Cactus League Game 21, Padres at M’s
This is what we will use to do battle with the hated Padres.
RF Ichiro!
3B Figgins
LF Bradley
DH Cust
CF Langerhans
1B Kennedy
SS Jack Wilson
2B Ryan
C Gimenez
P Bedard
Why, it’s almost an actual lineup. After Bedard, there’s a possibility of RHPs Jamey Wright, Denny Bautista, Josh Lueke, Brandon League, Mumba Rivera, and Andrew Carraway. Yes, friends, Mumba Rivera is still here.
Here’s an interesting bit from today’s press notes: the M’s are presently 6-0 in spring training vs. AL West opponents, going 2-0 to everyone. Division title, here we come!
Some people in the comments were asking for official remarks on the departure of Garrett Olson, by which I can only assume they mean something more substantive than snarky tweets. Generally, when a team places a player on waivers in the middle of spring training, you can expect that the organization didn’t value said player all that much and that they were expendable, with a few exceptions here and there (this guy). Olson was converted to being a full-time reliever last season, after which he showed some minor improvements across the board in areas like home run rate (still mysteriously worse than it was when he was an Oriole) and strikeout rate. The stuff, however, didn’t improve markedly over the previous track record, so it’s hard to say what changed and how it would be sustained. If you’re choosing to go the way of the advanced metrics, WAR and the like, Olson’s value sandwiched him between Brian Sweeney and Sean White, and he had guys like Ian Snell, Chad Cordero, and Jesus Colome ahead of him, all in very limited time of course.
In camp this year, Olson was competing against Castro and Ring, both of whom have looked better than him at varying points, with the exception of that one inning Castro had where someone was playing Yakety Sax in the outfield. There’s also Luke French, who has pitched better than all of them and remains in the fifth starter discussion for the time being. Down the line, there are also arms like Edward Paredes and Brian Moran who could turn into serviceable left-handed relievers. Olson was a cool guy and I’ll never forget that one time when he was John Travolta, but irreplaceable, he was not.
Cactus League Game 20, M’s at Rangers
According to the press notes, this is a lineup that we will be sending against Neftali Feliz.
SS Jack Wilson
2B Ryan
CF Gutierrez
DH Cust
1B Smoak
RF Langerhans
3B L. Rodriguez
LF Saunders
C Moore
P Castro
Fabio Castro is 5’7. Every time he takes the mound, in my mind, the game is being called by Myron Reducto. That aside, he’s actually pitched quite well this spring and currently has a 6/1 K/BB and only three hits allowed in five innings. The arms available in the bullpen will be RHP Tom Wilhelmsen, RHP Justin Miller, RHP Chris Ray, LHP Cesar Jimenez, and LHP Royce Ring, along with minor leaguers who may or may not see time like RHP Scott Patterson, RHP Jarrett Grube, and LHP Brian Moran. I don’t have as many remarks about them, aside from “This could be their chance to prove they belong in the bullpen,” etc.
A short time ago, via the Twitter, the Mariners announced that LHP Mauricio Robles is going under the knife to remove some loose bodies in the elbow and he will be out a few weeks. It’s a loss of playing time for Robles, but the one inning I remember him pitching showed diminished velocity and even worse command than usual, so I was concerned that he may have required surgery of a more career-threatening variety. Bone chip removal in baseball is surprisingly common for something that you don’t generally think about happening in any other profession.
Cactus League Game 19, D’Backs at M’s
This game is on TV via FSN. Why is an afternoon game on Friday being broadcast? I don’t know, but I’m watching.
RF Ichiro!
3B Figgins
DH Bradley
1B Smoak
2B Kennedy
SS L. Rodriguez
CF Gross
LF Mike Wilson
C Bard
P Vargas
I think that’s better than last night’s lineup. Meanwhile, the D’Backs have Bloomquist in center batting second, followed by Melvin Mora at third and Xavier Nady batting fifth. Spring training is just full of surprises.
The 40 Man Roster Crunch
As noted by Ken Rosenthal tonight, the M’s are going to have to start making some decisions on 40-man roster guys in the next couple of weeks. The team is at the 40 man limit, but several of the players penciled into the opening day roster are in camp on minor league contracts, and will have to be added to the 40 man roster before the season starts. Adam Kennedy is basically a lock for a spot at this point, and it seems likely that the fourth outfielder job will go to either Ryan Langerhans or Gabe Gross, with Michael Saunders headed back to Tacoma for more seasoning. With Miguel Olivo gimpy, they might also need to carry bring Josh Bard north to fill a catching spot, and depending on how the bullpen shakes out, there could be a non-roster guy or two down there that needs to be added as well.
Rosenthal put out the possibility of the M’s needing to open up five spots. I’d say it’s probably going to be four, but five isn’t completely out of the question. Where will the M’s find those spots?
There’s three that are very easy to identify from my perspective.
As Rosenthal notes in the same column, Garrett Olson is already on waivers, and he seems to be unlikely to make the team after the acquisition of Aaron Laffey. Since he’s out of options, the team will likely either ship him elsewhere or outright him to Tacoma. Either way, he’s probably not long for the 40-man roster.
It’s also pretty unlikely that Rule 5 pick Jose Flores is going to make the team either. He hadn’t pitched in a Cactus League game since March 7th coming into today, and after walking three guys in 2/3 of an inning (raising his spring training ERA to 12.27 in the process), he hasn’t exactly made a strong case for himself. Given that the team is already starting with a somewhat shaky bullpen out of the gates, they probably can’t afford to carry Flores, and he’ll either be offered back to Cleveland or they’ll strike a deal that lets them send him to the minors after he clears waivers.
On the position player side of things, Mike Carp has no real future with the organization, and given how common his skillset is, he’d be a pretty easy guy to replace even if he was grabbed off waivers. Carp might have a career as a back-up first baseman on a bad team, but he offers little upside and isn’t worth a 40 man spot, especially not to the Mariners right now.
I’d put decent money on those three being removed from the 40 man roster before spring ends. After that, its a little more speculative. There are quite a few guys who are all equally disposable, including Chaz Roe, Josh Wilson, and Matt Tuiasosopo. Tui has an option left and could be sent to Tacoma without passing through waivers, so he’s probably the least likely option. Brendan Ryan‘s acquisition made Josh Wilson nearly useless, but his ability to fill in as an outfielder might convince them to keep him around, given the lack of confidence that Milton Bradley, Starting Left Fielder engenders. If they do decide to keep Wilson, then a guy like Roe could be sacrificed, as the organization has no shortage of right-handed sinkerballers with no out pitch.
None of these guys are likely to be missed in the future, so these aren’t super painful decisions, but the 40 man roster you see today is going to look pretty different come April 1st.
Pineda Isn’t Ready
I’ve been sitting on this post for a few weeks now. I started writing it while I was up in New Hampshire on a ski trip, but I wasn’t satisfied that I had enough information and I was only a few days away from seeing Michael Pineda pitch in Arizona, so I figured I’d let it slide until I got a chance to see him live. I got that chance last week when the M’s played the Indians in Goodyear, but my vantage point wasn’t exactly what you would want for a good report, and so I kept asking around about him. Every scout I talked to loves Pineda. They all think he’s awesome, and trying to get anyone to do anything but rave was a challenge. So, I figured I’d watch him one more time, and try to let him change my mind with his outing last night.
It didn’t happen. The Michael Pineda I watched last night was the same Pineda I’ve seen before, and the one that I just don’t think is ready to pitch in the big leagues right now.
The first thing everyone talks about with Pineda is the velocity. He throws a legitimate mid-90s fastball, and at 6’7, he’s got enough arm extension where it probably gets on the hitter like a high-90s heater. He’s a big dude who throws really hard, and that’s generally exciting. When you add in that he can actually locate the pitch in the strike zone with regularity, and all of the sudden, you have something of an unusual prospect. Big guys who throw hard often have no idea where its going, but Pineda hardly ever walks anyone. If anything, he might throw too many strikes. And so, right off the bat, you have two really positive traits, which is why he’s considered a premium pitching prospect to begin with.
The problem that I see is that there’s a pretty gap between those strengths and the next best thing Pineda can actually do. Once you get past fastballs in the strike zone, there’s not a whole lot else there right now. His slider has some promise, but he throws it in the low-to-mid-80s and it doesn’t have a hard bite, so it’s not a classic knockout breaking ball. It’s also inconsistent, and he flattens out it at times, turning it into more of a cut-fastball. It’s not a plus pitch yet and he knows it, so his go-to pitch when he wants a strikeout is the high fastball out of the zone. This pitch gets swinging strikes, but it’s also a pretty easy pitch to lay off when you know it’s coming, and since the slider isn’t refined enough to be a really good second option, hitters are going to quickly figure out that they can look for the high heat with two strikes.
Against right-handers, this probably won’t be that big of a deal. He’s got enough velocity and command to get it in on right-handers enough that it should be a pretty effective pitch for him. They’ll also have to keep an eye out for the slider, which is far more effective against same-handed hitters, so he’ll have some element of surprise when a right-handed hitter steps up to the plate. The one plus pitch, usable breaking ball, and good control should be enough to let him get righties out with regularity.
Lefties are a whole different story, however. The slider has the largest platoon split of any pitch in baseball, and it’s generally a pretty worthless offering against opposite-handed hitters. Unfortunately for Pineda, he has to use it as his off-speed pitch against them, because his change-up is not really Major League quality at this point. When a lefty steps in, they can essentially sit on Pineda’s fastball, because they can easily adjust to the slider and pound it if it dives into their wheelhouse. He doesn’t have a weapon to keep LHBs honest.
Look through the list of fastball-slider starters who rely primarily on those two pitches, and you quickly identify one pretty clear trend – they often have very large platoon splits. Jeremy Bonderman is the classic example, as he’s a guy who basically pitched with just those two offerings his whole career and dominated righties while getting torched by lefties. The result – a reputation as a career underachiever. Oher examples of similar pitcher types are Justin Masterson (though his arm slot is a complicating factor, as he simply can’t get lefties out from where he releases the ball), Ervin Santana, and Mike Pelfrey. All three were pretty well thought of as prospects, but have had some shine come off as big leaguers. They’re quality pitchers, but none of them are aces, as they struggle to get left-handed bats out and can easily get beat by teams with LH-heavy line-ups.
For Pineda to be more than that, he’s going to need his change-up to turn into a legitimate pitch he can lean on. It’s just not there yet. It could get there, but it needs work. Ideally, to develop the pitch, he should probably be throwing it 10-20 times a game, but if he does that in the big leagues, he’s going to get destroyed – nearly every change-up he threw tonight was either out of the strike zone or got crushed. In Tacoma, the team could essentially mandate change-up usage, and make it a focal aspect of his development. In Seattle, he’d have to essentially put it in the shelf and only work on it in bullpens between starts, as it’s not good enough to get big league hitters out right now.
For Pineda to become what the M’s want him to become, he needs that change-up to get a lot better. Letting him break camp with the team will slow down the pace with which he could work on the pitch, and potentially slow down the timetable until he becomes a legitimate front-end starter. Is he better than David Pauley or Luke French right now, even without the change-up? Yeah, probably. Could he succeed in the big leagues this year? It’s certainly possible. However, the M’s focus needs to be on developing Pineda into a top-shelf pitcher as quickly as possible, and given the state of his non-fastball pitches, I think the organization is best served if he spends a few months in Tacoma trying to get the rest of his repertoire up to speed.
There are compounding factors that will go into the decision, but for me, I’m not all that worried about service time or his arbitration schedule. I’d rather see Pineda come up as a more fully polished product. Right now, he’s a pretty good raw talent, and while he might be able to survive on what he has, he’s going to need more than just his fastball to become what the organization hopes he can be. He’s just not Major League ready yet. He’s got work to do, and that work is best done in Tacoma.
Thanks to the positive developments with Erik Bedard (who we’ll talk about tomorrow), the organization has the ability to send Pineda to Tacoma without having to just completely punt the back end of the rotation. They should take advantage of that opportunity, and let Pineda get his work in down in the PCL. Everyone will be better off in the long run.
Pineda On TV
Michael Pineda takes the hill for the M’s against the Brewers tonight, and the game is on TV. I’m going to be throwing my thoughts in the comments for the first few innings, at least. I’ve got a long post on the rotation basically ready to go, but have been holding it off until getting to see Pineda tonight. I saw him live (although from a mediocre-at-best vantage point) last Friday and my feeling was that he needs some more time in the minors, but I’m willing to be swayed if he shows some legitimate secondary pitches tonight.
Game starts at 7:05 and is on FSNW.
Stories From Camp That I’m Reading, pt. 4
As I started writing this, I was thinking “I can’t remember that much news in this past week that caught my eye.” Three hours later, it turns out to be the longest one I’ve written. This is why marc accuses me of graphomania.
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Cactus League Game 15, M’s at Angels
This is what we’re sending against Ervin Santana today.
SS Jack Wilson
2B Ryan
DH Bradley
RF Langerhans
1B Tuiasosopo
LF Gross
CF Saunders
3B Josh Wilson
C Moore
P Vargas
Thrilling.
The news today is that Franklin Gutierrez now has a diagnosis on the stomach problems that have been bothering him, which is that he has a slow digestive tract, a gastrointestinal traffic jam, if you will. They’ve put him on a new diet and are giving him medications now so that it should be pretty much a non-issue for him playing from here out. Good news for all of us, because the issues that had been bothering him contributed to him hitting just .230/.269/.332 in the second half, a significant drop off from the level of production we thought we might be getting after 2009. The system doesn’t have any strong center field prospects right now, so the better shape Death to Flying Things is in, the better shape the team will be in.
The other news is that two more minor leaguers got picked off, Blake Beavan being optioned to Tacoma and Yoervis Medina to High Desert. Beavan, at the moment, is tied with Pineda and Robertson for the third most innings in camp. He’s only struck out three in seven innings, but given his stuff and how he profiles, this probably isn’t too surprising. The first two outings had him give up two runs in three innings on three hits, and this last one he went to three only allowing one run. Medina only worked one inning and that was nearly two weeks ago. Given that he had no chance to make the club, I don’t quite know why he wasn’t sent down in the first round of cuts. More interesting to me is that they’re opting to send him to High Desert in his second season in the U.S., after he split time between Everett and Clinton last year. This makes sense because he spent the four-year maximum in the VSL and the team would probably like to do anything that they can to speed up his timetable, but man, ouch.
Games are now at 1:05 pm because Arizona doesn’t do that whole Daylight Savings Time thing.
Weekend Odds and Ends: Over/Unders, “Short Hops” vs Strategy
Vegas Watch posted MLB win totals in February, and with several projection systems out now, it’s always fun to see where the major discrepancies lie. Last year, several teams projected win totals and their Vegas over/under figures (and remember, over/unders aren’t designed to project actual wins, they’re designed to produce an equal amount of bets for both sides) differed markedly. Matthew Carruth’s piece last year argued that the Vegas line was biased towards the previous year’s results, or more accurately stated, the Vegas line was set to account for the fact that most bettors are heavily influenced by last year’s results.
What’s interesting, at least to me, is how much they agree this year. Last year, six teams had over/under projections that were at least six wins above or below the average of their CHONE and CAIRO projected win totals. This year, well, I can’t use CHONE as its creator was snapped up by an MLB team, and thus the system isn’t public anymore. But CAIRO’s here, and Baseball Prospectus playoff odds report is here. Compare them to the over/unders here, courtesy of Vegas Watch. BP’s odds came out after Chris Carpenter’s injury, but even so, they’re within a win or two. CAIRO and the Vegas lines are surprisingly close; there just aren’t outliers here. The only one that stands out is the Angels, who have an over/under of 85, but 77 wins in both CAIRO/BP’s projections. What would account for this convergence? Are bettors more aware of regression? Do big trades/signings help bettors put aside previous year’s results? If so, were there really that many more impact moves this off-season than last? This would all be more fascinating if the projections for the M’s weren’t so uniformly terrible.
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Cactus League Game 14 – M’s vs. A’s
Blake Beavan gets the start with Felix Hernandez pitching in a ‘B’ game to prevent the A’s from becoming too familiar with his repertoire. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out, it seems pretty unlikely that the A’s would learn a whole lot from facing Felix twice in spring training that they haven’t figured out from advanced scouts, video, and Felix’s 5.5 year career. But hey, I’m sure Beavan doesn’t mind another start. The former Rangers first round pick struggled in Tacoma last year and so far this spring, he’s showing the same 89-91 velocity he had with the Rainiers – which is considerably slower than he threw immediately before/after the 2007 draft (when he touched the mid 90s).
Today’s line-up:
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Chone Figgins 3B
Milton Bradley LF
Jack Cust DH
Justin Smoak 1B
Franklin Gutierrez CF
Adam Kennedy 2B
Jack Wilson SS
Josh Bard C
Blake Beavan P
The A’s counter with Guillermo Moscoso, who started the previous game between these two teams. The A’s are evidently not as worried about the M’s booking Moscoso.
Also available to pitch today: Luke French, Jamey Wright, Tom Wilhelmsen and Dan Cortes,