Welcome to the Mariners, your office overlooks a smoking crater
A partial list of challenges facing an incoming GM, and why whoever takes over needs be half-crazed with ambition and, preferably, backed by an equally insane staff.
As it stands right now, here’s what the team will look like in this offseason, moving around the diamond:
We have no DH.
We have a young, promising catcher and an older catcher who seems to have collapsed entirely after being given a three-year deal.
We have no first baseman.
The second baseman signed to a multi-year deal through 2010 has turned into a defensive sinkhole.
The shortstop signed to a multi-year extension through 2011 has turned into a defensive sinkhole who doesn’t hit either.
You have a year of a good third baseman in which to extend him or find the next one.
We have no left-fielder.
We potentially have a center fielder in Reed, but resolving his situation may depend on the GM’s evaluation of his play.
Then to the pitching:
The Felix dilemma.
Bedard’s around for another year, what do you do with him?
Batista’s signed through next year and stinks.
Silva’s signed through 2011 and stinks.
Washburn’s signed through next year and stinks.
Morrow: start or relieve?
Assembling the rest of the bullpen.
That’s a huge list of issues to be done in the rebuild. Feel free to assign them your own difficulty rating, but it’s clear that while some of these will have relatively easy fixes — finding a new DH may be asking Raul if he wants to hang out for another year, for instance, and first base and left — leaving a lot of that will require a lot of work, and possibly the rapid application of a lot of money.
When they interview GM candidates and ask them “What would you do with the team?” they’re going to need to schedule a lot longer than an hour to get reasonable answers.
Jeff Sullivan @ LL’s been doing some good articles on how to approach the scope of the problems. (one, two). I think any team with the current version of Betancourt/Lopez is doomed to suck horribly, so I wouldn’t rest until that’s resolved, but still– it’s good reading.
Random thought
If PR concerns played a part in letting Richie go — and by PR concerns they certainly mean the constant booing — won’t that just encourage booing? Read more
A great day in Mariner history
Bloomquist’s power is back! In the 9th inning, in his fourth plate appearance, Bloomquist doubled off of Alan “Hey that guy is still in baseball oh I forgot he’s left-handed” Embree. And it wasn’t one of those cheap “skipped by Ibanez” doubles, no. It was a rulebook double! Bounced into the stands! Yeaaaaaaaahhh hooooo! The Mariners get to avoid having all of baseball watch the team for the continuation of an ignoble record! Wooooo!
I believe – and Jack Howland will correct me if I’m wrong, no doubt, brings the final tally to:
87 games without an extra-base hit, short of the unofficial record of 100.
173 consecutive at-bats without an extra-base hit, short of the unofficial record of 223.
199 consecutive plate appearances without an extra-base hit, short of the unofficial record of 266.
He was only five days from going a full calendar year without anything but singles.
This brings his slugging percentage to .272 and his season line to .262/.368/.271.
May Willie fill the power void long left by Richie Sexson! All hail Willie Boom-Boom, newly revived long-ball threat!
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
So, remember a while ago, I proposed the Full Nelson plan, suggesting that the Mariners should use the fact that they have several months to audition potentially useful players from Triple-A who wouldn’t otherwise get a shot at the bigs and see if they could be of some value, specifically naming Nelson Cruz and Brad Nelson as potential targets.
Well, with Sexson gone, the M’s have indeed acquired a Triple-A first baseman – Craig Wilson. Yea, that same 31 year old you remember kicking around Pittsburgh a few years ago, now past his prime, and hitting .230/.323/.396 for Indianapolis.
He’s right-handed, doesn’t walk, strikes out a lot, is a bad defensive player, and is near the end of his career. Sounds like exactly the kind of guy this organization should be acquiring…
Game 92, Mariners at Athletics
12:35, Dickey v Smith.
Cairo plays first base today, but Vidro will take over as the 1B vs RHP and play most of the time. Rejoice!
For what its worth, though, Riggleman’s comments about releasing Sexson because he wasn’t interested in having a player complain about not being in the line-up are nice to hear. We had to deal with a year of John McLaren coddling the veteran egos rather than putting the best team on the field, so it’s nice to see the organization finally telling the entitled group of suck to shut up.
PI: Sexson’s gone
Wasn’t in the clubhouse, locker’s cleaned, says Hickey
I have a question: why Sexson? Open-stance Sexson as Megavidro is way better than Vidro, who is the worst DH in the league and finished. Is this another example of the crazy Vidro influence field?
Dave adds: Because this city hates Sexson, and they only are unhappy with Vidro, thanks to the length of time we’ve been watching the two flail away. This was the right move, even if the timing was beyond weird.
Lopez, Betancourt are huge problems
I’ve been trying to dodge writing this all season, hoping at some point that things would turn around.
Here’s my pre-season post-o-rama:
Lopez. If putting him at #2 makes him a more selective hitter and helps him get his career back on track, I’m all for it. We’ve seen the Lopez that’s full of potential and was on a track to become a key part of a young Mariner middle-infield tandem that would help the team field competitive teams for years to come, and we’ve seen a wince-inducing Lopez that makes us wonder why the team ever invested in him. I want to think that last season’s swoon was due to off-field problems as much as anything. I have to admit that I wonder if Lopez is just going to end up being another young player who stalled. And then maybe two years after everyone’s cut bait on him he’ll put up an All-Star season playing for some awful .400 team that invited him to spring training on a lark. Baseball’s a weird game. And as much as I resist making any kind of personal judgments of players, I’ll say this: I think Lopez is a smart guy, and knows all that. The question may be whether or not he wants to work that hard now, and what he decides he wants to do with his career, more than whether or not he has the talent.
I’ve been a Lopez booster for a long, long time, even though there was a point it seemed like I was down on him because I thought he’d be good and not a superstar, and popular sentiment was a lot more optimistic.
We got an offensive rebound of sorts, where he’s hitting for average, not getting hiw walks, and not hitting for good power either. Still, among second basemen, that’s above average, and if he was playing reasonable defense, he’d be a net plus for the team.
He’s not, though. I was poking around while thinking about writing a piece on why the M’s, having improved their overall outfield defense, haven’t done a significantly better job at getting outs, and — there’s no writing about this team’s defense without confronting the two terrible defenders up the middle.
Lopez is slow, plus his reactions haven’t been great, and once in a while we get treated to seeing a ball go right through his legs, or off his noggin, waking him from a nap, and so on. I’ve been a little glad that we don’t get the best defensive stats until after the season, because I held out hope that he’d get better. But even the traditional, not-much-good stats, like fielding percentage… not good. Zone rating, terrible. And I mention that not as evidence but — I glimpsed these things, and they backed up everyone’s observation that his defense was way, way off, and I wanted to wait longer.
Too late. Replacement Level Yankees blog took a swing at ranking second basemen based on total contribution and Lopez tied for last. The metrics aren’t the greatest, but there’s one thing we need to confront: Lopez may well be the worst defensive second baseman in the league right now. It’s not just Sexson that’s killing the ground ball defense — it’s Sexson, Lopez, and Betancourt.
I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t have a handy explanation for why Lopez’s range is this far off, though the obvious suspect is ill conditioning (however you want to interpret that) or some kind of hamstring injury we just haven’t heard about yet.
And since I’ve brought it up — Betancourt is almost exactly the same problem. He’s horrible out there. He’s not making plays. His range is gone. Imagine when he first came up, how often he’d get behind second or third even just backing plays up. I was surprised at least once a game to notice how far he’d gone. And now, just like Lopez, he barely moves. It’s Beltre ranging way in and to his left to field slow grounders in front of Betancourt, and up the middle – it’s a free hit if it gets past the pitcher.
Unlike Lopez, he’s not even average for his position offensively. We knew we’d seen the best of Betancourt before — hitters who beat the ball into the ground don’t have a lot of room to evolve, and Betancourt’s skill set hasn’t changed at all. But this, this hollow-and-low average with a sprinkling of doubles, combined with a marked decline in defense, makes him a huge drag on the team.
If you were going to make a list of the team’s problems, with Ichiro being last and things like “the starting pitching is horrible” on top, you’d have to put these two, and particularly their immobility, right up there. The porous infield defense is killing guys like Silva who rely on it. They pretty much have to pray that a ball put into play goes to Beltre or center/right field. That’s it — that’s all they have. And as we’ve seen, while Lopez has collected some key hits, neither of them are helping the team consistently put up runs.
If this keeps up, improving the infield is going to have to be a priority for the team this off-season, and we’re barely halfway through the year.
Game 91, Mariners at Athletics
Batista v Blanton. Batista! He’s back, in starter form! 7:05.
Mariner lineup, by OBP
RF-L .360
2B-R .318
LF-L .344
1B-R .315
1B-B .260
3B-R .324
CF-L .340
DH-R .260
C-L .274
SS-R .278
(AL average up to today is .332)
Fun fact for Wednesday
Willie Bloomquist leads all position players in OBP at .361.
He also leads all position players in lowest SLG percentage at .248
Sorry, no, actually, not the last thing
Dave said his would be the last post… but it’s not. Responding to this, specifically, from Baker’s post:
I’ve since been alerted to the fact that the U.S.S. Mariner blog is taking issue with me writing down what Silva said last night. They say he had a less effective sinker because that’s what the vertical drop charts show. And also, they point out that he had more flyouts last night than ground outs. They suggest I listened to Silva and wrote what he said because I’m afraid of losing clubhouse access. Yes, that’s right. I’m afraid of not having access to players that have been almost universally criticized in this space and by me on the radio at various times all year.
The money quote here:
They suggest I listened to Silva and wrote what he said because I’m afraid of losing clubhouse access.
This is absolutely not true.
It’s not there. Read Dave’s post. Tell me where in that post Dave accuses Baker of writing what Silva said because he’s afraid of losing clubhouse access?
It doesn’t. Dave’s point is that he wishes Baker would stop just repeating what players say when it’s clearly incorrect or of no value.
If you want to argue that there are comments that speculate on clubhouse access being a reason why reporters don’t openly contradict players and coaches on points like this, that’s entirely true.
But Baker’s post substantially misrepresents what Dave said in order to make it easily-dismissible. It’s a strawman attack, and it’s disappointing.