The Mariners have not decided to trade Cliff Lee.
Despite the high volume of recent speculation surrounding Seattle pitcher Cliff Lee, a major league source with knowledge of the Mariners’ thinking said Wednesday that the team has not yet made its ace available.
This reinforces my notion that if the Mariners remain hot, they keep Cliff around.
The Mariners are 14 games out of first…..they woould have to be hotter than the sun to not trade this guy for some talent for the future…
@Paul Jackson: They are 13 games out of the wild card. Teams have come back from big deficits in less time. The difference to me is that most of the teams that overcame big leads were good teams chasing a team that had a wild first half. (I’m thinking of the 1978 Yankees, the 1993 Braves and the 1995 Mariners.) The Mariners are playing well under .500, which says to me they’re not that good a team. Keeping Lee gives them a chance to show the first two months were a fluke, or that getting rid of Griffey made the team better.
I’ve evolved a simple rule of thumb to evaluate whether a team has a chance at a playoff spot, which is probably horrible statistically but has the advantage of being quick to calculate. More serious statistically-minded people can come up with a better metric.
I just divide the number of games remaining to be played in the season by seven, round up, then compare that to the number of games a team is behind for a playoff spot. If the first number is higher than the second, the team has a chance, otherwise not. This tends to overrate teams’ chances in the first half of the season and underrate them in September, but its a rough and ready calculation and has been pretty accurate in the years I’ve been using it.
By this calculation the Mariners indeed have no chance of making the postseason, as do the Orioles, Pirates, and Diamondbacks. But the difference between the Mariners and the Orioles is that the Mariners hugely underperformed the first half of the season, they are a talented team, in a relatively soft division. I think their second half record will be quite good, and they may well finish with a better winning percentage than in 2009. The problem is that this won’t allow them to make the playoffs, because the hole they are in is too big. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them win 53 games in the second half, finish with something like 86 wins, only to see the Western Division won by a team with 88 wins and the wildcard going to the runner up in the American League East.
So they should have traded Lee unless they think they can sign him next year. Maybe the problem was that the other GMs realized this and offered too little to make the trade worthwhile.