I know why Villone is coming back. He was on Lou’s Refuse to Lose M’s in 1995. Oh yes, you may have forgotten, but the lefty was in nineteen games, nineteen kits, 23 walks (and 26 K), allowing for a fondly-remembered 7.91 ERA. And as a former first-round draftee, the team signs *on the cheap* the kind of talent they’re forced to give up when they sign luminaries like Ibanez.
In other joking news, the Mariners announced the signing of the Tooth Fairy to a two-year, $4m contract with club option for 2007 today. “The Tooth Fairy will provide a much-needed right-handed bat off the bench and is an outstanding defender at both first and third. The Tooth Fairy is also known for his generous contributions to children’s causes off the field and has been an outstanding community leader. “
Here’s to hoping this man isn’t a Mariner fan. I had never heard of “assault on a sports official” before; is it really a more egregious offense to give a basketball referee a concussion than a normal guy on the street?
Also, people are beginning to latch onto the reports of Villone’s contract not being guaranteed. I’m looking into this, but anything other than a health or fitness clause that would allow them to void the contract would be extremely abnormal. By definition, a major league contract is guaranteed, and the union is not in the business of letting players individually negotiate away provisions of the collective bargaining agreement. My best guess is there is a mid-March buyout, where the Mariners can either choose to pay him $100,000 to go away by March 15th or the entire contract is guaranteed. Despite the fact that none of the local dailies found this important enough to ask about, we’ll do our best to come up with the facts of the contract and report them here.
New Big Board. Dig it.
Say hello to Ron Villone and so long to Kazuhiro Sasaki. Also, if you’re keeping track of such things, the 40-man roster is now full.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait until we get minor league player assignments so I can clean things up a bit.
Anyway, as always, drop me a line if you see something amiss.
I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a reason this Villone signing isn’t awful, but I just can’t find one. I was ready to go so far as to say it makes sense if they turn around and trade Franklin to make Villone the 5th starter, but even that doesn’t work if you look at his splits (5.42 ERA as a starter over the past three seasons, 5.00 as a reliever). What’s worse, this pretty much guarantees that he’s going to be the #1 left-handed option out of the pen next season. Unless something has changed, Eddie Guardado is stepping in at closer, meaning he’s no longer a “lefty in the pen.” Our two lefties will most likely be Ron Villone and Mike Myers. Yahoo.
The best thing about Villone is his better-than-decent strikeout rate (7.68 per 9 IP last season). Not as good as, say, Arthur Rhodes, but what are you gonna do? We’re all about looking for positives.
New Big Board to follow.
Just when everyone begins to complain that there is no Mariner news to talk about, we get reminded why no news is good news. At least, when Bill Bavasi is running your club. $1 million base salary for Ron Villone, and $1 million in possible incentives. We have been unable to confirm that he will receive an additional $50,000 for every old lady he helps across an intersection, and $25,000 for every time he is publically quoted saying positive things about upper management.
We think Ron is a real good fit in that role (left-handed reliever). He is tough on left-handers as well as right-handers…
Of course, anyone with an internet connection and the savvy to find Ron Villone’s player card could dispell that myth in less than three minutes.
And, hey, just for fun, Mark Guthrie and Mike Matthews both signed minor league, non-guaranteed contracts last week. Not only do they not take up a spot on the 40-man roster, but if the Pirates and Reds don’t like what they see in spring training, they aren’t out a dime and can release them without compensation. A quick comparison of the three pitchers versus lefties from 2001-2003:
Guthrie: .243/.342/.370
Matthews: .213/.283/.316
Villone: .249/.334/.387
The going rate for middling non-effective relievers who just happen to throw with their left hand is not $1 million guaranteed plus incentives. Yet more evidence that market value is a completely foreign concept to our General Manager. And hey, now the M’s can count this as $2 million against their budget and continue to spin their way into not spending the money recovered from the Sasaki gift. Boy, following this team sure is a treat.
I started to write a long post today that never came about (more on this later). My basic point, presented here without the backup etc. that I was putting together, was that baseball teams seem to have divided themselves into two camps:
*Teams that want to win, but have limits on how they can achieve that and
*Teams that have another priority but wouldn’t mind winning.
The Mariners, I was going to argue, are the best team of the second group. They’re willing to invest a lot, they have a productive farm system and a major league team that while possibly competitive in a division with three good 80-90 win teams, and they play in a lovely new stadium I like to go see games at (which is not to say that I don’t have quibbles with it). But their priority list goes:
1. Definately make money
2. Field a friendly team of character guys
2. Win
Other teams do this a little differently. The Blue Jays, for instance, it’d be more like
“Win as many games as we can given our budget and our plan to be ready to compete when the Yankees and Red Sox fall over exhausted”
It’s a fine difference. The A’s may win just as many games as the M’s, but I don’t doubt that if Beane had to sell his family to Brian Sabean to get Barry Bonds playing left field, he’d do it.
Fortunately for us, they’ve so far decided that the way to make money is to put butts in seats and keep the team resonably competitive within the division. What I worry about is what happens if the team wobbles. What if Boone joins his brother on the out-for-the-season list, or Ichiro breaks his arm somehow, and the team drops below .500?
If the fans leave and the team starts to look at breaking even instead of making obscene amounts of money, I can see them punting entirely. They’ve been paying into the revenue sharing fund for years (which is morally wrong, but don’t get me started on that) and that has to rankle every one of the owners. If they can field a team for $25m, get half the fans plus an extra $40m in revenue-sharing money, I don’t doubt they’d be down to flipping a coin to make the decision.
Soo, now my off-topic rant on why I didn’t get around to writing a long, long essay on the relative priorities and goal-setting of different franchises:
You may be wondering why I haven’t posted since Friday when I’m a pretty regular bet to post something about something daily. Let me tell you, Dear Readers. I blame Creative Labs and the wonder of modern technology. I finally replaced my old and on-its-last-legs monitor* with a new one and finally got a new graphics card to replace my dying graphics card**, so I decided it would be a good time to update my drivers so I could play Halo when I’m not writing columns about baseball and then deleting them (folks, if you think the Breaking Balls columns are kind of weak sometimes, I’d like to say in my defense that is never for lack of trying). So!
* flash new motherboard BIOS, no problem, ASUS’s utility worked perfectly
* get the lastest Radeon drivers: no problem, install worked perfectly
* install monitor driver, smooth sailing still
Looks great. Halo runs like crap.
* find update for Halo, install, works fine.
Halo’s performance notes suggest upgrading sound drivers. That seems perfectly reasonable, right? Year-old drivers…
* run Creative Labs update for the Sound Blaster Live!
Meltdown of epic scope. Bombs in the middle of the driver install, blue screen of death (which I think I’ve seen maybe ten times since I installed XP when it came out, which (on another side note) makes previous MS operating systems look like TandyDOS). System comes back up, runs slow as Olerud. Can’t get anything working. Attempts to remove the half-installed drivers failed. Attempts to re-install drivers fail. Nothing worked and it took 20 minutes to not work.
I’ve been working on machines since I figured out the workaround for the broken ‘D’ key on my dad’s Heathkit H-19 (a build-it-yourself clone of the Zenith 80, if I remember). I’ve tweaked autoexec.bat and config.sys to squeeze enough base memory to run Wing Commander, and I’ve led expeditions deep into the wilds of the Windows registry. I’m not banging on the case with a rock or anything, and this disaster took me over a day of my weekend to get past.
Now Halo just sounds like crap. The sounds all pop and clip, and I have no idea what I do now.
Microsoft, and I’m entirely serious when I write this, should have some kind of health-department-like inspection rating for vendors so we can track how bad some of these people are. Or, and I’m okay with this too, they should hire goons to beat the stuffing out of people who do stuff like this and make their OS look bad.
* I bought a pair of 17″ Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 87TXM monitors at Boeing Surplus (which rules) a couple years ago for not much money ($150 each?). Your standard monitor does have a life-span: after three, four years of use they start to get fuzzy, or dim, or off-color. So these were super-good monitors but from the date on the back I could see they were barely three years old… got three years out of them. Everyone else there (not that this is even remotely relevant) was snapping up Viewsonics for the same price that were 5 years old. Boeing Surplus, folks. If you’ve got an eye for value, man, that place is cool.
** It had a fan on it that made awful grinding noises sometimes and was having trouble moving as much air as you’d like from a cooling fan
One of the interesting side effects fo the space-age material they stuck up out there is that this may offer us a chance to look at whether or not a batting eye is significant. It wasn’t that long ago that you could buy centerfield seats at the Kingdome that were right where batters tried to pick up the ball, and slowly they started to phase that out — booting people who were being intentionally distracting, not selling those tickets unless they had to, and so on. Griffey complained about that when he came up, as I remember. Since then the existence and protection of the batter’s eye has gone from a matter of courtesy to something parks like Safeco Field are built around as if it was a divine commandment. (And God said “Also, as an eleveth instruction, more a guideline really, in five hundred generations or so, you’ll be playing this game with a stick and a thrown ball and… you shall respect the batter’s eye and offer a background, dark in color, to those who swing the stick. And seriously, that no killing thing? I mean it. Don’t make me come down there.” Except that everyone forgot about it until the 1980s.*)
As much as statheads like to discuss them, and while I think applying park effects is the single biggest advance in player evaluation in modern times, no one really understands park effects and how to use them. There are sometimes big one-year fluctuations in park effects: do you adjust player stats based on a one-year park effect swing when it’s traditionally been a neutral park? What if the effect’s persistent? If I bat .300/.400/.500 consistently at home and the league builds a ton of hitter’s parks making mine seem like a pitcher’s, my offensive contributions at home don’t become more valuable, but now they’re adjusted up to compare to the league…
We can come up with theories on why parks played one way one year and another way another, but we don’t really know. Wind patterns inside a park have little if any relation to the wind in the area or even the wind in the neighborhood. It’s difficult to prove park effect correlation to humidity or cold or whatever because there are so many other factors and only 30 parks, each unique in almost every characteristic.
I look forward to seeing what Safeco’s numbers look like in the future, and seeing if we can nurse any good conclusions out of it. In the meantime, I agree with Dave — let’s remain skeptical for now.
* for the easily offended**: no blasphemy intended
** why bother with that footnote? it’s not as if someone easily offended would be mollified by a footnote that says “don’t be offended”
I just want to address a couple of notes that have piqued my interest around the blogosphere in the past few days.
The Mariner Optimist has a note about the possible shift of Safeco Field from a pitcher’s park to a hitter’s park, or, at least a neutral park, based upon the second half surge in offense seen in the Northwest. While it is tempting to credit the new honeycomb-substance for improving the batter’s eye and increasing offensive levels, it is far, far too early to make assumptions about this being a permanent change. Park Factors are often inconsistent on a year-to-year basis, simply due to sample size and varying factors (weather being a vital one), and breaking an already small sample size in half can lead to serious problems. To me, the fact that Safeco played as a hitter’s park in the second half of 2003 is interesting, but we need a lot more evidence before we assume it will play that way in 2004. History shows that Safeco Field is a pitchers park, and the generally accepted reasons for this (heavy air, giant gaps in left center field, wind almost never blowing out) are unchanged. I have never believed the effects of the hitting backdrop was very significant, and I certainly don’t see it as enough of a change to shift Safeco from being a predominantly pitcher-friendly park. It will be interesting to see how it plays in 2004, but at this point, the wisest assumption is to believe that it will again favor pitching.
Benny Looper was quoted last week as saying “Jose Lopez could play in the majors right now.†Technically, this is true. Jose Lopez has a pulse, is under contract to the Mariners, and will presumably bring his cleats and glove with him to spring training. He is physically capable of playing in the major leagues in 2004. However, that is entirely different from being able to perform at even a serviceable level. Lopez is a nice prospect, though at this point, he is more potential than performance. He has some skills and, with a wise development plan, could be an answer on the infield for the Mariners in several years. In reality, he shouldn’t see Seattle until late 2005 at the earliest. History is extremely unkind to players of Lopez’s skill-set being pushed to the majors quickly, and Mike Caruso should be the lesson here. Let Lopez begin 2004 back in Double-A San Antonio, and if he shows he can hit, consider moving him up at the all-star break. There is simply no reason to rush him to the show, and the odds of him actually helping the Mariners win games this year are somewhere between slim and none.
In the same prospect vein, I’ve seen several bloggers appealing for Chris Snelling to win a job on the 25-man roster out of spring training. As much as I like Snelling, this would not only be a waste of development time that he badly needs, it is unlikely that Snelling would provide much value in the role. The knee surgeries have robbed him of the needed range to play center field, so he’d be limited to backing up Ibanez and Ichiro in the corners. Unfortunately, all three swing the bat from the left side, so a platoon is impossible. Expecting Snelling to be able to produce enough offense to be a suitable replacement for either Ichiro or Ibanez on a regular basis is over-reaching, and both he and the Mariners are best served by letting him rack up at-bats in Tacoma, while the M’s give those at-bats to a veteran right-hander who can tee off on southpaws.
Finally, a cautionary note about a lot of the prospect lists we’re going to see popping up on the web over the next few weeks. A lot of sites put out “Top X Prospects†lists, mostly by reading Baseball America, adding in their own personal bias’, and rearranging to make it their own. Unfortunately, what it boils down to is a lot of uneducated guessing. While I’m a huge fan of statistical analysis, prospecting is a whole lot more than comparing performance and adding in an age/level adjustment. To accurately gauge a prospect, you really need to analyze his performance as well as his physical abilities, also factoring in the organization’s views on the player and their plan for his future. To do this well for more than a handful of players is essentially a full-time job. While meaning no disrespect to the hard-working folks out there trying to break into the prospect landscape, there are still only a few sources that should be taken with any true authority. Baseball America is obviously the cream of the crop in the field, and individuals such as John Sickels and Deric McKamey have proven to be quality talent evaluators as well. Baseball Prospectus provides the statistical look at prospects better than anyone else, though that can only get you so far. As far as national coverage goes, if it doesn’t come from one of those four, you are best off taking it with a big grain of salt. Covering an organization in depth, like we do with the Future Forty or Jamey Newberg does for the Rangers at the excellent Newberg Report, is one thing, but covering all 30 is a monumental task that can’t be done well by someone who is not being paid for their time.
It only took until February 5th, but we have the first official sign that baseball is almost here; newspapers filling space with quotes about a player being in the best shape of his life. 2004’s first target for this cliche’ is Eric Chavez, as Ken Macha gushes:
“Eric said he is in the best shape he’s been in his life,” Macha said of the third baseman, who is at 220 pounds after rigorous offseason workouts. “He said to me something like it’s time to fulfill the potential.”
Of course, unless you think Eric Chavez can’t hit lefties (.229/.278/.395 last three years) because he was out of shape, that career year probably isn’t coming. If I was an A’s fan looking for good news about Chavez, I’d hope for a quote along the lines of “I spent my entire offseason taking batting practice from Eddie Guardado. Not only can I now hit lefties, but Eddie’s arm is going to fall off from throwing me 300 pitches a day.”
Expect to see similar quotes about the Mariners as they trickle into camp for the next two weeks.
Willie Bloomquist spent the offseason in a gym adding muscle mass and now tips the scales at an impressive 143 pounds!
Wiki Gonzalez hired a personal trainer to prove that he isn’t the laziest player in baseball!
Quinton McCracken used his double major from Duke to invent a new natural supplement that gives him the strength of ten men!
Just remember, none of this means a thing. Being in shape is great, but if you’re last name is Bloomquist and you play for the Mariners, you still can’t hit major league pitching, regardless of how much body fat you have.
You may recall that MILB.com, where I like to look for minor league transactions, has apparently stopped carrying them (much to my dismay). I checked back today to find this: “We are aware of the Transactions problem. We are in a transitional phase and are working to correct this problem. The tracking of player movements will definitely be a part of our coverage of the 2004 season and beyond.”