You’ve seen those ads the M’s run, where they “thank the best fans in baseball.” Gee, and thanks to the Mariners organization for that meaningless gesture, it means a lot to me considering the massive screwing you’ve given all of us the last two years between the lying about budgets to the apathy about putting together a solid, deep team. I feel much better now.
You want to thank me? Win games.
September Wheel of Call-Ups
M’s called up two pitchers: RHP Aaron Looper and RHP J.J. Putz, neither of who offer anything particularly interesting. On the hitting side, they pulled UT-R Chad Meyers and OF-R Jamal Strong. Nothing huge there, except Jamal Strong now becomes an interesting right-handed bench bat who can single or walk, and also he’s now by far the team’s best pinch-running option for Edgar.
Jamal Strong hit .305/.390/.371 in Tacoma — that’s right, his slugging percentage is lower than his on-base. For all his speed, Strong only legged out 6 doubles. I’m a huge fan of Strong, in the sense that I love guys who work their ass off to make the most of their tools. I’m worried at every level he’s not going to be able to hit enough or draw enough walks to maintain an OBP high enough to be productive, but he’s managed it so far.
Meyers, btw, hit .300/.361/.401.
Meche’s sham option also ended, and he’s back on the 25-man. And MLB.com reported the team “selected” the contract of Sweeney, which I’ve never heard of. Did they pick it out of a pile?
The next potential round of reinforcements is about a week and a half out, when San Antonio gets out of the playoffs, and we could see some of these other guys — though I think it’s likely they’ll almost all be given the rest of the year off. Ugueto will be up, of course, so get those jerseys and banners ready.
Again, a plea on quoting and reproduction: if you want to point people to things you’ve seen here, reference our articles, short quotes are cool, but please use the links at the bottom (see the little time thing after the author’s name? that’s a link to this post that should, if Blogger’s working, link up to this post forever and ever) and credit where you got it. Do not copy-and-paste the whole thing.
It’s bad form, for one thing: this is our baby and our wishes for how our content should be read should be respected. If we want people to come here and check out the whole site, there’s nothing wrong with that.
Plus, it’s illegal. We retain the copyright to our works, and it’s easy to track this kind of stuff down thanks to the wonder of the internet. There’s fair use (I read this “[quote here]” on the USS Mariner, and I think they’re totally wrong), and there’s wholescale reproduction. The latter’s illegal, and I don’t care if you’re swapping songs on WinMX like there’s no tomorrow, come on– we make $0 for this, and copyright protection is all we have. Be cool.
Link to our posts. Don’t cut-and-paste the whole thing. If you’re not sure, email us and we’ll almost certainly give you permission.
Jason here, also not dead. There’s a new Big Board in the works, but I’ve kind of been waiting to see what they do in terms of calling up pitchers from Tacoma. Other than that you’re not missing much, as the only two clubs in the organization still playing are Seattle and Everett. If you haven’t made it up to Everett yet this season, you have three more chances: tonight, tomorrow and Thursday. I’m not one to talk as I haven’t made it up there yet this season, but I’m working to remedy that this week.
As for the M’s, frankly I don’t know what to think at this point. Are they good enough to take the division or the wild card? Yeah, sure. I don’t find myself all that excited by the team, however, particularly as the A’s have won nine in a row and the Red Sox seven of their last ten. I do know this, however — I have tickets for two of the season’s final three games against Oakland, and as the saying goes, a team of wild horses couldn’t keep me away.
Go M’s.
Yes, I’m alive, and thanks for asking. After a weekend trip to Cleveland and a trip down the Dan River, I find that the M’s are still two games back of Oakland, but aren’t the trainwreck that they were when I left.
By the way, three cheers to Derek, who does way more free work than anyone else out there. Between his hilarious poetry, background work on writing scripts so people can check the site thousands of times a day, and witty insights, its pretty clear that Derek is the best thing going for Mariner fans.
For those of you who follow the minors, I’ll be doing a year-in-review later this week. I’ll update the Future Forty, give out some random awards, and basically make sure you know everything of note that occurred in the system the past few months.
And, as Derek said, Go M’s.
The Next Series
Oakland begins +2 on the Mariners in the AL West
Seattle begins +1 on the Red Sox in the “wild card race”
Tuesday
Oakland @ Baltimore, Zito v Hentgen, 4pm
Seattle @ Tampa Bay, Pineiro v Zambrano, 4:15pm
Boston @ Chicago, Burkett v Colon, 5pm
Wednesday
Oakland @ Baltimore, Hudson v Lopez, 4pm
Seattle @ Tampa Bay, Garcia v Waechter (?) 4:15pm
Boston @ Chicago, Lowe v Buehrle, 4pm
Thursday
Oakland @ Baltimore, Lilly v DuBose, noonish
Seattle @ Tampa Bay, Franklin v Sosa
We saw how bad Baltimore is, and Tampa Bay seems to give us fits (seriously, does Piniella know his old team or what? It’s like Gruden v. the Raiders in the last Super Bowl). The good news here, if you’re cheering for the M’s to make the playoffs any way they can, is that Boston’s matchups are much tougher on paper than the M’s face.
And I’ll say something else, while I’m up — we get a lot of flack for being overly critical of the M’s and not the kind of rah-rah mooning coverage you expect from, say, the Seattle Times (Stone excepted). But you will be hard-pressed to find people who watch more games, who have been Mariners fans longer, and who genuinely want to see the M’s beat their opponents so badly they’re forced to end series early and return home to their unnaturally attractive wives, crying, leaving the rest of their games forfeit and their confidence shattered on the field.
Boston fans like to believe their suffering was first sung by Homer, but I’ll tell you that we stood and cheered for the M’s when they had no chance at all facing Boston, when you hoped to be surprised by a good game, and every ticket you bought was a leap of faith that Alvin Davis might hit four home runs and pitch nine good innings, or something equally improbable would happen and the M’s would pull one out. Boston’s fielded winning teams since I was born, but the Mariners — to be a long time Mariners fan has required faith, and boundless hope, and a love for baseball, even bad baseball by a bad team in a bad dome, supplied by a bad owner.
If the Mariners come home in a week and they’re still in contention, someone is going to have to beat me unconscious and hold me captive on some remote island where I can’t swim back to North America to keep me from these games, and if I can talk the day after a game, it won’t be for lack of cheering the night before. Sure, I’m mad about the team. And still, I feel like it’s a family thing: we’re all happy to insult each other and make fun, but if someone else came in and said something about my cousin, it’d be a brawl before I took my next breath. I’m not going to miss a game, and even though I know it takes seconds for the signal to bounce around to my dish and my TV, when you hear someone screaming “Run, Cameron, run!” off in the distance as Mike legs out a double, that’s going to be me.
Go M’s.
Hey, I may have just hacked RSS together for this bad boy. The RSS feed I did today’s sitting at http://www.blogstreet.com/rss/11328.rss so if it works, or doesn’t work, drop me a line. Thanks to Tim (of Mariner Musings) and Alex and — well, actually, I’m going to go see if this works or not before I start blowing kisses around. Okay, the trick Tim pointed me to didn’t work, so I’m going to give him an ‘E’ for effort.
Now I’m not sure if we push around the new URL, or what — put a link on the side that says “yo, stick this other URL in your content aggregator or whatever it is you do with it.” I honestly didn’t think I’d get this to work tonight before I got frustrated again and gave up. So now I’m going to give up and throw some more effort at it tomorrow. Suggestions, thoughts are welcome — RSS confuses and frightens me. I’m just a baseball writer from the 21st century, I don’t understand syndication and XML tagging for RSS.
John Hickey, of the P-I, has a Mariners notebook that is, well, it’s wrong.
First, though, it’s funny. Meche gets optioned to AAA (burning an option year, but anyway):
“They told me how it works, that they’re trying to set up for the postseason,” Meche said. “Whatever. I kind of understand it, but not really.” Well, as you’ve seen here, Meche is in good company.
Hickey’s thesis works like this:
This is how the team keeps a roster spot open if they make a trade after this.
Deadline for setting a roster is 9pm, Aug 31 (midnight MLB offices time).
Players on the DL as of Aug 31 are “special cases” and can be replaced come October.
This is, and I want to make this clear, absolutely not true, and the PI should hang their collective head in shame. I can think of no instance where a player acquired in a trade on or after 9/1 has played for that team in the post-season, and a couple instances where it would have been in the team’s interests to pull that off. For example, last year the Giants picked up Bill Mueller from the Cubs on 9/3, and instead of taking him into the post-season, they had to take Pedro Feliz.
No matter what version of the MLB rules you get a hold of, or what credible summary you read, the guys you replace post-season roster players who are on the DL with have to be in the organization on August 31st. Specificially, on the 40-man. This is why Francisco Rodriguez was cheating (or, since they weren’t caught, he was a piece of aggressive roster management)(or a special dispensation by Selig, though no one’s ever put that forward as an explanation). So Hickey’s wrong, unless the Mariners cheat, too — if they get Stairs today, they’re screwed, and it doesn’t matter who’s on the post-season roster and on the DL.
What this move was, and we won’t know until the list leaks or the M’s make the post-season, is that having Rett Johnson DLed and on the post-season roster means that the Mariners are able to hold off a decision on Sasaki versus ?? as the last man in the bullpen. Here’s how — they put Johnson on and leave Sasaki and Alternate Dude off. Then when it comes time to head to the playoffs, if Sasaki’s got his velocity and stuff back, they stick him in, and if not, Alternate Dude goes on.
Or possibly, Meche himself: that if Meche continues to wear, and the team wants to play Soriano in the rotation, they can make a move around him. It’s interesting stuff, and without knowing what the actual roster looks like, speculating on motives is tough.
Other news: as predicted here, Pat Borders will be a third catcher. Also as predicted, Borders got called up, and Sweeney, Putz, and Looper will all be on the expanded rosters.
And I’m trying to get my hands on a copy of the MLB roster rules, we’ll see how that goes.