Game 63, Mariners at Rays
Erasmo Ramirez vs. David Price, 10:10am
I should talk about this game, about David Price, or the frustrating arc of Erasmo Ramirez’s short career, but I can’t. As an M’s fan, the fact that another game is just about to start hours after the last one ends is brilliant. It’s an absolution, a cleansing, and many, many M’s games have required this process. It’s not even the hope that the next game will be better, it’s just that you can’t let yourself linger on a painful closer meltdown, or one of those games that foregrounds how much better some team is than the M’s.
This, then, is the opposite of that. I’m kind of angry that Erasmo Ramirez, even David Price, are going to step onto the same mound and perform routine baseball actions on them while the last notes of Felix’s symphony are still in the air, still trying to push the roof off of the stadium. I love Jeff’s post below because it hit on something that became clear in yesterday’s game. The Rays knew not only what was coming, but where it would be, and they couldn’t hit it. Someone on twitter mentioned that the Rays were just swinging – swinging like they had no idea what was coming, a fastball, a slider, a change-up, a honeybee, an oily rag. Their swings left that impression, I guess, but I was struck at how *obvious* it all was, at least the ends of the at-bats. Felix was going to throw a change-up, and it would be from the knees to just off the ground. Felix and Zunino all but TOLD the batters exactly what he would throw, at what speed, to what location, and it was like knowing made it harder to hit it. Like some weird Felix’d version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
So I’m angry that these teams are playing at 10 in the morning, and that we’ll have to talk about Price’s trade value or Erasmo Ramirez’s something or other today. I’m oddly jealous of every other sport, where the transcendent has room to breathe, where it has its own news cycle.
Fine, here’s your line-up:
1: Bloomquist, 1B
2: Jones, CF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Romero, LF
5: Zunino, C
6: Seager, 3B
7: Gillespie, RF
8: Buck, DH
9: Miller, SS
SP: Erasmo, whatever.
15 Strikeouts In 16 Screenshots
Sometimes you just don’t need a .gif.
1
Today’s Fun Fact
Earlier against the Rays, Felix Hernandez did something extraordinary. He set a new career high in strikeouts, and he became just the fourth Mariners pitcher ever to record at least 15 strikeouts in a single start. Felix was brilliant, obviously, and while sometimes achievements are only revealed to be brilliant upon in-depth analysis, Felix’s brilliance would’ve been apparent to a blind dead person. Joe Maddon thought Felix was better today than he was when he threw his perfect game. Felix was just putting fools away, and while I’m not saying all the Rays players are fools, everyone’s a fool trying to bat against Felix Hernandez. At least, for now, as Felix is pitching at an inconceivable level.
So, you don’t need to get analytical to appreciate what Felix is pulling off. But I do want to throw one thing your way, to function as a Felix-loving supplement. Felix’s whole game, mostly: trying to pitch down in the zone. That’s the goal, and today, out of 100 pitches, Felix threw 61 of his pitches no higher than two feet off the ground. Many of those were in the zone, low; many of those were beyond the zone, low, yet still good pitches. Curious about significance, I went over to Baseball Savant. I looked for Felix’s highest single-game low pitch rates, from 2008 to the present day. Here’s a table of the top ten:
| Rank | Game | Rate | Catcher |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6/2/2014 | 65.8% | Zunino |
| 2 | 6/8/2014 | 61.0% | Zunino |
| 3 | 4/11/2014 | 58.7% | Zunino |
| 4 | 6/20/2013 | 58.6% | Blanco |
| 5 | 4/16/2014 | 58.3% | Zunino |
| 6 | 5/23/2014 | 56.9% | Zunino |
| 7 | 3/31/2014 | 56.3% | Zunino |
| 8 | 4/26/2014 | 56.1% | Zunino |
| 9 | 8/23/2013 | 55.8% | Blanco |
| 10 | 5/18/2014 | 55.7% | Zunino |
Sunday’s performance: No. 2, since 2008, and probably of Felix’s whole career. The only start with a higher rate of low pitches: Felix’s previous start, in which he dismantled the Yankees. In fact, look over the whole table. You see eight starts from this season alone, and two from last year, caught by Henry Blanco. You don’t find a start from before last season until No. 14, and then not again until No. 20. Felix has always wanted to work down. Now he’s doing it more than ever, and though I’ve indicated this before, it’s worth a quick re-visit. Implied is that Felix has better command than ever. Implied is that Felix has more trust in his catcher to get strikes than ever. Implied is that Felix is constantly executing.
Felix started out great this year. Then he hit something of a rough patch, lasting perhaps as many as five starts. Within that slump, Felix was ill and he lost a lot of weight. Anyhow, he’s clearly back to normal now, where by normal I mean this year’s normal, which is abnormally amazing. Of note: during the five-start skid, Felix threw 46% of his pitches at two feet or below. In the other nine starts combined, he’s thrown 56% of his pitches at two feet or below. Here’s what those starts look like together:
| Stat | Slump | God |
|---|---|---|
| GS | 5 | 9 |
| IP | 31 | 67 |
| H | 36 | 46 |
| BB | 9 | 8 |
| K | 21 | 85 |
When he wasn’t at the top of his game, Felix was late-career Pedro Martinez. The rest of the time, he’s been prime-of-career Pedro Martinez. That’s what we saw today. That’s what we’ve been seeing a lot of. You can’t excuse Felix’s whole slump just because he was sick for a part of it, but even 2000 Pedro Martinez had a six-run outing, and a start in which he gave up three dingers. More often than not, Felix and Mike Zunino have worked together to generate Pedro-level results. I know that sounds insane, but, Felix has been kind of insane. Look at what he just did to the Rays, and then look away at something else, and then look back again at what he just did to the Rays. Consider how amazing you know that is. Consider you’re already burdened with the bias of expectations. Hitters against Felix are swinging underwater.
You know what FIP is. FIP- is like ERA+, where FIP is adjusted for park and compared to league average. An FIP- of 100 is average, and an FIP- below that is better than average. Kenley Jansen has a career FIP- of 55. Aroldis Chapman’s at 57. Mariano Rivera came in at 63. Felix Hernandez right now on the year is at 51. Felix Hernandez is a starting pitcher. Felix Hernandez is our starting pitcher. And he’s the biggest reason why the Mariners are presently in a playoff position. Where, in a one-game playoff, the Mariners could conceivably hand the ball to Felix Hernandez.
Game 62, Mariners at Rays
King Felix vs. Chris Archer, 10:40am
Happy Felix Morning!
The M’s pulled out another win yesterday as Alex Cobb continues to struggle. With Cobb, Jake Odorizzi and David Price underperforming their peripherals, you could make the case that Chris Archer’s the best Rays starter at the moment. Archer, the righty the Rays got from Chicago in the Matt Garza trade, has the best FIP of any starter (though they’re all bunched pretty tightly around 3.5) in the Rays rotation. He’s got an above average K rate, and while his walks have been higher than his colleagues’, the real story has been the way he’s limited HRs.
That sounds great – Archer’s been effective in a season-plus of work, but he’s struggled with HRs, especially to lefties. He’s shown Sean Green-like platoon splits coming into 2014, making right-handers look like the average pitcher, while he made all lefties something like Mike Trout or Joey Votto. This year, he’s seeing more lefties than ever, and suddenly he’s effective against them. The major change he made this year is throwing a lot more sinkers instead of four-seamers, which helps explain the rise in his GB rate, and, by extension, some of the decline in homers.
But it’s not enough on its own. Archer’s still fundamentally a fastball/slider pitcher; his career splits may have been inflated by bad luck, but he *should* have some fairly large splits. The fact that he’s given up exactly zero homers to lefties may be due to some improvement in how he uses his slider to them, but it’s much more likely to be a fluke. So far, so standard-sabermetric theory and all. That said, Archer’s slider is pretty interesting, and throughout his career, he’s struck out more lefties than righties. Archer’s slider is thrown around 87mph, about 8 mph slower than his plus fastball. It clearly breaks gloveside, as a slider would, but the thing that stands out is its vertical drop. It drops 8″ relative to his sinker, or 11″ relative to his four-seam. A splitter, like Cobb’s or Iwakuma’s, is an effective pitch to righties and lefties because the horizontal break isn’t terribly important. It’s a little bit like a sinker’s or a regular fastball’s, which should produce platoon splits, but it doesn’t. Archer’s slider may work in the same way; maybe the vertical drop essentially overwhelms the horizontal “slide” and renders it a more neutral pitch.
The line-up:
1: Chavez, LF
2: Jones, CF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Seager, 3B
5: Zunino, C
6: Ackley, DH
7: Gillespie, RF
8: Miller, SS
9: Bloomquist, 1B
SP: King Felix
Game 61, Mariners at Rays
I’m still sitting here, typing away at draft-related stuff, so why not throw up a thread? I’m not going to be as in-depth as Marc here, but I can do something.
The lineup again has a new look, with the order running with Chavez in left, Jones in center, Cano at second, Seager at third, Zunino behind the plate, Ackley at DH, Gillespie in right, Miller at short, and Bloomquist at first. Production-wise, we could’ve been batting our first baseman ninth the past month anyway. Saunders is out because his right shoulder is barking at him again. Smoak is out not due to lack of performance but a sore quad which has slowed him down from “stone in Racetrack Playa” to “possibly a pre-climate change glacier.” Ji-Man Choi should be back into Tacoma within the next couple of days. I am merely saying.
On the mound for the Mariners is beloved enigma Roenis Elias. I swear, I knew about him before this year. On the mound for the Rays is right-handed change-up artist Alex Cobb. Note that this year he’s allowing a .160/.192/.280 line against left-handers and a .288/.379/.397 line against right-handers. It seems like justification to play Gillespie to me [he hit a dinger as I typed this!], but I also probably would have thrown Romero out there to see what happens. The change is Cobb’s only consistently above-average pitch for his career, so playing strict L/R splits seems less than wise.
Today’s game start was delayed by the tribute to Don Zimmer. I wish I had something more substantive to say about someone who has had such an impact on baseball all around the world. I’m trying now to learn more about him via Wikipedia and have picked up that, before he even made the major leagues, he was hit in the head by a pitch and knocked unconscious for nearly two weeks during which time they had to drill multiple holes in his head to relieve pressure. Batting helmets have added so much to the game.
2014 MLB Draft Open Thread (Rounds 11-40)
This thing is still going on? And it isn’t even halfway done? Okay, look, one of the issues in spreading the draft over three days is that by the time you get into third day or even parts of the second day, the enthusiasm by those outside of the industry is pretty much burnt up. If it’s left to just one day you can sort of psych yourself into plowing through it or run off the excess energy whereas falling into exhaustion and then starting up again half a day later feels like a less practical use of one’s time. And you’re pushing it into a weekend? The weekend should be there to recover from the draft. I don’t think anyone is listening to me but danged if these don’t seem like reasonable complaints. Also you’re never going to generate enthusiasm for something with this erratic a yield. But I see no real reversal to it.
Day two brought the M’s mostly pitching. They bookended with a good defensive CF and a bat-first catcher and in the middle picked up a lot of college pitching. Of the pitchers, we had one junior draftee, one Juco guy, and four seniors. This would suggest in a way that the M’s expect to spend a lot of money on the combo of Jackson and Morgan just to get them signed and are scaling back a bit in order to do so. For example, the 7th round pick last year got $10k from us, the 8th rounder got $20k, and rounds nine and ten split $10k evenly between them. If the Mariners can get similar value from some of their senior signings, then appeasing Boras Jackson becomes easier.
What do I think of what’s going on so far? You could go the route of saying that most of these players will suck, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Its the same rationale that would allow you lazily to say that x position player won’t stay at their most taxing defensive position or y pitcher doesn’t have enough to start. Or you could treat it as that regular, fresh influx of names and talents that distracts us from the larger issues going on, much like say, the news does. The draft succeeds in diverting our attentions from the fact that the Rays had lost ten in a row before Erik Bedard schooled us last night. Or it at least puts in an effort.
Yarbrough and Ratliff seem somewhat similar, lefties with better than average fastballs who might have the secondary offerings to keep starting, though Ratliff is more raw on that front (he doesn’t even have a Perfect Game profile, but Twitter suggests to me that he’s worked out with the Mariners so I guess they saw something). Altavilla and Kerski are both undersized right-handers who get “bullpen” tags as a result. Altavilla has better stuff by a good margin, but the effort in his delivery seems to scare people and the M’s have generally put their high-effort guys in the bullpen pretty quickly. Byrd seems to be similar to last year’s seventh-rounder, Tyler Olson, in that he’s a left-hander with a good record who pitches off his breaking ball. Miller reportedly has average-to-slightly-better stuff but lacks much decent command of it.
The look of things is so heavy on college players right now that it seems a little weird. Could the first two picks go through that much money? Do Cousino or Altavilla or Ratliff really expect that much? We’re in a position now where it seems like the M’s could go for a tougher sign guy and attempt to throw a lot of money at him, but since the new rules went into effect, we haven’t really seen the M’s try that all that much, let alone succeed at it.
Let’s get to it then. Another thirty rounds. God, I hope we draft Handsome Monica.
Draft Truths
We don’t know if the Mariners drafted well. Hell, the draft isn’t even over yet, although the important bits are. But, we don’t know if the Mariners did well, and in a sense, we never will. This might be the most important point: player careers represent solitary player-career outcomes. For each player, we get an n of 1, and complicating matters to an impossible extent is that there’s drafting and there’s player development, and they both combine to make a player product. Take Jeff Clement. Who could forget Jeff Clement? Clement didn’t work out. Did he bust because he was a bad pick? Did he bust because he was developed poorly? Did he bust because of simple bad luck, like, say, because of a series of injuries? How much of that was the Mariners’ fault? How much of that was the fault of the Mariners people who scouted and drafted him?
If it weren’t for Clement, the Mariners would’ve drafted Troy Tulowitzki. Tulowitzki, as it happens, currently leads the majors in WAR. Was Tulo destined for this, or has Colorado done him a lot of good? What would the Mariners have made with the same ball of clay? Maybe you feel like I’m over-thinking this, but given how much dialogue is exchanged over the amateur draft, it’s critical to realize to limits of our knowledge. We’re not literally clueless, but we’re damn close. The Mariners drafted players yesterday, and today, and they’ll draft more tomorrow, and those players will have futures, and we’ll never be able to say with certainty whether or not the draft was genuinely a good one.
I mean, there’s Dustin Ackley. He’s got a career WAR just an inch higher than Tulowitzki’s 2014 WAR. Everybody in the world loved Ackley at the time. Was that actually a bad pick, or did the Mariners develop Ackley poorly, or did Ackley just mess himself up somehow? If the whole process were to repeat 100 times, how many times would Ackley end up the disappointment he is today? We’re about at the point where we can stop pretending he’s going to figure stuff out tomorrow or the next day. He’s 26 and he doesn’t do the two things that were supposed to be automatic.
The Mariners have a very bright, dedicated scouting staff. The same could be said of pretty much every other team, and each organization has its good and bad apples. The Mariners know a hell of a lot more about each of these players than we do, as they’ve been personally scouted for weeks or months or years, and as many of them have been personally engaged with. It’s kind of exciting to know that the Mariners have someone who believes strongly in literally everyone getting selected. It generates a lot of fan confidence. Just about every player selected by every team has someone who believes strongly in his skills. Most players are drafted with conviction. Most players ultimately go nowhere. It’s not a whole event built around lies, but it is founded upon focusing on upside while pretending the downside isn’t there. Every pick is a long shot, but the scout that internalizes the probabilities is the scout that lies awake, questioning the necessity of making his 5am flight to Merced. Scouts need to be believers in order to stay scouts.
Let’s call everything equal. Everything isn’t equal, but we don’t know how. What’s great about the draft is that it brings talent into the Mariners organization. And, because the Mariners were bad last year, they ought to add more talent to the organization than most of the other teams. If you don’t really know anything, you have to assume talent follows assigned bonus pools, and the Mariners have one of the bigger ones of those. So, the Mariners’ system is taking a step forward. It’s not a step being taken in isolation — everyone in baseball gets better. But the Mariners should get more better relative to most of the rest of the league. In theory they lose ground to the Astros and a few others, but you can’t always get what you want. And we didn’t really want the kind of season that would’ve left the Mariners picking first on Thursday anyway.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting amped about the actual players. Alex Jackson is talented enough to have been selected sixth overall in the country. It’s easy to imagine him as a big-leaguer. Gareth Morgan has enchanting power potential. Austin Cousino could be a long-term center fielder. Everyone that gets drafted has strengths, and everyone that gets drafted early has particularly promising tools. Analyze away; go nuts. Talk about Jackson as an outfielder vs. Jackson as a third baseman. Talk about Morgan vs. Giancarlo Stanton. This whole endeavor is a distraction, so you can focus on whatever you want. Don’t ever let anyone criticize you for your interests. It’s good to just be interested.
But, really, this isn’t about the particular players, so much as it’s about just having new players. That’s the exciting part, the part that panders to the side of every fan who loves making trades in fantasy baseball. The draft means change, change in an uncertain and potentially really good way, and personnel change is an addiction. We can tire of the same players, but every year, around this time, there’s a wave of new players, some of them possibilities to vault into the organization’s top ten prospects. They arrive right when certain other players might be disappointing. June is kind of prospect high tide. It’s always coming, so the cupboard’s never bare. Or, the sand is never without its seashells, or something. Every single year, no matter what, the draft allows us to be more consumed by the baseball hobby we’ve chosen and stuck with. And much like spring training, as fans are concerned, the draft is all upside. There are never clearly visible mistakes. There are always potential All-Stars and regulars.
Talented baseball players are being selected by the Mariners. Many of them will sign. Some of them are among the very most talented baseball players to be entering the professional ranks. We’ll never know how well this drafting went, because starting tomorrow the progress is out of the scouts’ hands. They’ll all get started on preparing for June 2015. It’s going to be up to the coaches, and it’s going to be up to the players. If the Mariners just went to the grocery store, now someone needs to blend the ingredients, because you don’t want to serve a raw potato.
According to the order of things, the Mariners should come out of this a little more talented than a lot of their competition. Reality never quite follows the order of things, but, good luck determining why. That Alex Jackson sure can hit, though, probably.
Game 60, Mariners at Rays
Chris Young vs. Erik Bedard, 4:10pm
The M’s head to Tampa in the extremely rare position of being in better shape than the Rays. The M’s have won 5 straight, leading to lots of chatter in sports radio and elsewhere about making moves to add another bat. Kendrys Morales is no longer toxic, as the draft’s (almost) over. The M’s still have some trade chips to play if they want to, though to be honest, this spring has done some damage to the market value of guys like Nick Franklin. But look at Tampa – their playoff odds have tumbled, and as Eno Sarris wrote about today, they’re approaching the deadline looking more like sellers than buyers. We all know that David Price is on the block, of course, and it’s possible they could move him in July. There’s no big, obvious flaw here – their rotation’s middle of the road (though a bit unlucky) and their line-up’s worse than it’s been, but it’s not an obvious train wreck. But they start today 14 games back of the Jays, and firmly in last place of the AL East.
Today’s game pits two oft-injured hurlers against each other. Both Bedard and Young’s career record for innings pitched in a season came back in 2006. That’s not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but the AL silver sluggers for OFs that year went to Jermaine Dye, Manny Ramirez and Vladimir Guerrero. The pitching gold gloves went to Kenny Rogers and Greg Maddux, which describes essentially every year from the late 80s to, oh, about 2006 or so. Both Bedard and Young had effective 2007s, with just a few less starts/innings than the year before, but as M’s fans remember well, 2008 kicked off a period of almost perpetual rehab and reinjury. Both suffered serious shoulder ailments, requiring multiple surgeries. A weakened Bedard’s actually pitched a fair number of innings as a BOR starter/swingman, while Young’s surgery habit proved difficult to break.
Bedard’s no longer a strikeout machine, and his walks have crept up, but he’s been decent for Tampa. Young’s been shockingly good for the M’s, despite the disappearance of his most noteworthy (and unlikely) skill – avoiding home runs. Young’s FIP almost matches his career worst mark, set in an injury-plagued (duh) 2009, and it’s not just the K:BB ratio. It’s that he’s given up 11 home runs in just 10 starts and 63 IP. But those 10 home runs have produced a grand total of 12 runs. Eight were solo shots, and two came with one on. Great, so it’s the old saying about Ryan Franklin circa 2003 – Sure, he gives up HRs, but he’s such a smart pitcher, he only gives up solo homers. There are few less-complimentary comparisons on this blog than the dreaded Ryan Franklin one, but really, is the idea of a skill in avoiding HRs situationally any more or less ridiculous than a skill in yielding OF fly balls that somehow don’t go past the OF? Chris Young makes very little sense, and I’m just going to enjoy it while the M’s are hot and we’re all excited about the M’s new draft picks. Yay Chris Young! Yay Alex Jackson! Yay Mariners!
1: Jones, CF
2: Saunders, RF
3: Cano, 2B
4: Buck, C
5: Seager, 3B
6: Smoak, 1B
7: Romero, DH
8: Gillespie, LF
9: Miller, SS
SP: Chris Young
That’s five lefties in the line-up against the left-handed Bedard. It’s not crazy though; in recent years, Bedard’s run reverse splits, and even looking back over his entire career, he was never particularly dominant against lefties. In fact, it’s *righties* who’ve been helpless against Bedard’s signature pitch, his curve ball. Lefties have hit it fairly well, and both lefties and righties have fared fairly well against Bedard’s fastball.
I wrote a long post about the Rainiers nationally televised game on CBS Sports Network last night, and I awoke to see that it never posted; wordpress notes vaguely that it simply “missed schedule.” Yeah, I noticed that too, wordpress. Anyway, did you hear about the game? Did you watch it? If you were able to find CBSSN, would you watch another MiLB game of the week, or are you pretty much *always* going to pick a big league game (even if it’s not the M’s) over a minor league one? I’m really curious to see how MiLB’s deal with CBSSN works out, and I hope the regional sports networks pick up a few more MiLB games (the way ROOT did with the Portland Beavers several years back). I’ll fully acknowledge that the market may not be all that large, though I think it’s considerably bigger than it was even 10-15 years ago.
The Rainiers lost, though, to the Albuquerque Isotopes, 6-0. They’ll get at ’em again at Cheney Stadium tonight with Andrew Carraway on the mound.
2014 MLB Draft Open Thread (Rounds 3-10)
Phew, that was some first two rounds, right? Remember that selection where the guy who we didn’t think would be picked was picked? That was really something. All right, so after last night I didn’t have that much time to look into things so my commentary will be limited, which means under 500 words. Maybe.
Two things surprised me so far. One was Kolek over Rodon. I had myself convinced that the Marlins would either take Rodon on what he would add to the franchise as a Cuban-American or they’d steal Jackson from us. Neither happened. The other was exactly how far Gettys and Gatewood slipped. These were fellows who were top ten picks coming into the year and one wonders, with the new CBA that I’m so fond of referring to, if they sign or go to college knowing that they could be in the top five three years from now.
The Jackson pick gives the Mariners a player who will likely be their top prospect in the winter. What I can add that I haven’t already is that the rock-back-and-forth mechanism in his swing looks to have been toned down quite a bit. The Other Ripkin Brother and Cornelius Clifford Floyd were talking about it as they went over the hitters and Jackson mechanics have gone from what I pointed out to more of a lift-lead-foot, plant, and-swing thing. It’s still a hitch that could be exploited a bit, but the severity of the issue has been diminished. One hopes it can be fixed entirely.
I have less commentary on Gareth Morgan. One of the first things I noted was that someone, in reply to the MLBDraftTracker tweet announcing his pick, made a Stanton comp, which I can only assume means that he’ll change his name on arriving in the majors. From what I’m reading, he seems to have extraordinary hitting tools but limited skills and is lacking the speed to play outside the corners. The former isn’t entirely surprising given that he’s from Ontario. One hopes that they’ll be able to get him a little more focused and disciplined in his approach, but he’s committed to NC State and who knows if he’s signable.
Regarding the draft so far for the M’s? Well, I don’t know why you’d ask two picks in, first off. But secondly, it’s interesting to note that thus far the M’s have not dipped into pitching and that they have bucked the perceived strength of the draft. I seem to remember them doing the same in the past. Be it contrarianism or some other inclination, I still expect them to go into pitching pretty quickly in day two, and have more faith in their development of said pitching since they’ve had some success teaching breaking balls. Since they went HS with the first two, they may also go college in their pitching in an effort to keep costs in line. It’s also worth noting that the M’s had three corner OFs in their top ten draft picks last year and we’re only adding to it. Depth can turn into strength, can turn into the surplus that you deal from.
Three through ten, starting at 10 am.
2014 MLB Draft Open Thread (Rounds 1 & 2)
So today’s the day, or “a day” (ugh), or perhaps you just weren’t paying attention up until now. Luuuuucky. With the sixth overall pick, sometime this afternoon the Mariners will be selecting some guy who might be their top prospect going into next season. Then later, with pick 74, they’ll pick some other guy who is probably an okay baseball player too. Better than you, at least. From there, we’ll drift into players that most of us have never heard of and go on until there are forty rounds of selections. Remember that there used to be fifty, and that there was also a January draft until 1986 and prior to that there was a brief August draft. You can never have too many. Or you could, and so they stopped.
Here are the basics of what you need to know. The draft will go on with large intermissions from today (Rounds 1 & 2 w/ comps), through Friday (3-10) until Saturday afternoon at some point (11-40). Friday and Saturday, coverage will begin at MLB.com at 10 am, but today, coverage complete with talking heads in conversation begins at 3 pm with actual selections coming at 4 pm. Because if there’s anything America loves more than the events themselves, it’s an hour of speculation and mental foreplay. I don’t know why this doesn’t extend to everything. The Thanksgiving Day parade should be preceded by predictions of marching order and possible rogue balloon entrants who were seen rising in the final months. Movie previews should have retired actors, directors, and screenwriters projecting what might happen based off of the summaries they read on IMDB. When I’m eyeing some gal at a reading or show or bar, I want a gallery of pick-up artists, therapists, and survivors of good and bad relationships giving odds on the possible outcomes of our striking up a conversation.
Here are some bullet points pertaining to what you might need to know:
* This draft class is partially the result of the new CBA’s allotment of fixed draft pools. Basically, the players exiting college right now were high schoolers in the last year before the new rules kicked in, and that year there was a lot of wild spending on prep players as a sort of last hurrah. This means the college ranks are a bit thin right now, but will normalize in years to come.
* The strength of the draft is largely in pitching, both high school and college. There have been a few Tommy John casualties as there often are (Hoffman, Fedde) and others whose mechanics still give pause (Freeland), but the top portion of third-party draft boards features a lot of pitching right now. We don’t know that the actual selections will play out like this. Maybe teams will be more eager to replenish with injuries rampant in the minor leagues this year, maybe they will be more shy about selecting more pitching. It’s possible too that because the hitting class is considered weaker, that hitters may be overvalued and teams will be more inclined to burn that pick early on hitting, knowing that they could get comparable pitching later. These are factors we all end up considering the day of.
* The mock draft consensus has been unusually consistent over the past few weeks in that the M’s are still projected to take top HS bat C/3B/RF Alex Jackson. Nothing has [yet] come up at the last minute to dissuade anyone from that. But bear in mind that this isn’t a lock either. There were mutterings of the Marlins perhaps trying to work a deal with him at #2, and no one rightly knows what the Cubs are up to at #4. If he slips past those two, he’s probably ours, but that’s a big if.
* Say that he doesn’t. In that case, the most likely pick seems to be Hartford left-hander Sean Newcomb, who seems to me like a less-developed James Paxton. There are other possibilities as well. This org looooves their shortstops, so if Nick Gordon gets past the Twins, he is also absolutely in play for us. If one of the top prep arms (Aiken, Kolek) or Rodon drop down, which seems improbable, they are also in play. The players that have linked to the M’s before but seem less likely at this moment are LSU right-hander Aaron Nola (high-floor, three good pitches), who may be in play earlier, and NC State shortstop and Rodon teammate shortstop Trea Turner (elite speed, good defense, swing like an uprooted tree wielded by a wimpy tornado).
* The Mariners, on account of sucking last year, were awarded a competitive balance pick at the end of the supplemental second round, which means that they’ll be making the last selection of the day at 74. The current administration has never not picked a position player in the second round, but who knows what happens here? Our normally allocated second round pick went to the Yankees because of Cano and Morales’ not-signing elsewhere.
My personal board, which is weighted for likelihood, looks like this:
1) Jackson [Weight transfer and timing may be an issue, but talent matches our needs well]
2) Newcomb [Lacking secondaries, but low mileage and org had success teaching curves]
3) Conforto [Fits our positional and power/OBP needs well, but I’m worried they’d rush him]
4) Freeland [Love the command, finish unnerves me]
5) Gordon [Great defensive actions, good offensive ceiling, but best at short]
6) Nola [The same basic pick the M’s have made four of the last five years]
If I’m not weighting my selections, I like Touki Toussaint a lot and think that this organization would be a good match to develop him to near his ceiling, but no one has put him this high and pitching still scares a lot of people. I also have an avowed interest in Michael Gettys because he really does have elite physical tools, but do I trust the Mariners to succeed in developing someone with a hitting ability this raw? No. I do not.
There’s reading material abounds. You can go through my earlier preview or read through Marc’s interview with Chris Crawford. Read Tony Blengino’s insights into what really goes on in the draft room! Or you could sift through some thousands of mocks and players profiles all over the internet in the hours leading up to the event because you’re a wizard and/or own a time machine.
I won’t be here for this draft. Just like the last one, I have somewhere to be that coincides with the start time. But rest assured that wherever I am, I will be reacting with proportionally inappropriate emotion.