Game 45, Mariners at San Diego – Deep Breath
Chris Flexen vs. Chris Paddack, 7:10pm
Sooo, the M’s got swept by the Tigers, made a bunch of roster moves, then had a player test positive for Covid, necessitating a ton more moves. This has not been a good week for your Seattle Mariners. The offense was shut down by a Tigers staff that came in with serious problems, and while the M’s faced the heart of their rotation, it’s not like they did anything against the bullpen, either.
Faced with a catching tandem that has combined to “hit” .156/.202/.305 *and* which has struggled defensively, the M’s decided to option Luis Torrens down to AAA Tacoma, and pulled back Jacob Nottingham from Milwaukee. The latter has spent the month of May in limbo, being pulled between the M’s and Brewers, and his itinerant life on the fringes of a MLB roster looks both weird and deeply unhappy. It’s one thing to be demoted, but it’s almost Kafka-esque to be caught between demotions a thousand miles apart. You could head home and have a beer and lament your lot, but literally, where is Nottingham’s apartment right now? Does he have one? Nottingham can also play 1B, the position he’ll be at tonight, so for additional catching depth, the M’s have called up Jose Godoy from Tacoma. He’s done well in Tacoma, with 2 HRs and a very low K rate thus far.
Luis Torrens has not always looked so lost defensively, a point made by Connor Donovan in this post at LL. That said, he’s had problems with the running game in the past, as we saw last August. Just before the trade that brought him to Seattle, the M’s faced Torrens with the Padres. The M’s didn’t have a ton of SB opportunities, but took just about all of them, swiping four bags in the game, including 3 straight opportunities in one inning, kicked off by some rare Kyle Seager thievery. The M’s pitchers aren’t helping here, but it’s probably a good time to have Torrens work on his defense under the slightly less glaring lights of AAA.
In addition, the M’s DFA’d 1B Jose Marmolejos, who offered very little defensively, and wasn’t hitting. That’s…a tough guy to keep on the roster of a struggling team. They also DFA’d Brady Lail, who’s been on and off rosters now several times over the past year, and sent OF Jake Fraley on a rehab assignment.
So yesterday’s transactions – like so many involving the M’s – involved a rueful head nod, and the hopes that Tacoma’s coaches can help a player in a tailspin after Seattle’s could not. But today’s! Oooh boy. Ok, so Robert Dugger, Drew Steckenrider, Anthony Misiewicz, and Will Vest are all on the IL with unspecified *cough COVID* issues. Replacing them are the back-from-injury Keynan Middleton, Aaron Fletcher, Wyatt Mills, and Yohan Ramirez. For good measure, they brought up IF Eric Campbell. This is what can happen, I guess, when the maybe 50% vaccinated M’s have a confirmed case in the bullpen. I know management has tried to impress upon the team how important getting the shot is, and there are very attractive incentives at play for the team. The M’s remain unmoved. Some of that is, as Seth Kolloen writes, because the FO hasn’t really earned the players’ trust after the Mather incident this winter. Some of it is that weird, entitled, sense that no sense of shared responsibility may infringe upon convenience and “choice” – as skewered in this brilliant post by David Roth after the Mets struggle to get players vaccinated came to light.
This feels different, though, in that the M’s are voluntarily depriving themselves of such choices/liberties as “being able to leave their hotel.” This feels like a bizarre reflection of the current/fraught culture wars: the M’s choices leave them clearly, rightly *less* free to make choices, and by so doing, they can complain bitterly about powerful entities *depriving* of that freedom. The added layer here is, as Colin O’Keefe notes, many of the just-IL’d are kind of on the fringes of the roster. They could be replaced at any point with the equally/slightly-more fringe players now in Tacoma, but the Tacoma roster is 100% vaccinated. Players generally are loathe to give up a roster advantage like that, but here we are. And yes, many of these players may have been partially vaccinated, or haven’t hit 2 weeks past the second shot yet, but still: it’s odd to put yourself at a competitive disadvantage like this.
So, tonight the M’s start a series in San Diego, with the M’s facing one-time phenom and now bottom-of-the-insanely-good-rotation guy, Chris Paddack. As you’ll remember, Paddack rides his at-times unreal change-up to success despite average FB velocity and despite breaking stuff that hasn’t developed as fully as the cambio. It worked in his rookie season of 2019, but, like many pitchers, he was absolutely sunk by a tidal wave of HRs last year. His rising, high-in-the-zone fastball was easy to elevate, and with the ball playing the way it did last year, not even San Diego’s park could keep them in play. Has the new ball helped him? Yes, definitely. His HR rate has fallen by more than half, from over 2 per 9 last year to under 1. He’s still not quite able to profit from this, though, as he’s struggled to strand runners, and as his walk rate’s grown from microscopic to merely small. He’s posted even-ish platoon splits in his career, but is running reverse splits this year. This may be a better match-up for righties, but it’s possible that he’ll struggle again with his fastball to RHB/LHB alike. That said, as we saw in the John Means no-no, the M’s often have trouble with change-ups. Let’s hope those problems don’t resurface.
1: Kelenic, LF
2: Haniger, RF
3: Seager, 3B
4: Lewis, CF
5: Crawford, SS
6: Nottingham, 1B
7: Murphy, C
8: Walton, 2B
9/SP: Flexen
Comments
7 Responses to “Game 45, Mariners at San Diego – Deep Breath”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
So, does it get worse before it gets better? We shall see… I’m not holding my breath.
Marc already said pretty much everything that needed to be said about the situation today, so I’ll leave that one alone.
Regarding the catching situation, there has been plenty of hype over Cal Raleigh’s start in Tacoma, but I’d like to know how his progress with keeping runners in check is coming along.
Whiskey-Coke night here. I was going to wait until the game got underway, but…
After 44 years of following the M’s–the last 10 of those following from China(!) The selfishness and ignorance of these guys is really hard to ignore. The lack of offense is also very hard to watch. But I’m used to the poor play. I can live with that if their are young enthusiastic players I can enjoy cheering for. But a team full of jerks doesn’t interest me much.
I didn’t realize Nottingham was wearing Ackley’s lucky number 13.
“many of these players […] haven’t hit 2 weeks past the second shot yet”
Many of these players haven’t hit for 2 weeks, period.
That’s also probably going to be what the Padres score tonight.
You were way off, eponymous.