Week One in review
Seven games, and the Mariners are 3-4.
We’ve seen the first of the team, and it’s a mixed bag. They took 2/3 from the Angels on the strength of strong pitching and good hitting, and then the Athletics beat them up to take 3/4, almost entirely disarming the offense. Faced with Blanton, Zito, and Harden, the Mariners looked hopeless. You want to hope that’s just three guys in a row who had great performances, but the worry is that even if they manage to scrape their way into the playoffs, they’re going to go down quietly against the first team they hit with a quality rotation. Seven games in, yeah, it’s too early to say that. But that’s what I thought.
The good:
Johjima looks like total stud. I love him. Reed and Lopez have both been hitting. Rafael Soriano has looked like he’s well on his way to dominant form. Even bad King Felix is good. Jarrod Washburn, the much-derided free agent signing, looked great.
The bad:
Carl “Waste of Carbon” Everett’s not hitting, but he’s still hitting more than Beltre, who was flatlined offensively until today. Putz looks horrible.
This next week we get to see the Mariners play against the Indians, a franchise I think we’re all huge fans of. They’ve got a great core of talent, having torn down completely and gone to a long-term rebuilding plan. Then Boston, which requires little introduction.
Both are contrasts to the Mariners: if they had realized their position and retreated from trying to compete earlier, and rebuilt on the cheap, they’d be the Indians of a year or two ago, preparing for an extended run at competition and if they’d been Boston, willing to wisely spend their massive revenues on the field, they might never have dropped as low. This next week will be an interesting measure in the neither-nor approach the team’s taken these last years, and should at least provide us with some good games.
Seattle Mariners Safeco Field ticket guide
I get asked questions about this all the time:
Where can I get a good ticket?
Are these seats any good?
Is this a good price?
I hope that in writing this up, I can help fans get more out of their ticket dollar. I’m also going to disclose a lot of my own ticket-buying strategies, so I really hope nobody reads this.
Where the best seats are
The Diamond Club seats. But good luck getting any. The best seats you can buy on the open market are the Lower Box seats (119-141). They’re $55/single game ticket. though. Season ticket holders pay $38/game, which can make this a nice pickup when you buy off them through some of the channels we’ll get to in a second.
Then you’re looking at the Field seats (110-118, 142-150). They run $38/game, and while they’re down the lines from the first-to-third sweet spot, a seat in the first couple of rows down even in the corner, like 112, is easily as good as one at the back of 124, which is mid-way between first and third, even before you consider the price difference.
The next-best value for your view dollar comes in the View Box seats ($25 single game). You’re only a couple of rows off the top-deck rail, so you’re significantly above the action, but you’re not really that far back at all. These are really good deals between first-and-third (~section 321 all the way across to ~339).
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Just in case you forgot
Happy Felix Day.
The King takes his throne in just over five hours.
Oh, and he turns 20 tomorrow.
The number values to running aggressively
Including a long bonus ramble on the offensive character of the 2002 American League!
Taking the extra base was one of the frequently-cited qualities about the World Series Champion 2002 Angels to the point of exhaustion, and is less often mentioned as a quality of that franchise in general during the Mike Scioscia years.
The Mariners are attempting a similar strategy to what the Angels are said to do: If you’ve got a single, go for two. A double, go for three. Now hitters do this but generally speaking, they’re pretty conservative about taking the sure base over the chance at greater riches.
Is it worth doing? When does it become counter-productive?
Back to the 2002 Angels. It’s hard to distinguish the attempts at extra bases from a team’s overall character, for a couple of reasons. Particularly, extra bases are a product of the team’s speed (Adam Kennedy’s a lot more likely to take second on a liner to right-center than, say, Frank Thomas is). The Angels stole 117 bases that year (and were caught 51 times). So they’re stealing and (supposedly) taking the extra base. Where does strategy and team composition meet here, and how to divide them?
First, take HRs out of it. How often did an at-bat result in an extra-base hit? Here the Angels were #3 in the AL. This immediately reveals some odd things, though: the Mariners, #2 in steals, fare quite badly at XBH/AB. The Red Sox, who didn’t steal, do well. The Mariners, who tried stealing a ton, don’t, and neither do the Royals. Speedy teams weren’t getting extra bases, and slow teams were. Hmm.
Let’s try something different: what percentage of hits were turned into extra-base hits? That is, (2B+3B)/H. Again, strangeness: the list goes Baltimore-Minnesota-Boston-Toronto-Texas.
Even Edgar and Olerud hit a ton of doubles, though. Maybe the double’s not the best method. The real mark of aggressive baserunning and speedy teams is the triple. Who pulled that off more, as a percent of their non-HR hits? Kansas City, Detroit, Toronto, Tampa Bay… Anaheim’s almost at the bottom.
So we shrug and move on. Some people believe that aggressive baserunning is worth a run a game, but no matter how we look at this (what teams scored more runs than you’d expect, given the number of balls they put into play, or hits they got, or… whatever) there’s no way the effect’s that big. There’s a good Michael Wolverton article from 2004 where he looks at this and finds the difference in 2003 between the best team in the league at not being caught stretching and the worst was 15 runs. The Angels were the second-best team in baseball that year.
15 runs over a season is hard to distinguish from noise. I’d be interested to see if that pattern exists over a long period of time: did Sciosia-managed teams do consistently well over years? That his players were thrown out so rarely in 2003 suggests that they were not as aggressive as widely believed, since Wolverton’s study focuses on the cost of baserunning outs. The Angels could have scored 100 runs by advancing more than they should have — but if they were doing that, even with a tremendous success rate, they’d still have been on the leader board there for their failures.
Back to the point. Stretching an extra base is, from a value standpoint, exactly the same as trying to steal a base. You start with the value of being on the base you could get with 100% certainty, and you’re risking the value of being one base further against the damage of being out. There are obvious real-world differences that affect the decision (where’s the ball, who’s fielding it, and so on), but in the end, it’s the same kind of wager that stealing bases is.
Fortunately for my purposes, a ton of research on this has already been done. For purposes of simplification, make it a generic situation, so I can use a run expectation table.
Say that leading off, Raul Ibanez hits a ball into left-center, and it’s a sure single. In 2005, teams with a guy on first with no outs scored on average .9 runs.
Should he make the turn to second? Teams with a guy on second with no outs scored on average 1.1 runs, which means it’s worth +.2 runs if he makes it.
But if he’s thrown out… teams with one out and no one on scored only .3 runs/inning. So it’s -.6 if he’s caught trying.
This is easy. 75%, right?
Wow, that’s tough. Stretch a double to a triple? The value of being on third with no outs is pretty high — 1.5, a gain of .4 runs — but the difference between being on second with no outs and having one out and no baserunners is also larger — .8 runs.
You need to be able to get there 2/3rds of the time to make it worthwhile.
You see where this is going: as a strict value proposition, trying for the extra base is worth it when the player can do it successfully in the vast majority of situations. Every time they fail, it’s a pretty nasty knock to the team’s chances that inning.
In this sense, it becomes clear that there are players you want trying this: more than speed, you want players who can judge their chances on the fly, maybe able to head back if the fielder who looked like they bobbled it comes up throwing, and you need coaches who can help. If a guy’s going to go every time, they’re going to get killed out there. So there are players who may not be well-suited to this. The trick would be to figure out who those guys are, and get them to knock it off, while the others keep at it.
So if you see some players getting thrown out now, so be it. If they’re thrown out over and over stretching their hits, that’s when you should get really mad about it.
Up soon: the secondary effects. Putting pressure on the defense, keeping the rally going, and so on, and good stuff like that.
Quick game notes
I was never a big believer in karma, but I kinda think after the seats I had tonight that the universe is finally creaking around to making up for my 1988-1992. I was in pretty bad shape for a while there and was glad I managed to rally in time to drag myself into town for the game.
In the spirit of Dave’s notes earlier this week:
- I saw an extremely drunk woman come in before the game and fall over on the steps to her seat.
- She kept yelling “Get a job! Get a fucking job!” at A’s players. I have no idea why.
- They cut her off in middle of the third inning. The third inning.
- They pulled her out of her seat before the fourth for a chat with the cops and she didn’t come back for about an hour.
- Johjima does a lot of infield positioning.
- Johjima is one mobile dude back there. He’s such an amazing upgrade over last year it’s amazing.
- I was psyched about the Johjima signing, and now I’m rapidly turning into a raving fan.
- Billy the ballboy is about the same weight and only slightly smaller then Ichiro.
- This aggressive baserunning thing is great and all, except when they’re getting picked off and generally acting badly. I’ll have to write a whole thing on the breakeven now, but man, Reed seems to not be cut out for this philosophy.
- Meche is Meche. From up close, about 50-75% of his pitches in any inning look like minor-league stuff you’d expect to see from some random AAAA pitcher (like Andrew Lorraine, no offense intended to Lorraine).
- Chavez cranked that ball. That it was only measured at 12 feet longer than the Everett home run is a testament to the unreliability of the metric. I’ve rarely seen balls that well-hit.
Simmer The Monkey
In Chinese astrology, 2004 was the Year of the Monkey. This was supposed to signify unpredictable, tumultuous changes.
I have this theory that, with apologies to my 2006 canine friends, the Year of the Monkey never actually ended.
Mike Hargrove doesn’t strike me as the star-signs type, but you might ask him again after the All-Star break. The Sporting News’ Ken Rosenthal has a list of managers on the hot seat, and Hargrove falls smack in the middle of it. Rosenthal’s rationale:
Mike Hargrove, Mariners. G.M. Bill Bavasi is far more likely to be in trouble after presiding over back-to-back 90-loss seasons; Hargrove is in the second year of a three-year deal. Still, Hargrove had philosophical differences last season with Ichiro Suzuki, the Mariners’ best player. Ichiro, signed through 2007, might not agree to an extension if Hargrove stays.
Rosenthal lists Hargrove’s status is “simmering,” perhaps like a nice potato leek soup. This seems to mix the “hot seat” metaphor, since most heated recliners don’t have a simmer setting. Dave’s take on the manager’s fate, as you may recall, was more aggressive — he’s forecasting a Hargrove ouster by mid-May.
The underlying point is the same. The Mariners have to win, win now, and win impressively, or there’s going to be upheaval. Blame it on the monkey if you want, but the team can’t fire a symbolic primate.
Thoughts from the first two games
Since I was blessed with some extraordinary seats for last night’s shindig, I’ve got a few more thoughts than normal about what we’ve seen the first 48 hours of the season. They’re all pretty disconnected, though, so let’s just do a notes column, shall we?
Thiel on pitching prospects
Art Thiel’s column looks at why the M’s haven’t developed much pitching. I’m glad someone’s covering this, and not to be depressing, but when the PI goes away, do you really think the Times is going to suddenly start covering this stuff?
A couple points: Thiel does note that the team’s had a lot of injuries, but on the list of causes one of the things that’s not there is probably the most important cause — that the Mattox/Gillick drafts picked many horrible pitchers.
Also, as to this —
In terms of injury rate, the Mariners may not be much above the norm, although comprehensive stats are hard to come by. Last summer on the InsideThePark.com Web site, executive editor and P-I baseball correspondent Jason Churchill concluded in an extensive story that the Mariners’ casualty rate isn’t much above the major league norm.
Or, if you want to spend a season doing research, you could determine that they’re way above the norm, even if that’s not above what you might expect from random variation.
He then repeats Jason’s basic contention, which is that power guys with breaking pitches get injured more. There are two problems with this: first, defining what that means turns out to be harder than it would seem, and that statistically if you look at the injuries and attempt to classify them into any defined bucket of what you’re looking you’ll find the data doesn’t support that. Jason’s argument sounds logical, and if you talk to the wizened baseball guys they’ll agree, but I haven’t been able to find the data to support it, and it’s certainly not something that’s as clear as distinction as is being drawn here. I wrote about this in the “Power versus finesse” section of the Attrition War Summary and Conclusions.
BTW, Jason’s got a new blog. Check it out.
I’m happy to see Thiel write about this, especially at such length. I am a little disappointed at how it wound up.
2nd Game Crowd
1995 19,336
1996 38,570
1997 30,951
1998 24,523
1999 20,435
2000 29,242 (first Safeco Field instance)
2001 27,212
2002 40,805
2003 35,492
2004 37,947
2005 28,373
2006 20,051
That’s way, way off. And if you watched it on TV, that didn’t look like 20k, either.
Game 2: Angels at Mariners
RHP John Lackey vs RHP Joel Pineiro. 7:05, televised on KSTW-11. Washburn’s not the #2? Really?
Suggested storyline: Can Pineiro continue his WBC success?