The first part of every series preview is a version of the below chart breaking down the team into various components and evaluating them relative to league average. I thought it might be interesting to see how that chart looks across the six highest levels of the Mariners organization. Apologies for the width of the table.
It's not exactly as apt as with the Major League team since Minor League teams balance trying to win with trying to develop talent for the parent organization. They deal with a lot more roster turnover, generally don't get to keep their best performing players for extended periods of time and have to sometimes suffer putting players in sub-optimal positions for the sake of practice or space constraints.
| MARINERS (55-64) | RAINIERS (53-73) | GENERALS (70-53) | MAVERICKS (73-49) | LUMBERKINGS (54-66) | AQUASOX (38-23) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HITTING (wOBA) | -105.2 (30th) | -28.5 (21st) | 17.9 (11th) | 88.3 (2nd) | 3.7 (12th) | 18.5 (5th) |
| FIELDING (GBs) | 26.5 (4th) | -24.4 (26th) | 15.6 (6th) | -5.3 (18th) | 4.7 (15th) | 10.5 (4th) |
| FIELDING (FBs) | 16.3 (9th) | -5.5 (19th) | 6.9 (8th) | -16.0 (22nd) | 2.0 (14th) | -2.8 (13th) |
| ROTATION (TRA) | 14.6 (10th) | -49.5 (27th) | 46.8 (2nd) | 16.7 (11th) | -5.3 (17th) | -4.3 (12th) |
| BULLPEN (TRA) | 2.0 (15th) | 19.8 (8th) | 8.2 (11th) | 13 (10th) | 4.8 (16th) | 1.2 (10th) |
| OVERALL (RAA) | -45.8 (21st) | -88.1 (26th) | 95.3 (1st) | 96.7 (4th) | 9.9 (12th) | 23.2 (5th) |
With the Minor League season almost over, I'm going to save a more in depth look into each team for afterward, but some quick bullet points are in order.
- The Jackson rotation, which started out with James Paxton, Danny Hultzen and Taijuan Walker, has been good. Three lesser known names that have also contributed are Andrew Carraway (now in Tacoma), Brandon Maurer (finally healthy) and Anthony Fernandez (began in High Desert).
- I know High Desert's park factors screw with stuff, but it's still been a great hitting team.
- Everett is in a 22-team level, so keep that in mind when it comes to the rankings.
- Victor Sanchez (Everett SP) is a kid a lot of people are excited about. He hasn't been as good as Jose Campos was last year down there, but he's also 1.5 years younger than Campos was at the time.
- The Mariners have a lot of hitters floating around the mid-levels (A+, AA) in the early-to-mid twenties. People such as Rich Poythress and Nate Tenbrink are having good seasons this year, but might need to start having great seasons to really push through. Still, it's better than when they were having disappointing seasons.
- The defenses seem to move jointly, being either great (Seattle, Jackson), good (Clinton, Everett) or awful (High Desert, Tacoma).
- Carlos Triunfel had a promising bit with Tacoma before fading into his usual 90 wOBA+ self. It's worth keeping something in mind though. You know how excited people are for Brad Miller? They have legitimate reason to be as Miller has hit very well this season in High Desert and Jackson. Brad Miller is also four months older than Carlos Triunfel and didn't lose an entire season to a broken leg.