Draft Signing Day
A bunch of you have been asking in the comments about Philippe Aumont lately, but I’ve held off talking about it until today to avoid making any misleading statements. Since today is the deadline to sign picks from June’s amateur draft, we’ll cover a bunch of topics all at once.
Aumont’s deal is basically done. They’ll put ink to paper later this afternoon, but there was never a real concern that he wasn’t going to sign. Expect the signing bonus to come in around $1.8 million.
Why did it take so long? Well, thanks to an initiative by the commissioner’s office to hold the line on labor costs, the process that teams go through to sign their draft picks has become quite political. MLB sends every team a “recommended” signing bonus for each pick in the first 5 rounds with each selection being worth marginally less than the one previous. They’ve been using this recommended slotting procedure for several years now, but they’re getting more aggressive – this year, they slashed 10% off of last year’s slot bonus recommendations.
Now, thanks to the collective bargainining agreement, the commissioner’s office does not have the power to mandate these bonus recommendations. In the end, the team makes the decision on how much they’re willing to pay. However, MLB has instituted a procedural chain of events that leverages the influence they do have. Before a team can sign a player to a contract for higher than the recommended slot bonus, they must inform the commissioner’s office. If they don’t, they’re subject to a fine. Once the commissioner becomes aware that the player development staff is on the verge of breaking from the recommendation, he places a call to that club’s owner, who in most cases, he’s very close with and has a lot of power over. He leans on the owner, who then in turn leans on the front office, in an effort to convince them to hold the line on the bonus figures.
For most teams, this works. Selig has a lot of allies in ownership groups, and as we saw last year with the Miller/Morrow decision, many clubs will simply decide that it’s not worth it to fight the commissioner for guys who make it known ahead of time that they expect a contract out of line with MLB’s recommended bonus. The Mariners are one of these teams. The ownership is Selig friendly, and they’re not going to significantly deviate from the bonus suggestions with their top picks.
Detroit, New York, and Boston, however, could legitimately not care less about the slotting system. They’re exploiting its flaws to their own gain on a yearly basis. The last four years, the Tigers have selected Justin Verlander, Cameron Maybin, Andrew Miller, and Rick Porcello – all elite prospects who required significant signing bonuses. Only Verlander didn’t require an above slot deal, but since he went #2 overall, he still cost an arm and a leg. Maybin, Miller, and Porcello all fell to the Tigers in large part due to their contract requirements. Detroit, recognizing a chance to add premium talent on a yearly basis, continues to lay out the money necessary to get these kids signed, and it’s been a massive success – Miller and Verlander are both in their rotation, Maybin is a top 5 prospect in baseball, and Porcello’s drawn comparisons to Josh Beckett.
Likewise, the Yankees and Red Sox have also loaded up on guys who fall in the draft due to their bonus demands, using their significant revenue advantage to simply outspend every other team with their draft budget. The other 27 teams are essentially ceding a competitive advantage to the three teams who don’t particularly care about the recommended slot bonuses. It will be interesting to see how many years they’ll be willing to let the rich get richer before realizing that giving these clubs the pick of the litter every year is probably not the best way to run a franchise.
Anyway, that’s a little bit of a diversion from the Aumont issue, but here’s how it applies to the M’s – they’re going to give Aumont a little bit more than the recommended slot, and they’ve known this for a while. However, the commissioner’s office essentially requested that teams that were going to go over slot to sign someone hold off until the last possible minute so that other clubs couldn’t use that signing as leverage in negotiations. As such, there are a ton of deals that will be announced today that have essentially been done for quite a while. The M’s aren’t lying when they say they don’t have a deal with Philippe Aumont just yet – there is no signed contract. But if you take away the commissioner’s offices role in the contract negotiations, this would have been done months ago. There was never any real risk that the Mariners weren’t going to sign him – the delay is just part of the political process teams have to go through to stay on the commissioner’s good side now.
Also, in slightly related news, Monday saw the reassignment of Frank Mattox from director of player development to an undefined role in the scouting department. Mattox, you’ll remember, was the Mariners scouting director before Bob Fontaine’s arrival (rescue?) and he oversaw some of the worst drafts in the history of major league baseball. Greg Hunter will take the director of player development role at least on an interim basis, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if he ended up with the gig full time.
David Wells
At some point, even the most stubborn Horacio Ramirez supporter has to admit that he’s not a major league pitcher. The question has long since ceased to be whether the team should stick with him. The more appropriate question is who should replace him in the rotation.
David Wells is still free. Give it a try.
Game 117, Twins at Mariners
Garza v Ramirez. 7:05.
You want the lineup? Why, you already know what’s coming:
CF-L Ichiro
DH-B Vidro
RF-R Guillen
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
2B-R Lopez
SS-R Betancourt
BLEEAAAAHGHHGHGHGGGGGG
That’s how you stop getting booed
Richie Sexson absolutely crushed two pitches tonight. In every other park in baseball, it’s a two homer night. Either way, he gets to wear the hero’s cape for the evening, after donning the goat horns way too many times this summer. Big win for the M’s – any time you can knock off Johan Santana, you have to take it.
Game 116, Twins at Mariners
Hernandez vs Santana, 7:05 pm.
Happy Super Awesome First In A Lifetime Great Venezuelan Pitching Matchup Day.
Felix vs Johan. The current Venezuelan ace against the future Venezuelan ace. The best pitcher alive against the guy with the best arm on the planet. This should be epic.
As such, I refuse to acknowledge the defense John McLaren has put behind Felix. It’s some kind of August 13th joke, and we’ll find out the real line-up just before gametime. No one’s stupid enough to bench Beltre and Lopez against a left-hander with the most dominant groundball guy on the staff pitching, right? Right?
Whatever. Go Felix.
Jeff Weaver, Junkballer
After yesterday’s performance, Jeff Weaver now leads the American League in complete game shutouts. I bet you could have gotten 1,000-to-1 on that being true back in May. To close out a successful 5-1 road trip, Weaver threw his best game of the year, dominating the White Sox in a way that makes you ask how it happened. Weaver’s been a lot better since his return in early June, but he hasn’t had any starts like this. What made the difference yesterday?
To try and answer this, I dove into the Pitch F/X system to look at the velocity and movement of his pitches yesterday in handy sortable form. There are some pretty noticable trends that jump off the page.
Breaking Ball, thy friend is Weaver.
Thanks to Weaver’s repertoire, categorizing his pitches is extremely easy. Unlike Felix, who has an assortment of pitches that travel in varying velocities anywhere from 78-99, there’s a significant velocity difference between Weaver’s pitches. He threw 51 pitches with a velocity between 87.0-92.6 MPH, but his 52nd fastest pitch was 83.6 MPH. He didn’t threw any pitch between 84-87, making the distinction between fastball and offspeed pitch very easy to recognize.
On the day, not counting the two HBPs that the Pitch F/X system didn’t register, Weaver threw 51 fastballs and 62 off-speed pitches. The slow stuff was an assortment of mostly sliders and curve balls with a few change-ups mixed in, but he clearly decided to attack the White Sox with breaking balls.
This became even more dramatic as the game wore on. Of his final 30 pitches, 25 of them were offspeed pitches. That’s 16% fastballs and 84% offspeed stuff. On the day, of the 113 pitches the Pitch F/X system recorded, only 22 of them were 90+, but 36 of them were 79 or slower.
The best pitch is strike one.
Here’s how Weaver started each hitter he faced:
Owens, fastball, called strike
Fields, fastball, called strike
Thome, curveball, swinging strike
Konerko, fastball, ball
Pierzynski, curveball, ball
Dye, fastball, called strike
Podsednik, fastball, foul
Uribe, fastball, called strike
Cintron, curveball, ball
Owens, fastball, called strike
Fields, fastball, called strike
Thome, curveball, called strike
Konerko, fastball, called strike
Pierzynski, curveball, called strike
Dye, fastball, ball
Podsednik, hit by pitch (no data)
Uribe, fastball, swinging strike
Cintron, slider, double play
Owens, curveball, called strike
Fields, slider, swinging strike
Thome, slider, ball
Konerko, curveball, called strike
Pierzynski, fastball, called strike
Dye, slider, called strike
Podsednik, curveball, ball
Uribe, fastball, called strike
Cintron, curveball, called strike
Owens, fastball, groundout
Fields, slider, pop out
Thome, curveball, called strike
Konerko, fastball, called strike
Pierzynski, curveball, called strike
Dye, fastball, called strike
The White Sox were content to go up to the plate staring at Weaver’s first offering, only swinging six times. 19 times, they stared at strike one. He only went to six 1-0 counts the whole game. When you’re working 0-1 on almost every single batter, you’re at a huge advantage.
Don’t throw anything straight.
Even when Weaver threw a fastball, it was moving. Without getting too deep into the complexities of how the Pitch F/X system calculates movement (essentially, it takes the movement minus the expected break of a hypothetic pitch with no spin), you can look at the PFX value and see that he only threw one pitch that could be defined as arrow straight, and it was out of the strikezone. When he put it in a hitters zone, it was diving all over the place.
Essentially, yesterday, Weaver pulled a Moyer. He commanded everything with movement, threw strikes, mixed his pitches, and attacked the hitters with offspeed stuff.
It worked to perfection, obviously. The White Sox aren’t a good offense, but as we saw, that ballpark is a total joke in the summer, and even ordinary flyballs can get out of there once they get up in the air. Weaver avoided pitching to contact and took advantage of Chicago’s take-then-hack philosophy, peppering them with pitches they weren’t expecting nor could they do anything with.
We probably won’t see a better pitched game by a Mariner all year long. The August 12th version of Jeff Weaver is a testament to just how successful you can be with command and movement. Let’s hope Felix was taking notes.
Game 115, Mariners at White Sox
Weaver vs Danks, 11:05 am.
Jones starts. Yay.
Game 114, Mariners at White Sox
4:05. Batista vs Floyd.
Check out that M’s lineup. Wooo-wheeee, that is nice. Good work there, McLaren, don’t strain yourself thinking too hard or anything.
True Tale of Moderation Glory
New user posts for the first time. It’s two paragraphs, one of which is a series of disconnected thoughts on the site and whatever, and the second is “my thoughts on the M’s are: Blowers is… Bloomquist is…” the whole thing badly written, with a ton of spelling errors, weird capitalization, punctuation, whatever.
Gets tossed into the mod queue, right, like all first-time comments in the new world.
Second comment:
“THANKS FOR MODERATING MY FIRST POST! FUCK YOU DMZ!!!”
Which is nice to see when I’m checking in on the site remotely.
So yeah, thanks for stopping by.
New Comment Policy Experiment
Okay, so, we’re going to try an experiment. As of now, everyone who has not added a comment to the site before will have their posts added directly to the moderation queue. They will have to be approved by an author before they become readable on the site. This will act as a de-facto trial period for new commenters.
To get your comment approved, you should focus on adding something substantive to the discussion and showing some degree of understanding of what has already been discussed. Think of your first comment as an audition.
To those who have been commented in the past, this change won’t affect you.