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Today's Fun Fact

Since Edgar said his final goodbye at the end of 2004, Mariner designated hitters have combined to put up a total batting line of .254/.317/.363 and a position-adjusted OPS+ of 74. This staggering display of consistent run production came for the low low cost of Chris Snelling, Emiliano Fruto, Shin-soo Choo, Asdrubal Cabrera, and roughly twenty-one million dollars.

Over the same span of time, Darin Erstad has batted .271/.325/.380.

Designated hitters have one job. Their job is to hit.

Good eye for talent there, Bill.

0 recs  |  278 comments

Comments

It's like those guys were cheap/free or something.
A typo free post and you have no snark?
My snark is now reserved for rarer occasions.

I was being realistic.
Bah.

Everyone knows you have to pay top-dollar to get production out of your 1B/DH/RF players.

Here we go!

1. Pena believe that guy was so cheap?
2. I would Bradley have him on my team
3. Stairs no doubt he’d be better than our DH
4. It’s beCust of acquisitions like this that Billy Beane is known as a good GM
5. If you Ludwick other teams can find to fill positions other than DH you realize how easy it should be to find a decent DH
6. If we had picked him up cheap when he was released I would have Thomased not to make fun of the team for at least a week
7. I would Reedily DH him over Vidro any day of the week
8. I’m sure if Vidro were released, the locker room would have a better aroma; there’s nothing worse than Snelling a dirty Vidro
9. The Lambst thing I would want is for Vidro’s option to vest
10. (Bullshit there are no ethnic people on the Cardinals other than Izturis, Pujols, and Molina)
11. If I ever had a chance to Petagine’s bottle, one of my wishes would be for a new DH

This is why we can't have nice things.
How long did this take you?
15 minutes of hard thinking. Ludwick and Petagine are stretches but they're also damn hard
You have a talent.

Not one that will ever bring you monetary gain, unfortunately.

It's the sort of talent which makes me want to stab things
I certainly didn't say I appreciated this talent.

Wrong

Yes, but that book is entitled best.
I'm sure it'll sell like hotcakes

It actually did make me laugh.
It's pretty hard to have such shitty DHs for such a long time

We should applaud Bill for his efforts

It really is amazing that he made a living doing the whole baseball thing for so long
He did nothing to get himself kicked out besides ineptitude
helps when daddy gets you on the inside.
MUST... RESIST... HORRID... PUNCHLINE....
But by saying this you're still saying the punchline.
Still better than OlSalty's awful pun today.
I missed it.
It went away
I wasn't sad that I missed it.
I thought it was excellent.
Furries won't be funny again for quite sometime.

It was an acceptable casualty.

I hadn't touched a furry gif in months.....

Until my relapse yesterday.

Yiff in hell fucker.
I'm not proud of that one
By the way

Willie since Opening Day 2005: .260/.319/.314, but with a steal-adjusted* SLG of .361.

Had this team made Willie the everyday DH beginning in 2005, then over the past 3.5 years it would’ve been worse off by only a handful of runs.

Steal adjusted SLG?
Matthew talked about this earlier today
I can't believe I haven't read every post.
You can't be a mod if you don't read every post.
Like we can be bothered reading every post
Jeff can.
You, on the other hand, just look for opportunities to be rude.
I'm not rude, I'm just big-boned
It was on the main page.

You responded to it.

Doesn't mean I read it.
At least he's honest.
You responded to something said in the body of the post.
He also said he had a really shitty memory
Oh my God

You really are my Lit Prof, aren’t you?

I responded to nothing to do with SB-SLG

I commented Re: Giles —> Who knew?, I tried to penalty box Matthew, and I commented on Wilkerson’s surprising complete lack of power.

You continue to amaze me
My things I didn't read to passing grades received ratio would/would not astonish you.
You're supposed to read stuff in Lit classes?

I just sucked up to the teacher and coasted to an A.

You had Lit classes in a Computer Science degree?

Lame

Writing requirement.
Still lame
^shrug^

It was me and 10 freshman/sophomore girls with a female grad student teacher.

I’m not complaining.

I'm sure everyone else was
Once every month that was a terrible class.
It's amazing they all synced up
We do it so we don't inflict the bitchiness on our own kind.
This flies in the face of my experiences with sororities.
It flies in the face of my experience in general with women.

But I was trying to be good to my gender.

I was trying to be nice by not generalizing to your entire gender.
I was wondering how long it would take to get on this topic.
Pshhh women

Who needs them?

Heterosexual men?
No one here.
Don't be mean, unless you're me
I thought it was funny.
I thought it was funny too

I just couldn’t think of a better response.

Then it was all worth it.
I've been outnumbered by at least twice as much.
I'm sure you awkwardly approached all of them
Which could, perhaps, be taken the wrong way.
Different kind of teacher.
I got the same grades whether I sucked up or not. >:(
I'm pretty sure this is true for any literature class
I refuse to believe that the grad student read everything.
Oh, wait I remember reading that.
At this writing, there have been 70 comments in this thread.

14 were on topic.

My first post was epic

and encouraged on-topicness.

This website has a problem.
So do the Mariners: DH
I spelled everything correctly.
I miss gamethreads

I’m going to only do on topic comments for the first 3 game threads back

The last couple gamethreads before the break were almost entirely on-topic

It was nice.

We needed a Felix Day in the worst way.
Could be worse. Could be one guy talking to himself.
I never used to understand why DMZ was so obsessed with

I’m starting to understand, though.

Oh, perfect, you can't use fucking brackets now?

“Why DMZ was so obsessed with ‘Deleted, Off Topic’

so drunk…. so very, very drunk.

Yeah

Once you grant it even the slightest opportunity, it’s nigh impossible to stop the avalanche.

We need to import some Red Wings then
Hockey off-topic is always welcome off-topic
By my count, baseball, hockey, beer and Mitch Hedberg are perma-topics.
Correct
Belhaven Wee Heavy is delicious.
But enforcement is the key

I’d exempt ancient history, but then, that’s self-serving.

I have years of experience letting this place police itself.

Enforcement is an unfamiliar step to take. I’m still learning.

Your penalty boxings are a big step forward for you.
I love the penalty box but it doesn't seem to be working.
More severe penalty boxings?
Plan on it
For the best.
I'll miss you guys

I’ll be at NEO-LL if anyone needs me.

NeoLL is my 30th favorite site
Use it on more than 3 people.
I'm fine with the three person limit.
Yeah, and I don't mean to sugges that you just adopt

USSM’s policy.

But daaaamn. Something?

Measures will be taken.

I just have to think/talk them over with a few people.

The freedom is kinda what makes this place so great

That doesn’t mean that freedom should be limitless of course because it can get totally out of control…but too much moderation does put a damper on the creativity of the comments along with stopping off-topicness.

I like discussing baseball a hell of a lot more than I like going off-topic, but when there isn’t a lot worth discussing about the baseball that’s being played by this team….It gets harder.

When ~every single thread goes off topic within 20 minutes, there's too much freedom
Yeah I agree there is definitely a problem

I just don’t think going completely overboard like the way Dave and DMZ moderate USSM is necessarily a good idea. I think most of the people who tend to take these things off-topic are regular posters who like the blog and can be reasoned with or if not, mocked into submission for off-topic posts.

I’m cool with not going off-topic anymore, I preferred it when things were mostly baseball related around here.

This isn't a black and white issue

Going the USSM approach and giving everyone limitless freedom are not the only two options here.

I know, it was just this comment that kinda worried me

Once you grant it even the slightest opportunity, it’s nigh impossible to stop the avalanche

I’m just saying that the regular posters here are probably more attached to this site than most other posters on most other sites and they’re probably willing to temper their posting when requested seriously without needing to moderate all that much.

I think the penalty boxing is viewed kind-of as a game right now and maybe it should be applied with a little more seriousness in cases where you want things to be kept on topic…

Unfortunately penalty boxing only really affects people who constantly post

so I think I’m going to have to make the sentences way longer.

The problem is, you guys have kinda turned penalty boxing

into it’s own little “haha this is funny” kinda meme.

it's a very valuable tool, not a meme

You could always go on an escalating scale – 5 min first offense, 30 min second offense, 4 hr third offense, 24 hr fourth. Fifth is a ban.

Yes, they’re long time periods. That’s the point.

My boxes are rarely under 5 mins

They’d have a better impact during game threads when the offenders are trying to post frequently.

You need to institute game misconducts for repeat offenders
There's some posts/threads where I think it can be okay to go off-topic.

Then there are posts/threads where it isn’t okay, such as the “What Went Wrong” posts Matthew just put up.

Series Preview posts generally have the green light since nobody cares about the games anymore
For the love of God, can we at least pay attention during Felix Day?

That would go a long ways to helping this place out.

Felix Days are rarely a problem.

If you pay attention to the game threads, it’s actually rather hilarious how well people stay on topic until the second Felix gets yanked.

I wish we could find a way to harness that kind of attention on Wash/Tits/Silva starts.
I can't decide if that would be good or bad for us
On the one hand, we'd be paying attention to games and staying a bit more on topic.

On the other hand, that’s a hell of a lot of negative GTE to endure.

GTE was a whole other problem earlier in the season

I, for one, am glad that it’s gone away.

God that was awful.

I’m glad I missed the first two game threads of the season to actually…you know…go to the games.

Game threads are going to be a huge problem if and when this team ever contends
I fear what happens when we're a contender

and the bandwagonners show up.

The constant stream of comments makes it impossible to follow both the thread and the game
brb, getting jello.
I like to write and I like to penalize people for shitty comments

Unfortunately I cannot do both. At least, not well.

Delegate.
You guys hereby have free reign to moderate whenever you feel it is necessary
You keep saying that

and then you leave us hanging at the end of the night.

Damn mixed messages!!

All I ask is that you supply a ban/box message
I was the first person to do that.
I appreciate the precedent
You didn't even leave a message when you unbanned me
MY ONE REGRET IN LIFE!
Perhaps you need to do what the USSM did

and get a dedicated gamethread moderator or two.

Not even joking right now

A combination of JI and/or me are around for every gamethread and we know what is acceptable here. If it ever really came to it you could entrust us and not have to worry about us going over board. This works with any of the other regulars here (Pdb, MarcW, etc)

I can try to keep posts like Matthew's on topic

or the tRA stuff, but I’m almost never around for game threads.

I'm pondering a final solution joke here.

Judges?

Always appropriate
*When executed properly
General rule

people trying to be funny = unfunny.

My funniest comments generally are generally unintentionally funny.
Yeah....

I miss the kind of GTE that re-emerged in the Felix GS gamethread though.

That GTE was natural and organic

Earlier in the season way too many people were trying to force it in an effort to one-up each other. The results were bad.

When GTE devolves into blatant racism and bigotry

it’s a problem.

I'm pretty sure that was just butthol
I sure hope so.
By the way, butthol's screenname has been permanently banned.
God is merciful.
oh is he now?

That is not my God.

My God looks an awful lot like Gil Meche.

I hate that fucking dog so much

>:(

They dress like they want it
Maybe it will get better as we get closer to the end of the season if we're still in the race for Strasburg?
I still love you.
Unless being Robertbaited I try to stay away from posting in threads that you put effort into.

And I have been advocating a daily link dump like AN has for a while. Let the masses run wild there and you shouldn’t have problems in threads like this.

I think this is becoming a problem.
And Matthew even provided an off-topic thread!

In which I bitched like a child over TV awards.

This might be a good idea

Provide an offtopic Fanpost for people to just talk in every few days or whatever and get it all out of their system/satisfy their boredom while moderating the serious threads a bit more.

This idea has come up before

I will have to give it serious thought.

I liked how that worked today.
Seems odd at first thought, but it might be wise.

We all dig talking to each other about random shit, but it does tend to water down the comments in the more informative posts.

On the plus side, the hardcore Data Fairy posts seem to survive

That’s a good sign.

I love the tRA posts, even if they're over my head.
Agreed.

A friend asked me to explain tRA today, and I got to “it assigns run values to each outcome in an at-bat, and then . . . I don’t know. It makes sense when I read it, but my brain doesn’t hold it. But it’s good, I swear.”

You have good friends
He's a lurker who reads most of the stuff here.
Which reminds me:

What does the “t” stand for?

the
If you're joking, that's hilarious. If you're not, that's even more hilarious.
I'm actually starting to get it I think

When the concept first came up I was completely lost on the whole thing, mostly because of my inherent stat prejudices I think, but it makes perfect sense now.

I try not to post too much in those, because I'm learning rather than getting it yet.

But I read them and appreciate them and enjoy the on-topic discussion in those posts.

Over at Blazers Edge,

Dave throws up a Junk Drawer Fanpost daily so folks can go OT in there to their heart’s content.

What else can be said about this?

The team has been terrible at filling a position that should be easy to fill.

Has this team filled anything other than the bullpen correctly?
I'm starting to think we're better off just trading Ibanez this month

and finding some scrap reject to rotate through DH next year.

Wouldn't be that hard.

And that would free up money for a certain other SP…

Sheets/Burnett in '08!
Anything leftover is put straight into building the medical staff
I hope Sheets shoulder explodes between now and then.
Wanna fund a PhD in modelling pitcher soft tissue injuries?
If that happens we should trade RRS
See you in a few minutes.

Chara is a scary man
Get used to seeing this picture pop up pretty often
I was expecting it, to be honest
It took forever to find a decent one
Allright, I'm making one.
Not quite what I wanted, but not bad for a quick effort.

Photobucket

I was going to explain myself

If we get Burnett and Sheets, we’d have this rotation (assuming no Bedard trade):

1. Felix
2. Bedard
3. Sheets
4. Burnett

The fifth spot should either go to Dickey or Morrow, Morrow to get experience as a starter and Dickey for being a solid #5. It shouldn’t go to RRS because Morrow has a ton more potential and if he isn’t the #5, he will eventually supplant the #5. Dickey is also a great long relief pitcher (as we have seen), so he could go back there., but if you truly believe RRS has the ability to become a #3/4 pitcher, it’d be a waste to have him out of the rotation and in the bullpen. This is why we would need to free him

...Silva...
I'm assuming someone here harpoons the mighty whale before next season
Seriously though, is there any chance we can move him to some other team, say, next season?
Not with that albatross contract.
Maybe we could unload him if we agreed to eat a large portion of it...

It’s a sunk cost anyways…

No reason to do that.

He’s perfectly fine as a back end SP.

With a better defense behind him.
Jon Garland here we come!
I would find that absolutely hilarious and so would you
I hope LeeP signs him on his last as interim GM

before Chris Antonetti is supposed to take over and then Antonetti says WTF and backs out of the job.

I want this team to either be as great or as shitty as possible
Bedard and Lopez for Rowand + Zito!
No dice, needs Mocock
Maybe with a fine patina

of Bengie Molina.

I actually like Rowand a lot.

What’s his contract anyways? Is he a good deal?

No
Which part is bad,

1) defense overrated 2) batting average unsustainable 3) contract/year is too high?

$60m/5yr
Better than Silva or GMJ at least.
Not a benchmark
Also better than Juan Pierre

in that “Somewhat preferable to being castrated by Divine’s teeth” sort of way.

(q: Divine’s been dead for two decades. A: exactly)

Andruw Jones, Barry Zito
Naming bigger disasters does not make Rowand's contract look good.
Compared to Moctezuma

Rowand is pretty good!

Here's something I'm wondering...

Look at all the deals for 4 (arbitration years not counting) years or more in the past 20 years or so, how many were busts, and how many were good deals, as in underpaid. I can only think of Steve Nash off the top of my deal, and that’s not baseball.

Uhhhhhh Barry Zito?
Yeah, I know there are lots of busts.

I meant, I wonder what the distribution is like. 30% overpaid, 68% ok deal, 2% underpaid?

If you're making an FA deal for 4+ years

you’re sort of taking ‘underpaid’ off the table. That’s not a criticism, that’s what both parties would agree is happening.

My sense is that the ‘overpaid’ is slightly higher, esp. so for pitchers, with hitters coming in around your percentages…

NO NO NO

STAB STAB STAB

Do you think we'll wait for the deadline to make any trades (if we make any)?
There's a decent chance he'd accept arb.
That is a concern.

Though a one year deal wouldn’t be horrid.

Assuming he DHes in a platoon and declines no further?...
Fuck this thread

the Who are on. I won’t brb.

Miami has had a worse time with QB's
Of course, unlike quarterbacks, decent designated hitter candidates might as well grow on trees
Another way that they are dissimilar to DHs is that quarterbacks don't play baseball.
No shit, I was hoping to snap the ball off the mound.
You are really unfunny

and not very pleasant to talk to. Has anyone told you this before?

Uh

I know the rule

and I didn’t think I was crossing it.

I'm not entirely sure you were either
Can we blow his identity yet?
Don't be mean unless you're Graham
Mean is one thing, that wasn't really mean.

Non-mods or admins shouldn’t try to enforce the rules. They can do it without our help

Eh, it seemed kinda mean to me

But you’re right, we shouldn’t be mini-modding. /withdrawn

Imagine if we had all those guys back

Chris Snelling, Emiliano Fruto, Shin-soo Choo, Asdrubal Cabrera

And then traded all 4 guys away in a trade right now?

I seriously wonder what the Mariner’s could get for them…

Rich Harden and Chad Gaudin?
Not very much
Yeah, the key is:

How many of the assembled need surgery/are out due to injury?

Cabrera is clearly the most valuable. The rest are just filler.

But Snelling...
Snelling comes with a free punchard with 10 of 12 already punched out. 12th MRI is free!!
That's good.
Their potentials were high

but most of them didn’t mount to anything, thanks to injuries and such. I guess you have to look at the deals for what they were at the time to determine if it was a good deal or not, just like the Garcia trade a few years back.

Jose Vidro and Ben Broussard
And Eduardo Perez.
Don't forget the $21 million

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