Back in the day — I’m thinking 2001 here — we used to complain that the M’s weren’t getting any offense from the 7-8-9 spots in their batting order. Did anyone happen to see today’s lineup? Batting 6th, Randy Winn (.666 OPS). Batting 7th, Jeff Cirillo (.600 OPS). Batting 8th, Dan Wilson (.600 OPS). Batting 9th, Willie Bloomquist (.536 OPS). Let us also not forget Mark McLemore (.613 OPS), who hit 2nd today. I know Boone had the day off and Guillen has a gimpy groin (side note: “Gimpy Groin” would be a good band name), but still. That’s five hitters who have no business whatsoever in the starting lineup. I won’t go so far as to say they have no business on a major league roster, but I’m close.
Oh, and Gillick missed out on D’Angelo Jimenez, too. The Reds picked him up for a minor league reliever. Yeah, the M’s don’t have any of those sitting around…
Congratulations to Mariner all-stars Ichiro, Edgar, Boone, Hasegawa, and especially Jamie Moyer.
Also, I unfortunately don’t have time to lay out the full explanation as to why, but it may be time to start being concerned with Gil Meche. His strikeout rate has fallen precipitously the past month.
Oh, and friend of U.S.S. Mariner Ivan Weiss was kind enough to drop me a line and tell me that Jamal Strong reached base all 6 times he was up tonight, and threw in a stolen base for good measure. That performance will raise his on base percentage from .290 to .441. Seriously. Gotta love small samples.
Official Seattle Baseball Print Writer of the U.S.S. Mariner, Larry Stone, has another installment of his cool series “Art of Baseball” today, available in your Sunday Times or online:
“Keeping Score,” “Mariners’ scorers take care to keep things fair,” “Ten great moments in scorekeeping,” and “Baseball’s rule book not exactly light reading” (this just in: “Headline Writer Not Exactly Good”. In any event, tons of good reading there — today’s Times contains two full pages filled entirely with Stone’s articles. (And in an entirely different section, my grandfather Larry Parker’s obituary). Congrats to Stone on his continued fine work, and to the Times (!) for giving Stone the space to write at length and so freely about baseball topics.
McLemore’s defense at short continues to be poor. In Moyer’s start there were a couple hits that any average shortstop would have gotten to, and his poor arm strength turned a ball he got to into a single. It’s ridiculous, seriously, there’s no reason he should ever be out there: to make up for the balls that get by him he’d have to go 10 for 5 at the plate, which is (barring multi-ball play) impossible.
In other news, Blogger continues to hack me off, as it’s now denying that I paid for Blog*Spot Plus, even though you’ll clearly note there are no ads on the top of the page and I was able to do things like look at stats up through last week. Of course, my only recourse is to log an issue on Blogger Control, where issues go unreviewed forever and you sort of sit around and wait until it’s accidentally resolved, presumably because someone with immediate family at Blogger discovers they can’t look at the stats for their wind chime blog. I hate wind chimes. Also, the neighbors let their yap-o-tronic corgi out at seven this morning. Seven! And that dog can bark constantly (random 2-3 barks, 5s-90s pause between barks) all fricking day. What kind of inconsiderate clods…. anyway.
Having Blogger denying I paid, which in turn denies me support, makes me feel like I’ve just given Castro a trillion dollar bill.
“Give what back?”