I don't know that we can really know much of what Jack & Co really want in a ballclub yet. It wasn't just a time crunch that they were dealing with - it was also a $$ crunch. They didn't exactly spend much of that $90 million on their own players. They had a lot of holes to fill and no $$ to spend.
When you've got almost $20 million of that $90 million tied up in two pitchers that had a net negative impact on the team (Silva and Batista), you are going to be in trouble almost no matter what. This off season will give us a much better read on what these guys value.
I will say that I still don't see a lot of budgetary reality in the M's blogosphere. Give Felix a blank check. Sign Webb. Add two or three "big bats" for LF, 3B and DH. I just don't see all that happening. As much as we might want to M's to run a Red Sox payroll, it's just not going to happen.
If I were to hazard a guess, I would guess that we are going to get a Felix extension and a Gillick off season - two or three $5-$8 million players. It's all going to come down to Jack - can he find an Olerud and a Boone or will he stick the franchise with underperforming players?
I/O: Fangraphs.com has an article pointing out that the 2009 Mariners had a sensational UZR as a team.
If UZR be on the right track here, the M's had a once-in-a-decade defense.
In the comments, the readers are left tackle the unaddressed question of, okay, but does pretty defense produce wins?
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CRUNCH: Assuming for the moment that UZR is not misleading here, and that the M's did have an unusually excellent defensive team:
1. Good on yer, boys.
2. The M's are now down a staggering -62 in run differential, despite having the #1 ERA in the American League.
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The locals have been calling for great defense as the Moneyball route to cost-effective contending. To me, the elephant in the room is that the 2009 Mariners executed this plan to the letter -- and wound up with a worse run differential than Bavasi's teams had.
The Mariners did play in Safeco with 3 center fielders all year, so without a doubt, their defense was real good. And at $90M+ the M's spent money too. And here we are with a team that, per Pythagoras, should have lost 88-90 games.
So when does anybody concede that we had the perfect defense, the $90M roster, and were nowhere near contending?
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The problem is that "cost-effective" superb defensive players, such as Endy Chavez, are cost effective because every other team, including the Theo Epstein- and Billy Beane-led teams, evaluated them as substitutes.
There's a reason that MLB teams don't go get backup CF's and SS's and sprinkle them around the diamond as starters.
Superb defensive players who can hit? Like Franklin Gutierrez and, in the NL, Adrian Beltre? Everybody wants those guys.
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Anyway... we're not trying to be snarky. I do firmly believe that backup CF's and SS's are not the basis of cutting-edge roster plans, and other locals believe the opposite, so the debate has been lively. There are a lot of substantial points to be made on the other side of the ball, of course.
Let's not lose sight of the basics: the defense was here. The "scoring more runs than the other guys" part wasn't.
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Tony Blengino said something very profound this summer: he and Capt Jack went out and got glove-first players because in the industry in 2009, that's the only kind of value you can get on 5 minutes' notice.
So Endy Chavez and Ronny Cedeno and Ryan Langerhans (LF), and Jack Hannahan 3b and, later, Michael Saunders LF and Jack Hannahan 1B were the best band-aids available.
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Cool. Let's hope that doesn't mean Jack Wilson at $8M and glove players in LF and 3b going forward. Dr. D got a very uncomfortable feeling that the Jack Hannahan 3b, Jose Lopez 1b type fixes were philosophical choices a lot more than they were emergencies.
If in 2010, the Mariners have a pretty defense and the worst offense in the league again, the mulligan won't apply.
It does this year. I'll buy it once. :- )
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The 2001 Mariners, also playing in Safeco, also had a once-in-a-decade defense. IIRC, they had a DER that was 13 points lower than the second-best defense -- like .730 vs .717 or somesuch.
But the 2001 Mariners brought their bats along with their gloves. Here are the OPS+'s of their top 11 players:
160
153
136
126
123
93
92
90
86
115
109
Pat Gillick isn't married to defense, but in the process of finding two-way ballplayers, he put together a great one.
Putting utility players with great gloves into the starting lineup isn't going to cut it. Blengino has stated that, given a little time, they'll find real starters who bring bats and gloves. I tend to believe him, because the fine Brewers' teams weren't notably built on utility-guys-come-starters.
Let's do it,
Dr D
Comments
I have become convinced by Sandy's argument that a team needs to build the foundation before "topping off" with the mega-free-agent signings. In the meantime, though, you gotta run a team out there, and you gotta convince them that they're scrapping for something.
Go back to Matt's post here: http://seattlesportsinsider.com/news/roster-turnover-let-kids-play
Draw a line over Aardsma (28). Who do you really need above the line? Ichiro and Branyan.
Then you got 19 guys 28 and below that you're moving forward with -- that's the foundation, and that's not even all of it (for example, Triunfel, Poythress, Robles, Fields, Aumont, Hill).
Above the line is where you find Wilson, Hannahan, Endy if he were still there; also Hall and Sweeney, who are not glove-first guys.
Below the line, where are the glove guys who would be backups on other teams? Maybe Rob Johnson, but you can argue that C is different.
So one way to construe the evidence so far is that they'll pull in glove guys as "roster patch" to stay competitive, but their main "foundational" moves for position players have been Guti, Ackley, giving Tui a shot at 2b, Carp, Poythress. (The other counterweight -- besides annoiting Johnson at C -- would be using a first-rounder on Nick Franklin, who's too young for Matt's list.)
I will be stunned if they simply pick up Wilson's option at $8M. I expect a multi-year deal at $5-6M per. And the main reasons for that are that there are NO options at short in the "foundation" section (even the "extended version" -- therefore, the need for "patch") and that Z truly believes he knows what Wilson brings from seeing him in the NL central for many years.
If we lop off the Silva and Batista dollars, that's $20M off of a $98.9M budget according to Cots. And now you're talking $79M after wasted dollars.*
Felix for peanuts, Russ Branyan for peanuts, your closer and CF for peanuts. After Felix, Branyan, the closer and CF you had $70M.
Beane's budget was $63M, so $79M after the two big errors is significant dollars.
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I agree with your basic reminder there, for sure, that the dollars are limited. :- )
Is that you put no pressure on yourself to identify, early, what your last few needs are.
On the other hand, if you can PREDICT to any extent where you'll need external help, then you expand your FA opportunity list. If you say, "I've got two offseasons, this and next, to buy my big FA's," you have more options than if you say "I've got to buy next offseason because I'll know more then."
If you have ARod at SS and Ken Griffey Jr in CF, then your job is EASIER in developing other position players -- 90% of all pro players can play left field.
But that's not to say that if you get an opportunity to sign Mark Teixeira for 50 cents on the dollar, that you won't exploit that opportunity and then accept the responsibility to fill the more difficult Yahtzee slot at SS.
It's all old hat to rotodweebs. :- ) Of course you'd like your Yahtzee-slot-fill job to be as easy as possible. But more important than that, is taking advantage of opportunities as they arrive.
...instead of calling attention to the ugly run differential, you could realize that the Mariners played all year with basically no offensive talent other than what they could acquire from the bargain barrel because the previous roster was constructed so badly that there was no way those problems were going to get fixed...and that a part of the reason they're a better club than their Pythag record is BECAUSE of that pretty defense you're so eager to bash.
But that's just my gut reaction.
Ya, the Ms OPS differential point to a .500ish team (maybe a bit better), and they did it solely because of the gloves.
Offensive upgrades at DH, LF, and 3B would help a ton.
...and we can get offense at DH and LF for sure without negatively impacting the great D much. And if Lopez moves over to third and Tui sticks at second, you've got two guys who, combined, can't be that much worse than the Beltre/Lopez/Hannahan cluster has been defensively this year...maybe we lose 10 runs by UZR if we bat-up in LF and go with some combo of Tui and Lopez at 2B and 3B next year. Doc seems to be laboring under the impression that the paradigm choice is EITHER gloves OR bats and there aren't teams who make gloves the priority first and still win (*cough*Cardinals*cough*). Never mind that we were in YEAR ONE of a rebuilding plan from a 101 loss disasterpiece theater of a roster with little prospect upside to tap...never mind that we were cash strapped...never mind that some of the players we acqiured for defense HELPED offensively. No no...in Dr. D's world, the Mariners should have lost 88-90 games this year BECAUSE they prioritized the gloves...rather than viewing it as "the Mariners should have lost 90+ games because they SUCKED before the season...but they're above .500 because Zduriencik found a cheap way to get them afloat."