Thursday Mariner goodness
DMZ · March 9, 2006 at 11:46 am · Filed Under Mariners
M’s versus Japan in an exhibition game yesterday got a ton of press (PI 1, PI 2, Times ).
Moyer likes Johjima. (TNT)
M’s versus Japan in an exhibition game yesterday got a ton of press (PI 1, PI 2, Times ).
Moyer likes Johjima. (TNT)
Maybe they should be missing Beltre. He just hit homerun #3.
Anyone getting excited by reports of how good Joel looks so far?
Beltre’s AB for a HR today was pretty impressive. It was against a no-name guy from Italy, but he *was* able to lay off a few low-and-away pitches to work the count full and get a nice, fat pitch to drive. So I suppose that’s encouraging.
Joel’s curve looked pretty nasty to me yesterday, but I guess it still remains an open question how consistent he can be with it. Against a major league lineup, it only takes a couple hanging curve to ruin your day. I guess it’s too early for me to get very excited about players who seem to be progressing.
#2: Joel got only two K’s in four innings while facing 15 or 16 batters in a pretty wimpy lineup. He gave up three hits and one walk. Reports I read said Joel was in the high 80’s with his fastball.
Color me unimpressed.
I figured out that Moyer liked Joh after he gave him the Helmet Pat Of Approval
On TV Joel’s fastballs were showing up in the low 90’s. If you put any stock in that. He kept the ball down, got curves over, and looked pretty good to my relatively untrained eye. But there are always times when Joel looks pretty good.
Foppert isn’t helping his cause today… it’s a no-hitter through two… but he walked the bases full in the 2nd and tried his darndest in the 1st…. 28 balls, 21 strikes
oh, you forgot Kelley, who tells us that Washburn “comes from a place that knows how to win” and is “not afraid to speak [his] mind”
I didn’t forget. I just don’t link or talk about Kelley unless my hand is forced.
This is the lineup against which Joel worked:
Kingsale
De Caster
Coffie
Jones
Simon
Adriana
Van Klooster
De Jong
Legito
Facing that feasome lineup, Joel yielded four hits and one walk with two K’s in four innings of work. Doesn’t it make you wonder what it would have been like if he had faced a real lineup? What difference does it make how good he looked if he got only marginal results against a sub-marginal lineup?
#8. I just can’t imagine why.
Pineiro looks good? That’s it, he’s going on my HACKING MASS team.
That reminds me, I need to start thinking of cool names.
We can all argue about whether Pineiro pitching four scoreless innings against weak competition is a reason for optimism or not. All I know is that anytime Joel doesn’t get tatooed I’m happy – regardless of who he’s facing. Call it shell shock from the past two seasons.
I saw Pineiro pitch on ESPN’s alternate feed on Dish Network last night, and, well, he looked OK. Nothing more, nothing less. I didn’t catch the velocity on his fastball, but his breaking balls were mostly in the dirt, and the hitters were chasing them. I recall only one real good knee-buckler thrown for a strike. He did look pretty good against Andrew Jones, when Jones grounded out weakly on a breaking ball (he put a pretty ugly swing on it, and looked fooled), but some of the lesser hitters in the lineup (I remember Kingsale in particular) hit the ball hard off of him a few times for lineouts.
Remember that these WBC outtings are basically spring training for guys like Ichiro and Pinero too. They haven’t got their timing back and are probably working on things as much as they can while still doing well.
“What difference does it make how good he looked if he got only marginal results against a sub-marginal lineup?”
In such a small sample size as four innings, I care a lot more about how he looked than what the results were. I’m not a very good judge of how he looked, but given the choice between a scout’s opinion of how he looked for 4 innings and his line score for 4 innings, I’d take the scout’s opinion every time. So, if there are any professional scouts out there, please raise your hands.
But at any rate, it’s just 4 innings, so there’s not much point in bending over backwards to adjust for the lineup and time of year and park factors and everything else you would need to do to squeeze some sliver of real information out of his stats.
It might not have been all that impressive, but it probably builds Joel’s confidence, which is as important.
The AP article on today’s Mariner pounding discusses the White Sox’s outfield glut. Both Joe Borchard and Ross Gload are out of options, but only one is likely to make the team. If you were running the M’s, would you pick one up when he become’s available? Either one is a better option that Lawton.