It’s Get Serious Time
At 14-23, the Mariners need some good news. They’re not going to get it from looking at their schedule, though. Over the next month, the Mariners play 29 games, with only seven of those coming against a team that is currently below .500 (the Angels). They have to play the Twins four times, the Cardinals three times, and the Rangers four times. They finish the stretch with 20 consecutive games without an off day.
There are no more games against the Royals or Orioles to look forward to. The M’s face a pretty grueling schedule for the next month, the kind of gauntlet that even a good team would struggle to finish over .500 against. And as we’ve all seen, the Mariners right now are not a good team.
Plain and simple, the M’s cannot wait any longer. If they keep trying to hold on with what they have, they’re going to sink. They need to get Milton Bradley and Jack Wilson back on the team as soon as possible. They need to make a trade (Ryan Raburn, please) right now. If Ryan Rowland-Smith struggles again tonight, he should probably head to the bullpen. The time for waiting is over. 29 games in 31 days, most of them against high quality competition… if the Mariners try to tackle that challenge with this roster, they don’t stand a chance.
The season isn’t over yet, but the time for patience is. It’s no longer a belief system to run Ken Griffey Jr out there – that’s just stubbornness. If the Mariners are serious about winning, they need to make changes, and they need to make them right now.
Minor League Wrap (5/10-16/10)
I don’t have any meditative/rambling intro prepared this time. The Diamond Jaxx are still playing good baseball though, and are within reach of the division lead, while the Clinton Lumberkings are getting it done with good pitching, home runs, and nothing else.
To the jump!
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Game 37 Götterdämmerung
If it’s not one thing, it’s another at this point. I don’t know if we’re full into the Götterdämmerung phase yet, as the offense will surely bounce back, and Milton Bradley will soon resume doing what he does, but the state of affairs is quite disheartening at the moment, and I wasn’t going to let marc’s use of “ragnarok” slide.
The Mariners faced off against a Matt Garza who wasn’t particularly on his game. At some point in the third inning, a graphic popped up that indicated that he had more balls than strikes. He left with only two strikeouts. Unfortunately, the home plate umpire didn’t really care that Garza was off his game and was repeatedly giving him the outside strike to left-handed batters. The two Ks, to Saunders in the third and to Griffey in the fourth, were questionable if you look at the pitch tracker. Take it away, robots.
Despite giving up his first walk of the season to Longoria, Lee pitched as well as we’ve seen from him, ending the night with ten Ks. Hank Blalock, who came in hitting 6-for-13 off him, went 0-for-3 and struck out twice. He managed to strand Aybar after that bizarre double just outside the infield when Figgins and Ichiro both lost the ball and Guti didn’t make it in time. He’s done everything to endear himself to the Mariners, including appearing back on the mound in the second before they even went to commercial break. The Mariners? Well, I can’t imagine that the feeling is mutual at this point.
Our one run came on three consecutive singles by the Tacoma Rainiers, Josh Wilson, Josh Bard, and Michael Saunders, but then Ichiro flew out, after coming into the game with seven consecutive multi-hit games, and Figgins grounded into his second double play of the series to end it. Bard made a good first impression on the team with the single, and the walk, and the catching of the baseball. We’ll see what happens in a couple of weeks when Moore is eligible to come off.
Other bullet points from the day:
* Griffey nearly blooped one to the left side, against the Griffey Shift. That ball was caught by Crawford, who also stole what might have been a RBI double from Jose Lopez in the sixth. Carl Crawford ruined my Sunday afternoon.
* Saunders nearly caught Crawford’s triple. Remain calm.
* It’s distasteful to see a man getting kicked when he’s down. Kotchman got that today, in consecutive at-bats. First he gets the chin music, and then as he’s spinning away, Navarro throws to his blindside to keep Lopez on the bag at first. The next time up, he gets drilled in the shoulder. What did Kotchman ever do to you, Rays?
* One of the things that’s likely to stick out in our minds after today’s game, like the Moore pinch-running mistake last night, is Gutierrez running into the third out of the inning at third base. Josh Wilson was at-bat then, not exactly the guy you want at the plate in a RBI situation, but still, awful. One interesting statistical tidbit on Guti is that in the month of May, he’s running a 13/11 K/BB. So, on one hand, he’s striking out in almost a third of his at-bats, but on the other, he’s already logged three more walks in May than he did the whole month of April.
* Jack Wilson went 1-for-2 as the DH in last night’s game for West Tenn, but is sitting out today.
Game 37, Mariners at Rays
Lee vs Garza, 10:40 am.
Junior returns to the line-up. It’s anyone’s guess as to why.
Moore to 15 day DL, Bedard to 60 day DL, Bard to the majors.
Ichiro, RF
Figgins, 2B
Gutierrez, CF
Lopez, 3B
Griffey, DH
Kotchman, 1B
Josh Wilson, SS
Bard, C
Saunders, LF
Game 36 Recap
I’ve heard that back in the day, there were journalists out there who wrote two different stories in the late innings of tie games, one for if the team pulled it out and one for if the team lost. Through seven innings, I was thinking we were going to pull it out. Instead, we lost yet another one that we didn’t need to.
Originally, my preface here was going to be about how we eked out a run against a pitcher that ended up dominating us in the late innings. Now, I have to talk about the eighth inning. Jason Vargas threw four perfect innings to start the game out because the Rays happen to be terrible against left-handed pitching. Through the first four innings, Vargas’ pitch count was only thirty-two, twenty-two of which went for strikes. The Rays were swinging early and putting the ball in play. It wasn’t working out well for them.
Oddly, in the fifth, they opted to become more aggressive, with eleven of sixteen pitches going for strikes, and they managed their first hit of the game, but things slowed down in the sixth, with twelve of twenty-four being called strikes and only five of twelve in the eighth. One would think that a manager would recognize Vargas seemed to be getting tired, and that a low pitch count was not reason enough to keep him going out there into the eighth, but nevertheless, Wak did.
We all know what follows because we’ve seen it too many times lately. We have a lead, and in the eighth inning everything blows up. Upton and Navarro had back-to-back singles, Upton moving to third as he had previously stolen second off a slightly rusty Rob Johnson behind the plate (the first time a Rays runner had even been in scoring position). League gives up a single to Bartlett and then is pulled after a sacrifice bunt by Bartlett and an intentional walk to Crawford, and that brings up the Sean White vs. Ben Zobrist match-up that ends in a sac fly and the tying run scoring before Longoria lines out.
From there, the story pretty much writes itself, except in our case we had the added fingernails-on-chalkboard effect of the Fox broadcasters not shutting up about pop music. Gutierrez drew a leadoff walk and stole second in a turnabout play off John Jaso entering the game, and then he was left out there, stranded after getting into scoring position. Jesus Colome served seven pitches to Willy Aybar and then I stumbled back to my ethernet connection, numb, because I had known the loss had been coming since the eighth.
The rest of the game, I don’t have all that much to write about because frankly, it wasn’t interesting from our perspective. Tui somehow got the start at first against a tough right-hander instead of Kotchman and went 0-for-4, striking out twice and stranding three. Heck, I would have settled for Langerhans out there again. The offense was not good, and after Mike Sweeney’s third home run in as many days, James Shields turned in four perfect innings of his own before Adam Moore’s single.
Funny, because yesterday, I wanted to talk up Moore’s good points, and today he struggled to justify much of that. He grounded to short in his first at-bat and had an ugly K in the fifth, one of ten against Shields on the day. He did well to knock out Longoria when he hit the tapper to the left side, but mostly, what we’re going to remember is him bruising his heel, or knee, or whatever, and coming up hobbled after his infield single in the eighth. If he comes out for a pinch-runner then, even Rob Johnson as the case probably would have been, we’re sitting pretty with runners on second and third with one out on Ichiro’s should-have-been double. At that point, Figgins doesn’t have an easy double play to ground into.
Speaking of which, I also wanted to talk up Figgins’ good points today, but can’t easily. He had a double in the first, legging out a close one that he probably shouldn’t have attempted, and then got a bloop single stolen from him his second time up. His last two at-bats were a strikeout and a double play. Whatever confidence he might have gained from forcing the error and scoring on a wild pitch in the first was probably undercut by not being able to come through in the eighth.
A few other “highlights”, so to speak, included Lopez snagging two liners, one in the sixth against Gabe Kapler that he jumped up to snag, and one in the eighth against Longoria again that probably spared us further run scoring. If he hadn’t been posting a .436 OPS in May, we might be talking about these sorts of things a little more.
Anyway, it’s still light out, the weather is pleasant, so go out and enjoy yourselves. There’s no miracle in this one, just another frustrating loss where the M’s let a winnable game get away from them. It’s getting mundane.
Game 36, Mariners at Rays
Vargas vs Shields, 1:10 pm.
Well, we got our miracle yesterday – hope for another one.
Game 35 “Not Quite Dead Yet”
Hey, 14-21. Perhaps there’s hope after all.
Late edit: The West Tenn Diamond Jaxx’ website says that Jack Wilson will be rehabbing with them starting tomorrow when the roadtrip to Mississippi begins. The Mariners official site confirms.
* Doug Fister had six walks coming into the game, and this was advertised as one of the things he’d need to keep up in order to win this one. He got to a full count on Jason Bartlett and threw eight pitches before he induced the ground out. This at-bat was a rough summary of how Fister was pitching today. While he did manage to get first pitch strikes in for over two-thirds of the batters he faced, he struggled to put them away and left after just five innings, having walked three. To be fair, one of his walks, the one to Brignac, basically wasn’t if you take a look at it…
Not a great outing for him, though watching him fool Longoria badly on a 88mph pitch in, and then get him to K on a checked swing up in the eyes, that was nice.
The run that scored against Fister was among the stranger ways I’ve seen to get on the board lately. First there was the double to Bartlett, which is something I suppose, but then Saunders threw a dart to the left of the second base bag that Figgins couldn’t line up with, and so the ball ended up spiking and bouncing away. After that, Fister got a cleat caught in the mound and ended up with a balk that resembled some unintentional whirlwind move that scored Bartlett from third. That was annoying.
* As disheartening as the losses in Baltimore were, this game served as a reminder of how much better the team is with Gutierrez in the lineup. The first inning home run on a pitch into his wheelhouse was a decent enough example of that, especially considering that was the first home run Wade Davis had given up to a right-handed hitter all season, but so was the sixth inning walk, where he stole second and alertly went to third as the throw went astray. Smarter baserunning always helps.
* One of the comments made during the game was that neither Johnson nor Moore has really taken the title of starting catcher, due to both weak hitting and frequent mistakes behind the plate. After tonight’s game, I figure a number of people out there will want to give that title to Moore after seeing a double and a home run in the box score. Frankly, I don’t know if those two aren’t caught in a ballpark where the ball doesn’t carry as well, but their location, to right field in both instances, raises an interesting point. You look at Rob Johnson’s hitting charts, in Safeco at least, and you’ll see that only four of the balls he’s hit have gone to the right side. Moore, while logging nine fewer at-bats at home, has five, and three of his four balls in play tonight went to the right side. That ability may be more conducive to future success in Safeco.
* In May, Casey Kotchman has hit .056/.190/.083 in 36 at-bats. The Rays still opted to walk him intentionally in the sixth in order to bring up Josh Wilson. That should tell you what other teams really think of Wilson’s recent hot hitting.
* Kanekoa Texeira had to face the 4-5-6 hitters in the Rays lineup in the bottom of the sixth. He frisbeed in two pitches around 90 mph to get two quick inside strikes on Longoria, and then struck him out two later on a pitch in the dirt. He then struck out Carlos Pena, a left-hander, on eight pitches, and Upton on five pitches, the last two of which were swings out of the zone. The seventh inning featured three pitches to get through the likes of Pat Burrell and John Jaso, and after the walk to Brignac, one more to Bartlett to end the inning. We like Texeira.
* Sometime in the sixth inning, seeing a number of pitches being dropped in around the dirt and barely snagged, a small child behind home plate screamed “HE CAN’T EVEN GET A HOLD OF IT!” Though this was one of our better games behind the dish all season, clearly the child had not been watching much Mariners baseball this year.
* We shouldn’t fault Kelley for the dinger to Longoria because it was a decent pitch to a fantastic hitter. All you can really do in that case is tip your cap to the guy. Against Carlos Pena, Kelley managed a strikeout on five pitches all around the zone, and B.J. Upton was knocked out with just four. Kelley is still one of the Mariners better relievers when used properly.
* I know that the condensed game for this one will include the highlights of the home runs by Gutierrez, Moore, and Sweeney, but I really do hope that Sweeney’s stolen base, his first in four years, manages to make it in there too.
Another edit: We now have more home runs than the Cleveland Indians. LOOK OUT, AMERICAN LEAGUE.
Game 35, Mariners at Rays
Fister vs Davis, 4:10 pm.
The M’s are badly in need of a miracle this weekend.
Ichiro, RF
Figgins, 2B
Gutierrez, CF
6-4-3, DH
Lopez, 3B
Kotchman, 1B
Josh Wilson, SS
Moore, C
Saunders, LF
Some Not So Fun Math
The Mariners are 13-21, 6 1/2 games out of first place. They have 128 games left to play.
Heading into the season, we had the team pegged as about an 83 to 85 win “true talent” team, which works out to about a .520 winning percentage. If the Mariners win 52 percent of their remaining games, they will finish with a record of 80-82. If our opinion of the team was exactly the same as it was on Opening Day, we would now expect the team to finish just below .500.
Of course, the last six weeks of baseball provide some evidence that there are reasons to think that this team might not be a true talent 83 to 85 win team. Milton Bradley didn’t stay under control. Jack Wilson didn’t stay healthy. Rob Johnson didn’t learn how to catch over the winter. Even leaving aside the slumps of guys like Chone Figgins and Jose Lopez, which have been big problems but should theoretically not continue for much longer, there are some structural issues with this roster that weren’t true in March. I’d probably argue that this is more like a 78 to 80 win true talent team right now, given how the roster has shaken out.
If I’m right, and the Mariners play like their “true” selves the rest of the year, they’d finish 75-87.
How wrong do we have to be for the Mariners to win the AL West? With 128 games to play, the team would have to play .601 baseball the rest of the year to finish at 90-72. Texas is good enough to win more than 89 games, and so I don’t think we can assume that anything less than 90 will get it done. .601 baseball is basically the level the Phillies have played for the first six weeks of the season. Right now, a .601 winning percentage would rank 6th highest in baseball. Even good teams have a hard time playing .600 baseball for four and a half months. And 90 wins is no guarantee of a playoff spot.
95 wins probably gets you in. It’s tough for me to see two AL West teams finishing with more than 95 wins, so we’ll say that’s the magic number to where you can be pretty darn sure you’ll be playing in October. The Mariners would have to play .640 baseball the rest of the year – about the level that the Yankees have played in the first six weeks of the season – to finish with 95 wins. That’s basically winning two out of every three games, all year long, starting today.
Like I said yesterday, I’m not trying to sound melodramatic, but the Mariners chances of making the playoffs now stand somewhere between five and 10 percent. They’re probably closer to five percent, honestly. It’s pretty bleak.
The point of this isn’t to be Debbie Downer, but rather, to suggest that the Mariners have probably played themselves out of a position to make the kinds of trades that people have been calling for. The numbers don’t add up to make a prospects-for-veteran swap make sense. Even if you could get Houston to trade Lance Berkman, this team has played themselves out of position to give up what it takes to get a guy like that. With trade season getting ready to open up, the Mariners can’t be “buyers” in the traditional sense. They shouldn’t make another Cliff Lee trade – there aren’t good enough odds of winning this year to justify it.
That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t make any moves and try to salvage the season. They aren’t so far out that you can pull the plug and just call it a rebuilding year. But they have to change the type of trades they may have been looking at. Instead of moving prospects for a big thumping bat who will walk away in a year or two, the team should be looking to make moves for guys that can help in 2010 and beyond – guys who make this roster better, but can also offer some longer term value.
Just as an example, the M’s should absolutely be burning up the phone lines in Detroit trying to get Ryan Raburn from the Tigers – a 29-year-old right-handed super utility player with a pretty solid bat and a good glove in the outfield who can also fill in at 2B/3B when needed. He makes the league minimum, is arb eligible for the first time this winter, and the Tigers just optioned him to Triple-A out of frustration with his slow start. ZIPS projects him for a .344 wOBA going forward, which would make him the second or third best hitter on the team, and he’d be a perfect complement to Saunders in LF while also offering a bat who can play multiple positions and have enough thump to improve the offense.
He’s not Lance Berkman, but he’s the kind of guy the Mariners should actively be trying to acquire. He won’t save this season, but there’s a pretty good chance that it’s not able to be saved, and the team doesn’t have a strong enough farm system to waste assets on a guy who won’t be here past this season.
They have approximately six weeks to turn this thing around and get back into the race, at which time they’ll have to figure out if they’re close enough to contention to keep Cliff Lee. They can’t just sit around and wait for guys to start hitting until then, but neither has this team earned the right to have the front office trade more future for present. That’s just not a wise trade anymore.
Whether they’re better than this or not, the 13-21 start has put the season on the brink.
Game 34 Ragnarok
I turned the radio off for a meeting, with the M’s win probability at 94%. Walking to lunch, I saw that they’d lost.
I talk up Brandon League’s sinking FB and he does this to me. 2 94-95 MPH pitches with good sink, 2 home runs, ball game.
Yay Felix, Saunders and Langerhans. Even Sweeney chipped in with a home run to CF. But a recap is pointless; all I want to do is mock the team (but it’s already been done, better, by Jeff) or rant about their failings (and I can’t top this).
It’s gorgeous out. Let’s all forget this kidney stone of a game ever happened, and try not to think about how much better both Texas and Oakland look right now. It’s May 13th, and the numbness is setting in.