by Jason Wojciechowski
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| Where's the rain? Photo by Michael Righi |
You'll forgive the long layoff between Path to Respectability posts. I poisoned myself this week with peanut butter, so I was out of commission for some time. To catch up, the Orioles were covered here and I wrote about the Royals here. After the Mariners, I'll go on to do the A's, Astros, Pirates, and probably the Cubs. Arguably bad teams that I'm skipping are the Twins (because Bill covered there at Baseball Prospectus), the White Sox (because in the Central, as a team that PECOTA sees winning 77 games, 88 could result just via schedule and some luck), the Mets, Dodgers, and Padres (78-to-79-win teams per PECOTA, too close to my target of 88 to make this exercise much fun). This is a shift from my original idea to take the worst team in each division, because that's less fun than looking at the actual bad teams. Like I said, pushing the Mets or Padres to 88 wins is boring.
Onward!
The basics on Seattle: PECOTA has them at 70-92, last place even behind the A's in the West, a full seventeen games back of Texas, on the "strength" of the second-worst offense (by True Average, BP's offensive value stat, which is park-adjusted) in the American League. The only real bright spots on the roster are Jesus Montero (2.8 WARP projection despite nearly all his playing time coming at designated hitter) and Felix Hernandez (you've heard of him).
