Dave Cameron laid out the methodology behind the rankings last Friday. Remember that the grading scale for each category is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

2012 Organizational Rankings

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago White Sox

Seattle’s 2011 Ranking: #17

2012 Outlook: 36 (26th)

You don’t have to crunch too many numbers to figure out that this year’s Mariners are an extreme longshot to make the playoffs. They haven’t scored 600 runs in a season since 2009, and the team is breaking in a host of young, inexperienced players, many of whom have significant question marks surrounding their 2012 production levels. The team is basically betting on regression to the mean for previously useful position players (Chone Figgins, Ichiro Suzuki, and Franklin Gutierrez) to bolster the offense, but they’re still likely to be among the lowest scoring teams in the league.

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Carson Cistulli remains away, so us the other writers shall — as the Necronomicon suggests we might — play.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Selected Televised Games
2. Japanese Baseball Wonderments
3. Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Get Your Vote On

Selected Televised Games
Notable games available on MLB.TV.

Mariners at Athletics AL | 6:10 ET
By the time your eyes hit these digital words, this game will should have expired — because this Regular Season series is taking place in yonder JAPAN. But, through the magic of Internet, you can watch this game anytime today and at your leisure! The contest will also be re-broadcast on MLB Network at 9 a.m. (with a three-hour delay, that is), so people looking to get their Yoenis Cespedes / Ichiro Suzuki fix have some options here.

The game is still in progress at the time of publication. I don’t want to give anything away, but suffice it to say: The game involves pitching performances! and multi-hit efforts! and diving/jumping catches!

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Of all the expletive-filled shouting matches between Dave Cameron and I during the recent Arizona FanGraphs retreat, the most interesting one pertained to Seattle’s very own Ichiro Suzuki. I am convinced Ichiro will rebound in 2012, and though he may not be the Ichiro of five years ago, he will still be a viable asset on offense. Today, I will posit that argument for you, the dribbling masses.

“What’s there to worry about Ichiro?” I asked Dave during one of our daily cactus-hunting team-building exercises, “Wasn’t most of Suzuki’s drop-off in 2011 due to BABIP issues?”

“Well, for one thing, Ichiro’s power numbers were way down, and what are you doing with a gun?” he said.

Power numbers, Dave? Hahaha!

Hmm… Yes… His declining power. 

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With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.

League Trends

To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.

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Dare to dream.

On Thursday, we looked at Fielding Independent Offense (FIO) — as well as the Should Hit formula — and decided to toss stolen bases into the equation. The result were, let’s say, brow-elevating.

Today, we are going to put that result — the FIO formula — into action.

In the timeless words of Sir Samuel Leroy Jackson: “Hold onto your butts!”
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Tom McNamara is playing a major role in the Mariners’ rebuilding efforts. Seattle’s scouting director for each of the past three drafts, McNamara added a franchise cornerstone when he took Dustin Ackley with the second-overall pick in 2009. A year later, he selected a raw high school right-hander named Taijuan Walker — now the team’s top-prospect — 43rd overall. Last June, he boldly nabbed left-hander Danny Hultzen with the second pick of a draft considered to have been one of the deepest in years.

McNamara talked about his scouting philosophy — including what he has learned working under Jack Zduriencik — and the decisions to take Walker and Hultzen.

——

On scouting Hultzen: “About two weeks before the draft we set up our board. We’re running around, seeing players all spring, and then we get into that room and start ranking the players. I keep it simple. We take the best guy and Dan fit that bill for us.

“I saw Dan pitch in high school, so we had a history with him. We saw him all three years in college and he improved each year. He was a Friday-night guy at Virginia, in a good conference, and [last year] I got to see him four times against pitchers who went in the first three rounds. We’d had our eyes on him all spring and wanted to make sure we saw him as much as we could.”

On Zduriencik‘s role in the draft: Read the rest of this entry »

The Seattle Mariners are looking for any way to get some value out of Chone Figgins. Since joining the team, the 34-year-old has been one of the worst regulars in the game. So to salvage what’s left of his contract, the Mariners are making Figgins a leadoff hitter — again. It’s a last ditch effort to improve his value, though it’s unclear whether Figgins’ contract can be saved.

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For the last 11 seasons, Ichiro Suzuki at the top of the order has been the one constant in Seattle. Ichiro isn’t leaving Seattle, but as Eric Wedge announced today, he won’t be leading off for the Mariners any more:

#Mariners manager Eric Wedge just announced that Ichiro will hit 3rd in the lineup this season.

— Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) February 21, 2012

For most of his career, Ichiro has been the prototypical leadoff hitter. Even without taking a bunch of walks, Ichiro has managed to post good-to-great on-base percentages and set the table for the rest of the Mariners’ lineups. But the third hitter’s job isn’t just to get on base, it’s also to move runners around to score. Can Ichiro — especially an Ichiro feeling the effects of aging at 38 — adapt his game to fit this new role?

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On Monday morning, I wrote an article that revealed the top five teams in Major League Baseball at drafting and developing talent for their big league club over the past decade, starting with the 2002 Draft.

Several people commented that they wished to see the entire list of teams, ranked by total accumulated WAR and also including average WAR per homegrown player. Here is the entire league:

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It is a simple question.

What is sabermetrics?

Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?

Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.

Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.

I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.

Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.
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