Hangin' With The Nuss

The end of the line: Find me now at Seattle Sports Report

2007-07-27T13:13:00.000-07:00

That's right: After more than a year and more than 300 posts, Hangin' With The Nuss will be no more.

You can now find my writing at Seattle Sports Report (http://seattlesportsreport.wordpress.com), so update your bookmarks accordingly.

Why did HWTN have to end? Well, there are a number of reasons.

First and foremost, this site began as an outlet for my own personal opinions and desire to write. I had no blogging experience at that time, and I didn't really have a heck of lot of expectations for readership. I figured I would post once or twice a week, and it was more just for me and a few of my friends.

The bottom line is that the site has outgrown that. I've been posting frequently, gained considerable blogging experience and knowledge, found my blogging "voice," and grown a consistent readership that is beyond my original expectations. It was time for the blog to take the next step, and that frankly wasn't going to happen as Hangin' With The Nuss.

What does the next step include? Taking the focus off me and putting it squarely on the teams, for one. Hence the new name of the blog, which is part of a new nation-wide network of city sports blogs called "Behind Enemy Lines." It also includes adding more writers to the fold, so more viewpoints can be heard and discussed.

Additionally, I had grown tired of trying to make the Blogger template work for me and my readers. It just didn't provide a heck of a lot of flexibility, and I've grown tired of the look of the site. Changing it would have been a heck of a lot of work I frankly don't have time for. Wordpress' blog interface allows greater flexibility for communicating information and a simpler, more attractive layout where the emphasis is on the content -- not on colors.

Thanks for taking the time to read me here, whether you've been here since the beginning or more recently, and I sincerely hope you'll join us over at Seattle Sports Report. I think it's going to be a fabulous step forward, and I'm excited to be a part of it.

Thanks,
Jeff

Innocent until proven guilty?

2007-07-25T19:00:00.000-07:00

Whenever an American runs afoul of the law in this country, we have a little saying we like to proudly spout with our chests proudly stuck out for the whole world to see:

Innocent until proven guilty!

Unfortunately, most Americans fail to grasp what it actually means. While it's the cornerstone of the legal system in this country, and it's part of what makes America great, it really is only that -- applicable to the legal system.

It doesn't apply to the private sector, and it most certainly doesn't apply to public perception -- two points that are critical to understand when wondering why Michael Vick has been barred from reporting to training camp for the Falcons and why Americans (and Bud Selig) are having such a difficult time embracing Barry Bonds' imminent setting of the all-time baseball home run record.

People are correct when they point out that not only does an indictment not prove anything, it's not terribly difficult for the government to secure an indictment against an individual.

But those people would be missing the point. Actually, four points.

The NFL is a business;
It's a private business run by extremely wealthy individuals who wish to protect their considerable investments;
Those considerable investments are only such because millions of fans take more than a passing interest in those investments; and
Because it's a private business, those wealthy individuals can do pretty much anything they want to their employees -- within the boundaries of the collective bargaining agreement -- that they think best protects their investment, especially in the eyes of those who make that investment profitable.

Many have cried that we wouldn't want our employers rushing to judgment on us in the face of a legal battle. The response to that is simple: We're not NFL football players. In general, our employers do not need to think the same way about public perception as the NFL does. Usually, they stand to benefit more by keeping us around for productivity purposes (or to avoid union headaches). If you're easy to replace, they'll replace you -- just ask any minimum wage worker who has been fired for a small mistake.

Is it fair to Michael Vick? Absolutely. He knew the rules when he became an NFL football player -- rules that have enabled him to already become wealthy beyond what most of us can comprehend because they protect the profitability of the product for all NFL players.

It's not always great for the individual, but nobody's complaining when they're cashing those million-dollar paychecks.

Beyond that, even our legal system doesn't require a smoking gun to prove guilt; many a criminal has been put away with enough circumstantial evidence.

How much less evidence, then, does a private business require to take action, or the public to reach a conclusion? Maybe it's simply an indictment that cuts to the heart of decent human beings everywhere. Or perhaps it's an exceptionally researched book. Whatever that burden of proof is, it's far less than what the courts require. It doesn't have to be a guilty verdict at the hands of a jury, or an indisputable positive result on a pee test.

Innocent until proven guilty?

Quit being so naive.

Effort to keep Sonics ramping up

2007-07-25T17:54:00.000-07:00

The folks over at Save Our Sonics have taken another big step forward in their effort to keep the Sonics in town.

They've stepped up and formed the "A Deal Is A Deal" PAC, which plans to introduce an initiative that would block Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels from negotiating any kind of a buyout to the Sonics' lease with KeyArena which runs through 2010.

From the news release:

“We are confident that this initiative is legally viable and – more importantly – that it will send a clear message to the Mayor’s office that engaging in conversations regarding a lease buyout are against the wishes of his constituency.

“This issue is about more than basketball and we expect it to appeal even to those who are not sports fans. When cities make significant investments in any type of public/private partnership there must be an understanding that both parties, as well as their successors, adhere to the terms of the contract. In the case of the Seattle SuperSonics, that means they should remain in the KeyArena until the completion of the lease in 2010."

And when they say they expect it to appeal to even non-sports fans, they aren't kidding. Chris Van Dyk -- driving force behind "Citizens for More Important Things" and frequent target of sports fans' ire -- is behind the initiative effort.

"We're endorsing it because the principle behind it seems to be that major league sports owners have to stop kicking their fans around and acting like they own the bloody world and can do whatever they want," Van Dyk said. "The Sonics committed to play at KeyArena through 2010, and a lot of businesses made decisions based on that. The Sonics need to pay in full for all the possible impacts they have on the local economy. It seems imminently reasonable and fair to us."

Perhaps in the whole lifetime of the saying "politics makes for strange bedfellows" has it never been more outrageously true.

At any rate, this is a GREAT sign for those of us that want to see the Sonics stay in Seattle. The KeyArena lease appears to be ironclad, except that the mayor has said that a buyout could, technically fulfill the lease. An initiative such as this -- if it can stand up in court -- would give the region some more time to figure out a solution to keep the team here.

Perhaps more importantly, such a mandate could persuade Clay Bennett to sell the team, rather than continue to lose money under the current agreement for an additional three years.

If you want to get more involved, you can find out more about how to do that over at SonicsCentral.com.

On freeing Adam Jones

2007-07-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

I was listening to the Mariners postgame show a few days ago on KOMO, and team reporter Shannon Drayer and host Tom Glasgow were discussing the merits of adding pieces to a team that seemed to be struggling to score runs.

They both agreed that it would be good to add an upgrade somewhere, but then Drayer went where most traditional baseball observers go.

Chemistry.

I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't write down the quote word for word, but her "analysis" went something like this:

"In the four years I've been covering the team, this is by far the best chemistry I've seen out of the Mariners. These guys genuinely like each other and are pulling for each other to succeed, and is a big reason why they're winning," she said.

It got better. Or worse, depending on your perspective.

"I think if this team can add a bat, it definitely should do it, but it should be careful who it adds. If the Mariners can add a proven, veteran bat who's comes to the clubhouse with some respect, I think the guys put on the bench will accept it," she said.

Then, the kicker.

"But I would be careful about adding a bat that's unproven at this level. That really could disrupt what this team's got going. I would be very wary of that."

Of course, that last comment was a not-so-subtle shot at all of us who are clamoring for this team to find space somewhere in the lineup for Adam Jones, far and away the team's best prospect at AAA.

In case you've been in a cave the last three months, Jones is putting up unreal numbers in Tacoma. He's got a .315 average, .382 OBP and .590 slugging percentage, and he has 23 home runs and 79 RBI. Granted it's AAA, but for a little perspective, among the regulars only Ichiro has a higher average and OBP on the big club, and no one is even close to that kind of slugging percentage. Additionally, the defensive transition from shortstop to outfielder appears to be nearly complete, as scouts now characterize him as an above average outfielder.

That he's major league ready is no longer in question. But the Mariners' intelligence is.

There were myriad complaints the past two years that this team lacked a leader in the mold of Jay Buhner or Brett Boone. Chemistry is such a big deal with the M's and their front office that the signings of Jose Guillen and Jose Vidro were characterized as not only upgrades in talent, but "more importantly" adding some veteran leadership to the clubhouse.

Drayer doesn't come up with that kind of bunk -- and it is bunk -- on her own. She's drinking the organizational Kool Aid. My guess is players have expressed reservations privately to Drayer off the record, and also shared their thoughts with decision makers. Thus, Jones rots away in Tacoma, beating the crud out of the PCL.

There's no doubt that leadership matters on a a team -- any team. No matter the organization, having strong leaders does make a difference. But chemistry? Something entirely different and extremely overrated.

"Chemistry" does not breed success, especially in baseball where everyone has their own job to do. Guys hit and pitch well because they have talent, and don't because they don't. I've been around plenty of organizations where everyone liked each other and produced plenty of crappy work. Likewise, I've been around those where few people could stand each other, but everyone did their job well. Why? Because everyone benefits from the organization being successful, and it's stupid to waste time worrying about things like chemistry.

Success breeds chemistry, not the other way around.

This team feels good because it's 13 games over .500 ... not the other way around.

So, back to Jones. He's saying all the right things, but one has to wonder at what point it begins to discourage him. Here's to hoping Bill Bavasi was waiting for a good excuse to bring up Jones, because that time is here. The team has failed to score a run in each of its past two games, and it's heading to the bandbox that is The Ballpark in Arlington.

Where to put him? How about left field, where Raul Ibanez -- bless his heart, he's a nice guy -- has become an embarrassment as one of the worst fielders in baseball. Even if Jones doesn't hit a lick, he's got to be worth some runs for his defensive abilities alone. Additionally, Ibanez has become one of the worst hitters on the team. His line in July? Batting average .147, OBP .202, slugging .232. That is horrific ... and it's WORSE against lefties. AND HE'S BATTING THIRD.

It would be one thing if he's a guy just going through a prolonged slump. But the guy has six home runs. SIX. He's 35 years old. The end is near.

And let's not even start on Jose Vidro, he of the emptiest .299 batting average you'll ever see. Yes, his OBP is a respectable .361. But his slugging percentage is a pathetic .366 -- well below the accepted slugging "Mendoza line" of .400. It's easily the worst slugging percentage of any regular DH in the American League, and let's not forget the guy has grounded into 16 double plays this year -- second in the league.

Oh, and about that myth that Vidro is a patient hitter? He sees just 3.6 pitches per plate appearance, better only than Kenji Johjima and Yuniesky Betancourt (3.3) among Mariners regulars. For perspective, to be among the top 29 in the American League, you need to see at least 4.0 P/PA.

If I hear Rick Rizzs say Jose Vidro is the perfect number two hitter "because he does all the things a number two hitter is supposed to do -- see pitches, handle the bat, put the ball on right side" one more time, I will literally throw up. (And when I say literally, I mean it, as I'm fighting the flu right now. Awesome summer vacation!)

OK, so I started on Vidro. I digress.

I will throw in one caveat regarding Jones. It's possible he's still at AAA because the team is considering trading him and that's the best way to keep his value high. If that's true, I really, really hope Bavasi gets value in return -- not something stupid like Jason Schmidt or Dontrelle Willis. Confidence is not high after his debacle deals this past offseason. How nice would Rafael Soriano be in the 8th inning right now?

So here's to getting Jones to Seattle in what has become a long overdue move. We don't have to make a trade to make our team stronger.

Happy news, then the joke of the day

2007-07-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

On a day when the Mariners lose a series to the Blue Jays after not scoring a run for the second consecutive game, this should make you smile.

BOSTON -- Jon Lester is slated to return to the mound for the Boston Red Sox on Monday, nearly a year after his rookie season was cut short when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Lester was scheduled to replace Julian Tavarez for Monday's game at Cleveland, the 23-year-old left-hander's first major league appearance since he beat the Los Angeles Angels on Aug. 23 last year. The Red Sox said nine days later that he had a treatable form of lymphoma.

Lester is a native Tacoman who pitched at Bellarmine Prep in high school, so good on him.

Then, there's this little delicious gem.

The club will designate pitcher Joel Pineiro (for assignment) prior to the game on Monday to make room on the roster. Pineiro was 1-1 with a 5.03 ERA in 31 games this season.

That's right, folks. After convincing the Red Sox he didn't suck to the tune of $4 million, Boston has confirmed that he does, indeed, suck.

For those of you looking for the joke, is there any bigger joke than Joel Pineiro?

That's what I thought.

BOOK REVIEW: 'Baseball Between The Numbers'

2007-07-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

Back in the saddle today with the first HWTN book review!

In the interest of full disclosure, let me start with a confession. I did not finish "Baseball Between the Numbers: Why everything you know about the game is wrong" before I had to return it to the public library.

But in not finishing the book, I came to this conclusion: This is not a book that is meant to be finished -- at least not in a couple of weeks. This is a book that is meant to be owned, perused, contemplated, poured over and thought about.

"Baseball Between the Numbers" is a collection of articles written by the experts at Baseball Prospectus, the guys best known for their analytical look at the game through numbers and statistics. And we're not just talking run-of-the-mill statistics like batting average or even OPS; we're talking hardcore sabermetric statistics such as VORP, WARP, and runs created.

In an attempt to keep potential readers from being scared off, editor Jonah Keri writes:

"Since this is a Baseball Prospectus publication, you'll know to expect plenty of numerical analysis in breaking down these debates and finding answers. At the same time, we merely use numbers as our framework for these answers. In a real sense, it's not arriving at those answers that is most important, but the journey, the way of thinking and the process you use to get there that leads to real understanding. It's the process of learning to think critically about the game that defines this book, and in a broader sense defines our experiences as avid fans of the game. It's the baseball between the numbers that we seek."

In my experience, however, most baseball fans fall between these two extremes:

Those who swear by these numbers, believing there's no better way to look at the game and its best practices and strategies than through data and evidence culled over decades of games and seasons. Most of these people fall here because they can actually understand what the BP guys are talking about;

and
Those who think they're full of crap and that they rob the beauty, aesthetics and human element from the game. Most of these people fall here because they never got past algebra in high school and can't follow the concept of win probability to save their lives.

And that's the main problem with this book, from a widespread appeal standpoint. It still relies heavily on numerical analysis, to the point that even casual fans that are willing to have their preconceived notions about baseball challenged may not always be able to follow the logic, and in turn will be frustrated and turned off.

But since I fall much closer to fan No. 1 than fan No. 2, I enjoyed this book. I was pretty good at math in high school, and can follow (for the most part) what they're talking about. (Although the concept of "regression analysis," used often in the text, still eludes my higher order thinking skills.)

Some of the chapters are a bit tedious and dry, but there were other chapters I found absolutely fascinating, such as "Why is Mario Mendoza So Important?", "Is Alex Rodriguez Overpaid?" and "Do High Salaries Lead To High Ticket Prices?" It's great for reassessing what you think you know about baseball, as each chapter centers around an accessible question and attempts to reason through the answer with available data. You might not always agree with the conclusions -- for example, I think the free agency analysis in the A-Rod chapter ignores some important concepts -- but you can't ever walk away from a chapter without having had to think about why you believe what you believe about that topic.

A word of caution: This is a book that is best bought, put on the shelf, and brought out to read from time to time. I plowed through about 100 pages yesterday, and by the time I was done, my brain hurt. It's just too much to try and digest all of those numbers in such a short amount of time. You're better off reading a chapter here and there, and then taking some time to ponder what you just read. It would even make for a cool "chapter of the week" discussion point for you and your baseball fan friends, if you're (apologies to the ladies) manly enough to do that.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who doesn't mind really thinking while thinking about baseball, and isn't afraid to have what they think they know challenged.

And while you'll never look at a sacrifice bunt the same way again -- you'll think to yourself, "How can they just give away an out there? Don't they know that it drops their chances of scoring more than one run this inning by nearly half?" -- you will be rewarded for your efforts with a more well-rounded view of the game, something I'm enjoying already.

Rating: 4 out of 5; worth your time

New post to come tomorrow

2007-07-19T11:06:00.001-07:00

Thanks for hanging with me during this crazy summer. I'm in Wenatchee right now as I write this, in town to look for a place to live, drop off stuff to my classroom, etc. So, no post today. But I'll have one tomorrow for sure.

Thanks for your patience, and believe me -- we will seriously ramp up as we get close to the trade deadline and the opening of training camp.

Need a pick me up on a Tuesday morning?

2007-07-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

Try Powerburst.

(Be warned: There is one naughty word in the video. But, hey -- Mother Nature had it coming. Also, does it make me a total geek that I know that the sans serif font in this video is Myriad Pro? I think it does.)

Thanks to Gomez, frequent contributor over at Lookout Landing, for digging this one up.

Eating crow on Ichiro

2007-07-15T21:55:00.000-07:00

Way back at the beginning of the season, I devoted an entire post on how overrated Ichiro is -- how he'd never be worth the $16-18 million he'd likely command on the open market, and how the Mariners would be smart to keep their money and let the selfish singles hitter walk.

As the Mariners prepare to pay Ichiro $90 million over the next five years, I just have one thing to say.

I was wrong. Really, really wrong.

I still stand by many of the things I said, put into the context of the post's April 12 date. At the time, he certainly seemed to be in the midst of what could be reasonably interpreted as a statistical decline.

Additionally, my perception that he wasn't contributing as much to the team's success wasn't entirely off base, either. After "creating" 146 runs in 2004 (the year of 262) -- runs created uses batting and baserunning to try to quantify the overall offensive contribution -- he created only 113 and 114 runs the past two years. Still pretty good, but not quintessential Ichiro.

I wondered if the Ichiro of 2001 and 2004 could ever return.

Well, he's returned with a vengeance and is a huge reason why this team seems to be overachieving this year. He's on pace to "create" 140 runs, but if fancy stats don't tickle your fancy, consider that he's on track to post his highest batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage since 2004, and his highest stolen base total since his rookie year.

Clearly, he still possesses the ability to change games the way he did in the past.

Also, upon reflection, I think I was vastly undervaluing Ichiro's defensive contribution as a centerfielder. When I wrote that original post in April, Ichiro had only played CF for a grand total of two months, and I really was still valuing him as a rightfielder. Playing centerfield everyday this year, Ichiro has proven to be an extremely valuable defensive commodity (two flyballs from Curtis Granderson notwithstanding). Defense matters -- it's the kind of thing that can take a guy from being worth $12 million a year to $18 million a year.

Many wonder if it's wise to give that kind of money to a 33-year-old. Dave Cameron at USS Mariner answers that question here, and I happen to agree with him. His argument is long, so here's the gist: Even if he declines at the expected rate -- no sure thing for a guy who Bill Bavasi said is in better shape at 33 than many players are at 23 -- by advanced statistical measures, he'll still be worth the money. And if you count yourself a person (like many in the mainstream national media and Dave Samson) who think there's no way a singles hitter can be worth that kind of money, check out this post by Cameron; it might cause you to reconsider what his skill set is actually worth.

At any rate, this team simply could not let Ichiro walk away -- not when it's experiencing the turnaround of this season and fans are beginning to flock back to Safeco Field. That's not something to be overlooked, given the downward trend in attendance the team has been experiencing. Ichiro is the main star attraction on a winning team that is winning back its fans. This signing just continues the excitement.

Had the team continued to flounder as it had the past two seasons, I still would have been first in line to say let him walk. Like a lot of leadoff hitters, he's really only as valuable as the guys behind him, and the guys behind him the past three years have been awfully bad.

But this year, he's showing what he can do when he's surrounded by some talent. Once again, he's showing just how valuable he can be on a contending team.

And that makes him worth every penny.

As promised: The answers you seek

2007-07-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

So, many of you -- OK, maybe just Jo-Jo -- have been wondering what I've been up to. No doubt, it's been a conspicuous time to be silent, given the Mariners' play and subsequent signing of Ichiro, Kevin Durant's summer league debut, among other things.

However, I have had my reasons.

Besides the fact that summer's just a time to be outside and not sitting at computers much -- unless you're one of those unlucky folks to work in an office everyday -- you might recall that a little over a month ago, I accepted an offer to become a teacher at Wenatchee High School. Well, a couple of things getting ready for that move have consumed all of my time over the past few weeks.

First, we have purchased this little gem to have some fun with on the east side of the mountains:

No, I did not purchase the girl -- that's my beautiful wife Sarah. I'm talking about the 2000 Jeep Wrangler, which we've already had a considerable amount of fun with in the sun. Joshua loves riding in the back -- very important.

Additionally, for those of you unfamiliar with Washington, Wenatchee is nowhere near where I live. That means we've been getting our house ready to go on the market, and it's taken us the better part of three weeks to get both my old classroom cleaned out and our house cleaned and fixed up.

But, we're there. Observe:

The house is in The Buttes outside of Orting and is being offered at $325,000. You can find a link to the listing here. My wife's the agent, so you can contact me directly here if you're interested or know someone who is.

So, there you go. Hopefully, this will be the end of the silence -- after all, I'm going to need frequent respites while packing stuff up. I'll hopefully have some thoughts on the Mariners (among other things tomorrow.

Where the heck have I been?

2007-07-11T09:42:00.000-07:00

I apologize deeply for the impromptu leave of absence. I'll be able to explain much more tomorrow. Hang with me, because I have a lot of thoughts about the Mariners heading into the second half of the season. It sure is a feel-good time to be an M's fan.

See you tomorrow.

Reading between Ichiro's lines -- good luck to you!

2007-07-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

After the Mariners finally got manager John McLaren his first win yesterday at the helm of the Mariners, Ichiro had some curious comments afterward.

For those of you looking for something "sinister" in the resignation of Mike Hargrove, I imagine you'll feel free to read plenty into these.

First, this one, told to the Japanese media and translated over at Detect-o-vision (courtesy of Enjoy The Enjoyment):

"There was a play (in the game) with a certain intention. A play we did not have for 2 years."

He was speaking, according the site, of a specific play in the game that seemed to be a part of having a plan to win the game -- something Hargrove apparently was lacking.

Then, there is this nugget, courtesy of Larry LaRue at The (Tacoma) News Tribune:

"We don’t know what the future holds for manager John McLaren,” Ichiro said. “But to be part of his first victory was emotional for all of us. I want to help him win a lot of games in his career.”

Wait. Did the guy who is an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year just say he wants to help the new manager win "a lot of games in his career"? I hope I'm not making too much of an assumption that McLaren's career will last more than half a season ...

Welcome to the world of hanging on every word of your team's superstar, made even more fun by the fact that he's Japanese, won't speak English to the media, and loves to give quotes that are more riddles than answers.

Just one more fun thing to watch for the rest of the season.

Happy 4th!

2007-07-04T13:42:00.000-07:00

I hope you're outside enjoying some sun instead of reading this.

But if you are reading this, perhaps you'd like to ponder how this guy:

Is going to coach this guy.

No, P.J., you will never out live this. Sorry.

We'll be checking in tomorrow. Hopefully the M's will have figured out how to beat the Royals by then.

P.J. Carlesimo will be Sonics' next head coach

2007-07-03T17:07:00.001-07:00

The San Antonio Express-News is reporting tonight what we all widely assumed would happen when Clay Bennett hired Sam Presti as GM: That P.J. Carlesimo will be the next head coach of the SuperSonics.

You know what? I like the move.

While the city (rightly) has sentimental ties to Dwayne Casey, if the organization was looking for a guy to implement the San Antonio philosophy up here, who better to get than a guy who has been an assistant coach in San Antonio for five seasons? Besides, what did Casey do in Minnesota that has inspired you to believe he'd do anything much different as the head man up here?

And I don't view this as the typical retread situation. This guy was a heck of a coach at Seton Hall, and didn't do a half bad job in his three seasons in Portland, where he averaged 45.6 wins and was chased out of town mostly because the Blazers never could get out of the first round of the playoffs. It was that debacle in Golden State that did him in, but, really -- name a coach not named Don Nelson who has had success in the Bay Area in the last 30 years. Better yet, name a coach that didn't have a problem with Latrell Sprewell.

I think Carlesimo, who has been saddled with a bit of unfair criticism, could end up being a great hire. He's going to bring a defense-first mentality and also is a creative offensive mind. He's learned under one of the best in Gregg Popovich, and rather than hanging our hats on some unproven assistant who might or might not be able to handle an NBA team, we get a guy who was a coach for six years and has had some time to reflect on what might not have gone right the first time around and hopefully learn from it.

Then again, isn't that kind of what we all said about Bob Hill? Let's hope coming from a winning organization makes the difference for Carlesimo.

Just how bad have the last 10 years been for the Sonics?

2007-07-03T13:52:00.000-07:00

Seth over at Enjoy the Enjoyment reminds us.

Holy crap. We should be a lot more pissed about where this franchise is than we really are. What an unbelievable string of ineptitude.

Hollinger: Sonics unlikely to net much in sign-and-trade for Lewis

2007-07-03T11:49:00.000-07:00

ESPN.com's John Hollinger has (by far) this morning's best take on Rashard Lewis' agreement to sign a max contract with the Orlando Magic.

First off, he thinks this is a classic case of a guy being worth more at a certain price to one franchise than he is to another. In this case, it made sense for the Magic -- who believe they can contend quickly in the mediocre East -- to sign Lewis to a max deal, but not the rebuilding Sonics.

(B)y not maxing out Lewis right now, the Sonics are better poised to add players later. Removing Lewis' cap hold puts Seattle $3.8 million under the salary cap right now, if we assume a $56 million cap for this season (again, the final number won't be known until July 11).

But the big splash is two years down the road. At that point, the expiring deals of Wally Szczerbiak and Chris Wilcox will take roughly $20 million off the Sonics' books. While extensions to Robert Swift and Delonte West are likely to eat up a portion of that, it still leaves Seattle with more than enough dough to chase a superstar in the summer of 2009.

Of course, what's unstated there is that the Sonics will be able to spend that $20 million at a time when Durant and Green have two years under their belts, putting Seattle in a position to make the kind of "over-the-top" move that potentially puts them in position to contend for championships.

And as for the possibility of getting something in return for Lewis in a sign-and-trade? Unlikely.

The problem is making it work. Although Seattle and Orlando have eight days to work out a deal, there isn't a great chance of this happening. Seattle reportedly isn't enamored of anyone on the Orlando roster (well, except Howard), so at best it would need to be a three-way deal. Those types of swaps are notoriously complex and difficult to pull off, especially because other teams covet few of Orlando's assets.

He does pose one interesting theory, however.

What Seattle might find more alluring is the prospect of a trade like Indiana made a year ago with the Hornets when Peja Stojakovic left. That swap gave the Pacers a $7.5 million trade exception that they turned around to acquire Al Harrington. In this case, the Sonics would get a $9.35 million trade exception (again, assuming a final cap number of $56 million) if they took nothing back from Orlando.

But this works only if Seattle can offer Orlando a little something for the trouble -- a draft pick being the most likely bait. And the trade exception might not mean as much to the Sonics as a draft choice at this point in their rebuilding process -- especially because trade exceptions can be difficult to use and expire in 12 months.

Let's hope GM Sam Presti can figure out a way to make this happen. Letting Rashard walk doesn't net the Sonics the $15 million or so he would have been making here -- remember, they would have been using their Bird rights to sign him, so it would only leave them $3 million or so under the cap. It's a number unlikely to result in the Sonics landing much help for this upcoming year.

And as for other rumors surrounding the Sonics?

An interesting one being reported by FoxSports.com: Richard Hamilton and Nazr Mohammed for Earl Watson, Chris Wilcox and Damien Wilkins. It's a deal the Sonics should do in a heartbeat, but you probably won't see much come from it until the negotiating window with Lewis has expired on July 11. But who knows? Maybe the Pistons become the third team in the sign-and-trade ...

ESPN.com says Rashard Lewis is off to Orlando

2007-07-02T23:21:00.001-07:00

ESPN.com's Marc Stein is reporting tonight that Rashard Lewis has agreed to a max contract with Orlando and will sign the deal on July 11, the first day free agents can sign new deals.

This doesn't exactly break my heart. I would have liked to keep Lewis, but I'm not convinced he's a max player -- he's got one All-Star selection under his belt, and even that was tenuous, brought about mostly because the team was having success.

He's a nice player, but not a superstar. I don't want to see the Sonics handcuffed by a bad contract, the way the Wolves were when they gave Wally Szczerbiak his fat deal. A max deal to Lewis probably would have done that.

Now, we'll see how good Presti is. The one thing the Sonics had going for them was that they could offer him a six-year contract; the most Orlando can offer is five. Let's see if Presti can really earn his money by negotiating a sign-and-trade with the Magic, where Lewis gets his six-year deal and the Sonics get some kind of return on him. That also would be best for the Magic, who still have designs on signing Darko Milicic. A sign-and-trade would give them enough cap space to still sign him, which they wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

I don't know exactly what the Sonics might get in return, but I know there are other people out there way smarter than me who break that stuff down. When I run across it, I'll pass it along.

McLaren drops debut, torches bullpen in the process

2007-07-02T21:52:00.000-07:00

Let's go ahead and begin this conversation with the understanding that John McLaren's managing style will be developed over weeks and months, not three hours, 20 minutes and 11 innings.

That said, I think there are some things worth noting in this, his first game as manager.

The thing that obviously sticks out above all others was his use of the pitching staff tonight, which probably cost the M's the game. It just seemed like a classic case of overmanaging, which might be expected given that the guy hasn't managed his own baseball team in about 20 years.

It started with his decision to pull Felix after eight innings, but just 92 pitches. Following a rocky first inning, Felix was on cruise control most of the rest of the way, and there was no real reason to pull him from a tie game. I haven't seen anything from McLaren yet on his decision to pull Felix, but I presume it was because David DeJesus -- he of the two hits, including a home run, off Hernandez -- was leading off the ninth. (UPDATE: Felix says he was gassed from the humidity.)

But ... who knew how long the game was going to last? Seems logical to ride that horse as long as he'll let you ride him. Especially since pulling Hernandez opened a can of worms McLaren wasn't prepared to deal with. It resulted in him burning through three relievers -- Eric O'Flaherty, Sean Green and George Sherrill -- to get three outs in the ninth inning of a tie game.

Of course, O'Flaherty put him in a bad spot by giving up two quick hits, but turning to Green was a bad option to begin with. McLaren clearly had no intention of letting Green pitch past Emil Brown, given Green's horrendous .364/.511/.455 line against lefties. My guess is McLaren was hoping for a DP out of Green, but when he didn't get it, he was left with no choice but to turn to Sherrill. The better option would have been to turn to Sherrill in the first place -- he's been equally effective against both righties and lefties.

Three relievers. Three outs. A game that could have gone on indefinitely with just three relievers remaining.

Saddled with an offense that couldn't get a hit with runners in scoring position, McLaren had no choice but to turn to Brandon Morrow for as long as he could go, because he only had two other pitchers left: Rookie Ryan Rowland-Smith (he of the 2 1/3 career major league innings) and J.J. Putz (who presumably was being held back for a save situation). (UPDATE: Putz was unavailable tonight.)

It backfired, as Morrow proved once again that his command simply isn't yet good enough for extended appearances.

I won't crucify McLaren for what looks like a pretty bad bit of bullpen management tonight. After all, it was only game one, and one has figure he's going to learn from it. But for those who say managers tend to have a relatively negligent impact on teams, McLaren deserves a fair share of the blame for tonight's loss.

That said, I feel good about the next two days, even if the eight-game winning streak is now over. As Bill Kruger said tonight on FSN, this was the very best the Royals have to throw at us, and you have to believe that a team that has hit nearly .300 with runners in scoring position this year won't be stranding nine runners again.

So, here's to taking the next two from the Royals and moving on to Oakland to finish the first half out strong. Let's hope McLaren's bullpen shenanigans don't have a lasting effect.

Hargrove resigns as M's manager

2007-07-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

I think we all came into this season figuring that Mike Hargrove would lose his job at some point. I just don't think any of us, in our wildest imagination -- with the team 11 games over .500 and riding a seven-game winning streak -- thought it would come like this.

Saying it had become harder and harder to bring daily the effort and energy he demands of his players, Hargrove resigned today as manager of the Mariners, effective after the Sunday matinée with the Toronto Blue Jays.

He insisted the decision was his and his alone.

"There are no dark sinister reasons for this decision," Hargrove said at a hastily called press conference this morning. "This is my decision.

"It’s not a problem with players, not a problem with Bill (Bavasi), not a problem with clubhouse manager, not a problem with my wife. It’s an accumulation of 35 years. That’s a long time. It’s just an accumulation of things. It's not one thing – I was not forced into this decision. There was a strong, credible job done by everyone to talk me out of it.

"But this is the right thing to do for Mike Hargrove and the Seattle Mariners."

Hargrove's always been a straight shooter, as is his nature as a native Texan, so it's hard not to take him at his word. But it's also hard not to wonder if there's another story, although any thoughts along those lines would be pure speculation at this point. And there will be plenty of that over the next 24 hours.

For now, I'll choose to accept his reasons, especially given that so much of what he said seems to be centered around his family. Family is unbelievably important to me, and I can't imagine what it would be like to be away from my wife and child for the extended periods demanded of a major league manager. This is a guy who's done it for 35 years. And when a guy says he's talked more to his wife in the past 10 days than he has in 10 years, well, that's pretty telling to me.

What to think of Hargrove's tenure?

For all the shots the guy has taken about his over reliance on veterans and ridiculous insistence on generally ignoring platoon splits, he did lead the team to heights I don't think any of us expected this year. Raise your hand if you thought this team would be 11 games over .500 at any point in 2007, let alone in June. That's what I thought.

And in many ways, this is the best possible scenario for Hargrove. He leaves with the team probably overachieving a bit, having overseen what appears to be an organization that has turned the corner from irrelevance to relevance once again. Even if interim manager John McLaren -- the guy we wanted to take over a long time ago -- comes in and leads the team to a playoff appearance, Hargrove will get a lot of the credit. If McLaren doesn't? If the team crumbles? It will be on him, even if such a fall would have been inevitable under Hargrove.

Will this team succeed under McLaren? The reality is nobody really knows how he's going to manage. I think we all suspect he'll be a little more prone to do some of the things we criticized Hargrove for not doing, given his seemingly more analytical nature. It'll be interesting to see how he forges out his own managing style, given all the years he spent hanging out with Lou Piniella, a manager notorious for his lack of patience with young players.

Will he be more open to Adam Jones playing everyday, as Jones should be? Will he fight for Jones' call-up if Bavasi doesn't want it? Will he be smart enough to make sure Jose Vidro never sees the top two-thirds of the batting order ever again? Will he have a better relationship with Ichiro, to the point that the team's lone superstar wants to stay in Seattle after this season? How will he manage the bullpen, which is going to have about three guys with arms fall off at this pace? Will he be more or less afraid to step on veterans' toes to make the right moves, given his interim status?

All will be things to keep an eye on, as this team tries to continue its current momentum. And we will keep an eye on it, starting tomorrow at Kansas City.

Until then, let's hope Hargrove goes out with a bang by sweeping the Blue Jays to finish a 10-2 homestand.

TNT's Hughes gets it with column

2007-06-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

My buddy Mike, who works for the Sonics, commented on this post that Seattle was the only place where the Ray Allen trade wasn't being hailed as a success -- that it was roundly being praised around the country.

In my response, I tried to make the argument that it's just not that simple. That people "around the country" aren't worried about losing this team the way we are, and that colors how we see everything. Frank Hughes at The News Tribune gets it.

"(S)adly, nothing can be taken in the context of 'purely basketball' with this organization, not now and probably not for the next nine months to a year.

"There is an overarching fog of uncertainty about the team’s future that never seems to dissipate, infusing itself into any discussion about the team and choking the excitement and optimism out of even the smallest scintilla of hope."

He goes on to tell of why he believes the Allen trade was a smart basketball deal -- a stance I'm beginning to agree with -- and explains that the consensus among NBA writers was that the Sonics got the best of that one.

But that doesn't mean we get the freedom to look at the move independent of the larger issues of the arena and the team potentially leaving town.

"It’s a good start to the reshaping of a roster that doesn’t need to be completely razed to achieve success. ... But how can an increasingly apathetic and alienated fan base generate the type of fervor that usually accompanies such dramatic decisions with the sneaking suspicion that it is intended for the benefit of another community? ...

"It’s a shame, really. These should be the best of times for this organization. New GM. Fresh perspectives. Innovative ideas.

"But there is one idea that never can be forgotten: In its current state, nothing with this franchise is purely basketball."

Blog on 48-hour break

2007-06-29T10:04:00.000-07:00

I'm heading out of town overnight for a retreat with the Washington Journalism Education Association, so I probably won't be able to blog until Sunday. I'll be keeping an eye on the Mariners from afar as they try to continue their winning streak against the Blue Jays, and I'll have some thoughts on that when I return.

In the meantime, enjoy your rainy weekend if you're in the Seattle area, or your sunshine of you're pretty much anywhere else at the end of June.

The day after: Reviews mixed on Sonics draft

2007-06-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd pass along some of the other reaction to last night's draft. Nationally, the Sonics' trade of Ray Allen and drafting of Kevin Durant and Jeff Green is being hailed as a success. Locally, many are left scratching their heads, the way I was last night.

And, by the way: Carl Landry (the second round pick that didn't make any sense whatsoever) was traded to Houston for a future second rounder and cash. So now that makes a lot more sense.

The News Tribune's John McGrath agrees with me.
Fans at the draft party felt like I did.
The Seattle Times' Jerry Brewer thinks sending Allen away was the right move.
The Times' other columnist, Steve Kelley, concurs -- he thinks the Sonics actually got better last night.
The Seattle P-I's Art Thiel says this better not be it.
Pete Nussbaum at SupersonicSoul says faith is the best course of action after last night's initial outrage.
SonicsCentral.com also believes this was the right time to trade Allen.
Seth over at Enjoy the Enjoyment likes the moves.
ESPN.com's Chad Ford gives the Sonics an A- for their two draft picks and the trade.
So does Sportsline.com's Tony Mejia.
ESPN.com's David Thorpe gives them an A+, via True Hoop.
Sports Illustrated's Chris Mannix disagrees, labeling the Sonics as one of his losers.

Happy reading.

Sonics demonstrate uncanny ability to wiz on fans' excitement

2007-06-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

This night was supposed to be the night the franchise turned around -- the night we celebrated the next great Seattle superstar's arrival in our town.

It was supposed to be a night of unbridled joy.

Instead, I'm left thinking that if Clay Bennett could send the Mariners on a 10-game losing streak or take a lead pipe to Matt Hasselbeck's kneecap, he would. He's that good at ruining pretty much anything that makes us smile.

On a night that was supposed to be all about Kevin Durant -- the night we dreamed that maybe, with just a little bit of roster tweaking, the Sonics were on their way to being relevant again by building around a new young superstar who would learn from the aging superstar -- we ended up talking all about Ray Allen becoming a Boston Celtic.

It really is amazing that anything could ruin this night, but Bennett and his guys figured out a way to do it.

I had hope that this team might become an instant contender. But it now is abundantly obvious that Bennett is intent on blowing the thing up and starting over, building around Durant. As I wrote earlier, the cynicist in me believes Bennett might just be trying to tank the team for just long enough to get it out of town. Even the most optimistic person would have to agree that losing 50 games again next year is not the way to get an arena deal done, and history tells us this isn't the best way to build to a championship.

Now, it's clear GM Sam Presti isn't done with this roster. He's got a sign-and-trade deal for Rashard Lewis to complete. They're still saying publicly they want Rashard back -- presumably to try and retain some leverage -- but let's get real. There are now three small forwards under contract in Durant, Jeff Green and Wally Szczerbiak, and as Allen said, Rashard is not likely to want to join a youth movement. He's got no scoring punch from the two-guard spot -- unless they're counting on Szczerbiak (who played in 32 games last year) -- and still has huge issues at point guard.

He's obviously got some substantial dealing left to do, so I'll reserve total judgment until I see how this all shakes out. But tonight could hardly have gone worse, from a fan perspective.

I'm not saying I don't totally understand parting with Allen; after all, he plays a position where the drop off in play is generally precipitous at his age. But I don't understand the pick of Jeff Green, a guy I think is really overrated. He's a nice player, but not the kind of guy who's going to pair with Durant to dominate the West for years to come. (And I don't just say that because he traveled against Vandy and ruined my bracket.) And to only get Wally Szczerbiak and Delonte West thrown into the deal, while -- oh, by the way -- giving up your No. 35 pick in this draft (which turned out to be Big Baby Davis)? It just doesn't make sense.

And I really don't understand the pick of Carl Landry, rated the 63rd-best prospect by Chad Ford at ESPN.com yet picked by the Sonics at 31. Even if he is your guy, in such a deep draft, the Sonics could have easily traded down and picked up a pick next year or something and still gotten him.

I would much rather have seen the Sonics pick Corey Brewer -- a lockdown perimeter defender and solid shooter -- to play the point at No. 5, then seen them pick up Arizona's Marcus Williams -- a pure scorer at the two-guard -- at No. 31. Both are long and versatile, and fit the mold that apparently Presti is looking for. That would have gotten me excited, as I would have seen how the pieces were fitting together.

Instead, we got a 3/4 tweener without any discernable strengths other than athleticism and yet another undersized power forward, with only the promise that there is more work to be done.

Yippee.

Thanks, Clay, for sucking the life out of Seattle once again.

Sonics make a trade, only not the one we all wanted

2007-06-28T17:46:00.001-07:00

The Sonics are blowing it up, and I don't like it. In fact, I smell a rat.

Ray Allen has been shipped to the Boston Celtics, and Rashard Lewis is as good as gone in what likely will have to be a sign-and-trade deal. In return, we get a team that features Kevin Durant (unbelievably awesome), Jeff Green (underwhelming), Wally Szczerbiak (terrifically bad and under contract at $12 million per for the next two seasons) and Delonte West (a crappier version of Earl Watson).

I know we're probably only getting part of the picture right now -- I'm sure GM Sam Presti will be making other moves to remake the roster -- but it sure seems like this is part of a plan to get the team to suck just long enough to get out of town, then blossom into a winner somewhere else.

I hope I'm wrong, but the original talk was that adding Durant to the original cast of characters would catapult the Sonics into playoff relevance.

Now, it's looking like they're following the Portland plan, which sounds nice, until you consider this: How many of the championship teams from the last 20 years built their squad by blowing it up and starting over at some point? None. San Antonio came closest, but their pick of Tim Duncan came after a 60-loss season in which David Robinson and Sean Elliott were hurt.

Yes, Portland has a nice nucleus of players, but there's no guarantee that team is going to become championship caliber. Keeping Ray Allen around -- a guy who's far and away better than anyone on Portland's roster -- would have made a lot of sense to help this team not stay in the 50-loss range. Now, it will be awful difficult to keep that from happening.

And once you start losing, it's awful tough to stop. The NBA is littered with franchises that started losing and are still losing.

Anyway, I'm rambling, so I'll check in later after we see how the rest of the night shapes up.

Latest on Sonic trade rumors

2007-06-28T09:54:00.000-07:00

I'll be posting periodically throughout the day on NBA Draft stuff that I come across, but I won't have the time to necessarily be scouring the Internet for the latest on all the trade rumors.

That's why you should visit this thread at SonicsCentral.com. They are doing that dirty work for all of us.

Among the interesting things they've picked up:

The News Tribune's Frank Hughes thinks Ray Allen will be traded before next season.
The Oregonian's Jason Quick thinks Greg Oden going No. 1 still isn't necessarily a done deal.

In less than 24 hours, Kevin Durant will be a Sonic

2007-06-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

Before we turn in for the night, some developments on the NBA Draft.

Greg Oden apparently has been promised by the Trail Blazers that he will be the No. 1 overall pick, according to ESPN.com.
No one really knows if the Sonics' on-again-off-again trade with Atlanta, in which Luke Ridnour would be sent to the Hawks in exchange for their No. 11 pick, is on or off at the moment. The News Tribune and the P-I are essentially reporting that the deal is done as long as the Hawks don't get involved in that much-rumored three-way deal that would send Kevin Garnett to Phoenix. ESPN.com is reporting, however, that the Hawks are having second thoughts about Ridnour. That's a bummer, because I can't wait to get Ridnour out of town. It's not personal -- it's just that he's not very good. (Don't tell the Hawks.)
If Ridnour is shipped off, expect the Sonics to take Eastern Washington's Rodney Stuckey, says Gary Washburn of the P-I.

We'll have plenty of draft day/night coverage and analysis here tomorrow.

Mariners sweep away Red Sox

2007-06-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

I'm a little speechless right now about what I witnessed this afternoon. Is this team just teasing us? I'm not sure.

What I do know is that they're a heck of a lot of fun to watch right now, and while the Red Sox haven't exactly been the hottest team in baseball over the past month, that's still a darn good team that the M's swept aside by beating Daisuke Matsuzaka.

For all the work they've done this year in improving on last year's record, one can hardly deny that they've seemed to do it by beating up on the weak sisters of the American League. The M's haven't exactly had a lot of success against the likes of the Angels and the Red Sox.

Until this series.

I wish I had more insightful commentary, but I'm not sure I know how this team keeps doing it. Ryan Feierabend had no right to do what he did today -- not after what happened on Friday. They're also winning in different ways, a departure from the Mariners' earlier win streaks.

The M's are now back to nine games over .500 and just two games back in the wild card standings, five back in the AL West as the Angels got swept by the Royals. So far, so good in the start to what was identified as a critical stretch against quality opponents; even our friends over at coolstandings.com have the M's playoff chances off of life support and back up to 20 percent.

Go take two out of three from the Blue Jays and the M's really will have something going.

And one more thing.

J.J. Putz is still the best closer in baseball.

Sonics land Oden with No. 2 pick!

2007-06-27T16:14:00.000-07:00

OK, so actually that's only according to ESPN.com's mock draft unveiled today. Usually, I think mock drafts are stupid, if only because they almost always seem to play it safe with conventional wisdom.

Well, conventional wisdom goes out the door when Bill Simmons is involved.

This mock draft is a tag-team effort between Simmons and NBA reporter Chad Ford, and it involves some pretty funny -- and insightful -- running commentary. Simmons was the guy to pick first, and had Portland take Kevin Durant. His reasoning?

(Durant's) a cold-blooded killer. I hate pre-draft workouts, but didn't you find
it interesting that Oden was nervous, awkward and apologetic during his workout
in Portland, but a confident Durant strolled in there two days later and blew
everyone away? You know what's funny about that? I knew that was going to
happen. One guy plays basketball because he was created to play basketball; the
other plays because he was bigger than everyone else and it seemed like the
logical thing to do. If there was a pickup game and Oden was on one side, Durant
was on the other, and your life depended on the game, you'd pick Durant. You
would.

Ergo, the Sonics land Greg Oden with the No. 2 pick. To which Ford says:

Bill, on behalf of the citizens of Seattle, Sam Presti, Ray Allen, Rashard Lewis
and all eight remaining Sonics season ticket holders, I want to thank you. Not
only did you pass on the best big man to come in the draft since Tim Duncan in
1997 ... you handed him on a silver platter to your biggest rivals.

It's pretty good stuff. And, if you're curious, Simmons took Texas A&M's Acie Law in that No. 11 spot the Sonics would acquire if they ship Luke Ridnour's sorry butt to Atlanta (more on that later) -- Mike Conley Jr. and Corey Brewer already were off the board. And if you're still curious, Simmons selected Spencer Hawes at No. 13 for the New Orleans Hornets.

On the eve of the draft, a reminder of what once was

2007-06-27T08:29:00.000-07:00

With the NBA draft tomorrow night -- and with us reminiscing about the stars of yesteryear -- here's just a little flash back of what once was in Seattle when it came to our SuperSonics.

I had a similar sensation watching the highlight reels of Junior this weekend as I marveled at his bat speed as a young player. Sometimes I forget just how good Shawn Kemp was. Thank goodness we have YouTube to remind us.

Special thanks to Seth over at Enjoy the Enjoyment for digging this up.

What the heck is wrong with Felix?

2007-06-27T00:05:00.001-07:00

A lot of people are trying to figure out what's wrong with Felix Hernandez, especially after another thoroughly average performance against the Red Sox which, of course, the M's were able to overcome with some typically stellar work out of the bullpen.

Some thought he was "fixed" after his last outing against the Pirates, but Jeff Sullivan over at Lookout Landing saw things that troubled him even in that performance. It's required reading, and it looks like he was right. There's no doubt that his stuff isn't as good as it was earlier in the year -- the data is there to prove it. (Why it's not as good, who knows. Felix says he's healthy. Sullivan's theory is here.)

But the folks over at USS Mariner have been hammering on Felix's pitch selection for some time, and given the way Jeff Weaver handcuffed the Sox last night with his array of junk, and given the way the Sox hammered away at Hernandez's steady diet of fastballs ... well, I have to believe there's some truth to that theory. (UPDATE: USS Mariner reiterates the point Wednesday.)

My take? He was able to get away with sketchy pitch selection when he was throwing a 94 mph two-seamer down in the zone and painting that 97 mph four seamer on the corners. Now that he's not doing that ... well, you see the results.

The crazy thing is that he's a guy who, for all the strikeouts, is a groundball pitcher. That should result in lower pitch counts. But his insistence on throwing that four-seamer -- which is straight as an arrow and often results in foul balls -- is killing his pitch counts, and keeping him from going deep in games. He needs to get back to focusing on getting outs early in the count, and it's probably well past time that he start using his off speed stuff to set up his fastball to do it.

Other quick observations from the night that was ...

What to make of taking the first two from the Red Sox? I'm not sure. After all, they beat up on one mediocre journeyman (Julian Tavarez) and one overmatched rookie who couldn't find the strike zone. Is this team for real? I still can't decide. But I'm enjoying the ride.
Mike Hargrove has done a pretty admirable job managing this team this year, but every once in a while, he does something that just leaves you scratching your head. Like batting Jose Vidro in the 3-hole. I thought we established long ago that Vidro is not a good hitter, and putting a not good hitter in the 3-hole is counterproductive -- especially when you have another hitter in your lineup who rakes lefty pitching batting sixth.

Not to get all sabermetric on you, but there's a theory out there by guys that are good with numbers that you want to get the guys who create more runs more at bats in any given game. Guys with higher OPS create more runs. Vidro's OPS against lefties is .673; Jose Guillen's is 1.079. Seriously, what's so hard to understand here?
J.J. Putz is still the best closer in baseball.
What is with the Mariners' defense the past two games? The third inning yesterday and various points today -- Jose Lopez's backhand ole of David Ortiz's shot sticking out in my mind -- leave me wondering when it's really going to catch up with this team to the point that it costs them a game. It also leaves me wondering who the bozo official scorer is who keeps calling those things hits. Granted, Lopez made a great diving catch to save a run, but is it too much to ask for these guys to make the routine plays?
Why is Willie Freaking Bloomquist playing left field with Raul Ibanez hurt when there's a guy with 17 bombs and a .979 OPS playing in Tacoma? This is seriously reaching comical proportions ... except that letting Adam Jones rot away at AAA is going to start costing the team games at some point, too. And that's not funny.
Is this the beginning of the Richie Sexson tear? He's 5 for his past 14 with three homers. If he comes around, this offense gets scary good.

Reflecting on our weekend with Junior

2007-06-26T22:16:00.000-07:00

First off, let me apologize for being so hit-and-miss with posts lately -- I really try to get at least one thing up each day, but when a blog is a one-man show, well, sometimes things like weddings, grading, the end of the school year, packing and moving get in the way of that man writing. Things should be a little clearer here the rest of the summer without having to do something quite so trivial as report to work.

But even as I watch this wild affair of a baseball game between the M's and the Red Sox, I'm reminded that I promised you some thoughts on the return of Junior.

I was on my way out to our fourth 1-year-old birthday party of the month of June on Sunday -- no, I don't know what was going on in September 2005 -- when my phone rang. My dad was on the other end.

"Are you watching the game?"

"I was, but I just left the house. I haven't turned the radio on yet. What's up? Did Junior hit another homer?"

And there was the rub. It wasn't so much that he had, indeed, hit his second homer of the game. It was more that as soon as my dad asked if I was watching the game, I just knew he was calling to tell me that Griffey had done something special yet again.

That's what it was like watching Junior all those years he was here in Seattle, and that's what I'll remember most about his time here. No matter what, you never wanted to leave your seat at a Mariners game because you never knew when Junior was going to do something special.

I remember sitting there as a kid with my bladder about to burst, waiting for that moment in the game when the M's were up to bat and Junior had no chance of coming to the plate so I could finally go to the bathroom. You didn't dare leave when the M's were on defense -- what if Griffey made one of those spectacular catches? No way was I going to miss that.

Leave a blowout early? Please.

And that's what this weekend was all about. It was to remember a time when the first bona fide superstar this town ever had captured our hearts. It was to remember when the Mariners could be exciting even when they were terrible, thanks to sheer magnitude of Junior's talent and charisma.

For just three days, all of that was back. We watched every at bat as if we might recapture just a little of that magic together. We cheered when he succeeded, a well-deserved response to the man who saved baseball in this city.

Much has been made of those cheers; those that objected to it because he plays for the other team are either short-sighted or ignorant, and I have patience for neither. Yes, this is a team in the throws of something resembling a pennant race, but no one is going to make me feel bad for finally getting a chance to properly honor a player who brought so much joy my life, whether he plays for the other team or not.

It wasn't about a win or a loss, especially on Friday night. I could care less that my team got blown out. All I could think about leading up to the game was what I felt like the day he was traded, watching his first news conference with Cincinnati, just hoping he'd say something to those of us in Seattle who stood by him for so long.

Then, I thought about what it was going to be like to finally get to replace that with a proper goodbye. It was everything I could have dreamed of, and more.

And that's what I'll remember now.

Would I love for him to come back, as he suggested he might? Sure I would. But I also know Junior to be a fickle, emotional guy who sometimes says things he doesn't mean. If my last memory is of him telling us how much he missed us, and of him waving to the crowd as he came off the field for the last time on Sunday, well, I'm perfectly OK with that.

Junior returns tonight -- thoughts later

2007-06-22T12:58:00.000-07:00

I wanted to do a full post on the significance of tonight, but it turns out today was a bit emotional saying goodbye to my students, whom I'm leaving behind as I move on to Wenatchee.

I'll be at the game tonight, then I'll be in a wedding on Saturday, so I probably won't have any more thoughts on anything until Sunday.

See you then.

I'm Roger Clemens, dammit!

2007-06-22T08:24:00.000-07:00

Roger Clemens 2057

If Roger Clemens is still alive in 2057, this is what it might look like. The ending is a bit lacking, but still pretty darn funny to kick off Ken Griffey Jr. day.

Mariners get back on winning track in improbable fashion

2007-06-21T11:21:00.000-07:00

Since I didn't get to watch the game last night -- I listened to most of it via radio while I was out driving around the greater South Sound region in search of new clothes -- I had this idea in my mind of checking out MLB.com's Gameday data to see if I could figure out how in the heck Jeff Weaver did what he did last night.

Then I got to school, checked in with U.S.S. Mariner and found that Dave Cameron already beat me to the punch.

Seriously, go read it. It's good. And while it might not give any indication that he can even come close to duplicating last night's occurrence, it does at least try to make sense out of how it happened. (Hint: Weaver's stuff was basically the same, he's still a junkballer, but different pitch selection might partly explain the unexplainable.)

Other things I noticed last night ...

While listening to the game on the radio last night, I remembered why it is that I love Dave Niehaus so very much, and why I want to punch in the mouth anyone who suggests he should hang it up because he can't keep up with the game. So what if he occasionally thinks an shallow fly ball is a home run, or if he confuses a name here and there? Niehaus is a master story teller, and that's what baseball is all about.

Last night, he and Rizzs were telling this story about the origin of "uncle charlie" as slang for a curveball. You probably had to be there, but it just cracked me up. It was Niehaus at his finest, and the reason why he's on the short list of people alive I'd love to just sit down and have dinner with. I'll miss him so much the day he decides to hang it up. I hope it's not soon, because the guy is priceless. He belongs in the Hall of Fame, and I hope they figure that out before he dies.
Kudos to Mike Hargrove for finally moving Richie Sexson down in the order. Let's hope he resists the urge to quickly move him back up after two consecutive games with a home run.
You know, after all the heat Adrian Beltre has taken the past two-plus years from all of us, finding out what life is like without him was not pleasant. I know this still doesn't justify his massive contract, but we all should just get over what he's getting paid. The guy is a great defender and a key component of this offense. I still wish he'd get on base more, and I still wish he'd hit for a little more power, but boy, that offense goes from being pretty good to being pretty mediocre when he's not in there.
One last thing about Weaver: I know a lot of fans still are rooting for him to fail so that the team will jettison him with a DFA. But it's in everyone's best interest that Weaver stay in the rotation if he can, and last night gives us hope that it might yet happen. Ryan Feierabend -- who, incidentally, is going to be taking Cha Seung Baek's turn in the rotation next time out, thanks to a combination of a favorable matchup with the Reds and Baek's suckitude last time out -- would be best served to play this year in AAA, and Horacio Ramirez would be best served by never seeing the major league roster again, ever. What does that mean? Weaver pitching well enough to keep heading to the hill every fifth day is what's best for the team, embarrassing Bavasi be darned.

By the way ... Cougs ranked No. 7

2007-06-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

In case you were wondering, the Washington State University men's basketball team is ranked No. 7 in the Andy Katz post-draft-declaration-pre-season rankings.

Strangely, the Spencer Hawes-less Huskies are nowhere to be found.

Actually, they are there ... you just have to look hard at the No. 25 Florida Gators.

The beauty of the Internet, in one post

2007-06-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of reasons I love being a Mariners fan. (Yes, you read that right.) One of the big ones is that while I have no empirical evidence to support this claim, I have to believe that we have to be the most information savvy bunch in the major leagues.

I love reading other blogs, especially U.S.S. Mariner and Geoff Baker's blog at The Seattle Times. (You can find the others I love on the right hand side.) I love reading them because I know a lot about sports, but I love to learn, and I always become a better-educated fan when I visit these sites. USSM's knowledge of baseball built as sabermetricians and Baker's knowledge of baseball and the Mariners built as a beat writer make for tons of good information.

The two had basically coexisted separately. Until recently, when their respective blogs crossed paths in a very public way.

It's why I love the Internet.

It started with this post by Baker, on the likelihood a team with an ERA higher than 4.50 (read: the Mariners) will make the playoffs.

I received a very interesting email today from a friend of this blog, Jack Lattemann, who has done an exhaustive study of whether teams with an earned run average of 4.50 or higher can even post winning records, let alone contend for a playoff spot. Jack has graciously allowed me to pass on his findings. They don't look good on the Mariners, who have a 4.84 team ERA despite a rock solid bullpen. He found that no team before 1969 had qualified for the playoffs. Not surprising, given the two-league format. There were a few more, post-1969, that made it. During the two-division format (four teams making the playoffs) from 1969-1993, the only playoff team with a 4.50 ERA or higher was the 1987 World Series champion Minnesota Twins, who finished 85-77 with a 4.63 ERA.

Dave Cameron over at U.S.S. Mariner -- after praising Baker for his coverage on the blog and the work he's done to interact with fans and the blogging community -- took exception to this kind of analysis, as did a number of commenters on Baker's blog. And with good reason.

Where to start with this paragraph - how about with the glaring, obvious problem, and one that I’ve been railing on for years here - Earned Run Average, by itself, is not any real indicator of pitching quality. It’s just not. I know it’s commonly accepted as the be-all, end-all pitching statistic, but the reliance on this inherently problematic stat has led to more bad analysis over the years than just about any other statistic out there. Using ERA to draw broad conclusions about pitching ability is a great way to be wrong on a large scale.

In reality, ERA kinda sorta measures the ability of the team’s run prevention skills when a specific pitcher is on the hill. ERA doesn’t attempt to separate responsibility for said run prevention between pitcher and defenders. It doesn’t attempt to take into account the context of the run scoring environment. And, just in case those weren’t big enough problems (they are), it introduces the biases of ballpark specific official scorers by excluding “unearned runs”, which are often classified as such due to arbitrary decisions on what constitutes an error.

Cameron goes on to explain that you have to consider run scoring environments of eras of the game before making any kind of cross-era analysis.

(P)icking a random ERA number that reflects “bad pitching” and applying it to any context is going to result in a list that means absolutely nothing. If you want to use ERA to evaluate a pitching staff, you’d be forced to come to the conclusion that the Washington Nationals currently have a better pitching staff than the Chicago White Sox. After all, they have a lower ERA. Of course, everyone understands that there’s a huge difference between pitching in RFK stadium against National League hitters and not facing the DH and facing American League hitters in New Comiskey park. We wouldn’t expect Mike Bacsik to post a 4.59 ERA if he was traded to the White Sox. No one would.

Baker's response on his blog?

Back to yesterday's post, I actually understated the infrequency with which teams have made the playoffs with an ERA of 4.50 or more. While the number of playoff teams with an ERA that high, since the advent of the wild-card, was 13 out of 96, the number of teams making the playoffs with an ERA that high was just 13 out of 354. One in 27. Is this all just a coincidence, as some suggest? Is there really no direct relation between ERA and making the playoffs? Well, let's just say that the more runs you allow, the more you have to score to win. The more wins, the easier to make the playoffs. Could we get scientifically more precise? Of course.

But I had no problem with Lattemann using an ERA of 4.50 and higher as a measuring stick. The average ERA in baseball last year was 4.44 and it's averaged out to roughly that since this decade began. So, anything 4.50 and worse would generally stand to be below average.

Some people objected to using ERA at all, while others say we should have adjusted it for park factors -- which looks at the difference between runs allowed at home versus the road and adjusts statistics accordingly. Well, park factors may have been needed if, say, we'd used ERA to gauge a Cy Young Award race. But not in this case, since we're merely looking at who made the playoffs. In other words, who won more games by scoring more runs than they allowed (or allowing fewer runs than they scored?) Park factors are irrelevant here. You score (and allow) the runs where the games are played and that alone determines who wins. At the end of a season, all MLB cares about in deciding a winner is who won the most games, not how easy or difficult it was to score runs in those games because of ballpark intangibles.

Finally, Baker relented in his next post.

First, let me deal with the issue of the posts from this morning and yesterday. You know, when enough people tell you you're wrong, you start to think that maybe they're on to something. So, I went back and had another look at those numbers using the suggested ERA+ method to account for park factors. The reasoning I listened to, from "Sammy" in the comments thread, Dave at the USS Mariner site, and others, has convinced me that comparing teams using a statistic that could adapt to changing year-to-year run conditions -- rather than a static number that couldn't change -- was the best way to go. ...

And the park factors do matter. I erred in saying they didn't. After all, you compete for the playoffs with other teams. The ability of those teams to score and prevent runs, based on the factors in the ballparks of the day, will have a bearing on it.

USSM's response? Big time kudos.

Geoff has been paid to write about baseball for a long time. He’s a very smart guy, and he puts a lot of work into what he does. And yet, when some fans challenge a point he made, he’s willing to listen, evaluate what they’re saying, and take another look at his stance. Truth is more important than pride, and Geoff proved that in spades.

Baker deserves a lot of credit for taking the time to dive into the issue. He’s already set the bar for Mariner beat-writers to follow, and now he’s just pushing it even higher.

Congratulations to the Seattle Times - you made a fantastic hire.

It's hard to imagine that there are very many cities where virtual conversations such as this one take place. And that, my friends, is why I consider myself fortunate to be a Mariners fan and why I love the Internet.

ESPN ombudmen hits the mark on 'tyranny of the storyline'

2007-06-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

Tennessee Titans cornerback Pacman Jones is going to be charged with two felonies.

How do I know this?

Because I clicked my way to ESPN.com, and it's the top news story.
Then I flipped on ESPN's "Around the Horn" as school dismissed, only to hear Woody Paige and Jay Mariotti arguing about whether Jones would play in the NFL again.
Then I watched Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon debate potential punishments on "Pardon The Interruption."
Then SportsCenter comes on. Cue the promo. "Pacman Jones faces two felony counts -- Is his NFL career over?"
After a brief update on the afternoon baseball results, the next two minutes of the show were dedicated to Jones, including the standard and expected overview of the story, then an opinion on Jones' playing status from John Clayton. Then we're told that later in SportsCenter we'll have more on Jones.
Twenty-three minutes later, Clayton is back on, repeating everything he already said about Jones' status as a player. We are told that we'll have even more on Jones later in SportsCenter.

This doesn't even mention all the coverage of the two-week-old Kobe Bryant "trade demand" story, which received only slightly less play on all of ESPN's shows, and immediately followed the Jones story each time.

It's this sort of overkill that has made ESPN virtually unwatchable at times. I tune into SportsCenter to hear the sports news of the day, not to hear 38 different (shouting) opinions on whatever the top story is. It's resulted in the amount of time I watch ESPN having been reduced dramatically over the years, practically down now to just the games the network broadcasts.

It's good to know I'm not the only one who longs for the days when highlights were the centerpiece of the show.

For all the things ESPN does that irritate me to no end, one of the things they do right is employ an ombudsman, currently Le Anne Schreiber. In her latest column, she attacks what she calls the "tyranny of the storyline," in which one supposedly compelling storyline seems to completely take over every arm of the network.

If I were to do a word frequency analysis on the messages I receive about ESPN's coverage, three words at the top of the list would be "Enough," "Stop" and "Way." As in enough Yankees/Red Sox, stop with Roger Clemens, and way too much Barry Bonds, Duke basketball/lacrosse, Brady Quinn, Dice-K and Michael Vick.

In part, these are complaints about the overkill that is an inevitable side effect of 24/7 programming, whether it is CNN and Anna Nicole Smith or ESPN and Clemens. On ESPN, if a story has legs, you will encounter it repeatedly on the daily 12 hours of SportsCenter and on each of the opinion shows that dominate the late afternoon. If you want to avoid redundancy on a given day, the only antidote is to limit your viewing.

The great thing about the ombudsman's role at ESPN is that it gives the network a chance to explain itself. Apparently, ESPN has research that suggests that you only tune in to watch the network occasionally throughout the day -- 49 total minutes, in fact, if you're an 18- to 34-year-old -- necessitating (in their eyes) the incessant overkill coverage of certain stories.

Such as the New York Yankees.

(A)ccording to Vince Doria, ESPN's senior vice president for news: "We think it's a compelling story. The most successful team in baseball, in the throes of a miserable slump, possibly on the verge of missing the playoffs for the first time in 12 years, determines to pay the greatest pitcher of this era a pro-rated $28 million to pitch roughly two-thirds of a season. And in the 22 days since they signed him, they have dropped from 5 1/2 to 13 1/2 games behind the Red Sox. And this is all happening in the heavily populated Northeast corridor, which includes a large number of viewers. People who are not interested in the story may want to characterize it as a last-place team and a minor-league game. I think most reasonable people would see greater news value in the story than that characterization would imply."

I don't disagree with all of this. But does it have to be so much? I know the point of any network is to make money, and I guess the best way to do that is to shoot for the vast majority that doesn't tune in all day long like lots of hardcore fans. But couldn't they do something as a nod to those of us who have an unquenchable thirst for sports, other than repeat the same stuff all day?

Aren't there more compelling sports stories to tell?

Of all the programming on ESPN, perhaps the show I enjoy the most is Outside the Lines. It's broadcast journalism at its finest -- or, at least as fine as sports journalism can get, given the fact that we're talking about sports -- tackling compelling issues with sound journalistic principles. No flash, no sound effects. Just good, solid investigative reporting.

Couldn't we see more of this on SportsCenter? Why does Outside the Lines need to be its own show? Couldn't it be part of the SportsCenter package?

Beyond that, why can we not get some of the other, featurey-type stories on the players themselves? There are so many great stories that are just waiting to be told; we shouldn't have to tune into the Olympics every two years on NBC to find out more -- and not in a "Stray-Rod" kind of way -- about the people we love to watch.

I'm constantly challenging my own journalism students to find better stories, to go below just the surface observations to find out what's really going on.

Shouldn't I expect the same out of a network giant such as ESPN?

Are M's losing because they're tired, or tired because they're losing?

2007-06-18T16:40:00.000-07:00

Much has been made of this stretch of games the M's have found themselves in, and what it's done to the team's play. I referenced it yesterday, and it's generating considerable discussion.

Geoff Baker at The Seattle Times tries to give some perspective on what it's like to travel from city to city to city, something most of us have no concept of.

Some of you think the travel stuff is overblown. Let me tell you, it is not. I've done this for a decade and I've never been more tired on the road than I've been this season. And I am in shape. Run three miles per day at a clip of seven minutes or less each. Lift weights. And I am tired. Why? Those added Cleveland stints really add up. That extra city has made the last two trips a four-city experience. Few ballclubs ever have to do that. Maybe once a year tops. Not on back-to-back trips. Not across multiple time zones and back again. It doesn't matter whether or not you are in a first class seat. I've been upgraded on a few of these flights and while it's great to have some food and a few inches more space, it doesn't change the stress and fatigue that even a one-hour flight places on your body.

However, he stops short of using it as a full excuse -- more like a semi-excuse:

The Mariners have gotten by all season long with starting pitching that befits a .500 team at best. Nothing better and nothing worse. Maybe a few games in either direction, but .500. They've scored a few less runs than they've allowed and that usually has .500 written all over it.

Lately, the offense had gone on a tear that no team in the history of baseball has been able to sustain over an entire season. The Mariners averaged about seven runs per game for a month. That's over 1,100 runs in a season. Again, check the history books. Can't be sustained.

So, the team just played 46 games in 48 days and the hitters got tired. Sexson as well. He's tired. Jose Guillen is more worn out than he's ever been in his career. Adrian Beltre is hurt. Jose Lopez's brother just died. Raul Ibanez looks like he's sleeping on his feet. Mentally and physically, these hitters are spent. Throw that into the mix with the usual starting pitching -- mostly adequate, but by no means contender-like -- and the losses start coming. Unless the hitters can pile up the runs, a team giving up five or more per game will usually lose as often, or more, than it wins.

Dave Cameron over at U.S.S. Mariner takes it one step further, completely debunking the travel quasi-excuse and simply stating the M's are not a very good team by comparing them to the Indians, who have endured a similar stretch.

Since the snowout series, the Mariners have played 63 games in 69 days. ... Since the snowout series, the Indians have played 65 games in 69 days. The Indians are 40-28, first place in the A.L. Central, having outscored their opponents by 46 runs on the year. They’ve played two more games since the end of the snowout series than the Mariners have in the same amount of days. I’m sure they’re a tired bunch, but unfortunately, I can’t find any quotes in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer to prove it. Maybe they were too tired to give interviews?

Or, alternately, perhaps they’ve overcome their exhaustion and continued to win baseball games because they’re a good team. A playoff team. A team with a well constructed roster able to provide organizational depth when the preseason rotation falls to pieces. ... Perhaps it’s not the schedule? Perhaps it’s the roster.

I think the truth probably resides more on Baker's side. Talent obviously has something to do with it, as the Mariners' considerable flaws are getting emphasized right now, thanks to all the games in a row on a pitching staff that already was thin. Throw in the fact that traveling from Seattle -- where EVERYTHING is far away -- is a lot different than traveling from Cleveland, and you've got the makings of a devastating losing streak.

Hawes makes it official

2007-06-18T12:39:00.001-07:00

As expected, Washington freshman Spencer Hawes has decided to stay in the NBA Draft.

From the official UW press release:

"After meeting with everyone, getting all the appropriate feedback and going through the entire evaluative process, I made a decision I believe is the best for my future and that is to remain eligible for the NBA Draft," said Hawes, who announced his intention to undergo the NBA Draft selection process in early April, attended the NBA pre-draft camp in Orlando, Fla. earlier this month and worked out for five different teams over the past 12 days. "The decision to further my career in the NBA at this point in time was difficult. Every day I had different feelings about it. But, at the end of the day, I have to be realistic and trust my instincts.

"The fact that our team struggled a bit last season made the decision not to return to Washington very difficult. Certainly, there are some things I would have liked to accomplish in college. But, I feel I made the best decision to my family and my future."

We'll add to this as the situation develops today. Hopefully he'll have some more insightful comments for actual media members.

Disastrous weekend leaves M's searching for answers

2007-06-17T16:54:00.000-07:00

After a start to the road trip that could not have been better, the M's finished up in the worst possible way by dropping five straight and leaving themselves in third place and 7 games behind the Angels, if they finish off the Dodgers, whom they lead 8-3 right now.

Some players have speculated that the team is tired after a daunting stretch of 33 games in 34 days, thanks to rainout makeups from early in the season. But that's not their biggest problem.

When the team got hot over the past few weeks, we knew two things for certain: 1) This team would not keep scoring 8-10 runs a game; 2) If the pitching staff kept pitching the way it was during the team's hot streak, that hot streak was going to end in hurry.

You see, the biggest issue in this losing streak wasn't the offense. Yes, the team only scored 14 runs over those five games. But in the last two, the team never had a chance thanks to the pitching staff, and the M's also watched as Brandon Morrow coughed up the team's first loss after leading after 8 innings. Combine that with a pair of very poor offensive performances, and you've got the makings of a losing streak.

Even great offensive teams go through stretches where they just don't score a ton of runs. If they are to be successful teams that win consistently, they need their pitching staffs to pick them up occasionally with a 1 or 2-run start. That hasn't happened for the Mariners, whose pitching staff hasn't given up less than three runs in a game since holding the Royals to one run all the way back on May 26.

That is not the recipe for consistent winning baseball.

We've been saying it for some time, but the cries became muted as the offense overcame its deficiencies: The starters have to do more. A lot more.

Felix has to figure out a way to go 7-plus innings on a semi-consistent basis. Jarrod Washburn has to pitch like he did earlier this year, although our worst fear -- that we were playing with house money when it came to 2.50 ERA Washburn -- might just be coming true. Miguel Batista has to not suck (for the love of God, don't be fooled by those people who point to his 7 wins and say that he's a guy who just figures out how to win) and Jeff Weaver needs to be out of the rotation. Cha Seung Baek was terrible yesterday, but c'mon -- you're going to get that every once in a while from a guy like him.

I'm optimistic about Felix, but not so much about Washburn, Batista and Weaver. And that's going to make for some roller coaster nights from here on out, and probably some roller coaster trips like the ones the M's just finished.

The good news is that after a day off tomorrow, the M's begin a 12-game homestand starting with six against the Pirates and Reds. I think some of the Mariners' recent offensive issues will work themselves out. The day of rest won't hurt, and Adrian Beltre should be returning to the lineup in a couple of days.

I think it's also going to benefit the team tremendously to return to American League rules. Much of this team's offensive effectiveness comes from having offensive threats up and down the lineup. But in an NL park with Beltre out, the Willie Bloomquist/pitcher black hole at the bottom of the order really presented some issues.

It's also time for the team to stop taking a very long, hard look at calling up Adam Jones from Tacoma and just do it.

There's no doubt he's ready offensively -- you can read about that here and here and here -- but I think the bigger benefit will be with Jones roaming left field. It's become pretty painful to watch Raul Ibanez play out there, and that was never more evident than Friday night when a pair of doubles eluded his reach -- two doubles that, if caught, would have ended innings and saved three runs from Felix's line.

Jones would have caught them both fairly easily.

It's time for Ibanez -- who still has value as a hitter (.295/.357/.455 in May and June) -- to move to the DH role. Obviously, Jose Vidro was not brought here and given an extension at the unconscionable amount of $7.5 million per year to sit on the bench and become a pinch hitter. But to keep a guy in the lineup just because you made a questionable move to bring him here in the first place when Jones represents such a clear upgrade is sheer stupidity.

Bring on the Pirates. We need them after that debacle.

Deadline looms for Hawes to declare decision

2007-06-17T14:15:00.000-07:00

Husky fans can almost quit shifting uncomfortably waiting for their favorite 7-footer to make his mind about the NBA draft. Spencer Hawes has until 2 p.m. tomorrow to make up his mind for good.

All indications have pointed to Hawes staying in the draft for some time, and that hasn't much changed, according to ESPN.com's Andy Katz:

There doesn't seem to be one NBA team that seriously believes Hawes will go back to Washington. But he has yet to give any real indication that he has made up his mind. He worked out in Minnesota, Chicago and Philadelphia and was scheduled to go to Sacramento, with Atlanta possibly on the docket after the Monday's deadline.

Boston caught a look at Hawes during the Sixers' workout this week. He is a lock for the lottery and likely wouldn't go below Philadelphia's pick at No. 12. If he can get that assurance and is comfortable with any of the previous stops, he'll likely stay in the draft.

If he returns to line up with Jon Brockman and Quincy Pondexter again, the Huskies should be a postseason team (they missed the NCAA and the NIT last season) and a thorn throughout the Pac-10. Hawes has a chance to move up in the draft next season but likely won't be a top-three pick. So he could move up a few spots by returning, but maybe not enough to make it worth his while.

I think that's asking the wrong question.

I don't think the question should be whether he would move up enough in next year's draft to make it financially worth his while; the question should be whether he'll improve enough next year to earn back the money he's forgoing over the remainder of the course of his career.

There's no doubt in my mind that Hawes would benefit developmentally from another year in school, and in my mind, that's usually enough to warrant coming back to school. Although I have no concrete evidence to back this up, it seems a player will usually develop at a faster rate playing 30 minutes a game at the college level than he will playing 15 minutes a game and sitting on the bench in the NBA.

My opinion hasn't changed. Hawes should come back to school.

Although, as a Coug fan, I won't exactly be sad when he doesn't.

A new definition of courage, courtesy J.J. Putz

2007-06-16T00:03:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, it's tough for fans to remember that our favorite players really are just people.

Well, if you need a reminder, check out this note on closer J.J. Putz.

How the man held it together for a save, I'll never know.

Are the Spurs a dynasty? That's not the question ...

2007-06-15T08:26:00.000-07:00

A lot is being made right now of the Spurs and the question of whether they are a dynasty. And while I think it's definitely a valid question, its dominance on the airwaves last night underscores a more pressing issue: The decline of interest in The Finals themselves.

I was interested in the NBA Finals last year, what with Dwyane Wade and Shaq teaming for an unlikely championship victory over the Dallas Mavericks. But that hasn't been the norm for me over the past decade or so.

I find it hard to pinpoint the reason I just haven't been able to get into The Finals. Maybe it's the fact that the Sonics haven't been relevant in the NBA in about that same amount of time. After all, I am a Seattlite, proven to be among the most provincial sports fans in the country -- if our teams aren't involved, we usually just don't care.

But I don't feel that way about the baseball playoffs, the NFL playoffs or the NCAA Tournament. Heck, I even follow the Stanley Cup playoffs, and we haven't had anything higher than junior hockey in Seattle in anything even close to my lifetime.

So what is it about the NBA that just doesn't get my sports fan juices going? I guess the big thing is that I just don't really care for the product.

Now, I'm not one of those self-righteous old people who points to the "lack of fundamentals" in the league and yearns for the "good old days" when Magic and Bird and the rest of the league "really knew how to play the game." To me, the bigger issue is the style of play, and how it absolutely kills the drama of the games.

Let me ask you this: Why were we all so entertained by the Warriors and their improbable victory over the Mavericks? Was it because of the sheer size of the upset?

Or was it maybe because the Warriors were doing something no one else in the league does -- and doing it successfully?

The NBA has become an incestuous league of copycats, and it has absolutely killed the game. Everybody runs basically the same kind of offense, they all run basically the same kind of defense. And they do it because it works.

When you watch an NBA game next year, watch how man times you see these three plays in a game: 1) The two-man isolation post up/kick out; 2) The high pick and roll; and 3) The one-man isolation dribble drive/kickout. Virtually every offensive play in the NBA is a variation on those three plays, because the results of those three plays get rewarded with either a foul or an open 3-point shot more often than any other.

It's the absence of that that makes other sports so exciting. It's Mike Holmgren figuring out a way to get his West Coast offense to beat the Steelers' 3-4 defense. It's the up-tempo style of Lorenzo Romar's Huskies trying to beat the slow-down style of Tony Bennett. It's the confrontation between a pitcher and a batter, trying to figure out how to beat each other.

With very few exceptions, that kind of creativity has been eliminated from the NBA. Don't believe me? George Karl failed to win a championship with the Sonics on the back of his trapping defense. The Warriors couldn't get past the second round with Don Nelson's style of play, and the Mavericks never made it to the Finals until they scrapped Nellie for Avery Johnson's copycat approach. The Suns haven't been able to get out of the conference finals for three years.

All had truly unique approaches of some aspect of the game. All have failed to win championships.

I can't say I really blame all of these organizations for going with what works. After all, if efficient offense and lockdown defense was good enough for the Spurs to win four championships with Tim Duncan and 35 other guys over nine years, then it's good enough for everyone else.

I blame the NBA for allowing it to get to this point. I blame the NBA for allowing its referees to become part of the story, year after year, dictating the outcome of games. I blame the NBA for not realizing that there's nothing less exciting than the final minute of a close game that takes 20 minutes to complete because of eight different time outs. I blame the NBA for allowing virtual literal muggings night after night that keep the best players from truly showcasing their talents.

For being such a visionary off the floor, David Stern has focused so much on image and marketing that he's ignored the very thing that truly pays the bills in his sport: The product.

Word was, he was just waiting for the next Bird or Magic or Michael to come along and pull the league out of its doldrums. Well, guess what -- he's here, he carried his team to the Finals, and it still didn't amount to a hill of beans in the ratings.

The NBA should take a cue from the NHL, which was willing to make radical changes to restore balance to its game. It eliminated old rules, such as two-line passes, designed to slow the game down. It implemented 4-on-4 overtime and shootouts to give fans exciting resolutions to its games. It cracked down on clutching and grabbing so that the smaller, more creative players could find a place in the league once again. It disciplined referees who refused to call penalties in the playoffs. And while it hasn't resulted in higher ratings yet, one can hardly deny the improved product on the ice.

The NBA has tried to do this before, what with eliminating illegal defense and such, but the reality is that teams have simply adapted the same mindset to a slightly different set of rules. The NBA is in need of a radical approach from someone with the vision to make it happen. Without it, the league will continue its slide into irrelevance.

Oh, and by the way, the Spurs are not a dynasty. Dynasties dominate their eras. The Spurs have yet to do that. End of discussion.

Where the heck have I been? Part II

2007-06-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Well, the busyness finally has begun to come to an end, and that's good for you, the reader.

Just to give you a little perspective on what has gone on in the past week, I interviewed for the journalism job at Wenatchee High School in Eastern Washington on Monday. So that sucked up a good amount of my time, both in preparation beforehand and in the travel afterward, which returned me home after midnight.

I was offered the job, and I've accepted, so I've been dealing with the transition since then. Never mind the fact that I was at the school until midnight on Tuesday with my newspaper kids, then at the school last night until 9 p.m. because of our journalism banquet.

So, needless to say, I just haven't had a lot of time to watch baseball or surf the Internet, my two main sources of inspiration when it comes to the blog.

That should change, starting tonight, as I've got an eye on the NBA Finals. And I'll have some thoughts on the Mariners as they try and rebound from dropping two out of three to the Cubs. Looked like that overworked bullpen finally caught up with the M's today. Hopefully it's not a portent of things to come.

Anyway, I look forward to getting back into the swing of things as the end of the year winds down at school. Thanks for sticking with me!

Where the heck have I been?

2007-06-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

Well, the short answer is, busy. The longer answer involves interviewing out of town for a journalism teaching position at an Eastern Washington high school, so that's kind of been consuming my time.

However, I did get text updates last night on the M's, and I do have some thoughts on the playoff "races" -- if you can call them that in June -- that not many people have considered yet. I'm going to work on getting a post on that up tonight, although newspaper deadline with my students beckons. I think I can squeeze it in, though.

See you then.

M's sweep Padres on the road to move to within 4.5 games

2007-06-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

Finally, the M's catch a break with the Angels, who lose to the Cardinals 9-6. Now just 4.5 games back after another gutty one-run win. How about Bloomquist stealing third there to set up the go-ahead run? Stellar.

I'll hopefully have some more thoughts on the game later tonight, but this is the one thought that already keeps sticking with me: I don't know how this team keeps doing it. The M's just keep figuring out ways to pull out wins, and that's as good an indication of a good ball club as any, in my book.

By the way, after watching him mow down the Padres again, is there any better closer in baseball right now than J.J. Putz? Jeff Sullivan over at Lookout Landing doesn't think so:

In save situations, opposing batters are hitting just .083/.154/.150 off of JJ Putz, with four walks and 18 strikeouts in 60 at bats. In one-run games, that batting line is .107/.167/.143, with two and ten in 28. In twelve plate appearances with two outs and runners in scoring position, Putz has yet to allow a baserunner. On zero days' rest, he's given up one hit in 5.2 shutout innings. I could keep listing off stat after stat, but instead I'm just going to say this: JJ Putz is the best closer in baseball. He's not pitching on a level all his own, but among the elites, he's currently the leader. With the game on the line, there's no one I'd rather have on the mound.

He made the Padres look silly in the 9th, and he seems to only be getting stronger as the year goes along. Seriously, he might already be the best closer in team history. I know we all have a soft spot in our hearts for Sasaki, but c'mon: The Kaz-man was heartburn city more often than not. Whenever Putz comes to the mound, you just know the game is over. He's that good -- and I'm not sure I can say that about any other guy who's ever held that role for the M's.

Anyway, more to come later. Enjoy the sweep.

Move Weaver to the bullpen already

2007-06-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

I was encouraged by Jeff Weaver's 4-inning, 2-run performance last night for one reason and one reason only.

He looks like he could be wicked out of the bullpen. That's pretty much it.

It's a good thing his "injury" is healed after his month-long stint on the disabled list, because all that work he did with the Mariners' trainers seems to have added exactly zero MPH to his fastball.

According to MLB.com's Gameday, he did touch 91 and 92 in the first inning -- although their readings tend to be a little faster than what you see on TV -- but he was basically 88-89 the rest of the way. Additionally, he essentially abandoned the fastball as the game wore on.

It's this last development that gives me hope that he can yet contribute to this team's success.

At this point, I have no hope that Weaver can be a starter on this team, as Ryan Feierabend looks like an infinitely more competent starter at this point, even though he's still got more developing to do. But that slider of Weaver's still can be murder on righties, and after watching how Jason Davis got butchered in his two innings, how much stronger would our bullpen be with Weaver back there to face righties, Feierabend in the rotation, and Davis back in AAA?

The Mariners haven't announced their plans for Weaver yet, since he left the game last night with a stiff back -- one can only hope that another trip to the DL is imminent -- but here's to hoping they stand up to the veteran this time and put him in a role where he actually can contribute to what this team, now six games over .500, is doing.

Felix goes against Chris Young today. This is a few days old, but Dave Cameron over at U.S.S. Mariner pointed out this interesting note after Hernandez's last start:

Hitters against Felix, pitches 1-25: .364/.396/.614, 7 XBH, 1.010 OPS
Hitters against Felix, pitches 26-50: .295/.380/.341, 2 XBH, .721 OPS
Hitters against Felix, pitches 51-75: .237/.310/.316, 3 XBH, .626 OPS
Hitters against Felix, pitches 76-100: .265/.324/.471, 4 XBH, .795 OPS

He attributes it to too many fastballs early, and it seems to jive with the organizational philosophy of "establishing the fastball." It'll be interesting to see what Felix's approach is today against the Padres, especially given San Diego's lack of success hitting Weaver's breaking stuff yesterday.

Oh, and by the way, despite all these wins by the M's, their playoff chances actually have decreased by about 5 percent in the past week. Every day that goes by that they don't make up ground, it becomes harder and harder to catch Anaheim.

Still think that series ending loss to the Angels wasn't that big of a deal?

Check out my brother's new blog; and other quick thoughts

2007-06-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

I don't have a lot of time to write today, so I want to pass along a few things.

Apparently, in some roundabout way, I had a hand in my brother entering blogdome. He's launched a new site called I Got The Broken Cookie, and though it only has one post so far, it explains just how I was able to influence my impressionable younger sibling to join the rest of us who spend far too much time in front of our computers, writing.

He's an excellent writer with fabulous voice, and while I doubt he'll write much about sports, if you're into politics and humanitarian interests, I Got The Broken Cookie will be a place you'll want to stop.

Some other quick thoughts, since I won't be able to write any more tonight:

I wonder if Lenny Wilkins' tenure as president of a franchise is the shortest in history. I also wonder if the guy is operating with a full deck anymore. From the way he botched the announcement of his imminent hiring as president -- I was listening to KJR when he sort of let it slip out of the bag, and it was rather feeble and pathetic -- to the way he botched the hiring of the GM, I'm glad the guy is no longer in charge of the franchise. Frank Hughes at The (Tacoma) News Tribune details all that went wrong here. The "put out to pasture" quote seems especially apt.
I love the hire of Sam Presti as GM for the Sonics, as I think he'll bring a much needed breath of fresh air and a fresh approach to the franchise. I can't see this guy stockpiling the roster with 7-foot projects the way Rick Sund did. I'm a little troubled, though, that we have an owner who once owned part of the Spurs, and a GM who was a VP with the Spurs ... can Spurs assistant coach P.J. Carlesimo be far behind? (Although I have to admit, I think Carlesimo got a bit of a raw deal the first time around, and might have learned something from his years in San Antonio.)
Here are some thoughts on the M's other first-day picks from Dave Cameron over at USS Mariner: "After the first round, the M’s selected five more players - college 3B Matt Mangini, HS outfielders Denny Almonte, Daniel Carroll, and Joe Dunigan, and college RHP Nolan Gallagher. Don’t read anything into the fact that they loaded up on toolsy young outfielders and any hidden meanings about their intentions regarding Ichiro - the decisions are completely disconnected from one another, and they were simply taking the players they thought were the best available at the time of the pick." Sounds like he really liked the draft, and since he really liked last year's draft, too, we can only hope that more sustained success lies ahead.
Speaking of Phillippe Aumont, here's an interesting look at him from Geoff Baker, a fellow Canadian from the same area as Aumont. It's a very unique perspective that you won't get anywhere else.
Is LeBron James going to get any help in this series? That's the only way the Cavs have a chance. Somebody else besides Drew Gooden is going to have to show up tomorrow night. I haven't seen that much standing around since noon hoops at the YMCA.

Speaking of Canadian baseball players ...

2007-06-07T15:15:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Jeff Sullivan at Lookout Landing for passing along this gem.

M's make HS pitcher Phillippe Aumont their No. 1 pick

2007-06-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

With a day off for the Mariners, the attention of the organization turns to the future, and the future is ...

Phillippe Aumont, an 18-year-old 6-foot-7 righty from Quebec.

I won't pretend that I know anything about the guy; I'll leave that to the experts who are, to say the least, pleased that the kid fell to the M's at No. 11 after widespread fear that the organization would draft for immediate help at the expense of adding a quality prospect to the farm system.

Aumont's draft report from minorleaguebaseball.com. A solid overview of what he brings to the table, including some video.
A nice little interview with Aumont via The Hardball Times; it's an extensive Q&A that reveals a lot of his personality, I think.
Dave Cameron's detailed take on Aumont over at U.S.S. Mariner. He compares Aumont's arsenal to Kevin Brown's.
A column out of Canada on Aumont's experience with the scouting process.

Like I said, I don't pretend to know a lot about him, but I know I like it when I read stuff like this:

Baseball Analysts: Do you think you have the ability to throw harder someday or are you comfortable with the level you're at right now?

Phillippe Aumont: I know I need to work on a lot of things and for sure it's one of my goals. Once in my life I would like to top 100 [mph]. I'm comfortable with where I am; hitters don't hit me.

Baseball Analysts: So it's not about throwing harder for you?

Phillippe Aumont: No. In the major leagues, not everybody can throw 96-97 [mph] and they still get guys out.

Um, an 18-year-old who already understands it's not about throwing harder? I like this guy already. Just don't expect to see him in the bigs for a few years.

Hope for keeping the Sonics ... at least through 2009-10

2007-06-07T08:54:00.000-07:00

The folks over at Save Our Sonics and Storm apparently have reviewed the KeyArena lease agreement between the Sonics and the city of Seattle and have come to this shocking conclusion: A signed lease actually is a binding agreement.

After careful review of the lease agreement between supersonics and the City of Seattle , there is a clear and unambiguous provision providing either party may specifically enforce the obligations of the other party.

PAGE 59 PARAGRAPH L OF THE LEASE STATES:

ENFORCEMENT OF THIS AGREEMENT: THE OBLIGATIONS OF PARTIES TO THIS AGREEMENT ARE UNIQUE IN NATURE; THIS AGREEMENT MAY BE SPECIFICALLY ENFORCED BY EITHER PARTY.

The release goes on to stipulate that it's up to the mayor's office to enforce the lease agreement.

While it's not ideal to have a ticked off owner for a tenant -- inevitably what would happen if the city chose to enforce the lease agreement -- what it could definitely do is buy the city/county/state some time to get their crap together and figure out a workable solution to keep the team longterm.

The city better think long and hard, though, about whether it wants to get in that kind of a pissing match with Clay Bennett. The man strikes me as the kind of guy just stubborn enough to slash payroll and put out a terrible product to sabotage attendance so nobody in Seattle makes any money off this team before running to the NBA and saying, "See, I told you I couldn't make any money in Seattle -- let me move the franchise." Then moves it to another city, resurrecting the franchise's value and making a tidy profit whenever he decides to sell it.

No matter how this press release appears, Bennett still holds all the leverage.

Can bullpen hold up enough to keep this 'special' feeling going?

2007-06-06T15:33:00.000-07:00

I visit a lot of sites that analyze the Mariners, and so many of them center around numbers. I even dabble in the numbers a bit -- though not to the degree those Baseball Prospectus guys will -- and I've learned to gain a healthy appreciation for them by reading books like "Baseball Between the Numbers."

But sometimes, numbers just don't do the trick when we're talking about a team and its performance.

It's about time we all admit it: There's a different feeling about this Mariners club, it's something that can't be quantified with numbers, and it's a feeling that's going to make this team a heck of a lot of fun to watch the rest of this season.

Even Ichiro's getting on board.

"There is some kind of atmosphere that this team has,'' Ichiro said through an interpreter after his team completed its second consecutive late-game comeback against the Orioles. "I'm not exactly able to put a finger on it. But we definitely have something going on.''

The thing that's got me believing more and more everyday in this team is that they seem to be doing it in different ways now. There's never been any doubt that this team could roll on a pitcher and score seven to 10 runs on any given night. But there were always far too many zero- to two- or three-run nights.

Tuesday was different in that it wasn't like the M's were hammering the ball all night and not finding holes -- they were genuinely struggling against yet another mediocre junk-ball pitcher. Yet they figured out a way to come back against the Orioles' flammable bullpen yet again.

"Today was a situation where our opponent gave us a chance to win,'' Ichiro said. "So, when something like that happens, with the team that we have this year, I felt like, 'We can capture this.' ''

This from the guy who essentially said after taking five of six from Tampa Bay and Kansas City that the team was winning, but not in ways it would be able to sustain against quality opponents.

The turning point in my mind was the series with the Angels. Yes, they lost two of three, but the way they fought through the series -- and displayed some genuine irritation at not winning the series -- showed me this team just has a different make-up than M's teams of the last three years.

Of course, those that cling to numbers will point to the production the team is getting throughout its lineup, including increased contributions from hot hitters Kenji Johjima, Yuniesky Betancourt and Jose Lopez.

But there's just an intangible quality with this team: It now believes it can win any game, and that simply can't be quantified with numbers. I don't see the defeatest attitude that permeated every Mariners team the last three years. I see a team that continues to scrap, and has been doing a much better job of getting into teams' bullpens as of late.

Of course, what's allowed them to scrap has been the unbelievable pitching out of the bullpen, made even more astounding by the fact that this team is at the end of 23 straight games without a day off. They're now 28-0 in games they lead after the seventh inning, which is unbelievable praise for a unit that had all kinds of question marks -- George Sherrill's poor spring, Brandon Morrow's youth, J.J. Putz's health -- heading into the season.

For all the crap Mike Hargrove got at the beginning of the year -- and believe me, a lot of it was deserved -- he's done a great job managing those arms to be able to get the games that are winnable during this stretch. Even letting John Huber and Chris Reitsma get the snot beat out of them today probably was a good decision with two games against the Orioles already in hand.

Of bigger concern at the moment is whether those relievers can keep it up. Not because I'm worried about them so much as I'm worried about the starting pitchers, most of whom seem allergic to the seventh inning.

Felix has not looked like himself since returning from injury. Jarrod Washburn just threw up his second consecutive poor start, and those of us who thought his early-season success is a mirage might unfortunately be looking right. Miguel Batista, Horacio Ramirez and Jeff Weaver were predicatbly bad, and with Weaver returning from "injury" and Batista having proven across his mediocre career to be virtually indestructable, one has to wonder if the bullpen is going to start feeling the effects of carrying this team.

Get more innings out of Felix, get Washburn back on track, get Weaver in the bullpen and Ryan Feierabend into the rotation, and we might be on to something big. Fail to do those things, and those late-inning comebacks might be a thing of the past as close games slip away -- as it did today.

Here's some advice: Watch a player PLAY to evaluate him!

2007-06-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

So, The Seattle Times is reporting this morning that Kevin Durant had a less-than-stellar workout at an NBA pre-draft camp in Orlando, Fla., this past week.

So bad, in fact that he ranked 78th out of the 80 prospects who worked out for scouts in terms of the "measurables" they took at the camp.

To which I humbly reply ...

WHO CARES? Have you seen the guy play?!?!

Seriously, after watching this video -- and remembering that the guy is 19 years old and just won every major college basketball player of the year award -- ask me whether I care if he can't bench press 185 pounds even once.

The headline on the story says "Durant far from finished product." Well, if that's the case, sign me up for about five championships between now and the end of his Sonics career.

Good morning!

2007-06-06T07:23:00.000-07:00

At some point today, I'll have a post up on your newly crowned Comeback Kids. Until then, check out Jeff Sullivan's great recap over at Lookout Landing.

See you later today.

Hasselbeck mum on outspoken sister-in-law

2007-06-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

Some of you might have caught Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O'Donnell's little verbal battle the other day on The View.

(Needless to say, I certainly hope you didn't catch it live. But I digress.)

Somebody out at Seahawks headquarters asked quarterback Matt Hasselbeck -- Elisabeth's brother-in-law by marriage to his brother, Tim -- what he thought of the whole dust up. And, like a good brother-in-law, he refused to comment on his family's dirty laundry, according to The News Tribune:

The Seahawks’ quarterback is generally quick with a retort, but not Monday. Asked about the on-air spat featuring sister-in-law Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie O’Donnell, he fell unusually silent.

“Strong show,” he deadpanned. “It’s been on for 10 years. I think they’re looking forward to many more years on the air.”

That would be no comment, I think.

And if you haven't seen it, here you go. It's about 10 minutes long, and you have to see the whole 10 minutes to really get a feel for it, but man -- it's kind of uncomfortable to watch.

If you're a man, you can add this to the list of reasons you are very glad you're not a woman.

Husky fans rejoice -- new book about James era now shipping

2007-06-04T15:48:00.000-07:00

Apparently, someone thought Don James and the University of Washington football program interesting enough topics to write a book about them.

Those of you who don't know me wouldn't know that I was a huge Husky fan back in the day, and remember the James era well -- I remember sitting up all night to see if they won the national championship in '91, and attended the 1993 Rose Bowl (the last of the three in a row).

However, I don't hold James in nearly as high of esteem as most Husky fans -- and it's not because I'm now a Coug through and through. Even as a teenager I considered him a quitter who bailed on his team precisely when it needed him most. Those violations happened on his watch, and whether the punishment was justified is irrelevant. He left his team high and dry, and the UW truly has never recovered.

That said, there's no denying the guy was a fabulous football coach, and the book should be an interesting read, if this interview with the author or this interview with the author are any indication.

Might make for a nice Father's Day gift if your dad's into that "wistful wishing for the glory of yesteryear" that so many Husky fans have going for themselves these days.

An all-time classic, brought to you by YouTube

2007-06-04T15:08:00.000-07:00

I don't know what precipitated this, but I know one thing: Lou Piniella's got nothing on this guy.

I especially love the rosin-bag-as-hand-grenade stunt. It's tough for managers to come up with new material for meltdowns, and that is an all-timer that might never be topped.

Why is it that everyone is worried the lottery is rigged and needs to be changed now?

2007-06-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

To complete the roundup, how about some thoughts on the Sonics?

So, apparently people still think the NBA lottery is rigged. And there's a lot of clamoring for the NBA to change its lottery.

It cracks me up that this conversation comes only after Portland and Seattle secure the top two picks in the draft. Had Boston or New York done what the Blazers or Sonics did, there would be no clamoring, only talk of how great it is that a great talent would be going to one of the NBA's great franchises. (Although talk of it being rigged might not go away.)

The funny thing is, as Henry Abbott of True Hoop notes, talk of rigging seems a little silly at first blush, what with the two superstars heading to what is apparently widely regarded as the end of the earth.

The NBA is a business, and if they were going to rig their league, you'd think they'd rig it in a way that would make them more money. And keeping the best players from one of the world's most popular teams, the Boston Celtics, would be a bad move. Sending those players away from the populous, wealthy, and timezone-advantaged Eastern seaboard would make little sense, unless you were going to send them to a major center like Los Angeles.

However, others aren't so sure. Team execs seem to think that NBA commish David Stern rigged the lottery to punish teams who were tanking at the end of the season to try and get one of those top two picks.

I think that's awesome.

Once upon a time , the NBA had a straight lottery to prevent this sort of tanking from happening at all. Now, with a weighted lottery, the temptation to try and play the odds is just too great. Whether Stern actually did rig it or didn't rig it is completely beside the point. The fact that execs in his own league actually believe that he might do something like that says more than anything. If that dissuades them from tanking next season, well, let perception and reality become as blurred as possible.

Former Seahawk Adams signs with Denver

2007-06-04T11:12:00.001-07:00

We're just going to go ahead and try and touch on every professional sports team in Seattle today. Next up: The Seahawks.

When the Cincinnati Bengals released DT Sam Adams a couple of weeks ago, my first thought was that he'd be a perfect fit for the Seahawks up front. Ignoring whatever personality issues might be at play -- and, believe me, I understand the bad feelings from his first stint in Seattle are nothing to simply dismiss -- from a purely football standpoint, he seemed to be precisely the kind of guy that could help the Seahawks.

He's big and physical, something the front four has really lacked the last two years with Marcus Tubbs in and out of the lineup thanks to chronic knee problems. In fact, the difference in the performance of the defense with and without Tubbs has been well documented.

Alas, it's not to be, as Adams signed today with the Broncos. The Seahawks didn't even contact him, as near as I can tell (which is from afar, obviously). With Tubbs coming off another knee surgery, it seemed that a guy of Adams' stature could have helped ease the burden on him. Adams is a shell of the player he once was, but with the way the Hawks rotate defensive linemen, I bet he could have given them a good team about 15-20 max effort plays a game.

This means one of two things to me: Either they dislike Adams that much, or they like fourth-round pick Brandon Mebane that much.

I sure hope it's the latter.

Billy Donovan wants out? Magic should let him -- at a price

2007-06-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

News out of Orlando, Fla., is that Billy Donovan wants out of the $27.5 million contract he signed with the Magic last week to return as head coach of the Florida Gators.

The way I see it, the Magic have very little choice in this matter. Yes, they could hold him to the contract he signed and force him to coach their team. But what good would that do? As an organization, you want complete commitment and complete buy-in from everyone, from ownership down to the last ticket-selling employee. Having a head coach that doesn't necessarily want to be there is likely to be a disaster for all involved.

That said, Donovan did sign a contract, and that can't be ignored, either. The Magic invested significant resources in bringing Donovan there, and with the draft less than a month away, beginning the search for another coach is, at best, an incredible inconvenience for the Magic.

The best solution for everyone involved is for the Magic to allow Donovan to return to Gainesville, but only after negotiating some sort of buyout of the contract that he already signed. After all, if I sign a contract to purchase a house, I can't exactly move out after two days and give back the loan and say, "You know, I just changed my mind."

Donovan should have to pay some kind of monetary amount to the Magic for backing out of the agreement. It's not about punishing Donovan; it's about the Magic getting something for the investment they made in hiring Donovan. Something in the $1 million range would seem to be adequate, and here's to betting that those boosters in Gatorville won't even hesitate to pony up the finances to get their beloved coach back on the sidelines.

Wild card talk not as crazy as it might sound

2007-06-04T09:10:00.001-07:00

Thanks for your patience this weekend while I was able to go out and enjoy a rare 80-plus-degree weekend here in the Seattle area. It was beautiful out, and I wasn't about to pass that up!

I also don't have much to say about beating the Rangers 3 out of 4 -- I mean, really, what else can you say about beating the crap out of the worst team in baseball? Hooray for bad baseball! I think Jeff Sullivan over at Lookout Landing said it best: This is what it must have been like to play the Mariners the last three years.

Meanwhile, Geoff Baker has picked up on the wild card angle this morning, and he's got some interesting thoughts about whether the M's are contenders. It was widely assumed early in the year that the West was the weakest of the American League divisions, with speculation that a record at or near .500 might be good enough to win its playoff berth.

It appears that couldn't be farther from the truth -- not with the Angels on pace at the moment for 100 wins. (By the way, our friends at coolstandings.com project the Angels for 93 wins and the M's for 84, if you're curious.)

All of this has led Baker to speculate that our early-season perceptions might not have been reality:

The other reason Seattle is so close in the wild-card, despite being only three games above .500, is the increased over-all "parity" or "mediocrity" or whatever you want to call it, in the AL. Look no further than the AL East to figure out why. The Boston Red Sox are the only team with a winning record in baseball's Cadillac division while everyone else stumbles around. You can blame a lack of pitching in the division for that one. Perhaps we truly are seeing a shift in the balance of power. I've believed for a while that the AL Central had become the best division in baseball. But it's also now possible that the AL East has become the worst division of the three in the AL. If that's the case -- and you can argue that the AL West's superior pitching does make it the better division of the two -- then teams previously dismissed outright as wild-card candidates have to be reconsidered. Hello, Mariners.

It often can be futile to look at wild card standings too early, but it's encouraging that the M's are all alone in second place. As Baker notes, it can be awfully difficult to jump over multiple teams in the standings, and as long as they can hang within a few game

The Tigers currently lead, and I'm not sure any of us think the M's are as good as Detroit, but I don't really see anyone else on that list that I would outright say is a better team than the M's. And that's encouraging in and of itself, if for nothing else than to give us something to look forward to this summer.

Oh, and if you're curious, here's the coolstandings.com graph on the M's playoff chances. Looking better than it was a week ago, as I believe the 21.2 percent is the highest it's been all season -- even higher than when they finished off their sweep of the Royals. (Get the coolstandings.com widget here.)

OK, one quick note before I go to bed

2007-06-03T22:34:00.000-07:00

You know, we all fixate so much on the AL West, but do you realize that the Mariners are in second place in the wild card standings, 2.5 games back?

Just some food for thought.

No post tonight, either ...

2007-06-03T22:21:00.001-07:00

I've been at my house for about four waking hours since Saturday morning, so I have been pretty well disconnected from the sporting world for a couple of days. I'll be getting back into the swing of things tomorrow.

See you then.

Blog shall return tomorrow ...

2007-06-02T21:50:00.000-07:00

Been away from the computer for the past 24 hours or so, barbecuing and hanging out in the sun and such. I'll try to have a post up tomorrow night -- here's to hoping the M's can close out 3 of 4, and I can't wait to watch LeBron James in the NBA Finals (even if they're going to get swept by the Spurs).

See you then.

Billy Donovan might actually succeed in Orlando; Other observations from the M's to LeBron to white GMs

2007-06-01T13:58:00.000-07:00

So, Billy Donovan wants to coach in the pros, huh?

The college hoops fan in me -- and it's a big one -- is disappointed to be losing Donovan to a job where the odds are severely stacked against him. But I can't really say I blame him -- $6 million is a heck of a lot of money to pass up, no matter if you're going to be making $3 million at your previous place of employment or not.

And, despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, I think there's actually an outside shot that this college coach could have some success in the NBA where so many others have failed.

I think most college coaches that get pro jobs fall into the self-fulfilling prophecy category -- they don't succeed in the NBA because they inherit terrible teams that have little talent. It's a league of superstars: If you've got one, you generally win; if you don't, you don't. The rule isn't hard and fast, but you try finding an NBA winner without a star. (You could maybe argue Utah, but Deron Williams sure looks like one to me after his team folded without him in the series-deciding game with the Spurs.)

So, let's look at the recent history of college coaches in the NBA:

Rick Pitino: Inherited a putrid 15-win Boston team, missed out on Tim Duncan in the lottery. Think Pitino might have been a better pro coach with Duncan on his team?
Lon Kruger: Inherited a putrid 28-win Atlanta team. (This just in: Without Kruger, the Hawks are still putrid -- only once since his final year of 2002 have they exceed the 33 wins he posted that year.)
John Calipari: Inherited a putrid 30-win New Jersey team. His "stars" were an injured Sam Cassell and noted headcase Stephon Marbury; he was fired just in time for the team to hire Rod Thorn, who drafted Richard Jefferson, Kenyon Martin and traded Marbury for Jason Kidd. In what I'm sure was all the coaching skill of his successor, Byron Scott, the team won 52 games in 2001-2002.
Mike Montgomery: Inherited a so-so 37-win Golden State team that hadn't had a winning record since 1994. Fired after two years, Don Nelson leads franchise to the playoffs in his first year -- but only with a healthy Baron Davis and after suckering Indiana into taking Mike Dunleavy and Troy Murphy for Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington, two key cogs in the Warriors' late-season success.

Donovan does have this going for him that those guys never had: This team just made the playoffs, and has a budding superstar. Granted, making the playoffs in the east -- and at 40-42 at that -- isn't the biggest accomplishment, and they were obliterated in the first round by Detroit. But with Dwight Howard as the centerpiece of the franchise, they're already heading in the right direction; Donovan will not be fighting against years of suckitude from the get-go, as virtually every other college-to-NBA coach has.

Additionally, I know that I'm overimplifying each of the four situations above, and that on some level each of them was in a bit above their heads in the NBA. Pitino's hard-driving nature grinds on players, while Montgomery's players never took him seriously. I'm not convinced that Donovan will be so over his head in Orlando. He's 42 years old, still young enough to relate to players (as was obvious from his rapport with his players in Florida) yet old enough to command some respect. He also was (briefly) an NBA player and (briefly) an NBA assistant. So he at least has some clue about the culture he's going to be entering.

If there's a guy to buck the trend of college coaches failing at the NBA level, I think Donovan might actually be it.

Other thoughts from the last 24 hours:

Didn't catch hardly any of the Mariners game last night, but I was pleased to see that this team did exactly what it should have done: Beat the tar out of a terrible team. Good to see the offense continue to roll against an awful, awful pitcher, and good to see Cha Seung Baek do enough to keep his team in a game. Disappointing that Hargrove had to gas the bullpen a little bit to make a 7-0 lead hold up, but J.J. Putz needed to pitch anyway. A sweep would be fantastic; anything less than winning two of the final three is a failure.
I also didn't watch the Cavs/Pistons game last night, but I did watch the highlights of LeBron James scoring 29 of his team's final 30 points here. This just might go down as one of the greatest playoff performances in the history of the NBA, but only if the Cavs can win the series. We'll see how much LeBron has left in the tank tomorrow night after that heroic effort. Guess he kinda does know what he's doing, doesn't he?
What's with NBA franchises just handing over the reigns to former players who have absolutely no previous track record of any kind with player personnel? Why do franchises constantly think these people will be able to manage franchises? Here's to betting that Steve Kerr, like former players Danny Ainge and Kevin McHale before him, will figure out a way to run a perfectly OK franchise into the ground.
And while we're at it: Is it just me, or are only white former players -- with the notable exception of Michael Jordan (who stunk at his job, too) -- the only people NBA franchises will hire for these jobs with no experience? With so many black coaches, it looks like the new color barrier in the NBA is to the front office. Just wondering why this is.

Jeff Weaver returning to the rotation is funny

2007-06-01T12:10:00.000-07:00

But, you ask, how can Jeff Weaver returning to the Mariners rotation possibly be funny?

This is how.

You owe it to yourself to follow that link. Do it. Now.

The NCAA finally gets something right

2007-06-01T08:43:00.000-07:00

I generally never have a tough time finding things about which to rip the NCAA, America's favorite beaureaucratic athletic institution that rarely can get out of its own way enough to figure out the right way to do things.

However, this time, when faced with a no-brainer decision, they actually -- gasp! -- made the no-brainer decision.

The Duke lacrosse players, recently national runners up just one year after false rape allegations led to the cancellation of a the better part of the 2006 season, have been granted an extra year of eligibility by the NCAA.

"These individuals were involved in an unusual circumstance that we believe warrants providing them the opportunity to complete their four years of competition," said Jennifer Strawley, NCAA director of student-athlete reinstatement and membership services.

Kudos to the NCAA for seeing the bigger picture. Yes, these players were involved in an ill-advised party that eventually led to the false charges being brought against three of their teammates. But what they were doing hardly was illegal -- unless you count the underage drinking that hardly is uncommon on college campuses -- and they certainly were not deserving of what happened to them.

However, not everyone is wise enough to see the bigger picture -- most notably a rival conference coach who probably would rather the Duke program go away.

"Everybody in the lacrosse world was embarrassed by what happened," [Virginia coach Dom Starsia] said. "But it almost feels now as if nobody's really paying for this thing. I would've been the first to say that Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty probably deserved another year. But I'm not sure that everybody involved here should be painted with the same broad brush and it just seems that's what the NCAA chose to do."

Who would you suggest pays for this, Starsia? The players? Even though the NCAA does it all the time, punishing players to get at the institution is never a good idea. Thousands of wild parties go on every weekend on college campuses; I'm not condoning them, but let's be real -- if every sports team that had a wild party was shut down, there would be no NCAA. I've been to them.

And I'm sure if we took a close look at your team, Starsia, I'm sure we wouldn't find 35 choir boys. Coaches should never stand on a sanctimonious soap box, lest someone find out what skeletons are in their closet.

The seniors on the Duke team would have to pursue post-graduate work in order to stay on for one more year; I'm sure many of them won't, having already said their emotional and psychological goodbyes to their college careers. But even if they don't, this will serve as one last symbolic apology. The NCAA too often punishes athletes who had absolutely nothing to do with the circumstances for which they're being punished.

Good on the NCAA for acting swiftly to make things right with players who deserved better.

Still bitter about last night? Check out USSM's 'Future Forty'

2007-05-31T14:05:00.000-07:00

So, let's say you don't agree with me, and you're not OK with the M's dropping two out of three to the Angels. You're despondent over the reality that the playoffs likely will not be coming to Seattle for the sixth consecutive year.

Well, nothing to cheer you up like looking to the future!

Dave Cameron over at U.S.S. Mariner has his "Future Forty" list in which he rates the Seattle Mariners' prospects. He just made his June updates today, and you can find his post that goes behind the numbers here.

Quick synopsis:

Wladimir Balentien is still raw. He's doing OK for AAA ball, but don't count on any meaningful major league production soon.
Adam Jones was ready for the bigs last week.
Jeff Clement is looking more and more like a bust.
Matt Tuiasosopo has cooled down in May, but it's no reason to panic. He's still progressing nicely.
Chris Tillman has gotten shelled since being promoted to the California League, something that can't possibly be good for his development.
Dave has a man-crush on 17-year-old shortstop Carlos Triunfel, who hit 326/.357/.424 in May at Class A ball.

Oh, and if you're curious, here's the reason for the man-crush:

"He showed some real power, driving 7 extra base hits, and actually drew walks in back to back games. His game is still ridiculously raw (he’s been picked off of first base four times in two months), but the bat is just so very special. He’s now only the second Mariner prospect ever to receive a 10 reward rating on the Future Forty. He’s still all projection at this point, but the ceiling is basically limitless. He’s got a real chance to be the next great Mariner hitter, and it’s been a long time since we had a prospect we could write that about."

So there you go. Hope you feel better now.

Finally, after three long years, a reason for hope

2007-05-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

Let's just get this out of the way now: Yes, last night's loss hurt, for reasons I've already documented extensively. The fact that it happened with Felix on the hill, giving up seven runs on three homers -- after TWICE being given a lead -- doesn't exactly ease that sting, either.

Yet, I find myself strangely content this morning.

Am I happy? No -- that's probably not the right word, because no fan in his right mind is ever (A) happy when his team loses, or (B) happy when his team's playoff chances take a major hit.

But considering all we've been through with this team since 2001, I'm finding it hard to be too upset with the events that transpired on this 10-game road trip, and especially with what happened in Anaheim.

In fact, I'm encouraged.

The thing that's made it so positively painful to watch the Mariners over the past three years hasn't necessarily been the losing. Sometimes that's just the natural cycle of events (although Pat Gillick and the M's obviously could have done a better job preparing the organization for life after 116), and fans can deal with that -- if they believe it's not going to last forever.

The problem is, it did seem like it was going to last forever.

Boneheaded trades (Freddy Garcia, Randy Winn, Rafael Soriano), boneheaded contracts (Scott Spiezio, Rich Aurilia), a dearth of major league-ready prospects ... there just wasn't a lot to look forward to after two consecutive 90-loss seasons and an 84-loss season that only was that good after beating the crud out of the National League and an unnaturally hot streak in September. We wondered if we'd ever come out of the post-116 funk. Everything seemed so hopeless.

Today, however, I have hope. And that's why I feel surprisingly OK.

The first thing every Mariners fan needs to do today is put away those thoughts of a division championship. I think we have found out pretty clearly where this team stands, and it's not among the elite. Seattle is a good team that clearly is no longer wallowing with the dregs of the American League -- the trip through Kansas City and Tampa Bay showed us that -- but it's also a team that, to borrow a phrase from Saturday Night Live, is not quite ready for prime time. We hoped against hope that maybe we were catching lightning in a bottle again, but that's simply not the case.

Is that reason to be upset? I sure don't think so. It's naturaly to feel a little disappointed, but the Angels, who already arguably have the best rotation in the American League, are a darn good team that's probably going to get better in July -- they've got the prospects in their farm system to pick up a big bat for the stretch run. The Mariners have no such pieces. They might be able to move someone like Wladimir Balentien for a middle-of-the-rotation guy, but that's not going to be enough to propel them past Los Angeles (or any of the teams in the wild card mix).

But that's OK with me. You see, with its offense and pitching staff the way it is, this team is going to be involved in a lot of games like the one last night. And you can either choose to be entertained by what's going to develop over the next few months, or maddened.

I'll choose to be entertained. Because I'm fairly certain even better times are ahead.

This team is learning to win; I don't see those meek Mariners anymore who walk off the field with their tails between their legs after yet another game slipped away. I see a team that's clearly irritated by losing -- and finally doing something about it. I mean, seriously: Did you think the M's even had a prayer last night, after falling behind 4-1? Last year, the answer would have been absolutely no way. A month ago, it would have been probably not. Now? This team is showing an uncanny ability to battle back -- the mark of a rapidly improving ball club.

Additionally, this team his a nice nucleus of talent that it's building around, starting with a potential ace at the top of the rotation. Does this mean I'm suddenly happy with GM Bill Bavasi and manager Mike Hargrove and the jobs that they've done? Um, no. Thanks to some inept moves by Bavasi, the rest of the rotation is still a mess, and I still have major issues with deciding to compose an offensive lineup almost exclusively with aggressive hitters, despite it's recent success.

Bavasi has made too many mistakes to cause me to trust that he's the guy to get them over the hump with some shrewd moves this offseason. When Bavasi is finally replaced (and it has to happen) it'll be kind of like Phil Jackson replacing Del Harris with the Lakers in 1999 -- thanks for getting us to this point, Del, but it's time to bring in the closer to win those championships. U.S.S. Mariner has been campaiging for Cleveland vice president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti for a while, but I don't even pretend to know who would be the best fit. I just know it's not Bavasi.

As for Hargrove, I'm not as down at this point on him as I was early in the season. I think, as Geoff Baker notes (all the way at the bottom), this recent stretch of consecutive games has forced Hargrove to be a more flexible manager and I think he's done a pretty nice job of it, with Richie Sexson sitting on the bench last night a prime example. I think he's now bought himself some time to show what he can do with an improving ball club. The question is, will he continue it as the season goes? I'll reserve judgement on his future until I see whether this recent trend of success using his bench, playing matchups, etc. continues.

Because of all this, I'm excited to see where this season goes. If the Mariners somehow figure out a way to get back into the AL West race -- unlikely, as you see from the graph above (thanks again, coolstandings.com, for permission to use your graphic) -- that'll be gravy. In the meantime, I'll be perfectly OK heading to Safeco Field this summer for some beautiful nights knowing that my team has a chance to win on any given night.

Because how long has it been since we've been able to say that?

In case you missed it ...

2007-05-30T21:27:00.000-07:00

... Kobe Bryant asked to be traded from the LA Lakers. Yes, the salaries work out to trade Ray Allen for Kobe straight up. No, it's never going to happen, because Kobe has a full no-trade clause, and if he is unhappy in LA, no way does he want to come here. Plus, he has a $13 million escalator clause in his contract, to be paid by the team that acquires him. Think Clay Bennett wants to pony up that kind of money?

... Jeff Weaver is returning to the M's rotation next week. I am not making this up. (You'll have to scroll down a little to find it. You'll also find a nice little shout out by Baker for HWTN -- pretty cool!)

... The NCAA actually did something right, granting the Duke lacrosse players an extra year of eligibility. I'll have more thoughts on that in the morning.

Until then, get your rally caps on -- M's trail by two in the top of the eighth. UPDATE: M's lose, 8-6. Disappointing end to the ninth -- really, is it that tough to lay off a breaking ball that bounces 12 inches in front of the plate? -- but I actually feel pretty good about the M's right now. I'll explain why in a full post in the morning.

M's now face "must-win game" No. 26 this season

2007-05-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

OK, so maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration.

But part of what's been fun about watching this team this season -- and trust me, I wasn't so sure I'd ever consider watching the Mariners "fun" this season -- is that every game seems so big. It seems like they're always on the verge of either becoming a serious threat in the AL West or becoming the also-ran we've grown so accustomed to over the past three years.

Accordingly, the M's face yet another one of these crossroads tonight: Win, and you're 3 1/2 games back; lose, and you're 5 1/2 games back. It's only two games, but two games is a huge difference.

Think of it this way. Let's say the M's take advantage of the upcoming soft spot in the schedule that features Texas, Baltimore, the Cubs, Houston, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati (with a series against San Diego and another singleton against Cleveland mixed in) and play .609 ball over those 23 games to go 14-9 before Boston comes to town on June 25. I think that's a reasonable proposition.

Under a 3 1/2-game deficit scenario, Los Angeles would have to go 10-12 over that same span for the M's to tie the Angels for first. If they're 5 1/2 back? The Angels have to go 8-14. Again, that's just to manage a tie. Don't forget, the Angels have played .600 ball so far this season -- including winning 15 of their past 20 -- and also play such juggernauts as Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Houston and Pittsburgh over those 22 games. That's why sometimes teams make up only one game in a whole month.

Some people thought I was overreacting when I said the M's really needed to sweep this series, but fans often don't recognize just how hard it is to make up games on a team. They see a 4- to 6-game deficit and think, "That's totally doable." But at just 4 1/2 back today, the M's chances of making the playoffs stand at just 16.5 percent -- or, roughly, a 6-to-1 longshot, pretty much what it's been all year. (Thanks, coolstandings.com, for the graphs to the left.) Conversely, check out the Angels' playoff chances with "just" a 4 1/2-game lead, right below that.

I don't know how far those percentages will swing with a win or a loss tonight, but my best guess is probably five percent in either direction for the M's -- a significant amount, given the difference is 10-to-1 or 5-to-1. (UPDATE: It actually only took a 3 percent hit after Wednesday's loss -- roughly a 7-to-1 shot to make the playoffs now.)

Do I like the Mariners' chances tonight? Of course I do -- with Felix on the hill, I like their chances against anyone. I especially like the idea of a pitching confrontation with Vlad Guerrero that will somewhat resemble a fair fight.

I didn't much like a lot of what I saw out of the offense last night, however. The Mariners' hitters' lack of patience is well documented, and while it appeared they had a solid approach in the first inning, that approach was quickly abandoned the second time through the order as the hitters pressed to make something happen. Having a plan and sticking to it is the mark of a excellent offensive baseball team, and that will be necessary again tonight against Jered Weaver.

Good Weaver hasn't been nearly as spectacular as he was when he burst onto the scene last year, as injuries have again thrown a bump into his season. While his strikeout rate is higher than it was last year, his strikeouts to walks is way down. He's also giving up a lot more hits than last year, many of them the line drive variety. If the M's go up to bat with a plan to be patient -- and actually stick to the plan -- Weaver's stats tell us they'll get some walks and likely get a pitch they can drive.

It should be fun to watch. I was glued to the TV last night, even as it became apparent the Mariners had no answer for Santana and weren't likely to have one for Scot Shields or Frankie Rodriguez, either. And that's as telling as anything: For the first time in three years, I'm actually having fun as a Mariners fan.

Other observations from last night's game:

I'm not going to say last night was a game the M's should have won, but it's a game they certainly could have won. But rather than get too wrapped up in what could have been -- or too upset -- I'll say this: Last night's game struck me as the kind of game that happens to a baseball team over the course of a 162-game season, the kind of game where you just get exceedingly unlucky and it's the difference between scoring one run and four or five runs.

Think about it -- Johjima's double play in the first inning that ricochets off the pitcher's mound right to the second baseman; Quinlan's diving stab of Guillen's rocket down the left field line; Ichiro losing a flyball in the twilight sky; numerous other hard hit balls being hit right at defenders. It's just unfortunate that it came in such an important game against the division leaders.
Loved what I saw out of Ryan Feierabend. He was one Ichiro misplay, one mistake pitch -- what in the world were he and Johjima thinking throwing a third consecutive fastball to a dead-red fastball hitter? -- and one boneheaded decision by Adrian Beltre (should have thrown to the plate in the 5th) from giving up just one run last night. He clearly is not a finished product, but that change-up is a major league-quality pitch right now.

Dave Cameron over at U.S.S. Mariner said he reminds him of Jarrod Washburn, but he actually reminds me a little of a poor man's Cole Hamels with that change-up. He needs to locate that fastball better to be consistently effective in the bigs, and that curve could be a heck of a lot better if he'd get a little more downward action on it, but he pretty clearly represents an immediate upgrade over Jeff Weaver and Horacio Ramirez.

If the M's are comfortable with him working on that fastball at the major league level, he should stay in the rotation. HoRam's $2.5 million salary isn't prohibitive, and he does have options left. Mike Hargrove was non-comittal after the game, and Times writer Geoff Baker speculates it hinges on convincing Weaver to make a couple of rehab starts at AAA.
After watching Raul Ibanez's debacle of a first inning in left field -- in which he made a comically pathetic slide as an imminently catchable dying line drive fell harmlessly in front of him, then he made another comically pathetic throw to home plate -- and subsequently watching Jose Guillen hold Willits to a single in the third on that ball down the right field line, someone please explain to me why Jason Ellison always comes in to replace GUILLEN in the ninth inning?

And while we're at it, why are we not seriously considering adding Adam Jones to this roster, despite the fact that Jones is right handed? I have to think that any damage exploited by lefty-righty matchups against Jones -- who is hitting .304 at AAA and hit two more home runs last night to give him nine on the season -- would be overcome by the runs he saves in the outfield.

Weaver is ruining things even when he can't go near a field

2007-05-29T19:15:00.000-07:00

I believe this is what Homer Simpson calls "harshing a buzz":

"Got to hand it to Jeff Weaver. He's the first to admit how bad he's been. But he's not looking for any rehabilitation starts in the minors. He threw 70 pitches in a simulated game today, no one in the bleachers got hit by any line drives and the picher later declared that he's ready to take on another starting assignment. Weaver is going to be an issue for this team in coming weeks. He's being paid $8.3 million to pitch here and right now, there is no room for him in the rotation -- assuming Horacio Ramirez isn't seriously hurt."

Seriously -- with all the good vibes surrounding this team right now, do we really have to contemplate Jeff Weaver's potential return to the rotation?

For what it's worth, Baker says Mike Hargrove wants Weaver to make a couple of rehab starts in the minors, ostensibly to buy himself some time to sort out the rotation. My guess is that Hargrove and the organization win out on this one.

Just watched Kenji Johjima hit into a bases-loaded, inning-ending DP. It hurts, but I don't think it'll be the last opportunity the M's have to score runs tonight.

I'll be watching Ryan Feierabend closely tonight. Might be a little much to hope for 6 innings out of the lad, but that's what I'm shooting for. I think he's got it in him. Just struck out the first guy on a pretty nice change-up. We'll see if he gets away with being off the plate all night. My guess is no -- he's going to have to come in a time or two.

Why sometimes it's not all about the money

2007-05-29T13:12:00.001-07:00

The debate over whether it's worth it to keep the Sonics so often centers around the economic benefit a professional sports franchise provides to a community -- something that pretty much has been proven to be negligible.

Seth Kolloen over at Enjoy the Enjoyment eloquently shows us that's not the point.

"Even if the Sonics are a drain on the economy, that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep them.

"Economic benefit analyses can't show everything. ... It's an intangible quality-of-life thing -- like playgrounds and opera houses and dog parks. What would be more 'economically beneficial' -- selling Magnuson Park to a developer and turning it into a giant corporate campus, or keeping it as a place to hold surplus library book sales and roller derbies?

"And what's a more compelling argument? Whether you'll be taking your kid to watch Kevin Durant play for the next 15 years or not, or whether we'll have a 4.2% (or whatever) increase in hotel revenue or not? Man, I'm asking lots of rhetorical questions here, but the point is that the debate about the Sonics' arena shouldn't be about economics alone."

Here, here. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Getting a read on Feierabend

2007-05-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

Mariners try to go 2-for-2 tonight against the Angels by sending rookie lefty Ryan Feierabend to the mound for his 2007 debut. If you're not familiar with Feierabend (whose name I consistently struggle to spell correctly) you're in luck: I've done your homework for you.

Complete prospect breakdown from Prospect Insider. They have him rated as the No. 5 prospect in the M's system. A must read if you want to know what you're going to be watching tonight.
A nice little writeup from last year by Jeff Sullivan over at Lookout Landing. He says today that his opinion of him hasn't changed.
Feierabend's AAA Tacoma stats, and stats from previous years, including 2006 call-up with the M's.

M's begin set with Angels in best possible fashion with 12-5 win

2007-05-28T21:57:00.000-07:00

Wow. That's about all I can say right now.

I actually caught very little of the game, but in perusing the boxscore, things hardly could have gone better tonight. There were the obvious things, such as the huge night by Adrian Beltre -- where has THAT been the past two-and-a-half years? -- but given the importance of sweeping this series, it's a subtler thing that could make the difference over the next two games.

The offensive explosion allowed Hargrove to rest his bullpen, even after yet another shaky outing by Miguel Batista. Although Batista could only get one out into the 6th inning, John Huber and Jason Davis did a fantastic job managing what was a marginal lead before it became a big lead. That means prime relievers Brandon Morrow, George Sherrill and J.J. Putz all will be rested and ready should the M's need some help in a tight game tomorrow -- a strong possibility given the rookie heading to the mound.

After all, with Felix going on Wednesday, tomorrow could prove to be the pivotal game, and the M's are now in prime position to capitalize, something not to be underestimated when in the middle of so many games with no days off.

One down, two to go. Thing could get real interesting in a hurry behind an offense that -- right now -- is one of the best in the majors.

Out for the night

2007-05-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

I'm off to do a little Memorial Day barbecuing. I hope to keep relatively decent tabs on the M's so I'll have something insightful to say later tonight or tomorrow. Unless you think I rarely have something insightful to say, and in that case ... why are you here in the first place?

On a roll, M's offense will be key to chances against Angles

2007-05-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

First off, sorry about no post yesterday -- I was off working on a project that I hope to tell you more about in the next couple of days. Now, onto our regularly scheduled programming ...

In a post on Friday, I cautioned against getting too wrapped up in a 5-1 road trip against Tampa Bay and Kansas City. And I still believe that whipping up on the two worst teams in the American League is no major accomplishment.

That said, the Mariners now have an opportunity -- for the first time in three years -- to make themselves relevant again.

They head into their Personal Hell for the next three days with what probably will be their last chance to truly become a factor in the AL West this season.

Don't believe me, you who think a 5- or 6-game deficit in June isn't that big of a deal?

Following the M's loss to the Indians to kick off this road trip, they were 5 games back of the Angels. After winning 5 of 6 against the Devil Rays and Royals, Seattle now is ... 4.5 games back.

Win 5 of 6, pick up 1/2 game.

But that's the way it goes in baseball. That's why the loss to the Devil Rays at the end of that series proves so costly -- 3.5 games is so much different than 4.5, because you only have so many opportunities to make up games on teams that are playing .550-.600 baseball. It's darn hard to make up ground. Simple series wins just won't do the trick.

And a series win won't do the trick here, either. While winning two of three will seem like a huge victory -- especially when you've lost 5 of 6 to the Angels this year -- it'll only get you one game in the standings.

No. If the Mariners are truly serious about being relevant, nothing less than a sweep will do.

It's obviously a tall order, especially when you consider they'll be facing Bartolo Colon, Ervin Santana and Jered Weaver, while conversely sending Miguel Batista, rookie Ryan Feierabend (probably) and Felix Hernandez to the mound. Here's how those Angels starters have fared against the M's:

Colon: Two starts in 2007, 2-0, 2.57 ERA.
Santana: One start in 2007, 1-0, 1.29 ERA.
Weaver: No starts in 2007, but 2-1 with 2.89 ERA in three starts last year.

Like I said, a tall order. But if you want to run with the best, you've got to beat the best, and if that's going to happen, the offense has to show up over these next three days. It's great to score tons of runs against some of the worst pitching in the majors, but everyone does that. They've got to score some runs against the best pitching staff in the division -- something they've absolutely failed to do this year. Beating the crud out of Gil Meche, who has been a real effective pitcher this year (much to the dismay of Mariners fans), might be an indication the offense is ready to take that next step. We'll see.

So, while it's great to beat up on the weak sisters of the league, at some point you have to prove that you belong. Sweep this series, and you're just 1.5 back.

How good can this team be this year? We're about to find out.

Sweep the Angels, and I'll believe anything's possible.

Around the 'Net: Beat writer takes M's management to task

2007-05-27T19:27:00.001-07:00

Seattle Times M's beat writer Geoff Baker continues to show why he was a great hire by the paper after Bob Sherwin retired last year. The guy just gets how a blog can enhance his coverage of the team, and his is the best blog to come Seattle fans' way since Mike Sando's Seahawks Insider.

But where Sando mostly sticks to straight reporting with solid analysis (and with good reason), Baker often will veer into commentary -- a welcome stance in the day-to-day duldrums of the marathon of a 162-game season.

Yesterday, he took the M's management to task for not just putting Cha Seung Baek in the rotation to begin the year, analysis I think was spot on.

Baker doesn't claim to have known that Baek would be so effective, and neither do I. But he says that those who get paid to see these things coming should have, and that's as much of an indictment on GM Bill Bavasi and the M's front office than anything else: They just have been absolutely abysmal at evaluating talent and the relative value of said talent.

"Hard to believe the Mariners did not want [Baek] in their starting rotation to begin the year," Baker writes. "I mean, that 4-1 record last fall, did anybody see it? Baek had fifth starter material written all over him. I can understand the temptation to throw $8.3 million at Jeff Weaver. Theoretically, he could have been an improvement had he pitched like he did for St. Louis in the post season.

"Could have, but didn't. So, the team is out $8 million and finally has the right guy in the rotation. Should the M's be criticized for this? Absolutely. They underestimated Baek's talent and overestimated Weaver's. And cost their owner big bucks, not to mention all those lost games.

"Sure, it's hindsight. But plenty of people in that front office are paid top dollar to make accurate assessments. A Mariners team with three rotation vacancies could have saved itself plenty of headaches by filling one of those spots with a no-brainer internal move. That way, perhaps, the team could have been a little more discriminating with how it went about plugging the remaining two openings. Instead, they've got two underperformers on the DL and Miguel Batista."

Ouch. But right on.

Here are some other interesting things I ran across while surfing the 'Net on this lazy Sunday afternoon:

Caron Butler is a stud. Not that I think athletes should do stuff like this all the time -- they have lives, just like we do -- but how much better of a place would our world be if more athletes realized how they can make someone's day with the simplest of gestures? How can you not read this and not think Butler is a great guy?
A little Ichiro note to make you laugh, in case you missed it, courtesy M's Insider Larry LaRue.
The Cougars continue to make inroads in basketball recruiting, showing they might not just be a flash in the pan under coach Tony Bennett. Getting Michael Harthun isn't exactly like landing Spencer Hawes or Quincy Pondexter, but it's a far cry from landing B-listers like Nick Graham and Justin Lyman ...

In case you missed it ...

2007-05-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

... Rashard Lewis officially opted out of the final two years of his contract with the Sonics, a move expected by everyone. He becomes a free agent, and the Sonics say they want to re-sign him despite the fact that he and Durant essentially play the same position. (I agree; I'll talk a little more in the coming days about how these two might fit together.)

... the Mariners whupped on the Royals tonight, 10-2 -- including 7 satisfying runs against Gil Meche. The city has now exhaled, knowing that King Felix left the game with just a stiff back. No reason to believe he'll miss any time.

... Ken Griffey Jr. hit homer No. 574, as he continues to march toward his return to Safeco Field on June 22. I'll be there, by the way.

Upon further consideration, M's making right move with Mateo

2007-05-25T14:18:00.000-07:00

Mariners' pitcher Julio Mateo has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons this year -- blowing games and allegedly assaulting his wife -- so more than a few eyebrows raised when the M's decided on Wednesday to activate Mateo from the AAA inactive list and allow him to join the Rainiers.

I'll admit: My first reaction when the news of the alleged assault came out was to dump him -- and while we're being honest, it probably had something to do with the fact that he had been a terrible pitcher this year. My second reaction was similar when I found out the Seattle Police Department had been called to his house one week earlier, and that had nothing to do with his ineffectiveness on the mound.

And it was my third reaction when I heard he was activated only after his domestic violence counselor suggested that a return to the workplace might be "beneficial" for Mateo. As if playing baseball were somehow good for him, leading to my next thought: "I wonder what kind of 'beneficial' treatment Mateo's wife has gotten lately ..."

But John McGrath wrote a column in The (Tacoma) News Tribune this morning that got me thinking. His piece doesn't necessarily laud the decision, but it certainly doesn't criticize it, either.

Once I got past my initial righteous indignation -- after all, we always want a head to roll, especially when it's a guy who makes a million bucks to throw a ball while the rest of us slog through our $40,000 a year jobs -- I really started to try and think of Mateo as a person. No, he doesn't have a constiutional right to play professional sports, but the ultimate goal should not be to punish him -- it should be to help him not continue to be a wife beater.

Does it not make sense, then, that the organization that knows him best and can care for him and help him rehabilitate best should try to do that?

It's not like this guy is getting a free pass. Anyone who's spent any amount of time around minor league baseball knows that even AAA is a far cry from the majors. And it's not like there's anything really in this for the organization; there are a dozen guys just like Mateo out there to be had for a minimal price.

No, the benefit here is the opportunity to forgive -- and potentially change the course of a family. Mateo's got two kids with his wife, and also cares for the five children of his brother, who died in a car accident last year. The impact stretches beyond Mateo.

Ultimately, this might not change anything. Mateo, who promises to make the most of his second chance, might end up right back where he was three weeks ago. If this doesn't work, and he ends up back in a police booking room, they can always cut him then.

But doesn't it make sense to at least try?

This is why the Mariners will not contend for ANYTHING

2007-05-25T14:14:00.000-07:00

The last three years, none of us have expected anything from this team. They stunk, and we all knew it. And I think we all thought they would stink again this year, too -- only, they happen to play in the worst division in baseball and have improved their talent level just enough to tantalize us.

Thursday's 13-12 loss to the Devil Rays is the perfect example of why this should be mantra for the next four-plus months, Mariners fans:

Enjoy baseball. Watch the Mariners.

Just be smart and don't get sucked in.

The reality is that teams that expect to contend don't do what the Mariners did yesterday in Tampa Bay. Everything was laid out for them to complete a sweep and make a move. The Rays are terrible and they were sending a terrible pitcher to the mound. The Angels were on the way to losing two of three to the Tigers, giving the Mariners a golden opportunity to make up two games in two days.

And they crapped all over themselves. In spectacular fashion.

It's not so much that they lost; it's the way they lost. Contending teams don't go out with a chance to sweep the worst team in the American League and allow 10 runs in the first three innings -- injury to starting pitcher (who allowed three runs in the first inning, incidentally) or not. Contending teams do not get guys thrown out at the plate twice in the same game -- once with no outs and down by six runs. Contending teams do not watch their No. 3 hitter go 4-for-5 one night then 0-for-6 with 6 LOB the next.

Contending teams rip the hearts out of weaker opponents. Yes, the Mariners battled yesterday, but contending teams never get in that kind of a hole in the first place. They take a sweep when golden opportunities to do so are presented to them.

They do not miss out on golden opportunities to make up ground on the team they're trying to catch.

This is not to say that the season is completely lost. Ostensibly, the M's are going to be a very entertaining team to watch this summer as some of the hitters who normally heat up with the weather start to get hot. With Felix, Washburn and Baek pitching the next three games, they might even roll into Kansas City and sweep the Royals to make this a 5-1 trip heading into Los Angeles on Monday.

But 4-2 is a lot more likely, and they'll be needing a sweep of the Angels to make up any kind of serious ground on the Angels, who, by the way, they've lost 5 of 6 to. Series wins feel good, but going 2-1 series after series only works if you mix in some sweeps along the way as the 2001 M's did on their way to 116. The 2007 Mariners don't have one yet. (At least, not the three-or-more-game variety.)

No, to make some real noise, teams have to rip off five- or six-game winning streaks. And not just one. The reality is that this team doesn't have that in them, not with the way the pitching staff is composed. Horacio Ramirez and Jeff Weaver have been well-documented disasters, it's unreasonable to expect Baek to do much more than he's already done, and there's not a lot of help down on the farm. The M's also have practically no commodities to try and pick up some major-league ready pitching help in a trade.

My advice? Just relax and enjoy each game for what it's worth and don't allow yourself to get wrapped up in talk of the playoffs.

Because it's crazy talk.

Oh, and one more thing.

HAPPY FELIX DAY!

Going to the Seahawks this fall? Don't count on getting a Coke

2007-05-25T08:34:00.000-07:00

In one of the more head-scratching notes of the morning, Jones Soda Co. is now the official soft-drink supplier of Qwest Field, supplanting mighty Coke.

It can be considered a mild coup for Seattle-based Jones (NASDAQ: JSDA), to beat out such soda giants as Coca-Cola and Pepsi for the Qwest Field rights, and fans at the game won't be able to buy a Coke next year when watching the Seahawks at home.

Coca-Cola Co., the previous exclusive soda at Qwest Field, has had a relationship with the Seahawks "on and off for the past 20 years," according to Susan Stribling, spokeswoman for the Atlanta soft drink company (NYSE: KO). Coca-Cola's Dasani water brand also won't be available at Qwest Field anymore, she added.

I've never actually had a Jones Soda -- mostly I just stare at their w acky flavors and interesting label photos when I walk downt he soda aisle at Safeway -- so I'm not sure I can tell you exactly what this means. I do know that they switched recently to making all their soda with pure cane sugar, to much fanfare.

I can just picture it now: "Can I get a large FuFu Berry soda and a small Blue Bubble Gum to go with my hot dog and nachos?"

"Jones Soda scores upset at Qwest" [Seattle Times]
"Jones Soda CEO's journey from fruit stand to soda pop king" [Seattle P-I]

Something to make you smile on a Friday morning

2007-05-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post about the Sonics, I asked if anyone was good with Photoshop. Well, apparently someone is REAL good. Thanks, Mike, for passing this along.

More advice on getting involved with grassroots effort to keep Sonics

2007-05-24T19:18:00.001-07:00

My buddy Mike, who works for the Sonics, had this to add to my advice on how to get involved with keeping the Sonics here. He originally posted this in the comments, but it's good, so it's getting top billing!

He's right when he says Rep. Frank Chopp is the key to this thing at least getting started -- the way our screwy legislature works, if this guy (the speaker of the House) doesn't want a bill to come up for a vote, it doesn't, and it dies. He also wields a lot of influence with other representatives; if he's behind a bill, so are a lot of other reps. Totally unfair, but as another legislator once told me, the system is stacked so most bills have no chance. You can contact Chopp here.

Anyway, heeeeeeere's Mikey!

---

If at all possible, try to get your letters/emails to Frank Chopp as well. I don't know if it is quite as easy, but he really is the gatekeeper in this process. If a long term solution gets done, it is going to be largely due to the grassroots effort -- by Sonics fans themselves. The Sonics as an organization are willing/desiring to put it to a vote. Even if it initially doesn't get the majority it needs, at least it gets the negotiation started.

The organization still believes it originally had sufficient support in legislation, but was Chopp Blocked! So now we need to flood our local legislation and Frank Chopp himself to get the juices flowing once again. Kevin Durant has sparked the masses, and with a rejuvenated fan-base it could/should be enough to get something done.

Briefly tell them about your experiences with the Seattle Sonics -- hit on the emotional -- because they are not going to listen to the economical/political stances! Unfortunately, the Seatle Sonics as an organization, can't really play the "sentimental card" too well. Regardless of how it is put out there, it would come across negatively... but if its from the fans -- it's authentic!!

Biggest ways to support -- buy up tickets and show up for the games! Next year we are going to see the college player of the year- 43 times!!! I would have paid huge money to watch a single Texas game last year, and now we have him in our backyard for 43 games a year!!! Regardless of the long-term, come out and enjoy the show next season!

Just as big -- be vocal and positive about keeping the Sonics here! If you are disinterested and truly feel that there are better things to spend your time and money on -- then go do that. Unless you have a personal agenda against keeping the team here, why waste everyone's time vocalizing your negativity? Until the other day, I was a big fan of Jim Moore ... does he really have nothing else to write about? Jim Moore in my books is officially "Debbie Downer".

Let me be the first to say ... Portland sucks!

2007-05-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

The sports talk radio airwaves were still abuzz yesterday afternoon with the talk of Kevin Durant likely coming to the Sonics. One of the radio hosts said that the No. 1 and No. 2 pick playing in the same division in two towns in the same region separated by less than 200 miles should lead to what has been a long-dormant rivalry.

My guess is, when the good citizens of Redheaded Stepchild Of The Northwest see this video, it might get ratcheted up even a notch further. Yes, that's the Sonics' employees you hear chanting for Portland to get the No. 3 pick, moments before the Hawks were revealed, to much rejoicing (photo, right).

What I love is that don't even bother to say, "Not the Sonics," which is all that really matters. They just fire a shot right across the bow of the Blazers. Makes me swell with Seattle pride.

The simple reality is that Portland wouldn't be much of a team if it weren't for big brother Seattle to take care of it. After all, we all saw what Portland could do when left to its own devices -- watch out for those Jailblazers!

Observe:

Billionnaire owner of the team? From Seattle, made his billions in Seattle.
Coach of the team? Spent entire playing career with the Sonics. Had number retired by the Sonics. Former coach of the Sonics. Family still lives in Seattle.
Star of the team, savior of the franchise? Seattle high school and college basketball legend.
Top pick the year before? Seattle high school star.

Portland can try to be like us by importing our stars; it might even try to upstage us by actually having a useful light rail system downtown.

But it will never be Seattle, no matter how hard it tries.

Finally, someone agrees with me! (It's a rarity, trust me)

2007-05-23T23:00:00.000-07:00

You might remember a post I did about a month ago detailing the futility of the Mariners' offense and why it is impossible for it to achieve any sustained success, centered around the fact that it's a poorly composed lineup full of hackers.

Apparently, I'm not alone. And this is a good thing.

Guest columnist Seth Kolloen -- of Seattlest fame -- reiterates a lot of the points I made, in this morning's Seattle P-I.

STATS Inc. tracks how many pitches MLB hitters see per plate appearance. In 2003, the year before Bill Bavasi became GM, Mariners hitters saw 3.81 pitches per plate appearance -- fourth-most in the American League. ...

Since then, Mariners hitters have seen fewer pitches every year. Last year, the Mariners ranked 10th in the AL, seeing only 3.70 pitches per plate appearance. ... In 2007, the Mariners' pitches per plate appearance has plummeted to 3.55, last in the American League. ...

Here's the problem: Patience isn't just about earning walks, it's about driving up the pitch counts of opposing starters, seeing them off to the showers, and pummeling the squishy belly of every team's pitching staff -- the middle relief.

The Mariners have knocked out a starter before the seventh inning only 11 times this season. That's the worst in the American League -- the Red Sox and Indians have done it 24 times each. Those teams score more runs not necessarily because they have better hitters, but because they are facing less talented pitchers.

And, just as I did, Seth lays the blame squarely on Bill Bavasi's shoulders. The problem with that, though, is that there are no easy fixes -- firing Mike Hargrove isn't going to change the fact that Yuniesky Betancourt thinks an eye-high fastball is his bread-and-butter.

Beyond that, the two guys who aren't the problem -- Ichiro and Jose Guillen -- are free agents at the end of the year. The rest of the guys are either young and locked up for the next four years, or old and locked up for the next two at a high salary. It's going to be next to impossible for whoever the next GM is to remake this lineup quickly.

That said, though, it might only take changing out a piece or two to change the complextion of the lineup. After all, you can have a few hackers -- just not a lineup full of them. If the next GM chooses wisely and works some shrewd deals, the offense might not be that far off.

But don't expect things to get markedly better this year. Watching these Mariners will be an exercise in frustration all summer long. You might as well get used to it.

Oh, and by the way: Kolloen has a new blog dedicated to the Seattle sports scene. Check it out when you get a chance -- it's definitely worth a read.

For the first time in a long time, it feels good to be a Sonics fan

2007-05-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

I was on my way home from work at about 6 o'clock last night when I remembered that the draft lottery had taken place about 15 minutes before. I turned off the iPod and flipped over to KJR, only to hear the host and Seattle SuperSonics broadcaster Kevin Callabro talking about Kevin Durant.

As a Seattle sports fan used to disappointment, doubt washed over me until they came right out and said what I had until that point refused to believe actually could be true: That the Sonics had won the right to select one of the two bona fide superstars in this draft.

I can't remember when the last time was I truly was excited about the Sonics -- probably 1996 -- but I can tell you this.

Today, I am excited.

Really, really, really excited.

When people talk about the 2007 draft lottery as a seminal point in the Sonics franchise, they are not overestimating the value of what happened last night. Jerry West, one of the foremost talent evaluators in NBA history, put it this way:

"There have been a lot of picks in the lottery that have [failed]. There are two in the lottery this year that are not going to fail. There are two superstars in the draft. I think for the teams fortunate enough to get them, the fortunes of their franchises have changed forever."

This, my friends, comes from a man not prone to overstatement. Greg Oden and Kevin Durant are that good, and one of them will be playing for the Sonics next season -- probably Durant. Although it wouldn't shock me completely if Portland took Durant, and they will consider it, I think they'd be crazy to pass on a superstar big man. (Besides, it would be just like Portland, the redheaded stepchild of the Northwest, to take the 19-year-old who looks like he's 48. Just look at that mug. They're both 19. Really.)

Either way, there's no second guessing the pick and no screwing it up: The Sonics will get a player who figures to be a star for years to come. Callabro even said he believes it makes the Sonics instant playoff contenders, given the talent already on the roster and the injuries that sabotaged them last year.

But beyond what Durant will do for the team on the court, it's possible the Sonics finally got a little bit of that same fairy dust that kept the Mariners here after 1995. The lament of our legislature was that there just wasn't a buzz about the Sonics, no groundswell of support from the constituency.

Well, there's a buzz now.

I'll have a couple of more posts up later today: What you can do to get on board with keeping the Sonics here, and what this means for the team on the court. In the meantime, revel away at the thought of Kevin Durant in a Sonics uniform.

Anyone handy with Photoshop?

Here's what local columnists are saying:

"Durant could be the player who saves Sonics," by Art Theil, Seattle P-I (The best column of the lot from the best writer in Seattle, in my opinion)
"Beleaguered franchise finally catches a break," by Jerry Brewer, Seattle Times
"Envelope opens door to Durant, Sonics staying put," by John McGrath, The (Tacoma) News Tribune

How you can get on board with Saving Our Sonics

2007-05-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

I'll admit, I was one of the many Sonics fans that felt pretty defeated by the events of the last year. And I'm a little ashamed to admit that my feelings of defeat led to virtual inaction on my part.

As my buddy Mikey -- who, not so coincidentally, works for the Sonics -- accurately pointed out, I've only written one post on the Sonics in the past year or so, and even that wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of optimism.

Well, consider me a changed man. Just as the Mariners' fortune changed in the most unlikely of three-month spans, so too can the Sonics' fortune -- if fans and ownership are savvy enough to capitalize on the momentum.

Enter the most powerful force out there: You.

You have the power to influence your elected officials. You have the power to convince them that there truly are some residents of the state of Washington that really want to see the team stay. As the Mariners showed, it doesn't need to be an overwhelming majority for it to happen -- just enough to give the team's lobbyists a foot in the door.

As a place to start, here's a list of "Do's and Don'ts" from Save Our Sonics that will give you some ideas. The biggest thing you can do right now is contact your state representation, which holds the power over whether the current stadium tax is extended to pay for the new arena.

Here's how to do it -- it's not nearly as intimidating or difficult as you might think:

Find your legislators here by filling out the appropriate information.
This will take you to a page with links to all three of your elected representatives. Make sure you follow the next steps for each of them.
On the official's home page, click the "e-mail" link under the photo.
Fill out the appropriate information. (Your e-mail has a much better chance of being read and responded to if it comes from someone verified to be in their district. E-mails directly to them without using this system often either never get read, or get read much, much later.)
Write a letter. It can be long, or it can be simple. Writing to a legislator can be a scary thing for a lot of people, but you don't have to be the best writer in the world to get your point across.
Copy the text of the letter. Repeat steps 3 through 5 for the other two elected officials.

As someone who's done this before, here are some tips for your letter:

Be concise. Legislators don't have a lot of time (although they've got a lot more of it this time of year) and you're a lot more likely to be read if you make your points quickly and easily.
Be respectful. Trust me when I tell you that a little respect goes a long way with these people. From Save Our Sonics: "If the official you are communicating with has been negative about keeping the Sonics & Storm in the area, do not insult them or be rude if you want them to consider your opinion. Express disappointment at their stance, make some well-reasoned points, and tell them you hope they will re-examine their stance."
Be heartfelt. You don't have to be the most eloquent person in the world to show your passion. Speak from personal experience, and don't use form letters you find elsewhere. Speak from the heart.
Urge action. Don't just say you like the Sonics -- tell them what you want them to do.

I hope this helps. We Sonics fans have a golden opportunity to capitalize on what could be a franchise-changing event. I don't know about you, but I sure as heck don't want to see Kevin Durant playing for my Sonics in a different city.

This city has been given the mulligan of mulligans with the draft pick. It's up to us to work to make it happen.

Comments back up and running

2007-05-22T20:34:00.001-07:00

Had a little bit of a snafu with the comments on some of the posts -- that's been fixed now. So if you wanted to comment on a post ... comment away to your heart's content.

I'll be posting on the Supes later tonight or tomorrow. Holy crap. If this doesn't get the ball rolling on an arena, nothing will.

How the Mariners killed the Golden Goose

2007-05-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

I heard it reported last week that the Mariners were disappointed by the turnout for the series with the Angels -- average attendance 21,529 -- given the gravity of the series with the first place team in the A.L. West.

Only one thing surprises me about this: That the Seattle Mariners leadership didn't see this coming.

Then again, given the way they've completely mismanaged the team since 2002, nothing should surprise me.

The thing that galls me the most about the Mariners -- and from here until the end of this post, when I say "Mariners," what I really mean is Mariners management -- is that they think they're special. That they can stave off the inevitable with clever marketing campaigns ("You gotta love these guys!") and a world-class ballpark experience.

In the end, none of that trumps what happens on the field.

We Seattle sports fans are a funny lot. We can be among the most enthusiastic in the country, and we start out trusting our teams completely and selflessly. Until they break our trust. And when they break our trust, it's a looooooooong time before that trust comes back.

Once upon a time, the Seahawks, Sonics and Huskies all thought they were pretty special, too. Then they all screwed up our trust in one way or another.

Ken Behring allowed the Seahawks to bottom out with a two-win season in 1992, then threatened to move the franchise to Los Angeles. Only a Super Bowl appearance restored the team's once lofty position in Seattle sports fandom.
The Sonics had this town captivated in the '90s, only to watch it implode behind a series of ill-advised contracts that set the franchise back for years. They have yet to recover, and probably will move to another city before they do.
Even UW football -- once thought to be untouchable -- has proven not to be immune. Inept recruiting has done what not even probation could do: Kept the rabid "Dawg" fans at home. (The Huskies averaged 57,482 fans in a 72,500-seat stadium.)

The funny thing is that it's not so much the losing that gets us. After all, Seahawks fans came out year after year for the first 15 years of the franchise, despite the team only posting a winning record five times. The Huskies went through some tough years (by their standards) after being put on probation by the NCAA in the mid-90s, yet UW fans continued to give their team one of the greatest home-field advantages in the Pac-10. As you can see from the chart below, even the Mariners sustained very good attendance numbers despite their swift decline -- better than any 63-win team had a right to expect.

To me, it has a lot more to do with how we perceive our teams that are part of the public trust are being managed for us. And there is absolutely no trust right now when it comes to the M's. I see this everyday on sites such as Lookout Landing and U.S.S. Mariner, where every move is second-guessed. On the flip side, I look at Seahawks Insider, where fans are quick to defend every move made by Tim Ruskell and company. That's the trust the Seahawks have earned, and it's what the Mariners should be looking to get back.

The situation is probably more bleak than the Mariners realize. As documented before, it took years before Seahawks fans came all the way back; simply winning doesn't cure all ills. The team made the playoffs two consecutive years in 2003 and 2004, yet still was struggling to sell out all eight home dates. The chart below seems to suggest the same thing for the M's.

Despite win totals that have increased each of the past three seasons (shown in red) -- and a team that appears better this year than it has been -- attendance has declined each year (shown in blue). The trend is striking, given that wins and attendance had gone hand in hand every year since 1995.

How to explain this? Trust has been broken, and we have no hope that this team is going to get better anytime soon.

The Mariners are saddled with multiple albatross-like contracts for players that are severely underperforming (Richie Sexson, Adrian Beltre, Miguel Batista), much of the young talent (Yuniesky Betancourt, Jose Lopez) isn't proving to be anything special, the team's lone superstar (Ichiro) has one foot out the door, and most of the team's prospects are at least one year away -- probably two or three for most of them.

Almost two years ago, Mariners President Chuck Armstrong told Seattle Times baseball writer Larry Stone the organization wouldn't consider an Indians-style dismantling of the team.

"It's incumbent on us — me, Bill (Bavasi), the baseball guys — to try to get the kind of players that will get this turned around as quickly as we can, as opposed to embarking on the Cleveland approach," Armstrong said. "Cleveland has such a nice little ballclub, yet we're averaging 10,000 more a game. We think we have a compact with the fans — ownership does."

Here's the difference, though, between Cleveland and Seattle: The Indians had a team that could have been a viable World Series contender for a number of years, yet the ownership chose to blow it up in a cost-cutting move. The Mariners would have been doing it during the normal cycle of a sports franchise, jettisoning their over the hill players to stockpile the farm system.

Had the organization considered such a move three years ago, here's what would have happened, in terms of attendance: The exact same thing! The residual effect of 2001 -- when fan trust was at an all-time high -- would have carried them through the lean years, as fans held out hope that the franchise would turn the corner. Had they not turned the corner, they'd be faced with the same prospects they're faced with now.

Instead, what we have is a team that has been patchworked together year after year with bloated free agent contracts in an attempt to continue to lure the "loyal" fanbase to Safeco Field -- a team with no future and no staying power.

Worse times are ahead for this franchise, which is in desperate need of new management if for no ther reason than to give a dwindling fan base a reason to hope. The Mariners have been saying for three years that they want to get it turned around before it's too late.

I got news for them.

It already is.

They killed the Golden Goose.

Some things are just funny

2007-05-21T10:09:00.001-07:00

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You know, I generally like to give you some kind of insightful analysis of the sports world here, but sometimes funny is just funny. Enjoy.

Poor guy. Not sure how he held it together for 90 seconds.

Bad, bad weekend for the Mariners

2007-05-20T20:23:00.000-07:00

The only way this could have been worse is if the Mariners had been swept by the Padres. Both the games they lost were very winnable, especially today's, when the tying and go-ahead runs reached base with no outs in the ninth ... only to be stranded after two pop-ups and a strikeout.

I'm not going to break down the weekend, because I really didn't get to watch much, except for the second half of today's game.

But I will say this.

Everyone keeps talking about how no one is going to run away with the AL West, but don't look now: Today's loss puts the Mariners five back of the Angels, who swept the Dodgers. It doesn't seem like much -- and I don't the the Angels or A's will run away with it, not with their pitiful offenses -- but the M's have been steadily losing ground in the division, and that's not a good sign.

One of the major problems with the Mariners this year has been the performance of the middle of the order. It's been more or less punchless for the better part of the year, given that Jose Vidro, Raul Ibanez and Richie Sexson occupied the 3-4-5 spots for the bulk of the season. Hargrove tried to rectify it by moving each man up one spot, and it worked short term.

But Ibanez and Sexson continued to struggle to drive in runs. Sexson just looks completely lost at the plate -- capped by him taking a fastball thigh high and right down the middle of the plate for his third strikeout on Friday -- and it probably was wise of Hargrove to give him a couple of days of.

Ibanez, I think, is a different story. He has the classic look of a guy who's just plain old, and Jeff Sullivan over at Lookout Landing does a tremendous job of backing up that assertion here. Here's to hoping he's been fighting this back injury all year, and that's the reason for the sudden dropoff. But the words "35-year-old outfielder" and "back spasms" appearing in the same sentence usually doesn't make you real confident that a few days of rest are going to turn things around.

Anyway, maybe they can make some hay on the road against Tampa Bay and Kansas City, but I'm not optimistic. And I guess it's just this general pessimism that has me so bothered. I want to believe that this team can be something. But it just keeps disappointing me.

Giambi tries, but he just doesn't get it

2007-05-18T09:07:00.001-07:00

In what has to be the coincidence of coincidences given yesterday's post, admitted steroid user Jason Giambi is the subject of a pair of stories on steroid use this morning in the USA Today.

The story that's getting all the play is Giambi calling for baseball to apologize for allowing the steroid era to happen, which also includes his closest public admission of steroid use yet. (You'll remember that Giambi made his initial "apology" a couple of years ago.)

"I was wrong for doing that stuff," Giambi told USA TODAY on Wednesday before playing the Chicago White Sox. "What we should have done a long time ago was stand up — players, ownership, everybody — and said: 'We made a mistake.'

"We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward. … Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic that everybody wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it."

To me, though, the more interesting story is Giambi's defense of Bonds and his pursuit of the home run record -- something that seems to be gaining popularity in player circles.

Giambi won't say whether he believes Bonds ever took steroids or human growth hormone, but he's convinced that no drug is responsible for Bonds' extraordinary career.

"Barry is one of the greatest players, if not the greatest, I'll ever see play," says Giambi, who has hit 355 career home runs. "I know people have a tough time accepting it, but what he's doing is unbelievable. And I don't care what people say — nothing is going to give you that gift of hitting a baseball.

"It's the same thing for Barry. If it were that easy, how come you don't see anyone else doing what he has done?"

Although I believe Giambi's heart is in the right place, he is missing the point entirely.

It's not that steroids give you some kind of magical ability; I can take all the steroids I want, and I'm still not going to be a professional athlete. But I will be a bigger, faster, stronger version of myself that would be a better softball or pickup basketball player. That's why they call them "performance enhancing drugs": They take what you have and make it better.

And that's what happened with Bonds. He already was one of the most gifted athletes of our generation -- steroids made him better, especially at a point in his career when he should have been declining. Instead, his ability to hit a ball over the fence reached levels it never had been at any point in his career. Bonds is the only player in the HISTORY of ANY of our sports to become a better player in his late 30s than he was in his late 20s. THE ONLY ONE.

Yes, Giambi and Ortiz are correct: A player still has to hit a baseball, undoubtedly the most difficult task to accomplish in all of sports. Steroids cannot create a swing.

But when that swing, which already was one of the best in the game, is kept from its normal course of deterioration by drugs that make your muscles stronger, faster and more durable -- let's not forget, one of steroids' greatest qualities is the ability it gives a body to recover from strenuous activity (such as a baseball game) -- well, we all know what you get.

Barry Lamar Bonds, home run fraud.

After reading 'Game of Shadows,' I'm conviced Bonds is a cheat

2007-05-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

So I just finished "Game of Shadows," the definitive account of the BALCO steroids scandal by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, and I now know two things for certain:

Barry Bonds absolutely and undeniably used steroids at least from 1999-2004;

AND
You are not allowed to have an opinion on Bonds, his alleged steroid use or his pursuit of the all-time home run record unless you've read this book.

I say this because the evidence presented in "Game of Shadows" is so thorough, so varied and so well presented that I don't believe there's any reasonable person who can reach the conclusion that Bonds didn't use steroids.

I always hear people say that Bonds has never tested positive for steroids, and that's reason enough to believe him when he says he never used them (or at least give him the benefit of the doubt). But I think that argument is ridiculous -- that's like saying you can't get a murder conviction without a body and the murder weapon. There is such a thing as circumstantial evidence, and Williams and Fainaru-Wada present plenty of it.

However, there are two things that stand out in my mind as the most convincing reasons why I'm confident Bonds used steroids extensively.

Amid the doping calendars and testimony by confidants, there's one especially damning piece of evidence discovered in the BALCO investigation by the feds: A pair of steroid blood tests ordered on behalf of Bonds by Victor Conte and BALCO. Why is this significant? It's the same thing Conte would do for all the track stars he was supplying with steroids to make sure they wouldn't ever flunk a drug test.

Why would Bonds ever need a test specifically designed to see if there were any steroids in his system if he wasn't taking steroids? The only plausible explanation is that he was trying to make sure he'd beat whatever test came his way, just like the track stars.

Second -- and most telling in my mind -- is that Bonds elected not to sue the authors for libel, as the statute of limitations in California ran out a couple of months ago. While libel can be difficult for public figures such as Bonds to prove, it's not impossible, and trust me when I say he'd have a pretty good case against Williams and Fainaru-Wada -- if, indeed, what's in the book is false.

The reason for his decision not to sue can be one of only two things. Option 1: The authors are telling the truth. Option 2: Libel suits result in an awful lot of digging into a plaintiff's past; Bonds has skeletons in his closet -- liikely related to steroids -- he just doesn't want to see the light of day.

Neither reflects well on Bonds.

So where does this leave baseball?

Well, first off, Bud Selig basically has screwed his sport by waiting so long to do anything about it. The authors use Black Sox scandal commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis as an example of how a commish can clean up his sport, and while I know Selig has nowhere near that kind of power today, he certainly could have stood up to Bonds and the other cheaters years ago.

If Selig had any guts, he would have banned Bonds, Jason Giambi, Gary Sheffield and others from baseball years ago, when all of this evidence came to light. He would have sent a clear message that steroids won't be tolerated. Now, he's relegated to hiding from the issue, sitting the corner with his fingers in his ears singing "la la la la la la la la la la" and pretending it all goes away.

If you read "Game of Shadows" and decide that there's just not enough evidence to "convict" Bonds and the others, so be it. If you finish and decide that Bonds did it, but didn't really do anything wrong, given that it wasn't against baseball rules -- never mind the fact that it's a federal crime to possess and use steroids without a prescription -- I can't change your mind on that.

But come to those conclusions only after considering all the evidence. You owe yourself that much as a sports fan.

Sorry about that!

2007-05-14T22:37:00.000-07:00

I know I said I'd have a post up on Sunday, but hey -- it was my wife's first Mother's Day! Then today, I was in training all day and away from a computer, only to emerge to 70 and sunny ... good time to get the lawn mowed and cars washed.

I'll try to get some Mariners thoughts up tomorrow. I also finished reading Game of Shadows yesterday, so I'll have some thoughts on that and Barry Bonds.

Thanks for stopping by.

Off to watch the M's; blog on hiatus until Sunday

2007-05-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'm on my way to catch my first game at Safeco Field this year, and it hopefully will be a good one.

I'll be getting back late tonight and away from an Internet connection all day tomorrow, so I'll try to post some thoughts on Sunday. Have a great weekend!

It only took 29 games, but M's finally put it together

2007-05-10T12:30:00.000-07:00

You know how a lot of people use the word "literally" wrong all the time? As in, "He literally dropped a bomb in the room," or "I literally crapped my pants when I heard that!"

Well, I can tell you I'm being accurate and it's not even a little bit of an overstatement when I say that I've literally been waiting all season for last night's 9-2 beatdown of Detroit. It wasn't just that the Mariners won; it was the way they did it, with a complete dismantling of what had been the hottest team in the majors.

All year long, the M's have tantalized us with bits and pieces of good performances -- just enough pitching or hitting to squeak out games here and there and keep their record around .500, even while getting blown out in a bunch on a fairly regular basis. In the midst of it all, there was this persistant thought that if they could somehow get it together, that if certain guys could start playing to their potential, this team might be capable of finally giving this town something to be excited about.

Last night might have been the start of that.

Nobody expected much out of this team when it embarked on this road trip, and the 3-5 mark with which it came home won't exactly light up the talk radio airwaves with excitement. But I saw a lot of things to be excited about on this trip, especially in the last three days in Detroit.

After 26 games, but Mike Hargrove finally showed a willingness to tinker with a lineup that was unbelievably ineffective. Moving Richie Sexson up to the cleanup spot is what's going to get all the attention, since he responded in the first two games by going 3-for-7 with a homer, 4 runs and 4 RBIs.

But for my money, the more important move was getting Jose Vidro up into that No. 2 spot. His .303 average and .346 OBP have been solid, but his .361 slugging percentage is what we in baseball jargon call piss poor for a No. 3 hitter. However, moved up one spot, he now becomes the guy who can move Ichiro around to third, or score him after a steal. Good move by Hargrove, pretty much no matter who's batting third or fourth.

(Although, we'll go ahead and say we like Raul Ibanez -- Bret Boone nosedive and all -- hitting there a lot better than Kenji Johjima, who seems to be in a "how fast can I put the ball in play" contest when he's batting up there.)

Speaking of Sexson, although it's tempting to laugh at an athlete who blames luck for his poor performance, when he says that he's really been unlucky so far this year, he's not just rationalizing -- the numbers back him up. He has a career .303 BABIP (what's BABIP?), yet this year it's just .164 (and that's after the last two games). That means that, in his career, three out of every 10 balls Sexson puts in play that aren't home runs end up as hits. This year, a lot of those balls are finding gloves (like that rocket to Magglio Ordonez on Tuesday).

Additionally, even though is OBP is an abysmal .280, his walk-to-strikeout ratio is significantly higher than it has been the past two years (.58 vs. .42 and .53), and his strikeout rate is down (23.5 percent) -- meaning he's not lying when he says he got a good approach at the plate.

So, while Hargrove probably will look like a genius for moving Sexson to the cleanup spot just as he starts to produce, keep in mind that it's really more of a stroke of dumb luck that the move coincides with Sexson's increased production, rather than any kind of smart managerial move that "got Richie going."

The bottom line is that the offense produced pretty darn well against three very good starting pitchers in Detroit, and that gives me hope that this team might yet contend. The Mariners easily could have won the first game of the series if it weren't for that farce of a pitcher fans call "THAT'S all we @!#!??@ got back for Rafael Soriano?" (more on that later), they beat up on a left-handed pitcher that had a 2.78 ERA before last night, and piled up 12 hits in a game started by Justin Verlander, even if they could't convert them into runs or a win.

All in all, I find myself encouraged and excited for this weekend's matchup with the Yankees. I think anything less than two out of three will be a huge disappointment with the way the offense is coming around, even though the pitching staff has a ways to go. May 15 can't come fast enough.

Other thoughts:

Here's the answer to Wednesday's trivia question: It's Horacio Ramirez. I mean, seriously, the only reason Ramirez hasn't been a consistent target of our scorn for the past month is because his bad start pales in comparison to Weaver's, which reached epic proportions with his sixth consecutive loss today. But now that Weaver has made it so painfully obvious he no longer can pitch in the rotation, fans are turning their ire to HoRam, especially now that the guy has allowed 7 runs in each of his past two starts -- games the Mariners should have won.

It's not that he's just been bad; he's bad with below-average major league stuff. Straight high-80s fastball, mediocre curve and changeup ... how in the world did Atlanta unload this guy? Oh, wait ... never mind.

The problem is this: You can't take both Ramirez and Weaver out of the rotation, because there are simply no other viable alternatives. Felix's return will take care of one of them, but there's no one at AAA who's likely to be appreciably better than either of them thanks to the fact that the Mariners have utterly failed to develop a quality starting arm in the last 10 years other than the King. Brandon Morrow might have been an option had he started the year in AAA and had been stretched out as a starter, but that's just not going to happen now.

So, the Mariners are stuck trotting them out there and hoping and praying that one of them figures it out, because Bill Bavasi has hitched his wagon to these two. Otherwise, we're stuck chalking up an automatic loss every fifth day and probably watching ourselves fall out of contention in the West.
Disturbing stat of the day: Jeff Weaver's ERA actually DROPPED ONE FULL RUN today, even after giving up 6 runs in 5 innings (15.35 to 14.32).
I loved Cha Seung Baek's gritty performance Wednesday. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The guy will make a fine No. 5 starter on this team. He's not going to do what he did Wednesday ever again, and it would be wrong of fans to expect him to. But what he will do is give you 5 or 6 innings ever fifth day and a shot to win -- the team is 4-0 in games he's started this year. Let me say that again: The team has won every game the guy that took Felix Hernandez's spot in the rotation has started. That's infinitely more than Weaver or Ramirez is giving the team right now.
Has anyone else noticed Jose Guillen is literally starting to hit the snot out of the ball? (Ha ha! Just checking to see if you're paying attention!) Seriously, though, his average is now .278 after a 3-for-4 performance Thursday, his OBP is now up to .340 and he's slugging .464 -- really solid numbers. If Hargrove wanted to do something really revolutionary, he'd divorce himself from his silly left-right-left-right fascination and move Guillen to the No. 3 hole, dropping Ibanez down to Guillen's No. 5 spot. (For the record, Ibanez is slugging .358, which I'm pretty sure has to now be worst among No. 3 hitters in the AL, supplanting ... Jose Vidro!)
Ichiro still isn't stealing any bases. Doesn't he know he has limited value on my fantasy team if he's not stealing bases? Sheesh.

Question: What's Darrell Jackson been up to in San Francisco?

2007-05-10T12:17:00.000-07:00

Answer: Pretty much the same thing he was always up to in Seattle.

"San Francisco 49ers acquired veteran receiver Darrell Jackson (82) WATCHES PRACTICE with tight end Bryan Gilmore (84) during minicamp at 49ers training facility in Santa Clara, Calif., Friday, May 4, 2007."

Although, I guess it's a little different, since he's actually at a minicamp for the Niners.

But that's just splitting hairs.

Rest of NFC West catching up with 'Hawks? Duh!

2007-05-10T11:12:00.000-07:00

ESPN.com's ubiquitous NFL reporter John Clayton weighs in this morning on whether the Seahawks' run as the class of the NFC West might indeed be coming to an end.

In Seattle, Mike Holmgren is enjoying a three-year run atop the NFC West that included one trip to the Super Bowl. But there is no doubt the Seahawks can hear footsteps as big and as loud as a Sasquatch's. ...

Clearly, their run at the top may be coming to an end. Age is creeping into their offense. Quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, fullback Mack Strong, left tackle Walter Jones, right guard Chris Gray and tight end Marcus Pollard all are in their thirties. Halfback Shaun Alexander turns 30 this fall, a nasty little number for a running back.

He details the strides the other teams have made to close the gap, which included coaching hires and savvy personnel moves. And while I don't disagree that the rest of the division isn't as bad as it has been, I certainly don't think it's time for Seahawks fans to worry too much about the upcoming season.

Is the rest of the division catching up? Of course they are -- it's the natural cycle of events in the NFL. No team stays great forever (see Rams, St. Louis, Greatest Show On Turf), and downtrodden teams are bound to make strides. It's the beauty of the league.

"They needed to," Alexander told reporters earlier this week when asked about the great offseasons of the Cardinals and 49ers. "When you win the division three years in a row, it says enough. I think it's going to be a challenge this year, but challenges are good. We've never been a team that wants to hope that someone else plays bad. We don't care what everybody is doing. We want to go out and just do what we do best, and that takes care of itself."

The reality is that neither the 49ers, Cardinals or Rams are ready to supplant the Seahawks just yet. I still believe the offense is the best in the division -- although Arizona with its playmakers could catch up if Matt Leinart continues to develop -- and the defense has been fortified with veterans who will complement the Seahawks' still-young core. And never underestimate the moxie of a team that just knows how to win, despite the myriad injuries last year that can't possibly be duplicated.

This smells more like a journalist trying to create smoke where there's no fire, to me.