Mariners Dismiss Jack Zduriencik 2.0
Since the start of the 2009 season, no team has won fewer games than the Astros, and during that window they’ve picked up a new general manager. The Marlins have won the second-fewest games, and they technically changed general managers. So did the Cubs, with the third-fewest wins. So did the Rockies, with the fourth-fewest wins. And now so have the Mariners, with the fifth-fewest. Word went out Friday morning, on the firing of Jack Zduriencik, and though no one expected the specific timing, the writing had probably been on the wall. Think about the Mariners. Think about what you think about when you think about the Mariners. That’s why they made this decision. It felt inevitable, with the only question being, when would the blade drop?
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’re no stranger to FanGraphs. If you’re no stranger to FanGraphs, I’m guessing you’ve seen a certain reference once or twice before. It’s this one. Years ago, FanGraphs tried to feature organizational rankings, and though we no longer do that, people have long memories, and in between 2009 and 2010, the site ranked the Mariners at No. 6, just above — also hilariously — the Rockies. A big reason was because the FG staff at that time collectively believed in the new Zduriencik front office. People laugh because, by and large, the Mariners have sucked. People laugh because, by and large, the front office seemingly took a step back. But I think this is particularly interesting to reflect upon. Say what you will about the ranking, but that’s what the staff believed. And not too long after, the front office completely changed its identity.
I’m not really sure how much I’m supposed to review. If you’re at all interested in this story, you already know the basics of what went down. Zduriencik took over a shipwreck of an organization. The team, his first season, was a pleasant surprise, especially given how few resources were in place when he was hired. Then came the complete devastation of 2010, when Zduriencik attempted to build a winning team around run prevention. It wasn’t insane. That team had two of the best pitchers in the world. The defense was supposed to be tremendous. The lineup projected to be light, but adequate. It wasn’t crazy to see a successful club. Last year’s Royals didn’t have a single regular finish with an .800 OPS. A promising Mariners team lost 101 times. If that team scored any runs, I don’t remember them.
Chone Figgins collapsed immediately. Jose Lopez collapsed immediately. Franklin Gutierrez started suffering from a disease most people have never heard of. Casey Kotchman hit .217, in between hitting .268 and .306. The team wasn’t built well, in that it seemed thin and barely average, but almost everything with the position players went wrong, and this proved to be a turning point. Much of what the Mariners went on to do was influenced heavily by what they did, and didn’t do, before 2010.
There wasn’t much debating how the Mariners were trying to build, up to that point. And then there wasn’t much debating, after that point. It began with run prevention and with marketplace bargain-hunting. It turned to a focus on sluggers. A couple years ago, Geoff Baker aired a lot of peoples’ dirty laundry. Among others, Eric Wedge and our own Tony Blengino gave their sides of stories that painted Jack Zduriencik in a negative light. Some of the details, I’m sure, are either partially or wholly untrue, but one little excerpt has stuck with me:
In 2011, Zduriencik imported longtime associate Ted Simmons as a senior adviser and increased responsibilities for second-year assistant GM Jeff Kingston, pushing Blengino from his inner circle. Zduriencik received a three-year contract extension that August and Blengino said Zduriencik told him: “Now, we do things my way.”
I don’t know if that’s an exact quote, but the idea is supported by the behavior. Somewhere during the Zduriencik years, the front office’s pattern changed. The guiding philosophies changed. An oversimplification of what happened: early on, Zduriencik listened to his analytical advisors, who preached things like FIP and UZR. Then the resulting model bombed, and Zduriencik decided to try something he understood better himself. The Mariners effectively got a new GM without anyone changing positions.
You wonder what would’ve happened had 2010 not been a colossal bust. Some of that was just plain bad luck. But here’s one reason why we don’t do organizational rankings anymore: people can act unpredictably. At the time, the staff couldn’t have known Zduriencik was going to shift his preferences. It’s not often that a front office undergoes a pole reversal. That’s what happened in Seattle, and the result was another extended stretch of losing. Last year, like 2009, suggested that the playoffs could be around the corner, but this year, like 2010, has shattered any thoughts of positivity.
It can all be so hard to evaluate. The early years were promising, yet they didn’t lead anywhere, and 2010 was dreadful. The later years seemed worse, from an outsider’s perspective, yet last season saw the Mariners a win shy of additional play. The biggest problem was DH, so the team signed a DH, and he’s put together an MVP-level offensive season, and the team blows. There’s no easy trend line, here. People have poked fun at Zduriencik for years. People poked fun at Dayton Moore for years, until his plan finally came together. Last year’s Mariners finished with two fewer wins than the Royals, and a superior run differential. Something special could’ve happened. Something special happened for Kansas City, and it’s bought Moore the benefit of the doubt.
The most perplexing variable for the Zduriencik front office is that concerning the player development. This, again, is nothing new — this is something people have observed for years. Zduriencik wanted to build mostly around a homegrown core. Before 2010, Jesus Montero was the Baseball America No. 4 overall prospect. Dustin Ackley was No. 11. Justin Smoak was No. 13. Occupying lesser levels, Nick Franklin was highly thought of, and so has been Mike Zunino. Ditto a number of others. Objectively, there hasn’t been a shortage of talent. There has been a shortage of results. The hardest thing in the world is figuring out who to blame.
I mean, I guess it’s easy — it’s Zduriencik. The GM is accountable for everything, and it’s his say-so who’s doing all the instructing. The Mariners would’ve been far better off had the blue-chippers played like blue-chippers. But it’s impossible to succeed long-term if you aren’t pulling up fresh new talent from your own system, and the Mariners haven’t been able to rely on it. This has been the biggest hurdle, and the most frustrating, because we still can’t analyze player development in any meaningful way, and all we can say right now is the Mariners seem like they’ve been bad at it, while, say, the Cardinals seem like they’ve been good at it. We can’t explain that, thoroughly. It’s just what is, and it’s a huge reason why Zduriencik’s out of a job.
For a while, he’s been an easy individual to criticize. He hasn’t portrayed himself as a progressive thinker. None of his teams have made the playoffs. It’s been said he’s less than a pleasure to work with, he’s done some disrespectful things to former employees, and he’s been frustrating in negotiation, in part because he would propose trades and then pull them off the table. Many people didn’t love working with Zduriencik. Many people didn’t love negotiating with Zduriencik. To a great extent, that only matters if the team is disappointing. If the Mariners were winning, no one would care. When the Mariners were winning, no one cared. At a certain point, winning does become everything.
Which brought Zduriencik down. There wasn’t enough winning. When the wins aren’t there in sufficient number, people will take a more critical look, and the Mariners decided they want a new architect. Ultimately, they felt like they gave Zduriencik enough of a chance. His plans didn’t work out, and now the Mariners figure someone else will give them a better shot of reaching the playoffs, and soon.
Which, maybe. That should always be the question: does the standing general manager make a team more likely to be good soon than those general managers who might potentially be available? When enough doubt enters the mind, it’s time for interviews. The Mariners will interview a great number of people. Whatever they do, we’ll all have an opinion too soon.
We learned that from the Jack Zduriencik front office. The front office that morphed at the first sign of trouble. The front office that got lousy returns from some very promising veterans. The front office that hit big on last winter’s analytically-panned free-agent blockbuster. The front office that assembled plenty of highly-regarded young talent, but couldn’t get them to do anything. There are so many different ways this could have gone. Even with just a little better luck. I’m sure that’s how Zduriencik sees it himself. It’s been a weird and windy era. The small sample of results just got big enough. More than anything, the Mariners ran out of faith. Now they’re looking to fall for another smooth talker.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
You mean their first move after firing Jack Zduriencik 1.0 was to hire an updated version of that guy?
And then fire him, too!
Who is the updated version of Jack? If you’re saying it’s Jeff Kingston, nothing could be further from the truth.
I find the Giants placement at 23rd more of a swing and a miss than the Mariners overplacement.
In fairness, seems like every person in the media just completely misread Brian Sabean and it wasn’t until the last few years that it’s actually been known that he runs a progressive ship. It seems like it takes 5-6 years for non-players to shake their reputation, for good and bad.
I think a major criticism of Sabean was his intentionally signing mediocre free agents in order to lose draft picks. His operating strategy in the early 2000’s was to eschew young talent in favor of veterans. His trade of Liriano and Joe Nathan for one season of AJ Pierzynski was widely criticized. In the late 2000’s, Sabean and the Giants have put together a farm system that have graduated a huge amount of talent. I think Sabean has changed a lot since his early years as GM.
Truth These guys learn from their mistakes. Even Ruben Amaro has supposedly embraced sabermetrics in recent years. No excuse for him taking 17 years to do it though after being in the Phillies front office for that long.
Giants have been very average since then with some inordinately good luck. Giants fans all know this. Everyone knows this.
Kiss the rings, BILL
I remember the 2009-2010 offseason very well. I objected to the #23 ranking for the Giants and commented that they were as well positioned for the future as any team in baseball and got absolutely fried for it. As for the Mariners, if you looked at their present talent and what was in the farm system, they should not have been ranked #6 even if you did have blind faith in Jack Z and the front office. It also is not just that Jack Z morphed into something different. The original model, if in fact there ever was one, was flawed and likely would not have succeeded anyway.
I’ll be honest. You may be right now, and you may have been right then, but I’ll be damned if I can remember anybody, on the internet or in real life, whom I had a grudge to settle against 5.5 years ago. You’re treating #6org like it’s the Kill Bill movies.
Maybe YOU have no grudge, but sports fandom is littered with millions of fans who have much longer grudges to settle. Fans are entitled to grudges.
And I’m entitled to think that type of fan is the very definition of childish.
Rivalries aren’t the same as grudges. I may always hate the New England Patriots, but that’s not a grudge, that’s a goddamned principle!
Yup. Fuck the Pats.
I’m an Eagles fan, and I rooted for the Giants in both Super Bowls.
I don’t even think it’s a grudge so much as an extreme emotional investment in proving oneself in the right, retrospectively. There’s a certain weird subset of commenters here who seem to lodge tons of predictions, deliberately, as Random-Walk-style investments in future self-congratulation.
I’ll be the contrarian here. I find it kind of disturbing that the popular thing to do was to caricature somebody and go after their character for the crime of being right about something.
If looking back at what actually happened amounts to some sort of Kill-Bill vendetta, the flip side of that coin is that debating which teams are better in the present with no intention of reevaluating those claims for veracity isn’t exactly in the spirit of sabermetic analysis.
Your point is a fair one in the abstract, but doesn’t really address the specific pattern here, which is prolific, extreme predictions (often extreme pessimism) followed by very loud later crowing — about only the selected few that turn out to be right.
Roger,
Just to be clear, I did not make any specific predictions in the organizational rankings discussions. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever made a specific prediction on this site. All I said at the time was I thought the Giants were ranked too low at #23 and the Mariners too high at #6. I then proceeded to give reasons for these opinions:
1. The Giants were coming off an 88 win season in 2009.
2. The Giants already had Matt Cain, Tim LIncecum, Pablo Sandoval and Brian Wilson producing on the MLB team.
3. The Giants had Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey ready to graduate to the majors sometime in 2010. That makes a very nice homegrown core, don’t you think?
4. The Giants still had Dick Tidrow scouting and developing pitchers and they had brought in John Barr as scouting director who had a track record drafting hitters.
5. Brian Sabean, for all his faults, had always been good at filling holes out of other team’s dumpsters.
6. The Giants were easily a top 5 organization in terms of financial health, present and future.
7. Based on #1-6, the Giants were as well positioned for the future as any team in baseball.
7. While Jack Z may well have been a tremendous GM, the Mariners were lagging in terms of present talent at the MLB level and in organizational talent in the minors.
Now, please point out where I was “prolific” or “extreme” or showed “extreme pessimism” in those points.
‘Remember that opinion I had OVER 5 YEARS AGO, that has been proven to be correct??? No??? Well, here, read a couple hundred words extolling its virtues.’
Put the rabbit down, buddy. He’s completely decomposed by this point.
He can’t. His ego won’t let him.
You earned a +1. Your comments mean nothing without accountability and you’ve now been proven correct years later.
Let’s roll the tape on all the others.
Ohhhh you mean prior to the first ws when the giants were a middling sabean team and rode some amazing pitching and deft veteran pickups to the title?
Nah, 23 might have been harsh but they were in the teens, no higher. The farm system wasnt very stacked outside of the two high picks that did pan out and it still isnt very stacked.
This was the offseason after the 2009 season when the Giants won 88 games. They already had Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, Brian Wilson and Pablo Sandoval on the MLB team and had Buster Posey and Madison Bumgarner less than a year away. They were as well positioned for the future as any team in baseball.
Oh and that crappy farm system you refer to? It has also produced Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford, Joe Panik, Matt Duffy and several other reserves that have contributed.
You go right ahead and continue to underrate the Giants farm system. Believe me, they have plenty more where all those players I just mentioned came from.
Jesus montero wasn’t homegrown. He was acquired from the Yankees in 2012.
Guess that depends on the definition of “homegrown,” right? Which I’ve always found odd. Montero was acquired after he had 69 major league at bats.
Is a player “homegrown” only if you were the first team that drafted him or signed him? Is a 16 year old you sign from the Dominican more “homegrown” than a 21 year old American kid you drafted after they played in college? Is the player still “homegrown” if you acquire them in a trade before they reach the majors and they spend some time in your minor league system?
Such an odd word. Anyway, I feel like the point Sullivan was making was that the Mariners intended to build around young, cheap players under team control. Which point is still valid w/r/t Montero regardless of whether he’s “homegrown.”
Don’t really see the confusion. “home-grown” means a player came up through a teams farm system and the players development was largely handled by a single team.
Sure there are some cases where its less clear but I don’t think Montero is one of them. He spent 4 years in the Yankees system before coming to Seattle as a 22-23 year old. He was pretty clearly developed by the Yankees, not the Mariners.
Eh, I can see some gray when the kid is just 22. There’s a lot of learning to do at the MLB level, and that’s where Seattle has been fucking terrible during the Jack Z. years.
Their prospects always put up big numbers in the minors.
So you think it is “very clear” that his development was complete in 2011?
I think its very clear that you are being deliberately obtuse.
It was the combination of homegrown and 2010 that spurred my comment. He wasn’t in the Seattle system in 2010, so it seems odd to use him as an example.
The same might be said for smoak, who was acquired from the rangers in the summer of 2010 in exchange for one of the “two best pitchers in the world”.
Sorry the quote should read “two of the best. . . “
Could’ve chosen a better word but I think the general idea is conveyed. Core of young hitting prospects, basically.
And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!
I want to write “#6org!!!!!!!” right now before Blinky preempts me like he did in his own post, where he implied, seemingly in Fangraphs self-defense, what Jeff says explicitly here, namely that Jack Z was a werewolf who was a genius in 2010 when Fangraphs judged the Mariners to be an elite organization with a future so bright parade planning should begin in earnest, but turned into a moron at the first full moon, and hence it’s not a failure of judgment on behalf of this site’s analysis to have esteemed them so highly. Alternatively, one might suspect the nerd-orgy thrown for for the Mariners after their one measly mediocre season was perhaps, just a teeny tiny bit, related to the personal fan support for that organization that may have lept from the heart of Dave and smothered his rational faculties which 99% of the time are the part of his soul that makes the decisions.
I can’t believe all of this is only 2 sentences.
I want to write “6org”! Before I go ahead as BLINKI me in his article, which is a collage of seemingly helpless Fangraphs, Jeff is clear that here, that Jack Z Loup werewolf is a genius in 2010 when assessed against the Mariners Fangraphs is an elite organization such a bright future, parade practice plan set to begin seriously, but turned into a stupid boy in the first full month, not the failure of judgment in favor of the analysis of the site is valuable to them. I also think that the sailors threw NERD orgy after a bad season can not be possible, just a little smaller, in combination with support staff in the organization can fan is razed in the heart of Dave and his ability muffled sound that 99% of the time, as part of his soul making a decision.
#KeepNotGraphs
And, give the username, neither one of them is “Ha!”
“HA, ha!”
No, it was a failure of judgment. But that’s not the interesting part. That’s the funny part, but not the interesting part. The interesting part is how dramatically the front office changed under the same general manager. When does that happen, and how are people supposed to be able to see that coming?
Its the reason you don’t consider an organization to be one of the best in baseball because your 2nd year GM had a good rookie year. Dave Cameron and FG predicted absolute greatness from a guy who had shown very little and assumed he was working on a level so far ahead of every other GM in the league, that it made up for the lackluster farm system and current ML team.
That’s the lesson to learn from this that Mariners fans seem to still be missing.
I imagine most everyone would agree at this point it was a failure of judgment.
the problem is that rankings should not incorporate intuitions about the confidence interval or potential variance in outcome, but they sort of have to when you do not provide additional information besides one ranking. Given that we only have ONE YEAR of priors in this particular case, the confidence interval floor and ceiling are ludicrously wide.
This is to say that in general rankings are bad systems that try to price all future and past information, where they should only do one or the other (or give two: ranking based on past performance, projection trying to price all future info)
I’m not sure if picking an organization to come in 6th is a prediction of “absolute greatness”, or “kind of greatness” or “greatness” at all. How about “absolute above averageness”? Or the more measured “comparative above averageness this coming year.” To put in in more “on the field” terms: which team came in 6th overall in the major leagues the year after the “#6org” was published. Fifth? Fourth? Beats me. I was amazed at the furor at the time: it was as though someone had released a pack of honey badgers who had an appetite for only one person’s testicles.
You must sacrifce The Typical Idiot Fan and/or Jeff Nye to the baseball gods, only then can the #6org curse be lifted.
It also wouldn’t hurt to find someone with sacrificial talent. (Willie Bloomquist?)
I think the failure of judgment was the interesting part.
Except you don’t know that they changed that much. Because you knee jerked so hard on a 2nd year GM. Thats the interesting part.
Actually, we do.
Jeff, it’s really funny that this is one of the few things that the peanut gallery has available to them to bitch about.
A number 6 prediction five and a half years ago? Damn, some of you people are just pathetic.
N/T
Building a team around run prevention was (and probably always will be) a terrible idea. Defense is simply too difficult to measure and too difficult to project. You can certainly win with defense, however, it is a risky bet. There is a reason teams pay more for offense, and it isn’t because they are “old school” or any other simple narrative. It is because they are more confident they will actually get the production they are paying for.
Pretty sure last year’s world series was Royals-Giants and both teams were built around run prevention. And/or Madison Bumgarner going super saiyan on fools.
Like I said, you can certainly win with defense.
And both teams are good again, so it’s not like it was just luck or a fluke.
The problem with the Mariners is that there were only 3 especially great defensive players on that 2009 team: Beltre, Gutierrez, and Johjima. And they let Beltre go and Johjima chose to leave. Ichiro and Gutierrez were still good defensively, but most of the other guys were not good, either before 2010 or after.
Russell Branyan, Michael Saunders, Mike Sweeney, Milton Bradley. Where is the defense?
They essentially tried to build around 2-3 really good defensive players (Gutierrez, Ichiro, and what Figgins had been). But the others were all average or worse on defense before 2010, and were ALSO not good hitters.
If you are going to build around defense, you need bad hitters to be great defensively, or mediocre defensive players to be good offensively.
The Mariners essentially got average defensive players who couldn’t hit (Jose Lopez, Josh Smith, etc.). No wonder it failed.
Casey Kotchman and Jack Wilson were supposed to be a part of it. They turned out to be shitty parts of it.
The Giants are #2 in team wRC+ and the Royals are #7. These aren’t weak hitting all defense teams.
“And both teams are good again, so it’s not like it was just luck or a fluke. ”
Good n=2 story…
Last year the Giants were 12’th in Runs and the Royals were 14’th so it wasn’t all run prevention. Neither team hit a lot of HR’s but there are more ways to score runs than via dingers.
What the Mariners should have done and still need to do is find hitters who will not only play good defense, but also hit for average with gap power and speed on the basepaths.
Right. The Royals and Giants were competent offensively; they weren’t amazing offenses, but they were good enough for their purposes. Coupled with both teams’ excellent pitching/run prevention, and it’s no wonder (retrospectively of course) they made the World Series.
The Mariners’ problem is there is too much focus on run prevention, not enough on offense.
“what the mariners need to do is find good hitters, who are also good baserunners, and who play good defense”
…
Too much focus on run prevention? Cruz? Trumbo? Weeks? Seth Smith? The Mariners aren’t known for their defense these days, if you hadn’t noticed. They’re 21st in the Fangraphs rankings in 2015.
“what the mariners need to do is find good hitters, who are also good baserunners, and who play good defense”
Good thing the other 29 teams aren’t looking for this kind of players!
Meh, I think building around defense is a good idea if your resources are limited given that buying offense is so expensive. Of course you could argue that Seattle shouldn’t have such limitations. One problem with the approach is that while offense has no upper bound, and therefore adding a high OBP player to an already high OBP lineup further enhances the effectiveness of the incumbents, run prevention is subject to diminishing returns. So to win with defense, you need to have a relatively competent offense as well, and Seattle’s simply fell apart in 2010.
This is an excellent point about the additive nature of offense relative to defense. It also illustrates why some of our methods for evaluating offense are flawed when applied to specific players on specific teams (i.e. linear weights).
But one can’t buy just offense or defense. One has to buy and field an entire two way player at some point. Your ISO monster is going to have to play defense and your shut down CF is going to have to swing the bat…
Don’t confuse the inaccuracy of the current statistical metrics with an inability of teams to intentionally put superior defense on the field.
How do they do it if they can’t even accurately know who the good fielders are?
That “statistical metrics” can’t do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Every sabr nerd would be the first to admit defensive stats just aren’t very good right now and probably lag behind scouting.
Yeah, Zduriencik probably changed, but that’s not the reason the #6 Org ranking was bad. The real issue is that even if Z had stayed the same and kept listening to Blengino, he still would have regressed to the mean. The ranking was based on the idea that Z and company were so great at their jobs that the fact that they didn’t have a lot of actual baseball talent at the time could easily be overcome. Which was a faulty assumption even if the M’s front office had “stayed analytical”.
Lots of people pointed this out in the original #6 Org comment thread, which is a pretty hilarious read, even now.
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/organizational-rankings-6-seattle/
It does seem that numerous people pointed out the flaws in those justifications even back then: http://www.ussmariner.com/2008/10/22/welcome-to-the-zduriencik-era/ I get it, it is hard to objectively assess the team you’ve been a fan of, no matter how much you attempt to suppress that fandom. But when the public pushes back strongly against your evaluation of that team and presents pretty good reasons for doing so, that should prompt reconsideration. I have much less sympathy for the individuals that attacked anyone who questioned the #6 ranking in those comments.
Good point, but I don’t think the bias was in fandom. I think it was more an aesthetic preference… The Mariners were doing things “the right way” and this was equated to success… I am pretty sure Fangraphs would have rated any team at #6 if they had those qualities.
I’m pretty sure that fandom had a lot to do with it. Other more proven analytical front offices fell well outside the top six.
More significant than the fandom, I think, was the fact that the early Jack Z front office appeared to be listening to sabermetric types like Dave and acting like their opinions mattered.
What’s depressing about that comments thread is how unintentionally prescient Marc W was with one of his comments…
“Obviously, if Z’s undercut by Lincoln/Armstrong, or if he clashes with others in the org, if he steadfastly refuses to engage with more analytical types, yeah, this might not work.”
Very good article. Over in Baltimore, we’re screaming at Dan Duquette for a completely different set of moves and non-moves that have resulting in a season-long face plant.
Here’s a prayer for better GMs for both teams!
As an Orioles fan I would kindly tell you and whoever else you’ve been talking with to ***** **** **** ***** ** **** ***. I suffered through fourteen straight losing seasons and you’re going to complain about one barely losing season in Duquette’s four year tenure? ** **** ******** **** * ***** ***********.
C’mon, man, Duquette had a bad year. And this was perhaps the last year of a tight window. Now we’re back in the doldrums and it doesn’t feel good.
I’m fine with legitimate criticism of certain decisions by Duquette. My issue is with the “prayer for (a) better GM.” It reeks of ingratitude and being spoiled by three consecutive winning seasons. Simply being relevant after fourteen years in the wilderness still feels great to me.
Am I the only one really curious to figure out what the swears here are? I mean, they can’t ALL be curse words, right? A one letter curse word?
The first, 5-letter, word in that first curse has to be a doozy.
I’m lost on the first one, but I’m pretty sure the second one is telling the OP to “go (censored) himself with a rusty (something)”.
Would you like to buy a vowel?
I’ll solve Pat.
I’ve been tripped up by this one before, but you won’t trick me with it a second time.
NAGGERS.
**** ******* ****** ****-*** ************ ***’* **** **** * ******* ********* medical director ** ******* ******* ******* *******. ** ****** **** ******* ***’* **** ******* *** ********!!!
He will always be the Duck of Death.
“The Seattle front office knows how to evaluate talent, and they know how to value talent. Organizations that do both things well, and are given a payroll of $100 million to boot, win a lot of baseball games.” –Dave Cameron
That would be true if StL was the hat logo for Seattle. It’s not.
😉
Wow… this #6 org thing really stuck with some people.
Internet posers. They live to tear down other people.
Consider that over the last five and a half years, this tiny triviality is the best ammunition they can find.
And then think about how sad that is and how sad they are.
Given Zduriencik’s long tenure I am sure it is hard to write about it all, and the switch in philosophies is very interesting, but I am a bit surprised that more analysis didn’t go into the recent years, especially the Cano signing. To me, Cano’s relative downfall is a big part of this as well.
Ehh, Cano was good in year 1, and while he hasn’t been overall good in year 2, he’s figured things out again the last few months. And his drop has been more than balanced out by the surprise of Nelson Cruz, who to this point has actually worked out. Weird set of events.
Jeff, so you think that your frequent citation to “weirdness” and the random nature of baseball in your writing is a sort of dodge? I don’t mean that harshly. You put out great stuff… But I can’t think of another way to put it. Is it really appropriate to black box things at the level you do? My instinct says it is not and that there is much more productive analysis to be done as to the whys and hows of what happened to the Mariners and what happened with the ranking.
PS. not saying that there are no black boxes…
It is human nature to see 100% cause and effect in everything. Especially in America, where morality is equated with success, it can be confusing, but the whims of random fate play a substantial role in every success (and every failure).
Jeff is great at consistently pointing out the limits of our knowledge about something and still exploring ways to push those limits back a little. That’s far better than empty, gassy opinion connected to some vague narrative, itself impossible to verify and useless in any case. I only wish that people in other fields applied his approach…
“To black box things” = “to admit the limitations of one’s knowledge”
Really liked this article. I would like to see more self-analysis of both what Fangraphs got right in the past and what they got wrong. If I have a general criticism of Fangraphs it is that there is an institutional unwillingness to examine and accept intellectual and conceptual biases. I think the sense of diminishing returns on analysis by the public is really a failure to transcend the assumptions that were brought to the endeavor at the beginning…
I agree about wanting some more self-analysis. I think it would really help Fangraphs stand out among these types of analytical/saber blogs (not that it doesn’t already, of course).
I think that the rush to make Seattle #6 may have been more about a desire to “catch the wave” rather than anything about Dave’s love of the Mariners. If Seattle turns into a juggernaut (which looked like a possibility after 2009) after 2010, Fangraphs looks way too conservative if they ranked them #15 in 2009.
No matter how much it might be denied, the main writers being huge Mariners fans certainly played a large part with that. The lack of any real evidence to support the glowing view of the front office suggests rose-colored glasses. A multiple column series tackling FanGraphs’ opinion of the 2015 Boston Red Sox would presumably get at some of the systemic flaws in the site’s analysis.
Calling the evidence “not real” and simply restating your conclusion with the word “certainly” is so persuasive.
Good point.
Calling the evidence “not real” implies that there was any evidence to begin with!
Good catch, K!
I don’t think that there is no self-analysis; I just don’t know that we as readers are privy to all of it. I’m sure models are tweaked and reassessed (I would think?) but we don’t get to see all of the sausage being made.
I remember the time Dave Cameron predicted the Mariners deep in the playoffs with such an awesome roster and the Rangers/Astros at the bottom of the barrel with no hope. The Rangers can’t possibly gain enough wins to get above 80 this year, silly boys.
Boy you sure told him!
What concerns me is that the ownership still sees Zduriencik as emblematic of analytics, due to the initial sales pitch, and its supposed inadequacy. Are they going to go even more old school now?
Good thing nothing has happened in baseball besides this.
Should have been mea.
I still think Brad Pitt is a good pick for the Jack Zduriencik biopic.
Vincent D’Onofrio, exactly as he was in the Daredevil series.
“And not too long after, the front office completely changed its identity.”
Or did everyone just knee jerk because they hired Tom Tango as a consultant, who is the source of many of the stats here? I mean, we are talking about 1.5 offseasons here! How can make any claims about a FO’s identity after 1.5 offseasons? Do you guys still not realize that that is the reason people made fun of you so much in the first place?
The sabermetric community’s credibility will be hurt if they cannot accept introspection and a good faith appraisal of when statistical analysis does and doesn’t work. There is no doubt that advance metrics played a big part in the mariners player acquisitions early in the Jack Z era. That strategy failed to create a winning team. I am not sure what this does or doesn’t mean about advances metrics, but at least acknowledging that is the first step to having a productive conversation about what does and doesn’t work. With all due respect to Jeff, who is a great writer and a smart baseball analyst, this post contains absolutely nothing of the sort. It’s says nothing beyond: “Jack Z’s moves didn’t work”
“But here’s one reason why we don’t do organizational rankings anymore: people can act unpredictably.”
Another reason that appears evident from the peanut gallery: you guys don’t want to face up to being wrong.
To be fair, they still do tons of predictions that rarely work out for them (not surprisingly).
This place is pretty silly on its treatment of GMs. Whenever people point out that RAJ or Dayton Moore would get killed on this site if they trade for $10 million Jim Johnson, or signed Billy Butler to 3/30, or trade Donaldson for 2 mediocre big leaguers and an A ball prospect, the usual defense is “smart GMs get the benefit of the doubt!” When you are a GM, your reputation is set in stone here, and there is almost nothing you can do to change it.
But as the Jack Z and Brian Sabean cases prove, the people here don’t have nearly as much insight into the workings of these front offices as they think they do. They just project whatever stats Tom Tango gives them onto the real world and let the confirmation bias begin. Half the time its like this place is just a clinic on ego masturbation by people who think they are so smart because they do things the progressive mathy way. Its pretty frustrating, really.
I agree Billy Beane will go down in history as one of the greatest GMs of all time…because Michael Lewis wrote a book about him.
I think the best part is to look at his list of “perfect world” 22 players in the 2002 draft
7 All-Stars in the first round. You know how many of them were on his list… 1 He nailed it with Swisher!
You know who else isn’t in his list of 22 besides Greinke, Fielder, Hamels, Saunders, Kazmir and Cain… Joey Votto, Jon Lester, Brian McCann, Curtis Grandson, Brandon Moss, Adam Lind, Howie Kendrick, Brandon McCarthy
And since that 2002 draft he missed on pretty much every 1st rounder from 2003-2010 (took Sonny Gray in 2011). He’s still cruising on benefit of the doubt.
I copied this for the A’s site, but yeah, Billy has been ok considering the budget he’s had to work under. I am just guessing here but the four teams with a better record in the AL since he took over are probably the Red Sox, Yankess and Angels. That’s 8 playoff spots in 17 years in OAKLAND! That’s good, that’s 10 years of domination. Sabean is good too, only difference is his teams had a little better play at the right time a la Sandoval, Bumbarner to get WS while the A’s have been booted often from playoffs but I think that is more randomness than anything.
‘Under his watch, the A’s have compiled a 1484-1268 (.539) record over the last 17 seasons, which is the fourth-best record in the American League and sixth best in all of baseball during that time frame. The A’s have six American League West titles (2000; 2002-03; 2006; 2012-13) and secured two AL Wild Card spots (2001 and 2014) during that span. His teams have posted 90 or more wins in eight of the last 15 years.
Billy bean is dumn. The A’s will never win.
Based on what evidence? Advanced metrics liked Adrian Beltre a hell of a lot more than Chone Figgins, and they didn’t exactly love Casey Kotchman. Zduriencik paid lip service to the use of advanced metrics and got the benefit of the doubt from FanGraphs writers as a result, but in reality his moves look to be a classic “small ball” play rather than anything we would associate today with “analytics.” He tried to turn the Mariners into a team of pitching, speed, & defense. It’s fair to question FanGraphs’ judgment when it comes to GMs, but to my eyes Zduriencik’s failure is not at all a failure of analytics.
In the saber blogoshpere circa 2010, the speedy defender was the “Moneyball” player. This blog and Dave Cameron had a full blown fetish for those types of players. Before that, it was the corner player who couldn’t play defense, had a low BA, and walked a lot.
Whoops.
You don’t understand what moneyball was.
In the saber blogoshpere circa 2010, the speedy defender was the Moneyball player. This blog and Dave Cameron had a full blown fetish for those types of guys. Before that, it was the corner player who couldn’t play defense, had a low BA, and walked a lot. And if you were a GM who signed a couple of fashionable Moneyball players, then you earned yourself quite a reputation among the saberists. Because, you know, math and stuff.
I don’t recall that being the case, but regardless, it still isn’t “advanced metrics.”
I’m not sure which of 2010’s failures can be specifically attributed to sabermetrics…Gutierrez’s disease? Figgins was a veteran prototypical leadoff hitter with batting average and stolen bases, Bradley was a slugger coming off productive seasons, Kotchman had scouting/prospect pedigree and batting average. Where exactly did the analytics come in and screw everything up?
The evaluation was wrong. Not sure who’s denying that these days. On top of that, I’m not even particularly invested, since I didn’t work for FanGraphs at the time of the organizational rankings. That was on a different group of people. What I find interesting is how one front office went from one approach to another almost overnight. You might be less interested in that, and that’s fine.
See i think you’re missing that folks are arguing that they DID not do that. The speed and defense model isn’t particularly analytical.
There are a legion of old school types who bemoan the death of 85 cardinals style teams.
They hired a couple of sabr guys as “consultants”. We have no idea how many order teams did that.
The major moves they made weren’t particularly analytical.
To me it looks like FG assumed this was a progressive front office VERY VERY early on with little evidence outside of two consultant hirings.
When things didn’t work out Z made analytics a fall guy for his own failure.
But this wasn’t a revolution in front office analytics.
It was am old school scout paying lip service to analytics.
Also this happens literally all the time. Organizations switch philosophy without firing CEO’s.
The main criticism seemed to be that there simply wasn’t any evidence that this front office actually was analytical or that many of the others weren’t.
They are fairly opaque institutions.
But different “courtiers” gaining and losing influence within an organization happens all the time. The king uses them as scapegoats for policy failures.
As the man once said, predictions are incredibly difficult because they are about the future. If any of you clowns in the peanut gallery think you can do better, then go start your own website. Me, I’m staying here and enjoying the articles I read (but not you bringing up a ranking from five and a half years ago, which comes across as childish and pathetic).
Appeals to authority are the apex of analytical argument for sure.
If anyone would like to get a good overview of how changing organisational philosophy on a regular basis works when running a franchise I invite you to peruse the last 15 years of the Toronto Maple Leafs: A team with the financial resources of the New York Yankees and the long-term vision of a day trader.
We’re a high-flying fast paced offensive team! No wait, we’re a hard-nosed team that no one wants to play! We’re going to trade for one of the best offensive players in the game! A good team needs to be built from the blue-line out! We’re trading one of our top defencemen for a forward! We finally have a solid goalie – let’s immediately trade for another one! We’re hoarding draft picks! No wait, we’re trading them for young players! We’re trading up in the draft for a franchise player! No we’re not! Let’s get rid of our best two-way forwards! We’re bringing in tough two-way forwards! Screw it we’re rebuilding again.
It took about 30 years but the Leafs finally beat the fan out of me. I’ll probably occasionally watch next year but I honestly stopped following the team while I was travelling the world last year and I don’t even know who is still on the team.
One thing all of this taught me is that a team needs a cohesive vision of what they are and how they can build on it. Changing that vision is just a recipe for mediocrity. What the Mariners need to do is focus on 3 things: Defense. Pitching. Guys who can get on base. Forget about sluggers and the power game. Go to the player ranking and sort by OBP – start acquiring those guys in descending order.
No, the Leaves are a hockey team, so this doesn’t make sense. Hockey and baseball are not the same sport.
Are you really that stupid, or are you just trolling us?
The confusion/disappointment among Mariner fans was the promise of what JackZ did in MKE and how that differed from his time in Seattle. To echo Jeff’s point about “pulling up fresh new talent from your own system”, I imagine Mariner fans hoped/anticipated similar results to his Milwaukee tenure, which had to be JackZ’s biggest selling point as a GM candidate. When he was in MKE, the Brewers drafted/developed loads of all-stars, and not just from 1st round picks using the template of drafting plus power-speed guys (obvious exception being Prince Fielder). JJ Hardy, Lorenzo Cain, Jonathan Lucroy, Brett Lawrie and Alcides Escobar are all been plus defenders. Ryan Braun (twice 30/30), Corey Hart (twice 20/20), Rickie Weeks, and Michael Brantley all were better than average MLB athletes. The problem with using resources to acquire Smoak and Montero is that if they failed at hitting, their lack of defensive value meant they were not major league players. When Braun failed at 3b, his plus athleticism transitioned fine to a corner OF. Montero had no where to go once he failed to develop behind the dish. And, other than Kyle Seager, no position players have come up from their farm system.
tl; dr
ADHD is a bitch, no? No wonder you’re a Giants fan.
wait wait wait…the front office took a step BACK under Jack Z? Has everyone forgotten about Bill Bavasi already?
Yeah who’s Bill Bavase?
Thing is, the Ms could also sign a few players in the off season and be right back in the thick of things. If they bring back Iwakuma, which they appear to be set to try and do, then have him healthy along with a healthy Walker and Paxton that would be huge. Yeah I guess health has proven to be an issue with those guys, but there haven’t been any major issues with them, knock on wood.
Go get an outfielder who can get on base, have Ketel Marte buck the Ms’ failing prospect trend and actually produce at a decent level, maybe sign a reliever or two, and hope Robbie gets back on form. Okay that’s a lot of questions, but they aren’t big questions that scream desperation.
So if the Ms win next year and get into the post season, how much credit will Z get?
It’s weird how obsessed a lot people still seem to be with the #6 org thing…
Anyway, whether the first 1.5 years reflects the “real” Jack Z, or the version after that does, it does appear there was shift in approach. It’s tough to know the motivations for it, but it seems like a good guess that losing in 2010 played a role. Jack Z did in fact hire Tango and Blengino and pay lip service to sabermetrics, and he definitely focused on defense for a while. Then, he kind of stopped doing that. Anyone remember Ibanez in the outfield?
What I would *really* like is for someone to investigate and come up with some reasonable hypotheses for why the Ms have so utterly failed at developing young players (whether their own or acquired). It seems systemic, but how could that be? I wonder if it is linked to a focus on power rather over OBP. The Ms have seemed to eschew OBP as a developmental or team objective since the Figgins debacle. Even their best hitters – Cano, Cruz, Seager – are sort of hackers.
I have to think Safeco contributes at least on some level. I know they moved the fences in a bit, but that was pretty much after a handful of young guys struggled.
They also seemed to rush a lot of those young guys. If you look at a lot of the minor league numbers of the players who came through under Z, they really aren’t all that impressive in most cases.
Add those two factors together and you get an organization that tells it’s prospects, “Okay we know you weren’t really dominating over an extended period of time like a top prospect should, but here, go out and produce at the MLB level in one of the toughest parks to hit in.”
I agree that maybe parks with difficult dimensions have trouble developing certain players. i.e., pitchers parks like Safeco, Miami, Mets, dodgers, giants, rays have trouble developing position players, particularly those with power (the giants and rays have had some success with your duffy’s, paniks, Jennings, kiermeir, etc). Conversely, hitter’s parks like Coors, Citizen Bank and Great America have trouble developing pitchers? Of course Nola seems to be doing ok, and the reds had cueto, leake, bailey who seemed to do well. Still, I think it is a mental hurdle and an adjustment for a player to go through when can’s of corn become home runs or hard hit rockets become outs.
I remember being at the season ticket holder day upon the jack Z hiring. A very polite gentleman stood up towards the end of the q&a and asked Jack how he felt about advanced stats. Jack said they would play a role in his decisions. The next question from a different fan was about WAR. Jack had to as what that term meant. As a BP guy then, I knew that wasn’t a good sign.
The thing about these Figgins comments that bother me most is that in 2010 he had a .340 OBP. It wasn’t until 2011 that he completely fell apart. Granted his .340 OBP was 50 points less than the previous year and was mostly attributed to a huge decline in walks while still striking out at the same rate.
On the 2015 Mariners that .340 OBP would be second behind Cruz. They are now so much worse than they were in 2010 that we lose sight of this.
I just want to say thank you for getting the #6org issue out front early in the article. That was always going to be the 800 pound gorilla in the room in any discussion of Zduriencik on Fangraphs. I think we can finally put this behind us collectively now.
Considering that there are still people posting mocking commentary in the Mariners organizational ranking post from 5 years ago, I doubt it.
To let understanding stop at that which cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
Jeff’s piece looks like the longer, more nuanced version of these sentences:
When you’re an incompetent prick but your team is winning, people won’t care. But once your team starts to lose consistently, you’ll be fired because you’re an incompetent prick.
Yet after losing seasons for 9 of the past 14 years the Indians had the same guy in the front office… until today.
True even of competent pricks, if team starts losing.
True even of competent nice guys, if the team starts losing.
Anything is possible. The train will keep going until the Cruz and Cano window is really closed. Marte has been promising for them in the second half, and they’ve attempted to put Miller in center instead of short. My choice for the M’s would be Kim Ng, but I’m clinging to a sliver of hope. Gap power, patience, and speed will certainly help, but pitching and run prevention is so fickle, it’s difficult to say what will be. Marte at short is a good start, multidimensional fielders would be the best bet, and I think Ng could take a look at the 2001 M’s to figure that out.
In those early days, Zduriencik’s primary virtue was that he wasn’t Bill Bavasi. That was worth a ton in the eyes of many Mariner fans.
Both sabermetrics and old-school assessment projected the Mariners to be a pretty good team this year. I’m unsure how much to fault Jack Z. that this did not happen.
Excellent point.
Biggest problem 14 vs. 15′ was the team was built for pitching and defense. By all accounts the defense has been good, excepting Cano’s below average metrics but he’s not terrible. It’s the pitching that has given up 4.58R Game vs. 3.41R GM last year. Biggest culprit, the bullpen. Rodney gets a lot of blame, but the others they have thrown out their like Leone, Medina, Luetge share a lot of it too. Even Wilhemson and Smith have only been average. Throw on injuries to Paxton and Iwakuma, not using Elias? and a downtick for King Felix and that sinks the ship. honestly they should have help Castillo and sent Zunino down and then been looking for pitching early instead of relying on the Happ’s and Montgomery’s of the world. The day he traded for Trumbo instead of pitching was the coffin in the season, or even spring training when there might have been some pitchers and relievers to be had but he didn’t do anything.
As for the team going forward it looks ok. Could use some outfield help, maybe they could swing a deal for Desmond Jennings or the like. Paxton, Iwakuma, Felix, Elias is a decent start and they’ve got more SP on the farm that is average at least. Bounce back year from a bullpen overhall and an extra SP arm or two and they could be right back in it.
Kiss the rings, BILL
I prefer “Flags fly forever”, kiss the rings sounds dumb.
I guess the next question is how are the Mariners going to become a playoff team “soon”? They aren’t completely devoid of talent but there are a ton of holes and not a ton of upside on the MLB roster. The guys there are what they are by now. Cano and Felix take up ~42% of their annual payroll and some of the younger guys are starting to get expensive (Seager’s contract jumps from $4.5 to $8 to $11 to $19M by 2018).
They have a few expiring deals/team options that will free up some money but I don’t really see a direct route to being a competitive team “soon”. They don’t have many prospects who are knocking on the door so any immediate fix has to come via free agency or the international market and there are a lot of needs on the MLB roster.
NO ONE CAN DESTROY BLENGINO
Ha! Giants the 23rd best org! Three in five! Kiss the rings, NERDS!
Have you been huffing benzene again?
Folks I didn’t read all the comments so if this was posted my apologies. It’s the stadium. Beginning and end of the story. As an east coaster, I’m frankly shocked why any team would build a stadium pitcher friendly. It only helps mediocre pitching look good, which doesn’t play well on the big stage. Then it proceeds to crush the confidence of young hitters who just finished taking in PCL. they start to believe they can’t hit, and it all goes downhill from there……..Fix the stadium , fix the problem, move in those fences.
I’d love to see what organizations spend on player development.
Zduriencik may be a mediocre GM – but he’s not teaching these guys how to hit. And a lot of scouts on other teams thought these guys could play.
The Mariners have terrible ownership and I’d bet they pay as little as anyone for the coaches in their system.
Like most saber people, I’m a STEM guy. Can a so-called normal person explain to me why you people care about meaningless stuff like arrogance, tone, and hubris? I don’t get it.
Imagine you’re in the field observing flamingos, and you go back to your boss and say, “Out of 100 flamingos surveyed, 65 were mostly pink, 25 were half pink/half white, and 10 were entirely white.”
Your boss says, “What are you, a moron? Go out and do it again. And don’t come back until you can tell me all the flamingos are blue. Every last one of them. Because flamingos always have been blue and always will be. If you can’t handle this, then I’ll have to find someone else who can.”
That’s arrogance and hubris. Tone is the part where he calls you a moron and threatens to fire you instead of saying “Hmmmm, I don’t see where you’re getting these results, could you try explaining this to me?”
They care about it because they aren’t STEM guys. If you have the education and experience then you know that not every extrapolations based on available data is going to pan out, and you accept that as a basic cost of doing business, and you move on.
These guys lack the education and the experience.
And you also know that what is said or written is important, and not the way it is said or written.
Holy crap, just read the entire 2010 #6org Seattle Thread. What a joke of a ranking.
.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – President Theodore Roosevelt
One of my favorite quotes! It illustrates that Z just didn’t have the stones.
It was one of my favorites, too! Which is why I quoted it at the peak of my disgrace, at my resignation. May it forever be at the reach of the crooked and incompetent at their moment of need, at exactly the time when their critics are proven righteous!