The Mariners have taken right handed pitcher Kanekoa Texeira (Yankees, AA) in the MLB portion of the Rule 5 draft, with no losses. Texeira, 23, is a guy who gets by without electric stuff, but he's tended to get the job done with plenty of strikeouts and ground balls. You may recall him for his involvement in the Nick Swisher trade - he was drafted by the White Sox in 2006 and sent to the Yankees with Swisher for a bunch of total crap last year. In 2009 the Yankees experimented with him as a starter at Trenton, and he more or less replicated his relief numbers in that role, albeit in a tiny sample size. He throws a slider and a sinker, both of which do what they're supposed to do, and he's pretty durable. It's unlikely that anyone would see him as much more than an emergency starter due to his total lack of a changeup, so there's that. He might stick in long relief if Carlos Silva doesn't get there first, or he could provide cover in the case of injuries to the pen at the start of the year.

In the minor league portion we lost Marshall Hubbard, which is to say nobody, and piked up RHP Terrence Engles from the Nationals, who we will likely never hear from again.

In other news, Josh Wilson returns to the Mariner organisation on a minor league deal. Hurray. Maybe he and Corey Patterson can be friends.

Yay.

Bossing the Flanks

So let's start with a quick run down on the interplay between wide midfielder and full-back in modern soccer. The wide areas of the pitch are far less dangerous than the centre, so wing play comes down to exploiting space in those wide areas to provide some mechanism to deliver the ball into the penalty area. Since the wings are less important to a defensive team, there's a lot more space to play with, hence seeing creative, fast players rather than the big battlers we so often see crashing the centre (our closest analogue to the latter archetype is Nate Jaqua). Beat a man wide and yard upon yard open up to explode into; beat a man in the box and some other defender is right on top of you and liable to kick the ball off your feet.

On defence, this area is covered by the full-backs, who are typically faster defenders in order to close down both the ball and any possible passing lanes. Wide midfielders occasionally track back to provide support, but it's rare to see even world class wingers who are capable of doing more fouling the opposition - they're there for their abilities on the attack rather than their defensive game. This leads to attacking full-backs being very useful in overloading a flank. Get a local 2 vs. 1 situation and you're suddenly giving the opposition considerable problems, assuming one's capable of doing something with possession wide. Teams will often cede the wide areas in front of the box to the other team's attack if they're confident that they can shut down attacks that emerge from such locations (an excellent example of this is the recent Premier League match between Chelsea and Arsenal), which isn't as hard as one might think: there are essentially only two attacks that are possible with the ball outside. Play one is to drive down the touchline and cross, and play two is to cut inside with the ball towards more dangerous areas in the hopes of playing short passes or shooting.

The first option is more suited to the full-back, the second the winger. Why?

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Or: Why James Riley Was Left Unprotected

You'll probably need some understanding of the formation aspect of soccer strategy before reading. Wikipedia is a good resource, and if you've watched many Sounders games you'll have picked up quite a lot of information as well. Sorry in advance for the English spelling.

Four at the back, one or two at the front. While there exist a huge variety of midfield combinations a Major League Soccer team can run with, the formations are typically bracketed by these five or six players. I imagine at this point several of you are already readying the comments that say I've completely ignored 3-5-2, which indeed I have. Before getting to the heart of the post, let me explain why.

The Dangers of 3-5-2

3-5-2 is a formation which takes the two wide defenders in a four-man back line (the full-backs) and pushes them into midfield, which reinforcing the defence with an additional central defender (centre-back). This has the effect of providing an additional defender to cover the two central strikers in the standard 4-4-2 whilst simultaneously overloading the midfield, allowing advantages in two key areas of the field. The formation came about as a direct response to 4-4-2 pulling the old-style wingers down the field and slightly inside. Why ignore a system designed to combat the most common formation on the planet, then? The answer is simple. Modern teams are perfectly capable of making changes to their shape, and within the 3-5-2 lie the seeds of its own demise. Withdrawing one forward from 4-4-2 into the central midfield turns the formation into a 4-5-1, leaving one of 3-5-2's central defenders standing around essentially doing nothing, almost turning the game into 11 vs. 10. So while we accept the possibility of a 3-5-2 appearing, its shortcomings mean that we don't expect it to encounter it too often. This is a formation whose heyday seems to have already passed, although we may see a form of it arise with one centre-back and two wing-backs, which would be functionally completely different (and defensively suicidal, one would only see this against teams playing something like 4-6-0, which nobody does. Yet).

Why Not Three Up Front?

4-3-3 is a formation you'll also see talked about which seems to turn my first sentence on its head (perhaps I should have written a more accurate first sentence!), but in most cases the attackers are staggered in a way which means that the two side players of the three in the front are only slightly advanced from the outside midfielders in 4-4-2, with a centre forward withdrawn in favour of a play-making central midfielder. It's rare that the outside forwards lie so far upfield that they could be considered bona-fide strikers, and there are no three players in MLS capable of providing the service that such a formation requires. Spain can pull it off fairly effectively against weaker teams, but they can field Fabregas, Iniesta, and Xavi, which might be the best set of midfielders who've ever lived, and it's still not that useful against their elite opponents.  So let's also neglect the possibility of seeing three 'real' strikers running rampant.

I hope at this point I've convinced you of the merits of my first sentence. If not, feel free to ignore the rest of the post!

Continue reading this post »

2009 AL Cy Young: Zack Greinke

(Felix came second with two first place votes)

Carlos Gomez is the return. More later.

[Source]

Later: Hardy is a guy that we'd all been hoping that the Mariners would make a play on this offseason to address the shortstop position, so it's a bit of a shame that he's been taken off the table so early and for what appears to be a fairly low price - one we doubtless could have paid. Gomez is a slightly below average centrefielder for league minimum, and the Brewers had top prospect Alcides Escobar waiting in the wings and a hole in CF with the departure of Mike Cameron, but I have a hard time thinking we couldn't have beaten that price.

In terms of money/talent, the deal makes a good amount of sense for both sides. The Twins get a big upgrade at shortstop, the Brewers deal from depth to cover a weak position (albeit not that well) for free, and have some more money to play with in free agency. As the return for a guy like Hardy, Gomez the talent is rather underwhelming, but the financial flexibility he provides is useful. Could/should the Brewers have gotten more for him? Yes. But they didn't, which is where this deal becomes weird from the Milwaukee side. They had an asset which had less value to them than to the rest of the league, but they sold him for his value to them rather than anyone else's, which is not the best trading strategy in the world.

Since this doesn't involve our team or division, let's be fairly brief:

The winner: Mark Teahen

The losers: Josh Fields (the other one), Chris Getz

Overview: Kenny Williams was so disappointed with Fields and Getz being unable to live up to their minor league numbers that he couldn't just non-tender the pair. Instead he paid $5 million to banish them to Kansas City. Harsh.

Moral: Do not disappoint Kenny Williams.

Ridiculous calls from yesterday's game:

1. Swisher called safe when picked off at second in the top of the 4th, one out, Yankees up by three.
2. Swisher incorrectly called out for leaving the bag early on a sacrifice fly to end the 4th, Yankees up by three.
3. Robinson Cano called safe when out at third on a hilarious Swisher 1-2 DP, Yankees up by five.
   

It all evens out, you say? Well, using the THT Win Probability tool, we end up with the following changes in win expectancy due to bad calls from the umpires (Angels win ex is positive):

1. -4%
2. +10%
3. -1%
   

All in all, the umpires skewed game four of the ALCS in favour of the Angels by a non-insignificant amount - in fact, 5% WPA is almost as much as Albert Pujols contributed per game for the Cardinals (this is a silly comparison but it illustrates the point quite well).

The playoffs deserve better than this.