Your choice of colors, too
“Towels” by tico24, cc-licensed
Yup
“Towels to chose from” by blmurch, cc-licensed.
Game 36, Rangers at Mariners
Gabbard v Felix. 7:10. Chance to make up a game, with the A’s and Angels off.
On mariners.mlb.com, one of the rotating top stories is “Vote to send Beltre, Mariners to the Bronx.”
I started laughing when I saw the pictures. Yes! Let me go vote for Jose Vidro as the all-star DH.
Here’s your lineup of inexplicableness:
CF-L Ichiro!
DH-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
1B-R Sexson
SS-R Betancourt
RF-R Balentien
C-R Johima
2B-R Bloomquist
Felix Day!
“Ist das die Sonne? Day 45” by Arwen Abendstern, cc-licensed
Is it Felix Day?
Yes, it’s Felix Day, child.
moar funny pictures
Here’s a dog licking her* chops with excitement.
“Annie licks her chops” by Barbara L. Slavin, cc-licensed
* presumably
Everett fans: host an Aquasock
If you’re close to the park, check out this chance to help out the Aquasox and the next Felix (2003) (or other great prospects: just that team had Adam Jones for a stint as well, and Eric O’Flaherty and a bunch of other familiar names). Read on for more from their email release
Read more
Organizational Problems, Summed Up
Nowhere have the failings of an organization been more succinctly summed up in one single situation than in using Willie Bloomquist to pinch hit for your designated hitter to represent the tying run in the 9th inning of a game you have to win. It may even have been the correct tactical decision – I’m not criticizing the team for making the pinch hit decision. I’m just in awe that a team that would have to find itself using Bloomquist to pinch hit for their #5 hitter was ever considered a legitimate contender.
If not Sexson, who? Willie! Boom-Boom! Yes! That guy!
I said some unkind things about McLaren’s choice to start Cairo in Sexson’s stead tonight. But there really is no way to justify the decision. With Sexson lost, here’s who was available:
– WFB-R, plays a good first base, terrible hitter
– WFB Light-R, plays a bad first base, terrible hitter
– Turbo-B, plays a bad first base, terrible hitter so far but probably a good bet to do better than either of those two, offensively
– play someone out of position, either Clement, Ibanez, or someone else, like someone tall from the bullpen
Once you’ve eliminated that last one, you really only have two defensible choices: Vidro, because you want a guy who’ll take a walk and might get a hit, or Bloomquist, because as long as you’re punting offense you might as well get a good glove out there.
There is no reason to play Cairo. There’s no reason Cairo’s on the roster, frankly, but this is supposedly exactly the reason Cairo’s there — to allow them to use Bloomquist while still having a Bloomquist facsimile on the bench. Arrgghhh.
And then — to not pinch-hit for Cairo late in the game when they’re down but things are still close… why not? You in the world do you pinch hit for Clement, who can hit, with Bloomquist in the 9th and not Cairo in the 8th? Why — this is just crazy.
Game 35, Rangers at Mariners
Padilla v Bedard. Go Bedard!
I don’t have a lot left in me after that last rant. Oakland won today, Angels are losing.
And if you thought that the team was going to try and close the gap, well, they’re starting Willie Bloomquist Lite at first base.
First base. Our first baseman is batting ninth in the order. Screw you, McLaren, there is no way to reasonably defend that decision.
Dog bites man, Armstrong feels team is great and you’re stupid
Club president Chuck Armstrong said before Wednesday’s game that there is more to the Mariners’ attendance troubles – seven of Seattle’s top poorest Safeco Field attendances have come this year – than the club’s 14-20 record.
”You expect some ebb and flow,” Armstrong said. ”The weather hasn’t been good. We haven’t played as well as we wanted. And this is the worst schedule ever.
…needless to say, I was on the internet within minutes, registering my disgust.
Really. Worst schedule ever. Worse than the time the team couldn’t play in the Kingdome and was on the road all year? Worse than last year, when they were trying to make up those missed games in absurd fashion? Substantially worse the Mariner schedules before unbalanced divisional play?
”I’m optimistic, but when you see 15,000 against a division rival, yes, you are disappointed.”
I’m optimistic, but when you see your team squander year after year of great revenues by having the wrong people spend that money on the wrong things, yes, I’m disappointed.
Jeez.
The most vocal portion of the Mariners’ fan base has long advocated changes at the top, specifically targeting general manager Bill Bavasi and, somewhat less often, manager John McLaren.
That’s only because McLaren hasn’t been around that long.
”There’s a fine line with patience,” he said. ”We already made moves (Clement and Balentien) to address the problems. Maybe those moves will come back to bite us. We don’t know.
“the problems” being.. two of them? I’m not sure how to read that. Does he really think that’s a complete solution to all the problems? I’m probably being too critical.
”But we made the moves in a considered manner with everybody involved. And I remember that last year at this time people were talking about making a move with Raul Ibanez. We stuck with him, and it paid off.
Who was advocating “a move” with Ibanez at this time last season? Seriously, I’m drawing a blank here. Was it me? I don’t think that was me.
If there was, though — shame on you, stupid people, talking about making a move with Ibanez, who was injured and concealing it and absolutely sucked. How dare you talk about making a move for such a selfless leader who gets injured and conceals it so that the team can’t figure out what’s wrong and stupidly keeps running him out there so his injured self looks terrible. How dare you! Don’t you know he’s injured?
Now, if you remember, at this time last year, there were people advocating that all kittens and puppies should suffer horrible, gruesome fates too terrifying to even detail here. But we persevered, and today those puppies and kittens are all living happy, fulfilling lives, letting doubles skip on past them in left field, and giving great post-game interviews.
People may ask “what do you expect Armstrong to say? He’s the president, after all.”
And I would respond here’s what I’d like Armstrong to say: “They’re right to be dissatisfied. We’ve tried to put together a contender this year, and we’ve gotten off to a bad start. I understand that it’s a mid-week night game, and it was cold, too. I appreciate the fans that did come out to see the team, and I’m sorry we put on such a poor showing.
“I still think the team is a lot stronger than we’ve shown so far, particularly with Bedard and Putz returning from injuries. I expect we’ll play much better from here on out and hopefully we’ll be able to make up the ground we’ve lost.”
And that’s probably not far off what Armstrong would like to say, but here — and you see this in Lincoln’s statements, too — what he actually says is steeped in the organization’s long-standing contempt for their customers, who here are irrationally concerned about the chances of a team with the worst record in the AL, a team they were assured was going to make a run at it.
I hate that. It does as much to turn me off as the losing, as irrational as that is at times, knowing that my ticket dollars support an organization that can’t even pretend to understand and sympathize with entirely reasonable fan sentiment.
Fielding statistics and defense
I’ve been thinking about defense with the team’s recent woes. Dave wrote a large article on evaluating defense a while back that stands up nicely, and I came across an interesting post randomly that I thought I’d pass along: “Comparison of Fielding Statistics” which compares 2006 data from six different stats and comes to some interesting conclusions about their utility.
I have some quibbles with the piece’s logic in places, specifically the comparison of stat “features” leading to
So, based on that table, I would have to say that UZR and PMR have the best methodologies, with a nod to the Fans data because they can provide such unique insights into player skill.
The problem is that this doesn’t at all evaluate methodologies. If I came up with a defensive metric called Random Runs that claimed to be built on hit-location data, zones, ball type, batter handedness, ballpark-adjusted, and player skill types, and I did all of those things horribly, that’s not a better system than something that does fewer things the right way, even though you’d check off those boxes.
The particularly interesting thing is the easy-to-scan graphs of system-to-system results. It’s interesting to see that in the 2006 data, the correlation is both highly significant and not anywhere near as good as you see from offensive contribution measures.
It all goes to reinforce something I’ve been saying for years — recognize that defensive tools are still pretty rough, but looking at a couple of them you’ll be able to get a pretty good idea of how good a particular player is with the glove.