Game 57, Mariners at Padres
After an off day, I hope you’re as excited to see some baseball my dear and unfortunately duped readers. Not exciting baseball (Lincecum in Oakland tonight!) but it has its charms:
Batista’s put together a string of not-disastrous starts since his May 12th drubbing at the hands of the Yankees. To compete, the M’s desperately need Batista to at least put up those kind of performances: get six innings in, keep the game under control. It may not be what they hired him on for, but they need the starting pitching to compete.
Fortunately, he’s up against the Padres, who are not a particularly good-hitting team. Even taking park effects into consideration, they’re not good.
Unfortunately, he’s up against Germano, who’s done quite well for himself so far. But the Mariners – they can hit this year. But then Germano’s right-handed, and the M’s aren’t as good against righties. Interestingly, though, the potential swap of Vidro-for-Sexson isn’t nearly the win it might seem. At least this year, while Vidro’s OBP v RHP (.339) is better than Sexson’s (.290)(ugh), Sexson’s decent power when he makes contact makes them a wash offensively. Even more interestingly, now that I look at those splits, is how badly Guillen’s done against righties. He’s hitting .240/.305/.367. That’s low. For a corner outfielder, too.
That’s likely not going to hang around: over the last three years, he’s hit righties better than lefties. Still, it’s weird to think that Guillen’s reasonable performance so far this year is due in such great part to his hitting left-handed pitching so well.
The really interesting thing, of course, is what happens if Hargrove, who seems somewhat bent on shoving Vidro, the team’s third-worst regular hitter (Sexson, Ibanez)(and it’s more like tied-for-second-worst, really), into the lineup, he may well do it at the expense of a lot of hitting and defense at third, less hitting and defense at second, or more or less a wash at first.
Which brings us to another point sometimes brought up in comments. Vidro’s 54 games into the year, he’s got 224 at-bats, 19 walks (11 GIDPs, 9 extra-base hits). At this point last year, Carl Everett had played in 54 games of 57, had 219 at-bats, 22 walks (5 GIDPs, 14 XBH).
Turbo: .290/.344/.357
Jurassic: .257/.338/.403
Carl Everett was, at this point in the season last year, having a better year than Jose Vidro is. You give up six points of OBP to get 43 points of SLG. At least Turbo isn’t quite as expens– ooooooh, right.
Lineups when they’re posted. I’m so excited to see them. Go for it, Hargrove! Be crazy!
Hot update! Hargrove chickens out! Buck-buck-ba-gaawwwwkkkkk! Isn’t baseball intended to be entertaining?
CF-L Ichiro!
2B-R Lopez
RF-R Guillen
LF-L Ibanez
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
3B-R Beltre
SS-R Betancourt
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In the Giants – A’s game, Randy Winn is playing 3B and Noah Lowry in RF. Weird NL ball.
Uh, CSG,
As much as Putz is kickin’ butt this year, Francisco Cordero is, like, that much better. Almost. Cordero’s ERA+BAA+WHIP combined is only 50 points below Putz’ BAA alone.
Er. 50 points above Putz’ BAA…
How is Pedro Feliz CATCHING and Randy Winn playing THIRD for SF?
From checking out the play-by-play, it would appear there was probably a collision at the plate that knocked the Giants’ catcher (who had come in as a pinch-hitter, so they were already on their backup). Feliz is thus their emergency catcher, and they had already used up the bench when the injury happened.
I realize that Cordero has been awesome this year, but he’s also very much been a small sample size monster this year. A .168 BABIP, 0.0% HR/FB rate, and 93.3% LB% is not sustainable.
405
Thanks. That does make sense. I noticed Lowery finished the game as their right fielder and that Bonds even had a stolen base.
Wacky stuff!
You guys realize that Brandon Morrow hasn’t allowed a run since April 20th?
Also, as good as Putz was last year, he actually outpitched his actual performance. A K/BB ratio of 8 with over 50% GB is absolutely dominant, and he’s pretty close to replicating that this season. Cordero’s not in the same class as Putz.
per Drayer, AB had a meeting with Hargrove after the game– the belief is that the (failed) bunt was not called by the bench
By the way, Putz’s WHIP is actually lower than Cordero’s (0.61 compared to 0.59).
Good tidbit, msb.
That bunt was so egregiously awful I figured Hargrove had to be behind it.
Morrow’s performance has been excellent thus far, I agree, but I don’t see him being able to sustain this level of dominance into the future. He’s walking almost 8 batters per nine, and he hasn’t given up a homer yet, despite being a strong flyball pitcher thus far.
Hey, nobody’s mentioning that we beat our hated rivals!
wow… fun game, but i’m hoarse from screaming for relief when Batista was still in with bases loaded. i mean, i’m not a major league manager, but neither is Grover Cleveland.
skipping the Weaver BP festival tomorrow but back out there on Felix Sunday! woooohoooo
Hey, we did beat our fierce regional rivals!
Batista’s a weird pitcher. He looked brilliant for most of tonight, then completely shit the bed. He’s done that for most of this season.
#416 – Let’s not forget how much Yuni’s error added to that. There were 2 outs in the 7th when Yuni committed his error. The runs came from there. I have no idea why Batista got 5ER last night, maybe I’m missing something, but it seems he shouldn’t have.
#417 I couldn’t agree more. It appears they gave the hitter a single on Yuni’s error (and then a throwing error to Yuni that let the runners advance). I know the scorer’s at home love to credit their guys with singles, but that looked like a textbook error to me. Batista should’ve only had 1 ER on his line for last night, but now it’ll just look like he had a bad game.
#418
AND that ump was really squeezing the zone. I think Batista got robbed a couple of times that inning.
Batista pitched fine again.
Baker notes that Tomo Ohka would be a cheap arm pick-up
I see that Mesa has returned to the Phillies, to get back to his former job of racking up those no-decisions for Moyer.
Yes, PositivePaul ERA, WHIP and BAA are all (to some degree) bogus stats that do not accurately predict future pitching performance and can’t be held to reflect past pitcher performance. Adding them up just gives us a larger useless number.
But Cordero’s still pretty darn good. Might as well throw him into the mix.
Agree on Ohka. I’d buy him, and also bring up Fierabend permanently; both of whom would replace Weaver and HoRam.
Anyone else sick of everyone glowing over how well Clemens pitched today? I’m sorry, but a guy who has a 4.50 ERA against the Pirates isn’t really worth $17 million. The Pirates average 4.13 runs per game, which means that Clemens actually was well below average against them.