Game 3, Mariners at Twins
Marco Gonzales vs. Bailey Ober, 11:10am
What a comeback. Two wins in two days, both in one-run games. With the exception of Andres Muñoz giving up a Byron Buxton drive that still probably hasn’t landed, the M’s bullpen has been exceptional. Today, Marco Gonzales makes his first start of the year against the Twins’ Bailey Ober.
Ober’s another fascinating story, a guy with a 92mph fastball with low spin, and a guy who refuses to give in and walk batters. On the surface, this sounds like any number of low-K, low-BB Twins prospects from the early 2000s (Nick Blackburn, maybe?), but then you see what he’s done. Ober was a strikeout maven through the minors, and he continued striking out more than a man an inning in his first taste of MLB. He’s maintained a low walk rate as well. Like opening day starter Joe Ryan, the one problem thus far has been HRs, something most of the league is struggling with.
As with Ryan, Jake Mailhot had a great overview of Ober and his Arsenal at Fangraphs here. The 6’9” Ober gets great extension which helps his fastball play up a bit, and he tweaked his slider (his primary weapon vs. righties) midway through 2021. Importantly, and a bit like Sonny Gray, Ober has a different approach to opposite-handed hitters, utilizing his change and curve.
Overall, he’s still kind of waiting for his slider to develop into a true weapon: the bones of it are there (I actually think he should go back to his original one), but he needs to add drywall and finishing to it. He’s been effective without it, though you can see he could do more than what he’s shown. Good fastball, so-so slider, four pitch repertoire…who does that remind you of? If you said Logan Gilbert, I totally agree, and more importantly, so do MLB’s algorithms, which list Gilbert’s 2021 season as Ober’s most similar pitcher.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, DH
5: Kelenic, RF
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Rodriguez, RF
8: Crawford, SS
9: Torrens, C
SP: Gonzales
Wow, three games in and the M’s will use three different starting catchers. I really thought Torrens would never catch again for the M’s after last year; happy to be wrong on that.
I went to the second game of the Rainiers double-header last night, which was definitely the one to see. Recent signing Daniel Ponce de Leon, the ex-Cardinals starter, pitched brilliantly for the R’s, and Penn Murfee got the win in relief. Scoreless into the final inning (the 7th), Mike Ford walked it off with a solo shot for the 1-0 win. We won’t speak of the 12-0 loss in game 1.
Frisco best Arkansas 8-7 in the highly anticipated pro debut from Rangers prospect Jack Lester.
Everett outslugged Eugene 10-7 with Noelvi Marte getting his first home run of the year.
San Jose beat Modesto 3-1.
Game 2, Mariners at Twins
Logan Gilbert vs. Sonny Gray, 11:10am
The first late-morning start of the year for your undefeated Mariners sees Logan Gilbert make his first start of the year. Opposing him is veteran righty, Sonny Gray. These two teams are fairly evenly matched, even though they have different strengths and weaknesses, and I believe these two starters are microcosms of that.
Logan Gilbert comes from the Robbie Ray school, at least this far. He’s going to establish his fastball, try to induce a chase with his slider, and generally try to overpower batters. That approach has brought strikeouts throughout the minors and a solid number in MLB, but there’s a slight problem. When his slider isn’t on, and it wasn’t on very much in 2021, he’s vulnerable to really hard contact. At some level, this trade-off is worth it: Robbie Ray consistently gives up hard contact, and it (generally) hasn’t concerned him. As long as the strikeouts stay high, you’d take a few hard-hit balls, knowing some will still find gloves.
Part of the reason why you’d make this trade is that strikeouts are “stickier” than contact stuff. Strikeout rate is more consistent, more reliable than hard contact. Now, Ray is evidence that you can’t just expect hard contact to naturally come back to average, but for a guy like Gilbert, you’d absolutely rather have a high K rate than low hard hit or barrel rates in your first MLB season.
Sonny Gray doesn’t care about all that though, and has gone all-in on the opposite strategy: he’s a contact manager that’s learning to get more K’s along the way. Now 33, the undersized righty has made a living keeping the ball off the barrel of opposing bats through very good command and a deep, varied arsenal.
Like Ray, Gray has had some ups and downs. In some years, it’s harder to pull off than others. That was certainly true in his stint with the Yankees, but Gray turned it around with his best seasons immediately after in Cincinnati’s hitter-friendly park.
Gray throws about 92, but has a great sinker he throws righties, and a cutting dart of a four-seamer he throws lefties. He pairs them with a slider, curve, and a rare change. He’s experimented with a cutter as well. There’s nothing eye-popping about his movement or velo; he has slightly higher spin rates, but I think his location makes more of a difference than spin.
When he’s on, he mixes pitches and (correctly) follows pitch-type splits to minimize platoon splits: over his long career, he’s held lefties to a .288 wOBA, just under righties’ .294. With the Reds, he took his bat-missing to a higher level, smashing his previous high K% every year. Part of the reason for this is the slight sharpening of his slider, making it more of the en vogue “sweeper” with tons of horizontal movement. The other part is refining his mix based on batter handedness. To lefties, he’s almost Lance McCullers-like, throwing about an even split of four-seamers and curves. He’ll even sneak in some two-strike sinkers to give them another look, even as he keeps the four-seamer as his primary heater to them. Righties get the sinker/slider mix that can be so effective against same-handed bats.
The approaches look very different at the season and especially career levels, but game to game, they can look pretty similar. Gilbert’s best game of 2021 was his sheer befuddling of the Yankees, who mis-hit and swung through fastball after fastball. Likewise, when Gray’s on, he can rack up a ton of K’s. We’ll see who’s sharper today.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, RF
5: Toro, 3B
6: Kelenic, LF
7: Rodriguez, RF
8: Crawford, SS
9: Murphy, C
SP: Gilbert
Game 1, Mariners at Twins
Robby Ray vs Joe Ryan, 1:10pm
Well, here we go. The M’s come into 2022 a much better team and with much higher expectations. The playoffs include ten teams per league, making the task of ending the longest playoff drought easier. It is, thankfully, time to stop talking about great prospects, and time to start watching them progress in MLB.
The M’s got a huge boost to their rotation when they signed the defending AL Cy Young award winner in Robbie Ray. His fastball/slider mix is deadly, and he’s among the game’s best strikeout pitchers. He’s given up hard contact throughout his career, including an abysmal 2020, but his stuff allows him to avoid that problem by missing bats altogether.
His stats last year were great obviously, and his HR totals were marred by a handful of starts in the Jays’ minor league parks in Florida and in Buffalo. It’s possible the stats *underrated* his season. That said, he has never been a model of consistency, with good, bad, and in-between seasons popping up almost randomly.
The Twins present a great early test. This is a team that’s spent big to overhaul their line-up, and it’s that line-up that they hope will keep them in the playoff chase all year. Carlos Correa is the big new star, but the Twins also hope to keep Byron Buxton healthy after he flashed superstar potential last year before a season-ending injury. There’s swing and miss in this line-up, but there are a lot of players who can punish mistakes.
The Twins lost Jose Berrios in trade last year, but are trying to make it up by acquiring Sonny Gray in trade, and some buy-low rotation help from Chris Archer and Chris Paddack. Their rotation got demolished last year, so it’s only up from that. But they had to trade some bullpen arms, and they’ll need their starters to keep it close this year. They’re a better pitching club, but that’s not hard, and there are question marks about all of them.
Despite Gray’s arrival, the Twins gave the opening day start to rookie Joe Ryan, acquired from Tampa in the Nelson Cruz deal. Ryan racked up Ks in the minors throwing almost nothing but fastballs, despite so-so velocity and spin. What he has is a flat approach angle, as Jake Mailhot detailed here. That is, his low arm slot and high spin efficiency give him the high vertical movement of an over-the-top thrower, but with the arm angle of a sinker/horizontal-movement guy. It’s this disconnect between what the batter’s eyes are telling him and what the ball is actually doing that can turn pitchers without 98mph velo into K machines. This is Paul Sewald’s MO, and it’s what has made Freddy Peralta so hard to hit for Milwaukee.
Ryan also has a change-up, slider, and rare curve. He didn’t need the four-pitch mix in the minors, but broke it out for his MLB trial last September. He pitched really well, with a K-BB% of 25%, which is amazing. Somewhat like Ray, he got hurt by the long ball, which makes sense when you post a ground ball rate below 30%.
So the M’s new-look offense has a fun challenge today. They’re facing a guy who threw fastballs 2/3 of the time, down from 70% in the minors, and who throws those heaters up in the zone again and again. Hitters essentially know what many of his pitches will be, and WHERE they’ll be, and Ryan is counting on them to swing through those fastballs anyway. It sounds ludicrous, but there’s Peralta and Sewald, nodding as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
This is a perfect match-up for Jesse Winker and perhaps Jarred Kelenic, and if anything it’s an easier introduction to MLB for Julio than most opening day starters with their physics-defying breaking balls. I’m excited to see how this goes.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, RF
5: Suarez, 3B
6: Kelenic, DH
7: Rodriguez, CF
8: Crawford, SS
9: Raleigh, C
SP: Robbie Ray
The big off-field news today was the 5-year extension JP Crawford signed to be a Mariner through 2026. It’s apparently worth $51 million, including a $5 million signing bonus.
The Risks, 2022
Okay, enough optimism. Expectations can bring excitement, but in this fan base, they can just as soon bring fear. The entire history of the past 20 years have been a series of other shoes dropping, pretty much on cue.
What other shoes are teetering this year? How can a year filled with such promise go wrong? Which of the innumerable expectation-repelling seasons could this one most resemble? Here is what I’m worried about.
1: The bullpen
The M’s bullpen almost single-handedly saved the M’s 2021. Sure, the offense’s almost spookily-perfect timing played a big role, but in terms of which group *played* the best, Paul Sewald and company would be the one.
Sewald is legitimately good, even if no one, including the Mariners, knew it a year ago. This underscores just how hard it is to find, develop, and *keep* bullpen arms playing well. The history of the M’s under Dipoto shows this. They had a good bullpen in 2018, before crashing to a disastrous 2019, and then enjoying last year’s top-5.
In addition to being the perfect group for Dipoto’s trade/waiver-claim addiction, the lower inning totals make bullpens especially liable to volatility, as regression and luck do their thing. In most years, that may not matter as much, and of course talent can help smooth out that volatility to a degree. But while regression is a perennial issue, 2022 is perhaps uniquely vulnerable to it.
The M’s benefitted from a low BABIP last year, but they had an even lower one in 2019. Crucially, they posted a very low HR/9 and HR/FB in 2021; these were what sunk that 2019 group. The new/refined M’s bullpen cut HRs allowed just as the league did, and that helped the fly-balling Sewald and
company post such great numbers. The M’s had a below-average K%, and while their walks allowed were legitimately great, the unit doesn’t scream “elite.” They also don’t stand out as a group who can beat the HR/FB ratio gods forever, which is fine: nearly no one can.
Now, theoretically, the additions of Sergio Romo, Ken Giles, and Andres Muñoz should help. The addition of additional roster spots in April should help manage innings. But the story of bullpens has traditionally been written by their best performers. If Giles (still hurt) and the newcomers don’t hit the ground running, they’re taking innings that could’ve gone to someone else. And all of that doesn’t even touch on the fact that the top of the pile includes some seriously volatile pitchers: Drew Steckenrider, Sewald, and even Giles himself.
If the starters and bats were world beaters, this would matter less. But the way the year is shaping up, and with Minnesota just trading for Chris Paddack and Emilio Pagan, the M’s can’t really afford to lose any late leads. The growth of the M’s as a team has made bullpen luck and bullpen skill more important than it’s ever been, and the M’s are coming off an historic year for both. That’s..that’s kind of a scary place to be.
2: Replacing Seager Harder Than it Looks
The M’s have depth at 3B for the first time in ages. The pickup of Eugenio Suarez gives them legitimate upside at the position, a critical need after Kyle Seager’s retirement. Abraham Toro is a super-sub to start, but could slide back to his natural position should Suarez’s (precipitous) decline continue.
It’s funny; Seager’s final two seasons were both solid, but they looked nothing like each other. In one, he was a low-K, high-BB guy with moderate pop and a low BABIP. Last year, he was an all-or-nothing slugger, popping a career high in home runs, but running a bad OBP due to a high K rate and an even lower BABIP.
Suarez last year looked just like the most recent season from Seager, right down to the poor BABIP and value derived mostly from longballs. If that BABIP turns around, you’ve got something, even admitting that his defense won’t be Seagarian. And Toro doesn’t have as much power, but has legitimately good contact skills and a solid eye, more like the 2020 version of Seags. He’s got nothing more to prove in the minors, and needs to show that he can hold down a full time gig.
So there’s plenty of upside, but the downside risks scream out all the same. Suarez’s trajectory can be fairly described as a three year free fall. Seattle’s home park is very much NOT where you go to find a BABIP turnaround, and it’s harder to hit home runs (the one thing he’s done consistently) in Seattle than Cincinnati.
Toro’s projections look good, but that’s been true for years, and he still has a career wRC+ in the 80s. Sure, it’s trending up, but he’s never managed a league-average mark in several (small) trials. Without great defense, it’s hard to make that work.
3: The M’s Rivals Did More
Minnesota picked up Carlos Correa, Gary Sánchez, Gio Urshela, Sonny Gray and two wildcards in Chris Paddack and Chris Archer. The Rangers gave themselves the best middle infield combo in baseball with Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. The mostly-quiet Red Sox may have an argument at middle infield after getting Trevor Story to go with Xander Bogaerts. The AL East remains stacked. You get the idea.
No, the M’s weren’t quiet. Picking up Robbie Ray in free agency and then swinging the Jesse Winker/Eugenio Suarez trade made them much better. You can argue that Minnesota had to do more, after a disastrous 2021. But that won’t work with New York, Boston, and Tampa, who did less, but arguably didn’t need to in order to stay ahead of Seattle.
Worse, the competition changes, but doesn’t go away, depending on the run environment in 2022 (obligatory statement of disgust that we have to wonder about this afresh each year). If the humidors knock down run scoring somehow, or bring it back to normal after years of superball-inflated HR totals, teams like Detroit and Cleveland become real wild card challengers (Detroit might be there anyway, depending on how well Spencer Torkelson hits). If it stays the way it was in 2019-21, then Minnesota and Texas have more of a shot. This is a case where the M’s balance could hurt them: not enough pitching to dominate in a low-run environment, not enough batting average and depth to win in a high run scoring environment.
So, yes: a bit more spending could’ve made a difference. The M’s line-up looks pretty good top to bottom, but it lacks the depth of the really good teams. And because Julio’s starting the year in Seattle, there’s less obvious high-minors help in case a starter goes down due to injury or ineffectiveness, at least on offense. There’s more depth at pitcher, but it’s always tough to count on young pitchers.
I’m not as down on the off-season as some, but the M’s front office would probably allow that the way they built this team comes with plenty of risk. They kept most of their top prospects, but find that their wildcard rivals are multiplying. Sure, the AL West isn’t as tough as it once was (though the Angels can’t underachieve *every* year, can they?), but it also matters less and less as the playoffs keep expanding. The M’s have to care about the other divisions in the AL, and their actions don’t show that the care all that much. Either that, or they’re absolutely convinced they have nothing to worry about. Not sure which is worse
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?
The Inevitability of Julio Rodriguez
It’s now almost 10-12 hours since the news broke that Julio Rodriguez has officially made the opening day roster, but my power’s been out all day thanks to these storms. So if we can’t be timely, let’s take a step back and talk about any larger repercussions.
Is this (and the opening day starts for some other top prospects) a sign that the new CBA has changed the math on service time manipulation, even at the margin? That’s an interesting question, but I think Julio’s promotion won’t really shed any light on it. What I mean by that is Julio’s play and the M’s injury situation made Julio’s path to the roster much easier. Kris Bryant had a legitimate, veteran major leaguer at his position back in 2015. Was it still a clear-cut case of service time manipulation? Absolutely, but even that’s not the case here, unless you call NRI Billy Hamilton the MLB vet that would enable the M’s to mess with Julio.
Beyond the roster, which is thin, but very solid, there are other factors that helped Julio’s cause (really, M’s fans’ cause). First is the lingering damage from Kevin Mather’s Bellevue remarks, and the salt they poured into the open wound of Jarred Kelenic’s relationship with the front office. Second, Kelenic’s struggles may have helped the team realized there’s no real magic about starting a prospect’s season at a lower level that makes the transition to the big leagues easier. Confidence is important, but you don’t fill up your confidence bank account by swatting some AAA home runs, especially not these days, when AAA-West’s run environment is essentially broken. The M’s may also see Julio’s arrival (and the sudden emergence of Matt Brash) as a way to take some of the pressure off of Kelenic. Kelenic was the big story for much of last year, and while he’s still an important player for the M’s chances, a heck of a lot of interview requests will shift over to the effortlessly charismatic Rodriguez.
But most of all, everything we’ve seen from Rodriguez underscores just how special a talent he is. Does that mean he’s an MVP candidate this year? Well, that’s probably a bit much, but Rodriguez has been on some very big stages and has hit well at essentially every level. The M’s upped the degree of difficulty on him by asking him to play a lot more CF this spring, but after his first or second game there, the game was over. He wasn’t splitting time with Kelenic anymore, and I’ll be shocked if the M’s give Kelenic more than a game or two in CF. He just looked natural out there, and head and shoulders above his in-house rivals. Here, too, the way things worked out may help Kelenic as much as they help Julio.
All of this has injected some optimism and excitement to a fanbase that spent last spring talking about Mather and service time manipulation, and the last few weeks talking about the team’s failure to land another free agent. The team is worse on paper than many of their wild card rivals, but the promotion of Julio and the utterly ridiculous Matt Brash, has helped shift the conversation from the upgrades on, say, Minnesota or Anaheim, and what this M’s team could do if things break right. Sure, some of that’s just the Spring talking, but a lot of it has to do with how amazing Julio looks. Julio essentially took this decision out of the M’s hands.