Mariners Re-Sign Griffey

The Mariners resigned Ken Griffey, Jr. to a one-year deal for 2010 at an amount reported to be slightly more than the $2 million base salary they game him in 2009.  With incentives, Griffey is believed to have earned a little over $3 million for the season just ended.

I can’t say that I think re-signing Griffey is a good move for the Mariners.  With a .214 batting average and a .735 OPS, Griffey was pretty terrible for the guy who got the most playing time at the M’s DH slot.  An AL team really needs to get more production out of the DH slot in today’s game to be competitive.

There’s still a chance that Griffey’s OPS in 2010 will be better than ‘09.  Excluding his rookie year way back in 1989, Griffey’s lowest OPS before this past season was .777 in 2008.  However, the trend over the last two seasons is obvious, and at age 40 in 2010, the odds aren’t great that Griffey will have a bounce-back season.

The contract isn’t big, but for a player you hope to bat as little as possible, $2 million is still a little too much to pay.

I also tend to think that the feel-good bump in attendance to see The Kid play for the M’s one more time probably won’t carry past the 2009 season.  Now, I suspect that most Mariners’ fans would prefer the team focus on making the post-season and will vote with their feet if the M’s aren’t competitive in 2010.

I had hoped the Mariners would make a run for Hideki Matsui, who as a DH can still hit.  Also, I loved the idea of a U.S. team having the two best Japanese players of their generation together for a couple of seasons.  I find it hard to believe that the Mariners would not be able to sell lucrative cable TV packages of their regular season games in Japan if they had both Ichiro and Godzilla playing for them at the same time.  There were some rumors that Ichiro would feel threatened to have Matsui play on the same team, but economic benefits to the Mariners seems obvious, to me at least.

Now that the Mariners have signed Griffey, who really can’t do anything but DH and pinch hit at this point in his career (he played only 11 games in the field in ‘09), I don’t see much chance of the Mariners going after Matsui, who is also basically a full-time DH at this point in his career.  Too bad.