Blackley dealt
Corco, here’s your roster move — LHP Travis Blackley sent to San Francisco for OF-R Jason Ellison. Ellison will be on the 25-man roster to open the season. As has been hinted at in the comments, Ellison went to South Kitsap with Willie Bloomquist. Yes, the Willie Bloomquist.
On a personal level, I’m sad to see Blackley go. Back when he was going really well (2003), I had the chance to interview him while he was pitching for San Antonio. We talked about baseball, life in the minor leagues, how he developed his changeup (messing around while playing cricket), and his growing up in Australia over the course of an hour. It’s funny… I interviewed a number of players on that trip, and other than Jose Lopez they’re all gone — Rett Johnson, Clint Nageotte, Justin Leone, Chris Snelling, and now Blackley.
Man, what a rotation the Missions had that year: Johnson, Nageotte, Blackley, Bobby Madristch and (while I was there), Matt Thornton.
Opening Day USSM Chill-o-thon
Tomorrow, Pioneer Square Saloon (73 Yesler), 1-3ish. I may show up even earlier. Short version of directions: walk down your north-south avenue of choice (1st, 2nd, whatever) until you get to Yesler Way. Look to the water. It’s on the south side of the street.
If you’ve managed to get your hands on the book, I’ll be happy to sign, if you don’t, I may be able to strike a deal to provide one for you. Elliot Bay and your local bookstore should have them in stock, and if they don’t, you should raise a fuss.
Come! Hang out! Pre-commiserate! Get excited for the game! Enjoy a delicious beverage!
More projection goodness (badness)
Over at the Replacement Level Yankees blog, check out this post which projects 2007 standings using Diamond Mind Baseball and a variety of projection methods for player performances. Short story: M’s look bad and win the AL West ~6% of the time. As always, please don’t take exercises like this too seriously.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Opening day is two days away. Huzzah! The M’s start at 0-0, just like everyone else. So, in that vein, lets take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of the 2007 Seattle Mariners.
Strengths
Felix Hernandez
The best arm of any starting pitcher in baseball along with an apparent dedication to hard work and improving his game. If there’s one thing to love about the M’s, its Felix. Not only is he a competitive advantage over every team in the division, he’s also 20 years old. All hail the king.
Infield Defense
Adrian Beltre and Yuniesky Betancourt are two of the best defenders at their positions in baseball. Jose Lopez is good enough to man second base. Richie Sexson’s glove is a problem, but if you’re going to have a bad defensive infielder, first base is the place to have one. This well above average collection of groundball vacuums should benefit the pitching staff, as well as those who just love to watch the leather being thrown around.
Line-Up Depth
The opening day line-up is going to have Jose Lopez and Yuniesky Betancourt batting 8th and 9th in some order. Both are projected to be nearly league average hitters, and they’re filling out the last two spots in the batting order. What the offense lacks in thump, it attempts to make up for in balance.
J.J. Putz
If his arm gets loose and he can unleash 98 MPH fastballs and 90 MPH splitters on the AL, he’s as good as it gets in the 9th inning. Closers are generally overrated, but when you have a relief ace as good as Putz, the hype is justified by the wins he adds.
Weaknesses
Depth
The Mariners aren’t a team that can survive multiple injuries. There’s not a capable major league replacement in the organization for Johjima, Beltre, Betancourt, or Lopez. If any of those four get hurt, the downgrade is going to be significant and swift. The same goes for Felix and Putz, the two good power arms on the team, who would be replaced by the likes of Cha Baek or Jake Woods on the roster. If long term injuries strike any of these key players, the season’s over.
Middle Of The Order
You’d be hard pressed to find a worse 3-4-5 combination in baseball than Vidro-Ibanez-Sexson. Vidro’s a contact gap hitter who can’t run, while Ibanez is trying to sustain his late career surge at age 35, and Sexson’s hoping to overpower the decline that is chasing him around the field everyday. All three are flawed players with little upside and would be role players on any other team with hopes of contending. On the Mariners, they’re the run producers.
Non-Putz bulllpen
Last year, the Mariners had one of the very best bullpens in baseball. After giving away Rafael Soriano, throwing money away to try and rehab Chris Reitsma, and counting on Julio Mateo to serve a prominant role in the bullpen, the team is going to have to sweat its way through every 7th and 8th inning lead. The team’s best chance for bullpen success lands on the very inexperienced shoulders of Brandon Morrow. For the 2007 team’s sake, he better be ready.
Management
In general, the field manager doesn’t make as much difference as fans believe. Mike Hargrove is not “in general”, however, and he’s easily one of the least qualified people to be running a team currently residing in a major league dugout. His teams have consistently underperformed under his watch, and his strategic decisions aren’t just poor, in many cases, they are indefensible. The front office hasn’t inspired much confidence in their roster construction, either, and the leadership has clearly taken a win-now approach that could jeopardize future talent in an effort to preserve jobs.
Overall Assessment
This is a flawed team that needs a lot of things to go right to contend for the division. There is talent all over the field, but every player comes with a substantial question about his ability to perform. The only sure thing on the roster is that Willie Bloomquist can’t hit. Everything else is questionable. Going into the season with so many variables leads to a lot of possible paths, from division champ all the way down to worst team in baseball. There’s no scenario you can imagine that isn’t at least somewhat plausible with this roster.
This team is, essentially, baseball’s version of the rusty trunk thats been stored in your grandparents home for 80 years. There’s a real chance that you could find several gold bars, one of the first photographs in american history, and the original copy of the declaration of independence. Or you might find a pair of false teeth, a hoard of rats, and a shirt containing remnants of the bubonic plague.
You won’t know until you open the trunk. We’ll find out on Monday.
Ow, ow, ow
Nate Silver’s got the PECOTA projected standings for the AL West up, and… they sting. The raw numbers: Angels at 86 wins, Oakland and Texas at 80, Seattle at 73.
73.
Oh, and if his playoff predictions pan out, Bob Melvin will win a World Series this year.
The universe works on a math equation
that never even ever really even ends in the end.
Baker @ the Times: “Ordonez on verge of making Mariners”
“Saint” Rey Ordonez, age 36
2002: 460 AB, .254/.292/.324
2003: 117 AB, .316/.328/.487
2004: 61 AB, .164/.190/.262
2005: n/a
2006: n/a
Career: .246/.289/310
Willie Bloomquist, age 29
Career: /257/.312/.329
PI: “Burke appears set as M’s backup catcher”
Jamie Burke, 2006 in Oklahoma: 370 AB, .278/.323/.422
Rene Rivera, 2006 in Seattle: 99 AB, .152/.184/.253
PI notebook on cuts.
Cut: C Rivera, RHP Green, LHP O’Flaherty, RHP Small, OF Reed
Players left in camp: 33
Cuts remaining: 8
Felix: 100% ready
Adios to One Stiff, Bienvenidos to Another.
According to Geoff Baker, we’ve seen the last of Rene Rivera. Hallellujah.
Jamie Burke has made the team as the backup catcher. We’ll see how long he sticks, but anyone not named Rene Rivera is an upgrade.
Also, Jeremy Reed was optioned to Tacoma. The team apparently feels fine with Broussard as the backup corner outfielder and Bloomquist as the backup center fielder, and there’s a legitimate chance that Hargrove The Great carries 13 pitchers on opening day that frees up room for the (dis)organization to carry Rey Ordonez. No, I’m not kidding.
110 million dollar payroll, and the best these clowns can do is Rey Ordonez, Jamie Burke, and rushing Brandon Morrow to the show.
Fire them all. Antonetti in ’08.
Putz to be ready for opening day, plus drugs and gambling
Times notebook says Putz will be ready for the start of the season.
The PI has a whole article on lottery tickets with the M’s logo.
The new ticket, which costs $5, has more than $1.4 million in $25 and $50 prizes and a top prize of $50,000. The game also has a feature for non-winning tickets. They can be entered to win several prizes, including Mariners paraphernalia, a trip for two to spring training next year or a pair of 2008 lower-box season tickets.
You can’t, however, bet on sports in this state (though the PI relates this season’s odds and provides a handy pointer to bodog). Or play poker online. Or… but I digress.
Proceeds from the lottery go “largely toward construction projects for the state’s K-12 schools” where they’re not doing a good enough job educating kids that they stop playing the lottery.
Baker makes a huge leap while trying to make a point about the evils of major league steroid use, going from minor leaguer Chris Minaker’s sociology paper on what influences college players to use supplements (teammates and coaches, who tout performance gain) to Minaker’s acknowledgement that
“The supplement culture has become completely intertwined with the culture of collegiate sports, just as it had before with professional sports. There has been a trickle-down effect from professional sports right on down to the ranks of all athletic levels.”
to Baker’s assertion that
The last thing Major League Baseball wants is a minor-leaguer writing that college-level players are, at best, being influenced by their perceptions about big-leaguers or, at worst, copying them
Except that there’s really no Minaker evidence that either of those are true – they’re being influenced by their peers and coaches. As a whole, he argues collegiate sports are influenced by weight lifting and supplement use, which took off for baseball in the late 1980s. There’s no assertion here that players are being influenced by their perceptions about big-leaguers, much less copying them in the way implied here (“Player X is on steroids, I should too!”)
Todd Walker
Today, the Padres announced that they were going to release veteran second baseman Todd Walker, paying him just under $1 million in termination pay, rather than keeping him on the roster for the full season and paying him $4 million to be Marcus Giles’ backup. Because his salary was determined through arbitration, it wasn’t fully guaranteed, and the Padres decided they’d rather pay Walker $1 million to not play for them than $4 million to be part of their bench.
Just for fun, let’s play the comparison game. Here are the 2006 numbers for Walker and another bad defensive second baseman who you may have heard of.
Walker: .278/.356/.398, 442 AB, 9 HR, 55 BB, 38 K, 62 Runs Created
Vidro: .289/.348/.395, 463 AB, 7 HR, 41 BB, 48 K, 63 Runs Created
It’d be hard to find two more similar players. Both aging, injury prone former middle infielders who belong at DH defensively, lack power, but control the strike zone well.
The Mariners valued this skillset so highly that… oh, you know what they did. The Padres looked at this skillset and decided that they’d rather pay it to go away.
Well done, fellas. Way to gauge the market.
My Last Morrow Post For A While
I don’t want to beat this subject to death, and I don’t want to come across as some kind of anti-Morrow crusader who will tear my hair out if he makes the team. Jeff Sullivan does a great job laying out the case for why it could work, and I agree with about 90% of what he wrote in that post. But I want to point out one comment he made in the comment section over there that is worth noting:
And yet, that’s precisely why it’s also so rooted in faith. Observation is subjective. So are interpretation and extrapolation. We have to trust the Mariners that they know exactly how good Morrow is and how much they can push him, and I think that’s the heart of the main disagreement. In theory, the organization should be more qualified to make this decision than any of us, but we’ve seen them screw up enough times in the past that the trust is on thin ice, if not already submerged in water. It’s a big leap, and precisely why I think external sources might offer the best opinions on this. I can’t do it, because my window is blurred.
Jeff’s absolutely right here. The best advice on this kind of decision is going to come from credible external sources. I think we have several.
Cleveland Indians optioned Adam Miller to Triple-A.
SF Giants optioned Tim Lincecum to Triple-A.
Detroit Tigers optioned Andrew Miller to Triple-A.
New York Yankees optioned Philip Hughes to Triple-A.
Cincinnati Reds optioned Homer Bailey to Triple-A.
Kansas City Royals optioned Luke Hochevar to Triple-A.
I’m going to focus on the Adam Miller transaction, because Adam Miller is essentially what we hope and pray that Morrow becomes. Their repertoires are similar, though Miller’s stuff is a notch above. Miller dominated spring training even more than Morrow did, tossing 14 shutout innings and allowing 11 baserunners. The Indians are legitimate contenders. Their bullpen is a giant jumble of question marks, and they lost starting pitcher Cliff Lee to an injury that will sideline him for the first month of the season.
Here’s a few quotes from an article about Miller the other day.
“He’s a man,” pitching coach Carl Willis said. “You watch the way he walks around this clubhouse, and he’s very respectful, but he has a presence about him. Even on the mound, he has that presence.”
“I don’t think anyone is surprised at what he’s come in and done this spring,” manager Eric Wedge said.
“We’ve never felt like Adam was a year away,” general manager Mark Shapiro said. “We’ve always felt that he could impact our team sometime this year. We felt he had the level of talent that, whenever that time came, it would be evident. When he puts everything together, he can dominate the competition.”
They’re saying the same things about him that the Mariners are about Brandon Morrow. And still, the Indians never once considered carrying Miller on opening day.
It’s the exact same situation, except the Indians have even more reasons for carrying Miller than the M’s do for carrying Morrow. And yet, Shapiro and Antonetti never even flinched in their resolve to do what was best for Adam Miller’s development.
Two organizations making the same decision. If someone asked you which front office was more likely to be making the right decision, and your choices were Seattle and Cleveland, would you really take the Mariners in that fight?
Not me.