I’ve been loosely following Matthew Pouliot’s “Restoring the Rosters” series over on NBC Sports, with the feeling that I’d get a punch to the gut by the time he concluded.  Pouliot’s series showed how MLB teams might be constructed if they retained all the players they originally signed, and then he ranked them backwards from worst (in his opinion) to best.

As you may have guessed, our Seattle Mariners came in first.  This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, because anyone who’s spent any amount of time in a Mariners forum has seen essentially the same post.  But seeing it in the mainstream media brings a new level of ‘ugh’ to me, for whatever reason.

Pouliot’s 2009 Mariners:

Rotation
Felix Hernandez
Derek Lowe
Gil Meche
Joel Pineiro
Ryan Rowland-Smith

Bullpen
Rafael Soriano
Brian Fuentes
George Sherrill
Ryan Franklin
Matt Thornton
J.J. Putz
Mark Lowe

[snip]

Lineup
RF Ichiro Suzuki
SS Asdrubal Cabrera
LF Shin-Soo Choo
3B Alex Rodriguez
1B Raul Ibanez
CF Adam Jones
DH David Ortiz
2B Jose Lopez
C Jason Varitek

Bench
OF Ken Griffey Jr.
INF Omar Vizquel
INF-OF Willie Bloomquist
C Kenji Johjima

We’ll all have objections in all sections, but that’s not the point.  Just passing this along.  What changes would you make to this team?

Here’s a few more quick shots (some of these are a few days old):

• Jason A. Churchill of Prospect Insider says that Russell Branyan will need surgery on his herniated disc.
• Brian Joseph of Baseball Digest Daily wonders if teams (and fans, for that matter) are putting too much stock in compensatory draft picks.  He makes some great points, but I’d love to see this revisited in another five years or so.  Perhaps it’s a misconception, but it seems to me like the draft is becoming less and less of a crapshoot in the earlier rounds.
• Oakland A’s pitching prospect Shawn Haviland writes at the Baseball Analysts about how sabermetrics are infiltrating baseball clubhouses and how he’s using advanced statistics to break down his own performances.
• Last week SI’s Ted Keith wrote about how the wild card has made baseball more exciting since it’s inception in the mid-90s, which produced a response from Baseball Digest Daily’s Jeff Lubbers that stated the opposite.  Both have valid points, but I think Lubbers has a more convincing argument.  Of course, the wild card has other problems that aren’t stated, such as the unbalanced schedules and interleague play schedules.