Friday, February 15, 2008 |
The Mariners Mirage
So why am I not more bullish on this trade for the Mariners? Well, those Angels and Twins teams were simply better than this one is. The 2008 Mariners looked like a .500 team, maybe a bit worse, before this trade was made. Having Bedard make 32 starts instead of having Cha Seung Baek or someone make them saves 35-50 runs, worth three to five wins in the standings if you assume there will be no cost to having Brad Wilkerson in right field rather than Jones (which, in 2008, may actually be true). That shortens the gap between them and the Angels, but it doesn’t close it by any means, and it doesn’t make them a factor in the wild-card race.The 88-win scenario stands in stark opposition to USS Mariner's recent simulated season, which had the team at 77-85. Of course, that simulation also put the A's on top of the division.The problem, of course, is that GM Bill Bavasi isn’t looking at his Mariners as a .500 team. He’s seeing last year’s 88-74 record and figuring Bedard, along with improvement from Felix Hernandez and bounce-backs by Jose Lopez and Richie Sexson, makes the Mariners as good as the Angels. The 2007 Mariners may have posted an 88-74 record, but that record was…misleading. The Mariners were outscored by their opponents, 813 to 794, a differential expected to produce a 79-83 team. Now, while the true ability of the Mariners was debated throughout last season—with a reasonable case being made that the gap between their run differential and record was not just luck, but the result of strong relief pitching and terrible back-end starters—in evaluating a team at the end of a season, it’s the run differential, and not the record, that is the better predictor of future performance.
Labels: mariners, predictions
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