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A Hey Bill this week was especially interesting:
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Hey Bill, I remember you wrote in an early abstract concerning Royals stadium, "if you don't have speed in the outfield, you will not win here period." Is that still true. I'm trying to gauge the Mets' chances.
Asked by: manhattanhi
Answered: 10/23/2015
The park is a lot different. It used to be an artificial turf park, and a very fast turf. If a ball got loose in the outfield, it was big trouble.
I would say it is still a park where speed in the outfield matters; the Royals' outfield is very fast, and you see the effects of that in almost every game. (Alex Rios is a player that a lot of teams would use as a defensive replacement in the outfield. The Royals, instead, use a defensive replacement FOR HIM in the outfield when they get a lead.)
I saw two games of a three-game series in Kaufman late in the year against Seattle, and the Mariners lost both of them mostly because their defense in the outfield was just amazingly awful. The right fielder let two balls get over his head for doubles that should have been caught, and the center fielder (who was really a shortstop playing center field), but if a ball was hit shallow you would assume he must have been playing deep and if the ball was hit deep you would assume that he must have been playing shallow, because he was never there even if the ball seemed to be in a place where it should have been caught.
But (a) I don't know if that was ever true, that you COULDN'T win in Kaufmann with a slow outfield; merely because I said something 30 years ago doesn't make it true, and (b) the park is different.
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If there were no other line but the one about Brad Miller, the week's BJOL would still have been worth the 75 cents :- )
As we've discussed before, the Mariners' Runs Saved (Dewan) last year were heinous:
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| POSITION |
RUNS |
| LF |
-9 |
| CF |
-26 |
| RF |
-11 |
| RUNS ON BASES |
-22.8 |
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And the Mariners did indeed go 36-45 in spacious Safeco Field, .500 on the road.
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When DiPoto says that the Mariners "need to get more athletic," I don't take that to mean he loves 5-tool players. That would be anti-sabermetric, you do realize? I take it to mean that he saw this collection of schlubs as just having way too many Jack Custs and Matt Stairses. Now, realize that Jerry DiPoto might be the very first GM in line to hire the Jack Cust. Or, by extension, the Seth Smith.
Chuck Knox had an analogous reaction when a sportswriter asked him if he could "handle" a "free spirit" like Brian Bosworth. "You've obviously never met Isaiah Robertson," growled Chuck. "A couple guys like that are fine. It's when you get 25 of them together that you have a problem." Or somesuch.
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At the same time, once you have played too much of the "Risk" board game, and you have gotten sick of 300-v-300 dice rolldowns in Indonesia ... you can start amusing yourself with variants. Maybe each player gets one country as a "base," fortified by (assumed) mountain ranges but if he loses that country, his entire regime collapses into gray-scale marauding berserkers. Maybe 3 contintents equals victory. Maybe you add money, nukes and call it Supremacy. At any rate, it's way more fun after you add "catches" to a board game like that.
The 2016 Mariners are like that. Suppose to build the best Fangraphs team you could. I'm talking strict Fangraphs here: 42.3 WAR beats 42.1 WAR. But there's an asterisk: your outfield absolutely must have positive defense, and your baserunning cannot be worse than -4.9 runs. Sounds funny? That is SSI's first triangulation of Jerry DiPoto's actual plan.
The first thing that occurs to you: Nelson Cruz will DH, whether he likes it or not. Here are his lifetime splits at DH. Hope Scott Servais has some people skills.
BABVA,
Dr D
