Game 21, Mariners at Blue Jays

marc w · April 27, 2012 at 3:31 pm · Filed Under Mariners 

Blake Beavan faces off against Ricky Romero and the Jays today at 4:07, the first of a three game series at the Rogers Centre. Coming into the season, we knew Beavan had plus control, but wondered how far his walk rate might regress. So far, he’s doubled down on being a pitch to contact guy, with a walk rate that’s actually under 3%, a K rate that’s under 10% and a ton of fly balls. Beavan’s curve’s looked better this year, though he’ll have to be careful in a domed stadium that plays HR-friendly.

Ricky Romero’s a lefty, so Wedge trots out the standard righty-heavy line-up. This means Alex Liddi’s in again and Kyle Seager sits until tomorrow. The “versus lefties” line-up hasn’t been bad, per se – they’ve got a better wOBA vs southpaws than righties – but they’re prone to K’s. Facing a guy with a great change-up, the M’s might swing and miss liberally, but a HR or two would help. The Blue Jays currently have the best team defensive efficiency in baseball, at 76%. The M’s just swept one of the most defensively-challenged squads in baseball and now face what may be the best defense around. All the more reason to take defense out of the equation and put a ball in the seats.

The big news of the afternoon is that Franklin Gutierrez has been diagnosed with plantar fasciitis. I swear he and Adam Moore are having some bizarre sort of competition. Chagas’ disease is unclaimed, guys.

The line-up:
1: Ackley (2B)
2: Ryan (SS)
3: Ichiro (RF)
4: Smoak (1B)
5: Montero (DH)
6: Liddi (3B)
7: Saunders (CF)
8: Olivo (C)
9: Wells (LF)
SP: Beavan

Go M’s!

Tags:

Comments

189 Responses to “Game 21, Mariners at Blue Jays”

  1. MrZDevotee on April 27th, 2012 7:33 pm

    actually, it’s not a save is it… Nevermind. (Car is totalled)

  2. Hammy57 on April 27th, 2012 7:33 pm

    It has only taken him 3 years but Saunders is showing signs of wanting to be a big leaguer!

  3. Westside guy on April 27th, 2012 7:33 pm

    Saw THAT one.

  4. djw on April 27th, 2012 7:33 pm

    Gameday seems to be malfunctioning again. It’s making frankly absurd claims about Michael Saunders.

  5. nvn8vbryce on April 27th, 2012 7:33 pm

    Can I have some salami on my crow sandwich?

  6. IwearMsHats on April 27th, 2012 7:34 pm

    OFF A LEFTY! WOW!

  7. seahopp on April 27th, 2012 7:34 pm

    YEAH CONDOR!!!

  8. MrZDevotee on April 27th, 2012 7:35 pm

    nvn-
    “Get out the mustard and the rye bread grandma… it’s Crow Salami time!”

  9. Westside guy on April 27th, 2012 7:35 pm

    Well MrZ, I think you’re officially off the hook.

  10. msfanmike on April 27th, 2012 7:36 pm

    No issues with Miggy hitting in this situation. LOL

  11. TherzAlwaysHope on April 27th, 2012 7:36 pm

    CONDOR!!!!! He doesn’t even look like the same guy as last year.

  12. stevemotivateir on April 27th, 2012 7:36 pm

    Love that they really made the Jays pay for their errors. We’ve been on the other end of that plenty of times. We were due for that!

  13. IwearMsHats on April 27th, 2012 7:36 pm

    Olivo put good wood on that.

  14. MrZDevotee on April 27th, 2012 7:37 pm

    Saunders might be figuring out what I hope Smoak figures out next… Being “careful” is not a successful approach to batting in the Major Leagues. It leads to ugly at bats. Whereas, shutting off your mind and trusting your instincts can lead to good, unexpected results… Not everytime, but more often than trying to think your way through it…

  15. Hammy57 on April 27th, 2012 7:37 pm

    It is a little frustrating that it has taken THIS long for Saunders to show up but WOW!

  16. zzyzx on April 27th, 2012 7:38 pm

    I wonder how many games in 2010 and 2009 we scored 7 or more runs…

  17. justdave on April 27th, 2012 7:38 pm

    CONDOOOR! I feel real bad for Guti, but now I’m suddenly not so worried about the CF position.

  18. msfanmike on April 27th, 2012 7:40 pm

    Close this thing out! No screwing around, throw strikes.

  19. MrZDevotee on April 27th, 2012 7:41 pm

    “How many?” zzyzx…

    I’d say it usually took us about 7 games to score 7 runs…

    (I know that’s not what you meant, but it made it funnier)

  20. stevemotivateir on April 27th, 2012 7:42 pm

    I was saying earlier that I’d love to see Saunders in left when Guti’s back. With the way things are going, there’s no reason to rush Carp back in there (when he’s recalled)

  21. MrZDevotee on April 27th, 2012 7:43 pm

    Things REALLY ARE changing for us… League DIDN’T put the 1st batter on base…

    Wow.

  22. stevemotivateir on April 27th, 2012 7:44 pm

    Funny you mentioned that Z, I was thinking the same thing

  23. zzyzx on April 27th, 2012 7:44 pm

    I’m looking forward to seeing the graph of this on lookout landing…

    …and yes I could go to fangraphs but where’s the fun in that?

  24. msfanmike on April 27th, 2012 7:44 pm

    That was fun. Time for me to see if I can go close on a high leverage situation

  25. stevemotivateir on April 27th, 2012 7:45 pm

    There we go! That was one FUN game!

  26. Westside guy on April 27th, 2012 7:45 pm

    Condor hit the slam because he’d heard the one guy who’d kept defending him had missed the earlier HR. 😀

  27. MrZDevotee on April 27th, 2012 7:45 pm

    4 game winning streak! I’ve heard about these things, but never seen one in person.

    It’s lovely.

  28. stevemotivateir on April 27th, 2012 7:46 pm

    Cool that so many players contributed tonight, but Saunders grand-slam was the icing on the cake!

  29. Westside guy on April 27th, 2012 7:46 pm

    zzyzx – totally agree. Those graphs just aren’t the same without the picture.

  30. justdave on April 27th, 2012 7:49 pm

    So the slugging Seattle Mariners have just won four in a row… based on decent pitching but also an offense that capitalizes on mistakes and hits the ball out of the yard. You have to wonder if this is all a dream.

  31. Westside guy on April 27th, 2012 8:05 pm

    What’s funny is – for all Wedge’s talk about the veterans, it was the kids getting it done tonight (and has been, most of the time).

    Well, except for one peculiarly overlooked veteran that gunned down somebody at home, all the way from right field…

  32. argh on April 27th, 2012 8:13 pm

    I saw the Mariners get perfect-gamed on Sunday. Tonight I saw the Mariners make the perfect comeback. And I have to say, tonight is better.

  33. justdave on April 27th, 2012 8:18 pm

    Bury the Angels! Their chance of making the playoffs is now 21.6% according to ESPN. Of course it’s silly to talk about that in late April, but it still puts a smile on my face…

  34. Westside guy on April 27th, 2012 8:25 pm

    It’s been shown before – April matters. The Angels have dug themselves into a darn deep hole. Whatever their true talent level is, there are just too many good teams they need to climb over in order to get the wild card (yeah, the AL West is a foregone conclusion at this point).

    Man, I know the Mariners will have me pulling my hair out at times this year – but it is SO MUCH FUN seeing a bunch of young talented players when they’re all clicking!

  35. WTF_Ms on April 27th, 2012 8:55 pm

    Westside…It’s true, you can’t win a championship in April, but you can lose one….however….

    We’re only 4.5 games back. That is an easy deficit to make up. Texas has been on fire, and that’s going to cool at some point. Hopefully, we’ll stay hotter than the cooling of Texas’ streak.

  36. raul_podzednick on April 27th, 2012 9:21 pm

    as Saunders is going into the dug out after his Salami, you can see Hector Noesi with a batting helmet on

  37. nvn8vbryce on April 27th, 2012 9:39 pm

    I’m going to take credit for this win because I’m the one that said “game over” and I have to say that I’m enjoying my crowlami sandwich… I kid, I kid…

  38. Kazinski on April 27th, 2012 10:59 pm

    Saunders might be figuring out what I hope Smoak figures out next… Being “careful” is not a successful approach to batting in the Major Leagues.
    Yes and no. Its really about pitch recognition, swinging at pitches in the zone, and laying off of pitches out of the zone.

    As I said, way back July 2, 2010 about Saunders, comparing him to Josh Hamilton:

    Looking a little further at the plate discipline comparison between Josh Hamilton and Micheal Saunders, there is one striking (pun intended) difference Hamilton only strikes out 21% of the time, while Saunders strikes out 33% of the time. This is despite Hamilton’s very high 14.8% swinging strike rate as compared to Saunders 11.2%.

    The reason Hamilton doesn’t strike out as much as Saunders despite swinging at and missing more pitches, is because Saunders takes almost 40% (38.5), of the pitches he gets in the zone, while Hamilton only looks at 18.1% of the strikes he sees.

    It’s pretty clear to me that Saunders is showing too much patience at the plate, at least in terms of looking at strikes, and he needs to be more aggressive with balls in the zone.

    He even looked a little like Hamilton tonight. Saunders, Hamilton and Smoak are all similar in that they have low contact rates. That can be a problem but swinging at strikes and not swinging at balls can mitigate that. If you have a 75% contact rate swinging at strikes means that you won’t get to a two strike count as often if you are swinging at strikes one and two, because some of those are going to be hits, or at least balls in play. But swinging at balls is just going to make things worse.

  39. marc w on April 27th, 2012 11:02 pm

    That was pretty amazing. Yeah, I just watched the replay again.

    Thanks for that cheap error w/2 outs in the 9th, Lawrie.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.