By the way, Mike Thompson laid things out perfectly at the P-I blog yesterday. There is simply no reason to pay Ibanez this much money, because he isn’t any better than what we already had. If the plan is to move Winn to center and go with an Ibanez/Winn/Ichiro outfield, then the 2004 season is already in the toilet.
Bad, bad news. Not only have the Mariners decided to flush $13 million down the drain on Raul Ibanez, they’re going to do so before the deadline to offer arbitration, meaning that we are voluntarily giving our first round pick to the Royals for the right to throw our money away.
Awful deal. Just pure crap. Bill Bavasi starts his tenure where the previous management left off. Way to squash all the optimism we’d managed to accumulate with one single move Bill. Just tremendous.
Can we start endorsing Chris Antonetti as Bavasi’s replacement yet?
This is what I get for not buying a calendar. I totally missed out on the fact that November 18th is “Trade With Your Sabermetrically Inclined General Manager Buddy” day. Theo Epstein apparently bought the same calendar I did. But, have no fear, Billy Beane, J.P. Ricciardi, and Kevin Towers all remembered, and they swapped major league players, contracts, cash, players to be named, and Terrance Long.
Deal #1: Oakland shipped All-Star Catcher (TM) Ramon Hernandez and Terrance Long to San Diego for Mark Kotsay.
This trade isn’t official yet, which means we could see something thrown in on either side before it gets confirmed. Usually, I’d say the sign of a fair trade is when you can see a valid reason for both teams making the move. I’m not sure what it says when I don’t really understand this trade for either team.
Oakland unloads their Jeff Cirillo, but has to give up their starting catcher coming off a career year in order to get anyone to take him. They also receive Mark Kotsay, whose contract runs an extra year and is worth more money than the two players they gave up will make combined. Now, Kotsay is the most talented player of the trio and could be the answer to their center field problem, but he’s been a disappointment thus far in his career, and has missed a lot of time with injury. A back problem turned him into a pretty lousy player last year, so the A’s are praying for a comeback or they’ve just inherited an even worse contract than Long’s.
I like this deal even less for San Diego. Ramon Hernandez isn’t the answer to any question except “which player had an age-27 inspired career year in 2003 and will revert to his previous mediocre form next year?” The Padres got nothing from their catchers this year, but I wouldn’t bank on that changing in 2004. Ramon Hernandez just isn’t that good. Terrance Long isn’t a major league player, but he’s going to be collecting millions of dollars from the Padres for the next two years. The Padres already awful outfield defense just got worse, and if they’re serious about a Klesko/Giles/Nady outfield next year, I’m putting the over/under on team ERA around 14.00. They didn’t save any money, acquire any players who will really help them win, or improve the team’s biggest weakness (defense). In fact, they took their best defensive player and shipped him off. This trade could be salvaged if they throw some money at a major league CF (like Mike Cameron), move Giles back to a corner, and tell Terrance Long to send them a forwarding address for his paycheck, but I’m not holding my breath.
Winner: San Diego fans who like extra base hits and don’t mind which team is hitting them.
Deal #2: Oakland sends Ted Lilly to Toronto for Bobby Kielty and cash or a player to be named later.
Beane acquires another outfielder, attempting to improve on the suckfest that was the A’s offense in 2003. Kielty has become a stathead favorite through his rise up the Minnesota Twins system after signing as an undrafted free agent. He draws walks, has flashed power, can be spotted in any of the three outfield positions, and works hard. Scouts don’t like his tools, so that endears him even more to the statistical community. When he was traded for Jayson Stark’s MVP candidate Shannon Stewart in July, people proclaimed Ricciardi a genuis for getting a cheap young outfielder for two months of an expensive, not-so-young outfielder. Kielty will likely be handed an everyday job for the first time in his career, and A’s fans will likely expect him to have a breakout year. But I’m not expecting stardom from Kielty. He’s gotten regular playing time in each of the last 12 months of the baseball season, and posted the following lines:
2002:
April: .278/.381/.611
May: .345/.472/.397
June: .341/.471/.659
July: .328/.463/.516
August: .173/.279/.231
September: .263/.310/.605
2003:
April: .324/.425/.588
May: .214/.371/.400
June: .218/.306/.327
July: .260/.366/.375
August: .164/.325/.284
September: .268/.337/.423
He was awesome for the first 4 months of 2002, than turned to crap for a month, before being okay in September. He started 2003 with a bang, than became a pretty useless player for the rest of the year. In the past 8 months of baseball, Bobby Kielty has been a good hitter in exactly one of them.
He also hit a dreadful .216/.328/.328 vs right-handers in 2003, though that could be a sample size anomoly, as he did fine against them in 2002. But, for 2003, he was basically a platoon outfielder who could mash lefties. Adam Piatt with better defense, in other words. Kielty hasn’t exactly been a model of consistency and there are questions surrounding his ability to play effectively every day. To me, it looks like the A’s may have just acquired another Eric Byrnes.
Toronto, on the other hand, traded an outfielder they did not need for a pitcher who could win 20 games next year. Now, as Esteban Loaiza shows us, every pitcher could win 20 games next year, and the odds of Ted Lilly doing it aren’t very high. But Lilly has nasty stuff and looked like he was finally coming into his own to finish 2003. He made 10 starts in August and September, compiling the following line: 54 innings, 52 hits, 3 HR, 16 BB, 52 K, 3.00 ERA. His strikeout-to-walk ratio for the season was nearly 3 to 1. He did benefit from his home park, which won’t be so kind to him in Toronto, but Ted Lilly’s a solid pitcher with the potential to be downright awesome. The Jays make out like bandits, flipping a spare part for a guy who should throw 180 quality innings next year and has all-star potential at age 27.
This trade defines what I believe the sabermetric community is doing incorrectly; putting market value prices on players who should be considered freely available talent. The lesson that should be learned from Bobby Kielty’s success isn’t that Bobby Kielty is a player you need on your roster, but rather that there are a lot of marginally useful major league outfielders who can be had for little to no cost. The minor leagues are littered with platoon outfielders who can mash lefthanders for the league minimum. The A’s waived one (Adam Piatt) earlier this year. The Rule 5 draft is a perfect opportunity to find such a player (hello Jay Gibbons). There’s no reason to give up players of value in exchange for this type of player. The A’s built their roster through realizing that they could rotate through Olmaedo Saenz/Matt Stairs/John Jaha/Ron Gant/Billy McMillon type players. Rather than finding another spare part on the scrap heap, they’ve given up one of the better young left handed pitchers in the American League so that they can find out if Bobby Kielty’s problems with right-handers are legitimate.
You improve your roster by obtaining bargains. As an undrafted free agent, Bobby Kielty was a bargain to the Twins. For 2 months of Shannon Stewart, he was a bargain for the Blue Jays. For Ted Lilly, he’s an example of a team overpaying for something they could have had a lot cheaper had they done some bargain shopping.
Winner: Blue Jays in a landslide
Maybe Billy Beane ran out of Pixie Dust. Overall, it was a good day to be a Mariner fan, as the most threatening competitor for the division in 2004 made themselves worse.
Kim Ng interview on Baseball Prospectus
Jonah Keri has a cool Kim Ng interview on Baseball Prospectus today. Apptly she didn’t interview for the M’s job (which doesn’t necc. rule out the reported phone conversation, if it wasn’t an “interview” interview)
And that’s a really nice dinner, too — that money goes straight to the food!
Article on Matsui’s press conference, including an awful-looking photo, is available over on ESPN.com.
We’ve begun to finalize plans for the U.S.S. Mariner Feed. Here is the vital information for those who have not expressed interest in attending as of yet:
Date: Saturday, December 20th
Time: 4 p.m.
Cost: $15.00 per person, dinner included
If you missed one of our earlier postings or just never got around to dropping us a line and telling you wanted to come, then do so now. Put “Feed Information” in the subject of the message, and I will add you to the mailing list for the feed, which includes more details on the event. Space is somewhat limited, but we do have room for more folks, so if you want to come, you still can.
Alex Rodriguez won his first MVP, after being the most valuable player in the American League for the 5th time in his career. Congrats to the voters who finally overcame their stupidity and recognized that he shouldn’t be punished for his teammates failures. Just to show that they aren’t out of the woods yet, though, Shannon Stewart finished 3rd and David Ortiz finished 5th. Yea…
By virtue of finishing 10th (ye gods, thats way too low), Bret Boone gets an additional $250,000 in salary next year. Expect a press conference tommorrow where Howard Lincoln will blame Boone’s bonus for global hunger. Or, at least, lay the foundation for why this crippling blow to the budget will force us to let (insert free agent here) walk away. The joys of being a Mariner fan. Even when your players get good news, you know management is preparing a doom-and-gloom press release for the next day.
Matsui’s coming to the US. Had a press conference and everything.
Sorry I’ve been out, I’ve been having this problem with this wireless network*, it’s driving me in-fricking-sane. (skip this paragraph unless you want to geek out, but seriously. I’ve got router A, laptop B, PC C. Everything worked fine until this weekend, when the PC decided it didn’t want to connect to the router, except when it did, and then it just drops it, buuuut if I hook up the LAN cable to the router, boom, I’ve got a LAN and a wireless connection going, and… I’m baffled. I’ve got ~2p of notes on what I’ve done and un-done trying to find a solution to this, but the short-version — such as it is — is that wireless technology is still not to the point where everyone can plug-and-play and enjoy no-headache Internet access. My notes are filled with comments like “this makes me think fondly of the ease-of-use of my old Hayes 2400 SmartModem”.)
For a moment though, I’m going to answer reader email, calm down and talk about Freddy (and remember folks: if you went to Kentridge and I know you, you get your emails answered automatically).
What do we see for Freddy’s future?
I see two possibilities. One is that Freddy, by chance or choice, finds himself working with a pitching coach and catcher that can bring out the best in him. Stan Williams had him in his rookie year, and then his Bryan Price years have been up and down. His Borders starts were (as we saw) excellent, but I haven’t been able to go back and see what his work with other guys breaks down like. I think he’s deeply unhappy being in Seattle, especially after we (and by we I should also say that I was in the front of the pack) gave him so much grief when he spent so much time pitching badly. It may be that he needs a guy like Oscar Acosta, someone known for taking no lip and kicking pitchers in the ass, and a Borders-like catcher unafraid to yell at him if he starts grooving breaking stuff in every pitch.
Garcia’s a year away from determining his own destiny. It would seem that he’s more likely to take the highest offer than find an environment where he’d succeed best– and I’m not sure Garcia knows if it’s him, or his coach, or if he’s just let his relationship with the team and coaches poison his on-the-mound ability.
Barring career-changing injury, there are two paths Garcia’s career will take:
Motivated Garcia: Freddy finds something in himself or finds the right supporting players to keep himself focused during the game, and not let a bad strike call or a muffed grounder cause him to blow his stack. He pays more attention to the scouting reports, and really works to become a better pitcher. This Freddy is a good-but-not great pitcher for years to come, a guy who never dominates a league in the way Randy Johnson or Pedro does, but still consistently one of the twenty best pitchers in baseball.
Inconsistent Garcia: Freddy doesn’t get his head right, doesn’t find the right manager, coach, or catcher to keep him charting pitches. This is the Freddy we’ve seen for too long now: a guy who can go out and throw a good game, another, and then get blown apart by the Tigers. His frustration will probably grow with his own struggles, and he’ll get ejected more often, and become known as a bad clubhouse guy who leaves his team in the lurch. Instead of a first-tier pitcher, he’s a third tier, a James Baldwin-esque gamble for teams who have a 3/4 spot they need filled on the cheap that might bear big returns, and might not. The upside to this is maybe Freddy, years down the line, realizes what’s happening and decides that he wants to really make a run at greatness, and we see the first scenario play out again.
And which one’s actually going to be the future of Freddy? The bad one. Until Freddy has his act together, I don’t think a team should gamble more on him than they can reasonably expect they’d pay for a comperable starter who’d offer consistency, though not the upside of Freddy’s raw talent — and that’s only $1-3m/year on short-term deals.
The issue becomes this: is the additional fame and fortune that comes with being great Freddy enough to make him shake off this funk?
And I don’t think it is. I’d like to be wrong, my view too bitter from exposure over the last year and a half, but I haven’t seen it in him yet. I don’t know Freddy enough to know that or pass judgement, but at the same time I think every Mariners fan has seen that there’s a huge distance between the Garcia that had confidence in his stuff and him ability to pitch and the guy we’ve seen lately, who isn’t comfortable with himself or the team he’s on, and doesn’t know what to do about either.
Jason and Dave, most likely, will have better, well-reasoned opinions on this. If they have troubleshooting tips on this $@#%@ Linksys PCI card/networking issue I’m having, that’d be even better.