Check out the MLB Trade Rumors page for Justin Upton, and you find something strange. Since a report on November 13 that the outfielder had been extended a qualifying offer, Upton has been invoked just three times there — in one case, with the Angels, merely to note that “nothing is happening” between Upton and the club. Los Angeles was merely engaged in “ongoing conversations” with Upton’s representatives. Whether those conversations are about a possible contract or fondue, no one knows. They’re having conversations.

Now check out the Ben Zobrist page. Even before signing last night with the Cubs, his name was ubiquitous across the site.

And that’s weird. One is 34 and was worth two wins last year. The other is 28 and was worth almost twice as much. You’d think the rumor count would be reversed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, when you hear about a transaction, you think “yeah, that makes sense.” Free-agent contract terms are seldom surprising. And trades between teams are also seldom surprising, in terms of how much each side seems to be worth. Every so often, though, a move will give you pause. There was a trade between the Red Sox and the Mariners, Monday, and it arrived a little differently than usual. It didn’t make immediate sense for both sides.

After having lost out on Hisashi Iwakuma, the Mariners turned around and picked up Wade Miley, along with Jonathan Aro. They wanted a starter, and they recognized that the Red Sox had some excess depth. Nothing surprising there. Nor was it surprising that the Mariners were willing to include Roenis Elias. The part that engaged the eyebrows was the final piece, that being Carson Smith. What this is, today, is the Wade Miley trade. What this very well might end up looking like is the Carson Smith trade. The Red Sox did well to add a reliever with many years left.

From time to time, you’ll see a move and you’ll think it favors one side. Some moves do favor one side. You can express yourself and stop there, or you can try to think about why the one team might’ve been a willing participant, given that every team has so much information. What it looks like is that either the Mariners are quite fond of Miley, or they’re a little down on Smith. It’s smart to at least try to understand from both perspectives.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Major League Baseball, the market tends to correct itself as clubs gain greater knowledge of players and their value. If aging players are less successful, the market for that group might slow a bit. Bullpen arms become more or less desirable depending on their scarcity. Increased revenues tend to move everyone up the pay scale. It is important to understand how and when to make adjustments in value as run-scoring environments, finances, and aging patterns change.

That is all well and good for those who run organizations and those who follow the game closely, but the arbitration process is much less nuanced. The non-tendering of contracts to Pedro Alvarez and Chris Carter, along with the trade of Mark Trumbo, are all the result of a failure to adjust — within the arbitration process, specifically — as the market slowly corrects for the overpayment of defensively- (and sometimes offensively-) limited home run hitters whose overall effectiveness has dimmed.

The arbitration process tends to favor the traditional stats that place like FanGraphs have tried to de-emphasize. Closers get big paydays in arbitratio, regardless of overall performance. As a result, the St. Louis Cardinals opted to let Steve Cishek go instead of moving to arbitration where he would receive a salary of around $7 million. Home runs and RBI tend to get paid as well, causing an overpayment for those players who rack up those numbers, but have big deficiencies in other areas.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the second time in as many years, Mark Trumbo has become to a fanbase one of those “Remember when we had Mark Trumbo?” guys. He received less than a year’s worth of playing time in Arizona before being shipped to Seattle where he received less than a year’s worth of playing time before being shipped to Baltimore.

That Trumbo has been traded three times in two years is, in some ways, revealing on its own. Good players get traded, too, but more often its the players with glaring flaws who find themselves repeatedly expendable and repeatedly dealt. As a bat-only, power-and-nothing-else guy, Trumbo fits the mold.

Trumbo is in his final year of arbitration and will be a free agent next offseason, meaning that he’s likely to become the answer of a trivia question to a third fanbase before too long. For the Orioles, Trumbo probably serves as a stopgap. He’s set to earn something like $9 million in arbitration, which made him a non-tender candidate for a Seattle team that’s looking to become more athletic.

One-dimensional non-tender candidates in their final year of team control don’t tend to carry too much in the way of trade value, and so all the Orioles had to give up for Trumbo’s services was Steve Clevenger. Clevenger is a soon-to-be 30-year-old catcher who bats left handed and is out of options so he’ll see some playing time in Seattle, but also seems likely to see playing time in Triple-A. He’ll do some things for the big league club, but he won’t do more things. He hasn’t hit much, but last year he hit a little, and he doesn’t carry any kind of defensive reputation one way or the other. Seattle doesn’t have any left-handed catchers in the high minors and he can also play some first base, so in that way, Clevenger is a fit in the loosest sense of the word. This is more than enough about Steve Clevenger.

Read the rest of this entry »

Theory: the Mariners want to be good soon. I haven’t talked about that with anyone in the industry, so I might be way off, but it’s the assumption I’m going to work with. Another assumption follows: if the Mariners want to be good soon, they probably figure James Paxton could and should be a part of it. The Mariners, probably, want Paxton to become a major contributor as soon as the season ahead. Toward that end, Paxton needs to stay healthy, and the healthy version of Paxton needs to do better.

There’s nothing worth saying about Paxton’s health. Hopefully he doesn’t get hurt. I don’t know why he gets hurt, and I don’t know how he can stop. You cross your fingers. But as far as being better is concerned? Most everything comes down to mechanical repetition. And health, of course, plays some role in that. Out of more consistent mechanics, the Mariners would like Paxton to improve his location. They’d like him to improve his changeup. And there’s another idea, which I already wrote about once some months ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Robinson Cano’s name found itself in the news, because someone decided to ask a presumably drunk former coach for his opinions while someone else was recording. The news cycle subsequently spent its weekend worshiping at the altar of football, but now we’re back to Cano again, this time for a different reason. John Harper wrote a piece for the Daily News, and within, former coach Rich Donnelly came to Cano’s defense. That’s not what’s grabbed attention, though; what’s grabbed attention would be this:

But even if Cano has had the best intentions as a Mariner, one long-time friend who spoke to him recently says the second baseman is not happy in Seattle, especially with a new regime in charge there now, and that he’d love to somehow find his way back to New York.

It seems like a powerful sentence. A feeling of regret for a one-time superstar who followed the money away from New York to the other side of the continent? Great for the area media. Great for the area readers. Helps New York feel better about itself, which tends to be the city’s primary interest. And for all I know, this might even be true. There was speculation Cano was “homesick” for New York in June. The Daily News made Cano sound unhappy in March 2014. Granted, Cano might’ve been somewhat unhappy in New York in 2013. He did leave, after all.

The Seattle-area media has never reported having the sense that Cano was unhappy. He happens to be coming off a disappointing year. Not just for himself, but also for the team, which underachieved while Cano’s old Yankees squeaked into the playoffs (for a day). My guess is this is nothing. It’s something to talk about on a Monday morning when there’s nothing else going on. Of course Cano would’ve preferred a stronger 2015, individually and as a group. If he was unhappy in 2014, it didn’t stop him from having a terrific year. If he was unhappy in the middle of 2015, it didn’t stop him from having a terrific second half.

I’m actually more interested in something else from the same article. Forget what one person says about Cano’s emotional state; it’s indirect, and uncorroborated, and not as important as his performance. More to the point of his performance: consider the following excerpt.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners needed a center fielder after they sent Brad Miller and Austin Jackson packing over the past year. They had an extra reliever, maybe, after they acquired Joaquin Benoit from the Padres last week. And, even given all the flaws in their new (probably platoon) center fielder, it’s hard not to like such a low-risk, high-reward move. Even if you value relievers highly.

But these are the things you have to talk about when you try to evaluate the trade that sent center fielder Leonys Martin and reliever Anthony Bass to the Mariners and reliever Tom Wilhelmsen and outfielder James Jones to the Rangers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Among the comments made by Jerry Dipoto in his conversation with David Laurila at the recently concluded GM meetings, one finds a fascinating statement by the new Mariners general manager on the topic of identifying undervalued offense, and nine things that successful hitters do.

We’ve defined a nine-point criteria of what we believe a quality at-bat consists of. If you do those things, you can play here.

What a delicious quote. What could those nine points be?

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the difference between now and the trade deadline. At the trade deadline, when the Twins went out and picked up Kevin Jepsen, I shrugged and kept thinking about other, potentially bigger things. I forgot about the move five minutes after I learned about it. Now, this is a whole post about the Mariners going out and picking up Joaquin Benoit from the Padres. Not that Benoit and Jepsen are identical, but they belong in the tier of second- or third-class moves. As such, I’m sure many of you couldn’t care less about this, but before you go away, let me tell you — Benoit remains one interesting reliever. Good relief pitching is en vogue at the moment, and while Benoit will be 39 next July, he doesn’t seem to be on the verge of anything but another strong 65 innings.

Benoit is going to cost $7.5 million. The Mariners got him from San Diego for Enyel De Los Santos and Nelson Ward, and while De Los Santos is a young one with a big arm, there’s a reason those are two unfamiliar names. Neither is likely to do anything at the highest level; Benoit is likely to go another season or three. For the Padres, there’s nothing wrong with shedding salary and adding a live-armed project. But, necessarily, this is more interesting from the Mariners’ side. As long as Benoit has pitched, he still seems capable of keeping opponents off base.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since we don’t have much more than velocity readings from Japan, it can be difficult to rely on anything but scouting reports when evaluating pitchers coming over from Nippon Professional Baseball. And now that 27-year-old Kenta Maeda is once again rumored to be coming to America through the posting system, we’re once again left wondering how to place him in context.

We have his Japanese strikeout and walk rates, which we can compare to recent postings to find comparable countrymen. We also have his velocity readings and a general sense of the quality of his pitches that we can use to compare him to pitchers beyond just ones that have come from Japan. We even have one game of PITCHf/x data to help us look at the movement of his pitches.

And the few comparable players we produce might be the best we can do from out here in the public sphere.

Read the rest of this entry »