Nope, not today either
Both games scheduled for today have been canceled as well. The M’s will now fly to Boston to try to begin their series against the Red Sox tomorrow. Since the M’s haven’t played since Wednesday, they can literally do whatever they want with their rotation. Knowing Hargrove, he’ll probably give Weaver the start tomorrow so that he doesn’t go several weeks between starts, then start the rotation back over with Felix going Wednesday (against Matsuzaka, on ESPN2).
Personally, I’d throw Felix tomorrow, which would then set him up to pitch against Minnesota when the road trip ends and then the final game of the Angels series in Los Angeles. If you save him for Wednesday, then he pitches in game two of the Minnesota series and the opening game of the series at Texas. I’d rather have Felix pitching in Los Angeles, against the free-swinging Angels, then against the Rangers in their bandbox of a ballpark. It’s still worth putting him in situations where he can succeed if you can, and the Mariners have a chance to do just that.
Wow, that is one hell of layoff.
Speaking of Los Angeles, Shannon Drayer mentioned the possibility that the Indians might be on their way out of town as well, to try and play their upcoming “home” series against the Angels in sunny California. Any word if something like that might happen?
Hey, FSN, televise the freakin’ game tomorrow! The M’s now have to make up four games later on the the year, which will be a big time pain-in-the-butt, especially if they’re anywhere close to being in contention. Thanks mlb — idiots.
The Cleveland Radio guy was on KJR this morning and said they were talking about Make-ups on two Mariners trips out east later in the year. One was right before playing Tampa Bay on MAy 21, the other was right before playing the Cubs on June 11. Both teams have open dates and he M’s would have to fly in for double headers on both days.
this morning a Cleveland reporter said that there are two open dates that match up for both teams, so they may end up playing a double-bill on an off-day before the M’s go to play Tampa, and then another en-route to the Cubs series.
“Knowing Hargrove, he’ll probably give Weaver the start tomorrow so that he doesn’t go several weeks between starts, then start the rotation back over with Felix going Wednesday (against Matsuzaka, on ESPN2). ”
Who wouldn’t be glued to the tv for that one?
To clarify, hte actual make up dates would be May 20 and June 10 in the scenario above (in post 4).
tchaw. see what being interrupted mid-typing gets you?
Thanks for remembering the dates, MedicineHat…
That scenario sucks so bad it’s not even funny. Fly out of Seattle, go to Cleveland for a double header, then head on out to play the next day in another city. Four games, three days, three different cities, twice in a season. Crap, crap, and double crap. The Mariner’s are getting hosed big time on this one.
The upside here is that the M’s have still not lost a series this year and are above .500! We haven’t even lost one single game on this roadtrip so far. How many of you pessimists predicted that?
I have to agree that dodging Cleveland is always a good thing. Boston isn’t going to be a treat either.
Looking at the weather forecast for Boston tomorrow. High 47. Well, at least it’s a day game.
Nothing would make this Boston dwelling Red Sox hater happier than Felix dominating the Sox with Matsuzaka on the mound.
Grrrr. This is such a waste of my time, particularly my weekend. MLB’s scheduler can go rot in hell.
4 games is a lot. We need to make up at least two of them to restore any semblance of fairness to the scedule. Especially since Cleveland should actually contend.
I’m waiting for the MLBPA to finally get a clue and start agreeing to doubleheaders to shorten the season and skip all this silliness.
Surely it’s better for the players to have planned doubleheaders than unplanned ones that involve 1-day series, to say nothing of the added injury risk in the cold.
To clarify, hte actual make up dates would be May 20 and June 10 in the scenario above (in post 4).
Actually, the dates were right the first time. Complete list of off-days the Mariners and Indians have in common:
April 16
April 30
May 14
May 21
June 11
July 9-11 (All-Star break)
August 16
September 24
Personally, I’d throw Felix tomorrow, which would then set him up to pitch against Minnesota when the road trip ends and then the final game of the Angels series in Los Angeles. If you save him for Wednesday, then he pitches in game two of the Minnesota series and the opening game of the series at Texas. I’d rather have Felix pitching in Los Angeles, against the free-swinging Angels, then against the Rangers in their bandbox of a ballpark. It’s still worth putting him in situations where he can succeed if you can, and the Mariners have a chance to do just that.
Hey what a great, well thought out plan! So it’s pretty safe to assume Grover won’t do that.
Commenting on the feasibility of those options:
April 16, April 30, May 14, and August 16 are all breaks during homestands at Safeco for the Mariners, so for travel reasons are the worst possible options. I assume playing games during the All-Star break is out of the question.
May 21 – Mariners finish up a homestand and head to Tampa Bay. As a stopover it’s plausible. Indians finish up a homestand and are leaving for Kansas City.
June 11 – Mariners are traveling from San Diego to Chicago. Adds a longer leg, but about as good as it’s going to get. Indians are in the middle of a road trip, so not a great choice for them. But the series they just finished is in nearby Cincinnati, so it works (they’re on their way to Florida).
September 24 – Mariners are traveling from LA to Seattle, so it’s rather out of their way. The Indians are finishing up a homestand, so it would work okay for them. Ironically, they’re on their way to Seattle for their one visit to Safeco this year.
A creative solution using that September off day would be to shorten the Safeco series to two days (the 26th and 27th), with a doubleheader, presumably on the second day, to get three games in. That opens up a second off day, which would allow the teams to have two days in Cleveland to play all four games with back-to-back doubleheaders.
It would be brutal, with seven games in four days all told, and each team with only one day off from September 1 to the end of the season. But it would at least allow the teams to play with their full 40-man rosters, which would alleviate some of the pressure on the pitching staffs of playing doubleheaders that way.
Here’s my modest proposal:
The first tripleheader in nearly 100 years. September 24. Do it when the rosters are expanded, pretty much play Game 1 as a minor league game.
The winner of the three-game mini-series will receive a broken broom handle from Bud Selig’s maid’s closet.
Never mind that the suggested makeup plan would take away precious off days and force the M’s to not just play for 3 weeks straight at a time, but have to play doubleheaders in the middle of those stretches. How is that a sound idea?
Just play some doubleheaders during the Safeco series and, if the games are necessary for playoff implications, make them up at season’s end. Don’t throw both teams in a midseason meat grinder just to get the games in.
Why not play all 4? Shorten the games to 7 innings and throw in $1 beers, hot dogs, and ice cream?
I guess my previous question about the Angels series has been answered. This week we get to see the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim play the Milwaukee Indians of Cleveland.
What about playing the doubleheaders at Safeco, and giving the ticket receipts to Clevalnd for the make-up games, but we keep the consessions Revenue?
I’d rather have Felix pitching in Los Angeles, against the free-swinging Angels, then against the Rangers in their bandbox of a ballpark. It’s still worth putting him in situations where he can succeed if you can, and the Mariners have a chance to do just that.
But isn’t Felix the starting pitcher on the staff most likely to succeed in Arlington? I know I’d rather have him pitching there than Washburn or Weaver for sure.
Why not play all 4?
Because if I’m sitting for 12 hours in a stadium, Radiohead better damn well be closing the concert.
That would be the greatest day of my life.
Can MLB screw the situation up any more? Of course. They’re moving the Anaheim-Cleveland series to Milwaukee.
HAHA Milweaukee? Will 250 people show up?
This nonsense would never have happened if people would be smart enough to live somewhere other than Cleveland. When the river in town catches on fire, it’s a sign that it’s time to leave. No people=no baseball team.
First, nice spelling on my part above.
Second, I agree with #24. I want Felix the groundballer extroadinaire pitching in Texas where he might escape that horrible park with just 3 ER instead of Weaver or Washburn who could easily give up 5-6.
OK, my real guess:
At least one game will be played in Seattle September 24, possibly two. One game will be made up in May. Another game will possibly be made up in June. I’m thinking, though, that one game will not be played unless they have to make it up.
One big problem with the M’s playing doubleheaders in September: The city will only allow them to play six weekday matinees a year, and the entire Indians series is a weekday series.
Why not play all 4? Shorten the games to 7 innings and throw in $1 beers, hot dogs, and ice cream?
Can’t happen. The Department of Labor and Industries prohibits workers from inhaling fumes from garlic fries beyond a normal eight-hour shift.
But those scheduled double-headers would generally be Saturday games, I presume (to maximize gate receipts and to give a chance to shift at least one to Sunday in case of a rainout), in the summer when the kids are out of school. So, other than starting the season a little later and ending it a little earlier, it wouldn’t end weather-related unplanned double-headers (and could create more of them if a planned double-header got rained out). They’d have to be followed by an off-day, too, to avoid messing up the rotation (of course that could be used as a make-up day if a Saturday double-header was rained out). So they wouldn’t shorten the season by much. Would it make a difference? Well, most seasons it might but it probably wouldn’t have helped with this debacle this year. More sane scheduling, as described by others — divisional rivals for early and late season games, no four day series early in the season as the only visit to a northern team with an unroofed stadium — would help much more.
For a chance to see two real pro baseball teams play each other? Where both have a shot to see the postseason? When was the last time anyone in Milwaukee had a chance to see that?
Plus they get to be amazed at the wonders of the Designated Hitter.
Hey at least Miller Park will finally get a DH hitting in it. That could be a rough trivia question in 20 years.
You know, maybe it’s just my glass-half-emptiness, but I was convinced that Grover’s masterful Human Snow Delay conversion of a talk with the umpire into a loss that never happened, was going to come back around to bite us in the ass. I wasn’t sure how — it might have been something as minor as an end-of-season makeup game screwing up the Indians post-season rotation so they lost in the playoffs, allowing ARod and the Yankees to go to the WS. Or it could have been something much worse — an injury to a key player in a game that was meaningless (to the M’s if not the Indians). But now that it’s going to be just one of four makeup games I guess I can let that go. I mean, those dark scenarios might still happen but there will be no way to lay the blame on Grover’s one “saved” game vs all the others…
Because if I’m sitting for 12 hours in a stadium, Radiohead better damn well be closing the concert.
Hilarious.
Of course Milwaukee has seen the designated hitter before — at least those Milwaukeeans who are old enough to remember the Brewers in the old AL West — and given that was just 10 years ago, that’s got to be a lot of them. (I remember sitting in the Kingdome as a kid, surveying the AL team logos arrayed around the outfield, and deciding the Brewer’s MB-glove logo was the only one that was anywhere near as clever as the M’s trident).
Joser – that’s why I was careful to say “Miller Park.”
That Jake Westbrook, he’s no Dave Bush. And Pronk ain’t no Prince Fielder. C.C Sabathia ain’t no Ben Sheets.
Actually, this was like when that fire hit San Diego and the NFL moved the Chargers-Dolphins game to Tempe, AZ, which coincidentally was the first time those fans got to see two real pro football teams at once in the regular season. That game was free. I wonder if MLB will do the same for Milwaukee.
zzyzx: yeah, I know — I noticed that. I was responding to Joe @34 (and that’s why I was careful to say “Milwaukee” and not “Miller Park”).
Well, if there are any Angels fans in Milwaukee they have to be really excited right now (though they’ll still probably show up in the 3rd inning and leave in the 7th).
joser – I was very careful to not notice post #34 right above mine
Dave – What are the odds that Hargrove will be lured by the media appeal of a Felix – Matsuzaka matchup? Would there even BE media appeal for such a matchup?
Dave – What are the odds that Hargrove will be lured by the media appeal of a Felix – Matsuzaka matchup? Would there even BE media appeal for such a matchup?
That won’t play into it, but yes, if there’s a Felix-Matsuzaka matchup (and it’s Matsuzaka-Ichiro), you’re going to see the hype machine go into overdrive on Wednesday.
Thanks. At least I can rest easy that Grover will be making uninspired baseball decisions based solely on baseball-related inputs and won’t require irrelevant factors to help him make them.
They really should just make the games up during the all-star break. The few all-stars that the M’s and the Tribe send would just take up valuable roster spots that could be filled by even more Red-Sox and Yankees. And EVERYONE wants more Yanks/Sox any way they can get ‘em.
#29: Give me a break. Lake Erie last caught on fire sometime in the late 1970s. Former Cleveland mayor and current presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich did a hell of a good job of cleaning up the city and forcing the feds to clean up the lake.
I was in Cleveland last year for a newspaper conference, and I was pleasantly surprised by what a beautiful and vibrant downtown it has. There’s plenty to do and see beyond the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.
Lots of large cities get snow into April. The people who live in those cities know it and choose to live with it. I’ve traveled several times to Edmontonn in the last couple of years — twice in the dead of winter — and was heartened to see how well its residents adapted to their meterological burden. They were cheerful, walking the streets in temps that touched on -20 Fahrenheit (I forget exactly what it was in Celsius) and very proud of where they were.
Add all this broken-schedule-due-to-weather-in-April foolishness to the fact that the Mariners are either #1 or #2 in most-travel-miles of the 30 MLB teams, and you have one gassed (or hosed, as has been mentioned here and several other places) team.
#12. louder said: “Looking at the weather forecast for Boston tomorrow. High 47. Well, at least it’s a day game.
47 to 50, anyway… Speaking of feingarden’s question in #43, Boston fans are already worrying about Matsuzaka’s home opener on Wednesday. It’s an ESPN game, so the time probably won’t be moved to an earlier day game start time.
I’d worry too if my $100+ million investment was pitching in freezing conditions (see the nighttime low for Wednesday). Same goes for our Felix, who’s at least as valuable even though he hasn’t cost as much yet.
Oops, forgot to close a tag… Just pretend a bracket-a-endbracket is after “50″ (thanks)…
Karen – Is the prospect of Matsuzaka going up against Felix being mentioned, or is it all Matsuzaka-centric hype? I’m curious whether Felix’s glow extends beyond the Pacific Northwest.
47. I forget exactly what it was in Celsius
Considering we Americans couldn’t possibly care less about Celsius temperature numbers I wouldn’t worry about it.
(-20) – 32 = -52 * 5 / 9 = -28.9F
Or you could just ask google
Not, as 51 says, anyone in the US actually cares. In Alberta that would barely be “cold” (you can only call it “chilly” until the moisture in your nostrils freezes as you inhale and melts as you exhale, which happens around -20C). They reserve all the really good terms for when it’s -40 plus a wind.
BTW, some good pictures of the conditions here and here (a fan jumped onto the field during the game Friday and made a snow angel?)
I would start Felix tomorrow too. Who cares if Weaver gets rusty? Why not maximize the number of starts Felix can make as long as you aren’t pitching him on short rest? Weaver is just killing time until The King is ready.
Oh yeah, another reason to make fun of Cleveland–their idea of a home grown presidential candidate is Dennis Kucinich!
Looking at the schedule and assuming Grover doesn’t skip anyone in the rotation, wouldn’t Felix pitching on Wed mean that he’d be throwing against Minnesota in game 1 instead of game 2? Unless there’s something I’m completely missing, it looks like we have the third game at Boston and then the three game set against Texas at home, giving Felix four games (five days including the off day on the 16th) between this Wednesday’s game and next Tuesday’s game. Then he would be on schedule to pitch the final Angels game on the 22nd.
The M’s don’t skip their 5th starter on offdays.
I just assumed all the old Cleveland mockers had dropped dead by now. Who knew?
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that they’d skip Weaver. Here’s what I meant to point out:
wed@bos-Felix
thu@bos-starter 2 (Washburn)
frivstex-starter 3 (Batista)
satvstex-starter 4 (Ramirez)
sunvstex-starter 5 (Weaver)
tuevsmin-Felix
feingarden asked: Karen is the prospect of Matsuzaka going up against Felix being mentioned, or is it all Matsuzaka-centric hype? I’m curious whether Felix’s glow extends beyond the Pacific Northwest.
Oh, yeah, everyone in NYC and Boston (the two Centers of the Universe, ya know
) is aware of Good Felix and Bad Felix. In various other-team threads on those team’s fan message boards, Felix’s better conditioning and progress in ST was mentioned frequently (I suspect the closest eyes on Felix were by fantasy baseball GMs).
One question on one board this morning was: “Can you imagine the firestorm from fans (Boston and Far East) if they moved the Thurs game to Wednesday and Matsuzaka pitched in the game that required Thursday’s tickets? Ticket brokers would be pumped because they’d get ANOTHER huge game to sell. The Wed night ticket holders would go from seeing a King Felix/Mastuzaka matchup to a Washburn/Wakefield duel.”
The latest opinion from a Red Sox fan — just a couple of hours ago — monitoring the weather situation is “As of right now I say it is very doubtful. There are going to be enough periods of really heavy rain from Wednesday at midnight until Thursday at midnight that even with lulls I don’t expect a game to be played.” This was in response to the question, “So is it safe to assume there’s pretty much no chance of a game being played on Thursday?”
Because they’re still babying Felix to some extent, or is it a general organizational policy?
Ugh, I have to work Wednesday night. Should be an awesome game.
47: My suggestion that everyone move away from Cleveland was tongue-in-cheek. Also, I’ve always thought that Kucinich looks like an elf.
I agree with Dave’s thinking about setting up the rotation anyway, but in terms of matchups (from a winning perspective not a baseball drama perspective), quite frankly I’d prefer not to see Felix vs Matsuzaka. Given the M’s offense so far, it’s quite possible Matsuzaka will shut them down completely even in cozy Fenway. Why waste a Felix start on a game where he gets no run support? Let the Red Sox have their Matsuzaka hypefest (shut-out? no hitter? Hey, it’s against the M’s, there has to be an asterisk), then let Felix do his thing when the Red Sox roll out someone the Mariners have a chance of slappig around. That being said, of course I hope I’m wrong and the Matsuzaka machine comes unglued at the hands of boys in, uh, teal.
It would be funny if we are still having this conversation next week, and the Mariners are still stuck at 2-1.
Maybe, the Mariners should just be into cryogenic suspended animation, and they can be unfrozen when the weather gets warmer.
65 – Friday is back at the Safe. Odds are that that game will be played
Selig is on the Reds broadcast, and says that Larry Dolan of the Indians called him first thing this morning with the Cleveland to Milwaukee move already set– we want to play in Milwaukee, we’ve agreed to use their field, we have hotel rooms set already and we’ll charge $10.00 a ticket, and hope to get our own field in shape for the weekend series.
Ms skipping 5th starter (See # 61)
The practice wasn’t instituted because of Felix (though it may havev been continued because of him). It used to be 35-35-34-34-24, but now it’s 32-32-32-32-32 (exactly as it was in 2003, when they used the same five starters all year).
Some teams use a fifth starter only when necessary, but other teams seem to feel that each of the five starters can use the extra day of rest that an off-day gives them.
Re: # 68 – corrections
(I must’ve accidentally hit some key or something, because my comment got posted before I had an opportunity to finish, or to proofread.)
2nd line: that word should be HAVE.
3rd line – before comma, add: (remember CLINT ZAVARAS or PAT RICE); and that 2nd rotation should be 33-33-32-32-32 [adds up to 162.]
And, at end, add: BTW, it got tiresome, frequently hearing on today’s radio broadcast that the reason the M’s stunk was because of their long layoff. (I’m eager to see how Cleveland does tonight.)