Everett’s 2007 option
Since this comes up in nearly every thread, I thought I’d attempt to answer it clearly, on the front page.
We believe that Carl Everett’s option for next year vests at about 450 plate appearances. That’s been where the M’s have set the playing-time bar for other contracts, and from what we know about the contract, it fits. He has ~320 right now, and if he continues to DH even against righties only, he’ll vest.
The option year, if triggered, is another year for the same amount of money, or about $3.4m. The club has to buy it out if he doesn’t reach the playing time quota, or they could decide to pick the option up for next year anyway.
There you go.
Game 95, Mariners at Yankees
10:05 AM here, and no TV (long rant about MLB’s stupidity w/r/t broadcast rights here). As a result, I’ll probably end up watching to see if Zach Duke can continue his resurgence, if Zito can whup the Orioles, or… well, probably not the Nationals-Marlins game.
Meche v Raaaaaaaaaaandy Johnson. Yup.
Interestingly, Jones stays in the lineup:
RF-L Ichiro
3B-R Beltre
2B-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
DH-R Perez (!)
SS-R Betancourt
C-R Rivera
CF-R Jones
Tonight’s Yankees lineup only has four guys who suck: their 6-9 hitters are Phillips/Cabrera/Guiel/Green.
Game 94, Mariners at Yankees
If I had to pick today’s games most unlikely to turn into a duel beteween pitchers, this would be it.
RHP Joel Pineiro v RHP Sidney Ponson.
Yeaaaaaaaaaagh.
On the other hand, we get an only mildly infuriating lineup:
RF-L Ichiro!
3B-R Beltre
2B-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
DH-B Everett
C-R Johjima
SS-R Betancourt
CF-R Jones
The Yankees oblige us by playing Miguel Cairo, who sucks, Bernie Williams, who isn’t good anymore, Phillips, who sucks, Cabrera, who sucks, Nick Green, who sucks, and Kelly Stinnett, who sucks.
Bad pitching versus bad hitting: who will triumph?
Tying up loose ends
A whole bunch of questions flooding the inbox, so it’s time for a notes post.
1. Trading for Alfonso Soriano would be a lousy, lousy idea. Yes, he’s having a good season in Washington, but it is the National League (and while the difference is probably overstated, the AL is significantly better this year, and that has to be acounted for), and Soriano is exactly the type of hitter that Safeco is harshest on. An optimistic expected performance from Soriano for the last two months of ’06 would be something like .280/.330/.500, and he could easily come in under that. Meanwhile, the optimistic expected performance of Chris Snelling would probably be in the .300/.360/.450 range, which is almost equal in value. Plus, Snelling is free, both in terms of salary and in terms of players needed to acquire him.
The M’s don’t need to trade for an LF/DH. They just need to use the ones already in Tacoma.
2. A few weeks ago, I noted the team had a glaring need for another strikeout pitcher in the pen to give Hargrove another option in the middle innings to use in situations where baserunners needed to be stranded. Since the end of the bullpen was made up of contact pitchers with mediocre control, the team had a significant weakness and really needed another reliever.
Enter Mark Lowe. 20 batters faced, 85 pitches, 57 strikes, 6 strikeouts, 6 groundballs. He put the first three batters he faced as a major league pitcher on board, and has since retired 14 of the last 17. He looked fantastic last night, going right after Rodriguez and Posada and getting out of a big jam. Despite his inexperience, he’s easily shown enough to be given that fourth reliever role, coming in to bail starters out of tough situations and getting strikeouts when needed.
Lowe’s a perfect example of why this new “the cost of good relievers is skyrocketing!” theory is nonsense. Relief pitching is the easiest job in baseball, and there are literally good arms in every minor league system who could come up and do the job well right now. You’d think organizations would learn when year after year, the leaderboard of elite relievers is cluttered with names their mothers wouldn’t have recognized before the season started.
The Mariners bullpen is a great example of this – J.J. Putz was a fringe prospect who is now an all-star caliber closer, George Sherrill was signed out of the independent leagues and is about as tough on lefties as anyone alive, and now the M’s look to have struck gold with Mark Lowe, who was a 5th round draft pick two years ago and had an unimpressive minor league resume coming into the year. Only Rafael Soriano was considered any kind of special talent.
Building a bullpen isn’t hard, just because Buster Olney tells you it is. And that is also why, during the offseason, the M’s need to give Mark Lowe another run as a starter. He has three pitches that he’s commanding right now, and while a move back to the rotation will cost him a little bit of velocity, he has some to give. It’s worth finding out if he could be effective for 7 innings sitting at 90-93 instead of one inning at 94-96. I’m fine leaving Lowe in the bullpen for the rest of the year while he adjusts to life in the major leagues, but he should enter Spring Training of 2007 in the hunt for a spot in the rotation.
3. Carl Everett is 19 for 106 since the calendar struck June, a .179 batting average, and we all know he doesn’t walk or hit for power. His continued presence in the line-up is a complete and utter joke, and a massive black stain on the organization. There’s literally no defense for not removing him from the job. The M’s are essentially going to war with an automatic out in the easiest position to field a hitter in baseball. Just ridiculous.
4. Willie Bloomquist has a .227 EqA, the worst of his already unimpressive career. He has four extra base hits all season. And this is the guy Mike Hargrove thinks we need to get into the line-up two to three days a week.
5. Thanks to the recent skid of 9 losses in the last 11 games, the Mariners chances of making the playoffs have taken a pretty significant beating. BP’s Playoff Odds Report has them at 5%, while coolstandings.com pegs them at 8%. I’d say they’re still a little bit higher than both of those, probably closer to 15-20%, but they aren’t great. While we still don’t have to make the buyers or sellers decision right now, we’re probably leaning towards sellers at this point.
6. How much is this starting pitcher worth to you on the open market?
28 years old, RHP, made the all-star team this year, averaged 200 IP for the last 5 years, posted ERA+ of 115 and 127 in the past two years, while posting a strikeout rate 20% better than league average, a home run rate 12% better than league average, and a walk rate 10% worse than league average. He’s got inconsistently good stuff but doesn’t always have command of it, but has managed to post low ERA’s and ranked 2nd and 3rd in the league in strikeouts the past two years. He also led the league in shutouts the past two seasons, though he has pitched in a pretty extreme pitcher’s park.
Sound like exactly the kind of pitcher everyone is hoping that Gil Meche has turned into, right? Meche’s rates this year are actually a bit worse (his K/9 is 16% better than average, walk rate is 18% worse than average, and his HR/9 is 6% worse than league average), but the profile is basically the same.
So, how much do you think that durable Gil Meche clone is worth, the one with an all-star team under his belt and 5 years of pretty consistent performance missing bats and living with the command issues? And are you worried that the performances have come in a pitcher’s park?
No? Neither were the Texas Rangers, when they signed that pitcher, Chan Ho Park, to a 5 year, $65 million dollar contract after the 2001 season.
Forget Jason Schmidt or Chris Carpenter – Chan Ho Park circa 2001 is almost an exact clone of what people are hoping Gil Meche has become. And they wonder why I’m against a contract extension…
Look back at 2006’s free agent pitching buffet
To harken back to Jeff’s post of similar title, I thought it’d be cool to look at how the 2006 signings are doing, looking at the deals they got and how they perform. I’m going to lean on xFIP (glossary!) here, because it amused me. In alphabetical order:
A.J. Burnett 5 years/$55M (2006-10)
The crown jewel of this off-season. Signed with the Blue Jays. He’s had injury issues and the team’s been cautious in pushing him back, looking at to the remaining four years on his deal. He’s barely over forty innings on the year, and while the ERA’s not so hot, the 41:8 K:BB ratio’s nice. While his ERA’s 4.25, his xFIP is but 3.29.
Kevin Millwood 5 years/$60M
Millwood was probably the general second choice of fans, including us. So far this year he’s thrown a lot more innings than Burnett, and he’s been reasonably good: in 116 innings, he’s struck out 78 and walked 25, and Texas doesn’t seem to be bothering him too much. His xFIP is 4.14, and that’s not that much better than the average is good, since xFIP isn’t park-adjusted, as Dave notes in the comments.
So those were the two big guys on the market, and neither of them have been worth the money. Burnett may yet turn in a performance through the rest of his contract to make it worthwhile, but Millwood’s a little less likely to pull that off, since he’ll be in his late 30s at the tail end of his deal.
The rest:
Esteban Loaiza 3 years/$21.375M (2006-08)
Ugh. This looked like he’d gone a little higher than market (Dave’s offseason plan had the M’s taking him for 3/$18m, for instance) but then the market for pitchers went insane, and suddenly it looked like the A’s had looked forward into the market and picked off a relative bargain.
Except Loaiza has sucked. He’s gotten into off-the-field trouble, and when he’s been on the mound for all of sixty innings, he’s been bad. 29 K, 27 walks is ugly, and that home run rate isn’t helping. His xFIP’s a whopping 5.75, and after a half-season, it looks like this deal is going to join a collection of weird, expensive deals Beane’s made that didn’t work out. It’s still a tribute to the A’s ability to construct a team that they’re able to do as well as they have when they’re fielding a team on a $60m payroll and $11m goes to Kendall and $6m goes to Loaiza right off the bat.
Loaiza’s had a weird career, and I’m not going to pretend I have any idea of how to explain it coherently. Maybe he’s done, and maybe he’s not — it’s certainly been thought before. But he has been flat horrible so far.
Matt Morris 3 years/$27M (2006-08)
Oh yeah, this guy. 72/39 K/BB ratio, 121 innings pitched, xFIP’s 4.83. At least they’re getting innings out of him, even if they’re not that great of innings.
Kenny Rogers 2 years/$16M (2006-07)
With his declining peripheral stats and age, I’d have stayed away from Rogers unless he came with a 50% discount tag or something ridiculous. But he’s been even better thais year than in the last few – he’s getting strikeouts, he’s not walking guys, and it adds up to an xFIP of 4.50. Same deal as the other guys: that’s too much money for what they’re producing.
Jarrod Washburn 4 years/$37.5M
Ah, the local boy. Not doing so well. He’s the pitcher he appeared to be in past seasons if you were paying attention, and not the superficially awesome pitcher some people saw. His K rate’s the same, more or less, his walk rate’s the same, the home runs, pretty much the whole package. As a result, his xFIP is only a little higher than what it’s been the last few seasons, while his ERA has skyrocketed from last year’s deceptive 3.20 to 4.58, which is only a hair better than 2003, and from there… yeah. Top-of-the-rotation money for mid-rotation fodder.
Jeff Weaver 1 year/$8.325M
You may expect that I’m going to hold my nose while I write about how stinky a deal this was. The problem is that in every serious way you want to measure it, Jeff Weaver has performed better than Jarrod Washburn, and that earned Weaver a trade off the team and the Angels ate a huge amount of his deal.
Meanwhile, the Mariners are happily cutting Washburn checks. Eeeeeeeeeeyup.
Halfway through the first season is too early to make final determinations, of course. They could yet get injured, or become stars, or whatever. But it certainly seems that in an irrational market, it doesn’t pay to participate.
My own opinion, ill-developed, is that pitchers are a lot like first baseman: it’s extremely hard to get your money’s worth in a free-agent contract. There will be cases where a pitcher is clearly worth the money if they’re healthy (Roger Clemens’ free agent deals, for example), and that might be as close to value as you get. In terms of making the least-worst deal in free agency, you’re much better off signing Carlos Beltran, say, over AJ Burnett.
Game 93, Mariners at Yankees
Washburn v Wang.
Today’s amazing Hargrove lineup:
RF-L Ichiro!
2B-R Willy “The Ignitor” Bloooooooomquissssst
3B-R Beltre
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
DH-B Everett
C-R Johjima
SS-R Betancourt
CF-R Jones
That’s… Hargrove-iffic. So the bench for tonight is
3B/1B-R Dobbs
C-R Rivera
2B-R Lopez
DH/1B/?-R Perez
Brutal
In the past two days, the Mariner bullpen pitched 11 innings, almost all of which were extremly high leverage situations where failure would equal an immediate loss. The distribution of those innings, thanks to the amazing Mike Hargrove:
Julio Mateo, 2 2/3 IP
Emiliano Fruto, 2 2/3 IP
Mark Lowe, 2 1/3 IP
George Sherrill, 1 1/3 IP
Rafael Soriano, 1 IP
Jake Woods, 1 IP
J.J. Putz, 0 IP
The Mariners can talk about his leadership, his experience, his motivational skills, whatever they want. However, this series was bullpen mismanagement of catastrophic levels.
Seriously, just an absolutely awful piece of managing by Mike Hargrove. Major League franchises don’t penalize their managers for poor in game strategy, but when a guy lacks basic understanding of fundamental principles, he simply can’t be allowed to continue to perform them.
Mike Hargrove is the in-game strategist equivalent of General Custer. I, for one, can’t wait for the last stand.
Game 92, Mariners at Blue Jays
Felix vs Burnett. This could be a lot of fun.
And here’s a fun note; Shin-Soo Choo was optioned back to Tacoma after going 1 for 11 in four games, and Mike Hargrove noted the other day that they were trying to get his bat into the line-up, but it just didn’t work out because his defense in center is just poor. And he’s right, Choo’s defense in center is poor.
Of course, going 1 for 11 happens quite frequently, and is almost never cause for demotion. In fact, here’s a list of the times Carl Everett has gone 1 for 11 (or worse) this season:
4/7 – 4/12, 0-17
5/25 – 5/29, 1-14
6/2 – 6/6, 1-16
6/22 – 7/2, 1-11
7/3 – 7/7, 1-11
In fact, after last night’s 1 for 6, Everett is now 17 for his last 97. Since the beginning of June, he’s hitting .175/.231/.288.
Shin-Soo Choo was deemed unworthy to play for Mike Hargrove’s team because he went 1 for 11 and can’t play center field. Carl Everett, however, is allowed to hit .175 for 6 weeks, not be able to play any position on the diamond, and not even worry about getting moved down in the order, much less lose his roster spot.
I know we mention this a lot, but it’s mind-numbing that a team that is in contention for a playoff spot is willing to live with a DH who hits like a pitcher, while staring at several internal options who, it cannot be argued, are better hitters right now, and have the bonus appeal of adding some value on defense and on the bases. Regardless of what you may think about the reliability of minor league data in predicting major league performance, it’s an incontravertible fact that Shin-Soo Choo and Chris Snelling are better major league hitters, right now, than Carl Everett is.
Thanks to the rest of the AL West, the M’s are in the playoff hunt. And for the last 6 weeks, they’ve been sporting a DH who is hitting like a slumping Rey Ordonez. That’s just remarkable, and is a massive black mark against the people who control the roster and the line-up.
Uhh, sorry
So, this is what happens when all the authors decide to have lives – we miss a game thread. Sorry about that. If it makes you feel any better, though, Derek just biked about 2,431 miles (hey, I said about), Jason has been prepping some of the best food in Seattle, I’m in the process of painting my living room, and Jeff’s working on his book (not a novel, a good story) about the poetic stylings of Japanese professional wrestlers (he’s not – I actually don’t know what he’s doing, but he could, I’m sure).
So, yea, sorry.
Oh, and here’s an interesting tidbit. Take a look at these home-road splits for Mariner hitters who have played at least semi-regularly this year.
Ichiro – home: .360/.410/.475, road: .326/.385/.414
Beltre – home: .225/.284/.324, road: .290/.358/.475
Lopez – home: .250/.303/.389, road: .314/.333/.520
Ibanez – home: .301/.375/.557, road: .262/.325/.506
Sexson – home: .198/.267/.395, road: .242/.315/.441
Everett – home: .225/.314/.384, road: .240/.297/.352
Johjima – home: .231/.311/.351, road: .338/.362/.556
Betancourt – home: .303/.329/.375, road: .271/.286/.424
Reed – home: .196/.255/.330, road: .235/.264/.417Team – home: .256/.318/.397, road: .279/.327/.446
The guys who hit better at Safeco: Ichiro, Ibanez, and Everett, all left-handed. The guys who hit better away from Safeco: Beltre, Lopez, Johjima, Sexson, and Reed. Four of the five are right-handed. Betancourt’s a push, basically.
The M’s offense is essentially crippled at Safeco Field, when you turn the four righthanders into automatic outs, and rely on Ichiro and Ibanez to provide all the offense.
Safeco is absolutely death to right-handed hitters. This isn’t a one year fluke. It’s almost certainly the hardest park in baseball for a right-handed power hitter to ply his trade.
The M’s seriously need to consider adjusting dimensions of Safeco Field. With the way its currently configured, the team stands a huge risk of every RH hitter they acquire failing to live up to their potential while playing for the team, simply due to the nature of their home park. Over 60% of all major league hitters swing from the right-side. And because of how Safeco plays, most of them have to be eliminated from consideration for employment by the Mariners, because there’s little to no chance that they’ll perform at a level commensurate with their salary while playing in Seattle.
It also creates the problem of the raw statistics hiding the true talent level of a player. The team, the fans, and the media often lament the team’s lack of offense and credit the solid pitching for keeping the M’s in contention this year. Except that is just wrong. The offense is the strength of this team. The pitching rotation has been absolutely abysmal away from Safeco Field, but their overall numbers are significantly aided by the effects of their home park.
As such, the Mariners run the risk of mis-evaluating the talent on hand, eliminating good hitters (Mike Cameron, anyone?) and acquiring or re-signing lousy pitchers (too many to name).
You can still have Safeco be a pitcher’s park without it destroying almost all right-handed hitters. Push the RF fence back, create a bit more foul territory, and for God’s sake, bring in the fences in left-center. The ballpark is putting an undo burden on the front office to find players who can succeed in this park. Even things out, and give them more guys to choose from.
Game 90, Mariners at Blue Jays
RHP Meche v RHP Janssen. 4:05, KSTW-11.
Every year, I ride the Seattle-to-Portland. I do it in one day, which requires a particular kind of conditioning and also a lot of stubbornness. When I’m riding during the summer, I’ll knock off a good century once a week, usually much harder per mile than the ride I’ll be doing in (oh man, is it really only) twelve hours. But there’s a big difference in doing that and spending the day on the bike, in finding the strength to charge up some monster hill at mile 150, when you’ve been out in the sun riding all day.
During the ride, there are parts of it that are beautiful and enjoyable, rolling hills and winding roads, and there are long stretches on the shoulders of highways with nothing to look at, along strip malls with no shade or respite, and the only way to keep going is to think about getting out of there.
It reminds me of being a baseball fan. I start out every season guardedly hopeful, knowing the worst-case scenario, and then for 162 games, more if you’re lucky, you keep at it. There are almost always painful stretches, like May, and there are pleasant surprises, like June.
But moreover, one of the reasons I go on the big rides is because once in a while, it’s good to be with ten thousand other bikers. Most of the time, we’re scattered across the region, maybe in small packs if we’re lucky. But for one day, particularly on this, the biggest ride of the northwest, to know that for all the solo time in the saddle, there are many, many more people of the same stripe, and they’re generally cool people, pleasant to hang out with even on an all-day ride.
I feel the same way about Mariner fandom. And even if our readership mirrors our author group and a quarter goes riding tomorrow, far more people will stop by USSM than ride the Seattle to Portland. Now that is cool.
So what’s up, folks? Gil Meche is our new ace. Adam Jones is our new centerfielder, for better or worse. Pineiro is the new Meche. We’re in contention for the AL West title. Our DH is the worst hitter on the team. The two highest-paid players are two of the worst-performing, while a set of guys under a million each are on fire.
This has been a fun trip so far. To a fine second half. Lineup when it’s available.