Game 146, Mariners at Angels
RRS vs Saunders.
For all of the hoopla around K-Rod and his record for most vulture saves in a year, it’s not actually that great of a season, even for him. I thought about this: how would the two highest Mariner save seasons compare:
Putz 2007: 40 saves in 68 appearances, 10.3 K/9, 1.63 BB/9, 0.75 HR/9
Sasaki 2001: 45 saves in 69 appearances, 8.37 K/9, 1.49 BB/9, 0.81 HR/9
K-Rod 2008: 57 saves in 69 appearances, 10.2 K/9, 4.41 BB/9, .57 HR/9
The thing is, you can’t really do the same thing with Putz as K-Rod this year: the 2007 M’s went 88-74, and of those, you can tell they’re just not as close: 47 were one-run games, while 53 were blowouts (5 or more runs in either directions). 29% close, 33% blowout.
For the Angels this year with 146 games in the book, they’re running a much tighter distribution you can see even just looking at the outliers: 48 have been one run games (33%) and 37 (25%) blowouts.
I’m curious, though — I don’t have time to look at this right now, but if you went through all the game logs and looked for situations where McLaren could have found vulture saves for Putz, how high could you get his season total?
Don’t Worry About Felix
After reading Jeff Sullivan’s Hey Felix, Do Better post the other day, I got thinking – certainly, there’s been a few pitchers who have come up early to exceeding amounts of hype, had some early success, but never developed into the Cy Young pitchers that people thought they could become. After all, young pitchers are unpredictable, so clearly there’d be some busts along with some booms.
So I checked, using Baseball Reference’s invaluable Play Index. I told the query to give me every pitcher who had thrown at least 540 innings from ages 20 to 22 in the majors with a strikeout rate of at least 7 K/9 IP. Basically, I just wanted a list of all the guys who pitched three full years before they turned 23 and had strikeout stuff at that age.
From 1901 to 2008, here’s the entire list.
Dwight Gooden
Bob Feller
Bert Blyleven
Frank Tanana
Dennis Eckersley
Felix Hernandez
CC Sabathia
Out of the seven guys on the list, there’s a couple of hall of famers, a guy who should be in the hall of fame, a guy who would have been had he avoided cocaine, Frank Tanana, and the two active pitchers. Tanana is clearly the worst guy on the list, and he racked up 240 wins as a slightly better than average pitcher who spent 21 years in the majors.
Sabathia’s a pretty good guy to look at the next time you find yourself frustrated with Felix’s development. In his age 20 to 22 seasons, he was significantly worse than Felix has been, and I’d say he’s turned out just fine.
I don’t really disagree with that much of what Jeff said, but there’s also the other hand – he’s the best young pitcher we’ve seen in 20 years. It’s okay to be frustrated with his inconsistency, but in the end, the accurate perspective is that Felix is off to a Hall Of Fame start to his career.
Game 146, Mariners at Angels
7:05. Morrow v Weaver. Wooo! Morrow!
Dave and I have both argued here that the M’s don’t need to totally tear down, throwing out everyone to go entirely with the young and talented supplemented by the really cheap and readily available. I still see a lot of “tear it down! I’d rather see crappy youngsters play than this lot!” which assumes, first, that if you tear down there are prospects with long-term upside to play and their struggles will help the team out in future years.
But even these last few games, where the M’s have run out teams that a good PCL team could put a scare into, demonstrate that that’s not really true — now there are complaints about the horrible quality of these teams, the minor-league level starters pitching, and so on. It’s pretty clear that despite the sincere desire to see the team suck towards a purpose rather than just suck, no one’s happy seeing a game featuring a Mariner lineup this painful.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way — and hopefully the new GM can give us something better than these September lineups made everyday.
Still no lineup posted? What is the scoop?
Update: Ah! Yup, LaHair at first, Valbuena at 2nd. Lopez DHs.
The AL West-clinched Angels — ugh. Yeah.
The ’09 Staff
Despite the fact that the M’s 2008 pitching staff has been horrible, there are plenty of reasons to think that it will be significantly better next year, even if they don’t make any real changes to the roster. Since I’m running into some time constraints, I won’t go through all the machinations behind these numbers, but here’s a quick-and-dirty projection for the team’s pitching staff for next year. And yes, I’m assuming whoever comes aboard will have the common sense to dump Washburn on whoever will take the biggest chunk of his contract.
Pitcher Innings FIP 1 Felix 200 3.40 2 Bedard 140 3.60 3 Morrow 130 4.00 4 Silva 180 5.00 5 RRS 150 5.25 6 Feier. 100 5.25 7 Batista 100 5.00 Long Dickey 80 4.50 Long Jimenez 70 4.50 Middle Corco 70 4.00 Middle Lowe 60 5.00 ROOGY Green 70 3.50 LOOGY Thomas 40 4.50 Closer Putz 70 3.50
We’re not being outlandish with anything – no predicted ace-dom for Felix, no miraculous health for Bedard, not asking Morrow to take the ball every five days, not expecting Putz to return to ’07 form – there’s a basic regression analysis and not much else. It’s crude, but since we’re not trying to be extremely precise, it’s good enough.
That group adds up to 1,460 innings (1,458 is 162 nine inning games) and has a combined FIP of 4.34. That’s pretty much a league average pitching staff.
Yep, league average. With no big additions, no big surges, but just some regression from Silva and Batista (neither are as bad as they’ve been this year) and a bit more health from Bedard and Putz, and you’ve got a league average pitching staff without even trying. Add a real lefty setup man and you could do even better.
The idea that this team has to lose 90 games next year while going through a painful rebuilding process is bunk.
Fans Scouting Report Article
Tom Tango has written an article at The Hardball Times that looks at the differences between the average Mariners fans opinion about the team’s individual defenders and my own. Tom’s project is pretty interesting, so check it out.
Two site things
Earlier this week, many people got served an error page instead of the site. I ended up turning off some of the plugins we use, and as near as I can figure it, the issue is that in certain cases (for instance, someone comes in and requests a super-crazy URL, possibly in an attempt to see if there’s a security exploit left unpatched… it’s unclear what causes this) the site refuses to generate the page, throwing an error instead, and that error message gets cached as the current version of USSM… and served out to a ton of other people. We saw this a couple months ago when, under load, it essentially cached and served out a blown version of the home page and I went through this fire drill again.
Now, the why and when I’m still not clear on, or why it seems like it’s far more likely to serve this up to people trying to access www.ussmariner.com instead of ussmariner.com — I have no idea. But I think we’ve got some reasonable solutions worked out, so I’m on that.
The other — I’ve read complaints that the RSS feed sucks since the redesign. I don’t know what the scoop is: I subscribe myself for troubleshooting purposes, and I haven’t seen anything, and the new theme shouldn’t affect the RSS pieces at all. If I had better repro steps, there might be more I could do, but right now I’m trying to pin down the problem.
Game 145, Rangers at Mariners
1:40 PM, Millwood vs Jimenez.
The M’s are doing a bullpen game today due to Silva’s absence (with his wife for the birth of their child) and Washburn’s injury. If you love spring training games, this is for you.
Nelson Cruz
A few months ago, I suggested the M’s trade for a 28-year-old Triple-A outfielder. They didn’t, and tonight, he’s starting against them, while being better than just about every player the M’s put in the line-up tonight.
Rebuilding isn’t that hard if you know where to look for undervalued talent.
Game 144, Rangers at Mariners
Padilla v Felix! 7:10.
I had one of the worst days of my IT career yesterday, for a whole host of reasons I’ll skip, and when I got home I was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to at least watch a game to relax. And today I get to work a 7am-9pm and miss at least the first couple of hours of Felix Day. I hope everyone else who gets to go out to the game and watch live gets to see something truly awesome, but I’m not going to follow the game because I am dying to get home, turn on TiVo, have a beer, and sit down to watch King Felix.
Have fun, all.
Happy Felix Day
In the spirit of Felix Day, another chart – this one from Felix’s last start against Texas.
I promise, I’m almost done with the graphs and will get back to writing soon.
And yes, that big blue clump in the upper left hand corner – that would be establishing the fastball. It’s worth noting that the only run of the game came in the first inning, and the M’s lost 1-0.