Like many obsessive baseball fans, I find myself committing entirely too much time to thinking of the most obscure players who fill the two criteria for a box on Immaculate Grid. Thursday, I tried to impose a regulator of sorts to rein in my time wasted on idle speculation, giving myself an informal time constraint of a minute or two on each box, only to be stymied by my complete blindspots for the Rockies and Mariners owing to their near-complete irrelevance for the past couple decades.
I needn’t delve into the Rockies too much. You probably forgot they existed.
The Mariners also tend to be a team who I’ve memory-holed because they’ve made the playoffs once since 2002, and if I’m watching a late game, I’m almost always opting for a Padres, Dodgers, Angels, or Giants/Arizona game, so I just don’t see the Mariners often.
Really, since their early 2000s clubs headlined by Ichiro and Edgar Martinez, the reasons to watch the Mariners have basically been limited to watching a Felix Hernandez start when he was arguably the best pitcher in the game for a few years and now Julio Rodriguez—no offense intended to Kyle Seager, Robbie Ray, or (I guess?) James Paxton.
It took me forever to come up with a complete guess I was even remotely OK with for a guy who could have played in Seattle and Colorado. In retrospect, that Colorado season as he (I’ll spare him the indignity of naming him here) approached 50 after a year off should have been memory-holed. The random Seattle Mariner/Texas Ranger answer, however, came to me very quickly.
At this moment, Shin-Soo Choo is registering a 2% on that box.
For whatever reason, Choo’s debut in Seattle always stuck in my head, but I hadn’t really looked at how he ended up in Cleveland and surely forgot his path there if I had ever really registered it.
Shin-Soo Choo debuted just ahead of his 23rd birthday, though just for a day, having gone the route of signing with the Mariners out of high school in South Korea, which was pretty unheard of at the time, having broken out as the MVP of the 2000 WSBC U-18 Baseball World Cup, signing a $1.35MM deal with the Mariners as an international amateur free agent after leading his team to the championship, though he did most of his heroics on the mound, striking out 33 in 21 innings and appearing in 6 of his team’s 8 games with a 3.48 ERA. The South Korean team bested a US squad featuring future big leaguers Joe Mauer, Jeremy Bonderman, J.J. Hardy, Chris Carter, J.P. Howell, and Brandon League, so he’d proven himself against a team featuring some real talent.
The Mariners at the time of his signing were run by General Manager Pat Gillick. Gillick had been GM in Toronto from 1978 to 1994, taking over the GM duties for Peter Bavasi, the then-GM/Team President under whom he’d been Assistant General Manager in their first year, eventually engineering back-to-back World Series wins in 1992 and 1993 before the team fell apart in 1994, leading Gillick to resign and hand the reins over to the impossibly Canadian-named Gord Ash, who oversaw the Jays’ continued fall from dominance.
Gillick moved on to Baltimore a year later, inheriting a competitive team, which went to the playoffs in two of his three years before he stated he was leaving at the end of his three-year contract in 1998.
2000 saw Gillick coaxed out of retirement yet again, this time to helm the Mariners (sorry, it wrote itself). Like the Orioles, these Mariners were very talented, featuring three future Hall-of-Famers and a solid rotation, but the first thing he was tasked to do was trade one of those Hall-of-Famers away, Ken Griffey Jr., who was on the final year on the extension he’d signed with Seattle. Griffey stated that he would only accept a trade to Cincinnati to be closer to home, vetoing a trade to the Mets that would have netted Seattle Roger Cedeño, Octavio Dotel, and either Dennis Cook or Armando Benítez.
Having eventually dealt Griffey to the only team that he’d go to for Mike Cameron, Brett Tomko and two minor leaguers, Gillick watched helplessly as the 2000 season ticked down for a second generational talent who’d be walking out the door, this time via free agency. The next offseason, Álex Rodriguez signed what was at the time (and for quite a while after) the most lucrative contract in baseball history, getting a ten-year, $250MM contract from the Texas Rangers, leaving the Mariners with just a compensation pick in the 2001 draft.
Now Gillick was clearly a leave-no-stone-unturned sort of GM because he’d gone to Nippon Professional Baseball to grab Kazuhiro Sasaki in the offseason leading into the 2000 season, and Sasaki rewarded him by winning American League Rookie of the Year honors. Sasaki wasn’t the first Japanese pitcher to come over and succeed, but there’d been no such success stories with Japanese position players when he signed Ichiro Suzuki on November 30, 2000. Ichiro one-upped Sasaki, not content to just win Rookie of the Year, taking home MVP honors for a team that tied the regular-season record for wins in a season with 116, after losing KEN GRIFFEY JR and ÁLEX RODRIGUEZ in successive offseasons.
So it should probably come as no surprise that Gillick would have had the foresight to have been dipping into the amateur ranks in South Korea to see if he could bypass KBO posting fees when he inked a Korean amateur in 18-year-old Shin-Soo Choo to a deal three-and-a-half months prior to signing Ichiro.
Pat Gillick and his Hall-of-Fame résumé re-retired in 2003 (unretiring in 2006 to oversee what would eventually become another World Series winner in Philadelphia), handing the keys to the kingdom (but not the Kingdome, which had been imploded in 2000) over to the younger brother of the man who first gave him a shot as GM, Bill Bavasi.
Bill Bavasi was, ummm, no Pat Gillick. From 2003 to 2008, Bill Bavasi built a team that had one winning season and by mid-June of his fifth season, the M’s had the worst record in baseball with what was then a competitive payroll of $117MM. For fear of sending the random Mariners fan into a post-traumatic stress reaction, I’ll refrain from listing the litany of disastrous moves he made, focusing on just one and back-dooring in another.
I will, however, add two things for color:
Bavasi’s Mariners were the one team the most critical spirits amongst Royals fans were OK with Dayton Moore engaging in trade talks with, as the likelihood of a fleecing was exceptionally low.
When Bavasi was shown the door in Seattle, people were concerned that the absence of José Guillén had created a chemistry problem.
No, I didn’t confuse Carlos Guillén with José Guillén. Things were so bad when he left that people were wondering if it wasn’t because JOSÉ GUILLÉN wasn’t around to improve clubhouse chemistry.
José.
Guillén.
So Shin-Soo Choo had ascended through the minors, steadily producing while moving up a level each year (with a couple late-season promotions mixed in). He was a Baseball America top 100 prospect heading into both 2003 and 2005. In 2005, he handled himself well in AAA, having two weird major-league call-ups for a couple days before getting the post-AAA-playoffs September cup of coffee. He was bad in that audition, but he was 22 and given just 21 PAs across seven games, far from a meaningful sample when evaluating a prospect.
As a 23-year-old repeating AAA in 2006, he took a step forward, slashing .323/.394/.499 in 94 games, and seeing four games of major-league action for Seattle before trade deadline.
Five days before the deadline, on July 26, Bill Bavasi looked at the 48-52 Mariners and fooled himself into believing they should buy because they were 3.0 games out of the division lead.
Well, that’s not entirely accurate. He actually convinced himself to buy back in June, a month before the deadline, shipping then-20-year-old AAA shortstop Asdrúbal Cabrera to Cleveland for the son of Hall-of-Famer Tony Perez, 36-year-old Eduardo Perez. To be fair, Perez had hit .303/.343/.636 with 8 dongs in 108 PA in Cleveland, but he was a plodding platoon bat at this point.
Perez got just 102 PA in 43 games in Seattle, hanging one dong while scoring 6 runs and driving in 11. He hit .195/.304/.241, good for a 48 wRC+ in his stint in Seattle. This would be his last major-league season. So Bavasi got -0.8 fWAR/-0.9 rWAR from the dismal last half a season of Eduardo Perez. For the pleasure of getting to watching this happen, Bavasi gave up the two All-Star appearances and 14.4 fWAR/20.7 rWAR Asdrúbal Cabrera put up in Cleveland before being dealt at the deadline the July before he was eligible for free agency.
So when the chance came 27 days later to make another trade with Cleveland, Bill Bavasi couldn’t help himself.
Enter Ben Broussard.
Broussard couldn’t hit a lefty to save his life, but he’d done pretty well for himself against right-handed pitching. Of course, he was a no-glove first baseman, a profile which virtually demands he hit quite a bit to be worth a roster spot. He still had two more years of club control after the 2006 season, and while he’d been roughly average in his first full season and again in his third full season in the bigs, his second season—2004 where he hit .275/.370/.488 with a 126 wRC+ worth 2.1 fWAR/3.1 rWAR—was strong enough that you could maybe be coaxed into buying into some of his 2006 performance. That is if you were a casual fan. Broussard’s 2006 stretch in Cleveland was inflated by a .367 BABIP that was completely out of line with his career marks that sat more in the .270-.320 range.
Moneyball was published in 2003. BABIP was not some highly proprietary measure of performance that Bavasi did not have access to in July of 2006. There was little reason to believe that this 29-year-old in his fifth year in the bigs was suddenly a .321/.361/.519 hitter.
So Bill Bavasi needed him some Ben Broussard. Who else to part with than a recent top 100 prospect with a pretty impressive if somewhat unusual prospect pedigree?
The first four months of the 2006 season were the last moments that Broussard would be able to call himself an above-replacement-level player.
Choo—we can ignore the second asset Bavasi sent to Cleveland, minor-league southpaw Shawn Nottingham, who was sent over as the player to be named later in the deal because it wasn’t enough to just give up one REAL PROSPECT for a player who I’d honestly forgotten existed until I saw his name today—afforded himself pretty well upon getting traded to Cleveland. In 45 games in the bigs, he slashed .295/.373/.473 with a 118 wRC+ in 167 PA, good for 1.2 fWAR/1.5 rWAR.
Broussard slashed .238/.282/.427 with a 79 wRC+, good for -0.5 fWAR/-0.2 rWAR in 177 PA to finish out the 2006 season in Seattle.
So just that season, Shin-Soo Choo—the prospect sent away in the deal at the deadline—outproduced the veteran meant to shore up, ummm… something? And outproduced is woefully insufficient when comparing them. Broussard was 21% below average offensively while manning first badly (24th of 31 1B with 500+ innings in the defensive component of fWAR—a cumulative stat—while playing 300-700 fewer innings than everyone around him). Choo was 18% above league average at the plate and played above average defense in right field, a tougher position to play than first base.
Broussard was dismal again in 2007, eventually getting traded in the offseason to the Rangers for future Royals’ legend Tug Hulett. Broussard amassed a total of -0.8 fWAR/-0.7 rWAR for the Mariners in a year and half before getting turned into Tug Hulett, who “gave” them another -0.2 fWAR/-0.2 rWAR before being waived and claimed by the Royals.
After missing a big chunk of the 2007 season, Choo was massively productive. Thanks to the injury in 2007 and less than a full load of service time accrued in the 2005 and 2006 seasons, Choo wasn’t a free agent until after the 2013 season. In those club-controlled seasons (he was part of a massive three-team deal to Cincinnati in his final season of arbitration eligibility), he racked up 27.0 fWAR/26.4 rWAR, slashing .290/.391/.468 in 839 games, putting up three separate 5+ fWAR seasons (rWAR isn’t as wild about his 2013), and getting down-ballot consideration in the MVP vote in 2010 and 2013.
For those keeping track at home, Bavasi lost 28.0 fWAR/27.3 rWAR just with the Shin-Soo Choo deal at the 2006 trade deadline, including a 1.7 fWAR/1.7 rWAR loss in the year he was focused on improving their odds. Chip in another 15.2 fWAR and 21.6 rWAR lost in that Perez/Cabrera deal. There’s bad process, and then there’s self-immolation. Feels like maybe the Mariners could have used those 40-50 wins over the years that followed…
As it happened, the 2006 Mariners finished 4th in the AL West, 15 games behind the Oakland Athletics and 17 games back of the sole wild card team, the Detroit Tigers.