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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, July 16, 2012
Hopefully they plan to face him with the zeal of a salary-cutter. Ichiro Suzuki is a 38-year-old impending free agent having the worst season of his brilliant career, hitting .258 with a .286 on-base percentage and .345 slugging percentage, but Mariners general manager Jack Zduriencik made it very clear that he has no plans to trade the outfielder and in fact expects to re-sign him for next season.
“He’s going to be a Mariner,” Zduriencik told Jon Morosi of FOXSports.com. “We intend to keep him. I’m telling you, he’s going to be a Mariner. He’s a big part of this team. He’s a franchise player here, and we have phenomenal respect for him.”
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1. Bhaakon Posted: July 17, 2012 at 08:18 AM (#4184599)Oof.
I assume he's a fan favorite, right?
The Mariners could and probably should keep him around another few years if he's cheap, but if he expects more than about 3/18 they're better off letting him walk. (Insert "but Ichiro doesn't walk!" witticism of your choice here.)
And yeah, like #1 I can't believe that contract is up already. I thought it was just last month David Samson was calling it the end of the world as we know it (I think those were his exact words). The Mariners got their money's worth out of it, I think.
EDIT: Upon closer inspection, I see that they indeed have wide home/road splits as a team as I had suspected: a .563 OPS at home, and a .723 OPS on the road. This is a team with some capable hitters.
There's this thing called "talent". They don't have it. At least not on the major league team; the Mariners seem to have the same aptitude for failing to develop hitting talent that the Orioles have long had for pitching talent.
Well, considering they put up an 82 team OPS+ last year and a 79(!) in 2010, I'd say they're on the road to victory.
Seriously though, it's not a bad question. Do they just have truly terrible hitters, or if there is something especially screwy about the park?
The park didn't slow this team down. I think the simplest explanation is they just suck.
And, in an irony Zeth can appreciate, they traded the ONE legitimate homegrown hitting talent that they had developed in years (Adam Jones) to the Orioles for the one legitimate homegrown pitching talent that THEY had developed in years (Erik Bedard).
Guess who won that trade?
Thankfully AB was just so damn good that he still earned the value on that contract, and has gone on to prove his worth with other teams since. But ugh. I got so sick of having to defend Beltre to people who joked about how his Dodger homers in 2004 either had to have clearly been "steroids!" or an embarrassing Gary Matthews, Jr.-esque fluke that bilked the M's out of a ton of cash. My two-pronged defense was: 1.) No, Beltre's still a fine hitter, it's just that Safeco viciously suppresses his numbers unlike any other park in the league; 2.) He's still worth it because of his glove, his awesome habit of appealing his own check swings to the 1B ump, and his reaction to being touched on the head.
Rarely seemed to work.
You know what King Felix has as a road ERA this year? 3.79 (which is not so kingly and may not even be princely). It is his home 2.21 that masks his current level of success.
Justin Smoak looks historically bad because of his home performance; on the road for a full season, he is a 30 HR kind of low average guy.
Home OPS allowed: 614
Road OPS allowed: 788
Hmmm. Maybe it has something to do with the park and the weather? The conspiracy theorist in me thinks maybe MLB dampened the bounce on the balls a couple of years ago to get past the steroid "scandals" and maybe this is affecting large parks on the coast more than others? It would explain Oakland becoming a graveyard for hitters, also. Then again, the Giants have had some good offensive performances. So, hell, I don't know.
The team is hitting .230/.292/.359, the league is at .256/.322/.412, if OPS+ didn't adjust for park it'd be at 78...
OTOH the team is hitting .256/.306/.417 on the road versus .196/.275/.288 at home...
their home era is 3.09, on the road it is 4.69...
their one year park factor is 85
so it is an extreme pitchers park
and the Mariners are also bad
BTW Smoak's career road numbers are .237/.304/.399... as a 1B that is BAD
1969-2012, 1Bs with 1000+ PAs:
Rk Player OPS+1 Dave McCarty 76
2 Mike Squires 78
3 Tony Muser 82
4 Justin Smoak 87
5 Ken Harvey 88
6 Todd Benzinger 88
7 Tom Hutton 88
8 Brian Hunter 89
9 Broderick Perkins 89
10 Pete LaCock 89
Maybe a pity run, now and then.
What if it was Brett Lawrie playing third and Mr. Toronto Shift playing short RF. Teams would struggle to hit .100!
I don't know why the Jays need 6 other players in the field, with Lawrie being the greatest defensive player ever.
We should call him Brett Bunny.
Bugs Lawrie would actually be a really funny nickname.
kid is slugging over .500 on the road
Or they are doing an extremely good job but somebody has switched the headings for "aquire" and "do not aquire" in Excel.
I suspect he's still very marketable. If you're not going to win anything over the next two or three years anyway...
I'm sure there is a certain group of fans that won't come out to the ballpark if there hero is no longer there, but there is a much larger set of fans that are sick and tired of #### teams, and realize that Ichiro, at this point, is a huge reason why their team is ####. They have around an 80 million dollar payroll, and 17 of those million are going to a replacement level RF, that's not good.
Of course, this all assumes Ichiro! wants to stay in Seattle and wind up his career playing for a bad team. But then again I don't think any good teams are going to be promising him a starting gig.
Re Ichiro! and TFE, my initial take was that this is pretty much the dreaded "vote of confidence" statement that can be read as near-certain confirmation of the opposite of what is being said.
Most teams wouldn't at this point. But Ichiro is a Japanese living legend, and the Mariners are owned by Nintendo and thus have close ties to Japan, which I suspect is the main reason why they will.
Yes. He's also still the lynchpin of the M's marketing. If you hear a radio or TV ad for an upcoming game, it's still likely to be something like, "Come see Ichiro, Felix, and the rest of the Mariners take on the Yankees at Safeco Field July 23-25."
If "genius" is defined as "someone who's not very good at putting together a baseball team," he's Albert Einstein times Stephen Hawking.
The only time we know that Hiroshi Yamauchimi has stepped in to influence a personnel decision since he bought the team was to tell the Mariners to sign Ichiro at all costs when he came over in 2000. It's not impossible to think Yamauchimi still has that sort of regard for Ichiro and has issued a similar edict. Yamauchimi is not that much of a baseball fan; he does know how famous Ichiro is in Japan (a few years ago a poll reported that he was the second most recognizable person in Japan, second only to the emperor, and he's not going to sign Akihito.)
See above. If he's making this statement on orders from above, there's nothing he can do about it.
6th best genius.
A 900 OPS is only serviceable?
2011 - .623 Home, .658 Road
2010 - .623 Home, .651 Road
2009 - .712 Home, .719 Road
Opponents team OPS:
2011 - .667 home, .728 road
2010 - .663 home, .768 road
2009 - .685 home, .737 road
The park is certainly a pitcher's park, but this year's splits are probably exaggerated due to small sample size. I think the more likely scenario is that the hitters still suck and that there will be some regression to the mean for both the home and road numbers in the second half.
As I've said before, I'll be happy to bet a b-r page sponsorship that Ichiro does not retire at the end of the year.
BBTF might have to revisit the global warming issue, again.
Buhner has correctly identified the problem here.
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