Game 43, Athletics at Mariners
Marco Gonzales vs. Zach Logue, 6:40pm
After a disastrous series in Boston, the M’s again turn to their stopper. No, not the defending Cy Young, or one of their young phenoms, but Marco Gonzales. I’d worry that he wouldn’t have the same competitive fire facing a near anonymous starter in Zach Logue, not a name brand Ace like Max Scherzer, but I think Gonzales is literally made of competitive fire.
Look, this has been a rough month for the M’s. Nathan Bishop wrote a great blog post about the feeling they’ve inspired. It’s hard to remember when they’re on a losing jag like this, but they’re not a horrible team – they’re a perfectly fine team who’s *playing* poorly at the moment. But the flip side to that, and one Nathan hits on, is that so much of the hope that April engendered wasn’t real either. Apparently, JP Crawford isn’t an 8-9 WAR player, who can hit for average and power, while playing a brilliant SS. Apparently, Matt Brash is going to take some time, and apparently, Logan Gilbert – while great – is not nearly unhittable.
Still, I loved reading Ryan Divish’s reminder that the club that won 90 games last year were very close to this a year ago. The M’s were 21-26, in 4th place in the AL West. They were the worst hitting club around, with the lowest average and OBP. Their bullpen wasn’t yet the savior of the team, as the first group had to make way for Paul Sewald and others. So it’s possible for a team to look lost, to look punchless, and come out of it. The problem is that, outside of a brilliant bullpen, the M’s didn’t come out of it by playing like a 90 win team – they came out of it by…I mean, I watched it, and I still have no idea how it happened. The M’s will improve in the coming weeks. Their worst hitters won’t stay this bad, and they’ll bolster the line-up by getting guys off the IL. The bullpen will play better.
That said, this team is not competing for a title. This club that fancied itself among the AL’s up-and-comers simply isn’t. That sucks; this fanbase has waited a long, long time. But for a number of reasons, they’re just not as good as the top clubs in the league, and may not be as good as mid-tier teams. What’s tough to figure out is what to do from here. Think of a guy like Adam Frazier, who’s a free agent at the end of the year. Mitch Haniger, too, and I just can’t see the M’s making a run at keeping him. The M’s are going to need to be very active in free agency to stay on the outskirts of contention, and they’ll need continued growth from Julio and a massive bounce-back from Jarred Kelenic.
That sounds like a tall order from a club that’s been hesitant to do much in free agency, and whose record with their top prospects has been, uh, spotty. But it’s not impossible. That said, what may be impossible is to re-focus on something more than contention. It’s so easy to say, but it’s not so easy to do.
Today, the M’s face the rebuilding A’s, the one team below the M’s in the AL West. Today’s starter is Zach Logue, whom the A’s acquired from Toronto in the Matt Chapman deal. A low 3/4/side-arming lefty, Logue throws a 90mph four-seamer, a change-up, a slider/cutter, and a slurvy curve. Despite his low vertical movement, his fastball isn’t really a sinker – especially given the way he uses it.
Logue slings in his fastball at or above the top of the zone.
In the high minors, this approach gave him the ability to rack up strikeouts. 90mph isn’t going to allow that at the big league level, but it does have another effect: Logue has one of the league’s lowest GB%. He’s really like a left-handed Paul Sewald, er, with 3mph less oomph, and as a starter. Sewald ran a sub-30% GB rate last year, and Logue’s at 25% himself. In an earlier era of baseball, like 2019, this would be…a really bad plan. But in 2022, with a dead ball, playing in Oakland (and visiting Seattle), that’s a decent idea. A .264 BABIP is probably not all that unlucky, though his strand rate of 93.4% most definitely is.
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Crawford, SS
4: Rodriguez, CF
5: Suarez, 3B
6: Winker, LF
7: Moore, RF
8: Torrens, DH
9: Raleigh, C
SP: Gonzales
The end of Kyle Lewis’ rehab forced a choice from the M’s front office. And thus, Lewis is on his way to Seattle and might play tomorrow. For a guy who has needed days off after playing less than a full game in the OF, he seems likely to be a full-time DH. And that’s fine – the M’s are platooning Luis Torrens and Mike Ford in that position now. But it also means that the M’s professed desire to wait until Lewis was 100% healthy couldn’t survive this losing streak.
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3 Responses to “Game 43, Athletics at Mariners”
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Giles will have a short season to dominate and show he’s worth the 9.5m option Seattle has on him for 2023.
Steckrider is making 3m and will enter his final year of arbitration, presumably with a raise if he sticks around.
Castillo will be in his second year of arbitration eligibility; Romo is on a one-year deal.
Seattle could see a significant turnover in relief pitchers alone and I wouldn’t (likely) fault them for pursuing alternatives.
But if they continue to bank on internal options to address the field and plate, this ‘step back’ will have mutated into a fall-down-the-stairs rebuild.
You can certainly see the storyline for a bounce back: the back part of the schedule is full of Detroit/Baltimore/Oakland/Washington games that the M’s should nominally be favored in (assuming Jerry doesn’t decide to do a bunch of fire sale 2022 talent for 2023 and later deals), the team is obviously in better shape than the nadir of 2019.
What’s teeth-grindingly annoying is much of the problems wouldn’t be problems were the M’s willing to spend money in the 2019-2021 off seasons, and the problems they have were very obviously shaky assumptions: Kelenic needed to be on pace for a bounce back season in 2022 even though his rookie season had big huge flashing warning signs, don’t need pitching depth in the rotation, etc.
And so we’re gonna have Lewis thrown into the MLB roster even when he can’t stay in a defensive lineup for more than a day at a time? Time to see if you can revive the corpse of Justin Upton’s career? It’s just disheartening to see an organization make decisions like this that even doofuses like me can figure out might backfire, instead of spending their billionaire owner’s money.
What’s teeth-grindingly annoying is much of the problems wouldn’t be problems were the M’s willing to spend money in the 2019-2021 off seasons, and the problems they have were very obviously shaky assumptions: Kelenic needed to be on pace for a bounce back season in 2022 even though his rookie season had big huge flashing warning signs, don’t need pitching depth in the rotation, etc.
Couldn’t agree more.