Game 159, Angels at Mariners
Moseley v Jimenez. This’ll be fun.
Lineups:
Mariners
RF-L Ichiro!
Assorted jerks and one person who apparently stuck up for him.
A brief comparison of Ichiro and Ibanez
I wanted to expand a little on this diary at Lookout Landing, which takes a different issue with Baker’s piece.
When it came to Ichiro, who got off to a typically slow start in April and part of May, the internal turmoil nearly hit its boiling point.
Ichiro, career April: .293/.348/.395
Ichiro, career May: .364/.412/.464
Ichiro, April: .252/.310/.361
Ichiro, May: .319/.384/.398
Ichiro, first seven games of May: .423/.464/.500
Ichiro, May 1-May 15: .310/.344/.379
Quick and dirty, M’s hitters through May 15th, by OPS
Ibanez .854
Beltre .777
Lopez .737
Ichiro .688
Betancourt .630
Johjima .570
(Did Sexson have a .714 or is that a query artifact?)
But others point out that Ichiro, along with Ibanez, is one of the few Mariners to put up consistently high numbers during a season in which the team has all but collapsed.
Ibanez, May, when Ichiro was supposedly about to be beaten up by his teammates: .218/.307/.366
Ibanez, September: .256/.316/.337
Shouldn’t the conversation have gone more like
Anonymous clubhouse coward: “Hey, so yeah, we all hate Ichiro and in May we were going to kick his ass because he wasn’t hitting.”
Baker: “Okay, but he was hitting, he started off May on an amazing streak and was stealing bases two a game.”
Anonymous clubhouse coward: “Uh, never mind.”
I don’t expect that. But the very least we should demand from people who cover the team is that they check these things before they go into print. Ibanez hasn’t been consistent unless consistent is “good except when he isn’t” and Ichiro’s stats don’t line up with the given reasons for discontent. And if they don’t, again — what’s the reason for the hate?
Quick Question
If clubhouse access allows reporters with press passes advanced insight and a perspective unavailable to the masses, why weren’t issues like the clubhouse-versus-Ichiro reported at the time, when they happened? Read more
Teammates Hate Ichiro, We Hate Teammates
In his second part of his rebuilding series, Geoff Baker writes about specific hostility towards Ichiro in the clubhouse during the early part of the season. Quoting the relevant portion:
And it was a clubhouse in need of some direction, given the problems engulfing it as the season came undone. When it came to Ichiro, who got off to a typically slow start in April and part of May, the internal turmoil nearly hit its boiling point.
“I just can’t believe the number of guys who really dislike him,” said one clubhouse insider. “It got to a point early on when I thought they were going to get together and go after him.”
The coaching staff and then-manager John McLaren intervened when one player was overheard talking — in reference to Ichiro — about wanting to “knock him out.” A team meeting was called to clear the air.
Now, you might wonder, what could Ichiro have done to foster such open anger? Clearly, he must have offended someone pretty severely.
Ichiro this year had to battle a midseason hamstring problem, and he was shifted from center field back to right because McLaren thought Ichiro was a better defender in the corner. While Ichiro is said to have recovered from his injury, his stolen-base totals dropped as the season progressed. He also did not get to some balls in the gap and the right-field corner at times, prompting more clubhouse complaints that he cared only about piling up hits instead of sitting out to heal properly.
Yep – the explanation given is that teammates want to “knock him out” because he plays when he’s less than 100% healthy. What a bastard. How could he possibly garner the respect of his teammates when he’s selfishly hurting the team by playing at a diminished level and keeping guys out of the line-up who could have helped the team win? If only he would learn how to be a clubhouse leader, such as Raul Ibanez, who would never struggle through pain, costing the team valuable runs in a playoff race while a ready replacement was waiting in the wings.
Oh, wait, that’s EXACTLY what Raul Ibanez did last year. You remember last year, right, where the team managed to stick in the race despite the fact that Ibanez had a .697 OPS the first four months of the season while playing absolutely brutal defense in left field. Remember last July, when he hit .184/.241/.262 as the team was trying to figure out if they were a legitimate enough contender to make a trade deadline acquisition, then later admitted that he had played through a painful shoulder problem that limited his power and affected his swing. Meanwhile, Adam Jones toiled in Tacoma, unable to get any playing time while Ibanez killed the team with some brutal performances.
Why was no one threatening to beat up Ibanez last year? Why is he a revered clubhouse leader while Ichiro is a selfish one dimensional egomaniac?
Because the stated reason is total crap. The players aren’t mad at Ichiro for playing hurt, even if that’s what they’ll state publicly. They’re mad at him because he’s Japanese, or he stretches by himself, or he wears funny clothing, or some other non-baseball reason. I’m not denying that they really do dislike Ichiro – this isn’t the first time this has come up – but I am calling BS on their reasoning. MLB players don’t get aggravated to violence because a guy won’t sit out when he’s hurt. Just the opposite, in fact, has been the case with Erik Bedard, where members of the team reportedly have no respect for him because he wouldn’t pitch with pain.
So, what is the real reason? It could be racially based (let’s be honest, MLB players aren’t the smartest crowd in the world), it could be personality based (“His shoes are pink – how gay!”), or it could be something else entirely. I have no idea, and I don’t pretend to know. But I do know this – I don’t care what a bunch of replacement level, washed up, overpaid and entitled career losers think about Ichiro’s efforts or value, and neither should the M’s front office. If Carlos Silva thinks Ichiro is selfish, then maybe Carlos Silva should look into being more selfish and pitching well enough to win a game once in a while.
100/100 club
I know milestones like this are pretty meaningless, but the loss mark on its own is enough to stop and contemplate.
Going back past the Gillick-through-Bavasi years, you have to really go back to get an M’s team this bad. They have a shot, if they really pull together — and Silva’s re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-injury doesn’t help their chances — to lose out and tie the franchise record of 104 losses in a year, set in 1978, the second year of their existence. More reachable: 1980’s 59-103, or 1983’s 60-102 (two teams with payrolls of approximately $0). Anyway you look at it, this season the M’s took a colossal amount of Nintendo’s money and managed to not only historically less with it but they also managed actively set the state of the farm system back and reached out to slap around future years by committing to waste future Nintendo money in advance, in case they’re not around to sign horrible pitchers to ghastly contracts.
I know I’ve tried to skate through the year a little, not spending too much time staring into the abyss, looking for bright spots like Morrow’s progression, or Ichiro’s play, but I paused after the game tonight and thought about the scope of this disaster for a while. The more I think about it, comparing how the team fell this far that it’s competing with those early expansion years, the more I wonder what I’m doing following this idiocy.
I can’t understand why anyone would want to retain Lincoln and Armstrong’s services, or anyone associated with them or even who knows them after the they put this capstone on the rubble they’ve turned the franchise into these last few years.
Game 158, Angels at Mariners
Felix! It’s Felix! Yayyy! Two-game win streak here we come!
Looking at the standings, I take some small consolation from knowing the Yankees won’t be getting a playoff berth either.
Our long nightmare ends
If you’d told me before the season started that the M’s would have a 12-game losing streak broken in a start where Ryan Feierabend left with five runs on his record, Roy Corcoran would get the win by pitching two innings, and four of the teams’ nine RBI would be from Jeremy Reed and Wlad Balentien, I’d probably have just stared.
“Attendance” last night was under 20k: 19,065.
Remaining games: 2 against the Angels, 3 against the A’s.
The Nationals have 2 against the Marlins and three in Philly.
I can’t bring myself to root against the M’s, but I don’t see any reason I can’t root for those lovable Nationals.
Game 157, Angels at Mariners
Weaver v Feierabend
On The Other Hand
While you might not want to care what they think about the 2009 standings, baseball writers can be really good at what they’re paid to do – write. In particular, Larry Stone is tremendous at making columns about baseball amazingly fun to read.
Today, he’s got another great one on the relationships players have with their bats. It’s more of Stone at his best, as he is often, and evidence of why the newspaper isn’t dead yet. As long as they still have people like him writing for them, they’ll always have an audience.
Yup, ignore ESPN
The Vegas Watch blog evaluated the preseason predictions of a lot of famous people, plus PECOTA’s projection system. And then Tom Tango updated the chart to include the default projection of every team going 81-81. Here’s the revised list (number to the right is RMSE)
9.6 PECOTA
10.2 Neyer
10.5 Law
10.6 Perfectly Competitive Balanced (all teams predicted at 81-81)
10.8 Vegas
11.1 Passan
11.3 Sheehan
11.4 Brown
11.7 Kurkijan
12.1 Stark
12.1 Henson
12.4 Phillips
13.0 Olney
PECOTA did the best, and then two PECOTA-ish writers (Neyer and Law) also beat the default projection. Everyone else did worse.
Let me repeat – everyone else did worse than predicting all 30 teams to go 81-81. If you knew absolutely nothing about baseball, didn’t know the rules, had never heard of any players, but you had a basic understanding of probability, you would have done better at predicting the 2008 MLB season than pretty much all of the experts on TV.
Yep.
Keep this in mind the next time some professional baseball writer calls you an arrogant bastard for daring to ignore their insights and opinions that stem from years of experience. They suck at turning their experience into actual knowledge. In fact, they suck at it so badly that they can actively take away knowledge. Listening to Steve Phillips and giving him credit for knowing something can actually make you know less about baseball than if you stuck your fingers in your ears and hummed every time he came on TV. And he used to run a baseball team.
People who think that their positions entitle them to have their opinions respected are likely not worth listening to. If they actually had something of value to share, they wouldn’t have to lean on their employment status, but could stand on their track records instead.
Moral of the story – ignore the media. They don’t know baseball any more than you do.