Hamilton

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Q.  When's the last time the Mariners scored 8 runs, three games in a row?  Much less the first three games?

A.  I dunno.  I'd like to know when was the last time they had any series that was so savage.

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Q.  Was it BABIP luck?

A.  As Dr. Grumpy says, if you're a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  To a Fangraphs editor, bless his heart, every baseball game looks like:

• Swinging strikes
• Balls outside the zone
• Ball in play --- > sheer luck takes over

Just for your own personal benefit, Dr. D recommends that you stow those cliche's like "a 40% line drive rate has to regress to the mean."  That doesn't get at the guts of what was occurring in reality.  The Mariners did NOT merely get a bunch of batted balls to simply parachute empty spots on the grass.

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Q.  What is the usual "script" for Erasmo Ramirez?

A.  He paints with the fastball and uses two "plus" offspeed pitches to draw swinging strike threes.

That sounds cliche, but the healthy Erasmo Ramirez walked a mere 1.83 batters per nine innings in 2012.  He's got Rob-O-Tronic mechanics, simply Madduxian down the centerline, and his command (then) was truly elite.

He's one of a very few pitchers who can walk 2 men per game, and yet draw 7+ strikeouts (Doug Fister, Cliff Lee, Adam Wainwright, Hisashi Iwakuma, now David Price).  In 2012, he scored an 11.3% swinging strike rate -- compare Clayton Kershaw last year at 11.4%.  At his best, he's actually one of the 10-20 top swing-and-miss guys in baseball.

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Q.  Did Tuesday night's game follow this script?

A.  Not at all.  He had his "B" game out there, had all kinds of problems hitting his spots, missing lots of pitches wildly off the plate ...

He wound up with a 67% strike ratio, which is sky high.  But as you can clearly see, a lot of that was because the Angels were going after sucker pitches and fouling them off.  The strike ratio doesn't do justice to how much he labored.

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So on Wednesday, Erasmo goes out and detonates a Ranger lineup that:

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There's a spirited debate, in the shout box, as to the value of Cano's "net drill."  Some think it's a panacea; others think it's just the "placebo effect" of having a Real Hall of Famer(TM) personally coach you.  One amigo wondered, plausibly, whether Smoak had actually done the "net drill" from the right side of the plate anyway (before his short, off-field double that day).

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First of all, here is the Ryan Divish video.  It shows Smoak taking batting practice, with a "fence" (net) set up close to him, so that he has to swing with the knob of the bat on his belly button.

If you're going to read further, YOU MUST VISIT THIS PAGE FIRST.  ;- )  Very simple texts, awesome .gifs.

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Second of all, it is true that most hitting tweaks don't matter much.  By "MOST" we do NOT mean "ALL."