The best and worst of 2007 UZR are on Tango's Blog.

Ichiro: 14 runs worse than average
Ibanez: 30 runs worse than average
Guillen: 21 runs worse than average

Hmmmmmmmm...

Ichiro's defense:Mariners fans
as to
Jeter's defense:Mainstream baseball press.

Are we that stupid?
Discuss.

So far in 2007:

Tacoma (Balentien, Clement, Green, Jimerson, Johnson, Jones, Morse, Reed), in 120 plate appearances: .808 OPS

Seattle (Everybody else): .758 OPS

Small sample size, etc, etc; but anyway, those young guys have just killed us, huh Geoff Baker.  I guess that these weak of character, inexperienced fellars somehow found a way to hit the ball in the bigs - and it August and September no less!  Black magic must be involved.

I gotta say, I really don't have any confidence that we'll be any better next year.  We have a lot of declining players still under contract, and can we trust the management to do anything right?

So with the Shankmaster looking to be locked up for three more years, what else is going to happen?

I've been trying to think of ways to find accurate "similar hitters"- kind of like a similarity score- but narrowed down to the type of swing a player has.  I spent the last couple of days organizing data from fangraphs into Excel.  I found all active MLB players with at least 700 career plate appearances (as of last week) and found their career BB%, K%, LD%, FB%, GB%, HR%, HR/FB%, and handedness.  

Take a look here.

This is a lot of fun to play with.  I wonder how much a player's "swing type" factors into these numbers and how much of them is related to how pitchers pitch them...