Mariners 2011 All-Joy-Team

So of course Carson Cistulli is doing his 2011 Team Joy Squad over at Fangraphs and I really like this idea. I mean the whole point of holding a blog is to scream and shout about the undervalued and disenfranchised players in major league baseball, right? Okay maybe not entirely. But, it’s one of my favorite parts.

Anyways, I like the whole point of the series and yesterday afternoon upon completion of the “Top-100 watchlist” I started playing around with the idea of an “Team Joy Squad” Mariners style type of post.

I mean how many times do we have to hear about the epic tales of Bryan LaHair and Bucky Jacobsen how they could have been and blah, blah, blah.

Well…this gives us an opportunity to kind of throw guys out there that have had successful careers that the scout in us would normally say there is A) no way he makes the major leagues B)  is successful in the major leagues or C) has a career as anymore than a utility/platoon player.

So basically I’m stealing the idea from Carson and recrafting into something that I feel (On a weird FYI type of note. My family nick name is Carson. It’s what all my sister-in-laws call me. Weird true story.) I enjoy his (i.e. Carson) posts very much and so it’s not that I think I can do it better but instead kind of putting a specific organizational twist on it.

So here is the basic idea in encapsulated form per Cistulli

"What made Señor [Colby] Lewis so interesting last year was that there were few expectations about what he’d do in 2010 and yet, given some optimistic projections and his crazy Japanese numbers, there were reasons to think that he might be superexcellentamazing. The difference between what was expected of him and what was possible — even likely — from him was substantial."

This is where I put my own spin on it.  Obviously the Mariners have a pretty extensive blogsphere and our system isn’t so vast where there are a lot of guys that get over looked. But there are a few and everyone has that one guy that they really like and hope they can grow and break out and be the guy that we envision them to be.

The guys I’ve selected will be guys with some type of statistical accomplishment and combined with a vague age equivilient to their respective league/level. It’s not a perfect system and again there will be people that want one guy over another. That’s fair. As I said everyone has their one guy that

I’m doing it as a series simply because I want to highlight each of the guys I list. They deserve some type of  justice and it’s kind of hard to do that when you want to write a whole blog post about 25 guys. Plus there are a lot of fans who don’t know who they are and possibly want to know more.

So here’s what I’m going to do, I’ll start with the infield, then head over to the outfield and designated hitter spot, followed by the starting pitchers, relief pitchers and then lastly the bench players.

Last real problem with all of this is what to call it. Cistulli of course calls his “Team Joy Squad” so I’m thinking we need to come up with something… well less peppy. I’ll take some ideas. Maybe you have them, because I certainly don’t. If anything I’m content to just call them the “Not As Sucky As You Might Have Thought If You Had Previously Heard Of Any Of These Guys” Team. Again, that’s a work in progress.