Game 151, Rangers at Mariners
Anthony Vasquez vs. Colby Lewis, 1:10pm uh, 4:10pm? Wha?
I’m out today and posting this on my phone, so this will be brief. The M’s celebrate their fans with Vasquez on the hill and Adam Kennedy at DH. Thanks for your support!
I was happier after last night’s shutout than I had any right to be; there’s something about stealing a win like that, and about getting an unlikely pitching performance, that makes for great TV. I think it’s because it so often happens against the M’s, but in any event, I’d love to see the M’s make it two today.
The line-up:
1: Ichiro
2: Seager
3: Ackley
4: Carp
5: Kennedy (DH)
6: Bard
7: Ryan
8: Robinson
9: Wells (CF) scratched, Saunders instead
Game 150, Rangers at Mariners
Blake Beavan vs. CJ Wilson, 7:10pm.
The Rangers come to town this week looking to stay in control of the suddenly tight AL West. Their appearance also serves as a handy reminder of just how much better they are. The last time they were here, they systematically took apart a terrible M’s offense and left with a sweep. They’ve beaten the M’s in all five game started by either Felix Hernandez or Michael Pineda, and their position players have been worth about 30 wins more than the Mariners’ group.
They are a measuring stick, and comparing the two teams can get a bit depressing. They had great pitching depth in the minors back in March/April, and they’ve seen injuries and trades essentially wipe out that depth. But here’s the problem: they’ve still got a better farm system than the M’s. That’s subject to debate and all, but while I might give the M’s the edge for pitchers right now (in an inversion of the rankings back in the spring), pitching isn’t really the problem here. The M’s have been worth 30 wins less this season, and whatever you think of Mike Carp, Dustin Ackley, UZR ratings, wOBA, etc., any true talent estimate is going to show the Rangers in the lead. And the Rangers have the superior hitting talent in the minors. The M’s front office has been a strength, but I’m not sure it’s better than the Rangers’. I’m sorry, I’m not being very uplifting here, but I’ve grown to hate playing the Rangers because it’s depressing.
Michael Young’s lion-in-winter season is one of the more unlikely of 2011, especially given how publicly he expressed his desire to have a lion-in-winter season somewhere else. Colby Lewis was expected to regress, and has, but it doesn’t matter. Neftali Feliz has gone from the top pitching prospect in the league to a poor man’s Mark Lowe, and it doesn’t matter. They got essentially nothing from CF Pedro Borbon, so they picked up Endy Chavez and promoted a defensive specialist in Craig Gentry, and they’re great. This isn’t to say that they’ve been lucky or unlucky (it’s tempting to call the Mike Napoli acquisition lucky, but they didn’t sign him; they had to make a trade, and they did), it’s to say that they were prepared.
The M’s have added Pete Vuckovich to the Front Office as another special assistant to the GM. Vuckovich and Zduriencik worked for Pirates GM Ted Simmons in the early 90s, and Simmons is now the senior advisor to the GM in Seattle. They’ve also made Roger Hansen, the long-time player (esp. catcher) development specialist, a special assistant to the GM. It’d be tempting to play office kremlinology and speculate on what it means for the team or Tony Blengino, but I haven’t a clue. I’d just love to hear from the M’s how they see the situation vis a vis Texas and how more assistants will get them what they need.
CJ Wilson’s now the ace of the staff, with a low 3’s FIP and 5+ wins under his belt so far. While he’s had significant platoon splits over his career, part of what’s made him an effective starter has been his ability to get righties out. He’s still better against lefties, but by improving his command (giving up fewer walks to lefties AND righties), he’s become a very effective starter. His struggles against righties in the past are the primary reason he’s faced nearly four times more right handers than lefties this year (180 to 673), but it hasn’t hurt him.
Opposing him is Blake Beavan, who’s in a dead heat with Brad Penny and Tyler Chatwood for the highest contact rate in baseball at 89%. When the Twins staff is laughing at your contact rates, you may want to think about trying to miss a bat or two.
The line-up, now with Brendan Ryan!
1: Ichiro
2: Ryan
3: Ackley
4: Olivo (nooo not cleanup noo)
5: Carp
6: Pena (DH)
7: Seager
8: Robinson
9: Wells (CF)
A Suggestion For Dumping Chone Figgins
Like Jeff Cirillo, Carlos Silva, and many others before him, Chone Figgins came to Seattle with some fanfare and a pretty decent sized contract… and promptly fell flat on his face. To say that he’s been bad would be the understatement of the year, and at this point, it’s hard to see Figgins having any significant role on this team going forward. The team could keep him around as a super-utility guy, but he can’t really play SS/CF, so he’d be a reserve 3B/2B/LF, which just isn’t all that valuable or all that hard to find.
So, despite being owed another $17 million in salary for 2012 and 2013, Figgins probably needs to go away this winter. The team could just release him and eat the cost of his salary, but teams are often reluctant to make that kind of maneuver and essentially admit that a move was a total failure. More often, they look for some other team’s overpriced underachiever and try to make a “change of scenery” swap, hoping both players will do better in a new location with a fresh start.
My guess is that’s exactly what the M’s will try to do with Figgins this winter, and in that vein, I’d like to offer up a suggestion on one particular team to call – the San Francisco Giants. They are the unfortunate rights-holders to one Barry Zito, who has two years left on the $126 million contract he signed as a free agent in the winter of 2006. That contract was one of the biggest disasters in baseball history, and because they misjudged his talents, the Giants are still on the hook for a whopping $46 million over the next two years (including the obvious buyout of the 2014 option). That money is essentially going to be wasted, however, as the Giants crowded rotation has pushed Zito out and Bruce Bochy wouldn’t even commit to him as a starting pitcher next year. Best case scenario for the Giants, they’d have the world’s most expensive left-handed specialist on their hands.
That’s not a good situation for anyone, and if they can convince Zito to waive his no-trade clause (which shouldn’t be that hard if he’s staring at a relief role for the next two years), shipping him to a team that would give him a chance to start would probably be best for everyone. Enter the Mariners.
Right now, the M’s have three decent Major League starting pitchers in the organization – Felix, Pineda, and Vargas. Blake Beavan doesn’t miss enough bats to be more than a replacement level placeholder, while Charlie Furbush belongs in the bullpen, where he can be used situationally to match-up against left-handed batters. Yes, there are some good arms in the farm system, but counting on Danny Hultzen or James Paxton to make the rotation out of spring training is asking too much of them, and the organization is best served by not rushing its best prospects to the majors too quickly.
Zito isn’t exactly anyone’s idea of an ace anymore, but he is a left-handed fly ball guy whose skills are fairly well suited to Safeco Field, and before this season, he’d been one of the game’s most durable pitchers. Having a guy who can soak up innings at the back of the rotation, even if they aren’t the highest quality innings around, has some usefulness for a team with as little high level pitching depth as the Mariners.
If nothing else, the M’s have the ability to find out if Zito is finished as a Major League starter or not. They could give him 10-15 starts next year to see if he’s got anything left, and if not, replace him come summertime with a guy like Paxton or Hultzen. If he manages a career rejuvenation, you might even be able to move him at the trading deadline and get the buying team to pick up some of the salary the Mariners are on the hook for, thus defraying some of the cost of the original Figgins signing.
There’s basically no chance that Figgins undergoes that kind of career revitalization in Seattle. It’s unclear how he’d even manage to get on the field regularly enough to get his career going again. However, the M’s would have a use for a veteran back-end lefty who could fill a rotation spot for the first few months of 2012 at the least.
For a National League team like the Giants, Figgins’s versatility would be more significant, and they have enough question marks on the position player side of things to give him a look at various spots on the field. At the least, he’d provide more value to their team than keeping Zito around in a relief role would.
With the $29 million difference in salaries over the next two years, the Giants would have to eat a lot of cash to make an even one-for-one swap, but they’re not going to be able to move Zito without picking up nearly all of the money he’s due anyway. At least in a Figgins for Zito swap, both teams can give themselves a chance to salvage something from a free agent signing gone wrong.
Game 149, Yankees at Mariners
Jason Vargas vs. Ivan Nova, 7:00pm (ESPN telecast, so note the change in start time).
You may have seen Jeff Sullivan’s post on Jason Vargas’ recent mechanical tweak, or Kyle Boddy’s follow-up at The Hardball Times – essentially, Vargas added an Eric Bedard/Felix Hernandez-style “twist” in his delivery to add a bit of velocity while improving his deception. (Kyle discusses how a twist might produce such results in his article).
Tonight’s a great opportunity to see how well the new approach works – can he maintain the velocity increase? It’ll be especially valuable since it’ll be his second straight start at home, so the impact of pitch fx calibration will be moderated. For an example of what I mean, check out his last road start here compared to his start in late August here. They look like two different pitchers – the movement’s different, the speed’s different, even the spin rate’s quite distinct. Now compare them to his start with the new mechanics. Clearly, he picked up some velo, but we need to figure out how much of the improvement carries over, and how it might be impacted by his pitch mix too.
I’m biased, obviously, but I find this fascinating. We’re able to watch a pitcher evolve with such focus. It’s not perfect; that Oakland start can realllly throw off a trend analysis. But we learn from the player what he’s trying to do, and now we’ve got all this data to illustrate it and to show how it impacts his effectiveness. Again, just like with Phil Hughes, we’ve got a pitcher who’s constantly tweaking his mix, his pitches themselves, and his delivery to stay in the rotation, and we’re perhaps more aware of it than ever before. Maybe it’s a lot of heat and not a lot of light, but as a Jamie Moyer fan, I’m just fascinated as to how guys throwing 86-88 can survive in this league – by what separates Vargas from Vasquez, or Travis Blackley. Deception and command are huge, but I do wonder if constantly evolving and adapting isn’t part of it as well.
The Yankees send out Ivan Nova, who’s had a very effective year for New York. He’s got a fastball in the 92mph range that looks quite straight, but gets a very good number of ground balls. He also throws a curve and change-up. I’m fascinated that a pitch with very little horizontal movement and an fairly normal amount of sink can produce the GB rates that Nova’s put up. But there, just ahead of Nova on the fangraphs leaderboard, is Zach Britton, who throws a 92mph FB (from the left side) with similar sink and gets similar results with it. I don’t know enough about either to really push this as a comp; Britton’s is a two-seamer and it has much more horizontal movement, but there’s certainly a precedent for Nova’s GB ability. Speaking of precedents, Britton shut out the M’s in May. On the plus side, Nova gets comparatively few whiffs and few strikeouts, and I’m getting fairly sick of the M’s striking out so much. However, the line-up includes Wily Mo, Olivo, Trayvon Robinson and Luis Rodriguez, so…maybe next game.
The line-up:
1: Ichiro
2: Seager
3: Ackley
4: Carp
5: Smoak
6: Olivo
7: Pena
8: Rodriguez
9: Robinson
Game 148, Yankees at Mariners
Charlie Furbush vs. AJ Burnett
AJ Burnett’s a frustrating enigma with a massive contract and stuff that looks better to TV viewers than opposing hitters. Sure, his fastball’s no longer 95-96, but it’s still good. The curve’s no longer a challenge to conventional aerodynamics, it’s just a solid pitch that he uses too much because his FB’s not fooling anyone. In short, he is the Yankees’ Miguel Batista – a guy who people detest for a variety of (generally good) reasons, but who isn’t as out-and-out bad as his reputation implies. I don’t know if Burnett’s tempo on the mound is as glacial as Batista’s, but this ultimately doesn’t matter. What matters is the Yankees have a Batista. I cling to this.
This is perhaps the least-satisfying schadenfreude around. The Yankees have more than enough money to swallow a bad contract or two. They *always* have a Batista around who’s making way too much money, if only because so many of their players are signed to huge contracts. They shrug off the Javier Vasquez’s and they still win. They breathe life into the bloated corpse of Bartolo Colon, and they ride it past the Red Sox (incidentally: John Lackey! Ha!). When even King Felix gets pounded by the Yankee dreadnought, the only thing I can do is point at their Batista and laugh a knowing laugh.
The line-up:
1: Ichiro
2: Seager
3: Ackley
4: Carp
5: Smoak
6: Olivo
7: Kennedy (DH)
8: Wells (CF)
9: Ryan
Game 147, Yankees at Mariners
Felix Hernandez vs. Phil Hughes, 7:10pm
Happy Felix Day! From 2009-2011, you’d be hard pressed to find a more consistent pitcher than King Felix. His FIP has swung between 3.09 and 3.02, and he’ll be worth 6+ wins for the third straight year. His pitch mix and velocity are quite consistent within the season too. Look at his pitch fx velocity graph here, for example: there are the occasional dips/spikes in velo (which may have more to do with pitch fx calibration issues than anything), but by and large, hitters know what they’re going to see from Felix. They just can’t hit it.
I bring it up because his opponent tonight, Phil Hughes, might be one of the more volatile pitchers in the league. There are a number of ways to measure volatility – this article at Beyond the Boxscore describes one, for example. But I’m not talking about a pitcher’s results, I mean: I have no idea what Hughes will throw tonight.
Phil Hughes was the #4 prospect in baseball in 2007, then got yo-yo’d between the bullpen and the rotation with a brilliant relief season in 2009 and a very solid year as a starter in 2010. Injuries have played a role in these moves, as he missed much of 2008 with rib/torso injuries. But a bout of dead arm this spring led to low velocity and ineffectiveness in April has led him to have one of the more experimental seasons I can remember. He toyed with a slider early on – a pitch he threw in 2009, but shelved in 2010 in favor of a change. His fastball averaged around 89 MPH in April, then 90 and even 92 later in the year. More than anything though, Hughes keeps working on his curve. It was a useful pitch for him when he was breaking into the majors, but he hasn’t been able to sustain that early success with it.
In April, his curve velocity was down considerably, along with his fastballs’. He returned to the big leagues with a new curveball grip to improve movement and velocity, and…nothing happened. Then, on August 2nd, he was throwing curves in the low 80s against the White Sox in his best outing of the year. I don’t think he changed the grip on it, but it took him a while to get the bump in velocity on it that he said he was after back in July. So what’s happened since August 2nd? His curve’s back under 73 MPH, and his FB velocity’s down a bit as well.
This seems like an awful lot of tweaking, but then you’d tweak everything you could too if you were getting torched like Hughes has this year. I think Hughes natural talent makes all of this more visible – he’s been scrutinized before he ever broke in with the Yankees, and his changing roles, injuries and yes, the team he plays for mean that we get to hear about every time he changes a breaking ball grip, or feels tightness in his shoulder, or gets extra work with the pitching coach. But the injuries have just brought him down to the level that many, most, pitchers inhabit every day.
Think of RA Dickey ditching his old breaking ball and coming up a forkball he dubbed “the Thang”…and getting pounded just as hard until he started throwing a knuckeball. Even between games, this sort of thing must be going on all the time – Jason Vargas talked about shifting from his slider to a cutter this year, and for people with less of a track record, the temptation to improvise and experiment must be pretty great. The pitching coaches may tell you that consistency and muscle memory is key, but it ain’t the pitching coach that’s going to call you into his office for a difficult discussion if your curve ball gets consistently pounded.
The point of this is: treasure Felix Hernandez. Phil Hughes was 18-8 last year, and the year before that was a shut-down late-inning reliever. Felix Hernandez was an amazing starter last year, and an amazing starter the year before that. Tonight, I’d guess he’s going to be an amazing starter. Never leave us, Felix.
The aggressive (and aggressively left-handed) line-up:
1: Ichiro
2: Seager
3: Ackley
4: Carp
5: Smoak
6: Olivo
7: Robinson
8: Ryan
9: Saunders
I know Bard caught recently, but they could’ve had 8 of 9.
The Byproduct of Aggressiveness
Over the weekend, the Mariners played four games against the Royals. The Royals pitching staff has the highest walk rate of any team in the American League. They also have the fifth lowest strikeout rate in the league, so overall, they’re just not very good.
The Mariners, in four games against that pitching staff, drew six walks and struck out 51 times. They struck out at least 11 times in each game of the series, becoming just the eighth team in AL history to accomplish that in four consecutive games. No AL team has ever done it in five straight games, so the M’s will go for that record tonight.
Jeff wrote about this yesterday over at Lookout Landing, and Mike touched on it here last week, but the M’s have now become the biggest collection of hacks in baseball. The only teams with worse BB/K ratios are in the NL, where they have to use pitchers several times a game, and even their marks aren’t that much worse than what the M’s are putting up.
It’s easy to attribute all the hacking to youth, and point out that the team is playing a bunch of guys with little to no Major League experience, and to some extent, that’s true – the team’s low walk rates and high strikeout rates are attributable to playing guys like Carlos Peguero, Greg Halman, and Michael Saunders for significant portions of the year. But the organization also targeted Miguel Olivo as the veteran catcher they wanted over the winter, and he has perhaps the worst plate approach of any regular player in Major League Baseball.
At this point, it’s essentially an organizational pandemic. There’s basically one guy – Dustin Ackley – in the whole organization who has a good plan when he goes up to the plate. Justin Smoak has the makings of giving them two guys, but he still chases a lot of pitches he should let pass. Beyond those two, there isn’t a discerning eye to be found anywhere.
Right now, the M’s run out 7 or 8 guys on a nightly basis whose sole focus at the plate is to swing the bat. Eric Wedge has wanted an aggressive team all year, and now he has the most aggressive group of hitters in baseball. The problem is that this approach doesn’t work. It doesn’t score runs. It gives pitchers free outs.
Plain and simple, the Mariners are now far too aggressive at the plate, just like they were during the Bavasi era. They present little challenge to the opposing pitcher not just because they lack talent, but because they lack a good game plan when they step into the batters box. Swing hard is not a recipe for success.
Getting better hitters would help, certainly. We can’t lay the blame at the coaching staff’s feet for not being able to make chicken soup out of chicken crap, but at the same time, Eric Wedge and his staff are here to teach these kids how to become good Major League hitters. And, unfortunately, there’s little to no evidence that any of them are getting better at the plate as the year goes on. No one is having better at-bats, getting into more hitters’ counts, or taking more free passes. If anything, we’re seeing the opposite. Previously patient hitters like Chone Figgins, Franklin Gutierrez, and Mike Carp have all stopped taking free passes this year. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Aggressiveness is fine in the right context. Stupidity is not. Right now, the M’s approach at the plate has crossed the line into being the latter.
Game 146: Royals at Mariners
Anthony Vasquez vs. Everett Teaford, 1:10pm; 9/11 memorial before the game at 12:45pm.
Everett Teaford’s a great name; I had to check baseball-reference to make sure there wasn’t an Evertt Teaford who played in the ’30s with Burleigh Grimes and Bobo Newsom. Other than that, though, he’s not terribly special. He’ll be making his starting debut today after making 23 appearances in relief.
The lefty has a 91 MPH fastball and a curve/slurvey-slider that he throws frequently to lefties or righties. That arsenal sounds like it’d produce some big platoon splits, but thus far, he’s been terrible against both. You’d expect a decent amount of strikeouts/whiffs of lefties with a good FB and a slider, but instead, he’s given up 9 free passes against 8 strikeouts against them. He’s got a better K:BB against right-handers, but he’s given up a lot of hits and 4 HRs in 57 batters faced. The samples here are tiny, as you’d expect, but he had similar problems at times in the minors.
Anthony Vasquez gets the ball for the M’s. Wooooo.
The line-up features a DH with a wOBA of .273. Adam Kennedy, you have been upstaged. Wedge clearly wanted righties, and he wanted dingers, so we’ve got Casper Wells in center, Olivo at DH and Alex Liddi at 3B.
1: Ichiro
2: Ryan
3: Ackley
4: Carp (LF)
5: Smoak
6: Olivo (DH)
7: Wells (CF!)
8: Bard (C)
9: Liddi
Game 145, Royals at Mariners
This game could hope to be half as interesting as last night’s game.
Paulino vs. Pineda, 7:10 pm
Pitch face aside, Paulino doesn’t interest me much, but he may manage to give up a home run or two.
Pineda’s second start in August was the point at which he broke his previous season high in innings pitched and he’s getting a full month of starts on top of that. Last year, towards the end there were reports of his mechanics starting to fall apart a little and he lost some command as a result, so if I were around for this game (hint: I won’t be) I would be checking to see how he looked physically. Any evaluation should also take into account that recently he’s been warming up while he’s out there instead of prior to the game. I would throw in some kind of remark about Pineda’s past elbow problems, but that was in an era when the org was shutting down pitchers left and right at the slightest sign of trouble, which makes it difficult to judge the severity of said elbow issues.
This is all an avoidance of talking about the lineup which will spur its own comments.
RF Ichiro!
SS Ryan
2B Ackley
LF Carp
1B Smoak
DH Kennedy
C Olivo
3B Seager
CF Saunders
Aggressiveness
Looking over the stats for a few different Mariner outfielders this year:
Carlos Peguero: 155 PA, 54 SO, 34.8 K%
Casper Wells: 103 PA, 36 SO, 35.0 K%
Trayvon Robinson: 95 PA, 35 SO, 36.8 K%
Greg Halman: 91 PA, 32 SO, 35.2 K%
Other than Peguero having a few more plate appearances, because he’s the one who got the biggest extended stretch of regular playing time back when the team had fewer options, those are some alarmingly similar numbers. We’ve discussed numerous times that for all their tools and raw power, Peguero and Halman will never be useful major leaguers with their current approach. It’s worth noting that neither was called up even when rosters expanded in September (although I don’t want to overemphasize that fact, considering that Michael Saunders is not all that far below this crew). While strikeouts are not necessarily worse than other kinds of outs, failing to make contact on this level generally makes it impossible to hit for a high average because you’re just not putting the ball in play enough. Both Halman and Wells have seen their batting averages collapse after hot starts with the team, illustrating how this plays out and reminding us of how much longer batting average takes to stabilize – two years or so, while all these guys are already approaching if not past the point where their strikeout rates would stabilize.
Now, the similarity in approach is not complete, because Wells and Robinson do walk more often: 6.8% and 6.3%, compared to 5.2% for Peguero and an appallingly bad 2.2% for Halman. Walk rate also takes a bit longer to stabilize than strikeout rate, so these numbers aren’t the final word, but it’s consistent with their past performances. Still, even those slightly higher rates are not exactly all that good.
For some finer detail, check out their plate discipline stats from Fangraphs:
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