Game 44, Padres at Mariners
RHP Clay Hensley v RHP Gil Meche.
Meche so far this year: 44.2 IP, 6 HR, 23 BB, 32 K. I’m not excited about heading out to this particular game, though I’ll be happy to hang out at Safeco with good company, in the specific sense and in the more general:
It’s Little League Weekend at the park, so free caps for the kiddies. It looks like the crowds are back for summer: there are 15,000 tickets up for tonight and 12,000 tomorrow (for Felix v Chan Ho Park), which means the team’s going to cruise to 35k crowds every night.
To be a little more of a downer and preserve our reputation as being overly negative —
2004 Mariners: 13-25 on May 18, 18-30 on May 29th.
2005 Mariners: 18-25 on May 22nd.
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169 Responses to “Game 44, Padres at Mariners”
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Ichiro is hitting awfully well for May. Lopez is hitting awfully well for May.
Ichiro’s May: .333 BA, .733 OPS
Lopez’s May: .365 BA, .957 OPS
Reed’s May: .314 BA, .971 OPS
Reed is hitting like a major leaguer _for exactly ONE WEEK_. Reed’s May until he got to Anaheim was forgetable, at best.
So? Ichiro was hitting sub-.300 until last week, and yet you’re not saying that he’s washed up.
You’re picking a very few days, taggin a ‘month’ with them (a statistically arbitrary division BTW), and calling that a trend.
Well, it’s a case that MLB does monthly splits, and that Reed’s 0-fer streak only went one game into May. So, I’m willing to call it a trend.
I hope for JR’s sake that you are right, that he’s turned a corner. THe idea that ‘Reed has been tearing it up ALL May’ flies nowhere.
I was just making the point that you can’t sit here and call him worse than WFB when WFB hasn’t had a hit in eight games (8 AB). Reed is clearly improving, and playing him will help that. WFB is just duct tape on positional holes, and that’s what he should be used for. If you’re playing him every day, then there’s something wrong with your team. He’s this decade’s Denny Hocking.
I don’t know who’s calling Reed worse than WFB, but I don’t care, either. The idea that “Reed is clearly improving” is more than questionable. Reed has had one good week. Virtually everyone can have one good week. If Reed hits anything like this for 2-3 weeks, he’ll have salvaged the first half of the season. If he maintains something close to that kind of line for most of the rest of the _year_ we can say with some justice that “he’s clearly improving.” At this point, we’re looking to see that Reed can actually hit ML pitching on any kind of regular basis. And let’s not even talk about LH pitching, I mean can Reed succeed under _optimal_ conditions.
That’s it on Reed, I’m out of it for today on his pros and cons after this comment.
SD announcers this series are pretty funny and much superior to our clowns…
lol. the discussion re: Bloomquist makes me think of two varying things I’ve read by so-called “experts” recently.
over at the Talented Mr. Roto Daily Blog, there was a reference along the lines of “I love me the Bloomquist” which caught my eye.
however, WFB’s write-up in Baseball Prspectus: “Less playing time for Bloomquist wpuld mean the Mariners have gotten better rsults from Reed, Betancurt, and Lopez.”
which to agree with? as long as Reed continues to produce, play him. personally, I think Beltre should take a week off, watch some tapes of 2004, and have WFB play a week at third & bat ninth…
Putz and Lopez are great.
Good game. There should be team meetings more often.
Wish we hadn’t sent Fruto back down. How can you argue with ~5 scoreless innings for your first two big-league appearances?
And who were the only hitless Mariners?
Sexson and Beltre. of course.
Man, someone let Rizz know that his toupe is perched pretty far back on his head tonight. Good lord, did you guys see the whole thing move back a couple of inches when he adjusted his headphones while introducing Jeremy Reed’s interview with Capuano? That was *hilarious!*
I wish he’d just give up, and admit that he & Valle have more in common that just their italian heritage …..
OK, as much as I enjoyed actually having the sound ON for tonight’s broadcast, it would have been well worth seeing the rug migrate!!!
http://komonews.com/komo1000news/rickrizzs/
Why did no one tell me about this?
#134 he’s actually not that good. if you look at his splits over the past few years, he breaks down at 75 pitches or so.
i was actually surprised he came out for the 8th. i couldn’t understand why they would even send him out there. there was no chance he was pitching the CG, and he has shown so many times that he breaks down, hard, when his pitch count gets up there.
he still had a great night. 108 pitches and 72 strikes? 7 Ks, 1 BB? 1ER in 7.2IP? I sure hope this version of meche shows up again sometime this season.
aaaand i sure hope every time eddie doesn’t show up anymore.
151 – Holy. Crap.
141 – Cool, Bela… for my part my confusion is coming from the fact that the entire extent of my Reed statement was that he was better than Bloomquist… something not argued here, but elsewhere.
Just getting on now (my first ever post!) and it’s actually a Fairlyism I caught tonight on the radio (I only listened to about 15 minutes, which makes it even better.) This riffs on 98 above.
Fairly: Betancourt now has an 8-game hitting streak, which ties his career high, of 8 games.
The man is a genius!!
I just realized we’ve won two in a row and actually scored some runs in both games. I guess Howard Lincoln is right, we DO have the best team in the West…the NL West.
Such an obvious problem with our team so far this year is that our “clean-up†hitter is a mess. He has only 1 more RBI than our #9 hitter (with 20 more AB’s!). He has less RBI’s than our number 2, 3, 5, and 7 hitters! Why is he still batting #4? And our wimpy 3rd baseman # 6 or #7? Who cares about salaries and pride at this stage, we (the team, the players, the fans, even Bavasi and Hargrove) need all the wins we can get right now. Our two millionaires can continue their batting practice in the # 8 and # 9 slots just as well as they are doing now, and maybe we will have some runs scored before they even get an AB.
Re: #152, dan, 75 actually seems like the better number for this year and late last year, yeah. I didn’t have any kind of breakdown or chart on him, so I took a nice round number that fits the last few years. Fact: Meche loses it if his pitch count gets above a modest number, and when he loses it it’s just gone. He was sharp today while he had it, though, so that’s good for him. (Sell now, boys.)
I was so hoping when he came out in the 8th Hargrove was going to come out right behind him and take the ball away from him so he could get a (deserved) standing O. Then when Grover let him pitch, I was hoping he was going to take him out after the first batter. And then… why did he leave him in after the HR?
Jeremy Reed’s been talking [in the Times today, and previously also] about “lowering his hands, and getting better bat speed,” i.e. tightening up his swing with a shorter stroke. The approach sounds like the right idea. Whether that really has ‘fixed a flaw’ for him at the plate, well, we’ll see. The idea is good, though, I could believe that the tweak is one to help him.