Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 273: The State of Seattle’s Front Office/The Decline of CC Sabathia

Episode Date: August 26, 2013

Ben and Sam discuss Jack Zduriencik and the future of the Mariners, then talk about CC Sabathia’s dismaying season.

You definitely have to have a short memory and just keep going. You know, that's the one thing I always tell myself, you know, no matter what happens in the game today, I will just keep pitching, keep going and keep, you know, trying to execute the game plan. Good morning and welcome to episode 273 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindberg, joined by Sam Miller. And it sounds like a new form of wildlife. I'm just going to be quiet for a second here. We'll both be quiet so that you can hear.

Okay. Okay. It's nice, isn't it? It is nice. So when I heard that, I said crickets, and you said no, and you said we could talk about what it actually was. It's frogs. It's frogs.

Really? That's what frogs sound like. They sound like crickets. They sound a lot like crickets, but these are frogs. So where are you right now? In just a bit south of San Jose. Well, I mean, you're not in there. I'm on a front porch.

Oh, okay. All right. All right. So, man, these Sunday night podcasts, I kind of wish we were like a Breaking Bad podcast instead of a baseball one so that we could talk about that, but we're not. So what is your topic? The Mariners. Okay. And I wanted to talk about CeCe Sabathia a little bit.

All right. Do you want me to start? Sure. So I guess two Mariners personnel moves have kind of been publicized, I guess, in the last few days. And arguably neither one is particularly new. One is new to us. The other is not really new, but was made official. And those moves are the kind of, it's actually not even official, I guess. But basically, Tony Bungino, who is one of, who was basically the, I don't know, the stat guy who joined

the Mariners at the same time as Jack Cerencic, he is basically going to be allowed to wander off. So his time with the club is, according to reports, essentially gone, done. And meanwhile, Jack Z is signed to a contract extension that goes through 2014. This extension was actually signed uh during the winter before the season uh it is just now being made public but we now know that um jack actually got some kind of i don't know arguably vote of confidence um arguably i think that's debatable and maybe now according to jeff passan uh even a little bit more vote of confidence by the Longino move.

And so I just thought that now's a good kind of time to look back at the Mariners, who have had five years under this regime. This regime has essentially been gutted other than Jack Z. And, you know, the Mariners have not been successful during that time. They have gone up and then down in the eyes of the, I guess, sabermetric community. They had an offseason where they seem to be the brightest young front office in the game, They seem to be the brightest young front office in the game, but they've not really won anything. They've not improved or really even gotten worse. They are a 75-win team, basically, that looks like a 75-win team. is just to say, was this five-year plan a total flop,

or is this story reasonably seen as ongoing? Well, I wrote a thing for Michael Clare's site earlier this year when he was doing his charity blogathon thing about how I felt like we were either too down on them and Jack Cerencic now, or we were too up on them several years ago. We proclaimed them the new smart front office who was doing everything right within the first year or so after he took over. And then in the last year or so, it's been everything wrong. And he's on the on the wobbly chair and and doesn't have a long leash and all these things. And, you know, it was a span of of like four years or so. And it it seems like we either overreacted to that initial success or now we're

overreacting to the struggles lately. And maybe, you know, the whole time they were somewhere in the middle there all along. Okay. But let me interrupt though. I mean, it has been five years and I was,

I was thinking back to that conversation that we had about, I think the terms were, we were being asked to pick which team was least likely to win a World Series in the next five years. Were those the terms? This was a while ago. This was a while ago. Yeah, probably six months ago or so. Yeah, right.

And it does seem like we probably maybe should have mentioned the Mariners. The Mariners two years ago, to me, even though their farm system at the time we had that conversation was widely considered to be stacked, to me they felt further away from competitiveness than they had two years previously. You know, they basically turned Michael Pineda into nothing, you know, not necessarily by any fault of their own, not even unnecessarily by any fault of overreacting to the winds of the moment, but do you think that five years tells us enough about a GM? Does it tell us what we need to know? I don't know. I think that's certainly the point at which you understand if ownership makes a move. But I think it's possible for a GM to just have some things go against him and the winning team not come together in five years, even though the plan was pretty good. I don't know whether that's the case here.

I mean, I think I'm probably more optimistic about the Mariners than I was maybe a few months ago, having seen Nick Franklin and Kyle Seeger having a good year. Yeah, Brad Miller. Yeah, Brad Miller. And Justin Smoak. Yeah, kind of like the thing is that the resurgence of justin smoke and i guess the five years of being awful of justin smoke and then this resurgence to some degree that just basically tells you all you need to know that like this stuff is at a certain point and to a large degree completely out of the

gm's hands it's like completely unpredictable and you just have to like kind of pray that not all your guys suck at the same time and that kind of happened to them all their guys who you know it's not like it's i guess to some like smoke was there were there were probably a greater than usual number of prospect writers who were down on smoke when he was a an elite prospect. And maybe the same about Ackley. But it's not like people were saying, you know, these guys were going to be terrible. Exactly. I mean, they put together a team that, you know,

of players who should have done well and then they didn't do well. It's hard to know how to assign blame on that. Dustin Ackley is hitting.353 in August. So, yeah, and that was supposed to be Jack Cerencic's strength, scouting hitters. That was supposed to be like his trump card or his calling card as a GM. And, yeah, I think we've talked about before how those moves were all defensible at the time.

Those were all, you know, Montero, Ackley, Smoke, all highly regarded prospects and players who just last time we talked about at least just hadn't panned out. And no one said those were bad moves at the time they were made. And probably most other teams would have been thrilled to have those players at the time that those moves were made so so i don't know and i think we concluded that you know if you're the team that does acquire them then you you kind of have to know more about them than than every other team i mean you like you have to be right it's not i don't know is it is it a defense that that every other team would have made the same mistake, I don't know, is it a defense that every other team would have made the same mistake? Or I don't know, you're the team that made the move and you maybe had the most confidence that those players would work out. So if you're going to make the move and give up

players to get those players, then you would want to be more right about them than everyone else um but there is kind of a a young core i mean zanino has not been great um but but between seager and franklin and miller and smoke kind of hitting and uh taiwan walker and there's still there's still some pitching so there's there's some stuff there that you look at and you kind of can see it. I mean, clearly it's not this year. And so it would have been nice maybe if they had traded some people, as I think we've discussed, maybe, you know, Kendris Morales or Raul Banez or whoever at the deadline

when maybe they could have kind of supplemented the new core with some people who are expiring assets and weren't going to help in the short term. But there's some talent there because like the really depressing thing was it looked like the core was just a complete flop and they were going to have to totally rebuild again a few years after rebuilding for the first time. years after rebuilding for the first time. And then now there's, there's enough there that you can kind of look at it and say, well, maybe one more year and maybe it comes together and maybe he looks pretty good at this, this time in 2014. It's, it's not a hopeless case. I don't know that I would, I don't know that I would put them at the top of that five-year World Series probability thing or at the bottom of it. I feel like there's enough young talent there that I can still kind of see it.

So it seems like a pretty rare event that a team de-stat heads itself, if that makes sense. seems like a pretty rare event that a team de-stat heads itself if that makes sense i mean the the you know the and i don't want to oversell what the mariners are doing uh because we don't you know they have a lot of guys who probably qualify i mean they probably have a ton of guys who qualify in that front office but they basically have you know removed the uh stat component of the jack z regime for the most part and. And a really visible part of it too. Like most team stats guys, you may not have even heard of them

or you'll almost never see them interviewed. But Bungino was like front and center when that new regime came in. I mean, he was giving interviews left and right. I think he had a regular radio segment where he would like explain how war works and just pick a stat every week and talk about it. And it was really just a lot more visibility than you typically see.

Most guys get rid of their Blengino equivalent. You probably wouldn't even know about it. Yeah. Yeah, so the norm is that you hear more and more about guys being hired or about teams going in this direction. And I'm thinking of precedents for the equivalent. And I mean, like the Dodgers, obviously, with DePodesta. But that was kind of, I mean, they had an insane owner. And he got kind of run out of town by a fairly coordinated campaign by the local media. And, you know, maybe the Diamondbacks, but, you know, Kevin Towers is, you know, sort of a giant in the game.

And there's nothing particularly unusual about wanting to have Kevin Towers. So do you think there's anything significant about the Mariners doing this? I mean, is it as, do you feel like this is a strange direction to go or should we just really not be thinking about front office personnel in those categories at all? Yeah, I don't know. It's hard for me to say without knowing who's left or who's filling that role. I mean, like it, I don't know that we can take it as an indication that they're forsaking the sabermetric approach or, or even giving more precedence to the scouting side or something. I mean, maybe that's the case, or maybe,

maybe they just wanted someone else to take over that role or they're going to hire someone else or hard to say. I don't think it's I don't know that they're like flying in the face of history or anything and just and, you know, rolling back the clock or anything like that. That would be I mean, it's possible, but I don't know enough to say. And last question, do you have any beef with Jack Z getting the extra year extension? Well, if it was done before this year, I mean, he's been, I guess, for most of the year at the top of the, or near the top of the list of GMs who could possibly lose their job. And I guess if it was done before this year, I mean, I don't know. I certainly would have, I wouldn't have protested if he had been let go. I wouldn't really have called for him to be fired because I don't really like to do that because I just don't

feel like I know enough about what people are doing behind the scenes. But I guess it's sort of surprising to me since this was kind of seen as a sort of a make-or-break year for him and for the Mariners, and they changed course in the offseason, and we talked about how they kind of went away from the defense first, and they signed power guys because they thought they needed a bat. And so I'm sort of surprised that they would have committed to him without waiting to see how that worked out. Yeah, I kind of feel like a one-year contract extension isn't really much of a commitment.

He doesn't really get paid much, relatively speaking, so it's like the sort of thing that executives everywhere have. I mean, when I was covering schools, all the superintendents had basically contracts that were like rolling three-year contracts. So every year, the next two years would turn into a three-year deal. So it was always this poison pill. So you could fire them and they would get their money, right? And so, I don't know, I kind of just feel like a one-year extension gives him a little bit of freedom to not act irrationally in the offseason, maybe to try to, you know, save his job or anything like that.

But basically it's like, you know, you're just basically putting his buyout into the contract or his severance into the contract. It doesn't feel like, this is not Mike Socha's 10-year, $50 million extension by any means, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Is that that? I did have a problem with the superintendents

having the three-year. That felt shady. That always felt like too much. So I will say, I'm okay with Jack Z's deal. I'm not okay with... I'm not going to name names here, but... Well, we should do a full podcast on your days covering education someday.

So let's talk about Sadathia. Okay, so we haven't really talked about him much this year, and he's sort of having a a notable season um he pitched pretty well uh over the weekend he lost to the rays but but pitched decently went six and a struck out seven gave up a few runs but his era since the the all-star break is over seven and the peripherals aren't the greatest either. He's walked 23 guys in 44 and two-thirds innings. So his stats for the full season are very not Sabathia-like at all. His ERA is almost five.

His FIP is well over four. And it's just something we really haven't seen from him since he was a very, very young pitcher who hadn't really refined his control as he has since then in the last several seasons. And it's his... Can I interrupt real quick? Sure, mm-hmm.

I don't know. I mean, obviously, there's lots of reasons to think Sabathia is in a bad spot and all that. But just in his defense, 7.7 strikeouts per nine, 2.6 walks per nine is his ratio this year and his ratio his first year as a Yankee. So, I mean, you know, the home runs are different. But depending on your philosophy about that, there is at least that. All right, so I'll put that out there, not in any sort of way that I would like to tie myself to, but I'll put it out there. Yeah, his FIP is still almost a run higher than it was that year, it looks like. Yeah, because of the home runs, but his ex-FIP, though.

Yes. I'm just saying, philosophically, that might be relevant information to people. Yeah, but of course the other relevant information is his stuff which has declined considerably. His fastball velocity according to Brooks Baseball is at 91.8 this year.

Last year it was 93.0 and the year before that it was 94.7 so he's basically lost a mile and a half or so per hour almost on his fastball the last couple of years and that's kind of scary and he's he's he's always been a guy who's really gone deep into games, and he hasn't done so well when Girardi has tried to push him into later innings this year, and there's been some writing and some talking about whether Girardi hasn't adjusted to the new Sabathia, and he's still treating him like a workhorse ace, even though he's not that anymore.

Sabathia's ERA in the sixth inning is almost 10. His ERA in the seventh inning is well over five. Of course, that's also the case of his first and second inning. So I don't know whether that means anything, but he has seemed to run out of gas earlier and maybe that's just because he hasn't been as efficient. But he's just, he looks very mortal right now, and so I'm kind of comparing him to the other bad contracts that the Yankees have had on the books and have on the books for a few years from now. Of course, he doesn't compare to the A-Rod contract,

but it's getting to the point where i wonder whether his contract is is better than the to share a contract uh to share they're both signed through 2016 um both around 23 or so million per year um and it's kind of getting to the point where you're, you're thinking of it in the same, in the same bucket, I guess, as those, as those contracts, which wasn't at all the case before this year. Johan Santana and how they avoided making that commitment to Santana because there were these warning signs that they saw before he was signed to that big deal. And at that point, they're really, I mean, his peripherals were fine. He was high up in the Cy Young voting every year. year. But the Yankees looked and saw that he was a high-risk player going forward health-wise, is what Cashman said, because of velocity loss and because he had used his slider less over the last couple of years. And so supposedly, at least in retrospect, Cashman said earlier this year, they avoided him because of those warning signs.

And they went with Sabathia instead, who was younger and hadn't had those warning signs. But now it's a few years down the road and he's kind of showing the same warning signs himself, which is interesting because before the Sabathia decline, I was wondering, did the Yankees know something special about how to evaluate pitchers and how to avoid the bad ones and then uh sabathia kind of seems to be showing the same sort of signs of decline that they were worried about with santana um remember when uh remember when cashman uh wanted to sign nate sherholtz and ownership wouldn't let him yeah man his hands were his hands were tied he really wanted sherholtz i just remember that yeah maybe my maybe my all-time favorite yeah newspaper fun fact um so so so what do you think of sabathia's contract then for the

next few years what what would sabathia be be signed for what would it be yeah if he were free agent this offseason and and say he finishes the season where he is now um so like like what can you think of a good comp can you think of a player who uh flopped so badly just just in his walk year. I guess, you know, those guys tend to like, maybe Adrian, well, Adrian Beltre is in no way comparable to Sabathia, but it just jogged my memory. And so now it has me thinking maybe that he's like, he would be a pillow contract guy.

But on the other hand, the pillow contract works if you're a player and you feel reasonably confident that you're going to bounce back. And if you're a pitcher who's losing velocity the way he is, you might be thinking the exact opposite, which is even if you have to take a lesser deal than you expected six months earlier, get every penny you can, because in nine months you might be out of the game for good. So I don't know. you might be out of the game for good. So, I don't know.

Sabathia, if Sabathia were a free agent right now, what would he get? Yeah. Or what would you give him, and what would he get? I would guess, I don't know, 3 and 45. And I'll say I would give him that and he would get that. So that's considerably less than he is signed for. So 23, 23, 25. So yeah, he's got three years and 71 plus a $5 million buyout for 2017

if his option doesn't vest. So yeah, that is sort of scary. It's not that bad. Yeah, it's not that bad. It's not good, but it's not, you know. Yeah, it's bad if you believe it. It's not $212 million for Bulls or $106 million for Hamilton. Yeah, and, yeah, if you believe in trends,

and sometimes trends can be deceptive and we can read too much into one-year performance when we should really be regressing that year and looking at prior years. I have a theory about velocity loss, guys, and I have not done any research into this theory. It's not a theory. It's a hypothesis based on nothing. So I'm going to give it to you, but don't hold me to it. But my hypothesis is that when a guy loses a mile and a half per hour on his fastball, we basically know what that means. Like in the aggregate, we know what happens to ERAs and FIPS when you take a mile and a half, or I guess we know what happens

to strikeout rate and all that, when you take a mile and a half off of the average pitcher's fastball. My theory, though, is that when a guy loses a mile and a half, like Sabathia did this year, he's actually lost, not necessarily with Sabathia, but in most cases, he's probably actually lost like two miles or two and a half, and he's overthrowing because he can't really admit to himself that he doesn't have that anymore. because he can't really admit to himself that he doesn't have that anymore. So the drop is actually bigger, but the drop in performance, the true talent loss is actually smaller because once he adjusts

and starts pitching with the fastball that he has and starts working with that fastball instead of the fastball he desperately wants, he actually can make some adjustments and get better. So like Tim Linscombe said something along these lines a few weeks ago when he said, you know, I finally realized that I don't throw 94 anymore and I should stop pretending I do. And I don't know, that's probably a fairly clichéd thing to say after the fact when you've had a run of six good starts or whatever. But I think it's probably kind of true.

I think that to some degree, if you're used to throwing 94 and you're all of a sudden throwing 91, you do what you can to try to get it to 92. So a lot of times we're not seeing the true pitcher as he is at that point anymore. I don't know if Sabathia fits into that hypothesis. Sabathia might be the exception. He seems to have been fairly mature about the mipd exception he seems to have been fairly mature about the velocity loss yeah very beginning right acknowledged it in about

the second start of the year yes he's yeah he's been full of just kind of like sad sad quotes all year yeah he's just been very very frank about it i mean at the end of j, he said, I suck. I suck. I wish I had an excuse or something. It sucks. It's embarrassing. And yeah, and and yeah, it was like a couple starts into his season when his his velocity was was low and he was coming off a sort of a minor surgery and hadn't really had a full spring training, I guess. But still, people were worried about it. And he basically said spring training, I guess, but still people were worried

about it. And he basically said, like, I can't do it. I can't throw his heart anymore. And so, yeah, I didn't know whether that was a good thing or not, because on the one hand, it's kind of, I don't know, I guess you want your pitcher to feel like he has good stuff or he's going to go out there without any confidence, and that won't be good. But you also do want someone who has lost his stuff to accept it and make that adjustment. And I don't know, he sort of seemed like one of those guys who would just kind of be smart and have enough secondary stuff to to get by if he wasn't throwing as hard but um hasn't hasn't been a particularly easy transition for him

xfip is lower than it was his first year as the yankee and basically the same as it was the second again not saying that i i would change my opinion of him based on that but some people might uh yeah you're right well we'll see we'll see what happens um okay are we done yep all right uh so we'll be back tomorrow send us emails at podcast at baseball perspectives.com and we will get to them on wednesday