Jeff's brought it up already in some other forms, but it got me to thinking. If I wanted to make a comprehensive list of all the positive or semi-positive things about this year, what would it look like?

1. Raul Ibanez continues to hit *
2. Jose Lopez rejuvenation at the plate **
3. Ichiro shows no sign of slowing down ***
4. Adrian Beltre hit lots of line drives and played very fine defense ****
5. Willie Bloomquist's insane walk rates *****
6. Erik Bedard's first PA to Ian Kinsler ******
7. R.A. Dickey the reliever was pretty effective and fun to watch. ******
8. Arthur Rhodes was decent enough to net us Gaby Hernandez at the deadline. ********
9. Sean Green continues to be a valuable piece out of the bullpen *********
   
10. Brandon Morrow is awesome in relief and awesome in his debut start **********
11. Roy Corcoran comes out of nowhere to become our most valuable reliever. ***********
    
12. Felix Hernandez hit a grand slam off Johan Santana. ***********

Continue reading this post »

Saturday 2/6

We had a pretty good morning. She slept in again - she hasn't had that much energy lately - so I got out of bed and decided to make her a surprise breakfast like I used to do when we first started seeing each other. I made her blueberry pancakes with turkey sausage patties and orange juice. It smelled really strong but I couldn't turn on the fan over the stove because I didn't want to wake her up. I took the tray to her in bed and woke her up with a kiss on the cheek. She looked at the plate and asked if I made any grits. Then she sighed and told me to leave it on the nightstand so she could eat it later. She thanked me and went back to sleep. It was sweet of her to thank me.

Sunday 2/7

We didn't do much today. It was a lazy Sunday. She got a call from her friend Ken who she used to date several years ago so they talked for a while. She told me once that she never really understood why they split up. But they're just friends now, she says. And he lives pretty far away. While they were talking I cleaned up the house and threw a few salmon steaks on the grill. After dinner we took a walk to the park that overlooks the canyon so we could sit on the bench and watch the sunset. I looked in her eyes and told her she's the most beautiful woman in the world. She asked if I really meant it. I said yes, the single most beautiful woman in the world. She asked why I think her mother is ugly.

Monday 2/8

Got a call at work today. She asked if I thought we needed a new computer. I said no, the one we have works fine, and we don't really use it that much anyway. Work went pretty well. Kevin couldn't make it in so I had to pick up the slack, but I got all the boxes unloaded and shelved by 11:45 so I was able to take an extra long lunch. I didn't remember Wendy's having a triple stack on the value menu. That was a nice surprise. There wasn't much to do after lunch. A new shipment came in around 4:30. I couldn't find Ted so I took care of it and got everything inventoried. I made it home around 7. There were a bunch of big folded boxes sitting by the side next to the recycling bin. The new computer is pretty big, but she said not to worry about it, she ordered a wider desk. I guess the connection speed is nice. There was a call a little later on from someone asking to confirm the shipping address for a 52" flat screen but I told them they must have made a mistake. Out of nowhere I got a headache so I tried to go to bed. The sheets looked a lot whiter so I guess she did laundry during the day. I couldn't get comfortable because something kept digging into my arm. It kind of felt like a tag. I don't know, I couldn't find the switch for the lamp. I got fed up but then I remembered that I forgot to write today, so I went to the den, but she was chatting online and listening to music so I came to the garage.

Tuesday 2/9

Slow day at work. Couldn't wait for lunch because she'd gone through the bagels I usually eat in the morning. I thought about ducking out early but another shipment came in so I got hung up. After dinner she got on the computer so I decided to go to the grocery store to cross an errand off the list. She told me to grab some ice cream and cinnamon-dusted Cheez Its. I told her I don't think they make those but she insisted. When I got there I asked a clerk about cinnamon-dusted Cheez Its and he looked at me like a crazy person. In the freezer section I saw a gorgeous young brunette trying to pick from an assortment of frozen yogurt. I had to reach down on the bottom shelf for a bucket of ice cream and she accidentally elbowed me in the head. She profusely apologized but I said it was no big deal. We got to talking. She said she was visiting a friend and would only be in town a few days before flying back to Florida. I couldn't believe how good she looked. Her friend called for her to come over from the next aisle. I was startled and dropped the bucket of ice cream on my foot.

Wednesday 2/10

Got a call at work around 10:30 or so. She said she couldn't find the cinnamon-dusted Cheez Its and wanted to know why I was hiding them.

Thursday 2/11

We've known each other almost our entire lives. We grew up on the same street and became friends long before we started dating in high school. After graduation she said she didn't go to college because even if she got into the same school as me, all that homework would take time away from our relationship, and she didn't want to lose what we had built. I'm beginning to think she didn't go to college because she's stupid.

Friday 2/12

Nothing day at work. We met up with a couple friends at night to go get a few drinks at the corner bar. I don't really like their beer selection but she said she wanted to go there because she knows the bartender and he's a cool guy so that's where we wound up going. When we walked in the bartender gave her a hug and made her a Long Island on the house. I asked him for a beer but I don't think he heard me. She explained that she knows him because she was friends with three girls he used to date. She said none of them ever worked out and he took it pretty hard. He kept making eyes at our table. I watched him glance over one time and he stared at me.

Saturday 2/13

Our bedroom ceiling has 42.5 tiles in it. Each tile has 70 little spiral designs. Our bedroom ceiling has 2975 little spiral designs.

Sunday 2/14

I called up that upscale Mediterranean restaurant downtown to confirm the Valentine's reservation I made a few months ago. They said everything was all set. I wanted to be sure to keep it a surprise so I tried to stay out of her way most of the morning and early afternoon. Around 4 I went in to tell her that she should dress nice and she was sitting on the bed putting on sweats. She said she felt like staying in for the night. I heated up some pasta. When we went to bed I held her hand and tried to give her a kiss but she rolled away and said I don't make her feel special.

Monday 2/15

Didn't feel like going to work today so I called in sick. Turns out the bedroom ceiling actually has 2977 little spiral designs. One of the side tiles is irregular. Were the tiles handpainted? That seems like a strange mistake. She turned onto her side while she was still asleep and for the first time I noticed that she was starting to get a little bit of a turkey neck. I don't know when that happened. She woke up a little later and mumbled something to me but all I could see was her turkey neck. Around 1 I got up to make myself a sandwich and saw that the counter was dirty, so I grabbed a bottle of 409 out of the cabinet. Before I put it away I read the back label. Turns out it can be fairly toxic.

Continue reading this post »

Carlos Silva is going on the DL with right elbow alibitis. Says Jim Riggleman:

As for Silva, Riggleman said he had felt some elbow pain in his bullpen session two starts ago, but didn't say anthing until after he got shelled yesterday. The plan is to rest Silva and bring him back in September. I suppose it would be nice for him to finish this season with some positive results to take into next year.

"It's something that I think if we were in a different part of the season, or the standings, he would pitch through it,'' Riggleman said.

To recap:

-Carlos Silva selfishly didn't let anyone know that his elbow hurt
-Carlos Silva got shelled
-Carlos Silva conveniently mentioned his elbow pain afterwards
-If the team were competing, Jim Riggleman would let Silva - who just got shelled while allegedly pitching with elbow pain - work through it

This is the stupidest team in baseball. The stupidest team. The stupidest team in baseball. End of story. If somebody were to ask you which team is your favorite, and you said the Mariners, and they said "you mean the stupidest team in baseball," and you said yes, you would be telling the truth.

UPDATE: Alternate version, in the event that Silva's fine and the team's making stuff up:

-Carlos Silva sucks
-He sucks so bad his team is hiding him

"Maybe half of the team wants to do the best they can,'' Silva said. "Take the starting rotation...every time we cross that line, we want to do our best. No matter how many games we are behind. But maybe half of the team doesn't have that mentality. They are only thinking of finishing strong. And to put up their numbers. That's great, but that affects us. As a team, that doesn't work out.''

...

"Maybe [I have] to go and grab somebody from his neck and throw him into the wall and something's going to change,'' he said. "I'm very close to doing that, so write that down.''

Yeah, damn those guys who want to finish strong and put up their numbers. Far better to play like ass all season and use every opportunity to call people out for the sort of bullshit that you yourself have been pulling as one of the alleged leaders of the ballclub. Does Carlos Silva understand that he's pitched like shit? Does he even care? Newsflash, you stupid fat fuck - nobody's intimidated by a guy who blows. Nobody's going to take your words to heart. If you were Felix, then maybe you could get away with this sort of thing, but I guarantee you that if you pick Yuni up by the neck, throw him against a wall, and demand that he starts to focus, he'll just tell you that he couldn't produce enough runs in the world to make up for your shitty-ass pitching. You are in absolutely no position to rip into other players for underperformance. Just shut your fat mouth, allow your seven line drives, and take your lumps like a man. Everybody else is doing it, and it's not like you're under any obligation to issue weekly reminders that you're a complete asshole. We already know, dude.

Thank goodness for Jim Riggleman:

"It's almost like these blanket statements are made, and the perceptions are because you're losing, you're doing these [little things] wrong. What it really comes to is we, like most teams, we take care of the little things. It's big things. We're not hitting good enough and we're not pitching good enough. If somebody wants to hide behind, 'Oh, we made a baserunner mistake or we didn't move a runner over,' ... and use the word selfish, you can try to act like, 'That's the problem right there. That will make up those 30 games.' But, you know, you've got to hit better and you've got to pitch better.

"When you've got something to say, don't use the newspaper to say it."

I hate you, Carlos Silva. Get the fuck out of my life.

In unison, everybody, doing your best Bryan Price:

Silva has been working all year to figure out why his sinker isn't working the way he'd like. It isn't sinking much. That's a big reason why he needed 100 pitches to get through five innings against the Tigers last Thursday.

It turns out, Silva made a between-starts mechanical adjustment. Pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, an ex-sinkerballer himself, felt Silva was squeezing the ball too hard. So, instead of holding his hands up near his chest as he began his windup -- which Silva felt caused his arms to press together and his fingers to grip the ball tighter -- he held them at waist level tonight.

Photographic evidence of this striking transformation:

One little adjustment and Silva goes from five runs in five innings to two runs in eight. Remarkable! This hand position thing sounds like the real deal. Stottlemyre sure does know what he's doing.

So just what kind of difference did Silva's shiny new sinker make, anyway? With 25 non-bunted balls in play tonight, it's probably pretty safe to assume that he was generating a bunch more groundballs than before. After all, that's what a sinker's supposed to do, right? Let's have us a look see:

Buhh. Maybe we're getting some extra noise in here from his changeup and slider. How about we isolate the balls Oakland put in play against his sinker?

Well that doesn't make any sense at all. It's almost as if...it's almost as if his sinker was actually worse tonight than it had been before. Save us, PITCHf/x. In your infinite wisdom, at least show us that Silva's sinker did indeed have more sink tonight, and that the A's just so happened to put it in the air. Let's do a movement comparison between tonight and Silva's 100-pitch/5-inning start against the Tigers last week, the start over which Silva's so embarrassed:

Wait. So you mean to tell me that Silva's sinker actually had 0.8 inches less vertical drop than it did against Detroit? Impossible! Getting more sink is why he made the whole change in the first place! Something fishy is going on. Something fishy is going on, and I don't like it one bit.

-----

...I'll stop playing around and get to the point. Carlos Silva may have made a little mechanical adjustment, but that isn't why he just threw eight solid innings of two-run baseball. Carlos Silva just threw eight solid innings of  two-run baseball because the A's can't hit. Not because of some improved sinker. Because the A's have a bad offense that runs into trouble when it faces a guy that throws a lot of strikes. Simple as that. It's the exact same thing we're hearing about Jarrod Washburn right now. Washburn will tell you he's built off a little change he's made since taking the advice of his collegiate pitching coach, but really, he's just been facing bad lineups. Pitchers don't like to hear that sort of thing, though (as you can imagine), so they point to something they did a little differently as being the reason behind any success. Correlation and causation and all that. If a pitcher makes a minor tweak (which they do all the time anyway) and then goes out and throws a heck of a game, he'll credit the tweak, even if it wasn't responsible for the success in the least. It's up to us to pick out what's real and what's just a fairy tale.

You want to know the truth? Silva's sinker has had a little more drop recently than it used to. His season average pfx_z is 8.3 (the same as last year, incidentally, even though he only now feels he isn't getting enough sink), but again, today he was at 6.6. So in that regard, he's right, there is a difference. However, he was at 5.8 a week ago against the Tigers and sucked hard, so what do we make of that? How do we reconcile these two data points?

(1) The hand position didn't do anything. Silva only lowered his hands today and his sinker sank less than it did against Detroit.
(2) Therefore what's going on is either (A) nothing, or (B) due to some other change he made earlier. Baker quotes Silva as saying that he and Stottlemyre have "been trying so many things" over the weeks, so I guess it's possible they did something before the Detroit game to give his sinker more drop, something people don't want to talk about because the Detroit game was bad.
(3) Pitchers don't talk about mechanical adjustments when they fail. Silva's sinker clearly dropped more against Detroit than it did on average before, but because he sucked, he didn't say a word. Reported mechanical adjustments are therefore selective for success. You don't read too many stories about guys making changes and not making any progress, and when you're only getting one side of the whole thing, it kind of negates its usefulness. Discussing how Silva's theoretical little changes may or may not have made a difference tonight does us no good if we don't also discuss how it may or may not have made a difference last week, but seldom can we ever know when a pitcher made a change that didn't work, so what's the point?

Remember how Silva was supposed to throw a splitter this year to combat tough lefties? Yeah. Safe to say I'm getting pretty sick of these things. They sound good on the surface, but there's so little actual substance in there that it's almost impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, and...and now I see that Dave just put up a post about the same freaking thing. Uh. Son of a bitch...

Note: posting will be back to normal tomorrow.

(Game thread posted below.)

When my plane landed in San Diego, I turned on my phone to seven new text messages and two new voicemails. When I got home and booted up the computer, I found five new Bavasi-related emails. Needless to say, it was a bit of a deluge. I'm still waiting for a knock on the door from FedEx since that seems to be the next logical step.

Leone For Third first opened up about a week before Bavasi was hired back in the fall of 2003. For all intents and purposes, as a blogger, I have known no other GM. The four and a half years since have been fraught with disappointment and well-intentioned failure. Bavasi's always been a hell of a guy who only wanted what was best for the team and who's always been willing to talk with his harshest critics face to face, but while I commend him for that, at the end of the day, if the only people you're meeting are critics, that means a lot is going wrong, and too much has gone wrong for the organization to justify keeping him in his role.

Bill Bavasi is finished as a Major League GM. I mean, sure, I guess the slim possiblity always exists that he could luck himself into another situation, but baseball is shifting irreversibly away from the back-slapping old school approach to roster management, and as Derek(?) remarked about the soon-to-be-fired John McLaren on Saturday, no team with a vacant managerial position down the road is going to look at Bavasi and say "that's the guy we need." It just isn't going to happen. Teams are smarter than that now*. Don't get me wrong, Bavasi will always be able to land a job with some organization if he's so inclined - other failed throwback GMs like Cam Bonifay, Dan Evans, and Woody Woodward have been able to stick around for quite a while as assistants and scouts. But as the guy leading the show, Bavasi is almost certainly done. He's exhausted his opportunities.

I suppose it's appropriate that a regime that never once demonstrated a solid grasp of probability was done in by its greatest gamble. 2008 was supposed to be the year. This was Bavasi's fifth season at the helm, and this was presumably the roster that Bavasi had been trying to build. The roster sucks. I don't know if you've looked at the standings recently, but the team that Bavasi thought was a playoff contender has been, for eleven weeks, three and a half games worse than any other team in baseball. That's really bad. And with so little help on the way, it's not going to be a real easy situation for whoever comes next. I won't go so far as to say that we're completely ruined, because we're not, but this organization is a mess, in large part due to Bavasi's lack of foresight.

Say what you will about ownership's intervention. From things like the Carlos Guillen deal to the Johjima extension, I think we all know that Bavasi was operating within certain constraints. But with that said, over the years it's become abundantly clear what he's all about. He loves chemistry. Loves it. Loves talking about it, and loves trying to build it, even though he himself has said that it's nigh impossible to predict. He also loves veterans, labels, roles, and spending way too much money on marginal improvements. Throw in a crippling inability to evaluate pitching and defense and you have the makings of a disaster. To his credit, Bavasi's pretty good with acquiring minor leaguers and locking up young players to long-term deals, but the former has more to do with his scouts, and as for the latter, on the day of his termination Bavasi's front office found itself at a standstill in contract negotiations with one of the greatest young talents the league has to offer. While the man may not have been granted free reign to do whatever he wanted, given what we know about him, shouldn't we be thankful for that? Ignore the results and look at the thought processes. There is no reason to believe that Bill Bavasi is even a half-decent general manager, and the organization is better off now than it was this morning.

It isn't yet time to celebrate. When I read those messages and listened to my voicemail, I was interested, but I wasn't smiling. Remember the official LL slogan for 2008: It Can Always Get Worse. Today the organization released one of its heaviest anchors. That's good news. But until we know who comes next, I don't think it would be wise to party too hard. In the event that Armstrong and Lincoln stick around, are they going to interview some fresh new blood, or will they stick with the same pool of retreads that can't find work anywhere else? What about Bob Fontaine? What's he going to do? Will the new guy approach Felix with the same zeal that Bavasi did Yuni and Lopez, or will they remain at an impasse? There are a lot of important questions to be asked, and for the time being, we don't have any answers. And so I beg of you, do not assume that we'll come out of this all peaches. We could and we should, but until we know, it's silly to take future improvement for granted. If the Bavasi era taught you anything, let it be that.

I'm looking forward to the interview process. This is a team that could reasonably decide to either play for 2009 or blow everything up, and that's exciting, both for us as fans and for applicants as GM. It's kind of nice to have the immediate future so open-ended, if only because Bavasi was so eminently predictable. I'm excited and nervous. But I'm not nervous because I'm fearful of impending doom; I'm nervous because I don't know quite how to respond to this glimmer of hope. There exists for us and for this organization a glimmer of hope. Not false hope. Real hope. It's there and I can feel it, and for the first time in what seems like forever, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know the next step. I don't know who Armstrong and Lincoln will interview. I don't know if Armstrong and Lincoln will even be around for the interviews. I don't know what approach the new GM will take with this team. I don't know.

And that's what's so exciting.

* except for the Astros

A quick hit-and-run post during the intermission between the third and fourth overtime periods in Dallas:

Carlos Silva has basically been the exact same pitcher in 2008 as he was in 2007, give or take a few minor little things. He's been throwing the same pitches, he's been throwing about the same speed, and he's been getting the same results. And while he definitely got a few bad breaks this afternoon, you'd be hard-pressed to find a luckier ERA than Silva's 2.79 through his first six starts. It was completely unwarranted, and while it fooled a few people into believing that he'd become a new pitcher, it was the same trick Washburn pulled a year ago, when his ERA stood at 2.64 on May 11th. And we know how that one turned out.

Carlos Silva isn't horrible. He could easily become horrible if he loses even a fraction of his command, but for now he's an innings-eater with ~average run prevention abilities, and despite what some people might've had you believe, he's not going to be anything more than that. Today was a pretty good reminder.The goods are all right, but the bads can be pretty damn ugly.

Regression, as they say, is swift.