Cactus League Game 1 (!)
Gonzales vs. Gore, 1:10pm – no ROOT telecast, but the Padres feed is free on MLB.tv
This bizarre, shortened pre-season is throwing me. The Mariners – the actual Mariners – play their first game of the Cactus League today against complex-mates, San Diego. It’s great to have baseball back, and it’s great to start the year off with a new-look line-up and a low-key fascinating pitching match-up.
The offseason has felt extremely short and never-ending, depending on the day. It’s probably more accurate to describe it as two brief, frenetic bursts of activity separated by 99 interminable days of the lockout. The M’s got their new #1 starter in the first of those bursts, and remade their line-up in the second. The A’s didn’t do much in the first, and thus gave themselves only about a week to tear their (good) club down, trading off Matt Champman, Matt Olson, Chris Bassitt and others and loading up on prospects. The Astros have been quiet, but may re-sign Carlos Correa, who’d looked certain to leave before the lockout. It’s a very different division, and a subtly re-made M’s club, but the M’s didn’t completely re-invent themselves.
Projections like ZiPS, Steamer, and PECOTA all see the M’s as a middle-of-the-pack team, a few games above or below .500 depending on which you look at. The pitching looks better than last year, and the lineup is similarly improved – but it all grades out as a team that looks set to give up about as many runs as it scores. The wonder of last year’s club was that it could win 90 games despite hitting .223/.303/.385. Their home park had a role in this display of abject ineffectiveness, but it also had to do with several prospects face-planting together. The arrival of Jesse Winker and Eugenio Suarez reduces the risk of that reoccurring and gives some of the same prospects who failed last year more protection. The M’s no longer need everything to go right with their young players, but it’s still true that if they’re going to blow their forecasts out of the water, they’ll need big seasons from the likes of Jarred Kelenic and, eventually, Julio Rodriguez.
Julio’s one of their best hitters by the projections, and may be an early test of the new CBA’s slight reductions in the incentives teams have to mess with service time. He’ll have to play his way on, but then, that’s exactly what Taylor Trammell did last year, and Rodriguez is a much, much better prospect. We’ll also have to see how the club deals with its many high-minors starting pitching prospects. By not targeting arms after acquiring Robbie Ray, the M’s made it clear that they want their starting pitching depth to come from the farm system. That may make sense, but it may be difficult to manage workloads if that’s the plan, just because the pandemic and minor injuries last year meant none of them pitched even 100 IP, and certainly didn’t come close to that in 2020. Still, the talent level in-house is quite high, and it’s been about a decade since the M’s had this much pitching talent in the high minors.
Today, Marco Gonzales takes the hill against enigmatic lefty MacKenzie Gore. Gore entered 2021 as perhaps the best SP prospect in the game. I got to see him in Cheney for his first start, and while he didn’t give up a lot of runs, he looked off; his control and command weren’t there, he had runners on the bases constantly, and he gave up tons of hard contact. After further struggles in the batter-friendly AAA-West (now back to its old name, the Pacific Coast League), he ended up spending a few months in instructs to get right mechanically and try to re-start a development path that had stalled out. I hope he’s back to the form he showed flashes of in 2019. There are so many young prospects whose development has been completely upended by the past few years, but Gore might have a claim to being the guy whose ascent was *most* impacted by the disruptions since 2020.
Line-up!
1: Crawford, SS
2: Winker, LF
3: France, 1B
4: Haniger, RF
5: Kelenic, CF
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Toro, DH
8: Frazier, 2B
9: Murphy, C
SP: Gonzales
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