Game Fourteen Recap
Yay, 7-7.
I won’t be able to add much the next three nights, as MLB.tv’s insane blackout policies prevent me from watching any Orioles games. So, I’ll just be going off the box scores for the next few days.
Fister is quickly becoming Jarrod Washburn 2.0, just without all the annoying parts that came along with the old version. Throw strikes, make opposing batters hit their way on base, and trust your defense is a great recipe in Safeco Field, especially for a guy with middling stuff. He won’t keep this up, of course, but it’s nice that the M’s have a guy who can step in and eat innings when needed. I’d say Ian Snell’s shot at staying in the rotation when Cliff Lee returns just took a hit. He’s going to have to pitch well pretty soon, because Fister won’t give up his spot easily.
Two more extra base hits for Casey Kotchman tonight raise his season line to .286/.367/.595. Call me crazy, but maybe he shouldn’t hit seventh tomorrow.
Franklin Gutierrez left the game after what was described as wincing as he rounded the bases in the 7th inning. Apparently, he’s okay, but the M’s lack of outfield depth becomes a pretty huge problem if this persists. I don’t think anyone wants Eric Byrnes playing center field in a non-emergency.
You can get around mlb.tv’s blackouts by temporarily using a free proxy from japan or china. At first it will be crazy slow and low quality, but after the game loads up, turn off using the proxy and everything will go back to normal. MLB.tv doesn’t appear to ever check your location again after the initial load so long as you don’t refresh or anything.
Proxies from the U.S., even out of zone, rarely worked for me, but ones from Japan and China always worked to get around the ridiculous blackouts.
Just watching the post game comments and Wak said it was some tightness in his groin, no pull. Guti wanted to stay in but Wak pulled him for obvious reasons. Lets hope that analysis sticks….
A large chunk of our offense hinges on Kotchman, it’s nice to see him swing the bat. I think Kotchman/Guti/Bradley make a decent 3/4/5, Lopez does not belong hitting in the 4 spot. Any thought’s on what the preference would be in slotting Kotchman/Guti/Bradley? The way Guti is hitting it seems like at least for now he should be left in the 3 hole, after that does having a LH and a switch-hitter create any large arguments for how you slot Kotch/Bradley vs. RHP?
I don’t think anyone really wants Eric Byrnes playing CF in an emergency, either.
Dave what are the odds Fister turns into a hidden gem? I mean no way he continues at this pace all year but, do you think he has a slim chance of being above-average this season? The rotation is looking less like a question mark more and more.
Anything, only get Lopez, the double-play-waiting-to-happen, out of the middle of the order. I wish he would hit his first home run so he would quit trying to hit his first home run.
Sure like watching Wilson on defense.
I really really really like Fister’s approach. The way he’s pitching, it’s like he’s saying to the hitters “cmon, try and hit it out of this park”, and hitters are going for it. He is truly taking pitching-to-defense-and-park to a whole new level.
I thought tonight’s center field appearance by Mr. Byrnes was the only appropriate one: when Guti takes time off for precautionary reasons in a blowout we’re winning.
No, Fister is not a hidden gem. He is what he is, a pitch to contact guy with no outpitch who will look good in Safeco when he goes up against a good offense. Good hitting teams will still knock him around.
Pack-
Wilson on offense was even worth watching tonight. 3 hits was a nice surprise.
Here’s hoping Dave’s reminders that Fister can’t keep this up will work like the “our pitcher might struggle tonight” reverse jinx, and allow him to keep missing bats until Lee and/or Bedard show up. Fister’s looking like a mix of Washburn’s middling speed and Jamie Moyer’s accuracy. Which just might work in Safeco.
PitchFX shows him using the entire strike zone equally well (as compared to Vargas’, say) and mixing up his speeds from 72 to 90mph.
And Baltimore’s lineup is definitely NOT the A’s lineup. This is exactly the surprise we needed early on, sorta the pitching equivalent of what Chavez did leading off in Ichiro!’s early absence last year.
He’s pitching well right now, and batter’s don’t know him very well yet. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him be able to keep it up for a month or so longer.
Go M’s.
Agreed. You can’t send 88 mph fastballs over the middle of the plate all night against many teams and have that kind of success. Fortunately the Orioles are hitting atrociously right now, so his 90% fastball mix looked great.
Byrnes in CF pretty much becomes an emergency, I would think. I find it interesting that the team would damn near panic about the bullpen the very first week, but seem to have no problem with Byrnes the only OF depth and Tui the only IF depth. Especially with two injury-prone starters in Wilson and Bradley.
Anybody as tall as Fister that doesn’t have trouble finding the strike zone get’s kudos from me. He will get knocked around sooner or later, but I’m okay with that – he’s battling for the back-end of the rotation and not tying up 3 WAR worth of salary. He lookes like he’ll be a net asset this year.
I am enjoying the Z approach to pitching depth of finding guys that fit the Washburn-lite mold. No reason why Safeco can’t be an advantage to the team if the roster construction is done right. Like the USSM guys constantly point out, Fister’s and French’s and Olson’s are pretty readily available, and the better versions like RRS and Vargas (guys who I think might stick in a rotation as more than just depth guys) are cheap. With Felix at the top and Lee/Bedard having what seems to be good rehabs, this rotation should be a major strength at full health.
Question: if the M’s make the playoffs, and Bedard and Lee are both healthy and pitching well, where do Vargas and RRS slot into the bullpen? I’m assuming RRS would stick as a starter, but given his previous success in relief, does he go back there? Whose stuff is better suited for what? I can’t help but think how much fun it would be to roll out those three in succession in the playoffs. Also, having one of our current starters drop to the bullpen when the rotation is at full strength could be huge for Bedard if he is still the 5 or 6 innings of great pitching then has to come out guy.
If Guti ever goes down for a significant amount of time, wouldn’t Ichiro just slide over to center and Byrnes would cover right?
Question: Much has been made of Fister’s height, and the fact that he releases the ball closer to the plate than a shorter pitcher would. However, by my calculation, an extra 8″ of height should only increase the effective velocity of an 88 mph fastball by 1 mph or so. The 8″ or so that Fister’s fastball doesn’t have to travel just isn’t that much compared to the distance between the mound and home plate. Am I missing something?
Apparently tonight was the lowest attendance in SafeCo park history. Ouch.
@bilbo27 How the f do you do that? I signed up for mlb.tv this year, but would really like to use it to watch M’s games because I don’t have cable at home. I’ve ran a Googlesearch and tried a couple different sites but MLBTV won’t run through them.
Looking at the numbers in the middle of the season is always misleading, but according to Fangraphs, Fister has already been worth $1.3 million, not counting tonight’s game. I presume he’s making the league minimum. Unless he falls off a cliff (and if he does, we can just send him down and bring up French), he will more than make up his salary this year. That’s the whole theory on what you should pay for a fifth starter.
This will probably continue for the next few weeks, until the weather warms… And for a couple years until people feel comfortable in this economy.
Nearly every park has seen a decline in attendance this year over last year, which was a bad year.
On top of that, we’re still #14 in attendance for MLB, between the Mets and Houston, two significantly larger markets.
Just watched the replay with Griffey getting thrown out at home by a football field.
Almost painful, but also pretty funny.
“Mulligan?”
Gosh, bongo, Rick R was saying on the air tonight that Fister’s fastball may only be 88 or 89, but it sure looks faster than that to the hitter! Yessir!
Now, WHY it would look faster is anyone’s guess. Maybe Rick was just filling some airtime.
And as for attendance, both my kids indicate they really want to see some games this summer, something I could never talk them into last year, so count three more people for a couple of games.
Fangraphs doesn’t have Fister’s stats from tonight up yet. But, through his first two starts, he was running a .244 BABIP, which IIRC is not typically sustainable. Tonight I suspect lowered that. He also has yet to give up a home run.
And again, IIRC, as his BABIP regresses to the mean over the season and fly balls start flying over walls, he will start to look like the Mister Fister his skill set suggests.
Am I missing something?
And, averages smaverages, a no-no into the 7th on a 67 degree spring night at the Safe was a great time.
Question: if the M’s make the playoffs,
Wow, win a few games and it goes from gloom and doom to playoffs in a hurry around here.
The answer to your question is “it depends”. Would have to see how well Bedard and RRS and the “5th” starter have been pitching and who the opponent is.
There are way too many uncertainties to start talking playoffs.
2 M’s and a former M got 3 of the 5 webgems tonight. Wilson with his double play tap-dance. Figgins/Fister with the pirouette throw out at first with Fister doing the splits, and believe it or not, Yuniesky Betancourt with a running catch in foul territory of the outfield. (He almost took out another player ala Chavez, making this play)
I don’t get how you can know for sure anything about future performance when you are biased with your use of stats. It could be that atheletes that have a certain ‘performance to date’, they can go on the same or even improve. It happens all the time. I know I’m not where you are with stat review expertise, but you could be wrong, and I’m sure you would love to be wrong when you state Fister will not keep up his performance. Lets hope for the best. What annoyed me about the past years with the Mariners was their unwillingness to settle with youth in positions and see what could happen. Other teams do it all the time and it’s good the Mariners have been forced to do it this season. They have jerked around so many possible good players with ‘the up-and-down to Tacoma’, and later signing retreads to big money contracts.
Nothing wrong with some fan optimism, right?
bloodydavid,
Nothing is going to be 100% certain, don’t look at it that way. Instead, think of it as a probability. For example,
About Fister lacking an outpitch: What about that changeup of which Jeff Sullivan posted a .gif after the previous game?
Re Kotchman: how long does he have to keep hitting for power before we can reasonably start to conclude he’s made a real change in his performance that’s likely to be permanent? I would think we’re not there yet (though I do wonder when the last time was that he had a SP near .600 over anything like this many games).
The fallback plan would be to bring up another outfielder. I guess it depends on what “significant amount of time” is.
We’d all love to see them make one or both DH’s go away, and replace them with another outfielder and/or infielder.
Here’s one difference between a well run organization and one that isn’t.
The M’s have depth in the rotation and in the bullpen. When they get Lee and Bedard, they will have even more depth. Much of this depth was acquired cheaply.
The Nationals have given 11 innings to Miguel Batista.
Also, in the off season, I seem to remember seeing in Fangraphs that some teams signed free agent relievers to large multi year deals.
After I posted this:
I realized it was a little too sweeping using the word “all”. Certainly, each of our DH’s has many fans who want to see them play. Near the end of spring training for example, many people posting here were berating Dave for saying that Sweeney shouldn’t be on the team. Haven’t heard too much from all those folks since the season started, though.
There were two more baserunning gaffes last night, but fortunately the team won 8-2 so we are not focusing on them.
The first was when Wilson hit a one-out single just inside 3rd base and then inexplicably decided to try to stretch it into a double. He would have been out by three steps if the throw to 2nd hadn’t been wide of the bag, so we caught a huge break on that one. We avoided a rally killer by sheer dumb luck. Wak needs to have a talk with Jack about his lack of baserunning skills.
The other gaffe was somewhat humorous as Brumley sent Griffey home from first on Bradley’s double and Griffey got thrown out by about twenty feet. Maybe the fact that Mike Blowers had been promoting Griffey’s “the slide” bobblehead giveaway scheduled for later this year led Brumley to forget that Griffey is 50, …uh, I mean 40… years old. I guess it’s safe to say that “Junior’s” days of scoring from 1st on a double are in the past.
a note from Larue today:
“White-haired manager Gene Mauch had a theory about most everything in baseball, including the month of April – when he’d have loved to have Doug Fister.
Mauch believed in taking a junkball pitcher north from spring training and putting him in his rotation for the first month of the season, believing that hitters who could time a fastball in April still couldn’t get it right against the soft stuff.”
Paul-
Just like using “all” may have been overshooting a bit, I don’t remember “many people berating” Dave over Sweeney. There was healthy debate, over things like whether Spring training matters, and whether Garko is a worthwhile detriment in the field versus his ability to “crush lefties”.
I for one simply reasoned that it didn’t really matter whether it was Garko or Sweeney, and also that whether spring is a worthwhile indicator or not, Garko was horrible, and Sweeney was hot.
The mistake was giving Sweeney a contract to begin with, and inviting him to camp. What message would it send to free agents/minor leaguers if they see two guys competing for a roster spot, one clearly outperforms the other, and yet he gets cut? Especially if we’re pushing a “belief system.”
Neither’s glove is worth being on the field for long, and the bat thing is still sort of playing out similarly (Garko is currently hitless for Texas, with 10 at bats– small sample size, granted, but that’s the same role he would have played here).
And for the record, I DO fall under the “we’d all like to see them make one or both DH’s go away”. I’m not a fan of Sweeney being on the roster, I’m still waiting for something better!
RE: Infield depth
We picked up former Mariner (and Pirate and Ranger) Ramon Vazquez yesterday, and stashed him in the minors (200+ Major League games at SS, 200+ at 3B, 150+ at 2nd…).
He was actually Jack Wilson’s backup in Pittsburgh last year, so Wilson might have played a hand in pointing him out.
Decent glove, and as recently as 2008 he batted .290 (87-for-300) with 18 doubles, three triples, six home runs and 40 RBIs.
Watching Eric Byrnes do anything is like going to the circus. You never quite know what you’re going to see, but it’s more than likely going to be entertaining….It may also scar you for life.
Hey Dave, I’ve been listening to the live Kiro broadcast out of Safeco from my house/car/wherever in LA using my i-phone and MLB’s ‘At Bat 2010’ App. You can choose which feed to listen to, home or away. Best $14.99 I’ve spent, and I know it’s available for a variety of smart phones if you have them.
m
I seem to recall that at one time, Ramon Vazquez was one half of the Mariners’ “double play combo of the future” along with a certain gritty local kid from Port Orchard.
Can someone please explain the Byrnes hatred? Heard quite a few comments from people in the crowd at Spring Training making fun of Byrnes and I really just don’t get it.
Perhaps other people have noticed, but you’ve been referenced on Y! by Scott Pianowski.
Whoo!
It wasn’t just in regards to Garko.
For examples, see here.
some of the messages included comments to Dave like:
.
also, see this one which may be what you were thinking of, as it was more about Garko.
I don’t hate Byrnes at all. He can hit against lefties okay and is (despite the entertaining methods he uses) a decent fielder. But he can’t hit righties any more. He’s a role player, a platoon LF and pinch hitter on a contending team.
The biggest problem really isn’t having Byrnes come in as a short term injury replacement. It’s not having anybody else on the roster to back him up. If Guti needs a few days off, ideally when the other team has a RHP starter, you could put, say, Langerhans in the lineup that day. And then if the other manager brings in a LOOGY in the 8th inning with Langerhans at the plate and the game on the line, you pinch-hit Byrnes. Reverse for LHP starters.
With the current roster, you can’t do that. Having a 12 man staff and two DH-only guys on the roster just limits things badly.
[edit: Or replace Guti with Bradley in the above hypothetical for an even more realistic scenario. ]
Paul-
Ahh. You’re right, those do go a bit overboard. Sorry. Obviously, I was defending my own debate about it, which I hope wasn’t nearly as internet-aggressive.
I definitely value Dave’s opinions, even when I disagree (and it’s an opportunity to see a different perspective when someone with more knowledge than myself disagrees with me).
Cheers.
This one killed me. To make matters worse Ichiro! was up next, so why risk it? Instead Wilson gets lucky, and Ichiro looks at four straight balls and ends up on first with what should have been an intentional walk.
Think about it there were three possible outcomes with the Wilson hit:
1) Wilson holds up at first, and they pitch to Ichiro.
2) Wilson gets thrown out at second. Bases are now empty and we have two outs. RALLY KILLER in the only inning we did real damage in the game. (This should have happened)
3) Wilson is safe at second on double, and they walk Ichiro (The actual outcome, and how that wasn’t scored as a single and an error is beyond me).
While I have to admit #3 is the best possible outcome, #1 is a close second, and #1 has a whole lot less risk associated with it. I do have to admit thought; the whole thing kind of became a mute point because Figgins draws a walk next to load the bases and Lopez grounds into what should have been an inning ending double play.
I agree unless the outfielder is trying to dig the ball out from under the outfield wall Griffey should hold. Cant blame Griffey for this one as his back was to the wall. If Griffey knew the outfielder had a bead on the ball I bet he would have held at that point. Baltimore gets a huge break here because the game was starting to get out of hand. Griffey would have been the sixth run that inning and there still would have been only one out.