300 Game Winners

Since the last time I've posted, my life has changed substantially. It is for the better, and most of the change for the better came from moving away from Oklahoma. Every time there is another 300 game winner, people ask if this will be the last one. People did it again with Randy Johnson, and this time there is some merit to it.
Predicting 300 game winners is hard, duh. To win 300 games you need to pitch well in your late 30's and on. There is simply no way to predict this. Ten years ago I looked at the list of active wins leaders and did not think Randy Johnson would make it to 300. I didn't even think he would still be pitching ten years later, the guy was old back then too.
So after that, I still have predictions to offer. My best guess for the next 300 game winner is Roy Halladay. He is showing no signs of slowing down at age 32 and seems like he will have the skills to adjust his pitching style as he ages. My next guess is somewhat more obscure, but Mark Buehrle has already won 128 games and he just turned 30. The big question is obviously whether or not he can keep it up for another 10+ years. That being said, examination of his stats leads me to conclude that even if he can't reach 300 wins he may be able to build up a Hall of Fame case. He has consistently been among the league leaders in innings pitched, ERA+, and K/BB rate.
After those two, I have no good guesses. Maybe Felix Hernandez, who was a rookie at age 19 and already has 44 wins. But nobody has a good guess and that's most of the fun.

Welcome Back Griffey!

I love Ken Griffey Jr. I do in spite of my recent post when I suggested the Mariners look into acquiring Nick Johnson. There is nothing wrong with wanting your favorite team to get better. I am overjoyed that he is returning to Seattle, the city he never should have left. I love Griffey for what he was and what he is now. He was the best player of the 1990's, which are now 10 years behind us. He was the man (or Kid!) who put the Seattle Mariners on the baseball map. He is not any of those anymore, and I love him for that.
Jack Zduriencik has spent this offseason breathing life into the Mariners organization. He took over a team whose idea of statistical analysis appeared to consist of looking at stats from the 2002 season, and fixed that by forming a new department for research. The team's defense was a joke so Jack Z (as I will call him) traded for Endy Chavez and Franklin Gutierrez. He traded Aaron Heilmann for two younger players. The Mariners had been flushing money down the toilet by playing Richie Sexson and Jose Vidro at 1B and DH, so Jack Z goes out and signs Russell Branyan and Chris Shelton on the cheap. And oh yeah, he also went ahead and brought back Griffey.
What Griffey is to these Mariners is the bridge between their first Golden Age of the mid 1990's and the team's future. Jack Z has brought a new way of doing business to the team. Griffey, the team's biggest star from its past happens to fit into the new way. He's relatively inexpensive and is an above average hitter when healthy. Granted, he should never play defense, but as a DH used correctly he will be an asset to the team. And he's already reviving fan interest in ways that Franklin Gutierrez and Garrett Olson can't.
I don't seriously expect this team to contend next season. But a wreck like the Mariners wasn't going to be fixed overnight. A record of around 76-86 is what I expect. That would still be a 15 win reversal and a 9 win improvement in pythagorean wins. Jack Z didn't bring in big names, but the new guys are going to make the team substantially better. And hopefully that one huge name of Ken Griffey Jr. will help make the team better too.

Goodbye to Lawton

• I arrived in Oklahoma on August 1st of last year.
• I had already decided that the state sucked because they stole the Sonics. Despite being prepared to hate it, I liked Oklahoma City. It isn't a bad place and my ranting about the city and the people who live there isn't really justified.
• For the first ten days I was there the high temperature was over 100 degrees.
• My first day in Lawton, OK a random driver on the street gave me the middle finger.
• There are two casinos on my street. One is in a tent.
• Beer is 3.2% alcohol.
• Yes, it does taste like ass.
• Drivers only drive 10 mph below the speed limit and believe that the two lanes on a road are for each side of the car.
• Sheridan Road, the main drag in "downtown" Lawton is lined with fast food joints. The only grocery stores are the Wal-Mart and some run down looking Country Marts. No wonder the people are so fat.
• There is no shortage of pawn shops and most of them have bars on the windows.
• Is there a local ordanance requiring businesses to put dancing people in animal costumes in their commercials? There are three of them and their ads run all the time on the local news.
• There is a liquor store-gas station combo. Its name is Fluffy's and its sign has a drunk chicken on it.
• A local middle school has two police officers on duty at detention.
• My apartment complex is brand new and appears to have been built using Legos. The door is falling off, handles on drawers fall off, the fuze box randomly shuts off power in one room, and all the lights in my room died a week after I put them in.
• At least gas is cheaper here than just about everywhere else in the country.
• The week I was in the field, an ice storm rolled through the state. Apparently it was chaos, but I don't know. I was outside the whole time. Ice formed on the inside of our tents and a couple guys got frostbite. When I drove home that Friday I saw that sand and salt had been haphazzardly applied to the roads. Half of a lane was sanded and half wasn't. Whoever did that must have also plowed the roads. They looked as good.
• We get gale force winds despite being hundreds of miles from the ocean.
• At least I'm leaving before tornado season. In my time living here, I only had one tornado warning.
• I've felt like I would never escape this town, but I'm finally able to leave. Goodbye, and I will fight to never come back here.

Things Were Bad When We Were Young

The whole decade of the 1990's was somewhat self consciously fraudulent.* We took a holiday from history, but the President delcared a state of emergency seemingly every other month to deploy troops to places like Haiti and Bosnia. We had great prosperity and a stock market boom, even though the boom was partly driven by companies that sucked and would never turn a profit. We had a fraud of a President, but he got by because times were good and no one cared. Americans more or less ignored the threat of Islamofascist terrorists and deemed band-aid solutions like bombing an asprin factory in Sudan acceptable. And baseball decided to destory itself and rise from the ashes. But no one cared about what was going on just below the surface.

* I use 1990's in the historical era sense defined by the fall of the USSR to 9/11. In other words 1991-2001. Historians love those kind of things, and I would love to be a historian.

I had never even thought about the possibility of steroids in baseball until the summer of 2001. At the end of "Conspiracy Day" on the Michael Medved Show a man called in to tell about an open conspiracy. It was that steroid use was rampant in Major League Baseball, everyone associated with the game knew it, and that they were looking the other way because of the sport's revival. He urged the listeners to look at the changes in players' bodies and changes in the record book. Medved doubted it and even had one more caller on after him to give Major League Baseball's party line.
In May of 2002 Ken Caminiti admitted his own steroid use to Sports Illustrated. Reading that article changed the way I looked at baseball forever. When I read it I remembered that caller to the Michael Medved Show and I wished I had followed baseball with a more critical eye. May, 2002 was the perfect time for me to read about the steroid era. I saw it as a part of a larger trend. America had enjoyed peace and prosperity. The peace had been achieved by ignoring threats and now we were at war, with another one on the horizon. The prosperity had been partly achieved by fraud, the corporate scandals were in the process of being exposed. And baseball's return from the brink had been built on lies. Needless to say I felt pretty impressed with myself.
But it was impossible for me to feel that good. I knew that everything I saw as a baseball fan was now questionable. Aside from some obvious cases, I had no idea who had been using steroids and who hadn't. I realized that any of my favorite players could have and could still be using. It was and still is an awful feeling.
That's why the whole Alex Rodriguez thing bothers me so much. I'm not a fan of his anymore. But I did believe that he would be remembered as the greatest player of all time. Now, I'm not so sure. To me he's just another one of them. And he's a reminder that steroids haven't gone away, even if he is only proven to have used them from 2001-2003. Players are still using and guys who aren't using anymore are still getting dimed out for it.
The man in charge for all of this has, of course, been dictator for life Bud Selig. He will be remembered as the "Steroids Commissioner." He did nothing to stop the use of steroids until 2002 when it was, conveniently enough, time to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement and he finally had an issue to browbeat the players' union with. That being said I'm sure Bud would rather be remembered as the "Steroids Commissioner" than the "Cancelled World Series Commissioner," "Racketeering Commissioner," "Conflict of Interest Commissioner," or any of the other things he could be remembered for. The man has cut a wide swath of descruction through baseball.
I still have my baseball memories from the Steroid Era. Those aren't going away. But I need to remember the truth too and I've tried to mentally prepare myself for the news that one of my all time favorite players took steroids. I can't look back at childhood baseball memories without thinking about it. In some way I'm glad for it. I have no illusions about the purity or authenticity of the game. I'd rather have authentic memories than ones built on lies. What I need now are to gain memories as an adult.

My Jeff Weaver Story

Does every Seattle Mariners fan have a favorite Jeff Weaver story from the year he pitched for the Mariners? I hope so, because he brought the team almost as much comic relief as Ichiro's quotes. Mine's pretty straightforward. I was following his April 28th start against Kansas City on mlb.com. Weaver proceeded to open by allowing four straight singles. Then he allowed a double. This was not unexpected as Weaver had been blazing 80 mph fastballs and 68 mph curveballs with 12 inches of break past the all powerful Royals lineup.
At about that time my parents called me. They were at the game and they wanted me to know how badly it was going. My mom held out her cell phone so I would have an easier time hearing the boos.
Weaver lasted 1/3 of an inning. And a run scored on the only out. It was a complete disaster. But strangely enough after going on the DL with a fake injury two weeks later, Weaver pieced it together. He was an above average pitcher the rest of the way and his performance on the year ended up being better than 3/5 of the Mariners starting rotation during the 2008 season.

Nick Johnson

I love Ken Griffey Jr., let me get that out of the way now. And I would love to see him in a Mariners uniform again. And I know he plans to go into the Hall of Fame as a Mariner. So should the Mariners sign Griffey, check or hold?*

*For those unfamiliar with a Field Artillery Fire Direction Center, check and hold are used when calculating firing data. Numbers will come up on the computer and if they match the manual computations the chart operator will say, "Check." If they do not he will say, "Hold." Wow, that was a nerdy and obscure reference.

That's one huge hold. That's because Nick Johnson is suddenly available after the Nationals signed Adam Dunn. Johnson has had issues with injuries (as in playing in 0 and 38 games the previous 2 seasons), but the M's have an open DH spot. If he doesn't have to play the field his chances of staying healthy are going to improve a lot. He also wouldn't have to platoon, like Griffey would.
As much as I love Griffey, his skills have declined across the board. His line last year of .249/.353/.424 wasn't that much better than average and he doesn't play defense. He would also have to sit against lefthanders since his line against them was a Sexsonian .202/.299/.350. Nick Jonhson's career line is .269/.396/.456 and he has virtually no platoon split. The M's should only sign Griffey if a deal for Johnson or maybe even Nick Swisher doesn't work out. However, I still want Griffey on the Mariners next year a lot more than I want Garret Anderson.

All-Seattle Area Team

Maybe it was boredom, or wanting to wait before writing anything about A-Rod, but I've come up with a team made up of major leaguers from the Seattle-Everett-Tacoma area and its surrounding suburbs. My criterea was pretty simple, be born in the area, graduate from an area high school, or play for the University of Washington. Some of these players are barely major leaguers, and yes, there isn't an extraordinary amount of big league talent from the area.

P Tim Lincecum (born in Bellevue, graduate of Liberty HS, played at UW)
P Jon Lester (Tacoma, Bellarmine Prep)
P Kyle Kendrick (Mount Vernon HS)
P Adam Eaton (Seattle, Snohomish HS)
P Dana Eveland (Olympia)
RP Andy Sisco (Eastlake HS)
RP Mark Hendrickson (Mount Vernon)
RP Sean White (UW)
RP Jason Hammel (South Kitsap HS)
C Mike Redmond (Seattle)
1B Lyle Overbay (Centralia)
2B Willie Bloomquist (Bremerton, South Kitsap HS)
3B Matt Tuiasosopo (Bellevue, Woodinville HS)
SS Brent Lillibridge (Everett, Jackson HS, UW)
LF Travis Snider (Kirkland, Jackson HS)
CF Grady Sizemore (Seattle, Cascade HS)
RF Geoff Jenkins (Olympia)
DH Travis Ishikawa (Seattle, Federal Way HS)

An American Life

• Almost a year ago my Leadership and Change Management professor assigned us to write our own obituaries. It is a self actualization exercise and I had heard of it being done before. So naturally I wrote three.
• My favorite one was where I became the billionaire owner of the Seattle Mariners. My future self also wrote a self congratulatory autobiography titled An American Life. I was deliberately vague about how I made my money, mainly because I don't have the slightest idea how I could become a billionaire. But I did give my future military self a Combat Action Badge, Purple Heart, and Ranger Tab. And I was stationed in Hawaii.
• I also had the Mariners win the World Series four times in my vision of the future.
• The second and third versions had me dying in Iraq and becoming a corporate drone respectively.
• I got the idea to write about this again from the Seinfeld episode where Elaine buys Kramer's life story in order to ghostwrite her autobiography of J. Peterman.
• Joe Posnanski wrote an article imagining what would have happened if the Kansas City Royals had gotten every pick of the 1999 draft right. His point was that one draft can change a franchise. I think of the Mariners getting Ken Griffey Jr. with the number one pick of the 1988 draft. Anyway his other point was that you don't even have to get every pick of the draft right, one can work just fine. His other apparent purpose was to depress Royals fans on their decision to pass (many times) on a junior college third baseman who had destroyed pitching in high school and college in Kansas City. It was Albert Pujols.
• The "perfect draft" is a good concept for a future post, I think I'll steal it. Keep posted.