If you’d told me Ibanez would hit two home runs off lefties in the first dozen games of the season, I’d have thought you were crazy. And yet I watched them both.
I thought of something yesterday I forgot to post. Like the Sports & Bremertonians guys, I’m not a big Jarvis fan, and I think that Melvin should have the bullpen phone and then a towel — an actual, real towel — and when he throws the towel on the field, that’s when Jarvis comes in. Any other reliever, he has to use the phone. Let’s not make this a subtle thing, no: let’s have Bed Bath & Beyond sponsor the towel and go all the way with this.
I agree with Dave about Garcia and his pitch selection. One of the great characteristics of baseball smarts has always been the ability to look at what a player can do and see how you make the most of that. Garcia’s not the model of a traditional power pitcher, and he never has been. That causes a lot of confusion, and a lot of people want to bang that peg into whatever hole they have handy.
Nice to see the team take a couple of walks, too.
Mariners-A’s for the first time in 2004 on a Monday night at Safeco Field, still one of the best parks to see a game on the planet. And it looks like there are about 14 people there. What, was it free colonoscopy night to the first 15,000 fans? Rabid dogs take over the city? Maybe a fight-til-the-death barista competition? It’s just weird to see that many empty seats at Safeco. From someone who is unable to attend, don’t take baseball at Safeco for granted. It’s still great entertainment, even if the M’s aren’t the team we would have built.
High horse aside, can we put to rest the “Freddy is a power pitcher” theory? Fairly and Niehaus are rambling about his great stuff at the moment, included a short interview with Melvin, and are discussing how he needs to setup his offspeed stuff with his fastball and be a true power pitcher. Freddy’s never been a power pitcher, and he’s never going to be one. His best outpitch is his changeup and he’s always thrown a lot of curveballs. Yea, his fastball hits 94 occasionally, but that is still his third best pitch. Live with it. He’s a finesse pitcher in a big body. If he was 5’10 and 180 pounds, even with the same repertoire, people wouldn’t peep about his pitch selection. Yet, since he’s a big guy and throws 94, he’s supposed to challenge with fastballs all the time. His changeup is a legitimate outpitch; don’t complain when he throws it alot.
And hey, now Ron Fairly is suggesting that the M’s should be “cautious” against the A’s early in explaining why its okay to throw lots of balls to the A’s. Balls = bad, strikes = good. This game isn’t nearly as complicated as the experts try to make it seem.
This just in, there are lots of great seats available for the next three games. It’s the Mariners and A’s, folks. Go buy them.
We’ve won two games in a row.
We hit three homers in one game.
Jamie Moyer had a phenomenal start.
Scott Spiezio’s back problems look like a thing of the past.
I’m really trying to convince myself that the team is showing signs of righting the ship, that these two wins are a sign of things to come, and the first ten games were still a meaningless slump. But you know, what, I can’t do it. Here are the facts of the first series win of the year:
The Mariners faced Chan Ho Park, Colby Lewis, and Ryan Drese in the three game set. Their 2003 ERA’s were 7.58, 7.30, and 6.85 respectively. If you were to make a list of the worst starting pitchers in the American League, all three of these guys would be contenders for the top spot. It is unlikely that the M’s will have another series all year long where they face such poor talent consistently. And they scored eight runs in those three games.
The last three games were certainly better than the first ten. But, in reality, we gave up just as many runs as we scored despite facing far inferior talent and running our two best starting pitchers at a line-up missing its best hitter. Yea, we won a series, but in reality, for a team that has playoff aspirations, they blew the best chance for a sweep they are going to see all year.
What a great game to be at. Pineiro didn’t look as strong as I heard he did when I got back (it’s always weird to hear the game distilled afterwards: what moments will become key to analysts and talking heads in retrospect, and how do those match up with what seemed important during the game?). He was deep in the count on a lot of batters, walked four. He did strikeout five and avoid the home run, though, which is good. The defense managed to trun about 2/3rds of the balls in play into outs, too, which was a welcome change.
Bloomquist’s continued hitting’s nice to see, even if I’m skeptical that it’ll be around that long. One of the more interesting things is that just as games are distilled into arbitrary key moments, so teams are distilled into key players and seasons into games. As the Mariners try and bring themselves back into contention after a start that at least partially has to be bad luck, contributions from guys like Bloomquist and Spiezio earn them reputations as catalysts* and sparkplugs.
Also, holy mackeral is Winn’s arm bad. When a runner headed towards third can get there, stop, and run back to second safely when your center fielder gets to a shallow fly, your center fielder doesn’t have much of an arm. Also, today was another of those fine kids’ innings (see this article) and today’s center fielder was Charlotte Zhao (I believe) who in running out deep into center field displayed more range than I think I’ve seen out of Randy this year. That’s not true, I know. I’m just bitter Cameron’s gone.
What’s weirder though is that on a beautiful Sunday afternoon game, the Mariners announced attendence was 35,182 people. Large chunks of the stands were empty. I was surprised, but last year they drew 35,000 for a sunday game (4-13) against the Rangers, and they’ll draw more fans later — this isn’t a sign that fan support has suddenly eroded during the slow start.
* catalysts when used in sports analogies is almost always completely wrong. To be way too simple, a catalyst is something that by its presence allows something else to happen but itself remains unchanged. It’s commonly used as ‘someone who makes something happen’ but a catalyst takes no active role. If the team won more with bench coach Rene Lachemann was present while the coach did nothing those games, that’d be a catalyst. **
** I know I’m way too picky about word choices
Tampa Bay playing the best outfield defense (see Derek’s post below) isn’t a huge surprise, if you think about it — they’ve got three centerfielders out there in Rocco Baldelli, Carl Crawford and Jose Cruz, Jr. They’re also playing in — I think — a park with a pretty small outfield, so there’s less ground to cover in general.
And… wait for it… M’s win 4-1. Very strong performance by Moyer tonight, who certainly needed one after two bad outings to start the year. Who knew Scott Spiezio would make such a difference?
Oh, and I just updated the Big Board. Spiezio activated, Putz back to Tacoma. I think that’s it.
When Statistical Analysis Wanders Around
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A post
Is our outfield defense really bad?
As of yesterday, the Mariners staff gave up 111 fly balls (and 116 ground balls) making them (weirdly) the most extreme ground-ball staff in baseball so far, with a G/F ratio of .8. The outfield made 61 putouts, which works out to a putout/flyball rate of .534. That’s fifth-worst in baseball, behind Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Kansas City, and Anaheim. The best OF defense so far seems to be played by Tampa (!) whith a ration of .833 putouts for every fly ball.
That’s all amusing and all, but there doesn’t appear to be any significant correlation between that metric and the number of runs a team allowed. So I looked at the rate of non-HR extra-base hits allowed by a team… and the M’s are getting killed. 4th-worst in the majors, behind Arizona, Pittsburgh, and Anaheim. But that didn’t correlate well with my scraped-together OF metrics, either. It’s late, so I’m giving up on putting some numbers behind outfield defense.
So on to some other good random stuff. The Mariners pitching as it ranks among all teams. Good would be 1 of 30, bad 30 of 30
Hits as a % of total batters faced: 27.2%, 29 of 30th
BB as a % of total batters faced: 7.2%, 6th of 30
K as a % of TBF: 15%, 12 of 30
Non-HR XBH: 6.5% of all batters facing the Mariners are getting extra-base hits, 28th of 30
HR as a % of batters faced: 3.2%, 18th of 30
Here’s another good overall defensive number to throw out there: doubles and triples as a % hits. The Mariners last year almost took non-HR extra base hits out of the game. This year 9.7% of hits are doubles and triples.
These aren’t all bloop singles that are dropping in front of Randy Winn. The team’s pitching has been decent — you can see that in things they control (BB/K/HR) they look okay. It’s the insane number of balls in play that are going for hits and extra-base hits at that that’s really killing this team.
If you were still on the fence about how good this team is right now, we just got shut out by Chan Ho Park.
Worse, I have a feeling that this lack of offensive spark will cause Melvin to shift away from Olerud in the two hole, which I really like, and think is one of the best strategical moves he’s made in his year plus as a manager.
Rangers at Mariners
(ahhhh, refreshment)
Friday, 7:05, RHP Meche v RHP Park
Saturday, 7:05, LHP Moyer v RHP Lewis
Sunday, 1:05 RHP Pineiro v RHP Dickey (?)
Also, the M’s should make as many early-season games afternoon as they can. Thank you for your consideration.
I dug up an URL I mentioned in the Seattle Feed, Michael Crichton on speculation (“Why Speculate“). It’s an interesting bit of thinking and I come back to it a lot when tossing over things to write about (and may be why I’ve done a lot less weird speculative columns since I read it). Its easily transferable to sports coverage, too, so check it out. For all the guessing we do at what the season’s going to turn out like, nobody has any clue. Dave and I can argue over why the team’s gotten off to a poor start, but neither of us can tell you whether they’ll play bad defense all year, or if this is a fluke.
Quick note — it appears Gustavo Martinez, who started last season as a reliever but finished as a starter, has taken the San Antonio rotation spot vacated by Glen Bott; new Big Board reflects this (and also has minor league links for Scott Spiezio and Rafael Soriano). Martinez gets the start tonight for the Missions.
Blogger is weird. I can see the posts in the queue, but not on the site. Oh, the joys of free software. At this rate, you may see this sometime Saturday.
Rafael Soriano pitched 4 solid innings for IE last night, and normally A-ball hitters would be relieved when the rehabbing major league fireballer is finally removed. Unfortunately for Bakersfield, the reliever was Felix Hernandez, who went 5 innings, gave up 2 hits, no runs, 2 walks, and 10 strikeouts. From Soriano to King Felix? That’s just evil.