Game 6, Mariners at White Sox
Robbie Ray vs. Dallas Keuchel, 4:10pm, but probably later or not at all due to rain in the Chicago area.
Soooo, Matt Brash was pretty good. The young Canuck threw 5 1/3 brilliant innings in his debut against a very good line-up, walking just one and striking out six. A home run in the 6th left him with an undeserved loss, but you had to be encouraged by what you saw. He threw a blizzard of sliders, but mixed in a curve and change along with an at-times dominant fastball.
The M’s ended up losing it despite facing a combination of the struggling Vince Velasquez and struggling Reynaldo Lopez. The line-up isn’t as bad as this, but many of the problems we saw last year are showing up again. Their BABIP is again low, but they also show a huge gap between their actual and expected production. But even that comes with a caveat: the M’s are again near the bottom (they’re 29th) in exit velocity. They were bottom five in that metric last year, and were near the bottom in 2020, too. The team had two big problems last year: they don’t hit the ball very hard, and don’t hit for average. In response, the M’s traded for Adam Frazier, who’s a decent hitter for average, but has essentially the lowest exit velocity in the game. This is a club that is very unlucky, but they may regress towards a level below the league-average mean.
Right now, the M’s are hitting a lot of fly balls this year, and fly balls combined with a low exit velo is a recipe for a bad average and bad production. Some of that will come around as the weather heats up, but yet again, we can’t get away from talking about the baseball. Right now, the wOBA on well-struck balls is not only lower than recent years, it’s miles lower. The same is true for the best contact, barrels. This could be the result of mixing early-April balls with others, but again, we’re holding contact constant. It’s not a fair comparison, exactly, but the *magnitude* here just screams out that the ball’s playing a bit different. The M’s wOBA on fly balls/line drives (ie., the kind of contact they’ve hit most) is just .422, a level not reached by any team in the previous four years. Again, this is apples to oranges, and not scientific, but it certainly *looks* like the ball is playing a bit differently than even the 2021 version.
Today, the M’s face the White Sox’s sinkerballer, Dallas Keuchel. Keuchel’s always seemed like a guy on the verge of falling below MLB-level given his marginal velocity and pitch-to-contact ways, but he was very good for Houston for several years. He looked cooked in 2019 with Atlanta, but had great results for the White Sox in 2020, though the BABIP gods certainly helped. 2021 was an unmitigated disaster, though, as his walks and home runs both hit career highs. He’s giving up tons of very hard contact, and the Sox don’t have an elite defense. It could get ugly this year. That said, he wasn’t as bad last year as Vince Velasquez, and that guy looked fine against this line-up yesterday. Keuchel’s a lefty, which at least partially explains the fairly bizarre line-up. This is one of those times when it’s too bad that the team’s best hitter, Jesse Winker, has such stark platoon splits. It’s probably a good day off for the struggling Jarred Kelenic, though.
1: Toro, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Haniger, RF
4: Torrens, DH
5: Suarez, 3B
6: Rodriguez, CF
7: Crawford, SS
8: Murphy, C
9: Moore, LF
SP: Ray
Per Ryan Divish, Kyle Lewis is working out and doing live AB’s at extended spring training, though he’s not actually playing in any of the games there.
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That might have been the wettest 9-inning game I’ve ever seen.