I think it was G-Money who suggested, or had heard, that Carp may have had an attitude problem of some sort durng his last Tacoma stint. IF he did I think it suggests even more about his MLB ability.
Imagine your Tom Brady and you're the taxe squad QB while Vince Young, certianly an impressive looking guy with some interesting skills, gets all the gametime snaps. Wouldn't you be a bit frustrated? Shouldn't you?
OK..the Carp/Brady comparison is a bit much, I know. But you get the idea.
Carp can play. Heck, he showed that when he hit .315 in those '09 PA's. Can you imagine Peguerro hitting .315 over any 65 plate appearances?
Heck, the one catch he made diving to the right last night was a stellar, Plus Glove, stype of play.
I hope he plays each and every day from here on out. Oh, and next year, too.
I loved his fly out to the LF wall last night. He took a tough pitch didn't get it all, (too much launch angle...watch that ball come off the bat. It seemed to go straight up) and still made it exciting.
You go kid!
moe
In Carp's first two games back, he's 4-for-10 with zero strikeouts and two aggressive, confident plays in left field. He's got two doubles, two singles and of his six outs, several have been unlucky.
He's got a Hideki Matsui-style balance at the plate, has a leg kick and a massive torque going, and he's spraying the ball to left, right and center. He's got a tight strike zone and, oddly for a power hitter, is staying inside the ball -- taking pitches on the inner half and hitting them hard the other way.
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=== July 20, 2011 ===
FIRST UPS. After the M's loaded the bases nobody out, Brandon Morrow suddenly decided to unleash a heavy barrage of impossible pitches. Morrow detonated Smoak and Kennedy (!) on AB's in which they had no chance.
Morrow quickly pounced on Carp, too, for a 1-and-2 count on two vicious sliders.
However, on pitch four, Morrow took the slider in just a bit more, precisely the pitch on which Justin Smoak was blown up, nine pitches earlier. Carp, in sharp contrast, held up easily and the count was 2-2.
Morrow came too far in with a 98 mph (!) fastball and again Carp held up easily. Full count.
On 3-2, Morrow again went to his Pineda-class cutter/slider, in on the hands, but Carp wasn't jumpy after the 98 fastball. He got a good look at the pitch, hit the inside half of the ball, and hit a medium liner at the SS's feet. His BABIP on that type of ball is .500, maybe .600, but this was one of the 40%'s. Out 6-3.
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SECOND AB. On an 0-1 pitch, Morrow came hard into the hands with a 93 mph "exploding" fastball. Carp again pounded the inside half of the ball, this time to straightaway LF, almost into the corner.
Snider ran up against the fence and just flagged it down. Again: gimme 100 outfield flies hit like that and I'll give you back 30, 40 hits -- most of them doubles and homers.
These are two failures in the box score. They most definitely are not failures in the video room.
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THIRD AB. Morrow sets Carp up with two FB's outside the black, one of which the ump blows, so it's 1-1. Morrow then pulls the string on soft stuff away, which Carp takes the other way, for maybe a .300 BABIP grounder to SS. Out again.
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FOURTH AB. On the first pitch Francisco hits the inside black with a 94 fastball.
Carp kicks the leg, uncorks the bat and screams a line-drive one-hopper two steps to Adam Lind's left. He can't get to it. A Carlos Peguero single.
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=== July 19, 2011 ===
As you mighta heard, Carp had three hits -- a single and two doubles.
As you might not'a heard, Carp's first double was to LEFT field, off a LEFT hand pitcher, and his second double was to center. He had another fly ball to CF, and he smoked an outside slider up the middle for his third hit..
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=== Jay Buhner "Let the Game Come To You" Dept. ===
We talk a lot about hitting a 3-iron off the first tee, and only going to the driver after you're rolling that day. Carp has come up to Seattle with the idea of hitting the ball hard, to wherever it's pitched. This will shortly lead to his hitting the ball not only hard but also far, over the fence.
Right now he's the Anti-Smoak; Justin got excited about his earlier hot roll and got himself royally fouled up. Perhaps watching Mike Carp -- a fairly similar baseball player -- will groove Smoak back in.
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=== Dr's Prognosis: Rauuuul-age Ahead ===
It was understandable, but unfortunate, that Wedge got so mesmerized by Carlos Peguero's physical tools. Mike Carp might have been ready to go by now, or that much more probable to start the season with a bang, in March 2011...
Carp has 50 homers in his last 176 games at Cheney, has nearly 300 games logged at the AAA level, and is a whale of a great bet to fill the Raul Ibanez roll call made by Spectator and Moe. Carp doesn't have Rauuuuuuul's topspin, but you could find a dozen other things they have in common, starting with body type, swing type, EYE, ISO and age-arc...
"Baseball organizations pay entirely too much attention to what their scouts are telling them, and entirely too little attention to how their ballplayers have performed." -- Bill James
Paraphrase this for Wedge: some managers pay entirely too much attention to what their eyes are telling them...
He shares this, and many, talents with Lou Piniella. Eric Wedge is a great technical baseball coach, and I mean a great one. I do wish he were just a skosh more sabermetric ... not in his mind, but in his heart. It's not that he wouldn't understand RC/27 if you brought it up. It's that his dazzling eye for the on-field game appears to seduce him, occasionally, into under-emphasizing past performance.
The M's chased Carlos Peguero's potential energy even while Mike Carp was delivering kinetic energy. Ah, well. Better late than never.
I'm going to have a lot of fun watching LF these last 60 games. I bet you Mike Carp can hit in the big leagues.
BABVA,
Dr D
Comments
Mike Carp is currently running a 35.5% line drive rate. Joey Votto leads the majors with a 28.5% rate. He is hitting the ball beautifully when he makes contact. If he can get his strikeout rate down from 27% to 20%, he should be a cheap placeholder in LF with genuine upside.
When we saw the rumors about Carp's personality, it synch'ed with a lot of other things that had gone on during his career here.
Supposing that Carp is a jerk, and at SSI we have no way to know that ... it's normally going to mean that a team moves him back in the line a couple spots.
It's normally not going to mean that a team "blackballs" an effective young major leaguer. There are obviously a lot of high-maintenance guys in the majors.
Personality issues might well have contributed to Peguero being moved ahead of Carp. Geoff Baker could tell us. ... if so, that might have been a HUGE domino in the M's collapsing season. Peguero's ugly AB's were a big part of the haunting visual in May and June.
35% for the year, yeah, in 52 PA's.
That stat, Dr. K --- > cements, for me, the impression we've had watching the swings. Had no idea the batted balls fell out as well as THAT, but it makes sense.
Mike Carp looks, more or less, like Hideki Matsui up there. IMHO the M's have simply got to give him the next 200-250 AB's this year.
REAL nice card flip at a #5 hitter for 2012. And it would seem they could use one.
I think he's going to be a decent OF for somebody in a year or two, on the cheap. Will he be great? I doubt it, but I doubted Raul too.
We need to know NOW what he's got and whether we want to bet on him in LF this offseason. Carp pulling off an Ibanez allows us to forgo a 30-40 million dollar contract there.
I'm with you, Doc - upset that Peguero got so much run while Carp got nada for the first half.
Mostly because Peguero has 2 more years that he can go to the minors and Carp has zero. With Carp it's time to fish or cut bait. I figured the Ms were cutting bait and were gonna watch him Mike Morse or Greg Dobbs his way to prominence with some other club in three years.
I've always thought he was a talented hitter. I just had other questions about him, and didn't think he was a slugger. Then he fixed that, and is just a year older than Peguero. If he works out, you have him for his whole prime. He can be a Brad Hawpe type, who also got his shot at 25 and had a nice little run from 27 on.
Carp's problem is that he needs to hit NOW. If Carp is putting up Peguero numbers for a month next year, he's just gonna get benched. There's not a lot of chance of him getting through waivers next year to go back to the minors, and if our offseason strategy doesn't include a veteran left fielder because we think Carp can do it...then he needs to do it.
So he'd better play 5 out of every 6 games, because we need him to get a couple hundred at-bats and decide if he plays for us...or somebody else.
Because it won't be Tacoma.
~G
It seems like the Ms have had nothing but bad luck for a while with hitters. Figgins imploding, Ichiro fading fast this year, Guti falling off the map, Bradley being a nice try but a horrible miss, Cust hitting with as much power as Jack Wilson, Wilson hitting like a ball boy...
The guys who have worked out, or will (Smoak and Ackley) were grade A dynamos, potentially the best bats in their draft classes. That's not luck, that's readily visible talent.
We've had no luck with hitters. I hope we finally have some with Halman and Carp. I'd take Halman OR Carp and consider myself lucky, but both would be brilliant.
Halman was the former #1 prospect in the system. Guti was the centerpiece of the Putz trade, but Carp was arguably the 2nd piece there. We need some of those types of guys to overcome the odds and work out. And Mike was giving every indication the last year+ that he was doing that, which I think was part of the problem for him when it wasn't recognized by the org.
Carp had every right to be angry about that, but he's been angry for about a year as far as I can tell, vocally so it seems, and I think it's holding him back. Your bosses tell you when you're ready, you don't tell them. Maybe that's not what's been happening, but I agree it could get him a shorter leash and less of a look.
Peguero seems to be a really nice guy, but he can't hit. Not yet, and maybe not ever. If Carp is more curmudgeonly...well there's a time to suck it up and let him swing anyway. That time is well past, so I'm glad he's here. Jeff Kent was a jerk but nobody cared because he was a clubber, too. Carp's no Jeff Kent, Hall of Fame candidate, but nothing says he's a jerk either, just frustrated. There's still a place for a guy like that, especially if he's cheap and at a position of dire need.
Suck it up, Mariners - we need to get some luck mojo going our way. Halman and Carp need hundreds of ABs apiece. Dump Cust and play Carp there, put Guti on the 60 day DL and make Halman the every day starter if you have to. We need to see em, and they need the reps against major-league pitching.
Make it happen.
~G
It's not like Carp can start hitting in 2013 and still be here. There's your constraining factor.
Probably Z agrees at this point. The next 60 games need to be dedicated to assessing Carp.
Am confident that Carp will do some hitting in the big leagues, and modestly confident that it will be starting now. He's attacking the pitchers in a very sophisticated way.
In all honesty, I was hot on Carp when he was still in the Mets system, so I'm not the most unbiased analyst for the fish.
But, given that I do my paint by numbers, while you guys get to see these guys on a daily basis, my opinion all along has been that Carp has been underestimated and Smoak overestimated for some time.
For me ... I think while they won't run the same line, I think they could both land in that "solid" MLB class of 110-120 OPS+ hitter that any winning team MUST have a bunch of.
Remember the hype of the Adam Jones upside? Where has he landed (so far)? He's a solid .800 hitter with a decent glove.
Mind you ... a year ago I would've expected Carp's line to have more walks and fewer dingers. But, Carp did what I suggested he could from day one ... he changed his profile to match what the club wanted.
While I think Z has helped the organization ... if I had to judge what is right now ... I'd say there remain too many guys throughout the organization that have 1940s views of the value of a walk. While they may "say" the right things publically about "smart" at bats and swinging at "good" pitches ... I continue to get the feeling that the org still has a personality that doesn't appreciate the walk. They're moving away from the "Ichiro" ideal toward the "Soriano" ideal rather than the "Abreu" ideal.
I think "Z" understands and appreciates the full package. I think he has made a concerted effort to find guys with 'full range' capability. And I know he brought in guys from Milwaukee who likely share his views. But, too many decisions seem to be influenced negatively by high walk rates.
Don't get me wrong. Going from wanting 9 Ichiros (which is modeling your ideal to a freakish impossibility) to 9 Soriano's is (IMO) a step in the right direction. But the patience with Saunders and Peguero and ease with which they reduced Cust's PT (even while he continued to lead the club in OBP) still gives me a 'sense' that when a kid walks, they don't think "good job" ... they think "you could've crushed that 2nd pitch".
That leaves me concerned that if Z continues to bring in patient hitters and the club continues to pound home the "aggressiveness" mantra, that the friction will be nominally detrimental to the club getting "lucky" with more hitters.