Game 59, White Sox at Mariners
King Felix vs. Jake Peavy, 7:10pm
It’s absolutely perfect ballgame weather, and the M’s send their ace to the hill against an eminently beatable line-up. They’re coming off a game in which Raul Ibanez had the M’s at-bat of the year, which he capped with a homer off a lefty. To make the night even better, the Astros completed a sweep of the Angels, pushing the Halos into a tie with Seattle. Strip context away, and this is a game you look forward to, and move stuff around to try and attend. With all of that context, it starts to feel a bit more like our customary once-every-five-days respite from watching Astros scores a lot more than A’s scores, and of looking at Rainiers box scores more purposefully (“Zunino hit a double!”) than we do M’s box scores (“Endy Chavez had a good game, I guess”). I know this, you know this, but let’s pretend, for one night, that we don’t. I’m going to try and be the casual fan that gets more scorn from the die-hards than he/she deserves. TOday I’m going to ignore the fact that the M’s playoff odds are at 1.3% and watch Felix be Felix for a while.
This is tougher than it looks. I’m not sure how far to take it (can I be a casual fan and still revel in Jesus Sucre’s pitch framing ability?), and even a casual fan might find it odd that Endy Chavez (35), Jason Bay (34) and Raul Ibanez (41) are in the line-up together. Still, heading to Safeco tonight and just watching Felix versus Peavy and forgetting about injuries, depth, stalled prospects and the yawning chasm between the M’s and Rangers sounds awesome. There are times I worry about my own tendency to forgive the M’s just about anything as long as they employ Felix Hernandez, but that sort of navel-gazing, woe-is-M’s stuff is exactly what I’m taking a temporary break from. Go Felix! Let’s see some dingers!
Jake Peavy’s late-career renaissance seems like it’s flown under the radar a bit, though that’s easy to say for someone who doesn’t live in Chicago. After two injury-plagued, inconsistent seasons in 2010-2011, he produced a 4.5fWAR season for the White Sox last year, throwing 219 innings and holding/improving his K% despite his velocity dropping below league average. This year, he’s been just as good if not better: his K% is now over 25%, back where it was in his heyday in San Diego in 2006 or so. His cutter’s still a very good pitch, and he pairs it with two well-located fastballs, a curve and a change-up for lefty hitters. Peavy’s cutter initially helped him battle opposite-handed hitters, but he now uses it as a slider (essentially), and his results look a bit slider-y; he’s running sizable platoon splits this year. Some may quibble and point out that his splits are essentially BABIP-driven, but it’s not just seeing-eye singles – lefties hit many more extra-base hits and hit more line drives against him. The K rate is just the same (better even), but he’ll hang the occasional cutter, and good hitters need to punish his mistakes. As it happens, the M’s actually have a good lefty hitter or two in the line-up tonight.
Line-up:
1: Chavez, RF
2: Bay, LF
3: Seager, 3B
4: Morales, 1B
5: Ibanez, DH
6: Franklin, 2B
7: Saunders, CF
8: Sucre, C
9: Ryan, SS
SP: El Rey
Jesus Sucre is the M’s starting catcher, and his hitting spray chart looks almost identical to Munenori Kawasaki’s from last year. The guy who struggles to hit a pitched baseball over 180 feet or so is the de facto starter, and I can’t complain. Kelly Shoppach’s a great fit on this team, and actually gives the team something of an interesting bench bat against lefties, but the team loves Jesus Sucre and if he can help get this team’s runs allowed under control, they can play him all they want.
A casual fan may have missed the news that Franklin Gutierrez’s leg is still giving him problems, and that he’s not able to return despite his rehab stint ending. The M’s have petitioned MLB to get a second 20-day rehab start for Guti based on a report from team doctor, Edward Khalfayan. This is something of uncharted territory, as the rules are the way they are to both prevent teams from keeping big leaguers in the minors on bogus pretext, or for stashing players in the minors to avoid service time/roster limit rules. But if anyone actually needs more than the allotted time to recover, it’s Gutierrez. I sincerely hope he’s granted a rehab do-over, and that this becomes known as the Gutierrez Rule forever more.
I went to Cheney last night to check up on Brandon Maurer, who made his AAA debut against Sacramento. The raw numbers were very good – 6 2/3 IP, 3H, 1R, 3BB, 7Ks, but he struggled a bit early. He walked the first hitter in the 1st and 2nd, and gave up two warning-track fly balls in the 2nd. His command within the zone was spotty, but he was able to work his way out of bad counts and keep the ball in the park. As the game went on, he got more comfortable, and he cruised through the middle innings before a couple of singles ended his night in the 7th. The RiverCats have some free-swinging right-handers (Grant Green is not looking forward to seeing Maurer again), but he was better against lefties than he was in the majors (not a big shock, but still good to see), and his command seemed to improve from the first inning to the sixth and seventh.
Rainiers’ righty Andrew Carraway’d quietly put himself into contention (kind of) for the rotation spot currently held by Jeremy Bonderman, with a sub-3.00 ERA and a solid run of form in May, but he was hit fairly hard by Sacremento this morning, as the RiverCats beat Tacoma 6-2. Carraway’s not on the 40-man, and Erasmo Ramirez obviously has the inside track on the 5th spot, but stranger things have happened.
Chance Ruffin, whose move to the starting rotation has gone far better than I would’ve thought (and I have to tip my cap to Mike Curto who predicted he’d do well in the new role), starts tonight for Jackson against Tennessee.
Meaningless Numbers That Are Meaningless
Fans spent years pleading for the Mariners to move in the fences at Safeco Field, because they wanted to watch the Mariners be a different kind of bad. There was a pretty sensible argument to do so, though, in that the ballpark before was simply too extreme, so at last the organization got to work last winter. Citing young-hitter psychology, the Mariners made the ballpark more batter-friendly in left, left-center, and center. Today Jesus Montero is in the minors, Dustin Ackley is in the minors, and Justin Smoak has three home runs in the season’s first third, but this sentence is hardly fair. It’s accurate, but it’s misleading and unfair, yet I’m leaving it in as part of an experiment. I won’t get into that part because you’re not supposed to know about it.
The potential effects of the Safeco changes were underwhelmingly studied, privately and publicly. It stood to reason that homers would increase, because the walls would be closer, and it’s just that simple. Less ground would have to be covered by fly balls. But park effects are almost inconceivably complicated, and the changes could also have effects on doubles and triples and singles and maybe even walks and strikeouts and everything else. The only way to know what would happen would be to make the changes and find out. We’re in the initial stages now of finding out. Safeco should play differently, but just how differently are we talking?
Let’s set a baseline and look at Mariners games in Safeco and away from Safeco between 2008-2012. I combined numbers for hitters and pitchers, for the Mariners and for their opponents, and following, you’ll see the Safeco numbers divided by the road numbers, expressed as a percentage. To get to it:
BA: 94% (Safeco BA was 94% road BA)
OBP: 97%
SLG: 90%
HR%: 81%
HR/BIP: 83%
These are all very simple, straight-forward numbers, unadjusted for quality of competition and such. The samples are each more than 30,000 plate appearances. Let’s look now at how the numbers appear so far for the 2013 season. The Mariners have played 26 games at home, and 32 games on the road. There have been more than 2,100 Safeco plate appearances, and nearly 2,600 road plate appearances. Straight-forward again and unadjusted again:
BA: 101%
OBP: 99%
SLG: 91%
HR%: 72%
HR/BIP: 73%
The respective batting averages are .247 and .244. The respective on-base percentages are .303 and .307. Essentially identical. But Safeco’s still reduced power — even more so than it used to. Home runs are down, relative to road games, and that carries over to isolated slugging percentage. The Mariners moved in the Safeco fences because they wanted more home runs in Seattle. So far, they’ve observed the opposite effect.
That’s poorly worded. There have been more home runs in Seattle. Mission accomplished! But there have been a lot more home runs away from Seattle, such that the ratios don’t match up. Such outcomes would’ve been unexpected. The Mariners thought this would be a gimme.
So what’s going on? Did the Mariners screw even this up? Did the Mariners somehow render Safeco even less dinger-friendly than it was before? Did the Mariners put too little thought into what they were doing, leaving them with a ballpark that isn’t what they wanted? Moving in the fences and still not getting homers — that would be very Mariners of them. It seems like a thing that would happen.
What’s actually going on, of course, is nothing. Park effects, as stated, are complicated, and you’re not going to learn about them based on two months of one season. It’s going to take years before it’s clear what the new Safeco is, because it takes a while for these numbers to sort of stabilize. 26 home games. 26 home games! That’s nothing! And the schedule’s been skewed! You’d have to adjust for opponents, and even then, 26 home games.
And it’s been April and May, in Seattle. The ball doesn’t fly so well in April and May in Seattle. This is a very inadequate look at the data. It doesn’t control for participants, it doesn’t control for the time of the year, and it doesn’t mind the sample sizes. The only real conclusion we can draw is that, so far, there haven’t been many homers in Safeco, compared to on the road. But it won’t continue that way. The home-run split is evidence in and of itself of why the sample size is insufficient. It makes no sense why dinger rate would go down in Seattle after the changes. The fact that it has speaks to the other fact that we can’t prove anything yet, and won’t be able to for some time.
So why post this at all? In part, to sate my own curiosity. Just because we only have small-sample numbers doesn’t mean I don’t want to look at them anyway, in the way that we look at player’s statistics in the middle of April. In bigger part, this is a test. A test of critical thinking and careful reading and data interpretation. As you were reading along, did you spot the problems with the analysis? Were you eager to leave me a comment, pointing out that it’s too early to say anything? Congratulations! If not, why do you suppose that is? Do you trust numbers when you see them online? Do you trust numbers when I’m the one posting them? (Ed. note: awww) There’s a lot of baseball analysis on the Internet. A lot of it sucks. There’s a lot of general analysis on the Internet. A lot of it sucks, too. One of the greatest skills you can possess is the ability to break down an argument. So many of them are flimsy, or insufficient, and more people would notice if more people were paying more careful attention. Don’t read passively. Read actively! That’s for you, Mr. D’Onofrio! I mean, don’t be a dick about it, but keep thinking. Think for yourself, as someone else is explain his or her thought process. It can be satisfying and illuminating and it can prevent you from being misled.
So that’s how this post turned out. I’m kind of surprised, myself. You’d think I’d have an outline for these things. Whatever, it’s a baseball blog.
The Mariners Don’t Need To Extend Kendrys Morales
I’ve been planning on writing this post for a week or two now, as Kendrys Morales caught fire in May and is establishing himself as a bright spot in an otherwise miserable season, but then Shannon Drayer went and beat me to the punch. In an article entitled “Morales, Mariners a great fit; time to lock him up“, Drayer is active in her encouragement of the Mariners to engage Scott Boras in negotiations now and try to sign Morales before he hits free agency this winter. An excerpt:
Morales very well may be the guy to build around. At the very least, he could be an important building block. Don’t you have to take a run at that? Boras client or not?
Get him signed and put him on a banner alongside Felix’s in front of the gates to Safeco Field. This is the hitter they have been trying to find for a long time.
Morales has been excellent for the Mariners this year, no question. He has a 140 wRC+, a mark that would represent a career best if he could keep it up all year long. Other players who have been similarly productive hitters this year: Evan Longoria (144 wRC+), Jose Bautista (141 wRC+), and Prince Fielder (140 wRC+). Yeah, it’s driven a bit by a higher BABIP, and he probably won’t keep hitting at this level over the long haul, but he’s a good hitter who has shown marked improvement from the right side of the plate, which was a real concern heading into the year.
If Morales’ improvements against LHPs are part of a real trend — and Jeff gave us reasons to think that they might be, even before he stated crushing them this year — than it isn’t inconceivable to think that he might very well be headed towards a new, higher level of production. Maybe he’s not a 140 wRC+ guy, but 125-130 doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility given his contact rates, power, and development as a real switch-hitter.
So, yes, the Mariners should be interested in keeping Kendrys Morales. They don’t have enough good players, he fills a need, and it’s nice that he apparently has some interest in returning. However, I don’t think the Mariners need to be too aggressive in pursuing an in-season extension, because thanks to the way free agency works, the Mariners are going to have all the leverage in the world this winter.
Assuming Morales stays healthy and keeps hitting all year, the Mariners can make Kendrys Morales a “qualifying offer” equal to the average of the top 125 salaries in MLB, which will be approximately $14 million for 2014. By making Morales that offer, draft pick compensation will attach, and Morales’ stock as a free agent will take a very large hit. In fact, Morales is exactly the kind of player that this system penalizes the most.
For a recent example, simply look at what Washington did with Adam LaRoche last year. LaRoche and Morales are very similar players, and LaRoche was a star for Washington last year, putting up the best numbers of his career (including a 127 wRC+ and +3.4 WAR) while helping carry the Nationals to the playoffs. However, he was also a non-elite first baseman on the wrong side of 30 with a bit of spotty track record and some recent health issues. Sound like anyone else you know?
Morales has been a slightly better hitter than LaRoche throughout his career, but most of that is just park adjustments, which teams aren’t notoriously great at factoring in. From a raw numbers perspective, their career lines are almost identical:
Morales: .283/.335/.491, .353 wOBA
LaRoche: .267/.333/.481, .350 wOBA
Morales is a couple of years younger, but he’s also spent a lot more time on the DL and has the continuing ankle issues that will almost certainly scare any NL team away from a multi-year contract. LaRoche’s ability to play the field everyday cancels out any advantage you want to give Morales in terms of age or offensive ability. Morales is going to be viewed, as a free agent, in a very similar manner to how LaRoche was viewed.
And LaRoche was basically ignored once Washington made him the qualifying offer. Like Morales, he was advised by Scott Boras, and Boras took LaRoche to free agency looking for a three year deal, reportedly with a $36 million asking price attached. Because teams viewed LaRoche as a good-not-great player, they simply weren’t willing to give up a first round pick in order to sign him, especially not to a three year deal. The Nationals offered LaRoche 2/24 — because they wouldn’t have to give up a pick to re-sign him — and refused to budge all winter. Finally, Mike Rizzo just told him to take it or leave it.
“I think we both were getting tired of the process,” Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo said. “We had a lot of conversations back and forth with his representative. Adam and I had a few private conversations. … I made it clear to Adam that it’s time to get this thing done. Make a decision. Our offer is what it is. It’s been on the table for a while. It’s time to think of your options and pull the trigger if you want to be here.”
LaRoche took it because he had no other choice. There just wasn’t a market for his services once draft pick compensation was attached. And it wasn’t just LaRoche either. Nick Swisher — another similar offensive player, just with more defensive value — basically got stonewalled by teams who didn’t want to give up a first round pick to sign him, and eventually landed in Cleveland for a significant discount. Michael Bourn, a significantly better player than Morales, also ended up in Cleveland after no one wanted to pony up a first round pick to sign him. Kyle Lohse sat around until after opening day before finally settling for a modest deal with the Brewers.
Major League teams showed, en masse, that they weren’t giving up their first round pick for the right to sign guys who are slightly above average players. And, for as well as Morales is hitting right now, that’s what he is. He’s a good-not-great hitter who can’t run and who has to sign with an AL team in case his ankle flares up. He might be able to pitch himself as a part-time first baseman, but he’s still an AL only player at this point in his career. Combine that with draft pick compensation, and you have all the makings of a guy who just isn’t going to be a hot commodity this winter once the Mariners make him that qualifying offer.
He can probably do better than $14 million for one year, but the Mariners probably don’t need to do better than a two year deal at something in that AAV range in order to get him signed. If they decided to offer a third year, you can probably knock the AAV down closer to $10 or $11 million per year.
The M’s should want to re-sign Morales, but they should also know that they’ll probably be able to get him back for something like 2/25 or 3/33 if they let him reach free agency, and there’s no reason to give him that kind of money now when they can just wait until the end of the season and make sure he stays healthy before they make the commitment. If he wants the guaranteed money now, you get a discount for taking on the additional risk, so maybe the Mariners should be willing to re-sign Morales now for something like 2/20. If he was up for that, I’m in. Sign me up for 2/20 or 3/27 or something in that range right now.
Want some history to support that kind of offer? The Blue Jays signed Edwin Encarnacion to a 3/29 extension last July in the midst of his break-out year, and like Morales, Encarnacion is a DH who plays the field occasionally. He was also 29-years-old last year, so he even had a slight age advantage. His career line? .264/.344/.473. His first half wRC+ last year? 156. This is what the market has established as the price for this kind of player.
If he wants more than that, though, there’s no rush. The Mariners can simply keep him for the rest of the year, make him the qualifying offer, and then let him see what the market for his kind of player really is once draft pick compensation attaches. Boras loves to shoot for the moon and prefers to take his players to market, so trying to re-sign him now is unlikely to lead to any kind of discount, especially with Morales hitting as well as he has been lately. So, there shouldn’t be any sense of urgency here. Let him prove he can play first base regularly over the rest of the season. Let him show that his improvement against LHPs can be sustained over a full year. Let him stay healthy for an entire season.
The price isn’t going to go up that dramatically, because the Mariners have the hammer here. This is no longer a situation where the M’s have to re-sign him now or trade him away at the deadline before they “lose him for nothing”. Now, with the new free agent system, keeping a player you intend to make a qualifying offer to is a significant benefit, and the Mariners should be happy to take advantage of the leverage that offer will bring them.
Game 58, White Sox at Mariners
Joe Saunders vs. John Danks, 7:10pm
The M’s return home to face Chicago, and their erstwhile innings-eater, John Danks. The M’s counter with Joe Saunders, whose coming off a successful start in a Safeco-like environment. The M’s obviously have some question marks in the pen, so it’ll be interesting to see Eric Wedge’s thought process in late game situations.
As Matthew wrote about in the series preview, Danks has reverse splits over his (fairly lengthy) career – due to his outpitch, the change-up. This isn’t merely a home-run-fueled artifact, either – Danks strikes out more and walks fewer righties. Lefties don’t exactly torch him, as he’s got a cutter and a (rare) curveball as well. Still, his swing-and-miss pitch is the cambio, with good arm-side run and sink. As a result, the Rays famously stacked their line-up with *righties* instead of lefties when they faced him. Rays fans even named it the “Danks Theory” after Joe Maddon’s slightly counter-intuitive strategy. The idea was simple: take away the opposing pitcher’s biggest strength. If the opposing starter had a great slider, then you’d use a traditional platoon line-up (opposite-handed hitters). If, like Danks, it was a change-up, then you went with a same-handed line-up to get him to throw more cutters instead. That’s all well and good for Rays fans, but we M’s fans know that when you play with sabermetrics, you’re playing with fire.
Perhaps luckily for the M’s – and to be perfectly fair, it’s not like Danks has strong platoon splits one way or the other – Wedge just isn’t able to mix and match. Injuries, and injuries that haven’t been DLed, have left the team with something of a short bench. That said, the line-up that’ll face Danks isn’t a bad one, given Danks’ weapon.
1: Chavez, RF
2: Bay, LF
3: Seager, 3B
4: Morales, 1B
5: Ibanez, Dh
6: Franklin, 2B
7: Saunders, CF
8: Sucre, C
9: Ryan, SS
SP: Joe Saunders
Danks’ return from major shoulder surgery is cool and all, but I’m going to miss this one. Brandon Maurer’s scheduled to make his AAA debut, and it’s absolutely gorgeous out, so I’ll head to Cheney. The Rainiers face ex-Rainier and ex-Mariner Justin Thomas, who’s now with the Sacramento RiverCats.
Tai Walker lost the opening game of a AA doubleheader today in Tennessee, giving up two runs in five IP, with two walks and five K’s. The offense couldn’t get him any runs, so the Generals dropped game 1 2-0. Game 2’s underway with Jimmy Gilheeney pitching.
The Jason Bay Lessons
It’s June 3, and Jason Bay is starting again tonight for the Mariners. He brings in just a .231 batting average, but his on-base percentage is more than a hundred points higher than that, and his slugging percentage is right there with Michael Morse’s and Kyle Seager’s. Through the first third of the season, Bay’s been a contributor, and a year ago he was a pile of crap. He cost the Mariners little to bring in, his placement on the roster was controversial, and now it’s time to review some lessons we all might have learned. Without further ado words:
Jason Bay isn’t toast
This, of course, is the most obvious lesson, on account of Jason Bay hasn’t played like toast. He hasn’t played like anything resembling toast. I don’t actually quite understand the expression, myself, just like I don’t understand the expression of being “on fire.” I certainly don’t understand how they can co-exist as they do. If you’re toast, you’re done. If you’re on fire, you’re performing quite ably. What does fire yield but extremely dark toast? If Jason Bay were on fire, would he not be toasty? Does “toast” refer to when you’re not on fire anymore? Does one go right from being on fire to being finished? And don’t most people enjoy toast? I don’t think these were thought through. I don’t think these were thought through at all.
Bay’s been one of the best hitters on the team. Last year, Bay was one of the worst hitters in baseball. He, for example, hit worse than Chone Figgins. He hit worse than Ramon Santiago. He hit worse than Brendan Ryan and Xavier Nady and whoever Gorkys Hernandez is. Bay was getting older and had had some injuries and there was reason to believe his days were just through, not on this planet, but at least in this league. Now he’s walking like always. He’s striking out basically like always. His isolated slugging percentage is where it was in 2008, when he clubbed 31 dingers and got himself involved in a Manny Ramirez trade. Jason Bay has bounced back. To some extent. To a productive extent. The Mariners picked up a shell and found a crab in it that looked suspiciously Canadian.
Also Bay’s defense hasn’t been bad. Or, if it has been bad, the badness has mostly escaped my attention. He seems to have been perfectly adequate, which is more than you could say of a few other frequent or semi-frequent Mariner outfielders.
Teams usually don’t make truly weird decisions for no reason
At the time, I didn’t understand the argument for Jason Bay over Casper Wells. That is, for all intents and purposes, the decision that was made. Bay was selected as a reserve outfielder while Wells was dropped and discarded. Wells was (and is!) younger, he could play center, he projected better, and he had some extra team control. On paper, choosing Wells was obvious. On paper, going with Bay amounted to lunacy, spring training be damned. It was a little thing, but it was a thing, in an offseason full of questionable things.
I still don’t quite get it. I still don’t get why the Mariners dropped a younger center fielder. Bay’s success doesn’t retroactively justify everything, any more than finding a quarter justifies my tipping over all the washing machines in a laundromat. But Bay has succeeded, and the Mariners felt like they saw something. Wells hasn’t succeeded, in large part because he’s had trouble finding steady work. Other teams didn’t care much for a freely-available Casper Wells, meaning it wasn’t just the Mariners’ evaluation. When a decision you disagree with seems to work out, it’s easy to just say “bad process, good results.” But it requires deeper examination. Probably, the process wasn’t so bad. Probably, it had better chances of working out than you gave it. Baseball teams aren’t baseball idiots. Except for sometimes.
We still haven’t learned about sample sizes
I’ll go quickly over this one since I don’t want to be perceived as a wet blanket, but Bay has 141 plate appearances. How “back” is he, really? He’s been protected from a lot of righties, and, let’s re-visit 2011. Through June 10, Adam Kennedy had a .784 OPS over 173 trips to the plate. The rest of the way, he came in at .521 and 236. We don’t know what Jason Bay’s going to do, and arriving at conclusions after a third of the season is a good way to look kind of stupid after three-thirds of the season. Bay, oddly, has twice as many homers as doubles. That probably won’t keep up. Because of Bay, there’s something of a rush of people admitting to having been wrong, or accusing others of having been wrong. It’s fine, encouraged even, to re-consider perspectives, but remember what date it is. Remember what numbers can do.
It doesn’t only happen to us
Scott Spiezio and Jeff Cirillo are among the more reviled Mariners in recent team history. Spiezio played like a total idiot and Cirillo essentially went bonkers. In Spiezio’s last year with the Mariners, he had three hits. In Cirillo’s last year with the Mariners, his OPS had three fives in it. Spiezio subsequently bounced back in a big way as a role player for the Cardinals. Cirillo found it again playing for the Brewers. It was maddening to see such aggravating busts have success somewhere else after flopping in Seattle. It felt, in some weird way, like an insult.
Jason Bay’s got an OPS near .800. Oliver Perez has an ERA closer to 1 than 2. In Perez’s last year with the Mets, his ERA was almost 7. In Bay’s last year with the Mets, he didn’t slug .300. Perez looked like a complete and utter loss, and Bay looked like a shell of a former star slugger. Mets fans, as far as I could tell, hated Perez. I don’t think they hated Bay — he’s a hard one to hate — but they weren’t sad to see him leave. He wasn’t of use anymore. He hadn’t been of use for some time. Except now, he’s of use, like Perez is, on the Mariners, who aren’t the Mets.
Neither of these guys is going to lead the Mariners to the playoffs, or come through with clutch stretch-run performances. They’re role players, and they’re non-elite ones. But, Mariners fans love to ask, “why do they always get better when they leave?” It’s a silly question, but we’re not the only ones asking it.
Mariners Limp Home and Face White Sox
| MARINERS (24-33) | ΔMs | WHITE SOX (24-30) | EDGE | |
| HITTING (wOBA*) | -9.8 (19th) | -0.1 | -79.2 (30th) | Mariners |
| FIELDING (RBBIP) | -3.9 (19th) | 0.5 | 9.9 (10th) | White Sox |
| ROTATION (xRA) | 11.1 (9th) | -0.9 | 22.3 (5th) | White Sox |
| BULLPEN (xRA) | 3.9 (8th) | -2.3 | -12.2 (29th) | Mariners |
| OVERALL (RAA) | 1.2 (16th) | -2.9 | -59.2 (28th) | MARINERS |
Oh, wow, the worst hitting team in the majors! The White Sox are posting a team slash line of about 25 points worse than the Mariners in both OBP and SLG. And the White Sox play in their joke of a park while the Mariners play in their less laughable park. Using StatCorner’s ratings, only one White Sox hitter — Alex Rios — has had a better than average bat. FanGraphs concurs unless you want to include Dylan Axelrod’s 1-for-2 performance.
In comparison, the Mariners have the following hitters with above average lines: Bay, Franklin, Gutierrez*, Ibanez, Morales, Morse, Peguero, Seager and, yeah, even Justin Smoak.
*Coincidentally funny that Nick Franklin and Franklin Gutierrez line up next to each other in alphabetical order
The Mariners aren’t a bad team, I think, they just seem to sometimes play like a horrendous team. Bonderman is an example of that. Three home runs allowed is a bad number for one start. Two of those were hitters took pitches, while behind in the count, on the outside edge of the zone and hit them over the fence the other way. That doesn’t happen very often. Is Bonderman just more hittable? It sure looked like it, but it’s hard to say after only one start. I don’t think he’ll be up for long regardless, and he wasn’t mowing down hitters in Triple-A either, but that was a weird start, from an overall stat line perspective.
Game 57, Mariners at Twins
Jeremy Bonderman vs. Scott Diamond 11:10am
When asked a few days ago who I thought would make this start, I answered Hector Noesi. Not because I have a lot of confidence in Noesi, but because Jeremy Bonderman was limping towards his contract’s finish line. Over his last four starts, Bonderman walked eight and struck out six. Oh well – welcome back, Jeremy.
Comparisons to Blake Beavan are too easy with Twins pitchers and their whiffless ways, but Scott Diamond is a lot like Blake Beavan. This year, he’s striking out less than 11% of opposing hitters while walking less than 5%. He’s a lefty with an 89mph fastball, a curveball he throws for strikes (duh) and a change for RHBs. Like Beavan, he often gets too much of the plate and serves up HRs.
1: Saunders CF
2: Bay LF
3: Seager 3B
4: Morales DH
5: Ibanez RF
6: Liddi 1B
7: Triunfel 2B
8: Sucre C
9: Ryan SS
SP: Bonderman
Erasmo Ramirez makes his first AAA start of the year today in Tacoma at 1:30. If you’re in the South Sound, that looks like a good game to attend.
Game 56, Mariners at Twins
Aaron Harang vs. Kevin Correia, too early am.
Harang v Correia. Technically, this is a match up of ex-All Star pitchers, but I just want to get back to my breakfast.
1: Chavez, RF
2: Bay, LF
3: Seager, 3B
4: Morales, 1B
5: Ibanez, DH
6: Franklin, 2N
7: Saunders, CF
8: Shoppach, C
9: Ryan, SS
SP: Harang
Go M’s!