A.L. West Roundtable
I participated in a roundtable about the A.L. West in 2008 with Patrick Sullivan, Rich Lederer, and Sean Smith. It has been posted over at The Baseball Analysts website. Much to my chagrin, people quote ERA a bunch when talking about pitcher abilities, but beyond that, there’s some interesting stuff in there, even if I don’t agree with all of it.
M’s post media guide
Check it out, the 2008 Mariner Media Guide, chock full of bios, weird team history, and wacky tidbits.
Let us know if you come across anything particularly interesting.
Small graph for Sunday
I put this together after I realized that the 2003 M’s outfield included two of the franchise’s all-time putout leaders at their positions despite those players not getting full seasons.
Unless I messed up, this the total putouts by Mariner outfields since 2000:
Note, of course, that this doesn’t take into account whether the staff was made of groundballers/flyballers/gopherballers, and other stuff.
Update: check out this further exploration o’er at Lookout Landing
Mariner all-time putout and assist leaders
I realized in making a quip earlier this week about Ichiro’s base stealing that the information on who the M’s leaders in putouts and assists is not readily available. Caveat: in the database, outfielders frequently have their position listed as “OF” and since center fielders dominate defensive statistics, it’s hard to pick out left fielders particularly. I welcome corrections.
Neither of these are particularly great defensive statistics on their own, though they’re also not as worthless as you might have been led to believe — but I’ll leave that discussion for another day. So!
Mariner all-time putout leaders
| Player | Year | Putouts | Position |
| Dan Wilson | 1997 | 1050 | C |
| Alvin Davis | 1985 | 1438 | 1B |
| Harold Reynolds | 1991 | 348 | 2B |
| Alex Rodriguez | 1998 | 268 | SS |
| Bill Stein | 1977 | 146 | 3B |
| Randy Winn | 2003 | 299 | LF |
| Mike Cameron | 2003 | 485 | CF |
| Ichiro! | 2005 | 381 | RF |
A putout is an action that “causes the out of a batter-runner or runner”. Catchers rack up putouts for strikeouts, first basemen rack up putouts for catching balls thrown to them. Centerfielders get theirs the hard way.
Beltre owns spots 2-4.
Updated: 1999 Brian Hunter gets bumped by 2003 Randy Winn, who managed that line in only 134 games started in left (!).
Mariner all-time assist leaders
| Player | Year | Assists | Position |
| Dan Wilson | 1997 | 72 | C |
| John Olerud | 2000 | 133 | 1B |
| Harold Reynolds | 1987 | 507 | 2B |
| Omar Vizquel | 1993 | 475 | SS |
| Jim Presley | 1985 | 335 | 3B |
| Brian Hunter | 1999 | 14 | LF |
| Ken Griffey Jr. | 1998 | 11 | CF |
| Ichiro! | 2004 | 12 | RF |
A shortstop gets an assist for fielding a grounder and throwing to first (where the first basemen gets a putout). So the infielders get a ton of those, while outfielders have to really work for those.
Ding ding ding ding ding
msb noted that we have a winner!
Cairo, or “I can’t believe he’s not Willie” is such a great imitation of Willie that McLaren will now be freed to use Bloomquist more! Which also tells you something about the daring nature of McLaren’s in-game tactics! Thrill to the thought of a year of these two together, occupying not one but TWO YES TWO bench spots every game, all season long!
(“baby wild horse” by plizzba and used under the Creative Commons license)
M’s radio deal up for renewal
Mike Snow pointed out this article in the PI on the M’s radio deal, MLBAM, and the interesting complications of the current situation. Particularly, it’s interesting to think that for many teams flush with MLBAM cash, they might see a decline (or at least an end to the huge increases) in local media revenue as online technologies take away ears and eyeballs from traditional broadcasters
Another reason GMs are reluctant to sign Bonds
I neglected this in my writeup the other day, but there’s a huge reason that teams are reluctant to sign Bonds, no matter if he’s a bargain and if he’s a perfect fit: they’re human, and the sports press will absolutely tear into them for it.
A lot of the weird, small moves we see at the edges of transaction wires are due to things we don’t know about: some guy is such a colossal jerk that the team waives him even though he’s a left-handed hitting backup catcher who can steal 15 bases a year. A minor league organizational soldier is called up for a week and given spot at-bats until he gets a major league hit. Two teams that could make a mutually beneficial trade won’t even talk to each other because one side’s still too angry about being dealt a pitcher with a bum shoulder years ago.
No GM wants to have to deal with hordes of national press calling him, clogging the clubhouse interviewing all the players trying to get dirt on Bonds. It’s probably not a big factor — a GM, after all, is supposed to take the heat if it’ll improve the team — but I can see where it would make a big difference in whether they lobbied their owner hard over it.
And for that matter, it’s probably even a bigger deal for owners, who look at the franchise’s marketability and long-term reputation.
As a cautionary tale, I present Tampa Bay. By all indications, some Tampa Bay people, including the manager, talked about Bonds. There’s no evidence they said “I wonder what it would take” or even contemplated what they’d do to fit him into the lineup. And we know that Bonds’ agent’s been actively lobbying teams to bring his client in, so the conversation probably went
“You think we should sign Bonds?”
“What’s the point? We’re the Devil Rays.”
“Just the Rays now.”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting.”
“No Bonds, then?”
“No, we’re rebuilding and we’re already going to end up doing a lot of roster juggling, let’s pass.”
“Cool.”
For this, Tampa Bay became the story of the week. I present this SI.com article as an example of its kind.
“Bonds’ bat not worth taking on his baggage”
There’s a lot in the article about how Bonds is a jerk, a bad clubhouse presence, and then Omar’s quoted —
“Nothing against Barry, but having all the things that come along with having him here sometimes made it hard to concentrate on baseball,” says shortstop Omar Vizquel. “We’ll definitely miss a lot of the things that he brought to the table, but there’s a feeling now that we’re a normal baseball team again.”
That’s… well, I would have said nothing.
Do you hear that, Rays? A normal baseball team. There is absolutely no shot at normalcy for any team that signs Bonds.
What does normalcy get you, exactly? A congeniality pennant?
Which takes us to this gem:
For all the pop and on-base percentage he brings to your lineup, for all the fannies he puts in your seats, he brings more negatives.
I know we can argue about chemistry forever, but… really? If you’ve got a crappy DH and you put Bonds in and he’s only healthy enough to get to 300 at-bats and hits a little worse than last year, your team will win three, maybe four more games than they would have.
I don’t understand how you can possibly reason that press attention and having a surly guy in the clubhouse possibly outweighs that kind of contribution. Even if you want to say “it’s not worth it” or “you have a moral obligation not to sign him” I can’t see a reasonable weighing of the evidence that would lead you to the conclusion that adding Bonds to a team that needed him would make it worse.
To find players like that, you have to go back to the totally corrupt days of baseball and look to Hal Chase and Buck Weaver — people who were so dirty they threw ballgames for money.
But not to dwell on this particular article too much — I wanted to look at the larger point. You can find dozens of articles like this. It was an easy column for writers to churn out this week, and they took it.
My point is that Bonds has never had a good relationship with the press. Even when he’s tried to do better in interviews, make himself more available, the detente collapsed pretty quickly. His place as the lightning rod for steroid discussions is due in no small part to the obsession with making him out to be the worst villain.
Every team knows that Bonds’ signing will create exactly this kind of national story, multiplied — the Rays barely talked about Barry, after all — and that no matter how tame the local press is, Bonds and his successes, failures, and his effect on his teammates will be the story that’s told and retold, all season long.
If you’re a GM, or an owner, the possible payoff for signing Bonds and being right has to be immense for you to risk that kind of continual negative attention, knowing the only way you could hope to be redeemed in the public’s eyes would be to get to the playoffs – never a sure thing – and have Bonds perform extremely well in post-season play. And only a World Series victory would assure forgiveness from some fans.
The number of teams with strong ownership groups unafraid of that kind of sustained attack is smaller than the number of teams that could use Bonds. And moreover, you can understand why teams on the edge would be extremely reluctant to make it known that they were even mulling it, given the treatment Tampa Bay’s received for doing nothing.
A brief moment of thanks to the mods
Sooooo I’m going to say that the volunteer mod corp’s been great. No complaints, only minor power-mongering, continued good discussion. So I thought I’d share, because I frequently hear from people that disagree with the comment policy (generally because they’ve just seen something disappear, but often they’re just concerned.
Below, the horror. This is a new user’s first three comments:
2008 USSM/LL Community Projections
It’s back – we are once again joining our efforts with Jeff Sullivan and his crew over at Lookout Landing to give you guys the opportunity to create the 2008 Community Projections. We’ve spent a lot of time over the offseason talking about the different projection systems and how they think the Mariners are going to do this year, but this is your chance to make your voice heard. Using the wisdom of crowds approach, we happen to think that the combined readership bases of USSM and LL are quite knowledgeable about this organization, and have some real insights into how the individual players, and thus the team, might perform.
As has been shown in different analysis studies, a large group of informed readers can do just as well or better as the best projection systems out there. This isn’t just fans wishcasting into a spreadsheet; each of you has some valuable piece of information, and when we combine all those pieces into one big pool of knowledge, we come up with a fairly reliable estimate of what’s going to take place in 2008.
So, I encourage you to participate and take it seriously. You have something to offer, and this is one of my favorite things we do every year. The results will be a lot of fun to look at, and we’ll be doing posts on what the community expects from individual players as we go through spring training.
Should you choose to participate (and I hope you will), this year is going to be a little different than the last. Instead of emailing out links to individual player sheets, we’re going to send you a form with drop-down menus for every relevant player. It will look like this. You’ll have a while to fill it out, so don’t worry if you can’t do everyone in one sitting. Here’s how you do this: enter your data, and when you’re done with each pair of players (one hitter + one pitcher), click ‘Submit’. Then use the drop-down menus to advance to the next pitcher and hitter in the list. You can’t do more than one pitcher and hitter at a time, so don’t try. It’ll bungle things up, and that won’t be fun for Jeff and I when we try to interpret the spreadsheet later on.
Once we have all the projections, we’re going to plug the data into Diamond Mind and run some season simulations (using ZiPS data for other teams) to figure out what the community thinks of the Mariners as a team. This is the part to which I’m looking forward the most.
Want to participate? Great! Here’s how:
(1) Send an email to communityprojections@gmail.com with “Sign Me Up!” in the subject line from the email address you want us to send the form to
(2) Receive the form (will happen within 24 hours of your request)
(3) Before you begin filling out the form, check out this spreadsheet as a reference. This spreadsheet includes 2007 data for every player and an area for you to input some test data to see just what you’re projecting. (For example, the form doesn’t have an area that automatically calculates BA/OBP/SLG, so in order to make sure your numbers make sense, run them by this spreadsheet first.) If you want player data from earlier years, everything’s available in the player splits at Baseball-Reference, the greatest website in the universe.
(4) Within a week, submit your projections. If there are certain players that you don’t feel like projecting, skip them.
After we’ve sent out the forms and given people time to fill them out, we’ll begin to publish the results of the community projections here and on Lookout Landing. We’re also going to take your projections, plug them into the Diamond Mind event tables, and run some simulations based on your projections, which will give us a good idea of how well you think this team is going to perform, even though we’re not asking you to individually predict the team’s overall performance.
It should be a fun project, and it will be much easier to contribute this year with a form that can be emailed to anyone. So, if you’re interest in participating, send that email to communityprojections@gmail.com with Sign Me Up! in the subject line. We’ll send out the form on a daily basis, so you should have it within 24 hours of signing up.
Any questions, feel free to post them in the comments.
A goldmine of Howard Lincoln goodness
Things that, on first glance, are provably false:
– Every year is a franchise record in payroll
– That they were sixth in MLB payroll, that they spent $113m on payroll (unless you want to buy their now-standard crazy every-year-inflating accounting)
– Payroll in 1992 was between $35 and $40m
Things that are not provably wrong:
– They’ve closed the gap between the M’s and the Angels
– “It looks like we’re heading in the right direction.”
– “we have one heck of a starting rotation”
Things that are at best misleading:
– “We’re not as large as a city or area of many teams that have lower player payrolls.” [sic]
Things that could be considered true:
– The Angels swept the M’s Aug 27-29 because they had better starting pitching (the Angels scored 8 runs a game, and the M’s had three poor starts in a row, though one of the Angels starts was Santana’s one-out disaster, when their bullpen carried them through the rest of the game)