Game 77, Blue Jays at Mariners
Dave · June 30, 2007 at 6:30 pm · Filed Under Game Threads
Batista vs Halladay, 7:05 pm.
M’s look to make it 7 in a row.
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Is Vidro playing tonight? He could really make some hay against Rice’s record if that’s the case.
Angels down by 3 runs in the 8th inning, Tigers lost, and despite the M’s struggles again Halladay he’s beatable this season IMO. GO MARINERS!
1. DH’ing and in the 2 hole.
Against Halladay, it’s going to be tough.
Raul Ibanez on the pre-game show saying “I really didn’t like” about his time as strictly a DH.
Sure is fun being a Mariner fan right now.
#2
Angels lost just now!
3: Ok, looks like Ichiro will be running tonight. Actually, if I remember…Halladay is not that good at holding runners on.
Tigers lost also.
And WFB playing 2nd base, batting ninth. Lopez, night off.
Over at lookout landing someone mentioned back spasms as the cause of Lopez’s absence. Is this true?
“And WFB playing 2nd base, batting ninth. Lopez, night off.”
I was wondering why the Under steamed 5%. Apparently sportsbettors know the value of WFB vis a vis a real MLB player. LOL!
Can Batista really throw 96, as Gameday is indicating?
ahaha Ichiro! Amazing!
That was a terrible bunt, but hey, it’s Ichiro.
Matt Stairs vs Ichiro isn’t even remotely fair!
Nice steal! Taking Turbo’s GIDP potential away.
Oh…he’s gotta run…stay out of the GIDP Ichiro!!!
at some point the league is going to figure out that Ichiro runs when Vidro comes up to bat ….
Best thing to do is run on the first pitch with Ichiro at 1st and Vidro up… especially against Greg Zaun. Well done.
god vidro is a waste of oxygen…
Not fair to bunt on an AARP member.
so, if Vidro were suddenly felled by some bad clam sauce, could Guillen & Ibanez alternate at DH, giving them both days to rest their various alments?
I see Hargrove’s inexplicable blindness to his corner OFers’ platoon splits continues…
once Ibanez is actually healthy, of course.
While it only got us one hit, we did make Halladay throw 20 pitches in that inning – not bad.
Who wins in a 100 meter dash: Frank Thomas or Turbo?
….and there’s a pizza at the finish line.
nice…
27
It would turn into a fist fight halfway down the basepaths…
And then Vidro would have a real injury for the DL…. “got his ass kicked by Frank Thomas”itis
#11 lopez has back spasms,
hey bako, “waste of oxygen”, were you referring to ron wright who went 0-3 in his mlb career, and managed to create six outs in those 3 at bats, or maybe it jesse foppert who you meant. certainly, vidro is no AL DH, but “waste of oxygen” seems a bit extreme even for you. actually, it might be tough to call any player who makes it to the big leagues, a “waste of oxygen”. hmmmmm, who might be an actual waste of oxygen ?
31: Thanks
Wow, lots of canadians in Safeco tonight judging by the boos on that call at first.
Apparently Mariners view a first-pitch ball as a gift which must be returned with a swing on the second pitch.
dave niehaus:
“That’s a fair ball”
… seconds pass as Broussard catches the ball on camera.
“HE CAUGHT IT! It left my field of vision”
roy doesnt look all that sharp. maybe the M’s can touch him…
damn it Vidro….
hey, at least he didn’t gidp
which mariners player would john gibbons be most likely to get into a fight with ?
**sigh**
Whoo.
Ichiro and Broussard each have 2 hits.
The Angels have a rally monkey. We have rally fries.
Meh.
Batista making some good pitches here in the 5th.
On the radio, Dave N is yelling at Rizzs for eating garlic fries in the booth
which mariners player would john gibbons be most likely to get into a fight with ?
I don’t know, but Hillebrand is available.
I’d like it to be Vidro, personally. No matter how that what happens in that case, the M’s come out ahead.
No popout!
wow
Woot! Betty!
Yuni! Vidro!
Good thing that throw home was off line.
That was almost as good as a suicide squeeze
Ichiro now leading batting championship
Ichiro = awesome
Ichiro is now batting .435 in June, with just an at bat or two remaining. Over the last 15 days Ichiro is batting .532.
these canadian announcers are saying that he was safe…he was out if kenji holds the ball…
I think the ump was calling him safe before he saw the ball come out. But you’re right bak, he was out if he holds the ball. Was a tough play though.
OK…. pay him whatever he wants… on pace for 100 RBI this season batting leadoff???? Hitting .435 this month??? Bow to Ichiro Seattle…
Decent game by Miguel, hopefully they don’t even think about sending him out there next inning. Green, Sherrill, Putz wooo!
Putz will not appear in the game today.
Well, anyone but Morrow wooo!
putz and morrow out tonight
Beltre wooo!
I hope this means Sherrill closing and not coming out against right-handers.
“on pace for 100 RBI this season batting leadoff????”
It’s never too late to brush up on your math skills…
ok ok…. I read 39 as 49… you got me… but I bet he’ll go to the break at 42-45 RBI and that is still Fing amazing as a leadoff hitter!
I fail to see why Miguel is still in the game.
Fan graphs already has O’Flaherty in the game.
Now they changed it to Green.
green is sooooo much better than having mateo in this role…NICE DP!
NICE!!
Gooooo wiffleball!
70 – I agree. Not enough to mention, when discussing where merit is due and why this season has gone so well so far, is that the team really turned it around when Mateo “punched” his ticket off the roster. That was a big step in morphing the bullpen from a gas can to a respectable outfit.
Hey Rumpelstiltskin (12) -
Yeah, Willie really sux vs. a real major leaguer, huh? At this point he’s had a hit and an important, perfect bunt sacrifice.
yeah, he’s terrible.
Please get the hell of his back. Thank you!
Actually, the M’s lost several worthless pitchers to injury, thereby making Grover look smarter (Reitsma, HoRam).
Vidro, Bloomquist, Weaver, Ramirez, and Batista are my sabermetric anti-heroes.
74: A hit and a sac bunt do not prove that a player is good.
What the FUNK just happened?
77-
Thank you.
People want to remember the good but forget the many, many bad times.
I root for Bloomquist to shatter all sabermetric probabilities.
78, ground rule double
Ground rule double by sexson, because the ball bounced from the right corner into the stands.
Broussard MONEY 4 for 4!
Letting Broussard hit against a lefty. Interesting. Or maybe there just isn’t anyone on the bench.
As I was writing that Ben got a hit.
Automatic double.
I like Vidro’s clubhouse presence.
Way to blow this one open. Against a lefty, even.
Ben Broussard: Trade bait Y/N?
85-
yep, too many people call them ‘ground rule’ doubles, ignoring what the term actually means. The ball getting stuck in the ivy in Wrigley? Ground rule double, ball bouncing over the fence, automatic double.
A hit and a sac bunt do not prove that a player is good.
They do if they are performed in a gritty manner.
75 – “Actually, the M’s lost several worthless pitchers to injury, thereby making Grover look smarter (Reitsma, HoRam).”
Also an almost worthless hitter, i.e. Ibanez.
Really, Grover has been helped enormously by strategic injuries to just the right (or really, wrong) people, forcing him to play the more productive guys.
88, Broussard should be DH’ing against righties, at a minimum.
mmm mmmmmmm grit
It is my understanding that Ibanez is not a worthless hitter, just a worthless outfielder and from what I understand Broussard isn’t much better of an outfielder.
rumple, those guys on the “under” just took a bath courtesy of the ignitor, kind of ironic.
Bloomquist RBI single? It’s a laugher.
Ibanez is in the downside of his career, with a huge year last year. Whether he is good enough to play depends on your projection of his decline and how fast you think it will be.
Ichiro made the final out in consecutive innings, gotta wonder how long it’s been since that’s happened.
Sorry if this is a repeat, but this needs to be passed on to Blowers.
He has to continue the “free fries” on the road. There will be plenty of fans in attendance when we go on the road, the Blowers has to contuinue to give out fries.
Again, sorry if this is old news, but somebody here has the power to reach Blowers and tell him to continue it on the road. It would be great to see those “fry signs” from visiting stadiums. They (other fans) would be clueless.
Even with two hits, Willie’s WPA tonight is negative.
@99 just now
Sims – Fries on the road?
BLowers – Why not?
Sims just asked him about fries on the road. That was fast.
Good, Blowers just said it, you guys get the word out fast.
Nevertheless Bloomquist is tonight’s sabermetric anti-hero of the game.
Even with two hits, Willie’s WPA tonight is negative.
I’m not extrememly famliar with the win probability stuff, but how is that possible? Is it because other guys on the M’s are having even better games?
they need to let green work the rest of the game to save the pen…never mind…
You nattering nabobs of negativity have made Willie F. Bloomquist my favorite player.
Willie belongs in the All-Star. His grit, his versatility, his speed and all around heady play make him the most underrated player in baseball.
I will brook no disagreement. You can have all your WPA (Willie Plays Again!) stats and put them in a pipe, and light em up!!
Get off his back, you stat geeks.
105, no. It means that he has done more to reduce the M’s probability of winning than he has of increasing it.
107
In the last few months I have developed a Stockholm Syndrome like loyalty to Hargrove, Vidro, Weaver, and Bloomquist.
So, no Putz in the 9th. Fortunately it’s not a close (or even a save) situation. But who do you bring in? Davis? Morrow until he walks the bases full? I’d like to see Sherrill, but I doubt Grover would do that.
Let’s see…
WFB should play every day
The M’s should trade Mateo for Griffey
The M’s should trade Ellison for Buehrle
Vidro is a great hitter because he can hit .300
Proven veterans are better than rookies
Small ball is the way to win
What did I forget?
Morrow will not pitch tonight either.
Isn’t Thigpen one of the Charlie Brown/Peanuts characters?
Just read this and substitute “Bloomquist” for “Eckstein.”
Maybe just let O’Fla finish out the game?
If your hits were meaningless to the outcome of the game and you whiffed when the outcome was still in doubt (ie in a relative high-leverage situation) you can have a “good night” and still be negative in WPA.
And sac bunts do not usually have a positive WPA.
OK, that makes sense. Thanks.
Nevertheless meaningless hits are still small victories for us Bloomquist sympathizers.
I don’t care if Adrian flails at pitches a foot outside. His defense is awesome.
95: I noticed and thought it was funny. Of course I haven’t been betting this year due to the UIGEA. I probably wouldn’t have thought it was funny last year
Paul, I can add to your list:
-Statistics are the only thing that matters in baseball. Why watch the game if you can crunch numbers instead?
-If a player who is statistically inferior has a good game, it’s an aberration, or he got “lucky,” or it was “against a weak team,” and soon he will regress to the statistical mean.
-If I use lots of acronyms representing various baseball statistics, I will sound very smart!
-Everyone who writes for this or any other blog is automatically smarter than anybody in the employ of a major league baseball team
Anything I missed?
Ditto on Beltre
119. Bloomquist’s average is up to .295.
74: You sound a little passive-aggressive. Either that or you’re WFB’s boyfriend. Anyways, sorry to pick on your hero LOLOL!
DiamondDave, this is a “stat geek” blog. I don’t think you’re going to enjoy yourself around here.
Sorry guys, but can someone tell me where on the net is in game WPA?
122-
You forgot one – people unwilling to adjust their perception of what makes a good player based on facts will make the same misguided assessments over and over and over.
http://www.fangraphs.com
Let’s hope that is a meaningless error.
Guillen is quite slow
Yeah, you guys got me. you’re all too smart.
I need to get out more.
FWIW, HoRam got shelled by Salt Lake…
7 in a row!
the victory train keeps rolling…weaver tomorrow? can the resurection continue?
I’ll take rally fries over a dancing monkey anyday.
Don’t forget the Angels lost, too, so we’re only 4 back now!
Fangraphs has WPA updated live (well, per AB).
“Willie belongs in the All-Star. His grit, his versatility, his speed and all around heady play make him the most underrated player in baseball.”
How do you say ‘troll?’
Don’t look now, but they’re one back in the wild card.
and 1 back in the WC…it’s on! bring up jones…trade for matt morris…playoffs guaranteed…
How do you say ‘troll?’
I read it as parody.
I think we’ll know when the Statheads have completed their takeover when, after a game, the announcer says something like.
“Well, Batista had a WPA of .141 today; he gets my game ball.”
Especially if that announcer is Joe Morgan.
I WANT TO BELIEVE
138: You have to know that DD is kidding!
Just back from the game tonight. What a blast. Sat in the 200 level and there were BJ fans all around – loud and pretty funny. Once the game started getting out of hand (from their perspective) they took it in stride and just shut up. This was the most I enjoyed an in stadium game in at least 5 years. The old feeling is back. I’m just miffed I didn’t get to see Survivorman pitch (my new name for JJ Putz). 11 games over .500 baby!
I really believe that the statheads on this site are far ahead of their time but I still can’t help but have a place in my heart for the willfully ignorant and the sabermetrically disadvantaged.
If you’re in the stadium in a game when Putz is warming up, make sure you go down to that bar behind the bullpen where you can look through the little peep-hole over the catcher’s shoulder. Watching a Putz fastball come in and smack the glove gives you a renewed appreciation of major league hitters. I’m not sure I could even catch one of those things, never mind trying to stand in against him. I realize there are plenty of guys in the majors who throw that hard, but still. It’s really impressive.
125: I’m not too sure that this is a stat-geek blog. There are a lot of us who enjoy this blog and all the diverse comments who are not statisticians. You just don’t hear from us because we are intimidated by the numbers.
144: Okay, if he’s kidding, then it’s pretty damn funny. I don’t spend that much time on this site. Nice work DD…
147: The peepholes look into the visitors’ bullpen, but you can certainly stand around the fence by the M’s bullpen…
btw–Blowers kept saying that Miguel had a fantastic game. He did? I counted 9 full counts, in trouble almost every inning.
You know, this is kind of weird, but: has any team been so helped by the unavailability of players as this year’s Mariners? You only have to look across the diamond, or down south a ways, to see teams that “coulda bin a contendah” if not for injuries and other lost players. The A’s and Jays haven’t been able to get their seasons going because so many key guys haven’t been in the game. And yet the Mariners have gotten better as they’ve lost guys who were on the opening day roster.
Mateo gets taken out of Hargrove’s hands, forcing him to play the kids (and actually manage a bullpen instead of mindlessly expecting a flyball “veteran” to get a groundball out and failing over and over). The worst pitchers in the rotation get hurt (or, in Weaver’s case, “hurt”) and again Hargrove has to juggle things and play the kids. Ibanez appears to have fallen off the age cliff everyone has been predicting, but then he gets hurt which forces Hargrove to remember that Broussard is on his bench, just waiting to get enough ABs in a row to remind people why he was worth trading for.
Heck, the team was even helped by having Hargrove be unavailable thanks to his daughter’s graduation, allowing MacLaren to remind everybody that they practice squeeze punts in ST for a reason, and there’s more than one way to construct a lineup.
Well as usual my attention span is so short that the best I can get is a superficial outlook on the results of the game so I just assumed that Batista did pretty good but I am sure the numbers reveal that he sucked as usual.
Batista walked 5 guys in 6.1 innings. No way that’s a fantastic game for a pitcher, no matter how few of those guys actually scored.
153-
5 walks and 5 hits in 6+ innings isn’t a good job, but the cursory glance at 1 ER will make people think he did.
Batista threw just 59 strikes in his 114 pitches. There are words for that, but I don’t think “fantastic” is one of them.
So if pitcher can give up 1 ER in 6 innings and have a not good outing, does that also mean a pitcher can give up 4 ER in 6 innings and have a good outing?
Doesn’t the end result of a preformance take into account somewhere? Somebody work the stats to show that the Yankees are the best team in baseball.
The end result can be positive, even if the contributing factors were negative. That results based conclusion of performance will get you nowhere fast.
In terms of WPA, Batista was the top contributor. Granted, that is a game-by-game stat, so it means little over the course of a season. These kind of performances aren’t sustainable, but he did the job today.
As has been said many times, the ability to strand runners is not a repeatable skill. However, I will say that the BJ line-up helped a great deal…they have some serious holes, and Batista (whether intentional or not) exploited them. See e.g. Greg Zaun.
So then, it is possible for a team to go 0-162 never winning a game and still be the “best” team in baseball?
and it is also possible for a team to go 162-0 never losing a game and at the same time be the worst team in baseball?
160: no and no…but it is possible for a team to win 116 games and win just one game in the ALCS.
161
And its possible for the LF on that team to have multiple wives and tall stories about allegedly playing football for SC
157: There’s a difference between an individual result (1 ER) and individual performance (walks) that might point to expected performance in future games.
as far as batista goes, no, walking 5 guys in 6 innings is not generally a way to give your team a chance to win, because after all guys, that is the goal of the starting pitcher, to pitch well and give your team a chance to win
but, none of the walks were lead off walks, which is a very good thing, and his fb to gb percentage was somewhat decent
no, no baseballs are going into the hall of fame thrown today, but i’ll take the results every single time; even if the chances of doing it like that again are slim.
Five walks and five singles will rarely hurt you badly unless they all come together in a bunch. It’s pretty easy to scatter those over six-plus innings and not give up much.
What was Batista’s OPS against?
BA = SLG = .208
OBP = .345
OPS against = .553
That’s never going to hurt you much.
Oh yeah, isn’t it the brains trust around here who say that WHIP is a crappy stat (almost the crappiest of crappy stats)?
So stop using it against Batista.
and Blow is an ex-player.
If you win the game, the pitcher musta been fantastic
162: Its also possible that the mendacious player you speak of be the only one to get a hit during a playoff game against his team at home.
Batista was certainly good enough. I guess I just have a higher bar for “fantastic” than a lot of people here do.
Coolstandings now gives the Mariners a better shot at the division then the wild card, and a 26% playoff chance overall. Moving up!
Oh yeah, isn’t it the brains trust around here who say that WHIP is a crappy stat (almost the crappiest of crappy stats)?
So stop using it against Batista.
It’s crappy as a predictive stat. Used to evaluate a pitcher it’s not great, but at least it’s not misused. Try to keep up.