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Gordon sez,

[The Safeco solution is] a garage door opener.  Make Edgar close it and leave it closed unless the day is spectacular.

 

It seems like the easiest fix for the lower end of our offensive woes.  The other part - the high end - is harder to fix.

 

As is ably illustrated in this Jayson Stark article, the age of the crushing offenses is over.  It's why I said last year that Fielder was a good buy despite the cost because of his age and because getting great offensive pieces will only get harder.

 

You might notice that nobody's hitting the market.  Tulo?  Locked up.  Cargo?  Same thing.  Votto? locked up.

 

The Brewers had to make a choice and took Braun over Fielder, otherwise Prince would never have made the open market either.  Ethier didn't and he's not even the best hitter on his team.  Kemp was extended for a fortune.

 

There aren't a lot of offensive talents any more and the odds of getting them, especially in their prime, are going way down.

 

Have to draft them or trade for them.  Which is what Jack's been trying to exploit before everybody else figures out that pitchers are easier to find now than hitters.  That's why we got Smoak, Montero, F-Mart, Trayvon, Chiang,  and Wells in trades, while also re-stocking pitching with Furbush, Beavan, Noesi and crew.

 

The year I wanted him to draft a pitcher he took a cross-fire pitcher (Hultzen), a newer breed of arm starting to show up (also briefly discussed in Stark's article).  But it was a good pitching year, and Hultzen's making him look like a genius.

 

This year he took one of the biggest HR hitters in college (which has been nice enough deaden their own bat to give a better read of the power potenial of collegiates).

 

But he took him at a glove position so that if he doesn't work out to as much power as we'd like he's still good positionally.  I hope that becomes a positive for us either way.

 

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That still doesn't help the plus side of the ledger as far as runs goes. We're going back to the 70s and 80s as far as power goes, and parks built in the 90s to play "fair" with all the crazy offense now look ENORMOUS to non-roided hitters.

 

The other way to fix that is to move the fences in, as has already been discussed.  20 years from now there are two possible solutions: one, somebody proves that HGH is good for you, and it's allowed, or two, the newer parks they're building at that point are cozier.

 

Because chicks dig the long ball and 1-0 pitching duels don't sell tickets.  Television ratings matter, and they recovered when hitters could hit. I don't think the league is gonna let viewership lag no matter how much they push their Verlanders.

 

In the meantime we need to figure it out in the Northwest in our already-built park.  First, close the roof next year if the temp is under 80.  If that doesn't help as much as we want, then start talking about the fences.  I'd prefer to let it be a roof issue and let the park simply pay fair with the non-roiders - I do not want to move the fence.

 

If the Rangers are proving that the excuses of heat and park were not gonna be accepted by their owners as reasons for terrible pitching down the stretch, then I really don't want to accept that simply hitting doubles instead of homers is a curse for our offense.

 

But if our pitchers are Felix / Vargas / Walker / Hutzen / Paxton or whatever,  with a bullpen of 99 mph torchers, then moving the fences in will do more for our offense than against our pitching.

 

Gotta do whatcha gotta do, and you can't win if you don't score.  In Safeco right now, we don't score.

 

~G

Hadn't thought of this, the parks that were designed as reactions to the absurd 70-homer seasons of the 1990's..

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So you deflate the hitters but leave them swimming around in an enormous ball-pong pit .... we're talking literally deadball-era offenses in 2010 and 2011 - literally 1906 slash lines teamwide.  Mr. Chuck's fondness for a "well-played" 3-2 game is well and truly outmoded in Seattle at this point.

You'd raise the ante to 80 degrees, eh ... I'd love to see something along those lines, maybe 69-overcast and below, but is there an issue selling that to Selig?  Or does Selig pretty much sign off on the org's roof policy?

As we know, Lincoln and Armstrong call these kindsa shots.  ... it appears that Eric Wedge, at least, will be a voice on the fans' side.

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No question either about your observation, that the deck of the ship is tilting wildly under their feet.  As far as the hitter-pitcher balance of power.  One part of this problem that amazes me, is simply the improvement in pitching ....

James has observed that --- > the last few years have been unique with regard to talented young starters coming up and staying healthy.   Some decades have featured an oddly deep collection of shortstops.  This one seems to be breeding starters.

In his opinion it isn't just the environment creating an illusion -- it actually is a weird number of Verlanders and Felixes and Cains and Prices and Kershaws ...

And here we go again with another wave:  Chris Sale and Strasburg and Gio and Lance Lynn and Alexi Ogando, you can count Yu Darvish in that, and soon to be Hultzen, Paxton and Taijuan as well as Trevor Bauer and other hotshots who virtually can't miss...

Behind them, it actually does seem like there is another tier there of "mediocre" pitchers who have leaped plateaus:  Ryan Vogelsongs and James McDonalds and Jason Vargases and those guys who just seem to have sharpened their games to a shocking degree. 

The M's need to hit better, but it seems every game I watch in 2012, the enemy pitchers are throwing aspirin tablets.

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As far as our having the margin-for-error to improve Safeco because Felix, Hultzen, Paxton, Taijuan and Tom Wilhelmsen :- ) are going to combine for 9 strikeouts per game ... pretty obviously true that the Seattle days of pitch-to-contact guys are fading fast.  There was a time when the 4-K flotilla of Batistas, Washburns, Silvas et al did create a synergy with deep fences.  That synergy is lost as the organization gets away from craven "at least this guy doesn't walk anybody" orientation.

Part of the reason that this year's 3-4-5 starters couldn't phase fast enough for me.  I wanna see pitchers attack hitters.  I've heard it's the trend.