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Q.  What are the Mariners expecting to receive from Mike Napoli?

A.  Napoli slugged .630 two years ago.  He slugged .470 last year, that being .450 in Arlington and .490 on the road.  His lifetime SLG is .507.  He walks 70 times per full season and the BB total is going up, not down.

So rotisserie analysts are going to split the difference, splitting it well towards the DWN side, and project him to a 2013 slash line of .250/.350/.500.  -ish.  With nothing on the line, without being too close to the situation, without emotions involved, a roto champ in St. Louis, MO is going to assume .250/.350/.500 for Napoli next year based on 100-120 games.

The question is:  what's that worth?  Not to a phantom drone team, but to the 2013-14 Seattle Mariners?

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Q.  What are the chances that he'll outperform a 4/$50M contract?

A.  YOU ARE AT THE WRONG END OF THE ROSTER TO ASK THIS QUESTION.  You save money with --- > Scrubs.  So that you can buy more Stars.  Stars' salaries need to meet the "not silly" standard.  

You save money on some players so that you can buy players you need.  Not so that you can look like a tree full of owls, wisdom personified.  Get it?  "Got it."  Good.

Let me read that last paragraph again.

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It's not like the M's have a fixed $260 roto budget.  They can raise it to $305 at any time.  In that context, %-of-payroll questions become almost meaningless.

Tell me the value of 12/x, when you don't know the value of x.  Supposing that ownership will plonk down an extra $10M, if and only if it's Josh Hamilton?  In that event Hamilton costs a rotisserie $13M per year, not $23M.  Supposing you played roto and one player came with a $10 dinner-for-two discount?

Lay aside the dogma when dealing with owner budget decisions.  They don't lend themselves to CPA-style "this is correct, that is not correct" evaluations.

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So the question morphs:  how does the Mike Napoli option compare to the Mariners' other real-world options?  The Mariners aren't competing against an XL spreadsheet.  They're in a war and they can select a tank, a helicopter, or a mortar for tomorrow morning's battle.

Obviously, it's to your advantage to save a buck.  But when did that become the POINT of the game, making sure that every purchase was a Hisashi Iwakuma-level heist?

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Q.  What ARE the Mariners' other real-world options?

A.  Too many to list.  Category A includes those options that go with the kids and pocket the money.  Category B includes other 2012 free agent buys, notably Swisher or Upton, or in a longshot Josh Hamilton, or a pitcher.

Napoli would presumably be one of two imports.  So in the grand scheme, it's like, [Swisher + Napoli?  vs. Swisher + Gordon?]  vs. one Josh Hamilton - if Hamilton is even worth holding up other options for.

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Q.  What if Napoli were useless at age 35, making $13M?

A.  One thing I can tell you about GM's, for a FACT, is that they don't mind a useless year or two on the end of the contract if they got big production early.

Suppose Napoli earns $20M per year for three years, and $0 the fourth.  Fans chip their teeth during year four.  GM's don't.  Most GM's very definitely think in terms of "that last year isn't going to be pretty, but we want the production now and we'll make it up in the big picture."

You HAVE to.  Big-money thinking has to be three-dimensional.  

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Q.  Supposing that Napoli did hit like Buhner or Glaus, playing C/1B/DH.  What's that worth?

A.  Dr. D likes WAR, for many uses ... none of which include dogmatic uses.  I take it as first principles that WAR underrates RBI men.  That's not just my opinion.  Real-world GM's, using hordes of state-of-the-art support saberdweebs, consistently pay more for RBI men than Fangraphs thinks they should.

Napoli is a part-time player; that's the difference between him and a big star.  In the games that Napoli plays catcher, he's a reasonable facsimile of Mike Piazza.  

In the games that he DH's and plays 1B, he's a reasonable facsimile of Mark Teixeira or Adrian Gonzalez - subtract ten or twenty BB's per 162 games.  Or take Paul Konerko - the OBP's and SLG's are the same for Konerko and Napoli.

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Q.  But how much is that worth at DH?

A.  You run into the misleading idea of "Replacement Level Player."  Fangraphs calculates the average production at 1B, but this average includes Albert Pujols, Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Howard, etc., and that skews the real-world "average."

You've got a player pool that includes 10-12 leviathans, and they skew a "league average," and you say "so what.  This guy only slugs .500.  That's not much better than league average."

Maybe there are exactly 20 astronauts in the world, and the "league average" for 30 of them (20 astronauts and ten plumbers) is a .500 astrophysics SLG.  How does that help you if you're #24 on the hiring list?  You've got to take into account plateaus in the resource field. 

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Comparing Mike Napoli to, let's just pull a name out of our ears, Justin Smoak, you are talking about 6.5 runs created per 27 outs versus 3.5 runs per 27.

Or let's say you compare Mike Napoli to Miguel Olivo, rather than to a hypothetical "average/mediocre" catcher.  A lineup of nine Olivos gets you 2.5 runs per game.  Napoli, 6-7 runs per game.

Which one is better to talk about?  Mike Napoli, versus your theoretically average player, or Mike Napoli versus Justin Smoak and Miguel Olivo?

For that lineup slot, you're talking 6-7 runs per game, vs. 3-4 runs, vs. 2-3 runs.  I wouldn't characterize that as "Napoli's a meh DH who occasionally impersonates a catcher."

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Q.  Leaving us where?

A.  Napoli is fragile, and is going to get more so.  You're going to figure on 100, 120 games of his production.  In Seattle, we've got a 9-to-make-5 lineup thing going, as they did in Texas.

For those 100, 120 games -- assuming there's no career-arc splatter here -- you're talking about an All-Star level player, near-Piazza instead of Olivo*, near-AGone instead of Smoak.

I got your "market inefficiencies" type right here, babe.  Part time players.