Game 84, Mariners at Astros
Hisashi Iwakuma vs. Jarred Cosart, 5:10 pm
Driving home from work last night, I realized that the Young vs. Bauer game in the last homestand marked the fifteenth anniversary of the Mariners playing their last game at the Kingdome, and while I had known about it, I had completely forgotten to mention it. I apologize for this regrettable omission.
Writing up intra-division pitching match-ups can be a bit of a pain. I know that if a guy hasn’t pitched against the M’s this season, I can talk a little bit about his arsenal, what he’s been up to relative to prior seasons, various introductory level bits of data. With the teams that we see with unbalanced regularity over the course of a season, writing up pitching match-ups in that style is like bumping into someone for the third or fourth time and realizing that you’re still trying to get their name down. In my defense, this isn’t my regular shtick and I’m not accustomed to thinking about major league players on other teams except as names to attach to the game I’m listening to.
Cosart is a late-rounder who did all right by himself in spite of that. Classic “put it in play” groundballer whose weakness is not so much elevating pitches to where they’re hit out of the park, but missing too often and not inducing enough swings to compensate for that with Ks. He’s basically a fastball/curve guy too, whereas groundball-oriented pitchers usually prefer sliders as their breaking pitch. There are splits from left to right, but left-handers tend to lose a little bit in average and make it up in power numbers. To no real surprise, he allows a greater slugging at home, so we could have another dinger-tastic game in the offing. I could be down with that.
Of course, it could also be a bad thing because ‘Kuma hasn’t been ‘Kuma the last couple of outings. Was it the neck thing lingering? Is it something else? What we’ve had the past couple of times out is a lower groundball and strand rates than we’re accustomed to seeing and a higher BABIP. Home runs have been allowed each time, but unlike the Erasmo Ramirez variety of home run, they have not been preceded by multiple walks. He’s also had a rather short leash, not exceeding 80 pitches either time out. Naturally, my distracted brain was drawing conclusions and saying “yeah, he was throwing too many pitches and that’s why he was pulled,” but nope, wasn’t happening, and you look at his strike% and it really isn’t all that bad. He was at 71% in Kansas City and 67.5% against Boston, both better-than-league-average marks by a sizable margin. The problem has more been a good amount of not-good contact. I wish I had something more substantive than that, but I’m radio-only for most of my baseball consumption and that makes objectivity a more difficult task. I try to visualize what’s happening on the field and all I get is the South Side of Chicago and Southern League baseball centering around Memphis.
DH Endy Chavez
CF James Jones
2B Robinson Cano
3B Kyle Seager
1B Logan Morrison
C Mike Zunino
RF Michael Saunders
LF Dustin Ackley
SS Rad Miller
Go ‘Ners!
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25 Responses to “Game 84, Mariners at Astros”
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Endy lead off walk!
Lets hope Kuma can hold onto this lead.
Say, that Jones kid is doing ok.
Jones just keeps on “Jonesing”
I love it.
Nice approach, and a stark contrast to Romero’s swing-from-the-ass-approach.
Chavez and Jones doing their jobs getting on base. Good to see Cano/Seager helping them home. RISP helps wins games.
Ackley and Miller onboard twice already. Its Chavez’s turn to help them home.
Ackley even slides below average.
Cano two run double! That’s some breathing space.
Cano is good
LoMo = NoMoSmoak ?
Back to back to back to back doubles!
This is amazing
I know it’s the Astros, but this is just ridiculous.
Double, Double, Double, Double, Single, Double and all with runners in scoring position
Man, Houston is looking very AAA right now.
If this was a fight they would have stopped it a few doubles ago.
Everybody has a hit!
Time to put in the scrubs, apparently.
So, hell froze over. Only way to explain the Mariners Madness. Doubles left and right, Chavez with two walks (maybe a bigger surprise than the doubles), and now a triple.
What’s next?
So many runs with no dingers.
Ok, maybe the ice has melted? Zunino has his minimum two strikeouts and Miller has an error.
So eight (8) Mariners have RBIs in this game. Is that a club record?
Seager is sweet.
I was just checking the standings, and I realized that the Mariners have the second-highest run differential in MLB.
I don’t know what to think. Sure, the pitching’s been very good, but — what?
A good defense, playing behind absurdly good pitching, will win a lot of games.
The current level of pitching is not sustainable; but then I expect the offense to improve somewhat too. Well, depending on what Lloyd does with Endy anyway…