Mitchell Report
Soon the results of baseball’s oft-halting, sometimes stymied, pearls-clutching investigation into how in the world those steroids got into the game will be announced. It supposedly includes some eighty names, and will probably include past Mariners. Possibly present Mariners, who knows. If advance leaks are to be believed, it credits MLB with trying to impose testing without noting how baseball squandered previous opportunities to implement a program with receptive players, or the circumstances that led to the union being so adversarial.
After which, Selig has his own conference, in which he’ll say “we appreciate these findings and all the hard work, so on and so forth, and we’ll do what we can.”
Most of the advance recommendations of the report I’ve seen are quite good, and baseball would be well-served to implement them — though I’ll wait on talking about the pros and cons at length until we see them. And, despite my reservations about the whole exercise, I’m pleased that those recommendations are reasonable, and don’t involve, say, torturing randomly-selected players until they finger others before banning them for life.
Inevitably, though, the story today’s going to be names, which is unfortunate. Still, I hope after the initial hysteria, there’s progress made.
M’s deal Broussard, keep HoRam
Yesterday was the deadline to tender contracts to arbitration eligible players or let them become free agents. The Mariners decided that Ben Broussard didn’t fit in their plans for 2008 and would have non-tendered him, but the Rangers stepped in and gave them a C- prospect so that they wouldn’t have to bid for him as a free agent. Broussard should get a decent opportunity in Texas, and the M’s get something instead of nothing, though Tim Hulett is about as close to nothing as you can get back in a trade. If he continues to develop and everything goes well, he’ll be a backup infielder. Hulett’s lack of a future isn’t any kind of indictment on the M’s trading abilities, though – there just wasn’t much of a market for Broussard.
On the other hand, the M’s decided to keep Horacio Ramirez, apparently believing their own lies that he was just confused and poorly coached last year. You have to wonder what it will take for this organization to realize how to evaluate pitching talent correctly – Horacio Ramirez is a Triple-A arm, and that should be pretty obvious to anyone who watches baseball with even a casual eye. This was obvious last year when the M’s traded for him, and his horrendous year in Seattle didn’t make him any more valuable. That they’re willing to give a replacement level pitcher millions of dollars to try to resurrect some potential he’s never had is just a continuing sign that the Mariners don’t have any better of an idea of what makes a good pitcher now than they did twelve months ago.
And Tejada moves
The Orioles get five players for the declining, expensive, and increasingly immobile shortstop. Wow.
Dave adds: The five players aren’t very good. A couple of back-end starters without much upside, a run of the mill corner OF, and a pair of fringe prospects. Of course, I don’t think much of Tejada either. Both teams still stink, but the Orioles save some money and don’t get demonstrably worse, so I guess they win the trade.
Also, Jeff Kent’s agent on Kent’s return:
“He is actively pursuing his customary and rigorous offseason conditioning and weightlifting program, and is very focused on helping his team win the World Series this year,” Klein wrote. “He asked me to wish all of you and your families a happy holiday season.”
Doing a lot of truck washing, then?
Kuroda to Dodgers? Who knows
Conficting reports this morning on the status of Horoki Kuroda – the Kyodo News says he’s going to sign with the Dodgers, while Geoff Baker says not so fast – we’ll find out shortly either way.
I’ve been ambivalent about Kuroda since the start, and honestly, I’ll feel the same way about this news. Kuroda isn’t particularly impressive to me, but this is a pretty unimpressive crop of available pitchers this winter. If losing out on Kuroda means that we throw $50 million at Kyle Lohse, than this is terrible news. If it means we throw $10 million at Bartolo Colon, then it’s awesome. But we don’t know which way the organization is going to go if they really do lose out on Kuroda, so I find it hard to have an opinion about him potentially going to LA one way or another.
OMG, someone bought an ad
Hey, so for a while I’ve been screwing around with ads — the Project Wonderful easy-bid thing, we did some Google ads randomly — and nothing made any money. So I signed up for blogads, and wow, today there’s an ad for a hair product of some kind. We put up the “buy us a beer” thing for a while (and got about 40 beers total over two trials).
Anyway, the short version is: we’ve been trying to figure out how to make USSM at least somewhat financially less horrible a venture without plastering the site with ticket scalper ads, and this is the the latest in the long tinkering. We’ll see if it hangs around.
Announcing the mods
Hey all — some time ago, we put out an open call for people to help us with the comment moderation, and I wanted to follow up, because I realized it’s been well over a month. We got a great bunch of volunteers, names you’ll likely recognize from their contributions in the comments: Graham MacAree, Jeff Nye, Mike Snow, and Jim Thomsen. As a group, they’re about 4x more qualified to be moderating comments than I am.
So far, it’s been going swimmingly: I don’t ever log in to see 35 comments in the moderation queue, for instance, and no one’s gone insane with power.
I am happy and grateful to them, and to everyone who volunteered to pitch in, for their help in keeping the site manageable as it grows in fits and bursts.
Shameless holiday gift-giving suggestion
May I shamelessly suggest The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball for any and all baseball fans you know?
The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball
M’s Select Knuckler in Rule 5 Draft
The Rule 5 draft was this morning as the wrapup to the winter meetings. Last year, the Mariners grabbed Sean White, and this year, it was R.A. Dickey. Dickey was a former 1st round pick who never made it as a normal pitcher, so he’s taken up the knuckleball as a way to try to have a major league career. He threw 170 innings for Nashville in the PCL last year with typical knuckler results – lots of walks, not many strikeouts, but a lot of groundballs and weak contact, leading to a decent ERA.
Maybe Dickey will get to spring training, be lousy, and the M’s will be out $25,000 when they return him to the Twins. But, I still like this move – having a knuckler in camp fighting for a spot on the pitching staff will be fun, and if the M’s decided to use him in relief, we could see all kinds of hilarity when he comes in to replace Felix Hernandez.
Jose Guillen to get suspended for steroid, HGH purchases
Wow. From ESPN:
The Major League Baseball Players Association is negotiating with MLB officials on a possible 10- to 15-day suspension for outfielder Jose Guillen for his reported involvement in the purchase of steroids and human growth hormone, sources told ESPN The Magazine’s Buster Olney on Wednesday.
If that’s right, you have to wonder how much that affected the Guillen extension talks this year – we know they were all but signed for some time, certainly until the Byrnes contract. Did it play a part in their decision to let Guillen walk?
BTW, I don’t know if this is true:
Seattle declined its $9 million option and Guillen turned down a $5 million player option, receiving a $500,000 buyout.
If I remember, the $9m option was mutual: both the team and Guillen would have had to accept it, and then if the team turned it down, Guillen had an option to extend for one year at $5m, and if he turned that down, he couldn’t get the buyout.
But when I try to look up the details, I’m just finding a lot of conflicting information.
Win Now? Do This.
As I mentioned in this morning’s post, the Mariners are in win now mode – coming off an 88 win season and with jobs still on the line, building for 2009 is not an option. However, as the Tigers, Yankees, Red Sox, and Indians continue to set the bar for just what a legitimate contender looks like, the M’s have some serious ground to cover if they’re going to actually try to win it all next year. Johan Santana wouldn’t have been enough. Erik Bedard won’t be enough. This team needs to make some significant improvements at multiple positions if they’re actually going to make a run for the pennant. (Note – I don’t support this philosophy, but realize that the organization won’t do what I want them to, so at least we can try to help them do the best while pursuing a suboptimal roster building approach).
So, here’s a totally made up series of moves (please don’t call these rumors or email beat writers asking how likely these moves are – they’re fictional creations from Dave Land) that could potentially help the Mariners accomplish their goal of having to be taken at least semi-seriously in the A.L. next year.
1. Trade Adam Jones, Brandon Morrow and Jose Lopez to Baltimore for Erik Bedard and Brian Roberts.
The M’s aren’t going to get Bedard without surrendering Adam Jones, but it doesn’t make any sense to just make that move and not fix the rest of the roster. By going from Lopez to Roberts, the team takes a significant step forward at second base; Roberts is one of those ridiculously underappreciated players in the game, because his contributions (lots of doubles, walks, and good defense) are generally undervalued among talent evaluators. Like Bedard, Roberts is under contract through 2009 at a below market salary, and is just 29 years old. While the team would be trading a lot of future value, they’d be getting two guys in their primes, both under club control for two more years.
If you’re going to trade Adam Jones, this is the kind of package you have to get back.
2. Sign Geoff Jenkins to a multiyear deal.
If Jones is traded, this is almost non-negotiable; the team would have to replace him with a quality defensive outfielder or we’ll just see a repeat of last year’s debacle in the outfield.
3. Sign Bartolo Colon to a one year deal.
We’ve talked about this – it’s a good idea, and if he goes into the season as your #5 starter behind Bedard, Felix, Batista, and Washburn, the downside if he gets hurt is limited (Rowland-Smith and Baek are still around), and the upside is still there for him to move into the upper half of the rotation, removing the team’s need to potentially throw Washburn to the wolves in a playoff series.
Ideally, they’d go beyond even these moves, dealing either Sexson or Vidro and replacing Ibanez with a real outfielder as well, but that might be asking for too much. If they’re going to get serious in a deal for Bedard, however, this is the path they need to commit to going down. Bedard and Kuroda is just not enough to make them real contenders. This team needs more than that.
Adding Roberts and Jenkins to the offense would add two more bats that can swing from the left side and are a good fit for Safeco Field, while also hopefully keeping the defense at least passable, rather than the disaster it was last year.
I’d still rather the team not trade Jones in some far fetched attempt to grasp at glory, but if they’re going to do so, at least we can hope that they’ll do something like this. Don’t settle for just adding a pitcher or two – either get serious, make the team good, or hold your cards.