...................................
Chris sez,
I was messing around a bit on the Safeco scatter plot for this year, and overlaying some of the other parks. It doesn't seem, at first blush, as if just the distance is the problem. Obviously, air quality plays into it as well. For instance, if you look at this year's scatter chart, and overlay Rangers Ballpark, roughly one quarter of the home runs in Safeco this year would be long outs in Texas. I believe maybe the humidity has something to do with it?
What I was looking for was a scatter plot of home runs, as well as warning track flyouts, in various parks, just to see if there was any way to justify moving the center field fence in ten feet. Obviously, there are so many other factors to consider, that just looking at a scatter plot would not do any justice to the idea. If it is the air in Seattle that is killing the ball, then maybe the move MAY make sense. BUT, then we may be doing damage to our pitchers in the long run. I'm not sure where the happy medium is, to be honest.
Cool air blows in from LF to RF. It comes off the ocean. The result seems to be a "pillow" effect in which balls to LF and CF get air under them like in ping-pong ball lotto machines. As the batters have mentioned, when the roof is closed this pillow effect is much reduced.
I'm not sure what the happy medium is, either. If you move the fences in, you've still got this weird effect in which any ball hit in the air haaaaangs and then parachutes down softly into fielders' gloves. Mike Cameron commented on this way back in 2001, and it's one reason that CF's stats look so good in Safeco...
Michael Saunders has the #3 UZR/150 among all of baseball's qualified center fielders right now. Does anybody remember when he was a "tweener" and his use in CF was controversial?
When Ichiro played CF in 2007, he was #4 among baseball's CF's in UZR/150.
When Jeremy Reed played CF in 2005, he was #3 among baseball's CF's in UZR/150. You telling me that Jeremy Reed was +14 runs per year over other major league CENTER fielders?
When Randy Winn (!) played CF in 2004, he had a +7.4 UZR/150, right ahead of ... Mike Cameron, who scored +7.3 in Shea Stadium.
............
This is part of what, in Safeco, makes very good center fielders ::coughgutierrezcough:: appear to be great center fielders.
Of course, a run is still a run. If Saunders, Reed, and Winn are going to show as +7 gloves in Safeco, and Gutierrez is going to show as a +17 guy, he is still getting you +10 runs over the tweeners. The problem comes when people begin to imagine that Franklin Gutierrez saves you +30 runs defensively over his peers -- most of whom are speed-burner track guys who could beat him by four steps in a 60-yard dash.
............
You could bring in the fences at Safeco, but the annoying ping-pong ball air ride effect is still going to be there. It's just that some of the marshmallows would settle down softly over a 365-foot fence. To me that would be even weirder than what we have now...
Also, am not sure that a few extra home runs would change Smoak's neural conditioning much. He's still going to run a ..230 or .250 BABIP, or something, right handed. For his career. Let's see, lemme check that .... yup. Justin Smoak's career home BABIP is .215. It says here that will never change much.
Right now, I'm leaning toward the idea of just avoiding hitters who hit 360-foot high flies with lots of backspin. Maybe the M's need to trade Smoak and let Seager, Saunders & Co. give them a home field advantage?
Well, here's a little data: the 2012 M's home BABIP, April-May-halfofJune: Check that - I was looking at batting averages. Thanks Sandy.
| Player | AVG Safeco 2012 |
| Ichiro | .250 |
| Saunders | .222 |
| Montero | .217 |
| Ackley | .209 |
| Jaso | .195 |
| Ryan | .194 |
| Smoak | .193 |
| Liddi | .189 |
| Seager | .188 |
| Figgins |
.143 |
| Olivo | .133 |
| Carp | .125 |
The BABIP's are fine (.270 to .325) for several players, notably Saunders, Montero, and Ackley. Maybe we're back to moving the furniture rather than the load-bearing walls: make sure you use hitters whose swings are naturally in harmony with the park.
..................
As Chris is, I'm a bit mystified as to what to do. Certainly you can avoid Adrian Beltre and Justin Smoak and, um, Mike Zunino. Certainly you can wait for the summer; at Wrigley Field they've been playing with "two ballparks" for a hundred years.
Ask me, if your position is anything other than the acknowledgement that Safeco is a big, big problem for the M's talented young hitters, you need to enhance your empathy factor. We mean it in a good way.
Cheers,
Jeff
...is to rotate the park 90 degrees.
They did it at the Kingdome...they can do it here. Right now the wind generally blow sin from left. If they turned the park clockwise 90 degrees, the wind would simply be a crosswind blowing mostly out to RCF.
I'm seeing different numbers:
Saunders = .326
Ackley = .292
Ichiro = .281
Montero = .269
Smoak = .215
Seager = .212
Only the Smoak and Seager numbers are "worrisome" IMO.
In looking at 2011 ... Smoak ran a .246 home and .295 road BABIP.
In looking at 2011 ... Seager ran a .242 home and .349 road BABIP.
Just FYI ...
Smoak's BABIP for his 225 PAs in Arlington is ... .250
Smoak's BABIP for his 398 PAs in Safeco is ... .245
My opinion of Smoak is unchanged, (I continue to believe he was always overrated as a hitter ... but was hoping to be proven wrong).
Seager is the one that I'd be concerned with. But, since he has way less time in the Bigs, I'm willing to entertain the notion that this might just be learning pains, (perhaps pressing just a tad at home). Lots of eventual star players run crappy BABIPs in their first taste of the Majors. If the BABIP read is still horrid after a thousand PAs ... it won't likely be improving. (Smoak's career BABIP is .264 after 1128 PAs).
I was inadvertently looking at home averages.
BABIP is not nearly as ugly. Thanks for the catch!
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/marinersblog/2018427466_mariners_m...
Which is analogous to telling your running back, "Hey, I don't care who's in the booth calling the plays. You need to forget about that and get back to juking some tacklers."
Which is true - from the running back's, er, hitter's, point of view. It doesn't help Justin Smoak to throw his helmet when he gets a ball caught on the track.
From a fan's point of view? There's a problem here, and it needs attending ....
If there is some wierd wind effect from an open roof, why not just close the roof? It would make for great baseball mythology. Imagine, a little boy at his first ball game saying:
"Why is the roof closed daddy? Its nice outside".
"Because the players are superstitious and they believe that they can hit better when its closed." They say the wind slows the ball down.
"Is that true, Dad?"
"It doesn't matter whether its true or not. That's the thing about baseball".
Also, the Mariners could close the roof during their at bats, and open it during their opponents, or, if that is too obvious a cheat, they could leave the roof closed, and open it whenever they had a lead needing protection.
I understand that it only takes 20 minutes to close or open the roof.
Just noodling.
Last I heard, Chuck Armstrong makes these calls in-game, and without the slightest rancor I would assert that he's prouder of the "ballpark experience" in Seattle than he is of wins on the field.
This factor has been part of the fabric of baseball in Seattle. Like Woody said, they want (the ballpark) to look good first, and win second. Oh for a Billy Beane who would play in Cheney Stadium if it meant a World Series.
You could make an argument to close the roof in April and May, any time it's at all cold (40-49 degrees) or threat of drizzle, but it ain't gonna be the Mariners listenin' to it.
There's a REASON they call it a ball PARK. Yessir. Gotta make sure the payin' custom-ers are havin' a GOOD TIME at the beautiful ol' ballpark. All 23 of them that are left!
The ones Sandy posted line up perfectly with what I'd expect. Smoak is definitely a backspin flyball slugger, not a line drive guy, and as a lefty, his power is up the middle while as a righty, he's more of a pull hitter. Seager is also a backspin hitter since his swing is a bat-drag technique and not a whip/pull method. You can see it in his LD vs FB ratios. He's an outrageous flyball hitter...he's going to get killed by Safeco, though at least a few of his fly balls will squeak out to RF.
The only way to beat the parachute effect is to hit the ball on low line drives and not big fly balls.
Interest in his brother (#18 overall pick) would seem to indicate "buy-in" to the Seager brand.
If he's a bad fit for Safeco, should we think about moving him before the shine wears off?
At the end, all we got back for Jose Lopez was the always-memorable Chaz Roe.
I don't think the shine will wear off for Seager as badly as it did for Lopez because his approach at the plate is WAY better than Lopez' was and because he's a beast on the road who will also gradually be getting on base more often as the league comes to respect him more. So he's not a HORRID fit for Safeco...I just don't think he'll benefit much from the RF porch the way that Ibanez did. Still...you could see the scenario where his value gets built up and he is then traded once one of the other third base guys is ready.
No Spec!
C'mon. Seager is a young, very talented, left-handed, mostly pull hitter. Why would you trade him? Unless you find a Rod Carew or young Ichiro, who is a better fit?
Safeco certainly impacts bats, seriously so. But it doesn't do so team selectively. We don't lose 2-1 because Safeco shafts us but not the other guys' fly balls.
I don't know if Safeco causes some players to "force" their swing, trying to smash through the cool air/wind, but that becomes an approach issue if it does.
I have no problem with experimenting with a semi-open roof, etc, but at some point you put the best talent on the field and go from there.
Lefty linedrive hitters make sense here, of course, but where don't they make sense?
And DaddyO, back in '01-'03, we piled in 3.5M, 3.5M and 3.3M folks....who didn't seem to mind the offense we put on the field, mostly because it was fairly prolific.
We can score runs here again. But we need guys who rip the ball.
Seager can do that. Let's hold on to him.
moe
while I was parroting the attitude of Chuck Armstrong, not my own attitude. He's happy if soccer Mom's enjoy a day in the park with their kids. I'm only happy if we put competitive baseball first. I don't care if we configure Safeco like a maze, I just want a team of ballplayers who can compete commensurate with the resources available to this ownership group. I want them to be a BASEBALL CLUB, not just a club. Armstrong wants to run it like a club. If the dues fall a bit short, cut back on expenditures. That'll fix it, he thinks. Meanwhile an attendance of 3 million turns into 1.2 million over a decade-plus. But hey, according to him he's an astute businessman.
Fascinating article from Stark about the diminishing offense in MLB.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8048897/the-age-pitcher-how-got-here-mlb
I like the Mattingly comments. Sounds a lot like some of the M's hitters:
Even as the home run rate spirals ever downward, Mattingly sees hitters who hit as if they hadn't noticed. They coil. They guess. And they let it fly -- as if routine fly balls were still traveling 440 feet. And all they get out of it is a lot of outs -- and strikeouts.
"Guys have gotten away from the good solid hitting mechanics of the past," Mattingly says. "The guys who really do it right -- you see less of that. ... It used to be that if you struck out 100 times, it was a big deal. Now if it's 'just' 100, you're kind of a low strikeout guy. That tells me mechanics are getting worse."
Seager is an EXTREME pull-hitter. Hes a fly-ball hitter, but a guy who should hit in Safeco very well in the long-term. I wouldn't worry about the short-term splits.
The offense is finally being catered to Safeco. Ackley, Seager, Saunders, and Franklin (maybe) are all great Safeco fits.
The only potential star thats a bad fit for the part is Montero. Smoak hasn't looked like a player to build around yet. He may not even be a regular by next season.
Not a bad idea. Or maybe we could just put in a bunch of wind turbines to disrupt that air current and generate electricity. Fix our hitting and get some enviro-cred at the same time!
On a more serious note, I'd think it wouldn't be too hard to find some way to direct the air in a different way with some minor structural mods.
I wrote over the winter that it was reasonable to project Ackley and Seager as similar to Pedroia and Ellsbury, in terms of both being top-50 hitters in the majors (at least they were in 2011), and that was way before Seager became the darling he is now.
But my way of analysis isn't based on scout stuff (since I'm not qualified), it's looking at minor-league performance under age 23, and one thing minor league performance can't do is replicate the conditions of Safeco.
So, particularly after we all witnessed Beltre slug over .500 before and after Seattle but never in Seattle, I do try to be aware of how Safeco affects hitters.
Jumping right to "trade bait" maybe was rash, but I did want to get to the heart of whether Seager really was likely to be a good Safeco hitter or not. I hadn't heard the argument that he might not be a good fit.
I bet Smoak looks like a world beater if Texas hadn't traded him. As it is, he's getting Beltre'd pretty bad. He either needs to get a lot stronger or the M's have to trade him before his value totally craters. It's a shame because he definitely helps balance the lineup some.
Too late. His value is zero now.
EA,
You might be right. But my opinion of Smoak hasn't changed since he was acquired.
My read on his minor league stats was AAAA player. After listening to Doc's disection of all the plusses of his swing and physical attributes ... I doubled down. He's a AAAA with absolutely nothing to actually improve. Every now and then he'll have a hot streak ... hit .850 during it ... and the "you've won a BRAND NEW CAR!!!" sirens start going off. But, if you're an .850 hitter ... when you streak, you hit .950 or 1050.
If you're a .700 hitter ... you hit .850 when you're "in the zone".
I still hold (slim) hope that Smoak might be another Carlos Pena ... that the hold back here is mental ... and that maybe one more year of maturity might turn on that last lightbulb.
But ... what I see in the numbers is a guy who has plus-plus patience and spotty power. Love his eye. But, that .250 AAA average has translated into a .230 MLB average spanning over a thousand ABs. His *CAREER* .263 BABIP includes a .250 BABIP in Arlington.
He's Tony Batista with more walks and fewer HRs. Batista managed a .257 BABIP for a 5,000 PA career.
When he's dialed in, Smoak looks like a star. But he's only dialed in during weeks with Mayan holidays. Though he doesn't have a significant difference between RH and LH hitting ... maybe that switch hitting is suppressing his potential on both sides.
I know lots of guys have left Safeco and blossomed. I don't think Smoak would be one.
Respectfully, as I am a LOOONNNGGG time reader and lurker......I don't think rotating the field will help. You mention the Kingdome, but one reason balls flew out in the Kingdome was that it a domed stadium, and therefore climate controlled to a certain extent. We won't see that kind of offense in Safeco unless they decide to enclose it completely.
Right on Sandy.
He mashed...for a week, or so.
No mash now.
I've actually wondered if he wouldn't be better off just hitting from one side. Tough to change now, I suppose.
Given enough seasons, he'll have a hot one. See Kotchman.
But overall, I'm not seing a guy who can carry an offense by bing a consistent middle of the order basher.
moe
No argument at all. We really needed him to take the bull by the horns and lead this offense this year and neither he nor Ackley have shown the growth signs we needed them to show for our offense to work this season.
But I don't understand using his AAA batting line to say anything. He didn't even have 400 at bats in all his AAA stints with multiple teams combined. Smoak was rushed to the bigs and has suffered for it.
I'm normally very leery of power-hitting switch hitters, because it's a RARE gift. I was hoping Smoak was gonna be more like Teix (who still isn't a world beater like Chipper or Berkman, but is very good) but he's now hoping to be more Howard Johnson - have him reel off a few good power years and then get away from him before he ages back to uselessness.
We don't have any first basemen in the minors worth looking at for the next couple of years at least. All the great first basemen around the league are locked up (does getting Prince Fielder look like a stupid redundancy with Smoak now?) - no Prince, no Votto....and honestly play drops off after that, especially with Trumbo and Miggy not playing the position currently.
The "great crop" of first basemen from the 2008 draft looks pretty withered right now.
#3 Hosmer - played well last year, has struggled this year, still young
#7 Alonso - blah minors #s, traded, blah big league numbers so far
#11 Smoak - rushed through minors, flopped around in bigs
#13 Wallace - weak first 500 ABs, doubles power only
#17 Cooper - college bat but can't get more than coffee so far
#18 Ike Davis - out of the gate fast, bad this year
Now maybe all those guys are gonna fail, but I'd guess that's a long shot. Our only internal options are Liddi (still strikes out every 3 at-bats) or Carp (separated shoulder causing year long problems).
Smoak's got until a healthy Carp comes back to show something, IMO, but if he doesn't...what? Demote him? Can't trade him, he's gotta hit first.
Smoak is our Alex Gordon, except Gordon demolished the minors. I'm still holding out for that Pena / HoJo career crest, because we don't have a lot of choices. I agree with some other folks that Smoak would look better in a place where his warning track outs cleared the fence.
This is not that place - and his road splits aren't exactly astounding either. Justin simply hasn't hit the way I would have expected him to. I thought his low point was a .230/.330/.450 hitter, but he was likely to do significantly better than that.
.230/.310/.380 is killing us. He's finally walking again this month and at some point, for someone, I do think Smoak will hit for a few years. But while I can live with Ackley's growing pains because he plays a glove position, Smoak's lack of anything resembling corner production is destroying us, especially with Ichiro on another corner.
But he plays because we need him to get better, and we have no one else. It's always been our system weakness and one Jack still hasn't managed to fix. Pray Carp comes back healthy and crushing, or that a lightbulb goes on for Smoak in the next 6 weeks and these fitful spurts of production followed by backfires turn into ignition at last.
~G