Jack Zduriencik had reason for optimism heading into the 2009-2010 Major League Baseball season. His team had come off an impressive 85-win campaign the previous season, and after having traded for Cliff Lee (in this humble blogger's opinion a top-5 pitcher) and signing Chone Figgins away from a division rival, why not be optimistic?
 |
| Yeahhh.... About that.... |
In life, not everything works out the way you want it to. Sometimes you go into a store only hoping to spend 10 dollars, but you end up spending 20. With the 2009-2010 Mariners, they went in only wanting to spend 10 dollars, but ended up going into such deep debt with a loan shark that they ended up floating at the bottom of the Puget Sound with two broken legs encased in concrete.
Allow me to set the mood here.
In the 2009-2010 Season, the Mariners were totally, consistently, inarguably, unabashedly (and historically!) terrible at offense. Allow me to do my best stutter impression. They placed last (30/30) in Batting Average, .236, last (30/30) in Slugging Percentage, .339, last in On Base Percentage, .298, had the fewest runs, 513, fewest hits, 1274, fewest doubles, 227, fewest triples, 16, fewest Home Runs, 101, and, surprise!, had the fewest RBI's, 485. In total, they were so bad, I couldn't even count the number of games where Felix Hernandez would come out during the 7th nursing a 1-0 lead, drape a towel over his head, and contract his entire body in anticipation of the sound of the other teams bat hitting ball.
CRACK. *Felix Hernandez rips towel off his head, jumps up, leans over rails, and affirms that other team just scored two runs off [hapless reliever X]* .... *Felix thinks about how C.C. Sabathia is getting over 7 runs worth of run-support per game in New York*......*Felix re-drapes towel and cries*
 |
| Getting lonely, King? |
And that's what makes this year, and this Cy Young award winners season, particularly frustrating.
In other areas of the game, the M's showed life.
They had a top-ten team ERA of 3.93, a 21st ranked defense by Fielding Percentage (.982) but 10th ranked by UZR (15..8).Heck, they had 2 gold glove winning outfielders (ichiro and guti) to boot.
If they could have gotten some hitting from the get-go (only Ichiro produced this season, per usual) and justified holding onto Cliff (perhaps for a dream contract re-extension run this summer!?!?), they could have made a run at the division. Instead, we crapped the bed, and ended up trading Cliff within the division (practically gift wrapping the world series berth for the Rangers).
 |
| Wipe that smirk off your face, you never even averaged .280 for us |
Which brings us to Adrian Fucking Beltre. I really hate that guy. For years he was our ace defensive third baseman, AKA the "hot corner". Before he came to us, he was also (at least for a short while) a monster offensive player. He wasn't that for us. In 5 years, his batting averages were .255, .268, .276, .266 and .265 with pedestrian slugging percentages and a passable home run rate. We let him go before the 09-10 season because we signed Chone Figgins (only moderately productive, clearly on the downside of his career) away from the Angels. Then, we found out Chone couldn't play third base so we moved him to second and slotted Jose FATpez (er, Lopez) into third base.
Boy that turned out well.
And after quietly signing with the Bahhhhstan Red Sox, check out the numbers Adrian Fucking Beltre (AFB for short) put up:
Beltre
Avg .321
Slg .553
Ops .919
102 RBI
28 HR
189 H
84 R
40 BB
Adrian Fucking Beltre. Why couldn't you have put up those offensive numbers for the half-decade you played for us?
There is a special place in hell reserved just for you.
You crushed my dreams of years of King Felix/Cliff Lee, anchored by great defense and the hitting prowesses of Dustin Ackley, a 369 (or whatever) year old Ichiro, and Franklin "Death to Flying Things" Gutierrez.
You crushed them, you bastard.
...
 |
| Thissss fuckin' guyyyy |
...
No comments:
Post a Comment