As I sit here this morning thinking about the Mariners game Friday night, I am struck by the lineup they fielded. You have Ichiro and Figgins at the top, Bradley, Olivio, Smoak and Cust in the middle and Wilson, Saunders and Ryan and the back end, Not exactly Murderer’s Row, but it was good enough to get them the win last night after Brendan Ryan, who was batting under .190 going into the at bat, punched a single up the middle to score the winning run.
Jack Cust - The Sluggardly Slugger who leads the Mariners in walks.
Talking to Annie at the game made me realize this lineup is pushing the extremes at both ends of the OBP spectrum. Generally the league average OBP is somewhere around .325. You are above average in the .365 to .375 range and, if you are over .400, you are an OBP machine. Conversely, anything under .300 means you probably shouldn’t be a regular in the lineup.
Here is how the lineup last night looked with their OBP listed as of 5/7:
Player
OPB
OBP+
Ichiro
.356
109
Figgins
.270
83
Bradley
.318
97
Olivo
.236
72
Smoak
.413
127
Cust
.361
111
Wilson
.278
85
Saunders
.242
74
Ryan
.270
83
The OBP number is basically how good a players OBP is relative to league average with 100 being league average. This lineup is basically split between the guys who get on base at an above average clip and the guys who are really bad at it. There isn’t much room for middle ground in this lineup, which has a lot to do with why the Mariners are still only in a 3-way tie for 10th in the AL in scoring with Baltimore and Chicago. The interesting thing is that the Mariners are actually second in walks in the AL, only 3 behind the Red Sox. How are they doing it? “Walk this way” and I will show you:
Player
Walks
BA
OBP Spread
Jack Cust
23
.200
161
Justin Smoak
16
.315
98
Milton Bradley
13
.215
103
Ichiro
11
.304
52
Ryan Langerhans
11
.173
143
Brendan Ryan
8
.191
79
Chone Figgins
8
.222
48
Michael Saunders
7
.184
58
Luis Rodriguez
7
.220
127
Miguel Olivo
6
.200
36
Jack Wilson
4
.243
35
Adam Kennedy
4
.275
36
Chris Giminez
4
.263
128
The OBP spread is OBP – BA, it is a quick and dirty way to see how much of a players OBP comes from walks. A value of 100 is considered a very patient hitter, 60 would be about league average and a value of 40 would be a free swinger. I caution you that these numbers are skewed by sample size, but it does illustrate how you can be at the bottom of the league in scoring while being near the top in walks – THIS TEAM DOES NOT HIT. Putting guys on base is great, but it doesn’t help you if you don’t drive them in, which is the Mariners problem. If Eric Wedge handed me the keys to the castle for one day, this is the lineup you would see:
Figgins – 3B
Bradley – LF
Ichiro – RF
Smoak – 1B
Langerhans – CF
Cust – DH
Kennedy – 2B
Giminez – C
Ryan – SS
There isn’t much to work with and I hate Langerhans, but honestly, he is the best option for this lineup right now. If the bats eventually come around and the guys who are walking now continue to do so, this team will have a legitimate shot at a .500 record. If they continue to hit like a bunch of bush leaguers, I will stand by my original win prediction.
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:
Wins
Percent
89-95
0.1%
83-88
2.1%
76-83
13.6%
70-76
34.1%
63-69
34.1%
56-62
13.6%
48-55
2.1%
41-47
0.1%
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.
Now you can pick him out of a police lineup if needed.
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.
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).
Not even this handsome gentleman could boost attendance at Safeco these days.
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?
As I sit here yet again late at night, working, I find myself reflecting on the Mariners home opener. The game was not pretty – they got shellacked badly and the offense looked lifeless. I won’t bother with a game recap, there are plenty of those out there, I wanted to talk about a few things I noticed at the game.
Just about everyone on the coaching staff played for the Cleveland Indians at some point in their career, which is funny considering it is a new staff and the home opener was against Cleveland. The only coaches that did not play for Cleveland are Mike Brumley and Carl Willis (although Willis did sign with them as a free agent but ended up pitching in the minors for them). The other 6 coaches all played at least 1 game for Cleveland.
I am digging the new scoreboards that line the stadium. They are LED, easy to read and have all sorts of new statistical information. The one near the Hit It Here Café not only has the pitchers line for the game, but also has the hitters BA/OBP/OPS for the season, vs. the handedness of the pitcher on the mound and his career splits against the current pitcher.
The Dave Neihaus tribute was somewhat lacking. While I am sure the My Oh My rap song was a heartfelt tribute, it sounded lousy and didn’t seem to fit celebrating the man who was the voice of the Mariners. I am sure they wanted something less somber than the tribute that was held in the off-season, but the least they could have done was have a moment of silence for Dave. There should not have been a dry eye in the house for this.
They did have a remembrance for the baseball players who passed away in the off-season. I hadn’t realized it, but we lost several Hall of Famers in the span of a couple of months. Our connection to the golden age of baseball is slowly fading into history and soon there will be no one left who remembers it.
Something I noticed – when Ichiro was presented with his plaque for becoming the Mariners all-time hit leader by Edgar Martinez, Edgar got a much bigger ovation. Edgar looks like he dropped a bunch of weight also and hasn’t looked that good since his playing days.
On a note not related to the Mariners, this is the 50th anniversary of the first time that MLB expanded, when the AL added 2 teams. Can you name them? (answer after the jump)
The Vegas over/under for M’s season wins opened in the 67.5 – 68.5 range. The number closed at 70.
I recently read somewhere that in 2010 there were a few significant differences between sabermetric projections and the Vegas lines, and that this year they’re pretty much in agreement.
As I was working at 2 AM the other morning and was trying to stay awake watching a file load, I started thinking about the 2011 season for the Mariners and what that is going to look like. I took a “best case” and “worst case” look at the team and eventually it evolved into a discussion with myself. Here is how that broke down:
This analysis of the Mariners is sort of like Spy vs. Spy.
Starting Pitching
The rotation: Felix, Jason Vargas, Doug Fister, Erik Bedard, Michael Pineda
The Optimist’s Take – this has the potential to be one of the top 5 rotations in baseball. Felix should easily put together another Cy Young quality season, Bedard looks like he regained his form and is ready to be dominating, Vargas is right about in his prime years and looks to have finally realized his ceiling, Fister is a serviceable back of the rotation guy, and Pineda looks ready to be a young Felix. The rotation could be the strength of this team.
The Pessimist’s Take – Once you get past Felix, this rotation has a potential for disaster. Vargas has no track record to show last season was not a fluke; Bedard is as fragile as a china doll and there is nothing in the organization to replace him with (French, Robertson, and a bunch of 4A guys); Fister is a soft tosser that is always playing with fire when it comes to getting shelled; Pineda might be the next coming of Felix, or he might pitch like a 22 year old rookie and find himself back in Tacoma sooner rather than later. There are too many questions to get excited about the rotation right now.
Relief Pitching
The Pen: David Pauley, Brandon League, Chris Ray, Jamey Wright, Josh Lueke, Tom Wilhelmsen and Aaron Laffey
The Optimist’s Take – the pen is going to have to hold together until Aardsma comes back. League should step right in to the closer role the rest of the pen is a nice combination of rookies and vets with some hard tossers thrown in. If they can hang on until Aardsma is back, they should be tough in the 7th, 8th and 9th innings with League – Lueke – Aardsma.
The Pessimist’s Take – this pen is a bunch of has-beens and never will-bees. League is solid and they will hopefully improve when Aardsma comes back, but who bridges the gap between the starters and League. Chris Ray, has a terrible injury history and isn’t a power pitcher anymore. Pauley, Laffey and Wright are all mop up guys and you don’t want them protecting any leads. Lueke throws hard and has all of 17 innings at AAA in his career. Wilhelmsen is a 27 year old rookie who has never pitched above class A. That is not the kind of pen that strikes fear into the hearts of opposing hitters.
Hitters
The Starters: Chone Figgins at third, Brendan Ryan at shortstop, Jack Wilson at second and Justin Smoak at first. Miguel Olivo will start behind the plate. Jack Cust will be the designated hitter. Seattle’s outfield will include Ichiro Suzuki (right field), Ryan Langerhans (center field) and Milton Bradley (left field).
Langerhans as the starting CF for the Mariners? Really?
The Optimist’s Take – the lineup can’t possibly be any worse than it was last season. Figgins should be better at 3B than Lopez and will hopefully build off his 2nd half of 2010; Ryan should be better than the Wilson-Wilson-Woodward disaster there last season; Wilson is probably a downgrade at 2B and you have to wonder if there is something wrong with him (you don’t normally move a Gold Glove SS to 2B for a lesser defensive replacement) and hope that Ackley is ready by June; Smoak has a full season under his belt and looks more relaxed; Cust will be better than the black hole at DH the M’s had last season and has the potential for being a legitimate 25-30 HR power threat; Olivo should be more productive then Bard-Moore-Johnson; Ichiro will be Ichiro. The only real potential areas for worse production are CF (until Guti comes back) and LF where it will be dependant on which Milton Bradley shows up day to day.
The Pessimist’s Take – Of course this lineup would be hard pressed to do worse than last year’s ineptitude. In the IF, you have an unknown with Smoak and potentially 4 sub-100 OPS+ guys manning the rest of the IF, with three of those guys, Ryan, Wilson and Olivo possibly posting sub-300 OBP. Olivo didn’t hit last year outside of Colorado, so how far will his numbers drop? Cust is a nice addition, but will he show any power in Safeco? Ichiro will hopefully continue to produce, but Langerhans in center? Really? You aren’t going to win and you need to know if Saunders is going to have anything resembling a decent career so why not put him out there. Either way, I think we are going to find that Guti’s 2009 season was his career year when he gets back from the DL. Bradley should be interesting. I give him until April 20th to blow up again.
The Bench
Luis Rodriguez and Adam Kennedy will act at utility infielders, Adam Moore as backup catcher and Michael Saunders acting as a utility outfielder.
The Optimist’s Take – Not much here to look at; you just hope that they are able to produce something when they are in the lineup.
The Pessimist’s Take – Langerhans should be your backup OF. You are leaving too much potential on the bench.
The Outlook The Optimist’s Take – if the pitching comes together and the hitting improves, this should be a 73 – 77 win team. Nothing exciting, but not nearly as dreadful as last year,
The Pessimist’s Take – this team isn’t much of an improvement over last season’s crapfest, so they should really end up in the 65 – 70 win range, only because you have Felix and it is really hard to lose 100 games in back to back seasons. The fire sale should take place in about June again.
After the outlooks were written, the following conversation took place:
Pessimist: Hey, O, what kind of sunshine are you smoking, calling this a 77 win team? Optimist: The pitching is better, the hitting should improve. Pessimist: You could put me in the lineup and the hitting would improve. Even if the M’s score 100 more runs this season, that will still probably make them the worst offense in the AL. Do you really think this team is going to score 100 more runs? Optimist: Probably not, but the pitching will probably give up fewer runs and close the run differential gap. Pessimist: You mean like last season when we had Cliff Lee? What do you do when Bedard can’t make it past the 5th in every start and then goes down with an injury? Luke French time? Optimist: This team doesn’t exactly have pitching depth. Pessimist: And the bullpen? Optimist: Yeah, they really aren’t that impressive. Pessimist: Ok, let me get this straight – the offense is better, but still among the worst in the AL, the pitching could be great, but is fragile and the bullpen isn’t good. Yet, you think they will improve by 15 wins? Back to my original question, what kind of sunshine are you smoking? Optimist: Well, since you say it that way, it does sound a little crazy. Pessimist: Yeah, just a *little*. Then again, this conversation is between me and myself.
There you have it, my prediction is the Mariners win between 65 and 70 games this season.
Will someone please explain this to me – The Kingdome, which cost $67 million to build originally and another $51 million to fix when the roof fell in, and was blown up in 2000, won’t be paid off until sometime in the second half of this decade. Safeco Field, which cost $340 million in public funds to build, will be paid off by the end of this year. Did the state ever think that refinancing those bonds from the Kingdome might be a good idea?
I have been thoroughly confused by the moves that his Holiness, Jack Z has made over the last few weeks – not as confused as I am with the moves that Wunderkind Theo Epstein has made, but that is for another post. Z’s moves over the last couple of years have really made me wonder if he is the guy we want running this team.
I was ready to write a nice post praising Z for the signing of Jack Cust and trading Jose Lopez. I really like Cust – yes, he strikes out a ton and yes, he is a butcher in the OF (hey he is no worse than Raul Ibanez ever was), but the guy is a LH power bat who has posted decent numbers in Safeco over his career. More importantly, Cust has great plate discipline and walks a ton, a direction this team really needs to start heading in to be successful. Getting rid of Lopez is addition by subtraction – he can’t hit, he hasn’t met a pitch he didn’t like and he was generally not good defensively. The fact they got a warm body for him was an added bonus. My only question is – does signing Cust mean that Saunders is not going to get regular playing time in LF?
Then Z goes and makes some moves that just are mind blowing.
1) He signs Miguel Olivo for 2 (!) years. Olivo is basically Jose Lopez but a catcher – he swings at everything, hits for occasional power and really is not considered a good fielder. The Mariners moved him a few years ago when he was younger because he couldn’t hit and the pitchers hated throwing to him. I am pretty sure nothing has changed. And before you point out his decent production over the last few seasons – I would like to point out that 3 of those 5 seasons came in the NL, he posted an OPS+ greater than 100 only once and his walk totals in those 5 season were 9, 14, 7, 19 and 27 – every one of those seasons he racked up at least 360 plate appearances.
2) He trades for Brendan Ryan. Ryan is a spare part – a Josh Wilson kind of guy who can play 3 IF positions, none extraordinarily well, but well enough and can hit a little, but you are probably asking for trouble if you give him north of 300 plate appearances. I fundamentally have no problem with getting Ryan, they gave up a guy who probably will never make the majors for him; it is what they are planning to do with Ryan that makes no sense – make him a starter. How many Jack Wilson/Josh Wilson/Matt Tuisasosopo guys do you need on your roster – they are all interchangeable parts and carrying 3 or 4 of them will really limit your team – how does it benefit you if you have 3 guys who all can do the same thing with the same basic abilities.
3) Releasing Rob Johnson. I have no love for Johnson – he can’t handle the pitchers very well, he has trouble with keeping the ball in front of him (as evidenced by the 9 PB in 61 games last year), hasn’t shown that he can hit MLB pitching and really shouldn’t be a starter. He is 28 and probably primed for his best career season, is making close to league minimum and has shown that he can hit in the minors. You are telling me that you had to DFA him instead of finding someone that would be willing to take him for a warm body? They needed to clear a roster spot for Jack Cust, but I don’t understand dumping a catcher. Someone will end up signing him.
The Mariners are going to have to make another move when Olivo officially signs. I can only hope that they guy they get rid of is one of the Jack Wilson/Josh Wilson/Matt Tuisasosopo three headed monster.
There have been plently of eulogies for Dave Niehaus’ passing. He was a great announcer (although clearly slipping over the last couple of years), one of the last remaining great ones and his death is truly a loss to the baseball world.
Rob Neyer chimed in on his meeting of Niehaus, and it is moving:
In the Big Baseball World, I’m a nothing and Dave Niehaus is an Institution. Frankly, every time I walked into the booth and saw him, I halfway assumed he would have completely forgotten me. How many people must Niehaus have met over the years? How many other broadcasters and writers and glad-handers and just plain baseball fans have wanted their little moments with the man who had seen nearly every game in Mariners history?
And every time I stepped into his office, Dave Niehaus seemed genuinely glad to give me a few of his precious moments, happy to invite me to sit down next to him and talk about baseball or his trip to Cooperstown or whatever was ailing his Mariners.
I wish I had just a few more of those moments. I didn’t visit the booth in 2010. I didn’t want to impose. And I didn’t imagine, for even a second, that I would never have another chance. I sort of thought Dave Niehaus would live forever.
Tonight I’m feeling sorry for myself. I’m feeling sorry for his family. And I’m feeling sorry for the many thousands of Pacific Northwest baseball fans who have spent huge and hugely important chunks of their lives with Dave Niehaus. All of us will go on next spring, because that’s what we do. It’s just not yet apparent how, exactly.
Neyer is right – we will go on, and I am sure that there will be a moving tribute to Dave Niehaus on opening day, one last chance to say goodbye to a great one.
FlatbreadGarden 