U.S.S. Mariner

Poof!
The broadcast of today’s game just showed a *brand new* seating section installed overnight. No joke: I was there yesterday, no seating section, and watching the game today, there it was. I have no idea how they pulled this off. It looks like it essentially replaces the beer garden, which would mean the team has [...]

Illustrated Whupping
For those of our readers who weren’t able to see the game today, here’s a quick visual reference for today’s game:

Also, you’ll note my experiments with adding comments didn’t get us comments yet. We’re not sure if it’s a feature we want to add, for a couple of reasons, but I still plan on giving it a whirl if I get over the technical/etc barriers. Or maybe setting up a forum (”I was a minor [...]

Depending on where you look, Meche or Franklin gets the start tonight (Meche in the vast majority of spots). Against the Orioles, will the obviously tired and worn pitcher look good, or is there a point where leaving pitches up means even the Orioles hit you? And I can’t find the possibly-magical phrase I posted [...]

On a non-Mariners note, how wacky is the NL Wild Card race right now? Houston, Philadelphia, Florida, St. Louis and Montreal are all tied for the lead, then you’ve got Arizona one game back and Chicago and LA only 1.5 games back. That’s 8 teams within 1.5 games of the top spot. As I’m fond [...]

The Veteran
by Derek Zumsteg, with help from Jason, and with obvious apologies to Poe
Once upon a game day bright and sunny, while the Mariners took fan money,
As I puzzled working over statistics like a drunk sophomore,
While my thoughts grew thick, there came a sound quick,
Like scratching of a great bird, on my office door.
‘Tis the [...]

So.
Out of first place for the first time in just over four months.
What is there to be done? It’s been a total collapse this month. The pitching staff has a 4.71 ERA for August, though to me that really doesn’t explain how bad things have been — the five starters have a collective ERA of [...]

On the fleeting nature of random stats: while I reported here earlier that Baseball Prospectus’ Postseason Odds Report had the M’s winning a playoff berth what, 80% of the time, they’re now down to a 41% chance at the division title and a 20% chance at the wild card, which means there’s a 40% chance [...]

Just as a service note, I’m screwing around with possibly adding comments today. I’d add RSS, but it looks like it would require an additional investment of $ by me, and frankly, the in/out money ratio on this blog is currently running… well, I’m getting a “div 0″ error. So if you see a comments [...]

Somebody just posted on our comments section — hey! we’ve got comments! [ed. note: had] — about perhaps putting Soriano in the rotation to shake things up. I like it. I had been reluctant about this before, when things were going well and he was tearing it up in relief, but now it seems like [...]