The Upside, 2022
Nathan Bishop of Dome and Bedlam summed up the general mood of M’s fandom this morning by saying that this is as optimistic and excited as our downtrodden lot has felt in a long time. It’s true: the best players won spots on the roster, the best prospects have shone brightly, the M’s haven’t lost a regular season game.
Let’s keep up the optimistic mood with this year’s upside post. Last year, we talked about the M’s horrific luck vis a vis true talent reversing, and…whoa, did it ever. The OF depth thing worked out slightly less well, but the AL West, while not bad, felt more even than it has in a while.
This year, here are the three things that make me optimistic, or more optimistic than I am after staring at the projections and once again looking longingly at Houston’s roster.
1: J-Rod and Brash
Wrote about it yesterday, but this list *has* to start with the M’s two rookies, Julio Rodriguez and Matt Brash. With Julio, the M’s have been (successfully) stoking fan excitement since his first games stateside, and he’s not only lived up to the lofty expectations around him, but become a skillful and charismatic personality, able to shape how he’s seen/marketed/known. He’s been beyond his years in essentially every way, on and off the field, since the M’s signed him.
Brash is another story. Not a big first rounder, a small-college, cold-weather guy who was a throw-in in a minor trade. His stuff dramatically improved over the lost 2020 season, and I think all of that has led him to be overlooked, even among those scouting M’s pitchers. There’s a kind of anchoring, a reticence to *dramatically* changing prospect grades, and it’s meant he’s ranked behind guys he’s out pitched.
This has happened before, but I can hear the “you’re just scouting the stat line,” complaints from here. But 1: the stay line is *telling you something* important, and 2: it’s corroborating everything you can see just by watching him pitch an inning. This isn’t a 90mph command/control guy. This isn’t a guy racking up K’s with an advanced-for-A-ball change up or a funky delivery. This is reliever stuff from a starter, including a deadly, sweeping strikeout slider that looks designed in a lab.
Many projections don’t have Julio playing in even 100 games, and most still don’t quite know what to make of Brash, and obviously average in his pre-breakout handful of innings. Even putting THAT aside, no one needs these guys to break out or smash their projections; they just need to play more. And now, thankfully, they will.
2: Humidors!
One of the most striking things about recent vintages of the M’s has been their utter inability to hit in Seattle. For a few years now, the M’s have had an inability to do anything at home, putting up a sub-.300 OBP, for MLB’s worst average AND on-base percentage.
Sure, you say: they’ve been a bad offensive club. Bad teams with some bad split luck and you can craft a narrative out of a simple lack of talent. But the problem is that the M’s weren’t too bad on the road. They weren’t great or anything – I don’t want to push this too much – but things look different because they’re able to get some base hits away from T-Mobile.
There are a number of reasons why this sad state of affairs might be: the batter’s eye sucks, or the much-hyped marine layer is knocking down fly balls. As I’ve talked about a lot, there’s simply less physical room in the T-Mobile OF. All may play a part, but the most cited of them (marine layer) would seem to prevent HRs more than base hits.
There’s also the rapidly changing ball itself, this cavalcade of mismanagement by MLB who has continually denied doing what independent researchers keep finding them doing, both before and after buying the company making baseballs.
But that hasn’t been the only problematic – or at least questionable – decision they’ve made. MLB decided that after the successful introduction of a humidor in low-humidity Colorado, they should try them in a few more places. Seattle was on a subsequent round of that rollout, but only ten parks in the league used them, creating an odd, imbalanced, and unclear impact on competition. Is the humidor collaborating with these other park effects to knock a foot or two of distance off fly balls? Taking the sting out of a smash grounder headed for an outfield corner? I don’t know, and I don’t think MLB did either.
But at least they’ve pulled the plug on the “1/3 of the league does one thing, the other 2/3 another” experiment. All MLB parks will have them for 2022. Won’t this mean that NOBODY will get hits now? No, of course not. It may be a minor factor, and Colorado essentially always leads the league in home average/BABIP. But that doesn’t mean that this wasn’t *a* factor: if the ball moved fractionally differently on its way to the plate, if it interacted with Seattle’s climate or batter’s eye in a different way, that’s an issue, and at least standardizing the ball’s properties before a game should help reduce these oversized home/away splits. Also, Adam Frazier might help.
3: JK’s OK
Jarred Kelenic’s debut was really quite bad. I know you know this; we don’t have to go through the batting line like it’s a rap sheet. I mention that just because the optimistic turn in M’s fans tend to focus on the great final month. That was encouraging! But it came 12 months after the same people said the same exact thing about Evan White, and how *his* bad line was actually only a bad start, or something. A larger sample often matters more.
There was no Brash-like uptick in bay speed, no doubles suddenly becoming homers, if only because, in true Mariners fashion, there weren’t any doubles to begin with. But I came here to be optimistic about Kelenic, and to me, the way to do that isn’t with platoon splits or September numbers, or numbers at all.
Jarred Kelenic had been stewing for over a year, *knowing* the way amazing athletes know that the M’s were bringing in retread after retread, keeping him in alternate site purgatory even as a playoff chase they hadn’t expected and essentially *didn’t want* kept coming at them. Philip Ervin! Philip Ervin played corner OF and Jarred Kelenic took that personally. He knew it would be him if he signed a below-market extension, but he wouldn’t, so it’s more Tim Lopes, then.
He made an improved M’s club in May of 2021 and probably instantly wanted to show everyone how ludicrous it’d been that he wasn’t up last year. He wanted to show the fans they’d been right about him, wanted to show the trade that brought him west was every bit the disaster that Mets fans feared, and wanted to show the M’s front office they messed with the wrong guy.
Soon after, he would have to confront a failure the likes of which he’d never suffered and do so in a spotlight he’d never seen the likes of. It’s…a lot. There’s the obvious shitty feelings that everyone who shad ever failed intuitively grasps, and then there are the nuances that journalists, coaches, and maybe teammates want to discuss, categorize, and theorize over.
None of that’s changed, but that fraught moment and all those awful taxonomic moments after (“yesterday you struggled with fastballs. Today, change-ups. Would you say you’re not seeing the ball well?”) have passed. Dealing with a team that has expectations is slightly different, but only a little: the Mariners no doubt believed they had a chance late last year, because they absolutely did. What has changed is how much he’ll be the focus now. He can work on adjustments without worry. Not only is Julio here, but so is Jesse Winker, so is Eugenio Suarez, and Robbie Ray, etc.
I think he still has things to work on, and I’m more concerned about that first season than most. But I think the change in his/the team’s situation can mean the world here, and that this season puts Kelenic in a position to succeed whereas last year’s must’ve felt suffocating. That’s worth, what, 50 points of BABIP?
I certainly agree with all of those points, and if you’re talking about things that the projections might not capture/get right, I think this is a good list, but I also remain kind of astonished that so little is being made of the addition of Robbie Ray.
I get it – he was not great before last year, but pitcher breakouts can happen almost any time, and he’s obviously always had top-tier stuff. While I understand that some of his run prevention from last year might have been fluky, I also think he’s a decent bet to submit the best SP season for a Mariner in at least five years, if not since Prime Felix. That allows everyone else in the rotation to slot in to a more natural spot, in particular Flexen and Marco.
Again, I get that pitchers are naturally more volatile than position players, and that Ray is perhaps more volatile than most, but the fact that he’s not a position player doesn’t mean he doesn’t help the M’s massively.
The opening day roster this year is a heck of a lot more promising than it was last season, but it amazes me how little depth there is. Easy to see this team getting off to a strong start, only to flounder with waiver claims 45-60 days from now.
I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. I like all three catchers (Murphy & Torrens hit well after rough starts), Toro is probably better than Suarez right now, Moore is a nice utility piece who is a bounceback candidate (one not expected to play a major role), & Lewis/Trammell behind Haniger/Julio/Kelemic/Winker is super solid. I still think Evan White can turn things around too & he’s an afterthought the way this roster is constructed.
Sure Kirby/Stoudt/Hancock/Sheffield as rotation depth is a slight concern considering how few innings the young hurlers (including Brash) pitched last year but there’s plenty of upside in that group. If there’s one thing the M’s will target at the deadline it will be a top of the rotation arm to pair with Ray & Gilbert. The bullpen is kind of bonkers deep, especially when Elias gets healthy.
The minor league teams are so flush with talent that it wouldn’t be a big surprise if one or more of the players burst onto the cusp of MLB this season. Perfect roster? No. Deep roster? For sure. As Dipoto said, every position has 3 WAR seasons in the past or is a young talent with obvious ability to post 3 WAR. We’ll see though. Baseball likes to bring the unexpected between the lines.