Minor League Wrap (4/25/-5/1/11)
We were 12-13 this week, so I guess things seem to be on the up-and-up, particularly with the high minors affiliates. In this wrap, we talk defense, High Desert mirages, players on the rebound, and the debut of a very important pitcher. Also Horacio Ramirez makes an appearance.
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Minor League Wrap (4/18-24/11)
In the last wrap, people mentioned that they looked on these as a sign of hope in a troubled time for Mariners baseball. This week, the affiliated went 8-18. Whoops. Some positive things came of it all at certain levels, but one has to root around a bit in order to dig those up in some cases.
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Minor League Wrap (4/7-17/11)
Hello, and welcome to the first giant wall of text this season, to be followed by more, sometimes even larger walls of text later in the season. We have a listing of games for you, some transactions, some items of interest, and a whole lot of real and pretended analysis.
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2011 Tacoma Rainiers Preview
This our triple-A team. I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking repeat. The new park down there in Tacoma is also looking really nice now and I’m looking forward to checking it out in the coming weeks, as soon as they’re playing at home and I have the free time to get there.
With this, the minor league preview season is done and the minor league regular season starts tomorrow. I won’t have a wrap up for the first Monday, because four games isn’t so much to look at, but things should resume their usual routine on the following Monday. I’ll be working on other projects in the meantime.
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2011 Jackson Generals Preview
Sometimes, you play with the roster you have and not the roster you would like to have. I mean, look at the Mariners bullpen. The Jackson Generals, in their first season with a new name, are running into a similar issue. They have eight players on their DL to open the season, spanning all throughout the roster. I have no idea what the team will really look like a month from now, but here’s some projections based on the available data. It seems like it could be a pretty solid team with a chance at the playoffs. I guess.
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2011 High Desert Mavericks Preview
The end of spring training leaves the Mavericks in a strange position, perhaps stranger than the fact that I am still writing about them in 2011 when I did not want to be writing about them in 2009. On one hand, they’ve eliminated radio broadcast in a cost cutting measure, though I’ve heard that one fellow will be doing weekend games on a pro bono basis. On the other, ticket prices are down (yay?) and the new ownership group plans on sticking it out in Adelanto and trying to talk the city into making stadium improvements. We are going to be stuck there forever, in a park that had a 156/156 factor for home runs last year. Might as well make the best of it…
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2011 Clinton Lumberkings Preview
Here we go, just two days away now and already getting some rosters in. This year’s group of Lumberkings has a much younger look than last year’s, with nine players on the roster born in the 90s. It also has intriguing talent at just about every position, and as a team, might interest me even more than last year’s west division champion squad. The Lumberkings will be celebrating their 75th anniversary in Clinton this year, and if things break right for them, it could be a good one. I’m already planning on tuning into a lot of games.
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Rebuilding and the Draft
Rebuilding is a dirty word in baseball. In football or basketball, it’s possible to cobble together a youth movement with a few savvy trades and a strong draft. If you’re lucky, you’ll be competing again by year two. In baseball, if a player is even on a MLB roster after two years as a pro, it’s a rare return. The 40-man rules are even set up so that prospects don’t need to be protected from the Rule 5 draft until three or four years into their careers, and even then given three or more option years to be sent back to the minors. The development of prospects in baseball, even for the best of them, takes time. Even worse, when a team starts talking about a rebuilding effort, very often they’re dealing with a stretch where the organization wasn’t able to produce good, young players. Fans get impatient, journalists get impatient, owners get impatient, and before long, whatever groundwork a new GM worked to lay is now being salvaged off for quicker fixes. Rebuilding efforts are both perilous and time consuming.
What follows here is a study of the return the Mariners have gotten from the draft from 2003 to 2007. Anything more recent would be a bit too soon and anything before that would only upset everyone. The goal isn’t to make anyone sick so much as show how the present youth movement, while well-intentioned, is operating with substantial constraints left over by previous administrations. Let’s get to it then, here comes the horror show. I swear this hurts me more than it hurts you…
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Wilhelmsen and the Future
While few were ever predicting that Tom Wilhelmsen would take his great story to the major leagues out of spring training, the fact remains that him making the club as a reliever has been a possibility in the back of everyone’s mind. His Arizona Fall League stint only solidified the opinion that he has the stuff to be able to work out of the ‘pen and soon if the organization felt like fasttracking him. Still, with the appealing starting pitching options beyond Pineda including generous estimations of Robles’ abilities and ambitious timetables for Paxton, some have come to me asking if Wilhelmsen could start, and if so, would his addition to the Mariners staff represent a setback.
Wilhelmsen is an odd duck in many respects. If you run down the list of reasons why guys are converted to relief, it’s usually stalled development (age can be a factor here), lack of command, lack of tertiary offerings, and durability concerns. Wilhelmsen doesn’t quite fit the bill. Limited experience as a pro keeps him from being “stalled”, though he is older, and durability right now is an unknown beyond reports of some nerve issues in the elbow coming off his independent league campaign. If nothing else, his arm is reasonably fresh. His command and stuff are also pretty good for a guy who wasn’t throwing for a long time, perhaps much better than they have any right to be. Much talk has been devoted to the live fastball and the bombshell curve, but all the scouting reports I’ve seen on him also mention a change-up and a sinker, both in complementary terms, which indicates that the two could be serviceable pitches in time. The two biggest marks against Wilhelmsen is that he is older, which would make an organization inclined to be less patient with him, and he lacks experience. Everything else says he has the capacity to start.
When we look at Wilhelmsen’s situation, we ought to recognize that this is really quite different from every other instance we’ve recently seen where a pitcher was aggressively promoted to the major leagues in order to relieve. Time against more polished hitters is the biggest thing Wilhelmsen is lacking. Some of this was even referenced in the articles that have been circulating, about how he realized that he couldn’t blow the ball past the better hitters and started to get himself into more trouble as he moved up the ladder last season. He doesn’t need to start from scratch with a third pitch to keep hitters honest, he just needs to figure out how to set them up and when to use each of his offerings.
If he’s conscious of this and doesn’t become a two-pitch guy in the bullpen, then using him in the bullpen won’t keep him from starting at a later date. The ambitious, best-case scenario could involve him limiting his innings by relieving this season and then getting his feet wet starting for the Lara Cardenales in the LVBP over the winter. Continuing the daydream, if he does well there, he could contend for a spot in the rotation as early as next year. All of these plans are contingent on a few factors that may not come to pass, but none of them seem improbable. Wilhelmsen may yet be a possibility for the starting rotation.
Stories From Camp That I’m Reading, pt. 6
As the spring goes on, we get to the point where rosters are mostly conceived and the talk of prospects is of those that will make it, not the camp curiosities. But hey, this is the end of it, isn’t it? We’re getting on to the point where the real baseball will start, along with real-ish minor league baseball soon after that.
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