Mack’s Morning Report – 1-4 – Collin McHugh, Seattle Mariners, 5-Man Rotation, Fernando Martinez

 

Jack Leathersich ‏@LeatherRocket  - This weather up here is brutal.... Headin down South to train with @Wheelerpro45 next week... 2014 here we come

 

Ex-Met Collin McHugh almost made Las Vegas sound bearable:

My dreams and expectations evolved almost daily. Beginning the year in my first Big League camp with the New York Mets, I expected to get a fair shot (whatever that means) to break camp as the 5th starter in their rotation. Two weeks into camp I was sent back down to the minor league side of Spring Training having been told that there was never a real chance that I was going to head north with the team on April 1st.  My expectation and destination changed in that moment from the bright lights of NYC to the bright neon desert oasis of Las Vegas. I'd never been to Vegas and all my knowledge of its endless Craps tables came from Chevy Chase in "Vegas Vacation." We lived a block off The Strip, as it's affectionately called, in a luxury apt. compound that housed about 15 of my teammates and a few local night club promotors/drug dealers. I didn't really have a bunch of preconceived notions about what life would look like out there, but whatever this was, it was certainly different that what I had expected. We rented cars, lived with 2 roommates (and sometimes more when their wives/girlfriends/family came in town) and learned what real Mexican tacos were all about. We baked in the sun and grilled meat poolside with our teammates. I pitched and pitched very well. We found routine. http://www.adayolderadaywiser.com/

Mack – Yeah, there’s nothing like putting the apartments your prospects are going to sleep in next to the ones the drug dealers do their business.

 

Ben Badler had an interesting post about the top 10 teams that are interested in signing pitcher Masahiro Tanaka and the number one is the Seattle Mariners. Baseball fans could easily on the surface be surprised that a small market team like this would have the kind of bucks needed for this sign, especially after dishing out a zillion dollars to Robinson Cano, but this is a team that have just signed a new regional television contract that will pay them $2 billion over 17 years. No one has to even come to the ballpark with these kind of number and, even better than this, their owners didn’t invest this money in a Ponzie scheme…

 

Jeff Sullivan wrote a wonderful post over at Fangraphs, called ‘Revisiting The Myth of the Five Man Rotation’. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/revisiting-the-myth-of-the-five-man-rotation/ Sullivan said:

I think most people have a good understanding that it matters to have starting-pitcher depth beyond the front five. At least, most people who hang around at places like FanGraphs. We all get that pitchers are volatile, and we all get that pitchers get injured. Yet still there’s a focus on just the first five, because no pitcher is individually super likely to break down, and if the five are good enough you should never need a replacement, right? People talk about filling out five-man rotations, but really, a team would be fortunate to lean on a five-man rotation, and I thought it could be useful to provide some updated numbers from the season most recently finished. Those sixth and seventh starters in a system — they’re going to get innings. Sometimes a lot of them.

I find myself most of time thinking the Mets only need five starters every year, but the minimum usually is six. We’re assuming that the first four slots are filled and that Jenrry Mejia will get first shot at SP5, but even last night (on SNY) we heard the first re-mention of him returning to the pen. On ‘my team’, Carlos Torres is my SP6 in waiting while Rafael Montero and Noah Syndergaard will enter the picture at the end of June.

All this is kewl until you add in the possibility of someone like Tyler Thornburg possibility joining this team, followed by Cory Marroni and Jacob deGrom knocking on the door, and then.. and then… Matt Harvey comes back and asks for his ball back.

What do you do now, huh? What do you do now?

Read the article.

 

Look who I found Nick Melotte writing about in an article about free agent minor league outfielders:

Though it feels like Fernando Martinez has been around forever, he's still only going to be 25 years old next season. He was originally signed by the Mets in 2005 for $1.4M, and has been a hot commodity since. Before ever playing a professional game, he was rated as the 4th best prospect in a barren system. He debuted the following year in Low A as a 17 year old center fielder and mashed. In just 45 games in the South Atlantic league, he hit .333/.389/.505 with five home runs, 14 doubles and seven stolen bases with 15 walks and 46 strike outs. He moved on to High A where he struggled in 30 games to the tune of a .196/.260/.375 line but with five home runs and almost half of his hits going for extra bases (11 out of 23). After the regular season ended he became the youngest player ever in the Arizona Fall League where he hit .304 against players at least three years his elder. He fought through a bone bruise in his hand and a knee sprain during the year but played will enough that he was named the #2 prospect in the Mets system following the 2006 season, both the best power hitter and best hitter for average in the system, and the #3 prospect in the South Atlantic. With accolades like this it's not hard to see why he was ranked the 22nd best prospect in baseball. http://www.minorleagueball.com/2014/1/3/5252782/prospecting-for-minor-league-free-agent-outfielders