Optimizing The End Of The Roster
As we saw yesterday, there’s a downside to carrying a 12th pitcher in lieu of a 14th position player – not having a fifth spot on the bench means that you can find yourself in some bad spots if a couple of position players are dinged up at the same time. The M’s were lucky that they got a great performance out of Felix and the bullpen on a day when they put a line-up on the field that couldn’t score at a brothel.
Seriously, against a right-handed pitcher in a park that is death to right-handed batters, the Mariners ran out a line-up that went L-L-R-R-R-R-R-R-R, and one of the Ls was Endy Chavez. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was James Shields, James Baldwin, or James the VI – the Mariners weren’t going to put up much offense yesterday.
As we mentioned coming out of spring training, the team is too right-handed. Of the 13 position players they’re carrying, nine of them are right-handed bats. They team is currently incapable of playing a LH bat at catcher, second base, shortstop, or third base on any given day. If any of the four LH bats need a day off, for any reason, the team has to replace them with a right-handed hitter. So, frequently, you’re going to see line-ups with just two or three LH bats in the line-up against an RHP, and that’s a pretty big problem.
For instance, this weekend the Mariners will be facing Shane Loux, Anthony Ortega, and Jered Weaver. Here are the career platoon splits for those three.
Loux: .642 OPS vs RH, 1.004 OPS vs LH
Ortega: No Major League Experience
Weaver: .661 OPS vs RH, .767 OPS vs LH
Loux’s sinker is a nice weapon against righties, as we saw last week, but he’s got nothing against lefties. He’s basically Sean Green out there, throwing his sinker and getting torched by opposite handed hitters. They don’t even have to be good – a crappy left-handed bat can look like a star against pitchers like Loux. Ortega is basically the same thing, just with less of a sinker. And Weaver’s stuff plays up much better against righties than lefties.
If the M’s had a LH bat off the bench, they could add a legitimate offensive weapon this weekend, even if that guy wasn’t a great hitter, simply due to the matchups. The right-handedness of the team’s position players is a handicap that is really going to hurt them in series like this.
This team needs a fifth bench player a lot more than they need a 12th pitcher. Shawn Kelley didn’t even pitch in the Tampa Bay series. Miguel Batista is getting used every four days or so. The Mariners run prevention has been excellent, and the team is getting innings from the rotation.
I know Jeff Clement had a bad spring and isn’t tearing the cover off the ball in Tacoma, but he’d be a pretty useful guy to have around right now. Or, just go sign Geoff Jenkins or trade for Adam Kennedy or something. The team needs a left-handed reserve. They can’t keep running out these overly RH line-ups and giving teams easy matchups to shut them down.
Math kudzu
Or “Step on them! Step on them hard!”
Early in the season, I don’t pay attention to the standings for a while. Certainly not to get excited about. But today I broke down and started playing with the numbers, building on Dave’s “Fun Thought” post, wondering what the chances are the M’s will compete for a pennant and how important this series might be. Start with the pre-season conventional wisdom that the Angels were the team to beat in the AL West. That they were a 85-win team.
Now we’re a tenth through the season. Seattle’s 10-6, LA of A are 6-9. They’re three and a half back already. That’s a surprisingly big hole to climb out of already. A couple games ago, when the M’s were 8-3, you could run the rest of the season out and the M’s would finish three games back.
It’s even tighter now — play out the season with the M’s gong .480 or so, the Angels rally to go .525, and they’ll finish two games ahead.
So let’s look at this next series. What if the M’s sweep? They’ll come out 13-6, the Angels will be at 6-12. Then if you still assume they’re 85 and 78-win teams and play that way the rest of the year, the M’s win the division by a game.
2-1, the M’s finish a game back.
1-2, three games back.
Or to put this another way: if the M’s sweep to get to 13-6 and play .500 ball the rest of the way, they’ll win 85 games, or what the Angels were supposed to win. The Angels, to recover, have to play .567 ball all the way to the finish.
This omits of course any adjustment we should be making to their true strength — are the Angels now worse than their pre-season projections? If so, lower their chances. Does the M’s early start (and particularly the Washburn revival) show us that they’re legitimately stronger than everyone thought, and a team that can go .500 or better the rest of the way? If so, bump their chances up.
No matter what, though, the two teams starts have given the M’s a surprising opportunity to put a divisional rival deep into a whole they may not be able to escape this year… and we’re sixteen games in.
We start The Interview, Newer Slimmer Carlos Silva, and The Bus. This is going to be good.
Rainiers Game Thread
I’m a bit late in getting this up, but with the M’s playing a day game, you’ve got a chance to listen to Mike Curto call the Rainiers as they play Salt Lake tonight. Dan Denham vs Andy Baldwin, so you should be in for some offense.
Clement is out of the line-up, as he’s a new papa.
And sometimes pounding the zone works out
Felix threw 72 (identified) fastballs and 32 other pitches of any kind.
Interestingly, he did manage to get some varied movement:
Game 16, Rays at Mariners
Why carrying 12 pitchers is stupid – your bench gets a little banged up, and voila, you’re running out Jamie Burke at first base. Apparently he’s the only one left with any experience there, all of 10 innings.
RF-L Ichiro
LF-L Chavez
2B-R Lopez
3B-R Beltre
DH-R Balentien
C-R Johnson
CF-R Ferguson
SS-R Betancourt
1B-R Burke
Meanwhile, even after burning through the bullpen with Jakubauskas pitching last night, come on, it’s Felix Day. Hernandez v. Shields, 3:40.
USSM Meetup, NC version
With Conor Glassey and Jeff Shaw joining me as North Carolina residents, we’ve decided to have an east coast USSM event. Thanks to Conor doing the legwork, we have a date and a place.
Sunday, May 17th, at the Champps Sports in Durham. We’ll have a private room that can hold up to 40 people to watch the Mariners take on the Red Sox. If you’re interested, just leave a note in the comments so we can get a rough headcount. We’ll post a few more notices as the date gets closer.
Rob Johnson’s Catching
Much has been made over the last few years about Kenji Johjima’s game calling, how the pitching staff doesn’t like throwing to him, etc… Much has also been made about Rob Johnson’s work with the pitching staff, how great of a communicator he is, how well he handles a pitching staff, his leadership, and all of that stuff.
Their reputations couldn’t be more opposite. A lot of people think that having Johjima behind the plate really hurts the pitching staff, while having Johnson behind the plate really helps the pitching staff.
Let’s insert some facts into the discussion, shall we?
Team with Joh behind the plate.
Team with Johnson behind the plate.
Opposing hitters have fared slightly better against the M’s when Johjima is behind the plate, posting a .650 OPS versus a .613 OPS when Johnson is behind the plate. However, let’s look at the breakdown by pitcher.
Felix: 56 PA, .702 OPS with Joh, 27 PA, .638 OPS with Johnson
Bedard: 22 PA, .747 OPS with Joh, 56 PA, .448 OPS with Johnson
Washburn: 12 PA, .000 OPS with Joh, 68 PA, .608 OPS with Johnson
Silva: 51 PA, .836 OPS with Joh, 0 PA, NA with Johnson
Jakubauskas: 17 PA, .639 OPS with Joh, 43 PA, .931 OPS with Johnson
Rowland-Smith: 20 PA, .733 OPS with Joh, 0 PA, NA with Johnson
Morrow: 15 PA, .500 OPS with Joh, 11 PA, .282 OPS with Johnson
Aardsma: 15 PA, .298 OPS with Joh, 11 PA, .273 OPS with Johnson
Corcoran: 16 PA, .648 OPS with Joh, 18 PA, .914 OPS with Johnson
Batista: 13 PA, .615 OPS with Joh, 12 PA, .817 OPS with Johnson
Kelley: 4 PA, .500 OPS with Joh, 12 PA, .727 OPS with Johnson
Lowe: 7 PA, .452 OPS with Joh, 15 PA, .533 OPS with Johnson
White: 0 PA, NA with Joh, 17 PA, .301 OPS with Johnson
Johnson hasn’t caught Silva at all this year. Think that matters? Yea, me too. Selection bias is the glaring problem with catcher ERA. If Roy Halladay had a personal catcher, I’d bet the farm on him leading the league in CERA, even if he wasn’t very good defensively. Likewise, the best defensive catcher of all time couldn’t make Brandon Backe into anything other than a crappy pitcher.
That problem manifests itself here. Joh only caught Bedard for five innings and only got four innings with Washburn before he had to leave with his injury. By the way, if the situation had been reversed, and Joh replaced Johnson while Wash had a perfect game, only to immediately give up a base hit and a home run as soon as he entered, that would have been a story in the news, yes? It would have fit the narrative. That it happened the other way means it doesn’t get mentioned. This is how myths are created.
But, getting back to the point at hand – look at the breakdown of pitchers who have been caught by both Joh and Johnson.
Felix: Marginal difference in favor of Johnson
Bedard: Big edge to Johnson
Washburn: Big edge to Joh
Jakubauskas: Big edge to Joh
Morrow: Big edge to Johnson
Aardsma: Push
Corcoran: Big edge to Joh
Batista: Big edge to Joh
Kelley: Big edge to Joh
Lowe: Marginal difference in favor of Joh
This is all ridiculously small sample stuff, but five pitchers have gotten significantly better results with Johjima behind the plate. Two, Brandon Morrow and Erik Bedard, have gotten significantly better results with Johnson behind the plate, and of course that comes with the caveat that Johjima caught the still-working-stuff-out version in Minnesota, while Johnson caught the okay-now-I’m-ready-for-the-season version lately.
What should you conclude from this? Absolutely nothing, because the sample sizes are basically worthless and there are all kinds of problems with using both catcher ERA and OPS against for a pitcher. But that’s the point – the “Rob Johnson is awesome” crowd has created this idea that the team pitches significantly better when he’s behind the plate, and want you to extrapolate actual abilities from those results, even though you shouldn’t. I’m simply pointing out that even the results that those conclusions are based on don’t support the idea that Joh is ruining the pitching staff and Johnson is working miracles behind the plate.
By the way, opposing hitters had an .886 OPS against the Mariners last year when Rob Johnson was behind the plate – easily the worst of any catcher the M’s used last year.
Don’t buy into the myth. Rob Johnson can work hard, be a great communicator, an awesome leader, a nifty teammate, and all that goes along with the praise for his work ethic, and no one still has any idea how much it matters. What does matter is that he can’t hit, and the Mariners aren’t in a position where they can afford to be giving regular at-bats to a guy with no bat and a question mark surrounding his defensive contributions.
Game 15, Rays at Mariners
Today’s lineup:
DH-L Griffey & Co.
RF-L Ichiro!
LF-L Endy Chavez
DH-L Griffey
3B-R Beltre
1B-R Sweeney
2B-R Lopez
C-R Johnson
CF-R Gutierrez
SS-R Betancourt
Stacking all the lefties up top! Wow.
It’s Griffey’s team
It’s official. Here’s the Pravda lead story:
Help Griffey and Co. head to St. Louis for ASG
All-Star Game ballots were released on Wednesday and former Seattle All-Star standout, Ken Griffey Jr., tops the list of Mariners nominated for the Midsummer Classic
Now, I don’t want to be a dick about this — scratch that, I kind of do. Yay Griffey’s back, yay. That said, what the hell? This is exactly the kind of all-Griffey, all-the-time nonsense I dreaded.
Griffey is hitting a Vidro-esque .184/.326/.342 (yes, I said it). He hasn’t gone to an All-Star game since 2007 and only two in the last five (four in the last ten).
What about the rest of the team? Just in terms of general acclaim, Ichiro’s gone every year since 2001 (and won a Gold Glove every year and only one year (2005) has Griffey beat him in share of MVP votes. In contribution over the last few years, Beltre’s a legitimate All-Star. And that’s not even counting Felix!
But this is what they’re pushing? Griffey as All-Star? Come on. His clubhouse influence can’t possibly be so great that the massive contributions the other players have made to this team should be reduced to “& Co.”
Washburn Throws Kitchen Sink For Strikes
Want to know why Jarrod Washburn was able to run up nine strikeouts last night?
If you look at a Pitch F/x chart for most pitchers, you’ll see three or four clusters that represent the different pitch types. The fastballs will all be grouped together in the not much movement/higher velocity area. The off speed pitches will be lumped together in lower velocity/higher movement areas. And there will be significant separation between the two.
Washburn, though, throws so many variations of all of his pitches that clusters are nowhere to be found. He threw a 91 MPH fastball with hardly any movement at all (upper right corner), he threw an 89 MPH fastball that rivaled Brandon Webb’s sinker for movement, and he threw everything in between. There’s so much variation in velocity and movement that the pitch description algorithm kind of threw it’s hands up in the air and went on strike.
Just on his fastball, we’ve got a lot of four seamers, a few sinkers, a couple of cutters, a pair of splitters, and a few that are just generically labeled fastball because they don’t fit into any of the aforementioned categories. That doesn’t even include the change-up, some of which are probably actually sinkers, and move like his fastball just with less velocity.
Oh, and he also threw two distinctly different breaking balls, just for good measure.
Washburn threw everything but the knuckleball last night. When we beg Felix to mix his pitches and avoid patterns, this is what we’re talking about. Washburn’s stuff is not that much better than what you’ll see when you go to a Triple-A game, but he really knows how to keep hitters off balance. There’s no guessing right when you’re facing Washburn, because he might not throw you the same pitch twice all game. With so many variations of his fastball, plus an improved change-up/sinker, and two breaking balls with significantly different movements, good luck figuring out what you’re going to get on any given pitch.
No, this isn’t “for real”, in the sense that he’s going to finish the year with an ERA below 2.00 or a FIP below 3.00. He’s going to get whacked around some this year, and it’s a good bet that he’ll finish the year with something close to his typical 2.5 BB/5 K/1.1 HR profile, but on nights where he carves up a pretty good line-up by giving a display on how to pitch, I’ll tip my cap to him. That was fun to watch.