Breathe
And now, after running the Gauntlet of Death, the M’s actually get to face a below average major league pitcher. I don’t want to belittle Jason Johnson, who I made a case for acquiring in the offseason, but he’s just not the caliber of pitcher the M’s have faced in their first nine games. You want to see some tough competition? Check this out. The combined 2005 average performance of the starting pitchers the M’s have faced to date:
14-9, 3.65 ERA, 207 IP, 58 BB, 154 K, 23 HR allowed.
Or, if you like more advanced metrics:
4.42 FIP, 4.23 xFIP, 2.4 BB/G, 7.0 K/G, .96 HR/G
2.5 walks, 7 strikeouts, and keeping the ball in the park? That’s basically like facing the 2005 Kevin Millwood. Nine times in a row.
Bring on Jason Johnson.
Game 9, Mariners at Indians
4:05. RHP Gil Mech v RHP Paul Byrd.
Lawton is off the restricted list after his 10-day suspension. Time went fast, blah blah blah. This set off a couple of weird moves: Jeff Harris was optioned to Tacoma, Guillermo Quiroz was taken off the roster via designation for assignment, and Rene Rivera was recalled.
I’m as baffled as you are. Why did Quiroz got the boot? It was a nice little pickup. Did he turn out to have personality issues or something?
And I’m a little surprised that they’re moving off the extra-beefy bullpen, given that the starters are getting rocked.
Great Nickname
You’re probably aware that the M’s recently traded RHP Marcos Carvajal to the Devil Rays for fellow RHP Jose de la Cruz. What you might not have known is that de la Cruz, who stands 6-7 and weighs 245 pounds, is known as “The Aircraft Carrier.” Thanks to Baseball America’s Trade Central for that one.
Game 8, Mariners at Indians
LHP Washburn v LHP Lee. 4:05, KSTW-11.
Will Washburn be able to dominate a team he’s not angry at?
The Mariners front office the last two years has pointed at the Indians as an example of what they didn’t want to do. We’ve agreed — Dave wrote a great post a long time ago about how the M’s financial advantage means that you can wallpaper over a tear-down job as you rebuild, for instance — and we see a lot of comments when this subject come up that say, essentially, “yeah, that would be soooo horrible, if the Mariners rebuilt as quickly and as effectively as the Indians have.”
And while it’s of course a more complicated situation than that, it’s true that the Indians are my favorites to win the division, and have done a great job, while the Mariners haven’t, and that they’re a better team this year.
Chuck Armstrong, among others, has argued that the team’s commitment to spending money, even badly, has been an expression of the team’s compact with fans, part of a keep-showing-up-and-we-keep-spending pact.
In particular, they’ve mocked Cleveland a little, saying “they may be better off than we are, but they really tore down and they’re drawing ten thousand fewer fans a night now.”
Check out ESPN’s attendance numbers. The Mariners in their seven games averaged 29,330 fans. Cleveland so far has drawn 30,287 in three. Mind you, that’s 42k in the first home game and 25k/23k on a Sat/Sun (the M’s did 38k/27k against the A’s… but it looks like that gap’s closing.
Then what’s the argument? “If you hadn’t kept enabling us by coming out to the game, we would have built a better team faster?”
It’s entirely valid for the M’s to say that their situation’s much different than the Indians, or from any team — but the business side guys seem to want to bag on the Indians for what they’ve done, as if it’s alienated their entire fan base, while being unwilling to admit that their massive revenue streams make them much more like Boston, which has spent much more freely, and wisely, and accomplished greater things.
Anyway. I really like the Indians, it’s a well-run franchise, and this should be good baseball.
Tuesday is newsday, but not really
Johjima catching on quickly with M’s [Times]
The M’s had a real off day Monday. [PI] (Now there’s news, folks)
Also from the PI, I found these two Chicago links, in which the Everett-White Sox feud continues (but remember, he’s a team player and everyone who’s ever played with him loves him and has nothing bad to say).
Sun-Times
Tribune
The PI Answer Guy reveals that, as you probably noticed:
The team is experimenting with a new broadcasting format, in which the play-by-play announcers (Dave Niehaus, Rick Rizzs) do half the game on TV and half the game on radio, but the color commentators (Fairly, Dave Henderson, Dave Valle) stay either with the TV broadcast or the radio broadcast for the entire game.
(Advance warning: any comment with those names wrong gets nuked)
KUOW gig available for your listening pleasure
I had a great time: Jonah and I could (and sometimes do) talk baseball for hours, though he doesn’t plug his book in private conversations if you already own it. And I got to meet Larry Stone, Officially Endorsed Baseball Writer of USSM, and I gotta admit I was a little starstruck — I’m such a big fan.
Random Thoughts, Week One
[Watch as Dave usurpus the top spot from both JMB and DMZ. Hooray for eastern time.]
So, a week is in the books, and we stand at 3-4, built basically on a three game winning streak and the current three game losing streak. The team has looked both fantastic and terrible. What have I seen so far?
- The team scored 30 runs in seven games at Safeco Field against the toughest group of starting pitchers any team has faced so far this year. Colon, Harden, Lackey, and Zito are all borderline all-stars, Weaver and Loiaza are upper-tier mid rotation guys, and Blanton is a second year arm with some promise. Those pitchers are going to pose a challenge to any team. Scoring 30 runs in seven games against those arms is an accomplishment.
- Take away Felix’s velocity and command, and what do you have left? A guy with so much movement that teams still can’t get the ball out of the infield against him. That was as bad as Felix has looked since he got to the majors, stuff-wise, and he still dominated the A’s. This kid’s ridiculous.
- This team can’t win consistently without Adrian Beltre hitting like a major league third baseman. Right now, he’s the same guy he was last year. His pitch recognition is terrible, and he’s missing easily hittable balls. If ever there was a candidate for someone to watch hours and hours of video to learn how to read a ball coming out of the pitcher’s hand, it’s Beltre.
- Willie Bloomquist shouldn’t be an option in center field. That dive on the line drive on Saturday was one of the worst defensive plays you’ll ever see.
- Richie Sexson has one walk and nine strikeouts in 26 at-bats. And he’s the patient hitter in the line-up.
- For everyone concerned about the bullpen, don’t be. The M’s have options. Nageotte and Sean Green are showing off some nasty sinkers down in Tacoma. Green is a groundball machine, and even when he’s not missing bats, he’s tough.
- Three against Cleveland and three against Boston, all on the road? I’ll be thrilled if they can pull of a .500 road trip.
Big Board Updated
[Watch with wonder as Derek and Jason fight for top billing!]
At long last, the Big Board has been updated for the start of the 2006 season. Please see the link at left, under “features”.
Known issues:
1. Minor league links still point to BaseballAmerica.com, which as of this writing still shows player stats for the 2005 season. If they don’t get this updated pretty soon — their stats were pretty bad last year well into the season, if you recall — I’ll switch back to MinorLeagueBaseball.com links instead.
2. As a result of #1 above, there are no links for guys who didn’t appear in the minors last season. Examples include Kevin Appier, Dan Wright, and Adam Pettyjohn.
3. Teams have only played four games (three, in the case of Inland Empire), so it can be hard to figure out starting lineups. This is made worse by the fact that minor league teams often do things like rotate their players around, such that there isn’t a regular DH, for example.
4. Mozilla tends to freak out at Big Board updates. At least it does on my machine, getting the formatting all wrong. Hit refresh and you should be OK. By the same token, if you click on the link and see the old version, make sure you hit refresh. You probably have the old one stuck in your cache (which isn’t as painful as it might sound).
I’m happy to take feedback on other issues, such as incorrect handedness, misspelled names, bad links, and so on. Drop me a line or leave a comment on this post.
Week One in review
Seven games, and the Mariners are 3-4.
We’ve seen the first of the team, and it’s a mixed bag. They took 2/3 from the Angels on the strength of strong pitching and good hitting, and then the Athletics beat them up to take 3/4, almost entirely disarming the offense. Faced with Blanton, Zito, and Harden, the Mariners looked hopeless. You want to hope that’s just three guys in a row who had great performances, but the worry is that even if they manage to scrape their way into the playoffs, they’re going to go down quietly against the first team they hit with a quality rotation. Seven games in, yeah, it’s too early to say that. But that’s what I thought.
The good:
Johjima looks like total stud. I love him. Reed and Lopez have both been hitting. Rafael Soriano has looked like he’s well on his way to dominant form. Even bad King Felix is good. Jarrod Washburn, the much-derided free agent signing, looked great.
The bad:
Carl “Waste of Carbon” Everett’s not hitting, but he’s still hitting more than Beltre, who was flatlined offensively until today. Putz looks horrible.
This next week we get to see the Mariners play against the Indians, a franchise I think we’re all huge fans of. They’ve got a great core of talent, having torn down completely and gone to a long-term rebuilding plan. Then Boston, which requires little introduction.
Both are contrasts to the Mariners: if they had realized their position and retreated from trying to compete earlier, and rebuilt on the cheap, they’d be the Indians of a year or two ago, preparing for an extended run at competition and if they’d been Boston, willing to wisely spend their massive revenues on the field, they might never have dropped as low. This next week will be an interesting measure in the neither-nor approach the team’s taken these last years, and should at least provide us with some good games.
Seattle Mariners Safeco Field ticket guide
I get asked questions about this all the time:
Where can I get a good ticket?
Are these seats any good?
Is this a good price?
I hope that in writing this up, I can help fans get more out of their ticket dollar. I’m also going to disclose a lot of my own ticket-buying strategies, so I really hope nobody reads this.
Where the best seats are
The Diamond Club seats. But good luck getting any. The best seats you can buy on the open market are the Lower Box seats (119-141). They’re $55/single game ticket. though. Season ticket holders pay $38/game, which can make this a nice pickup when you buy off them through some of the channels we’ll get to in a second.
Then you’re looking at the Field seats (110-118, 142-150). They run $38/game, and while they’re down the lines from the first-to-third sweet spot, a seat in the first couple of rows down even in the corner, like 112, is easily as good as one at the back of 124, which is mid-way between first and third, even before you consider the price difference.
The next-best value for your view dollar comes in the View Box seats ($25 single game). You’re only a couple of rows off the top-deck rail, so you’re significantly above the action, but you’re not really that far back at all. These are really good deals between first-and-third (~section 321 all the way across to ~339).
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