Injury to insult, received evenly
After today’s painful to watch game, I thought “With our luck, the M’s will probably view this as affirmation they should sign Teixeira this off-season, since he did so amazingly well against our high-priced FA signing…” and when I clicked his name to go look up his historical vs. M’s splits to see if there were any more good stats to throw in a short post about it, XP bluescreened on me with an error in tcpip.sys (wheee!).
After which it wouldn’t boot. And so since the game ended, I’ve been trying to repair my stupid XP box and contemplating at what point I give up and order a new box (and whether that box is a new hand-built Vista box or I buy a nice Mac to go with my beloved MacBook)(where I’m working now).
The weird thing about this is that I haven’t gotten angry about anything all day. I went from seeing today’s lineup card to seeing Silva suck to seeing Dickey stink up the place to wondering if the M’s were about to make a potentially terrible free agent signing on the basis of Teixeira’s play against them to spending a couple hours with the XP recovery console (for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, it’s pretty painful) and now, over an hour watching CHKDSK grind through my file system, inserting index entries, deleting index entries, with one monitor displaying normally and the other a disturbing burnt orange/green… and I haven’t gotten mad at all.
About a week ago, when I was at dinner with Dave and Jeff Sullivan and Matthew Carruth from Lookout Landing, Jeff asked what it would take for us to get riled up at this point, and when we got right down to it, for me it was “they trade Ichiro.”
Today the M’s started the game with a terrible lineup, their pitching was horrible, my computer’s dead in possibly a particularly expensive way, but Ichiro didn’t get traded, so I’m okay with everything.
The 2008 Mariners have given me the gift of equanimity.
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I am past mad at this point. The whole season is very comical to me now. I know this may raise some eyebrows, but I think I would be more upset if they traded Felix Hernandez.
Yes I would be livid either way, but I think Felix being traded would be worse for me.
I’m pretty sure I’d get riled up if they let Vidro’s option vest. I’m also pretty sure I’d get riled up if they hired Krivsky or Terry Ryan or anyone in the “old school” vein as our next GM. Other things that would rile me up: Ibanez signing an extension; Ibanez being traded for a worthless scrap; Clement playing in only 50% of our games from here on out; Morrow being left in the bullpen indefinitely.
Point is, there’s still PLENTY of things our organization could do to rile me up bigtime.
Agreed. Age difference is 12 1/2 years. If given the horrible ultimatum, I’m taking Felix.
He was hired by the Mets this week.
Right now I don’t recommend Vista. It does somethings well, but it is at best an incremental improvement over XP. And its frequent habit of seizing up for 10 or 20 seconds when I press “Save As” or try to open the main “Documents” folder is maddening. It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who’s suffering from petit-mal epilepsy.
Given that I do those things about 100 times a day, that’s about 25 minutes every working day I spend looking my laptop having a seizure.
Caveat – this is my first proper Vista machine; I’m not counting the other jury-rigged ‘upgrade’. Perhaps this is a localized fault.
Sweet baby Jesus, that’s great news! One possible nuclear winter meltdown scenario down… until they lure him away from the Mets with a very lucrative offer, heh.
Out of curiousity, would you be angry about Ichiro getting traded because it’d be done by an interim front office, or would you be angry simply because they traded Ichiro?
If it’s the first case, I whole heartedly agree. The second case not so much. This team is pretty much broken from top to bottom, and there isn’t much reason to have serious expectations for the team over the next year or two. If we had a GM that we had any faith in I think it’d be foolish not to listen to offers for Ichiro. The only untouchable I see is Felix.
Not that it matters, barring a change in ownership, Ichiro isn’t ever going anywhere.
I think I’ll be pretty upset when I see what little the Mariners get back when they deal Bedard before the trade deadline.
That’d be making the classic mistake of selling low – just what we’d expect from the M’s.
We gave up a classically awesome haul to acquire Bedard, and now we’re likely to receive a substandard return for him if we deal him this season while he’s been pitching like a candya**. I agree — this sounds exactly like something the Mariners would do!
Are you against signing Teixeira because you don’t think he’s any good or because you don’t think the Mariners are in position to be adding big money veterans? Cuz I’ll agree to the latter, but the former? Teixeira certainly seems like a good player to me. I know his offense is down a little this year, but he’s not old and he’s still a good fielder who draws walks and drives the ball, right?
Anyways, when did all this “Ichiro’s going to be traded” talk start? I know the Mariners keep saying “Nobody’s safe,” but since when did this organization have the balls to deal their most popular player? They haven’t even had the balls to admit they need to rebuild for the last three years.
Vidro playing the field and batting 4th today didn’t piss you off? I must not be desensitized to the incompetence yet. Letting Vidro bat 3rd or 4th, whether he is the DH or playing in the field, is an insult to all M’s fans. There is no justification or excuse for it, none! Having him in the line-up everyday is the new definition of insanity.
The only joy today was watching Clement hit his double and homer.
You must be new. Having him in the lineup isn’t a new definition of insanity. It’s an old definition of insanity. One we’ve been defining day in and day out for quite some time now. It doesn’t even affect me anymore. I see Vidro fourth and I just nod and go back to reading articles on fangraphs.
It’s a funny thing for me, too. With Bavasi gone, McLaren gone, and the season basically over, I’m no longer frustrated and angry. I’m actually quite relieved that they’ve given up and hopeful that the future might bring us greener pastures.
I had to ask myself seriously if that was it; if i would get mad if the same people were still in charge and I have to say yes. I’d still be fuming over a lineup like today if it was Squinty. I’d still be fuming over the players used in today’s game still being there if Bavasi was in charge. While I know the two headed vulture of Howard The Chuck is still there, there’s something less painful about having fresh meat at the helm.
Don’t be fooled. That isn’t fresh meat, they just changed the expiration date on the packaging.
If you got a bluescreen in your networking driver and then chkdsk is finding things to fix on your drive, I’d be worried you’re looking at dying hardware rather than anything OS-specific. Get memtest86, boot from it and let run for a few hours (so it runs through all the tests a couple of times). It’s rare for memory to go bad but it does happen (especially is warm and the fans are clogged with lint).
Colm: is your default view for those folders “thumbnails”? I’ve seen “seizures” like you describe resulting from the OS trying to generate thumbnails for oddball file types that require it to load a DLL from the parent app to get that representation (this can be particularly problematic with buggy codecs for video/graphics files).
Are you against signing Teixeira because you don’t think he’s any good or because you don’t think the Mariners are in position to be adding big money veterans?
I assume DMZ is against it for the same reason Dave is: 1B/DH is a terrible use of your free agent dollar. (And if you want proof, look no further than what the M’s have now, compared to, say, the Indians or the Red Sox or the Rays or just about any well-run team. Even when Sexson was good he was overpaid). To quote a post Dave made at Fangraphs (he’s said the same thing here at USSM, as well as at the feed, but I’ve got this link handy)
Similarly, see his Brad Nelson suggestion from a few days ago. There are lots more guys where Nelson came from. The whole point of getting out from under Sexson’s contract is to get smarter, not to get under another one. There’s no reason to pay the kind of money Teixeira is going to command just to put a body at 1B, even one who can hit some dingers. For that kind of money you should be getting some defense to go along with your XBH. Also, let’s not forget Teixeira is not exactly Rafael Palmeiro at Safeco, and we have a decent sample size to back that up. His career line at the cozy confines of the Safe:
.241/.315/.420 (181 PA)
And that’s batting against Mariners pitching. At Safeco against other teams’ TOR guys, it’s liable to be worse.
Teixeira is a talent, but he’s not the right one for the M’s, and he’s going to be overpriced for whoever does sign him.
You want Ubuntu Linux.
Brad Eldred
Dan Johnson
Scott Thorman
Mike Hessman
Dallas McPherson
Craig Brazell
All cheap, all available, all can put up better numbers than our current first basemen. I don’t even think Brazell has a team.
The Indians (Hafner, DH) aren’t perfect, either.
The Red Sox are giving Papi a ton of money too. Of course they can afford it.
Your gift of equanimity has increased my confidence & composure in the face of a second half that will require great sangfroid on behalf of every member of this team (FO, players & support) to avoid 120 loses.
Good luck with your computer!
: -)
Brad Eldred would hit .155 with 22 home runs, and strike out 300 times, over a full season.
Thorman’s pretty bad, and justifiably failed his extended trial with the Braves.
Dan Johnson doesn’t move me. He’s the dictionary definition of a “meh” player.
Don’t know much about the others, except that McPherson washed out with the Angels.
Like other posters in this thread I am numb. I do not care if they win or lose. I do care about the perfomance of specfic players and if the line up make any sense. II also look forward to seeing who our next GM is which players are moved and which Mac you are going to get.
One of us
One of us
The Indians (Hafner, DH) aren’t perfect, either. The Red Sox are giving Papi a ton of money too.
Ortiz is getting $12.5 million per year through 2010 with a club option for $12.5 mil in 2011. Here’s a list of all the Mariners players with similar or more expensive contracts.
Carlos Silva – 4 years, $12 million per year
Ichiro Suzuki – 5 years, $18 million per year
Richie Sexson – 4 years, $12.5 million per year (yes, that’s correct — we paid Sexson what the Red Sox pay David Ortiz and somehow many people in our front office still have a job)
Jarrod Washburn – 4 years, $10 million per year
I’m no expert, but I’d say David Ortiz is relatively underpaid considering what other players around the league get paid.
Also, Travis Hafner was one of the top three hitters in the league two years ago. I don’t blame the Tribe for signing him to what they thought would likely be an Ortiz-like period of hitting. That he’s fallen due to injuries isn’t so much their fault as it is horrible luck. When you have a DH the level of Hafner or Ortiz, you pay the extra money to keep them because of how amazing they are with the bat compared to replacement level DH’s. And honestly, the contract dollars for the two of them were really quite sane.
I’m not a Seattle fan (Reds). I only come here because of the a good analysis. That said, you could make a fairly strong argument that just about any player in Major League Baseball is “relatively underpaid” when you stack them next to some of the Mariners’ recent dealings. So I’m not sure how that furthers the argument.
More importantly, in re: Travis Hafner. He was a top 2 or 3 hitter in the league for 3 years. Then last year he got off to a disastrous start. Rather than wait to see if that was a fluke or a trend, at midseason they signed him to a deal big enough (4 year / $57M) to be hard for a small market team to overcome if it turned sour. It did.
About the BSoD: If you haven’t formatted your system partition, and if you can salvage any core dumps, check out WinDbg.
Either that, or do a repair install.
For me, the only player I’d get upset about the M’s trading is Felix. Everyone else can be had for the right price/fair value.
It’d suck losing Ichiro, but if the M’s got more than fair value for him, I wouldn’t be upset at all.
Doesn’t mean he won’t be available in October.
Yes, but remember how they acquired him? Minnesota let him go, they signed him as a FA fr 1year (2003) @ 1.25 million, and he was still arb-eligible the next year. I’m not saying any of the freely available talent that has been mentioned here is going to be the next Ortiz, but even the chance of someone growing to be an 800 OPS first baseman with an average glove would look good right now.
That said, I can understand why reaching for an All-Star quality position player has its attraction for this team right now. The M’s have a adequate hitters for most of their lineup slots, but there is a lack of threatening don’t-let-him-beat-you hitters. One or two of those would let the new manager put together a nice batting order without trying to make Jose Lopez a cleanup hitter. Unfortunately, stretching for one or two of those gives you Richie Sexson and/or Adrian Beltre for 4-5 years. Texiera looks like that to me.
Please don’t say that.
Bad thought: Doesn’t mean he won’t be available in October.
Good Thought: He is replacing Minaya
To quote the great George Costanza;
“Serenity now!”
I have to agree with DMZ. I thought about it in my head, and the thing the Mariners could do which would upset me the most would be to trade away Ichiro.
Sure I’d miss Felix’s starts once every 5 or 6 days. But Ichi not out there everyday, I couldn’t stand it. Especially if his absence was due to the FO making the final moronic move and saying goodbye to him.
(And it is extremely unlikely that they would trade Felix. No scenario for that, even for this FO).
I would be very sad if the Mariners traded Ichiro, even if they got proper value for him.
I’ve stuck by this team through a lot, but that might very well be the last straw.
Serenity now was mostly said by Frank Costanza, although George did throw it out there once.
I still say this team lacks the balls to trade Ichiro. I’m pretty sure Cincy could call offering Jay Bruce, Edinson Volquez, and Johnny Cueto the Mariners would say no. They know their fanbase is upset and they don’t want to upset them more.
Do you remember on April Fool’s Day when FSNorthwest was telling people Ichiro got traded to the Yankees? They said we got like Chien-Ming Wang, Joba Chamberlain, and Robinson Cano I think. And what was the reaction of Average Joe Sport’s Fan on the street? “We traded Ichiro? DAMNIT! I love that little guy! He was my favorite player!” Did any of them stop and think “So who did we get?” No. Did any of them ask themselves if this trade helped the Mariners as a team? No. I think the team knows what would happen if Ichiro was dealt. It would be a PR nightmare and right now, this team doesn’t need bad press.
Oh man, XP Recovery Console. Watching the M’s play baseball is pure bliss compared to dealing with that.
Well, despite the M’s intense degree of sucktitude this season, I foolishly made the trip from southeast Alabama to Atlanta for the Saturday and Sunday games this weekend. It was hard to watch.
I ran into about seven other M’s fans (not a very big Seattle contingent in the southeast United States). We always made eye contact, but we didn’t say anything. Every one of them just had that wait-til-next-year look in their eyes.
Twelve hits in two days. Awful. I thought they might look better in real life than they do on TV. They looked worse. The worst part of it might have been watching Cairo start twice. At least Clement hit a home run.
What can I say? We’re two losses closer to the first pick of the 2009 draft.
Wow, a rough weekend on all fronts it seems.
As far as operating systems, XP is still your best bet…much more software compatibility, cheaper (much) hardware than apple as well. Linux is fun but not something you want on your front line machine.
Trade the entire orginization away, trade Safeco for some little league ballfield, just, whatever you do, don’t trade Ichiro or Felix. Please.
Karma. I got the delightful “unmountable boot error” blue screen on my XP box yesterday and couldn’t even get the recovery console to run.
Oh, and the team still grinds me down. How can a sapient creature bat Vidro at all, much less high in the lineup? Does he have pictures?
Little league ballfield? Man, how many homeruns would…uh…I guess everybody hit?
When Griffey left, we still had Buhner, Edgar, Randy, and A-Rod. Then Randy went, then A-Rod. With Buhner on the bench and Edgar past his prime, we had the ‘01 season. oh, Olerud was popular especially w/his ties to WSU, and a successful player, how could I forget him.
7 years later, you lose Ichiro, who have you got? You might roll over 60% of this team (hopefully) from now until next year, a lot but not unheard of especially given the extreme edge of the bell curve this team is on, we’re nearly an outlier statistically. But you ditch Ichiro, who have you got?
I agree that Texiera may not be the right answer, even if there were a snowball’s chance in hell he’d want to come here. But assessing 1b/DH as a place not to spend a lot of money seems to me to be missing the point. We’ve gone into the last two seasons without a legitimate 3, 4 or 5 hole hitter (I consider both Beltre and Ibanez suited to hit sixth).
So, to me, positions are irrelevant–do we really have anyone in the system capable of hitting in the middle of the lineup even in three years? Clement maybe? Wlad seems doubtful.
Where are the middle order hitters?
And I didn’t name check Felix, because I don’t think he’s quite in Randy territory yet. Couple more 1 hit games, 9 pitch 3 strikeout innings, maybe an exploding bird is all it’s going to take though. Randy just had something extra, he was the Intimidator, he had that pock marked face, a mullet, and that slider. Felix is close, maybe only a mullet away.
On this team? Don’t make me make the easy joke here.
This. The trouble with trading Ichiro is that even if you got back baseball talent value in return, it would be impossible to get back baseball entertainment value. Ichiro is such a singular player in today’s game. There is just not another player like him playing today. Heck, there hasn’t been one like him since the deadball era finally died out.
Is this a relevant concern if you have below average hitters around him?
Do it!!!
Randy left a year and a half before Griffey.
Edgar had a .966 OPS, and a 160 OPS+ in 2001. He was hardly past his prime. This really didn’t happen until his last year.
#48 Er, egg on my face? Still, the point I was getting at is the Ichiro thing, despite mixing up the order the players left. And Edgars numbers. That one was really embarrassing.
Hey, I tried to donate to the site, and it kicks me out when I hit the button, also when I click on the ‘contact us button’ I get nothing. I’m using a mac powerpc G5 w/system 10.5.2. Is there an incompatibility issue anybody knows of? I just read the Bugs Bunny vs. Gashouse Gorillas article, it’s worth the price of admission. I have a link to another funny article. //www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/last-page-200806.html
The site rejects your donations when you fail to quote stats to back up your arguments.
I kid, I kid.
Felix with a mullet…my God. That’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. Think of the power!
If we traded Ichiro and got back a rough doppelganger of everything we lost in getting Bedard, I’d be satisfied. Throw a legitimate (young) everyday player into the mix and I’d be ecstatic.
God, I’d hate to see him go, but I’m more ready at this point to weep for our gutted farm system than I am for our essentially temporarily irrelvant big league club.
Felix gone, that would upset me. I want us to kick off a string of winning seasons in ‘10 (and am hoping to be surprised to see it happen next year). To do that, we need him.
This post was nothing but an excuse for Derek to use the word equanimity. So I’m not going to look it up. I just won’t. Nope, you won’t find that word in my Google history.
I’d love it if a member of the Seattle press would ask this question, point blank, to anyone left standing at the end of the season: “Why did you stand idly by while the worst hitter in the American League batted clean-up? And as a follow up, can you tell us why you should still have a job, or any self respect, in light of that fact?”
#53,
From last years stats:
Turbo:
G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB K SB CS AVG OBP SLG OPS
147 548 78 172 26 0 6 59 63 57 0 0 .314 .381 .394 .775
Molina:
134 497 38 137 19 1 19 81 15 53 0 0 .276 .298 .433 .731
Molina’s HR numbers were way higher, but Vidro is pretty comparable otherwise.
It’s pretty crazy, but if Molina can be a successful cleanup hitter, then maybe Turbo can too.
Okay, probably not.
Derek, get a new Mac. I can score you a free (yes, legal) copy of Parallels or Fusion, which would allow you to run Windows as a virtual machine on your Mac. Just make sure you get at least 4GB of RAM, which is also really cheap right now (Just paid 80 bucks for 4GB for my iMac).
I’ve been using Ubuntu on my main desktop for 4 years now. The latest version is just as polished as XP and tons easier to use than Vista. OS X is a little easier to do basic tasks, but anything complex takes twice as long for me there.
Before tossing your computer try SpinRite It has saved many hard drives from the brink of complete failure.
Benne #53. Nice to see a site w/so many SABRE fans on it have people w/a sense of humor, so many other sites the people posting wear out the idiot word. And I alluded to stats, and was wrong. Which to me is worse than not using stats at all, it spreads opinions based on incorrect info, and there is WAAAAY to much of that on the net, so I’m really feeling like a nincompoop. If that’s a word. It should be. I’m a nincompooper.
Another vote for Apple; My girlfriend and I bought a new iMac this weekend.
I’ve only had this thing two days, have been working on it pretty much non-stop and I am never buying another Windows product again, ever. I second the comment about running XP as a virtual machine if you absolutely have to use it…