Updating for 2005
The 2005 M’s construction post is linked up on the left with the features now, and has been updated with salary information helpful reader Jason Rogers sent us. Yay, readers. We’ve also started linking up the names with the specific posts on that player, which should turn this into one happy conversational splinter-fest almost immediately but may also make it really cool for in-depth referencing.
Section 101 to go away
… sort of.
At the Public Facilities District meeting yesterday, a woman (no info on who yet) got up and laid into the Mariners for the center-field landing bleachers and covering up her brick in particular.
Chuck Armstrong, Mariners president, apologized about the bleachers and said that they would only be deployed when the team had already sold out the game. Which I’d be a little angry about except that I don’t think the M’s are going to sell out a lot next year. Still, it does leave open the question of whether they’d push them out all the time if they could, or if they see this as an easy give-back to the public since they’re not selling anyway. If they were selling those 240 seats out every game, I don’t think they’d be coming out this early in the fight.
Talking to the PFD this morning, I asked them if they had anything to do with this and they said “I think it was the public that did it.”
Good job, public.
Fall of AT&T Wireless
You may already know that I spent over five years working at AT&T Wireless, and have some strong opinions on how the company managed to destroy itself. The Seattle PI has a long, insightful article on this today, which is the best piece I’ve seen written on it so far. It’s particularly good on the cultural and leadership issues that infected everything about the company. John Zeglis was paid many, many millions for the utter incompetence that destroyed AWS, and will receive tens of millions more when they snuff the candle. I think of this every time someone tells me that baseball players are overpaid.
Madritsch
I know a bunch of people have seen the following quote from Ken Rosenthal’s latest piece and decided to hammer Bavasi for it, but I’m going to uncharacteristically defend the man. Here’s the quote:
“I know we will have some arguments in the future about his (Bobby Madritsch’s) role,” Mariners G.M. Bill Bavasi says. “Whitey (Herzog) always said to build a staff from the back — start with a closer so you can play your 27 outs vs. their 24. Bobby seems to have the mental makeup to close.”
There are three basic things we can say about this quote:
1. It lacks context. We have no idea what the question was, why it was brought up, or if Bavasi was intending this as a simple complement on Madritsch’s demeanor on the mound. Really, those two sentences alone tell us nothing about what Bavasi feels Madritsch’s future role should be.
2. The fact that Bill Bavasi is quoting Whitey Herzog is not a good thing. This quote, especially, is easily refutable and obviously incorrect.
3. Bavasi is right. So far, Madritsch has displayed all the traits that most people usually look for in a “closers mentality”. I personally believe it’s a ridiculously overplayed cliche, that most good relievers can close with few problems, and that mental makeup specific to closing out games is mostly a creation of the media looking for a story. However, if you were to identify the kinds of things that would usually be associated with a “closer mentality”, Madritsch would get check marks on just about every one.
So, what he essentially said was true, but why he said it we don’t know. It’s nothing to get worked up over. The biggest complaint I have about most more-than-casual fans is their obsesion with analyzing quotes in the media. Ignore it. It’s almost all crap. It gives little to no insight into what people actually believe, and trying to break down a manager or GM based off of answers giving in question and answer forums is doomed to failure.
Safeco Field cost
To clarify something: we often refer to Safeco as being a $330-350m stadium financed by tax dollars. This is a little unfair to the team, but entirely fair in another sense.
The cost of the stadium was supposed to be in that range, with the M’s contribution slated to be about $40m, which they immediately recouped by selling the naming rights to Safeco Insurance.
However, the cost overruns, which the team was respoinsible for in the rush to build it, and which they had promised to pay for, were not paid for by the public. Though not for lack of trying, as the M’s attempted to get the public to pay for it (because the tax was collecting more revenue than anticipated, which is like going to lunch with someone and refusing to split the bill because they have more money then you). The final cost of the stadium was about $520m, and I’ve read the team ended up covering about $130m of the overruns (meaning the public paid $390m for the stadium). The team then went and tried to pursue legal action against everyone they’d hired to build the stadium. I don’t know if they recovered any of that money or not — I can’t remember reading anything about any settlements, but that’s the kind of detailed, no-story-here event that I imagine was probably on page 8 of the business section, if it ran at all.
If that’s the case, the Mariners ended up paying about a quarter of the cost of the new stadium out of pocket, which would make them one of the more generous contributors in the last stadium boom. But some points to consider:
– the overruns were entirely the fault of the team’s desire to open mid-season 1999, a move that made them about $75m in additional revenues (I could do a detailed breakdown of my guess there, but that’s probably in the ballpark — ha!) for that year
– they did try and go back on their promise to pay and made all kinds of dire predictions about what would happen if they were forced to pay their lunch tab
In that sense, I’m reluctant to credit them for this.
However, assume for moment that the team’s crack legal team went out into the wild to go hunt for settlement money and they came back with nothing. There would be a massive debt on the books the team would have to pay down as a result of their own actions. When they pay that off, it makes their profits look much smaller, even as their revenues may be spectacularly high. Even for a highly profitable team like the M’s, this means they can retire that debt quickly over the last couple of successful years, making it easy to make the profits of those boom years go away.
This is important to you because while the team’s lease with the PFD is laughably bad (I’d love to rent a place to live under the terms of this deal) it does contain limited profit-sharing. The team is supposed to share a portion of the money they make once they’ve paid off debt they supposedly (but did not actually) accumulated during the 1989-1999 years. The Mariners, if they never recovered any of the cost of the overruns, have $126m in postponement of the start of revenue sharing, of putting money back in the public coffers. As a result of thier own incompetence in project planning.
That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of postponement.
Not that has anything to do with present events. It just occurred to me.
More section 101 coverage
In the Seattle Times/PI Sunday edition sports section, there are two letters on Section 101:
John Ringler (Henderson Nevada!) blisters the Mariners up and down over it: “Someone in your organization has made the decision to destroy the center-field landing, a unique feature of Safeco Field, to insert about 240 more seats.” He talks about the current owners in contrast to the past ones, and even suggests that if the Mariners are going to sell everything in the stadium, we might as well charge them a license to use “Seattle” in their name… man, it’s a nice little piece of work.
Janine Grantski laments the loss of Mike Cameron and the center-field landing, and wonders “just how temporary these bleachers are going to be”. Janine: check out our seating audit for more on how often it’s there (most of the time and every game after the All-Star break).
The question about the bricks has been raised repeatedly, most pointedly by PI columnist John Levesque as a metaphor for the arrogance and greedy nature of local ownership. But as important as that is, and as clear-cut a wrong as it is, it’s only one part of this. If the Mariners move the bricks, for instance, and still have the stands in the center-field landing, they’ll still have taken one of the few unique, cool features of the ballpark we paid for and turned it into some crappy seats. That’s still wrong even if they’re not built on top of people’s bricks, breaking their deal with the most enthusiastic of their supporters.
If you haven’t already, join the dogpile on the Mariners. Express your discontent, and you may particularly want to point out that the Seattle Times has yet to print a word on this that isn’t a reader mail in the combined Times/PI Sunday edition. Though I understand the issue might get a sentence or two soon… but we’ll see.
Game Report, Athletics over Mariners 7-4
I go to a lot of games. With its combination of ten-minute funeral dirge national anthem, pervasive boredom, low temperature with slight warmth-stealing breeze, many pitchers for no reason, futility, long inning breaks for the national broadcast, slow, slow A’s team that on the bases would take their sweet time walking back… this was the worst game of the year for me. Even worse than the couple of times I’ve eaten there and gotten an upset stomach free with my $10 purchase of concession food.
Here’s my question, though, and I mean this sincerely: the Mariners are out of the race, yeah, sure, I understand there’s a natural tendency to Boone it and not try so hard. But when one of your teammates is making a run at a historic achievement, one that he will certainly hit if everyone can only feed him enough plate appearances, shouldn’t this be an occasion where you try and fight that?
I’m frustrated with the hacking, the dumb plate appearances in general, the stupid baserunning that costs us outs and Ichiro! a chance to set a cool record. Run those balls out. Work that count. If you’re that distracted thinking about how tonight you’re going to order the other item on the room service menu you passed up yesterday that you can’t give a respectable account of yourself, you shouldn’t be in the lineup. You shouldn’t be written into the lineup.
I also got mad because I was walking to the Ivar’s stand where I buy my stomach-upsetting concessions (seriously, it’s a three-game streak for them now as I type this), and they were playing the pre-game show over the PA. It featured a discussion between whoever, Larry LaRue of the Tacoma News Tribune, and Norm Charlton, and LaRue was the only one who seemed to have two brain cells to rub together. Charlton is chock-full of the old-school baseball cliches, and between him and whoever was running the show (Waltz? Hutler?) every couple of seconds you got a factual error and a bizarre error in reasoning.
Will anyone ever win 30 games again?
LaRue: No, the 5-man rotation requires pitchers to be too perfect, and they’d need a great bullpen.
Charlton: No way, pitchers today are wimps.
Host: Yeah, you talked earlier about how pitchers used to throw 140-pitch innings (yes, I know what he meant)…
Charlton then managed to say that the 4-man wouldn’t come back because it was more expensive than the 5-man (because it requires that you hire four really good pitchers, who are expensive, which was another weird jump in logic), and then also that the Yankees had gone to the 6-man for a while this year because “it was a luxury only the Yankees can afford” (which, again, not true, and ineffective rotations are a luxury teams would build if they had the money? what?)
People worked on that program — somewhere, there were engineers, and producers, and the end result of their efforts was Norm Charlton claiming that all the workouts and pitch counts that were part of a modern pitcher’s life hadn’t “paid off” because they couldn’t pitch both ends of a double-header and then go 12 rounds bare-knuckle with a notorious boxing bear from Vladivostok. Do these people go home at night and dream of producing intelligent baseball programming?
On another note, Eric Chavez’s home run was impressive. It was one of those home runs where it comes off his bat, I said “woah” and by the time I got to the “h” it was three quarters of the way to its final destination in the stands. That dude can hit.
Question
I didn’t watch today’s game, so I’m hoping there was some kind of real explanation for this that I’m missing. Here’s the 9th inning game log:
SEATTLE 9TH
-O Dotel relieved T Hudson.
-M Olivo struck out looking.
-J Reed walked.
-J Reed to second on fielder’s indifference.
-J Lopez singled to center, J Reed scored.
-I Suzuki struck out swinging.
-R Winn walked, J Lopez to second.
–J Cabrera hit for E Martinez.–
J Cabrera grounded into fielder’s choice to shortstop, J Lopez out at third.1 run, 1 hit, 0 errors
Oakland 7, Seattle 4
Was Edgar ill? Hurt? Saving a cat from being dropped off the roof?
Because if not, why would you ever pinch hit Jolbert Cabrera for Edgar Martinez? Much less when Edgar is playing in his 5th-to-last-ever home game, representing the tying run at the plate in the bottom of the 9th inning.
Seriously, if this was a “strategy” move, I don’t have words for the stupidity of it. Someone tell me there were mitigating circumstances. Please.
Jose Lopez and 2005
I made a pretty long post about Jose Lopez about a month ago, so I’m going to try and stay away from rehashing the arguments about Lopez’s future potential and value. I am wondering, however, why nearly everyone views him as a viable option as the Mariners starting shortstop or even third baseman next year.
Regardless of whether you think Lopez is going to be a superstar, you have to admit that the current version is not a productive player. His .234/.265/.383 line gives him a VORP of -0.1. He’s basically the definition of a replacement level shortstop, giving the Mariners the same production as they could find by signing a minor league free agent this offseason.
How likely is it that he’ll make the jump from replacement level to useful contributor next year? Slim to none. PECOTA (which basically nailed Lopez’s 2004 performance on the button) had Lopez’s value in 2005 at about 0.7 wins and a .246 EqA, meaning he’s just a hair above replacement level. To be simply “average”, he’d have to hit his 75th percentile projection. To expect much more out of Lopez next year than a .250/.290/.400 line is unrealistic. Even the most optimistic comparisons for Lopez struggled in their age 21 seasons in the majors. At that age, Tejada hit .202/.240/.333 in 98 at-bats, then followed it up with a .233/.298/.384 season a year later. He didn’t even become useful until age 23 or productive until 24.
So, if we expect that Lopez is going to perform at or near replacement level next year, why on earth would you go into spring training with him as your number one option? Even if you want him to take the job, it is incumbant upon the Mariners to bring in another replacement level shortstop to provide depth and an alternative in case of injury or struggles. Making Lopez the unquestioned starter while simultaneously expecting a performance equal to what you could get for a non-roster invitee is foolish.
In my mind, it isn’t even a question that the Mariners need to sign a cheap alternative shortstop to seriously challenge for the position. If spring training rolls around and Lopez has made monstrous improvements, you simply cut the NRI or make him the backup. However, if Lopez hasn’t made strides and appears to be on his way to posting another season at least as mediocre as what you can get from the veteran-of-the-day, send him to Tacoma and save the service time.
Players develop in Triple-A all the time. The argument that Lopez cannot develop without the challenge of major league pitching lacks any kind of supporting evidence. Simply burning through his pre-arbitration years because he’s cheap is short-sighted thinking. The Mariners will be able to pick from a large group of players who can be obtained for the major league minimum, several of them non-guaranteed, who will be able to post numbers in a similar range to what you expect from Lopez next year. With that being the case, he just shouldn’t be considered a real option for the opening day job. If he opens your eyes in spring training, deal with it then. Assuming that he’s going to is setting yourself up for disaster, both next year and in 2011, when he’s hitting the free market a year earlier than he should be.
Corey Koskie
I’m hoping to knock out mini-columns on each player who seems like a good fit for the M’s in the offseason. We’ve done Beltre (thumbs up), Beltran (thumbs way up), and Delgado (thumbs down) so far. Since Corey Koskie is getting some love in the comments and even Derek’s throwing him support, this seems like a good time for me to bust out the “Corey Koskie as Jeff Cirillo” post. There’s just no way you could convince me to sign Koskie for more than 1 year at any price, and I’d be reluctant to give him more than $1 million for 2005. Obviously, he wouldn’t be signing with my team, which is fine with me.
And I say that as a huge Corey Koskie fan. For the past 4 years, he’s been a very underrated player, a solid contributor both offensively and defensively who does the things that don’t get noticed well enough to establish himself as a mini-star but gets none of the noteriety. Unfortunately, Koskie is on the verge of collapse, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was out of baseball in two years. Take a look at these 2001-2003 splits:
Vs Left: .239/.326/.388
Vs Right: .297/.396/.500Home: .292/.401/.486
Road: .265/.348/.443
Good Koskie couldn’t hit lefties and was an average player away from the Metrodome. He was only a factor offensively in about 65 percent of the Twins games. Put a lefty on the mound or grass beneath his feet and Koskie, at his physical prime, was someone you don’t really want in the line-up every day. Even at his peak, he was only situationally valuable.
I’m of the belief that Good Koskie is gone forever, and precipitous decline is on its way. He is a career .280 hitter, hitting .292 last year. He’s hitting .249 this year, including monthly averages of .245, .241, and .209. Huge drops in batting average can be random, but they can also indicate a serious loss of bat speed. Players usually compensate for this by adopting “old-player skills”, taking more pitches and only swinging at the ones they can drive. This often provides upward spikes in walk and home run rate, while singles and doubles take a dive. Even if it provides a short value boost, it is often a sign of iminent decline.
His bat has noticably slowed and his chronic back problems have contributed to an adjustment in Koskie’s approach at the plate. He’s also missed the last several weeks with a severe ankle sprain. His body is wearing down and is just about ready to give out.
PECOTA projected a precipitous decline for Koskie even before he started his transformation to old-player skills this year. Based on his numbers through 2003, PECOTA projected Koskie from 3.7 wins in 2004 to 2.8 wins in 2005 down to 2.1 wins in 2006 and just 1.3 by 2007. Koskie undershot his 2004 projection and the system will almost certainly penalize him for that, so you can knock those projections down a notch.
Corey Koskie has been a good player, though one with limited uses, for several years. Unfortunately, he’s on the verge of collapse, and giving him a multiyear deal is setting yourself up for a trap. Koskie is firmly entrenched in the avoid category for the coming offseason.