I’m Just Saying
Pitch F/x missed the third inning, so the data below won’t match official totals. Point is still the same.
Aardsma: 19 pitches, 19 fastballs
Morrow: 16 pitches, 14 fastballs
Corcoran: 14 pitches, 14 fastballs
The Mariner relievers combined to throw 49 pitches today. 47 of them were fastballs. Toss in Silva, and the Mariners threw 135 pitches today – 90.3% of them were fastballs.
I get that Silva’s sinker is his only major league pitch. I get that Aardsma throws hard. I get that Corcoran’s sinker is his only major league pitch. I get that Morrow throws hard. I know, they were going with their best stuff.
But 90% fastballs? Really? Did Kenji decide that if Wak was going to second guess him for calling for a secondary pitch in Minnesota that he’d just go drastically the other way?
I’m thrilled that we’re 6-2. But can we get a few breaking balls tomorrow, please?
New day
The M’s, at 6-2, have now won 10% of last year’s total. If they go .500 the rest of the way, they’ll finish 83-79, an improvement of 27 games.
Game 8, Angels at Mariners
Silva vs Loux, 3:40 pm.
Chavez, RF
Cedeno, LF
Griffey, DH
Beltre, 3B
Branyan, 1B
Lopez, 2B
Johjima, C
Gutierrez, CF
Betancourt, SS
Opening Day, Part II
The new look M’s take the field in about three hours for their first home game of the season. Very few people expected this series to feature the first place Mariners, and I’d imagine most people outside of Seattle expect the Angels to “correct” that early season fluke in this series. However, I’d give the M’s pretty good odds tonight, at least.
I know, Carlos Silva is pitching. But for Silva, this is about as good a match-up as he’s going to get. The Angels line-up is almost as RH heavy as the Mariners – their only LH bats are Chone Figgins, Bobby Abreu, Kendry Morales, and Erick Aybar, and neither Figgins nor Aybar is going to scare you much. Almost all of the Angels power is right-handed, so Silva should be able to feature his sinker/slider combination against Guerrero, Hunter, Napoli, Kendrick, and Rivera. You neutralize those five, and the Angels aren’t going to score many runs.
LAA counters with Shane Loux, who is basically their version of Silva. He throws a 91 MPH fastball that doesn’t miss any bats at all, and his game plan is to put the ball over the plate and pray. He’s the kind of pitcher that a contact oriented team can beat down pretty badly – Betancourt and Lopez can hit guys like this.
Don’t be surprised if we’re talking about the 6-2 Mariners after tonight’s game. The next two will be significantly tougher to win, but at least for one night, bet on the M’s.
Dave on KUOW
I’ll be doing a short interview on KUOW 94.9 at 12:40ish this afternoon. Probably only lasts five minutes or so, but tune in if you’d like.
Recap of the Monday content
Since we posted many thousands of words yesterday, and I’m sure you need something to distract you from Opening Day at Safeco Field, Featuring Newer, Slimmer Carlos Silva (side note: is there really no way they could have jiggered the rotation somehow to avoid this?).
– Jay Yencich wrote a Minor League Wrap that will be retold by future generations in epic verse form
– I threw in an update about construction and traffic around the games
– Dave offered thoughts from the first week
– Larry Stone got great quotes from Ichiro
– The FTA’s blaming the 2005 Congress, the M’s, and you for the regulation that ended ten years of success with shuttle buses
In non-M’s news, Harry Kalas, Phillies broadcaster, and Mark Fidrych, Tigers pitcher, died. Jayson Stark’s column on Kalas.
FTA response blames M’s, wants you to go screw yourself
From the FTA, if you can manage to get their broken contact form to work.
Answer: Thanks for taking the time to share your
comments. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has
received a number of questions and comments concerning the
Seattle Mariners’ 2009 baseball season bus service. A lot of
these comments have come from an article published recently
in a local paper that mistakenly gives the impression that
FTA “banned” the service.
I don’t know why they’d think that. Crazy people. The FTA just enacted a regulation that made it cost prohibitive for the M’s to continue. That’s not banning it.
FTA drafted the charter regulation in response to a request
from Congress. There was a charter regulation in existence
prior to the current one that was vague, specifically when
it came to the definition of charter service. The current
charter regulation is the result of over a year’s worth of
work consulting, and negotiating with members of both
private charter companies and public transit agencies. The
result was a rule that provides clear guidelines for the
first time in 30 years, aimed at helping public transit
agencies and private charter companies figure out who is in
the best position to provide bus service for such events
conveniently, efficiently, and economically.
Do you think Metro, or anyone, signed off on this? Really? All the public transit authorities in the country were just begging the FTA “please, please, we can’t figure out what to do with ourselves, or how we can best serve our communities! Ban us from doing anything that’s not strictly scheduled, for the love of God!”
And remember how horrible life was under the previous, vague regulation. Has everyone erased their memories of the Greyhound-Sound Transit War of 2006, when buses armed with technicals ran wild through the city, the air filled with the smell of gunpowder and the chatter of small arms? When the bus barn looked like this?
pictures from an armed convoy trip in Mogadishu, ctsnow
Thank goodness that horrible time is over.
The regulation, in part, protects private bus companies
from having to compete unfairly with federally funded public
operators-a long-standing point of contention. As cities
across the country gear up for their summer festivals and
concerts, many have already successfully adjusted to the
rule. Transit agencies, in turn, are better able to focus on
their core mission-providing high quality, timely, bus
service-without sacrificing any of the services riders
expect from them on regular fixed routes.
Good of them to explain what a transportation agency’s core mission is for us.
I thought Metro’s mission was
Provide the best possible public transit services that get people on the bus and improve regional mobility and quality of life in King County.
Like, say, low-cost public transport to special events downtown.
During the negotiations on the charter rule a concern was
raised about unmet needs several times. As a result, there
are different measures in the current charter regulation
that work to prevent unmet needs, including petitioning FTA
for an exception for an event of regional or national
significance, hardship, or time sensitive events, as well as
an option for transit agency to send out notices for service
they are interested in providing. All of these tools work
together to ensure that a transit agency can work with
private operators to prevent unmet service needs.
Uh huh, uh huh. Except that clearly they do not work, since we don’t have shuttle service any more despite Metro and the Mariners both wanting to provide it.
Organizations like the Seattle Mariners are free to
contract with local companies to provide shuttle service to
baseball games. If an organization chooses not to spend
money to ensure their fans can get to games quickly and
efficiently, then the call that fans should really make is
to the organization–not the Federal government. While we
stand at the ready to explain the regulation, we cannot
explain why the Seattle Mariners organization chooses to
leave its fans out in the cold, while other sports
organization gladly spend the dollars to ensure fans have
easy access to games (the Washington Nationals pay for
shuttle service for its fans, as do the Baltimore Ravens, as
well as many others). In the end, the Seattle Mariners
baseball organization made the business decision to not
provide its fans with shuttle service this year.
Wow. Was there no ASCII art middle finger they could have included in the email?
This is, and let’s just call it what it is, a big fuck-you to anyone who writes them, and whoever came up with this answer should be ashamed of themselves.
The M’s ran, for ten years, a lovely little program with Metro which provided shuttle bus service which was cheap, convenient, got people who might not use public transit a nice introduction, and helped everyone.
As the result of this Bush regulation, they can’t. So they went to Starline, which quoted them a price hundreds of thousands of dollars more. The M’s decided not to foot that bill — which is totally understandable.
So we’re supposed to blame the M’s because the FTA wants to ban Metro from providing extra off-schedule bus service?
I don’t understand, frankly, why anyone could possibly support this. From a common-sense perspective, the service was good for the M’s, it was good for Metro, it was good for traffic. From a free-market perspective, first, why does the FTA get to decide if it’s best for Seattle to hamstring this kind of service? Why not let an existing infrastructure provide a more efficient service, “freeing up” Skyline to do whatever it is they do when they’re not lobbying. And why blame the M’s for making that business decision? And on and on and on
Unless otherwise specified, this message is being sent by
an individual employee in an effort to provide a rapid
response to an email inquiry and may not represent official
FTA or DOT policy. Individuals seeking formal
determinations or opinions are invited to submit their
requests in writing to the agency.
Oh, I will.
Federal Transit Administration
Office of Communications & Congressional Affairs
East Building, 5TH Floor
1200 New Jersey Ave SE
Washington, DC 20590
Update: Much of that FTA response, if you’re curious, is indeed stock, recycled from James Simpson’s May 27 2008 letter to the Washington Post, helpfully found here. Simpson’s a 2006 appointee and came from… wait for it… “an international transportation company.”
Some Thoughts From Week One
Based on my observations of the team from the first week, as well as my observations of the reactions of others to those same events.
1. Perhaps the best thing to come out of week one was the Endy Chavez Small Sample Size Hot Streak. Going into the season, the only people who were remotely excited about the idea of a slap-hitting no power guy in left field were the nerds who have been advocating for the undervaluation of defense in prior years. Had Chavez started the year 3 for 30, the public sentiment would have shifted fairly strongly to LF being some sort of Griffey/Balentien combo, and Wakamatsu would have had his preference for defense challenged pretty quickly.
However, Endy’s single-fest has made it fairly simple for Wak to tell Junior “look, you’re great and all, but I can’t bench the guy who hits .380 and plays great defense – you want to win, right?” So, it’s made the Junior-as-DH plan a lot easier to pitch to both Griffey and the fan base, and that’s only good news for the team. In the long run, there’s probably no more important roster decision that needs to be made than keeping Griffey off the field as much as possible, and the Endy Chavez hot streak helped make that more realistic.
However, it’s apparently also given some people the idea that Endy Chaez isn’t a lousy hitter. No one’s advocated for Chavez more than I, but we have to be realistic in our expectations – Endy Chavez is a terrible hitter. That hasn’t changed just because he won a bunch of coin flips. He has a batting average on balls in play of .407 – his career mark is .297. That’s not skill – that’s good luck. He’s finding holes, and while I love that he’s finding holes, there’s absolutely no reason for anyone to think that this represents some kind of new expectation for his offensive performance level. He’s the worst hitter on the team (okay, he might be better than Rob Johnson), and he should hit as low in the order as possible when Ichiro is healthy. This idea that he should hit 2nd to “ride the hot streak” assumes that hot streaks are predictive, and it’s been proven that they aren’t. Thank the world for its gift of a good offensive week from Chavez, move him to the #9 hole, and keep trying to win games.
2. The bullpen posted a 2.37 ERA last week, but it was the scariest 2.37 ERA of all time. Their combined walk rate was 5.21 and 40% of their balls in play were outfield fly balls, so even while they got some key outs and held almost all of their leads, they didn’t exactly pitch well. I’m as big a David Aardsma fan as anyone, but let’s not kid ourselves – he was no relief ace this weekend. Pounding the upper half of the strike zone with four seam fastballs when you don’t have a great idea of where it’s going isn’t exactly going to make you the new Mariano Rivera.
This bullpen is remarkably interesting, but also still a pretty real concern in the short term. The idea of collecting a bunch of live arms and sorting them out as the season goes on is a good way to build a bullpen, but inherent in the assumption is that some guys will be pretty bad in the process of sorting themselves out of the equation. Those bad outings are going to hurt the team, and if the team keeps playing close games, those implosions are going to occur in high leverage outings, which is going to lead to losses for the club.
What we have right now is a bunch of guys pitching at similar levels, which is the exact opposite of sorting things out. When Tyler Johnson comes off the DL, who goes away to open up a roster spot? Corcoran was the last guy to make the team out of spring training, but he was also pretty good last year and has a terrific sinker that makes him a useful situational reliever. This team needs a LH reliever, though, and with a lot of options for RH specialists, maybe he’s the guy who loses out, but it’s not an obvious call one way or another.
While we’re talking about the bullpen, we have to talk about Wak’s usage so far. Yesterday, he brought Aardsma in to replace Bedard with Giambi/Holliday/Cust due up. He took out an LHP and brought in an RHP with two LH hitters due up in a one run game. If McLaren had done this, I’d have flipped out and gone on some long rant about platoon adantages, but I didn’t. This either reflects on a bias that I have that is interfering with my ability to cover this team objectively or reflects a built up trust in Wakamatsu’s intellect that creates a benefit-of-the-doubt that didn’t exist with prior managers. I guess it’s up to you to decide whether that benefit-of-the-doubt is a bias or is built on a reality that our new management team actually knows what they’re doing.
3. There’s a remarkable amount of wisdom in not extrapolating from early season results – way too many wrong conclusions have been drawn from small sample size data and a lack of understanding of the variability in performance in narrow time spans. My Endy Chavez paragraph up above is based on the premise that luck can be a massive factor in the results of 30 plate appearances. However, some things stabilize faster than others, just due to physical limitations in abilities. Endy Chavez can hit .400 for a little while, but he can’t slug five home runs in a week. He’s just not strong enough.
Likewise, flyball pitchers can’t run up 60% GB rates and bad pitchers can’t post exceptional BB/K rates. Even though it’s only 13 innings, Bedard’s 15/1 K rate suggests that he posseses an ability that guys like Carlos Silva don’t have. You will never see a Carlos Silva-level pitcher run a 15/1 K/BB rate in 13 innings. Last year, guys like me who are constantly warning about small sample sizes whiffed on Cliff Lee despite an amazing April where he pitched like Johan Santana. When we see extremely good or bad performances in the true outcome categories, we need to give them some amount of real credit. You can say “it’s only two starts” all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that Erik Bedard has established a level of ability that he simply didn’t have last year. That should be exciting to you.
Stone with Ichiro
Construction and Mariner game traffic
Hey, if you’re thinking about driving into the game todaytomorrow, here’s some handy DOT info about the construction (SR519 link) Read more