Dave on KJR
I’m on with Groz at 4:05 pm on KJR. Lots to talk about, and I’m sure we’ll cover all the big changes of the last week.
The Full Nelson Plan
Now that the Mariners have officially admitted that this season is toast and are looking towards putting a competitive team on the field for the rest of the season while realizing that the playoffs aren’t a reality they can aspire to, I have a pair of suggestions for interim GM Lee Pelekoudas.
The main silver lining in the cloud of a season gone wrong is that you get months to evaluate players at the big league level that you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to give full time jobs to. You basically get to use the rest of the year like an extended tryout, and you can take some flyers on guys that may turn out to be useful pieces down the line while other teams focus on squeezing every last win out of their rosters. Now, because the M’s did a pretty terrible job of stocking the Tacoma team with useful minor league veterans, the M’s don’t really have anyone down in Triple-A that they can look at in this way, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t still have that opportunity.
So, here are a couple of players that you could acquire without giving up the farm, and you could see whether they were pieces that might fit into your plans for 2009.
Nelson Cruz, OF, Texas
If there’s one thing the Texas Rangers don’t need, it’s an outfielder. With Josh Hamilton, David Murphy, Marlon Byrd, Brandon Boggs, and Frank Catalanatto, they have a crowded group already. They’ve passed over Cruz each time they needed to call up a hitter from Triple-A, and he’s pretty clearly out of their plans. However, he really deserves another look in the big leagues, and he’s doing all he can to make sure that teams take notice while he’s down in the PCL.
He’s currently hitting .356/.459/.712 and owning the title of best hitter in the Pacific Coast League. He’s gotten more selective (16.1% BB%) while maintaining his contact and power, and right now, he’s basically a more polished version of Wladimir Balentien’s skillset. Cruz is, right now, what we want Balentien to become. He turns 28 in a few weeks, so he’s not going to get any better and will likely only have a couple of years to offer a major league club that gives him a real shot, but the M’s shouldn’t walk away from the chance to pick a legitimate power hitting outfielder for nothing and pay him the league minimum for several years.
The A’s and Brewers have hit gold by pulling AAAA sluggers Jack Cust and Russ Branyan out of the minors, and the Mariners have the chance to do the same thing here with Cruz. This is a team that could use outfield depth and real power, and Cruz offers both.
Brad Nelson, 1B, Milwaukee
If there’s a worse organization on earth to be a minor league first baseman in than the Brewers, I’m not sure what it would be. With Prince Fielder entrenched at the major league level, Matt LaPorta coming up behind him, and no DH in the National League, Nelson doesn’t have any real future in Milwaukee. And, at age 25, he has to establish himself as a major league player pretty soon before he gets tagged with the dreaded AAAA player label.
A former top prospect, Nelson has struggled with injuries and inconsistency before re-establishing himself this year as a potential big league hitter. He’s dramatically cut his strikeout rate from 22.1% last year to 14.3% this year, and he’s now drawn more bases on balls than he’s accumulated whiffs. His .312/.423/.514 line shows a player with some real ability, though next to no star potential. As a left-handed hitter with knowledge of the strike zone and some pull power, he’s the kind of first baseman that they should be looking at for the rest of 2008. If he can put together a .270/.350/.450 mark, he’d make himself an option at first base for 2009 and give the team another lefty power bat in the organization.
To acquire Nelson Squared, the team wouldn’t have to part with more than a couple of mid-level prospects, and they have the playing time available to give both looks as everyday players the rest of the season. Cruz and Nelson could easily replace Sexson and Vidro on the roster, with Ibanez shifting to DH, and make the team both better and more interesting for the rest of the year.
You’ve got a chance to take some steps forward, Lee. Bring us a pair of Nelsons and give us a reason to watch this team on a daily basis.
Site work
Update — Caching’s been cranked back up and seems to be functioning okay.
I suspect something just snapped under this morning’s load, and I’m never going to figure it out: there’s nothing in the logs… anyway, as a proportion of people served those who got the 403/redirect was tiny. Anyway.
Riggleman as a manager
There’s not a whole lot out there on Riggleman. He managed the Padres from 1992-1994, taking over for Greg Riddoch for the last few weeks of the 92 season, and never got to 1995. His team stunk.
Then in 1995-99, he was with the Cubs, where he’s generally known as being a pretty straight by-the-book manager. He’s seen this kind of collapse, too — the 98 team won 90, and the 99 team lost 95. And then he got fired. He’s 55, he’s been in different coaching positions for ages. There’s not a lot more than that.
It’ll be interesting — from everything we know, if he’s a pretty standard-issue manager, it’ll be a huge improvement in terms of consistent lineups, bullpen usage, and so on, but that would also require him to sort through this pretty horrible 25-man roster quickly, realize Raul needs to be platooned, all while ill-equipped to swap out players: there just aren’t ready replacements hanging around AAA right now for some of the team’s problems.
It’ll be interesting. I’ll certainly be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt — I’ve been thinking about how we as fans follow managers, and that’s a whole other story, but this seeing what he can do with the team is certainly going to be something worth watching for in this lost season.
Baker totally cracks me up
Seriously, this is why I’m a fan. From his post on Sexson and Vidro being on the team flight:
Lee Elia, rapidly climbing the professional ladder once again, is going to be Jim Riggelman’s new bench coach. Jose Castro is the new hitting coach, but Elia will remain above him and supervise the hitting program he’s spent the past 10 days implementing.
That’s some quality nested humor there, especially in the larger context of the team.
No Antonetti?
So here’s the first word, from the blog of an Indians MLB.com writer:
“I hope I’ve been very clear how happy I am in Cleveland,” Antonetti said. “I’m looking forward to continuing to build a winning team here. Hopefully I’ve been clear with that. That’s not with respect to Seattle. That’s my situation here. I’m very happy.”
In the blog entry, it’s sold as him not being interested, but that quote isn’t quite that strong. Of course, I might just be reading it that way because I want there to be room there.
But the Anthony’s written probably 90% of the articles up on the Indians MLB site right now, so I’m inclined to trust his judgement in interpreting what Antonetti was trying to say. Unless heeeee’s biased because he doesn’t want Antonetti to leave… yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.
Coverage so far
Let’s see if I can do this without pushing the whole site somewhere:
Baker for the Times
Hickey for the PI
SEATTLE — The so-called dream job that landed in John McLaren’s lap almost one year ago ended on Thursday morning when he became the latest victim to the Mariners’ nightmarish season.
Victim?
I’d link the AP piece on ESPN, but I refuse to link to AP stuff any more.
McLaren fired, Riggleman in
So says the hot rumor. I guess he got the predicted June 19th viking funeral after all.
11:30 press conference.
Was it the open letter on lineups? I was only trying to be helpful.
As Dave noted earlier, the reason to keep McLaren around would be to let an incoming GM pick their own candidate: if Riggleman does better the rest of the season, which should happen, then the thought is it’s harder to fire him. I’m not sure that’ll deter whoever takes over, of course.
Off day
We could certainly use the rest too. You’ve probably noticed, but we’re exhausted: we’ve done 24 posts since we got the news that Bavasi was being fired, some of them quite huge, and behind the scenes we’ve been dealing with crazy traffic which has kept me busy on the back-end too.
If you appreciate this kind of intense coverage and having USSM stay up through it, please consider tossing us a buck or two.
I don’t know if we’ll end up buying an entirely new server or what, but I’m going to do something here shortly. Anyway —
w/r/t yesterday’s lineup post, msb sent us this quote from McLaren, on batting Lopez third:
“We’re trying to just get a workable lineup. Lopez has been our best hitter, and that’s as good as I can put it.â€
Please, McLaren, read the lineup post.
Cuban Refugee Yuniesky Betancourt Prefers Castro To M’s Manager John McLaren
Open letter to McLaren on lineups
I know you said you’ve given up on reading things on the net, but I wanted to offer something beyond criticism in the hope that you’ll be able to use it. It’ll help your team score runs, and I think you’d agree that you should always take runs where you can find them. Please at least consider this.
There’s been a lot of research done on lineup construction. The most recent is the chapter in Tango’s “The Book” and there’s a good chapter on this in Baseball Between the Numbers (“Was Billy Martin Crazy” by James Click, now with the Tampa Bay Rays). The work they’ve done sits on research done since the early days of Bill James and Pete Palmer, but I’ll spare you the lineage.
But it’s not just a bunch of computer people running simulations: much of this comes from validating the philosophy of the best baseball managers, like Earl Weaver.
James Click found that the difference between the worst possible lineup and the best possible lineup (Click’s example is in an NL lineup, batting the pitcher first and the best hitters at the bottom) produced a difference of 26 runs. The difference between a major-league standard lineup (speed, OBP at #1, contact and bunting at #2, best hitter #3, 2nd best/power at #4, and so on) and the best possible one was about ten runs, but the details of how that works should be left to the book.
Here’s the thing. You’re running out a lineup that is close to that worst-possible one: you’re regularly batting a pitcher in the top spots. This is an easy fix you can start making Friday, and you can do it by applying a couple of easy principles that research has found. You can check out those two books, or I’ll try to summarize it really quickly.
The best hitters should go first. As the game goes on, each extra at-bat goes to those guys. Over the course of the season, that’s a significant number of plate appearances you can direct to your best hitters bu putting them at the top. Normally this isn’t a huge deal, but the difference between getting Raul an extra 20 at-bats this year instead of Vidro is runs on the board.
Stack by on-base percentage as much as possible. Not creating outs is the most important thing a hitter can do. I know you’re not going to want a slow OBP guy up top, and I’ll get to that.
Here’s how this applies to the Mariners. It might be helpful to think of this like a draft board. You’ve got your starting lineup and you want to pick the best available hitter with each pick, taking only as much consideration for handedness and skill as you have to.
I’m going to assume it’s a right-handed starter, so Reed’s in center.
Bat Ichiro first. He’s a great leadoff guy, you’ve got him stealing like crazy, it’s great.
Second, the pure OBP play here is Ibanez, but I’ll suggest that you play Beltre. You’ve seen him, he’s taking walks, hitting for a decent average, spraying line drives around even if they’re not dropping in.
Or take Reed. Like Ichiro, has some speed, can run the bases, takes his walks. The downside is you’ve got two lefties at the top of your lineup.
Lopez would be a decent third choice, but he’s not taking the walks you want out of a guy that high up in the order.
Let’s say you take Beltre for L-R. Then #3, you take Ibanez, he’s your best hitter and you’ve got two good on-base threats ahead of him.
#4, Beltre if you passed him up at #2. if you didn’t, and you’re determined to take a rightie here, go for Lopez or Betancourt. Seriously: they’re hitting for average and some power, you’ve got three good threats to get on-base ahead of them, and if Ichiro led off, he’s probably in scoring position by now.
If you’re willing to take a lefty, take Clement.
#5, take Clement if you passed him up at #4. He’s the best hitter on the board at this point no matter how you got here.
#6-7, you take Lopez or Betancourt if you didn’t pick them at #2 or #4
#8, you take Sexson, assuming Sexson’s playing first
#9, you put Vidro
And now a word on Vidro. He’s done. You must see this. If you have to play him, and I obviously don’t know your reasoning behind it, he’s the worst hitter on the squad, and batting him high in the order hurts the team. And the fans. Don’t do it. He’s not hitting for average, he’s not getting on base, he has no power. For whatever reason, he’s the worst hitter in the American League right now. Don’t hit him high in the order. Put the best lineup order you can out together, and that’ll push him down.
So here’s what you get going through this exercise v RHP, assuming you want to alternate handedness:
Ichiro-L
Beltre-R
Ibanez-L
Lopez-R
Clement-L
Betancourt-R
Reed-L
Sexson-R
Vidro-B
Or, if you don’t want to bat Beltre at #2 and still want to alternate handedness
Ichiro-L
Lopez-R
Ibanez-L
Beltre-R
Clement-L
Betancourt-R
Reed-L
Sexson-R
Vidro-B
And you can see how the same method works when building the anti-LHP lineup.
This simple change to how you’re ordering lineups is probably worth five, maybe even ten runs over the rest of the season. Ten runs is an extra win. Five runs over the course of the season is huge on its own. And it doesn’t require you to change players, positions, or anything. It’s absolutely worth doing.
If you can, I highly recommend checking out those two books. Baseball Between the Numbers is available used right now for $1, which may make it the best pure value in modern baseball research, and it’s full of information you can use to make the team better. Or drop us a line, and I’ll mail you my copy, compliments of USSM.
But if you can’t, at least consider using these well-known principles of how to construct a lineup to help your team out. And if you’re interested, there’s a whole set of fixes like this you can use to improve the team from here on out. Just let me know, and we’ll keep writing them up — and we don’t even have to make a big deal out of it, or be acknowledged, and we won’t mention you’re listening. I’m serious: I’m willing to back criticism with research and ways to make things better. Drop us a line.