Well, it took about a month longer than we were internally told, and granted that was a beta date, but it's finally here! Gameday, and more importantly, PITCH f/x in three dimensions.

Pan around the entire field. See the entire pitch trajectory from any angle. Zoom, whatever.

Go check it out right now.

Keep in mind that it's very very early. You need to give these things a day or two to see if swelling was hiding anything or the like.

That being said, the word currently is a slight sprain. A negative x-ray and Felix is talking like he won't miss a start. However, the team would be crazy not to skip at least once just to be safe, but for now they are dismissing the need to use the DL as an option.

And as a possible sunny side effect, with Bedard needing to miss a start as well, we could be close to seeing our favorite pitcher with a hyphenated last name get a start.

MLB.com:

Interim general manager Lee Pelekoudas and Mariners executives were in meetings for much of Tuesday to discuss plans for the rest of the season, which could include releasing first baseman Richie Sexson in the upcoming days, according to a report in the Everett Herald.

Richie's release has been a foregone conclusion for a little while now, as he's failed to take any strides forward from a year ago and in so doing has become, on any given day, the most hated man in Safeco. That whole thing about changing his stance made for a good story, but gun to my head, I'd say they did it for two reasons: (1) to have an excuse to bench him over a homestand and shelter him from the booing, and (2) to buy themselves a little more time as they search for a replacement. This gives them a pretense under which they can keep playing him a little while longer "to see how he adjusts" while they wait for someone more qualified than Miguel Cairo to start looking like a qualified stopgap. So in that regard I think the stance thing was intended more to help the Mariners than to help Richie Sexson.

This is the sort of problem we warn against when we say that a player's contract is too long. They're not empty concerns. They're real, and this is a perfect example of why. At first it can be easy to ignore how much a player costs, but if a front office decides to throw caution to the wind and chuck money around all willy-nilly until there's nothing left to spend, danger may swiftly approach. God knows we've seen it first-hand on far too many occasions. I'd rather overspend in years than overspend in players, but I'd also rather overspend in money than overspend in years, and in a hypothetical utopia I'd rather not overspend at all. It's a bigger problem than a lot of people think it is, because even just one bad player living out the end of a long contract can weigh a team down. If you know you're giving too long of a contract you better be damn sure the player in question will make it worthwhile in the short-term, but those players don't come along very often, and Richie Sexson was never one of them.

I'd eulogize Richie, but for one thing, he's not yet gone, and for another, it would be about a year and a half too late. I don't know if he's completely and utterly finished, but he's finished with the Mariners, because he doesn't want to be in Seattle and Seattle doesn't want him to be in Seattle. While I guess you could call it a mutual break-up, this is only happening at the finale of a one-sided abusive relationship, and one party is coming out of it in much better shape than the other. For all the crap he's taken, both justified and not, Richie made his millions while the team sank like a stone, and at the end of the day he managed to outlast the guy who hired him, in no small part due to Richie's own performance. There's something poetic in there, although I don't care to find it.

Learn from this, Mariners. There are lessons in each and every one of your countless mistakes, but lessons are only effective when learnt.

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

Baker's Link

USSM Link

I figured changes were going to have to come after getting swept by the Nationals, but never did I think it would be Bavasi this soon. Is this good news for us? A lot depends on who the new hire eventually is, the search will "take place immediately" but we'll see if they're able to get much accomplished in-season if they want to bring in outside candidates.

It remains to be seen if Bavasi is just the latest and greatest (so far) scapegoat to this season or if there was actual fear that he might further jeopardize the future of the ballclub in order to try and save his job by dint of damaging trades come July. Bavasi did a decent job of trading when he was ditching veterans for prospects, but who knows.

One thing this does worry me is that firing a GM mid-season instead of waiting until after the season likely means the true heads of affiars, Lincoln and Armstrong, seem unlikely to go anywhere since they're likely the ones doing the hiring for the new GM and while it's rare enough for a team to fire it's General Manager mid-season, it is rarer still for a change to take place in team presidency mid-season.

Wait and see I suppose.

DANCE!!

In other news, Cha Seunk Baek has been traded to... who else? The Padres! We get this guy in return.

No word yet on who's coming up. The best-case scenario is Jeremy Reed at LF and Raul Ibanez at DH, while the worst case scenario is Bryan Lahair at anything.

Bavasi had his reasons for promoting Clement when he did, but he was striking out entirely too often and just didn't look very comfortable, so he's heading down to AAA for more seasoning. Which will give us that additional year of team control we feared we had lost a few weeks ago. And I think that has to be considered good news.

See you soon, Jeff.

Update: sounds like Reed, although we don't know what his role would be. Presumably something stupid.

Update #2: Something stupid indeed.

Tonight wasn't all downside. If you can look past the awful hitting and awfuler defense (when I talk about our bad defense I'm referring to range, so this was a whole new pile of suck), there was one big positive, and that was the pitching of Erik Bedard.

First things first: yes, Bedard's fastball seemed to be missing some miles today. With an average velocity of 88.5mph according to PITCHf/x, it was down two miles from last week and three miles from Opening Day. However, Wang was also down several miles from where he usually hangs out as well, suggesting that either it was too cold in New York for the starters to get comfortable, or there's something wonky with Yankee Stadium's PITCHf/x system. Whatever the case may be, Bedard certainly wasn't knocked off his game, so I'm not the least bit concerned.

Below are the four main graphs of Bedard's PITCHf/x data for his seven innings tonight, which are pretty self-explanatory:

Nothing groundbreaking in there, but again, you can get a pretty good sense of Bedard's game plan. Pitch on the outside corner against lefties and drop the curve down and away. Then spot the fastball all over the zone against righties while using the outside curve for surprise strikes and the low curve for misses. His actual strikeout pitches were pretty well mixed up, which I'd imagine is good for two reasons - (1) he didn't fall into any patterns, and (2) it shows he's capable of punching batters out with more than one pitch. But that's just hypothesizing.

This was a really good start. Granted, the Yankees weren't sending out the most intimidating lineup, but even if you skip over the PITCHf/x stuff and just go straight to the numbers, here's what you get:

70% strikes
17% swinging strikes
4 hits, only one of which was a line drive
1 walk, after walking four in each of his first three starts
6 strikeouts

By far the best performance of Bedard's brief Mariner career, as his only real mistake was leaving an 0-2 fastball up for Matsui to line into left field in the first. Other than that, he was great, and over his final five innings - during which he allowed all of "two" baserunners (up yours Giambi) - he was spectacular.

While I'm still a little concerned about his hip, it's clear that if it's bothering him, it's not taking any kind of toll on how he pitches. This was the ace we thought we were getting from Baltimore. Here's to seeing a whole hell of a lot more of him.

So as you've all surely heard by now, Barry Zito - the durable front-of-the-rotation starter with ~5.8 years and $114m left on his contract - has been bumped to middle relief. By the Giants. The move, while surprising, is long overdue, as Zito's been nothing short of an absolute disaster of Chernobylian(?) proportions. Over 39 starts with San Francisco, he's put up a 91 ERA+, a 5.16 xFIP, and a 10% walk rate. And while 2007 was bad, 2008 has been a total catastrophe, as for six starts Zito was far and away the worst pitcher in the Major Leagues.

Don't believe me? Observe:

ERA: 7.53
RA: 9.42
xFIP: 6.01
tRA: 6.37
K%: 7.8%
BB%: 10.6%
StS%: 8%
Cntc%: 88%
GB/FB: 0.84
FBv: 83.7mph

The entire package is an unthinkable nightmare, but perhaps the greatest horror is that 8% swinging strike rate. Thanks to his little league fastball, Zito's missing as many bats as Carlos Silva, yet he's walking more guys than Daniel Cabrera and giving up more flyballs than Jarrod Washburn.

Barry Zito has zero strengths. Zero. The only differences between Zito and Steve Trachsel are the famous curveball that hasn't been a weapon in years and the fact that, while Trachsel will walk and likely retire in the fall, Zito's still guaranteed another nine figures. Barry Zito's contract is the worst contract ever signed in baseball history, and as much as you might want to tell me I'm wrong, you won't be able to prove it, because I'm right. No contract has ever gone so sour so fast. And there isn't any indication that things are about to get better.

I knew from the get-go that Zito was a bad idea, but never at any point did I think he'd fall apart this quickly. That's come as a surprise. But the fact of the matter is that smart front offices knew what they were doing and stayed the hell away. They saw the red flags, understood the market, and looked elsewhere without even placing a call to Zito's agent.

Bill Bavasi offered him six years and ninety-nine million dollars.

There but for the grace of Sabean go I, and you, and the Mariners, and all of our collective hopes and dreams. This team tried its damndest to kill itself in the face, but thanks to the existence of another, more stubborn holdout from the daunting realm of intelligent thinking, we were spared. We were spared. Mr. Sabean, I am forever indebted to your misguided courage. Regardless of your intentions at the time, you fell on a nuclear grenade, and for this gesture I cannot thank you enough. May this thread be construed as a token of my appreciation.

And damn you Bill for ever thinking this was a good idea for the Mariners. Damn everyone who thought this was a good idea for the Mariners. All of you are stupid. There, I said it. Maybe you've gotten smarter over the past year and a half, but if you wanted the Mariners to sign Barry Zito as a free agent, you were stupid. Stop being stupid. Brian Sabean can only prevent so many bad decisions.