Mariners at Angels, 9/22
Go Ichiro!
Multi-ball! Multi-ball! Multi-ball! (whack whack whack whack)
4 hits tonight. He’s going to do it.
Levesque on Section 101 removal
“M’s fans reclaim patio space“
Troy Glaus
In our continuing series of mini-articles on prospective free agents, I’m tackling Troy Glaus today. I’m hoping to knock out two more later this week. If you guys have any requests for players you think we may not discuss, bring them up in comments, and I’ll see what I can do.
For me, Troy Glaus has been on the verge of becoming a superstar for about six years now. I talked him up a great deal when he came out of UCLA as a shortstop, and his tear through the minors gave the appearance of a potential hall of fame slugger. In 2000, at age 23, he hit .284/.404/.604 and was tremendous defensively, making him worth about 11 to 12 wins over a replacement level third baseman. That’s an MVP type season, and at age 23, put Glaus in rare company.
Glaus has never gotten back to that level of productivity however, and his .284 average that season is beginning to look like an outlier. His BA in other seasons run .218, .240, .250, .250, .248, and .267. That’s a pretty consistent pattern of production, and when coupled with his high strikeout rates, he appears unlikely to post averages in the .280 mark with any kind of regularity. His power has remained consistant as measured by extra base hits as a percentage of total hits, basically a determination of how often he hits the crap out of the ball. In that 2000 season, 85 of his 160 hits, or about 53 percent, were extra base knocks. In 2001, when his BA, OBP, and SLG dropped to .250/.367/.531, 81 of his 147 hits, 55 percent, were extra base knocks. The decline wasn’t due to any loss of power, but simply a reversion to a lack of hitting singles that he’s displayed throughout his career.
Injuries have taken their toll on him the past few years, but he looked healthy in spring training. In April, I wrote “I have this feeling that (Glaus) is going to take the Carlos Delgado leap from good player with big time power to dominant, offensive wrecking ball.“. More shoulder problems ruined the makings of that career year for Glaus this season. He hit .270/.341/.662 in April and followed it up with a .353/.476/.765 May before more shoulder problems shut him down. He hasn’t been nearly the same hitter since returning in September, hitting just .207/.313/.431. Clearly, Glaus has shown throughout his career that when he’s healthy enough to make consistent contact, he can be a monster, one of the best hitters in the game, but his health is a legitimate concern at this point, and even when healthy, he still has not quite been the superstar that he could be.
BP’s PECOTA system projected a nice bounceback year from Glaus, but a plateau for most of the next few years with only a remote possibility of a return to his 2000 form. Glaus was projected to be worth between 3 and 4 wins above replacement for the next three years, with his decline coming around age 31, a bit earlier than most. His continuing shoulder problems and lack of playing time will probably make him even more comparable to Dale Murphy types who fell apart long before one would expect them to, based on normal aging patterns.
So, what about Glaus as a Mariner? He could certainly infuse the team with some needed power and production from third base, but the risk is very high. Between his apparently chronic health problems and near total reliance on his power for value, he’s not likely to age well. He should not be counted on to play well into his thirties, and giving him more than a two or three year contract looks like an unnecessary risk. Depending on how the market treats him, Glaus may actually prefer a one year deal this offseason, giving him another chance to have a big year and cash in while still in his prime.
Based on expected performance, Glaus should be worth about $8 million per season for the next few years, but he comes with considerable risk of returning nothing on that investment, likely knocking down his value in the marketplace. If he can’t find someone to give him a 3 year, $24 million deal (the top endof what I feel he should expect), I would be in favor of the M’s making a run at him with a 1 year deal for $8-$9 million and a club option for the second year. The potential is there to infuse the offense with needed power and, at worst, he’s a decent trade chip at the deadline. A one year deal for Glaus is relatively low risk with solid upside, but the Mariners would almost certainly have to outbid all other teams financially to convince him to take the trip up north for only one guaranteed year. However, I’m uncomfortable guaranteeing Glaus a significant part of the 2006 or 2007 budget, and his health problems make him virtually uninsurable.
I believe the Mariners should let Glaus know that they have interest in his services, but would like to let the market establish his value. If he decides to take a one year deal, he’s a good place to overpay, as he’ll come with more potential than just about any other player not getting a multiyear commitment. If he can find a team willing to sign him through 2007, however, wish him luck. That’s just a big commitment with a large unknown that the M’s don’t need to be making.
2005 Mariner veterans
In the 2005 Mariner post you’ll see that there are two huge questions we haven’t talked a lot here on the USSM, focusing instead on questions of the day.
Jamie Moyer and Bret Boone are both going to be paid huge sums of money in 2005. Moyer $7.5m and Boone $9m. The M’s are going to have payroll flexibility like crazy, but a lot depends on these two. Has age finally cost Moyer enough that he’s unable to walk that fine line between control-freak artist and all-too-hittable? Did Boone get old, fast, or is there Something More Nefarious going on with his hitting problems (and please, let’s not get into that)(please?).
I think Moyer’s the better bet for a return to goodness. But… maybe not. Here’s why:
Moyer’s striking out batters this year at about the same rate (~14%) as he has since he got to Seattle. His best rate’s about 16%, but 14% is good. His walk rate is ~7% which is higher then we’d like to see: in his good years in Seattle it’s 4-5%. It’s the HR rate that’s way, way up, to 5%. That’s ugly. He’s seeing more balls put into play go for hits, but we’ve talked about the decreased defense.
The walk rate was the same last year, cause for concern, but the hit rate would go down if the team improved the defense next year, and that’d help him a lot. The HR rate’s a real worry. It’s higher than it’s ever been in his career, and while pitchers don’t have as much control on hit rate as you might think listening to the broadcasts, Moyer’s been one of the rare pitchers who consistently has held it down. If he’s not getting weak grounders and pop-ups anymore — if hitters are mashing those over the wall not out of luck but because he’s not quite as fine, then this is trouble.
That said, the home runs are subject to a lot of luck. There’s an argument here that Moyer’s been forced to pitch off his game consistently because the team’s offense has been so weak he’s not going after hitters, afraid that the one hit’s going to be the game, so when he has to work from behind… I don’t know, and I haven’t done the tea-leaf thing with this detailed splits against historicals to look for clues there yet.
Boone, by contrast… there was a point in Moyer’s career where the light went on and he started being the crafty left-hander we’ve known and loved. When Boone came over from San Diego, he was a glove man who had never hit particularly well and suddenly was ripped with muscle and putting up seasons (in Safeco!) that looked like something out of Joe Morgan’s career lines, just blisteringly good. And then okay, and then good again, and then.. this year.
Except this year looks like something out of his early career.
There’s a chicken-and-egg argument over power and walks: that power creates walks because hitters get pitched around, or that by being more selective hitters can get pitches they can drive (Ted Williams, for one, weighs in on this side). Doesn’t matter which side you take, though — if Boone isn’t the fearsome power hitter, he’s not a guy who wants to take a lot of walks on his own, so he’s neither chicken or egg. The argument is kind of pointless with Boone anyway, as he took 40 walks in his monster 2001, 53 in his off-2001 2002, and 68 in his monster 2003 year.
What concerns me is that he’s displaying a normal aging path: if you figure as bat speed goes down and power declines, you’ll see avg drop, power numbers drop, strikeout increase (and walks, usually, but again, Boone-as-non-poultry), that Boone’s season for you. Huge drop in ability to make solid contact, when he does make contact he’s not putting enough on it, and he’s striking out more, either unable to pull the trigger or not getting bat-on-ball.
Average is the most variable of skills, and most people understand that even without the Bull Durham speech. But the whole package here? It’s not to say that players can have late-career peaks (heck, check out Boone, years 32-34) but if the reflexes and bat speed start to go, there’s no coming back from that.
Jason advocated benching Boone to avoid this option year. This is a case where I’d have to defer to the scouts: is this aging? Is he getting the bat around as fast this year? Is there something else going on?
Between the two of them, Moyer seems like the guy who can compensate for aging, who can come back next year and contribute. Boone’s the one I’m much more concerned about.
Blogs in general
We’re in the Seattle Times today in which the Times, for the first time, mentions the bleachers.
Two things I want to mention:
Perhaps it takes the right hot-button issue. Zumsteg, a program manager at Expedia who writes the U.S.S. Mariner blog, just might have hit on one.
I don’t so much write the blog as for the blog. Given the massive contributions of Dave and Jason (yeah, I know he hasn’t been around — he’s got a new kid) I think that’s an important distinction.
And
“We’re like the Radio Free Europe for Mariners fans,” said Derek Zumsteg, 30, who blogs on the baseball fan site U.S.S. Mariner and says he wants to stimulate “a good fight with hair-pulling and name-calling.”
I did say the Radio Free Europe thing, but the other quote comes from the Comments Guidelines where that was supposed to come across as a comment by someone I don’t want hanging around, expressing a view entirely opposite to the one I hold. I’ve tried to make that a little clearer, going in and putting the header in quotes and making the text clearer that I’m responding… but unfortunately it’s too late for the article.
Mariners at Angels, 9/21
One of the more interesting and laughable assertions of the last couple of years ties into this game: the Orioles, who before the 2000 season turned down Aaron Sele at the last minute, probably at the direct request of Peter Angelos, skipped out on a three-year deal. Sele, as you know, signed with the M’s for two years, where he did okay — a pretty good pickup for the money, I’d say. Then he went to the Angels, where he’s been bad and had shoulder surgery late in the 2002 season.
The Orioles, who’ve suffered through no GM, more than one GM, and general confused leadership, have tried to spin the story that they turned down the deal not because they thought it was too long, or too expensive, or whatever the reason was, but because they say, in the results of his physical, clear signs that he would break down in three years, so they decided not to sign the deal.
This is obvious balderdash. Even the best doctors, the Yokums and the Andrews (Andrewses? Andrewii?), look at photos of pitcher’s arms and have trouble telling if a guy like Rafael Soriano is injured right then. Given the same photos of a pitcher’s shoulder, different specialists will come to entirely different conclusions (smart teams look at this and figure out who’s right more often) about what’s going on right then. Team physicians and players often waffle over whether or not a player should have surgery or rehab right then, based on all available evidence.
To think that anyone could look at pitcures of Sele’s arm after the 1999 season and say “well, it’s frayed, but not badly, and at the current rate of decline he should start to lose effectiveness… 2002. Yup. Why, were you thinking of giving him a three-year deal?” is… well, I don’t fault them for floating it, but at least tone the lie back: “We thought there might be an injury risk, and it was serious enough that we backed off.”
That they have to go for the gold ring of prescience by pretending they knew he’d have two good years — and how do you even know any pitcher’s going to have a good year, much less two? — and then get injured… it’s wacky. It’s like shooting for the big lie and then hoping people give you credit for 50% of it.
Which reminds me: I don’t think I’ve mentioned lately that I invented the taco. It’s true. All by myself. Think of me the next time you enjoy one. Also, widescreen movies, that was me too.
Updating for 2005
The 2005 M’s construction post is linked up on the left with the features now, and has been updated with salary information helpful reader Jason Rogers sent us. Yay, readers. We’ve also started linking up the names with the specific posts on that player, which should turn this into one happy conversational splinter-fest almost immediately but may also make it really cool for in-depth referencing.
Section 101 to go away
… sort of.
At the Public Facilities District meeting yesterday, a woman (no info on who yet) got up and laid into the Mariners for the center-field landing bleachers and covering up her brick in particular.
Chuck Armstrong, Mariners president, apologized about the bleachers and said that they would only be deployed when the team had already sold out the game. Which I’d be a little angry about except that I don’t think the M’s are going to sell out a lot next year. Still, it does leave open the question of whether they’d push them out all the time if they could, or if they see this as an easy give-back to the public since they’re not selling anyway. If they were selling those 240 seats out every game, I don’t think they’d be coming out this early in the fight.
Talking to the PFD this morning, I asked them if they had anything to do with this and they said “I think it was the public that did it.”
Good job, public.
Madritsch
I know a bunch of people have seen the following quote from Ken Rosenthal’s latest piece and decided to hammer Bavasi for it, but I’m going to uncharacteristically defend the man. Here’s the quote:
“I know we will have some arguments in the future about his (Bobby Madritsch’s) role,” Mariners G.M. Bill Bavasi says. “Whitey (Herzog) always said to build a staff from the back — start with a closer so you can play your 27 outs vs. their 24. Bobby seems to have the mental makeup to close.”
There are three basic things we can say about this quote:
1. It lacks context. We have no idea what the question was, why it was brought up, or if Bavasi was intending this as a simple complement on Madritsch’s demeanor on the mound. Really, those two sentences alone tell us nothing about what Bavasi feels Madritsch’s future role should be.
2. The fact that Bill Bavasi is quoting Whitey Herzog is not a good thing. This quote, especially, is easily refutable and obviously incorrect.
3. Bavasi is right. So far, Madritsch has displayed all the traits that most people usually look for in a “closers mentality”. I personally believe it’s a ridiculously overplayed cliche, that most good relievers can close with few problems, and that mental makeup specific to closing out games is mostly a creation of the media looking for a story. However, if you were to identify the kinds of things that would usually be associated with a “closer mentality”, Madritsch would get check marks on just about every one.
So, what he essentially said was true, but why he said it we don’t know. It’s nothing to get worked up over. The biggest complaint I have about most more-than-casual fans is their obsesion with analyzing quotes in the media. Ignore it. It’s almost all crap. It gives little to no insight into what people actually believe, and trying to break down a manager or GM based off of answers giving in question and answer forums is doomed to failure.
Safeco Field cost
To clarify something: we often refer to Safeco as being a $330-350m stadium financed by tax dollars. This is a little unfair to the team, but entirely fair in another sense.
The cost of the stadium was supposed to be in that range, with the M’s contribution slated to be about $40m, which they immediately recouped by selling the naming rights to Safeco Insurance.
However, the cost overruns, which the team was respoinsible for in the rush to build it, and which they had promised to pay for, were not paid for by the public. Though not for lack of trying, as the M’s attempted to get the public to pay for it (because the tax was collecting more revenue than anticipated, which is like going to lunch with someone and refusing to split the bill because they have more money then you). The final cost of the stadium was about $520m, and I’ve read the team ended up covering about $130m of the overruns (meaning the public paid $390m for the stadium). The team then went and tried to pursue legal action against everyone they’d hired to build the stadium. I don’t know if they recovered any of that money or not — I can’t remember reading anything about any settlements, but that’s the kind of detailed, no-story-here event that I imagine was probably on page 8 of the business section, if it ran at all.
If that’s the case, the Mariners ended up paying about a quarter of the cost of the new stadium out of pocket, which would make them one of the more generous contributors in the last stadium boom. But some points to consider:
– the overruns were entirely the fault of the team’s desire to open mid-season 1999, a move that made them about $75m in additional revenues (I could do a detailed breakdown of my guess there, but that’s probably in the ballpark — ha!) for that year
– they did try and go back on their promise to pay and made all kinds of dire predictions about what would happen if they were forced to pay their lunch tab
In that sense, I’m reluctant to credit them for this.
However, assume for moment that the team’s crack legal team went out into the wild to go hunt for settlement money and they came back with nothing. There would be a massive debt on the books the team would have to pay down as a result of their own actions. When they pay that off, it makes their profits look much smaller, even as their revenues may be spectacularly high. Even for a highly profitable team like the M’s, this means they can retire that debt quickly over the last couple of successful years, making it easy to make the profits of those boom years go away.
This is important to you because while the team’s lease with the PFD is laughably bad (I’d love to rent a place to live under the terms of this deal) it does contain limited profit-sharing. The team is supposed to share a portion of the money they make once they’ve paid off debt they supposedly (but did not actually) accumulated during the 1989-1999 years. The Mariners, if they never recovered any of the cost of the overruns, have $126m in postponement of the start of revenue sharing, of putting money back in the public coffers. As a result of thier own incompetence in project planning.
That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of postponement.
Not that has anything to do with present events. It just occurred to me.