Jacque Jones
Initially, I had planned on posting a full overview of what I would do to reshape the M’s this offseason if the world came crashing down and I was magically installed as the Mariner GM. As I tinkered with the roster, however, I started making decisions that were going to require some fairly in depth explanations. Like the Kevin Brown idea, for instance, which most of you hated even after I did an entire post on my train of thought.
So, rather than drop the full roster construction post on you at once without any explanation, I’m going to break down the bigger pieces into their own seperate posts. I’ve already addressed Brown as an option for a back-of-the-rotation starter. Today, I move on to adding that “left-handed sock” that the club has repeatedly referred to. And we’re not talking footwear.
With the trade of Randy Winn and the injury to Chris Snelling, the M’s are missing a left fielder who can take advantage of Safeco Field’s short porch down the right field line. Raul Ibanez’s defense makes him a prime candidate to DH, and with Safeco rewarding teams who have flycatchers who can chase balls in the gaps, there is still a good amount of wisdom in acquiring a player who actually has some skills with the glove. The perfect fit for the M’s would be an above average defensive player who swings from the left side and hits the crap out of the baseball.
Unfortunately, those guys just aren’t available. Brian Giles could potentially fit the bill, but he’s not likely to leave San Diego, is looking for a big payday, and is reaching the end of his career. So, assuming Giles and Matsui aren’t going to be realistic targets, especially with the team having to rebuild nearly the whole rotation, we’re looking for an opportunity to bring in a quality player who can contribute to the team without breaking the bank.
Ladies and Gentleman, Jacque Jones.
Okay, okay, I know, he hit .249/.321/.438 this year. Not exactly the big bat everyone was hoping for, is he? His plate discipline is legitimately terrible, and his .258 EqA places him as a league average hitter playing one of the easiest defensive positions in baseball. His offensive production the past two years is actually fairly similar to what Adrian Beltre put up for the M’s this season. And I don’t think I’m going to win anyone over by saying that acquiring another 2005 version of Adrian Beltre was going to save the Mariner offense.
Stay with me, though. I’m not insane. Really.
Take a look at these numbers over the past four seasons:
Vs Left: 608 AB, .229/.285/.365
Vs Right: 1510 AB, .277/.338/.472
Jacque Jones cannot hit lefties. At all. Since 2002, against southpaws, he’s drawn 37 walks and struck out 147 times. His line against left-handed pitchers makes him the rough offensive equivalent of someone like Jason Phillips or Neifi Perez. In other words, not anyone you want in your line-up.
But against right-handers, he’s pretty darn good. His line against righties the past four years puts him in the category of guys like Carlos Lee, Jose Guillen, and Shawn Green. When a right-handed pitcher is on the hill, Jones is a well above average offensive force, even when compared to other left fielders. You’d like to see a higher OBP, but the power is a legitimate offensive weapon that the team lacks. Jones has “left-handed sock”, if you will. But he only has it against 75 percent of the major league pitchers out there.
To be truly effective, Jones needs to be platooned. At 30 years old, he’s had plenty of time to make adjustments and show some improvement against lefties. He hasn’t. So he shouldn’t play against them. This puts a cap on his value, since he would begin 25 percent of the M’s games seated on the bench. However, that flaw in and of itself isn’t enough to disqualify him. Even if he only manages 450 at-bats next year while hitting .270/.330/.470, that’s worth approximately 25 runs on offense. 25 runs is a significant upgrade from what the M’s got from their left-fielders this season. Creating 25 runs with his bat would have made him the 4th best hitter on the Mariners this year.
However, 25 runs from a left fielder isn’t the kind of production you’re looking from in a left fielder, especially one who is going to command a multimillion dollar deal as a free agent. Thankfully, offense is only part of the Jacque Jones story.
We’ll be the first to admit that defensive statistics are flawed. When evaluating defense, we need to speak in generalities. We have a pretty good idea of who is good and who is bad, but we don’t have anything like the tools we do to evaluate offense production. The defensive metrics that have been developed based on proprietary play-by-play data hardly ever agree anyways.
But occassionally, they do. And in Jacque Jones case, they agree that the man is pretty freaking awesome defensively.
According to Baseball Prospectus, Jones was 12 runs better than an average right fielder this season.
UZR had Jones as being 11 runs better than an average left fielder from 2000-2003.
PMR thinks that Jones was worth about 9 runs over an average right fielder last season.
Lastly, David Gassko’s new stat put Jones at 23 (!) runs above average for 2004.
Keep in mind, all these stats are compared to the league average. Calculating replacement level for defense is a bit tricky, and we don’t have something like VORP for defense, but it’d be fair to say that all of the advanced defensive metrics make Jacque Jones worth something like 25-35 runs better than a replacement level defensive corner outfielder.
In other words, his defense is more valuable than his offense. And his offense is league average!
Jacque Jones is from the Mike Cameron school of undervalued players. They aren’t exactly the same type (Cameron actually walked and was otherworldly in center field), but the analogy fits as a blunt tool. Jones isn’t a great hitter, but he is a tremendous asset with the glove. The combination of his value added by whalloping right-handed pitching and playing great defense is a valuable, and generally underrated, asset.
After the 2003 season, the Mariners decided to take a huge hit on defense to make a minor upgrade on offense, and it cost them dearly. While the focus continues to be on adding “a big bat”, and fans clamor for a superstar hitter, the fact remains that acquiring a world class defensive left fielder who can also hit a bit will have a similar positive effect on the team’s ability to outscore their opponents. I’m fairly sure the comments will be filled with folks who simply want a big stick and don’t like the idea of Jones, because, after all, this team needs to score more runs.
In reality, however, the team’s problem isn’t that they didn’t score enough runs. It’s that they didn’t outscore their opponents by enough runs. Run prevention or run production achieve the same goal. The M’s have a chance to acquire a guy who, between the two, adds a significant amount of runs to the team. He just doesn’t add them all at the plate.
Okay, so, how much will Jones cost? He made $6.2 million this year after being arbitration eligible following last season, but before the injury to Jason Kubel, he was almost certainly going to be non-tendered by the Twins. So, heading into the 2005 season, his market value was assessed to be right around the $6 million mark for one season.
Look at some of the contracts signed by comparable players last offseason:
Richard Hidalgo: 1 year, $5 million
Jeromy Burnitz: 1 year, $5 million
Jermaine Dye: 2 years, $10 million
Moises Alou: 2 years, $13 million
Two years ago, the standard contract for a corner outfielder was 2 years, $6 million. That’s what Jose Guillen, Rondell White, and Reggie Sanders signed for.
The market for solid but unspectacular corner outfielders has been set pretty evenly the past couple of seasons; short term, mid-millions range. Jones overall numbers are dragged down by his poor showing against lefties and the Twins refusal to platoon him, so he may not even match what the top guys in his level from each of the last few classes have gotten. He’ll be looking for something like 3 years, $18 million, but more than likely have to settle for something like 2 years and $12 million. $6 million per year for a player worth between 4-5 wins? That’s a bargain, especially in the free agent market, where wins generally go for between $2-4 million apiece.
Now, if the M’s go through with my endoresement of Jacque Jones, they’re certainly going to have to acquire a platoon partner for him that can be expected to play well and get 200-250 at-bats a year. I’ll do a Reshaping The Bench piece at a later date, but to head off too many questions now, I’ll mention that a guy like Marcus Thames could be had for a song, and he’d be a perfect fit with Jones. Between the two of them, you’re not going to pay more than $6.5 million a year, you’re going to have a short term commitment, and you’re going to get something like 60-70 runs out of your left field platoon.
Jones is not a classic statistical darling, but for the 2006 Mariners, Jacque Jones is a great fit. At 2 years, $12 million, he’d be a steal for the M’s. He gets my vote to wear the Left-Handed Sock.
Hack Attack
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities. This is a truism. And since there is a study for everything these days, there’s hard scientific research proving it from Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The idea is that dull thinking skills lead to overconfidence. In extreme cases, this can cause misguided faith in one’s ill-held ideas. An extreme example from the study: a sad fellow who was shocked to be arrested for the bank robberies he’d committed, having been under the mistaken impression that rubbing lemon juice on one’s face obscured his appearance to the security cameras.
From the abstract:
[P]eople who are unskilled … suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across four studies, the authors found that participants [whose] … test scores put them in the 12th percentile … estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
This calls to mind the old Socratic canard that the only thing worth knowing is how little you really know, or the Robert Burns poem about being able to see ourselves as others see us. It also calls to mind L.A. Times sportswriter Bill Plaschke.
To Plaschke, Dodgers GM Paul DePodesta’s failure to bring back manager Jim Tracy is an unforgivable betrayal of a baseball man by a man blinded by his book-learning.
Potshots between old and new schools are nothing new, and Plaschke grinding his dull butterknife (too dull to call it an axe) isn’t exactly stop-the-presses material either. This, though, is the rich part, and the part that inspires this post:
But love of the Dodgers no longer matters here. It’s all about loving DePodesta, who has polarized the Dodger community like few others.
Plaschke saying DePodesta has polarized the Dodger community is a bit like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow complaining about the heat in the barn. Why, oh why, would this vile man and his nefarious spreadsheet set Dodger fans against each other in this way? It isn’t like there was anything fanning the flames from the very beginning.
Let’s leave aside the merits or demerits of the Tracy firing. Indeed, let’s forget even the substance of this particular beef and think a bit broader.
Reasonable people can disagree about the way baseball teams go about business. To claim that a failure to stand in lockstep with a columnist’s dogma constitutes a lack of “love” isn’t just wrong, it’s a bit pathological.
My knee isn’t going to jerk defending either DePodesta or his methods. The man has come in for much criticism here over the last year. The danger of Plaschke’s pathology, though, is that it eliminates open-mindedness, stifling the ability to acknowledge that we all have a lot to learn, and often from the people we least expect to learn from.
At times, the old ways are the best. A certain criminal might have been better off with the time-honored tradition of pantyhose or a ski mask. We’re all better off, though, when we consider that new thoughts are worth a look.
Otherwise, you end up being — like Plaschke — the one with lemon juice on your face.
AL West Getting Smarter
John Hart stepped down as GM of the Texas Rangers this afternoon and named 28-year-old Jon Daniels as his replacement. Daniels is one of the most respected assistant GMs in the game and has a very bright future ahead of him. He is from the new class of baseball executives trained at an Ivy League school, but he also has a tremendously deep respect for scouting and subjective talent evaluation. He’s firmly in the school of “as much good information as possible” rather than casting his lots with the stats or scouts crowds.
The Rangers are in good hands with Daniels. The competition in the AL West just got a little bit tougher.
Pocket Lint
We’ve really laid off Bob Finnigan this year. We used to hammer him pretty regularly, but the decision was made to mostly ignore him and keep the blog focused on actual analysis, rather than reminding everyone how abysmal the guy was at his job.
Today, he’s decided to re-incarnate last year’s “M’s Caught in Numbers Crunch” article, where he claimed the team had about $13 million to spend on free agents (they spent about $24 million, in reality), and today has posted “No Easy Solution to M’s Problems”. Despite the fact that he’s run this bad-math-expectations-lowering pile of crap article every year since the beginning of time, he still feels the need to remind us all that he lacks basic logical skills, and attempts to share his depressing view of the world with his readers. Fortunately for us, his ramblings aren’t based in reality, so we don’t have to take his down-in-the-mouth approach to the offseason.
But man, how this thing gets published every year is beyond me. What a lousy paper the Times is. They should be embarrassed to put this thing in print.
So that would leave Millwood, the American League earned-run average champ, Kenny Rogers, or Jeff Suppan, a former American Leaguer, as the best choices.
When the right answer to your question is Kenny Rogers or Jeff Suppan, you’re asking the wrong question.
Suppan, who won 16 games for St. Louis, has AL experience. The problem is that his prior AL experience was nowhere near as successful as he has been with the St. Louis Cardinals. But then he was pitching for Kansas City…
So, we should pursue Suppan because he was once horrible in the American League?
Indications are that the payroll will be down some from the $96 million/$98 million, to $90 million/$92 million.
Of course, every real analysis of Mariner payroll puts the ’05 mark somewhere around $86-$89 million, nowhere near Finnigan’s numbers. But he’s the king of making up payroll, so this is nothing new.
This money still is not Cracker Jack, but it awaits the market to see how much it will bring. Based on existing contracts, Seattle has already used up about $49.5 million (all figures rounded off) of that money.
For that they get Sexson, Beltre, Ichiro, Joel Pineiro, Raul Ibanez, Miguel Ojeda and Eddie Guardado. (The club is unlikely to pick up Guardado’s option at $6.5 million, and he can opt out or come back at $4.25 million.)
About $50 million for that group is actually pretty accurate. Amazingly.
Add in buyouts of club options that might not be exercised  Shigetoshi Hasegawa, Pokey Reese, Wiki Gonzalez, Jeff Nelson and Spiezio  and you get another $4.5 million.
This is poor wording; Spiezio’s buyout is only $250,000, but his ’06 salary is $3.25. If that comes off the ’06 books (it probably will), then this number is accurate. If the M’s eat it on the ’05 payroll, this number goes way down.
Add in prorated signing bonuses (including that of departed Ron Villone) of about $6 million, and about $1 million still due on Jeff Cirillo, and you’ve got another $7 million.
And now we get into classic Finnigan. Villone’s signing bonus was $500,000. Prorating that over the two years of his contract, we get $250,000. Big whoop-de-doo. And here Finnigan uses prorated signing bonuses, assumed for every player on the roster who got one, but earlier in the article used actual 2006 payout to add up the salaries for the guys currently under contract. Consistency, Bob. Either use actual payout or annual average value. You don’t get to combine the two to make your bottom line as high as possible.
Add in other contracts  Hernandez, Yuniesky Betancourt, Jose Lopez, Greg Dobbs, Rene Rivera, Jeremy Reed, Bobby Madritsch, Rafael Soriano, J.J. Putz, George Sherrill, Mike Morse (and possibly Jeff Harris, Matt Thornton, Scott Atchison, Chris Snelling, Jamal Strong, Ramon Santiago) and you could reach another $4.5 million.
That’s 17 players, Bob. 17! If you think the M’s are going to give major league contracts to all those guys, you’re freaking insane. Chalk this group up to about $3 million.
Then there are arbitration eligibles  Gil Meche, Willie Bloomquist, Julio Mateo, Yorvit Torrealba, Ryan Franklin  and put down another $10 million, give or take.
Now the real fun begins. No comment on this for now. But you should note that, at the moment, Finnigan has the M’s carrying a 29 man roster.
The budget is so tight, it will almost certainly turn Franklin and Torrealba and other arbitration eligibles into non-tendered players, although it is tough to see Meche in this category. If they are not traded and don’t sign a deal by the Dec. 20 deadline, they might not be offered a contract, and will become free agents.
So, the arbitration group knocks $10 million off the payroll… but they’re likely to be non-tendered. Wait, what? Did Bob even bother to read these two paragraphs. And who are these “other arbitration eligibles”? He already said Franklin and Torrealba would be, and Meche wouldn’t be (he’s wrong about the last two), so that leaves Bloomquist and Mateo. Anyone here really expect either of those to be non-tendered? Does anyone see any situation, ever, where that would happen?
In reality, Franklin is a certain non-tender, Meche is a very likely non-tender (or trade for peanuts), and Torrealba, Bloomquist, and Mateo will combine for about $3 million in salaries for next year. So you can immediately lump $7 million off of Finnigan’s bottom line, despite the fact that he wants you to believe that the M’s are broke.
Finnigan wants you to believe that the M’s have about $10 million to spend. In reality, they have about $25 million. Last year, he threw out a $13 million figure and wrote several articles ridiculing everyone who expected big changes. When the M’s ended up signing Beltre, Sexson, Reese, Villone, Campillo, Betancourt, Sele, and Nelson, blowing Finnigan’s numbers out of the water, we never saw any kind of retraction. Or even an article explaining how the M’s fit these contracts into his little $13 million window.
Now, a year later, we get the same thing. Apparently he hopes that everyone who reads today’s piece forgets the hatchet job he did last year and gives him a mulligan.
Sorry Bob, but you don’t get any more chances. You’ve earned the nickname Pocket Lint.
Research Project
One thing we get in our inbox fairly frequently are comments like “hey, love the site, if you guys ever need anything, let me know.” Well, I’m taking you guys up on it.
Baseball America has relaunched their player finder feature, which allows you to search for a player by name and pull up his 2005 statline. It’s a very nifty tool that they made so unbelievably cool by adding the hardest-to-get-meaningful-stat in the minors in groundout/flyout ratio. This is a pretty important part of evaluating a pitcher, and until now, we had to jump through hoops to find out what a minor leaguers G/F rate was.
Here’s the catch, though. It’s only available through the player search pages. They aren’t listed on the team by team statistics or the league statistics. So, while we now know that Clint Nageotte was a groundballing machine (2.82 G/F rate) in Tacoma, we have no idea what that means, in context. He was definitely more of a groundball pitcher than Felix was in Tacoma, but that might be sample size. We don’t even know where Nageotte stands among his peers in the PCL. Or where the PCL stands in regards to the Cal League. Basically, we lack context.
I don’t want to lack context, so I’m making a request; if anyone is really bored, has a ton of free time, and wants to help, you can claim a league or half a league in the comments section and start knocking it out, player by player. You can get the rosters from a multitude of sources and just start using the player finder feature. Drop the players statline from his BA team stats page in an excel spreadsheet and add a column for G/F rate. Then, add the numbers to the spreadsheet from the player search page. When you’re finished, you can send it to me, and when I get enough of them, I’ll start creating league averages and leaderboards, and we can have some kind of idea of where these guys stand in relation to the other players in their leagues.
In other words, we’ll have context.
So, claim away in the comments. You can claim the Midwest League. You can claim the Cal League. You can claim the PCL North. You can claim the whole PCL. Just pick more than one team. Pick as many as you think you can handle. And then get to work. I’d love to have, say, 12 guys (or girls) chip in and each claim a league, which would cover the 10 full season leagues and the 2 short season leagues. I don’t care too much about the rookie leagues or at all about the complex leagues – those stats are worthless anyways. But I’ll take what I can get.
Knock yourselves out. When this gets done, it’ll be darn cool and we’ll have created a resource for the rest of the baseball fan community to share. And we’ll know just how excited to get about Nageotte’s G/F rate, and what it might mean for his future.
Bryan Price to resign
According to Finnigan, Bryan Price has resigned as the Mariners pitching coach.
Rather than rehash the good and bad of Price here, I’ll simply point you to the back and forth discussion Derek and I had about him a few weeks ago. Basically, I don’t expect this to be a huge deal either way.
Dempster, as in “dumpster”
A week ago, Dave speculated on the myriad of quality relievers who’ll be on the market this winter, and specifically how that relates to Eddie Guardado’s team/player option situation. The prevailing wisdom was that the M’s should decline their $6.5M option, and if Eddie picks up his (cheaper) option, so be it. If not, there’s always the FA market.
That FA market got an early boost today when Ryan Dempster — who has essentially never pitched well in his life before this season — signed a three-year, $15.5M deal with the Chicago Cubs. A former starter, Dempster has served as the Cubbies’ closer for most of the year and has done well, coverting 33 of 35 chances including 19 straight at one point.
I applaud the Cubs for taking a guy who never cut it as a starter — he was released by the Reds just two years ago — and making him a closer. More clubs should take marginal starters and make them into relievers, as there’s generally pretty good success with this sort of thing, and it can be a cheap way to fill out your bullpen. But after you’ve made a smart move like this, turning freely available talent into something useful, you don’t turn around and give the guy $15.5M.
When the M’s are forced to pay some closer $21M over four years this winter, they’ll have the Cubs to blame. OK, so they’ll really have themselves to blame. But it’s always nice to blame the Cubs for something.
Game 162: Athletics at Mariners
LHP Joe Kennedy vs. RHP Felix Hernandez, 1:05pm, FSN & KOMO.
The 2005 season has come to an end for your Seattle Mariners. It’s fitting, I think, that King Felix take the hill today. Not only was he one of the few bright spots in an otherwise miserable season, but he’s also going to be a big part of the team returning to respectability next season.
RF Ichiro!
SS Betancourt
DH Ibanez
1B Sexson
3B Beltre
LF Morse
2B Lopez
CF Bubela
C JoeJessica
Game #161: Athletics at Mariners
Jeff Harris makes his first start since September 20, nearly two weeks. It could very well be his last in a Mariner uniform.
The Mariners face right-hander Joe Blanton. One could make a good case that Blanton should rookie of the year, but that won’t happen. According to VORP, he leads all rookie pitchers.
The Mariners have seen Blanton three times this year. April 30 the M’s chased him before the end of the fifth inning with 8 hits, scoring 4 times. June 29 Blanton dominated the Mariners, surrendering only an Adrian Beltre home run. September 5 he took the loss in a pitching dual against King Felix.
As I type this, both the Indians and Red Sox seem to have decided to let the Yankees have a playoff spot. Crap.
Game 160: Athletics at Mariners
RHP Kirk Saarloos vs. LHP Jamie Moyer, 7:05pm, FSN & KOMO.
Well, it’s almost over. Tonight begins the final series of the year, as the M’s and A’s play out the string with three meaningless games. Why watch? Other than King Felix going on Sunday, Ichiro! needs just two more hits to reach 200 for the fifth consecutive season. It’s not exactly 262, but it’s a remarkable accomplishment just the same. And of course, there’s tonight’s feel good story: Dan Wilson will start at catcher, catch the first inning, and then leave the field to what I’m sure will be a very long ovation.
Moyer, in his final start of the season, tries to run his Safeco Field record to 10-0 against a team which has beat him up in 2005 — 26 hits and 15 earned runs allowed in 15 2/3 IP over three starts. Saarloos, one of my favorite pitchers thanks to his generally good control and extreme groundballing ways (2.33:1 GB:FB this year, 2.27:1 career), dominated the M’s in his one start against them this year: 9 IP, 4 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, and 7 K in a 127-pitch effort back on June 23rd.
RF Ichiro!
SS Betancourt
LF Ibanez
1B Sexson
3B Beltre
“DH” Dobbs
2B Lopez
CF Bubela
C Wilson