Time for a notes post
This is one of those ideas where I had a whole bunch of good ideas and don’t have time to finish any of them, so in lieu of a real post, have the abbreviated version.
1. Geoff Baker has spent the last few days blogging his thoughts on the Adam Jones situation, the value of experience, how rookies earn playing time, and so on. He’s done a good job of laying out the argument and articulating the organization’s philosophy on the issue of how players are evaluated. Not surprisingly, I think he’s wrong, and I’ve got a mountain of evidence to back me up, but it’s not the kind of post I want to spend 20 minutes on and slap up as a counterpoint, so a rebuttal will have to wait until next week.
2. Somewhat related to that, the Tigers are designating struggling veteran Craig Monroe for assignment today and calling up 20-year-old Cameron Maybin to take over as their regular left fielder. Maybin was promoted to Double-A last week, played five games there, and is now on his way to the show. You can add Maybin’s name to Andrew Miller, Ryan Braun, Justin Upton, Philip Hughes, Joba Chamberlain, and the ever growing list of highly talented rookies who have displaced veterans and been handed prominant roles on playoff contending clubs as teams decide that talent trumps experience.
3. Jose Contreras takes the hill against the Mariners tonight. I’ve heard from multiple people that this is essentially an audition for the M’s – if he pitches well tonight and the scouts like what they see, he could be joining the Mariners as soon as tomorrow. He’s undoubtedly a huge upgrade from Horacio Ramirez, but the remaining 2 years and $20 million left on that contract are ugly with a capital U, and the fact that he cleared waivers when every pitcher of any value is getting claimed should tell you just what the rest of the league thinks of that deal.
4. Speaking of waivers, Jayson Stark reported that Richie Sexson was claimed on waivers and pulled back by the Mariners. This news generally sparked a lot of anger among M’s fans, since dumping Sexson’s salary and handing his at-bats to Ben Broussard sounds like a win-win situation to a lot of people. However, I’ve been told that one of the claiming teams was the Detroit Tigers, and as much as I’d like to see the M’s move Sexson this winter, I can completely understand the organization’s reluctance to hand Sexson to a team they’re trying to beat out for a playoff spot.
5. Yes, there’s a Future Forty update coming soon. Probably early next week. Short version – Carlos Triunfel is awesome and Chris Tillman has made big strides lately. The farm system is in better shape now than it has been at any time in the last five years.
6. Wily Mo Pena has been traded to the Washington Nationals. I’ve been joking for a few years that I think Jim Bowden’s Baseball America subscription ran out in 1997 but he still uses the old issues as his main reference when trading for players, but he just keeps giving me reasons to keep running that joke out there. The man has a toolsy outfielder fetish that is unrivaled in the history of the game. I’m somewhat surprised he hasn’t flanked Wily Mo with Ruben Mateo and Kenny Kelly yet.
Thursday positivity thread
Only positive thoughts here!
Ichiro is awesome!
Safeco is a great place to see a game!
The Mariners are in the playoff hunt for the first time in years!
Vidro Vidro Vidro
As much as I’d prefer to let this run to the end of the season, let’s get review this as he’s hitting .319/.384/.388 and ON FIRE! (and so forth)
Right now, Vidro’s beating up on his projections in one way: he’s hitting for a lot more average. His walk rate’s a little up, the strikeout rate a little lower, but not hugely. Almost no power at all (of players in the AL with 350+ PA, he’s the 8th-worst player in Isolated Slugging as I write this). His HR/FB rate is an absurd 3.5%. Everyone who tried to tell you he was going to turn into some kind of Edgar clone was entirely wrong, but you knew that at the time.
He has no speed at all – he hasn’t even tried to steal a base this year. Whatever the Mariners thought they were going to be able to do to rehab his legs, it didn’t work. He’s been healthy enough to be in the lineup, but that’s it. He’s not running out doubles. We should probably be grateful for that, though.
There’s a lot to be wary of. For someone with no speed, he’s getting a lot of infield hits (7.1% right now) and his batting average when he puts the ball in play is a ridiculous .346. Now, speedy hitters get good rates, because they’re hitting the ball hard, or they can leg them out. The players around Vidro’s infield hit percentage are generally speedsters, guys like Vernon Wells, or Orlando Cabrera (he is, to spite me, just behind Jack Wilson and ahead of Troy Tulowitzki in the majors in IFH%.
And the same thing with batting average on balls in play: Ichiro’s at .376, for instance (his career BABIP is .356)(worst in the majors right now? Richie Sexson, .219). And there are other players who put up really good BABIP numbers for different reasons — but generally speaking, if you’re putting up a really good BABIP rate, you’re Willy Taveras more than Pujols (career .312 BABIP).
Moreover, these are anomalous even in Vidro’s career. Even in his best year, he didn’t manage to get to a .346 BABIP, and his career batting average on balls in play is .319, a significant dropoff from what he’s running right now.
Those hits are in the books, though, in the same way it doesn’t matter what your run differential is if you end the season 90-72. However, it’s worth examining this in an attempt to look at how big a swing that is. If Vidro got hits at his career rate, and his infield hit rate was a little more reasonable, here’s his line:
.286/.351/.355
Moreover, you can look at his hit chart, there’s really been no change from early in the year, when we pointed out almost all his fly balls were dropping in the shallow outfield. I think he’s been putting a few more deeper flies to left, I don’t have the data for that.
Unless there’s a really good reason that those dribblers and bloop flies are going to continue to fall in for the rest of the season, that line is also a reasonable guess at how he’ll produce from here out. If you know a good explanation of why Vidro’s enjoyed such amazing, unexpected success in those areas this year, and can explain why you think it’s sustainable, we’d love to hear it.
I hope you see why I’m skeptical, though.
I’m a long-time defender of Ichiro, who played a different game than other right fielders, and there’s no reason not to apply that to the DH. I don’t particularly care that he’s not hitting for power if he’s contributing in a different way. And if Vidro can continue, the salary’s not an issue: $6m a year isn’t that outrageous, especially compared to some of the other botched signings (hellloooo, Mike Piazza, who didn’t see that coming?)
But it was still a bad acquisition. Discard Snelling/Fruto entirely: there were more-productive DH candidates available for less. Putting Vidro at DH has created team construction problems that have kept the team from putting the best lineup on the field. Who knows what it’s going to mean for them going into next year.
And say that those hits were luck — would you pay six million to get .286/.351/.355 from a DH? What about next year, when he’s another year older? Where does that 2009 option vest?
Signing Vidro to a 2-year, $12m deal with a vesting option would have been a bad idea, even if the team hadn’t given anything up for them. Our objection to this trade has always been about the ease of finding a DH, not about who they gave up for him.
On the trade, yes, Fruto’s in AAA Columbus, trying to become a starter and having a bad time of it, not contributing to a major league team, and Snelling’s on the DL. And I freely (and have, repeatedly) admit that I’m unable to discuss Snelling with any degree of impartiality, so I’ll only say yes, he’s on the 60-day DL with the knee contusion, but it could have happened to anyone, and also yes, it’d be nice if he could get or stay healthy but he doesn’t, and I know the chances he’s going to have a major league career are basically gone, so if everyone could please stop sticking me about it, that’d be nice.
Or, to get back to my point: I haven’t found any good reason besides good fortune that explains Vidro’s recent performance in finding holes, and a lot of good reasons to think he owes those extra dozen or so hits to chance. And if that’s the case, that’s the performance of a replacement-level bat rubbing a lucky rabbit’s foot bare.
Yes, Vidro’s hitting .400 since the all-star break, and like everyone else alive, he’s a great player who is helping the team if he can hit .400. But there are all kinds of reasons to think he can’t, and there’s nothing less indicative of a hitter’s skill then the ability to hit a bunch of singles. Vidro was a horrible player the first half of the year and has been an amazing one since, but the underlying skills suggest that we should expect something a lot closer to this first half performance than his second half performance going forward. And this team can’t afford to have another hitter go cold.
Game 118, Twins at Mariners
Baker vs Washburn, 1:35 pm.
Warning – if you’re tired of hearing us complain about the line-up, turn away now.
1. Ichiro, DH
2. Lopez, 2B
3. Guillen, RF
4. Ibanez, LF
5. Beltre, 3B
6. Sexson, 1B
7. Jones, CF
8. Burke, C
9. Betancourt, SS
When Adam Jones was called up, the decision was made that he would play center field three times the rest of the year – games immediately preceding an offday, so that Ichiro could get a half day off before the full day off. There was no consideration taken into scheduling Ichiro’s DH games to coincide with a groundball pitcher being on the mound (hint – Washburn, not a groundball pitcher) or when they’d be facing a left-hander (hint – Baker, not a left hander).
The Mariners decided that arbitrarily giving Ichiro consecutive rest is more important than putting a line-up out to counter the strengths of their opponents. So, today, with a flyball starter on the mound and facing a right-handed pitcher, the M’s replace Turbo’s left-handed bat with Adam Jones’ right-handed bat while simultaneously putting Jones in the outfield without improving the defense.
It takes a lot of work to be this strategically horrible. The Mariners live in oblivious world, and reality is a long, long ways away.
Draft Signing Day
A bunch of you have been asking in the comments about Philippe Aumont lately, but I’ve held off talking about it until today to avoid making any misleading statements. Since today is the deadline to sign picks from June’s amateur draft, we’ll cover a bunch of topics all at once.
Aumont’s deal is basically done. They’ll put ink to paper later this afternoon, but there was never a real concern that he wasn’t going to sign. Expect the signing bonus to come in around $1.8 million.
Why did it take so long? Well, thanks to an initiative by the commissioner’s office to hold the line on labor costs, the process that teams go through to sign their draft picks has become quite political. MLB sends every team a “recommended” signing bonus for each pick in the first 5 rounds with each selection being worth marginally less than the one previous. They’ve been using this recommended slotting procedure for several years now, but they’re getting more aggressive – this year, they slashed 10% off of last year’s slot bonus recommendations.
Now, thanks to the collective bargainining agreement, the commissioner’s office does not have the power to mandate these bonus recommendations. In the end, the team makes the decision on how much they’re willing to pay. However, MLB has instituted a procedural chain of events that leverages the influence they do have. Before a team can sign a player to a contract for higher than the recommended slot bonus, they must inform the commissioner’s office. If they don’t, they’re subject to a fine. Once the commissioner becomes aware that the player development staff is on the verge of breaking from the recommendation, he places a call to that club’s owner, who in most cases, he’s very close with and has a lot of power over. He leans on the owner, who then in turn leans on the front office, in an effort to convince them to hold the line on the bonus figures.
For most teams, this works. Selig has a lot of allies in ownership groups, and as we saw last year with the Miller/Morrow decision, many clubs will simply decide that it’s not worth it to fight the commissioner for guys who make it known ahead of time that they expect a contract out of line with MLB’s recommended bonus. The Mariners are one of these teams. The ownership is Selig friendly, and they’re not going to significantly deviate from the bonus suggestions with their top picks.
Detroit, New York, and Boston, however, could legitimately not care less about the slotting system. They’re exploiting its flaws to their own gain on a yearly basis. The last four years, the Tigers have selected Justin Verlander, Cameron Maybin, Andrew Miller, and Rick Porcello – all elite prospects who required significant signing bonuses. Only Verlander didn’t require an above slot deal, but since he went #2 overall, he still cost an arm and a leg. Maybin, Miller, and Porcello all fell to the Tigers in large part due to their contract requirements. Detroit, recognizing a chance to add premium talent on a yearly basis, continues to lay out the money necessary to get these kids signed, and it’s been a massive success – Miller and Verlander are both in their rotation, Maybin is a top 5 prospect in baseball, and Porcello’s drawn comparisons to Josh Beckett.
Likewise, the Yankees and Red Sox have also loaded up on guys who fall in the draft due to their bonus demands, using their significant revenue advantage to simply outspend every other team with their draft budget. The other 27 teams are essentially ceding a competitive advantage to the three teams who don’t particularly care about the recommended slot bonuses. It will be interesting to see how many years they’ll be willing to let the rich get richer before realizing that giving these clubs the pick of the litter every year is probably not the best way to run a franchise.
Anyway, that’s a little bit of a diversion from the Aumont issue, but here’s how it applies to the M’s – they’re going to give Aumont a little bit more than the recommended slot, and they’ve known this for a while. However, the commissioner’s office essentially requested that teams that were going to go over slot to sign someone hold off until the last possible minute so that other clubs couldn’t use that signing as leverage in negotiations. As such, there are a ton of deals that will be announced today that have essentially been done for quite a while. The M’s aren’t lying when they say they don’t have a deal with Philippe Aumont just yet – there is no signed contract. But if you take away the commissioner’s offices role in the contract negotiations, this would have been done months ago. There was never any real risk that the Mariners weren’t going to sign him – the delay is just part of the political process teams have to go through to stay on the commissioner’s good side now.
Also, in slightly related news, Monday saw the reassignment of Frank Mattox from director of player development to an undefined role in the scouting department. Mattox, you’ll remember, was the Mariners scouting director before Bob Fontaine’s arrival (rescue?) and he oversaw some of the worst drafts in the history of major league baseball. Greg Hunter will take the director of player development role at least on an interim basis, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if he ended up with the gig full time.
David Wells
At some point, even the most stubborn Horacio Ramirez supporter has to admit that he’s not a major league pitcher. The question has long since ceased to be whether the team should stick with him. The more appropriate question is who should replace him in the rotation.
David Wells is still free. Give it a try.
Game 117, Twins at Mariners
Garza v Ramirez. 7:05.
You want the lineup? Why, you already know what’s coming:
CF-L Ichiro
DH-B Vidro
RF-R Guillen
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
2B-R Lopez
SS-R Betancourt
BLEEAAAAHGHHGHGHGGGGGG
That’s how you stop getting booed
Richie Sexson absolutely crushed two pitches tonight. In every other park in baseball, it’s a two homer night. Either way, he gets to wear the hero’s cape for the evening, after donning the goat horns way too many times this summer. Big win for the M’s – any time you can knock off Johan Santana, you have to take it.
Game 116, Twins at Mariners
Hernandez vs Santana, 7:05 pm.
Happy Super Awesome First In A Lifetime Great Venezuelan Pitching Matchup Day.
Felix vs Johan. The current Venezuelan ace against the future Venezuelan ace. The best pitcher alive against the guy with the best arm on the planet. This should be epic.
As such, I refuse to acknowledge the defense John McLaren has put behind Felix. It’s some kind of August 13th joke, and we’ll find out the real line-up just before gametime. No one’s stupid enough to bench Beltre and Lopez against a left-hander with the most dominant groundball guy on the staff pitching, right? Right?
Whatever. Go Felix.
Jeff Weaver, Junkballer
After yesterday’s performance, Jeff Weaver now leads the American League in complete game shutouts. I bet you could have gotten 1,000-to-1 on that being true back in May. To close out a successful 5-1 road trip, Weaver threw his best game of the year, dominating the White Sox in a way that makes you ask how it happened. Weaver’s been a lot better since his return in early June, but he hasn’t had any starts like this. What made the difference yesterday?
To try and answer this, I dove into the Pitch F/X system to look at the velocity and movement of his pitches yesterday in handy sortable form. There are some pretty noticable trends that jump off the page.
Breaking Ball, thy friend is Weaver.
Thanks to Weaver’s repertoire, categorizing his pitches is extremely easy. Unlike Felix, who has an assortment of pitches that travel in varying velocities anywhere from 78-99, there’s a significant velocity difference between Weaver’s pitches. He threw 51 pitches with a velocity between 87.0-92.6 MPH, but his 52nd fastest pitch was 83.6 MPH. He didn’t threw any pitch between 84-87, making the distinction between fastball and offspeed pitch very easy to recognize.
On the day, not counting the two HBPs that the Pitch F/X system didn’t register, Weaver threw 51 fastballs and 62 off-speed pitches. The slow stuff was an assortment of mostly sliders and curve balls with a few change-ups mixed in, but he clearly decided to attack the White Sox with breaking balls.
This became even more dramatic as the game wore on. Of his final 30 pitches, 25 of them were offspeed pitches. That’s 16% fastballs and 84% offspeed stuff. On the day, of the 113 pitches the Pitch F/X system recorded, only 22 of them were 90+, but 36 of them were 79 or slower.
The best pitch is strike one.
Here’s how Weaver started each hitter he faced:
Owens, fastball, called strike
Fields, fastball, called strike
Thome, curveball, swinging strike
Konerko, fastball, ball
Pierzynski, curveball, ball
Dye, fastball, called strike
Podsednik, fastball, foul
Uribe, fastball, called strike
Cintron, curveball, ball
Owens, fastball, called strike
Fields, fastball, called strike
Thome, curveball, called strike
Konerko, fastball, called strike
Pierzynski, curveball, called strike
Dye, fastball, ball
Podsednik, hit by pitch (no data)
Uribe, fastball, swinging strike
Cintron, slider, double play
Owens, curveball, called strike
Fields, slider, swinging strike
Thome, slider, ball
Konerko, curveball, called strike
Pierzynski, fastball, called strike
Dye, slider, called strike
Podsednik, curveball, ball
Uribe, fastball, called strike
Cintron, curveball, called strike
Owens, fastball, groundout
Fields, slider, pop out
Thome, curveball, called strike
Konerko, fastball, called strike
Pierzynski, curveball, called strike
Dye, fastball, called strike
The White Sox were content to go up to the plate staring at Weaver’s first offering, only swinging six times. 19 times, they stared at strike one. He only went to six 1-0 counts the whole game. When you’re working 0-1 on almost every single batter, you’re at a huge advantage.
Don’t throw anything straight.
Even when Weaver threw a fastball, it was moving. Without getting too deep into the complexities of how the Pitch F/X system calculates movement (essentially, it takes the movement minus the expected break of a hypothetic pitch with no spin), you can look at the PFX value and see that he only threw one pitch that could be defined as arrow straight, and it was out of the strikezone. When he put it in a hitters zone, it was diving all over the place.
Essentially, yesterday, Weaver pulled a Moyer. He commanded everything with movement, threw strikes, mixed his pitches, and attacked the hitters with offspeed stuff.
It worked to perfection, obviously. The White Sox aren’t a good offense, but as we saw, that ballpark is a total joke in the summer, and even ordinary flyballs can get out of there once they get up in the air. Weaver avoided pitching to contact and took advantage of Chicago’s take-then-hack philosophy, peppering them with pitches they weren’t expecting nor could they do anything with.
We probably won’t see a better pitched game by a Mariner all year long. The August 12th version of Jeff Weaver is a testament to just how successful you can be with command and movement. Let’s hope Felix was taking notes.