Game 130, Rangers at Mariners
Joe Saunders vs. Travis Blackley, 7:10pm
A battle of lefty pitch-to-contact guys who have a striking inability to deal with right-handed hitters tonight. Thus, your first look at a game like this is to ask yourself which team has the superior right-handed bats. But that’s no fun, because the answer is as obvious as asking yourself “which of these two teams is better?” and then you find yourself tuning out or reading, or improving yourself in one of any number of ways. That’s not what we’re about, though – all of that perfectly sensible, good-for-you crap. I don’t think I have anything like a mission statement with these posts, because that’s a wee bit too business school for me and this is all supposed to be, well, no, not “fun.” I guess what I’m saying is that every once in a while we can put aside the fact that you can make a really good case to do literally anything else, and just wallow in the Mariners together.
Ok, here are the career splits for tonight’s starters:
That one guy, vs. lefties: .237/.288/.328
The other guy, vs. lefties: .228/.297/.374
That one guy, vs. righties: .287/.347/.485
The other guy, vs. righties: .262/.352/.494
Let’s be clear: those are not *identical* lines; they’re not as close as those plate discipline stats in Jeff’s post below. Other’s guy’s clearly got bigger problems with HRs, which drive up his ISOs, though to be fair, he yields fewer hits (thanks to more Ks; it’s not a pure BABIP thing). So there are differences here, but they’re relatively small. You’d think the two were more similar than not, if this was all you had to go by. Essentially, this small gap is one way to understand the gap between a respected veteran (and the myriad cliches that adhere to respected veterans – “knows how to pitch” “keeps you in the ballgame” etc.) and a guy who was just cut by the actual Houston Astros.
Blackley was always one of my favorite M’s prospects. His superficially dazzling line with San Antonio in 2003, the early run of success in Tacoma, and the big breaking yakker, all wrapped in an intensely competitive personality. His confidence must’ve taken a hit in his years in the baseball wilderness, capped by essentially sitting 2011 out, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from watching him last year. He was the swingman/spot-starter on the playoff A’s, getting plenty of action thanks to suspension and injuries, and he performed admirably for a 5th starter. It wasn’t a shock that the A’s let him go, and it was probably even less of a shock that the Astros saw him as an upgrade. But as Joe Saunders can tell you, it’s one thing to have “trouble” with right-handed hitters in Seattle or Anaheim, and a very different, uglier, thing to have “trouble” with righties in Houston and Arlington. They’re vanishingly small, but for laughs: Blackley’s batting line against *at home* this year is .292/.380/.672. His home FIP is 8.58. He’s given up a HR every 10 PAs in the state of Texas this year, and just one in 66 PAs anywhere else. Vs. Lefties, away from home, he looks like an OK 4th starter. At home, vs. righties, his numbers might make Fangraphs’ database gravely ill.
Think about how odd, at least on the surface, it is for Texas to claim Blackley from the Astros. The Rangers are in a playoff race with the Athletics. The Astros *were* in a contest with Miami to see which god-awful team was the worst, but that “race” is all but over. Sure, the Rangers have had injury woes in the rotation, same as every team; Blackley could be gone when Nick Tepesch returns, and that could be fairly soon. But it’s somewhat telling that the Rangers saw past the barrage of HRs and thought Blackley could hold down the fort for a little while. Blackley still throws a 90-91mph four- and two-seam fastball, a change-up, a cutter and the big, slow curve ball. In recent years, he’s used the cutter/slider much more frequently and the curve relatively less. That trend was magnified this season, as he’s used the cutter more than any other single pitch, and the curve makes only rare appearances. In his first start with Texas, covering four innings, he threw just one curve. The cutter’s been a perfectly successful pitch for him – his problem lies in setting it up with his fastball. 42 at-bats have ended on Blackey fastballs this year. He’s struck out three hitters, walked ten, and yielded seven homers.
Like many, he throws sinkers more often to righties, and throws more four-seamers to lefties, despite the fact that stat-nerds would argue the opposite. In the spacious confines of the Oakland Coliseum, his fly-ball tendencies didn’t hurt him, and he kept righties in the park, allowing him to use his other pitches. In Houston, that just didn’t work out, as batters both hit more balls in the air and turned more of those balls into home runs. Now, if you followed those pitch type platoon split links you might see that curves are great pitches to throw opposite-handed hitters. Not quite as effective as change-ups, but definitely not in the sinker/slider category either. That’s what makes Blackley’s shift from the curve to the cutter so odd. Not just because that defies a pattern that people have discovered amongst the entire population of pitchers, but because Blackley *has* a curve and used it often in 2012. It’s all the more mystifying when you consider that Blackley has given up zero career HRs on the curve ball. None. I’m going to repeat this more for myself than anyone, but here we go: a pitcher who is in danger of bombing out of MLB in large part due to a home run problem has a pitch that has never been hit for a home run, and he’s choosing (or being told) not to use it. Ok.
The M’s are pulling out, well, SOME of the stops in an effort to put together a RH-heavy line-up tonight. To that end, they’ve activated CF Franklin Gutierrez,* putting his LHP-killing splits up against Blackley’s RHB-enhancing splits. To do this, they’ve DFA’d Aaron Harang. Just last night, many talked about how it was unlikely the M’s would make a move today,** just a few days before rosters expand on Sept. 1. That says something about how interested the M’s were in playing out the string with Mr. Harang, as does their plan to fill his spot in the rotation (essentially, “uh, you know, some guys”). Nick Franklin moves to leadoff, too:
1: Franklin, 2B
2: Miller, SS
3: Gutierrez, RF
4: Morales, DH
5: Seager, 3B
6: Morse, LF
7: Smoak, 1B
8: Ackley, CF
9: Quintero, C
SP: Joe Saunders
Edwin Diaz headlines the affiliate starting pitchers tonight, with Blake Beavan (AAA), Trevor Miller (AA) and Thyago Viera (SS-A) also taking their turns.
* No Franklin Gutierrez-has-been-activated-or-DL’d story would be complete without a new diagnosis, and today’s is one I’ve never heard of. Apparently, we can add “Ankylosing Spondylitis” to Guti’s roster of maladies. AS is a type of spinal arthritis, apparently. It’s churlish to point to dollars owed or games lost or anything of the kind when dealing with someone’s health, but I sincerely wonder if Guti wouldn’t be better off retiring. I don’t believe he gets a new disease every time he falls awkwardly; I believe the more doctors examine him, the more they find.
** Credit to Rick Randall, who heard rumbling about this last night, and tweeted about it even though it seemed far-fetched. Good bit of reporting.
Dustin Ackley: Player Of Not No Consequence
They say the key to good writing is to give away the ending immediately and insult your audience, so, listen up, idiots: in this post, Dustin Ackley is not figured out. This post is not the last word on Dustin Ackley; this post cannot tell his future. No baseball post can ever tell anyone’s future, no matter the evidence presented, but here I’ll admit it up front. Lower all of your expectations. This is, essentially, commentary, dressed up as freshman analysis.
I told myself I wouldn’t write about post-recall Ackley until he hit a home run. I wasn’t actually going to hold myself to that, at least in the event Ackley never homered again, but just yesterday afternoon, Ackley went deep off Jered Weaver with what I’ll lovingly refer to as a puddlejumper. I think that word conveys the right impression, even if it doesn’t make any sense on its own in a baseball context. Yesterday might’ve been the best game yet for Ackley since he returned from Tacoma, and though none of his teammates thought to contribute themselves, this was a game between the Mariners and the Angels, and the wins and losses didn’t matter. At this point we’re in it for the individual storylines, and Ackley’s been busy writing one. One of success, one of redemption.
The most popularly-cited split these days: Ackley’s performance since the All-Star break. Over just short of 100 plate appearances, Ackley has hit a spectacular .330, with an encouraging .833 OPS. That’s more like the Dustin Ackley we expected to play for the Mariners, and less like the decent-hitting pitcher Ackley used to hit like. Whenever a pitcher bats, and an announcer says “for a pitcher, he can swing the bat,” what the announcer leaves off is, “he still sucks though.” Ackley was hitting like a pitcher when he went down. Now he’s back! Look at those numbers since the All-Star break!
You might immediately see one problem. Well, really, two. One, it’s not even a hundred plate appearances. Two, Ackley wasn’t brought back from Tacoma during the All-Star break. Ackley returned to the Mariners in time to play on June 26, and between then and the break, he went 9-for-44. Just because there are pre- and post-break splits doesn’t mean they make sense to use, since that’s just a widely accepted arbitrary endpoint. Since his recall, over nearly 150 plate appearances, Ackley has hit a solid .289, with an acceptable .738 OPS. Those initial numbers can’t just be discarded.
But, all right. Two things: that’s certainly an improvement over Ackley’s .516 OPS when he went down. Tuberculosis would be an improvement over a .516 OPS. And, maybe Ackley is just getting more and more comfortable. So maybe what he’s done after the break means more than what he did just before the break. If I recall, the Mariners didn’t want to bring Ackley back quite as soon as they did. And last year, after working on his swing in Tacoma, Justin Smoak came back and had a lousy August before a five-alarm September. Everything is a process, and why wouldn’t players be able to get better and better?
The important thing is that Dustin Ackley has been hitting. He’s been spraying line drives and hitting balls to gaps, and yesterday he finally sent a ball over a fence. People who know about this stuff have pointed out some improved swings, and Ackley himself says he’s feeling more confident. Subjectively, he’s been making better and more consistent contact, and that’s what’s been driving the improved results. The good version of Dustin Ackley looks a lot more like this guy than this same guy in April, or last summer. There’s no question we’re seeing improvement.
What’s maybe most interesting is how the improvement is mostly psychological. Ackley has admitted he wasn’t ready to hit before, and now he’s feeling more like himself. This season, we don’t observe big changes in his swing rates. Ackley hasn’t gone from being passive to being aggressive, not outwardly, not in the numbers. Though he’s swung more in the second half, he’s also seen more pitches in the zone than any other Mariner in the second half, and that’ll lift a guy’s swing rate. You’re not going to figure out Dustin Ackley by examining his plate-discipline statistics.
Because in there, it’s all subtle. In there, too much is lost or left out. Let’s look at some numbers from 2011 to the present. One of these players is Dustin Ackley since his debut.
O-Swing%
- Player A: 25%
- Player B: 25%
Z-Swing%
- Player A: 54%
- Player B: 54%
Swing%
- Player A: 39%
- Player B: 39%
Zone%
- Player A: 51%
- Player B: 50%
Strikeout%
- Player A: 19%
- Player B: 20%
The other of those players is Mike Trout, by the way. It doesn’t matter which is which, because everything’s basically the same, and we all know that Dustin Ackley has slumped and Mike Trout has been the best player in baseball. By the plate-discipline numbers, Ackley and Trout have a whole lot in common. By the more important numbers, they don’t, so we know there’s nothing crippling about Ackley’s plate-discipline profile. Probably, a good version of Ackley would profile very similarly, because he’s not the type to turn into an over-aggressive hacker.
Ackley’s always going to be a little more patient than average, and he’s always going to make more contact than average. This was the case when he was bad, and this remains the case now that he’s been pretty all right. The changes are somewhat to his swing but mostly in his head, and so it’s hard to find those changes in the sabermetric details. We’re left more settling with observation of his in-game performance and his wOBA or OPS or whatever you like to like.
Ackley’s been seeing a lot of strikes, and lately he’s been hitting them pretty hard. Finally, he hit a home run, and we’ll see if pitchers start nibbling a little more. Then there could be an opportunity for Ackley to draw a few more walks, since he hasn’t been walking, since he hasn’t really been getting the chances. As Ackley has wanted to be more aggressive, pitchers have cooperated by also being more aggressive. Now we’ll see if someone responds to the other someone.
For Ackley, the problem’s never been as simple as the lefty strike. Somehow that idea took off, but it’s always been more complicated, and earlier this season Ackley’s confidence hit a professional low. His confidence pretty much mirrored Tom Wilhelmsen’s, and as difficult a concept as that is to analyze, confidence is one of the most fundamental components of on-field success. Enough smart players have said as much, to smart people. Now Ackley’s confidence is returning, and with a tweaked swing, he’s generating numbers that aren’t pathetic. Ackley, in short, is making himself worth paying attention to again. He got dangerously close to going the way of Jesus Montero.
Don’t know if he’s going to keep hitting. Don’t know if he’s actually going to hit for any real power. Don’t know what position he’s going to play, or for which team. So, don’t know Dustin Ackley’s realistic career WAR ceiling. There’s lots I don’t know about Dustin Ackley these days. But one thing I do know is that Dustin Ackley made me want to look at his recent statistics. And I don’t mean hate-look, the way I look at Aaron Harang’s statistics. There might still be a future with Dustin Ackley in it. Along the Jeremy Reed career path, Ackley might have found a spur.
Mariners can still Play Spoiler against Rangers
| MARINERS (59-70) | ΔMs | RANGERS (75-55) | EDGE | |
| HITTING (wOBA*) | 5.6 (12th) | -18.4 | -8.9 (18th) | Mariners |
| FIELDING (RBBIP) | -28.6 (27th) | -3.6 | 22.3 (6th) | Rangers |
| ROTATION (xRA) | 9.1 (14th) | -4.5 | 31.3 (4th) | Rangers |
| BULLPEN (xRA) | 1.1 (17th) | 4.5 | -6 (23rd) | Mariners |
| OVERALL (RAA) | -12.8 (16th) | -21.9 | 38.7 (9th) | RANGERS |
It appears that my strategy of ignoring the Mariners entirely while I was on vacation in the hopes that my lack of attention would free them from an emotional burden and thus allow them to get in a groove failed. Record-wise, the Mariners went 7-11 while I was away. That stretch downgraded them from a 76-win pace to a 74-win pace.
Looking over the hitting numbers from below, it appears that I did not miss much in the way of encouraging performances from the Mariners’ younger hitters.
I did miss Yoervis Medina turning back to the Yoervis Medina we thought we knew and I did miss a domineering stretch from Danny Farquhar. The last unintentional walk or hit batter that Farquhar issued was back on July 27. Since then, 26 strikeouts and just one intentional walk.
Having not seen any game action for roughly three weeks now, I don’t have any more to quip on. So on to the numbers.