The Mariners announced yesterday that Manager John McLaren and General Manager Bill Bavasi will both be back next year.
McLaren took over in mid-season, the team was 40-41 under his guidance. 2008 will be Bavasi's fourth year as Mariners GM.
Out in blogland, they've been calling for McLaren's head since the M's went on a 15 of 17 losing jag, one of the biggest collapses by a contending team in baseball history. The main complaint: that McLaren was too hesitant to use young Adam Jones, who'd torn up AAA pitching.
McLaren instead decided to stick with his veterans, Raul Ibanez, Jose Vidro, and Richie Sexson. And as the season winds down, let's see how they did:
Ibanez: .290, 20 HR, 103 RBI.
Vidro: .382 OBP (that's only .13 less than Ichiro, or 3%.)
Sexson: .205, 63 RBI.
Yep, Sexson was a bust. But McLaren was right on two out of three.
McLaren also took heat for his management of the bullpen during the losing streak. Using Rick White, for instance, while J.J. Putz sat idle. These were infuriating decisions, but not troubling in the long run. The losing streak wasn't McLaren's fault, it was the fault of the bullpen.
And for that, we must turn to Mr. Bavasi, who engineered one of the most disastrous trades in Mariner history in the offseason, acquiring Horacio Ramirez for fireballing reliever Rafael Soriano.
The trade was made out of desperation. Bavasi had an impossible task this offseason--get three starting pitchers. He wisely steered away from granting massive long-term contracts to pitchers on the downslopes of their careers, (Mr. Zito), and instead tried to make do with trades and bargain bin shopping. The three players he got:
The mediocre:
Miguel Batista: 15-11, 4.33 ERA. Cost: 3 year, $25 million contract
The bad atrocious:
Jeff Weaver: 7-13, 6.30 ERA. Cost: 1 year, $8.2 million contract (probably ended up being more with incentives).
Horacio Ramirez: 8-7, 7.16 ERA. Cost: $2.6 million PLUS Rafael Soriano, who had a great year in the Braves 'pen.
Bavasi's strategy for acquiring starting pitcher was disastrous. Instead of looking for young, cheap, unproven pitchers, he threw good money and good players at pitchers who had nothing going for them other than major league experience. It couldn't have worked out worse, as the M's starters--as a group--have the 2nd-worst ERA in the American League, though they start 1/2 their games in pitcher-friendly Safeco Field.
The terrible starting pitching had a pernicious effect on the bullpen, which had to consistently pick up three or four innings per night because the starters--even the decent ones--didn't make it past six innings. By trading Soriano, Bavasi lost a guy who could've been a key cog in the 'pen.
I don't think it's too big of a stretch to say that had the M's kept Soriano, they would've made the Wild Card.
Bavasi's big offseason offensive acquisition--trading injury-prone outfielder Chris Snelling for Jose Vidro, was pilloried by fans. As I wrote at the time:
USS Mariner commenters, never a stable bunch to begin with, are variously threatening to murder, blackmail, and engage in sexual congress with GM Bill Bavasi.
As it turned out, this was Bavasi's best deal. Vidro had a good year, and Snelling, once again, missed most of the season with an injury.
The lineup scored nearly five runs a game, and if $15.5 million man Richie Sexson had hit as well as even an average first baseman, would've been among the best in the AL.
Were Bavasi or McLaren perfect? No. Not even close. But firing them would be a precipitous move, ushering in a whole new regime. That just not what you do when a team goes from 77 to 85 wins. Whether or not the M's improved in the stats (they actually allowed more runs than they scored), they won eight more games than they did the year before.
This may sound like Joe Morgan talking, but baseball is about winning games, and I don't see how you can judge them on any other basis.
I mean, if I sell widgets, and I sell 20,000 more widgets than the year before, you're going to come in and tell me that you looked at the number of sales calls I did, and, mathematically, I only should've sold 2,000 more widgets?
That's nuts. Bavasi and McLaren get one more year, and I hope they do something with it.
Let's go 2008 M's!
6 comments:
I just don’t see any good reason to keep these two guys around when there are better options out there. As a fan, I want to see the M’s do whatever’s necessary to turn the team into a World Series contender. I’m sure you feel the same way. Do you really see that happening with Bavasi and McLaren manning the ship? I certainly do not. How the hell are the M’s going to win a title when their best hitter has an OPS of .826? When their number two pitcher is Jarrod Washburn?
There simply aren’t any .900 OPS guys at the right position or above average starting pitchers available in free agency this off-season (Bonds being the exception, though I doubt the M’s will go there). Aside from Adam Jones and WLAD there’s no one in the farm that’s capable of turning into those types of players in the near future and at this point it’s unsure whether McLaren will even give either of them the chance. As for trading, well, Bavasi has never pulled of a deal for a legit #2 starter or a high OPS guy and I don’t see any reason to believe he’ll be able to pull one off now.
In their current configuration, the M’s are a Ryan Howard and Jeremy Bonderman away from perennial contention. We’d have to sell the farm to get just one of those types of player. Bavasi’s been able to get the team to slightly above average, which is something you’d hope he’d be able to do with a $110,000,000 payroll, but in reality we’re not much closer to winning a World Series now then we were when he took over. The negative run differential is a very, very bad sign for next year’s team. Expect ~80 wins.
It’s time for new management.
Oh, and there’s no way that Soriano’s worth seven wins, which is what it would take for the M’s to have been in the Wild Card chase.
I wish I'd explained the Soriano thing better. By himself, Soriano isn't worth seven wins. But by having Soriano for the 8th, it means you are using Sherrill/Green in the 7th, and the less effective O'Flaherty and Morrow in the disastrous Rick White/John Parrish role.
So you're not only getting Soriano's improved production, you're also getting improved production all the way down the line in that bullpen.
Not only that, but the improved production comes in EXTREMELY high-leverage situations. I mean, you can't really compare the stats of Putz and, say, Green, to determine how many wins each are worth. Putz appeared in the ninth inning, when outs are simply more important than they are in the sixth.
So, with Soriano, you're getting a better pitcher getting more important outs in the 8th, on down the line.
Also, you would've had someone in the rotation other than Ramirez, which could only have been a good thing.
I understand the increased value of outs in the 8th and 9th inning, but even the best set-up guys in the game don’t prevent 45 runs (a conservative estimate of what seven wins would be worth in the 8th inning, though it’s more likely closer to 55 or 60) over the course of a season. Assuming he pitched the same number of innings he did in Atlanta if he had stayed in Seattle, to get to that number he’d have to prevent almost 2/3 of a run an inning over a replacement level pitcher. Had he not given up a single run all year, he still wouldn’t have come close to hitting that number (he’d need at least 90 innings). There’s no denying that a 3.00 ERA and 3.82 xFIP are first-class numbers for a set-up guy, and it certainly would have been good to have him in our bullpen this year, just not seven wins good. Factor in at least a .5 bump in his ERA from switching leagues, a flyball tendency, and the Mariner’s disastrous defense, and the drop-off from Raffy to Green become much less than you’d think.
Runs and wins are given as numbers above a replacement level player. Because relief pitching is the most fungible asset in baseball, applying runs and wins to a guy like Soriano should, if anything, exaggerate his value, not reduce it. So, the fact that Green and Sherrill pitched the majority of his innings, particularly in the high leverage situations, actually diminishes his win value.
I hated the Raffy trade as much as the next guy and the team would certainly have been better off if they had kept him. I had hoped the M’s would give him another shot in the rotation this year. But few people, Jeff Sullivan excluded, thought Ho-Ram would suck nearly as much as he ended up sucking. And while Ho-Ram was worse than replacement level this year, his crapitude does not augment Soriano’s value. The truth is that we can’t know who would have been in the rotation in Ho-Ram’s place if the trade hadn’t gone down. Feierabend? Yeah, he looked a lot better. You just can’t evaluate the trade by saying “oh, Soriano’s +3 wins minus Ho-Ram’s -4 wins equals 7 wins” because Soriano’s absence or presence on the team had nothing to do with the M’s keeping Ramirez in the rotation for so long.
"...but even the best set-up guys in the game don’t prevent 45 runs (a conservative estimate of what seven wins would be worth in the 8th inning, though it’s more likely closer to 55 or 60) over the course of a season"
i don't think we were thinking soriano was going to help us win 7 games that we lost by 8 runs/game...
Give me 20 runs, let me add them or take them away from eighth innings, and I'll get you at least 15 wins.
Also, Soriano's 3.00 ERA is no reflection of his value--check out his .86 WHIP, which was HALF of Green's.
Recap--Soriano, twice as good as Green.
Hey--I actually supported the Soriano trade at the time, I thought we needed another starter, and I assumed that the M's knew something about HoRam that the stats didn't indicate. Obviously I was wrong and the trade was sooo sooo soo terrible.
Seth, dude, you’ve got to understand that you - or the pitcher for that matter - can’t exactly pick when or where to add or subtract runs. Pitchers simply have very little control over when they give up runs. There is some evidence that a very select few pitchers are better at stranding runners, and better evidence that closers don’t perform as well in non-save situations. Other than that, a pitcher has no control over when surrender runs.
Also, WHIP is an absolutely terrible statistic for evaluating a pitcher’s ability. Last year, Freddy Garcia was second in the NL with a 1.28 WHIP, but otherwise was the definition of average with a 4.53 ERA and 103 ERA+. So, it does matter that Soriano and Green are completely different pitchers. Hits against Green aren’t nearly as costly as hits against Soriano because Green, unlike Soriano, is an extreme groundballer. Raffy gives up tons of flyballs, which lead to a lot of homers and other sorts of extra base hits you don’t like to see. Recap: half WHIP not equal half quality. All statistics are not created equal.
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