Felix Day! It’s Felix Day!
Woo-hoo! Yeah! Felix Day is here! Sorry to have to spring this on you before you get of town, Oakland, but that guy with the weird facial hair (no, the other one, the one that’s scheduled to start today) drew a short, short straw, because he gets to pitch against Felix. I know, sometimes life’s like that. But hey, look at the bright side: because of the way the schedule works out, you won’t have to face him again until July. Two months without having to see that terrifying curve. It’ll be like a vacation.
Game 25, Athletics at Mariners
6:10. The return of Bedard, unless they scratch him at the last minute and don’t tell anyone again. Facing Justin Duchscherer.
As I write this (which is early, because it’s a beautiful day and I’m going to go down to Safeco and see it live! In person!) Bedard requires someone to be taken off the 25-man, and speculation’s run to Baek/Corcoran. We’ll see — they’ll have to make a decision before game time.
Upgrade note for 4/25
We upgraded WordPress. I hurried to get it in ahead of the game thread, but it turned out to be a little rougher than I’d expected, so if you had any issues between ~5-7, sorry. It’s been handling the game traffic really well, though, so I’m inclined to think it all worked out.
If you ever wonder what we do with our time behind the scenes… it’s stuff like that.
Game 24, A’s at Mariners
7:10, FSN. Batista v Eveland. Oakland comes into the series tied for the division lead with the Angels. The M’s have a chance to pull them down. We’ll see how it goes.
Dana Evelend’s another guy the A’s took off the Diamondbacks. He’s a lefty, pretty heavy groundballer, historically has a little above average on walks given up, about average for striking guys out.
I don’t think lineups have that huge an impact, but if I were to put together tonight’s, I’d be wary of where I put the slow ground ball hitters, if you know what I’m saying. We’ll see what happens.
Lineups!
C-R Suzuki
1B-L Barton
2B-R Ellis
DH-R Thomas
LF-L Cust (who is listed under “designated hitters” on the A’s roster)
RF-R Brown
SS-R Crosby
CF-R Sweeney
3B-R Murphy
CF-L Ichiro!
2B-R Lopez
LF-L Ibanez
3B-R Beltre
DH-B Professional Hitter who is not hitting Jose Vidro
1B-R Sexson
C-R Johjima
RF-R Bloomquist
SS-R Betancourt
M’s Extend Johjima
Well, this is a bit surprising – the M’s have locked Kenji Johjima up through the 2011 season. No financial details to report, but I was told that this was “a good deal” for the M’s. Considering that Johjima took less money to play in Seattle initially, it’s not a huge surprise that he’d take a below market deal to stick around.
Despite his early struggles, he’s still an above average catcher right now, but I do wonder how much he’ll have left to contribute beyond 2008. Signing him through his age 35 season is a classic M’s move, as they consistently show willingness to have bad long term contracts in exchange for some short term rewards.
The bigger news is that this almost certainly means that Jeff Clement’s days behind the plate are numbered. The M’s wouldn’t have extended Johjima if they were optimistic that Clement was anywhere close to being ready (in their opinion) to be behind the plate regularly. Johjima’s extension means Clement’s going to end up at 1B or DH, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see the organization start trying him out at first base in Tacoma in the not too distant future.
Laugh, cry, your pick
Scraps wrote in yesterday’s comments:
Is Jeremy Reed really so bad that we think Willie is a better option in RF?
No, Reed is really so bad that Willie is a better option on the bench, because Willie can play multiple positions and Reed can’t, and Reed is only a marginally better hitter. (You don’t need both Willie and Cairo, but that’s another issue.)
I don’t understand where the fascination with Reed comes from at this point. When he was here, everyone wished he wasn’t. Now I guess we’ve forgotten how bad he was. 840-odd plate appearances, .314 onbase, .366 slugging, 17 for 32 as a base stealer, not making anyone forget Mike Cameron in the outfield. He’s a AAA player. Sure, he’s 27, so maybe it’s time for him to have one decent year, convince management that he’s finally reached his potential, get an overpriced contract, and go back to sucking. I figure that’s the best-case scenario.
Good points. I wanted to point out though that today, a .316 OBP and .366 slugging percentage would make Reed clearly a better offensive option than three players who started Opening Day:
Jose Vidro, .264/.310
Brad Wilkerson .302/.244
Kenji Johjima .268/.246
…in addition to being a better option than both Bloomquist and Cairo in the outfield.
Thanks
During the game tonight, I believe I finally managed to catch up on writing thank you notes to everyone who decided to support the site in the last week or so. Thanks everyone, for encouraging us to throw that donation button up there, and for following through. I look forward to trying to do it justice.
I have some thoughts about how to do that, and we’ll be talking more about that soon.
Game 23, Mariners at Orioles
Loewen v Washburn. 7:10.
Adam Loewen’s a lefty from Surrey, BC, which as I understand it is on the way to Vancouver from here (just kidding! I know you have to turn off at some point).
The M’s are 9-8 against RHP and 2-3 against LHP this year.
Last year, it was 60-61 and 28-13, and interestingly, though you’d think they were vulnerable to lefties, they actually hit better against them – .295/.348/.446 to .284/.333/.419.
No, we do not have any information on when Lookout Landing will be up
Please stop asking. Thank you.
Really, Geoff? Really?
I’ve been trying not to bite on a couple of Baker’s blog posts, because I don’t think we can evaluate the team’s offseason yet. But this —
Bring in a hitter at the expense of upgrading the starting rotation? That was what many were calling for, if not Jeff in particular. Let’s see, had the club kept Adam Jones in right field, it would now have a .632 OPS hitter playing that spot rather than Brad Wilkerson. Net gain there, despite Jones being slightly “better” if you can call it that, would be about zilch.
I’m not sure that anyone called for “bringing in a hitter at the expense of upgrading the starting rotation”. If anyone proposed that, let me know.
But really? This is a serious argument? That Adam Jones, a good defensive outfielder who hasn’t hit well but has still hit way better than Wilkerson, would be a “zilch” upgrade over the dessicated corpse of a player we’ve seen for 45 at-bats?
Zilch.
Really.
And what about the bullpen? For all the writing Baker’s done about the bullpen, here he’s omitting that the M’s traded, along with that right field upgrade, George Sherill, and when Putz was out we all saw what happened. You don’t think there’s a game in that?
In the meantime, we’ve gotten diddly/squat out of Bedard. So if you want to evaluate that part of the off-season so far, it stunk. It was horrible. The M’s got robbed.
Now, that’s just how things have gone so far, sure, and maybe Bedard will go 20-0 over the rest of the season while Jones doesn’t get another hit.
But if you’re going to pass judgment on the trade now, it was awful. There’s no getting around this. The M’s would at this point in the season have done better if they hadn’t made that trade.
And if you want to argue that there’s no way to know that, that we can’t predict how they would have performed if they hadn’t made it (and so and so forth) then I don’t understand how you could say that a certain course of action wouldn’t have helped or not. If it’s all impossible to say, then it’s all inconclusive and no trade is either good or bad at any point in time. We can never judge anything.
This offense is to the point where one big bat isn’t going to make much of a difference. The team needs some of its existing bats to get going. It also has the option of interchanging Wladimir Balentien and Jeff Clement with some existing hitters if things don’t improve.
That’s silly. If you’ve got an offense of Ichiro and Beltre, you don’t have to get seven new hitters to get better. You need one. And then another. It’s not like the team is down a ten foot well and getting two feet up only causes them to slide back down. Fewer outs means more runs means more wins. Improvements help.
This offense doesn’t have to be night and day better than it is right now. Just more consistent. Too many games, as one of you noted, where the team scores four runs or less. Even with standout pitching, it’s tough to always hold opponents to three runs or fewer. Add another run per game, though, and the one-run wins should start to pile up in Seattle’s favor.
Ron Fairly? Is that you? I remember you from that “four runs or more” point you repeated over and over.
Subtract a run given up, and they’ll win more too.
The whole concept of “more consistent” is silly. It’d be great if you could get players to schedule their hits, but you can’t. It’d be great if you could stop scoring runs in a blowout and stash those for an extra inning game later, but you can’t. Has there ever been a team that was able to score four runs a game every game? Or even three runs a game, every game? Can you build a team around offensive consistency?
No. No one’s ever scored the same number of runs. No team that’s been better at scoring runs has been better at scoring runs at the same level game after game. They score more runs in general, and they get them in bunches and they get shut out. It’s the way offenses work.
Try to score more runs all the time. Try to prevent more runs all the time. Win more games.
Come on, Geoff. I expect better from you than that.