1
It's instructive to go to B-R and look up the last few drafts round by round and take a look at the WAR values for players taken. It makes you wonder where 30 25-man rosters come from.
Okay, mal brought this up again, so let's get to it:
How long should players be allowed to struggle? 3 months? 3 years? When do you cut bait and move on, and when do you wait around for greatness?
After all, greatness should show itself in good order, so are you waiting around for goodness, or okay-ness? Who wants to wait 3 years for okay-ness?
blissedj follows up on the thought by saying, "a couple years ago we had 3 top 20 in all of baseball prospects! That is good drafting and trading, yet at this point nothing to show for it. 0-3. It still counts for me that Smoak and Montero failed even if we didn't draft them they were not established major leaguers. They were at the end of their development, so even less risk! Still no success as of yet."
So I guess the question is, how long does a rebuild take? How many blue-chippers does a team need in order to pull it off?
The short answer: too long, and too many.
The long answer: let's take a look a the 2008-2009 drafts, shall we?
-----------------------------
For the Mariners, the 2008 draft was a lost one with their own draft pick, but we snagged a nicely rated first rounder in Smoak from this draft. It was The Draft Of the First Basemen. There were SEVEN first basemen taken in the first 23 picks. ALL of their WAR figures, added together, do not equal Buster Posey's. Did I mention that, historically, college first basemen have been the SAFEST high draftpicks? These guys are screwing that up at the moment. After Posey, the best first-round WAR figures go to Brett Lawrie, Gordon Beckham and Ike Davis. Wanna know what their career lines look like?
Lawrie: .265/ .323/ .434. .757, 103 OPS+ (69 this year)
Beckham: .246/ .312/ .381/ .693, 84 OPS+ (79 last year, lost for this year)
Davis: .240/ .324/ .436/ .761, 109 OPS+ (35 this year)
Danny Espinosa, SS, is one of the best WAR players from this draft so far. He struck out 189 times last year and has a 34 OPS+ this year. Alex Avila is another WAR star from the lower rounds (6th). His WAR is almost entirely earned from one great year. He's gone from a 142 OPS+ to a 100, and this year a 42.
So if you wanted to point me to the greatest hitting stars of the 2008 draft where do you go? Posey and... whom?
It's very hard to rebuild with blue chippers if they're really all yellow or brown chippers. Smoak is not what we wanted him to be. Almost NONE of this hitters, especially the hyped hitters, from the 2008 draft have been that. They've all been mediocre thus far. We attempted to get Lawrie instead of Montero with our Pineda poker chip but couldn't. You know who's better than Lawrie right now? Some dude named Seager that we already have. That might not continue for their careers, but even the hitting stars of this draft aren't wowing at the moment (other than a certain two-time WS winner, anyway).
-----------------------------
2009?
Dustin Ackley currently has the 2nd-best WAR total (6.7) of any 1st round player from 2009 to Mike Trout. Yes, Strasburg will pass him very shortly, so feel free to put him at #3. The next closest first-round hitter in WAR is AJ Pollack, OPSing .723 career with a 1.5 WAR in just a handful of ABs so far.
Best hitters out of the next several rounds come up as:
- 2nd rounder Jason Kipnis, with a 108 career OPS+ at second base and 6.2 WAR.
- 3rd rounder Kyle Seager, 111 OPS+ and 5.1 WAR
- 4th rounder Brandon Belt, 117 OPS+ and 4.7 WAR (sucks being a 1B)
- 8th rounder Paul Goldschmidt, 131 OPS+ and 6.5 WAR.
There's your 2nd offensive star from the draft. We actually tried to get Arizona to trade him to us, if the rumors are correct, but they wisely said, "Ha ha ha ha ha... *click*" so no luck there. But the Ms DID draft two of the top half-dozen position players that have emerged from that draft so far. Is Ackley making us all very angry? Sure. Lawrie and Davis and Avila are all making their fans angry too, and they've had an extra year to get it right but they all seem to be "regressing" too.
That's the pattern for young players, certainly young hitters. Pitchers can make plateau jumps but hitters normally have to see a lot of pitches. Spoiler alert: it took Mike Minor, the 7th pick in 2009, 300 major league innings to make that plateau leap. The #8 pitcher Leake hasn't made it yet and is toiling along with an ERA+ under 100 in the NL. Storen's a reliever. Ditto Brothers, and Crow. None of the "safe" top college arms made any sort of real dent until this year, so was going with the college hitter of the decade a mistake? Or is it just annoying that he's not fast-tracking his learning curve like Trout and Harper?
-----------------------------
Very few players come up to the majors and excel from day one. Several players from this draft have yet to emerge from the minors with any serious playing time (like our own Nick Franklin) but immediate and monstrous impacts, even from blue chippers, aren't that common. Gotta wait. The oven only cooks as fast as it cooks, and checking the souffle every 5 minutes is a good way to get it to collapse.
That's one of the reasons I was angry at the Ms last year: putting Ackley and Smoak in the position to have to carry the offense was a horrible idea. They figured that out this year, but it's a little late in their development and yes, we may have retarded their early growth. Both men are going to have to figure out their own games again, what they can and cannot do. But at least now they're not doing it as the expected run producers. Let's hope the souffle is salvagable.
I haven't been happy with our major-league talent development nor our plan for how to nurture the young players of whom we expect too much, but I've been pretty impressed with our drafts and don't feel like they're behind schedule in delivering players to us.
I think sometimes people expect miracles because we're "being patient" and "doing this the right way" so naturally all the top prospects should come up quickly and immediately do well. It just doesn't work like that very often. Because it's happened within our division recently it's a double burr under our saddles, but we've had Seager come up and have immediate impact. That's just not enough to catch our rivals.
The place for immediate impact is with pitching. That's also the place to lose a good player to injury, so it's hard to bet on the arms. We've done both, and taken a mix of high-quality arms and bats. Right now the arms are injuring themselves and the bats are on the slow bell curve (or as it appears sometimes, the inverted bell curve). That sucks.
It's also the nature of a rebuild. We did not have great assets to trade to create a larger number of young ballplayers, and we did not have free agents that would earn us extra compensatory picks. Bavasi left us with basically NOTHING. He only drafted 4 useful talents that have made decently positive WAR contributions in the pros thus far: Saunders, Morrow, Tillman and Fister. He messed up Morrow, Tillman was basically useless in the bigs until this year, and Fister was not TOR Fister until THIS development team got to him. Considering our woes in getting any FAs to take our money, this was as fast as our rebuild was gonna happen.
So what am I saying? I'm saying we're stuck fellas. This is the pace. We're not slow and inept, we simply have not built a self-sustaining team yet. We have a self-sustaining FARM, but with the accompanying growth curves and injury casualties we'll need free agents to come here and help us for a couple of years yet. And that's been the weakness in Zduriencik's GM tenure thus far. This year, the trades and FAs have worked out well - it's the kids who are either on the DL or not pulling enough weight.
I believe that will change as the year progresses. Fast enough to keep us in any sort of Wildcard chase? Dunno. Signs are pointing to no right now, but we were fine 10 days ago. Fingers crossed that we'll be fine 10 days from now.
And in the meantime give the kids a little breathing room, K? They're learning as fast as they can - and about as fast as most kids in other orgs learn, it seems. Maybe someone like Ackley needs to be kicked back to the minors to do that learning, but as demonstrated with Montero we're not against that either.
I know we've been waiting for a decade, but that's not Jack's fault. Give it time. Or else let somebody else take the glory for all of Jack's players ripening according to schedule and not according to our preference.
~G
Comments
2
Breakdown of hitters by WAR between now and the steroid era (250+ PAs):
5+ WAR:
2012
2012 % of players
2001
2001 % of players
Age 25 and under:
7
30%
7
20%
Age 26-31:
12
52%
18
51%
Age 32+:
4
17%
10
29%
2-5 WAR:
2012
2012 % of players
2001
2001 % of players
Age 25 and under:
29
23%
13
14%
Age 26-31:
73
59%
56
61%
Age 32+:
22
18%
23
25%
2012
2012 % of players
2001
2001 % of players
Age 25 and under:
32
20%
42
24%
Age 26-31:
83
53%
72
42%
Age 32+:
43
27%
59
34%
So kids are getting a few more chances now than they did when roids were keeping the older folks around longer. They still aren't producing anything like what the prime players do - as should be expected. Your team will be carried by the 26-31 age range at the plate - as one would expect. The mental part and the physical prime are matching up at that point.
Seager and Ackley are 25. Smoak is 26. Last year's Mariners over 25 (again, 250+ PAs) : Ichiro (traded mid-season), Ryan (helping no one at the plate), Olivo (see: Ryan) and Jaso (part time C/DH).
The reason last year was an offensive disaster was because the kids had to carry all the load. This year they don't, and this year we have an average offense even with Ackley and Montero bottoming out.
~G
3
*** post deleted by me, DaddyO ***
:grins: sometimes I get a little bit carried away.
4
Looking over the best teams over the last decade, I expected to see more with cores of 24-26 key players, but they tend to be filled with the 30-34 year olds (and up) having big seasons. I don't fault the M's for thinking they might hit a trifecta last season, but in retrospect that was obvious wishful thinking. They did a good job supplementing the young core this season, picking up guys like Bay for free. Bay has serious upside because of his past that Wells couldn't claim. You don't want to sign too many of these guys to long term expensive contracts, like we considered giving Bay himself a few years ago. But you want them on your roster.
5
G,
Of course this is a long way out but what core of any age will the M's be able to count on in 2014? I see only Seager and hopefully Saunders. Perhaps Morse but if not ??? It would be one thing if 2 of Smoak, Montero and Ackley could at least be about average while developing and not have to carry the team. All three have been so bad that they were shipped back to AAA at some point. That just isn't the way it usually works out that all your blue chippers fail so miserably they can't even stick around to learn to carry the team. How do you see 2014 offense stacking up any better than 2011 or 2012? Is it even possible? Hope that ROOT sports is raking in some free agent cash to stop the bleeding, but then we don't want to build with FA so this process is going to take probably 5 more years. At that point we will have to hope some of Ackley, Montero, Smoak, Franklin, Miller, Zunino, Romero, etc... have stepped up. If there is no 26-31 core developed from there then another 5 years for a whole new round of prospects.
6
So we'd better pay one of Morse/Morales to stay, maybe both. They're both here, the offense works pretty well with the mix of hitting and power the two bring, Seager is a good third option, Saunders has good power but doesn't hit for enough average to be a middle-hitter. He's very Mike-Cameron-esque. A two or a six hole hitter, IMO.
We don't know whether Montero or Ackley will straighten out in the minors, but I wouldn't make 2014 plans around it for sure.
As far as any kind of prototypical 3 or 4 hole hitters... I don't see them in AAA (outside of the upsides of Montero and Ackley that we're pretty far from at the moment).
Well, Miller just got there and he might be a #3 some day. He's got some Tulo in him. Zunino has the power but no way do I ask a catcher to be my MOTO out of the gate. Buster Poseys don't come around all the time.
For the most part, though, the Ms farm system lacks in MOTO hitting. They've got all kinds of hitting except for 40 HR guys. If we go back to the Edgar/Ole MOTO then our options increase a little - I have a huge man-crush on Choi, who should be in AA before the year is through. But that's still 2 or 3 years away from hitting MOTO for the Ms even in best case.
So we need the FAs - or trades - to do it. With Franklin and Miller, Seager and Saunders, Zunino... we've got kids who should hit for their positions. Of course, we had that a couple of years ago with Smoak, Montero and Ackley and that hasn't worked out so far.
I still expect to sell the farm for Stanton if possible. If we want a long-term MOTO solution it would have to be someone like that, paired with a Morales, and then filled in by plus-hitting kids.
~G
7
In some ways, he the most exciting hitter on our farm, and at AA. I can see him as a future MOTO - staying healthy right now - knock on wood.
8
But the dude just can't make it through half of a minor league season, let alone a major league one. If and when he stays healthy we can start talking about it, but he's got to play some full seasons first. Like, more than one. *laughs*
~G
9
The only reason you don't try to keep both of those guys is if you have one or more young players who are obviously better than them at their positions. Which you don't.
Those two are legit bats, and they are in the primes of their careers. Morales gives you a tough AB every time, gets on base, hits tough pitchers, and Morse can hurt the opposition with a bomb at any time. The days of 'gimme outs' from the M's need to be over, now.
Same goes for Shoppach, really. You re-sign him unless Zunino comes up this year and is absolutely stellar. Otherwise, Shoppach-Zunino is the way to go for next year; you play the hot bat and let Zunino learn from a productive veteran backstop.
As far as MOTO of the future... The M's have gone after some guys in the not too distant past... Raben, Poythress... who was the big 1B guy they drafted but couldn't sign?... And the minor league masher from Boston who couldn't hit once he arrived here? .. They tried to get Hamilton, and Justin Upton... Did they go after Goldschmitt too? And they probably figured Smoak and/or Montero would grow in to a MOTO bat. It's not like they haven't been trying...
Turns out though, OPS'ing 1.000 is really hard to do.
10
Fingers crossed and I'll be thrilled if they lay down some cash to keep both here. It's time to start spending some money and work on fielding a complete, competitive team again. Felix / Iwakuma / Morse / Morales works for me to build around. My hunch is Miller and Morban end up being the gems. Franklin sure looked the part simply standing in the field at second. He oozes "ballplayer" and "confidence", looked great at the plate. Let some close pitches sail into the catchers glove with confidence. Ackley used to take pitches with confidence. Let me rephrase that, when he first came up Ackley would take close pitches that were BALLS with confidence. Like the ball had barley left the pitchers hand and he would show disdain for the pitch by the time it crossed the plate. That was a long time ago. Anyhow, Franklin just looks like a player without doing anything. Can't wait to see him take some hacks tomorrow!
11
As of right now the lack of development into core players by "The Young Core" carries with it the potential to turn Jack's 5-year plan, which is really a 7-year plan, into a 10-year plan. Geoff Baker perfectly captures my reaction to the roster movements yesterday:
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/mariners/2013/05/27/despite-todays-win-not...
You spend five years assembling, developing and giving experience to The Young Core, the franchise saviors. You dedicate everything, EVERYTHING, including a string of seasons with a historically inept offense to deploying this young core. And despite the fact that we can acknowledge they may yet succeed, at this point you have NOTHING to show for it. What is to make us think that The Second Wave is going to fare any better than the first? Are their credentials any better? Will it take three or four more years before we can find out if they are going to take a new path or follow in the footsteps of their predecessors?
The game today was F-U-N. Ending the 8-game losing streak and winning two in a row has been fun. But I'm with Geoff. The fact that yesterday's moves and Montero's previous demotion were necessary portend ill for the Zduriencik regime and the fortunes of the team. The idea that we just sign Morales and Morse assumes that Morales and Morse will be up for it, But just perhaps, having established their bona fides they will decide wisdom is the better part of valor and go for bigger bucks on better teams.
12
No young core were up before the middle of 2011, DaddyO. So in terms of "years dedicated" I guess I'd say technically, yes... but we aren't even 2 full seasons into their deployment. Two of them have stuck in the lineup (Seager and Saunders), the entire pen is kids except for reclamation-project Perez, we swapped in two MORE kids (Triunfel and Franklin) and have two others (Miller and Zunino) in Tacoma while Ackley and Montero try to find their mojo.
I agree, it feels like forever. But the reason we had terrible guys in the lineup like Cust is because we were a terrible team that couldn't draw FAs. He talks about how we didn't go after Bourn, but that's because we are paying Guti at the same position. Bourn is having a nice start to the year - buoyed by a .400+ BABIP that will not last. I'm of the opinion he's gonna crash back to earth, followed by the burn well before the end of his vesting option 5 years from now. We stayed away from the CF version of the Chone Figgins disaster and Baker is upset about it? Let's re-visit in a coupla years.
Now on Nick Swisher, I agree. For at least the next few years he should be a quality hitter, and I was okay with coughing up the first for what his price wound up being. But if that keeps Morse or Morales off this team, how much better are we? Better in '14, I guess, since we'd have a MOTO bat locked down.
But last I heard we WERE in on Swish, he just chose to go home to Cleveland. We can't make people want to come here any more than we can make some of the best prospects in baseball play like it when they're in Ms uniforms.
I'd like to see it happen, though.
This could all be moot in 2 months, when Franklin is lighting up the park and Erasmo is back in the 3-slot in the rotation and Ackley and Montero have recovered their swings in time for a trade to Miami for Stanton or whatever. This ain't how I'd draw it up, but that's why prospecting sucks. Gold can be a long time coming. It doesn't mean you stop looking for it and blow up the mine.
~G
13
The progress we've made here is tremendous. Replacing Ackley with Franklin is a big improvement over what Jack began with. Back then, when a middle infielder like Yuni or Jack Wilson failed, we had Josh Wilson and Chris Woodward. When Beltre was hurt, we had to go get Jack Hanrahan. Replacing Figgins with Seager was a huge improvement over what the Mariners could do in the past. When was the last time the Mariners developed a prospect at 3rd base? Edgar Martinez. Today the pipeline is quite a bit fuller. One great prospect failure a catcher will soon be replaced with another great prospect. There is a difference between failure with nothing in the pipeline (Bavasi) and failure with emerging talent to step in. And, remember that Ackley and Montero are only sidetracked. They will likely be back.
Bavasi offered a good example of how you can reallly screw up a rebuilding process. I'm glad Jack held his best prospects, and Bavasi's track record in bringing in veteran leadership demonstrated how quickly that can fall apart. Most of the free agents we could have chased after would have been disasterous. The few that were worthwhile were highly sought after, and in most cases the teams that won them paid too much. Bay would have been a disaster of Figginsian proportions. Bavasi valiantly tried to compete by signing free agents, bringing in veterans, and trading prospects. The record shows two meager winning seasons, and Jack deserves the lion's share for one of them.
It takes time to rebuild a decimated system, and it may seem like we are back on square one. But we are far from square one here. Seattle may lose Morales and Morse to other teams, but we will be farther along in persuading them to stay than past seasons. It won't be like losing Beltre because, unlike Adrian, they know they can succeed here.
Interesting that with all the handwringing regarding last season, it still compared favorably to a number of Bavasi's veteran teams.
14
OPSing 1.000 is tough to do without 'roids, so finding 1.000 OPS MOTO bats is tougher in the post-roid era. When you don't have your own, and you can't buy FA's, you also can't expect all your kids to perform at the MLB-TM level all at once. Jack was shrewd to pick up both Morse and Morales. I only wish he had done it sooner, and now hope at least one of them is re-signed/extended.
15
To add to that, though... we need to be (more) agile about swapping out players. When the Angels had Kotchman and Morales, they punted Kotchman off the reservation to the shock of many (though keep in mind, it took Morales parts of THREE seasons before he came up full-time - back to that patience thing and those decrying the demotion of Ackley as some kind of wrong committed against the laws of nature and rebuilding).
With Franklin able to replace Ackley and Miller able to replace Ryan, with Abe Almonte and Stefen Romero promoted to AAA in the OF and Morban (maybe) on the way soon, we don't need to wait for 2 years to see how a player is working out. In fact, we won't be able to. The 40 man will clog up and force a trade so that we don't lose good players for nothing.
So don't be afraid to trade Ackley or Smoak if you have their replacement sitting in AAA. Smoak's replacement is still about a year away from AAA, but still - gotta stay fluid. If 3 out of 10 good prospects make it in the bigs, then we need to find those three. It'll hurt to trade the wrong guy... unless you found a guy as good in the process.
That's what's going to make or break us - which of these talented players to keep and buy into, and which to trade.
Rebuilding doesn't get simpler with more talent in the pipeline, funnily enough. And it's never easy.
~G
16
May actually be closer than a year from AAA, if he turns out to be Jesus Montero. ;-) What you say about Morales, Ackley, and those partial seasons - so true. One thing you learn in roto keeper leagues is that the best values are often those guys who are coming back, maybe a year or two after flaming out in their rookie season. You always want to be on the lookout for those kids who went back to the minors, and whom everyone forgot about as they are oogling this season's hot prospects. We focus on the major league regulars, and the hot rookies, and forget about those "failures" who toil away between the majors and AAA, fixing their game. So often those are the guys no one notices who are ready to step in as big time contributors . So, one day you look up, and Chris Davis is a star. I hope Jack's up to the decision making thing you describe, G. The failed Upton trade suggests he may be.
17
I guess it's up to Ackley now. If he truly does have the talent to exist as a plus hitter in the majors, it's up to him to make the adjustments necessary to get back to that level. What worries me is that he's spent so much time in the majors already. However, there are recent historical precedents in Alex Gordon and Chris Davis as guys that spent significant amounts of time in the majors with underwhelming results before finally fixing what ailed 'em in the minors. Then you have the Mariners' own Raul Ibanez bouncing back and forth between Tacoma and Seattle before finally finding a major league home in Kansas City. That's a sort-of applicable example.
18
This article is one of the reasons I don't care for Baker. I find him unconvincing and completely lacking in analytical ability. His answer is always spend, spend, spend and when one of your free agent acquisitions fails, then you spend even more to make up for that. But they spent a lot of money in the 2004 - 2008 seasons, and what we ended up with was no longer having Asdrubal Cabrera, Shin-Soo Choo, and Adam Jones. Those players were deemed expendable because we were "in it".
19
His main point is that, while everyone is glad that the M's have now finally made the moves they needed to, sending Montero and Ackley down to AAA and calling up Franklin, the excitement about the addition of a new potential Young Core Player shouldn't overshadow the implications of these moves for the progress of Jack Zduriencik's rebuilding program. Personally I think his point is valid and ought to be acknowledged.
It's good news that we have a Franklin to call up. It's definitely NOT good news that both Montero and Ackley have lost their way, at least for now. If they don't find it (and Baker acknowledges that both still could), it will mean a reboot of the two to three year period we've just been through where young, talented players have to find their sea legs. As of right now, there is no established Young Core to show for all our investment. There is hope that it will come to fruition, but as of right now we have yet to show that we are significantly closer to that than we were two years ago. In fact, if you compare our earlier expectations for Smoak and Ackley (going into the 2011 season) and Montero (going into 2012) they have been revised signficantly downward for all three.
I can understand that you might find him unconvincing, though with regards to his central asssertion in this article I myself am convinced, but that he is "completely lacking in analytical ability," that I find difficult to understand. You may disagree with him, but he's not incompetent. And I suspect his reputation for advocating spend, spend, spend is less a reflection of any full-orbed plan of his own and more a reaction to the prevailing mindset in Seattle that doing things the Tampa Bay and Oakland way is The Right Way and doing things the Texas and LAAofA way is destined to fail. At the very least recent American League West history is on Baker's side. And a number of Baker articles over recent years have analytically attempted to demonstrate that the last twenty years of MLB history support his thesis as well.
It seems to me Baker thinks the M's have been acting like a Loser Franchise, especially given that their resources are far greater than the Tampa Bays and the Oaklands of the world. Seattle Mariners history backs that up. Personally, I think his assessment is spot on, and that he has backed it up thoroughly with analytical arguements over the years. I suspect he also feels that the Seattle fan base has played the role of enablers. I can't say I disagree with him there either.