Weaver set to return to the rotation
WOOO HOO!
WEAVER MANIA!!
If you weren’t down after today’s game, well check this out!
Tuesday, manager Mike Hargrove said he wanted Weaver to face some live batters in game competition. But when Weaver declined to go to the minor leagues for a rehab start, the issue became pitch count.
Weaver, who threw a simulated game Monday, will throw a bullpen session Thursday in Seattle before the Mariners open a homestand with a game against Texas. He’ll then throw another simulated game Sunday, the last day of the series against the Rangers.
[…]
With the second simulated game behind him, Weaver will go back into the rotation, Hargrove said Wednesday.
I’m looking at my old CBA (helpfully provided by the MLBPA) and I’m not seeing the exact rule I want to quote, but then I’m tired.
I don’t understand why Weaver would want to do this, though, or why the team wants him back in the rotation. It seems like until they can tell that he’s a better option than anyone currently in the rotation, they would want to hold off. And for Weaver, he draws salary whether he’s getting rocked in the majors or the minors, and he’s likely to get a better view on his suitability to return to action in the minors than side sessions. The only reason I can see for him to refuse a minor league rehab assignment is if Weaver believes… I don’t know. That the minors are that horrible?
I don’t get it. And I don’t look forward to it.
Game 49, Mariners at Angels
Felix vs Weaver, 7:05 pm.
Happy Felix Day. The M’s couldn’t ask for a better day to have their ace on the mound than the series finale with the team they are chasing for first place and the Mariners teetering on the verge of contention. Win tonight, cut the lead to 3 1/2 games, and head into June with a goal of cutting into that lead even further. Lose tonight, fall 5 1/2 back, and you’re looking at a tough climb to get back in this thing.
The M’s need the King to show up tonight. I have a feeling he will. This could be a lot of fun.
Happy Felix Day, or Happy Conflicting Book Event
Felix starts tonight in the third game of the series against the Angels… and, by wild coincidence, I have a book event *at almost the exact same time* at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. The last time I was scheduled to do an author appearance there, I ended up in the ER in Bremerton.
I’m sure some helpful soul will smuggle in his laptop, or whatnot, so we’re not entirely deprived.
Update! As msb suggests, the new secret plan is to do the reading/signing and then hustle over to the nearest TV at the Mexican restaurant (is it Torero’s?) if the game’s still interesting for general tomfoolery.
I’m happy to take suggestions on parts to read from.
Feierabend, Take One
I posted a brief review of my feelings on Ryan Feierabend’s performance in the game thread last night, but I figured I should put up something with a little more detail today, for those who didn’t catch his season debut.
The fastball was consistently 86-90, all of the four seam variety, and usually up in the zone. It’s easy to see why he’s a predominantly flyball pitcher, as he lived above the belt with the fastball. From his arm slot, he got a decent amount of run in on right-handed pitchers, though the mistake to Shea Hillenbrand showed what will happen if his location isn’t good.
He threw two offspeed pitches – a slow, slurvy curveball that came in at 76-78 with little downward break and generally floated into the strike zone. It had a good amount of left to right break, and he generally tried to locate it on the inside corner to right-handers. It actually got a decent amount of called strikes as he threw it in a couple of fastball counts and caught hitters off guard, but the pitch itself was basically a meatball. Without any real biting movement, the ball stayed on the same plane that it was on when it left his hand, making it an easy target for hitters. He also left it up in the zone far too frequently. As the scouting report on him gets around the league, he’s going to have to throw that thing less, or get better downward movement on it, because the curveball he threw last night wasn’t a major league pitch.
His change-up, on the other hand, was terrific. He consistently got it down in the strike zone at 77-79 MPH, keeping a consistent arm speed with his fastball and adding to the deception. The pitch showed good fade away from right-handed hitters at times, and he commanded it better than either his fastball or curve. It was clearly his best pitch, and the only thing he threw that could be considered an out pitch.
His pickoff move came in with the billing of being the best in the organization, and it didn’t take long for him to confirm that. He comes very close to driving his front foot towards the plate before the step over, but he’s mastered the art of getting as close to a balk as possible without violating the rule. It’s a great pickoff move, similar to Andy Pettitte’s, and is one of the best in baseball.
Overall, Feierabend did a good job attacking the strike zone with his pitches and not throwing in a predictable pattern. The fastball is a bit below average, but the change-up is well above average, and he should be able to mix those two pitches enough to keep hitters off balance when he’s ahead in the count. The problem will come when he falls behind hitters, however. He doesn’t have a fastball he can throw by hitters and the breaking ball he showed last night needs an awful lot of work.
Feierabend is going to rely heavily on commanding the strike zone early in counts to get into good pitcher’s counts, where his change-up and fastball will be enough to put hitters away. He’s going to run into trouble when he doesn’t start out strike one, because he doesn’t have the stuff to put away a hitter who is able to load up for a fastball in a particular count.
If Feierabend can improve the breaking ball or master the command of his change-up to where he feels confident throwing it for strikes in any count, he’s got the makings of a solid #5 starter, a guy who is a perfect fit for Safeco with his flyball tendencies and left-handedness. On days where he doesn’t have the feel for his change-up, however, he could get pounded early and often, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a few disaster starts along the way.
In an ideal world, he could hang out in Tacoma this year, working on improving the curveball and mastering his command of the change-up, but the Mariners need competent starting pitchers, and Feierabend showed enough stuff and command last night to constitute an upgrade over Jeff Weaver and Horacio Ramirez. The M’s are going to want to get a return on their significant offseason investments in that pair, but if they’re more concerned with winning games than salvaging some value out of guys they would have been better off never acquiring, then they should leave Feierabend in the rotation. Right now, he looks like the 5th best major league starting pitcher in the organization, and in a pennant race, the team can’t afford to have that guy not pitching every five days.
Game 48, Mariners at Angels
7:05, FSNW.
Feierabend v Santana.
I predict Mr. Feierabend will have trouble getting his name spelled right. (Wow, Aaron Hill just stole home on Pettitte to take a 2-1 lead. Awesome play.)
M’s lineup is the same as last night, the Angels (per Baker) throw out something significantly different:
LF-B Willits
SS-R Cabrera
RF-R Guerrero
CF-B Matthews Jr.
3B-R Quinlan
C-R Napoli
2B-R Kendrick
DH-R Hillenbrand
1B-L Kotchman
Fun with random numbers
I missed the weekend while shooting a friend’s wedding in Kentucky, so it’s a stream of consciousness post as I play catchup on what I missed.
1. Adrian Beltre is obviously on fire. 11 for 21 with 7 extra base hits in his last 5 games, giving him a .275/.321/.495 line for the season. It’s stretches like this, along with his defense, which is why we’re Adrian Beltre fans. For all the complaining people do about the guy when he’s not going well, and for all the grief his contract gets from national writers, Beltre is entrenched as a top three 3rd baseman in the American League. The only guys with any kind of credible arguments as better players are Alex Rodriguez and Mike Lowell. The M’s have a competitive advantage at the position over every other team in the A.L. except Boston and New York.
2. Richie Sexson on this road trip: .333/.419/.593. No, he won’t hit this well all year, but it’s nice to have regression to the mean going in the M’s favor for once.
3. If Kenji Johjima doesn’t make the all-star team, I’m going to demand a criminal investigation. He’s a RH pull hitting catcher playing in the worst park in baseball for a right-handed pull hitting catcher, and he’s running an .870 OPS.
4. Turbo homered!
5. Hello Ryan Feierabend. You might not be ready for the major leagues, but you have a pulse, so you’re an upgrade over Horacio Ramirez. May you pitch well and stick around.
6. The M’s three high leverage relievers all have sub-2 ERAs. Remember when people were concerned about George Sherrill in Peoria? Yea, spring training performances don’t matter at all.
7. The M’s have raised their playoff odds from 3% to 20% in the last 7 days, per the calculations from coolstandings.com. BP’s playoff odds report has them at 28%, up from 15%. That’s a good week, but there’s still work to do.
8. The A’s are theoretically contenders, right? Did you know Jason Kendall is hitting .182/.227/.194 and is still playing everyday. He’s their Jeff Weaver.
9. From the Remember When These Guys Were Good category, the following players are all running an OPS of less than .700 this year: Eric Chavez, J.D. Drew, Brian Giles, Ivan Rodriguez, Nomar Garciaparra, Michael Young, Scott Rolen, Carlos Delgado, Mike Cameron, Jim Edmonds, and Bobby Abreu. 2007 may go down as the year of the Collapsing Veteran. I’m not sure I remember this many high profile players all falling off a cliff at one time.
10. Did you know the draft is nine days away? We have been less focused on it this year since the M’s pick 11th instead of 5th, like last year, but we’ll ramp up the coverage this week and fill you in on what it looks like the Mariners are going to do.
Game 47, Mariners at Angels
Batista v Colon. 6:05, FSN. Dun dun dunnnnnnnnnn.
I’d like to declare, as today’s game thread benevolent dictator, just as an experiment, this thread a funk-free zone. Thanks for your understanding.
CF-L Ichiro
DH-B Vidro
RF-R Guillen
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
3B-R Beltre
SS-R Betancourt
2B-R Lopez
v
LF-B Willits
SS-R Cabrera
RF-R Guerrero
CF-B Matthews
1B-L Kotchman
2B-R Kendrick
C-R Napoli
DH-R Hillenbrand
3B-B Figgins
Hmm.
Betancourt seeks greatness*
From ESPN.com’s Enrique Rojas.
*Disclaimer: He defines greatness as Jose Reyes and Derek Jeter. Not that I’m bagging on either one of those guys. If Betancourt turns into either one we should all do backflips down Edgar Martinez Drive.
The size, shape, and other characteristics of the mountain ahead
I don’t know a reasonable M’s fan that doesn’t look at this next series without realizing its importance. Three games against the Angels, 4.5 back, could be a season-breaker, and we’ve drawn:
Batista vs Colon
Feierabend v Santana
Felix v Good Weaver
There’s another way to get into the playoffs, but right now it looks a lot harder – Detroit and Cleveland have both played .600 baseball so far, and Detroit hasn’t even dropped one of their poorer starters for Andrew Miller yet, which is crazy to contemplate. The M’s aren’t as far back in the wild card as they are in the division race, but in the division race they only have to catch one team (right now) while in the wild card race two really good teams have to collapse while Chicago stumbles (and New York doesn’t wake up and run off a 10-game winning streak).
Focus on the division, then. I’ll re-use a comment from Typical Idiot Fan on yesterday’s game thread:
[…] The difference is really in the runs allowed area. Anaheim has allowed only 199 runs to score against them in 51 games, or 3.9 per game. Seattle has allowed 224 in 46 games, or 4.8 per game.
Seattle RSPG – 4.8, RAPG – 4.8
Anaheim RSPG – 4.6, RAPG – 3.9
Oakland RSPG – 4.5, RAPG – 3.8
Texas RSPG – 5.0, RAPG – 5.7By all logical reasoning, Oakland should be right there with Anaheim but they’re not. Oakland should probably improve in the W/L column soon enough as things start to even out. Seattle, meanwhile, is one big lefty bat and one good starting pitcher away from making some serious strides.
If it keeps up for the rest of the year, the Angels could easily wind up ten games up on the M’s. I don’t think the Angels are a .600 team, but they don’t have to be. They only have to stay ahead of the M’s. Vlad Guerrero could decide to retire tomorrow and it’d still be a toss-up if the M’s could catch them.
But to the question at hand: what does it take to compete, to take use this early luck and turn it into sustained contention? The team, to be overly simplistic, has a couple of huge, obvious holes:
– they’re too right-handed
– Sexson has sucked, but if he’s really just always a slow starter, that’ll resolve
– Ill offensive production from Lopez/Ibanez
– Starters 3-5 suck
There are other issues (Betancourt’s eye-popping defensive woes, for instance) but that’s the big stuff.
There’s not a lot to be done about the offense – when you can’t find a spot for Adam Jones, well, you’ve got some team construction issues.
The argument about the rotation is that we’ve seen a lot of Weaver, and now that Baek’s here, things are greatly improved. We’ll see how Baek does over an extended period, but even if he’s a solid back-of-the-rotation guy, right now any pick-two of Weaver/Batista/Ramirez means you’ve picked two crappy starters. There’s no way around it: they’re pitching terribly.
Possibly that skews any runs scored/allowed analysis. If there are two major league starters in the rotation and the 3-5 guys get shelled and chased out of games early (that group’s average start goes five innings), it doesn’t really matter if the offense is cracking along, because they’ll need to score 7, 9 runs to win. Plus the bullpen has to pick up a lot of innings, and there are secondary issues from that as well, but here’s my point — as much as the M’s operate at an advantage when Felix starts, they’re giving that away and then some a couple times a week. They turn average offensive players into a lineup of — well, Johjima’s not a bad comparison, actually.
Some comments noted that the team’s a lot like some of the mid-90s M’s teams, and while I might quibble with it, I think it’s a useful because it does convey some of the feel of this team. There’s a really good starter, someone behind him, and then you’d watch the other games with one eye open, wincing.
You can, as we’ve seen, make it to the playoffs with that. But Felix has to be great, Washburn has to be good, Sexson needs to start to hit, the bullpen needs to put up with being stretched frequently, and nothing else can go seriously wrong.
The challenge is that much less has to go right for the Angels for them to survive, and in many ways, they’re a lot better built for Stoneman to go make a move to improve the offense than the M’s, who need a left-handed bat and can’t get one.
And, of course, we neglect the A’s, who if history holds will shuffle some more pieces around and then come out of the All-Star break to rip off a 81-game winning streak to finish the season. It’d be nice, as an M’s fan, if they didn’t do that this year.
If the M’s get swept, they’re toast, because at that point it’s extremely unlikely they could make up that deficit.
If the M’s sweep, they’ve got a reasonable shot at it, but it’ll be quite a haul.
Batista starts the first game of the series tonight.
Game 46, Mariners at Royals
Swwweeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Swwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
Washburn v Perez. Hot cha cha.
Mariners offer
CF-L Ichiro
DH-B Vidro (~7 VORP!)
RF-R Guillen
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
3B-R Beltre
SS-R Betancourt
2B-R Lopez
C-R Burke
Kansas City’s lineup is a little wonky.
DH-R German
CF-L DeJesus
2B-R Grudzielanek
RF-L Teahan
LF-R Brown
C-R Buck
3B-L Gordon
1B-R Shealy
SS-R Pena
Brown hasn’t been hitting at all this year, and when he did, he was pretty much an AVG/OBP guy, but here he’s fifth. Their DH is batting leadoff, which is rare. Grudzie’s batting third – which in this lineup isn’t that unusual, but he’s not your normal #3 guy.
Q: How do you know your lineup sucks?
A: Mark Grudzielanek’s your best hitter.