I’m a Sims fan
Sims, talking about Andy Devine (“that name will ring a bell…”)
Blowers, in standard-issue flat Blowers voice: “It will?”
Long, long pause and then you can barely hear Sims cracking up. Then Sims — not acknowledging the break at all — picks up calling the game.
Unlike many other broadcasters, if you really listen to Sims through a game, you’re rewarded: you’ll hear him throw a couple of gems out there for those of us paying attention. Sometimes it’s a gentle self-deprecating joke, or mocking the amount of commercial endorsements they do, or the game, and sometimes it’s a winking pun (“…an explosion out of his lower body” or yesterday’s repetition joke) but I have to say, as much as the “no question/no doubt” thing he’s picking up from Blowers annoys me, Sims has helped make this year a lot easier to watch.
Game 127, Athletics at Mariners
Smith v Rowland-Smith
Will To Win
One of the frequent criticisms of this organization by fans at large is that they’re not interested in winning, just in making money. In fact, the quantity of comments like that popping up here have increased dramatically over the last few weeks – we seemingly can’t have a thread about anything before someone pops in and says that the team is happy just being competitive and profitable. In this morning’s P-I, Chuck Armstrong responded to a similar question:
“I’d respond that that’s nonsense,” Armstrong said. “Look at the payroll. If you split the big city markets with two teams (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago), Seattle is the 18th-biggest market in the league. The payroll as of the All-Star break was sixth or seventh. That’s commitment of ownership.
“I keep scratching my head — what more could ownership do? If we’d made the right decisions along the way, we’d be right there. If what we were worried about was making a profit, we’d lower payroll, not raise it.”
Guess what – he’s right. The “ownership doesn’t care about winning” line isn’t based on any kind of actual evidence. The Mariners have consistently spent huge amounts of money on their payroll since moving into Safeco Field, and have had the financial edge over the rest of the division for the last decade. If winning was simply based on payroll, the M’s would be running away with the AL West for the 10th year in a row.
Simply because of population density, the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets will always be in their own little stratosphere of payroll, with the other 27 teams lagging behind. Take them out of the picture for a second – who else has consistently outspent the Mariners in payroll?
Detroit has a $20 million higher payroll this year, but this was their go-for-broke season when they pushed it all in to try and win this year. It didn’t work, and they’ll be cutting payroll this winter.
Then, there’s a big cluster of teams all right around the $120 million payroll mark – the Angels, Dodgers, Cubs, White Sox, and Mariners. That’s the group the M’s find themselves in when it comes to spending – being dead even with the two Chicago and two LA franchises.
I’m not sure what more people want, honestly. The Mariners are supposed to outspend the Dodgers and Cubs now? Why? Quite simply, if you can’t build a winning team for $120 million, you don’t deserve any more money, or even a job. And that’s the conclusion the Mariners finally came to this year – the problem isn’t the lack of money available to sign talent, but instead, the people in charge of deciding who to give it to.
Now, I’m not a Chuck Armstrong/Howard Lincoln fanboy by any means – we have deep philosophical disagreements with them on how things should be run, and it’s clear that a good portion of the blame for how this franchise has been handled falls at their feet. But can we please put to rest this notion that somehow ownership doesn’t want to win? It’s ridiculous and unsupported by any kind of actual fact.
The Mariners want to win – they just don’t know how. Ignorance is not the same thing as apathy.
Starting Suckitude
Mariners starters versus White Sox this series:
11 1/3 IP, 24 hits, 21 runs, 7 walks, 0 strikeouts, 6 home runs
Washburn, Hernandez, and Dickey faced 63 batters – they didn’t strike out a single one. That’s only slightly worse than the weekend series in Minnesota, when Silva, Rowland-Smith, and Feierabend combined to strike out a whopping two batters.
The M’s starting pitchers have combined for two strikeouts in their last six starts. The odds of that have to be astronomical.
Please cross-apply my previous post
I’ve been chewing over re-writing the “Imagine Sisyphus a Mariner” post for a while, and re-reading it, I think I’ll pass: it needs almost no update, though it was posted February of 2007.
How sad is that?
Wait, wait, what just happened?
I see as if in a fog. My head is… it’s swimming. I… I’m disoriented. I thought he had turned a corner. Didn’t he? I saw it, I became a believer. He’d made improvements… hadn’t he? He had this new pitch, and had made adjustments that stuck, he’d put it all together and turned a corner, the evidence was incontrovertible by any weight of evidence or argumentation.
And then the game… I’ve been staring at the box score hoping that my memory was false, that I’d seen something besides another terrifying meltdown by Washburn, the improved Washburn no less. But no, there it waited until I was ready to accept it.
Washburn (L, 5-13), 4.1 IP, 7 H, 8 R, 8 ER, 2 BB, 0 K, 2 HR.
Woe! Woe is me! Woe is all of fandom! Stolen from us is Washburn the valuable commodity, so precious the M’s were right to hold onto, and now he is gone, replaced by another one of the endless prancing talentless fools that come streaming out of the clown car of the rotation — how did this happen? He was so good since May! Since May!
And then, reaching out for some kind of sanity, I find out that he’s sucked in August. How did we not see this? Why weren’t we informed? Once we sliced the season into the first ten starts and the rest, were we all so blind that the last few were so worthless? Was his splitter so split, his new changeup grip so gripping that it entranced us even as we had crossed another boundary zone, the nebulous post-trade-deadline wasteland where no hope resides?
August: 0-4, 22 IP, 28 H, 22 R, 18 ER, 9 BB, 11 K, 4 HR. 104 batters faced.
That’s a 7.38 ERA! O cruel Fates! Why do you torture us so?
I am lashed, lashed from side to side by the gusting monthly vagaries of Washburn’s successes and failures, I twist in pain as he struggles and exalt in his success, and now — how long will this new, retroactively bad Washburn last? A month? And then what, another roll of the dice to see how he’ll perform for the next thirty days? What kind of sadistic god metes out such punishment?
Is this our penance for some unknown offense to the baseball deities, to watch this month-by-month horror unfold before us, each lash of the whip spaced by four games to nearly heal, powerless to change the outcome, forced to watch other teams pay less and get so, so much more? Is this cruel fleeting talent of Jarrod only intended to torment us more, to give us hope, and let us savor and nurture it long enough that when it is taken from us our hearts are rent anew, and the pain returns to us fresh?
What is it? What did we do?
Yeah, we’re stuck with Jarrod
So I followed up on some of the info from today’s open call, and yeah… we’re hosed.
Major League Rule 10 (c) (4): unless you’re releasing them unconditionally (essentially) you can’t request waivers on a player for 30 days after you withdraw a request. So it’s not just 30 days, it’s 30 days from when when negotiations fell through and the M’s pulled him back.
The supposed 30-day waiver rule
Hi — I’ve seen this restriction mentioned but cannot find evidence that the M’s couldn’t put Washburn back on waivers within 30 days of their first (now withdrawn) attempt. If this restriction does exist, this obviously means he’s much less likely to be claimed, as he couldn’t be put on a team’s playoff roster (and you know how valuable Washburn is in the playoffs). But while there are two waiver periods (essentially it’s up to Aug 1 and then Aug 1 onwards) I can’t find anything that would have prevented a second (irrevocable) waiver request within 30 days.
If anyone who can cite the actual rule — not a story about the rule, not someone claiming the rule exists — could help with a comment, that’d be much appreciated.
Free Agent Compensation
Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard a lot of talk about free agent compensation draft picks, especially as they pertain to Raul Ibanez. The Mariners (correctly) decided that they wouldn’t take less than two good prospects for him at the deadline, since they’ll receive two high compensation picks if he leaves as a free agent this winter. They could get two good prospects by not trading him, so there’s no reason to trade him for less than that. By in large, the media has caught on, and we rarely see any more references to a player being traded or “lost for nothing” during the winter. Most people get it – free agent compensation picks are valuable.
However, they don’t make any sense. Seriously, when you stop and think about how the system works and the results it provides, everyone loses. They’re bad for everyone, and it’s pretty remarkable that they still exist. Let’s look at what they’re supposed to do and what they actually do.
Goal #1: Promote parity by allowing teams to recoup talent lost when big market teams steal their players
This clearly doesn’t happen. Go through the list of who gets compensation picks every year, and it’s not the Marlins, Rays, and Royals. It’s the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers, plus other similar big payroll teams. There’s a couple of reasons for this:
1. Type A and Type B free agents are generally good players. Good players make a lot of money, so they are more likely to be on teams with big payrolls. When their contracts expire and they sign with a new team, they’re generally just going from one big payroll team to another, and so the big boys who certainly don’t need extra picks for competitive balance reasons end up with an advantage in the draft anyway.
2. The system requires you to take a financial risk in order to get the draft pick. Teams on strict budgets can’t always afford to take the risk that a player will accept arbitration and eat up a big chunk of their payroll, but it’s just not a big deal to the Yankees if Damaso Marte makes a couple million more than they were counting on. The big payroll teams are more able to take the risk, and thus, more likely to get the reward.
Goal #2: Provide a disincentive for teams to sign free agents away from other clubs, making it more likely for players to stay with their original franchise.
Again, it clearly doesn’t work this way. If you lose a Type A free agent (and you offer them arbitration), you get two high draft picks. If you sign a Type A free agent that another team had offered arbitration to, you lose one high draft pick. In many cases, you actually get rewarded for letting your player leave and bringing in someone else’s exact equal. For instance, if the Mariners were to have to decide between re-signing Raul Ibanez this winter or offering the exact same contract to say, Pat Burrell, then they’d gain an extra pick from signing Burrell and letting Ibanez leave. In fact, we’ve seen teams essentially swap free agents at the same position and both teams have come out with +1 draft picks – the Orioles and Rangers did this in 1994 with Rafael Palmeiro and Will Clark.
Those are basically the two overriding goals of free agent compensation, at least in theory. The current system fails spectacularly at both, and just for good measure, has even more flaws as a byproduct of the system.
Some players are less marketable, and have to sign for less money, after being classified as Type A free agents when they shouldn’t really have been. This is especially true of relief pitchers – rack up the saves and you’ll climb the Elias rankings pretty quickly, even if you’re not particularly good. Most teams have figured out that surrendering a draft pick to sign a mediocre reliever who just happened to notch a lot of 9th inning finishes isn’t a good idea, and they’ll shy away from signing undeserving Type A players who get offered arbitration. For a subset of major league players, they’d be better off getting a worse ranking in the Elias system, because if they become Type As, it will cost them money.
It also, as we saw with Ibanez, keeps non-contending teams from trading quality players at the deadline, making the stretch run and post-season less interesting. Instead of playing for a winning team and potentially getting to play in October, Ibanez has to play out the string for a horrible team because it was in the best interests of the organization not to trade him because they’ll get more for him if he leaves as a free agent.
Overall, it’s hard to find a redeeming quality about the system as currently structured. It doesn’t help small market teams – it does just the opposite, in fact. It doesn’t convince teams to keep their home grown stars, but again, rewards a team for letting their guys walk and replacing them with an equal player from another franchise. It dissuades teams from making deadline trades to help contenders strengthen their clubs, and in some cases, it costs players a chance at a better contract.
If this system does anything right, I have yet to find it. It fails on so many levels and helps no one, but because it has to be collectively bargained (due to how it affects player salaries, which is a big union issue), it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon. So we’re stuck with a failing system that does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do and adds a few lemons on top of that.
Owners, Players Union, I know this isn’t a sexy issue, but when you guys sit down to renegotiate the CBA, can you do us a favor and just rip up the current free agent compensation system? Thanks.
Stating The Obvious
Ryan Feierabend better figure out why his fastball didn’t make the flight to Minnesota, because he’s not a major league pitcher when his fastball averages 86 MPH. He needs to get it back to the 88-90 range with some regularity, because otherwise, he’s just Horacio Ramirez with a hard to spell last name.