Perpetual Futility: The Seattle Mariners Fanclub

Man, its been hard watching all of the losses pile up. I think its time to look at Free Agents during the off-season and try to upgrade the lineup.

 

The Yankee method for building teams (SPEND SPEND SPEND ON FREE AGENTS YAY!) is a dead concept. The successful teams we're seeing now have built internally. Oakland, Tampa Bay, Boston, Florida, and Anaheim feature rosters that are built primarily on their own internal talent, not FA splurges... Hey wait, those are all Sabermetric teams. Surely these things aren't related? Nah.

Silva is nothing more than a replacement-level player. Not even league-average. His K% has dropped, his swinging-strike rate has vanished, and his ground-ball rate is virtually non-existent. You can take any arm out of a AAA system and get the same results.

So, with all that said, here's my revised list of CRAP THIS TEAM NEEDS TO DO!

Management and Front Office moves:

1) Fire John MacLaren - Bullpen mismanagement is his biggest crime.
2) Fire Bill Bavasi - After the draft.
3) Fire Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln - These two have ensured this is a mediocre club for decades.
4) Hire Chris Antonetti, assistant GM of the Cleveland organization.

Contract Extensions

1) King Felix - Again, duh.
2) Adrian Beltre - He's a top-5 3B. Replacing him will be impossible
3) If possible, Erik Bedard. If not, trade him.

Internal options
1) Dump Richie Sexson - Last season, who cares. Cut ties, try something else. Anything else. Except for Jeff Clement at 1B.
2) Transition Kenji Johjima to DH and recall Jeff Clement. Clement becomes starting catcher
3) Dump Jose Vidro before his option vests
4) Dump Miguel Cairo, recall anyone with a pulse.
5) Move Raul Ibanez to 1B or DH
6) Jeremy Reed to LF
7) Brandon Morrow to AAA or AA to start.
8) Ryan Rowland-Smith to Jarod Washburn's rotation spot. Washburn ejected into sun.

2009 Off-season moves

1) Sign Mark Teixeira - 1B with excellent defense and an excellent left-handed stroke.
2) Shore up outfield depth - Corey Patterson, Mike Cameron available.
3) Sign up a league average backup 1B/DH
4) Take a flier on Rocco Baldelli - Offer a 500K minor league contract with a spring training invite.

 

Ow! That game yesterday vs. Detroit sounded terrible! Silva gives up 7 earned runs in 2/3 of an inning? And everyone thought Detroit was a bust! This is not good.

 

So do you believe me when I say Silva is a replacement-level arm at best yet?

Yikes he was bad. That was Jeff Weaver/Horacio Ramirez bad.

 

His career numbers still don't equal a AAA pitcher, but time will tell. I hope he's not a complete bust for Seattle as he was a good #3 type pitcher for the Twins. Course the Twins weren't silly enough to give him 12 million dollars....

 

His career numbers don't matter when all of his peripheral stats show he's in the middle of a drastic decline. There's no reason to believe he'll be any more than a replacement level arm. I'd rather see RA Dickey in his spot in the rotation.

 

R.A. Dickey could start every fifth day for the rest of the season and not get 3 wins....It amazes me that your a Mariners fan and are rooting against Silva. Even when he was pitching well you were putting him down. He's still had 8 good starts out of twelve total starts this year. Looks for the most part like the offence is doing him no favors. He has stunk the last 3 times out though, badly. Don't throw in the towel just yet. R.A. Dickey is not a big league pitcher, at best a middle releif mop up guy. I can understand the frustration but looking at Game log for the year Silva's had a lot more good starts than bad, just when he's been bad he's been aweful. We'll see what happens.

 

When Silva was "pitching well" he wasn't doing what was advertised. He was brought in because he was supposedly a ground-ball pitcher. His GB percentage has fallen to a below-average 42%, Strikeouts-per-game has fallen to a well-below-average 3.3 per game. Opposing batters are slugging .523 against him. His walks-per-game are a career high 1.6.

I'm not rooting against him. I'm pointing out he's not a good pitcher. All of his peripheral stats (and don't start quoting ERA, that's the most useless pitching metric of them all) show he's a league average arm with no upside. These peripherals are the same kind of numbers Horacio Ramirez put up over the course of an entire season. In essence, the Mariners paid 48 million for the economy-sized HoRam.

 

This may be the worst draft in franchise history. Using your first pick on a relief pitcher?

This club has no idea what they're doing.

 

That was a pretty big blow up yesterday in the clubhouse.

 

That blowup was rather humorous, actually. Let's take a look at the flowchart.

1) President Chuck Armstrong feels the heat from the board of directors. He yells, screams, and pitches a fit at the coaching staff.
2) The Coaching staff feels the heat from the team president. They yell, scream, and pitches a fit at the players.
3) The General Manager feels the heat from the coaches, the players, the fans, and the media. He yells, screams, and pitches a fit at the players. To punish the players, he puts them all on timeout and forces them to sit in front of their lockers. He even goes as far as taking away post-game shower and towel privileges.
4) The players shrug and address the media as they were told to. None are pleased with the fact they are being treated like kindergartners who have misbehaved on the playground.

Let's get one thing straight: the problem with this organization goes far beyond coaching, management, and personnel. Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln are poison to this club. They're one of the last remaining members of the Old Boys club that refuses to adopt new lines of thinking that moving through baseball. It's the same problem that's plaguing the New York Yankees. This is a franchise that is getting left in the dust. In other words, meet today's new Montreal Expos.

Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln hire yes-men. As long as they can turn a profit, winning doesn't matter. This is precisely the reason they hired Bill Bavasi: he's a general manager who is going to cave to Armstrong and Lincoln every time. No one in this organization is accountable except for the players. The field manager isn't accountable for terrible bullpen usage. The General Manager isn't accountable for putting together a roster full of collapse-candidate players. That however pales in comparison to Chuck Armstrong and Howard Lincoln's crime: tolerating mediocrity since Nintendo purchased the team in 1992.

Art Thiel sums up the Lincoln problem well.This has long been an organization that has lived without accountability from upper management. The contempt Lincoln and Armstrong have shown towards fans for the last decade and a half would not be tolerated by any other market. Want this team to be successful? Lincoln and Armstrong have to go. They have allowed and perpetuated a culture of losing and irresponsibility for far too long.

Once Lincoln and Armstrong are gone, former Microsoft exec Chris Larson should become the team's new president of operations. Larson's first order of business should be to fire Bill Bavasi and hire a general manager who is adept at evaluating talent in a 21st century manner. Yes, it's time to bring in a sabermetrician. Available are former Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta and Cleveland assistant GM Chris Antonetti (who is the favorite candidate of the USSM writers, Dave Cameron and Derek Zumsteg). From there, Antonetti should be given free-reign to clean house.

This team isn't that far away from contention. The biggest holes on the roster are at 1B/DH/RF, the three easiest parts of the club to fill. Antonetti will be able to find league-average to above average players on the cheap to fill those spots.

This is a team that can be competitive next season, but in order for that to happen Lincoln and Armstrong must go.

 

Here's a piece I wrote up for a Mariner's blog I occasionally write for

Looks like it's time for everyone's favorite game: Is Adrian Beltre a Bust or Not?

Let's start with his simple batting line:

.226/.303/.427

He's a bust! He's a terrible player! Replace him with Willie Bloomquist right now!

Wrong, wrong, and wrong (especially the Willie thing, come on). Hold on to your seats, I'm about to cite some dreaded statistics from THT.

Beltre's LD%: 20.5%
Beltre's BABIP: .225

Now what exactly do these two numbers mean? First let's take a look at the Line Drive percentage. 20.5% is an insanely high LD rate, even better than his monstrous 2004 campaign. A higher LD percentage shows that a player is hitting the ball hard with consistency. Now, that kind of an LD rate should translate into a .280 BA, yet Beltre is marred with a .227 average. What gives?

Let's take a look at the second number I quoted, his batting-average on balls hit into play. BABIP measures how often a batted ball that is hit into the field of play falls in for a hit, taking walks and strikeouts out of the equation. A league-average BABIP is .290, if you hit a ball into play, chances are it will fall in for a hit 29 percent of the time.

Right now, Beltre's BABIP is an anemic .227. Two things cause BABIP numbers like this to manifest. Either he's making poor contact and only hits weak pop-ups, or he's extraordinarily unlucky. As unlikely and odd as this seems, Beltre is one of the unluckiest hitters in all of baseball this season.

You hardly ever see such a high LD% accompanied by such a low BABIP. Beltre would have to strike out more often than Richie Sexson to make these numbers logical. He's hitting the ball hard, and has nothing to show for it. Beltre may be making the most solid contact on the team right now.

Team average LD% is standing at 18 percent right now, right around league average. Beltre currently has the second highest LD% on the team, behind only Raul Ibanez at 20.9%. Let's do another comparison.

Ibanez LD%: 20.9%
Ibanez BABIP: .271

Raul Ibanez and Adrian Beltre have similar LD% but very different BABIP. Wheras Beltre has a BABIP of .227, Ibanez has a BABIP of .271. Watch what a higher BABIP combined with a similar LD% does to the overall line:

Raul Ibanez: .261/.332/.436

This illustrates the point I'm trying to make. Both Ibanez and Beltre are hitting the ball hard. Both players have great approaches at the plate. The difference between the two players is their BABIP. Ibanez has a higher average on balls hit into play, and it shows in his overall line. Why does he have a higher BABIP if both players have a similar LD%? There is no good reason, even sabermetricians concede there's such a thing as luck in baseball. Right now, Beltre is unlucky. Extraordinarily unlucky.

So here's the question: If Beltre's approach at the plate is good and he's smoking the ball hard, do you want to get rid of him solely because he's unlucky this season? I assure you it will be extremely difficult to replace a player of Beltre's caliber. Nothing is available in FA, and nothing is ready in the MiLB system.

Adrian Beltre is still one of the best third basemen in the league, furthermore, he is very, very low on this team's list of things to worry about. You might complain about his BA with RISP, call him unclutch for only hitting solo home runs (not his fault no one is aboard), but you have to realize that when your BABIP is that low, you're one unlucky player. That kind of BABIP is going to magnify all sorts of things and make a player look far, far worse than they really are.

Remember people, the standard batting line only tells part of the story. Don't let it be the end-all to determining a player's value. That's the kind of mistake our FO would make.

 

Adrian Beltre is definitely worth the contract. However, if there was some more punch in the lineup; what there is now is just not going to cut it. I agree totally about going after Mark Texeira in the offseason. He's a great power bat.

 

The coach bit it today...

 

General manager, not the manager.

 

My mistake.

 

No, now both are gone. *Sigh*, the Mariners haven't been good since Mike Hargrove left town...

 

Zaz was just three days early with his comment

 

Mike Hargrove was a terrible manager who had no idea how to use his pitching staff.

Here's the list of GM candidates I'd like to see employed by the Mariners

1)Chris Antonetti - Assnt. GM Cleveland - Responsible for player acquisition in the Cleveland organization and is widely believed to be Mark Shapiro's successor. If he can be lured away, he would make a great GM in Seattle.
2)Kim Ng - Up and coming baseball executive, very adept at statistical analysis.
3)Kevin Towers - A nice mix of traditional scouting and statistical analysis.
4)David Forst - Assistant GM Oakland - Billy Beane's protege. Enough said.
5)Jed Hoyer - Assistant GM Boston - From the same mold of Beane, Epstein, DePodesta.

Managerial candidates:

1)Someone who knows how to properly utilize a pitching staff and starting lineup.

 

Oh well, it's been too many years since the Mariners won a lot of games. Now they stink!

 

Did you hear about Felix Hernandez's grand slam yesterday vs. the Mets? It's a shame that he was injured one out before he could pick up the win.

 

That was one of the single most awesome moments of my life.

Thank you, Felix.

 

I heard about it in the paper. First time in 37 years!

 

...and among potential trade rumors comes the idea of Seattle trading Bedard.

Not sure how much they could get for him, though...

 

Bedard isn't going anywhere. Trading him now would be getting 25 cents on the dollar. What you are hearing is media speculation, mostly because the media hates, loathes, and despises Bedard's very existence.

Here's a move I would like to see happen: Washburn/Betancourt for one of those young guys Torre hates. If the Dodgers want a shortstop, Yuni should be available.

Granted, he can't hit a lick, but he has a reputation of being a defensive wizard (even though he's a worse shortstop than Derek Jeter these days). For once, I'd like to see our FO fleece someone else.

On another note, I think this team can be a playoff contender in 2009. Don't believe me? You should.

Here's Jeff Sullivan's argument.Warning. This link contains sabermetric lingo.