Lincoln, Armstrong, and the business side
Speculation and more speculation from a still jet-lagged author
Much is frequently made of what kind of a leader Howard Lincoln is, as a representative of the team’s ownership group, of which Nintendo of America forms the bulk. Lincoln is the Chairman and CEO of the company, and Chuck Armstrong is the President.
Howard Lincoln gets singled out for a lot of attacks. He’ll say things like “we have talked to a lot of season-ticket holders over the course of the last year, and one of the things we hear consistently is the following, we love this team, we love to watch major league baseball in Safeco Field, we appreciate the fact it is safe, secure, offers a family-friendly environment, and yeah, we’d like to see the team win (so would we) but nevertheless we like to come to Safeco Field. ” (msb sent us a whole transcript of an interview he did. msb is awesome, and feel free to thank her when you see her in the comments)
That kind of talk makes the serious fan blanch. The immediate reaction is “who the heck are they talking to?” followed by “would people please stop telling them that?”
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Spiezio and female companion v cabdriver
Former Mariner Scott Spiezio (who, you may remember from way back, was brought in to provide clubhouse leadership, grit, and character) was charged with assaulting a cabdriver in Chicago.
Spiezio […] argued with the driver, Gani Musabar Hasan, over the credit card fare, [police spokesman] Bayless said. During the argument, Jennifer Pankratz, 27, reached through the cab’s partition for the credit card, grabbed it and broke Hasan’s glasses, authorities said.
The result:
Pankratz was charged with battery and criminal damage to property, and Spiezio was charged with theft, criminal damage to property and simple assault. Bail for each was set at $1,000.
A quick search reveals Ms. Pankratz has done some modeling and that she is likely the same Jenn who is, reputedly, Spiezio’s girlfriend. Spiezio and Ms. Pankratz can be seen together in this photo.
You can purchase a Pankrantz 2003 “Benchwarmer” collector’s card on a signed (maybe) Ebay right now for $1.34 if you act within the next few days or an unsigned for $3.00 in the next day.
While bidding for those items is not hot, remember for contrast that a Scott Spiezio 1997 rookie card is worth (based on recent sales) under $1.
2005 Year in Review
Early in the week I had written up the Rogers Hornsby quote about what to do doing winter on a markerboard in my house. The guy who lives next to me – an unabashed Yankee lover – says to me, “Nice quote. But I don’t get it. The season is just starting.â€Â
I wanted to punch him in the face.
Here’s the final tally on the Mariners’ 2005, because the baseball season is definitely over.
Vital Signs
Wins: 69. Losses: 93. Games out of first place: 26.
The Mariners claim the cellar for the second consecutive season, and rumor has it, become the first team since Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s to follow-up a pair of 90-win seasons with a pair of 90-loss seasons. Nevermind that the M’s had four 90-win seasons prior to last year. But that’s for another day. It’s only the second time since 1992 (don’t count ‘94) that the Mariners failed to win 70 games. On the bright side (bright as in dark and dreary as a November afternoon in Seattle), there happen to be 10 seasons in Mariner history that were worse than this one, according to winning percentage. Again on the plus side, the Mariners improved by 6 games over last year. And they finished 3 games closer to first place. That’s something, ain’t it?
Runs Scored: 699 (13th in the American League). Batting average: .256 (last). On-base percentage: .318 (last). Slugging percentage: .392 (13th). Home runs: 129 (13th). Bases on balls: 466 (8th). EqA: .249 (12th, tied with Kansas City). The American league average is .267/.328/.424.
Runs allowed: 751 (7th). Staff ERA: 4.47 (7th). DIPS ERA: 4.64 (12th). Strikeouts: 885 (last). Bases on balls: 495 (9th). Home runs allowed: 178 (10th, tied with Baltimore). Starters ERA: 4.92 (11th). Relievers ERA: 3.52 (5th). Defensive efficiency: 70.2% (5th).
A proposal to the M’s marketing for a 2006 slogan: Seattle Baseball – At least it’s not the 80’s anymore!
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The Mariners are not the Indians
A series of digressions and random musings on the topic by a severely jet-lagged author
The M’s business-side leadership has said that they don’t want to be Cleveland, a team that tore down dramatically, saw attendence decline dramatically, and only now has recovered. This is not particular news, as they’ve said many times before that their goal is to remain competitive. And you almost never hear a front-office type of any stripe, be it GM or President, say that a season’s lost.
However, this distaste for Cleveland and their rebuilding comes more from a fear of declining revenues than of on-field success. Cleveland hasn’t done so badly for itself.
2001: Won the division, went 91-71.
2002: They get a new GM, who makes one final go at it but the team fails, dropping to 74-88. The teardown begins.
2003: Year two of the teardown, things get worse. 68-94.
2004: Things start to turn around, and they go 80-82.
2005: They miss the playoffs by a couple of games, finishing 93-69.
The Indians, like the Mariners, started their rebuilding with little help from the farm system, having expended many outstanding prospects in the 1994-2001 contention runs. It took them two years before they got back to .500 and three before they contended again.
If the Mariners pulled that off and started to fight for division titles in 2007, that wouldn’t be that bad at all. Many teams have endured much longer and more painful rebuilding, drawn out into hopelessness. What are they afraid of, then? From baseballreference and ESPN:
2001: 91-71. Attendance: 3,175,523 (3rd out of 14)
2002: 74-88. Attendance: 2,616,940 (5th out of 14)
2003: 68-94. Attendance: 1,730,002 (12th out of 14)
2004: 80-82. Attendance: 1,814,401 (12th out of 14)
2005: 93-69. Attendance: 1,973,185 (12th out of 14)
That’s what scares them: the possibility that a couple of bad years will turn the fan base off, and winning won’t bring fans back. This year’s Indians barely drew better than the 1993 Indians that played in Cleveland Stadium.
After that, they moved to Jacobs Field, had good seasons and started to draw better.
There’s a maxim floating out there that attendance goes up the year after success, but that’s not always true, and there so many other factors at play that it’s almost meaningless. We may see the Indians draw a lot better next year, for instance. They sold out that last series against the White Sox, for instance, and 25 thousand went to the mid-season Devil Rays series before that. They generally drew more the deeper into the season they went.
But back to the comparison. The Mariners, unlike the Indians, have not suffered the same decline:
2003, last contending year: 3,268,509 (2nd out of 14)
2004, first bad year: 2,940,731 (3rd out of 14)
2005, second bad year: 2,689,529 (4th out of 14)
Starting from similar points, the Mariners have seen a drop of only ~600k, while the Indians during their fall were down 1.5 million.
It’s true that the Mariners have a newer stadium, but that shouldn’t reassure them. Other teams with new stadiums have seen them go empty when the on-field product stinks. The novelty doesn’t last long. The Indians, for example, moved into a great park in 1994 (especially compared to the competition of the time), had a winning team, it was a great place to be, and people kept coming out for eight years.
The Mariners moved into Safeco Field in mid-1999. There’s been enough time for the new-stadium smell to waft away. As long as the crowds are good, and they’ve been great, especially in the summer, the atmosphere’s family-friendly, people keep turning out, and the money flows in, but what they must worry about is the steady erosion in turnstile counts (which they don’t release). At some point, and no one knows where that is, the feeling of being out with the crowd goes away, and then the stragglers leave too.
Safeco Field isn’t a better place to see a game than Pittsburgh’s stadium, and they only drew 23,000 a game. Cincinnati, in a new park, almost got 24,000 to their games. That’s not just market size, either — Pittsburg’s got well over two million people, and Cincinnati might squeak over that as well if you took a census today. In both cases, though, those franchises weren’t doing anything when they got the stadium and didn’t do anything of note afterwards.
The Indians may be the best example for looking at the Mariners even if they got their new toy much earlier: they’re a team that was winning from the mid-90s, moved into a new stadium, and continued to win.
What’s interesting, then, is why. Why haven’t Seattle fans found other things to do in the same way Cleveland has?
It’s not a difference in population. Cleveland, like Seattle, is often perceived as a small-market team, but is only smaller by about 500,000 people.
There’s some difference in approach, but it would be hard to say that the Mariners have not lost the same kind of key, fan-favorite players the Indians have, both through free agency and in trades for players who can contribute in the future. The Mariners, by having more money, have been able to spend heavily on high-profile free agents, but can that be that huge of a difference in keeping butts in seats? Are Seattle summer nights that much more pleasant?
I don’t know, and neither does Howard Lincoln or Chuck Armstrong. This must scare them: there’s no good reason to to be assured that fans will be around much longer, and a lot of evidence they’ve been lucky to continue to see great crowds. They may see dramatic declines even if they get back to 80 wins this season. The only thing they can know will keep the turnstiles moving and the money flowing is to win, and win now.
And this brings me to another difference between the Indians and the Mariners. The Indians, through years of careful construction starting with that failed first year, go into 2006 with their front office secure and a lot of flexibility in deciding what they want to do next.
Bavasi, by contrast, will be given some amount of money this off-season. Could be $20, 25 million, maybe much more or it might be, as the Times reports, orders to cut half the budget and sell a kidney. It comes with a high goal: he needs to get the team fighting for a pennant, worst to first, or they’ll likely fire him. He knows this. He also knows that given the team in front of him, spending that on 5 random third-tier free agents at $4m a piece isn’t going to get the team there. It’ll take trades, weird players, crazy cheap gambles, and if it fails, well, he was going to get canned anyway.
It’ll be interesting.
If the M’s were the Indians, we could at least look forward to respectability this year. The club’s fear of losing its fan base may drive it to success, and it may doom them to being expensive and bad for a long time.
To-do list
Hey, I’m back from Australia. Coming up soon, so you fine readers don’t have to reconstruct it in every thread, I’m going to try and update the Mariner contract sheet with the latest information for at-a-glance payroll and status information (and Finnigan refutation).
And a bit on Howard Lincoln, Chuck Armstrong, and why the business side of the team does and doesn’t matter.
I’ve also been thinking about doing a couple Attrition War updates, adding data and trying to make it available in a format that would help people do follow-up research. We’ll see how that goes. That project’s a huge time sink, which unfortunately means thoughts of keeping it current/ongoing/etc are impractical, and also has kept me from some of the follow-ups I wanted to do.
Other than that, I’m going to try and reset the body clock and see how that goes.
Mind Game out
The long-delayed “Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning” is finally available (according to Amazon, it’s by the excellent Steve Goldman, who wrote and edited, and also some of the old Baseball Prospectus guys who didn’t say, write chapters like me and others… which is kinda annoying, since this is the last BP book my name’s going to be on in any capacity and I worked hard on it).
I’d tell you how the final product is, but as an author, it’s unlikely I’ll ever be receiving a copy (don’t ask). The stuff I read was quite good, though, I liked my chapters, Goldman’s great, and the reception seems to be excellent, so I’m confident it’s worth checking out if you get the chance. However, I don’t get any money if it sells well and no longer have any stake in BP’s success, so don’t at all feel like a purchase supports, even indirectly, me or USSM.
Jonah Keri’s doing a book signing for Mind Game December 17th at Third Place Books, which I’m sure we’ll be plugging again as that approaches.
Coaching Carousel
You know, I think, currently, we are in the most underrated phase of being a baseball fan. Sure, the playoffs are great, but I’m not sure there are many things more fun than reading about the managerial and coaching changes and the potential interviewees. Every day, you learn shocking things that bring a smile to your face. For instance, today I learned that Lee Tinsley is the D’backs outfield instructor and is in line to become their first base coach. Lee Tinsley!
Watching the coaching carousel take place brings back memories. Did you know Torey Luvullo is one of the better young managerial prospects in the game and has an interview for the Dodgers opening? Or that Mickey Brantley is a hitting instructor in the Mets organization? I mean, when I think Mickey Brantley, I think disciplined hitting.
Those who can’t, teach, right?
Jacque Jones
Initially, I had planned on posting a full overview of what I would do to reshape the M’s this offseason if the world came crashing down and I was magically installed as the Mariner GM. As I tinkered with the roster, however, I started making decisions that were going to require some fairly in depth explanations. Like the Kevin Brown idea, for instance, which most of you hated even after I did an entire post on my train of thought.
So, rather than drop the full roster construction post on you at once without any explanation, I’m going to break down the bigger pieces into their own seperate posts. I’ve already addressed Brown as an option for a back-of-the-rotation starter. Today, I move on to adding that “left-handed sock” that the club has repeatedly referred to. And we’re not talking footwear.
With the trade of Randy Winn and the injury to Chris Snelling, the M’s are missing a left fielder who can take advantage of Safeco Field’s short porch down the right field line. Raul Ibanez’s defense makes him a prime candidate to DH, and with Safeco rewarding teams who have flycatchers who can chase balls in the gaps, there is still a good amount of wisdom in acquiring a player who actually has some skills with the glove. The perfect fit for the M’s would be an above average defensive player who swings from the left side and hits the crap out of the baseball.
Unfortunately, those guys just aren’t available. Brian Giles could potentially fit the bill, but he’s not likely to leave San Diego, is looking for a big payday, and is reaching the end of his career. So, assuming Giles and Matsui aren’t going to be realistic targets, especially with the team having to rebuild nearly the whole rotation, we’re looking for an opportunity to bring in a quality player who can contribute to the team without breaking the bank.
Ladies and Gentleman, Jacque Jones.
Okay, okay, I know, he hit .249/.321/.438 this year. Not exactly the big bat everyone was hoping for, is he? His plate discipline is legitimately terrible, and his .258 EqA places him as a league average hitter playing one of the easiest defensive positions in baseball. His offensive production the past two years is actually fairly similar to what Adrian Beltre put up for the M’s this season. And I don’t think I’m going to win anyone over by saying that acquiring another 2005 version of Adrian Beltre was going to save the Mariner offense.
Stay with me, though. I’m not insane. Really.
Take a look at these numbers over the past four seasons:
Vs Left: 608 AB, .229/.285/.365
Vs Right: 1510 AB, .277/.338/.472
Jacque Jones cannot hit lefties. At all. Since 2002, against southpaws, he’s drawn 37 walks and struck out 147 times. His line against left-handed pitchers makes him the rough offensive equivalent of someone like Jason Phillips or Neifi Perez. In other words, not anyone you want in your line-up.
But against right-handers, he’s pretty darn good. His line against righties the past four years puts him in the category of guys like Carlos Lee, Jose Guillen, and Shawn Green. When a right-handed pitcher is on the hill, Jones is a well above average offensive force, even when compared to other left fielders. You’d like to see a higher OBP, but the power is a legitimate offensive weapon that the team lacks. Jones has “left-handed sock”, if you will. But he only has it against 75 percent of the major league pitchers out there.
To be truly effective, Jones needs to be platooned. At 30 years old, he’s had plenty of time to make adjustments and show some improvement against lefties. He hasn’t. So he shouldn’t play against them. This puts a cap on his value, since he would begin 25 percent of the M’s games seated on the bench. However, that flaw in and of itself isn’t enough to disqualify him. Even if he only manages 450 at-bats next year while hitting .270/.330/.470, that’s worth approximately 25 runs on offense. 25 runs is a significant upgrade from what the M’s got from their left-fielders this season. Creating 25 runs with his bat would have made him the 4th best hitter on the Mariners this year.
However, 25 runs from a left fielder isn’t the kind of production you’re looking from in a left fielder, especially one who is going to command a multimillion dollar deal as a free agent. Thankfully, offense is only part of the Jacque Jones story.
We’ll be the first to admit that defensive statistics are flawed. When evaluating defense, we need to speak in generalities. We have a pretty good idea of who is good and who is bad, but we don’t have anything like the tools we do to evaluate offense production. The defensive metrics that have been developed based on proprietary play-by-play data hardly ever agree anyways.
But occassionally, they do. And in Jacque Jones case, they agree that the man is pretty freaking awesome defensively.
According to Baseball Prospectus, Jones was 12 runs better than an average right fielder this season.
UZR had Jones as being 11 runs better than an average left fielder from 2000-2003.
PMR thinks that Jones was worth about 9 runs over an average right fielder last season.
Lastly, David Gassko’s new stat put Jones at 23 (!) runs above average for 2004.
Keep in mind, all these stats are compared to the league average. Calculating replacement level for defense is a bit tricky, and we don’t have something like VORP for defense, but it’d be fair to say that all of the advanced defensive metrics make Jacque Jones worth something like 25-35 runs better than a replacement level defensive corner outfielder.
In other words, his defense is more valuable than his offense. And his offense is league average!
Jacque Jones is from the Mike Cameron school of undervalued players. They aren’t exactly the same type (Cameron actually walked and was otherworldly in center field), but the analogy fits as a blunt tool. Jones isn’t a great hitter, but he is a tremendous asset with the glove. The combination of his value added by whalloping right-handed pitching and playing great defense is a valuable, and generally underrated, asset.
After the 2003 season, the Mariners decided to take a huge hit on defense to make a minor upgrade on offense, and it cost them dearly. While the focus continues to be on adding “a big bat”, and fans clamor for a superstar hitter, the fact remains that acquiring a world class defensive left fielder who can also hit a bit will have a similar positive effect on the team’s ability to outscore their opponents. I’m fairly sure the comments will be filled with folks who simply want a big stick and don’t like the idea of Jones, because, after all, this team needs to score more runs.
In reality, however, the team’s problem isn’t that they didn’t score enough runs. It’s that they didn’t outscore their opponents by enough runs. Run prevention or run production achieve the same goal. The M’s have a chance to acquire a guy who, between the two, adds a significant amount of runs to the team. He just doesn’t add them all at the plate.
Okay, so, how much will Jones cost? He made $6.2 million this year after being arbitration eligible following last season, but before the injury to Jason Kubel, he was almost certainly going to be non-tendered by the Twins. So, heading into the 2005 season, his market value was assessed to be right around the $6 million mark for one season.
Look at some of the contracts signed by comparable players last offseason:
Richard Hidalgo: 1 year, $5 million
Jeromy Burnitz: 1 year, $5 million
Jermaine Dye: 2 years, $10 million
Moises Alou: 2 years, $13 million
Two years ago, the standard contract for a corner outfielder was 2 years, $6 million. That’s what Jose Guillen, Rondell White, and Reggie Sanders signed for.
The market for solid but unspectacular corner outfielders has been set pretty evenly the past couple of seasons; short term, mid-millions range. Jones overall numbers are dragged down by his poor showing against lefties and the Twins refusal to platoon him, so he may not even match what the top guys in his level from each of the last few classes have gotten. He’ll be looking for something like 3 years, $18 million, but more than likely have to settle for something like 2 years and $12 million. $6 million per year for a player worth between 4-5 wins? That’s a bargain, especially in the free agent market, where wins generally go for between $2-4 million apiece.
Now, if the M’s go through with my endoresement of Jacque Jones, they’re certainly going to have to acquire a platoon partner for him that can be expected to play well and get 200-250 at-bats a year. I’ll do a Reshaping The Bench piece at a later date, but to head off too many questions now, I’ll mention that a guy like Marcus Thames could be had for a song, and he’d be a perfect fit with Jones. Between the two of them, you’re not going to pay more than $6.5 million a year, you’re going to have a short term commitment, and you’re going to get something like 60-70 runs out of your left field platoon.
Jones is not a classic statistical darling, but for the 2006 Mariners, Jacque Jones is a great fit. At 2 years, $12 million, he’d be a steal for the M’s. He gets my vote to wear the Left-Handed Sock.
Hack Attack
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities. This is a truism. And since there is a study for everything these days, there’s hard scientific research proving it from Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The idea is that dull thinking skills lead to overconfidence. In extreme cases, this can cause misguided faith in one’s ill-held ideas. An extreme example from the study: a sad fellow who was shocked to be arrested for the bank robberies he’d committed, having been under the mistaken impression that rubbing lemon juice on one’s face obscured his appearance to the security cameras.
From the abstract:
[P]eople who are unskilled … suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across four studies, the authors found that participants [whose] … test scores put them in the 12th percentile … estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
This calls to mind the old Socratic canard that the only thing worth knowing is how little you really know, or the Robert Burns poem about being able to see ourselves as others see us. It also calls to mind L.A. Times sportswriter Bill Plaschke.
To Plaschke, Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta’s failure to bring back manager Jim Tracy is an unforgivable betrayal of a baseball man by a man blinded by his book-learning.
Potshots between old and new schools are nothing new, and Plaschke grinding his dull butterknife (too dull to call it an axe) isn’t exactly stop-the-presses material either. This, though, is the rich part, and the part that inspires this post:
But love of the Dodgers no longer matters here. It’s all about loving DePodesta, who has polarized the Dodger community like few others.
Plaschke saying DePodesta has polarized the Dodger community is a bit like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow complaining about the heat in the barn. Why, oh why, would this vile man and his nefarious spreadsheet set Dodger fans against each other in this way? It isn’t like there was anything fanning the flames from the very beginning.
Let’s leave aside the merits or demerits of the Tracy firing. Indeed, let’s forget even the substance of this particular beef and think a bit broader.
Reasonable people can disagree about the way baseball teams go about business. To claim that a failure to stand in lockstep with a columnist’s dogma constitutes a lack of “love” isn’t just wrong, it’s a bit pathological.
My knee isn’t going to jerk defending either DePodesta or his methods. The man has come in for much criticism here over the last year. The danger of Plaschke’s pathology, though, is that it eliminates open-mindedness, stifling the ability to acknowledge that we all have a lot to learn, and often from the people we least expect to learn from.
At times, the old ways are the best. A certain criminal might have been better off with the time-honored tradition of pantyhose or a ski mask. We’re all better off, though, when we consider that new thoughts are worth a look.
Otherwise, you end up being — like Plaschke — the one with lemon juice on your face.
AL West Getting Smarter
John Hart stepped down as GM of the Texas Rangers this afternoon and named 28-year-old Jon Daniels as his replacement. Daniels is one of the most respected assistant GMs in the game and has a very bright future ahead of him. He is from the new class of baseball executives trained at an Ivy League school, but he also has a tremendously deep respect for scouting and subjective talent evaluation. He’s firmly in the school of “as much good information as possible” rather than casting his lots with the stats or scouts crowds.
The Rangers are in good hands with Daniels. The competition in the AL West just got a little bit tougher.