The sixth in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .276/.343/.447
Actual Line: .293/.358/.479

I'm tired of writing the same stuff about Ibanez over and over again so today I give you the illustrated version of what should at this point be common knowledge.

Yes, Raul Ibanez is a good hitter. Over the last three years he's been the best hitter on the team. But hitting is only half of his job, and while he's been able to hold his own in that department for a while, his defense has slipped to the point at which he could leave his glove in the outfield and go get some snacks during play and still provide a reasonable approximation of his physical ability. Overall he's been a below-average player these last two years, and at 36 years old, his best days are behind him, meaning whoever gives him a three-year contract to reward his professionalism and RBI totals will be paying a guy who simply doesn't help the team win. A small drop in his offense going forward will get him pushing the boundary of 1 WAR, and any significant age-related decline will sink his value in a hurry. He's just a bad gamble. Shame on the team that gives Raul the money he's going to get.

Raul, I appreciate all the run production and hard work, but your canonization is a shining example of everything that was wrong with the prior front office. Although I like you fine as a guy and as a role model for some of the younger players, I am beyond ready to move on and replace you with someone who gets more done, so with that in mind, good luck, and thanks for the laughs. Your defense may have contributed to the killing of a season, but your .gifs were what saved it. And that counts for something.

About damn time.

Baker:

Also, Zduriencik has had conversations about another free-agent and may have an answer in 48 hours.

LaRue:

As the coaches were being introduced, GM Jack Zduriencik said he had one contract offer on the table to an unnamed free agent...

Hickey:

GM Jack Zduriencik said in a conference call Monday afternoon that he has one offer out to a free agent. He wouldn't say who it would be, but did say he hoped to have an answer ''in the next 24-48 hours.''

The free agent is:

-a position player
-not Mark Teixeira
-not Griffey
-not Manny Ramirez
-not Barry Bonds

...which leaves us with but several dozen possibilities.

If it turns out to be Ben Broussard my heart will melt.

Good news from Larry LaRue. After Raul declines and goes away to be someone else's hilassacre, we'll land a pair of picks, and thereby avoid the retarded Jose Guillen mistake we made last winter. You want evidence that the new administration is better than the old one? There you go. Good heavens was that ever stupid.

In addition, we're bringing in two new coaches. Ty Van Burkleo comes over from Oakland to be Wakamatsu's new drinking buddy, and Lee Tinsley will regale baserunners and first basemen alike with stories of how he totally sucked in Sega's World Series Baseball '94. I expect he'll also give good advice, because if Tinsley learned anything from his own career, it's that standing on first base is a rare privilege, not a right, and you shouldn't try to pull anything stupid because you never know if you'll ever be back there again. Isn't that right, Lee? You were a bad little player, weren't you? Weren't you? Yes you were. awww

Fun fact: in 1996, Tinsley was successful on eight of twenty steal attempts.

The fifth in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .288/.340/.506
Actual Line: .266/.327/.457

Healer of sick and slayer of evil, in 2008 Adrian Beltre put in yet another strong and underappreciated full season of work. He flew out of the gate with a scorching first month, almost singlehandedly keeping a bad lineup good enough to remain competitive, and while a lousy May pulled him back down to Earth, he was done in by a .156 BABIP that in no way reflected how well he was hitting the ball. Things started to even out over the rest of the summer, and although Raul Ibanez finished with the numbers, a convincing argument could be made that for much of the year Beltre was making the best contact on the team. And all the while he was doing it with a torn ligament in his thumb, an injury to which he finally succumbed in September so that he can be ready for spring training. 

Playing through injuries is nothing new for this team. Much to my chagrin, it seems like half the guys have done it. But the difference is that, where the Silvas and Batistas and Ibanezes of the world either directly or indirectly used their injuries to explain away ineffectiveness, Beltre downplayed his pain and somehow managed to sustain around the same level of performance as before. The discomfort was obvious whenever he caught a line drive or got jammed by a pitch, but he never talked about it, and he never made excuses. He just went out there and played, celebrating his triumphs and accepting responsibility for his mistakes. If you're determined to play through an injury, this is the way to do it. Make sure it doesn't kill your performance, and then don't talk about it. If people play through pain to look tough and heroic, pointing it out all the time kind of negates the whole idea. In this sort of circumstance, the strongest leader is the silent one.

It wasn't just Beltre's offense that he managed to keep up despite the injury - for five and a half months, his defense was absolutely out of this world. And I mean that. Just look at what he did:

UZR: +29 runs
PMR: +17 plays
RZR: +32 plays
+/-: +32 plays

Altogether, those stats paint the picture of a guy who was 20 or 25 runs above average for his position in the field last year. 20 or 25 runs. Now obviously that isn't his true talent level, since that would be borderline insane, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. While Adrian Beltre's offense was hurt by a little bad luck in 2008, he made up for it in the field, and the overall package came together to make him the best player on the team. Which I understand is kind of damning with faint praise, but it's true nevertheless. Beltre was better than Ichiro, he was better than Lopez, he was better than Felix, and he was better than Ibanez. In 2008, Adrian Beltre was the greatest Mariner.

As of next April, he's in line to be the greatest Mariner once more. Or he might be ~tied with Ichiro and Felix. But the point remains. Beltre may not repeat as the +29 run UZR third basemen he was in 2008, but he's established a true talent somewhere between +10 < x < +20, and his offense should get a boost from a healthy left hand and a BABIP that improves on last year's .279. Put it all together and you've got a 3.5-4 WAR star player, a guy who'd be worth a good $17m or so on the open market. Adrian Beltre may not get his results in the most obvious way, but he still gets his results, and he's set to be a hell of a value, just as he's been for the last three years. Which answers the question of why we love him so much. We don't love him because he's funny, or because he has weird little ticks. We love him because he's one of the best baseball players this team has had in a good long time.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what puts him front and center this offseason. As maybe the best player on the team, Beltre stands as one of our most marketable assets, and when you're looking to rebuild an organization, desirable veterans with one year left under contract tend to be the first to go. And why wouldn't they? Veterans generally don't want to stick around and re-sign with a rebuilding franchise, so if they're going to leave down the road anyway, you might as well make them available, just to see. It only makes sense.

As painful as it is to think about, the front office needs to make a decision on Beltre, and they need to make it soon. Either they want him to be a part of this team's future or they don't. If they want him to stick around for the long run, they need to approach him, make their rebuliding intentions clear, and ask him if he'd be willing to re-sign. If he were to say yes, they'd need to start negotiating an extension before he has time to change his mind. If he were to say no (or maybe), they'd need to deal with it the same way they should if they didn't want him to stick around in the first place - make him available, take some offers, and pull the trigger on the best one if the return is better than whatever compensation picks they could get after the year. Because if Beltre doesn't want to re-sign with a project, it doesn't really do us that much good to keep him.

Assuming that we're getting ready to tear things down and start over, I can't imagine that Beltre has much interest in staying. He wants to win. He's only been in the playoffs once - for four games - and a player only has so many opportunities to pick a new team while he still has something left to contribute. So while I'm not going to draft my tearful goodbye just yet, I'm preparing myself. I expect to hear Beltre's name surface in a new rumor pretty much every morning. I expect to hear at some point that discussions are intensifying. And before too long I expect to hear that a deal went down. There're no guarantees, but given enough demand that there's a good enough return on the table, it seems like the best course of action for all parties involved. Including me. Even if it feels like someone ripping my heart through my ribs.

I guess I shouldn't get ahead of myself. As of this writing, Adrian Beltre's still a Mariner, and he's one of the best Mariners we've got. But because that may not last much longer, all I ask is that with every passing day, each and every one of you appreciates him. That each and every one of you appreciates the shit out of him. If only because somebody has to, and one man can't do it alone. No matter how fucking insane he might be.

Jesus

The fourth in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .291/.321/.424
Actual Line: .279/.300/.392

Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2005: This guy's going to be a hell of a player. A franchise cornerstone.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2006: Building block. There might not be 25 other players in baseball for whom I'd trade this guy tomorrow.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2007: A good player, and a good value. Useful regular to have on the team.
Popular opinion of Yuniesky Betancourt, 2008: trade trade trade trade trade trade trade

There is no more compelling evidence that people are beginning to understand how important it is to be good in the field than the fans' total 180 on Betancourt over the past couple seasons. Yuni came up as an exciting sparkplug of a shortstop who was beloved by casual fans and statheads alike, but despite remaining the same offensive player he's always been, slowly but surely people have turned against him, because the wizard who was once capable of turning any groundball into an easy play has morphed into a fat sack of crap in a pointy hat with stars and moons on it.

It's difficult to overstate just how significant an impact Yuni's defensive decline has had on his local reputation, because again, seriously, his hitting hasn't changed. I know last year's .691 OPS looks a lot worse than 2007's .725, and that his wOBA* has bounced around between .301 and .335, but his skillset's pretty much exactly the same as it was when he first came up as a rookie. Yuni swings. At everything. Then he runs. Some of the time he gets to first base. He's an aggressive hacker who always makes contact and rarely hits the ball into the seats. His swing rate has changed a little bit over the years, and the same goes for his groundball rate as well, but these aren't really significant, and altogether we get the sort of hitter who's mighty easy to project. .280-.300 BA, a handful of walks, and a handful of homers. Bam. Done. For years, Dave's been talking about how Betancourt's skillset gives him a low offensive ceiling, and that's exactly what we're dealing with. The Yuni we've seen at the plate is about as good as we're ever going to see him, and there's not really anything anyone can do about it.

Oh, people thought something was up in 2008. When Yuni's OPS flirted with .600 a few times over the course of the season, there was mounting concern that he had just all-around suffered a total collapse. But at least offensively, those concerns were unwarranted, as Yuni rode a hot 200 at bats down the stretch to end up within his established range. His triple slash line drop was driven almost exclusively by BABIP, and that's just the nature of the beast when you put the ball in play as often as Yuni does. There wasn't anything wrong with his bat in 2008 anymore than there was anything wrong with his bat in 2007, and going forward, I don't see any reason to believe that things will be different in 2009.

But the defense. Cursed defense.

* - projection as of early June; final number not posted

Egads.

It's easy to argue with one metric. UZR and I, for example, seem to disagree on Ichiro, and given that the other metrics back me up, that argument is as yet unresolved. But when pretty much all of the big players when it comes to defensive quantitation come together to hold a big flashing neon sign that says THIS GUY IS FALLING APART it's way more difficult to maintain that they're wrong. UZR thinks Yuni collapsed. Plus/minus thinks Yuni collapsed. PMR thinks Yuni collapsed. RZR thinks Yuni collapsed. If you're a Betancourt supporter, what're you supposed to do? How is anyone supposed to look at this data, combine it with visual observation, and come away thinking that Yuni's any better than a mess in the field?

It's borderline unfathomable to consider that Yuni got this bad this quick, but here we are, and this is our reality. If we apply a smoothing curve, over the past four seasons Yuni's gone from great to average to bad to terrible. Four seasons. He did that in four seasons. Between 23-26 Yuni's aged like twice as hard as Omar Vizquel in one-fifth as long. He appears to the naked eye to be visibly larger than he was back in the day, and while some of that is muscle, some of it isn't, and it's not hard to imagine that this has had a negative effect on his range. Range that is an entirely different kind of jaw-dropping now than it was when Yuni first came up.

In 2008, Yuniesky Betancourt was a disaster of a defensive shortstop, and combined with below-average defense, the overall package was a replacement-level player. Replacement-level players aren't assets. They are, by definition, easily replaceable. The magician around whom we thought this team would be building back in 2005 took four years to turn into the sort of guy you can pick up for free, and were I to compose a list of the biggest Mariner-related letdowns since I started blogging, Yuni's career would be somewhere near the top. We basically just lost a blue-chipper for nothing. It's like we packed a suitcase for vacation then mistakenly picked up the wrong bag from the carousel on the other end. It's hard to enjoy vacation when instead of clothing and a camera you have to make do with documents and corn.

Projecting Betancourt now is an exercise in disappointment. The ~.320-.330 wOBA* is about what we always expected, but having to put a minus in front of the 10 in the Defense column invariably evokes a deep, heavy sigh. If you think Yuni's a -10 defender, he's a 0.5-1.0 WAR shortstop. If you think he's a -5 defender, he's a 0.9-1.4 WAR shortstop. If you think he climbs all the way back up to average, he's a 1.3-1.8 WAR shortstop. But that's as good as it gets. And considering that last year he was more like -15, it's all but impossible to be optimistic. Even given that he started to look more energetic in the field down the stretch, I can't imagine that he'll ever be able to climb back out of the negatives. No matter what was wrong with him in 2008, I'm afraid that the magnitude of Yuni's defensive decline is such that the process is essentially irreversible. While he may recover some, he'll never recover it all, and he will therefore never be the player we thought he could be.

The time is now to say goodbye and trade Yuni before his reputation around the league catches up to his reputation around here. Make no mistake: there are still a lot of front offices that love him as a player. People who don't have to watch him everyday assume he's still one of the top gloves at his position, and a recent player survey called Yuni one of the top defensive infielders in the American League. People who think Yuni is a good player are wrong, and people who are wrong and have things to trade are good people to call on the phone. I mean, the Dodgers are sniffing around Jack Wilson. The Tigers are sniffing around Julio Lugo and Alex Cora. The Giants are sniffing around Edgar Renteria. The Royals have coveted Yuni for as long as I can remember. Teams need shortstops, and teams like Yuni. This is a good combination. And perhaps now that we have a new front office in town, we'll finally be able to remove the "untouchable" tag from Yuni that Bavasi inextricably affixed and move him in return for more than he's worth. Because at this point, there's nothing to gain by letting him stick around. Yuni may be able to get a little better going forward as he regresses to the mean, but his career ceiling - which was already modest - now appears wholly unreachable, and he's not in line to be an important part of the next contending team in Seattle. Move him. Move him for the value that I'm almost certain would be offered. It doesn't count as selling low if the buyer isn't aware of the low in the first place, and I can think of few things more exciting for this team looking ahead than the opportunity to rebuild up the middle.

Do it. Do it and don't look back.

Baker's on it:

...An entirely new coaching staff will be around next season from the one that began the 2008 campaign. But for some, the coaches coming to Seattle are not new at all. The folks in Dallas know Don Wakamatsu well from his five-year stint as a Rangers coach.

It is all but certain that Wakamatsu's entire staff of pitching coaches will be coming out of Arlington as well. Dom Chiti was the bullpen coach for the Rangers (until being fired in August) and will be the new Mariners pitching coach once the holidays are over.

Last summer, Chiti was fired by a team with lousy pitching. So we're left with three possibilities:

1) The Rangers were right; Chiti isn't a very helpful coach, and deserved to be fired
2) The Rangers were wrong; Chiti is a helpful coach, and deserves a promotion
3) Wakamatsu thinks pitching coaches are irrelevant and Dom Chiti has a bitchin moustache

I don't know anything about Dom Chiti, so all I'll say is at least he's not Mel Stottlemyre, and anyone who can watch Josh Rupe and Jamey Wright warm up every other day without going wacko should be more than qualified to handle the whole Carlos Silva experience. New blood!

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The third in a non-alphabetical and irregularly updated series of review pieces for each(?) of the players we predicted last spring.

LL/USSM Community: .277/.319/.416
Actual Line: .297/.322/.443

In a season of black comic tragedy, it was Lopez who shined as the greatest - and perhaps only - true highlight on the team. Always in possession of considerable talent, Lopez won fans without ever having put it all together on a Major League field. "Watch this kid," they'd say. "He's going to be a good player someday. You just have to give him time." And time he was given. Year after year Lopez would hit a new roadblock, and year after year skeptical arguments were met with age-based disregard. Lopez was still plenty young, see. He just needed more time.

But it was only when even some of his loyal supporters grew concerned that Lopez finally started to showcase that talent that for years he'd kept in the dark. It wasn't the way he started the season. It was the way he finished that drove the point home. After four consecutive letdown second halves, including one in 2007 that stands among the worst offensive second halves in franchise history, Lopez got going early on and sustained it through the summer. He hit .315 in June. Then .311 in July. Then .264 in August. Then .304 in September. August wasn't great, but it was a good deal better than the August before. More importantly, he started hitting for more power over the course of the season. Lopez only had two home runs through his first 56 games, but he'd go on to hit 15 over his final 103, and his 27 extra-base hits in the second half were eight more than he hit in the second halves of 2006 and 2007 combined. This was a different Jose Lopez. This was a good Jose Lopez. The sort of Jose Lopez about whom legends were told but never confirmed.

Lopez closed out the season on a three-week tear during which he hit .337 with a .943 OPS. That hot streak was enough to give him his first above-average wOBA of his career. While that may not sound like anything great, it represented a massive improvement, and for the sake of Lopez's living as a big leaguer, it couldn't have come at a better time. I wrote last March:

I'll say this: while I can't be sure about which path Lopez will take, his future in Seattle will depend on his taking some substantial strides forward. We know the front office and coaching staff are dissatisfied. The onus is on Lopez to come out of the gate playing well, impress McLaren from the two-slot, and avoid another summer collapse. Another year like the last two will probably be his last as a Mariner. Lopez needs to get going, because before long it will be too late.

Lopez took those steps forward in 2008, and in so doing, he re-established his value as an everyday regular. A talented 25 year old coming off a wOBA of .346 looks a hell of a lot better than a talented 24 year old coming off a .294, after all. The Mariners couldn't hit last year, but Lopez was still the third-best on the team, and no matter how bad an offense may be, that says a little something.

Of course, the biggest question with Lopez is just how much value he has going forward. If you call him an average defender (and, even granted his occasional lapses in concentration, I think that's about right), last year he was worth about 2-2.5 wins over replacement. That's a good player. That's a guy who can help a competitive team. However, the year before he was below replacement-level, and that year happened, too. We can't just throw it out. You'll see people all the time posit arguments that boil down to "if you ignore X, then Y," but that's not how statistics work. Unless we have good reason to throw away a certain clump of data, we have to look at the whole picture, and the whole picture for Lopez isn't that pretty. Marcel, for example, projects a park-adjusted wOBA of .322, which drops Lopez into the 1-1.5 WAR range. And if you call him a -5 defender instead of league average, then he comes off looking even worse. And let's face it: Lopez has to work pretty hard to be an average defender. He's not the most nimble guy on the team.

Here's the bottome line: if you think 2008 Jose Lopez was legit, he's a neat little player. If you think 2008 Jose Lopez overperformed, then he doesn't look so hot.

Me, I'd like to think that Lopez's improvement was real. He made more contact. He swung less often, and less often at bad pitches. His HR/FB increased. He hit a lot of doubles. There are indicators - good indicators - suggesting that Lopez started making better use of his talent last season, and that he's a reasonable bet going forward. If someone came up to me and said "Jose Lopez is going to OPS .770 next year," I wouldn't look at him like he was crazy.

But statistically speaking, 2008 is the outlier, and outliers for young players don't always mean a new level of performance is on the way. They can and often do signal imminent regression, and if Lopez regresses back to something like .280/.315/.415, then all of a sudden he's not really that valuable anymore, especially if his defense declines. In that scenario he's just a guy who doesn't hurt us but who also doesn't help us, just a guy who hangs out and takes up space until the team finds a better second baseman to help it compete.

I don't know which path Lopez is going to follow. I don't know. He's a volatile young player, and while there are perfectly sound and solid reasons to believe that he'll hold on to his gains, there are also perfectly sound and solid reasons to believe that he'll regress. It's up to Lopez to decide how good he wants to be. All I can really say is that, no matter how much I'd like to see Lopez develop into a star, it would behoove the new front office to place a few calls and see what people might offer for a "young middle infielder on the upswing." I know there are some early signs of this being a buyer's market, but the fact of the matter is that the Mariners aren't going to compete for a little while, and Lopez may never have more trade value than he does at this writing. He's young. He just had a big bounce-back season. He hit for a good average. His second half was encouraging. He's under contract. These are good selling points. There may be a GM or two out there eager to take Lopez in exchange for a player who can help out the next Mariner team to make the playoffs.

I can't speak to that. And while it's related, I guess that's a different subject anyway. What it really comes down to is that, no matter what happens from this point forward, in 2008 Jose Lopez re-inserted himself into the organizational discussion. Lost in the mix of what we can expect from him in the future as a regular is the fact that he even has a future as a regular, something which was far from a certainty a year ago. Lopez's hard work paid off, and as a result he had himself a career season. That's significant. And I think I speak for all of us when I say I hope he's able to hang on to his gains, regardless of where he's playing in 2009 or 2010. Because if nothing else, it'd be reassuring to know that this organization is indeed capable of developing decent position players. Even if they don't develop in Seattle.

Man: Hey, Sean. What's the word?

Hi.

Man: What've you been up to these last couple days?

Errands.

Man: Yeah, it's a good time to run errands.

Man: So what kinds of errands did you run?

Shopping.

Man: You went shopping? What for?

Cups.

Man: Cups? Why cups?

We were out of cups. 

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