Game 154, Mariners at Angels
DMZ · September 22, 2007 at 12:56 pm · Filed Under Game Threads
Batista v Colon! Wooo! 12:55, which I totally did not see coming.
Bloomquist at 3rd! IGNITION TIME
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we are out of it. there is no reason AJ should not start every single game for the rest of the season
My tv listings show Mariners at Angels, but the local Q13 Fox station announcers said Mets vs Marlins was coming up.
We are out of it in part because AJ did not start in ever game this year.
2 – We’re in a rain delay. They just took the tarp off the field in Anaheim.
I realize that, but Mac and Bavasi have no excuse not to put him in there every day now. It is just ridiculous how this team is run sometimes
we are out of it.
Such an unbeliever. As long as the Mariners win all of their remaining games and the Angels lose all of their remaining games, and the Mariners beat the Angels in a one-game playoff, then they’re in the playoffs. No problem.
Since 1995 there have been more games called in Anaheim due to rain than Seattle. 1-0.
The Ignitor starting at 3rd base. Yeah, Willie does a lot of things, just nothing very well.
The front office and McLaren just wear me out. These morons are either unable or unwilling to either construct or properly use what they have, and the worst part is that both Bavisi and Uncle John will probably be back next year to wreck more havoc.
Here comes the BLOOM, ready or not.
I say we see how Willie is on the mound.
I wonder if they fed Goff those nicknames, or if he was just screwing around.
Go BlueJays and Tigers! Wooo.
How does Cabrera stack up against Yuni on defense? I hear a lot about him, but have rarely seen him play.
This Fox crew is crazy. If you thought any team’s crew was ill-informed, well, allow me to introduce you to these guys.
It is a Fox crew, after all. Never expect quality.
Watching this team at this point in the season is like watching the docs take grandma off life support. The over and under on how many breaths she manages before flat-lining can be entertaining, but basically it’s a pretty dismal process.
These idiots on Fox just said that “it promises to be a great post-season.”
Yeah — if you’re a fan of the Skanks, HoSox or Angies, that is.
No matter who’s calling the game, whenever the Angels are on TV, there are certain ideas that must be repeated incessantly:
1. The Angels apply pressure.
2. Reggie Willits is the perfect baseball player.
3. Three-run home runs are bad for baseball — and are inversely proportional to a team’s fundamental quotient.
Is it me or has Fox already started artificially boosting audience noise levels to their playoff broadcast levels?
Or, as Fox likes to call it, ‘Bill O’Reilly Conversational Level’.
18: They must have. It’s only the third inning…certainly not all of the Angies’ “loyal” fans have reached the park yet.
Also, is this the most humorous overenunciation of Hispanic names since that classic Jimmy Smits/Bob Costas SNL skit?
I was hoping inning 2 Batista would hang around.
I noticed a heavy overenunciation on Johjima’s name, too.
I watched two at bats of the game so far. WFB’s and Betancourt’s.
In which small amount of time the Fox guys were able to mention how WFB’s pathitic slap singe was a “nice piece of hitting”, that WFB is “one of the better base stealers in baseball”, that Bartolo Colon does not give up many stolen bases because of his “quick athletic feet”, and again about what a “nice piece of hitting” that WFB single was.
I know it wasn’t intentional, but Anderson almost pulled an A-Rod slap there at first.
At least there are no rolling “r”s in Ichiro!.
I’ve never understood whether momentum complemented or overcame chemistry.
Mark (dis)Grace on Fox just sounded surprised that we got that run — as if we’d already lost 110 games or so on the season.
Yeah, that was funny – and now SEATTLE has a run!
The emphasis was awesome, like he thought Detroit had a better chance of getting a lead in this game than Seattle.
Also, few things are funnier to me than odd apparel choices at a ballgame. Today’s winner so far: The guy rocking a Seahawks sweatshirt.
I always thought that momentum was averaged in chemistry giving us the ideal gas law pV=nRT.
30: Maybe he’s just jealous ‘cuz Anaheim was such a GREAT market for the Rams that they left.
This Angels team’s going to be a real pest in the playoffs, since with this scheduling they can pitch Lackey almost every other game all the way through. Ugh.
OF ALL THE FREE AGENT PITCHERS LAST YEAR BATISTA HAS PERFORMED THE BEST
Does McLaren not know that we signed Jose Guillen in free agency last year?
HE KNOWS NOTHING
Amen.
“…[the fact that Batista has the most wins of any free agent since 2005] says a lot about the value of Batista”
Uhh, no, it says a lot about the value (or lack thereof) of Wins for pitchers.
“McLaren has a guy in Willie Bloomquist who knows how to handle the bat well…”
Uh, right.
Could someone explain to me why Bloomquist is batting above Betancourt?
Roles. It’s all about roles.
“To win, the Angels will have to score some runs.”
If anyone is interested, I have one of those Special Ticket Offers that has a couple of Two for One, $1 game ticket, and 50% off ticket coupons. Drop me an email ( taa23 (at) hotmail (dot) com ) and I will put it in the mail today or Monday. It’s good for the CLE series, and the Saturday Tex game. I paid $30, and I won’t end up being able to use it. I’ll take any reasonable offer, I would like to see it go to some use.
Scioscia Ball!
These guys have quire a man-crush on Colon. I don’t see the attraction, myself.
45-they have been just “oohing and ahhing” over him all game. They sound like Anaheim announcers…lame homers
This Angels team’s going to be a real pest in the playoffs, since with this scheduling they can pitch Lackey almost every other game all the way through. Ugh.
How about the Indians? Sabathia and Carmona then plan on lots of off days. It doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Spahn and Sain then pray for rain, but it’s probably a higher percentage strategy. Of course, they’ll be counting on Joe Borowski to close out games for them.
I love how they rave about the Angels defense as being so awesome.. in raw balls turned into outs, they’re 23/30 in the majors.
And the Angels have the 2nd-best team FIP in the league, so it’d be tough to say that their pitchers are so bad that they’ve been allowing balls-in-play that are exceptionally difficult to field. The Angels’ defense ranks as a -53 plays above average over at the THT team page. That’s almost as bad as the Mariners’ -67. Plus/minus has Toronto as the best fielding team in the majors, and it’s not even close.
Is it possible to frustrate Batista by slowing down the game?
Hey don’t worry. Batista is the best in the majors, remember?
Sweep the leg, Cobra-kai!
Boy, that was close. We almost let momentum get away. Crazy little bugger is always trying to jump ship.
Sweet pickoff move.
Too bad the game wasn’t tied, because then RRS could win the game throwing zero pitches…
I’ve never been able to comprehend the balk rule. Was that pickoff move legal?
Are we going to end up signing Colon if the angels decline the option?
Yes, yes we are.
Also, does anyone pull the majorette move more after fouling off a pitch than Beltre?
Please tell me that there is only one October where we have to suffer those Dane Cook ads.
Please don’t blow this. Please?
Wanna bet JJ gets shut down for the season after this game?
Cmon, putz!
Eat it, Angels. Going to be at the game tomorrow, and will root my lungs out to make those guys celebrate on the road.
How can Anderson strike out? He’s a clutch RBI guy! I must have mis-seen that.
heh heh heh
Arte better make an AM/PM run to get some more ice for that champagne.
Yeah! One more day of life in the AL west race
At least they don’t get their champagne on national TV.
This was a big win – for me anyway. I will be in a houseful of Angel fans for dinner tonight. I don’t think I could have handled the clinch today. I would have been a bad houseguest.
Hey, atleast this means the Mariners will finish with a winning record for the first time since ‘03. Good job guys.
70: The Mariners were guaranteed a winning season after yesterday’s win, actually. But yes, it’s a very nice feeling.
wow. I was expecting to be told all about what I missed, as all I heard was the 3rd out of the 9th inning. This was a very quiet game thread.
[snerk] someone on the postgame just asked if we could somehow get Colon in the off-season. Billy Hassleman just let him down softly.
ah, so Willie was in as AB’s shoulder was sore, and he asked to DH …
So, when do the Bonds-Mariners rumors begin????
74 – That question is so September 21. (It’s hard to do a valley girl impression on a blog.) There are a bunch of stories on the net that the race is between the A’s and us, because we’re on the west coast and in the AL. That pretty much covers all the variables, doesn’t it?
all I have seen is columnists eliminating teams that wouldn’t/couldn’t take him, and speculating the Mariners might be interested because they have a crap offence. No one has actually said the M’s have any actual interest at all.
76 – Oh, I agree that I haven’t seen anything about the M’s expressing an interest in him. That doesn’t stop a rumor tidbit though.
see, and I haven’t even seen ones about a race between the A’s & the M’s:
Stan McNeal, Sporting News (ranking the M’s next to last in the possible 5)–
“They have a few factors in their favor: They’re on the West Coast, they spend and they’ve got a decent team. Heck, he could even play some left field as long as Ichiro was in center to cover for him. Their ballpark, however, is not conducive to home runs and Bonds might want a bit more of a launching pad after spending so many years in San Francisco.”
Josh Dubow, the AP– “The Seattle Mariners also could be interested since they are tied for last in the AL with only eight home runs from their designated hitters.”
Ray Ratto, SF Chron– [having eliminated most everyone else] “So we’re down to long shots, like Baltimore (where the Orioles stink, don’t draw, and have an owner, Peter Angelos, who is as capable of hatching a crackpot idea as anyone), Seattle (where the Mariners need a bat in the worst way, which is how they got Richie Sexson) or Texas (owner Tom Hicks is a bigger believer in star power than Magowan was in ‘92, and his current team is as bland and faceless as the Giants’)”
and my favorite crack, also from the SF Chronicle: “Seattle might be an outside chance, although I’d love to see Ichiro’s reaction to a guy who decides he’s a little above rules, regulations and hustle.”
A great night. The wife and I we went to a great art opening in Georgetown at the Fantagraphics Gallery for an amazing show of the mid-20th C. jazz illustrator Jim Flora (his art is on the cover of the Weekly this week and all over the Fall Arts pullout). It’s a good night, I already knew the M’s won, so I enjoyed some good art in Georgetown, and we came back to Ballard for a nightcap with some friends at the Lockspot in Ballard. I’ve been home for an hour now and my wife is in bed, so I retire to my studio and put on the new animal collective record and start looking for a bottle opener in my desk drawer to drink the IPA I just pulled out of the fridge. I don’t see it, so I pull the drawer out of the desk and immediately spill the whole goddamn thing all over the floor. Holy shit! There’s that tinfoil-wrapped bud I lost in 1999! But I also had stack of miscellaneous ticket stubs that spilled onto the floor. I see some M’s stubs and pick ‘em up: 1995 AL Division Series, Games A, B, and C, and 1995 AL Championship Series, Games, A, B, and C. Whoaaaah. I haven’t seen these since, uh, 1995… It makes me think of the playoffs in 1995, 1997, 2000, 2001… and the 2002 and 2003 seasons, which were both close. But what struck me was that this was the first year in three or four years that anything in the second half mattered, and we ended the longest stretch the M’s have gone between Septembers that mattered since the early 1990s and that awesome 1995 season, so maybe that’s something.
I would take some miniscule solace in winning tomorrow and avoiding watching the Angels celebrate.
Y’know, I like to consider myself a pretty loyal fan; I’ve been with the M’s since I was born through thick and thin. But, so help me god, if they sign Bonds anyone can pick up my caps, shirts, sweatshirts, beer mug, coffee mug, Edgar jersey, Ichiro jersey, and Felix jersey at the Ellensburg Goodwill the next day.
Honestly, I would probably enjoy my summers more.
Total walks by Mariners this season: 372
Total walks by Barry Bonds this season: 132
And Bonds has only played in 125 games, a number I’d assume would go up if he were DHing. Add in that his OPS+ (172, second-highest in baseball) is 47 points higher than the best Mariner’s (Ichiro), and I gotta admit, it looks appetizing as a one-year contract.
There doesn’t seem to be a spot for him considering the team’s current status with Vidro/Ibanez/Jones/Sexson, but damn, there’s no debate that he could greatly improve this lineup.
All that said, I wouldn’t bet a cent on it happening.
what time does the
carnagegame begin?Whatever you want to call it, it begins in a couple of minutes (12:30). Looks like it’s supposed to be on KSTW
I wonder if TV Producer will show up? I wonder if Dave or DMZ will remember to start a thread?
M’s lineup:
Ichiro
Beltre
Ibanez
Guillen
Broussard
Vidro (DH)
Lopez
Burke
Bloomquist
(Betancourt has a “tender” elbow but could start if necessary; Joh a little beat up from a collision at the plate yesterday)
Weaver back to his classic form: making guys with single-digit season HR totals look like Barry Bonds.
sigh. I was going to try to hang in there today, but the volatile mix of Weaver & Angels & Clinching just makes it too damn hard.
I want WFB to pitch and catch this season… haha.
And then never play again…
Nah he’s ok as a utility guy.
Anyone notice that WFB has *ONLY* 6 stolen bases (heard on KOMO)! Just another sign of how badly Hargrove & MacLaren are using him. He should have 20, in situational pinch running situations.
Just goes to say how effective he is at the plate.
Well, now it’s official…
First, the Ducks beat the crap out of the Canucks in the NHL playoffs…then the Angels chump out the M’s for the AL West title…
Thank God the Rams don’t play in Anaheim anymore, at least. I don’t think I could handle getting my heart stomped on by the miserable town THREE times in one calendar year! >:(
Oh well, not this year.
Could the 2007 Mariners count as a major collapse? I mean I know they didn’t lead a division, but they did have a pretty good lead on the wild card and were really close to the division before blowing it.
Not a major collapse — a three game lead doesn’t result in a “major” anything (win or loss).
And don’t forget they weren’t expected to go anywhere, and in fact didn’t really show much for really the first half of the season (everybody had written them off when they tanked in interleague, you might remember). If the Angels hadn’t been dragged down by injuries the division wouldn’t have been close, and if the Yankees wins had been more evenly distributed across the season, the wild-card wouldn’t have been close either. The M’s happened to be outdoing themselves just when their rivals were at their worst. It happens sometimes, but it doesn’t mean that a return to form by everyone is a “collapse” by somebody.
Anyway, I think I’m going to start watching games again (rather than just having the radio on while I’m doing something I actually care about) because with the team officially eliminated we should finally see the kids play. I hope Guillen and Ibanez have something to do while they’re on the bench.
It totally counts as a major collapase.
They were in a race, WINNING the race, and promptly went on a 3-15 tear. If you blow it so quickly and so thoroughly… I don’t see how you call it anything but a major collapse.
I don’t think just because the lead was only three games, it can’t be a collapse. Look at it this way… if Team A and Team B had duked it out all season and got the the end of the season tied, then Team A lost the next 7 games… I don’t think there is any doubt but that you could call that a collapse.
And pre-season expectations are irrelevant once you get to the last week in August with a playoff race lead.
I think the last week in August is late enough, and losing 9 games in a row after you get in front is ugly enough that it absolutely qualifies as a major collapse.
Am I surprised? No. Did they completely collapse? Yes.
they weren’t winning the race; the Angels have been better than them all year.
The wild card race.
Thank you Mariners, for a more-entertaining-than-expected (for the most part) 2007 campaign.
That being said, it’s still baseball season? I thought that ended once the Hawks begin playing.
#91 So if I subscribe to your theory of no collapse, just a return to form, then I guess I shouldn’t have any angst about McLaren’s managing. Following your logic the team was over achieving while everyone else was under achieving. When those anomalies corrected themselves everything returned to normal, hence the manager was not to blame by staying with the veteran’s or misusing the pitching staff?
I like the no gamethread as a protest of it being meaningless thing.
Eric Wedge, covered in champagne, gave Chris Antonetti a shout-out on TV today after the Indians clinched.
#87 chief — no, the flaw in your logic is that the team was outperforming itself, including its manager. There were lots of games where everybody here spent most of the game deploring MacLaren’s decisions, but the team won anyway — mostly because the bullpen happened to be on a streak where they could do no wrong, and bullpens are the streakiest things in baseball (after maybe slap singles hitters) so counting on that to continue for the rest of the season is foolish. And, not surprisingly, it didn’t continue.
When the M’s were on their tear lots of people were pointing to the pythagorean RS-RA numbers and saying it couldn’t continue (and the Yankees, who were underperforming their numbers to an even greater degree), while others (often with appeals to “chemistry” and “grit” and “intangibles”) kept insisting that wins are wins and none of those other numbers matter — and those are the people who were surprised by a “collapse” when it turned out those other numbers were predictive after all. As a matter of fact, far from calling this a collapse, we should be calling it a victory: the Mariners still are over-achieving — before the season not many people were predicting they’d be over .500, and based on the RS-RA they still shouldn’t be.
But should we attribute that over-achievement to MacLaren? No, that’s in spite of him, because I’m sure we can all think of some games (every one that featured Parrish or White, for example) that the M’s would’ve won if not for his decisions. If you observe someone doing something stupid, but through sheer luck they get a positive result, do you then conclude that you were wrong and they aren’t stupid, or that you were right and they were just lucky? If you go to Vegas and run up some winnings at the craps tables, do we conclude you’re better at rolling dice than anyone else? And when you play long enough and inevitably lose everything, do we call that a collapse? It may feel like one from the inside, but it’s clearly not. Your luck just ran out.
Clearly, we want more qualities from a manager than dumb luck.