Why I’m a Baker fan, one in a continuing series
From his latest blog entry, I just wanted to point this out:
Spoke to Jeff Weaver at length. He doesn’t think he had a problem “putting guys away” in 0-2 counts. He kept insisting that he’s not a strikeout pitcher and that it’s his job to get ground balls — which he did at times, with some of them finding holes.
That may be. Trouble is, Weaver needs to get those grounders earlier in counts. If he keeps throwing 68 pitches through three innings, he’ll have trouble getting even five frames in. It wasn’t his strikeouts, it was the fact he kept getting balls fouled off or taken for balls before they were finally put in-play.
Got the word from the player, does some cogent thinking, presents a view that’s not precisely dissent but more… illumination? Pointed expansion?
His ground/fly ration is 1.44, which is up there with his career highs back in Detroit, but yeah — Weaver’s averaging 3.9 pitches per batter faced this year, which is not good.
I know, it’s not revelatory, he’s not quoting line drive percentages, but when was the last time, pre-Baker, we saw any kind of reasonable post-comment analysis like this in M’s coverage, where there’s that next step in writing it up?
Wheel of GM speculation
So Geoff Baker at the Times wrote something really interesting to me a while ago: he said that the M’s, if they fired Bavasi mid-season, would be looking for an interim GM, someone currently serving as a GM but with previous GM experience. Presumably, a name.
First, if they do, I’ll be shocked: firing the GM mid-season, especially ahead of the draft, is rarely done, and with good reason.
But second — who would that be? Who would want that job, and who would give their assistant GM permission to leave mid-season to take the job?
We can pretty reasonably assure no one in the AL West would be so generous.
So… assistant GMs who’ve served as GMs. Who was Baker hinting at?
Jim Duquette, of the Orioles?
Gord Ash, of the Brewers? Possible bonus points for previous Blue Jays (and thus, presumably, Baker) connection.
Dan Evans is right here, but he’s “Special Assistant to the GM”
Update-clarificaton: Dylan wrote
Baker actually responded to a comment I made via E-mail concerning the possible interim GM’s. He told me that the interim candidates were from within and had previous GM experience, with one of the candidates even having previous managerial experience. Who in our front office fits the bill?
Thatttt’s even more interesting.
And see Dave’s comments, below: he thinks it’d be likely to be Pelekoudas.
We don’t even get a day off to recover
In a few hours, Baek takes one for the team (unless that noted source of disinformation, the Mariner team site, is wrong again), facing Kevin Millwood in Texas. If he can somehow pull out a win, it would be the team’s first win since last Sunday, also against Texas.
There’s a break in the schedule ahead, as the M’s face Kansas City for three after getting out of Oakland Thursday. But if they come home from the road trip playing .300 ball, is that a slow enough start for changes to be made before that?
Baker’s hunch is that Hargrove gets canned if the streak goes to to ten. I don’t know, though — if they go 1-3 and then come home to get whacked around by the Royals, it’s unlikely Hargrove sees May.
But then, what do I know? I thought he was going to get fired after last season too.
Bloomquist, pitcher
So scrappy people keep hijacking threads. From Drayer’s blog:
“Ben has been struggling to adjust to his pinch hitter off the bench role. He’s not one to complain, in fact he is one of the most good natured guys you could ever expect to meet, but he is going a little stir crazy in his new role.
Now just because he doesn’t like his new role doesn’t mean he is not going to put everything in to it. He has been trying to find ways to stay ready. About two weeks ago, in the 6th inning of a game he asked Willie Bloomquist to throw him some batting practice from behind the screen in the hitting cages.
Willie, who can often be seen messing around with different pitches and would one day like to get up on the mound for an inning, took things a step further. He pulled the screen in so it was close to the hitter, then started pitching to Ben. He wasn’t throwing batting practice fast balls, rather he was throwing splitters, sliders and fastballs that from that short distance were right on Ben. Ben said that got his eye ready, and in the words of Bloomquist “If he can hit me, I figure he can hit anyone.â€â€
Hargrove extension rumors
Geoff Baker writes in the Times blog:
I actually did hear the other night, from an assistant in another team’s front office, that Hargrove had quietly been given an extension for 2008 behind the scenes. Such an extension, I’m told — and nothing has been confirmed to me — would not preclude him from being fired this year. In other words, the team would eat the money. Again, just to repeat, this is just the word going around. Do not treat it as gospel. The point of me bringing it up now, rather than before, is that even if true, it would not impact the tenuous state of Hargrove’s job security.
With nothing announced, I’m inclined to think it’s close but in-progress instead of a done deal: if the team’s going to spend money like that, they’re likely going to do it in public because they think it’ll help answer questions about his job security – paying $250k or $500k or whatever it turns out to be to try and stop the speculation.
But, as Baker notes, that extension’s not going to end the speculation. They gave Melvin an extension and fired him under similar circumstances, as we all know.
Or, to recap:
1) Melvin’s been put on the hot seat by comments from ownership attempting to
2) Seeing continued speculation that Melvin is on the hotseat, the team attempts to end speculation by giving him an extension
3) Extension fails to end speculation
They might as well just put money in a big pile and set it on fire. It’d be prettier to watch than this last week’s games.
Game 14, Mariners at Angels
Jeff Weaver vs Ervin Santana.
Bloomquist playing second, hitting second. Beltre dropped to 7th.
Plot thickening
Just to stir this up more:
They probably just wrote up the notes based on the probable starters briefly listed on the M’s site and then retracted, right? I mean, what other explanation could there be?
hat tip to crosscut
It was on the M’s website
Hi! You may have heard those wacky “internet rumors” that Morrow was starting, resulting in the standard mockery of internet sites etc.
Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
I’ll just type that again, because I think this is an important point to make.
Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
This was not some crazy rumor Dave posted. If you want to mock this crazy, nutty rumor, you can go ahead and mock the Mariners, because, and I’ve mentioned this before, Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
So go ahead, make fun of those unreliable internet sites, like the Mariners team site on MLB.com, for their crazy unreliable rumor-mongering and tomfoolery, because, as much as everyone loves heaping mockery on blogs, Morrow was listed on the Mariners official site as Monday’s starter.
If you want to get on us for not updating with the M’s denials and the disappearance of Morrow, that’s entirely valid.
(added) And, to be clear, I don’t think Baker’s slagging us — I dropped him a note about this, and he’s trying to respond to the hordes of Times blog comments/emails on this: he hadn’t read USSM at all until just now.
The M’s are insane
Eric O’Flaherty is coming up from Tacoma and will join the team in Anaheim. Brandon Morrow will move from the bullpen to the rotation and make Felix’s scheduled start in Texas on Monday.
Yes folks, Brandon Morrow is going to make his first major league start, on the road, in the bandbox that is whatever they’re calling The Ballpark in Arlington now.
Brandon Morrow threw an inning on April 3rd, an inning on April 10th, and an inning on April 14th. During spring training, his longest outing was two innings, he threw 8 1/3 total innings in the month of March. In his professional debut last year in the Arizona and Cal Leagues, his longest outing was three innings.
The last time Brandon Morrow threw more than 3 innings in a ballgame was May 5th, 2006 against the Stanford Cardinal.
And now, he’s being asked to go into a severe hitters park and make his first major league start, after having spent the entire spring being used as a reliever, and then sitting on his hands for the better part of April.
This organization is ridiculous.
Anatomy of a really dumb series of moves
Today’s game offers us some unwelcome insights into how Hargrove thinks, and how that thinking costs the team games (I recommend Geoff Baker’s entries here, and here, which are likely as close to transcriptions of Hargrove’s brain process as we’re likely to get).
The situation before Hargrove starts making decisions:
1b: empty
2b: Alexi Casilla (who is crazy fast)
3b: Jason Bartlett
The M’s lead 2-1 and have one out.
Up next:
C-L Mauer
RF-R Cuddyer
1B-L Morneau
DH-R Redmond
Notes on those guys:
Mauer has a huge platoon split: 04-06, he hit .275/.337/.334 against LHP and .342/.427/.535 against RHP.
Cuddyer’s hit significantly better against lefties than righties (his OPS split is .845/.788) but it’s not that huge.
Morneau’s not as bad as Mauer, but he’s got a split vulnerability (.262/.304/.457 v LHP, .290/.360/.536 v RHP).
Redmond’s a less-good Cuddyer: .795 OPS v LHP, .678 v RHP.
In the bullpen:
RHP Sean Green
RHP Julio Mateo
RHP JJ Putz
RHP Chris Reitsma
RHP Sean White
LHP George Sherill
Also, RHP Brandon Morrow, who Hargrove seems to have forgotten (side note: Morrow would now have three starts under his belt had he not broken camp with the team, instead of 3 innings).
Assumptions: Washburn’s done and needs to come out.
Desired outcome: get out of the inning with as few runs scored as possible.
Potential strategies:
No roles. Put Putz in. This is a critical juncture in the game, so you want your best reliever out there. Putz can get strikeouts and keep the ball in the infield. He’s effective against lefties. But this isn’t even a possibility, since Putz is the closer. Hargrove brings him in much later in the game, with the M’s way down.
Assume the closer is sacred. So we don’t get Putz, because Putz must be saved for a possible close situation later. Who do you want? There seem to be two obvious choices:
– Bring a lefty – which means Sherill – to face Mauer. Mauer’s a kitten versus lefties, hopefully you get a K, or an easy pop-out. A fly out might score Bartlett and advance Casilla, but you’re already in trouble there. Either way, you could then intentionally walk Cuddyer, even, and face another guy who has trouble with lefties in Morneau. Given Sherill’s spring, it would clearly take some stones to make the move, and maybe you’d even rather there was a different lefty here… but there isn’t. Tough call to make.
– Bring in an effective righty who isn’t Putz. Almost certainly you want Reitsma. Given how the next set of hitters do against righties, though, tough call between Sherill and Reitsma.
Walk Mauer and hope for a double play. I almost never like intentional walks, but with only one lefty in the bullpen (and that being Sherill, who you might understandably be reluctant to gamble on) let’s say this a valid strategy.
What then? You’ve loaded the bases with the intention of getting a double-play, which requires a ground ball and reliance on your infield. Who do you look to?
By 2006 G/F ratio
—
RHP Sean Green 2.48
RHP Chris Reitsma 1.68
LHP George Sherill 0.59
RHP Julio Mateo 0.51
RHP Sean White (?)
(excludes Morrow, Putz)
Mateo is the pitcher least likely to succeed in this situation. Equally clearly, if you want an experienced veteran groundballer to pound the strike zone with breaking pitches to get a grounder, Reitsma is your guy.
There’s an argument that Hargrove was looking to a batter-pitcher matchup and liked Mateo. That may be possible. But if that’s the case, it’s a further evidence that Hargrove can’t make these decisions. Mateo can get groundouts. But he doesn’t. He’s not that good at it. He has a pitch you might think should get a groundball – Hargrove clearly does – but Mateo does not throw it well enough to be effective with it.
And the rest is much the same. Once Mateo’s in there and gives up a double to Cuddyer, Hargrove has a similar choice, and choses to walk Morneau with Mateo instead of bringing Sherill in to defang him. The double play is set up again, and Mateo is no more suited to get a ground ball here than he was the last time. He predictably fails to get one. Finally, he gets Josh Rabe to ground to short – and then is removed for Sherill. In terms of G/F ratio, this is about what you’d expect from Mateo.
There’s a further argument here, that you can’t use Reitsma early because he’s reserved for later innings, to which I make the same counter-point: with two men on, facing the heart of the Twins lineup, putting a bad pitcher in there means that there’s no lead to protect later in a neat 8th-9th fashion, no save situation for Putz, nothing. If this adherence to roles is really so strict that in a crucial situation in the 7th the two best-suited pitchers are barred from helping the team win a game because they’re going to be used in less-meaningful situations later, that is a gift to every opponent the team faces, a significant disadvantage the team is taking on willingly, for no better reason than the modern book on reliever usage is rigid, and the team follows its dogma.
Is the team really better off having Putz and Reitsma watch from the bullpen as Mateo lets inherited runners score and squanders games, ensuring they don’t get in?
Are they better off letting other teams know that if they can work a starter for enough pitches and chase them from the game early they’re guaranteed a gift-wrapped chance to put up a nice, crooked number on the board?
And how can the M’s management tolerate having a manager this inflexible who, even in choosing poor strategies, finds the most destructive way to implement them?