Game 66, Mariners at Athletics
DMZ · June 13, 2006 at 6:30 pm · Filed Under Game Threads
LHP Jamie Moyer v RHP Joe Blanton.
This series is going to be an interesting test. The M’s may have played better than their record, but if they want to move up in the division, they’re going to need to climb over the A’s and Texas. Getting wins here would be big. Can the pitchers continue their success against a team that so far is even worse offensively than the Twins? Can they keep hitting against a staff way, way better than Angels, the Royals, or the Twins?
Blanton vs the M’s so far this year: 2-0, 1.20 ERA, 15 IP, 9H, 0 HR, 1 BB, 8 K.
Moyer vs. the A’s so far: 0-2, 6.17 ERA, 11.2 IP, 17 H, 1 HR, 4 BB, 8 K.
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#135 – Thats great to hear. We’re just a smidgen better than KC. Wow.
#141 – I didn’t know that either. I live in Idaho and I drive through Colfax regularly.
#146: It was Angie Arlotti. Worst. Name. Change. Ever.
Almost as bad as this game. I’m mostly mad at Ibanez for looking at strike three. Bases loaded you go down swinging.
#151– Angie Marzetta (daughter of Dante Marzetta) Arlati (from her 1st husband, one-time UW tennis player & now tennis coach Ornello Arlati) Mentink (from Jarrett Mentink, 2nd husband & father of her son, children’s author with a Ph D in Ed., formerly an asst. basketball coach at SPU & head coach at Todd Beamer High School)
Angie cracks me up … I mean, there was the whole move from high school football team manager to player … in JuCo she was a right-handed hitter playing 3rd, who moved to center AND to hitting left-handed, and was hitting .454 when the UW recruited her a year later.
Back when she was playing pro ball, she had some interesting things to say about the switch to baseball — a bigger change for the Bullets, as it was a lot more than learning to use a wooden bat:
“Marzetta has used tips from batting coach Johnny Grubb, a 16-year major-league veteran, to build a .213 batting average, fourth on the team. Her ability to draw walks has enabled her to reach base four out of every 10 times. But when you’ve hit .472, as Marzetta did for the Huskies as a junior, .213 is hard to deal with.
“Defense hasn’t been that big of an adjustment,” Marzetta said, “but hitting is a major change. You can’t get a hit just by making contact like in softball. I’ve had some good contact and the ball doesn’t get
out of the infield. And anticipating the different spins. Knucksie (Manager Phil Niekro) threw me this pitch in batting practice the other day, some friggin’ sideways-spinning thing. I still have no idea what it was.” Marzetta applauds the patience of the coaching staff, saying: “They’ve been understanding of our frustration of jumping to a new level. We’re not accustomed to losing. I’m certainly not used to it.””
damn, i was almost getting to the point where i thought the m’s had made some strides, that their offense was coming around, that their pitchers were waking up. and then they had to play a decent team and f it all up.
way to go mariners.
Why do we always make Blanton look like a Cy Young canidate. I mean come on. His ERA this season 5.04 (including tonights game), compared to an ERA close to 0.00 in his three starts against the M’s. Seriously we turn decent pitchers into All Stars!
Did anybody catch some of the M’s minor-league transactions today?
1. Todd Sears released; Bryan LaHair promoted to Tacoma.
2. Guillermo Quiroz “sent to Everett”; Rob Johnson activated.
Also, Mike Nannini released.
Didn’t kow about Sears and Quiroz but did see LaHair’s first AAA hit (1st AB) in person. Why was Quiroz sent to AA? Playing time issue? Last I saw, he was holding his own in AAA.
Quiroz was hitting .304/.354/.452. In other words, better than Rene Rivera could ever dream of.
In looking over the Rainiers’ transaction history this season, it seems that “transferred to Everett” is merely a way of procedurally stashing a player for safekeeping while the organization works out it next move or moves.
For instance: Francisco Cruceta was transferred to Everett on April 10, and brought back to the Rainiers on April 16. The same thing happened again from April 29 to May 2, and May 10 to May 12. And MIke Nannini was transferred to Everett on June 11, one day before he was released.
Ok, here’s my completely unresearched crazy-ass theory: Moyer hurts M’s batters. Seriously. Moyer wins when he can persuade the ump that those balls in the corners are really strikes. So if the ump goes along with it, he expands the strike zone for the M’s batters too (fair’s fair, right?) And suddenly the M’s don’t know where the strike zone is… except they’re also dealing with actual fastballs and other pitches Moyer can’t throw. And it completely messes up their heads. It takes them about 4 or 5 days to get their heads together again… and then Moyer has another start.
Just wanted to add, at this ungodly hour at my home computer in Ballard, that I saw the 8th and 9th, and at no time did I feel that we were going to pull it off. That’s just sad. When Richie weakly fouled off strike two in the ninth, I said, “He’s going to K,” and he did, on a ball way out of the strike zone. And what the F was Beltre looking at? The guy has no aggressiveness. Get some guts and swing the damn bat.
Bah, I’d rather watch the US men’s soccer team get killed in the World Cup than watch the Ms get shut out by Oakland AGAIN. Too much pain.
An awful lot of angst here for a two-run loss after a great span of games.
#160 – Huh? Do you mean Ibanez?
#158 – yeah, ‘transferred to Everett’ means a lot of things. Rob Johnson went on bereavement leave, but the transaction page shows ‘transferred to Everett’ instead. I think that’s what it said when Emiliano Fruto went on the ‘temporariliy inactive list’ as well earlier this season to attend the birth of his first kid.
LaHair did indeed get his first AAA hit yesterday, which is notable, since the Rainiers got shelled. Okay, maybe just Nageotte got shelled (8 runs in 1 2/3 innings? Gawd he looked awful). Who IS Dan Wright? It was very nice watching him go 4.1 innings in relief and facing minimum # of batters in 3.1 of them….
IIRC, Dan Wright was a guy who played for the Chicago White Sox at one point and is now basically a AAAA/Replacement Level type of player. The only difference is that the Mariners don’t pay him 3-6 Million to get the results 2 other Replacement Level Pitchers born days apart do.
#159– a nice theory. Of course, it wouldn’t account for those years when he gets some of the hightest run support in the league….
#161– I think it is because it was amlost exactly a month ago when they took those two out of three in Anaheim, Fruto had his big game, and “the bats were coming around” … they went into Oakland, were swept into another giant hole, and slowly slowly started to crawl out, only to go back into Oakland and get smacked down by Joe “Asesino del Mariner” Blanton
#164 – When Moyer did have the highest run support, we had more batters in the middle of the line-up who could bat. I don’t think any one explanation is the only answer but this theory is interesting to consider. Jamie lives on the outside corners which of course are no-man’s land to Beltre, Sexson and Everett. A full third of our line-up is vulnerable to those pitches.
Of course it doesn’t explain why the whole line-up is mystified by Blanton. Anyone have a clue as to why Blanton is so effective against the Ms and pretty much league average or less elsewhere? Is our line-up that silly or does he know something about us?
Of course I got accepted into UPS. I even got most of my tuition paid for. I’m not an idiot Corco.
159. Explain the games he won last season. By this theory, wouldn’t he have a Franklin-esque record, since his umpire gerrymandering would leave his own team at an inherent disadvantage?
I know there’s no new game thread up, but is Loaiza pitching today after spending the night in jail? ESPN reported it at 11:30 EST.