Game 92, Mariners at Athletics
12:35, Dickey v Smith.
Cairo plays first base today, but Vidro will take over as the 1B vs RHP and play most of the time. Rejoice!
For what its worth, though, Riggleman’s comments about releasing Sexson because he wasn’t interested in having a player complain about not being in the line-up are nice to hear. We had to deal with a year of John McLaren coddling the veteran egos rather than putting the best team on the field, so it’s nice to see the organization finally telling the entitled group of suck to shut up.
PI: Sexson’s gone
Wasn’t in the clubhouse, locker’s cleaned, says Hickey
I have a question: why Sexson? Open-stance Sexson as Megavidro is way better than Vidro, who is the worst DH in the league and finished. Is this another example of the crazy Vidro influence field?
Dave adds: Because this city hates Sexson, and they only are unhappy with Vidro, thanks to the length of time we’ve been watching the two flail away. This was the right move, even if the timing was beyond weird.
Lopez, Betancourt are huge problems
I’ve been trying to dodge writing this all season, hoping at some point that things would turn around.
Here’s my pre-season post-o-rama:
Lopez. If putting him at #2 makes him a more selective hitter and helps him get his career back on track, I’m all for it. We’ve seen the Lopez that’s full of potential and was on a track to become a key part of a young Mariner middle-infield tandem that would help the team field competitive teams for years to come, and we’ve seen a wince-inducing Lopez that makes us wonder why the team ever invested in him. I want to think that last season’s swoon was due to off-field problems as much as anything. I have to admit that I wonder if Lopez is just going to end up being another young player who stalled. And then maybe two years after everyone’s cut bait on him he’ll put up an All-Star season playing for some awful .400 team that invited him to spring training on a lark. Baseball’s a weird game. And as much as I resist making any kind of personal judgments of players, I’ll say this: I think Lopez is a smart guy, and knows all that. The question may be whether or not he wants to work that hard now, and what he decides he wants to do with his career, more than whether or not he has the talent.
I’ve been a Lopez booster for a long, long time, even though there was a point it seemed like I was down on him because I thought he’d be good and not a superstar, and popular sentiment was a lot more optimistic.
We got an offensive rebound of sorts, where he’s hitting for average, not getting hiw walks, and not hitting for good power either. Still, among second basemen, that’s above average, and if he was playing reasonable defense, he’d be a net plus for the team.
He’s not, though. I was poking around while thinking about writing a piece on why the M’s, having improved their overall outfield defense, haven’t done a significantly better job at getting outs, and — there’s no writing about this team’s defense without confronting the two terrible defenders up the middle.
Lopez is slow, plus his reactions haven’t been great, and once in a while we get treated to seeing a ball go right through his legs, or off his noggin, waking him from a nap, and so on. I’ve been a little glad that we don’t get the best defensive stats until after the season, because I held out hope that he’d get better. But even the traditional, not-much-good stats, like fielding percentage… not good. Zone rating, terrible. And I mention that not as evidence but — I glimpsed these things, and they backed up everyone’s observation that his defense was way, way off, and I wanted to wait longer.
Too late. Replacement Level Yankees blog took a swing at ranking second basemen based on total contribution and Lopez tied for last. The metrics aren’t the greatest, but there’s one thing we need to confront: Lopez may well be the worst defensive second baseman in the league right now. It’s not just Sexson that’s killing the ground ball defense — it’s Sexson, Lopez, and Betancourt.
I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t have a handy explanation for why Lopez’s range is this far off, though the obvious suspect is ill conditioning (however you want to interpret that) or some kind of hamstring injury we just haven’t heard about yet.
And since I’ve brought it up — Betancourt is almost exactly the same problem. He’s horrible out there. He’s not making plays. His range is gone. Imagine when he first came up, how often he’d get behind second or third even just backing plays up. I was surprised at least once a game to notice how far he’d gone. And now, just like Lopez, he barely moves. It’s Beltre ranging way in and to his left to field slow grounders in front of Betancourt, and up the middle – it’s a free hit if it gets past the pitcher.
Unlike Lopez, he’s not even average for his position offensively. We knew we’d seen the best of Betancourt before — hitters who beat the ball into the ground don’t have a lot of room to evolve, and Betancourt’s skill set hasn’t changed at all. But this, this hollow-and-low average with a sprinkling of doubles, combined with a marked decline in defense, makes him a huge drag on the team.
If you were going to make a list of the team’s problems, with Ichiro being last and things like “the starting pitching is horrible” on top, you’d have to put these two, and particularly their immobility, right up there. The porous infield defense is killing guys like Silva who rely on it. They pretty much have to pray that a ball put into play goes to Beltre or center/right field. That’s it — that’s all they have. And as we’ve seen, while Lopez has collected some key hits, neither of them are helping the team consistently put up runs.
If this keeps up, improving the infield is going to have to be a priority for the team this off-season, and we’re barely halfway through the year.
Game 91, Mariners at Athletics
Batista v Blanton. Batista! He’s back, in starter form! 7:05.
Mariner lineup, by OBP
RF-L .360
2B-R .318
LF-L .344
1B-R .315
1B-B .260
3B-R .324
CF-L .340
DH-R .260
C-L .274
SS-R .278
(AL average up to today is .332)
Fun fact for Wednesday
Willie Bloomquist leads all position players in OBP at .361.
He also leads all position players in lowest SLG percentage at .248
Sorry, no, actually, not the last thing
Dave said his would be the last post… but it’s not. Responding to this, specifically, from Baker’s post:
I’ve since been alerted to the fact that the U.S.S. Mariner blog is taking issue with me writing down what Silva said last night. They say he had a less effective sinker because that’s what the vertical drop charts show. And also, they point out that he had more flyouts last night than ground outs. They suggest I listened to Silva and wrote what he said because I’m afraid of losing clubhouse access. Yes, that’s right. I’m afraid of not having access to players that have been almost universally criticized in this space and by me on the radio at various times all year.
The money quote here:
They suggest I listened to Silva and wrote what he said because I’m afraid of losing clubhouse access.
This is absolutely not true.
It’s not there. Read Dave’s post. Tell me where in that post Dave accuses Baker of writing what Silva said because he’s afraid of losing clubhouse access?
It doesn’t. Dave’s point is that he wishes Baker would stop just repeating what players say when it’s clearly incorrect or of no value.
If you want to argue that there are comments that speculate on clubhouse access being a reason why reporters don’t openly contradict players and coaches on points like this, that’s entirely true.
But Baker’s post substantially misrepresents what Dave said in order to make it easily-dismissible. It’s a strawman attack, and it’s disappointing.
Wrapping Up The Silva Thing
Last post on this, I promise. But, since Geoff responded, I might as well set the record straight. After Jeff and I both pointed out last night that the whole mechanical change thing didn’t cause Silva’s sinker to drop any more than it did in his last start, he had this to say:
As for whether or not Silva is spinning yarns about his sinker, first off, the effectiveness of a sinker won’t always correalate to how much it drops.
Now, keep in mind, this is what he wrote last night.
Silva has been working all year to figure out why his sinker isn’t working the way he’d like. It isn’t sinking much. That’s a big reason why he needed 100 pitches to get through five innings against the Tigers last Thursday.
Or, if you want a summation of how this conversation went:
Baker: Silva’s sinker hasn’t been sinking, and that’s why he’s been getting torched. But he fixed that, and look at how awesome he is now.
Dave/Jeff: Actually, his sinker didn’t sink any more last night than it did against Detroit.
Baker: Uhh, I didn’t mean the mechanical change helped give him more sink (even though that’s what I wrote), I meant it gave him better command.
Dave/Jeff: Yeah, okay, whatever.
I’m not going to argue against a moving target. If he wants to change his argument because we discredited his first one, that’s fine – his new one isn’t any better, but I’ll let you guys all see right through that one and leave it alone.
But, he did toss out one more point that I’ll address quickly:
Unfortunately, or perhaps, fortunately for you, I don’t keep a list of fan favorite players (Ichiro, Beltre, Bedard, Clement, Hernandez) or whipping boys (Sexson, Vidro, Batista, Washburn, Silva). We call them like we see them here. The popular and unpopular guys are all treated the same way.
If you notice, the group that he thinks we are biased towards have something in common, as do the group that he thinks we’re biased against – Group A is full of good players, while Group B is full of disastrously awful players. We like good players who help teams win, and unlike beat writers who focus on things like clubhouse intangibles and ERA, we actually can tell which players can help teams win and which players can’t.
The Beltre rumor
Yes, ESPN’s got a “Twins talk to the M’s about Beltre” rumor up. The Twins picking up that kind of payroll, though… I don’t think this passes a sniff test.
To go back to the trade value post of a while back — Beltre’s a tough sell, generally.
Update: as Mike points out, that’s based on the Twins having internal discussions that mentioned him, making this possibly the thinnest rumor since the Rays briefly discussed Bonds and were batted about by the national press for weeks (fun side note: look how the Rays DHs have done since then).
Bedard out until after the All-Star break, rotation fun
Out with the back issue. The M’s will almost certainly DL him — they can make it retroactive to July 5th, eligible to come back off and start against Cleveland, say the 20th (but I’ll get to that)
Meanwhile, it looks like Felix will come back Friday, making the next set of starts:
Batista vs Oakland
Dickey vs Oakland
Felix vs KC (wahahahahaha)
The Bus vs KC
??? (Silva?) vs KC
Then the All-Star break. You can see where necessity created this mess, but I wonder about the decision to start Dickey over Rowland-Smith.
Dickey, as a starter: 30.2 IP, 6.16 ERA, 41 H, 3 HR, 16 BB, 18 K
Dickey, as a reliever: 23 IP, 1.96 ERA, 17 H, 2 HR, 6 BB, 17 K
While RRS, on a really short leash, has at least performed a lot better than Dickey as a starter — and in the rotation the manager doesn’t get to forget he’s there for weeks.
Oakland, v lefties .244/.313/.345
Oakland, v righties .252/.329/.389
Meanwhile, KC:
v lefties .275/.336/.418
v righties .258/.308/.376
Ah. If you can’t get RRS the start against Oakland because he started on the 6th, it makes sense to think about pushing Dickey out there and trying to pick your spots in relief.
The really interesting thing to watch is how they patch this up post-break, if Bedard can come back. They’ll have Felix on long rest to re-start, and then they’ll need at least one start to get to Bedard, with three more spots to fill and not enough good pitchers to do it. And if they manage to deal Washburn off… you see how this gets hairy quickly.
Selected exchange from yesterday’s post-game post-post discussion
DKJ:
Any chance the FO is hoping Vidro, et al. will rip off a couple of XBHs, like Richie’s anomaly last night, and get some drunken and/or deluded team to give TWO bags of balls for one of these guys?
Steve T:
There isn’t a team in MLB that doesn’t have a big fat file on Vidro, full of completely black pages like the one in Tristram Shandy. He could hit four home runs tomorrow and Pelekoudas’s phone wouldn’t ring.