Game 108, Red Sox at Mariners
This should be a good time. Matsuzaka v Washburn? Possibly the best team in baseball against a hot M’s team struggling to put themselves into contention — sign me up.
Daisuke v Jarrod!
Daisuke: 144 IP, 133 H, 15 HR, 50 BB, 142 K
Jarrod: 129.1 IP, 137 H, 10 HR, 42 BB, 69 K
And one of them pitches in Fenway, the other in Safeco.
Jones and role-playing
Hi all.
There’s been a lot made of what the team intends to do with Adam Jones, who is awesome, and whether they’re going to play him all the time, some of the time, never, or what. McLaren’s made some comments, and whatever.
Here’s the thing: what McLaren, or Bavasi, or anyone, says about the team’s plan should be discarded immediately. The only thing we should pay attention to in the next few weeks is when Jones actually plays, and how he does.
We know a couple of contradictory things: McLaren’s been spouting about how little he intends to use Jones. But despite McLaren’s comments, they didn’t call Jones up to play him once a week, or use him as a defensive replacement to carry the destroyed legs of Ibanez/Guillen. McLaren’s clearly also trying to manage the veterans, who haven’t been hitting or fielding, as best he can, which would prevent him from exposing plans to fit a full-time player in the roster. And yet the team’s trying to get into the playoffs for the first time after years of entirely unsatisfying play, and if Jones is playing well and clearly helping them at that, they’ll play him even if the plan really was to have him play twice a week, which it isn’t.
We’ll see. Jones did well last night, so they’ll probably throw him another start as soon as they can figure out a pretext to do so (rest someone on Sunday, say) and then if he’s still on fire, they’ll throw him playing time in Baltimore. His path is obviously made clearer if he’s tearing it up, and then McLaren will go in front of reporters and say “What can I do, the kid’s made a spot for himself, everyone likes winning,” and shrug.
You don’t have to have faith or lack faith in the front office at this point. Complaining about playing time they haven’t had a chance to not allocate to him yet isn’t useful. Let’s wait and see how this plays out, and we can dissect the statements later.
J.D. Pruitt, strange outcome player
J.D. Pruitt plays for the Vancouver Canadians, Oakland’s Northwest League affiliate. He came out of the University of Montevallo, he’s listed as a 5’9″ outfielder who weighs 195, born in 1985, so he’s 22 in short-season ball.
He’s hitting .187/.466/.271.
Pruitt, in 36 games and 107 at-bats, has 20 hits, 1 2b, 1 3b, 2 HR, 31 walks, and 43 K.
“But Derek,” you may be thinking, “that’s only a .370 OBP.”
Aha! The problem, and what’s not showing on his stats page, is that Pruitt’s been hit by (if I caught this correctly) 25 pitches so far this season, on his way to destroying the Northwest League record.
He’s been hit by 5 more pitches than he has hits.
Supposedly, and I haven’t seen it, he doesn’t have the Valle lunge or the Biggio armor-and-lean. He doesn’t move, and at that level the pitchers are wild enough that it means you get plunked all the time doing that.
But I want to just ponder this for a second, the weirdest outcome player ever. Each time he comes to the plate, here’s the odds:
10% it’s a single (12% total for any hit)
15% he’s hit by a pitch
20% he walks
26% he strikes out
.187/.466/.271
If you pay attention to the low minors, you see some strange things.
Dave on KJR
Here’s your weekly reminder that I’ll be on KJR today at 2:20 pm with Groz. You can listen live here. Hopefully, I still have something of a voice left after last night after about eight solid hours of talking at the first USSM/LL event.
Slate on Ichiro
It’s Adam Jones Day!
Hopefully.
I saw one of Adam Jones’ three games in Everett back in 2003 (which is a fine reason to go check out Aquasox games). I’d heard that his eventual position was on the mound, so I was more interested in seeing his arm than anything (also on that 2003 team, Felix Hernandez). And he had a cannon for an arm that fired rockets with lasers on them.
I left interested, wondering how things would turn out, and followed his progress as his hitting skills seemed to improve at every level. Last year I got to see him again, as he made the transition to the outfield, saw how quickly he was coming around to being a good defender, especially considering he’d only just converted, and it made me happy.
We saw him struggle in his call-up, when he didn’t hit and Hargrove decided he didn’t like the rough defense he saw, so he was going to get squeezed for playing time. Jones’ 2006 line was a poor .216/.237/.311, and I think that did a lot to dim his star in the eyes of general M’s fandom. I heard that his hot start in Tacoma might have been a fluke, and whatever else.
But here’s the thing: Jones was 21 last year. He hit .287/.345/.484 in Tacoma. This year, he went on to show that it wasn’t a fluke, either:
2006: .287/.345/.484
2007: .314/.382/.586
The only thing that didn’t take a big step up was his plate discipline: Jones attacks the ball. He doesn’t walk that often (though his rate’s not horrible) and he strikes out a lot. But when he makes contact, the ball goes places in a hurry. 44% of his hits so far this year have been extra-base hits. 44%!
Look at his ISO (isolated power, SLG-AVG) which will serve us decently here: it’s .272. If he put up a .272 ISO in the majors, he would be one of the ten best, behind Miguel Cabrera (.279), Barry Bonds (.277) and Justin Morneau (.276).
And, unlike somebody like, say, Prince Fielder, or Adam Dunn, other guys who hit for that kind of power, he’s a good outfield glove.
Yeah, so… Have I mentioned I’m a huge fan? I love watching the way Jones plays.
We’ll see if he can translate his steady impressive hitting progress into success at the major league level this time and seize a starting job. And we don’t know how they’re going to get him into the lineup, though all signs are the organization’s committed to seeing him play regularly, which is good.
But Jones is another one of the players I’ve followed for years. I’ve enjoyed seeing him move up the farm system, finding greater and greater success, and I hope everyone else will get to see the Jones I, and the other fans who’ve seen him cut a swath through the minor leagues, have been lucky enough to see.
User pruning
Hey, short note – I went through the users and did some nuking of dead/inappropriate/impersonators/multiple account holders/and so on. Hopefully no actual, active accounts got caught, but as always with this stuff… if that’s you, apologies in advance.
Bonus: anyone who can offer me a reasonable explanation of why the most-duped account was “Chet Masters” wins a month’s free subscription to USSM.
Adam Jones up on Friday, vets grumbling
Here’s Geoff Baker’s blog entry on this. Includes several quotes of Guillen being pissed off about it. Check it out, seriously.
MLB.com (“Fox News for baseball”) has the story, which follows their 7/31 story by Patrick Brown which included the line “As the old adage says: If it ain’t broke, don’t’ fix it.”
The new story gives us
“I would prefer not to talk about Adam’s role at this time,” McLaren said. “We’ll talk about that on Friday.”
Jason Ellison will be moved to make room.
As others said in comments, it’s unreasonable to expect people who are so driven they become elite athletes to think someone else can do their job better than they can, to recognize when they’re hurting their team, and so on. Almost no baseball player ever retires early.
Baker raises a particularly interesting issue for why they may not have made the move earlier: McLaren as a new manager needed time to earn the players’ trust (which you’d hope he’d have done as bench coach but never mind that) before doing something like this.
In any event — the M’s offense has some huge holes in it. Adam Jones is a huge bat. We’ll see how well he does, of course, but minor league performances are outstanding predictors of major league performance, Guillen’s opinions aside. The outfield defense has a huge hole in it. Adam Jones plays good outfield defense.
Moreover — no other team, contender or not, has a player like Jones in the minors. Any comparable prospect this year on any team has been called up. The Tigers managed to find room for Miller, and on and on. For all the talk about how you don’t want to be in a pennant race with a rookie, what you really don’t want is to be in a pennant race with a team that’s not as good as it could be, and that’s what the M’s have been fielding for a while, out of fear for team chemistry, the team’s trust in McLaren, or whatever.
Game 106, Angels at Mariners
Felix Day, Felix Day, Felix Felix Felix Day
Jered Weaver v Felix Hernandez. 7:05. FSN.
Usually, I wait to post the game threads until about an hour ahead of time, but what’s the point? The M’s lineup is going to be the M’s lineup.
For pre-game discussion, then — please help me with this: Lopez is hitting really badly. The last time we visited this topic, he was doing well. Previous discussions about how Hargrove’s insistence on having him go opposite-field and ground to the second baseman all the time were held up as examples of how Hargrove had a long-term plan for developing Lopez, and we (and by we I mean us and Jeff Sullivan at LL) were a bunch of morons for doubting his wisdom.
Now, I missed a chunk of the season there, but what happened? Did he fall apart entirely? Is he swinging at everything?
Ah, lineups are out. And… well:
3 RF-R Guillen
4 LF-L Ibanez
5 3B-R Beltre
6 1B-L Broussard (!)
Just a quick note
As I’m prepping to fly back to Seattle this afternoon, and will be spending most of my time in the northwest away from a computer, the wave of neverending Dave posts will be taking a hiatus until next week. I won’t disappear, but if you’re wondering where the new Future Forty is or why I’m not answering any of your questions, try not to get offended.
For those of you who have registered for the USSM/LL events the next couple of nights, I look forward to seeing you all there.