I mentioned this briefly the other night, but now have a bit more time, so here’s some fun with the incomparable Ichiro!
Pre All-Star: .321/.369/.399, 371 AB
Post All-Star: .486/.513/.604, 144 AB
70 for 144 since the break. Absolutely unbelievable.
Vs Left: .415/.466/.544, 147 AB
Vs Right: .348/.385/.421, 368 AB
And it’s still fairly common to see managers bring in a lefty to face Ichiro.
Runs Above Replacement for Position (offense only):
Vladimir Guerrero: 45.3
Ichiro!: 43.0
Gary Sheffield: 42.5
Factoring in defense, baserunning, and health, Ichiro’s been the best rightfielder in the American League this year. And he has 6 home runs, fewest of any regular player at the position. Just for fun, Carlos Beltran’s RARP is 32.3, and that’s adjusting for the weaker competition in center field. If Ichiro was playing center field, he’d be fighting Jim Edmonds for the title of best CF in baseball.
He’s not going to hit .400 for the season, as a few people have asked. At his current rate, he’s going to end the season with 259 hits in 707 at-bats. He’d need to go 92 for his next 194, a .489 batting average, to end the season with 283 hits, giving him the magical .400 mark. I just can’t see him actually hitting better for the next 6 weeks than he has for the past 5, but then again, he’s probably the most unpredictable athlete in any sport right now, so who knows.
When the M’s signed him to that monster contract extension during the offseason, we justified it as a good move from a financial standpoint but that it was not a good “baseball contract” and he would not provide the same on field production as others in his payscale. We’ve been dead wrong. As of today, Ichiro is one of the most valuable players in all of baseball, lumping himself in with the slugging superstars of the game.
While it had been reported that sides were close, it is now official; the Mariners signed a two year player devleopment contract with Tacoma and the Rainiers signed a lease extension with Cheney Stadium that will keep the M’s Triple-A club playing right down I-5 through the 2006 season.
I want to clarify something I thought I’d been clear about in my last post on this, since it’s generating some email–
Exploratory surgery is when they go in because they have no clear diagnosis for a serious problem, like elbow pain. They might go in to determine the extent of damage, look for a cause on infection, whatever. You can look this up on the web and see all kinds of gross pictures of abdominal exploratory surgeries.
I did mention this.
“They’re going to cut him open and see what’s going in there, sure, but there’s an excellent chance they’re going to do something about it.”
In fact, a reader sent me email (I wanted permission to run first, and I haven’t heard back, because it’s sort of a privacy issue on a case where this happened) and he was mad that I’d insinuated that exploratory surgery was only a look around and then they stitch you back up, and offered an example of a baseball injury where they did exploratory surgery to determine the cause of a strange pain that wasn’t diagnosable on an MRI, found something, and fixed it.
Except… I never said that, and his larger case is exactly my point. We’re sort of going right past each other.
My point was first that exploratory surgery is not a walk in the park, even in cases where they don’t find anything, and in many cases they do go in, find something, and fix it right there. For instance, what actually happened with Soriano, where they’re in there, see something, and end up doing a ligament replacement.
And further, that the Mariners have been bad about early injury diagnosis, actively working towards preventing injuries, prefering the old school rub-some-dirt-on-it cureall, and have been particularly… deceptive’s not the right word, but… not forthcoming? If they do exploratory surgery on Meche, and try to repair a tear in his rotator cuff, that’s no longer exploratory surgery, that’s a labrum surgery. They’d just as soon not fess up to that, though.
The issue of players’ health and medical disclosure is much more complicated than I have time to reasonably discuss. I hope I haven’t only created more confusion with this one.
Just heard on FSN NW that while they were “exploring” Soriano’s elbow, they went ahead and performed the TJ surgery.
What Ichiro is doing right now is simply unheard of. This is one of the more remarkable runs you may ever see. After hitting .250 in April, he’s managed to turn his season around where he’s now having the best year of his professional career and has become one of the most valuable players in the American League. 2004 Ichiro is better than 2001 Ichiro.
Goes to show just how much teammates matter in the “Most Valuable Player” discussion, eh?
Rafael Soriano’s going to have “exploratory” surgery on his right elbow to, uhhh… take a look at it? The surgey’s going to be done by Dr. Lewis Yocum, who’s a big name.
I want to mention this not just because it sucks but because, really, there’s no such thing as exploratory surgery. They’re going to cut him open and see what’s going in there, sure, but there’s an excellent chance they’re going to do something about it. Just doing the surgery is damaging, so you have to figure they’re prepared to fix anything they find when they go in. Exploratory surgery is often used as a cover for actual corrective surgery. For instance, Gil Meche had a mysterious exploratory surgery that the team never admitted the scope or seriousness of, and we only figured it out when Meche made some innocent comments about how the second surgery was going to fix what they hadn’t been able to completely fix the first time.
This is serious, and really, should make you wonder what in the world the Mariners medical staff has been doing this whole year as Soriano’s struggled back and forth, on the DL and off, pitching in pain, briefly effective between bouts of awfulness… does anyone think he tore his ligament when he last threw off a mound and experienced pain? Is this an injury that they’ve been aggravating and re-aggravating all year long, never finding the source? Is it even something that was much more minor and might have been healed with rest and rehab, but for the team forcing him to go on, and on, and try to pitch over and over?
We probably won’t ever know the answers to those questions. What’s disturbing as that the team’s handling of Soriano this year shows that they don’t know the answers either, and weren’t doing a good enough job asking — and Soriano’s one of the team’s brightest young pitchers.
On the continuing Villone thing: what a terrible idea this is. Villone’s a decent enough fill-in, but the Mariners have a bumper crop of young pitchers. They should be playing to the team’s organizational strengths and the ballpark: even a modest talent, given some good defense, can look great in Safeco, and if that helps them develop, yay, if it means someone else bites in trade and wants to give us something even shinier, double yay. What the team doesn’t need is to sign another old, declining player to a too-long, too-rich contract they’ll regret almost immediately. That this is even under discussion is a sign that the organization has not learned anything from the disaster of this season, and the greatness of the Garcia trade was a fluke, and not a sign that inspiration had taken up residence in the front office.
Quick note to Bill Simmons; please stop lusting after my cousin. Thanks.
Also, getting conflicting accounts from readers on Bucky’s Knee. That it’s not that bad, really. Reader Brian Johnson, for instance, writes:
And let me ask a related question — since when have the Mariners trainers ever been this overly cautious with anyone? When Meche was wearing down last year, did they pull him from the rotation to be safe, or let him grind it out? In fact… well, I don’t get this at all.
The new Big Board is up. That’s Jason for you, folks — newborn kid and he’s still keeping an eye on the organization.
And, uh, if anyone out there has experience setting up WordPress, could you drop me a line? I’ve got a question that I can’t figure out from reading the docs (and related stuff).