Game 45, Mariners at Orioles
For tonight’s game thread, I would like to call your attention to awamori, the delicious distilled rice liquor from Okinawa.
Like a strong, smooth, sake, the libation is first-rate. Occasionally, though, they change it up a little. As any reasonable person might expect, this involves putting a poisonous habu snake inside the bottle, making habu awamori.
It’s like the joyous combination in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, with booze and venom in place of chocolate and crushed goober peas. Hey, you got a deadly viper in my alcohol! Hey, you got spirits all over my poisonous, fanged friend!
As a habitual liquor enthusiast, you accept the risk that alcohol may slowly kill you. It’s kind of the price of admission. A venomous viper turning up in your libation of choice — bearing fearsome fangs and a more direct form of poison — is a bit of a shock to the system.
[The effect is even more pronounced if, when drinking with a friend, you switch a snake-free bottle with a snake-full bottle while he or she visits the restroom. Surprise!]
Similarly, we expected bad pitching could wreak havoc with the Mariners’ season. So far, it has. But the hitting hasn’t been any kind of tonic, either. Well, maybe an illness-inducing one. Two great tastes that taste brutal together. Hey, you got Aaron Sele in my rotation! Hey, you got Wilson Valdez in my lineup!
For those keeping score at home: yes, I am comparing the Mariners’ recent pitching and offensive performance to a mind-numbing, tissue-destroying elixir. Lately, it seems appropriate.
As for the snake liquor, I have an uncle who enjoys all distilled beverages, the barley pop and other brain cell-murdering delights. Have you tried that habu awamori? I asked him one night. Yes, he replied. How is it? I followed up.
I’ll never try it again, he said.
There is a lesson in there that I will try to distill while watching Jamie Moyer take on Rodrigo Lopez. 4:05 p.m. TV: FSN. Radio: KOMO.
Game 35, Red Sox at Mariners
Jeremi Gonzalez v Joel Pineiro. 7:05, FSN for TV.
I was out biking today on my lunch hour, and it was hot and muggy. This afternoon it was hot and muggy. I have no idea what’s going to happen when the sun goes down, but we may see some weird weather at Safeco Field tonight. I’m rooting for partisan hometown whirling mini-cyclones to whisk all the Red Sox fans back to the NE, except for the ones I know.
By game time, this will be sold out, and the next two games (with Franklin and Meche pitching) will also sell out day-of.
Please heed Dave’s call tonight.
The Dodgers, the Mariners
If you hung out here during the off-season (and I’m guessing you did) you probably heard Dave and I (at least) say that the Dodgers had the worst off-season of any team.
They’re 20-14, while the Mariners (who I applauded for the Beltre signing) are 13-21 and are ahead of only KC and Tampa in the overall AL standings.
So what the heck?
Read more
Week #7 in Review
Ice. Elevate. Rest.
Wednesday night while I played softball, the third base bag grabbed me by my cleats and spun me around and threw me to the ground in a move that would impress most fans of World Wrestling Entertainment.
Today my ankle and heel are colors of black and purple I don’t remember ever seeing in my 128-crayon box from 1st grade. I should be able to avoid the disabled list and be day-to-day. Will Carroll can provide the details.
And I’m choosing not to speak with my Yankee-fan sister this week. But because I am a Mariners fan, and thus choose to accept the bad with the good, I will relive the moments of the last week, though it may give me bad dreams…
Vital Signs
As of today the Mariners are 13-21, making pleasant company with those leftover cans of peaches from Y2K in the cellar of the American League West. A brutal week, but the M’s lost just a game on the division-leading Los Angeles Angels, and they are now 6 out of first place. They have been outscored by their opponents 160-141. It’s not the worst run-differential in the division, and according to adjusted standings of Baseball Prospectus, the Mariners are underperforming by a single game, and interestingly enough, the division should be a lot tighter at this point. The Mariners are 10th in the league in runs scored, tied with the Angels. They are 11th in on-base percentage, and 13th in slugging percentage. Their 102 walks rank 8th in the league, and their 23 home runs rank 13th in the league.
Some challenging offense this past week has brought the Mariners’ run prevention back under the influence of gravity. While their runs allowed is still second only to the Angels in the division, they have fallen to 8th in the league. The gloves are still outstanding, but the M’s slipped to 3rd in the league turning 71.4% of balls in play into outs.
Key pitching stastic: Starters ERA – 5.46. Bullpen ERA – 2.64.
Another week, another victory. There was a time not so long ago when roadtrips to northeastern America provided some of the best baseball games of the season. This week it was more like the scene from middle school where the acne-covered fat kid gets kicked in the junk and has his lunch money stolen. The Mariners were outscored 41-27. While they were out-homered 8-6 and out-walked 17-16, they simply surrendered more total hits to the opposition 65-49. It’s May 13 and the Mariners have won twice this month.
It’s plain not fair when you score more runs in the first inning on Wednesday than you’ve scored in 2/3’rds of your total games all season and still lose. I hate the Yankees.
Heroes
Ichiro! led the team in batting .400/.429/.600 with 15 total bases. (Kudos to a solid week from Adrian Beltre, too, .333/.385/.583, 3 doubles and a homer).
Eddie Guardado, Shigs Hasegawa, Julio Mateo and J.J. Putz combined for 14.1 innings and allowed only a single home run to Jorge Posada in the 8th inning Wednesday. They allowed just 6 hits, walked 1 and struck out 10.
Not-so-much Heroes
If Aaron Sele’s days as a Mariner aren’t already numbered, they should be. The Yankees carved him like a Thanksgiving turkey, as he recorded only 8 outs. In his 2.2 innings, he allowed 8 hits, walked 2 and surrendered 7 runs. His ERA presently stands at 6.31 through 35+ innings.
Mariner wins in May: 2. Contribution from Miguel Olivo: 0-for-21. Coincidence? Whatever.
Coming to a Stadium Near You
It’s like Groundhog Day all over again, only the M’s get to wear the white uniforms this time. Red Sox Friday-Saturday-Sunday. Yankees Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday.
And I swear, the next time I see David Ortiz take a swing, I’m making like Buster Bluth and dropping into the fetal position.
Updated Draft Board
The 2005 Draft Board has been updated. The changes aren’t dramatic, but there is some movement in the top five, and I have updated the statistics for each of those players. For those who really don’t like clicking on links, the top five are Gordon, Upton, Maybin, Hochevar, and Drew, in that order.
This is a great thread to bombard with draft questions. I’ll be around for the next hour or so, and I’ll get to the rest tomorrow.
Commenting
Probably the most prominant new feature on the blog this year have been the Game Threads that we’ve been posting, and judging by the hundreds of comments each one receives, they’ve been pretty popular. We’re happy to provide a place for everyone to discuss the game as its going on, something of a virtual sportsbar, and we intend to continue posting game threads for the forseeable future.
However, as you’ve probably noticed, the last two days, we have felt the need to close down the threads after some of the commentary got out of hand. The tone of the threads has gotten progressively worse as the team has hit its slide, and multiple posts have had to be removed. Unfortunately, as the game threads have degenerated, it’s meant significantly more work for us in trying to keep an eye on all the comments and eliminating those that fall outside the lines of the comment guidelines.
So, consider this a preemptive strike and a call to raise the level of commentary in the game threads. This blog is not, for better or worse, a message board where you are free to say what you will. There are a ton of places you can go if you really feel the need to attack people and act like a 5 year old, but the USSM comments aren’t one of them. The point of the comments, even in the more laid back game threads, is the exchange of ideas and commentary about the subject of the post.
So, in the spirit of making the threads both more enjoyable to read and easier for us to monitor, here are some things we’re going to ask of you guys that we will enforce to the best of our abilities:
1. Punctuation and some semblance of grammar aren’t optional. Writing four sentences without a period is just painful to read. Don’t use all capital letters. Don’t omit capital letters when necessary, either. This is pretty basic grammer, and while it may seem pedantric, it’s a basic fundamental of communication. You are posting for thousands of other people to read. Make it easy on them. Punctuation isn’t exactly time consuming to add to your comments.
2. Personal attacks will get your posts deleted. It doesn’t matter who they are aimed at. Whether it be someone in comments who said something you don’t like, one of us, someone on the team, you don’t have the right to impugn anyone else’s character. You can disagree with their point, but when it crosses the line to discussing their qualities as a person, your posts will be removed.
3. This is more of a suggestion, but when responding to a comment from a previous post, it is often a good idea to quote a portion of the thought you’re responding to. I prefer the italics method personally, but your mileage may vary. If you’d like to make it easier to people to see what you’re responding to, use the html tag of emphasis, which is “em” followed by “/em” offset by <> on each line. So, it’d look like < .em>quoted material here< ./em> (without the ., which I used just to get the actual tags to show on the site). This isn’t required, but I figure some of you guys may find it helpful.
Basically, what we’re asking is that you make our job easier and improve the quality of the comments in the threads. Don’t inflame others, don’t attack people, and make your comments easy for other people to read.
Edited to add a primer on a few html tags that work in wordpress, as requested in comments
All of these have the same < ...>text< ./...> format.
Bold: strong-/strong
Italics: em-/em
Block quote: blockquote-/blockquote
To link to another webpage, use the following: < .a href="http://www.pagehere.com">description of page< ./a>. As before, omit the periods.
Game 34, Mariners at Yankees
LHP Moyer v RHP Pavano. 10:05 (!) broadcast on ESPN.
From the press notes, it looks like the 13-19 Mariners will sell out through the Boston series.
Brief digression:
From the MLB.com Game Preview:
“I have to find a way to keep the ball down and my fastball away from the middle of the plate. It’s pretty simple.” — Aaron Sele on what he needs to do to improve
Alternately:
“I need to invent a time machine, travel back in time to before my arm blew up, when I could pitch effectively, and then abduct myself to make my next start. But then wait… what happens to old me? Do I disappear now because the old me won’t be around?”
Game 33, Mariners at Yankees
Sele v Wang. 4:05. KSTW.
This has a reaaaal high chance of being a reaaaaal ugly game.
Mariners, World Champions that Weren’t
“The Mariners had Junior, A-Rod, and Randy Johnson, and they didn’t win squat.”
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that about the Mariners. But I’ve never sat down and taken a serious look at that window, and considered what might have been, and how it could have got there.
The window’s shorter that many people realize. Griffey came up in 1989 and was here through 1999. Randy Johnson came over in 1989, but didn’t ascend to dominance until 1993 and after that was astoundingly good until he was traded in 1998. Alex Rodriguez debuted in 1994 but didn’t play full time until 1996, when he too was insanely good, and he left after 2000.
Two years with those three players: 1996 and 1997. And with Randy out for much of 1996, really 1997 is their shot at it.
In 1996, they went 85-76 and finished second in the AL West by five games.
In 1997, they won the division and the Orioles handed them their ass in the Division Series.
How can a team with those three players putting up Hall of Fame years not win the league and go to the World Series?
Offensively, it’s hard to find something to improve on. The team led the league both years in runs scored per game, and that was legit even given the Kingdome’s effect on offense. They got great production out of Buhner, Edgar and some of their stop-gaps, like Paul Sorrento, worked out pretty well. They juggled a couple of holes (1996: 3B, LF, 1997: LF) but overall, there’s not a lot to criticize here. Sure, there are some dumb what-ifs (sign Barry Bonds in 1993, for instance) we could look at, but generally, scoring runs wasn’t the issue.
The problem, as we know it, was that they had poor pitching. Could that have been fixed?
Yup.
Essentially, the team needed a couple of pitching widgets:
1996: five decent starters. That rotation (Hitchcock-Wolcott-Wagner-Mulholland-Wells) was awful. Randy only pitched in 14 games that year, too. The late-season acquisition of Moyer helped, but this team desperately needed starters.
The bullpen is okay.
1997, though, things change a lot. Jeff Fassero comes on, there’s a full season of Moyer and Randy, and only the 4-5 starters are terrible. The bullpen is awwwwwwwwwwwwwful.
What could the team have done over these two years? I looked for free agents in those years who signed with teams other than their last team. The list of players who could have changed history for the team is short.
Before the 1996 season
Kevin Brown. The deal he signed with the Marlins for 1996-1998 was a steal. His performance in 1996 alone might have swung the division between the Mariners and the Rangers.
Al Leiter. Another part of the huge Marlins rotations, Leiter would have been big in 1996 and filled in the back of the rotation in 97, and then been great again in 1998 which is, again, outside the scope of this exercise.
And that’s all I see, surveying the free agent market before the 1996 season like this.
Those two would have cost the Mariners an immense amount of money to sign. However, headed into the season they would have had an amazing Johnson-Brown-Leiter-crap-crap rotation, where crap and crap don’t make the post-season roster (then Randy drops out, they still trade for Moyer…)
1997 — hey, Albert Belle’s available! That’ll fill the left-field… oooooh.
I like Roger Clemens here. He and Randy instead of Randy and Fassero… man, that’d have been awesome. And Clemens was brilliant in 1997 — that contract worked out really well for Toronto.
But for super-ace relievers, what am I going to say? Picking the crop of these guys even with hindsight is terrible. I mean, there were smart people who thought Mike Henneman was going to be a star for years after 1995. Didn’t happen.
(mmm.. Piazza in 1997, too…)
Here’s what If ound particularly interesting: it wouldn’t have cost them all that much. Leiter and Brown’s salaries for Florida in 1996 added up to $6m.
$6m, and I think they win the division and pound the tar out of every team they face in the playoffs. They spent $4m on Chris Bosio that year and $2.85 on Hibbard.
A little more in there (put Buhner in left, sigh Sheffield, who goes on a tremendous run for another chunk, that’s probably eight games right there over the left field tilt-a-whirl) and it starts to get sick.
The lasting lesson I see is that the great failure of the 90s Mariner teams wasn’t in a failure to develop players, or anything like it. It was the steady adherence to the old M’s Bosio/Hibbard philosophy: attempt to find undervalued modest free agents coming from bad teams.
By itself, this isn’t such a bad philosophy. You want to look for value wherever you can get it. But what it meant to those two teams with the greatest home-grown core was that they were saddled with modestly-priced modest players that then failed to live up to even that expectation. For every success the team had in finding a guy like Paul Sorrento, it failed at another position and sometimes an entire unit.
Which brings me to the failure of strategy. The Mariners of the late 90s were a lot like the Mariners 0f 2004 in that there was not a lot of deep thinking about how to construct a team. There were players they had, holes they wanted to fill, and Lou screaming about needing pitches who could throw strikes.
Bullpens are junk. You can assemble a rag-tag collection of servicable relievers out of organizational floatsam, minor league free agents, and waiver claims. Look at the bullpen today: Putz and Thornton are random dudes, and Sherill could outpitch Nelson. Plus, the risk on investment in the bullpen is so huge (for a number of reasons). I’d much rather put that kind of money in a hitter or a starter.
But back to my point — if you’re the Mariners in 1996, you’re confronted with a rotation that any rational evaluation will tell you is going to be a problem, and a couple position holes. At the same time, the clock’s ticking. While you’re not in Safeco Field yet, even if you figure that Randy will stay through his contract year, you have three seasons. After that, it’s pointless to forecast.
So the miracle season is over.
You face the off-season, and you have:
Randy and then question marks and gaps in the rotation (Benes, Belcher filing for free agency)
A bullpen with some issues.
Some hard choices to make with players like Tino Martinez and Mike Blowers, with teams expressing interest in making trades.
That stupid three-year clock ticking.
This was the great failure of the Mariners, and one we would see again in 2001: with great success and acclaim, the team didn’t look to make massive improvements and try and make choices that would allow them to compete for and win a World Series title for the next few years, or even a year. They shuffled the deck. Blowers to LA for junk. Tino to NY for Russ Davis and junk.
The way that great teams are great is not because of luck and circumstances, though both of those play an important role. It’s that those teams both believe they can be great and are realistic about the challenges they face and so can find solutions to those problems. While I may disagree with some of the choices the Red Sox made last year, they were a great example of this. Every day: “Is this the day I have to make a deal to improve our defense? Do I have to go get a better platoon partner for Trot Nixon? Is it worth it to upgrade defense at first base?”
This is why people screamed about the team’s “ennnhhh, get into the playoffs and luck out” philosophy. If you want to have people walk around on the moon, your goal has to be putting people on the moon so they can walk around. You can’t say “we’re going to put people in orbit and maybe they’ll luck into landing on, walking around on, and returning from the moon”. If your vision and belief in your ability to achieve your goal waver, you may get there, but your chances are greatly diminished.
That’s your 1996-7 Mariners, the World Champions that weren’t. “Will this move make us great?” “I don’t know, but Lou will stop yelling at me about the bullpen for a week.”
Dave’s Game Notes
I wasn’t up to liveblogging the game, so here are my retrospective thoughts from tonight’s affair.
The M’s lack of any kind of right-handed bat on the bench kills them against lefties. Every southpaw gets four guaranteed outs in the lineup every time they face us. Starting Bloomquist in CF isn’t helping anything. Acquiring Beltre and Sexson doesn’t change the fact that the rest of the roster is useless against left handed pitching.
Rick Sutcliffe was awful announcing. I could spend several paragraphs harping on his stupidity, but the open legs = curveball thing was by far the worst. He cherry picked examples to defend his statement, ignoring every pitch where Wiki had open legs and the pitch was a fastball. He took something completely random, proclaimed it a tell, and then proceeded to only point it out when the randomness matched up with his claim.
Robinson Cano’s last name is pronounced “K-no”, by the way. Not “cuh-no”.
Beltre smoked that home run.
Thornton and Nelson are arguably the two worst relievers in the pen. They’re allowing far more baserunners than any other pitchers in the pen, and in a tie game on the road, they’re the ones who get the call? Why? Is there any rationale at all for using Nelson in that situation? How on earth is he a better choice than Putz or Mateo?
Dave Hansen and Jeremy Reed get a DNP-CD, while Greg Dobbs gets to make the final out. I wonder how much Greg Dobbs Is Good Kool-Aid Hargrove had to drink when he got hired.
Willie Bloomquist is now hitting .138/.166/.172. National League pitchers are hitting .141/.174/.175.