Amidst the general decline in opinion of the Mariners front office (although it is still justifiably quite high at least in the blogosphere) I sought to justify my original and continued optimism that their decisions represent a sound decision making process and skill at evaluating the market.  The easy solution is to be content that the decisions were for the most part sound and many things went horribly wrong in the luck distribution.  The argument could end here, but one feels uneasy after a season like this, and is tempted to analyze decisions on results as well as process.  I immediately sought comfort in both Cliff Lee trades as evidence of deal-making prowess.  I’m willing to believe that the first trade didn’t just fall into Jack Zduriencik’s lap and that it had just as much to do with awareness of what other teams were trying to do, skill in communicating the right information about what Mariners were after, and most importantly skill in evaluating an opposing GM (the limits of their idiocy) in order to sufficiently low-ball them without causing the discussion to collapse.  It seems like an easy call that the first Lee trade wasn’t completely luck and most likely demonstrates ability that fans should be enthusiastic about. 

               The second Lee trade is trickier because it seems like a much different scenario.  For one, dealing powerful position of having highly sought after talent that could still provide some value if not traded gave the Mariners tremendous leverage.  There was also a bidding war.  The first Lee trade could not have contained any kind of bidding war or else Amaro Jr.’s evaluation of talent is worse than we all thought.  Midseason 2010 however it was clear that Lee was available and multiple teams wanted him.  The existence of two known offers from smart teams seems like evidence of determined value rather than one team plundering another team who is desperate to distance their offer from others.  I guess my question is whether we can have enough information to assign skill to a trade where all the heavy lifting in negotiating a valuable return is essentially done by their negotiating position and the market.  One could argue it took skill to know when Lee’s value would be the highest, whether or not waiting could generate a higher offer, and whether this waiting is worth the injury risk.  It is also important to be able to judge whether another team’s “final offer” is really final.  One also must be aware of the possibility that an offer that is on the table will not last, because the offering team will realize that it is too high.  Bidding wars create a time sensitive scenario where an offer might be made before the offering team thought through and weighed every possible outcome.  The process is so complex, with so many changing scenarios and moving parts, that being able to choose the best offer cannot be as easy as simply waiting for an offer they like and taking it. 

In negotiating, both teams are essentially playing chicken and trying to figure out what the other’s true final offer will be.  Sure, Zduriencik could have simply waited until midnight on the trade deadline and took the highest offer, but I’m sure there were teams that said at various points that their offers were final.  I can see teams actually harming themselves in a short term trade outcome in order to establish credibility that they mean it when they declare an offer “final.”  There have probably been situations in the past where players that by all rights should’ve been traded aren’t because a team feels they have to uphold this credibility.  A trade for a gigantic haul vs. meager one could be the outcome of one team’s guess of another team’s limits or posturing.  It probably took skill to correctly value the potential for different teams to offer better and the risk in not accepting their offers.  Texas had the most to gain from trading for Lee, so they were the most desperate.  Waiting to see whether they would break and make the offer they did was a calculated gamble.  The Yankees and Twins both have a good shot at winning the World Series this year while keeping the talented players they offered/considered offering.  The Mariners waiting and saying no to them was obviously a risk. 

I guess the point of all this is to reject the notion that some of Zduriencik’s successes could be attributed to luck in a way that, in the wake of this disastrous season , could shine a new and distressing light on the deals that were failures as evidence of deeper flaws being unmasked.  The job of running a baseball team requires limitless time and effort and trades and free agent signings are time sensitive with  changing windows of opportunity.  The amount of time and effort put into deals that never happen, that we never know about, further drains the finite resources a front office can devote to its functioning.  A bad trade could be evidence of bad evaluating skills or lack of discipline, a bad process or simply not enough time spent contemplating and weighing the likelihood of possible outcomes.  Perhaps if Zduriencik had weeks to lock himself in his office and think of nothing other than the likelihood of Morrow reaching his potential or Jack Wilson turning to dust, those trades might have been different. The second Cliff Lee trade obviously took massive amounts of time and focus.  The variables are such that good and bad outcomes could be evident of the same level of skill and quality of process subjected to differing levels of time and focus.  Looking at process is valuable but needs to be weighted according to the importance of the trade. Because differing amounts of luck or skill can be assigned to any one deal, we need to look at all of Zduriencik’s deals as a whole before we can begin to put any kind of predictive value on them.  Zduriencik isn’t the GM that made the Cliff Lee deals, and he isn’t the GM that made the Jack Wilson and Brandon League deals.  He’s somewhere in between, a mixture of both, and that is a GM I’m comfortable with running my favorite team.

With appologies to Attractive Nuisance, and of course to Bruce Springsteen...

Hey Ken Griffey where’s your bat speed gone?

Did it go away, leaving you flailing on?

This is getting dire

Please retire

Tell me now Griffey of your legacy

Do you want it to include destroying this team

This is getting dire

Please retire

Sometimes it’s like someone took your bat Griffey

Filled it with lead, and cut a six inch valley

Through the middle of its head

Each time you take a swing have you noticed that

With a fastball running through the

Middle of your bat

It’s time, this is getting dire

Please retire

I’ve been thinking lately about the question of whether a team needs to be more balanced in order to win more games –that the Mariners need a “big bat,” even if he blows a hole in our defense.  I’m convinced by the argument that balance doesn’t matter, that it is simply about addition/subtraction of overall talent, that the way a team achieves its run advantage over its opponent doesn’t matter.  However I’ve been wracking my brain, playing devil’s advocate, trying to come up with a way that the argument for more offense could work.  I first thought that adding a hitter at the expense of defense makes sense because defense cannot affect walks, home runs, or line drives that no human could get to.  However this is just restating the fact that offense is more important than defense, which doesn’t help at all.  I then considered that the effect of adding a hitter changes depending on the team’s existing offense –the number of runners that will be on base when he comes up, the likelihood that someone else will hit him in when he gets on etc.  Adding Chase Utley to the Yankees would have a greater effect on their runs scored than adding him to the Mariners.  However additional runs are more important to the Mariners, so he might have a greater impact on our win total than theirs.  This logic is the same for extra runs prevented. 

I’m wondering about two things that I don’t have enough information to figure out.

 First, because a player’s run output is dependent on other players being on base or hitting him in, the addition or loss of good hitter seems to have a greater impact on runs scored the better the team’s offense is.  For example, removing Ichiro from the Mariners would lower our runs scored less than removing a similar offense player like Robinson Cano from the Yankees would lower theirs.  Do defensive changes have a similar non-linear impact?  I know individual defenders don’t affect each other’s defense, but in overall run prevention, adding a good defender to a team already more likely to limit base runners makes it less likely on each pitch that a defender will face a batted ball that could change the score.  I know there’s a discussion about how pitching impacts the marginal value of defense (good defense being wasted on good pitching) but I want to focus only on defense.  If the run impact of changing defense is more linear than that of changing offense, then would adding more defense actually help the Mariners more than adding a bat.  Under this logic, wouldn’t adding Yadier Molina provide more value for what we’d give up than adding a similarly good offensively oriented player?

Secondly, if I am right that improving a team with a tendency towards close games adds more wins than the same improvement would a team trending toward larger single game run differentials, how far can that logic be stretched?  Does this mean that the low offense, high run prevention template for building a roster is better because when that team is able to improve itself, they will see more value in those close games from that marginal improvement?

To sum up my ramblings, would improving defense actually help the Mariners more than improving offense because the offense is already so hopeless it wouldn’t matter as much? And do teams like the Mariners see a greater change in record from marginal additions or subtractions because the games are so close?

I'm a Mariners fan, so I watched very few Rays games last year and am not as familiar as most here with their 2009 season.  Also, forgive me evoking what must have been a frustrating experience. 

I was trying to figure out why the Rays only won 84 games last year.  The Rays WAR values in 2009 according to Fangraphs show a 100 win team in terms of actual performance, and this high value is supported by 2008’s team WAR and the fact that they went to the World Series (and play in the AL East!).  The crazy emergence of Zobrist and the career years of Crawford and Bartlett would seem to counterbalance the collapses from Kazmir, Upton etc.  You’re obviously aware of their roster and player performances so I’ll just say that I recognize that the roster was not only as talented as '08, but played up to their talent last year.  Essentially the Rays neither lost talent, nor failed to live up to their true talent level.  So my question is this:

 Is the runs scored/runs allowed disparity simply because of a really unlucky strand/L.O.B. rate for both their hitters and pitchers?  I tried to research this myself, but it’s hard to decipher exactly what the numbers here tell us because good pitchers are supposed to strand a higher percentage of runners than bad ones, so I would have to know what rate their level of pitching talent should normally strand, which for individuals can be found with career averages but for a team is difficult.  I couldn’t find strand rate for hitters and the same problem would apply anyway.  Basically I’m asking whether bad luck with strand rates is the main reason why the Rays won so few games.