Adios to One Stiff, Bienvenidos to Another.
According to Geoff Baker, we’ve seen the last of Rene Rivera. Hallellujah.
Jamie Burke has made the team as the backup catcher. We’ll see how long he sticks, but anyone not named Rene Rivera is an upgrade.
Also, Jeremy Reed was optioned to Tacoma. The team apparently feels fine with Broussard as the backup corner outfielder and Bloomquist as the backup center fielder, and there’s a legitimate chance that Hargrove The Great carries 13 pitchers on opening day that frees up room for the (dis)organization to carry Rey Ordonez. No, I’m not kidding.
110 million dollar payroll, and the best these clowns can do is Rey Ordonez, Jamie Burke, and rushing Brandon Morrow to the show.
Fire them all. Antonetti in ’08.
Putz to be ready for opening day, plus drugs and gambling
Times notebook says Putz will be ready for the start of the season.
The PI has a whole article on lottery tickets with the M’s logo.
The new ticket, which costs $5, has more than $1.4 million in $25 and $50 prizes and a top prize of $50,000. The game also has a feature for non-winning tickets. They can be entered to win several prizes, including Mariners paraphernalia, a trip for two to spring training next year or a pair of 2008 lower-box season tickets.
You can’t, however, bet on sports in this state (though the PI relates this season’s odds and provides a handy pointer to bodog). Or play poker online. Or… but I digress.
Proceeds from the lottery go “largely toward construction projects for the state’s K-12 schools” where they’re not doing a good enough job educating kids that they stop playing the lottery.
Baker makes a huge leap while trying to make a point about the evils of major league steroid use, going from minor leaguer Chris Minaker’s sociology paper on what influences college players to use supplements (teammates and coaches, who tout performance gain) to Minaker’s acknowledgement that
“The supplement culture has become completely intertwined with the culture of collegiate sports, just as it had before with professional sports. There has been a trickle-down effect from professional sports right on down to the ranks of all athletic levels.”
to Baker’s assertion that
The last thing Major League Baseball wants is a minor-leaguer writing that college-level players are, at best, being influenced by their perceptions about big-leaguers or, at worst, copying them
Except that there’s really no Minaker evidence that either of those are true – they’re being influenced by their peers and coaches. As a whole, he argues collegiate sports are influenced by weight lifting and supplement use, which took off for baseball in the late 1980s. There’s no assertion here that players are being influenced by their perceptions about big-leaguers, much less copying them in the way implied here (“Player X is on steroids, I should too!”)
Todd Walker
Today, the Padres announced that they were going to release veteran second baseman Todd Walker, paying him just under $1 million in termination pay, rather than keeping him on the roster for the full season and paying him $4 million to be Marcus Giles’ backup. Because his salary was determined through arbitration, it wasn’t fully guaranteed, and the Padres decided they’d rather pay Walker $1 million to not play for them than $4 million to be part of their bench.
Just for fun, let’s play the comparison game. Here are the 2006 numbers for Walker and another bad defensive second baseman who you may have heard of.
Walker: .278/.356/.398, 442 AB, 9 HR, 55 BB, 38 K, 62 Runs Created
Vidro: .289/.348/.395, 463 AB, 7 HR, 41 BB, 48 K, 63 Runs Created
It’d be hard to find two more similar players. Both aging, injury prone former middle infielders who belong at DH defensively, lack power, but control the strike zone well.
The Mariners valued this skillset so highly that… oh, you know what they did. The Padres looked at this skillset and decided that they’d rather pay it to go away.
Well done, fellas. Way to gauge the market.
My Last Morrow Post For A While
I don’t want to beat this subject to death, and I don’t want to come across as some kind of anti-Morrow crusader who will tear my hair out if he makes the team. Jeff Sullivan does a great job laying out the case for why it could work, and I agree with about 90% of what he wrote in that post. But I want to point out one comment he made in the comment section over there that is worth noting:
And yet, that’s precisely why it’s also so rooted in faith. Observation is subjective. So are interpretation and extrapolation. We have to trust the Mariners that they know exactly how good Morrow is and how much they can push him, and I think that’s the heart of the main disagreement. In theory, the organization should be more qualified to make this decision than any of us, but we’ve seen them screw up enough times in the past that the trust is on thin ice, if not already submerged in water. It’s a big leap, and precisely why I think external sources might offer the best opinions on this. I can’t do it, because my window is blurred.
Jeff’s absolutely right here. The best advice on this kind of decision is going to come from credible external sources. I think we have several.
Cleveland Indians optioned Adam Miller to Triple-A.
SF Giants optioned Tim Lincecum to Triple-A.
Detroit Tigers optioned Andrew Miller to Triple-A.
New York Yankees optioned Philip Hughes to Triple-A.
Cincinnati Reds optioned Homer Bailey to Triple-A.
Kansas City Royals optioned Luke Hochevar to Triple-A.
I’m going to focus on the Adam Miller transaction, because Adam Miller is essentially what we hope and pray that Morrow becomes. Their repertoires are similar, though Miller’s stuff is a notch above. Miller dominated spring training even more than Morrow did, tossing 14 shutout innings and allowing 11 baserunners. The Indians are legitimate contenders. Their bullpen is a giant jumble of question marks, and they lost starting pitcher Cliff Lee to an injury that will sideline him for the first month of the season.
Here’s a few quotes from an article about Miller the other day.
“He’s a man,” pitching coach Carl Willis said. “You watch the way he walks around this clubhouse, and he’s very respectful, but he has a presence about him. Even on the mound, he has that presence.”
“I don’t think anyone is surprised at what he’s come in and done this spring,” manager Eric Wedge said.
“We’ve never felt like Adam was a year away,” general manager Mark Shapiro said. “We’ve always felt that he could impact our team sometime this year. We felt he had the level of talent that, whenever that time came, it would be evident. When he puts everything together, he can dominate the competition.”
They’re saying the same things about him that the Mariners are about Brandon Morrow. And still, the Indians never once considered carrying Miller on opening day.
It’s the exact same situation, except the Indians have even more reasons for carrying Miller than the M’s do for carrying Morrow. And yet, Shapiro and Antonetti never even flinched in their resolve to do what was best for Adam Miller’s development.
Two organizations making the same decision. If someone asked you which front office was more likely to be making the right decision, and your choices were Seattle and Cleveland, would you really take the Mariners in that fight?
Not me.
Mike Hargrove is Delusional
The Brandon Morrow issue continues to be the only noteworthy thing around. Today, John McGrath weighs in with some quotes from Bavasi and Hargrove.
“Originally, we were sending him down to the minors (to) start him,†general manager Bill Bavasi said. “If he makes the club in relief, it alters how you develop him as a starter.
“Now, we may have to look at something in the offseason – sending him to a half-season of winter ball, perhaps, and have him re-establish a third or fourth pitch there. But that would depend on how many innings he gets between spring training and the regular season.â€
Good News – Bavasi isn’t yet pigeonholing Morrow as a reliever, talking about coming up with a plan to still attempt to develop him as a starter in other ways. Of course, the M’s paid this same lip service to Rafael Soriano as well, so it’s good news with a caveat.
When Hargrove considers the debate about assigning Morrow a big-league roster spot, he recalls the soul-searching once invested over a flaky Cleveland Indians prospect he wanted on his big-league team in 1994.
“Manny Ramirez,†Hargrove said. “He turned out OK. People called me an idiot then, too.â€
Manny Ramirez’s minor league career before being called up to the Indians:
1991 – Burlington (rookie): .326/.426/.679 in 215 at-bats as a 19-year-old
1992 – Kinston (high-A): .278/.379/.502 in 291 at-bats as a 20-year-old
1993 – Akron (double-A): .340/.414/.581 in 344 at-bats as a 21-year-old
1993 – Charlotte (triple-a): .317/.424/.690 in 145 at-bats as a 21-year-old
After his rookie league debut, he was named the #37 prospect in baseball. After dominating high-A ball, he moved up to #13. After destroying Double-A and Triple-A, Baseball America tabbed him as the seventh best prospect in baseball, one spot behind Alex Rodriguez.
By the time Hargrove plucked Ramirez out of the minors, he was well known to every person in the game as an elite talent and had dominated every level of minor league baseball over a three year span.
Yea, that’s the same thing we’re doing with Morrow.
Head versus heart. Caution versus impulse.
It wasn’t supposed to be this complicated.
It’s not. Every other organization in baseball has already farmed out their big armed elite pitching prospect to help get them more development time and allow them to make the show when they’re ready. Only the Mariners are so swayed by 8 innings of exhibition work that they’d overhaul their development plan at the whim of a manager whose usefulness has long since expired.
Red hot televised spring training action!
Seattle @ Texas! Whee! 6:05!
Momentum, problems, superstition
Hickey tells us the M’s master plan for this spring:
“We wanted to get to the final week of the (spring), win every game that week and go into the season with some momentum,” bench coach John McLaren said. “We’re in position to do that.”
In talking about errors in yesterday’s win, Hargrove said
“We made some mistakes that we wouldn’t make if we did it 100 more times,” Hargrove said.
Say, like hiring Mike Hargrove to manage the team after Melvin got the axe.
Baker on M’s superstitions.
With Amazon and B&N shipping last Friday, some of you should be getting The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball today. May it make you happy. In the meantime, you can always enjoy the blog, where yesterday was the Kent Hrbek/Ron Gant 1991 World Series incident.
Rotation roundup, Sherrill’s struggles, Majors for Morrow?, Ichiro: “Icky!”
AP story: M’s announce starting rotation. King Felix, Washburn, Batista, Ramirez, Weaver the Lesser. Is Jeff Weaver, at $8+M, the most expensive fifth starter in baseball? Hmm. Hargrove did say that given Weaver’s veteran-ness, they won’t be skipping the fifth starter even when given the opportunity by the schedule.
I can’t decide if this headline is amusing, or sad. “Sherrill lowers ERA to 15.00.” Ouch. I’m sure he’s got this one pinned up in his locker.
Also, Mark Lowe begins throwing this week (multiple sources).
As for young Brandon Morrow…
PEORIA, Ariz. – Final roster decisions won’t be made until next weekend, but one thing has become a near certainty for the Seattle Mariners.
Rookie pitcher Brandon Morrow, a spring training invitee who has just eight games of professional experience, has all but made the team.
“I don’t have a whole lot of problem with it,” manager Mike Hargrove said Saturday. “There’s been a lot of discussion but if he continues to throw the way he’s throwing, I know what my recommendation is going to be.”
Finally, from the Arizona Republic:
Ichiro laid down a perfect drag bunt that started a winning ninth-inning rally against the Oakland Athletics. During the postgame celebration, Piniella, his manager – arguably most exuberant and extroverted manager in baseball since Billy Martin – rushed up with a bear hug and a big ol’ smooch on the cheek.
Ichiro didn’t say much at the time but later told a Japanese TV crew: “It’s something that makes most Japanese men want to throw up.”
Uh huh.
Felix first, Guillen’s grudge
Felix will be the Opening Day starter. Hickey considers historical precedent and gets Felix’s reaction:
Since 1970, the only other Opening Day starting pitchers who were younger than 21 were Fernando Valenzuela (Dodgers, 1981) and Dwight Gooden (Mets, 1985).
“I never saw either of those guys pitch,” Hernandez said Friday, about an hour after manager Mike Hargrove named him to start the opener. “I don’t read much baseball history. But I’ve heard both of those guys were pretty good.”
That cracked me up.
And Felix offers this on being the starter:
“You are like a leader of the pitchers,” Hernandez said. “I want to be a leader for my team. This is one of the greatest things in my life.”
Baker’s got the same story for the Times.
Jose Guillen doesn’t like Mike Scioscia.
Greg Johns on Tui’s struggles.
But the Tuiasosopo name comes with more than just extra vowels. Things like leadership, work ethic and a stubborn pride have the youngest of Manu Tuiasosopo’s sons champing at the bit to get things turned back around this season.
Includes a rare Greg Hunter quote.
After a strong performance that may not be in his long term interests, Morrow is stunned to find Hargrove serenading him with “You Shook Me All Spring Long” in an attempt to woo him to break camp with the club.
Cheater’s Guide now shipping and buyable
I’m as surprised as anyone, but Amazon’s now shipping the Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, and so is Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, and all kinds of good places.
Remember, your purchase indirectly supports USSM.
The next really simple thing you can do for the book is review it. If you loved it, liked it, didn’t like it, when you’re done, throw something up on Amazon or B&N. Reviews are good.
And if you liked it, please, go ahead and tell people. Bug them to buy it. Buy it for them. And if they need a signed copy, let me know, and we’ll work something out.
If you’ve got other ideas on how I can sell more of these things, please let me know. Or comment. Whatever. It’s my first solo book, I’m inexperienced and eager.