We’re finally here! The moment you’ve been waiting for is finally here. All that time you probably spent lethargically reading through 6-20 has paid off, as the end is near! Here they are, my top 5 Seattle Mariners prospects for 2010.
#5 – Matt Tuiasosopo
Matt Tuiasosopo, “Tui”, is a 23 year old right handed infielder, and the Mariners’ third round pick in the 2004 amateur draft. First off, Tui gets big points for being basically major league ready. He’s been in the system for quite awhile now, and if the team currently had a spot for him, he’d be ready to [...]

[Griffin's Note]: Might as well take this opportunity to announce that Nathan is now officially a permanent contributor to SoDo Mojo. We’re really happy with what we’ve seen from him so far, and look forward to many more excellent contributions. Congratulations!
Smell that? Smell it? That, my friends, that’s baseball. It’s waiting just ’round the bend. A mere seven more days until the first Mariners game of the Cactus League. Woo!
So you know what that means, right? A time to build excitement for the upcoming season? To stay up too late unable to resist studying small spring training sample sizes while [...]

Some happy news coming out of Arizona today, as the word from Indians manager Manny Acta is that Russell Branyan “will get the majority of the playing time (at first base)”. This isn’t necessarily a big surprise, but it’s really nice to hear, as myself, and I’m sure a lot of you, really grew to like Russell over the course of 2009. And why shouldn’t we? He came in at a very low price and hit 31 home runs. At the beginning of this off season, most of us, myself included, really anticipated Branyan returning to the M’s for at [...]

Alright, this top 20 prospects series is taking way too long, and at this rate I won’t be done till May. So, I’m just going to shorten this up by doing a short blurb about each in groups of 5. Sure, this would have made way more sense if I had done it for 10-20 instead of 1-10, but what’s done is done. Let’s get a move on.

This post is more of a reference or an index than a real, honest-to-gosh sabermetrics-analyzing post.
For those of you who aren’t sure what statistics to use when evaluating a player, look no further than this post.  Feel free to disagree, but I believe that these are categorized correctly.
Good stats are those that measure a player’s actual talent or skill level in a certain area.  Bad stats don’t account for luck or other such factors that get in the way of understanding a player’s true underlying skills and ability.
Good stats – use these to evaluate how good or bad a baseball [...]

Dave Cameron was on “GM’s Corner” hosted by Jim Bowden, and LL posted it today. I don’t really know how to explain it… just go watch it, several times…
HERE! HERE! HERE! HERE! HERE! HERE!  HERE! HERE! HERE!  HERE! HERE! HERE! HERE!  HERE!

This is a series in which I’ll be going over my personal top 20 Seattle Mariners 2010 Prospects. As you can see, I’ll be counting them down, starting at 20, and I’ll try to do them, well, whenever I get the chance. Keep in mind that almost all of these are completely debatable, and reflect only my personal opinions.
Maikel Cleto is a 20 year old, right handed pitcher out of the Dominican Republic. The Mariners acquired him from the Mets at the end of 2008, as a part of the super-deal that brought Franklin Gutierrez to Seattle and sent [...]

These days we know that defensive evaluation is as inexact a metric there is. Lately there’s been a trend to quantify defensive performance by putting it within a range. Griffin did just that with the UZR projections in his (excellent) post below. (Seriously. Go read it.)  For example: he puts the A’s Ryan Sweeney’s UZR at 7 < X < 12 in right field.
This gives you a couple pieces of important information.
1) Ryan Sweeney is good defensively.
2) His downside is better than average.
3) His upside is really good.
4) We don’t know what his defense gonna be like exactly but it’s [...]

Well, here we are. The offseason is winding down, Spring Training is upon us, and the majority of baseball teams are set and ready to roll. Back in October, it was really anyone’s guess how this division was going to end up looking – I for one certainly didn’t expect to be looking at four realistic contenders here in February, but now that appears to be the case. With very few moves left to be made, it’s now time to take a detailed look at how the AL West has formed.
All WAR projections are a mix of CHONE and my [...]

I’ll start off by making a very long and very debated story short.  Baseball players are human beings.  Team chemistry exists.  However, team chemistry does not appear to have a quantifiable or substantial effect on the overall performance of a baseball team.  Thus, to disregard clubhouse chemistry is not to regard baseball players as wooden pieces on a chess board; rather, to do so is the result of a logical thought process based on lots and lots of statistical and non-statistical research.
However, the value of a baseball player’s character is incredibly important in one specific part of the game — [...]