Game 33 Recap
Well this is no fun.
I caught some of the post-game show on KIRO, and found I agreed entirely with Matt Pitman’s read on the situation: Ryan Rowland-Smith is a great, great guy, and he’s incredibly easy to root for. He’s also not helping the team right now. I thought RRS would be good for nearly 2 WAR this year, a prediction that now looks certifiably insane. Did I overestimate him because I like him? Is this just an aberration or another dead-arm period that affected him last year at this time? Is this, as Ryan’s hinted at himself, just a period of self-doubt, where he’s out-thinking himself and struggling with his confidence? I don’t really know, but it’s painful to watch.
Ryan Rowland-Smith’s fastball averaged 87 MPH today, exactly the same as he averaged in his last start. I went back and looked at some of his starts down the stretch in 2009, and while the data aren’t consistent, they’re telling. In his last start of the year, he went 6 2/3 IP against Texas, throwing 104 pitches. He topped out that day at 93, and hit 92 with his 100th pitch (and again with his 102nd!). Can you even imagine RRS hitting 92 now? This is as difficult for me to visualize as a Griffey home run off of a curve ball. Velocity isn’t the key to Ryan’s game any more than it is for Jason Vargas, but he really doesn’t pitch well at 87.
Coming into the year, we all thought the curve was RRS’s out-pitch. He’d run up consistently good pitch values on it, and he used it enough to command it. The first game out, the A’s clearly waited on the slow curve and hit it hard. He had a modicum of success with his change-up that night, so he’s since thrown more change-ups and fewer curves. RRS threw a total of 3 curve balls tonight, but it didn’t matter: his change-up didn’t fool the O’s, and it ended up his worst pitch on the night. Now, these are all tiny, tiny samples, but it’s looking like he comes into a start with a game plan, with pitches he wants to use to get swinging strikes and outs, but the pitch just isn’t good enough. I thought his early struggles with the curve were survivable given the success he’s had with the change and slider, but today’s game makes me think that ‘success’ has been BABIP luck. Like I said, this sucks.
Ken Griffey Jr hit a sacrifice fly to right field in the ninth for a meaningless run. As is so often the case, the at-bat will be seen completely differently by different fans, based entirely on what they thought of Junior going into it. The pro-Griffey camp may see it as the beginning of a turn-around: down 1-2, he fought off two tough off-speed pitches, then *pulled* a 96 MPH fastball deep to right. Pessimists will see this as confirmation that Griffey’s power is completely shot: a 96 MPH fastball imparts a lot of momentum, and Griffey’s swing can no longer hit one out under the best of circumstances. Honestly, I thought it was a good AB, and the fact that he got around on the pitch impressed me. There may be more in the tank than I’d previously thought, but not enough to justify the roster spot.
Adam Moore looks completely lost at the plate right now. His swing doesn’t look capable of driving the ball, and a bloop single or a seeing-eye GB is basically the best-case scenario in each at-bat. Alonzo Powell needs to work with him, and soon. There’s ability in there, but his approach puts him on the defensive. He looks like he’s mimicking someone else’s swing (as a kid, I loved copying Mickey Tettelton’s swing, which is basically the opposite of what Moore’s doing these days).
Ian Snell was his usual enigmatic self. He averaged 93 MPH and touched 95 with his FB, and his slider had nice break. The Orioles – the Orioles – hammered both of them. I thought that he had a chance to re-invent himself as a 2-pitch reliever with a FB set-up by a slider. His FB’s generated such poor results that he may need to throw the slider 40/50/60% of the time to survive, but the stuff was clearly there. Now I’m not so sure. There are plenty of theories as to why Snell’s FB doesn’t make batters miss, but now we have to wonder why his slider’s hittable too. I like Snell and wanted him to succeed badly, but the early returns on his ‘change of scenery’ aren’t encouraging. He’s slowly (or not-so-slowly as the case may be) becoming a likable Miguel Batista. This recap is pure sunshine.
Uh, Langerhans looked great – at least we’ve got a player with actual positional flexibility. After a day at 1B, he moved to CF and threw Miguel Tejada out at home on a single. He’s hitting well recently! I’m… scraping here.
The M’s still have a chance at the playoffs thanks to the division’s mediocrity and the number of games left to play. If you’re hoping for a late charge though, it’s time to start rooting for whoever’s playing Texas. The Rangers talent looked a touch better than the M’s to start, but they’re not running away with things thanks to Chris Davis’ death-rattle, Justin Smoak’s learning curve and Julio Borbon’s inability to get on base. They had as many disappointing starts as the M’s, but their depth is allowing them to work through them. They’re starting to look scary. OK, MORE scary.
I will be awefully surprised if Hyphen is still in the rotation after today’s game. Snell working on locating his fastball is an easier fix than RRS adding another 7-8 mph to his.
RRS to Tacoma when Bedard is healthy?
This team has so many problems right now it is depressing. Hopefully Texas starts to run into a series of their own problems soon.
RRS might be the bullpen lefty when Bedard returns. Unless he keeps getting rocked.
As mentioned this off season Snells throwing everything outside as a result hes is not making it tough on the hitters.
He needs to throw inside as right now batters have a much higher O-Contact percentage then one would expect with his stuff.
Obviously the batters are looking for pitches in a zone even the ones just outside the strike zone and hitting them. Also there is a problem that his change up and slider are getting faster by a mph and his fastball slower by 1.5 mph resulting in only a net difference of 6 and 7 mph.
So batters generally know the location and the speed of his pitches so they are feeling pretty comfortable at the plate.
It really seems to me that RRS needs to throw his curve in more 0-2, 1-2 counts. The only correlation I can glean from his numbers are an increase in O-Contact% and a decrease in number of curves. Could he be throwing more change-ups in pitchers counts? Thus allowing more balls out of the strike zone to be fought off, raising his pitch counts and killing his K’s? I’m probably completely over thinking this but maybe it’s something to look for in his next start.
You’re kidding, right?
Most of the regulars have an average of .215 or worse. Only Ichi and Guti are batting over .300.
They’re also the only 2 of the regulars with a wOBA over .300.
Are you telling me that in the next 2 months or so we’re going to see enough positive regression to have 4 or 5 hitters add 50 – 70 points to their averages and 40 – 60 points to their wOBA? (I say next 2 months or so because any kind of late-season surge to make the #s look average will be too little, too late… by then the Ms would have played and lost too many games within their own division.)
When we’re actively rooting for other teams to beat up on Texas as the hope for playoffs, in mid-May, it’s time to call it. Nothing short of a substantial roster overhaul of the position players at the ML and AAA level will fix what ails this club.
The offseason plan of “++ pitching, ++ defense, league average hitting” didn’t work. The plan needs to be closer to “++ pitching, + defense, + hitting”, so that when the hitting slumps, it slumps down to merely average instead of truly horrific. You can’t count on just one or two above-average hitters – especially if they’re not your middle of the order hitters – to carry the club.
Really? Are you sure the plan “didn’t work”, or did the players simply not hit as well as expected? Who’s hitting better than expected? Guti, I guess. And did you really think Griffey, Lopez, Figgins, Moore, Wilson, Bradley and Kotchman would be as bad as they are. I have a hard time saying the plan didn’t work, when the vast majority of players aren’t hitting their projections.
That’s the point – the plan doesn’t have insurance against hitting slumps, and some of the projections were wrong.
– We knew Griffey, Wilson and Moore would be as bad as they are.
– We know Lopez gets off to slow starts in the first half of the season.
– We knew Bradley and Kotchman were gambles.
Only Figgins is the true surprise and disappointment, but even if he were performing well, that would mean 2 men constantly stranded on base instead of one.
The plan required everyone to hit their average numbers or better, like clockwork. It didn’t have a margin of error.
I think it’s still too early for the Mariners to give up on the ++pitching,++defense, and average offense plan. Besides, what other options are there? Trade Cliff Lee now?
If Z can figure out some way to significantly upgrade the DH spot, And maybe swap out Adam Moore for a better offensive option at catcher – I’d say this team can still compete for the division.
I’m really looking forward to watching Felix, Lee, Bedard, Vargas, Fister (the best starting rotation in Mariners history?), and I’m confident Figgins, Lopez, Bradley, Kotchman, and even Jack Wilson will improve their offensive production.
Oh yeah, Mike Brumley needs a new gig too.
Just my two cents…
Pretty much signing anyone cheaply would do it, at this point. A league-average hitter (there’s that relying on average hitters thing again…) boosts this year’s production by 30 or 40 points, easily.
I agree. Who’s available, though, or might be available in a month? I’m not up on which underperforming teams have catching depth.
The plan required everyone to hit their average numbers or better, like clockwork. It didn’t have a margin of error.
No, it didn’t. It required that as a GROUP, the Mariners hit what management though they should. Any competent GM or fan knows that some players will do better some years, some players will do worse.
The problem with the team (beyond the OLordI’mtiredoftheDHdiscussion) is that 2010 is the offseason additions to the team are the absolute opposite of 2009, where Zduriencik drew to some inside straights: instead of the pleasant surprises of Aardsma, Branyan and Gutierrez giving us more than we expected, we have Lee, Figgins, Bradley, and Kotchman being various shades of injured or bad and giving us far less than expected. (If you want to go back a bit, the deal for Wilson/Snell hasn’t exactly panned out all so great, either… but it doesn’t appear we gave up a ton.)
You know what? That happens. GM’ing and assessing talent is not an exact science. It’s also not the end of the world, even if the team never crawls back into contention (and they easily can, it’s not even Memorial Day yet). Figgins isn’t on a stupid contract and is very likely to rebound, Kotchman is on a one year deal, Lee can either be traded or will likely net us good draft picks, Snell comes off the books in 2011, and Bradley… well, at least we don’t have Carlos Silva.
Look, Billy Beane’s had a couple of off years lately- is it time for him to give up HIS approach?
No, it doesn’t need to be plus-hitting. Average hitting would be fine. The problem is they’re not getting average hitting. They’re getting horrible hitting.
Now, horrible hitting is to be expected from Rob Johnson, Jack Wilson and the Fight-n-Snooze DH tandem, but Kotchman, Figgins and Lopez should be around average. I think we can expect the latter three to raise their wOBA significantly.
It seems to me much more likely that French gets the next start instead of Snell. Snell had his chance and was the first one to lose his rotation spot, and has done nothing in the bullpen to justify giving him his spot back. If RRS is out, I would prefer the M’s to put a young starter with a 1.72 ERA in 47 IP in AAA this year in that spot to act as the bridge between now and Bedard.
What’s up with the O’s starting Wigginton at 2B. 6’0″, 230 lbs. Really? Can he play 2B adequately?
If he is a 2B, then I’m a linebacker for the Hawks at 6’2″, 185 lbs.
At least Wilson takes a few pitches to go along with his suckiness.
Re: the sacrifice fly, not to pile on Griffey, but I was thinking when that happened that there should be a rule similar to the “defensive indifference” which allows the scorer not to award a sac fly in situations such as this one where it clearly doesn’t help the team any more than a straight out.
“You’re kidding, right? “
No. Have you seen the other teams in this division? Texas is legitimately good, and they’ve had a higher margin for error (which they absolutely needed), but we’re in May and the gap isn’t huge. If we were in another division, absolutely, and we may know fairly soon if it’s truly hopeless, but it isn’t now.