Game 121, Mariners at Tigers
Dave · August 20, 2009 at 9:45 am · Filed Under Mariners
Rowland-Smith Vs Washburn, 10:05 AM
I will be giggling like a school kid if the M’s light up Washburn today.
Also, Olson to Triple-A to make room for Bill Hall.
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I’m calling a Bran Slam today. Which I’ll take credit for even if it’s not a granny.
Geoff says:
RF Ichiro
CF Franklin Gutierrez
2B Jose Lopez
DH Mike Sweeney
1B Russell Branyan
C Kenji Johjima
3B Jack Hannahan
SS Josh Wilson
LF Mike Saunders
I like #2 there.
#4 however…
How weird it is to see Washburn and Ichiro photos on the GameDay page.
Any radio feed online?
Why are we bunting in the 1st inning?
That’s awful. Gutierrez kills lefties – bunting in the first inning there is just stupid.
yay, scored in the top of the first!
but, yeah, we kinda play to avoid getting more than that by bunting there don’t we?
I guess Wak figured the only way the M’s would score a run would be on a sac fly.
VENGEANCE MATCH!!!!
Someone had to say it.
Especially since you’re not risking hitting into a double play there.
There’s not much downside to letting Gutierrez swing, and there’s a whole lotta upside. Bad call, Wak.
It would have been even cooler if it had worked out so it was French against Washburn.
Rick on the radio says it is starting to drizzle.
Damn, Josh can play some SS.
Is Josh Wilson our own Derek Jeter?
I think Wak needs to put the brakes on his love of bunting. That was silly, I don’t get it.
If the game gets postponed or canceled, and y’all need reading materiel, I highly recommend this piece, on Marginal Revolution. Heck, read it between innings.
It’s all about the evolution of sports rules, from the perspective of an econ prof.
Uh-oh, RRS is tough but it sounds like he took a Kuroda off the foot.
He’s one bad dude.
Correction, off the calf. Hope it doesn’t stiffen up while he’s sitting on the bench.
Drayer had an interesting post about Johjima and Snell and throwing fewer fastballs (hey, that sounds familiar)
At least it was a nicely executed sac bunt!
No Rob Johnson again tonight?
I hope Kenji gets some hits off the Bus.
Sorry for the double post…
Didn’t they change the rules so a player had to stay on the field of play for a catch to count?
Replays shows that Inge caught the fly ball, but the umpire didn’t call it until after he was in the stands. How does that work? A player could pick the ball off the ground and the umpire wouldn’t know the difference.
In his Beyond the Bases interview, Buhner talks about the catch where he went over the wall. Says he had asked the ump earlier what would happen if… Basically the ump says, catch the ball and return to the field of play for the call.
Not watching today’s game, so not sure how that compares to Inge’s catch, but thought it was related/interesting.
Lopez!!
They wait to make sure the player hangs onto it. I don’t know about staying on the field of play, as the specifically allow you to go up on the wall and railings (as Ichiro has done).
Meanwhile: Jose punishing Washburn. Yay!
Oops, the game is on. Yay! Hopefully we’re using our knowledge of the Angry Beaver against him!
Washburn’s ERA is now over 3. Will it be at 4 by season’s end?
Branyan didn’t strike out.
66 mph curve to Joh? It must be, it is, THE DOLPHIN has made an appearance! Rob would’ve parked that, right??? Okay, sarcasm sign off.
Yeaahhh!!
Joh’s seen that pitch before.
Heh, Johjima just put that pitch on the bus out of the stadium.
KENJI!!!!!!
Joh would’ve parked that. Apparently.
Revenge!
Who was kissing Kenji!? God that was so gay looking.
Kenji!!!! Revenge on the Bus!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Kenji rides the bus!
Ahhhhhh HAHAHAHAHA.
I just laughed so effing loud after that homer, people in the office gave me funny looks.
Sweet, sweet revenge for Kenji.
…that was great… It just goes to show you, Washburn can’t be successful with Johjima near the plate.
Washburned!!!
Today we call Joh “Bus Driver”
Washburn is still a fly ball pitcher, huh? (snicker)
FB% 2009 42.5% career 43.6%
HR/FB 2009 7.5% career 8.6%
Shocking news – Jarrod Washburn, surprisingly, not that good.
I just re-read Dave’s post from last year. Got a good laugh.
LOL, so true!
Detroit broadcast:
“Home runs for Washburn were not a problem in Seattle, now he has 6 in 4 starts.”
“That was the slow curveball that he (Johjima) taught Washburn in Seattle.”
Ah … sweetness.
Thank you for Frenchie and Robles!
So I’m guessing Dave is giggling pretty good a this point.
DTFT!
Nice job Franklin!
JMB sighting!
Guti makes everything look so ridiculously easy…
Oh, Franklin… I love you.
RRS is getting hit hard this inning.
Man they’re really crushing RRS now.
Damn, that Brandon Inge can really hit home runs. I’ll bet he’d do great in the HR Derby.
Common RRS… no more meatballs! That last homer was on the upper corner even, but no movement…
MLB.com shows both HR off of “sinkers.”
Saunders has a Gameday picture now!
I think Kenji was nursing more than knowledge when he tattooed that pitch.
Washburn flyball tendencies + more hitter-friendly ballpark for RH batters = lots of souvenirs in the bleachers.
(FWIW, in light of the last two balls hit by Detroit: THT calculates that while Safeco is slightly more hitter-friendly than Comercia for HR balls hit to right, Comercia is significantly more hitter-friendly than Safeco for balls hit to left field, and much less hitter-friendly to deep center. In fact, deep center in Detroit appears to be the toughest HR in all of baseball. But that aside, for a rightie pull hitter like Kenji facing a leftie like Washburn, Comercia does not work in the pitcher’s favor)
Also, bonus points for Dave N recounting Gutierrez catch with “crashes…lightly, into the wall.”
Stepped away…but woo Kenji, who now has the official upper hand in the post-breakup relationship.
That Inge can play some D, too. And he can even play catcher. Too bad about his knees.
Speaking of that first, into-the-stands catch he made: I was at the game a few years ago when the Mets came to Safeco and David Wright made a very similar play just a few rows in front of me. He was completely in the seats on top of several people but they awarded him the catch.
(That was an interesting game in several ways: Pedro started and recorded his first loss ever against the M’s, Mike Morse looked great in one of his first games after arriving in the Garcia trade, and Sexson took a called 3rd strike and went into complete meltdown, throwing buckets of balls from the dugout and getting himself ejected… in the bottom of the first inning.
Ok, not to pick on you because this has been building from reading other sites, but…. “Common”? What? I think you mean “Come on” which can be contracted to “C’mon”… but how do we get from that to “Common”? Is this spell-checking run amok?
It’s the same relationship, but they’ve assumed new positions.
Who’s behind the plate? GameCast had Thames walking on four strikes.
This umpire has the oddest strike-zone. I’ve noticed a few of Washburn’s pitches obviously out of the zone called strikes, and RRS is getting squeezed. Granted I haven’t seen every pitch thrown in the game, but I’d appreciate it if the zone was at least somewhat consistent.
Only the last pitch to Thames was even close on my Gameday.
To clarify – was even close to being a strike.
How is that rain coming along?
Sweeney can be listed as DH R.
Bran Slam!!!
“And it’s the Sween-dog with the home run!” Really? Sween-dog?
And Sweeney breaks his bat on his back…
Braaaaaanyan with a follow-up! Off the upper-desk post. Bong!
Wow, Sweeney looked like he broke something on that swing other than his bat. But a home run, woo.
Also, Branyan…wow, that ball was absolutely crushed. Oh. My. God.
It’s time to put “Wash” in the shower.
Okay, you get the credit.
Sure glad we were bunting in the 1st!
Someone is giggling like a school girl right now, and that is a good thing.
Hey, look: even Sweeney got that memo.
Note to Washburn: when even 2009′s shambolic, re-animated zombie babysitter version of Mike Sweeney can hit HRs off you…. well, you’re not as good a pitcher as you think.
….and Branyan gets in on the fun too. Think Detroit is starting to smell a rat yet?
And yet more kudos to Jack Zduriencik. In Dave’s immortal words, “Washburn is Pets.com at $140. Sell! Sell!”
That ball was absolutely crushed… Dayum!
This game is delicious.
Okay, I’d bet Dave’s well past giggling and reaching guffaw territory…
Time to pull RRS… =(
rain delay.
Come on, call the game. Branyan’s and Sweeney’s HRs may not count since the Tigers couldn’t finish the 6th, but lets get out of here.
Man, the weather commentary we’re getting from Rizzs and Niehaus on the radio is almost exciting as the game.
Dave Niehaus on the radio says the next update will be at 28 minutes past the hour.
On the Tigers radio they said the Branyan home run was “home run derby-esque” and that the kid that caught it was so far back in the grandstand that he couldn’t throw it back onto the field – hit a lady in the fourth row… (I think that might have been a bit of artistic license, but they were very impressed by that hit…)
I hope this is one of those games FSN repeats at 7pm, because I think I missed all the good parts.
Funny thing — when I belatedly checked in on the game, I noticed that the M’s had 6 runs off of only 5 hits. I figured that Washburn must’ve given up a ton of walks for such a thing to happen, but imagine my surprise to find that he’d only allowed one (and one HBP). For this game, he’s running a LOB% of 14.3%! Talk about regression biting you in the ass.
Whoa, Brock and Salk just bitch-slapped Hasselman for saying the M’s are last in defense. “What rating are you using there? Just errors?” Sweet.
FYI, the HBP to Lopez was really a walk, it came on ball 4 and just grazed Lopez so was scored a HBP.
Fifty, I caught that, too. Salk was all over Hassleman!
Hassleman’s whole analysis, from the M’s defense to Washburn’s troubles, was completely speculative with no analysis to back it up (other than the errors comment). I have heard the same comment from broadcast crews for Mariners opponents; if they are last in fielding percentage, their defense must be horrible! Nevermind they have three players who are Gold Glove-caliber (F-Gut, Ichiro, Beltre) plus LF has been largely manned by excellent defenders. Take it from someone who was a crappy pitcher for awhile: great outfield defense saves a lot of runs.
Is there a place I can find ballpark stats based on handedness? When Wash moved to Detroit I felt that it wouldn’t work out because Detroit’s OF defense isn’t nearly as good and Comerica seems to be much more friendly to RH than LH. However, I don’t have any stats to support the latter point (or have it disproven). Anyone know where I can find those stats?
Read this one too, especially the last sentence and then read the comments.
You mean this comment?
Annnnnd we’re back.
What’s the on-field delay?
God, I was ready to call in to blast Hassleman on that, ready to explain UZR, the fallacy of E’s and just lay down the smack. Might still call in later just to rip him anyways.
Jak has arm trouble. Leaving him in though.
Man, that really hurts RRS’s line…
Good times.
Yeah and there is a strong wind blowing in so none of those homeruns were cheap.
Well, that was true before they moved the fences in. Somebody’s a few years out of the loop.
That THT article I linked to earlier breaks down fields into sectors (LF, LCF, CF, RCF, RF) but doesn’t (explicitly) account for batter (or pitcher) handedness, and it only addresses home runs. There’s another THT article that looks at batted balls in general, but again handedness is not included. My understanding is that tRA, now featured on Fangraphs, makes use of park factors but I’m not sure if the ones they use are available (or if handedness can be teased out of them).
Park factors interest me, especially as it relates to handedness, but I haven’t seen a particularly satisfactory treatment of them yet. I suspect we may be waiting for Hitter FX for that to happen.
Is Shawn Kelley still our best strike throwing relievers?
Kelley’s slider is awesome today.
Jack H is no Adrian Beltre. Nice bunt.
Hannahan took his friggin eye off the ball. I’d score that an error; difficult play but he should have made it.
Let’s not blow another game here.
Nice running grab by Guti there!
…but a J. Wilson is a J. Wilson!
And another by Wilson!
Gogo good defense!
I bet Wash misses Frakie’s D… Damn he’s good.
Just realized that we have no singles thus far.
I bet he’s missing the Safe pretty dearly too about now.
5 hits and four home runs. thank goodness for one walk and one HBP/BB.
mla said: Man, that really hurts RRS’s line…
Hurts Jak’s stats as well…
MLB boxscore shows
“Inherited runners-scored: Jakubauskas 3-9.”
No walks, No walks, No WAKS!
The Tigers have rejected the DA plea bargain.
Aardsma starts with “A.”
So does “anxiety.”
tough part of the order here.
On GameCenter I see Aardsma is only throwing 92-93 mph. He is going to have to get his slider over if his fastball isn’t working.
So this game is well on its way from glee to frustration.
That IBB actually increased our WPA.
Ever since that MLB artcile by Street proclaiming the greatness of Aardsma/Lowe closing team, they have not been that great.
Great. Just great.
CRAP
Wow, that was really lame. Went from 3rd to 6th in my rotisserie league with that blown save.
Also, we let Washburn off the hook.
If the M’s were in a pennant race, the 1st and 3rd games of this series would have been even more frustrating.
27 pitches for Aardsma, 25 registered as fastballs on GameDay. Seriously, 8 straight fastballs to Thomas in that last AB. 13 strikes, granted he threw 4 int., but come on.
BS…again!
Mariners baseball: A new day, the same way
The Seattle Mariners: Disappointing fans since 2002.
feeling less giddy now.
anyway, I’ll be rooting for the tigers against the angels in the playoffs.
a new game, the same pain
Softly falling back to that magical .500 mark…what a comfortable, non-threatening place it is.
Lately I’ve been wondering if Wak’s handling of the bullpen has hurt the relievers down the stretch. I know a lot of the guys have out-pitched expectations this summer and they’re bound to regress some, so I’m not trying to say the bullpen struggles are all poor management, but Wak loves to pull pitchers after a one inning effort. This leads to a lot of situations where guys pitch 3 of 4 days. I’m aware that today Wak let Kelley work 2, but I think that was more because the only other option was Batista.
If a guy comes out and rolls through an inning in 10 pitches why not at least let him start the next? Maybe he’ll roll again. What’s the real difference to the pitchers arm from 10-20 pitches? I feel like the 1 inning 5 times a week for everyone not named Batista is hurting them down the stretch.
The Mariners have demonstrated resilience in 2009….
But really….
How many games has this team frittered away in the final inning this season? I’ll have to go over it, but this is about the 10th time they’ve absolutely turned victory into defeat. Way too many ouch! losses this season. I realize the Mariners too have pulled several games out of the fire, but this is at least the 10th gut-buster of a loss.
You don’t lose games where you hit four home runs!
Aardsma is one tired pitcher. An admirable season, for sure, but his edge is gone. He isn’t going to make it to the finish line.
Lowe has a decent arm, but reminds me of too many M’s of years gone by. That is, he seems unable to take his game to the next level. Good stuff, but he lacks the savvy to get through an inning when his game is off. Could be a bullpen savior, but focus and tenacity could use boosts.
I’m not sure I’d jump to the conclusion that Aardsma is tired or that he won’t “make it to the finish line.” We’ve known about his control issues from the beginning. He’s going to have games like this from time to time.
We could always rehire Bavasi as a consultant to build a good bullpen with no money.
I hope you’re right that Aardsma isn’t tired.
My point is, there was a good stretch of the season where he was sailing, and he would let his defense do the work.
Nowadays, his shaky outings outnumber the good ones, and this won’t do on a team hard-pressed for offense.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what Aardsma has done for this team, and Z gets kudos for picking him up in the first place.
Some idiot just called into the postgame show and tried to say that Wak doesn’t use enough small-ball and thus doesn’t know about baseball.
Really? Really?! Not enough small-ball?
On a positive note, Vinnie and Hasselman are still ripping the guy a couple minutes after dumping the call. Vinnie sounds livid. Quite amusing…
He also is a poor in-game manager sez another caller. He leaves pitchers out there too long and doesn’t always move the base-runners.
Now is that because he is pitching them one inning a day, or are they pitching more because the starters are not pitching long?
The bullpen was pointed out as a weakness before the season started, on this very blog. Most of the pitchers have command/control issues, it’s too right handed, and the Mariners have traded a LOT of talent out of it the last couple of years.
It’s something the Mariners can address in 2010, when they aren’t paying Miguel Batista 8 million to pitch garbage relief, but for this season, yeah, the M’s are going to blow winnable games from the bullpen.
msb – one of my clients tried to argue with me about Wak not leaving pitchers out there long enough, specifically referencing several of Bedard’s starts.
I looked up the box scores of those games, showed him the pitchcounts (all were between 90-95 pitches), then showed him Bedard’s career average of pitches per game (been awhile since this conversation, I think it was around 97).
He shut up real quick after that
I’ve long felt this way. If a reliever “has it,” stay with his hot hand!
That is twenty blown leads by the M’s bullpen this year. What a different season this would be if the team had a third of those back.
I don’t think there’s any reason to look for answers, fatigue or otherwise. Aardsma has control issues. We knew that going into the season. Overall, he’s been better than most of us expected (and much better than his career averages) but he is who he is, still.
Aardsma walks a guy almost every other inning, on average. In the 25 outings (21.7 innings) prior to today where he has given up a walk, he’s also surrendered 21 hits and 14 runs (12 earned). All of his blown saves fall into this category.
In the 31 outings (31.2 innings) where he doesn’t walk anybody, he’s given up just 15 hits and only 1 run (Jeter’s HR last week).
So it’s a bit of a coin flip with him, and the run of heads we were seeing there for a while may have caused us to forget that tails can come up too.
That is twenty blown leads by the M’s bullpen this year. What a different season this would be if the team had a third of those back.
The 2009 Mariners decided to concentrate on cheap fungible arms for the bullpen and work on other weaknesses, knowing that this would be something that could come back to bite them occasionally. It might indeed be a different season if they had decided to spend money on the bullpen and/or retain organizational talent there, but it might not be any more successful.
This isn’t a good bullpen, and it’s pretty obvious it will need to be an offseason priority to augment it, after spending the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 seasons shedding talent in order to make other roster moves. That being said, it’s a lot easier to find bullpen arms at reasonable prices than center fielders, starting pitchers, and so on. For a team that’s basically built a bullpen out of organizational castoffs, rookies and an overpaid veteran, I’m surprised this has worked as well as it has.
How many of those 20 blown saves happened in true save situations? How many do other TEAMS in the AL have?
Blown saves as a team is a silly stat as it includes games like today as well as some ridiculous ones. Starter leaves in the 7th with a 3-2 lead and the bases loaded with no one out. Reliever gets a sac fly and a double play => blown save. OK, that’s extreme but since you can’t get a save unless it’s the 9th inning, it doesn’t make sense to charge a blown save unless it’s the 9th.
A reliever starting the 7th with a one-run lead who goes two innings and gives up a run hasn’t “blown the game”, he’s done his job.
The Dodgers have 21 blown saves. The Reds have just 6. You have to get into save situations to blow them.
Setting aside my distaste for the save stat in general and just pretending this is actually going to tell us something about the quality of bullpens, we could look at total save chances and lowest percentage of blown saves. The Mariners have had more save opportunities than any other team in baseball: 56 (counting today). Their blown save percentage (36%) makes them only slightly worse than average. On a percentage basis (and ignoring the Reds due to the small sample size) the Yankees, Rangers, and Cardinals come out on top. But if we look at just the teams with at least 50 save opportunities, the Astros (20 BS in 50 ops) and Dodgers (21 in 53) are both worse than the M’s, while the Brewers (18 in 50) are comparable and only the Angels (13 in 50) and Yankees (10 in 50) are better.
Aren’t calculations with misleading stats fun? I should be on the radio! (“Hello, caller with a spreadsheet, prepare to be hung up upon…”)
So are you saying that it’s unreasonable to expect a late reliever to hold a lead?