Why Branyan makes sense (economically)
This team is horrible to watch offensively. They’re hitting .239/.308/.344. At this rate, they’ll be outhit by the 2008 61-101 team (.265/.318/.389). They’re even with the inept 1983 Mariners squad that hit .240/.301/.360. And if you go back and look at that team, they had Steve Henderson for an offensive mainstay. This year has Ichiro! and Gutierrez and they’re still terrible.
They’re not an exciting small-ball team that makes announcers drool onto their microphones: they’ve got two good runners in Ichiro! and Chone, then Gutierrez is adept, aand… yup. They’re a singles-hitting, low-walk, no-power offense where you can go do something else for 2/3rds of the lineup and not miss anything, ever.
I’m not going to argue here about whether or not the team took the right gambles. But even in bad seasons, Safeco Field’s drawn well for home games in the summer. There’s a vast number of fans who attend 3-5 games a year in person when the weather’s nice. They’re vaguely aware if the team is doing well, or terrible. When I talk to them about the team, they ask “so what’s going on with the Mariners sucking it up this year?” and want to talk about where to sit when they take visiting relatives.
The M’s want people who come to a few games a year to have a good time, and see the team win. They want the stadium experience to be lively: a lot of music cues, scoreboard activities, jarring bursts of 115 db noise piped directly into your eardrums, and there’s only so large a bow you can put on this sow before it falls on its side and can’t get up. We’re there. I went to a Felix start where the crowd seemed half-asleep the whole time as he put on a clinic. When the team gets a single and the fanfare kicks up like we just landed humans on Mars or defeated the zombie Nazis and the crowd yawns in response, you’re in trouble.
Branyan solves for that, a little. Kotchman may on balance end up being as good a player, but his offensive value is entirely in cheap singles and walks, and that’s not drawing enthusiastic applause. No one’s going to come home from a game and say “it was so great when Kotchman hit that dying quail to shallow left to advance the runner” but they’ll absolutely talk about the moonshot. And if they want the ugly single, there are still four or five more hitters each night who’ll do their darnedest to serve one up.
The M’s know more about this than anyone. They might well be prepared to avoid trading off good players unless there’s a can’t–miss offer so they play .500 ball the rest of the summer in front of the fatter crowds, and reap the word of mouth benefit, get people thinking maybe they were just off to a slow and unlucky start and might have been in it if only Lee had stayed healthy, and next year they could put it all together.
And for now, as baffling as it may seem at the baseball level, there’s a story they get to tell now, which is “hey, we realized this was a team without power, and you wanted a big bat, right? Here’s a bat you know and love…”
You may be rolling your eyes at that. But if you attended one of the low-scoring home losses where the team seemingly stranded a dozen runners, there’s a good chance you’ll reconsider going next time. And similarly, if you’ve been cursing them for not pursuing Branyan in the off-season*, maybe you feel validated now, and will head to the park.
I know all of that seems vague and foo-foo. And as the most dedicated and tortured fans, we don’t see a lot of difference between losing 85 games and 90, much less 90 and 95. But it’s there, and you can read up on this if you’re interested. The best explanation is Nate Silver’s chapter “Is Alex Rodriguez Overpaid?” in Baseball Between the Numbers, and while it’s true the difference is far greater for wins 81-95 or so, it’s also true that below that it’s fairly consistently $1m/win. There’s a lot of follow-up research that’s added to this, but that’s the crux of it: every loss lowers revenue a little, and every win brings it up. And that comes from all of the small bits of aesthetic arguments: someone who watches the team play horribly on TV is less likely to tune in for the next game, and if they spend $100 to take their spouse out to the park and watch the M’s get beat up by the Orioles, they’re less likely to spend that next time.
From a pure supported-by-research side, if the M’s get a win upgrade from Branyan over Kotchman in the rest of the season, they’ll make $1m — and there’s no reason not to, if the Indians as rumored are picking up salary. And it makes sense that for the M’s in low-attendance seasons, where such a huge chunk of the actual people-in-seats attendance happens late, that they’d value putting a marginally better team on the field so highly, even when it seems pointless in the long term.
In the long term, though, if they can keep fan interest up and it gives the business side confidence to spend on payroll next year** and beyond, then the whole economic reason to give Branyan a shot starts to make sense for the team’s baseball future as well.
* and let’s just again dispel that myth: the Mariners made Branyan a one year offer, guaranteeing him the starting job even though he had a herniated disk and his long-term prospects were uncertain, with a one year option we don’t know the details of but which likely vested at 400 plate appearances or was similarly health-based. Branyan wanted 2-3 years guaranteed for a lot more money. When they agreed they couldn’t come to terms, the M’s made their very public “No really, we’re not re-signing Branyan” comments in order to clear up the wide perception that he wasn’t really on the market. Branyan then explored the free agent market and found nothing near what he wanted and in the end settled for something substantially worse than the M’s came out with.
** I know. It’s the reality of the situation, though, and I’ve long since given up trying to convince teams that budgeting this way is often counter-productive.
Dave On KGA
I’ll be on with Toby and Danny at 5:15 on 1510 KGA in Spokane. You can listen live here
Here’s the audio file if you missed it.
Minor League Wrap (6/21-27/10)
The awkward cousin to the draft, the July 2nd opening of the international signing period, will come this week. I don’t know how much I’m going to have to say about that immediately, but I’ll cover what I have next time around. Let’s just say that the Mariners are planning on spending a lot of money on interesting players, as usual, and probably won’t break any records with their bonuses while they’re at it. In the meantime, the wrap is now more than 50% longer, because really, it was way too short in its earlier incarnation.
To the jump!
Read more
Game 75, Mariners at Brewers
Vargas vs Narveson, 10 minutes ago.
Sorry, forgot to put this up earlier.
I Don’t Get It
Marc’s got the details on the Branyan trade below, so read that. Nuts and bolts, M’s gave up two fringe prospects who probably max out as bench players long term, so don’t freak out about them giving up the farm, but I still don’t get it.
The Mariners are 14 games out of first place. The time to try to add some offense to this roster was six weeks ago. Branyan is better than Carp and Kotchman, but not enough to matter. Hell, at this point, Albert Pujols might not be enough to matter. The Mariners are not catching the Rangers – not with this roster, and certainly not with this roster minus Cliff Lee, which is where we should be in a week or two.
Branyan makes the team marginally better, and the M’s didn’t give up much in prospects, but they’re now going to pay an opportunity cost. As we talked about a few weeks ago, the big benefit to being out of the race in June is that you can take flyers on young kids who need a shot to show what they can do. The M’s just eliminated a chance to do that at first base, a position that is an organizational hole for 2011. Rather than giving a shot to a guy like Kila Ka’aihue (.313/.481/.577 in Triple-A, age 26, completely buried in KC), the M’s are now going to use a few hundred at-bats on a guy who turns 35 this winter and has a serious back problem.
Yeah, the team needed power, but they needed power when it mattered. It doesn’t matter anymore. Now, they need to be looking to 2011. And, as much as I like watching The Muscle hit home runs, if he’s the 2011 starting first baseman, this team probably isn’t a contender. This isn’t a move for the future – it’s a move to make the present team less painful to watch hit. This is a move they should have made on May 1st, not June 26th.
M’s Re-Acquire Russell Branyan
According to Shannon Drayer (and Mike Curto), the M’s have traded two minor leaguers for 1b Russell Branyan. The M’s players are apparently Ezequiel Carrera and Juan Diaz.
Branyan missed most of April with the same back injury that forced him out late in 2009, but recovered to post a .353 wOBA this year for the Indians. His ZiPS projection the rest of the way is just shy of that, at .348 (which, it should go without saying, would be a massive improvement on Kotchman/Carp/Sweeney).
Carrera led the Southern League in BA and OBP last year, but some scouts questioned whether he’d ever be more than a 4th OF in the majors. A brilliant spring capped by a homer off of Felix in an intra-squad game led many to believe that the scouts were wrong. However, from April on, Carrera’s played like a dictionary definition of a 4th OF – a poor man’s Endy Chavez – and picked up a few injuries on the way. He’d been on the Rainiers’ 7-day DL, but it obviously wasn’t serious enough to delay this move.
Juan Diaz was a moderately promising SS in a system without many middle infield ‘spects. Until this year, when Nick Franklin made him 100% expendable. Diaz hit the Cal League last year with the reputation of a glove-first guy, but put up a .346 despite never coming close to .300 previously. He wasn’t able to force his way to AA this year (a guy named Triunfel mans SS for West Tennessee), and he’s regressed a bit at High Desert thanks to his BABIP coming back to earth. .
All in all, it’s tough to be upset about what we’re sending to Cleveland. I’d been excited to see Carrera in Tacoma, but he quickly showed that he was a fairly limited slap hitter (I’m still trying to envision him hitting a homer off of Felix and I can’t quite do it). And if anyone thought Diaz’s offensive outbreak was ‘real’ in 2009, 2010 is getting really hard to explain.
With all of that said, this is a rather odd move to make now, around the first of July, with the team way back of Texas (and the .500 mark). There’s no question Branyan improves the team, and we didn’t give up another Shin-Soo Choo. But why acquire a guy of Branyan’s age and injury history at all? This’d be a great move for a contending team, but I’m struggling a bit to figure this one out. It’s clear the M’s don’t think Mike Carp’s a long-term answer at 1B, and that’s a fair conclusion to come to. But why do they need Branyan right now?
Brian Sweeney
I didn’t see the game, so I don’t have much to add about how he looked, but here’s the thing that stands out from the statline during Sweeney’s impressive season debut – he threw 44 pitches and twelve of them were fastballs. He basically lived off his change-up, throwing 18 of them, and mixed in some sliders and a few curves for good measure. Here’s his Pitch F/x plot:
No one will ever confuse him for a stuff guy, as his velocity never got over 90, but he showed that he can keep hitters off balance with a variety of off-speed pitches. I’ll have to go back and watch the archive, but from a first glance, I’m already impressed with his pitching smarts.
Game 74, Mariners at Brewers
Fister vs Wolf, 1:10 pm.
Shawn Kelley went on the DL to make room for Fister on the roster, and David Aardsma has left the team to be with his wife for the birth of their child. Fister went four innings in his only rehab start. This could be a complete disaster. If he’s limited to less than 5 innings – a real possibility against a Brewers team that can hit – we’re looking at a lot of mound time for Brian Sweeney, Sean White, and Garrett Olson, because League is the defacto “closer” for the next few days and Chad Cordero is likely unavailable after pitching yesterday. So, yeah, the M’s probably need to score 10+ runs to win today.
Ichiro, RF
Figgins, 2B
Gutierrez, CF
Lopez, 3B
Sweeney, 1B
Bradley, LF
Josh Wilson, SS
Johnson, C
Fister, P
Game 73, Mariners at Brewers
Rowland-Smith vs Bush, 5:10 pm.
Today, Jack Z told Ken Rosenthal that he wasn’t yet ready to throw in the towel, because the pitching is too good to give up. The pitching is good, but the Mariners are 14 games out of first place, and are now chasing a team with the second best record in baseball. If the Rangers play .500 ball the rest of the way, they’ll win 89 games. For the Mariners to win 90 and beat them out, they would have to go 60-30 the rest of the way. No pitching staff is good enough to carry this roster to a .667 winning percentage for three months.
I can understand the reluctance to give up when the team is playing well, but the season is over. Throw in the towel, Jack. Play for the future – it’s all we have left at this point.
Ichiro, RF
Figgins, 2B
Gutierrez, CF
Lopez, 3B
Sweeney, 1B
Bradley, LF
Jack Wilson, SS
Johnson, C
Rowland-Smith, P
Monday’s Report from Everett
Did anyone expect the Aquasox to start the season 7-0, breaking a few franchise records along the way? Because I sure didn’t. There were some vets on the roster, true enough, but I wasn’t thinking they had quite the talent required to take it to this level. Here are some notes I have typed up from my trip to Everett Memorial for Opening Day. Remember, you can still catch them tonight at seven with the Mariners out of town, if you are so inclined. It will be the last game of the homestand before the team heads over to Spokane.