Game 18, Mariners at Angels
6:05. FSN. Given Silva’s pitch-to-contact nature, this would be a fine time to go to the best possible defensive lineup.
Some pre-game thoughts for your consideration and discussion.
Players with 50 or more plate appearances and no walks:
Bengie Molina, C, SF
Yuniesky Betancourt, SS, Sea
Fielding percentage is nothing. The broadcast crew’s mentioned a couple times now that the M’s are having defensive problems. As a team, this is absolutely not true. And I rarely use italics.
Yes, they’re near the bottom in fielding percentage. But look closer. In terms of raw balls put into play turned into outs, the M’s are 10th in the majors. Last year they were 26th. Using an advanced defensive measure like UZR that looks at play by play, the M’s are the best defensive team in baseball right now… by five runs.
Now if you look at individual UZR, Betancourt is big problem, Ichiro’s below-average initially (but we’ve got every reason to have faith). But the two new outfielders are putting up world-beating numbers. We’ve liked using the example of the Winn-Cameron-Ichiro! outfield before to talk about how good these guys could be. And yeah, they’re that good. This is a stellar defensive outfield.
This is another example of how a story originating in the flaws of bad metrics gets repeated by people who have a public forum and ta da! everyone’s worried about the team’s defensive issues.
This is a team designed to play great defense, and they’re playing great defense. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
M’s valuation drops
The new Forbes franchise value numbers (“Disputed by MLB since we started”) are out. Warning: annoying “welcome screen” ahead.
The M’s dropped 9% as years of losing and last year’s disastrous season caught up to them, along I presume with the expiration of the amazingly rich KOMO broadcast deal. Here’s the Mariners detail page which has some nice graphs but not a whole lot of useful information.
They do note “The team is having trouble selling season tickets and suites for 2009” (which we’ve talked about a little here). We saw last year there were just a huge number of no-shows, and it’s pretty clear the team took a huge hit when they decided not to renew.
The Yankees and Mets lead, which makes sense given that they have new stadiums to better exploit the richest media market in the country. But just behind them is the Rays, now valued at $320m after their turnaround. In relevant news, however, both teams are having trouble filling their super-premium-awesome seats, which makes it look on TV like people aren’t attending the games, which in turn makes me laugh. I’d feel bad, but I can’t. It’s bad enough Selig’s annoyed, but what are they going to do? Dropping the prices is going to severely piss off the people who already bought, but the teams aren’t going to want to give refunds to them.
What might end up the interesting story is the debt/value ratio. If you remember, a couple years ago Selig was trying to use this as a lever to drive down team spending. But it’s a lot harder to find financing compared to a few years ago (as Tom Hicks is discovering). If teams were carrying massive short-term debt expecting they’d be able to continually refinance, they could be in serious trouble in the next few years. It’s hard not to look at that chart of team debt and wonder how many of them could have issues.
Happy Newer Slimmer Carlos Silva Day!
I know, you were thinking “after seeing another sweet start by Bedard, I’d really like to get some red hot Newer Slimmer Carlos Silva action.”
Now seriously, if ever there was a time to put up a good start, to get some breaking pitches to break, the sinker to sink, to turn that improved nutrition and flexibility into results, this is it.
Game 17, Mariners at Angels
7:05, FSN. Here’s the M’s lineup against SP-R Shane Loux.
RF-L Ichiro!
LF-L Chavez
DH-L Griffey
3B-R Beltre
1B-L Branyan
2B-R Lopez
C-R Johnson
CF-R Gutierrez
SS-R Betancourt
Yay Branyan returns!
Meanwhile, we get this awesome (for us) Angels lineup:
3B-B Figgins
RF-B Matthews
LF-L Abreu
CF-R Hunter
1B-B Morales
C-R Napoli
2B-R Kendrick
DH-R Quinlan
SS-B Aybar
The Angels have another switch hitter (Izturis) that’s not in the lineup, but they could plausibly field five in a game. The M’s have zero.
Optimizing The End Of The Roster
As we saw yesterday, there’s a downside to carrying a 12th pitcher in lieu of a 14th position player – not having a fifth spot on the bench means that you can find yourself in some bad spots if a couple of position players are dinged up at the same time. The M’s were lucky that they got a great performance out of Felix and the bullpen on a day when they put a line-up on the field that couldn’t score at a brothel.
Seriously, against a right-handed pitcher in a park that is death to right-handed batters, the Mariners ran out a line-up that went L-L-R-R-R-R-R-R-R, and one of the Ls was Endy Chavez. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was James Shields, James Baldwin, or James the VI – the Mariners weren’t going to put up much offense yesterday.
As we mentioned coming out of spring training, the team is too right-handed. Of the 13 position players they’re carrying, nine of them are right-handed bats. They team is currently incapable of playing a LH bat at catcher, second base, shortstop, or third base on any given day. If any of the four LH bats need a day off, for any reason, the team has to replace them with a right-handed hitter. So, frequently, you’re going to see line-ups with just two or three LH bats in the line-up against an RHP, and that’s a pretty big problem.
For instance, this weekend the Mariners will be facing Shane Loux, Anthony Ortega, and Jered Weaver. Here are the career platoon splits for those three.
Loux: .642 OPS vs RH, 1.004 OPS vs LH
Ortega: No Major League Experience
Weaver: .661 OPS vs RH, .767 OPS vs LH
Loux’s sinker is a nice weapon against righties, as we saw last week, but he’s got nothing against lefties. He’s basically Sean Green out there, throwing his sinker and getting torched by opposite handed hitters. They don’t even have to be good – a crappy left-handed bat can look like a star against pitchers like Loux. Ortega is basically the same thing, just with less of a sinker. And Weaver’s stuff plays up much better against righties than lefties.
If the M’s had a LH bat off the bench, they could add a legitimate offensive weapon this weekend, even if that guy wasn’t a great hitter, simply due to the matchups. The right-handedness of the team’s position players is a handicap that is really going to hurt them in series like this.
This team needs a fifth bench player a lot more than they need a 12th pitcher. Shawn Kelley didn’t even pitch in the Tampa Bay series. Miguel Batista is getting used every four days or so. The Mariners run prevention has been excellent, and the team is getting innings from the rotation.
I know Jeff Clement had a bad spring and isn’t tearing the cover off the ball in Tacoma, but he’d be a pretty useful guy to have around right now. Or, just go sign Geoff Jenkins or trade for Adam Kennedy or something. The team needs a left-handed reserve. They can’t keep running out these overly RH line-ups and giving teams easy matchups to shut them down.
Math kudzu
Or “Step on them! Step on them hard!”
Early in the season, I don’t pay attention to the standings for a while. Certainly not to get excited about. But today I broke down and started playing with the numbers, building on Dave’s “Fun Thought” post, wondering what the chances are the M’s will compete for a pennant and how important this series might be. Start with the pre-season conventional wisdom that the Angels were the team to beat in the AL West. That they were a 85-win team.
Now we’re a tenth through the season. Seattle’s 10-6, LA of A are 6-9. They’re three and a half back already. That’s a surprisingly big hole to climb out of already. A couple games ago, when the M’s were 8-3, you could run the rest of the season out and the M’s would finish three games back.
It’s even tighter now — play out the season with the M’s gong .480 or so, the Angels rally to go .525, and they’ll finish two games ahead.
So let’s look at this next series. What if the M’s sweep? They’ll come out 13-6, the Angels will be at 6-12. Then if you still assume they’re 85 and 78-win teams and play that way the rest of the year, the M’s win the division by a game.
2-1, the M’s finish a game back.
1-2, three games back.
Or to put this another way: if the M’s sweep to get to 13-6 and play .500 ball the rest of the way, they’ll win 85 games, or what the Angels were supposed to win. The Angels, to recover, have to play .567 ball all the way to the finish.
This omits of course any adjustment we should be making to their true strength — are the Angels now worse than their pre-season projections? If so, lower their chances. Does the M’s early start (and particularly the Washburn revival) show us that they’re legitimately stronger than everyone thought, and a team that can go .500 or better the rest of the way? If so, bump their chances up.
No matter what, though, the two teams starts have given the M’s a surprising opportunity to put a divisional rival deep into a whole they may not be able to escape this year… and we’re sixteen games in.
We start The Interview, Newer Slimmer Carlos Silva, and The Bus. This is going to be good.
Rainiers Game Thread
I’m a bit late in getting this up, but with the M’s playing a day game, you’ve got a chance to listen to Mike Curto call the Rainiers as they play Salt Lake tonight. Dan Denham vs Andy Baldwin, so you should be in for some offense.
Clement is out of the line-up, as he’s a new papa.
And sometimes pounding the zone works out
Felix threw 72 (identified) fastballs and 32 other pitches of any kind.
Interestingly, he did manage to get some varied movement:
Game 16, Rays at Mariners
Why carrying 12 pitchers is stupid – your bench gets a little banged up, and voila, you’re running out Jamie Burke at first base. Apparently he’s the only one left with any experience there, all of 10 innings.
RF-L Ichiro
LF-L Chavez
2B-R Lopez
3B-R Beltre
DH-R Balentien
C-R Johnson
CF-R Ferguson
SS-R Betancourt
1B-R Burke
Meanwhile, even after burning through the bullpen with Jakubauskas pitching last night, come on, it’s Felix Day. Hernandez v. Shields, 3:40.
USSM Meetup, NC version
With Conor Glassey and Jeff Shaw joining me as North Carolina residents, we’ve decided to have an east coast USSM event. Thanks to Conor doing the legwork, we have a date and a place.
Sunday, May 17th, at the Champps Sports in Durham. We’ll have a private room that can hold up to 40 people to watch the Mariners take on the Red Sox. If you’re interested, just leave a note in the comments so we can get a rough headcount. We’ll post a few more notices as the date gets closer.