On the Marlins claiming Borchard
From the press release:
Seattle Mariners Executive Vice President & General Manager of Baseball Operations Bill Bavasi announced today that the Florida Marlins have claimed outfielder Joe Borchard off waivers.
The Mariners had designated Borchard for assignment on Sunday, April 23.
Borchard, 27, appeared in six games with Seattle this season, including making two starts in center field. Borchard, 27, appeared in six games with Seattle this season, including making two starts in center field.
Florida’s been running out a horrible outfield that Borchard would improve. No, really, go check it out.
Josh Willingham has the range of narcoleptic cow in left.
Reggie Abercrombie’s in center.
Chris Aguila’s in right.
You could put Huey, Dewey, and Louie the ducks out there and do as well. I wonder what those three are up to these days, anyway? Selling speakers out of a van to gullible teenagers in the suburbs? Running a gas station at some arbitrarily-established “town” along the I-5 corridor, spending their time fixing flats and glaring at the customers using the pay-at-pump feature?
His legacy will be ridding the team of Matt Thornton. In Chicago so far, his 3.18 ERA conceals a standard Thornton performance so far: a hit, a walk, and a strikeout every inning. That’s our boy. Go get ’em, tiger!
Sexson Green with envy or something
Sexson’s in a funk, if you haven’t noticed. But, like Middle-Aged Man, he’s working on it (PI). Time to see that Pentland magic (wait, no, can he fix Beltre and Sexson at once?). Also, some bad puns on Green’s name in today’s notebooks at the dailies.
On the charter flight to Chicago:
Bloomquist: I’m on fire! Guys, guys, have you seen me hit lately?
Lopez: Yes.
Bloomquist: Was the bat smoking?
Lopez: No.
Bloomquist: Because I’m on fire!
Lopez: I heard that.
Bloomquist: Guess how many hits I have.
Lopez: No.
Bloomquist: Go on, guess.
Lopez: No.
Bloomquist: Come ooooooooooooooonnn.
Lopez: You have no hits.
Bloomquist: Higher…
Lopez: One.
Bloomquist: Come on, you’re not even trying.
Lopez: No, I’m not.
Bloomquist: Nine! Nine hits.
Lopez: You’re on fire.
Bloomquist: Yes! Guess how long it took me to get nine hits last year.
Lopez: You got nine hits last year?
Bloomquist: Of course I got nine hits last year.
Lopez: Uh huh.
Bloomquist: May 29th! Can you believe it? And this year I got it on May 2nd! Wow.
Lopez: Skip, can I throw Willie out of the plane?
Hargrove: Okay, but you have to be the emergency catcher.
Lopez: It’s not worth it.
Bloomquist: You couldn’t throw me out. You’d burn your hands.
Lopez: Because you’re on fire, yes. I get it already.
Game 28, Mariners at Twins
Jarrod Washburn vs Johan Santana in a battle of southpaws who couldn’t be more different. Santana’s fastball routinely hits 95 MPH, which translates to 142 on the gun Fox Sports was using last night, and his change-up is about as unhittable as any pitch in the majors.
Washburn, on the other hand, has an 87-90 MPH fastball and… not a lot else. But he throws strikes and the Twins have a worse offense than the Tacoma Rainiers, so I’m thinking we’ll see another quality start from Washburn.
Also, WFB is not only back in the line-up, but he and his .308/.345/.308 line are hitting second while Jose Lopez takes his .514 slugging percentage to the eight hole. Even better, since Bloomquist is starting and we have no other backup middle infielders on the roster, we can’t pinch hit for him late in the game. Mike Hargrove is about as useful to the Mariners winning ballgames as a potted plant.
Tuesday Marinerosity
Today features accounts of Beltre’s joke on Hargrove(PI), which is good fun. It would have been cool if they’d actually done it, too. Still, funny (TNT).
Pineiro is the new version of good Franklin, except with better stuff.
Russ Swan, 1964-2006
Today brings the sad news that Russ Swan has passed away.
I remember his first appearance as a Mariner, making a start against Detroit in 1990. He had a no hitter through 7 innings, and since I was 9 years old, that was enough to convince me that he was the savior of our pitching staff. It didn’t quite turn out that way.
RIP, Russ.
Freddy Garcia pitches badly in day games
…in order to be taken out before 4:20.
Former Mariner and sometimes lamented trade victim Freddy Garcia tested positive for marijuana at the WBC. Not that MLB.com is like Pravda back in the day, but if it’s running there, you know it’s trouble.
We ran our share of posts mocking Freddy-as-partyhead back in the day (okay, I ran posts…) but forget that for a second — if nothing else, if he’s still smoking, it means that married life hasn’t straightened him entirely out.
Anyway, Freddy’s in good company, though I’ll spare everyone a long digression about the insanity of dope-paranoia.
Week 4
4-2 on the week.
The good news: Ichiro hitting a ton of singles. Adrian Freaking Beltre 6-20 with a home run! A home run! Woo-hoo!
Willie Bloomquist hit .364 for the week (on-base percentage? .364. Slugging percentage? .364.) Not to make too big of a deal about this, but the major league on-base percentage is about .340-.350. If he can hit .364, more power to him. Actually, more power would be nice.
Putz continues to be absolutely lights-out, which is good if you’ve seen Guardado lately, because Eddie’s been looking bad.
The bad news: Guardado’s 4.50 ERA doesn’t do his work this week justice. He’s looking awfully shaky for a proven veteran closer, and giving up a dinger every other time out makes those three-run leads a little more precarious than they should be. Fortunately, using him with three run leads means that it’s hard to blow.
Some other dudes didn’t hit. Pineiro got shelled. Sherill took three appearances to get three outs — and faced only four batters.
What’s it all get us?
The team’s hanging on. 11-15 isn’t so bad with everyone in the AL West stumbling off the line. It’s certainly not something they can’t recover from.
And, in the “it doesn’t feel like a Tuesday” comment of the week — it doesn’t feel like they’re 11-15. They’re still a bizarre team to watch, where any given night it seems like you’re going to see 3-4 players give outstanding performances and play their heart out and another 3-4 make you wince, and you can’t predict which ones are going to show up that night. It’s frustrating but I feel like if Hargrove just once would look around the clubhouse before the game and pick the right lineup, great things would happen.
Coming up: the road trip continues through Minnesota, we face Chicago in Chicago, and then the team’s back hom to face Cleveland.
Also, that you can vote for the All-Stars so soon is ridiculous.
Game 26, Mariners at Orioles
Caught us all sleeping in, looks like. 10:35? What a dumb time to start a game, time zones or no time zones.
Game 24, Orioles at Mariners
(the real game, obviously, is Mariners at Orioles @ 4:05 — we don’t play 4:05 games, this is a road trip, etc)
Saturday, 4-29-2006
I feel responsible. I know it’s impossible, that my part in this was insignificant, but I can’t escape it. I got out of work early to go catch the game, and there was almost no one on the streets. A guy in a suit sold us two amazing box seats up the third base line, only a couple of rows back, for half face. Half face! Said he was tired of seeing Meche pitch while I was fishing out the money.
Dammit. I hadn’t checked the starters before I headed down. No big deal, though, it’s a beautiful night to see a game, and it beats working, anyway.
I buy some kettle corn and we head in. The usher gives our tickets the twice-over at the gate and on the aisle, but whatever. These are the best tickets I’ve ever had at Safeco, I don’t care if the average per-seat income level took a kidney punch for it to happen. Come focus group me. Please.
Good beer’s $8 a cup now. For $8 a cup I should be able to tell Beltre to just bunt at every pitch for all the good swinging does him.
Being far away, you don’t realize that the game’s not silent on the field. A few rows away, you can hear them talk about where they want to get dinner, or which guys on the other team they played with in the minors, and which ballgirl they find more attractive that night. The ball cracks into gloves as players tossing the ball back and forth in along the baseline.
So there’s the Ceremonial First Pitch, the Safeco Field Welcome Pitch, the Sponsor of the Night First Pitch, and all of them: the banker, the kids, the relief worker, they all throw horrible pitches to random Mariners, way out of the strike zone, short of the plate, and I mention this because the dozen people who came on and off the mound to throw fake first pitches, all of those people threw better first pitches than the professional did when he finally got up there. It was a fastball thrown up and way behind the batter, and Johjima, having reacted instantly to jump out of his stance and watch if sail, seemed to sigh behind all that equipment. Just above the background noise of people chatting happily and yapping into their cell phones there were boos. On the first pitch. These smaller crowds have a lot sharper edge to them, and it suits me.
Four balls in a row and Roberts was on first. Then Meche plunked some guy I’ve never heard of with a curve ball that doesn’t break. He got a strike when Mora watched a 3-0 fastball, hold the fast, came right down the pipe. Mora stepped out of the box and looked back at the dugout with an expression on his face that said “the next time you tell me to take, I’m missing that sign”. Meche puts a fastball low and away for ball four.
Three men on, and only one strike thrown in what, fifteen pitches. The boos rain down under the clear blue sky.
Johjima jogged to the mound for a word with Meche, which I like to imagine was “Boooooooo.” No one got up in the pen. My eight dollar beer had a weird aftertaste and I started to wonder how well the volunteers really clean the tubes and taps.
Chavez came out from the dugout and Bloomquist walked in from second. If he was so scappy and versatile, why wasn’t he pitching? The ump took his time sauntering out to break up their chat. No signal from Chaves, still no bullpen action. What could Meche have possibly said to the coach to convince him not to get someone ready? “Sorry about that, coach, but it turns out knowledge is power and now that I know that I don’t have control or stuff or speed tonight, I’ll be able to figure out Tejeda, no problem.”
Meche dropped something weak a foot ahead of the plate that bounces and Tejeda twitched, as if considering hitting it off the bounce, Ichiro-style. Meche stepped off the mound, took off his hat, wiping sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. The anger bubbled inside me.
“Throw strikes, you moron!” I yelled.
Meche looked at me, turned the ball over in his hand, and stepped on the rubber.
The pitch was a 90-mile-an-hour fastball right down the plate, and Tejeda hit it so hard it sounded like lightning had struck the batboy. The ball hit the center-field scoreboard in an instant, and I’d swear it was still rising.
The boos came in waves, washing over Meche. In the bullpen, I see movement, a jacket being taken off.
Meatball to Gibbons, and Gibbons yanks it into the left-field bleachers, a monster shot. The boos were louder than the announcement of Lopez, louder than the piped noise to accompany scoreboard instructions to do anything but keep booing Meche. Everyone was booing. My throat hurt. Lopez took two balls and doubled past Ibanez. The boos got louder. First pitch to Millar was the third home run of the inning, left-center, banging off the head of Woods, who was warming up. Woods went down. There would be no relief.
I looked around and everyone in the stadium, all twenty thousand and change of us, are yelling at Meche now. The bandwagon fans, the players’ wives, the guys in the press box, the ushers, everyone. There was a little girl, maybe seven, eight, standing on her seat yelling the craziest playground obscenities at Meche in this piercing scream that made my ears feel like they would burst. I heard curses so hazardous they’re normally restricted to members of the armed forces who are trained in their use.
Then we lost the roof. I don’t know what happened, I’ve been watching CNN and they’ve been running experts through on a conveyor belt talking about strutural harmonics and single points of failure, but there was a groan louder than the world heckling Meche and I looked up to see the whole north support structure accordian into itself and the whole thing dropped.
We’ve got a better idea of what happened then. Seattle’s on a fault, we all live like we don’t know it, but just because it’s not named San Andreas and doesn’t have movies made about it doesn’t mean it’s any less dangerous, and it turns out dropping something as heavy as the roof in one spot, right on the glacial silt over a tectonic fault makes things happen. Seattle’s sinking into the sea, and soon Elliot Bay and Lake Washington aren’t going to need locks, and that downtown we could never get right’s going to be under fifty, a hundred feet of salt water.
Seattle’s gone. Bellevue is the new Seattle. Or West Seattle’s the new San Francisco, and Bellevue’s Oakland, and Renton’s San Jose, and the U District’s what — San Rafael? I don’t know what to think. The team’s going on the road indefinately, and I was one of the last people to ever see live baseball in Seattle proper.
I’ll never complain about Gil Meche again.
The day in Mariner
Good stuff in the Times notebook: Johjima was screwing around with pitch-calling late in the blowout to see if there was anything interesting to be learned. Yeaaaah.
Also, this great Hargrove quote:
Hargrove admitted he had set goals for the start of the season. But he refused to divulge them.
Said Hargrove: “I was told by [the Pacific Institute’s] Lou Tice here in Seattle years ago when I was with Texas, one of the worst things you can do is make your goals public; it only adds pressure.”
An opposing view would be that making your goals known not only encourages you to fufill them, but allows accountability.
In the PI’s notebook, there’s talk of juggling the rotation (but not) and some generic Bloomquist love from Hargrove.