Day Thirty Seven: Richie Sexson

There have been two monumental seasons in my adult life: 2001 and 2008. Pretty much the entire decade leading up to this coronavirus was forgettable and regrettable. 2009 was a bounce back in some ways, but truly, from 2008 on, it has been folly. And I thought it would be cute to include another one of these Upper Deck Documentary cards (the first was with Erik Bedard) to commemorate one of the historic seasons of Mariners history. And to begin at the end for good ol Richie Sexson. Brush Prairie's own! Richie Sexson! But it's not fair to Sexson to harp on 2008. It really isn't. So let's go back to the beginning.

After the dismal showing of 2004 (of course it is important to remember that Ichiro was utterly captivating in 2004. It was his most interesting season as a US pro and he broke a ridiculous 90 year old record that in some ways seems more unbreakable than Joe Dimaggio's hitting streak. But I digress.) new GM Bill Bavasi needed to make a splash. He couldn't spend Yankees or Dodgers type money, but the Mariners had been in the top 3 of attendance and merchandising for three straight years. An entire country was exclusively Mariners fans. The Mariners were a hot franchise and a huge moneymaker. (That sentence is so odd in 2020, but it is true). The fans didn't want to watch losing baseball. The city had experienced what it was like to watch a great team (maybe too great) and there was now some serious expectation to put a winner on the field. So Bavasi made a splash on the free agent market. And let us not forget with our 20/20 glasses of backwards viewing, the two big free agents that he brought to the Mariners in 2005 were quite impressive. Bavasi brought in NL MVP runner up and gold glove quality thirdbaseman, 25 year old (wow he was young) Adrian Beltre with the most dynamic signing of the off season, and he also brought in another NL MVP vote getter from 2003, Richie Sexson.

I am not going to be that asshole who sits here and lies. I was super pumped by both of these signings. Sexson had been injured in 2004 and looked like a bounce back candidate for sure, and Beltre looked like a future HOFer (I wasn't wrong). So when 2005 started it seemed like we were going to have some serious thunder in the midsection of the lineup. And Richie Sexson did not disappoint.

He was amazing that first year. If you look at Sexson's line it is exactly what he was being asked to do. He had 39 dingers, and an OPS of .910. He got meaningful MVP votes that year. It was his counterpart who fell off mightily. And of course it is very easy to remember Adrian Beltre more fondly than Richie Sexson for a variety of reasons, but I want to make sure that Big Sexy gets his due here. He was outstanding in 2005 and his 2005 seasons is exhibit A in the grand "Marine Air" conspiracy that shitty hitters have used to excuse their shitty hitting in the 21st century of Mariner baseball. I won't hear it. Richie Sexson was a force of nature that year. He clobbered balls (just like Nelson Cruz and most other big league sluggers) over the left field wall. I watched a lot of them. So 2005 Richie Sexson was awesome.

And 2006 was a great year as well. His numbers dipped a bit but he still put out a .842 OPS. That is mighty fine for a giant firstbaseman. That is the number you are looking for honestly. Anything lower than that and it's getting scary though .You begin to lose a lot of ground having a corner infielder with an OPS lower than that. And in 2007 Sexson was much much lower than that.

I have done my due diligence discussing Richie Sexson's excellent first two seasons with the Mariners. There, I will not be a revisionist who claims "I knew he was going to suck." Not at all. I wanted Richie to be good, and until the end of 2006 he was excellent. And then he pretty much nosedived off a cliff. Becoming a guy who we would regularly during the fun and frolicking summer of 2007 (what a fun year) guess how many pitches it would take him to strike out on. He was so overmatched that entire year. So brutally at a disadvantage. And that was when the really bad general manager moves started to happen. That was when the Mariners traded Shin-Soo Choo for Ben Broussard because Sexson was such a suck on their potentially division winning lineup. But the club faded, and Sexson was out of baseball by the end of 2008. So it hurts less in some ways. And I will say that it is certainly a high probability that Richie Sexson never took steroids (just drank and drove) because his career ends exactly where it should. While his fellow corner infielder from those ugly seasons...

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