Five Days
This will sound overly dramatic, but it’s simply a realistic assessment of where this team stands – the Mariners have exactly five games to save the 2008 season. If they don’t perform well between now and Sunday, the rest of the year will simply be playing for second place, because the hole will be too large to overcome. They have five home games against below average teams, starting with Bedard and Felix to close out this series.
If the Mariners don’t win three of the next five games, they can cash in their chips and go home. The deficit would just be too large to believe that anything short of a miracle could cause them to win the division.
With the Angels and A’s both off to strong starts, you have to set the bar for minimum wins required at 93. It would take some historic collapses by both clubs for the division winner to finish with less than 92 wins, especially considering how well they’ve both played through the first five weeks of the season. So, the M’s target has to be 93+ wins.
If they go 2-3 to finish out this homestand, that would put them at 16-23 with 123 games to go. In order to finish the year with 93 wins, they’d have to play .626 baseball, a 77-46 mark. This team is just not capable of playing that well. Very few teams are, and this is certainly not one of them. If they can go 4-1, they “only” have to play .608 baseball the rest of the year – very freaking hard, but at least within the ream of possibility.
Two wins or less and it’s pull the plug time. The season will officially be over, and they can start shopping the veterans around and setting up the interview list for the new front office and management staff. Three wins keeps the team on life support, with a faint chance of contending still hanging by a thread. Four or five wins gives them a little bit of life as they head out on the road next week.
But they’re at a crossroads. Finish this week strong or fold your tents, because the rest of the year is a waste of time if they can’t beat the Rangers and White Sox at home with the season on the line.
15,818
That’s announced attendance and not actual turnstile count. So 15,818 fans didn’t see the game in person.
Why? A couple things come to mind:
– it’s cold, and more and more people are catching on that Safeco Field night games early in the season are really unpleasant.
– the M’s, for all the talk about this year being a contention year, were way under .500 and way back in the division, which makes the sales pitch not that much different than other recent years
– they were playing the Rangers, who have a bad record (like the M’s) and have been bad for years, so there’s not a lot of rivalry or divisional interest there either
– uninspiring pitching lineup
If I’d had season tickets, I’d have been trying to move or exchange for a future matchup. This is the kind of game it used to be really hard to convince my wife to go to, because she had good sense (“Ryaaaan Fraaaaaaaanklin? Uhhh…. I couuuuuuuuld goooo…”)
This isn’t all that far off previous season lows, especially the last few years, where they’ve had mid-week night games in the cold draw poorly. It happens. I have no doubt that as we’ve seen before, the stadium will fill up when the weather gets better.
But it is a new low, a benchmark for how fickle their fans have become and how few the most dedicated are.
Game 34, Rangers at Mariners
If the Mariners don’t manage to cut into the Angels’s lead in the next week or two, I get the feeling that there’s going to be a lot of finger pointing going on as to who’s responsible for the team’s awful fortunes, and there’s a very good chance that we’re going to see the new guys, called up to help the franchise, blamed for not turning the team around.
That’s too bad, because they don’t deserve it. Let’s compare where things stand right now just in terms of production.
Balentien’s hitting .238/.238/.524 in his 21 plate appearances. But Wilkerson was hitting .232/.348/.304, so every game he’s playing that Wilkerson doesn’t is an improvement just on offense.
Jeff Clement, new semi-DH, is hitting .176/.300/.176 in 20 plate appearances.
Jose Vidro, the old DH, hit .192/.248/.298 in 113 plate appearances. As a side note, to get to Clement’s line: -3 singles, -1 double, -1 walk (sort of).
In terms of overall contibutions, here’s their VORP: Vidro, -4.1, Clement, -1.2. Clement needs to suck as badly as he’s sucked for another 18 games before he’ll have hurt the team as much as Vidro already has.
If you want to portion out responsibility, start with the players who have really stunk up the place. Johjima, as much as I’ve been a fan, has been horrible (-7.1 VORP). Bloomquist still can’t hit, and managed to get over thirty plate appearances (-2.6 VORP). Miguel Cairo’s awful ten plate appearances (-1.8 plate appearances) hurt the team more than Clement has so far.
And that’s not even getting into who isn’t playing up to expectations or salary. Or the team’s defense, which has been bad.
The rotation’s been pretty good, though Batista and Bedard have disappointed to different degrees. Putz hasn’t been himself, and the bullpen’s been a real weakness so far, along with bullpen management.
Which brings us to the topic at hand. It’s not fair to blame Clement or Balentien if the team doesn’t come back to be competitive. They don’t fill out the lineup cards, forget who’s in the bullpen, or run the game. They didn’t assemble the roster, or hire the manager. They didn’t hire the GM who hired the manager.
Blame, if you’re going to hand it out, should flow upwards from the new guys who’ve only been playing for few games to the architects of the season, roster, and franchise.
But it’s too early yet for blame. Let’s wait a game, at least. And hey! There’s a game in an hour!
That donation page again
Some of you have asked, w/r/t Dave’s news, what the link is to the leukemia/lymphoma research drive page in question. Since Amy has already reached her goal, if you want to continue to donate, here’s a link to her running partners page.
Dave on KJR
We’re doing the KJR gig today at 1:50, since I was a little busy proposing yesterday and all.
An Update
A few months ago, I put up a post mentioning that my girlfriend was running a marathon in Alaska this June to raise money for leukemia and lymphoma research. Well, I wanted to give you guys a couple of updates.
First off, she stands all of $13 away from her goal of $5,000, and you guys were a huge part of that, giving almost $2,500 in a day. She was overwhelmed by your generosity, and both her and I can’t thank you guys enough for being willing to give to a great cause. Thank you.
And, as a further update, she’s actually not my girlfriend anymore. As of yesterday, she’s now my fiancee`. I proposed in front of Elk Falls in the mountains of North Carolina, and her response was “Are You Serious?”. Apparently, even when dating a blogger, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll ever actually propose. She did say yes once the shock wore off, at least.
We’re probably headed towards an October or November wedding, which means that I’m officially rooting for the Mariners to not win it all this year. Feel free to suck eggs and not be playing meaningful baseball this winter, fellas. You have my permission.
Game 33, Rangers at Mariners
7:10. Both teams 13-19. Huh. Who woulda thunk it?
Millwood (who, as Sims noted last night, it seems like we’ve seen pitch against the M’s waaayyy too many times) v Washburn. Lineups when I get ’em.
Update: Huh, interesting. Sexson at 5, and Betancourt moves up to 7 behind Clement with Balentien at 9. I wonder why they’re moving Betancourt up from 9?
On sunk costs, the value of wins, and the course of the season
Today’s earlier post veered frighteningly fast from my “here’s a good thing that’s happened” to “blow the team up aieeeeee!”
Which was a little disconcerting for me. But it took an interesting turn late into sunk costs, with a comment about, as I understand it, a box with contents almost everyone would find disappointing.
As fans, we’re in a really strange spot for what to hope for.
Uncontroversial tenets:
Not a lot of faith that the team’s going to compete
We know the team is great at marketing and has huge amounts of revenue and a sweet stadium deal that allows them to print money
Ownership that is not particularly savvy and isn’t interested in getting with the program, if you will
A front office that reflects that philosophy
A front office that isn’t particularly good at talent evaluation, but pretty good at drafting and player development
Which leads to a whole other spiral: you don’t want anyone fired if you can reasonably believe that their replacements will be worse (and I really do think that Bavasi & Co are as forward-thinking and talented as we’re likely to get hired under Lincoln’s stewardship). Then what?
If you think they’re totally incompetent, you don’t want them to tear the team down because they’ll never recover from the funk. And even if they tore down, who would they trade, and why should you think they would get anything worthwhile back? But then again, they were pretty good at losing there before, and player development pretty much saved their butts… and you don’t want them to go for it, because they’ll trade the rest of the team for the wrong veteran reinforcements. Even if they rally, keep it close, that’ll just extend the current regime’s reign. And playoffs? This punchless, no-field team with a shaky pen’s going to have a hard time getting anywhere even if they do luck into it, but their berth will get everyone even longer contracts.
Really, if you believe that the people running the team are totally incompetent, there’s no course of action you want to happen except a team sale and house cleaning.
Your fandom, not the off-season acquisitions, are the sunk cost.
Still, I’d like to talk for a second about something Dave and I wrote about repeatedly during the worst of the losing years: there’s no need for a Cleveland-style rebuilding. There’s no need for the team to blow everything up and lose 100 games for a few years. There’s a huge reason for them not to: while as a borderline obsessed fan I might willingly trade years of terrible teams for a World Series title, the team’s financial viability and fanbase depends on winning games. People who come to see the team and watch the M’s lose over and over stop coming to games.
Others have done a lot of research into what drives a team’s marketing reach, and we find that it’s a team’s success over years that brings in the TV deals, keeps the turnstiles going, and so on. It’s worth winning 76 games instead of 72, and it’s worth winning 72 over 68, because unless you get the #1 or #2 draft pick, it’s not that big of a deal.
Or to put it more bluntly, a win is probably worth $2m to the M’s. Probably more. Winning keeps the revenue coming.
To tie that back in, look at the rest of the season. The M’s are unlikely to make a playoff run at this point. Do you, as many people have advocated, tear it all down?
I don’t see the point. For many of these guys, the M’s don’t have internal replacements and it’s hard to see who’s going to trade them enough prospects in return. There’s value in giving playing time to young prospects if you’re trying to develop them, or sort out how they fare against major league competition. If they’re all organizational fodder with no long-term future, it doesn’t help anyone (except the fodder, who get delicious service time).
Take Beltre. Beltre, as Dave’s argued, is a fine value when weighed against his competition, even as he’s generally slagged for being a free-agent bust. If you traded Beltre now and stuck Bloomquist out there (or Cairo!) to finish out the season, whoever you received in return would have to be good enough to make up for that loss over their Mariner career. I don’t see who offers that. Better to take his contributions this year and enjoy his play.
And so on, down the roster. Maybe you pull a Beane and try and haul some top-line guys for Bedard, but to who, and when, and what can they offer the M’s that helps in the long term?
Because of the way the team budgets (the “no carry-over” accounting method) there’s almost no point even in trading Sexson. Saved salary doesn’t benefit you next year, so unless you can make an improvement on the field now, you might as well pay him.
It’s no good to argue that the M’s should trade their vets for good prospects. That’s all fine and dandy. But on any serious consideration, it becomes extremely hard to imagine reasonable scenarios where the players the Mariners have on hand that have trade value would get them the blue chip prospects they’d need to get in return.
And similarly, I’d argue that even if the M’s have a 10% chance at the playoffs, there’s no reason not to keep working towards improving the team. Ibanez is still a huge defensive liability — if they had a chance to upgrade left field and move Ibanez to DH… whoops, Clement’s there now. My point is that there’s no reason for this team to ever give up wins, much less seasons. I for one would much rather see a .500 team playing interesting baseball late in the season without a shot at a division title than I would a torn-down team patched with more Cairo-style acquisitions to patch newly created holes from trading off players they don’t have replacements for.
If you think the team’s run by incompetents, there’s no course of action short of a Politburo-style purge by a new leader that won’t make your skin crawl, so your skin’s going to be crawling. Sorry.
If you think they’re about as good as we’re going to get right now, we have to accept that and draw our enjoyment from what we can (Ichiro! Felix Day and so forth).
And a sign of hope, too
Steve Nelson made this comment late in the discussion of Dave’s post:
But, but .. this is team carefully assembled with a core of gritty veterans who know how to play the game. The kind of players who don’t panic and get thrown off when things don’t go right. The kinds of players who know how to do the little things to win games.
That the Mariners handily beat their Pythag record last season wasn’t a fluke; it was the direct product of filling the roster with players of character, integrity and veteran savvy. [/sarcasm]
I think the current team situation directly relates to perceptions of last years team. Many fans, and apparently the Mariners FO as well, believed that last year’s team was a valid contender (or almost contender) – that the record at the end of 2007 was a true reflection of the ability of the team. Buying into that notion leads directly to the conclusion that if a few holes are patched (primarily in the rotation) the team is a true contender. Clearly, that’s the way the FO saw the team last winter. I’ve mentioned in several posts over the last several months that the I think the FO viewed the 2007 season as vindication for their thoughts about roster construction, viz. that a roster assembled with the proper intangibles will outplay their true talent level – said team will win more than their “fair share†of games because the will do the things needed to win games and will play as greater than the sum of the parts.
This season can be viewed as a test of that notion. Many here (myself included) saw that belief as a misperception; the Mariners were not as good as their record and that they Pythag record was a better indication of the teams true talent level. I will gladly eat crow if I am wrong, but so far this season would seem vindication.
I heartily agree on most counts, and we’ve talked about a lot of those issues and the differences in how we viewed the team and how the front office viewed this year’s team coming into the season.
But we need to point out that something interesting just happened in the Wilkerson move: they recognized a problem, adjusted, and they did it early. We can certainly argue over whether or not it was the right move, but just a few years ago they were clinging to the belief that Carl Everett would turn it around any day now (depressing fact: Everett’s 2006 line would be a dramatic improvement over Vidro this year, or, unfortunately, Johjima) much later into the season. The offense was struggling, and they did something about it.
Sure, they may have gone into this season with unreasonable expectations of building from an 88-win season and decided to go for it, but at least we’ve seen they’re not looking at the roster with blinders on. If we take nothing else away from that, we should be happy that they’re not letting that initial assumption blind them to the glaring problems they face right now.
Now, whether that leads to trading the remaining prospects for proven veteran relievers, that’s a whole other topic.
Season Salvaging Time
It’s May 4th, and believe it or not, the Mariners season is on the verge of extinction. They currently stand six games behind the Angels (who are winning 4-2, which would push the deficit to six and a half games) with 130 games to play. That sounds like a lot of time until you realize just how large of a hole that really is.
To win the division, the Mariners would have to outplay both the Angels and A’s by a significant margin. To put some context to this, here are the winning percentage pairs from here on out that would lead to the M’s ending up with just one more win then Los Angeles (ignoring the A’s for right now), ranging from 89 wins to 95 wins for the Mariners.
Angels – .527 – Mariners – .585
Angels – .535 – Mariners – .592
Angels – .543 – Mariners – .600
Angels – .550 – Mariners – .608
Angels – .558 – Mariners – .615
Angels – .566 – Mariners – .623
Angels – .574 – Mariners – .631
The Angels have played .594 baseball through their first 32 games without John Lackey or Kelvim Escobar and with Vladimir Guerrero off to the worst start he’s had in years. Even assuming they aren’t going to get Escobar back this year, Lackey takes a while to regain his previous form, and Guerrero doesn’t rebound all the way back to his prime levels of production, it’s still hard to see this Angels team playing much worse than .550 baseball the rest of the way.
A .550 winning percentage is an 89 win pace over a full season, and that’s about what I expected the Angels to finish with before the year started. If the Angels playing .550 ball from here on out, they’ll finish with 91 wins, and the Mariners would have to play .608 baseball to end the year at 92-70. No team has played a full season of .608 baseball or better since the 2005 White Sox and Cardinals won 99 and 100 games respectively.
It’s really freaking hard to play .608 baseball for any sustained period of time, even if you’re a truly excellent team. And let’s be honest, this Mariners team isn’t excellent. For a team of this quality to play .600 ball for five months is almost unheard of.
So, the M’s simply have to start winning, and doing so soon. They need to beat up on Texas, the White Sox, and the Padres, who they play their next 13 games against. They need a 9-4 or 10-3 stretch to make up some ground or else it just becomes too prohibitive to think they can close this gap.
It’s May, but it’s getting late for the Mariners. They don’t have any more time to struggle. They have to start winning, and they have to start tomorrow.