Results tagged ‘ Seattle Mariners ’
Felix Hernandez, the Seattle Mariners and a really bad contract extension
Bob Nightengale of USA Today reports that Felix Hernandez and the Mariners have agreed to a seven-year, $175 million contract extension. The contract will make him the highest paid pitcher in baseball history, both in overall contract and in average annual value.
The Mariners will tear up his current deal, which was to pay him $19.5 million this year, and replace it with the new one. It will pay him, on average, $25 million a year through 2019. It’s not known yet if the contract amount increases over time or if it’s a flat $25 million a year.
Lemme say it right here.
This is a bad move.
No, it’s a terrible move.
Hernandez is a great pitcher. One of the best in the game no doubt. I absolutely love the guy and would kill to have him on my team…at the right price.
I mean the dude is 98-76 with a 3.22 ERA and 1,487 strikeouts and 480 walks in 1620.1 innings across eight seasons.
Those are great numbers sandwiched around one really freakin’ scary one. Simply put, “them’s a lot of innings man”.
No matter how you slice it, the guy already has a ton of mileage on him and more importantly we’ve already seen a substantial decrease in his velocity.
via Fangraphs this is what King Felix was throwin in his in 2007:
The fastball was 95-100, the slider was 89-92, the change-up was 86-89 (ignore the “FS” labels, as the algorithm wasn’t so good back then), and even his “slow curve” was 82-87. Felix was the embodiment of a power pitcher, and while his three off-speed pitchers were all notable in their own right, Felix’s mid-90s two-seamer was his defining pitch. There just weren’t many guys in the game that could run a sinking fastball up there at 95 MPH, and that pitch helped him run a 60.8% GB% that year.
Now here is what he did in a randomly picked start this past season:
The change-up is still in the upper-80s, while the slider and curve are both down a couple of ticks on average, but not too terribly far from where they were five years ago. However, the fastball is 90-93, and because of its close proximity to the change-up, it’s basically indistinguishable in the chart. Instead of two distinct clumps, there’s just now one big mess of pitches in the 90 MPH range with similar movement and velocity.
It’s not just the lack of swinging strikes that set his fastball apart on Saturday night, however. As noted, Felix came into the league as an extreme groundball pitcher. As his velocity has declined slightly over the last four years, he’s settled in as more of a 50-55% groundball guy.
Now none of this is to say he will not be a very effective pitcher for the bulk of this contract, provided he stays healthy.
But the warning signs are there:
We saw these signs with Johan Santana before he signed his big deal with the Mets & then we saw them a couple years back with Tim Lincecum.
Johan was nothing short of a bust when you factor in the cost of the contract (3 very good years, one injury riddled year everyone who paid attention saw coming and one mediocre bounce-back season so far) and “The Freak” is not a guy you’d want to see your team handing a 7 year/$175M deal to right now, is he?
The Mariners have a good farm system but it is loaded with pitching and not a lot of high-end offense, at least not with any amount of depth to survive flame-outs and injuries that are bound to happen.
Felix is just a high-priced (albeit proven) version of what they have tons of in the system.
They’re trying to catch an A’s team that has a decent organization, tons of pitching depth and a shrewd general manager.
They’re trying to catch up to a Rangers team that is both light-years ahead of them AND has every bit the farm system they have.
They’re trying to catch up with the Angels who have a lot of young offensive talent, two of the games biggest sluggers and an owner that is not afraid to make bold moves or write big checks.
In other words, simply re-signing one man at such a huge expense is not going to get it done.
They would have been much better served to put him on the market and completely fleece a team like Boston or New York for 5-6 high impact prospects.
By the time this team turns it around Felix will have 2,500 – 3,000 innings on that arm, his velocity will have lost a couple of more miles per hour and he will in all likelihood be a shadow of his former self.
At that point he’ll still be owed two to three years at $25M per season and you’ll be over-paying for “veteran’s presence” while wishing you had never made this deal.
Mariners Offense Is Just Plain Crazy Bad
Crazy Stat of the Day
The Mariners team numbers look like this for 2012:
.232 AVG, .294 OBP, .364 SLG, .657 OPS.
For his career Randy Johnson allowed hitters to bat the following off of him:
.221 AVG, .297 OBP, .353 SLG, .650 OPS.
Meaning on your typical day the M’s offense makes your run-of-the-mill average MLB pitcher literally as dominant as a five-time Cy Young winning, first ballot Hall of Famer.
Yet again, a lack of instant replay looms big in another no-hitter
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…
Hardball Talk‘s Matthew Pouliot chimes in on the latest umpire assisted no-no:
Just like in Johan Santana‘s no-hitter exactly a week ago, a close play that could have been overturned by replay loomed large in Seattle’s combined no-hitter against the Dodgers on Friday night.
Dee Gordon, maybe the National League’s fastest player, led off the bottom of the ninth with a broken-bat flare to shortstop against Tom Wilhelmsen. Brendan Ryan, just in the game as a defensive replacement, grabbed the ball and made a strong throw to first, getting the out call.
Replay, however, showed that Gordon may have beaten the relay.
In this case, the evidence wasn’t so solid as last week’s fair-foul call on what should have been a Carlos Beltran double.
The play at first base was so close there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have been overturned on whatever replay system baseball eventually implements. Still, it did look like Gordon was safe. Besides just disrupting the no-no, it was a huge call in what was just a 1-0 game at the time.
It’s one of those calls MLB will someday need to make its best effort to get right, instead of just letting one man try to call it at real speed.
Whether it’s the blown Jim Joyce call that actually cost, the now infamous “No-han Santana*” incident or now this, too many of these “historical moments” are being affected by things so easily remedied.
When Armando Gallaraga lost his perfect game on a blown call just over two years ago I wrote that baseball needed instant replay, but “if change comes, make no mistake it will come for entirely the wrong reason” and for me, nothing has changed.
We need instant replay expanded to ensure the integrity of the game, to make sure that a botched call doesn’t determine which teams make the playoffs (or God forbid, the actual outcome of a playoff game).
BUT if the catalyst for change comes in the form of your average baseball fan’s infatuation with no-hitters & perfect games, I’ll take it.
