Hey, remember when I talked about Kevin Jarvis and how getting rid of him and his salary wasn’t an added cost for the team? In fact, I even said —
If this is used as an excuse at any point this season for not making moves, or taking on salary, or raising beer prices, everyone should know this — this is not an added expense in any way.
Turns out Howard had beat me to it.
“The message this sends is that we are prepared to make a significant financial sacrifice in order to meet our number one objective, which is to field championship teams that get into the playoffs and go as far as possible,” said Howard Lincoln, the Mariners chief executive officer. “But right now, we don’t know if he will picked up by another team or traded. We don’t know that.”
What we do know is that Lincoln was, at best, being deceptive, as the team was making no financial sacrifice here.
Wow, that’s a surprise: Edgar and Boone out and the team can’t score runs.
Anyway, a little bit about defensive efficency. Click that link to bring up BP’s report on this. The short explanation is “How good are teams at turning balls that hypothetically could be turned into outs into outs?”
You take all the plate appearances and subtract everything not related to the defense: walks, strikeouts, HBP, HR, and… what’s ROE? I forget. That’s embarassing. That’s the number of balls put into play. Last year the Mariners were amazingly good at this, and I wrote a lot about how important that is, but not just in turning balls into outs but doubles/triples into outs/singles. Unfortunately that chart’s not sorted by DE rank, but the Mariners are down towards the bottom. Only Minnesota, Anahiem, are much worse than the M’s, and Cleveland, Kansas City and Detroit are a hair worse. The best were St. Louis, followed closely by Tampa Bay, Florida, and the Chicago White Sox (!).