Game Twenty-Five Recap
Dave · May 2, 2010 at 4:27 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Boo, 11-14.
Dear Jack,
Your move.
Sincerely,
The Fans.
(Seriously, if this roster hasn’t seen significant changes by Tuesday, the gloves come off. It took you three days to abandon the six man bullpen – you’ve had long enough to abandon this roster. It doesn’t work. Fix it.)
Eric Byrnes is no longer a major league player. Mike Sweeney is no longer a major league player. We need a roster with 25 major league players on it.
Let’s see, who’s next… offday tomorrow, that’s good, that’d be a good day for some moves… and then it’s HOLY COW IT’S THE TAMPA BAY RAYS.
Well. I think it’s safe to say the Ms will be dead last and 5 games out by this weekend.
Wow, this series with the Rangers was almost a textbook exmaple of how to turn wins into defeats in the most agonizing ways possible for fans.
It’s like the Baseball Gods wanted to come up with the masochistic ways to torment M’s fans.
That’s scary. Almost everyone has the solution being Bradley sliding to DH and placing Langerhans in LF.
But the offense is so bad that it seems more reasonable to keep Bradley’s bat (with all the defensive miscues…sorry Felix) in LF and add a Jack Cust-type to DH
what happened to the whole “preventing a run is just as good as scoring a run” thing that everyone was in love with this offseason?
If the Mariners had prevented or scored one more run during the regulation nine innings, they would have won today, no? They are just as good. But at this point it would be very difficult for the Ms to better their run prevention. It would be easier to better their run production.
Does anyone think that if we had more offense in the minors we wouldn’t have brought it up by now?
Bringing up Langerhans helps in the flexibility department, but it isn’t going to solve the overall offense problem. It does show the organization acknowledges there’s a problem, but we’re going to have to look outside the organization, which will take time and cost us something.
Ahh, Burkie. Back in the day, we thought he was a pretty decent back-up. Who knew then that we’d wind up with a tandem of starting “catchers” who’d make him look like Pudge Rodriguez by comparison.
Also our catchers are hitting .178/.299/.274 with 6 PB and a 3-14 CS rate.
If we’re going to have no-offense catchers, they might as well be able to catch the ball. And being able to throw would be a plus. So hello Jose Molina?
What about Hank Blalock? He’s in Durham, can opt out of his contract for a MLB offer (I think), is caught in a numbers game in Tampa, and can hit as well as be an emergency option at the corners. Sure, he’s had health problems in the past, but that makes him no different than the DHs the team has at present.
We’re talking about the same organization that has 2 well-past-their-prime DH’s and thinks Jose Lopez is a cleanup hitter. Sometimes I really don’t know what they’re “thinking”.
True that…but then again, when the M’s were trying to win the division back in ’02/’03, a certain really sucky Tampa Bay team in those days was known to come in on occasion and take two-out-of-three from them in series which they needed to win…
With any luck, maybe they’re due to call in that marker!
DFA Byrnes and Sweeney tomorrow and bring up Langerhans and Hannahan. Make Bradley the primary DH. Scan the waiver wire for a catcher who won’t let the ball hit the backstop 2 or 3 times a game. Move Lopez down to the six spot where he belongs. Simple changes that will help but I don’t see any magic bullets to fix this offense.
Good point. Compared to Byrnes, Blalock would look like Ryan Howard in that lineup.
This is the kind of team, with a terminally ill offense, and deflating losses at home, that fans will tune out pretty quickly. I’m about there. It’s just hard and incredibly frustrating to watch this team. I went to the game today, but left after the 8th, because I couldn’t bear to see another pitching gem get wasted (and of course, this came true).
You gotta wonder what the starters are thinking when they go to the mound. It’s like, “God, I gotta be perfect, and that might not even be good enough.”
Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see anybody mention the strategic goofs made by Wak on Friday night. Lat in the game, Griffey has up with the winning run in scoring position and portsider Darren Oliver on the mound – a perfect time for Sweeney to PH. Wak leaves Junior up there who fails to deliver. Next inning – bases loaded and Wilson due up. We need his speed to stay out of the DP. Ridiculously, Sweeney is sent in to take for for Jack and does what we expected him to do, a quick 6-4-3. Not only does he also fail to execute, but it takes Wilson out defensively and puts our only alternative, Tui, in to play short in an extra-inning game. Tui is a terrific guy, but no shortstop. No surprise on my end when he throws a slow roller to Spokane Street when he should have just eaten it. Game, set, match!
And since I’m still feeling the anger of a mismanaged series – WHAT IS WRONG WITH LETTING A STARTER FINISH WHAT HE STARTS. IS THERE SOME RULE THAT I HAVE OVERLOOKED THAT SAYS A “CLOSER” MUST TAKE OVER IN THE NINTH????
I’ve attended about 30-35 M’s games a year since the team’s inception in ’77 and I’m about to throw in the towel. I’ve never been this frustrated with a team in my 71 years!!!!
If no roster changes are made this week, I would absolutely love to hear Felix, Cliff, hell even Doug call out the offense publicly. They’ve been working magic so far, they should have be able to risk a little bit of ill will in the lovey-dovey clubhouse by demanding that people play smart.
Worked on Felix…
Oops! My frustration got the better of my typing. Second line should read, “Late in the game, Griffey is up . . . “
Sweeney, Byrnes and RJ must have a picture of Wak with a goat.
Oh, god, you just made my day. He was the first Mariner I ever met–on Little League Day.
TOTALLY AWESOME.
Please fix this team. Although I can see us losing on Felix day because he didn’t pitch so well, shutouts are a different matter altogether. Just find someone with pop, I don’t give a shit if it’s Bucky Jacobsen.
Yeah…it’s that unwritten rule in this so-called “new age style of management” over the past 30 years or so which states: “The starting pitcher’s arm shall fall off if he exceeds that forbidden 100-pitch mark!” — unlike all those HOF’ers such as Ryan, Palmer, Carlton, Sutton, Seaver et al who were all throwing WAAAAY more pitches than than back in the day and yet still pitching into their 40’s.
Hey, the Buckster’s sitting up in KJR’s booth doing “Baseball’s Best Post-Game Show” these days…maybe Z can bring him downstairs and activate him to the roster! 🙂
So, at what point do we consider the possibility that Aardsma’s “throw high fastballs all day long” skillset isn’t the best fit for high-leverage innings anymore?
I was at all 3 games. It was incredibly frustrating to watch.
Jeff Nye you mock the overreacting crowd and then suggest taking Aardsma out of ‘high leverage innings.’
Isn’t your suggestion an overreaction? He has two blown saves. The offense is responsible for more losses than Aardsma.
I’ve had questions about Aardsma’s skillset since last year. And I could care less about the save stat, which is why I said high leverage innings.
Thanks for assuming my mindset and motivations, though.
He’s not the biggest problem with this team, no; but it’s really hard to be consistently successful against major league hitters with only one pitch, unless you’re Mariano Rivera.
And with high fastballs being his only trick, the results of his mistakes are generally going to be costly.
Too bad it did not work out for Byrnes.
He could have been a good fourth OF.
The team was simply not in a position to wait him out, as he may well be done.
People forget that Zduriencik “Patchwork quilted” his way through 2009. The way the West is right now, he may well be able to actually keep us in contention doing that this year.
But he can do better, and I believe he will, until actual events indicate otherwise.
What about Hank Blalock?
We have several internal options who are better than Blalock. He was never as good as people thought (career road OPS: 714), and he fell off a cliff in the last year. Frankly, I don’t see why he’d be a better bet than Sweeney to produce this year–Sweeney was a much better hitter, park adjusted, in 2009.
The offense has been an issue since 2002. Long before Aardsma, and his one-trick pony.
So you weren’t enjoying the ‘overreaction’ you just felt like posting you were? Or a failed attempt at sarcasm?
Jeff Nye said:
And I could care less about the save stat, which is why I said high leverage innings.
I think Jeff Nye means “I couldn’t care less…”
I’m not really sure how replacing Griffey in the lineup with Langerhans is going to help the team score more runs. Run-prevention is a non-issue when the team is scoring 4 runs in 32 innings.
The M’s would have to be very lucky to get one their AAA guys to outproduce Griffey. Carp, maybe? Is the marginal potential upgrade worth messing with chemistry? Hard to argue that point.
I think the Mariners should keep Eric Byrnes … as a mascot to go along with the Mariner Moose.
He could ride around on his beach bicycle between innings.
Fister by that point had faced the full lineup three times, which is usually the end point for a typical SP: Check the splits by pitch count and you’ll see an appreciable drop in performance. With 95-100 pitches, plus warmup pitches each of his 8 innings, plus the possible mounting pressure while he was perfect, it’s certainly likely he was gassed enough after the 8th to call it a day.
As for deploying Aardsma in the 9th… why do you have a closer if you’re not going to send him out for the 9th in that situation? As Jeff Nye noted, he’s hardly the ideal guy for that situation, sure… but what should Wak have done there if Fister was done?
I wouldn’t mind Everidge as a DH. At least every time he comes up to bat there’s a chance he could hit a moonshot. It would be nice to have a hitter where you feel that way once in a while.
About this whole team chemistry thing, the best ingredient for team chemistry is talent.
Hm, an subject that has interested me for a while now has popped up. Pitch counts.
It became interesting to me since I started watching the Koshien tournament. It’s a national HS tournament in Japan held semiannually (one is an invitational, the other the actual tournament). Team qualify through tournaments in their prefecture or region.
Many HS teams don’t have more than one ace – even the top tier schools may have 2 at the most.
This means that the ace has to go almost every game (unless you’re confident to throw a weaker pitcher against a weaker opponent).
I attended the 2006 tournament where ace Saitou Yuuki of Waseda Jitsugyou threw 6 complete games, 69 innings, 262 of 264 total batters and 948 pitches, including a two-day championship (the first in 37 years) which ended in a 1-1 tie after 15 innings the first day and winning 4-3 the next. All this in less than a 3 week span, and 3 of those games were on back-back-back (9 innings-15-9).
By the way, he’ll graduate from Waseda University this year and is the next pitcher thought to consider MLB.
Anyways, pitchers in Japan for the most part throw pitch counts out the window. Phenom Yu Darvish easily throws over 100 each start, and in his most recent one threw 150. In fact, he already has 4-140+ pitch starts.
That’s why I wasn’t too surprised when Colby Lewis went out for the 9th on Friday even though he was over 100. He did it too in Japan, and Nolan Ryan has begun to throw the book on pitch counts out the window.
Now sure, NPB teams have less games and sometimes have 6 man rotations. And one wonders about the injury risk posed to such pitchers. (See Daisuke Matsuzaka and Koji Uehara)
But I wonder about the idea. Could you throw pitchers longer here? Perhaps you would have to go to a 6-man rotation because of the extra games.
I mean, let’s just say you were able to get the M’s rotation go say 120-140 pitches each start, but have a rotation of:
Felix-Lee-Bedard-RRS-Fister-Vargas
Instead of approximately 33 starts, you’d get around 27. But you would get them to go longer and finish more games.
You wouldn’t necessarily need a bigger bullpen now that the SP are going longer. And if the bullpen is failed SP, then it’s a good thing.
But the problem remains whether the pitchers here would be conditioned to do so. In Japan, pitchers go often and long, so it makes sense that they carry it into college and pros. But I don’t know if you could do that here unless it too was done at early levels. I don’t have experience about baseball here at the LL to HS level to know.
This team may have played several winnable games lately, but this team has also nearly lost nine games in a row. Both the wins in Kansas City were not pretty, with the first win bordering on “gift” status. Jack has made the right roster adjustments, but if this team continues to screw up the little things while not hitting doubles or home runs, then maybe we need to start looking at the job Wak is doing. Consistently terrible base-running, an inability to score runners from third base with fewer than two outs, erratic approaches at the plate from our worst hitters… these are all responsibilities of the manager.