picked up the wrong bag from the carousel on the other end. It's hard to enjoy vacation when instead of clothing and a camera you have to make do with documents and corn.

Projecting Betancourt now is an exercise in disappointment. The ~.320-.330 wOBA* is about what we always expected, but having to put a minus in front of the 10 in the Defense column invariably evokes a deep, heavy sigh. If you think Yuni's a -10 defender, he's a 0.5-1.0 WAR shortstop. If you think he's a -5 defender, he's a 0.9-1.4 WAR shortstop. If you think he climbs all the way back up to average, he's a 1.3-1.8 WAR shortstop. But that's as good as it gets. And considering that last year he was more like -15, it's all but impossible to be optimistic. Even given that he started to look more energetic in the field down the stretch, I can't imagine that he'll ever be able to climb back out of the negatives. No matter what was wrong with him in 2008, I'm afraid that the magnitude of Yuni's defensive decline is such that the process is essentially irreversible. While he may recover some, he'll never recover it all, and he will therefore never be the player we thought he could be.

The time is now to say goodbye and trade Yuni before his reputation around the league catches up to his reputation around here. Make no mistake: there are still a lot of front offices that love him as a player. People who don't have to watch him everyday assume he's still one of the top gloves at his position, and a recent player survey called Yuni one of the top defensive infielders in the American League. People who think Yuni is a good player are wrong, and people who are wrong and have things to trade are good people to call on the phone. I mean, the Dodgers are sniffing around Jack Wilson. The Tigers are sniffing around Julio Lugo and Alex Cora. The Giants are sniffing around Edgar Renteria. The Royals have coveted Yuni for as long as I can remember. Teams need shortstops, and teams like Yuni. This is a good combination. And perhaps now that we have a new front office in town, we'll finally be able to remove the "untouchable" tag from Yuni that Bavasi inextricably affixed and move him in return for more than he's worth. Because at this point, there's nothing to gain by letting him stick around. Yuni may be able to get a little better going forward as he regresses to the mean, but his career ceiling - which was already modest - now appears wholly unreachable, and he's not in line to be an important part of the next contending team in Seattle. Move him. Move him for the value that I'm almost certain would be offered. It doesn't count as selling low if the buyer isn't aware of the low in the first place, and I can think of few things more exciting for this team looking ahead than the opportunity to rebuild up the middle.

Do it. Do it and don't look back.

Pitching Coach On The Way

2008-11-26T19:21:36Z

Baker's on it:

...An entirely new coaching staff will be around next season from the one that began the 2008 campaign. But for some, the coaches coming to Seattle are not new at all. The folks in Dallas know Don Wakamatsu well from his five-year stint as a Rangers coach.

It is all but certain that Wakamatsu's entire staff of pitching coaches will be coming out of Arlington as well. Dom Chiti was the bullpen coach for the Rangers (until being fired in August) and will be the new Mariners pitching coach once the holidays are over.

Last summer, Chiti was fired by a team with lousy pitching. So we're left with three possibilities:

1) The Rangers were right; Chiti isn't a very helpful coach, and deserved to be fired
2) The Rangers were wrong; Chiti is a helpful coach, and deserves a promotion
3) Wakamatsu thinks pitching coaches are irrelevant and Dom Chiti has a bitchin moustache

I don't know anything about Dom Chiti, so all I'll say is at least he's not Mel Stottlemyre, and anyone who can watch Josh Rupe and Jamey Wright warm up every other day without going wacko should be more than qualified to handle the whole Carlos Silva experience. New blood!

Also, Norm Charlton's surly air of antiquated disapproval is going away. I have organized a support group to help deal with the grief.

Community Projection: Jose Lopez

2008-11-26T02:29:48Z

The third in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .277/.319/.416
Actual Line: .297/.322/.443

In a season of black comic tragedy, it was Lopez who shined as the greatest - and perhaps only - true highlight on the team. Always in possession of considerable talent, Lopez won fans without ever having put it all together on a Major League field. "Watch this kid," they'd say. "He's going to be a good player someday. You just have to give him time." And time he was given. Year after year Lopez would hit a new roadblock, and year after year skeptical arguments were met with age-based disregard. Lopez was still plenty young, see. He just needed more time.

But it was only when even some of his loyal supporters grew concerned that Lopez finally started to showcase that talent that for years he'd kept in the dark. It wasn't the way he started the season. It was the way he finished that drove the point home. After four consecutive letdown second halves, including one in 2007 that stands among the worst offensive second halves in franchise history, Lopez got going early on and sustained it through the summer. He hit .315 in June. Then .311 in July. Then .264 in August. Then .304 in September. August wasn't great, but it was a good deal better than the August before. More importantly, he started hitting for more power over the course of the season. Lopez only had two home runs through his first 56 games, but he'd go on to hit 15 over his final 103, and his 27 extra-base hits in the second half were eight more than he hit in the second halves of 2006 and 2007 combined. This was a different Jose Lopez. This was a good Jose Lopez. The sort of Jose Lopez about whom legends were told but never confirmed.

Lopez closed out the season on a three-week tear during which he hit .337 with a .943 OPS. That hot streak was enough to give him his first above-average wOBA of his career. While that may not sound like anything great, it represented a massive improvement, and for the sake of Lopez's living as a big leaguer, it couldn't have come at a better time. I wrote last March:

I'll say this: while I can't be sure about which path Lopez will take, his future in Seattle will depend on his taking some substantial strides forward. We know the front office and coaching staff are dissatisfied. The onus is on Lopez to come out of the gate playing well, impress McLaren from the two-slot, and avoid another summer collapse. Another year like the last two will probably be his last as a Mariner. Lopez needs to get going, because before long it will be too late.

Lopez took those steps forward in 2008, and in so doing, he re-established his value as an everyday regular. A talented 25 year old coming off a wOBA of .346 looks a hell of a lot better than a talented 24 year old coming off a .294, after all. The Mariners couldn't hit last year, but Lopez was still the third-best on the team, and no matter how bad an offense may be, that says a little something.

Of course, the biggest question with Lopez is just how much value he has going forward. If you call him an average defender (and, even granted his occasional lapses in concentration, I think that's about right), last year he was worth about 2-2.5 wins over replacement. That's a good player. That's a guy who can help a competitive team. However, the year before he was below replacement-level, and that year happened, too. We can't just throw it out. You'll see people all the time posit arguments that boil down to "if you ignore X, then Y," but that's not how statistics work. Unless we have good reason to throw away a certain clump of data, we have to look at the whole picture, and the whole picture for Lopez isn't that pretty. Marcel, for example, projects a park-adjusted wOBA of .322, which drops Lopez into the 1-1.5 WAR range. And if you call him a -5 defender instead of league average, then he comes off looking even worse. And let's face it: Lopez has to work pretty hard to be an average defender. He's not the most nimble guy on the team.

Here's the bottome line: if you think 2008 Jose Lopez was legit, he's a neat little player. If you think 2008 Jose Lopez overperformed, then he doesn't look so hot.

Me, I'd like to think that Lopez's improvement was real. He made more contact. He swung less often, and less often at bad pitches. His HR/FB increased. He hit a lot of doubles. There are indicators - good indicators - suggesting that Lopez started making better use of his talent last season, and that he's a reasonable bet going forward. If someone came up to me and said "Jose Lopez is going to OPS .770 next year," I wouldn't look at him like he was crazy.

But statistically speaking, 2008 is the outlier, and outliers for young players don't always mean a new level of performance is on the way. They can and often do signal imminent regression, and if Lopez regresses back to something like .280/.315/.415, then all of a sudden he's not really that valuable anymore, especially if his defense declines. In that scenario he's just a guy who doesn't hurt us but who also doesn't help us, just a guy who hangs out and takes up space until the team finds a better second baseman to help it compete.

I don't know which path Lopez is going to follow. I don't know. He's a volatile young player, and while there are perfectly sound and solid reasons to believe that he'll hold on to his gains, there are also perfectly sound and solid reasons to believe that he'll regress. It's up to Lopez to decide how good he wants to be. All I can really say is that, no matter how much I'd like to see Lopez develop into a star, it would behoove the new front office to place a few calls and see what people might offer for a "young middle infielder on the upswing." I know there are some early signs of this being a buyer's market, but the fact of the matter is that the Mariners aren't going to compete for a little while, and Lopez may never have more trade value than he does at this writing. He's young. He just had a big bounce-back season. He hit for a good average. His second half was encouraging. He's under contract. These are good selling points. There may be a GM or two out there eager to take Lopez in exchange for a player who can help out the next Mariner team to make the playoffs.

I can't speak to that. And while it's related, I guess that's a different subject anyway. What it really comes down to is that, no matter what happens from this point forward, in 2008 Jose Lopez re-inserted himself into the organizational discussion. Lost in the mix of what we can expect from him in the future as a regular is the fact that he even has a future as a regular, something which was far from a certainty a year ago. Lopez's hard work paid off, and as a result he had himself a career season. That's significant. And I think I speak for all of us when I say I hope he's able to hang on to his gains, regardless of where he's playing in 2009 or 2010. Because if nothing else, it'd be reassuring to know that this organization is indeed capable of developing decent position players. Even if they don't develop in Seattle.

Tuesdays With Sean Green

2008-11-25T22:59:56Z

Man: Hey, Sean. What's the word?

Hi.

Man: What've you been up to these last couple days?

Errands.

Man: Yeah, it's a good time to run errands.

Man: So what kinds of errands did you run?

Shopping.

Man: You went shopping? What for?

Cups.

Man: Cups? Why cups?

We were out of cups.

This potentially regular feature is currently in the experimental stages.

Buyer's Market

2008-11-25T19:57:43Z

Cincinnati.com:

Brian Goldberg, the agent for former Reds outfielder Ken Griffey Jr., said Monday he thinks things will to open up in early December. Dec. 1 is the last day for clubs to offer salary arbitration to their free agents. The players have until Dec. 7 to accept. If they refuse, teams get a draft pick or two for them - depending on their classification.
...

Goldberg said Griffey has had contact with nine teams - six in the AL, three in the NL.

"Some I contacted, some contacted us," Goldberg said. "We're still talking."

Phone: ring ring ring
Epstein: Ahoy hoy?
Goldberg: Hi there, Theo. This is Brian Goldberg, agent for Ken Griffey Jr.
Epstein: Oh yeah, hey, what's up?
Goldberg: I was just wondering if you would be interested in my client as an everyday regular for the 2009 season. An experienced player with Hall of Fame talent, Ken is passionate about helping his future employer proceed to the World Series.
Epstein: Sorry, Brian, but we don't have room or a need. But thanks for calling.

Phone: ring ring ring
Epstein: Ahoy hoy?
Goldberg: Hey Theo, Goldberg again.
Epstein: Uh huh
Goldberg: So, Griffey. I know before you said you weren't interested, but hear me out.
Epstein:
Goldberg: -an experienced player with Hall of Fame talent, Ken is passionate about helping his future emp
Epstein: We're not interested.
Goldberg: loyer proceed to the World Series.
Epstein: Not interested.
Goldberg: His experience and passion are second to none, and players with his kind of Hall of Fame talent are few and far between.
Epstein: Not.
Goldberg: I think he'd be a shot in the arm to your ballclub, and
Epstein: Interested.

Phone: ring ring ring
Epstein: Ahoy hoy?
Goldberg: Theo, hey, what's up! It's Brian Goldberg!
Epstein: What do you want
Goldberg: So, this Griffey kid, right? I noticed your team kind of struggled there at the end of the playoffs, and I've got just the guy to put you over the top.
Goldberg: What would you say if I told you I've got a guy with experience, passion, and Hall of Fame talent?
Goldberg: And that he's ready to sign with a winner? A winner such as the Boston Red Sox?
Goldberg: Speechless? I know, right? But I'm serious.
Lucchino: Brian.
Goldberg: who the fuck is this
Lucchino: If you call this number again I will have you dismembered.

Phone: ring ring ring
Phone: ring ring ring
Phone: ring ring ring

Phone: ring ring ring
Epstein: Ahoy hoy?
Goldberg: Theo! Buddy!
Goldberg:
Goldberg:
Goldberg:
Goldberg: Theo?

Phone: ring ring ring
Epstein: Ahoy hoy?
Goldberg: Theo, it's Scott. Boras.
Epstein: What's the good word?
Goldberg: So I've caught wind of some rumors involving you and my boy Mark.
Epstein: Yeah, I think it's fair to say we've got a bit of interest.
Goldberg: Well you know some of the other teams are going after him pretty hard.
Epstein: I saw that, yeah. We don't know yet whether we're comfortable going to the level that some of the other guys are talking about.
Goldberg: We're looking ten years and we're pretty sure we're going to get it.
Epstein: That just isn't reasonable, not for us.
Goldberg: I hear you, I hear you. It's a big time investment.
Epstein: It is. And worse comes to worse, we're pretty happy with the setup we've already got.
Goldberg: Well listen, if the market for Mark does end up going where I expect, a buddy of mine has a guy who might be able to help you out for a much lower price.
Epstein: Oh yeah?
Goldberg: Yeah, he was talking to me about the player just the other day. He sounds a lot more affordable.
Goldberg: An experienced player with Hall of Fame talent
Epstein: FUCKING CHRIST

Out With The Old, In With The Helpful

2008-11-25T18:23:05Z

Larry Stone shares some welcome news:

Mel Stottlemyre and Lee Elia will not be part of the coaching staff of new Mariners' manager Don Wakamatsu, The Seattle Times has learned.

Stottlemyre, 67, served the 2008 season as Mariners' pitching coach after a 10-year stint with the Yankees. He said he heard over the weekend from Wakamatsu, who told him he had decided to bring in a new pitching coach.

Under Stottlemyre, Felix went from throwing 56% fastballs in 2007 to 65% fastballs in 2008, with corresponding increased fastball percentages in every single count but 1-2 (where he remained the same). Felix's performance took a step back at a time at which he should've been making progress.

If that's not reason enough to send Stottlemyre packing, there's also this:

"It was a really rough year, but I still enjoyed it."

This is a man who has lost his mind.

What it comes down to is this: what did Stottlemyre do right? If Wakamatsu were to call Stottlemyre and ask him flat-out "why do you think I should keep you around," what could he say? That Bedard getting hurt threw everything out of whack? That Roy Corcoran got a lot of grounders? Honestly, aside from its length, is there anything about Stottlemyre's resume that really makes it stand out? Because at no point this past season was I ever impressed.

As far as I can tell, Mel Stottlemyre is considered a good pitching coach because he was a member of the Yankees when the Yankees were awesome. And that just isn't enough. Here's to new blood.

Tazawa Decision Draws Nigh

2008-11-24T23:45:35Z

Pravda headquarters:

Hideaki Okubo, manager of the Nippon Oil team that Tazawa pitches for, said the Braves, Red Sox and Mariners are also involved. Okubo said the Rangers have made the largest offer to Tazawa.

"Now that these offers are on the table, a conclusion will be reached in three or four days," Okubo said.

So to review:

Texas has reportedly offered the biggest contract
The Red Sox are considered the front-runners in part because Daisuke Matsuzaka is Tazawa's hero
The Braves have reportedly offered a Major League deal worth $4-5m
Nobody knows what the Mariners put on the table

Tazawa's set to leave his current team tomorrow, and it's assumed that he'll make his decision shortly thereafter. Given the way the year has gone for Seattle sports, I expect Tazawa to sign with Boston on a minor league deal and then call home to inform his family and fellow countrymen that the way in which the Mariners approached negotiations was unprofessional and impossibly racist.

Update: looks like the Mariners offered three years and $3m, with incentives. It wasn't enough; Boston apparently won.

Community Projection: Richie Sexson

2008-11-24T01:43:45Z

The second in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .247/.329/.457
Actual Line: .221/.321/.382

Signs that a team's big money investment in a slugging first baseman isn't working out as planned:

1) Team benches him for five days to change his stance
2) He doesn't hit a home run in his next 89 trips to the plate
3) Team happy to see improvement

People everywhere expected a bounce-back season from Sexson. Smart people. People like us. While everyone was aware of the nightmare summer he had in 2007, it seemed impossible that a hitter of Sexson's caliber could become that finished that quickly. So people looked for improvement. Even if it came only in the area of a little BABIP regression, people looked for improvement, because it was an almost alien feeling to see a guy like Richie Sexson slugging under .400.

I suppose there's some symbolism, then, in the fact that a hitter we were counting on to be one of our primary run producers got released in July.

Sexson's season and that of the Mariners mirrored each other. On April 20th, the Mariners picked up their biggest win of the year, hanging on to beat the Angels 4-2 with a clutch RRS strikeout of Garret Anderson. The M's pulled themselves up to 10-10 with the win and stood two games behind the division lead. On that day, Sexson's OPS stood at a season-high .875, having put the finishing touches on a three-homer weekend series that had a fourth one robbed by Torii Hunter. Up to that point, the M's were playing competitive baseball, and Richie Sexson was a big reason why.

Then it all came crashing down. The M's got to 11-10 the next game, but that one aside, after Anaheim it was all downhill for both Sexson and the team around him. The Mariners would go 24-45 over the next two and a half months, and over the same span of time Sexson would hit .214 with a suspension and a benching. At one point, Sexson - whose acquisition was intended to give the Mariners a fearsome power bat in the middle of the order - went 96 plate appearances between home runs, and while a change to his batting stance helped drive up his average and OBP, the power never came back, and in early July the team decided enough was enough and sent Richie on his way. He'd get claimed by the Yankees to be part of a platoon, but he got cut by them a month later, too, and he spent the final six weeks of the season unemployed. A four-year contract that began with high hopes ended as possibly the last Major League contract of Sexson's career.

From the whole Sexson saga, we can learn (or, I suppose, confirm) two things:

1) It is generally foolish to give a big contract to any non-elite slugging first baseman on the wrong side of his career. These players don't age very well, and there is no more shining example than Sexson, whose OPS+ dropped from 144 in 2005 to 89 in 2008. They're bad investments, and it's my hope that this organization never tries to do the same thing again, because it was an awful, awful mistake. Even at his Mariner best, back in 2005, Sexson was lousy in the field, and his .399 wOBA* from first base only got him up to a total value of about three wins over replacement. In other words, Richie Sexson's best year as a Mariner was worse than Adrian Beltre's 2008. His worst year, meanwhile, was a full game below replacement level, at a time when the team needed him most. So our return on investment was moderate success in lost seasons and sub-replacement-level performance when the team could've used him. Bill Bavasi now has a few of these on his resume.

2) The 2008 Mariners didn't have a plan. At least, they didn't have a plan that was particularly well thought out. When Sexson served his suspension in early May, the team replaced him at first base with Miguel Cairo. When Sexson got benched to work on his stance a few weeks later, the team replaced him with Miguel Cairo. After Sexson got released in July, the team replaced him with Miguel Cairo and Bryan LaHair. Competitive teams have depth. Especially at first base. Next to DH, first base should be the easiest position to fill with a decent bat in the event that the starter is struggling or injured. Bats like Sean Casey and Eric Hinske. After cutting Greg Norton in April, the Mariners had a pinch-runner and a non-prospect. In my mind, Miguel Cairo is a symptom. A mass embedded deep within your brain is a tell-tale sign that you have terminal cancer. Having Miguel Cairo as your backup at first base is a tell-tale sign that your team is fucked. The 2008 Seattle Mariners were built to win, but only on the surface, and as soon as a drop of rain fell on their newspaper hat, the whole thing was destroyed.

Unless I'm not seeing something, Richie Sexson isn't going to get a Major League contract this winter. I imagine he'll get an NRI, and he might even win a roster spot as a bench bat or platoon half if he impresses next March, but he's not going to start, meaning that at the age of 34, four years after being one of the most sought-after bats on the market, Richie Sexson's career as a regular is finished. At a cost of fifty million dollars, he rewarded the Mariners with approximately three total wins over replacement, with nearly all of his value coming in the first year of his deal and the final three years ranging between mediocre and horrific. Bill Bavasi made a lot of mistakes, and this team is still paying for quite a few of them, but none were higher-profile than the slugging first baseman who spent the final year and a half of his Seattle career getting booed, and this particular lapse in judgment shall not soon be forgotten by a city that most of the time is all too forgiving.

If Richie Sexson did anything for us in 2008, it was to make the fanbase care again. He just didn't make them care in the way that Bavasi planned, and in large part because of that it's not a stretch to say that several people lost their jobs. This is an organization that needed an awful lot of undoing.

The Essence Of Leadership

2008-11-23T23:10:18Z

Kirby Arnold fans the flames of justifiable contempt:

SEATTLE -- Reports of the pounds Carlos Silva put on this year might not have been as exaggerated as his weight itself.
...
The Mariners won't say what the man nicknamed "Buffalo" weighed at the end of the season, although it clearly wasn't a four-pound difference. It was more like 30.

The Mariners are taking special steps this winter to make sure he isn't super-sized again.

It's funny to read over the Silva press conference article from last December and see how completely wrong everybody was. Maybe not so much ha-ha funny as hey-that-blood-spatter-on-the-wall-from-my-chest-kind-of-looks-like-Jerry Lewis funny. There are different kinds of funny.

The Mariners signed Carlos Silva for four main reasons:

1) to add a league-average arm to the rotation
2) to add an innings eater to the rotation
3) to add a veteran leader to the clubhouse
4) to be a good mentor for Felix

What they got in return:

1) the 16th-worst tRA and the 19th-worst tRA* of 130 qualified starters
2) 153.1 innings, a DL stint, constant back problems, and a 5.5 IP/start ratio that was below the AL average of 5.9
3) threats to throw teammates into walls and a stubborn reluctance to acknowledge his own shortcomings
4) substantial in-season weight gain from a guy who called out others for not showing enough commitment or drive to win

Carlos Silva didn't do a single thing right in 2008. Not a single thing. Remember how during the 06/07 offseason, a huge deal was made over how Felix had worked out really hard and lost so much weight? The big guy the organization brought in as a role model for their blossoming ace just gained 30 more pounds in six months. While playing games.

I'm not going to say this team would be better off were Silva to be rendered paraplegic in a traffic accident. But it wouldn't not be better off.

Give Dave Money

2008-11-21T17:25:45Z

So in the end, Dave was defeated by the swarming horde of political hate-mongering, as David Mauro rode the wave of Progress! to defeat that Mariner-blogging neocon by nearly eight thousand votes. Rest assured, I'd have the good sense to make some big changes if this place ever developed a community like the one that operates at DK, but clearly some people think otherwise, and that's their decision. Anyway, just because Dave isn't getting his $10,000 scholarship doesn't mean you can't still help him out. Go swing by USSM and make a Paypal donation to the cause. Everything but the Paypal Tax goes to Dave, and if only 20% of the people who voted for him donate $5, then he'll beat that $10,000 no problem. Which isn't to say that you should limit yourself to $5. Donate as much (or as little) as you want. Maybe if we exceed the $10,000 mark by enough, Derek can scrape some off the top and buy the site a server free of mouse wheels and string.

Dave said all along that while he wanted to win the scholarship, he wasn't willing to compromise his morals. With the help of the Mariner blogosphere community, he can have it both ways. Let's all pitch in to do a big favor for a brilliant analyst, a thoughtful person, and a guy without whom LL wouldn't exist. He deserves it.

Stats vs. Scouts

2008-11-21T21:19:57Z

So I've been thinking about this post for about a year now, but I've never got around to writing it properly. Well, I have 45 minutes to kill, so it's as good a time as any. I realise that I'm probably preaching to the choir here but whatever.

"Stats vs. scouts" is one of the central arguments in baseball circles, leading to mildly horrifying levels of vitriol leveled at members of either side. It's one of Moneyball's lasting legacies, as anything that portrays the old guard as curmudgeonly incompetents doomed to fall under the armies of cleverness is going to provoke a reaction from said curmudgeonly incompetents (NB: I am not calling the old guard curmudgeonly incompetents), and rightly so.

The problem is of course that statistical analysis and scouting are by no means natural enemies - in fact, they're closely allied. Advanced statistics are proxies for good scouting. Sometimes they pick up things that scouts miss, and sometimes scouting will tell you things that stats will not, but they are complementary. A team's front office doesn't have to be one or the other - the point is that both methods are tools to evaluate players.

Interestingly, the argument doesn't even seem to be about player evaluation, and the dogmatic camps generally make absolutely no sense at all. Those in the "scouts" camp spout off about RBI and batting average (which are statistics last time I looked), and people trying to be "statsy" will misuse numbers they don't understand to come to stupid conclusions. Does anyone* seriously think that 'gritty' would be the main point in a real scouting report? Or that analysts throw random numbers at the wall until the come up with their stats?

No, this isn't about statistics against scouting. Not at all. It's about people believing that they're already experts on baseball player evaluation. Imagine if people took the same attitude towards, say, engineering as they did baseball. You'd see people looking at construction sites with total disdain:

"I've walked through a lot of buildings and I can say for sure that using an eccentric braced frame for the lateral force resisting system is completely stupid. SCBFs are much better in the clutch."

Watching a lot of baseball doesn't mean you know anything. Playing a lot of baseball doesn't mean you know anything. Watching a lot of baseball while listening to the opinions of people who've played a lot of baseball doesn't mean you know anything. But it's amazing how many people seem to think it does.

It's not stats against scouts, and it never has been. It's acknowledging one's own ignorance against the belief that one already knows everything.

Because if you already know everything, why would you ever need to think about it?

*Well, yes I'm sure someone does, but if that person is you and you feel inclined to comment on it you're going to end up banned so don't.

Projecting Raul Ibanez

2008-11-21T20:56:15Z

Offense

A .1/.2/.3/.4 four-year weighting system assigns Raul a .372 wOBA*. Knocking off 5% due to age (he'll be 37 next June) drops it to .354. Marcel's projected wOBA* is .349, so we're in the right area.

Defense

I'm going to be really nice to Raul and call him a -10. In reality, it could be as bad as -15 or even -20, but I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt so that we can reasonably maximize his value.

Overall

If you run through the WAR formula, you come out with a final answer right around 1. If you call Raul a -20 defender instead of a -10, he's almost replacement level. If you go the opposite way and keep him as as -10 while bumping his offense up to, say, .365, you end up with about 1.7.

As a DH, he's between 1-2 wins.

Conclusion

On the free agent market, teams spend about $4.8m per one win. So Raul Ibanez, at his unlikely absolute very best, is about a $10m player in 2009. Meanwhile, Raul Ibanez the Marcel projection is more like a $5m player in 2009. He is then, of course, expected to continue declining in 2010 and 2011.

Rosenthal:

Is Ibanez better than Ramirez or Teixeira? Of course not. He's also five years older than Burrell and seven years older than Dunn, and hits for less power.

Still, teams love Ibanez's professionalism, and one general manager predicts he will receive a three-year deal for between $8 million and $12 million per season.

This isn't going to go well for someone.

Whoops!

2008-11-21T20:33:12Z

Heyman:

The Royals are quietly shopping righthanded-hitting outfielder Jose Guillen, a terrific talent who seems to have the knack for wearing out his welcome pretty quickly. Guillen is said to be at odds with Royals manager Trey Hillman, who just completed his first year at the helm in Kansas City.

Jose Guillen's Marcel-projected 2009 wOBA is .321. Grant a league average .335 and knock him down five runs for his defense in a corner and you've got yourself a nice and shiny 0 WAR - the true definition of a replacement-level player. All that and an unpredictable temperament for only twelve million dollars!

Kansas City is set to have a team payroll somewhere around $60m next season. As of right now, a fifth of that is committed to a guy who gives them literally nothing they couldn't get for 1/30th of the cost. Dayton Moore didn't only bring his office with him from Atlanta; he also brought his genius.

But at least Guillen's a good teammate. He really adds that extra spark. If there's one thing the Royals have been lacking for as long as they've been bad, it's been a good spark.

Community Projection: Kenji Johjima

2008-11-21T05:04:50Z

The first in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .283/.325/.433
Actual Line: .227/.277/.332

Sweet baby Jesus did we ever blow that one.

In many ways, 2008 couldn't possibly have gone more wrong for Kenji Johjima. Among catchers who came to the plate at least 300 times, Kenji's OBP ranked second-last, and his SLG was only two slots better. He followed up two consecutive solid offensive campaigns with one unmitigated disaster, and at the end of the year the guy many people had been calling the Japanese Jason Varitek showed that perhaps the label is only all too appropriate. While a lot of the focus will go to Erik Bedard and a disappointing pitching staff, Kenji Johjima's inability to produce any runs was one of the biggest unforeseen factors behind the Mariners' collapse.

It's not that there weren't highlights and flashes of promise. It's that they were too far between, too infrequent for a guy the team was counting on to help keep an unspectacular offense consistent. Johjima waited until May 12th to hit his first homer. He only had eleven games in which he drove in more than one run. The most extra-base hits he had in any single month was seven, and he only had 13 through the entire first half, compared to 25 the season before. While he was able to pick it up in September to push his OPS over .600, for the majority of the year he was the definition of a black hole, one of a number of guys on the team whose numbers wouldn't have belonged anywhere close to a competitive roster.

As if the offensive struggles weren't enough, Kenji started catching flak for his defense as well. His caught stealing percentage dropped from an incredible 46.5% to a modest 32.5%, but more importantly, his game-calling was coming into question, and at one point both Jarrod Washburn and Erik Bedard were using Jamie Burke as a personal catcher because they didn't like pitching to Johjima. Whether or not Kenji's game-calling is a problem, I can't be sure - and I must stress that there's no reliable evidence either way - but once the word gets out that a guy can't call a game, that's a label that tends to stick. Even if it isn't true, people start to believe it, to the point at which they're so convinced that they just start looking for mistakes to verify a subjective hypothesis. Kenji may not have deserved the label, but he got stuck with it, and his reputation suffered as a result.

Nichols' Law of Catcher Defense states that "a catcher's defensive reputation is inversely proportional to his offensive abilities." So a guy like Brad Ausmus, who's never been able to hit, is considered to be one of the better defensive catchers of his generation, whereas Jorge Posada's been so good for so long at the plate that people have always been bearish on his glovework. For Kenji, though, the relationship worked in the inverse of the inverse: as his offensive productivity dropped, so did people's opinions of him as a catcher. He was an exception to the rule, and all that meant was that people looked at him and assumed that he was an all-around nightmare. Which, who knows, he might have really been.

The only thing that went Kenji's way in 2008 was the three-year extension he signed towards the end of April, although now that I think about that, it may have worked against him, in that the contract caused a great deal of resentment among teammates who thought that Kenji was getting preferential treatment from the owners (the same owners who were responsible for the deal). I'll say this: while the extension announcement was met with shock and disappointment, there was a case to be made for it at the time, as no one could have foreseen that Kenji would remain so feeble with the bat. But the timing was just beyond lousy. Kenji was batting .200 with a .514 OPS when word spread that the team had just committed to him another $24m over three years. .200 and .514, while Jeff Clement was busy flipping out in Tacoma. No matter what your in-season Marcel projections might tell you, you can't give an extension like that when a player is struggling so bad. At least wait until he shows some signs of getting back on track. Kenji's price wasn't going to skyrocket. Ownership had time to wait, but they acted too fast, and now what they've been left with is another three years of a catcher who got statistically out-hit by Jose Vidro. While it's good to take risks, they're only worth taking when you have a specific window of opportunity. There was no reason to push for a new contract at the time, but they did anyway, and got badly burned.

For whatever it's worth, it's not all bad news. Yes, Kenji Johjima is coming off a .227 BA over 112 games. Yes, he's 32 years old, and yes, his power disappeared. But he also posted a 19% line drive rate that was right by his 06/07 average. So while his BABIP dropped from .290 to a paltry .231, it wasn't necessarily supported by any apparent underlying decline in ability. He was still hitting the ball fairly hard; it just wasn't finding the holes. And as you should all be able to tell me by now, that isn't the sort of thing we should expect to continue. We should see more of those balls find the grass than we did last year, and as a result, his numbers should climb higher up towards respectability.

If you regress Kenji's 2008 batting line to his now-career BABIP mark of .275, his BA jumps from .227 to .264. That improvement, in turn, pushes his OPS up near .700, which isn't a bad place to be when you consider that the league-average catcher last year came in at .715. A little BABIP regression along with a Safeco park adjustment turns Kenji's nightmare 2008 into a season of average offense. So that's something. It's not at all what he looked like a year or two ago, but it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of frustrated Mariner fans would have you believe.

Kenji Johjima is an aging catcher, and it's entirely possible that he'll never again reach a home run total in the double digits. But while the three-year extension looks horrible, there's reason to believe that he may still be perfectly useful in 2009, even in a regular role. Marcel projects a .699 OPS. Bill James projects .727. Those don't seem very good, but then that's kind of par for the course, because catchers aren't world-renowned for their ability to hit. They just have to hit well enough to not cripple the offense, and provided that Kenji gets some better luck, next year he should be able to fulfill whichever responsibilities he's given, whether that be as a starter or a backup.

Jose Vidro is finished. Richie Sexson is finished. But Kenji Johjima, I think, still has a little life left in his bones. While some nights I wish to the high heavens that I could go back in time and prevent the owners from mandating that extension, I feel like Kenji's still capable of earning a good bit of that money before eventually going away. Just so long as Jarrod Washburn lets him.