Clement Out For Season
Jeff Clement has a torn meniscus and will have surgery that will sideline him for the rest of 2008. The new general manager will have to be one to make the call, but at this point, moving Clement to first base seems like the right move. He’s pretty lousy behind the plate, and knee problems for a catcher aren’t a minor deal.
Game 141, Yankees at Mariners
Ponson vs. Ryan Rowland-Smith.
In the spirit of Dave’s Graphing Weekend, and since a few of you guys liked the ones I did for Morrow’s start last night, here’s a graph of Rowland-Smith’s last start versus Cleveland. Velocity is still on the vertical axis and pitch count is on the horizontal axis.
There are basically three distinct areas where you’ll see mostly consistent values – his fastball in the upper 80s, his change-up around 80, and his breaking ball around 70. Despite the fact that he doesn’t throw very hard, as you can see, he throws a ton of change-ups to keep RH batters off balance. Against lefties, he threw 9 fastballs and 8 curveballs with no change-ups. Against righties, it was 48 fastballs, 33 changeups, and 9 curveballs.
The change-up is really the pitch that allows RR-S to get RH hitters off balance, and if he succeeds as a starter long term, that pitch will be the reason why.
More Morrow Graphing
Because it’s nice to have something fun to talk about again. Here’s another graph of Morrow’s pitches as the game goes on, with velocity on the vertical axis and his pitch count on the horizontal axis. I’ve also included the trendline.
A few things jump out, but the most obvious is shown best by the trendline, but can also be seen in the density of pitches in each region – as the game went on, Morrow threw more and more offspeed stuff. You can see it’s basically all fastballs to start off, but then he mixes in some slower stuff in the second inning. Then, around the 40 pitch mark, he just starts throwing a ton of breaking balls, going chnage-curve-curve-slider-change-slider in the Damon/Jeter at-bats in the 4th inning. He went back to his fastball later, but then at the end of the game, he was basically Jamie Moyer – 12 of his last 16 pitches were offspeed.
His fastballs at that point in the game were also down to the 94 range rather than the 96 MPH heaters he was throwing up an inning before. It is pretty likely that he just ran out of gas in the 8th inning, which is to be expected considering his situation. However, if out-of-gas Brandon Morrow can still throw 94 and has the confidence to work in a bunch of breaking balls, then out-of-gas Brandon Morrow is still twice as good as Carlos Silva.
Congratulations Brandon
That couldn’t have gone any better.
Some numbers for the night from Pitch F/x:
106 pitches thrown, 72 strikes (17 of them swinging), 34 balls
62 fastballs, 16 changeups, 15 sliders, 12 curveballs, 1 splitter
Average fastball velocity: 95.7 MPH
Fastest pitch – 98.4 MPH fastball
Slowest pitch – 80.7 MPH curveball
Morrow only threw his fastball 58% of the time tonight, compared to 76% of the time when he was a reliever. That’s a huge change in approach, and one that he absolutely had to make. That he was able to sustain a fastball with an average of 96 MPH for 106 pitches is pretty remarkable, honestly – no other starter in baseball consistently rushes their fastball up to the plate at that speed. Not even Felix.
If he’s going to keep throwing 95 and mixing in offspeed stuff 40% of the time, he’s going to be terrific.
And, just for fun, here’s a histogram of Morrow’s pitches tonight. He might be the easiest pitcher in baseball to discern between his fastball and offspeed stuff.
Game 140, Yankees at Mariners
Pettitte v Morrow.
I didn’t get down to Tacoma to catch any of Morrow’s starts, but I’m not sure that it matters: he only made five starts, twenty three innings. How stretched out can he be, really? The adjustments he’s going to have to make are as much in approach and particularly pacing as anything else. No matter how well he did in Tacoma, the temptation to resort to throwing gas and giving up on his other pitches when he’s in a jam could throw the whole thing off.
And apologies to the 5 people who saw this go up a day early at the scheduled *time*.
Armstrong, Lincoln interfered, sucked when we had a GM
A quick reminder on how active Lincoln and Armstrong’ have been even with a sitting, non-interim GM, and the results. From this Times blog piece:
The first was on who engineered the Kenji Johjima contract extension. Lincoln told me that it was Allan Nero, Johjima’s agent, who first approached the M’s with the extension idea. After that, it was primarily the team’s owner, Hiroshi Yamauchi, Lincoln and Chuck Armstrong who did the deal. Bavasi had limited involvement in it.
It’s not just something with Lee and the interim title. And GM candidates will know this.
Next choice: which printer does resumes best?
For the record, Armstrong says he was the one who blocked the Jarrod Washburn trade to the Twins. Says he wants “value” back, not just more saved money. He feels Washburn has been the only one other than Hernandez getting hitters out the past three months and that the team still needs that to get through the year. He also says, if the new GM doesn’t deal Washburn, the team could still find value in having Washburn stick around.
What good general manager candidate is going to want to work for a team where Armstrong — Armstrong! — blocks baseball moves that would help the franchise? Armstrong says he wants candidates to offer a comprehensive plan for how they’d rebuild the franchise over the next years. Presumably, anyone who says “I’ll extract a promise that I can act freely within bounds set by the ownership group, then give you a cell number that’ll ring an intern I’ll hire who sounds just like me and can pretend to be interested in your opinion, and spend the next couple seasons trying to undo the damage you and yours have wrought here” will be thanked for their time and shown the door.
Ichiro: basestealer, leader, slighted
Peter Campbell and Loukas Tsopanoglou both inquired about Ichiro’s basestealing and CF/RF as part of the WoTYC, and I decided to write out something I’ve been puzzling about for a while.
| Apx. Chances | Attempts | Attempt % | success rate | |
| April/March | 36 | 7 | 19% | 86% |
| May | 45 | 19 | 42% | 95% |
| June | 43 | 9 | 21% | 100% |
| July | 42 | 2 | 5% | 50% |
| August | 49 | 7 | 14% | 86% |
“Apx. Chances” is a rough estimate of how often he was on first or second after his at-bat, as H-3B-HR+BB. Obviously, he can’t steal if someone’s blocking the basepaths, and he can’t steal if they get a hit on the first pitch, but given the team’s offense this year, how often did that happen anyway? I could have drawn out a better number from game data, but this is a decent approximation.
That’s pretty crazy: he started off the season just crazy, making me and my “McLaren’s crazy to encourage Ichiro to steal 90 bases” post look dumb, but since then… he slowed way down as early as June, stealing about half as often when he was on base, and then in July he ran almost not at all, with August a little better.
Meanwhile, I thought that one of the reasons he might be reluctant to steal more often was that it took a lot out of him and he’d prefer a high average to a high SB total.
|
BABIP
|
|
| April/March |
0.262
|
| May |
0.347
|
| June |
0.358
|
| July |
0.340
|
| August |
0.365
|
Hmm.
Interestingly, there’s a pretty distinct line where Ichiro gives up on base-stealing: after June 23rd in Shea, he didn’t attempt a steal for ten games, went for it once in two games, and then didn’t try again for twenty-two games (attempting against Baltimore August 3rd) followed by a six-game stretch without an attempt.
He started the season that way, too, despite the encouragement: he didn’t attempt a swipe until April 13th.
That’s Ichiro’s stolen base binge, right there: between April 13th and June 23rd, over sixty four games, Ichiro stole 33 bases and was caught twice. He averaged a live stolen base attempt every other game, and did it with a terrific success rate. In the other seventy-five games this year, he’s 7-2.
Was he bored? Desperately trying to keep the team in contention any way he could? Why doesn’t he get any credit for this manic clinic he put on?
Or let me try this a different way. Ichiro starts the season in center field. On each side he has two defensively inept fielders, so if his fly ball pitchers are going to get any outs, it has to be Ichiro that runs everywhere. The team starts out devently and then gets rocked by Baltimore to get to 2-5, takes 2-3 from Tampa, and then April 11th-13th, the M’s take two from the Angels. They’re 6-6 and in third place. Ichiro’s only hitting .269 at that point.
He goes absolutely crazy. He hits .291/.355/.370 from April 13th through June 23rd while stealing eighty kajillion bases and running all over the place in the outfield.
During the April 30-May 4th losing streak, he hit .381/.381/.381 and stole six bases in five games.
During the May 5-10th losing streak, he hit .286/..348/.429 (3 doubles!) and stole three bases in six games.
During the May 20-May 26 losing streak, he hit .367/.424/.467 and tried to steal twice in seven games.
I’m not going to try and make an argument that Ichiro’s more talented in losses or whatever. But what you absolutely cannot say is that Ichiro has ever given up on this inept, horrible team. In the depths of losing streaks, he’s been charging out infield hits, working over opposing pitchers, stealing. And he’s done most of it while shouldering the burden of being the only working outfielder on the team, the most valuable outfielder when most of our carelessly-assembled rotation of horror is at work.
I don’t know what happened when he turned the afterburners off. There could only be forty good steals in his legs a year, and he burned them off trying to keep the team from utter embarrassment, and now he’s given up. Perhaps something’s bugging him, and that’s part of why he wanted to get back into right to try and save himself. Or Riggleman, after watching for a week, told him it was okay to ease up. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone with a press pass has asked him.
This is why I get so absolutely livid when I hear or read people running down Ichiro’s contribution this year. This year Ichiro quietly tore himself up over two months, playing center while grounders skipped by the middle infield, showed up to catch nearly every fly to left-center and right-center, even if he flew over to end up only backing up the fielder who’d huffed his way ten steps over, worked every at-bat and stole bases to get into scoring position in lineups where Jose Vidro was tasked with driving him in. And we’re supposed to listen to garbage like “he doesn’t dive” or “he’s not a vocal leader?”
No. I won’t have it. Ichiro tried to put the team on his back this year, and the teammates he was given watched, shrugged, and went off to go get dinner or give good quote in the post-game interviews. I don’t know what more anyone wants from a player, but good luck finding it.
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The return to the long dark winter of a small market
I don’t have a lot to say about Armstrong’s comments, but I wanted to make this quick point:
His comments about the challenges of Seattle’s market, and more generally the preparations to get everyone ready for slashing payroll and going to ground for a couple of years, are entirely lies, based on the premise that Seattle is a small market, which it isn’t, or that it’s hard to make money, which it’s not, and that they gave it a good try but failed because of totally unforseeable events they had no control over.
It’s part of the team’s long and storied history of mendacity, expectation-lowering, and their continual pouting that the fans and the city aren’t grateful enough to them for operating a for-profit business subsidized by us all.
As bad as these years have been, I’m not looking forward to seeing an even more petulant team waving a finger at me in the future, lecturing me on how they can’t afford to upgrade the team because I don’t go to enough games, rather than because they spent so long being so incompetent when the money was easy to come by.
Armstrong Speaks
Ross Newhan wrote a piece for the LA Times where he looks at the state of the American League West, from a “can anyone catch the Angels” perspective. In the piece, he gets a few interesting lines from Chuck Armstrong:
“I don’t think the Angels have anything we can’t catch up to,” he said from the West’s basement, “but after thinking it was going to happen this year I’m not predicting it’s going to happen next year.
“It’s not going to be a quick fix, because we’re going to have to grind through some of these contracts we’ve obligated ourselves to. Our attendance is going to go down in connection with our performance, and as chief operating officer here it’s my job to be fiscally and financially responsible, so you’re not going to see the Mariners go out and commit high dollars to free agents. We want to get back as quickly as we can, but we want to build something that will endure. If you don’t build a strong foundation in a market our size, you’re going to have some volatile swings in your record.
This is the most declarative public statement about what the organization is planning for the future we’ve heard since Bavasi was fired, and it seems clear that Lincoln has settled on rebuilding. Stating in September that “you’re not going to see the Mariners go out and commit high dollars to free agents” just doesn’t make any sense if you’re going to entertain any possibility of retooling and trying to win next year. These comments make it fairly obvious that the team is going to tear it down, cut payroll, and take their lumps for a few years.
This pretty much rules out Pat Gillick’s return (thank God), as you’d imagine that the GMs they’ll interview will be ones with experience in player development/franchise building. Don’t be surprised if John Hart, who recently said he was interested in the job, becomes a leading contender – Armstrong’s comments lead us to believe that we’re going to see a Cleveland-style rebuilding, and Hart is the most experienced guy in building a franchise through player development out there.
Enjoy Adrian Beltre’s last month in September – these kind of statements make it exceedingly likely that he’ll be traded this winter, as the M’s go young and cheap next year.