The 2008 Mariners through ZiPS
Let me warn you ahead of time: if you don’t like projections, and you don’t like sims like Diamond Mind, this is not going to be your post. And it’s long.
(“Tea Party!” photo by dreamcicle19772006 and used under the Creative Commons license.)
Dave sent me an email about the new 2008 ZiPS projections and being the geek I am, I loaded it up and went a-simulating: traded Bedard for Jones/Sherill/etc, set up the M’s likely lineup (last year’s with Wilkerson in right, no platooning), worked out the bullpen roles and went at it. Now mind you, all the other teams had the default bad to the point of almost-randomness profiles (except the Orioles, for who I plugged the rotation and activated Jones/Sherill). So the M’s operated at a huge advantage.
Dave warned me about what would happen and the results still shocked me.
The first season the M’s went 70-92 to finish 21 games behind the Angels and last in the AL West. They scored 733 runs and gave up 802.
I did some more work. Threw Horacio Ramirez off the team (as the team will likely do at some point), cleaned up some of the roles, brought Reed up to play a decent 4th OF and defensive replacement…
81-81, 3rd, 9 games back of the Angels, 750/804
69-93, last, 681-783
77-85, third, 717-809
72-90, last, 668-764
69-93, third, 690-810
64-98, last, 733-842
70-92, third, 754-763
… and on and on. Again, this is with the M’s as the only team in baseball with a roster set up with reasonable roles and a rational bullpen. When I do this normally, teams with that advantage play way, way over their heads. At least as ZiPS is concerned, this is not a good team.
Batista and Silva get shelled over and over. The defense is porous. A huge chunk of the lineup stinks against lefties. It’s ugly. It’s really ugly.
If you’re curious, my final M’s lineup, in which I tried to do some good around the margins while being realistic about who’s playing where, was:
Hitters (14)
DH-0: Vidro
C-R: Johjima
1B-R: Sexson
2B-R: Lopez
SS-R: Betancourt
3B-R: Beltre
LF-L: Ibanez
CF-L: Ichiro!
RF-L: Wilkerson
Bench: C-R Burke, OF-L Reed, OF-R Balentien, IF-R Morse, WB-R Bloomquist
The corner outfielders need legs and right-handed backups, so Reed/Balentien are up. I gave Balentien some of Ibanez’s playing time v. LHP. I tilt towards more hitters, obviously, but that’s a whole other discussion. Really, any left-handed pitcher, you might be better playing the backups and… um, I’m already proving I’m way too into this kind of thing, so I’ll stop there.
Pitchers (11)
SP-L Bedard
SP-R Felix
SP-L Washburn
SP-R Silva
SP-R Batista
RP-R Baek
RP-R Green
RP-R Morrow
RP-L O’Flaherty
RP-R Putz
RP-L Rowland-Smith
It’s a pick-em in the bullpen. The projection wasn’t sweet on anyone, so it didn’t matter if I had Huber/Lowe out there. The last two relievers in the bullpen got rocked every year. I took Baek/RRS for long relief with two starters getting rocked regularly, but you could change that mix if you wanted.
(“Sack O’Taters” photo by ninjapoodles, used under the Creative Commons license.)
Anyway, I could spend a lot more time on this, but I’ll spare you. The short version is having gone through this exercise, I’m worried my last estimates of the team’s strength were high.
But USSM is your home for Mariners-related pessimism, so what do we know.
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55 Responses to “The 2008 Mariners through ZiPS”
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Despite a ponies-per-post ratio that appears to have set a new record, I think pessimism is surely in order. I’m pumped to watch Bedard pitch, but not at this cost. My stomach is turning.
And Derek, with all those third-place finishes, was it the Rangers finishing second? And did the Angels win the division every time?
Haven’t done DMB before–what’s the “WB” position for Bloomquist? Warms Bench? Won’t Bat? Worthless Batter? Or is he so iconic that there’s an actual “Willie Bloomquist” position? In which case, why is it just “WB” instead of “WFB?”
Also, doesn’t Reed bat left-handed?
Anyway, it’s pretty hard to swallow that the M’s might struggle to win even 70 games. On the other hand, it seems to me like only 7 players on that roster have any upside, if you define upside as an appreciable chance to perform significantly better than reasonable expectations: Lopez, Betancourt, Ichiro!, Balentien, Bedard, Felix, and we’ll say one of the bullpen guys. Whereas if you look at non-injury downside–a decent chance of underperforming and/or looking done as a contributing Major League player–I count (ignoring the bench because they’ll likely get less ABs and each player has value in a specific role) 10: Vidro, Sexson, Lopez, Ibanez, Wilkerson, Washburn, Silva, Batista, Morrow, and O’Flaherty.
So, in my highly subjective assessment, that makes 7 players with upside, and 10 with downside. And that’s with the asymmetrical categorizations of “pleasant surprise” and “utterly crushing disappointment.” Seriously, all those downside guys except probably Morrow are capable of turning in replacement-level or worse production. Seems like a lot of things need to go right for the Mariners to contend, perhaps even unrealistically so (with guys like Ibanez, Wilkerson, Sexson, Vidro, particularly), but there’s a lot of ways things can go horribly wrong without even considering injuries. Bleh.
The pony tea party, however, is nothing but MVP-level upside.
I’m imagining that not doing the trade doesn’t make an appreciable difference, though. Jones doesn’t make Ibanez any better in left (yes, Ichiro can cover more of left center, but that’s not been the trouble, it’s balls down the line or dropping in front of him or going behind him), doesn’t give Vidro power, doesn’t bathe Sexson in the fountain of youth. And, Lord, you just know it would mean HoRam in the rotation to start the season.
I agree, but doesn’t that make the trade seem even worse? If they can win roughly as many games this year with Jones and Sherrill, that’s all the more reason to keep those guys and the prospects, right? I generally see the trade as a lock to improve the team this year, barring injury of course, but if even that’s not the case… I think I’m going to look at the pony tea party picture some more.
Isn’t the general consensus here that this trade makes the M’s something like 1-3 wins better this season, but is not worth it in the long run due to other reasons that have been beaten to death already. Did you sim some seasons using the rosters without the trade? Jones, Sherrill, etc. Curious how that comes out.
I find it very hard to imagine that these offseason moves only make us three wins better, could someone please explain how (bedard,silva,wilkerson) vs. (horam,weaver,jones) only equates to three wins, i know jones defence would have been better than wilkerson’s but offensively they are probably a wash. With bedard and silva plugged in to replace horam and weaver, thats gotta be at least a ten win improvement, and as far as the mariners overachieving last year and our run differential a lot of that would be directly related to horam and weaver giving up 5 or 6 runs in the first 2 or 3 innings. As for sherill, i really like the guy especially since he likes seattle as a team and a city, and he has been great over the last couple of seasons but i think that O’Flaherty or a healthy Lowe could fill in nicely.
Projections smections I say. Most projection systems I’ve seen don’t account for heart. If you don’t have heart, you don’t have love and if you don’t have love, really, what do you have?
With this trade I can only see one direction for this team. Bavasi and crew have cut all there options to a win now montra. Ichiro’s prime is quickly coming to an end, and Beltre will soon be a overly high priced free agent. Keeping Johjima will be questioned unless we can contend now and for the next 2-3 years.
I see 1-2 more trades before the allstar break. We need Bats and badly. Bavasi and crew are gonna dump what talent is left in the minors to get it. I am resigned to the fact that Triunfel, Clement, Morrow, Rohrbaugh, Feierabend and O’Flaherty will all be sacrafised. This year will go down in sports history as the worst butchery of a team ever.
I really hope I am wrong. But with this trade I can see no other direction for the team. Mac knows the need offense, Bavasi knows they need offense, Hell the 10 year old sitting in row 25 knows they need offense. And at this point there is no turning back….
I am just disgusted. We should have rebuilt and went with the youth and traded away what useable vets we have and went the way of the A’s. In my opinion this trade would have been like trading Griffey to the Yanks when he was 20. I am just Sick…
I’m sure you also ran the projections w/o Bedard and with Jones instead. How did that come out?
As a bit of a simhead myself, I wonder do you ever play the historical game at simnasium?
I’m wondering about the non-trade simulations too.
…hey at least our summers are now freed up. It can’t rain every single Sunday again this year, right?
It’s amazing the Mariners front office can be this bad with such a huge payroll and an owner who doesn’t meddle (except when he insisted the Mariner sign Ichiro [one of their best moves]). Really…just astonishing. Boggles the mind.
The Rangers/A’s finished ahead of us all those times? Goood god I hope you’re so wrong.
How accurate are ZIPS projections?
How accurate are ZIPS projections?
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/unfiltered/?p=564
I copied this link a few days ago that compares how accurate the popular projection systems are. It’s on on BPro’s website though so…
Nice work, Derek. You totally beat me to the punch. If I hadn’t been out to dinner so late last night we could debate if your computer or mine hate the M’s more. =)
Reed is a Lefty.
Fixed the Reed typo (Reed’s supposed to be the “legs” and Wlad the “right-handed bat” there)
Simulations don’t account for veteran grit, mid-season acquisitions of grizzled bullpen help or ignition from His Ballgameness.
So, take the results with a grain of salt.
Speaking of Baseball sims, 2K has supposedly fixed a lot of the issues in the upcoming MLB 2K8 that they didn’t address going from 2K6 to 2K7. Anyone who has played it on 360/PS3, and banged their head against the wall when encountering the bugs in franchise/simulation knows what I am talking about. I guess I’ll take the plunge and spend the 60 bucks.
I was never really fond of the sim parts of console games. Games usually do one of two things really well: arcade or simulation. I play 2K6 or so for the arcade factor on my PS2 and up until several days ago have been playing APBA’s computer simulator on a long line of computers since junior high.
Real McClaren says that he want the team to run more in 2008. If Simulated McClaren does the same thing, the projected win total is probably worse.
#5 #9 I also vote for seeing a Zips simulation w/o Bedard keeping Jones, Sherill et al.
The data’s out there, you’re welcome to run that sim yourself.
I’m sure Geoff Baker will provide data from the 2001 Toronto Blue Jays to disprove it all. I also predict an increase in the number of butts in seats, until about, oh, the all-star break, when it dawns on people that this really isn’t going to turn out so well, and the rotation starts to gripe about the lack of run support. At least we can root Ichiro on as he goes for those 80 stolen bases.
#5 #9 I also vote for seeing a Zips simulation w/o Bedard keeping Jones, Sherill et al.
I’ll try to run it tonight or tomorrow. I’m guessing it ain’t gonna change much though. But then, I never would have guessed they’d project out so bad this year.
Y’all have to bear with me, Derek has much more experience with DMB than me.
That is an awful lot of ponies.
There’ll be ‘Pony Day @ the Park’ for everyone to feel better. By August we’ll have pony rides in the outfield after the game…
I think I just threw up in my mouth. And it doesn’t taste like the M’s kool-aid. Still, Safeco is a good place to watch a ballgame…
The reason your simulated Mariners did so poorly is you left Miguel Cairo off the roster. Add his veteran leadership and undoubted chemistry with Willie Bloomquist, and this is a different team. With Bloomquist platooning in right field and Cairo in left, this team will now go undefeated against left-handed pitching, bringing their win total to 117.
Baseball Musings has been posting lineup analysis, and the M’s had the worst offense in the division by a fair margain according to Marcels. The A’s did a lot better than I expected.
http://www.baseballmusings.com/archives/024609.php
Margin. Sorry.
coming at this from a vast pool of sim ignorance– what happens if you run the 2001 team through these?
What would happen to the sims if Bonds was added to the lineup as a DH?
32: Depends on whether we can resurrect Johnnie Cochran.
Agreed that offense is the problem. Take your best shot and match our 3-4 hitters against anyone–even the Royals. Ouch.
However, also note this from the Baseball Musings analysis:
For all the talk of Adam Jones, he doesn’t project to be much of a savior in 2008. The Bill James projections put Jones’s slugging percentage higher, at .459. But if Jones can only post an OBA in the .320s at age 22, I’d give him up for Bedard.
Did you simulate more than one season as your “control”? It’s possible that your roster moves made the team worse but with just one simulation we don’t know if that 70 wins was the low or high end. Certainly, after the moves, 70 wins wasn’t an outlier.
Doesn’t (didn’t) Diamond Mind simulate something like 1,000 seasons?
I’d be pretty surprised to see Reed on the big club again. I get the feeling they’ve soured on him quite a lot. Of course I could be wrong since this is just a feeling and not based on any facts or sources.
Also, aren’t these projections notoriously hard on Ichiro?
You’d trade the performances. Not sure you’d trade the players, though.
And, like a lot of folks, this ignores the defensive contributions, even in a qualitative way.
32: Depends on whether we can resurrect Johnnie Cochran.
That’s right — even as a DH, Bonds needs serious help with his defense.
You’re not just trading Adam Jones this year. You’re trading him for the next 6 years. So what if he only has a 320 OBP and a 450-something slugging. You’re talking about a really good defensive 22-year old. A lot of people aren’t making a big deal nationally about this is because he’s not a Red Sock, Yankee or Met. If you replaced ‘Adam Jones’ with ‘Jacoby Ellsbury’ people wouldn’t pass him off. It’s frustrating.
Speaking of Baseball Musings, here’s their take on the Cleveland Indians
I have a baseball game simulator that I wrote in VB that uses advanced sabermetric algorithms to model a baseball game. I simulated almost every single NL West game last year with it and published a win expectancy and compared it to the win expectancy of the Las Vegas Hilton Sports Book for comparison. After leading the first month of the season, the Sports Book slowly caught up and passed my simulator and won by 1.12%. I have made some upgrades, particularly in the field of park factors, so hopefully the simulator can turn the tables this year. This winter, I am using the simulator with 2008 ZIPS projections to rank each of the 6 divisions. The only two remaining divisions are the AL West and AL East, as I am waiting for the Bedard deal to be completed and new ZIPS projections to come out for Adam Jones and Bedard. The method I used for ranking the teams in each division was to play each team against each of the other teams in the division, with #1 starters only facing the other teams #1 starter, and so on down the line for the other 4 starters. Each game was simulated 2000 times, both home and away. All the win totals were summed and a final win percentage was calculated. There are a few things the sim didn’t take into consideration, the most major of which is that I did not weight playing time based on injury prone players. I have ran the AL West numbers pre-Bedard trade, here is a sneak preview. This was meant as a semi-thorough study with a more rigurous one to come towards the end of spring training.
Complete list of Division Rankings
1. Angels .5272
2. Rangers .5033
3. A’s .4988
4. Mariners .4707
vr, Xeifrank
Reviewing what Diamond Mind predicted for the 2007 season.
It was pretty good overall, but thought the M’s offense would be worse than it was. Luck? I suspect that this was in part to Guillen outperforming his projection, and Ichiro was his incomparable self.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/preview07/news/story?id=2820932
Predicted
AL West
Angels 91 71 810 711
A’s 84 78 773 748
M’s 77 85 748 795
Rangers 75 87 794 851
Actual http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/standings/index.jsp
Angels 94 68 822 731
M’s 88 74 794 813
A’s 76 86 741 758
Rangers 75 87 816 844
Not bad. The one thing that isn’t provided is the standard deviation, how tight is the prediction for each team? Is it ±1-2 wins or ±3-5
Overall the prediction was quite good with notable exceptions, Colorado (77-85 actual, 90-73 predicted) and the Texas lines are way creepy (75-87 actual and 75-87 predicted).
The runs scored/allowed for the AL west is pretty consistent with the results except that the M’s offense was better than predicted.
So how to take the USS Mariner’s prediction? Well they actually didn’t do a thorough simulation, they only managed the roster of 1 team (ie optimized) the M’s. So I’ll wait to see a more complete simulation with all roster’s managed.
We lost Guillen, gained Wilkerson and everyone’s a year older….so I don’t think the offense will be that much worse but the defense will likely be better. Enough for 90 wins. Nope. We were lucky last year. Bad enough for 70 wins, don’t think so.
We’ll see in a year. Still hope this trade gets scuttled.
To be clear, this isn’t a prediction — it’s an attempt to use the ZiPS projections to find out some interesting things about the team as it’s currently built with the Bedard trade. If I was going to make a serious prediction, I’d have to set up everyone’s profiles, and so on and so forth.
Derek- So, you’re talking about the manager’s profiles? Or just each team in general?
You know, it occurs to me that when I get into that inevitable conversation with the guy on the next barstool this summer, there’s going to be a quick and easy way to figure out if it’s worth continuing the discussion. I’ll just say
“You know why the team ERA is so high? Because they traded Adam Jones”
If he treats that with understanding and agreement, I’ve found a kindred (or at least informed) soul; if he’s confused by my mixing pitching stats and position players, it’s time to just go back watching the game. Likely with my hands pressed to my temples. Or one slapping my forehead.
ZiPS may not have many nice things to say about the Mariners, but the team does have something that no baseball projection/simulation system–no matter how sophisticated–can account for: The Power of the USSM Pony!
Ha! F*** the Rally Monkey. We’ve got the power of the USSM Pony!
I wonder if the Pony can do the Rally Jig.
Seriously. We need the Rally Pony. Lookout has the Rally Dino.
Graham you need to get to work on this.
Makes you wonder if a singles-hitting, NOT-strikeout-pitching, poor-defensively team can win 88 games… two years in a row.
Also, is Jeff Nye also Lookout Landing Jeff? They both seem to like Willie B and his noble steed (actually a pony).
No, I am not that Jeff. I am better looking.
I’ve finished 3 seasons of ‘08 DMB with the M’s sans the Bedard trade.
Still not real pretty. Derek knows this game a lot better than I, but I tried to use the same staff and bench he did. I picked up whatever clues (Balentien subs some of Raul’s vsL ABs) when I could. Anywho, I’ve got a lot to learn but here they are.
67-95 612/795 26 Games back of LAA last in OPS
75-87 649/741 22 3rd last in OPS
69-93 688/770 22 4th 26th in OPS
Consistently Adam has hit .260-.275 with a OBP 40-50 point higher than that with decent power. Felix had one bad year (the first) and two really good years. Pretty much every other starter has been average or a lot, lot worse.
Drawing walks was this team’s problem last year. And it probably will this year too.
Like I said, take it for what it’s worth. You need to run hundreds of these things to make them worth anything. I’ll do some more later.
As if not trading Jones would turn this all around?
As if not trading Jones would turn this all around?
Way to hilariously miss the point.