Cactus League Game ??: Mariners at Dodgers
Chris Flexen vs. Trevor Bauer, 5:05, MLB.TV!
After an absolutely disastrous performance against the Rangers yesterday, the M’s have an evening game against the reigning champions, the Dodgers. LA picked up perhaps the best starter on the market this offseason, getting Trevor Bauer to agree to a short but lucrative deal. The move gives the Dodgers rotation unreal depth, and as I’ve said before, the M’s need to be calling Andrew Friedman daily to ask what it might take to get some of the guys likely to be bumped from that rotation, Tony Gonsolin is my personal favorite, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Chris Flexen will get his second start of the spring. He looked solid against the Cubs, but didn’t quite have his best stuff. The same happened with Logan Gilbert in his recent start – he couldn’t command some of his breaking balls, and he noticeably slowed his arm down on his slider, which is part of the reason he got hit a little bit in the second inning. But it’s early March, and if he was able to get plenty of Ks without his best stuff, that’s encouraging. Flexen had some of the same issues with command, and it’ll be good to see how he responds today, albeit against a much better line-up than he faced the first time out.
Looking around the AL West, the Angels look better than they did a year ago, and they replaced their defensive legend at SS with…another defensive legend. But Houston…man, things aren’t looking great. Justin Verlander’s out for the year with his TJ recovery, and now Framber Valdez, coming off a great rookie year, hurt his finger which *could* put him out for the year as well. They picked up Jake Odorizzi, which should help stabilize things, but they’re all out of depth, as top pitching prospect Forrest Whitley will go under the knife for TJ surgery as well. Whitley’s been among the game’s biggest prospects, seemingly since he was selected in the first round of the 2016 draft, but he’s *still* not cracked the 200 IP mark…for his career. He missed most all of 2018, pitched sparingly in 2019 (and poorly), and then, well, 2020 happened. Now, he might return in late 2022? Horrific for the guy; you start getting Ryan Anderson vibes from him.
Today’s line-up:
1: Crawford, SS
2: Moore, 2B
3: France, 3B
4: Lewis, CF
5: Torrens, C
6: Trammell, LF
7: White, 1B
8: Marmolejos, DH
9: Fraley, RF
SP: Flexen
Jake Fraley’s been playing just about every day with Jarred Kelenic recovering from his knee injury. The door to becoming the starting LF on opening day opened, but Fraley hasn’t been able to walk through it. He’s now 0-15 with 5 BBs and 7 Ks, and is 0-2 in stolen base attempts. Taylor Trammell’s been great, but Fraley’s just making the M’s decision an easy one.
Cactus League Game 10, Rangers at Mariners – Underrated M’s
Justus Sheffield vs. Jharel Cotton, 12:10pm
The M’s host the rebuilding Rangers today in Peoria, and one-time A’s/Dodgers prospect Jharel “Squeaky” Cotton and his floating, high-70s change-up hopes to secure a job in the wide-open Rangers pitching staff. The M’s counter with Justus Sheffield, looking to build on a successful 2020 behind his new sinker. There’s some skepticism from some corners, given the *way* that Sheffield put together that 2020 campaign, and his very low HR/FB ratio. Sure, his statcast expected slugging wasn’t high either, thanks to the fact he allowed a lot of weak contact, but we’re at a point in baseball where velocity and the ability to miss bats are seen as the gold standard of player development (and rightly so, I’d add). But does that mean we’re overlooking players who don’t necessarily fit that template?
I think we probably are. At the population level, stats like xBA and xSLG or xwOBA don’t show a huge improvement in predictive power over plain old BA or SLG%…stats that are notoriously noisy for pitchers. That’s partially what’s driven up the value of things like velocity and K%: they’re stickier. They point to a real underlying skill, not just a series of results which are in part dependent on teammates and park. So I completely understand the reason why fantasy baseball players might take a run at Kevin Gausman or someone like that. But I think it’s clear that some pitchers might be able to limit contact or limit runs in ways that the entire population can’t.
The M’s certainly hope Sheffield becomes one of them, but they’ve already got one of the poster boys for this phenomenon in Marco Gonzales. I’ve been down on Marco, especially after he lost velocity in 2019 and had a wildly volatile year, going from months where he posted great results to months in which he got knocked around. But something seems to have clicked in 2020, even though that velocity never came back. Despite that, Gonzales has turned his underwhelming stuff into a confusing arsenal for batters. His sinker’s better than ever, and is the key to his repertoire. He’s living inside the zone far more than ever, and yet he’s yielding less loud contact.
In this way, he’s similar to perhaps the sine qua non of these results-over-stuff pitchers, Ryan Yarbrough. Unconcerned with the low reliability of xstats, Yarbrough yielded the lowest percentage of hard-hit balls in 2019, and finished that up by ranking third-lowest in 2020. The former M’s farmhand has an ERA and FIP below 4 despite one of the lowest fastball velocities in the game. At that kind of velo, there’s no wicked movement or freakish break on his pitches. He’s just confusing people by disguising his pitches and filling up the zone. His arm slot may help, but again, there’s just nothing in the raw stats that shows how/why he’s so effective.
Except one, perhaps. Yarbrough’s cutter seems to show some evidence of the “seam shifted wake” or the newly-discovered force that can impact movement. This isn’t based on pure spin, but rather on the intial orientation of the seams when the pitch is thrown. It’s remarkable, and is probably the big stats story of this offseason (well, at least it would be if the league would stop changing the baseball). Yarbrough’s actual movement looks different than you’d guess if you knew just the spin and velocity, and that might help confuse batters. Something similar, though less pronounced, seems to be at play with Gonzales’ sinker, too. That said, it’s not like you can go down the leaderboard for observed/predicted movement and identify undervalued pitchers like these; the whole thing is too new, and the data too noisy at this point.
This isn’t just an M’s specialty. The A’s Chris Bassitt seems perpetually overlooked, too, and there are others throughout the league. The M’s need to take an important step forward this season if they want to compete in 2021, and solidifying Sheffield’s gains, or making Chris Flexen and Ljay Newsome into guys who can beat the eye test will help them do so.
1: Haniger, RF
2: Haggerty, 2B
3: Seager, 3B
4: Marmolejos, 1B
5: Murphy, C
6: Trammell, CF
7: Crawford, SS
8: Fraley, DH
9: Rodriguez, LF
SP: Sheffield
Soooo, Ty France, eh? France has been a revelation, hitting the ball incredibly hard all spring. Given the M’s need for batting average and, relatedly, SLG%, I think France is the most important member of the M’s everyday line-up. A big year from France takes a lot of pressure off of JP Crawford (who can be perfectly acceptable as a decent OBP, great defense middle infielder) and Mitch Haniger (who can work himself back into game shape without thinking that he has to carry the run production on his own). It gets more out of late-period Kyle Seager, who combines great bat-to-ball skills with perhaps a lower average due to shifting, and it allows a guy like Tom Murphy to hopefully be effective despite a lower BA/OBP.
Cactus League Game 8, Mariners at Cleveland
Yusei Kikuchi vs. Zach Plesac, 12:05pm
Cleveland’s player development team did an amazing job turning one-time org depth pitcher Corey Kluber into a Cy Young-winning behemoth. They decided they didn’t really want to keep Kluber around for his decline phase, and saw Trevor Bauer pitch brilliantly in 2018. The next year, Mike Clevinger took huge strides forward, going from a solid middle-of-the-rotation prospect to a bat-missing #1/#2. Instead of building around *these* guys, Cleveland traded both away, just in time to watch Shane Bieber lay waste to the AL en route to his own Cy Young award.
It’s a remarkable run of success, and the hope to keep it going with today’s starter, Zach Plesac, and RHP Triston McKenzie. For all of the accolades that the Dodgers, Astros, and, increasingly, Mariners get for their pitching development, I’m not sure anyone can touch what Cleveland’s done the last five years. The problem is that they seem to think it’s enough. I mean, it did help net them an AL pennant, but the club can’t hit, and they seem stubbornly uninterested in changing that. Hey, if they don’t care, I won’t worry too much about it, but it’s a real clear symptom of the problems in baseball’s finance and overall competitiveness.
In questionably meaningful stats, the M’s have a team OPS over .800 in the spring, one of ten clubs to do so. They’ve scored the fewest runs of any of those 10, though bad luck may be a part of it. The pitching’s been poor this year, though again, it’s hard to make much of spring stats in a cactus league that’s played pretty hitter-friendly.
1: Crawford, SS
2: Haniger, RF
3: Seager, 3B
4: White, 1B
5: Murphy, C
6: Trammell, CF
7: Moore, 2B
8: Fraley, DH
9: Rodriguez, LF
SP: Kikuchi
Good to see Julio get a start, and to see Trammell get a run in CF. Trammell seems to have the inside track on the LF job, though Fraley keeps getting PAs to see if he can get back on track and challenge him.
Cactus League Game 7, Mariners at Angels – Logan Gilbert’s Turn
Logan Gilbert vs. Jamie Barria, 12:10pm
The M’s won’t have to further enrage Jarred Kelenic by sending him down to the minors. A strained adductor muscle in his knee will sideline the OF phenom, realistically ending any chance he had of making the team. It’s a tough blow for Kelenic, and for the M’s chances to run out their best line-up, but it saves the M’s a tough decision and….it is so, so gross to write about baseball with this service time nonsense as the frame. They’ve essentially made us do so; the service time issue/scandal is included in the mlb.com article about the injury. It’s unavoidable. It’s just a terrible way to think about the game and the M’s young prospects. I cannot wait for a future CBA that enables us to talk about baseball players as players, and not as financial assets/liabilities. I know – we don’t have to fall into it in most cases, but for the past year, and certainly since Kevin Mather’s infamous breakfast, it is completely inescapable when talking about Kelenic.
We’ll see if it becomes more of an issue with today’s starter, Logan Gilbert. The M’s have already committed to a six-man rotation, and with Marco Gonzales, Chris Flexen, Justus Sheffield, James Paxton and Yusei Kikuchi pretty much locking down five spots, you’ve got a number of pitchers – Justin Dunn, Nick Margevicius, Ljay Newsome, and Gilbert – vying for the sixth. Dunn’s probably the favorite, given his starting experience in 2020 and stuff advantage over Newsome. But Dunn’s peripherals were atrocious, even though his ERA looked ok. Margevicius has MLB starting experience too, but his left-handedness may work against him given that four of the five locks for the rotation are southpaws.
All of this gives Gilbert a sliver of a chance to seize the opportunity and take the sixth starter job. His upside handily outpaces his competitors, and I’m keen to see how it plays against what looks like a regular season Angels line-up (watch out for that Trout fellow, Logan). But again, what exactly is Gilbert competing for? Would the M’s who’ve been so public about messing with Kelenic’s service time or buying out Evan White’s (for a deep discount) *really* allow Gilbert to win a job on the opening day roster? Is the service time issue lessened for notoriously volatile pitchers? Would they do it to show that they’re turning the page from the bad old days of the Mather-led M’s? Or is it a joke to think that starting the season with their best six pitchers in the rotation is even on anyone’s mind?
Jamie Barria is a long-time Angel who came up through the system and posted a great 2018 rookie season before absolutely cratering in 2019. Despite the Angels struggles in the rotation in 2020, Barria bounced back when given another opportunity essentially out of desperation. Barria throws a low-90s fastball, in both a four-seam and two-seam form. Both have some sink. His best pitch, and the pitch he throws most often, is a slider at 84. He’s got a change as well, though he doesn’t throw it much.
1: Haggerty, 2B
2: Torrens, C
3: Lewis, CF
4: France, 3B
5: Marmolejos, 1B
6: Raleigh, DH
7: Fraley, RF
8: Walton, SS
9: Bishop, LF
SP: Gilbert
Will Vest may get another chance to pitch today after having a fairly disastrous first appearance as a Mariner. Drew Steckenrider, Paul Sewald, and Aaron Fletcher are also among the probable relievers.
Cactus League Game 5, Mariners at White Sox – It’s Flexen Time
Chris Flexen vs. Jonathan Stiever, 12:05pm – On MLB.tv, finally.
The M’s take on the White Sox today in a televised game, giving us our first chance to see the (hopefully) new and improved Chris Flexen.
The White Sox spent years and years in a rebuild they fully committed to, trading away a young, club-controlled Chris Sale among other top players and collecting one of the best assemblages of prospects we’d seen in years. They got the top players in international free agency, they had high-ceiling arms like Michael Kopech, top position player prospects like Yoan Moncada. And then they just kept losing.
Moncada struggled a bit out of the gate, Kopech’s been injured, and many of their first-wave prospects, from Dylans Covey and Cease or the uber-prospect Lucas Giolito and one-time uber prospect Carlos Rodon didn’t become cornerstones. It happens. They became, at least for me, a cautionary tale about rebuilds, and how they can take a lot longer than anyone thinks, even with unbelievable talent.
It’s taken a while, but the Sox are now a pretty good team, and have a real shot in an AL Central weakened by teams that have stopped trying to improve, like Cleveland. They’ve been smart in the free agent market, grabbing Dallas Keuchel last year and Lance Lynn this offseason to help stabilize a rotation that’s grown a bit with Giolito’s emergence. They got Yasmani Grandal to catch, hoping he’d get more out of those starters, and brought in top-shelf closer Liam Hendriks. The White Sox are officially going for it.
I keep wondering if this is what the M’s might look like in a few years. Some growing pains at first (that sounds like I’m talking about Evan White and…yeah, I’m talking about Evan White), followed by slow and steady improvement and then some free agent splashes to round things out. We all hope it doesn’t take as long, but we’ll see. A good Chris Flexen really would help accelerate the M’s timeline.
1: Moore, 2B
2: Lewis, CF
3: France, 3B
4: Raleigh, C
5: Kelenic, RF
6: Fraley, DH
7: Haggerty, SS
8: Travis, 1B
9: Bishop, LF
SP: Flexen
Cactus League Game 4, Mariners vs. Rockies – The Hot Stove Villains
Justus Sheffield vs. Chi Chi Gonzales, 12:10pm (Radio on 710am delayed until 7:00pm; live radio available on mariners.com)
The Rockies have probably already sent Kevin Mather a thank you note, a bottle of wine, or some other gift. For a while there, everyone in the baseball world saw the Rockies trade of Nolan Arenado for a package centered around swingman Austin Gomber as the perfect example of everything wrong with baseball. Here was a team that managed to develop a power-hitting SS in Trevor Story, an all-world 3B in Arenado, and an All-Star CF in Charlie Blackmon. All were drafted and developed “home grown” players and formed a core that brought a lot of wins to Denver. But because they could never supplement that core with enough pitching, they struggled in 2019-20. Would they re-tool now that some of their massive bullpen free agent mistakes were off the books? Go after a Trevor Bauer or another free agent starter? Make a trade?
No, they decided that they didn’t have enough to trade and didn’t want to put good money after bad in free agency. Given that Arenado and Blackmon were long past their pre-arb years and had signed extensions, they saw themselves as selling high on over-valued assets. That is, the team that developed and witness Arenado flourish thought “ehhh, not exactly cheap anymore” and not only traded him for lottery tickets and a 6th starter, but *paid* St. Louis Arenado’s 2021 salary. It was, and remains, a perplexing move, and one I would never forget if I was a Rockies fan.
It was the kind of thing that seemed to highlight everything wrong with how players are valued: years of club control seemed to matter much more than what happened in those years, what each player is likely to actually produce. It seemed to be solely about reducing costs instead of bringing in new talent to replace a franchise cornerstone going out. Any time you trade an established star for prospects, you necessarily reduce your payroll. But by sending so much money and getting nowhere near the top prospects in a so-so Cardinals system, the Rockies didn’t seem to be attempting to retool as much as just cut the cord. To their franchise cornerstone. It remains baffling.
So think about their luck when after a week or two of absorbing the slings and arrows of baseball fans, Kevin Mather fires up zoom and speaks to the Bellevue Rotary Club. He, too, lamented that his experienced 3B/face of the franchise as “overpaid,” went on to cop to messing with Jarred Kelenic’s service time, and took potshots at Julio Rodriguez’s English skills. It remains one of the great unforced errors in modern baseball leadership, and it cost him his job. It also got the Rockies out of the headlines for a bit. Fans couldn’t understand the Arenado deal, a deal that didn’t save any money short term but made the Rockies a sure-fire bet to finish last. But Mather incensed MLB’s fans *and players* in ways we won’t fully understand until the next CBA is agreed upon.
It’s that sword hanging over the head of the club that we’re reminded of every time Jarred Kelenic does anything. Yesterday’s HR was particularly well-timed, as ESPN was in the process of interviewing Scott Servais, who said that prospects often show you when they’re ready. As I’ve said repeatedly, all attempts to re-frame Kelenic’s “readiness” for MLB as a baseball question, as something that will be evaluated by his skills/results, is a mistake, and an obvious attempt to conceal what Mather already explained. Kelenic is ready whenever he signs an extension, and the M’s admitted that last year…when they made Kelenic an extension offer.
I don’t know if the M’s will get hit with a grievance, or how the MLBPA and the owners will re-work the service time process, but thanks to Mather, everything’s in the open. It’s irreparably broken. A system the players had hoped would increase competition by enforcing a kind of parity instead rewarded gaming service time. An expanded playoffs didn’t make more teams willing to spend, it *reduced* the teams willing to spend. No one has any incentive to make a mediocre roster better, and a clear and obvious financial interest in making it worse. The M’s and Rockies have both showed why the system needs to change, and for that, I guess, we should thank them.
1: Crawford, SS
2: Haniger, RF
3: Seager, 3B
4: France, 2B
5: Murphy, C
6: White, 1B
7: Trammell, LF
8: Travis, DH
9: Bishop, CF
SP: Justus Sheffield
Chi Chi Gonzales was once the Texas Rangers first round pick out of Oral Roberts, the same school that produced Mariners #1 overall pick Mike Moore in 1981. Gonzales was known as a competitor, but has never missed any bats at the big league level. The righty throws a sinking four-seamer, a sinking…sinker, and a slider, change, and rare curve. Despite all of that sink, he’s a fly-ball pitcher, something that seems odd for a guy in Colorado. In fact, HRs haven’t been his big problem. It’s more that he has terrible command, producing sky-high walk rates, which combine with an inability to get guys to chase to result in tons of at-bats with men on. Because of the lack of whiffs, he struggles to strand them. He also happens to be the last starter I saw at a big league game, as I happened to catch his start against St. Louis in late 2019. He tossed a gem, Arenado homered, and the home fans went home happy.
Cactus League Game 3, Mariners vs. Cubs
Ljay Newsome vs. Zach Davies, 12:10pm
Scott Servais was on local sports radio yesterday, telling Danny and Gallant that he thought the M’s could surprise people thanks to their pitching. Now of course the M’s posted an ERA over 5 with a similarly-ugly FIP last year, but Servais mentioned how much better the team looked in the second half of the abbreviated season, and obliquely referenced the team’s bullpen improvements over the off-season.
The M’s *starters* really were a strength last year. Once you strip out the bad bullpen, the M’s run-prevention looks a lot better, and the M’s added to that group in the off-season by picking up Chris Flexen, who’s coming off a great season in Korea. The six-man rotation will make more use of their depth, and could help get the most out of Yusei Kikuchi and James Paxton, two of the guys they really need to have big years.
While it’s easy to see why Servais is optimistic, it’s worth exploring why the M’s projections see a below-average group, and how to bridge the gap between these two evaluations. Marco Gonzales’ massive leap forward last year and track record make me much less concerned about him than I have been in the past. He needed to answer questions about how he would miss bats and avoid dingers at a lower velocity, and his 2020 campaign was a pretty loud response to those question. Yusei Kikuchi looked like a different pitcher in 2020, and pitched like one, too – it just didn’t add up to consistent production. Kikuchi is clearly the enigma, and a step forward in results to match his step forward in velocity and stuff would go a long way to making the M’s a good team. For a guy who’s struggled in two years and in very different ways, his projections are remarkably similar between the various systems. They’re not exactly excellent, but an ERA in the mid-4s would be a noticeable and very welcome improvement. Justus Sheffield’s results were great, driven by a promising decrease in walk rate and an almost freakish lack of HRs-allowed. While the projections for Sheffield aren’t great – a mediocre K:BB and HR regression don’t produce eye-popping numbers – he and Kikuchi might be helped by the slightly deadened baseball.
But for all of the variance in potential outcomes for Kikuchi/Sheffield, they’re not the guys the projections disagree on. The biggest mystery, and thus potentially the key to the M’s blowing their poor runs-allowed projections out of the water, is Chris Flexen. Clay Davenport translates his KBO stats and sees an excellent starter, and someone who functions as the real #2 behind James Paxton. ZiPS and PECOTA are hesitant to put too much stock in his 2020, and thus weigh his (brief) MLB stats more heavily, and those MLB stats are *ugly*. Flexen would not be the first pitcher to come back from the KBO with a renewed approach, and if he comes anywhere near the kind of performance he had in 2020, the M’s rotation starts to look quite different.
The other guy the systems can’t quite figure out is today’s starter, Ljay Newsome. I think from the M’s point of view, if Newsome logs plenty of innings in 2021, something’s gone pretty wrong. He’s not among the first six starters on the M’s depth chart, and you have to figure that Logan Gilbert will have magically corrected whatever flaws the M’s point to right around the time he loses a full year of service time (or the super two deadline. Both dates are truly remarkable teaching/player development tools). ZiPS, Steamer, Clay Davenport all see Newsome as generic and replacement-level. PECOTA sees someone who’s a decent bet to out-pitch Kikuchi and Sheffield, presumably due to his microscopic walk rate.
The M’s are going to *need* pitching depth. We’re coming off of a bizarre, pandemic-shortened season, and it may be tough for guys to log anywhere close to “normal” innings for a big league starter. Another key member of the rotation is James Paxton, and I think all of us know not to expect 200 IP from him. Depth absolutely destroyed the M’s bullpen last year, as a couple of injuries showed just how unprepared the M’s were. I’m not putting a ton of stock in Newsome’s (or anyone’s) projections, but a solid year from Flexen and a good start to Gilbert’s career really would change the look of this team’s outlook.
Today’s line-up:
1: Dylan Moore, 2B
2: Kyle Lewis, CF
3: Ty France, 3B
4: Jose Marmolejos, 1B
5: Cal Raleigh, C
6: Jarred Kelenic, DH
7: Jake Fraley, RF
8: Taylor Trammell, LF
9: Donovan Walton, SS
SP: Ljay Newsome
The game’s on ESPN, by the way.
The AAA season’s been delayed by a month, and Tacoma will again host a revised “alternate site” training complex. With the vaccine roll-out speeding up, I’m pretty hopeful that the Rainiers can get into their season in early May, which is when AA was scheduled to start.