DaddyO lists the Dodger starting pitchers under Tommy Lasorda:
As a Dodger fan growing up in the years I got used to a team that had a seemingly endless parade of effective starting pitchers (and usually bullpens too) that other teams simply couldn't match. It's astounding when you really look at it (see below). - See more at: http://seattlesportsinsider.com/blogs/merging-into-the-something-special...
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It seemed that the Little Blue Bicycle usually had 4-5 really good SP's --- > AND, on the roster or about to be on the roster, 1-3 more who would win 100+ games in the major leagues. Pinching from Daddy-O's list, look at the 1973 Dodgers on baseball-reference.com:
But here's DaddyO's punch line. He continues,
This is why I find the Mariners so frustrating. For the Dodgers, such pitching was the bedrock of sustained success. They rarely had the best offense in the league (when they did they won the pennant), but their pitching routinely had them in contention and all it took was an offense a little above average to vault them into the playoffs. Often they didn't even have the best top two or three pitchers in the playoffs, but they could compete with depth.
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This is a confusing issue you bring up . You put your finger right on it.
It was a 1980's Bill James Axiom that if you had an extreme park, it would play with your ability to develop long-term success. He used Fenway Park as an example (having no idea that he'd later work for them). Fenway made all hitters believe that they were stars (as Houston and LA made pitchers believe they were stars). The result was that you had average hitters batting .320 with 97 RBI's for Boston, and they all got Russell Wilson syndrome.
James concluded in one of his 80's articles, "There has never been a Boston pennantwinner in which the batting lineup had not been churned over recently." You had just a year or two to watch Mike Easler bat .300/.400/.500 for the Red Sox until you needed all new (humble, team-oriented) batters.
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So you might expect the 1970's Dodgers to have Zduriencik's problem. Instead of that, they had the Garvey-Lopes-Russel-Cey infield, and a lot of other guys too like Tom Paciorek, Bill Buckner, and Jim Wynn. Rick Monday. Dusty Baker. These guys built long-lasting big league careers.
Keith Law just now charged Jack Zduriencik with being incapable of building an offense. M's fans could turn to the "Safeco Field" defense: a Logan Morrison tee shot (or ten) get caught on the deep right-center warning track, well, it just defeats his belief in himself. Same happened to a lot of Mariners. ... (is it happening to Cano?) ... but batters hated Dodger Stadium back then, too, and Dodger prospects didn't all become Justin Smoak. Edgar Martinez was totally unaffected by the move to Safeco. He just kept Edgaring it all the way into his fifth decade of life.
It's an interesting puzzle going on. I'd make Safeco much more hitter-friendly, but a pitcher's park doesn't account for 7 years of hitting drought all by itself.
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Can tell you one thing that DaddyO will back me up on. Tommy Lasorda was a rah-rah manager of a magnitude you kiddies have not seen in your lives. As a Reds fan, I'd listen to him talk up a .241 hitting Davey Lopes as the best 2B in the National League, better than Joe Morgan who towered over the NL like the Space Needle over Seattle. The Dodger way was to give you a great reputation and then demand you live up to it.
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Good news is, it is really easy to develop pitching here. There's a list we should count up: all the Jason Vargases, of dubious talent, who molded (or are molding) very nice big league careers out of a Seattle start.
Cheers,
Dr D
I think the lesson is to understand in what ways your home park helps and/or hinders you in building out your roster. Zduriencik seems to think that power hitting is the answer, but the Safeco Field template is pitching, defense, speed, contact hitting, athleticism, and positional versatility. He got the pitching part right, but it seems like he's never really understood the position player side.
There's a case to be made m'friend.
On the other hand, Dustin Ackley is such a player (relative to Mark Trumbo) and the 513-run Mariners (Chavez, Kotchman) featured defense (therefore speed). I'm not countering you; I'd just like to hear your reply to the 513-run problem. The attempt to win with UZR was ugly, that's for sure. Not that you are championing UZR as such.
Ackley does fit the template, he just hasn't hit consistently. Otherwise, yes, he fits the template pretty well. But you do have to score runs at some point. A lineup with 9 Ackleys is a recipe to get yourself the number one draft pick. The problem with Trumbo is that he's a one skill player and his one skill is suppressed by the home ballpark. More and more, that trade makes no sense to me. It reeks of a general manager making moves out of desperation.
Maybe the issue there was that Figgens (also in the Ichiro/Ackley template) cratered, and Jose Lopez just forgot how to hit. Guti got sick. We were really planning on offense from them.
Catchers were terrible, below replacement on offense and not too great on D either IIRC. Saunders was still broken.
You could make an argument that the 2010 team really confirmed the "too many black holes" theory leading to anti-synergy rather than discredititing UZR based lineup construction.
I suspect that the idea was to run like a 90 OPS+, sacrificing some offense for a great D and roll out great pitching. Instead we only got one regular over 87 OPS+: Ichiro. And the 87 was sick Guti. Team OPS+ ended up being 79.
Basing my judgment on what he's actually done, it seems like Zduriencik at some point kind of threw up his hands and decided that he was going to make power a priority in his roster decisions. And to be fair, production from DH and 1B, your traditional power spots, has been inconsistent in recent years.
Looking back at the 2010 team, you can see how the wheels were starting to come off. Jose Lopez and Gutierrez both regressed; Guti played a full season, but the production was down, presumably starting to feel the effects of his then undiagnosed condition at that point. Production at 1B took a nosedive with Kotchman. Russell Branyan was brought back at the DH slot in the second half, and he added some power, but his average was low and it was pretty much too little, too late at that point. Oddly, Figgins wasn't too bad that year. I think we'd take his .340 OBP this year. I don't know if Saunders was broken that year, or if he was just young and still needed time to move forward on his age-arc progression.
I'm not sure it it's a fixation on power so much as on what is easily available in trades without giving up the farm.
Trumbo was a cheap patch for a sucking chest wound (Ackley). I'm sure if a better/more complete player were available for similar cost then Z would have jumped on that.
Look at FA targets. Figgins, Fielder, Cano, and to a lesser extent Hamilton represent pretty complete hitters and good defenders for their positions. Cruz is a more complete hitter than he is given credit for and it's not like he's a complete butcher in the OF. Really only Mike Morse sort of fits the mould of one dimensional slugger, and his season was derailed by injury after a very promising start, and I don't think the plan was to have him in the OF as much as we did. And he ran some decent OBPs for a few years there as well.
After all Z is also the guy that completed a trade for Justin Upton only to have it torpedoed. While not great, Upton's pretty solid offensively and defensively and would have plugged some serious holes on this team (at great expense).
Fallback plan to shore up the OF? Z makes a nice trade for Jackson, a good defender and solid leadoff/decent OBP bat. Who immediately turned into bad Figgins for a year.
I think he gets a lot of 1B/DH types b/c they're relatively cheap and most importantly available. He definitely recognizes the value of defense and OBP going by his other moves.
Rah Rah Lasorda, no doubt about it. He became the Dodgers third base coach in 1973, and took over when Alston retired after the 1976 season. A greater contrast between two managers cannot be imagined. Alston got one last pennant winner in 1974. His steady, low-key, kind but firm personality had characterized the Dodgers success of the mid-60's. But times had changed, and his demeanor, so succssfull before, did not connect with the players of the '70's, and he was advanced in age. There was a sense of tiredness surrounding the franchise.
Lasorda came on board and started talking up his players and his team, saying "you gotta believe." He talked about bleeding Dodger blue. He was mostly bluster and baloney. Everyone knew it. But he had managed all the kids in the minor leagues, and he knew them, and they knew him. They knew what he said was schtick. But somehow it worked. The Dodgers went to the World Series in each of Lasorda's first two seasons, vanquishing the Big Red Machine in the NL West but eventually losing to the hated Yankees.
So why did Lasorda's schtick work? He was often a doggone buffoon. I don't know. It just did. He told his players to believe...and they did. There's been a bunch of managers who've told their players to believe, but with Lasorda it was authentic. The Dodgers were literally his religion.
But the direction your article takes this, Doc, raises an intersting question. Is what's wrong with the Mariners essentially a "spiritual" sickness? or a talent deficiency? We all agreed they were poised to do something very good this year. Is it that the roster just doesn't work, or is it some "Mariners infection" that eventually seizes anyone who comes to this team, some of them right away (like Trumbo)?
I really don't know. But it's worth pondering.
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Lasorda's schtick worked because he had a boatload full of good players: An IF of Garvey, Lopes, Russell, Cey is a nice thing to build off of. Add a Reggie Smith or two...and a bunchof throwers and you have a huge recipe for a lots of wins.
True enough, Lasorda's schtick would not have worked if he didn't have a boatload of good players (except when it did in 1988). But only from afar could you have missed the invigorating breath of fresh air that blew through the franchise with the retirement of Alston (a wonderful but aging father figure) and the installation of Lasorda as manager. Boatloads of good players don't always achieve. Lasorda was able to take that boatload of players and lead them to achievement. I personally don't for a minute believe that would have happend under just any manager. In our lifetime we have seen many teams fail that have assembled a boatload of acknowledged talent. Can't seem to think of it right now, but it seems to me there might be a local, current example somewhere at hand.
To get back to the original point, Alston's prime teams were even more dependent on pitching than were Lasorda's. Koufax and Drysdale are obvious, and even more important in the era of four man rotations, and 40+ starts. But they got so much attention that guys like Johnny Podres, Stan Williams and Osteen didn't get their just due. And Larry Sherry, and then Perranoski, were absolute forces to close games.
But the formula didn't really extend to 'pitching and defense'. Those teams were not remarkable in the field, and they also attempted to deploy power at the cost of defense. Tommy Davis and Frank Howard were worth the trade-off. Hail Marys like Moose Skowron and Dick Stuart weren't.
On the bases, Wills and Willie Davis were burners...but no one else could really run.
My thought is that maybe the path to success for the Mariners is not to worry to excess over the hitting. Maybe we just continue to build on pitching?
Someone has to hit eventually--right? :)
Diderot... good point on the early Dodgers. I wonder how much Buzz Bavasi loved pitching, or if was others beneath him... I thought about making a Bavasi joke, but it was too easy. However, pitchers back then were men, and they did what the team needed them to do.
As far as the Mariners just concentrating on hitting, that is what this year's draft seems to be what the Mariners did. More than that though, Jack has made it a point of drafting college pitchers every year that have an out pitch - be it a hot fastball, a wicked slider or a nasty change up... so Jack has never neglected the strength developing pitching.
The problem with comcentrating on pitching though - especially in this second dead ball era we are in, is that a lot of teams are also concentrating on developing pitching. Thus, there are a lot of teams stocked with pitchers, and virtually every one of these teams seems more willing to part with blue chip pitching prospects more than Jack is, so unless Jack gets lucky or changes his strategy- we are going to suffer through years like this.
I think they concentrated on pitching and basically punted hitting in this year's draft (at least punted the concept that they can draft and "develop" a power hitter).