Game 44, Rangers at Mariners
Hernandez vs Darvish, 7:10 pm.
Happy Felix Day!
The pitching match-up is obviously the story here. The M’s did a nice job taking pitches and making Darvish get himself in trouble in their first outing against him, but he’s gotten his command under control over the last few weeks, so they’ll have to get some hits tonight.
Ackley, 2B
Saunders, CF
Ichiro, RF
Seager, 3B
Montero, DH
Smoak, 1B
Jaso, C
Carp, LF
Ryan, SS
Minor League Wrap (5/14-20/12)
There were interesting things that happened this week. Hultzen pitched well and was named to the Prospect Hot Sheet. Someone threw a four-run complete game. A High Desert hitter had an OPS of 1.300+. None of these things are the most interesting minor league baseball-related item I encountered this week. The most interesting minor league baseball thing I learned about this week was this, via Wikipedia, which I hope is not full of lies:
The Bakersfield Blaze have played in Sam Lynn Ballpark since 1941. Or at least they’ve been the Blaze since 1995, but they’ve been around since 1941. One night, in 1982, before they were the Blaze, a game that ran late resulted in the automatic sprinklers coming on while players were on the field. Various attempts were made to remedy this problem, such as the solution of standing on the sprinkler heads, most popular among four-year-olds, but the groundskeeper couldn’t be located easily and it took twenty minutes to find a shutoff. The problem of standing water remained, so Visalia’s team manager provided a novel solution: pour gasoline on the puddles, and try to burn them off. It worked. Sort of. The third base side of the diamond was badly burnt and wasn’t fixed until the offseason. Meanwhile, Visalia rallied and won the game.
And people wonder why I love minor league baseball.
To the jump!
Read more
Game 42, Mariners at Rockies
Vargas vs. Friedrich, 1:10 pm.
You might remember Christian Friedrich as one of the many players we could have selected back in the first round of the 2008 draft instead of Josh Fields, a college reliever with bad command who has never made any progress. Okay, that was a Bavasi/Fontaine pick, but Zduriencik still went ahead and signed Fields after he held out until the following spring.
Montero is back in the lineup after his day off.
2B-L Ackley
LF-R Wells
RF-L Ichiro
C-R Montero
3B-L Seager
1B-R Liddi
CF-L Saunders
SS-R Ryan
P-L Vargas
Game 41, Mariners at Rockies
Millwood vs White, 5:40 pm.
The M’s go DH-less for three days in a National League park, and to start the series, Jesus Montero is the guy losing out on playing time, as John Jaso gets the start against a right-hander. He’s certainly played well enough to deserve more playing time, and Montero isn’t exactly lighting the world on fire this year. I’d imagine you’ll see Montero back in there tomorrow.
Also, to protest the constant focus on batting order, I present today’s position players in alphabetical order. They’ll all bat a few times, except maybe Millwood, who is probably pitching for his job the next few times out.
Dustin Ackley, 2B
Mike Carp, LF
John Jaso, C
Kevin Millwood, SP
Brendan Ryan, SS
Michael Saunders, CF
Kyle Seager, 3B
Justin Smoak, 1B
Ichiro Suzuki, RF
Some Intelligent Commentary on Batting Order
With so much attention being paid to the team’s batting order right now, I’ve decided to just stop talking about it. By and large, line-up order just doesn’t matter very much, and we all need a break from the insanity of who-should-hit-where. But, if you’re really interested in batting order philosophies, this interview with Manny Acta (and Cleveland baseball ops guy Mike Chernoff) is a must read.
“The main thing is scoring runs, so you need to stack up your best hitters up front. You forget about trying to put a guy in the second spot just because he can hit-and-run and bunt. After the first six hitters, you should put your best hitters in front of the [lesser] hitters. The bottom of your order should be the bottom. I’ve never been a big believer in the idea of having a second leadoff hitter. I don’t like putting a guy in the nine-hole who should be hitting in the seven- or eight-hole. To me, you have to maximize at bats. Your better hitters should have a shot at getting that extra at bat.”
The Cleveland Indians replaced Eric Wedge with the guy that said that. Also, check out his final paragraph on bunts. Yes, the game is changing – slower at the field level than the front office level, but it is changing, and changing for the better.
More on Steve Delabar
Steve Delabar has an xFIP of 3.33. He’s K’d 23 batters and walked only 5. Why does Dave have him yielding his spot in the bullpen to Stephen Pryor (or Blake Beavan, the yin to Pryor’s yang)? Today’s game-tying HR was Delabar’s sixth of the year so far – his sixth in 18 1/3 innings.
So has Delabar been the victim of bad luck? Almost certainly. His true talent probably isn’t anywhere near 3 HR/9. Still, Delabar has now given up 7 HRs in his brief 25 IP career. This is more than luck – this is a function of Delabar’s serious problems with right handed batters. The HR by Jose Lopez today was the 7th Delabar’s given up to a righty. That is to say, all of them.
Quick -who’s been the M’s most effective pitcher against lefties this year? Lucas Luetge? Charlie Furbush? Jason Vargas? It’s an absurdly small sample size, but the runaway winner, yielding a wOBA of .063, is Delabar. Lefties are 1-25 off of him this season, and 2-37 against him overall. He’s K’d 11 of those 37 and given up 4 free passes. The M’s were stockpiling LOOGYs this spring, and they seem to have missed that their most effective lefty-killer is actually their right-handed set-up man. How?
Delabar’s relying a lot on his fastball, it’s true. He’s used the pitch around 70% of his nearly 450 major league throws. It’s been reasonably effective against both lefties and righties, though he’s now given up 5 HRs this year on it. As Dave talked about, this is what happens when hitters sit on the fastball. His primary breaking ball is the real reason for his bizarre platoon splits – his splitter. With over 10″ of armside run, the pitch acts a lot like a change-up (which is why gameday/pitch fx often calls it a change-up). As Max Marchi showed a few years ago, change-ups often have a reverse platoon split.* Delabar’s strictly a two-pitch hurler against lefties, and they can’t touch him. Both the fasbtall and splitter break away from lefties; the vertical drop of the splitter apparently appears too late for lefties to adjust. But for righties, both his fastball and splitter break in. His fastball break shouldn’t be a huge problem on its own, but it’s possible that his inability to differentiate it from his breaking ball’s making him look really predictable. It’s not like he’s afraid to go to the splitter against righties – he’s used it about 30% of the time, the same percentage as lefties. Moreover, he’s never given up a HR against the splitter.
His problem is that he’s got nothing breaking the other way – away from righties. A slider or a curve would give hitters something else to think about, and sliders often have huge platoon splits – think of Jeff Nelson or, more currently, Shawn Kelley and Lucas Luetge. Of course, Delabar has a slider – it’s just not very good, and he’s thus not very fond of using it. Coming into today, he’d thrown all of 22 (Ian Kinsler took one deep in Arlington). It’s got the makings of a decent pitch, with good movement and high-80s velocity, but he’s obviously not that confident in it. Delabar has the tools to be a good set-up man in the majors, but this lack of confidence is a problem. Righties are killing Delabar right now – they’ve got a wOBA of over .400 in his brief career. Some of that’s luck, but Delabar clearly has to change something. If he goes to Tacoma to make room for Pryor or to accommodate Blake Beavan, he should focus his efforts on his slider. With a weapon to use against righties, he can be – he SHOULD be – a great set-up man. As it stands, he’s a LOOGY whose continually asked to get righties out.
Reshaping the Roster
We’re getting towards the end of May, the team has lost four straight games, and after six weeks of watching the old guys mostly struggle, the club isn’t that far away from the annual roster overhaul. It’s become a yearly tradition – they should actually make a promotion out of it, playing off the Mariner theme to have the embattled veterans actually walk a physical plank. Can you imagine what attendance would be like if the Mariners announced that next week you’d get to see the release of Chone Figgins made official by having him walk down a plank and into a pool full of alligators? Safeco would be sold out in an instant.
But, alas, we’re not going to get to see anything that dramatic, and instead, the roster changes will be announced with a press release including some quotes from Jack Z about how the team is “committing to the youth movement” and are “excited to see what our home grown products can do”. Maybe they’ll wait until the end of the month, maybe they won’t, but the roster turnover is inevitable at this point. The team has already started putting the wheels in motion, moving a couple of arms to Tacoma to set them up for big league spots in the near future.
The first domino in the chain of moves will be the return of Miguel Olivo, which sounds like it is about a week away. He’s going to join the team in Colorado this weekend, then go out for what has been described as a “short rehab” assignment, so I’d guess he’ll get 2-3 days in Tacoma before they activate him. His return will mean that a position player has to go, and since they used his injury to bring back Mike Carp, it’s going to be someone who started the year on the club.
In reality, there’s two obvious candidates – Casper Wells and Chone Figgins. Eric Wedge showed today that he’s willing to use Liddi as a right-handed option in left field, which essentially duplicates Wells skillset and pushes him out of a job if that becomes a more regular occurrence. Wells, though, is at an age where more time in Triple-A isn’t all that likely to do him any good, and if you’re going young, he’s worth keeping around since he theoretically provides some long term potential. Figgins is the guy without a job on this team anymore, with no future in the organization, and with no remaining chance of establishing any value. When Olivo returns, Figgins should be the one to go. Signing him made sense, but it didn’t work, and it’s just time to cut bait and let him try to salvage the remainder of his career somewhere else.
Now, I know some of you will argue that if the team is tossing the useless old guys overboard, Olivo probably should just join Figgins on his way out of town. But, unlike Figgins, there actually is a role for Olivo on this roster. While we can all hope and pray that Wedge has noticed that John Jaso is actually a decent hitter against right-handers, he’s useless against lefties, and the team doesn’t have many better options against lefties behind the plate.
While Montero and Jaso should still split a good chunk of playing time behind the plate the rest of the year, having Olivo around to play against left-handers and pinch hit for Jaso isn’t the worst use of a roster spot. Ideally, the roster adjustments will lead to Wedge acknowledging that Olivo shouldn’t be the “starting catcher” anymore, but if he gets back into the habit of playing him behind the plate most everyday, then I’ll advocate for Jack to just take away his favorite toy in order to force him to use Jaso more often, but there’s room for all three guys on the roster if they’re utilized correctly.
So, Olivo in and Figgins out. Not much of a youth movement, eh? Well, the reality is that the Mariners don’t have much in the way of interesting position player prospects down in Tacoma, especially with Vinne Catricala forgetting to how to hit a baseball. The offense is already pretty young anyway, so you probably won’t see many changes to the position players. On the pitching side, though, there are more moves to be made.
Let’s start in the rotation. Forget about Danny Hultzen, James Paxton, and Taijuan Walker for now. They’re all talented kids, but they’re all also having some ups and downs in Double-A, and there’s simply no reason to rush any of them to the big leagues prematurely. All of them could use another couple of months in the minors, and Walker could probably benefit from not seeing Seattle until 2013. So, while there are almost certainly some pitching changes coming soon, they probably won’t involve any of those three.
Instead, the two arms that I’d expect to see on the roster sooner than later are Erasmo Ramirez and Stephen Pryor. Ramirez, you know about, since he spent the first month of the season functioning in long relief. They sent him back to Tacoma to get him stretched back out to start, and he’s done his usual thing for the Rainiers, throwing strikes and getting ground balls. He’s first in line for a promotion, and would likely be the guy to replace Kevin Millwood or Blake Beavan in the rotation if the team decides to cut bait on the 37-year-old or shift Beavan to the bullpen.
Millwood’s pitched better than his ERA would indicate, but he’s starting in Colorado tomorrow, and that could ugly enough that he might very well end the month of May with an ERA over 6.00. There’s obviously not much upside there, and while the team might like having a veteran in the rotation, they’re itching to see what Ramirez can do as a big league starter, so it might be easier to release Millwood than shift Beavan into relief work.
What happens over the next week or two with those two could determine who stays or who goes, but it’s pretty likely that one of them will not be in the rotation come the beginning of June, and Ramirez will almost certainly be the one tabbed to take their place. If they did decide to move Beavan back to the bullpen, the reliever to head back to Tacoma would probably be Steve Delebar. His K/BB ratio has been fantastic, but he gave up his sixth home run of the season today, and given how reliant he is on his fastball, it’s pretty clear that opposing hitters are just sitting on that pitch right. Some time in Tacoma to work on his slider could do him some good, and moving Beavan back to relief would allow them to shift Shawn Kelley into the setup role and give them another multi-inning reliever besides Hisashi “I’m only used as a last possible resort despite the fact that I’m actually pretty good” Iwakuma.
If they went with releasing Millwood instead, Delebar might still end up back in Tacoma, as the team is going to have to send someone down in order to call up Stephen Pryor, and he’s essentially forcing their hand right now. They moved him up to Tacoma after he proved too good for Double-A hitters, and he’s now just making Triple-A hitters look silly. He got two more strikeouts tonight in saving a one run game against Omaha, and he’s now given up just five baserunners (two hits and three walks) in seven innings pitched for Tacoma, striking out 11 of the 25 batters he’s faced. His stuff is top-shelf, with a fastball in the high-90s and a knockout slider, and he’s ready to face big league hitters right now.
Pryor could get his feet wet in middle relief, but there’s a decent chance that he could be causing a mini-closer controversy at the end of the year. Tom Wilhelmsen is obviously next in line for saves, but Pryor’s actually got better stuff and might be better suited to the ninth inning role. This might sound ridiculous, but Pryor could probably close for half the teams in the Major Leagues right now – his stuff is that good.
Speaking of closers in a post that talks about roster changes, that brings us to Brandon League. I had hoped the M’s would move him before he had a performance like the one he tossed up there today, but unfortunately, they kept him around long enough to have a pretty noticeable metldown. And now, they’re kinda stuck with him for a bit, as they’re going to need him to string together some dominant performances so that they’re not marketing a guy with a 10/10 K/BB ratio and a career low ground ball rate as some other team’s bullpen savior. So, now, League’s probably here for a while, or at least until he straightens himself out and starts pitching like someone another team would want to trust their ninth inning leads to again.
Okay, so, Olivo/Ramirez/Pryor – maybe it’s not the massive influx of youth you were expecting. But, I’d expect that we’ll see some moves to get all three of these guys on the roster in the not too distant future.
Game 40, Mariners at Indians
Noesi vs McAlister, 9:05 am.
An early morning game against the Indians with a struggling starter on the mound? This is going to be a ratings bonanza for ROOT Sports…
Alex Liddi gets his first professional start in left field tonight after playing a couple of innings there last night. While I know that this is just about getting Liddi in the line-up a bit more often, it is a little strange that they’re using Liddi in left. If they wanted a right-handed hitter with some power who strikes out too much to play left field, they could just use Casper Wells, who is basically the outfield version of this skillset. There’s really no reason to prefer Liddi to Wells, especially not once you factor in the defensive difference. But, once the BABIP comes down and his line doesn’t look quite so shiny, I’m sure we won’t see this too often. It’s just a blip on the radar.
Ackley, 2B
Saunders, CF
Ichiro, RF
Seager, 3B
Smoak, 1B
Liddi, LF
Jaso, C
Carp, DH
Ryan, SS
Game 39, Mariners at Indians
Hernandez vs Jimenez, 4:05 pm.
Happy Felix Day!
Saunders moves up… you know what, screw it. The line-up doesn’t matter. All this time being spent talking about batting order is just a giant waste of time. Batting order has a very small impact on a team’s performance over the course of the season. It just isn’t worth all this attention.
Ackley, 2B
Saunders, CF
Ichiro, RF
Montero, C
Seager, DH
Smoak, 1B
Liddi, 3B
Figgins, LF
Ryan, SS
Game 38, Mariners at Red Sox
Beavan vs Beckett, 1:05 pm.
Josh Beckett is struggling mightily, and his velocity is down significantly, so this match-up isn’t quite as bad for the Mariners as the names suggest. Beavan probably can’t keep the Red Sox offense down by himself, though, so the offense is going to have to get to Beckett or the Red Sox fairly shaky bullpen.
Munenori Kawasaki getting his second straight start against a right-hander with Brendan Ryan back on the bench. He played the last few days against lefties, but clearly, his playing time is in jeopardy. If the M’s had a better option, okay, but Kawasaki isn’t it. It will be interesting to see how how this situation plays out, as there are several teams in the market for a decent veteran shortstop, and even with his lack of offense this year, his price tag and his defense would make him a tradeable piece. If Wedge is ready to give up on Ryan as his regular shortstop (and the front office isn’t prepared to overrule him on that decision), a trade might end up being the best option. Ryan’s glove is good enough that he should be playing most days, but given his age and injury issues, he’s probably not a long term solution. If a team like the Brewers (who just lost Alex Gonzalez for the season) came calling, Jack should probably see what they’re offering. There’s no real internal options to take over on a regular basis, but the Mariners are in a better position to punt production from shortstop than a legitimate contender, so if they have to go with some waiver claim/AAA guy for the rest of the year, it’s not the end of the world.
Also, Jaso back in the #2 spot in the order. Huzzah. Glad to see this has stuck, at least in the short term. Kudos to Wedge for making this move.
Ackley, 2B
Jaso, C
Ichiro, RF
Montero, DH
Seager, 3B
Smoak, 1B
Carp, LF
Saunders, CF
Kawasaki, SS