Drew and Weaver sign
Minutes before the deadline last night, both Stephen Drew and Jared Weaver put their names on the dotted lines with the Diamondbacks and Angels, respectively. As expected, both settled for significantly less than they were demanding.
The interesting thing here, from the Mariners perspective, is that rumors continue to persist that a side aspect to the Drew deal was that Arizona agreed to draft one of Boras’ pitchers, likely Mike Pelfrey, with the number one overall selection. If Arizona passes on Justin Upton, it gives the M’s a shot at one of the two players they covet (Alex Gordon being the other), and significantly upgrades the draft potential for the M’s selection.
They are still just rumors, but the odds of the M’s getting Upton or Gordon went up significantly yesterday.
Olivo down, Rivera up
Miguel Olivo has been sent to AAA Tacoma. Rene Rivera will replace him on the roster. Though this was rumored, I’m still somewhat surprised, since you have to anticipate that Rivera will effectively become the everyday catcher. Unless another move to acquire a more experienced catcher is in the offing …
Quoth Bill Bavasi: “We have, in no way, given up on Miguel.” Let me think of a positive spin to this news: Now Olivo can work on his chemistry, pitch-calling and developing “veteran leadership” in tandem with King Felix.
News tidbits
Time/PI notebook watch: Borders, Bloomquist may get more and more of the playing time (Borders, presumably, until he stops hitting, Bloomquist, relative to Wilson Valdez, is probably a better choice anyway).
This leads to a problem we saw in yesterday’s game: because the bench is so thin (and bad), if Bloomquist is the 4th outfielder, playing him at shortstop means that if they need a replacement OF, they either have to move Ibanez out of the DH slot (forcing the pitcher to bat) or move Bloomquist into the OF, and Valdez takes over at short. If you pinch-hit for Bloomquist, it’s Ibanez or more juggling that ends up with someone in the outfield who shouldn’t be there.
I know that seems like another of the more trivial problems of the team, and it is — it doesn’t matter if they can’t easily sub a left fielder in if they’re down by 8 — but it’s a good example of how carrying 12 pitchers and having such an inflexible bench hampers the manager, and the team’s, ability to adapt.
We’ve seen Reed start to hit lately, but even the balls that are dropping are part of a pattern: he’s been pulling almost everything to right field. If you look at his MLB.com hit charts, you can see there’s a huge skew, to the point that you could take the left-fielder and play him shallow behind first-and-second or play really shallow and then shift the infield heavily.
Players can be productive like this, but the problem will come if this is an exploitable flaw in his swing. If teams find that he can only ground out weakly on pitches in, where he can’t get the bat around, that’s all he’ll see.
Reed was my pick as AL Rookie of the Year. There’s still time, but I’d feel a lot better about this if he was hitting to all fields. Or even two fields.
From Gammons:
(on mid-season trades for pitching)
Just as in late July if Barry Zito, Kip Wells, Kevin Millwood, Jason Jennings and Joel Pineiro are available.
That’s an interesting thought, but thie requires a team to look at Pineiro and see something they can fix and something worth an expensive two-year gamble. I don’t see anyone taking that unless he shows he can be consistent with his new lower velocity and that he can do well with it. If a team’s going to deal for pitching help, they’re going to be looking for help, and probably someone who can fit in the first three slots of the rotation if they head towards the playoffs.
Remember Ryan Anderson, the 6-foot-10 “Little Unit” and former no. 1 pick of the Tigers? The Brewers recently signed him out of an Arizona independent league, and he had a four-strikeout inning debut
The Tigers?
More Beltre depressingness
Nate Silver, at Baseball Prospectus (subscription article), looks at players who are blowing away or hugely underperforming their PECOTA projections. Beltre’s one:
Beltre’s revised EqA estimate is at .263, which is almost exactly at the baseline he’d established between 2001 and 2003, when his growth appeared to have stagnated. I see absolutely no reason to take anything other than the Occam’s Razor explanation: Beltre’s 2004 was one of the biggest one-year flukes in baseball history.
Owwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Super-reader Paul Covert notes in the Week 9 review comments that
Hardball Times’ Batting Stats show Beltre with an above-average Line Drive Percentage of .207, which suggests that he’s been hitting better than his numbers show thus far. Unfortunately, Reed’s LD% of .118 is much less encouraging.
I still want to believe there’s hope. But having spent some quality time looking for signs of hope while writing the PI bit, I haven’t been able to take the leap. His performance so far’s been so abjectly bad it’s like I’m entirely turned around from my previous burning optimism about the signing. When you’re hoping he’ll come around to have a season that’s merely bad, that’s tough.
Week #9 in Review
Legend has it that REM’s 1991 album was named one afternoon when the record label got sick of waiting for the band to come up with a title. Drummer Bill Berry picked up the phone, nodded, looked to his bandmates and said: “we’re Out of Time.”
This morning, so was Peter White, who tapped me to put the finishing touches on the post you are currently reading.
“Jeff,” he says. “I’ve got this almost done, but I have to leave the country on secret business. The post is basically finished. It just needs some spicy color.”
“Peter,” says I, “this looks fine to me as is. And besides that, color, being a visual concept, cannot possibly be ‘spicy.'”
He was most insistent. So I agreed. And as payment for my agreeance, I get the best of all possible worlds: Peter does 99 percent of the work, I add a sentence or two, and I get to play off anything you don’t like with “oh yeah, Peter wrote that part.”
Hope you enjoy. If anything tastes spicy or looks colorful, that was me.
Vital Signs
On this Friday we find the Mariners 18-28. First the good news: The Mariners are not in last place. Now the bad news: They slipped another game-and-a-half behind the leader. They are now 8.5 games behind the Rangers and Angels. The Rangers have been feeding off perhaps the weakest part of their schedule at taken 6 in a row from from Houston and Kansas City. If you think the Mariners aren’t doing so hot, you should check out the Astros and Royals. Yech. And on another positive note, according the third-order
wins, the Mariners are 2 wins behind where the Mariners should be.
The offense ranks 12th in the league, scoring 189 runs, just one behind the Angels and Royals. Their 33 home runs rank 13th in the league and their 127 walks rank 9th in the league. Meanwhile, their .306 on-base percentage ranks 12th and their .376 slugging percentage is also 12th.
The defense has allowed 215 runs, ranked 8th in the league. The gloves are turning 71.2% of balls in play into outs, good for 2nd in the league. The pitching staff is looking league average, with an overall ERA of 4.53. The starters have been well below average with a 5.23 ERA, while the bullpen has remained a strength with a 2.97.
So basically, the team’s strengths boil down to “can catch the ball” and “can usually get outs late in games.” Those are good things, but unless they are complemented with “can hit rotating horsehide spheroid to an uninhabited locale between white lines,” they’re looking at a whole lot of weeks like this one.
It was a 2-4 week. Things looked sharp at the beginning of the week as the Mariners took 2 of 3 from San Diego. However, that Baltimore series was just brutal. Overall, the Mariners were outscored just 20-16. They were out-homered 6-4 (I could have sworn Rafael Palmeiro hit more home runs than that) and out-walked 18-11. But check out that .265 OBP. The M’s were making outs like they were going out of style.
On the minus side, all the free-swinging from players that can’t hit is driving Mike Hargrove crazy. So crazy that he’s already pled in the media for his hitters to be more selective. On the plus side, at least they’re losing quickly, so if Hargrove enjoys golf, he can get in more of it on the road.
Heroes
Jeremy Reed finally had the week we’ve all been waiting for. He led the team hitting .368/.429/.632 with a pair of doubles and his first major league home run. Reed was promptly rewarded by a caller to Thursday’s postgame show suggesting the M’s bench him in favor of Doyle.
[As a sidenote, there is no more depressing spectacle than listening to the postgame show on radio. It’s like a netherworld of random opposite-of-true observations. Sometime, I will endure one, in the interests of science, to document the atrocities in a post. Maybe we’ll ask Evil Rick Rizzs to liveblog it.]
Proving that even blind squirrels can find nuts, Aaron Sele pitched 9 scoreless innings last Friday against the Padres. Of course, his defense played a large part by making 24 of those 27 outs for him.
The next time you get down on this rotation, consider this: how bad would they be performing in front of a below-average defensive team? Then shudder.
Not-so-much Heroes
I’ve been thinking about writing a post about how I can no longer for Bret Boone as an All-Star with a good conscience, and this week gives me more reason (not that one single week should make or break an All-Star). He went 3-for-22.
To think that, just a year ago, Mariner Musings mused about Boone’s Hall of Fame chances.
True, we concluded “Slim and none — and slim just left town.” But watching Bret treat ground balls like the Corbin Bernsen character in Major League makes it seem stunning that the question was ever raised.
Shigetoshi Hasegawa hadn’t made an appearance in over a week. It showed Thursday night as he pitched one inning and gave up a 2-run home run to Miguel Tejada in the 8th inning, essentially ending the game.
Remind me why we have a 12-man pitching staff, but no right-handed bench bat that wouldn’t be better off just praying for a walk.
Coming to a Stadium Near You
On the road to Tampa Bay. Yeah. Back to Seattle for Toronto.
Mariner color men: fight! fight!
Last night ended John Marzano’s brief stint working alongside Rick Rizzs. While Rizzs didn’t seem to know what to do with Marzano at times, and Marzano stepped on Rizzs pretty frequently, that’s to be expected for a short stint like this.
I posted this on yesterday’s game thread, but here’s what Marzano said about his brawl with Paul O’Neill:
Tim Davis was pitching. The ball wasn’t even that close, and he started mouthing off like he was going to go out there and beat up Tim Davis. I said ‘Well, I’m right here, you don’t have to go that far’ and that’s when we got into it.
That is some quality color commentary, and a long ways off the clean-and-wonderful Mariner image we often get pushed on us.
Marzano provided a lot of insight and in particular he seemed to be pretty good about guessing pitching approaches (“I’d feed Olivo a change here”). He’s also a big believer in confidence and its viral-like properties, and timely hitting.
Part of what made it interesting was the novelty, I think — if a color man’s got a couple topics they like to wear to death, over three games it’s not that annoying. Over a couple of games, it’s not a big problem.
I’d love to have the Mariners do more of this. Of course, I think they should have Mike Curto do games, or at least rotate in so Fairly doesn’t ever have to do play-by-play.
So kudos to the team for bring Marzano in. It was a worthwhile change, and it made this awful series better.
Doyle interview at Lookout Landing
Lookout Landing’s got a long interview in two parts with Doyle for your listening pleasure, check it out.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve come out of the gate real fast. There’ve been a couple at-bats I’ve wasted…”
.397/.475/.621
Dude.
Also, he thinks he’s striking out too much.
18 walks, 22 strikeouts.
Good stuff: talking about having to teach himself to walk four times
First part’s got a lot of nuts-and-bolts stuff, while the second part features Doyle in the Outback, his intro to the game, the incident at third.
I will point out that the interview starts out with Devin calling Doyle “a little outfielder for the Tacoma Rainiers”.
Hitter’s meeting, PI bit
Hargrove shares our pain. He and Baylor held a meeting to talk about trying to be more selective, get your pitch and drive it or walk — from the PI:
Manager Mike Hargrove said he called the meeting specifically to address the dearth of walks.
“There are certain hitters on any club who aren’t going to draw a lot of walks,” Hargrove said. “We’ve got our share of those. So we’ve got two, three, four guys who should swing most of the time.
“I’m not going to name names, but we had guys tonight swinging at three pitches out of the strike zone,” Hargrove said.
Holy mackeral! I don’t know how effective this is going to be, but I think we can agree that at least Hargrove’s watching the same team we are. Though… only three? Did he mean “clearly out of the strike zone”?
This week’s column in the PI is on the different starts of the two big off-season signings, and my increasing despair over Beltre’s start. Check it out, or don’t… no pressure.
Game 45, Mariners at Orioles
For tonight’s game thread, I would like to call your attention to awamori, the delicious distilled rice liquor from Okinawa.
Like a strong, smooth, sake, the libation is first-rate. Occasionally, though, they change it up a little. As any reasonable person might expect, this involves putting a poisonous habu snake inside the bottle, making habu awamori.
It’s like the joyous combination in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, with booze and venom in place of chocolate and crushed goober peas. Hey, you got a deadly viper in my alcohol! Hey, you got spirits all over my poisonous, fanged friend!
As a habitual liquor enthusiast, you accept the risk that alcohol may slowly kill you. It’s kind of the price of admission. A venomous viper turning up in your libation of choice — bearing fearsome fangs and a more direct form of poison — is a bit of a shock to the system.
[The effect is even more pronounced if, when drinking with a pal, you switch a snake-free bottle with a snake-full bottle while he or she visits the restroom. Surprise!]
Similarly, we expected bad pitching could wreak havoc with the Mariners’ season. So far, it has. But the hitting hasn’t been any kind of tonic, either. Well, maybe an illness-inducing one. Two great tastes that taste brutal together. Hey, you got Aaron Sele in my rotation! Hey, you got Wilson Valdez in my lineup!
For those keeping score at home: yes, I am comparing the Mariners’ recent pitching and offensive performance to a mind-numbing, tissue-destroying elixir. Lately, it seems appropriate.
As for the snake liquor, I have an uncle who enjoys all distilled beverages, the barley pop and other brain cell-murdering delights. Have you tried that habu awamori? I asked him one night. Yes, he replied. How is it? I followed up.
I’ll never try it again, he said.
There is a lesson in there that I will try to distill while watching Jamie Moyer take on Rodrigo Lopez. 4:05 p.m. TV: FSN. Radio: KOMO.
The Little Unit
The Little Unit had been pitching in an indy league — and by “pitching,” I mean he had worked in one pre-season game — since being released by the M’s this spring, but the Brewers bought his contract this week and assigned him to Brevard County of the Florida State League.
Here’s a quote from his now-former manager, Ozzie Virgil Jr., “We pitched him this week for an inning in a spring training exhibition game against the San Diego Surf Dawgs and he was unhittable with his fastball at 93-94 and a curveball that should be illegal.”
I’ll, uh, believe it when I see it. And even then I probably won’t believe it.
(Dave asked that I clarify — it’s not that I don’t believe the radar readings, but rather that he’s pitching at all. It’s been so long that it’s hard to imagine, that’s all.)