Week #16 in Review
Short week. But the three-day vacation gives you all the more time to savor that four-game sweep.
Vital Signs
Wins: 39. Losses: 49. Games out of first place: 13.5.
Finishing off a four-game sweep of the Angels, the Mariners game a couple of games in the standings this week. But the A’s keep winning, too, which now leaves the Mariners 6 games away from 3rd place. According to third-order wins, the Mariners are unlucky by not quite 3 games. Still, only Tampa Bay and Kansas City have fewer 3rd order wins.
Runs Scored: 380 (last in the American League). Batting average: .257 (last). On-base percentage: .317 (last). Slugging percentage: .389 (last). Home runs: 65 (last). Bases on balls: 247 (8th). EqA: .262 (tied for 10th with the Blue Jays, mere fractions above the last place White Sox, A’s and Royals).
Runs allowed: 393 (8th). Staff ERA: 4.26 (8th). DIPS ERA: 4.83 (13th). Strikeouts: 451 (last). Bases on balls: 296 (12th). Home runs allowed: 96 (11th, tied with Twins). Starters ERA: 4.88 (12th). Relievers ERA: 2.96 (2nd). Defensive efficiency: 71.7% (2nd, tied with Oakland).
Nice way to close the first half of ’05, but in all honesty, it hasn’t changed much. It was the Mariners’ third victorious sweep of the season (the Royals and Mets being the other shameful victims), and scored in double digits in consecutive games for the first time. In fact, those two games represented the 6th and 7th times the Mariners had scored 10+ runs all season. (By comparison, the ’04 club scored 10+ runs only 3 times in the first half.) More amazing, in those 5 previous victories, the Mariners garnered a victory only once in the following game and averaged little over 3 runs in that next game. And against, what at the time was, the second best pitching staff in the league. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, I guess.
In a truncated week, the Mariners went 3-1, after dropping the first game of the Baltimore Orioles. They dominated their opponents on the scoreboard (26-16) largely due to some well-sprinkled fairy dust. Their oppoents hit more home runs (6-3), the Mariners drew no more walks (12) and accumulated no more total bases (57). Chalk this up to the small size of only 4 games.
Heroes
Richie Sexson went 4-for-13 (.308/.500/.615) with a double, a home run and 5 walks. With two outs in the fifth inning Saturday, Sexson clobbered a two-run double off John Lackey that scored the deciding runs in a 6-3 victory over the Angels.
Over the four games, the entire bullpen saw 11.1 innings of action and allowed just 2 runs. To be specific, J.J. Putz surrendered a Juan Rivera home run on Saturday and an infield single, walk and a run-scoring sac fly on Thursday. Even including Putz, the bullpen combined to allow 9 hits, while walking 6 and striking out 8.
Not-so-much Heroes
Someone’s hamstrings feeling better? Adrian Beltre is hacking away again, going 2-for-16 (.125/.176/.125) with 1 walk and 7 strikeouts. That’s a total of 14 outs in 17 chances at the plate. Randy Winn contribued 17 outs of his own in 20 times to the plate.
Thursday against the Orioles, Aaron Sele lasted 6 innings and allowed 4 runs on 7 hits and a walk. He surrendered home runs to Jay Gibbons (SLG .595 versus righties) and Sal Fasano (.404 career SLG). He did strike out 5, only the third time he’s done that all season.
Coming to a stadium near you
The Mariners next play three more against the Orioles in at Safeco Field. Then they travel to Toronto for a three-game set at Rogers Centre.
While the O’s started the second half with a win over the Mariners, they closed their first half 6-13. They have scored 436 runs, 4th in the AL, and allowed 412, 9th in the league.
Toronto has scored 428 runs, 5th in the league. They’ve allowed 384 runs, also 5th in the league. The Blue Jays lineup is exceedingly balanced without any sinkholes, but also plain vanilla average. Eleven Blue Jay hitters have logged 150 or more plate appearances. All but Aaron Hill sport an OPS between .707 and .806. And a Roy Halladay-less rotation means the Mariners will at least get a sporting chance of it.
You’ve got the wrong guy!
ESPN.com has a fluffy article about the Dept o’ Homeland Security busting up vendors hawking counterfeit merchandise (and “forged or illegally scalped tickets”).
So here’s what cracked me up:
“Our focus is not the individual vendor,” Moskowitz said. “It’s the criminal organizations behind the vendors. Those organizations are driven by greed, and anyone driven primarily by greed is dangerous to the public.”
Like Major League Baseball? Isn’t being driven primarily by greed the whole problem with capitalism in general (“I have a moral obligation to sell crack to schoolchildren if it’s legal in order to maximize shareholder value.”)
Not to mention, as Moskowitz put it, “The same methods used to bring counterfeit goods into this country can be used to bring in weapons, drugs or people.”
Wait, wait… so these methods they’re using to bring counterfeit goods into the country, along with weapons, drugs, and people… you’re going after the counterfeit goods? Could you please go after the other three? Because that’s what scares the crap out of me. Nobody’s going to blow up the Columbia Center with a fake Raul Ibanez jersey.
Now, I wouldn’t mind so much if they were busting all these vendors, tossing them in interrogation rooms and working their way up the system to close off those methods. But they’re not. If you read the rest of the story, they confiscate a lot of stuff but only make two arrests (though they “plan to question many vendors privately” which, uh, they could have done if they’d gone ahead and arrested them).
So what’s more… well: Read more
Game 88, Orioles at Mariners
Thank heavens, the game’s back on and — wait. RHP Daniel Cabrera v RHP Sele? Oooooohhhh.
Congratulations in advance to Rafael Palmeiro on some milestone hit. Boooooooooooooooo!
Bloomquist starts at short. So here’s a question– say you’re Mike Hargrove, and you believe in the hot hand, which is why you’ve been playing Bloomquist every day. How long of a break before you’d assume the hot hand was cold again? Would you try it? And how long does he have to be cold before you go back to not using him again?
And also, where’s Doyle? Fricking play him or let him get his hacks in at Tacoma.
On an unrelated note, Hargrove’s quote in the MLB.com (no link because of their stupid auto-play video clips) —
“I think a five-day break for the All-Star Game would be great. That way you could go home. This way, you spend two days traveling.” — Hargrove on the three-day All-Star break.
Please note how many players have kids in April. So something’s getting done. That’s all I’m going to say.
Those wacky A’s
Here’s what our division rivals are up to:
RHP Chad Bradford to the Red Sox for OF Jay Payton.
OF Eric Byrnes and something (SS Quintanilla) to the Rockies for LHP Joe Kennedy and RHP Jay Witasik.
It’s a weird set of trades, and I don’t think they’re done yet. Jay Payton wasn’t happy sitting on the bench (though he still got into 55 games this season) in Boston, but Oakland is still stacked in the OF even after trading Byrnes.
Kennedy’s another weird Oakland gamble. Maybe they see something they think is fixable, and he is only 26.
I can’t quite see how this helps them yet unless there’s one or two more deals to come.
Fun Friday Feature … on Thursday
From his new digs in San Francisco, former Mariner Omar Vizquel relaxes by painting. But he won’t do landscapes or baseball pictures, since those would block his path to inner peace. Or something.
Which is too bad: maybe he could airbrush the wrinkles off of Moises Alou and paint the Giants into the wild card race. So what, pray tell, does he paint?
[T]he walls and floors are covered with his works in progress: a tribute to the pope, a Christlike figure and a reclining nude.
No word on whether the reclining nude is one of the “Older Women For Omar.”
Gil Meche and the Marlins
Okay, my resistance to trade rumors lasted much of the day, and for that I am proud. It’s time now to eschew pride and bring you the latest.
The Marlins are shopping A.J. Burnett, who will be a free agent at year’s end. They’re in discussions with at least six teams, and today a name you might not expect came up: Gil Meche.
Don’t get excited: the Marlins are apparently looking at Gil in a potential side deal to replace a departing Burnett in the rotation if they deal him elsewhere.
It does not seem like the Mariners would be anywhere near the frontrunner to land Burnett anyway. The Blue Jays and Orioles are both wisely interested in adding a starter to help them compete this year, and others indicate that what the Florida Fish are really after is a reliever. (It’s surprising that Eddie Guardado isn’t mentioned as a target, but the Marlins apparently love Jorge Julio).
That’s not certain, since Gustavo Chacin is cited as the key to a possible trade with the Blue Jays … but then, nothing is certain in this sort of thing.
Alan Schwarz on Felix, trades
In case you’re wondering about whether people in other parts of the country are as excited about King Felix as you are, Alan Schwarz has an answer. One of the elements in his second-hald preview is “when will Felix get the call?”
The Mariners also get a mention as one of the sure sellers, but we’ve talked about trades enough lately.
Boone trade round-up
From the comments, many of y’all are aware of Batgirl, superior Twins blogger, and her entertaining site. Highly recommended.
Well, she has a good round-up of reaction to the Boone trade on her own site and a rather off-beat piece on Page 2. Check both out.
All-Star Game!
Ichiro vs. punks.
Sigh. Remember when we had a whole ton of players in the game? Good times.
Sirens and Sagan
In Carl Sagan’s sagacious tome The Demon-Haunted World, he bemoans “the siren song of unreason,” which humans follow to irrational conclusions about such matters as UFOs, fairies and the rally cap. Adherence to unreason, he says, is “not just a cultural wrong but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms.”
Mariner fans are as susceptible to unreason as anyone else, and more so in the case of Willie Bloomquist. He is our alien abduction, our siren song. Or at least he is for John Levesque, who once again is killing me.
The reason behind the Mariners’ sweep of the Angels, and the reason they’ve been playing .600 ball over the last 10 games (yes, I know), isn’t the resurgence of the team’s top-tier talent — it’s the scrappy, hustling, hometown boy. Why? No one can really tell, least of all the P-I’s former TV critic.
Apart from sprinkling magic pixie dust around the clubhouse, Bloomquist is said to bring a “spark” to the team. He is also, like David Eckstein, “making things happen.” In baseballese, these terms are equivalent to the French “je ne sais quoi,” which literally means “I don’t know what.”
And that’s what Levesque means: he’s sure Bloomquist is doing something right, but he isn’t sure what it is, and even if he was, he couldn’t prove it. Call it faith-based analysis.
Where Levesque does try to offer statistical support for his position, it gets surreal and frustrating, akin to teaching a desert tortoise about French philosophy.
For instance, Bloomquist has had only 100 at-bats this season, but he has scored 15 times. Only Sexson, the team’s designated slugger, and Ichiro, the designated hit machine, score more often per 100 at-bats (17.8 and 16.5 times, respectively).
Calling this laughable is like saying Carrot Top isn’t: so obvious it’s hardly worth doing. But let’s endeavor.
Pinch-runners aren’t charged with at-bats, but they do score runs. Bloomquist is the team’s pinch-runner, and has scored two of those 15 runs as such. Plus, the statistic is flawed anyway: Sexson drives himself in with home runs, but other players have to rely on teammates to drive them in.
The forehead-slapping portion of the column, though, comes here:
Regardless, if Bloomquist provides those things that help the Mariners score 5.5 runs a game, as they have in their past 10, versus 4.2 runs a game, as they did in their previous 77, the Mariners’ brass should check their obstinacy at the clubhouse door and admit that maybe, just maybe, there’s something to letting him play every day.
Remarkably, there wasn’t anything to letting him play every day during the first nine games of 2004, where the Mariners went 2-7. Even more remarkably, no other potential causes for the offensive boost are explored in the column. Ten games is a blip on the seasonal radar screen, and it’s pure folly to credit any power surge to a player whose lifetime OPS is .670.
Confusing correlation with causality, drawing specious conclusions from a tiny sample size, and ignoring any contrary evidence — it’s as if Levesque hit the Logical Fallacy Pinata, and all the bits of flawed reasoning hit the keyboard at once.
This isn’t the first time Levesque has beaten this drum. It’s a pet issue for him, and that’s fine: we all have them. Even Carl Sagan admitted he’d be thrilled to find alien life out there, though he maintained that no real proof for such life currently existed.
But let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s say Bloomquist was geting on base at a .400 clip, but had scored fewer than 15 runs — 5 or so. Do you think Levesque would write a similar column, but use the argument “look, this guy has an incredible on-base percentage!” instead of this made up “run-scoring efficiency” hokum? I think so.
What that tells me is that the conclusions come first, and the rationale comes later. This style of reasoning is many things, but scientific it ain’t. Being reasonable means admitting to yourself when you want something to be true, and being honest with yourself when it simply isn’t.
It’s true, Bloomquist has hit well over the past few games. It’s also somewhat true, as Levesque says, that he “can play every infield and outfield position.” In the same vein, I can speak nine languages, if you don’t mind limiting conversations to “hello,” “where is the bathroom,” and “another beer, please.”
Every club needs a utility guy, a versatile type to fill the final slot on the bench. In that role, Bloomquist does fine.
These are the facts, though: Bloomquist has had more than 500 at bats, including long stretches of playing every day, to prove that he is a subpar major league hitter. He’s had about 1,500 minor league at bats that support the same conclusion. This is not a starter, not even for the Devil Rays.
Like Sagan, I would love to believe in mystical positive energy, mysterious keys to victory and Willie Bloomquist as an everday player. I would love to believe that rally caps matter. But the available evidence on this point wouldn’t satisfy Carl Spackler, let alone Carl Sagan.
This particular siren song thankfully doesn’t threaten our freedoms — but it does threaten the fate of the hometown nine. Plug your ears, and lash yourself to the deck if you have to. But resist.