Link Roundup: Waner's Ceremony, Mariners News, and All-Star Tokenism

by Charlie Wilmoth on Jul 11, 2007 4:37 PM EDT in News

-P- The Pirates will retire Paul Waner's number before the game on July 21.

-P- SI points out that the Yankees are as far out of the playoff race as the Pirates are.

-P- The Mariners and Ichiro Suzuki are on the verge of agreeing to a five-year deal worth almost $100 million. USS Mariner likes the deal. Personally, I'd be concerned about the way Ichiro would age - so much of his value has to do with his spectacular baserunning. How's he going to be running the bases in 2011 or 2012, when he'll be 37 and 38? And how many of those Ichiro-special infield singles is he going to beat out? Even if we accept that this is a good deal based on Ichiro's performance now, I'd be concerned that he won't age as well as other players do. But the USS Mariner guys would know a lot more about this than I would.

-P- By the way, speaking of USS Mariner - I keep forgetting to post this, but it's a really cool story. A couple weeks ago, USSM wrote an open letter to the Mariners' pitching coach explaining why Felix Hernandez needed to mix up his pitches better in the first couple innings of his starts. Well, then Hernandez threw a two-hitter over eight innings against the A's - and credited USSM for his success. I guess I can continue to dream that baseball blogs do matter.

-P- More Mariners news: the M's will call up top prospect Adam Jones, who had a .963 OPS at Class AAA Tacoma, and he'll start in right field for them. The effect of all this will be that slow, slow outfielder Raul Ibanez will move to DH and DH Jose Vidro and his .698 OPS will move to the bench. This should be a big boost for the Mariners, who are only 2.5 games back of the Angels in the AL West.

-P- Royals Review has a good post that shows how little the 'at least one player per team' All-Star Game rule really accomplishes. Pirates fans will surely nod their heads in agreement. Brian Giles got one whole at-bat in 2001; Mike Williams (perhaps fortunately) didn't pitch in the 2003 All-Star Game; Jason Bay didn't play in 2005. What good is this rule?

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I like that MLB still acknowledges that there are baseball teams that don't play in New York, Boston or Chicago. Not sure that would happen without this rule.

by KPatrick on Jul 11, 2007 8:53 PM EDT reply actions

Another interesting link

Writing for FOX, Tracy Ringolsby (beat writer for the Rockies) seems to think it's a done deal that we'll have a new manager and GM next year. He also floats the possibility of Jack Zduriencik (the Brewers' director of scouting) as the next GM. Link.

Jack Z used to be part of our front office in the early '90s.

by Vlad on Jul 12, 2007 12:41 PM EDT reply actions

That seems to be the conventional wisdom

Nevertheless, I still have this terrible conflicted feeling. If the Pirates have a good second half--which realistically could happen and would certainly be a welcome break from so much awful baseball--I'm afraid DL will get another 3-4 years, even if the team finishes under .500. I'm really tired of "improvement" being the standard. Even a .500 season wouldn't show that DL is competent. (Just ask KC fans about 2003.) It'd have more to do with the fact that four of the NL's six least talented teams are in the Central, combined with the unbalanced schedule. I just wish the Bucs had an owner or CEO whom I thought was capable of concluding that, "Yes, we had a better year, but after so much losing baseball and with the farm system in poor shape, I'm still convinced that we need a better GM."

by WTM on Jul 12, 2007 7:18 PM EDT up reply actions

Yeah

A good second half might actually set the Pirates back a couple of years. Real improvement won't be possible until Littlefield's gone and the Pirates hire someone competent and give them control. If Littlefield gets anywhere near .500, it'll be hard to find a CEO with the guts to fire him.

by Charlie Wilmoth on Jul 12, 2007 7:27 PM EDT up reply actions

Totally with you

For the sake of getting both, I'm hoping for six weeks of good baseball to make summer viewing worthwhile, then a nice 5-25 tailspin where Tracy loses the team, and they still finish with 90 losses. I like football, so by then I can watch that.

Hey WTM, not that your site is hard to navigate or anything, but a search-by-player box would be great. No trouble finding anyone, just saying. Also, maybe a link to players no longer in the system. Like, what had you written about, say, Lillibridge, or Stansberry, might be interesting.

And while I'm handing out suggestions, Charlie, sometime when you do a minor league recap, one idea might be to take one of the teams and compare them to a few other teams of the same level. Like, how does Altoona compare to the AA teams of NYY, MIL, STL and MIN. I just picked those randomly, you might pick a few teams that make a point about where the Pirate org stands.

I was on vacation for the suggestion box post, but another one, similar to what someone said in that thread, is to link to some of the meaningful stuff at BBTF or other (preferably free) sites or blogs. Or even old articles there that discuss why, say, BABIP, or whatever you might be talking about, has meaning.

Otherwise, I like what you do here, and like the diary capability, it's like a blog for non-fulltime bloggers. I would have done diaries for the Indy-Rochester games like I did last year, but there's really not a whole lot I'm interested in seeing, and I could only make two games, and one was tonight's, which I declined.

by azibuck on Jul 12, 2007 9:30 PM EDT up reply actions

Former players

I'm responding sentence-by-sentence here.

The former players' pages are still there, at least ones who left in the last two years since I switched ISPs. There's just no link. If you go to the right position, say shortstop, go to any shortstop's page, erase his name from the URL and put in the one you want, you'll get the old page. You just have know the position and spell the last name. The URL always has the complete last name with no caps, spaces or punctuation ("vanbenschoten"), except it's preceded by the first initial where it's a common last name ("jwilson").

I'll see about putting up links to the former players when I get back from vacation. Of course, they'll be outdated.

by WTM on Jul 12, 2007 11:45 PM EDT up reply actions

Minor league recaps

That's a good idea, but it would be tough to implement, because it's hard to say exactly what would be considered "average" or representative. But it would probably be good for me to do something like this in the offseason when people's top prospect lists come out, or when John Sickels does top prospect lists for different teams. Those would be pretty easy to compare to one another.

by Charlie Wilmoth on Jul 13, 2007 4:53 PM EDT up reply actions