Welcome To Seattle Jack Cust
According to Susan Slusser, the M’s have signed erstwhile Athletics ‘LF’. Cust was non-tendered last week by Oakland.
Shannon Drayer’s reporting Slusser’s report, and now I am pointing to Drayer’s report of Slusser’s report.
Dave went over Cust in his post a few days ago, so the same caveats about his 2010 season (and his .371 wOBA) apply. He’s clearly a guy who can hit, but he’s now seen his ISO and HR/FB drop 3 straight years. If the team follows Dave’s advice and platoons him with Bradley, his ISO might even recover a bit. Still, even without a platoon-based recovery, a 15% walk rate and a Michael-Saundersish ISO isn’t terrible. On this team, it adds up to clear improvement.
UPDATE:
Jon Paul Morosi is reporting Cust will make a base salary of $2.5m. Not bad, Mr. Zduriencik. (hat tip-Lookout Landing)
The Jack Cust Rumor
According to Susan Slusser, the Mariners are nearing an agreement with Jack Cust. John Hickey reports that the deal probably won’t happen here at the winter meetings, however, and suggests that the M’s might leave Orlando with just their Rule 5 picks added to the roster. But, regardless, it sounds like it may indeed happen, so let’s talk about Cust for a bit.
Like Russell Branyan, he is the quintessential three true outcomes type of hitter. A huge proportion of his at-bats will end with a walk, a strikeout, or a home run – for his career, 53 percent of his plate appearances have ended with the defense being irrelevant. While Branyan emphasized the HR and K aspects of those “three true outcomes”, Cust is more of a BB and K guy. He showed some big time power in 2007 and 2008, but has seen that go south a bit the last two years, as he’s attempted to cut down on the copious amounts of whiffs. The power-for-strikeouts trade-off has not been worth it, of course, as home runs are more good than strikeouts are bad.
While Cust’s .371 wOBA last year looks pretty good, and is actually equal to his 2008 season when he hit 33 home runs, it is almost entirely built around a crazy high .387 batting average on balls in play, which would be unsustainable for someone like Ichiro, and for a plodding DH like Cust is almost unfathomable. For reference, his career BABIP before last season was .325. There is simply no way that Cust puts up anything close to that BABIP again, and unless his power comes back, that’s a pretty big problem.
For reference, 2009 Cust combined middling power with a reasonable BABIP and posted a much more ordinary .342 wOBA. As a guy who is essentially a DH-only player, that makes him just a bit better than replacement level. Jack Cust isn’t awful, but he’s not particularly good either. If his power returns, he could be a league average player, or maybe a tick better. If his power doesn’t come back, well… he’ll be better than Bradley was last year, I guess.
We’ll have to wait and see what the money looks like. I wouldn’t give Cust more than $3 or $4 million, personally. Hopefully he didn’t get any more than that. As for the rest of the roster, this pushes Bradley into the role of spelling Saunders in left and Cust at DH, mostly against LHPs. If they actually intend to keep him, they now have to keep him happy while also keeping him on the bench most days. Good luck!
An Interesting Rumor
Per Shannon Drayer on twitter, the M’s have begun to focus on a new option to handle second base this year, and you might remember this one – Luis Valbuena, who the M’s shipped to Cleveland in the Franklin Gutierrez deal. He’s been nothing short of awful since going to Cleveland, posting a .243 (!) wOBA last year that is astonishingly awful for a player who has showed some legitimate promise. He would have been one of the worst hitters on last year’s Mariners team, and that’s saying something.
That said, Valbuena absolutely killed Triple-A in each of the last two years (in admittedly small samples of about 100 PA each), and his minor league track record was strong in Seattle as well. He’s still youngish in that he just turned 25 last week, though time is running out for him to establish himself as a Major League player. In some ways, he’s at the same point of his career that Adam Moore is – if he doesn’t hit in 2011, he’s probably going to get stuck with the AAAA player label and struggle to get another real shot at regular playing time.
Valbuena offers a very different package than we thought the M’s might have targeted. Rather than going for a steady veteran who would hold down second base for a few months, they’d get a guy who could theoretically take the job and run with it, or flame out spectacularly. Perhaps they see the two months before Ackley comes up as a worthwhile opportunity to take a flyer on a guy – if he sucks, you’ve got his replacement on the doorstep, and if he’s good, you now have an interesting player that you didn’t have before. Cleveland thought enough of his defense to give him time at shortstop, so there is a dream scenario where he hits enough to hold a starting job and fields enough to convince the team to let him take over for Jack Wilson, but that’s getting near the land of wish-casting.
If Cleveland isn’t asking for a huge return, it could be an interesting opportunity to buy low on a talented underachiever, and at the league minimum for 2011, he’d fit into the team’s need to deal with budgetary restrictions. That said, giving him the second base job out of spring training, coming off the kind of season he had last year, also increases the team’s chance of being absolutely terrible, and that’s the kind of outcome that could get everyone in the front office fired.
It’s a risk. It might be one worth taking. At the very least, it’s an interesting rumor in a day that has lacked them.
Just Say No To Miguel Olivo
The rumor of the day surrounding the Mariners is all about Miguel Olivo. Everyone I talk to brings his name up. At this point, it’s gone from weird speculation to “they aren’t really thinking about this, right?”
There are parks where Olivo can be kind of useful, as he showed with his +3.2 WAR season last year. As it is for most hitters, but especially fringey right-handed pull power guys, Coors Field treated Olivo well. He hit .318/.349/.556 at home and a miserable .211/.276/.322 on the road. If you eliminate Coors Field from the list of parks that Olivo has hit in during his career, his line is .239/.276/.415 in over 2,800 plate appearances. That sucks. And that’s in an average park, not Safeco Field. Olivo’s home run chart from 2010:
Where is it hardest to hit the ball out in Safeco? Left and left-center, of course. Where is all of Olivo’s power concentrated? Left and left-center.
Even if you put aside Adam Moore and the money it would take to get Olivo, he’s just absolutely wrong for this park. He’s Jose Lopez with more strikeouts, and we all just celebrated getting rid of Lopez. Olivo can help a Major League team in the right circumstance, but Seattle is not that team and not that circumstance.
Fighting For Scraps
Yestrerday, Chuck Armstrong confirmed what everyone had assumed going into the winter – the payroll will be about the same as it was last year, meaning that our projections that the team has about $10 million or so to spend should be about right. If they move Aardsma, they might have something more like $14 million. Their total spending allowance this winter is going to be somewhere in that range.
The problem is that we’re seeing prices go crazy right now, so $10 million may not buy what we thought it would a few weeks ago. Ty Wigginton just got a two year deal at $4 million a year this morning, and Ty Wigginton is terrible. Even beyond the Jayson Werth contract, we’re seeing significant inflation for marginal players. It looks like we might be back to a market where a mediocre bench player costs a few million bucks, and even lousy everyday players are getting deals that would eat up half of the money the team has to spend. Given that the Mariners really need to acquire at least three or four players, that’s a huge problem.
So, if you’re wondering why the M’s are in on guys like Gregg Zaun, blame the market. Until all these teams blow through their cash and everything calms down, the M’s simply aren’t going to be able to make a reasonable signing. A quality DH isn’t going to take less money than Wigginton just got right now – they’re going to need to come to the reality that it might be one of the last few jobs available this winter. Much like Russell Branyan had the market set in on him late, the Mariners are probably going to need to have a guy find himself unemployed in January before they are able to get someone to agree to a deal on their terms.
Barring a trade, this is probably going to be a pretty boring week for the M’s. The shift in the market has made it impractical for them to try to land a starter in free agency right now.
Mariners Sign Esteilon Peguero
As first reported by Baseball America’s Ben Badler on Twitter, the Mariners have signed 17-year-old Dominican SS Esteilon Peguero to a $2.9 million signing bonus. That’s the largest bonus any international prospect got this year. His write-up is here. I’ll see what I can dig up on him from down here.
Mariners Writers Twitter List
I made this last year and it was pretty popular, so I’ve updated it for this year’s winter meetings – a Twitter list of Mariners-centric writers. If you’re not on Twitter yourself, you can simply read the feed on this page to see the information from just those who write about the team, so you’ll get all of their tweets in one place without actually having to join Twitter or load their pages individually.
Here’s the link. If you want constantly refreshed news about the team, that’s your place to sit.
Rumors, Inaction, And This Crazy Market
Today, we saw Adrian Gonzalez officially get traded to Boston, Jayson Werth shock the world by taking a massive deal from the Nationals, and the Blue Jays ship Shaun Marcum to Milwaukee. And the winter meetings don’t even officially start until tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the Mariners have done very little so far this winter, and there have been next to no rumors involving the organization kicking around. This can lead to a sense that the front office is sitting on their hands, and I know some of you are getting frustrated by the lack of movement so far. I will say, however, that the lack of rumors don’t mean anything at all. While many organizations routinely leak stories to local media for various reasons, the Mariners simply don’t play the same game. They don’t share information with local press in the same way as many other clubs, and this directly leads to fewer rumors surrounding the club.
In fact, since Jack Z took over, most of the moves the Mariners have made have been broken by members of the national media or by local writers in the cities of the organization that the team is dealing with. And many of them have seemingly come out of left field, as deals that were never rumored before they happened. It’s just the nature of how the organization handles themselves now.
So, don’t get frustrated if you don’t hear a lot of talk about what the M’s are working on. We never do, and they’re usually still doing stuff.
Also, given the prices we’re seeing teams pay for free agents this winter (spectacularly evidenced by the Werth contract), the M’s are almost certainly best served by staying out of these early bidding wars and waiting for the market to calm down, or simply pursuing other avenues to acquire talent. The organization simply isn’t in a position where it makes sense to be bidding against some of these crazy offers. It might not be much fun to sit on the sidelines and watch other teams add premium players, but given the costs, most of these deals are going to go south, and we’ll be really happy that we don’t have those long term, big money commitments in 12 months.
Patience is going to be a very important virtue this winter.
Meetings Coverage
As you guys almost certainly know, the winter meetings are down in Orlando this week, and for the first time, I’ll be in attendance. What that means for the site is that I probably won’t be around to write ridiculously long missives on each deal as soon as they happen, but I will try to make up for it with some interesting content that can only be gathered by being down there. We’ll probably do a live chat or two, though they might be a bit shorter than the ones we’ve done previously. I might toss up some video responses, since I’ll have a camera down there and it will be faster for me to record and upload a reaction than to type one out.
It’s going to be different, and I don’t totally know what it will look like, honestly. But, if you want immediate coverage from the home front, I suggest checking out Lookout Landing, where Jeff Sullivan will almost certainly be covering trades as they happen with his unique brand of analysis and MS Paint. He and I have the same opinion on everything anyway.
Hyphen Non-Tendered
Rather than offer Ryan Rowland-Smith a slight raise in arbitration, the Mariners non-tendered him today, making him a free agent. If they weren’t able to come to terms by now, it’s unlikely that they’ll agree after this. He’ll probably end up signing elsewhere to try and get a fresh start. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him land in San Diego.
I will say that I don’t really get this. Given his 2010 season and the fact that he was a first year arbitration eligible, he wouldn’t have gotten more than a couple hundred thousand more than the league minimum. The team isn’t really saving any significant money here, so they’re basically just choosing to let him go try and reboot his career somewhere else. Unless they were completely convinced that he wouldn’t make it in Seattle, it seems like a waste. He’s never going to be a star, but there’s enough there to think that he could be an effective reliever, and Safeco is the perfect park for him to pitch in.
Given that the team found room for the completely useless Josh Wilson, I don’t see why they found it necessary to non-tender Ryan Rowland-Smith.