Totally OT for our Puget Sound readers: anyone hiring a crackerjack IT analyst/PM should drop me a line. I could use the work.
The issue with Cirillo is that he’s viewed as such a huge disappointment that it’s hard to see past the money and gap between being the pay and value. People look at Cirillo and see a huge $ that can’t swing a bat, and when they look at Willie they see a young, smiling local boy. Here’s the actual situation, though: the team’s paying both of them either way. If Cirillo was an upgrade on Bloomquist and made $20m/year, while Bloomquist made $1/year, the team is still better playing the massively disappointing Cirillo over Bloomquist if doing so makes the team on the field better. The team, and fans, need to regard players as two separate and distinct things:
– their ability to contribute on the field
– their off-field cost and value relative to cost (which is trade value)
Apparently I spoke too soon. The most unbelievable boxscore line of the season did happen last night, but it wasn’t courtesy of John Mabry — instead, it comes to us from Omaha, where Tacoma’s Jamal Strong hit two homers yesterday. Entering the game, Strong had two homers in his entire minor league career (a span of 355 games).