It is becoming increasingly hard to score bunches of runs, beyond the 5th inning, because you face a bevy of power-armed beauties, coming at you one after the other!  If a guy gives up two bleeder singles he gets the hook.  So the single, single, double, singe, 3 run rally is now walk and a jack for two runs!  Nobody nickels and dimes a Chapman to death!!!  But if you get out in front of his cruise missile, you can send it for a ride!  

On the chart above, there was basically a flatline trend throughout the Moneyball era, but that has changed dramatically, and had begun to by the time Moneyball was a movie in '11.

Young power bats, K's be damned, and one-inning Bob Fellers are now all the rage.  Consider the Gonzo for Tank trade, made by the best run franchise in sport. Even the Cards seem to be following the masses!  

...do the opposite of the thing everyone else is doing?

I guess that's an attempt at strategy? It's a stupid attempt, though.

MLBTR has a blurb on the neat list of OF talent that the Cardinals have stockpiled, both at the MLB and farm level, most of it young.  They include Tank O'Neill.  Yet with all that talent, the still traded Gonso for Tank.  Btw, the Cards own Tommy Pham is sort of a poster child for the tolerance for K's, in return for pop.  He struck out at a huge level in the bigs last yeat, yet there was little handwringing or lamentation.    This year?  He's ripping!!  

...any assessments of what's going on with our boy Haniger?

Per Greg Johns: "Mariners selected to play in Arizona Fall League include OFers Kyle Lewis & Braden BIshop, inf. Eric FIlia and C Joe DeCarlo. Mariners pitchers selected for Arizona Fall League: Matthew Festa, Darin GIllies, Max Povse and Art Warren."

Kyle Lewis is still Seattle's best prospect.  His stats have crashed in August but they pulled him out of the field for the most part and just had him DHing.  Whether that's simply precautionary because his knee is still giving him issues I don't know, but he is not a DH type - you gotta let him play the field.  Hopefully they do in AZ.

Braden Bishop is fascinating to me, because I disliked drafting him but he's the one guy we've really managed to tweak at the plate and get way better results than I expected.  When you look at where he's come from with his 5:33 eye in Everett to a 60:80 eye between High A and AA, they've really gotten some much more quality swings out of him.  Bishop looks legit now at the plate and he's always brought a glove. With Lewis likely to be manning a corner after that knee injury rather than a full-time center field, Bishop still has a path for this team.  He might also be their best available trade chip as a batter.

Eric Filia doesn't strike out (63:42 eye in 535 PAs) and is old as dirt, prospect-wise.  I assume they want a better look, but he's a fascinating CTZ guy with minimal power. He can't really play CF though so you're trying to get a .310/.400/.400 guy on a corner.  He's still interesting to me.

Joe DeCarlo is a former 3B who has been converted to catcher.  He was one of our cold-weather draftees and we like to convert strong-armed infielders with questionable range to catcher (Littlewood was like this too). Low average but good walks and decent power.  He's trying for the Greg Zaun approach as a backstop, and he needs all the reps he can get.

Matt Festa from the 2016 draft has been closing some in High-A and has run a 13K / 2.5 BB rate for the year. That's probably good. I assume they want a longer look at him for a full-time closing role next year, as well as some work on his secondaries.

Darin Gillies has been Just A Guy this year in AA after jumping over High-A entirely.  He hasn't been bad, but as a strict bullpenner his work hasn't really stood out.  I think they have some tweaks for him too, in order to see if they can recapture some of his low-minors magic when he was fooling more batters.

Max Povse has been bounced from the rotation to the pen and now in his last couple of starts in Tacoma they were stretching him back out as a starter. Hopefully they pick one, and it's the starting role.  We'll see.

Art Warren really surprised me. He was so wild in High-A last year and got transitioned from mostly-starting last year to a pure pen role this year, with a lot of finishes.  I consider him another random pen arm (so great to have a ton of those 9K / 3 BB pen arms lying about) but I wouldn't have bet on him being the one sent to the AFL.  Hopefully they can finish ironing out his control issues there.

It's an interesting squad, at least.

Whenever you can pay a #4 guy $16 million a season I guess you have to do it, especially on this team.  We'll see how much money STL is kicking in, and losing Rayder is fine.

That severely curtails next year's spending though.  Leake is next year's big free agent acquisition - which just puts more pressure on Seattle's young players to pick up the slack.  Fingers crossed that Moore or Marco can do that.  

Sonny Gray still has 2 more years of arb eligibility, btw, and hasn't given up more than 2 ER in any game since joining the NYY.  Seattle's choices are like Game of Thrones romances.

Seattle. Where GM's with no track record go to die a slow, steady, painful death, taking the fans and the franchise along with them. The Pasta King strikes again. Our wall is so full of pitching spaghetti that there's no room left for anything to stick. 

a hard trade to get excited about, for me.  Or a hard acquisition in the better phrase.  We didn't give up much.  But we did get 180 innings, so there is sort of a Gallardo flavor to this one.  

He throws GB's, I suppose that is a positive.

interesting article here:  https://www.fangraphs.com/community/wikileakes-what-went-wrong-for-mike-...