SB Nation User Blog: Manzanillos Cup

Keith Law isn't sure what to do with Franklin Gutierrez. Maybe platoon him?

Manzanillos Cup — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:20:33 -0000

Keith Law isn't sure what to do with Franklin Gutierrez. Maybe platoon him?

In his latest chat, Keith Law got asked if he thought Franklin had room left to progress, and where he ranked among CFs. Klaw writes back "In a perfect world, the Mariners would platoon him with another plus-glove CF who bats left-handed, but how many teams have two plus-glove CFs and are willing to carry both?"

Soooo... "in a perfect world", the Mariners should bench a 4-5 win, 26 year old player for 2/3 of their games. Even if you did have a lefty CF, that would still be a terrible use of resources . It'd really endear the players to the team too. I wouldn't have expected this kind of bizarre focus on platoon splits coming from this source.

Edit: My lustful thoughts towards Guti may have led to an exaggerated estimation of his true talent. I think the point still stands though.

Mariner Outfield Defense according to 2007 UZR

Manzanillos Cup — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:16:55 -0000

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.

Tacoma vs. Seattle

Manzanillos Cup — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:04:48 -0000

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.

Offseason poll

Manzanillos Cup — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 16:11:49 -0000

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?

Poll

What will the M's do to "improve" this offseason?

Sign David Eckstein to play 2B

18 votes

Move <i>out</i> the left field fence

3 votes

Bring back their "proven" management team

31 votes

Aquire expensive bullpen help, a la Baltimore

7 votes

Trade Wlad for Steve Trachsel

9 votes

Sign Raul Ibanez to a lifetime deal

4 votes

Ban Vidro from Home Town Buffets

6 votes

78 votes | Poll has closed

Hitter plate appearance breakdowns

Manzanillos Cup — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:12:04 -0000

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...