Game 146, Mariners at Angels
7:05. Morrow v Weaver. Wooo! Morrow!
Dave and I have both argued here that the M’s don’t need to totally tear down, throwing out everyone to go entirely with the young and talented supplemented by the really cheap and readily available. I still see a lot of “tear it down! I’d rather see crappy youngsters play than this lot!” which assumes, first, that if you tear down there are prospects with long-term upside to play and their struggles will help the team out in future years.
But even these last few games, where the M’s have run out teams that a good PCL team could put a scare into, demonstrate that that’s not really true — now there are complaints about the horrible quality of these teams, the minor-league level starters pitching, and so on. It’s pretty clear that despite the sincere desire to see the team suck towards a purpose rather than just suck, no one’s happy seeing a game featuring a Mariner lineup this painful.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way — and hopefully the new GM can give us something better than these September lineups made everyday.
Still no lineup posted? What is the scoop?
Update: Ah! Yup, LaHair at first, Valbuena at 2nd. Lopez DHs.
The AL West-clinched Angels — ugh. Yeah.
The ’09 Staff
Despite the fact that the M’s 2008 pitching staff has been horrible, there are plenty of reasons to think that it will be significantly better next year, even if they don’t make any real changes to the roster. Since I’m running into some time constraints, I won’t go through all the machinations behind these numbers, but here’s a quick-and-dirty projection for the team’s pitching staff for next year. And yes, I’m assuming whoever comes aboard will have the common sense to dump Washburn on whoever will take the biggest chunk of his contract.
Pitcher Innings FIP 1 Felix 200 3.40 2 Bedard 140 3.60 3 Morrow 130 4.00 4 Silva 180 5.00 5 RRS 150 5.25 6 Feier. 100 5.25 7 Batista 100 5.00 Long Dickey 80 4.50 Long Jimenez 70 4.50 Middle Corco 70 4.00 Middle Lowe 60 5.00 ROOGY Green 70 3.50 LOOGY Thomas 40 4.50 Closer Putz 70 3.50
We’re not being outlandish with anything – no predicted ace-dom for Felix, no miraculous health for Bedard, not asking Morrow to take the ball every five days, not expecting Putz to return to ’07 form – there’s a basic regression analysis and not much else. It’s crude, but since we’re not trying to be extremely precise, it’s good enough.
That group adds up to 1,460 innings (1,458 is 162 nine inning games) and has a combined FIP of 4.34. That’s pretty much a league average pitching staff.
Yep, league average. With no big additions, no big surges, but just some regression from Silva and Batista (neither are as bad as they’ve been this year) and a bit more health from Bedard and Putz, and you’ve got a league average pitching staff without even trying. Add a real lefty setup man and you could do even better.
The idea that this team has to lose 90 games next year while going through a painful rebuilding process is bunk.
Fans Scouting Report Article
Tom Tango has written an article at The Hardball Times that looks at the differences between the average Mariners fans opinion about the team’s individual defenders and my own. Tom’s project is pretty interesting, so check it out.
Two site things
Earlier this week, many people got served an error page instead of the site. I ended up turning off some of the plugins we use, and as near as I can figure it, the issue is that in certain cases (for instance, someone comes in and requests a super-crazy URL, possibly in an attempt to see if there’s a security exploit left unpatched… it’s unclear what causes this) the site refuses to generate the page, throwing an error instead, and that error message gets cached as the current version of USSM… and served out to a ton of other people. We saw this a couple months ago when, under load, it essentially cached and served out a blown version of the home page and I went through this fire drill again.
Now, the why and when I’m still not clear on, or why it seems like it’s far more likely to serve this up to people trying to access www.ussmariner.com instead of ussmariner.com — I have no idea. But I think we’ve got some reasonable solutions worked out, so I’m on that.
The other — I’ve read complaints that the RSS feed sucks since the redesign. I don’t know what the scoop is: I subscribe myself for troubleshooting purposes, and I haven’t seen anything, and the new theme shouldn’t affect the RSS pieces at all. If I had better repro steps, there might be more I could do, but right now I’m trying to pin down the problem.
Game 145, Rangers at Mariners
1:40 PM, Millwood vs Jimenez.
The M’s are doing a bullpen game today due to Silva’s absence (with his wife for the birth of their child) and Washburn’s injury. If you love spring training games, this is for you.
Nelson Cruz
A few months ago, I suggested the M’s trade for a 28-year-old Triple-A outfielder. They didn’t, and tonight, he’s starting against them, while being better than just about every player the M’s put in the line-up tonight.
Rebuilding isn’t that hard if you know where to look for undervalued talent.
Game 144, Rangers at Mariners
Padilla v Felix! 7:10.
I had one of the worst days of my IT career yesterday, for a whole host of reasons I’ll skip, and when I got home I was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to at least watch a game to relax. And today I get to work a 7am-9pm and miss at least the first couple of hours of Felix Day. I hope everyone else who gets to go out to the game and watch live gets to see something truly awesome, but I’m not going to follow the game because I am dying to get home, turn on TiVo, have a beer, and sit down to watch King Felix.
Have fun, all.
Happy Felix Day
In the spirit of Felix Day, another chart – this one from Felix’s last start against Texas.
I promise, I’m almost done with the graphs and will get back to writing soon.
And yes, that big blue clump in the upper left hand corner – that would be establishing the fastball. It’s worth noting that the only run of the game came in the first inning, and the M’s lost 1-0.
Feierabend’s Learning Curve
When you don’t have time to write 10,000 words, draw a picture. Here’s today’s:
It’s the same pitch-by-pitch graph I did for Morrow and RR-S over the weekend, but this time, it’s comparing Ryan Feierabend’s start yesterday with Jarrod Washburn’s last start in Cleveland. I think the graph helps illustrate one of the main things that Feierabend is going to have to work on: keeping hitters off balance, and this won’t show up in average velocity readings.
Washburn and Feierabend have nearly identical average velocities on most of their pitches – they’re both 85-90 with the fastball, 75-80 with both their breaking ball and change-ups. However, as you can see in the graphs above, Feierabend is much, much more consistent with his velocities – there’s basically nothing in that 80-85 range all game. Washburn, on the other hand, has a much greater variety, with a far more random scattering of pitches than Feierabend’s fast-or-slow approach.
This is basically what people mean when they talk about keeping hitters off balance. It’s not just about mixing your pitches (though that’s important too), but mixing velocities within your pitches. This is what Feierabend needs to get better at.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Feierabend needs to learn from Jarrod Washburn. Washburn really represents his upside – a pitch to contact flyball lefty who looks okay in front of good defenses and in a generous home park – so emulating Jarrod isn’t a bad idea for him. With a little bit of work, Feierabend could basically replicate what the Mariners think they’ll get from Washburn next year, and hopefully, if he improves the final month, the team will realize that Wash is simply not worth $10 million to this organization when he’s so easily replaced.
Game 142, Yankees at Mariners
Mussina v Silva
Silva pitch type, 2008
Fastball 69%
Slider 10%
Change 21%
Mussina pitch type, 2008
Fastball 51%
Slider 19%
Curveball 25%
Changeup 6%
I’m a long-time fan of Mussina: you may remember not that long ago I was wildly advocating the Mariners trying to pick him up when the Yankees were unhappy with him. And I have to admit that as much as I rail against the stupidity of the arbitrary standards for Hall of Fame admission, if there is going to be a “twenty-game winner” check box that counts for five points, well, I wish him luck getting it.
Not tonight, of course. But Mussina’s going to need to pick up three wins in these four likely starts:
Tonight, against the M’s.
Saturday, against the Rays.
Thursday the 18th against the White Sox.
Wednesday the 24th against the Blue Jays.
Now there are two rest days in there, and the Yankees suck, so say they skip forward in the rotation where possible. Then there are five:
Tonight.
Friday the 12th against the Rays
Wednesday the 17th against the White Sox.
Tuesday the 23rd against the Blue Jays.
Sunday the 28th against the Red Sox.
He gets the extra start, and probably against a Red Sox team, but one looking ahead to the playoffs and possibly resting some regulars.
What makes me sad, though, is the thought of the Yankees potentially stooping to get him some vulture wins to get him to twenty. But stupid standards often drive stupid decisions, and if it’s the difference between getting him into the Hall or not, well, good luck with that.