If they really wanted a no-hit 4th/5th outfielder, the M’s should have kept Greg Colbrunn and just signed Eric Owens to the minor league deal rather than trading for McCracken. McCracken and Owens are pretty much the same player, and have very similar career numbers once you factor Coors Field out of McCracken’s. At least then you’d still have Colbrunn’s bat on the bench.
The general reaction to yesterday’s signings is that, since they are minor league deals, its a no-harm, no-foul transaction. Let Owens and Mulholland come to spring training, see what they show, and if they stink, release them. Here’s the rub, though; these guys have a long track record that we can easily evaluate them with, and the conclusions are clear. Neither one belongs on a major league roster. To give them an opportunity to get hot for a few weeks in spring training and blind the organizations eyes to this fact is playing with fire.
How bad is Eric Owens? Last year, he had a VORP (value over replacement position) of -9.2. That means he was worth 9 runs less than what would be considered a freely available player plucked out of any random Triple-A team. For comparison sake, Jeff Cirillo was -9.5 VORP. In 2002, he had a career year, and was worth 3.9 VORP. 2001, he was his normal self, posting a -9.0. His 3 year average puts him at -4.5, or between 4 and 5 runs worse than guys who will make $50,000 on a split contract and sit in AAA all year.
Mulholland is a little more defensible, as he was still servicable against left-handers last year (while righties beat him like he stole something), despite posting peripheral numbers that make Giovanni Carrara look like Cy Young. Bavasi’s quote extolling his virtues had me chuckling, though: “He is very tough on opposing baserunners.” His pick-off move is still one of the better ones around, but this is about as useless a skill as there is in the game. It really doesn’t matter if the man on first can steal second base or not when the next batter is likely to hit it over the wall.
Anyways, here’s the main reason these signings, despite being “low risk”, are bad moves. If either man gets added to the 40-man roster, his contract becomes guaranteed, and the M’s are on the hook for the full years salary regardless how long they stick on the roster. If the Mariners were intelligent enough to give those opportunities to minor leaguers on split contracts (where they are paid significantly less after being optioned back to the minors), they would save giant chunks of money.
As an example, lets say Gil Meche’s shoulder is a bit sore in March, and the team decides he should start the year on the disabled list getting loose in Peoria while the team goes north for the first two weeks. Due to his veteran status, Mulholland gets the nod over Bobby Madritsch, and breaks camp with the club. He predictably gets rocked, Meche returns, and the Mariners release Mulholland to make room on the roster. For that two weeks of brutal pitching, they’re out $600,000. Had they gone with Madritsch, in addition to getting a better pitcher, they could simply option Madritsch back to Tacoma when Meche is healthy and resume paying him at his Triple-A Salary (approximately $60,000).
If either Mulholland or Owens sees the light of day on the Mariners roster, it will be essentially the same as lighting a half million dollars on fire. They are inferior talents to players already in the system who would command a significantly smaller amount of money and have actual potential to improve. These moves aren’t just pointless no-risk gambles. They are dangerous chances for management to blow another million dollars on players who should be watching the games from the stands.
Seriously, for those who pride themselves on being optimistic about the team and the front office, I simply ask for the name of one worse talent evaluator currently holding a GM position than Bill Bavasi. Just one. At this point, it is painfully clear that he has surpassed even in the ineptitude of Chuck LaMar and established himself as the worst general manager in major league baseball. And it only took him four months. That has to be some kind of record.
I know they’re just minor league deals, but geez.
I know why Villone is coming back. He was on Lou’s Refuse to Lose M’s in 1995. Oh yes, you may have forgotten, but the lefty was in nineteen games, nineteen kits, 23 walks (and 26 K), allowing for a fondly-remembered 7.91 ERA. And as a former first-round draftee, the team signs *on the cheap* the kind of talent they’re forced to give up when they sign luminaries like Ibanez.
In other joking news, the Mariners announced the signing of the Tooth Fairy to a two-year, $4m contract with club option for 2007 today. “The Tooth Fairy will provide a much-needed right-handed bat off the bench and is an outstanding defender at both first and third. The Tooth Fairy is also known for his generous contributions to children’s causes off the field and has been an outstanding community leader. “
Here’s to hoping this man isn’t a Mariner fan. I had never heard of “assault on a sports official” before; is it really a more egregious offense to give a basketball referee a concussion than a normal guy on the street?
Also, people are beginning to latch onto the reports of Villone’s contract not being guaranteed. I’m looking into this, but anything other than a health or fitness clause that would allow them to void the contract would be extremely abnormal. By definition, a major league contract is guaranteed, and the union is not in the business of letting players individually negotiate away provisions of the collective bargaining agreement. My best guess is there is a mid-March buyout, where the Mariners can either choose to pay him $100,000 to go away by March 15th or the entire contract is guaranteed. Despite the fact that none of the local dailies found this important enough to ask about, we’ll do our best to come up with the facts of the contract and report them here.
New Big Board. Dig it.
Say hello to Ron Villone and so long to Kazuhiro Sasaki. Also, if you’re keeping track of such things, the 40-man roster is now full.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until we get minor league player assignments so I can clean things up a bit.
Anyway, as always, drop me a line if you see something amiss.
I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a reason this Villone signing isn’t awful, but I just can’t find one. I was ready to go so far as to say it makes sense if they turn around and trade Franklin to make Villone the 5th starter, but even that doesn’t work if you look at his splits (5.42 ERA as a starter over the past three seasons, 5.00 as a reliever). What’s worse, this pretty much guarantees that he’s going to be the #1 left-handed option out of the pen next season. Unless something has changed, Eddie Guardado is stepping in at closer, meaning he’s no longer a “lefty in the pen.” Our two lefties will most likely be Ron Villone and Mike Myers. Yahoo.
The best thing about Villone is his better-than-decent strikeout rate (7.68 per 9 IP last season). Not as good as, say, Arthur Rhodes, but what are you gonna do? We’re all about looking for positives.
New Big Board to follow.
Just when everyone begins to complain that there is no Mariner news to talk about, we get reminded why no news is good news. At least, when Bill Bavasi is running your club. $1 million base salary for Ron Villone, and $1 million in possible incentives. We have been unable to confirm that he will receive an additional $50,000 for every old lady he helps across an intersection, and $25,000 for every time he is publically quoted saying positive things about upper management.
We think Ron is a real good fit in that role (left-handed reliever). He is tough on left-handers as well as right-handers…
Of course, anyone with an internet connection and the savvy to find Ron Villone’s player card could dispell that myth in less than three minutes.
And, hey, just for fun, Mark Guthrie and Mike Matthews both signed minor league, non-guaranteed contracts last week. Not only do they not take up a spot on the 40-man roster, but if the Pirates and Reds don’t like what they see in spring training, they aren’t out a dime and can release them without compensation. A quick comparison of the three pitchers versus lefties from 2001-2003:
Guthrie: .243/.342/.370
Matthews: .213/.283/.316
Villone: .249/.334/.387
The going rate for middling non-effective relievers who just happen to throw with their left hand is not $1 million guaranteed plus incentives. Yet more evidence that market value is a completely foreign concept to our General Manager. And hey, now the M’s can count this as $2 million against their budget and continue to spin their way into not spending the money recovered from the Sasaki gift. Boy, following this team sure is a treat.
I started to write a long post today that never came about (more on this later). My basic point, presented here without the backup etc. that I was putting together, was that baseball teams seem to have divided themselves into two camps:
*Teams that want to win, but have limits on how they can achieve that and
*Teams that have another priority but wouldn’t mind winning.
The Mariners, I was going to argue, are the best team of the second group. They’re willing to invest a lot, they have a productive farm system and a major league team that while possibly competitive in a division with three good 80-90 win teams, and they play in a lovely new stadium I like to go see games at (which is not to say that I don’t have quibbles with it). But their priority list goes:
1. Definately make money
2. Field a friendly team of character guys
2. Win
Other teams do this a little differently. The Blue Jays, for instance, it’d be more like
“Win as many games as we can given our budget and our plan to be ready to compete when the Yankees and Red Sox fall over exhausted”
It’s a fine difference. The A’s may win just as many games as the M’s, but I don’t doubt that if Beane had to sell his family to Brian Sabean to get Barry Bonds playing left field, he’d do it.
Fortunately for us, they’ve so far decided that the way to make money is to put butts in seats and keep the team resonably competitive within the division. What I worry about is what happens if the team wobbles. What if Boone joins his brother on the out-for-the-season list, or Ichiro breaks his arm somehow, and the team drops below .500?
If the fans leave and the team starts to look at breaking even instead of making obscene amounts of money, I can see them punting entirely. They’ve been paying into the revenue sharing fund for years (which is morally wrong, but don’t get me started on that) and that has to rankle every one of the owners. If they can field a team for $25m, get half the fans plus an extra $40m in revenue-sharing money, I don’t doubt they’d be down to flipping a coin to make the decision.
Soo, now my off-topic rant on why I didn’t get around to writing a long, long essay on the relative priorities and goal-setting of different franchises:
You may be wondering why I haven’t posted since Friday when I’m a pretty regular bet to post something about something daily. Let me tell you, Dear Readers. I blame Creative Labs and the wonder of modern technology. I finally replaced my old and on-its-last-legs monitor* with a new one and finally got a new graphics card to replace my dying graphics card**, so I decided it would be a good time to update my drivers so I could play Halo when I’m not writing columns about baseball and then deleting them (folks, if you think the Breaking Balls columns are kind of weak sometimes, I’d like to say in my defense that is never for lack of trying). So!
* flash new motherboard BIOS, no problem, ASUS’s utility worked perfectly
* get the lastest Radeon drivers: no problem, install worked perfectly
* install monitor driver, smooth sailing still
Looks great. Halo runs like crap.
* find update for Halo, install, works fine.
Halo’s performance notes suggest upgrading sound drivers. That seems perfectly reasonable, right? Year-old drivers…
* run Creative Labs update for the Sound Blaster Live!
Meltdown of epic scope. Bombs in the middle of the driver install, blue screen of death (which I think I’ve seen maybe ten times since I installed XP when it came out, which (on another side note) makes previous MS operating systems look like TandyDOS). System comes back up, runs slow as Olerud. Can’t get anything working. Attempts to remove the half-installed drivers failed. Attempts to re-install drivers fail. Nothing worked and it took 20 minutes to not work.
I’ve been working on machines since I figured out the workaround for the broken ‘D’ key on my dad’s Heathkit H-19 (a build-it-yourself clone of the Zenith 80, if I remember). I’ve tweaked autoexec.bat and config.sys to squeeze enough base memory to run Wing Commander, and I’ve led expeditions deep into the wilds of the Windows registry. I’m not banging on the case with a rock or anything, and this disaster took me over a day of my weekend to get past.
Now Halo just sounds like crap. The sounds all pop and clip, and I have no idea what I do now.
Microsoft, and I’m entirely serious when I write this, should have some kind of health-department-like inspection rating for vendors so we can track how bad some of these people are. Or, and I’m okay with this too, they should hire goons to beat the stuffing out of people who do stuff like this and make their OS look bad.
* I bought a pair of 17″ Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 87TXM monitors at Boeing Surplus (which rules) a couple years ago for not much money ($150 each?). Your standard monitor does have a life-span: after three, four years of use they start to get fuzzy, or dim, or off-color. So these were super-good monitors but from the date on the back I could see they were barely three years old… got three years out of them. Everyone else there (not that this is even remotely relevant) was snapping up Viewsonics for the same price that were 5 years old. Boeing Surplus, folks. If you’ve got an eye for value, man, that place is cool.
** It had a fan on it that made awful grinding noises sometimes and was having trouble moving as much air as you’d like from a cooling fan
One of the interesting side effects fo the space-age material they stuck up out there is that this may offer us a chance to look at whether or not a batting eye is significant. It wasn’t that long ago that you could buy centerfield seats at the Kingdome that were right where batters tried to pick up the ball, and slowly they started to phase that out — booting people who were being intentionally distracting, not selling those tickets unless they had to, and so on. Griffey complained about that when he came up, as I remember. Since then the existence and protection of the batter’s eye has gone from a matter of courtesy to something parks like Safeco Field are built around as if it was a divine commandment. (And God said “Also, as an eleveth instruction, more a guideline really, in five hundred generations or so, you’ll be playing this game with a stick and a thrown ball and… you shall respect the batter’s eye and offer a background, dark in color, to those who swing the stick. And seriously, that no killing thing? I mean it. Don’t make me come down there.” Except that everyone forgot about it until the 1980s.*)
As much as statheads like to discuss them, and while I think applying park effects is the single biggest advance in player evaluation in modern times, no one really understands park effects and how to use them. There are sometimes big one-year fluctuations in park effects: do you adjust player stats based on a one-year park effect swing when it’s traditionally been a neutral park? What if the effect’s persistent? If I bat .300/.400/.500 consistently at home and the league builds a ton of hitter’s parks making mine seem like a pitcher’s, my offensive contributions at home don’t become more valuable, but now they’re adjusted up to compare to the league…
We can come up with theories on why parks played one way one year and another way another, but we don’t really know. Wind patterns inside a park have little if any relation to the wind in the area or even the wind in the neighborhood. It’s difficult to prove park effect correlation to humidity or cold or whatever because there are so many other factors and only 30 parks, each unique in almost every characteristic.
I look forward to seeing what Safeco’s numbers look like in the future, and seeing if we can nurse any good conclusions out of it. In the meantime, I agree with Dave — let’s remain skeptical for now.
* for the easily offended**: no blasphemy intended
** why bother with that footnote? it’s not as if someone easily offended would be mollified by a footnote that says “don’t be offended”