Lookout Landing

Yesterday I brought back memories of the Mariners hiring Don Wakamatsu. Well, maybe not. Do you have any memories of that? I don't. Maybe nobody did; it was a pretty bland announcement since it was not a surprise and Wakamatsu was mostly an unknown. Do you remember the Mariners signing Matt Fox this past winter? Maybe none of this stuff actually happened. If nobody is around to remember it, did it still happen?

Yes, because the internet is now always around. Stupid internet and its memory. One other thing the internet remembers is that the Mariners also had several choices for who to be the General Manager after Bill Bavasi and interim Lee Pelekoudas.

Tony Bernazard (Mets VP of Player Development)
Jerry DiPoto (Diamondbacks Director of Player Personnel)
Bob Engle (Mariners VP of International Operations)
Tony LaCava (Blue Jays Assistant General Manager)
Kim Ng (Dodgers Assistant General Manager)
Lee Pelekoudas (Mariners Interim General Manager)
Peter Woodfork (Diamondbacks Assistant General Manager)
Jack Zduriencik (Brewers Assistant General Manager)

Tony Bernazard you might remember from the meltdown that was the Mets 2009 season and several reports that he had challenged multiple other employees to fights. Or from offending Carlos Delgado back in 2004. Or for being implicated in getting Willie Randolph unceremoniously fired in 2008. How he ended up a GM candidate for the Mariners is confusing to me, but good thing he was eliminated from consideration quickly.

Jerry DiPoto became the interim GM for Arizona after they unexpectedly fired Josh Byrnes but like Pelekoudas he didn't survive the interview process for the promotion and Kevin Towers was brought in. DiPoto stayed with Arizona for another year, but last fall moved to Anaheim to take over the GM job there from Tony "Stealth Ninja" Reagins.

I doubt Bob Engle ever had much of a chance at the Mariners' job. I'm glad for that because he is so very good at the job that he does now and that job is also essential to the Mariners' future success. I hope Engle stays right where he is, but continues to get amply rewarded for his talents.

Running down those same eight, here are their current positions.

Tony Bernazard (unknown)
Jerry DiPoto (Angels General Manager)
Bob Engle (Mariners VP of International Operations)
Tony LaCava (Blue Jays Assistant General Manager)
Kim Ng (MLB Senior VP Baseball Operations)
Lee Pelekoudas (unknown)
Peter Woodfork (MLB Senior VP Baseball Operations)
Jack Zduriencik (Mariners General Manager)

With about 3.5 years of hindsight now to reflect on, I don't find myself wishing the Mariners had chosen any of the other seven candidates. Only with DiPoto do we have evidence of how he or she would actually perform as a GM and that's very little evidence. While DiPoto's moves to date have seemed well received (haha, Albert Pujols), is it worth messing with the current timeline for that switch? I suppose that ultimately comes down to how you feel about the past three seasons and the ones to come.

It was 10 November 2008 and ESPN, by way of the Associated Press (they apparently didn't have better things to associate with), released details on the Mariners; managerial search, which was into its first round of interviews. We know how it ended up. About a week later, it was Don Wakamatsu and that was that.

However, I recently became curious about what'd happened to the other six named possibilities. As a refresher, here were "The Magnificent Seven" and their jobs at the time:

Joey Cora (White Sox 3^rd base coach)
Chip Hale (Diamondbacks 3^rd base coach)
DeMarlo Hale (Red Sox 3^rd base coach)
Brad Mills (Red Sox bench coach)
Jose Oquendo (Cardinals 3^rd base coach)
Randy Ready (Padres minor league manager)
Don Wakamatsu (Athletics bench coach)

There were so many third base coaches! I suppose that's a manager-in-training job in baseball. Does that mean Jeff Datz could be a manager someday in the future? Would that even be allowed? Anyways, that's who the seven were and where they were. Where have they gone since then?

Joey Cora went on to be interviewed the following year by Milwaukee, but the job went to Ron Roenicke. Cora stayed in Chicago where he had been employed since 2003 and as bench coach since 2006. Cora was fired along with Guillen at the end of 2011 and both now work for the Miami Marlins, as head (Ozzie) and bench (Joey) coach again.

Chip Hale ended up being hired as the third base coach with the Mets for the 2009 season and was a candidate for their manager position after Jerry Manuel was fired after 2010. Instead, Hale is now the bench coach with the Oakland Athletics.

The other Hale, DeMarlo, continued 2009 as the third base coach for the Red Sox and after that year was moved to the bench coach role. Hale was again a managerial candidate the following season, for Toronto. Hale stayed with Boston through 2011 and is now the third base coach for the Orioles, having successfully fled to a better organization (ha!). The Red Sox bench coach before Hale, Brad Mills was named the manager of the Astros after the 2009 season.

Jose Oquendo is still the Cardinals' third base coach. Besides Seattle, he was interviewed for a head coach job with the Padres, Mets and Cardinals. It's worth bringing up that Oquendo was specifically mentioned by Brendan Ryan in his Q&A with David Laurila at FanGraphs as someone who really helped him with his defensive approach.

Randy Ready, who was managing the Portland Beavers at the time, was named the hitting coach of the Padres at the trade deadline of 2009 and remained there through the 2011 season, after which he was fired. He lasted longer than Wakamatsu did though, who was fired by the Mariners on 9 August 2010. Wakamatsu spent 2011 and is currently the bench coach for the Blue Jays.

In conclusion, here's the same list of seven and their current jobs

Joey Cora (Marlins 3^rd base coach)
Chip Hale (Athletics bench coach)
DeMarlo Hale (Orioles 3^rd base coach)
Brad Mills (Astros head coach)
Jose Oquendo (Cardinals 3^rd base coach)
Randy Ready (unknown)
Don Wakamatsu (Blue Jays bench coach)

Sometimes baseball feels static and everlasting. Ichiro and Felix, the Mariners can't hit and we hate our manager. Change occurs of course, but it does not occur with uniformity or regularity. There were seven people leaked as candidates to be named the first manager of the Mariners under Jack Zduriencik. That was way back in the middle of November 2008. We are well into the fourth baseball season since that time and looking back I found it jarring how little life has changed for those seven people. Maybe it's just with baseball coaches, but sometimes I feel so damn stuck.

Among Mariners fans, I've observed a lot of interest in what former players and prospects are up to with their playing days behind them. Maybe this isn't unique to Mariners fans, and I don't know why it would be unique to Mariners fans, but Mariners fans are the only fans I ever really observe, so. People are interested in knowing what Ryan Anderson is up to. People are interested in knowing what Chris Snelling is up to. People are probably interested in knowing what Clint Nageotte and Rett Johnson are up to, although I have no idea.

I've recently been updated on what Bobby Madritsch is up to. I remember how popular Madritsch was when he emerged and ultimately burned out years ago, so I figured I'd share with the group.

The picture kind of says it all. Madritsch is in Burbank, Illinois, where he was born and went to high school. There, he helped to start a youth baseball organization called the Burbank Knights, with this modest website. He has worked with his brother Ken, and Bobby manages the oldest players on the travel ball club. This is the Knights' first year of existence, and they anticipate a lot of growth going forward. These are mostly words that have been fed to me, which you can probably tell, but Bobby is apparently quite the inspirational leader. Which maybe shouldn't be a huge surprise, given what he fought through on his way to the top.

Madritsch today is just 36 years old. Three weeks ago, he was 35. He hasn't pitched in the Majors since 2005, and he hasn't pitched in affiliated minors since 2004. After his shoulder blew up, he was finished, and he signed with the Royals and got released by the Royals without ever throwing an inning. Madritsch's career didn't go the way anyone wanted it to. But his career did get him to the Major Leagues, and he did post a 3.41 ERA in the Major Leagues, so it's not like the whole thing was a bust. Madritsch did beat the odds to make it, if only for a little while, and if that experience helps him to lead and inspire a team of developing teenagers, then that's terrific. Playing baseball was not the only way for Bobby Madritsch to make a difference. It was just one of the ways.

I don't know how we're supposed to feel about Bobby Madritsch's current situation, given what could have been his current situation, but I hope that the answer is "good". I hope he's coaching his heart out, and I know if I were a 14-year-old I'd be scared to death of disappointing a man with a neck tattoo.

Earlier this morning, Baseball Nation published an article I wrote about the circumstances surrounding the trade that sent Jason Varitek from the Mariners to the Red Sox in 1997. As it happens, also this morning, Alex Speier wrote a much better and more thoroughly-researched article on the same topic. This is all happening because Varitek is about to announce his retirement, and while it might seem like a waste of time to explore something that happened so many years ago, that's a pretty lame perspective, history-hater.

The Varitek and Derek Lowe trade is widely considered one of the biggest mistakes in Mariners franchise history, but tucked within Speier's piece is a nugget indicating how this all might have been avoided:

Seattle still wanted Slocumb, but was initially unwilling to trade two prospects for a reliever. Duquette made a one-for-one offer of Slocumb for Cloude, but the Mariners wouldn't move the young pitcher [...]

That's Ken Cloude. The Red Sox wanted to trade for Cloude, while the Mariners wanted to give them Lowe. Eventually, just in front of the deadline, a compromise was reached, which looks nothing like a proper compromise today.

From one angle, this was terrible on the Mariners' part. Varitek developed into a regular catcher, and Lowe developed into an effective closer and an effective starter, while Cloude developed into a guy whose arm hurt a lot of the time. Cloude didn't throw a Major League pitch after turning 25. His career ERA was 6.56.

But back then, Cloude was a hard-throwing 22-year-old generating a strikeout an inning in double-A. Varitek was a decent 25-year-old catching prospect in Tacoma. Lowe was a decent 24-year-old pitching prospect in Tacoma. Varitek and Lowe had value, but you could argue that Cloude had more value, and so you could argue that the Mariners did better dealing the first two than if they had dealt the third.

Of course, we're going way back in time, so I don't know just how highly Cloude was thought of. And the issue here isn't only what the Mariners gave up - it's also what the Mariners got, which was an unspectacular reliever. You could argue that the Mariners did better trading Varitek and Lowe for Slocumb instead of Cloude for Slocumb, but those weren't the only two options. Hindsight doesn't make trading value for Slocumb at all look very bright.

Anyway, something to think about. Trades are funny.

There was a time, long ago, a time I would still eat a Pop Tart, when baseball rotated both home field advantage in the World Series and picks in the amateur draft between the two leagues. The World Series made sense, though an argument for the team with the better regular season record getting it also makes sense. The winner of the All Star Game determining home field advantage can make sense if you torture it enough and are somehow ignorant of all the better options available. Alternating in the draft can also make some sense if you think a disparity between the leagues might give one an unfair advantage, but I feel that most of us agree that going strictly by last year's winning percentage regardless of league is the better method.

Home field in the World Series didn't go on to have much tangible impact on the game. Few Series went to seven games and home field in baseball has been shown to be just not that big of a deal compared to other major sports. Forcing the draft order to wobble between leagues did have noticeable repercussions however. We've spoken a couple times recently about the suck mastery of the 2003 Tigers. They were 20 wins worse than the next worst team, who were the Rays. San Diego was third and yet picked first in the 2004 draft. The Padres Portland'd the pick and Detroit still snagged Justin Verlander, but my how it could have been.

Famously, on two occasions, 1987 and 1993, the Mariners ended up with the first overall pick despite not deserving it based on winning percentage the year prior. Those happened to be two very good years to have that first pick and the Mariners capitalized with Ken Griffey Jr and Alex Rodriguez. The Pirates were the rightful owners in 1987 and left with Mark Merchant*, who never played in the Majors, as a crummy consolation prize. In 1993, the system relegated the Dodgers to second and selected Darren Dreifort.

*Uninterestedly, Merchant ended up in the Mariners' system less than two years after being drafted, part of a five-player trade that "featured" Rey Quinones.

Of course, it's not as simple as to say that the Mariners would have missed out on both or either had they picked second in those drafts. The Pirates or Dodgers could have passed over Griffey and Rodriguez, perhaps for the same players they ultimately did draft. It's hard to say with clear certainty. Owner George Argyros wanted to draft Mike Harkey in 1987 and Lou Piniella wanted the Mariners to take Darren Dreifort in 1993 so while other teams are probably not as incompetent as the Mariners, the possibility exists.

Some Pirate fans still bring up the Griffey draft, but the shifting around of draft picks from the pure order was frequent and in other years it worked against the Mariners. As noted in the write up on Bill Swift, the Mariners drafted him second after the Mets took Shawn Abner. Unnoted was that the Mariners had the worst 1983 record and were bumped from the first overall slot. Granted, it didn't come back to haunt them, but it could have. One time in history it's certainly feasible that such shuffling did.

Four other times (2000, 2001, 2003 and 2004*) the Mariners would have had shifted first round picks as well, but their picks were surrendered as part of free agent compensation. The players signed that caused those forfeited picks were, in order: John Olerud, Jeff Nelson, Greg Colbrunn and Eddie Guardado. I won't complain about the Olerud signing.

*Thanks, Pat and Bill

What ifs in the draft are best left with first overall picks since at least there you can unequivocally state that the picking team could have picked anyone. It can get crazy the further down you go and I prefer to stay out of such matters. Nevertheless, one specific case has me interested and it pertains to those laments from Pittsburgh about Griffey.

By record, the Mariners should have drafted sixth in 1985 instead of seventh. The teams that picked one through five would not have changed had that draft been ordered by straight winning percentage. Therefore, I think it entirely within grounded reason to state that had such an order been in place, the Mariners would have been drafting with Barry Bonds still on the board, in the draft spot where he was taken, by the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Fans in retroactive looks at the draft often cry over who their teams passed over (hey there, Michael Garciaparra over David Wright) but this is quite a bit different from those I feel. This wasn't late in the draft. Barry Bonds was a well-known prospect. He went very high in the draft. He went one spot ahead of Seattle' pick. He went in the spot Seattle could have had.

That's a titillating thought for me. Barry Bonds as a Mariner in the late '80s and early '90s; instead of some of us clamoring for Bonds in the late '00s as a DH, him in his young prime. Even nuttier is that while Bonds did play (in center field) in 1986 and was worth about three wins, the various Mariners playing center amounted to roughly replacement level. Three extra wins in the 1986 season still leaves the Mariners with the worst record in the AL and second worst overall. It's a stretch to say that the Mariners could have ended up with both Griffey and Bonds, but the wistfulness is equally plausible as Pittsburgh's.

I don't know, only a few people could, what the Pirates would have done with the first pick. The Mariners almost didn't go with Junior and Willie Banks and Mark Merchant were both highly thought of at the time. It's coincidental but perfect that arguably the two greatest players of the '90s were so close to being on the same team, either Pittsburgh or Seattle. What a short, but wild ride that would have been.

At the start of last week (assuming you count Monday as the start. I do), I wrote two pieces for FanGraphs about relative pitcher strikeouts. They covered the worst and the best such rates in baseball history. They ended up not having anything to do with the Mariners so I didn't bother linking them here. So here's to rectifying that by creating a Mariners spin off! Will it be as short lived as the original series?

You can go read the original FanGraphs pieces for the back story if you want but the gist of the idea is that I wanted to examine pitcher seasons totally within the context of the rest of the baseball league for each season. Perhaps most noticeably, strikeouts have risen over time so what seems pedestrian to us now was actually dominance back in those terrible years of history.

What came out of the all-encompassing look was finding out that Ted Wingfield existed and that Dazzy Vance really deserves to be more of a household name among households that routinely discuss the greats in baseball history. He probably does not need to be mentioned amongst families that don't because that would just get weird.

I decided to get a little more advanced for the Mariner section because I love you all. I cleaned all of your gutters and bathroom tile just the way you like them to be cleaned. I have also included z-scores (since I canvassed the entire population of pitchers) in my charts and used that to decide what I think are the worst and best relative strikeout seasons in Mariner history. It's a slightly different definition from what I did with FanGraphs, and I'm not claiming it's a better one, but I like different.

The six most Mariner Mariners' seasons (min: 500 batters faced).

Poor Ryan :( I went to six solely so that I could include Carlos Silva here. You were terrible, Carlos. You were bad at pitching, unpleasant to watch and reportedly a bad teammate.

Glenn Abbott was the guy who I thought would top this list and it still gets me that Abbott was the Opening Day starter in 1979, but Bill Swift's 1988 season edged him out if you go by z-score. Abbott still has the lower relative strikeout rate, so I'm comfortable giving the title of worst strikeout season to either of them.

And because it maximizes the point, here are the seven most outlying (biggest z score) strikeout seasons in Mariner history.

Oh, Randy.

You might not be intuitively familiar with statistics (you should learn, even at a beginners level, it's a vastly helpful knowledge tool) and thus might not grasp how unlikely a z score over four is. With a normal distribution — of which these seasons closely approximate — a z-score of three represents the 99.9th percentile. A score of four or more (in either magnitude) is very rare. Randy Johnson was a special pitcher.

Bill Swift ended his career as a Seattle Mariner in 1998. I have absolutely no memory of that happening. As a 36-year-old, he made 26 starts on the team that traded Randy Johnson and relied on Ken Cloude to make 30 starts. I vividly remember watching Randy that season and I desperately hoped he would stay. I draw a complete blank on Bill Swift. Perhaps because his season was rather bad, but he did pitch nearly 145 innings so maybe I just didn't see those games. Any of them. Or maybe that was the year aliens landed in my town and I kept getting my mind blanked by Tommy Lee Jones. Anyways, more important than potential alien invasions is that Swift's final year was not a good one. He struck out 77 and walked or hit 59 over just near 145 innings.

Bill Swift began his career as a Mariner as well. Technically, I don't remember that either since it happened before I was born. Swift was a Mariner because in 1984 the Mariners drafted him second overall. That is fact number two about Bill Swift that I would not have gotten correct had you quizzed me. Really, Bill Swift was a number two overall draft pick? Wow.

Of course there's no saying who the Mariners should have selected instead. The Mets took Shawn Abner first that year and he never amounted to much. I don't know the scouting consensus pre-draft or even if such knowledge is findable on the web archives somewhere. I do know that Mark McGwire and a few other choice talents were taken later in the draft. Three more of them will play a minor part later in this story.

Swift, a college senior (he'd been drafted by the Twins in the second round a year prior) spent almost no time in the Minors before entering the Seattle rotation. He wasn't amazing with the strikeouts and walks, but despite the Kingdome's reputation for surrendering home runs, Swift did well avoiding them. We don't have a breakdown of batted balls back when Swift debuted, but starting in 1988 we do and for the next four years as a Mariner, Swift did post crazy good ground ball rates.

However, his ERA was quite outsized and starting in 1989, Swift was moved more and more to the bullpen until by 1991, his final season as a Mariner, Swift made zero starts. By now his strikeouts had risen and his walks decreased and Swift was a bona fide good reliever.

nBB = unintentional walks + batters hit by pitch

And then in the winter after the 1991 season, the Mariners traded Swift to San Francisco in a five player deal that brought back Kevin Mitchell. Kevin Mitchell had recently been really good, winning the 1989 MVP with a legitimately outstanding season. Candlestick Park had a neutral home run park factor for right-handers and Mitchell knocked 47 out of the park in '89, followed by 35 and 27 the next two years. That appears to signal a downward trend, but Mitchell's home run rate shows some drop off, but less than his raw totals indicate.

1989: 47 home runs, 640 plate appearances, 7.3% HR
1990: 35 HR, 589 PA, 5.9%
1991: 27 HR, 423 PA, 6.4%

As a Mariner, Mitchell hit well enough, but the awesome home run power turned into less impressive doubles power. He hit just nine home runs in 402 trips to the plate (2.2%) and played only 99 games for Seattle that season as injury problems continued. The team traded Mitchell to Cincinnati for Norm Charlton (1984 draft pick) and Mitchell became another example (foreshadowing) of a player getting better after leaving the Mariners. With Cincinnati in 1993-4, Mitchell still didn't play full time but over those two seasons got 733 plate appearances and posted a 1.048 OPS (172 OPS+). In 1993 Charlton pitched 34.2 innings. He didn't pitch in 1994 and wasn't a Mariner anyways. Don't worry, he'd come back twice more.

While all that transpired up north, the San Francisco Giants returned Bill Swift to the starting rotation and he kept right on with his newfangled getting hitters out way. He led the National League in ERA in his first season with the Giants. In the next, Swift made 34 starts, hurled 232.2 innings and had a 3:1 strikeout to walk ratio. He finished second in the Cy Young voting to Greg Maddux (1984 draft pick) and ahead of third place Tom Glavine (1984 draft pick).

Swift left the Giants after the 1994 strike season and signed with the Rockies. He never found success or health there though, working just 189 innings over three seasons. That set the stage for his farewell tour with Seattle in 1998 which ended his career as it began, as a Mariner starter with an inflated ERA.

I was getting prepared to start writing this, and then Matthew told me from the next room over that the Sounders just made a huge and hugely controversial trade. So it's not like this post is going to be read by anybody anyway, since Seattle-area sports fans are all reading about that. But I'm still going to get this out there, because my whole life people have told me that I shouldn't bottle things up, since that just leads to an explosion. You shouldn't ever bottle anything up. Except so, so many delicious things.

A link was passed along to me today, to a post on a blog called Plunk Everyone. Within the post, the author went team-by-team and identified the ten all-time players (each) who had the highest winning percentages when they were in the starting lineup. The example given in the intro is that the Diamondbacks won 58 percent of their games when Tony Womack was in the starting lineup. That example immediately tells you that what follows is more interesting than meaningful, but there's room for things to be both interesting and meaningful. I think the Mariners' list is both interesting and meaningful. The Mariners' list:

1. Mike Cameron, 61.3%
2. John Olerud, 58.7%
3. Bret Boone, 54.6%
4. Dan Wilson, 53.3%
5. Edgar Martinez, 51.6%
6. Alex Rodriguez, 51.2%
7. Jay Buhner, 49.1%
8. Ken Griffey Jr., 49.1%
9. Ichiro, 48.8%
10. Richie Sexson, 47.2%

I definitely wasn't expecting to see Richie Sexson pop up, but then it's not like 47.2% is anything to be proud of. More significant is the guy at the very top. The Mariners have had a higher winning percentage with Mike Cameron in the starting lineup than they have with any other player in the starting lineup in franchise history (given a 500-start minimum).

Setting the start minimum at 500 admittedly keeps the player pool pretty small. And a huge part of Cameron's record is that he was a Mariner at the right time, since those 2000-2003 teams were something else. But then Cameron was also a huge part of those 2000-2003 teams. According to Baseball-Reference, his four-year WAR was 19.0. According to FanGraphs, his four-year WAR was 19.7. Players with similar WARs over the same span of time: Jorge Posada, Larry Walker, Bret Boone and Shawn Green. I am very much aware of the limitations of WAR, but this is just to illustrate the point that Mike Cameron was fuckin awesome.

And then his contract ran out and the Mariners didn't offer him arbitration. He was 30 years old, coming off a season in which he was worth about five wins at a $7 million salary, and the Mariners didn't offer him arbitration. They just let him go. They signed Raul Ibanez for three years, and they just let Cammy go, without so much as a compensation pick. You can try to read the explanation here, but I should warn you that it's very stupid. We had a good idea that it was stupid at the time. We have a better idea that it was stupid now. So stupid. The Mike Cameron situation isn't why the Mariners went from being very good to very bad, but it was a contributor.

Mike Cameron: awesome Seattle Mariner, and current owner of a Seattle Mariners franchise record. It's a shame the way it wound up, but at least we got to have Cammy for a while, and at least for his sake he got out before shit turned rotten. I suppose it's all in how you look at it.