Two Interesting Developments
Two notes from the AL today that could have a ripple effect on the M’s.
The White Sox offered Abreu $8 million on a one year deal, which probably puts him out of range for the M’s. Chicago is a great place to hit, especially in the summer, and if he’s looking to re-establish some all-star numbers and get a big payday next winter, he’s got a better chance of doing that in Chicago than in Seattle. That means the M’s would probably have to spend around ~$10 million to land Abreu, and given the available alternatives and their respective costs, that doesn’t make much sense.
However, a new, lower cost option may be opening up. The Orioles signed Ty Wigginton to a two year deal at just over $3 million per season. Wigginton best fits as a 1B/DH, but the O’s already have handed Aubrey Huff the first base job and moved Luke Scott to DH to make room for Felix Pie in left field. Scott isn’t thrilled with the idea of DH’ing, and he shouldn’t be – he’s an above average defensive corner outfielder, and his skillset makes him more valuable in the OF than being used as a bat only guy.
So, the Orioles should have some incentives to move Scott to a team that could use a lower cost, left-handed outfielder with some power and a decent glove. Like, say, the Mariners. He’s not an all-star, and at 30 years, he’s not going to get much better, but he’s a solid player who would help the M’s offense more than he would hurt their defense. At $2.5 million for 2009 (and arb eligible for 2010 and 2011), he’s a lower cost option than guys like Abreu or Swisher.
So, the Abreu option might be going away while the Luke Scott option emerges as a possibility.
No Thanks
John Hickey gives us a blog post with some good news mixed with bad news.
Perhaps that call will come from Minnesota. Sources suggest that the Mariners have been trying to clear some room on the payroll by trading left-handed starter Jarrod Washburn to the Twins.
The Twins might take Washburn? Sweet!
One deal discussed in the last week or so involved sending Washburn and catcher Jeff Clement to Minnesota in exchange for 23-year-old outfielder Delmon Young.
Ummm… no thanks. Delmon Young could be a nice buy low candidate as his stock has taken a huge hit the last two years, but the Mariners are a bad, bad fit for him. A right-handed, bad defensive OF, he has upside, but is not so much better than the sum of the M’s current group of young OFs (Wladimir Balentien, Greg Halman, Michael Saunders, Dennis Raben, Ezequiel Carrera) that they should be trading Clement to add to the deepest position in the organization. When looking at a one versus the field proposition, you’re almost always better off taking the field – in fact, I’d argue that it’s not just possible but likely that one of the five players listed in the parenthesis will be a better major league player going forward than Delmon Young.
Making this deal would do a lot of things, and most of them not good. It would make the ’09 team worse both offensively and defensively, skew the line-up even further to the RH side, block off the path to the majors for some of the team’s better prospects, and generally muck up a lot of the good work that’s been done this winter.
This rumor doesn’t make sense for the Mariners, and it doesn’t really make sense for the Twins either. See, they have this guy named Mauer that isn’t going anywhere, so they’d be acquiring Clement as a DH, which he wouldn’t be particularly happy with. And he’s not so great a hitting prospect that teams should be crawling all over themselves to acquire Clement The DH.
So, I’m just going to write this one off as one of those strange rumors that isn’t going anywhere. It’s just not a deal that makes sense, and thankfully, with this new front office, we can feel safe that not every rumor that would make the team worse will come to fruition.
The Template For Success in 2009
We’ve talked a lot so far this winter about how well we think the new regime has handled the roster, rebuilding with quality young major league talents, finding low cost players with real upside, and aligning the team so that the defense complements the pitching staff. However, questions still remain about how the team is going to score runs, and ultimately, win games. Can you contend with a shortage of offense, a good defense, and mediocre pitching?
The 2003 Mariners say that you can. Six years ago, the Mariners ran out a line-up of defense-first position players and surrounded them with an average rotation and turned it into 93 wins. Seriously, take a look at some of the production the M’s got that year.
Catcher (Wilson/Davis): .235/.276/.354 in 610 PA
Third Base (Cirillo/McLemore): .243/.321/.340 in 654 PA
Left Field (Winn/McLemore): .277/.330/.401 in 687 PA
First Base (Olerud): .265/.361/.389 in 701 PA
The Mariners got a combined 42 home runs and a .372 SLG% from those four positions. They had a first baseman with no power, a left fielder with no power, and got nothing offensively from either catcher or third base. Ichiro had the third highest slugging percentage among the starting nine. Ichiro!
The offense was essentially Bret Boone (.387 wOBA), Edgar Martinez (.386 wOBA), five guys right around league average (Cameron, Ichiro, Winn, Olerud, and Guillen), and two huge holes. The team hit 139 home runs, 13th out of 14 AL teams, and only 2 HR ahead of the least powerful team, Tampa Bay.
Despite the lack of power and only two guys who could claim to have had legitimately good offensive seasons, the team scored 795 runs. Boone going nuts and Edgar’s last stand, mixed with a bunch of guys who didn’t have any power but didn’t make a lot of outs, along with two black holes in the line-up added up to an above average offense.
However, the strength of the team wasn’t at the plate, but instead, at the field. They were the best defensive team in baseball, racking up a +52 UZR. Thanks to their outstanding gloves, the team had the second best ERA in the American League despite a pretty mediocre pitching staff. The rotation just wasn’t that good – Pineiro (3.93 FIP), Moyer (4.01 FIP), Meche (4.79 FIP), Garcia (4.82 FIP), and Franklin (5.17 FIP) comprised a group of a pair of decent mid-rotation starters and three guys who were on the fringes of being bounced from the rotation entirely.
However, the M’s got a 3.92 ERA from the rotation despite their 4.54 FIP. The Winn-Cameron-Ichiro outfield made mediocre pitchers look excellent, and the team kept runs off the board as well as any in the American League. By only allowing 3.9 runs per game, the M’s won a lot of low scoring contests, making up with their gloves what they lacked with their bats.
13th in the league in home runs. A 4.54 FIP from their starting pitchers. 93 wins.
The 2009 Mariners aren’t going to score 800+ runs. They might not score 700+ if the team doesn’t land one more quality hitter. But, if they commit to running out a Chavez-Gutierrez-Ichiro outfield and the middle infield gives some better glove performances (either by improvement or by more innings for Cedeno), this defense has a chance to be very, very good. The pitching on this team is better than the pitching that was the ’03 staff. There’s run prevention talent on this roster.
If the Mariners are going to contend this year, it’s going to look a lot like 2003.
Kotchman, Braves reach deal
1y, $2.85m
Other than that, I don’t think anything’s really going on.