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By The Numbers: After historically bad season, can Mariners get much worse?

Greg Jayne: By the Numbers

By Greg Jayne, Columbian Opinion Page Editor
Published: April 30, 2011, 12:00am

They can’t be worse, can they?

The Mariners last season made a case for having the worst offense in major-league history. Or maybe just the worst in generations.

Either way, the bottom line was this: They were beyond awful. Seattle scored 513 runs in 2010, while the next-worst American League team scored 613. Yes, Seattle was 100 runs worse than awful.

But what about this year? Have the Mariners improved their lineup? Have they improved enough to get the team anywhere near .500, short of having Felix Hernandez or Michael Pineda pitch every day?

Let’s take a look:

Historically bad

First, we need a little context. We need to understand how woeful the Mariners’ offense was in 2010, in order to figure out how far they have to go.

Taking the number of runs a team scores, adjusting it for the home park, and comparing it to the league average, we can figure out how effective the lineup is. For example, Seattle scored 3.17 runs per game, which wouldn’t have been that bad if it were 1968.

But the conditions of the game have changed over the years, rendering 3.17 runs per game positively impotent.

True, Safeco Field favors pitchers. Last year, it reduced runs by about 10 percent when compared with the typical stadium. When we take that into account and compare the resulting number with the league-wide average of 4.45 runs per game, we come up with an Offensive Winning Percentage of .358 for the 2010 Mariners.

That means that if they had average pitching backed by average defense, the Mariners would win 36 percent of their games — a 58-104 record.

How bad is that? Over the past 50 years, since the major leagues first expanded in 1961, these are the teams with the worst OWP:

1981 Toronto Blue Jays .342

1969 San Diego Padres .346

2010 Seattle Mariners .358

1965 New York Mets .362

1998 Tampa Bay Devil Rays .362

1971 San Diego Padres .372

1983 Seattle Mariners .373

1964 Houston Colt .45’s .374

2002 Detroit Tigers .375

1963 Houston Colt .45’s .375

By this measure, only the Blue Jays (playing a 106-game schedule in a strike year), and the Padres (an expansion team in its first season) were worse. By any measure, Seattle’s offense was putrid.

The Mariners’ catchers combined to hit .201 with a .263 on-base percentage. The first basemen hit .227. The third basemen hit .226 with a .259 OBP, and the shortstops weren’t any better. The left fielders hit .218. Among the regulars, only Ichiro Suzuki was an above-average offensive player, while everybody else would have had trouble making the Bad News Bears.

What now?

There have been changes this year, which might be akin to rearranging the deck chairs on The Titanic.

• Miguel Olivo, who has a .283 career OBP, was brought in to play catcher.

• Justin Smoak, a 24-year-old in his first full season, takes over at first base.

• Brendan Ryan, who has a career slugging percentage of .339, moves into the lineup at shortstop, essentially replacing Jose Lopez as other players were moved around.

• Michael Saunders, a career .216 hitter, is playing center field every day while Franklin Gutierrez recovers from an injury.

• Jack Cust, who actually has been a good major-league hitter throughout his career, takes over at designated hitter. But he is 32 and has had old-player skills for several years now. He won’t age well.

The Runs Created formula, developed by Bill James, tells us how many runs a player contributes to his team’s offense. If we divide by the number of outs a player uses and multiply by 27, we can figure out how many runs an entire lineup of that player would score per game.

Here are the Runs Created Per Game the Mariners got from each position last season, along with the career RCPG for this year’s lineup:

2010 2011 Player Career

C 2.29 Miguel Olivo 3.93

1B 3.44 Justin Smoak 4.72

2B 3.57 Jack Wilson 3.91

SS 2.68 Brendan Ryan 3.75

3B 2.39 Chone Figgins 5.01

LF 4.34 Milton Bradley 5.81

CF 3.90 Michael Saunders 3.43

RF 5.88 Ichiro Suzuki 6.58

DH 2.86 Jack Cust 6.32

From this perspective, it appears there might be some improvement. Then again, Baseball Prospectus’ in-depth preseason analysis predicted the Mariners will score 507 runs this year. But they can’t be worse, can they?

Question or comment for By the Numbers? You can reach Greg Jayne, Sports editor of The Columbian, at 360-735-4531, or by e-mail at greg.jayne@columbian.com. To read his blog, go to columbian.com/weblogs/GregJayne

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