Friday, April 02, 2004
UNDER FOUR DAYS AWAY
Just a few things to say tonight, I think...
P-I notebook -- Raul Ibanez is hitting out of his mind in spring training, Scott Spiezio's status is up in air, they'll put Willie Bloomquist at third (cue up the obligatory brown-nosing Bremerton Sun article to come), Ron Villone's not going anywhere because he has a roster spot and they've already overpaid him, and there's a hilarious anecdote of Dave Niehaus doing broadcasts of simulated games during the 1983 strike, where the numbers cranked out by a professor's computer put the Mariners on a long losing streak and Niehaus had none of that.
P-I AL rankings -- First off, I don't believe the Mariners are anywhere close to being fourth-best in the AL. Maybe a notch or two lower. On this list, if they're better than Oakland at all, they're definitely not three slots better. But if you take the rankings at face value, everything turns out as expected. The Yankees are the top-ranking AL East team, so they'd be in the playoffs. The Royals are the top-ranked AL Central team. The Angels are the top-ranked AL West team. The top-ranked non-division winner? That's the Boston Red Sox, your Wild Card team, according to your Seattle P-I. Yes, this ranking list taken at face value basically says the Mariners as they stand right now are not making the playoffs. I guess I'm mildly surprised because it seemed like there was an air of optimism going through the nightly articles lately. Do I have evidence of this? No, I'm just going with my gut this time; just a reaction to all this optimistic Ibanez talk. Wake me up when he goes 11-for-11 during the season.
The P-I Mariner writing staff puts up their division rankings and playoff predictions. The first thing that is apparent is that Jim Moore is on crack, so we'll just ignore him (Steve Sandmeyer of KJR railed on him yesterday morning, claiming Moore writes about Amber Lancaster the SeaGal in almost every article...I say Amber and Jeff Cirillo account for 95% of his material, with the other 5% being references to his Cougarness). With the five writers together, they only choose two different winners for each division, and never more than that. For all the reminders of optimism I've been seeing in the articles lately, it seemed hilarious to me that Hickey and Andriesen, the day-to-day guys, both have Seattle finishing short of the playoffs. For the record, Art Thiel also has the Mariners coming up short. Moore, as I mentioned, is nuts, though John Levesque has the Mariners winning the division and getting beat in the playoffs before they could win the AL championship.
In a move that is making the Mariners officials scramble to revoke Steve Kelley's press pass (presuming he has one), this article is running in the Times today. I had the Lincoln/Griffey semi-feud in the back of my mind the whole time when these Griffey rumors were circulating, fueling my thoughts that Griffey wasn't coming back. Also fueling my thoughts -- multiple offseasons of rumors and nothing actually happening.
Anyway, the Kelley article is worth it just for this one quote...
There is no room on Lincoln's Mariners for dissent. Freedom of speech is a concept for the Constitution, not the clubhouse.
Game. Set. Match. He could have just stopped the article right there and I would have been fine with it. Of course, it would have been well under Kelley's required wordage, I'm sure, and the article's structure would have seen an abrupt end, but I wouldn't have objected.
Is ther really anyone out there who believes that the Mariners really traded away Jeff Nelson for Armando Benitez because they liked the fact that Benitez could close games and was "versatile"? Jeff Nelson was a guy who had the rings who'd been a champion many times over. Armando Benitez was a ringless headcase (with noted past incidents of unclutchitude) on a team where surely there didn't need to be any more headcases (Cirillo, Cameron, Garcia, Melvin). Benitez' most memorable pitch in his Mariner tenure -- the fastball he grooved to Rafael Palmeiro in this game last September. I still think to this day that Melvin should have left Franklin in to face Blalock, blablabla. It was one of those moments in sports where I knew -- I just KNEW -- what was going to happen next. Fastball in the wheelhouse, three-run bomb, tie game, Franklin gets screwed. I'm not sure if we knew by that point that Rhodes (only job was to get Blalock out, he couldn't do that, and was pulled) should have gone on the DL earlier in the season and that we were being witness to a gimpy Rhodes for most of the season.
...But enough with my incoherent rambling, I need some sleep.
P-I notebook -- Raul Ibanez is hitting out of his mind in spring training, Scott Spiezio's status is up in air, they'll put Willie Bloomquist at third (cue up the obligatory brown-nosing Bremerton Sun article to come), Ron Villone's not going anywhere because he has a roster spot and they've already overpaid him, and there's a hilarious anecdote of Dave Niehaus doing broadcasts of simulated games during the 1983 strike, where the numbers cranked out by a professor's computer put the Mariners on a long losing streak and Niehaus had none of that.
P-I AL rankings -- First off, I don't believe the Mariners are anywhere close to being fourth-best in the AL. Maybe a notch or two lower. On this list, if they're better than Oakland at all, they're definitely not three slots better. But if you take the rankings at face value, everything turns out as expected. The Yankees are the top-ranking AL East team, so they'd be in the playoffs. The Royals are the top-ranked AL Central team. The Angels are the top-ranked AL West team. The top-ranked non-division winner? That's the Boston Red Sox, your Wild Card team, according to your Seattle P-I. Yes, this ranking list taken at face value basically says the Mariners as they stand right now are not making the playoffs. I guess I'm mildly surprised because it seemed like there was an air of optimism going through the nightly articles lately. Do I have evidence of this? No, I'm just going with my gut this time; just a reaction to all this optimistic Ibanez talk. Wake me up when he goes 11-for-11 during the season.
The P-I Mariner writing staff puts up their division rankings and playoff predictions. The first thing that is apparent is that Jim Moore is on crack, so we'll just ignore him (Steve Sandmeyer of KJR railed on him yesterday morning, claiming Moore writes about Amber Lancaster the SeaGal in almost every article...I say Amber and Jeff Cirillo account for 95% of his material, with the other 5% being references to his Cougarness). With the five writers together, they only choose two different winners for each division, and never more than that. For all the reminders of optimism I've been seeing in the articles lately, it seemed hilarious to me that Hickey and Andriesen, the day-to-day guys, both have Seattle finishing short of the playoffs. For the record, Art Thiel also has the Mariners coming up short. Moore, as I mentioned, is nuts, though John Levesque has the Mariners winning the division and getting beat in the playoffs before they could win the AL championship.
In a move that is making the Mariners officials scramble to revoke Steve Kelley's press pass (presuming he has one), this article is running in the Times today. I had the Lincoln/Griffey semi-feud in the back of my mind the whole time when these Griffey rumors were circulating, fueling my thoughts that Griffey wasn't coming back. Also fueling my thoughts -- multiple offseasons of rumors and nothing actually happening.
Anyway, the Kelley article is worth it just for this one quote...
There is no room on Lincoln's Mariners for dissent. Freedom of speech is a concept for the Constitution, not the clubhouse.
Game. Set. Match. He could have just stopped the article right there and I would have been fine with it. Of course, it would have been well under Kelley's required wordage, I'm sure, and the article's structure would have seen an abrupt end, but I wouldn't have objected.
Is ther really anyone out there who believes that the Mariners really traded away Jeff Nelson for Armando Benitez because they liked the fact that Benitez could close games and was "versatile"? Jeff Nelson was a guy who had the rings who'd been a champion many times over. Armando Benitez was a ringless headcase (with noted past incidents of unclutchitude) on a team where surely there didn't need to be any more headcases (Cirillo, Cameron, Garcia, Melvin). Benitez' most memorable pitch in his Mariner tenure -- the fastball he grooved to Rafael Palmeiro in this game last September. I still think to this day that Melvin should have left Franklin in to face Blalock, blablabla. It was one of those moments in sports where I knew -- I just KNEW -- what was going to happen next. Fastball in the wheelhouse, three-run bomb, tie game, Franklin gets screwed. I'm not sure if we knew by that point that Rhodes (only job was to get Blalock out, he couldn't do that, and was pulled) should have gone on the DL earlier in the season and that we were being witness to a gimpy Rhodes for most of the season.
...But enough with my incoherent rambling, I need some sleep.
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