Game 17, Mariners at Rays
Logan Gilbert vs. Matt Wisler and Josh Fleming, 3:40pm
After a dominant homestand pushed them to the top of the AL West, the M’s head out on the road to take on Wander Franco and the Rays. The M’s held their own to open the season, but a BABIP-driven .192/.292/.338 slash line meant they needed to rely on their pitching staff to win. That’s not impossible, not with Logan Gilbert nearly untouchable in the early going, but .192 is, even in this run-starved environment, not great. So, they decided to come home and hit the crap out of the ball for a week or two, one Justin Verlander gem standing as the sole exception.
The offense is red hot, led by Ty France, who was just named co-Player of the Week by MLB. With 5 HRs, is he suddenly hitting the ball much harder than he used to? France has never been a statcast darling, as he mixed really hard hit balls with a bunch of poorly-hit, low-exit-velo jobs, pushing his average down. In the early going, that’s still very much the case – and his plummeting K rate means there are ever more balls in play. What he does so well, as this piece by Jake Mailhot lays out, is hit the ball on a line. He’s one of the best in the game at hitting the ball at an ideal angle, an angle most conducive to hits. No, that doesn’t mean his barrel rate is elite, but it means he’s not getting lucky: he’s hitting nearly everything thrown at him, and he’s hitting frozen ropes throughout the park. His expected wOBA based on the angle and speed of the batted balls he’s hit place him in the 99th percentile in MLB, just one spot ahead of some guy named Trout.
It’s funny: though France’s strikeouts are down markedly, he’s not actually making more contact. Contact has been critical to France’s overall game since he was a minor leaguer, but nothing’s changed dramatically on that front. His contact rate of 82.1% is good, but it’s actually lower than it was in 2021. What’s different is that he’s making the most of small improvements in pitch recognition: fewer swings at balls, and more swings at strikes. Pitchers can’t get away with trying to freeze him on a slider in the zone; he’ll destroy it. He’s improved on sliders over 2021, when he was already pretty good at facing them, and that’s helped him hit extremely well even when pitchers are ahead in the count. You can get him to swing and miss occasionally, but getting three of them is a tall order.
Just as the slider’s been important in France’s hot start, it’s been just as critical for Gilbert. Despite a good fastball that generated poorly-hit contact, Gilbert’s breaking balls didn’t work so well in his rookie campaign. His slider in particular was quite poor, racking up 9 runs below average per MLB.com. With less-than-average movement in both horizontal and vertical planes, and coming in at 83 – 12 mph lower than the fastball – it was slurvy in all the wrong ways. So what do you? In the year 2022, the answer is clear: make it more sweepy. Gilbert’s slider is now all the way up to 86 mph, and while that reduces the amount of time it has to break, Gilbert’s sacrificed a bit of vertical movement, but given the pitch an above-average amount of horizontal sweep. This isn’t transformational; it’s not suddenly an unhittable pitch, or the reason for his strikeouts. Batters are making *more* contact on it than last year. But they’re doing a lot less on that contact. By expected slugging percentage (using exit velo and angle), the pitch has gone from .462 in 2021 to .310 in the early going this year.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Suarez, 3B
5: Crawford, SS
6: Toro, DH
7: Murphy, C
8: Rodriguez, CF
9: Moore, RF
SP: Gilbert
Kelenic gets a day off with the M’s facing a left-handed “bulk” pitcher in Josh Fleming, who’ll come in after former Mariner Matt Wisler opens the game for Tampa.
George Kirby got the win for Arkansas today, going 5 IP, with 1 R (1 HR) on 3 H, 2 BB and 5 Ks in the Travs’ 10-4 win over Wichita.
Following this team has so many different exciting facets. No longer are we being forced to garner hope in 2 or 3 story lines, we quite literally have 10-12 really good areas to watch. Thank you as always for your write ups. This team has a hard to look away feel. That’s serious nutrition for a starving fan base.
So, Gonzales is down and Mike Ford was already DFAd.
Perfectly good replacement just thrown away.
Mike Ford as a replacement for . . . whom? Marco?
Has nobody seen Ford pitch?