Mariner Annual Pre-Orders Now Available
The 2010 Mariner Annual, announced yesterday, is now available for pre-order from the Maple Street Press store. As noted on the page, the magazine will ship on February 17th if ordered directly from MSP, and will be in retail stores on March 2nd.
Buy early, buy often, buy lots.
The Project
Over the last few months, I’ve hinted at a project that was a bit time consuming for me, but would result in something pretty awesome for Mariner fans in the spring. I officially announced this on Saturday at the USSM/LL event, but here’s the scoop for everyone who was not there.
We have partnered with Maple Street Press, a publishing company out of Massachusetts, to produce a 2010 Mariner Annual. It’s going to be 128 pages of ad free, Mariner specific goodness. Their production team is terrific, running full color, aesthetically pleasing productions that are of the highest quality. The images in the magazine come from Getty, and the entire thing comes off as a top flight press product. To give you an idea of the content that will be in this magazine:
Larry Stone: An In Depth Interview With Don Wakamatsu About Baseball Strategy.
Art Thiel: Griffey’s Return To Seattle
Jonah Keri: How Lou Gorman Built The 1977 Mariners
Geoff Baker: The Franchise Turnaround
Shannon Drayer: Ryan Rowland-Smith’s Road To The Bigs
Jeff Sullivan: The Actual Value Of Defense and Chone Figgins Is Better Than You Think
Vince Gennaro: The Secondary Value Of Defense
Dave Allen: Pitch F/x Tackles Cliff Lee
Matthew Carruth: Effects of Safeco’s Asymmetry
Derek Zumsteg: Edgar Belongs In Cooperstown and Ichiro Just Doesn’t Age
Jay Yencich: Top 10 Prospects
Jason Churchill: Dustin Ackley’s Future
Jon Shields: Catcher Of The Future (Adam Moore)
Dave Cameron: The Maturation Of Felix Hernandez
Essentially, the entire blogosphere has collaborated on this project, giving us 16 articles ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words apiece. I hired the best baseball writers I could find, and they turned in terrific, interesting pieces on everything from the minors to how the team got started. We cover a broad spectrum of topics, and the hope is that the magazine will appeal to all Mariner fans. There’s certainly statistical analysis in there, but Jonah’s piece on Gorman and Thiel’s piece on Griffey will be enjoyed by any long time fan of the team. Shannon’s piece on Hyphen is just good reading, regardless of what kind of fan you are. And Larry’s interview with Wak is tremendous.
I’m really proud of the whole thing. It’s going to be awesome. It will be on sale at the beginning of March at local bookstores and retail outlets that sell magazines (as well as online through Maple Street’s website for those out-of-towners who want a copy), and it’s the best $12.99 you will spend this spring. It’s the blogosphere in print, previewing the 2010 team and looking at where we’ve come from. It’s going to be tremendous.
USSM/LL Event Recap
So, that went well.
Section 331 has already written her recap, and I know that there will be one up on Proball NW in the not too distant future, so feel free to read those to get the perspective of a few folks in the audience.
From my spot on stage, I thought the afternoon was a lot of fun. We spent the first hour making a lot of jokes before Jack, Tony, Mac, and Jeff Kingston arrived and took the stage. We then spent about two hours bouncing questions off of them, ranging from Cliff Lee (they think he’s good) to Brandon League (Blengino is apparently super super high on him) to what they would like us to understand (players are people).
They talked about acquiring Milton Bradley as a conclusion of reward outweighing risk, and had some interesting comments about how they don’t see Wak as Houdini, insinuating that they’re not expecting Bradley to be an angel here. They understand the volatility, but they’re willing to take a shot on it working in a smaller, more friendly environment than Chicago, pointing to his success in San Diego and Texas.
They talked about planning the off-season planning, dismissing a notion of “going for it” in lieu of “rebuilding”, choosing rather to make moves that improved the team. They talked about Dustin Ackley (they’re encouraged by the early reviews at second base), they talked about Chone Figgins (he was the guy that everyone in the front office wanted), and they talked about wanting to do a couple more things before the season starts.
They were great. They did a good job of answering the questions that they wanted to answer while inserting humor into the questions they didn’t want to answer. The standing ovation at the end was louder than at the beginning.
For those who came out, thanks for making the trip. We’ll do it again, I’m sure.
Bargain of the decade
Not literally (the Evan Longoria contract and maybe a couple others would beat it out), but there’s a reason for the time interval chosen in the title. Now that the Franklin Gutierrez extension is official, let’s take a look at what it costs to sign a CF for his age 27-30 seasons and buy out one season of free agency, when the guy is all-world defensively, has a little bit of power, and is generally competent offensively, although being a righthanded hitter, Safeco Field hurts his production somewhat:
Signing bonus: $1.25 million
Age 27: $2.225 million
Age 28: $3 million
Age 29: $4.25 million
Age 30: $7 million
Total outlay for 4 years – $17.725 million. But that doesn’t quite add up, you might think, the number doesn’t match reports that Gutierrez’s new contract is for $20.5 million. That’s right, it doesn’t. We haven’t seen the exact breakdown of his extension yet. These numbers are what Mike Cameron was paid during his Mariner career, starting exactly a decade ago. (To be precise, Cameron actually signed a 3-year deal with the signing bonus after being arbitration-eligible his first year.)
Now, if you’ve spent much time here you should already know that Cameron was (and still is) seriously undervalued. Ten years later, the Mariners will be paying just 15.7% more for his equivalent. That’s in raw dollars, without adjusting for inflation of any kind. In the U.S., inflation over the past ten years comes in at 28.5%, even with a couple of stock market crashes in the interim. In major league baseball, the average salary has gone up 88% over the last ten years.
Sure, we’re going through a bit of a correction for baseball salaries, but this is still an incredible bargain. You can calculate however you like what the contract should be worth and come up with numbers like $30 million, $40 million, $60 million (as Matthew did over at Lookout Landing). You can’t come up with $20 million. This is just as good a deal as Cameron was in the first place.
All that, and I haven’t even mentioned the team option for 2014. We’ll see how good that looks depending on how Gutierrez ages, but I think we can at least hope that this time, our GM won’t get tired of our centerfielder just because he strikes out too much.
Current depth chart for the next hour or so
Remember: this is not a 40 or 25-man roster.
Pitching
SP-R Felix Hernandez
SP-L Cliff Lee
SP-L Ryan Rowland-Smith
SP-R Ian Snell
SP-R Doug Fister
(SP-R Yusmeiro Petit, then there’s a grey area for a couple of the guys below)
Soooo let’s try and sort out the bullpen this time, rather than just leave a huge blob. Assume 7.
RP-R David Aardsma
RP-R Brandon League
RP-R Mark Lowe
RP-L Luke French
RP-L Jason Vargas
RP-L Garrett Olson
RP-R Shawn Kelley
(then the blob: RP-R Sean White, RP-R Kanekoa Texeira)
Position players
C-R Rob Johnson
C-R Adam Moore
1B-L Casey Kotchman
2B-R Jose Lopez
SS-R Jack Wilson
3B-B Chone Figgins
LF-L Michael Saunders
CF-R Franklin Gutierrez
RF-L Ichiro!
DH-L Ken Griffey Jr.
DH/LF-B Milton Bradley
IF-L Jack Hannahan
OF-L Ryan Langerhans
I’m inclined, like Dave, to think Saunders goes to AAA to start the season, and they run their multi-headed platoon in left/DH.
SS-R Chris Woodward probably becomes the team’s backup infielder stashed in AAA, or forces Hannahan down.
Second and almost certainly last USSM event question thread
We’re going to compile questions tomorrow, so post ’em (or email ’em) if you’ve got em.
Updated Take On Kotchman Deal
It’s funny how something as seemingly small as Bill Hall’s inclusion into the Casey Kotchman deal can change things. As noted below, I wasn’t a huge fan of acquiring Kotchman to be the everyday first baseman if that was the last piece the M’s would be adding. If Hall was still around, then you’d have your 13 position players, and that would be that. But with Kotchman essentially swapping places with Hall on the roster, it changes the dynamic somewhat.
With Kotchman replacing Hall, first base closes off for potential acquisitions. But, LF opens up a bit. Prior to this deal, I had outlined why we should expect some kind of Langerhans/Hall/Bradley platoon in left. Hall was likely to be the guy playing LF against lefties. That spot is now open, as there’s really no one on the roster currently to replace him.
So, it seems likely that the final roster spot will be given to an outfielder, replacing Hall on the roster, and probably eating into some of the at-bats that would have been given to Langerhans in the old setup. This would make the new guy a more regular player, probably in line for 400 to 500 AB, shifting Langerhans to a 4th OF role and keeping Bradley as more of a DH than an LF.
Until we know who that guy is, we can’t really evaluate the Kotchman deal. It’s a setup for another move, shifting the need from 1B to LF. I’d imagine the M’s already know who is going to fill that spot, though, and they decided they’d rather have that guy than any of the available first basemen at the current asking prices.
ARE YOU KIDDING ME? ARE YOU FRICKING KIDDING?
I’ve been to Cooperstown. It’s just a plaque. And I’ve managed to talk myself into not caring so much about what writers vote for when it comes to the MVP and whatnot.
But then Rickey doesn’t get in unanimously and steam comes out my ears. Or this… I would start my litany of complaint, but it’ll be a string of curse words and we’ll get USSM blocked on people’s work filters.
The Myth Of Defensive Diminishing Returns
This was written before the Kotchman deal became public. I published it, then took it down when the Gutierrez news broke (so it wouldn’t get lost in the shuffle). This is not written to justify the Kotchman acquisition, which I’m lukewarm about. But it’s still true.
One of the popular phrases you’ll hear people spout is that the M’s “have enough” defense and now need to focus on adding some offense. The idea behind this is that adding another good defensive player will have less of an impact on the team’s overall record, because they are already a good defensive team. This is basically the theory of diminishing returns, where the next unit of something is worth less than the prior unit you acquired.
There are a lot of areas where diminishing returns are an important concept to understand. When stores try to up-sell you into an 84 ounce drink because its the best “value”, diminishing returns helps you realize that the actual value of the liquid beyond what you should consume is actually zero, so you’re paying for something you simply don’t need, and in reality, you should just order the human sized version.
This even applies in roster construction for baseball teams. The Mariners have four power right-handed relief pitchers on the roster right now, with David Aardsma, Mark Lowe, Brandon League, and Shawn Kelley. The marginal value of adding another reliever to the bullpen is diminished from their true talent level, because there are only so many high leverage innings to go around. If the team signed a guy like Jose Valverde, his innings would come at the expense of one of the relievers already here, so the actual value they’d get from Valverde would be less than what he would add to a team with a more shallow bullpen.
Since this is a valid theory, and it works in other parts of roster construction, a lot of people have no problem transferring it over to the defensive side of the game. The assumption is made that a quality defensive team will face diminishing returns from adding another quality defensive player, resulting in a value add that is less than the player’s actual abilities.
This assumption is wrong.
Put simply, almost every single ball in play that matters is only catchable by one player. On a line drive to left field, the quality of the defender at second base is completely irrelevant. That the team already has Franklin Gutierrez and Jack Wilson doesn’t matter when the hitter smashes a line drive down the first base line – the only variable on the defensive side is the quality of the first baseman. If he’s lousy, then the play isn’t getting made, regardless of how good his teammates are defensively.
Now, I know there are plays where two defenders converge on the ball, but those balls in play are going to be outs 99.9 percent of the time even if the second guy doesn’t get there. Even the worst defensive teams in baseball turn 65% of their balls in play into outs. Nearly two-thirds of all non-HR contact is fairly routine for the defense, and those plays are going to be outs whether you have Adam Dunn or Endy Chavez playing defense.
The plays that matter, though, where the runs are saved and wins are earned, are on balls that are smoked. Hot shots up the middle, sinking liners in the gap – this is where the difference in defensive ability comes into play, and on nearly all of those types of plays, there is only one guy who has a chance to convert the out. His defensive quality matters, and that’s it.
History has shown this to be true. When you put a good defensive SS next to a good defensive 3B, their individual numbers do not take a significant hit. Ichiro’s UZR did not go down when the Mariners replaced Jeremy Reed with Franklin Gutierrez, despite Death To Flying Things covering more ground than any outfielder in baseball. Adrian Beltre’s UZR didn’t crash when the team went from Yuniesky Betancourt to Ronny Cedeno and then to Jack Wilson. There just aren’t enough plays that matter where two guys both can convert the out for there to be significant diminishing returns in playing quality defenders side by side.
If the Mariners add a good defensive first baseman, they will get the full value from his glove, regardless of the fact that they already have good defenders around the field. If they upgrade their second base defense, it will improve the run prevention, even though they already have Jack Wilson playing shortstop. There is no evidence that there are significant diminishing returns from adding another good defender to a team that already plays good defense.
Run difference matters. Whether you create another 20 runs with an offensive first baseman or save another 20 runs with a defensive first baseman doesn’t matter. 20 runs are 20 runs, and those 20 defensive runs saved are not dependent on the skills of the other guys on the field.
Now, it’s certainly easier to find a +20 hitter than a +20 fielder at first base, so there’s a pretty solid argument to be made that the team will likely add a guy who is more of an offensive player at the position, but don’t buy into the hype that the team “needs a hitter and already has enough defense”. It’s not true.
M’s Maybe To Trade For Kotchman
Buster Olney, among others, reports that the M’s are “expected” to acquire Casey Kotchman from the Red Sox for a minor leaguer.
Kotchman is a +1 to +1.5 win, 27-year-old first baseman whose value mostly comes from his contact skills and defense. He’s a Zduriencik kind of player – left-handed, patient approach, good defensively, young-ish with upside, coming off a poor year where his value is low. He’s got some value, and he’s certainly better than what the team already had in guys like Mike Carp.
What he’s not, however, is a big powerful thumper who is going to hit 30+ home runs. He’s a gap power guy whose ISO has declined each of the last two years, to the point where he’s been a below average hitter for the past two years. We talked about how power wasn’t utterly necessary with a guy like Chone Figgins or Nick Johnson because they did so many other things well, but Kotchman isn’t at that level. He has a good approach at the plate, but he’s not a 100 walk guy. He’s a good defender, but not a great one. He doesn’t run particularly well. So, given those other skills, he has to drive the ball to be a good player. And he hasn’t done it with regularity in a couple of years.
He’s worse than the Overbay/Branyan/LaRoche types by about +0.5 to +1 win per season. He’s cheaper, and younger, and healthier, but not as good. There are reasons to think he’s got some upside to maybe get to that +2 to +2.5 win level, but you can’t expect it, not after what he’s done the last two years. You hope for it, but you don’t count on it.
As a player, he’s kind of like Ryan Langerhans or Jack Hannahan. He’s a good role player, but you could do better. Unless the M’s are just out of money and can’t get any of the better free agents to sign here for what they’re offering, this is a bit of a curious move.
Update: Ken Rosenthal says Bill Hall is going to Boston in the deal. Interesting.