Time To Panic
Felix is 88-92 with his fastball, his curve is flat as anything, and he’s throwing a ton of junk early in the game. There’s no way he’s healthy.
Okay, so, pretty much everyone who pitched in this game had lower velocity readings than usual, so we’ll assume that something was wrong with the Pitch F/x data.
Also, ugh.
Game 35, Mariners at Rangers
Hernandez vs Harrison, 11:05 am.
Felix Day is going to suck eggs if we lose. With Bedard getting scratched for Saturday, we’re throwing Jakubauskas-Olson-Vargas at the Red Sox this weekend. Lose today, and you’re staring at a pretty good chance of being losers of six in a row when the Angels roll into town on Monday. The M’s have to win today. They have to. Felix vs an LHP – we couldn’t ask for a better matchup. We lose today, the season is basically over.
Ichiro, RF
Lopez, 2B
Sweeney, DH
Beltre, 3B
Branyan, 1B
Balentien, LF
Johnson, C
Gutierrez, CF (argh!)
Cedeno, SS
Wak gives us another Yuni-free day, which is a blessing. Hopefully Cedeno can play well enough to convince the staff that he should be at SS more often.
As far as the line-up goes, does anyone have an explanation for Rob Johnson hitting in front of Gutierrez? Death To Flying Things is hitting .273/.360/.591 against southpaws this year, and it’s not luck – he’s killing the ball against them. That’s a .951 OPS vs LHPs with a .211 batting average on balls in play. This isn’t some bloopers falling in. He’s struck out once in 22 plate appearances against them, and three of his six hits have gone for extra bases. He should be hitting 2nd, not 8th. Hitting him behind Johnson is just nutty.
Acid In The Wounds
Were you sitting around and thinking “man, you know what this team could use – an injury to Erik Bedard. That would just make this stretch of baseball perfect.” If so, I have good news.
Larry Stone informs us that Bedard will miss his start on Saturday against the Red Sox with tightness in his hamstring. Garrett Olson will get the start in his place.
Remember what I said the other day about Bedard and Washburn being extremely volatile assets? Yea. Please get healthy quickly, Erik, so that we can trade you as soon as possible.
On umps and strike zones
I was going to put up a big, picture-heavy post on how Marvin Hudson’s inability to call a decent strike hosed the game up, but two things:
1) he didn’t do that bad on Washburn and Aardsma, and McCarthy made out decently, though there were some bad calls. And overall, check out the normalized strikezone graph. He wasn’t calling the low strike for beans.
2) humans shouldn’t be calling balls and strikes. A guy squatting behind a plate can’t adequately determine if a 90mph pitch crossed a three-dimensional strike zone. The sooner the swap’s made, the better for the game.
To pre-empt the standard “you can’t be serious” comments I get: I am. That anyone should be trying to judge balls and strikes by eyeballing it is absurd. We know it doesn’t work: we’ve got all of baseball history to show that. If you want the strikezone called consistently, especially if you want it called by the rulebook, you’re on my side.
Arguing that umps should be doing this is saying “I support preventable errors affecting the outcome of games.” And then why not just have whatever system you implement make errors, say, 50% as often as human umpires? Or heck, if you like the errors, have them call 25% of pitches randomly.
Or re-write the rule book, and define the strike zone to be whatever the guy behind the plate thinks it should be, and have that day’s home plate ump give a quick talk about his artistic interpretation during the lineup exchange so both managers can brief their teams on what to expect. Acknowledge and celebrate the flaws.
Backbreaker
That’s a tough loss. Just like with Vargas last night, Washburn should get a medal for surviving Texas’ offense and ballpark. The offense was able to get a few longballs off of McCarthy, whose up-in-the-zone pitching style makes him the kind of righty we can actually score runs against, but the flaws of the offense got exposed late in the game.
You can’t have Lopez bunt Ichiro to second in the 8th inning with Junior coming up against a lefty. You just can’t do it. The odds of Lopez whacking a Guardado pitch are a lot better than Junior getting a base hit against a lefty or Beltre getting a base hit against a side-arming righty. I know Wak likes small ball, and Derek showed he’s been mostly doing an effective job of utilizing the bunt this year, but that was bad. It’s okay to play for one run in a tie game in the 8th inning, but bunting there doesn’t make sense. Not with Lopez at the plate against a lefty, Junior coming up, and a righty specialist warming up to go after Beltre.
Morrow… what can you say? His command sucks and he’s heavily dependent on the fastball. That doesn’t work against good hitting lefties, and the Rangers have a lot of good hitting lefties.
16-18, 3 1/2 out of first place. If they can’t beat Texas with Felix on the hill and an LHP starting for the Rangers… well, let’s just say they need to win tomorrow.
Game 34, Mariners at Rangers
Cy Young contender Washburn v. McCarthy.
A brief call for optimism
In this year’s off-season, with all the trades and small pickups, the front office only really spent a small amount of money on their new lineup.
Last offseason’s acquisitions:
Aardsma, $420k
Branyan costs $1.4m
Cedeno, $1m.
Chavez’s ’09 costs $2m
Griffey costs $2m (+incentives)
Gutierrez, $455k
Olson, $400k
Sweeney, $500k
Vargas, $400k
All their retooling required some talent swaps too, but focus just on that for a second: the new regime’s share of the payroll, if you will, comes in at around $10m.
Next season, between Batista, Washburn, and assume Beltre leaving too, another $31m in payroll will roll off the books.
The Bright Side
Yea, that sucked, but it wasn’t all that hard to see coming. As we’ve noted repeatedly, the Mariners roster is structured incorrectly, which leaves them essentially incapable of hitting pitchers like Scott Feldman. Sending the M’s line-up against RH sinker-slider guys is just going to result in failure. This isn’t going to get better until they make changes. The team will hit fine against lefties and hold their own against righties who pitch up in the zone (McCarthy tomorrow, for instance, they should do okay against), but they can’t hit this pitcher type. So, pretty much any time you see the M’s going against a Bartolo Colon/Sidney Ponson/Nick Blackburn/Shane Loux/Scott Feldman type, you can forget scoring a bunch of runs. Until this team tosses one or two of Yuni/Lopez/Johjima overboard and adds a couple of left-handed bats, this is what you’ll see.
But, at least we had Jason Vargas’ effort tonight. Expectations were understandably low, and while 400 foot outs are not a recipe for success, the M’s couldn’t have asked for any more from him than they got tonight. I loved the gameplan he took to the mound.
Look at all those change-ups. He threw 22 of them, and mostly did a good job of locating them. He knew the Rangers are a great fastball hitting team, and he has a below average fastball, so he didn’t even bother trying the whole “establish the fastball” crap. He went with his off-speed stuff, disrupted timing, mixed speeds and locations, and used the fastball as a complementary pitch. Against offenses with less power and more left-handed bats, he can throw the fastball a little more, but that wasn’t going to work tonight and he knew it. Just a smart, well pitched game by a guy who really had no business succeeding in that environment.
Game 33, Mariners at Rangers
Vargas vs Feldman, 5:05 pm.
Ichiro, RF
Lopez, 2B
Griffey, DH
Beltre, 3B
Branyan, 1B
Gutierrez, CF
Johjima, C
Betancourt, SS
Chavez, LF
As I mentioned in the piece this morning, this is a brutal situation for Vargas to try to stake out a claim to a rotation spot. The Rangers are going to throw a line-up of seven right-handed hitters, Josh Hamilton, and Chris Davis at him. There’s simply no soft spots to let him work around guys who can hurt him. Everyone in this line-up can hurt him. Plus, it’s Texas, where the air is not exactly known for knocking down fly balls.
So, the M’s are going to have to put up runs tonight. Unfortunately, they’re facing yet another right-handed sinker ball guy, and this pitcher type is the one the M’s are least suited to hit. Just like Padilla, Colon, Ponson, Blackburn, and all the other right-handed starters of this ilk that have shut down the M’s, Feldman’s sinker is a pretty good pitch against righties and a meatball against lefties. The offense is going to have to come from Ichiro, Griffey, Branyan, and Chavez. Hopefully, they can get a couple home runs early and get into the Rangers bullpen.
Quick snipe
We get asked about Ibanez a lot. Here’s a terrible article about his early time in Philly.
“Raul’s a winner,” Werth said of Ibañez, whose Mariner teams averaged only 72 wins per game.
That’s a lot of wins/game. That’s the kind of overperformance clubhouse chemistry advocates claim.
Anyway, it’s a fine example of after the fact justification. Hey, he’s up in UZR? Let’s go reason hunting
One of the knocks on Ibañez was his defense, but he has had a renaissance on Philadelphia’s south side. Using the ultimate zone rating, a measure of how many runs a player saves or costs his team defensively, Ibañez cost the Mariners nearly 34 runs the last two seasons. This season, however, he has saved nearly six runs for the Phillies, which ranks third among all major league outfielders, trailing only Jay Bruce and Mike Cameron. Ibañez has only average speed, but Victorino praises how observant his teammate is to tendencies and how well he uses the scouting reports. Ibañez’s cerebral approach to fielding includes noting the cut of the grass to predict which way a ball is likely to skip.
Why didn’t any of those things help him in previous seasons? No clue! How did he manage to be so, so bad for so long and then suddenly a defensive whiz? Pony power! Was he injured or something and hiding — no, not Raul! Never.
When you look at defense, look at the long term. Three seasons if you can get it. And two seasons of absolute suck followed by thirty games of relative performance still mean you should consider him a crappy defender, certainly until some reason why his abilities changed is advanced.
And yes, I’m tired of the “why did you let go of Ibanez (or Bloomquist)????” questions.