Baker totally cracks me up
DMZ · June 19, 2008 at 1:48 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Seriously, this is why I’m a fan. From his post on Sexson and Vidro being on the team flight:
Lee Elia, rapidly climbing the professional ladder once again, is going to be Jim Riggelman’s new bench coach. Jose Castro is the new hitting coach, but Elia will remain above him and supervise the hitting program he’s spent the past 10 days implementing.
That’s some quality nested humor there, especially in the larger context of the team.
The comments there raise a good point. If you’re going to punt Vidro or Sexson, why not do it before you play the NL games? Having both (or either, really) on the roster for NL games serves no purpose at all.
Yeah, that’s some of the best subtle humor he’s done.
It makes sense if you haven’t made up your mind on who you want to fill those roster spots, right?
Nice thing is, Castro’s already used to working with hitters who belong in the minor leagues.
I doubt he intended humor with the comment:
I can understand the emotion of being let go from a dream job, especially since this isn’t a job you just go out and get by filing your application. But how could Mclaren have NOT been preparing for this moment? He’s been around the game long enough to know that this is how these things work.
If he had some expectation of riding out the summer, that just goes to show that maybe he didn’t appreciate just how poorly he was doing his job, even given the feeble pieces with which to work.
knowing you are likely to get canned, and the actual occurrence are two separate things.
Being prepared to be fired doesn’t necessarily trump the fact that getting fired is hard on people.
Maybe they are going to be “Randolphed”
#6/#7 – I totally get this, because it happened to me earlier this week. I’m not trying to take anything away from Mac or kick him while he’s down.
I’m just wondering if he had been preparing for this moment, as opposed to it being a shock. I’d just like to know the back-story. I’ll have to watch the press conference.
“He took the news hard” is not at all the same thing as “he was shocked at the news.” If he wasn’t at least contemplating the possibility, especially once Bavasi went down, then he really isn’t very smart. Did anyone who reads this blog not think this had a good chance of happening?
I know Baker isn’t the team, but it’s still ironic that he cites Sexson’s lack of power as a key reason he will be released when a large part of that was the M’s “fixing” him by messing with his batting stance, which essentially robbed him of the power he had left. Thank you, M’s coaches!
Before they “fixed” him, he was slugging .430 and had a .739 OPS. Since they “fixed” him, his SLG has dropped 50 points. Before they fixed him, he had 11 XBH in a little over a month. After the “fix,” he’s had 3 XBH in a little over a month. So they want to release him because of his lack of power (in part), according to Baker.
Nice.
#11- He should have been released before they worked on his batting stance.
Can we maybe not have the debate over releasing Sexson again in this comment thread, since it’s been rehashed in at least three other recent comment threads that I can think of?
Nobody (on either side) is likely to change their mind at this point, and its connection to this thread’s topic is tenuous at best.
RealRhino’s got his horse, and it’s his only one, so he’s going to keep riding it even if it’s keeping company with Barbaro.
I’m not sure there are any horses left to ride around here.
I have to say, I do sort of wonder what Lee’s batting program involves. Making everyone show up and hit the cages?
oh, yeah.
what? no ponies????
11,12
I don’t know. You’re spending 14+M on the guy. Why not try something? He wasn’t adequate before, so what did they have to lose? Unfortunately, they deprived Cairo and Bloomquist of some at bats,, but they had a bigger upside in view.
In all probability, he was done. I tried to look up his stats for April and May in past years, because, as I recall, he always starts slow. It seems within the realm of possibility to me that he had a bad year last year and was just having his normal slow start this year.
It seems conceivable to me that he was exposed by 3 replacement level pitchers backed up by terrible defense (yeah, I know, including his own) and a lineup lacking power. In that case he could otherwise have ended up with the .230-.250 w/30 HRs that is all the Mariners could reasonably have hoped for. Even after last year, all the projections at Fangraphs have him ~.240 w/20-25 HRs.
Man, and I even asked nicely.
13 Sorry Jeff, I didn’t see yours while I was writing my #18. Done now.
you were very polite.
what? no ponies????
Ponies were an answer to people who thought we were being too negative about the Mariners. With this trainwreck, too negative is a logical impossibility. For me, the ponies are as dead as all the other horses in the cattle car.
The official pony of your 2008 Seattle Mariners.
That’s a dead link — but here’s hoping it’s not supposed to be a picture of Eight Belles.
It’s fixed – no, not her.
[already asked nicely]
Dagnabbit, thanks for the fixed link.
From Baker’s second blog entry today (Many questions, few answers):
Doesn’t this suggest a big part of the problem. If Pelekoudas is the GM and in charge of baseball operations, why does he need their permission to fire the manager? If you don’t trust him to make that decision, then he shouldn’t be in the position.
The fact Lee managed to talk HoChuck out of another bad decision is at least a move in the right direction. But yeah, locking that two-headed moron in a gimp box so Lee could make these deicisions without having to debate their rediculous baseball opinions would be even better.
28 – I thought I heard it mentioned at the Bavasi press conference that at first Lincoln and Armstrong would be involved in the decisions until Lee got settled or some such nonsense. I could be wrong on that.
Jeff,
You said you didn’t want a debate. I didn’t offer one, I simply said the reason it had been so difficult to drop was that the proffered reasons were not only not persuasive, they were largely flippant and implausible, and offered an example of the same.
But you deleted my post anyway, even though I had complied with your request not to debate his release. As is your right, of course.
Maybe I should have posed my previous objections to Sexson’s release as an “Open Letter To Mariners Fans On Releasing Players?”
In Baker’s latest entry, he cites Armstrong warning about bringing kids up too soon and hurting their confidence. Does anyone think that they will do an about face on their aggressive promotion campaign, or will they merely apply it only to the majors?
Nope. These two clowns are becoming baseball’s newest examples of incompetent meddling executives. They should be nowhere NEAR any baseball decisions…so, naturally, they thrust themselves into it, feet first.
How can Mac be taking this hard? His inability to fill out efficient lineups was part of the reason he was 20 games under .500 as the M’s manager.
Hi, Management here.
Everybody be cool. Thanks.
Sorry.
Basically, the read I get from this is that the M’s senior management is still in shock over how wrong things have gone, and is completely bewildered on where to go from here, so they’re tossing out basic stock answers about wanting to be as good as they can be over the next 90 games, doing the fire-the-field-manager-and-GM dance, and so on. Thus we see Pentland and Bavasi fired, reversing poses within 72 hours on McLaren, absolutely no movement on veterans, ditching Wlad and calling up Clement, etc.
It’s such a joke. I mean, COME ON, Riggleman HAS a record as a MLB manager, and it’s pretty clear he’s not magic fairy dust. I’m also extremely skeptical that Pelekoudas is much of the answer to anything as interim GM if his answer to all of this failure is “gee, let’s have Riggleman give Vidro and Sexson more plate appearances to see if it makes them any better”. If that’s his logic, he doesn’t seem to understand the idea of “sunk cost”, which makes him a REGRESSION on Bavasi, who at least showed that he got it with Boone, Olerud, Everett and so on.
Oh, and overseeing Pelekoudas? We have a guy who values makeup over tools. This has the potential to end up going very badly at trade deadline time, when lousy-makeup Bedard gets traded for a bunch of Willie Bloomquists.
Does anyone think that they will do an about face on their aggressive promotion campaign, or will they merely apply it only to the majors?
It only applies to the majors, I don’t think they see it as inconsistent. The aggressive promotion philosophy is supposed to make prospects experience adversity before they reach the big leagues, so that they’re able to overcome it after they’re already there.
Gee, and they have such a sterling record of guiding minor leaguers over that hump.
GET THAT FOOL AWAY FROM BASEBALL OPERATIONS!
I don’t think we have to worry about Bedard being traded that way EC. The M’s will trade him to a team and get a decent package back be it now-deadline or after the season.
Yeah, right. And how has that worked out? Isn’t their usual M.O. is to yank youngsters back to AAA, and give them NO chance to overcome that adversity? (I think the only exception is Lopez and Betancourt….)
If Bedard’s going, the sooner the better — right now he’s got 1.6 seasons left in him at the current compensation rate. Wait till next year and his value goes down commensurately. Plus, there’s the ever-present possibility of one of his season-shortening injury problems cropping up which is a wild card with any player but one that seems more highly represented in Bedard’s deck.
Back to the title of the thread, I agree and that’s why I read him every day. There’s usually some good snark–sometimes subtle, sometimes a train roaring down the tracks–in there and it’s a shame so many of his commenters miss it completely. I’d love to hear an off the record conversation between you guys.
41: You can’t forget about WFB, one good September call up and he’s been with the M’s ever since. Jim Capel had a pretty good quote in a piece on ESPN.com – “what is Willie Bloomquist — no extra base hits — doing in the major leagues”
I am really confused that Lee is allowed to do anything. Why hurt yourself by letting a interim GM make trades, when thats something your new GM is going to want to do.
I don’t get it can some one enlighten me :S. Wouldn’t it be best to leave the trading to our New? Especially big moves such as Bedard? DMZ, what do you think?
I don’t think that Pelekoudas is going to be making the monumental decisions that will set the M’s back any further than they already are. If you can get a good package at the trade deadline when you can potentially get a bidding war going, players like Bedard, Ibanez and Beltre potentially could have a much higher perceived value since they will be filling an immediate need, than they would as a strategic long term value in the off season. I don’t think that you are going to see a gutting though that sends Bedard, Ichiro, and Beltre to different teams for a combined return of 12 ash bats, a used batting practice screen, and a bucket of KFC extra crispy.
As far as other moves go, Sexson, Vidro, Cairo…the axe needs to swing and it really doesn’t matter who does it, nor can it really wait until the off season, if for nothing else than to free up roster spots.