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Let's hope the Mariners don't get themselves out...as they've been doing with annoying regularity the last week.
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The MINOR point is that --- > Yes. it's very frustrating to wait this long for the Mariners to get hot. Your feelings are hurt and they Should be hurt. This has been a forlorn experience to date. The M's are -3 below .500 and need a little run to +3 before they can talk Wild Card again.
The MAJOR point is that baseball is much more fun than weeding your garden in 85-degree heat. Baseball is like ... um, PIZZA!, yeah, that's the ticket, it's like pizza in that when it's bad, it's still pretty good. Bill James once said, "a ballplayer making a million dollars and wanting more is natural. A ballplayer making a million dollars and complaining about it deserves a good swift kick in the man region." Feel free to make your own application about watching Seattle baseball.
Also there is the little matter of sabermetrics to consider. Bad luck is NOT a skill. Neither are injuries. It seems so, but nada. From here forward, the dice have no memory of the last six snake eyes. That will remain true as long as people throw dice.
So, in lieu of a Mariners winning streak, why not download your vitamin (Dr) D instead?
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Win the battle, lose the war: Felix got hit last night but his dry spitter is mostly back. They also showed a graphic claiming an .067 AVG against it. The King will win some and lose some but he is throwing a lot better.
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Bob Dutton's twitter feed points out a Baseball America pay article on Nick Neidert - actually, written by Dutton himself, we notice. There y'go, a triply-redundant annoyance wall for you. But the gist is, the 20-year-old Neidert has added nice velocity this summer, and missed more bats, while retaining his "remarkable" command in the strike zone. G-Money's template here was a Zack Grienke wannabe.
Here is a game report from June 27. Here is his MiLB page - his last 10 starts are 9.5 good outings with 63 strikeouts and 5 walks.
Dutton also points out that Ben Gamel is one (1) plate appearance shy of qualifying for the AL leaderboards, which he would lead in AVG at .332.
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So they haul Hisashi Iwakuma back into dry dock and Drew Smyly is an ex-parrot. Clarity is always good .... but notably, when a trade deadlline is approaching. We've got K-Pax, Miranda, Felix, and Moore - an Opening Day starter and three quality arms behind him. Would be sweet to fill the #5 slot with a #2. If only we had a gutsy GM.
By the way, here is a data-rich environment at Prospect Insider, declaring the M's "hopeful" for a Drew Smyly in 2018 or 2019. There is a difference between a Seattle blog declaring Smyly a "hopeful" for two years on, vs. Jerry DiPoto declaring the same thing, which he did. If you think of Smyly as a Nick Neidert-type prospect he would rate as the M's best pitching prospect. So don't forget about Smyly in long-term pitching scans, simply out of pique at his injury.
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Ariel Miranda threw a 2-hit shutout, truncated seven innings of course, his last turn. He did so by grabbing the ball, reading Zuumball's signs during his rock step, and then firing the ball in the general direction of the chest protector. I was surprised to learn that Miranda has locked the enemy down to 2 runs or less in 80% of his starts the last two months.
In part that's because he has a bunch of strike/pitch ratios in the neighborhood of 75/105. Check it out in the game log linked. Miranda will give up some home runs; he's a fly ball pitcher throwing meteor showers of strikes. In fact he has given up quite a few HR's during his 8-of-10 great starts stretch. Take the good with the bad; with Miranda it's been mostly the former.
Chris Sale, by contrast, has held his enemies to 2 runs or less in only 4 of his last 10 starts, not eight of them. Miranda is better than Sale. QED.
Jason Vargas is 12-3, 2.22. Oohhhh, I know what you're thinkin'. But Bill James says the last time he saw anybody throw a scuffball was about three years ago. A glance at Vargas' F/X shows the only difference in New Vargas is that he's throwing even slower after his two years off -- 85 MPH fastball and 79 MPH change. The 2.22 is lucky by half, unless you think Vargas should have been 2.22'ing it the last ten years. Just take a long look and casually swat it into right center, Zuumy.
Enjoy,
Dr D
Comments
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The sad truth about this club appears to be that they will always live or die with their bats. We're all tickled to have the non-K-Pax starters go 6, 7 innings of three run ball, because in theory that's all this offense needs. In reality, there's a real lack of lockdown potential in our rotation
-Do we expect Miranda to go 8/10, or even 6/10 lockdowns from here? Serious question. I like the guy, but I'll believe it when I see it. His ERA vs FIP last year was 3.88 to 5.25. Now it's 3.82 to 5.14. Is he the rare man who can routinely overperform his peripherals? I haven't heard a reason WHY yet, but would love to hear one.
-I've had Felix's back here before, but to be honest, I'm getting worried. Sure, his change is coming back. But once it comes back, he'll still need to reacclimate to keeping his slowball out of the dog's mouth, without the control that used to generate Ultra King Felix pitch sequences. His vast array of killer offspeed just doesn’t translate to dominance if the hitters are all looking for slow pitches low in the zone. I'm still bullish on him long-term. In the next two months... I'll be pleased if he defends himself well enough to escape with a bunch of low-quality starts (say 5.2 innings, 2 or 3 runs). He feels like a #4 right now, I think.
-Sam Gaviglio funs stats: 5.4ks, 1.9hr/9, 10.4% whiffs, 5.71FIP. Is he better than HWMNBN? Yeah, duh. Is he gonna carry us to many pitcher's duel wins in the future? Um, naw, prolly not.
-Andrew Moore is really cool, but by definition he's going to give us a lot of competitive starts, not lockdowns. Which puts the pressure back on the offense...
To sum up: using the highly subjective criteria of number assignation, I figure we've got a #1, Pax, although a vaguely inconsistent one at this point. A #2, Miranda, if you squint just right and only look at his ERA. His other stats say he's a #4 that's well suited to the park. We'll see. Moore looks like a quintessential #3, so that's a sweet add. Like I said, Felix looks like a #4 for the next few months, and we hope he's better by the playoffs. Gaviglio sure looks like a #5 of #6 who's faking it real well: we may see Bergman in that slot a month from now.
Looks to me like a standard rotation, but with only downside. No realistic chance anyone overperforms their slots, except Felix. Or I suppose Pax, who could always lock in any day now and be the best pitcher in the world for a decade. Could also take a year or two to go full Randy. That's why we needed Smyly so badly, to bump everyone down a slot and make them overqualified for their roles. Heck, Kuma would have been a decent pull at a #4 in the 5 slot. Now that they’re toast, we badly need a TOR at the deadline, or our rotation won't really be playoff worthy.
If the goal is to claw our way back into the Wild Card race, the bats need to wake back up. We're not gonna put together a run with a bunch of lockdown starts. We need 5, 6 runs a game if we want to make a move. Luckily, we've finally got an offense capable of doing that. In fact, I expect them to starting any day now. My point is, any time we have a mediocre hitting week, we're gonna lose lots of games. We're not set up to win without above average offense.
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A TOR, or even a solid #2, transforms our season here. Anything less just leaves too many question marks up top. Our offense can be dominant, but just hasn't quite managed to be so consistently ever since the injury waves came crashing down. I wonder what Mitch might have been this year if his rhythm was never thrown off by the DL...
Gray. Give us Gray. Please?
Interesting note Doc has on Smyly, too. Wasn't he one of the ones, along with... Valencia?... that JeDi tagged as 'target of the offseason' for him? Makes sense that he wouldn't punt just now when things are rough, stands to reason he'll be mostly the same pitcher when done (potentially with post-TJ upside, definitely with less mileage). I wonder if you can actually extend a guy like this... say, we'll give you X% of your salary for the down year, push this year's salary back a year, and tack on an option year you can upgrade to something nice via performance/health?