Mariners Foibles
I wrote a guest post for The Baseball Analysts dealing with the roots of the failures of the 2008 team. Re-reading it, I think I might be a little bit frustrated with this organization.
Rick Sutcliffe is a horrible person and ESPN’s no better
This is still bugging me hours later, so:
I was watching ESPN’s broadcast of the Braves game tonight, and there was a really, really weird moment where they were discussing Rick Sutcliffe taking time off to go get cancer treatment, and Erin Andrews was in the stands and wished him well or something — I wasn’t really paying attention, it seemed totally pointless — at which point Sutcliffe went off on a bizarre rant about her, how good she looked, her skirt, and how everyone was watching her and her skirt and when they cut to the broadcast booth, his partner had this weird look of terror and shock on his face, and they chatted about how distracting she was around the batting cage.
This should be Rick Sutcliffe’s last job announcing anything. He shouldn’t be hired to do dog races. He shouldn’t be able to ever get a quarter for hawking wares at garage sales.
I don’t care that he has cancer.
I don’t care that Erin Andrews is attractive, or that she wore a skirt.
He should be fired for making comments like that. More than that, he should be fired for this rant, about her.
I don’t care what your opinion of her is: Erin takes an enormous amount of entirely unjustified personal crap. She’s been treated badly by players, awkwardly clutched by coaches. If you put her name into a search engine you need to get decontaminated within minutes of just looking at the results or your eyes will melt. Erin is objectified and degraded in a way that no male sports media figure has ever had to face, and Rick Sutcliffe, working with her, should know that and, if he can’t support her, at least shut up.
It is amazing and embarrassing that no one on the broadcast crew stopped Sutcliffe. No one cut his mike, nothing, and his partner didn’t stop him but instead ended up playing along. The broadcast team and the network let someone use game time to slobber all over another broadcaster for absolutely no reason.
That’s it, that’s all I have. Fuck you, Rick Sutcliffe. Fuck you, other guy in the booth. You’re embarrassments to my gender.
Update: here’s the video.
USSM/LL Event Information
As you probably know by now, we’re having our 2008 USSMariner/Lookout Landing get together on Saturday. I sent out a big email with information detailing when and where to those who have already registered – if you have signed up for the event and did not receive that email, please say so in the comments section of this entry, and that email will be forwarded to you on Thursday. If you have not yet signed up, we have a few more spaces available due to cancellations, so you can send an email to us and let us know that you’d like to attend. Because I will be traveling on Thursday, you won’t get a reply until Friday, but barring a huge surge of last minute registrations, I’m going to assume we have a spot for you and will get back to you on Friday with the details.
We hope to see you all on Saturday. It’s going to be a good time.
And, just to toss in a baseball fact, Felix Hernandez now has 500 career strikeouts, ranking 12th on the all-time Mariner list for career Ks. He’s 22 years old, and he’s 12th in franchise history in strikeouts.
Interview of The Interview
ESPN gets players to do their dirty work and ask Bedard questions. The answers are about what you might expect.
Piling on
For those of you wondering why Willie Bloomquist was batting second today, it’s becasue the team wanted Jose Lopez to hit fifth. He’s been their most productive guy for a while now and Adrian Beltre was supposed to get a full day off to rest. So, it wasn’t because Bloomquist is a great No. 2 hitter. It’s because the team needed a No. 5 guy and their options were limited. Hope that helps.
[sic]
* You want your best hitters up in the order. If you only did one thing to create a lineup and stacked your guys by goodness, regardless of power/contact/whatever, you’d be pretty close to the best possible one. They get more at-bats. You want your good hitters to get the good at-bats.
* If McLaren was entirely serious about that justification, he doesn’t understand the simplest thing about how to put a lineup together, is entirely unqualified for his job, and should be fired immediately.
* They pinch-hit with Beltre, so that full day of rest thing didn’t quite work out (not that I disagree with pinch-hitting him).
* Lopez is not the team’s most productive hitter lately. It’s Jeremy Reed, or Ibanez, or Ichiro.
* Or if you want the last month, it’s Betancourt (seriously, check out the last 30 day splits)
* Unless you’re evaluating productivity by some strange standard besides “hitting” which is the only thing that should matter in a lineup.
* It still makes absolutely no sense, if you’re going to stick the guy you think is the best hitter in the #5 slot (which itself makes no sense) to stick two absolute offensive sink holes into the #2 and #3 spots. Why not just go up before the game, set fire to your lineup card, and then go tell Felix he’ll have to allow -1 runs if he wants the win?
Someone please fire McLaren and lower the city’s blood pressure. It’ll save lives. I’m serious.
You’re all wrong! Cairo is awesome!
“Cairo’s numbers don’t measure his value”
subhead: Utilityman gets job done off bench even if stats say otherwise
Great headline, there, by the way. I’d love if my job performance was evaluated like that.
“Derek, you failed to do any of the tasks assigned to you all year.”
“Sure, but I got the job done in other ways. I made coffee in the morning, I always make sure the printer has paper on it, I volunteer to drive to lunch every day…”
Because right now, the actual doing-my-job part of the job is the hard part. I’d love to get paid for the peripherals.
TORONTO — If performance was always judged strictly on numbers, then it’s likely Miguel Cairo would no longer have a place in the Major Leagues.
He doesn’t — he plays for the Mariners.
But after listening to Mariners manager John McLaren rave about the 34-year-old, it becomes a little bit easier to understand where Cairo’s true value lies. He can play all four infield positions as well as the corner outfield spots and regardless of where he’s slotted into the lineup, McLaren knows what type of performance he’s going to get.
None?
Isn’t that exactly what they’re supposed to get out of Bloomquist?
“Stats are not what he’s all about,” McLaren said. “He has made plays defensively your best first baseman in the league would be hard to duplicate. He does the little things. Moves runners, he can squeeze, hit-and-run. I’ve always admired him.”
Um, assuming that second sentence is just clumsy and not a particularly ribald innuendo… no. He doesn’t move runners over. And as much as I’m a huge fan of the suicide squeeze and think it’s woefully underused, that doesn’t a player make.
So now we have two “super utility” guys, full of scrap and awesome little thing skills, and the team still can’t score runs, pitch, or play defense. I’m all for looking at the bright side, but could we maybe laud Felix or Ichiro or one of the players that has actually contributed to the team’s success?
He made a good defensive play and laid down a bunt. You could (and yes, this is frequently done) figure out how to make any player look good by citing a couple well-chosen examples. On Tuesday, they “sparked a rally” or “kept the pressure on” with a single, and their take-three-steps-and-fall catch becomes a “diving grab that saved a double” or whatnot.
Cairo is Bloomquist Lite. That as McLaren’s guy he seems to have eclipsed Bloomquist is sad, funny, and a terrible commentary on the state of the team.
This is exactly what I wrote about yesterday
Tie game on the road, top of the ninth. Ichiro’s managed to get on base. Who do you want up?
If you answered “Willie Bloomquist and Miguel Cairo” congratulations, you manage a major league baseball team. It was a near miracle that they managed to get to Raul, who knew what to do with that wood thing you take up to the plate.
In terms of offensive talent, here’s how McLaren constructed tonight’s lineup:
Ichiro!
ass
ass
good bat
contact hitter
unsure quantity
power-only slugger turned into open-stance singles machine
decent hitter mired in awful slump
contact hitter
How do you not get canned for this kind of insanity?
Game 66, Mariners at Blue Jays
0937h. Felix Hernandez v Shaun Marcum.
Wow. Scheduled to run on FSN. I mean, yay Felix and all, but that’s right at the start of the work day. How are we supposed to pull this off?
Bloomquist at third! Vidro batting third! Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Triunfel Goes Yard
Teenage wunderkind Carlos Triunfel hit his first home run as a professional for High Desert tonight. The kid needed it, too, as he was just 3 for his last 34 heading into the game. And yes, he played second base again. Not many people have ever thought he’ll stick at shortstop, but this isn’t a permanent move yet – they’re just giving him experience at second base as well.
In other High Desert notes, Gregory Halman blasted two more home runs, giving him 19 on the season in just 243 at-bats. As I’ve noted here before, Halman is a dead ringer for Alfonso Soriano at the plate, and his skillset is almost as extreme – ridiculous power and no concept of pitch recognition. His 14/72 BB/K is actually an improvement over his numbers from last year. He needs a lot of work on his approach, but considering that he’s got 19 home runs and 22 steals on June 10th, it’s hard to argue that there is a better power/speed guy in the organization.
The source of not hitting with runners on is not hitting
Today’s obvious observation, inspired by this McLaren quote, via Baker:
“We’ve had a tough time in this series with runners in scoring position,” McLaren said. “It’s been a tough go for us. We know we need to do a better job.”
I understand the frustration with stranding runners. Given a rare situation where the team is more likely to score a run, it’s disappointing to see nothing happen. But the cause of this problem isn’t because there’s some skill the M’s are missing, like “advancing the runner” or “hitting to the right side of the infield” or whatever. It’s that the offense sucks.
The M’s hit .249/.306/.377 normally, .248/.320/.389 with runners on, and .227/.321/.376 with runners in scoring position. AL average is .261/.330/.404, and with runners in scoring position is .266/.351/.406. So the M’s RISP performance is almost exactly what you’d expect it to be.
Beyond that, if you want to look at causes of their runner stranding, how about this: there is one — one — ONE, DAMMIT, ONE — player on the team who gets on more than a league average hitter, and it’s Ichiro. He’s usually followed by Lopez, who hits for average and not much else. Behind them it’s an absolute crapshoot: Ibanez if you’re lucky, or Beltre, but often Vidro, or Cairo, or some other zero. The guys who can get on base are isolated in the lineup from any one else with any offensive value. I know a lot of people are skeptical about the value of lineup construction, but some of these McLaren creations have come about as close to the worst possible choice.
The problem isn’t that the Mariners don’t hit with runners in scoring position. It’s that they don’t hit, they don’t have runners, the runners aren’t in scoring position, and the hitters who can get on and get into scoring position have to watch from the basepaths as inept batters following them make out after out.