Mariner Minors: 12/11/2005

Mariner Minors

Friday, December 16, 2005

Even More on the Dominican Summer League...

Slow news periods are nice, aren't they?

This time it's coming from a three-part series in the Denver Post, which is sort of interesting from the "new organization trying to establish itself" perspective. Without many Latin American players on their roster, the incentive to sign is not great, so how did they sign their top prospect down there? One of his older brothers had played in their system years earlier, and I guess that's how you have to do it sometimes. Before Freddy Garcia, our Venezuelan scouting wasn't particularly strong, but his acquisition helped bring Felix aboard, and Felix, in turn, is bringing others now. Beltre and Soriano could eventually bring us greater returns in our Dominican scouting, but, as one of the people interviewed put it, it's a tough thing to get into.

Speaking of player acquisitions, is it just me, or has this been a particularly slow international signing period? Not just with the M's, but all around baseball. I haven't heard about a new player signing out of Australia since the end of August, and it seems just as slow on other fronts.

posted by Jay Y. @ 2:51 PM

Thursday, December 15, 2005

M's acquire Luis E. Gonzalez from the Rockies

Title pretty much says it all, official release here. I heard that this was supposed to be an extension of the Torrealba trade, but the release says nothing of the sort.

He throws in the low-90s and his secondary stuff is pretty inconsistant, but I'll take a young lefty who can throw hard but still needs some work over an older guy of a similar description who may never get there.

To make room on the roster, RHP Cha Seung Baek was designated. There's not much to say about him other than he's never regained his lost velocity post-Tommy John and he seems to be on a downward trend since coming back, which is just ugly.

posted by Jay Y. @ 12:36 PM

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

This 'n' That

It's been a slow period as far as news goes, so I'm going to take this opportunity to make a brief "State of the Blog" address to answer a few questions that have been floating around.

Like, for example, "where are you and why haven't the next set of affiliate recaps coming in?" The initial part of the question is too difficult to nail down (suffice to say, all over the place), but the good news is that things will be calming down a bit after tomorrow, which means that I'll have more time to sit around and get these things together. Not a great deal of time, mind you, given the holidays and other factors, but enough to where I can probably finish off the pitcher and two hitters I haven't written up yet for San Antonio and send that along. G's started working on his end of the Tacoma recaps, as of last week sometime, and that will help get things finalized a bit quicker.

The second question I've been getting off and on is whether or not I'm going to be doing the stats wrap like I've done in previous seasons. Initially, my intention was that the affiliate recaps would be done in lieu of the stats wrap, and the reasoning behind that was that I felt the stats were occassionally a bit too abstract and there was very little feedback on them until I got to synthesizing the info and filling in the blanks with scouting reports. The other reason this wasn't on my list as a Priority, was because Jeff Sullivan, who you should be reading anyway at Lookout Landing, already compiled some neat spreadsheets on minor league hitters and minor league pitchers for those of you who have Excel on your computers (I do not). He also went into cFIP as a means of looking at performances that aren't weighted so heavily on defense, which was exceptionally cool. Baseball America also did their part in contributing to my laziness by hooking up the pitchers part of their organizational stats (link on the right) with not only ground-fly ratios, but complete batting lines against, which is something I wouldn't have dreamed of getting without the help of inside sources.
If I have some extra time after I complile the last of the San Antonio write-up, I'll see if I can get some Runs Created, RC/27, and SECA going for the hitters (I no longer have access to EQA) and do some minor BB/K and WHIP stuff for the pitchers.

Of course, that means I have to re-learn how to rig some tables using HTML, which brings me around to the third major point regarding the mechanics of the blog. Oddly enough, I can't seem to go back more than either 300 or 500 entries and see how I structured the HTML of last year's stats wrap, which is one of the things that's been bugging me about Blogger (yes, I could convert that page of the archives to .txt, but do I want to?). Another thing would be that, around the time Blogger started instituting a premium form of their services, which included a feature that made the blog RRS friendly, they did something in the code the disabled my rigged RRS feed, which no longer reaches either Sportsblogs or the recently created MojoBot. If I can work my way around both those problems, then things will go on as usual, if not a little better, but in the event the code is to ornery to be dealt with in any sensible matter, I may be forced to export the archives (somehow), switch to WordPress (somehow), get a new design (somehow), and host the site elsewhere (somehow). All would be sound long-term investments, but there are other more pressing monetary issues that I have on my mind, and I'd like to get those resolved before I start factoring all that into my regular expenses.

And that's the gist of it.

posted by Jay Y. @ 5:03 PM

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Winter Leagues Stats Update (12/11/05):

Venezuelan Winter League:
RHP Nibaldo Acosta: 0-1, 6.75 ERA in 5.1 IP, 4 runs (4 ER), 4 hits, 0/6 K/BB
RHP Yorman Bazardo: 0-0, 1.93 ERA in 23.1 IP, 5 runs (5 ER), 15 hits (HR), 21/10 K/BB
OF T.J. Bohn: .272/.366/.354 in 158 at-bats, 10 2B, HR, 17 runs, 29 RBI, 23/46 BB/K
SS Asdrubal Cabrera: .219/.342/.281 in 32 at-bats, 2 2B, 4 runs, RBI, 6/6 BB/K
RHP Marcos Carvajal: 0-2, 5.40 ERA in 11.2 IP, 10 runs (7 ER), 9 hits (HR), 10/8 K/BB
RHP Renee Cortez: 0-2, 4.79 ERA in 20.2 IP, 11 runs (11 ER), 20 hits (HR), 21/9 K/BB
RHP Rich Dorman: 3-2, 2.88 ERA in 40.2 IP, 18 runs (13 ER), 43 hits (HR), 55/27 K/BB
LHP Jose Escalona: 0-0, 4.50 ERA in 4.0 IP, 6 hits, 2 runs (2 ER), 1/2 K/BB
RHP Emiliano Fruto: 3-1, 1.29 ERA in 21.0 IP, 10 saves, 4 runs (3 ER), 17 hits (HR), 23/10 K/BB
IF Jesus Guzman: .277/.336/.415 in 94 at-bats, 4 2B, 3 HR, 13 runs, 15 RBI, 9/18 BB/K
RHP Jeff Heaverlo: 0-3, 6.11 ERA in 17.2 IP, 17 runs (12 ER), 21 hits (4 HR), 14/10 K/BB
LHP Cesar Jimenez: 2-3, 2.57 ERA in 49.0 IP, 17 runs (14 ER), 43 hits, 33/20 K/BB
LHP Chris Key: 0-0, 6.48 ERA in 8.1 IP, 7 runs (6 ER), 12 hits (2 HR), 5/3 K/BB
IF Jose Lopez: .263/.360/.337 in 95 at-bats, 4 2B, HR, 8 runs, 10 RBI, 13/15 BB/K
IF Oswaldo Navarro: .265/.286/.382 in 34 at-bats, 4 2B, 7 runs, 1 RBI, 1/3 BB/K
C Luis Oliveros: .250/.250/.250 in 8 at-bats, RBI, 0/1 BB/K
LHP Ryan Rowland-Smith: 0-0, 4.05 ERA in 6.2 IP, 3 runs (3 ER), 7 hits, 2/3 K/BB

Goodbye Torrealba, hello Carvajal. Otherwise, the list has changed little. They had their all-star break this past week.

Dominican Winter League:
RHP Julio Mateo: 0-1, 7.71 ERA in 7.0 IP, 2 saves, 6 runs (6 ER), 8 hits, 5/3 K/BB
RHP Rafael Soriano: 1-0, 6.58 ERA in 13.2 IP, 14 runs (10 ER), 28 hits, 8/5 K/BB

Soriano was apparently pitching in the low-90s. Nothing bad in the delivery, but no juice in the arm. He was shut down this week, I don't know if that'll continue for the rest of the season or not. Mateo got a few more innings in, managing to not suck in that span.

Puerto Rican Winter League:

RHP Sean Green: 0-0, 4.00 ERA in 18.0 IP, 11 runs (8 ER), 22 hits, 14/7 K/BB
2B Erick Monzon: .053/.143/.053 in 19 at-bats, 1 run, 2/3 BB/K
C Rene Rivera: .224/.286/.224 in 58 at-bats, 4 runs, 4 RBI, 3/15 BB/K

Numbers accurate as of Friday. Rivera seems to be improving a bit. Monzon is still terrible, but he scored a run this week. Green gave up a run in three innings.

posted by Jay Y. @ 11:09 AM