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All's well that ends well: The widely used baseball term "sabermetrics" will not be trademarked, and will instead remain in the public domain. The m...

I apologize for the lateness of this week's Mendozas, but I felt sort of hung-over this morning. Which was odd, since I barely watched -- and hardly d...

Remember a couple of Julys ago, when the Pirates traded a couple of veterans to the Yankees and got four prospects in return? The plum was Jose Tabata...

As usual, Cameron's dead right: When people talk about teams that have had good offseasons, the usual names that come up are the Seattle Mariners, t...

Nick Piecoro reports the Diamondbacks and Mark Reynolds might be working on a contract extension, and Piecoro comes up with some reasonable numbers: ...

Today's links were manufactured in a facility that also processes journalism ... * What's the difference between a great start and a lousy start? I...

Over at Nick's Twins Blog, Nick isn't shy about his affection for Orlando Hudson, perhaps the best player who's still looking for a job and a salary c...

So why are the Giants and Tim Lincecum so far apart? Andrew Baggarly thinks it's about more than trying to save a few (million) bucks: We all kno...

Is Justin Verlander worth $80 million over five years? I'll leave that question to my intellectual betters, but this bit caught my eye: Detroit's de...

In his long tenure as the Tigers' general manager, Dave Dombrowski hasn't once taken a player to arbitration. As Bob Ballard writes, this might not be...

So we don't have to, Wezen-Ball's Larry Granillo ranks baseball's best statues, by ballpark. Larry says the Pirates have the best statues, and that's ...

Craig Calcaterra is amused by a report that Manny Ramirez considered opting out of his $20 million deal this season with the Dodgers: Ramirez...

Ah, another welcome sign of a spring: via Joel Sherman, we revisit the 2010 roles of the Yankees' talented-but-ill-defined young pitchers. It was im...

Re: Lost - Just when I thought I was out ... they pull me back in! * Beyond the Boxscore presents the top four finishers for its sabermetric writin...

From the middle of The Common Man's ode to the manly awesomeness of Frank Howard (one of my favorite players who I never actually saw): In fact, it ...

There are a few teams looking for a right-handed bat off the bench and the Baltimore Orioles may be the team that helps fill that need for one of them. MASN hypothesizes that backup first and third baseman Ty Wigginton(notes) may get moved out of Baltimore before Opening Day.

He apparently had an awesome spring training last year and never quite lived up to it for the rest of the season, going .273 with 11 dingers and 41 RBIs. The team doesn't really have much use for the 32-year-old now that it's signed Miguel Tejada(notes) and Garrett Atkins(notes).
Wigginton is due to make $3.5 million this year.

Follow Yahoo! Sports Rumors on Twitter at @markjmill.

A look at the best players on the worst teams of the past 10 years

Click the title to read more.

Read more great baseball stuff at The Hardball Times.

I tried really hard to just let this Steve Kelley “apology to Erik Bedard” go. But, I can’t. I can’t just let this sit there. So, here we go.

Last week, a few readers — well actually a lot of readers suggested, demanded really — that certain sportswriters, namely me, owed Mariners pitcher Erik Bedard an apology.

They’re right.

Awesome. You totally do. Glad to hear that you figured that out.

After all, we (and by we, I mean I) have spent a lot of the past two years lamenting the trade that sent a large chunk of the Mariners’ future to Baltimore for a pitcher we (and, by we, I mean former general manager Bill Bavasi) expected to be the ace of the staff as the Mariners challenged for an American League West title.

Of course, that never happened.

Bedard rarely was healthy. He made only 30 starts in two seasons. He ran too many deep counts, which meant the bullpen usually had to get up by the fifth or sixth inning and he was as exciting to watch as your Uncle Bob on the putting green.

Not only that, but he might have been the most media-unfriendly Mariner since, I don’t know, Phil Bradley?

It was as if he were allergic to reporters. He answered questions in a monotone, often snickered at the questions we asked and never let us see what was behind his icy eyes.

It was that way from his first spring-training start in 2008 in Scottsdale, when he got hit hard by the San Francisco Giants and dismissed every question he was asked.

I’m sorry, didn’t you say that you owed Bedard an apology? Does “recounting everything I hate about a person” qualify as an apology to you? Why are you repeating the same tired insults you’ve been hurling at him for two years now? Wasn’t the point of this piece to admit that you were wrong, not to try to defend your wrongness?

His personality (or lack of one) should have nothing to do with the way we covered him, but human nature being what it is, Bedard created an adversarial relationship which affected the way we (I) wrote about him.

Hey, good, we’re back on track here, even though you apparently felt the need to take another swipe at the man you’re attempting to apologize to. But at least you’re admitting that you let personal bias get in the way of whatever journalistic ethics you’re attempting to hold onto. That’s a good first step. Maybe it will get better from here…

Of course, he never made it easy on himself. He asked out of his first homecoming start in Baltimore, because of an injury and he never gave the impression — on the mound, or in the clubhouse — that he had that Cliff Lee give-me-the-ball-and-I’ll-throw-200-pitches-if-that’s-what-it-takes mentality.

He wasn’t a gamer like CC Sabathia. He wasn’t an Alpha Dog like Curt Schilling. He couldn’t be counted on every fifth day from April to September. That was the impression.

And we’re right back to listing the reasons you hate the guy. This is now two attempts to apologize, both of which times you’ve followed an apologetic lead in with shots at Bedard. You suck at this whole apologizing thing.

Last season, it always seemed as if Bedard was afraid to throw hard. His fastball was topping out in the 80s. His control was off.

Erik Bedard’s average fastball in 2008: 90.9 MPH. Erik Bedard’s average fastball in 2009: 91.5 MPH, exactly the same as it was in 2007, when he dominated hitters in Baltimore. You also suck at fact checking, apparently.

There were those of us (me) who thought he was a malingerer. That he didn’t have the heart to pitch in the heat of a pennant race. That he didn’t much like the game.

I’m not sure if you realize this or not, but you’re still insinuating that there’s some truth to this stupidity by repeating it yet again.

Now we know he was hurt. He was trying to pitch with a torn labrum, which is a little like a miler trying to run with a broken ankle.

You should have led with this, and then just stopped writing.

This was, quite possibly, the worst apology in the history of the world. You, Steve Kelley, managed to take an article where the premise was that you were wrong about Erik Bedard, and turn it into a defense of your own stupidity. You now need to apologize for your apology.

Or just go away. We’d settle for that, too.

-- This post came from: U.S.S. Mariner, and is copyright by the authors. This RSS feed is intended for the personal use of readers and not, for instance, spam blogs.

Okay, I Have To Do It

Over the 15 months or so, we have certainly said our fair share of positive things about Jack Zduriencik and the job he’s done since taking over as the M’s GM. We all watched the franchise turnaround first hand, and it was amazing to see how quickly the team was able to get back on track. The turnaround was a great story.

That great story has now been written about, oh, everywhere. A google search for “Jack Zduriencik” + “turnaround” returns 2,900 hits. Name a national outlet, and they’ve done a feature on Jack Z recently. The off-season moves have people gushing. Pretty much every move the team makes is well received, both locally and nationally. The team is being held up as the poster boys of stats and scouts converging, and how well a team can be run when they listen to both sides.

I’m not here to say any of it is wrong. I am here to say that it may be time to move onto another subject of discussion, though, because I’m beginning to get the sense that it’s all getting to be a bit much for non-Mariner fans. All the stories, all the raves, all the hype… it’s starting to feed a backlash, and perhaps, setting the club up as an unnecessary litmus test for the current sabermetric beliefs.

As much as we like what the M’s have done in the last year and a half, there’s still a really good chance that this team is not going to make the playoffs. There are a lot of things that could go wrong with this team. Felix could get hurt. Lee could regress. Bradley could get injured/suspended/arrested. Wilson could pull something, and Jack Hannahan would be the team’s starting shortstop. Aardsma could forget how to throw strikes again. Kotchman could continue to not live up to his talent level. Bedard’s rehab could go badly.

Some of those things will happen. In a worst case scenario, almost all of them could happen at the same time. And if those downsides all happen to occur at the same time, this team could suck. They could win 70 games. The whole thing could fall apart.

It’s not likely, but it’s possible. Baseball’s weird. Good teams have bad years. “The best laid plans” is only a cliche because of how often well laid plans go awry.

I’d rather not have that kind of result lead to a larger, anti-stathead movement, where all the hard work done by so many to better understand the game is devalued because the 2010 Mariners were made the proxy for everything that we stand for. We think they’ve made a lot of good moves. We like this team. We think they have a chance to contend. But they might not, so in the way we talk about the franchise, let’s leave some room for the fact that the 2010 Mariners could finish in last place.

The M’s are a lot of things, but they’re not a litmus test for sabermetric theory. We’ve made the point clear that we’re extremely happy with how the team is being run, and I think the world has gotten the message. So, let’s lay off for a while, eh?

-- This post came from: U.S.S. Mariner, and is copyright by the authors. This RSS feed is intended for the personal use of readers and not, for instance, spam blogs.

Calling For A Moratorium

Previously, I looked at the pitchers with the biggest increases in fastball speed this past season. The list of the top 20 was dominated by relief pitchers, which is not a huge surprise given how volatile relief pitchers tend to be and since they tend to throw harder, on average, than starters, those fluctuations can cause bigger shifts in absolute speed.

Looking at the list from the other end, however – that is, from the pitchers that lost the most speed on average on their fastballs – produces more starters. Whether because starters will get more innings even when injured, a usual byproduct of diminished fastball speed, or some other cause is open for speculation, but the results are definitely interesting.

As promised, a list of the biggest drops in fastball speed from 2009 to 2008. A minimum of 50 innings pitched in each season was needed to qualify.

Joba Chamberlain, -2.5
Ervin Santana, -2.1
Ross Ohlendorf, -2
Jared Burton, -1.7
Tim Lincecum, -1.7
Daniel Cabrera, -1.7
Manny Delcarmen, -1.6
Chan Ho Park, -1.6
Brian Fuentes, -1.6
Jeremy Sowers, -1.5
Lance Cormier, -1.4
Chris Young, -1.4
Grant Balfour, -1.3
Mariano Rivera, -1.3
Tim Redding, -1.3
Oliver Perez, -1.2
Aaron Cook, -1.2
Kevin Gregg, -1.2
Kyle McClellan, -1.1
Aaron Heilman, -1

Obviously, the decrease in fastball speed meant little to Tim Lincecum as he went on to repeat his NL Cy Young. Ervin Santana’s recovery from injury in 2009 was far from 100% and how his fastball shows up in 2010 could have a major impact on the close AL West race. The Yankees might be starting to worry about the future ceiling of Joba Chamberlain and the Mets, well, the Mets should have been worried about Oliver Perez long before they inked him to that ridiculous extension.