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=== Tacoma Rain Sez ===
I just do not think cutting a couple marginal players gets you bad karma. Doc and Moe are correct in that there must be something else missing...
What I do see though is that EVERY team the Mariners play seem to have most of their batters at peace when they are in the batters box. All these teams have a majority of their players almost in a zen like state of see ball - hit ball.
Ackley has 40% chance at best currently of putting a hanging slider in play, and much less hitting it to the wall. Seagar is trying to make sure he hits every fast ball thrown, so he does not have to try hitting anything off speed ...
On the flip side, every team we face knows ALL the Mariner pitchers are throwing strikes. Our philosophy is not to WALK ANYONE. If you know that as a hitter, you dig in your back foot, you lean in to make sure you reach the outside corner, and especially the last week, you look for the mistake pitches that are up... and you just crush the ball. There is nothing that scares you about facing the Mariners pitching staff.
I do think we need to throw inside a LOT MORE, and get opposing players moving their feet away from the plate. Ya know... add some Ron Villone or Drysdale to your pitching diet. Now maybe this is where a Shoppach catching may help, but Montero is not too young to learn.
For what ever it is worth, I do remember that during Felix's great stretch last year that Felix hit Ichiro, Jeter and A-Rod all in the same game...and I think we won.
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=== Detecto-O-Vision Crunch ===
Fascinating point by Rain, and it goes to the most systemic level possible.
On Thursday night, Grimm didn't really know where the ball was going. But somewhow, the Mariners failed to punish him for all the 2-0 counts. But there you go, exactly what you're talking about Tacoma Rain, the Mariners having less "comfortable" AB's than the enemy.
Perhaps because the M's emphasize SP's who can command the ball, as opposed to pitchers with great stuff? Blake Beavan is a whale of a more comfortable AB than would be James Paxton.
Time and time again, the Mariners select pitchers who know where their own pitches are going. Here comes another one, Aaron Harang.
Obviously Hisashi Iwakuma is wayyyyyyyy over into the "predictable command" category. He has yet to walk a batter this year. Joe Saunders' walk rate last year was 2.01. Blake Beavan somehow moved way to the front of the line over far-more talented pitchers.
When it came time to select between Erasmo Ramirez and the Big Three, the M's went with the kid who knows where the ball is going. Kelly Gaffney has pointed this org bias out several times; Tacoma Rain now extends this insight, asking if it explains the karmic flow of the games we're seeing.
Taijuan, KPax, and Hultzen aren't going to be up until they give us comfortable AB's. Thing is, they will then be providing comfortable AB's to enemy batters, too.
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In contrast, the Rangers put Justin Grimm, a white-knuckle kid in there against Felix Hernandez, a kid with good stuff and dubious control ... and their #5 starter beat Felix.
That's not an isolated case. Derek Holland and Matt Harrison, when they first came up, were works in progress as it pertained to command of their own stuff. Yu Darvish walked over 4 men per game last year.
The Rangers are not afraid to put a starting pitcher out there who feels a little bit white-knuckle, as long as the kid has the stuff to whiff his way out of trouble.
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The thing is, if we insist on pitchers who give US comfortable at-bats, what are the enemy batters getting?
This may even apply to Felix a little bit. His 2nd and 3rd starts were frustrating. Maybe batters are getting into too soft a rhythm, even with Felix.
If true, this aspect of M's games might explain all of the weird vibe I'm getting from the game flow. Maybe it's not a karma thing or a confidence thing; maybe it's just a pitch-predictability thing. Maybe the opponent looks more "in synch" than us because able to establish a rhythm against we have, after Felix, an entire rotation filled with cruddy stuff and reliable location.
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Rain's got a point here. Enemy batters are getting nothing but comfortable AB's against M's pitchers. It's a whale of an insight on his part.