Game 121, Mariners at Tigers
Dave · August 20, 2009 at 9:45 am · Filed Under Mariners
Rowland-Smith Vs Washburn, 10:05 AM
I will be giggling like a school kid if the M’s light up Washburn today.
Also, Olson to Triple-A to make room for Bill Hall.
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150 Responses to “Game 121, Mariners at Tigers”
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Yeah and there is a strong wind blowing in so none of those homeruns were cheap.
Well, that was true before they moved the fences in. Somebody’s a few years out of the loop.
That THT article I linked to earlier breaks down fields into sectors (LF, LCF, CF, RCF, RF) but doesn’t (explicitly) account for batter (or pitcher) handedness, and it only addresses home runs. There’s another THT article that looks at batted balls in general, but again handedness is not included. My understanding is that tRA, now featured on Fangraphs, makes use of park factors but I’m not sure if the ones they use are available (or if handedness can be teased out of them).
Park factors interest me, especially as it relates to handedness, but I haven’t seen a particularly satisfactory treatment of them yet. I suspect we may be waiting for Hitter FX for that to happen.
Is Shawn Kelley still our best strike throwing relievers?
Kelley’s slider is awesome today.
Jack H is no Adrian Beltre. Nice bunt.
Hannahan took his friggin eye off the ball. I’d score that an error; difficult play but he should have made it.
Let’s not blow another game here.
Nice running grab by Guti there!
…but a J. Wilson is a J. Wilson!
And another by Wilson!
Gogo good defense!
I bet Wash misses Frakie’s D… Damn he’s good.
Just realized that we have no singles thus far.
I bet he’s missing the Safe pretty dearly too about now.
5 hits and four home runs. thank goodness for one walk and one HBP/BB.
mla said: Man, that really hurts RRS’s line…
Hurts Jak’s stats as well…
MLB boxscore shows
“Inherited runners-scored: Jakubauskas 3-9.”
No walks, No walks, No WAKS!
The Tigers have rejected the DA plea bargain.
Aardsma starts with “A.”
So does “anxiety.”
tough part of the order here.
On GameCenter I see Aardsma is only throwing 92-93 mph. He is going to have to get his slider over if his fastball isn’t working.
So this game is well on its way from glee to frustration.
That IBB actually increased our WPA.
Ever since that MLB artcile by Street proclaiming the greatness of Aardsma/Lowe closing team, they have not been that great.
Great. Just great.
CRAP
Wow, that was really lame. Went from 3rd to 6th in my rotisserie league with that blown save.
Also, we let Washburn off the hook.
If the M’s were in a pennant race, the 1st and 3rd games of this series would have been even more frustrating.
27 pitches for Aardsma, 25 registered as fastballs on GameDay. Seriously, 8 straight fastballs to Thomas in that last AB. 13 strikes, granted he threw 4 int., but come on.
BS…again!
Mariners baseball: A new day, the same way
The Seattle Mariners: Disappointing fans since 2002.
feeling less giddy now.
anyway, I’ll be rooting for the tigers against the angels in the playoffs.
a new game, the same pain
Softly falling back to that magical .500 mark…what a comfortable, non-threatening place it is.
Lately I’ve been wondering if Wak’s handling of the bullpen has hurt the relievers down the stretch. I know a lot of the guys have out-pitched expectations this summer and they’re bound to regress some, so I’m not trying to say the bullpen struggles are all poor management, but Wak loves to pull pitchers after a one inning effort. This leads to a lot of situations where guys pitch 3 of 4 days. I’m aware that today Wak let Kelley work 2, but I think that was more because the only other option was Batista.
If a guy comes out and rolls through an inning in 10 pitches why not at least let him start the next? Maybe he’ll roll again. What’s the real difference to the pitchers arm from 10-20 pitches? I feel like the 1 inning 5 times a week for everyone not named Batista is hurting them down the stretch.
The Mariners have demonstrated resilience in 2009….
But really….
How many games has this team frittered away in the final inning this season? I’ll have to go over it, but this is about the 10th time they’ve absolutely turned victory into defeat. Way too many ouch! losses this season. I realize the Mariners too have pulled several games out of the fire, but this is at least the 10th gut-buster of a loss.
You don’t lose games where you hit four home runs!
Aardsma is one tired pitcher. An admirable season, for sure, but his edge is gone. He isn’t going to make it to the finish line.
Lowe has a decent arm, but reminds me of too many M’s of years gone by. That is, he seems unable to take his game to the next level. Good stuff, but he lacks the savvy to get through an inning when his game is off. Could be a bullpen savior, but focus and tenacity could use boosts.
I’m not sure I’d jump to the conclusion that Aardsma is tired or that he won’t “make it to the finish line.” We’ve known about his control issues from the beginning. He’s going to have games like this from time to time.
We could always rehire Bavasi as a consultant to build a good bullpen with no money.
I hope you’re right that Aardsma isn’t tired.
My point is, there was a good stretch of the season where he was sailing, and he would let his defense do the work.
Nowadays, his shaky outings outnumber the good ones, and this won’t do on a team hard-pressed for offense.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what Aardsma has done for this team, and Z gets kudos for picking him up in the first place.
Some idiot just called into the postgame show and tried to say that Wak doesn’t use enough small-ball and thus doesn’t know about baseball.
Really? Really?! Not enough small-ball?
On a positive note, Vinnie and Hasselman are still ripping the guy a couple minutes after dumping the call. Vinnie sounds livid. Quite amusing…
He also is a poor in-game manager sez another caller. He leaves pitchers out there too long and doesn’t always move the base-runners.
Now is that because he is pitching them one inning a day, or are they pitching more because the starters are not pitching long?
The bullpen was pointed out as a weakness before the season started, on this very blog. Most of the pitchers have command/control issues, it’s too right handed, and the Mariners have traded a LOT of talent out of it the last couple of years.
It’s something the Mariners can address in 2010, when they aren’t paying Miguel Batista 8 million to pitch garbage relief, but for this season, yeah, the M’s are going to blow winnable games from the bullpen.
msb – one of my clients tried to argue with me about Wak not leaving pitchers out there long enough, specifically referencing several of Bedard’s starts.
I looked up the box scores of those games, showed him the pitchcounts (all were between 90-95 pitches), then showed him Bedard’s career average of pitches per game (been awhile since this conversation, I think it was around 97).
He shut up real quick after that 😉
I’ve long felt this way. If a reliever “has it,” stay with his hot hand!
That is twenty blown leads by the M’s bullpen this year. What a different season this would be if the team had a third of those back.
I don’t think there’s any reason to look for answers, fatigue or otherwise. Aardsma has control issues. We knew that going into the season. Overall, he’s been better than most of us expected (and much better than his career averages) but he is who he is, still.
Aardsma walks a guy almost every other inning, on average. In the 25 outings (21.7 innings) prior to today where he has given up a walk, he’s also surrendered 21 hits and 14 runs (12 earned). All of his blown saves fall into this category.
In the 31 outings (31.2 innings) where he doesn’t walk anybody, he’s given up just 15 hits and only 1 run (Jeter’s HR last week).
So it’s a bit of a coin flip with him, and the run of heads we were seeing there for a while may have caused us to forget that tails can come up too.
That is twenty blown leads by the M’s bullpen this year. What a different season this would be if the team had a third of those back.
The 2009 Mariners decided to concentrate on cheap fungible arms for the bullpen and work on other weaknesses, knowing that this would be something that could come back to bite them occasionally. It might indeed be a different season if they had decided to spend money on the bullpen and/or retain organizational talent there, but it might not be any more successful.
This isn’t a good bullpen, and it’s pretty obvious it will need to be an offseason priority to augment it, after spending the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 seasons shedding talent in order to make other roster moves. That being said, it’s a lot easier to find bullpen arms at reasonable prices than center fielders, starting pitchers, and so on. For a team that’s basically built a bullpen out of organizational castoffs, rookies and an overpaid veteran, I’m surprised this has worked as well as it has.
How many of those 20 blown saves happened in true save situations? How many do other TEAMS in the AL have?
Blown saves as a team is a silly stat as it includes games like today as well as some ridiculous ones. Starter leaves in the 7th with a 3-2 lead and the bases loaded with no one out. Reliever gets a sac fly and a double play => blown save. OK, that’s extreme but since you can’t get a save unless it’s the 9th inning, it doesn’t make sense to charge a blown save unless it’s the 9th.
A reliever starting the 7th with a one-run lead who goes two innings and gives up a run hasn’t “blown the game”, he’s done his job.
The Dodgers have 21 blown saves. The Reds have just 6. You have to get into save situations to blow them.
Setting aside my distaste for the save stat in general and just pretending this is actually going to tell us something about the quality of bullpens, we could look at total save chances and lowest percentage of blown saves. The Mariners have had more save opportunities than any other team in baseball: 56 (counting today). Their blown save percentage (36%) makes them only slightly worse than average. On a percentage basis (and ignoring the Reds due to the small sample size) the Yankees, Rangers, and Cardinals come out on top. But if we look at just the teams with at least 50 save opportunities, the Astros (20 BS in 50 ops) and Dodgers (21 in 53) are both worse than the M’s, while the Brewers (18 in 50) are comparable and only the Angels (13 in 50) and Yankees (10 in 50) are better.
Aren’t calculations with misleading stats fun? I should be on the radio! (“Hello, caller with a spreadsheet, prepare to be hung up upon…”)
So are you saying that it’s unreasonable to expect a late reliever to hold a lead?