Drew and Weaver sign
Minutes before the deadline last night, both Stephen Drew and Jared Weaver put their names on the dotted lines with the Diamondbacks and Angels, respectively. As expected, both settled for significantly less than they were demanding.
The interesting thing here, from the Mariners perspective, is that rumors continue to persist that a side aspect to the Drew deal was that Arizona agreed to draft one of Boras’ pitchers, likely Mike Pelfrey, with the number one overall selection. If Arizona passes on Justin Upton, it gives the M’s a shot at one of the two players they covet (Alex Gordon being the other), and significantly upgrades the draft potential for the M’s selection.
They are still just rumors, but the odds of the M’s getting Upton or Gordon went up significantly yesterday.
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.