The Media and Jose Guillen
Occasionally, the local beat writers like to play the “we’re objective!” card to try to explain why you should listen to them despite the fact that their analysis is usually horrible. But then, they write about Jose Guillen, and their analysis becomes both horrible and unobjective.
Case in point, John Hickey’s latest musings on Guillen and how retaining him would have effected the Mariners.
Guillen has, after a slow start, come on to have a decent (.263, 20 homers, 93 RBIs) season…
Guillen’s hitting .263/.297/.446 – he’s hit a few longballs, but they just serve to somewhat offset his abysmal rate of reaching base, making him a slightly below average hitter instead of a horrible one. I don’t care how much you think all our statistical analysis stuff is crap – you can’t sit there and honestly believe that a right fielder with a .297 on base percentage is having a decent offensive season. You have to intentionally ignore the facts to write that sentence.
The reality is that Guillen’s been worth a couple runs less than an average major league hitter this year, thanks to his out making prowess. Corner outfielders hit better than the average hitter, so we can knock off another five runs or so to compare him to his positional peers. And, to boot, he’s also played absolutely abysmal defense. The Fielding Bible’s +/- system has him at 19 plays below average on the season, which works out to about -15 runs or so.
Overall, Jose Guillen has been about 20 to 25 runs worse than a league average right fielder this season. If you think that’s a decent season, you don’t know baseball.
for a Kansas City team that’s only claim to fame is that they’re going to finish 2008 with a better record than the Mariners.
Wait – isn’t part of Guillen’s mythical appeal that his presence in the locker room makes the team’s he’s on magically better? In fact, let’s just go ahead and skip down to where Hickey makes that point in the same post.
That’s a lot to put on one man’s shoulders, but there’s no doubt that one of the reasons the Mariners won 88 games last year was because they had an in-your-face guy, Guillen, in the clubhouse.
That’s right, folks – there’s “no doubt” that Guillen’s personality was one of the main reasons the M’s won 88 games, and his loss is one of the main reasons why the M’s suck this year. Except, you know, the Kansas Royals have Guillen this year, and they didn’t have him last year, and they’ve improved a whopping .014 points in Win%, going from .426 to .440.
If Guillen’s clubhouse influence is without doubt, why haven’t the Royals bonded together and performed better than expected? What players has Guillen held accountable and forced to perform who otherwise would have slacked off without his vaunted leadership? Seriously, name a player on that roster that you could make any kind of argument that Guillen has helped this year. Just one.
The beat writers love to tell us that Guillen kept the young players focused on winning and playing the right way, inspiring them to work hard by his example. But in his only season here, Jose Lopez – the guy who the organization constantly reminds us needs help working hard – had his worst season as a Mariner, and then had his best season as soon as Guillen left.
If you want to play the correlation = causation game, then you might as well conclude that Guillen was responsible for Lopez’s brutal 2007 season. Or, you could realize that correlation is not causation, and that the team’s collapse is due to things beyond not having a replacement level right fielder yelling in the clubhouse.
John Hickey’s not stupid. But when it comes to Jose Guillen, the guy who was constantly there for the beat writers last year, the media has no objectivity. They continue to ignore facts in order to fawn over a guy they like, whose personality fits their preconceived notion of what a clubhouse leader is supposed to look like, despite the fact that Guillen is one of the main reasons the Royals haven’t improved at all this year.
Jose Guillen’s having a horrible season, and he’s costing the Royals $12 million a year for the right to not make them any better. And yet, the local writers continue to write about Guillen as a glowing savior.
Good luck playing the objectivity card, fellas. Your biases are just as obvious as you claim ours are.
How do you sell Silva?
Hypothetically, let’s say that the M’s hire you to be the GM next season and you can’t resign because they’ve got a bunch of really, really cute kittens they’re holding hostage or something. And your orders are to get rid of Silva and his Silva-sized contract.
What’s your pitch to other teams?
“He’s bound to regress up to the mean.”
“It’s not the worst contract for a back-of-the-rotation guy.”
“If you put him in a big park with a great defense he’d do much better.”
“He used to be friends with Santana.”
What do you say?
Game 149, Mariners at Royals
Silva, assuming his back hasn’t gone again, versus Kyle Davies.
Yost fired
Quick post: this is crazy! Milwaukee get swept, and he’s out, even though they’re in the middle of a pennant race! I’ve never heard of something like this happening in baseball.
Dave adds: It’s impossible to know for sure, but his handling of the bullpen yesterday was so horrible that I wouldn’t be surprised if Doug Melvin just decided that there’s no way he could trust MelvinYost to be the in game strategist in a playoff series.
A Eulogy for Adrian
Yesterday, Adrian Beltre played his final game of the season, as he’s having surgery on both his thumb and his shoulder on Thursday. Because the Mariners seem resigned to a several year rebuilding process and Beltre’s a free agent at the end of next season, it seems likely that the M’s will trade him this winter, meaning Beltre has probably played his last game as a Mariner.
So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at what he’s given us since signing here four years ago.
2005-2008: 2,370 at-bats, 632 hits, 145 2B, 8 3B, 95 HR, 173 BB, 420 K, 36 SB, 10 CS
As a Mariner, Beltre has hit .267/.320/.455, which works out to about five percent better than a league average hitter would perform playing half his games in Safeco. Five percent may not sound like much, but a sustained advantage over four years adds up, and Beltre’s been worth about a total of 1.5 wins above an average hitter while wearing a Mariner jersey.
Of course, we all know that Beltre isn’t just a hitter – he’s also one of the best defensive third baseman alive, and he’s been a tremendous asset with the glove as well. According to the Fielding Bible’s +/- system, Beltre was 24 plays better than an average third baseman in ’06, 7 players better than average in ’07, and 28 plays better than average in ’08. We don’t have +/- available for 2005, but MGL’s UZR system is built similarly (they just use different datasets but the same basic idea), and he has Beltre at four runs above average (or about +6 plays to get it on the same scale as +/-) during the ’05 season.
So, if we just do some basic approximations, we could say that Beltre was something like +5 runs with the glove in ’05, +15 runs in ’06, +5 runs in ’07, and +20 runs in 2008, give or take a few runs each season. Overall, we’re estimating that Beltre saved about 40 runs with his defense during his time as a Mariner – 40 runs is about four wins.
So, we add Beltre’s +4 wins defensively to his +1.5 wins offensively, and we can say that Beltre’s been about 5.5 wins better than an average player over his four years as a Mariner. Comparisons to average are fairly easy, but there’s a problem – league average players aren’t just laying around, so we have to give Beltre credit for the gap between league average and replacement level as well. In general, a replacement level player is about two wins below average per season. Over four years, the difference between a replacement level player and a league average player would be about eight wins.
So, we add 8 wins to the 5.5 we’ve already credited to Beltre for being above average, and we can say that he’s been worth something like 13.5 wins above a replacement level third baseman during his four years as a Mariner.
The Mariners have paid Adrian Beltre about $50 million over the last four years, including annual salaries and a prorated portion of his signing bonus. $50 million for 13.5 wins works out to about $3.7 million per win – the going rate for a free agent the last few years has been between $4 and $5 million per win.
No matter how you slice it, Adrian Beltre has been a relative bargain for the Mariners – a high quality player signed to a below market contract. Often maligned for his contract by those who don’t understand how valuable he’s been, Beltre has been one of the shining lights in a stretch of dark seasons.
If we really have seen the last of Adrian Beltre, it’ll be a shame. The Mariners need more players like Beltre, not less. I’m afraid that Beltre is doomed, however, to be the next Mike Cameron – wildly underrated during his time here and highly valuable to the teams that employ him after the M’s cut him loose. The Mariners have never been able to replace Cameron in the outfield, and it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to replace Beltre at third anytime soon.
If this was it, Adrian, thanks for four great seasons. We’re sorry that some people don’t understand how good you are, and we hope to see you next spring. But if we don’t, it was fun having you here, and we’ll be worse off without you.
Game 148, Mariners at Angels
Felix versus Ervin Santana.
Giants decided to prove Morrow better pick by destroying theirs
For those of you tired of reading “M’s were amazingly stupid for drafting Morrow” comments that attempt to take over all conversation like so much kudzu, Tim Lincecum threw 138 pitches last night in a meaningless SF-SD game. 120 is about where you want to set the upper limit on how far a pitcher should be throwing: there’s a clear detrimental effect on their next start, and beyond that the injury risks are — well, they’re debatable, but there’s reason to believe throwing over 120 increases the chance a pitcher will go down. Individual results may vary, of course, and so on and so forth.
But if the Giants really are really going to grind him down in meaningless games, and that increases the chances he’ll get injured, we could well see him pick up the “fragile” and “not a game” labels soon, which would reduce the annoying chatter, but at the cost of his career. I have to hope the Giants come to their senses.
Trying Lopez out for 2009 first baseman
Over at the Times, the news that Lopez will play first tonight as the Mariners kick around the idea of playing him there next year.
Jose’s had an offensive bounce this year, hitting over his career average, and yet:
Jose this year: .292/.318/.431
AL first basement this year: .265/.345/.440
As a general comparison, he’d be a little worse offensively than Casey Kotchman. The average first baseman is… James Loney (90% of Loney?). He’d be better than throwing a total random cheap player out there, but not all that much. To get him up to being an average first baseman, Lopez would need to be ten runs better defensively than a Loney.
And that’s possible, but his play at second’s been bad this year (well, pick your metric). The difference between second to first gets him some of that back, but how much? Five runs? Ten?
The other issue is that it’s a lot easier to find a first baseman than a competent second baseman. If they move Lopez to first, where he’s average, that’s an improvement over what they had there this year, but then they’re either going to be paying for a free agent second baseman, trading for someone, or they’ll end up playing a scrub or organizational player like Tug — and if you’re lucky, we end up with an all-glove no-bat player, picked my an organization that’s done a really bad job over the last five years evaluating defense as a team much less for individuals.
If Lopez can play first, though, it certainly gives the team more options this off-season, and I’m all for that.
Game 147, Mariners at Angels
Feierabend v Garland
Mariner cupcakes
Weekend non-team linkage: We got a nice note from the Baseball Cupcakes blog about their Mariner Mousse Cupcakes. I was filled with gratitude that it didn’t use less appetizing ingredients to convey a sense of the season.