Seattle Sports Insider

Where Have Dipoto's Trades Left Us ?

son, wait here while I put your mom through that thing

Posted by

12/22/16

Dipoto said something interesting on Mariners.org:

"With trades, you're acquiring players that fit your roster," he said. "It gives you the ability to fit a puzzle piece in with some degree of precision, because you identify the pieces and move forward. With free agents, you're in the market competing with 29 other teams. You have to fit the puzzle piece, but also sell your team, stadium, manager, city, the money. Each step gets more complicated."

MORE precision in trades? Than just going shopping for exactly the player you want?

Well, yeah. It sounds counterintuitive. But this has been an SSI mantra for quite a while ... that if Gentle Reader ever actually became a GM, he would find the free agent market sort of like trying to thread a needle with leather mittens on. There are only a very few options, and you gotta get your owner to sign off, and you gotta talk the agent into it, and by then your owner has changed his mind, and ... you might find that it boiled down real quick to Mark Trumbo vs. Brett Cecil. And that's as far as your options went.

Whereas! You might go to the DBacks and say, Hey, out of all 29 teams' trade bait, you got a player on the market who is just perfect... we'll give you Taijuan and Ketel, and then you let us pick any young player off this list of 20 who fits our roster...

Counterintuitive, but makes all kinds of sense. Also, most free agents on your list are OLDER than Mitch Haniger. Which Dipoto also emphasizes.

THEORY AND PRAXIS, Dept.

That said, how have Dipoto's trades actually gone. Huh? This Greg Johns article lists them all in order. What do we have, right now, that we could put our hands on? At what cost? Let's oversimplify, at the risk of actually understanding, though:

IN	OUT
Segura, SS	Marte, SS
KKKarns, P	Taijuan, P
Vogelbach, 1B	Trumbo, 1B
Valencia, 1B-3B	Miller, SS (?)
Haniger, OF	Montgomery, RP
Leonydas, CF	Farquhar, RP
Ruiz & Gamel, C & RF	Nuno, P

We sort of put them on 1st board, 2nd board, etc ... what's notable here: of the 7-8 biggest offloads, half were pitchers. Of Dipoto's main adds, all but KKKarns are batters. That's a roto-y approach. Get your predictable hitters and then throw spaghetti against the wall on the mound.

Lesser ADDS

Whalen, Heston, Povse, Scribner

Lesser SUBTRACTS

Alex Jackson, Tyler Pike, Taylor SS, Kivlehan

So ... would you deal Segura, Karns, Vogelbach and crew for Marte, Taijuan, Logo et al?

UND TAKE ZIS MIT YOU, Dept.

In Dipoto's first year, 2016, the M's did good but trades had little to do with it. He jettisoned Mark Trumbo for Steve Clevenger, who was worth less than a Tweet. (Well, maybe that's not saying much; the value of a Tweet has escalated from Steve Clevenger to $4.2 billion airplanes to, apparently, one Nuclear Winter to be named later.*)

The big contributors were the Stars of the payroll, along with internal solutions Diaz and Paxton and maybe Zunino. A free agent part-timer or two, mainly Cishek and Dae-Ho and Iannetta, caulked in some cracks. We are oversimplifying at the risk of actually understanding.

It hasn't started paying off yet, but there's no way I'm giving you back Segura & Karns & Valencia, and the sleeker, saber-y Big Three Prospects for a set of Zduriencikian wannabes.

BABVA,

Dr D

....

* The poignant moment of the transition was the day that Twitter couldn't make the traveling squad on the tech giant roundtable. The typical CEO at Trump's tech meeting was head of a company worth $200-600 billion; Twitter's market capitalization is a feeble $11 billion. Also, Twitter's advertising waters are swirling down the tubes because of all their fake accounts.

It's got to hurt when the Twitter company is worth less than tomorrow morning's Tweet! LOL ;- )

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Comments

Twitter (and the Mariners)

There were two trades that were just AWEFUL on Dipoto's list...and the rest were pretty good. That's a fairly decent batting average IMHO - if you don't deal Miller for Karns the head-case...you don't have to deal Walker for Segura...or if you do that deal anyway, Miller becomes a nice corner outfielder. And if we'd not thrown Trumbo away after it was plainly obvious that he was fixed to anyone paying attention...we could have kept Montgomery...who would have been MIGHTY useful down the stretch...but whatever. :\

On the whole, I think the trades have brought in more than they've wasted. So...good.

As for Twitter - their advertising revenue is disappearing in part because of fake accounts and in part because they're run by authoritarian thugs who censor free speech and make the environmnent hostile to half of the American users.

Censorship

I'm wondering what your evidence is for censorship on twitter? I routinely see the most vile, nasty things posted on Twitter - mostly from the right. If they are censoring, then they are doing a pretty bad job of it. If it's the Milo thing, they had to ban the jerk. He organized a nasty hate-filled Troll attack on another Twitter user. He did the organizing it on a different platform, got caught red-handed doing it and then threw a fit and called it censorship. Bull Dookey.

I know a little something about Twitter's ad model. Ad revenue is unquestionably tanking because of all the fake accounts and bots. When Twitter tells you that your ad will reach/has reached X# of eyeballs, you cannot trust that number. By some accounts, 20%+ of twitter accounts are fake. Nobody is paying to advertise to a fake account or bot. Jack is in a trap of his own making on it, too, since one of the primary metrics he has reported to his board is # of active accounts. He literally cannot give the ax to the fake accounts and bots withouth losing 20-25% of his "active accounts".

Here ya go:

http://www.dailywire.com/news/3295/meet-leftists-who-will-be-censoring-y...

The source is undoubtedly a conservative source, but they provide the backgrounds of twitter's team of social monitors and the turn toward increased SJW activism on the site.

I actually agree re: Milo, though. I can't stand the man - I think he is a vile, angry person who does nothing but stir up emotions to gain attention.

Re: Milo

Milo, pretty early on in his Final Form's rampage across the internet, was candid about the role he's filling as a cultural icon and how he wishes he lived in a world where people like him *didn't* capture the attention that he does or serve the purpose he serves. Go back and look at some of his earlier appearances, as recently as 2013, and you'll see a WILDLY different person on camera.

He's playing a role, and he's doing it with aplomb and gusto which rightly should induce cringing and outrage by people from across the spectrum. Unfortunately, that's a feature of Free Speech, not a glitch. You *want* people out there pushing the boundaries as energetically as possible, and you *want* people poking bears that the rest of us are too timid to poke. It's why things like crucifixes bathed in urine are tolerated in our society and, in certain circles, even upheld as high art. Milo's doing the same thing from the 'opposite' side of the spectrum (if the spectrum was indeed one dimensional, which we all know it's not but it makes communicating the idea that much quicker).

I want to live in a world where people like Milo, 2016, are ignored rather than applauded. I want to live in a world where the hippies are ignored. I want to live in a world where lunatics and doomsayers are ignored. We don't live in that world, though, and I'm good with that.

I'm a Milo fan, for sure, but I also wish that our society was well-rounded and free enough in terms of our dialogue that someone who behaves as he does is ignored or ridiculed rather than borne into speeches on golden litters while proclaiming himself to be the Most Fabulous Supervillain On The Internet.

BTW...

"most of it from the right"?

I'm gonna have to call baloney on that one. The storm of hateful celebrations when noted conservatives die, screeds about doing away with people the left dislikes and hastags like #KillAllWhites would argue the hatred and ugliness on twitter is pretty even.

Perhaps it's a bit of a Rohrshach test? :- )

Hey, amigo, are Republicans meaner or are Democrats?

Both

It's gotten ridiculous. I worked for Sen. Morse in DC in 1968 (as an intern) and even in THAT year partisanship was at least polite, if still there. None of his colleagues called Richard Russell a segregationist jerk, even if he might have been one. Instead, they tried to get laws passed. It seems that the hooligans outside the Chicago convention (from both sides) are now our elected representatives - and still more interested in theatre than governing.

Can you imagine what "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today" would be like amplified on Twitter? And then located in the seats of power rather than in the mob outside?

And how about conservatives (over)reacting (to sometimes reprehensible - but still free - speech) like the Chicago police? We're there.

And lost souls like Dylann Roof listen to that kind of stuff and feel it justifies them.

Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls - it tolls for thee.

God Bless Us Every One. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHtlJb-nDwU

I think switching Trumbo to 'Bach

Is largely about having potential breakout youth around the core. Keeping the window open can happen if just one or 2 of those guys break through each year and Dipoto has given every indication that that's exactly what his goal is.

If Seth Smith gets traded, what's the average age on opening day? 2 years younger than when he took over? 3? And that with the holdovers aging 1.5 years during that time.

And of course factoring in the salaries...

Trumbo at $10, $14M per year or Dan Vogelbach for free? You've got to make that tradeoff at SOME positions.

Happy Birthday to Mitch Haniger!

Only 25 when acquired. I thoughtl 26-28 was Dipoto's wheelhouse. Martin, Karns, Segura...Ithought there were more. But then Vogue and Gamel were only 23. Ruiz and Valencia are in their 30s.

Well...Ruiz is 1 year (to the day) younger than Figgins. Thank God his skills are different.

An observation from an ingnoramus

In my intellectual depravity I have been enjoying watching other MLB clubs claim and reclaim former Mariners formerly chosen by Dipoto. It seems that the _other_ GM's think his picks, though they themselves be waived when greater perceived value is found, are worthy of consideration. I may be wrong, but it seems this is occuring with greater frequency than under previous regimes. I suppose this could simply be a result of the sheer volume of Dipoto's activity. But, in my willful land of mariner-blue-colored glasses, I prefer to think that we have a GM who is a cut above what we've known in the past.

It sounds silly or trite, but there's nowhere to go but 'up'

from the management team that led the M's for the first dozen years of the millenium. Friends and co-workers used to boggle at how bad the M's were at trades, and they weren't exactly hardcore fans. They'd catch a game per week, maybe one every other week, but that didn't invalidate their opinions.

It looked *to me* like if the M's had made *zero* trades from 2001-2012 (when I stopped paying super close attention to the roster moves) that the organization would have been markedly better off. And it seemed *to me* that if they had pulled the trigger on the handful of trades involving eventually busted prospects (like Jeremy Reed) *in addition* to all the other bad trades they did happen to make in that timeframe, they would have been better off.

It's entirely possible that this was purely hindsight based on speculation, but it genuinely seems to me that the team has nowhere to go but 'up' in terms of its front office performance. And, thankfully, it appears that's the direction things are headed.