Game 50, Blue Jays at the Mariners
LHP Lilly v LHP Moyer. 7:05, FSN.
Mariner bullpen usage
by day, by batter faced, with 10+ as + to preserve formatting
[Derek note: deleted for formatting reasons]
Organized alphabetically. Names and dates removed for pattern-scanning ease, though they’re still alphabetical. I had this done up in Excel with conditional formatting, but I could never get it to look quite right.
Olivo down, Rivera up
Miguel Olivo has been sent to AAA Tacoma. Rene Rivera will replace him on the roster. Though this was rumored, I’m still somewhat surprised, since you have to anticipate that Rivera will effectively become the everyday catcher. Unless another move to acquire a more experienced catcher is in the offing …
Quoth Bill Bavasi: “We have, in no way, given up on Miguel.” Let me think of a positive spin to this news: Now Olivo can work on his chemistry, pitch-calling and developing “veteran leadership” in tandem with King Felix.
Non-smoking establishments
Hey, I have to take some high-falutin’ noble to a game this week, and he’s insisting that cigarette smoke upsets his delicate constitution. This rules out many of the cheap-beer bars that tolerate me. Does anyone have suggestions for decent non-smoking bars/restaurants within walking distance of Safeco that we can patronize?
I’d like it to have good beers on the cheap.
News tidbits
Time/PI notebook watch: Borders, Bloomquist may get more and more of the playing time (Borders, presumably, until he stops hitting, Bloomquist, relative to Wilson Valdez, is probably a better choice anyway).
This leads to a problem we saw in yesterday’s game: because the bench is so thin (and bad), if Bloomquist is the 4th outfielder, playing him at shortstop means that if they need a replacement OF, they either have to move Ibanez out of the DH slot (forcing the pitcher to bat) or move Bloomquist into the OF, and Valdez takes over at short. If you pinch-hit for Bloomquist, it’s Ibanez or more juggling that ends up with someone in the outfield who shouldn’t be there.
I know that seems like another of the more trivial problems of the team, and it is — it doesn’t matter if they can’t easily sub a left fielder in if they’re down by 8 — but it’s a good example of how carrying 12 pitchers and having such an inflexible bench hampers the manager, and the team’s, ability to adapt.
We’ve seen Reed start to hit lately, but even the balls that are dropping are part of a pattern: he’s been pulling almost everything to right field. If you look at his MLB.com hit charts, you can see there’s a huge skew, to the point that you could take the left-fielder and play him shallow behind first-and-second or play really shallow and then shift the infield heavily.
Players can be productive like this, but the problem will come if this is an exploitable flaw in his swing. If teams find that he can only ground out weakly on pitches in, where he can’t get the bat around, that’s all he’ll see.
Reed was my pick as AL Rookie of the Year. There’s still time, but I’d feel a lot better about this if he was hitting to all fields. Or even two fields.
From Gammons:
(on mid-season trades for pitching)
Just as in late July if Barry Zito, Kip Wells, Kevin Millwood, Jason Jennings and Joel Pineiro are available.
That’s an interesting thought, but thie requires a team to look at Pineiro and see something they can fix and something worth an expensive two-year gamble. I don’t see anyone taking that unless he shows he can be consistent with his new lower velocity and that he can do well with it. If a team’s going to deal for pitching help, they’re going to be looking for help, and probably someone who can fit in the first three slots of the rotation if they head towards the playoffs.
Remember Ryan Anderson, the 6-foot-10 “Little Unit” and former no. 1 pick of the Tigers? The Brewers recently signed him out of an Arizona independent league, and he had a four-strikeout inning debut
The Tigers?
Hall of Fame trip
I had Friday off of school, so I made my first-ever trip to the Hall of Fame. It’s a nice day trip from here, about 2.5 hours each way of pleasant driving through the Catskills. Incidentally, I found a great baseball fan litmus test for anyone living in this area. This week at school people were talking about their weekend plans (we have a four-day weekend, Friday off for a day between blocks and Monday for Memorial Day). I told people I’d be going to Cooperstown on Friday. You can tell a baseball fan right away, because the face lights up and they say something like, “oh, that’ll be awesome.” Non-baseball fans who know the town say, “Yes, that’s a very nice little town.”
I spent a little more than three hours taking it all in. It reminded me of watching Ken Burns’ Baseball back in the day — you really have to search to find something, anything, about the Mariners. There’s a Mariners jersey display, which all teams have. The M’s are listed on Gaylord Perry’s plaque. You can scan various displays to find out that Ken Griffey Jr. won an AL MVP award, or that Edgar Martinez won two AL batting titles.
Of course there’s the Ichiro 262 display, which is pretty hard to miss. Derek talked about this before, and it’s pretty darned cool. Bats, gloves, sunglasses, the “Ichi-meter” fan sign from Safeco, it’s all there in a very nice glass case. But, sadly, that’s the only thing that screams “Mariners.” I guess that’s fair, given the team’s place and relative youth in baseball history.
Going on a weekday before school’s out was a good way to go. It wasn’t emtpy, of course, but there were far fewer people there than I expected. There were no fights to see displays or long lines, nothing like that. The biggest annoyance was finding a place to park, as all the street parking nearby is two-hour limit.
All in all, it was a very good time, and I highly recommend every baseball fan make it to Cooperstown at least once. I also suggest, as was suggested to me, that you go by yourself the first time if at all possible. I had been planning to take my son, but I’m glad I didn’t, because there’s no way he would have put up with three hours of looking around. I’m sure we’ll make it up there at least once before I’m done with school, though, when he’s old enough to get something out of it.
Game 49, Mariners at Devil Rays
RHP Joel Pineiro v RHP Doug Waechter. Televised on FSN and FSN-HD.
Normally, I’d try to offer some kind of interesting tidbit or something to think about, but only a couple minutes ago I made it back from a 75-mile bike ride, and I’m all grimy, euphoric, cold, and in pain, so I have some things to tend to before the game starts.
I think Pineiro is seriously injured, and he’s going to have Tommy John/rotator cuff surgery before the season’s over. If he doesn’t go under the knife, he’ll go through the season without improving at all from the wild, erratic-velocity Pineiro we’ve seen so far. I have no inside information or medical background, so feel free to discard that prediction.
Game 48, Mariners at Devil Rays
RHP Aaron Sele v LHP Tony Fossas. Casey Fossum, sorry, sorry. 3:15, radio only.
It’s a stunning day out. No television coverage, Sele coming off a complete-game start… even if you don’t get out to enjoy the sun, take the radio out in the backyard, or on the balcony, enjoy a beer or some iced tea. And please, don’t tell anyone outside of Seattle how nice it’s been this week.
Also: if you’re reading this outside of Seattle, it’s been nasty here. You get so used to the horrible weather that you can’t handle a sunny day with temperatures over 70. It’s awful. Don’t move here. Thank you.
Jeff, by the way is here.
Game 47, Mariners at Devil Rays
RHP Gil Meche v LHP Mark Hendrickson. 4:05, FSNW for TV.
Also, since this gets asked every game thread — it’s Darnell Coles in the booth with Rizzs.
This series appears like it’s perfectly timed. After a brutal schedule against other AL East teams, finally a rest against a patsy. The Mariners are 18-28, we’ve got a rotation that’s in deep trouble, a bunch of automatic outs in the lineup, and the big question is whether there’s a 2004-style dismantling in the team’s near future. You would think that Tampa would be a tonic for this battered squad.
It’s not so simple. Park-adjusted, the Devil Rays offense ranks 7th in the majors, the Mariners 24th. Their pitching, though, has been awful awful awful. If you think the Mariners are bad, the Devil Rays are giving up another full run each game, and even if you want to give Safeco some credit, there’s no way that gap isn’t wide. And their starters — 5.82 ERA, 38 HR in 48 games and 262 IP. 129 walks to 151 strikeouts. That their bullpen (4.95 ERA) offers any improvement is a horrible comment on how bad their pitching’s been.
However, particularly relevant to tonight’s matchup, the current Mariner splits
v. LHP: .225/.285/.334
v. RHP: .254/.312/.388
Last time I looked at this, I suggested that opposing teams should consider calling up anyone left-handed from their AAA teams to make spot starts against the Mariners. At this point, I would consider having my right-handed starters throw left-handed to turn the Mariners into the harmless (but cute) basket of kittens that shows up against southpaws.
The counter-argument, of course, is that the team can’t hit either way. 30 points of OBP? Who cares? Have the right-handed groundskeeper relieve, they’ll get themselves out.
Or, to put this another way: against left-handers, the Mariners are nine Royce Claytons, hoping to be nine Adam Everetts. They’re nine Kazou Matsuis.
Against right-handers, they’re nine Chone Figgins. Sure, there’s a bump in OBP and a bigger bump in power, but it’s the difference between a team that scores three runs runs most games (3.3 average or something similar) and possibly four, five a game (Chone Figgins has a RC27 of 4.6, which isn’t the best comp, but it’ll do). One’s awful and the other’s below average, so your choice is “is this lefty’s ERA more than a run and change over the right-hander I was going to spot here?
If you’re Tampa, it’s unlikely any left-handed option would be that bad, given how awful their starters are. I’d throw a left-handed kitchen sink at the Mariners if I was them.
More Beltre depressingness
Nate Silver, at Baseball Prospectus (subscription article), looks at players who are blowing away or hugely underperforming their PECOTA projections. Beltre’s one:
Beltre’s revised EqA estimate is at .263, which is almost exactly at the baseline he’d established between 2001 and 2003, when his growth appeared to have stagnated. I see absolutely no reason to take anything other than the Occam’s Razor explanation: Beltre’s 2004 was one of the biggest one-year flukes in baseball history.
Owwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Super-reader Paul Covert notes in the Week 9 review comments that
Hardball Times’ Batting Stats show Beltre with an above-average Line Drive Percentage of .207, which suggests that he’s been hitting better than his numbers show thus far. Unfortunately, Reed’s LD% of .118 is much less encouraging.
I still want to believe there’s hope. But having spent some quality time looking for signs of hope while writing the PI bit, I haven’t been able to take the leap. His performance so far’s been so abjectly bad it’s like I’m entirely turned around from my previous burning optimism about the signing. When you’re hoping he’ll come around to have a season that’s merely bad, that’s tough.
Week #9 in Review
Legend has it that REM’s 1991 album was named one afternoon when the record label got sick of waiting for the band to come up with a title. Drummer Bill Berry picked up the phone, nodded, looked to his bandmates and said: “we’re Out of Time.”
This morning, so was Peter White, who tapped me to put the finishing touches on the post you are currently reading.
“Jeff,” he says. “I’ve got this almost done, but I have to leave the country on secret business. The post is basically finished. It just needs some spicy color.”
“Peter,” says I, “this looks fine to me as is. And besides that, color, being a visual concept, cannot possibly be ‘spicy.'”
He was most insistent. So I agreed. And as payment for my agreeance, I get the best of all possible worlds: Peter does 99 percent of the work, I add a sentence or two, and I get to play off anything you don’t like with “oh yeah, Peter wrote that part.”
Hope you enjoy. If anything tastes spicy or looks colorful, that was me.
Vital Signs
On this Friday we find the Mariners 18-28. First the good news: The Mariners are not in last place. Now the bad news: They slipped another game-and-a-half behind the leader. They are now 8.5 games behind the Rangers and Angels. The Rangers have been feeding off perhaps the weakest part of their schedule at taken 6 in a row from from Houston and Kansas City. If you think the Mariners aren’t doing so hot, you should check out the Astros and Royals. Yech. And on another positive note, according the third-order
wins, the Mariners are 2 wins behind where the Mariners should be.
The offense ranks 12th in the league, scoring 189 runs, just one behind the Angels and Royals. Their 33 home runs rank 13th in the league and their 127 walks rank 9th in the league. Meanwhile, their .306 on-base percentage ranks 12th and their .376 slugging percentage is also 12th.
The defense has allowed 215 runs, ranked 8th in the league. The gloves are turning 71.2% of balls in play into outs, good for 2nd in the league. The pitching staff is looking league average, with an overall ERA of 4.53. The starters have been well below average with a 5.23 ERA, while the bullpen has remained a strength with a 2.97.
So basically, the team’s strengths boil down to “can catch the ball” and “can usually get outs late in games.” Those are good things, but unless they are complemented with “can hit rotating horsehide spheroid to an uninhabited locale between white lines,” they’re looking at a whole lot of weeks like this one.
It was a 2-4 week. Things looked sharp at the beginning of the week as the Mariners took 2 of 3 from San Diego. However, that Baltimore series was just brutal. Overall, the Mariners were outscored just 20-16. They were out-homered 6-4 (I could have sworn Rafael Palmeiro hit more home runs than that) and out-walked 18-11. But check out that .265 OBP. The M’s were making outs like they were going out of style.
On the minus side, all the free-swinging from players that can’t hit is driving Mike Hargrove crazy. So crazy that he’s already pled in the media for his hitters to be more selective. On the plus side, at least they’re losing quickly, so if Hargrove enjoys golf, he can get in more of it on the road.
Heroes
Jeremy Reed finally had the week we’ve all been waiting for. He led the team hitting .368/.429/.632 with a pair of doubles and his first major league home run. Reed was promptly rewarded by a caller to Thursday’s postgame show suggesting the M’s bench him in favor of Doyle.
[As a sidenote, there is no more depressing spectacle than listening to the postgame show on radio. It’s like a netherworld of random opposite-of-true observations. Sometime, I will endure one, in the interests of science, to document the atrocities in a post. Maybe we’ll ask Evil Rick Rizzs to liveblog it.]
Proving that even blind squirrels can find nuts, Aaron Sele pitched 9 scoreless innings last Friday against the Padres. Of course, his defense played a large part by making 24 of those 27 outs for him.
The next time you get down on this rotation, consider this: how bad would they be performing in front of a below-average defensive team? Then shudder.
Not-so-much Heroes
I’ve been thinking about writing a post about how I can no longer for Bret Boone as an All-Star with a good conscience, and this week gives me more reason (not that one single week should make or break an All-Star). He went 3-for-22.
To think that, just a year ago, Mariner Musings mused about Boone’s Hall of Fame chances.
True, we concluded “Slim and none — and slim just left town.” But watching Bret treat ground balls like the Corbin Bernsen character in Major League makes it seem stunning that the question was ever raised.
Shigetoshi Hasegawa hadn’t made an appearance in over a week. It showed Thursday night as he pitched one inning and gave up a 2-run home run to Miguel Tejada in the 8th inning, essentially ending the game.
Remind me why we have a 12-man pitching staff, but no right-handed bench bat that wouldn’t be better off just praying for a walk.
Coming to a Stadium Near You
On the road to Tampa Bay. Yeah. Back to Seattle for Toronto.