The Overlooked Organizational Issue
As has been covered, well, everywhere, the Mariners have a few problems. They’ll be hiring a new GM and a new manager this winter, and we’re hopeful that they’ll recognize the need for a new direction and new philosophies in how the team is run.
However, just hiring a new GM isn’t going to just miraculously turn this team around. He’s going to have to do more than just make good trades and free agent signings, because this team needs to do a better job of developing talent from within. This isn’t a scouting problem – the M’s are one of the best teams in baseball in acquiring amateur talent through the draft and international free agency. They’re constantly bringing talent into the fold, including some guys with star potential.
However, once the kids get into the system, there are some problems. Here’s one of the glaring ones.
Carlos Triunfel: 6.3% BB%
Gregory Halman: 6.2% BB%
Matt Tuiasasopo: 9.8% BB%
Michael Saunders: 8.6% BB%
Adam Moore: 8.4% BB%
Rob Johnson: 8.4% BB%
Matt Mangini: 5.3% BB%
Daniel Carroll: 6.0% BB%
Alex Liddi: 9.1% BB%
Denny Almonte: 7.7% BB%
Jharmidy DeJesus: 7.4% BB%
That is, basically, a list of the draft picks or significant bonus international signings over the last few years, or guys who are considered real prospects by the organization. And, of course, their walk rate is listed next to their name. The A’s used to have a policy that they wouldn’t promote a prospect from one minor league level to the next unless he had a walk rate of at least 10% – none of these guys meet the mark.
Yes, Clement walks, and so does Dennis Raben, but both of those guys learned how to take the base on balls in college – they already had a set philosophy of how to hit by the time they got into the organization. Of the guys the M’s are trying to turn from teenagers into major leaguers, they just don’t develop anyone with any real patience at the plate.
This is obvious at the major league level as well. Obviously Lopez and Betancourt are hackity-hack-hack-hacks. Balentien is still a free swinger, even despite a lot of improvement the last few years. Adam Jones learned how to swing at everything before going to Baltimore. Even the big league guys the team has gone after have a grip-it-and-rip-it approach, from Beltre, Johjima, Guillen, and even Ichiro – the M’s love guys who swing a lot, and that’s what they’re developing.
This has to change, and just hiring a new GM and hoping that fixes the issue isn’t going to work. Whoever takes over is going to have to have the freedom to make sweeping changes in how the organization coaches its young talent and the things that they’re stressing in player development. It simply isn’t good enough to be developing a bunch of clones who have to hit .300 to succeed since they never learned how to make a pitcher work the count.
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Good post Dave.
Is this something that our current prospects are capable of learning? For example, I don’t imagine that a difference in organizational philosophy would’ve had much effect in the case of, say, Jose Lopez. Or do the M’s need to also take a look at acquiring slightly different talent?
You could write a co-post on the Mariners’ failures in developing pitchers. This team is simply not on the cutting edge of anything, other than (arguably) scouting and marketing.
Great argument Dave.
This is a great post, but there are a lot of people who don’t understand the value of a walk and how it helps a team. M’s management included.
I would imagine that there is a propensity for “patience” vs. “aggressiveness” (on a sliding scale, of course) for all of these guys. However, if you spend a few years beating them over the head with a philosophy of patience (even of the sort JLo had at the beginning of the year where he just wouldn’t swing at the first pitch, regardless), you’re going to move them toward one end of the spectrum.
Young, impressionable kids who are learning about the professional game are natrually going to be influenced by what their coaches are telling them. If you’ve got a bunch of coaches, like we do now, from the grip it and rip it school, they’re gonna trend that way. We need to change the personnel in charge of the prospects, not the prospects themselves.
How the hell did it come to this?
Was there a sea-change in organizational philosophy at some point post-2001? Did they look at Edgar, Olerud, Cameron etc, taking all those pitches and carrying them to 116 victories and say: “F**k that, those guys walk WAY too much. We need more hitters like Tony Batista!”
I’ve been trying to teach my tee-ball team not to swing at everything, but maybe that’s taking it too far.
Actually, that may be just about right. (Well, OK, you can at least wait for coach-pitch.)
The argument in “Moneyball”, which I have seen repeated elsewhere, is that plate discipline is basically unteachable at ANY professional level. You can make it an organizational philosophy not to acquire guys who swing at everything, but if those are the guys you have, you pretty much just can’t teach them not to. Plate discipline, the theory goes, can be taught only in a hitter’s truly formative years – meaning high school and earlier.
I tried it at Machine Pitch, but it doesn’t work.
They get their alloted pitches even if the machine is slinging them in at eye level.
I’ll wait for Little League.
If by “change the prospects” you mean “adjust way our current prospects approach the game”, that probably won’t work. But if by “change the prospects” you mean “exchange these prospects for different guys who will take walks”, then that is probably the only way to fix the problem.
I’d be interested in hearing more about how the minimalist school of walking is actually coached down in the minors and how such coaching (or organizational attitude) ends up being system wide. Is it as basic as effusively praising every hit, no matter how ill-advised the decision to swing, while remaining silent about walks? Or is it more direct in the form of instructions that “This team doesn’t wait for things to happen, it *makes* things happen, so I don’t want to see you standing up there looking at pitches like you’re some old lady doing her grocery shopping, ‘kay?” And where did the organizational bias come from in the first place? A conscious decision by management or like Topsy, did it just grow?
Dave – 2nd paragraph, 2nd sentence, I suggest changing “He’s” to “The GM is”. Don’t want to count out Kim Ng.
If the new GM and his or her superiors are on the patience bandwagon, then it will come to pass. If they aren’t, then we’ll have aggressive hitters.
Maybe Lincoln wants shorter games to entice parents to bring kids on weeknights?
azfred: “He” is the neuter pronoun in English. (I’ve been tilting at that windmill for years.)
On substance: It’s nice to have a couple hackers in the lineup. Ichiro, for instance, may not make pitchers work because he swings at so much. However, when you’ve got a pitcher who’s having a night, it’s nice to have someone who can step up there and hit tough pitches.
On the other hand, when you fill the lineup with those guys you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Who’s the best hitter in franchise history? Edgar Martinez. And what did he do? Swing at good pitches.
Speaking only about myself. When I was in Little League, Babe Ruth and High School Baseball, my coaches always preached “take a strike, take a strike.”
The problem I had with that was once I took a strike and then got a 2nd one I sort of got into a panic mode and started swinging at bad pitches because I didn’t want to get called out. Fortunately I hit enough to be considered soemwhat successful. When I went on to Community College Baseball, I couldn’t hit a lick because the pitchers were better and I still hit in a panic mode.
On one ever taught me to “foul off pitches” until I got the one I liked.
I saw some impressive at bats by Cairo during the Twins series in which he was able to foul off pitches to get the pitch count up.
I don’t know if its a learning or a talent deficiency.
Edgar would spend hours on eye drills, where he would do nothing but concentrate on balls from the pitching machine, with numbers on them. He wouldn’t swing but rather just call out the number on the ball as it approached the plate. He virtually taught himself to be a good hitter.
He learned to focus on the spead and ball rotation and could usually tell when the ball left the pitchers hand if it was going to be a strike or not.
Maybe he should be our hitting coach.
This has been one of the most frustrating things about the team for the past few years. I remember (in the Edgar, Olerud, etc, days) when, even if a pitcher had our number, we could count on getting into the bullpen just on pitch count. This then weakened their bullpen for the next game and was , I think, one of the major factors in the 116 win season. My kids have had to physically hold me back from kicking in the tv when I see pitcher after pitcher getting into the 7th inning now having thrown 80 pitches.
That would fit with what we’ve previously heard. The M’s want guys who “put the ball in play and make things happen.” I think there’s another angle – making contact. This organization loves guys who make contact (and hates guys who strike out – cf. Mike Cameron and to a lesser extent, Adam Jones).
A free swinger has to make a lot of contact to survive, even in the minors. The Royals are the only team in the league with fewer walks, but nobody has fewer K’s (and it’s not even close, M’s batters have struck out 704 times this year. 2nd place are the Blue Jays with 771). It may be that the M’s don’t mind walks, but what they really want to see is a guy who puts the bat on the ball, a guy who doesn’t swing and miss very much. High contact guys tend to be slap hitters. Power hitters who don’t swing and miss much are rare (hello Edgar, wherever you are). If all those slap hitters were Ichiro! clones, we’d be celebrating. But Ichiro is damned near unique. A Betancourt or Vidro clone is more likely.
It’s a busted philosophy. The M’s rank 8th in AVG, but 12th in OBP, OPS and R/G. Hmmm. Maybe OPS and OBP are betting indicators of talent than AVG or avoiding K’s? Dave’s right, the new GM needs to change more than just the trading and FA philosophy. The organization’s belief in what makes for a good hitter has to be radically updated.
Hey, I’ve been saying this for years: replacing the GM is not enough. The whole organization has to be retooled.
And we saw it this year in the very similar behavioral organization with Washburn. This is an organization with very outdated ideas on what makes a good baseball player. They’re working with stone tools when everyone else is working with machine-tooled measurement sticks and lasers.
They HAD players who were patient, but it was more by accident than anything else (remember…Edgar was blocked by Jim Pressley, showing that the team has been blind to the virtues of patient hitters FOR YEARS). It’s not going to change until we change the scouts and change the coaches. And that’s going to take awhile.
And that’s just the hitters. The development, assessment and coaching of pitchers is just as atrocious, as we well know…
“He” isn’t the neutral pronoun in English, it’s one of them. And grammar is not a set of rules inscribed on holy tablets. Just because something has a long pedigree doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to change. At any rate, despite the objections of some pedants, “they” and “their” as neuter pronouns go back hundreds of years — Shakespeare used them, for example — so why not use “they” when you truly don’t wish to imply a single gender, as the use of “he” certainly does, and if you don’t think it does, try using it in a sentence in which you use a noun generally but not universally associated with women, and see if it doesn’t sound wrong when you follow it with the supposedly neuter “he” or “his”. I’ll give you an example: “Every nurse in the hospital is responsible for his own uniform.” (I hope it’s clear that I’m not criticizing Dave’s language, just responding to the notion that an absolutist grammatical position trumps everything.)
Regarding changing the organizational philosophy: This strikes me as a very delicate issue. If I recall correctly, attempting to root out outmoded ideas in the organization was one of the things that made enduring enemies for Paul DePodesta. When an organization is as steeped in old-fashioned thinking as the Mariners are, it’s going to be hard to transform it without a big stink. It would be nice if some of the major media got on board with the idea, but I’m afraid of a Dodger-like bloodletting.
Year MLB Rank Total Walks
2008 29
2007 30
2006 29
2005 22
2004 24
2003 6
2002 4
2001 4
I see a correlation with W/L record and Dave’s argument.
Yah. The people skills are going to be paramount. (Particularly if there’s no change at the top–you’re fighting inertia AND your own bosses). It’s going to take years to makde adjustments (and probably should, given the magnitude of the change).
That may mean that we WON’T be seeing a major change in orientation in any potential GM, unfortunately…
Geoff Baker?
I would hope that the W/L record and correlation would be a powerful enough argument, albeit certainly incomplete and oblivious to other factors at play. But Lincoln and Armstrong have been around through the years, and they seem, at least from the outside willing to look at incomplete arguments to draw sweeping conclusions (i.e. ERA is a good measure of a pitcher’s capabilities)
Dave -
How common do you suppose this is? I’m looking at the Angels prospects, and it looks much the same: none among Bourjos, Trumbo, Conger, Sweeney, Morales has 10%. Wood is right on the cusp, and we all know about Kendrick/Aybar.
The same is largely true of the Giants. Schierholtz, Bowker, Villalona, etc. all under 10%. I know full well that you don’t want to be mentioned in the same sentence with the Giants in terms of ‘organizational development of hitters,’ but still…
I know not ALL orgs are the same way – the Rangers especially look good in this metric (and the Twins do surprisingly well).
Also, do we know that this is a player development problem, or is it more likely a scouting bias/problem/preference?
Finally, does this information change how you’d rank the future 40? That is, does someone like Luis Valbuena, whose shown a decent walk rate, leap ahead of some of these bigger name prospects? How about Mike Wilson?
“The argument in “Moneyballâ€, which I have seen repeated elsewhere, is that plate discipline is basically unteachable at ANY professional level.”
That struck me too. Conventional wisdom: power cannot be developed, discipline can; evidence suggests: discipline cannot be developed, power can.
…although evidence also suggests that discipline can be undeveloped/discouraged.
This is a related comment to the issue of the M’s organization….On Athletics Nation, an Oakland A’s blog they have posted a four part interview with the owner, Lew Wolff.
That’s right, the owner of the team sat down with a blogger for an extensive interview. After reading any of the four parts I come away convinced that the A’s have the best owner in baseball. Everything they do is toward building a better ball club.
Can anyone imagine Lincoln or Armstrong spending ten minutes with Dave or Derek to discuss the baseball team? The problems of the M’s run deep and wide, much like the River De-Nile, but check out the Wolff interview and tell me you are not impressed with what the A’s are doing. When or IF they get their new stadium they are going to eat the M’s and everyone else for lunch.
Edgar Martinez’s patience combined with effectiveness is unrivaled in organizational history. His influence spread across the team; perhaps this means he should be the hitting coach.
Geez, I didn’t mean to start anything (I should know better). I thought Dave would want to avoid sounding sexist because I know that wasn’t his intent so I offered a simple solution.
Just because they “rules” say its okay doesn’t make it so.
My concern with the Edgar as hitting coach idea:
Those who can’t do, teach.
Those who CAN do… can’t necessarily teach.
mod – please delete my previous comment – I should have let it go w/o comment.
“Those who can’t do, teach.”
That is extremely insulting to teachers.
Thank you tumwatermike for the story on Edgar. I new he did eye exersises for his eye problem. But never new about this batting practice. Wonder who thought of it first.
I think I understand why the M’s have an organizational philosophy that discourages walks.
Walks are boring, and you can’t create catchy fan-friendly slogans like Funk Blast! based upon them.
I’m looking at the Angels prospects, and it looks much the same
This is partly related to the Mariners looking to the Angels as a model (as opposed to the A’s). It’s where Bavasi came from and shapes much of what they’ve been trying to do, but have failed to execute. If everything had worked according to plan, the idea was basically to reproduce the approach of the 2002 Angels team that won the World Series.
Maybe if they did the Hokey-Pokey down to first base after a walk….
it’s called the “Conditioned ocular enhancement machine” and the M’s bought it when it first came out, back in 1999.
“The Mariners enrolled in the program this spring. Edgar Martinez, John Mabry and Raul Ibanez are regulars in sessions in their ballpark … A vacuum motor drives a compressed air unit that fires a tennis ball every three seconds at speeds up to 170 m.p.h. The balls fly out of a 6-foot pipe at a batter 54 feet away, approximately the distance from home at which a pitcher releases his throws. At first the player neither swings nor holds a bat. He merely tries to track balls coming at increasingly higher speeds. Next he catches balls in a lacrosse-like net. Finally he takes a bat and alternately tracks, bunts and hits tennis balls.”
FWIW, an old article about Edgar’s different kinds of patience and one that mentions the machine
John Mabry…now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. I mostly remember being annoyed at Rizzs every time he pronounced it “Mayberry.”
I pitched my way through college and there was nothing I liked more than facing a lineup filled with “aggressive” hitters.
Sure, they’d occasionally go out of the strike zone and make me pay, but those lineups generally made me look a lot better than I actually was because they’d bail me out on some of the poorer pitches I threw. Plus, they kept my pitch count down.
The teams that hurt me were ones that didn’t swing until they got “their pitch” and then fouled off a bunch of close stuff with two strikes.
It’s pretty obvious that at the big-league level, no pitchers are approaching the M’s free-swinging lineup with the “Oh no, I’m going to get hammered tonight” attitude. Instead, the Mariners let them breeze through three inning stretches where they only throw 30-35 pitches.
Thanks for addressing this issue, Dave.
I forgot to say, the quote came from an 1999 article that I couldn’t link to online. I first saw the machine on an FSN piece that Angie did, where she got in the cage with the machine and after doing the tracking exercises, tried to bat against it.
Because it’s imprecise as hell.
Just because lots of people do it doesn’t make it a good idea.
The gender neutral singular pronoun in English is “it”.
That is extremely insulting to teachers.
Yes, but (and I say this as the son of a teacher) it’s also often true that the people for whom a skill or technique came relatively effortlessly have a hard time developing it in others; the people who struggled to acquire and master the skill, who had to break it down into its constituent parts and analyze their own execution of each of those parts, are the people who can more readily do the same with others. Of course there are a lot of other attributes that are also necessary in good teachers (patience and empathy being high among them). But with respect to the particular merits of Edgar as a pitching coach, I don’t think Gomez’ comment is relevant, precisely because hitting didn’t come easily to Edgar, at least at his level: he clearly worked hard at acquiring and maintaining his hitting abilities, and that is certainly something that could get passed on. Whether he wants to (or has the other necessary abilities necessary to do so) is a completely separate question.
Walks are boring, and you can’t create catchy fan-friendly slogans like Funk Blast! based upon them.
But men on base are exciting. Unfortunately, the only slogan we’ve been able to come up with is “Two men on, nobody out…. so what.”
I tried it at Machine Pitch, but it doesn’t work.
But it’s still a good strategy if you run up the pitch count and tire out the machine, so a relief machine has to come in from the bullpen…
I was thinking about this a while back when I stumbled over the numbers JMHawkins lists in #16
The general consensus in the stat community (reached by Tango and others) is that OPS needs to be weighed so that the OBP is about 1.8x the value given to SLG. It’s actually probably higher than that for a team that plays half its games in Safeco, because Safeco suppresses hits and HRs so finding some other way to get on base is even more valuable. Yet this team systematically attempts to skew itself the other way, and apparently is oblivious to how it handicaps them. If this town had a less-docile sports media corps, somebody would ask Chuck “In my own mind, I’ve used statistical analysis the whole time I’ve been in the game” Armstrong about this very point.
PS – Can we change the title of this post to “An Overlooked Organizational Issue”? I’d hate to sell the other ones short.
And using “he” for a possible female is precise???????
Um, check your assumptions……
No, but it DOES make it grammar. By definition.
Walks are boring, and you can’t create catchy fan-friendly slogans like Funk Blast! based upon them.
How about “WALK TILL YOU DROP.”
“Base on Funk”
Can we change the title of this post to “An Overlooked Organizational Issue� I’d hate to sell the other ones short.
No, it’s the organizational issue. Well, that and the appalling lack of Chest Protector Backpack giveaways. (You want to talk about falling behind in the AL West? The promotional spiff gap is a yawning chasm).
Of course, if they ever actually fix this issue, another one will move up to be the issue. Yeah, it would be great if they could make progress on more than one at a time, but I’d be overjoyed to see them make any sort of visible progress on even one.
Rizzs did that? Are you sure? I know Valle always pronounced it “Mayberry.” Oh, but the agony when Valle pronounced “especially” as “expecially.”
Henry Higgins would hang himself high in Hartford, Hereford, or Hampshire.
“Oh, but the agony when Valle pronounces ‘especially’ as ‘expecially.’”
Oh man! Why doesn’t someone tell him?!
“No, it’s the organizational issue. Well, that and the appalling lack of Chest Protector Backpack giveaways. (You want to talk about falling behind in the AL West? The promotional spiff gap is a yawning chasm).”
True Dat.
The Mariners also need more bobblehead promotions.
This lack of bobblehead giveaways is appalling and just another example of the M’s organizational failure.
That doesn’t mean Edgar will be able to effectively instruct players and, when they don’t understand something, be able to figure out why they don’t understand it, and troubleshoot.
Teaching something is a whole different exercise than learning something. It’s one thing to teach yourself. You understand how you think. It’s another thing to work with someone that may not think or handle things the way you do.
Teaching something is a whole different exercise than learning something. It’s one thing to teach yourself. You understand how you think. It’s another thing to work with someone that may not think or handle things the way you do.
I think that is way too big a generalization on teaching and learning.
Although it is true that a good hitter doesn’t necessarily make a good hitting coach.
It is completely false that discipline cannot be developed or learned. If this were true, then plate discipline would not be considered an “old player” skill. In fact, both power and patience are skills that players can develop as they age.
What people are confusing is the difference between “developing patience hitting” and “developing into a patient hitter.” Jose Lopez will never be a patient hitter. That doesn’t imply that he cannot become more patient than he currently is. To me it looks like the problem with the Mariners is that they both (a) choose hitters who aren’t likely to develop into patient hitters and (b) don’t attempt to develop these hitters’ patience.
The question of whether “they” is vaguer than “he” as a pronoun referring to persons of both sexes depends on whether you care more about *number* or about *gender.* Both are vague, but they are vague in different ways. “They” obliterates the distinction between singular and plural. “He” confuses that between masculine and feminine. “It” suggests that what is referred to is sexless, lifeless, or non-human. (A little bit like the verb aru in Japanese).
Yes, my mistake.
Excellent example.
I seriously wonder if this isn’t an organizational philosophy built around: A) An old-school belief in batting average as the most critical offensive stat and; B) A foolish attempt to play a “more exciting brand of baseball.” It seems so consistent up and down the entire organization you have to believe they really want free-swinging players, if not for the reasons I’m imagining then for some other equally misguided purpose.
Ah, good point. I think I’ll steal it for my own.
Yuppers.
Hrm. More the former than the latter, I think. I don’t think they’re foolish enough to mix marketing aims with baseball aims at such a basic level. I think it’s truer that they think aggressive players put pressure on a pitcher…and I think I’ve read that they truly think they can teach patience at the major leauge level…
For this argument to be better explored, as Marc W suggests, we need a much larger sample size than, ‘the A’s used to have a policy that they wouldn’t promote a prospect from one minor league level to the next unless he had a walk rate of at least 10%’. That’s as limiting as suggesting that a team should always sign players with low walk rates because Vladdy is so good.
I’m not arguing with the conclusion, just wondering if there’s a way to apply this to, say, the top five hitting prospects in every organization.
I recall the old quote applied to prospects from the D.R.–’no one ever walked off the island.’ Might this be true for foreign prospects in general, an area where the M’s have been relatively successful?
If they hadn’t promoted so many bobbleheads in this organization already, we might not be looking at another last place finish.
Ba-dum.
I always considered the greatest irony was that Hargrove was advocating with the hitters exactly the opposite of what had made him an effective player. He was quoted as telling the players that they should expect only one good pitch per at-bat, and they’d better swing at it. Yet Hargrove as a hitter was a guy who made it so difficult for pitchers to pitch to him they’d offer him up stuff just to get him to swing.
In 2001, Lou finally came around to the idea that selective hitters would wear down the opponent’s pitchers, after watching the Yankees do that to his pitchers. No team can survive getting five innings out of its starters night in and night out, and one way to get the starters out is to waste a lot of pitches and take a lot of pitches.
The 2008 Mariners are the perfect example of that, of course, with our starters typically in the 80s after four innings, while the other team’s starter has barely broken a sweat. I don’t understand why this is controversial, by the way.
Not to anyone in the 21st Century.
But this team seems adamant on keeping their Stone Age tools. They’re ignoring why they had the success they had in 2001; in fact, they seem to be doing the exact opposite of what made them so successful in 2001.
Plate discipline is considered an “old player” skill because is does not decline with age the way other skills do, not necessarily because it can be taught to older players. If you have objective evidence that plate discipline can be taught at the professional level, please cite it. I’m not saying you are wrong. I am just repeating conventional wisdom that appeared in the most famous baseball book ever and is frequently repeated in sabrmetric discussions. I’d love to see actual evidence to the contrary.
First, I didn’t claim that discipline could be *taught*, but that it could be *learned.* Second, there are plenty of players who have developed increased walk rates as they have aged; which is the best proof I can find of this.
Or were you looking for proof that it happens in general? I certainly didn’t claim that. I claimed that players *can* develop this skill. And it isn’t hard to find some players who actually have done so. Here is one: Richie Sexson is an example of a player whose walk rate increased throughout much of his career.
If it can be learned but not taught, then organizational philosophy is irrelevant, isn’t it? You either learn it or you don’t.