by A.J. Coltrane

Disclaimer:  Unusually shoddy use of sabermetrics and statistics ahead! This post is a thought experiment, a combination of ideas I’ve been kicking around. The concept can now “Fly, be free”, and go roost somewhere else.

Prior to the 2011 season, the sabermetric community and the gambling community agreed in their assessments of how many games the M’s would win. That number was about 69.5 – 70.

The Concept:

1.  Given that the numbers and the public opinion are the same, let’s say that we “know” that Mariners will win 70 games in 2011 — that the M’s true talent level will produce exactly 70 wins.

2.  Let’s say that we also “know” the standard deviation of season wins around that result. The difference would result from things like the team under or overperforming their expected wins relative to their run differential, or an unexpected player addition or loss, or something as simple as “luck.” This research has been done before, and the standard deviation of wins according to The Book is 6.4.

What does that mean?

It means that we could forecast the M’s ceiling and floor for season wins, as well as make a pretty good guess as to their actual odds for contention. Like so:

I rounded off the win totals of course, it isn’t possible for the M’s to win 4/10th of a game, anymore than it’s possible to have 6/10th of a kid, or be “kind of pregnant.”

In reality it’s hard to win fewer than about 48 games — a team composed entirely of fringe major leaguers would win around that many games. The 2001 Diamondbacks won 51 games. The 2004 Tigers won 43 games. Beyond that you have to go back to 1962 and the Mets, who went 40-120. I think it’s interesting that there was a 42-year gap between the terrible Tigers and Mets — I’d have to think that teams are almost never “pegged” for fewer than 60 wins in the new millenium.. there’s too much information available to even the most incompetent of baseball front offices, and the stakes are too high.

Blaidd wrote a post that focused in part on the M’s poor attendance so far this year. I’m wondering if maybe to some degree it isn’t “I already know how the movie ends, why bother going?” (That, and it’s been a cold spring.)

There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, that fans really didn’t know the talent level of their favorite team coming into a season. Information consisted of weekly Sports Illustrated fluff pieces, a skimpy sports section headed by people with homer-centric viewpoints, and, if you were lucky, a half-page in the Sporting News weekly baseball edition. You wouldn’t really know if your team had a shot or not until at least a couple of months into the season. Now, if somebody on the team gets a hangnail the fans know about it within a few minutes. The M’s opened the season 2-7, continued on to 4-11, and were declared DOA on the spot. Looking at the chart above, the M’s had less than a 2% chance of the playoffs this year before any games were played. The poor start basically finished their hopes for the playoffs.

And I think the fans “got it.”

by A.J. Coltrane

It took twelve years, but somebody finally did it. Ryan Raburn became a trivia answer last night by becoming the first player to hit the Safeco Field roof. (Technically it was a beam supporting the roof, but still.)

In other news: The final score was 8-3, Tigers. The M’s are now 5-12. It’s April 19 and Coolstandings gives the M’s a .2% chance to make the playoffs.

That was fast.

By Blaidd Drwg

And not about the team on the field, we already knew that product wouldn’t be particularly good. The attendance is what they should worry about. In the 6 game home stand the M’s just completed, they drew 138,127 fans, which is an average of 23,000 per game – not great, but not terrible for April when attendance tends to be lower. That number is deceiving, especially when you consider that more than half of those fans were at 2 games – the home opener (45,000) and the second game which was an Ichiro Felix Bobble Head night (30,000).

They managed to draw 21,000 to Kids Opening Day on Sunday (it seemed like a lot less than that), 13,000 to Felix’s first start of the season and 12,400 to the last game of the series against the Jays, a new all-time low attendance figure for Safeco field. The really sad thing is that the game Felix started also broke the record for the lowest attendance at Safeco field. I am also shocked to see that the attendance for the bobble head night was only 30k – it is usually closer to 40K.

This is a team with a nearly 90 million dollar payroll that has a handful of players worth watching, so the lack of people coming to the games is really not all that surprising. There has been a noticeable downward trend in attendance for years for the M’s and I think this might be the year they fail to break 2 million for the first time since Safeco opened. To make matters worse, with all the talk of a “youth movement” for the Mariners, their hitters have an average age of 31.3, which makes them older than every team in the AL except the Yankees (the league average is 29.5 years old). They do much better with an average pitcher age of 27.5, good for the 5th youngest in the AL, but outside of Felix and Pineda, are any of the “young” pitchers on this team really guys you see being Mariners in 3 years?