.

Jeff Zimmerman of Fangraphs has a smokin' hot grok of one Roenis Elias.  Zim had earlier had the sense that he could sort of tell, during Elias' motion, what pitch was coming next.  Couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Dr. D agrees with this 100.00%.  And it's part of what we were talking about, that Elias' first-pitch strike percentage was far better than his BB's wound up showing, and his swing-and-miss percentage was also better than his K's wound up showing.  There was something wrong with his mid-count results.

Zim nails it down:  He was too predictable in his pitch selection.  Also, Elias was telegraphing his offspeed stuff by release point.  Also, Elias was telegraphing the pitches by "showing" them in the first 20 feet of the flight.  

For example, in all pitchers' counts against lefty hitters, Elias went to his curve ball a full 73% of the time.  He got into a good spot, here came the hook -- but he didn't throw many of them for strikes.  Tell me that doesn't explain his ability to go 0-1 but inability to go 1-3.

See Jeffy's article, but here is one of his sweet graphs that compares Elias' pitches to Lester's at the 20-foot point:

This explains, perfectly, the feeling that you could tell (off the CF camera) that a curve ball was coming right out of the hand. 

.........

The takeaway, there, was that Elias needs to get more deceptive.

The takeaway, here, is that naturally a AA pitcher has plenty 'nuff to worry about just throwing strikes.  And that Roenis Elias has a really nice helium supply going into his next five years of club control.

..........

As to Upton?  You gotta give somethin' to get somethin'.  J.A. Happ this year, blending softly casual into Johann Santana West, I'm good with that.  

If you can't deal Elias for Upton, you've got to think you could get some kinda thumper for him.  Ian Desmond?  Elias and ? for Joey Bats?  Zduriencik is playing hard-to-get with all these trade pardners, but hey.  The old man is down the road.

You might conceivably extend Upton with something kinda-sorta similar to Shin-Soo Choo's deal, 7 years x $130M.  If you -- and by you we mean Kevin Mather, who just admitted the obvious, that RF is still a Barney episode -- gave Upton $18-20M per year for (say) 6 additional years?  He'd lock in his first hunnerd-fifty million and the M's would lock in their righty bat who can run. 

If I'm Mather, and Zduriencik is holding firm on this idea "we can't give up any of our top ten youngsters for the final piece," well, I remind him what a chain of command is for.

Slap me silly, what would a Mariners' lineup look like with Upton added to Cruz?  The M's were about 100 runs to the good without 'em.

Here are the morning's cross-sport noodlings at my second site, Detectovision.

Be Afraid,

Dr D