ZIPS on the 2013 Mariners: They Suck
Dan Szymborski’s ZIPS projection system is one of the best publicly available forecasting tools available. No system is perfect, and of course teams can perform quite differently than their forecasts — hello, 2012 Orioles — but it’s still important to understand what a good forecasting system expects from a specific group of players. And for most of the Mariners current specific players, ZIPS does not think very favorably.
Focus mostly on the plus and minus stats, as the overall numbers will likely change due to the change in the dimensions affecting how Safeco Field plays. I’d expect most of the hitters to post better numbers, and most of the pitchers to post worse numbers, but all you really should care about is their performance adjusted for league norms and park effects.
For instance, Kendrys Morales is projected for a 115 OPS+, right around what he got last year. That’s not bad. He’d be a roughly league average player when he’s on the field if that forecast is correct, which is about what we pegged him for when the Mariners acquired him. After that, though, the idea of a rejuvenated offense kind of goes away.
Michael Morse is projected for an OPS+ of 103, the same as Kyle Seager and Jesus Montero. ZIPS doesn’t see him aging very well. Meanwhile, the team’s next best projected hitter after Morales and those three — Mike Zunino, who is likely to have a very limited role in the big leagues this year, if he gets there at all. Now, the projection for Zunino is fantastic, calling him a +3 win catcher right now, but that doesn’t do a lot of good for the 2013 Mariners. You should be excited about Zunino’s future, but you were probably already excited about Zunino’s future. That ZIPS likes him a lot as well shouldn’t be a huge surprise.
Behind Zunino, hanging out in the roughly average hitter category, are Dustin Ackley, Justin Smoak, Mike Carp, Raul Ibanez, Casper Wells, and Michael Saunders. For Ackley, a decent defensive second baseman, this makes him a pretty solid everyday player and the best position player on the team. For the rest, it suggests that they’re marginal role players at best, as an average bat at a corner position isn’t that valuable unless it is paired with elite defense. Wells and Saunders play good enough defense to be useful, but by and large, it thinks most of these guys aren’t good enough to start on a quality MLB team.
And then there’s the pitching. Oh, the pitching.
Again, the superficial numbers might look okay because the environment is based on a park that drastically deflates run scoring, but look at the ERA- numbers, which measure performance relative to park adjusted league average.
Felix has an ERA- of 79. In other words, still an ace. #1 comp is Greg Maddux. Felix is good.
Iwakuma comes in at 100. Solid average starter. About what you should expect.
Erasmo Ramirez comes in at 109, making him an okay #5 starter. I think he’s probably a little better than this, but it’s worth noting that his pedigree has always been about performance over stuff, and even a performance-only forecast isn’t a big fan.
And then the wheels come off. Blake Beavan is forecast for a 121 ERA-, making him a replacement level pitcher. Hector Noesi is at 132, and if he pitched 130 innings, he’d rack up -1 WAR. No Major League team should be okay with either of these guys in their rotation. Right now, the Mariners have both. Noesi is going to be replaced, but Beavan likely isn’t, and the depth behind him just isn’t there. Hultzen (115 ERA-), Paxton (120 ERA-), and Walker (127 ERA-) aren’t ready, and even the more command oriented Brandon Maurer (124 ERA-) is projected as another replacement level arm for 2013. These kids might have a bright future, but it’s not here yet. Expecting them to come in and turn into quality Major League starting pitchers is simply not realistic.
To be a legitimate contender for the playoffs, a team basically needs to compile 40 WAR, and needs more like 45 to 50 to give themselves a good shot at getting in. Just based on the M’s ZIPS projections and their current depth chart, the team comes in around +26 WAR. If you replace Noesi with an average starter, that puts them at +28 WAR. Maybe you bump them up a bit because you like the young bullpen arms more than the projections, so now you’re at +30 WAR. For comparison, the 2012 Mariners posted a total of +28 WAR.
That’s still not a very good team. The offense isn’t as improved as the Mariners are hoping for, and the pitching looks like it could be a total disaster. There’s some reasons for optimism in the forecasts for Zunino, Ackley, Montero, and Brad Miller (forecast to be nearly a league average player right now, which is kind of interesting), but by and large, ZIPS is unimpressed with the imports the Mariners made this winter, and thinks this team would need a few minor miracles to have a shot at contending in 2013.
The Mariners could outperform their forecasts. These aren’t written in stone tablets, of course. But think of this like a weather forecast. Based on the available information, and what we know about historical patterns, the 2013 Mariners don’t look very good. Prepare for a pretty lousy team, just as you would prepare for rain if the weather guy told you a storm was coming. It might not happen, because there are unpredictable variables that can have a real impact on the team’s outcomes, but the most likely outcomes involve the 2013 Mariners being bad.
Happy Wednesday.
Shoppach to Mariners, Finally
The seemingly inevitable deal is apparently done. We still may not know exactly how to measure catcher defense, but we know who’ll likely be doing some defending for the 2013 Mariners: veteran back-up Kelly Shoppach.
Unlike the Ronny Paulino deal, I’d assume this is a major league contract, meaning that the M’s have another 40-man decision to make. Yoervis Medina may sleep a little less soundly tonight, and I can’t imagine Carlos Peguero is safe either. They could also choose to drop someone a little more prospect-y but further from the majors – Julio Morban or Francisco Martinez come to mind.
Shoppach is a three-true-outcome hitter – he couples Olivo-like contact and with above-average power with decidedly non-Olivo-like walk rates. His batting average and strikeout rates are going to require some patience, but he’s put up very nice wOBA’s in his short stint in Boston last year and in more regular duty in Cleveland. His manager with the Indians was Eric Wedge, and it’s easy to assume that Wedge had a hand in picking Shoppach. Given the talk this winter about changing the nature of the veteran presence in the clubhouse, it makes sense that they’d find some guys they’re familiar with.
His defense is a bit harder to get a handle on. He’s generally rated poorly in the defensive metrics at fangraphs, where some solid work throwing out runners is undone by pitch blocking. The Mariners FO clearly thinks a lot about catcher defense, but looking at the succession of catchers who’ve played for the M’s (Rob Johnson, Adam Moore, Miguel Olivo, Jesus Montero, John Jaso, now Kelly Shoppach), it’s glaringly obvious that they don’t much care about passed balls/wild pitches. I’m not saying they’re wrong to see it as a minor element of a catcher’s overall worth – it’s just an interesting and very consistent pattern.
What Do We Know About Catcher Defense?
From Dave Cameron to Larry Stone, people have seen Kelly Shoppach’s signing with the M’s as something of a formality. He’s a veteran, he’s played for Eric Wedge before, he’s got a solid defensive reputation. Meanwhile, the normally tight-lipped M’s front office has made it clear that John Jaso’s defensive problems limited his value both to the M’s and potential trading partners. So, how do we know that catcher A is good and that catcher B is terrible? Perhaps no other area of analysis has changed so much in the past five years, so it may be time to look at what we think we know about measuring a catcher’s impact. For those looking for an air-tight conclusion, or a single number we can confidently slap onto Ronny Paulino, Shoppach or Jaso, this piece may disappoint. Those of you who are used to my epistemological musings will understand that we can’t yet do that, but yet it’s still interesting to think through the process.
So: what does a catcher do? What’s in the job description? They’re there to call pitches (sometimes), catch/block wayward pitches, to present somewhat less wayward pitches in the best possible light so that they may be called strikes, throw out runners attempting to steal bases, and function as psychologist, coach and motivational speaker to pitchers. Measuring passed balls/wild pitches is easy, though comparing it to an appropriate baseline is. Same with stolen bases – adding up the runs saved/lost in the running game is easy, but apportioning those runs to catchers and pitchers can be a bit trickier. Still, sabermetrics is on pretty firm ground in assigning values to these two components of catching; Fangraphs’ catcher defense metric is the sum of these two measures. However, the range of this metric simply isn’t all that big. The best/worst catchers range from about -5 to +5 runs in each one, so the gap between the best and worst catchers would realistically be in the neighborhood of +1 to -1 wins per year. That’s…not a lot, and several years ago, the idea that teams were too willing to move “questionable” defenders off the position were popular in some sabermetric circles. The squishy stuff like pitch framing and “managing a pitching staff” seemed near impossible to measure, and no one was certain if it was really true, or if it was just a baseball equivalent of an old wive’s tale.
The first real attempt at trying to measure the impact of the psychologist-cum-strategist role of the catcher is Catcher ERA, or cERA. In its simplest form, it just the earned runs scored while a catcher was playing – crediting the pitcher’s ERAs to the catcher. The problems with this are legion, and we’ve dealt with this issue several times at USSM. As Dave said back when people were clamoring for more Rob Johnson (this really happened! There was clamoring!), the fatal flaw with the measure is selection bias. John Jaso looks great by cERA in 2012 because he caught a lot of Felix’s starts.* Craig Wright updated it years ago in his book “The Diamond Appraised” by focusing solely on pitcher/catcher pairs. That is, he took selection bias out by controlling for the pitcher. Still, methodological problems remain – two catchers could have identical ERAs with a set of hurlers and come out with vastly different cERAs depending on how frequently they caught each of them.
The combination of small samples, a lack of evidence for a real effect, potential biases and the lack of an identifiable *reason* for catchers to have vastly different results led many in sabermetrics to dismiss cERA, leaving just the running game and pitch blocking to measure. Two things fundamentally changed that. First, Dan Turkenkopf and others tried to assign a value, in runs, of a pitch being called either a ball or a strike. An fastball on the black is ruled a ball by a vindictive umpire – what did that cost the pitcher and his team? The answer he got (0.161 runs) was stunningly high – if catchers had a repeatable skill in getting on-the-edge pitches called strikes, the impact of it could dwarf the value of CS% or wild pitches. Initial studies of the impact of pitch framing saw massive, almost impossible gaps between the best and the worst catchers, until Mike Fast’s definitive study on the matter put the range at about +/- two wins per year. For some catchers, this skill does in fact dwarf the impact of CS% and passed pitches. The measure is so new, and researchers are still tweaking it to ensure that they control for everything from the umpire, the park’s pitch fx calibration, the hitter, and the pitch type. This gap remains, and, more excitingly, this appears to be an actual skill – good pitch-framers in year X are generally good pitch-framers in year Y. Maybe the old baseball saw about catcher defense wasn’t just precedent mixed with hokum.
Now that pitch fx has been in use for 5 full seasons, and now that researchers can correct for the park-by-park idiosyncrasies in the data, sabermetrics is again looking at something like cERA to see if there’s any other effect a catcher might have on a pitcher’s performance. In reality, something like a new-fangled cERA (or what Tom Tango always called a WOWY -with or without you- study) is more about capturing everything than it is about isolating a particular skill. Still, might framing and, say, pitch blocking taken together exert a bigger impact on a pitcher’s confidence? Might a catcher’s pitch calling or the way he sets a target have an impact? Controlling for pitch fx, pitcher, batter and just about everything else, Max Marchi tried to measure the runs saved or lost by each catcher.
All of this suggests that teams should be focused on catcher defense. Indeed, the Astros snapped up Mike Fast not long after his article on pitch framing appeared (and another just hired Dan Turkenkopf), so we know that teams *are* paying attention to developments in this field. Marchi’s work on handling a staff and Fast’s work on pitch framing are so new, they’re not incorporated into WAR measures.** This may lead to WAR understating the importance of catcher defense, but I think it’s reasonable for sites to wait a few years to see if anyone’s able to shoot holes in these studies. There’s plenty of work to be done teasing out what it is a catcher does to get a pitcher more comfortable, and, perhaps more importantly, why a catcher will work quite well with one pitcher (or kind of pitcher) and not at all well with another.
There’s also the problem that catchers who are great at one aspect of the job are often poor at others. To bring this back to the Mariners’ catching depth (finally!), we see that Ronny Paulino isn’t great at blocking pitches or controlling the running game, but he’s above average in framing. Miguel Olivo was (surprise!) one of the worst in baseball in blocking pitches, but one of the best (at least from 2008-2011) at handling a staff. John Jaso rates poor in blocking and not-so-hot in pitch framing, but is a touch above average in pitcher results/handling a staff. Kelly Shoppach was a bit above average in framing and in the running game, but a bit below in pitch blocking and hide-your-eyes-bad in pitcher results. Jesus Montero’s not been catching long enough to show up on a lot of these lists, but his results in 2012 weren’t great. He was noticeably worse than Jaso/Olivo with many pitchers last year, and posted the worst K:BB ratio and OPS-against of the three backstops. We’ve got a heck of a lot more data, and even some new theories about how to use it, but I’m not sure we can definitively say that John Jaso was terrible*** or that Kelly Shoppach/Ronny Paulino/anyone else is really good. So help me out: what did YOU think of the M’s catching defense in 2012, and how do you think it’ll change in 2013? What aspects of the catcher’s role is sabermetrics ignoring, even now? What do YOU think the M’s care about in assessing a catcher’s performance, and if you had your way, what WOULD they care about?
* – It’s sort of interesting how catching a bunch of Felix’s starts doesn’t count as a credit, though. I mean, why would Felix keep throwing to him – and so well – if he Jaso was god-awful?
** – Baseball-Reference’s WAR measure for catchers – Defensive Runs Saved – apparently incorporates a cERA-like measure, though it’s tough to tell.
*** – John Jaso’s cERA highlights something that may be the next frontier in researching catcher defense. Over his career, he’s been pretty good compared to other catchers he’s played with (like Kelly Shoppach) in things like K:BB ratio and plain old BB%. Where he’s had a problem is giving up long balls. With the M’s in 2012, Jaso yielded runs and walks at the lowest rate of the three M’s catchers, but saw a lot more HRs per PA against him – particularly with Blake Beavan and Jason Vargas. In Tampa, Jaso had solid RA numbers and decent BB% rates, but was beset by HR problems, particularly when paired with fly-ball pitchers like James Shields and Matt Garza. But just as he had good results – better than Olivo/Montero’s results- catching Felix, Jaso seemed to work well with David Price. I initially thought the issue may be the result of issues with a specific pitch: the change-up. But most of the HRs came on fastballs, and Blake Beavan barely even throws a change-up. Still, it’d be interesting to see if there are specific characteristics of catchers that can lead to problems or successes in things like homers, double plays, walks, or strikeouts. Is Jaso’s low BB% and high HR% the product of a catcher who doesn’t call enough breaking pitches out of the zone? This would be an interesting topic for further research.
M’s Brass Talks to Press, Says Nothing
The M’s had their media luncheon today. A bunch of people talked. We learned that the M’s are going to have fireworks after some games this year, they’re giving away a Dustin Ackley gnome, and that the list of talking points for Jack and Wedge haven’t changed. They checked off pretty much every box, saying all the same things they always say. No one’s on scholarship. Competition is great. Veteran leadership taking pressure off the kids. Excited about the future. Who knows what might happen. We’ll see. Special group of young pitchers. You know the drill by this point.
If you’re looking for something resembling news, probably the closest thing was Eric Wedge noting that his preferred alignment has Smoak as the full-time starter at first base, with Morales serving as the regular DH. Of course, he didn’t exactly write it in stone, and with Ibanez around, Smoak’s probably not going to have much of a leash. Still, it sounds like Wedge’s preference is for something resembling a set line-up, as there doesn’t seem to be any preference for platoons or job shares.
Beyond that, most of the big league roster stuff wasn’t anything that wasn’t already known. The organization is going to sign Ronny Paulino to a minor league deal, and then probably sign another catcher as well, which I’d still bet on being Kelly Shoppach. They’d like to add a “veteran starter”, which is basically code for anyone better than Hector Noesi, which isn’t a super high bar to clear. Seager will get some reps at shortstop, which is necessary if they’re only going to carry Andino as a backup infielder, and Morse will be the emergency 3B who will take over if someone gets hurt after they pinch hit for Brendan Ryan.
On the minor league front, Stefen Romero is going to be used as a utility guy, playing second, third, and outfield. And Chris Gwynn, at least, thinks Zunino needs a good amount of seasoning in the minors before he gets to Seattle. But, yeah, not huge news.
If you want to watch the press conferences, Ryan Divish has videos and transcripts, and some additional thoughts from someone who was there. Feel free to check it out, especially if you like repetitive cliches.
Ronny Paulino Signs, Felix/M’s Mull Extension, etc.
1: The M’s were quite clear after trading John Jaso that they intended to pick up a veteran catcher to split time with Jesus Montero. Someone who wouldn’t cost a lot, so they can jettison him once they deem Mike Zunino MLB-ready, but someone who could handle a staff and with a bit more defensive chops than Jaso/Montero. Yesterday, they settled on Ronny Paulino, who signed for $1m which could grow to $1.2m if he breaks camp with the team. This may not be their final decision; there are several free agents out there, and they could always make another move either at the beginning or the end of spring training, but they have their veteran catcher now.
Paulino will be 32 for the season, and has played very sparingly the past two years. He’s a career .272/.324/.376 hitter, though much of that production came when he was the starter for the 2006-07 Pittsburgh Pirates. He had a solid year in limited time in 2009, but his power has dropped each season since then, and thus he’s not expected to add much at the plate. Behind it, the story’s mixed too. His CS% has dipped under 30% in recent years (though CS% is down league-wide too), and while he has fewer PB+WPs allowed per inning than Montero, Olivo or Jaso, he’s not exactly Pudge Rodriguez in that department.
Paulino’s main attribute is his ability to hit left-handed pitching; he’s got a career wOBA of .367 against southpaws. Still, it’s a bit strange given that Jesus Montero also hits lefties well, so the M’s aren’t platooning or helping shield Montero from tough RHPs. And there’s also the fact that Kelly Shoppach, a free-agent back-up catcher with slightly better CS%/PB numbers, has a career .374 wOBA against lefties. George Kottaras, the guy the A’s DFA’d to make room for Jaso, hits lefthanded and while his average will always be low, at least offers power/patience (sort of like Shoppach). Kottaras is no one’s idea of a great fielding catcher, so the move highlights that the M’s view the C position as a defense-first job. Despite publicly wanting to improve their offense, the M’s have willingly punted on offense at catcher in order to shore up some suspect defense.
This was highlighted today when Buster Olney reported that the Mariners included John Jaso in their proposed package for Justin Upton, which the D-Backs slugger vetoed. If true, it adds a bit more credence to reports that other GMs saw the M’s package as a gross overpay. It also highlights that the M’s appear to have been shopping Jaso around quite actively – he came up in rumors with the Pirates and Diamondbacks before ultimately heading to Oakland. There’s value in trading a guy like Jaso at the peak of his value, particularly if you think he just had a career year. But the willingness to include Jaso in various deals again shows how little the M’s brass thought of his catching prowess. I still don’t see why he was so much worse than Miguel Olivo or Jesus Montero, but the M’s front office, stocked with ex-catchers, obviously disagreed. They may have worried that Jaso wouldn’t work well with one of the pitching prospects, should Hultzen/Paxton/Maurer/Walker push their way to Seattle in the second half of the year. These are perhaps reasonable concerns, and the M’s were careful not to give Jaso a start at C with Erasmo Ramirez starting last year, but it’s still remarkable the degree to which they outweigh offense. In a year in which the M’s desperately need to improve their batting, they were still willing to punt Jaso due in part to concerns about his D.
2: In happier news, the Mariners are rumored to be discussing a new four-year extension with Felix Hernandez. Ken Rosenthal reports that a 4/$100 million deal to keep Felix a Mariner through 2018 may be a possibility. Felix’s current contract pays him about $20m per year for 2013 and 2014, and the extension would give him a raise to $25m/year from 2015-2018. Pitchers are impossible to project, and health issues make long contracts for hurlers risky. But I’m on board for this extension. Felix clearly, improbably, wants to stay, and the M’s need to make sure their best player and the undisputed face of the franchise does just that.
3: The Philadelphia Phillies added Delmon Young for $750,000. That’s a tiny sum in MLB terms, but it seems to keep Phillies’ prospect Domonic Brown blocked (unless they want Young to be a bench bat only). Many of you have already mentioned it on twitter, but I imagine many teams are inquiring about Brown’s availability in the wake of the Young signing. Given that the M’s team is mostly corner OFs and 1B/DHs, I can’t imagine Zduriencik would be involved too heavily, though it wouldn’t cost them much to swap out Brown for, say, Bay. USSM/Fangraphs head honcho Dave Cameron points out that Young isn’t that older than Brown, and may make sense for a team like Philadelphia that doesn’t care as much about bases on balls. He also points out that Brown hasn’t exactly made the most of his (few) chances with the Phillies.
4: Wendy Thurm had a great piece in Fangraphs today regarding the lawsuit several fans filed against MLB alleging that its blackout policy violated anti-trust laws. Yes, baseball’s had an anti-trust exemption, but that doesn’t mean the courts (or Congress) couldn’t revisit that. It’s fitting somewhat that Thurm’s article came out on the day that new reports valuing the Dodgers deal with Time Warner at between $7-8 billion came out. Many, like Maury Brown, pointed to Cleveland’s tv deal in late December as a sign that smaller teams can’t count on eye-popping deals like the LAs and Texas teams, and Thurm makes the good point that regional sports networks are probably factoring in losing this lawsuit either in the price they’re willing to pay or with opt-out language. The M’s can opt out of their current deal in 2015, but it seems increasingly likely that the market two years from now may be substantially different.
5: Finally, for those of you who’ve had enough of wall-to-wall Manti Te’o coverage, enjoy the single funniest baseball article I’ve read in the last year: Sam Miller’s satire on Baseball’s Greatest Hoax.
A Run is a Run is a Run
I know a lot of Mariners fans are tired of bad offensive teams. I know the Mariners are tired of bad offensive teams. In order to not have a bad offensive team next season, you’re more than willing to give up equal or greater amounts of pitching and defense, because you’re just tired of watching bad offensive teams.
Here’s the problem – if you want to win, you have to divorce yourself from that mindset. If you’re one of those who simply believes that the Mariners are doing the right thing by focusing solely on adding more power hitters in order to score more runs, please read this post. There’s some math, but it’s not scary math, and it’s not math you have to do. And the conclusion is perhaps the most important thing you can accept about baseball. I’m going to put the conclusion below this sentence, but you’ll want to read the whole post to see the evidence for yourself.
There is no evidence of additional benefit from improving a bad offense rather than improving a strong run prevention squad. There is simply no way to look at this data and suggest that there are strong levels of diminishing returns for run prevention, or that the models overrate the likelihood of a team with a bad offense’s chances of winning. If anything, the data points to the models slightly underrating those types of teams, and confirming the idea that, when it comes to winning more baseball games, a run is a run is a run.
Now, it’s almost certainly easier to improve on a weak offense than it is to improve on a strong run prevention group, or even vice versa. Filling a hole with a moderately useful player is simply not as challenging as upgrading on that a productive member of your team, and it’s certainly engrained within our personal psyche to focus on fixing what’s broken rather than improving areas that are working just fine. I’m not using this data to say that a team with a bad offense should just be content to keep having bad offensive clubs and focus entirely on preventing runs.
I am saying, however, that if a team makes a conscious decision to trade 20 runs allowed for 15 runs scored, they’re making a bad decision, no matter how bad their offense was the previous year. What matters is maximizing your ratio of runs scored to runs allowed, not reaching some kind of ideal balance between the two. Making a larger downgrade in pitching and defense in order to fix a bad offense is a trade-off that is likely to result in fewer wins. The same is likely true for swapping out hitters for pitchers, if you had a bad pitching staff last year.
Building a baseball team isn’t about simply improving on weaknesses. Building a baseball team is about putting as many good players on the field as possible, and caring too much what kinds of good players those are often leads to poor decision making. Don’t focus so much on scoring more runs or preventing more runs. Just focus on outscoring your opponent. That’s what wins games.
This isn’t “new stats versus old stats”, or “stats versus scouts”, or “insiders versus outsiders”, or any kind of argument that can be broken down along those lines. This is simply fact-based evidence. And that evidence simply refutes the idea that the Mariners are better off improving their offense, even if they have to sacrifice a greater number of runs prevented in order to make that improvement.
The “more power, more runs scored” approach to team building is simply incorrect. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t win games. Outscoring your opponent wins games. That’s the only thing the Mariners should care about.
M’s Hire AAA Guy to be Full-Time Radio Broadcaster….Awww, Man
Today, the M’s announced the hiring of 29-year old Aaron Goldsmith to be Rick Rizzs’ full-time partner in the radio booth. They’d rotated several people through that role since Dave Niehaus’ death in 2010, and wanted to bring someone on for continuity and consistency. Goldsmith served as the announcer for the Red Sox AAA affiliate in Pawtucket last year, and with the Rangers’ AA team in Frisco, TX before that. I’m sure he’ll be great, and while I don’t get as passionately upset/elated about announcers as many of you, I look forward to hearing how he works with the long-tenured Rizzs.
Many of you know that this blog is fond of a different AAA announcer, and were openly pulling for Mike Curto in this process. I am in absolutely no way an impartial, unbiased observer, so my two cents is worth even less here, but I’m disappointed Curto didn’t get a chance. That’s not a slight on Goldsmith, who didn’t create this situation and wasn’t involved the last time Mike got passed over. But I’ll be solipsistic for a minute and say that if the team wanted to undo some of the damage from yesterday’s news, they didn’t exactly do that.
The Trade and the Benefit of the Doubt
I’m over the shock of the trade now, and I’ve had the chance to replace bile and dismissal with contemplation and discussions with smart people who like, er, ok, don’t mind this trade from the M’s perspective. The arguments still don’t convince me, but it might be helpful to step through why.
1: The M’s didn’t trade prospects, they made a simple 1-1 exchange for one of the most valuable commodities in baseball: power.
I think one of my biggest flaws as an analyst is that I tend to overrate prospects. Unlike Dave (and many of you), I thought the rumored deal for Justin Upton was too much for the M’s to give up. So believe me when I say that I’m not a “prospects mean nothing” or “prospects are just minor leaguers” type, and believe me when I say I’d rather have traded prospects. The Mariners goal for the past few seasons has been to upgrade their anemic offense. Their minor league system has enviable pitching depth. The Nationals wanted pitching. Instead, the Mariners traded away the guy who put up the best wOBA, wRC+, OPS, and even slugging percentage on the 2012 team.
2: The M’s had to rethink the move after the Nats signed Rafael Soriano – the Nationals needs changed 24 hours prior to this trade.
Again, that sounds plausible, but it isn’t completely exculpatory. The Nationals hung the “for sale” sign around Morse’s neck for weeks, and the M’s had plenty of relief depth to trade from. Maybe the Nats didn’t want a youngster like Stephen Pryor, but a package around Tom Wilhelmsen might have intrigued them (“proven closer”). And in the end, look at what the Nationals got back in return: RHP prospect AJ Cole, a hard-throwing kid who got blasted in the Cal League, but dominated the Midwest League after his demotion. No pitching prospects are exactly alike, but Brandon Maurer offers a better performance record at a higher level, and the gap in overall talent is lower than it once was (Maurer’s stock rose considerably last year). Not saying Maurer alone would’ve gotten it done, but I’m saying that the Nationals wanted pitching for Michael Morse, and they got it. The M’s seemed intent on moving Jaso, as they apparently didn’t see him as a catcher, so he was one of the myriad guys who may shuffle between 1B/DH/bench bat. In order to improve the team’s offense, the M’s seemed intent on moving one of their best offensive performers from 2012. Hmmm.
3: You can’t focus too much on 2012 stats. Morse was a beast in 2011, and Jaso was more or less replacement level. When Morse is healthy, he has upside that Jaso just doesn’t.
There are two things here, one of which is absolutely true, and one of which is almost certainly wrong. First, Morse had an amazing year at the plate, knocking 31 HRs in just shy of 150 games, and putting up a .390 wOBA. That same season, Jaso’s wOBA was .292. Both players have had career years and some, let’s say, challenging ones in the recent past. The problem is that when you combine defense and position into the equation, Jaso’s value looks pretty close to Morse’s upside value. That is, Jaso’s been worth 2.5 fWAR in 2010 and 2.7 fWAR in 2012, despite playing a lot less than Morse. Morse’s career year was worth 3.3 fWAR. Play Jaso anything approaching 130 games (even if not all are at catcher) and it’s easy to see him getting close to that 3.3 win figure. Given Morse’s age and injury history that Dave discussed yesterday and it’s harder to count on another 3 wins next year. The Fangraphs ‘fans’ projection (the average of fan estimates of what Morse would’ve done in DC) forecasts a big improvement in Morse’s skills in 2013 compared to 2012 – better power, fewer Ks, more walks – along with more games played. All of that only gets him to 2 WAR. That seems like a reasonable estimate not for a best case scenario but for a slightly optimistic one. To reiterate, Jaso put up 2.7 WAR last year and 2.5 WAR in 2010.
4: Morse consolidates value into one line-up and roster slot, instead of spreading the value across two in the case of platoon players like Jaso. Even at equivalent value, Morse allows you to do something with the extra roster spot.
Dave has mentioned why he doesn’t think Jaso needs to be typecast as a platoon player, and Matthew Carruth points to Jaso’s minor league numbers as more evidence that his usage is too restrictive. But let’s say you’ve dug in your heels and won’t hear of Jaso improving against lefties. If the goal is to improve the offense, or to field a line-up that has the potential to score more than 600 runs/year, you want Jaso on the club regardless. Regress his performance severely. Have him get fewer plate appearances. Cut his positional value if you disagree with Felix Hernandez and consider him worthless as a catcher. After all of that, Jaso still appears to add plenty of value to the line-up thanks to his approach. A guy who drew 55 unintentional walks to 51 Ks has value to the line-up even if he’s not knocking 30 HRs…especially to a team that posted the worst OBP in Major League Baseball. For the third consecutive season.
5: The Mariners can’t keep building low-cost, club-controlled but flawed teams. The Mariners needed to change course and really attempt to win. Getting a proven slugger to pair with growth from Seager/Ackley/Montero shows that the M’s aren’t content to compete in 2016, they are taking a run at 2013.
The Mariners have obviously had plenty of flaws, but once again, the M’s haven’t posted a team on base percentage above .300 since Jose Lopez was good (in 2009, they finished merely last in the AL, unlike the last three seasons when they’ve ignored the DH rule and posted worse OBPs than every team in the NL). Getting a slugger to protect Kyle Seager sounds great, but this gets back into the well-trod ground about “protection” or about how many HRs you need to be a successful team. This isn’t beating a dead horse, this is whipping protohippus fossils. I think this argument really stems from the idea that the M’s committed to building a team a certain way, and need to change the way their entire approach to player value. We’ve all seen so many losses that looking at the team and saying, “Whatever you’re doing, just do the opposite” seems logical as well as cathartic. The problem is that everyone has a slightly different idea of what they thought the M’s were trying to do. And no matter what your preferred ‘philosophy’ of team construction, the fact remains that John Jaso showed that he could potentially add some value to your club. A high-OBP guy, an up-the-middle defender (albeit not a pretty one), someone whose power seemed to make a large jump after reworking his swing – this seems like the kind of player you would accommodate. If you’re a power/offense-first type, you might limit him to a platoon, and limit his C innings. If you’re an on-base/Moneyball type, maybe you *increase* his playing time and keep him at C. If you want to squeeze value out of certain spots and bring in big-ticket free agents, you could do either one. But it’s pretty hard to see him as a problem, particularly if you’re focused on offense. There is perhaps no greater difference of opinion between the blogosphere and the M’s front office than how we value John Jaso and perhaps Casper Wells. In many cases, there may be more to it when we bash a move the FO makes – lots behind the scenes that, if we on the outside knew, might change or at least ameliorate our confusion/disagreement. I kind of doubt that’s the case here.
I’d love to win now; I’m really sick of following a last-place team. But that’s somewhat dangerous, for the reasons many talked about after the Wil Myers for James Shields deal. The M’s get Morse for one season (unless they negotiate an extension), and absolutely everything needs to break right in that season for the M’s to pass OAK/LAA/TEX. Not to say it can’t happen, but it’s fairly unlikely that everything goes right for Seattle and simultaneously many, many things go wrong elsewhere in the division. It’s possible that the need to “go for it” and change the culture is more important than we basement-dwelling bloggers know, but it’s scary to see how blurry the line between “going for it” and “desperation” is.
6: You just hate Mike Morse from his days as a slightly odd M’s prospect without much power and without a position.
Anyone who’s played parts of 2 seasons in Tacoma is OK in my book. Seriously. Whatever league Bobby Livingston is in, I hope he makes its all-star team. All things equal, I’d rather purchase insurance from TJ Bohn than somebody else. If Juan Thomas really is a police officer in Atlanta, then I need everyone in the ATL to mind their Ps and Qs. I hope Mike Morse hits 31 HRs again, and it’s pretty cool that he became a huge fan favorite in DC. I’ll be cheering for him. But I still don’t understand this move unless it really WAS an attempt to win now. I know many of you are sick of talking/arguing about this, so I won’t dwell on it. I’m glad Michael Morse is back, but I’m worried about what it says about this organization.
Morse: The Lesser of Two Evils
Obviously, I’m not a big fan of yesterday’s trade from the Mariners perspective. I don’t think it makes the Mariners better in the short or long term, and I think how the Mariners evaluated the relative merits of the two players suggests a problematic approach towards valuing different skills. A few years ago, the Mariners were focused on adding value in any form they could find it; today, the Mariners are focused on scoring more runs. It’s an understandable reaction to the offensive struggles of the last few seasons, but it’s regrettable at the same time, and the focus on simply improving the team’s run scoring instead of their run differential is going to make it less likely that the team is competitive in 2013.
So, no, I haven’t talked myself into liking this move a day later. But, I will say that we should probably realize that this Mariners team, with this coaching staff, might be slightly better off with Mike Morse than they would have been with John Jaso. Because, whether it is rational or not, John Jaso wasn’t going to be a significant piece of the Mariners team next year. The world in which John Jaso got 450 plate appearances and was the team’s regular catcher against right-handers was a fantasy that simply wasn’t going to happen.
It may very well happen in Oakland, since the A’s think about baseball differently than the Mariners do. And I think we could make a pretty strong case that it should have happened in Seattle, and that the evidence points to the team’s unwillingness to use Jaso behind the plate more often being a mistake, but it was always going to be a hypothetical. Had the team gone into camp with Jaso and Montero as the catching tandem, the likely outcome was Montero taking a larger bulk of the duties, with Raul Ibanez or Justin Smoak sliding into either the 1B or DH spot so that the team could keep Jaso on the bench and not have to carry a third catcher on the roster this year. We’ve talked about the inflexibility that the team has because of all the defensively challenged players on the roster. The Mariners solution to that problem was to not put both catchers in the line-up on the same day.
Had the Mariners not made this trade, John Jaso’s value almost certainly would have gone down over the next six months, as the staff would have relegated him into a role that gave him even less playing time than he got last year. We would have spent the entire year screaming about the daily line-ups, with Ibanez regularly slotted in as the starting DH while Jaso sat on the bench. It would have been not too dissimilar to last April, when Jaso was buried as the 25th man and hardly ever played, and his presence was more a source of frustration for the fans than a source of value for the team.
That shouldn’t have been the alternative, but that’s what life in Seattle held for John Jaso in 2013. And so, yes, Mike Morse will likely provide more value to the team next year than Jaso would have, because Jaso as the regular catcher against right-handers wasn’t on the table. This trade didn’t end that possibility, because that wasn’t a consideration even before the trade. That’s simply not a job that this organization was willing to entrust him with.
Or, to use a metaphor, John Jaso was a t-bone steak in a vegan’s refrigerator. If that vegan converted into being a carnivore, they had some delicious dinner waiting for them, but as long as they remained a vegan, they just had an item taking up room in their cooler that wasn’t ever going to be used. So, the vegan found a carnivorous neighbor who had some extra celery root and a few carrots that he didn’t need anymore, and now the neighbor gets a free steak dinner and the vegan gets to go on with the type of dinner they prefer.
Trading John Jaso for Mike Morse is a sign of the organization’s commitment to baseball veganism. John Jaso doesn’t provide the kind of package that they want in a catcher. We can argue about whether or not they should value him as a catcher, but this trade is simply a byproduct of that evaluation, and that evaluation was made a long time ago.
I’d rather have Morse on the roster than have Jaso as a 200 PA catcher who wastes away watching lesser players get his playing time. And, while there was a theoretically viable third option, it wasn’t viable in Seattle. So, perhaps, making this trade was the lesser to two evils, and perhaps, the Mariners will be better off than they would have been had they not made the trade. The best option, the one we’re comparing the Morse acquisition to, wasn’t an option in Seattle.
That’s too bad. And it speaks to a larger organizational problem. But it wasn’t something that was going to change, and keeping Jaso around as a once-per-week catcher wasn’t going to do the team any good either. Given the position that their evaluation of his abilities boxed them into, this might very well be preferable to the alternative. And now, at least, we don’t have to spend every day of the 2013 season lamenting the fact that the team’s best left-handed hitter isn’t in the line-up.
The Fundamental Flaw
You’ve heard, by now, that the Mariners traded John Jaso for Mike Morse. The spin is essentially going to go something like this:
The Mariners needed to improve their offense, specifically, hitting for power. Mike Morse is a better hitter than Jaso, and because he doesn’t have Jaso’s large platoon splits, he can affect the line-up everyday. As a platoon catcher, Jaso’s value was limited to only playing against right-handers, and with Mike Zunino on the way, he didn’t have a future behind the plate for the Mariners. Jesus Montero and Kendrys Morales were going to make it difficult to get him at-bats at DH, and the team had hole in the outfield. Thus, by trading a C/DH for an outfielder, they’re dealing from a position of strength to fill a void.
There are some true statements in there. John Jaso does have big platoon splits. The Mariners did have a bit of a glut of C/1B/DH types. John Jaso is coming off a career year, and he won’t repeat his numbers from 2012 again. The problem comes when you try to stretch all those true statements together to form a rational defense of trading a younger, cheaper, more valuable player for one who is simply worse overall.
The only way to view Morse as an improvement over Jaso is to think in a particularly narrow minded way, seeing players primarily through the lens of labels, mostly defined by their hitting abilities. Mike Morse is a “power bat”, John Jaso is a “part time player”. And who wouldn’t rather have a guy who can hit cleanup rather than a guy who needs to sit on the bench regularly?
Of course, players are far more complex beings than that, and seeing baseball through that kind of particular worldview was a hallmark of the last Mariners front office. You remember those days, back when Carlos Silva was “an innings eater”, Jarrod Washburn was a “proven workhorse”, and Richie Sexson was a “big bat”. The Mariners fired the last guy who thought in those terms, but not before he had torn the franchise down to shreds and left it in ruins. You cannot build a winning baseball team by evaluating a player’s value in terms of generic cliches.
Back in October, I wrote about the need to stop underrating John Jaso. I’m going to quote three paragraphs from that post, but just go read the whole thing.
There is simply no argument to be made that Jaso’s problems against left-handers or his throwing serve to significantly drag down his value to the point where he’s best served in some kind of part-time bench role like he was used this year. His usage this year was a mistake, and one that should absolutely be corrected in 2013.
John Jaso is a Major League quality starting catcher, and based on his MLB performance to date — again, in over two full seasons worth of playing time — he’s showed that he’s probably one of the 10 best catchers in baseball. That doesn’t mean you have to run him out there against every left-hander, but using him like the Diamondbacks used Montero or the White Sox used Pierzynski is completely rational. That’s around 120 starts per year, with a bias towards using his days off when a left-hander is on the mound.
John Jaso is pretty obviously the team’s best hitter right now. He might very well be the team’s best player, even with his moderate power, big platoon splits, and his mediocre throwing arm. While Eric Wedge failed to recognize Jaso’s strengths and simply focused on his weaknesses, that doesn’t mean that we have to do the same. Jaso isn’t a perfect player, but besides Joe Mauer, there are no perfect left-handed hitting Major League catchers. Other organizations have realized that the positives so far outweigh the negatives that they’ve simply found a capable right-handed hitting back-up to start 40 games a year and let their lefty hitting catchers be significant assets to the organization.
John Jaso, with his inability to hit left-handers and his poor throwing arm, is still an above average Major League catcher. He’s comparable in overall value to Alex Avila, who was the starting catcher for the team that just won the American League. Because there are so few catchers in baseball who can hit, even a bad defender who can hit right-handers like Jaso can puts him in rare company. Even limiting him to just 450 plate appearances, due to strict platooning, Jaso’s career average grades out to about +2.3 WAR. If you assume that any of his 2012 improvement was real, and that he’s better than a straight career average, then he’s closer to a +2.5 to +3.0 WAR player.
Now, no one has figured out how to perfectly evaluate everything a catcher does. We can make a pretty good guess at the obvious things, like controlling the running game and keeping pitches from going to the backstop. Those things are already included in WAR, since they’re not that hard to measure. There are other parts of catching that are not easy to measure, and are not included in WAR, so no one is claiming that WAR is the gospel truth here. Jaso could easily be a worse player than WAR calculations suggest. In fact, given his defensive reputation, that’s probably the truth. So, hey, let’s just knock a win off of his value, in addition to the penalty he’s already getting for allowing stolen bases and blocking balls in the dirt. Let’s call him a +1.5 to +2.0 win player, assuming that there really are big parts of catcher defense that we can’t accurately measure, and assuming that Jaso is terrible at those things.
Guess what? That’s still better than Mike Morse. Dan Szymborski released his ZIPS projections for the Nationals a few weeks ago, and he has Morse at +1.4 WAR in 2013. Because, quite simply, there’s more to baseball than hitting home runs, and Mike Morse is pretty terrible at every part of baseball that isn’t hitting home runs.
For a more detailed breakdown, you can read this post I wrote on Morse last week. We go through his offensive projections (still pretty decent!), but also through his defensive value (awful), his baserunning skills (lousy), and his durability (not good). Despite all the talk about Morse being a “full time player”, he’s dealt with a litany of health problems during his career, and has only managed to play more than 102 games once in his career. You simply can’t project Morse as a 150 game regular next year, and his deficiencies in the field and on the bases cut into his value even when he is in the line-up.
Morse has power. His power is valuable. It helps make him a decent player even though he doesn’t do anything else at a Major League level. In a lot of ways, Morse is similar to Kendrys Morales, in that his power tool is good enough to carry him despite being a pretty one dimensional player. It’s useful to have these kinds of players, but if you don’t do anything besides hit, you better be a spectacular hitter. Morse is not a spectacular hitter. He’s a decent hitter, an above average hitter, but he doesn’t walk, he strikes out a decent amount, and he doesn’t run the bases well. When you only do one thing, it significantly limits your value.
So, in reality, the Mariners are swapping an average-ish player (if you give Jaso a big penalty for catcher defense) for an average-ish player. Only, the average-ish player they’re receiving has one year left on his contract, while the average-ish player they’re giving up is under team control for three more years. Even if you ignore the roughly $6 million difference in salary, Morse would have to be a significantly better player than Jaso to justify giving up two extra years, as the Mariners have done here.
And, of course, there’s the problem of roster construction. We talked about how the pieces fit together the other day, noting that the Mariners couldn’t simply acquire another hitter without giving any consideration to defense. While Morse officially takes Jaso’s spot on the roster, they obviously have to replace Jaso with another catcher, so there are one of three players who could go away to make room for Morse on the roster: Jason Bay (the best choice), Casper Wells (the likely choice), or Justin Smoak (the easy choice).
Because the Mariners already have a glut of 1B/DH types, Morse is almost certainly going to get a decent amount of playing time in the outfield. Right now, he displaces Wells as the third starting OF — despite the fact that Wells is probably Morse’s equal in terms of value going forward — and moves Wells and Bay into a competition for the fourth OF job. If the Mariners wanted to keep both, they could theoretically option Smoak to Tacoma, then use Bay in the outfield against lefties with Morse shifting to first base, which is the role Smoak was slotted in for when we did the exercise the other day. Or, if Bay shows nothing in spring training, then the could just cut him and go with both Smoak and Wells as reserves. The problem is that there wouldn’t be much playing time for either one, and the lack of defensive flexibility would cause the team some real problems with in-game strategy.
More likely, I think, is that the Mariners trade Wells along with one of their extra bullpen arms for starting pitcher, taking him out of the picture entirely. Then, they’ll bring in a super utility type who can play both IF and OF to round out the bench, then let Bay and Smoak compete for the final bench spot depending on who has a better spring.
In the end, I’d bet that this series of moves is likely going to end up looking something like Jaso, Wells, and a reliever for Morse, a free agent catcher of some sort, and whatever pitcher Wells can bring back in return. And the Mariners are not likely going to get any more production from their new trio than they would have from just keeping Jaso and Wells and using the salary difference to sign a free agent pitcher. Only, now, they also don’t have Jaso’s future, probably won’t have Wells’ future, and might very well get a worse pitcher than they would have had they gone after a free agent starter back when there were still some good ones available.
The Mariners didn’t need offense. The Mariners needed talent. The Mariners didn’t get a talent upgrade today. They turned one piece into a less valuable piece, all because the new guy does the thing that that everyone has been wanting to see more of; hit home runs. Home runs are nice, but the 1990s Mariners should have taught everyone that home runs don’t win games. Runs, of all shapes and sizes, win games. And Mike Morse won’t help the Mariners outscore their opponents any more than John Jaso would have.
Just like with the Brandon Morrow swap, this is just the Mariners misevaluating a player they had, because they focused too much on what he wasn’t good at. Just like the Brandon League acquisition is looked back on as a silly one, so will this. The Mariners paid a premium to not get better in the present and cost them some value in the future.
Blech.