A Suggestion For Dumping Chone Figgins
Like Jeff Cirillo, Carlos Silva, and many others before him, Chone Figgins came to Seattle with some fanfare and a pretty decent sized contract… and promptly fell flat on his face. To say that he’s been bad would be the understatement of the year, and at this point, it’s hard to see Figgins having any significant role on this team going forward. The team could keep him around as a super-utility guy, but he can’t really play SS/CF, so he’d be a reserve 3B/2B/LF, which just isn’t all that valuable or all that hard to find.
So, despite being owed another $17 million in salary for 2012 and 2013, Figgins probably needs to go away this winter. The team could just release him and eat the cost of his salary, but teams are often reluctant to make that kind of maneuver and essentially admit that a move was a total failure. More often, they look for some other team’s overpriced underachiever and try to make a “change of scenery” swap, hoping both players will do better in a new location with a fresh start.
My guess is that’s exactly what the M’s will try to do with Figgins this winter, and in that vein, I’d like to offer up a suggestion on one particular team to call – the San Francisco Giants. They are the unfortunate rights-holders to one Barry Zito, who has two years left on the $126 million contract he signed as a free agent in the winter of 2006. That contract was one of the biggest disasters in baseball history, and because they misjudged his talents, the Giants are still on the hook for a whopping $46 million over the next two years (including the obvious buyout of the 2014 option). That money is essentially going to be wasted, however, as the Giants crowded rotation has pushed Zito out and Bruce Bochy wouldn’t even commit to him as a starting pitcher next year. Best case scenario for the Giants, they’d have the world’s most expensive left-handed specialist on their hands.
That’s not a good situation for anyone, and if they can convince Zito to waive his no-trade clause (which shouldn’t be that hard if he’s staring at a relief role for the next two years), shipping him to a team that would give him a chance to start would probably be best for everyone. Enter the Mariners.
Right now, the M’s have three decent Major League starting pitchers in the organization – Felix, Pineda, and Vargas. Blake Beavan doesn’t miss enough bats to be more than a replacement level placeholder, while Charlie Furbush belongs in the bullpen, where he can be used situationally to match-up against left-handed batters. Yes, there are some good arms in the farm system, but counting on Danny Hultzen or James Paxton to make the rotation out of spring training is asking too much of them, and the organization is best served by not rushing its best prospects to the majors too quickly.
Zito isn’t exactly anyone’s idea of an ace anymore, but he is a left-handed fly ball guy whose skills are fairly well suited to Safeco Field, and before this season, he’d been one of the game’s most durable pitchers. Having a guy who can soak up innings at the back of the rotation, even if they aren’t the highest quality innings around, has some usefulness for a team with as little high level pitching depth as the Mariners.
If nothing else, the M’s have the ability to find out if Zito is finished as a Major League starter or not. They could give him 10-15 starts next year to see if he’s got anything left, and if not, replace him come summertime with a guy like Paxton or Hultzen. If he manages a career rejuvenation, you might even be able to move him at the trading deadline and get the buying team to pick up some of the salary the Mariners are on the hook for, thus defraying some of the cost of the original Figgins signing.
There’s basically no chance that Figgins undergoes that kind of career revitalization in Seattle. It’s unclear how he’d even manage to get on the field regularly enough to get his career going again. However, the M’s would have a use for a veteran back-end lefty who could fill a rotation spot for the first few months of 2012 at the least.
For a National League team like the Giants, Figgins’s versatility would be more significant, and they have enough question marks on the position player side of things to give him a look at various spots on the field. At the least, he’d provide more value to their team than keeping Zito around in a relief role would.
With the $29 million difference in salaries over the next two years, the Giants would have to eat a lot of cash to make an even one-for-one swap, but they’re not going to be able to move Zito without picking up nearly all of the money he’s due anyway. At least in a Figgins for Zito swap, both teams can give themselves a chance to salvage something from a free agent signing gone wrong.
Game 149, Yankees at Mariners
Jason Vargas vs. Ivan Nova, 7:00pm (ESPN telecast, so note the change in start time).
You may have seen Jeff Sullivan’s post on Jason Vargas’ recent mechanical tweak, or Kyle Boddy’s follow-up at The Hardball Times – essentially, Vargas added an Eric Bedard/Felix Hernandez-style “twist” in his delivery to add a bit of velocity while improving his deception. (Kyle discusses how a twist might produce such results in his article).
Tonight’s a great opportunity to see how well the new approach works – can he maintain the velocity increase? It’ll be especially valuable since it’ll be his second straight start at home, so the impact of pitch fx calibration will be moderated. For an example of what I mean, check out his last road start here compared to his start in late August here. They look like two different pitchers – the movement’s different, the speed’s different, even the spin rate’s quite distinct. Now compare them to his start with the new mechanics. Clearly, he picked up some velo, but we need to figure out how much of the improvement carries over, and how it might be impacted by his pitch mix too.
I’m biased, obviously, but I find this fascinating. We’re able to watch a pitcher evolve with such focus. It’s not perfect; that Oakland start can realllly throw off a trend analysis. But we learn from the player what he’s trying to do, and now we’ve got all this data to illustrate it and to show how it impacts his effectiveness. Again, just like with Phil Hughes, we’ve got a pitcher who’s constantly tweaking his mix, his pitches themselves, and his delivery to stay in the rotation, and we’re perhaps more aware of it than ever before. Maybe it’s a lot of heat and not a lot of light, but as a Jamie Moyer fan, I’m just fascinated as to how guys throwing 86-88 can survive in this league – by what separates Vargas from Vasquez, or Travis Blackley. Deception and command are huge, but I do wonder if constantly evolving and adapting isn’t part of it as well.
The Yankees send out Ivan Nova, who’s had a very effective year for New York. He’s got a fastball in the 92mph range that looks quite straight, but gets a very good number of ground balls. He also throws a curve and change-up. I’m fascinated that a pitch with very little horizontal movement and an fairly normal amount of sink can produce the GB rates that Nova’s put up. But there, just ahead of Nova on the fangraphs leaderboard, is Zach Britton, who throws a 92mph FB (from the left side) with similar sink and gets similar results with it. I don’t know enough about either to really push this as a comp; Britton’s is a two-seamer and it has much more horizontal movement, but there’s certainly a precedent for Nova’s GB ability. Speaking of precedents, Britton shut out the M’s in May. On the plus side, Nova gets comparatively few whiffs and few strikeouts, and I’m getting fairly sick of the M’s striking out so much. However, the line-up includes Wily Mo, Olivo, Trayvon Robinson and Luis Rodriguez, so…maybe next game.
The line-up:
1: Ichiro
2: Seager
3: Ackley
4: Carp
5: Smoak
6: Olivo
7: Pena
8: Rodriguez
9: Robinson
Game 148, Yankees at Mariners
Charlie Furbush vs. AJ Burnett
AJ Burnett’s a frustrating enigma with a massive contract and stuff that looks better to TV viewers than opposing hitters. Sure, his fastball’s no longer 95-96, but it’s still good. The curve’s no longer a challenge to conventional aerodynamics, it’s just a solid pitch that he uses too much because his FB’s not fooling anyone. In short, he is the Yankees’ Miguel Batista – a guy who people detest for a variety of (generally good) reasons, but who isn’t as out-and-out bad as his reputation implies. I don’t know if Burnett’s tempo on the mound is as glacial as Batista’s, but this ultimately doesn’t matter. What matters is the Yankees have a Batista. I cling to this.
This is perhaps the least-satisfying schadenfreude around. The Yankees have more than enough money to swallow a bad contract or two. They *always* have a Batista around who’s making way too much money, if only because so many of their players are signed to huge contracts. They shrug off the Javier Vasquez’s and they still win. They breathe life into the bloated corpse of Bartolo Colon, and they ride it past the Red Sox (incidentally: John Lackey! Ha!). When even King Felix gets pounded by the Yankee dreadnought, the only thing I can do is point at their Batista and laugh a knowing laugh.
The line-up:
1: Ichiro
2: Seager
3: Ackley
4: Carp
5: Smoak
6: Olivo
7: Kennedy (DH)
8: Wells (CF)
9: Ryan
Game 147, Yankees at Mariners
Felix Hernandez vs. Phil Hughes, 7:10pm
Happy Felix Day! From 2009-2011, you’d be hard pressed to find a more consistent pitcher than King Felix. His FIP has swung between 3.09 and 3.02, and he’ll be worth 6+ wins for the third straight year. His pitch mix and velocity are quite consistent within the season too. Look at his pitch fx velocity graph here, for example: there are the occasional dips/spikes in velo (which may have more to do with pitch fx calibration issues than anything), but by and large, hitters know what they’re going to see from Felix. They just can’t hit it.
I bring it up because his opponent tonight, Phil Hughes, might be one of the more volatile pitchers in the league. There are a number of ways to measure volatility – this article at Beyond the Boxscore describes one, for example. But I’m not talking about a pitcher’s results, I mean: I have no idea what Hughes will throw tonight.
Phil Hughes was the #4 prospect in baseball in 2007, then got yo-yo’d between the bullpen and the rotation with a brilliant relief season in 2009 and a very solid year as a starter in 2010. Injuries have played a role in these moves, as he missed much of 2008 with rib/torso injuries. But a bout of dead arm this spring led to low velocity and ineffectiveness in April has led him to have one of the more experimental seasons I can remember. He toyed with a slider early on – a pitch he threw in 2009, but shelved in 2010 in favor of a change. His fastball averaged around 89 MPH in April, then 90 and even 92 later in the year. More than anything though, Hughes keeps working on his curve. It was a useful pitch for him when he was breaking into the majors, but he hasn’t been able to sustain that early success with it.
In April, his curve velocity was down considerably, along with his fastballs’. He returned to the big leagues with a new curveball grip to improve movement and velocity, and…nothing happened. Then, on August 2nd, he was throwing curves in the low 80s against the White Sox in his best outing of the year. I don’t think he changed the grip on it, but it took him a while to get the bump in velocity on it that he said he was after back in July. So what’s happened since August 2nd? His curve’s back under 73 MPH, and his FB velocity’s down a bit as well.
This seems like an awful lot of tweaking, but then you’d tweak everything you could too if you were getting torched like Hughes has this year. I think Hughes natural talent makes all of this more visible – he’s been scrutinized before he ever broke in with the Yankees, and his changing roles, injuries and yes, the team he plays for mean that we get to hear about every time he changes a breaking ball grip, or feels tightness in his shoulder, or gets extra work with the pitching coach. But the injuries have just brought him down to the level that many, most, pitchers inhabit every day.
Think of RA Dickey ditching his old breaking ball and coming up a forkball he dubbed “the Thang”…and getting pounded just as hard until he started throwing a knuckeball. Even between games, this sort of thing must be going on all the time – Jason Vargas talked about shifting from his slider to a cutter this year, and for people with less of a track record, the temptation to improvise and experiment must be pretty great. The pitching coaches may tell you that consistency and muscle memory is key, but it ain’t the pitching coach that’s going to call you into his office for a difficult discussion if your curve ball gets consistently pounded.
The point of this is: treasure Felix Hernandez. Phil Hughes was 18-8 last year, and the year before that was a shut-down late-inning reliever. Felix Hernandez was an amazing starter last year, and an amazing starter the year before that. Tonight, I’d guess he’s going to be an amazing starter. Never leave us, Felix.
The aggressive (and aggressively left-handed) line-up:
1: Ichiro
2: Seager
3: Ackley
4: Carp
5: Smoak
6: Olivo
7: Robinson
8: Ryan
9: Saunders
I know Bard caught recently, but they could’ve had 8 of 9.
The Byproduct of Aggressiveness
Over the weekend, the Mariners played four games against the Royals. The Royals pitching staff has the highest walk rate of any team in the American League. They also have the fifth lowest strikeout rate in the league, so overall, they’re just not very good.
The Mariners, in four games against that pitching staff, drew six walks and struck out 51 times. They struck out at least 11 times in each game of the series, becoming just the eighth team in AL history to accomplish that in four consecutive games. No AL team has ever done it in five straight games, so the M’s will go for that record tonight.
Jeff wrote about this yesterday over at Lookout Landing, and Mike touched on it here last week, but the M’s have now become the biggest collection of hacks in baseball. The only teams with worse BB/K ratios are in the NL, where they have to use pitchers several times a game, and even their marks aren’t that much worse than what the M’s are putting up.
It’s easy to attribute all the hacking to youth, and point out that the team is playing a bunch of guys with little to no Major League experience, and to some extent, that’s true – the team’s low walk rates and high strikeout rates are attributable to playing guys like Carlos Peguero, Greg Halman, and Michael Saunders for significant portions of the year. But the organization also targeted Miguel Olivo as the veteran catcher they wanted over the winter, and he has perhaps the worst plate approach of any regular player in Major League Baseball.
At this point, it’s essentially an organizational pandemic. There’s basically one guy – Dustin Ackley – in the whole organization who has a good plan when he goes up to the plate. Justin Smoak has the makings of giving them two guys, but he still chases a lot of pitches he should let pass. Beyond those two, there isn’t a discerning eye to be found anywhere.
Right now, the M’s run out 7 or 8 guys on a nightly basis whose sole focus at the plate is to swing the bat. Eric Wedge has wanted an aggressive team all year, and now he has the most aggressive group of hitters in baseball. The problem is that this approach doesn’t work. It doesn’t score runs. It gives pitchers free outs.
Plain and simple, the Mariners are now far too aggressive at the plate, just like they were during the Bavasi era. They present little challenge to the opposing pitcher not just because they lack talent, but because they lack a good game plan when they step into the batters box. Swing hard is not a recipe for success.
Getting better hitters would help, certainly. We can’t lay the blame at the coaching staff’s feet for not being able to make chicken soup out of chicken crap, but at the same time, Eric Wedge and his staff are here to teach these kids how to become good Major League hitters. And, unfortunately, there’s little to no evidence that any of them are getting better at the plate as the year goes on. No one is having better at-bats, getting into more hitters’ counts, or taking more free passes. If anything, we’re seeing the opposite. Previously patient hitters like Chone Figgins, Franklin Gutierrez, and Mike Carp have all stopped taking free passes this year. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Aggressiveness is fine in the right context. Stupidity is not. Right now, the M’s approach at the plate has crossed the line into being the latter.
Game 146: Royals at Mariners
Anthony Vasquez vs. Everett Teaford, 1:10pm; 9/11 memorial before the game at 12:45pm.
Everett Teaford’s a great name; I had to check baseball-reference to make sure there wasn’t an Evertt Teaford who played in the ’30s with Burleigh Grimes and Bobo Newsom. Other than that, though, he’s not terribly special. He’ll be making his starting debut today after making 23 appearances in relief.
The lefty has a 91 MPH fastball and a curve/slurvey-slider that he throws frequently to lefties or righties. That arsenal sounds like it’d produce some big platoon splits, but thus far, he’s been terrible against both. You’d expect a decent amount of strikeouts/whiffs of lefties with a good FB and a slider, but instead, he’s given up 9 free passes against 8 strikeouts against them. He’s got a better K:BB against right-handers, but he’s given up a lot of hits and 4 HRs in 57 batters faced. The samples here are tiny, as you’d expect, but he had similar problems at times in the minors.
Anthony Vasquez gets the ball for the M’s. Wooooo.
The line-up features a DH with a wOBA of .273. Adam Kennedy, you have been upstaged. Wedge clearly wanted righties, and he wanted dingers, so we’ve got Casper Wells in center, Olivo at DH and Alex Liddi at 3B.
1: Ichiro
2: Ryan
3: Ackley
4: Carp (LF)
5: Smoak
6: Olivo (DH)
7: Wells (CF!)
8: Bard (C)
9: Liddi
Aggressiveness
Looking over the stats for a few different Mariner outfielders this year:
Carlos Peguero: 155 PA, 54 SO, 34.8 K%
Casper Wells: 103 PA, 36 SO, 35.0 K%
Trayvon Robinson: 95 PA, 35 SO, 36.8 K%
Greg Halman: 91 PA, 32 SO, 35.2 K%
Other than Peguero having a few more plate appearances, because he’s the one who got the biggest extended stretch of regular playing time back when the team had fewer options, those are some alarmingly similar numbers. We’ve discussed numerous times that for all their tools and raw power, Peguero and Halman will never be useful major leaguers with their current approach. It’s worth noting that neither was called up even when rosters expanded in September (although I don’t want to overemphasize that fact, considering that Michael Saunders is not all that far below this crew). While strikeouts are not necessarily worse than other kinds of outs, failing to make contact on this level generally makes it impossible to hit for a high average because you’re just not putting the ball in play enough. Both Halman and Wells have seen their batting averages collapse after hot starts with the team, illustrating how this plays out and reminding us of how much longer batting average takes to stabilize – two years or so, while all these guys are already approaching if not past the point where their strikeout rates would stabilize.
Now, the similarity in approach is not complete, because Wells and Robinson do walk more often: 6.8% and 6.3%, compared to 5.2% for Peguero and an appallingly bad 2.2% for Halman. Walk rate also takes a bit longer to stabilize than strikeout rate, so these numbers aren’t the final word, but it’s consistent with their past performances. Still, even those slightly higher rates are not exactly all that good.
For some finer detail, check out their plate discipline stats from Fangraphs:
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Minor League Wrap (8/29-9/5/11)
I couldn’t think of any special matter to cover in the final intro, especially considering that we only have one squad headed to the playoffs, so I’ll just drop the note that we had three guys named Pitcher of the Week by their respective leagues and then get to it. Some of the write-ups for certain guys this week are rather long, so break it up if you have to. I know I had to take breaks when writing it!
To the jump!
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Game 141, Mariners at Angels
Happy Felix Day! The six-man rotation (may it die a swift and terrible death) means that even when the schedule has you facing the same team twice in a row, your pitching opponent will be different. So instead of the fine Felix vs. Dan Haren matchup we enjoyed last week, this time it has to be Felix against Ervin Santana.
Another thought to consider – we already have seven-man bullpens, imagine if the six-man rotation caught on too. You’d need more than half of your roster for the pitching staff, and you’d be left with absolutely no bench. Once you make sure you’re carrying the standard three catchers, there’s room for literally one guy, who apparently has to be able to somewhat capably play all of the positions in the field. Wait, I see a market opportunity for Chone Figgins! (And don’t tell me you can cut down on the bullpen if you go with a six-man rotation. The deeper you have to dredge to find starters, the crummier they will be, and you’ll need that bullpen more than ever.)
RF-L Ichiro
SS-R Ryan
2B-L Ackley
DH-L Carp
1B-B Smoak
C-R Olivo
3B-L Seager
LF-B Robinson
CF-L Saunders
Let’s Talk About Alex Liddi
Yesterday, the Mariners made semi-history when they promoted Alex Liddi to the Majors. While there have been other Italian born Major Leaguers, Liddi is the first in a long time to actually have been raised in Italy, as the Mariners signed him as a 17-year-old after scouting him internationally. Because of his power and the organization’s overall lack of that particular skill, he’s gotten a decent amount of attention as a prospect, and I’m sure many of you are hoping to see him play quite a bit in September.
Personally, I hope we don’t see too terribly much of Liddi this month, because I’d argue that regardless of what happens this month, he needs to spend 2012 back in Tacoma. I know it’s tempting to look at the 30 home runs he hit for the Rainiers and hope that he could provide some thump from the third base position for next year and the future, but when you look at the context of the PCL this year, Liddi didn’t actually have that great of a season.
For the season, he hit .259/.332/.488, good for an .821 OPS. The average hitter in the PCL this year hit .286/.359/.448, good for an .807 OPS. Always a good hitters league, this year the PCL was the best offensive environment to be found anywhere in the sport. Four teams averaged in excess of six runs per game, and only two averaged less than five. It was just a great year to be a hitter in the Pacific Coast League.
When you adjust for context, Liddi’s overall offensive performance simply isn’t all that impressive. He showed no real improvement in his ability to make contact, and a 27% strikeout rate in Triple-A is a legitimate concern. While he’s more selective than a guy like Carlos Peguero, often times an inability to make contact with minor league stuff indicates a more serious issue that can be exploited at the Major League level.
While Liddi made significant strides with the glove this year, he’s still a guy whose value will be tied to well he hits in the big leagues. Right now, there’s not much of a reason to think he’s ready to hit big league pitching.
If he gets regular playing time in September, there are basically two potential outcomes – he performs well and generates unrealistic expectations about his potential ability to contribute to the 2012 roster, or he struggles mightily and loses some of the sheen from what is (at least on the surface) a pretty successful 2011 campaign. Either outcome is probably not in the organization’s best interests.
Liddi is young enough to still have time to improve on his weaknesses and potentially develop into a useful big league player, but he’s just not there yet. Giving him regular playing time down the stretch will likely either generate unfair expectations or harm his confidence, and I’d rather avoid both of those outcomes.
Let him play once a week, use him in blowouts, and give him a taste of the Major Leagues. But, the best use of playing time at third base is still to continue to evaluate Kyle Seager on a daily basis, and I’d rather not see Liddi take any PT away from a guy who could legitimately fill a role on the 2012 team.