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The 1950's Braves managed to parlay Hank Aaron, Eddie Matthews and Warren Spahn into one championship and a long series of excuses.  The Seattle Mariners appear to have outdone them.  -- Bill James, ca. 1999

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SABRMatt captures the issue in mathematical terms:

 

 

We are now seeing, in one season, incontrovertible evidence...

The Mariners have now run two different ball clubs out there in one year that absolutely proves to my satisfaction that having more than one hitting black hole has been the primary source of our team's offensive struggles, both with runners in scoring position (relative to overall) and with run scoring (compared to team OPS+). If you go and look at the last three years of Mariner clubs and project their OPS+ to runs scored, you'll find that they scored less than their OPS predicts each and every year. And were doing the same as of mid-June of this year.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the fourth year of this happening. We plugged two of our three black holes, with CF being the only eyesore left (Ackley is still not really hitting...even Zunino is not a black hole by catching standards...though he isn't great obviously). We called up Franklin and Miller, replacing Chavez and Ryan as primary starters and lengthening the line-up such that your problems no longer ended if you were a pitcher getting to the #6 spot in the batting order.

The result...suddenly the club is scoring the way it should for its OPS...hitting with RISP...and winning lots of baseball games. It's not just that they added offensive talent. It's that they removed offensive anchors too. I believe this proves my point about the need to account for the supermargin and sub-margin as non-linear factors in run scoring.

- See more at: http://seattlesportsinsider.com/article/brad-millers-defense#comment-90263

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When Matty says "supermargin" and "submargin" and "non-linear" he means that if you have a sumo wrestler playing CF, it's going to cost you a lot more than the UZR says it will.  Allow REALLY terrible liabilities, or get REALLY great assets, and the whole will be more than the sum of the parts.

Sabes hate this idea, but personally, I'm certain that it's true.  

SABRMatt says, you are seeing it before your eyes.  Look!  The Mariners just now fixed their lineup holes.  And they're hemorrhaging offensive runs.  4-10 runs every blinkin' night, just because they have a shortstop?  What sense does that make?

Not sure if the 2013 Mariners put "paid" to the discussion, all by themselves, but a picture is worth 1,000 words.  Franklin and Miller get here, and BAM the Mariners go from 513 runs to 900 :- )

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Most GM's will agree that Job One is to plaster over the potholes in a new team they take over.  They all realize, with grim clarity, that it's easier to move a 50 OPS+ to 90 than it is to move 110 to 140...

I still don't think they pay ENOUGH attention to it, do you?  Else why is Jack Zduriencik so nonchalant about shortstops like Ryan and Wilson?  To say nothing about corner OF's like Endy Chavez and 1B's like Casey Kotchman *at the same time.*

But still.

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I've always believed that when you are rolling TWO or THREE Adam Moores out there at the same time, you're going to see your problems multiply exponentially.  Like, the pitchers can "coast" every third inning, and stuff.  

If you ran a Sumo out there to play CF, the other team would exploit the situation through strategy, right?  Or if you had my man Mike Blowers fill in at catcher for the next series, wouldn't you have a 90% chance of being swept?  How do you do the math on that 90% sweep chance?

Well, isn't that same type of true when you have three pitchers in your batting order?

The Seattle Mariners have always had a tall, VERY THIN talent pyramid.  It destroyed them during the Unit-Griffey-Edgar-ARod era.  The 1997 Mariners had these players:

• Randy Johnson (!!)
• Jeff Fassero
• Jamie Moyer (!)
• Ken Griffey Jr. (!!)
• ARod (!)
• Edgar (!!)
• Bone

And the rest of the 25-man roster still sufficed to make this incredible group look like idiots.  You remember the Sanders-Ayala bullpen that year?  In 1997, I had non-baseball-watching friends who would turn on the TV just to see what kind of train wreck there would be that night.  Literally.

That's because the Seattle Mariners have always been run by lawyers.  That's why the bottom 90% of their baseball structure has always been non-major-league.

Right now, only now, the pyramid is changing shape.