Tonight only! Kazmir Kazmir Kazmir!
If you’ve been slacking off on your Mariner-watching lately, what with the Olympics and all (and I have greatly mixed feelings about the Olympics, but that’s beside the point) , tonight’s a good one to tune into, even if only for the first couple of innings. We get young super-prospect Kazmir starting for the Devil Rays, who stink in an entirely different way than the M’s do, and Madritsch for us. Now, did the Mets abandon Kazmir because Rick Peterson saw something in him that doomed his chances for future success? I’m looking forward to going to the game tonight, and I’ll be honest — that hasn’t been the case for many matchups this year.
Linking up and site warning
Service bulletin: I’m going to swap over to the USSM 2.1 template tonight, so if you log in and see the page all half-gussied up, apologies in advance for any inconvenience. Here at the U.S.S. Mariner labs, we never stop innovating… for you!
Also, I’ve finally gone through and gotten us up to date on the M’s blogosphere. A bunch of new ones, and a lot of dead ones pruned. Here’s how it went:
– updated recently (like, say, the last two weeks)?
– is this blog primarly or mostly about the Mariners, unless we’ve been linking to it for ages anyway, like the Bremertonians?
Otherwise, no link in the M’s blogosphere section. Now… this means that I skipped some that I like personally (like Bob Mong’s, for instance, which sometimes has really good M’s stuff) and may eventually go into another links section. But not right now.
Update 8:50pm: USSM 2.1 template’s up. Incremental changes to follow, but that’s the big one.
Update midnight: I spent way too much time on this this weekend. Last set of changes for the night published, and that’s all for now.
Gil Meche
I’m going to take advantage of our new fangled comments to start a discussion on Gil Meche. I was thinking about posting my thoughts, but I’ll hold off for now. I want to hear what you guys think. I really don’t have a good feel for the majority opinion on him.
Obviously, we’ve all been indoctrinated by the “Gil Meche has all-star stuff” doctrine, which I’m not sure I agree with, but most people have bought full force. It appears to me that most folks think his problems are almost all mental, and once he “learns how to pitch”, he’s going to be a frontline major league starter. The fear of letting him go seems very high.
So, what do you guys think? The M’s have to offer him arbitration in two months, meaning he’ll make a minimum of $1.9 million next year, and possibly more. Do you spend the $2 million to bring him back and hope he turns a corner next year, or use his stuff as trade bait and let someone else try to get him to live up to the hype?
sorry, pardon me, coming through
I’m working on tweaking the template a little to make everyone (and particularly Dave) happier, so the site may look a little… uh… wonky here today.
Hmmm… Dave wanted the boxes behind posts, I’m not so sure it works. I’ll leave it up for a while. Anyway, it looks like this is going to require some serious hammer-pounding and general teeth-gnashing, so… I’m going to stop watching the game and tinkering and just watch the game. I’ll do the serious stuff next time I’m up late and there are fewer people around to see the sidebar move around.
Also, in general — part of the problem is that I’m trying to do a lot of CSS tweaking and porting between a couple of different templates we’re using while integrating the stuff that worked off the old USSM blogger template, and it’s far more complicated than I thought it would be. The blogger template was straight HTML, so I didn’t have to do a lot of tweaking. This is a whole other thing.
So bear with me.
And whatever they put in Willie’s water today, can I get some before my games this week? Holy mackeral.
(updating again: I stood up, got a Coke, watched Pudge’s at-bat, worrying they might still lose it, and when Rodrigues hit that ball, yelled “Get to it!” sighed in relief when Ichiro! got there… and tried to drink my Coke, except I’d forgotten to open for… how long did that at-bat seem to last, ten minutes? So I all I got was the refreshing taste of aluminum can. I’ll take the W.)
AquaSox 6, Volcanoes 3
As I mentioned in my last post, I caught Everett’s win tonight. My real reason for going up there was to get an interview with Matt Tuiasosopo for the September issue of the Grand Salami, but I’m always happy to catch a game as well. I arrived about 4:40pm, and it was raining pretty hard. I checked in at the office to see if the game had been called already, and either way, if I could perhaps sneak in the interview before the players either needed to take BP or were told to go home.
Amy Randall, Everett’s media relations guru, told me the players were still around, waiting for the weather to clear up so they could take BP. She radioed up to another team employee to check on Tuiasosopo’s availability. Word comes back that manager Pedro Grifol has given me until 4:45 to complete the interview… or less than five minutes. I am to meet Tuiasosopo outside the clubhouse. Now, if you’ve ever been to Memorial Stadium you know that it doesn’t have clubhouses. In an arrangement you’d only find in minor league baseball, the players get dressed at the high school next door, then walk down to the stadium for games. For me, this meant I was roughly one block away (up hill) from my target with less than five minutes to make the walk and complete the interview.
Fortunately, he wasn’t outside waiting for me when I got up there. He emerged, along with most of the team, a few minutes later, presumably from some sort of team meeting. I introduced myself, we shook hands, and I conducted the interview. When Grifol and a team employee (presumably the guy Amy radioed earlier) started giving me the evil eye, I knew it was time to wrap things up. You can read the interview for yourself in next month’s Salami.
On to the game, which began on time and was played without delay thanks to the rain letting up about 5pm.
Upon arriving in the press box, I was greeted by the following:
I was also told that Misters Gillick and Bavasi might be in attendence. They never did show up, but I just read in our comments that Bavasi was in Tacoma instead. Mr. and Mrs. Pelekoudas were no-shows as well.
Nothing says fun like Western night at the old ballpark!
The managers exchange lineups and go over the ground rules with the umpires (yup, you’re seeing things correctly — only two umps in the Northwest League).
Matt Tuiasosopo takes his hacks in the on-deck circle.
The writer for a certain paper, which shall remain nameless, spend the entire game playing hearts on his laptop, surfing the ‘net or playing games on his cellphone.
The first 1,000 kids age 12 and under were given Rafael Soriano bobblehead dolls on their way into the park. After the game I saw a kid in the parking lot playing with his… and wouldn’t you know it, little Rafael’s right arm fell off at the elbow. It was the weirdest thing.
Everett starter Aaron Jensen was considered a pretty hot prospect when he was drafted last year. He fell to the 19th round due to signability concerns, but was considered a high-round pick. From what I saw he has pretty good stuff, though he’s quite erratic. His fastball ranged from 89 to 93 MPH, sitting primarily from 90-92. He also threw a big, overhand curveball which clocked in anywhere from 73 to 77. It was at its best the slower he threw it; when he overthrew it, it stayed up and didn’t break. Jensen also threw some changeups, which registered in the low- to mid-80’s. Finally, he threw a handful (as in, five or six all game) of sliders in the high-80’s. The slider is a new pitch for him this season, and it showed. Overall, he didn’t seem very comfortable with any of his non-fastball pitches. He also fell behind too many hitters by missing with his fastball early, which then didn’t allow him to set hitters up for his off-speed stuff.
I also had my first look at Phil Cullen, a former University of Utah hoops player. For a guy 6-9, he sure doesn’t generate much velocity — his fastball topped out at 84, and more often than not it was 81-82. He has a slow, deliberate motion and threw a ton of curveballs. He wasn’t comfortable at all pitching without a full windup. To be fair, he’s just coming back from a broken arm that has cost him almost two years of pitching.
Dave’s talked about Casey Craig in the past; I was very impressed by his approach at the plate. In his first at-bat, he walked on six pitches without taking the bat off his shoulder once. Next time up, his first swing was on a 2-2 pitch, lined up the middle for a single. Third at-bat, he hammered a 1-0 fastball into right for another single. He went down swinging in the 8th, but not before making the pitcher throw six pitches. He didn’t swing at any bad pitches and saw 18 pitches in his four plate appearances. Not too shabby.
Tuiasosopo isn’t nearly as patient, preferring to swing early in the count. To his credit, he didn’t swing at bad pitches, he just hit earlier in the count. He also drew a five-pitch walk in the 7th. For the game, he finished 2-3 with a pair of singles, a walk and two runs batted in. One positive sign, particularly for a young hitter, is that he likes to hit up the middle and go the other way, as opposed to many young hitters who try to pull everything thrown to them.
The star of the game to me was shortstop Asdrubal Cabrera, who looks like he could play major league defense tomorrow. Come to think of it, so could 2B Oswaldo Navarro. Shortstop, I mean, not second base. Cabrera made a phenomenal play in the 9th, going to his right, then dropping to one knee to play a wicked hop backhanded and up around his head. Without missing a beat, he turned his body — he’s still on one knee, mind you — and threw a perfect strike from deep at short to nail the runner by two steps. Navarro and Cabrera also combined on a couple of extremely fluid double plays. Good defense is fun to watch.
Time to wrap this up… it’s absolutely pouring outside right now. Woo! I’ve missed the rain!
I agree
I’ll echo what Dave said — bravo to Derek and USSM v2.0. We’ve come a long way, baby.
I braved the elements tonight (well, Saturday, which is really last night, but hey, I’m still awake so it’s still today) to watch the Aquasox beat Salem-Keizer 6-3. Good game. I’ll post a full report here in a bit (pictures too! it was Western Night at the ballpark!), assuming I can figure out this new interface and the baby decides to sleep for another hour.
Hey, also, I made a few edits to the Big Board. Primarily I fixed a few incorrect links — major league players who still had minor league links and the like.
Naked and Famous
How’s this for cool: while I was working on site migration tonight, I was listening to the Presidents of the United States of America. Now, having called it quits for the night, I find we’re on their links page.
I’m grinning like a moron.
Bean Lust
Every manager’s got their own strength and weaknesses. In light of the Royals sending a pixalated dog into the dugout to flush out M’s so they could be beaned ala Duck Hunt for the NES, I wanted to wistfully remember Lou Piniella, who kept guys on in the bullpen for their willingness to go in and plunk somebody and immediately be ejected. Bobby Ayala, Frankie Rodriguez… Lou’s mercurial nature had its drawbacks, but I like to think after Ichiro went down everyone would have cleared out of the park, because fastballs were going to be a-flying.
Now, I don’t know if that’s a deterrent or not, but… like many of the Piniella v Melvin comparisons, at least there was some comfort in knowing that Piniella cared, and was seething with the same frustration.
Huzzah
Derek is the man. Hooray for USSM 2.0
Ichiro is 7 for 10 since getting a concussion. Seriously, this whole stretch has just been absurd.
And we’re up again
You’ll note the page looks dramatically different. This is the second phase of the U.S.S. Mariner improvement program. We’ve moved from blogger. While we complained a little about how slow pages were loading there, etc., one of the other things that was going on was that it was frequently impossible for us to log in to make posts, we had weird problems with double-posting (resulting in the ever-popular “You guys can’t be that smart if you’re double-posting HA HA HA 0wn3d!!” email), etc. Now we’re on WordPress, so we control the tools, the site, storage… and, unfortunately for me, we’re on the hook for our own bandwith, and I’m thinking about shutting boeing.com access off because you engineers can’t stop reloading the page every hour (I’m kidding! Big shout out to the Lazy B!).
If you’re visiting the site this weekend, you’ll see the links built back up as I port those over, and the template will continue to be tweaked into shape.
Comments!
You’ll note I enabled comments but did not launch forums. I decided not to implement forums after I cruised around looking at what other M’s forums were offering and decided it wasn’t worth it. We don’t have the time or resources to moderate forums, and while I had a dream of building a really great Mariner discussion community as part of this project, I just can’t do it. Sorry.
And as long as I’m being open about the rationale behind things, I’m pessimistic comments are going to be up for long, either. At a certain size, it becomes impossible to leave those things open, because you’re too attractive for spammers, trollers, and the like. I haven’t disclosed site traffic sites (and won’t) but we’re past that point.
It is my hope that the exceptionally high quality of our reader base will be reflected in quality of comments and thus will allow them to survive.
We’ll see. There may also be a problem where comments (and the associated cost in having people frequently reload for updated discussions) cost me too much in bandwith.
I’ll keep everyone updated. Back to baseball.